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Reimagining Great Power Relations
Reimagining the International Environment: Part 1
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
Senior Fellow, the Watson Institute for International and
Public Affairs, Brown University
9 March 2017,
Providence, Rhode Island
This is the first of three lectures on the
changing international political, economic, and military environment after the
Pax Americana. The second will consider
the impact of China’s rise on relationships in Asia. The third will address the changes underway
in the Middle East.
International
reactions to the election of Donald Trump have catalyzed a far swifter collapse
of the American-led world order than anyone could have imagined. Interactions between great and middle-ranking
powers are undergoing rapid evolution.
The political, economic, and military interests and influence of the
United States still span the globe, as does American popular culture. Nations and non-state actors in every region
continue to worry about American policies, activism, or passivity on matters of
concern to them. In short, the United
States is still the planet’s only all-around world power. But the clout that status confers is not what
it used to be.
The only other
polity with the potential to rival America’s worldwide influence at present is
the European Union (EU). It has the
money but lacks the ambition or political and military cohesion to exert
decisive influence beyond its periphery.
Until “Brexit,” the EU included two former world powers, Britain and
France. Now only France -- which retains
a sphere of influence in Africa and overseas territories in the Caribbean,
Indian Ocean, and Polynesia – can bring a global perspective to EU councils.
China and Japan
have great worldwide economic influence but little political appeal and
negligible ability to project conventional military power to regions remote
from them. Russia has a nuclear arsenal
that can devastate every corner of the globe.
It has again become a major actor in the Middle East, but otherwise
lacks economic, political, or cultural reach much beyond the confines of the
former Soviet Union. Brazil and India
dream of global roles but exercise little influence beyond their immediate
regions and the parts of Africa that are closest to them.
The Trump
administration’s rejection of multilateralism marks a major step back from
international leadership by the United States.
It signals that America no longer seeks to make and interpret the rules
that govern the world’s political, economic, and military interactions. Instead, Washington will seek unilateral
advantage through piecemeal bilateral deals.
This pivot away from preeminence has created a geopolitical and geoeconomic
power vacuum into which other great powers are being drawn. Responsibility for the maintenance of global
political, economic, and military order is everywhere devolving to the regional
level.
Meanwhile, the
United States is increasingly isolated on transnational issues. Official American antipathy to science on
climate change and similar issues has discredited the United States as a
participant in setting polices that address them. Washington’s escalating disdain for the
United Nations and international law has meanwhile delegitimized its role as the
“world policeman.” The uncertainties
inherent in this situation are everywhere accelerating the formation of
regional groupings. But, despite some
stirring by China, there is as yet no credible successor to the United States
as a global order-setter.
The U.S. armed
forces remain the only military establishment with global power projection
capabilities and experience in managing multinational coalitions. Generals and admirals bestride the highly
militarized foreign policy apparatus of the United States government. This caps a longstanding trend. Americans so thoroughly identify “power” as exclusively
military in nature that it has been necessary to invent an academic concept of
“soft power” to embrace measures short of war like diplomacy.
But global military
primacy no longer translates into political leadership at either the global or
regional levels. It doesn’t even
guarantee dominance in the world's regions.
Recent American
military interventions abroad have consistently evoked resistance that has frustrated
the achievement of their goals. Unless
tied to clearly attainable political objectives, the use of force can
accomplish little other than the slaughter of foreigners and the destruction of
their artifacts. This generates more
blowback than security.
As American
influence has receded, regional great powers like China, India, Iran, and
Russia have begun to consolidate
regional state systems centered on themselves.
This process was underway even before “America first” impaired U.S.
leadership by making American indifference to the interests and concerns of
other countries officially explicit.
America has now chosen publicly to redefine itself internationally as
the foreign relations equivalent of a sociopath[1]
– a country indifferent to the rules, the consequences for others of its
ignoring them, and the reliability of its word.
No nation can now comfortably entrust its prosperity or security to
Washington, no matter how militarily powerful it perceives America to be.
In the United
States, there has been a clear drift toward the view that outcomes, not due
process, are the sole criteria of justice.
Procedures – that is, judicial decisions, elections, or actions by
legislatures – no longer confer legitimacy.
The growing American impatience with institutions and processes is
reflected in the economic nationalism and transactionalism that now guide U.S.
policy. Washington now reserves the
right to pick and choose which decisions by international tribunals like the
World Trade Organization (WTO) it will follow or ignore.
