Courting Science: Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century
248
Courting Science: Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century
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Overview
In Courting Science, Damon Coletta offers a novel explanation for the decline of American leadership in world affairs. Whether the American Century ends sooner rather than later may depend on America's capacity for self-reflection and, ultimately, self-restraint when it comes to science, technology, and engineering. Democracy's affinity for advanced technology has to be balanced against scientific research and progress as a global enterprise. In an era of rising challengers to America's lead in the international order and an increasingly globalized civil society, a "Scientific State" has a better chance of extending its dominance. In order to draw closer to this ideal, though, the United States will have to reconsider its grand strategy. It must have a strategy that scrutinizes how tightly it constrains, how narrowly it directs, and how far it trusts American scientists. If given the opportunity, scientists have the potential to lead a second American Century through domestic science and technology policy, international diplomacy, and transnational networks for global governance.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804798969 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford Security Studies |
| Publication date: | 05/25/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 663 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Courting Science
Securing the Foundation for a Second American Century
By Damon V. Coletta
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9894-5
CHAPTER 1
A Second American Century
Toward the end of his influential War and Change in World Politics (1981), Robert Gilpin famously claimed that Thucydides, by virtue of his deep insight into the causes and consequences of the Peloponnesian War, would, if properly briefed about critical technologies and lead actors on the world stage, render a similarly penetrating history of contemporary international rivalries. On its face, the assertion that nothing much has changed over twenty-five centuries sounds absurd, but Gilpin's idea has not lost its luster. It speaks to a central and controversial ambition for universality in both the study and practice of International Relations.
Yet, something important has changed in the last half-century: the centrality of science and technology (S&T) for creating power in international affairs. Thucydides wrote about the implications of geography, population, democratic culture, and ship-building technology for the balance of power in ancient Greece. Many of his insights do hold in modern times, but in comparison with the factors on Thucydides' original list, science really is different. While crucial for cultivating national capability, science encompasses more than techne or a library of useful facts about Nature. Science is also a method of inquiry, a practice of cosmopolitan high culture, a human activity that cannot be cornered or harnessed entirely by any single government.
Thucydides wisely remained vague about whether divine or cosmic justice intervened in the power competition among states. He detailed, in protagonists' arguments for war and in his battle descriptions, which miscalculations, which misapprehensions of physical force, led to spectacular Athenian defeat in Sicily, the beginning of the end of Athenian influence. Curiously, though, Thucydides moved Sicily from its actual position in the chronological stream of events so close to Athens' barbaric destruction of tiny Melos, and so close to the end of Athenian hegemony, while Athens would fight on for years; readers were left to wonder whether Athenian injustice ultimately frustrated Athenian imperialism. When Professor Gilpin conjured Thucydides in the 1980s, he may have intended to invoke classic balance-of-power realism, but humanist critics who read Thucydides as literature would sense an opportunity to mine a more complex portrayal of hegemonic decline.
Twenty-five centuries later, science and technology have attained a stature in human affairs on the same scale with cosmic justice, only less vague. If the United States now hopes to extend its international influence and fashion a second American Century, it will have to come to terms with relatively new sources of power that operate largely outside Thucydides' history. This book argues that the United States has not done so, mainly because it conflates scientific advancement with technological development — science and technology (S&T) are hopelessly jumbled together in the rush of national policy-making. Among the consequences of this U.S. myopia are distortion of the national effort to remain the world's leading technological power and the hastening of American hegemonic decline.
Thirty years ago, Gilpin's claim for universal International Relations Theory rested on the notion that the ancients understood raison d'état and that actions of the most powerful states set basic parameters for societies caught in the international milieu — whether they remained at peace, how they prospered, and whose justice inscribed their laws and mores. Having insight as to why states acted as they did admitted one to a special fellowship spanning thousands of years. Members of this circle included not only Thucydides, Machiavelli, and contemporary realists but also statesmen who went beyond studying the world and strived to shape it: Pericles of Athens, Richelieu of France, Metternich of Austria, and Kissinger of the United States. If they could all belong to the same club, if states, after all the changes in circumstance, were still states, then perhaps international politics was more of a trade — and statecraft more of a profession — than heroic biographies implied. Almost anyone who studied the cases systematically would see for themselves the governing principles, the near universal theories of political power, which shaped great questions of any age.
Contemporary opponents of realism seek to explain why the international system defies Gilpin's claim, why it is no longer what it once was, and why today's great states are fundamentally different from the creatures that fought for dominance of ancient Greece. Robert Keohane's and Joseph Nye's (1989) complex interdependence comes to mind because it so carefully dissects and reconfigures the basic assumptions of Gilpin and other realists. States are not solitary key actors determining important international outcomes; military force is not the ultima ratio in high politics; and a state's survival may be sufficiently secure to admit other national objectives as primary.
