One of the most striking features of Ambassador Javad Zarif’s critique ("Indispensable Power," Winter 2003) is that it embraces the increasingly vocal consensus in the international community about the limits and dangers of unilateralism. It is encouraging to hear a thoughtful Iranian diplomat praise global cooperation, human rights, and democracy, which Iran’s leaders scorned during the 1980s and early 1990s. This shift, which undoubtedly reflects the "new thinking" of Iran’s reformist President Mohammad Khatami and his allies, makes it more difficult for a liberal, neo-realist internationalist like myself to disagree with Ambassador Zarif.

Indeed, I agree with many of his points. US President George Bush’s administration has alienated much of the world by its rejection of international treaties, advocacy of regime change, implicit rejection of national sovereignty, failure to push for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and what many see as a self-serving and hypocritical approach to non-proliferation. I also agree that much of the "hatred" toward the United States has more to do with US policies than US values. No amount of shrewd public diplomacy can overcome the basic policy clashes that separate Europe and Washington almost as decisively as they divide Washington and the Third World. That said, Ambassador Zarif has simplified some of the inevitable challenges that the world’s remaining superpower must encounter. Moreover, he ignores the daunting challenge that Iranian leaders still face in squaring their espousal of international norms and institutions with many of Iran’s foreign policies. Unfortunately, some of these policies reflect the enduring influence of a hard-line clerical establishment that repudiates many of the very global norms that Ambassador Zarif advocates.

It is no easy feat for US leaders to avoid "confusing unilateralism with leadership" or leadership with hegemony. As the sole superpower whose military weight must sometimes be used to address international conflicts, the United States has been compelled to act as a political entrepreneur that, under certain conditions, must threaten or use military force to induce collective action, particularly from its Western European allies. To reduce the complex link between leadership and hegemony solely to the ideological pre-occupations and influence of the Bush administration’s neoconservatives is misleading. It is worth remembering that following the failure of European allies and the United Nations to use military force in the Balkans, US President Bill Clinton’s administration also acted as the hegemon. If Kosovo’s Muslims are today free of the threat of Serbian persecution and violence, this has something to do with the readiness of that "globalist" Democratic administration to implicitly (if belatedly) advocate a doctrine of military intervention and even regime change when sovereign states trample on international norms of human and civil rights. While there is no straight line from Clinton to Bush, there is certainly a conceptual and practical evolution from one to the other.

The question of Iraq illustrates the thorny link between leadership and hegemony. Absent the Bush administration’s willingness to use force, Saddam Hussein would likely continue to flout UN authority indefinitely. The looming threat of US unilateralism has, at least for the time being, reinforced UN legitimacy and prominence, much to the chagrin of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. The latter might still prevail over the more multilateralist instincts of US Secretary of State Colin Powell and his allies in the US State Department and even military, but US military predominance remains an "indispensable" reality with which European leaders must grapple despite their misgivings or ambiguous feelings about the costs and benefits of hegemony.

I doubt that such misgivings will create the “balancing coalition” Ambassador Zarif describes. European peace and prosperity are founded on a quest for economic, political, and social integration whose very success hinges on having the United States shoulder the primary economic and even human costs of acting as military hegemon. The challenge facing European leaders today is to harness and thus restrain US power without sacrificing their countries' vital interests.

The case of Iraq shows how tricky it is to strike this careful balance. By agreeing to a more robust UN resolution on disarmament and inspections in Resolution 1441, the international community has tried to placate the Bush administration hawks while drawing them into an inspections regime whose very success depends on the credible threat of force and even war. The strategy of "coercive inspections," as my colleagues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have called it, constitutes one version of coercive diplomacy. It is a game of chicken whose outcome might determine whether the deep division within the Bush administration (and the US Congress) between neoconservative interventionists and real-politick neo-internationalists is ultimately decided in favor of one or the other.