The idea that
previously agreed arrangements can be abandoned or renegotiated at will has
succeeded the principle of “pacta sunt servanda” (“agreements must be
kept”). The result is greatly reduced
confidence not only in the reliability of American commitments but also in the
durability of the international understandings that have constituted the status
quo. In the security arena, this trend
is especially pronounced with respect to arms control arrangements. As an example,, Russia has cited American
scofflaw behavior to justify its own delinquencies in Ukraine and with respect
to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
When a hegemon
fails to pay attention to the opinions of its allies, dependencies, and client
states or to show its adversaries that it can be counted upon to play by the
rules it insists they follow, it conjures up its own antibodies. In the absence of empathy, there can be no
mutual reliance or collective security.
Without confidence in the reliability of protectors or allies, nations
must be ready to defend themselves by themselves at any moment. If covenants are readily dishonored, the law offers
no assurance of safety. Only credible
military deterrence can protect against attack.
The post-Cold
War era began in 1990 when the international community came together to affirm
that the new order should not allow large states to use force to annex smaller,
weaker neighbors, as Iraq attempted to do with Kuwait. But the opening years of the 21st
century have taught small and medium-sized nations a different lesson. They have learned that to preclude threats to
their independence and territorial integrity from great powers they must either
accommodate them, seek the protection of alliances with others, or possess the
capacity to inflict severe injury on any potential attacker, no matter how
militarily powerful.
They have
learned that there is no longer any security to be found in the United Nations
Charter or its decision-making processes.
International law and vetoes in the U.N. Security Council did not
protect Serbia from great power intervention to detach Kosovo from it. Nor did opposition in the Security Council
prevent the coercive separation of Crimea from Ukraine. No one even bothers to mention international
law in discussions of Syria, where external interventions to produce regime
change have been unabashedly overt. The
old rules no longer provide security. They
are increasingly ignored.
An Indian
general remarked after the 1990-91 Gulf War that its lesson was clear. To be secure from attack by the United States
one must possess a nuclear deterrent.
(Pakistan would no doubt say the same thing about India, as would some
in Iraq and Iran about Israel.) Lacking
nuclear weapons, Iraq and Libya saw their governments overthrown and their
leaders brutally murdered. Nuclear-armed
North Korea – by any measure, a far more dangerous regime – has so far been
spared foreign attack. It is telling
that every non-nuclear weapons state now allegedly attempting to develop such
weapons and related delivery systems (including north Korea) is said to be
doing so to deter an attack by the United States. Not one appears to be motivated by a desire
to deter China, Europe's nuclear powers, India, Japan, Pakistan, or Russia.
Across the
globe, the lessened security that results from the erosion of rule-bound order
has been compounded by hysteria over attacks by terrorists. The spread of
Islamophobia has paved the way for the revival of other forms of xenophobia,
like racism and anti-Semitism. Illiberalism
looks like the wave of the future. We are witnessing the consolidation of
national security-obsessed garrison states.
Some sub-global
powers -- like Iran, Turkey, Russia, and China -- are demanding deference to
their power by the countries in their “near abroad” or “near seas.” They thus negate the near-universal sphere of influence that America
asserted during the so-called “unipolar moment” of worldwide U.S. hegemony that
followed the Cold War. They are imposing their own military
precautionary zones (“cordons sanitaires”) to manage and reduce external
threats from other powers. This pushback
is resented by the United States, which – with no sense of irony, given its own
insistence on exclusive control of the Americas – charges them with attempts to project illegitimate "spheres
of influence" beyond their borders.
By disavowing
longstanding U.S. commitments, the Trump
administration has inadvertently confirmed foreign doubts about American
reliability. Efforts to allay these
concerns have garnered little credence.
The ebb of U.S. influence is forcing countries previously dependent on
Washington’s protection to make unwelcome choices between diversifying their
international relationships, decoupling their foreign policies from America's,
forming their own ententes and coalitions to buttress deterrence, or
accommodating more powerful neighbors.
Whatever mix of actions they choose, they also boost spending to build
more impressive armed forces.
Almost all
countries still under U.S. protection continue to affirm their alliance with
the United States even as they ramp up a capacity to go it alone. Arms races are becoming the norm in most
regions of the world. Global military
expenditures grew by fifty percent from 2001 to 2015.