If actors, instruments, and goals of international politics can change so much, the way is open for a host of new possibilities. Policies of the capitalist class, rather than the Great Powers, may decide questions of war and peace. State motivations may not be predictable across time if democratic regimes weigh options differently from autocrats. The meaning of anarchy and the motivation for Great Power intervention on the seas and in lesser developed regions can change according to shifts in a global discourse. Given the potential confusion, it is tempting, though by no means agreed among scholars, to do as Gilpin did in War and Change: place realism first, then see what sort of adjustments explain important international outcomes that do not fit the original pattern. Appropriating Thucydides for our time may violate several social science criteria for reasonable counterfactuals, but Gilpin hit on something by snatching him up anyway. Contemporary theories for apprehending International Relations still do turn on how well Thucydides succeeded in applying his explanations for state behavior in the Aegean so many centuries ago. Thucydides' ideas, however, probed beyond states' differential capacity to wage war. The West's first international historian examined the wasting effect of Great Power war on civilization, which is to say, the Hellenic world's communion with the divine through human art and science.
Science and International Realism
Intriguingly, a younger, iconoclastic Robert Gilpin, well before War and Change, conducted groundbreaking research on why Thucydides would not be able to sift details and reveal underlying order in contemporary politics. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War became a classic work of Western civilization because it memorialized the tortured fall of onetime exemplar Athens, linking hegemonic decline forever to the conditions of its assent. By contrast, young Gilpin's France in the Age of the Scientific State boldly asserted how state development entered a qualitatively different epoch after World War II. The Great Power contest midway through the twentieth century ended abruptly with the birth of new technology, the atomic bomb. Had German rather than American science developed the weapon in time, Hitler might well have recovered, even from the Allied invasion of France. Had American science failed along with the Germans in 1945, the timing and terms of Japan's surrender in the Pacific theater would have been dramatically different.
With the dawn of the Scientific State, Gilpin reported, the gap between scientific discovery and innovation in strategic technologies vital to military and economic power had shrunk from decades to a few years or months. While Thucydides could anthropomorphize his leading city-states, bequeathing them a natural cycle of rise and decline, modern science was the proverbial Fountain of Youth made real for states. It completely disrupted the old narrative of international politics. Once a Great Power partook of Science, once it unlocked the secrets of Nature at a depth and pace well beyond that of other states, other actors in the system could never catch up. Science, particularly in the fields of atomic energy, electronics, and computers, broke Thucydides' twenty-five-hundred-year run. The life and death of Athens as an international power was no longer a story for all time. To be sure, young Gilpin's heraldry has not panned out, at least not yet, but this book explores what it would take to bring the immortal Scientific State to life in the twenty-first century.
For a moment, the Scientific State seemed real back in the 1960s. Gilpin concluded, then, that if France did not resolve the dilemma of preserving its autonomy by pooling resources with Germany and other European powers in order to master science, it actually risked sinking to irrelevancy in what was rapidly becoming an American dominated system. Yet Gilpin also hedged his bets, noting plausible arguments that discounted links between leadership in basic science and unassailable hegemonic power, so he provided ample documentation that at all events French leaders fretted over the rise of America as a Scientific State. Perceptions of a close connection between scientific achievement and subsequent economic and military capacity — even if the precise mechanism could not be isolated — were sufficient to shape domestic policy on science and technology as well as international behavior.
Once the American debacle in Vietnam had unfolded during the 1970s, Gilpin's fallback position carried more weight. How could America bestride the world like a Colossus when it failed to protect tiny South Vietnam against radical insurgency and a communist army from underdeveloped North Vietnam? How could science and technology render the United States invincible when the Defense Department was capable of such tragic miscalculation in Southeast Asia, when American society itself appeared torn by self-doubt over everything from the war to race, poverty, and the environment? Gilpin expertly portrayed the Age of the Scientific State in the late 1960s, but this vision simply did not fit the collapse of the ensuing decade. Far more attuned and prominent were treatments like that of Robert Keohane's After Hegemony (1984), which asked how international order could survive once the American hegemon declined — the opposite of Gilpin's bullish projection in 1968.
Yet, if France in the Age of the Scientific State did not have much to say about the 1970s, it served as an uncanny primer for the late 1990s. Tables demonstrating the U.S. lead on indicators of economic, military, and cultural influence, along with arguments about how research and development expenditures were widening the gap, appeared in Gilpin's Scientific State thirty-five years before updated versions arrived in fin-de-siécle reflections on American unipolarity.
The old description of the French mindset, capturing both Charles De Gaulle and his domestic opposition, hit the mark decades later when Hubert Védrine and Dominique de Villepin, foreign ministers from different parties, raised comparable warnings against the American hyperpower and conjured multilateral restraints for the United States to safeguard French independence on the world stage. Since de Villepin's star turn during the Iraq crisis, U.S. fortunes in the Middle East and in its mastery of the global economy have dipped. Today, many scholars return to themes of the 1970s, analyzing how the United States might best manage hegemonic decline, or teasing out distinctions between raw economic and military capacity versus effective power to organize matters abroad.
