Deep Currents

This is a straightforward summary of military historian Robert Kagan’s most recent book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. More to come in evaluating his perspective, but it’s worth noting that the book is endorsed by McCain and that his proposal for a “League of Democracies” has been taken up to one extent or another by both presidential campaigns.

Thesis:

• Democracies wanted to believe that all ideological and strategic conflict was finished with the end of the cold war
• But nation-states remain strong and continue to compete for stratus and influence
• Great power competition has returned among China, Russia, Iran, Japan, India, and the U.S.
• The old battle between liberalism and autocracy has returned
• The conflict between radical Islam and the West has also returned
• Democracies have been divided to date and it is time for them to unite and shape the future

Hopes and dreams

• After the Cold War, Americans and Europeans thought China and Russia were on an inevitable path towards democracies and both political and economic liberalism
• This animated a dream that a “new world order” could form where liberal democracies bound by trade would remain at peace and share “universal values”
• The U.S. saw itself as “the indispensible nation” leading the world to that point
• The E.U. saw itself as modeling the postmodern state and believed the model would spread—a model where supranational institutions replaced national interest

The return of great power nationalism

• This optimism was possible because the usual competition among great powers was on hiatus, since the bipolarity of the Cold War had faded and Japan India, and the E.U. were all in hibernation
• This ended as the great powers rebounded: first China and India set off economic booms, then Japan and Russia returned to full strength

The rise of Russia

• Liberalism staled and then reversed under Putin
• Its foreign policy has done the same and as result Western Eurasia is now a zone of competition between Russia and Europe
• High prices for oil and gas have enabled the country to build its economic and military power very quickly
• Europe is heavily dependent on Russia for energy, which Russia exploits to sow division in the E. U.
• Russians now rue the loss of the U.S.S.R. and long for a return to great power status
• Europe’s 21^st-century postmodern renunciation of power politics now faces a Russia pursuing 19^th-century-style ambitions, a conflict the E.U. is unprepared to face

The rise of China

• China has risen further faster since 1950 than almost any nation, which naturally has given it new ambition
• The optimism after the Cold War led many to hope that China would be different from historical precedent and rise peacefully to commercial but not strategic greatness
• Today China believes it can return to its former status as the dominant power of Asia
• Now it is building its military at a fast clip, including its first navy in centuries
• The postmodern-minded West argues that China doesn’t need hard power in today’s age of globalization but the Chinese are proud to build their power, enjoying the self-reliance that it brings
• Taiwan is a clear example of China’s 19^th-century view of power: war would be unprofitable and unnecessary except that China was “robbed” of its sovereignty and wants to avenge its honor
• Taiwan is also a symbol of U.S. dominance in the region and hostility to China

Japan: a return to normalcy

• Japan has the second-largest economy and the third or fourth-largest military budget (which funds one of the world’s most modern armies on one percent of its GDP)
• Today it is more expansive in its use of power and more nationalistic than in past decades
• Japan has long been a rival of China’s and will not be content to play second fiddle
• China still remembers the thrashing it received from Japan in the war of 1895 and the horrors of the Rape of Nanking in 1930

India and the argument of power

• Economic growth has brought India to geopolitical as well as commercial prominence, a shift from its rejection of power politics post-independence
• It has now become a nuclear power, asserted its dominance over its neighbors to exclude Russia and China, and seeks to be the “swing state” in geopolitics
• India has tensions with China over its support of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Burma’s navy, and the expansion of Chinese-controlled trade routs in the Indian ocean
• It now aligns itself with Japan and the U.S.

Iran and regional hegemony

• Iran has a sense of historical grievance like China, India, and Russia, built up over 200 years of plunder by Europe
• It also feels besieged as a Shia nation among Sunnis
• It wants nuclear power both to fend off the U.S. and to establish regional hegemony
• The presence of Russia, China, and India gives Iran potential allies as a counterbalance to Western power

The ambitious superpower

• The U.S. did not pull back from its role as a superpower after the Cold War—it maintained its sense of righteousness
• Instead of pulling back the U.S. expanded, spreading its influence to Central Asia and the Caucasus, pushing for democracy and free-market capitalism
• Rapid technological advances gave the U.S. military even greater superiority in the 1990s
• Between 1989 and 2001 the U.S. intervened abroad an average of once ever y16 months, the most in its history
• This was consistent with the American belief that only it could be trusted to keep the world safe for democracy
• Americans see themselves as a “reluctant sheriff”: they distrust the use of power but they use it nonetheless
• The “new world order” was attractive because it offered an escape from that conundrum

