Steady As She Goes

Just a few years ago, America's global hegemony was the topic of the day. History was over, and the United States had won. Now, with the Middle East in turmoil, Washington on the defensive and Asia on the rise, history seems in play once again.

American hawks, focusing on the dangers posed by terrorism, nuclear proliferation and Islamist radicalism, are trying to frame the current situation as "World War IV": another epic global contest in which the United States is leading the free world against the forces of darkness. Doves, meanwhile, argue that U.S. power and activism are the real problems. Still others think the American moment has already passed, with global power and influence destined to be shared ever more widely with Europe, Russia and fast-growing giants such as China and India.

Each of these perspectives starts from a valid observation but vastly exaggerates its significance. Radical Islam is a problem, but it hardly encompasses or defines all contemporary global affairs. The Bush administration's recklessness and incompetence have wreaked havoc, but are hardly the source of the world's major troubles. And power is indeed diffusing more widely—but this won't challenge American preeminence for a long time to come.

The United States, though chastened, remains not only the leading country in the world but the most dominant power in the history of the modern state system. The dilemmas it faces stem less from any lack of capabilities or influence than from the intractable nature of reality itself. Despite what everybody seems to think, however, those dilemmas are relatively minor and the world is generally heading in the right direction.

The Bush administration's two great failures lay in not recognizing this truth—in thinking that the world was on the wrong track and could be put right by American will. Bush's team came to office believing their own overheated campaign rhetoric about Bill Clinton's failures, and they took the 9/11 attacks as a sign that the rot ran even deeper than they'd thought.

Changing the course of history thus became their avowed purpose. Drunk with the nation's unprecedented power, the neoconservatives in the administration decided to overturn the existing order in the Middle East and to bring the region into the light. As a senior White House aide told the journalist Ron Suskind in 2002, top officials believed that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."