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America First Does Not Mean America Alone

Leadership Wanted: America Needs to Act, Not Apologize

There Are No Core U.S. National Interests at Stake in Ukraine

Anti-US China/Russia alliance emerging now

Tom Porter, 12-27, 23, Russia and China are on the brink of a military alliance that could overwhelm the US, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/russia-and-china-are-on-the-brink-of-a-military-alliance-that-could-overwhelm-the-us/ar-AA1m01aa

But as 2023 draws to a close, conflicts are flaring across the world, and Russia and China are growing increasingly aggressive in their shared ambition to topple the US as the world’s biggest power. Their authoritarian leaders, Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia, are seeking to exploit global instability to damage the US and its allies, say analysts, and are drawing closer to forming a military alliance that poses the biggest threat the US has faced in decades. “It is clear that the two states see themselves as military partners, and that this partnership is growing deeper and more experienced, even if it is not a formal alliance in the Western sense,” Jonathan Ward, CEO of the Atlas Group, told Business Insider. Xi and Putin draw closer to formidable military alliance In conflicts across the world, the rivalry between the US and the Russian and Chinese partnership is playing out. China has provided Russia with vital economic and diplomatic support in its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, while the US has provided billions in aid to Kyiv. In the Middle East, Russia and China have aligned themselves with Iran and criticized Israel’s attacks on Gaza to destroy the Tehran-backed terror group Hamas. The US, meanwhile, has provided military aid and diplomatic support for Israel. China, say experts, is likely watching the outcome of the Ukraine war carefully for signs of how the world will react should it act on plans to seize control of Taiwan. And as they draw closer, China and Russia are increasingly coordinating their military resources. “The Russia-China ‘comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era’ has always been about military power,” said Ward. Over the past two years, Russia and China have launched joint naval exercises in the Sea of Japan, Russia has handed China submarine technology that could give it the edge in a war with US allies in the Pacific, and the leaders have pledged to cooperate on high tech weapons development, Putin said in November. Though the leaders have not signed a formal military alliance, such moves should be of huge concern to the US and its allies, writes Chels Michta in a recent article for the Center for European Policy Analysis. “A full-scale China-Russia alliance would present the United States with a threat unlike any it has confronted since the end of the Cold War,” writes Michta. US military urged to address new threat During the Cold War, the Pentagon planned to be able to fight one major war and two smaller wars simultaneously. But in the face of changing threats, it shifted its strategy to be able to fight one major war and deter other attacks. The Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States in October said that the US now faces threats “fundamentally different [to] anything experienced in the past, even in the darkest days of the Cold War” because of the rise of China and Russia. It urged the Pentagon to revise its plans to be ready for the possibility of war with China and Russia simultaneously. “The Russia-China axis poses an enormous threat to the United States given that we will have to handle security in both Europe and Asia, as well as in the Middle East, with the risk of being stretched thin while Beijing and Moscow coordinate to pursue their respective regional ambitions,” said Ward.

US credibility critical to deter global conflict

Bremmer & Cohen, 12-6, 23, Jared Cohen is the president of global affairs at Goldman Sachs and a New York Times bestselling author of five books. Previously, he was CEO of Jigsaw, which he founded at Alphabet Inc. in 2016. He has previously served as chief advisor to Google’s CEO and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and as a member of the secretary of state’s Policy Planning Staff; Ian Bremmer is the president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media. He is also the host of the television show GZERO World with Ian Bremmer. Bremmer is the author of eleven books, including New York Times bestseller Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism, which examines the rise of populism across the world. His latest book is The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats—and Our Response—Will Change the World. Twitter: @ianbremmer, Foreign Policy, The Global Credibility Gap, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/06/global-geopolitics-credibility-us-china-competition-alliances-deterrence-military-economic-power/

After decades of relative geopolitical calm, the world has entered its most volatile and dangerous period since the depths of the Cold War. Consider recent events. Despite U.S. President Joe Biden’s high-profile meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco last month, relations between their two countries have deteriorated so sharply that a war between them, though unlikely, is no longer unthinkable. The COVID-19 pandemic, although largely in the rearview mirror, unleashed political and economic shocks that continue to reverberate across the global system. Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine plunged Europe into a destabilizing war with far-reaching consequences for trade and markets worldwide. And on Oct. 7, Hamas’s terror attacks against Israel sparked a new Middle East war that threatens to destroy years of progress toward economic transformation and regional stability. These global shifts and shocks are often grouped together, and for good reason. According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists, they are among the drivers of a “policy-driven reversal of global economic integration” termed “geoeconomic fragmentation.” For some analysts, they are constituents of a so-called polycrisis, in which a series of disparate shocks “interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.” And the White House itself has repeatedly highlighted how it helped crystalize thinking about the links between national security and economic policy to produce a “New Washington Consensus.” But in our view, recent events are best understood as symptoms of a broader, metastasizing crisis in global politics: a crisis of credibility. As it becomes apparent that no one power is seen as both willing and able to single-handedly uphold the international order, and great powers refuse to cooperate to do the same, the international system itself is rapidly losing credibility. This global credibility gap, in turn, is compounding geopolitical instability and uncertainty as actors ranging from competitive and opportunistic states to terrorists and criminal elements take advantage of the political vacuum. Though hardly irreversible, it’s a trend that is likely to get worse before it gets better. Interactions between states depend on perceptions of power, which are correlated with assessments of credibility. In its everyday meaning, credibility is whether someone or something is trusted or believed in. The same holds true for states, especially great powers and the regional and international orders that they shape. If an order lacks credibility, its detractors—and even disillusioned adherents—cease to abide by established rules and conventions. The result, unsurprisingly, is disorder and instability of the type we are witnessing today. For states, credibility involves several key variables: hard military and economic power; the soft power of political and cultural attraction; and more intangible qualities related to reputation, history, and context. Hard and soft power are necessary but not sufficient for a state to be credible; others must also believe that it will follow through on commitments and meet expectations. Credibility is the leverage that allows states to turn power into influence. States use threats and promises to deter adversaries, reassure allies and partners, and compel actions. But carrying out threats and making good on promises is costly. Credibility allows states to achieve their desired outcomes at minimal cost to themselves, advancing their priorities beyond what raw power would allow. Although policymakers often conflate the two, credibility is not synonymous with resolve. Indeed, scholars have rightly questioned the invocation of credibility as a justification for policy misadventures. “Instead of bolstering one’s credibility,” as Stephen Walt has argued in these pages, “defending a lot of secondary interests for the sake of one’s future reputation may unintentionally undermine it.” Yet even skeptics do not argue that credibility is unimportant—just that it is too often invoked recklessly. At the global level, credibility makes alliances and deterrence work, increasing cooperation and reducing the risk of conflict. When major powers possess credibility, the orders that they uphold are perceived as legitimate by other states, which recognize their own interest in the preservation of those orders and willingly operate within them. But when the credibility of major powers erodes, so too do the incentives for other actors to moderate their behavior. The credibility of the world’s leading powers is thus a prerequisite for the creation and maintenance of international order and geopolitical stability. Despite recent efforts to stabilize U.S.-China relations, the most important dynamic in global politics remains the deepening competition between Washington and Beijing. And at the heart of that rivalry is a contest to shape the international order. While U.S. policymakers believe that Washington is “better positioned than any other nation [to] define the world we want to live in,” they recognize that Beijing “is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and the growing capacity to do it.” Not only are the United States and China competing for global leadership, they are also, given their overwhelming lead in terms of economic size and military might, the only states that can plausibly claim the capacity for it. The question is whether Washington or Beijing possesses the credibility to persuade other states to follow their lead. The ongoing geopolitical recalibration that we’re seeing worldwide suggests that there are reasons to doubt it. As the incumbent global leader, the United States is the guarantor of the current global order. But it is increasingly seen as unwilling and unable to play that role, at least without a broad concert of likeminded powers. And as the only plausible challenger, China is positioning itself as the principal alternative to the United States, although Beijing is often seen as unable to fill Washington’s shoes. In the absence of great power cooperation, then, geopolitical stability and a renewed international order appear a long way off. The United States and China, however, are not starting from the same position. Nor does their credibility matter equally. Given the scale and scope of America’s global commitments, Washington’s power is significantly more leveraged on credibility than Beijing’s. The trajectory of geopolitical stability accordingly depends far more on the credibility of U.S. threats and promises than those of its strategic rival. U.S. credibility has underpinned the postwar global order that Americans have benefited from for more than 75 years. It’s a well-known story. After World War II, the United States harnessed its economic and military superiority to spearhead the reconstruction of Europe and Japan and the creation of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions. Crucially, it drew on its stock of credibility to construct those institutions and persuade other states—including newly independent ones in Africa and Asia—to join them. During the Cold War, Washington leveraged its credibility to build a network of military alliances, most importantly NATO, and under the Truman Doctrine to support nations “resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” But at the core of this policy to contain the Soviet Union, its architect George Kennan wrote, was “a test of the overall worth of the United States,” including whether it could successfully manage both “the problems of its internal life” and “the responsibilities of a world power.” Washington’s record on both counts was mixed. The “city upon a hill,” a beacon of freedom and democracy, coexisted with racial segregation under Jim Crow lasting until the 1960s. That terrible inequality, as well as interventions to topple foreign governments, undermined U.S. leadership abroad. Yet the United States’ capacity for self-criticism, reform, and rejuvenation meant that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, U.S. democracy, however imperfect, remained a model around the world. U.S. credibility arguably reached its height in the 1990s—the onset of a “unipolar moment” of unrivaled American dominance. With military primacy, the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, an extraordinary cultural attraction that compelled Joseph Nye to coin in these pages the term “soft power,” and widespread confidence in U.S.-led globalization, Washington presided over what some observers later termed a “liberal international order.” America’s AAA geopolitical credit rating allowed Washington to project power widely without risking overextension.

Credibility is needed for international cooperation to solve global conflict

Perhaps the clearest outcome of the credibility crisis is the erosion of international cooperation on urgent transnational challenges, from pandemics to climate change and disruptive technologies. These issues affect the global commons and cannot be adequately addressed by individual countries acting alone. International cooperation is hard enough to achieve at the best of times. The erosion of trust in the world’s leading powers, however, makes other states even less willing to limit their sovereignty by accepting binding rules and making costly investments. The result is a global governance deficit—a mismatch between the proliferation of transnational issues and the reluctance or inability of countries to address them. This problem was all too evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when geopolitical rivalries, weakened international institutions, and beggar-thy-neighbor policies led to shortfalls of critical medical equipment and major disparities in the global distribution of vaccines. It also underpins the world’s collective failure to address climate change and biodiversity loss, which are already having major consequences, from agriculture and finance to food security and refugee flows. New and disruptive technologies including generative AI further highlight this global governance deficit. AI systems hold immense promise but also pose great risks, and states lack the technical expertise and bureaucratic agility to govern AI effectively. The most powerful national actors—the United States and China—also fear falling behind their competitor in an AI arms race, while private tech firms have no official role in the AI governance process even though they are the principal actors in that space. Without renewed, credible leadership that enables urgent global cooperation, unconstrained AI proliferation will further destabilize the international order. Both China and the United States suffer from a significant and growing credibility gap that, in turn, is draining the global system of its own credibility and legitimacy. In a world where great powers—and the international order that they uphold—are credible, other countries recognize their own interest in working with those powers and within that order. But when great-power credibility erodes, so too do the incentives for countries and other actors to respect established rules and conventions, intensifying geopolitical competition and destabilizing the international order as a result. Although the United States has not lost significant power in recent years, its credibility has diminished, whereas China has gained significant power but not the credibility to match it. As a result, both countries suffer from a significant and growing credibility gap that, in turn, is draining the global system of its own credibility and legitimacy. Today, with renewed instability in the Middle East, a grinding war in Europe, mounting tensions in the Indo-Pacific, and ongoing technological changes that will reshape our world in ways we are only beginning to understand, we face the most unstable and uncertain geopolitical environment in decades. In the continued absence of restored credibility or new forms of cooperation among the great powers, geopolitical volatility and uncertainty look to be among the defining features of global politics for many years to come.

US has unparallel economic and military power

Those doubts are not primarily about hard power. At $27 trillion, U.S. GDP accounts for roughly 25 percent of global economic output—the same share as at the end of the Cold War. Many of the world’s leading and most innovative companies are based in the United States and are often founded and led by first- or second-generation immigrants. And despite continued speculation about potential alternatives, the U.S. dollar remains the world’s reserve currency by a wide margin.

The immense and dynamic U.S. economy supports its position as the only country capable of projecting military power across the globe; its defense budget—approximately $877 billion in 2022—remains the world’s largest. With some 750 military bases in 80 countries, moreover, the United States enjoys an unrivaled defense network that facilitates its global power projection.

US global credibility declining

But the most serious factor undermining U.S. credibility may be what Kennan called the “problems of its internal life.” In recent years, the United States’ society and political system have become increasingly divided and dysfunctional. Life expectancy has declined as income inequality has grown, and many indicators point to increasing polarization: public trust in the U.S. federal government is at record lows, nearly two-thirds of Democrats and Republicans believe that members of the opposite party are more dishonest and immoral than other Americans, and a small but growing number of Americans—on both sides of the aisle—believe that political violence can be justified. After Jan. 6, 2021, the United States no longer has an uninterrupted history of peaceful transfers of power. Mounting evidence makes clear that domestic politics have eroded the United States’ global credibility. Small pockets of the country are also driving big political swings. Fewer swing states and districts mean that members of Congress have fewer incentives to compromise, and control of the executive branch depends on the same narrow group of swing states. This results in foreign-policy volatility in the White House and partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill, with Congress regularly slowing or blocking appointments and confirmations. One recent example makes the point: when Hamas launched its brutal terrorist attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, the United States had no speaker of the House and no confirmed ambassadors in Israel, Egypt, Oman, or Kuwait. Mounting evidence makes clear that domestic politics have eroded the United States’ global credibility. U.S. allies in Europe fear that American support for both Ukraine and NATO will shift with the domestic political winds. Many of Washington’s traditional partners in the Middle East are growing skeptical about long-term U.S. commitments, prompting some to increase economic and even military ties with China. And in the Indo-Pacific, even staunch U.S. allies worry about Washington’s reliability. U.S. adversaries, for their part, seek to exploit its polarization through influence and intelligence operations. While the United States remains the world’s leading power and retains a great deal of international goodwill, Washington’s allies are less sure of its leadership, its competitors are more emboldened, and countries in the middle are increasingly hedging their bets.

US global leadership now, no decline

Tom Stevenson, 11-30, 23, The Guardian, America’s undying empire: why the decline of US power has been greatly exaggerated, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/30/americas-undying-empire-why-the-decline-of-us-power-has-been-greatly-exaggerated

To its credit, the contemporary US foreign policy establishment has shown some candour about its world-ordering ambitions. Much of the discussion takes place in public between a nexus of thinktank and academic institutions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Kennedy School at Harvard, the Wilson Center, the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Foundation. Respectable pillars of the establishment such as Michael Mandelbaum at Johns Hopkins University (formerly of the CFR) have talked of the US acting as “the world’s government”. By 2011, John Ikenberry – the central intellectual figure behind the idea that the US builds and upholds a “liberal international order” – was willing to entertain the idea of “imperial tendencies” in US actions deriving from its overwhelmingly powerful global position. Some discussion has begun about the kinds of imperial activity in which the US should engage. In 2014, Barry Posen, the director of the security studies programme at MIT, began to advocate for US “restraint” in the use of force in global affairs, if only for the ultimate goal of the empire’s reinvigoration. But whatever the merits of these contributions, hegemonists who seek American primacy and neo-cold warriors fixed on the likelihood of a confrontation with China have retained a plurality. For more than a decade, commentators on international affairs have obsessed over the supposed transition from a unipolar order, in which the US is the sole global superpower, to a multipolar or polycentric world in which the distribution of power is less lopsided. But this is easy to overstate. International affairs scholars have long predicted a return to a balance of power among the great states, as a correction to the enormous imbalance represented by the US since the late cold war, if not since the end of the second world war. One question is why it seems to have taken so long. Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth, two scholars at Dartmouth College, persuasively argued that the extent of American power had to be reckoned with in a different way: the US had attained power preponderance – a degree of global power so great that its very extent served to disincentivise other states from challenging it. To many observers, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was another omen of American decline. Most of the US national security establishment did not welcome Trump’s rise, and four years later would cheer his departure. In parts of the Holy Roman empire, a new prince was obliged not just to attend the funeral of his predecessor but to bury the body. After Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, many Trump opponents appeared to desire the finality of interment. It was clear why Biden’s victory was seen as a form of deliverance by many in the US. But a similar view was not uncommon among the elites in the core American allies. When the election results came through, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung carried the news under the headline “Demonstrativ Staatsmännisch” (Demonstratively Statesmanly), reflecting a belief that a Biden victory represents a return to dignity and rectitude. In the Washington Post, one columnist wrote that Biden held the promise of salvation from the Trump days: “A return to a bipartisan, internationalist foreign policy that moderate Republicans and Democrats have long championed.” For the New York Times, the moment would be accompanied by “sighs of relief overseas”. In Britain there was more ambiguity: Rishi Sunak’s future adviser James Forsyth wrote that the end of Trump was a “mixed blessing”: Biden would “take the drama out of Anglo-American relations” but might punish Britain over Brexit. The Trump administration’s foreign policy was more orthodox than is generally admitted. While derided as an isolationist by the US bureaucracy, for whom the term is a stock insult, Trump was committed to the US’s “unquestioned military dominance”. Many of his appointees were old regime hands: his trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, was a Reagan-era official; the director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, ran a torture site under George W Bush; Trump’s fifth secretary of defence, Mark Esper, was formerly an adviser to Barack Obama’s defence secretary Chuck Hagel. Having pledged to “get out of foreign wars”, Trump did nothing of the sort. He pursued the global assassination programme established under Obama and prosecuted the US-backed war in Yemen. Trump did not get along with the diplomats at the state department, but his administration did very little that was out of the usual line of business. Trump was disdainful of international cooperation on terms other than those of the US, but this was nothing new, and disputes with the foreign policy intelligentsia were for the most part matters of style, not principle. In Latin America, Trump made clear through his adminstration’s “western hemisphere strategic framework” that the western hemisphere is “our neighbourhood”. In the Middle East, Trump overturned the minor accommodation the Obama administration had reached with Tehran and in doing so reverted to the traditional American strategy of strangling Iran while prevailing on the Gulf monarchies to recognise Israel. Trump criticised the costs of the US military’s presence in the Middle East, but US troop levels in the region increased during his time in office, as did military spending overall. His eccentricities were those of the modern Republican party, a reflection of the polity’s rightwing shift rather than of a barbarian anomaly. Dismantling American hegemony would have been a historic act, but Trump never considered it. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, which necessitated the simultaneous withdrawal of the forces of any remaining western allies, was yet another death for American empire. The clamour of the final exit partly drowned out the tawdry record of every US president in Afghanistan from Bush to Biden. That 20 years of occupation and state-building crumbled in weeks confirmed only that the Afghan government had been an artificial and corrupt dependent. Under Trump and Biden, US planners had concluded that the US could no longer afford to keep up pretences with a fragile and exposed government in Kabul. Enough of the US global order survived the withdrawal from Afghanistan that it could die again in February 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Contrary to unserious predictions before its outbreak, this was no “hybrid war” or “cyberwar”, but a traditional ground operation that proved far more difficult than the Russian leadership imagined. In the event, expectations of a dash for Kyiv causing the quick capitulation of the Ukrainian government were frustrated. The US strategy of building up Ukrainian armed forces as a specific counter to Russian armoured invasion proved effective in staving off the initial assault. The US, Britain, Poland and other allies supplied key weapons and detailed intelligence, including satellite targeting, while seeking to inflict some economic damage on Russia with sanctions. That US intelligence appeared to have had a source in the Kremlin with access to the war plans – the US told Ukraine that Russia would invade before it did, and then made that assessment public, and CIA director Bill Burns has said clearly that the war planning was conducted by Putin and a small number of advisers – also ran counter to the narrative of the empire’s demise. That Ukraine, with heavy US support has, so far at least, held the line against Russia even at the extremity of eastern Ukraine reinforces the reality of current American power on global affairs. Russia’s general strategy has, since 2008, been to reassert influence in the former Soviet states around its borders. Yet between 1999 and 2009, Nato expanded into Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania and Croatia. Perceiving this as a defeat, Russia had sought to bring it to a stop through machinations on its immediate borders. Yet in Georgia, the Caucasus, Crimea, Belarus and Kazakhstan, recent Russian operations were comparatively small-scale. Why a completely different and far more hubristic strategy was adopted for Ukraine remains poorly understood. Part of the story must lie in the two strategic agreements signed between the US and Ukraine between September and November 2021. Yet the US, Britain and Nato itself had studiously kept to ambiguous ground about future Ukrainian accession. Putin’s decision to invade may have been taken after the failure of diplomatic talks between the US and Russia in January 2022. In any case, the invasion itself was a terrible crime and a grave gamble. It has been mirrored in the strategy of the US and its allies, which since April 2022 has shifted from a simple frustration of the initial invasion to the grander ambition of using the war to achieve strategic attrition of Russia. In the Middle East, Israel’s brutal retributive attack on Gaza, the mirror of the orgiastic violence carried out by Hamas fighters on 7 October, only reinforces this picture. Over the past two months, the influence of US global power has been plain to see. Thanks to US protection, Israel has been free to carry out what in all likelihood amount to large-scale war crimes while largely disregarding any threat from regional states that might otherwise have sought to limit its attacks on Gaza. The US has supplied Israel (probably with some help from Britain’s military base at Akrotiri in Cyprus) throughout the campaign and has moved aircraft carrier groups and nuclear armed submarines to the region to make the point abundantly clear. Britain has followed in lockstep with its more modest capabilities. The US and its allies have effectively rendered action at the UN impossible. American imperial power is all too evident in the ruins of Gaza city. In large part, talk of the end of American dominance was a reaction to the global financial crisis and China’s industrial rise. For prominent western strategic planners like Elbridge Colby, one of the authors of the 2018 US National Defense Strategy, conflicts in Afghanistan, the Middle East and even Ukraine had come to be seen as distractions from the China threat, which represents the only plausible challenge to American global dominance. In its 2022 National Security Strategy, the Biden administration declared that the 2020s were to be a decisive decade. Past military adventures in the Middle East were criticised as extravagances and distractions in the era of competition with China. “We do not seek conflict or a new cold war,” the NSS said, but “we must proactively shape the international order in line with our interests and values”. In order to prevail in competition with China, the US had to enhance its industrial capacity by “investing in our people”. The present moment was said to represent “a consequential new period of American foreign policy that will demand more of the US in the Indo-Pacific than has been asked of us since the second world war.” What should be made of the fact that it is Biden, not Trump, who has overseen a major escalation of tension with Russia and an escalation in the trade war with China? At the time, the one ostensibly distinct part of the Trump programme appeared to be the trade war. Trump was seen as standing for an insular protectionist turn, but the same basic policies have been continued under Biden through export controls on advanced microchips. Still, Biden has proved to be just as uninterested in limiting capital flows from surplus countries like Germany and China into US treasuries, which arguably have negative effects on industrial workers in the US, but certainly inflate the prices of assets owned by the rich and underpin US power over the international financial system. The US political system as a whole appears, at present, to be opting for China containment. President Biden said on the campaign trail that under him US strategy would be to “pressure, isolate and punish” China. Encouraged by the US, Japan, like Britain, is engaged in a major arms buildup. American politicians make showy visits to Taipei. The US has threatened China with nuclear weapons in the past on the basis that it does not have a comparable nuclear arsenal. There is some debate over whether China’s current nuclear-armed submarines are able to avoid tracking by the US. China is also working to make its intercontinental ballistic missiles more secure. It is possible that soon they will together constitute a completely reliable second-strike capability against the US. The most dangerous moment of the cold war was in the early 1960s, when an aggressive and overwhelmingly dominant nuclear power saw itself in competition with an adversary that didn’t yet have equivalent nuclear forces. The US and China may be approaching a similar point. President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden during the Apec summit, California, in November. President Xi Jinping and President Joe Biden during the Apec summit, California, in November. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters Earlier this month, Biden and Xi Jinping met in San Francisco in an attempt to smooth over relations that had become dangerously unstable. In November 2022, when Biden met Xi at the G20 in Indonesia, both had appeared to strike a conciliatory tone. Biden said the two had “a responsibility to show that China and the US can manage our differences” and “prevent competition from becoming conflict”. But the 2022 decision to ban Chinese access to the semiconductor trade was a straightforward escalation. Trump and Biden responded to their respective moments according to a general strategy that is longer-lived than either of them. US foreign policy has been quite stable for 30 years: a mode best characterised as reactive management of the world empire, with the aim of pre-empting the emergence of any potential challengers to its primacy. For all the talk of multipolar worlds, other poles of world power have been hard to find. Russia has hardly proved itself a global power in its botched invasion of Ukraine. Fantasies of European strategic autonomy have shown themselves insubstantial. India’s economic growth has been notable but it projects very little influence away from the subcontinent. The resurgent nationalisms in Turkey and Iran hardly qualify them as poles of global power, and the former still serves as a staging ground for American nuclear weapons. As the former Tsinghua professor Sun Zhe observed, developing countries are not cooperatively “rising together” to “challenge the current order” – the likes of Brazil and South Africa have, if anything, been declining in terms of economic heft. So where is the multiplicity in world politics? Much of the predicted systemic change consists of the emergence of Sino-American competition. But “multipolarity” is a poor description for this development. The strategic balance so far remains hugely in favour of the US. China does not militarily threaten the US. Chinese naval power is routinely exaggerated; its navy is not predicted to rival the US Pacific fleet for another generation, and it still lacks “quiet” nuclear-powered submarines that resist sonar detection. It is not clear that China is capable of mounting an invasion even of Taiwan, and there are good reasons to think China’s leadership knows this. For its part, China has not even made a serious effort to escape the dominance of the dollar in its trade with the rest of the world. It is the US that asserts a policy of isolation and punishment of China, not vice versa. So long as the US is maintaining a “defense perimeter” in the East and South China Seas that extends to a few kilometres from mainland China, it is not dealing with a peer, it is threatening a recalcitrant. Assertions of the inevitability of American imperial decline over the long term are fair enough; in their most abstract form, and on a long enough timescale, they must eventually turn out to be true. And the US position does look shakier than it has for decades. But what is striking is how seldom this system that is said to be in decline is given even a cursory description, especially in the subordinate parts of the Anglosphere. Why the reticence to explain the nature of American power? And why ignore that so much of contemporary US grand strategy is oriented precisely to prevent its dissolution? As the 2022 National Security Strategy said, “prophecies of American decline have repeatedly been disproven in the past”. This time the effort may be in vain. The risks of a Sino-American confrontation and the Russo-American nuclear standoff implied in the war in Ukraine are considerable. Whatever is to come, the fact remains that global power at present remains unipolar. The task for those not committed to its continuation is to understand it and, wherever possible, to challenge its assumptions.

World becoming multipolar now

Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter, 8-22, 23, Will Ukraine recover from its failed counteroffensive?, https://unherd.com/2023/08/will-ukraine-recover-from-its-failed-counteroffensive/

The Russian economy is faring better under Western sanctions than anyone expected, while European governments ride the discontent of their voters over rising living costs. On the diplomatic front, non-Western powers view the war in Ukraine with either unruffled equanimity or quiet satisfaction, happy to trade with Russia at discount prices and to assume a role in the multipolar order now demonstrably coming into being. Far from being isolated, Russia’s role in Africa is rapidly expanding as that of the West deteriorates.

China and Russia combining to eclipse US power is it declines

Rosario Rivera, Mexican Center for International Relations, Alí Gómez Villascán, 7-24, 23, Dispute for the Arctic: China and Russia against the United States, https://cemeri.org/en/art/a-disputa-artico-china-rusia-usa-au

The current dispute between the United States of America against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation is not only limited to a trade war, it also encompasses a strategic competition for different regions – including the Arctic. Although the United States could be thought of as a favorite given its hegemony, it has actually been weakening to such a degree that it could lose the battle in the Arctic against Russia and China. The contemporary system, established after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, has been characterized by the excessive actions of the USA. However, almost thirty years later, its supremacy has already been threatened by the rise of new emerging powers and certain unexpected events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the hegemon has had more limitations than ever. In this regard, Fareed Zakaria, who is a leading author of neoclassical realism, indicates that the world has entered a post-American phase in which two other main players have emerged. The concern of the United States in the face of the increasing expansion of Russian power is undeniable, but there is a bigger one that challenges even the established world order: “the Red Dragon”. It would be both anticipated and uncertain to affirm that any of these last two countries can – individually – impose a new era and place themselves at the top of the international system. However, such a scenario is not very distant if we talk about Sino-Russian cooperation, that [strategic] association (https://sputniknews.lat/20201027/alianza-militar-entre-china-y-rusia-que-pasaria- if-the-two-superpowers-join-forces-1093266157.html) [2] unprecedented that aims to put US unilateralism in check. The economic, political, military and technological power that Russia and China have developed gives them a fairly strong bargaining power. In such a way that they have expanded their influence in the world through what is known as smart power or intelligent power. This type of power is based on creating a strategy that combines the elements of both hard power and soft power. While it is true that the European Union (EU) has the support of the United States, its closeness to the two aforementioned powers makes decision-making for the good of European economic integration difficult under pressure from the North American hegemon. However, in the face of facts such as Europe’s dependence on Russian gas and heavy Chinese investment in the region, the options are so limited that Russian and Chinese expansion is virtually inevitable. Climate change, which brings with it severe consequences for all living beings on the planet, paradoxically, creates a unique opportunity in the Arctic: the extraction of strategic resources such as oil and gas, as well as various precious stones such as diamonds and gold; and essential elements (mainly those belonging to the platinum group) used in the manufacture of electronic gadgets. The bilateral relationship between Russia and China seems to benefit from this event, because Russia has an excellent location in the Arctic, being the nation with the largest territory in this area, and China can complement Russia’s ambitions by contributing manpower and essential technological resources for extraction.

Hegemonic decline of the US and the West now, and any advantage in military power is useless

Orban & Orban, 7-2, 23, Balázs Orbán is a member of the Hungarian parliament and political director for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, to whom he is unrelated, A Central European Proposal for the Revival of Europe, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/central-european-proposal-revival-europe-206608

Over the past three decades, the world has undergone profound transformations. Political and economic restructuring has led to the erosion of the prevailing Western hegemony. However, it is incorrect to claim that the West is being replaced by a non-Western hegemonic force. Instead, what we observe is a leveling off in the ongoing competition between the West and the East. Hungary and the other Central European states are growing increasingly concerned about Europe’s diminishing capacity to engage in this competition. There is a growing perception that excessive energy is being directed towards ideological disputes, which in turn diverts attention away from crucial areas of collaboration that could further enhance Europe’s strength. A strong and dependable Europe, serving as an influential ally, is of paramount strategic interest to the United States. The Western alliance, compared to a strong engine with two parts, has driven progress over the past century. It is crucial to ensure that both parts have sufficient power to keep the momentum going. Considering this, Central Europe, located at the center of the continent and serving as its economic powerhouse, plays a significant role, making it a natural and indispensable partner for the United States. The Era of Western Hegemony Is Coming to an End The West’s dominance over international relations, resting upon three key pillars, is visibly diminishing. The first pillar was the West’s longstanding dominant position as the global economic powerhouse for two centuries. The second pillar involved the establishment of institutional bodies in international relations and trade by the West, granting them the ability to shape the rules of globalization. The third pillar relied on the idea that the United States, as the hegemonic superpower after the collapse of the USSR, would collaborate with Europe to promote the neoliberal political and economic model, aiming for a more peaceful world. As the prevailing belief of that era declared, we had reached “the end of history.” However, all three pillars are now displaying signs of declining influence. The premises of the third pillar in particular have failed remarkably. The imposition of the neoliberal political and economic model not only resulted in alienation from the rest of the world but, paradoxically, brought together its adversaries in increasingly closer cooperation. The events of the past year have undeniably demonstrated this, leading even some of the most avid proponents of “the end of history” to abandon their belief in it. It is intriguing to note the similar narrative adopted by America, portraying the war in Ukraine as a conflict between democracies and autocracies—an ironic stance when considering the United States’ role in supplying arms to 57 percent of the world’s authoritarian regimes in 2022. In this context, even the second pillar finds itself on shaky ground. The challengers to the existing order are actively constructing alternative systems for agreements, forming alliances, and establishing platforms to address conflicts. It seems inevitable that a tipping point will arise, where they will effectively bypass the institutional framework established during the past few decades of globalization and thrive within parallel systems. A closer examination of the first pillar reveals equally worrisome prospects. In an extraordinary turn of events, the economic rivalry between the Western and non-Western worlds is approaching a state of equilibrium after two centuries, signifying a momentous shift in civilizations. The unfolding of these transformations can be observed through at least five significant areas: economic power, access to vital resources such as raw materials and energy, demographic trends, technological advancements, and military capabilities. The East has witnessed a remarkable surge in its share of global economic output, at the expense of the West. Back in 1990, the Western world’s dominance over the world’s economic output was exceeding the 50 percent mark. Fast forward to today, and that figure has drastically decreased to a mere 30 percent. These trends will continue as the center of economic gravity continues to shift further toward the East. The geographical reality that most of the world’s raw materials and energy resources are located outside the West has further exacerbated our competitiveness. Although the United States enjoys a slight advantage in this regard, largely due to its vast shale oil and gas reserves, the West has been unable to fully compensate for this disadvantage. Notably, certain European governments, spearheaded by Germany, swiftly embarked on a green transition to meet Europe’s energy demands. However, the rapid policy changes outpaced technological advancements, resulting in green energy remaining considerably more expensive compared to other sources, thereby hindering our economic competitiveness. Demographic trends also work against the West. Regardless of the metric used, the world’s population surpasses the 8 billion mark, with a staggering 7 billion individuals living in non-Western countries. Despite the efforts of Hungary and a handful of like-minded governments to implement family policies aimed at increasing fertility rates, the trends still indicate a deep demographic crisis in the West, particularly in Europe. The realm of technology is also fiercely contested. Emerging players invest heavily in research and development, almost matching the expenditure of established giants. This head-to-head race involves various nations, with notable progress seen in Eastern electric cars and battery technologies—areas of significant importance for Central Europe. Lastly, in terms of military power, the West undeniably maintains a substantial edge over the East. While this may initially seem advantageous, the prevailing consensus underscores the futility of exploiting this advantage, as doing so would entail dire global consequences—a tragic outcome not worthy of pursuing.

Russia’s is not a great power, it’s military is a joke

PHILLIPS P. O’BRIEN is Head of the School of International Relations and Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews, 6-29, 23, Foreign Affairs, There’s No Such Thing as a Great Power: How a Dated Concept Distorts Geopolitics, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/theres-no-such-thing-great-power

In the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, most Western analysts saw Moscow as a great power and Kyiv as a lesser one. Diminished though it was from its Soviet heyday, Russia still retained a large conventional military and a vast nuclear arsenal, earning it a spot in the top echelon of global powers. In January 2022, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley warned that Moscow was capable of dealing a “horrific” blow to Ukraine. Michael Kofman, head of the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analysis, argued that Russia had “the power to challenge or violently upend the security architecture of Europe” and “the conventional military power to deter the United States.” This view of Russian power was widely held in the United States and Western Europe, and it prompted many analysts to argue that the United States and NATO should either stay out of a conflict between Russia and Ukraine or strictly limit military aid to Kyiv. For instance, the realist scholars John Mearsheimer, Barry Posen, and Stephen Walt all labeled Russia a great power and argued that Moscow’s need to dominate Ukraine should be indulged. Posen went even further, suggesting that Russia had the military might to impose its desired outcome. As he put it just days before the Russian invasion began, “Ukrainian units would no doubt fight bravely, but given the geography of the country, the open topography of much of its landscape, and the overall numerical superiority that Russia enjoys, it is unlikely that Ukraine will be able to defend itself successfully.” But once Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed his war machine, that narrative of Russian power swiftly unraveled. The Ukrainian army, supposedly outgunned and with little chance of resisting conventionally, fought back with brains and ferocity. And Ukrainian civilians, whom many experts thought to be divided over the question of the country’s relationship to Russia, rallied to defend their homeland. Meanwhile, Putin’s military floundered. Its weapons and doctrine proved to be lackluster at best, and its soldiers performed far worse than expected, thanks in part to corruption and poor training. Hundreds of thousands, maybe more than a million, Russian men of military age fled the country to avoid conscription. And just last week, the Wagner paramilitary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin briefly seized control of the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and threatened to plunge the country into civil war, sending his mercenary fighters to within 120 miles of Moscow. This stunning revelation of Russian weakness calls into question not just Moscow’s status as a great power but also the very concept of a great power. Even realists who frequently use the term have never provided a clear and convincing definition of what makes a power great. Rather, they tend to use the term to describe everything from true superpowers such as the United States and China, which wield the full spectrum of economic, technological, and military might, to better-than-average military powers such as Russia, which have nuclear weapons but little else that would be considered indicators of great power. Such imprecision not only distorts analysis of state power and its use in war but can also make countries seem more militarily threatening than they really are. For these reasons, analysts should stop asking what makes a country a great power and start asking what makes it a “full spectrum” power. Doing so would have helped avoid overestimating Russia’s might before February 2022—and will help avoid exaggerating the threat posed by China, going forward. The “great power” moniker has never been especially useful. On the eve of World War I, Europe was thought to be dominated by its great powers: Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom. But the war showed that there were really only two dominant European powers: Germany and the United Kingdom. The power differentials between these countries, on the one hand, and Austria-Hungary and Italy, on the other, were so great that the latter two quickly became dependent on other countries, both desperately needing loans and eventually troops from their more powerful allies to keep fighting. When the United States entered the war in 1917, it created a whole new class of power, one that was basically impervious to outside threats. Washington remained the world’s lone superpower through World War II, when it was able to fight in every domain (air, land, and sea) in every theater—and provide massive aid to its allies. No other power came close to matching these capabilities. By no metric can Russia be considered an economic or a technological great power. Russia today is not a great power from this perspective and has not been part of one since years before the Soviet Union collapsed. Assertions to the contrary were grounded in a false view of Moscow’s military strength, one based on the most obvious trappings of power: weapons and supposed capabilities, troop numbers, performance in military maneuvers, and stated doctrine. By these measures, Russia looked like a heavily armed nuclear and conventional power that was able and willing to impose its will not just on its neighborhood but on countries around the globe. But beneath this menacing picture of the Kremlin was a much shabbier portrait of the underlying social, political, economic, and technological elements of power, all of which suggested that Russia was anything but great. Take the question of troop morale. Analysts assumed that Russian forces were both well trained and well led, capable of competently executing military operations. Although Russian forces had not performed particularly well in Chechnya in the 1990s and the first decade of this millennium or in Georgia in 2008, analysts nonetheless minimized such concerns and focused instead on Russia’s more impressive weaponry. If the military analysis of Russia was skewed, the overall picture of the country was even more flawed. By no metric could Russia have been considered an economic or a technological great power. In 2021, Russia’s GDP was smaller than Canada’s, Russia was not a player in high technology, and it was growing more corrupt and dictatorial. Its economy was powered by resource extraction rather than manufacturing. And it was a demographic mess, with collapsing birth rates and an average male life expectancy of just 66 years. U.S. Senator John McCain’s quip in 2014 that Russia was “a gas station masquerading as a country” might have been a little too demeaning—but only a little. More useful than the concept of a great power is that of a full-spectrum power, which takes into account the diverse factors that create military might, not just its outward manifestation in weapons. Few countries have ever achieved all the fundamentals on which superior military power is built and sustained; most that have been described as great powers were in fact midranking Potemkin states whose militaries served as façades for otherwise weak power bases. This was true of Benito Mussolini’s Italy, and it is true of Putin’s Russia. In the last 150 years, there have been only a handful full-spectrum powers. One is obviously the United States, which became the largest economy in the world sometime in the 1890s and had few security concerns compared with most countries. The United Kingdom was certainly a full-spectrum power from the late nineteenth century until 1943, when it had to subordinate its preferred grand strategy to accommodate U.S. interests. Before then, the United Kingdom was capable of creating and deploying advanced and well-prepared forces almost anywhere in the world and maintaining a war economy that hardly any other state could match. Other countries that probably fit the full-spectrum bill were Germany from around 1900 to 1942, the Soviet Union from 1949 to the 1970s, and China from approximately 2010 to today. All three could compete in every strategic domain and produce high-quality military equipment. They did not always have true global reach, but they exercised great influence in a large part of the world. What made them full-spectrum powers, however, was not only their military might but also the economic and technological prowess that enabled their armed forces. Military power is to a large degree based on the ability to make the best, most advanced military equipment, from small arms to highly complex aircraft and naval vessels. This ability cannot be faked, and it must have the capacity to scale up quickly when the need arises. A military is only powerful if it can be equipped—and then re-equipped. That is why the Soviet Union was in some ways the weakest member of this club and why it ceased to be a full-spectrum power sometime in the late 1970s. Few countries have achieved all the fundamentals on which superior military power is built. Not all economic powerhouses become full-spectrum powers. Take, for example, Germany and Japan, neither of which has developed into a major military power. That is because political and social factors matter as well as economic and technological ones. Politics and society shape the creation and use of power far more than many realist scholars acknowledge. Countries compete for global influence in different ways, and these differences often boil down to who leads, what type of system they lead, and whether their societies help or hinder the exercise of power. Different leaders can perceive power balances differently. Often, they take actions that fit their particular worldview rather than those that reflect the actual balance of power or some abstract, objective national interest. Going to war, for instance, is almost always a choice that does not have to be made. Sometimes, leaders are more aggressive than they need to be, given the threats that they face. Often, their personal prejudices shape their perceptions of the national interest, leading them to make decisions that are not in the interest of the people they govern. Politics and political systems also play a role in determining whether countries develop into full-spectrum powers. All leaders, from dictators to consensual democrats, operate within systems in which they want to maintain power. That imperative can either push them to act or restrain them. After France fell to the Nazis in May 1940, for example, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt believed that the United States would have to get into the war to destroy Germany’s power. But he was not convinced that the American public shared this belief—and he was right. So for a year and a half, he did everything possible to get the United States into the war but always stopped short of declaring war. In the end, it was Japan’s unexpected attack on Pearl Harbor that got Roosevelt out of his dilemma and the United States into the war. Different leaders can perceive power balances differently. The role that societies play in determining when and how military power is deployed is complex. Some societies are more supportive of military expansion than others. Some societies more efficiently and creatively transmit ideas and develop or adopt technological advances—both of which are key to generating military power—while others have different priorities. And some societies seem to favor military action that is far beyond what their governments are capable of undertaking. Societal commitment is not easy to measure, but clearly it is making a big difference in the war in Ukraine. Although Russian leaders like to talk about national sacrifice, they have not asked elites in Moscow or St. Petersburg to take part in the war. By contrast, Ukraine has mobilized a far broader cross section of society. Such societal differences do not figure in the calculations of realists, whose writings before the outbreak of war seemed to deny the Ukrainians any agency in determining the future of their country. Thankfully, the Ukrainians thought otherwise. But if societal commitment is an elusive quality, it is more often found in flexible and pluralistic political systems, which have had the most success in sustaining—if not achieving—full-spectrum power. Such systems create military power that is more adaptable and less prone to the whims of a dictator. Partly because they require societal support to sustain wars, they also create militaries designed to limit their own casualties, relying more on machines than on personnel. It is for these reasons that the United Kingdom and the United States have had the longest tenures as full-spectrum powers. By contrast, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union failed to adapt to changing circumstances and so saw their powers wane. Germany was doomed by its dictatorial system, which allowed Adolf Hitler to launch a global war that was beyond the country’s means. The result was defeat so total that even after Germany regained its economic strength, neither its political leaders nor its people wished to restore its military power. For its part, the Soviet Union was brought low by economic weakness that was partly the result of an inflexible political system that had lost the support of much of the public.

Interdependence will not stop China’s aggression

Cha, January-February 2023, Foreign Affairs, How to Stop Chinese Coercion: The Case for Collective Resilience, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/how-stop-china-coercion-collective-resilience-victor-cha https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/how-stop-china-coercion-collective-resilience-victor-cha

At first glance, the row between China and the NBA may seem like small potatoes: a tiny example of how the U.S.-Chinese relationship is now more defined by contestation than by close economic partnership. But Beijing’s behavior toward the NBA is emblematic of a much bigger and extremely worrying pattern, and it is one that the Biden administration’s China strategy does not wholly address. Over the last dozen years, Beijing has slapped discriminatory sanctions on trading partners that interact with Taiwan or support democracy in Hong Kong. It has imposed embargoes on and fueled boycotts against countries and companies that speak out against genocide in Xinjiang or repression in Tibet. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has gone after almost any entity that has crossed China in any way. And this strategy has worked. Because the Chinese economy is so integral to global markets, China’s coercive behavior has caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. The mere threat of Chinese cutoffs is now prompting states and businesses to stay quiet about Beijing’s abuses. This silence is both deafening and dangerous. The CCP is carrying out a genocide of China’s Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, engaging in a wide variety of other human rights abuses, and menacing nearby countries—but states are too afraid to respond. Left unchecked, this paralysis could hollow out the postwar liberal order. Should they fear major penalties, few governments, for instance, will come to Taiwan’s defense if it is attacked by China. They will not help New Delhi if China attempts to take more Indian land in the Himalayas. They will hesitate to join the White House’s supply chain initiatives.

The US is the dominant global power; Russia’s military has been destroyed and China is undermining itself

MATTHEW KAMINSKI, 01/20/2023 , Matthew Kaminski is POLITICO’s Editor-in-Chief, Bolstered by a strong response in Ukraine, the U.S. is once again the talk of Davos, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/20/us-davos-ukraine-00078771

DAVOS, Switzerland — For the American abroad, the signals are unmistakable — and dissonant. The world is bullish on America and American power. You read that right. This is the same world that looks on with glee or horror at the carnivalesque, occasionally violent politics on Capitol Hill. The same one that barely a year ago dismissed an America defeated in Afghanistan as a has-been and hailed the rise of a new authoritarian age led by China, with an assist from Vladimir Putin’s confident Russia Now some caveats. By the world, we’re referring to C-suite and political mastodons, and their assorted retinues, who spend $1,000 a night on a tiny bed in a drab two-star hotel to slosh around the icy streets of this Alpine town for a week of the World Economic Forum: the so-called Davos Man (and Woman). By bullish, we don’t mean unconditionally in love with America — when has that ever been the case? — but recognizing, sometimes begrudgingly, its deep strengths and appeal. And doing so in ways that were unimaginable recently and jarring to anyone marinated in the daily cycle of American news. To be clear, we’re not in the “unipolar moment” of the early 1990s or the era of hyperpuissance — hyperpower, as a former French foreign minister called the U.S. at the close of the century, in what was not intended as a compliment. Nor does this moment resemble the Pax Americana of the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush years. There’s, in addition, a giant caveat, most loudly voiced by the Europeans: This new American-led age could differ in one crucial and to them dangerous aspect from past ages in its tepid view of globalization and liberal world order, and that makes them very anxious. But first, listen to the positives that Davos Man sees in America today — starting with its recently well-deployed hard power. President Joe Biden probably won’t dwell on the irony of the gratitude for American leadership on Ukraine. Only months before Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to take Kyiv, Biden ordered his out of Kabul, ceding a 20-year war to the Taliban and infuriating his allies. Soon after, one European diplomat in Washington could memorably dismiss Biden’s brainy and inexperienced foreign policy team thusly: “They’ve never had sex, but they’ve read all the books about it.” The perception of a superpower in decline seemed to confirm Putin’s belief the U.S. lacked the stomach or muscle to stand in his way in Ukraine. By many lights, the sole winner of the Russian war on Ukraine so far is the U.S. Accounting for nearly half the world’s military capability, the U.S. has reminded friends and adversaries of its superiority. Iraq and Afghanistan — that’s a bad but fading memory. Armed and aided by Washington, the Ukrainians have not just withstood the assault but destroyed a large chunk of the Russian military. Washington also gets points for its diplomacy. Even the French, usually eager to knock the U.S. down, sound complimentary. “The U.S. has taken the lead convincingly and quite deftly on Ukraine,” François Heisbourg, the veteran and often critical French observer of American foreign policy in action, told me. Referring to the same advisers who were dismissed as callow incompetents in Afghanistan, he said, “Most of them are adults. They are potty trained. This [kind of U.S. response] hasn’t happened in over 20 years,” since the Clinton administration’s intervention in the Balkans. “We’re back to a world that people my age recognize,” added Heisbourg, who’s in his early 70s. Another source of American power? Chinese weakness. As Putin’s military got shredded on the battlefield, Xi Jinping mismanaged the Covid response and cemented one-man rule at his party congress in ways that spooked neighbors and investors. Add an aging population and slowing growth, and — at least by the new Davos Consensus — we’ve passed “Peak China” and are headed the other way. This doesn’t mean China won’t be a danger; its frailties could make Xi less predictable and more dangerous. But the idea once dominant here that China would soon succeed the U.S. as the world’s leading power sounds ridiculous to Davos ears — as much as the claims about Japanese supremacy in 1980s did a few years after they were made. Bearishness on China and on Europe’s prospects adds to America’s appeal, in particular, for business elites. Here’s a typical sentiment: “The U.S., in almost any sector, is the most attractive market, not just in terms of size but innovation,” Vas Narasimhan, who runs the Swiss drug maker Novartis, the world’s fourth-biggest pharmaceutical company with a large presence in Massachusetts, told me. As the world worries about possible recession, another part of the new consensus is that the U.S. would weather it best. This upbeat view on the U.S. isn’t intended to warm patriotic or partisan fires. For one thing, the Davos Consensus is often wrong; not so long ago, this crowd was long on crypto and short on the U.S. It’s also worth listening to the anxieies. They’re as revealing as the bullishness — about America and the state of the world. In the wake of the Trump era, everyone feels free to doubt the stability of the American system, even if the midterms sent a reassuring message of back-to-normalcy. Most global companies and players know the policy paralysis and political polarization firsthand. And yet: As often as an executive will bemoan that members of Congress care more about Fox/MSNBC bookings than grappling with complex legislation, in this same breath, they’ll mention a constitutional order going back 250 years and traditions of rule of law hard to find in many other places. Until proven otherwise, probably by its own hand, democracy in America is one of the safer bets in the world, they say. The new anxiety: America’s back on the world stage, but what kind of America?

Being a part of NATO is in the US national interest

Julie, 11-27, 22, The Effect Of The United States Withdrawing From NATO, https://malaysiandigest.com/the-effect-of-the-united-states-withdrawing-from-nato/

The United States gets several things out of NATO. First, it is able to station troops in other countries in order to deter aggression and protect its own interests. Second, it provides a forum for the United States to consult with and coordinate with other countries on security issues. Finally, it gives the United States a way to project its power and influence around the world. As a result of these treaty relationships, the United States has developed a strategic advantage. American prosperity has been greatly enhanced by its central role in trans-Atlantic and international relations through NATO, which has cemented American prosperity and freedom…. It is critical for the United States’ security that NATO is included in its foreign policy. NATO has supported Afghanistan’s war effort by providing airspace defense and security in the United States, as well as maritime patrols in the Mediterranean Sea to keep weapons and terrorists out of the sea. The United States has the most military personnel in NATO, with 1.35 million personnel on the ground. Turkey has approximately 447,000 military personnel, but China has slightly more than one million. There is a critical relationship between the United States and NATO that is essential for the security and freedom of the North Atlantic.

Shift to multipolarity now

Faroohsr, November-December 2022, RANA FOROOHAR is Global Business Columnist and an Associate Editor at The Financial Times and the author of Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post- Global World (Crown, 2022), from which this essay is adapted., Foreign Affairs, After Neoliberalism All Economics Is Local, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/after-neoliberalism-all-economics-is-local-rana-foroohar

At some point, the pandemic will end, as will the war in Ukraine. But globalization will not revert to what it was a decade ago. Nor will it disappear entirely, however. Ideas and, to a certain extent, data will still flow across borders. So will many goods and services, albeit through far less complicated supply chains. In a 2021 survey by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, 92 percent of the global supply chain executives polled said they had already begun changing their supply chains to make them more local or regional, increase their redundancy, or ensure that they are not reliant on a single country for crucial supplies. Governments have encouraged many of these changes, whether through legislation such as the Biden administration’s industrial policy bill or guidance such as the European Union’s New Industrial Strategy, both of which aim to restructure supply chains so that they are less far-flung. The exact shape of the coming post-neoliberal economic order is not yet clear. But it will likely be far more local, heterodox, complicated, and multipolar than what came before. This is often portrayed as a bad thing—a comedown for the United States and a risk for much of the world. But arguably it is just as it should be. Politics takes place at the level of the nation-state. And in the post-neoliberal world, policymakers will think much more about place-based economics as they work to rebalance the needs of domestic and global markets.

The US should increase climate disaster assistance and renewable investment to compete with China

Lazarus, 11-23, 22, The ‘Pivot to Asia’ Should Include Climate Action, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/%E2%80%98pivot-asia%E2%80%99-should-include-climate-action-205931, Leland Lazarus serves as Associate Director of Research at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute of Public Policy.

Working more closely with allies and partners on climate finance and disaster relief is not just goodwill; it’s a strategic imperative. China has been increasing its international influence through climate projects. Even though China is one of the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters, the country has invested heavily in renewable energy projects worldwide. China accounts for more than 40 percent of renewable energy investment, has tripled its investment in solar energy, and announced a disaster relief fund for Caribbean countries. However, there is still no specified amount for the fund. In this era of strategic competition, the United States can prove to the world that it is more serious about dealing with the climate crisis than China and is committed to delivering for its partners when natural disaster strikes. With the combined resources of its European and Asian partners, the United States can show that it can put its money where its mouth is regarding climate change. Because in a global crisis like climate change, it’s always all hands on deck—from the East and the West.

Competing against both Russia and China will push the US hegemonic decline

Wyne, 11-23, 22, ALI WYNE is Senior Analyst with Eurasia Group’s Global Macro-Geopolitics practice. He is the author of America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition, Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/formidable-not-invincible, Foreign Affairs

Today, by contrast, while the United States remains the world’s foremost power, it is in relative decline. Its share of global GDP decreased from roughly 30 percent in 2000 to just under 25 percent in 2020. In addition, its share of global goods exports diminished from approximately 12 percent to just over 8 percent during that period. And the share of global foreign exchange reserves denominated in U.S. dollars fell to its lowest level in a quarter century in 2020. Meanwhile, China’s economy is already about three-quarters as large as the United States’, its exports reached a record high of $3.36 trillion last year, and the available evidence suggests that the rhetoric around decoupling China from the global economy outstrips the reality. Today’s geopolitical environment would accordingly be less forgiving of the indiscipline that Washington once exhibited. Although Russia and China are manageable by virtue of being self-limiting, they collectively have ample capacity to goad the United States and lock it into a reactive and self-defeating foreign policy….

Even as it embraces selective competition, however, the United States should not adopt great-power competition as a foreign policy framework. Were it to do so, the United States would risk getting drawn into a global struggle with Russia and China that would undermine its geopolitical position. Going down that path would also compel those two countries to draw even closer together than they would have otherwise and limit the United States’ ability to make diplomatic inroads in regions such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Washington should instead make a decisive break with the inertia that for some eight decades has tethered its foreign policy to the actions of—and at times the search for—external competitors. It should accord principal priority to renewing its unique competitive advantages, demonstrating anew that it has an enduring capacity to strengthen its socioeconomic foundations at home and mobilize collective action abroad to meet the full array of planetary challenges.

Competing against Russia and China undermines solutions to climate change and pandemics

There are other reasons why the United States should choose selective competition over universal struggle. Not every decision that Russia or China makes is intrinsically inimical to vital U.S. national interests—or necessarily taken with the United States in mind. Despite narratives that still suffuse much of American commentary—portraying Russia as the stealthy and ubiquitous opportunist and China as the patient and farsighted strategist—neither country is immune to hubris and overreach. And although an inexorably tightening China-Russia entente may seem like a fait accompli, U.S. foreign policy should entertain the possibility that strains between the two countries could eventually emerge. Moreover, Washington’s efforts to manage transnational challenges, such as climate change and future pandemics, will be limited if the United States bypasses Russia and China and solely engages like-minded countries.

Competing against Russia and China alienates our allies

Finally, beyond achieving little traction in the developing world, a foreign policy organized too tightly around contesting Russia and China would elicit significant concern even among U.S. allies and partners, few of which would take kindly to serving as instruments of a new Cold War—an outcome, U.S. President Joe Biden has often and properly stressed, that need not be inevitable. Perhaps the most crucial observation in the administration’s national security strategy reflects that judgment: “We will avoid the temptation to see the world solely through the prism of strategic competition and will continue to engage countries on their own terms.”

Russia won’t be able to sustain its military

Russia will also struggle to rebuild its military power. Putin’s September order to mobilize Russian conscripts demonstrates how significant its personnel and materiel losses have been and how markedly momentum on the battlefield has shifted in Ukraine’s favor. In addition to using decades-old equipment to sustain its campaign, Russia is turning to Syria and Iran for military assistance. The Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank focusing on security, found that 27 of Russia’s key military systems rely heavily on some 450 microelectronic components made in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Maintaining those systems and the defense industrial base that underpins them will grow more difficult and costly as sanctions steadily restrict Moscow’s ability to procure semiconductors.

Russia’s hardest task, however, will be to repair the diplomatic damage that it has sustained. NATO is poised to admit Finland and Sweden, the EU has granted membership candidate status to Ukraine and Moldova, and even Central Asian countries that Russia presumes to be within its sphere of influence are reconsidering their orientations. Further afield, Japan and South Korea have both imposed sanctions against Russia, and India has redoubled its efforts to find substitutes for Russian energy and arms. Even China, Russia’s putative “no limits” partner, may be looking to modify its relationship. Chinese President Xi Jinping hinted at that possibility at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in September, when he informed Putin of his “questions and concerns” about Russia’s war.

China is not a rising threat

Closer to home, China is eroding the United States’ military overmatch in Asia and increasing its centrality within the global economy (its GDP is forecast to be roughly 87 percent as large as the United States’ in 2027). It is also using geoeconomic statecraft and technological innovation to build its global influence. It, too, however, confronts serious economic, military, and diplomatic challenges.

A poor demographic trajectory, an economic model that faces diminishing returns, and a fixation on consolidating the Chinese Communist Party’s rule are all hampering China’s prospects for maintaining robust growth. And external headwinds could amplify internal ones. The economic woes of the Belt and Road Initiative are mounting as the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine make it even harder for many recipient countries to pay back loans that they have received from Chinese institutions to finance infrastructure projects. As it renegotiates a growing value of overseas loans—$52 billion in 2020 and 2021, up from $16 billion in 2018 and 2019—China has also offered “rescue loans” to countries including Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and Turkey to help them avoid balance-of-payments crises.

As China seeks to place its economy on a stabler footing, it must also contend with a more challenging security landscape. The leaders of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States⁠—the members of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad—have now convened four times, first in March 2021 and most recently in May of this year. Canberra has initiated a major review of its defense posture in hopes of enhancing its long-range strike capabilities and modernizing its navy. Washington and New Delhi have pledged to enhance their interoperability “across all domains of potential conflict,” inked an agreement to facilitate cooperation in space, and committed to new talks on artificial intelligence. And owing in part to shared anxiety over China’s deepening ties to Russia, Tokyo and Seoul are moving incrementally to build mutual trust. Finally, and critically, the United States, Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea are all significantly increasing their defense spending.

Like Russia, China will find that its biggest challenge is diplomatic. Washington is convinced that Beijing seeks to become the world’s preeminent power, and bipartisan support for strengthening ties between the United States and Taiwan is growing. The EU is steadily adjusting its stance toward China, as seen with its decision to pause the ratification of the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, a deal seven years in the making that was intended to improve both European investors’ access to and European companies’ treatment in China’s vast consumer market. China’s failure to condemn Russian aggression in Ukraine has only deepened Europe’s anxiety—as well as that of NATO, which warns in its new strategic concept that China’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security, and values.” And the Quad proceeds with clear momentum, having intensified efforts to articulate standards in critical technology domains such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, launched the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness, and announced a Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Package.

Great Power Competition blocks effective China-US cooperation on climate change

Khorammi, 11-22, 22, Nima Khorrami is a research associate at the Arctic Institute, The Diplomat, Can China and the US Cooperate on Climate Change?, https://thediplomat.com/2022/11/can-china-and-the-us-cooperate-on-climate-change-2/

The geopolitics of technology and technological innovation, on the other hand, can be explored from two standpoints: a system-level perspective, which considers technological innovation as a power booster, and a post-modern or critical lens, which highlights how states exercise power, and exert influence, via standardization and/or agenda setting. With regard to the former, suffice to say that modern-day diplomacy and warfare are only possible thanks to the technological strides of the recent past. Whether it is shuttle diplomacy, digital diplomacy, remotely operated drones, or the use of virtual reality as a more cost-effective alternative to traditional training regiments for pilots, it is indisputable that the conduct of both war and diplomacy is directly linked to technological advancements. What stands out in this context is that there is a strong technological element in any nation’s ability to project power and defend its vital national security interests. As Mark Leonard has put it, “power and influence are formulated at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.” Regarding the latter, it is a commonly acknowledged observation that one who sets the standards gets to rule. More precisely, one can exercise significant influence if rules of conduct or parameters of responsible behavior are based on, or rooted in, its norms and values. Hence, it ought not to be surprising that the United States has been alarmed by China’s more hands-on approach to agenda-setting practices at international forums or Chinese tech companies’ fast expansion into other markets. Washington worries that the more Chinese tech products are used around the globe, the easier it becomes for China to export its values and set the rules of the game. The Nexus of Technological Cooperation and Environmental Cooperation To realize the link between technology and climate change, one needs to look no further than Beijing’s and Washington’s own action plans for tackling and coping with the adverse effects of environmental degradation and a fast-warming planet. Both countries have assigned strategic importance to technological innovation and the up-skilling of their labor markets in their battle against the looming climate crisis and their push toward the creation of green economies. Strategic technologies deemed critical for addressing and mitigating the effects of climate change can be divided into two groups. On the one end of the spectrum, there are the technologies that can harness the so-called clean sources of energy such as plants, geothermal heat, or the sun. On the other end are technologies that are essential to the energy industry because they can make traditional forms of energy not just cleaner but also more efficient. Cases in point include coal gasification, carbon capture and storage, and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology. In addition, there are technologies that are situated in between the two groups mentioned above. One group comprises technologies necessary for both making material production processes greener and increasing materials’ life cycles and efficiency. The other group includes space-related technologies and AI. The effects of climate change can be more comprehensively understood once states develop the capabilities to process larger sets of satellite data more frequently. Doing so requires advances in satellite technologies as well as machine learning so more data can be processed within a considerably shorter timeframe. Is Cooperation Possible? From a global good perspective, China and the United States must put aside their strategic differences and seek to maximize cooperation on climate change. This is so because the climate crisis presents a global threat and hence dealing with it calls for global efforts. However, the problem today is that China’s and the United States’ strategic priorities do not align. In spite of their common identification of climate change as a pressing national and global security threat, their national interests in outdoing one another for global supremacy make it difficult for the two to work hand-in-hand in addressing the climate crisis. While the prospect of an all-out war between the United States and China remains marginal, it is nonetheless abundantly clear that the two are locked in a technological cold war, as evident in their aggressive decoupling efforts. Fueled by what Alex Capri has described as techno nationalism, Chinese and U.S. behaviors are best described as “mercantilist-like.” This view ties a nation’s national security, economic competitiveness, and socio-political stability to technological advancement. Emboldened by its impressive economic growth, China now seeks recognition for its governance model, claiming that it outperforms Western liberal democracy on a number of key indicators. The United States, for its part, is determined to withhold such recognition. Hence, while Chinese diplomats are drumbeating the virtues of their model and courting developing countries to follow the Chinese path, U.S. officials are trying to counter those efforts by highlighting the normative shortcomings of the Chinese model, such as lack of respect for human rights and individual privacy. This rivalry ought not to be surprising. After all, leadership and ongoing innovation in the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution will certainly confer critical economic, political, and military power. This is why both countries have devoted large sums of capital to finance R&D on such technologies and, in the process, have developed a zero-sum view on each other’s progress, whereby gains by China are taken as a loss for the United States and vice versa. This trend was most vividly on display at the confirmation hearing for Lloyd Austin, Biden’s secretary of defense. Austin stated that he would maintain a “laser-like focus” on sharpening the United States’ “competitive edge” against China’s increasingly powerful military and described Beijing as “the most significant threat going forward” for the United States. However, what makes strategic compartmentalization highly unlikely is the fact that China-U.S. technological competition is not confined to the innovation race alone. Rather, it includes a fierce, and fast-intensifying, rivalry over the establishment of regulatory frameworks for the development and governance of new technologies, which pits two entirely different value systems against one another. One can see a clear manifestation of this unfolding normative contest in China’s Global Initiative on Data Security as well as its recently updated Personal Information Protection Law, which aims to counter the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, and the U.S. proposal for the establishment of a G-7 AI Pact as well as its revitalization of the Wassenaar Arrangement. Conclusion Throughout the history, nations have sought technological superiority in order to strategically outmaneuver their rivals and exercise power and influence beyond their immediate borders. Therefore, the current state of technological contestation between China and the United States ought not to be surprising. Nor should be their inability to co-invent the technologies deemed essential for combating climate change and collaborate on the scaling-up of such technologies. Technological knowhow and technology transfers are viewed as instruments of leverage and influence, which China and the United States could utilize to tilt other states into their own spheres of influence. This tendency could lead to further division and an unfortunate return of Cold War mentality to global politics. More broadly, the two superpowers are unlikely to be able to separate climate change from the grander strategic context of their bilateral relations simply because the valuational distance between their governing models has widened as the power gap between them has shrunk. China, in fact, made this clear on the eve of Kerry’s trip to Tianjin last year, when Foreign Minster Wang Yi dismissed the idea of splitting climate from other policy issues. Technological cooperation for tackling climate change would only become possible if Beijing and Washington manage to set up a high-level committee to regulate their technological rivalry; that is, to set the basic rules for ultimately arriving at a consensus that neither will seek to inflict a high-tech attack on the other. As long as this set up is missing, the prospect for their technological cooperation on other fronts, including climate change, will remain illusive.

Xi preparing for war against Taiwan

Gao, 11-22, 22, China’s New Politburo Has Taiwan in Its Crosshairs, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/china%E2%80%99s-new-politburo-has-taiwan-its-crosshairs-205909, Simone Gao is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentarian whose work has been focused on China. She is the host of the in-depth report program “Zooming In with Simone Gao.”

Five years ago, Xi ordered the military to prepare for war; today, the order is to win a war. But to win a war against whom? The direct target is clearly Taiwan, but the PLA’s real rival is America and its allies, who are likely to come to Taiwan’s defense should China invade the island.If America and its allies join the fight over Taiwan, it will not be the quick battle Xi has hoped for, even if the PLA gains the upper hand early. It will be a long, hard war on the battlefield and at home, as Xi works to first gain support from his nation and then sustain that support through lengthy battles and what will surely be extensive loss of life. But, as a closer look into the new top leadership of the CCP reveals, that is exactly what Xi appears to be preparing for. Xi has formed a wartime cabinet that is able to efficiently draw resources from and ready the entire nation for war.

Following the 20th Party Congress, a new Central Military Commission (CMC) was put in charge of the two-million-strong PLA. The most striking difference between Xi’s new CMC and the previous one is that the current leadership is narrowly focused on Taiwan and waging war. Adm. He Weidong, the new vice-chairman of the CMC, previously led the Eastern Theater Command, whose primary responsibility is the recapture of Taiwan by force. He also oversaw China’s large-scale live-fire military around Taiwan in the wake of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August visit to the island. His promotion to vice-chairman is considered by many to be an astounding departure from China’s pattern of political promotions, given that He had not previously been a member of the CMC or the Party’s Central Committee. Xi’s willingness to radically depart from established political patterns demonstrates his central focus on Taiwan Adm. Zhang Youxiao remained as another CMC vice-chairman and is one of two members who have seen time in battle, having participated in the 1979 China-Vietnam War. This choice was more expected, given that Zhang and Xi’s fathers had worked together during the Chinese Civil War in the 1940s and the two families continue to have a good relationship. Moreover, despite the fact that many CMC members have not personally seen time in battle, all are hostile to the idea of Taiwan’s self-determination. That a large portion of the PLA’s top leadership is optimized for invading Taiwan says a lot about Xi’s intentions for his third term in office. But wanting to fight a war is a far cry from having the resources and strategies necessary to win a war that is sure to involve many global superpowers. There are indications, though, that Xi has fine-tuned his plan for fighting a war over Taiwan.

The CCP’s Politburo is a powerful ruling body, second only to the Politburo Standing Committee. Seven provincial heads were added to the 20th Politburo, making up 40 percent of the twenty-four-member Politburo, excluding the Standing Committee members. This is a deep departure from the norm, which raises questions about Xi’s motivations for appointing so many provincial heads as members of the Politburo. On further examination, we see that these local party secretaries fall into three categories: those who have been senior technocrats in military-related fields, those who demonstrate excellence in coordinating and executing efforts in a province that will be directly involved in a war over Taiwan, and those who are Xi’s close confidants in such provinces.

The five top technocrats in the new Politburo are Li Ganjie, a nuclear expert from Shandong Province; Ma Xingrui, an aerospace expert from Xinjiang; Zhang Guoqing, who comes from Liaoning and was the general manager of the China Ordnance Industry Group; and Yuan Jiaun from Zhejiang, another aerospace expert.

These officials all began to take on increasingly complex and powerful governmental positions after Xi became general secretary of the CCP at the end of 2012, and all of them were promoted to their current provincial party secretary positions in late 2020 and 2021, after Xi had made international news for his positions on Taiwan. A closer examination reveals that the professional backgrounds of these secretaries are strongly correlated with the provinces they are currently governing and China’s potential needs in a war with Taiwan.

…

Xi has set about transforming the political structure of the CPP, particularly the Politburo, in order to strengthen China for a battle against Taiwan and, potentially, the world. He has also altered China’s “social appearance and popular psychology” through rising state controls over Chinese society and industry. Xi has been transforming the economy in a myriad of ways, most notably with the restoration of state-run “supply and marketing cooperatives,” which were prevalent during China’s command economy more than half a century ago and allow the supply and sale of goods to be controlled by the government.

Accompanying the cooperatives are further public-private partnerships, tightened taxation monitoring mechanisms targeting the rich, restrictions on citizens’ overseas travel, and even state-run community kitchens whose main goal, at least according to the Chinese government, is to provide convenience to the elderly in need of care. While that may be true to some degree, by enabling the state to collect and distribute resources and by driving people toward collective activities, these measures increase the government’s control over resource distribution, which will conveniently suit wartime management of societal resources and needs.

John Culver, a retired CIA researcher and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, recently wrote that there is no sign of an imminent invasion of Taiwan by the PLA, at least before 2024. Culver argues that if war was Beijing’s plan, there would be reliable indications that it is coming, including surging production of various missiles, rockets, and key munitions, which would be noticed by international governmental and nongovernmental observers alike. He also says that China would take visible steps to insulate its economy, military, and key industries from disruptions and sanctions and would start preparing the population psychologically for the cost of the war. So far, as Culver notes, such indications have not appeared.

Although we may not have seen mobilization in ways that would suggest a known start date for a war, Xi is clearly determined to wage such a war in the not-too-distant future, as indicated by how the new Politburo and CMC were composed.

One of Mao Zedong’s famous military doctrines was to never fight battles that the military was unprepared for or unconfident in its ability to win. However, war is often about exceptions. Adolf Hitler would have liked to have started World War II in 1941 after Germany was fully prepared. However, Germany’s dire economic conditions and the alarm set off by the United Kingdom and France in response to the German aggression forced Hitler to begin the invasion eighteen months earlier than he had planned. Similarly, it is not impossible that Xi would launch an attack before China is fully prepared if he saw an opportunity that he believed would provide a strategic advantage, such as by catching the rest of the world off-guard, capitalizing on the chaos and distraction in other countries.

The CCP claims to hold three magic weapons necessary for victory: the populist route, armed struggle, and stealth wars. Among the three, stealth war is the most powerful, as it can initiate and spread chaos and then defeat those weakened and distracted enemies. America and Taiwan should be on high alert for such operations, especially during 2024, when both countries will hold important presidential elections.

US-China competition kills cooperation on climate change

Michael Shuman, November 21, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/11/us-china-relations-climate-change/672170/, Where U.S.-China Competition Leaves Climate Change

The latest round of international negotiations on climate change, which concluded on Sunday, achieved a significant breakthrough by creating a fund to compensate poor countries for damage caused by global warming. But the two weeks of intense haggling at COP27, this year’s United Nations climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, may focus the attention of the climate-activist community on the United States and China more than ever. The summit left unresolved some of the thorniest issues, including how exactly the new fund will work, and many experts believe that the progress necessary to repair a warming world will be extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, without close collaboration between these two great powers Lately, that cooperation has fallen victim to souring U.S.-China relations. Beijing suspended bilateral dialogue with Washington on climate in August, and talks were not resumed until midway through COP27 in a meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali last week. Some fears may now be soothed. But the episode confirms the precariousness of the U.S.-China relationship—and, even more, the dangers of relying on continued goodwill between the two countries to solve global problems. In the past, breakthroughs in cooperation of the world’s two largest economies (and greenhouse-gas emitters) have invigorated international efforts to tackle the climate challenge. A pact to reduce emissions that the pair reached in 2014 paved the way for the historic Paris Agreement a year later. Without renewed impetus, some experts worry, the UN-backed process could drift and founder. “This is a new challenge that we need to deal with,” Li Shuo, a senior global-policy adviser for Greenpeace in Beijing, told me: “How do we adjust to the fact that the two biggest powers in the world will, like it or not, compete or even confront each other … but at the same time, there are issues that require their alignment, or at least their engagement … For a long time, we didn’t have to deal with this dichotomy.” After watching the events at COP27, “I believe even more firmly that U.S.-China engagement is key for climate progress,” Li added. “Without that, the multilateral process will be paralyzed.” The conundrum is also a huge test for U.S. foreign policy and strikes directly at its greatest contradiction: Washington must protect U.S. national interests from an adversarial China and yet collaborate with Beijing on matters of crucial importance to the country and the world. Much depends on the attitude in Beijing. China’s leaders find themselves in the same fix—compelled to push back against American global power even as they remain dependent on that power to achieve their own national goals. In that sense, tackling the climate crisis will be a test of China’s new role in the world, and what its leaders wish that role to be. President Joe Biden has tried to insulate climate from issues of greater contention in the U.S.-China relationship, such as human rights, technology, and Taiwan. And he’s had some success. A year ago, Washington and Beijing surprised the climate-activist community by presenting a joint pledge to accelerate their efforts on climate, giving the previous UN summit—held in Glasgow, Scotland—a major boost. Recently, though, China’s leaders have tied their continued collaboration on climate more tightly to concessions from Washington on other sensitive issues, most of all on Taiwan. Beijing called off high-level climate talks with Washington in August in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island, which the Communist government believed undermined the idea of “one China.” (Beijing considers Taiwan a part of China.) The U.S. government “is very selective,” Yang Fuqiang, a senior adviser at the Institute of Energy at China’s Peking University, told me. “You think, ‘On this issue I would like to work with you, but on that issue I don’t like to work with you.’ The Chinese government says, ‘If you have this kind of attitude, forget it’ … We think we have to work together in an integrated, friendly approach.”

In spite of its battlefield losses, Russia remains a threat

Fontaine, 11-18, 22, RICHARD FONTAINE is CEO of the Center for a New American Security. He has worked at the U.S. Department of State, on the National Security Council, and as a Foreign Policy Adviser to U.S. Senator John McCain, Foreign Affairs, Taking on China and Russia To Compete, the United States Will Have to Pick Its Battles, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/taking-china-and-russia

Such a grand strategic move, unrealistic before Russia’s invasion, is now unthinkable. Given Russia’s war of conquest, its disregard for the most basic rules of international conduct, and its stated desire to upend the European security order, there will be no rearranging of the chessboard. For the foreseeable future, Russia will represent a significant threat to U.S. interests and ideals. Although the war in Ukraine is already depleting Russia’s conventional military might, Moscow retains the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and a range of unconventional capabilities that, together with the remaining military and intelligence tools at its disposal, will allow it to menace neighbors, interfere in democracies, and violate international rules. Absent a major change in its political system, dealing with Russia—even if it is in decline—will require significant U.S. attention and resources for years to come.

No China threat, Pro cards over-hyped

Johnson, 11-14, 22, CHRISTOPHER K. JOHNSON is President and CEO of China Strategies Group, a political risk consultancy, and a Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis., https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/why-china-will-play-it-safe

At a time of growing tension between Beijing and Washington, China’s 20th Party Congress in October unsettled many outside observers. During the proceedings, not only did Chinese President Xi Jinping stack China’s all-important Politburo Standing Committee with loyalists and secure a third term in office; he also painted his darkest picture yet of China’s external threats. Xi called for further increasing the quantity and quality of China’s already accelerating defense production. And he appointed a mix of protégés and skilled technocrats to the full Politburo to oversee China’s response to the challenge.

So far, Beijing has withheld escalatory responses that would amount to direct economic warfare against the United States, such as disrupting crucial supply chains of rare-earth metals or using untested Chinese regulatory tools such as its “Unreliable Entity List” and the Anti–Foreign Sanctions Law, which could penalize foreign companies simply for complying with U.S. regulations. But to many analysts, Xi’s recent moves are a sign of worse to come. Now that Xi is firmly ensconced in his third term, some China observers argue that he could move to retake Taiwan in the next few years, provoking a full-fledged war between the world’s two most powerful states.

But the new Politburo is not a war cabinet. Although there is no question that China’s leadership has grown more prickly and assertive, predictions in the wake of the congress that Beijing could soon launch a military provocation or that Xi will dramatically rein in free-market capitalism in favor of a return to statism are wrong. For all their loyalty to Xi, the party’s new leaders are mostly measured technocrats. Xi has certainly added many close allies, but they also have strong connections to China’s private economy and are unlikely to be pure sycophants. Rather than planning for an aggressive, closed, and highly personalistic China, the United States should expect Beijing to continue to govern in a stable and predictable manner, if only because China is facing major challenges that make the Politburo crave stability.

THE SPIRIT OF STRUGGLE

The 20th Party Congress is not the first time Xi has spoken about the world in a menacing tone. In May 2019, U.S. talks with China over President Donald Trump’s tariffs collapsed in Washington. Shortly after, Xi traveled to Jiangxi Province on a visit full of symbolism: Jiangxi was the launch pad for the Chinese Communist Party’s fabled Long March in 1934, when CCP forces successfully retreated from advancing Chinese nationalists, regrouped, and then won. “We are now embarking on a new Long March,” Xi said to a cheering crowd at the Long March memorial site, “and we must start all over again.” He doubled down in a Politburo meeting a year later, declaring that China was fighting a “protracted war” against the United States, in a throwback to On Protracted War, Mao Zedong’s 1938 book about defeating a superior foreign enemy.

