(Page 39 of 51) - Can the United States Be Balanced? If So, How? authored by Walt, Stephen.

try to portray U.S. primacy and U.S. foreign policy as inherently illegitimate, in order to
persuade others that U.S. primacy ought to be resisted. A strategy of delegitimation does
not seek to challenge U.S. power directly—i.e., by forming a countervailing coalition—
instead, the main goal is to undermine the belief that U.S. primacy is either “automatic”
or morally acceptable. In essence, delegitimation seeks to make more people resent U.S.
dominance, so that they become more willing to take action against it and so that the
United States has to work harder to win their support.

But where does legitimacy come from? What characteristics or behaviors make

one country’s position “legitimate” in the eyes of other states, and what traits or actions
will tend to call one’s legitimacy into question? There are at least five possible sources
of international legitimacy, and the struggle to either legitimate or delegitimate U.S.
primacy takes place along every one of these fronts.

Conformity with Established Procedures. In politics, actions may be legitimate

because they result from a previously agreed-upon process. In a democracy, for example,
the authority of political leaders is established by winning a fair election, just as new
statutes are legitimate if they emerge from normal legislative procedures. By the same
token, the legitimacy of an elected official (or a new law) ruler or a law will be
compromised if agreed-upon procedures appear to have been violated or ignored.

It follows that U.S. primacy will be more legitimate when the United States acts

in accordance with established international procedures. To take the most obvious
example, the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq was seen as a legitimate use of U.S. power,
because the use of force was specifically authorized by the United Nations Security
Council. By contrast, the decision to attack Iraq in 2003 undercut the legitimacy of U.S.
primacy, because the United States failed to gain Security Council authorization yet went
to war anyway.

The more well-established the process is, the greater the expectation that states

should follow it. In challenging the new US doctrine of preemption, for example, UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan explicity noted that this policy clashed with procedures
and principles that the international community had endorsed for over five decades. In
his words, the logic of states that “reserve the right to act unilaterally, or in ad hoc
coalitions. . . is a fundamental challenge to the principles on which, however imperfectly,
world peace and stability have rested for the last 58 years.”

Annan’s challenge to U.S.

Max Weber’s seminal discussion of legitimacy is not especially relevant for world politics. Weber

argued that political institutions or leaders derive legitimate authority either from “tradition” or from
“charisma.” In the first case, a leader or institution is legitimate because it follows a well-established
precedent; i.e., because “it has always been that way.” By contrast, “charismatic” authority derives from
the seemingly “magical capacities of certain leaders” (Hitler, Napoleon, Jesus). Needless to say, neither
mechanism can be used to legitimate U.S. primacy. American dominance cannot be justified by invoking
“tradition”—if only because the United States has not always been #1 (and certainly not as dominant as it is
today). Similarly, “charismatic” leadership cannot legitimate U.S. dominance because there is no way to
guarantee that every U.S. leader will possess such magical qualities.

Thus, many people believed the 2000 presidential election in the United States undermined George W.

Bush’s legitimacy, for he seemed (to some Americans, at least) to have gained the White House through
electoral chicanery.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan, “Address to the General Assembly,” September 23, 2003, available at