Dear Friends, Two essays
below. They both read sophisticated, well-researched and learned,
but use a typical Hollywood and academic template - We the West are virtuous
and "Enlightened" and they the rest of the world (except neo-Fascist
India, neo-totalitarian Saudi Arabia and Sisi's Egypt, who are with Us) are
anti-humanity, illiberal and evil (?). Like economics, which
assumes anything and everything that doesn't fit the prejudices (called
theories), these essays require suspending your intellectual faculties and going along with the authors'
fantastical views of the world.
They are published on major
"liberal" platforms: The Atlantic and Foreign Policy.
Over the years I have developed the habit of
reading, listening to and watching views which I violently disagree with.
I don't write off or skip anything simply because the author or speaker is
someone whose views I disagree strongly or whose personality I find
distasteful.
In the age of "echo chambers"
facilitated by the social media platforms and their algorithms my habit has
served me well. Sometimes you learn more from those who hold
opposing views than those with whom you are in the same camp. I won't
comment on these except to say that ideologies are alive and kicking.
"Facts" as such are constructed in order to support one's
preferred delusions, hence one of my favorite jokes, "give me your policy,
and I will give you the corroborating 'facts'.
Enjoy!
Zarni The World Is Realigning
An emerging Axis of Resistance confronts the
Liberal Alliance.
Like a lightning strike illuminating a dim
landscape, the twin invasions of Israel and Ukraine have brought
a sudden recognition: What appeared to be, until now, disparate and
disorganized challenges to the United States and its allies is actually
something broader, more integrated, more aggressive, and more dangerous. Over
the past several years, the world has hardened into two competing blocs. One is
an alliance of liberal-minded, Western-oriented countries that includes NATO as
well as U.S. allies in Asia and Oceania, with the general if inconsistent
cooperation of some non-liberal countries such as Saudi Arabia and Vietnam: a
Liberal Alliance, for short. The other bloc is led by the authoritarian dyad of
Russia and Iran, but it extends to anti-American states such as North Korea,
militias such as Hezbollah, terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestine
Islamic Jihad, and paramilitaries such as the Wagner Group: an Axis of
Resistance, as some of its members have accurately dubbed it.
With the adoption of the Abraham Accords normalizing
Israel’s relationship with several Arab countries, and with the accession of
Sweden and Finland into NATO, the Liberal Alliance has forged tighter ties. In
response, the Axis of Resistance has adopted a more offensive posture. “This is
an entente that is really coming together in a way that should alarm us quite a
lot,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Kagan said recently in an
interview with the journalist Bill Kristol. “These countries
disagree about a lot of things; they don’t share a common ideology. But they do
share a common enemy: us. And the thing that they agree on is that we are a
major obstacle to their objectives and their plans, and therefore that it’s in
each of their interest to help the others take us down.”
The Axis of Resistance does not have a unifying
ideology, but it does have the shared goal of diminishing U.S. influence,
especially in the Middle East and Eurasia, and rolling back liberal democracy.
Instead of a NATO-like formal structure, it relies on loose coordination and
opportunistic cooperation among its member states and its network of militias,
proxies, and syndicates. Militarily, it cannot match the U.S. and NATO in a
direct confrontation, so it instead seeks to exhaust and demoralize the U.S.
and its allies by harrying them relentlessly, much as hyenas harry and exhaust
a lion.
The Axis has thus developed into an acephalous
networked actor, its member states operating semi-independently yet
interdependently, taking cues from one another and sharing resources and
dividing duties, jumping in and out of action as opportunities arise and
circumstances dictate. One country will help another bust sanctions while receiving
military equipment from a third. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum has
reported, Russia, Iran, and China have also joined forces on the
propaganda front, launching waves of disinformation toward the West. Although
the Axis normally takes care to keep its hostilities beneath the threshold that
would trigger state-to-state military conflict, it can and will resort to
direct military confrontation if it sees need or advantage.
In the two current conflicts, Ukraine and Israel act
not only on their own behalf but also as surrogates for the broader alliance.
Neither Ukraine nor Israel can sustain its position without outside support.
