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THE LONELY SUPERPOWER ,
By: Huntington, Samuel P.,
Foreign Affairs, 00157120, Mar/Apr99, Vol. 78, Issue 2
THE NEW
DIMENSION OF POWER
DURING THE
past decade global politics has changed fundamentally in two ways. First, it
has been substantially reconfigured along cultural and civilizational
lines, as I have highlighted in the pages of this journal and documented at
length in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Second,
as argued in that book, global politics is also always about power and the
struggle for power, and today international relations is
changing along that crucial dimension. The global structure of power in the
Cold War was basically bipolar; the emerging structure is very different.
There is now
only one superpower. But that does not mean that the world is unipolar. A unipolar system
would have one superpower, no significant major powers, and
many minor powers. As a result, the superpower could
effectively resolve important international issues alone, and no combination
of other states would have the power to prevent it from doing so. For several
centuries the classical world under Rome, and at times East Asia under China, approximated this
model. A bipolar system like the Cold War has two superpowers,
and the relations between them are central to international politics. Each superpower
dominates a coalition of allied states and competes with the other superpower
for influence among nonaligned countries. A multipolar
system has several major powers of comparable strength that cooperate and
compete with each other in shifting patterns. A coalition of major states is
necessary to resolve important international issues. European politics
approximated this model for several centuries.
Contemporary
international politics does not fit any of these three models. It is instead
a strange hybrid, a uni-multipolar system with one superpower
and several major powers. The settlement of key international issues requires
action by the single superpower but always with some
combination of other major states; the single superpower can,
however, veto action on key issues by combinations of other states. The United States, of course, is the
sole state with preeminence in every domain of power -- economic, military,
diplomatic, ideological, technological, and cultural -- with the reach and
capabilities to promote its interests in virtually every part of the world.
At a second level are major regional powers that are preeminent in areas of
the world without being able to extend their interests and capabilities as
globally as the United States. They include the
German-French condominium in Europe, Russia in Eurasia, China and potentially Japan in East Asia, India in South Asia, Iran in Southwest Asia, Brazil in Latin America, and South Africa and Nigeria in Africa. At a third level are
secondary regional powers whose interests often conflict with the more
powerful regional states. These include Britain in relation to the
German-French combination, Ukraine in relation to Russia, Japan in relation
to China, South Korea in relation to Japan, Pakistan in relation to India,
Saudi Arabia in relation to Iran, and Argentina in relation to Brazil.
The superpower
or hegemon in a unipolar
system, lacking any major powers challenging it, is normally able to maintain
its dominance over minor states for a long time until it is weakened by
internal decay or by forces from outside the system, both of which happened
to fifth-century Rome and
nineteenth-century China. In a multipolar system, each state might prefer a unipolar system with itself as the single dominant power
but the other major states will act to prevent that from happening, as was
often the case in European politics. In the Cold War, each superpower
quite explicitly preferred a unipolar system under
its hegemony. However, the dynamics of the competition and their early
awareness that an effort to create a unipolar
system by armed force would be disastrous for both enabled bipolarity to
endure for four decades until one state no longer could sustain the rivalry.
In each of
these systems, the most powerful actors had an interest in maintaining the
system. In a uni-multipolar system, this is less
true. The United States would clearly prefer
a unipolar system in which it would be the hegemon and often acts as if such a system existed. The
major powers, on the other hand, would prefer a multipolar
system in which they could pursue their interests, unilaterally and
collectively, without being subject to constraints, coercion, and pressure by
the stronger super power. They feel threatened by what they see as the
American pursuit of global hegemony. American officials feel frustrated by
their failure to achieve that hegemony. None of the principal power-wielders
in world affairs is happy with the status quo.
The superpower's
efforts to create a unipolar system stimulate
greater effort by the major powers to move toward a multipolar
one. Virtually all major regional powers are increasingly asserting
themselves to promote their own distinct interests, which often conflict with
those of the United States. Global politics has
thus moved from the bipolar system of the Cold War through a unipolar moment -- highlighted by the Gulf War -- and is
now passing through one or two uni-multipolar
decades before it enters a truly multipolar 21st
century. The United States, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has said,
will be the first, last, and only global superpower.