Not long ago,
geopolitics was largely explicable in bipolar terms of US-Soviet rivalry. After a unipolar moment, the political and
economic orders have gone fractal – understandable only in terms of evolving
complexities at the regional or sub-regional level. Intra-regional rivalries now fuel huge purchases
by middle-ranking powers of state-of-the-art weaponry produced by the great
powers. No one should confuse increased
weapons purchases with a deepening of alliance commitments.
So, for
example, Saudi Arabia’s arms purchases have tripled in the past five
years. Trends in other Gulf Cooperation
Council (GCC) member countries are similar.
At the same time, the Gulf Arabs are reaching out to China, the EU,
India, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, and Turkey and convening pan-Muslim coalitions
against Islamist terrorism and Iran.
They have undertaken
unprecedentedly unilateral and aggressive military interventions in
places like Libya, Syria, and Yemen. As
they have done so, the countries of the Fertile Crescent – Iraq, Lebanon, and
Syria – have drawn ever closer to Iran.
Iraqi Kurdistan has become a de
facto Turkish dependency.
Before a
Western-supported coup ousted Ukraine’s elected president[2],
that country wobbled between East and West but was on its way into the Russian
embrace. The Philippines has distanced
it from the United States and bundled with China. So has Thailand. Myanmar and Vietnam, by contrast, are seeking
partners to balance China. The Baltic
states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have doubled down on their reliance on
NATO, which they joined in 2004 to secure their independence from Russia. Cuba and Venezuela look to Russia and China
for support against ongoing American policies of regime change.
Meanwhile,
international governance of trade and investment continues to devolve to the
regional level and configure itself to supply chains. Examples include new trade pacts, like the
RCEP,[3]
the Pacific Alliance,[4]
and the Eurasian Economic Union;[5]
preexisting blocs like the GCC,[6]
Mercosur,[7]
and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization;[8]
as well as well-established confederations like the 27-member post-Brexit EU
and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)[9]. Each of these groupings has one or two
heavyweight members at its core, constituting a natural leadership.
Where such
regional arrangements have been implemented, rules are made and enforced
without much, if any, reference to external powers. Thus, the EU has had no role to speak of in shaping
relations between Canada, Mexico, and the United States under the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Conversely, the United States has had very little say in decisions made
in Brussels on rules for trade and investment in the EU and its associated
economies. Given the Trump
administration’s aversion to multilateralism, the United States will have no
say at all in the standard-setting that will take place in either the RCEP or
the 65-country pan-Eurasian economic community that is beginning to emerge from
China’s “belt and road” initiative.
Regionalism limits the reach of great powers. Bilateralism limits it even more.
The
decentralization of authority over global economic, political, and defense
issues represents a net loss of influence by the U.S. and other great powers
over the evolution of the international state system. But it presents both a challenge and an
opportunity for middle-ranking powers.
On the one hand, as U.S. and EU influence atrophies, they have an
expanding role in international rule-making.
On the other, they are now subject to pressure from neighboring great
powers that is unmoderated by any global rules.
Take Mexico as
an example. This is a proud nation of
nearly 130 million people, the world’s 13th largest country
geographically and its 11th most populous. It has the world’s 11th largest
economy. By every measure, Mexico is a
middle-ranking power. As such, even if
it were not a member of NAFTA and the Pacific Alliance, it would have a
significant voice in the G-20, the WTO, the United Nations, Latin America, the
Caribbean, and the Asia-Pacific.
Interdependence
has mitigated but not erased historic Mexican resentment of domineering
American behavior. Mexicans have not forgotten that the United
States invaded their country and annexed 55 percent of its territory in 1846 -
1848. But, since the entry into force of
NAFTA in January 1994, Mexico’s economy has become almost fully integrated with
the American economy through complex supply chains. Eighty percent of Mexican exports now go to
the U.S. Mexico has become the United
States’ second largest export market and its third largest trading partner
(after China and Canada). It has also
quietly transformed itself into a reliably pro-American bulwark against influences
from extra-hemispheric powers like Russia and China. It has proven the efficacy of economic
opening and reform and has become an influential advocate of liberal economics
as opposed to the perennial statism and mercantilism of most other Latin American
nations.
Now Mexico is
faced with demands from the Trump administration to cooperate in dismantling
its interdependence with the United States.