That support, therefore, is a primary target of the Axis, which coordinates
across both fronts. Russia has ditched its previously warm relationship with
Israel to embrace Iran, which supplies the
Kremlin with weaponry and equipment. North Korea likewise supplies the Russian
war effort, and it recently entered into a
security pact with Russia; Hamas praises North Korea as “part
of [our] alliance.” China, while keeping some distance from the
Ukraine conflict militarily, has declared “unlimited partnership” with Russia,
helps Russia defeat economic sanctions, and provides industrial and
technological support for Russia’s war effort. Meanwhile, Russia props up the
pro-Iran regime in Syria, and militias aligned with Iran use missiles and
drones to strike Israel from Gaza and Lebanon, U.S. forces from Iraq and Syria,
and Saudi Arabia from Yemen. Even the weakest and poorest of the Axis forces,
the Houthi rebels in Yemen, disrupt regional shipping virtually at will.
======
The Most
Dangerous Game
Do Power
Transitions Always Lead to War?
By Manjari Chatterjee Miller
July/August 2024Published on June 18, 2024
At first, many in Washington
assumed that China’s rise could be managed. In response to the inexorable logic
of modernization and some coaxing, China would become, as U.S. Deputy Secretary
of State Robert Zoellick put it in 2005, a “responsible stakeholder” in the
international system. For a time, Beijing did seem to be tamed, as it appeared
to embrace Western norms and international institutions such as the World Trade
Organization (WTO).
Today, however, that hope is
dying. On issue after issue, Beijing seems to be rejecting rather than
accepting the U.S.-led global order, putting it on a collision course with
Washington and prompting endless discussion about how to solve the “China
challenge.” But for all the specificity of the debate—how to deter an invasion
of Taiwan, what to do about Beijing’s expansionist claims in
the South China Sea, and whether the West should economically and
technologically decouple from China—at the heart of the matter lies a much
bigger and older conundrum in international relations. How does a status quo
power handle a rising power, and do moments of transition inexorably lead to
war?
The political scientist Graham
Allison has called the seemingly inevitable clash between the United States and China “the Thucydides trap.” The
phrase refers to the pattern first laid out by the fifth-century Greek
historian in his study of the conflict between Sparta, then the dominant power
in ancient Greece, and Athens, its rising challenger. In The History of the
Peloponnesian War, he famously concluded that “what made war inevitable was the
growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” In the
modern era, international relations scholars have come up with a name for this
dynamic: power transition theory.
Pointing to history, the theory
holds that ascendant powers routinely emerge to challenge the dominant power
and the international order established by it, eventually leading to conflict.
Far from remaining confined to the ivory tower, this conceptual framework has
long guided official thinking. After World War II, for example, policymakers in Washington and
Moscow worried that the Cold War between the established American power and the
rising Soviet one might turn hot.
But power transition theory
offers another implicit, and often overlooked, truth: that the way the
established power manages the international order can matter as much as, if not
more than, the ambitions of the challenger. Precisely because they are still
rising, challengers generally have to act within the existing laws, norms, and
institutions that govern international relations, even when they disagree with
them. By contrast, established powers have the ability to adjust those rules
and institutions in ways that sustain or enhance their own position. In other
words, for a long-dominant hegemon, the best response to a threatening upstart
may not be to confront or try to defeat it but to use the international order
to contain it.
HOME-FIELD
ADVANTAGE
Modern power transition theory
originated with the political scientist A. F. K. Organski, who gave a general
theoretical foundation to the problem first articulated by Thucydides. In 1958,
Organski identified what he called a “recurring pattern” in international
relations: in every era of history, he argued, there is a status quo power that
eventually faces a challenger. During the Cold War, scholars such as Robert Gilpin, Jacek Kugler, and
Ronald Tammen expanded on Organski’s thesis, agreeing that a rising power tends
to be “dissatisfied” with the way that the dominant power influences the
distribution of goods in the international system, thus preventing the
challenger from reaping equal benefits. And so it rises to displace the status
quo power, a confrontation that often leads to war.