AMERICAN
OFFICIALS quite naturally tend to act as if the world were unipolar. They boast of American power and American
virtue, hailing the United States as a benevolent hegemon. They lecture other countries on the universal
validity of American principles, practices, and institutions. At the 1997 G-7
summit in Denver, President Clinton
boasted about the success of the American economy as a model for others.
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright has called the United States "the
indispensable nation" and said that "we stand tall and hence see
further than other nations." This statement is true in the narrow sense
that the United States is an indispensable
participant in any effort to tackle major global problems. It is false in
also implying that other nations are dispensable -- the United States needs the cooperation
of some major countries in handling any issue -- and that American
indispensability is the source of wisdom.
Addressing
the problem of foreign perceptions of American "hegemonism,"
Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott set forth
this rationale: "In a fashion and to an extent that is unique in the
history of Great Powers, the United States defines its strength -- indeed,
its very greatness --not in terms of its ability to achieve or maintain
dominance over others, but in terms of its ability to work with others in the
interests of the international community as a whole. . . . American foreign
policy is consciously intended to advance universal values [his
italics]." The most concise statement of the "benign hegemon" syndrome was made by Deputy Secretary of
the Treasury Lawrence H. Summers when he called the United States the "first nonimperialist superpower" -- a claim
that manages in three words to exalt American uniqueness, American virtue,
and American power.
American
foreign policy is in considerable measure driven by such beliefs. In the past
few years the United States has, among other things, attempted or been
perceived as attempting more or less unilaterally to do the following:
pressure other countries to adopt American values and practices regarding
human rights and democracy; prevent other countries from acquiring military
capabilities that could counter American conventional superiority; enforce
American law extraterritorially in other societies; grade countries according
to their adherence to American standards on human rights, drugs, terrorism,
nuclear proliferation, missile proliferation, and now religious freedom;
apply sanctions against countries that do not meet American standards on
these issues; promote American corporate interests under the slogans of free
trade and open markets; shape World Bank and International Monetary Fund
policies to serve those same corporate interests; intervene in local
conflicts in which it has relatively little direct interest; bludgeon other
countries to adopt economic policies and social policies that will benefit
American economic interests; promote American arms sales abroad while
attempting to prevent comparable sales by other countries; force out one U.N.
secretary-general and dictate the appointment of his successor; expand NATO
initially to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic and no one else;
undertake military action against Iraq and later maintain harsh economic
sanctions against the regime; and categorize certain countries as "rogue
states," excluding them from global institutions because they refuse to
kowtow to American wishes.
In the unipolar moment at the end of the Cold War and the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was often able to
impose its will on other countries. That moment has passed. The two principal
tools of coercion that the United States now a ttempts
to use are economic sanctions and military intervention. Sanctions work,
however, only when other countries also support them, and that is
decreasingly the case. Hence, the United States either applies them
unilaterally to the detriment of its economic interests and its relations
with its allies, or it does not enforce them, in which case they become
symbols of American weakness.
At relatively
low cost the United States can launch bombing or
cruise missile attacks against its enemies. By themselves, however, such
actions achieve little. More serious military interventions have to meet
three conditions: They have to be legit imated
through some international organization, such as the United Nations where
they are subject to Russian, Chinese, or French veto; they also require the
participation of allied forces, which may or may not be forthcoming; and they
have to involve no American casualties and virtually no
"collateral" casualties. Even if the United States meets all three
conditions, it risks stirring up not only criticism at home but widespread
political and popular backlash abroad.
American
officials seem peculiarly blind to the fact that often the more the United
States attacks a foreign leader, the more his popularity soars among his
countrymen who applaud him for standing tall against the greatest power on
earth. The demonizing of leaders has so far failed to shorten their tenure in
power, from Fidel Castro (who has survived eight American presidents) to
Slobodan Milousevic and Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the
best way for a dictator of a small country to prolong his tenure in power may
be to provoke the United States into denouncing him
as the leader of a "rogue regime" and a threat to global peace.
