Competition among the great powers in Eurasia could foster miscalculation and war, just as it did before 1945
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". . . Although the Biden administration recognizes that we are back in a world of several great powers, it seems nostalgic for the brief era when the United States didn’t face peer competitors. Hence its vigorous reassertion of “U.S. leadership,” its desire to inflict a military defeat on Russia that will leave it too weak to cause trouble in the future, and its efforts to stifle China’s rise by restricting Beijing’s access to critical technological inputs while subsidizing the U.S. semiconductor industry.
"After the United States moved from the darkness of the Cold War into the pleasant glow of the so-called unipolar moment, a diverse array of scholars, pundits, and world leaders began predicting, yearning for, or actively seeking a return to a multipolar world. Not surprisingly, Russian and Chinese leaders have long expressed a desire for a more multipolar order, as have the leaders of emerging powers such as India or Brazil. More interestingly, so have important U.S. allies. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder warned of the “undeniable danger” of U.S. unilateralism, and former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine once declared that “the entire foreign policy of France … is aimed at making the world of tomorrow composed of several poles, not just one.” Current French President Emmanuel Macron’s support for European unity and strategic autonomy reveals a similar impulse.
Surprise, surprise: U.S. leaders don’t agree. They prefer the
expansive opportunities and gratifying status that come from being the
indispensable power, and they have been loath to abandon a position of
unchallenged primacy. Back in 1991, the George H.W. Bush administration
prepared a defense guidance document
calling for active efforts to prevent the emergence of peer competitors
anywhere in the world. The various National Security Strategy documents
issued by Republicans and Democrats in subsequent years have all
extolled the need to maintain U.S. primacy, even when they acknowledge the return of great power competition. Prominent academics have weighed in too—some arguing
that U.S. primacy is “essential to the future of freedom,” and good for
the United States and the world alike. I’ve contributed to this view
myself, writing
in 2005 that “the central aim of U.S. grand strategy should be to
preserve its position of primacy for as long as possible.” (My advice on
how to achieve that goal was ignored, however.)
Although the Biden administration recognizes that we are back in a world of several great powers, it seems nostalgic for the brief era when the United States didn’t face peer competitors. Hence its vigorous reassertion of “U.S. leadership,” its desire to inflict a military defeat on Russia that will leave it too weak to cause trouble in the future, and its efforts to stifle China’s rise by restricting Beijing’s access to critical technological inputs while subsidizing the U.S. semiconductor industry.
Even if these efforts succeed (and there’s no guarantee they will), restoring unipolarity is probably impossible. We are going to end up in 1) a bipolar world (with the United States and China as the two poles) or 2) a lopsided version of multipolarity where the United States is first among a set of unequal but still significant major powers (China, Russia, India, possibly Brazil, and conceivably a rearmed Japan and Germany).
What sort of world would that be? International relations theorists are divided on this question. Classical realists such as Hans Morgenthau believed multipolar systems were less war-prone because states could realign to contain dangerous aggressors and deter war. For them, flexibility of alignment was a virtue. Structural realists such as Kenneth Waltz or John Mearsheimer argued the opposite. They believed bipolar systems were in fact more stable because the danger of miscalculation was reduced; the two main powers knew the other would automatically oppose any serious attempt to alter the status quo. Moreover, the two main powers were not as dependent on allied support and could keep their clients in line when necessary. For structural realists, the flexibility inherent in a multipolar order creates greater uncertainty and makes it more likely that a revisionist power will think it can alter the status quo before the others can combine to stop it.
If the future world order is one of lopsided multipolarity and if such orders are more war-prone, then there is some reason to worry. But multipolarity might not be that bad for the United States, provided it recognizes the implications and adjusts its foreign policy appropriately.
For starters, let’s recognize that unipolarity wasn’t that great for the United States, and especially not for those unfortunate countries that got the brunt of U.S. attention in recent decades. The unipolar era included the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, two expensive and ultimately unsuccessful U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some ill-advised regime changes that led to failed states, a financial crisis that altered U.S. domestic politics dramatically, and the emergence of an increasingly ambitious China whose rise was partly facilitated by the United States’ own actions. But the United States hasn’t learned much from the experience, given that it is still listening to the strategic geniuses whose actions squandered Washington’s Cold War triumph and hastened unipolarity’s end. The only restraint on a unipolar power’s actions is self-restraint, and self-restraint is not something a crusader nation such as the United States does very well.
