So there are somewhat autonomous actors with which states have to interact, but the states still have a lot of power. This is not all or nothing. States can still do much to regulate the activities of autonomous organizations. States can also decide not to just regulate but to outlaw these organizations, which is the case with respect to the drug trade, the slave trade, and terrorism. The bottom line is that states have considerable capacity to push back. International relations, if you will, becomes two-pronged: not just state-to-state, but between states on the one hand and sub-national and supra-national actors on the other.

We talked about the preeminence of US power. What are the greatest threats, international or domestic, to US power at this point?

In the short term, the greatest threat would probably be a massive terrorist attack, possibly involving a weapon of mass destruction. That has to be the principal security threat facing the United States today, but I could list many others, including an assassination in a critical country such as Afghanistan or Pakistan where no obvious alternative leadership is in place. I could imagine an economic crisis, triggered either by an economic event or a non-economic event, with the same result—a massive flight from the dollar with all its economic but also strategic consequences. I can imagine a crisis in the Taiwan Strait that could confront the United States with some extraordinarily difficult decisions about how to act.

What is interesting, however, is the low likelihood of war between the United States and another major power in the near future. With the exception of a Taiwan crisis, it is inconceivable to me to envision a conflict between the United States and any of the other major powers of the day, essentially China, India, Russia, Europe, or Japan. This is worth noting; it constitutes a remarkable break in the historical pattern of the previous few centuries, when great power conflict was not just the norm, but the dominant paradigm for the world.

In terms of long-term risks, one has to consider what North Korea, Iran, and others might do with weapons of mass destruction and their nuclear programs. As decades pass, the United States will face the challenge of how to deal with a rising China and a declining Russia. Both challenges, while different, could be extremely difficult for the United States, because one thing we do not want to see is a reversion to an international system in which great power competition again becomes the dominant characteristic.

What would happen were the United States to lose much of its predominant power?

The United States could lose its predominance in essentially one of two ways, yielding very different worlds. One would result from the loss of US predominance to China. The United States would not be replaced by China—that is far-fetched—but rather would lose its position of primacy. This could come from a combination of a gradual weakening of the United States and a gradual strengthening of China. The world would be no longer unipolar, but bipolar or multipolar. Thus one alternative world would be one in which the balance of power would re-emerge, replacing today’s imbalance of power. You would have a much more competitive relationship between the United States and China, perhaps the emergence of a new Cold War. That to me is one way in which history could evolve over the next several decades, although it is not a terribly attractive way, to say the least.

A very different alternative to a unipolar world would be an apolar world in which the current situation is replaced not by the emergence of one or more powers with whom the United States has to share world leadership, but by the ending of US primacy. The danger is that without US primacy and without any sort of a balance that would take its place, the world would degenerate in many ways, and it may even take on elements of a modern dark ages. That would be a world in which, for example, terrorist organizations had tremendous sway, in which failed states could be counted in the dozens, in which disease—HIV/AIDS and others––ravaged societies and populations, and in which local conflict became endemic. That to me would be an even worse alternative.

So I would suggest that the goal of US foreign policy should be to avoid either of these alternatives, either the emergence of a multipolar, new Cold War kind of world or the emergence of a world without poles, in which order breaks down.

What would be the role of the United Nations in the apolar world?

The role of the United Nations in any world is what the major powers want the role of the United Nations to be. The United Nations is not an independent sovereign entity. When the major powers agree, the United Nations can act, and when the major powers cannot agree, the United Nations essentially has to be a bystander to history, and that is the whole concept of the Security Council. So, almost by definition, if you are talking about a world in which order is breaking down in the political-military sense, in the areas of health, or in the areas of trade, where protectionism becomes the rule, by definition this is a world in which international institutions, including but not limited to the United Nations, play hardly any role.

You said that the goal of US foreign policy, very broadly, should be to avoid the emergence of a multipolar world or an apolar world. That would suggest that US foreign policy should really be about maintaining or increasing US power. What are your broad strategic recommendations for sustaining and furthering US power?

I would favor the United States maintaining its position of primacy—not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. The purpose of our foreign policy cannot simply be to perpetuate US predominance, because if that is all our foreign policy is, inevitably we will end up in that second world I talked about where competitors will rise.