Conducted by Xiaohang Liu 

Paul Kennedy is the J. Richardson Dilworth professor of history, the Brady-Johnson distinguished fellow in grand strategy, and the director of the International Security Studies program at Yale University. His books include The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000.

In the International Herald Tribune you mentioned a large-scale naval buildup in East Asia. What do you think the Western world should do in response to this buildup?
The article in the Herald Tribune was noting the interesting fact that, while Europe has been a traditional great naval power for 500 years, its navies are either declining or not increasing. In East Asia and Southeast Asia, however, the budget and the size of navies are going up. So there is some interesting disjuncture between the rise of navies in one part of the world and the non-rise or decline of navies in other parts of the world. It is not something for the West to get too alarmed about, but it causes us to think about whether Europe should be paying any attention to the rise of navies in the Far East and Southeast Asia. One answer could be: we are not threatened by our neighbors; it’s the problem of East Asian countries. We did it a hundred years ago, and we got ourselves into two world wars. This time, count us out.The second response is to say: the buildup of navies in Korea, Japan, China, India, and Indonesia is showing a continuing importance of sea power, as argued by the American sea captain Mahan in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. We should not be frightened, but, perhaps, we need to look at our own naval plans, projects, and spending. What makes Europe similar to the East Asian states is that East Asia is building up their naval forces partly because it wants to protect its petroleum supply lines from the Persian Gulf. Europeans are also dependent upon the same petroleum sources, so if the Asian countries think that a strong navy is needed to protect its sources of supplies, why shouldn’t Europe? 
 
Are naval forces still a critical indicator of military strength, as compared to the past two centuries?
Navies are not the only one. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, one has to say that air power is a stronger indicator of military strength because it can constrain both sea power and land power. However, there are still some sea power weapon systems that the air power cannot deal with. Newport News just launched the $2.5 billion USS North Carolina, which is a state-of-the-art nuclear-powered submarine. If the U.S. Navy is putting $2.5 billion into one single craft, then it is still a critical element; Mahan said it was the critical element. If you ask the troops on the ground in Fallujah or Tikrit, they will say land power. I think that, at least in the military realm, you need three or four critical elements, not one.

Islam is a fast growing religion. This has created some concerns in a few European countries. Do you think this growth will lead to any major changes in international relations in the future?
The world population is still fast growing, so there are going to be more people who are either atheist, or Catholic, or Muslim, or Buddhist. In any case, the Vatican will tell you the Catholics are fast growing in Brazil and Africa. Islam is fast growing, but it is fast growing because the population is fast growing. So the concern is not that it is fast growing, but whether more and more of the people of Muslim faith are adopting an extreme or fundamentalist point of view, which is antagonistic to other more tolerant Muslims and to other people, other religions, and other societies. Evidence shows that there is greater intolerance and extremism. There is more popularity, especially among younger male Muslims, for extremist dogma. This is chiefly concentrated in Muslim societies. The biggest problem is not what the government of France has or the government of England has, but what the government of Indonesia, or Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia has.However, because of globalization and the diaspora of young Muslim workers, there is a great fear that they will be seduced by intolerant beliefs and that they will bring their intolerant beliefs to some action against other people, like the bombs in London or in Madrid. The western liberal societies have this challenge to their values. Their values are about tolerance of all faith and all colors, yet a proportion of young men of Muslim faith have accepted radical, aggressive, and violent pursuits. There is no easy end to it. The western democracies have to bear it as a burden before it dies out.

Regarding the war in Iraq, the Democrats’ position is to either pull out of the war immediately or to redeploy some troops and force the Iraqis to resolve their differences by themselves. Are any of their ideas workable? What do the Iraqis think of these options?
We have been very slow to ask the Iraqis what they think. Right now, my guess is that half of the Iraqis want us out, and the other half are scared that we go out. It may even depend from province to province, or from village to village. If the American forces are keeping the bad guys down, perhaps Iraqis want them to stay in. If the American forces are taking out their young fighters, they want the American forces to go. So we have not asked the Iraqis, and now we don’t have an honest system under which to ask them. We can’t just have Gallup polls go into every Iraqi household.As to the troops, I don’t think we will stay much longer than the end of the Bush presidency. The U.S. Congress has been very slow in dealing with this, but it is now dealing with it very fast. It went from not asking any awkward questions to now proposing all sorts of solutions. Get out immediately? Almost impossible. Surge? It doesn’t look like it’s working. Stay the course? You will be voted out of office. The American public will not vote for staying the course. In my opinion, it really just comes down to some form of calibrated, staged withdrawal. Should it be the way the Democrats want? Should it be the way the military experts want? I don’t know, but we are not going to stay there.

You said in a recent interview, “If by spreading democracy Americans mean ‘one person, one vote’ without considering the other elements—a good commercial foundation backed by a system of order and law—it could be chaotic.” Is there an alternative method of moving totalitarian states toward democracy? 
Most scholars now think that “one person, one vote” is too simplistic. If that principle of “one person, one vote” is applied in a society where the religious and ethnic divisions are primal, then you will vote along the lines of your religion, ethnicity, or tribe. Therefore, the majority tribe will win—as happening in so many African countries—and the minority tribes will not win. Here in this country, we don’t vote on tribal lines. Although there are certain tendencies, we don’t really vote on ethnicity lines. “One person, one vote” works fine in a mature, multicultural democracy—a liberal democracy.However, when we just march into Iraq and say, “one person, one vote,” we know how they are going to vote. We know that they are going to vote for Kurds, Shia, Sunni, or Marsh Arabs. So I am like Henry Kissinger and some others who are skeptical that “one person, one vote” is the immediate answer. It is the final answer. Many things have to happen, like rule of law, good judicial system, fair police, and tolerance. These things need to happen before anybody could think that “one person, one vote” would work.