In line with this thesis, most
policymakers and analysts thinking about China today have been concerned almost
exclusively with the direct threat posed by Beijing’s rise. This is not
surprising, since power transition theory’s primary implication is that
challenges by rising powers can lead to war. For this reason, the first
generation of power transition theorists tended to focus on how the
distribution of power affected the probability of war and peace: a
concentration of power in a single hegemon could, in their view, stabilize the
system until a challenger became sufficiently strong to contest that power.
Applied to the United States and China today, this framing suggests a dire
outcome. Even if a full power transition does not occur—that is, even if China
eventually stagnates—Beijing might attain enough economic and military power to
push back against Washington, raising the odds of war.
But the emphasis on China’s
trajectory ignores the theory’s second implication—the part that attempts to
explain why rising powers seek to challenge the great power in the first place.
Power transition theorists argue that conflict emerges not simply as a
consequence of a challenger’s growing power but because of the challenger’s
relationship to the international order. Specifically, a rising power may be
dissatisfied with existing international arrangements and may seek to gain
sufficient power to eventually change them. Therefore, the way the status quo
power manages the international order can determine whether rivalry turns into
conflict.
Challengers generally have to act within existing
norms, even when they disagree with them.
To understand why, it is
necessary to grasp exactly which aspects of the existing order rising powers
wish to change and how. Most rising powers are not wholly revisionist. Rather,
they tend to dislike some elements of the international order while accepting
others. Thucydides himself implicitly made this point: in his view, it was not
just Athens’s rising power that led to the Peloponnesian War but also its
dissatisfaction with some of the cultural and political norms that Sparta
embraced. As Laurie Bagby has observed, Thucydides argued that the clash
between the “national character” of Sparta (reticent, inward-looking) and that
of Athens (daring and glory seeking) influenced how they approached the
distribution of power and the international order. For example, Sparta was slow
and hesitant to defend friendly states. This emboldened Athens to invade and
annihilate a neutral state—the island of Melos—to demonstrate its strength and
power. In his Melian Dialogue, Thucydides’s dramatic narration of the
negotiations between Athens and Melos, Athens declares, in a show of the
cultural norms that drove it, that “the strong do what they can and the weak
suffer what they must.”
Over the past decade or so, a new
generation of power transition scholars has paid more attention to how rising
powers, both past and present, interact with the international order. Stacie
Goddard has studied the ways that rising powers justify their actions, showing,
for example, that the long-dominant United Kingdom chose to accommodate the upstart United
States in the 1820s because London recognized that Washington, through the
Monroe Doctrine, was upholding existing norms of free trade, international law,
and noninterference. Xiaoyu Pu has explored how rising powers strategically
frame their views of order to domestic and foreign audiences. China, for
example, has engaged in “conspicuous giving” and charity through its Asian
Infrastructure Investment Bank in an effort to convert economic power into diplomatic
power. Rohan Mukherjee has looked at the tendency of challengers to sacrifice
material interests in order to be accepted as a part of the great-power club.
Japan, for instance, agreed to limit the size of its fleet at the Washington
Naval Conference of 1921–22, notwithstanding its drive to become a major naval
power, and China, despite its efforts to build a larger nuclear arsenal, agreed
to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996.
Michelle Murray has shown how
rising states seek to be recognized as full equals of established powers, as
both the United States and imperial Germany did at the beginning of the
twentieth century, and how denial of that recognition can fuel a “forceful
contestation.” Joshua Shifrinson has noted that, contrary to what one might
expect, rising powers are often careful to avoid antagonizing a declining great
power, as the United States did when it supported the United Kingdom at the
start of the Cold War. By accommodating the incumbent, a rising power can more
quickly expand its own capabilities. And Kristen Hopewell, Emma Mawdsley, and
Khalid Nadvi have each sought to identify the ways in which rising powers want
to change the international order and why, concluding that they often cooperate
with each other to modify the existing structures of global governance.