Yet Xi did not completely upend Chinese doctrine on those occasions. In each instance, he held fast to the judgment that stability and economic growth continued to be the dominant global trends. By declaring that “peace and development remain the themes of the era,” he parroted a phrase first coined by Deng Xiaoping—the father of China’s post-Mao reforms. He also said China was enjoying “a period of strategic opportunity”: an axiom introduced by Jiang Zemin, Deng’s successor and another market-oriented reformist. The idea underlying both concepts is that China enjoys a benign, perhaps even welcoming, global geopolitical climate. This assessment forestalled Chinese military adventurism aimed at reshaping East Asia’s balance of power and instead incentivized the country’s policymakers to focus on economic growth. Both phrases appeared again in critical CCP documents from April and June 2022, reaffirming their canonical standing in party dogma.

That continuity, however, did not stop Xi from changing Chinese foreign policy. Already in November 2014, he gave a speech in which he effectively broke with Deng’s injunction that China should keep a low international profile, even though Xi’s immediate predecessor—Hu Jintao—had offered a full-throated defense of that approach just a few years earlier. Indeed, Xi made it clear that he had little regard for most of his various predecessors’ decisions. In a party resolution passed in November 2021, Xi condemned the rampant corruption and ideological laxity under their rule, and he put his own ideological contribution on par with Mao’s while downgrading Deng’s. This boosting of Xi’s own thoughts at the expense of his predecessors’ continued in the run-up to the party congress. In July 2022, a prominent party theoretician penned an article in the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily extolling Mao’s and Xi’s theoretical achievements while making no mention of Deng, Jiang, or Hu.

China’s new Politburo is not a war cabinet.

This diminution campaign cleared the way for Xi to finally excise both phrases—“peace and development” and “strategic opportunity”—from his political report to the 20th Party Congress. It is unclear exactly why they were removed, but the West’s galvanized response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Politburo’s conclusion that the Biden administration is at least as aggressive toward China as the Trump administration was probably made a difference. These two factors are also part of the reason why Xi has made multiple references to “the spirit of struggle,” a deliberate callback to Maoist rhetoric used when China faced both a hostile West after the Korean War and an antagonistic Moscow after the Sino-Soviet split. Although language about peace, development, and strategic opportunities all appear in the political report, the terms are used in isolation and counterbalanced with references to “risks,” “challenges,” and “hegemonic bullying.” Xi almost directly attacked the United States for its tariffs and criticisms, saying China opposes “building walls and fortifications,” “decoupling and breaking links,” and “unilateral sanctions and extreme pressure.”

So far, the main policy implication of Xi’s stiff language has been a campaign to build domestic industrial strength. At the congress, Xi sketched out his plans to create a “fortress economy” that is self-sufficient in food, energy, and core technologies, such as semiconductors and advanced manufacturing. Xi also said he hopes to build supply chains that are safer from Washington’s interference. He seems similarly committed to increasing China’s military strength abroad and the regime’s security at home. In the 20th Party Congress report, his “comprehensive national security concept” had its own standalone section, and mentions of “national security” were up 60 percent over the last report, in 2017. Xi also subtly declared that China must improve its “strategic deterrence”: a likely nod to China’s August 2021 test of a hypersonic glide vehicle—and an indication that China will substantially expand its nuclear force.

Economic development retained its spot as China’s “top priority” in the report. But Xi’s new admonition to “ensure both development and security” puts security on nearly equal footing, potentially creating more friction with Washington. Xi’s proclaimed desire to promote a unique “Chinese-style of modernization” for developing countries might spark fears that China’s amorphous Global Development and Global Security Initiatives are in fact nefarious joint campaigns to directly challenge the Western international order. Equating development and security could also heighten U.S. concerns about “civil-military fusion” in China’s economy—fears that have already prompted U.S. President Joe Biden to implement a virtual ban on exporting high-end semiconductors to China. If Xi merges departments focused on development and national security at China’s next legislative session—or creates a new structure to improve coordination and cooperation between them—an increase in Chinese-U.S. tensions would become virtually certain.

STEADY AS SHE GOES

In many ways, Xi’s new leadership team matches his protectionist and militaristic language. Several of the new Politburo members are techno-nationalists with expertise in important state-led scientific endeavors that have advanced China’s industrial prowess; they include a nuclear engineer, an expert in material sciences, and four officials with experience in Chinese defense firms. In the security realm, Chen Wenqing is the first former head of China’s civilian foreign intelligence arm to sit on the Politburo. He is joined on the CCP Secretariat—the Politburo’s executive body—by both China’s top cop and a career police officer turned party disciplinarian, creating the largest contingent of security officials on the Secretariat in recent memory. Xi’s new chief uniformed officer and his presumptive next defense minister have both overseen weapons development, highlighting the CCP’s emphasis on continually upgrading China’s capabilities. Xi’s revamped high command also has two officers who saw action in China’s border wars with Vietnam and a third who served extensively in Chinese army units near Taiwan.

Given these appointments, it is understandable why many analysts believe China is preparing to upend the liberal order—perhaps even through violence. Major news outlets across the globe said Xi’s new lineup, especially in the military, proves he is itching for war. But such narratives are overhyped. Xi’s all-loyalist Politburo is not designed for near-term conflict with Taiwan (or any other state) but rather to “harden” China’s system in case war becomes unavoidable. Xi kept an aging top general on the Politburo, for example, because he is a fellow CCP blue blood who can be trusted to enforce Xi’s political grip on the military, not because he fought in China’s disastrous war with Vietnam 40 years ago. Likewise, Xi promoted defense specialists to the Politburo because they achieved previously unattainable technological breakthroughs, such as landing rovers on the moon, rather than for their weapons-making prowess. And despite the new language, Xi’s work report still balanced calls for a “fortress economy” with language supporting markets, suggesting he will govern with a precautionary approach instead of marching to war.

The idea that Xi’s new economic team is an incompetent and sycophantic group of statists, also popular among China observers, is similarly off base. The officials’ career paths alone belie that caricature. China’s next premier, Li Qiang, has led all three of China’s top east coast economies and maintains good relations with private-sector entrepreneurs. His stewardship of the wrenching Shanghai lockdown raised reasonable questions about whether loyally following Xi will outweigh his pro-market instincts, but that is nothing new for China: outgoing Premier Li Keqiang, an unquestioned reformist, earned a similar black mark for toeing the party line amid controversies earlier in his career. Li Qiang’s likely economic deputy—Ding Xuexiang—is more of a cipher, but he hails from the financial capital of Shanghai and will be attuned to the markets. As Xi’s longtime chief of staff, Ding knows how to please his boss, but he is also experienced at operating China’s government to address various problems. Finally, He Lifeng—assumed to be the economy’s new operational manager—has substantial experience in several of China’s market-driven special economic zones.

China’s president is a ruthless and tenacious leader.

The Biden administration will need to understand that China’s new leaders are not just warmongering statists if it wants to successfully handle an unbound Xi. Right now, however, it may not. On Taiwan, the administration has touted an ever-shrinking timeline for possible Chinese military action, and it has alleged that the Chinese government is impatient about retaking the island. This messaging may be deliberately alarmist—part of an attempt to tell Beijing that the United States is ready and watching, thereby deterring an attack. But it could create a self-fulfilling prophecy if the resulting support to Taipei hollows out Washington’s official “one China” policy—which recognizes the Chinese position that Taiwan is a part of China and that the mainland is the sole legal government of China—and in turn crosses Beijing’s fundamental redline. Biden officials are more circumspect in describing Xi’s new economic team, but their framing of the Chinese-U.S. rivalry as a competition of economic and governance systems implies that they expect China’s model will ultimately fail—a perspective that earns them few friends in Beijing.

That is not to say Xi’s approach and his new team are the right choices for China or that they will inevitably succeed. And regardless, Biden must understand that Xi’s power equals that of Mao—except during a time when China is far more economically powerful and globally consequential. China’s president is a ruthless and tenacious leader, full of ambitions that will not be subordinated by norms: something the reformist Hu Jintao’s embarrassing and forced exit from the congress meeting clearly illustrated. By appointing a mix of loyal protégés and accomplished technocrats to the Politburo, Xi has also made it clear that he is a man in a hurry, pursuing fast results. He could act rashly and catch Washington off guard.

But that does not mean Xi is itching for a fight. In fact, Xi’s very sense that China faces substantial challenges may encourage him to lower bilateral tensions. Ding, a leading Politburo member, unwittingly hinted as much in a lengthy early November article in the People’s Daily, where he forcefully catalogued China’s many challenges and arduous tasks over the next five years (and beyond) and offered a controversial Mao formulation as the right response. It was, after all, Mao who first lowered tensions with Washington in order to more easily achieve many of his objectives. Xi is not looking for a rapprochement, but he might like some breathing room. Early rumblings that Biden and Xi could hold a lengthy meeting with the trappings of traditional modern summits, where both sides use the gathering to announce commercial deals and other deliverable results, certainly suggested as much. The real question is whether Biden wants to—or can—seize Beijing’s apparent interest in a détente to pump the brakes on the relationship’s downward spiral.

China doesn’t have the military ability to invade Taiwan until at least 2027

Lam & Hung, 11-12, 22, Sze Hong Lam is an internal Ph.D. candidate at the Grotius Center of International Legal Studies of Leiden University. He had formerly interned at the Legal Office of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the Office of the Prosecutor of the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT). He has written in the areas of international humanitarian law, international criminal law, the history of international law, and on the right to self-determination, Short of War: Is the World Ready to Defend Taiwan?, Wei Azim Hung is a part-time Research Assistant at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica. He graduated International Studies, cum laude, from Leiden University and researches on uncovering the relationship between state discourse and nationalism.

hird, the feasibility of executing the assault on Taiwan is also an open question. The most prominent and aggressive operational concepts of large-scale amphibious invasion are complex operations requiring air and maritime superiority. It would require the PLA to mechanize, informatize, and intelligentize its armed forces before Beijing could employ credible military options for a Taiwan scenario. This is expected to materialize no sooner than 2027. Additionally, the possibility of a U.S. intervention during a Taiwan contingency and ongoing border conflicts with Vietnam and India poses significant constraints on PLA resources and manpower. Acknowledging that Xi is no longer on borrowed time, there is no reason for him to incur domestic and international backlash that may hurt his position of power. Moreover, he does not have to gamble on the prematurity of the other two variables, in which a military failure could have unintended consequences such as significantly weakening China or leading Taiwan to formally declare independence. Thus, the practical solution for Xi is to continue restructuring the PCS-CMS chain of command and modernizing the PLA to remake the status quo in the PRC’s favor. At present, measures short of war are the best military option for Xi’s Taiwan strategy.

Europe-US technology coop critical to great power competition against China

Yerxa & Houck, 11-11, 22, Amb. Rufus Yerxa, former WTO Deputy Director General and Senior Advisor at McLarty Associates, advises clients on global trade matters;m Kellie Meiman Hock is a Managing Partner at McLarty Associates and the former Director for Brazil and the Southern Cone in the Office of the United States Trade Representative, The US/EU Alliance: Divided We Fall, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/useu-alliance-divided-we-fall-205828

It is time to signal to the world that Europe and the United States are aligned, with less daylight than ever before. The strong security alliance between the United States and Europe in opposing Russian aggression has demonstrated why the world needs Transatlantic unity to preserve peace. But when it comes to another existential challenge, taking on China’s authoritarian capitalism and the gravitational pull it exerts around the world, we are falling short. Instead, Europe and America are bickering, with irritants ranging from digital trade to industrial policy threatening to unravel more than seventy-five years of shared leadership in global commerce. Performance Golf Why does that matter? Because responding to the aggression inherent in China’s state-driven economic model is as vital as standing up to military challenges. The threat might be less dramatic, but over time it is insidious and we risk losing the very underpinnings of our free societies. China’s success in deploying vast state power to capture world markets and technological leadership, coupled with its growing military might, is an existential security challenge. China’s rise has also eroded support for open trade—already wavering—in both Europe and the United States, especially when coupled with the disruptions of Covid-19, supply chain constraints, and now Russia’s war. As a result, our policy focus has turned inward, with reshoring and regionalization the buzzwords of the day. Yet pulling back from world markets and pinning our hopes on self-sufficiency would be a tragic mistake. World trade is still growing; strategic sectors are globalized. Ignoring this reality and failing to align U.S. and European interests is a dangerous bet. We each need to build economic strength at home and maintain a leading edge in innovation, but not at the expense of disengagement from the battle to maintain our joint global gains. In that battle, the power of strategic alliances is decisive. We are living in a new reality of “fractured globalization,” where trade policies still matter but play out in realigned spheres of influence with altered patterns of trade and investment. Multilateralism will still exist but shaped more by competing blocs than by purely multilateral exercises. Against this backdrop, regional and a la carte alliances reign supreme. Both Europe and the United States need diverse alliances around the world. But for historical and commercial reasons, the Transatlantic bond must be our indispensable cornerstone, singularly able to play the role of standard bearer for market democracy in a realigning world. As EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said in Washington last month, it is “crucial that the EU and US stay on the same page as we face overlapping global challenges.” Neither Europe nor the United States should use a country’s level of democratization as a sole litmus test for a trading relationship, although Europe’s overreliance on Russia for energy has been a difficult lesson for us all. At the same time, when the United States and Europe lose sight of the importance of our alliance—including in the economic realm—authoritarian regimes rejoice. We have encouraged some joy on this score. Some long-standing bilateral troubles have been swept under the rug, but recent steps to join forces have fallen short of true strategic alignment. Even worse, both sides are adopting policies drawing us further into commercial conflict. A glance at the EU push for “digital sovereignty” or restrictions on agricultural imports, to say nothing of U.S. chips policy or its scheme to localize electric vehicle manufacturing, leaves us wondering if either side understands the existential importance of this moment in history, which demands more. This dynamic undermines our competitiveness, undoing hopes for a shared economic security agenda. Instead, we should deploy mechanisms like the G7 and the U.S./EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC) to reverse this narrative. To be successful, we must grasp the dangers of fighting over local content requirements and data regulations while Rome burns. Choosing proactively to not hit the economic interests of one another demands a sense of urgency and political impetus from the top. Our agenda needs to be bigger and bolder, eliminating discrimination and embracing Transatlantic unity while seeking to make supply chains more resilient and addressing economic pressures at home. Only together can we meet today’s geopolitical threats, and only together (along with allies such as Japan, Korea, and others) can we craft future multilateral trade rules. By closing gaps in our respective visions of the future geoeconomic order—and not prejudicing one another’s companies—we can navigate this era of great power competition 2.0. It is time to signal to the world that Europe and the United States are aligned, with less daylight than ever before. The alternative is unthinkable.

Technology competition undermines China’s support on Russia

Carpenter, 11-10, 22, Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the National Interest, is the author of thirteen books and more than 1,100 articles on international affairs. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022), Washington Keeps Alienating Its Policy Partners, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/washington-keeps-alienating-its-policy-partners-205780

As if those measures weren’t enough to alienate Beijing, the administration concluded in early October that it was an appropriate time to launch a salvo against China’s economy by imposing sweeping tech restrictions. The new measure included a provision barring China from using semiconductor chips made with U.S. tools anywhere in the world. It constituted by far the harshest economic measure ever leveled against Beijing since the normalization of diplomatic relations. A Bloomberg analysis described it as “a kneecapping of the Chinese tech industry, depriving it of the advanced chips—and the means of making them—vital for everything from smartphones to self-driving cars.” It is not clear that these hostile steps were solely in response to the PRC’s refusal to join the anti-Russia coalition, since bilateral frictions had been rising for years. However, the annoyance with Beijing’s neutrality on the Russia-Ukraine War almost certainly was at least one factor. In any case, the timing was horrible, and reduced rather than increased the prospect that China might decide to tilt against Putin.

Great Power Competition kills climate cooperation with China

Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, 11-11, 22, Foreign Policy, Will U.S. Midterm Results Affect Washington’s Foreign Policy?, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/11/biden-china-ukraine-midterm-results-affect-washington-foreign-policy/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News%20Alerts&utm_term=57422&tpcc=News%20Alerts

EA: Yes, unlike last year’s event in Glasgow, there aren’t particularly high hopes for this conference. We talked a bit last column about the contradictions in the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy on climate, with the administration arguing that they can both pursue competition with China and cooperation on climate issues. That seems like a real stretch to me, and I’m just not sure that John Kerry will be able to achieve that much here in his role as climate envoy. Frankly, I fear that the continued shift toward a confrontational stance on China may sound the death knell for any attempt to find a climate solution in the next few years. Depending on how one views the threat from China, that might be a worthwhile price to pay, but to my mind, it would be an extremely high price unless the threat from China were overwhelming.

Cooperating with China won’t reduce emissions

Matthew Kroenig, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.11-11, 22, Foreign Policy, Will U.S. Midterm Results Affect Washington’s Foreign Policy?, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/11/biden-china-ukraine-midterm-results-affect-washington-foreign-policy/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News%20Alerts&utm_term=57422&tpcc=News%20Alerts

MK: The hope of cooperating with China on climate change was always misplaced. China needs to be part of the solution, only because China is the biggest part of the problem. Moreover, during the period of U.S. strategic engagement with China from 1990 to 2017, Chinese greenhouse gas emissions increased fivefold. Clearly, being nice to China didn’t work. Perhaps a more competitive approach will yield better results. But while we are talking about shared global challenges, can we turn to food security? I am learning a lot about the subject this week. It is a real security issue. One out of every eight humans goes to bed hungry. It will be a major topic at the G-20 summit this weekend.

China ahead of the US in hypersonics

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, 11-4, 22, Wall Street Journal, FACEBOOK, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-big-one-is-coming-china-russia-charles-richard-u-s-military-11667597291 ‘The Big One Is Coming’ and the U.S. Military Isn’t Ready

The news last year that China tested a hypersonic missile that flew around the world and landed at home should have raised more alarms than it did. It means China can put any U.S. city or facility at risk and perhaps without being detected. The fact that the test took the U.S. by surprise and that it surpassed America’s hypersonic capabilities makes it worse. How we lost the hypersonic race to China and Russia deserves hearings in Congress.

“We used to know how to move fast, and we have lost the art of that,” the admiral added. The military talks “about how we are going to mitigate our assumed eventual failure” to field new ballistic submarines, bombers or long-range weapons, instead of flipping the question to ask: “What’s it going to take? Is it money? Is it people? Do you need authorities?” That’s “how we got to the Moon by 1969.”

The alternative to great power competition/US hegemony with Russia and China is global autocracy

JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University. He is the author of A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, November-December 2022, Foreign Affairs, Why American Power Endures The U.S.-Led Order Isn’t in Decline, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-american-power-endures-us-led-order-isnt-in-decline-g-john-ikenberry

This world system whirred into action most recently in the global reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The struggle between the United States and its rivals China and Russia is a contest between two alternative logics of world order. The United States defends an international order it has led for three-quarters of a century—one that is open, multilateral, and anchored in security pacts and partnerships with other liberal democracies. China and Russia seek an international order that dethrones Western liberal values—one that is more hospitable to regional blocs, spheres of influence, and autocracy. The United States upholds an international order that protects and advances the interests of liberal democracy. China and Russia, each in its own way, hope to build an international order that protects authoritarian rule from the threatening forces of liberal modernity. The United States offers the world a vision of a postimperial global system. The current leaders of Russia and China increasingly craft foreign policies rooted in imperial nostalgia.

The alternative to great power competition is international cooperation; it keeps the peace

JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University. He is the author of A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, November-December 2022, Foreign Affairs, Why American Power Endures The U.S.-Led Order Isn’t in Decline, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-american-power-endures-us-led-order-isnt-in-decline-g-john-ikenberry

Realist thinkers claim that states exist in a fundamental condition of anarchy that sets limits on the possibilities for cooperation. No political authority exists above the state to enforce order or govern relations, and so states must fend for themselves. Liberal internationalists do not deny that states pursue their own interests, often through competitive means, but they believe that the anarchy of that competition can be limited. States, starting with liberal democracies, can use institutions as building blocks for cooperation and for the pursuit of joint gains. The twentieth century offers dramatic evidence of these sorts of liberal ordering arrangements. After World War II, in the shadow of the Cold War, the United States and its allies and partners established a complex and sprawling system of institutions that persist today, exemplified by the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and multilateral regimes in diverse areas of trade, development, public health, the environment, and human rights. Grand shifts in the global distribution of power have occurred in the decades since 1945, but cooperation remains a core feature of the global system.

The problems of hierarchy are the mirror opposite of the problems of anarchy. Hierarchy is political order maintained by the dominance of a leading state, and at the extreme, it is manifest as empire. The leading state worries about how it can stay on top, gain the cooperation of others, and exercise legitimate authority in shaping world politics. Weaker states and societies worry about being dominated, and they want to mitigate their disadvantages and the vulnerabilities of being powerless. In such circumstances, liberal internationalists argue that rules and institutions can simultaneously be protections for the weak and tools for the powerful. In a liberal order, the leading state consents to acting within an agreed-upon set of multilateral rules and institutions and not use its power to coerce other states. Rules and institutions allow it to signal restraint and commitment to weaker states that may fear its power. Weaker states also gain from this institutional bargain because it reduces the worst abuses of power that the hegemonic state might inflict on them, and it gives them some voice in how the order operates.

Despite any transgressions, US hegemony is on-balance desirable

JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University. He is the author of A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, November-December 2022, Foreign Affairs, Why American Power Endures The U.S.-Led Order Isn’t in Decline, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-american-power-endures-us-led-order-isnt-in-decline-g-john-ikenberry

CONTINUES

Unique in world history, the U.S.-led order that emerged after 1945 followed this logic. It is a hierarchical order with liberal characteristics. The United States has used its commanding position as the world’s leading economic and military power to provide the public goods of security protection, market openness, and sponsorship of rules and institutions. It has tied itself to allies and partners through alliances and multilateral organizations. In return, it invites participation and compliance by other states, starting with the subsystem of liberal democracies mostly in East Asia, Europe, and Oceania. The United States has frequently violated this bargain; the Iraq War is a particularly bitter and disastrous example of the United States undermining the very order it has built. The United States has used its privileged perch to bend multilateral rules in its favor and to act unilaterally for parochial economic and political gains. But despite such behavior, the overall logic of the order gives many countries around the world, particularly liberal democracies, incentives to join with rather than balance against the United States.

The problems of interdependence arise from the dangers and vulnerabilities that countries face as they become more entangled with each other. Starting in the nineteenth century, liberal democracies have responded to the opportunities and dangers of economic, security, and environmental interdependence by building an international infrastructure of rules and institutions to facilitate flows and transactions across borders. As global interdependence grows, so, too, does the need for the multilateral coordination of policies. Coordinating policies does entail some restrictions on national autonomy, but the gains from coordination increasingly outweigh these costs as interdependence intensifies. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt made this case in his appeal to the delegates grappling with postwar financial and monetary issues at the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944. Great gains could be obtained from trade and investment across borders, but domestic economies had to be protected from destabilizing economic actions taken by irresponsible governments. Such logic is in wide application today within the U.S.-led liberal order.

In each of these areas, the United States sits at the center of a liberal system of order that offers institutional solutions to the most basic problems of world politics. The United States has been an imperfect champion of these efforts to shape the operating environment of international relations. Indeed, a great deal of the criticism directed at the United States as a global leader stems from the perception that it has not done enough to move the world in this “third way” direction and that the order it presides over is too hierarchical. But that is precisely the point—if the world is to organize itself to address the problems of the twenty-first century, it will need to build on, not reject, this U.S.-led system. And if the world is to avoid the extremes of anarchy and hierarchy, it will need more, not less, liberal internationalism. China and Russia have themselves benefited from this system, and their reactionary vision of a post-American order looks more like a step backward than a step forward.

THE ANTI-IMPERIAL EMPIRE

The United States is a world power like no other before it, a peculiarity that owes much to the idiosyncratic nature of its rise. It alone among the great powers was born in the New World. Unlike the United States, the other great powers, including China and Russia, find themselves in crowded geopolitical neighborhoods, struggling for hegemonic space. From the very beginning of its career as a great power, the United States has existed far from its main rivals, and it has repeatedly found itself confronting dangerous and often violent efforts by the other great powers to expand their empires and regional spheres of influence. These circumstances have shaped the United States’ institutions, its way of thinking about international order, and its capacities for projecting power and influence.

Distance from other powers has long given the United States space to build a modern republican-style regime. The Founding Fathers were quite conscious of this uniqueness. With the European powers an ocean away, the American experiment in republican government could be safeguarded from foreign encroachments. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued that the United Kingdom owed its relatively liberal institutions to its location. “If Britain had been situated on the continent, and had been compelled . . . to make her military establishments at home co-extensive with the other great powers of Europe, she, like them, would in all probability be at this day a victim to the absolute power of a single man.” The United States was similarly lucky. Its European counterparts had to develop the robust state capacities to swiftly mobilize and command soldiers and materiel to wage the continent’s endless wars; the United States did not. Instead, it began as a fragile attempt to build a state that was institutionally weak and divided—by design—to prevent the rise of autocracy at home. The United States’ isolation gave it the opportunity to succeed.

China has no real allies

JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University. He is the author of A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, November-December 2022, Foreign Affairs, Why American Power Endures The U.S.-Led Order Isn’t in Decline, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-american-power-endures-us-led-order-isnt-in-decline-g-john-ikenberry

The United States’ geographic position and rise to power in a world of empires provided the setting for a distinctive strategy of order building. Its comparative advantage was its offshore location and its capacity for forging alliances and partnerships to undercut bids for dominance by autocratic, fascist, and authoritarian great powers in East Asia and Europe. Many countries in those regions now worry more about being abandoned by the United States than being dominated by it. As a result, alliances with fixed assets, such as military bases and forward troop deployments, provide partners with not just security but also greater certainty about U.S. commitment. This confluence of geographic circumstances and liberal political traits gives the United States a unique ability to work with other states. The United States has over 60 security partnerships in all regions of the world, while China has only a scattering of security relationships with Djibouti, North Korea, and a few other countries.

It’s the US or Russia and China

JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University. He is the author of A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, November-December 2022, Foreign Affairs, Why American Power Endures The U.S.-Led Order Isn’t in Decline, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-american-power-endures-us-led-order-isnt-in-decline-g-john-ikenberry

Democratic solidarity also creates a setting for generating progressive ideas and attracting global support. Collective security (defined by Wilson in his Fourteen Points speech as “mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike”), the Four Freedoms (Roosevelt’s goals for postwar order: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear), and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, are all grand ideas forged out of great-power contests. The world order contest underway between the United States and its autocratic rivals China and Russia offers a new opportunity to advance liberal democratic principles around the world.

China does not have an appealing alternative vision of the world

JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University. He is the author of A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, November-December 2022, Foreign Affairs, Why American Power Endures The U.S.-Led Order Isn’t in Decline, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-american-power-endures-us-led-order-isnt-in-decline-g-john-ikenberry

Given the country’s recent domestic convulsions, these exhortations for the centrality of the United States in the coming century might seem odd. Today, the United States looks more beset with problems than at any time since the 1930s. Amid the polarization and dysfunction that plague American society, it is easy to offer a narrative of U.S. decline. But what keeps the United States afloat, despite its travails, is its progressive impulses. It is the idea of the United States more than the country itself that has stirred the world over the last century. The country’s liberal ideals have inspired leaders of liberation movements elsewhere, from Mahatma Gandhi in India to Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Young people in Hong Kong protesting against the Chinese government have routinely waved U.S. flags. No other state aspiring to world power, including China, has advanced a more appealing vision of a society in which free individuals consent to their political institutions than has the United States.

US has enormous geopolitical advantages

JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University. He is the author of A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order, November-December 2022, Foreign Affairs, Why American Power Endures The U.S.-Led Order Isn’t in Decline, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/why-american-power-endures-us-led-order-isnt-in-decline-g-john-ikenberry

The United States enters today’s struggle to shape the twenty-first century with profound advantages. It still possesses the vast bulk of the material capabilities it had in earlier decades. It remains uniquely positioned geographically to play a great-power role in both East Asia and Europe. Its ability to work with other liberal democracies to shape global rules and institutions is already manifest in its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and will stand it in good stead in any future collective response to Chinese aggression in East Asia. Although China and Russia seek to move the world in the direction of regional blocs and spheres of influence, the United States has offered a vision of world order based on a set of principles rather than competition over territory. Liberal international order is a way of organizing an interdependent world. It is, as the Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad called it, an “empire by invitation.” Its success depends on its legitimacy and appeal and not on the capacity of its patrons to force obedience. If the United States remains at the center of world politics in the decades to come, it will be because this type of order generates more supporters and fellow travelers around the world than that offered by China and Russia.

The U.S. confrontation with China and Russia in 2022 is an echo of the great-power upheavals of 1919, 1945, and 1989. As at these earlier moments, the United States finds itself working with other democracies in resisting the aggressive moves of illiberal great powers. The Russian war in Ukraine is about more than the future of Ukraine; it is also about the basic rules and norms of international relations. Putin’s gambit has placed the United States and democracies in Europe and elsewhere on the defensive. But it has also given the United States an opportunity to rethink and reargue its case for an open, multilateral system of world order. If the past is any guide, the United States should not try to simply consolidate the old order but to reimagine it. U.S. leaders should seek to broaden the democratic coalition, reaffirm basic values and interests, and offer a vision of a reformed international order that draws states and peoples together in new forms of cooperation, such as to solve problems of climate change, global public health, and sustainable development. No other great power is better placed to build the necessary partnerships and lead the way in tackling the major problems of the twenty-first century. Other powers may be rising, but the world cannot afford the end of the American era.

Ceding anything to Putin won’t stop him

Wallace, 10-31, 22, Gregory J. Wallance, a writer in New York City, was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations, where he was a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team that convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is working on a book about a 19th century American journalist who investigated the Siberian exile system. Follow him on Twitter at @gregorywallance., The Hill, Isolationist Republicans and progressive Democrats are having their shameful Munich moment, https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3712458-isolationist-republicans-and-progressive-democrats-are-having-their-shameful-munich-moment/

These members of Congress are misreading the threat that Russian President Vladimir Putin poses as badly as Chamberlain misread Hitler. The progressive Democrats seem to think that, if Putin is ceded part of Ukraine, he will stop there. But Putin, a nuclear saber-rattling, conquest-bent, irredentist megalomaniac, has no interest in compromise. The Institute for the Study of War, which releases daily, granular analyses of the Ukraine War, recently assessed that “Putin is setting conditions for Russia to continue a protracted high-intensity conventional war in Ukraine, not a negotiated settlement or off-ramp.” All that the progressive Democrats and isolationist Republicans have done is to encourage Putin to believe that, if he keeps the pressure on, American and European support for Ukraine will eventually collapse. The magical thinking of the isolationist Republicans is that a Russian victory will not damage American interests. They ignore or badly underestimate Putin’s barbarism — and his hatred of the United States. His army behaves as though it had stormed out of the Dark Ages, pillaging, raping, murdering, torturing and carrying off Ukrainian children. Its motto might be, “You may defeat us on the battlefield, but we will kill your pregnant women and destroy everything Ukrainians depend on for life.” Once Putin invaded Ukraine, neutral Sweden and Finland, fully grasping that he wouldn’t stop there, sought safety in NATO membership. Putin is obsessed with restoring the Russian Empire, and with the demise of the United States, which he has predicted for years. He blames the United States for the ills of the world. He hates us for allegedly declaring ourselves, in his words, “the messenger of the Lord on Earth.” He hates us for our “radical denial of moral norms, religion, and family” (read recognition of gay and transgender rights). He hates us for our “outright ‘Satanism.’” Spending whatever is needed to ensure Ukraine’s survival serves overriding American interests. Ukraine is a Western-oriented democracy, the post-war international system is at stake and a Russian takeover of Ukraine would present a direct, strategic threat to NATO. A collateral benefit of the nightmare that Putin has unleashed, not to be underestimated, is that the Ukrainian armed forces are killing Russian soldiers whom American soldiers might otherwise have to fight if Russia attacks NATO. Given Putin’s ambitions, the Ukraine aid is money well spent.

Hard-line against Russia on the Ukraine risks escalation and trades-off with domestic needs

Shifron, 10-30, 22, Joshua Shifrinson is an associate professor with the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a senior fellow with the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, and a non-resident senior fellow with the Cato Institute, What Is America’s Interest in the Ukraine War?, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-americas-interest-ukraine-war-205555

DISTURBINGLY, HOWEVER, these claims have gone broadly unremarked. Again, the United States has run real risks—most dramatically, possible military escalation and thus a nuclear exchange with Russia—and borne real costs—including aid equivalent to the budgets of the U.S. Transportation, Labor, and Commerce Departments combined—for the sake of helping Ukraine. Many analysts claim that the escalation risks involved are lower than one might think as, for instance, Russia would not be so suicidal as to risk war with the United States and its allies. Still, billions of dollars remain at stake at a time of rising domestic resource demands, and the fact that policymakers and analysts are debating how threatening American responses are likely to be viewed in Moscow suggests the risks being run are not negligible. It may be impolitic, but sound statecraft means we ought to ask whether the game is worth the candle.

China won’t attack Taiwan because of any US weakness on the Ukraine

Holding aside that policymakers have long abjured the idea of the United States serving as the world’s policeman, there are several problems with this argument. First, as Stephen Walt notes, the historical record is replete with aggressors paying exorbitant costs for their behavior—think of Germany’s defeat, occupation, and division following World War II or the firebombing of Japan. Nevertheless, aggression remains a reality in international politics as, even when one aggressor is defeated, others do not readily seem to “learn” the lesson.

Second, allowing that potential aggressors may exist, an array of research indicates that state calculations are shaped not by general impressions of how a single great power may respond, but contextual judgments of whether counterbalancing and punishment are likely given the distribution of power and known state interests. Extending the point, the United States (1) can afford to ignore Ukraine without risking aggression in other theaters provided it has an interest in and the wherewithal for checking other potential threats, or (2) there are local actors able and interested in the same. This makes intuitive sense: Beijing, for instance, is likely to care far more about what the United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Australia, etc. can and will do in Asia than it cares about what the United States does 4,000 miles away. Analysts that treat Ukraine as decisive to other states’ aggression overlook the geopolitical constraints that are likely to shape others’ interest in and opportunities for aggrandizement.

US never supports the global democratic order

Threats to Order: Theory, Not Reality. Assertions that neglecting to act in Ukraine will undermine the liberal order are similarly suspect. First, while the United States has often sought to promote democracy abroad, it tempers this impulse with consideration of geopolitical imperatives regardless of how this affected democracy’s spread. To this end, the United States frequently overthrew elected governments in states such as Iran and Guatemala during the Cold War, has regularly made deals with autocrats (for instance, in Cold War-era Taiwan and South Korea and post-Cold War Saudi Arabia), and tolerates democratic backsliding among major allies today (as seen, for example, in Hungary, Poland, Pakistan, and Turkey). In short, Washington has never made the defense of foreign democracy per se an interest—as the record suggests, the question was instead whether policymakers perceived a given country as important to U.S. interests; so far as a liberal order emerged after World War II (and there are good questions whether one has), it was despite U.S. ambivalence over backstopping other democracies as an end unto themselves Asserting that the liberal order now requires the United States to defend Ukraine inverts the logic driving American policy.

The US has an interest in preventing the conflict from spreading and restoring relations with Russia

Viewed in this light, American interests in Ukraine are fairly limited. First, the United States has a strong interest in preventing the conflict from spilling beyond Ukraine. This reduces the chance that the United States may be pulled into a broader confrontation with Moscow that might escalate to war, with all the attendant dangers. Second, the United States maintains an interest in avoiding such a collapse of U.S.-Russian relations (1) that any future engagement with Russia on issues of mutual concern (e.g., arms control, counter-terrorism, climate change) is impossible, and (2) that Moscow, as Henry Kissinger cautions, is driven to seek “a permanent alliance elsewhere”—that is, with China. These outcomes would complicate the United States’ strategic map and exacerbate the already difficult adjustments underway in U.S. grand strategy as the unipolar era comes to an end. Finally, Washington has at least some interest in sustaining the already-favorable European balance of power as an insurance policy against the risk of Russia—or any state—calculating that further aggression may pay. Note that this latter interest is not about teaching Russia or others a lesson by causing harm (as the current policy conversation has it), but rather about reducing opportunities for Russian aggrandizement going forward.

Hegemony not responsible for China and Russia aggression, isolationism, won’t solve

Grygiel, 10-30, 22, Jakub Grygiel is a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America and a fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology,

Isolationism may be tempting, but it is utopian — and dangerous The Hill, https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/3711643-isolationism-may-be-tempting-but-it-is-utopian-and-dangerous/

Isolationism is tempting. We may look at the world and see distant wars as local squabbles that, tragic as they may be, do not impact our life. War in Ukraine? It must be another eruption of ancient tribal hatreds and we should steer clear of it. Moreover, we may be tempted to blame conflicts in faraway lands to our own actions, with our rivals responding only to us and our presence nearby. Hence, as some suggest, Russia must have invaded Ukraine because we were dragging a pro-Russian Kyiv into our camp. In either case, the result is a call for disengagement with the world: let’s come home and live a tranquil life. Such views become more prominent at election time. They appeal to large swaths of the electorate because they promise national well-being at no cost. We can live better by doing less! On the right side of the spectrum, this is a call for rebuilding the U.S. with the money purportedly saved by withdrawing from foreign policy. On the left side, this is a call to amp domestic social engineering while letting post-modern international institutions take care of the world. Both advocate isolationism for different purposes and with different logics behind them. And both are pernicious because they promise something that is simply not true: peace and welfare at cheaper costs.

The idea that the U.S. can separate itself from the tribulations of the world arises out of the belief that the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are the greatest buffers in history. They allow, so the view goes, the establishment of an autarkic republic, content in its separation from the global mess and self-sufficient in its material needs. Not surprisingly, many of the ideal states conceived by some of the greatest minds in Western political traditions were islands. In the early 16th century, Saint Thomas More, for instance, drew his “Utopia,” a perfect state, on a peninsula that then the first king would sever from the mainland by digging a wide channel. The isle allows isolation, which then in turn should allow domestic harmony established by well-structured laws and balanced governance. Appealing as such a vision is, it is nowhere to be found in real life. Thomas More, after all, called it “Utopia,” a place that exists nowhere. As the patron saint of politicians, he warns us not to build polities that are, quite literally, not on this earth. For the United States, oceans are not moats that can protect us hermetically from the world. On the contrary, they are highways that link us with the rest of the world (and Eurasia in particular), allowing us to trade with it but also bringing distant problems to us. Modern technology only makes such distance less protective than a century ago. The other belief at the basis of the isolationist temptation is that our actions and presence abroad is the primary source of problems. This used to be a claim coming mostly from the left side of the political spectrum, blaming America for every ill in the world. But recently it has taken hold also of some conservative voices. The argument is that a promethean ideology of progressivism keeps pushing imperial boundaries into lands that reject it. The war in Ukraine, for instance, is thus seen as being caused by the Western attempt to bring this country into its sphere. And Vladimir Putin, according to this logic, was forced to react to this progressive imperialism. In reality, Russia has its own plans and acts on them. It is not an empty vessel that is filled with resentment of the West and acts only in response to it. It continues to pursue a westward strategy, brutally conquering lands in order to assert its domination. It is expanding when and where it can. Similarly, China is an autocratic state, motivated by a strong Leninist-Nationalist ideology, eager to incorporate countries that are not eager to fall under its sway. The problem, that is, is not that the U.S. is abroad, but that Russia and China want to expand their empires over countries that reject them. Our withdrawal will not end Russian and Chinese aggression.

Unipolarity less likely to produce war than bipolarity

Cliff Kupchan, 10-29, 22, The Impact of the Ukraine War Will Last for a Generation, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/impact-ukraine-war-will-last-generation-205533?page=0%2C1, Cliff Kupchan is Chairman at Eurasia Group. He has worked on Russia for over thirty-five years in government, in the private sector, and served for two years as vice president of the Nixon Center.

THE FINAL set of under-recognized implications of the war pertains to the international system. First, this war foreshadows a likely increasing number of wars in the current historical era. As I explained in the Winter 2021 issue of Washington Quarterly, the current period is one of bipolarity: the United States and China are the superpowers. Bipolarity is more stable than the multipolar world that most observers predict, but it is less stable than the unipolar, U.S.-led world that existed from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Overwhelming U.S. power deterred challengers and suppressed most wars. Under bipolarity, though, leaders must judge the power of not one but two nations—a task made even more difficult because the bipolar system is new. The Ukraine conflict is the first major war of the bipolar era. Under bipolarity, more conflicts should be expected, including those between a great power and its neighbors (Ukraine), as well as proxy wars between a superpower and a great power over a third party (the United States and Russia over Ukraine). Putin tried to elevate Russia’s status in the system by weakening the U.S.-led order in Central and Eastern Europe, and by keeping NATO out of Ukraine. Russia’s leader, however, badly underestimated the strength and resilience of the U.S.-led grouping within bipolarity. This is an example of why wars are more likely under bipolarity than unipolarity—a misperception of relative power leading to war.

Russia-US relations are dead

Cliff Kupchan, 10-29, 22, The Impact of the Ukraine War Will Last for a Generation, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/impact-ukraine-war-will-last-generation-205533?page=0%2C1, Cliff Kupchan is Chairman at Eurasia Group. He has worked on Russia for over thirty-five years in government, in the private sector, and served for two years as vice president of the Nixon Center.

The most profound risk is war between the United States/NATO and Russia. It is unlikely because the cost would be enormous for both sides. But given Ukrainian battlefield successes based in part on Western weapons, and Vladimir Putin’s view that control of the Donbass is an existential need for Russia, conflict is conceivable. Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons makes the risks and possible implications for international relations greater. More broadly, the relationship will be moribund for as long as Putin is president, and that could be a decade or more. Some Russian analysts now refer to the United States as “the enemy.” While true, it’s still quite a shock to hear for long-time Russia analysts. Neither side will be interested in meaningful relations with the other for a long time.

Deterrence critical to prevent Russian aggression

Cliff Kupchan, 10-29, 22, The Impact of the Ukraine War Will Last for a Generation, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/impact-ukraine-war-will-last-generation-205533?page=0%2C1, Cliff Kupchan is Chairman at Eurasia Group. He has worked on Russia for over thirty-five years in government, in the private sector, and served for two years as vice president of the Nixon Center.

That leads to a series of risks. On nuclear arms control and strategic stability, Moscow will probably adhere to most of the provisions of New START until it expires in 2026—despite having recently suspended on-site inspections. But as of 2026, the nuclear relationship will probably rest on crude deterrence, much like in the initial years of the Cold War. Mutual transparency and limits will fall by the wayside. Thin levels of communication will stand alongside a broken relationship between the top nuclear powers. For NATO and Europe, assuming no direct armed conflict, there will be an unstable, hot line of control in the middle of Europe just as Russia and the rest of the continent have decoupled in the energy sector. Along that line will be a newly muscular and cohesive NATO standing opposite a Russian buildup.

Nukes prevent Ukraine conflict escalation

Cliff Kupchan, 10-29, 22, The Impact of the Ukraine War Will Last for a Generation, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/impact-ukraine-war-will-last-generation-205533?page=0%2C1, Cliff Kupchan is Chairman at Eurasia Group. He has worked on Russia for over thirty-five years in government, in the private sector, and served for two years as vice president of the Nixon Center.

Second, nuclear weapons have played an underrecognized role in restraining both the United States and Russia. It is remarkable that the dimension of the Ukraine conflict pitting the United States/NATO against Russia has not already produced a military crisis. Both nuclear powers in the event seek to avoid direct conflict and the risk of escalation to the nuclear level that entails. Indeed, the shadow of nuclear weapons will continue to dampen escalation between the United States/NATO and Russia—it is the primary reason why war remains unlikely.

Ukraine war has not undermined the international norm against conquest

Cliff Kupchan, 10-29, 22, The Impact of the Ukraine War Will Last for a Generation, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/impact-ukraine-war-will-last-generation-205533?page=0%2C1, Cliff Kupchan is Chairman at Eurasia Group. He has worked on Russia for over thirty-five years in government, in the private sector, and served for two years as vice president of the Nixon Center.

What are the long-term implications of the war for the international system? Many observers believe the West will get a huge boost if Russia loses. Others see a big hit to the international order if Russia wins, including a weakening of the norm against the use of force for territorial conquest.

But history will likely view this war as a regional conflict that didn’t alter the international system. The war won’t affect the distribution of capabilities that produces the system. The United States and China were the superpowers in a bipolar world before the war, and they will be after it. Each side will have regions or spheres of influence. And within the robust U.S.-led grouping at least, the norm against conquest by force will remain alive and well.

Great Power Competition (GPC) is focused on Russia and China (with high-tech)

Sydney Freedberg, 10-28, 22, Breaking Defense, We live in the world Ash Carter saw coming, https://breakingdefense.com/2022/10/we-live-in-the-world-ash-carter-saw-coming/

Confirmed as secretary in February 2015 after a lovefest of a Senate hearing — albeit not as Obama’s first choice — Carter inherited a military still fighting intensely with Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq; still rushing to reposition itself in Europe after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and the eastern Donbas the year before; and still struggling to execute the “pivot to the Pacific” that the Obama Administration had proclaimed back in 2012. Within a year, however, Carter’s team — of course, with White House guidance — had crafted the first Pentagon budget request explicitly focused on countering Moscow and China, a focus enshrined in the following year’s National Defense Strategy. “Two of these challenges reflect a return to great power competition,” Carter declared in 2016. “The first is in Europe, where we’re taking a strong and balanced approach to deter Russian aggression….The second is in the Asia-Pacific, where China is rising.” Carter’s request highlighted limited but significant seed-corn investments in crucial technologies, like $7 billion for cyber operations, $8 billion for submarines, $71 billion for R&D writ large. Carter kicked off a host of projects to bring in civilian tech-sector best practices, like bug bounties, and to upgrade legacy weapons for new missions. And he reinforced the Strategic Capabilities Office — which he had created in an earlier tour as deputy secretary back in 2012 — to rush new tech into service and repurpose legacy weapons for new missions. “Over the last 10 years,” a Pentagon spokesman emailed reporters Thursday, “37 SCO capabilities have been delivered to the warfighter and nine capabilities are in operational use.”…. This legacy of Carter’s goes well beyond specific missiles. His overarching approach was to counter Russian and, especially, Chinese build-ups by investing in cutting-edge technology — especially tech in which he saw potential for rapid advances that could tilt the balance of power towards the US. Long-range, precision-guided weapons were one big part of that. But so were artificial intelligence, robotics, and unmanned vehicles, as demonstrated by his gleeful robo-boat demonstration back in 2016; since then, there’s even been an SM-6 launch off an unmanned vessel. Carter also pushed to network all these technologies together, whether through tactical networks linking submarines, surface ships, and aircraft, or at strategic headquarters, like the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSpOC) linking Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office satellites. From ‘Third Offset’ to ‘All-Domain’ At the time, this complex of concepts and technologies was called, cumbersomely, the Third Offset Strategy. The first offset strategy, in the 1950s and ’60s, used nuclear weapons to “offset” Soviet numerical superiority; the second, in the ‘70s and ’80s, embraced stealth and precision guidance; the third, AI, networks, and long-range strike. Formally launched by Carter’s predecessor, Chuck Hagel, the Third Offset was mainly the brainchild of the man who served both Hagel and Carter as deputy secretary, former Marine artilleryman Bob Work. But Carter, with a PhD in physics, grokked the technology and ran with it in way that Hagel, a Vietnam combat vet turned Senator, had not. “Ash Carter was a big believer in the critical importance of achieving and maintaining military-technical superiority over all potential adversaries—and it was a goal he worked toward his entire career in the Department of Defense,” Work wrote to Breaking Defense after Carter’s death. As undersecretary for technology and then deputy secretary from 2009 to 2013, “he helped jump-start the Third Offset Strategy when he established the Strategic Capabilities Office,” Work said. “When he returned as Secretary in 2015, he supported both the Defense Innovation Initiative and the Third Offset Strategy and added materially to them by insisting we could never achieve our aim unless we exploited the vibrant commercial innovation sector.” While Carter stepped down when the Trump Administration took over, Work stayed on for another six months as deputy — and helped ensure many of the Carter-era innovations continued. Ultimately, the two men’s emphasis on coordinating unmanned systems and long-range strikes through inter-service networks gave rise to the ongoing Joint All-Domain Command & Control (JADC2) initiative and the emerging doctrine of Multi-Domain Operations (MDO). (No, the Pentagon’s never gotten any better at naming things). Unlike all too many technophiles, moreover, Carter didn’t see high tech as a solution in itself, but as a tool of strategy. He embraced the Third Offset technologies because he saw them necessary parts of a pivot from hunting Islamic extremists to containing Russia and China, with their large conventional forces, arsenals of long-range missiles, and enthusiastic pursuit of AI. Carter also used technology as a tool of diplomacy, striking important defense trade accords that brought the US closer to traditionally pacifist Japan and traditionally neutral India. In particular, America’s prized not-quite-alliance with India against China grew, in part, from Carter’s wooing of New Delhi as deputy secretary almost a decade ago. “Ash Carter moved at the right time and on the right issues to develop better US-Indian mil-to-mil relations,” said Paul Sullivan, an expert on energy and security policy with the Atlantic Council and Johns Hopkins. “He was a diplomat as well as the Secretary of Defense in many ways. He showed how much more a Secretary of Defense could be in the intellectual and diplomatic realms.” “When it came to technology and strategy, he had few peers,” Work said. “The entire national security community is lessened by his passing.”

It’s in the US national interest to avoid war with Russia

David Ignatius, 10-27, 22, Putin demands we listen to him. The U.S. should take him up on it., https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/27/putin-united-states-ukraine-diplomacy-nuclear-threat/

A shaken Russia seems weirdly eager to communicate these days, too, although it’s been sending a twisted and misleading message. The latest example was Thursday’s speech by President Vladimir Putin. He repeated his usual grievances with the West, but his other theme was that Russia wanted a version of dialogue. “Sooner or later, both the new centers of a multipolar world order and the West will have to start an equal conversation about a common future,” Putin told an annual foreign-policy forum in Moscow. The Biden White House should forget the bizarre details of his view of reality: Take him seriously; answer his message. An example of Russia’s recent communications binge — and a good U.S. response — was the barrage of allegations about an alleged Ukrainian plot to build a radiological “dirty bomb.” To most Western analysts, this looked like a bogus Kremlin pretext, perhaps to justify Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons. That assessment seems likely to me, too. But it’s also possible that Putin really believes it and thinks he has evidence. The Kremlin pushed every messaging button it had. The Russian minister of defense called his U.S. counterpart, twice, and along with the British, French and Turkish defense ministers. The chief of Russia’s military staff delivered the same message to his Pentagon peer. Russia raised the issue with the U.N. Security Council. Putin himself repeated the charge. What did the Biden administration do? Sensibly, while rejecting the allegations, it moved quickly last weekend to encourage an investigation by Rafael Grossi, the head of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency. To facilitate Grossi’s travel to Ukraine, top White House and State Department officials called their Ukrainian counterparts. In 24 hours, the Biden administration found an international forum to defuse this crisis (at least momentarily) and address Russia’s loud complaint. This model of crisis communication needs to be replicated in every area that could lead to — let’s just say it — World War III. I think that Putin is a liar and a bully, and I hope the Ukrainians keep hammering Russia on the battlefield. But the United States also has an abiding national interest in avoiding a direct war with Russia, as Biden has said repeatedly.

Great Power Competition with China includes AI and technology containment

Solimon, 10-27, 22, Mohammed Soliman is the director of the Cyber Security and Emerging Technology Program at the Middle East Institute, Tech Containment Is Core to Washington’s Cold War 2.0 Strategy, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland-when-great-power-competition-meets-digital-world/tech-containment-core-washington%E2%80%99s

The Biden administration has released its first National Security Strategy (NSS) with a renewed focus on great power competition and building on the strategic discourse that the Trump administration laid out in its 2017 NSS—ratifying a significant change in U.S. strategic thinking. The architects of the 2022 National Security Strategy laid the intellectual foundation for what they have referred to as the “decisive decade,” in which emerging technologies are the gateway to an emerging era of global order where states compete over data, artificial intelligence (AI), and information networks. By perceiving technologies as a gateway to the new global order, Washington not only aims to manage technological decoupling from China but also pursues a strategy of “tech containment” against Beijing.

China wants global tech supremacy

Technology is where national interest, human progress, education, innovation, culture, and economic development converge. Thus, technology will continue redrawing geopolitical lines, redefining sovereignty, and altering the global order in the twenty-first century. China’s rise was defined by its significant geotech footprint, which allowed Beijing to maintain significant influence globally beyond its sphere of influence because of the increasing centrality of affordable Chinese tech to the global economy in the last two decades. From 5G to AI, drones to space, and autonomous vehicles to decentralized finance, China prioritized transforming itself into a “high-end self-reliant innovation power” that centers tech supremacy in its broader global positioning.

US losing tech supremacy to China, tech containment critical to US leadership

There is a growing sense of fear that the Uited States is gradually losing its technological edge in a way that makes Washington no longer able to outcompete China or maintain its status as a tech gatekeeper globally—especially in critical technologies that are foundational to maintaining a favorable position for the United States in this emerging multipolar, multi-civilizational order. Because of this interpretation of the U.S.-China tech cold war, America risks not only losing tech hegemony to China but also losing to middle tech powers, which would likely undermine Washington’s position regionally and globally. Washington is unambiguous in its focus on rebuilding domestic technological capabilities while leveraging its control over technological chokepoints to pursue an aggressive agenda of a tech containment strategy against China and, ultimately, re-organizing the digital order on favorable terms for a U.S.-led technology bloc.

US engaged in tech competition against China

Washington’s Tech Containment Strateg

The struggle against Huawei set the tone for a rare bipartisan consensus on the way forward for Washington’s tech containment strategy, which is unambiguous in its focus on rebuilding domestic technological capabilities, decoupling the technology supply chain from China, institutionalizing a U.S.-centric tech bloc, and limiting China’s and Russia’s access to critical technologies, eventually leading to their tech regression.

In a return to a Hamiltonian era of industrial policy, the bipartisan Chips and Science Act of 2022 “provides $52.7 billion for American semiconductor research, development, manufacturing, and workforce development.” The Chips Act also “provides a 25 percent investment tax credit for capital expenses for manufacturing of semiconductors and related equipment.” Building on this industrial policy and provoked by its assessment that American technology boosts China’s hypersonic missile program, Washington moved to the next stage of its aggressive tech containment strategy by choking off Beijing’s access to semiconductors, which is an integral part of China’s quest to become a tech superpower. Notably, more than $300 billion worth of semiconductors are imported into Beijing annually, and 25 percent of American companies’ earnings come from China. In October, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) implemented a series of targeted updates to its export controls to restrict China’s ability to purchase and manufacture high-end chips used in military applications and to also prohibit U.S. firms and personnel (including Green Card holders) from helping China develop leading-edge manufacturing capabilities for logic and memory chips. The objectives are to constrain China’s current access to the AI chips that power its civil-military fusion strategy and block China from accessing U.S. chip design software and manufacturing equipment—eventually slowing down the entire AI ecosystem and disrupting Beijing’s civil-military fusion. By utilizing its dominance across the semiconductor industry’s chokepoints, Washington is not only taking aim at China’s semiconductors but also leveraging its position to push allies and partners to side with the United States in this all-out tech Cold War.

Tech Containment Is the New Normal

Washington understands that its export controls would now only deprive Beijing of the necessary talent and American equipment and software to slow down China’s semiconductor industry, but also create an incentive for the Chinese government to shift its focus to supporting and building its indigenous semiconductor industry. However, timing is a deliberate choice in this envisioned tech containment strategy. With the United States realizing that time is on China’s side in this technological Cold War, slowing down the Chinese semiconductor industry is the right tactical move, especially as it is simultaneously accompanied by stepping up government subsidies for the domestic semiconductor industry, consolidating a U.S.-centric technology coalition, and tightening the United States’ grip on the semiconductor industry chokepoints. Beyond semiconductors, Washington will maintain its proactive industrial policy by identifying tech vulnerabilities, allocating its financial resources to rebuild shortfalls, and invigorating a global technology alignment with allies and partners.

The US should use its limited resources to pursue a China containment policy; realist theory supports this

Whiton, 10-27, 22, Christian Whiton is a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest. He was a State Department senior advisor during the George W. Bush and Trump administrations, End of Superpower Monopoly Can Be Good for America, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/end-superpower-monopoly-can-be-good-america-205590

Finally, reduced defense budgets, voter fatigue with military failures and sideshows, and wariness of European moochers create an opportunity for a future president to adopt a constrained, realist foreign policy that prioritizes serious threats like those posed by China or Iran. There is an outside chance such a president could even build on Donald Trump’s tariffs, which have been popular and successful throughout most of American history beginning with George Washington’s administration. The result would be an America that is still deep in debt, but recommitted to internal economic growth, including manufacturing, and with a smaller but focused military. Ceasing to be a sole superpower could foretell a leaner and more effective America.

The US needs to increase cyber security, strengthen ties with allies and protect its space assets

Mahnken, 10-27, 22, THOMAS G. MAHNKEN is President and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a Senior Research Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. From 2006 to 2009, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning, Foreign Affairs, Could America Win a New World War? What It Would Take to Defeat Both China and Russia, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/could-america-win-new-world-war

When it comes to international relations, 2022 has been an exceptionally dangerous year. During the first two months, Russia massed thousands of troops along Ukraine’s borders. At the end of the second one, Moscow sent them marching into Ukraine. China, meanwhile, has grown increasingly belligerent toward Washington, particularly over Taiwan. After U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei in August, Beijing carried out a furious set of military exercises designed to show how it would blockade and attack the island. Washington, in turn, has explored how it can more quickly arm and support the Taiwanese government.

The United States is aware that China and Russia pose a significant threat to the global order. In its recent National Security Strategy, the White House wrote that “the [People’s Republic of China] and Russia are increasingly aligned with each other,” and the Biden administration dedicated multiple pages to explaining how the United States can constrain both countries going forward. Washington knows that the conflict in Ukraine is likely to be protracted, thanks to the ability of Kyiv and Moscow to keep fighting and the irreconcilability of their aims, and could escalate in ways that bring the United States more directly into the war (a fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber rattling makes readily apparent). Washington also knows that Chinese leader Xi Jinping, emboldened by his appointment at the 20th National Party Congress in October to an unprecedented third term, could try to seize Taiwan as the war in Ukraine rages on. The United States, then, could conceivably be drawn into simultaneous conflicts with China and Russia.

But despite Washington’s professed focus on both Beijing and Moscow, U.S. defense planning is not commensurate with the challenge at hand. In 2015, the Department of Defense abandoned its long-standing policy of being prepared to fight and win two major wars in favor of focusing on acquiring the means to fight and win just one. This policy shift, which has remained in place ever since, shows. Large quantities of the United States’ military equipment are aging, with many aircraft, ships, and tanks that date back to the Reagan administration’s defense buildup in the 1980s. The country also has limited supplies of important equipment and munitions, so much so that it has had to draw a large portion of its own stocks down to support Ukraine. These problems would prove particularly vexing in simultaneous conflicts. If the United States found itself in a two-war situation in eastern Europe and the Pacific, the commitment would likely be lengthy in both cases. China’s expanding interests and global footprint suggest that a war with Beijing would not be confined neatly to Taiwan and the western Pacific but instead stretch across multiple theaters, from the Indian Ocean to the United States itself. (China might launch cyberattacks, or even missile strikes, on the U.S. mainland in an attempt to blunt U.S. military power.) The United States needs to create deep munitions reserves, stockpile high-quality gear, and come up with creative battlefield techniques if it hopes to win such fights.

Washington should get started now. U.S. policymakers must begin working to expand and deepen the United States’ defense industrial base. They need to develop new joint operational concepts: ways of employing the armed forces to solve pressing military problems, such as how to sustain forces in the face of increasingly capable Chinese military capabilities and defend U.S. space and cyber networks from attack. They should think seriously about the strategic contours of a war in multiple theaters, including where they would focus most of the United States’ military attention, and when. And Washington can do a better job of coordinating and planning with U.S. allies, who will be indispensable—and quite possibly decisive—to the successful outcome of a worldwide military conflict.

War with Taiwan will spread and will trigger a Russian invasion of Europe

That said, as defense strategists game out simultaneous conflicts with China and Russia, they will need to figure out how to prioritize U.S. military action based on the relative threats in Asia and Europe, the geography of the theaters, and the allies Washington has in each region. This isn’t a simple business. A war across multiple regions could break out in any number of ways and proceed in a messy fashion. Xi, seeing the United States preoccupied with Europe, might decide it’s time to move against Taiwan, something he believes is necessary to “rejuvenate” China. Such an attack could take many forms, from a blockade to a missile campaign to a full-fledged amphibious invasion. If things go well for Beijing, the United States might face the need to assist the Taiwanese in resisting Chinese occupation. But even if things go well for Washington, and a Chinese missile campaign or amphibious invasion ends in failure, Beijing would likely fight on. The United States, Taiwan, and their friends would then face a protracted conflict that could spread to other theaters. Moscow, meanwhile, could decide that with the United States bogged down in the western Pacific, it could get away with invading more of Europe..

China poses a threat to Asia and war there could go nuclear

The situation in the western Pacific is different. China has a stronger military than does Russia, and it poses a graver danger to the prevailing regional order. The United States has capable local allies in Australia, Japan, and South Korea, but there is no NATO equivalent. There are many capabilities that only the United States can bring to the table, including nuclear deterrence; key naval, air, and space capabilities; as well as vital logistical support such as munitions. Washington would need to work with Taiwan, and potentially others, to help Taipei resist Chinese attacks and to augment Taiwanese military power. Such an effort would involve forces operating out of U.S. territory, such as Guam, as well as from the territory of allies such as Japan. It would require that the United States protect its territory and allies in the western Pacific and beyond, including the continental United States, as well as its computer networks and satellites. Such a campaign might last months.

This type of war would be frightening, in no small part because it would occur under the shadow of the Chinese, Russian, and U.S. nuclear arsenals. These three powers would have to communicate redlines to one another—for example, attacks on U.S. and allied territory—to avoid the use of weapons of mass destruction. These redlines would likely constrain each state’s military operations. In doing so, the war might simmer longer, but it would likely cause less damage. But the presence of nuclear arsenals would also significantly raise the stakes of escalation. It’s not impossible that the war could produce the world’s first nuclear attacks since 1945.

Competition with China undermines cooperation

Paul Heer, 10-26, 22, Heer is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. U.S. and Chinese National Security Are Not Irreconcilable, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-and-chinese-national-security-are-not-irreconcilable-205566

A key task for Washington and Beijing should be exploring and expanding cooperation on shared interests, as an alternative to letting the U.S.-China relationship drift toward an exclusively confrontational and hostile one.

The Biden administration’s newly-released National Security Strategy (NSS) states that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “presents America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge.” This is because the United States is engaged in “a strategic competition to shape the future of the international order” and China is the leading challenger because it is the only state “with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.”

The NSS repeatedly affirms that America’s vision is of a “free, open, prosperous, and secure” world, and infers that the PRC shares neither that vision nor fundamental U.S. interests and values. Instead, Beijing is characterized as leading those autocratic regimes that threaten global peace and stability by working to “undermine democracy” and “create more permissive conditions for [their] own authoritarian model,” which is “marked by repression at home and coercion abroad.”

Against this challenge, the NSS asserts that the United States must prevail by “outcompeting the PRC in the technological, economic, political, military, intelligence, and global governance domains.” Rather than allow China to remake the world in its image, Washington “must proactively shape the international order in line with our interests and values” and “prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the PRC.” Basically, this is a zero-sum contest in which the United States must stay on top as “the world’s leading power.”

Less than a week after the release of the NSS, Xi Jinping offered Beijing’s own view of the U.S.-China strategic competition in his “work report” to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 20th National Congress. His speech offered a similar characterization of an emerging and increasingly antagonistic struggle. Without ever mentioning the United States by name, he described “drastic changes in the international landscape, especially external attempts to blackmail, contain, blockade, and exert maximum pressure on China.” He asserted that China has entered a period “in which strategic opportunities, risks, and challenges are concurrent and uncertainties and unforeseen factors are rising.”

In response to this adverse external environment, Xi outlined Beijing’s own strategy to meet the challenge. Mirroring the NSS, he implicitly laid out a prescription for maintaining a competitive edge over the United States and pursuing a world order conducive to China’s interests and values. In this context, he highlighted an increasingly central theme in Chinese strategic thinking: an expansive definition of China’s “national security” and the requirements for ensuring it. Specifically, Xi emphasized the indivisible link between internal stability and external security—with the former drawing support from the latter and from a broader web of political, economic, technological, and even cultural security. This flows in large part from Xi’s promulgation in 2014 of a “comprehensive national security strategy” and accompanying proliferation of laws, administrative structures, and enforcement mechanisms to implement it.

The external projection of this evolving and all-encompassing Chinese national security strategy was apparent in April of this year when Xi unveiled a “Global Security Initiative” (GSI). The speech in which he made this proposal largely reiterated earlier themes in PRC diplomacy, but Chinese officials and scholars have indicated that the GSI was intended as an extension of Beijing’s previously domestically-focused “comprehensive national security strategy.” Predictably, it offers a different perspective on many of the objectives attributed to Beijing in the Biden administration’s NSS.

In presenting the GSI, Xi stressed a vision of “common” and “cooperative” international security, and mentioned, in particular, the “principle of indivisible security” and the need to respect the “legitimate security concerns of all countries”—two phrases that Beijing has used in defense of Russian threat perceptions before and since Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine. More conventionally, Xi reiterated China’s promotion of the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence,” including non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs and acceptance of their “independent choices of development paths and social systems.” He also repeated the Chinese mantra of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries—despite Moscow’s betrayal of that principle in Ukraine. Finally, the GSI aims to uphold “the purposes and principles of the UN Charter,” reject the “Cold war mentality,” and promote international cooperation on global challenges like climate change.

Scholar Sheena Chestnut Greitens has identified several aspects of the GSI that are potentially problematic for other countries. First and foremost, the linkage between the PRC’s “political” and external security clearly reflects the CCP’s overriding preoccupation with regime stability, which was also inherent in Xi’s speech at the 20th CCP Congress. The fact that Beijing’s pursuit of domestic stability and regime legitimacy increasingly appears to require a more assertive Chinese posture abroad is cause for concern. Greitens particularly highlights Beijing’s growing law enforcement cooperation with and export of surveillance tactics and equipment to other countries, enabling authoritarianism elsewhere. Noting that the GSI essentially “aims to revise global and regional security governance to more closely align with [the CCP’s] regime security interests,” she appropriately advises that Washington “should not underestimate the risks of this new Chinese approach to foreign policy.”

At the same time, we should be careful not to overestimate or exaggerate those risks. Much depends on the accuracy of Washington’s assessment of Beijing’s strategic intentions and ambitions. In this regard, the NSS repeats earlier assumptions that are questionable. For example, the Biden administration states that “Beijing has ambitions to create an enhanced sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power.” The former clause is well-founded, notwithstanding varying interpretations of “sphere of influence.” But the presumption that China seeks to become “the world’s leading power” is highly debatable, given the inconclusive evidence to support it, and the multiple reasons Beijing has to judge that pursuing global hegemony would be destabilizing and sustaining it would probably be impossible. However, it is conceivable that China could eventually embrace that goal if it concluded that the only alternative was perpetual subordination to U.S. hegemony—which the NSS appears to adopt as the U.S. goal.

The NSS also appears to overstate Beijing’s nearer-term intentions with regard to global governance. As noted earlier, China indeed seeks to “reshape the international order” and (as others have described it) “make the world safe for autocracy.” But “reshape” is not the same as “replace” or “supplant.” As Xi reiterated in his 20th Party Congress speech, Beijing’s agenda is the “reform and development of the global governance system” to make it “fairer and more equitable.” This resonates across the developing world with countries that similarly wish to see greater attention to and representation of their interests in multilateral institutions.

In comparing the NSS and Xi’s GSI (and 20th Party Congress speech), what is perhaps most surprising is the overlap they arguably reveal between the two countries’ stated objectives. For example, the NSS observes that “the vast majority of countries want a stable and open rules-based order that respects their sovereignty and territorial integrity, provides a fair means of economic exchange with others and promotes shared prosperity, and enables cooperation on shared challenges.” Might China be one of those countries? All of these themes appear in Xi’s talking points, except for the reference to a “rules-based” order—a Biden administration phrase that is subject to varying interpretations among many countries that question whose rules and interests and what order it represents.

Similarly, the NSS emphasizes the “foundational principles of self-determination … and political independence”; the notion that “countries must be free to determine their own foreign policy choices”; and the need for the global economy to “operate on a level playing field and provide opportunity for all.” Again, Beijing routinely uses almost the same language when discussing both the GSI and its companion “Global Development Initiative.” The NSS says the United States wants to avoid competition that “escalates into a world of rigid blocs,” while Xi likewise said China opposes “bloc confrontation.” And both sides have insisted that they do not want “a new cold war.”

Of course, Beijing and Washington often talk past each other even when they are using the same language. The CCP clearly is seeking to expand China’s global influence at the U.S. expense, and to legitimize illiberalism in the process. And there obviously are fundamental disagreements between the United States and China over governance and development models, human rights, trade practices, and international law—among other ideological and systemic differences. But do these differences proscribe Beijing and Washington from recognizing and pursuing mutual interests and objectives? The core question here is whether the two sides, despite their inevitable strategic rivalry, can nonetheless maximize the scope for cooperation in areas where their interests and strategic preferences genuinely coincide.

Both the NSS and Xi claim to believe that they can. The NSS acknowledges that the PRC “retains common interests with other countries, including the United States, because of various interdependencies on climate, economics, and public health.” It also affirms that “we will cooperate with any country, including our geopolitical rivals, that is willing to work constructively with us to address shared challenges.” Echoing this, Xi’s GSI speech declared that all countries need to “work together on regional disputes and … global governance challenges.” The NSS even proclaims that it is “possible for the United States and the PRC to coexist peacefully, and share in and contribute to human progress together.” It asserts that Washington “will always be willing to work with the PRC where our interests align … because working together to solve great challenges is what the world expects from great powers, and because it’s directly in our interest.”

But the NSS stops short of explaining how this could or will happen. One reason is that it largely frames U.S. strategy as that of forging the “strongest possible coalitions” among “partners” that “share our interests” and our “vision for a better future.” But it never quite allows for the possibility of China itself being a member of such a coalition, largely because it adopts the premise that Beijing is committed to an agenda that is inimical to U.S. interests. Indeed, the frequent reiteration of the U.S. goal of a “free, open, prosperous, and secure” world is clearly a tacit reference to China, which is assumed to oppose and to endanger that vision. However, this both exaggerates Beijing’s intentions and fails to recognize or acknowledge the areas of overlap between the American and Chinese objectives identified above. A key task for Washington and Beijing should be exploring and expanding those areas, as an alternative to letting the U.S.-China relationship drift toward an exclusively confrontational and hostile one.

The NSS insists that Washington “will avoid the temptation to see the world solely through the prism of strategic competition.” But little in the strategy escapes that prism. Indeed, the document concludes that “by deepening and expanding our diplomatic relationships not only with our democratic allies but with all states who share our vision for a better future, we will have developed terms of competition with our strategic rivals that are favorable to our interests and values and laid the foundation to increase cooperation on shared challenges.” But by drawing this line between countries that “share our vision for a better future” and “our strategic rivals,” the strategy appears to exclude the possibility of pursuing a mutually beneficial future with those rivals. It also shows that cooperation with them is only a peripheral consideration, and indeed only allows a narrow arena for it.

This strategic framework reflects an underlying dilemma that is apparent in the most revealing passage in the NSS:

We cannot succeed in our competition with the major powers who offer a different vision for the world if we do not have a plan to work with other nations to deal with shared challenges and we will not be able to do that unless we understand how a more competitive world affects cooperation and how the need for cooperation affects competition. We need a strategy that not only deals with both but recognizes the relationship between them and adjusts accordingly.

This NSS is not such a strategy, because it fails to confront this central dilemma and to “adjust accordingly.” It vaguely recognizes but does not really address the biggest challenge the United States faces in dealing with China: devising a formula for peaceful coexistence that does not subordinate cooperation to competition. This will require both the United States and China to find a way to manage their differences while looking beyond those differences to pursue a shared “vision for a better future.” If this is too much to ask or to hope for, it is difficult to see how Washington and Beijing can prevent the “new cold war” they both insist they are trying to avoid.

Russia and China simply won’t accept the liberal international order

Austen & Dezenski, 10-23, 22, John Austin is the director of the Michigan Economic Center and a nonresident senior fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Brookings Institution, Dezenski is senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Foreign Policy, October 23, 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/23/democracy-backsliding-authoritarianism-us-uk-china/

Ultimately, Obama’s foreign policy contributed to our current weaknesses with China, Syria, and other countries, as it looked like a further retreat from U.S. leadership in global system. As a result, a rising China ended up dashing Western hopes it would integrate with the West and democratize, as evidence has grown that not only was it not really joining in Western norms and our economic and political order, while economically benefitting from it, but rather had designs on how to supplant them. Finally, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put an exclamation point on the obliterated Western hopes that it too could be trusted to join the family of nations. Today it is increasingly clear that we are not going to forge new universal global agreements about how best to “run the world.” The postwar global institutions are being weakened in part by countries that do not want to play by these rules and in part by populists at home. These include Donald Trump, along with Boris Johnson until his recent comeuppance in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, and now Georgia Meloni in Italy, who all wish to undermine these rules and the influence of the “globalists.” Today it is increasingly clear that we are not going to forge new universal global agreements about how best to “run the world.” And we cannot use the old playbooks to win the new competition. In this new pitched battle, containment—the strategy that won the Cold War—is not an option. As Blair points out, unlike prior inflection points, today the “East is on par with the West” in terms of economic clout. China is too big, influential, and a tightly integrated part of the global economy and polity to simply isolate it and wait for the inevitable collapse. Today’s contest can only be won by strengthening the hand of democracies and free people, strengthening the influence and numbers of those who want to play by an open rules-based and freedom-valuing regime, and enlisting in the struggle and linking arms with countries on the fence between the two systems, by offering a better and more attractive alternative. Blair offers a similar diagnosis, but his proposed remedies are not up to the ambition of his call for a new “plan” for the West. He looks chiefly to the power of new and emerging technologies to solve a host of global challenges from raising living standards to improving health care to tackling climate change. Technology drives progress, but this is a very “top-down” approach, an expectation that miracle technologies from on high will save us all. We maintain that the work needs to begin from the ground up. We propose to address the root causes of anti-democratic movements at home and abroad, and a new strategic foundation for democratic strength and unity abroad. Left: A woman pushes a stroller in front of a boarded-up property in in Redcar, England, on Sept. 29, 2015, follwing the announcement that a steel plant in the town would close causing the loss of 1700 jobs. IAN FORSYTH/GETTY IMAGES Right: Street scenes from the historical steel mill town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, once a thriving center of America’s steel industry, on Oct. 13, 2016. ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Technology restrictions fail

Ashford, 10-21, 22, Emma Ashford is a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University, and the author of Oil, the State, and War, Foreign Policy, Strategy a Match for a Chaotic World?, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/21/is-bidens-national-security-strategy-a-match-for-a-chaotic-world/

EA: It’s a lot more complicated than that. Yes, the Chinese have been able to benefit from U.S. technology in order to build up some of their own military capabilities. Policymakers in Washington need to be taking a long, hard look at how to insulate advanced U.S. technologies so that the country retains its qualitative technological edge. But as is always the problem with arms control and sanctions regimes, lots of things are dual-use. The Russians are today engaged in a campaign to pull chips out of household appliances like washing machines in order to use them for military purposes. The restrictions on advanced chips the Biden administration has put forward are probably a bit too broad and sweeping, but at least they attempt to make a distinction between critical, hard-to-replicate technologies and ones that are broadly used in trade of all kinds. It’s easy to say, “Let’s decouple from sensitive areas only,” but in reality, all trade is intertwined. And if you want an example of how hard it can be to cut off military capabilities through these kinds of sanctions, you need look no further than Iran. The country has been under various kinds of restrictions on military equipment—and even civilian technologies—since the 1979 revolution. Yet the Russians are now importing Iranian-made drones to bomb Ukraine. There’s simply a limit to what you can do to prevent a large country like China or an oil-rich one like Iran from building military technology.

China will invade Taiwan this year unless the US stops it

AFP, 10-21, 22, China could invade Taiwan this year, US admiral warns, https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/china-could-invade-taiwan-this-year-us-admiral-warns/news-story/65f0e86d70ec7cb7964bb9bb3d1cf68d

The US military needs to be ready to respond to a potential invasion of Taiwan as early as this year, a senior US admiral said on Wednesday, signalling heightened alarm over Beijing’s intentions towards the island. Admiral Michael Gilday, chief of US naval operations, is the latest senior official in Washington to raise concerns that China’s President Xi Jinping may be much more willing than previously thought to seize Taiwan. His comments came as Taiwan’s top security official warned any attempt to invade the island would fail and turn China into an international pariah. Xi is on the cusp of securing a third five-year term at the helm of the world’s most populous nation, delivering a landmark Communist Party Congress speech on Sunday where he restated his vow to one day “reunify,” or forcefully take, Taiwan. In a discussion with a think-tank, Admiral Gilday was asked about Xi’s speech and whether he agreed with comments by another US admiral that Beijing would be ready to take Taiwan by 2027. “It’s not just what President Xi says, it’s how the Chinese behave and what they do,” Admiral Gilday told the Atlantic Council. “And what we’ve seen over the past 20 years is that they have delivered on every promise they’ve made earlier than they said they were going to deliver on it. So when we talk about the 2027 window in my mind, that has to be a 2022 window or potentially a 2023 window. I can’t rule that out. I don’t mean at all to be alarmist by saying that. It’s just that we can’t wish that away.” Taiwan is not a treaty ally of the United States, but Congress is bound by law to sell Taipei defensive weapons and there is bipartisan support for protecting what has become a progressive democracy and vital global trade partner. Beijing’s stance has long been that it seeks “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan but reserves the right to use force if necessary, especially if the island formally declares independence. The rhetoric and actions towards Taiwan have become more pronounced under Xi, China’s most assertive leader in a generation, and the military has ramped up equipment purchases aimed at pulling off an invasion. Xi has tied taking Taiwan to his vision of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and said the goal of reunification cannot continue to be passed indefinitely from generation to generation. Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, which China has not condemned, has also raised fears that Beijing might take similar moves against Taiwan’s 23 million people. Military analysts have long warned that even with strength in numbers, invading Taiwan is a difficult task, given its location and terrain. Taiwan’s national security chief Chen Ming-tong echoed that sentiment and delivered his own warning to Xi. “I want to solemnly tell the Beijing authorities that there is no chance of winning to attack Taiwan by force,” he told reporters on Thursday in Taipei. “It would lead to international economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, ruining his [Xi’s] ‘great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ and making him a sinner of the Chinese nation.” On Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Beijing wants to seize Taiwan “on a much faster timeline” than previously considered, adding that “a very different China” had emerged under Xi. Mr Blinken also warned any war over Taiwan would have an “enormous” impact on global trade.