Despite recent difficulties, though, now is an appropriate moment to revisit Gilpin's early themes. Writing from his mid-twentieth-century vantage point, Gilpin chose the French perspective. Could a midsize power reform its national institutions, and for some traditional functions, pool its sovereignty with other Europeans in order to retain freedom of action against the scientific behemoth across the Atlantic?
This research question presumed that (1) a lead in science was crucial for maintaining a lead in international influence, and (2) unless other state actors altered their science and technology portfolios, the United States would extend its advantage to outclass other participants in the system, including the Soviet Union and older European powers. The latter assumption has frayed only in recent years, and that does not mean that the former was any less plausible. We should indeed re-examine the old concept of the Scientific State.
Surveying the link between scientific productivity and international hegemony is more interesting — more is at stake — if the pole position in the new international order remains, as realism would predict, difficult to maintain. Young Gilpin and a coterie of American research university presidents may have been correct: a cluster of natural discoveries in the twentieth century, unlocking atomic energy and accessing vast information potential in particle dynamics, constituted a political big bang, with sufficient force to interrupt the cycle of Great Power rivalries from Thucydides' model. Patterns in politics, though, unlike natural laws of physics, are subject to human will, which means that Gilpin's scientific superstate, of its own accord, might misstep and fail to capitalize on an unprecedented opportunity to escape the decline phase so central to realism's tragic view of international politics. What is required, then, is an understanding of the connection between scientific achievement and power among nations that moves beyond the traditional realist focus on material resources.
In the time of Napoleon, during the last, great French bid for mastery, when European armies clashed in epic violence, moral elements were "among the most important in war." Napoleon, himself, purportedly believed, "Even in war moral power is to physical as three parts out of four." It is not unreasonable to imagine that in the broader competition among nations, even from a realist perspective, moral factors, legitimacy, or what is sometimes termed today as "soft power" could make the difference between success or decline in international affairs. A judgment, then, on whether and how something like the Scientific State could ultimately emerge and maintain the lead role in global affairs rests on an understanding of the scientific element in the composition of state power for the twenty-first century, and respective relationships of this kind of power to polarity and more durable hegemony in the international system.
Science and Technology
Much of the conventional wisdom relating science to international affairs emphasizes what young Gilpin emphasized in the 1960s: atomic weapons, computers, and aerospace. That is, scientific knowledge forms the foundation from which superior technology springs, and technology affords the possessor, from Athens to America, certain material advantages that can be applied toward coercion of inferior states.
As the older Gilpin pointed out in War and Change, though, such technology is as much accoutrement as cause of power in the international system. Just as in Athens' time, technological success can breed arrogance, which inspires new coalitions among enemies until the would-be hegemon must literally conquer the world to maintain its place in the pecking order. Technologies that permit one state to take the offensive sometimes have asymmetric antidotes that allow "lesser" states to create quagmires or deny access for their aspiring conqueror. If it is true that necessity is the mother of invention, rising upstarts will generally be in greater need and know greater hunger than the state on top, which must feel an unrelenting temptation to enjoy privilege while resting on its laurels.
The irony of the conventional link, and it is fair to say the ultrarealist link, between science and state power in the international arena is that it excises the collective will to fight, the acceptance of risk or hardship, to see through a great national enterprise. In this narrow evaluation of science, it matters not whether the leading state values larger truths of individual dignity or human freedom, whether the method it uses to organize its union or the purposes to which it directs its power have any appeal abroad.
Yet, for arguably the greatest contest in the history of world politics, that between the United States and the Soviet Union, ideological competition was critical to the outcome. At the technological level, the United States may have ended up with advantages in miniaturization and precision control, but these were not sufficient to physically overthrow a Soviet Union with massive, robust, and nuclear second-strike capability. Realists would point out how in the long run, economic strength underwrote military power, and economic concerns eventually forced the Soviet Union to discontinue its arms race with the West and release its death grip on satellite states. Still, the economic defeat involved more than technology deficits. Soon after Secretary Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s, official policy attempted to restructure and open institutions within the USSR. Part of the reason perestroika and glasnost came too late was that Soviet production could not compete with ever-rising standards in the global economy, led by the United States to be sure, but sustained by active cooperation from Western Europe and Japan and invigorated by rising economies from the so-called periphery in Latin America and East Asia.True, U.S. science and technology outclassed all rivals, including the Soviet Union, but in tracing the many twists and turns leading toward the end of the Cold War, it is difficult to divorce the science advantage from elements of soft power, specifically the appeal of the U.S. system at home and the legitimacy of U.S. leadership abroad.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Courting Science by Damon V. Coletta. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
1. A Second American Century2. Science and the Hegemon: Speaking Truth to Power
3. Power, Polarity, and Hegemony in the 21st Century
4. Science and the American State: Mobilizing Democracy
5. Science and Diplomacy: U.S. Hegemony and the Rise of the Rest
6. Science and Global Governance at the Final Frontier
7. Science, Grand Strategy, and Prospects for American Influence