Neither the Clinton administration nor
Congress nor the public is willing to pay the costs and accept the risks of
unilateral global leadership. Some advocates of American leadership argue for
increasing defense expenditures by 50 percent, but that is a nonstarter. The
American public clearly sees no need to expend effort and resources to
achieve American hegemony. In one 1997 poll, only 13 percent said they
preferred a preeminent role for the United States in world affairs, while 74
percent said they wanted the United States to share power with other
countries. Other polls have produced similar results. Public disinterest in
international affairs is pervasive, abetted by the drastically shrinking
media coverage of foreign events. Majorities of 55 to 66 percent of the
public say that what happens in western Europe, Asia, Mexico, and Canada has little or no
impact on their lives. However much foreign policy elites may ignore or
deplore it, the United States lacks the domestic
political base to create a unipolar world. American
leaders repeatedly make threats, promise action, and fail to deliver. The
result is a foreign policy of "rhetoric and retreat" and a growing
reputation as a "hollow hegemon."
IN ACTING as
if this were a unipolar world, the United States is also becoming
increasingly alone in the world. American leaders constantly claim to be
speaking on behalf of "the international community." But whom do
they have in mind? China? Russia? India? Pakistan? Iran? The Arab world? The
Association of Southeast Asian Nations? Africa? Latin America? France? Do any of these
countries or regions see the United States as the spokesman for
a community of which they are a part? The community for which the United States speaks includes, at
best, its Anglo-Saxon cousins (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) on most issues, Germany and some smaller
European democracies on many issues, Israel on some Middle
Eastern questions, and Japan on the implementation
of U.N. resolutions. These are important states, but they fall far short of
being the global international community.
On issue
after issue, the United States has found itself
increasingly alone, with one or a few partners, opposing most of the rest of
the world's states and peoples. These issues include U.N. dues; sanctions
against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and Libya; the land mines
treaty; global warming; an international war crimes tribunal; the Middle East; the use of force
against Iraq and Yugoslavia; and the targeting of
35 countries with new economic sanctions between 1993 and 1996. On these and
other issues, much of the international community is on one side and the United States is on the other. The
circle of governments who see their interests coinciding with American
interests is shrinking. This is manifest, among other ways, in the central
lineup among the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. During the
first decades of the Cold War, it was 4:1 -- the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and China against the Soviet Union. After Mao's
communist government took China's seat, the lineup
became 3:1:1, with China in a shifting middle
position. Now it is 2:1:2, with the United States and the United Kingdom opposing China and Russia, and France in the middle spot.
While the United States regularly denounces
various countries as "rogue states," in the eyes of many countries
it is becoming the rogue superpower. One of Japan's most
distinguished diplomats, Ambassador Hisashi Owada, has argued that after World War II, the United
States pursued a policy of "unilateral globalism,"
providing public goods in the form of security, opposition to communism, an
open global economy, aid for economic development, and stronger international
institutions. Now it is pursuing a policy of "global
unilateralism," promoting its own particular interests with little
reference to those of others. The United States is unlikely to become
an isolationist country, withdrawing from the world. But it could become an
isolated country, out of step with much of the world.
If a unipolar world were unavoidable, many countries might
prefer the United States as the hegemon. But this is mostly because it is distant from
them and hence unlikely to attempt to acquire any of their territory.
American power is also valued by the secondary regional states as a
constraint on the dominance of other major regional states. Benign hegemony,
however, is in the eye of the hegemon. "One
reads about the world's desire for American leadership only in the United States," one British
diplomat observed. "Everywhere else one reads about American arrogance
and unilateralism."
Political and
intellectual leaders in most countries strongly resist the prospect of a unipolar world and favor the emergence of true multipolarity. At a 1997 Harvard conference, scholars
reported that the elites of countries comprising at least two-thirds of the
world's people -- Chinese, Russians, Indians, Arabs, Muslims, and Africans --
see the United States as the single
greatest external threat to their societies. They do not regard America as a military threat
but as a menace to their integrity, autonomy, prosperity, and freedom of
action. They view the United States as intrusive,
interventionist, exploitative, unilateralist, hegemonic, hypocritical, and
applying double standards, engaging in what they label "financial
imperialism" and "intellectual colonialism," with a foreign
policy driven overwhelmingly by domestic politics. For Indian elites, an
Indian scholar reported, "the United States represents the major
diplomatic and political threat. On virtually every issue of concern to India, the United States has 'veto' or mobilizational power, whether it is on nuclear,
technological, economic, environmental, or political matters. That is, the United States can deny India its objectives and
can rally others to join it in punishing India." Its sins are
"power, hubris, and greed." From the Russian perspective, a Moscow participant said, the
United States pursues a policy of
"coercive cooperation." All Russians oppose "a world based on
a dominant U.S. leadership which
would border on hegemony." In similar terms, the Beijing participant said
Chinese leaders believe that the principal threats to peace, stability, and China are "hegemonism and power politics," meaning U.S. policies, which they
say are designed to undermine and create disunity in the socialist states and
developing countries. Arab elites see the United States as an evil force in
world affairs, while the Japanese public rated in 1997 the United States as a threat to Japan second only to North Korea.
