Preface

"May you live in interesting times," goes an ancient Chinese blessing and curse. I have. The world has changed dramatically during my life, which has coincided with what is often called "the American century." With poetic hyperbole, in 1983 the American Catholic bishops described our era as "the first generation since Genesis with the capability of destroying God's creation." For better or for worse, for four score years, I have lived in interesting times, and confronted the existential threat of nuclear weapons. The story I am telling is personal, but I hope it helps historians to look back, and our grandchildren to look forward.

My earliest political memories are of World War II, the atomic bomb, and the death of Franklin Roosevelt. From a child's point of view, the war was represented by my parents' concern about rationing coupons, conserving gasoline, and defeating evil people. Dropping an atomic bomb on Japan meant we would win, and the boys would soon come home. Little could I have imagined that I would one day visit Hiroshima as a guest of the Japanese government, or that I would be in charge of President Jimmy Carter's policy to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and would win the State Department's Distinguished Service Medal for my work. Subsequently, when I returned from Washington to Harvard, I tried to think through what I had done and wrote a book with the title Nuclear Ethics. During the Reagan Administration, I wrote and commented in national newspapers, magazines, and television on nuclear arms control and our policy toward the Soviet Union.

Nor could I have imagined that I would then work in Bill Clinton's Pentagon and be responsible for an East Asian security policy that the Japanese dubbed the "Nye Initiative," and for which I would one day stand in the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to receive the Order of the Rising Sun from the Emperor of Japan.

As I entered my teens, my political imagination was captured by maps colored for areas representing American troops moving up the Korean peninsula and then being pushed down again after Chinese troops surged across the Yalu River. I did not imagine that someday I would sit in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and meet General Chi Haotian, the Chinese Defense Minister, who, as a young soldier, had participated in those battles. Or attend a 1995 summit meeting between the American and Chinese presidents and hear Bill Clinton tell Jiang Zemin that the United States had more to fear from a chaotic China than from a rising China, echoing an estimate by the National Intelligence Council that I chaired in 1993. Later, in 1999, I wrote an invited editorial for The Economist of London, speculating on whether we were fated to replicate Thucydides' prediction that an established and a rising power were fated to clash. How we handle that relationship is one of the great questions that has preoccupied me, and I will return to it often below. But first, let me go back to the beginning.

When I was born in 1937, one of every four Americans was out of work. War raged in Spain, and Hitler's growing strength portended world war. Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia and Japan slaughtered Chinese civilians in the "Rape of Nanjing." This was also the year Pablo Picasso painted his iconic image of the horrors of the destruction of Guernica, but most Americans, including my family, were strongly isolationist, despite Franklin Roosevelt's efforts to coax Americans to look outward and broaden their horizons.

Today, our nation debates whether we are witnessing the end of the American century in which the United States has been the dominant power. Some believe that we are about to be displaced by China, but I have argued that the future is still open. I have lived through eight decades of an American era that included World War II, Hiroshima, and wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Nuclear holocaust was always a background fear. School children were told that, in the event of a nuclear explosion, they should duck under their desks and cover their heads. The Cold War ended without the nuclear catastrophe that hung over our heads, but it was replaced by a period of hubris as America became the world's sole superpower. That unipolar moment was soon replaced by fears of transnational terrorism and cyber wars and analysts today speak about a new cold war with a rising China and fear of nuclear escalation following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Our mental maps of the world have changed dramatically over my lifetime.

So has our technology. When I was born, there were no real computers. Today, most of us carry a computer in our pocket that would have required a building to house just a few decades ago. I have an even smaller one implanted in my body that paces my heart. In 1937, transcontinental and transoceanic air travel was barely possible. Over the years, I have logged more than 1 million frequent flyer miles on more than one airline. And then, during the Covid pandemic of 2020, I suddenly stopped traveling. Nonetheless, new technology allowed me to give talks on four continents in the course of a week without spending a drop of jet fuel. At the beginning of the American era, no one considered the impact of humans on the earth's climate: today, it is a major concern as we confront ever more intense wildfires, storms, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and forced migration of peoples.

My family is a very American mix of immigrants. Benjamin Nye was a Puritan who came to Massachusetts in 1639 and the house he built is still preserved as a museum in the small town of Sandwich on Cape Cod. One of my ancestors fought in the American revolution before moving to Maine. My grandmothers, however, were more recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany. My paternal great grandfather, John Ward Nye, was a farmer from Maine who joined the California gold rush but found no gold. Unlike so many New Englanders, I have a grandfather who was born in California but decided to return East to work for another branch of the Maine family that had prospered in New York. When my grandfather fell in love and married Lillian Spaulding, the artistic daughter of an Irish Catholic family that ran the Brooklyn boarding house where he was staying, the staunchly Protestant family was scandalized, and he was forced to resign from the family company. After his mother died of cancer when he was nine, my father was brought up by two Baptist "old maid" aunts (as they were then called). They told him his mother had gone to hell because she was a Catholic. The little boy loved his caring aunts and loved his mother, so he developed a distrust of organized religion. As an adult, my father refused to go to church but retained a broad belief in God. He sent me and my sisters to Sunday School; I too wrestled with religion during various phases of my life, at one time even contemplating a career as a minister. That was not to be.

Religious intolerance was intense in twentieth-century America, but by 1960 I was able to cast my first vote for Jack Kennedy, an Irish Catholic. I never knew my Irish grandmother, but l like to imagine her smiling at this vote by her grandson. America has serious flaws, many of which preoccupy us now, but we have also had a capacity to recreate ourselves. Growing up, society told me that homosexuality was abhorrent. Today my wife and I accept and love a transsexual member of our extended family. Racial prejudice was rampant, and I had no African American friends. Now my granddaughters date across racial divides. Our nation is far from overcoming our original sin of slavery, but we have made racial progress, including the election of a Black president. I deeply believe more will come. Without that hope, who are we? As my friend and co-chair of the Aspen Strategy Group Condoleezza Rice said in celebrating Juneteenth 2021, our saving grace as a nation is "that we are always working toward a more perfect union - that we may never get to the 'perfect', but that we are always striving for it."1

Americans have worried about our decline right from the start. As a fragment of European society that broke off to worship in a purer way, we have long worried about whether we were living up to those standards. American exceptionalism can blind us, but it has deep roots. Today, both our values and our power are changing. Every modern generation witnesses what it believes to be unprecedented changes in technology and society, but not every generation experiences the rise of a nation to global power and suffers recurrent anxieties about national decline.

For eight decades, we have lived in what TIME publisher Henry Luce in March 1941 baptized "the American Century." In the nineteenth century, the global balance of power was centered in Europe, which sent its imperial tentacles around the world. The US was a bit player with a military not much larger than that of Chile. As the twentieth century began, the US became the world's largest industrial power, and accounted for nearly a quarter of the world economy (as it still does today). When Woodrow Wilson decided to send 2 million troops to Europe in 1917, the US tipped the balance in World War I. But afterwards, the US "returned to normal" and in the 1930s became strongly isolationist. It is more accurate to date the American century with Franklin Roosevelt's entry into World War II in 1941. It was in that context, to resist isolationism and urge participation in the war, that Luce coined his...