The axis of democracy and the association of autocrats

• Russia’ Democracy” is now a czarist system that is only democratic in the sense that it responds to popular will
• Strength and control at home helped Putin return Russia to great power status, and that strength abroad then justifies the need for strength and control at home
• Russia’s growing clout abroad also shields it from critique: when foreign diplomats have to contend with Russia as an adversary or win it over as an ally they’re less inclined to nitpick about democracy
• Russia watched China with envy as China weathered the storm of criticism over its undemocratic practices and built its economy into a powerhouse while Russia fell apart under Yeltsin
• Western observers have long predicted that China will democratize as it gets richer, but it has not, and its leaders are sufficiently competent and ruthless to maintain their grip
• In both countries it has been easy to convince the people making money to keep their noses out of politics
• Wealth has allowed autocracies to exert greater control over information by monopolizing TV and filtering the Internet
• Prosperity may produce liberalism eventually but it could be many decades
• The conflict between liberalism and autocracy divided the U.S. from Europe in the 18^th century and European nations form each other in the 19^th and 20^th—the same conflict has now returned
• China and Russia’s rulers have no ideology but they do believe that a strong central government is necessary to provide order, stability, and prosperity—and that the chaos of democracy would be too much for the country to bear
• Democracy has only been popular since the 1950s and the most common form of government since the 1980s
• Autocrats have a basic interest in maintaining power, and that means that they will tend to promote autocracy elsewhere to provide themselves support
• Russia was friendly with NATO when it was democratizing but is now aggressive even as NATO has stood down
• Russia and China are worried about their minority status: they remember the sanctions on China that followed Tiananmen, they’ve watched with concern as governments in Haiti, Panama, and Serbia have fallen, and Russia finally completed its turnaround in foreign policy after the “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan
• They worry about the loss of allies and that the same subversive forces could unseat them
• The Westphalian set of international laws have protected autocrats for 300 years, but today democracies believe their universalist ideals give them the right to interfere to assure proper elections and protect human rights—ideals that democracies hold to be universal but autocracies do not
• The U.S. has always acted out of a sense of messianism, and after World War II Europe “decided” that mutual interference was preferable to constant war—the common historical experience of extreme nationalism and the tragic consequences provided the unifying glue to create the E.U.
• Russia and China are now successfully promoting national sovereignty and non-interference
• Small nations often pattern themselves after great powers, and the same is happening now with the rise of autocratic great powers, who are proving the model’s success and offering its adherents support
• This geopolitical configuration is very similar to the 19^th century
• The great powers are increasingly choosing side based on their system of governance, e.g. with Japan and India lining up with democracies who are far abroad
• The matchups are not perfect, of course, and sometimes ideology and great power competition are opposed, but style of government has still become the best predictor
• These divisions do real damage to work that requires international cooperation, e.g. climate change mitigation and poverty relief
• There is very little sense of shared morality among the great powers today, which is why the U.N. Security Council is deadlocked
• Expanding trade ties is helpful, but trade can result in serious disagreements, and trade wasn’t enough to prevent World War I when we had the same amount of it—nations are too strongly influenced by their emotions

The hopeless dream of radical Islam

• In the past, traditional peoples who came under attack by modernity were out-gunned as well as out-cultured, but today radical Islamists have access to modern tools and weapons
• Still, traditionalism cannot win against modernity, even if it can do horrendous damage, simply because modern ideas are exported alongside goods, and have an unavoidable appeal
• Radical Islamists want to return to the culture that existed 1,400 years ago, before the Enlightenment, and the more radical want to return to theocracy
• This is impossible for three reasons: the region is strategically important to the great powers, the majority (by far) of the population are uninterested, and it is nearly impossible to block out the sights and sounds of other countries’ modern ways of life
• What this means is that the great powers neither want to give in nor could they if they chose
• But the great powers have little unity to fight back given their divisions over ideology, power competition, and the use of force

The vices and virtues of American hegemony

• Public opinion would have America diminish its international role to allow for greater multipolarity
• This makes sense if we’re headed for a postmodern order of liberal democracies, but not in a world in the midst of ideological and power-competition turmoil: in that world the U.S. has an important role
• America alliances have strengthened recently and no anti-American coalition has formed, except for China and Russia’s military cooperation, a recent development after centuries of rivalry
• The rest of the great powers (Europe, Japan, and India) are drawing closer to the U.S., even though Europe does disagree with the American approach to using force
• American allies in the Middle East are likewise coming closer: Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Libya, Lebanon, and Iraq
• A nuclear Iran would change the regional balance
• The U.S. has built bases in many new locations since 2001 in central Asia, eastern Europe, southeast Asia, and the Middle East, all with permission from local governments (except Iraq)
• American hegemony will remain so long as it is the dominant military power, the center of the world economy, and the leading apostle of the most popular political philosophy
• An American-led order is not as good as a postmodern, multipolar order of liberal democracies, but it is better than the realistic alternative of stepping back and letting the other great powers take charge
• In East Asia, American withdrawal would unleash a nationalistic Japan on China
• In Europe, it could lead Russia to be aggressive with the eastern European nations, and it would remove the implicit security guarantee that undergirds the E.U.
• In the Middle East, it would allow other great powers to fill the vacuum, notably China and Russia, and embolden Iran
• On the seas, removing the American Navy’s dominance would mean a reversion to the historic norm of national competition, which disrupts trade

Toward a concert of democracies

• Democracy is powerfully challenged and needs new means for protecting democracies’ interest, advancing their goals, and defending their principles
• There ought to be a forum that operates in parallel to the UN, the G8, NATO, etc. where the world’s democracies confer and coordinate
• The goal should be to build solidarity among democratic states and encourage democracy elsewhere
• This would put a spotlight on China and Russia’s weakest spot: the issue of legitimacy, already their prime concern
• Many are overly pessimistic today about the prospects for change
• The best way to fight Islamic radicalism is to erode its base of support: rely on the inherent appeal of modernity and push for more globalization faster

Conclusion

• The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that our liberal international order is derived from ideological triumph and the natural unfolding of human progress
• This has been the Enlightenment dream ever since Kant’s idea of the “perpetual peace”
• The victory of liberal democracies is the reason why the world has been run by liberal principles following the Cold War, but that victory was not inevitable and need not last
• Democracies must rise to the challenge of protecting and improving the liberal world order, and the United States must lead the charge

Written: July 18th, 2008