Goodbye hegemony?

President Obama’s speech on the intervention in Libya served to highlight a trend in US foreign policy: America no longer leads; it selectively sponsors.

He avoided the idea that the US initiated the intervention in Libya. This was not accidental. Obama was rebuffed in his efforts to push prescriptions on environmental policy in Copenhagen, share the military burden in Afghanistan and deliver economic coordination at successive G20 meetings. He has discovered that America finds it easier to play a crucial supportive role in sponsoring global initiatives rather than set the agenda.

The American public, and many of its politicians, are blithely unaware that American legitimacy has nose-dived around the world, despite the president’s personal popularity. They still believe that the role of the US is to lead, the alternative being politically unacceptable. But a third option has now emerged: sponsoring (or muscularly enforcing) global initiatives.