US needs to compete with China in hypersonics or they will lose a war

BEN JOHANSEN – 10/18/22, The Hill, US lagging China, Russia on hypersonic weapons: Lamborn, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3694954-us-lagging-china-russia-on-hypersonic-weapons-lamborn/

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) on Tuesday raised concerns that the United States is falling behind adversaries China and Russia in manufacturing and testing hypersonic missiles. “As a country, we are behind China, and even Russia for that matter, and this is not a good situation,” Lamborn said, adding hypersonics are “a whole new type of offensive capability, and we are behind, no doubt about it.” Lamborn’s concerns were echoed by academics and weapons experts who joined The Hill’s Tuesday event, “National Security at the Speed of Sound: Hypersonics in American Defense,” sponsored by Raytheon Industries. Hypersonic missiles are weapons that have the capability to travel at five times the speed of sound, roughly 4,000 miles per hour. They are designed to be so fast that other defense technology cannot react in time to prevent strikes. Lamborn, the ranking member on the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, said the U.S. must expedite its testing capabilities in order to catch up to other nations. He pointed specifically to HBTSS satellites, which could track hypersonic weapons from China and elsewhere. “Right now, we don’t have the ability to adequately cover the tracking and even the fire control when it comes to hypersonic vehicles,” Lamborn told Hill editor-in-chief Bob Cusack. “We need to have the sensor layers in space.” Lamborn was joined by Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), chair of the Tactical Air & Land Forces Subcommittee, who was more optimistic about congressional suppot for the Department of Defense’s hypersonics strategy. “There’s concern about hypersonics, no question about it,” Norcross said. “But I believe given where we are right now and the progress we made, we’re going to be able to meet the timelines that the department has set.” Norcross also noted that while hypersonics are crucial, there are a number of ways to address China and Russia’s defense advancements. Lamborn’s concerns were echoed by defense experts Mark Lewis, director of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute, as well as Kelly Stephani, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “The country that actually worries me the most is China,” Lewis said. “Their systems factor much more closely into what we would anticipate as far as warfighting capabilities in that part of the world. We have seen what appear to be very capable systems in the hands of the Chinese.” Cusack asked Stephani whether she sees China ahead of the U.S. in these technological advancements, to which she bluntly answered, “Yes.” “We challenge our congresspersons, and the nation in general, to recognize this threat, and act on it,” Stephani said. “We have a limited time, and it is something that we have to rally on.” “Every time we did war games in certain scenarios across the world, we found out that when the United States was facing an opponent who had developed hypersonic capabilities, if we didn’t have that capability, we lost,” Lewis said. “This has to be a priority if we’re going to be successful in the future fight.”

Authoritarian countries are inherently weak and will collapse

Fukuyama, 10-17, 22, Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies., More Proof That This Really Is the End of History, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/francis-fukuyama-still-end-history/671761/

Over the past decade, global politics has been heavily shaped by apparently strong states whose leaders are not constrained by law or constitutional checks and balances. Russia and China both have argued that liberal democracy is in long-term decline, and that their brand of muscular authoritarian government is able to act decisively and get things done while their democratic rivals debate, dither, and fail to deliver on their promises. These two countries were the vanguard of a broader authoritarian wave that turned back democratic gains across the globe, from Myanmar to Tunisia to Hungary to El Salvador. Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.

The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences. Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.

Supporters of liberal democracy must not give in to a fatalism that tacitly accepts the Russian-Chinese line that such democracies are in inevitable decline. The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad. People across varied cultures do not like living under dictatorship, and they value their individual freedom. No authoritarian government presents a society that is, in the long term, more attractive than liberal democracy, and could therefore be considered the goal or endpoint of historical progress. The millions of people voting with their feet—leaving poor, corrupt, or violent countries for life not in Russia, China, or Iran but in the liberal, democratic West—amply demonstrate this.

The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy. We’ve seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.

The weaknesses of strong states have been on glaring display in Russia. President Vladimir Putin is the sole decision maker; even the former Soviet Union had a politburo where the party secretary had to vet policy ideas. We saw images of Putin sitting at the end of a long table with his defense and foreign ministers because of his fear of COVID; he was so isolated that he had no idea how strong Ukrainian national identity had become in recent years or how fierce a resistance his invasion would provoke. He similarly got no word of how deeply corruption and incompetence had taken root within his own military, how abysmally the modern weapons he had developed were working, or how poorly trained his own officer corps was.

The shallowness of his regime’s support was made evident by the rush to the borders of young Russian men when he announced his “partial” mobilization on September 21. Some 700,000 Russians have left for Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland, and any other country that would take them, a far greater number than has actually been mobilized. Those who have been caught up by the conscription are being thrown directly into battle without adequate training or equipment, and are already showing up on the front as POWs or casualties. Putin’s legitimacy was based on a social contract that promised citizens stability and a modicum of prosperity in return for political passivity, but the regime has broken that deal and is feeling the consequences.

Putin’s bad decision making and shallow support have produced one of the biggest strategic blunders in living memory. Far from demonstrating its greatness and recovering its empire, Russia has become a global object of ridicule, and will endure further humiliations at the hands of Ukraine in the coming weeks. The entire Russian military position in the south of Ukraine is likely to collapse, and the Ukrainians have a real chance of liberating the Crimean Peninsula for the first time since 2014. These reversals have triggered a huge amount of finger-pointing in Moscow; the Kremlin is cracking down even harder on dissent. Whether Putin himself will be able to survive a Russian military defeat is an open question.

Something similar, if a bit less dramatic, has been going on in China. One of the hallmarks of Chinese authoritarianism in the period between Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978 and Xi Jinping’s accession to power in 2013 was the degree to which it was institutionalized. Institutions mean that rulers have to follow rules and cannot do whatever they please. The Chinese Communist Party imposed many rules on itself: mandatory retirement ages for party cadres, strict meritocratic standards for recruitment and promotion, and above all a 10-year term limit for the party’s most-senior leadership. Deng Xiaoping established a system of collective leadership precisely to avoid the dominance of a single obsessive leader like Mao Zedong.

Much of this has been dismantled under Xi Jinping, who will receive the blessing of his party to remain on as paramount leader for a third five-year term at the 20th Party Congress. In place of collective leadership, China has moved to a personalistic system in which no other senior official can come close to challenging Xi.

This concentration of authority in one man has in turn led to poor decision making. The party has intervened in the economy, hobbling the tech sector by going after stars such as Alibaba and Tencent; forced Chinese farmers to plant money-losing staples in pursuit of agricultural self-sufficiency; and insisted on a zero-COVID strategy that keeps important parts of China under continuing lockdowns that have shaved points off of the country’s economic growth. China cannot easily reverse zero-COVID, because it has failed to buy effective vaccines and finds a large part of its elderly population vulnerable to the disease. What looked two years ago like a triumphant success in controlling COVID has turned into a prolonged debacle.

All of this comes on top of the failure of China’s underlying growth model, which relied on heavy state investment in real estate to keep the economy humming. Basic economics suggests this would lead to massive misallocation of resources, as has in fact happened. Go online and search for Chinese buildings being blown up, and you will see many videos of massive housing complexes being dynamited because there is no one to buy apartments in them.

These authoritarian failures are not limited to China. Iran has been rocked by weeks of protests following the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the morality police. Iran is in terrible shape: It faces a banking crisis, is running out of water, has seen big declines in agriculture, and is grappling with crippling international sanctions and isolation. Despite its pariah status, it has a well-educated population, in which women constitute a majority of university graduates. And yet the regime is led by a small group of old men with social attitudes several generations out of date. It is no wonder that the regime is now facing its greatest test of legitimacy. The only country that qualifies as even more poorly managed is one with another dictatorship, Venezuela, which has produced the world’s largest outflux of refugees over the past decade.

Celebrations of the rise of strong states and the decline of liberal democracy are thus very premature. Liberal democracy, precisely because it distributes power and relies on consent of the governed, is in much better shape globally than many people think. Despite recent gains by populist parties in Sweden and Italy, most countries in Europe still enjoy a strong degree of social consensus.

US needs to deter an emerging China-Russia alliance

Matthew Kroenig is the acting director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, October 2022, Six Months, twenty-three lessons: What the World Has Learned from Russia’s War in the Ukraine, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/six-months-twenty-three-lessons-what-the-world-has-learned-from-russias-war-in-ukraine/

The Biden administration came to office believing it could park relations with Russia, putting it on a “stable and predictable” footing while prioritizing competition with China as part of its national-security policy. But Moscow had other ideas: By launching the largest land war in Europe since World War II, Putin reminded Washington how much its security and prosperity is tied to peace and stability in Europe. The Biden administration was forced to return to the drawing board and rewrite its national-security strategy (which has still not been published more than one-and-a-half years into Biden’s term) because the first version gave short shrift to Russia. China should be a priority, but the United States remains a global power with global interests; its national-security strategy must reflect that reality. An effective approach must address the serious threats posed by China and North Korea in the Indo-Pacific, Iran in the Middle East, and Russia in Europe. Moreover, these threats are interconnected—with Russia, China, and Iran increasingly working together. Success in one of these theaters will strengthen, not sap, US power to deal with the others.

Forward deployment of US forces through NATO is needed to prevent a Russian attack

Hans Binnendijk is a distinguished fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, October 2022, Six Months, twenty-three lessons: What the World Has Learned from Russia’s War in the Ukraine, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/six-months-twenty-three-lessons-what-the-world-has-learned-from-russias-war-in-ukraine/

As Russian troops assembled to invade Ukraine early this year, many defense analysts believed the threat of severe economic sanctions would be enough to deter a Russian attack. But for Putin, revanchist territorial aims outweighed any potential harm that might be done to the Russian economy through Western sanctions. While great damage has been done to the Russian consumer economy, the ruble has strengthened and foreign reserves have increased due to high oil prices and shifting Russian markets. Putin’s judgment appears to have been correct, at least in the short term.

NATO leaders had made it clear that they would not commit troops to defend Ukraine, which led Putin to miscalculate on two fronts—underestimating Ukrainians’ ability to defend themselves and the West’s willingness to rapidly arm them. So Western defense officials have relearned a Cold War-era lesson: What deters Russian aggression is NATO troops on the Alliance’s eastern flank, not the threat of economic sanctions. It’s possible that if Alliance troops had deployed to Ukraine, it could have deterred the invasion; but they may have also started World War III. Deploying troops forward on NATO territory now will assure that Putin does not miscalculate again.

The cornerstone of the recent NATO summit was an effort to absorb and implement this lesson. NATO’s deterrent posture is shifting from “deterrence by punishment” to “deterrence by denial,” and allied forces are being positioned forward to deny Russia’s ability to occupy any bit of NATO territory. Battalion-sized NATO battle groups have now been deployed to eight frontline allies, and American forces in Europe have increased to one hundred thousand. Many believe that even more needs to be done to assure deterrence by denial—for example, by deploying brigade- or even division-level NATO forces to frontline allied countries.

US needs to compete with China in hypersonics or they will lose a war

BEN JOHANSEN – 10/18/22, The Hill, US lagging China, Russia on hypersonic weapons: Lamborn, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3694954-us-lagging-china-russia-on-hypersonic-weapons-lamborn/

Authoritarian countries are inherently weak and will collapse

Biden’s new National Security Strategy promotes Great Power Competition

David Adesnik, a senior fellow and the director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,, 10-17, 22, Foreign Policy, Biden’s New National Security Strategy: A Lot of Trump, Very Little Obama, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/17/national-security-strategy-nss-biden-trump-obama-china-russia-geopolitics/

“The United States welcomes the rise of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China.” These words from the Obama administration’s 2015 National Security Strategy already belong to a bygone era. On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden, who was vice president when the earlier document was drafted, released his own National Security Strategy. And it couldn’t strike a more different tone. “We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over [China],” the document pledges, blasting China for trying “to become the world’s leading power.” Russia, too, is no longer described in rosy terms as a potential partner but as an “immediate and persistent threat” to global peace and stability. Put simply, the Biden strategy is a 180-degree turn from the last Democratic administration. Instead, the new document affirms what the Trump administration first concluded in its 2017 strategy: “[G]reat power competition [has] returned.” The similarity of the diagnoses presented by the Trump and Biden administrations does not mean their prescriptions for U.S. policy are the same. Nonetheless, much like a medical diagnosis, a strategic one narrows the range of options available for treatment. In his first address to the U.N. General Assembly in 2009, then-President Barack Obama declared, “More than at any point in human history, the interests of nations and peoples are shared.” Obama’s first strategy, published in 2010, reported that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the “circle of peaceful democracies has expanded; the specter of nuclear war has lifted; major powers are at peace; the global economy has grown.” Against this backdrop, a strategy that emphasized engagement seemed practical. Thus, Obama’s blueprint explained, “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia.” It’s not that the world has fundamentally changed since then. During the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign, Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain, already offered a very different view of the strategic landscape. McCain, like many others, already saw Russian President Vladimir Putin then as most Americans see him now. After all, Moscow had invaded Georgia only a few months before the 2008 election. McCain’s view of China was similar, and he would never have placed a democracy like India in the same category of potential partners as a pair of revisionist dictatorships. The usual explanation for the divergence in views is that McCain was a foreign-policy hawk, in contrast to Obama’s more dovish approach. Yet the hawk-dove metaphor is misleading. It presumes the two camps differ in their readiness for confrontation. However, the more profound difference is in their perception of threats—the hawks sense hostility where the doves see potential partners. In their perception of threats, the Trump and Biden strategies converge fully on the pivotal issue of great-power rivalry. But there are many ways to deal with the same threat, as illustrated by the wide range of Cold War-era strategies that all fell under the heading of containment. But even on the level of policy, Biden’s 48-page strategy provides surprisingly few indications of whether and how his approach will differ from former President Donald Trump’s. Nor did the Trump strategy, which ran across 68 pages, map the course of his policies clearly. The reasons for this ambiguity are structural: Every National Security Strategy of the post-Cold War era reads more like a list of aspirations than a disciplined exercise in matching courses of action to achievable objectives—and this is the most one should expect from a public strategy that will be read by critics at home and adversaries abroad. More specific decisions would give opponents a chance to mobilize before a policy is put into action. Building consensus within the administration for a detailed global plan of action would also require the adjudication of countless disagreements across departments and the various national security factions. These are incentives for ambiguity. There are still plenty of markers indicating that this is the strategy of a Democratic president, not a Republican. The three pillars of Biden’s strategy toward China therefore remain ambiguous. The first is “to invest in the foundations of our strength at home—our competitiveness, our innovation, our resilience, our democracy.” Who could disagree with this political version of motherhood and apple pie? The second pillar is “to align our efforts with our network of allies and partners.” This appears, at first, like a departure from Trump, who seemed to delight in antagonizing many U.S. friends and partners—until you remember that during 70-plus years of NATO history, squabbles have been the norm. Finally, the strategy says the United States will “compete responsibly with [China] to defend our interests and build our vision for the future.” This is like saying the strategy is to have a strategy. Tension between presidents and their staff may also render written strategies an unreliable guide to actual policy. Trump’s public statements, especially the joint press conference with Putin in Finland in 2018 that shocked much of the Western world, stood in stark contrast to what Trump’s staff had written in the 2017 strategy, which asserted that Russia wants “to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.” Meanwhile, Biden’s own staff has now corrected him four times following unscripted pledges to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, which is not official U.S. policy. The staff position on Taiwan prevails in the new National Security Strategy, but there is no reason to believe that has resolved the dispute. While the Trump and Biden strategies may offer nearly identical diagnoses of the most serious threat facing the United States, there are still plenty of markers indicating that this is the strategy of a Democratic president, not a Republican. There is the traditional warmth, not skepticism, toward the United Nations and the full range of multilateral institutions. Similarly, Biden’s strategy includes 20 references to climate change and 11 more to the climate crisis, whereas Trump’s mentioned the business or investment climate more frequently than climate policy, which only got one mention. Biden has already shepherded $370 billion in climate spending through the U.S. Congress. Still, there is a sense of discouragement about the role of climate diplomacy in foreign relations. In the interim security strategy released shortly after Biden took office, the White House balanced tough language on China with a readiness to “welcome the Chinese government’s cooperation on issues such as climate change … where our national fates are intertwined.” The new document, in contrast, has sharp words for China’s “massive coal power use and build up”—which, as critics would note, was plainly apparent long before Biden took office. It is perilous to read too much into any National Security Strategy. Their importance is that they set the tone for U.S. security policy and indicate its direction. Therefore, when a Democratic administration offers a diagnosis that aligns so fully with the views of its Republican predecessor—and is so different from that of the last Democratic White House, from which so much of the current administration hails—it indicates a sea change in U.S. thinking. But if you think there will now be less partisanship in U.S. foreign policy—where conflicts are often said to stop at the water’s edge—you’d be mistaken. As a quick glance back to the Cold War shows, the question of how to deal with a mutually acknowledged threat can be just as divisive.

Framework: Security interests of the US are the primary interest of the US government

Matlock, 10-17, 22, Jack F. Matlock, Jr. is a career diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991. Prior to that he was Senior Director for European and Soviet Affairs on President Reagan’s National Security Council staff and was U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1981-1983. He was Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and has written numerous articles and three books about the negotiations that ended the Cold War, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and U.S. foreign policy following the end of the Cold War, On Ukraine, the US is on the hook to find a way out, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/10/17/on-ukraine-the-us-is-on-the-hook-to-find-a-way-out/

Some will argue that the United States has a moral obligation to support whatever the Ukrainian leaders demand since “they know best.” No, they do not know best what is in the security interests of the American people, and that should be the primary concern of any American government. They also, under the stress of war, may not be the best judges of their own ultimate security interests.

Great Power Competition against Russia and China pushes them into an alliance

A new iron curtain is now being imposed on Russia — this time by Western policy — even as the United States announces more measures to confront and “contain” an assertive China. This will result, inevitably, in more cooperation between Russia and China. Also, the increasing use of economic sanctions to achieve political purposes will encounter push-back with a greater volume of international trade conducted in national currencies other than the U.S. dollar.

US doesn’t have the resources to win a great power competition; focusing on competition crushes US-China cooperation

Michael D. Swaine Jake Werner, 10-16, 22, Michael D. Swaine is director of the Quincy Institute’s East Asia program; Jake Werner is a Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute, How Biden’s New National Security Strategy Gets China Wrong, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-biden%E2%80%99s-new-national-security-strategy-gets-china-wrong-205323

The Biden administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) attempts to explain how the United States can win a global struggle for democracy over authoritarianism. In doing so, the document reveals a wide gulf between Washington’s ambitions and its capabilities—a gulf which threatens to drive America into years of dangerous, likely-futile attempts to decisively “shape” the global order and “win” the coming era of great power competition.

The Biden administration argues that America and the world are engaged in a critical struggle with “powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.” The NSS states that Russia and China (“the largest autocracies”) threaten the interests of even non-democratic states by “…waging or preparing for wars of aggression, actively undermining the democratic political processes of other countries, leveraging technology and supply chains for coercion and repression, and exporting an illiberal model of international order.” The NSS suggests the adversarial elements of U.S. security policy are primarily aimed at only two powers; in other words, the core dynamic driving Washington’s grand strategy today is really great power competition, not ideology per se.

For the Biden administration, it appears the only relevant difference between Russia and China lies in their level of power, or ability to seriously threaten the United States, the West, and the world order. Both nations apparently pose dire threats, but China is “…the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.”

Despite the Biden administration’s avowed belief in a genuine and critical need to cooperate with China on common threats such as climate change, pandemics, and nonproliferation, the NSS reaffirms the Trump administration’s basic assessment that China and Russia have

…concluded that the success of a free and open rules-based international order posed a threat to their regimes and stifled their ambitions. In their own ways, they now seek to remake the international order to create a world conducive to their highly personalized and repressive type of autocracy.

It is hard to see how such a zero-sum characterization of the presumably dire threat that China (and Russia) poses to the world can be squared with the document’s assertion of a need to constructively engage with China in combating what it correctly calls the “existential” threat posed by climate change. China is unlikely to join U.S. efforts while Washington is working hard to limit Chinese development, as reflected in Commerce Department’s recent restrictions on Chinese companies’ access to advanced semiconductors and other cutting-edge technology. There is a tension between these aims that the NSS does not confront.

The document brings a polemical edge to defining Chinese interests. For example, it states that China seeks only to undermine “…the autonomy and rights of less powerful states…” while the United States seeks only to “…support every country, regardless of size or strength, in exercising the freedom to make choices that serve their interests.” In reality, neither nation is without fault in defending the autonomy and rights of smaller powers and upholding the rules of international regimes. But rather than acknowledging this fact and stating a commitment to work with China to reach mutually acceptable norms and rules, the NSS approaches the problem as a Manichean struggle over freedom in which China’s goals are virtually unmovable and threatening while the United States is the arbiter of what constitutes a just and free order. Such a zero-sum framing of the Sino-U.S. competition excludes the possibility that in many areas there might actually be room for U.S.-China agreement on needed reforms or, failing that, for genuine compromise.

The NSS also makes broad claims about how third countries view the great power contest, asserting that,

Across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, countries are clear-eyed about the nature of the challenges that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] poses. Governments want sustainable public finances. Workers want to be treated with dignity and respect. Innovators want to be rewarded for their ingenuity, risk-taking, and persistent efforts. And enterprising businesses want open and free waters through which their products can be traded.

There are certainly important shortcomings and abuses in China’s record of overseas engagement, but the NSS ignores a similar history of U.S. shortcomings and abuses. More importantly, the one-sided characterization of China’s record as malicious in intent—rather than admitting the far more complex reality of contending interests that shape Chinese behavior—undermines the possibility of working with China to improve its practices. It also tends to offend the leaders of the many countries that maintain productive economic relationships with both China and the United States.

Many of these countries have signaled loudly to Washington that they dread the possibility of being forced to choose between the two powers, and the NSS reflects the fact that the administration is listening to these concerns. As the document states, “We also want to avoid a world in which competition escalates into a world of rigid blocs.” This, together with the NSS’s renunciation of military force to remake other societies, marks a significant and welcome break with the Trump administration’s dangerous intimation that the United States intends to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.

Yet the NSS’s characterization of Chinese motivations as malign and its unvarying criticism of Chinese behavior across the full range of statecraft both indicate clearly to Beijing that Washington regards Chinese success as unwelcome. The United States certainly should apply pressure and criticism—many Chinese practices are objectionable, and some are unacceptable. But if the pushback is not accompanied with an equally robust path for mutual adjustment, cooperation, and shared achievement, it will be very difficult to avoid the disastrous great power conflict that the NSS professes to eschew.

New National Security Strategy, which focuses on great power competition, relies on strengthening ties with allies

McKinnon, 10-12, 22, Amy Mackinnon is a national security and intelligence reporter at Foreign Policy, Foreign Policy, Biden’s White House Finally Unveils Its National Security Strategy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/10/12/biden-national-security-strategy-russia-china-middle-class/

The Biden administration unveiled its long-awaited National Security Strategy on Wednesday, singling out competition among major world powers and shared threats, such as climate change, as the two biggest challenges facing the United States.

As the world enters what the document describes as a “decisive decade,” it outlines three priority areas: investing in the underlying sources of U.S. strength, working with allies and partners to address mutual challenges, and setting the rules of the road on trade, economics, and emerging technologies.

It sketches in broad terms a road map to navigate between the near-term threat of a revanchist Russia and the longer-term threat of a rising China.

“Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown,” the document states. “[China], by contrast, is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.” The strategy also acknowledges that Russia’s status compared to other Asian powers, such as China and India, has been “profoundly diminished” by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to go to war.

The 48-page document offers the most in-depth look at the Biden administration’s worldview to date. Building on the interim strategy released shortly after U.S. President Joe Biden’s inauguration as well as adding to policies already rolled out by the administration, its central themes will contain few surprises for close observers of his foreign policy.

“I do think this is a very clear strategy,” said Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center. “It’s making a very clear case for what it is the administration wants. And I think that is an American foreign policy not for Americans but for the world.”

The National Security Strategy was initially slated to be released in the spring but was delayed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Although the interim version released in March of last year contained no mention of Ukraine, the document released on Wednesday makes 32 references to the embattled nation.

“I don’t believe that the war in Ukraine has fundamentally altered Joe Biden’s approach to foreign policy,” U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on a call with reporters. “But I do believe that it presents in living color our approach and the emphasis on allies, the importance of strengthening the hand of the democratic world.”

Revitalizing international alliances, such as NATO, which was shaken by the Trump administration’s isolationist instincts, as well as strengthening partnerships in the Indo-Pacific have been central to the Biden administration’s approach to competing with China and addressing shared transnational threats, such as climate change, pandemics, terrorism, and energy shortages. At the same time, Sullivan said Washington is willing to “cooperate with any country, including our geopolitical rivals, that is willing to work constructively on shared challenges.”

Some analysts see an inherent tension in the goals of the strategy, a critique that has been leveled at National Security Strategies across administrations.

“The document still looks like it was written by two different sides of the Democratic Party,” said Gabriel Scheinmann, executive director of the nonpartisan Alexander Hamilton Society. “There are some internal inconsistencies in the way this was written, which I suspect was an effort to assuage different constituencies.”

The administration’s dual efforts to champion democracy around the world while addressing the realpolitik of pressing global challenges has, at times, come under strain, which has been underscored by the United States’ turbulent relationship with Saudi Arabia.

In June, Biden visited the Persian Gulf state as he sought the oil-rich nation’s help in tamping down global energy costs, which were sent soaring following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, despite having previously vowed to render the kingdom a “pariah” over the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. On Tuesday, White House officials said the administration was reevaluating its relationship with the country after the OPEC+ grouping of oil-producing nations announced the biggest cut in production since the beginning of the pandemic, threatening a rise in energy prices and undermining Western efforts to target the Kremlin’s oil revenue.

Speaking to reporters, Sullivan acknowledged these challenges. “There are tensions between trying to rally cooperation to solve these shared challenges and by trying to position ourselves effectively to prevail in strategic competition,” he said.

On the campaign trail, Biden spoke at length about his vision for creating a foreign policy for the middle class, and the concept features highly in the new strategy, which sees a prosperous and resilient America as the key to projecting power and influence abroad. “We have broken down the dividing line between foreign policy and domestic policy,” the strategy states.

The contours of this approach have already emerged in legislative efforts, such as the $1 trillion infrastructure bill; the CHIPS and Science Act, which authorized $280 billion for research and development of advanced technologies and the semiconductor industry; and the Inflation Reduction Act, which seeks to reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

The document was also notable for what it didn’t say. Afghanistan, the most ignominious chapter of Biden’s foreign-policy record so far, is mentioned four times. “The fact that the president lost a war and it merits a sentence … is sort of shocking,” Scheinmann said. The section on the Middle East, once at the forefront of U.S. national security priorities, was also markedly pared back compared to previous administrations.

But in other areas of statecraft, trade, economics, and emerging technologies, the strategy underscores the importance of the United States continuing to set the rules of the road—and enforce them.

But here, Ashford pointed to a “real tension” between the strategy’s emphasis on the liberal international order and the importance of international institutions while, at the same time, asserting the need for U.S. leadership in certain areas.

Nuclear war kills 5 billion

Anthony Blair, 10, 14, 22, https://www.the-sun.com/news/6442242/nuclear-war-with-putin-food-russia/, DEAD PLANET World-ending nuclear war with Putin could wipe out 5BILLION people and block out the sun for years, experts warn

DEAD PLANET World-ending nuclear war with Putin could wipe out 5 BILLION people and block out the sun for years, experts warn A NUCLEAR war with Putin could wipe out five billion people and block out the sun for several years, experts have warned. Fears are growing that Putin is escalating the nuclear threat in the war in Ukraine as his botched invasion drags on into its ninth month. A nuclear war could wipe out up to 5billion people worldwide Currently, there are more than 12,000 nuclear warheads worldwide The original blasts could kill up to 300million people Speaking to The Sun Online, disaster expert Paul Ingram said: “During the Cold War, it was often said that we had enough nuclear missiles to blow the world up several times over. “That isn’t the case anymore. There are more than 12,000 nuclear warheads worldwide. “Russia alone has almost 6,000 of them.” “The blast and radiation from these would lead to casualties of 200 to 300million worldwide.” Ingram, from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, also warned of apocalyptic aftershocks from any nuclear conflict. “On top of the immediate deaths, the all-out nuclear exchange would throw up so much radioactive soot that it would obscure the sun for several years,” he said. “This would lead to the deaths of up to five billion people worldwide.” He added that the danger of such a strike on a country like Ukraine, which is seen as a “breadbasket” because of its wheat production, is that it could trigger worldwide food shortages. ‘Five dead including cop’ after active shooter opens fire in neighborhood SICK ATTACK ‘Five dead including cop’ after active shooter opens fire in neighborhood Kiely Rodni’s cause of death revealed after diver called passing ‘suspicious’ MAJOR UPDATE Kiely Rodni’s cause of death revealed after diver called passing ‘suspicious’ “Crops would fail worldwide, and this would cause a lack of food,” he said. “Temperatures would plummet worldwide by up to 16C. “Breadbaskets such as Ukraine would never rise above freezing point. “In the centre of London, we are more at risk of direct blasts and radiation, but no one would be safe.” As of January this year, there are approximately 12,700 nuclear warheads worldwide. Of those, the highest number, almost 6,000, are in Russia, while around 5,400 are in the US. The UK has 225 nuclear warheads, most kept onboard Trident submarines. China, France, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea make up the world’s other nuclear powers. All-out nuclear exchange would throw up so much radioactive soot that it would obscure the sun for several years Paul IngramCentre For The Study Of Existential Risk, University Of Cambridge However, although Russia has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal, many of these weapons date back to the Cold War, and their current status is unclear. British Army veteran Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Crawford told The Sun Online: “Russia’s tactical nukes have been in storage since the 1990s. We don’t know if they have been well maintained or serviced.” He was speaking after the science journal Nature Food released a paper in August examining the potential outcomes of a nuclear war between two countries. The paper found that even a limited nuclear conflict in which two nations unleash weapons on each other could trigger global famine. “A large per cent of the people will be starving,” climate scientist Lili Xia from Rutgers University in New Jersey said. “It’s really bad.” The paper used parallels such as forest fires to model the climatic effects of multiple nuclear explosions over cities. Blasts could throw radioactive dust into the sky obscuring the sun for several years Huge temperature drops would trigger mass crop failures and global famine Scientists analysed six war scenarios, each of which would pump different amounts of radioactive soot into the atmosphere. Each scenario would cut surface temperatures anywhere between 1C to 16C, while the effects could linger on for more than a decade or so. Taras Young, author of the books “Nuclear War in the UK” and “Apocalypse Ready”, told The Sun Online: “Nuclear war isn’t survivable.” He added: “We are far better prepared for cyberattacks than we are for nuclear war. We have the National Cybersecurity Centre. “Education is key. The government needs to do more to educate people on the threats out there.” Professor Andrew Futter, Professor of International Politics at the University of Leicester, added: “It is very difficult to plan for such an event. You need to plan for how society would function if there is disruption to food, energy, and medical supplies.” He went on: “The UK could probably survive a single nuclear strike, but a significant attack would be devastating.” Lt Col Stuart Crawford told The Sun Online: “Should the Russians deploy their nuclear missiles, the West’s vengeance will be swift and terrible. “Russia would cease to exist as a country in its current state.”

Brink of global nuclear war

Daniel Devise, 10-14, 22, The Hill, Americans’ nuclear fears surge to highest levels since Cold War, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3687396-americans-nuclear-fears-surge-to-highest-levels-since-cold-war/

Some scholars say the threat of nuclear conflict looms larger now than at any time since the close of World War II. The Doomsday Clock, a symbolic measure of humans’ proximity to extinction, stands at 100 seconds to midnight, the nearest the world has ever strayed to its hour of doom since the clock was first set in 1947. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists consider climate change and other perils in their calculus, but nuclear fears predominate. “We really are hanging on the hope that Putin is rational, and not suicidal, and not delusionary,” Kuznick said. “[President] Biden said this week Putin is a rational actor being given bad information. We hope he’s right. The problem is, we’re dealing with the future of life on our planet.” “It’s very difficult to quantify the risk,” said Derek Johnson, managing partner of the anti-nuclear organization Global Zero, in an email interview. “Is it 1 percent? Two percent? Ten percent? I don’t know, and I don’t know any credible expert who claims to know either,” he said. “But I can say it’s a lot higher than we should be comfortable with, and likely higher now than it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, if only for the fact that the war in Ukraine is a cascade of opportunities for mistakes and miscalculations.”

Unless the US steps-back in the Ukraine, Putin will use nukes

Stanovaya, 10-6, 22, TATIANA STANOVAYA is a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Founder and CEO of the political analysis firm R.Politik., Putin’s Apocalyptic End Game in Ukraine Annexation and Mobilization Make Nuclear War More Likely, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/putin-apocalyptic-end-game-ukraine

On September 30, following a series of sham referendums held in occupied territory in Ukraine, the Russian government declared that four Ukrainian regions are now officially part of Russia. The annexation came amid a “partial” Russian mobilization that is in fact rapidly becoming a large-scale one that has left many Russians aghast and anxious. With these moves, the war in Ukraine has entered a new stage in which the stakes have risen drastically. Russian President Vladimir Putin is explicitly demonstrating that he is going to do whatever it takes to win, even at the risk of undermining his own regime. Blindly believing in his own rectitude, Putin may resort to nuclear weapons if events in Ukraine continue to confound his ambitions. The key question is whether Russia’s elites and broader society are prepared to accompany their president on this journey to hell, or if Putin, in doubling down on his disastrous gamble in Ukraine, has only paved the way for his own end. A NOT-SO-GRAND ULTIMATUM Ukraine’s counterattack, launched at the end of August, has completely changed Putin’s calculations regarding how Russia should fight. His previous plan, based on the idea that Kyiv would not dare to carry out a full-fledged offensive on Russian positions, presumed that the Kremlin had plenty of time to establish itself in the territory it had occupied, while the Ukrainian government, exhausted by the war and with the economy in ruins, would sooner or later have to capitulate. The strategic part of Putin’s plan remains the same. It envisages that Kyiv will fall, since his paramount purpose in this war is still to put an end to what he sees as the “anti-Russia” geopolitical project managed by the West and secure a long-term Russian presence on Ukrainian territory. The tactics Putin will use to achieve this goal, however, have been fundamentally revised. The military threats to Russian positions in Ukraine, based on the Kremlin’s miscalculations, have reached the point where the Kremlin has effectively issued an ultimatum to the world: either Russia wins Ukraine or it will resort to nuclear escalation. This ultimatum has three major parts. The first is declaring stretches of Ukraine to be Russian territory. The annexation of four regions—Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia—means that Russia has artificially transformed its war to destroy Ukraine as an independent state into a war of self-defense against foreign military forces. The annexation is a form of protest against Western involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. It frames the West’s military aid to Ukraine as tantamount to aggression against Russia. By annexing these territories, Putin is sending a blunt message: continuing to help Kyiv will inevitably lead the West into a direct conflict with Russia, something he believes Western capitals would like to avoid. This move also reflects another important shift in the Kremlin’s understanding of the current situation. Before Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Moscow did not believe that Western aid could drastically change the balance of forces and create conditions in which Ukraine would threaten Russia militarily. Now, it does. NUCLEAR BLACKMAIL Another plank of Putin’s ultimatum is the nuclear option, which is now squarely back on the table. After cooling his rhetoric over the summer, Putin has returned to invoking this ultimate threat as a way to influence Western policy on Ukraine. In April, when Russian forces retreated from failed offensives against Kyiv and Chernihiv, the Kremlin turned to nuclear blackmail, with Putin suggesting that his government was willing to allow the use of nuclear weapons “if necessary” and effectively blaming the West for Russian failures. By May, however, that language had died down; Putin had concluded that even with Western assistance, Ukraine was doomed to lose eventually. With the Russian military struggling, commentators and officials are once again advocating the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. They have filled TV screens and social media with nuclear saber rattling. The pro-Kremlin segment of Telegram, a Russian information-sharing app, is buzzing with hundreds of posts justifying Moscow’s legitimate right to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine or trying to convince the world that Putin is seriously ready to resort to nuclear weapons in the event of further escalation. The profusion of posts insisting that “Yes, he can,” “he must,” and “he will” is not only part of a deliberate campaign to intimidate the West, but also a demonstration of the growing determination among the most committed, ambitious pro-war elements of Russia’s elite and society that the war must be won no matter what. Whether or not Putin is bluffing, the threat of using nuclear weapons creates higher expectations among the elites about how far Putin is prepared to go, and it dramatically reduces room for maneuvering in a hypothetical future political bargain over Ukraine. To take the nuclear card off the table, Putin would need to see the successful military advance of Russian forces combined with signals from Washington that the West will shrink its role in the conflict. If these demands are not met—and it is safe to say they will not be—Russia will resort to the nuclear option: such is the new reality that Putin seeks to shape, in effect taking the world hostage. TOTAL WAR Raising the stakes through his annexation of Ukrainian regions and his invocations of nuclear war, Putin has also upped the ante further by making ordinary Russians part of the war. His mobilization order in September caught Russians off-guard. Over the summer and in the first half of September, polls recorded an uptick in the positive mood among Russian society, growing fatigue with military rhetoric, and declining interest in the war in Ukraine. Although the pro-war part of the establishment, together with the military, demanded that Putin announce a mobilization as soon as possible, those in the presidential administration who oversee domestic policy had tried to minimize the war in the minds of the public. They sought to calm the angry jingoists who were advocating for Moscow to take Kyiv. Now, mobilization has irretrievably changed the lives of millions. In the latest Levada Center poll of Russians, 47 percent of respondents said that the partial mobilization made them feel “anxiety, fear, and horror,” 23 percent felt “shock,” and 13 percent felt “anger and indignation.” Only 23 percent said they felt “pride in Russia.” Even if the mobilization has not prompted mass protests, it has undermined the public’s trust in the state and state media. Beyond the question of how the mobilization will affect domestic affairs, this drastic political decision reveals much about Putin’s priorities. The president has dared to announce what looks to be the most unpopular political decision in his 22 years of rule, regardless of how mass conscription will stoke anger, resentment, and social tensions and threaten domestic political stability. This decision puts in doubt any further social consolidation between the authorities and ordinary Russians over the war. Until recently, the majority of Russians accepted the deal offered by the Kremlin: Putin would fight for “historical justice” against Ukrainian “Nazis,” relying on “professionals” and volunteers to avert the strategic threats posed to Russia by the West’s involvement in Ukraine. This goal found significant social support, but on one important condition: that Russia fought without the direct involvement of ordinary Russians, who have been living their lives more or less as usual since the invasion began. Mobilization has ripped up this contract. Having chosen mobilization despite the predictable public anger, Putin has shown that if it comes to a choice between achieving his goals in Ukraine and placating Russian society, Putin will opt for the former, sacrificing popular support at home for geopolitical victory in Ukraine. It is an explicit rebuttal to those who have suggested that Putin’s fear of a collapse in his political support among Russians would stop him from taking risky decisions. In truth, he is single-mindedly driven to turn his gamble in Ukraine into a victory, whatever the cost. THE POISON PILL Putin’s nuclear ultimatum and mobilization order put significant pressure on both Russian society and the increasingly nervous Russian elites, who must decide which losing scenario is less tragic: to accompany the furious leader until the end of the world, to escape both Putin and the retribution of the West, or to wait for Russia to lose. It puts Putin in an unprecedentedly vulnerable position. His obsession with Ukraine has never been shared to the same extent by most of the Russian elite, and his readiness to sacrifice thousands of Russian lives is not shared by much of his own electorate. He appears to be pushing a scenario in which he is the only one who has the capacity to pay whatever price it takes, to fight under the banner of “all or nothing.” The president’s manic course of action carries a distinct and bitter taste of suicidal exasperation. It would be wrong, however, to think that it cannot get any worse. At this stage, however cornered Putin may seem, he still believes he can win. In his eyes, the mobilization should help the Russian army drive out Ukrainian forces from the newly annexed territories and convince the West to step back from Ukraine, leaving Kyiv doomed to surrender and opening the opportunity for the Russian government to establish some facsimile of normal life in the new regions. So what happens when things don’t go to plan once again? What happens when Russian forces fail to defeat the Ukrainians, the West increases its military aid and demonstratively ignores Putin’s blackmail, and people in the new territories continue to resist their Russian occupiers, targeting senior officials and administrative buildings in terrorist attacks? Then the pivotal moment will arrive when the only option Putin sees available to him is the nuclear one. It will also be a decisive moment for the Russian elites who still do not dare to countenance this worst-case scenario, something that many today avoid thinking about. Domestic political conditions may be reaching the point where senior officials would dare to disobey, speak out louder, and fight with each other more resolutely. Ukraine may become a poison pill for Putin: in seeking to swallow it, he is dooming himself to defeat.

If the Ukraine retakes Crimea, Putin will use nukes

Lieven, 10-3, 22, Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/10/03/no-blob-we-are-not-already-fighting-world-war-iii/

He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London. He is a member of the advisory committee of the South Asia Department of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He holds a BA and PhD from Cambridge University in England.From 1985 to 1998, Anatol Lieven worked as a British journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and covered the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and the southern Caucasus. From 2000 to 2007 he worked at think tanks in Washington DC. Lieven is author of several books on Russia and its neighbors including “The Baltic Revolutions: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence” and “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry.” His book “Pakistan: A Hard Country” is on the official reading lists for U.S. and British diplomats serving in that country. His latest book, “Climate Change and the Nation State,” was published in March 2020 by Penguin in the UK and Oxford University Press in the USA, and is to appear in an updated paperback edition in Fall 2021.

Fortunately, the Biden administration does appear to understand the difference, and has taken a good deal of care to avoid direct clashes with Russia. The problem is that while Washington has given massive support to Ukraine, it has not established any goals or limits on how far Ukraine should go in defeating Russia. If Ukraine wins more victories and recovers the territories that Russia has occupied since February, Putin will in my view probably be forced to resign, but Russia would likely not use nuclear weapons. If however Ukraine goes on to try to reconquer Crimea, which the overwhelming majority of Russians regard as simply Russian territory, the chances of an escalation to nuclear war become extremely high. This points to another danger of the “World War III” language: it suggests a universal threat, and the need for, and the possibility of, absolute victory over absolute evil, as in World War II. But the war in Ukraine is nothing like that. It has become a post-colonial struggle over local ethnic borders, of which there have been so many examples (often waged by U.S. allies) since the fall of the Ottoman, British, French, and Soviet empires. As for absolute victory, not one American war since 1945 has ended that way. All have led to draws, compromises, long civil wars, or eventual outright defeat. The search for absolute victory in Ukraine points towards either unending war, or the Russian use of absolute weapons in response. Moreover, a central characteristic of both world wars — which is why they have been called world wars — is that every great power in the world was eventually drawn in on one side or the other in response to its own ambitions or fears.

Anatol Lieven, October 2020, Lieven is the director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of numerous books, including Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry, https://jacobin.com/2022/10/ukraine-russia-us-nuclear-war-putin

The second thing is the Ukrainian government — to what extent this is Volodymyr Zelensky’s own position, to what extent he is trapped by his own hard-liners is very difficult to say — but the Ukrainian government is increasingly adopting a position about the complete recovery of all the territory Russia has held since 2014, which no Russian government will accept. The attempt to recover Crimea or the naval base at Sevastopol would closely resemble an attempt by China to capture Hawaii and Pearl Harbor. It also has that kind of emotional resonance.

In the wake of the latest Ukrainian victories, we are now talking about 85 percent of Ukraine that, whatever happens — whatever happens — will now be fully independent and have the chance to move toward the West. The initial Russian plan to conquer Ukraine is over. The attempt to capture the whole of the east and south is over. This is a much more limited war. The US administration has an absolute duty to the American people and humanity, to play a part in — not, I fear now, a comprehensive peace settlement, because after these latest annexations, that’s not possible — but a ceasefire that will preserve Ukrainian independence, preserve the territorial integrity of by far the greater part of Ukraine, but not push the Russians so far that nuclear war becomes a possibility.

CONTINUES

The thing is we don’t know when or if Putin actually would use nuclear weapons. My sense is it would be only in the very, very, very last resort, because the damage to Russia’s image in the world and the damage to Russian troops and territory occupied by Russia would be colossal. Talking to Russian experts, the only scenario in which they find that plausible — though they could be wrong too — but they say it would be if Crimea itself would be in danger. We’ve drawn certain red lines for the Russians, and we need to draw red lines for the Ukrainians. I know that sounds immoral and so forth, but we are dealing with very serious dangers.

Nuclear war won’t remain limited. The use of one nuke escalates to the end of the world

BRANKO MARCETIC US officials are talking about responding to any future Russian nuclear attack on Ukraine with a conventional or even nuclear strike on Russia. What would that actually mean? ANATOL LIEVEN It would mean the end of civilization. As innumerable studies have shown, it would be exceptionally difficult in those circumstances to avoid escalation to total nuclear war. Even if we managed to avoid that, if the United States fired a nuclear missile into Russia, without any question whatsoever, Russia would send a missile into America. It depends on the scale of the missile and so forth, but even one missile would cause at minimum hundreds of thousands of American dead, more civilian dead than have ever died in the whole of US history. But as I say, it’s more likely at that point there would be full-scale nuclear exchange, and that would be the end of the world. Humanity as such would survive in extremely poor shape. America, Russia, Europe would not. Incidentally, the argument here that this is necessary because it’s up to the Ukrainians — at this point, what is the first country that would be completely destroyed? Has anyone thought of asking ordinary Ukrainians if that is a price they think worth paying? Not now to defend the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainian independence, because at this point those have been secured, by Ukrainian victories with Western support. What we are talking about now is pretty typical postcolonial battles over limited amounts of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine. Anyone who thinks it’s worth risking potentially billions of lives — and people, by the way, all over the world, have never been asked for their opinion on this — has lost touch with certain elements of basic reality and sanity but also certain aspects of basic morality. BRANKO MARCETIC Are people taking this seriously enough, or should they be more alarmed than they are right now? ANATOL LIEVEN During the Cold War, both sides, both US and Soviet leadership, took great care that wherever else they waged proxy wars against each other they would not do it in Europe, because there, the two sides were too close together, vital interests were involved, and so both Joseph Stalin and Dwight Eisenhower and Eisenhower’s successors avoided doing that. That was not, on our side, an easy moral decision. It meant not supporting the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechs and Slovaks in 1968. But the decision was made, and made by US presidents who were in no way soft on communism or national security, that the dangers were simply too great. Of course, it is very difficult morally and emotionally. What President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government have done in Ukraine is a crime, a tremendous crime against international law, a crime against the Ukrainian people, and massive suffering has resulted. But I think we should remember — and this used to be simply accepted on the Left in the United States and among liberals — that opposing Stalinist communism and its expansion in the Soviet Union in the first years of the Cold War, as drawn up in policy by George Kennan, in terms of philosophy by figures like Reinhold Niebuhr, did not generally lead to supporting Curtis Lemay or John Foster Dulles in a global struggle with communism or pushing for policies that could lead to nuclear war. In other words, we’ve already managed to contain Russia in Ukraine. The risk is that by going for total victory — and the Ukrainian leadership is now talking about expelling Russia from all the territories it’s held since 2014, which in the case of Crimea is a genuinely disputed territory in terms of the wishes of its population, in terms of its previous legal status — the question is: Are we going beyond containment to the search for total victory, which really would risk a nuclear war? And at that point, we have to remember how, sometimes in circumstances of much lower tension, just how close we came a few times during the Cold War — and of the reasons we didn’t go over the edge, which were that both leaders and in a few occasions junior officers in crucial moments hesitated, because they were well aware of the cataclysmic consequences and the responsibility that they personally bore. I am simply appalled by the lighthearted spirit with which some commentators now talk about the possibility of nuclear war. I mean, nuclear deterrence was created in democratic societies with the acceptance of democratic majorities for the defense of our societies against existential threats. The cases where it was contemplated using them in proxy wars — most notably by General Douglas MacArthur in Korea, when American soldiers on the ground were losing the war — when on earth was the last time that anyone sensible thought Gen. MacArthur was right and President Harry Truman was wrong when he vetoed that? Where are we going? What’s happened to our minds? BRANKO MARCETIC The counterargument is that by giving in to Putin here, we establish a dangerous precedent that might be worth the risk of nuclear war, to avoid other leaders using their nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip. ANATOL LIEVEN Of course they use it as a bargaining chip. That once again is why Eisenhower backed off the rollback of Eastern Europe, because the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. That is why no country — it’s not in any case a practical possibility — but why no country will ever dare directly challenge the United States on its own continent: because America has the capacity to destroy them. It’s why Israel has guaranteed its security with its nuclear deterrent. Pakistan has used their nuclear deterrent to deter what on a number of occasions would have been almost certainly an Indian attack on Pakistan in response to terrorist attacks. It’s a fact. It doesn’t depend on what we say or think or our intellectual argument. It is a fact that nuclear weapons, that every nuclear weapon involves the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, that the massive use of nuclear weapons would mean the end of civilization. It’s not a university debating point.

Forward force projection triggers violence, war and counterbalancing

Arrequin-Toft, 9-27, 22, In an increasingly digitally-mediated era of great power competition, it’s not asymmetry of power, but the asymmetry of vulnerability that is driving international political outcomes. For the United States, retrenchment from the Middle East might make sense. Israel’s increasingly far-right government has made it a more costly ally, and the entire world is shifting away from fossil fuels. But it hardly follows that any resources the United States gains from retrenchment will make it more secure. The stopping power of water only works, at best, for material threats. And the evolution of small, dispersed, inexpensive, and autonomous sea-going denial technologies call this into question. In a non-material sense, domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns have caused citizens worldwide to lose faith in the democratic process. Finally, the United States’ derogation from its core principles—along with two unnecessary wars in the Middle East and a force-first foreign policy—has hurt its global reputation, increased the number of its adversaries, and enabled them to target U.S. vulnerabilities, In the Digital Age, Retrenchment May Not Make America Safer, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland-when-great-power-competition-meets-digital-world/digital-age-retrenchment-may-not-make?page=0%2C1

In her forthcoming book Dying by the Sword: The Militarization of U.S. Foreign Policy, political scientist Monica Duffy Toft, the director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts Fletcher School and co-author of a new dataset of U.S. interventions since 1776, records a dramatic increase in the pace of U.S. military activities since 2000 even though the United States faced no existential material threats. Toft calls this shift to a “force first” U.S. foreign policy “kinetic diplomacy,” and recent Pew Research polls show that one consequence is that the United States is now ranked as a greater threat to world peace than China, Iran, and even Russia. To be blunt then, U.S. kinetic diplomacy has not made the United States more secure or prosperous. Instead, it has flattened U.S. national prosperity, intensified the polarization of domestic politics, proliferated enemies, and given them powerful incentives to innovate around U.S. strengths while exploiting vulnerabilities.

The water won’t protect us because (1) navies; (2) cyberwar

Retrenchment advocates argue that the United States would now be better served by allowing the Middle East to solve its own problems and shifting the resources saved to the growing menace of China in the Pacific. Others go further and argue that the United States can afford to withdraw completely from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East because of something the political scientist John Mearsheimer labeled “the stopping power of water.” That’s a dangerously material-centric conception of power.

Winners, Losers, and Non-Material Balancing

The basic model of conflict-of-interest resolution goes something like this: (1) we clash; (2) there’s a winner and a loser; and (3) the loser attempts reforms aimed at deterring, not losing, or winning future clashes. In traditional international relations theory, this is called “balancing” and there are two ways a weaker actor might increase its likelihood of a better outcome in a future clash. First, it can balance internally by redistributing domestic resources to increase its power. Second, it can balance externally by wooing other actors into an alliance. But all of this presupposes that the “power” we’re talking about is material power: the power to fight and win wars. What if you’re Canada or Belgium though? Internal balancing won’t work unless you’re willing and able to acquire a nuclear deterrent. And external balancing is a terrific idea in principle but it didn’t help Poland in 1939 when its allies, France and Great Britain, immediately declared war on Germany but then stood idly by while the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany destroyed it.

The stopping power of water argument falls into the same materialist trap. Understanding that losers can successfully balance in non-material ways—even lethal non-material ways—is key to understanding why the U.S. Navy alone cannot secure the United States today in the way it might have just after World War II.

First, recent advances in sea-going autonomous weapons, loitering munitions, and hypersonic missiles have created significant and relatively cheap capabilities to close sea lanes of communication. To survive as a great power, the United States needs to ship things to and from its shores. The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard may be up to the task of protecting American commerce for some time but the window is closing. The fate of heavy platforms such as tanks as compared to small, lethal, mobile denial weapons like Javelin anti-tank missiles may be analogous to what’s to come in naval engagements.

Second, U.S. adversaries have found ways to overcome the stopping power of water and inflict severe damage to U.S. national security and prosperity. The 9/11 terrorist attacks weren’t stopped by water but supporters of the argument would add that the attack wasn’t existential since it didn’t threaten conquest and occupation. However, the attacks gravely wounded the United States in non-material terms. As David Kilcullen noted in his book Accidental Guerrilla, Washington’s reaction, derogation from “a nation of laws and not men,” threatened to destroy the American experiment.

Today we can add that cyberattacks in the form of disinformation campaigns, accelerated by U.S. social media companies like Google and Meta, have severely undermined trust in democratic systems worldwide. Few Americans are aware, for example, that in 2010, Facebook ran a “social contagion experiment” to see whether it could increase voter turnout in the U.S. midterm elections. It graphically altered the “I voted” feature of a random sample of sixty-one million of its voting-age users and found that by adding tiny images of a user’s friends, those users were much more likely to vote. The “tiny faces” banner was shown only once but it resulted in a turnout increase of 300,000 voters. The margin of Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral college victory over Hillary Clinton came down to 70,000 votes in three states. Even assuming that Russia’s disinformation campaign in support of Trump only affected the outcome by 1 percent (and George W. Bush won Florida by .01 percent), that would have been enough to tilt the election to Trump. The United Kingdom’s referendum on European Union membership, another target of a Russian disinformation campaign, was also a close vote. So whether one supported or opposed Trump’s election or Brexit, what’s at stake is faith in free and fair elections in which every citizen has an equal chance to vote. Water can’t stop this.

In an increasingly digitally-mediated era of great power competition, it’s not asymmetry of power, but the asymmetry of vulnerability that is driving international political outcomes. For the United States, retrenchment from the Middle East might make sense. Israel’s increasingly far-right government has made it a more costly ally, and the entire world is shifting away from fossil fuels. But it hardly follows that any resources the United States gains from retrenchment will make it more secure. The stopping power of water only works, at best, for material threats. And the evolution of small, dispersed, inexpensive, and autonomous sea-going denial technologies call this into question. In a non-material sense, domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns have caused citizens worldwide to lose faith in the democratic process. Finally, the United States’ derogation from its core principles—along with two unnecessary wars in the Middle East and a force-first foreign policy—has hurt its global reputation, increased the number of its adversaries, and enabled them to target U.S. vulnerabilities.

Massive military spending useless, need to focus resources at home

Andrew Bacevich, 9-14, 22, Andrew Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His latest book, co-edited with Danny Sjursen, is Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars. In November, his new Dispatch book, On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, will be published, Will the U.S. Learn Anything from Putin’s Disastrous Invasion, https://countercurrents.org/2022/09/will-the-u-s-learn-anything-from-putins-disastrous-invasion/

Implicit in this critique, voiced by self-proclaimed American experts, is the suggestion that, if the Russian army had paid more attention to how U.S. forces deal with such matters, they would have fared better in Ukraine. That they don’t — and perhaps can’t — comes as good news for Russia’s enemies, of course. By implication, Russian military ineptitude obliquely affirms the military mastery of the United States. We define the standard of excellence to which others can only aspire. Reducing War to a Formula All of which begs a larger question the national security establishment remains steadfastly oblivious to: If jointness, combined arms tactics, flexible leadership, and responsive logistics hold the keys to victory, why haven’t American forces — supposedly possessing such qualities in abundance — been able to win their own equivalents of the Ukraine War? After all, Russia has only been stuck in Ukraine for six months, while the U.S. was stuck in Afghanistan for 20 years and still has troops in Iraq almost two decades after its disastrous invasion of that country. To rephrase the question: Why does explaining the Russian underperformance in Ukraine attract so much smug commentary here, while American military underperformance gets written off? Perhaps written off is too harsh. After all, when the U.S. military fails to meet expectations, there are always some who will hasten to point the finger at civilian leaders for screwing up. Certainly, this was the case with the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Critics were quick to pin the blame on President Biden for that debacle, while the commanders who had presided over the war there for those 20 years escaped largely unscathed. Indeed, some of those former commanders like retired general and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, aka “King David,” were eagerly sought after by the media as Kabul fell. So, if the U.S. military performance since the Global War on Terror was launched more than two decades ago rates as, to put it politely, a disappointment — and that would be my view — it might be tempting to lay responsibility at the feet of the four presidents, eight secretaries of defense (including two former four-star generals), and the various deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, and ambassadors who designed and implemented American policy in those years. In essence, this becomes an argument for sustained generational incompetence. There’s a flipside to that argument, however. It would tag the parade of generals who presided over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and lesser conflicts like those in Libya, Somalia, and Syria) as uniformly not up to the job — another argument for generational incompetence. Members of the once-dominant Petraeus fan club might cite him as a notable exception. Yet, with the passage of time, King David’s achievements as general-in-chief first in Baghdad and then in Kabul have lost much of their luster. The late “Stormin’ Norman” Schwarzkopf and General Tommy Franks, their own “victories” diminished by subsequent events, might sympathize. Allow me to suggest another explanation, however, for the performance gap that afflicts the twenty-first-century U.S. military establishment. The real problem hasn’t been arrogant, ill-informed civilians or generals who lack the right stuff or suffer from bad luck. It’s the way Americans, especially those wielding influence in national security circles, including journalists, think tankers, lobbyists, corporate officials in the military-industrial complex, and members of Congress, have come to think of war as an attractive, affordable means of solving problems. Military theorists have long emphasized that by its very nature, war is fluid, elusive, capricious, and permeated with chance and uncertainty. Practitioners tend to respond by suggesting that, though true, such descriptions are not helpful. They prefer to conceive of war as essentially knowable, predictable, and eminently useful — the Swiss Army knife of international politics. Hence, the tendency, among both civilian and military officials in Washington, not to mention journalists and policy intellectuals, to reduce war to a phrase or formula (or better yet to a set of acronyms), so that the entire subject can be summarized in a slick 30-minute slide presentation. That urge to simplify — to boil things down to their essence — is anything but incidental. In Washington, the avoidance of complexity and ambiguity facilitates marketing (that is, shaking down Congress for money). To cite one small example of this, consider a recent military document entitled “Army Readiness and Modernization in 2022,” produced by propagandists at the Association of the United States Army, purports to describe where the U.S. Army is headed. It identifies “eight cross-functional teams” meant to focus on “six priorities.” If properly resourced and vigorously pursued, these teams and priorities will ensure, it claims, that “the army maintains all-domain overmatch against all adversaries in future fights.” Set aside the uncomfortable fact that, when it counted last year in Kabul, American forces demonstrated anything but all-domain overmatch. Still, what the Army’s leadership aims to do between now and 2035 is create “a transformed multi-domain army” by fielding a plethora of new systems, described in a blizzard of acronyms: ERCA, PrSM, LRHW, OMVF, MPF, RCV, AMPV, FVL, FLRAA, FARA, BLADE, CROWS, MMHEL, and so on, more or less ad infinitum. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Army’s plan, or rather vision, for its future avoids the slightest mention of costs. Nor does it consider potential complications — adversaries equipped with nuclear weapons, for example — that might interfere with its aspirations to all-domain overmatch. Yet the document deserves our attention as an exquisite example of Pentagon-think. It provides the Army’s preferred answer to a question of nearly existential importance — not “How can the Army help keep Americans safe?” but “How can the Army maintain, and ideally increase, its budget?” Hidden inside that question is an implicit assumption that sustaining even the pretense of keeping Americans safe requires a military of global reach that maintains a massive global presence. Given the spectacular findings of the James Webb Telescope, perhaps galactic will one day replace global in the Pentagon’s lexicon. In the meantime, while maintaining perhaps 750 military bases on every continent except Antarctica, that military rejects out of hand the proposition that defending Americans where they live — that is, within the boundaries of the 50 states comprising the United States — can suffice to define its overarching purpose. And here we arrive at the crux of the matter: militarized globalism, the Pentagon’s preferred paradigm for basic policy, has become increasingly unaffordable. With the passage of time, it’s also become beside the point. Americans simply don’t have the wallet to satisfy budgetary claims concocted in the Pentagon, especially those that ignore the most elemental concerns we face, including disease, drought, fire, floods, and sea-level rise, not to mention averting the potential collapse of our constitutional order. All-domain overmatch is of doubtful relevance to such threats. To provide for the safety and well-being of our republic, we don’t need further enhancements to jointness, combined arms tactics, flexible leadership, and responsive logistics. Instead, we need an entirely different approach to national security. Come Home, America, Before It’s Too Late Given the precarious state of American democracy, aptly described by President Biden in his recent address in Philadelphia, our most pressing priority is repairing the damage to our domestic political fabric, not engaging in another round of “great power competition” dreamed up by fevered minds in Washington. Put simply, the Constitution is more important than the fate of Taiwan. I apologize: I know that I have blasphemed. But the times suggest that we weigh the pros and cons of blasphemy. With serious people publicly warning about the possible approach of civil war and many of our far-too-well armed fellow citizens welcoming the prospect, perhaps the moment has come to reconsider the taken-for-granted premises that have sustained U.S. national security policy since the immediate aftermath of World War II. More blasphemy! Did I just advocate a policy of isolationism? Heaven forfend! What I would settle for instead is a modicum of modesty and prudence, along with a lively respect for (rather than infatuation with) war. Here is the unacknowledged bind in which the Pentagon has placed itself — and the rest of us: by gearing up to fight (however ineffectively) anywhere against any foe in any kind of conflict, it finds itself prepared to fight nowhere in particular. Hence, the urge to extemporize on the fly, as has been the pattern in every conflict of ours since the Vietnam War. On occasion, things work out, as in the long-forgotten, essentially meaningless 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada. More often than not, however, they don’t, no matter how vigorously our generals and our troops apply the principles of jointness, combined arms, leadership, and logistics. Americans spend a lot of time these days trying to figure out what makes Vladimir Putin tick. I don’t pretend to know, nor do I really much care. I would say this, however: Putin’s plunge into Ukraine confirms that he learned nothing from the folly of post-9/11 U.S. military policy. Will we, in our turn, learn anything from Putin’s folly? Don’t count on it.

The liberal international order and the academic enterprise that supports it promotes racist imperialism driven by capitalism.

Mampillly, September-October 2022, ZACHARIAH MAMPILLY is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College and is an affiliate faculty member at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a co-author of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change, The Du Bois Doctrine: Race and the American Century, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/web-du-bois-doctrine-race-america-century

It’s hard to argue that Du Bois, perhaps the most celebrated Black intellectual of all time, is underrecognized. His work remains a standard on syllabi across disciplines; prizes from academic associations bear his name. Despite the acclaim, however, Du Bois remains underappreciated—especially when it comes to his thinking on international politics. For a time, Du Bois was a regular contributor to Foreign Affairs, publishing five essays during the interwar period on topics ranging from European colonialism in Africa to the United States’ role in the League of Nations. But Du Bois was an exception in this regard: during his lifetime, this magazine published very few Black voices—and its founding involved acquiring an existing journal that had occasionally trafficked in the racist pseudoscience that shaped the early years of international relations theory. Then, during World War II and amid the hysterical anticommunism of the early Cold War, Foreign Affairs joined the rest of the white American establishment in casting out Du Bois; partly as a result, his contributions to the field have received little attention from scholars in recent decades. Du Bois is rightly still venerated for his work on civil rights. But the erasure of his contributions to debates on U.S. foreign policy and international order represents an enormous loss. By discarding him, the American foreign policy establishment robbed itself of one of the twentieth century’s most perceptive and prescient critics of capitalism and imperialism. His now forgotten texts on world politics prefigured many of the ideas that later shaped international relations theory. They brim with insights on the importance of race, the effect of domestic politics on foreign policy, the limits of liberal institutions, and the relationship between political economy and world order. Revisiting them today reveals how racism marred the dawn of the so-called American century and the liberal internationalism that drove it—and the role of establishment institutions (including this magazine) in that history. And because many of the ills that Du Bois diagnosed in the imperial and Cold War orders persist in today’s putatively liberal international order, rediscovering his work serves more than a purely historical purpose. A better order demands a more complete reckoning, and restoring Du Bois’s rightful place in the international relations canon would be a step toward that goal. STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING? Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and his lifespan overlaps almost exactly with the Jim Crow era, a period during which Black Americans faced severe restrictions on their ability to participate in political, economic, and social life. Du Bois’s youth also coincided with a period of domestic expansion after the Civil War, as the U.S. government, newly triumphant over the single greatest threat to its sovereignty, sent its armies west to put down various indigenous insurgencies. The enlargement of the U.S. military that accompanied the pacification of rebellious southern whites and the defeat of Native American resistance did not recede once those projects were complete. Instead, the colonial projects that European countries were pursuing in Asia and Africa galvanized an envious United States to carve out its own colonies. In 1898, a year before Du Bois published his first major sociological study, The Philadelphia Negro, the United States’ imperial ambitions produced the annexation of Hawaii and the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as spoils of the Spanish-American War. At around that time, as the United States began to emerge as a leading global power, modern international relations theory started to take shape. As the political scientist Robert Vitalis has written, “The central challenge defining the new field of ‘imperial relations’ was the efficient political administration and race development of subject peoples.” Most early theorists, such as John Hobson, Alleyne Ireland, and Paul Reinsch, saw as major concerns two interlinked subjects: first, the question of whether the United States should secure a global empire in the manner of its European rivals, and second, the role of race in U.S. foreign policy. Writing in Political Science Quarterly, Hobson, for example, argued that the clear biological advantages enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxon race not merely justified colonial occupation but demanded it: “It is desirable that the earth should be peopled, governed and developed as far as possible by the races which can do their work best, that is, by the races of highest ‘social efficiency’; these races must assert their right by conquering, ousting, subjugating or extinguishing races of lower social efficiency.” Du Bois remains underappreciated—especially when it comes to his thinking on international politics. Today, many scholars dismiss the imperialist, racist logics propounded by the founders of modern international relations theory as merely reflecting the prejudices of an unenlightened era: sins not egregious enough to diminish the value of the sinners’ good works. Vitalis, however, maintains that the origins of modern international relations theory cannot be cleaved from the junk race science and dubious anthropology that were, at the very least, present at its creation. The same could be said about this magazine. In 1922, the Council on Foreign Relations launched Foreign Affairs after acquiring the future publication rights for an existing quarterly called the Journal of International Relations—which, until just a few years earlier, had been known as the Journal of Race Development. Established to be what its editor, George Blakeslee, described as a “forum for the discussion of the problems which relate to the progress of races and states generally considered backward,” the Journal of Race Development published plenty of quackery: for example, articles that considered whether white people could adapt to the tropics and that explored the evolutionary origins of blond hair. But it was hardly a bastion of white supremacism. Indeed, one of its most prominent contributors was Du Bois; in one contribution in 1917, he argued that World War I had its origins in colonial exploitation. And when the publication changed its title, dropping “race development” in favor of “international relations,” Du Bois was skeptical: “I am much more interested in the old name than in the new name of your journal,” he wrote to Blakeslee. And despite Blakeslee’s interest in publishing him, Du Bois did not contribute to the short-lived Journal of International Relations. But a few years later, after Foreign Affairs had launched, Du Bois submitted an article titled “Worlds of Color,” which revisited his concept of a global “color line” in light of the events of World War I. In a letter to Du Bois accepting the piece, the magazine’s managing editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, praised “the admirable restraint with which you have expressed yourself.” The essay was published in 1925, a quarter century after Du Bois had initially developed the concept, and it garnered a good deal of attention. In that piece and four others that he published in Foreign Affairs over the following two decades, Du Bois offered a real-time assessment of the emerging world order, decrying the yawning gap between its proponents’ putatively liberal values and the order’s actual consequences for the colonized world. “BLACK AND POOR IN A RICH, WHITE WORLD” One of the central questions that motivated Du Bois was why the white working class in the United States refused to align with formerly enslaved Black Americans to challenge their common oppression. His solution to this puzzle rested on his views about the nature of race and the tensions between democracy and capitalism. Unlike most of his white contemporaries, Du Bois did not see race as an immutable characteristic but as a social construct. “Humanity is mixed to its bones,” he wrote in a 1935 article for Foreign Affairs. Race was not a product of primordial competition among different groups of humans but a useful fiction of sorts, employed by economic elites to justify hierarchies that served their interests. “The medieval world had no real race problems,” he noted in the same article. “Its human problems were those of nationality and culture and religion, and it was mainly as the new economy of an expanding population demanded a laboring class that this class tended . . . to be composed of members of alien races.” And later, writing on European colonialism, he argued, “The belief that racial and color differences made exploitation of colonies necessary and justifiable was too tempting to withstand. As a matter of fact, the opposite was the truth; namely, that the profit from exploitation was the main reason for the belief in race difference.” Du Bois saw this dynamic clearly at work in the United States, where white elites avoided economic redistribution and retained political power by offering white workers “a public and psychological wage” in the form of control over police forces, access to politicians, and flattering media portrayals. But white American elites did not rely solely on such tactics to secure the allegiance of the white working class: beginning after the collapse of Reconstruction in the late 1870s, global capitalism and imperialism improved the living conditions of poorer white Americans by providing resources for their segregated schools, parks, and neighborhoods, all without meaningfully transferring power to them. In this way, Du Bois argued in his seminal 1935 work, Black Reconstruction, white elites in the United States had created a double proletariat divided by a racial line. On one side were poor and working-class whites, afforded some material gains but no genuine social mobility or political power. On the other were Black Americans, bereft of any hope for either economic or political gain. Through imperial war and capitalism, the United States—in concert with the European powers—had created a global system for upholding white supremacy. In the interwar period, Du Bois initially placed his faith in the emergence of international institutions to redress these inequities. In 1921, he presented a petition to the newly created League of Nations on behalf of the Pan-African Congress, concluding that the league might spark a “revolution for the Negro race.” But over the next decade, his views soured as the league failed to live up to its liberal ideals and became a tool of the superpowers. The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution In a 1933 Foreign Affairs essay on Liberia, he detailed an unholy alliance between the Firestone corporation, the league, and the U.S. government. Despite a league-commissioned investigation that found that Firestone, in connivance with Liberian elites, had used forced labor, the United States sided with the company against the league’s plan for reform. The result was Liberia’s indebtedness and loss of sovereignty. As Washington debated whether to increase its military involvement to resolve the consequent crisis in Liberia, Du Bois asked, scathingly: “Are we starting the United States Army toward Liberia to guarantee the Firestone Company’s profits in a falling rubber market?” Long before such charges became a staple of left-wing criticisms of American hegemony, Du Bois foresaw the troubling effects of commingling U.S. military power with private interests and the ease with which major powers could employ international organizations to hide their imperialist agendas under a veneer of legitimacy. The exploitation that Du Bois detailed in his report on Liberia was something of a blueprint for how, long after the end of direct colonialism, global superpowers would use debt to guarantee the subservience of countries in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world. By the time he published his Foreign Affairs piece on Liberia, Du Bois had come to see the promise of Western liberal internationalism as hollow. “Liberia is not faultless,” he wrote. “She lacks training, experience and thrift. But her chief crime is to be black and poor in a rich, white world; and in precisely that portion of the world where color is ruthlessly exploited as a foundation for American and European wealth. The success of Liberia as a Negro republic would be a blow to the whole colonial slave labor system.” In his final essay for Foreign Affairs, in 1943, Du Bois rejected the idea that World War II was a fight between liberal and illiberal powers, arguing that it was competition for colonies that produced the fighting instead. “Is it a white man’s war?” he asked, rhetorically, on behalf of Africans and Asians. And by the time of the San Francisco Conference that birthed the United Nations in 1945, which he attended on behalf of the NAACP, Du Bois’s skepticism of the emerging liberal order had calcified. Afterward, he wrote a letter to Armstrong, who had become the editor of Foreign Affairs in 1928 (and would stay in the position until 1972), pitching a critique of the nascent organization. In his estimation, the conference “took steps to prevent further wars” but “did not go nearly far enough in facing realistically the greatest potential cause of war, the colonial system.” The magazine rejected the pitch, and Du Bois would never again publish in Foreign Affairs. AGAINST EMPIRE, FOR DEMOCRACY In exploring the relationship between race relations inside the United States and the country’s quest for power in the international system, Du Bois anticipated the ways in which, in the mid-twentieth century, scholars of international relations would increasingly focus on domestic politics to explain countries’ foreign policies. And he applied this lens to cases besides the United States. In trying to understand the costs of European competition for control over Africa, for example, Du Bois argued that domestic factors would undermine the clear military advantage European countries had over their colonial subjects. As a keen observer of emergent anticolonial struggles in India and elsewhere, Du Bois deduced how the occupation of foreign lands would engender resistance among the colonized. But Du Bois also saw another dilemma that imperialism created for European countries: colonial domination abroad often required the sacrifice of democracy at home. Imperialism inevitably led to increased racial and economic inequality at home: military adventures and opportunities for extracting natural resources empowered the capitalist class (and its favored segments of the underclass) and stoked racial prejudice that justified further interventions in foreign lands. As Du Bois put it in “Worlds of Color” in 1925: “One looks on present France and her African shadow, then, as standing at the parting of tremendous ways; one way leads toward democracy for black as well as white—a thorny way made more difficult by the organized greed of the imperial profit-takers within and without the nation; the other road is the way of the white world, and of its contradictions and dangers English colonies may tell.” Du Bois’s increasing engagement with international politics also shaped his evolving views of the United States and its racial and class hierarchies. Early in his career, Du Bois developed the concept of “the talented tenth,” the idea that marginalized groups require their own internal elite to pull the rest of the group out of poverty. But his study of European colonialism in Africa forced him to reassess his faith in minority elites as a vehicle for racial uplift. In Liberia, Du Bois had initially supported Firestone’s investment as a way to buttress the legitimacy of the ruling Americo-Liberian community. But by the 1940s, he had grown disenchanted with the idea of the talented tenth, warning that it would empower “a group of selfish, self-indulgent, well-to-do men.” This change in his thinking dovetailed with the fact that, in his personal life, he was becoming increasingly estranged from Black elites in the United States, who he felt had not supported him during his investigation by the United States government. Du Bois argued that Washington’s quest for a liberal order could never be reconciled with a Jim Crow system at home. Eventually, Du Bois embraced the strategy of “assigning transformative responsibilities to the international proletariat,” as the political scientist Adolph Reed has put it. His change in thinking was reinforced by his interpretation of how international capitalism was developing: instead of a tool to uplift the darker races, it was the cause of their exploitation. As a result, long before he fully embraced communism, he had moved toward a form of democratic socialism. Yet even as he developed a theory of working-class agency, Du Bois could never fully shake his faith in the idea of a chosen few leading the way toward emancipation or in the potential for global cooperation. But it would not be Western elites, with their attachment to racial and economic hierarchies, who would lead the way. Rather, he believed, it was the rising powers of Asia, as well as the Soviet Union, that would upend the global system of white supremacy and liberate Black Americans. This view is palpably present in one of his most personal works, the novel Dark Princess, which Du Bois wrote in 1928. Inspired by his participation in the First Universal Races Congress in 1911 and in other forums, such as the League Against Imperialism in 1927, Dark Princess tells the story of Matthew Townes, an African American medical student in self-imposed exile in Germany, where Du Bois had conducted some of his graduate studies. An obvious surrogate for Du Bois, Townes encounters elites from multiple African and Asian countries who seek to overthrow colonial rule but whose own prejudices prevent them from recognizing the potential of the Black working class in the United States. One of these characters is the Indian princess of the novel’s title, who overcomes her prejudices and commits a form of class suicide, giving birth to a child fathered by Townes. Du Bois positions the child as a messiah figure who will someday rescue the oppressed darker races of the world. Because of their historic prejudices, Europe and the United States—as well as rich elites elsewhere—were denying not only themselves but all of humanity of the potential benefits of lifting up marginalized groups. WHAT DU BOIS SAW That Du Bois died a member of the Communist Party is no secret. But his journey to the left took decades. Du Bois first encountered socialism as a student in Germany in the 1890s, but it was not until the 1930s that he began to seriously engage with leftist politics. Given Du Bois’s stature as the predominant Black intellectual of his time, his leftward drift was a source of suspicion for the U.S. government. The FBI began investigating Du Bois in 1942, following his visit to imperial Japan, where he delivered a speech praising the country as a potential friend to Black Americans. Despite concluding that there was “no evidence of subversive activity,” the FBI continued to investigate Du Bois for the rest of his life, derailing his career and strengthening his anti-Americanism. During the McCarthy era in the early 1950s, U.S. authorities arrested Du Bois and charged him with being a secret Soviet agent after he circulated a petition calling for a ban on nuclear weapons. At his trial, a federal judge summarily acquitted Du Bois as soon as the prosecution rested its case, citing a lack of evidence. But the controversy rendered Du Bois persona non grata—and penniless. The State Department refused to issue him a passport in 1952, a harsh blow for a man who had spent his entire adult life visiting and studying foreign countries. In 1957, Du Bois sought to regain his passport to attend Nkrumah’s inauguration. Du Bois sent a personal appeal to Vice President Richard Nixon, who was scheduled to attend on behalf of the United States. But the State Department denied the request. The following year, the Supreme Court declared the policy of denying passports to suspected communists unconstitutional. Du Bois secured a new passport—although, in Ghana just a few years later, he would be unable to renew it—and immediately embarked on a ten-week trip to China, where he met with both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Having last visited the country in 1936, Du Bois was amazed by China’s progress, praising its rising industrial prowess and calling the changes nothing short of a “miracle.” The success of American democracy required that political and economic equality be extended to all people around the world. Du Bois’s admiration for authoritarians such as Nkrumah and Mao, and his fulsome praise for the Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin were inconsistent with his lifelong support for democracy. But his unfortunate embrace of such figures arguably represents a misapplication of his well-founded belief that democracy was incompatible with racial and economic inequality. His decades-long persecution at the hands of the United States also fed his misgivings about Western liberalism’s ability to foster racial and economic equality. In his writings on international politics, Du Bois argued that the domestic could never be divorced from the global, and that Washington’s quest for a liberal order could never be reconciled with a Jim Crow system at home. Although American society has changed since Du Bois’s time, that fundamental tension has never been resolved: from the Cold War to the “war on terror” and beyond, the United States has cast itself as a champion of freedom and equality, despite never meeting its own standards in its treatment of American citizens and despite routinely enabling and empowering authoritarians and other enemies of liberal values when doing so has served U.S. economic or national security interests, as defined by establishment elites. Realists often excuse or even demand such inconsistency and hypocrisy, suggesting that liberals are naive to believe that domestic values should guide foreign policy. Meanwhile, hawks of all stripes—from neoconservatives to liberal interventionists—refuse to acknowledge the inconsistency and hypocrisy at all, claim they are transient aberrations, or insist that they don’t really matter. By linking his devastating insights into the realities of American apartheid with his analysis of Western imperialism, Du Bois charted a unique course through this perennial debate. His work upends the liberal fantasy of the United States’ inevitable progress toward a “more perfect union” that would inspire a just global order and gives the lie to the realist fantasy that how the country behaves internationally can be separated from domestic politics. For Du Bois, the success of democracy in the United States required that political and economic equality be extended not only to U.S. citizens but to all people around the world. It is an uncompromising and inspiring vision; embracing it cost Du Bois dearly. But it may be just what the country needs as it faces the waning of American imperium

Russia will never accept the LIO

Haas, September-October 2022, RICHARD HAASS is President of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the forthcoming The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens., The Dangerous Decade, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/dangerous-decade-foreign-policy-world-crisis-richard-haass

This failure is especially noticeable when it comes to Russia. In the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the juxtaposition of vast American power and staggering Russian weakness made it seem unlikely that, three decades later, world affairs would once again be dominated by hostility between the Kremlin and Western capitals. Debates rage about how this came to pass, with profound disagreements over how much blame the United States deserves and how much should be attributed to Putin or to Russian political culture more broadly. But whatever the cause, it is difficult to deny that six U.S. presidential administrations have little to show for all their efforts to build a successful post–Cold War relationship with Russia. Today, under Putin, Russian behavior is fundamentally at odds with the most basic tenets of international order. Putin shows no interest in integrating Russia into the prevailing order but rather seeks to ignore it when he can—and when he cannot, to undermine or defeat it. He has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to employ brutal military force against civilian populations in Europe and the Middle East. Putin’s regime does not respect the borders and sovereignty of other countries, as witnessed with its ongoing invasion of Ukraine and attempt to annex parts of the country.