Such
reactions are to be expected. American leaders believe that the world's
business is their business. Other countries believe that what happens in
their part of the world is their business, not America's, and quite
explicitly respond. As Nelson Mandela said, his country rejects another
state's having "the arrogance to tell us where we should go or which
countries should be our friends. . . . We cannot accept that a state assumes
the role of the world's policeman." In a bipolar world, many countries
welcomed the United States as their protector
against the other superpower. In a uni-multipolar
world, in contrast, the world's only superpower is
automatically a threat to other major powers. One by one, the major regional
powers are making it clear that they do not want the United States messing around in
regions where their interests are predominant. Iran, for instance,
strongly opposes the U.S. military presence in
the Persian Gulf. The current bad relations between the United States and Iran are the product of
the Iranian revolution. If, however, the Shah or his son now ruled Iran, those relations
would probably be deteriorating because Iran would see the
American presence in the Gulf as a threat to its own hegemony there.
COUNTRIES
RESPOND in various ways to American superpowerdom. At
a relatively low level are widespread feelings of fear, resentment, and envy.
These ensure that when at some point the United States suffers a humiliating
rebuff from a Saddam or a Milosevic, many countries will think, "They
finally got what they had coming to them!" At a somewhat higher level,
resentment may turn into dissent, with other countries, including allies,
refusing to cooperate with the United States on the Persian Gulf, Cuba, Libya, Iran, extraterritoriality,
nuclear proliferation, human rights, trade policies, and other issues. In a
few cases, dissent has turned into outright opposition as countries attempt
to defeat U.S. policy. The highest
level of response would be the formation of an antihegemonic
coalition involving several major powers. Such a grouping is impossible in a unipolar world because the other states are too weak to
mount it. It appears in a multipolar world only
when one state begins to become strong and troublesome enough to provoke it.
It would, however, appear to be a natural phenomenon in a uni-multipolar
world. Throughout history, major powers have tended to balance against the
attempted domination by the strongest among them.
Some antihegemonic cooperation has occurred. Relations among
non-Western societies are in general improving. Gatherings occur from which
the United States is conspicuously
absent, ranging from the Moscow meeting of the
leaders of Germany, France, and Russia (which also excluded America's closest ally, Britain) to the bilateral
meetings of China and Russia and of China and India. There have been
recent rapprochements between Iran and Saudi Arabia and Iran and Iraq. The highly
successful meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference hosted by Iran coincided with the
disastrous Qatar meeting on Middle
Eastern economic development sponsored by the United States. Russian Prime
Minister Yevgeni Primakov
has promoted Russia, China, and India as a "strategic
triangle" to counterbalance the United States, and the "Primakov doctrine" reportedly enjoys substantial
support across the entire Russian political spectrum.
Undoubtedly
the single most important move toward an antihegemonic
coalition, however, antedates the end of the Cold War: the formation of the
European Union and the creation of a common European currency. As French
Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine has said, Europe must come together on
its own and create a counterweight to stop the United States from dominating a multipolar world. Clearly the euro could pose an
important challenge to the hegemony of the dollar in global finance.
Despite all
these antihegemonic rumblings, however, a more
broad-based, active, and formal anti-American coalition has yet to emerge.
Several possible explanations come to mind.
First, it may
be too soon. Over time the response to American hegemony may escalate from
resentment and dissent to opposition and collective counteraction. The
American hegemonic threat is less immediate and more diffuse than the
prospect of imminent military conquest posed by European hegemons
in the past. Hence, other powers can be more relaxed about forming a
coalition to counter American dominance.
