countries in the Middle East: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. As a result, American interests in the region were secure. Today, American influence with each of these four states is largely reduced. America and Iran are locked in a hostile relationship; Saudi Arabia is critical of America’s evolving regional policy; Turkey is disappointed by the lack of American understanding for its regional ambitions; and Egypt’s rising skepticism regarding its relationship with Israel is setting it at odds with America’s priorities. In brief, the US position in the Middle East is manifestly deteriorating. An American decline would end it.
Unlike its impact on the especially vulnerable countries, America’s slide into international impotence or even into a paralyzing crisis would not significantly affect the scale of international terrorist activity. Most acts of terrorism are—and have been—domestic, not international. Whether in Italy, where in 1978 some 2,000 terrorist acts occurred in a single year, or in contemporary Pakistan, where the casualties from terrorist killings annually measure in the high hundreds and where high-level assassinations are commonplace, the sources and targets of domestic terrorism have been the product of internal conditions. This has been true for over a hundred years, since political terrorism first appeared as a significant phenomenon in late nineteenth-century Russia and France. Therefore, a precipitous decline in American power would not influence the scale of terrorist activities in, for example, India because their occurrence in the first place relates little to America’s role in the world. Because most domestic terrorism is rooted in radicalized local or regional political tensions, only changing local conditions can affect the scale of this type of terrorism.
America has become the target of a genuinely global brand of terrorist activity only over the past decade and a half. Its rise is associated with the populist passions that have grown because of political awakening, particularly in some Muslim states. America has become the target of terrorism because Islamic religious extremists have focused their intense hatred on America as the enemy of Islam and as the neocolonialist “great Satan.” Osama bin Laden used the notion of America as the embodiment of Satan to justify his 2001 fatwah, which led to the September 11 terrorist assaults on the United States. Further justification for the targeting of America by Al Qaeda has been the alleged desecration of sacred Islamic sites by the US military deployments in Saudi Arabia and by America’s support for Israel. Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution in Washington, has observed that bin Laden in twenty of his twenty-four major speeches, both before and after 9/11, justified violence against America by citing its support for Israel.
The inspiration for these international terrorist acts has been the Manichean view of the United States held by extremist Muslim fanatics. Accordingly, an American decline would not serve to dissuade these groups. Nor would it serve to empower them because their message lacks the distinctly political aspects of other domestically entrenched groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. It is thus doubtful that such fundamentalist terrorism can gain control over the ongoing upheavals in the Islamic world. And even if it did, it is more likely to result in internecine struggles than in any united action against outside states. It is also noteworthy that in the years from Bakunin{4} to Bin Laden, nowhere has terrorism achieved its political objective or succeeded in replacing states as the principal actor per se on the international stage. Terrorism can intensify international turmoil but it cannot define its substance.
In addition, the foregoing discussion points to the following more general conclusions:
First, the existing international system is likely to become increasingly incapable of preventing conflicts once it becomes evident that America is unwilling or unable to protect states it once considered, for national interest and/or doctrinal reasons, worthy of its engagement. Furthermore, once awareness of that new reality becomes internationally pervasive, a more widespread tendency toward regional violence, in which stronger states become more unilateral in their treatment of weaker neighbors, may ensue. Serious threats to peace are likely to originate from major regional powers inclined to settle geopolitical or ethnic scores with their immediate but much weaker neighbors. The fading of American power would create an open space for such an assertion of force, with relatively little short-term cost to its initiator.
Second, several of the previous scenarios represent the unfinished legacy of the Cold War. They are a testament to America’s lost opportunity to use the consolidation of a peaceful zone of security near Russia to engage Russia in closer security cooperation. That might even have involved a joint NATO-Russia treaty as NATO was expanding, thereby furthering a more enduring East-West accommodation while helping to consolidate Russia’s nascent democracy.[9] Perhaps such an initiative by the West would have been rebuffed, but it was never explored. Instead, after 2001 the United States became obsessed with its “war on terror” and with gathering support for its military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to the detriment of any larger geostrategic designs. Meanwhile, Russia became focused on the establishment of a more repressive authoritarianism and on the restoration of its own influence in the space of the former Soviet bloc.
Third, East Asia and South Asia would be the regions most vulnerable to international conflicts in a post- American world. The rise both of China and of India as major regional powers with global aspirations is prompting shifts in the region’s distribution of power while their evident rivalry is generating unavoidable uncertainties. If America falters, weaker countries may be forced to make geopolitical choices in a setting of increasing instability even if China and India avoid a major collision. At the same time, pressure is rising in China for a pushback of US power in Asia while concern is growing in East and Southeast Asia over China’s potentially expansionist aspirations. Creating even more uncertainty is the reality of North Korea’s openly proclaimed quest for nuclear weapons in the context of internal political dynamics that are as undecipherable as they are dangerously unpredictable. America’s decline would diminish an external restraint that states considering the unilateral use of force normally have to take into account. In brief, America’s decline would inevitably contribute to a rise in the frequency, scope, and intensity of regional conflicts.
3: THE END OF A GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD
America is bordered by only two states, Mexico and Canada. Though both are good neighbors, Mexico poses a much more serious risk for America in the event of American decline because of its far more volatile political and economic conditions. For example, America and Canada share an enormous but mostly tranquil border, while the US-Mexico border, though much smaller, is the site of violence, ethnic tension, drug and weapons trafficking, illegal immigration, and political demonization. And, though both Mexico and Canada are economically dependent on the United States, with relatively similar GDPs, roughly 15% of Mexico’s labor force works inside America and Mexico’s percentage of population below the poverty line is more than double that of Canada. Furthermore, Mexico’s internal political dynamics are much more unstable and its relationship with the United States has been historically more turbulent. Therefore, while Canada would be adversely affected by an American decline, Mexico would likely plunge into a messy domestic crisis with seriously adverse implications for American-Mexican relations.
In recent decades, America and Mexico have succeeded in constructing a predominantly positive relationship. However, their economic interdependence, their demographic interconnection due to years of high Mexican migration to the United States, and their shared security threat emanating from the cross-border narcotics trade makes relations between the two countries both more complex and also more vulnerable to the impact of international changes. Americans tend to take Mexico’s relative stability for granted, assuming it poses little direct threat to America’s strategic position and to the security of the entire Western Hemisphere. A significant deterioration in the US-Mexico relationship and its resulting consequences would thus come as a painful shock to the American public, generally not aware that the Mexican and American versions of their countries’ past relations tend to vary.
Mexican-American relations have been historically both contentious and cooperative. Conflict has often occurred when Mexico was afflicted with internal violence and political turmoil, with America fearing a spillover into its territory but also exploiting the resulting opportunity to gain territory at the expense of its weaker neighbor. America’s inconsistent and sometimes self-serving application of the Monroe Doctrine, its wars of expansion that resulted in it seizing Texas, California, and the American Southwest in 1848—then over 50% of Mexico’s whole territory—and President Wilson’s unpopular occupation of Veracruz during the Mexican Revolution provide the most prominent examples. On the other hand, cooperation between the two (as well as Canada) led to the creation of