Epkskopis, 9-5, 22, Why Gorbachev’s Dream for Russia Failed, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-gorbachev%E2%80%99s-dream-russia-failed-204614

Gorbachev, eulogized in the West as a visionary and “great emancipator,” is generally regarded by Russian public opinion as a fatally misguided idealist at best and a “traitor” at worst. “He is a traitor, not a General Secretary. He destroyed the state, a precedent for betrayal from above. It is synonymous with betrayal,” said Nikolai Kolomeitsev, the first deputy head of the Russian Communist Party, following Gorbachev’s death. “I am convinced that the time will come when the truth about Gorbachev will prevail in Russia and the world, and we will all be horrified [by it],” stated Russian politician Sergei Baburin. “He was a terrible person who not only betrayed not only his country but his civilization.” The Kremlin has not joined hawkish Russian commentators and politicians in openly condemning Gorbachev, instead striking a more ambivalent tone. “Gorbachev gave an impulse for ending the Cold War and he sincerely wanted to believe that it would be over and an eternal romance would start between the renewed Soviet Union and the collective West,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “This romanticism failed to materialize. The bloodthirsty nature of our opponents has come to light, and it’s good that we realized that in time.” It was reported earlier this week that Putin is planning to refuse Gorbachev a formal state funeral in what Russian and Western media outlets speculated would be a final, stinging rebuke of his legacy. The Russian president opted for a less confrontational course, approving a semi-state funeral ceremony in the Pillar Hall of the House of the Unions near the Kremlin on Saturday. Putin, who will not attend the ceremony, privately laid flowers at Gorbachev’s coffin on Tuesday. Yet Putin has repudiated Gorbachev’s legacy in a much more profound way: not in word, but in deed. “What Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev did is all destroyed. Gorbachev’s reforms—to zero, to ashes, to smoke,” Russian opposition journalist Alexei Venediktov told Russian Forbes magazine in 2020. “I can tell you that Gorbachev is upset, of course, he understands. This was his life’s work. Freedom—this was Gorbachev’s work.” Gorbachev’s ambitious foreign and domestic reforms were premised on the conviction that there is a place for Russia in the grand project of a “common European home.” But the intoxicating chiliasm of the 1990s soon gave way to a more familiar set of mutual suspicions, historical grievances, and conflicts of interest. It became increasingly clear to lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic that Russia could not be integrated into the liberal international order as a post-Soviet nation-state. By the same token, the Kremlin concluded that the liberal international order as it is currently constituted poses an existential threat to Russia’s statehood. The Gorbachovian vision of a unified Europe stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” has been dashed against the rocks; in its place is the Kremlin’s concept of a “Russian World” that stands in diametrical opposition to the “Collective West.” The Ukraine War, described by NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg as the most dangerous moment for Europe since World War II, marks the most visceral rejection yet of the post-Cold War world envisioned by Gorbachev. It is a forceful reaffirmation of the very same imperial identity that Gorbachev believed Russia, if encouraged by a prudent and forward-looking West to act on its better instincts, could outgrow. Gorbachev’s contemporaries triumphantly theorized that his tectonic reforms heralded the “end of history,” or the undisputed hegemony of Western liberal democracy. Instead, the Soviet collapse opened a new chapter in the global great-power struggle for supremacy that may well turn out to be bloodier and more destructive than the last.

Russia and China aligned against the LIO

What is certain is that Xi and other Chinese leaders seem to assume that China will pay little if any cost for its aggressive behavior, given that others are too dependent on its exports or on access to its market. So far, this assumption has been borne out. Yet a conflict between the United States and China no longer seems like a remote possibility. Meanwhile, as Washington’s relations with Moscow and Beijing grow tenser, Russia and China are growing closer. They share an animosity to a U.S.-led international system that they see as inhospitable to their political systems at home and their ambitions abroad. Increasingly, they are willing to act on their objections and do so in tandem. Unlike 40 or 50 years ago, it is the United States that now finds itself the odd man out when it comes to triangular diplomacy.

Promoting the LIO undermines global cooperation on key issues, democracy vs the world fails [should focus on climate change]

There is another reason for prioritizing the promotion of order over the promotion of democracy—one that has nothing to do directly with Russia and China. Efforts to build international order, be it for the purpose of resisting aggression and proliferation or combating climate change and infectious disease, have broad support among nondemocracies. A world order premised on respect for borders and common efforts on global challenges is preferable to a liberal world order premised on neither. That so many countries have not participated in sanctioning Russia is revealing. Framing the crisis in Ukraine as one of democracy versus authoritarianism has, not surprisingly, fallen flat among many illiberal leaders. The same logic applies to the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, which the Biden administration is belatedly working to repair: a preference for democracy and human rights is one thing, but a foreign policy based on such a preference in a world defined by geopolitics and global challenges is unwise and unsustainable.

A similarly clear-eyed view should determine how Washington approaches cooperation on global challenges. Multilateralism is far preferable to unilateralism, but narrow multilateralism is far more promising than universal or broad forms of collective action that rarely succeed; witness, for example, the course of climate-change diplomacy and trade. Better to pursue realistic partnerships of the like-minded, which can bring a degree of order to the world, including specific domains of limited order, if not quite world order. Here, too, realism must trump idealism.

This observation has direct implications for dealing with climate change. Climate change poses an existential threat, and although a global response would be best, geopolitics will continue to make such collaboration difficult. The United States and its partners should emphasize narrower diplomatic approaches, but progress on mitigation is more likely to stem from technological breakthroughs than from diplomacy. That owes not to a lack of possible policy tools but rather to a lack of political support in the United States and other countries for those measures or for trade pacts that could encourage mitigation by imposing taxes or tariffs on goods derived from fossil fuels or manufactured through energy-inefficient processes. As a result, the goal of adapting to climate change should receive more attention and resources, as should exploration of the technological possibility of reversing it.

No international cooperation on climate now

Among other global challenges, climate change has arguably received the most international attention, and rightly so—yet there is little to show for it. Unless the world makes rapid progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions during this decade, it will be much more difficult to preserve and protect life as we know it on this planet. But diplomatic efforts have come up short and show no sign of improving. Individual countries determine their own climate goals, and there is no price for setting them low or not meeting them. Generating post-pandemic economic growth and locking in energy supplies—a concern heightened by the war in Ukraine and the disruptions it has yielded in the energy sector—have increased countries’ focus on energy security at the expense of climate considerations. Once again, a traditional geopolitical concern has collided with a new problem, making it harder to contend with either one.

China dominance of Taiwan would kill US leadership and cause an economic shock

Washington and its partners will also need to respond forcefully if China moves against Taiwan. Allowing China to capture the island would have massive ramifications: every American ally and partner would reconsider its security dependence on the United States and opt for either appeasement of China or some form of strategic autonomy, which would likely involve obtaining nuclear weapons. A conflict over Taiwan would also lead to a profound global economic shock owing to Taiwan’s dominant role in manufacturing advanced semiconductors.

Great Power Competition now due to Russian aggression; the West must endorse real politic and deterrence to manage

Charles A. Kupchan, 9-2, 22, National Interest, The War in Ukraine and the Return of Realpolitik, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/war-ukraine-and-return-realpolitik-204515?page=0%2C2

GREAT POWER competition is back. The transatlantic alliance must revise its grand strategy accordingly and downsize its idealist ambitions in favor of pragmatic realism. Throughout the crisis over Ukraine, the West’s ideological North Star—the promotion of democracy—guided statecraft, with NATO supporting and encouraging Kyiv’s aspirations to join the Western alliance. But Russian president Vladimir Putin, unwilling to let Ukraine leave the Russian fold and emerge as a democracy anchored in the West, launched a war to put Kyiv back under Moscow’s sway. Putin owns this war, with the death and destruction that it has produced.

The West’s reaction—arming Ukraine, sanctioning Russia, bolstering NATO‘s eastern flank while extending membership to Finland and Sweden—is fully justified. Yet legitimate outrage over Russia’s pummeling of Ukraine threatens to obscure the need to draw sober lessons from the war. Perhaps the most important is that the world is reverting to the rules of power politics, requiring that ideological ambition more regularly yield to strategic realities in order to ensure that the West’s purposes remain in sync with its means. This adjustment means that the West will need to focus more on defending, instead of expanding, the democratic community. To be sure, by combining its values with its power, the West has bent the arc of history away from the practice of realpolitik and toward greater freedom, human dignity, and peace. But the transatlantic community must now temper its idealist ambitions with greater strategic pragmatism to successfully navigate a world that has just shifted back toward Hobbesian realism.

The unrulier and more competitive world that is taking shape will naturally bolster transatlantic unity—just as the threat posed by the Soviet Union contributed to NATO’s cohesion during the Cold War. Yet the political ills that have been plaguing the West have not dissipated; Russia’s invasion, along with the prospect of a new cold war, is not enough to cure the United States and Europe of illiberalism and political dysfunction. In fact, the war in Ukraine has produced economic spillover effects that could further weaken political centrism. Accordingly, America and Europe face a double challenge: they must continue getting their own houses in order even while they stand together to resist Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.

THIS TENSION between lofty ambition and strategic reality is nothing new, particularly for the United States. Since the earliest days of the republic, Americans have understood the purpose of their power to entail not only security, but also the spread of liberal democracy at home and abroad. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.”

Paine was surely engaging in hyperbole, but successive generations of Americans have taken the nation’s exceptionalist calling to heart—with quite impressive results. Through the power of its example as well as its many exertions abroad—including World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—the United States has succeeded in expanding the footprint of liberal democracy. At the time of the nation’s founding, republics were far and few between. Today, more than half of the world’s countries are full or partial democracies. The United States played a leading role in effecting this transformation.

But these ideological aspirations have at times fueled overreach, producing outcomes that compromise the nation’s idealist ambitions. The founding generation was determined to build an extended republic that would stretch all the way to the Pacific coast—a goal that the nation achieved by the middle of the nineteenth century. Much of the United States’ westward expansion took place under the exalted banner of Manifest Destiny, which provided ideological justification for expanding the frontier—but also moral cover for trampling on Native Americans and launching a war of choice against Mexico that led to U.S. annexation of roughly half of Mexican territory. The Mexican-American War and the bout of expansion that accompanied it came back to haunt the United States by intensifying the sectional rift over slavery and pushing the North and South toward civil war.

President William McKinley in 1898 embarked on a war to expel Spain from Cuba—one of its few remaining colonies in the hemisphere—insisting that Americans had to act “in the cause of humanity.” Yet victory in the Spanish-American War turned the United States itself into an imperial power, as it asserted control over Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific, including the Philippines. “There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them,” McKinley insisted as U.S. forces occupied the Philippines. The resulting insurgency led to the death of some 4,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Filipino fighters and civilians. The United States held on to the Philippines until 1946.

into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson declared before Congress that “the world must be made safe for democracy.” After U.S. forces helped bring the war to a close, he played a leading role in negotiations over the League of Nations, a global body that was to preserve peace through collective action, dispute resolution, and disarmament. But such idealist ambitions proved too much even for Americans. The Senate shot down U.S. membership in the League; Wilson’s ideological overreach cleared the way for the stubborn isolationism of the interwar era.

Just before launching the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush affirmed that “we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty … they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.” The result of the war in Iraq was far different: region-wide suffering and sectarian conflict poised to continue for generations. As for Afghanistan, Bush proclaimed in 2004: “Now the country is changing. There’s women’s rights. There’s equality under the law. Young girls now go to school, many for the first time ever, thanks to the United States and our coalition of liberators.” But two decades of exhaustive U.S. efforts to bring stability and democracy to Afghanistan fell embarrassingly short, with the U.S. withdrawal last summer giving way to Taliban rule and a humanitarian nightmare. Across these historical episodes, noble ambitions backfired with dreadful consequences.

THE UKRAINE question has similarly exposed the inescapable tensions between lofty ambitions and geopolitical realities. These tensions were, for the most part, in abeyance amid the bipolarity of the Cold War, when geopolitical expedience guided the U.S. strategy of containment. The Yalta agreement struck by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at the end of World War II was the ultimate realist compromise, leaving much of Eastern Europe under Soviet domination. Roosevelt and Churchill were wisely yielding principle to pragmatism by providing Soviet Russia with a buffer zone on its western flank. Such strategic restraint paid off handsomely; it contributed to stability during the long decades of the Cold War, buying time for a patient policy of containment that ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union.

NATO’s eastward expansion then began in the 1990s, the era of unipolarity, when Washington was confident that the triumph of American power and purpose would usher in the universalization of democracy, capitalism, and a liberal, rules-based international order. The Clinton administration embraced a grand strategy of “democratic enlargement”—a key plank of which was opening NATO’s doors to Europe’s new democracies and formally welcoming into the West the states of the defunct and discredited Warsaw Pact.

NATO’s eastward enlargement has fostered both moral and strategic gains. The West capitalized on the opportunity to reverse Yalta; NATO members could reassert their moral authority by integrating Europe’s newest democracies. The allure of meeting the political standards for entry into the Western alliance helped guide through democratic transitions more than a dozen countries that long suffered under communist rule. Opening NATO’s doors also provided the alliance strategic depth and increased aggregate military strength. The defense guarantee that comes with membership serves as a strong deterrent to Russian adventurism—a prized commodity given Moscow’s renewed appetite for invading its neighbors. Indeed, Finland and Sweden have left behind decades of neutrality in order to avail themselves of that guarantee.

But despite these principled and practical benefits, the enlargement of NATO also came with a significant strategic downside: it laid the foundation for a post-Cold War security order that excluded Russia while bringing the world’s most formidable military alliance ever closer to its borders. It was precisely for this reason that the Clinton administration initially launched the Partnership for Peace—a security framework that enabled all European states to cooperate with NATO without drawing new dividing lines. But that alternative fell by the wayside early in January 1994, when President Bill Clinton declared in Prague that “the question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members but when and how.” The first wave of expansion extended membership to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999, followed since by four additional bouts of enlargement. So far, NATO has admitted fifteen countries (encompassing some 100 million people) that were formerly in Russia’s sphere of influence.

The Kremlin objected to NATO enlargement from the get-go. As early as 1993, Russian president Boris Yeltsin warned that Russians across the political spectrum “would no doubt perceive this as a sort of neo-isolation of our country in diametric opposition to its natural admission into Euro-Atlantic space.” In a face-to-face meeting with President Clinton in 1995, Yeltsin was more direct: I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you proceed … Why do you want to do this? We need a new structure for Pan-European security, not old ones! … For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding towards those of Russia – that would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.

Moscow’s discomfort only grew when Putin took the helm in 1999 and reversed Yeltsin’s flirtation with a more liberal brand of governance. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin declared that NATO enlargement “represents a serious provocation” and asked, “Why is it necessary to put military infrastructure on our borders during this expansion?”

Russia soon began concrete efforts to stop further enlargement. In 2008, not long after NATO pledged that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO,” Russia intervened in Georgia. In 2012, Moscow allegedly attempted to organize a coup in Montenegro to block its accession to the alliance, and later worked to prevent North Macedonia’s membership. These efforts in the Balkans were to no avail; Montenegro joined the alliance in 2017 and North Macedonia followed suit in 2020. Now Putin has invaded Ukraine, in part to block its pathway to NATO. In his February 24 address to the nation justifying the beginning of the “special military operation,” Putin pointed to “the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia … I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.”

The United States has largely dismissed Russia’s objections. While the Kremlin has been anxiously watching NATO’s advance, Washington has viewed NATO’s eastward expansion primarily through the benign lens of America’s exceptionalist calling. Enlarging the alliance has been about spreading American values and removing geopolitical dividing lines rather than drawing new ones.

As he launched NATO’s open-door policy, President Clinton claimed that doing so would “erase the artificial line in Europe drawn by Stalin at the end of World War II.” Madeleine Albright, his secretary of state, affirmed that “NATO is a defensive alliance that … does not regard any state as its adversary.” The purpose of expanding the alliance, she explained, was to build a Europe “whole and free,” noting that “NATO poses no danger to Russia.” That’s the line that Washington has taken ever since, including when it came to Ukraine’s potential membership. As the crisis over Ukraine mounted, President Joe Biden insisted that, “the United States and NATO are not a threat to Russia. Ukraine is not threatening Russia.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken agreed: “NATO itself is a defensive alliance … And the idea that Ukraine represents a threat to Russia or, for that matter, that NATO represents a threat to Russia is profoundly wrong and misguided.” America’s allies have mostly been on the same page. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, affirmed during the run-up to Russia’s invasion that: “NATO is not a threat to Russia.”

Yet Russia saw things quite differently—and not without reason. Geography and geopolitics matter; major powers, regardless of their ideological bent, don’t like it when other major powers stray into their neighborhoods. Russia has understandable and legitimate security concerns about NATO setting up shop on the other side of its 1,000-mile-plus border with Ukraine. NATO may be a defensive alliance, but it brings to bear aggregate military power that Russia understandably does not want parked near its territory.

Indeed, Moscow’s protests have been, ironically, very much in line with America’s own statecraft, which has long sought to keep other major powers away from its own borders. The United States spent much of the nineteenth century ushering Britain, France, Russia, and Spain out of the Western Hemisphere. Thereafter, Washington regularly turned to military intervention to hold sway in the Americas. The exercise of hemispheric hegemony continued during the Cold War, with the United States determined to box the Soviet Union and its ideological sympathizers out of Latin America. When Moscow deployed missiles to Cuba in 1962, the United States issued an ultimatum that brought the superpowers to the brink of war. After Russia recently hinted that it might again deploy its military to Latin America, the State Department spokesperson Ned Price responded: “If we do see any movement in that direction, we will respond swiftly and decisively.” Given its own track record, Washington should have given greater credence to Moscow’s objections to bringing Ukraine into NATO.

For almost three decades, NATO and Russia have been talking past each other. As Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov quipped amid the flurry of diplomacy that preceded the Russian invasion, “we’re having the conversation of a mute person with a deaf person. It’s as though we are hearing each other, but not listening.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes clear that this disconnect between Russia and the West has exploded into the open, finally doing so for a number of reasons. Moscow took the entry into NATO of a band of countries stretching from the Baltics to the Balkans as a strategic setback and political insult. Ukraine, in particular, looms much larger in the Russian imagination; in Putin’s own words, “Russians and Ukrainians are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities.” The 2019 split of the Orthodox church of Ukrainian from its Russian counterpart was an especially bitter pill; the Ukrainian church had been subordinated to the Moscow patriarch since 1686. Russia today is far more capable of pushing back than it was during the early post-Cold War era, bolstered by its economic and military rebound and its tight partnership with China.

Yet the Kremlin made several gross miscalculations in proceeding with its invasion of Ukraine. It vastly underestimated the willingness and capability of Ukrainians to fight back, producing early Russian setbacks on the battlefield. Moscow saw numerous sources of Western weakness—Brexit, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, ongoing polarization, and populism—leading to an underestimation of the strength and scope of the West’s response. In Putin’s mind, a combination of Russian strength and Western frailty made it an opportune moment to throw down the gauntlet in Ukraine. But Putin was wrong; the West has demonstrated remarkable steadiness as it has armed Ukraine and imposed severe sanctions against Russia.

These miscalculations help shed light on why Putin chose to address his grievances through war rather than diplomacy. Indeed, Putin had the opportunity to settle his objections to Ukraine’s membership in NATO at the negotiating table. Last year, President Biden acknowledged that whether Ukraine joins the alliance “remains to be seen.” Amid the flurry of diplomacy that preceded the Russian invasion, President Emmanuel Macron of France floated the idea of “Finlandization” for Ukraine—effective neutrality—and proposals for a formal moratorium on further enlargement circulated. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy admitted that the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO may be “like a dream.” His ambassador to the United Kingdom indicated that Kyiv wanted to be “flexible in trying to find the best way out,” and that one option would be to drop its bid for NATO membership. The Kremlin could have picked up these leads, but instead opted for war.

THE SAGA of NATO enlargement exposes the gap between the West’s ideological aspirations and geopolitical realities that has been widening since the 1990s. During the heady decade after the end of the Cold War, the United States and its allies were confident that the triumph of their power and purpose cleared the way for the spread of democracy—an objective that the enlargement of NATO would presumably help secure.

But from early on, the Western foreign policy establishment allowed principle to obscure the geopolitical downsides of NATO enlargement. Yes, NATO membership should be open to all countries that qualify, and all nations should be able to exercise their sovereign right to choose their alignments as they see fit. And, yes, Moscow’s decision to invade Ukraine was in part informed by fantasies of restoring the geopolitical heft of the Soviet days, Putin’s paranoia about a “color revolution” arising in Russia, and his delusions about unbreakable civilizational links between Russia and Ukraine.

Yet the West erred in continuing to dismiss Russia’s objections to NATO’s ongoing enlargement. In the meantime, NATO’s open door policy encouraged countries in Eastern Europe to lean too far over their strategic skis. While the allure of joining the alliance has encouraged aspirants to carry out the democratic reforms needed to qualify for entry, the open door has also prompted prospective members to engage in excessively risky behavior. In 2008, soon after NATO ignored Russian objections and promised eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine, Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, launched an offensive against pro-Russian separatists in South Ossetia with whom the country had been sporadically fighting for years. Russia responded promptly by grabbing control of two chunks of Georgia—South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Saakashvili thought the West had his back, but he miscalculated and overreached.

In similar fashion, NATO overreached by encouraging Ukraine to beat a path toward the alliance. The 2014 Maidan Revolution toppled a pro-Moscow regime and put Ukraine on a westward course, resulting in Russia’s intervention in Crimea and the Donbas. NATO’s open door beckoned, prompting Ukrainians in 2019 to enshrine their NATO aspirations in their constitution—a move that set off new alarm bells in the Kremlin. Given its proximity to Russia and the devastation caused by Moscow’s further aggression, Ukraine would have been better off playing it safe, quietly building a stable democracy while sticking with the neutral status that it embraced when it exited the Soviet Union. Indeed, Ukraine’s potential return to neutrality has figured prominently in sporadic talks between Kyiv and Moscow to end the war.

NATO has wisely avoided direct involvement in the fighting in order to avert war with Russia. But the alliance’s unwillingness to militarily defend Ukraine has exposed a troubling disconnect between the organization’s stated goal of making the country a member and its judgment that protecting Ukraine is not worth the cost. In effect, the United States and its allies, even as they impose severe sanctions on Russia and send arms to Ukraine, have revealed that they do not deem the defense of the country to be a vital interest. But if that is the case, then why have NATO members wanted to extend to Ukraine a security guarantee that would obligate them to go to war in its defense?

NATO should extend security guarantees to countries that are of intrinsic strategic importance to the United States and its allies—it should not make countries strategically important by extending them such guarantees. In a world that is rapidly reverting to the logic of power politics, in which adversaries may regularly test U.S. commitments, NATO cannot afford to be profligate in handing out such guarantees. Strategic prudence requires distinguishing critical interests from lesser ones, and conducting statecraft accordingly.

STRATEGIC PRUDENCE also requires that the West prepare for the return of sustained militarized rivalry with Russia. In light of the tight partnership that has emerged between Moscow and Beijing—and China’s own geopolitical ambitions—the new Cold War that is taking shape may well pit the West against a Sino-Russian bloc stretching from the Western Pacific to Eastern Europe. Like the Cold War, a world of rival blocs could mean economic and geopolitical division. The severe impact of the sanctions imposed on Russia underscores the dark side of globalization, potentially driving home to both China and Western democracies that economic interdependence entails quite considerable risk. China could distance itself from global markets and financial systems, while the United States and Europe may choose to expand the pace and scope of efforts to decouple from Chinese investment, technology, and supply chains. The world may be entering a prolonged and costly era of de-globalization.

The return of a two-bloc world that plays by the rules of realpolitik means that the West will need to dial back its efforts to expand the liberal order, instead returning to a strategy of patient containment aimed at preserving geopolitical stability and avoiding great power war. A new strategic conservatism should seek to establish stable balances of power and credible deterrence in the European and Asia-Pacific theaters. The United States has a playbook for this world: the one that enabled it to prevail in the first Cold War.

What Washington does not have a stratagem for is navigating geopolitical division in a world that is far more interdependent than that of the Cold War. Even as it stands up to autocracies, the West will need to work across ideological dividing lines in order to tackle global challenges, including arresting climate change, preventing nuclear proliferation and pursuing arms control, overseeing international commerce, governing the cybersphere, managing migration, and promoting global health. Strategic pragmatism will need to temper ideological discord.

Washington also lacks a stratagem for operating in an era in which the West faces homegrown threats to liberal democracy that are at least as potent as the external threats posed by Russia and China. During the Cold War, the West was politically healthy; liberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic enjoyed ideological moderation and centrism, buttressed by broadly shared prosperity. A steady and purposeful brand of U.S. grand strategy rested on a solid political foundation and enjoyed bipartisan support.

But the West today is politically unhealthy, and illiberal populism is alive and well on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the bipartisan compact behind U.S. statecraft has collapsed—as has the nation’s political center. Ideological moderation and centrism have given way to bitter polarization amid prolonged economic insecurity and gaping inequality. The war in Ukraine has not helped matters; Biden’s ambitious agenda for domestic renewal, already scaled back due to gridlock in Congress, suffered further as a result of Washington’s focus on the conflict. And high rates of inflation, fueled in part by the economic disruptions arising from the war, are stoking public discontent, likely costing Democrats control of Congress in the upcoming November midterms.

In Europe, the political center has broadly held. Mainstream center-left and center-right parties have lost ground to anti-establishment parties, but they have stayed ideologically centrist and, for the most part, remained in power. Yet illiberal populists continue to govern Hungary and Poland, and their fellow travelers wield political influence in most European Union (EU) member states. Indeed, Italy’s centrist government collapsed in July and the hard right may well surge in approaching elections. The United Kingdom has engaged in a stunning act of self-isolation and self-harm by quitting the EU—London remains tangled up in uneasy negotiations with Brussels over the terms of Brexit. The economic damage wrought by inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and potential energy shortages abetted by the West’s sanctions on Russia, may end up undermining the continent’s political center and weakening European and transatlantic solidarity.

As the United States and its allies contemplate mounting tension with a Sino-Russian bloc, they must ensure that they continue to redress the West’s own internal vulnerabilities. It is true that during the Cold War, the discipline that the Soviet threat imposed on American politics helped mute partisan conflict over foreign policy. Similarly, the current prospect of a new era of militarized rivalry with Russia and China is reviving bipartisan cooperation on matters of statecraft.

This return to bipartisanship is, however, likely to be short-lived—just as it was after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans should not operate under the illusion that a more competitive international environment will of its own accord restore the country’s political health—especially amid the highest U.S. inflation rate in forty years. In similar fashion, even though Europe has demonstrated impressive unity and resolve during the war in Ukraine, it will undoubtedly face renewed political challenges as it copes with a huge influx of Ukrainian refugees and deals with additional economic burdens, including weaning itself off of Russian energy.

Both sides of the Atlantic thus have hard work to do if they are to get their own houses in order and reinvigorate the globe’s anchor of liberal order. Given the potential for the politics of grievance to make a comeback in the United States, the Biden administration urgently needs to continue advancing its domestic agenda. Investing in infrastructure, education, technology, health care, climate solutions, and other internal programs offers the best way to alleviate the electorate’s discontent and revive the country’s ailing political center. Europe’s agenda for renewal should include economic restructuring and investment, reform of immigration policy and border control, and more expenditure in and pooling of sovereignty on foreign and defense policy.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine heralds the return of a more realist world, requiring that the West’s idealist ambitions more regularly yield to cold strategic realities. Even though the war has certainly helped revive the West and its cohesion, the homegrown threats to liberal democracy that were front and center before the war still require urgent attention. It would be ironic if the West succeeds in turning Putin’s gamble in Ukraine into a resounding defeat, only to see liberal democracies then succumb to the enemy within.

China economy slowing – real estate, COVID, unfavourable demographics, high levels of debt, intervention in corporate affairs

Stella Yifan Xie, Sept. 2, 2022, Wall Street Journal, Will China’s Economy Surpass the U.S.’s? Some Now Doubt It, https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-chinas-economy-surpass-the-u-s-s-some-now-doubt-it-11662123945?mod=hp_lead_pos4

The sharp slowdown in China’s growth in the past year is prompting many experts to reconsider when China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy—or even if it ever will. Until recently, many economists assumed China’s gross domestic product measured in U.S. dollars would surpass that of the U.S. by the end of the decade, capping what many consider to be the most extraordinary economic ascent ever. But the outlook for China’s economy has darkened this year, as Beijing-led policies—including its zero tolerance for Covid-19 and efforts to rein in real-estate speculation—have sapped growth. As economists pare back their forecasts for 2022, they have become more worried about China’s longer term prospects, with unfavorable demographics and high debt levels potentially weighing on any rebound. In one of the most recent revisions, the Centre for Economics and Business Research, a U.K. think tank, thinks China will overtake the U.S. as the world’s biggest economy two years later than it previously expected when it last made a forecast in 2020. It now thinks it will happen in 2030. The Japan Center for Economic Research in Tokyo has said it thinks the passing of the baton won’t happen until 2033, four years later than its previous forecast. Other economists question whether China will ever claim the top spot. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said China’s aging population and Beijing’s increasing tendency to intervene in corporate affairs, along with other challenges, have led him to substantially lower his expectations for Chinese growth. He sees parallels between forecasts of China’s rise and earlier prognostications that Japan or Russia would overtake the U.S.—predictions that look ridiculous today, he said. “I think there is a real possibility that something similar would happen with respect to China,” said Mr. Summers, now a Harvard University professor. Researchers debate how meaningful GDP rankings are, and question whether much will change if China does overtake the U.S. The depth and openness of the U.S. economy mean the U.S. will still have outsize influence. The dollar is expected to remain the world’s reserve currency for years to come.

China growth critical its global leadership and replacing the US as the global hegemon; current growth rates do not allow for that

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said China’s aging population and Beijing’s increasing tendency to intervene in corporate affairs, along with other challenges, have led him to substantially lower his expectations for Chinese growth. He sees parallels between forecasts of China’s rise and earlier prognostications that Japan or Russia would overtake the U.S.—predictions that look ridiculous today, he said. “I think there is a real possibility that something similar would happen with respect to China,” said Mr. Summers, now a Harvard University professor. Researchers debate how meaningful GDP rankings are, and question whether much will change if China does overtake the U.S. The depth and openness of the U.S. economy mean the U.S. will still have outsize influence. The dollar is expected to remain the world’s reserve currency for years to come. Size alone doesn’t reflect the quality of growth, said Leland Miller, chief executive officer of China Beige Book, a research firm. Living standards in the U.S., measured by per capita gross domestic product, are five times greater than in China, and the gap is unlikely to close soon. Still, a change in the ranking would be a propaganda win for Beijing as it seeks to show the world—and its own population—that China’s state-led model is superior to Western liberal democracy, and that the U.S. is declining both politically and economically. Over time, it could lead to more-substantive changes as more countries reorient their economies to serve Chinese markets. “If China slows down substantially in its growth, it impacts China’s capacity to project power,” said Mr. Summers. How the two countries stack up economically matters to Chinese leaders: After the U.S. economy grew faster than China’s during the last quarter of 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping told officials to ensure the country’s growth outpaces the U.S.’s this year, the Journal previously reported. Economic fortunes can reverse quickly. In 2020, when China bounced back faster than the U.S. did from initial Covid-19 outbreaks, it looked like China’s economy might surpass the U.S. sooner than expected. Some economists appear less perturbed by near-term threats to China’s growth. Justin Yifu Lin, a former chief economist at the World Bank who has long been bullish on China’s potential, argues its larger population means the country’s economy will wind up twice as big as the U.S.’s eventually. At a forum in Beijing in May, he predicted that process would continue despite the country’s latest slowdown. Nevertheless, economic problems keep piling up in China, in part because of policy choices Beijing has made to contain Covid-19 and rein in debt. The country’s real-estate slowdown is showing no signs of letting up. An index tracking consumer confidence plunged to its lowest level in decades in spring this year. Urban youth unemployment is at a record high. The Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, noted in a March report that it expects Chinese growth to average only about 2% to 3% a year between 2021 and 2050, compared with some researchers’ expectations that China could maintain 4% to 5% growth until midcentury. The institute cited unfavorable demographics, diminishing returns from infrastructure investments and other challenges. With growth of 2% to 3% a year, China could still become the world’s largest economy, the institute noted. “But it would never establish a meaningful lead over the United States and would remain far less prosperous and productive per person than America, even by mid-century,” it wrote. Its growth also wouldn’t be enough to give it any significant competitive advantage. In a response to questions, the Lowy Institute said China’s further economic slowdown since the report came out has “at minimum pushed back the likely moment when China might overtake the U.S., and made it more likely that China might in fact never be able to do so.” easured by purchasing power, which takes into account differing costs of goods and services across countries, China already overtook the U.S.’s economy in 2016, according to World Bank figures. Measured in U.S. dollar terms, however, China’s GDP was 77% of the size of the U.S’s. in 2021, up from 13% in 2001, data from the World Bank shows. Capital Economics researchers wrote in a report early last year that their most likely scenario envisions China’s economy expanding to about 87% of the size of the U.S.’s in 2030, before dropping back to 81% in 2050. It blamed China’s shrinking working population and weak productivity growth, among other factors. “A lot of people for a long time have overestimated the competence of China’s leadership and have been shocked by the missteps with Covid and the property sector,” wrote Mark Williams, the firm’s chief Asia economist, in an email in which he reaffirmed his firm’s forecast. “The weakness these crises have revealed have been present and growing for a long time.” Bert Hofman, director of the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore and a former economist at the World Bank, said he believes China can surpass the U.S. in GDP size by 2035, if it raises its retirement age, allows more rural workers to move to cities, and takes steps to enhance productivity such as spending more on education and healthcare. But China won’t be able to catch the U.S. if policy makers pursue only “limited reforms,” he said, or if it suffers a debt crisis. Further decoupling with the U.S. could make it harder for China to advance, as the flow of knowledge from abroad is disrupted, he said. Other economists worry that size comparisons risk eliciting nationalism that can be detrimental to both countries. “Too many people have lost sight of the fact that our economies are mutually beneficial,” said Andy Rothman, an investment strategist at Matthews Asia. Since China joined the World Trade Organization, he noted, U.S. exports to China are up over 600%, compared with 126% to the rest of the world. “Looking at the Chinese economy and the U.S. economy as a zero-sum game—that’s not accurate,” he said.

Afghanistan withdrawal has not weakened US credibility, credibility arguments are BS and regions are different

Larison, 9-2, 22, Responsible Statecraft, Amazing: US ‘credibility’ still intact a year after Afghanistan withdrawal, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/02/amazing-us-credibility-still-intact-a-year-after-afghanistan-withdrawal/

Hawks denounced the withdrawal from Afghanistan for many reasons, but one of their recurring complaints was that it threatened to wreck U.S. credibility in the world. According to the standard hawkish view, withdrawing from a failed war signals weakness and a lack of resolve, which in turn causes allies to lose confidence in U.S. commitments to protect them and encourages adversaries to become aggressive on the assumption that the U.S. is unwilling or unable to oppose them. Hawks hold to a quasi-mystical view of credibility where a withdrawal anywhere invites aggression everywhere, and they then try to blame the withdrawal for causing whatever goes wrong anywhere else in the world afterwards. In the year since the last U.S. forces departed Afghanistan, the record clearly shows that the hawks were panicking over nothing, and that the hawkish credibility argument is nothing more than an ideological fantasy. Policymakers should remember this the next time they are inclined to heed blood-curdling warnings about the need to maintain credibility by going to war or staying bogged down in one. Leaving Afghanistan was supposed to deal a fatal blow to U.S. credibility with global consequences. But today, one looks in vain for the adverse effects that they predicted. U.S. alliances are no weaker, and allies are arguably more reliant on the U.S. and more trusting of its promises than before. Adversaries have acted much as they were acting before the withdrawal, and any changes in their activities are much more reasonably explained by factors specific to them and their regions. Credibility hawks strain to link disparate events around the world to a single U.S. policy in a different region unrelated to any of the others, but this is irrational. Simply put, no government makes its policy decisions in its own region based on what the U.S. does or doesn’t do in a distant war in another part of the world. Hawks rely on the fallacy that everything that happens after a withdrawal has happened because of it. Their argument requires us to assume an absurdly American-centric view of the world in which other states’ actions are governed by whether the U.S. maintains a military presence in an entirely different part of the world. One need only consider the counterfactuals to realize how silly the argument is. Would keeping a residual U.S. force in Afghanistan have somehow prevented a Russian invasion of Ukraine? How would that possibly have worked? Maintaining a U.S. military presence isn’t a magical ward against misfortune. Withdrawing that presence doesn’t trigger global disaster. The U.S. should not fear quitting a lost war because of credibility concerns, and it should not choose to wage an unnecessary one for that reason, either. If allied governments were unhappy about the way that the United States withdrew, this did not weaken their belief in U.S. commitments to them. Leaving a 20-year war in a country where America has no vital interests has no implications for Washington’s willingness to fight on behalf of treaty allies. Just as choosing not to bomb Syria had no discernible negative effects on U.S. alliances, the decision to pull out of a failed war after two decades did not diminish allies’ trust in U.S. security guarantees. Hawks are compelled to exaggerate the significance of “inaction” or withdrawal because they cannot provide good arguments for their preferred policies. Their alarmist claims are a tacit admission on their part that these hawkish policies have nothing to do with making the United States more secure. Predictions of the disasters that are supposed to follow lost credibility don’t come true. If you listened to credibility hawks during the Afghanistan withdrawal, you would have expected U.S. alliances to weaken and crumble as America’s security dependents began hedging and then abandoning the United States. Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster said that the U.S. would suffer “severe political consequences, in connection with our credibility with our allies and partners.” Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that “this debacle will certainly harm America’s credibility with its friends and allies.” AEI’s Kori Schake said, “It is hard to overstate the damage to U.S. credibility wreaked by this fiasco,” but grossly overstate it she did. She also made a specific prediction that the “disastrous withdrawal will make it harder for Washington to put together such coalitions in the future,” but within half a year of the war’s end the U.S. had rallied NATO and other allies into a formidable coalition in support of Ukraine and in opposition to the Russian invasion. As it turned out, none of the predicted setbacks happened. Allied governments recognize that U.S. commitments are rooted in shared interests, and they understand that those commitments were not compromised at all by the decision to leave Afghanistan. Insofar as ending the war freed up resources and attention for other parts of the world, allied governments likely welcomed the long overdue conclusion to an unsuccessful war. We need to remember that treaty allies were relieved by the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and in practice we are seeing much the same thing today. Far from losing credibility, Ben Friedman pointed out earlier this week that “the U.S. has too much credibility among its allies.” If the U.S. wants its allies to take up a larger share of responsibility for their own security, it should reassure them much less than it has done. In order to believe that ending a failed policy in one place would have devastating consequences for U.S. credibility elsewhere, one must assume that international events are all closely linked together and depend on each other. As Christopher Fettweis explained in The Pathologies of Power, “All the evidence that does exist actually points in the opposite direction, suggesting that international events are generally independent.” Despite the strong evidence that other states do not judge credibility as hawks think they do, the credibility argument flourishes because it is a convenient crutch for advocates of aggressive and militaristic policies. It is no accident that hawks shriek about credibility only when the U.S. is considering ending a war or when it might choose not to start or join one. It is an argument ready-made to justify perpetual war, no matter how divorced from national interests it is, and it is the hawkish fallback when they want to get the US into a new war in places where U.S. interests do not warrant military action. As Fettweis observes, “Most of the time, when arguments for action are based on credibility, nothing of importance is likely at stake.” The U.S. has blundered disastrously when it has chosen to shore up its credibility through war. Dedicating countless lives and fortunes to preserving credibility is inherently wasteful. Any war in which credibility is one of the main justifications is not worth fighting. The more that hawks emphasize credibility as a reason for doing something, the more likely it is that policymakers should hasten to do the opposite of what the hawks want. If credibility hawks had gotten their way in blocking withdrawals from desultory wars, U.S. troops would have been dying in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan for many more years than they already had. As abstract as the debate over credibility may sometimes seem, the consequences of buying into credibility nonsense are serious and impose real costs on the U.S. military and the country.

China-Russia ties increasing

Sarang Shadore, 9-1, 22, Sarang Shidore is Director of Studies at the Quincy Institute. His areas of research and analysis are geopolitical risk, grand strategy, and energy/climate security, with a special emphasis on Asia. Sarang has collaborated and published with multiple organizations including the Asian Peace Program, Brookings Institution, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, Council on Strategic Risks, Oxford Analytica, Paulson Institute, Stimson Center, UK Ministry of Defense, and Woodwell Climate Research Center. He has more than 80 publications to his credit in journals, edited volumes, and media outlets in his areas of expertise. Prior to his current role at the Quincy Institute, Sarang was a senior research scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and senior global analyst at the geopolitical risk firm Stratfor Inc. and earlier also spent a decade in product management in the technology industry, Responsible Statecraft, Vostok military exercises indicate that Russia is far from isolated, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/01/vostok-military-exercises-indicate-that-russia-is-far-from-isolated/

The next iteration of Russia’s quadrennial Vostok exercise has just begun in its far east region, involving more than 50,000 troops, 140 aircraft and 60 warships. Vostok (which means “east” in Russian) is one of four exercises Russia routinely conducts every four years, the others being Zapad (west) Tsentr (center), and Kavkaz (south), the directions corresponding to the locations of the drills within the country. The previous iteration of Vostok (in 2018) included China for the first time, as well as Mongolia; these being the first two states outside the former Soviet Union to join these exercises. The 2018 exercise was also much bigger. The Ukraine war, which has utilized many units normally stationed in the east, appears to have seriously crimped Russian abilities to mount a large-scale drill. But the true significance of Vostok 2022 is not size, but its participants. This year, the list of countries from outside the former Soviet Union joining as participants or observers is much longer and, apart from Mongolia, also includes Algeria, Syria, Laos, Nicaragua, and India. Of these, China is clearly the most significant. The Russian-Chinese security convergence has garnered global headlines since earlier this year, when their two leaders issued a joint statement asserting a “no limits” partnership just prior to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. But in fact, Russia and China have been strongly converging since the 2014-15 period, in the wake of the first Ukraine war. Their security partnership is not a formal alliance — it lacks a mutual assistance agreement — but has steadily grown closer, with increasingly sophisticated joint exercises (including in distant regions such as the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea), sales of Russia’s most advanced weapons systems such as the S-400 and the Su-35 to Beijing, and co-development of defense equipment. Since 2018, Vostok has not simulated an invasion by China, which was at least partly a focus of its previous versions. There is no evidence, at least yet, that Moscow and Beijing have moved to the stage of joint operational planning for wartime contingencies. Still, in many ways, China and Russia can be said to be informal allies, a development brought on in substantial measure by the simultaneous containment strategies of Washington toward both. Vostok will include major maritime exercises in the Sea of Japan. After an attempted rapprochement when Shinzo Abe was Japanese prime minister, ties between Tokyo and Moscow have worsened significantly. Japan imposed major sanctions on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, and the rhetoric between the two is now much more adversarial. Of the rest of the Vostok participants, Algeria, Laos, Nicaragua, and Syria have either distant or adversarial relations with the United States. However, their involvement in Vostok is more symbolic of the gathering oppositional coalition than substantive, given their limited geopolitical heft. India’s involvement though has more significance. A close U.S. partner and even a quasi-ally on China, India has nevertheless taken a sharply different view on the Ukraine conflict, not condemning Russia by name, and greatly increasing its oil purchases from Moscow. Concerned by a further deepening of Russian-Chinese ties since the Ukraine war began, India recently dispatched its National Security Advisor to Moscow where he also reportedly assured Russia that India was not in any camp. India is also a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a grouping led by China and Russia, and takes part in security dialogues and military exercises under its rubric. These include an upcoming counter-terror exercise in India in which Chinese, Russian, Iranian and Pakistani troops (among others) will participate. The upshot of all this is that, more than six months into a brutal war, the United States and its European allies have made almost no headway in adding to their coalition ranged against Russia. Except for Japan, and to an extent Singapore, the major Asian and Eurasian states are not only not in, but some of them seem to be building even deeper ties with Russia. Washington may wish to reflect as to why its Russia strategy is failing to excite most Asians.

Multilateral institutions cannot constrain new global aggression

Tugenhadt, 9-1, 22, TOM TUGENDHAT is a Conservative Member of the British Parliament and the Chair of its Foreign Affairs Committee, Foreign Affairs, Britain After UkraineA New Foreign Policy for an Age of Great-Power Competition, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-kingdom/britain-after-ukraine

Six months after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of a European democracy, the West is awakening to a startling reality: the nation-state is back. The institutions built to constrain rogue actors are vulnerable, and technology has given autocracies new forms of leverage. Rather than the last gasp of nationalism, the attack on Ukraine shows the new direction of power. Risks that were only possible now look probable. The Baltic states’ paranoia about Russia now seems well founded, and Finland and Sweden’s once-vaunted neutrality no longer appropriate. Even Beijing’s threats against Taiwan look less performative and more preparatory. The severity of the international response to Russia’s aggression is just as notable. For years, Moscow made clear its plans—cyberattacks on Estonia in 2007, the occupation of Georgia in 2008, the attack on Ukraine in 2014—but Europe and the West treated these events as business as usual. This time is different. Governments from Tokyo to Stockholm are proving their resolute support for Ukraine with military aid and unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia. The global order has been upended, and the events of the past year show that the world has moved into a new era of brutish great power politics. Western democracies now inhabit a world in which multilateral institutions are no longer able to provide the stability or security they once promised. For a country such as the United Kingdom, whose economic and diplomatic model is based on its status as a globally connected nation, the new instability presents an acute threat.

Global autocracies are no longer deterred, West not credible

Nor are these the only forces undermining global stability. Viewed from Beijing and Moscow, Western disasters such as the botched U.S.-led withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 have reinforced a perception of weakness. Watching Washington’s failures in Afghanistan—where its strategic impatience left allies exposed—autocrats concluded that Western democracies have lost the will to endure. Moscow’s assault on Kyiv may have failed, but China is watching and absorbing lessons on how to threaten Taiwan. The era of “respectful disagreement”—when dictatorships had more to gain from using existing systems than breaking them—is over. Where many Western leaders in the first post-Cold War generation saw globalization as bringing greater interdependence and efficiency, our rivals saw the creation of new vulnerabilities.

Russia and China engaging in Great Power Competition

Until recently, the United Kingdom’s response to this discordant new world has been dangerously inadequate. Shaped by the post-Cold War decades of globalization, British foreign policy has found itself unprepared for the rise of autocracy and the combustible new conflicts that have come with it. The country’s dependence on others for energy and technology have exposed it to powerful new forms of external pressure that weaken its economic foundations.

Too often, the United Kingdom has responded by ignoring the problem or turning inward. Instead, the United Kingdom must exploit its own traditional strengths of outreach, diplomacy, and influence by seeking new kinds of partnerships with current allies and future powerhouses. And it must do so while reducing its exposure to malign powers and building its economic resilience at home. Accomplishing both will be tough, but failure to do so could risk reducing the country into a vassal of the new world order. The costs of maintaining the status quo are already apparent, not only in growing energy insecurity and severe economic pain but also in the gradual erosion of liberal values that underpin freedom.

INTO A DANGEROUS WORLD

British foreign policy did not start from here, of course. Over the past three decades, from the end of the Cold War through the first decade of this century, burgeoning connectedness and growing partnerships took root across the world. International institutions such as the World Trade Organization, by and large, worked well enough. Even after the September 11 attacks, the threat of international terrorism was asymmetric and comparatively limited, affecting only small parts of the global network at any one moment, even if specific incidents echoed more widely. Where geopolitical conflicts emerged, such as the messy breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s or even the reignited wars in Sudan and Yemen, they rarely seemed to threaten the institutions that buttress the international order.

During these years, the rise in connectivity delivered remarkable prosperity and freedom for hundreds of millions of people, not only in the West but all across the world. Technology and the Internet promised opportunity and openness as flows of trade and information delivered growth and built new connections between countries and communities.

The climax of this hopeful era arrived only a few years ago. It was marked not only by extraordinary trade between United Kingdom and China but also by Germany’s industrial strategy, built on a deliberate dependence on Russian energy through Baltic Sea pipelines. Policymakers and businesses made thousands of smaller decisions based on the assumption that geopolitical rivals were no longer threats and that economic competition was based on fixed rules.

Where Western leaders saw new prosperity, their rivals saw new vulnerabilities.

Over the past decade, however, these assumptions have come crashing down. The forces of globalization that made the United Kingdom richer, reduced its costs, and knotted its citizens into a global network also helped authoritarian governments create monopolies and turn international hubs into choke points. China’s dominance in manufacturing, for example, leaves British citizens medically dependent on Guangzhou for items no longer made in Europe. Just-in-time commerce has become not just a supply chain principle but a way for adversaries to amass power. The quest for efficiency has led to dependency, and technology has accelerated the change.

Nor are these the only forces undermining global stability. Viewed from Beijing and Moscow, Western disasters such as the botched U.S.-led withdrawal from Kabul in 2021 have reinforced a perception of weakness. Watching Washington’s failures in Afghanistan—where its strategic impatience left allies exposed—autocrats concluded that Western democracies have lost the will to endure. Moscow’s assault on Kyiv may have failed, but China is watching and absorbing lessons on how to threaten Taiwan. The era of “respectful disagreement”—when dictatorships had more to gain from using existing systems than breaking them—is over. Where many Western leaders in the first post-Cold War generation saw globalization as bringing greater interdependence and efficiency, our rivals saw the creation of new vulnerabilities.

The world is witnessing a turning point and perhaps the end of the post-Cold War order. This transformation has led us back into great power competition, where the biggest states build influence and assert their interests through strength, not negotiation.

Competitive deterrence against China and Russia key, attempts at cooperation fail and strengthen China

Gabriel Scheinmann, the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society, 8-31, 22, Here’s What Biden’s New National Security Strategy Should Say, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/31/biden-national-security-strategy-russia-china-geopolitics-competition-military-defense-spending/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921

After a long wait, the Biden administration may finally release the new U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) this fall. Originally scheduled for publication late last year, the document was withheld as Russian war preparations on Ukraine’s borders intensified. The invasion and its fallout then presented Washington with a new strategic situation, requiring the document to be rewritten. Its absence has left many wondering about the administration’s strategic objectives, priorities, and plans to achieve them. The Biden administration laid out its initial impulses on national security in its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, published shortly after the new team moved into the White House in early 2021. That document prescribed a heavy dose of cooperation with other powers—including the United States’ adversaries. Beijing and Moscow were presented as partners on such issues as climate change, nonproliferation, arms control, public health, and economic stability. Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s unleashing of the biggest European war since 1945—as well as his Chinese counterpart’s declaration of “no limits” support—laid the administration’s ideas and intentions to waste. It is critical, therefore, that the new NSS adapts to the new reality and sets Washington on a different course to prevail in the increasingly direct geopolitical competition with Moscow and Beijing. A successful approach to the challenges posed by these adversarial regimes must involve a global strategy to counter threats, not merely manage crises as they pop up. This includes, most importantly, a substantial increase in U.S. defense spending. A serious strategy would begin by recognizing that the post-Cold War era is over. Beijing and Moscow have thrust a new cold war on Washington and its allies, despite the West’s best efforts to embrace these two powers as partners. The new NSS must end this unrealistic and naive approach. If the United States is to win this long-term competition and reckon with its inability to deter Russia—and potentially China—from invading their neighbors, the Biden administration must provide immediate, real, and sustained increases in the U.S. defense budget. Washington’s allies and friends should of course be encouraged to do the same. As a percentage of GDP, U.S. defense spending is at one of the lowest levels since World War II. It’s not enough for Congress to top up Biden’s budgets, as it has done. Even achieving the lowest level of Cold War-era spending of 4.5 percent of GDP, as former National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and I suggested in Foreign Policy—let alone spending 5 percent, as incoming Republican Senate Armed Services Committee leader Roger Wicker has proposed—would require a roughly 50 percent increase or more of the budget. Hard power is not the relic of a bygone era but the foundation of any successful attempt to win what Biden rightly calls “the competition of the 21st century.” The new NSS should clearly recognize that helping Ukraine defeat Russia is not only the strategic priority in Europe but also a key front in deterring China. A suitable strategy would recognize that China is the primary threat to the United States. To deter China from the use of force against Taiwan or its other neighbors, the United States must urgently arm its allies and partners (like it is now, belatedly, doing in Ukraine), as well as bolster its own deterrent capabilities. Should China attack Taiwan, U.S. and allied forces must be capable of quickly reinforcing the island and rapidly attriting China’s attacking of naval and air assets. This hinges on U.S. investment in areas that would allow Washington to quickly counter Beijing’s navy. It also requires expanding integrated joint and combined operations capability, forward basing, economic integration, and multilateral engagement through organizations like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad)—a U.S. quasi-alliance with Australia, India, and Japan. As the Cold War has taught us, success means deterring an attack, not merely responding to one after it occurs. This isn’t only about defense. Deterring China and Russia in the military sphere will ensure—not undermine, as some contend—the preconditions for broad, shared economic prosperity at home. The United States and its allies must stop facilitating the growth of Chinese and Russian economic power—and must enhance their own instead. The United States cannot continue to enable China’s economic and technological rise—both absolute and relative—and simultaneously meet the challenge of a long-term competition. The first priority must be to end those forms of engagement that mostly advance Beijing’s national security goals and economic strength while weakening Washington’s. This will require a strategic, selective economic decoupling from China. From restructuring supply chains to reshoring production of high-end manufactured products to better monitoring and regulation of technology and capital flows, the NSS must make reducing the economic leverage held by America’s adversaries a priority. Europe’s extreme energy dependence on Russia—which Putin is now turning against countries supporting Ukraine—demonstrates where that leverage leads. The Chinese leadership is paying close attention to the war in Ukraine. The new NSS should clearly recognize that helping the Ukrainians defeat Russia is not only the immediate strategic priority in Europe but also a key front in deterring and weakening China—which has made it abundantly clear that it seeks global, not merely regional, power and influence. As part of its Europe strategy, the administration should make sure NATO allies, such as Germany, follow through on their new commitments to spend the NATO minimum of 2 percent of GDP on defense—and support them as they enhance Europe’s defense. The NSS should also commit Washington to help Europe diversify energy supplies and turn away from its dependence on Russia. While the United States no longer relies on the Middle East for energy, many of America’s allies and partners still do. In tandem with increasing U.S. energy production and export capacity, the NSS should prioritize cooperating with major Arab oil producers to undercut Russian energy blackmail against Europe and use China’s energy vulnerabilities to weaken it. Biden’s pledges to turn Saudi Arabia into a “pariah” and consign fossil fuels to history created a chasm between the United States and its major Arab energy-producing partners—a chasm that helped fuse the Saudi-Russian oil cartel and create an opening for China. Building on the Abraham Accords and other regional groupings, a smart NSS would recognize and respond to the growing security cooperation between China, Russia, and Iran. This week’s news of a Russian-Iranian oil swap to bust Western sanctions is a case in point. The administration should abandon any effort to use a nuclear agreement with Tehran to reintegrate Iranian oil into the marketplace, which would only finance the regime’s continued assaults—and lead America’s Arab partners to hedge against U.S. credibility by seeking better relations with Russia and China. U.S. presence and leadership in the Middle East is essential to—not a distraction from—geopolitical competition with Beijing and Moscow. In releasing the new strategy, the Biden administration has an opportunity to take stock and change course. Indeed, there are ample precedents of other Democratic administrations making such a pivot amid geostrategic shifts. In 1950, President Harry Truman and Congress reacted to the shock of the Korean War by doubling the defense budget, which brought to an end the post-World War II shrinking of U.S. forces. In 1979, the Carter administration underwent a similar transformation: Spurred by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and other geopolitical challenges, President Jimmy Carter ended a failed strategy of accommodation with Moscow and began a sustained boost of U.S. defense spending, which eventually put the Soviets back on their heels. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine should serve as such a wake-up moment for Biden. By producing an NSS that reinvigorates U.S. power and deterrence, the Biden administration has the opportunity to set America on a course to prevail in the geopolitical competition that will determine the future of the United States and the world.

China will not attack Taiwan, claims that it will be militarily aggressive in Asia are without evidence, projecting power against China risks war

Michael D. Swaine, 8-29, 22, The Taiwan issue, at root, is not about military balances but political motives., Michael D. Swaine is director of the Quincy Institute’s East Asia program.. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-colby-wrong-taiwan-204512

In his recent Foreign Affairs article “America Must Prepare for a War Over Taiwan,” Elbridge Colby argues that the solution to sustaining stability in the Taiwan Strait is for the United States to greatly ramp up its defense spending in Asia in order to deter an otherwise likely Chinese attack on Taiwan and preserve peace in Asia. Politics Strategy Game Yet instead of preserving the peace, Colby’s approach would guarantee conflict, produce an open-ended U.S-China arms race, significantly increase the chance of further conflicts over Taiwan or other issues, and of course, destabilize the global economy. Colby consistently fails to adopt any frame of analysis for the Taiwan issue other than a simplistic force-on-force approach. In doing so, he overestimates the capabilities of the Chinese military to take Taiwan and totally ignores the reality that even a militarily inferior Beijing will still employ force against the island if it believes that the United States were using its military might to back a clear bid by Taipei for independence. As examined in my recent Quincy Institute study of U.S. threat inflation, the Chinese military has certainly greatly increased its capabilities relevant to Taiwan over the previous decades and poses an increasing threat. But it has not amassed anything approaching the level of superior force that would be required to confidently subdue Taiwan while deterring or defeating any U.S. intervention. The Chinese military still operates under a wide array of limitations in weapons, logistics, training, and experience that would make any full-scale resort to force a gigantic roll of the dice. Thus, continuing to sustain such a high risk for Beijing does not require a huge increase in U.S. defense spending, as Colby suggests. But Beijing would be quite willing to throw the dice if it were to conclude that Washington had entirely discarded its One China policy and decided that Taiwan is a vital strategic asset for the United States that must be kept from China, as a recent senior U.S. defense official has suggested. Such a Chinese attack could come in the form of a blockade or an attempt at an outright invasion of Taiwan, or a lesser but still highly escalatory kinetic action designed to force Washington to reconsider. Any of these would almost inevitably lead to a direct Sino-U.S. clash with disastrous consequences for all. The Chinese leadership would take this gamble and essentially be willing to fight and possibly lose an initial conflict over Taiwan if the alternative were to risk a permanent loss of the island by doing nothing. Such a national disgrace would almost certainly bring down the regime, given the close link that exists between its legitimacy and the completion of the sacred Chinese task of national reunification. And if the Chinese lost the initial engagement, they would assume that there would be subsequent rounds and thus increase their capabilities even further in order to establish a military advantage in the future. I know of no reputable China security specialist who doubts this. All this means that to avoid producing the outcome Colby ostensibly seeks to avoid, any “peace through strength” strategy must also include credible reassurances that American strength will not be used to backstop the permanent separation of Taiwan from China. This requires a very credible, continued U.S. commitment to its One China policy, something Colby does not even mention. Indeed, his other writings suggest that this policy could be hollowed out or discarded entirely by bringing Taiwan within the U.S. defense perimeter, i.e., making it into a de facto security ally. Why does Colby ignore the fact that the Taiwan issue, at root, is not about military balances but political motives? I think it is partly because he is a defense analyst who believes most security problems are nails that only require a solid hammer to resolve. More importantly, I suspect it is because he has not spent any part of his career trying to understand Chinese views on the issue. He simply believes that the Chinese will behave like unrestrained power maximizers, a tenet touted by the offensive realist theory he champions. And so, he posits a People’s Republic of China that goes from seizing Taiwan to attacking Japan, then the Philippines, or any other place in Asia that just might challenge China. This extreme notion lacks any substantive evidence to back it, relying only on theoretical assumptions. There is a more financially feasible, less provocative, and dangerous approach to the Taiwan issue. Rather than unnecessarily doubling down on defense spending, bringing Taiwan into the U.S. defense perimeter, and denying, in effect, the efficacy of the U.S. One China policy, the United States should adopt a more stabilizing, defense-oriented, and affordable force posture in Asia, along with genuine efforts to reinvigorate the One China policy. And the United States should also coordinate this defense strategy with the more cautious, restrained stance of America’s allies in the region. None of them, including Japan, want the kind of militaristic, zero-sum stance toward Beijing that Colby proposes. The same can be said of the American public, who, despite their growing concerns about China, want Washington to engage the Chinese in meaningful diplomacy, not risk yet another war or engage in endless arms racing. This is all spelled out in a recent report by the Quincy Institute, a multi-authored document that includes former U.S. government officials and intelligence officers on the defense budget, the Chinese military, and China’s foreign and defense strategy.

US regularly trashes the Liberal International Order; it’s hegemony cannot sustain it, only destroy it

Fraser, 8-29, 22, Sam Fraser is a communications associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He holds a B.A. in International Relations from Claremont McKenna College. His studies there focused on U.S. foreign policy and Latin America, and he has conducted field research on human rights and transitional justice in Argentina. He has also studied the issue of impunity for U.S. foreign policy officials for his undergraduate thesis entitled “The Catastrophe Artists: Understanding America’s Unaccountable Foreign Policy Elite.”, Responsible Statecraft, Why US hegemony is incompatible with a ‘rules-based international order’, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/08/29/why-us-hegemony-is-incompatible-with-a-rules-based-international-order/

The second claim is even more striking. In essence, Spencer-Churchill argues that all peoples self-evidently desire liberal democratic capitalism, and therefore capitalist democracies like the United States have a right to deliver this system to them by force, whether asked for or not.

This contention, of course, is nothing new. It has helped sell numerous U.S. military interventions since the Second World War and itself is only a refinement of the “civilizing missions” of earlier European imperialisms. Yet, in a year when the United States has rallied global opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the name of upholding the rules-based international order, state sovereignty, and self-determination, the absurdity of Spencer-Churchill’s claims is shown in stark relief.

In Spencer-Churchill’s formulation, the United States and its allies serve as the guarantors of a rules-based international order, but also enjoy license to violate these rules under broad circumstances of their own determination. While it is not often laid out so bluntly, this is largely how American foreign policy has operated for over seven decades. The United States points to a liberal order as the justification for and result of its predominant military power and global influence, and will invoke that order in the face of other parties’ abuses, but will accept no restraints on its own freedom of action.

This is well demonstrated by Washington’s habitual rejection of international treaties produced by the United Nations system (the creation of which, of course, was led by the U.S. itself). The U.S. will nonetheless wield these treaties against the behavior of other nations, as it does with China’s maritime claims and the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the United States has neither signed nor ratified.

When proponents of liberal hegemony acknowledge this tension, some argue that it is necessary, even beneficial to the project of building a stable, liberal world order. The international system is anarchic and actors worse than the United States abound, ready to fill any power vacuum left vacant by Washington or its close allies. Such an order needs a powerful state to enforce it, and sometimes it may be necessary to bend or even break rules in defense of higher principles.

In a recent article for The Atlantic, journalist Tom McTague made such a case, examining the “idea that convinces U.S. leaders that they never oppress, only liberate, and that their interventions can never be a threat to nearby powers, because America is not imperialist.” McTague recognizes that this – the notion that the U.S. is driven by universal values and acts in the universal interest – is both a “delusion” and “lies at the core of [the United States’] most costly foreign policy miscalculations.” Yet McTague asserts that this delusion is necessary to sustain America’s commitment to upholding global order and keeping more malicious powers at bay.

Never mind that some of the heroic interventions McTague cites — like the Korean War — were in fact atrocity-ridden debacles that could not credibly be presented as defenses of democracy at the time they actually took place, his larger case is also unpersuasive. Outside of the U.S. and Europe, what he calls the “necessary myth” of American benevolence has been hemorrhaging credibility, and the hypocrisy at the heart of the liberal international order is not a means to its perpetuation, but rather to its steady undoing.

Decades of lawless interventions in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America have left nations of the Global South deeply and rightly skeptical of the United States as an upholder of international law. Younger Americans increasingly reject U.S. exceptionalism and global military dominance as well

As America’s relative power declines and we move toward an increasingly multipolar international system, the contradictions inherent in Washington’s version of the liberal order will become even harder to ignore. A United States that faces more and greater challenges to its power will likely turn to increasingly coercive means to defend that power, rendering its “liberal” guise increasingly threadbare.

It is clear that, going forward, the laudable goal of creating a global order based on international law and mutually agreeable rules of conduct is incompatible with U.S. hegemony — or for that matter, the hypothetical hegemony of any other power. Any state possessing a preponderance of power will, as the U.S. has, reject external restraints on that power. Any “rules-based order” put forward by a hegemon will be wielded in service of hegemony, not the other way around.

Hegemonic decline and a turn toward multipolarity means US military aggression

Fraser, 8-29, 22, Sam Fraser is a communications associate at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He holds a B.A. in International Relations from Claremont McKenna College. His studies there focused on U.S. foreign policy and Latin America, and he has conducted field research on human rights and transitional justice in Argentina. He has also studied the issue of impunity for U.S. foreign policy officials for his undergraduate thesis entitled “The Catastrophe Artists: Understanding America’s Unaccountable Foreign Policy Elite.”, Responsible Statecraft, Why US hegemony is incompatible with a ‘rules-based international order’, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/08/29/why-us-hegemony-is-incompatible-with-a-rules-based-international-order/

As America’s relative power declines and we move toward an increasingly multipolar international system, the contradictions inherent in Washington’s version of the liberal order will become even harder to ignore. A United States that faces more and greater challenges to its power will likely turn to increasingly coercive means to defend that power, rendering its “liberal” guise increasingly threadbare.

Multipolarity means miscalculated wars

Kroenig, 8-27, 22, Matthew Kroenig is deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a professor in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His latest book is The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy Versus Autocracy From the Ancient World to the U.S. and China, Foreign Policy, International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming

Realists argue that multipolar systems are unstable and prone to major wars of miscalculation. World War I is a classic example. Multipolar systems are unstable in part because each country must worry about multiple potential adversaries. Indeed, at present, the U.S. Defense Department frets about possible simultaneous conflicts with Russia in Europe and China in the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, U.S. President Joe Biden has stated that the use of military force remains on the table as a last resort to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. A three-front war is not out of the question. Wars of miscalculation often result when states underestimate their adversary. States doubt their opponent’s power or resolve to fight, so they test them. Sometimes, the enemy is bluffing, and the challenge pays off. If the enemy is determined to defend its interests, however, major war can result. Russian President Vladimir Putin likely miscalculated in launching an invasion of Ukraine, incorrectly assuming that war would be easy. Some realist scholars warned for some time that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was coming, and there is still the possibility that the war in Ukraine could spill across NATO’s borders, turning this conflict into a direct U.S.-Russia conflagration. In addition, there is the danger that Chinese President Xi Jinping might miscalculate over Taiwan. Washington’s confusing “strategic ambiguity” policy as to whether it would defend the island only adds to the instability. Biden has said he would defend Taiwan, but his own White House contradicted him. Many leaders are confused, including possibly Xi. He might mistakenly believe he could get away with an attack on Taiwan—only to have the United States intervene violently to stop him. Moreover, after several U.S. presidents have threatened “all options on the table” for the Iranian nuclear program without backing it up, Tehran might assume that it can make a dash for the bomb without a U.S. response. If Iran is mistaken in doubting Biden’s resolve, war could result.

Liberal multilateral institutions are manipulated by those engaging in conflict

Kroenig, 8-27, 22, Matthew Kroenig is deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a professor in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His latest book is The Return of Great Power Rivalry: Democracy Versus Autocracy From the Ancient World to the U.S. and China, Foreign Policy, International Relations Theory Suggests Great-Power War Is Coming

Even liberalism, a more optimistic theory in general, provides a reason for pessimism. To be sure, liberals are right that institutions, economic interdependence, and democracy have facilitated cooperation within the liberal world order. The United States and its democratic allies in North America, Europe, and East Asia are more united than ever before. But these same factors are increasingly sparking conflict on the fault lines between the liberal and illiberal world orders.

In the new Cold War, international institutions have simply become new arenas for competition. Russia and China are infiltrating these institutions and turning them against their intended purposes. Who can forget Russia chairing a meeting of the United Nations Security Council as its armies invaded Ukraine in February? Similarly, China used its influence in the World Health Organization to stymie an effective investigation into COVID-19’s origins. And dictators vie for seats on the U.N. Human Rights Council to ensure their egregious human rights abuses escape scrutiny. Instead of facilitating cooperation, international institutions are increasingly exacerbating conflict.

Liberal scholars also argue that economic interdependence mitigates conflict. But this theory always had a chicken-and-egg problem. Is trade driving good relations, or are good relations driving trade? We are seeing the answer play out in real time.

China containment risks great power war

Wertheim, 8-24, 22, Stephen Wertheim last week, who makes the case for American restraint. Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/24/us-restraint-ukraine-taiwan-wertheim-interview/

However, when I look at the U.S. side, I see the United States as having leapt from the so-called engagement strategy to containment. In other words, engagement was always a kind of regime-change strategy. The idea was that the United States would be fine with coexisting with China and engaging in a great amount of trade with China, so long as China came to look more like the United States, more like a liberal democracy, and fulfilled our expectations internationally, accepted U.S. leadership, etc. Well, that hasn’t happened. And so, noting the increasing scale of Chinese power, the United States beginning under the Trump administration moved essentially to a containment approach, saying, we have to get tough with China and view the expansion of Chinese power and influence as a significant threat to the United States. I think that we passed over another option, which is mutual coexistence, being clear-eyed that China has its own system that we don’t approve of, and we’re going to continue to object to Chinese human rights abuses like the large-scale ones in Xinjiang, but we also are going to clearly signal to China that we can coexist. We don’t seek to change the Chinese regime, and not all aspects of Chinese power run counter to U.S. interests in the world, and some things are also not worth antagonizing China over, because when you have the world’s two leading powers, there’s a risk of great-power war.

American unilateralism and Isolating China will trigger the end of civilization

Lieven , 8-24, 22, Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London. He is a member of the advisory committee of the South Asia Department of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He holds a BA and PhD from Cambridge University in England. 1985 to 1998, Anatol Lieven worked as a British journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and covered the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and the southern Caucasus. From 2000 to 2007 he worked at think tanks in Washington DC, Putin fairly deconstructed: a man, a myth, the state, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/08/24/putin-fairly-deconstructed-a-man-a-myth-the-state/

Lieven is author of several books on Russia and its neighbors including “The Baltic Revolutions: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Path to Independence” and “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry.”

Short is however at pains to bring out the fact that the changes in Putin’s ideology did not take place in a vacuum, and reflected (as well as shaped) much wider changes in Russian attitudes. The repeated willful disregard for Russian views and Russian interests displayed by Western governments not only helped to produce a catastrophic backlash in Russian foreign policy but also contributed greatly to the growth of illiberalism at home. Short quotes Sir Francis Richards, former British diplomat and head of GCHQ (the British equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency), on the West’s failure to reciprocate the gestures of support and goodwill made by Putin after 9/11:

“We were quite grateful for Putin’s support after 9/11, but we didn’t show it very much. I used to spend a lot of time trying to persuade people that we needed to give as well as take…I think the Russians felt throughout that [on NATO issues] they were being fobbed off. And they were.”

As Short indicates, Putin’s help to the Bush administration, and that administration’s subsequent abrogation of the ABM Treaty and advocacy of NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine led to “a growing feeling in the Russian elite that Putin was being played.” This domestic embarrassment most likely contributed to the ferocity of Putin’s approach to the Ukraine issue.

Short’s ultimate conclusion is a profoundly pessimistic one: that largely irrespective of individual leadership on either side, American determination to pursue unilateral global leadership (and European acquiescence in this) was bound to bring America and Russia into confrontation, given Russia’s determination to remain one pole of a multipolar world. “America, the global power, believes that its role is to lead. Russia refuses to be led.”

For this reason alone, Short should be read by U.S. policymakers — because if Washington repeats the same approach with regard to the vastly more powerful Chinese state, the result could be the end of civilization.

Beckley & Hands are wrong: Decline doesn’t necessarily lead to war

Andrew Latham, 8-22, 22Andrew Latham is Professor of International Relations and Political Theory at Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, and Research Associate with the Centre for Defence and Security Studies, Canada. Professor Latham has taught courses such as Chinese Foreign Policy, Regional Conflict and Security (which has alternatively focused on the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific Region); War and Islam; US Foreign and Defense Policy, International Security, and Advanced International Theory, What if China is not rising, making it more dangerous?, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/08/22/authors-china-is-not-rising-but-that-makes-it-more-dangerous/

In their recently released book “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China,” Hal Brands and Michael Beckley challenge key aspects of this conventional wisdom. At the risk of oversimplification, their argument is that China is not a rising power, at least in the sense that it is on a linear trajectory to become ever more prosperous and powerful, and perhaps one day predominant. Rather, it is a faltering power, one that is fated first to stumble and then decline, at least in relative terms. Furthermore, this looming reversal of fortunes, they argue, is neither a remote possibility nor one that is contingent on some policy misstep on the part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is baked into China’s demography and economy, and it is reinforced by the logic of geopolitical counter-balancing.

At this point, according to the authors, there is simply nothing the CCP can do to avoid the “middle-income trap,” the imminent prospect of “growing old before growing rich,” or the effort on the part of weaker neighbors to band together to constrain what they consider to be an increasingly menacing China. Simply put, though China’s star might seem to be still ascendant, it has effectively peaked. And it has done so long before supplanting the United States as a global, or even regional, hegemon.

While this might seem like a blessing, Brands and Beckley argue, if history is any guide a faltering China is likely to prove anything but. Consider the two historical cases of Germany in 1914 and Japan in 1941. In both cases, a rising power — a power that had grown increasingly wealthy and that wanted to claim its rightful place in the sun — began to lose ground, in the German case demographically, in the Japanese case strategically.

Having realized that their relative power positions were likely to get worse over time, both powers decided to initiate wars they knew had only a slim chance of winning because they also suspected their prospects were only going to get worse with each passing year. In both cases, the hegemonic contender made a desperate bid to lock in its relative power position by launching a war to reset the international system in their favor.

In neither case was war caused by rising states leaping through open windows of opportunity created by actual military advantage. Instead, they were caused by a stalled rising power, at a current or imminent military disadvantage, attacking despite this disadvantage because it was the least bad of several very bad options open to them. Reasoning by historical analogy, the authors conclude that the most important foreign policy challenge facing the United States over the next decade or so will be to figure out how to deal with a China that, like Germany in 1914 and Japan in 1941, sees the ring of regional and perhaps global predominance slipping away.

This is an ambitious book and, as such, has much to recommend it. The focus on China peaking or plateauing — as opposed to rising — is particularly salutary as it forces us to think about the strategic implications of what remains an under-appreciated shift in China’s developmental trajectory.

Like every ambitious book, however, this one rests on a number of assumptions, assertions and arguments that are open to conceptual and/or empirical challenge. The most significant of these can be found in the authors’ conclusions regarding the implications of peak China for international peace and security. Via historical analogy, the authors come to the conclusion that the next decade will be a moment of considerable peril, similar in kind — and fraught with the same risk of war — as the years immediately preceding 1914 and 1941.

Now, in the abstract at least, there’s nothing inherently wrong with using this sort of historical analogy to shed light on a contemporary geopolitical dynamic. The devil, however, is in the details. Faulty or false analogies can arise when one likens one case to another when the differences between the two outweigh the similarities. Similarly, one can misanalogize by treating one version of an historical case as objective history when in fact there are multiple, competing versions of the narrative, any of which could lead to quite different conclusions about the contemporary dynamics.

In this case, the authors appear to have fallen prey to the latter type of logical fallacy, very selectively drawing on one theory out of many that purport to explain the outbreak of war in 1914 and 1941 in order to make an argument about the dangers associated with China’s coming decline. Having for many years taught a college course on the politics of the world wars, I can point to any number of theoretical explanations for the causes of those wars that have little or nothing to do with German or Japanese fears of relative decline.

That the authors treat the most convenient accounts of these wars as simply the way things happened, and then conclude that we are now entering a similar period of heightened risk, may be suggestive but it is far from dispositive.

Russia will inevitably build strong ties with China

Marks, 8-21., 22, Ramon Marks is a retired, New York international lawyer, No Matter Who Wins Ukraine, America Has Already Lost, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/no-matter-who-wins-ukraine-america-has-already-lost-204288

Regardless of who wins the Ukrainian war, the United States will be the strategic loser. Russia will build closer relations with China and other countries on the Eurasian continent, including India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. It will turn irrevocably away from European democracies and Washington. Just as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger played the “China card” to isolate the Soviet Union during the Cold War, presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will play their cards in a bid to contain U.S. global leadership.

Knowing that it can no longer keep Europe as its top energy customer, Moscow has logically moved to grow its fossil fuels sales with Asia, notably China and India. Since the Ukraine invasion, Russia has become China’s top oil provider, replacing Saudi Arabia. It is true that in the short to medium term, transfer capacity will limit how much more fossil fuels Russia can sell to China. Russia currently has just one overland oil route to China, the ESPO pipeline. The only gas pipeline currently in operation is Power of Siberia. Pipeline sales of both oil and gas are supplemented by seaborne routes to mainland China. In the years ahead, China and Russia will doubtlessly make substantial investments to expand oil and gas transmission between the two countries, better enabling Russia to be the primary supplier of fossil fuels to China. The Chinese will likely be able to reduce their dependence on fossil fuel shipments from the Middle East which must pass through vulnerable naval choke points such as the Malacca Straits. Closer energy relations between China and Russia will help to draw them closer as strategic allies with “no limits” on the Eurasian continent. By having a committed Russian energy supplier in its backyard, China will inevitably obtain more strategic flexibility for dealing with the United States and its Indo-Pacific regional allies, all to the detriment of Western democracies.