Second, while
countries may resent U.S. power and wealth,
they also want to benefit from them. The United States rewards countries that
follow its leadership with access to the American market, foreign aid,
military assistance, exemption from sanctions, silence about deviations from
U.S. norms (as with Saudi human rights abuses and Israeli nuclear weapons),
support for membership in international organizations, and bribes and White
House visits for political leaders. Each major regional power also has an
interest in securing U.S. support in conflicts
with other regional powers. Given the benefits that the United States can distribute, the
sensible course for other countries may well be, in international-relations
lingo, not to "balance" against the United States but to
"bandwagon" with it. Over time, however, as U.S. power declines, the
benefits to be gained by cooperating with the United States will also decline, as
will the costs of opposing it. Hence, this factor reinforces the possibility
that an antihegemonic coalition could emerge in the
future.
Third, the
international-relations theory that predicts balancing under the current
circumstances is a theory developed in the context of the European Westphalian system established in 1648. All the countries
in that system shared a common European culture that distinguished them
sharply from the Ottoman Turks and other peoples. They also took the
nation-state as the basic unit in international relations and accepted the
legal and theoretical equality of states despite their obvious differences in
size, wealth, and power. Cultural commonality and legal equality thus facilitated
the operation of a balance-of-power system to counter the emergence of a
single hegemon, and even then it often operated
quite imperfectly.
Global
politics is now multicivilizational. France, Russia, and China may well have common
interests in challenging U.S. hegemony, but their
very different cultures are likely to make it difficult for them to organize
an effective coalition. In addition, the idea of the sovereign legal equality
of nation-states has not played a significant role in relations among
non-Western societies, which see hierarchy rather than equality as the
natural relation among peoples. The central questions in a relationship are:
who is number one? who is number two? At least one
factor that led to the breakup of the Sino-Soviet alliance at the end of the
1950s was Mao Zedong's unwillingness to play second
fiddle to Stalin's successors in the Kremlin. Similarly, an obstacle to an
anti-U.S. coalition between China and Russia now is Russian
reluctance to be the junior partner of a much more populous and economically
dynamic China. Cultural
differences, jealousies, and rivalries may thwart the major powers from
coalescing against the superpower.
Fourth, the
principal source of contention between the superpower and the
major regional powers is the former's intervention
to limit, counter, or shape the actions of the latter. For the secondary
regional powers, on the other hand, superpower intervention is
a resource that they potentially can mobilize against their region's major
power. The superpower and the secondary regional powers will
thus often, although not always, share converging interests against major
regional powers, and secondary regional powers will have little incentive to
join in a coalition against the superpower.
THE INTERPLAY
of power and culture will decisively mold patterns of alliance and antagonism
among states in the coming years. In terms of culture, cooperation is more
likely between countries with cultural commonalties; antagonism is more
likely be tween countries
with widely different cultures. In terms of power, the United States and the secondary
regional powers have common interests in limiting the dominance of the major
states in their regions. Thus the United States has warned China by strengthening its
military alliance with Japan and supporting the
modest extension of Japanese military capabilities. The U.S. special relationship
with Britain provides leverage
against the emerging power of a united Europe. America is working to develop
close relations with Ukraine to counter any
expansion of Russian power. With the emergence of Brazil as the dominant state
in Latin America, U.S. relations with Argentina have greatly improved
and the United States has designated Argentina a non-NATO military
ally. The United States cooperates closely
with Saudi Arabia to counter Iran's power in the Gulf
and, less successfully, has worked with Pakistan to balance India in South Asia. In all these cases,
cooperation serves mutual interests in containing the influence of the major
regional power.
This
interplay of power and culture suggests that the United States is likely to have
difficult relations with the major regional powers, though less so with the
European Union and Brazil than with the others.
On the other hand, the United States should have reasonably cooperative
relations with all the secondary regional powers, but have closer relations
with the secondary regional powers that have similar cultures (Britain,
Argentina, and possibly Ukraine) than those that have different cultures
(Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan). Finally, relations between
major and secondary regional powers of the same civilization (the EU and Britain, Russia and Ukraine, Brazil and Argentina, Iran and Saudi Arabia) should be less
antagonistic than those between countries of different civilizations (China and Japan; Japan and Korea; India and Pakistan; Israel and the Arab states).
