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Not too much America but too little Europe

Of the analyses in Europe is basically this: "9/11 has been used as an agenda, not engineered but utilised, to mask an development which would have taken place anyway: basically, the continued rise of the unipolar world. In Huntington's terms: a uni/multipolar-world, where the US believes itself alone and does what it wants - it would have done that anyway, on the back of its economic and military power, and nobody can stop it." Some people would say it is a development they can trace back to the Clinton-administration. So basically one can draw up the entire last fifteen years of world history as the 'even-further-rise' of an American superpower, where 9/11 fits into that puzzle - it colours a period and then it goes away. What do you think of that analysis? 

DH: Different things! The mere fact of power doesn't define a foreign policy. It is a political decision what you do with it. One can make the argument that 50 or, I guess now: close to 60, years ago, the United States was the undisputed unipolar power: At the end of World War II, we had equal if not greater power relative to the rest of the world than we do today. But at that time, our leadership made other decisions - they decided to exercise that power through institutions. To build all the multilateral institutions that everyone is used to now and not paying any attention to. And that basically, the genius of American leadership at that time was to get other powers to identify their interests with those of the United States - and work through institutions to in a sense a common purpose. 

Obviously, the Cold War provided a framework for that, but it is important to understand: many of the institutions the US built at that time pre-dated the Cold War. All of the economic institutions - Bretton Woods, that whole system, were done just after World War II, in fact the planning started during the war. It was a different sense of how you use power. And the spectre haunting those people was not the Soviet Union, it was the conflicts within Western Europe that kept dragging Americans into war. And it was that effort that drove many of the institutions which we still have. So it is not the fact of power, but again: what you do with it. 
 
I would argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a simple fact: that the only superpower left was the United States. If you recall our debate at the end of the Cold War, it was a debate about retreat and isolation again - bringing everyone home. Americans do not sit easily with this notion of an 'American Empire.’ That is alien to Americans’ sense of themselves. But the United States has this power, now, it is simply a fact.  

In the 90s, it wasn't as much that the Americans were charging ahead, it was that the Europeans failed to produce economic growth, frankly. The US growth rates in the 1990s have produced an economy the size of Italy, relative to Europe - we're that much further ahead now.

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 Illustrationsfoto: The White House (Tina Hager)

Portrætfoto: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, The Johns Hopkins University