Multilateralism failing to stop global conflict and solve problems

World Politics Review Insight, 8-19, 22, What’s Next for Multilateralism and the Liberal International Order?, https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/

The United Nations is perhaps the most prominent manifestation of an international order built on balancing sovereign equality with great-power politics in a bid to maintain international peace. But its capacity to do that—and to meet its other objectives, which include protecting human rights and delivering aid—have been severely constrained in recent years by its member states. The real power in the U.N. lies with the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council—the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain and France. And they have used their positions to limit the institution’s involvement in major recent conflicts, including civil wars in Syria and Yemen. But perhaps no global crisis has underscored the Security Council’s limitations more than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Because of its veto, Moscow has been able to block all efforts at the council to condemn or intervene in a war of aggression that clearly violates the United Nations Charter. Beyond the Security Council, the U.N. has sprouted additional specialized agencies to address specific issues—health, women’s rights and refugees, among others—that have met with varied degrees of success. In some instances, they have been able to galvanize global action around urgent goals, like UNAIDS’ work curbing the international AIDS crisis. But many of those agencies are now also facing funding shortages that could severely curtail their work, not least the World Health Organization, which has led the global coronavirus response. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addresses the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 24, 2019 (AP photo by Richard Drew). In addition to the U.N. and its agencies, multilateralism of all stripes is under strain, in part because of the Trump administration’s hostility during its four years in office toward these organizations due to the perceived constraints that multilateralism places on Washington’s freedom of action. In the absence of U.S. leadership and at times in the face of U.S. obstructionism, many multilateral efforts floundered. Heightened tensions and strategic competition among the U.S., Russia and China have also blocked efforts to address crises, even where their interests converge, as in Afghanistan. President Joe Biden promised to adopt a more conventional U.S. approach to multilateralism and America’s global role, and his administration has already followed through with efforts to correct course on both scores in its first year and a half in office. But whether that will be enough to shore up the international order remains to be seen. It is unclear whether the WTO will be able to reassert itself as global trade revives after the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance. The International Criminal Court, which could play a vital role in pursuing charges of war crimes emerging from the war in Ukraine, is under pressure from all sides—including the U.S. And the WHO has emerged from the coronavirus pandemic with its reputation severely damaged by its perceived inability to hold countries—particularly China—accountable for failing to meet their responsibilities under the global health governance system. Other multilateral bodies, including the G-20 and G-7, are finding themselves ill-equipped to exercise any influence, as global powers are increasingly interested in competition rather than cooperation. While Moscow, Beijing and, increasingly, Washington were already looking to shake up the status quo, the pandemic encouraged other countries to try to take advantage of the situation for their own political, economic and strategic gain. Bodies like the G-20 and the G-7 were designed to leverage the economic power of rich countries around a unified response to international crises, but there is little unity to be found at the moment. WPR has covered the U.N. and multilateral institutions in detail and continues to examine key questions about their future. Will veto-wielding Security Council members continue to curtail U.N. involvement in key geopolitical hotspots, and what will that mean for the legitimacy of the institution? Will the U.N. and its specialized agencies be undone by threatened funding cuts? Will the world be able to formulate a multilateral approach to addressing the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic—and now the war in Ukraine? Below are some of the highlights of WPR’s coverage.

China is an aggressive global power that will become even more of a threat as it declines

Brands & Beckley, 8-13, 22, Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy, What Does China Want? https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/08/13/what-china-wants-us-conflict/ Michael Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The greatest geopolitical catastrophes occur at the intersection of ambition and desperation. Xi Jinping’s China will soon be driven by plenty of both. In our new book, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, which this article is adapted from, we explain the cause of that desperation: a slowing economy and a creeping sense of encirclement and decline. But first, we need to lay out the grandness of those ambitions—what Xi’s China is trying to achieve. It is difficult to grasp just how hard China’s fall will be without understanding the heights to which Beijing aims to climb. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is undertaking an epic project to rewrite the rules of global order in Asia and far beyond. China doesn’t want to be a superpower—one pole of many in the international system. It wants to be the superpower—the geopolitical sun around which the system revolves. That ambition is now hard to miss in what CCP officials are saying. It is even more obvious in what the CCP is doing, from its world-beating naval shipbuilding program to its effort to remake the strategic geography of Eurasia. China’s grand strategy involves pursuing objectives close to home, such as cementing the CCP’s hold on power and reclaiming bits of China that were ripped away when the country was weak. It also includes more expansive goals, such as carving out a regional sphere of influence and contesting American power on a global scale. The CCP’s agenda blends a sense of China’s historical destiny with an emphasis on modern, 21st-century tools of power. It is rooted in the timeless geopolitical ambitions that motivate so many great powers and the insatiable insecurities that plague China’s authoritarian regime. Although China’s drive to reorder the world predates Xi, it has accelerated dramatically in recent years. Today, CCP officials outwardly evince every confidence that a rising China is eclipsing a declining United States. Inwardly, however, Beijing’s leaders are already worrying that the Chinese dream may remain just that. China’s grand strategy is typically found more in a rough consensus among elites than in detailed, step-by-step plans for the future. Yet there is ample evidence that the CCP is pursuing a determined, multilayered grand strategy with four key objectives. First, the CCP has the eternal ambition of every autocratic regime: to maintain its iron grip on power. Since 1949, the Chinese regime has always seen itself as being locked in struggle with domestic and foreign enemies. Its leaders are haunted by the Soviet collapse, which brought down another great socialist state. They know that the collapse of the CCP-led system would be a disaster—and probably fatal—for them personally. In Chinese politics, paranoia is thus a virtue rather than a vice. As Wen Jiabao, then China’s head of government, once said, “To think about why danger looms will ensure one’s security. To think about why chaos occurs will ensure one’s peace. To think about why a country falls will ensure one’s survival.” The CCP has historically gone to enormous lengths—plunging the country into madness during the Cultural Revolution, killing hundreds or perhaps thousands of its own citizens amid the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989—to protect its power. And the goal of perpetuating the CCP’s authority is at the core of every key decision. Xi’s fundamental purpose, as a reporter summarized one official’s explanation in 2017, was “ensuring the leading role of the Communist Party in all aspects of life.” Second, the CCP wants to make China whole again by regaining territories lost in earlier eras of internal upheaval and foreign aggression. Xi’s map of China includes a Hong Kong that is completely reincorporated into the CCP-led state (a process that is well underway) and a Taiwan that has been brought back into Beijing’s grasp. Elsewhere along its periphery, the CCP has outstanding border disputes with countries from India to Japan. Beijing also claims some 90 percent of the South China Sea—one of the world’s most commercially vital waterways—as its sovereign possession. Chinese officials say that there is no room for compromise on these issues. “We cannot lose even one inch of the territory left behind by our ancestors,” Xi told then-U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis in 2018. The CCP’s third aim is to create a regional sphere of influence in which China is supreme because outside actors, especially the United States, are pushed to the margins. Beijing probably doesn’t envision the sort of outright physical dominance that the Soviet Union exercised in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. The CCP envisions, rather, using a mix of attraction and coercion to ensure that the economies of maritime Asia are oriented toward Beijing rather than Washington, that smaller powers are properly deferential to the CCP, and that the United States no longer has the alliances, regional military presence, or influence necessary to create problems for China in its own front yard. As Xi said in 2014, “It is for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia, and uphold the security of Asia.” Other officials have been more explicit. In 2010, then-Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told 10 Southeast Asian countries that “China is a big country and you are small countries, and that is a fact.” The final layer of Beijing’s strategy focuses on achieving global power and, eventually, global primacy. State media and party officials have explained that an increasingly powerful China cannot comfortably reside in a system led by the United States. Xi has talked of creating a global “community of common destiny” that would involve “all under heaven being one family”—and presumably obeying the fatherly guidance of the CCP. Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency, makes no bones about who will shape global affairs once China’s national rejuvenation is achieved: “By 2050, two centuries after the Opium Wars, which plunged the ‘Middle Kingdom’ into a period of hurt and shame, China is set to regain its might and re-ascend to the top of the world.” The struggle to “become the world’s No.1 … is a ‘people’s war,’” the nationalist newspaper Global Times declares. “It will be as vast and mighty as a big river. It will be an unstoppable tide.” The four layers of Chinese grand strategy all go together. The CCP argues that only under its leadership can China achieve its long-awaited “national rejuvenation.” The quest for regional and global power, in turn, should reinforce the CCP’s authority at home. This quest can provide legitimacy by stoking Chinese nationalism at a time when the regime’s original ideology—socialism—has been abandoned. It can deliver prestige, domestic as well as global, for China’s rulers. And it can give China the ability, which it is using aggressively, to silence its international critics and create global rules that protect an autocratic state. Chinese grand strategy thus encompasses far more than the narrowly conceived defense of the country and its ruling regime. Those goals are tightly linked to the pursuit of an epochal change in the regional and global rules of the road—the sort that occurs when one hegemon falls and another arises. “Empires have no interest in operating within an international system,” writes former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in his book Diplomacy, “they aspire to be the international system.” That’s the ultimate ambition of Chinese statecraft today. Americans might be surprised to find that Chinese leaders view the United States as a dangerous, hostile nation determined to hold other countries down. Yet even as China has, in many ways, flourished in the Pax Americana, its leaders have worried that Washington threatens nearly everything the CCP desires. It cannot escape the attention of Chinese policymakers that the United States has a distinguished record of destroying its most serious global challengers—Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union—as well as a host of lesser rivals. Nor can Chinese officials forget that the United States is poised to frustrate all of the CCP’s designs. From Mao Zedong to Xi, Chinese leaders have seen the United States as a menace to the CCP’s political primacy. When the United States and China were avowed enemies during the early Cold War, Washington sponsored Tibetan rebels who fought against that regime, while also supporting Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek and his claim to be China’s rightful ruler. In recent decades, American leaders have insisted they wish China well. But they have also proclaimed, as then-U.S. President Bill Clinton said in 1997, that the country’s authoritarian political model puts it “on the wrong side of history.” After the Tiananmen Square massacre, and in response to CCP atrocities against the Uyghur population more recently, the United States even led coalitions of countries that slapped economic sanctions on China. The CCP sees through the subterfuge, one Chinese politician explained: “The U.S. has never given up its intent to overthrow the socialist system.” Even when the United States has no conscious design to undermine dictators, it cannot help but threaten them. America’s very existence serves as a beacon of hope to dissidents. CCP members surely noticed that protesters in Hong Kong prominently displayed U.S. flags when resisting the imposition of authoritarian rule in 2019-2020, just as the protesters in Tiananmen Square erected a giant sculpture resembling the Statue of Liberty 30 years earlier. They howl in anger when U.S. news organizations publish detailed exposes of official crimes and corruption in Beijing. Things that Americans view as innocuous—for instance, the operation of nongovernmental organizations focused on human rights and government accountability—look like subversive menaces to a CCP that recognizes no limits on its own power. The United States simply cannot cease threatening the CCP unless America somehow ceases to be what it is: a liberal democracy concerned with the fate of freedom in the world. The United States stands athwart China’s road to greatness in other ways. The CCP cannot make China whole again without reclaiming Taiwan, but the United States shields that island—through arms sales, diplomatic support, and the implicit promise of military aid—from Beijing’s pressure. Similarly, the United States obstructs China’s drive for dominance in the South China Sea with its Navy and its calls for freedom of navigation; its military alliances and security partnerships in Asia give smaller countries the temerity to resist Chinese power. Washington maintains a globally capable military and bristles when China tries to develop something similar; it uses its heft to shape international views of how countries should behave and what sort of political systems are most legitimate. Beijing must “break the Western moral advantage,” noted one Chinese analyst, that comes from determining which governments are “good and bad.” To be clear, China doesn’t reject all aspects of the U.S.-led order: The CCP has brilliantly exploited access to an open global economy, and its military forces have participated in United Nations peacekeeping missions. But Chinese leaders nonetheless appreciate, better than many Americans do, that there is something fundamentally antagonistic about the relationship: The CCP cannot succeed in creating arrangements that reflect its own interests and values without weakening, fragmenting, and ultimately replacing the order that currently exists. Even at moments when Beijing and Washington have seemed friendly, then, Chinese leaders have harbored extremely jaded views of U.S. power. Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, whose economic reforms relied on U.S. markets and technology, argued that Washington was waging a “world war without gunsmoke” to overthrow the CCP. Such perceptions, in turn, lead to a belief that realizing China’s dreams will ultimately require a test of strength with the United States. The CCP faces a “new long march” in its relations with the United States, Xi said in 2019—a dangerous struggle for supremacy and survival. Xi is right that the countries are on a collision course. The CCP’s grand strategy imperils America’s long-declared interest in preventing any hostile power from controlling East Asia and the western Pacific. That strategy is activating America’s equally long-standing fear that a rival that gains preeminence on the Eurasian landmass could challenge the United States worldwide. China’s drive for technological supremacy is no less ominous: A world in which techno-autocracy is ascendant may not be one in which democracy is secure. The basic reason why U.S.-China relations are so tense today is that the CCP is trying to shape the next century in ways that threaten to overturn what the United States has achieved over the last century. This raises a deeper question: Why is Beijing so set on fundamentally revising the system, even if doing so leads to dangerous rivalry with the United States? The answer involves geopolitics, history, and ideology. In some ways, China’s bid for primacy is a new chapter in the world’s oldest story. Rising states typically seek greater influence, respect, and power. Yet China isn’t simply moved by the cold logic of geopolitics. It is also reaching for glory as a matter of historical destiny. China’s leaders view themselves as heirs to a Chinese state that was a superpower for most of recorded history. A series of Chinese empires claimed “all under heaven” as their mandate; they commanded deference from smaller states along the imperial periphery. “This history,” writes veteran Asia-watcher Michael Schuman in his book Superpower Interrupted, “has fostered in the Chinese a firm belief in what role they and their country should play in the world today, and for that matter, into the distant forever.” In Beijing’s view, a U.S.-led world in which China is a second-tier power is not the historical norm but a profoundly galling exception. That order was created after World War II, at the tail end of a “century of humiliation” in which a divided China was plundered by rapacious foreign powers. The CCP’s mandate is to set history aright by returning China to the top of the heap. “Since the Opium War of the 1840s the Chinese people have long cherished a dream of realizing a great national rejuvenation,” Xi said in 2014. Under CCP rule, China “will never again tolerate being bullied by any nation.” When Xi invokes the idea of a CCP-led “community of common destiny,” he is channeling this deeply rooted belief that Chinese primacy is the natural order of things. Not least, there is the ideological imperative. A strong, proud China might still pose problems for Washington even if it were a liberal democracy. But the fact that the country is ruled by autocrats committed to the ruthless suppression of liberalism domestically turbocharges Chinese revisionism globally. A deeply authoritarian state can never feel secure in its own rule, because it does not enjoy the freely given consent of the governed; it can never feel safe in a world dominated by democracies, because liberal international norms challenge illiberal domestic practices. “Autocracies,” writes the China scholar Minxin Pei, “simply are incapable of practicing liberalism abroad while maintaining authoritarianism at home.” This is no exaggeration. The infamous Document No. 9, a political directive issued at the outset of Xi’s presidency, shows that the CCP perceives a liberal world order as inherently threatening: “Western anti-China forces and internal ‘dissidents’ are still actively trying to infiltrate China’s ideological sphere.” The perpetual, piercing insecurity of an autocratic regime has powerful implications for Chinese statecraft. Chinese leaders feel a compulsion to make international norms and institutions friendlier to illiberal rule. They seek to push dangerous liberal influences away from Chinese borders. They must wrest international authority from a democratic superpower with a long history of bringing autocracies to ruin. And as an authoritarian China becomes powerful, it inevitably looks to strengthen the forces of illiberalism overseas as a way of enhancing its influence and affirming its own model. There is nothing extraordinary about this. When the United States became a world power, it forged a world that was hospitable to democratic values. When the Soviet Union controlled Eastern Europe, it imposed communist regimes. In great-power rivalries since antiquity, ideological cleavages have exacerbated geopolitical cleavages: Differences in how governments see their citizens produce profound differences in how those governments see the world. China is thus a typical revisionist state, an empire trying to reclaim its cherished place in the world, and an autocracy whose assertiveness flows from its unending insecurity. That’s a powerful—and volatile—combination. This is the outrageously ambitious China that the United States, and the world, are now familiar with. And as China amasses the means of global power—from influence in international organizations to the world’s largest navy by number of ships—it often seems as though it has embarked on an unstoppable ascent. “The East is rising, and the West is declining,” Xi likes to say. But it’s sometimes hard not to wonder if Xi and his lieutenants are as buoyant as they seem. Careful analysts of Chinese politics detect subtle anxiety in government reports and statements. Themes of bounding optimism are mixed with “words of caution and deep insecurity,” one such analyst wrote last year. Xi acknowledges, even as he touts Beijing’s power, that there are many ways in which “the West is strong, and the East is weak.” He warned, even in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, of “looming risks and tests.” He declared that China must make itself “invincible” to ensure that “nobody can beat us or choke us to death.” And he advised his cadres to prepare for brutal struggle ahead. Xi’s not wrong to worry. On closer inspection, it turns out that there is another China, one beset by multiplying problems at home and multiplying enmities abroad. Economic growth has slowed to a crawl. Productivity has collapsed, while debt has ballooned. Xi’s government is careening into ruinous totalitarianism. Water, food, and energy resources are becoming scarce. The country faces the worst peacetime demographic collapse in history. Not least, China is losing access to the welcoming world that enabled its ascent. Whatever its propagandists may say, this China will struggle mightily to surpass the United States over the long term. For that very reason, it may actually be more dangerous in the near future. Peaking powers usually become aggressive when their fortunes fade and their enemies encircle them. China is blazing a trail that often ends in tragedy: a rapid rise followed by the threat of a hard fall.

Competition against China triggers nuclear war

Larsen, 8-12, 22, Daniel Larison is a contributing editor at Antiwar.com and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago, Hawks: Time to prepare the nation for war with China, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/08/12/hawks-time-to-prepare-the-nation-for-war-with-china/

China hawks have been responding to Beijing’s more aggressive military exercises near Taiwan by calling for increased U.S. efforts to protect it from possible attack. Case in point: Elbridge Colby argued in Foreign Affairs this week that the United States is unprepared for a war over Taiwan and insisted that the Biden administration bring its policies into line with the president’s declarations of support. Colby writes, “Given its public statements and strategies, it would make sense for Washington to be behaving as though the United States might well be on the verge of major war with a nuclear-armed superpower rival.” If our government’s public statements and strategies have put the U.S. in such a dangerous position, that suggests that the U.S. should seriously reconsider and revise those statements and strategies before our country blunders into an avoidable disaster. Colby is right about one thing: there is a huge gap between the official rhetoric coming from Washington on Taiwan and the actions that the U.S. has been taking to back up these statements. President Biden has repeatedly made the mistake of claiming that the United States has a commitment to defend Taiwan from attack, and Speaker Pelosi’s ill-advised visit to Taipei included her statement that U.S. support for Taiwan was “ironclad.” As this gap has opened up between public statements and U.S. capabilities, there is a temptation to increase the latter significantly, but ramping up military spending and deployments is the wrong answer. The better solution is to scale back the expansive rhetoric and to stop chipping away at the status quo that has helped to preserve the peace in East Asia for more than forty years. While the call for a military buildup is framed as a deterrent to prevent a future conflict, it seems practically guaranteed to intensify an arms race with China and to feed the Chinese government’s fear of permanently losing Taiwan. If the U.S. encourages Beijing to conclude that time is not on their side and that the possibility of reunification will soon be foreclosed forever, that might very well hasten the onset of war instead of postponing it. In other words, the more that the U.S. builds up its military and focuses it on defeating China, the greater the incentive the Chinese government will have to respond in kind to match what our government does. Looming over all of this is the reality that the U.S. and China are nuclear powers with more than enough weapons to devastate both countries. If deterrence should fail for whatever reason, the costs of such a conflict would dwarf anything we have ever seen. The U.S. has pledged to take that risk for its treaty allies, but it should not take the same risk in this case. The demand to prepare for war with China takes for granted that the U.S. must go to war for Taiwan if it is attacked, but our government is not obligated to do this and our country does not have any vital interests at stake that would justify doing it. The U.S. can and should continue to assist Taiwan in building up its own defenses, but it should do this quietly without the frequent rhetorical jabs in the Chinese government’s eyes that serve only to increase tensions to no one’s benefit. Actively preparing for a war that the U.S. does not have to fight and does not need to fight will make such a war more rather than less likely. Assuming that there will be a war sooner than later and that the U.S. must be ready to fight it when it has no compelling reason to do so needlessly puts two of the world’s major powers on a collision course. George Kennan remarked on a similar dynamic in The Fateful Alliance, his excellent history of the formation of the alliance between France and Russia prior to WWI: “So powerful are such compulsions, at all times and in all places, that the absence of any rational motives for a war, or of any constructive purpose that could be served by one, is quite lost sight of behind them. The assumption of the inevitability of a war is allowed to rest exclusively on the fact that “we” and “they” are both preparing so intensively for it. No other reason is needed for the acceptance of its necessity.” The U.S. must avoid falling into this trap in the case of Taiwan. Colby also calls for the U.S. to encourage “far greater military contributions” from allies for the purposes of countering China and to free up U.S. resources in other parts of the world. It is doubtful that many allied states will want to do this, especially when the Washington continues to increase its own military spending to record high levels. As the U.S. takes on larger burdens and costs voluntarily, that signals to allies that they do not have to increase their own contributions. Our government has had the bad habit of promising more than it can realistically deliver, and in practically every case the mistake has been to create false expectations of full U.S. support that was never going to be forthcoming. Loose talk about coming to Taiwan’s defense may encourage the Taiwanese government to take more risks in their dealings with Beijing, but the bigger danger is that it leads the Chinese government to conclude that the U.S. is reneging on its past commitments to them. The initial Chinese response to Pelosi’s Taiwan visit indicates that this is exactly how their government perceives the direction of U.S. policy, so it would be reckless for the U.S. to give the Chinese government additional reasons to think this. The official line from the Biden administration is that U.S. policy has not changed with respect to China and Taiwan. If that’s true, the administration needs to do a better job of managing the relationship with Beijing than it has done so far. The immediate fallout from Speaker Pelosi’s visit has made that harder, but that is all the more reason for the administration to make the effort. The U.S. absolutely should not indulge advocates of so-called “strategic clarity” by making an explicit security commitment to Taiwan, since this would only cause further deterioration in the relationship and put Taiwan in greater danger. At the end of The Fateful Alliance, Kennan issued a warning of the dangers of great power rivalry in the nuclear age: “If, today, governments are still unable to recognize that modern nationalism and modern militarism are, in combination, self-destructive forces, and totally so; if they are incapable of looking clearly at those forces, discerning their true nature, and bringing them under some sort of control; if they continue, whether for reasons of fear or ambition, to cultivate those forces and to try to use them as instrument for self-serving competitive purposes—if they do these things, they will be preparing, this time, a catastrophe from which they can be no recovery and no return.” A policy that puts the United States and China on a path to increasing tensions and direct conflict risks embarking on a march to folly that would be even more destructive than the one that wrecked Europe more than a century ago.

Domestic dysfunction undermines the international order

George Beebe,Director of Grand Strategy, Quincy Institute, 8-11, 22, NATO’s Tunnel Vision, https://quincyinst.org/report/natos-tunnel-vision/

Increased political polarization at home could contribute to the devolution of the broader international order, resulting in a situation in which it is the West’s standing — in contrast to that of Russia, China, and other authoritarians — that erodes. The attractiveness of the American model for foreign audiences will diminish as domestic dysfunction within the United States increases. Already, Western efforts to align the Global South against Russia and China have made little progress. Putin’s recent high-profile meeting in Tehran with Turkish leader Erdogan and Iranian leader Raisi showed that important international doors remain open to Putin despite his transgressions in Ukraine. Key parts of the Global South, including most notably India, Africa, and the Middle East, have resisted U.S. demands for isolating and sanctioning Russia and bristled at American pressure for democracies to unite against authoritarians.21 For many nations already inclined to worry much more about reckless or coercive American actions than about threats from Russia, the implications of severe Western sanctions are prompting them to hedge against U.S. power rather than to bandwagon with it.22

Reduced relations with China mean China supports Russia in the Ukraine

George Beebe,Director of Grand Strategy, Quincy Institute, 8-11, 22, NATO’s Tunnel Vision, https://quincyinst.org/report/natos-tunnel-vision/

Moreover, dealing with China’s rise will only be more difficult for the United States if Beijing and Moscow are working actively together against it. International cooperation to combat climate change — described in NATO’s Strategic Concept as “a defining challenge” for the alliance — will be all but impossible. Despite this, the United States seems to be inadvertently encouraging Russian-Chinese partnership against the West. NATO’s blunt assertion that China’s “stated ambitions and coercive policies challenge our interests, security, and values” will only spur Eurasia’s two largest powers to partner against the United States and Europe.23 Russia’s dependence on China has grown significantly in the wake of its attack on Ukraine and corresponding rupture in relations with the West.24 Beijing has not backed away from Russia despite U.S. pressures and its own ambivalence over Russia’s violation of Ukrainian sovereignty — though it has so far avoided arming Moscow.25 The more tensions there are in the U.S.-China relationship, the more likely China will be to help Russia’s efforts in Ukraine.

Only US engagement can resolve the Ukraine war

George Beebe,Director of Grand Strategy, Quincy Institute, 8-11, 22, NATO’s Tunnel Vision, https://quincyinst.org/report/natos-tunnel-vision/

No settlement will be possible, however, absent active U.S. leadership. Without strong American backing, Ukraine could neither defend itself against Russian attacks nor build a base of domestic support for a negotiated end to the war. Without U.S. involvement in a settlement, Russia would doubt that any compromise with Ukraine would prompt the West to relent in its efforts to punish and weaken Russia. Only the United States has the requisite mix of carrots and sticks required to convince Putin that continuing the war will be worse for Russia than settling it. Only the United States can instill confidence in Ukraine that its future can be prosperous and secure outside the NATO alliance.

China’s aggression in Asia will increase

Panda, 8-11, 22, Dr. Jagannath Panda is a Contributing Editor at the National Interest. Dr. Panda is the Head of Stockholm Centre for South Asian and Indo-Pacific Affairs (SCSA-IPA) at the ISDP; and a Senior Fellow at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies. He is also the Director for Europe-Asia Research Cooperation at the YCAPS, Japan. Did Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan Trip Close the Thucydides Trap?, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/did-nancy-pelosi%E2%80%99s-taiwan-trip-close-thucydides-trap-204114

The Chinese standpoint is clear: The status quo that gave cross-Strait relations a semblance of stability has been ruptured. Chinese state media has declared the U.S. House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan a “salvo of war.” This, they say will precipitate a change in China’s United States policy—“strategic and comprehensive countermeasures” is the buzzword. Even before her arrival, China was categorical about the serious ramifications of this trip as it constituted “gross interference in its internal affairs.” Even U.S. president Joe Biden publicly acknowledged it as “not a good idea.” That Pelosi’s stopover would invite trouble was written on the wall. How can a politically symbolic action be without grave consequences? But perhaps the more important question is, how much worse will things get? The Chinese standpoint is clear: The status quo that gave cross-Strait relations a semblance of stability has been ruptured. The downward slope that the Thucydides Trap dynamic entails is certainly getting steeper. Will this then force the United States to finally review its Taiwan policy or initiate conciliatory actions? Has Taiwan become a victim of token symbolism or was the Nancy Pelosi-Tsai Ing-wen image an evocative democratic totem? And what consequences will Pelosi’s visit engender in the long term for Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific security architecture? Toward an Inescapable Trap? Times have certainly changed since 1997 when the then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich made a trip to Taiwan. Today, the balance of power between the United States and China has shifted towards the latter. While China was forced to tolerate Gingrich’s visit in 1997 to preserve its valuable economic relationship with the United States, the fact that he was not a member of President Bill Clinton’s party or administration made it more palatable. This was not the case with Pelosi’s trip. Between 2018 and 2022, the U.S.-China trade war has metamorphosed into a new Cold War exacerbated by China’s support of Russia in the Ukraine war and U.S. efforts to coalesce like-minded partners in the Indo-Pacific with groupings like AUKUS and the China-focused Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, composed of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. In Europe, the United States’ confrontational policy against China has influenced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to label China a “systemic challenge.” It also pushed for a greater focus on the Indo-Pacific during the NATO summit by bringing in Japan and South Korea as observers. Hence, Beijing is feeling contained from multiple directions. As a retaliatory measure, Beijing has stepped up its diplomatic maneuvers and is gearing to revitalize its own multilateral forums like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) by leading emerging and developing states as a counter-weight to the U.S. coalition. Apart from that, China is an economic and military rival to the United States that is willing to flex its might. Since Pelosi’s arrival in Taipei, there have already been immediate consequences: Beijing has (temporarily) banned the import of about 100 Taiwanese food items including citrus fruits and fish; suspended the export of natural sand to Taiwan; and carried out its vow to respond by surrounding the island with live-fire air-and-sea military exercises and “Taiwan lockdown drills” which are reminiscent of the third Taiwan Crisis on a larger scale. Apart from that, Taiwanese government agencies were targets of an unprecedented number of presumably Chinese-initiated cyberattacks, with some of the screens showing messages asking Pelosi to leave. The United States upped the ante with a G7 statement criticizing China for using Pelosi’s visit as a “pretext” to cause military escalation. Beijing obviously viewed this statement as a way to shame it on the world stage, linking it to the historical subjugation of China by the “Eight-Power Allied Forces.” China has not only canceled its bilateral meeting with Japan and announced eight “countermeasures” (canceled or suspended dialogue) against the United States but also sanctioned Pelosi and her family. China has consistently accused the United States of violating the One China Principle which stipulates that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the sole legal government representing the whole of China. China has also criticized the United States for undermining the spirit of the 1972, 1979, and 1982 U.S.-China joint communiques that form the foundation of their bilateral relationship. On the other hand, the United States pursues the One China Policy, yet it has maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity over whether it would intervene directly if Taiwan was attacked. Pelosi’s visit has weaponized Chinese claims that the United States is gradually chipping away at China’s sovereignty by providing tacit support to the so-called “secessionist forces” (referring mainly to the ruling pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, which is seen in Beijing as “ultra-nationalist”). In fact, for China, Taiwan’s attempts to promote “incremental independence” by seeking the United States’ support and its refusal to abide by the 1992 Consensus, which is another contested term, are an erosion of the foundational tenets to ensuring cross-Strait stability. The Consensus, a debatable and controversial political understanding between the CCP and the Kuomintang Party (Chinese Nationalist Party, KMT), was promulgated by the KMT as “One China, respective interpretations” although China steadfastly remarks time and again that “no room” for misinterpretation exists. The current Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, while acknowledging the meeting as a historical fact, does not recognize the Consensus as such. The United States has been somewhat non-committal about it, yet there is a contention that the securitization of the term has amounted to a “discursive practice,” eventually inflecting Chinese animosity toward Taiwan. So, although the United States and China were not aligned in their approach to the Consensus, both accorded it a security status for maintaining peace and stability in the Strait. Yet, it is argued that although the promotion of pro-independence values is directly linked to instability, the rejection of the Consensus per se does not challenge the status quo. The Chinese narrative, which links the two, seems to indicate otherwise. Nevertheless, today Washington finds itself caught in a challenging position between wanting to support the Taiwanese pro-democratic government without sparking a flare-up in tensions with China. White House National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby said that nothing about the visit “would change the status quo” and has tried to de-escalate tensions by reiterating that the United States does not support Taiwanese independence. For Pelosi, the visit was essential to promote solidarity with Taiwan in the battle between autocracy and democracy—a move that has earned her support from many China hawks in the U.S. Congress. The meeting between Pelosi and Tsai—the first woman House speaker and first Taiwanese woman president—was also an impressive reminder of the stakes beyond blinkered foreign policy, as well as a contrast to the “entrenched patriarchy” in the upper echelons of the CCP. Higher goals notwithstanding, it is not only the central understanding between the United States and China that is being eroded. The 1992 Consensus has been politicized by both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The Consensus was originally made between the KMT and the CCP to recognize only “one China”, with the implicit mutual understanding that they both had different interpretations—in 2006 the KMT admitted to inventing the term to alleviate tensions. Taiwan now largely denies the Consensus and rejects the “One Country, Two Systems” model. Beijing’s increasingly enraged responses to interferences in Taiwan have revealed its changing perspective on the 1992 Consensus as the CCP now aims to de-legitimize the elected government in Taipei altogether. Furthermore, under the assertive leadership of President Xi Jinping, achieving reunification is more essential than ever and the CCP has vowed to use force if necessary. Long-Term Damage Pelosi’s visit took place during an already highly sensitive time for China with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) anniversary on August 1 and Xi Jinping’s bid for a norm-breaking third term only months away at the 20th National Congress in November. Xi’s tough stance on Taiwan has become a keystone of his presidency and the need to strongly respond to Pelosi’s “provocation,” so as to maintain credibility, becomes both an incentive and a compulsion. Therefore, a more belligerent China should be expected in the Indo-Pacific. The CCP will feel China has to react firmly to Pelosi’s visit so that it does not appear weak or humiliated by the fact it could not force the United States to comply with its warnings over Taiwan. Like in Taiwan, Beijing is likely to ramp up military intimidation over other contested hotspots in the Indo-Pacific to induce a level of respect in regional powers for its core national interests and territorial claims. The new bipolar order will be increasingly fragile, with the risk of a war breaking out increasing as Xi inches toward achieving his “Chinese Dream” of restoring China’s great power status by 2049. India and the South and East China seas could also be impacted by the domino effect of this burgeoning crisis when small flare-ups are likely to be conflated. It will also push China to further collaborate with authoritarian and relatively weak states (e.g., Russia, North Korea, and Pakistan) but also developing states across regions that have no stake in the U.S.-led Western normative fight between democracies and autocracies but are concerned with their immediate national interests. Xi’s speech at the recent BRICS summit is a reminder of the new reality that the United States has more to lose. In Northeast Asia, China’s growing camaraderie with an isolated North Korea coupled with enhanced American alliances with Japan and South Korea portends an even trickier situation given Kim Jong Un’s impending seventh nuclear test. The absence of President Yoon Suk-yeol and his foreign minister during Pelosi’s visit to South Korea, which was noted by China, is a signal to avoid any unnecessary diplomatic controversy with Beijing. Japan’s defiant trajectory, of course, has already been set as an Indo-Pacific anchor state that has indicated military support for Taiwan’s defense though, considering the potential for volatility, it has largely refused to comment on Pelosi’s stopover in Taiwan. China’s calculation with India, the United States Indo-Pacific partner, despite the ongoing Himalayan conflict, has become more predictable because of Beijing’s need to expand its outreach in China-led multilateral forums like the SCO and India’s centrality as a buffer with the West and formally non-aligned power. However, a simple misstep would be enough to derail this fragile détente—the border talks have just reached a political “four-point consensus” though without any further disengagement. Hence, India will have to deftly manage Chinese advances for cross-regional cooperation.

War over Taiwan goes nuclear

Allison, 8-5, 22, Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/taiwan-thucydides-and-us-china-war-204060

Third, while most American politicians have yet to recognize it, the military balance in the Taiwan Strait has been transformed in the quarter century since the last Taiwan crisis. The local balance of power has shifted decisively in China’s favor. As I explained in an article published here last year, the United States could lose a war over Taiwan. Indeed, as former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work has stated publicly, in the Pentagon’s most realistic simulations and sensitive war games, in conflicts limited to Taiwan, the score is eighteen to zero, and the eighteen is not Team USA.

Were the United States to fight a local war over Taiwan, the president would likely face a fateful choice between losing and escalating to a wider war in which the United States would have the upper hand. Despite its huge leap forward in military capabilities, the United States continues to dominate the blue water seas on which China is dependent both for the import of energy and for exporting its products. Of course, that wider war could escalate further. And the upper rungs of this escalation ladder include the use of nuclear weapons.

In the nuclear domain, there is no question about the fact that the United States could erase China from the map. There is also no question about the fact that it could not do so without China retaliating with nuclear strikes that would kill most Americans. China now has a robust nuclear arsenal that creates a condition Cold Warriors called MAD: mutually assured destruction. In a nuclear war, neither the United States nor China could destroy the other without being destroyed itself. In that world, as President Ronald Reagan taught us, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must therefore never be fought.” But while no rational leader would choose to fight a nuclear war, the history of the Cold War includes a number of confrontations in which leaders chose to take increased risks of war rather than to accept the Soviet seizure of Berlin or the emplacement of nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba.

No major countries support the international order; US doesn’t support it in multiple ways that even the plan can’t solve for

Menon, 8-3, 22, SHIVSHANKAR MENON is a former diplomat who served as National Security Adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from 2010 to 2014. He is currently Visiting Professor of International Relations at Ashoka University, Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/nobody-wants-current-world-order, Nobody Wants the Current World Order How All the Major Powers—Even the United States—Became Revisionists

The world is between orders; it is adrift. The last coherent response by the international system to a transnational challenge came at the London summit of the G-20 in April 2009, when in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, leaders took steps to avert another Great Depression and stabilize the global banking system. The subsequent international response to climate change, the metastasizing debt crisis in developing countries, and the COVID-19 pandemic can only be described as pathetic. That failure stems from the fact that fewer and fewer countries, including the ones that built the previous international order, seem committed to maintaining it. The United States led two orders after World War II: a Keynesian one that was not inordinately interested in how states ran their internal affairs in a bipolar Cold War world (a socialist India, therefore, could be the largest recipient of World Bank aid in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s), and, after the Cold War, a neoliberal one in a unipolar world that ignored national sovereignty and boundaries where it needed to. Both orders professed to be “open, rules-based, and liberal,” upholding the values of democracy, so-called free markets, human rights, and the rule of law. In reality, they rested on the dominance and imperatives of U.S. military, political, and economic power. For much of the era that followed the demise of the Soviet Union, most powers, including a rising China, generally went along with the U.S.-led order. Recent years, however, suggest that this arrangement is a thing of the past. Major powers exhibit what may be called “revisionist” behavior, pursuing their own ends to the detriment of the international order and seeking to change the order itself. Often, revisionism takes the shape of territorial disputes, particularly in the Indo-Pacific: China’s friction with its neighbors India, Japan, Vietnam, and others in maritime Asia comes to mind. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a violation of international norms and a further rebuke to the notion that Russia could find a comfortable role within a U.S.-led order in Europe. Revisionism also manifests in the actions of a plethora of other powers, including the growing skepticism about free trade in the United States, the military build-up in once-pacifist Japan, and the rearmament of Germany. Many countries are unhappy with the world as they see it and seek to change it to their own advantage. This tendency could lead to a meaner, more contentious geopolitics and poorer global economic prospects. Coping with a world of revisionist powers could be the defining challenge of the years ahead. REVISIONISTS HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE Few of the world’s major powers are content with the international order as it exists. As the sole global superpower, the United States is committed to extending President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda under the rubric of “Build Back Better World.” The program’s name itself indicates that the order the United States has presided over so successfully for more than half a century needs improvement. The foreign policy establishment within the United States seems riven by fault lines separating those who preach a modern form of isolationism and restraint and those who have embarked on an ideological quest to divide the world between democracies and autocracies. The United States has turned away from international institutions it built, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. It has stepped back from its commitments to free trade by withdrawing from agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The view from Washington has grown darker, with great power threats looming on the horizon: not only China but also Russia, which has in many ways been expelled from the international order that sought to remake it in the image of the West. China was the greatest beneficiary of the globalized order led by the United States. It now wants, in President Xi Jinping’s words, to “take center stage.” Beijing explicitly seeks a rearrangement of the balance of power in Asia and a greater voice for China in international affairs. But Chinese leaders have yet to present an alternative ideology that attracts others or confers legitimacy to their quest for dominance. Even in its immediate neighborhood, China’s influence is contested. Major flashpoints and security dilemmas, including the future of Taiwan and territorial disputes with India and Japan, surround China. These disputes are a consequence of the real ways that China has disrupted the balance of regional and global power. Taken together, China’s assertive actions since 2008 make clear that Beijing seeks to change the global order. A world of revisionist powers will be meaner, more contentious, and poorer. For its part, Russia never really fit in the global order that Western powers tried to squeeze it into in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War. Instead, Moscow resents its decline and reduced influence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The invasion of Ukraine is only the latest expression of this sense of grievance, which leads Russia to work with China to undermine U.S. global leadership and to try to shake up Europe, where Russian power still matters both economically and militarily. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to announce that the world had reached a Zeitenwende, or turning point. For decades an economic powerhouse with limited political ambitions, Germany is now taking a more assertive regional and international role by seeking to build up its military, arm Ukraine, and reassess its significant relationships with China and Russia. The fear of abandonment that the Donald Trump presidency induced in U.S. allies, such as Germany and Japan, has encouraged many of them to beef up their security capabilities. Japan has reassessed its role in the region and the global order thanks to China’s rise. Japan is in transition from an economy-focused, pacifist, noninterventionist power burdened by the legacy of World War II to a much more normal country, looking after its own security interests and taking a leading role in the Indo-Pacific. Shinzo Abe, the recently assassinated former prime minister, both embodied and made possible this shift, which now enjoys broadening public support. Japan’s vocal commitment to the principle of a free and open Indo-Pacific, the Quad (the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a partnership with Australia, India, and the United States), and other initiatives arises from its fear of both China’s rise and the United States’ possible retrenchment. India, which embraced and benefited from the U.S.-led liberal international order after the Cold War, remains a dissatisfied member. Its quest for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council is the most visible example of India’s desire to have a bigger say in the international system, commensurate with its economic and geopolitical weight.

….

A kind of anarchy is creeping into international relations—not anarchy in the strict sense of the term, but rather the absence of a central organizing principle or hegemon. No single power can dictate the terms of the current order, and the major powers do not subscribe to a clear set of principles and norms; it’s hard to establish the rules of the road when so many countries are on their own paths. In both word and deed, China and Russia today question major aspects of the Western liberal order, particularly its norms relating to universal human rights and the obligations of states. They invoke the principle of state sovereignty as a shield to operate as they wish while seeking to set new rules in domains such as cyberspace and new technologies. But they do not yet offer an alternative, or one that is sufficiently attractive to others. Indeed, their treatment of their neighbors—in Ukraine, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea and on the India-China border—suggests an overwhelming reliance on hard military and economic power to the detriment of norms and institutions.

China doesn’t offer an alternative model for global leadership

Equally, it is misguided to see today another Cold War defined by the sharp bipolarity of two blocs: a “free world” and a realm of “autocracies.” The transatlantic alliance has consolidated, and China and Russia appear united in an alliance of animus against the West, but this is far from another Cold War. Several democracies increasingly display the characteristics of autocratic states. The world’s reactions to the Ukraine war and Western sanctions on Russia show that there is no unified bloc outside the transatlantic alliance. The economic interdependence of China and the United States has no precedent in the Cold War, when the chief adversaries were poles apart. Besides, there is no equivalent to the ideological alternatives posed by the Cold War rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union; nothing like the appeal of communism and socialism to developing countries in the 1950s and 1960s is apparent today. The prime authoritarian, China, does not offer an ideological or systemic alternative but attracts other countries with financial, technological, and infrastructure promises and projects, not principles.

China will continue to escalate because it does not think diplomacy works

Lin & Blancette, 8-1, 22,nBONNY LIN is Director of the China Power Project and Senior Fellow for Asian Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. JUDE BLANCHETTE is Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Foreign Affairs, China on the Offensive: How the Ukraine War Has Changed Beijing’s Strategy, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/china-offensive

A final component of China’s foreign policy rethink concerns military force. Beijing believes that the West is incapable of understanding or sympathizing with what it views as legitimate Russian security concerns. There is no reason for China to assume that the United States and its allies will treat China’s concerns any differently. Because diplomacy is not effective, China may need to use force to demonstrate its resolve. This is particularly true when it comes to Taiwan, and Beijing is now more anxious than ever about U.S. intentions toward the island and what it perceives to be increasing provocations. This has led to discussion among some Chinese foreign policy analysts about whether another Taiwan Strait crisis is imminent and, if so, how China should prepare. Yang Jiechi, a diplomat who serves on China’s Politburo, has stated that China will take “firm actions”—including using the military—to safeguard its interests. At the same time, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has engaged in more exercises near Taiwan in an effort to deter potential third-party intervention. These dynamics likely explain why Beijing is issuing unusually sharp warnings over the visit to Taiwan that Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is planning, saying that such a trip would “have a severe negative impact on the political foundations of China-U.S. relations.” It would be a mistake to brush aside China’s warnings—and its threats of military action—simply because prior warnings have failed to materialize. Although the prospect of an invasion of Taiwan remains remote, Beijing has numerous paths to escalate short of outright conflict, including sending jets to fly over Taiwanese territory. And if Beijing did take more drastic action out of frustration with recent U.S. behavior, this could easily provoke a full-blown crisis. IT’S UP TO XI Will China’s recent efforts to shift the balance of momentum and power in its direction work? It remains to be seen if the GSI will fundamentally alter the international order, or even become a key pillar of China’s approach to global governance. China has tried and failed before to drive the discussion on global security, as was the case with its New Security Concept, a security framework that sought greater economic and diplomatic interactions, which was first articulated in 1996. Back then, of course, China had far less economic and diplomatic leverage. And regardless of its ultimate success, the GSI is an important window into how Beijing will seek to steer the conversation on regional and global security after the upcoming 20th Party Congress, which is expected to be held in the fall. Beijing’s efforts to revitalize and expand existing organizations such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization also face obstacles. India, for instance, is a member of both blocs and may constrain any openly anti-American efforts. But even marginal improvements in the capabilities and cohesion of these groupings would help Beijing blunt any coercive or punitive moves that the United States and its allies may make against China in the years ahead.

China will try to retake Taiwan; competition needed to deter

Chellaney, 8-1, 22, Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground” (Georgetown University Press). Follow him on Twitter @Chellaney, The Hill, Will Taiwan be the next Ukraine on Biden’s watch?, https://thehill.com/opinion/3581442-will-taiwan-be-the-next-ukraine-on-bidens-watch/

President Biden has still to grasp that Taiwan is far more important than Ukraine to the future of American power in the world. Yet the likelihood is growing that, on Biden’s watch, Chinese President Xi Jinping will move on Taiwan, just as Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. In a forewarning of that, China has recently started claiming that it owns the critical international waterway, the Taiwan Strait. Just as it did earlier in the South China Sea – the strategic corridor between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, through which one-third of global maritime trade passes – Xi’s regime is seeking to advance its expansionism by laying an expansive claim to the Taiwan Strait, which, by connecting the South and East China Seas, serves as an important passage for commercial shipping as well as foreign naval vessels. The new claim signals that Xi is preparing to move on Taiwan at an opportune time — an action that would involve exercising maritime domain control. By forcibly absorbing Taiwan, China would drive the final nail in the coffin of America’s global preeminence. A takeover of Taiwan would also give China a prized strategic and economic asset. The defense of Taiwan has assumed greater significance for international security because three successive U.S. administrations have failed to credibly push back against China’s expansionism in the South China Sea, relying instead on rhetoric or symbolic actions. Biden, rather than working to deter and thwart a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan, is seeking to shield his tentative rapprochement with China, which has been forged through a series of virtual meetings with Xi and by offering Beijing important concessions. This explains why Biden publicly pushed back against a Taiwan visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). It is important to remember that, much before Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden had begun to ease pressure on China. He effectively let Xi’s regime off the hook for both covering up COVID-19’s origins and failing to meet its commitments under the 2020 “phase one” trade deal with Washington. Biden also dropped fraud charges against the daughter of the founder of the military-linked Chinese tech giant Huawei. U.S. sanctions over China’s Muslim gulag remain essentially symbolic. And now Biden is planning to roll back tariffs on Chinese goods, which will further fuel China’s spiraling trade surplus with America. After swelling by more than 25 percent last year to $396.6 billion, the trade surplus with the U.S. now makes up almost three-quarters of China’s total global surplus. The mammoth surplus is helping to keep the Chinese economy afloat at a time when growth has slowed almost to a halt, triggering rising unemployment and mortgage and debt crises. The situation has been made worse by Xi’s lockdown-centered, zero-tolerance approach to COVID-19, which is breeding anger and resistance amid a property implosion. Xi’s growing domestic troubles at a critical time when he is seeking a norm-breaking third term as Communist Party chairman heighten the risk of the Chinese leader resorting to nationalist brinkmanship as a distraction. After all, initiating a foreign intervention or crisis to divert attention from domestic challenges is a tried-and-true technique of leaders of major powers. In his latest virtual meeting with Biden on July 28, Xi sharply warned against U.S. interference in the Taiwan issue, saying that those who “play with fire will perish by it.” Biden, by contrast, struck a defensive tone, reaffirming the U.S. commitment to a one-China policy and reassuring Xi that American “policy has not changed and that the United States strongly opposes anyone who will change the status quo or undermine peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. Having swallowed Hong Kong, the Chinese Communist Party seems itching to move on Taiwan, a technological powerhouse that plays a central role in the international semiconductor business. Annexing Taiwan will make China a more formidable rival to America and advance its goal of achieving global preeminence by the 100th anniversary of communist rule in 2049. Against this background, Biden’s conciliatory approach toward China threatens to embolden Xi’s designs against Taiwan. Taiwan’s imperative is to expand its global footprint to help safeguard its autonomous status. Instead of aiding that effort, Biden inexplicably excluded that island democracy from his recently unveiled Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — an economic platform that seeks to promote cooperation among its member-states. Biden’s pursuit of a rapprochement with China also explains his administration’s proposal to roll back tariffs on Chinese products, an action that would break his promise not to unilaterally lift tariffs unless Beijing’s behavior improved. Not once, not twice, but at least three times Biden has said in recent months that he is willing to get militarily involved to defend Taiwan, only to have his senior officials walk back his comments on every occasion. The last time when he sowed international confusion afresh, Biden himself walked back his Taiwan comments, telling reporters a day later, “My policy has not changed at all.” In seeking to placate China, Biden is sending out contradictory signals, leaving Taiwan vexed and confused. Instead of privately advising Pelosi against visiting Taiwan, Biden gratuitously told a reporter that “the military” thinks a Pelosi visit to Taiwan is “not a good idea right now.” Pelosi then told the media, “I think what the president is saying is that maybe the military was afraid our plane would get shot down or something like that by the Chinese.” The president’s unusual remark conveyed American weakness by implying that the U.S. military was not capable of securing the flight path of the Pelosi-carrying military aircraft to Taiwan or effectively responding to any Chinese provocation. The comment also encouraged Xi’s regime to escalate its bullying threats to stymie a Taiwan visit by the person second in line to the U.S. presidency. More fundamentally, if Biden fears a Pelosi visit to Taipei would set back his nascent rapprochement with China and ignite new tensions, it raises serious doubts whether he will have the political will to help defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Xi is also likely encouraged by Biden’s failure to force Russian forces to retreat from Ukraine, despite Washington spearheading unprecedented Western actions against Russia, including weaponizing finance, slapping wide-ranging sanctions and arming Ukraine with a plethora of sophisticated weapons. With Biden’s poll numbers already in the tank, the president is likely to emerge further weakened from the approaching midterm elections. By contrast, a strengthened Xi securing a precedent-defying third term is likely to be bolder and more assertive in pursuing his geopolitical ambitions.

International law fails to deter aggression; military power is needed

Meilander, July 28, 2022, Jonathan Meilaender is a graduate student at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and an incoming law student at Georgetown Law., Tell Olaf Scholz: Military Strength Matters, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/tell-olaf-scholz-military-strength-matters-203817

Vladimir Putin, Scholz said, is a neo-imperialist and the “autocrats of the world are watching very carefully whether he is successful. In the 21st century, is it the law of the stronger or the strength of law that counts?”

Scholz, of course, wants to say that the strength of law is what counts, and thinks that the European Union can be a global actor that operates by following international law, issuing regulations, and setting a good example. But Russia’s invasion demonstrates a very different truth: sometimes, the law of the stronger matters. Russia failed to take Kyiv not because of international law or even European solidarity, but because Ukraine, with the support of the United States, United Kingdom, Poland, and much of Eastern Europe, blunted the Russian advance. In Ukraine, the stronger will win, and the rule of law does not matter very much.

Offshore balancing triggers regional aggression, undermines alliances and destroys US leadership

Kaplan, July 29, 2022, Robert D. Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of twenty-one books, including The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power, forthcoming in January with Yale University Press, Realism Is More Than Restraint

Indeed, the world may be as divided as ever, but the relentless power of technology is rendering the world more and more a single system, in which crises can migrate from one part of the earth to another as never before, and affect each other as never before. The Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann explained that whereas in the past a sparsely populated geography had acted as a safety mechanism against military and technological advances, as the years and decades advance geography itself has been losing the battle against population growth, urbanization, and weapons development. The very “finite size of the earth” has become a force for instability, in other words. In this singular and highly unstable world system, becoming more unstable by the day, a school of policy belief has emerged counseling restraint and off-shore balancing, as the attributes of a new post-Cold War realism. There is nothing wrong with this belief on its face. Restraint is a good in and of itself, and is synonymous with prudence. Offshore balancing boasts the good of establishing priorities and a hierarchy of needs. The problem they have is not an intellectual flaw, especially considering that the lack of restraint and the failure to establish priorities were strong features of America’s recent debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, the issue lies not in their logic, but in their limitations. The fact is that realism means more than those things. In a world more interconnected than ever before, placing restraint on a pedestal may mean you’ll sacrifice any principle for the sake of it, and consequently run the risk of signaling inaction and weakness. Never tell your enemy what you’re not going to do, is a dictum of realism that an obsession with restraint violates. A foreign policy should not be that doctrinaire and predictable. Offshore balancing, by essentially stating publicly that the United States shall defend some parts of the world (Europe, Northeast Asia, the Persian Gulf) but not necessarily others may set off a mad scramble for influence in those other parts, such as the South China Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait, as well as limiting our options in ambiguous crises that simultaneously involve multiple parts of the world in this hyper-global age. Restraint and offshore balancing are faithful to realism in theory but not necessarily in practice. The theory of realism, harking back to Thucydides and progressing forward to the likes of Hans Morgenthau, essentially emphasizes national interest in a debased world, with its dim accounting of human nature and historical precedent, as opposed to abstract principles of justice. But restrainers and offshore balancers take this too far. They indicate that the United States is generally about looking out for itself and relatively little more. That is no way to exercise leadership for the world’s greatest diplomatic, military, and economic power. And leadership matters because alliances—so helpful in a nervous, chaotic world—are not self-organizing. Like all large groups, alliances depend on their strongest member for coherence.

Xi will become more aggressive after his third term starts

Yun Sun, July 28, 2022, YUN SUN is Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the East Asia Program and Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center., https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/what-expect-bolder-xi-jinping, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/what-expect-bolder-xi-jinping

As China prepares for this fall’s 20th Party Congress, the odds grow stronger by the day that Chinese President Xi Jinping will emerge from the meeting having secured a third term in office. This will mark a break with Chinese precedent since Deng Xiaoping wrote a two-term limit into the country’s constitution in 1982—a limit that was removed in 2018. Xi, who took office in 2013 and is now 69, could foreseeably extend his tenure well into the 2030s. The consolidation of Xi’s rule comes as his administration faces significant headwinds both at home and abroad. China’s zero-COVID policy has provoked an economic slowdown and popular discontent. Its rivalry with the United States is intensifying, and Xi’s alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin has created more problems than Beijing bargained for. Under these circumstances, it might be reasonable to think the Chinese leader will recalibrate once his political future is assured. But those who expect Xi to moderate his policies after the 20th Party Congress are likely to be disappointed. Xi’s personality and political beliefs leave little room for a reconsideration, let alone a reversal, of his vision for the country. What he has described as the “China Dream”—or the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”—sees the Chinese Communist Party leading China’s reemergence as a great power. Xi has shown signs of restraint since Beijing hosted the Winter Olympics in February, prioritizing stability over bold action that would risk undermining his agenda at the Party Congress, but his frustration with China’s strategic position and domestic troubles has been mounting. When the political pressure is lifted after the Party Congress, Xi seems poised to revamp his assertive foreign policy, intervening more directly in disputes on China’s periphery and pushing more forcefully against the United States’ presence in the Pacific. Xi will be back with a vengeance—and he will have uncontested authority and the full power of the Chinese state behind him. So far, 2022 has not gone well for China. Beijing had hoped that the competition with the United States would slow down under President Joe Biden, but instead it has accelerated as Washington reinforces its network of alliances and partnerships to more effectively counter China. In an attempt to reduce its isolation, Beijing strengthened its strategic alignment with Moscow. Xi and Putin declared “no limit” to the two countries’ cooperation during Putin’s visit to China for the Winter Olympics—and Putin tested this proposition with his invasion of Ukraine, evidently aware that he was exploiting Chinese naiveté while counting on Chinese support. The Russian war triggered international outrage and sanctions, complicating China’s foreign relations and casting doubt on the wisdom of Xi’s decision to align closely with Russia. Skeptical views of China’s Russia policy have circulated on Chinese social media platforms. In widely read posts, Hu Wei, a senior scholar affiliated with the Counselors’ Office of the State Council, a government advisory body, questioned China “binding itself with Russia,” and Gao Yusheng, a former Chinese ambassador to Ukraine, predicted that “Putin is bound to fail” in his war effort. Beijing’s zero-COVID policy and the prolonged lockdowns in Shanghai and other cities this spring have been another source of domestic discontent. Some Chinese observers speculated that the zero-COVID policy was deployed to undermine the power base of the “Shanghai gang”—a group of party officials who gained influence under former President Jiang Zemin—after Shanghai city leadership took a more liberal approach to pandemic management and economic development than Xi preferred. The toll of COVID restrictions has been tremendous in both human misery and economic cost. Shanghai’s GDP contracted by 5.7 percent in the first half of 2022. China’s overall GDP growth in the second quarter of 2022 was 0.4 percent, its lowest rate in decades. Controversy over Russia and COVID policy may not be enough to challenge Xi’s reign, but the timing is particularly inconvenient for him. By embarking on an unprecedented third term, Xi will be ushering in a new governance and political model for China. Even for a leader as powerful as Xi, breaking away from established tradition requires significant political capital. He needs to rally broad support among party elites. In China’s meritocratic system, any change must be justified. Xi has to prove his superior wisdom and decision-making abilities—and he needs concrete successes to highlight in support of his claims. FOREIGN POLICY IN MODERATION Xi has avoided major foreign policy initiatives that could escalate tensions with neighbors or adversaries this year. Most important, he does not want China to become embroiled in a conflict that would distract him from or undercut his position in the domestic political battles that are now his top priority. This does not mean that China will not react if its interests are under threat—although Chinese reactions to perceived provocations, such as the United States fortifying its support of Taiwan, have been relatively mild so far this year. U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s reported visit to Taiwan, if it happens, could trigger a Chinese military response, but it is highly unlikely that China will use the opportunity to attack Taiwan. China is prioritizing stability, at least until the Party Congress is over. This restraint has been apparent in China’s handling of contentious issues on its periphery. For instance, since 2020, China and India have held 16 rounds of talks regarding their border dispute. Although the talks have yielded little substantive progress so far, China has eagerly pursued improved diplomatic ties with India in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And as the new South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol reorients Seoul’s foreign policy to emphasize security cooperation with the United States—a significant departure from former President Moon Jae-in’s balancing between the United States and China—Beijing has so far refrained from speaking out forcefully against the change or taking retaliatory measures. Xi’s frustration with China’s strategic position and domestic troubles has been mounting. Despite its putative alliance with Moscow, China has declined to take a clear stand on Russia’s war in Ukraine, too. Its economic and military support of Russia has been surprisingly thin, given the expectation that pressure from the United States to condemn Moscow’s behavior would trigger more Chinese defiance. In diplomatic statements, China has defended Russia’s actions and accused NATO of aggression, but Beijing’s fear of U.S. sanctions and the further disruption of U.S.-Chinese relations has moderated its policies in this delicate year of political transition. As a result, Russia has complained loudly to Chinese officials that China has not held up its end of the two countries’ partnership. Even on Taiwan, Beijing’s most sensitive issue, the Chinese government’s policies have been largely reactive to what it perceives as a U.S. and Taiwanese “salami-slicing” strategy—an effort to inch forward bilateral ties. Rather than escalating, Beijing, for the most part, has kept the intensity of its actions below the threshold set in previous years. So far in 2022, the number of Chinese warplane intrusions into the Taiwanese Air Defense Identification Zone on a single day has not exceeded the record of 56 set on October 5, 2021. Beijing has continued its diplomatic, economic, and legal coercion of Taiwan, but it has not advanced further in luring away Taipei’s remaining diplomatic allies since Nicaragua severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan in December 2021. Nor did Beijing react strongly when Taiwanese Vice President William Lai visited Tokyo to attend former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s funeral in July—a notable example of restraint given the seniority of Lai’s position and his past advocacy of Taiwanese independence. THE LOOSENING OF CONSTRAINTS Election season in democratic countries is often marked by lofty campaign rhetoric and political posturing, with candidates making promises they may or may not keep once in office. In China, however, political power struggles are fought and won within the Chinese Communist Party. For Xi, as the incumbent hoping to extend his rule, stability is useful while this competition plays out. But the same logic does not hold after he secures a third term. Some observers have assumed that, after the Party Congress, Xi will moderate his foreign policy because he no longer needs to prove his strength to the party elite. This is a grave misunderstanding. Domestic politics may no longer require Xi to look tough, but his desire to maintain that image and his ambitions for China will not have changed. The world, therefore, should not expect China to be any less assertive or confrontational after the 20th Party Congress than it has been for most of Xi’s tenure. Beijing’s actions will follow Xi’s convictions, and Xi believes in China’s growing power and in securing the country’s rightful place in the international system. His mission will remain “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” If anything, Xi, having grown increasingly frustrated this year with China’s foreign and domestic challenges, will be prepared to project Chinese power even more forcefully and vehemently after his political drama concludes. Free of his current constraints, Xi will ratchet up China’s activities abroad to put the embarrassment of 2022 firmly behind him. Once his third term is confirmed, Xi’s status as China’s undisputed leader will enable him to take such action with little to no opposition within the Chinese government. Dissenting views, though faint, have persisted inside the system, but Xi’s success in claiming apparently indefinite rule and his appointment of loyalists to key positions will eliminate them. The echo chamber in which China crafts its foreign policy will be sealed even tighter, amplifying the voices of security services and propaganda departments. With no expiration date for Xi’s reign, his critics will have few channels, official or unofficial, through which they can express their opinions or hope for a change in leadership. Bureaucrats will not only follow Xi’s policies but also augment the tough approach they believe is Xi’s preference. Even if some officials in China wish to tone down Beijing’s assertive foreign strategy, regional developments may not give Xi the option. Intensifying competition with the United States has set in motion a vicious cycle. Washington is consolidating its alliances and partnerships to counter an assertive China, fortifying bilateral security arrangements with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, as well as the security agreement between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom known as AUKUS; the Quad, with Australia, Japan, and India; and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, announced in Tokyo in May. In China, meanwhile, an anti–United States propaganda machine has been fully mobilized, creating a hypersensitive environment in which any move by Washington whips the “Wolf Warrior” diplomats—Beijing’s new generation of aggressive and coercive representatives abroad—into a frenzy of fanatic overreaction. This approach has a strong domestic incentive: although China’s authoritarian government has enough control over public opinion to lower the temperature if it chooses, so far Beijing has more often found it useful to fan the flames of nationalism as it tries to coerce foreign governments and advance its policy goals. XI UNLEASHED Once the Party Congress is behind him, Xi will seek to reassert Chinese power in areas of strategic priority. Disputes in the western Pacific will be at the top of his list. Tensions are already building around the Korean Peninsula, with North Korea’s next provocation only a matter of time and Washington and Seoul intent on enhancing their deterrence against Pyongyang. In Beijing’s view, these developments undermine China’s military security and its regional influence. In addition to tying South Korea more closely to the United States, a focus on deterrence reduces the incentive for diplomatic engagement with North Korea—an endeavor that boosts Beijing’s leverage. As Washington and Seoul strengthen their military capabilities on the Korean Peninsula, Beijing will engage in tit-for-tat deployment of its own forces within Chinese territory and step up its support for and coordination with Pyongyang. Many Chinese experts on Korea have condemned the Yoon administration’s efforts to align with the United States to counterbalance China as a grave strategic misjudgment. Some even anticipate maritime military skirmishes between China and South Korea in the coming months. A similar dynamic is at play between China and Japan as Tokyo strengthens its capacity to counter Chinese military and paramilitary tactics, such as intrusions by warplanes, naval vessels, and fishing vessels into the airspace and waters surrounding the disputed Diaoyu Islands (known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands). Even more concerning are Beijing’s plans for Taiwan. Chinese leaders are increasingly enraged over U.S. actions that they see as hollowing out Washington’s “one China” policy and Taiwanese actions—both domestic legislation and international outreach—that they interpret as moves toward independence. China has taken a series of legal steps over the past few years, too, inching forward Beijing’s claims in the Taiwan Strait. Since 2020, the Chinese government has formally denied the existence of the median line, long tacitly acknowledged as a maritime border between mainland China and Taiwan. This past June, Beijing went further by claiming that the strait cannot be considered international waters. Next, China may take concrete steps to put this claim into practice—administering the strait as an exclusive economic zone, for instance—in a bid to eventually oust the U.S. military from the waterway, making it more difficult for the United States to intervene in a potential conflict over Taiwan. And as Taiwan’s local election in late 2022 and presidential election in 2024 approach, China will intensify its military coercion and intimidation in the hope of tipping the scales in favor of the Taiwanese political party that is accommodating to Beijing. The brief hiatus in China’s diplomatic pressure campaign will be over, too, as Beijing moves forward with its standing plan to push additional countries, such as the Vatican, to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Once the Party Congress is behind him, Xi will seek to reassert Chinese power. The region as a whole will likely become more tense—and less safe—after the 20th Party Congress. China has dragged its feet in negotiations with Southeast Asian countries over a code of conduct for the South China Sea, which would establish rules for maritime activities and a dispute-resolution process to enforce them. And in the meantime, Beijing has been equipping at least three artificial islands with military planes, antiship and antiaircraft missile systems, and laser and jamming technology. The Chinese military’s pushback against U.S. freedom of navigation operations will likely grow bolder during Xi’s third term. This year China has already made several aerial and naval intercepts of U.S. warplanes and vessels that raised alarms among U.S. military officials. Beijing may see the risk of these incidents escalating into full-blown conflict as acceptably low, which means it will continue to employ these tactics in an effort to drive the U.S. military away from China’s periphery. It is wishful thinking to expect China’s economic slowdown to curb Xi’s ambition or soften his tactics. Xi’s past behavior shows that he does not consider economic performance to be his primary source of legitimacy—just look at his stubborn adherence to the zero-COVID policy despite its tremendous economic costs. Instead, his actions are predicated on the belief that China has accumulated enough wealth to make displays of strength worth the economic price. China has weathered more than two years of self-imposed, COVID-induced isolation. In 2022, China’s foreign policy has been relatively mild compared with what it could have been. After the 20th Party Congress, however, China will gradually reopen to the world. The return to normal exchanges, trade, and travel will no doubt be eagerly welcomed. But the darker side of the same coin is the resumption—and potential escalation—of China’s assertive foreign policy. When the Chinese Communist Party meets, Xi will be coronated as the “People’s Leader”—a title held only by Mao Zedong and his successor, Hua Guofeng. A strengthened Xi is not going to be more moderate. He will have less to prove to his domestic audience. But he will have all the power and the opportunity he needs to pursue his “China Dream.”

China attack on Taiwan imminent, the US must deter

Gregory Moore, July 26, 2022, Gregory J. Moore (PhD University of Denver) is Professor of Global Studies and Politics at Colorado Christian University. In addition to many articles on politics, international relations, and Chinese and American foreign policy, he is the author of Human Rights and US Policy Toward China from a Christian Perspective (Crossroads/CPJ, 1999), author/editor of North Korean Nuclear Operationality: Regional Security and Non-Proliferation (Johns Hopkins, 2014), and author of Niebuhrian International Relations: The Ethics of Foreign Policymaking (Oxford, 2020), Biden Is Right: The United States Must Defend Taiwan, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/biden-right-united-states-must-defend-taiwan-203809

While not walking away from its traditional positions, it appears that the United States is being less ambiguous about its commitment to Taiwan. I believe this is warranted for several reasons. First, under Xi Jinping, China has moved to a more authoritarian (even totalitarian) politics at home and a more aggressive and robust foreign policy orientation abroad. All of this indicates a military move against Taiwan is more conceivable than was the case previously. Second, China has continued to increase its year-on-year defense spending, has moved from a minimalist nuclear deterrent to a first-strike nuclear capability, strengthened its ability to neutralize U.S. military bases and aircraft carriers in the region with long-range missiles, greatly increased its air, sea, and land capabilities in the region adjacent to Taiwan, and exponentially increased its air incursions into Taiwan’s air space. All of this lowers the potential cost of a Chinese attack against Taiwan. The air incursions in particular are aimed at achieving a desensitization effect in preparation for an invasion. Third, Chinese leaders have a “sacred commitment” that will not ever go away, and Xi Jinping has made it clear that he will not back away from China’s commitment to see Taiwan return to the mainland, whether by suasion or force. Fourth, given the changes he has made to the constitution, Xi is now an extraordinarily powerful leader without term limits and very little accountability, making potentially reckless behavior more conceivable than it was previously. Fifth, the upcoming Chinese Communist Party’s 20th Party Congress in the fall may impact Xi’s thinking toward Taiwan. The meeting is vital for Xi to gain approval for a rare third term, which most observers believe he is planning to do. Some believe Xi sees the return of Taiwan as an important part of his legacy, made perhaps more pressing given his changes to the constitution, the centralization of power, and an economy negatively affected by his policies on the Covid-19 pandemic and U.S. trade relations, among other things, make it more likely that he is seeking to buttress support for his rule. The return of Taiwan to mainland China might be just the ticket. Finally, the war in Ukraine may have impacted Xi’s thinking about the timing of a move against Taiwan. Some observers have argued that the robust response from the United States and NATO to Putin’s aggression, coupled with the unity of the West, might give Beijing pause as it considers any move against Taiwan. That may be true but, on the other hand, Beijing might also conclude that China and its economy are more important to the world than ever, given the economic disruption wrought by the Russo-Ukrainian War. Therefore, economic concerns, as well as war weariness, might see a less unified Western response to Chinese aggression against Taiwan. If true, China might have an incentive to move against Taiwan. What does all of this mean for the United States? China will make a move against Taiwan sooner rather than later, even though Xi was undoubtedly taken aback by the robust Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, I believe Chinese analysts would conclude that the PLA is better equipped and prepared to take Taiwan than the Russian military was to take Ukraine. While that may be true, as Stephen Biddle and others have noted, China’s command and control system is similar to the same top-heavy, centralized Russian military command structure. Unless China achieves a quick victory, it could suffer the same problems Moscow has faced with command and control. One big difference between the Chinese and Russian militaries, however, would be morale. Chinese troops will be highly motivated and nationalistic during an operation to take Taiwan. By contrast, Russian troops do not appear to have been told why they were invading Ukraine and troop morale has been poor as a result. This will likely not be a problem for Beijing. While I believe the Taiwanese will fight as hard for their territory as the Ukrainian people have, it would be harder for the international community to keep them supplied given the island’s unfavorable geography. Thus, deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan is more important to American interests than ever. There are two important historical failures to deter military adventurism in the past that cost the United States dearly. The first is the January 1950 National Press Club speech by U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson. During his speech, Acheson excluded South Korea and Taiwan from the U.S. defense perimeter in East Asia. Most analysts have concluded that this was seen by North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung as a green light to invade his southern neighbor and that the United States would not intervene. A similarly tragic American diplomatic miscue occurred in 1990 when April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, passed a message from her superiors to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein that the United States did not take a position on Iraq and Kuwait’s border dispute. Saddam seems to have read this note as a policy of nonintervention and it may have encouraged him to invade Kuwait in 1990. In both cases, however, the United States and its allies were drawn into the conflicts. A lack of clarity on what the United States’ position was in these two instances invited aggression by adversarial powers. Today, it is concerning that a lack of clarity on the U.S. position toward Taiwan may have the same effect on leaders in Beijing and lower the bar for a potential decision to invade Taiwan. If Washington’s position is that it would defend Taiwan militarily it should communicate this to Beijing clearly, regardless of the political fallout that might ensue. I conclude that this was Biden’s intention in saying “yes” to the reporter’s question in Tokyo. This is the right messaging if it is indeed Washington’s position. I believe it is, and it is good that this has been communicated to Beijing, for Washington cannot afford any miscalculations in its communications with China.

Russia and China are not responsible for the decline of democracy and challenging them won’t save it; reasons for the decline are internal

Feldstein, 7-26, 22, Foreign Affairs, Ukraine Won’t Save Democracy: The Causes of Democratic Decline Are Internal, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/ukraine-wont-save-democracy, STEVEN FELDSTEIN is a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 2014 to 2017, Steven Feldstein he served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

Witnessing Ukrainian fighters’ valiant efforts to resist Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of their fledgling democracy, a growing cohort of analysts and policymakers have begun to argue that a Russian defeat would not simply remove a major threat to Western democracies. What it would also do, they argue, is revive liberal internationalism itself, breathing new life into an ailing and increasingly dysfunctional post–Cold War global order. A win against the Kremlin would help upend the narrative that the West is too weak and divided to push back against authoritarianism, and it could prompt fence-sitting countries to reconsider their embrace of China or Russia. But the notion that defeating Putin could reverse 16 straight years of global democratic decline simply doesn’t hold up. Although a decisive Ukrainian victory might momentarily slow the downward cascade, the pathologies underlying democratic decay are largely disconnected from Russian or Chinese actions. Instead, the greater threat to the world’s democracies comes from within. A toxic combination of internal factors—including pernicious polarization, anti-elite attitudes, and the rise of unscrupulous politicians willing to exploit these sentiments—has led to a breakdown in shared values in the democratic world. Preventing further democratic decline, let alone reversing it, requires both a clear-eyed understanding of these factors and, more important, a renewed commitment to core democratic values. DEMOCRACY IN DECLINE One reason for democratic backsliding is that liberal democracies and electoral democracies are facing an ongoing crisis in governance. Heads of state such as former U.S. President Donald Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have brazenly subverted democratic institutions in their pursuit of power. These trends, which researchers have described as a “third wave of autocratization,” are particularly pronounced in established democracies. The most recent report from the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem) at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg found that roughly one in five European Union member states are growing more autocratic, as are long-standing democracies such as Brazil, India, and the United States. As a result, the number of liberal democracies worldwide stands at a 26-year low. Authoritarianism is also expanding rapidly in the weak democracies or competitive autocracies known as hybrid states. During Uganda’s 2021 presidential elections, for example, President Yoweri Museveni authorized forceful measures to assure that he remained in power. He imposed a complete Internet blackout leading up to the vote and used state security forces to intimidate and arrest journalists, civil society actors, and opposition figures such as presidential candidate Bobi Wine, who was detained by the police after casting his ballot. In this regard, Uganda is far from alone. Similar rights violations have occurred in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Philippines, illustrating the far-reaching nature of this trend. Research shows that while authoritarianism is surging, democratic movements and institutions have failed to respond with sufficient force, allowing many repressive measures to go unchallenged. While pockets of resistance have emerged in countries including El Salvador, Myanmar, and Slovenia (where the electorate recently voted out the country’s right-wing populist leader in favor of the liberal opposition), these examples are rare. In contrast, pro-autocracy protests have been on the rise in developing countries and in the postcommunist world. This development partly reflects the growth of “conservative civil society,” in which right-leaning civic actors join forces with illiberal politicians to reject liberal democratic norms. Across the world, autocratic leaders are mobilizing citizens to help advance their antidemocratic agendas. In Brazil, thousands rallied in September 2021 to Bolsonaro’s calls to remove all Supreme Court justices. In the United States, Trump encouraged an insurrection on January 6, 2021. In Thailand, royalists have assembled antidemocratic coalitions to deter opposition protesters. These popular mobilizations suggest that democracies are losing the normative argument about the desirability of liberal governance. AUTOCRACY NOW Indeed, autocrats have seized the initiative to erode the idea that all citizens possess inalienable rights and freedoms regardless of national origin. Illiberal leaders are arguing with increasing success that citizens’ rights and liberties should face limitations, particularly when these freedoms challenge the incumbent’s rule. Autocrats are using an array of justifications such as national security, public order, or cultural preservation to make a case for prioritizing sovereignty over universalism. Discarding universal principles isn’t a new phenomenon. But it is gaining momentum, partly because autocrats feel decreasing pressure to follow the liberal democratic model. The weakening of universal norms is happening in big and small ways worldwide. The “splintering” of the Internet is one such trend. Autocracies such as China, Iran, and Russia, may have led the way. Still, democracies such as Brazil, India, and Nigeria, have also devised rules governing what information their citizens can access and produce, in clear violation of freedom of expression. In India, for example, the government has decreed that social media platforms must take down content that threatens “the unity, integrity, defense, security or sovereignty of India.” In turn, this has precipitated broad suppression of legitimate speech, such as the Indian government’s order that Twitter ban hundreds of accounts linked to farmers’ protests in 2021. These leaders are calculating that if they can undermine universal democratic principles that dilute their power, they can more easily consolidate their rule and remain in office. The weakening of universal norms is happening in big and small ways worldwide. Similar deterioration has been witnessed across a range of democracy indicators: V-Dem researchers find that “six critical indicators of “liberal democracy,” from judicial independence to executive oversight, are declining worldwide. In scores of countries, states have instituted restrictive legal measures to constrain nongovernmental organizations, carried out “aggressive smear campaigns” to discredit independent organizations, and intentionally sowed discord among civil society actors. Leaders justify these crackdowns by claiming that civil society groups are damaging national interests or allowing shadowy foreign brokers to undermine political systems. In 2018, for example, Orban secured passage of what became known as the “Stop Soros” law, a reference to the philanthropist George Soros, a longstanding Orban target. The law made it illegal to assist undocumented migrants and provided a convenient pretext for the Orban government to crack down on its political opponents. Autocrats worldwide are increasingly using similar restrictions to justify repression in the name of national sovereignty. In some countries, Beijing and Moscow have played significant roles in reinforcing authoritarianism, mainly by providing military assistance and economic support. In the Central African Republic, Libya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, and Sudan, Russia’s Wagner Group, a paramilitary organization with close ties to the Russian armed forces, has spearheaded disinformation campaigns to undermine regime opponents, secured payment for services through extractive industry concessions, and carried out joint military operations that have led to civilian killings. China has pursued similar policies to help Cambodia’s longtime strongman, Hun Sen, stay in power. In return, Hun Sen has granted China permission to build a clandestine naval facility for its exclusive use. China’s surveillance and censorship exports have helped it to pursue similarly advantageous relationships with Algeria, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Serbia, and Zambia. COUNTERING AUTHORITARIANISM As Western policymakers struggle to counter growing authoritarianism worldwide, they should take care not to overemphasize competition with Russia and China. Already, there is widespread suspicion about U.S. motives. A string of foreign policy blunders has damaged the United States’ reputation: prisoner abuse scandals in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, Edward Snowden’s disclosures, and unaccountable civilian deaths from U.S. drone strikes. U.S. efforts to box in Russia and curtail China’s influence have drawn tepid responses in many countries. When I conducted field research in Ethiopia in 2020, for instance, my sources repeatedly mentioned that the U.S. rivalry with China felt irrelevant and that they believed that the United States’ involvement in their country was motivated by its own security priorities rather than a genuine interest in advancing democracy or prosperity in the country. It comes as little surprise that, as the historian Peter Slezkine writes, “outside of the United States’ (mostly Western) formal allies, attitudes toward anti-Russian sanctions have been largely ambivalent.” This sentiment touches on a crucial point: few of the world’s citizens are fooled by U.S. President Joe Biden’s focus on the contest between authoritarianism and democracy. They see the U.S. agenda for what it is: lofty rhetoric about democracy undercut by geopolitical calculations. Biden’s recent trip to the Middle East—during which he greeted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (whom U.S. intelligence agencies hold responsible for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi) with a fist bump, and had a warm tête-à-tête with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi (whose government has detained tens of thousands of political prisoners)—offered a pointed reminder about U.S. policy priorities.

