Transcript
STEPHEN STEDMAN: Our intention was to aim at American foreign policy, but we wanted to bring a larger perspective. And we wanted to bring realism into the 21st century, and we wanted to bring international institutions into the 21st century. Now, by realism into the 21st century, what I mean is that, you know, we still think that, still believe that states are the primary actors in the international system; that power and interests still matter. But unlike the 20th century, the great source of danger and insecurity is not from other powerful states but from transnational threats, transnational threats such as climate change, catastrophic terrorism, economic instability, civil wars, and the collapse of states themselves, biological threats like deadly infectious disease, threats of pandemic and the possible misuse in the future of biotechnology.
Now, these transnational threats structure international relations in a different way today than in the past. First of all, they create an intense security interdependence. American security is interdependent with global security. The United States has the most powerful -- we still believe the United States is the most powerful state in the international system, but it cannot defend itself against any threat to its security unilaterally. The United States depends on sustained robust international cooperation to defend itself against a host of threats. So there is this basic fact of security interdependence coming from transnational threats.
Now, it's not that national rivalry and state aggression are irrelevant; it's the security interdependence means that most states are status quo or revisionary states; that is, they want reform to the international system, and there are, in fact, very few revolutionary states, and they're not the most powerful states. Moreover, most states in the world see cooperation as in their national interest, and this is very important. Power still matters, but power is more diffuse and uncertain today than certainly in the past 40 years. There are more veto players in the world on a whole host of issues. It is not just that America is in relative decline as Fareed Zakaria or Richard Haass have written, and it's not just that you have a whole host of emerging powers like China, like India, like Brazil; it is that power is diffused so that it matters by issue area and in some circumstances states may be the primary actor, but nonstate actors can have immense power and leverage when it comes to issues such as biological security, or the economy, or climate, and that order itself can't be derived from traditional ideas about balance of power. Balance of power is insufficient because of the premium on cooperation amongst powerful states today.
So order has to come from a different vision, and in the book we put forward a vision of international order that first of all upholds and defends the sovereignty of states but insists that sovereignty, like freedom, entails obligations and not just privileges and prerogatives, and we call this vision responsible sovereignty.
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