At the same time, the U.S. president is denigrating Mexicans, proposing
to wall them out, and threatening to deport masses of undocumented migrants and
alleged criminals to Mexico, whether they are Mexican or not and whether Mexico
has any legal reason to accept them or not.
Not surprisingly, Mexican opinion is now hostile to the United
States. Mexico’s government has little
leeway for compromise. Surrender to
American demands is not an option. But
Mexico currently has little leverage over Washington.
So Mexico faces
highly unwelcome choices. It can bargain
as best it can on its own, risking its prosperity and stability on what is
almost certainly a bad bet. It can seek
leverage over the United States by suspending cooperation against transit by
illegal migrants and the supply of narcotics to American addicts. It can make common cause against the United
States by forming a global united front with other economies targeted by the
Trump administration for their bilateral trade surpluses, like China, Germany,
Japan, and south Korea. It can adopt
Cuban-style defiance of Washington’s efforts to bring it to heel, allying
itself with extra-hemispheric powers like China and/or Russia or Iran. Or it could choose some mixture of all of
these options. It is too early to
predict what course Mexican-American relations will take in the age of Trump. They will be affected by many factors,
including the state of relations between the United States and other great
powers – especially China and Russia.
Mexico is far
from the only middle-ranking power now of necessity maneuvering between the
world’s great powers. Ukraine has yet to
find its place between Russia, the EU, and the United States. Turkey has distanced itself from the EU and America
and formed an entente (limited partnership for limited purposes) with
Russia. Iran has reached out to India as
well as Russia in order to counter the United States and the Gulf Arabs. Saudi Arabia – once exclusively attached to
the United States – is actively courting China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and
Russia. Pakistan is seeking to avoid having
to choose between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
At the same time, it has accepted the task of coordinating the
activities of a pan-Islamic military alliance that implicitly counters both
Iran and an ever more assertively Islamophobic India. To reduce dependence on the United States and
the GCC, Egypt is courting cooperation with Iran, Russia, and Turkey. Old global
alignments are everywhere giving way to more complex patterns.
Despite an
unprecedented degree of interdependence between them, relations between the
great powers are also in motion. Brazil,
China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States are each one
another’s largest or second largest trading partners and sources of foreign
direct investment. They are linked to
each other in global supply chains, which tend to converge in and between large
economies. All are members of the
Bretton Woods legacy institutions – the International Monetary Fund (IMF),
World Bank, and WTO. These institutions
earlier accommodated the rise of Japan.
More recently, they have lagged in reflecting the rapidly increasing
weight of other non-Western economies in world trade and finance.
The formation
of the “BRICS” group was a collective effort by Brazil, Russia, India, and
China (soon joined by South Africa) to develop institutions to reflect the
current distribution of global commercial and financial power and contemporary
governance requirements. When Bretton
Woods took place the world had just been crushed by World War II. America dominated the world economy,
justifying its preeminent role in global
governance. Recent shifts in economic
balances of power have not been reflected in legacy institutions. Washington
remains the nominal leader in them but finds itself increasingly sidelined as
others feel obliged to work around it.
The Trump administration’s skepticism about the value of the
international economic institutions that earlier generations of Americans
created has accelerated the diminishment of U.S. managerial control over the
global economy.
Similar erosion
of U.S. primacy is evident in international politics. China, India, and Russia have met annually
since 2002 to discuss how to establish a multipolar world order in which U.S.
unilateralism cannot hold sway.
Antagonism between the world’s greatest powers is growing. With the United States pushing back against
Russia in the West and China in the East, the two are being nudged together to
counter America.
To offset
Sino-Russian partnership, Japan seeks rapprochement with India and Russia,
leavening its longstanding exclusive reliance on the United States. China, Europe, Russia, and the United States
are also courting India, which is, as always, playing hard to get. Meanwhile, China is reaching out to Europe
and the EU is attempting to work with it to fill the leadership vacuum in the
Asia-Pacific created by the sudden U.S. abandonment of the economic leg of its
“pivot to Asia.” No region is immune
from realignment in its international relationships. Brazil’s membership in the BRICS group
symbolizes its cultivation of relationships with emerging powers to balance
those it has with the United States and middle-ranking powers in the Western
Hemisphere.
As a
consequence of these trends, we are now well into a world of many competing
power centers and regional balances.