What are the
implications of a uni-multipolar world for American
policy?
First, it
would behoove Americans to stop acting and talking as if this were a unipolar world. It is
not. To deal with any major global issue, the United States needs the cooperation
of at least some major powers. Unilateral sanctions and interventions are
recipes for foreign policy disasters. Second, American leaders should abandon
the benign-hegemon illusion that a natural
congruity exists between their interests and values and those of the rest of
the world. It does not. At times, American actions may promote public goods
and serve more widely accepted ends. But often they will not, in part because
of the unique moralistic component in American policy but also simply because
America is the only superpower,
and hence its interests necessarily differ from those of other countries.
This makes America unique but not benign
in the eyes of those countries.
Third, while
the United States cannot create a unipolar world, it is in U.S. interests to take
advantage of its position as the only superpower in the
existing international order and to use its resources to elicit cooperation
from other countries to deal with global issues in ways that satisfy American
interests. This would essentially involve the Bismarckian
strategy recommended by Josef Joffe, but it would
also require Bismarckian talents to carry out, and,
in any event, cannot be maintained in definitely.
Fourth, the
interaction of power and culture has special relevance for European-American
relations. The dynamics of power encourage rivalry; cultural commonalities
facilitate cooperation. The achievement of almost any major American goal
depends on the triumph of the latter over the former. The relation with Europe is central to the
success of American foreign policy, and given the pro- and anti-American
outlooks of Britain and France, respectively, America's relations with Germany are central to its
relations with Europe. Healthy cooperation with Europe is the prime antidote
for the loneliness of American superpowerdom.
Richard N. Haass has argued that the United States should act as a
global sheriff, rounding up "posses" of other states to handle
major international issues as they arise. Haass
handled Persian Gulf matters at the White House in the Bush
administration, and this proposal reflects the experience and success of that
administration in putting together a heterogeneous global posse to force
Saddam out of Kuwait. But that was then,
in the unipolar moment. What happened then
contrasts dramatically with the Iraqi crisis in the winter of 1998, when France, Russia, and China opposed the use of
force and America assembled an
Anglo-Saxon posse, not a global one. In December
1998 support for U.S. and British air
strikes against Saddam was also limited and criticism widespread. Most
strikingly, no Arab government, including Kuwait, endorsed the action.
Saudi Arabia refused to allow the United States to use its fighter
planes based there. Efforts at rallying future posses are far more likely to
resemble what happened in 1998 than what happened in 1990-91. Most of the
world, as Mandela said, does not want the United States to be its policeman.
As a multipolar system emerges, the appropriate replacement
for a global sheriff is community policing, with the major regional powers assuming
primary responsibility for order in their own regions. Haass
criticizes this suggestion on the grounds that the other states in a region,
which I have called the secondary regional powers, will object to being
policed by the leading regional powers. As I have indicated, their interests
often do conflict. But the same tension is likely to hold in the relationship
between the United States and major regional
powers. There is no reason why Americans should take responsibility for
maintaining order if it can be done locally. While geography does not
coincide exactly with culture, there is considerable overlap between regions
and civilizations. For the reasons I set forth in my book, the core state of
a civilization can better maintain order among the members of its extended
family than can someone outside the family. There are also signs in some
regions such as Africa, Southeast Asia, and perhaps even the
Balkans that countries are beginning to develop collective means to maintain
security. American intervention could then be restricted to those situations
of potential violence, such as the Middle East and South Asia, involving major
states of different civilizations.
In the multipolar world of the 21st century, the major powers
will inevitably compete, clash, and coalesce with each other in various
permutations and combinations. Such a world, however, will lack the tension
and conflict between the superpower and the major regional
powers that are the defining characteristic of a uni-multipolar
world. For that reason, the United States could find life as a
major power in a multipolar world less demanding,
less contentious, and more rewarding than it was as the world's only superpower.
By Samuel P.
Huntington
Samuel P.
Huntington is the Albert J. Weatherhead III
University Professor at Harvard University, where he is also
Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and Chairman of
the Harvard Academy for International and
Area Studies.
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