amicable relationship between America and Mexico. And if that were to happen, America’s geopolitically secure location free of neighborly conflicts, identified earlier in Part 2 as one of America’s major assets, would become a thing of the past.
4: THE UNCOMMON GLOBAL COMMONS
The global commons, those areas of the world that are shared by all states, can be reduced to two main sets of global concerns: the strategic and the environmental. The strategic commons include the sea and air, space, and cyberspace domains, as well as the nuclear domain as it pertains to controlling global proliferation. The environmental commons include the geopolitical implications of managing water sources, the Arctic, and global climate change. In these areas America, thanks to its near global hegemonic status, has had in recent years the opportunity to shape what has been called the “new world order.” However, while American participation and, very often, American leadership have been essential to reforming and protecting the global commons, the United States has not always been on the front lines of progress. America, like any other great power, tried to construct a world that first and foremost benefited its own development even though during the twentieth century the United States at times was more idealistically motivated than previous dominant states in history.
Today the world’s emerging powers—China, India, Brazil, and Russia—are playing a more integral role in this global management process. An American-European consensus or an American-Russian consensus alone cannot effectively dictate the rules of the commons. These new players are—though slowly—rising, necessitating a larger consensus group in securing and reforming the global commons. Nonetheless, American participation and co- leadership remains essential to solving new and old challenges.
The strategic commons will likely be the area most impacted by the shifting paradigm of global power, as relates to both the gradual growth in the capabilities and activism of emerging powers like China and India and the potential decline of American primacy. The sea and air, space, and cyberspace central to every country’s national interest are dominated for the most part by America. In the coming years, however, they will become increasingly crowded and competitive as the power and national ambitions of other major states expand, and overall global power disperses.
Because control over the strategic commons is based on material advantages, as other nations grow their military capacities they will necessarily challenge the omnipresent position of the United States, in hopes to replace the United States as regional power broker. This competition could easily lead to miscalculation, less effective management, or a nationalistic territorial interstate rivalry in the strategic commons. China, for example, sees its surrounding waters as an extension of its territory. It considers most of the disputed islands there to be its own, and China has focused on developing naval capabilities aimed at denying America access to the South and East China Seas in order to protect those claims and solidify its regional position. Moreover, China has recently escalated disagreements over the limits of its territorial waters and over the ownership of the Senkaku, Paracel, and Spratly Islands into international disputes. Russia has also recently decided to make the navy its highest military priority, heavily increasing the funding for its Pacific Fleet. India too continues to expand its naval capabilities in the Indian Ocean.
The key to future stability in the strategic commons is to gradually develop a global consensus for an equitable and peaceful allocation of responsibilities while America’s power is extant. For example, a peaceful maritime system is essential to the success of a globalized economy and all nations have an interest in seeing the air and seas managed in a responsible fashion because of their impact on international trade. Thus, a fair system for allocating management responsibilities is highly likely, even in the evolving landscape of regional power. However, in the short term, when such a system is only just emerging, one nation might well miscalculate its own power vis-a-vis its neighbor or seek to take an advantage at the expense of the greater community. This could result in significant conflicts, especially as nations press for greater access to energy resources beneath disputed waters.
America’s decline would have dangerous implications for this strategic common since currently the world relies de facto on the United States to manage and deter maritime conflicts. While it is unlikely that an American decline would severally inhibit its naval capacity—since it is central to America’s core interests—a receding United States might be unable or simply reluctant to deter the escalation of maritime disputes in the Pacific or Indian Oceans, two areas of particular concern.
Similarly, outer space, an arena currently dominated by the United States, is beginning to experience greater activity thanks to the growing capabilities of emerging powers. The two most pressing issues regarding space are the increasing presence of space debris and space weaponry, both of which are being compounded by the surge in international space activity. When China successfully launched an antisatellite missile in 2007, destroying one of its own satellites, it added an unprecedented amount of dangerous debris to the low earth orbit and raised the level of uncertainty regarding China’s intentions to militarize outer space.
While the United States has the most advanced tracking system of orbiting entities in the world and, therefore, possesses the ability to protect some of its assets, the rules regulating space activity need to be updated to reflect the post–Cold War environment, ensure the tranquility of space, and prohibit actions like that of China in 2007. But, if an American decline forces the United States to reduce its own space capabilities, or, much more likely, allows—in the midst of its decline—other emerging powers like China or India to consider space a viable domain in which to test their technology, herald their growing influence, and initiate a new strategic competition, the “final frontier” could become ominously unstable.
The Internet has become now what outer space used to be: the limitless frontier for commerce, communication, exploration, and power projection. Militaries, businesses, and government bureaucracies alike rely on a free and safe cyberspace for the successful execution of their responsibilities. However, maintaining the freedom of the Internet while simultaneously ensuring the security of information is a serious challenge, especially given the decentralized and rapidly evolving landscape of the Internet. American power in cyberspace, like in the oceans, has been essential to the fair regulation and freedom of the Internet because the United States currently controls—via a private nonprofit entity based out of California called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)—most of the access to and oversight of cyberspace. The world’s resentment of American hegemonic control over the Internet coupled with the nuisance of cyber espionage and the serious threat of cyber warfare complicates the difficult task of managing this strategic common.
While this system allows the Internet to function, it does not prohibit individual nations, such as China or Iran, from limiting their own citizens’ access to the Internet; although the United States has made it a priority to publicly oppose such restrictions. Thus, it is possible that in the absence of a strong America, emerging powers, particularly those nations not supportive of democracy or individual political rights, will exploit the lack of any political restraints and try to alter the working characteristics of the Internet, so as to more effectively restrict the Internet’s potential beyond even their national boundaries.
In addition, the control of global nuclear proliferation is essential to the stability of the international system. For some years now, the United States has been the most vocal proponent of minimizing proliferation, even setting as its goal a world with zero nuclear weapons. Moreover, the United States provides security guarantees to specific non–nuclear weapon states that fear their nuclear neighbors by extending to them the US nuclear umbrella. Because the United States is the largest and most advanced nuclear weapon state and because its global position depends on the stability provided by its nuclear umbrella, the responsibility for leadership in the nuclear nonproliferation domain sits squarely on American shoulders. In this domain above all others the world still looks to the United States to lead.
Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons today, combined with the possible American decline tomorrow, highlights the potential dangers of continuing nuclear proliferation in the twenty-first century: the fading of the nonproliferation regime, greater proliferation among emerging states, extensions of the Russian, Chinese, and Indian nuclear umbrellas, the intensifying of regional nuclear arms races, and the greater availability of nuclear material for theft by terrorist organizations.
An American decline would impact the nuclear domain most profoundly by inciting a crisis of confidence in the credibility of the American nuclear umbrella. Countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey, and even Israel,