US and China soft power is not zero-sum

Repnikova, July/August 2022, Foreign Affairs, The Balance of Soft Power: The American and Chinese Quests to Win Hearts and Minds, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-06-21/soft-power-balance-america-china

As in the United States, soft power has been treated as a hopeful idea in China: an important additive to the country’s rise, especially its economic expansion. In fact, Chinese experts and officials now embrace soft power with more urgency than do their American counterparts. There is an inherent understanding that China’s status in the international system is limited and overshadowed by the West, and that to truly rival the United States, China needs more recognition from and more influence over global public opinion. External legitimation and respect, for the Chinese party-state, is also linked to its domestic legitimacy. The Chinese understanding of soft power is connected to ideas of “cultural confidence” and “cultural security” that President Xi Jinping has promoted, terms that signify social cohesion around and pride in Chinese culture, values, and history.

As the contest between the United States and China accelerates, it would be natural to see soft power as just another vector of competition, with Washington and Beijing vying to make themselves and their political and economic models more attractive to the rest of the world. Leaders and elites in both countries clearly see things that way, and some worry about their potential vulnerabilities. In the United States, the erosion of democratic norms could harm the country’s image as a bastion of liberal values. In China, a slowing economy and a sense of isolation created by the country’s “zero-COVID” approach to the pandemic could dim its reputation for pragmatic, results-oriented governance.

But the image of straightforward contest does not quite capture the way events are playing out. For one thing, the two countries interpret soft power quite differently and operationalize the concept in distinct ways. Whereas Washington places democratic values and ideals at the heart of its soft-power promotion, China focuses more on practical matters, seeking to fuse its cultural and commercial appeals. That approach has reaped limited rewards in the West but has resonated in the “global South.” Even there, however, people often see the two forms of soft power as complementary rather than competitive. Simply put, people in many parts of the world are perfectly happy to have both the Americans and the Chinese try to seduce them with their respective visions and values. What Washington and Beijing see as zero-sum, much of the world often sees as win-win.

China’s transactional approach to soft power fails

For its part, by relying on practical inducements rather than ideological visions, China invites scrutiny over the quality of its offerings and risks a wholly transactional reciprocity on the ground. China’s COVID-19 vaccine exports, for instance, were met with suspicion in many parts of the global South and were sidelined in favor of Western options when they became available; concerns about the effectiveness of the Chinese vaccines were later borne out. Similarly, in conversations I have had with students from a number of African countries, many have worried aloud about the quality of student-teacher interactions and the pedagogic approaches at some education programs in China. Studies of the impact of Chinese state media in Latin America and in Africa have noted limited public consumption, partly because people saw the content as unappealing. To bridge the quality gap, the CCP would have to shift its evaluation metrics from quantity to quality and allow for more creative freedom, especially in the media—two adjustments that appear unlikely to happen under Xi.

More broadly, China’s pragmatic soft-power approach risks collapsing into mere transactionalism, with any benefit to China contingent on others’ receiving material benefits. When I asked Ethiopian university officials what would happen to Confucius Institutes in the country if studying at them no longer led to jobs at Chinese companies, their response was clear and terse: “We would close them down.” It remains to be seen how China’s years of pandemic isolation, which have hindered people-to-people exchanges, will affect its image in the global South. In the absence of a larger ideational vision, however, China will need to keep doling out ever larger gifts—a task that will become harder if the Chinese economy continues to slow.

Hegemony has not prevented genocide

Hooker, 7-20, 22, R.D. Hooker Jr. is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. He previously served as Dean of the NATO Defense College and as Special Assistant to the US President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia with the National Security Council, Ukraine Can Win, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-can-win/

The US and its British and French allies have successfully relied on nuclear deterrence for many decades. That deterrent remains intact and operative. Here we must not give in to our fears. American and European leaders talk much about “preparing for a long war.” With skyrocketing energy prices and a looming global food crisis, the world does not need that. What it needs is a speedy end to the conflict.

Since 1945, the West’s record in preventing genocide and massive loss of innocent life has unfortunately been a poor one. For reasons that seemed both politic and sensible, we stood aside while hundreds of thousands perished in the killing fields of Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, the Sudan, the Balkans and Syria. It is now happening again as Russia attempts to snuff out Ukrainian democracy, independence, and culture. There will be consequences if the Atlantic community chooses once again to stand aside. This time, the conflict will not be in our backyard. It will be at our front door.

Great Power Competition with Russia triggered the Ukraine war

Greg Pence, Jinternational studies graduate of University of San Francisco, July 21, 2022, Eurasia Review, Ukraine War Has Two Initiators: Putin And NATO – OpEd, https://www.eurasiareview.com/21072022-ukraine-war-has-two-initiators-putin-and-nato-oped/

Ukraine’s war revealed the existence of the vestiges of the Cold War era in the minds of Biden and Johnson. In the first days of the war, Biden explicitly told that the sanctions are to punish Russia, and not to stop it from invading Ukraine. His quotes implicitly suggest that the United States was already prepared for the war, considered it an ideal option, and even pushed Russia into it. Britain, too, declared that the sanctions sought to topple Putin.

The root of the current tension between Moscow and Washington is pursuing a containment strategy and the discourse of the Cold War era. The united states, by intermittently bringing up the necessity of Ukraine joining NATO, incessantly tried to put Russia and Ukraine in confrontation with each other. What paved the way for the realization of this dream was the toppling of the then Ukrainian President, Yanukovych, with the support of the USA. In addition, a year after the occupation of Crimea, the CIA began to conduct secret and intensive training courses for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and intelligence personnel in America. Although the reason behind establishing such courses was not clear enough at that time, on January 13, a little more than a month before the start of the Russian offensive, it was reported that CIA-trained forces could soon play a major role in Ukraine’s eastern border, where Russian forces had been massing and preparing for a possible attack. In fact, the purpose of training them was to engage the Russian forces in different parts of Ukraine in order to ground them- not just to defend against military aggression. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine was clearly recognizable to America and NATO in advance, and even Biden had clearly announced its time a few months before the start of the war. When the flame of the war ignited, NATO started sending heavy and semi-heavy military equipment to Ukraine from its two active and up-to-date command centers in America and Germany at an unbelievable speed and trapped Putin and the Russian army in a deep quagmire. In less than two days, Putin’s unmotivated army turned the golden dreams of Peter the Great into a terrible nightmare

A competition strategy with China leads to global war

Courtney McBride, July 19, 2022, MSN, Kissinger Warns Biden Against Endless Confrontation With China, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/kissinger-warns-biden-against-endless-confrontation-with-china/ar-AAZL2VS

Bloomberg) — Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said geopolitics today requires “Nixonian flexibility” to help defuse conflicts between the US and China as well as between Russia and the rest of Europe.

Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, speaks at the OPEC Oil Embargo +40 conference hosted by Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE) in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013.

While warning that China shouldn’t become a global hegemon, the man who helped reestablish US-China ties in the 1970s said that President Joe Biden should be wary of letting domestic politics interfere with “the importance of understanding the permanence of China.”

“Biden and previous administrations have been too much influenced by the domestic aspects of the view of China,” Kissinger, 99, said in an interview Tuesday in New York with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. “It is, of course, important to prevent Chinese or any other country’s hegemony.”

But “that is not something that can be achieved by endless confrontations,” he added in the interview produced by Intelligence Squared US and How To Academy. He’s previously said the increasingly adversarial relations between the US and China risk a global “catastrophe comparable to World War I.”

US hegemony drives China and Russia together and leads to counterbalancing

Pillar, 7-19, 22, Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University. He is also an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. He retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, after which he was visiting professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, Responsible Stratecraft, The United States is building a coalition of its adversaries, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/07/19/the-united-states-is-building-a-coalition-of-its-adversaries/

Countries like China, Russia, and Iran have cause for frosty intra-relations but US foreign policy is bringing them together.

At last week’s summit meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, President Biden tried to reassure his audience about U.S. attention to the Middle East by declaring, “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran.” The metaphor of a vacuum as applied to international relations always has had major problems, especially in ignoring how foreign interventions in any region are at least as likely to be an assertive reaction to someone else’s intervention, rather than the filling of a vacuum.

The United States ought to know, given how it has often been the reactor in such situations. For example, the United States Navy conducts “freedom of navigation” operations in the South China Sea not because a vacuum had been left there but instead because China had been conducting its own assertive military operations in the area.

The very trip during which Mr. Biden made his remark further illustrates the point. The trip was dripping with hostility toward Iran, including Biden talking about his willingness to use military force against Iran. The main theme of the trip was U.S. promotion of tighter relations between Israel and Gulf Arab states, a relationship that is an anti-Iran military alliance, one member of which already is waging clandestine war against Iran and regularly threatens to make that war overt. So threatened, Iran naturally seeks to respond.

One way it responds is to ally with outside powers that are themselves adversaries of the United States, or have acquired that label because Washington describes them as such. Over the last several years Iran has significantly enhanced its economic and security relationship with China, notwithstanding a paucity of ideological or cultural links or shared values. Iran is joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, an Eurasian alignment in which China and Russia are the two dominant members. As if to punctuate the point as a matter of timing and not just of substance, Russian President Vladimir Putin chose this moment, on the heels of Biden’s Middle East trip, to travel to Tehran to nurture relations between Russia and Iran.

Biden’s own national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, introduced an additional data point by claiming that Iran will sell drones for military use to Russia. Sullivan might have been stretching the available intelligence a bit in order to enhance the administration’s anti-Iran message to Middle East audiences on the eve of Biden’s trip to the region. But subsequent reporting suggests the story may have validity, even though the postulated exports run in the opposite direction from most arms sales involving Russia.

Physical theories about nature abhorring a vacuum work fine in describing how physical phenomena such as gasses in enclosed spaces behave. But a better guide to how nations behave is international relations theory — especially of the realist variety, in which the concept of counter-balancing to respond to perceived threats is central. The balancing may bring together states that are half a globe away and have little in common beyond the animosity and sanctions of the United States — such as Russia and Venezuela, which have allied beyond matters of oil and have agreed to exchange visits of warships.

In some instances, the alliances, based on sharing hostility from the United States, overcome significant historical hostility between the allies themselves. This is true of the relationship between Russia and China, where longstanding economic, demographic, and ideological differences have caused frictions so severe that they have even erupted into open warfare. Despite that background, a perceived need to counter the United States led the presidents of China and Russia to declare earlier this year a friendship “with no limits.” The alliance has so far survived even the Russian war in Ukraine, a source of major discomfort to China in directly violating the Chinese mantra about noninterference in other nations’ internal affairs.

A similar situation prevails between Russia and Iran, with a historical background of competition for territory and influence between the Russian Empire and Persia. The Soviet Union occupied the northern third of Iran during World War II and caused a crisis when it refused to leave for another year. Russia and Iran compete today for influence in Central Asia, and alsos compete in seeking markets for oil. Despite all this, the fact that both are bêtes noires of the United States brings them together.

An all-too-common error is to perceive the behavior of one’s adversaries as somehow hard-wired into their nature and not to be a reaction to one’s own policies and conduct. By making this error, the United States, among other consequences, is encouraging adversaries to unite and thereby to oppose U.S. interests more effectively.

Great Power Competition leads to great power war and US decline

Larrison, 7-15, 22, Daniel Larison is a contributing editor at Antiwar.com and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLarison and at his blog, Eunomia, here, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/07/15/how-the-great-power-competition-model-leads-costly-entanglements/

Defining U.S. foreign policy primarily in terms of “great power competition” is a trap that risks overextending the United States and allowing its foreign policy to be dictated by Moscow’s and Beijing’s actions. Washington needs to recognize the limits of U.S. power as it experiences relative decline in a world with two major rivals, and it must seek to cooperate with those rivals on issues of global importance for the sake of all concerned while managing tensions with them to avoid the disaster of another great power war.

Instead of being guided by a poorly defined framework of “great power competition,” the United States must chart out its own vision for its foreign policy that does not aspire to counter every move that Russia and China make in the world. These are some of the insights and recommendations that Ali Wyne offers in his valuable new book, “America’s Great power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition.”

Wyne has done policymakers and analysts a service by tracking and examining the overuse of the “great power competition” framing in recent years. While the phrase has since become ubiquitous, it was rarely used in government circles until the start of the Trump administration. Since then, it has taken off in popularity and become a regular part of official jargon both within and outside the government.

The chief problem with defining U.S. foreign policy in terms of “great power competition” is that recognizing the existence of competition does not provide any clear answers for what the United States ought to do in the world. As Wyne says, “interstate competition is a characteristic of world affairs — like the balance of power — not a blueprint for foreign policy.” Acknowledging competition is a necessary first step in crafting an appropriate strategy and in setting the limits of what is possible, but it doesn’t tell us what the content of the strategy should be. Wyne counsels us that “we should not conflate description with prescription,” and that is what the “great power competition” framing encourages us to do.

Because it has been employed so indiscriminately, “great power competition” has become an umbrella concept to cover any number of individual policies and its vague definition allows almost anything to be smuggled in under its label. As Wyne observes, there is no scholarly consensus on either of the constituent parts of “great power competition,” so it is not surprising that no one can agree on what their combination entails. The danger of such a vague and slippery concept is that there is no way to identify proper ends or means, and it becomes an all-purpose justification for whatever anyone in Washington wants to do. As Wyne puts it, “A framework that is at once widely accepted and highly elastic is vulnerable to misappropriation.”

Far from focusing or disciplining U.S. foreign policy, the embrace of this concept becomes an invitation to a smorgasbord where “great power competition” becomes the official excuse for anything and everything.

A comparison with containment doctrine is instructive. The containment doctrine envisaged by George Kennan was relatively limited, not heavily militarized, and intended mainly for Europe. But within a few years it had morphed into a militarized global doctrine that was later used to justify all sorts of interventions around the world from coups to wars. Most of the worst U.S. blunders and crimes of the Cold War were the result of pursuing that much more ambitious form of “containment” that treated every country as a potential battleground.

Wyne comments on this aspect of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War: “Washington proved to be incapable of distinguishing between the core and the periphery of the postwar order because it feared that its vital national interests were implicated wherever Moscow asserted itself.”

This is what the fixation on “great power competition” threatens to do to our foreign policy again.

Great power competition can trap the United States into taking on far too many commitments and overstretching itself by trying to counter every action by other major powers. Wyne recommends a more selective approach that is not based on reacting to what the other powers do.

He sees several pitfalls from centering U.S. foreign policy on opposing all Russian and Chinese bids to increase their influence: it risks committing the United States to an expansive strategy that it can ill afford, it could lead to U.S. overreaction that drives Russia and China more closely together, and it forecloses the possibility of cooperation and locks the United States into open-ended hostility with both states. A foreign policy that is reflexively anti-Russian and anti-Chinese at all times has the perverse effect of letting the Russian and Chinese governments drive U.S. decision-making. It also means sacrificing U.S. interests that might be served by cooperation on specific issues, such as arms control or climate change.

He also warns against treating every region in the world as a potential arena for competition, and he urges Washington to exercise greater discipline and restraint by setting priorities for which regions are most important to vital interests. There is a temptation to use “great power competition” as a justification for maintaining or increasing U.S. commitments everywhere regardless of the underlying interests at stake. He argues that the United States needs to resist that temptation and be willing to reduce its commitments where appropriate, and it should not view every Russian and Chinese initiative as a threat that demands a U.S. response.

Wyne argues that the United States should not expect Russia or China to implode suddenly as the USSR did. Since there is no realistic prospect of inflicting total defeat on another major power in the nuclear age, Washington will have to find some way to live with these other states in what he calls “strained cohabitation.” Therefore, the United States must learn how to manage that cohabitation through diplomacy, and its chief goal must be averting a new great power conflict. Wyne stresses this point several times throughout the book: “The most urgent priority, of course, is to avoid a great power war.” Insofar as the great power competition framing encourages and stokes that great power conflict, it is inimical to both U.S. and international security.

The book concludes with a set of principles to guide policymakers in the context of competition with Russia and China. Several of these focus on the need for America’s internal renewal, or what Wyne calls “becoming a more dynamic version of its best self.” This renewal is not only a necessary precondition for being able to compete effectively, but it is also an important goal that needs to be pursued for the benefit of the country regardless of what other states do.

Another principle calls for recognizing the limits of America’s unilateral influence in order to guard against the mistaken belief that Washington can control or decisively influence all outcomes around the world. One of the last recommendations is to pursue possibilities for cooperation in order to keep competition between major powers from spinning out of control.

A foreign policy of restraint is compatible with Wyne’s recommendations for taking advantage of America’s “great power opportunity.” It should also be much better suited for putting them into practice because advocates of restraint have already been arguing for many of the same things for years.

China threat inflated, triggering war

Michael D. Swaine, July 15, 2022, Michael D. Swaine is director of the Quincy Institute’s East Asia program, Inflating China’s Threat Risks Disaster for the United States, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/inflating-china%E2%80%99s-threat-risks-disaster-united-states-203570

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently claimed that Chinese leadership has “announced its ambition to create a sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power.”

Blinken is wrong: no Chinese leader has ever made such a clear statement. But Blinken’s mischaracterization is only the latest notable signal of a dangerous trend in Washington, where U.S. government officials are significantly inflating the threat that China poses to the United States. This threat inflation actually hurts America’s interests at home and in the region, and it increases the chances of a disastrous U.S.-China conflict.

In May, I published a study examining the widespread presence of threat inflation in assessments of the Chinese military and Beijing’s general strategic intentions. Blinken’s speech is practically a case study in threat inflation, and his insistence on Beijing’s globe-bestriding ambitions is a sterling example. Blinken was likely referring to a speech made by Chinese leader Xi Jinping that has often been wrongly translated. At the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017, Xi stated that China will become “a global leader in terms of composite national strength and international influence.” Although many analysts translate the original Chinese phrase into English as “the” global leader, this is far from clear in the original Chinese, and the official Chinese translation of the term uses “a,” not “the.” It was hardly a clear announcement.

In Blinken’s defense, he’s not alone. Throughout history, individuals, governments, and leaders across disciplines have shown a strong tendency to exaggerate and distort threats, both in general and in relation to other countries.

Political experts and government advisers tend to overestimate the likelihood of threats because they can easily imagine the pathways to war, giving less attention to threats that have not led to war before. Policymakers appear inclined to believe hawkish advisers over dovish ones, as psychological impulses lead many leaders to exaggerate the evil intentions of adversaries. And the political culture and identity of some nations—like America—that rely on beliefs and values rather than ethnicity or race for their identity are inclined to create threat narratives that bolster domestic solidarity and legitimacy.

Many might think that inflating the threat posed by another country is better than underestimating or ignoring it. In reality, threat inflation can pose as much or more danger than underestimating a threat.

Threat inflation can create a dangerous, vicious circle in which each side reacts to inflated threat perceptions with excessive military buildups and overreactions to real and imagined challenges. Opportunistic politicians often inflate threats to create public alarm, justify domestic witch hunts, and impose restrictions on personal liberties. Threat inflation can also divert public attention and resources from more serious threats to the nation and undermine cooperation between states.

U.S. perceptions of China today bear all the hallmarks—and carry the attendant risks—of threat inflation. For many in Washington, China has now become ten feet tall. Depending on who you ask, Beijing threatens the very existence of the United States, its political system and society, the global economy, the security order in Asia, and the entire so-called rules-based international order—or all the above.

But in each of these areas, the level and nature of the threat China presents is routinely and almost invariably exaggerated. As a result, U.S. officials and policy analysts almost always argue for zero-sum, confrontational policies toward Beijing while ignoring or dismissing as “tried-and-failed” other possible approaches that could reduce the chance of crises or conflict with China and would better serve U.S. interests.

The U.S. must devote more attention and resources to right-sizing China’s threats–and it certainly does pose some. To do this, U.S. leaders and policy analysts first need to recognize the common tendency to inflate threats built into human psychology and political systems—which routinely influences their own perceptions—and the specific, inflation-creating biases and misperceptions that operate in the case of China.

America needs to develop policies and approaches toward Beijing that accurately reflect the more complex set of concerns, threats, and opportunities that China presents to the United States, other democracies, and the world. And, by the way, Beijing needs to do something similar, given its own tendency toward threat inflation. The objective for both nations should be to create a stable regional and global balance based on restraint and focused on limited deterrence, bounded, clearly defined competition (both zero-sum and positive-sum in nature), and a certain level of reassurance and mutual accommodation, all to facilitate a stress on the truly existential threats both countries face, beginning with climate change.

The United States has long inflated threats posed by non-democratic states and others—often with disastrous results. And yet few in Washington acknowledge U.S. threat inflation. Worse yet, many argue that we underestimate the threat China poses. Washington can’t seem to see things straight when it turns toward Beijing. Until we come to grips with this tendency, the likelihood of overreaction leading to conflict and even war will only grow.

Great power competition increases racism, diverts funding from needed social programs and encourages militaristic counterbalancing and repression

Bernes & Jackson, July 14, 2022, MICHAEL BRENES is Interim Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in History at Yale University; VAN JACKSON is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, and the Defence & Strategy Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies in New Zealand, Great-Power Competition Is Bad for Democracy, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2022-07-14/great-power-competition-bad-democracy

The Washington establishment’s view that great-power conflict is a net good for the United States derives from a tortured reading of Cold War history. In this view, Soviet rivalry provoked the passage of civil rights legislation, the space race led to innovations in technology and computerization, and the Cold War economy created affluence and enabled homeownership for many Americans. This historical interpretation of the Cold War lies behind recent legislation, including the 2021 Strategic Competition Act and the 2022 America COMPETES Act, both of which seek to marshal federal resources to spur economic development and job creation, all in an effort to compete with China.

But the Cold War’s influence is much more complicated—and grimmer—than policymakers’ standard telling of it. It is true that the Cold War created tremendous economic growth and prosperity, but it did so with deleterious effects on free speech, racial and economic equality, and democratic pluralism. Rivalry with the Soviet Union stoked the Red Scare in the 1950s, during which people merely accused of insufficient loyalty to the U.S. government lost their jobs and were blacklisted in Washington and in Hollywood. It inhibited the most ambitious parts of the civil rights agenda, sacrificing job creation and infrastructure investment for Black American communities in order to pay for the Vietnam War. It delayed needed reforms on gender by pressing women into domestic familial support roles and suppressing the feminist movement until it found a voice alongside other struggles for justice during the Vietnam War era. And by attacking programs for full employment, national health care, and labor unionism as “socialist” or “communist,” it embrittled the New Deal economic order established under U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.

Great-power rivalry with the Soviets exacerbated class inequalities that paved the way for the ascendance of austerity politics in the 1980s. Then, neoliberal prescriptions for managing the economy included a weak welfare state, corporate deregulation, and the privatization of public goods and services—all of which yielded growing disparities in wages, incomes, and job prospects between working-class and wealthy Americans. A political economy dependent upon military spending created jobs in the engineering and tech sectors, but that primarily benefited the highly educated and the upper middle class. The rise of the postindustrial economy in the 1970s and 1980s meant that Americans outside the fields of technology, academia, and engineering (fields subsidized by Cold War defense spending), and without advanced degrees, had to look for jobs in the service industry, which provides perpetually insecure, low-wage work without much opportunity for social mobility. The Cold War was not a struggle that benefited the working class.

Many of the most pressing threats to democracy cannot be solved through a competitive framework.

The Cold War also set a precedent regarding federal spending by which guns necessarily came at the expense of butter. Whereas Pentagon spending averaged 7.6 of GDP, education spending took up only three percent between 1946 and 1960. At their height in 1982, Social Security benefits comprised close to 5 percent of GDP. In the forty years prior, benefits averaged less than 3 percent of GDP. (Only healthcare expenditures rivaled national defense as a percentage of GDP during the Cold War). The balance of U.S. defense and social priorities have been mismatched since World War II.

Making matters worse, Cold War liberals conditioned domestic investments on great-power rivalry. This meant decoupling the rationale for public goods from a positive vision for society on its own terms and instead tying it to what would most hurt the Soviets. This made it possible to oppose domestic spending with the contorted logic that it was harmful to competition with the Soviets. Even Democrats started adopting this view of the welfare state by the 1970s, effectively abandoning the labor base of the Democratic party in favor of a white-collar, technologically literate constituency that it saw as more capable of outperforming the United States’ geopolitical foe. This bargain, which has left the Democratic party of the 2020s searching for its political soul, worked out far better for right-wing, nationalist politicians who consistently argued that money spent on poverty reduction—at home and abroad—would be better spent on intercontinental ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warheads, missile defense programs, and a more muscular foreign policy overall. This tendency helped rationalize the shadow of nuclear terror the world is still forced to live under today, but it did little to, say, shore up American democracy or prepare the United States for a global pandemic—to say nothing of lifting up America’s poor.

Fighting a monolithic communist enemy abroad also boomeranged in the form of racism and xenophobia against immigrants at home. The 1950 Internal Security Act, which required Communist Party members to register with the federal government, allowed U.S. authorities to deport naturalized immigrants suspected of “disloyalty.” After the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, Chinese immigrants during the Cold War were compelled to “confess” their illegal immigration status—even if they had broken no laws when they came to the United States—to earn their citizenship rights. Such policies reflected the anticommunist hysteria of McCarthyism that lasted well into the 1960s. Even when Democrats finally took up the cause of civil rights, as the historian Mary Dudziak has explained, it was in a stunted, narrow way that had been delayed decades by the earlier destruction of a previously unified Progressive movement that was the first organized champion for political and economic equality in America. That coalition was undone by anticommunist liberals—including Democrats and Republicans—whose visions for change were shortened by defining their politics against an enemy rather than for their own theory of democracy.

The failure to see the Cold War for what it was has left the United States unprepared to manage the risks that great-power competition poses to democratic society today. The Biden administration thinks this rivalry will benefit the American middle class and the world, yet it is already poisoning U.S. politics, aiding Chinese President Xi Jinping, and accumulating avoidable strategic risks along the way.

RIVALRY AND RACISM

Just as racism and ethnically motivated violence was part of the Cold War experience, so too has it become the most visible and immediate price of today’s showdown with China and Russia. In the past few months alone, xenophobic attacks against Russians and Chinese immigrants have escalated in the United States. Incidents of hate crimes toward Asian Americans have increased 339 percent since 2021, including a mass shooting in Atlanta in March 2021 that killed six Asian American women. Following the Ukraine invasion, Russian businesses in the United States have been boycotted, and Disney paused its new film releases in Russia. Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell even went so far as to recommend “kicking every Russian student out of the United States.” This is a disturbing echo of Cold War exclusionism.

U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly denounced acts of overt racism and xenophobia against Russian and Chinese immigrants. But an antiracist, antixenophobic policy is not one that merely denounces racial slurs or bigoted civilizational reasoning; it must also make it harder, not easier, to traffic in racialized sentiment. And on this count, the Biden administration is failing. Every gesture toward “outcompeting China” unintentionally buoys ethnonationalism at home and abroad. U.S. policymakers need to understand that Xi draws strength from rivalry, as do American far-right extremists, conspiracy theorists, and the demagogic Washington politicians who pander to them.

Republican senators such as Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley straddle the interests of Washington polite society and the far right. How? By invoking hateful rhetoric and promoting policies of racial exclusion that appeal to white supremacists and conspiracy theorists while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy by claiming that they target the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or “China” writ large—a vague menacing “other” that ensnares the larger community of Asian Americans. Months into the 2020 pandemic, Cruz defended the use of racially coded epithets aimed at China, including “kung flu” and “Chinese virus.” Cotton personally trafficked in these yellow-peril dog whistles, and co-sponsored legislation that year to ban Chinese students from securing visas to study science, technology, engineering, or math in the United States. And Hawley earned a Vanity Fair headline that read “Josh Hawley Proudly Declares Himself Pro Hate Crimes” after casting the sole vote against the uncontroversial COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act. Hawley also campaigned for reelection on ads that included depictions of Chinese businessmen taking over American farms, creating a racial stigma around who should be allowed to own the most important tangible asset in the U.S. economy.

Stoking this rivalry has also allowed conservatives to avoid political accountability, politicizing Chinese villainy rather than answering at the polls for their conduct in office. Shortly after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, for instance, the BBC asked outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo how the event affected America’s global image, to which he responded, “I actually think that question is basically Chinese propaganda.” The National Republican Senatorial Committee, similarly, instructed conservatives running for office in 2020 to tell voters, “Coronavirus was a Chinese hit-and-run followed by a cover-up that cost thousands of lives” and Democrats are “soft on China” and to “push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading the pandemic.” Their explicit aim was to avoid a referendum on Trump-era conservative policies and his mishandling of the U.S. pandemic response.

Expedient hate-mongering is not confined to the political right. Rather than condemn Republicans’ race-baiting and diversionary politics, many Democrats flirt with that same premise. Tim Ryan, a Democrat running for Senate in Ohio, has been unapologetic in his willingness to blame the economic plight of blue-collar workers on a China bogeyman—“China is winning and workers are losing” and “It’s us versus China,” he said in one ad. Democrats have been complicit in creating the economy that has put millions of Americans in a precarious financial position, so small wonder that they, too, would rather blame China for the state of things than reflect on their culpability.

Democrats have also bet that they can win support on infrastructure investment by framing it in terms of strengthening the United States for long-term competition with China. But perversely, Republicans and conservative Democrats have instead countered that competing with China may mean not investing in the United States’ long-term future. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, for instance, rationalized voting against Build Back Better legislation last year on the grounds that the United States needed the money for military contingencies against China and Russia. Earlier this year, Manchin joined Cotton in diverting $4 billion from a climate fund to Pentagon research and development, citing concerns about China.

Whatever the merits of military spending, it is literally coming at the expense of funding for projects that would directly benefit the American people—just like it did during the Cold War. And that means Democrats using foreign competition as the key to domestic rejuvenation are making a bad bet that misapprehends the realities of American politics.

MAKING STRONGMEN STRONGER

In China, rivalrous geopolitics is having similar consequences. China’s political economy, and by extension Xi’s rule, depends on oligarchs who exploit a weak labor rights regime and extreme worker precariousness, then move their profits offshore into often risky state-directed investments. This process is how China funds the Belt and Road Initiative, which Washington sees as a sign of Beijing’s hegemonic ambitions. In other words, China’s economic influence abroad is built on inequality and repression at home.

Rivalry perpetuates this dynamic. Economic growth, the great legitimizer of authoritarian politics, cannot forever proceed in a straight upward line. When growth rates fall, which in relative terms they are now, the ruling regime needs an alternative source of legitimacy. For Xi, that alternative is ethnonationalism—the glue that holds together political order in a deeply exploitative economic system.

Like its American cousin, Chinese ethnonationalism is a problem because it begets belligerence. The CCP’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy—the aggressive style of diplomacy adopted under Xi’s administration—is less a sign of insecurity than it is a symptom of nationalism being stoked for deliberately political ends. And ethnonationalism rationalizes the expansive modernization projects of the People’s Liberation Army, just as the same jingoistic, racially tinged sentiments in the United States are used to justify massive Pentagon budgets. Reactionaries in Washington and Beijing are mirror-imaging each other, and benefiting politically from the negative synergy of rivalry.

The Cold War’s influence is much more complicated—and grimmer—than policymakers’ standard telling of it.

Recent history has also made it evident that great-power rivalry does not help efforts to weaken autocrats, and may end up doing the opposite. Great-power competition did not produce leaders such as Vladimir Putin of Russia, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, or Viktor Orban of Hungary, but neither can it manage the forces that propelled them to power: ethnonationalism, economic inequality, and democratic backsliding. Rivalry between countries is not a viable framework for democratic improvement within them. Instead, geopolitical competition compels the United States to make undemocratic moral compromises in the name of democracy. In a rush to convince everyone that “America is back” as leader of the “free world,” the Biden administration has drawn hypocrisy-riddled distinctions between dictatorship and democracy as an ideological basis for great-power rivalry. But it is self-defeating—and logically contradictory—to enlist foreign governments in an anti-China, anti-Russia foreign policy agenda when the same mindset justifies U.S. backing of despotic, demagogic leaders from Turkey to Saudi Arabia to the Philippines and beyond. The United States’ limited political influence could be much better spent.

If left as the sole basis for American grand strategy, great-power rivalry will become circular, validating Russia’s and China’s militarist paths and justifying a superpowered U.S. national security bureaucracy primed for perpetual conflict. It will fail to rectify the sources of democratic weakness, which are rooted in economic precariousness, political corruption, and racism. It will lead to the election of autocratic leaders, who decry the United States’ domestic failures and link them to a supposedly weak foreign policy.

Given the public’s lingering desire to see the United States invest more at home, the time is right to shift course. Americans are looking for U.S. foreign policy to align with democratic expectations and public opinion. A truly great power would do its utmost to tackle the unresolved issues heightened by the pandemic: racial and economic inequality, a public health crisis, and runaway environmental degradation. Geopolitical rivalry will do none of that.

China is not seeking global dominance, US policies trigger aggression
Engagement with China will succeed, it just hasn’t yet

Heer, July 14, 2022, Paul Heer is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018), Engagement With China Has Not Failed,

But this analysis requires several caveats. Notwithstanding the breadth and depth of the Chinese challenge to the United States, there are limits to Beijing’s global ambitions. Indeed, Friedberg is somewhat equivocal or at least inconsistent in his characterization of China’s end game. He varyingly observes that Beijing seeks to “displace the US as the preponderant global power”; to develop “capabilities and influence equivalent, and eventually superior to, those of the US”; or to become “the predominant power globally, or at least with an extended sphere of influence [emphasis added].” So, which is it? The core question is whether Beijing seeks exclusive world domination, as is asserted in another new book by China scholar Ian Easton, The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy. But neither Friedberg nor Easton offers persuasive evidence that Beijing’s goal is global hegemony. For his part, Easton relies heavily on Chinese military textbooks whose authoritativeness as evidence of CCP leadership thinking is at best debatable. Friedberg, in citing statements from Xi that indicate Beijing’s ambitions, quotes references to China becoming “a global leader in terms of national strength and international influence.” In none of these cases, however, did Xi clearly declare that China sought or needed to be “the” sole global leader.

It is certainly true, as Friedberg notes, that “whatever their Western counterparts may profess to believe, China’s rulers are convinced they are locked in a zero-sum struggle” with the United States. But many of their Western counterparts profess to believe in precisely the same kind of winner-take-all struggle, and Friedberg himself apparently agrees. What he overlooks is the extent to which Beijing’s perceptions of a zero-sum contest mirror rhetoric and behavior from the United States, in a classic security dilemma. The possible impact of U.S. actions is also relevant to Friedberg’s analysis of Xi’s centrality to China’s strategic behavior. As noted above, Friedberg correctly observes that Xi largely inherited Beijing’s objectives from his predecessors, even if he has “pursue[d] them more forcefully.” What he overlooks here is the extent to which China’s greater assertiveness over the past decade has been a product not just of Xi’s leadership but of policies and actions by the United States and other countries over the same time period, to which Beijing felt the need to respond firmly.

The central issue of whether Washington “got China wrong” is more complicated to parse. Friedberg no doubt is correct that many policymakers and scholars were buoyed after the collapse of the Soviet Union with the notion that communism would eventually collapse in China as well, and they either advocated policies aimed at advancing that goal or justified policies on the grounds that they could advance that goal. He is also correct that U.S. commercial interests played a central and often self-serving role in promoting those ideas. Moreover, Friedberg notes that academic studies at the time appeared to provide a “sound empirical footing” for the theory that economic engagement with China would lead in turn to market reforms and political liberalization there.

But that is not the same as asserting that U.S. policymakers pursued engagement solely for that purpose, or with that metric for success. In fact, post-Cold War U.S. presidents—no less than Richard Nixon a generation earlier—pursued engagement with China for a variety of geostrategic reasons that usually had more to do with influencing Beijing’s international behavior than with its domestic governance, and they often did so with success.

Perhaps more importantly, Friedberg overstates the extent to which U.S. policymakers failed to recognize the nature of the CCP regime and its internal and external ambitions. He criticizes Washington’s “inability or unwillingness to grasp … the CCP’s unwavering determination to maintain its unbreakable hold on power and its tireless creativity and brutal skill in doing so,” and he asserts that U.S. policymakers “systematically underestimated” the regime’s “mix of insecurity, ambition, and opportunism.” He adds that Washington was “reluctant to acknowledge the fact that China was working to displace the United States as the preponderant power in Asia,” and failed to realize that the CCP “never had any intention of proceeding down the path towards full economic liberalization.”

But having worked within the U.S. Intelligence Community on East Asian issues for virtually all of the relevant period Friedberg is addressing, I do not recall a time when these aspects of the CCP regime were not well understood by the U.S. Government. Indeed, Friedberg himself observes that the “Tiananmen [Square crackdown in 1989] made it impossible for American policymakers and the American people to ignore the CCP regime’s ugly, repressive face,” and that “it is difficult to escape the conclusion that any chance of China evolving gradually into a Western-style liberal democracy died at Tiananmen.” Accordingly, and in my experience, Washington subsequently was under no illusions about the character of the CCP.

Friedberg avers that after Tiananmen “portions of the US military and intelligence communities” started to pay more attention to troublesome aspects of the regime, but “at the highest political level … officials remained intensely focused on engagement” and regarded Beijing’s long-term intentions as “unformed and therefore susceptible to shaping, for better or worse, by the actions of others.” There is much to unpack here. But in Washington’s approach to China, engagement was never exclusive of greater attention to Beijing’s problematic behavior and ambitions both domestically and abroad, and indeed such attention expanded within the U.S. government in tandem with the persistence of engagement in pursuit of U.S. strategic objectives. Moreover, although Beijing’s long-term intentions were never judged to be wholly “unformed,” they have in fact always been “susceptible to shaping.” The bottom line is that the limits (to date) on the success of engagement were not primarily the result of ignorance or denial of the nature of the CCP and its strategic intentions. They were more likely the result of inherent limits on the United States’ ability to influence China, and perhaps of trends in the United States itself—especially in the wake of the global financial crisis—that further eroded relative U.S. influence, while giving Beijing the opportunity and the incentive to push back harder against Washington’s strategy and to score points against it.

Friedberg frequently overlooks the symmetry between his characterization of Beijing and Washington’s own approach to the bilateral relationship. For example, he observes that “rather than consider the possibility that Beijing’s own actions might have been at least partly responsible for triggering a spiral of escalating tensions, Chinese analysts and officials placed the blame squarely on the US.” U.S. officials, however, routinely deflect the possibility that American actions have played a role in fueling tensions. Similarly, Friedberg notes that the CCP “is quick to interpret every action of the United States and its allies as proof of hostile intent and justification for its own aggressive policies.” But Washington is similarly inclined to interpret Chinese actions as proof of hostile intent and as necessitating strong U.S. pushback. He observes that “Beijing believes that rivalry with the West is inescapable and the stakes are existential.” But Washington appears to have embraced the same view of U.S.-China “strategic competition.” Finally, Friedberg judges that Chinese leaders have “tied themselves into the dangerous knot of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” overlooking or denying the possibility that U.S. leaders risk doing the same thing. Indeed, he appears to deride scholar Joseph Nye’s famous remark that “if you treat China as an enemy, China will become an enemy.”

Inherent in all this is the probability that the United States has in fact shaped China but has done so counterproductively. Friedberg notes correctly that “over the last three decades, Western policymakers have been compelled repeatedly to upgrade their assessments of Beijing’s aims.” But he does not address the extent to which Beijing’s aims may have evolved in response to U.S. policies and actions that were perceived by Chinese leaders as intended to constrain or even contain China. Friedberg correctly notes that the Trump administration “reinforced Beijing’s long-held belief that the Americans were determined to hold China down.” But it also crystallized the belief in Washington that China is determined to keep America down, and thus fueled U.S. policies that Beijing was bound to view as hostile.

This symmetry and its consequences are amply but probably unintentionally reflected in Friedberg’s policy prescriptions for what Washington should be doing to rectify the errors he attributes to engagement. He starts by rebuking what he calls the “lexicon of strategic paralysis”—the use of pejorative slogans to preempt policy changes by presuming that they would fail. Specifically, he criticizes those who warn against a “new Cold War” with China, “containment,” “decoupling,” or “regime change.” Friedberg’s policy recommendations would essentially promote all four.

He contends that an “all-out Cold War style ‘neo-containment policy’ designed to isolate China, stifle its growth, and prevent its rise” was not the only alternative to engagement. The United States and its allies, he suggests, could instead have used their leverage “more forcefully to try to compel Beijing to modify its domestic politics” and could have taken steps to slow the growth of China’s power and to impose constraints on its external behavior.” The substantive difference between these two characterizations is not clear. Similarly, he suggests that “containment” is not feasible, but asserts that the United States and its allies “are going to have to find ways to offset and neutralize China’s growing ability to impose its will upon them, whether through coercive threats, direct attack, or by gaining control over key chokepoints or portions of the global commons.” How is that not “containment”? On “decoupling,” Friedberg observes that Beijing is trying to reduce China’s economic dependence on other countries and increase their dependence on China, because the CCP “has always regarded economic policy as a tool for enhancing China’s power relative to the United States.” But Washington’s approach—and his recommendations—reflect the same goals and regard economic policy much the same way. Finally, on “regime change,” Friedberg recommends that Washington “increase the pressure that the CCP regime feels from within to address its own domestic failings by heightening awareness of them among its citizens.” This echoes statements by Trump administration officials that appeared to encourage the Chinese people to overthrow their government.

Friedberg outlines four lines of effort for U.S. policy: (a) mobilizing for a protracted U.S.-China rivalry; (b) “partial disengagement” in the economic realm; (c) intensified military preparations and diplomacy to deter Chinese coercion and aggression; and (d) “waging discursive struggle” to challenge Beijing’s ideological narratives. He emphasizes that the United States cannot afford to adopt a purely defensive posture: it must exploit China’s critical weaknesses, impose costs on its actions, slow the growth of Chinese power and influence, and dissuade Beijing from calculating that military force could achieve its goals. But Beijing is pursuing precisely the same four lines of effort against the United States: girding for a long-term struggle, selectively decoupling, building up its diplomatic and military leverage, and trumpeting the benefits of socialism and the supposed frailties of democracy. And China will be similarly determined to exploit U.S. weaknesses, impose costs on U.S. behavior, and persuade Washington that U.S. military actions against China would be disastrous. Friedberg suggests that “the greatest risk of miscalculation is likely to arise from an underestimation by China’s leaders of the capabilities and resolve” of the West. But the risk is no less great that Washington will underestimate China’s capabilities and resolve—and overestimate its own.

In the end, Friedberg insists that “the nature of China’s CCP regime” leaves “little prospect of a stable and mutually satisfactory accommodation,” and thus makes peaceful coexistence unlikely for the foreseeable future. “There is little overlap,” he asserts, “between what China’s rulers really want and what Washington and its allies can, or should be willing to, give.” But this is based on specious or invalid assumptions about “what China’s rulers really want.” As noted above, Friedberg says the United States lacks a “clearly articulated and widely shared assessment of the nature and severity of the challenge” from China. But the assessment he offers, although clearly articulated, is neither widely shared nor accurate. China’s challenge to the United States (and the West) is not as absolute or existential as Friedberg suggests; Beijing’s international behavior is driven by structural, historical, and material factors beyond just the nature of the CCP regime; and there is in fact room for mutual accommodation and peaceful coexistence if Washington is prepared to recognize this and to adopt a more empirical assessment of the “nature and severity” of the challenge.

This is where engagement still provides opportunities and in fact the best vehicle for averting conflict and fixing the U.S.-China relationship. Friedberg correctly observes that “engagement was a gamble rather than a blunder,” and he acknowledges that “US and other Western policymakers cannot fairly be faulted for placing their original bet.” It is true that the gamble has not paid off, but that does not mean the original bet has been lost. Engagement in fact has not failed; it just hasn’t succeeded yet. And Friedberg himself implicitly endorses it when he recommends that “the United States and its allies should continue to articulate the hope that liberal reforms will someday be possible [in China] and try to create conditions that may make them more likely.” That was, and remains, an excellent reason for engagement with China.

Multipolarity means war

Reiff, July 12, 2022, David Rieff is the author of At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice and Money in the Twenty-First Century; and, most recently, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies, Can America Overcome a Century of Challenge?, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-america-overcome-century-challenge-203491

It is all very well to talk in welcoming tones about the new age of multipolarity, but that age seems more likely to usher in a period of anarchy and war than stability, balancing, and peace. IT IS almost impossible to overstate the gift that Vladimir Putin’s decision to try to subjugate Ukraine represents for U.S. interests in Europe. For whatever happens on the battlefield—and one must be careful here: despite Kyiv’s heroic but also surprisingly successful resistance so far, the outcome of the war is still far from clear—the United States will emerge from the conflict having achieved strategic goals in Europe that appeared completely out of reach as recently as six months ago. NATO has regained its coherence and, assuming Turkey’s opposition can be overcome, with Finnish and Swedish accession will expand not in a way that adds to its responsibilities without strengthening its capacities—as was the case in the Baltics—but immensely increase its power and resources. Germany, for all the double game it is playing on importing Russian energy, has finally entered what might be called the “post-post-Hitler era” and will rearm. The EU’s economic withdrawal from Russia will remove a great deal of the leverage Moscow previously could exercise in Brussels. And, less measurably, the anti-Americanism of many Europeans will now have to at least coexist with the understanding that it is Russia that poses the existential threat. Not since the days of John Paul II has the balance shifted to such an extent, and in my more whimsical moments, I sometimes wonder why the conspiracy theorists on both the Right and the Left who believe Putin was pushed into war by NATO expansion and that the Maidan Revolution was, in reality, a Western coup don’t instead accuse the Russian leader of being a U.S. agent of influence.

But Europe is not the world (much as it sometimes still seems to manage to imagine that it is), and all the geo-economic and geostrategic reasons that have rightly led Washington to view Asia, above all (here, I am not sure wisely) Northeast Asia, as the central concern of U.S. foreign policy remain in place. Again, while we don’t yet know the fate of Ukraine, even if, in my view, Washington and its NATO allies must do everything short of sending its own forces into the battlespace to help Ukraine prevail, we do know that whatever happens Russia will emerge from the war weaker, poorer, and less globally consequential. In contrast, at worst, China will emerge unscathed from the conflict, but is more likely to come out strengthened by it insofar as Russia—and how Mao Zedong would have enjoyed that!—will almost certainly be forced to reconcile itself to being the junior partner in the relationship with China, forced to sell its energy in a market skewed in favor of the buyer of last resort: Beijing. At the same time, this is a moment of considerable domestic tension in China, above all in urban China, where Xi Jinping’s zero Covid policy is stressing both the citizenry and the economy. Overconfidence and anxiety are always a dangerous mix for totalitarian governments. In that context, the reconquest of Taiwan may finally seem irresistible to Beijing, which means that, now, as perhaps not since the Mao period, one of the principal challenges facing U.S. policymakers is now to decide what the U.S. response would be.

Whatever that decision is, it seems all but inevitable given the alarm in both South Korea and Japan over China’s rise, —and, for the first time since 1945, the willingness of Japan to consider significant remilitarization (the parallel with what is happening in Germany is, well, striking)—that the military element in U.S. foreign policy will develop even further post-Ukraine. This probably would have happened anyway given that even before the Russian invasion it was quite clear that the so-called Long Peace of the post-1945 world was ending, to the extent, that is, that it had ever existed at all. But post-Ukraine, the timeline for this clearly has been shortened. At the same time, the so-called pivot toward Northeast Asia in no way clarifies what U.S. foreign policymakers need to do, or, indeed, even how they need to think about South Asia. Above all, what to do about Narendra Modi’s India and the balancing act between the United States, China, and Russia, that so far at least New Delhi has been performing with considerable sophistication. And then there is a rising Africa, whose population by 2100 will either be equal to or have surpassed Asia’s, and with whose rapidly increasing importance U.S. policymakers have not even begun to engage seriously.

And all of this is taking place in the context of a global climate emergency that no nation, even one as rich and powerful as the United States, can hope to address consequentially on its own, even if there were—and there is most emphatically not—a domestic consensus to do so. At the same time, international institutions, above all the UN system, have rarely seemed more irrelevant, except perhaps in its humanitarian role, while the post-1945 international order more generally seems to be coming apart. It is all very well to talk in welcoming tones about the new age of multipolarity, but for now, at least, that age seems more likely to usher in a period of anarchy and war than stability, balancing, and peace. U.S. foreign policy will be forced to confront this post-Ukraine, and forced to do so at a time in U.S. history where the country is as profoundly divided about how to interpret its past, how to govern itself in the present, and how to imagine a decent future for itself, as it has been at any time since the 1930s. Unenviable does not even begin to describe it.

Russia and China are a threat to global democracy; [need to strengthen ANUKS to challenge]

Twining & Quirk, July 11, 2022, Daniel Twining is President of the International Republican Institute (IRI), where Patrick Quirk is Senior Director for Strategy, Research, and the Center for Global Impact. Both authors previously served as members of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, Fighting Back: How Democracies Can Check Authoritarian Aggression, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/fighting-back-how-democracies-can-check-authoritarian-aggression-203467

Last week, President Joe Biden and his fellow G7 leaders pledged $600 billion in public and private funds over the next five years to assist developing countries and counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—a key tool of economic and political influence for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It’s a welcome step but could prove a mere drop in the ocean if it is not folded into a broader campaign to fight back against transnational authoritarianism. The fact is that Xi Jinping and his fellow autocrat Vladimir Putin are on the front foot. From the Solomon Islands to Ukraine, Xi and Putin are using force and varying methods of subversion to co-opt, supplant, or hollow out democratically elected governments to serve their own interests. By equipping repressive leaders with the technology, expertise, and funds to suppress dissent and extend their rule—in exchange for favorable UN votes, access to natural resources, or other concessions—the Kremlin and the CCP are underwriting authoritarian expansion. The challenge Russia and China pose to democracy is decades old. What is different today is that the threat to democracy is now existential. Xi and Putin have paired their standard suite of influence tactics—for example, economic coercion, election interference, and opaque dealmaking—with more expansive and aggressive moves to shape critical domains, from internet freedom to the basic tenets of sovereignty. This is creating an environment that is fundamentally hostile to vital American interests. This threat is not lost on the United States. In a recent speech outlining the new U.S. China policy, U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken said that America “must defend and reform the rules-based international order” in order to realize a future where “universal human rights are respected” and “countries are secure from coercion and aggression.” President Biden has stated the case more pointedly, saying that the United States is in a competition between democracy and autocracy. The administration deserves credit for its pro-democracy statements and initiatives, and for its continued support for foreign assistance programs that strengthen democratic resilience to authoritarian influence. Yet unfortunately, U.S. policy has often not lived up to the administration’s rhetoric. As China hollows out United Nations institutions and gobbles up Pacific Island outposts, and Russia decimates Ukraine, the White House has too often stood by as our adversaries shape the battlefield. And while this week’s pledge from the G7 is a good start, it falls short of what is needed to win this contest of systems: to aggressively underwrite and expand support for democratic institutions and movements, and ensure that emerging components of the international order are grounded in the ideals of freedom. The Biden team knows that it cannot singlehandedly check authoritarian aggression and has done well to rally American allies—from galvanizing NATO against Russia’s invasion to deepening the quadrilateral partnership uniting America, India, Japan, and Australia, and launching the Australia-United Kingdom-United States Partnership (AUKUS). The United States and core allies have affirmed support for a world that is safe for democracy; it’s time to underwrite those intentions with actions that take the strategic initiative to put autocracies on the back foot. Working with D-10 or G-7 allies, the United States should go beyond this week’s proposed assistance efforts and spearhead a campaign to empower democratic movements around the world. This should include moral, legal, and financial assistance to the people on the ground working to advance democracy and under the threat of retribution by authoritarian regimes or their local proxies. Xi and Putin have asserted their right to undermine open societies. The free world must promulgate the right of democratic movements to receive assistance, and fulfill its responsibility to help those seeking to protect or advance democracy in their societies. The free world must also unite within the UN and other multilateral organizations to arrest the ongoing erosion of those institutions by Beijing and Moscow. UN agencies play an important role in setting international standards and norms; yet Chinese representatives lead two of fifteen such bodies (the International Telecommunications Union and the Food and Agriculture Organization) and are principal deputies at UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization; the International Monetary Fund; and the World Bank. To compete, the United States and its allies must mount coordinated campaigns to prevent China from heading other agencies and reclaim those it currently holds, while also exploring alternative groupings that will more effectively serve the needs of a liberal democratic order. The existential threat to democracy from Russia and China is perhaps most severe in the digital domain. The CCP has invested heavily in exporting surveillance technology and backdoor access to networks via the state-owned tech giant Huawei; and both Beijing and Moscow have invested in offensive cyberwarfare capabilities with which to blackmail or assault free societies. The United States must take aggressive steps to ensure a free and open internet based on principles of transparency and openness. This could be accomplished by forging alliances and aligning our regulatory structures with like-minded countries to enable the free flow of information online; developing penalties for countries that build firewalls; and creating incentives for countries to remain open. The United States and its partners can also invest in technologies like satellite internet that deny authoritarians the ability to shut off internet access and preserve the basic right of citizens everywhere to circumvent authoritarian censorship. Big Tech can and should do more on this front, and the United States and other democracies should design incentives to this effect. At minimum, technology companies should provide tools to activists on the front lines pushing for freedom to keep themselves safe from surveillance as well as develop and distribute technologies to access the internet in countries where it is restricted. Powerful tech companies can also do more to keep their platforms operating in repressive societies rather than bowing to government pressure. Our leading geopolitical adversaries face no credible deterrent to undermining democratic movements and elected governments. Such political warfare can be just as harmful to stability and American interests as military incursions, but is yet another area in which America’s actions have not lived up to its rhetoric. How can we be serious about competing with China and Russia if we all but give them a pass in this critical domain? America must start imposing costs to deter and prevent Chinese and Russian interference in foreign political systems and constrain the authoritarian regimes they seek to enable. The United States and its allies should demonstrate their willingness to deploy calibrated, credible economic and military actions in response to verified reports of the Kremlin or CCP political warfare. The United States and its partners should make clear, both publicly and privately, that such incursions will have meaningful consequences. Washington could work with local partners inside Russia and China to expose leadership corruption, delegitimizing rulers who claim a nationalist mandate to conduct authoritarian aggression abroad even as they systematically steal from their own people. Economic sanctions should be introduced earlier and at a more consequential scale to communicate the costs of proceeding with political warfare. Additionally, China’s membership in the World Trade Organization could be reconsidered as punishment for its continued violation of economic norms. On the military side, so-called “gray zone” tactics—including targeted cyber-attacks—could be deployed to raise the costs for authoritarians who otherwise enjoy impunity in assaulting democratic institutions beyond their borders. Biden has said that “we are now finally awakened to the challenge” posed by transnational authoritarianism. Yet the question of whether we are prepared to do what it takes to push back remains unclear. Defending democracy is critical to building a free, secure, and prosperous world. We must now pursue policies that go beyond exalted rhetoric to strengthen and empower fledgling democratic institutions and deter our adversaries from their campaigns of malign foreign influence. It is past time the United States starts playing offense to shape a balance of power that continues to favor freedom.

US is still the global hegemon

Rachman, 7-11, 22, Gideon Rachman is the Chief Foreign Affairs Columnist at the Financial Times., Ukraine Is a Tragedy, But America’s Biggest Threat Lies at Home, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukraine-tragedy-america%E2%80%99s-biggest-threat-lies-home-203495

THE INVASION of Ukraine is tragic and dangerous. But it is also a huge geopolitical opportunity for the United States. The dominant geopolitical trend of the twenty-first century has been the steady decline of American hegemony and the erosion of the unipolar world that was briefly created by the end of the Cold War. But Russia’s failures on the battlefield—and the Biden administration’s forceful and effective diplomatic response—present America with a chance to halt and perhaps reverse this trend. Since 2000, a number of events have eaten away at U.S. power and prestige: 9/11, two failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Global Financial Crisis that began on Wall Street, the election of Donald Trump, the reassertion of Russian power, and the inexorable rise of China. The idea that the United States and the West as a whole are in irreversible decline has become a central feature of both Russian and Chinese official discourse. Vladimir Putin liked to proclaim that Western liberalism was obsolete. Xi Jinping regularly proclaims that the East is rising and the West is in decline. Putin’s strongman style of leadership gathered fans around the world in the years before the invasion of Ukraine. His fan club included Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Trump, who called Putin a strategic genius just days before his invasion of Ukraine. The fact that Putin’s war has gone so badly should weaken the prestige of Russia and its leader. By contrast, the United States and the EU have demonstrated that the supposedly decadent Western alliance can still be formidable—when it is roused. The continued dominance of the dollar has allowed the United States to effectively cut Russia out of the global financial system. Even Chinese tech companies will be wary of supplying Russia, in case they run into secondary American sanctions. The superiority of Western military technology, supplied to the Ukrainians, has also been demonstrated on the battlefield. All of this sends a useful message—not just to Russia, but also to China. Direct comparisons between the United States and China have in recent years looked encouraging for Beijing—China is now the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter and has the world’s largest navy and foreign reserves. But China, unlike the United States, does not have a network of allies. Measure China against the United States, the EU, Japan, and South Korea, and the contest looks a lot less even. The “West,” it turns out, includes the advanced democracies of Asia. This message has been usefully reinforced by the Ukraine crisis. Unlike the Trump administration, the Biden White House has understood the importance of allies—and has worked hard to keep them onside. America’s central goal over the next few years should be to build on the allied unity demonstrated by the Ukraine crisis. Joint approaches and policies should be created in key areas—such as technological standards, finance, and security in the Asia-Pacific.

Alternative to hegemony is global dominance by other powers such as Russia

Kagan, May/June 2022, ROBERT KAGAN is Stephen and Barbara Friedman Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of the forthcoming book The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941, Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-06/russia-ukraine-war-price-hegemony, The Price of Hegemony Can America Learn to Use Its Power?

For the 70-plus years since World War II, the United States has actively worked to keep revisionists at bay. But many Americans hoped that with the end of the Cold War, this task would be finished and that their country could become a “normal” nation with normal—which was to say, limited—global interests. But the global hegemon cannot tiptoe off the stage, as much as it might wish to. It especially cannot retreat when there are still major powers that, because of their history and sense of self, cannot give up old geopolitical ambitions—unless Americans are prepared to live in a world shaped and defined by those ambitions, as it was in the 1930s.

Americans are part of a never-ending power struggle, whether they wish to be or not.

The United States would be better served if it recognized both its position in the world and its true interest in preserving the liberal world order. In the case of Russia, this would have meant doing everything possible to integrate it into the liberal order politically and economically while deterring it from attempting to re-create its regional dominance by military means. The commitment to defend NATO allies was never meant to preclude helping others under attack in Europe, as the United States and its allies did in the case of the Balkans in the 1990s, and the United States and its allies could have resisted military efforts to control or seize land from Georgia and Ukraine. Imagine if the United States and the democratic world had responded in 2008 or 2014 as they have responded to Russia’s latest use of force, when Putin’s military was even weaker than it has proved to be now, even as they kept extending an outstretched hand in case Moscow wanted to grasp it. The United States ought to be following the same policy toward China: make clear that it is prepared to live with a China that seeks to fulfill its ambitions economically, politically, and culturally but that it will respond effectively to any Chinese military action against its neighbors.

It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict. But Washington is risking conflict now; Russia’s ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world. If the United States and its allies—with their combined economic, political, and military power—had collectively resisted Russian expansionism from the beginning, Putin would have found himself constantly unable to invade neighboring countries.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult for democracies to take action to prevent a future crisis. The risks of acting now are always clear and often exaggerated, whereas distant threats are just that: distant and so hard to calculate. It always seems better to hope for the best rather than try to forestall the worst. This common conundrum becomes even more debilitating when Americans and their leaders remain blissfully unconscious of the fact that they are part of a never-ending power struggle, whether they wish to be or not.

But Americans should not lament the role they play in the world. The reason the United States has often found itself entangled in Europe, after all, is because what it offers is genuinely attractive to much of the world—and certainly better when compared with any realistic alternative. If Americans learn anything from Russia’s brutalization of Ukraine, it should be that there really are worse things than U.S. hegemony.

China containment bad: fails; undermines domestic renewal; undermines cooperation on all large global issues; undermines resolution of the Ukraine war

Hussain, 7-11, 22, Senator Mushahid Hussain is Chairman of the Senate of Pakistan’s Defence Committee, a longtime visitor to China, he studied at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service; U.S. China Policy Is Heading Towards Disaster, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-china-policy-heading-towards-disaster-203510

In any case, U.S. policies have pushed China and Russia closer together, unlike the Cold War when China was an American ally. One important factor for the U.S. victory over the USSR in the twentieth-century Cold War was the solid support of China. After President Nixon’s historic opening to China fifty years ago, China became a de facto U.S. ally on most global issues where the United States was confronting the Soviet Union, be it Afghanistan or the Soviet-supported Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia or combating Soviet expansionism in Africa. Given this context, U.S. policymakers need to rethink before they sleepwalk into a new Cold War against an adversary they do not fully understand, in a complex global setting where the United States no longer can lay claim to be “the sole superpower.” Second, in the current global setting, America’s appeal and, indeed, its strength remain in the domain of “soft power,” where it excels and is unmatched. The allure of the United States, the razzle and dazzle of the American “way of life” and its innate dynamism and creativity, serve as a magnet which entices the best and brightest of the world to study, stay, and settle in the United States—seen as a land of opportunity where merit matters. This is still America’s strongest selling point globally, not in cobbling military alliances based on the “shock and awe” of military might, where it has been a constant loser on the battlefields of Asia. Embarking on a quest to contain China, when China still doesn’t threaten core American interests directly, would be a tried, tested, and failed formula, wasting resources as happened in the post-9/11 “War on Terror” when $6.5 trillion were squandered in two decades of futile conflict. Third, in 2022, both Xi and Biden, the leaders of China and the United States, are going through a critical transition in their respective countries. Xi is getting ready to preside over the most important CCP conclave this fall since 1978 when Deng Xiaoping did the massive “course correction” from Maoism to a market economy, politically labeled “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” For Biden, the midterm elections in November are “make or break,” which will determine whether he will have a political future beyond 2024. Biden needs Xi for an economic bailout that will give the U.S. economy badly needed relief, while Xi is aware that the “great disorder under heaven” can be destabilizing for China, serving to detract China from its post-Covid transition to normalcy after nearly three years of lockdowns and quarantine. Therefore, both leaders need a semblance of cooperative partnership for political stability at home, economic growth, and a lowering of tensions in an otherwise volatile world. Confrontation, containment, or a new cold war would detract from these common objectives. Fourth, as a landmark Harvard study, authored by Prof. Graham Allison, “The Great Hi-Tech Rivalry: China and the United States” indicates: China is already overtaking the United States in high-tech manufacturing. For example, in 2020, China produced 1.5 billion cell phones, 250 million computers, and 25 million automobiles. Putting the Chinese genie of economic growth and technological excellence back into the bottle would be an uphill, if not impossible, task, for the United States. In key areas of innovation, science, and technology, which are going to be determinants of twenty-first-century advancement, China is almost at par or ahead of the United States, including in artificial intelligence, 5G, cloud computing, robotics, and studies in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Finally, and this is the key, on balance, there is greater convergence of Chinese and U.S. interests on key global issues, than divergence. North Korea and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is a case in point. Stability and peace in Afghanistan are other areas of congruent interests. A stable Middle East, including close ties with Israel, are fundamental elements of this China-American confluence of interests. In fact, the only issue of discord in U.S.-Israel relations is China’s close economic and technological ties with Israel, including building of the Haifa Port, which the United States labels as a potential “security threat.” Other areas of convergence between the two countries include climate change, counterterrorism cooperation (especially combating religious extremism of groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda), a quest for regional connectivity, and the building up of free trade groupings. Even on that, China has an edge given the incentives offered by the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) are not comparable to the U.S. initiative of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), which neither provides for market access nor lowering of tariff barriers. RCEP countries provide 30 percent of global industrial output and 30 percent of global trade. China’s pragmatism is evident in delinking trade from politics, as the recent opening of direct shipping lines between the Chinese port of Qingdao and Japan’s Osaka port indicates. Or flexibility on Hong Kong, where Xi personally reassured the international community, during his speech on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Hong Kong handover, that the basic character of Hong Kong as an “open and free economy based on one country, two systems” and the “Common Law” of the island would remain unchanged. In the current context, a key area of potential convergence of Chinese and American interests could be Ukraine. China has not endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because it goes against the grundnorm of Chinese foreign policy, namely, the inviolability of established borders and respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of states. While China has not formally condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China does not condone it either. It is, therefore, no accident that two days after the June 15 Xi-Putin telephone conversation, President Vladimir Putin hinted at China-Russia differences during his revealing statement at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (Russia’s Davos) where he stated that “China has her own interests and these are not the same as Russian interests, but these interests are not against Russia.” In any peaceful settlement of the Ukraine conflict, China can be a key facilitator of the United States because of the relationship that Beijing enjoys with Moscow. More than any other country, it is China that has strategic leverage over Russia. China is naturally perturbed at the destabilization of the European status quo caused by the invasion of Ukraine, which, in turn, has militarized European foreign policy to the extent that a rejuvenated NATO is now taking on a China-focused direction, extending its tentacles to the Asia-Pacific, where China has core interests. In the last ten years, Xi has met Putin thirty-eight times, the maximum number of meetings of Xi with any foreign leader; both have a very close personal rapport and both are members of a “mutual admiration society.” If Putin takes any leader seriously, it is Xi, and Xi too has admired Putin as a “strong and decisive” leader, spearheading Russia’s resurgence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This relationship can be leveraged by the United States to seek an end to the Ukraine war, providing for a face-saving exit for Putin. A long-drawn-out conflict in Ukraine is neither in American or Chinese interests. While the United States has been helped by Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine, the Ukraine war, for the most part, is seen in much of the Global South as primarily a “European War,” driven by a desire to isolate and contain Russia, which itself feels encircled by NATO enlargement. For the first time in twenty-five years, China, India, and Pakistan took a similar position on a global issue, choosing to abstain from voting on Ukraine, like so many others, including Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Even solid American allies like the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been found “sitting on the fence” on Ukraine. Given this context, instead of rushing headlong into confronting and containing China, wisdom gleaned from past experience and contemporary geopolitical realities demand a review and reset in the U.S. approach to China. Some broad understanding on the “rules of the game” must be found so these two global giants can contest and compete without rocking the boat or resorting to a needless confrontation, that neither they nor the world needs or can afford, economically, politically, or militarily.

US not declining and can sustain its global security commitments

Roy, 7-9, 22, Denny Roy is a Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, U.S. Grand Strategy Should Reject Declinism, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-grand-strategy-should-reject-declinism-203433

There is at present no compelling reason for the United States to voluntarily abandon a strategic shaping role in Asia and retrench to Europe and North America.

Officially, China thinks the United States is a paper tiger. Some Americans agree. Michael Lind, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, argues in a July 2 article in The National Interest that “American Triumphalism is back,” revived by the failure of Russia to quickly achieve the apparently original objectives of its invasion of Ukraine. As a corrective, Lind makes a case for American declinism. Worldwide, he says, the United States is “in retreat or in defeat or in stalemate.” China, on the other hand, is winning. Thus, Washington’s grand strategy should settle for America being influential only in Western Europe and North America, Lind writes. The case Lind makes is deeply flawed, and if operationalized would serve U.S. and allied interests badly.

Whether the Russo-Ukrainian War has pushed the Biden administration into “triumphalism” is questionable. Washington has been cautious and worried about provoking Russian escalation. Biden and his senior officials have expressed what could be better described as a grim determination to rally and maintain support from the other NATO members to prevent an outright defeat of Ukraine.

Lind argues that “the United States is staggering from a series of humiliating strategic defeats” around the world. Naturally, this list of disasters relies heavily on the Middle East: the withdrawal from Afghanistan was “embarrassing,” the continued U.S. presence is unpopular in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad remains in power in Syria despite U.S. opposition, and U.S.-backed Arab Springs in Libya and Egypt failed.

These were the “defeats,” however, of a superpower driven by hubris to overstretches that few if any other countries would attempt. In Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. government spent twenty years and $2 trillion, and this without seriously disrupting life for most Americans back home. None of this suggests weakness. These were failures of judgment rather than of military or economic strength. The lesson is not that America is in decline, but rather that Washington should avoid nation-building in the Third World.

The other U.S. “defeats” Lind mentions are failure to dissuade China from pressing its claim to ownership of most of the South China Sea or to stop its persecution of Uyghurs in China. The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) construction of military bases on disputed reefs was a successful gray-zone tactic that the United States declined to go to war to stop. Instead, Washington has relied on military signaling and diplomacy to counter China’s claims. Consistent with the U.S. agenda, Beijing has not gained the assent of rival claimants or the international community to its claims. In another arena of PRC irredentism, the United States has up to now successfully deterred China from a military attack against Taiwan.

Regarding abusive practices by the Chinese government against its own citizens, no foreign country is able to compel Beijing to reverse a policy if this would threaten or shame the ruling Party. The persecution of Uyghurs is such a case; Beijing has committed itself to denying all accusations and doubling down on the policy.

Lind is unimpressed by the Quad, an informal counter-China coordination framework with core members Japan, India, Australia, and the United States. He gives two reasons. First, he says, the Quad failed to inflict “serious consequences” on China for the June 2020 Sino-Indian border skirmish in the Galwan Valley. In fact, India itself has duly retaliated against China. While India reported that twenty of its military personnel died in the clash, the Chinese side may have suffered as many as forty-five fatalities. Furthermore, India subsequently imposed economic punishments on China. In any case, it is unclear how the Galwan Valley incident and its aftermath provides evidence of U.S. decline.
Secondly, Lind says Quad cooperation to oppose China will be impossible given that Japan, Australia, and other U.S. allies are heavily economically dependent on China, and “At some point, China will jerk the leash.” China, however, has already jerked the economic leash, with only limited effect.

Starting in 2020, Australia suffered Chinese bans against several important Australian exports for calling upon the World Health Organization to investigate the origin of the coronavirus. Later that year, Chinese officials demanded that Australia act on fourteen PRC grievances. To date, however, Australia has not met China’s demands.

The Japanese business community sees a close economic relationship with China as crucial to Japan’s continued prosperity. Nevertheless, Japan has steadily moved in recent years toward increasing national defense spending, cooperating more closely with the United States on security issues, and committing to help defend Taiwan in the event of a cross-Strait war, despite repeated warnings from the Chinese government.

Unlike Lind, the Chinese government finds the Quad deeply worrisome.

In addition to “defeats,” Lind sees a lack of U.S. successes as evidence of decline. “Since the fall of Saigon,” he writes, “the only lasting military and geopolitical victories of America and its allies have been in Europe.” The change of government in South Vietnam, which moved the country out of the U.S. bloc, still left the United States as the strategically most influential country in Asia. When you’re already the hegemon, maintaining the status quo is not too bad.

Even so, Lind’s assertion is inaccurate. There have occurred lasting U.S. and allied victories since 1975. South Korea and Taiwan became liberal democracies and more robust supporters of the U.S.-led regional order. Furthermore, with U.S. assistance, South Korea made itself far less vulnerable to a forcible takeover by the North Korean government. Mongolia implemented a democratic system of government in 1990 and moved to permanently closer relations with the United States. Washington has stronger security cooperation with several Southeast Asian countries now than during the 1970s.

China will maintain leverage over the United States, Lind says, because “America’s business and banking elites” will prevent economic de-coupling from China. Total de-coupling is a straw man; both governments are moving toward targeted de-coupling in certain vital sectors, which will make it harder for either to use the economic relationship to effectively coerce the other. In the meantime, however, note that economic interdependence has not resulted in consistent U.S. kowtowing to Beijing. This year, for example, Washington diplomatically boycotted the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, banned the importation of cotton from Xinjiang, and sent a delegation of six senior members of Congress to visit Taiwan.

Lind’s argumunt that China’s economic supremacy will make American strategic pre-eminence untenable is based on a projection of recent trends. But this may be the end of an era rather than the beginning. China’s economy is slowing toward a long-term annual growth rate similar to that of the United States, and China’s people will likely never reach the per capita wealth and productivity of Americans. Xi Jinping’s drives to shrink civil society, make the Chinese Communist Party a stronger presence in Chinese life, and promote state-owned industries at the expense of the private sector undermine China’s ability to compete with the United States in creativity and innovation. An increasingly concerted U.S. effort to avoid helping China take the lead in crucial future technologies will handicap China further.

Ideally, Washington and Beijing can reach an understanding on peaceful coexistence that allows each side to preserve what it considers vital interests. But even if not, there is at present no compelling reason for the United States to voluntarily abandon a strategic shaping role in Asia and retrench to Europe and North America. U.S. friends and allies in the Asia-Pacific still value U.S. engagement, and these partnerships make the United States more secure and prosperous. The rise of a China that is both strong and revisionist raises the costs and risks of America playing this role. But just as the competition gets more intense, China’s ability to compete may be plateauing.

Structural problems prevent China’s hegemony

MICHAEL J. MAZARR is Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, July/August 2022, Foreign Affairs, What Makes a Power Great The Real Drivers of Rise and Fall, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2022-06-21/what-makes-a-power-great

Yet there are reasons to think China may falter. Opportunity there is widespread but still limited: inequality is growing, the World Economic Forum ranks China 106th out of 153 countries on gender equality, and young people are increasingly anxious about lack of social mobility. On the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators, which measure quality of governance, China continues to lag behind the United States. China has little diversity and shows even less interest in embracing it. Most critically, China is not achieving a healthy balance of these essential characteristics. Its ambition is becoming excessive and self-defeating; its proud national identity could curdle into a xenophobic and exclusionary one that limits learning from abroad. The Chinese state is also becoming hyperactive, seeking to dominate all areas of social and economic life, choking off policy innovation and adaption, and imposing rigid orthodoxies that stifle free inquiry and innovation. These trends, along with other well-known challenges—including a rapidly aging population and burgeoning debt—should be red flags for China.

Russia and China will not accept the rules-based global order

Daalder & Lindsay, July/August 2022, IVO H. DAALDER is President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013; JAMES M. LINDSAY is Senior Vice President and Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Affairs, Last Best Hope: The West’s Final Chance to Build a Better World Order, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2022-06-21/last-best-hope-better-world-order-west

Concern about deepening divisions glosses over a critical point: Western democracies are already locked in a struggle with authoritarian governments over whose values will guide the world order. Neither China nor Russia is looking to improve existing international arrangements. Both are revisionist powers contesting the norms and institutions of the postwar order. They wish to return to an era of great-power politics in which they would be free to dominate their neighbors. Western democracies have been reluctant to recognize the challenges both countries pose, hoping that engagement would persuade Beijing and Moscow to work with rather than against them. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with China’s all-but-formal endorsement, has made clear that the Chinese-Russian partnership is headed toward confrontation over everything the West—and the rules-based order—stands for.

Russia will never accept the liberal world order

Remchukov, 7-6, 22, What Vladimir Putin Is Really Thinking, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-vladimir-putin-really-thinking-203422?page=0%2C1

Putin does not recognize the familiar, but legally vague concept of the “rules-based order.” He says that Russia does not understand these rules, did not participate in the development of these rules and will not follow them. He is convinced that the Yalta-Potsdam peace is over thanks to perpetual violations of international law and the UN Charter by Western countries. He cites the bombing of Belgrade, Iraq, Libya, and Kosovo as examples.

Ukraine war has rebutted US global leadership and the US has re-established deterrent credibility

Kimmage, 7-5, 22, Michael C. Kimmage is a professor and Department Chair of History at Catholic University of America, A Post-War Stand-Off Between Russia and the West Is Inevitable, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/post-war-stand-between-russia-and-west-inevitable-203387

By responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as it has, the Biden administration has already shown its capacity for effective diplomacy. It may not rise to the level of the institution-building President Harry S. Truman pioneered in the late 1940s, often considered the gold standard of American diplomacy. But the coordination of countries within and outside of Europe, the construction of an ambitious sanctions regime against Russia, and the rapid provision of military assistance to Ukraine have been extraordinary—and it is obviously happening beneath the umbrella of American leadership. China has appeared lackluster and confused in relation to Russia’s war. It is a true partner neither to Russia nor Ukraine; it has no vision for the war or for the postwar world. By contrast, the United States is projecting a formidable degree of energy and purpose. Washington has shown that it can guarantee regional security in Europe, though not, of course, for all of Ukraine. This will leave the United States in its traditional post-1945 position in Europe as the focal point of European security. It will also make the United States a plausible contender for a similar position in Asia. “Credibility” is a mysterious property in international relations. It lies in the eye of the beholder. When the war in Ukraine is over, U.S. credibility will loom quite a bit larger in the eyes of many beholders.

World is now multipolar

Emma Ashford is a Resident Senior Fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, July 4, 2022, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukraine-and-return-multipolar-world-203276, Ukraine and the Return of the Multipolar World

But nothing could be more mistaken. A sphere of influence is not a normative concept, nor something a state cedes to another out of courtesy or pity. It is instead a simple fact: the place where one great power is unwilling or unable to commit the necessary resources to force another state to submit. In that regard, Ukraine is itself not a repudiation of the idea of spheres of influence, but rather a clear example of how they work in practice. Ukraine is both a clear indicator of the limits of America’s global sphere of influence in the post-Cold War period, and a demonstration of the extent to which Russia is able to defend what it sees as its own regional sphere. The war in Ukraine thus does not mark a continuation of the unipolar moment, but instead, a dividing line between the period when the United States saw the whole world as its sphere of influence, and a new, more multipolar world in which U.S. power is constrained and limited.

