Primacy in the Service of (Inter)national Security: The Promises and Pitfalls of the “Unipolar Moment”

Abstract

This chapter explores the opportunities and dilemmas created by the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War for American grand strategy. It notes that the end of the Cold War presented the United States with a grand strategic dilemma: would it use this opportunity to achieve, in Walter Lippman’s phrase, a “solvent” grand strategy that brought into balance “the nation’s commitments and the nation’s power” or would it seek to embed its preeminent international position indefinitely? The chapter demonstrates that the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush ultimately abjured a more limited or “solvent” grand strategy in favor of an explicitly primacist ones that sought, in the words of President George H. W. Bush, to harness the “moral and material resources” of the United States to construct “a new world order…compatible with our values an congenial to our interests”. While the events of 9/11 served to intensify the George W. Bush administration’s pursuit of primacy, the precise shape of that strategy was clearly informed by an aspect of domestic political culture: the influence of the Wilsonian and Jacksonian political cultures of statecraft both within the administration and the wider foreign policy elite in Washington. Ultimately, this chapter concludes that the permissive systemic characteristic of unipolarity enabled the United States a wide latitude in foreign policy choices animated not by pressing security threats but rather by domestically-informed and framed ambitions.