Watching Chinese President Xi Jinping speak about
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Hong Kong, September 2023
Watching Chinese President Xi Jinping speak about
China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Hong Kong, September 2023
Tyrone Siu / Reuters
This growing body of work has
added important insights about how rising powers navigate the international
order: rather than challenging it outright, they tend to accept many existing
norms, cooperate to reject other aspects, and are sensitive to accusations of
being overthrowers of existing arrangements. In doing so, they are playing a
long game aimed at two objectives: using the arrangements of the current order
to bolster their own rise, and weakening the architect of that order until they
can attain sufficient power to create a new one. Yet this research also offers
insights into how the great power can avoid this outcome. Left untended, the
international order may facilitate a challenger that seeks to manipulate existing
norms to gain advantage or to draw other countries into its own orbit. But the
great power also has the ability to change the order in ways that limit these
dangers.
As Sevasti-Eleni Vezirgiannidou
has pointed out, it matters not only how the great power manages its relations
with the rising power but also whether the great power is prepared to rethink
the order it built. She argues that the United States has avoided contemplating
changes to the liberal international order that could help slow its decline.
Rather than strengthening or even reforming existing international
institutions, Washington has often turned to ad hoc informal institutions and
diplomacy, making the international order more fragmented and contested than
ever. For example, Vezirgiannidou notes that the United States has sanctioned
Iran, a fellow member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for its nuclear
program yet sought to legitimize India, which is not a member of the treaty, as
a nuclear weapons state—an approach that may ultimately weaken international
arms control arrangements. Such erosion of international institutions could
accelerate China’s rise, making China more likely to challenge the existing
order or even to precipitate a direct conflict with the United States.
By instead rethinking the formal
institutions and existing practices of the international order, the United
States can fortify its own position and diminish China’s influence, thus
reducing the chance of conflict. But Washington should act quickly. For now, Beijing
is still a hegemon in the making and lacks the clout and capability to impose a
new order: even as it seeks to get around some of them, it must generally play
by established practices and norms. At some point, however, American leaders
could find that it is China, not the United States, that is writing the rules
of the game.
PLAYING TO WIN
To put the more recent insights
of power transition theory into practice, it is important to identify the
aspects of the liberal international order that China and other challengers accept, not only those
that they reject. As my own research has shown, rising powers often have to
embrace important elements of the international order to gain recognition as a
future dominant power. At the end of the nineteenth century, both the United
States and Meiji Japan understood that owning and administering colonies
signified great-power status, even if, in the case of the United States, there
was great debate about the moral, racial, and economic implications of doing
so. Both rising powers accepted the need to become a colonizer to achieve
status, with Japan acquiring a vast empire and the United States annexing
Hawaii and the Philippines.
China’s behavior today is
analogous. Consider the Belt and Road Initiative, its vast infrastructure and
investment program. Western analysts have criticized the BRI for “debt-trap
diplomacy,” arguing that Beijing extends loans to smaller countries in the
global South as a way of gaining inordinate influence over their affairs. But
it is hard to dispute that the initiative was built on the established
multilateral principles underpinning the U.S.-led liberal international
order—namely, facilitating global trade and economic growth through
interconnectivity. Accusing China and the BRI of wholesale revisionism not only
leaves the United States open to charges of hypocrisy but also creates the
perception that the United States is simply not able to compete with China in
the global economy. A smarter approach would be to offer a better alternative
to the BRI. So far, Washington has not done so. The West’s supposed answer to
the BRI—the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, a $600
billion initiative launched by the G-7—is hampered by its members’ domestic
political constraints and their limited ability to control private-sector
investments.
Rather than seeking to confront
China directly—a strategy that could itself lead to conflict—the United States
should determine how to change the order to reinforce its own power. To begin
with, this means recognizing that a challenger is far more likely to disrupt
than disfigure the order. In Tanzania, for example, China has established an
academy where young leaders from various African ruling parties are taught
about the subordinate position of courts and the importance of rigid party
discipline. But even this project seeks only to offer—rather than
impose—China’s authoritarian model of governance and development. And at any
rate, Beijing’s broader efforts to spread its ideology on the continent have
had mixed success. The United States, by contrast, has the power and authority
to press for changes in the order that could strengthen African support or
existing institutions.
Yet Washington’s management of
the order has been underwhelming. The Biden administration’s 2021 Summit for Democracy, for
example, was intended to shore up liberalism. But the meeting included
countries such as India and Nigeria that today are hardly considered paragons
of democratic practice; it also largely sidelined civil society and had no
concrete agenda or outcomes. On economics, the United States has to a
significant degree abandoned its long-held belief in trade liberalization, yet
it has not even bothered to frame its aggressive use of tariffs and industrial
policy as part of a systematic rethinking of the global economic order.