To put it another way: the war in Ukraine has demonstrated three things about the shifting balance of global power. First, while America may still claim a global sphere of influence, it is not willing in practice to risk a nuclear war with Russia to protect Ukraine. American arms, intelligence, and finance have undoubtedly served to tip the balance in the conflict, but it will not be fought by American troops. Second, spheres of influence are rarely uncontested, and Russia has thus far proven incapable of imposing its will on Ukraine, failing to achieve both its primary and secondary military goals in this war. As such, the boundaries of a potential Russian sphere of influence may in practice be far smaller than assumed prior to February 24. They may be limited to little more than Russia’s own borders.

Third, while much of the coverage of the war in Ukraine has been framed in this bipolar way—presenting the conflict as a struggle between Russia and the West—the response to the war has been far less clear-cut. Outside of Europe, most states have taken a more nuanced approach to the crisis.

joined UN votes condemning Russia but have not joined sanctions. India has refused to take sides, a decision rooted in its partial dependence on Russian military exports, and has benefitted from cut-rate Russian oil exports. The Gulf States have for the most part carefully cultivated their neutrality, refusing to increase oil production or even to call the conflict a war. Meanwhile, Beijing has pursued cautious support of Moscow but has resisted any deeper political or economic involvement.

None of this suggests either that we are headed back into the post-Cold War unipolar moment, or that we are headed for a new Cold War-style showdown with Russia, or even with both Russia and China. Instead, it suggests that the world is increasingly fracturing into a more complex and multipolar environment, one in which America’s long-running foreign policy adventurism and overreach are liable to leave it overextended. For all the triumphalism of the Washington foreign policy narrative on Ukraine, it would be foolish for U.S. policymakers to assume that this war presents either a vindication of the liberal order or a repudiation of power politics and spheres of influence. Instead, it suggests that they must learn to navigate a world that is not divided into black and white, but rather, into many shades of gray.

US global leadership and credibility have collapsed

Michael Lind, 7-2, 22, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a columnist for Tablet, and a fellow at New America. He is the author of The New Class War (2020) and The American Way of Strategy (2006), American Grand Strategy: Disguising Decline, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/american-grand-strategy-disguising-decline-203305

The United States is in retreat, defeat, or stalemate everywhere, whether in the military arena or in the realm of trade and industrial production.

AMERICAN TRIUMPHALISM is back. The difficulties encountered by Vladimir Putin’s regime in its invasion of Ukraine are being used to revive Cold War rhetoric about American leadership, the struggle for global democracy, and Western unity. America as the leader of the Free World is once more in the saddle!

Unfortunately, it is far from clear that Putin will actually lose the war. If, as a result of a negotiated compromise or prolonged stalemate, much of Ukraine remains indefinitely under Russian occupation, then in spite of the costs Putin will have succeeded in territorial revanchism in Ukraine—in addition to having annexed Crimea and successfully gone to war to keep Georgia out of NATO. The possible admission of Finland and Sweden to NATO would be a symbolic insult to Moscow, but Russia was not going to invade either country anyway.

On a global level, the U.S. campaign to get other nations to sanction Russia to punish it for invading Ukraine has been a flop. A map of the countries that have sanctioned Russia includes the United States and Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. Most countries in the rest of the world, including India, Mexico, and Brazil, along with most nations in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa have refused to go along. In Cold War II, the nonaligned bloc is back.

While Congress votes to deliver arms to bleed Russia in a proxy war in Ukraine, everywhere else in the world the United States is staggering from a series of humiliating strategic defeats. After two decades of fighting in Afghanistan, Washington abruptly abandoned it to the Taliban in a bug-out even more chaotic and embarrassing than the fall of South Vietnam. In post-Saddam Iraq, the remaining U.S. presence is opposed by many Iraqis, and the Iraqi parliament recently passed a law punishing the normalization of ties with Israel with death or life imprisonment. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad has survived Washington’s war to depose him. The overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya by the United States and NATO has produced chaos and disintegration. Remember Tahrir Square? The military is back in charge in Egypt. So much for George W. Bush’s global democratic revolution and Barack Obama’s Arab Spring.

America’s major great-power adversary is China. News that the United States is running short of Javelin and Stinger missiles to resupply Ukraine may confirm those in Beijing who think America is a paper tiger.

China’s territorial revanchism, like Russia’s, is succeeding. China will never give up the islands in the South China Sea it has successfully fortified, no matter how many freedom of navigation operations the U.S. Navy undertakes. Nor will it abandon the brutal, coercive Sinicization of the Uighurs.

We are supposed to believe that China can be contained by the Quad—the United States, Japan, Australia, and India. But China has suffered no serious consequences from beating and killing Indian soldiers along the Sino-Indian border. And China is the largest single trading partner of both Australia and Japan. These U.S. allies see no contradiction between deepening their integration with China and engaging in anti-Chinese military planning with Washington. At some point, China will jerk the leash.

For that matter, China is the top supplier of imports to the United States, and the U.S. trade imbalance with China has worsened in the last few years. During the first Cold War, the United States and its allies imposed across-the-board embargoes on the Soviet Union. But America’s business and banking elites, like those of its allies, oppose any decoupling of the economies of China and the West. The few measures of anti-Chinese economic warfare—Trump’s tariffs, the incentives in the CHIPS Act to build more chip foundries in the United States—are so feeble that they hardly affect the deepening economic dependence of the United States and its allies on Chinese manufacturing. And even these ineffectual attempts to rebuild U.S. manufacturing may be abandoned as a result of lobbying by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Meanwhile, China is pushing the United States and its allies out of one global market after another. In 2010, China surpassed America as the world’s leading manufacturer. In 2021, China surpassed South Korea as the world’s leading shipbuilder. A single Chinese company, DJI, makes 70 percent of the world’s civilian drones. One-third of global industrial robots are made in China, which is also the world’s largest market for them. It is probably only a matter of time before China challenges the United States, Europe, and Japan in aerospace and automobiles as well.

Wherever we look, then, we see the United States in retreat or in defeat or in stalemate, whether in the military arena or in the realm of trade and industrial production. Since the fall of Saigon, with the exception of military victories in Iraq and Libya that led to chaos, the only lasting military and geopolitical victories of America and its allies have been in Europe. One was the bloodless liberation of Eastern Europe from the Red Army and the incorporation of much of it into NATO. Another was the defeat of Serbia in the war of the Yugoslav succession. Unable to resist Chinese salami tactics in the South China Sea, and unable to convert short-term military victories into lasting diplomatic victories in the Middle East and North Africa, U.S. foreign policy has only had successes in Europe.

I have been told that Germans have a proverb about working in an office hierarchy: “Bow in front, kick behind.” This is a good description of America’s actual global strategy for disguising its accelerating decline. While appeasing a powerful, rising China in practice, the United States picks fights with weak countries—Serbia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now a much-diminished Rump Russia. The United States is a declining force in global commerce and global diplomacy, but in its remaining North American and European spheres of influence, it can still play the hegemon and relive the glories of the past.

China threatens hegemonic dominance in Asia

Colby, 7-1, 22, Elbridge Colby is Co-founder and Principal of the Marathon Initiative. He led the development of the 2018 National Defense Strategy as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development from 2017–2018. He is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, China, Not Russia, Still Poses the Greatest Challenge to U.S. Security, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/china-not-russia-still-poses-greatest-challenge-us-security-203228

Preventing China from establishing this hegemony over Asia must be the priority of U.S. foreign policy—even in the face of what is happening in Europe.

AMERICAN FOREIGN policy after—indeed, during—the Russo-Ukrainian War should promptly head to the world’s most decisive region: Asia. This will require that American foreign and defense policy genuinely put Asia first—in our military investments, in our allocation of political capital and resources, and in our leaders’ attention.

Nothing that has happened since Russia’s abominable invasion of Ukraine has changed a set of facts: Asia is the world’s largest market area, and it is growing in global share. Located in the middle of Asia is China which, alongside the United States, is one of the world’s two superpowers. China’s behavior has become increasingly aggressive and domineering and appears oriented toward establishing Beijing’s hegemony over Asia. If Beijing achieves this goal, the resulting consequences for American life will be dire.

Preventing China from establishing this hegemony over Asia must therefore be the priority of U.S. foreign policy—even in the face of what is happening in Europe. The simple fact is that Asia is more important than Europe, and China is a much greater threat than Russia. By way of comparison, Asia’s economy is roughly twice as large as Europe’s today—but within twenty years it will likely be multiple times greater. China, in the meantime, has a GDP roughly an order of magnitude larger than Russia’s.

If current trends continue, China appears on a trajectory to achieve its hegemonic ambitions. Beijing has been building a military distinctly not limited to territorial defense. Rather, it will be capable of enabling Beijing’s pursuit of much larger and ambitious goals—first by ingesting Taiwan, but not ending there. Indeed, amidst the furor over the war in Ukraine, Beijing announced yet again that it would increase its defense spending by 7 percent this year. Meanwhile, despite much talk, the United States has neglected its military position in Asia, while many of its allies—especially Japan and Taiwan—have been laggard in maintaining their defenses. As a result, the military balance in Asia has continued to shift markedly against the United States and our allies. In blunt terms, we are now rapidly approaching, if not already in, the window of opportunity where China might well decide to attack Taiwan—and we might lose.

Avoiding this outcome must be the top, overriding priority for U.S. policy. This does not mean Europe is unimportant or that we should neglect or abandon it. We should actively support Ukraine with weapons and other forms of support while remaining firmly committed to NATO, albeit with our contributions being more focused and narrow in scale. But it does mean Asia must be our priority, and genuinely so, not just rhetorically as has so often been the case in the past.

Because of these factors, shifting our focus to Asia would make sense regardless of how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fared. But, if anything, the war in Ukraine and the reaction to it has made it even more palatable for the United States to turn to Asia. Moscow, while still menacing and dangerous, has vividly demonstrated that its power is less formidable than many of us had feared. Russia is very likely to try to recover its strength, but the losses of war and the impact of sanctions are likely to make that process slow and difficult. At the same time, Europe has stood up, announcing major increases in defense spending, supporting Ukraine’s own self-defense, and demonstrating an unprecedented degree of cohesion in applying sanctions and other forms of pressure on Russia.

The result is that Moscow appears less of a threat than many of us had supposed, while Europeans are doing more to shoulder their own defense. If anything, this should make the United States more, not less, ready to focus on Asia. Indeed, in these circumstances, it is actually hard to understand the logic of increasing America’s focus on Europe. Why would we double down in Europe at the expense of Asia when there is less of a threat from Russia and more European self-help—all while the danger in the primary theater only increases?

Yet many in the foreign policy and political elite seem to view the Russo-Ukrainian War as an opportunity precisely to double down in Europe. Even more, for some, it is a chance to try to turn the foreign policy clock back to the globe-spanning liberal imperialism of two decades ago.

Washington must resist this temptation like the plague. The breathtakingly hubristic foreign policies of the 2000s were unwise even in the period of unipolarity, as we have found to our chagrin. As American leaders sermonized on an end to evil, China rose at our expense; our military expeditions in the Middle East ended in frustration, when not failure; and we lost our military edge and many of our economic advantages. But such policies would be even more extraordinarily ill-advised when we are now locked in a strategic rivalry with a superpower China that is far more powerful than the USSR, Germany, or Japan ever were. We simply do not have the preponderance of power to waste our resources anymore.

Time, then, to focus on the region and the contest that really matters: the effort to deny China’s dominance of Asia. We are already well behind in that struggle, and every day we neglect to increase our focus further increases the chances of crisis, war, and defeat—with grievous consequences for all Americans.

US global influence waning and it’s benefitting China

Heere, 6-30, 22, Paul Heer is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (2018), America Must Beware Its Foreign Policy Blind Spots, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-must-beware-its-foreign-policy-blind-spots-203229

Moreover, many countries are highly ambivalent about the Biden administration’s emphasis on a global struggle against authoritarianism, and its characterization of the war in Ukraine as a front line in that contest. Perhaps most importantly, many countries—including U.S. allies both inside and outside Europe—remain uncertain about the reliability and credibility of American leadership despite the transition from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. In short, the world is not necessarily ready or eager to bandwagon with Washington’s approach to dealing with Russia or with other global issues, or to embrace its preferred version of the “rules-based order.” China, meanwhile, is seizing every opportunity to capitalize on this international ambivalence about the United States and to score points against Washington in the competition for global influence—despite Beijing’s own discomfort with the nature and extent of Putin’s assault on Ukraine.

Roe overturn guts US foreign policy credibility

Jen Kirby, 6-30, 22, Why America’s allies are worried about the end of Roe, https://www.vox.com/23186751/roe-supreme-court-europe-world-reaction

The United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade just as President Joe Biden was preparing to leave for Europe for meetings with America’s closest allies, first at the Group of Seven and then at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Summit. A president’s foreign trip is sometimes a respite from domestic turmoil, but the news followed Biden abroad. World leaders talked about it. They tweeted about it. The European press wrote about it. Some people protested in solidarity, in places like Paris. But the Supreme Court’s overturning of a 50-year precedent establishing a constitutional right to an abortion would have been a jolt, globally, no matter the timing. It collided with a question that has percolated with particular ferocity since the Trump administration, which is something like: Who is America, now? “People are waking up to the realization that our democracy is nowhere near as expansive, is nowhere near as nimble, as perhaps they thought [it] to be when it comes to accommodating these new challenges that we’re facing,” said Omar Guillermo Encarnación, professor of political studies at Bard University. Not all allies and partners likely have the same interpretation of the merits of the Supreme Court ruling; the news, for example, didn’t seem to resonate as strongly in South Korea, according to Politico’s Alex Ward. But at least across much of Western Europe, where majorities are pro-abortion rights, leaders have largely framed this as a step backward for women’s rights and human rights. That puts the US on an entirely different course from many of its closest allies, and may further weaken the US’s leadership on human rights. Beyond the substance of the opinion, the decision rattles because of what it means for America, and its political divisions, and how that might translate into how reliable and stable America and its institutions remain. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overruling Roe is about to open up another huge chasm in American political life, said Sarah Croco, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland. “I think this is just one more huge signal: The country’s not predictable anymore,” Croco said. Of course, the Supreme Court’s decision is a domestic matter, and it won’t have the same effect as, say, pulling out of a major multilateral treaty. Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the American Statecraft program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. said it was unlikely to have a major effect on allies and partners, but coming after other examples, like President Donald Trump and January 6, “it may contribute to a sense that the United States seems like a less familiar place, particularly to Europeans. Less aspirational, and so more distant.” Biden promised allies at the start of his presidency that “America is back.” On the global stage, he has tried, from rejoining global institutions to the deep consultations with allies around the Ukraine war. But in Europe, especially, no one is quite sure how long that will last. The Supreme Court didn’t create that doubt. It’s just another reminder that such doubts aren’t going away. “Is that something which, in and of itself, makes people kind of question the relationship with the US?” said David O’Sullivan, who served as EU ambassador to the United States from 2014 to 2019. “No, but in terms of the direction of travel, I think it’s yet another worrying indication of the deep divisions in American society.” Roe may damage America’s soft power On the same day the Supreme Court overruled Roe, Germany repealed a Nazi-era law that banned abortion providers from advertising or providing information about their services. It is part of a larger pattern: In the past 25 years, nearly 60 countries have expanded access to reproductive rights, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. The United States is just one of four countries — Poland, Nicaragua, and El Salvador being the others — that has rolled back rights since 1994. That group isn’t exactly the cohort of democracies the United States often sees itself as the leader of. Though, to be clear, the US has always swung back and forth when it comes to promoting reproductive rights as part of its foreign policy; Republicans withdraw and Democrats restore funding for certain programs. The Roe decision is in some ways more visible than, say, the funding for a UN agency. As experts said, gender and women’s rights have long been a rallying point for US foreign policy. The Dobbs decision isn’t the first thing to expose the gaps between America’s ideals and its realities, but it could make it harder for the US to take that stand. “It’s taking this huge step back, and so the soft power of the US is damaged in several ways,” said Michaela Mattes, an associate professor in international relations at the University of California Berkeley. And Supreme Court rulings can matter internationally. Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark anti-segregation case — also helped the United States show the world it was trying to live up to post-World War II ideals of human rights, and it helped in the larger ideological battles of the Cold War between democracy and communism. As former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2004: “To sum up, Brown both reflected and propelled the development of human rights protection internationally. It was decided with the horrors of the Holocaust in full view, and with the repression of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe a current reality.” Encarnación pointed out that, when it comes to civil liberties, “it’s been a long, long, long, long, long, long, long time since the Supreme Court led the world” in policy or laws. (Same-sex marriage, maybe the last big progressive ruling, was already legal in about 20 countries when that ruling came down in 2015.) The question is whether Dobbs will have influence, but in an entirely different direction — either further damaging the US’s ability to advocate for human rights, or being used to justify rollbacks to women and human rights in other places. “This is something that we saw with Brown v. Board of [Education] — how a domestic federal ruling had global dimensions,” said Joyce Mao, associate professor of history at Middlebury University. “The overturning of Roe may have a similar cultural, political, and diplomatic importance that is going to absolutely influence the way in which potential allies and existing allies view American democracy.” America, the unpredictable Allies and others have gotten pretty concerned and disillusioned with the United States before, as during the Iraq War. But then came Donald Trump, who did things like threaten to pull out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, actually pull out of the Iran deal negotiated with European partners, and start trade wars with allies. Also, Twitter wars. Things that seemed like bipartisan constants in American foreign policy were no longer. But the Trump era also exposed how deeply divided and polarized America was, culminating in January 6, 2021, and the election fraud lies, which have only hooked themselves deeper into American political life. Biden is president, and right now, relations with allies and partners are copacetic, even invigorated. But that no longer feels permanent. The Supreme Court’s decision fits into this larger pattern of unpredictability, which makes it hard to know where America will be in the next months, a few years, or a decade. As experts said, US institutions, including internationally, were often seen as creating this framework of stability — yes, different political parties won, there were tensions between branches, but pragmatism tended to prevail. “That pragmatism in terms of execution has been lost — and Roe and Dobbs illustrated that to the nth degree,” Mao said. As Mattes said, now, the Supreme Court decision reaffirmed that the institutions once seen as stabilizing factors are not necessarily so. Instead, who has control over the institutions matters; and they may no longer have the same constraints. And predictability is what you want when dealing with other countries, and it’s what you need when it comes to allies and close partners. Dobbs probably isn’t going to directly alter the US’s relationship with its allies in the immediate term, and it will land differently in different parts of the world. But among European partners, especially, it is likely to raise the ever-present worry that the Biden administration is less a restoration than a respite.

Western democracy and hegemony have collapsed

Feffer, June 29, 2022, John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series, and the final novel in the trilogy, Songlands, has only recently been published. He has also written Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response, CHINA WILL DECIDE THE OUTCOME OF RUSSIA VERSUS THE WEST, https://fpif.org/china-will-decide-the-outcome-of-russia-v-the-west/

Admittedly, the continued military dominance of the United States and its NATO allies would seem to refute all rumors of the decline of the West. In reality, though, the West’s military record hasn’t been much better than Russia’s performance in Ukraine. In August 2021, the United States ignominiously withdrew its forces from its 20-year war in Afghanistan as the Taliban surged back to power. This year, France pulled its troops from Mali after a decade-long failure to defeat al-Qaeda and Islamic State militants. Western-backed forces failed to dislodge Bashar al-Assad in Syria or prevent a horrific civil war from enveloping Libya. All the trillions of dollars devoted to achieving “full-spectrum dominance” couldn’t produce enduring success in Iraq or Somalia, wipe out terrorist factions throughout Africa, or effect regime change in North Korea or Cuba. Despite its overwhelming military and economic power, the West no longer seems to be on the same upward trajectory as after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back in the 1990s, Eastern Europe and even parts of the former Soviet Union signed up to join NATO and the European Union. Russia under Boris Yeltsin inked a partnership agreement with NATO, while both Japan and South Korea were interested in pursuing a proposed global version of that security alliance. Today, however, the West seems increasingly irrelevant outside its own borders. China, love it or hate it, has rebuilt its Sinocentric sphere in Asia, while becoming the most important economic player in the Global South. It’s even established alternative global financial institutions that, one day, might replace the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Turkey has turned its back on the European Union (and vice versa) and Latin America is heading in a more independent direction. Consider it a sign of the times that, when the call went out to sanction Russia, most of the non-Western world ignored it. The foundations of the West are indeed increasingly unstable. Democracy is no longer, as scholar Francis Fukuyama imagined it in the late 1980s, the inevitable trajectory of world history. The global economy, while spawning inexcusable inequality and being upended by the recent pandemic, is exhausting the resource base of the planet. Both right-wing extremism and garden-variety nationalism are eroding the freedoms that safeguard liberal society. It’s no surprise, then, that Putin believes a divided West will ultimately accede to his aggression.

US unipolarity is over

Caldwell, 6-27, 22, Dan Caldwell is the vice president of foreign policy for Stand Together. He is a former congressional staffer and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War, America in a World of Limits, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-world-limits-203217

In truth, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not change the fact that America’s global power position is constrained. The heady days of unipolarity are over. Policymakers who fail to acknowledge those realities when dealing with the fallout from the war in Ukraine will only make America less safe and threaten the conditions of our prosperity.

To be sure, the United States retains a powerful economy and military. But unlike in the early 1990s, the United States faces real global competitors—in particular China—along with domestic challenges that will require better prioritization and trade-offs.

While far from guaranteed, there is a reasonable chance that China’s total economic power will overtake the United States within the next few years. China’s economy now comprises 18 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (in terms of purchasing power parity) compared to 16 percent for the United States. Additionally, future American economic growth is threatened by record levels of inflation and a $30 trillion national debt.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military has spent the last two decades bogged down in a handful of endless wars across the Middle East and Africa. The price of these conflicts has been steep. Thousands of American lives were lost and more than $8 trillion squandered. These conflicts also wore down important strategic assets like our B-1 bomber fleet, incentivized investments in platforms like the Littoral Combat Ship that are not suited for combat against near-peer adversaries, and forced cuts to the U.S. Air Force and Navy to build an Army designed to fight counterinsurgency conflicts in strategic backwaters.

Moreover, these wars were unpopular—both at home and abroad—and their pernicious effects have eroded the power of American leadership. The challenges facing America have not gone unnoticed. Many countries have refused to join the American and European-led sanctions regime imposed on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. These nations are clearly hedging their bets in a world where American dominance is less certain. This even includes countries that have benefitted from the American security umbrella. Take the United Arab Emirates for example, which has enabled Russian oligarchs to escape targeted sanctions on their assets. The Emirati crown prince doubled down on this bad behavior when he refused a call from President Joe Biden to discuss energy market distress.

The United States should not tolerate a delusional foeign policymaking elite that ignores real constraints on American power. Instead, our leaders should adopt a sober and realistic approach to the current state of the world that recognizes our limits so that America can remain safe and prosperous.

Reducing hegemonic power increased aggression by China and Russia

McMaster & Scheinman, 6-17, 22, H. R. McMaster is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a former U.S. national security advisor during the Trump administration, and the author of Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World; Gabriel Scheinmann is the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society, U.S. Restraint Has Created an Unstable and Dangerous World, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/17/us-miliitary-strategy-geopolitics-restraint-russia-china-ukraine-war/

However, restraint was not reciprocated. As the United States reduced its defense spending to the lowest share of GDP since 1940, Russia and China embarked on the largest military modernization and expansion programs their countries had seen in generations. They bullied their neighbors (or in Russia’s case, attacked and occupied them), corroded the institutions they joined, and sought to eliminate their citizens’ liberties. U.S. restraint was interpreted as weakness. Ignoring these menaces has now led the West to the most dangerous precipice since the depths of the Cold War.

Even before the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Russian and Chinese militarism and belligerence were evident. In June of that year, Chinese tanks put down peaceful protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing thousands of people. In late 1995 and early 1996, Beijing tried to intimidate Taiwan in the run-up to its first democratic election, firing missiles into Taiwanese territorial waters. In April 2001, a Chinese fighter jet rammed a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace, forcing the naval airmen into an emergency landing in China, where they were detained for 10 days. Moscow engaged in two brutal wars against Chechnya and launched an assassination campaign against political opponents that continues to this day. In 2004, the Kremlin nearly killed then-Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko in an attempt to secure victory for its preferred candidate. In 2006, a Russian agent poisoned and killed Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who had defected, and Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, was assassinated for opposing Putin’s wars. From the killing of Boris Nemtsov, a liberal critic of Putin, in 2015 to the poisoning and incarceration of dissident Alexey Navalny in 2020 to the most recent imprisonment of Russian opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, Putin and his thugs have worked tirelessly to extinguish any criticism of, let alone challenge to, his iron rule.

Russia and China were emboldened, in part, because the United States undertook the greatest military drawdown since the collapse of the British empire.

Washington still did not waver from its predisposition toward restraint. Even after Putin made plain his goal of undermining the United States and the West at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, the U.S. military drawdown from Europe and Asia continued. The United States welcomed Russia into the G-7 in 1998, turning it into the G-8. China and Russia became part of the G-20 in 1999 and the World Trade Organization in 2001 and 2012, respectively. Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia was even rewarded with a positive “reset” of relations. The 2010 U.S. National Security Strategy called for a “stable, substantive, multidimensional relationship with Russia, based on mutual interests” and sought “Russia’s cooperation to act as a responsible partner in Europe and Asia.” Similarly, even as Chinese ships began clashing with those of their neighbors, even as China built and militarized 27 artificial islands and other outposts in the South China Sea, and even as Beijing claimed sovereignty over the sea and established air and sea superiority in an area where one-third of global trade passes, Washington remained withdrawn. The 2015 U.S. National Security Strategy “welcome[d] the rise of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China” and sought “to develop a constructive relationship with China that delivers benefits for our two peoples and promotes security and prosperity in Asia and around the world.”

Instead, the two autocracies’ belligerence has only expanded. In 2014, Russia invaded, occupied, and annexed parts of Ukraine, initiating a long war it has now expanded. The following year, Russian troops propped up the murderous dictatorship of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, and soon thereafter, Putin sent his private mercenary army, the Wagner Group, into Libya. In 2016, Russia interfered in elections in Europe and the United States, exploiting domestic political divisions to sow discord and mistrust in the democratic process. Not to be outdone, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a genocide of its own citizens, imprisoned 1.8 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in concentration camps and forcing them to undergo compulsory sterilization, forced labor, medical experiments, mass rape, torture, renunciation of their religious beliefs in favor of the Communist Party, cutting and selling of their hair, and organ harvesting. In 2020, Beijing cracked down in Hong Kong in direct contravention of the “one country, two systems” policy it had committed to by international treaty. Chinese soldiers also attacked Indian troops across their disputed border, initiating skirmishes leading to several dozen deaths. As if that was not enough, Beijing’s deceit, dishonesty, and dissimulation about the nature and origin of COVID-19 helped transform a local and possibly containable outbreak into a horrific global pandemic that has cost more than 15 million lives so far.

Russia and China were emboldened, in part, because the United States undertook the greatest drawdown of military power since the collapse of the British empire. In 1990, the U.S. military had about 266,000 service members stationed in Europe; by the end of 2021, it was only about 65,000 service members. In 1989, the U.S. Army had 5,000 tanks permanently stationed in West Germany alone; by 2014, there were zero on the entire continent. In 1990, the United States had 5,000 nuclear bombs forward deployed in Western Europe; today, it has around 150 nuclear bombs. Until the 2014 start of Russia’s war in Ukraine and despite NATO enlargement, not a single U.S. service member was permanently stationed farther east than during the Cold War. In Asia, where the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has more than 2 million ground force personnel and the Chinese navy is now the largest in the world, the United States’ active-duty Army has been cut by one-third since 1990. The U.S. Navy has 40 percent fewer sailors in Asia and will soon have only half the number of active warships it had stationed there in 1990. In 2019, China conducted more ballistic missile tests than the rest of the world combined. Recent reports show that China is expected to quadruple the size of its nuclear arsenal by decade’s end.

The policy of restraint continues to limit the U.S. defense budget. At the close of the century, China and Russia together spent 13 percent of what the United States spends on defense. Today, that number is 67 percent. Whereas U.S. defense spending fluctuated between 4.5 percent and 11.3 percent of GDP during the Cold War, Biden’s budget request for 2022 would have put defense spending at less than 3 percent of GDP—the lowest level since 1940, when Washington was still trying its best to stay out of international affairs. And while the White House’s recently released 2023 budget request contains a small nominal increase, rampant inflation makes it another de facto cut. By comparison, the Chinese defense budget—which is chronically understated by the CCP and does not include, for example, what local authorities spend on military bases or investments in research and development—grew 7.1 percent in 2021. And lest you be impressed by the still-ample size of U.S. spending, keep in mind that Washington spreads its military thinly, whereas Russia and China have a laser-like focus on dominating their neighbors and regions. U.S. armed forces are not only too small to deter or respond effectively to aggression, but the services have also incurred significant deferred modernization due to inadequate and unpredictable defense budgets as well as the U.S. Defense Department’s dysfunctional acquisition and procurement system. The United States is weaker, less secure, and less prepared to fight and win than at any time since the beginning of the Korean War.

Consequently, Putin launching the largest war in Europe since World War II should not have come as a surprise. For over three decades, Moscow and Beijing have eroded, flouted, mocked, and assaulted the order the United States and its allies built. Restraint encouraged that agenda as the United States and its allies dismantled the ramparts that had been vital to preserving peace and protecting the sovereignty of nations on the peripheries of two revanchist powers. And the drawdown continues—even as Russia continues its brutal invasion and China lays claim to Taiwan and the South China Sea. In its new national defense strategy, the Biden administration uses the term “integrated deterrence” to create the illusion that better coordinated policies can be substitute for modernized, ready, forward-positioned forces capable of operating at a sufficient scale to deter conflict and, should that deterrence fail, fight and win.

The United States must end its unilateral restraint vis-à-vis Russia and China and be realistic about the nature of the adversaries it faces. First, the United States must rearm, and the defense budget must increase. It must pay for new capabilities that counter and exceed those China and Russia have invested in. The Joint Forces must be substantially bigger to deter Russian and Chinese aggression as well as be able to respond to multiple, simultaneous contingencies. In today’s dollars, achieving even the Cold War-era floor of spending 4.5 percent of GDP on defense would mean a $1.2 trillion budget. Second, the United States must end its diplomatic restraint. Where it can, it should counter Beijing’s and Moscow’s efforts to subvert and co-opt international institutions and turn them against their purpose. If some of those institutions are beyond rescue, the United States and likeminded partners should form new groupings to advance the originally intended values and principles. In these cases, new institutions should prove more resilient and effective than the current ones plagued by discord and corruption. The Biden administration must stop describing Russia and China as partners in arresting nuclear proliferation, combatting climate change, and curbing pandemics. Finally, the United States must end its economic restraint against the predatory practices and outright criminal behavior of the Chinese regime. U.S. policymakers should not tolerate violations of bilateral and international trade agreements, the use of forced labor and other inhumane labor practices, and supply chains that leave U.S. national security vulnerable. Free trade only works among free people.

Putin’s latest assault on the free world—and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s threats to do so himself—have the capability of resuscitating Washington from its comatose policy of restraint. The longer the United States operates under the delusion that restraint will appease authoritarian regimes that have made their hostile intentions abundantly clear, Russia and China will become bolder and the risk of a catastrophic war—which Ukraine was the prelude for—will only grow. In a world created by U.S. restraint, democracy, prosperity, and peace are on the decline. As Putin’s brutal war has reminded the world, weakness is provocative. Strength is the best way to preserve peace and secure a better future for generations to come.

Biden conceded to the Russians before the invasion

The Biden administration failed to deter Russia from its second invasion of Ukraine. Like his predecessors in the White House, U.S. President Joe Biden went to great lengths to placate and reassure Russian President Vladimir Putin in return for stable relations. Biden defied Congress when he refused to sanction the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, unilaterally extended U.S. adherence to the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty without reciprocation by Russia, and honored Putin with a bilateral summit during his first overseas trip. As Putin amassed his troops on Ukraine’s borders, Biden pulled U.S. naval forces out of the Black Sea, refused to send additional weapons to Ukraine, enumerated everything the United States would not do to help Ukraine defend itself, and evacuated U.S. Embassy staff and military advisors. More broadly, the administration proposed a real cut to the defense budget; sought to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. defense strategy; restricted U.S. production capacity for oil, gas, and refined products that might have displaced Russian supplies; and signaled its willingness to overlook Russian and Chinese aggression in exchange for hollow pledges of cooperation on global issues such as climate change. After surrendering Afghanistan to a terrorist organization and conducting a humiliating retreat from Kabul, the administration’s attempts to deter the Russian invasion with threats of punishment were simply not credible.

US has not abused its hegemonic power

Deterrence, however, does not disintegrate overnight. Contrary to the narrative of U.S. belligerence and imperialism that has been impressed on countless university students, the United States has, since the end of World War II, largely pursued a policy of restraint despite its considerable military power. Unlike other superpowers, it has not sought territories or treasure—on the contrary, it incurred considerable expense to foster a peaceful international order where other nations could thrive. Under the belief that a market economy, normal trading relations, and a democratic wave would foster liberal democracy everywhere, Washington even sought to elevate, embrace, and enrich its former Cold War enemies. From the World Bank to the International Space Station, the World Trade Organization to the Paris Agreement, Washington welcomed Moscow and Beijing into Western institutions—in other words, into the order Washington had previously tried to keep them from tearing down. Seeking to partner with Moscow and Beijing in the pursuit of global prosperity and a peaceful planet, Washington bridled its power by undertaking a generational drawdown of military forces and capabilities. Indeed, global prosperity grew and the number of democracies in the world steadily rose. As conviction rose in Washington that both China and Russia had transformed from adversaries to partners, U.S. restraint seemed a rational choice.

Realism is an accurate description of the world, not a normative claim; in fact, it is immoral to act out of moral principles that destroy the state

Maitra, Sumantra, 6-18, 22, Maitra is a national-security fellow at the Center for the National Interest and an elected associate fellow at the Royal Historical Society, Hatred for Realism Is an Elite Affliction, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/hatred-realism-elite-affliction-203056

Why do people hate realism so much? It’s a thoughtful question asked by Stephen Walt in Foreign Policy. Walt is a card-carrying foreign policy realist, his work on alliances and his theory of balance of threat influenced the theoretical framework of much such research with major explanatory power. Walt argues that at the time of realism’s triumph, as the theory predicted a conflict in Ukraine, we’re observing a withering attack on the worldview. “Much of this ire has been directed at my colleague and occasional co-author John J. Mearsheimer, based in part on the bizarre claim that his views on the West’s role in helping to cause the Russia-Ukraine crisis somehow make him ‘pro-Putin’ and in part on some serious misreadings of his theory of offensive realism,” Walt writes, adding that “another obvious target is former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose recent comments urging peace talks with Moscow, a territorial compromise in Ukraine, and the need to avoid a permanent rupture with Russia were seen as a revealing demonstration of realism’s moral bankruptcy.”

Conflict of Nations

Walt concludes that there are several reasons people dislike realism. Primary among them is the idea that realism is pessimistic. “It’s not hard to understand why many people are reluctant to embrace such a pessimistic view of the human condition, especially when it appears to offer no clear escape from it.” Second, realism is “indifferent or hostile” to ethical considerations, being an amoral framework where power is the chief determinant. “There is a grain of truth in this charge, insofar as realism’s theoretical framework does not incorporate values or ideals in any explicit way,” Walt writes, “for realists, noble aims and good intentions are not enough if the resulting choices lead to greater insecurity or human suffering.” Realists do not consider any country exceptional, as their worldview argues that every country, every power will usually act in a certain way, facing a certain set of variables. That also rubs most people the wrong way, as most people tend to think in group dynamic, and any criticism of their own country’s behavior or dissent and nonconformity to the “current thing” or conventional wisdom, are considered unpatriotic.

Finally, Walt writes that realism got major questions right, and naturally got major ideological opponents on the way. Walt writes, “realism tends to be unpopular because its proponents have an annoying tendency to be right … realists were right about NATO enlargement, dual containment in the Persian Gulf, the war in Iraq, Ukraine’s ill-fated decision to give up its nuclear arsenal, the implications of China’s rise, and the folly of nation-building in Afghanistan, to note just a few examples.”

There is a lot of sense in these arguments. Realism, a framework which privileges (to borrow a word used often by the academic Left) power and national interest, is by definition a “reactionary” theory, more at home within political conservatism and hierarchy. It is fundamentally opposed to mass democracy and subsequent volatility of public passions. And while it is sternly in favor of national interest, it also favors compromises and a balance of power based on relative gains. Furthermore, being a reactionary theory, it believes in a cyclical view of history, instead of a steady arc of progress. Therefore, realism falls squarely opposed to any worldview that affirms egalitarianism or progress, whether liberalism, socialism, feminism, or Marxism, all of which are theories stemming from the enlightenment, with an egalitarianism embedded. In turn, all progressive theories, from liberalism to Marxism, are normatively opposed to any political reaction. The opposition to realism (and realists) within the academy is therefore qualitatively similar to all the progressive fanaticism about statue toppling, hierarchy, and canceling classics, a deep aversion to anything vaguely reactionary from patrimony, to authority, to national borders, an opposition which isn’t just academic or theoretical, but ideological. To borrow Peter Hitchens’ famous words, a rage by “tiny figures scuttling through cavernous halls built for much greater men.”

Realism is, of course, amoral, but not cruel or unethical. In fact, the instinct for compromise and balance of power comes from a higher ethical consideration. As Hans Morgenthau wrote,

Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but that they must be filtered through the concrete circumstances of time and place. The individual may say for himself: “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish),” but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. Both individual and state must judge political action by universal moral principles, such as that of liberty. Yet while the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of liberty get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival. There can be no political morality without prudence; that is, without consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action.

While realism isn’t blameless, the record of realism isn’t comparable to the democracy crusades of the last thirty years.

But to return to the original question, one must add that the framing of the question itself is flawed. The people don’t hate realism. In fact, public opinion is usually fundamentally reactionary, if channeled rightly. The majority favors national borders and opposes foreign misadventures. What could be more reactionary than that in our time? Public opinion can be volatile and appeals to emotion succeed in the short term. But overall, the public understands their interests if clearly communicated with. Consider the recent drop in support for a No-Fly Zone (NFZ) over Ukraine, the moment it was explained what an NFZ would actually entail. The hatred for realism (and any political reaction) is an elite progressive affliction, aided by an ideological academy. What realists sometimes refuse to accept is that they are at a structural disadvantage. This isn’t the time of Metternich, nor is it the time of Yalta, or even Kissinger’s secret China visit. Realism isn’t a worldview that can succeed automatically in the age of social media, NGOs, hyper-democracy, and an activist academy and internationalist news media. To succeed in that scenario, realism and realists will need to use the inherent reactionary public instinct to their advantage, and communicate in ways that might at times go against electoral propriety, and sound like an uncouth New York tycoon. Whether it is a compromise academic realists are willing to entertain, to regain a hand in policy setting, is a key question.

Retrenchment means war over Taiwan

Green & Talmadge, July/August, 22, BRENDAN RITTENHOUSE GREEN is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati; CAITLIN TALMADGE is Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Walsh School ofForeign Service at Georgetown University, The Consequences of Conquest: Why Indo-Pacific Power Hinges on Taiwan, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-06-16/consequences-conquest-taiwan-indo-pacific

Finally, the United States might pursue a strategy that ends its commitment to Taiwan and also reduces its military presence in Asia and other alliance commitments in the region. Such a policy might limit direct U.S. military support to the defense of Japan or even wind down all U.S. commitments in East Asia. But even in this case, Taiwan’s potential military value to China would still have the potential to create dangerous regional dynamics. Worried that some of its islands might be next, Japan might fight to defend Taiwan, even if the United States did not. The result might be a major-power war in Asia that could draw in the United States, willingly or not. Such a war would be devastating. Yet upsetting the current delicate equilibrium by ceding this militarily valuable island could make such a war more likely, reinforcing a core argument in favor of current U.S. grand strategy: that U.S. alliance commitments and forward military presence exert a deterring and constraining effect on conflict in the region.

Unipolarity decreasing, global democracy on the decline

Shankar, 6-15, 22, Can the United States Kick the Afghanistan Syndrome?, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-united-states-kick-afghanistan-syndrome-203013

Given how the United States escaped the Vietnam syndrome not just due to Soviet actions, but also because of a historically unprecedented alignment of several other international developments, it is difficult to see how the mobilization against Putin’s imperial conduct would help overcome fatigue from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A pivotal shift in Washington’s calculus would require a broader change in global circumstances, most of which are unfavorable to the United States compared to the state of the world in the 1990s. For over a decade, America has been on a path of relative decline, and the unipolar world order has gradually been fading. Freedom House reports a continual regression of democracy in every region of the world since 2006, in part due to the ascension of Chinese power. And far from having the wind at their backs as they did after the fall of the Berlin Wall, proponents of classical liberalism now find themselves on the defensive. Will a Ukrainian triumph be enough—as predicted by Francis Fukuyama—to revive the “spirit of 1989?”

Ukraine proves realism is true and international cooperation fails to prevent conflict

Poast, 6-15, 22, PAUL POAST is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a Nonresident Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs,

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-06-15/world-power-and-fear

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Among the collateral damage of the war in Ukraine is a school of thought: realism. This intellectual tradition insists that the pursuit of national interests trumps higher ideals, such as the commitment to open trade, the sanctity of international law, and the virtues of democracy. Realists focus on how states, particularly major powers, seek to survive and retain influence in world politics. As such, realism appeared well suited for explaining the imperatives and calculations behind the Russian invasion. Instead, it found itself caught in the crossfire. After realist arguments seemed to excuse the Kremlin’s actions, critics in Europe and North America have variously called prominent individuals associated with realism—and realism itself as a doctrine—irrelevant, callous, and even morally reprehensible.

The political scientist John Mearsheimer drew much of the opprobrium for his claims about the origins of the war in Ukraine. An unabashed advocate of realism, Mearsheimer has insisted that the United States and its allies are at fault for encouraging NATO and EU expansion into what the Kremlin sees as its sphere of influence, thereby threatening Russia and provoking Russian aggression. Criticism of Mearsheimer mounted after the Russian Foreign Ministry itself promoted his ideas in the wake of the invasion. The urgings of another realist, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, exhorting Ukraine to give up territory in order to appease Putin have also led to a barrage of attacks on the tenets of realism.

But realism’s critics should not throw out the baby with the bath water. The invective directed at realism misses an important distinction: realism is both an analytical school of thought and a policy position. The errors of the latter don’t obviate the utility of the former. In explaining the war in Ukraine, realism, like any theoretical framework, is neither good nor bad. But even when its prescriptions can seem unsound, it retains value as a prism through which analysts can understand the motivations and actions of states in an inevitably complex world.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the field of international relations was riven by the so-called paradigm wars. Scholars feuded over the best way to think about—and how to study—international politics. These debates were nuanced, but they essentially boiled down to a clash between those who held a realist view of international politics and those who did not.

Realism comes in many hues. Some realist approaches emphasize the importance of individual leaders, others stress the role of domestic institutions, and still others focus squarely on the distribution of power among countries. There is classical realism (human nature compels states to pursue security), structural realism (the lack of a world government compels states to pursue security), and neoclassical realism (a combination of internal and external factors compels states to pursue security). These approaches have their own subvariants. For instance, structural realists are divided between a defensive camp (states seek security by preventing the hegemony of any single power) and an offensive camp (states must seek hegemony to achieve security). Some realists would disavow the label altogether: the work of the British historian E. H. Carr is clearly realist in its leanings, but he would never have identified himself as such.

Rather than being a strictly coherent theory, realism has always been defined not by what it prescribes but by what it deems impossible. It is the school of no hope, the curmudgeon of international relations thought. The first work of modern realist thought and the precursor to Mearsheimer’s own work was The European Anarchy, a short book written by the British political scientist G. Lowes Dickinson in 1916. It emphasized that states, out of fear, will seek to dominate and, indeed, gain supremacy over others. During the 1920s and 1930s, realists (although not yet referred to as such) pointed to the futility of arms control and disarmament treaties.

Realism is the school of no hope, the curmudgeon of international relations thought.

In 1942, the American scholar Merze Tate published The Disarmament Illusion, a book that argued that states will inevitably seek to retain their arms and whose ideas fit well with the claims made by the later realists Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Waltz. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Kissinger and Morgenthau pointed to the impracticality of hoping for a single world government or even peaceful coexistence among countries. In the 1970s and 1980s, realists were primarily identified (either by others or by themselves) as those who derided the hope that international regimes, such as the United Nations, could solve global problems. By the 1990s, realists were criticizing the expectation that international institutions and the spread of democracy would usher in a golden age of global peace and prosperity troubled only by the occasional rogue state.

Realism fared quite well compared with an alternative theory that gained prominence in the 1990s and continues to receive attention in policy circles: the notion that geopolitics would become a “clash of civilizations,” as advanced by the American political scientist Samuel Huntington. Like Mearsheimer’s core realist work, Huntington’s thesis was written in the wake of the Cold War, as analysts and scholars sought to anticipate what the end of superpower bipolarity would mean for the world. While Mearsheimer focused on the return of great-power politics, Huntington claimed that it would be cultural, largely religious, differences that would drive the conflicts of the future. Huntington was, in effect, rebutting the work of Mearsheimer. In contrast to the statist emphasis of realism, Huntington’s culture-based theory predicted peaceful relations between Ukraine and Russia, countries that in his view belonged to the same overarching civilization. That prediction has not aged well.

What ultimately unifies the branches of realism is the view that states bristling with arms are an inescapable fact of life and that international cooperation is not just difficult but fundamentally futile. In essence, it is foolish to hope that cooperation will provide lasting solutions to the intractable reality of conflict and competition as countries pursue their own interests.

That is the framework that characterizes realist thought, including the work of Mearsheimer. Realism sees international politics as a tragic stage in which the persistence, if not the prevalence, of war means that governments must focus on guaranteeing national security, even at the expense of liberties and prosperity. Tate captured this sentiment well in The Disarmament Illusion: “Dissatisfied powers may not actually want war, may even dread it, and may be quite as unwilling to run the risk of an appeal to arms as the satisfied states; but in spite of this, they will not voluntarily shut off all possibility of obtaining a state of things which will be to them more acceptable than the present.”

Realism as a theory gains power by highlighting the mechanisms that constrain human agency, be they the innate nature of humans (as emphasized by Morgenthau) or the distribution of global power (the focus of Waltz). To draw an analogy, realism’s role is to continually point to the gravity that undercuts human attempts to fly. Realism can be used to explain the foreign policy choices of certain countries or why an event, such as a war, occurred. As a theory, realism can be very effective in explaining relations among states. But it becomes something different when it journeys from the realm of description to that of prescription. When brought into policy, realist theory becomes realpolitik: the position that states should balance against their adversaries and seek relative gains rather than accept supranational and institutional constraints on their freedom of action in international affairs.

The distinction between realism as theory and as policy appears in the historical debate over nuclear proliferation. In the early 1980s, Waltz argued that the spread of nuclear weapons would lead to greater peace. He cut against the conventional wisdom that insisted that only limiting the spread of these weapons would ensure a safer world (the logic behind the creation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970). His claim was subsequently debated by those who, to put it simply, pointed out that the proliferation of nuclear weapons would make the world more dangerous.

In making his arguments, Waltz took a descriptive and theoretically informed observation (the likelihood of war decreases as deterrent and defensive capabilities increase), applied this to nuclear weapons (nuclear weapons dramatically improve a country’s deterrent and defensive capabilities), and then deduced a recommendation for how policymakers should view the spread of nuclear weapons: that more should be welcomed, not feared.

It is in this last step that Waltz goes from describing international politics (here is why states seek nuclear weapons) to prescribing international politics (here is why states should seek nuclear weapons). One is a description, the other is a justification. They are both valid intellectual enterprises, but they should not be confused. A particular understanding of world events does not inevitably lead to a particular policy response. In this case, the same factors that led Waltz to justify the spread of nuclear weapons could have led him to offer the opposite prescription, in that a state’s security goals could be achieved without them (for instance, by sheltering under the nuclear umbrella of a major power). Realist theory helps describe the world, but such prescriptions reflect the interpretations of individuals, not the overarching theory itself.

Realism as policy also manifests itself in debates over restraint in U.S. foreign policy. Proponents of U.S. restraint aim to counter liberal internationalism, the view that the United States must be involved, militarily if necessary, in foreign arenas for the sake of promoting and maintaining a rules-based international order. By contrast, restraint calls for the United States to reduce its global footprint and avoid getting involved in issues that are marginal to U.S. national interests. As with the debate over nuclear proliferation, realism’s role in debates on how the United States should behave in international affairs must not be confused with using realism to describe U.S. foreign policy. Realism can explain why the United States finds itself in a particular geopolitical situation, but it doesn’t offer an obvious answer about how the United States should behave in that situation.

REALISM AND UKRAINE

The debate regarding Ukraine has long featured realist voices. In 1993, Mearsheimer wrote in Foreign Affairs that Kyiv should retain the stockpile of nuclear weapons it inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union because Moscow might one day seek to reconquer Ukraine. Some 20 years later, Mearsheimer wrote of how NATO enlargement and the promise of bringing Ukraine into the alliance provoked Russian aggression, namely the seizing of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Both pieces were focused on policy prescription: rather than simply describing what Russia, Ukraine, the United States, the European Union, and NATO were doing, they focused on what they should do.

Although one can disagree with those arguments, it is worth pointing out that they reflect realism as policy, not realism as theory. Realism as theory would have limited itself to explaining why the crisis is happening, perhaps focusing on how the desire of major powers to dominate their region means that Russia would eventually seek to militarily coerce (or even invade) its neighbors, or that conditions were conducive to a former empire seeking to reestablish itself, or that in their search for security, states can act in ways that can be perceived incorrectly as being aggressive.

None of this is to say that realism or any one theory offers the best explanation for the war in Ukraine. Alternative explanations abound, including the power of nationalism, the differences in regime types, and the traits (one might say, quirks) of particular leaders. But realism offers a useful frame for understanding this war’s onset. Indeed, the enduring power of realism is its ability to offer a clear baseline for coming to grips with why the world is and will likely remain a world full of pain and despair.

China undermining its own potential for global dominance

Cogan & Scott, 6-4, 22, Mark S. Cogan is an associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Kansai Gaidai University based in Osaka, Japan and a former communications specialist with the United Nations.; Paul Scott is a Japan-China specialist and democracy activist who is currently teaching in the Graduate Program in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Universitat Jaume I, Castellón de la Plana, España and at the Catholic University of Lille, France; Imperial Overstretch: Has Xi Jinping’s China Gone Too Far?, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/imperial-overstretch-has-xi-jinping%E2%80%99s-china-gone-too-far-202803?page=0%2C1
If Deng Xiaoping were alive today, he would neither be pleased nor surprised. The pro-market reforms that launched China into a global power are being undone under Xi Jinping, curtailing growth for the sake of concentrating political power, spending far too much political capital on crushing dissent and punishing the last vestiges of democratic ambitions, and overextending China militarily in the Indo-Pacific. Deng’s critical reforms were based on two fundamental beliefs, first, that communism in China could be saved by creating a vibrant economy and improving people’s lives, and second, without the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in charge, China would descend into chaos. When Wei Jingsheng went on trial in 1979 on charges of being a counter-revolutionary, the first sign was visible that the gaps between economic and political reform and the need for a Fifth Modernization, democracy, would not and could not be resolved. Under Xi’s leadership, these gaps have turned into a chasm. His selection as president in 2013 was a transformative event. While Mao Zedong unified the nation and Deng made it rich, Xi has created an overbearing surveillance state marked by sharpened authoritarianism. So-called “wolf warrior diplomacy,” which is assertive, confrontational, and hypersensitive to criticism, has become the hallmark of Chinese diplomacy. China is projecting power through the most ambitious and expensive construction project in human history. Xi’s policies envision a new world order with Beijing at the center. This is oddly a bastardized return to traditional pre-modern hierarchies based on kowtow, which ritualized inequality among states and recognized the moral superiority of China. However, in autocracies like China’s, there is often a fatal flaw. Chinese leaders have painted themselves into a corner by not embracing diversity of opinion and by failing to admit when they make mistakes. An apt analogy is the recent Covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai. To control the spread of the virus, China locked down the city of 25 million but in so doing created lasting damage to its economy while harming the livelihoods and psychosocial well-being of its residents. China’s overreach led to a rare outpouring of dissent. Xi has stressed that CCP leadership and the “advantages of the socialist system” are the cure for all problems, but challenges keep piling up. China’s economy is slowing, local debts are increasing, and its corporations have borrowed with reckless abandon. Trumpeting that only the CCP can solve mounting social and economic problems is dangerous since it raises the risk of over-promising and under-delivering. During the 1980s, there were criticisms of Deng’s reforms. The absence of any dissenting voices riled not just university students but workers as well. The inability of a tone-deaf CCP leadership to listen to criticism directly led to the Tiananmen movement. China’s imperial overreach, a combination of inflexible leadership, a failure to admit mistakes, and intolerance of criticism is alive and well. China is experiencing pain in its economy that it hasn’t felt in decades. A zero-tolerance policy on Covid-19, as well as a regulatory crackdown on the tech sector and the real estate industry, have left China’s labor market in a precarious state. Beijing reported an urban employment figure of more than 5 percent, but the devil is in the details. Migrants from rural areas aren’t working in urban areas because of changes in the labor market, including having to be in quarantine. For example, the number of rural laborers working in major metropolitan areas declined by 5.2 million workers in 2020, or 1.8 percent due to Covid-19 restrictions. There’s scant evidence they are going to return and this will cause significant damage to the economy. Some of the jobs previously held by migrants aren’t coming back due to declines in manufacturing and increased automation. As China now struggles with a labor shortage, it looks to automation to solve some of its critical manufacturing challenges. But the Chinese Communist Party cannot get out of its own way. A regulatory crackdown on private enterprise has left tens of thousands of people out of work in the critically important tech sector. The move to better regulate private enterprise and disrupt monopolies comes with little explanation and is a departure from the past, where a hands-off approach led to a surge in growth evidenced by the success of e-commerce giant Alibaba, as well as Huawei and Tencent. China’s overreach has held back its economic engine to the tune of $1.5 trillion and has been personified by the silencing of billionaire Jack Ma. In 2020, when Ma in 2020 spoke at a conference against the actions of Chinese state-owned banks, regulators brought him in for questioning and halted the IPO of Alibaba subsidiary Ant Group. Since then, the private sector crackdown has spread across industries related to education, cryptocurrencies, and finance. The motivations behind Xi Jinping’s economic crackdown point to a desire to consolidate his political power ahead of the 20th Party Congress, which is scheduled for later this year. The “common prosperity” rhetoric designed to shift the narrative to closing income gaps between China’s richest and its most beleaguered masses feels like a secondary effort that will do little to address institutionalized inequalities and corruption. Hong Kong also personifies Xi’s overreach. The recent arrest of ninety-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen, a democracy and human rights activist, provides valuable insight. To outsiders, the arrest of an elderly man is a testament to how petty Chinese enforcement of its 2020 national security law has become, because after all, what national security threat does an elderly retired Catholic cleric pose to China? The arrest of pro-democracy activists, opposition lawmakers, and a crackdown on political expression has been brutal. Now, the potential of a crackdown on religious freedom makes Chinese overreach another step beyond the pale. Zen’s arrest exemplifies Xi’s intolerance of pluralism where other ideas, including democratic ones, might exist alongside his own. Hong Kong’s Western-influenced political and cultural norms and values have been all but dismantled since the national security law took effect. While Hong Kong’s “zero Covid” policy has contributed to the largest brain drain in the city’s history, some of the vast relocations of expats and residents are also linked to the draconian security law. Its passage also accelerated the growth of Hong Kong’s diaspora which numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Even now, while safe across oceans or international borders, Beijing holds potential leverage over those who speak out and have family or financial assets remaining in Hong Kong. China’s relentless pursuit of growth and a dogged insistence on reclaiming the hierarchies that existed prior to its Century of Humiliation at the hands of the West have harmed its international reputation. One does not need to look far to find examples. The Mekong River originates in China but flows down into lower basin countries such as Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. To satisfy its vast energy demands, China built the Manwan Dam in 1995 and has since built ten more. Eleven more dams are in different stages of construction in Laos and Cambodia. The Mekong River is host to 20 percent of the world’s freshwater fish and is a critical economic resource for people in the region. However, China has used upstream dams as leverage against downstream countries. Even though evidence, such as that provided by the Mekong Dam Monitor, shows that Chinese dams are damaging the environment around the Mekong, China is resistant to help. Rather than provide information to downstream countries about potential changes in the flow of the river, China has largely refused to share valuable data. Since its inception, the discourse surrounding the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been vociferous and wide-ranging. There are multiple dimensions, but aside from the trade and strategic ramifications, financing has always been a major concern. The BRI is not a Chinese-style Marshall Plan done largely through grants; Chinese investors expect to make a profit. According to AidData, policymakers in low and middle-income countries are mothballing high-profile projects because of overpricing, corruption, and debt sustainability concerns. Malaysia is a prime example. Instead of creating meaningful coalitions, the BRI has exposed China’s shortcomings, which ignore critical measures like monitoring and evaluation.

US needs to increase its military strength to prevent China from attacking Taiwan

PettyJohn & Wasser, May 20, 2022, STACIE L. PETTYJOHN is a senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security; BECCA WASSER is a fellow in the defense program and co-lead of The Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security, Wargaming Reveals How a U.S.-Chinese Conflict Might Escalate, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-05-20/fight-over-taiwan-could-go-nuclear

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised the specter of nuclear war, as Russian President Vladimir Putin has placed his nuclear forces at an elevated state of alert and has warned that any effort by outside parties to interfere in the war would result in “consequences you have never seen.” Such saber-rattling has understandably made headlines and drawn notice in Washington. But if China attempted to forcibly invade Taiwan and the United States came to Taipei’s aid, the threat of escalation could outstrip even the current nerve-wracking situation in Europe.

A recent war game, conducted by the Center for a New American Security in conjunction with the NBC program “Meet the Press,” demonstrated just how quickly such a conflict could escalate. The game posited a fictional crisis set in 2027, with the aim of examining how the United States and China might act under a certain set of conditions. The game demonstrated that China’s military modernization and expansion of its nuclear arsenal—not to mention the importance Beijing places on unification with Taiwan—mean that, in the real world, a fight between China and the United States could very well go nuclear.

Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway republic. If the Chinese Communist Party decides to invade the island, its leaders may not be able to accept failure without seriously harming the regime’s legitimacy. Thus, the CCP might be willing to take significant risks to ensure that the conflict ends on terms that it finds acceptable. That would mean convincing the United States and its allies that the costs of defending Taiwan are so high that it is not worth contesting the invasion. While China has several ways to achieve that goal, from Beijing’s perspective, using nuclear weapons may be the most effective means to keep the United States out of the conflict.

China is several decades into transforming its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into what the Chinese President Xi Jinping has called a “world-class military” that could defeat any third party that comes to Taiwan’s defense. China’s warfighting strategy, known as “anti-access/area denial,” rests on being able to project conventional military power out several thousand miles in order to prevent the American military, in particular, from effectively countering a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Meanwhile, a growing nuclear arsenal provides Beijing with coercive leverage as well as potentially new warfighting capabilities, which could increase the risks of war and escalation.

China has historically possessed only a few hundred ground-based nuclear weapons. But last year, nuclear scholars at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and the Federation of American Scientists identified three missile silo fields under construction in the Xinjiang region. The Financial Times reported that China might have carried out tests of hypersonic gliders as a part of an orbital bombardment system that could evade missile defenses and deliver nuclear weapons to targets in the continental United States. The U.S. Department of Defense projects that by 2030, China will have around 1,000 deliverable warheads–more than triple the number it currently possesses. Based on these projections, Chinese leaders may believe that as early as five years from now the PLA will have made enough conventional and nuclear gains that it could fight and win a war to unify with Taiwan.

A fight between China and the United States could very well go nuclear.

Our recent war game—in which members of Congress, former government officials, and subject matter experts assumed the roles of senior national security decision makers in China and the United States—illustrated that a U.S.-China war could escalate quickly. For one thing, it showed that both countries would face operational incentives to strike military forces on the other’s territory. In the game, such strikes were intended to be calibrated to avoid escalation; both sides tried to walk a fine line by attacking only military targets. But such attacks crossed red lines for both countries, and produced a tit-for-tat cycle of attacks that broadened the scope and intensity of the conflict.

For instance, in the simulation, China launched a preemptive attack against key U.S. bases in the Indo-Pacific region. The attacks targeted Guam, in particular, because it is a forward operating base critical to U.S. military operations in Asia, and because since it is a territory, and not a U.S. state, the Chinese team viewed striking it as less escalatory than attacking other possible targets. In response, the United States targeted Chinese military ships in ports and surrounding facilities, but refrained from other attacks on the Chinese mainland. Nevertheless, both sides perceived these strikes as attacks on their home territory, crossing an important threshold. Instead of mirror-imaging their own concerns about attacks on their territory, each side justified the initial blows as military necessities that were limited in nature and would be seen by the other as such. Responses to the initial strikes only escalated things further as the U.S. team responded to China’s moves by hitting targets in mainland China, and the Chinese team responded to Washington’s strikes by attacking sites in Hawaii.

A NEW ERA

One particularly alarming finding from the war game is that China found it necessary to threaten to go nuclear from the start in order to ward off outside support for Taiwan. This threat was repeated throughout the game, particularly after mainland China had been attacked. At times, efforts to erode Washington’s will so that it would back down from the fight received greater attention by the China team than the invasion of Taiwan itself. But China had difficulty convincing the United States that its nuclear threats were credible. In real life, China’s significant and recent changes to its nuclear posture and readiness may impact other nations’ views, as its nuclear threats may not be viewed as credible given its stated doctrine of no first use, its smaller but burgeoning nuclear arsenal, and lack of experience making nuclear threats. This may push China to preemptively detonate a nuclear weapon to reinforce the credibility of its warning.

China might also resort to a demonstration of its nuclear might because of constraints on its long-range conventional strike capabilities. Five years from now, the PLA still will have a very limited ability to launch conventional attacks beyond locations in the “second island chain” in the Pacific; namely, Guam and Palau. Unable to strike the U.S. homeland with conventional weapons, China would struggle to impose costs on the American people. Up until a certain point in the game, the U.S. team felt its larger nuclear arsenal was sufficient to deter escalation and did not fully appreciate the seriousness of China’s threats. As a result, China felt it needed to escalate significantly to send a message that the U.S. homeland could be at risk if Washington did not back down. Despite China’s stated “no-first use” nuclear policy, the war game resulted in Beijing detonating a nuclear weapon off the coast of Hawaii as a demonstration. The attack caused relatively little destruction, as the electromagnetic pulse only damaged the electronics of ships in the immediate vicinity but did not directly impact the U.S. state. The war game ended before the U.S. team could respond, but it is likely that the first use of a nuclear weapon since World War II would have provoked a response.

The most likely paths to nuclear escalation in a fight between the United States and China are different from those that were most likely during the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the United States feared a massive, blot-from-the-blue nuclear attack, which would precipitate a full-scale strategic exchange. In a confrontation over Taiwan, however, Beijing could employ nuclear weapons in a more limited way to signal resolve or to improve its chances of winning on the battlefield. It is unclear how a war would proceed after that kind of limited nuclear use and whether the United States could de-escalate the situation while still achieving its objectives.

AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION

The clear lesson from the war game is that the United States needs to strengthen its conventional capabilities in the Indo-Pacific to ensure that China never views an invasion of Taiwan as a prudent tactical move. To do so, the United States will need to commit to maintaining its conventional military superiority by expanding its stockpiles of long-range munitions and investing in undersea capabilities. Washington must also be able to conduct offensive operations inside the first and second island chains even while under attack. This will require access to new bases to distribute U.S. forces, enhance their survivability, and ensure that they can effectively defend Taiwan in the face of China’s attacks.

Moreover, the United States needs to develop an integrated network of partners willing to contribute to Taiwan’s defense. Allies are an asymmetric advantage: the United States has them, and China does not. The United States should deepen strategic and operational planning with key partners to send a strong signal of resolve to China. As part of these planning efforts, the United States and its allies will need to develop war-winning military strategies that do not cross Chinese red-lines. The game highlighted just how difficult this task may be; what it did not highlight is the complexity of developing military strategies that integrate the strategic objectives and military capacities of multiple nations.

Moving forward, military planners in the United States and in Washington’s allies and partners must grapple with the fact that, in a conflict over Taiwan, China would consider all conventional and nuclear options to be on the table. And the United States is running out of time to strengthen deterrence and keep China from believing an invasion of Taiwan could be successful. The biggest risk is that Washington and its friends choose not to seize the moment and act: a year or two from now, it might already be too late.

Multilateral cooperation critical to sustain the global order – disease, climate, tech control

Ian Bremmer, 5-5, 22, IAN BREMMER is President and Founder of Eurasia Group., Foreign Affairs, The New Cold War Could Soon Heat Up, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2022-05-05/new-cold-war-could-soon-heat

Biden, by contrast, doesn’t see much need for cooperation across ideological boundaries. Rather than portraying the conflict in Ukraine as a discrete attempt to combat a war of aggression, the U.S. president has framed it as a “battle between democracy and autocracy.” Xi Jinping can’t like the sound of that, and China will naturally reject efforts to push Russia out of the G-20. Come the group’s November summit, Biden and allied leaders must choose between sharing a table with autocrats such as Putin and Xi or rendering the G-20 dysfunctional at a time when global threats that demand collective action—climate change, pandemics, and the spread of disruptive technologies, to name just a few—are growing in importance. The prospect of a breakdown in multilateral cooperation is the single greatest danger to the global order since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine war caused by US hegemony, need to retrench to avoid global conflict and terminal US decline

Flynn, 4-20, 22, Brendan Flynn has been studying for his Ph.D. at Wayne State University since 2020, where he concentrates on international relations with a focus on China and Asian security. From 2015 – 2016, Brendan studied Chinese in Beijing, before researching Asian maritime disputes as an intern at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC. He currently lectures on international relations at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. This essay was a runner-up in the 2022 John Quincy Adams Society/The National Interest Student Foreign Policy Essay Contest, America’s Interest in Ukraine Is Not What You Think, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/america%E2%80%99s-interest-ukraine-not-what-you-think-201869

America’s Interest in Ukraine Is Not What You Think

If American foreign commitments continue to exceed American power, the inevitable result will be additional crises and accelerated decline. The United States’ primary security interest in Ukraine is a stable relationship with Russia, but you would not know it based on U.S. foreign policy. As John Mearsheimer has argued, the United States has pursued a revisionist policy “to make Ukraine a Western bulwark on Russia’s border.” This strategy, which included vague promises of eventual NATO membership, was pursued with naïve disregard for Russia’s security concerns and the likely effect on the U.S.-Russia relationship.

As early as 2000, power transition theorists argued that “Russia matters because of the potential power of a Russian-Chinese alliance.” Just as Russia ought to have been viewed in light of the anticipated security competition with China, Ukraine ought to have been viewed in terms of the realpolitik need to keep Russia onside. Instead, motivated by liberal ideology and mistaken assumptions tracing back to the end of the Cold War, the United States viewed Ukraine (and Georgia) as the logical next target for inclusion in its democratic alliance system. If history was over, then such a policy was logical. Ukraine’s inclusion in key Western institutions was simply part of a process whereby China, the Middle East, and Russia itself would eventually join the United States in a universal democratic peace.

This faulty vision, derived from learning the wrong lessons of U.S. victory in the Cold War, is responsible for errant U.S. policy in Ukraine. It is responsible for the idea that because democracy was on the march and because democracies tend not to fight one another, “support for democracy [was] to be our guide in the … world,” as David Lake summarized the widely held view in 1994. The successful expansion of NATO in 1999 and 2004, as well as waves of EU enlargement, reinforced this view. But Russia’s invasion of Georgia following NATO promises of future Georgian and Ukrainian membership at the alliance’s 2008 summit in Bucharest should have been a blinking red light that spheres of interest still mattered. Instead, the United States chose to ignore this warning. Its ideological blinders would not allow it to consider that great power politics remained alive and well.

This ideological misunderstanding of the U.S. national interest has influenced the U.S. pursuit of a revisionist and interventionist approach across the globe for three decades, with catastrophic consequences in Iraq and now Ukraine. At Stephen Walt points out, “the liberal ideologues who dismissed Russia’s repeated protests and warnings and continued to press a revisionist program in Europe with scant regard for the consequences” deserve a healthy share of blame. Had the United States understood its interests in Ukraine from the perspective of U.S-Russia (and, ultimately, U.S.-China) relations (a perspective Joe Biden himself shared regarding NATO expansion in 1997) rather than democracy expansion, this crisis and humanitarian tragedy could have been avoided.

Rather than bring about a more stable, secure, and prosperous world, U.S. revisionist policy inspired by liberal ideology has had the opposite effect. The Middle East is engulfed in perennial chaos, the Taliban once again rule Afghanistan, and a hostile Iran continues to wield great influence in Iraq. More significantly, every year China’s economy grows faster than the American economy is a year in which U.S. relative power further declines. As Graham Allison illustrates, on many key measures of power China has already surpassed the United States. This is why the 2021 U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence Annual Threat Assessment listed China as the United States’ number one threat, the second consecutive administration to hold such a view. This view of China as the biggest threat to U.S. interests is uniquely bipartisan.

Because economics and demographics are the primary sources of power, prescient analysts foresaw the threat from China as early as the 1990s, even as scholars like John Ikenberry were focused on “strengthen[ing], deepen[ing], and codify[ing] the liberal political order.” In 2000, power transition scholars argued that “plans for limited NATO expansion ignore the biggest future security problem for the West,” namely China. They accurately understood that the “need to prevent any … [Sino-Russian] alignment should be central to all thinking about the future of NATO.” It was “naive,” these scholars argued, to assume NATO expansion would not ultimately push Russia into China’s arms. Yet NATO did expand, and Sino-Russian alignment is precisely what has occurred.

This is a strategic error of massive consequence. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov is not wrong when he suggests the war in Ukraine poses a question to “the legal world order.” Indeed, Fareed Zakaria has officially declared that we are now living in a “post-American” global order. Given the so-called economic law of uneven growth articulated by scholars like Robert Gilpin, such a new reality may have been inevitable. But the United States has accelerated this shift by expanding rather than contracting its global commitments even as its relative power basis has declined. The United States has been talking loudly while carrying a shrinking stick.

The war in Ukraine gives the lie to liberal internationalists such as Robert Kagan who argue that “maintaining the liberal world order” is simply a matter of resolve. Quite the opposite. What Kagan calls “constant [order] tending” is actually clinging to a strategic lifestyle the United States can no longer afford. If American foreign commitments continue to exceed American power, the inevitable result will be additional crises and accelerated decline. Rather than expanding our commitments in places like Ukraine (and Taiwan, for that matter), the United States should begin strategically unwinding commitments it no longer has the capacity to uphold. As Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent point out, “sagging capabilities and a sprawling defensive perimeter will court disaster.”

Unfortunately, the disaster has already arrived. The United States should, therefore, work to limit the scale of the catastrophe by supporting peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. The U.S. interest is in a sovereign, neutral Ukraine with clear red lines mutually understood and agreed to by Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Such an agreement might involve an open door to eventual EU membership even as NATO is definitively taken off the table. If such a deal can be reached and the United States finally abandons its ideologically driven foreign policy and instead pursues a foreign policy of restraint, perhaps this tragedy will not have been completely in vain.

Need restraint, not primacy; Russia is not a significant threat and won’t take Europe

STEPHEN WERTHEIM is Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School. He is the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy, April 12, 2022, The Ukraine Temptation Biden Should Resist Calls to Fight a New Cold War https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2022-04-12/ukraine-temptation

For three decades, U.S. foreign policy has run on inertia and called it strategy. The Cold War had ended, but the United States nonetheless retained its Cold War alliances. The Soviet Union had disappeared, but the absence of a major threat produced much the same prescription as the presence of a major threat had: just as the U.S. military had defended “the free world,” now it would become the guardian of the whole world. When problems appeared, successive administrations generally took them as reasons to expand U.S. deployments. Even if its bid for primacy had created or exacerbated those problems, Washington had the solution: more and better primacy. Now the war in Ukraine is tempting policymakers to repeat that mistake in an exceedingly consequential way. Just when President Joe Biden had been trying to prioritize security in Asia and prosperity for the American middle class, advocates of U.S. primacy are seizing this emotionally charged moment to insist that post–Cold War path dependency prevail. Rather than pivot to Asia, they argue, the United States must now build up its military presence in Europe to contain an assertive Russia, even as it strengthens its Indo-Pacific defenses to contain a rising China. They admit their proposal would cost hundreds of billions of dollars more in defense spending and put U.S. forces on the front lines of two potential great-power wars, but they think the price is worth it. The Biden administration should decline this invitation to wage a risky global cold war. Although the invasion of Ukraine has revealed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to take risks in the pursuit of aggression, it has also exposed the weakness of the Russian military and economy. If anything, the war has strengthened the case for strategic discipline, by offering a chance to encourage Europe to balance against Russia while the United States concentrates on security in Asia and renewal at home. Such a division of labor is fair and sustainable. It would put the United States in the best position to limit the fallout from the war in Ukraine and achieve long-term peace and stability in Europe and beyond. Primacy’s lure is strong in Washington, but a more restrained approach is better. Since Russia’s invasion began, advocates of U.S. primacy have contended that the war demands not only an immediate response from the United States but also an enduring grand-strategic shift. Riding a wave of anti-Russian sentiment, they want the Biden administration to cast aside the new, Asia-centric posture that it had been expected to roll out. “We cannot pretend any longer that a national security focus primarily on China will protect our political, economic and security interests,” wrote former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. “As we have seen in Ukraine, a reckless, risk-taking dictator in Russia (or elsewhere) can be every bit as much a challenge to our interests and our security.” To keep the war from expanding, the Biden administration has boosted the number of U.S. troops in Europe to around 100,000—a level not seen in decades. But a bid to restore global military primacy is no more merited today than it was before the invasion. Putin’s gruesome attack has made the Russian threat visceral, but it has not actually increased the threat or produced other compelling evidence for taking on new commitments or missions. Gates appears to confuse a humanitarian calamity with a threat to the United States. As the Biden administration has maintained, vital U.S. security interests are not at stake in Ukraine, and so the United States will not intervene directly against Russian forces. Especially unclear is why Putin or just any “reckless, risk-taking dictator” should be presumed to challenge U.S. interests on a similar magnitude as China, the world’s number two economic and military power. Thinking that way could lead U.S. officials to give up on formulating strategy on the basis of discernable national interests. The United States would find itself policing the world, no matter the stakes. If Russia were to overrun the heartland of Europe, the United States’ security and prosperity would become endangered, since much of the wealthy and populous region would come under Moscow’s control. In the late 1940s, the United States waged the Cold War in part to prevent the Soviet Union from using its formidable resources to conquer noncommunist Europe. In a March article in Foreign Affairs, the scholars Michael Beckley and Hal Brands implicitly resurrected this strategic objective by invoking “the policies that won the Cold War” as a model for what to do today: contain Russia and China simultaneously through U.S. military buildups in both Europe and Asia. By their estimate, this course of action would require boosting defense spending over the next decade from 3.2 percent of GDP to five percent of GDP, making for a 56 percent increase. But it is difficult to discern how Russia could drive far into Europe, even if it tried. Before the invasion, the EU’s economy was roughly five times as large as Russia’s, by the conservative metric of purchasing power parity, and wartime sanctions are set to widen the gap. Taken together, the European members of NATO already outspend Russia on defense, and Europe’s geopolitical awakening will only push them to spend more. And the lackluster performance of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine does not augur well for their prospects against NATO in the near term. For three decades, U.S. foreign policy has run on inertia and called it strategy. Rather than explain how Russia could possibly come to dominate Europe, then, Beckley and Brands adopt an expansive conception of the United States’ interests and responsibilities that would have made George Kennan, the architect of Cold War containment, blush. They would seemingly have the United States go to war to stop any act of “autocratic aggression” in eastern Europe or East Asia, and perhaps wherever else “the international order” might appear to be imperiled. Indeed, as inspiration for their approach, they draw on NSC-68, the strategic document of 1950 that called for limitless anticommunist crusades and exorbitant military spending. As the historian John Lewis Gaddis has put it, NSC-68 “found in the simple presence of a Soviet threat sufficient cause to deem the interest threatened vital.” In other words, NSC-68 had the United States assume vast costs and risks without reference to the country’s safety and well-being; it severed the link between U.S. policy and U.S. interests. It should not be a template for our time. The call for a cold war against China and Russia would have Americans take on enormous burdens not because specific U.S. interests require it but because U.S. primacy does. No longer able to maintain global military dominance at the current level of exertion, the United States is now supposed to plow ever-greater resources into the endeavor. Perhaps the country could get away with strategic excesses in the 1950s, when it accounted for some 27 percent of world economic output, nearly double the combined Soviet and Chinese share of 14 percent. In 2020, by contrast, the United States accounted for 16 percent of global GDP. China and Russia together came to 22 percent. China alone topped the United States. It is doubtful that sheer will can overcome the chasm between the United States’ material superiority during the Cold War and its shortfall today. Coming out of World War II, the American public understood the implications of undertaking obligations to defend other countries. By contrast, most Americans alive today, having never seen a great-power war or paid tangible costs for smaller wars, are not used to enduring hardship for foreign policy choices. Their well-founded suspicion of far-flung military interventions creates uncertainty about how the United States would truly act if one of its dozens of defense commitments came due. It also raises doubts about whether high defense spending could be sustained indefinitely. Rather than lock a new cold war into place, Biden should remember what produced the United States’ greatest successes during the original affair: a willingness to adjust to changing circumstances and weigh creative options without clinging to outmoded habits. The Marshall Plan, for example, broke with precedent by extending government funds to rebuild European countries that might have turned communist. Decades later, U.S. policymakers saw an opportunity to stabilize superpower relations and achieved détente, devising mutually beneficial arms control measures and stabilizing Europe through the Helsinki Accords. These achievements deserve to be emulated—and that requires eschewing misplaced nostalgia. A EUROPE STRONG AND FREE The war in Ukraine has made strategic discipline not only more necessary but also more achievable. By turning Europe into a more unified and determined geopolitical actor, the war has generated international dynamics that are conducive to U.S. restraint. Biden should reject a cold war strategy of dividing the world and keeping one half dependent on the United States. He should not allow Putin’s aggression to define the United States’ concept of itself and its role in the world. Instead, he should seek to make the world resilient—more capable of effective and collective action and less reliant on U.S. military protection. The first step is to support Ukraine while avoiding escalation into a direct clash between U.S. and Russian forces. Having galvanized domestic and international action, the Biden administration should avoid the rhetorical inflation of its aims and stick to a clear goal: not to defend Ukraine but rather to help Ukraine defend itself and end the war. Accordingly, the administration should push for a peace settlement with as much vigor as it has displayed in imposing costs on Russia. A negotiated agreement will almost certainly require lifting at least some of the harshest sanctions on Russia, including the freeze of the Russian central bank’s assets. The administration should proactively communicate an offer of sanctions relief to Moscow, which might not otherwise believe that such relief is possible. In conjunction with a pledge by Ukraine to give up on trying to join NATO, Biden should also be prepared to state publicly that the United States opposes further consideration of Ukraine’s membership prospects, which were never high to begin with. After the war, the United States should continue to send weapons to Ukraine to help it defend itself. It would not be necessary or wise to pledge to go to war on Ukraine’s behalf, a commitment that would diminish American security and expand the U.S. military role in Europe. While avoiding the worst outcomes in Ukraine, Biden should take advantage of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put the European security order on the path to self-sufficiency. With immense economic and demographic superiority, Europe is more than capable of developing the military power to balance Russia. Now, it seems increasingly willing to do so. But if Washington does not get out of its own way, change will not happen. Biden should reject a cold war strategy of dividing the world and keeping one half dependent on the United States. Biden should back European strategic autonomy and make a six-year plan, to cover the rest of his term and the next one, to transition European defense to European leadership. The administration should press European countries to provide new manpower in the eastern countries of NATO and replace the additional U.S. troops sent there since January. And it should help European capitals coordinate their next steps: improving their forces’ readiness and sustainability, developing capabilities for high-end operations, and harmonizing EU defense capabilities with those of a European-led, U.S.-supported NATO. Limiting the United States’ burdens in Europe would enhance its strategy in Asia. Biden would spare himself and his successors from facing the devil’s choice that advocates of primacy would force on generations to come: weaken the United States’ Indo-Pacific defenses in the event of a European war with Russia, or prepare to fight two great-power wars by raising defense spending so high as to court a political backlash. U.S. policymakers must steer clear of these unacceptable options. Nor need they resign themselves to a strategic competition with China so intense and encompassing as to resemble the early Cold War. Military restraint is desirable on strategic grounds, but it is also essential to freeing U.S. statecraft to pursue what matters most. The priorities that Biden identified when he came into office—delivering prosperity for ordinary Americans and tackling climate change and pandemics—remain just as important today, and the war has made them even harder to address. Russia’s war and Western sanctions risk triggering a global recession or contributing to a period of stagflation. A downward economic spiral could even accompany a downward security spiral; countries could divide into economic blocs for fear that geopolitical contingencies may one day suddenly force them to join one grouping or another. The United States should act to arrest deglobalization, which would depress growth and innovation and inhibit climate cooperation. Rather than succumb to a cold war framework, it should remain economically engaged with China and respect the sovereign choices of countries in the developing world to abstain from sanctions on Russia and otherwise opt for nonalignment. As surging prices compound the effects of the pandemic, the United States should rally its European and Asian partners to provide funds and technology to build renewable energy capacity in developing countries. Climate change is perhaps the biggest threat to the American people. If it remains a sideshow in national security policy by the end of Biden’s tenure, then his foreign policy will have failed, no matter how well he handles the war in Ukraine. THE PRICE OF PRIMACY Among the priorities of the twenty-first-century United States should not be relations with Iran. Nevertheless, the country may soon vault to the top of the president’s agenda. Negotiators are currently trying to resurrect the agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. If those talks break down, the Biden administration will have to decide whether to support a military strike on Iran, even though it will likely regard the country as a negligible concern and a distraction from Ukraine. But even Ukraine is a distraction from what the administration had hoped to focus on: competition with China, not to mention rescuing American democracy, mitigating a pandemic, and preserving a habitable planet. Such cacophony is the predictable result of the quest for global military primacy—not control over world events but the forfeiture of self-control. The problem will get ever worse as the unipolar moment continues to recede. A new cold war promises clarity of purpose. In reality, it would impose enormous costs and generate unnecessary risks. It would not, moreover, make other priorities go away; it would more likely exacerbate the United States’ domestic travails and stifle urgent international cooperation. After 9/11, the United States allowed itself to become consumed by fears of the enemy. After Ukraine, the Biden administration should let nothing keep it from advancing the best interests of Americans.