Should the United States make it a priority to remain the world’s sole superpower?
It is only natural that it would. There are very few statesmen, politicians, and citizens who want to give up being number one. Usually, it comes after you are so exhausted at trying to be number one, such as Spain in the eighteenth century, but it is natural that there will be a striving to preserve being number one. The questions for me are: what are the cleverest policies to maintain the hegemonic position and—the most important question of all—however clever you are, if the world’s economic, technological, and military balance is shifting, is it possible that you still might not be able to make it?One hundred twenty years ago, in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, a large number of very intelligent men said that the British Empire may lose its number-one position. They had all sorts of understandable strategies—technological renewal, tariff protectionism, and better education. They tried to deal with a big shift in world affairs, and they did very well. But, ultimately, they failed. That’s possible for this country. After all, we only have 4.5 percent of the world’s population. If globalization is raising everybody else up to the standard of America, we could just be pushed aside, like the British Empire.

How would the rest of the world react if the U.S. were no longer regarded as the presumptive world power?
Some would rejoice, but a large number would be regretful. I grew up in northern part of England, which was occupied by the Roman Empire for four hundred years. The Romans gave it peace, security, roads, and trade. It was under Roman rule, but I bet there were a large number of Britons who were frightened when the Roman legions left. There will be a large number of people in this world who will be frightened if and when there comes an American withdraw and decline. You know the old saying, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” You know the American devil, you don’t know the Chinese devil or the Pakistani devil or the al Qaeda devil, so perhaps be grateful for what you have.

After numerous unilateral actions by the U.S. in recent years, what kind of role do you think the UN wants the U.S. to play in the world today?
We can’t ask the question “what it is that the United Nations thinks.” The United Nations is just a limited company of 192 nations. It is the United Nations, but it isn’t a parliament of men or a world government. The way I would rephrase that is, “What would the more internationally minded officers and nations like New Zealand, Sweden, and Canada want the United States to do?” They would like it to be a bit less unilateral and a bit less cherry picking. Big governments—the U.S., Russia, China, India, and France, perhaps—decide which part of the UN they like and which part they don’t like. The best one can hope is that this American government, or, more likely, its successor, will recognize the value of using multilateral instruments and responses rather than unilateral. But there will always be a unilateralist part of our policy and of Russia’s, China’s, and India’s. It’s natural.

Can NATO be an effective alternative to replace the United Nations in military operations?
First, you are only talking about military organization, and the UN is much more holistic than that. It deals with economic, social, human rights, cultural, and environmental dimensions. Second, the UN charter allows for the Security Council to authorize a regional military or political group, like the Organization of American States, African Unity, or NATO to carry out something under UN Security Council resolutions. There is nothing wrong with that. What would be wrong is the assumption or the argument that NATO can replace the UN. As I have said, it can’t replace all of the UN’s other dimensions, but it can replace many of the peacekeeping and peace enforcement dimensions. Suppose there is a Tibetan uprising against China—there is no way that most NATO members would deal with it. There is no way that China would tolerate it.After long experiences of looking at which peacekeeping works and which doesn’t work, and since all of the disasters started in Rwanda and the Balkans fifteen years ago, my opinion is that there is no blueprint, no template. You can’t say, “Let’s take NATO and deal with a future war between Peru and Bolivia.” The Security Council, therefore, has to be supreme, even if its membership is flawed and out-of-date. The Security Council agreed to NATO operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, but it also agreed to authorize Australia to restore order in East Timor and Tony Blair’s government to restore order in Sierra Leone. There are also the traditional peacekeeping operations and observer roles by UN in Kashmir, Cyprus, and the Golan Heights. So there is no simple replacement for peacekeeping and peace enforcement.

In a past interview, you mentioned that dealing with terrorism should be achieved by addressing the grievances that led people to terrorism, such as unemployment and poverty, along with religious fervor. However, since addressing these issues takes time, what effective measures could be taken against terrorism in the short term?
If I said that then, clearly, I was too one-sided; it seems to be me that to handle almost all of our global problems, we need reactive policies, so we need professional intelligence, special police squads, and everything else they have for dealing with terrorism. But that’s the reactive part. We also need the proactive part, which is clearly longer term. Proactive means you start beforehand. If you learn about enormous malnutrition, human rights abuses, and tribal discontents in a country like Mali or Côte d’Ivoire or Liberia, and if you are worried about that country, you start first with the proactive.When you think about the United Nations charter, it is like a three-legged stool. The first leg is the Security Council, peacekeeping, and peace enforcement. That’s the reactive leg. The second leg is all the economic and social agencies, from the World Bank to UNICEF to the UN Population Fund. They are trying to improve the conditions of people so that they won’t go to war. The third leg, which we often forget about, is the leg of international cultural understanding, so that we try to live in a world with different languages, religions, and cultures and appreciate them rather than hate them. There are some much-neglected bodies like UNESCO, which we ought to think about more. The charter of UNESCO begins with the wonderful words, “Since war begins in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that we have to cure antagonisms.” It is a wonderful sentence, one which is easy to say that at a place like Yale, which is so multicultural. In a poor, deprived, tribal village in upper Nigeria or in Darfur, unless we get the security forces, then the economic developments, then tolerance, these places will continue to have a hard time. This will not be an easy twenty-first century.

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