A New Superpower?

I've recently been reading The United States of Europe: The New Superpower and the End of American Supremacy by T.R. Reid which is, in essence, the breezy and journalistic version of the dry and academic argument in Charles Kupchan's The End of The American Era. Both posit that the unipolar moment of American hegemony is coming to an end, and that the rival power is not one of the usual suspects rising in the East (Japan, China, India, ...) but a Europe that is not so much getting stronger as simply pooling a strength that is already considerable. This amounts to a rather strange sort of superpower, since even if European Defense Integration proceeds quite gingerly, the EU will still be a military dwarf compared to the United States. I believe Foreign Policy ran a rather silly article a few months back referring to the EU as being, in this sense, the "metrosexual superpower." In short, by combining into a single trading bloc, the EU has enormous economic leverage. Yet by remaining a whole bunch of separate sovereign states, the EU gets tons and tons of votes in multinational organizations, making it quite the diplomatic heavyweight.

What to make of all this, I don't quite know. But I think one thing we've clearly seen happening over the past few years is that the United States is putting much more emphasis on raw military force as a policy instrument than it traditionally has. One way to think about this is as a response to the rise of Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the big Asian countries) as economic and diplomatic forces. Increasingly, raw force is where our comparative advantage lies, so we find it increasingly useful to define international politics in terms of force. The trouble is that -- as we're seeing in Iraq -- even with 50 percent of the world's military spending, our overwhelming military preponderance accomplishes rather less than one might think.