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The return of multipolarity will recreate a world where Eurasia contains several major powers of varying strengths. These states are likely to eye each other warily, especially when they are in close proximity. This situation gives the United States considerable flexibility to adjust its alignments as needed, just as it did when it allied with Stalinist Russia in World War II and when it mended fences with Maoist China during the Cold War. The ability to pick and choose the proper allies is the secret ingredient of the United States’ past foreign policy successes: Its position as the only great power in the Western Hemisphere gave it “free security” that no other great power possessed, and it made the United States an especially desirable ally whenever serious trouble arose. As I wrote way back in the 1980s: “For the middle powers of Europe and Asia, the United States is the perfect ally. Its aggregate power ensures that its voice will be heard and its actions will be felt … [but] it is far enough away so as not to pose a significant threat [to its allies].”
. . . READ MORE
Red Cell: The Fallacy of Perpetual US Primacy • Stimson Center
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Kagan paints a compelling, if selective, historical canvas: The United States was free riding on Pax Britannica into the 20th century. As Britain’s naval hegemony underpinning the liberal order began to erode, the U.S. reluctantly began to replace it. By World War I, President Woodrow Wilson did not fear that the United States’ direct physical security was threatened, but rather that the global system was imperiled. He began to intercede, first with the quiet diplomacy of Col. Edward House and, after his efforts at a negotiated compromise failed in 1916, with U.S. military intervention and a peace plan to “make the world safe for democracy.”
A similar logic of moral imperative applies to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s initial incremental involvement in World War II and, after the Pearl Harbor attack, its full entry. Kagan cites FDR’s elegant warning in 1939 that “there comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” After World War II — and unlike the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles and Wilson’s failed League of Nations — the United States established a less punitive global order, including the founding of the U.N. and Bretton Woods finance and trade institutions that generated 70 years of unprecedented stability and prosperity for the West, and, in the last 30 years, for the rest of the world.
This state of affairs persisted after the Cold War, from 1990 to 2001, but violently ended with 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Then the 2007-08 global financial crisis spurred new uncertainties of a post-Cold War multipolar milieu, a redistribution of wealth and power and a time of unfinished transformation.
Enter Ukraine. Ergo, a resurgence of American hegemony standing in the way of tyranny. Certainly, the December 2022 U.S. visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy enthralled Washington and an America much in need of a hero. U.S. support for Ukraine appears popular. President Joe Biden’s success in mobilizing European and Asian allies in support of Ukraine has been impressive, a Cold War-like consensus.
The advocates for perpetual U.S. global primacy do have a point. All things considered, U.S. primacy with its enlightened self-interest — in defense of principles — has broadly been a source of stability and prosperity. Nevertheless, it is a specious argument to say that realists conceive national interests only as direct attacks on U.S. soil. Rather, realists argue for balances of power, opposing Russian and Chinese attempts at hegemony over Europe and Asia, and occasional intervention to restore that balance. They are skeptical of foreign meddling for other ends, which can lead to overreach.
Many advocates of perpetual U.S. primacy dismiss such concerns. They see failed foreign adventurism as stemming less from the folly of an expansive definition of U.S. interests, than as an aberration of liberal hegemony. They tend to discount those failed U.S. interventions that ended in catastrophe, including Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya, and especially the 2003 Iraq War. Both neoconservatives and liberals were cheerleaders for these fiascos. The destabilizing destructiveness of these unnecessary interventions spawned lingering global resentment and cannot be easily airbrushed from Americans’ collective memory.
Advocates of perpetual U.S. primacy discount too many failed U.S. interventions that ended in catastrophe, but they cannot be so easily airbrushed from most Americans’ collective memory. . ." READ MORE
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We are at a hinge point and the postwar settlement has been eroded
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It was only the day before yesterday that the rich democracies imagined a post-cold war global order fashioned in their own image. Now they are running away from the world.
There were to be three pillars to the new order. As a benign hegemon, the US would underwrite the international peace and advance the spread of liberal democracy. Europe would export its model of postmodern integration to its near neighbourhood and beyond — remember those predictions that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations would soon be like the EU? A declining Russia would join China and the rising powers of the east and south in recognising their national advantage in becoming stakeholders in a western-designed system.
That was then. . ." READ MORE
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CORONAVIRUS AND THE HORIZONS OF A MULTIPOLAR WORLD: THE GEOPOLITICAL POSSIBILITIES OF EPIDEMIC
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The global coronavirus pandemic has enormous geopolitical implications. The world will never be the same again. However, it is premature to speak of what kind of world it will end up being. The outbreak has not passed: we have not even reached the peak. The main unknown points remain:
- what kind of losses will humanity ultimately suffer - how many deaths?
- Who will be able to stop the virus from spreading, and how?
- What are the real consequences for those who have been sick and those who have survived?
No one can yet answer these questions even approximately, and therefore we cannot even remotely imagine the real damage. In the worst case scenario, the pandemic will lead to a serious decline in the world's population. At best, the panic will turn out to be premature and groundless.
But even after the first months of the pandemic, some global geopolitical changes are already quite obvious and largely irreversible. No matter how the subsequent events unfold, something in the world order has changed once and for all.
The thaw of unipolarity
The outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic has been a decisive moment in the destruction of the unipolar world and the collapse of globalization. The crisis of unipolarity and the slippage of globalization has been noticeable since the very beginning of the 2000s - the 9/11 catastrophe, the sharp growth of China's economy, the return to global politics of Putin's Russia as an increasingly sovereign entity, the sharp activation of the Islamic factor, the growing crisis of migrants and the rise of populism in Europe and even the United States that resulted in the election of Trump and many other parallel phenomena have made it clear that the world formed in the 90s around the dominance of the West, the US and global capitalism has entered a crisis phase. The multipolar world order is beginning to form with new central actors, civilizations, as anticipated by Samuel Huntington. While there were signs of emerging multipolarity, a trend is one thing, and objective reality another. It is like cracked ice in spring - it is clear that it will not last long, but at the same time, it is undeniably here - you can even move across it, albeit with risk. No one can be certain when the cracked ice will actually give way.
We can now begin the countdown to a multipolar world order - the starting point is the coronavirus epidemic. The pandemic has buried globalization, open society and the global capitalist system. The virus has forced us onto the ice and individual enclaves of humanity have begun to take their isolated historical trajectories.
The coronavirus has buried all the major myths of globalization:
- the effectiveness of open borders and the interdependence of the world's countries,
- the ability of supranational institutions to cope with an extraordinary situation,
- the sustainability of the global financial system and the world economy as a whole when faced with serious challenges,
- the uselessness of centralized states, socialist regimes and disciplinary methods in solving acute problems and the complete superiority of liberal strategies over them,
- the total triumph of liberalism as a panacea for all problem situations.
Their solutions have not worked in Italy, or other EU countries, nor in the United States. The only thing that has proven effective is the sharp closure of society, reliance on domestic resources, strong state power and isolation of the sick from the healthy, citizens from foreigners, etc.
How can we, as Americans, prepare for a multipolar world?
I am not American, but I do study politics and have encountered many scholarly articles on the matter. So maybe my opinion can carry some weight.
In a political sense, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, The United States - not America as you have so wrongly stated - has been at the top of the state hierarchy. During the Cold War it was a bipolar world.
Now, with 600+ military bases around the world and a political agenda which enforces their rule over differing ideologies in an economic and political sense, the United States is clearly dominant in world affairs. The invasion of Iraq was justified in the grounds that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, yet the United States itself holds thousands of these weapons and so do nations such as Russia, so why not invade Russia now on those grounds?
Ever heard that song ‘Californication?’ Well it has some truth to it, The lyrics go that California is the ‘edge of the world and all of western civilisation.’ From Hollywood, millions of people are fed United States idealism and ways of life with ‘little girls in Sweden’ dream of. The United States has set the global agenda, inticing conflict and poking it's noses in places on the grounds of ‘humanitarian intervention.’
Great from all of you from the United States though right?
But there are 7 billion of us others. Globalisation and the interconnected state of the world has now challenged the United States which has led to a leader like Trump come to power on the grounds of fear that your position as ‘top dog’ may not be as solidified as you think.
BRIC nations, including China, Russia and India are increasing in influence worldwide, exerting influence, and as a New Zealander I feel more closely aligned to the Chinese or the British in a historical sense.
So what can you as a citizen of the United States do to prepare for a multipolar world?
Embrace culture. Embrace the fact that you aren't the centre of the world and adopt a more cosmopolitan view, because your moral obligation should extend to all humanity and not to your given community. Humanity is the moral subject and it is not confined to state boundaries.
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