Despite drawbacks, the alternative to US hegemony is China and Russia dominance

For years, analysts have debated whether the United States incited Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interventions in Ukraine and other neighboring countries or whether Moscow’s actions were simply unprovoked aggressions. That conversation has been temporarily muted by the horrors of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A wave of popular outrage has drowned out those who have long argued that the United States has no vital interests at stake in Ukraine, that it is in Russia’s sphere of interest, and that U.S. policies created the feelings of insecurity that have driven Putin to extreme measures. Just as the attack on Pearl Harbor silenced the anti-interventionists and shut down the debate over whether the United States should have entered World War II, Putin’s invasion has suspended the 2022 version of Americans’ endless argument over their purpose in the world. That is unfortunate. Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading. Just as Pearl Harbor was the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9/11 attacks were partly a response to the United States’ dominant presence in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, so Russian decisions have been a response to the expanding post–Cold War hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe. Putin alone is to blame for his actions, but the invasion of Ukraine is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in which the United States has played and still plays the principal role, and Americans must grapple with this fact. For critics of American power, the best way for the United States to cope is for it to retrench its position in the world, divest itself of overseas obligations that others ought to handle, and serve, at most, as a distant offshore balancer. These critics would grant China and Russia their own regional spheres of interest in East Asia and Europe and focus the United States’ attention on defending its borders and improving the well-being of Americans. But there is a core of unrealism to this “realist” prescription: it doesn’t reflect the true nature of global power and influence that has characterized most of the post–Cold War era and that still governs the world today. The United States was already the only true global superpower during the Cold War, with its unparalleled wealth and might and its extensive international alliances. The collapse of the Soviet Union only enhanced U.S. global hegemony—and not because Washington eagerly stepped in to fill the vacuum left by Moscow’s weakness. Instead, the collapse expanded U.S. influence because the United States’ combination of power and democratic beliefs made the country attractive to those seeking security, prosperity, freedom, and autonomy. The United States is therefore an imposing obstacle to a Russia seeking to regain its lost influence. What has happened in eastern Europe over the past three decades is a testament to this reality. Washington did not actively aspire to be the region’s dominant power. But in the years after the Cold War, eastern Europe’s newly liberated countries, including Ukraine, turned to the United States and its European allies because they believed that joining the transatlantic community was the key to independence, democracy, and affluence. Eastern Europeans were looking to escape decades—or, in some cases, centuries—of Russian and Soviet imperialism, and allying with Washington at a moment of Russian weakness afforded them a precious chance to succeed. Even if the United States had rejected their pleas to join NATO and other Western institutions, as critics insist it should have, the former Soviet satellites would have continued to resist Moscow’s attempts to corral them back into its sphere of interest, seeking whatever help from the West they could get. And Putin would still have regarded the United States as the main cause of this anti-Russian behavior, simply because the country was strong enough to attract eastern Europeans. To insist that Putin’s invasion was entirely unprovoked is misleading. Throughout their history, Americans have tended to be unconscious of the daily impact that U.S. power has on the rest of the world, friends and foes alike. They are generally surprised to find themselves the target of resentment and of the kinds of challenges posed by Putin’s Russia and by President Xi Jinping’s China. Americans could reduce the severity of these challenges by wielding U.S. influence more consistently and effectively. They failed to do this in the 1920s and 1930s, allowing aggression by Germany, Italy, and Japan to go unchecked until it resulted in a massively destructive world war. They failed to do so in recent years, allowing Putin to seize more and more land until he invaded all of Ukraine. After Putin’s latest move, Americans may learn the right lesson. But they will still struggle to understand how Washington should act in the world if they don’t examine what happened with Russia, and that requires continuing the debate over the impact of U.S. power. BY POPULAR DEMAND So in what way might the United States have provoked Putin? One thing needs to be clear: it was not by threatening the security of Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russians have objectively enjoyed greater security than at any time in recent memory. Russia was invaded three times over the past two centuries, once by France and twice by Germany. During the Cold War, Soviet forces were perpetually ready to battle U.S. and NATO forces in Europe. Yet since the end of the Cold War, Russia has enjoyed unprecedented security on its western flanks, even as NATO has taken in new members to its east. Moscow even welcomed what was in many ways the most significant addition to the alliance: a reunified Germany. When Germany was reunifying at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev favored anchoring it in NATO. As he told U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, he believed that the best guarantee of Soviet and Russian security was a Germany “contained within European structures.” Late Soviet and early Russian leaders certainly did not act as if they feared an attack from the West. Soviet and Russian defense spending declined sharply in the late 1980s and through the late 1990s, including by 90 percent between 1992 and 1996. The once formidable Red Army was cut nearly in half, leaving it weaker in relative terms than it had been for almost 400 years. Gorbachev even ordered the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Poland and other Warsaw Pact states, chiefly as a cost-saving measure. It was all part of a larger strategy to ease Cold War tensions so that Moscow might concentrate on economic reform at home. But even Gorbachev would not have sought this holiday from geopolitics had he believed that the United States and the West would take advantage of it. His judgment was sensible. The United States and its allies had no interest in the independence of the Soviet republics, as U.S. President George H. W. Bush made clear in his 1991 speech in Kyiv, in which he denounced the “suicidal nationalism” of independence-minded Ukrainians (who would declare independence three weeks later). Indeed, for several years after 1989, U.S. policies aimed first to rescue Gorbachev, then to rescue the Soviet Union, and then to rescue Russian President Boris Yeltsin. During the period of transition from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to Yeltsin’s Russia—the time of greatest Russian weakness—the Bush administration and then the Clinton administration were reluctant to expand NATO, despite the increasingly urgent appeals of the former Warsaw Pact states. The Clinton administration created the Partnership for Peace, whose vague assurances of solidarity fell well short of a security guarantee for former Warsaw Pact members. It is easy to see why Washington felt no great compulsion to drive NATO eastward. Few Americans at that time saw the organization as a bulwark against Russian expansion, much less as a means of bringing Russia down. From the U.S. perspective, Russia was already a shell of its former self. The question was whether NATO had any mission at all now that the great adversary against which it was aimed had collapsed—and given just how hopeful the 1990s felt to most Americans and western Europeans. It was thought to be a time of convergence, when both China and Russia were moving ineluctably toward liberalism. Geoeconomics had replaced geopolitics, the nation-state was passing away, the world was “flat,” the twenty-first century would be run by the European Union, and Enlightenment ideals were spreading across the planet. For NATO, “out of area or out of business” was the mantra of the day. Many Americans equate hegemony with imperialism, but the two are different. But as the West enjoyed its fantasies and Russia struggled to adapt to a new world, the nervous populations lying to the east of Germany—the Balts, the Poles, the Romanians, and the Ukrainians—viewed the end of the Cold War as merely the latest phase in their centuries-old struggle. For them, NATO was not obsolete. They saw what the United States and western Europe took for granted—the Article 5 collective security guarantee—as the key to escaping a long, bloody, and oppressive past. Much like the French after World War I, who feared the day when a revived Germany would again threaten them, eastern Europeans believed that Russia would eventually resume its centuries-long habit of imperialism and seek to reclaim its traditional influence over their neighborhood. These states wanted to integrate into the free-market capitalism of their richer, Western neighbors, and membership in NATO and the European Union was to them the only path out of a dismal past and into a safer, more democratic, and more prosperous future. It was hardly surprising, then, that when Gorbachev and then Yeltsin loosened the reins in the early 1990s, practically every current, and soon former, Warsaw Pact member and Soviet republic seized the chance to break from the past and shift their allegiance from Moscow to the transatlantic West. But although this massive change had little to do with U.S. policies, it had much to do with the reality of the United States’ post–Cold War hegemony. Many Americans tend to equate hegemony with imperialism, but the two are different. Imperialism is an active effort by one state to force others into its sphere, whereas hegemony is more a condition than a purpose. A militarily, economically, and culturally powerful country exerts influence on other states by its mere presence, the way a larger body in space affects the behavior of smaller bodies through its gravitational pull. Even if the United States was not aggressively expanding its influence in Europe, and certainly not through its military, the collapse of Soviet power enhanced the attractive pull of the United States and its democratic allies. Their prosperity, their freedom, and, yes, their power to protect former Soviet satellites, when combined with the inability of Moscow to provide any of these, dramatically shifted the balance in Europe in favor of Western liberalism to the detriment of Russian autocracy. The growth of U.S. influence and the spread of liberalism were less a policy objective of the United States than the natural consequence of that shift. Russian leaders could have accommodated themselves to this new reality. Other great powers had adjusted to similar changes. The British had once been lords of the seas, the possessors of a vast global empire, and the center of the financial world. Then they lost it all. But although some were humiliated at being supplanted by the United States, Britons rather quickly adjusted to their new place in the firmament. The French, too, lost a great empire, and Germany and Japan, defeated in war, lost everything except their talent for producing wealth. But they all made the adjustment and were arguably better for it. There were certainly Russians in the 1990s—Yeltsin’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, for one—who thought that Russia should make a similar decision. They wished to integrate Russia into the liberal West even at the expense of traditional geopolitical ambitions. But that was not the view that ultimately prevailed in Russia. Unlike the United Kingdom, France, and to some extent Japan, Russia did not have a long history of friendly relations and strategic cooperation with the United States—quite the contrary. Unlike Germany and Japan, Russia was not militarily defeated, occupied, and reformed in the process. And unlike Germany, which always knew that its economic power was irrepressible and that in the post–World War II order it could at least grow prosperous, Russia never really believed it could become a successful economic powerhouse. Its elites thought that the likeliest consequence of integration would be Russia’s demotion to, at best, a second-rank power. Russia would be at peace, and it would still have a chance to prosper. But it would not determine the fate of Europe and the world. WAR OR PEACE In the fall of 1940, Japan’s foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, posed his country’s predicament starkly in a meeting with other senior officials. Japan could seek a return to cooperative relations with the United States and the United Kingdom, he noted, but only on those countries’ terms. This meant returning to “little Japan,” as the minister of war (and future prime minister), General Hideki Tojo, put it. To Japanese leaders at the time, that seemed intolerable, so much so that they risked a war that most of them believed they were likely to lose. The coming years would prove not only that going to war was a mistake but also that the Japanese would indeed have served their interests better by simply integrating themselves into the liberal order from the beginning, as they did quite successfully after the war. Putin’s Russia has made much the same choice as did imperial Japan, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany, and many other dissatisfied powers throughout history, and likely with the same end—eventual defeat. But Putin’s choice should hardly have come as a surprise. Washington’s protestations of goodwill, the billions of dollars it poured into the Russian economy, the care it took in the early post–Cold War years to avoid dancing on the Soviet Union’s grave—all this had no effect, because what Putin wanted could not be granted by the United States. He sought to reverse a defeat that could not be reversed without violent force, but he lacked the wherewithal to wage a successful war. He wanted to restore a Russian sphere of interest in central and eastern Europe that Moscow had lost the power to sustain. The problem for Putin—and for those in the West who want to cede to both China and Russia their traditional spheres of interest—is that such spheres are not granted to one great power by other great powers; they are not inherited, nor are they created by geography or history or “tradition.” They are acquired by economic, political, and military power. They come and go as the distribution of power in the international system fluctuates. The United Kingdom’s sphere of interest once covered much of the globe, and France once enjoyed spheres of interest in Southeast Asia and much of Africa and the Middle East. Both lost them, partly due to an unfavorable shift of power at the beginning of the twentieth century, partly because their imperial subjects rebelled, and partly because they willingly traded in their spheres of interest for a stable and prosperous U.S.-dominated peace. Germany’s sphere of interest once extended far to the east. Before World War I, some Germans envisioned a vast economic Mitteleuropa, where the people of central and eastern Europe would provide the labor, resources, and markets for German industry. But this German sphere of interest overlapped with Russia’s sphere of interest in southeastern Europe, where Slavic populations looked to Moscow for protection against Teutonic expansion. These contested spheres helped produce both world wars, just as the contested spheres in East Asia had helped bring Japan and Russia to blows in 1904. Russians may believe they have a natural, geographic, and historical claim to a sphere of interest in eastern Europe because they had it throughout much of the past four centuries. And many Chinese feel the same way about East Asia, which they once dominated. But even the Americans learned that claiming a sphere of interest is different from having one. For the first century of the United States’ existence, the Monroe Doctrine was a mere assertion—as hollow as it was brazen. It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the country was able to enforce its claim, that the other great powers were grudgingly forced to accept it. After the Cold War, Putin and other Russians may have wanted the West to grant Moscow a sphere of interest in Europe, but such a sphere simply did not reflect the true balance of power after the Soviet Union fell. China may claim the “nine-dash line”—enclosing most of the South China Sea—as marking its sphere of interest, but until Beijing can enforce it, other powers are unlikely to acquiesce. Some Western analysts nonetheless argued when the Cold War ended, and continue to argue now, that Washington and western Europe should have given in to Russia’s demand. But if Moscow could not enforce a sphere, then on what grounds should the West have acceded? Fairness? Justice? Spheres of interest are not about justice, and even if they were, consigning the Poles and other eastern Europeans to subservience to Moscow would have been a dubious justice. They knew what it was like to be under Moscow’s sway—the loss of independence, the imposition of rulers willing to take direction from the Kremlin, the squelching of individual liberties. The only way they would have accepted a return to Russia’s sphere was if they were compelled to by a combination of Russian pressure and the studied indifference of the West. In fact, even if the United States had vetoed the accession of Poland and others to NATO, as some suggested at the time that it should have, the Balts, the Czechs, the Hungarians, and the Poles would have done everything they could to integrate themselves into the transatlantic community in every other possible way. They would have worked to join the global economy, to enter other Western-dominated international institutions, and to gain whatever commitment they could to their security—acts that almost certainly would have still antagonized Moscow. Once Putin began taking slices out of Ukraine (there would be no way for him to restore Russia to its previous great-power status without controlling Ukraine), the Poles and others would have come banging on NATO’s door. It seems unlikely that the United States and its allies would have continued to say no. Russia’s problem was ultimately not just about its military weakness. Its problem was, and remains, its weakness in all relevant forms of power, including the power of attraction. At least during the Cold War, a communist Soviet Union could claim to offer the path to paradise on earth. Yet afterward, Moscow could provide neither ideology, nor security, nor prosperity, nor independence to its neighbors. It could offer only Russian nationalism and ambition, and eastern Europeans understandably had no interest in sacrificing themselves on that altar. If there was any other choice, Russia’s neighbors were bound to take it. And there was: the United States and its strong alliance, merely by existing, merely by being rich and powerful and democratic, offered a very good choice indeed. Putin may want to see the United States as being behind all his troubles, and he is right that the country’s attractive power closed the door to some of his ambitions. But the real sources of his problems are the limitations of Russia itself and the choices that he has made not to accept the consequences of a power struggle that Moscow legitimately lost. Post–Cold War Russia, like Weimar Germany, never suffered an actual military defeat and occupation, an experience that might have produced a transformation of the sort that occurred in post–World War II Germany and Japan. Like the Weimar Republic, Russia was therefore susceptible to its own “stab-in-the-back myth” about how Russian leaders supposedly betrayed the country to the West. But although Russians can cast blame in any number of directions—at Gorbachev, at Yeltsin, and at Washington—the fact is that Russia enjoyed neither the wealth and power nor the geographic advantages of the United States, and it was therefore never suited to be a global superpower. Moscow’s efforts to sustain that position ultimately bankrupted its system financially and ideologically—as may well be happening again. SOONER OR LATER Observers used to say that Putin played a bad hand skillfully. It is true that he read the United States and its allies correctly for many years, pushing forward just enough to achieve limited goals without sparking a dangerous reaction from the West, up until this latest invasion. But even so, he had help from the United States and its allies, which played a strong hand poorly. Washington and Europe stood by as Putin increased Russian military capabilities, and they did little as he probed and tested Western resolve, first in Georgia in 2008 and then in Ukraine in 2014. They didn’t act when Putin consolidated Russia’s position in Belarus or when he established a robust Russian presence in Syria, from which his weapons could reach the southeastern flank of NATO. And if his “special military operation” in Ukraine had gone as planned, with the country subdued in a matter of days, it would have been a triumphant coup, the end of the first stage of Russia’s comeback and the beginning of the second. Rather than excoriating him for his inhumane folly, the world would again be talking about Putin’s “savvy” and his “genius.” Thankfully, that was not to be. But now that Putin has made his mistakes, the question is whether the United States will continue to make its own mistakes or whether Americans will learn, once again, that it is better to contain aggressive autocracies early, before they have built up a head of steam and the price of stopping them rises. The challenge posed by Russia is neither unusual nor irrational. The rise and fall of nations is the warp and woof of international relations. National trajectories are changed by wars and the resulting establishment of new power structures, by shifts in the global economy that enrich some and impoverish others, and by beliefs and ideologies that lead people to prefer one power over another. If there is any blame to be cast on the United States for what is happening in Ukraine, it is not that Washington deliberately extended its influence in eastern Europe. It is that Washington failed to see that its influence had already increased and to anticipate that actors dissatisfied with the liberal order would look to overturn it. For the 70-plus years since World War II, the United States has actively worked to keep revisionists at bay. But many Americans hoped that with the end of the Cold War, this task would be finished and that their country could become a “normal” nation with normal—which was to say, limited—global interests. But the global hegemon cannot tiptoe off the stage, as much as it might wish to. It especially cannot retreat when there are still major powers that, because of their history and sense of self, cannot give up old geopolitical ambitions—unless Americans are prepared to live in a world shaped and defined by those ambitions, as it was in the 1930s. Americans are part of a never-ending power struggle, whether they wish to be or not. The United States would be better served if it recognized both its position in the world and its true interest in preserving the liberal world order. In the case of Russia, this would have meant doing everything possible to integrate it into the liberal order politically and economically while deterring it from attempting to re-create its regional dominance by military means. The commitment to defend NATO allies was never meant to preclude helping others under attack in Europe, as the United States and its allies did in the case of the Balkans in the 1990s, and the United States and its allies could have resisted military efforts to control or seize land from Georgia and Ukraine. Imagine if the United States and the democratic world had responded in 2008 or 2014 as they have responded to Russia’s latest use of force, when Putin’s military was even weaker than it has proved to be now, even as they kept extending an outstretched hand in case Moscow wanted to grasp it. The United States ought to be following the same policy toward China: make clear that it is prepared to live with a China that seeks to fulfill its ambitions economically, politically, and culturally but that it will respond effectively to any Chinese military action against its neighbors. It is true that acting firmly in 2008 or 2014 would have meant risking conflict. But Washington is risking conflict now; Russia’s ambitions have created an inherently dangerous situation. It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small: Putin was never going to obtain his objectives by destroying himself and his country, along with much of the rest of the world. If the United States and its allies—with their combined economic, political, and military power—had collectively resisted Russian expansionism from the beginning, Putin would have found himself constantly unable to invade neighboring countries. Unfortunately, it is very difficult for democracies to take action to prevent a future crisis. The risks of acting now are always clear and often exaggerated, whereas distant threats are just that: distant and so hard to calculate. It always seems better to hope for the best rather than try to forestall the worst. This common conundrum becomes even more debilitating when Americans and their leaders remain blissfully unconscious of the fact that they are part of a never-ending power struggle, whether they wish to be or not. But Americans should not lament the role they play in the world. The reason the United States has often found itself entangled in Europe, after all, is because what it offers is genuinely attractive to much of the world—and certainly better when compared with any realistic alternative. If Americans learn anything from Russia’s brutalization of Ukraine, it should be that there really are worse things than U.S. hegemony.

Russian dominance/aggression collapses the global norm against protecting territorial integrity, triggering massive war

TANISHA M. FAZAL, is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and the author of State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation, May/June 2022, Foreign Affairs, The Return of Conquest? Why the Future of Global Order Hinges on Ukraine, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-06/ukraine-russia-war-return-conquest

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is shining a light on the precariousness of the norm against territorial conquest. The good news is that the outrage has been swift and broad, with a variety of actors worried that Putin’s attack could undermine the stability of borders globally. Even those who did not participate in the drawing of today’s national borders have spoken out passionately. “We agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited,” Martin Kimani, Kenya’s ambassador to the UN, said at a February 22 Security Council meeting. “We chose to follow the rules of the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations Charter,” he went on, “not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater, forged in peace.” Leaders of countries from Albania to Argentina have condemned the Russian invasion on similar grounds.

In part, the fate of the norm against territorial conquest depends on the extent to which Putin violates it in Ukraine. If Putin ends up replacing the administration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and installing a puppet regime in Ukraine, he would be engaging in blatant regime change and dealing a grave blow to the Ukrainian people. But he would not be challenging the norm against territorial conquest per se. The country would be under indirect, rather than direct, Russian control.

Likewise, if Putin attempts to absorb Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk—areas he has long claimed as Russian territory—and the rest of the world acquiesces, it would weaken but not completely overturn the norm guarding a state’s territorial integrity, because most of Ukraine would remain intact. Even so, the acceptance of a limited violation of the norm might do more damage in the long run than a rejection of a major violation of it. After all, it is likely that the West’s relatively weak response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea emboldened Putin.

There is reason to fear that Putin’s ambitions go well beyond these goals. As his remarks questioning the legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent country suggest, Putin seems interested in much more than merely putting a crony in charge of a former Soviet republic or carving out parts of the country; he may be contemplating redrawing the map of Europe to hark back to imperial Russia. If Russia were to take over the entirety of Ukraine, Putin would drive a stake into the heart of the norm against territorial conquest.

Norms are nourished by enforcement.

If Putin went that far, then the fate of the norm would depend largely on how the rest of the world reacted. Norms are nourished by enforcement. In 2013, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad clearly violated the norm against the use of chemical weapons (and international law) when he fired sarin-filled rockets at the Damascus suburbs. Even though U.S. President Barack Obama had declared the use of chemical weapons to be a redline, the response to this violation was so tepid that one can be forgiven for asking whether the taboo against chemical weapons still holds.

Fortunately, much of the world’s response to the Russian invasion indicates that countries are largely united in their determination to protect the norm. Unprecedented sanctions on Russia, combined with donations of humanitarian aid and weapons for Ukraine, are applying pressure on Putin while offering (admittedly limited) relief to Zelensky. If that international resolve were to ebb, however, countries that neighbor Ukraine, such as Moldova, Poland, and Romania, would rightly become nervous about their sovereignty. Indeed, they already are. It is notable that the international community has not banded together to repel Russia’s incursion the way a U.S.-led global alliance turned back Iraq’s attempted annexation of Kuwait. That move not only restored Kuwaiti independence but also reinforced the norm against conquest. (Russia, of course, is far more powerful than Iraq ever was and possesses nuclear weapons to boot.)

At the same time, enforcing the norm against territorial conquest comes with tradeoffs, about which everyone should be clear-eyed. Protecting Ukrainian sovereignty is likely not worth a third world war—especially one that could go nuclear. The world should not pay the ultimate price just to support the norm against territorial conquest. But the bloody costs that come with that choice cannot be ignored. The West is currently walking a difficult line, seeking to respond to Russia’s invasion with strength but without escalating the conflict.

To preserve the norm against territorial conquest, the global community should keep up the pressure on Russia, even if Putin’s goal is to annex only Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. The Western alliance, for example, should not fully lift sanctions on Russia until and unless Putin recognizes Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. International jurists should take Ukraine’s various suits against Russia seriously, not just in the context of this specific conflict but also with an eye to any precedents their decisions might set. Along these lines, it is worth paying attention to how the accusations that Russia has committed the crime of aggression play out. The fact that Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, can veto a referral for the crime of aggression to the International Criminal Court exposes a troubling vulnerability of the norm against territorial conquest. It is hard to maintain norms when great powers are determined to break them.

Norms don’t always last forever.

If the global community fails to enforce the norm against territorial conquest, the states bordering great powers will face the highest risk of extinction. Among the most concerning aspects of a return to a world of violent state death are the effects invasions have on civilians. Annexationists frequently engage in indiscriminate targeting, similar to what is happening today in the Ukrainian cities of Kharkiv and Mariupol, to quell and even depopulate areas. In other words, the demise of the norm against territorial conquest could see an increase in not only the incidence but also the brutality of war.

Even if the global community does not rally behind the norm in the face of a Russian attempt to reinstate imperial boundaries, hope for Ukraine will not be lost. About half of all the states that died violently since 1816 were later resurrected. An important predictor of resurrection is nationalist resistance to being swallowed up. The extent of the resistance can be difficult for invaders to predict. Putin’s expectations certainly seem to have been way off the mark: the widespread and sophisticated Ukrainian resistance strongly suggests that Russia will find it nearly impossible to control Ukraine. Few occupations in history have ended up achieving their long-term political aims.

If the Ukrainians are left to resurrect their own country, the end result will be good for Ukrainians but not particularly encouraging for the norm against territorial conquest. For norms to remain strong, violations must be punished. A resurrected Ukraine might deter future would-be conquerors from attacking the country. But globally, aspiring invaders would draw a clear lesson: it is possible to get away with territorial conquest.

RECOMMITTING TO BRIGHT LINES

It might be more comforting to believe that once established, a norm is permanent, but norms don’t always last forever. Think about how many have slipped away. People no longer settle fights via ritual dueling. Governments rarely issue formal declarations of war; the last time the United States did so was in 1942, even though the country has fought many wars since then. The public assassination of state leaders, which was a regular feature of international politics in Machiavelli’s time, was viewed as abhorrent by the seventeenth century (although covert assassinations continued). If the prohibition against territorial conquest ends up in the graveyard of norms, then history will turn backward, and the world will revisit the brutal era of violent state death. This is not to say that the norm ushered in world peace. There have been plenty of wars since 1945. But a certain kind of war—wars between states over unresolved territorial claims—did decline. Should that style of conflict return, civilians around the world will bear the consequences.

Consider the dozens of ongoing territorial disputes today. Armenia and Azerbaijan are engaged in a frozen conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. Sudan has challenged its border with Ethiopia in the southeast and South Sudan in the south. In the East China and South China Seas, China and its neighbors, including Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, disagree over the sovereignty of a series of islands. Taiwan’s fate is of particular concern. Putin’s arguments about the legitimacy of Ukraine’s statehood echo China’s claim that Taiwan and China are already one country. If it suddenly seems acceptable to take territory by force, leaders of states with long-unresolved territorial claims could attempt to subsume sovereign nations.

Existing norms and legal structures have helped stop recent territorial conflicts from escalating, offering nonviolent paths to their management and resolution. The International Court of Justice resolved a case between El Salvador and Honduras in 1986, for example. The United Nations and the Organization of American States resolved a brief conflict between Ecuador and Peru in 1998. Several years later, the ICJ resolved a long-standing militarized territorial dispute between Bahrain and Qatar; subsequently, the two states invested in what will be the world’s longest bridge. This mediation allowed states to settle their differences without significant bloodshed.

Russia’s war in Ukraine is about much more than Russia and Ukraine. Allowing the norm against territorial conquest to wither away would mean taking the lid off territorial disputes around the globe and making millions of civilians more vulnerable to indiscriminate targeting. Right now, the immediate effects of the war are largely contained to Ukraine, Russia, and the countries taking in Ukrainian refugees. But further down the road, if the norm against territorial conquest ends up as another casualty of this war, states would be wise to carefully tend to their borders.

Putin’s popular, has developed a strong sense of nationalism, will engage in mass destruction, and will threaten all of Europe

Andrew Sullivan, 3-25, 22, https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-strange-rebirth-of-imperial-russia-694?s=w, Weekly Dish, The Strange Rebirth Of Imperial Russia

“The huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown,” – Vladimir Sorokin, New York Review of Books, 2017. The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of post-modern life into a new collective, ancient meaning. Even when it’s based on bullshit. You’d be amazed how vacuous slogans about returning to a mythical past — “Make America Great Again!”, “Take Back Control!” — can move public opinion dramatically in even the most successful modern democracies. That’s one reason it’s self-defeating for liberals to press for maximal change in as many things as possible. National identity, fused often with ethnic heritage, has not disappeared in the human psyche — as so many hoped or predicted. It has been reborn in new and strange forms. Now is the time of monsters, so to speak. Best not to summon up too many. This, it seems to me, is what many of us have missed about the newly visible monster of post-Communist Russia. It would be hard to conjure up a period of post-modern bewilderment more vividly than Russia in the post-Soviet 1990s. A vast empire collapsed overnight; an entire totalitarian system, long since discredited but still acting as some kind of social glue and cultural meaning, unraveled in chaos and confusion. Take away a totalitarian ideology in an instant, and a huge vacuum of meaning will open up, to be filled by something else. We once understood this. When Nazi Germany collapsed in total military defeat, the West immediately arrived to reconstruct the society from the bottom up. We de-Nazified West Germany; we created a new constitution; we invested massively with the Marshall Plan, doing more for our previous foe than we did for a devastated ally like Britain. We filled the gap. Ditto post-1945 Japan. But we left post-1991 Russia flailing, offering it shock therapy for freer markets, insisting that a democratic nation-state could be built — tada! — on the ruins of the Evil Empire. We expected it to be reconstructed even as many of its Soviet functionaries remained in place, and without the searing experience of consciousness-changing national defeat. What followed in Russia was a grasping for coherence, in the midst of national humiliation. It was more like Germany after 1918 than 1945. It is no surprise that this was a near-perfect moment for reactionism to stake its claim. It came, like all reactionary movements, not from some continuous, existing tradition waiting to be tweaked or deepened, but from intellectuals, making shit up. They created a near-absurd mythology they rescued from the 19th and early 20th centuries — packed with pseudo-science and pseudo-history. Russia was not just a nation-state, they argued; it was a “civilization-state,” a whole way of being, straddling half the globe and wrapping countless other nations and cultures into Mother Russia’s spiritual bosom. Russians were genetically different — infused with what the reactionary theorist Lev Gumilev called “passionarity” — a kind of preternatural energy or will to power. They belonged to a new order — “Eurasia” — which would balance the Atlantic powers of the US and the UK, and help govern the rest of the world. In his riveting book, “Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism,” British journalist Charles Clover recounts how mystical and often fictional accounts of Russian history pre-1917 endured through suppression in much of the Soviet era only to burst into new life under Vladimir Putin. Clover’s summary: The [reactionaries] argued that their native Russia, rather than being a branch of the rationalistic West, was the descendant of the Mongol Horde — a legacy that the Bolshevik Revolution, with all its savagery, seemed to confirm. They saw in the Revolution some promise of a future — a shedding of Western conformity and the rebirth of authentic Russianness, a Biblical event, a cataclysm that brings earthly beatitude. Alrighty then. But a civilization that sees itself as the modern incarnation of the Steppe Mongol tribes who ransacked cities and towns wherever they went is not quite a regular, Westphalian nation-state, is it? Nothing in modernity’s political structures quite captures it — because it is a pre-modern concept: mystical, spiritual, with no border to the north but frozen darkness, and no firm border between its neighbors to the south and west either. And, of course, in the 1990s and 2000s, this fantastic vision of a new Russia appealed to youngsters, hipsters, gamers, and online freaks, in a similar fashion to alt-righters in the West at the time, and often with the same ironic lulz. A key figure here is Aleksandr Dugin, a guitar-strumming poet who resurrected Gumilev’s theories by writing “The Foundations of Geopolitics.” That book is perhaps the best guide to understanding where Putin is coming from, and what Russia now is. Dugin has the same post-modern worldview as the woke left and alt right in the US: nothing is true; everything is power; and power must be exercised. For Dugin, “all ideology is mere language games or camouflaged power relations; all politics is simulacrum and spectacle; all ‘discourses’ are equal, as is all truth,” Clover writes. So of course it doesn’t matter if history is invented, lies repeated, myths invoked as facts. For the Russian reactionaries, just as for the critical race theorists, history is a tool to be manipulated and wielded to gain power, not a truth to be discovered and debated. And when Dugin pontificates about the West’s desire to dismember Russia, or sees the Cold War not as a fight between liberalism and communism, but between “sea people” and “land people,” you’re never quite sure if he’s serious or not. Was the long standoff between the US and USSR really “a planetary conspiracy of two ‘occult’ forces, whose secret confrontations and unwitnessed battle has determined the course of history”? Or is he just out for attention? But for Putin, it didn’t seem to matter. Dugin’s and Gumilev’s ideas were perfectly attuned to a post-truth dictatorship, crafted by relentless TV propaganda and opinion polling, and gave him a rationale for a post-ideological regime. So from 2009 onwards, Putin started using words like “passionarity” and “civilization-state,” rejecting a Western-style Russian nation-state, in favor of a multi-ethnic empire, in line with “our thousand-year history.” Putin went on in 2011 to propose a “Eurasian Union” to counter the EU. It’s worth noting here that this is not Russian ethnic nationalism: the whole point is that there are many distinct ethnicities in the Russian Empire, all united in the protective motherland. When today, Putin insisted that cultural diversity is Russia’s strength, this is what he meant. In all this, the contours of Dugin’s thought is pretty obvious: “The Eurasian Empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, the strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.” Putin’s seething resentment of the West, his inferiority complex, his paranoia are all echoed in Dugin’s sometimes hypnotic prose — as Putin’s latest diatribes show. And yes, this is a kind of international culture war, which is why illiberal rightists across the West warm to the thug in the Kremlin — and why Putin just invoked JK Rowling as a fellow victim of cancel culture. Dugin’s view of Ukraine? “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion. This is my opinion as a professor,” he told a magazine in 2014. A joke or not? As with many of Dugin’s provocations, hard to tell. Putin distanced himself a little afterwards. Religion is part of this new Russia, as it is in American reactionism. Like America’s religious right, Dugin’s version of Orthodoxy has replaced Christian faith with Christianism — a fusion of politics and religious tradition in defense of a single charismatic leader’s authority — and against cultural liberals and their “gender freedoms.” How earnest is this? About as earnest as Donald Trump’s “faith.” But negative polarization — the consuming hatred of Western liberalism — keeps the show on the road, even in a country where actual belief in God is hard to find. Support independent media There is a tendency to talk of Russia as if Putin has hijacked the country, wresting it away from the West, and from being a “normal country.” I wish that were true. Putin is closer to many Russians’ view of the world than we’d like to believe; his popularity soared after the seizure of Crimea; his mastery of modern media manipulation means his war propaganda can work at home — at least for a while. Most Russians see Ukraine as indelibly Russian, and they certainly don’t support a fully independent nation-state allied with the EU and NATO. This was the view of figures as disparate as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, George Kennan, and Joseph Brodsky in their time. And if you want to grasp the power of nationalism in Russia, remember that Alexei Navalny, Putin’s greatest potential foe, has built his career on it. All of this, it seems to me, tells us something about this moment: the invasion of Ukraine is part of a now-established narrative of Russia defending its civilization against the liberal West. It is wrapped up in history and religion and a sense that Russia means nothing if it is just another nation-state, what Russophobe John McCain called a “gas station masquerading as a country,” wedged between Europe and China. For years now, Putin has built his legitimacy as a “gatherer of the lands” of his Russian ancestors, buttressed by a near-eugenic understanding of Russian identity: “We are a victorious people! It is in our genes, in our genetic code. It is transferred from generation to generation, and we will have victory!” That seems preposterous — at least right now, as Russian troops in Ukraine take massive casualties and remain stuck in a stalemate. It proves reactionaryism’s core weakness: its alienation from reality and the present. You can theorize endlessly about Eurasia, the glories of Empire and the legacy of the Mongols, but if your tanks keep getting blown up, your communications don’t work, and your troops are poorly trained, it will all look pretty ridiculous soon. More to the point, if your nostalgia for imperial nationalism confronts real actual living nationalism among those you’re invading, it will also lose. The crudeness of the invasion, its cruelty and incompetence have all conjured up a far stronger Ukrainian identity — among Russian and Ukrainian speakers — than ever before. And if your worldview is built on esoteric theory from hipster fascists, and you ignore how countries shift in real time in practice, you’ll misunderstand your enemy. What Ukraine has gone through in the past decade has changed it. What it has endured this past month has transformed it. In one terrible mistake, Putin has been more successful at nation-building than the US has been for two decades. He has built a new Ukraine even as he continues to carpet-bomb it. Which is, of course, the caveat. The invasion of Ukraine is integral to the entire edifice of the Putin era. It is what everything has been leading up to — from Chechnya to Syria. If it ends in manifest failure, Putin is finished. But if it becomes a grinding, hideous war of attrition; if the West loses interest (as we surely will); if exhaustion hits Ukraine itself and Russia is able to pulverize and terrorize it from a distance, I’m not so sure. At the very least, Putin may succeed in the permanent annexation of the Donbas and Crimea, claim he has disarmed the “Nazis” in Ukraine, milk the conflict for a jingoistic boost, and declare victory. Russia tends to win wars of attrition — whether against Hitler or Napoleon, or in Chechnya and Syria. Russian regimes have little compunction in the mass murder of civilians or brutal destruction of towns and cities where their enemies live. Putin has a narrative into which all of this fits, and the extraordinary sanctions — an economic nuclear bomb — imposed on Moscow will feed into his story of the persecution of Russia and the perfidy and hypocrisy of the West. Putin could become like Assad, his puppet, turning Mariupol into Aleppo, testing chemical weapons, but with a nuclear capacity to turn the planet to dust. Sanctions? Putin will use them, as Saddam did, to further demonize the West, and sing the praises of Russian stoicism and endurance. I pray he fails. But Putin is not without allies. China, Brazil, India, Israel — they’re all hedging their bets, alongside much of the global South. And the invasion of Iraq and the US abandonment of the Geneva Conventions have greatly undermined any moral authority the West once might have had in the eyes of many in the developing world. This story is not over. Nor is this war. Nor the project Putin has constructed. It may, in fact, just be beginning..

International cooperation needed to solve disease, climate change and nuclear proliferation

Goddard, May/June 22, STACIE E. GODDARD is Mildred Lane Kemper Professor of Political Science and Paula Phillips Bernstein ’58 Faculty Director of the Albright Institute at Wellesley College, Foreign Affairs, The Outsiders How the International System Can Still Check China and Russia, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-06/china-russia-ukraine-international-system-outsiders

The growing alarm about China’s and Russia’s revisionism has amplified calls for the United States to abandon its institutionalist strategy and instead embrace traditional realpolitik. The goal is no longer integration; it is deterrence: the United States must ensure that its military and alliances are strong enough to dissuade China and Russia from using force to achieve their aims. This was the stated approach of the Trump administration. Its 2017 National Security Strategy argued that while the United States would still “seek areas of cooperation with competitors,” its primary aim would be to “deter and if necessary, defeat aggression against U.S. interests and increase the likelihood of managing competitions without violent conflict.”

The United States needs to embrace a strategy of institutional realpolitik.
Instead of abandoning institutional integration in favor of saber rattling, Washington needs to make better use of institutions to exert its influence and limit that of its rivals. Even the most hardened proponents of realpolitik concede that institutional cooperation is necessary to deal with existential threats such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and pandemic disease. Ensuring that all the great powers remain firmly integrated in institutions that address these collective dangers—such as the Paris climate accord and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty—should be the goal.

Beyond this, the United States needs to embrace a strategy of institutional realpolitik. To begin with, it should abandon the idea that the purpose of international institutions is to eliminate revisionism or expand liberal global governance. Rather, international institutions are a tool to manage power politics. The most straightforward and significant aim should be to channel revisionist ambitions toward institutional forums and away from more violent and destructive behavior. International institutions could be designed not to stop competition through power politics but to direct it and make it more predictable by providing channels of communication, forums for negotiation, and clear rules about what counts as appropriate behavior.

In Ukraine, this may seem like too little, too late. But at some point, the war will be over, and it is important to consider what will come next. This is not to advocate another “reset” or a substantive partnership with Russia, which must not be permitted to subjugate its neighbors. The goal, instead, should be to redirect a hostile relationship back into more predictable forums—of the kind that stabilized U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War. Some might decry this as tantamount to appeasement. To be clear, the United States and its allies should make such cooperation contingent on Russian acceptance of existing territorial boundaries, including those of Ukraine. The United States should support similar institutions to modify China’s actions in the South China Sea. At a minimum, Washington should ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to give it more legitimacy in pushing back against illegal Chinese behavior.

The United States should also try to outflank its rivals by thinking strategically about where revisionists could mobilize support for an alternative and more illiberal international order in the future. This is particularly important in the coming long contest with China, in which Washington, so far, seems to be largely on the defensive. AUKUS, the trilateral security pact with Australia and the United Kingdom; the G-7; and the Five Eyes partnership with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom are all designed to shore up the United States’ security relationships. But Washington remains strangely reluctant to engage in offensive institution building. Biden has yet to reverse his predecessor’s decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, whose successor institution, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, established a free-trade zone stretching from Vietnam to Australia and encompassing around 40 percent of global GDP. The United States is also excluded from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a regional free-trade pact that is likely to build stronger ties between China and Southeast Asian countries. Finding a way to interact with these new institutions is critical if Washington wishes to bind itself to its allies and partners in meaningful, credible, and durable ways.

Moreover, China has significantly expanded its footprint in areas that the United States has treated as peripheral. Although originally Chinese officials portrayed the infrastructure projects of the BRI as a complement to the liberal economic order, Beijing has since begun to frame them as steps in building an alternative order, or a “community of common destiny.” Reforming international economic institutions to make them more attentive to the needs of aid-recipient countries could help outflank the BRI, which has experienced its own difficulties. For example, the United States could use its own existing institutions—the Millennium Challenge Corporation or the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation—to invest in infrastructure that would buttress the efforts of the new African Continental Free Trade Area and stymie China’s influence.

KEEP THEM CLOSE

Such reforms would not represent a return to the order building of the 1990s. The United States has neither the power nor the will to go back to that approach. Indeed, institutional realpolitik should involve selective retrenchment. Washington should be willing to identify places where it overextended at the height of U.S. primacy. It may make sense to pull back from the globally oriented, hyper-legalized institutional structure of the WTO, which has benefited countries that are not playing by its rules, such as China. Washington should also be willing to let its regional allies and partners take the lead in institution building. Strong regional institutions, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the EU, are critical to halting revisionist projects, even if they sometimes act against the United States’ interests.

The next era of great-power competition is already here, but this is not the time to be ramping up military confrontations and shutting down or pulling away from international institutions. U.S. policymakers should reject the false dichotomy that suggests that Washington must choose between realpolitik and institution building. Seeking to reinvigorate international alliances and institutions is not evidence of a lack of imagination or a naive faith in multilateralism. Rather, it is a tried-and-true way to play the game of great-power politics.

China has the military capabilities to dominate Asia

Wallace Gregson, April 4, 2022, Wallace C. Gregson served as a former assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs (2009-11) and is currently a senior advisor at Avascent International as well as senior director for China and the Pacific at the Center for the National Interest. Gregson last served as the Commander, U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific; Commanding General, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific; and Commander, U.S. Marine Corps Bases, Pacific, headquartered at Camp H. M. Smith, Hawaii. He is a senior advisor to General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems, Unipolarity Is Over: Great Power Rivalry Has Returned to Asia, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/unipolarity-over-great-power-rivalry-has-returned-asia-201628

Now our air and sea control are seriously challenged by China’s massive force development program; long-range precision munitions; and ubiquitous, pervasive surveillance. China took advantage of its massive geographic sanctuary, building a missile arsenal that looks to establish sea control from the land. But they are not limited to one option. Their naval building program, and that of all other armed elements of the People’s Liberation Army, including paramilitary organizations, continues unabated. China conducted an unchallenged dredging operation in the South China Sea to create large military outposts on seven previously submerged features. Some estimate that China achieved and demonstrated de facto control over the South China Sea through this action. Our allies and friends, and our forces on and within the First Island Chain, are within range and targeted. Intelligence estimates vary, of course, but there is no disagreement that China’s naval and air forces enjoy a great numerical advantage over U.S and allied forces. We’re outnumbered and outranged. And allies, notably Japan and the Philippines, are in the Chinese weapons engagement zone.

Strong deterrence prevents Chinese aggression

All elements of national power must be brought to bear. The current conflict in Ukraine demonstrates a remarkable ability of the United States, European allies, and many other nations to quickly agree on the employment of a wide range of national capabilities, including painful sanctions and seizure of ships. The same can work in Asia. With sea and air control over the South and East China Seas in conflict, we gain the ability to control access to the limited number of straits that enable China’s seaborne trade. This gives us the ability to control the conflict and contain it while working toward acceptable war termination conditions. Building and demonstrating this capability establishes the undoubted capability to prevail essential to deterrence.

Effective diplomacy relies on hard power

Gottlieb, 3-24, 22, Stuart Gottlieb teaches American foreign policy and international security at Columbia University, where he is a member of the Saltzman Institute of War & Peace Studies. He formerly served as a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter in the United States Senate (1999-2003), President Biden Is Leading From Weakness on Ukraine, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/president-biden-leading-weakness-ukraine-201383

Leading from strength means first recognizing that the Democratic Party’s approach to foreign policy over the past decade failed to prevent the first major land war in Europe since World War II. Following Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, the Obama administration responded with weak sanctions and a refusal to provide Ukraine with lethal military aid, out of fear it would provoke a full-scale Russian invasion. Last year, the Biden administration exacerbated this blunder by first signing an agreement with Ukraine that supports its “aspirations to join NATO” (a blinking red line for Vladimir Putin), while simultaneously refusing defensive military equipment to Ukraine—such as anti-tank javelins and anti-air stingers—in case Russia invades. In other words, Democratic foreign policy left us with the riskiest of circumstances: bold proclamations mixed with weak actions. As Frederick the Great once said, “diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.” The way to deter an opponent is by credibly raising the stakes in advance, not simply relying on promises of bold responses in the future. CONTINUES] In the 1980s, Reagan broke from four years of foreign policy malaise under Democratic president Jimmy Carter—including the expansion of Russian (Soviet) power in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—with a simple message of “peace through strength.” Though many worried his approach, which combined increased military power and tough diplomacy, might provoke World War III, it instead inspired the end of the Cold War and a period of unprecedented peace. Every moment in history requires its own assessments and actions. And hard power must always be applied with prudence. But, as shown in the past, major global challenges are best met by an America focused more on what its power can accomplish, than fear of what it might provoke.

Global democracy at-risk, the US must defend

Finally, leading from strength means bolstering U.S. leadership of Western alliances and security institutions like NATO. Democratic countries and the global liberal order itself are facing profound threats from anti-liberal, anti-democratic forces—from China, to Russia, to Islamist militancy. Democratic presidents like Barack Obama and Joe Biden fully understand this, and are most eloquent in their defenses of the West. But this moment requires a more assertive American leadership—one that more openly mixes power with principle.

Western response to Ukraine means China won’t attack Taiwan

Allison & Yaldin, 3-24, 22, Graham T. Allison is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? Amos Yadlin is former Chief of Israel’s Defense Intelligence and a Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Piercing the Fog of War: What Is Really Happening in Ukraine?, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/piercing-fog-war-what-really-happening-ukraine-201440?page=0%2C1

Could Xi now be having second thoughts about the “no limits” partnership with Moscow that the 5,000-word communique that capped the Xi-Putin summit at the opening of the Beijing Olympics declared? Certainly, he and his colleagues have to be thinking about: the underperformance of Russian soldiers, weaponry, and logistics; the rapid and massive response of the “Global West,” including Japan and Australia, that is willing to upend decades of economic, financial, and trade relationships to punish aggression; the beginning of the end for Putin, who will become an isolated pariah regardless of the outcome of the war; the growing domestic disturbances across Russia; the promise of prolonged popular resistance or insurgency in Ukraine even if Russia sacks Kyiv and installs a puppet regime On the other hand, if the U.S.-led sanctions and other forms of economic warfare were to prove effective in crippling Russia, China has to fear that it could be the next target. If the West were to succeed in “canceling” Putin, his circle of oligarch supporters, and other Putinistas, China would have to be concerned about its own vulnerabilities to something similar. Thus, at this point, we have seen no concrete evidence to suggest that China is seeking to constrain Russia’s war. If Russia had achieved a quick victory at low costs, and the West’s response essentially mirrored the sanctions imposed after Crimea, the likelihood of a Chinese move against Taiwan would have increased. Watching the performance of what Putin had advertised as a new modern army with the capacity to “fight and win,” the repeated breakdowns and malfunctions of Russia’s most modern military equipment and logistics, and the ferocity of the U.S.-led Western response, we suspect Beijing is pausing to review its plans for military action against Taiwan.

Deterrence fails, nuclear escalation likely

Matthew Harries, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. March 22, 2022, Putin’s Brutal War Shows the Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterren, Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/22/ukraine-putin-russia-nuclear/

The first conclusion to draw from all this is that nuclear deterrence is an inherently risky way of managing relations between great powers. Because deterrence is neither automatic nor static, there is no way to reap its prime benefit—discouraging war between nuclear-armed states—without some real chance of nuclear weapons being used, even if the probability is low. Unusable weapons cannot deter, and the risk of nuclear use will be present during any crisis of the sort currently seen in Ukraine. What’s more, the strong normative taboo against nuclear weapons means that the most reckless party to a conflict can extract the most value from playing with nuclear risk. In this case, it is clearly Russia. Nuclear brinksmanship may become a feature of Europe’s security landscape in a way that its current generation of leaders have not experienced firsthand. These risks are compounded by the possibility of inadvertent escalation. With tensions high and Russia fighting in close proximity to NATO forces, a mistake or misjudgment could be the spark for a wider war. Yet despite its dangers, moving away from nuclear deterrence will be very difficult. Unless the war ends in Russian defeat and regime change, Russia’s leadership will probably reckon it has benefited greatly from possessing nuclear weapons and will be even less inclined to disarm. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is watching Russia’s brutal aggression, conducted under the cover of nuclear threats and inflicted on a non-nuclear country that, unlike NATO members, does not enjoy the United States’ nuclear backing. This has awakened a sense of existential threat in Europe and is likely to strengthen support for nuclear weapons where they already exist. It has already ensured, for example, an accelerated German decision to procure F-35 fighters to replace the aircraft currently equipped with NATO nuclear bombs. So, as things stand right now, Russia’s invasion may have killed off for a generation or more the idea of an orderly, multilateral process of nuclear disarmament. That process was imagined as a managed series of steps, starting with deep reductions to the nuclear stockpiles of Russia and the United States and then drawing in the other nuclear-armed states, including China. It depended on the belief that nuclear weapons could be gradually moved to the background of world affairs. None of that seems likely today. Two drastic war outcomes—the use of nuclear weapons or Putin’s removal from power—could change this picture and even perhaps open up more sudden and disorderly paths to disarmament. A large-scale nuclear exchange would be a global catastrophe and remains unlikely. Yet if nuclear weapons were used in a limited way, there would be plausible pathways to further escalation. Indeed, nuclear deterrence relies on at least some fear of uncontrolled escalation in order to work. No risk, no deterrence. Nuclear use that did stay limited would still be a historic turning point, its meaning defined by the consequences imposed on Russia. If Russia were to use a small number of nuclear weapons with impunity and achieve concrete benefits, then, in addition to immediate humanitarian consequences, we would enter a dreadful new nuclear era. As well as killing off hopes for disarmament, Russian success could entice nuclear possessors to develop a broader range of limited options and even make use more likely elsewhere.

Hard power is needed to deter conflict; international norms and institutions are not enough to prevent it

Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and professor of international relations at Harvard University, March 21, 2022, Foreign Policy, Hand European Security Over to Europeans, Hand European Security Over to the Europeans, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/21/us-geopolitics-security-strategy-war-russia-ukraine-china-indo-pacific-europe/

Properly understood, the war in Ukraine shows that Europe taking greater responsibility for its security is not only desirable but feasible. The war has been a wake-up call for Europeans who believed that large-scale war on their continent had been made impossible by norms against conquest, international institutions, economic interdependence, and U.S. security guarantees. Russia’s actions are a brutal reminder that hard power is still vitally important and that Europe’s self-ascribed role as a “civilian power” is not enough. Governments from London to Helsinki have responded vigorously, belying predictions that “strategic cacophony” within Europe would prevent the continent from responding effectively to a common threat. Even pacifist, postmodern Germany appears to have gotten the memo.

Ukraine war proves Russia is weak and Europe can defend itself

The war has also exposed Russia’s persistent military deficiencies. Despite months of planning and preparation, the Russian invasion of far weaker Ukraine has been an embarrassing debacle for Russian President Vladimir Putin. No matter what he may hope, it is now obvious that Russia is simply not strong enough to restore its former empire—and will be even less so as Europe rearms. Moreover, even if Russia’s brutal tactics and superior numbers eventually force Ukraine to capitulate, Moscow’s power will continue to decline. Neither Europe nor the United States will return to business as usual with Russia as long as Putin remains in power, and the sanctions now in place will hamstring the battered Russian economy for years to come. Propping up a puppet regime in Kyiv would force Russia to keep a lot of unhappy soldiers on Ukrainian soil, facing the same stubborn insurgency that occupying armies typically encounter. And every Russian soldier deployed to police a rebellious Ukraine cannot be used to attack anyone else. The bottom line is that Europe can handle a future Russian threat on its own. NATO’s European members have always had far greater latent power potential than the threat to their east: Together, they have nearly four times Russia’s population and more than 10 times its GDP. Even before the war, NATO’s European members were spending three to four times as much on defense each year than Russia. With Russia’s true capabilities now revealed, confidence in Europe’s ability to defend itself should increase considerably. For these reasons, the war in Ukraine is an ideal moment to move toward a new division of labor between the United States and its European allies—one where the United States devotes attention to Asia and its European partners take primary responsibility for their own defense. The United States should drop its long-standing opposition to European strategic autonomy and actively help its partners modernize their forces. NATO’s next supreme allied commander should be a European general, and U.S. leaders should view their role in NATO not as first responders but as defenders of last resort.

China is the biggest threat to US security, Europe can defend itself

Toshihiro Nakayama, a professor of U.S. politics and foreign policy at Keio University, March 22, 2022, Maintain the Strategic Focus on China, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/21/us-geopolitics-security-strategy-war-russia-ukraine-china-indo-pacific-europe/,

Russia’s war in Ukraine will change geopolitical perceptions much more than geopolitical reality. While Russia under President Vladimir Putin looms large as a short-term challenge, China will remain the overriding threat in the medium to long term. How to balance the two will be critically important. Although attention tends to be drawn to the here and now, strategic focus must be maintained. We can expect major changes in Russia after Putin—if he does not take the world to hell before his demise. But the threat from China is structural, where a change in leadership will not bring major changes. The overwhelming reality is that China is narrowing the power gap with the United States. Nevertheless, Washington’s attention will have to be drawn toward the European front. In the face of Russia’s attempt to reestablish a sphere of influence through the use of force, the United States has no choice but to confront it with power. Even Europe, after it had noticeably distanced itself from the United States, has rediscovered that U.S. power is indispensable. Germany’s review of its defense posture, for example, is based on this premise. China will try to behave as a more responsible country even as it cozies up to Russia. Seeing the unity of the West and its partners in response to Russia’s war, Beijing may just now be learning how dangerous a game it is to attempt to change the status quo by force. It will become increasingly difficult for China to justify a Sino-Russian partnership with “no limits,” as Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping jointly described it shortly before the invasion. China may emphasize that it is not an outlaw state like Russia while doubling down on establishing a sphere of influence through nonmilitary coercion, as it is already doing. In Washington, it appears as if the battle between advocates of strategic competition and those of engagement has been settled in favor of the former, but we may see pushback by those who favor engagement based on the argument that China is behaving more responsibly than Russia. The United States does not have the operational capability or sustained attention for a full long-term commitment to two spheres. But geopolitical reality demands that Washington commit to both. If this is the case, then U.S. allies and partners on both the European and Indo-Pacific fronts will have no choice but to commit themselves more actively. The good news is that there are signs this is already happening. The message is certainly coming through that the United States will not intervene in Ukraine directly. This is understandable, as there is a clear line between NATO and non-NATO members. While this logic cannot be applied directly to Asia, there is no doubt that how we perceive U.S. credibility will be greatly affected by how the United States acts in Ukraine.

Transatlantic security cooperation needed to deter China

Anne-Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America, March 22, 2022, Build Out the Trans-Atlantic World, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/21/us-geopolitics-security-strategy-war-russia-ukraine-china-indo-pacific-europe/

The consensus opinion about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is that we are at an inflection point in global affairs, that the post-Cold War era is now over, and that if Putin wins, he will have rewritten the rules of the liberal international order. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is horrific, brutal, and a flagrant violation of international law, and the West should do everything—short of engaging Russia directly—to help the Ukrainians fight Russian forces to a standstill. But is this invasion a difference of degree so great that it is a difference of kind? Putin already broke international law in precisely the same way in 2014, when he invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. The United States violated the same pillar of the international order when it invaded Iraq without formal approval from the U.N. Security Council. Both the Soviet Union and the United States invaded countries they considered to be within their spheres of influence during the Cold War. The fundamental change today is not Putin’s war but China’s refusal to condemn it. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria has written, pushing Moscow and Beijing closer together is a costly strategic byproduct of the Biden administration’s policy of challenging and containing China. A world in which China and Russia support each other in redrawing territorial maps and rewriting the rules of the international system—rather than working to gain influence within existing institutions—is a much more dangerous world. In this context, the folly of the Biden administration’s elevation of the U.S.-China rivalry as the focal point of its security policy is all the more evident. Washington should have focused on Europe first by building out a trans-Atlantic economic, political, security, and social agenda and expanding it as far as possible across the entire Atlantic hemisphere, both North and South. The best way to compete with China is to recognize that the continents that both Europe and the United States have treated as their backyards deserve front-yard treatment. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine underlines just how indispensable Europe is as a military ally but even more as an economic, moral, and legal partner. Europe, however, has a different perspective: Although the invasion appears to be convincing key European countries—above all, Germany—to increase their defense spending, they are not doing this to draw closer to the United States. Rather, they are preparing for a future in which Europe may no longer be able to count on U.S. support. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke of purchasing a new generation of fighter jets and tanks but insisted they would have to be built in Europe with European partners. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s hostility to NATO and the continuing dysfunction of the U.S. political system have rattled European leaders even as they appreciate the Biden administration’s assiduous diplomacy and staunch support. The United States should encourage all European efforts to develop a stronger and more coherent pan-European defense—not least because European military power will make Washington less likely to take Europe for granted. At the same time, the Biden administration should press ahead with a new trans-Atlantic trade and investment treaty and digital common market. The United States should also encourage European relationships with countries in the global south while acknowledging they are often freighted with postcolonial baggage. And after Putin’s demise, Washington should support Europe in building a new security architecture from the Atlantic to the Urals, perhaps with intersecting and overlapping circles of defense cooperation among groups of countries. NATO will never be able to stretch to the Pacific, so other frameworks should be pursued.

Strong alliances needed to deter both Russia and China dominance

By C. Raja Mohan, a columnist at Foreign Policy and senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, March 22, 2022, Empower Alliances and Share Burdens, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/21/us-geopolitics-security-strategy-war-russia-ukraine-china-indo-pacific-europe/

Unlike the Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy, which viewed both Russia and China equally as threats, the Biden administration focused mainly on China in its 2021 interim guidance. U.S. President Joe Biden even reached out to Russian President Vladimir Putin in pursuit of a stable and predictable relationship that could let Washington focus on its priorities in the Indo-Pacific. Unsurprisingly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised questions about the sustainability of Biden’s tilt toward the Indo-Pacific. Does the United States have enough political bandwidth and military resources to cope with simultaneous challenges in both Europe and Asia? Some in Asia now worry that the threat posed by Russia in Europe could compel Biden to ease the confrontation with China and return to a China-first strategy in the region. Notwithstanding Washington’s diplomatic attempts to enlist Beijing’s help in stopping Putin’s war, the Feb. 4 joint proclamation of a Sino-Russian partnership with “no limits” by Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping precludes Biden from choosing between the European and Asian theaters. Further, the geopolitical trajectories of Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China are founded in a shared deep distrust of the United States. The room for either leader to negotiate a separate peace with Washington seems quite small; if anything, the prospect of a weakened Russia could bring them closer together. If Washington now faces both Chinese and Russian challenges, it must necessarily empower its allies and modernize burden-sharing arrangements in Asia and Europe. Fortunately, the Biden administration’s grand strategy has the space to do both. Its special emphasis on building what U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan calls a “latticework of flexible partnerships, institutions, alliances, [and] groups of countries” has already gained considerable traction in Asia. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi put it recently, the United States has developed a “five-four-three-two” formation in Asia—“from strengthening the Five Eyes to peddling the Quad, from piecing together AUKUS to tightening bilateral military alliances.” There could be no better endorsement of the Biden administration’s latticework in Asia. Thanks to Putin’s war in Ukraine, Europe’s prolonged sabbatical from geopolitics has come to an end. It is finally ready to do more for its own defense, including a historic German decision to rearm. If the United States’ European allies take greater responsibility for securing their homelands from the Russian threat, there is little reason for Washington to downgrade Asian concerns for the sake of European stability. Unlike the Europeans’ more recent epiphany, U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific—especially Australia, India, and Japan—have been ready to shoulder greater responsibilities for Asian security. Neither Asia nor Europe can balance China and Russia on its own for the foreseeable future. But by doing more for their own security, they help boost U.S. domestic political support for sustained military commitment to the two regions. By promoting a larger role and increased political say for its allies, Washington can build durable regional balances of power in Asia and Europe—backed by U.S. military power. That, in turn, might compel Beijing and Moscow to adopt more reasonable approaches to their neighbors and discard the belief that they can cut superpower deals with Washington over the heads of Asia and Europe. Shared security burdens and empowered alliances with the United States will make it easier for Asia and Europe to explore the balance of near-term containment of and long-term reconciliation with China and Russia. That outcome reinforces the enduring goal of U.S. grand strategy—to prevent the domination of either region by a single great power.

Ukraine proves multilateral organizations are useless for security

Kapitonenko, 3-4, 22, Mykola Kapitonenko is an Associate Professor at the Institute of International Relations in Kyiv, Ukraine, Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Has Changed the World, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia%E2%80%99s-invasion-ukraine-has-changed-world-200988

Sixth, international security organizations will become obsolete (they probably have been long before February 2022). The management of international disputes in multilateral fora has been profoundly poor, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has set a new low. The United Nations, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and other international security institutions failed to impose any additional costs on Moscow’s behavior. International organizations’ weakness may play in Russia’s favor in the short run, but it will undermine Russia’s normative power in places such as the UN Security Council.

US naval power needed to deter growing Chinese aggression, secure supply chains, protect the economy, reduce global poverty and maintain the liberal order

Schake, 2-22, 22, KORI SCHAKE is a Senior Fellow and Director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Safe Passage: The Transition From British to American Hegemony. She was Deputy Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department in 2007–8., https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2022-02-22/lost-sea

In 1897, the British Parliament pressed George Goschen, first lord of the Admiralty, about the potential maritime threat posed by a deepening alliance of continental European powers. Asked what the United Kingdom would do if it were confronted by multiple European navies at sea, Goschen replied, “Trust in Providence and a good Admiral.” In other words, the United Kingdom had no good answer for a challenge of that magnitude. The same could be said of the United States when it comes to the threat of a rapidly rising China. For years, the United States clung to a near-religious belief that as China grew more prosperous, it would become more democratic and politically liberal. Now that the authoritarian regime in Beijing has disproved this theory, it seems the American public can trust only in the good admirals of the U.S. Navy to handle the looming threat of an increasingly belligerent China, even as the American economy grows more and more reliant on that same adversary. That is because to a degree many observers fail to appreciate, the contest between Beijing and Washington will increasingly become a struggle for naval power. Naval analysts joke that in a war with China, the U.S. military should first strike the port of Long Beach, in California, since disrupting China’s seaborne commerce to the United States would inflict more damage on Beijing than attacking the Chinese mainland. So interwoven are transnational supply chains that pandemic delays in China caused container ship traffic jams in Long Beach so costly that the Biden administration considered deploying the National Guard to help unsnarl them. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised awareness of those global linkages and spurred some governments to consider “reshoring” production in crucial areas, but the webs of investment, communication, and production that bind economies together continue to expand. Maritime trade and power are critical to these global networks: around 90 percent of the world’s traded goods are transported by sea. Discussions of power and strategy in the twenty-first century often revolve around the novel frontiers of cyberspace and outer space. But in the near term, the geopolitical future will play out mostly in an older, more familiar arena: the sea. Two new books assess the challenges and importance of contemporary maritime power relations. Bruce Jones’s To Rule the Waves and Gregg Easterbrook’s The Blue Age are primarily concerned with international security, building on the naval strategist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan’s premise that “the history of sea power . . . is largely a military history.” Both make strong cases that U.S. security and prosperity depend on naval dominance, and both are laden with omens that commercial waters will once again turn violent. These books will exasperate experts but will offer most readers helpful insights into maritime aspects of the global economy, the rise of China, and climate change. Jones takes a journalistic approach, using accounts of his own encounters and conversations as a foundation for his ideas and explanations. To illuminate the centrality of the oceans in everyday commerce and communications, he charts the enormous web of undersea fuel pipelines and transmission cables, underscoring global economic reliance on seaborne delivery. And he makes powerfully clear that the oceans “play a surprisingly central role in the realities of energy, and in the global fight over climate change.” Jones sets out to show that “the world’s oceans are rapidly becoming the most important zone of confrontation between the world’s great military actors.” He argues that the cooperative patterns of the twentieth century are eroding, setting the stage for a large-scale conflict—and that geopolitical struggles are now playing out on the high seas. Given this grim forecast, Jones warns against the diminishment of U.S. maritime hegemony. His recommendations, however, are unrealistic and lack analytic rigor: he calls, for example, for an “alliance of alliances” in which the United States would orchestrate global cooperation among all energy-consuming economies. He would also have Washington “tackle the question of winners and losers from globalization” and “adopt the kinds of plans needed to abate carbon emissions.” But he offers few specifics to flesh out any of these proposals. Control of the sea will be the defining factor of the next century. Easterbrook likewise advocates maintaining U.S. maritime dominance, but he takes a different tack. He is clearly writing for people on the political left. “Many people do not like military organizations,” he declares. “The reasons to dislike them are self-evident, and we can dream of the day when no nation requires an army or navy.” Nonetheless, Easterbrook wants to make “a liberal case for the U.S. Navy” on the basis that its power has produced “an amazing reduction of poverty in the developing world . . . and higher material standards almost everywhere.” Easterbrook argues that beyond maintaining U.S. naval dominance, Washington could seek to enhance the U.S. Navy’s global reach by having its ships make more port calls, establishing more bases to defend allies, and enforcing freedom of navigation. But he undercuts his argument by concluding that the U.S. national debt is already too large to make such steps fiscally attainable. Easterbrook, like Jones, offers a number of policy prescriptions, but he makes little effort to evaluate alternatives. Easterbrook is even more utopian than Jones, proposing the establishment of a “World Oceans Organization” that would provide “a true global governance system” to protect worker rights, restrict weapons, regulate offshore energy projects, enforce free trade, and guarantee environmental standards throughout the world’s waters. Both authors make faulty assertions that dent the credibility of their analyses and prescriptive ideas. Contrary to Jones’s interpretation of the 1956 Suez crisis, it was not “one of the first moments when the Cold War might have escalated into actual conflict”: the 1948–49 crisis over the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the Korean War fit that description more closely. For his part, Easterbrook wrongly states that “the United States has nearly the same number of deployable modern naval vessels as do all other nations combined,” when China alone has a larger navy than the United States. He also blames friction between China and the United States on “threat inflation by the military-industrial complex and alarmism by journalists,” absolving China of any responsibility. Regarding the South China Sea, where China has routinely violated other countries’ territorial sovereignty and created artificial islands to establish military bases, Easterbrook concludes: “So far these waters are mostly peaceful—for which China receives no credit in the West.” Despite their flaws, both books are admirable attempts to lure general readers into specialized waters. For the United States to meet the challenges of globalization, the rise of China, and climate change, ordinary Americans will need to develop a better grasp of maritime issues and of their own country’s role as a naval power. To preserve the decaying international order that Jones and Easterbrook laud, the United States will need to restore the military and civilian maritime power that it has allowed to atrophy. The global interconnectedness that both authors praise has enabled the rise of enormous private logistics conglomerates that now dwarf the U.S. merchant marine fleet, which is essential for the United States’ capacity to mobilize for military purposes in times of war. In 1950, the U.S. merchant marine fleet accounted for 43 percent of global shipping; by 1994, that share had dropped to four percent, despite a 1920 law requiring ships passing between U.S. ports to be built and registered in the United States and operated by a crew of mostly U.S. citizens. The current U.S. merchant fleet of 393 vessels ranks just 27th in the world. By contrast, China has the world’s second-largest merchant marine fleet, and that doesn’t include the notorious paramilitary fishing fleet it uses to launch incursions into disputed waters.

China wants tech dominance in AI and biotechnology to enable global leadership

MICHAEL BECKLEY is is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower., March/April 2022,https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2021-02-14/china-new-world-order-enemies-my-enemy, Enemies of My Enemy How Fear of China Is Forging a New World Order

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

The architecture of the new order remains a work in progress. Yet two key features are already discernible. The first is a loose economic bloc anchored by the G-7, the group of democratic allies that controls more than half of the world’s wealth. These leading powers, along with a rotating cast of like-minded states, are collaborating to prevent China from monopolizing the global economy. History has shown that whichever power dominates the strategic goods and services of an era dominates that era. In the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom was able to build an empire on which the sun never set in part because it mastered iron, steam, and the telegraph faster than its competitors. In the twentieth century, the United States surged ahead of other countries by harnessing steel, chemicals, electronics, aerospace, and information technologies. Now, China hopes to dominate modern strategic sectors—including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, semiconductors, and telecommunications—and relegate other economies to subservient status. In a 2017 meeting in Beijing, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told H. R. McMaster, then the U.S. national security adviser, how he envisioned the United States and other countries fitting into the global economy in the future: their role, McMaster recalled Li saying, “would merely be to provide China with raw materials, agricultural products, and energy to fuel its production of the world’s cutting-edge industrial and consumer products.”

China’s authoritarian dominances threatens the global order

The international order is falling apart, and everyone seems to know how to fix it. According to some, the United States just needs to rededicate itself to leading the liberal order it helped found some 75 years ago. Others argue that the world’s great powers should form a concert to guide the international community into a new age of multipolar cooperation. Still others call for a grand bargain that divides the globe into stable spheres of influence. What these and other visions of international order have in common is an assumption that global governance can be designed and imposed from the top down. With wise statesmanship and ample summitry, the international jungle can be tamed and cultivated. Conflicts of interest and historical hatreds can be negotiated away and replaced with win-win cooperation. The history of international order, however, provides little reason for confidence in top-down, cooperative solutions. The strongest orders in modern history—from Westphalia in the seventeenth century to the liberal international order in the twentieth—were not inclusive organizations working for the greater good of humanity. Rather, they were alliances built by great powers to wage security competition against their main rivals. Fear and loathing of a shared enemy, not enlightened calls to make the world a better place, brought these orders together. Progress on transnational issues, when achieved, emerged largely as a byproduct of hardheaded security cooperation. That cooperation usually lasted only as long as a common threat remained both present and manageable. When that threat dissipated or grew too large, the orders collapsed. Today, the liberal order is fraying for many reasons, but the underlying cause is that the threat it was originally designed to defeat—Soviet communism—disappeared three decades ago. None of the proposed replacements to the current order have stuck because there hasn’t been a threat scary or vivid enough to compel sustained cooperation among the key players Until now. Through a surge of repression and aggression, China has frightened countries near and far. It is acting belligerently in East Asia, trying to carve out exclusive economic zones in the global economy, and exporting digital systems that make authoritarianism more effective than ever. For the first time since the Cold War, a critical mass of countries face serious threats to their security, welfare, and ways of life—all emanating from a single source. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. This moment of clarity has triggered a flurry of responses. China’s neighbors are arming themselves and aligning with outside powers to secure their territory and sea-lanes. Many of the world’s largest economies are collectively developing new trade, investment, and technology standards that implicitly discriminate against China. Democracies are gathering to devise strategies for combating authoritarianism at home and abroad, and new international organizations are popping up to coordinate the battle. Seen in real time, these efforts look scattershot. Step back from the day-to-day commotion, however, and a fuller picture emerges: for better or worse, competition with China is forging a new international order. ORDERS OF EXCLUSION The modern liberal mind associates international order with peace and harmony. Historically, however, international orders have been more about keeping rivals down than bringing everyone together. As the international relations theorist Kyle Lascurettes has argued, the major orders of the past four centuries were “orders of exclusion,” designed by dominant powers to ostracize and outcompete rivals. Order building wasn’t a restraint on geopolitical conflict; it was power politics by other means, a cost-effective way to contain adversaries short of war. Fear of an enemy, not faith in friends, formed the bedrock of each era’s order, and members developed a common set of norms by defining themselves in opposition to that enemy. In doing so, they tapped into humanity’s most primordial driver of collective action. Sociologists call it “the in-group/out-group dynamic.” Philosophers call it “Sallust’s theorem,” after the ancient historian who argued that fear of Carthage held the Roman Republic together. In political science, the analogous concept is negative partisanship, the tendency for voters to become intensely loyal to one political party mainly because they despise its rival. For the first time since the Cold War, a critical mass of countries face serious threats to their security, welfare, and ways of life. This negative dynamic pervades the history of order building. In 1648, the kingdoms that won the Thirty Years’ War enshrined rules of sovereign statehood in the Peace of Westphalia to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Great Britain and its allies designed the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht to contain France by delegitimizing territorial expansion through royal marriages and the assertion of dynastic ties, Louis XIV’s preferred method of amassing power. The Concert of Europe, the post-Napoleonic peace established in Vienna in 1815, was used by conservative monarchies to forestall the rise of liberal revolutionary regimes. The victors of World War I built the interwar order to hold Germany and Bolshevik Russia in check. After World War II, the Allies initially designed a global order, centered on the United Nations, to prevent a return of Nazi-style fascism and mercantilism. When the onset of the Cold War quickly hamstrung that global order, however, the West created a separate order to exclude and outcompete Soviet communism. For the duration of the Cold War, the world was divided into two orders: the dominant one led by Washington, and a poorer one centered on Moscow. The main features of today’s liberal order are direct descendants of the United States’ Cold War alliance. After the Soviets decided not to join the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt), these institutions were repurposed as agents of capitalist expansion—first, to rebuild capitalist economies and, later, to promote globalization. The Marshall Plan laid the foundation for the European Community by lavishing U.S. aid on governments that agreed to expel communists from their ranks and work toward an economic federation. NATO created a united front against the Red Army. The chain of U.S. alliances ringing East Asia was constructed to contain communist expansion there, especially from China and North Korea. U.S. engagement with China, which lasted from the 1970s to the 2010s, was a gambit to exploit the Sino-Soviet split. Each of these initiatives was an element of an order designed first and foremost to defeat the Soviet Union. In the absence of the Cold War threat, Japan and West Germany would not have tolerated prolonged U.S. military occupations on their soil. The British, the French, and the Germans would not have pooled their industrial resources. The United States—which had spent the previous two centuries ducking international commitments and shielding its economy with tariffs—would not have thrown its weight behind international institutions. Nor would it have provided security guarantees, massive aid, and easy market access to dozens of countries, including the former Axis powers. Only the threat of a nuclear-armed, communist superpower could compel so many countries to set aside their conflicting interests and long-standing rivalries and build the strongest security community and free-trade regime in history. BUCKLING UNDER THE PRESSURE For decades, the United States and its allies knew what they stood for and who the enemy was. But then the Soviet Union collapsed, and a single overarching threat gave way to a kaleidoscope of minor ones. In the new and uncertain post–Cold War environment, the Western all