Long-term vision and short-term diplomatic agility are at a
premium. Neither is anywhere
evident. In their absence, territorial
disputes rooted in World War II and Cold War troop movements and lines of
control, arms races (nuclear as well as conventional), shifting balances of
prestige, and the reduced moderating effect of international organizations are
helping to escalate alienation and tension between the great powers.
The stakes are
high. Trade wars that could wreck the
global economy and degrade the prosperity of all are now all too easy to imagine. Armed conflict could break out at any time
along the unsettled borders between China and India and China and Japan. The U.S. and Chinese navies are maneuvering
against each other in the South China Sea.
The two countries appear to be headed for a military confrontation over
Taiwan. The Peloponnesian War and World
War I remind us that squabbles between lesser powers can drag their patrons
into existential strife despite their better judgment.
Notwithstanding
ample opportunity to do so, the U.S., EU, and Russia failed to craft a
cooperative post-Cold War order to regulate their interaction in Europe. There is no agreement on where NATO ends and
Russia begins. We now face the possibility that it will take an armed face-down
to define a dividing line between them.
All great
powers now share an avowed interest in containing Islamist terrorism and
remediating its causes. Escalating
antipathies born of territorial disputes and Chinese and Russian opposition to
U.S. primacy prevent cooperation to this end.
The politically expedient demonization of strategic rivals in
democracies like the United States inhibits cooperation even where specific interests
nearly completely coincide. The same
factors diminish the likelihood of cooperation on other matters where interests
substantially overlap -- like Syria and Korea.
Meanwhile, U.S.
deployments of ballistic missile defenses and the increasing lethality of American
nuclear warheads have convinced both Russia and China that Washington is
reaching for the ability to decapitate them in a first strike. Russia and the United States are in a nuclear
arms race again. China seems to have
provoked to develop a second-strike capability that, like Russia’s, will be
able to annihilate, not just maim America. The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists has moved its “Doomsday Clock” the closest to midnight since 1954.
The risks the
world now faces were not (and are not) inevitable. They are the product of lapses of
statesmanship and failures to consider how others see and react to us. The setbacks to America’s ability to shape
the international environment to its advantage are not the result of declining
capacity on its part. They are the
consequence of a failure to adapt to new realities and shifting power
balances. Raging against change will not
halt it. Pulling down the frameworks and
trashing the rules on which North American and global prosperity were built is
far more likely to prove counterproductive than empowering. Buying more military hardware will not remedy
the national strategy deficit. Gutting
the foreign affairs agencies and doubling down on diplomacy-free foreign policy
will deepen it.
Americans are
badly in need of a national conversation about their aspirations in foreign
affairs and how to take advantage of the changing world order to realize them. That conversation did not take place during
the run-up to the 2016 election. The
inauguration did not mark an end to the chaos of the presidential transition. Forty-eight
days later, most government policy positions remain unfilled. Policy processes have yet to be defined.
In the current
atmosphere, slogans displace considered judgments, intelligence about the
outside world is unwelcome, expertise is dismissed as irrelevant or worse, and
policy pronouncements appease the delusions of political constituencies instead
of addressing verifiable realities. The
Congress has walked off the job. Some
sort of order must eventually reassert itself in the U.S. government, but the
prospects for intelligent dialogue about the implications for American
interests of developments abroad seem exceptionally poor.
But such
dialogue cannot be deferred for another four years. It seems ever clearer that it will not
originate in Washington. It must begin
somewhere. Why not here? Why not now?
[1]Mental health specialists define a “sociopath” as
someone who exhibits a lack of empathy and a disregard for community norms, the
rules both written and unwritten that help keep the world safe and fair for
all. A sociopath is someone with no conscience who ignores reality to lead an
uncaring and selfish life. The sociopath cares only for himself and lacks the
ability to treat other people as worthy of consideration.
[2]Viktor Yanukovych, elected February 2010, overthrown
and driven into exile in Russia February 2014.
[3]The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
comprised of the ten member states of ASEAN and Australia, China, India, Japan,
New Zealand, and south Korea.
[4]Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, the“Alianza del PacÃfico”.
[5]Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia.
[6]Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the
United Arab Emirates.
[7]Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Bolivia is a candidate to join. Venezuela’s membership is suspended.
[8]China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan,
Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, with Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia as
observers.
[9]Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana,
Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal,
Sierra Leone, and Togo.
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