MORE FRIENDS,
MORE POWER
If recent power transition theory
makes clear that the United States needs to rebuild the liberal order to
sustain American power, it leaves open how. One promising approach is to
address issues that are not yet governed by international norms. Take
cybersecurity. To address the growing threat of Chinese and Russian hackers,
the Biden administration has made cybersecurity a national priority, yet it has
failed to establish broader international cooperation, including by setting
down international regulations and penalties for cyberattacks. Other issues for
which international standards are deficient or lacking include social media,
cross-border data flows, food security, pandemic preparedness, and artificial
intelligence.
To truly restructure the order,
however, the United States also needs buy-in from its allies. An international
order cannot be built or rebuilt by the hegemon alone; it takes a coalition of
the willing. Consider the Cold War, which could be described as a successful
case of a power transition that did not end in direct conflict between the
hegemons themselves: confronted by the rise of the Soviet Union, the United
States was able to use its alliances to build a liberal international order in
ways that strengthened the West and helped contain the Soviet challenge.
Indeed, the communist threat gave Washington’s allies and partners an
unambiguous rationale for supporting such efforts. The new Western-led order
was expressed both in military alliances such as NATO and in international institutions such as the
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the WTO.
Today, the rationale for
supporting U.S.-led innovations to the order is not as clear. Many countries
are glad to do business with both China and the United States and want to
preserve that flexibility. Nonetheless, the United States has an advantage.
Building on its decades-old alliances and international relationships, it has
introduced several new formal arrangements with other countries, such as the
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, with Australia, India, and Japan, and
AUKUS, with Australia and the United Kingdom, which are both underpinned by the
desire to contain China. By contrast, China has no special friendships or
strategic partners, let alone formal military allies; its emerging partnership
with Russia is still fragile. Not surprisingly, the international institutions
that Beijing has spearheaded, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of
Eurasian countries and the BRICS—the group founded by Brazil, Russia, India,
China, and South Africa—have limited influence.
Washington’s management of the international order has
been underwhelming.
Still, as power transition theory
shows, Washington cannot rest on its laurels. For several decades, the center
of gravity in world politics has been shifting away from the West. China and
India have been vying to lead the developing world, and both have sought to
highlight the divide between the global South and the West. The United States
needs to show that its interests are not in opposition to those of non-Western
countries. At the WTO, for example, Washington has wisely supported changes
that aim to be inclusive but are also pragmatic and efficient. These include
the increasing use of multilateral negotiations, or negotiations that are in
principle open to all parties but are in fact mostly undertaken by only those
members that are particularly interested in the issue at hand—an approach that
is endorsed by most developing countries but opposed by India. Similarly, the
Biden administration’s promotion of “friend shoring,” or bringing supply chains
out of China and onto less hostile territory, holds tremendous potential for
building more trade links with developing countries. But Washington needs to go
further. With friend shoring, it needs to explain what its criteria for
friendship are and what exactly its friends will get, beyond merely more
bilateral trade.
By taking such steps, the United
States can better respond to rising powers that may reject important elements
of the international order yet still buy into much of it. India is the chief
example here. Although it is one of Washington’s strategic partners, New Delhi
holds positions on trade and liberalism that depart significantly from the
principles endorsed by the United States.
India has a lax approach to
intellectual property rights, for instance, and under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, its government has been accused of
dramatically eroding civil liberties. But given both countries’ wariness about
China, they need each other. By rebuilding the order to include new areas or
issues in which India has a deep interest—technology and cyberspace, for
example—the United States can induce more buy-in from India and set the norms
for future cooperation or restraint.
For now, however, the main focus
should be China. A power transition is coming: China is still rising and could
soon have the capability to revise the international order, which could
ultimately unseat the status quo great power. That is what challengers do once
they have risen. If the United States hopes to avoid that outcome, it cannot
simply rely on confronting China or complaining about how China is playing the
game. It will need to change the game itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment