Jessica Mathews and Jonathan Kirshner Survey Never Pretentious
HOW AMERICA AND CHINA CAN AVOID WAR
MARCH/APRIL 2021 / "&#'( !"#$% )*)+ • ,-(.!/ Decline and Fall
+** Can America Ever Lead Again? • 0.!1/# ) •
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Present at the Re-creation? 10 U.S. Foreign Policy Must Be Remade, Not Restored Jessica T. Mathews
Gone But Not Forgotten 18 Trump’s Long Shadow and the End o! American Credibility Jonathan Kirshner
A Superpower, Like It or Not 28 Why Americans Must Accept Their Global Role Robert Kagan
The Fractured Power 40 How to Overcome Tribalism COVER: Reuben E. Brigety II PABLO Foreign Policy for Pragmatists 48 DELCAN How Biden Can Learn From History in Real Time Gideon Rose
March/April 2021
FA.indb 1 1/22/21 9:00 PM The World Is Changing And So Are We
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Short of War 58 How to Keep U.S.-Chinese Confrontation From Ending in Calamity Kevin Rudd
Accomplice to Carnage 73 How America Enables War in Yemen Robert Malley and Stephen Pomper
How the WTO Changed China 90 The Mixed Legacy o! Economic Engagement Yeling Tan
System Failure 103 America Needs a Global Health Policy for the Pandemic Age Ashish Jha
A New Conservatism 116 Freeing the Right From Free-Market Orthodoxy Oren Cass
A Palestinian Reckoning 129 Time for a New Beginning Hussein Agha and Ahmad Samih Khalidi
The Innovation Wars 142 America’s Eroding Technological Advantage Christopher Darby and Sarah Sewall
Opening Up the Order 154 A More Inclusive International System Anne-Marie Slaughter and Gordon LaForge
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JKSIS_FA_FallFP_2.indd 1 7/15/20 9:25 AM Democracy on the Defense 163 Turning Back the Authoritarian Tide Yascha Mounk
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REVIEWS & RESPONSES The Arena 186 Southeast Asia in the Age o! Great-Power Rivalry Bilahari Kausikan
The Stories China Tells 192 The New Historical Memory Reshaping Chinese Nationalism Jessica Chen Weiss
Market Value 198 Can Capitalism Serve Democracy? Binyamin Appelbaum
Recent Books 204
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FA.indb 5 1/22/21 9:00 PM March/April 2021 · Volume 100, Number 2 Published by the Council on Foreign Relations
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02_TOC_Blues.indd 6 1/25/21 1:41 PM CONTRIBUTORS
KEVIN RUDD has served as Australia’s prime minister (twice), its foreign minister, and the leader o! its Labor Party. Pro"cient in Mandarin, Rudd began his career as a diplomat, "rst posted to Stockholm, then to Beijing. Now president o! the Asia Society, Rudd argues in “Short o! War” (page 58) that increased rivalry between the United States and China is inevitable but catastrophe is not; with smart diplomacy, the contest can be managed.
YELING TAN studies how globalization changes the incentives o! authoritarian governments. Trained at Harvard, she is now a professor o! political science at the University o! Oregon and the author o! the forthcoming book Disaggre- gating China, Inc.: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order. In “How the WTO Changed China” (page 90), Tan reckons with the mixed legacy o! China’s accession to the World Trade Organization and the prospect o# future economic reforms.
An expert on pandemic preparedness, dean o! the School o# Public Health at Brown University, and a practicing internist, ASHISH JHA has emerged as a leading advocate for a bold U.S. federal response to the COVID-19 crisis. He raised the alarm about the virus last March and has s$nce publ$shed research on masks, test$ng, and lockdowns. In “System Failure” (page 103), he makes the case for a new, less U.S.-centric approach to global health.
A former adviser to such leading Republican "gures as Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney, OREN CASS is widely known as a conservative antipoverty crusader. After four years as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Cass now serves as the executive director o! American Compass, an organization he founded that aims to reorient conser- vative economic thinking. In “A New Conservatism” (page 116), he calls on the Republican Party to abandon its obsession with low taxes and free-market economics.
02_TOC_Blues.indd 7 1/25/21 1:56 PM
DECLINE AND FALL
ith the storm past, it is reasoned argument, with no room in time to assess the damage, its columns for polemic, for anger, clean up the mess, and mull for personal attack. A literary tone W that would be quiet and serious, but what to rebuild and how. Jessica Mathews and Jonathan Kirshner survey never pretentious. Importance, as the main criterion in the selection o" the broken, battered world the Biden material—whether the importance administration has inherited and how was to come from the signi#cance its players view Washington now. and originality o" the subject matter Robert Kagan traces the gul$ between or from the authority o" the author. the United States’ large geopolitical But no concessions to any would-be burdens and its public’s modest prefer- contributor, humble or great, when it ences. And Reuben Brigety explores came to clarity o" thought, signi#- the deep domestic divisions that cance o" content, and moderation o" Americans have to overcome. language. My own essay asks whether history has any direction, and i" so, how the For nigh on a century, Foreign A!airs new administration can #nd out and has not deviated from that path. It has follow it. Consider it a valedictory, for been an honor and a privilege to carry after 20 years at the magazine, this will on the tradition. be my last issue. —Gideon Rose, Editor Foreign A!airs was founded in the wake o$ World War I by Americans who believed that with great power came great responsibility. The United States could not hide from the world; it had to engage, intelligently and con- structively. That required a space for informed public discussion. And that meant starting a magazine. George Kennan captured the vision o" the new publication in his obituary for Hamil- ton Fish Armstrong, the magazine’s dominant #gure: A forum for the opinions o" others, expressing no opinion o" its own. A place for fact, for thought, for calmly
FA.indb 8 1/22/21 9:00 PM What Biden regularly calls “the power of our example” is DECLINE AND FALL nothing like what it used to be. – Jessica Mathews
Present at the Re-creation? The Fractured Power Jessica T. Mathews 10 Reuben E. Brigety II 40
PABLO Gone But Not Forgotten Foreign Policy for Pragmatists Jonathan Kirshner 18 Gideon Rose 48 DELCAN A Superpower, Like It or Not Robert Kagan 28
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TK
FA.indb 9 1/22/21 9:00 PM
The failures have also been domestic. Present at the To date, the United States has handled the .&/)0-19 pandemic worse than any Re-creation? other major country. Americans make up only four percent o" the world’s popula-
AND FALL tion but account for a staggering 25 U.S. Foreign Policy Must Be percent o" global .&/)0-19 cases and 19 Remade, Not Restored percent o" deaths from the disease. The failure has come at all levels: a stunning lack o" national leadership, an alienated DECLINE Jessica T. Mathews population unwilling to make modest sacri#ces in the common interest, and a or years, Joe Biden has portrayed health-care system that is deeply inequi- the presidency o3 Donald Trump table and administratively fractured. Fas an aberration from which the These maladies predated Trump, o" United States can quickly recover. course. President Barack Obama’s Throughout the 2020 U.S. presidential administration had to design interna- campaign, Biden asserted that under his tional agreements such as the Paris leadership, the United States would be climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal “back at the head o" the table.” But a in a way that would avoid the need for return to the pre-Trump status quo is formal rati#cation, because the world not possible. The world—and the knows that the U.S. Senate has been United States—have changed far too unable to approve a multilateral treaty much. And although hailing the return for nearly 15 years, even one modeled o" American hegemony might seem directly on U.S. domestic law. But comforting to Americans, it reveals a Trump’s “America #rst” populist nation- degree o" tone-deafness to how it sounds alism has cut deeply into the foundation to the rest o" the world. When people o" American foreign policy, as his admini- elsewhere look at Washington’s track stration called into question long-standing record over the past two decades, they alliances, embraced authoritarian rulers, don’t see con#dent leadership. What denigrated allies, and withdrew the they see, instead, are a series o" disasters United States from a wide range o" authored by Washington, chie" among international agreements and organiza- them the 2003 invasion o3 Iraq and the tions that it founded. Beyond the moves subsequent destabilization o" much o" that garnered headlines were a great the Middle East and the 2008 global many more that made it impossible for #nancial crisis. During those decades, valuable institutions to operate. Under Washington also pursued an ine!ectual Trump, for example, the United States war in Afghanistan, an incoherent policy vetoed every nominee to the World in Syria, and ill-judged humanitarian Trade Organization’s Appellate Body, interventions, most notably in Libya. purposely keeping the number o" judges below the required quorum and thereby JESSICA T. MATHEWS is a Distinguished Fellow and former President of the Carnegie depriving all 164 12& member countries Endowment for International Peace. o" the means to resolve disputes.
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FA.indb 10 1/22/21 9:00 PM Present at the Re-creation?
March/April 2021 11
FA.indb 11 1/22/21 9:00 PM Jessica T. Mathews
In short, what Biden regularly calls close allies have therefore been forced “the power o* our example” is nothing into a dangerous game o* American like what it used to be. When it comes roulette, dealing with a United States that to the pillars o* a law-abiding democ- can +ip unpredictably from one foreign racy, the United States is now more an policy posture to its opposite. The logical example o* what to avoid than o* what response for them is to hedge: avoiding to embrace. The country retains mili- major commitments and keeping their tary primacy and the economic heft to options open, even when it comes to U.S. impose sanctions, but the former has policies that would otherwise be wel- limited utility, and the latter are seldom come. In such an environment, every- e0ective when wielded unilaterally. To thing that Washington hopes to achieve achieve its ends, Washington will have will be more di,cult. to heal at home—a long, slow process— while it rebuilds its power to persuade. PICKING UP THE PIECES As secretary o* state, Antony Blinken Unless there is a current crisis, foreign will likely lead an important e0ort to policy generally plays a negligible role rebuild morale and e0ectiveness within in U.S. elections. That was never more the country’s diplomatic corps, luring true than in the 2020 Democratic pri- back talented professionals who +ed mary campaign, in which every contender Trump’s chaos, broadening recruitment, named repairing democracy at home as pursuing reforms to make the depart- the most important “foreign policy” ment’s work more e,cient and creative, priority. Biden was an extreme example. and appointing diplomatic veterans to The fact sheet that accompanied his -rst key posts at home and abroad. But such major foreign policy address, delivered steps will take a long time to make a in October 2019, listed “remake our di0erence. Meanwhile, Biden’s team education system” as the -rst bullet may be seriously overestimating the point and “reform our criminal justice leverage that the United States retains system” as the second. for initiatives that depend on its ex- Nor was foreign policy a signi-cant ample, such as the global summits the topic in the general election campaign, president wants to convene on climate even though the past hal* century has change and renewing democracy. shown that what occurs overseas is more Facing a globalized world in which than likely to determine a president’s power is dispersed and the United States’ legacy. Disastrous wars or foreign reputation is diminished, Biden will imbroglios severely damaged the admin- confront cautious, even skeptical foreign istrations o. -ve o/ Trump’s nine most partners—a challenge to which American immediate predecessors: Lyndon leaders are unaccustomed. Much o/ his Johnson (the Vietnam War), Richard agenda will have to be carried out through Nixon (Vietnam, again), Jimmy Carter executive orders, which, the world knows, (the Iran hostage crisis), Ronald Reagan can be just as quickly undone by the next (the Iran-contra a0air), and George W. president. Foreign governments under- Bush (the Iraq war). Foreign policy is stand that last year’s presidential election also the source o* sudden surprises that was not a repudiation o/ Trumpism. Even call for leaders with experience in rapid,
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high-stakes decision-making and a by o!cials who know something about knowledge o" recent history. Nonethe- what is being discussed and who sup- less, voters don’t seem to care much— port, rather than oppose, the mission o" and thus neither do most candidates. the international organizations that Still, Biden’s intentions can be inferred convene them. These will be sweeping from his record in government, from what changes, welcomed around the world. he has said and written in the past few Among speci#c priorities, climate years, and, particularly, from his early change is clearly at the top o$ Biden’s high-level appointments. Although mind. The president has assembled a together those things shed a good deal o" team whose strength signals the weight light on what he will try to do, it is too he attaches to this issue: a former secre- early to know what a U.S. Senate that tary o" state (John Kerry) as a special features the thinnest possible Democratic envoy on climate, an experienced former majority will allow him to accomplish or head o" the Environmental Protection how doubting foreign governments will Agency (Gina McCarthy) in a newly respond. Unknowable, too, are the e+ects created senior environmental post in the o" dangers now building o+stage, the White House, a highly regarded state kinds o" systemic shocks that have become o!cial (Michael Regan) to lead the %&', almost a norm o" the last several decades. and a former Michigan governor Finally, there are practical issues o" (Jennifer Granholm) known for her sequencing that get lost in campaign expertise in alternative energy sources, rhetoric. For instance, it is one thing to especially electric vehicles, as head o" say, as Biden has, that new trade agree- the Department o$ Energy. ments will have to wait until after the Conversely, Granholm’s nomination federal government has made major to lead the department (75 percent o" investments in infrastructure and research whose budget goes to nuclear weapons and development; it is quite another thing and infrastructure) and the choice o" to do that in practice. The world won’t the retired general Lloyd Austin to head take a time-out while the United States the Department o$ Defense suggest that makes badly needed repairs at home. nuclear issues will not be a priority, as It is certain that Biden will make two neither o" them, nor Biden’s national overarching changes to the foreign security adviser, Jake Sullivan, is a policy o, Trump and his secretary o" widely recognized expert in this area. state, Mike Pompeo. Biden understands Biden will act immediately to extend the the strength inherent in Washington’s New ()'*) agreement with Russia, the network o" allies and friends and will do last remaining major nuclear arms all he can to rebuild close relationships control treaty. And he will be prepared with them, especially in Europe. He to spend a great deal o" political capital will also reverse the Trump administra- to rejoin and rescue the Iran nuclear tion’s dismissive attitude toward multi- deal. But there are many other conse- lateral problem solving and the interna- quential items in the nuclear portfolio. tional institutions that make it possible. As vice president, Biden took a strong Washington will now show up at even stance in favor o" reducing the role o" the most boring meetings, represented nuclear weapons in U.S. defense strat-
March/April 2021 13
FA.indb 13 1/22/21 9:00 PM Jessica T. Mathews
egy, limiting their use to deterrence certain sectors. This is old-fashioned rather than war ,ghting. The Trump industrial policy. Whether it is good administration took the opposite economic policy and where the money will position, and Biden will need to try to come from are debatable issues; whether wrench policy back toward his preferred they are the stu* o+ foreign policy is not. course. Meanwhile, the country is in the The more closely one examines the early stages o- a second nuclear arms speci,cs, the more the concept o- a foreign race, this time with both China and policy for the middle class slips away. Russia. A bloated, $2 trillion nuclear First among the true foreign policy modernization program is underway that challenges is the need for a balanced, urgently requires reexamination. Also, nonideological approach to China. new technologies are being developed Beijing’s military buildup, its provoca- that will raise the likelihood o- an tive maneuvers in the South China Sea, unintended nuclear war and erase the its increasingly repressive policies once sharp barrier between conventional (including egregious human rights and nuclear con2icts. Addressing any o- abuses against Uighurs in Xinjiang and this successfully will require leadership a crackdown on pro-democracy activists from someone o- real stature in the ,eld. in Hong Kong), and its withholding o- critically important information on the A FOREIGN POLICY emergence o- the novel coronavirus that FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS? led to the ."/%0-19 pandemic all form a Throughout the campaign, Biden spoke threatening backdrop. The United o1 his intention to craft “a foreign policy States has no choice, however, but to for the middle class.” No other theme develop a strategy for successful coexis- was as prominent. In practice, however, tence with this fast-rising economic and his administration will have to face the military power. Trump’s approach question o- whether such a thing actually swung from fawning praise o- Chinese exists. Changing the rules o- interna- President Xi Jinping to unrelieved tional trade is a small part o- the answer, enmity and pointless name-calling. The but technological change has played a far administration’s single achievement on larger role than trade in the loss o- China was a ballyhooed trade deal that high-paying U.S. manufacturing jobs. pushed the most important structural That may be why, when discussing how issues to a second round o- negotia- his foreign policy will help Americans, tions—which never took place. Beijing Biden tends to veer quickly from trade pledged to buy an additional $200 to other issues: a higher minimum wage, billion worth o- U.S. goods and services better education, more a*ordable health but has not come close to actually doing care. All o- those are important, but so. Meanwhile, the percentage o- none is the province o+ foreign policy. Americans with an unfavorable view o- Biden’s “Build Back Better” economic China has increased from 47 percent at plan promises enormous federal invest- the beginning o1 Trump’s presidency to ments in infrastructure—roads, railways, 73 percent last fall, according to the the electric grid, and broadband Inter- Pew Research Center. Even in the net—and in research and development in business and ,nancial sectors, which
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still hope to pro#t from access to the democratic ally at tremendous reputa- huge Chinese market, views on China tional cost. A U.S.-Chinese war would have turned decidedly negative. be unlikely to stay nonnuclear. To reverse the downward spiral in relations, Washington needs to abandon “POSTWAR THINKING the lazy habit o" demonizing China and WITHOUT THE WAR” drop the pretense that the contest with Biden has taken o!ce at a moment when Beijing is an ideological struggle akin the broad bipartisan consensus that to the Cold War. Instead, the United underlay U.S. foreign policy for hal" a States needs to identify China’s legiti- century following World War II has mate interests in Asia and around the collapsed. Since the end o" the Cold world and determine what Washington War—and especially since the end o" should accept, where it should try to the so-called unipolar moment o" the outcompete China, and what it must 1990s—Americans have debated what confront. It should base its posture on kind o" world order is most in their its relations with allies and potential interest and what role the United States partners across the region, recognizing should assume in it, without any com- how conditions have changed since the mon view emerging. global #nancial crisis and avoiding an U.S. foreign policy specialists fall into approach that would force Asian gov- two broad camps, one o" which advocates ernments to choose between the two continued U.S. leadership globally and superpowers. Washington should get across the full spectrum o" issues. The back into multilateral trade and economic other believes that the United States agreements in Asia and join forces with should de#ne its interests more narrowly European countries in its approach to with regard to both where and what. Beijing, rather than allowing Europe to Within the former group are those who become a battleground in the U.S.- argue that the world requires leadership Chinese rivalry. Most urgently, Beijing, and there is no alternative leader to the Taipei, and Washington (including United States now or on the horizon. some heedless members o" the U.S. Some go further, claiming that U.S. Congress) must recognize that the “one interests inevitably will be damaged more China” policy is in imminent danger o" by doing too little than by trying to do unraveling after having kept the peace too much. They favor a unilateral brand in an interrupted civil war for four o$ leadership and generally approve o" decades. Instead o" maintaining the armed interventions. They tend to rely policy’s delicate balance o" ambiguities, more on familiarity with the past than on Trump and Pompeo played a game o" insight into the future, and they largely chicken, thus inviting massive and ignore the force o" domestic public utterly unnecessary risks. I" the agree- opinion. Others see a more restrained role ment falls apart, the possibility o" war for the United States as the #rst among between China and the United States equals in a multilateral community. will be high, since for the United States Recently, some in this #rst camp have to back away from a #ght would mean begun to question the #tness o" the abandoning its commitment to a current order in a world characterized
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FA.indb 15 1/22/21 9:00 PM Jessica T. Mathews
by surging populism and authoritarian the various expert views on foreign governance. They argue for an order policy do not line up exactly with the de,ned by a coalition o+ democracies on di*erences between the two political one side in opposition to authoritarian parties, the country’s deep polarization governments on the other. Biden some- and the almost even partisan representa- times gives unsettling hints o+ sharing tion in Congress mean that nearly every this view. Should such an order emerge, policy shift will be a political battle. the world would be less likely to deal Meanwhile, public opinion is divided. In successfully with the global challenges 2016, the last time the Pew Research that pose the greatest risk to everyone: Center asked Americans to describe their nuclear proliferation, corruption, cyber- country’s global role “in terms o+ solving war, pandemics, and climate change. world problems,” 41 percent o+ respon- The second camp sees the U.S. track dents said the United States did “too record o+ the past 20 years as evidence much,” 27 percent said “too little,” and 28 that Washington has gotten used to percent said the United States did “the de,ning its interests too broadly, which right amount.” Finally, fresh thinking is has led to a habit o+ starting wars and always hard to come by, absent a major military interventions without a clear upheaval. Decades ago, the U.S. diplo- national interest at stake. Some who hold mat Harlan Cleveland was fond o+ saying this view argue for a major retrenchment, that what Washington needed was paring back the de,nition o+ U.S. core “postwar thinking without the war.” That interests to include little more than remains true—but is unlikely in the relations with China, Russia, and Europe. present environment. Promoting democracy, advancing human I+ the Biden administration contin- rights, helping poorer nations develop, ues as early indications suggest, it will and other goals that have consumed U.S. fall squarely into the ,rst o+ the two foreign policy in the past three decades broad camps, and i+ it stumbles, it will would lie beyond those boundaries. be because it looks too much to the past Others advocate a much more modest and tries to do more than the country’s correction, focused mostly on pulling resources, will, and reputation can back from the troubled Middle East. currently support. It will try hard to It seems unlikely that this debate will make progress on key issues, although be resolved within the next four years. it may overreach in attempting to Far more than in a typical presidency, promote democracy. But i+ it can foreign policy during Biden’s time in develop a strategically sound relation- o-ce will be devoted to undoing a ship with China, reassert itsel+ in mountain o. his predecessor’s mistakes, relations with Russia, pursue economic consuming not only time and diplomatic policies that see international economic e*ort but also political capital. A good growth as a win-win and not a zero- deal o+ what can be accomplished will sum competition, and recapture the depend on whether would-be Trump con,dence o+ allies and friends, it will successors in the Senate make a return have done more than enough to be to “America ,rst” policies a main thrust proud of, even without leaving behind a o+ their public postures. And although new foreign policy consensus.∂
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FA.indb 16 1/22/21 9:00 PM Globally Focused Future-Ready
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by the fear that today’s apparent friend Gone But Not will become tomorrow’s mortal foe. Still, also like most abstractions, there Forgotten is an inviolable kernel o" truth to the anarchy fable. Ultimately, the world o"
AND FALL states is indeed a self-help system, and so Trump’s Long Shadow countries must necessarily make guesses and the End of about the anticipated future behavior o" American Credibility others—about what seems likely and the range o" the possible and the plausible. DECLINE Jonathan Kirshner This is why even though Donald Trump has become a member o" a rather exclusive club—one-term U.S. presidents—the Trump presidency will n the #rst lecture o" any introduc- have enduring consequences for U.S. tion to international relations power and in4uence in the world. Leo Iclass, students are typically Tolstoy warned that “there are no warned o" the pitiless consequences o" conditions to which a man may not anarchy. World politics, they are become accustomed, particularly i$ he informed, is a self-help system: in the sees that they are accepted by those absence o" a global authority to enforce around him,” and it is easy, especially rules, there are no guarantees that the for most insular Americans, to implic- behavior o" others—at times, danger- itly normalize what was in fact a norm- ous and malevolent others—will be shattering approach to foreign policy. restrained. With their very survival on Level whatever criticisms you may the line, countries must anticipate about the often bloodstained hands o" the worst about the world and plan and the American colossus on the world behave accordingly. stage, but Trump’s foreign policy was Like most abstractions, IR 101’s di!erent: shortsighted, transactional, depiction o" the consequences o" anar- mercurial, untrustworthy, boorish, chy is a radical oversimpli#cation, useful personalist, and profoundly illiberal in as an informal modeling device, as far as rhetoric, disposition, and creed. it goes. In the real world—that is, for Some applauded this transformation, most states, most o" the time—survival but most foreign policy experts, practi- is not actually at stake when they are tioners, and professionals are breathing deciding which among various possible a sigh o" relie" that a deeply regrettable, foreign policies to adopt. And countries and in many ways embarrassing, inter- rarely retreat into a defensive crouch, lude has passed. (It is exceedingly unwilling to trust any others, paralyzed unlikely that any future president will exchange “beautiful letters” with and JONATHAN KIRSHNER is Professor of Political express their “love” for the North Korean Science and International Studies at Boston leader Kim Jong Un.) But such palpable College and the author of the forthcoming book An Unwritten Future: Realism and Uncertainty in relie" must be tempered by a dispiriting World Politics. truth, rooted in that notion o" anarchy:
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the world cannot unsee the Trump nouncements little more than shallow, presidency. (Nor, for that matter, can it opportunistic posturing? Ultimately, unsee the way members o* the U.S. these are questions o* trust and con+- Congress behaved in the +nal weeks o* dence that require judgment calls. And the Trump administration, voting for better or worse, it is easier to partner opportunistically to overturn an elec- with a country whose underlying foreign tion and helping incite violence at the policy orientation is rooted in purposes Capitol.) From this point forward, that are reasonably consistent over time. countries around the globe will have to For U.S. partners in Asia, Europe, and calculate their interests and expecta- the Middle East, however, Washington’s tions with the understanding that the priorities on the world stage must now Trump administration is the sort o* be interrogated, and any conclusions thing that the U.S. political system can reached must be held with quali+cations plausibly produce. rather than con+dence. And there is Such reassessments will not be to the nothing that President Joe Biden and United States’ advantage. For 75 years, his team o* immaculate professionals can the general presumption that the United do to stop that. From now on, all States was committed to the relation- countries, everywhere, must hedge their ships and institutions it forged and the bets about the United States—some- norms it articulated shaped the world in thing that will unnerve allies more than ways that privileged U.S. interests. I* it adversaries. Whatever promises are is increasingly perceived to be feckless made and best behaviors followed over and self-serving, the United States will the next few years, a resurgence o* +nd the world a more hazardous and knuckle-dragging America +rstism will less welcoming place. loom menacingly in the shadows. That possibility will inevitably shape other POWER AND PURPOSE states’ conclusions about their relations One country tries to anticipate the with the United States, even as nearly foreign policy behavior o* another by every world leader rushes to shake the making assessments about two factors: hand o* the new U.S. president. power and purpose. Measuring the Thus, even with the election o* former seems straightforward, although Biden—a traditional, centrist liberal it is often not. (France seemed to boast a internationalist, cut from the same basic formidable military in 1939, and the foreign policy cloth o* every U.S. Soviet Union was considered a super- president (save one) across nine dec- power a hal* century later, yet both ades—countries will now have to hedge countries suddenly and unexpectedly against the prospect o* an indi,erent, collapsed under pressure.) Measuring disengaged, and clumsily myopic U.S. the latter—purpose—requires more foreign policy. After all, anarchy also guesswork in practice but is even more demands that states see the world as it important. Is a country a friend or a foe, is, not as they wish it might be. And the and in either case, for how long? Is a warning signs that the United States is country’s word its bond, or are its perhaps not the country it once was commitments ephemeral and its pro- could not be -ashing more brightly.
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Although the margin o! victory in by an oil shock and the Iranian hostage the 2020 U.S. presidential election was crisis. Those events were enough to have wide (the two candidates were separated his approval rating plummet into the 20s by seven million votes, a 4.5 percent and soon send him packing after his edge in the popular vote, and 74 electoral landslide defeat in 1980.) Rather, Trump votes), it was not, by any stretch o! the characteristically treated a pandemic that imagination, a renunciation o, Trump. killed well more than a quarter o! a In 2016, some argued that Trump’s million o! the people under his charge as election was a &uke. This was always a personal inconvenience, to be managed whistling past the graveyard, but the case exclusively for perceived political advan- could be made. After all, the election tage. Even so, 74 million people voted for hinged on only about 80,000 votes, spread him—nine million more than did in 2016 across three swing states. Even with that, and the most votes ever cast for a U.S. but for the historically contingent geo- candidate for president, with the exception graphic quirks o" Michigan (the Upper o" Biden, who garnered 81 million. Peninsula) and Florida (the Panhandle), One cannot paint a picture o! the those states would have gone blue. And American polity and the country’s the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton future foreign policy without including (who did walk away with the popular the signi#cant possibility o! a large role vote by a large margin), was, for some for Trumpism, with or without Trump key constituencies, a suspect candidate. himsel! in the Oval O$ce. Looking The 2020 election put to rest the ahead four years, America watchers must comforting fable that Trump’s election anticipate that the next U.S. presidential was a &uke. Trump is the United election could turn out quite di%erently. States—or at least a very large part o! This does not bode well for U.S. inter- it. Many Americans will choke on that ests and in&uence in world politics. As sentiment, but other countries don’t Mark Leonard, the director o! the have the luxury o! clinging to some European Council on Foreign Relations, idealized version o! the United States’ observed, “I! you know that whatever national character. Trump presided over you’re doing will at most last until the dozens o! ethical scandals, egregious next election, you look at everything in a procedural lapses, and startling indiscre- more contingent way.” tions, most o! which would have ended Indeed, the story o! the 2016 elec- the political career o! any other national tion wasn’t just about Trump’s victory political #gure o! the past hal! century. over Clinton; from the perspective o! But the trampling o! norms barely other countries trying to guess the registered with most o! the American future o! U.S. foreign policy, what public. Nor did the sheer, horrifying happened in that year’s primaries was incompetence o! the administration’s even more informative and chilling. In handling o! the gravest public health the '()’s contest, a political novice, crisis in a century chase Trump from reality *+ star, boastful businessman o! the political scene in disgrace. (Imagine questionable repute, and indi%erent, what would have happened to Jimmy only occasional member o! the party Carter, a decent man dealt a di$cult hand itsel! managed to steamroll a strong
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+eld o* established competitors by what he described as “another trade disparaging the party’s heroes and deal disaster.”) In fact, the agreement trampling on its long-held core policy became law thanks only to overwhelm- beliefs about global engagement. ing Republican support in both houses Because it took place within the Repub- o* Congress. Trump withdrew from the lican Party, this astonishing, unantici- pact on his +rst day in o,ce. pated upheaval cannot be attributed to the possible /aws o* Clinton or liberal IT GETS WORSE overreach in the culture wars, explana- Carrying through to the Biden adminis- tions subsequently trotted out after the tration, then, is the observation that the shock o* the general election. And a center o* political gravity in the United similar story was seen in the Demo- States has shifted away from the en- cratic Party’s nomination process. gaged internationalism that character- Senator Bernie Sanders o0 Vermont— ized the previous 75 years before Trump another long-shot outsider, an old and toward something closer to isola- socialist from a tiny state—came very tionism, o* which there is a long tradi- close to wresting the prize from a tion in U.S. history. In assessing the powerful political machine fully backed future trajectory o* U.S. foreign policy, by the party apparatus. outside observers will have to make What did Trump and Sanders have assessments about each political party. in common? Almost nothing—except Even with Trump out o* o,ce, the for their rejection o* internationalism. Republican Party will likely decline to The 2016 campaign revealed that the distance itsel- from Trumpism, given bipartisan postwar internationalist how much elected o,cials live in fear consensus, cracks in which had been that Trump will turn his large and loyal visible and growing for decades, had following against those who criticize been shattered. A telling casualty him. Rhetorically at least, the party will marking the end o* American interna- likely remain nativistic and nationalist tionalism was the Trans-Paci+c Partner- in its attitude toward the rest o* the ship, a far-reaching trade agreement world. The Democratic Party’s foreign among a dozen Paci+c Rim countries, policies, even though they may be less including the United States. The overtly malevolent, will not o.er much agreement was at the center o* the reassurance. Biden can be expected to Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia. /ood the +eld with an impressive Clinton, as secretary o* state, had foreign policy team and give every orchestrated the painstaking negotiations reassuring impression that the United that produced the treaty and crowed States will behave as a responsible great that the pact set “the gold standard in power, one that is engaged with the trade agreements to open free, trans- world, respects rules, and follows parent, fair trade.” Yet during the norms. But his mandate is limited. pitched battle for the Democratic nomi- Biden, elected mostly on a platform nation, she was forced to renounce the o0 being everything Trump isn’t, has 122, which many in her party had been precious little political capital, and he is wary of. (Sanders led the charge against unlikely to deploy it for the purpose o*
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"ghting for his foreign policy priorities. o! its population embracing wild con- The Democrats, united in their horror spiracy theories. The United States at the Trump presidency, are divided today looks like Athens in the "nal years on much else. Visible "ssures run o! the Peloponnesian War or France in through the party, often on generational the 1930s: a once strong democracy that lines, between the party’s centrist and has become ragged and vulnerable. left-leaning wings. And its median France, descending into appeasement, constituent, although neither nativistic would soon well illustrate that a country nor nationalist, might be described as consumed by domestic social con#ict is globalism-wary and even isolationism- not one that will likely be capable o! curious. The con#icts within the Demo- practicing a productive, predictable, or cratic Party will be exacerbated by the trustworthy foreign policy. salience o% Biden’s age at the time o& his inauguration (78). Given that Biden NO MORE BLANK CHECKS himsel& has repeatedly hinted that his This dystopian scenario may not come might very well be a one-term, transi- to pass. It might not even be the most tional presidency, his fellow Democrats likely American future. But the logic o! will quickly begin jockeying for position anarchy requires that all countries must in the anticipated battle for party leader- at least process the United States’ ship. Thus, predicting U.S. behavior polarization and domestic dysfunction, will again require looking down the road think through the implications o! that at the likely range o! political outcomes scenario in which all bets are o$, and four years into the future. imagine a world in which Washington, Worse, foreign assessments o! the for all its raw power, is less relevant in United States must consider the possi- world politics. This prospect will invite bility that it will soon simply be out o! major reassessments o! U.S. behavior. the great-power game altogether. Looked Some o! the impending revisions at objectively, the country boasts a will be benign and even bene"cial from colossal economy and commands the a U.S. perspective. On the positive side world’s most impressive military. But as o! the ledger, Middle Eastern countries the old saying about sports teams goes, may "nally begin to imagine life with- they don’t play the games on paper, and out strong U.S. military commitments there are reasons to question whether in the region. In 1990, it was under- Washington has the wherewithal to behave standable that U.S. allies welcomed as a purposeful actor on the world stage the U.S.-led war to liberate Kuwait and pursue its long-term interests. The from Iraqi occupation. Had that problem is not just that with politics no invasion gone unchecked, Iraq would longer stopping at the water’s edge, likely have achieved political domina- U.S. foreign policy could veer unpredict- tion over the vast oil reserves o! the ably from administration to administra- entire Persian Gul! region. Thus, in the tion. It is that the United States is absence o! a peer military competitor taking on water itself. The country has or a pressing security threat, the United entered what can only be characterized States was well positioned to repel that as an age o! unreason, with large swaths aggression.
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But much has changed in the inter- decision, rare and risky in the annals o* vening three decades. The United States diplomacy, to throw in his lot with a is now the world’s largest producer o* foreign political party rather than a oil and natural gas; China is currently country. By sidestepping President Barack the biggest export market for Iraq, Obama to work directly with congres- Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia; and i* any- sional Republicans and then by embrac- thing, given climate change, the United ing Trump with a bear hug, Netanyahu States should be looking to discourage, hitched his strategic wagon to the star not subsidize, the burning o- fossil fuels. o* a U.S. president who did not see past I* one were designing U.S. foreign policy the perceived domestic political advan- from scratch today, it would be quite tages to be gained from his Middle East di.cult to justify a U.S. security com- policy. Trump reciprocated by dashing mitment in the Gulf. The U.S. relation- o+ another political blank check, recog- ship with Saudi Arabia, in particular, nizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, has always been more a marriage o* withholding criticism o* any o* that convenience than a deeply rooted friend- country’s transgressions (and thus ship. That was especially evident in the abandoning the notion that the United Trump era, which featured the shady States might be an honest broker in princeling-to-princeling connection peace negotiations with the Palestin- between the president’s son-in-law, Jared ians), and essentially bribing some Kushner, and Mohammed bin Salman, countries to normalize their diplomatic the Saudi crown prince. But personal relations with Israel—all without receiv- ties are the most /eeting. They account ing anything in return from the perspec- for the Trump administration’s near tive o* U.S. national interests. It remains silence over the assassination o* the to be seen whether bilateral relations Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi between Israel and the United States (allegedly ordered by the crown prince will emerge unscathed now that U.S. himsel,) and its tacit approval o* the diplomacy in the Middle East has humanitarian nightmare that is the Saudi passed from the hands o, Trump’s small war in Yemen. In contrast, as a candi- coterie o- Middle East advisers. date, Biden said that should he be elected, Saudi Arabia would no longer enjoy a AFTER AMERICA “dangerous blank check.” It is always I* the post-Trump perceptions o* the possible that campaign-trail rhetoric will United States in the Middle East may yield to the realities o* power politics, be good news for U.S. power and but in assessing their own national interests, the same cannot be said for security in the coming years, Saudi Arabia the rethinking that will take place in the and its fellow Gul, kingdoms have no rest o* the world. And in contrast to in choice but to at least anticipate the the Gul* region and the Middle East withdrawal o* U.S. power from the region. more generally, in Europe and Asia, the Israel must confront similar calcula- United States has enormous geostrate- tions. During the Obama administra- gic, political, and economic interests— tion and after, Israeli Prime Minister as it has for a century. What happens in Benjamin Netanyahu made the radical Europe and East Asia, which are among
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the world’s vital centers o! economic Hungary, Poland, and Turkey is endan- activity, matters for the United States. gering the notion o! the alliance as a Reduced engagement with and commit- like-minded security community. (It was ment to partners in these regions will this notion that caused Spain to join the create opportunities for others—actors alliance in 1982, after it transitioned to who will be indi&erent or even hostile democracy.) A "#$% that contains to what the United States wants in the authoritarian members will rot from world. These challenges defy easy within. In the United States, meanwhile, reassurance. Biden will surely (and wisely) growing skepticism o! internationalism rea'rm the U.S. commitment to "#$%. may mean that the country no longer It is unlikely that the alliance would has any interest in pursuing milieu goals. have survived a second Trump adminis- Washington might simply pick up its tration, given Trump’s ambivalence about marbles and go home. Europe would be democratic allies in general and partici- compelled to test the theory that the pation in what he oddly perceived to be alliance is a force for comity and stabil- a dues-paying organization in particular. ity. But the implications o! American Will the alliance survive much past abandonment would go far beyond the 2025? There are reasons to be doubtful. continent. It could also presage a In 1993, the realist international post-American world that is darker, more relations scholar Kenneth Waltz argued authoritarian, and less able to address that with the Soviet Union gone, "#$% collective challenges. had outlived its usefulness, and he There is no region o! the world where predicted, “N#$%’s days are not numbered, revised assessments about the United but its years are.” The alliance turned States will be more consequential than out to have decades o( life left, o! course. Asia. Many observers fret over the What Waltz missed was that "#$% has prospect o! a ruinous shooting war always been more than a narrow mili- between China and the United States, tary alliance; it is also a broader security as Beijing looks to assert what it consid- community o( like-minded states and a ers to be its rightful place as the domi- stabilizing force on a historically war- nant power in the region. Emerging prone continent. As such, the alliance great powers with revisionist aspirations has advanced what another realist scholar, are nothing new and are commonly Arnold Wolfers, called “milieu goals”— destabilizing, as they invariably step on measures designed to make the interna- the toes o! the contented guardians o! tional environment more benign. N#$% the status quo. That said, the future o! has managed to achieve these goals at Asia will be determined more by political very little cost, considering that it has calculations than military confronta- always been unlikely that the United tions. Regional actors, once again, will States would cut its overall spending on have to make guesses about the future defense and thus save money i! it international disposition and reliability withdrew from "#$%. o! the United States. But now, "#$% faces existential The main geopolitical assessment that threats on both sides o! the Atlantic. In regional powers will have to make is Europe, authoritarian backsliding in not whether the United States would win
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a war against China; it is whether the China is now South Korea’s largest export United States will stay involved. Will market, and South Korea sells almost Washington retain its alliance commit- twice as much to that country as it does to ments? Will it demonstrate enough the United States. Should Seoul assess political engagement and recognizable that a future U.S. president might cut the military capacity to give regional powers cord o* the U.S. alliance with South the con.dence to balance against China? Korea, South Korea might increasingly I* countries .gure that the United fall into the orbit o* China’s in+uence. States is out, or indi-erent, then many will decide they have little choice but to SCARRED FOR LIFE bandwagon with China, given its over- The future o* U.S. in+uence—in Eu- whelming power. I* it becomes apparent rope, Asia, and everywhere else—de- that China’s power and in+uence will pends a great deal on what the United be left unchecked, countries in the region States says it will do and whether it will increasingly accede to more o* follows through with consistent actions. China’s demands in bilateral disputes and Biden is capable o, following through. show greater deference for its prefer- But in an anarchic world, U.S. in+uence ences more generally. will depend at least as much on some- The ground in Asia is clearly shifting. thing else: how other states measure Washington renounced its own grand long-term American purpose. By trade agreement, the /00, and a /00 that producing a Trump presidency and includes the United States is not likely calling attention to the underlying coming back. As international trade domestic dysfunctions that allowed a agreements will almost certainly remain previously inconceivable development to a lightning rod and perhaps even a litmus occur, the United States is now looked at test for powerful constituencies in both far di-erently than it once was. These political parties, trying to breathe life back new and consequential perceptions will into the /00 by joining its successor pact endure, and for some time. is unlikely to be successful—nor deemed A second Trump administration worth the anticipated political blowback. would have done irretrievable damage China, in contrast, has picked up that to the United States as an actor in dropped ball and recently signed on to world politics. But even with Trump’s the Regional Comprehensive Economic defeat, the rest o* the world cannot Partnership. Less ambitious than the ignore the country’s deep and dis.gur- /00, that agreement nevertheless boasts ing scars. They will not soon heal.∂ countries that intended to join the U.S.-led pact: Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and South Korea, among others. And international politics and economics are not easily disentangled. Trump commonly disparaged military allies as freeloaders and viewed American troops stationed abroad, including in South Korea, as a for-pro.t, mercenary force.
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their perception o" their proper place and A Superpower, role in the world. Even as they have met the challenges o3 Nazism and Japanese Like It or Not imperialism, Soviet communism, and radical Islamist terrorism, they have
AND FALL never regarded this global activism as Why Americans Must normal. Even in the era o" the Internet, Accept Their Global Role long-range missiles, and an interdepen- dent global economy, many Americans retain the psychology o" a people living DECLINE Robert Kagan apart on a vast continent, untouched by the world’s turmoil. Americans have ll great powers have a deeply never been isolationists. In times o" ingrained self-perception emergency, they can be persuaded to Ashaped by historical experience, support extraordinary exertions in far-o! geography, culture, beliefs, and myths. places. But they regard these as excep- Many Chinese today yearn to recover tional responses to exceptional circum- the greatness o" a time when they ruled stances. They do not see themselves as unchallenged at the pinnacle o" their the primary defender o" a certain kind o" civilization, before “the century o$ humili- world order; they have never embraced ation.” Russians are nostalgic for Soviet that “indispensable” role. days, when they were the other super- As a result, Americans have often power and ruled from Poland to Vladivo- played it poorly. Their continental view stok. Henry Kissinger once observed that o" the world has produced a century o" Iranian leaders had to choose whether wild oscillations—indi!erence followed they wanted to be “a nation or a cause,” by panic, mobilization and intervention but great powers and aspiring great followed by retreat and retrenchment. powers often see themselves as both. That Americans refer to the relatively Their self-perception shapes their low-cost military involvements in Afghan- de#nition o" the national interest, o" what istan and Iraq as “forever wars” is just the constitutes genuine security and the latest example o" their intolerance for the actions and resources necessary to achieve messy and unending business o" preserv- it. Often, it is these self-perceptions that ing a general peace and acting to forestall drive nations, empires, and city-states threats. In both cases, Americans had one forward. And sometimes to their ruin. foot out the door the moment they Much o" the drama o" the past century entered, which hampered their ability to resulted from great powers whose aspira- gain control o" di5cult situations. tions exceeded their capacity. This on-again, o!-again approach has Americans have the opposite problem. confused and misled allies and adversar- Their capacity for global power exceeds ies, often to the point o" spurring con4icts that could have been avoided by ROBERT KAGAN is Stephen and Barbara a clear and steady application o" Ameri- Friedman Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of The Jungle Grows can power and in4uence in the service o" Back: America and Our Imperiled World. a peaceful, stable, and liberal world
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order. The twentieth century was littered golden dwellings.” For the moment, Bryce with the carcasses o+ foreign leaders and wrote, “she sails upon a summer sea.” governments that misjudged the United But then the world shifted, and States, from Germany (twice) and Americans suddenly found themselves at Japan to the Soviet Union to Serbia to the center o* it. The old order upheld by Iraq. I* the twenty--rst century is not to the United Kingdom and made possible follow the same pattern—most danger- by a tenuous peace in Europe collapsed ously, in the competition with China— with the arrival o* new powers. The rise then Americans will need to stop look- o* Germany destroyed the precarious ing for the exits and accept the role that equilibrium in Europe, and the Europe- fate and their own power have thrust ans proved unable to restore it. The upon them. Perhaps after four years o* concurrent rise o* Japan and the United President Donald Trump, Americans are States put an end to more than a century ready for some straight talk. o+ British naval hegemony. A global geopolitics replaced what had been a OF TWO MINDS European-dominated order, and in this Americans’ preference for a limited very di,erent con-guration o* power, the international role is a product o* their United States was thrust into a new history and experience and o* the myths position. Only it could be both a Paci-c they tell themselves. Other great powers and an Atlantic power. Only it, with weak aspire to recapture past glories. Ameri- neighbors to the north and south and vast cans have always yearned to recapture oceans to the east and west, could send what they imagine as the innocence and the bulk o* its forces to -ght in distant limited ambition o* their nation’s youth. theaters for prolonged periods while its For the -rst decades o* the new republic’s homeland remained unthreatened. Only existence, Americans struggled merely to it could a,ord to -nance not only its own survive as a weak republic in a world o* war e,orts but also those o* its allies, superpower monarchies. They spent the mustering the industrial capacity to nineteenth century in sel-shness and produce ships, planes, tanks, and other self-absorption, conquering the continent materiel to arm itsel* while also serving and struggling over slavery. By the early as the arsenal for everyone else. Only it twentieth century, the United States had could do all o* this without bankrupting become the richest and potentially most itsel. but instead growing richer and powerful country in the world, but one more dominant with each major war. without commitments or responsibilities. The United States, the British statesman It rose under the canopy o* a benevolent Arthur Balfour observed, had become world order it had no part in upholding. the “pivot” on which the rest o* the “Safe from attack, safe even from men- world turned or, in President Theodore ace,” the British historian James Bryce Roosevelt’s words, “the balance o* power wrote o* the United States in 1888, “she o* the whole world.” hears from afar the warring cries o* The world had never known such a European races and faiths, as the gods o* power—there was not the language to Epicurus listened to the murmurs o* the describe it or a theory to explain it. It unhappy earth spread out beneath their was sui generis. The emergence o* this
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unusual great power led to confusion and Europe would again divide into “hostile misjudgment. Nations that had spent camps,” the world would again descend centuries calculating the power relation- into “utter blackness,” and the United ships in their own regions were slow to States would again be dragged into war. appreciate the impact o! this distant deus The United States had an interest in a ex machina, which, after long periods o! peaceful and predominantly liberal indi$erence and aloofness, could sud- Europe, a peaceful Asia, and open and denly swoop in and transform the safe oceans on which Americans and balance o! power. Americans, too, had a their goods could travel safely. But such hard time adjusting. The wealth and a world could not be built except around relative invulnerability that made them American power. Thus the United uniquely capable o" #ghting major wars States had an interest in world order. and enforcing peace in Europe, Asia, Such arguments met powerful and the Middle East simultaneously also opposition. The Republican senator made them question the necessity, Henry Cabot Lodge and other critics desirability, and even morality o! doing condemned Wilson’s league as both so. With the United States fundamen- unnecessary and a betrayal o! the tally secure and self-su%cient, why did founders’ vision. For the United States it need to get involved in con&icts to concern itsel! with world order was thousands o! miles from its shores? And to violate the basic principles that made what right did it have? it an exceptional, peace-loving nation in The case for a policy aimed at creating a world at war. Two decades later, as and preserving a liberal world order was Americans debated whether to enter #rst made by Theodore Roosevelt and another world war, another Republican Woodrow Wilson during World War I. senator, Robert Taft, ridiculed the idea With the United Kingdom and the other that the United States, which was European powers no longer able to perfectly safe from attack, should “range preserve order, they argued, and as the over the world, like a knight-errant, war demonstrated, it had fallen to the protecting democracy and ideals o! United States to create and defend a good faith, and tilting, like Don Qui- new liberal world order. This was the xote, against the windmills o" Fascism.” purpose o! the “World League for the President Franklin Roosevelt argued Peace o" Righteousness,” proposed by that even i! the United States was not Roosevelt at the beginning o! the war, directly threatened by Nazi Germany or and o! the League o" Nations, which imperial Japan, a world in which those Wilson eventually championed after it: powerful dictatorships dominated their to create a new peaceful order with regions would be a “shabby and danger- American power at its center. Wilson ous place to live in.” It was only a believed it was the only feasible alterna- matter o! time before the dictatorships tive to a resumption o! the con&ict and would gather themselves for a #nal chaos that had devastated Europe. I! assault on the remaining citadel o! Americans instead turned back to their democracy, Roosevelt believed, but “narrow, sel#sh, provincial purposes,” he even before that moment came, the warned, the peace would collapse, United States might become “a lone
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island” o* democracy in a world o* an explosion o* global prosperity and a dictators, and democracy itsel* might historically unprecedented spread o* simply perish. But the opponents o* democratic government. American intervention in World War II That was the conscious aim o* worried as much about the conse- Roosevelt during World War II and o* quences o* winning as about the costs o* his successors in the Truman adminis- intervening. They did not want their tration. They believed that a world country to subordinate itsel* to the order based on liberal political and interests o/ European empires, but economic principles was the only neither did they want it to replace those antidote to the anarchy o* the 1930s. empires as the dominant world power. For such an order to exist, the United Citing Secretary o* State John Quincy States could not “sit in the parlor with a Adams, they warned that in becoming shotgun, waiting,” argued Dean Ache- the “dictatress o* the world,” the United son, President Harry Truman’s secre- States would lose its soul. tary o* state. It had to be out in the The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor world actively shaping it, deterring cut short the debate but left it unsettled. some powers and bolstering others. It Roosevelt fought the war with his eye on had to create “situations o* strength” at the postwar order he hoped to create, critical nodes, spreading stability, but most Americans saw the war as an prosperity, and democracy, especially in act o* self-defense, perfectly consistent the world’s core industrial regions o* with a continental perspective. When it Europe and Asia. The United States was over, they expected to come home. had to be “the locomotive at the head o* When the United States did end up mankind,” Acheson said, pulling the dominating the world after World War II, world along with it. therefore, Americans su0ered from a kind o* cognitive dissonance. During AMERICA ADRIFT the Cold War, they took on unheard-o* Yet even as they created this order, few global responsibilities, deploying troops Americans ever understood world in distant theaters by the hundreds o* order as the goal. For most, it was the thousands and +ghting two wars, in threat o* communism that justi+ed Korea and in Vietnam, that were 15 these extraordinary exertions, that times as costly in terms o* combat justi+ed the establishment o* '(," and deaths as the wars in Afghanistan and the defense o* Japan, Korea, and, Iraq would be. They promoted an ultimately, Vietnam. Resisting commu- international free-trade regime that nism became synonymous with the sometimes enriched others more than national interest, for communism was themselves. They intervened economi- perceived as a threat to the American cally, politically, diplomatically, and way o- life. When Americans balked at militarily in every corner o* the world. supporting Greece and Turkey in 1947, And whether or not they were conscious the Republican senator Arthur Vanden- o* it, they did create a liberal world berg told Truman administration order, a relatively peaceful international o.cials to “scare hell out o* the Ameri- environment that in turn made possible can people,” and Acheson saw the
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FA.indb 32 1/22/21 9:00 PM REDESIGNING GLOBALIZATION
Discover our degrees in International A!airs & Public Policy The UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy provides analytical training for the next generation of policymakers, utilizing the latest science and technology to solve the world’s greatest challenges. gps.ucsd.edu Robert Kagan
expediency o* making things, as he to what Bush had called “a Europe admitted in his memoirs, “clearer than whole and free.” Clinton, too, was truth.” With communism as the sole attacked by realists—for engaging in enemy, everything mattered. Every act “international social work.” was as an act o* defense. Then came President George W. When the Cold War ended, there- Bush. The second war with Iraq was fore, the disjunction between Ameri- also aimed primarily at preserving cans’ actual role and Americans’ self- world order—to rid the Middle East perception became untenable. Without and the Persian Gul* o* a serial aggres- the global threat o* communism, Ameri- sor who fancied himsel* the new cans wondered what the purpose o* their Saladin. But the 9/11 attacks had foreign policy should be. What was the caused world-order objectives to again point o- having a globe-girdling security become confused with continental system, a hegemonic navy, far-.ung defense, even for the war’s advocates. alliances with dozens o* nations, and an When the intelligence on Saddam’s international free-trade regime? weapons programs proved mistaken, The rebellion began immediately. many Americans felt that they had When the Iraqi dictator Saddam been lied to about the direct threat Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Iraq posed to the United States. President George H. W. Bush initially President Barack Obama rode to power made the case for driving him out on in part on the angry disillusionment world-order grounds. “A world in that still shapes American attitudes which brutality and lawlessness are today. Ironically, in accepting the allowed to go unchecked isn’t the kind Nobel Peace Prize, Obama observed o* world we’re going to want to live in,” that American willingness to “under- Bush said in a televised address from write global security” had brought the Oval O/ce, quoting the general stability to the postwar world and who was commanding the U.S. marines that this was in the United States’ ,ghting Saddam’s forces. But when “enlightened self-interest.” Yet it realists and conservatives criticized quickly became clear that Americans Bush’s vision o* a “new world order” as were more interested in nation build- overly ambitious and idealistic, the ing at home. In the end, Obama’s administration fell back on the kind o* realism, like Taft’s, consisted o* accept- narrow, continental rationale Ameri- ing “the world as it is,” not as advocates cans could supposedly better under- o* world order might wish it to be. stand—“jobs, jobs, jobs,” was how In 1990, the former U.S. ambassador Secretary o* State James Baker ex- to the +' Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that plained what the Gul- War was about. the United States should return to When President Bill Clinton inter- being a “normal” nation with normal vened twice in the Balkans and then interests, give up the “dubious bene,ts expanded '(0", it was in defense o* o* superpower status,” end the “unnatu- world order, both to stamp out ethnic ral focus” on foreign policy, and pursue cleansing in Europe and to prove the its national interests as “conventionally United States’ continuing commitment conceived.” That meant protecting its
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citizens, its territory, its wealth, and its for “restraint” still recite the founders’ access to “necessary” goods. It did not wisdom and declaim its betrayal as acts mean preserving the balance o" power o! hubris, messianism, and imperialism. in Europe or Asia, promoting democ- Many internationalists still believe that racy, or taking responsibility for prob- what they regard as the unwarranted lems in the world that did not touch exercise o" American power is the Americans directly. This is the conti- greatest obstacle to a better and more nental perspective that still reigns just world. The mixed results o" the wars today. It does not deny that the United in Afghanistan and Iraq are not merely States has interests, but it proposes that errors o" judgment and execution but they are merely the interests that all black marks on the American soul. nations have. Americans still yearn to escape to a The problem is that the United more innocent and simpler past. To a States has not been a normal nation for degree they probably don’t recognize, over a century, nor has it had normal they yearn to have less power. Realists interests. Its unique power gives it a have long understood that as long as unique role. Bangladeshis and Bolivians the United States is so powerful, it also have an interest in global stability, will be hard to avoid what the political after all, and they might su'er i" scientists Robert Tucker and David another Germany came to dominate Hendrickson once called “the imperial Europe or i" another Japan came to temptation.” That is one reason why dominate Asia. But no one would realists have always insisted that suggest that it was in their national American power is in decline or interest to prevent that from happen- simply not up to the task. The colum- ing, because they lack the capacity to do nist Walter Lippmann and the diplo- so, just as the United States lacked the mat George Kennan made that argu- capacity in 1798, when it was most ment in the late 1940s, as did threatened by the prospect o" a Euro- Kissinger in the late 1960s and the pean hegemon. World order became the historian Paul Kennedy in the 1980s, United States’ concern when the old and many realists still make it today. world order collapsed in the early Realists treat every unsuccessful war, twentieth century and the country from Vietnam to Iraq, as i" it were the became the only power capable o" equivalent o" the Sicilian expedition, establishing a new one in which its the #nal act o$ folly that led to Ath- interests could be protected. ens’s defeat in the war against Sparta That is still the case today, and yet, in the #fth century %&. An entire even more than in Kirkpatrick’s time, generation o" Americans has grown up continentalism remains the dominant believing that the lack o" clear-cut perspective. It informs the language victories in Afghanistan and Iraq Americans use to talk about foreign proves that their country can no policy and the theoretical paradigms by longer accomplish anything with which they understand such concepts as power. The rise o" China, the United national interest and security. It also States’ declining share o" the global remains su'used with moralism. Calls economy, the advance o" new military
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technologies, and a general di+usion ton’s weakness, use its own growing o* power around the world—all have power to try to alter the East Asian signaled the twilight, once again, o* strategic situation, it might have to the American order. cope not only with the United States Yet i* the United States were as but also with a global coalition o* weak as so many people claim, it advanced industrial nations, much as wouldn’t have to practice restraint. It is the Soviets discovered. precisely because the country is still The Trump years were a stress test capable o* pursuing a world-order for the American world order, and the strategy that critics need to explain order, remarkably, passed. Confronted why it should not. The fact is that the by the nightmare o* a rogue super- basic con.guration o* international power tearing up trade and other power has not changed as much as agreements, U.S. allies appeased and many imagine. The earth is still round; cajoled, bringing o+erings to the angry the United States still sits on its vast, volcano and waiting hopefully for isolated continent, surrounded by better times. Adversaries also trod oceans and weaker powers; the other carefully. When Trump ordered the great powers still live in regions killing o* the Iranian commander crowded with other great powers; and Qasem Soleimani, it was reasonable to when one power in those regions grows expect Iran to retaliate, and it may still, too strong for the others to balance but not with Trump as president. The against, the would-be victims still look Chinese su+ered through a long tari+ to the distant United States for help. war that hurt them more than it hurt Although Russia possesses a huge the United States, but they tried to nuclear arsenal, it is even more an avoid a complete breakdown o* the “Upper Volta with rockets” today than economic relationship on which they when that wisecrack was coined, in the depend. Obama worried that providing early Cold War. The Soviets at least o+ensive weapons to Ukraine could controlled hal* o/ Europe. China has lead to war with Russia, but when the taken the place o* Japan, stronger in Trump administration went ahead with terms o* wealth and population but the weapons deliveries, Moscow with unproven military capabilities and acquiesced with barely a murmur. a much less favorable strategic posi- Many o, Trump’s policies were erratic tion. When imperial Japan expanded in and ill conceived, but they did show the 1930s, it faced no formidable how much excess, unused power the regional competitors, and the Western United States has, i* a president powers were preoccupied with the chooses to deploy it. In the Obama German threat. Today, Asia is crowded years, o-cials measured 50 times with other great powers, including before deciding not to cut, ever fearful three whose militaries are among the that other powers would escalate a top ten in the world—India, Japan, and confrontation. In the Trump years, it South Korea—all o* which are either was other countries that worried about allies or partners o* the United States. where a confrontation with the United Should Beijing, believing in Washing- States might lead.
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GREAT POWER, GREAT warned, against a provoked America and RESPONSIBILITY its allies, they might well meet the same The United States is “lazily playing fate as other U.S. rivals. with a fraction o" her immeasurable The question is not whether the strength”—so the British historian United States is still capable o! prevailing Arnold Toynbee commented somewhat in a global confrontation, either hot or ruefully in the early 1930s. At the time, cold, with China or any other revisionist U.S. defense spending was between two power. It is. The real question is whether and three percent o! %&'. Today, it is a the worst kinds o" hostilities can be little over three percent. In the 1950s, avoided, whether China and other during the Eisenhower administra- powers can be encouraged to pursue their tion—often seen as a time o! admirable aims peacefully, to con#ne the global restraint in U.S. foreign policy—the competition to the economic and political United States had almost one million realms and thus spare themselves and the troops deployed overseas, out o! a total world from the horrors o! the next great American population o! 170 million. war or even the still frightening confron- Today, in an era when the United tations o! another cold war. States is said to be dangerously overex- The United States cannot avoid such tended, there are roughly 200,000 U.S. crises by continuing to adhere to a troops deployed overseas, out o! a nineteenth-century view o! its national population o! 330 million. Setting aside interest. Doing that would produce what whether this constitutes “lazily playing it produced in the past: periods o! with a fraction” o! American strength, it indi$erence and retrenchment followed is important to recognize that the by panic, fear, and sudden mobilization. United States is now in peace mode. Already, Americans are torn between Were Americans to shift to a war these two impulses. On the one hand, footing, or even a Cold War–type China now occupies that place in the footing, in response to some Chinese American mind that Germany and the action—for instance, an attack on Soviet Union once held: an ideological Taiwan—the United States would look opponent that has the ability to strike at like a very di$erent animal. American society directly and that has At the height o! the late Cold War, power and ambitions that threaten the under President Ronald Reagan, the United States’ position in a key region United States spent six percent o! %&' on and perhaps everywhere else, too. On defense, and its arms industry produced the other hand, many Americans believe weapons in such quantity and o! such that the United States is in decline and quality that the Soviets simply could not that China will inevitably come to domi- keep up. The Chinese could #nd them- nate Asia. Indeed, the self-perceptions selves in a similar predicament. They o! the Americans and the Chinese are might “run wild for the #rst six months perfectly symmetrical. The Chinese or a year,” as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, think that the United States’ role in the commander o! the Japanese (eet their region for the past 75 years has during World War II, predicted about his been unnatural and is therefore tran- own forces. But in the long run, as he also sient, and so do the Americans. The
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Chinese believe that the United States is capable o* upholding such an order is in decline, and so do many Americans. the United States. This is not an The danger is that as Beijing ramps up expression o+ hubris but a reality rooted e,orts to ful.ll what it has taken to in international circumstances. And it is calling “the Chinese dream,” Americans certainly a mixed blessing. In trying to will start to panic. It is in times like this preserve this order, the United States that miscalculations are made. has wielded and will wield power, some- Perhaps the Chinese, careful stu- times unwisely and ine,ectively, with dents o+ history that they are, will not unpredictable costs and morally am- make the mistake that others have made biguous consequences. That is what in misjudging the United States. wielding power means. Americans have Whether Americans have learned the naturally sought to escape this burden. lessons o* their own history, however, They have sought to divest themselves remains to be seen. A century-long o* responsibility, hiding sometimes pattern o* oscillation will be di/cult to behind dreamy internationalism, change. It will be especially so when sometimes behind a determined resig- foreign policy experts o* all stripes nation to accept the world “as it is,” and regard support for a liberal world order always with the view that absent a clear as impossible and immoral. Among and present danger, they can hang back other problems, their prescriptions in their imaginary fortress. su,er from an unwarranted optimism The time has come to tell Americans about the likely alternatives to a U.S.- that there is no escape from global led order. Realists, liberal international- responsibility, that they have to think ists, conservative nationalists, and beyond the protection o* the homeland. progressives all seem to imagine that They need to understand that the without Washington playing the role it purpose o* '(-" and other alliances is to has played these past 75 years, the world defend not against direct threats to U.S. will be just .ne, and U.S. interests will interests but against a breakdown o* the be just as well protected. But neither order that best serves those interests. recent history nor present circum- They need to be told honestly that the stances justify such idealism. The task o* maintaining a world order is alternative to the American world order unending and fraught with costs but is not a Swedish world order. It will not preferable to the alternative. A failure to be a world o+ law and international be square with the American people has institutions or the triumph o0 Enlight- led the country to its current predica- enment ideals or the end o+ history. It ment, with a confused and angry public will be a world o* power vacuums, convinced that its leaders are betraying chaos, con1ict, and miscalculation—a American interests for their own nefari- shabby place indeed. ous, “globalist” purposes. The antidote to The messy truth is that in the real this is not scaring the hell out o* them world, the only hope for preserving about China and other threats but trying liberalism at home and abroad is the to explain, again, why the world order maintenance o* a world order conducive they created still matters. This is a job for to liberalism, and the only power Joe Biden and his new administration.∂
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FA.indb 38 1/22/21 9:00 PM THESE EXCEPTIONAL TIMES REQUIRE EXCEPTIONAL ACTION.
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development experts scrutinize con#den- The Fractured tial cables in secure facilities in Washing- ton and conduct public surveys in con4ict- Power prone countries. They interview local stakeholders on the ground and consult
AND FALL experts in capitals around the world. How to Overcome They make every e!ort to understand Tribalism fractured societies in granular detail, both to predict potential con4icts and to propose interventions to stop them. DECLINE Reuben E. Brigety II For most o" recent history, Americans have deployed such frameworks else- hen the United States looks where, reserving concerns about instabil- abroad to assess the risk o" ity or con4ict for countries other than Wcon4ict, it relies on a host o" their own. When applied to the United tools to understand other countries’ social States in 2021, however, the U.S. govern- and political divisions and how likely ment’s own tools paint a damning picture they are to result in unrest or violence. o" American politics. The contentious These techniques re4ect decades o" 2020 presidential campaign laid bare deep research, in both government and aca- divisions in American society, exhibiting demia, into the root causes o" civil disor- precisely the kind o" tribal politics—when der and state failure. The idea is that by strict loyalty to a foundational identity better understanding those causes, (such as race, religion, clan, or region) is policymakers can prevent con4ict before the organizing principle o" political life it breaks out or, failing that, help states within a country—that sets o! alarm bells recover quickly once it does. when seen abroad. The campaign looked One such tool is the U.S. Agency for less like a contest o" ideas and more like a International Development’s Con4ict battle between tribes, with voters racing Assessment Framework, which is de- to their partisan corners based on iden- signed to illuminate the underlying tity, not concerns about policy. dynamics o" countries in various stages o" These divisions, moreover, are civil strife. Analysts use the .,% to coupled with a growing belie" that U.S. understand local grievances and divisions political and social institutions are no in a particular country, the resilience o" longer functioning as intended. Accord- the country’s political system, and events ing to a 2019 report by the Pew Research that could trigger violence. The process Center, over 60 percent o" Americans can require dozens o" personnel and take believe that declining levels o" trust, months to complete. Diplomats and both interpersonal and in government, are making it di5cult to solve the
REUBEN E. BRIGETY II is Vice Chancellor country’s problems. Tools such as the and President of the University of the South and .,% also note the importance o" the Adjunct Senior Fellow for African Peace and longer-term context to understanding Security Issues at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2013 to 2015, he served as U.S. the likelihood o" violence. And the Ambassador to the African Union. context in the United States is troubling.
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FA.indb 40 1/22/21 9:00 PM The Fractured Power
March/April 2021 41
FA.indb 41 1/22/21 9:00 PM Reuben E. Brigety II
The !.% has reported that in 2019, the West and “the rest.” Contemporary U.S. United States saw more racially and politics, however, resists this simplistic religiously motivated hate crimes—in- dichotomy. Tools such as the *(! demon- cluding 51 murders—than it had at any strate that tribalism, and its potential to point in the previous two decades. ignite con+ict, is a general force that Sales o/ 0rearms reached new highs in connects one’s identity to one’s politics— 2020, with African Americans, worried regardless o, location or political system. about becoming the targets o- racial The more tribal a society is, the violence, purchasing guns in record more closely membership in the tribe is numbers. The killing o- George Floyd policed and the less one is permitted to in May 2020, and the summer o- cooperate with outsiders. Such forces reckoning that followed, brought racial did not disappear with the advent o- the tensions in the United States to their modern nation-state, and they aren’t highest levels in a generation. limited by nationality. Modern Israeli Hardened ethnic and ideological Jews, Iraqi Shiites, and American identities a1xed to political parties. Southern Baptists can exhibit the same Political leaders exacerbating sectarian tribal loyalties as ancient West African divisions. Public institutions that are Ashantis, South American Incas, or distrusted by more and more citizens for imperial Persians. The central benchmark their failure to deliver policy solutions. is whether citizens o- diverse back- The capitol stormed by rioters for the grounds can use reason and argument to 0rst time in over 200 years. A heavily transcend foundational identities and armed society in which a defeated head work together toward a common good. o- government claims that the election Although there have been other was illegitimate yet continues to enjoy moments in U.S. history when the the loyalty o- nearly hal- the electorate. country’s governance failed to meet that I- American diplomats and aid special- ideal—most notably during the Civil ists found this fact pattern elsewhere, War—the current era ranks high among they would call for diplomatic interven- them, especially by the standards the tion. But just as experiences from U.S. government uses to evaluate the elsewhere o2er a reason to worry about risk o- con+ict abroad. Today, the tribes American tribalism, they also provide are the country’s two major political valuable instructions for how to overcome parties, bolstered by the demographic it. I- they learn the right lessons from subgroups that compose their most their counterparts abroad, U.S. citizens, loyal and predictable constituencies. civic groups, and leaders can bridge the Over the past two decades, these groups country’s tribal divisions and begin to have grown further and further apart— revive American democracy. each side accusing the other o- stirring up historical grievances among its core AMERICAN TRIBALISM supporters. According to two 2020 Tribalism, and the con+ict that it can studies by the Pew Research Center, produce, is often understood through roughly eight out o- ten supporters o- facile comparisons between primitive either Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, villages and civilized cities or between the or President Donald Trump, the Republi-
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can nominee, said that they disagreed politics even as a global pandemic o! with the other side over “core American biblical proportions ravages the country. values,” and roughly nine out o! ten— This is not politics as usual. It is again in both camps—said they worried worse than the gridlock and culture that a victory by the other side would lead wars that began in the 1990s, which the to “lasting harm” to the United States. Clinton White House or politically The two parties have also grown savvy moderate Republicans could apart demographically. Although sometimes overcome. Rather, the religion and race have long been two o! current state o! a"airs represents a real the most salient predictors o! a person’s departure from both past practice and party a.liation, they now lock people civic ideals. The United States’ once into political viewpoints in dangerous resilient institutions are now largely ways. Even though Trump managed to incapable o# keeping tribal in$uences in improve his performance among minori- check. At the federal level, serious ties in 2020, people who identify as problems increasingly defy solution, not African American, Asian American, or for a lack o% feasible proposals but Latino overwhelmingly vote Democratic. because politicians are determined to White Americans—particularly those in$ict defeat on their opponents in the who identify as evangelical Protestants— name o! tribal solidarity: Trump’s overwhelmingly vote Republican. impeachment over allegations o! abuse Indeed, a majority o! white Americans o! power and obstruction o! Congress, have voted for the Republican candidate for instance, was decided almost en- in every presidential election in the last tirely along party lines, notwithstanding 50 years. Few other characteristics seem the facts o! the case. The United States able to shake these dividing lines: educa- has su"ered the most &'()*-19 deaths tion, income, region, and gender all pale o! any country in the world at least in comparison when it comes to predict- partly because o! partisan di"erences at ing a given voter’s party preference. the state and the federal level, not a lack Unsurprisingly, politicians’ behavior o! information about how to defeat the re$ects the growing divide among their virus. Such “chronic capacity de+cits,” constituents. According to one metric to use the &,-’s language, can produce from the Brookings Institution, from serious grievances that, under the right 1992 to 2013, the ideological divergence on circumstances, might spark con$ict. committee votes between Democratic and These developments have not gone Republican House members grew by over unnoticed abroad. The United States’ 50 percent. In that environment, coopera- allies and partners regret that tribalism tion across the aisle is nearly out o! the has diminished American diplomatic question. Such profound polarization in$uence and soft power. Its enemies and has made it impossible, for example, to rivals view that tribalism as an opportunity pass comprehensive immigration reform they can exploit. Russia, for example, took despite a clear need to address the issue. advantage o! American society’s racial Likewise, a fundamental problem such and political +ssures during the 2016 as health care, which a"ects every single and 2020 presidential campaigns, when American, is still embroiled in partisan Russian cyberwarriors $ooded social
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media platforms with disinformation Agreement and bring peace to Northern aimed at Black and Latino voters and Ireland. To be sure, the conditions need targeted in+ammatory racist posts toward to be ripe for leaders to move their white voters. (As a senior !0% agent told supporters from hostility to comity with an election security conference in early long-established adversaries, but a 2020, “To put it simply, in this space, willingness to renounce violence and Russia wants to watch us tear ourselves work across tribal divides matters im- apart.”) Foreign adversaries determined mensely. It can be the di*erence between to undermine U.S. governance from perpetual con+ict and durable peace. within could easily replicate these tech- The United States is neither apartheid niques. E*orts to stoke tribal hatreds and South Africa nor Northern Ireland during deepen partisan divisions have succeeded the Troubles. But even though political before; they could succeed again. parties in the United States do not engage in open armed con+ict, there is still an AMERICA, HEAL THYSELF acute need for leaders who are prepared I, diagnosing the United States’ currently to cross tribal lines for the good o, the tribal politics relies partly on tools country. To their credit, throughout 2020, originally developed to assess foreign every living U.S. president (save one) and countries, such as the 1(!, then the many other former elected o-cials solution can be found in a similar place. publicly called for an end to tribal By learning lessons from other societies politics in the country. Following the that have emerged from tribal con+ict, election, former President George W. the United States might be able to Bush released a statement urging Ameri- overcome this divisive moment. cans to move beyond their entrenched One central lesson is that leadership boundaries, saying, “The challenges that matters. On the whole, con+ict-a*ected face our country will demand the best o, states have found it nearly impossible to President-elect Biden and Vice-President- overcome tribal divisions unless their elect Harris—and the best o, us all. We opposing leaders commit to doing so. must come together for the sake o, our Conversely, strong and principled leaders families and neighbors, and for our can help point the way toward a more nation and its future.” Former President united future. Notwithstanding the Barack Obama made a similar plea when generational brutality and oppression he called for Americans to “do our meted out by Afrikaners and other white part—to reach out beyond our comfort South Africans against the Black and zone, to listen to others, to lower the Coloured populations in South Africa, temperature and .nd some common the antiapartheid activist Nelson Man- ground from which to move forward.” dela famously worked with President Such statements were less forthcoming F. W. de Klerk, a member o, the party from political leaders in o-ce. Although responsible for apartheid, to dismantle the political calculus o, those actively the apartheid system. The Sinn Fein serving di*ers from that o, those who leader Gerry Adams and the Unionist have left public life, taking personal risks David Trimble bridged bitter and violent for the greater good is the very de.nition di*erences to negotiate the Good Friday o/ bravery. Americans must demand that
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FA.indb 44 1/22/21 9:00 PM The Fractured Power
their elected leaders show the courage socioeconomic inequalities that a!ect necessary to bridge partisan divides. communities o" color, could help move Another lesson drawn from con#ict- the United States’ political culture a!ected countries is the importance o" beyond one o" its most entrenched tribal civic engagement. Precisely because divisions: partisan identity tied to race. serving leaders are constrained by poli- Although this is work in which every tics, civic groups dedicated to peace may citizen can engage, as president, Biden be needed to make compromise possible. must take the lead. To start, he should The Community o" Sant’Egidio, a group convene a national summit on tribalism o" Catholic laity based in Rome, for and American politics to examine the example, helped negotiate an end to the issue, explore its threat to U.S. gover- civil war in Mozambique in 1992. The nance and security, and propose recom- Women o$ Liberia Mass Action for Peace mendations to address it. The gathering movement, led by the peace activist could be co-chaired by two former U.S. Leymah Gbowee, played a similar role in presidents o" opposite political parties ending the Second Liberian Civil War in and include academics, members o" the 2003 by organizing Christian and Mus- business community, civic leaders, and lim women across confessional lines to other former elected politicians, all on a demand a negotiated settlement to the bipartisan basis. Together, they could con#ict. For her e!orts, Gbowee shared produce tangible proposals, from the the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. local to the national level, designed to In the United States, all manner o" fortify American governance against the groups could take up the challenge o" scourge o" tribalism. building these sorts o% bridges. Many Beyond civic engagement, however, already have. The civic campaign Mil- institutions also matter. Legal systems lions o" Conversations, founded by the and constitutions can either encourage or Tennessee attorney and former White discourage cooperation. This is why many House fellow Samar Ali, seeks to foster peace agreements brokered in countries dialogue across party lines and social riven by tribal con#ict have concluded divisions. In November 2020, it spon- with either a substantially revised consti- sored a “depolarization summit,” which tutional framework (as in South Africa sought to proactively address potential after apartheid) or a binding power- violence following the 2020 election. sharing deal (as in Burundi in 2000, after The Episcopal Church, likewise, has the country’s civil war). Americans are made racial reconciliation a priority in proud o" the durability o" their country’s its national ministry. Beyond the moral constitution, which the Founding Fathers imperative underlying such work, the designed to sti#e factionalism. Yet today, documented correlation between racial the framework provided by the U.S. and political identities in the United Constitution is no longer up to the task. States means that healing the country’s O" the various proposed constitutional racial wounds will have an important reforms designed to modernize U.S. insti- e!ect on governance. A full accounting tutions, the most important for address- o" the country’s racial history, coupled ing the challenge o" political tribalism is with focused attention on stubborn ending partisan gerrymandering. The
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practice, employed by both political not be easy, not least because the citizens parties, creates majority districts without on whom the burden o* addressing the regard to natural or sensible geographic crisis falls are themselves caught up in the boundaries. In so doing, it incentivizes tribalism that pervades society. Solving legislators to play to a partisan base rather tribalism in the United States is not than seek compromise across the aisle, unlike the biblical admonition “Physician, lest challengers further to their party’s heal thyself.” Yet the state o* U.S. democ- ideological extreme penalize them. racy, as well as the country’s place in the Tribalism is thus reinforced by the world, depends in large measure on system. E,orts to end political gerry- whether its citizens can meet this mandering have been underway for years, challenge. American foreign policy and but politicians need to accelerate the national security experts, accustomed to process. One option is for individual dealing with events beyond the country’s states to ban the practice in their jurisdic- shores, would do well to participate in tions. The other is for national leaders to domestic forums aimed at healing schisms amend the U.S. Constitution to end the at home. Citizens who are normally loath practice nationwide. Although both to engage in anything political should +nd approaches would face sti, political ways to spend time regularly and mean- opposition, there is no other structural ingfully interacting with people from reform that would do more to diminish distinct backgrounds and perspectives. the impact o* tribalism on U.S. politics. The goal is not to eliminate di,erences but to learn how to govern despite them. MEETING THE MOMENT Although the United States is not at In Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Cyprus, and imminent risk o* a civil war, it is unable many other countries beset by tribalism, to resolve many o* its pressing domestic it took external intervention to resolve problems or encourage other countries ongoing con-icts. In some instances, to do the same. Tribal divisions within that intervention took the form o* the United States are susceptible to mediation e,orts by regional organiza- manipulation by enterprising politicians tions such as the African Union or the at home and malevolent adversaries Organization o* American States. In abroad. Strengthening the country’s others, it involved peacekeeping forces capacity to govern itsel* across these from third parties such as the .' or boundaries is more than a moral good; it '(/". Unsurprisingly, the United States is a national security priority. The case is unlikely to tolerate outside help when for U.S. global leadership has never been it comes to bridging its divisions. The simply that the country has an economy country will never listen to a démarche or a military that is stronger than any from the European Union expressing other. It is that the United States’ concern about rising tribalism, nor will example, and the ideals the United States it invite peacekeepers to rescue Black embodies, is worthy o* emulation and neighborhoods from aggressive policing. respect. A country that reveres its So it will fall to Americans to do the freedom and insists on its exceptionalism work themselves o0 bridging their should also meet the standards o* gover- country’s tribal divisions. The task will nance it sets for itself.∂
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FA 47_ads_rev2.indd 1 1/25/21 4:07 PM
There are a lot o* possible theories o* Foreign Policy for history, but they tend to fall, like Bush’s and Trump’s, into two main camps: Pragmatists optimistic and pessimistic. Thus, the Clinton administration followed its own
AND FALL version o+ happy directionality—think o* How Biden Can Learn From it as Bush with less muscular Christianity. History in Real Time And there have been earlier believers in Trump’s dark and stormy night, as well. Unfortunately, given the stakes o* the DECLINE Gideon Rose question, no one really knows whether the optimists or the pessimists have the ismarck once said that the states- better case. Political theorists have man’s task was to hear God’s fought about that for centuries, with Bfootsteps marching through neither side winning. A few generations history and try to catch his coattails as ago, modern social scientists joined in, he went past. U.S. President George W. generating and testing lots o* theories in Bush agreed. In his second inaugural lots o* ways, but still, neither camp address, Bush argued that “history has bested the other. And then, in the last an ebb and -ow o* justice, but history few years, history got interesting again also has a visible direction, set by liberty and erased some o* the few things the and the Author o. Liberty.” President scholars thought they had learned. Donald Trump had a di/erent take. His As individuals, presidents have had National Security Strategy claimed: “A strong views on these matters. As a central continuity in history is the group, they have not. American foreign contest for power. The present time policy is notorious for its internal ten- period is no di/erent.” The Bush team sions. Its ,ts and starts and reversals do saw history moving forward along a not ,t easily into any single theoretical sunlit path; the Trump team saw it as a framework. Yet this pluralism has proved gloomy eternal return. Those beliefs led to be a feature, not a bug. Precisely them to care about di/erent issues, because it has not embraced any one expect di/erent things o* the world, and approach to foreign policy consistently, pursue di/erent foreign policies. Washington has managed to avoid the Theories o+ history, fundamental worst aspects o* all. Blessed with geopo- beliefs about how the world works, are litical privilege, it has slowly stumbled usually assumed rather than argued and forward, moving over the centuries from rarely get subjected to serious scrutiny. peripheral obscurity to global he gem- Yet these general ideas set the parameters ony. Its genius has been less strategic for all the speci,c policy choices an insight than an ability to cut losses. administration makes. Know an admin- By now, it seems fair to say that the istration’s theory o+ history, and much debate between the optimists and the o* the rest is easy to ,ll in. pessimists will never be settled conclu- sively, since each perspective knows GIDEON ROSE is Editor of Foreign A!airs. something big about international politics.
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Instead o* choosing between them, the and his version o* the state o* nature was new administration should keep both more permissive. He didn’t think anarchy truths in its pocket, taking each out necessarily forced states into inevitable as appropriate. con+ict. I* they wanted, they could avoid Learning in U.S. foreign policy has war through cooperation, gaining security come largely across administrations. and protection by association. President Joe Biden’s goal should be to Hobbes’s world and Locke’s world speed up the process, allowing it to hap- looked quite di,erent, so it was clearly pen within an administration. Call it important for policymakers to determine the Bayesian Doctrine: rather than which one corresponded better to reality. being wedded to its priors, the adminis- I* war was inevitable and any stretch o* tration should constantly update them. international quiet was just the calm The way to do so is to make theorists, before another storm, states would be not principals, the administration’s true suckers for ever letting their guard team o* rivals, forcing them to make down. But i* sustained peaceful coop- real-world predictions, and to o,er eration was possible, they would be testable practical advice, and then seeing fools for not trying to achieve it. For 300 whose turn out to be better in real years, the argument raged without end. time. In this approach, searching intel- Pessimists tended to follow Hobbes, and lectual honesty is more important than became known as “realists.” Optimists ideology; what people think matters less were drawn to Locke, and became than whether they can change their minds. known as “liberals.” And history piled Constantly calculating implied odds up data higher and higher. won’t always win pots. But it will help After World War II, scholars o* the administration fold bad hands early, international relations tackled the prob- increasing its winnings over time. lem. They imposed order on the discus- sion and re-ned its concepts. They THE RISE AND FALL OF showed how one could operationalize INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS realist and liberal theories in many ways, THEORY using di,erent variables and processes The canonical modern statements o* the to produce di,erent outcomes. They pessimistic and optimistic visions were tested the theories with sophisticated set out by the English philosophers methods and hoped that eventually their Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in the collective e,orts would yield greater seventeenth century. Hobbes argued that understanding. Studies proliferated, states in the international system were like researchers got better, and work became individuals in a hypothetical state o* more rigorous. But the anticipated nature, before the invention o* govern- knowledge failed to materialize, and it ment. Living under anarchy, with no was hard to tell what, i* any, intellectual sovereign above them to provide order and ground had really been gained. Because security, they were at perpetual risk, o* this conspicuous failure, by the trapped in a permanent war o* all against twenty--rst century, the status claims o* all, doomed to spend eternity jockeying realism, liberalism, and rationalistic for power. Locke’s view was less bleak, theorizing in general were being called
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FA.indb 50 1/22/21 9:00 PM NEW FROM GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS
“Fukuyama here shows again that the telos of history is human dignity, not the State’s boot on your face, forever.” —Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, author of Why Liberalism Works
“Unprecedented insight into the mind of one of the most influential public intellectuals of our time.” —Helena Rosenblatt, author of The Lost History of Liberalism
“The Biden administration should “Williams’s description of Japan’s take careful note of the authors’ latest intelligence and security smart and practical proposals for reforms provides excellent restoring America’s traditional background and analysis both of welcome to those seeking safety continuing challenges Japan faces from persecution.” and how it has addressed past —T. Alexander Aleinikoff, former gaps and failures.” UN Deputy High Commissioner —Andrew L. Oros, author of for Refugees and director, Zolberg Japan’s Security Renaissance, Institute on Migration and Mobility Washington College
“An insightful assessment of all “A readable, coherent, and well- important facets of China’s growing, and argued synthesis of the lessons increasingly capable, nuclear arsenal.” the US military learned (and —Thomas G. Mahnken, senior ignored) observing the conflicts research professor at the Philip outside its borders.” Merrill Center for Strategic Studies, —Brian McAllister Linn, Johns Hopkins Ralph R. Thomas Class of 1921 Professor in Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University
“A very important book on how the “This journal will not fly you from United States should cope with a your chair to the front lines of very different world. Essential for climate change, but we hope conflict resolution courses.” that the voices represented can —Roy Licklider, adjunct senior communicate some of what it research scholar at the Saltzman means to be there.” Institute for War and Peace Studies —Mark Giordano, Cinco Hermanos Chair in Environment and International Affairs, Georgetown University
FA 51_7_GeorgetownU_Press.indd 1 1/22/21 2:52 PM Gideon Rose
into question within the discipline. meanwhile, can no longer be automatically Competing theoretical perspectives considered the greatest danger countries crept back into serious discussion, and face. The pandemic has caused more death scholars increasingly abandoned big and economic destruction than anything questions altogether. Journals published short o* nuclear war or a world war, and articles on “the end o* international climate change will be even more signi+- relations theory.” And then the world cant. Global issues such as these do not started to go o- the rails. +t well into the realist paradigm. Where do things stand now? Liberals The problems go deeper still. “Inter- are on the defensive. They argued that national relations scholars,” the political globalization would build on itsel* and scientist Daniel Drezner has written, increasingly tie the world together, but “are certain about two facts: power is instead it provoked a massive backlash, the de+ning concept o* the discipline and and states are weaponizing interdepen- there is no consensus about what that dence. They saw democracy as improving concept means.” at its core and marching forward on the Consider the question o, how a periphery, but it is now regressing and declining United States should respond to retreating. They saw Chinese authoritari- a rising China. But +rst, explain just what anism as doomed to fail, but it has is rising and falling about each. Military succeeded beyond all expectations. They strength? Economic potential? Percep- preached cosmopolitanism, but it turns tions about the long-term trends o* those? out that everybody’s a little bit nationalist Perceptions about the willingness to (and gets more so under stress). They deploy them? The worth o* each country’s claimed that norms constrained behavior, alliances? Their national cohesiveness and but the reality is that shameless people institutional performance? Power obvi- can break them without consequence. ously comes in multiple forms and These setbacks may be temporary, and the depends on context. This means that the world may get back on the upward track it apparently straightforward question about seemed to be traveling. But maybe not. the U.S.-Chinese power di-erential is Realists, meanwhile, having taken actually quite complicated. the other side o* those bets, are feeling For all the realists’ ominous predictions validated. Relations between the United about recurring con.ict, +nally, great- States and China are playing out like a power war has not occurred for genera- classic security dilemma. The Trump tions. Nobody knows for sure what has administration’s most notable foreign driven this so-called long peace or how policy accomplishment, its Arab-Israeli much longer it will endure. Suggestions peace deals, emerged from classic include luck, nuclear weapons, historical realpolitik. In practice, liberal hegemony memory, U.S. power and policy, eco- looks a lot like . . . hegemony. nomic interdependence, changing value Nevertheless, the picture is problem- systems, and more. But whatever the atic here, too. Realism emphasizes states’ cause, until this unprecedented stretch o* relative power, and that matters. But so great-power peace is broken, it is a bit do leaders, publics, nonstate actors, ideas, rich for pessimistic realists to claim that institutions, and everything else. War, optimistic liberals are obviously naive.
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08_Rose_pp2_Blues.indd 52 1/25/21 11:54 AM Foreign Policy for Pragmatists
Interestingly, the dissidents in inter- numbers. Humans’ multiple cognitive national relations—sociologists, psychol- de!ciencies, for example, make them ogists, constructivists, critical theorists, susceptible to lies, which play a major cultural theorists, Marxists, feminists, but understudied role in politics. network theorists, and others outside the Ordinary lying, knowingly telling U.S. mainstream—have weathered untruths, is common. Big lying, peddling recent decades better. This is not because a full-"edged alternative reality akin to their own !ndings have cumulated; they the Marvel Universe, is not. haven’t. But scholars drawn to those Big lies are the territory o# prophets approaches made wiser bets than the and demagogues, people who hear divine rationalists, both realist and liberal, on voices themselves or play a divinity for what ultimately mattered in political life. others. They are self-contained intellec- They focused on hierarchy as well as tual paradigms immune from scienti!c anarchy, making them better at seeing falsi!cation. As the scholar Nina domination when it was occurring. They Khrushcheva notes, the big lie “covers were more attuned to social relationships. everything and rede!nes reality. There And they started from better assumptions are no holes in it. You . . . either accept about their basic unit o# analysis. the whole thing or everything collapses.” We now know that humans are cogni- The bigger the lie, the further it is from tively biased against reason. Our brains reality, the more psychic potential energy are hardwired to make us emotional, builds up in between. And when the volatile, and tribal. We act according to collapse comes, the energy gets released personal webs o# meaning that do not in a sudden burst. It was that kind o# necessarily overlap with those o# others. cathartic explosion that blew over the The dissidents in international relations U.S. Capitol on January 6. took those factors as starting points, not Was the riot a political protest that afterthoughts. They looked at political got out o$ hand? An attempted putsch? actors from the inside as well as out, A heroic defense o# the republic focused on identity, and appreciated against satanic pedophiles? It was all o# culture and contingency. Their approaches these and more, because the event was were better suited for a world in which streaming on several platforms simul- identity politics is central to everything taneously—not just the conventional and small numbers o# people can wreak %& networks but also the inner mental vast amounts o# damage—not to mention channels o# the deluded rioters. This a world in which those people increasingly was history as tragedy and farce live through social media, the addicted combined; the casualties included a customers o# private companies with busi- woman who was reportedly trampled ness models based on custom-tailoring to death while carrying a "ag saying reality, in"aming emotional volatility, and “Don’t Tread on Me.” stoking group con"ict. The most persuasive reading o# the day is as immersive theater, and not just THE DRAMA AT THE CAPITOL because the marchers came in costume. Studying these strange particles is It played like a mass live production o# di'cult. It’s hard to count the irrational Euripides’s Bacchae, the tale o# a myste-
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rious cult leader who wreaks vengeance other way last November, letting Trump on a city that disrespects him by whip- win the presidency and the Republicans ping its citizens into a frenzied nihilistic keep the Senate, fair and square. rampage. Some men just want to watch In that branch o* the multiverse, the world burn. And some crowds just January 6 in Washington plays out rather like the way it hurts. di+erently. The same crowd comes, but it The riot’s practical implications are is much, much larger. They don’t want to deeply disturbing. But its theoretical hang Vice President Mike Pence; they implications are more so. For example, want to hug him. They don’t storm the one leading proponent o* the big lie in Capitol; they stand outside cheering as he question, Peter Navarro, was a crucial certi,es the president’s reelection. Trump architect o* the Trump administration’s is happy, too. And why not? He gets to trade policy. It will be interesting to be the supreme leader o* the world’s most see how mainstream scholarship on powerful military, in unquestioned international political economy incor- control o- his party and all three branches porates conspiracy theorizing into the o* government, with an o.cial propa- heart o* its analysis. ganda network and a cult o* personality Once they seized the Capitol, that has millions o* members who will meanwhile, these terrorists took sel,es literally believe him over their own eyes. rather than hostages. Like most o* For four more years. their predecessors in the 1970s, they It didn’t happen. But it could have, wanted a lot o* people watching, not a easily, with all the consequences one lot o* people dead. But what i* among might spin out for everything from them had been an even prouder boy, foreign policy and trade, to American one like Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 ideals and institutions, to the future Oklahoma City bomber? Then, the course o* international politics. Democ- entire U.S. Congress could easily have racy didn’t prevail. It lucked out. One been wiped out, along with the vice does not come away from the thought president. It will be interesting to see experiment struck by some larger how the episode a+ects risk assessments pattern o- history, optimistic or pessi- o* all kinds. Clearly, it isn’t so hard to mistic. One comes away struck by its decapitate the United States. Just as radical contingency. clearly, it hasn’t happened recently not because anybody prevented it but FOREIGN POLICY AS ORIENTEERING because almost nobody was trying. Some call for abandoning the search for Most disturbing is what the incident a larger theoretical framework for revealed about Trump. As Bob Corker, foreign policy altogether. “Grand a former Republican senator from strategy is dead,” claimed Drezner and Tennessee, put it: “The one plus that two other political scientists, Ronald comes out o* this [is] people have been Krebs and Randall Schweller, in these able to see ,rsthand what all o* us have pages last year. They argued: known, just who he really is.” With that in mind, imagine a scenario in which a The world today is one o* interaction few hundred thousand votes went the and complexity, wherein the most
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08_Rose_pp2_Blues.indd 54 1/25/21 1:57 PM Foreign Policy for Pragmatists
direct path between two points is not realist and liberal maps o! the world a straight line. A disordered, cluttered, with them as they go, "ltering and and $uid realm is precisely one that combining them as possible. does not recognize grand strategy’s The "rst thing a player with two bad supposed virtue: a practical, durable, maps would learn was not to trust and consistent plan for the long term. either completely. The learning would To debate grand strategy, they show itsel! over time primarily through wrote, “is to indulge in navel-gazing the avoidance o! extreme failure. while the world burns. So it is time to Interestingly, this is just what Drezner operate without one.” They want an and his co-authors "nd in the history administration’s agenda to emerge o! American foreign policy—which is piece by piece, bottom up from depart- precisely why they suggest listening to ments and the "eld, rather than spring the inductive, experiential wisdom o! from the head o! some scribbler in practical policymakers: “The push and Washington who thinks he knows pull between the establishment and its where history is going. In place o! critics and between the executive overarching theoretical frameworks, branch and Congress eventually reined they propose $exibility and incremen- in the worst excesses o! American tal experimentation. activism and prevented the overem- Drezner, Krebs, and Schweller are brace o! restraint.” The pattern is there, correct when they argue that simplistic but miscoded. The United States has road maps are not very helpful in not succeeded because it has operated dealing with today’s complex interna- without theory. It has succeeded be- tional landscape, and both convinced cause it has relied on multiple theories. optimists and convinced pessimists The process works like this. An seem fated to produce crude and optimistic administration, believing the incomplete surveys. But that is not an world can be improved, invades a argument for throwing the maps away. developing country (Vietnam, Afghani- It is an argument for "guring out how stan, Iraq, etc.) and tries to make it to use two bad maps simultaneously. look like Nebraska. After many years o! Foreign policy, after all, is not futile, costly e#ort, the administration cartography. It’s orienteering—racing is kicked out and replaced with a madly through dangerous, unknown pessimistic successor that withdraws. It territory. And theorists aren’t mapmak- can go the other way, too. A pessimis- ers, they’re coaches: their job is to help tic administration, thinking coopera- players race better. Maps provide tion is for suckers, tries to go it alone crucial information, but the players in the world—only to achieve little and have to use them out in the "eld, trying be swapped out for optimistic succes- to move as fast as possible relative to sors able to work better with others. others without getting hurt. O#ered The motor o! U.S. diplomatic success two bad maps, smart players wouldn’t has been the combination o! multiple pick one or toss both. They’d take both foreign policy traditions, multiple along and put them to use. Policymak- dogmatic administrations, and regular ers should do the same, carrying both political turnover.
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American foreign policy has always incorporating the two basic approaches involved -ying blind, making mistakes, to prediction, scenario planning and and slowly, painfully learning what not probabilistic forecasting, into a uni*ed to do. But the process has played out framework. As Scoblic and Tetlock put it: unconsciously, across administrations and eras rather than within them. By The answer lies in developing clusters o+ questions that give early, recognizing and surfacing the pattern, forecastable indications o+ which by becoming aware o+ itself, the country envisioned future is likely to emerge, could own its behavior and more con- thus allowing policymakers to place sciously control and direct it. smarter bets sooner. Instead o+ An excellent way to do just this in evaluating the likelihood o+ a long- practice emerges from the forecasting term scenario as a whole, question research o. Philip Tetlock, an expert in clusters allow analysts to break down political psychology. Tetlock began with potential futures into a series o+ clear a simple experiment: he asked supposed and forecastable signposts that are experts to make speci*c predictions about observable in the short run. future political events and then checked to see how they did. The results showed The Biden administration, in short, that Yeats was right: the best lacked all does not face a tragic choice o+ pessimism, conviction, while the worst were full o+ optimism, or just winging it. Instead o+ passionate intensity. As the international embracing realism or liberalism, it can security scholar Peter Scoblic and Tetlock choose pragmatism, the true American wrote in these pages last year: ideology. The key is to draw on diverse theoretical traditions to develop plausible Those who were surest that they scenarios o+ many alternative futures, understood the forces driving the design and track multiple indicators to political system (“hedgehogs,” in the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s terminol- see which o+ those scenarios is becoming ogy) fared signi*cantly worse than more likely, and follow the evidence their humbler colleagues, who did honestly where it goes. not shy from complexity, approach- Such an approach to foreign policy ing problems with greater curiosity would not change the world. But it would and open-mindedness (“foxes”). allow the United States to see the world clearly and operate in it more e,ectively. More experiments followed, includ- Which would be nice for a change.∂ ing tournaments with large numbers o+ experts and amateurs, repeating and elaborating on the *ndings. Out o+ the whole, a picture emerged o+ what the most successful forecasters did: they kept an open mind and thought -exibly. The essence o+ successful forecasting, Tetlock decided, was combining multiple maps with good decision rules for choosing among them—which meant
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FA.indb 56 1/22/21 9:00 PM ESSAYS
A framework for managing U.S.-Chinese competition will be di!cult to construct, but doing so is still possible—and the alternatives are likely to be catastrophic. – Kevin Rudd
Short o! War The Innovation Wars Kevin Rudd 58 Christopher Darby and Sarah Sewall 142
Accomplice to Carnage Opening Up the Order Robert Malley and Stephen Pomper 73 Anne-Marie Slaughter and Gordon LaForge 154
REN CHENMING How the WTO Changed China Yeling Tan 90 Democracy on the Defense Yascha Mounk 163 System Failure /
COLOR CHINA PHOTO CHINA COLOR Ashish Jha 103 The Rate Debate James H. Stock 174 A New Conservatism Oren Cass 116
A Palestinian Reckoning
/ Hussein Agha and AP Ahmad Samih Khalidi 129
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Short of War How to Keep U.S.-Chinese Confrontation From Ending in Calamity Kevin Rudd
5cials in Washington and Beijing don’t agree on much these days, but there is one thing on which they see eye to eye: the Ocontest between their two countries will enter a decisive phase in the 2020s. This will be the decade o$ living dangerously. No matter what strategies the two sides pursue or what events unfold, the tension between the United States and China will grow, and competition will intensify; it is inevitable. War, however, is not. It remains possible for the two countries to put in place guardrails that would prevent a catas- trophe: a joint framework for what I call “managed strategic competi- tion” would reduce the risk o" competition escalating into open con4ict. The Chinese Communist Party is increasingly con#dent that by the decade’s end, China’s economy will #nally surpass that o" the United States as the world’s largest in terms o" *06 at market exchange rates. Western elites may dismiss the signi#cance o" that milestone; the ..6’s Politburo does not. For China, size always matters. Taking the number one slot will turbocharge Beijing’s con#dence, assertiveness, and lever- age in its dealings with Washington, and it will make China’s central bank more likely to 4oat the yuan, open its capital account, and chal- lenge the U.S. dollar as the main global reserve currency. Meanwhile, China continues to advance on other fronts, as well. A new policy plan, announced last fall, aims to allow China to dominate in all new tech- nology domains, including arti#cial intelligence, by 2035. And Beijing now intends to complete its military modernization program by 2027 (seven years ahead o" the previous schedule), with the main goal o" giving China a decisive edge in all conceivable scenarios for a con4ict
KEVIN RUDD is President of the Asia Society, in New York, and previously served as Prime Minister of Australia.
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with the United States over Taiwan. A victory in such a con!ict would allow President Xi Jinping to carry out a forced reuni"cation with Tai- wan before leaving power—an achievement that would put him on the same level within the ##$ pantheon as Mao Zedong. Washington must decide how to respond to Beijing’s assertive agenda—and quickly. I% it were to opt for economic decoupling and open confrontation, every country in the world would be forced to take sides, and the risk o% escalation would only grow. Among policy- makers and experts, there is understandable skepticism as to whether Washington and Beijing can avoid such an outcome. Many doubt that U.S. and Chinese leaders can "nd their way to a framework to man- age their diplomatic relations, military operations, and activities in cyberspace within agreed parameters that would maximize stability, avoid accidental escalation, and make room for both competitive and collaborative forces in the relationship. The two countries need to consider something akin to the procedures and mechanisms that the United States and the Soviet Union put in place to govern their rela- tions after the Cuban missile crisis—but in this case, without "rst going through the near-death experience o% a barely avoided war. Managed strategic competition would involve establishing certain hard limits on each country’s security policies and conduct but would allow for full and open competition in the diplomatic, economic, and ideological realms. It would also make it possible for Washington and Beijing to co- operate in certain areas, through bilateral arrangements and also multilat- eral forums. Although such a framework would be di&cult to construct, doing so is still possible—and the alternatives are likely to be catastrophic.
BEIJING’S LONG VIEW In the United States, few have paid much attention to the domestic political and economic drivers o% Chinese grand strategy, the content o% that strategy, or the ways in which China has been operationalizing it in recent decades. The conversation in Washington has been all about what the United States ought to do, without much re!ection on whether any given course o% action might result in real changes to China’s stra- tegic course. A prime example o% this type o' foreign policy myopia was an address that then Secretary o% State Mike Pompeo delivered last July, in which he e(ectively called for the overthrow o% the ##$. “We, the freedom-loving nations o% the world, must induce China to change,” he declared, including by “empower[ing] the Chinese people.”
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The only thing that could lead the Chinese people to rise up against the party-state, however, is their own frustration with the **+’s poor performance on addressing unemployment, its radical mismanagement o, a natural disaster (such as a pandemic), or its massive extension o, what is already intense political repression. Outside encouragement o, such discontent, especially from the United States, is unlikely to help and quite likely to hinder any change. Besides, U.S. allies would never support such an approach; regime change has not exactly been a winning strategy in recent decades. Finally, bombastic statements such as Pom- peo’s are utterly counterproductive, because they strengthen Xi’s hand at home, allowing him to point to the threat o- foreign subversion to justify ever-tighter domestic security measures, thereby making it easier for him to rally disgruntled **+ elites in solidarity against an external threat. That last factor is particularly important for Xi, because one o. his main goals is to remain in power until 2035, by which time he will be 82, the age at which Mao passed away. Xi’s determination to do so is re/ected in the party’s abolition o, term limits, its recent announce- ment o, an economic plan that extends all the way to 2035, and the fact that Xi has not even hinted at who might succeed him even though only two years remain in his o0cial term. Xi experienced some di0- culty in the early part o, 2020, owing to a slowing economy and the *"1%2-19 pandemic, whose Chinese origins put the **+ on the defen- sive. But by the year’s end, o0cial Chinese media were hailing him as the party’s new “great navigator and helmsman,” who had prevailed in a heroic “people’s war” against the novel coronavirus. Indeed, Xi’s standing has been aided greatly by the shambolic management o, the pandemic in the United States and a number o, other Western coun- tries, which the **+ has highlighted as evidence o, the inherent supe- riority o, the Chinese authoritarian system. And just in case any ambitious party o0cials harbor thoughts about an alternative candi- date to lead the party after Xi’s term is supposed to end in 2022, Xi recently launched a major purge—a “recti3cation campaign,” as the **+ calls it—o, members deemed insu0ciently loyal. Meanwhile, Xi has carried out a massive crackdown on China’s Ui- ghur minority in the region o, Xinjiang; launched campaigns o, re- pression in Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet; and sti/ed dissent among intellectuals, lawyers, artists, and religious organizations across China. Xi has come to believe that China should no longer fear any sanctions that the United States might impose on his country, or on
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individual Chinese o!cials, in response to violations o" human rights. In his view, China’s economy is now strong enough to weather such sanctions, and the party can protect o!cials from any fallout, as well. Furthermore, unilateral U.S. sanctions are unlikely to be adopted by other countries, for fear o# Chinese retaliation. Nonetheless, the $$% remains sensitive to the damage that can be done to China’s global brand by continuing revelations about its treatment o# minorities. That is why Beijing has become more active in international forums, including the &' Human Rights Council, where it has rallied support for its campaign to push back against long-established universal norms on human rights, while also regularly attacking the United States for its own alleged abuses o# those very norms. Xi is also intent on achieving Chinese self-su!ciency to head o( any e(ort by Washington to decouple the United States’ economy from that o# China or to use U.S. control o# the global )nancial system to block China’s rise. This push lies at the heart o# what Xi describes as China’s “dual circulation economy”: its shift away from export dependency and toward domestic consumption as the long-term driver o# economic growth and its plan to rely on the gravitational pull o# the world’s big- gest consumer market to attract foreign investors and suppliers to China on Beijing’s terms. Xi also recently announced a new strategy for tech- nology R & D and manufacturing to reduce China’s dependence on imports o# certain core technologies, such as semiconductors. The trouble with this approach is that it prioritizes party control and state-owned enterprises over China’s hard-working, innovative, and en- trepreneurial private sector, which has been primarily responsible for the country’s remarkable economic success over the last two decades. In order to deal with a perceived external economic threat from Washing- ton and an internal political threat from private entrepreneurs whose long-term in*uence threatens the power o# the $$%, Xi faces a dilemma familiar to all authoritarian regimes: how to tighten central political control without extinguishing business con)dence and dynamism. Xi faces a similar dilemma when it comes to what is perhaps his paramount goal: securing control over Taiwan. Xi appears to have concluded that China and Taiwan are now further away from peaceful reuni)cation than at any time in the past 70 years. This is probably correct. But China often ignores its own role in widening the gulf. Many o# those who believed that China would gradually liberalize its political system as it opened up its economic system and became more
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connected with the rest o" the world also hoped that that process would eventually allow Taiwan to become more comfortable with some form o" reuni#cation. Instead, China has become more authori- tarian under Xi, and the promise o" reuni#cation under a “one coun- try, two systems” formula has evaporated as the Taiwanese look to Hong Kong, where China has imposed a harsh new national security law, arrested opposition politicians, and restricted media freedom. With peaceful reuni#cation o! the table, Xi’s strategy now is clear: to vastly increase the level o" military power that China can exert in the Taiwan Strait, to the extent that the United States would become unwilling Beijing has concluded that to #ght a battle that Washington itsel" the United States judged it would probably lose. Without U.S. backing, Xi believes, Taiwan would would never "ght a war it either capitulate or #ght on its own and could not win. lose. This approach, however, radically underestimates three factors: the di5- culty o" occupying an island that is the size o" the Netherlands, has the terrain o3 Norway, and boasts a well- armed population o" 25 million; the irreparable damage to China’s inter- national political legitimacy that would arise from such a brutal use o" military force; and the deep unpredictability o" U.S. domestic politics, which would determine the nature o" the U.S. response i" and when such a crisis arose. Beijing, in projecting its own deep strategic realism onto Washington, has concluded that the United States would never #ght a war it could not win, because to do so would be terminal for the future o" American power, prestige, and global standing. What China does not include in this calculus is the reverse possibility: that the failure to #ght for a fellow democracy that the United States has supported for the entire postwar period would also be catastrophic for Washington, particularly in terms o" the perception o" U.S. allies in Asia, who might conclude that the American security guarantees they have long relied on are worthless—and then seek their own arrangements with China. As for China’s maritime and territorial claims in the East China and South China Seas, Xi will not concede an inch. Beijing will continue to sustain pressure on its Southeast Asian neighbors in the South China Sea, actively contesting freedom-of-navigation operations, probing for any weakening o" individual or collective resolve—but stopping short o" a provocation that might trigger a direct military confrontation with
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Washington, because at this stage, China is not fully con*dent it would win. In the meantime, Beijing will seek to cast itsel+ in as reasonable a light as possible in its ongoing negotiations with Southeast Asian claimant states on the joint use o+ energy resources and *sheries in the South China Sea. Here, as elsewhere, China will fully deploy its eco- nomic leverage in the hope o+ securing the region’s neutrality in the event o+ a military incident or crisis involving the United States or its allies. In the East China Sea, China will continue to increase its mili- tary pressure on Japan around the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, but as in Southeast Asia, here too Beijing is unlikely to risk an armed con,ict, particularly given the unequivocal nature o+ the U.S. security guarantee to Japan. Any risk, however small, o+ China losing such a con,ict would be politically unsustainable in Beijing and have massive domestic political consequences for Xi.
AMERICA THROUGH XI’S EYES Underneath all these strategic choices lies Xi’s belief, re,ected in o-cial Chinese pronouncements and ../ literature, that the United States is experiencing a steady, irreversible structural decline. This belie+ is now grounded in a considerable body o+ evidence. A divided U.S. govern- ment failed to craft a national strategy for long-term investment in in- frastructure, education, and basic scienti*c and technological research. The Trump administration damaged U.S. alliances, abandoned trade liberalization, withdrew the United States from its leadership o+ the postwar international order, and crippled U.S. diplomatic capacity. The Republican Party has been hijacked by the far right, and the American political class and electorate are so deeply polarized that it will prove di-cult for any president to win support for a long-term bipartisan strategy on China. Washington, Xi believes, is highly unlikely to recover its credibility and con*dence as a regional and global leader. And he is betting that as the next decade progresses, other world leaders will come to share this view and begin to adjust their strategic postures accord- ingly, gradually shifting from balancing with Washington against Bei- jing, to hedging between the two powers, to bandwagoning with China. But China worries about the possibility o0 Washington lashing out at Beijing in the years before U.S. power *nally dissipates. Xi’s concern is not just a potential military con,ict but also any rapid and radical eco- nomic decoupling. Moreover, the ../’s diplomatic establishment fears that the Biden administration, realizing that the United States will soon
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be unable to match Chinese power on its own, might form an e!ective coalition o" countries across the democratic capitalist world with the express aim o" counterbalancing China collectively. In particular, ##$ leaders fear that President Joe Biden’s proposal to hold a summit o" the world’s major democracies represents a %rst step on that path, which is why China acted rapidly to secure new trade and investment agreements in Asia and Europe before the new administration came into o&ce. Mindful o" this combination o" near-term risks and China’s long- term strengths, Xi’s general diplomatic strategy toward the Biden ad- ministration will be to de-escalate immediate tensions, stabilize the bilateral relationship as early as possible, and do everything possible to prevent security crises. To this end, Beijing will look to fully re- open the lines o' high-level military communication with Washington that were largely cut o! during the Trump administration. Xi might seek to convene a regular, high-level political dialogue, as well, al- though Washington will not be interested in reestablishing the U.S.- China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, which served as the main channel between the two countries until its collapse amid the trade war o" 2018–19. Finally, Beijing may moderate its military activity in the immediate period ahead in areas where the People’s Liberation Army rubs up directly against U.S. forces, particularly in the South China Sea and around Taiwan—assuming that the Biden administra- tion discontinues the high-level political visits to Taipei that became a de%ning feature o" the %nal year o" the Trump administration. For Beijing, however, these are changes in tactics, not in strategy. As Xi tries to ratchet down tensions in the near term, he will have to decide whether to continue pursuing his hard-line strategy against Australia, Canada, and India, which are friends or allies o" the United States. This has involved a combination o" a deep diplomatic freeze and economic coercion—and, in the case o( India, direct military con- frontation. Xi will wait for any clear signal from Washington that part o" the price for stabilizing the U.S.-Chinese relationship would be an end to such coercive measures against U.S. partners. I" no such signal is forthcoming—there was none under President Donald Trump— then Beijing will resume business as usual. Meanwhile, Xi will seek to work with Biden on climate change. Xi understands this is in China’s interests because o" the country’s in- creasing vulnerability to extreme weather events. He also realizes that Biden has an opportunity to gain international prestige i( Beijing co-
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operates with Washington on climate change, given the weight o* Biden’s own climate commitments, and he knows that Biden will want to be able to demonstrate that his engagement with Beijing led to re- ductions in Chinese carbon emissions. As China sees it, these factors will deliver Xi some leverage in his overall dealings with Biden. And Xi hopes that greater collaboration on climate will help stabilize the U.S.-Chinese relationship more generally. Adjustments in Chinese policy along these lines, however, are still likely to be tactical rather than strategic. Indeed, there has been re- markable continuity in Chinese strategy toward the United States since Xi came to power in 2013, and Beijing has been surprised by the relatively limited degree to which Washington has pushed back, at least until recently. Xi, driven by a sense o+ Marxist-Leninist determinism, also believes that history is on his side. As Mao was before him, Xi has become a formidable strategic competitor for the United States.
UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT On balance, the Chinese leadership would have preferred to have seen the reelection o, Trump in last year’s U.S. presidential election. That is not to say that Xi saw strategic value in every element o, Trump’s for- eign policy; he didn’t. The --. found the Trump administration’s trade war humiliating, its moves toward decoupling worrying, its criticism o* China’s human rights record insulting, and its formal declaration o* China as a “strategic competitor” sobering. But most in the --.’s for- eign policy establishment view the recent shift in U.S. sentiment to- ward China as structural—an inevitable byproduct o* the changing balance o* power between the two countries. In fact, a number have been quietly relieved that open strategic competition has replaced the pretense o, bilateral cooperation. With Washington having removed the mask, this thinking goes, China could now move more rapidly— and, in some cases, openly—toward realizing its strategic goals, while also claiming to be the aggrieved party in the face o* U.S. belligerence. But by far the greatest gift that Trump delivered to Beijing was the sheer havoc his presidency unleashed within the United States and between Washington and its allies. China was able to exploit the many cracks that developed between liberal democracies as they tried to navigate Trump’s protectionism, climate change denialism, nation- alism, and contempt for all forms o* multilateralism. During the Trump years, Beijing bene/ted not because o* what it o0ered the
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world but because o! what Washington ceased to o"er. The result was that China achieved victories such as the massive Asia-Paci#c free-trade deal known as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the $%-China Comprehensive Agreement on In- vestment, which will enmesh the Chinese and European economies to a far greater degree than Washington would like. China is wary o! the Biden administration’s ability to help the United States recover from those self-in&icted wounds. Beijing has seen Washington bounce back from political, economic, and secu- rity disasters before. Nonetheless, the ''( remains con#dent that the inherently divisive nature o! U.S. politics will make it impossi- ble for the new administration to solidify support for any coherent China strategy it might devise. Biden intends to prove Beijing wrong in its assessment that the United States is now in irreversible decline. He will seek to use his extensive experience on Capitol Hill to forge a domestic economic strategy to rebuild the foundations o! U.S. power in the post-pandemic world. He is also likely to continue to strengthen the capabilities o! the U.S. military and to do what it takes to sustain American global technological leadership. He has assembled a team o! economic, for- eign policy, and national security advisers who are experienced pro- fessionals and well versed in China—in stark contrast to their predecessors, who, with a couple o! midranking exceptions, had little grasp o! China and even less grasp o) how to make Washington work. Biden’s advisers also understand that in order to restore U.S. power abroad, they must rebuild the U.S. economy at home in ways that will reduce the country’s staggering inequality and increase economic op- portunities for all Americans. Doing so will help Biden maintain the political leverage he’ll need to craft a durable China strategy with bi- partisan support—no mean feat when opportunistic opponents such as Pompeo will have ample incentive to disparage any plan he puts forward as little more than appeasement. To lend his strategy credibility, Biden will have to make sure the U.S. military stays several steps ahead o! China’s increasingly sophis- ticated array o! military capabilities. This task will be made more di*cult by intense budgetary constraints, as well as pressure from some factions within the Democratic Party to reduce military spend- ing in order to boost social welfare programs. For Biden’s strategy to be seen as credible in Beijing, his administration will need to hold the
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line on the aggregate defense budget and cover increased expenses in the Indo-Paci*c region by redirecting military resources away from less pressing theaters, such as Europe. As China becomes richer and stronger, the United States’ largest and closest allies will become ever more crucial to Washington. For the *rst time in many decades, the United States will soon require the com- bined heft o+ its allies to maintain an overall balance o+ power against an adversary. China will keep trying to peel countries away from the United States—such as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom—using a combination o+ eco- nomic carrots and sticks. To prevent China from succeeding, the Biden administration needs to commit itsel+ to fully opening the U.S. econ- omy to its major strategic partners. The United States prides itsel+ on having one o+ the most open economies in the world. But even before Trump’s pivot to protectionism, that was not the case. Washington has long burdened even its closest allies with formidable tari, and nontari, barriers to trade, investment, capital, technology, and talent. I+ the United States wishes to remain the center o+ what until recently was called “the free world,” then it must create a seamless economy across the national boundaries o+ its major Asian, European, and North Amer- ican partners and allies. To do so, Biden must overcome the protection- ist impulses that Trump exploited and build support for new trade agreements anchored in open markets. To allay the fears o+ a skeptical electorate, he will need to show Americans that such agreements will ultimately lead to lower prices, better wages, more opportunities for U.S. industry, and stronger environmental protections and assure them that the gains won from trade liberalization can help pay for major do- mestic improvements in education, childcare, and health care. The Biden administration will also strive to restore the United States’ leadership in multilateral institutions such as the -', the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Most o+ the world will welcome this after four years o+ watching the Trump administration sabotage much o+ the machinery o+ the postwar international order. But the damage will not be repaired overnight. The most pressing priorities are *xing the World Trade Organization’s bro- ken dispute-resolution process, rejoining the Paris agreement on climate change, increasing the capitalization o. both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (to provide credible alternatives to China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and its Belt and Road Initiative),
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and restoring U.S. funding for critical !" agencies. Such institutions have not only been instruments o# U.S. soft power since Washington helped create them after the last world war; their operations also materi- ally a$ect American hard power in areas such as nuclear proliferation and arms control. Unless Washington steps up to the plate, the institu- tions o# the international system will increasingly become Chinese satra- pies, driven by Chinese %nance, in&uence, and personnel.
MANAGED STRATEGIC COMPETITION The deeply con&icting nature o# U.S. and Chinese strategic objec- tives and the profoundly competitive nature o# the relationship may make con&ict, and even war, seem inevitable—even i# neither country wants that outcome. China will seek to achieve global economic dom- inance and regional military superiority over the United States with- out provoking direct con&ict with Washington and its allies. Once it achieves superiority, China will then incrementally change its behav- ior toward other states, especially when their policies con&ict with China’s ever-changing de%nition o# its core national interests. On top o# this, China has already sought to gradually make the multilateral system more obliging o# its national interests and values. But a gradual, peaceful transition to an international order that ac- commodates Chinese leadership now seems far less likely to occur than it did just a few years ago. For all the eccentricities and &aws o# the Trump administration, its decision to declare China a strategic com- petitor, formally end the doctrine o# strategic engagement, and launch a trade war with Beijing succeeded in making clear that Washington was willing to put up a signi%cant %ght. And the Biden administra- tion’s plan to rebuild the fundamentals o# national U.S. power at home, rebuild U.S. alliances abroad, and reject a simplistic return to earlier forms o# strategic engagement with China signals that the contest will continue, albeit tempered by cooperation in a number o# de%ned areas. The question for both Washington and Beijing, then, is whether they can conduct this high level o# strategic competition within agreed- on parameters that would reduce the risk o# a crisis, con&ict, and war. In theory, this is possible; in practice, however, the near-complete ero- sion o# trust between the two has radically increased the degree o# dif- %culty. Indeed, many in the U.S. national security community believe that the ''( has never had any compunction about lying or hiding its true intentions in order to deceive its adversaries. In this view, Chinese
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diplomacy aims to tie opponents’ hands and buy time for Beijing’s military, security, and intelligence machinery to achieve superiority and establish new facts on the ground. To win broad support from U.S. foreign policy elites, therefore, any concept o* managed strategic com- petition will need to include a stipulation by both parties to base any new rules o* the road on a reciprocal practice o* “trust but verify.” The idea o* managed strategic competition is anchored in a deeply realist view o* the global order. It accepts that states will continue to seek security by building a balance o* power in their favor, while rec- ognizing that in doing so they are likely to create security dilemmas for other states whose fundamental interests may be disadvantaged by their actions. The trick in this case is to reduce the risk to both sides as the competition between them unfolds by jointly crafting a limited number o* rules o* the road that will help prevent war. The rules will enable each side to compete vigorously across all policy and regional domains. But i* either side breaches the rules, then all bets are o+, and it’s back to all the hazardous uncertainties o* the law o* the jungle. The ,rst step to building such a framework would be to identify a few immediate steps that each side must take in order for a substantive dia- logue to proceed and a limited number o- hard limits that both sides (and U.S. allies) must respect. Both sides must abstain, for example, from cyberattacks targeting critical infrastructure. Washington must return to strictly adhering to the “one China” policy, especially by ending the Trump administration’s provocative and unnecessary high-level visits to Taipei. For its part, Beijing must dial back its recent pattern o* provoca- tive military exercises, deployments, and maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait. In the South China Sea, Beijing must not reclaim or militarize any more islands and must commit to respecting freedom o* navigation and air- craft movement without challenge; for its part, the United States and its allies could then (and only then) reduce the number o* operations they carry out in the sea. Similarly, China and Japan could cut back their mili- tary deployments in the East China Sea by mutual agreement over time. I- both sides could agree on those stipulations, each would have to accept that the other will still try to maximize its advantages while stopping short o- breaching the limits. Washington and Beijing would continue to compete for strategic and economic in.uence across the various regions o* the world. They would keep seeking reciprocal access to each other’s markets and would still take retaliatory measures when such access was denied. They would still compete in foreign investment
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markets, technology markets, capital markets, and currency markets. And they would likely carry out a global contest for hearts and minds, with Washington stressing the importance o" democracy, open econo- mies, and human rights and Beijing highlighting its approach to au- thoritarian capitalism and what it calls “the China development model.” Even amid escalating competition, however, there will be some room for cooperation in a number o" critical ar- The trick is to reduce the eas. This occurred even between the risk to both sides by jointly United States and the Soviet Union at crafting rules of the road. the height o" the Cold War. It should certainly be possible now between the United States and China, when the stakes are not nearly as high. Aside from collaborating on climate change, the two countries could conduct bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations, including on mutual rati#ca- tion o" the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and work toward an agreement on acceptable military applications o" arti#cial intelli- gence. They could cooperate on North Korean nuclear disarmament and on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. They could undertake a series o" con#dence-building measures across the Indo- Paci#c region, such as coordinated disaster-response and humanitarian missions. They could work together to improve global #nancial stability, especially by agreeing to reschedule the debts o" developing countries hit hard by the pandemic. And they could jointly build a better system for distributing .&/)0-19 vaccines in the developing world. That list is far from exhaustive. But the strategic rationale for all the items is the same: it is better for both countries to operate within a joint framework o" managed competition than to have no rules at all. The framework would need to be negotiated between a designated and trusted high-level representative o3 Biden and a Chinese counterpart close to Xi; only a direct, high-level channel o" that sort could lead to con#dential understandings on the hard limits to be respected by both sides. These two people would also become the points o" contact when violations occurred, as they are bound to from time to time, and the ones to police the consequences o" any such violations. Over time, a mini- mum level o" strategic trust might emerge. And maybe both sides would also discover that the bene#ts o" continued collaboration on common planetary challenges, such as climate change, might begin to a!ect the other, more competitive and even con4ictual areas o" the relationship.
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There will be many who will criticize this approach as naive. Their responsibility, however, is to come up with something better. Both the United States and China are currently in search o* a formula to man- age their relationship for the dangerous decade ahead. The hard truth is that no relationship can ever be managed unless there is a basic agreement between the parties on the terms o* that management.
GAME ON What would be the measures o* success should the United States and China agree on such a joint strategic framework? One sign o* success would be i+ by 2030 they have avoided a military crisis or con,ict across the Taiwan Strait or a debilitating cyberattack. A convention banning various forms o* robotic warfare would be a clear victory, as would the United States and China acting immediately together, and with the World Health Organization, to combat the next pandemic. Perhaps the most important sign o* success, however, would be a situation in which both countries competed in an open and vigorous campaign for global sup- port for the ideas, values, and problem-solving approaches that their respective systems o-er—with the outcome still to be determined. Success, o* course, has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. But the most demonstrable example o* a failed approach to managed strategic competition would be over Taiwan. I* Xi were to calculate that he could call Washington’s blu- by unilaterally breaking out o* whatever agreement had been privately reached with Washington, the world would .nd itsel* in a world o* pain. In one fell swoop, such a crisis would rewrite the future o* the global order. A few days before Biden’s inauguration, Chen Yixin, the secretary- general o* the //0’s Central Political and Legal A-airs Commission, stated that “the rise o* the East and the decline o* the West has be- come [a global] trend and changes o* the international landscape are in our favor.” Chen is a close con.dant o* Xi and a central .gure in China’s normally cautious national security apparatus, and so the hu- bris in his statement is notable. In reality, there is a long way to go in this race. China has multiple domestic vulnerabilities that are rarely noted in the media. The United States, on the other hand, always has its weaknesses on full public display—but has repeatedly demon- strated its capacity for reinvention and restoration. Managed strategic competition would highlight the strengths and test the weaknesses o* both great powers—and may the best system win.∂
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Accomplice to Carnage How America Enables War in Yemen Robert Malley and Stephen Pomper
n late March 2015, Saudi o5cials came to the Obama administra- tion with a message: Saudi Arabia and a coalition o" partners Iwere on the verge o" intervening in neighboring Yemen, whose leader had recently been ousted by rebels. This wasn’t exactly a bolt from the blue. The Saudis had been 4agging their growing concerns about the insurgency on their southern border for months, arguing that the rebels were proxies for their archrival, Iran. Still, the mes- sage had what Obama administration o5cials characterized as a “#ve minutes to midnight” quality that they had not quite anticipated: Saudi Arabia was going to act imminently, with or without the United States. But it much preferred to proceed with American help. President Barack Obama’s advisers looked on the decision facing the administration with queasiness. Both o" us were serving in senior positions at the National Security Council at the time, one advising on Middle East policy and the other on human rights and multilat- eral a!airs. Everyone in the administration knew the checkered his- tory o" U.S. interventions in the Arab world, most recently in Libya, and was well aware o" the president’s strong distaste for another one. From Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, o5cials knew how hard it was to defeat an insurgency—how promises o" a quick victory over a de- termined group o" rebels have a way o" disappointing. In this case, there was extra reason to be skeptical. U.S. o5cials thought Saudi Arabia was exaggerating Iran’s role, and they had no illusions that the Saudi armed forces, although well supplied with modern U.S. weap-
ROBERT MALLEY is President and CEO of the International Crisis Group. During the Obama administration, he served as Special Assistant to the President, White House Middle East Coordinator, and Senior Adviser on countering the Islamic State. STEPHEN POMPER is Senior Director for Policy at the International Crisis Group. During the Obama administration, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral A!airs and Human Rights at the National Security Council.
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ons, were a precision instrument. In short, there was plenty that could go wrong. As a former senior o*cial would later tell one o+ us, “We knew we might be getting into a car with a drunk driver.” And yet the United States climbed in anyway. Thinking that it could o,er sober guidance and grab the wheel when necessary, Washington shared intelligence, refueled aircraft, sold weapons, and provided dip- lomatic cover. Now, almost six years after the Saudi intervention, the war in Yemen is nothing short o+ a disaster. It has further destabilized the Middle East, empowered Iran, and sullied the United States’ global reputation. Above all, it has devastated the Yemeni people, who are now experiencing the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. Close to a quarter o+ a million people have died as a result o+ the con- -ict, according to the .', roughly hal/ from indirect causes such as malnutrition and disease. Many millions more are starving or home- less. And with power fragmented among a growing number o0 Yemeni actors on the ground, the con-ict has become even harder to resolve. The United States has had a major hand in Yemen from the begin- ning and thus must answer for its part in the tragedy. For reasons both moral and strategic, the Biden administration should make it a priority to disentangle the United States from the war in Yemen and do what it can to bring the con-ict to a long-overdue conclusion. But to prevent history from repeating itself, the administration should also make it a priority to learn from the con-ict’s sad lessons. The story o+ U.S. involvement in the war is one o+ entangling partner- ships, wishful thinking, and expediency. Seeking to avoid a rift with a close ally, an administration that was determined to steer clear o+ another war in the Middle East ended up becoming complicit in one o+ the region’s most horri1c ones.
OBAMA’S CHOICE How did the United States get pulled into this wretched mess? The tale begins in 2011, with the fall o0 Yemen’s aging, corrupt, and authoritar- ian president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was forced by protests to hand over power to his vice president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Hadi was supposed to serve as a bridge between the old regime and a brighter future, but it didn’t work out that way. A nine-month “national dia- logue conference” delivered an aspirational, i/ -awed, blueprint for po- litical reform in January 2014. But by then, the economy was near collapse, and a group o+ rebels that had been 1ghting the central gov-
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Blockaded: a malnourished girl in Hodeidah, Yemen, March 2019 ernment for the past decade was making rapid territorial gains. These were the Houthis, also known as Ansar Allah (Partisans o" God), fol- lowers o" the Zaydi branch o" Shiite Islam who were based in the coun- try’s north, near the Saudi border. In September 2014, riding a wave o" antigovernment anger, the Houthis seized control o$ Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and eventually chased Hadi to the southern port city o" Aden. Saudi Arabia feared that its neighbor would be completely taken over by Iranian surrogates. In early 2015, it rallied a coalition o" nine mostly Sunni Arab states, the United Arab Emirates chie" among them, and prepared to launch a military intervention to restore Hadi to power and counter what it perceived as an expanding Iranian threat to the region. The decision came on the heels o" a power transition in
ABDULJABBAR Saudi Arabia that resulted in the rise o" Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, who would become the face o" the war in Yemen. That was the context in which the Saudis made their request for
ZEYAD American help. U.S. o5cials scrambled to consolidate their views and make a recommendation to the president. Many had concerns about / REUTERS the coalition’s possible heavy-handedness and were o" mixed minds about whether MBS should be seen as a potential rising star or a wor- rying hothead, but in the end, the decision was not an especially close
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call. Obama’s senior national security team unanimously recommended proceeding with some measure o" assistance for the Saudi campaign, and the president concurred. The White House announced that he had authorized “the provision o$ logistical and intelligence support” to the coalition and that the United States would work with its new part- ners to create a joint planning cell in Riyadh that would “coordinate U.S. The United States has had military and intelligence support.” a major hand in Yemen Why the Obama administration did this had much to do with Hadi. In from the beginning and its view, he was the legitimate leader thus must answer for its o$ Yemen and a vast improvement part in the tragedy. over his much-disliked predecessor. Hadi was also seen as a reliable coun- terterrorism partner, someone who gave the United States wide berth in its operations against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which many U.S. o5cials rated as the most dangerous o" al Qaeda’s franchises. When the Houthis, who were ve- hemently anti-American, ran Hadi out o" Sanaa, the U.S. government saw their triumph as an a!ront to its interests in Yemen and to inter- national law. For reasons that seemed to it both principled and prag- matic, Washington hoped for a restoration. That was not all. U.S. o5cials also sought to improve relations with the Saudis and with Washington’s other Gul" partners, most notably the United Arab Emirates. For decades, the United States had viewed its partnerships in the region as key to protecting its en- ergy and security interests, and in the spring o" 2015, those ties were under strain. Saudi Arabia and its Gul" allies saw the Iran nuclear deal, then nearing completion, as giving Iran a leg up at their ex- pense. But they were nursing other grievances, too—notably about U.S. policy during the Arab Spring, particularly toward Egypt, where they thought the Obama administration had been too quick to aban- don President Hosni Mubarak and then too willing to normalize re- lations with the Muslim Brotherhood government that replaced him. The Gul" states also believed that the United States was withdrawing from the region, leaving them vulnerable to Islamist attacks. Thus, the watchword o" U.S. policy became “reassurance.” This meant reinforcing to the Saudis that Washington would stand behind a decades-old security assurance to defend their country against certain
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FA.indb 76 1/22/21 9:00 PM Nonconformity, Dissent, Opposition, and Resistance in Germany, 1933-1990 The Freedom to Conform
“This book brings fresh light to previously marginalized subject in German history. It is an original approach, up-to-date written without scholarly jargon, easily accessible to students, both at undergraduate and graduate. It is highly focused departing from the usual “histories” of a single country arguing for the “two German states”, and the three political systems.” — Prof. Dr. László Kürti, Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Miskolc, Hungary
This book contrasts three very different incarnations of Germany – the totalitarian Third Reich, the communist German Democratic Republic, and the democratic Federal Republic of Germany up to 1990 – in terms of their experiences with and responses to nonconformity, dissent, opposition, and resistance and the role played by those factors in each 978-3-030-55412-5 case. Although even innocent nonconformity came with a price in all eBook: 76,99 € three systems and in the post-war occupation zones, the price was the Hardcover: 98,09 € highest in Nazi Germany. It is worth stressing that what qualifies as nonconformity and dissent depends on the social and political context and, thus, changes over time. Like those in active dissent, opposition, or resistance, nonconformists are rebels (whether they are conscious of it or not) and have repeatedly played a role in pushing for change, whether through reform of legislation, transformation of the public’s attitudes, or even regime change.
This unusual study compares the struggle over nonconformity across three political regimes, the Third Reich, the GDR and the FRG. The analysis of dimensions like the role of religion, sexuality, politics and culture exposes the dialectic between regime efforts to enforce conformity with its own ideology as well as popular resistance against it. This unconventional approach sheds new light on the similarities and differences between different forms of German politics and society in the mid-twentieth century. — Konrad Jarausch, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Master_FP_Ad.indd 1 1/13/21 2:51 PM Robert Malley and Stephen Pomper
external threats, as well as spreading some o* that feeling o* steadfast support to other regional partners. When U.S. o+cials were plan- ning a summit o* Gul, leaders at Camp David for May 2015, they had one major deliverable in mind: a communiqué a+rming the United States’ readiness to come to their countries’ aid in the event o* exter- nal aggression. Now, the Saudis felt threatened by an Iranian-backed militia on their southern border. Giving them a -at no would have been o. message, to say the least. Another reason U.S. o+cials decided to support the Saudi-led coalition in 2015 was that they thought Washington could act as a moderating in-uence. The support that Obama authorized came with limits, caveats, and safety features. Obama’s guidance was that American help should serve the purpose o* protecting Saudi Ara- bia’s territorial integrity, making the assistance essentially defensive in nature. The administration also hoped that the joint planning cell would act as a forum where American advisers could professionalize their Saudi counterparts, learn what they were doing, and, when necessary, rein them in.
REINING IN THE SAUDIS As soon become apparent, and has since become incontrovertible, the United States greatly underestimated the challenge it would face in curbing Saudi operations and minimizing both humanitarian dam- age and civilian casualties. The coalition resorted to brass-knuckle tactics early on. First, it prevented imports from entering Houthi- held areas, strangling the -ow o* commodities into the country’s largest and most important port, Hodeidah. Then, it bombed critical infrastructure, such as container cranes and food-production facili- ties. Strikes hit residential neighborhoods and weddings. In several instances, U.S. o+cials worried that the coalition was acting inten- tionally, perhaps perceiving these strikes to have a tactical bene/t. The U.S. response was to try to /x the problem. American diplo- mats backed an import-veri/cation regime to help persuade Saudi Arabia to ease its restrictions on goods going into the country, but the -ow o* goods grew only slightly, and Yemenis struggled with increas- ing hardship. To reduce civilian casualties from the bombing cam- paign, U.S. o+cials developed “no strike” lists for Saudi pilots, but there was a giant loophole: the lists applied only to preplanned strikes, not to ones decided on while a pilot was in the air. As for the joint
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planning cell in Riyadh, the personnel that the Pentagon assigned to it tended to specialize in logistics and intelligence, not in techniques for avoiding civilian harm during airstrikes. On top o" that, most (i" not all) o" them were seated away from the operations 4oor where targeting decisions were made; they were either on a separate 4oor or in a separate building. The State De- partment eventually sent its own ex- pert to work with the cell, but after a The United States greatly spike in civilian casualties in August underestimated the 2016, it reversed its decision, worried that the adviser’s presence would give challenge it would face in an American imprimatur to irrespon- curbing Saudi operations. sible targeting practices. Amid this blur o" e!ort to contain a worsening humanitarian disaster, what the United States did not do was walk away. American planes continued to refuel Saudi jets on their way to bomb Yemeni targets, without necessarily knowing what those targets were. Washington provided intelligence, shipped weapons, and sent contractors to help keep the Saudi air force 4ying. It did all o" this in part out o" deference to the same interests that had led to its in- volvement in the con4ict in the #rst place, and in part because it con- tinued to believe that its position at the coalition’s side allowed it to do some good—steering the coalition away from even worse decisions than it was already making and coaxing it to the negotiating table. In its last six months, the Obama administration took a number o" steps that several former o5cials later said they wished it had taken earlier. In August 2016, Secretary o" State John Kerry pushed peace- making e!orts into high gear by moving away from the unrealistic framework that had guided earlier diplomatic pushes. (A 2015 7+ Security Council resolution had insisted that the Houthis hand over their heavy weapons and allow Hadi’s government to return to Sanaa to rule; Kerry o!ered the Houthis and their allies a role in a power- sharing arrangement in return for handing over weapons and terri- tory.) After an October 2016 airstrike on a funeral hall in Sanaa killed 155 people, the Obama administration also rethought its approach to arms sales to the Saudis. In December, it announced that it was halt- ing a planned sale o" precision-guided munitions. It was too little, too late. For several months before this decision, as the U.S. presidential election loomed, it had become harder for
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U.S. diplomats to motivate the Saudis to focus on the peace plan. When Donald Trump won, it became impossible. The Saudis sus- pected that the administration waiting in the wings would be both more supportive o* its anti-Iranian agenda and more willing to look the other way on civilian casualties. The suspension o* weapons sales, for its part, barely stung. The Saudis correctly predicted that the Trump administration would reverse it. By the time the Obama ad- ministration started to toughen its approach somewhat, it was time to pass the torch to its successor. The worst was yet to come.
A BLANK CHECK The Trump administration saw the Middle East through very di+erent eyes. It shared the Saudis’ ,xation on Iran, and Trump himsel* displayed a particular a-nity for strongmen in the mold o. MBS. Although some senior U.S. o-cials, such as Secretary o. Defense James Mattis, had little appetite for the con/ict in Yemen, seeing no feasible military solu- tion, the new administration’s priorities were clear, and they did not in- clude peacemaking. The Trump team cared much more about making Saudi Arabia an even bigger purchaser o* American weapons and a part- ner in a notional Israeli-Palestinian peace deal and turning Yemen into a front in its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. Under Trump, the U.S. approach to the war in Yemen zigged and zagged. At ,rst, attention to the peace process withered, as it was left in the hands o* subcabinet o-cials, while operational support for the military campaign grew. The United States opened the taps on sharing intelligence that enabled strikes on Houthi targets, and in June 2017, the Trump administration unlocked the delivery o* arms that the Obama administration had suspended. Trump’s team also sent mixed signals about whether it might approve o* a renewed attack on the port o. Hodeidah—this time by land rather than sea— something that the prior administration had said was categorically unacceptable. In a particularly jarring act, in September 2018, Sec- retary o* State Mike Pompeo formally noti,ed Congress that the coalition was doing enough to protect civilians, a prerequisite for continuing refueling operations, mere weeks after an errant Saudi strike hit a school bus and killed 40 children. U.S. policy took another turn after the Saudis murdered the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at their consulate in Is- tanbul in October 2018. With Congress outraged, the Trump ad-
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ministration pushed for renewed peace talks between the Hadi government and the Houthis. Thanks in part to personal outreach by Mattis to members o! the coalition, in December 2018, negotia- tions took place outside Stockholm under the auspices o! the "#. These talks resulted in a cease-$re around Hodeidah and created what might have been a foundation for a broader e%ort to reach peace. But later that month, Mattis stepped down, and U.S. atten- tion to the peace process once again waned. As time passed, the con&uence o! an escalating con&ict in Yemen and intensifying U.S. pressure on Iran turned the war into an in- creasingly central arena in a regional power struggle. On one side were the United States and its regional partners, and on the other were Iran and its allies. How much the Houthis depend on Iranian support and to what extent their actions re&ect Iranian desires have been matters o! intense debate. But two things seem clear: $rst, that Iran saw the con&ict from the start as a low-cost, high-reward oppor- tunity to bog down and bleed its Saudi rival, and second, that as the war has persisted, ties between the rebels and Tehran have deepened, with the Houthis becoming progressively more willing to turn to Iran for succor, whether in the form o! training or material assistance. Thanks in part to this support, the Houthis upped their drone and missile attacks against Saudi territory. Iran itsel! seemed to jump into the fray. In September 2019, a complex drone attack was carried out against oil facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia. Although the Houthis claimed responsibility, the sophistication o! the strikes and the &ight paths o! the drones suggested an Iranian hand. In part, the attack was Iran’s way o! responding to Washington’s maximum pres- sure campaign and discouraging Gul! countries from participating in it. The war in Yemen has given Iran both the motivation and the op- portunity to &ex its muscles, and it has obliged. Over the course o! 2020, Saudi Arabia recognized that the quick war it envisaged had turned into a long slog, coming at a heavy cost, both materially and reputationally. MBS has been keen to repair his seriously damaged standing in Washington, which has su%ered as a result o! the Khashoggi murder and the brutal campaign in Yemen. In the wake o! the drone attack on its oil facilities, Saudi Arabia re- vitalized talks with the Houthis, and Riyadh has worked hard to bring the $ssiparous anti-Houthi bloc under a single umbrella. But ending the war has proved far more di'cult than launching it. As o!
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January 2021, the Houthis had consolidated their control over north- western Yemen, with 70 to 80 percent o* the country’s people falling under their rule, and were threatening the government stronghold o* Marib, near the northeastern corner o* their zone o* control. The rest o* the country is a political patchwork, variously dominated by gov- ernment forces, sundry militias, and local authorities.
THE CASE FOR CARING Joe Biden has signaled that the issues he will focus on as U.S. presi- dent will be those with tangible domestic impacts: climate change, the pandemic, China. Why, given his over+owing plate, should he even care about solving the crisis in Yemen? Three reasons stand out. First is the United States’ responsibility in what has unfolded. Saudi Arabia almost certainly would have intervened in Yemen even i* the Obama administration had rejected its call for help, and it may well have prosecuted its campaign with even less regard for the laws o* war absent the United States’ defective supervision. But without U.S. support, Saudi Arabia would have found it harder to wage war and, arguably, would have been more eager to ,nd a way out. Wash- ington has a responsibility to help clean up the mess it helped create. Second is the sheer magnitude o- Yemen’s humanitarian crisis. According to .' statistics, as o* mid-2020, some 24 million Yemenis, 80 percent o* the country’s population, needed some form o* assis- tance. Roughly 20 million were teetering on the brink o* starvation. In November 2020, .' Secretary-General António Guterres warned that Yemen was “now in imminent danger o* the worst famine the world has seen for decades.” The con+ict is not alone to blame— Yemen was the region’s poorest country even before the con+ict began—but the collapse o* the economy and the loss o* access to or the closure o* airports and seaports, all byproducts o* the war, are primarily responsible. Third is the potential for regional spillover. As long as the con- +ict endures, so does the risk that it could provoke a direct confron- tation between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As a candidate, Biden committed to steering the United States away from adventurism in the Middle East. But such commitments can be di/cult to keep at moments o* crisis. Should con+ict between Iran and Saudi Arabia begin to escalate on the Arabian Peninsula, the Biden administra- tion could come under enormous pressure to get involved, despite
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its better judgment. That risk alone should be reason enough for Biden, at the beginning o* his administration, to both disentangle the United States from the con+ict in Yemen and seek to end it. There’s one big problem with this plan, however: it may not work.
GIVING PEACE A CHANCE Biden faces a conundrum in Yemen. Senior members o* his team, including Secretary o, State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, signed a letter in 2018 (which we also signed) acknowledging the failure o, the Obama administration’s Yemen policy. As a candidate, Biden himsel, pledged to “end U.S. support for the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen and order a reassessment o, our relationship with Saudi Arabia.” He has also vowed to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran. Those moves will inevitably raise ten- sions with Saudi Arabia. Yet the Biden administration is also com- mitted to ending the war in Yemen and negotiating a follow-on deal with Iran on regional issues, steps that by de-nition will require working closely with Riyadh. Further complicating matters, the ad- ministration will have to somehow make sure that the Houthis, who are likely to feel as buoyed by any reduction in U.S. backing for the war e.ort as Saudi Arabia will feel forsaken, nonetheless come un- der enough pressure to agree to a peace deal. Deft diplomatic jug- gling will be needed for the United States to do several things at once: step back from the war while helping end it, squeeze Saudi Arabia but not overly alienate it, and engage directly with the Houthis without excessively emboldening them. Any U.S. o/cial trying to navigate this terrain might construct the following road map. First, Biden would reverse the Trump administra- tion’s last-minute decision to designate the Houthis a terrorist organi- zation. Far from creating leverage over the Houthis, as Trump o/cials maintained, that move triggered sanctions that could have catastrophic humanitarian implications and severely complicate diplomatic e.orts. Second, he would announce a halt to U.S. military assistance to the Saudi war e.ort. To avoid estranging Riyadh to the point where it re- fuses to cooperate, Washington would also reiterate its commitment to help the kingdom and its partners defend their territorial integrity, while making clear that this promise applies only to threats o, a certain magnitude. In Sullivan’s words, the goal should be “to balance anxiety with reassurance.” The administration might also make clear that the
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direction o$ bilateral relations would depend in large part on whether the Saudis worked with it to come up with a practical way to end the war. In parallel, Washington would intensify its support for the 7+-led peace process and perhaps name a U.S. special envoy for Yemen to that end. Finally, on the margins o" discussions with Iran over a mutual return to the nuclear deal, the admin- istration would press Tehran to con- vince the Houthis to cease hostilities Among the items on the and show 4exibility in peace talks— new administration’s not as a condition for rejoining the deal but as a step that would lower Middle East to-do list, regional tensions and build trust. Yemen is one of those that Among the items on the new ad- may be ripest for progress. ministration’s Middle East to-do list, Yemen is one o" those that may be rip- est for progress, although that is not the same thing as saying that the e!ort will succeed. One likely problem involves calibrating how much reassurance Washington should extend to Saudi Arabia and its part- ners. History suggests that the very concept o" reassurance invites trou- ble. After all, that was the rationale that led the Obama administration to support the Saudis’ campaign in the #rst place. As much as the Biden administration should try to make clear what it is and isn’t willing to do, with a shooting war underway, that exercise is sure to be fraught. That is largely because it will be challenging to #gure out which elements o" U.S. support for the Saudi-led campaign to continue and which to halt. What constitutes defense, and what o!ense? On what side o" the line does interdicting arms shipments to the Houthis fall? What about sharing intelligence that the Saudis could use to target Houthi missile launch sites, or helping the Saudis maintain their aircraft? The Houthis have crossed the border into Saudi Ara- bia and control territory there. When Washington provides intelli- gence or weapons to counter the Houthis, is it ful#lling its com mit ment to defend Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity or merely entangling itsel3 further in the war in Yemen? Deciding to end support for the war in Yemen doesn’t answer these questions. It is just another way o" posing them. It is sobering to remember that Obama also sought to draw such distinctions yet ended up getting sucked into a broader #ght anyway. But the Biden team at least has the bene#t o" seeing what did not work for the Obama administration, and it can prepare
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itsel" to be far more restrained about the circumstances in which it is prepared to lend assistance. Moreover, however much the Saudis may cooperate on the peace process, at this late date, it may prove insu5cient. Obstacles to peace abound. The Houthis will have to accept that given the resistance o" large portions o" the Yemeni population, a viable deal will not simply convert territorial realities into interna- tional recognition o" their rule. But Ending the war may prove having been ascendant for the past two to be beyond the new years, they are unlikely to show interest in compromise. Hadi will have to ac- administration’s in#uence. cept that his demands for a return to Ending U.S. complicity power in Sanaa through a Houthi sur- in it is not. render are wholly unrealistic. But the embattled president has proved re- markably stubborn, and he is likely to see the formation o" a new government as a sign that the tide is #nally turning in his favor. The United States and Iran, for their part, may #nd themselves struggling to come to an accommodation on Yemen even i" they reach agreement on the nuclear deal. Although the end o" the maximum pressure campaign should diminish Iran’s incentive to act aggressively in the Gulf, it might not be reason enough for the country to seriously pressure the Houthis to compromise—something it might not even be able to do anyway. A #nal obstacle: Yemen is no longer the country it was when the war began. As the con4ict has ground on, power has become di!used across a multitude o" armed actors on the ground—not just the Houthis and the Hadi government but also separatist forces in the south and militias under the authority o$ Tareq Saleh, a nephew o3 Hadi’s predecessor. The war now rages on multiple fronts, each with its own political dy- namics and lines o" command and control. Absent the buy-in o" all these actors, a peace settlement is unlikely to be sustainable. And get- ting their buy-in will be di5cult: many o" the groups in Yemen have developed economic incentives to prolong the con4ict. Further compli- cating matters, multiple regional players have taken an interest in back- ing di!erent groups on the ground. The Biden administration should not allow these considerations to dissuade it from making a major push for peace in Yemen. The stakes are too high not to try. But the administration should also bear in mind that
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whatever it does, it will have to be !rm with Saudi Arabia about its deci- sion to pull the United States back from most activities relating to the war, however di"cult that may be. Ending the war may prove to be beyond the new administration’s in#uence. Ending U.S. complicity in it is not.
PREVENTING FUTURE YEMENS The intractability o$ the war in Yemen should serve as a stark re- minder o$ the costs o$ entering such con#icts to begin with. It should also, then, compel the Biden administration to come to grips with a crucial question: How can the United States avoid becoming com- plicit in similar disasters? A good place to start would be with the fundamentals o$ U.S. security partnerships in the Gulf. Washington has given far-reaching assurances that it will come to the defense o$ Saudi Arabia and other Gul$ states and has arranged to place in their hands a large arsenal o$ American weapons, sustained by American parts and personnel. Because o$ the way in which these partnerships are structured, when one o$ these states chooses to launch an unwise war, especially when there is a defensive rationale, the United States will face a hard choice. Should it join the e%ort to dem- onstrate fealty to its assurances and try to in#uence how its weapons are used? Should it refuse to participate but continue to allow arms and assistance to #ow? Or should it cut o% support and risk rupturing its relations with a regional partner, recognizing that other would-be weap- ons suppliers, such as China, Russia, or Turkey, might well step in? These are the sorts o$ questions that ought to be examined in the reassessment o$ U.S.-Saudi relations that Biden has promised. At the heart o$ that review will be a calculation o$ which o$ two paths would better serve U.S. interests. The United States could rea"rm its stead- fast commitment to a long-standing partner, even i$ it risks drawing the United States into future wars o$ precisely the sort that a growing number o& both Democratic and Republican leaders appear set on avoiding. Alternatively, it could lessen that commitment in an e%ort to reduce the danger o$ damaging entanglements, even i$ that means loosening a bond long seen as key to protecting U.S. energy and se- curity interests in the Gulf. I$ the balance o$ the risks leads the ad- ministration down the second path, which seems the right one to us, it will likely want to revise U.S. security assurances so as to provide more room for maneuver in Yemen-like situations, which, although serious, fall far short o$ an existential threat.
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The soul-searching should extend beyond the executive branch. Congress has a role to play in preventing future Yemens, and indeed, it appears to recognize as much. In 2019, both the House and the Senate, outraged by the killing o* Khashoggi, passed a resolution that would have required the United States to withdraw from the hostili- ties in Yemen, but Trump vetoed it. The bill invoked the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which was designed to limit the executive branch’s power to enter armed con+icts, but even i, it had passed, it would likely have been ignored by the administration because o, the lati- tude that the executive branch has given itsel, over the years to inter- pret key terms in the 1973 resolution +exibly. I, Congress wants to play a bigger role in decisions about whether to involve the United States in future misadventures, it will have to amend that act. In its current form, the War Powers Resolution applies only to con+icts in which U.S. troops are either giving or receiving -re, not ones in which the United States is merely providing arms and advisers. Con- gress should change the law so that a president must obtain ap- proval—and periodic reapproval—i. he or she wants the United States to give support at levels that would e/ectively make it a party to a con+ict. A reform like this would do nothing i, Congress were more bellicose than the president, o, course, but even so, it would be wise i, it took the consent o, two branches o, government, rather than one, to enter a war. Such a change would make it less likely that the United States would get drawn into quagmires in the -rst place and more likely that it would correct course i, it did. The war in Yemen is a tragedy for its people, an enduring source o, instability for the region, and an open wound for the United States. At this point, however it ends, it is unlikely to end well. At the very least, the United States owes it to itsel, and to the victims o, the war to learn something from the disaster. That would be one way in which the precedent in Yemen might do Washington and the world some good: i, it forced U.S. o0cials to candidly reexamine the United States’ posture in the Gul, and recognize how easy it can be, despite the best o, intentions, to get pulled into a disaster.∂
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How the WTO Changed China The Mixed Legacy o" Economic Engagement Yeling Tan
hen China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the event was hailed as a pivotal development for the Wglobal economic system and a bold marker o" the coun- try’s commitment to reform. It took 15 long years o" negotiation to reach the deal, a re4ection o" the challenge o" reconciling China’s communist command economy with global trading rules and o" the international community’s insistence that China sign on to ambitious commitments and conditions. U.S. o5cials had high hopes that those terms o" entry would #x China on the path o" market liberalization and integrate the country into the global economic order. U.S. Presi- dent Bill Clinton called Beijing’s accession to the 12& “the most sig- ni#cant opportunity that we have had to create positive change in China since the 1970s” and argued that it would “commit China to play by the rules o" the international trading system.” Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji evinced similar resolve in securing 12& membership. In their view, joining the organization was not only appropriate for a country o" Chi- na’s size and economic potential; it would also force China to move forward on necessary domestic reforms. Chinese state media noted at the time that entry into the 12& would “expedite the process o" Chi- na’s reform and opening up”; spur the “cleaning up o$ laws, regulations, and policies”; facilitate the establishment o" an “impartial, e5cient
YELING TAN is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Oregon and the author of the forthcoming book Disaggregating China, Inc.: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order.
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judicial system”; and bring much-needed external competition to the country’s ine!cient state-owned enterprises ("#$s). China accepted far more stringent terms than any other new member before or since. These commitments included not just large cuts to tari%s on imports into China but also a sweeping overhaul o& domestic institutions and policies to allow market forces freer rein within the economy. Beijing pledged to improve the rule o' law by strengthening courts and in- creasing protections o& intellectual property rights, to allow (rms greater autonomy and limit the government’s interference in their af- fairs, and to revamp regulation to make governance more transparent. Such commitments generated widespread anticipation that China’s accession to the )*# would bring about major change and tie a rising China more tightly to global economic networks and institutions. But these hopes now seem like wishful thinking. In 2018, the o!ce o+ Rob- ert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, proclaimed that the United States had “erred in supporting China’s entry into the )*#,” arguing that China’s “state-led, mercantilist trade regime” was “incom- patible with the market-based approach expressly envisioned by )*# members.” Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, two former Obama admin- istration o!cials, claimed in these pages in 2018 that “the liberal inter- national order has failed to lure or bind China as powerfully as expected.” By most accounts, in Washington and more broadly, China’s economic model has not turned toward market liberalism since 2001 but instead consolidated into a form o& state capitalism that Beijing hopes to export globally. W*# membership, the new consensus goes, has allowed China access to the American and other global economies without forcing it to truly change its behavior, with disastrous conse- quences for workers and wages around the world. China seems to pay lip service to international norms and still play by its own rules, taking advantage o' loopholes and naive policymakers abroad. But i& the hopes for China’s )*# accession were overblown, so is this new consensus, which oversimpli(es a complex story that holds di%erent lessons about the path of, and prospects for, China’s reform and about the future o& trade liberalization globally. China has surely not followed the course envisioned by Clinton—or, for that matter, that anticipated by Jiang and Zhu. But rather than judge China’s )*# entry in the categorical terms o& success or failure, a more productive way forward would be to understand the ways in which )*# member- ship did lead to positive change within China—and when and why that
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positive change started to slow and then reverse. Joining the *+" had a stronger liberalizing e,ect in some parts o- the Chinese state than in others, and that liberalization was more forceful at some points in time than at others. At least for a few years, China’s accession to the trade body bolstered Chinese reformists and helped authorities push through necessary changes, in the process showing that multilateral institutions can boost domestic reform in China. But the impetus for reform wa- vered, and other actors within China pushed in opposite directions, steering the economy toward greater state control. It’s not impossible to foster positive change in China, but it will be uneven, contested, and require ongoing pressure and engagement from the outside.
THE SUM OF ITS PARTS China .rst embarked on the path o- reform under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, when the Chinese leader began to gradually open the economy by decollectivizing agriculture. Beijing accelerated these market- oriented reforms in the ensuing years, granting more leeway to pri- vate enterprises, opening the door to foreign .rms, and steadily privatizing large )"$s. An economy that had become moribund in the 1970s was growing at a breakneck clip o- nearly ten percent per year by the late 1990s. But that story o- rapid growth and incipient liberal- ization concealed a much more complicated picture: China’s economy consisted o- a welter o- di,erent actors pursuing di,erent, sometimes contradictory interests. Accession to the *+" in 2001 was a .llip for the country’s pro-market liberalizers, but many others evaded or re- mained hostile to liberalizing reform. The Chinese state is vast, sprawling, and highly decentralized, especially when it comes to economic policy. The Chinese Commu- nist Party (//0) comprises about 90 million members, which would make the organization larger than the 16th most populous country in the world (the Democratic Republic o- the Congo, which has a population o- around 89 million). Its members have a wide range o- backgrounds and views, from executives with international business experience to dyed-in-the-wool apparatchiks who eagerly study the ideals articulated by President Xi Jinping. The central government oversees over 30 provinces, hundreds o- cities, and thousands o- counties. As a result, Beijing has long struggled to coordinate, im- plement, and enforce policies across the country. Subnational gov- ernments enjoy broad discretion over how to run their local economies.
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China makes, the world takes: sock textiles in Zhuji, China, February 2015 Governors and mayors compete with their neighbors to produce ever-higher and more spectacular growth rates, and they enjoy enough autonomy to selectively enact, creatively interpret, and even subvert guidelines from Beijing. When China was preparing to join the !"#, its system o$ eco- nomic governance was decidedly mixed. Some actors within China’s massive party-state advocated liberalization based on free-market principles. Others supported a strategy akin to those adopted dec- ades prior by Japan and South Korea, which involved o%ering &nan- cial incentives and instituting administrative measures to support
CHINA &rms in industries deemed strategic. And still others counseled ad- hering to China’s command economy. STRINGER The various actors within China’s large and complex economy had to reckon with the seismic shift o$ entry into the !"#. Accession triggered
NETWORK many signi&cant changes and strengthened the hand o$ the country’s reformists, who in the &rst few years following !"# entry implemented large cuts to import tari%s, loosened rules around trading licenses to / REUTERS introduce domestic private and foreign competition, shrank the state- owned sector, and enhanced the functioning o$ market forces in the economy. Beijing strengthened the rule o' law and the protection o$
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intellectual property rights to greatly improve the ease and predictabil- ity o" doing business in China and limit government interference. The central government drove much o" the resulting change, be- cause it felt the pressure o" adhering to 12& rules more keenly than did provinces and cities lower down in the administrative hierarchy. W2& membership spurred Beijing to undertake a formidable legisla- tive and regulatory overhaul in order to bring domestic laws and policies into compliance with the in- ternational trading system. For exam- Liberal reform in China ple, it amended its law regulating the ran up against deep-seated quality o" products, with the aim o" improving standards and strengthen- bureaucratic resistance. ing the state’s ability to guard against counterfeit and subpar goods. It re- formed a commodity inspection law to create a common certi#cation process for foreign and domestic goods and put in place similar re- forms for customs laws; rules governing pharmaceutical products; and copyright, patent, and trademarks laws. It also overhauled na- tional economic institutions to strengthen the state’s regulatory ca- pacity, merging a number o" agencies to eliminate overlap. The new General Administration o" Quality Supervision, Inspection, and Quarantine (,8-)8) took the lead in assessing over 21,000 domestic technical standards, abolishing about 1,400 o" them, and revising over 9,000 others to bring the country’s standards regime into con- formity with 12& rules. The central government’s liberalizing e!orts did not stop with le- gal and institutional reforms. Beijing established research and advi- sory centers in various parts o" the country to provide guidance on matters pertaining to 12& rules and procedures. Authorities launched a national campaign through state media to raise awareness about the consequences o" the country’s joining the 12& and held training ses- sions for government o5cials to help them navigate the complex proc- ess o" implementing the trade body’s rules. This e!ort to set in motion greater market liberalization ran up against deep-seated bureaucratic and industry resistance. Those in the state-owned sector feared that foreign competition would crush their businesses. The automotive industry had even petitioned Jiang for greater protection when he was negotiating the entry deal. Pow- erful industrial ministries within Beijing bristled at the idea that
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international rules would now curb their autonomy to make policy. The agricultural sector protested the opening up o! China’s markets to highly subsidized goods from developed countries. Foreign businesses immediately bene"ted from the measures that followed China’s accession. By 2003, roughly 70 percent o! U.S. "rms surveyed in China reported that Chinese domestic reforms had im- proved their business climate “to a great extent” or “to a very great extent.” Those measures would not have occurred without the exter- nal impetus o! entry into the #$%. And they re&ected the degree to which China’s leaders had succeeded in using multilateral trade com- mitments to drive forward di'cult domestic changes. But the actions o! the central government tell only part o! the story. Subnational authorities, which escaped direct #$% scrutiny, did not match Beijing’s commitment. China’s entry into the #$% re- framed local economies, inviting foreign competition while creating opportunities for commerce abroad. Regional governments had to keep their economies growing while dealing with potential import threats and pursuing potential export gains. Some local leaders re- sponded by liberalizing their markets and facilitating more business- friendly regulations, but many found ways to resist opening up and to promote their own interests in other ways. Anhui Province, for instance, issued an industrial policy in 2001 that drew from South Korea’s success in automobile exports, targeting state support to favored "rms. Authorities in Shandong Province noted that the territory should “seize the opportunity” created by #$% entry to expand and develop its shipbuilding industry—which meant not liber- alization but increased preferential credits and subsidies in order to ex- pand exports out o! the province. Other, smaller jurisdictions responded to the threat o! intensi"ed competition with even more forceful inter- ventions aimed at suppressing market forces, using administrative di- rectives to reshape local businesses. The autonomous prefecture o! Yanbian, in northeastern China, for example, launched a restructuring drive in 2003 to consolidate its cement industry. Rather than let the market dictate which "rms would thrive and which would die, the local government picked winners and losers, taking away business licenses, cutting o( the electricity supply, and dismantling the machinery and equipment o) factories that were deemed to be too small or ine'cient. Accordingly, China’s entry into the #$% produced a wide range o! shifts, often in contradictory directions. It initially spurred sweeping
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e*orts to liberalize the economy, reshape policies to accord with inter- national rules, strengthen institutions to support the free market, and reduce the role o+ direct state intervention—transforming China’s economic landscape and vastly expanding the scope for private and foreign enterprises to do business in China. But the country did not move in lockstep toward liberalization. Subnational governments a dopted a plethora o+ strategies to pursue economic growth, many o+ them in clear contrast to Beijing’s liberalizing agenda. A stark internal divergence in China’s economic policies emerged, with some parts o+ the state strengthening their commitment to market liberalization and others following more statist paths. China did ful,ll the majority o+ the terms o+ its -." accession within a few years. Tari* rates on foreign imports were slashed, and a multitude o+ nontari* barriers were eliminated. The authority to en- gage in foreign trade, previously restricted to )"$s and foreign ,rms located in special economic zones, was broadened to all ,rms, includ- ing private Chinese enterprises. Beijing substantially improved legal protections for and reduced administrative burdens on businesses. Foreign investment surged once more into China, after having pla- teaued during the Asian ,nancial crisis in the late 1990s.
THE STATE ADVANCES Market-friendly reforms, however, would soon lose their luster for the central government. Observers in China use the term guojin mintui, or “the state advances, while the private sector retreats,” to describe the central government’s slide starting around the middle o+ the ,rst dec- ade o+ this century toward greater state intervention in the economy. Several domestic and external factors pushed China’s powerful central government to embrace state capitalism. In the ,rst few years after the accession, pro-reform ministries in Beijing drove the agenda for mar- ket liberalization, empowered by the mandate o+ China’s pledges to the -.". The Ministry o+ Commerce, China’s trade agency, led e*orts to harmonize China’s trading regime with international rules. A/)%/, the new quality-control agency, encouraged the adoption o+ interna- tional standards and established a direct link with the -." to manage potential con0icts. These agencies further bene,ted from the leader- ship o+ Jiang and Zhu, who were not just ideologically well disposed to reform but also able to wrangle the country’s sprawling central bu- reaucracy to keep the reforms on course. Under the two leaders, the
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government instituted important macroeconomic reforms to recali- brate revenue-sharing arrangements between the center and localities, better control in4ation, and improve central oversight o" the banking sector. And in a major administrative restructuring in 1998, Zhu had slashed the central bureaucracy in half, from eight million to four mil- lion people, and cut the number o" central ministries from 40 to 29. But as China ful#lled its 12& com- mitments on schedule, pro-liberalization forces lost momentum; swiftly meeting Dysfunction in the WTO the terms o" China’s accession had the dealt a blow to the cause of e!ect o" sapping the urgency o" re- pro-market reform. form. Without the outside pressure that 12& entry #rst provided in 2001, it was di5cult for reformists in Beijing to keep up the push for greater liberalization. Instead, rival agencies that oversaw industrial policy gained the latitude to expand their in4uence. This shift in bureaucratic power dovetailed with a change in lead- ership in 2003 from Jiang and Zhu to President Hu Jintao and Pre- mier Wen Jiabao. The leaders di!ered less in their essential views on reform than in their abilities to control the state bureaucracy. Hu and Wen did not have their predecessors’ political strength to discipline the state. Wen, in particular, had spent the majority o$ his career within the central government. He rose to the top with support from networks deeply embedded in the Beijing bureaucracy. Although this milieu might have given him some advantage in understanding the inner workings o" the central state, it also left him beholden to that bureaucracy. Unlike Zhu, who was able to halve the size o" the central government in 1998, Wen’s attempt at administrative restructuring in 2003 was relatively unsuccessful. Reports at the time indicated that Wen planned to whittle down the number o" ministries by as many as seven, but he eventually axed only one central agency. In- stead, agencies dedicated to industrial policy, such as the National Development and Reform Commission, gained greater in4uence: the +0'. became informally known as the “mini State Council.” In 2008, the newly created Ministry o3 Industry and Information Tech- nology added to the central government’s increasingly activist role in enacting statist industrial policies. The cause o" pro-market reform was dealt a further blow by the failure o" 12& members to agree to another comprehensive package
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for trade liberalization as part o* the Doha Round o* negotiations in Geneva in 2006. The disagreement over farm subsidies and import taxes underlined tensions within the trade body, and the ensuing im- passe strengthened the hand o* agencies in Beijing that oversaw in- dustrial policy and did not subscribe to the market-friendly imperatives o* the +,". Dysfunction in the trade body meant that Chinese reformists could not repeat the success o* 2001, lacking re- newed external impetus for domestic liberalization. The central government’s new policy trajectory started to become clear in the 2006 iteration o* the Five-Year Plan, China’s periodic policy blueprint. It emphasized domestic innovation and reducing China’s reliance on foreign technology, rea-rming the dominant role o* the state in the economy—and inevitably dispiriting foreign .rms doing business in China. According to the American Chamber o* Commerce in the People’s Republic o* China’s annual surveys o* its members, positive sentiment among U.S. .rms operating in China fell to an all-time low in 2006. The 2008 global economic crisis and its aftermath reinforced the regime’s statist turn by setting the stage for greater government in- tervention and laying bare the weaknesses o/ free-market capitalism. China responded to the downturn with a $580 billion .scal stimulus and channeled the funds largely through )"$s and local govern- ments. This spending strengthened the central state’s hand and boosted the ideological justi.cation for statism. While many wealthy countries that had also enacted large .scal stimulus programs soon shifted back to economic austerity (and a diminished role for the state), China continued on the path that it had embarked on before the crisis, toward greater state control o* the economy. The state- owned sector had steadily shrunk in the years following China’s ac- cession to the +,". In 2001, 40 percent o* all jobs in China were in the state sector. That .gure had fallen to 20 percent by 2008, but this decline came to a halt in the years after 2008 and showed little change up to the end o* the Hu-Wen administration, in 2012. Between 2008 and 2012, assets managed by state .rms rose from over 12 trillion yuan to more than 25 trillion yuan. Since Xi’s ascent to power in 2012, the state’s role in the economy has only become stronger and more pronounced. Private investment had for many years expanded at a faster pace than investment by state entities, but this dynamic began to weaken after 2012, and it even re-
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versed from 2015 to 2016. China has continued to pursue free trade in its foreign relations, inking numerous deals with countries far and near, but the political energy for domestic market reform has all but disappeared. Recent years have seen the country’s !"#s become stronger and larger than before, boosted by national policies that rea$rm the dominant role o% the state and the overarching supremacy o% the &&' over the economy. China’s overseas economic footprint has also ex- panded signi(cantly, most notably through Xi’s vast infrastructure and investment program known as the Belt and Road Initiative, spark- ing fears that China is seeking to export its brand o% state capitalism globally. Such fears, however, are overblown.
CONTAINING MULTITUDES China may have dashed the hope that it would become a liberal free- market economy, well integrated into the international economic sys- tem. But even now, its model o% state capitalism is not the juggernaut that many make it out to be. In many respects, China still lives under the shadow o% its entry into the )*". Ultimately, the Chinese system is not likely to prove strong enough to completely resist the liberal- izing e+ects o% globalization or coordinated enough to e+ectively pur- sue its ambitions on the global stage through its !"#s. In some ways, )*" membership reinforced the central govern- ment’s inability to prevent local governments from interpreting higher- level directives to serve their own interests. W*" entry brought a new surge o, foreign capital into China, reducing the reliance o% subna- tional governments on funding from Beijing and providing them with alternative resources to pursue their own goals—and the -exibility to disregard dictates from the capital. For example, despite Beijing’s de- sire to orient economic growth around increasing productivity, boost- ing technological development, and training a more skilled workforce, subnational governments have (xated on a quantitative approach to growth that relies on capital investment and high-pro(le development projects, undermining the overarching national e+ort. Instead o% mak- ing long-term investments to raise the productivity o, (rms and their capacity for innovation, local o$cials seek out foreign direct invest- ment to expand output for short-term gains, leading to projects that duplicate the work o% others and generate problems o% excess capacity. China’s policy on so-called new-energy vehicles (electric and hy- brid cars) illustrates this divide. In 2012, the central government’s
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State Council issued an industrial policy on such vehicles that stressed the importance o* promoting innovation and explicitly warned local governments against “blindly making low-quality investments and duplicating construction.” But that same year, Hubei Province issued its own policy, which ignored the central government’s focus on tech- nological innovation and high-quality production and instead stressed the need for “investment promotion” and “large-scale production” to scale up the manufacturing o* the vehicles. Nor was Hubei alone in pushing for rapid expansion and disregarding the longer-term im- perative o* improving technological capacity. By 2017, the central gov- ernment had to issue a new directive to curb the overinvestment o* local governments in the production o* new-energy vehicles. Similar con+icts plague China’s overseas economic ambitions. Al- though some )"$s (particularly those in strategic sectors, such as automobiles and shipping) have retained a more statist orientation to trade, not all are faithful agents or reliable exemplars o* state capitalism. China’s entry into the ,-" granted more foreign trading rights to domestic private enterprises, lowered import barriers, and allowed private companies greater freedom to operate. Once exposed to foreign competition and global rules, many )"$s—especially those participating in highly competitive sectors not protected by state industrial policy—came to resemble more traditional commercial ac- tors, responding to price signals in the same way as private .rms. It is not a given that China’s )"$s will act as agents o* China’s overseas economic statecraft. The extent to which an )"$ might directly serve Beijing’s interests is instead determined by a bevy o/ factors, includ- ing the competitiveness or strategic importance o* a particular sec- tor, the degree to which the central government can monitor the .rm’s overseas behavior, and the speci.c political context o* the country in which the .rm is operating.
WHAT NOT TO DO Some Chinese state and nonstate actors see their interests as aligned with international economic rules; others seek to exploit gaps in global governance. Some dependably behave as operatives o/ Beijing, whereas others actively subvert national policy in pursuit o* their own narrow interests. These dynamics have persisted even as Xi has sought to consolidate 001 rule over many aspects o* Chinese political, eco- nomic, and social life. Despite Xi’s e2orts, China’s global economic
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posture remains mostly the product o! the country’s messy internal politics and not the result o! a coordinated master plan. This reality complicates matters for Washington and other govern- ments. Given the multitude o! actors and interests involved in Chi- nese economic a"airs, traditional state-to-state diplomacy, centered on communications between national capitals, is necessary but insu#- cient. Substate actors, such as provinces and cities, wield substantial authority over economic a"airs. The actions o! Chinese $rms do not necessarily represent the will o% Beijing. Countries must therefore take a multipronged approach to engage with China at di"erent levels. A policy o! overt hostility that overlooks the diversity o! interests driv- ing China’s massive economy will end up being counterproductive. Recent U.S. policy has demonstrated how not to encourage greater market liberalization in China. The U.S.-Chinese trade war launched by the administration o% former President Donald Trump has created conditions opposite to the ones that spurred market reform back in 2001. Washington levied unilateral tari"s, launched trade-dispute cases, instituted export bans, and placed restrictions on foreign in- vestment in the United States. The Trump administration framed re- lations with China in terms o! a zero-sum competition and even went so far as to threaten the decoupling o! the two countries’ giant (and thoroughly enmeshed) economies. Chinese leaders view these actions as part o! a hostile U.S. strategy to contain or undermine China’s rise. The confrontation has empow- ered the nationalists and conservatives opposed to market liberaliza- tion, who point to U.S. coercion as a reason to further protect China’s high-tech manufacturing and secure the country’s supply chains. The trade war has marginalized pro-reform o#cials who have called for many o! the changes to Chinese policy that the United States has requested, such as the liberalization o! the $nancial sector and the loosening o! rules around foreign investment. China’s reformists no doubt have less clout than their more statist counterparts. But their relative weakness has led them in the past to seek external leverage— as reform-minded o#cials did during China’s &'( accession. This dynamic is by no means restricted to trade. China’s banking regula- tors, for instance, have drawn on frameworks put forward by the Ba- sel Committee on Banking Supervision (an international committee o! central bankers) to overcome the resistance o! state banks, )(*s, and local governments to greater oversight o! the banking system.
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U.S. policymakers should not abet the nationalists in China by fo- cusing on threats and punishments. A broader strategy o* engage- ment that o+ers signi,cant bene,ts in return for Chinese commitments to further liberalization would provide domestic reformists with just the sort o- leverage they enjoyed in 2001. Initiatives backed by multi- lateral institutions would have more legitimacy than would Washing- ton’s unilateral demands. Today, segments o* the Chinese political elite remain open to adopting the high product standards and market- oriented rules o* multilateral trade arrangements. A number o* cur- rent and former Chinese o.cials have even spoken positively about the prospect o* China’s joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Paci,c Partnership, a free-trade deal, a step that would bene,t the United States (although it is not a party to the deal) by bringing greater external oversight o* problematic issues, such as the governance o* Chinese )"$s and foreign investment in China, into the bilateral relationship. The sweeping liberalization that China’s central government em- barked on at the beginning o* this century showed the positive ef- fects o* the country’s joining the /0". But it was naive then to expect China to fully open up its economy and integrate it into the international trading system, just as it is simplistic now to think that China has abandoned liberal reform for the more familiar comforts o* state capitalism. The Chinese economy is neither entirely mar- ketized nor completely state-controlled, and any sensible China pol- icy cannot treat the system as a monolith.∂
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System Failure America Needs a Global Health Policy for the Pandemic Age Ashish Jha
hared transnational challenges are supposed to bring the world together. The .&/)0-19 pandemic, however, has done the op- Sposite, exposing the shortcomings o" the structures that govern global health. At the start, countries scrambled in a free-for-all for medical supplies. They imposed travel bans and tightly guarded data about the novel disease. The World Health Organization (19&), after struggling to secure Chinese cooperation, became a scapegoat for U.S. President Donald Trump, who announced that the United States would withdraw from the international health body. U.S. President Joe Biden, promising to break with Trump’s retreat to vituperative nationalist politics, has signaled his intent to rejoin the 19& and revive the United States’ leading role more broadly. As wel- come as those steps are, the Biden administration cannot simply pick up the mantle o" U.S. leadership after it was discarded four years ago. Even before Trump’s presidency, American primacy in global health governance was ebbing. No one can turn back the clock to the bygone era in which the United States set the agenda. The great health challenges o" the twentieth century—including 9)//,)0-, malaria, and tuberculosis—a!ected poor countries more than wealthy ones. To address those diseases, the United States em- braced a model o" global health that resembled patronage, providing aid to institutions and countries. Washington shaped the international agenda through funding and its broad sway over multilateral health organizations, chie" among them the 19&. In the twenty-#rst century, the United States has contributed about one-#fth o" the 19&’s bud- get, much o" it earmarked for speci#c programs that have been high
ASHISH JHA is Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
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priorities for Washington, including children’s health and infectious diseases. Likewise, U.S. bilateral global health funding over the last 20 years—the United States spent $9 billion in 2020 alone—has given Washington overweening in*uence over the health systems o+ recipi- ent countries. The outsize U.S. role has made it hard for multilateral organizations to function e,ectively without tacit U.S. support. No doubt the money spent by the U.S. government has done tremendous good, but it has also allowed the United States to unilaterally set inter- national health priorities and de-ne the metrics o+ success, sometimes at the expense o+ what is actually needed on the ground. But this model is now becoming obsolete. Unlike the health threats o+ the last century, the ."/%0-19 pandemic has reached nearly every corner o+ the globe. The United States cannot sit aloo1 from a troubled world, dispensing its benevolence and largess; it, too, is caught up in the crisis. At the same time, new networks and institutions, including philanthropies, regional organizations, and private companies, now play a major role in addressing global health challenges. Western re- searchers once steered the development o2 best practices and scienti-c knowledge in matters o+ public health; now scientists and organiza- tions in the developing world wield in*uence, too. The technological revolution has generated many forms o+ new data that promise to transform the way governments and their health agencies work. As a result, the governance o+ global health is becoming more de- centralized, determined less by Washington’s prerogatives than by the combined work o+ governments, nongovernmental organizations, and private actors. In such a world, Washington must reimagine how it can lead: instead o+ trying to de-ne the agenda, it must work with other governments, regional organizations, and the private sector to put partnership at the center o+ its e,orts to protect public health.
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD The U.S.-led global health order o+ the past did achieve major vic- tories, with the high-water mark being the bid by the George W. Bush administration in 2003 to end the 3%//(%0) epidemic through the program known as the President’s Emergency Plan for (%0) Re- lie+ (4$4!(#). Activists capitalized on the moral standing that the United States had gained in the wake o+ the 9/11 attacks to build an unprecedented coalition with conservative Christian policymakers. They launched 4$4!(# with an initial budget o+ $15 billion over -ve
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Their turn: testing COVID-19 samples in Nairobi, Kenya, April 2020 years. Since then, Congress has reauthorized the program every !ve years. Having devoted to date over $95 billion, it remains the larg- est commitment o" any government in history to address a disease and the largest commitment by the U.S. government to any cause since the Marshall Plan. It has been enormously successful, prevent- ing, by one estimate, 18 million deaths. But even as #$#%&' marked a seminal achievement in U.S.-led global health policy, it also pointed the way forward to a new world less dom- inated by the United States. P$#%&' adopted multilateral approaches from the outset, working with the () and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build the capacities o* local health systems around the world. In recent years, #$#%&' has focused its work on 13 countries, and it intends to direct 70 percent o" its future funding to partner organiza- BRIAN tions headquartered in poor countries, not in the capitals o" the West.
INGANGA That change in emphasis is revealing o" a broader shift. The United States and the +,- no longer hold total sway over the governance o" global health. When the +,- was founded, in 1948, there were few / AP other organizations o" its kind. But smaller, regional organizations PHOTO now help lead the way in a more interconnected world. The Pan Amer- ican Health Organization, for example, has funded immunization ini-
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tiatives and supported health education programs across Latin America. And health agencies in South Korea and Vietnam have led far more e!ective responses to the pandemic than their counterparts elsewhere. Africa has seen perhaps the most dramatic progress in coordinating a regional health policy. In 2017, the African Union’s members launched the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. When an Ebola disease outbreak began in the Democratic Republic o" the Congo in In a world of increasingly 2018, the Africa .0. supported six labo- di!use power, no single ratories that conducted tens o" thou- sands o" tests and trained thousands o" player can drive the global health-care workers. As the Ebola out- health agenda. break was ending in 2020, the Africa .0. shifted its focus to the .&/)0-19 pandemic, organizing the region’s re- sponse and helping distribute medical supplies across Africa. The Africa .0. has actively pushed back against the old Western- centric model o" global health. In April 2020, its director, John Nkenga- song, refused to sanction a trial in Africa o" a tuberculosis vaccine that might o!er protection against the novel coronavirus. A French doctor had suggested in a televised discussion that such a vaccine should be tested in Africa because the continent had “no masks, treatment, or intensive care, a bit like we did in certain ,)0- studies or with prostitutes.” The doctor later apologized, but the implication o3 Nkengasong’s refusal was clear: African countries, which have to date managed the pandemic much better than the United States and western European countries, will decide their own health priorities and ensure that medical studies conducted in Africa are led by Afri- can researchers in the interests o" African peoples. Indeed, in No- vember, 13 African countries launched the ,+2).&/ study, a joint e!ort to devise treatments for mild to moderate cases o" .&/)0-19 in a bid to keep hospitalization rates down. Meanwhile, in Geneva, the 19& has become an arena for geopo- litical competition. As a membership organization, the 19& is vulner- able to the power dynamics among its member states, and China and the United States, in particular, have clashed over its decisions. The 19& made the mistake o" appeasing China after the outbreak o" .&/)0-19 at the end o" 2019, presumably in an e!ort to gain better access to information about the progress o" the disease. The 19&’s leaders
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FA.indb 106 1/22/21 9:00 PM With chapters by: James A. Baker III Nancy Bearg Jean Becker Catherine Bertini Edward Djerejian Richard Haass Carla Hills Robert Kimmitt James Kunder Jane Lute Dayton Maxwell Andrew Natsios Douglas Paal !omas Pickering Condoleezza Rice Dennis Ross Horst Teltschik Chase Untermeyer Philip Zelikow
From the fall of the Soviet Union to the Gulf War, the presidency of George H. W. Bush dealt with foreign policy challenges that would cement the post-Cold War order for a generation. !is book brings together a distinguished collection of foreign policy practitioners – career and political – who participated in the unfolding of international events as part the Bush administration to provide insider perspective by the people charged with carrying them out.
bush.tamu.edu/scowcroft Ashish Jha
applauded Beijing’s response to the virus and overlooked early mis- steps and the withholding o* critical data, sparking outrage in the United States and elsewhere. China has played an increasingly large role in global health in recent years, both through bilateral initia- tives—its vast investment project known as the Belt and Road Initia- tive includes health infrastructure projects around the world—and through support for multilateral programs. A country o* China’s size must be engaged in these global e+orts, but that engagement is most e+ective in the service o* shared values and a broad, international con- sensus. Ironically, the U.S. decision a few months into the pandemic to withdraw from the ,-" only made it harder for the international community to try to hold China accountable. The Trump administra- tion’s abandonment o* multilateralism played into China’s hands.
THE RISE OF THE PHILANTHROPISTS Another powerful force remaking the governance o* global health is the growing role o* private and nongovernmental actors. The launch o* the Gates Foundation in 2000 marked an important shift away from a model o* global health centered on government action. In its .rst year o* operation, the foundation spent $1.5 billion—orders o* magnitude more than what any other organization o* its kind had ever spent. The seismic impact o* the Gates Foundation can be seen in a massive increase in global health spending, including at the ,-": the organization’s budget grew from less than $1 billion in 2000 to nearly $6 billion in 2020. In 2018, the Gates Foundation was the second- largest funder o* the ,-", after the U.S. government. The Gates Foundation has used its .nancial muscle to drive improvements in vaccinations and other lifesaving therapies for the world’s poor. A private philanthropic organization having this much in/uence repre- sents a sea change in global health. Beyond philanthropies, a new kind o* public-private partnership has arisen to address neglected problems at a time when many coun- tries are struggling to provide basic health care to their citizens. Indeed, the cost o* developing e+ective measures to .ght future pan- demics is prohibitively high for any individual country, but all coun- tries bene.t from the preparations o* one. In 2017, a collection o* private donors, pharmaceutical companies, and national governments launched the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. C$0% directs resources to develop vaccines against highly contagious dis-
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eases. The group has helped address some o! the biggest challenges in pandemic preparedness, ones that were di"cult for the #$% to tackle on its own. C&'( has supported the development o! vaccine plat- forms—technologies that can be quickly adapted to create vaccines for new diseases. It has sought to broker deals between private pharma- ceutical companies and vulnerable nations to ensure greater access to vaccines during outbreaks. In 2019, for instance, )&'( helped deploy experimental Ebola vaccines in the Democratic Republic o! the Congo. In 2020, with the pandemic raging, )&'( collaborated with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a public-private global health partnership, and the #$% to launch the )%*(+-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility, also known as )%*,-, an e.ort to distribute e.ective and safe vaccines to countries otherwise unable to procure them. As o! January 2021, )%*,- had over 180 participating countries—but not the United States, which joined Belarus, Russia, and a handful o! island states in declin- ing to join the initiative. In keeping with Trump’s “America /rst” foreign policy, this decision was one o! several marking the adminis- tration’s position o! “vaccine nationalism,” in which Washington saw the United States’ health interests as part o! a zero-sum contest with other countries. Under Trump, the United States stood mostly alone in approaching vaccines for )%*(+-19 as a matter o! purely national importance. Meanwhile, the rest o! the world—with China playing a prominent role—has participated in multilateral initiatives to help distribute )%*(+-19 vaccines. Entities such as the Gates Foundation, )&'(, and )%*,- have not made the United States or the #$% irrelevant. Far from it. But in a world o! increasingly di.use power, no single player can drive the global health agenda. This is largely a good thing. And it provides the United States an opportunity to engage as a partner—rather than as a patron— encouraging collective action and countering parochial nationalism.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER As global health leadership has become decentralized and less reliant on the West, so, too, has medical scholarship. Advocates for “decolo- nizing global health” have long pointed to the disproportionate share o0 Western authors featured in global health journals, studies, and re- views; researchers and practitioners in poor countries that bear the greater burden o! disease are often sidelined. But times are changing. Cutting-edge health and pharmaceutical research increasingly takes
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place outside the West. Chinese scientists who studied in the United States now run large, well-funded laboratories in China that are driv- ing the next generation o* scienti+c breakthroughs. Similar pioneering work is taking place in Southeast Asia and, increasingly, South Asia. In the years to come, African and Latin American scientists are poised to join their counterparts elsewhere in driving research forward. Non-Western researchers are more often leading global health studies, particularly those presented in open-access publications— scholarship available to all for free. A 2019 analysis o* medical re- search conducted in Africa—an area long dominated by Western scholars—found that 93 percent o* infectious disease studies had at least one African author, and nearly hal, had an African lead author. As education and scienti+c capacity in the developing world improve, knowledge and best practices increasingly -ow from poor countries to wealthy ones, bucking old colonial dynamics. Private enterprises have also helped reshape the public health land- scape in developing countries. The health technology company Bao- bab Circle, for instance, has introduced a popular app in sub-Saharan Africa that allows users to track their exercise, diet, and mental health and access online consultations with physicians. In Egypt, the startup TakeStep helps recovering addicts through telemedicine, allowing them to schedule appointments with counselors, psychiatrists, and cli- nicians. The Ugandan startup Matibabu has pioneered a device that can rapidly diagnose malarial infection (the cause o* one million deaths globally per year) without requiring a blood sample. In India, Healthians delivers at-home tests for many diseases to rural commu- nities that lack easy access to hospitals and clinics. Medicus (%, a com- pany founded in Dubai, has designed an app that uses machine learning and arti+cial intelligence to explain complex medical diagno- ses through user-friendly visualizations and recommendations. The proliferation o* technology-driven startups o* this kind points to a new challenge in global health: managing the reams o, health data that governments, health-care providers, and private companies pro- duce. How data are generated, governed, and ultimately used will be the de+ning issue o* global public health in the coming decades. Au- thoritarian countries have already started monitoring and controlling their populations by exploiting various data streams. Increasingly, mul- tinational corporations are tapping into private data sources to build sophisticated models that will allow them to identify and respond to
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disease outbreaks. Yet government agencies in democratic countries are struggling to determine how best to use these data without violat- ing ethical standards and legal protections. Worried about privacy, they have proved reluctant to utilize the data sets held by private compa- nies. As a result, they have missed out on the huge potential for data- driven approaches to public health, ceding the #eld to authoritarian governments and private industry. For- tunately, the coronavirus crisis may The United States must compel a reevaluation o" this approach, adjust to being a partner as the contrast between the inadequacy o" conventional public health data in a more decentralized streams and the e!ectiveness o" the global health system. tools available to autocratic regimes and private parties becomes apparent. Consider how China has responded to the pandemic. In addition to imposing lockdowns more rigid than those feasible in democratic countries, China deployed a surveillance system that uses various relatively new technologies—including loca- tion tracking, facial recognition, and 8' codes that allow citizens ac- cess to public spaces only i" they aren’t sick. In the early stages o" the pandemic, for instance, the local government o3 Hangzhou introduced an app that assigned users a color code to indicate their health status. Only those with a green code—a clean bill o$ health—could enter subways, malls, and other public spaces. The app was decidedly opaque and invasive. Users, most o" whom had not been tested for .&/)0-19, had no idea how determinations about their health status were made, and the app appeared to report users’ locations and other personal information to the police. It was as i" the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States had used Facebook to track sus- pected .&/)0-19 patients and then quietly shared their user informa- tion with the local sheri!’s o5ce. However disconcerting this approach was from a privacy perspective, it also allowed China to rapidly con- tain the virus. Many Western countries, by contrast, continue to struggle to do so, in part because they are reluctant to resort to such invasive apps. The United States has lagged behind its European peers in gathering and sharing relevant data, including contact-tracing data and genomics analysis, and only a handful o" U.S. states have enabled mobile phone contact-tracing capabilities. There are some signs o" progress: the
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state o! California has pioneered a "#$%&-19 exposure noti'cation sys- tem that safeguards privacy by protecting users’ identities and block- ing their locations. Facebook and Google have developed powerful tools for monitoring and responding to the pandemic, including com- munity mobility data (analyzing anonymous data o! the movements o! people in a community) and symptom maps (tracking users’ re- ports o! "#$%&(19 symptoms on social media). But the federal govern- ment remains missing in action. I! the United States does not lead the implementation and mainstreaming o! these technologies, the coun- try will be forced to choose between meeting future health challenges blindfolded and adopting approaches developed by authoritarian gov- ernments that do not share U.S. constitutional values.
FROM PATRON TO PARTNER After decades o! setting the global health agenda and almost single- handedly funding key global health goals, the United States must adjust to being a partner in a broader, more decentralized system. This new partnership model should be understood as the inevitable result o) long- term shifts, including the growing importance o! private enterprise to public health, the increased role o! China as a global power, and the decolonization o! global health policy as more authority and resources are a*orded to poor countries. Washington should not simply dwell on its lost standing and in+uence in the arena o! global health governance. Instead, it should enthusiastically play a central and constructive role in this new order, working with a diverse set o! partners to reform global health in ways that are consistent with American values. As a 'rst order o) business, the United States must renew its com- mitment to the ,-#. This does not mean that Washington should refrain from criticizing the ,-#; indeed, reform o! the organization, including encouraging the body to adopt a narrower, more focused agenda and granting it greater budgetary discretion to respond to emerging threats, must be a top priority o! the Biden administration. But criticism will be meaningless without credible assurance that the United States will work to help the ,-# succeed rather than simply walk away when the going gets tough. Some argue that the ,-# has become obsolete in the increasingly decentralized public health system, its consensus-based leadership cumbersome by comparison to ad hoc associations o! countries and private entities. But in truth, the ,-# is like a Rorschach test, with
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each o* its di+erent constituents seeing in it a di+erent agency that should prioritize di+erent goals. For wealthy countries, for example, the ,-" represents an opportunity to shape the global health agenda and keep disease outbreaks at bay. For less wealthy countries, the ,-" is a lifeline, providing crucial technical assistance and helping eliminate diseases such as polio. Too often, the ,-" tries to be all things to all countries, ensuring that it is e+ective in few o* the objectives it pursues. A clearer, more streamlined set o* responsibilities would allow the ,-" to build stronger capacities to monitor infectious disease out- breaks and share critical health data among countries. Having a more coherent agenda would help the organization secure more stable fund- ing. The ,-" must do the things that only it can do, including setting shared global health norms and targets and coordinating responses to transnational health threats. Its leadership, with full input from its member states, must ensure that such reforms aren’t merely cosmetic; they must recast the ,-" to meet modern challenges. The United States should not make the ,-" a battleground o* geopolitical competition with China; instead, it should encourage the organization to adopt higher standards in several crucial areas, includ- ing data transparency. New data streams are essential to building modern surveillance systems for disease outbreaks. For instance, in 2020, using mobile phone data, investigators highlighted the role o* informal cross-border migration in the transmission o* malaria in Bangladesh. The ,-" must recognize both the importance o* these kinds o* data and the necessity to shape the norms around their use. The body’s current approach relies on more traditional data sources and methods o* modeling disease that are inadequate to prepare for current threats. Indeed, the assessments the ,-" had made before ."/%0-19 o* various countries’ pandemic preparedness were often completely wrong; some o* the ostensibly best-prepared countries (notably the United States) have had the worst responses to ."/%0-19. Beyond the ,-", the United States should invest in the growing diversity o* the global health governance ecosystem by supporting new public-private entities. It should help 1ll niche gaps by, for ex- ample, supporting the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, which develops diagnostic tests for diseases that may spark pandem- ics, and allow the ,-" to concentrate on a limited set o* core compe- tencies. Washington should expand its global health partnerships with entities such as the Africa .0. to improve public health in the devel-
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oping world, promote American soft power, and strengthen the abil- ity o! poor countries to respond to disease outbreaks. A top priority o! U.S. global health investments must be building the capacity o! researchers and public health leaders in the developing world through prepublication support (o"ering advice and technical assistance to re- searchers), research partnerships, data sharing, and policy collabora- tion as peers. And the United States must help ensure that the information generated by the technological revolution, much o! it in private hands, can be used for the good o! public health without in- fringing on democratic values and individual rights. In the twentieth century, global health challenges were rarely truly global. Instead, they were typically con#ned to particular countries or regions. But in the twenty-#rst century, threats to health a"ect the en- tire world. The United States needs to recognize that the centralized approach to global health that it dominated and the $%& managed is no longer viable. The era o! U.S. agenda setting may have ended, but that only increases the importance o! U.S. leadership. In years past, Ameri- can priorities inevitably shaped global health; today, i! the United States wants future global health initiatives to re'ect its values, it must collaborate with others and seek to lead through partnership.∂
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A New Conservatism Freeing the Right From Free-Market Orthodoxy Oren Cass
he .&/)0-19 pandemic sent U.S. policymakers scurrying to their bookshelves, searching for responses to a public health ca- Ttastrophe that threatened to plunge households, businesses, and governments into #nancial despair. Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the White House 4ipped frantically through their dog-eared playbooks from the 1980s to determine just the right tax cut for the moment. But the chapter on society-wide lockdowns was nowhere to be found. Many Republicans shrugged and proposed a tax cut anyway. Presi- dent Donald Trump called for reducing the capital gains rate and joined Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in pushing for an expansion o" the corporate meals-and-entertainment deduction. Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to Trump, argued for a payroll tax “deferral” that even the U.S. Chamber o" Commerce dismissed as “unworkable.” Two months after the passage o" the .,'(- Act, as the novel coronavirus continued to rage, the Wall Street Journal editorial board questioned whether more relie" was necessary, suggesting instead that “every pri- vate investment made for the rest o" this year be exempt from any capi- tal gains tax.” On the same morning that a six-column New York Times headline blared, “MARKETS SPIRAL AS GLOBE SHUDDERS OVER VIRUS,” Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who served as U.S. ambassador to the 7+, displayed the familiar instincts o" a future Republican presidential candidate by tweeting, “As we are deal- ing with changes in our economy, tax cuts are always a good idea.” The pandemic’s distinctness made for a distinctly inept response, but this was only the latest iteration o" a pattern that had imprinted
OREN CASS is Executive Director of American Compass and the author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. In 2012, he was Domestic Policy Director for Mitt Romney's U.S. presidential campaign.
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itsel! across the right-of-center in recent years. Even in the face o! new economic challenges—China’s aggressive mercantilism, the "nancial crisis, rising inequality—the Republican Party has hewed rigidly to an agenda o! tax and spending cuts, deregulation, and free trade. The descent into dogmatism is a time-honored tradition in Ameri- can politics. What makes conservatism’s present bout peculiar, however, is its lack o! any discernible conservatism. The coalition o! economic libertarians, social conservatives, and foreign policy hawks that kicked o# the Reagan revolution, vanquished stag$ation, and won the Cold War is rightfully proud o! its accomplishments. But that bargain— whereby each camp took charge o! its own portfolio—left wide swaths o! public policy in the hands o! a small clique o! market fundamental- ists. They shared few values or intuitions with conservatives, who were themselves consigned to talking about “social issues.” As conservative economic thinking atrophied, libertarian ideas ossi"ed into the market fundamentalism that most commentators today casually call “conserva- tive.” The result has been a political crisis, for conservatism especially and for American government broadly. A right-of-center that is neither conservative nor responsive to people’s problems is incapable o! playing its vital role as the outlet for a nation’s conservative impulses and the counterweight to its progressive ones. Nor will it win many elections. In his run for the White House, Trump exposed the weakness o! the Republican establishment and the frustration and alienation o! its voters. But he was no conservative. Indeed, he lacked any discernable ideology or capacity for governing. He left the White House in dis- grace, having also lost his party the House and the Senate, abdicated all responsibility for leadership during the pandemic, and broken a centuries-long tradition o! outgoing presidents conceding defeat and transferring power peacefully. Now is the moment for conservatives to reassert their claim to the right-of-center. In the United States and in the rest o! the world, serious problems created in part by the absence o! a robust conserva- tism require conservative solutions. Progressivism, meanwhile, is in- creasingly obsessed with identity politics and the bugbears o! its overeducated elite. That makes it uniquely vulnerable to competition from an ideological message focused on the worries shared by most Americans, regardless o! their race or religion, about the foundations o! their families and communities. In politics, the odds usually favor incumbents, but the establishment that is $ying conservatism’s ban-
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ner has lost its vitality and now hunkers down behind crumbling walls, reciting stale pieties that few still believe. The circumstances today suggest that a realignment around a multiethnic, working-class conservatism might just have a chance.
THE TRUMP EARTHQUAKE Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election was an extraordinary aberration. Had Trump run in a typical primary, he would have strug- gled to assemble a plurality o* supporters. Had the opponent who +- nally emerged as his alternative been more popular with the Republican Party leadership than Senator Ted Cruz o, Texas, Trump would likely have lost; compare how quickly Democrats rallied around Joe Biden four years later when it appeared that Senator Bernie San- ders o, Vermont might actually secure their party’s nomination. In the general election, had his opponent been a competent politician, rather than Hillary Clinton, Trump would likely have lost. In the end, Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 by the narrowest o* margins in several states and lost the popular vote decisively. Still, his success exposed deep rot in the American political system. A well-functioning party capable o* serving its constituents does not allow itsel* to be commandeered as the &"- was. A country with a responsive and ef- fective political class does not elect a vulgar reality ./ star to the world’s most powerful o0ce. Trump’s heterodoxy and disruptiveness provided the equivalent o* an enormous natural experiment, and the results were surprising. The problems Trump emphasized bore little resemblance to the standard stories both parties thought they should tell, yet they seemed to resonate with voters, even though he o1ered no solutions. His remarkable gains among nonwhites, compared with Republi- cans in prior election cycles, refuted many o* the standard hypoth- eses about identity politics and gestured toward the possibility o* the right-of-center consolidating a culturally conservative bloc across races. What Trump did not provide was any foundation for a politi- cal movement to build on. Trump was not “conservative,” in style or substance, under any meaningful de+nition o* the word. But he didn’t seem to be anything else, either. His background evinced no commitment to any set o* political principles, and his campaign’s message and agenda never adopted one. With no intellectual framework, his administration’s
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Party man: Trump at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, October 2020 fortunes rose and fell on the highly variable quality o! his appointees, who often seemed to be working at cross-purposes. For each state- ment, appointment, or policy action pushing in one direction, the administration typically had another one pushing the other way. Un- surprisingly, this proved to be an obstacle to both governance and coalition building, and it provided a poor basis for a reelection cam- paign. And yet, had the U.S. economy been booming in 2020 at the prior year’s pace, rather than struggling against an unprecedented public health crisis, Trump might easily have won a second term. In the wake o! Trump’s defeat, analysts have pondered whether his brand o" populism might represent the conservative future. But DOUG this misunderstands his role. There is no discernible Trumpism in-
MILLS dependent o! Trump himself. His presidency was an earthquake, the immediate result o" a political landscape shifting after decades o" / THE mounting pressure. Earthquakes do not build anything. They dis-
NEW rupt and destroy, but they are temporary, and they provide the ben-
YORK e#t o" exposing structures that were sloppily built or that rested on crumbled foundations. People who relied on the old structures will TIMES rush in to put them right back up again. But after the earthquake comes a chance to reassess, to learn from what failed, and to rebuild
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in a way better suited to contemporary conditions. The important question to ask about the earthquake is not about the earthquake at all. It is, What should we build now?
ESTABLISHMENT THINKING The hallmark o* conservativism is not, as is often thought, opposition to change or the desire for a return to some earlier time. The miscon- ception that conservatives lack substantive preferences and merely re- +ect their environments leads to some confusing conclusions—for example, that the conservative o* 1750 would oppose American inde- pendence but the conservative o* 1800 would support it, or that today’s conservative must favor rapid globalization and deregulated ,nancial markets because that has been the recent tradition. What in fact distin- guishes conservatives is their attention to the role that institutions and norms play in people’s lives and in the process o* governing. “When the foundations o* society are threatened,” wrote the political theorist Samuel Huntington, “the conservative ideology reminds men o* the necessity o* some institutions and the desirability o* the existing ones.” Edmund Burke, the father o* modern conservatism, provided a quintessential illustration o* this dynamic. Although he was a mem- ber o* the British House o* Commons, Burke supported the Ameri- can Revolution in 1776 on the grounds that the United Kingdom, through its overbearing administration and arbitrary taxation, had irrevocably breached its relationship with the Colonies. He thought the Americans could better continue in their tradition o* self-government i* they freed themselves from King George III’s rule. Yet a decade later, Burke reacted with horror to the French Revolution, in which he saw a radical mob tearing away the guardrails and buttresses on which society depended. In both assessments, o* course, he was proved entirely correct: the United States became a +ourishing de- mocracy, and France descended into chaos. Burke was at once a “preserver o* venerated traditions” and “a re- former o- failing institutions,” the conservative scholar Yuval Levin has written. As Burke himsel* put it, “a disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard o* a states- man.” This same disposition is easily identi,able in conservatives to- day. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has spent years testing the foundations o* people’s moral reasoning, has found that conserva- tives tend to exhibit a much broader range o* moral concerns, giving
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fairly equal weight to care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. “They believe that people need external structures or con- straints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive,” Haidt has writ- ten. “These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions.” Liberals, by contrast, overwhelm- ingly prioritize care, particularly care for victims o" oppression. Liber- tarians, for their part, are obsessed with liberty to the exclusion o" other values. As a result, conservatism, more so Markets should never be than other ideologies, sees progress as an end unto themselves. a process o" accumulation rather than disruption, recognizing what is good in society and striving to build on it. Conservatism approaches the proj- ect o" governing with particular humility, grateful for whatever order a society’s traditions have managed to wrangle from imperfect human nature. The problems it identi#es and the solutions it proposes give relatively less weight to guaranteeing individual freedom and choice and more to reinforcing obligations and constraints, relationships and norms, and the mediating institutions that shape and channel people’s energies toward productive ends. Viewed this way, the conservative a5nity for markets should seem natural. Markets limit the power o" a central government and place it instead in the hands o" those best positioned to take care o" their own interests. They evolve over time in response to real-world conditions rather than at the whim o" a technocrat. They are themselves institu- tions through which people develop informal codes and formal rules to help themselves cooperate and transact more productively. An al- liance with libertarians to promote markets was logical in the second hal" o" the twentieth century, during an era o" great-power competi- tion against communism and when the domestic market was choked by an exploding bureaucracy and welfare state, a sclerotic system o" organized labor, con#scatory tax rates, and raging in4ation. Critically, however, a conservative skepticism o" markets is equally natural. Markets reduce people to their material interests and reduce relationships to transactions. They prioritize e5ciency to the exclu- sion o" resilience, sentiment, and tradition. Shorn o" constraints, they often reward the most socially corrosive behaviors and can quickly undermine the foundations o" a stable community—for instance, pushing families to commit both parents to full-time market labor or
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strip-mining talent from across the nation and consolidating it in a narrow set o* cosmopolitan hubs. For conservatism, then, markets are a valuable mechanism for sustaining and advancing a +ourishing soci- ety. But they should never be an end unto themselves. And their qual- ity is contingent on the norms and rules by which they function and the vitality o* the other institutions operating alongside them. Libertarians have no time for such nuance, and the purportedly conservative establishment has paid it little heed, either. Senator Pat Toomey, Republican o, Pennsylvania, has de-ned capitalism as “nothing more than economic freedom,” a sentiment echoed by Haley, who has warned that any interference with that freedom would head down “the slow path to socialism.” Jack Spencer, the vice president o* the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity, has suggested, “Why don’t we look at a policy and just ask, Does it expand economic freedom?” The conser- vative columnist Amity Shlaes has gone so far as to declare, “Mar- kets do not fail us. We fail markets.” The right-of-center’s preeminent public policy institutions display these same blinders in their mission statements—or, rather, mission statement, as they all seem to share the same one. The conservative think-tank world is dedicated to advancing the principles o* “limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty” (the Competi- tive Enterprise Institute), or “free markets and limited, e.ective govern- ment” (the R Street Institute), or “free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom” (the Heritage Foundation), or “individual liberty, limited government, free markets” (the Cato Institute), or “economic choice and individual responsibility” (the Manhattan Institute), or “individual, economic, and political freedom; private enterprise; and representative government” (the Hoover Institution). What began as entirely justi-ed advocacy for the bene-ts o* markets has mutated into a fundamentalism that throws bad policy after good, unable to distinguish between what markets can and cannot do and unwilling to acknowledge the harm that they can cause. Fortunately, it comes with an expiration date.
ANATOMY OF A FAILURE It is telling that right-of-center coalitions across Western democracies -nd themselves under pressure simultaneously. The backlash can be seen in the United Kingdom, where Brexit rejected an antidemocratic
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globalism; in eastern Europe, where the success o! Poland’s Law and Justice party and Hungary’s Fidesz has revitalized a Christian tradi- tionalism; and in Spain, where the rise o" Vox has given the world a rare right-wing party with a labor union. The politics and circumstances o# course vary by country, but tremors from the same tectonic shifts that set o$ the United States’ earthquake can be felt far and wide. Three major trends seem responsible for the fall o# the old orthodoxy, and all point toward the promise o# a conservative resurgence. The %rst is a changing world. Few observations are more trite than “the world changes,” yet analysts cling to outdated economic claims with religious tenacity, as i# each insight represents an eternal and universal truth. Perhaps this is because economists, play-acting at science, pretend that their models o$er just that. Those models rely on countless unstated assumptions about the world as it happens to be, and they stop working when it becomes something else. Purvey- ors o# the myth that free trade is always good and more is always better are eager to dismiss the havoc wreaked by the introduction o# China’s aggressive mercantilism into the global market as an outlier or the exception that proves the rule. But economic models and pol- icy recommendations are o" little use i# they cannot account for a near- peer economy o# 1.4 billion people dominated by the state-controlled enterprises o# a communist, authoritarian regime. Another change in the world has been the unmooring o# owner- ship and management from the communities in which %rms operate. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the economist Adam Smith em- phasized how societal expectations shape people’s incentives. A per- son’s “desire o" being what ought to be approved of,” he wrote, is “necessary in order to render him anxious to be really %t” for society. Such considerations for the traditional business owner lose their ef- fect i" he is replaced by a set o# institutional investors or a consor- tium o# private equity funds on another continent deploying capital held in trust by some government for workers’ pensions. In his sem- inal case for the now prevalent doctrine o# shareholder primacy, Mil- ton Friedman, a leader o# the Chicago school o# economics, disregarded Smith’s nuanced view o# the prerequisites for a well- functioning society and celebrated instead a world in which the de- sires o# owners “generally will be to make as much money as possible.” I# the character and constraints o# capital ownership change, it should not be surprising that outcomes do, too.
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The list goes on. Changes in cultural norms and expectations— “what ought to be approved of,” in Smith’s formulation—should cause policymakers to rethink economic assumptions. Instead, con- servatives have developed the habit o" saying, “that’s a cultural prob- lem” as an excuse to do nothing, for instance, when growing numbers o" young men cannot #nd and hold steady jobs. Growth, invest- ment, and what passes for innovation have become concentrated in a technology sector that defaults to- ward natural monopoly. Trillion-dollar American politics, guided tax cuts seem not to spur capital by the neoliberal consensus spending, and trillion-dollar de#cits between progressives seem not to raise interest rates. Play- books published in the 1980s do not and libertarians, has contain answers. focused on a blinkered set The second trend responsible for of moral concerns. the failing consensus is overreach. In technocratic fantasies, careful regula- tors #ne-tune their policies, asymp- totically approaching the ideal formula for delivering the best outcomes. In practice, politicians and their advisers land on ideas that seem to work and then push them ever further. A reduction in too-high marginal tax rates rarely sates the appetite for tax cuts. Few policymakers go partway on liberalizing the cross-border 4ow o" goods, people, and capital and conclude that the time has come to stop. Likewise, issues that have been deemed undeserving o" con- cern do not receive attention at the #rst sign o" trouble; they remain ignored until they no longer can be. Even as risk built up in the United States’ deregulated #nancial system, nothing was done until after the 2008 meltdown. Policies will tend to experience diminishing returns that eventu- ally turn negative—until the case for changing direction becomes undeniable. Even the best thinking contains within it the seeds o" its own undoing, with inevitable excesses driving a necessary cycle o" failure and reform. The West, now well into a postwar period #lled with extraordinary achievements, can double down on the solutions o" 40 or 60 years ago only so many times before going bust. Defusing the hypernationalist tensions o" the early twentieth century was wise; proceeding to eviscerate solidarity within the nation-state was not. Requiring pollution controls and considering the environmental im-
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pacts o! new projects made sense in the 1970s; tightening the ratchet afterward until industrial investments faced prohibitive risks and costs did not. Expanding the pipeline o! talented students attending college has always been a worthy aspiration; converting high schools into college-prep academies is not. The third factor undermining the old economic orthodoxy is its failure to update its own rules. An analogy to sports is instructive. The goal o! a professional sports league is to entertain paying customers, but the league does not accomplish this by directing how each player moves around the "eld to create maximum drama. Instead, it estab- lishes rules and trusts that players competing under those rules will yield an entertaining product. The unpredictability o! the outcome is key to the spectators’ enjoyment. Likewise, the rules that the govern- ment establishes for economic actors are designed to facilitate compe- tition that will redound to the bene"t o! all. And because those actors are free agents working within a system o! rules, rather than perform- ers following a script, they can respond creatively to changing condi- tions. But no framework o! rules is perfect. Designed based on how the game is being played at the time, it works well at "rst. But the athletes and teams evolve their own strategies in ways that the rule- makers could not have anticipated. When competition fails to yield the desired bene"ts, the leagues modify the rules—pushing back the three-point line in basketball, lowering the pitcher’s mound in base- ball, or adding the forward pass in football. The same thing has happened in the U.S. economy, except that the rule-makers haven’t kept up. Businesses and investors exploit ever more obscure opportunities for e#ciency, and their most successful strategies tend to diverge from those that produce desirable results for the nation. One such e$ect is the economy’s "nancialization, which has directed an increasing share o! talent, investment, and pro"ts toward "rms that excel at speculative transactions rather than productive contributions. Another is the labor market’s trend toward workplaces in which many functions are outsourced and many em- ployees are replaced with independent contractors, as "rms maximize their %exibility and pro"t margins by minimizing their attachments and obligations to workers. Surging pro"tability may signal success for the capitalist, but as Smith recognized in The Wealth of Nations, the opposite holds true for capitalism. “The rate o! pro"t does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declen-
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sion, o* the society,” he wrote. “On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the coun- tries which are going fastest to ruin.”
A NEW APPROACH These trends are the product not o* too much conservative thinking but o* too little. American politics, guided by the neoliberal consensus between progressives and libertarians, has focused on a blinkered set o* moral concerns and blindly pursued the unquestioned priorities o* personal freedom and consumption. No wonder the prevailing con- sensus struggles to respond to the problems facing society today. Con- servatism, however, is well suited to addressing them. Conservatives have an appreciation for the nation-state, the rules and institutions necessary to well-functioning markets, and the strength o* the social fabric. That starting point provides a better foundation for addressing great-power competition with China, monopolies in the technology sector, failing communities, and rising inequality than does the liber- tarian faith in markets or the progressive reliance on redistribution. Whereas progressives and libertarians both exhibit an inclination to reason from abstract principles toward absolute commitments and thus encourage overreach, the conservative begins by looking at real- world conditions. Burke knew this well. “Circumstances . . . give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and dis- criminating e+ect,” he wrote. “The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme bene,cial or noxious to mankind.” Accepting the rule book’s inherent imperfection and striving to up- date it over time as conditions change—that is the quintessential con- servative approach to policymaking. A conservative economics would recognize the power and value o* markets but insist on analyzing them within their human context rather than as abstract engines o* e-ciency. For instance, it would recognize the pernicious e+ects that high levels o* economic inequal- ity can have on the social fabric, the functioning o* markets, and people’s well-being, regardless o* absolute material living standards. It would give weight to the value o* di+use and widespread invest- ment, not just the value o* agglomeration. It would consider the bene,ts that locally owned establishments bring to their communi- ties, alongside the bene,ts that hypere-cient conglomerates can de- liver. It would recognize the importance o* nonmarket labor performed
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within the household and the community, such as caretaking and vol- unteering, rather than assuming that the higher monetary incomes in a society o" two-earner families must indicate progress. Organized labor should be a conservative priority. The outdated U.S. system is in terminal decline and in desperate need o" reform, function- ing more as a fundraising arm o" the Democratic Party than as an economic force boosting workers’ fortunes. Union Organized labor should be membership has fallen to six percent o" a conservative priority. the private-sector workforce. Conserva- tives will #nd much to like in the con- cept o" a vibrant labor movement giving workers power in the job market, representation in the workplace, and support in the community. Placing workers on an even footing with #rms so they can negotiate their terms o" employment boosts family incomes by emphasizing economic agency and self-reliance rather than by resorting to redistribution. It allows them to make tradeo!s tailored to their own preferences rather than depend on government regulation to protect their interests. The union is also the quintessential mediating institution, occupying a role in civil society between atomized individuals, on one hand, and an encroaching state, on the other, a force that can help people transition into the workforce and between jobs, build solidarity among workers and relationships with em- ployers, and even manage portions o" the social safety net. It is time for conservatives to rethink the public education system, too, which has been commandeered for the task o" transforming all Americans into college-educated knowledge workers and does it quite poorly. According to data from the Department o3 Education and the Federal Reserve, barely one in #ve young Americans goes on from high school to college, completes a degree on time, and then #nds a job requiring that degree. A better approach would ensure that schools can meet students where they are and o!er them pathways to produc- tive lives in jobs they want and in which they can excel. High schools would teach practical skills and partner with employers to o!er work- place experiences. Postsecondary programs would emphasize subsi- dized employment and on-the-job training. Colleges would not operate as amusement parks that deform the cultural expectations and eco- nomic incentives o" young people; instead, they would be recognized as one path among many, present prospective students with their real cost and thus represent an attractive option for some but not most.
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Conservatives are right to look skeptically at the ability o* the gov- ernment to supplant markets, but they must appreciate both what markets do well and what they will not do on their own and thus embrace the indispensable public role o* channeling investment to- ward long-term national priorities. This was long the American tradi- tion. Indeed, it was a pillar o* the “American System” o* investment in domestic industry and infrastructure proposed by Alexander Hamil- ton, championed by Henry Clay, and endorsed by Abraham Lincoln, a plan that helped transform the United States from a colonial back- water into the leading global power. A modern equivalent would spon- sor innovation, mandate domestic sourcing in critical supply chains, and discourage the +nancial speculation that goes by the name “in- vestment” but bears little resemblance to the work o, building pro- ductive capacity in the real economy. A conservative coalition built around economic priorities such as these, plus a merely nonradical set o* cultural concerns, would attract a broad range o* voters. It would attract the core o* the existing Republi- can Party, which, as Trump proved, has much less interest in libertarian platitudes than Beltway strategists assumed. It might equally appeal to a large portion o* the Democratic Party that is likewise culturally con- servative; many Democratic voters aspire not to escape their families and communities or rely on public bene+ts but rather to be productive contributors in an economy that has a place for them. Unlike the naive fantasies that presume that a centrism halfway between the parties’ existing commitments must surely be ideal, a multiethnic, working- class conservatism could deliver a durable governing majority. It would do so by rediscovering an entirely di-erent set o* commitments, one that both parties’ elites have neglected for too long.∂
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he o!cial Arab-Israeli con"ict has ended. Over the past sev- eral months, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (#$%), Su- Tdan, and Morocco have normalized relations with Israel. Oman may be on its way to doing so, and Saudi Arabia has taken unprecedented steps in that direction. Other Arab governments main- tain important, albeit discreet, ties with Israel, and further moves to- ward normalization appear to be only a matter o& time. Egypt and Jordan have been at peace with Israel for decades. The one-time pan-Arab call for a united front against Israel “from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gul'” has given way to normalization across that same expanse. The pace and extent o& that shift have under- mined the common Arab position re"ected in the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. Rather than insisting on “land for peace” and o(ering nor- malized ties only in return for a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines, Arab governments have given precedence to self-interest: for Morocco, U.S. recognition o& its control over Western Sahara; for Sudan, the re- moval o& U.S. sanctions; for the #$%, access to advanced U.S. arms. But i& the state-to-state con"ict has come to an end, Israel’s con"ict with the Palestinians has not. Rede)ning “peace” to conform to the needs o& Arab governments does not do away with the Palestinians or resolve Israel’s Palestinian problem. Thirteen million Palestinians are spread across the Holy Land and in exile. Nearly seven million o& them reside in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediter- ranean. They are going nowhere.
HUSSEIN AGHA is a Senior Associate at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and has been involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for more than three decades. AHMAD SAMIH KHALIDI is a Senior Associate at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, and was involved in post-Oslo Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. They are co-authors of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine and Track-II Diplomacy: Lessons From the Middle East.
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History does not support the contention that Israel’s peace with the Arabs will inevitably open the door to peace with the Palestinians, compelling them to submit to Israeli terms under the pressure o* new realities and isolation. The current Palestinian national movement emerged precisely from the sense o* defeat, solitude, and abandon- ment by Arab governments that followed 1948. Dire as Palestinian circumstances may be now, there are no signs o* surrender. For Israel, the wave o* normalization means that there is little incen- tive to make peace with the Palestinians. That will likely result in con- solidation o* the status quo in the short term. But a new landscape is in the making, shaped by unprecedented Arab dealings with Israel, seeth- ing Palestinian frustration, and a drift to the right in Israel, all o* which could eventually bring a new dynamic to the seemingly frozen situa- tion. Bereft o* e+ective Arab strategic depth—that is, the willingness o* Arab states to lend their backing to the Palestinian cause—the Pal- estinians must now think hard about how to reorder their struggle, how to address what has brought them to this point, and how to change it. The Palestinians have been here before. Around ten years after the nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) o* 1948, a distraught group o, Pales- tinians disillusioned with the Arab states’ lack o* seriousness in rally- ing to their cause decided to take matters into their own hands. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was born, and it was taken over by Yasir Arafat in 1969. What started with isolated armed opera- tions helped forge the modern Palestinian national movement. The -." succeeded in bringing Palestinians together, asserting a separate Palestinian political identity, forcing its cause onto the international agenda, and returning some Palestinians to self-rule. But it failed to end the Israeli-Palestinian con/ict, to establish an independent and sovereign state, or to develop good governance for Palestinians. The time has come for a new beginning.
THE FAILURE OF PALESTINIAN DIPLOMACY The Palestinian leadership at 0rst responded to the recent Arab nor- malizations with Israel with public anger and charges that the Arab states had stabbed the Palestinians in the back. But that initial criti- cism has abated. It was bound to be hard to sustain, since the -.", as the representative o* the Palestinian people, itsel* recognized Israel in 1988 and embarked on a “peace process” with it three decades ago. The Palestinian leadership has also maintained security coordination
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The struggle continues: Palestinians at a rally in Ramallah, November 2009 with Israel, undercutting its ability to object when others establish security relationships o" their own. Nor can the Palestinians simulta- neously insist that their plight is the central Arab cause and that they have the sole right to address it as they see #t. By regularly invoking their national interests and their “independence o" will,” as repeatedly articulated in their political statements, the Palestinians have left themselves with no defense against those who claim the right to an- swer to their own sovereign will and forge their own path. In short, Palestinian diplomacy has failed massively. It takes excep- tional talent to transform an almost complete consensus among Arabs and Muslims on the future o3 Palestine and Jerusalem into just an-
MUHAMMED MUHEISEN other matter on a packed Arab agenda. Partly as a consequence, the 6:& has lost all credibility as a decision- making or representative body. Its founding principles and its 1968 charter are o" a bygone era, and they have been violated and tra- duced by the Palestinians’ own o5cial practice. The 6:&’s political program, based on the two-state solution, stands on pillars de- / AP nounced and decried by its own founding document, which rejects PHOTO the principle o" the partition o3 Palestine on political and moral grounds. The charter has not been formally revised or updated since
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1996. Its ethos lingers in its suspended articles, disconnected from practical politics. The 6:& was originally established as a forum for factional representa- tion, but the factions it represents no longer mirror the political forces in Palestinian society. The 6:&’s quota system, which allocates seats to vari- ous Palestinian factions according to their purported size, is an archaic and distorted means o" power sharing and decision-making. Many o" the fac- For Israel, the wave of tions, such as those formerly sponsored normalizations means that by Arab regimes, are now defunct, but they still keep their seats. Hamas, the there is little incentive e!ective ruler o" Gaza, and other Is- to make peace with the lamist factions are not represented. The Palestinians. 6:& may seek to respond to a strong popular desire for unity, but its lan- guage, comportment, and direction are very much o" the past. A new Palestinian beginning cannot start with the same faces, beliefs, and mechanisms that have led to today’s dead end. The 6:&’s one-time virtue was that it gave the Palestinians a voice, an address, and a forum for a genuine national debate. As the 6:&’s stature grew, it subsumed its divisions under a nominal national ru- bric, with factions papering over their di!erences for the sake o" agreement on broader objectives. The organization’s leadership was frequently criticized, but its legitimacy was never questioned or chal- lenged. Yet the 6:& has not adjusted its form and mission to meet the goal o" statehood. In both construction and function, it is beyond re- form. The Palestinians need new tools o" representation and political action that re4ect present realities and future prospects. That could require a new constitutive assembly, with a mission, charter, and po- litical program that speaks to all Palestinians and eschews the stale language o" the old 6:&, a discourse imbued with the spirit o" the mid- twentieth century but with no currency in the twenty-#rst. Since it was established by the 1993 Oslo agreements between Is- rael and the 6:& to govern Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian Authority (6,) has become the true political center o" gravity, with the 6:& retaining a zombie form—a higher decision- making body in theory, but marginalized in practice. Blurring the line between the 6, and the 6:& and allowing the 6, to take over most o" the 6:&’s functions are actions that have impaired both. The 6, should
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be relegated to a purely administrative role, freed from the shackles o! high politics to manage Palestinians’ lives under its control and safe- guard their welfare and security. A successor organization to the "#$ should serve as the representative and political address o! the Pales- tinians, free from the chores o! civil duties and with a mandate to speak and act on behal! o% Palestinians everywhere. That was the model envisioned by the Oslo agreements but never practiced. Ten- sion between a new "& and a new "#$ is to be expected, but the ben- e'ts o! clear lines o! responsibility justify the challenge. Another weakness o! the Oslo process was that it sidelined the Pal- estinians who live in the diaspora; for them, even the unlikely prospect o! a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza does not o(er real redress, since it addresses neither their current security and welfare nor their future aspirations. A new Palestinian beginning cannot be based solely on the tunnel vision o! a Ramallah-centered worldview. A political program should o(er a clear space and voice for those outside the West Bank and Gaza by ensuring their fair representation in Pal- estinian institutions and by building a new national agenda that recog- nizes their predicament and re)ects their needs. I! e(orts to end the con)ict are to be serious, they have to include the bulk o% Palestinians.
PRISONERS OF DISCOURSE True “independence o! will” must begin with a clear position on what is attainable as well as desirable—a revision o% Palestinian priorities and goals that goes beyond old slogans. To move forward, a substan- tial recalibration o% Palestinian aspirations is essential. The dream o! self-determination via statehood that would compensate for the pain o! exile and occupation is distant. The Palestinians cannot remain hostage to the absence o! a state, living in permanent limbo while awaiting a salvation that is visibly retreating and may never arrive. The national movement has understandably given precedence to collective interests, but as a result, basic individual rights—the free- dom to think, speak, work, live, move, and prosper—have been rele- gated to the margins. Palestinian leaders must give much greater consideration to such issues, particularly because the "&’s record has hardly o(ered a seductive model o! good government, better life, or greater freedom. Hamas’s rule in Gaza (Hamas wrested control after violent confrontations with the "& in June 2007) has had even less ap- peal, bringing further su(ering and impoverishment to, and a con-
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tinuous corrosion o* the quality o* daily life for, the more than two million Gazans. Palestinians in much o* the near diaspora, such as those living in Lebanon and Syria, face increasingly harsh conditions, as well. Whatever Israel’s responsibility for the Palestinians’ plight, the Palestinian leadership must bear its own share o* responsibility for its people’s safety and welfare. De+ning a new direction will be di,cult. “Armed struggle,” upheld in the -."’s 1968 charter as the “sole means o/ liberation,” has long been eschewed in favor o* diplomacy, and the limitations o0 force have be- come increasingly apparent even to Hamas. The -." laments that nearly three decades o* endless negotiations have led nowhere, yet its only re- course has been to seek a return to negotiations in the vain hope that this time it may be di1erent—that some new framework and the pas- sage o* time will yield the achievement o* previously unachievable goals. This hope has proved elusive, as each credible “peace” formula ends up being a regression, o1ering less to the Palestinians than the one before. Since the Palestinians agreed to accept a state on just part o* their national soil, the tragedy o0 Palestinian negotiations has been the total indistinguishability o* the Palestinians’ talking points and their real positions: there is no daylight between what Palestinian representa- tives say in public and what they demand at the negotiating table. By contrast, their Israeli counterparts never reveal their real positions, and they align their talking points with changing circumstances. By failing to do the same, the Palestinians have put themselves in a posi- tion in which nothing but agreement to all their terms could be ac- ceptable, which has opened them up to charges o* in2exibility and intransigence. They appear to be unbending, since every new proposal they issue is nearly the same as the last. Having made their most sig- ni+cant concessions before a +nal deal, they have little left to give in talks. The Palestinians thus +nd themselves in a trap from which there is no escape, which makes true negotiations impossible; they are pris- oners o* their own discourse, reasserting the same points to no end. The -." has also repeatedly sought U.S. intervention, yet repeat- edly decried the United States’ bias even as it pleaded for U.S. pres- sure on Israel. Palestinian leaders chase after the United States without accepting its policies, waiting for U.S. salvation while rejecting all U.S. plans. Counting on European “initiatives,” in the hope that Eu- ropean pressure will alter the U.S. position, has been a waste o* valu- able diplomatic time and energy. So has repeated anticipation o*
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positive change from a new U.S. administration or a new Israeli gov- ernment. Whenever one U.S. president fails to match their expecta- tions, the Palestinians shut down and wait in the hope that the next one will be friendlier. The same applies to Israeli leaders; once a prime minister is tested and found wanting, the wait starts for a successor. The result is a repeated cycle o! high hopes and dashed expectations coupled with procrastination and paralysis.
ENDURING DELUSIONS Palestinian leaders promised their people a path to freedom and em- powerment. Yet in the last two decades, they developed a culture o" dependency rather than resourcefulness, an expectation o" external sal- vation rather than self-reliance. This sapped their will to build and de- velop their society and stymied their willingness to explore new thinking. Palestinians o" the post-Oslo generation have lacked valid and vi- able political outlets, torn between parroting worn-out slogans they no longer believe in and waiting for overseas charity to bail them out. National assertion and independence have given way to nagging, com- plaining, sulking, and a sense o" entitlement, with Palestinian leaders frequently looking to outside powers for succor. This deterioration has undermined and corrupted Palestinian politics, de#ated popular action, and encouraged political drift. It has also alienated foreign supporters, who have become exasperated with Palestinian conduct. International backing for the $% now stems less from any conviction in its competence than from the belie" that the governing body is the best way to preserve relative quiet in the Holy Land. The $&'’s default position is to appeal to international law, hoping that the international community can or will act on its behalf. That appeal has been one o" the more enduring delusions o" the Palestinian leadership, ever since the struggle for international recognition re- placed the presumption o" revolutionary legitimacy and diplomacy took the place o" armed struggle. In reality, international law has not been a dependable friend to the Palestinians (from the Balfour Decla- ration in 1917 to the () Partition Plan in 1947 to () Security Council Resolution 242 in 1967, the cornerstone o" the peace process). While it has lent the Palestinians a hand by recognizing their claim to terri- tories occupied by Israel after the 1967 war and their right to state- hood, and by serving as an increasingly fragile dam against Israeli settlement and annexation policies, international law has made a dif-
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ference only when the outside forces that purport to uphold it—espe- cially the permanent members o* the +' Security Council—are prepared to in fact do so. There is not much evidence that this is the case today, as illustrated by the absorption o* Arab East Jerusalem into Israel, U.S. recognition o, Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, and now de facto annexation o* much o* what remains o, Palestinian lands. The value o* international law is ultimately beholden to the prevailing political environment and the stances o* its major sponsors. The Palestinians’ con-ict with Israel is not a legal dispute. Inter- national law has not helped solve con-icts in Crimea, Cyprus, Kash- mir, Kosovo, or Nagorno-Karabakh. It was not international law that compelled Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula, southern Lebanon, or Gaza; it was a combination o* power politics and diplo- macy. Yet many Palestinians cling to an uninformed misapprehen- sion o* international law’s potency. The Palestinians have further weakened their own position by taking a misguided approach to negotiations. They have a history o* rejecting proposals and then going back to them in less auspicious circumstances, and at greater cost. Palestinian leaders rejected the 1947 +' Partition Plan for its iniquitous terms, but then accepted partition on signi.- cantly less advantageous terms in 1988. They rejected Egyptian Presi- dent Anwar al-Sadat’s proposal for Palestinian autonomy in 1977, but then agreed to a more restricted interim authority at Oslo in 1993. Taking a principled position may be laudable, but subsequent back- tracking and the violation o* those same principles under duress are bad politics and detrimental to national morale. Instead o* accruing credit and strengthening their hand, the Palestinians have squandered current assets with no guarantee o, favorable future returns. Current realities may require the Palestinians to go beyond outright rejection and focus on achieving interim gains while exploring new possibilities for ad- vancing their long-term goal o* a state o* their own. The normalization deals between Israel and Arab countries, for example, might o/er op- portunities that could be leveraged to Palestinian advantage—such as conditioning Saudi normalization with Israel on Israel’s ending its de facto annexation o* the West Bank through its settlement expansions. Another tactic that has proved ine/ective is the Palestinians’ pro- pensity to threaten Israel with actions that they have no intention o* pursuing and are raising merely as a bugaboo to pressure Israel to o/er some concession; repeated claims that the 0( will end security coop-
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eration with Israel, or that it is ready to hand over the keys and return the West Bank to direct Israeli occupation (with all the ensuing mate- rial and moral costs), have lost all credibility with Israel and the Pales- tinian public alike. The threat to resort to a “one-state solution” appears equally vacuous and has the added disadvantage o! con"rming Israeli concerns about the #$%’s commitment to a two-state solution.
FIRST PRINCIPLES Even with the advent o! the Biden administration, a serious new push for negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians seems un- likely unless the two sides can show that this time it will be di&erent. Unfortunately, the #' and the #$% seem to believe that they can return to the old formula, based on () resolutions and the 1967 lines as the “terms o! reference,” with sponsorship and endorsement by an inter- national conference. But other actors see other paths forward. One view holds that side- lining the Palestinians and advancing normalization between Israel and Arab states will push the Palestinians to eventually compromise on their demands for fear o* being left behind and denied what re- mains o! their diminishing prospects. Another view hopes that the combined weight o! the Arab normalizers could allow for the launch- ing o! a more credible and robust diplomatic process that involves the Palestinians and provides them with a stronger bargaining hand. A group that includes, along with the Palestinians, the Gul! Arab states, Egypt, and Jordan would evidently enjoy greater sway with both Is- rael and the United States than the Palestinians do on their own, the thinking goes. The "rst view assumes that the Palestinians would join burgeoning regional peace e&orts out o! desperation; the second, that they would join out o! the hope for new opportunities. Both views may contain a grain o! truth. Yet any future negotia- tions would need to take some hitherto overlooked "rst principles into account. One o! the Oslo accords’ most egregious failures was to treat the con+ict as a purely bilateral a&air that could be solved with a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians alone. The West Bank’s future cannot be determined in isolation from Jordan and Jordanian interests; history, politics, demographics, and geography dictate that the Oslo agenda on security, borders, refugees, and the status o! Jeru- salem is as vital a concern for Jordan as for Israel and the Palestinians. Similarly, Egypt was the caretaker administration in Gaza for two
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decades after 1948, and Gaza’s fate—given its history, location, and population—cannot be determined without Cairo’s consent. New Egyptian and Jordanian roles can be e*ective supplements at a time when the Palestinians on their own have been unable to secure their land from further Israeli encroachment. Jordan’s gravitational pull on the West Bank remains strong. West Bankers’ tendency to see Am- man as their social, political, and economic metropolis has only grown with the withering o+ the Palestinian national movement. Egypt’s sway over Gaza has also persisted, as is evident in Cairo’s role as the media- tor between Israel and Hamas. Egypt continues to have a strategic and political interest in Gaza, notably as it relates to the security o+ Sinai. With Palestinians already a majority in Jordan, signi,cant constitu- encies there regard attempts to drag Amman into the future o+ the West Bank as e*orts to undermine Hashemite rule. But Jordan has a very limited range o+ options for dealing with the open sore o+ an inde,nite con-ict on its border, which is a threat to its own security and stability. An ever-expanding Israeli presence and chronic Israeli-Palestinian vio- lence will prove more costly i+ Jordan opts to stay out o+ e*orts to reach a solution. Amman cannot a*ord to disregard its security responsibili- ties on the eastern border o+ a future Palestinian state; it might be more willing to engage i+ doing so could draw signi,cant moral, political, and ,nancial backing from Arab states normalizing relations with Israel. Egypt is similarly likely to be reluctant to take on any responsibility for the over two million Palestinians in Gaza, many o+ whom have Is- lamist tendencies and a history o+ activism and resistance. But an open- ended Hamas problem and concerns about security in Sinai may convince Egypt to agree to a role that would allow it more control over events in Gaza. Like Jordan, Egypt cannot shirk its security responsibilities. Cairo has always had a historical interest in the interplay among the Palestin- ian territories, Jordan, and Israel and in retaining a signi,cant presence in the Levant. Gaza will remain a point o+ access into that sphere, one that Egypt’s aspirations to a regional role do not allow it to ignore. The Gaza–West Bank divide presents a further impediment to Pal- estinian aspirations. It has driven a broad transnational movement into the increasingly insular and rival bubbles o. Hamas-controlled Gaza and /(-governed Ramallah. The fruitless attempts at reconciliation be- tween Hamas and the /0" have consolidated a schism that has become as problematic as the Israeli-Palestinian divide. Without a genuine re- connection between the two regions, the putative Palestinian entity
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will further shrink, and the prospects o" containing Hamas will recede. The schism undermines the legitimacy o" the entire Palestinian politi- cal system, severely compromising the 6:&’s claim to be the sole Pales- tinian representative. Despite recurrent calls to hold elections and agree on a common national program, neither Hamas nor Fatah, the two dominant Palestinian political forces, has o!ered a convincing answer as to how to end the rift. And even i" The Palestinian scene is elections do take place, as Palestinian ripe for a jolt of self- President Mahmoud Abbas recently decreed, they will serve only to legiti- realization and mize an ailing political system, not to empowerment. facilitate a genuine transfer o" power: neither side is prepared to hand over power to the other, making elections little more than a sham. Negotiations would also have to contend with the fundamental dis- connect between Israeli and Palestinian political language and under- standings o" crucial issues. Security is a prime example. The Palestinian view o" security is narrow, local, and tactical; the Israeli view is broad, regional, and strategic. When the two sides discuss security issues, they talk on di!erent planes; the Palestinians focus on threats to individuals, whereas Israeli concerns relate to powerful states and organizations. Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, has tried, unsuccessfully, to address the disconnect. He is the last o" the Palestinian founding fathers and also the #rst signi#cant Palestinian national leader in modern history to openly and unreservedly abjure violence and to commit to diplo- macy and peaceful means as the sole path to a resolution o" the con- 4ict. Despite their faults, the Oslo accords would not have been possible without his determined stewardship; neither would the rela- tive quiet o" the past 15 years. His contribution has not been appro- priately valued by either Israel or the United States. In return for his transformation o3 Palestinian discourse and actions, Abu Mazen col- lected sweet words, empty promises, and #nancial crumbs. By failing to reach a deal with him, Israel sacri#ced long-term strategic gains for short-term tactical considerations. For now, Abu Mazen’s resolute opposition to violence has been absorbed by the Palestinian majority. Besides Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, no signi#cant Palestinian faction, popular movement, or potential successor espouses “armed struggle” today or calls for its
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return. Abu Mazen managed, almost unaided and against formidable odds, to expunge what he considered to be a destructive belie* from the mainstream Palestinian political lexicon and from mainstream Palestinian conduct. In the absence o+ an equitable resolution, Abu Mazen’s legacy may yet be questioned and reconsidered by his own people, and its e,ects may erode over time. In the process, however, the -( has to many Palestinians come to resemble a subcontractor to Israeli occupation, charged with suppress- ing militant opposition to Israel in the areas under its control. That image has undermined the -(’s credibility and legitimacy and helped nourish a sense o+ disillusionment with the state-building exercise. The -( leadership made little attempt to explain the rationale behind agreeing to security coordination with Israel, and it got little in return in the way o+ reciprocity. That security cooperation has also dulled the Israelis’ sense o+ urgency and helped sideline Palestinian core con- cerns by seemingly giving precedence to protecting Israelis as op- posed to Palestinians. The upshot is that Israel has tolerated a strategic threat in return for instant individual safety. As long as there are no Israeli casualties as a result o* Palestinian action, Israel can forgo ad- dressing the Palestinian need for a long-term solution that will deliver a more stable and sound security structure for both sides. Even with adjustments to the approach, it is questionable whether a return to negotiations will produce an end to the con.ict. Barring some unforeseen radical shift or traumatic event that compels a compromise that can bridge what has so far been unbridgeable, there is little reason to think that future talks will succeed. The most likely result is an ex- tension o+ the status quo, with uncertain and unexpected consequences: the slow absorption o* Palestinians into the Israeli political orbit, inter- communal violence, new cooperative ventures and exchanges across an obliterated Green Line. Any or all o+ those could redesign the map and consolidate a one-state reality with no separation between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. For some Israelis and Palestinians, this may be a source o+ comfort; for others, it would be an existential hazard.
THE NEW STRUGGLE The struggle for an independent state has centered on Palestinian sovereignty as the antidote to decades o+ dispossession and occupation. But the prospects o+ securing “hard” sovereignty, based on nineteenth- century notions o+ the nation-state, with full and complete control
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over land, borders, and resources, are remote. There is nothing to sug- gest that Israel’s terms will change to accommodate such Palestinian expectations. Harsh as this conclusion may seem, the Palestinians’ choice may be between clinging to the self-defeating chimera o! hard sovereignty, thereby compromising any chances o" release from their predicament, and adopting softer versions, as in the case o" member states o" the European Union, that may o#er a way out, although at a cost to what they have so far set up as a national prerogative. Under soft sovereignty, border security arrangements would need to be tri- lateral in both the West Bank (Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian) and Gaza (Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian). The exact terms o" such tradeo#s may be navigable, but the precondition is an adjustment in political discourse that has yet to be embraced by the Palestinian po- litical elite. It is plain that the Palestinians need a new approach—one founded on a reconsidered strategic vision and recalibrated aspirations. The new way forward must consider a new constitutive assembly that will represent and involve more Palestinians, giving voice to those who have been ignored or marginalized, and prioritize Palestinian welfare and security. It must reorder relations between a new $% and a new $&' and resolve the Gaza–West Bank divide. It must develop new ideas o" individual and collective rights, encourage free internal de- bate and dialogue, and espouse a culture o" tolerance. It must recog- nize that salvation comes from within while reexamining relations with the United States, leveraging the Arab normalization processes to Palestinian advantage, and involving Egypt and Jordan in any new talks. It must rede(ne the Palestinian notion o" sovereignty, review Palestinian views o" security, and refrain from shirking responsibility or indulging in threats that are not credible. This moment is reminiscent o" the early days o" the $&'. The Pal- estinian scene is ripe for another jolt o" self-realization and empower- ment, the nature o" which is yet to be determined. But as long as the Palestinians are neither paci(ed nor fairly accommodated, their cause will continue to burn, and the prospects for genuine peace and stabil- ity will remain elusive.∂
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The Innovation Wars America’s Eroding Technological Advantage Christopher Darby and Sarah Sewall
ince the early days o* the Cold War, the United States has led the world in technology. Over the course o* the so-called SAmerican century, the country conquered space, spearheaded the Internet, and brought the world the iPhone. In recent years, however, China has undertaken an impressive e+ort to claim the mantle o* technological leadership, investing hundreds o, billions o* dollars in robotics, arti-cial intelligence, microelectronics, green en- ergy, and much more. Washington has tended to view Beijing’s mas- sive technology investments primarily in military terms, but defense capabilities are merely one aspect o* great-power competition to- day—little more than table stakes. Beijing is playing a more sophis- ticated game, using technological innovation as a way o* advancing its goals without having to resort to war. Chinese companies are selling 5G wireless infrastructure around the world, harnessing syn- thetic biology to bolster food supplies, and racing to build smaller and faster microchips, all in a bid to grow China’s power. In the face o* China’s technological drive, U.S. policymakers have called for greater government action to protect the United States’ lead. Much o* the conventional wisdom is sensible: boost R & D spending, ease visa restrictions and develop more domestic talent, and build new partnerships with industry at home and with friends and allies abroad. But the real problem for the United States is much deeper: a .awed understanding o* which technologies matter and o* how to foster their development. As national security assumes new
CHRISTOPHER DARBY is CEO of IQT, a not-for-profit investment firm working on behalf of the U.S. national security community. SARAH SEWALL is Executive Vice President for Policy at IQT. From 2014 to 2017, she was U.S. Undersecretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights.
142 !"#$%&' (!!(%#) The Innovation Wars dimensions and great-power competition moves into di+erent do- mains, the government’s thinking and policies have not kept pace. Nor is the private sector on its own likely to meet every technologi- cal need that bears on the country’s security. In such an environment, Washington needs to broaden its hori- zons and support a wider range o* technologies. It needs to back not only those technologies that have obvious military applications, such as hypersonic .ight, quantum computing, and arti-cial intelligence, but also those traditionally thought o* as civilian in nature, such as microelectronics and biotechnology. Washington also needs to help vital nonmilitary technologies make the transition to commercial success, stepping in with -nancing where the private sector will not.
AMERICA’S INNOVATION CHALLENGE In the early decades o* the Cold War, the United States spent billions o* dollars dramatically expanding its scienti-c infrastructure. The Atomic Energy Commission, formed in 1946, assumed responsibility for the wartime labs that had pioneered nuclear weapons, such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the headquarters o* the Manhattan Project, and went on to fund academic research centers, such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Department o/ De- fense, founded in 1947, was given its own massive research budget, as was the National Science Foundation, established in 1950. After the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, in 1957, Washington created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or '()(, to win the space race, as well as what would become the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was tasked with preventing a future technological surprise. By 1964, research and development accounted for 17 percent o* all discretionary federal spending. Partnering closely with academia and companies, the government funded a large variety o, basic research—that is, research without a speci-c end use in mind. The goal was to build a technological founda- tion, de-ned primarily as conventional and nuclear defense capabilities, to ensure the country’s security. The research proved astonishingly suc- cessful. Government investment spawned cutting-edge capabilities that undergirded the United States’ military superiority, from super- sonic jets to nuclear-powered submarines to guided missiles. The pri- vate sector, for its part, got to capitalize on the underlying intellectual property, turning capabilities into products and products into compa-
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nies. G0)-enabled technologies, airbags, lithium batteries, touchscreens, voice recognition—all got their start thanks to government investment. Yet over time, the government lost its lead in innovation. In 1964, the U.S. government was spending 1.86 percent o* &10 on R & D, but by 1994, that share had fallen to 0.83 percent. During that same period, U.S. corporate R & D investment as a percentage o* &10 nearly doubled. The numbers tell only hal* the story. Whereas much o* Over time, the U.S. the government’s R & D investment government lost its lead was aimed at -nding new, game- in innovation. changing discoveries, corporate R & D was mostly devoted to incremental innovation. The formula for growing revenue, the private sector realized, was to expand on existing prod- ucts, adding functionality or making something faster, smaller, or more energy e2cient. Companies focused on nearer-term technolo- gies with commercial promise, rather than broad areas o* inquiry that might take decades to bear fruit. Increasingly, the most innovative R & D was taking place not in the labs o, large corporations but at nimbler, privately funded startups, where venture capital investors were willing to tolerate more risk. Modern venture capital -rms—partnerships that invest in early-stage companies—-rst arose in the 1970s, leading to early successes such as Apple and Microsoft, but it wasn’t until the dot-com bubble o* the 1990s that this style o* investment really took o+. I* the -rst phase o* R & D outsourcing was from government labs to corporate America, this was the second phase: away from big businesses and toward small startups. Large companies began to spend less on internal R & D and more on what they called “corporate development,” or acquiring smaller, venture-backed companies with promising technologies. The rise o* venture capitalism created a great deal o* wealth, but it didn’t necessarily further U.S. interests. Venture capital -rms were judged by their ability to generate outsize returns within a ten-year win- dow. That made them less interested in things such as microelectronics, a capital-intensive sector where pro-tability arrives in decades more so than years, and more interested in software companies, which need less capital to get going. The problem is that the companies receiving the most venture capital funding have been less likely to pursue national security priorities. When the American venture capital -rm Accel hit
144 !"#$%&' (!!(%#) The Innovation Wars the jackpot by investing early in Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish video game company behind the mobile app Angry Birds, it may have been a triumph for the -rm, but in no way did it further U.S. interests. Meanwhile, government funding o* research continued its decline relative both to &10 and to R & D spending in the private sector. The Department o/ Defense retained the single biggest pot o/ federal research funding, but there was less money overall, and it became more dispersed across various agencies and departments, each pursu- ing its own priorities in the absence o* a national strategy. As the best researchers were lured to the private sector, the government’s in- house scienti-c expertise atrophied. Once close relationships be- tween private companies and Washington also su+ered, as the federal government was no longer a major customer for many o* the most innovative -rms. U.S. agencies were rarely the -rst to buy advanced technology, and smaller startups generally lacked the lobbyists and lawyers needed to sell it to them anyway. Globalization also drove a wedge between corporations and the government. The American market came to look less dominant in an international context, with the huge Chinese consumer market exert- ing a particularly powerful pull. Corporations now had to think o* how their actions might look to customers outside the United States. Apple, for example, famously refused to unlock iPhones for the !3%, a decision that probably enhanced its brand internationally. Further complicating matters, innovation itsel* was upending the tra- ditional understanding o* national security technology. More and more, technology was becoming “dual use,” meaning that both the civilian and the military sectors relied on it. That created new vulnerabilities, such as concerns about the security o* microelectronic supply chains and tele- communications networks. Yet even though civilian technologies were increasingly relevant for national security, the U.S. government wasn’t responsible for them. The private sector was, and it was innovating at a rapid clip with which the government could barely keep pace. Taken to- gether, all these trends have led to a concerning state o* a+airs: the inter- ests o* the private sector and the government are further apart than ever.
THE CHINESE JUGGERNAUT The changes in American innovation would matter less i* the world had remained unipolar. Instead, they occurred alongside the rise o* a geopolitical rival. Over the past two decades, China has evolved from
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a country that largely steals and imitates technology to one that now also improves and even pioneers it. This is no accident; it is the result o* the state’s deliberate, long-term focus. China has invested mas- sively in R & D, with its share o* global technology spending grow- ing from under -ve percent in 2000 to over 23 percent in 2020. I* current trends continue, China is expected to overtake the United States in such spending by 2025. Central to China’s drive has been Washington has monitored a strategy o* “military-civil fusion,” a China’s technological coordinated e+ort to ensure cooper- ation between the private sector and progress through a the defense industry. At the na- military lens. tional, provincial, and local levels, the state backs the e+orts o* military organizations, state-owned enterprises, and private companies and entrepreneurs. Support might come in the form o* research grants, shared data, government-backed loans, or training programs. It might even be as simple as the provision o* land or o2ce space; the government is creating whole new cities dedicated solely to innovation. China’s investment in 5G technology shows how the process works in practice. Equipment for 5G makes up the backbone o* a country’s cellular network infrastructure, and the Chinese company Huawei has emerged as a world leader in engineering and selling it—o+ering high-quality products at a lower price than its Finnish and South Korean competitors. The company has been buoyed by massive state support—by The Wall Street Journal’s count, some $75 billion in tax breaks, grants, loans, and discounts on land. Huawei has also bene-ted from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which pro- vides generous loans to countries and Chinese companies to -nance infrastructure construction. Massive state investments in arti-cial intelligence have also paid o+. Chinese researchers now publish more scienti-c papers in that -eld than American ones do. Part o* this success is the result o/ fund- ing, but something else plays a big role: access to enormous amounts o* data. Beijing has fueled the rise o* powerhouse companies that sweep up endless information about their users. These include Alibaba, an e-commerce giant; Tencent, which developed the all-purpose WeChat app; Baidu, which began as a search engine but now o+ers a
146 !"#$%&' (!!(%#) The Innovation Wars range o* online products; 14%, which dominates the consumer drone market; and SenseTime, which provides facial recognition technol- ogy for China’s video surveillance network and is said to be the world’s most valuable arti-cial intelligence company. As a matter o, law, these companies are required to cooperate with the state for intelligence purposes, a broad mandate that is almost certainly used to force com- panies to share data for many other reasons. That information increasingly involves people living outside China. Chinese companies have woven a global web o* data-gathering apps that collect foreigners’ private information about their -nances, their search history, their location, and more. Those who make a mobile pay- ment through a Chinese app, for example, could have their personal data routed through Shanghai and added to China’s growing trove o* knowledge about foreign nationals. Such information no doubt makes it easier for the Chinese government to track, say, an indebted Western bureaucrat who could be convinced to spy for Beijing or a Tibetan ac- tivist who has taken refuge abroad. China’s hunger for data extends to some o* the most personal in- formation imaginable: our own 1'(. Since the 5"6%1-19 pandemic began, 3&%—a Chinese genome-sequencing company that began as a government-funded research group—has broken ground on some 50 new laboratories abroad designed to help governments test for the virus. China has legitimate reasons to build these labs, but it also has an ugly record o/ forcibly collecting 1'( data from Tibetans and Uighurs as part o* its e+orts to monitor these minorities. Given that 3&% runs China’s national library o* genomics data, it is conceivable that through 3&% testing, foreigners’ biological data might end up in that repository. Indeed, China has shown great interest in biotechnology, even i* it has yet to catch up to the United States. Combined with massive com- puting power and arti-cial intelligence, innovations in biotechnology could help solve some o, humanity’s most vexing challenges, from disease and famine to energy production and climate change. Re- searchers have mastered the gene-editing tool 5#%)0#, allowing them to grow wheat that resists disease, and have managed to encode video in the 1'( o, bacteria, raising the possibility o* a new, cost-e+ective method o* data storage. Specialists in synthetic biology have invented a new way o* producing nylon—with genetically engineered microor- ganisms instead o* petrochemicals. The economic implications o* the coming biotechnology revolution are staggering: the McKinsey Global
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Institute has estimated the value o, biotechnology’s many potential applications at up to $4 trillion over the next ten to 20 years. Like all powerful technologies, however, biotechnology has a dark side. It is not inconceivable, for example, that some malicious actor could create a biological weapon that targeted a speci-c ethnic group. On controversial questions—such as how much manipulation o* the human genome is acceptable—countries will accept di+erent degrees o* risk in the name o* progress and take di+erent ethical positions. The country that leads biotechnology’s development will be the one that most profoundly shapes the norms and standards around its use. And there is reason to worry i* that country is China. In 2018, the Chinese scientist He Jiankui genetically engineered the 1'( o* twin babies, prompting an international uproar. Beijing portrayed him as a rogue researcher and punished him. Yet the Chinese government’s disdain for human rights, coupled with its quest for technological supremacy, sug- gests that it could embrace a lax, even dangerous approach to bioethics.
THINKING BIGGER Washington has monitored China’s technological progress through a military lens, worrying about how it contributes to Chinese defense capabilities. But the challenge is much broader. China’s push for tech- nological supremacy is not simply aimed at gaining a battle-eld ad- vantage; Beijing is changing the battle-eld itself. Although commercial technologies such as 5G, arti-cial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology will undoubtedly have military applications, China envisions a world o* great-power competition in which no shots need to be -red. Technological supremacy promises the ability to dominate the civilian infrastructure on which others depend, providing enor- mous in.uence. That is a major motivation behind Beijing’s support for high-tech civilian infrastructure exports. The countries buying Chinese systems may think they are merely receiving electric grids, health-care technology, or online payment systems, but in reality, they may also be placing critical national infrastructure and citizens’ data in Beijing’s hands. Such exports are China’s Trojan horse. Despite the changing nature o* geopolitical competition, the United States still tends to equate security with traditional defense capabilities. Consider microelectronics. They are critical components not only for a range o* commercial products but also for virtually every major defense system, from aircraft to warships. Because they
148 !"#$%&' (!!(%#) The Innovation Wars will power advances in arti-cial intelligence, they will also shape the United States’ future economic competitiveness. Yet investment in microelectronics has fallen through the cracks. Neither the private sector nor the government is adequately funding innovation—the former due to the large capital requirements and long time horizons involved and the latter because it has focused more on securing cur- rent supplies than on innovating. Although China has had a hard time catching up to the United States in this area, it is only a matter o* time before it moves up the microelectronics value chain. Another casualty o* the United States’ overly narrow conception o* security and innovation is 5G technology. By dominating this market, China has built a global telecommunications network that can serve geopolitical purposes. One fear is that Beijing could help itsel* to data running on 5G networks. Another is the possibility that China might sabotage or disrupt adversaries’ communications net- works in a crisis. Most U.S. policymakers failed to predict the threat posed by Chinese 5G infrastructure. It wasn’t until 2019 that Wash- ington sounded the alarm about Huawei, but by then, there was little it could do. U.S. companies had never o+ered an end-to-end wireless network, instead focusing on manufacturing individual components, such as handsets and routers. Nor had any developed its own radio access network, a system for sending signals across network devices that is needed to build an end-to-end 5G system like that o+ered by Huawei and a few other companies. As a result, the United States found itsel* in an absurd situation: threatening to end intelligence cooperation i* close allies adopted Huawei’s 5G technology without having an attractive alternative to o+er. Digital infrastructure may be today’s battle, but biotechnology will likely be the next. Unfortunately, it, too, is not considered a priority within the U.S. government. The Department o/ Defense has under- standably shown little interest in it. Part o* the explanation for that lies in the fact that the United States, like many other countries, has signed a treaty renouncing biological weapons. Still, biotechnology has other implications for the Pentagon, from changing manufacturing to improv- ing the health o* service personnel. More important, any comprehensive assessment o* the national interest must recognize biotechnology’s im- plications for ethics, the economy, health, and planetary survival. Because so many o* the gaps in U.S. innovation can be traced back to a narrow view o* the national interest and which technologies are
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needed to support it, the Biden administration’s -rst step should be to expand that understanding. O2cials need to appreciate both the threats and the opportunities o* the latest technologies: the havoc that could be wreaked by a paralyzed 5G network or unscrupulous genetic engineering, as well as the bene-ts that could come from sustainable energy sources and better and more e2cient health care. The Biden administration’s second step should be to create a process for aligning government investments with national priorities. Today, federal funding is skewed toward military capabilities. This re.ects a political reality: the Pentagon is the rare part o* the government that reliably receives bipartisan budgetary support. Fighter jets and missile defense, for example, are well funded, whereas pandemic preparedness and clean energy get short shrift. But setting the right national techno- logical priorities raises questions that can be answered only by making judgments about the full range o* national needs. What are the most important problems that technology can help solve? Which technolo- gies have the power to solve only one problem, and which might solve multiple problems? Getting the answers to such questions right requires taking a truly national perspective. The current method doesn’t do so. A properly run process would begin with what national security professionals call a “net assessment”—in this case, an analysis o* the state o* global technological progress and market trends to give poli- cymakers the information necessary to work from a shared baseline. To be actionable, the process would establish a handful o* near- and long-term priorities. A compelling candidate for long-term invest- ment, for instance, might be microelectronics, which are foundations for both military and civilian innovation but have di2culty attracting private investment dollars. Another long-term priority might be bio- technology, given its importance for the economy and the future o* humanity. As for short-term priorities, the U.S. government might consider launching an international e+ort to combat disinformation operations or to promote 5G innovation. Whatever the speci-c pri- orities chosen, the important thing is that they be deliberate and clear, guiding the United States’ decisions and signaling its aspirations.
A MARKET MINDSET Supporting those priorities is another matter altogether. The current approach—with the government funding only limited research and the private sector taking care o* commercializing the results—isn’t work-
150 !"#$%&' (!!(%#) The Innovation Wars ing. Too much government-funded research remains locked in the lab, unable to make the leap to commercial viability. Worse, when it man- ages to leave U.S. government labs, it often ends up in foreign hands, depriving the United States o* taxpayer--nanced intellectual property. The U.S. government will need to take a more active role in help- ing research make it to the market. Many universities have created o2ces that focus on commercializing academic research, but most federal research institutions have not. That must change. In the same spirit, the U.S. government should develop so-called sandboxes— public-private research facilities where industry, the academy, and the government can work together. In 2014, Congress did just that when it established Manufacturing USA, a network o/ facilities that conduct research into advanced manufacturing technologies. A simi- lar initiative for microelectronics has been proposed, and there is no reason not to create additional sandboxes in other areas, too. The U.S. government could also help with commercialization by building national data sets for research purposes, along with improved privacy protections to reassure the people whose information ends up in them. Such data sets would be particularly useful in accelerating progress in the -eld o* arti-cial intelligence, which feeds o+ massive quantities o* data—something that only the government and a handful o, big technology companies currently possess. Success in synthetic biology, along with wider medical research, will also depend on data. Thus, the U.S. government should increase the quantity and diversity o* the data in the National Institutes o/ Health’s genome library and curate and label that information so that it can be used more easily. All this help with commercialization will be for naught, however, i* the startups with the most promising technologies for national security cannot attract enough capital. Some o* them run into di2culties at the early and late stages o* growth: in the beginning, they have a hard time courting investors willing to make high-risk bets, and later on, when they are ready to expand, they -nd it di2cult to attract investors will- ing to write large checks. To -ll the gaps at both stages, the U.S. government needs its own investment vehicles. We work at the parent company o/ In-Q-Tel, which o+ers a prom- ising model for early-stage investment. Created in 1999 by the 5%(, In-Q-Tel is an independent, not-for-pro-t -rm that invests in tech- nology startups that serve the national interest. (One early recipient o/ In-Q-Tel’s investment was Keyhole, which became the platform for
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Google Earth.) Now also funded by the Department o/ Homeland Security, the Department o/ Defense, and other U.S. agencies, In-Q-Tel identi-es and adapts innovative technologies for its government cus- tomers. Compared with a federal agency, a private, not-for-pro-t -rm can more easily attract the investment and technology talent required to make informed investments. There is every reason to take this model and apply it to broader priorities. Even just $100 million to $500 million o* early-stage funding per year—a drop in the bucket o* the fed- Too much government- eral budget—could help -ll the gap be- funded research remains tween what the private sector is providing locked in the lab. and what the nation needs. For the later stage, policymakers could draw inspiration from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the federal agency responsible for investing in development projects abroad, which in 2018 was -rst authorized to make equity investments. A late-stage investment fund could be structured as an arm o* that agency or as a fully independent, not-for-pro-t private entity funded by the gov- ernment. Either way, it would provide badly needed capital to com- panies ready to scale up their operations. Compared with early-stage government support, late-stage government support would have to be greater, in the range o* $1 billion to $5 billion annually. To expand the impact o* this government investment, both the early- and the late-stage funds should encourage “sidecar” investments, which would allow pro-t-seeking -rms and individuals to join the govern- ment in making, and potentially pro-ting from, technology bets. Government-sponsored investment funds like these would not only -ll critical gaps in private-sector investment; they would also allow tax- payers to share in the success o* research their money has funded. Cur- rently, most government funding for technology comes in the form o* grants, such as the Small Business Innovation Research grants adminis- tered by the Small Business Administration; this is true even o* some programs that are billed as investment funds. This means that taxpayers foot the bill for failures but cannot share in the success i* a company makes it big. As the economist Mariana Mazzucato has pointed out in these pages, “governments have socialized risks but privatized rewards.” Not-for-pro-t investment vehicles working on behal* o* the gov- ernment would have another bene-t: they would allow the United
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States to play o+ense when it comes to technological competition. For too long, it has played defense. For example, it has banned the export o* sensitive technology and restricted foreign investment that might pose a national security risk—even though these actions can harm U.S. businesses and do nothing to promote innovation. Supporting commercialization with government-sponsored equity investment will not be cheap, but some o* the upfront costs would likely be re- gained and could be reinvested. There are also nonmonetary returns: investing in national priorities, including infrastructure that could be exported to U.S. allies, would enhance the United States’ soft power.
INNOVATION EVER AFTER President Joe Biden has pledged to “build back better” and restore the United States’ global leadership. On the campaign trial, he laid out promising proposals to promote American innovation. He called for dramatically boosting federal R & D spending, including some $300 billion to be focused on breakthrough technologies to enhance U.S. competitiveness. That is a good start, but he could make this drive far more e+ective i, he -rst created a rigorous process for identifying top technological priorities. Biden said he supports “a scaled-up ver- sion” o* the Small Business Innovation Research grants and has backed “infrastructure for educational institutions and partners to expand research.” Even greater opportunity lies in -lling the gaps in private-sector investment and undertaking a long-overdue expansion o* government support for commercialization. On innovation, i* the United States opts for just more o* the same, its economy, its security, and its citizens’ well-being will all su+er. The United States will thus further the end o* its global leadership and the unfettered rise o* China. Biden has the right instincts. Yet in order to sustain its technological dominance, the country will have to fundamen- tally reenvision the why and how o* innovation. Biden will no doubt be consumed with addressing domestic challenges, but he has spent much o, his career promoting the United States’ global leadership. By revamp- ing American technological innovation, he could do both.∂
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Opening Up the Order A More Inclusive International System Anne-Marie Slaughter and Gordon LaForge
hen the world looks back on the response to the .&/)0-19 pandemic, one lesson it will draw is the value o" compe- Wtent national governments—the kind that imposed social- distancing restrictions, delivered clear public health messaging, and implemented testing and contact tracing. It will also, however, recall the importance o" the .(&s, philanthropists, epidemiologists, doc- tors, investors, civic leaders, mayors, and governors who stepped in when national leaders failed. Early in the pandemic, as the U.S. and Chinese governments cast research into the new coronavirus as a jingoistic imperative, the world’s scientists were sharing viral genome sequences and launching hun- dreds o" clinical trials—what The New York Times called a “global col- laboration unlike any in history.” The vaccine race involved transnational networks o" researchers, foundations, and businesses, all motivated by di!erent incentives yet working together for a common cause. Still, with the rise o" China, the fraying o" the postwar liberal inter- national order, and the drawbridge-up mentality accelerated by the pandemic, realpolitik is back in vogue, leading some to propose recen- tering international relations on a small group o" powerful states. Al- though it is easy to caricature proposals for a world run by a handful o" great powers as the national security establishment pining for a long- gone world o" cozy backroom dealing, the idea is not entirely unrea- sonable. Network science has demonstrated the essential value o$ both strong and weak ties: small groups to get things done and large ones to maximize the 4ow o" information, innovation, and participation.
ANNE!MARIE SLAUGHTER is CEO of New America and former Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department.
GORDON LAFORGE is a Senior Researcher at Princeton University and a lecturer at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management.
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Even i! states could create a modern-day version o! the nineteenth- century Concert o" Europe, however, it would not be enough to tackle the hydra-headed problems o! the twenty-#rst century. Threats such as climate change and pandemics transcend national jurisdictions. In the absence o! a true global government, the best bet for guaranteeing the world’s security and prosperity is not to limit the liberal order to democracies but to expand it deeper into liberal societies. There, civic, educational, corporate, and scienti#c actors can work with one an- other—and with governments—in ways that enhance transparency, accountability, and problem-solving capacity. Leaders do not face a binary choice between the state and society. Global problem solving is a both/and enterprise. The task is thus to #gure out how best to integrate those two worlds. One promising ap- proach would be to identify the many actors working on a speci#c problem (say, infectious disease) and then connect the most e$ective participants and help them accomplish clear goals. “We do not need new bureaucracies,” %& Secretary-General António Guterres has written. “But we do need a networked multilateralism that links global and regional institutions. We also need an inclusive multilater- alism that engages businesses, cities, universities and movements.” It is a dark time for global politics. States are adapting to a world o! multiple power centers and complex issues that require coordina- tion at every level o! society. Four years o! erratic, personality-driven leadership in the United States under President Donald Trump, moreover, have left the liberal order in tatters. To repair it, leaders need to tap the talent and resources outside the state. Humanity can- not a$ord to go back to a world in which only states matter.
THE CASE FOR EXPANSION States create international orders to, well, establish order—that is, to #ght chaos, solve problems, and govern. The liberal international order is a subset o! this idea, a set o! institutions, laws, rules, procedures, and practices that shaped international cooperation after World War II. Its purpose was to facilitate collective action by regularizing decision- making processes, developing shared norms, and increasing the repu- tational costs o! reneging on commitments. The institutions that form part o! that order—the %& system, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, &'(), and the precursor to the *%, the European Eco- nomic Community—served that purpose reasonably well for decades.
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But the world cannot successfully address twenty-#rst-century threats and challenges, such as climate change, pandemic disease, cy- bercon4ict, and inequality, without mobilizing a new set o" actors. Ex- isting institutions, although valuable, were built for a world o" concentrated power, in which a handful o" states called the shots. To- day, power is much more di!use, with nonstate actors strong enough to both create international problems and help solve them. Accordingly, the If humanity is to survive current order needs to expand not by and thrive, it cannot go di!erentiating between various kinds o" states but by making room for new back to a world in which categories o" nonstate actors. only states matter. Take the response to the pandemic. Unilateral action by national govern- ments was often decisive in curbing the disease. Implementing social restrictions, closing borders, and providing emergency economic relie" saved lives. Despite all the criticism they have received, international organizations were also essential. The World Health Organization was the #rst body to of- #cially report the outbreak o" a deadly novel coronavirus; it issued technical guidance on how to detect, test for, and manage .&/)0-19; and it shipped tests and millions o" pieces o" protective gear to more than 100 countries. Also critical, however, were many other actors outside the state. As many governments promulgated false or politically biased infor- mation about the new coronavirus and its spread, universities and independent public health experts provided reliable data and action- able models. Philanthropies injected massive amounts o" money into the #ght; by the end o" 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had donated $1.75 billion to the global .&/)0-19 response. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a global vaccine-development partnership o" public, private, and civil society organizations, raised $1.3 billion for .&/)0-19 vaccine candidates, two o" which, the Mod- erna vaccine and the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, are already being administered to the public. O5cials below the national level also played a vital role. In the United States, where the federal government’s response was indeci- sive and shambolic, governors convened regional task forces and to- gether procured supplies o" ventilators and protective equipment.
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Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and former New York City mayor, provided funding and organizational and technical assistance to create a contact-tracing army in the city. Apple and Google partnered to develop tools that could notify smartphone us- ers i! they came into contact with people infected by the virus. Seri- ous planning on when and how to reopen the U.S. economy was "rst done not in the White House but by governors and a #$% task force convened by the nonpro"t the Business Roundtable. The "rst large- scale antibody study to determine the prevalence o! the virus in the United States was conducted not by the National Institutes o! Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but by California universities, an anti-doping research group, and 10,000 employees and players o& Major League Baseball. The response to the #%'()-19 pandemic is only one example o* how global actors, not states alone, drive solutions to complex problems. Although it would have been preferable had e+cient central govern- ments organized a coherent response to the pandemic, the distributed response on the part o! others demonstrated just how much problem- solving talent exists outside the state. Moreover, as some countries become more nationalist, parochial, and captured by special interests, opening up the international order to global actors is the best way to reform the order in the absence o! a major state-led initiative.
GROWING NETWORKS The activity o! global actors working on a given problem, such as #%'()-19, is di+cult to map, much less manage. But it is also here to stay. As the scholar Jessica Mathews "rst noted in Foreign A!airs in 1997, powers once reserved for national governments have shifted substantially and inexorably to businesses, international organiza- tions, and nongovernmental organizations. Later that same year, one o! us (Anne-Marie Slaughter) noted, also in these pages, the emerging “disaggregation o! the state” into its component executive, legislative, judicial, and subnational parts. Regulators, judges, may- ors, and governors were already working together in “government networks” that provided a parallel infrastructure to formal interna- tional institutions. This phenomenon has only grown more pro- nounced in the intervening two decades. Still, nation-states will not disappear, nor even diminish in impor- tance. Many governments possess political legitimacy that global ac-
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tors often lack. Populist leaders have also demonstrated both the capacity to reassert traditional conceptions o* sovereignty and the appeal o* that strategy to many o* their citizens. Trump single-handedly dismantled many o* the signature foreign policy achievements o* the Obama administration: he withdrew from the Paris climate agree- ment, torpedoed the Iran nuclear deal, and reversed the opening to Cuba. Autocrats in China, the Philippines, Russia, and Turkey have consolidated power and control, leading observers to bemoan a re- turn to the era o* the strongman. Where democracy is retrenching, however, it is often mayors, governors, businesspeople, and civic leaders who o+er the strongest resistance. These actors prize and bene,t from an open, democratic society. The geography o* global economic power, moreover, is also shifting in favor o* nonstate actors. Five giant technology companies—Ama- zon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—have a combined mar- ket capitalization o* roughly $7 trillion, greater than the &-. o* every country except China and the United States. Even i* governments reined in or broke up those ,ve, scores o* other companies would have more economic resources than many states. A similar shift is evident when it comes to security. As 9/11 made clear, some o* the most potent national security threats emanate from organizations una/liated with any state. Even public service delivery is no longer the sole remit o* governments. Since 2000, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, has helped im- munize more than 822 million children in the developing world. This transformation is partly the product o* global connectivity. Never before has it been so easy to communicate, organize, and con- duct business across national borders. In 1995, 16 million people used the Internet; in 2020, 4.8 billion did. Nearly 1.8 billion people log on to Facebook every day, a population larger than that o* any single country. World trade as a percentage o* global &-. is double what it was in 1975. According to one estimate, the number o* treaties depos- ited with the 0' grew from fewer than 4,500 in 1959 to more than 45,000 50 years later. In 1909, there were 37 international organiza- tions; in 2009, there were nearly 2,000.
MAPPING THE NETWORKED WORLD The world o* global networks is a messy and contested space. Inter- national networks committed to ending climate change, promoting human rights, and ,ghting corruption exist alongside those bent on
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perpetrating terrorist attacks or laundering money. But .&/)0-19 has shown that successfully responding to contemporary challenges requires mobilizing global actors. One way to marshal these forces is to expand the liberal order down. The goal should be a horizontal and open system that har- nesses the power and e5cacy o$ both governments and global actors. The pil- lars o" this order might be called “im- An expanded liberal order pact hubs”: issue-speci#c organizations can harness and shape that sit at the center o" a set o" impor- tant actors working on a particular networks from every sector problem—coordinating their collective of society. work toward common, clearly measur- able goals and outcomes. A hub could be an existing international or regional organization, a coalition o" nongovernmental organizations, or a new secretariat within the 7+ system speci#cally created for the purpose. Gavi is the clearest example o" this hub-based approach. The Gates Foundation helped found Gavi in 2000 as an alliance o" gov- ernments, international organizations, businesses, and nongovern- mental organizations. Its small secretariat is charged with a wide array o" vaccine-related functions, from research to distribution, all under the eye o" a 28-person board o" public, private, and civic rep- resentatives. The founders o" Gavi designed it as a new type o" inter- national organization, one that sought to be representative, nimble, and e!ective all at the same time. The result is far from perfect, but it has enormous advantages. Purely governmental organizations are often paralyzed by politics, and purely private or civic networks are invariably interested in pursuing their own interests. In most areas o" global problem solving, however, the challenge is not too few actors but too many. The goal is to identify the most e!ec- tive and legitimate organizations in a particular area and link them to a hub that has both the funds and the authority to make a di!erence. Too much connection can be as bad as too little: the bigger the meeting, the harder it is to reach consensus and take action. Moreover, formal inclu- sion often means informal exclusion: when nothing gets done in the meeting, lots o" action takes place among smaller groups in the lobby. To avoid that outcome, would-be architects o" a new global order should begin by mapping the networked world. A good place to
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start would be to look at the actors working on each o* the +'’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (),&s)—targets the world has agreed must be met by 2030 to achieve global peace and prosperity. The relevant actors include +' special agencies and a-liates; re- gional groups such as the European Union and the Organization o* American States; corporations such as Coca-Cola, Siemens, and Tata; large philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Aga Khan Foundation; and research centers, private institutes, think tanks, and civic and faith groups. Mapping these actors and the connections between them would reveal the most important centers o* activity and provide a starting point for .guring out where to locate or support a hub.
HUBS AND SPOKES With networks mapped, leaders would then need to o/er incentives to spur the designation or creation o* the hubs. One way to do this would be to use challenges issued by international organizations, phi- lanthropies, or groups o* governments. The MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change challenge, for instance, o/ers a $100 million grant to fund a single proposal that “promises real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem o* our time.” A properly designed challenge could encourage the formation o* powerful hubs by triggering a natural growth process that network science calls “preferential attachment.” In all sorts o* networks— biological, social, economic, political—the nodes that already have the most connections attract the greatest number o* new connec- tions. Within international relations, the +' is a useful example o* this phenomenon. Initiatives and institutions often grow out o* the +' because nearly all countries are already a part o* its structure and because it has a record o* credibility and expertise. The +' should, however, pursue a more deliberate strategy to en- sure that its many programs, commissions, and sub-organizations be- come problem-solving hubs. The secretary-general could, for example, connect a global network o* mayors and governors to the +' Refugee Agency to help with refugee resettlement. Or, to combat climate change, the +' Environment Program could work with the Global Covenant o0 Mayors for Climate and Energy, a partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies and the European Union that has brought together more than 7,000 local executives.
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For those issues on which actors view the !" as too big, bureau- cratic, or divided for e#ective action, regional organizations, infor- mal groups, or existing public-private coalitions could serve a similar purpose. The point, however, is not simply to create partnerships and coalitions—the world is awash in them already. It is to create a stronger and more participatory order. Over time, the messy spa- ghetti bowl o$ global networks could evolve from a distributed struc- ture with no hubs, or countless small hubs, into a more rationalized structure, one that has fewer but bigger hubs. An e#ective global order also needs to be judged by its practical results, with clear metrics that incentivize competition and invest- ment. Here, impact hubs o#er an enormous opportunity to compare progress across di#erent organizations, alliances, coalitions, and net- works. Some organizations are already developing standardized met- rics o$ progress. Impact investing—whereby investors seek not just %nancial returns but also environmental, social, and governance re- turns—is an enormous and fast-growing %eld. Just as traditional investors look to economic indicators such as pro%t margins, impact investors rely on concrete indicators to guide their choices, such as carbon emissions or school enrollment. Leaders can and should apply similar metrics to the work o$ inter- national institutions. Imagine a global impact metrics organization, comparable to the International Organization for Standardization, that rated global impact hubs in terms o$ the progress they were mak- ing toward achieving a particular &'(. However they were organized, reliable metrics would create a uniform way o$ assessing the actual contributions o$ di#erent groups and hubs. In challenge competitions, the networks that were measurably more e#ective would prevail, which would then put them in a position to attract more people, funds, and connections, creating a virtuous circle. The broader result would be a )exible, ever-changing system, one that would be more responsive and e#ective than the current order. It could meet the planet’s challenges while allowing for important varia- tion at the local and national levels.
A NEW LIBERAL ORDER As children pore over maps and globes, they learn to see a world neatly divided into geographic containers, brightly colored shapes separated by stark black lines. Later, they come to understand that al-
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though those borders are real, guarded by fences, walls, and o*cials, they are only one way o+ visualizing the international system. Satellite pictures o+ the world at night show clusters and ribbons o, light, de- picting the riotous interconnectedness o, humanity in some places and the distant isolation o+ others. Both o+ these images signify something relevant and important. The former portrays the state-based international order—visible, or- ganized, demarcated. The latter illustrates the tangled webs o, busi- nesses, civil society organizations, foundations, universities, and other actors—an evolving, complex system that, although harder to concep- tualize, is no less important to world a-airs. The two exist side by side or, more precisely, on top o+ each other. The great advantage o+ the state-based order is that it has the legitimacy o. formal pedigree and sovereign representation, even i+ it is often paralyzed and ine-ective at solving important problems. The global order, by contrast, has the potential to be far more participatory, nimble, innovative, and e-ec- tive. But it can also be shadowy and unaccountable. I, leaders bring together parts o, both systems in a more coherent vision o+ a liberal order, the United States and its allies could build the capacity necessary to meet today’s global challenges. An expanded liberal order could harness networks o+ people, organizations, and resources from every sector o+ society. The existing institutions o+ the liberal, state-based order could become impact hubs. The result would be a messy, redundant, and ever-changing system that would never be centrally controlled. But it would be aligned in the service o+ peace and prosperity.∂
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Democracy on the Defense Turning Back the Authoritarian Tide Yascha Mounk
fter the Cold War ended, it looked like democracy was on the march. But that con#dent optimism was misplaced. With the Abene#t o$ hindsight, it is clear that it was naive to expect de- mocracy to spread to all corners o" the world. The authoritarian turn o" recent years re4ects the 4aws and failings o" democratic systems. Most analyses o" the precarious state o" contemporary democracy begin with a similar depiction. They are not altogether incorrect. But they omit an important part o" the picture. The story o" the last two decades is not just one o" democratic weakness; it is also one o" authoritarian strength. Since the 1990s, autocratic regimes have advanced in terms o" eco- nomic performance and military might. Dictators have learned to use digital tools to oppress opposition movements in sophisticated ways. They have beaten back democratic campaigns that once looked prom- ising, taken hold o" countries that seemed to be on the way to becom- ing more democratic, and vastly increased their international in4uence. What the world has seen is less a democratic retreat than an authori- tarian resurgence. Autocrats, long focused on bare survival, are now on the o!ensive. The coming decades will feature a long and drawn- out contest between democracy and dictatorship. The outcome o" that contest is not foreordained. To prevail, the United States and its democratic allies need to understand the stakes o" this historic moment and work together to protect global democ- racy in more imaginative and courageous ways than they have in the past. They will also need to solve a dilemma created by the tension between two core objectives: stemming backsliding within their own ranks, on the one hand, and maintaining a uni#ed front against
YASCHA MOUNK is an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Founder of Persuasion.
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authoritarian regimes such as those in China and Russia, on the other. Simply put, it will be hard to oppose antidemocratic govern- ments in countries whose support is crucial to confronting full- throated, increasingly assertive authoritarians. Dealing with that dilemma will require a skillful approach that preserves the possibil- ity o* cooperation with countries that have questionable democratic bona +des while reserving close partnerships for genuinely demo- cratic allies. It will also mean abandoning “democracy promotion” in favor o* “democracy protection”—seeking, for the most part, to se- cure, rather than expand, the democratic world.
AUTHORITARIANS ON THE MARCH Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House cast unprecedented doubt on which side the United States would take in the con,ict be- tween democracy and dictatorship. Even before 2016, Washington regularly supported autocratic governments when the prospects o* +nding democratic allies in a strategically important country looked slim. But the past four years marked the +rst time that a U.S. presi- dent seemed to openly favor dictatorships over democracies and boosted autocratic forces within democratic allies. Trump called the desirability o* '(-" into question. He repeatedly refused to condemn autocratic attempts to interfere in democratic elections, murder dissidents on foreign soil, or put bounties on the heads o* U.S. soldiers. He expressed admiration for dictators includ- ing Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un even though they and their countries shared little in the way o* ideology or geostrategic importance. Under Trump, the United States also promoted extremist forces within other democratic countries. In an interview with the far-right news outlet Breitbart, Richard Grenell, then the U.S. ambassador to Germany, insinuated that he sought to “empower” populist move- ments across Europe. Meanwhile, Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassa- dor to the Netherlands, held a private gathering for members o* an extremist Dutch political party and its donors at the U.S. embassy. Back home, Trump himsel* welcomed a series o* authoritarian popu- lists to the White House, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Put diplomatically, during Trump’s tenure in o.ce, the United States ceased to be the so-called leader o* the free world. Put more
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The autocrats: Xi and Putin in Shanghai, May 2014 bluntly, large parts o" the Trump administration e!ectively de- fected to the autocratic camp. On the surface, the moderate leaders o" powerful democracies in Europe and elsewhere have little in common with Trump. Little love was lost between him and Emmanuel Macron, the president o3 France, or Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. But despite those Euro- pean leaders’ putative support for democratic values and their elegant LAN HONGGUANG speeches in support o$ human rights, their actual deeds have repeat- edly aided and abetted the forces o" autocracy around the world. When Merkel was struggling to deal with a large in4ow o" refugees from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa in 2016, for instance, / XINHUA she spearheaded a deal between the (7 and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that cut o! one o" the main routes for migrants /
EYEVINE headed to mainland Europe. Even as Erdogan sought to concentrate power in his own hands and was busy jailing more than 100 journal-
/ ists, the lucrative agreement helped him cement his political standing. REDUX Germany and several other European states also pressed ahead with Nord Stream 2, a Russian-built gas pipeline that would secure their
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energy supplies while leaving some central and eastern European de- mocracies immensely vulnerable to pressure from the Kremlin. The most important service that Merkel and other European lead- ers provided the autocratic camp, however, was their failure to con- front democratic backsliding in neighboring countries such as Hungary and Poland. Over the past decade, governments in both Budapest and Warsaw have rapidly eroded the rule o* law, weakened the separation o+ powers, undermined the free press, and rendered elections deeply unfair. Freedom House, an organization that tracks the status o+ dem- ocratic governance around the world, recently downgraded Hungary to “partly free”—a sad ,rst for a member o+ the $-. Even so, Brussels has yet to levy serious sanctions on either Hun- gary or Poland, and both countries continue to receive billions o+ euros from the $-. Because the bloc has failed to exercise any e.ec- tive control over the money’s distribution, it has essentially pro- vided the antidemocratic populists who lead the governments in both places with a slush fund to reward their political allies and pun- ish their adversaries.
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE? This shameful period o+ inaction in the face o+ the authoritarian re- surgence is now, hopefully, coming to an end. In the United States, Joe Biden’s victory in last year’s presidential election put politicians deeply committed to democratic values back in power. In the $-, the attacks on democracy by some member states have become so blatant that several crusading politicians, including Mark Rutte, the prime minister o+ the Netherlands, and Sophie in ’t Veld and Sergey Lago- dinsky, two members o+ the European Parliament, have forced the bloc to start confronting the authoritarian governments in their midst. But unless democratic leaders recognize the extent o+ the au- thoritarian resurgence and the serious threat it poses, their response is likely to be too little, too late. The $-’s attempts to contain autocracy within the bloc is a depress- ing case study in how hal/earted e.orts are likely to fail. In 2020, af- ter years o+ inaction, the $- ,nally tried to impose stronger conditions on the funds it disburses across the bloc. A European Commission proposal envisioned a system that would freeze payments to member states i+ they violated the rule o* law in their countries. Poland and Hungary, two likely targets, fought back, threatening to veto an $-
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budget that included funding for vital .&/)0-19 relie" e!orts. True to form, European leaders quickly caved. In a compromise that was de- signed to save face but mostly demonstrated how autocratic leaders within the (7 are now essentially immune from negative repercussions for their attacks on democracy as long as they give one another politi- cal cover, the commission abandoned the measure’s core elements. As a result o" the deal, the European Commission still cannot with- hold funds when member states take steps to weaken the rule o$ law. To sanction such states, Brussels instead Autocrats, long focused needs to demonstrate that (7 funds on bare survival, are now are being misspent. In another con- on the o!ensive. cession, the commission promised not to bring any rule-of-law proceedings against member states until those that are opposed to what is left o" the new rules have a chance to contest their constitutionality in front o" the European Court o" Justice. This e!ectively guarantees that Orban and other autocratic leaders will win more unfair elections, remaining in power for years to come. In the end, the failed attempt to discipline Hungary and Poland merely illustrated how much impunity autocratic leaders within the (7 now enjoy. Across the Atlantic, it is too early to assess how e!ective the new U.S. administration will be in bolstering democracy. Initial statements from Biden and members o$ his senior foreign policy team suggest that they take the autocratic threat seriously and are keen to restore the United States to its role as the “leader o" the free world.” A year ago, Biden wrote in these pages that “the triumph o" democracy and liberal- ism over fascism and autocracy created the free world. But this contest does not just de#ne our past. It will de#ne our future, as well.” This attitude marks a real shift from the last four years. Under Biden’s lead- ership, the short-term survival o" +,2& will, thankfully, no longer be in doubt, and countries that depend on the United States for their secu- rity will rightly breathe a sigh o" relief. Over the next years, the United States is also more likely to work closely with long-standing democratic allies than with either auto- cratic states or backsliding democracies. In contrast to Trump, Biden will undoubtedly have better relationships with democratic leaders such as Merkel and South Korean President Moon Jae-in than with autocratic ones such as Erdogan or Sisi. Biden is unlikely to invite
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antidemocratic populists such as Orban or Modi to the White House, as Trump did on several occasions. And under Antony Blinken’s leadership, the State Department will once again express concern over attacks on human rights and free institutions around the world. Populists and autocrats will have to pay a price for attacks on core democratic values. Biden and his team have also signaled their intention to convene a high-pro*le summit o+ democracies. Although the incoming admin- istration has not released details about the summit’s timing or con- tent, the proposal’s intention is clear: to reinvigorate democratic countries in their *ght against autocratic threats. I+ done right, the summit could send an important signal about the United States’ commitment to democratic values. All these changes will represent a notable improvement over the Trump administration. But even i+ they are fully implemented, they likely won’t su,ce to stem the authoritarian resurgence. The problem is that two o+ the central goals o+ these e-orts—containing the in.u- ence o+ powerful autocracies and halting backsliding in key democra- cies—are often in con.ict with each other. Any attempt to halt the authoritarian resurgence must simultaneously stop embattled democ- racies such as India and Poland from joining the ranks o+ the world’s dictatorships and prevent countries such as China and Russia from reshaping the international order. But i/ Washington wants to contain Russia, it needs to preserve a close relationship with Poland, and i+ it wants to contain China, it needs to keep India onboard. This dilemma will make it di,cult for the Biden administration to carry out its pro-democracy agenda. When the United States convenes its proposed summit o+ democracies, for example, it could safely abstain from inviting countries that are rapidly backsliding and have compara- tively little geostrategic importance, such as Hungary. But it will be harder to avoid inviting backsliding democracies such as India or Poland, which, because o+ their size or location, are important allies in the e-ort to contain the United States’ most powerful authoritarian adversaries. Democracies will never be able to sidestep this predicament en- tirely. They can, however, be open about the nature o+ the problem and publicly commit themselves to a consistent strategy. This would require that the leading democratic states clearly distinguish be- tween two levels in their relations with other countries: a lower tier available to countries that share a geostrategic interest in containing
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powerful dictatorships, even i! they themselves are autocracies or backsliding democracies, and a higher tier for countries that share both democratic values and geostrategic interests. This strategy would represent a continuation o! past foreign policy in recognizing the need to sustain strategic alliances with countries that are less than fully democratic. But it would also represent a marked departure by committing the United States and other power- ful democracies to reserving the status o" full partner for liberal de- mocracies and downgrading their relationships with other longtime partners i! they signi#cantly backslide. Creating this two-tier structure would provide a modest yet real incentive for governments o! countries interested in maintaining a re- lationship with established democracies to end their attacks on the rule o$ law. It would also provide pro-democracy activists and movements in those countries with evidence o! the international bene#ts o! resist- ing would-be autocrats. Especially in deeply divided states where pro- democracy forces still have some hope o! displacing the government through elections, this policy change might just make the di%erence between aspiring autocrats’ losing power and their holding on to it. At his proposed summit o! democracies, Biden should establish cri- teria for what would constitute a breach o! minimum democratic stan- dards and what costs Washington would impose on countries that failed to live up to them. He should also invite other countries to adopt their own versions o! this Biden Doctrine. The more developed de- mocracies pursue this approach, the more powerful its e%ects will be.
PROTECTING DEMOCRACY This kind o! approach would require policymakers in the United States and Europe to rethink the notion o! “democracy promotion.” For the most part, that term has been used to describe admirable e%orts to bolster democratic movements in autocratic countries or &edgling democracies. But at times, the United States and others have abused it, misapplying it to destructive attempts to impose democracy by force. The deeper problem, however, is that the very idea o! democracy promotion rests on the assumption that the fu- ture will be more democratic than the past. In light o! the recent authoritarian resurgence, leaders need to stand this assumption on its head. It is certainly possible that some autocracies will democratize over the coming decades, and when such
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opportunities arise, developed democracies should do what they can to help. But the primary goal o" U.S. and European foreign policy should not be to promote democracy in countries where it does not already exist. Instead, it should be to protect democracy in those countries where it is now seriously at risk. Just as democracy promotion developed gradually, democracy pro- tection will take time to evolve. But there are some immediate steps that the United States and its allies should take. As Warsaw restricts press free- To address the threat that dom, Radio Free Europe should re- resurgent authoritarians start its Polish-language broadcast, as it did its Hungarian-language broad- pose, the world’s cast in 2020. In turn, Voice o" America democracies need to should monitor changes in India that commit to bold action. might justify a new Hindi-language program. Organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy should step up their activities in such places—a shift o" resources that is increasingly crucial as governments in those countries sti4e civil society and crack down on nongovernmental organizations. A serious commitment to democracy protection would also mean us- ing diplomatic tools to put pressure on backsliding allies. This would necessarily involve sticks as well as carrots. One potential stick could be the expanded use o" targeted sanctions against o5cials who work to subvert democratic institutions. Another would be to delay or cancel planned initiatives that would boost antidemocratic governments, such as the Pentagon’s intention to move thousands o" U.S. troops to Poland. Democracy protection will also require a greater focus on the con- nection between foreign policy and domestic politics. O$ late, com- mentators and policymakers have begun to emphasize how international issues such as free trade a!ect domestic politics: unless ordinary citi- zens believe that the liberal international order will improve their daily lives, they will be unwilling to carry its burdens. But the link is just as strong in the other direction: citizens who lose faith in demo- cratic values or no longer believe in their own political system can hardly be e!ective advocates for democracy. Leaders in developed democracies need to take on autocratic chal- lengers in their midst. But they must avoid doing so by illiberal means. This can be a tough line to walk: many democracies, for instance, are
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increasingly willing to ban extremist political parties, restrict speech deemed hateful, and censor social media platforms. The e!cacy o" all these measures is doubtful. What is certain, however, is that budding autocrats often use strikingly similar laws and regulations as cover for concentrating power in their own hands. The link between foreign and domestic policy is also a reason to stop autocrats abroad from limiting what citizens o" democracies can say at home. Over the past several years, China has mounted a concerted cam- paign to deter citizens, municipalities, and corporations elsewhere from criticizing its human rights record. In Germany, for example, the city o" Heidelberg in 2019 removed a Tibetan #ag #own outside its city hall after pressure from Chinese diplomats. Following economic threats from the Chinese government that same year, the National Basketball Asso- ciation criticized Daryl Morey, then the general manager o" the Houston Rockets, for supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. Although it will likely prove impossible to completely prevent this sort o" muzzling, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act o" 1977 might serve as a model for an e$ective response. That U.S. law creates a major deterrent to engaging in graft by imposing sti$ punishments on corporations that pay bribes to foreign o!cials. A similar deterrent could be created by legislation in the United States and Europe that would prohibit corporations and other organizations from punishing their employees for criticizing the policies o" autocratic regimes. By tying the hands o" organizations such as Nike, Volkswagen, and the Houston Rockets, such laws would make it far easier for them to resist outside pressure to silence their employees.
REFORM OR PERISH A %nal step in heading o$ the authoritarian resurgence would be to reform two o" the liberal international order’s foundational institu- tions: the &' and ()*+. The Americans and Europeans who designed those bodies assumed that their own countries would never experi- ence serious democratic backsliding. As a result, neither organization has straightforward means for suspending or expelling a member whose character has fundamentally changed. This is particularly problematic for the European Union, which requires its members to sacri%ce an unusually high degree o" sover- eignty to join the bloc. Although national politicians sometimes %nd it hard to explain this to their voters, there are some compelling rea-
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sons for the arrangement. On their own, most $* countries are too small to tackle transnational problems such as climate change or sig- ni+cantly in,uence world politics. Since these countries share a com- mitment to democracy and the rule o- law, giving up a measure o. independence enables them to promote their shared values. According to this same logic, however, the rise o. authoritarian leaders within $* states deeply undermines the bloc’s legitimacy. It may be rational for citizens in the Netherlands to pool some o. their country’s sovereignty with that o. nearby democracies, such as Greece or Sweden, as their interests are presumably aligned. But it is hard to explain politically or justify morally why rules set in part by would- be dictators in Budapest and Warsaw should bind Dutch citizens. I. policymakers in Brussels don’t address that contradiction, the $* will face a legitimacy crisis o. existential proportions—one that its cur- rent institutions are entirely ill equipped to solve. N(/" faces a similar problem. Like the $*, the alliance was founded, as the treaty’s preamble makes clear, on a determination “to safeguard . . . the principles o. democracy, individual liberty and the rule o- law.” Since the alliance’s primary purpose has always been military, how- ever, it has long tolerated some violations o. those principles. Portu- gal, one o. '(/"’s original members, was a dictatorship at the time o. the alliance’s founding. In the decades after 1952, when Greece and Turkey joined, both countries remained in good standing despite their occasional control by military dictatorships. The problem that '(/" faces today, however, is di0erent. Even when Greece, Portugal, and Turkey were dictatorships, they re- mained reliable members o. the alliance; during the Cold War, they clearly sided with democratic countries such as the United States rather than communist powers such as the Soviet Union. Now, some member states, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and Turkey, appear to favor China and Russia over the United States. The Turkish military may have even attacked a U.S. commando out- post in Syria in 2019. These internal contradictions are unsustain- able. A mutual-defense pact that includes countries willing to +re on another member’s troops will quickly lose all credibility. Ejecting a member from '(/", however, is even more di1cult than doing so in the $*. Although some lawyers have suggested clever work- arounds, the treaty does not explicitly contain any mechanism for suspending or expelling a member state.
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In both organizations, !xing these "aws would take enormous po- litical capital, necessitate serious diplomatic pressure, and potentially require a complete legal or organizational reinvention. All o# these are good reasons why democratic leaders likely lack the appetite for mak- ing the necessary reforms. But without mechanisms to ensure that member states either stay aligned with each organization’s missions or exit it, the $% and &'() will drift into dysfunction and irrelevance. Politicians who are serious about democracy protection must pri- oritize reforming these institutions, even i# doing so leads to serious internal con"ict. Member states whose actions are no longer in line with the core mission o# the $% or &'() must either change course or accede to rules that make it possible to expel them. I# these reforms prove impossible, however, it may be better to refound both organiza- tions on a more sustainable basis than to let them decay. European leaders are starting to wake up to the threat o# demo- cratic backsliding in their midst. A new U.S. administration has pledged to defend democracy against illiberal threats. For this de- termination to be translated into meaningful action, statesmen and diplomats will need to look beyond the traditional diplomatic play- book. To address the threat that resurgent authoritarians pose, the world’s democracies need to commit to bold action. I# they do, they will no doubt face an arduous and uncertain journey—one that will cost them political capital and inspire blowback. The alternative, however, is incomparably worse.∂
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The Rate Debate Rethinking Economics in the Age o" Cheap Money James H. Stock
he past #ve years o" U.S. economic policy have been noisy, as the Trump administration and its allies in Congress pursued a Tcontroversial agenda: a trade war with China, a push to repeal the A!ordable Care Act, tax cuts that mostly bene#ted the well-o!, and so on. Behind this sound and fury, however, lies a story o" quieter but deeper economic changes that will have far-reaching implications. That story revolves around four interconnected developments: the fall in the natural rate o" interest, the remarkable decline in the price o" renewable energy, the stubborn persistence o" in4ation below the U.S. Federal Reserve’s target o" two percent, and the stunningly fast collapse and then partial rebound o" the economy during the .&/)0-19 crisis. These changes do not necessarily call into question any fundamen- tal principles o" traditional economic theory. In fact, in many cases, they con#rm the value and validity o" certain core concepts. They were largely unexpected, however: taken together, they require econ- omists to rethink some key parts o" their models. They also open new dimensions in old debates about taxes and spending. And what is per- haps most consequential, they present new opportunities for policy- makers when it comes to the #ght against climate change.
ACT NATURALLY The natural rate o" interest, or r*, is the real interest rate—that is, the actual current interest rate minus expected in4ation—that would pre- vail in an economy enjoying full employment without any government intervention. Savers and investors use r* to project interest rates over the long run; for example, the expected long-term value o" the yield on
JAMES H. STOCK is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University and a member of the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School.
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ten-year U.S. Treasury securities is r* plus the expected long-term rate o! in"ation. Monetary authorities can hold real interest rates above or below the natural rate for months or years—but not forever, so r* is the benchmark against which monetary policy is considered tight or loose. Although r* is a revealing metric, it is also a problematic one. The economy, after all, is never at full employment without government inter- vention; the Fed always has its hand on the wheel. And because expected in"ation is an estimate, the real rate o! interest is impossible to measure directly at any given moment. So gauging r* is a tricky proposition. Yet there are still several ways to estimate r* and to observe its steady decline. The simplest one is to select a relatively long period o! time in the past, identify the average interest rate on a low-risk asset during that period, and then subtract actual in"ation during that period. Take, for example, 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds. The return on those bonds, minus the rate o! in"ation, has fallen consis- tently over the course o! the past four decades, from an average o! 5.9 percent in the 1980s to 4.7 percent in the 1990s, 2.8 percent in the #rst decade o! this century, and 1.6 percent in the 2010s. More so- phisticated estimates o! r* draw on statistical models. Although no single method is determinative, they broadly converge on the #nding that r* has fallen by approximately 1.5 to 2.5 percentage points over the past two decades, and not only in the United States but also in developed countries around the world. Because this decline occurred over decades, it cannot be attributed to a single business cycle or to monetary policy; explanations must lie elsewhere. Economists disagree about which factors have played the biggest role. Some point to the aging o! workforces in developed economies. In the United States, this has occurred as baby boomers have approached retirement age. As they have, their savings have risen, which has had the e$ect o! pushing interest rates down. Others argue that the high savings rate in China has put downward pressure on interest rates around the world. And although the evidence is mixed, some economists cite factors such as the slowing growth rate o! productivity (which has dragged down consumption) and the rise in income inequality (which causes the overall savings rate to rise, since the rich command an ever-larger share o! income and tend to save a greater portion o! their income than the poor do). Whatever its causes, the decline o! r* has profound implications. One is the increased capacity o! developed economies to take on ad-
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ditional sovereign debt. The conventional wisdom—dating to the 1960s and earlier, when r* was much higher than it is today—holds that carrying too high a level o* debt is unsustainable for governments because interest payments compound and overwhelm the state’s ca- pacity to tax, leading to a debt crisis. What constitutes “too high” has never been made clear, but the historical experience o+ foreign debt crises, periods o, hyperin-ation, and defaults provides compelling evidence that some threshold did in fact exist. The logic o+ .scal prudence is turned on its head, however, in a world o, low r*. I* the interest rate paid by the government is less than the growth rate o* the economy, then debt taken on today can be rolled over in perpetuity—and the burden posed by the interest on that debt becomes a vanishingly small fraction o* &/0. Governments can therefore .nance current spending with essentially no change in future tax rates. Naturally, this “free money” argument is appealing to politicians across the U.S. political spectrum: those on the right have used it to rationalize making permanent the 2017 income tax cuts; those on the left have used it to justify massive spending proposals under the so-called Green New Deal. To some economists, including myself, such arguments are unset- tling: after all, r* is less than the growth rate o* the economy until sud- denly it isn’t. To the extent that the decline in r* is driven by an aging population, that demographic transition will taper o1. For example, in the United States, by 2030, all the baby boomers will be at least 65 years old. Additional government borrowing will, all else being equal, place upward pressure on interest rates and on r*. The lesson from previous .scal crises is that when markets start to doubt the ability o* a government to meet its debt obligations, things can sour quickly, and no one wants to set the stage for a Chinese bailout o* an overindebted U.S. government. Experts in public .nance have long maintained that Americans should not burden their children with a debt-to-&/0 ratio o* 100 percent. Although that threshold now seems too low, econo- mists have not yet reached a consensus on what it should be.
WORTH THE COST? The evidence for a long-term decline in r* adds a new dimension to arguments about spending and taxes. Those arguments are age- old, and the role o* interest rates is a familiar part o* the debate. More novel, however, is the question o, how the decline o* r* might
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Nice work if you can get it: in New York City, March 2020 a!ect an issue that has come to the forefront o" U.S. politics only in more recent years: climate change. Policies that reduce emissions o" greenhouse gases entail taking ac- tions today that governments would not take, at least not with any urgency, absent the risk o# future harm from climate change: in other words, they involve incurring costs today to enjoy bene$ts at some point down the road. To know whether those future bene$ts will out- weigh the present costs, one must $rst assign dollar values to both and then place those monetized values, which are realized at di!erent dates, on the same footing. This is done by converting future costs and bene$ts to current-year dollars using an interest rate, which in this context is called a “discount rate.” For example, at a $ve percent an- nual discount rate, $1 today is equivalent to $1.05 next year. Such a comparison o" the present values o" costs and bene$ts is more than merely sound practice: it is required by law for some federal regula- tions and by presidential order for others. Making such a comparison
JOHN MINCHILLO requires choosing a discount rate, which for long-term societal costs (such as damage from climate change) is conventionally taken to be the long-term real rate o" interest—that is, r*. In the case o" climate policy, the so-called social cost o" carbon (%&&)
/ is the present value o" the harm done by emitting one metric ton o" AP carbon dioxide. The U.S. government has published estimates o" the
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-.. since 2010. At the end o" the Obama administration, the federal government estimated the -.. to be $51, a value it computed by set- ting the discount rate to three percent. The Trump administration re- vised this down to $7 by considering only domestic climate damages, and not global ones, and then further lowered it to just $1 by setting the discount rate to seven percent. The choice o" where to set the discount rate In some parts of the matters a great deal: at three percent, it United States, clean energy would make economic sense to pay $97 today to avert $1,000 in damages in the sources are now cheaper year 2100, whereas at seven percent, it than dirty ones. would make sense to pay only $5. In this light, the Trump administration’s calculations encourage the conclusion that under current U.S. policy, climate change will in4ict tremendous global damage—but that it would still be cost-e!ective just to let fu- ture generations deal with the problem. The three percent #gure used by the Obama administration comes from a remarkable o5cial document released by the O5ce o3 Manage- ment and Budget known as “Circular A-4,” which was issued in 2003 and which provides detailed, thoughtful guidance to federal agencies on how to conduct cost-bene#t analyses. “Circular A-4” arrived at the three percent #gure by taking the 30-year average rate o" interest on ten-year U.S. Treasury bonds and subtracting the rate o" in4ation in the con- sumer price index (.6)). Repeating that calculation today provides a dramatic restatement o" the decline in r*: over the past 30 years, the yield on ten-year Treasuries has averaged 4.3 percent, and .6) in4ation has averaged 2.3 percent, putting r* at 2.0 percent. I" this calculation is performed over the past 20 years, the resulting r* is 1.1 percent—sub- stantially lower than the Obama-era estimate o" three percent. Despite the Trump administration’s suspect abandonment o" the three percent rate, that number continues to be used as a reference point in some tax rules and policy proposals. But the decline in r* implies that the three percent discount rate is too high, and by using that too-high factor, economists are underestimating the -... I" r* is not three percent but rather two percent, then the -.. is not $51 but actually $125, and it would make economic sense to pay $209 today in order to prevent $1,000 in damages in the year 2100. In other words, in a world o$ low r*, many climate policies that might once have ap-
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peared inordinately expensive start looking more a!ordable. A prin- ciple o" regulatory policy is that costs and bene#ts should be calculated using the best available science. “Circular A-4” is now nearly two de- cades old. U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly issued an executive order to update it so that it re$ects new economic understanding.
IT’S EASIER BEING GREEN Climate change policy has been framed as a tradeo! between the ben- e#ts o" reducing carbon dioxide emissions and the costs o" those reduc- tions. Economists have encouraged this cost-bene#t mindset at many levels, perhaps most prominently by advocating a carbon tax that would make it more costly to pollute. The implicit assumption in that thinking is that polluting will naturally be cheaper than not polluting. But over the past #ve years, a remarkable development occurred: the cost o" green technology fell sharply, and in some parts o" the United States, clean energy sources are now cheaper than dirty ones. From 2014 to 2019, the cost per kilowatt o" solar panels fell by around 50 percent. In many parts o" the country, building a new wind or solar farm costs less than running an existing coal plant or building a new natural gas plant. The U.S. Energy Information Administration proj- ects that wind and solar farms will soon account for more than three- quarters o" newly installed power plant capacity. These installations were supported by federal tax credits and by incentives at the state level. Still, the main driver o" their falling costs was not such subsidies but advances in technology and companies simply “learning by doing” in the production and installation o" renewable power facilities. Similar cost reductions occurred in electric vehicles. The main driver o" the price o" these vehicles is the cost o" the lithium-ion batteries, which fell, on average, by more than 87 percent between 2010 and 2019. By 2024, in many parts o" the United States, an electric vehicle with a 250-mile range will reach price parity with a comparable conventional vehicle. These dramatic price declines in two key parts o" the U.S. energy system are shifting the economics o" climate policy: instead o" making it more expensive to pollute, policymakers are looking for ways to make it cheaper to be clean. This puts some economists outside their comfort zones: there are no randomized controlled experiments that can tease out the precise causes o" these price declines. That said, the available evidence suggests a potent role for policy in driving down costs. Solar energy prices declined because o% high demand for solar
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panels even at very high prices, thanks in part to government spend- ing through programs such as Germany’s Energiewende and the Cal- ifornia Solar Initiative, which committed the German and California governments to purchase solar technology even when it was expen- sive. In the case o* declining onshore wind energy prices in the United States, it seems that one important contributor was learning by doing; companies simply have gotten better at installing wind farms—the development o* which, it should be noted, was aided by public subsi- dies. Similar trends are shaping the market for o+shore wind energy, which exists thanks only to massive early government commitments, notably by Denmark, to make major purchases. O* course, there are plenty o* examples o* such policies not pan- ning out. One study has suggested that although certain initial small grants o* up to $150,000 that the U.S. Department o, Energy awarded between 1983 and 2013 helped some -rms get a start, the second round o, funding, with grants up to $1 million, had little e+ect on those -rms’ future business prospects. Perennial funding favorites, such as small nuclear reactors and research on nuclear fusion, have made little federally funded progress (although private investment has recently spurred a rash o* exciting fusion projects). The federal grant-making process is also conservative, with high political penal- ties for failure. I* a program aimed at developing high-risk technolo- gies doesn’t include failures, however, then it isn’t taking enough risks. Meanwhile, prioritizing the improvement o* technology need not mean abandoning the idea o* a carbon tax that would make it more expensive to pollute: policymakers can make future clean technology cheaper while also making it more costly to pollute today.
GRADING ON A CURVE The drop in green energy prices might have many causes. But ex- plaining it is a relatively easy task compared with accounting for a more fundamental change relating to prices, one that confounds con- ventional economic thinking: the astonishing stability o. low in/a- tion. Economists’ main theory o* the rate o* price in/ation is the so-called Phillips curve, named for the economist A. W. Phillips, who introduced the concept in the 1950s. In its original form, the Phillips curve showed an inverse relationship between wage growth and the unemployment rate. Modern versions, applied to prices, link the cur- rent rate o* in/ation to both expected future in/ation and a measure
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o" economic slack, such as the gap between the rate o" unemployment and its full-employment value—that is, a measure o" the value o" un- used resources in the economy, such as people who cannot #nd a job. The past #ve years have not been kind to this cornerstone o" mac- roeconomics. From the 1960s through the early 1990s, the U.S. Phil- lips curve was remarkably stable, with an increase in slack reliably correlating to a reduction in the rate o" in4ation. Since 2000, however, this cor- relation has dropped nearly to zero. For The past "ve years have example, during the economic expan- not been kind to the sion o" 2018 and 2019, the U.S. unem- Phillips curve. ployment rate stabilized at around 3.5 percent, but the rate o" in4ation failed to rise. In fact, in 2019, after subtracting out the in4uence o3 food and energy prices, in4ation fell to just 1.6 percent—its lowest annual rate since 2015, when the unemployment rate stood at 5.3 percent. In a marked break from the experience o" past economic down- turns, the trend o" in4ation becoming less and less sensitive to eco- nomic conditions continued into the .&/)0-19 recession. During the 1990 recession, for each percentage point increase in the unemploy- ment rate, the core rate o" in4ation in the United States fell by 0.8 percentage points. In the 2000 recession, that #gure was 0.4 percent- age points. During the recession that followed the 2008 #nancial crisis, it was 0.3 percentage points. And in the current pandemic recession, it has been less than 0.1 percentage points. It is worth noting that the rate o" in4ation has been unusually hard to measure during the .&/)0-19 crisis because o" shifts in demand, which implies that consumption bundles are changing (toward, say, home o5ce supplies and away from hotel stays) more rapidly than the assumptions that are built into the in4ation measures. Moreover, the pandemic has produced both a negative supply shock and a negative demand shock, which are, respectively, in4ationary and disin4ation- ary in standard Phillips curve models. Still, the stability o" the rate o" in4ation through periods o$ historically low unemployment and then through periods o$ historically high unemployment remains puzzling. There are plenty o" possible explanations for this 4attening o" the Phillips curve. One is that the prices for many goods and, increasingly, the level o" many wages are now set internationally and thus are less sensitive to domestic economic conditions. This is consistent with
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the fact that the prices o" goods and services that are produced and consumed locally—such as housing rentals, restaurant meals, and ho- tel rooms—have tended to fall during recent downturns. Another explanation is that the apparent insensitivity o" prices to economic conditions re4ects the Fed’s success in stabilizing prices. But that hy- pothesis cannot account for why the Fed, the European Central Bank, and Macroeconomic dynamics the Bank o" Japan have not been able to can change far more get the rate o" in4ation up to two per- cent despite their clear desire to do so. rapidly than economists The persistently low rate o" in4a- have traditionally assumed. tion, combined with the decline o" r*, has made it harder for central banks to react in customary ways to sharp eco- nomic downturns. In the recessions o" 1990, 2000, and 2008, the Fed reduced short-term interest rates by an average o" roughly #ve per- centage points. During the #rst three weeks o3 March 2020, as the .&/)0-19 crisis began in the United States, the Fed had far less wiggle room, since the core federal funds rate was already at just 1.6 percent. The Fed brought this rate down to essentially zero, but even that did not provide remotely close to the level o" support the economy needed. So, as it did following the #nancial crisis, the Fed purchased long- term assets in order to stabilize asset markets and keep interest rates low, making it easier for companies to borrow and preventing a public health crisis from cascading into a #nancial crisis. One reason the Fed had the con#dence to go all in on long-term asset purchases is that, as the pandemic took hold, the central bank was just wrapping up a years-long review o" its monetary policy framework. The Fed had undertaken the review partly in response to the decline in r*, which had led Fed economists to conclude that it was highly probable that the federal funds rate would be stuck at zero for extended periods. The review was both evolutionary and revolution- ary. It was evolutionary in that the changes it codi#ed, such as calling for long-term asset purchases when necessary and encouraging a will- ingness to tolerate persistent excursions o" in4ation over two percent, were consistent with years o" research and were broadly understood and accepted by markets. But the review was revolutionary in that it happened at all. The process was transparent and systematic, relied on the best available science, and received input from the broader com-
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munity o! experts and the general public. Such transparency and pub- lic discussion stand in stark contrast to the secrecy and opacity that have historically characterized Fed decision-making. As a result o! this process, the Fed has become a stronger institution. But the Fed could have gone even further. The central bank’s new willingness to tolerate extended periods o! in"ation exceeding two percent has introduced a window for experimentation, which could increase comfort with raising the in"ation target. To its credit, the Fed, through its review, has now created a means for publicly discuss- ing this charged issue in a rational and scienti#c way.
LIFE COMES AT YOU FAST As the pandemic rages on, it is too soon to know precisely what lessons it will eventually yield. But one is already clear: macroeconomic dynamics can change far more rapidly than economists have traditionally assumed. Prior to the $%&'(-19 crisis, the largest monthly increase in the U.S. unemployment rate since 1950 was one percentage point, which occurred in 1953. In April 2020, the rate increased by 10.4 percentage points, then fell by 4.6 percentage points over the following three months. The speed o! this spike and retreat was unprecedented; these were changes immensely larger than what recessions typically pro- duce. At a casual level, this might seem unremarkable: after all, schools closed across the country and many businesses shut down. But at the level o! economic modeling, the speed o! these changes was a dra- matic departure and has led to an especially wide range o! projections about the recovery. One view is that the post-vaccine recovery will be rapid, as pent-up demand is released and extra savings are spent on vacations, restaurants, and other long-delayed services. A second view is that because o! widespread business closures, workers will not have jobs to return to and that, after an initial fast recovery, the usual slow business-cycle dynamics will take over. Although such dramatic changes call for a rethinking o! some basic concepts, much o! economic theory has fared quite well over the past #ve years. Take, for example, the concept o! externalities. Public in- terest in doing something about climate change has sharply increased, from consumers choosing “green” options, to corporations purchasing carbon o)sets for their employees’ travel, to a growing preference among investors for funds that pursue social and environmental goals alongside pro#ts, to the Congressional Budget O*ce including cli-
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mate damages in its long-term &*+ forecasts. But carbon remains un- priced, and so the carbon externality persists. And although U.S. emissions o, carbon dioxide have fallen because o, the shift from coal to natural gas and renewables (and most recently because o, the pan- demic recession), the rate o, the reduction has not been nearly fast enough. Because carbon is unpriced, carbon pollution will remain a problem that markets left alone will not solve. The -".%*-19 crisis has presented another example o, externalities. Wearing a mask reduces your risk o, contracting the virus, so that bene/t o, mask wearing is internalized. But it also provides a bene/t to others by protecting them from you i, you are infected, and because that bene/t does not accrue to you directly, that bene/t is not internal- ized. This is a classic externality: one person’s decision not to wear a mask a0ects the welfare o, others. Economic theory suggests multiple ways for o1cials address this, such as making it costly not to wear a mask by /ning those who refuse, making it pay to wear a mask by re- quiring it in places o2 business, and reducing the potential social costs o, wearing a mask by casting it as a patriotic duty or as an act o, com- passion. Oddly, and tragically, policymakers have rarely pursued such solutions—often because they have denied that the contagion exter- nality exists in the /rst place, an eerie echo o, the way that many o, the same policymakers deny the existence o, climate externalities. Another principle o, traditional economic theory that has fared well is the importance o, well-functioning institutions as the basis for a well-functioning economy. C".%*-19 has revealed that U.S. public health institutions are not up to the task o, responding to a pandemic. The institutional breakdown resulted from a combination o, chronic underfunding and a presidential administration instinctively averse to science and expertise. Economists have invested heavily in ensuring the intellectual integrity and independence o, the Federal Reserve, which has operated admirably and e0ectively in the crisis. They would do the country a service by turning their attention to the job o, mak- ing other institutions just as resilient.∂
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SERGEY No country in Southeast Asia will accept an exclusive relationship with China or the PONOMAREV United States. No country will pick a side. – Bilahari Kausikan / THE
NEW The Arena Market Value
YORK Bilahari Kausikan 186 Binyamin Appelbaum 198
TIMES The Stories China Tells Recent Books 204 Jessica Chen Weiss 192
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China and the United States. To di!er- The Arena ent degrees and in their own ways, every country in the region has adopted that approach to China—and to the Southeast Asia in the Age o" United States, too. Great-Power Rivalry Southeast Asia has always been a strategic crossroads, where the interests o" Bilahari Kausikan great powers intersect and sometimes collide. It is naturally a multipolar region, never under the sway o" any single external power, except for in the brie" Under Beijing’s Shadow: Southeast Asia’s period o" Japanese occupation during China Challenge World War II. Today’s competition BY MURRAY HIEBERT. Rowman & between China and the United States is Little#eld, 2020, 608 pp. just another phase o" a centuries-old dynamic that has embedded the instinct In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in to simultaneously hedge, balance, and the Chinese Century bandwagon in the region’s political 0+,. BY SEBASTIAN STRANGIO. Yale Americans seem to #nd this di5cult to University Press, 2020, 360 pp. grasp. There is a strong tendency to view the region in binary terms: i" the region is Where Great Powers Meet: America and not “free,” it is “red”; i" democracy is not China in Southeast Asia advancing, it must be in retreat; i" the BY DAVID SHAMBAUGH. Oxford Association o" Southeast Asian Nations University Press, 2020, 352 pp. (,-(,+) does not embrace the United States, it is in danger o$ being captured hen I served as a Singapor- by China. This simplistic attitude has led ean diplomat, I once asked a to several policy failures, including, most WVietnamese counterpart disastrously, the Vietnam War. what an impending leadership change Three outstanding books o!er in Hanoi meant for his country’s timely correctives to this misguided relations with China. “Every Vietnam- view through country-by-country ese leader,” he replied, “must get along accounts o" the ambivalence and unease with China, every Vietnamese leader with which Southeast Asians view must stand up to China, and i" you can’t China’s role in the region. Murray do both at the same time, you don’t Hiebert’s masterly and monumental deserve to be leader.” Under Beijing’s Shadow is the most As U.S. President Joe Biden begins detailed and nuanced o" the three. Like his term in o5ce, his team should heed Hiebert, Sebastian Strangio focuses on those words. Southeast Asia is the China’s relations with countries in the epicenter o" the competition between region in In the Dragon’s Shadow, whereas David Shambaugh frames BILAHARI KAUSIKAN is former Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign A!airs of Where Great Powers Meet around the Singapore. theme o" U.S.-Chinese competition.
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China’s size and economic weight no country—spent !ve years wrangling doubt stoke anxieties among its South- with China over a railway project to east Asian neighbors, worries that have secure terms “that they could live with.” been accentuated by the aggressive foreign I happened to be in Vientiane, the policy o" President Xi Jinping. But those capital o" Laos, in early 2016, when the concerns must be weighed against the ruling Lao People’s Revolutionary Party necessity o( maintaining political and held its Tenth National Congress. A economic ties with Asia’s biggest power. friend—a party member—told me that No country in Southeast Asia will accept some senior people would be dismissed an exclusive relationship with China or for being too pro-China. I was skeptical. the United States or any other power. But two Politburo members, President No country will pick a side. and General Secretary Choummaly Sayasone and Deputy Prime Minister NOT FOR A MESS OF POTTAGE Somsavat Lengsavad, were indeed sacked. Many outside observers often assume— Laos has real institutions—most perhaps unconsciously but still insult- important among them a Leninist-style ingly—that the countries in the region vanguard party, whose interests are are all so irredeemably corrupt, termi- paramount—and although it is hemmed nally naive, or simple-minded that they in by China and does not have much would sell their national interests for a room to maneuver, it uses those institu- mess o( pottage. The authors o( these tions as best it can. Cambodia, by books don’t make that mistake. Economic contrast, is what Shambaugh calls the ties are not to be lightly disregarded, only “full-blown Chinese client state” in but no #$%#& member structures its #$%#&, a description that Hiebert relations with China solely on the basis echoes. Unlike in Laos, the leadership in o( trade and investments. Nationalism Cambodia is almost totally personalist: remains a potent political force. Prime Minister Hun Sen has described Hiebert is particularly adept at expos- support for China as “Cambodia’s ing the undercurrents, which he aptly political choice,” and his choices are the describes as “the complex cocktail o' hope only ones that matter in Cambodia. and anxiety,” “anticipation and uneasi- Still, not everyone in Cambodia is ness,” that lies beneath the surface o( brimming with enthusiasm about Hun China’s relations with its smaller south- Sen’s subservience to China. In January ern neighbors. This is true even with 2018, the governor o" Preah Sihanouk countries highly dependent on China, wrote a letter to the Interior Ministry such as Cambodia and Laos. Among the complaining o' how Chinese investment strongest sections o" Hiebert’s book are had led to a surge in crime and caused those in which he examines these “insecurity in the province.” It is a countries, exposing the complexity o( biological inevitability that Hun Sen’s attitudes toward China and how small personalist leadership must end. Cam- nations can still exercise agency despite bodia’s status as a Chinese client state their dependence on Beijing. For instance, may prove to be only a phase. he notes how the leaders o" Laos—an These books make clear that China “underpopulated and heavily indebted” has serious liabilities in Southeast
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Asia—although not necessarily the ones make clear, however, in Southeast Asia, identi+ed by observers in the West. there is as much anxiety about China’s Some Western analysts, for example, tend activities in another body o* water: the to view warily Beijing’s cultivation o* Mekong River, which runs through +ve Chinese diaspora communities, seeing o* the ten ()$(' member states and these minorities as a potential +fth does not receive enough attention from column. Xi has claimed the support o* international relations specialists. “all Chinese” for his version o* “the Strangio reminds readers that Chinese dream,” arousing suspicions “China’s economic and political in,uence about China’s intentions. ,ows down the Mekong River into But all three books demonstrate that Southeast Asia” and that China’s “valve- in Southeast Asia, where the relation- like control” o* the river’s upper reaches ships between ethnic Chinese and “gives Beijing considerable control” over indigenous populations are often fraught its southward ,ow. China’s dam-building with underlying tensions, the Chinese projects on the upper Mekong are already diaspora is not at all an obvious advantage reducing the ,ow o* water downriver. for Beijing. The authors recognize that The Cambodian and Laotian econo- there is no simple correlation between mies still largely rely on subsistence ethnicity and in,uence. The mere agriculture. Leaders in Cambodia and presence o* ethnic Chinese communities Laos may not care too much about what in Southeast Asian countries doesn’t China does in the South China Sea, but necessarily serve China’s interests. they will have to think hard about an In 2018, during the Malaysian issue that potentially poses an existen- general election, the Chinese ambassa- tial threat to the livelihoods o* their dor openly campaigned for the leader o* own people. I* China’s actions on the the ruling coalition’s ethnic Chinese Mekong do not make Phnom Penh and party, breaking a fundamental norm o* Vientiane rethink how they conduct diplomatic conduct: noninterference. their relations with China, then other The ruling coalition lost, and its succes- ()$(' members should reconsider the sor promptly renegotiated several organization’s relationship with them. economic projects backed by China. During a visit to China later that year, MANAGING MISTRUST Mahathir Mohamad, the new Malaysian Some readers might be surprised by the prime minister (he had previously suggestion that in an area in the shadow served as prime minister from 1981 to o* a major power, a regional multilateral 2003), pointedly warned that Chinese organization wields real in,uence. But actions in the region might resemble a ()$(' does. None o* these books deals “new version o* colonialism.” adequately with the organization. Western observers tend to see Shambaugh’s is the only one that devotes China’s actions in the South China Sea, a chapter to it. This is not surprising. where it has steadily encroached on the Few scholars really understand how maritime borders o* its neighbors, as ()$(' works. Its fundamental purpose the clearest example o. Beijing’s expan- is not to solve problems but to manage sive ambitions. As Hiebert and Strangio mistrust and di-erences among its
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members and stabilize a region where mains with any single major power. The even civility in relations is not to be taken diplomacy o! "#$"% and its members is for granted, thus minimizing the oppor- naturally promiscuous, not monogamous. tunities for great-power interference. Shambaugh claims that “"#$"% Even some "#$"% leaders do not states are already conditioned not to seem to understand this. In July 2012, criticize China publicly or directly.” when Cambodia was serving as the chair But "#$"% states do not publicly criti- o! the organization, "#$"% for the +rst cize the&United&States&or&any&other& time failed to agree on a foreign ministers’ major&power' either. They don’t publicly joint communiqué. Hor Namhong, the criticize others not because they are Cambodian foreign minister, refused to “conditioned” by anyone but because accept any compromise on language public criticism forecloses options and regarding the South China Sea, insisting reduces the room for diplomacy. that there should be no mention o! the Small countries can maneuver only issue at all. He clearly did so at China’s in the interstices between the relation- behest; Fu Ying, China’s vice foreign ships o! major powers. The essential minister, barely bothered to conceal her purpose o! "#$"%-led forums such as hovering presence at a meeting she had the annual East Asia Summit, which no business attending. brings together "#$"% member states Only a week later, however, Marty with the likes o! Australia, India, Natalegawa, then the foreign minister Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the o, Indonesia, persuaded Cambodia to United States, is to maximize those join "#$"%’s consensus on the South interstitial spaces, deepening the China Sea. The text o! the statement region’s natural multipolarity. was largely taken from previously agreed-on documents, and in some THE AMERICAN COUNTERWEIGHT instances, the +nal language was Some external powers, o! course, matter stronger than the compromises Cambo- more than others. Absent the United dia had rejected just the previous week. States, no combination o! other powers Phnom Penh’s haphazard attempt to can balance China. Not every "#$"% please Beijing proved to be singularly member will say so in public, but most clumsy and ultimately only a waste o! members seem to recognize this fact. time. Fu’s bosses in Beijing cannot have At the end o! the 1980s, Philippine been too pleased to have China’s heavy domestic politics and a natural disaster hand blatantly exposed to no purpose. compelled U.S. forces to vacate Subic And ever since, Cambodia has not been Bay and Clark Air Base. In 1990, quite as foolishly intransigent on Singapore, which had long backed a discussions o! the South China Sea. U.S. military presence in Southeast No country needs to allow Beijing to Asia, concluded a memorandum o! de+ne its national interests in order to understanding, or ()*, with Washing- maintain a close relationship with China. ton that allowed some U.S. forces to With the limited exception o! Cambodia, use Singaporean facilities. At the time, no "#$"% member sees a need to neatly several "#$"% members loudly and align its interests across di-erent do- vehemently criticized the deal. But
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there was nary a whisper when Singa- meant to encourage its authoritarian pore signed an agreement regarding regime’s incipient liberalization, was a greater defense and security cooperation bold stroke. The crafting o* the Trans- with the United States in 2005 or when Paci+c Partnership was a major achieve- the 1990 ."/ was renewed in 2019. ment in a region where trade is strategy. That change o* attitude re0ects the But soft power, which Obama had in region’s growing disquiet with Chinese abundance, is inadequate without the behavior, which all three books docu- exercise o, hard power—and Obama ment. Chinese policy often provokes had little stomach for that. In 2012, his opposition. For instance, both Hiebert administration brokered a deal between and Strangio explore in detail the Beijing and Manila regarding Scarbor- Myitsone dam project in Myanmar. As ough Shoal, in the South China Sea. Strangio notes, from the moment When China reneged on the terms o* Myanmar signed an agreement for the the deal by refusing to remove its ships dam with a Chinese state-owned +rm in from the disputed area, Washington did 2006, “opposition was nearly universal.” nothing. In 2015, Xi promised Obama The project was suspended in 2011, but, that China would not militarize the as Hiebert writes, as late as 2019, “the South China Sea. But when Beijing did Chinese ambassador’s ham-+sted and so by deploying naval and coast-guard tone-dea, lobbying [to revive the proj- assets to intimidate ()$(' claimant ect] prompted renewed protests against states in 2016, the United States again the dam in cities across the country.” did nothing. Obama’s failure several A great merit o* Shambaugh’s book years before, in 2013, to enforce a redline is its detailed analysis o, how China’s on Syria’s use o* chemical weapons had growing footprint in Southeast Asia has undermined the credibility o* U.S. not led to a reduction o* economic or power—and China took notice. security relations with the United U.S. President Donald Trump’s States. In some cases, relations with the rejection o* the Trans-Paci+c Partner- United States have even expanded. ship on assuming o-ce in 2017 was a Unlike many other scholars, Shambaugh slap in the face to U.S. friends and understands that Southeast Asian allies. But not everything he did was countries do not see the choices avail- necessarily wrong. However incoher- able to them in binary, zero-sum terms. ently and crudely, Trump seemed to Shambaugh is, however, only partly instinctively understand the importance correct when he concludes that “South- o* demonstrating hard power. When he east Asia never had better relations with bombed Syria in 2017 while at dinner the United States, and vice versa,” than with Xi, he did much to restore the it did during the Obama era. It was credibility o* American might by comforting to hear an American presi- showing his willingness to use force. dent speak about making Asia the Trump also explicitly rejected central concern o* U.S. foreign policy. China’s claims in the South China Sea It was 0attering when President Barack and empowered the U.S. Seventh Fleet Obama made time to attend ()$(' to conduct freedom-of-navigation meetings. His 2012 visit to Myanmar, operations to challenge them. Freedom
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o! navigation is a right, and other in the region; too passive a stance will countries do not need China’s permis- elicit fears o! abandonment. This sion to exercise it. By contrast, during cannot be helped. But Biden must avoid Obama’s second term, the Pentagon and Obama’s mistake o! thinking that the the National Security Council sparred United States needs to de-emphasize loudly over the wisdom o! such opera- competition to secure Beijing’s coopera- tions, undermining their intended e"ect. tion on issues such as climate change. Because he was Obama’s vice presi- As any undergraduate student o! dent, Biden cannot distance himsel! international relations should know, easily from what happened on Obama’s cooperation is not a favor one state watch. Friend and foe alike will scruti- bestows on another. I! it is in its inter- nize Biden’s every move for any sign o! est, Beijing will cooperate. States can weakness. He will likely #ne-tune U.S. and do compete and cooperate simulta- policy, but not fundamentally shift neously. That understanding is funda- direction, on China and trade. His mentally what Southeast Asia expects administration will make and commu- o! the United States.∂ nicate policy with more coherence and consideration for friends and allies than did Trump’s. The atmospherics o! U.S. diplomacy will improve after the bluster and chaos o! the Trump years. All o! this will be welcome. But it will be for naught i! U.S. foreign policy lapses back into Obama’s reluctance to use hard power. Biden should be cautious about promoting American values in response to Trump’s indi"erence to them. Such values are not necessarily a strategic asset in Southeast Asia, where they are not shared by all. “Democracy” is a protean term, “human rights” is subject to many interpretations, and Southeast Asia generally places more emphasis on the rights o! the community than on those o! the individual. The United States has not deployed forces on the mainland o! Southeast Asia since the end o! the Vietnam War. As an o"shore balancer, the United States will always #nd it di$cult to determine just how it should position itself: too forceful a stance against China will evoke fears o! entanglement
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now helping maintain the international The Stories order in the twenty--rst. Employing the terms that the Chinese Communist China Tells Party (../) uses to describe World War II, Xi hailed China’s commitment to “uphold the outcomes o* the Chinese The New Historical People’s War o0 Resistance Against Memory Reshaping Japanese Aggression and the World Chinese Nationalism Antifascist War” and called on all coun- tries to respect “the international order Jessica Chen Weiss and system underpinned by the pur- poses and principles o* the 1' Charter, build a new type o* international relations featuring win-win coopera- China’s Good War: How World War II Is tion, and advance the noble cause o* Shaping a New Nationalism global peace and development.” BY RANA MITTER. Harvard Under Xi, the ../ has tried to University Press, 2020, 336 pp. project an image o* seeking peace through strength, neither picking -ghts n September 3, 2015, a proces- nor shying away from confrontation. In sion o* Chinese missile launchers recent years, however, China’s increas- Oand more than 12,000 soldiers ingly assertive and often abrasive paraded through Tiananmen Square, in conduct has undercut its attempt to Beijing, to commemorate the 70th claim international leadership. Xi’s anniversary o* the end o+ World War II. appeals to the past represent one way to Some 850,000 civilians were deployed to o2set this inherent tension. patrol Beijing; in parts o* the city, busi- But China’s interest in commemo- ness, tra,c, and all wireless communica- rating World War II began much tions were shut down. But lest anyone get earlier, in the 1980s. The chaos and the wrong impression, President Xi trauma o* the Mao-era famine and the Jinping delivered an address meant to Cultural Revolution had left scars on assuage those alarmed by all the -repower the national psyche and had laid bare and manpower on display. “No matter the 3aws o0 Marxism-Leninism as a how much stronger it may become, China governing philosophy. When Deng will never seek hegemony or expansion,” Xiaoping took the helm after Mao he assured his audience, which included a Zedong’s death in 1976, the ../ sti3ed few dozen world leaders. the 3ames o* class struggle and stoked In fact, Xi argued, China had played capitalist fervor and consumerism an important part in defeating fascism instead. Yet even as the party adapted in the twentieth century, and China was its ideology, its search for popular legit- imacy remained tethered to national- JESSICA CHEN WEISS is Associate Professor of ism and became increasingly rooted in Government at Cornell University and the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest China’s role in World War II, which in China’s Foreign Relations. Chinese leaders routinely held up as
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evidence o% the party’s defense o% the who sat next to U.S. President Franklin Chinese people in the face o) foreign Roosevelt and British Prime Minister aggression and humiliation. Winston Churchill at the 1943 Cairo In his insightful new book, the conference, which laid the groundwork historian Rana Mitter opens a window for the postwar order. It was the Chi- into the legacy o% China’s experience o% nese Nationalists, not their Communist World War II, showing how historical enemies, who helped establish the !" memory lives on in the present and and the Bretton Woods institutions, contributes to the constant evolution o% including the International Monetary Chinese nationalism. In this deft, Fund and the World Bank. textured work o% intellectual history, he In playing up China’s role in creat- introduces readers to the scholars, ing the postwar order, the ##$ some- 'lmmakers, and propagandists who have times overstates its case. But just sought to rede'ne China’s experience o% making the case at all marks an impor- the war. And he shows how their e*orts tant shift in Chinese nationalism, re(ect Xi’s interest in portraying China which has often cast China not as a as a defender o% the postwar interna- victor but as a victim, especially o% tional order: a leader present at the Japanese aggression and imperialism. creation in 1945, rather than a latecomer By presenting China as a key wartime who gained a seat at the !" only during partner o% the Allies and a co-founder the height o% the Cold War. o% the postwar order, the Chinese As historical revisionism goes, this is leadership seeks to suggest “that China relatively benign, Mitter notes. And in plays a similarly cooperative role in some ways, the motivations behind it are today’s international community,” understandable: China’s contributions to writes Mitter. The intended message is the war against fascism are rarely ac- that China is more interested in reshap- knowledged in the West. Yet Mitter does ing existing institutions from within not shy away from exposing some o% the than in scrapping them altogether. political 'ctions that the ##$ imposes on This form o& historical revisionism China’s past—to the detriment o% its has another bene't: it de(ects attention attempt to craft a persuasive narrative from the ideological distance that China about China’s future. has traveled since the postwar years. Until Mao’s death, China was no AN EMPTY IDEOLOGY champion o& liberal internationalism; it Under Xi, China has displayed a grow- was a proponent o% global communist ing appetite for global leadership. Xi has revolution. Beijing’s new emphasis on stated that “China will 'rmly uphold what Mitter calls the shared “moral the international system” as “a founding agenda” o% defeating fascism con ven- member o% the United Nations and the iently glosses over one reason China 'rst country to put its signature on the can claim to uphold today’s world !" Charter.” As Mitter notes, Xi order: the ##$ has largely abandoned its conveniently elides that it was Chiang founding ideology. In China today, “the Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, and ideological cupboard is relatively bare,” not Chiang’s Communist rival, Mao, Mitter sharply observes. Under Xi, he
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Founding fathers? At the Cairo conference, 1943
writes, China is “still having a hard time challenge conventional narratives, de#ning its economic and security Chinese historians and propagandists vision as anything other than an in- have dutifully parroted the “political creasingly authoritarian not-America.” shibboleths” o" their era, including the
Mitter’s assessment that China is a “direction o3 Marxist-Leninist dialecti- U.S.
“postsocialist state in reality i" not in cal materialism.” But “between the NATIONAL name” is a refreshingly sober alternative political bromides,” Mitter writes, “the to the Trump administration’s hyper- scholars placed a depth-charge under
bolic assertions that the ..6 was seek- the ..6’s traditional historiography.” ARCHIVES ing to bring about a “socialist interna- Marxist thought remains politically tional order” and a “globe-spanning correct in China today, but Marxist universal society.” Those accusations arguments are sometimes used in AND
relied on the fact that o5cial Chinese surprising ways. For example, Jie Dalei, ADMINISTRATION RECORDS rhetoric still uses phrases and concepts a scholar o" international relations in rooted in Marxism-Leninism. As Beijing, recently drew on Marxist Mitter’s book shows, such language principles to argue that “China’s rise is should not be taken at face value: #rst and foremost an economic success Chinese scholars and o5cials often use story” and that China should use ideological catch phrases to provide economic diplomacy to avoid “ideologi- political cover for dissent. In order to cal con4ict with the United States.”
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FA.indb 194 1/22/21 9:01 PM AT WAR WITH ITSELF One o! the strengths o" Mitter’s book is that it illuminates how di#erent voices within China have looked to history to unearth new truths about the country’s identity and trajectory—not all o! them favorable to the $$%. Compared with traditional approaches to telling the history o! the World War II era, these revisionist currents reveal less about China’s adversaries than about China itself. Mitter writes that “much o! the discussion o! the war in the public sphere is not really about Japan at all; it is about China and what it thinks about its own identity today, rather than in 1937 or 1945.” The country, he argues “is not so much in con&ict with the Japanese as with itself, over issues that include economic inequality and ethnic tensions.” Along these lines, Mitter relates how in recent years, Chinese historians have begun to draw attention to the 1942 famine in Henan Province, which killed three million people, one o! many chapters in recent Chinese history that require “humor and a large helping o! amnesia” to face, in the words o! the Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun. Nation- alist policies contributed to that famine, making references to it a relatively safe way for Chinese novelists, 'lmmakers, and bloggers to present veiled critiques o! the Communists’ Great Leap For- ward, a disastrous experiment in com- munal industry and agriculture that produced a famine in which at least 30 million Chinese starved to death. Since the 1980s, revisionist histories o! the World War II era have encouraged a more sympathetic view o! the Nation- alists, many o! whom were persecuted by the $$% after the Nationalist leadership &ed to Taiwan in 1949. Mitter follows the
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writings and travails o- Chinese o1cials, more. Mitter has tried to correct that scholars, and .lmmakers who have in this book, building on the scholar- navigated state censorship and resistance ship o* his previous and also excellent from cultural conservatives to bring to work Forgotten Ally. light long-ignored stories o- the Nation- But foreign countries and their alists’ contributions to the war, including citizens hardly pose the biggest obstacle those o- soldiers who fought against the to China’s quest to use history to bur- invading Japanese army only to be nish its legitimacy: the ++, itsel- is the hounded and marginalized under Com- main barrier. Even when the party munist rule. In recent years, such stories allows a more thorough investigation o- have become part o- the o1cial narrative. the wartime past, it still ruthlessly State-approved .lms, museums, and the suppresses narratives—whether about 2015 military parade have all incorpo- Hong Kong, Tibet, or Xinjiang—that rated the Nationalist war e0ort—making challenge its increasingly ethnonational- sure, o- course, to portray it as having ist de.nition o- who and what belongs taken place under ++, leadership. Mitter to China. And as .lmmakers navigate aptly describes this as an “uneasy the party’s limited tolerance for ambi- balance between allowing a more inclusive guity, the result is often big-budget .lms history and trying not to damage the that emphasize the scale and horror o- myths o- the ++,’s history.” World War II without the kind o- One is left wondering why the ++, nuance that would humanize its victims has policed history strictly at some and perpetrators. For many Western times but not at others. Mitter hints at critics, these .lms provide too much some international factors driving the “loud spectacle and cheap sentiment,” ++,’s “grudging relaxation o- interpre- writes Mitter, describing the critical tations o- the war,” including its interest responses to Zhang Yimou’s Flowers of in cultivating ties with Taiwan and in War, which chronicles Japan’s brutal reminding Japan o- its unsettled war- occupation o/ Nanjing, and Feng time past. Ultimately, however, a lack o- Xiaogang’s Back to 1942, which recounts clarity on this question may simply the Henan famine. re2ect the reality that under the ++,’s Even more important is the simple rule, the shifting boundaries o- what is fact that China’s growing authoritarian- permissible are rarely easy to discern. ism is at odds with the dominant postwar narrative in Europe and the United States ITS OWN WORST ENEMY that explains why the war was fought: to The ++, faces an uphill battle in selling save democracy from fascism. As an its newly revised version o- China’s increasingly dictatorial party-state, the World War II history to audiences ++, obviously cannot embrace that outside China. Part o- the problem lies version o* history or .nd an easy way to in Western historiography and preju- insert China into it. As Mitter percep- dice, Mitter writes: China’s role in the tively observes, “keeping the world safe war has been neglected for so long in for consumerist authoritarianism is hardly Western countries that few people in a very attractive o0er in the twenty-.rst those places have an interest in learning century,” especially for the leading
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democracies that continue to put the &ght nuclear proliferation while also parrying for freedom at the center o" their own the e!ects o" China’s growing authori- national ethos. Indeed, the $$%’s growing tarianism and pugilistic nationalism. surveillance state and brutal “reeducation” Beijing’s attempt to recast the history and internment camps in Xinjiang have o# World War II might help them do so. led many outside observers to accuse Xi Without endorsing the $$%’s version o" o" reviving fascism. history or excusing Beijing’s aggression There is also some risk in Beijing’s abroad and abuses at home, leaders in strategy o" recasting China’s history in Washington and elsewhere could more order to in'uence perceptions o" its explicitly acknowledge China’s contri- present and potential future role in the butions to ending World War II and world. The more China portrays itsel" creating the existing order. Doing so as a defender o" the postwar order, the might mitigate the growing sense more it might spur a sense among among Chinese citizens that the United Chinese citizens that their country is States and its partners will never allow entitled to more in'uence and an ever China to play a leading role on the more central role in international a!airs world stage. That recognition could in in the decades to come. The rest o" the turn help Washington press the $$% to world, however, might not play along. pull back on its campaign to intimidate And should China encounter concerted, and punish its critics abroad. An agree- uni&ed opposition to its global ambi- ment o" that kind would not solve many tions, the $$%—and the world—might o" the problems plaguing relations have to contend with a growing sense o" between the United States and China. grievance, disappointment, and resent- But it is precisely the kind o" carefully ment among the Chinese people. &nessed arrangement that Washington This dynamic goes beyond Beijing’s and Beijing will have to get much better e!orts to recast history, o" course. Over at crafting i" they are to achieve any- the past four years, China positioned thing resembling peaceful coexistence.∂ itsel" as a defender o" international institutions and agreements threatened by the Trump administration, from the World Health Organization to the Paris climate accord. At the same time, however, Beijing has tried to diminish the role o" universal values in the international order, instead elevating economic development and state security over individual political rights. For China’s neighbors and rivals, the $$%’s mixture o" cooperation and confrontation de&nes the “China challenge”: how to work with Beijing on controlling the $()*+-19 pandemic, slowing climate change, and preventing
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themselves. Pollution was reconceived Market Value as a tradable good. Spending money was declared to be a form o3 free speech. The evangelists o3 free exchange Can Capitalism Serve insisted that unregulated capitalism and Democracy? liberal democracy were symbiotic. A hal" century later, it is getting harder to Binyamin Appelbaum #nd people who still think that is true. There is an ineluctable tension between property and democracy: political free- dom is, among other things, the danger- Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight ous idea that the polity gets to de#ne to Liberate Itself From the Grip of the property rights. Maintaining a market Invisible Hand economy and a liberal democracy re- BY MIKE KONCZAL. New Press, 2021, quires a careful balancing act. And it is 256 pp. clear that Americans o" all political persuasions are losing interest in forg- t has become a matter o" general ing the necessary compromises. agreement among citizens o" the On the right, there is a growing Irichest country on earth that things willingness to sacri#ce democracy. As the are not going so well. The United States historian Quinn Slobodian pointed out in its 245th year is an ailing nation—so- in his 2018 book, Globalists, defenders cially, politically, and economically. In o" property rights are not opponents o" the recent presidential election, one government involvement in the econ- political party promised to “make Amer- omy; rather, they have sought, with ica great again—again.” The other rallied considerable success, to encase property supporters to “build back better.” Nobody in a fortress o$ laws expressly designed talked about “morning in America” or to limit the power o" the polity. This anything similarly sunny. Everyone can defense o" privilege is understandably see that it is dark outside. infuriating to the many Americans who During the country’s last national lack the economic security to provide funk, in the 1970s, Americans latched for their families or the opportunity to on to the idea that the market would set pursue their dreams. It fuels the re4exive them free. The result was an era o" hostility toward the market that increas- religious reverence for property rights ingly colors policy debates among liberals. and markets in everything, as a solution In his new book, Freedom From the not just to the country’s economic Market, Mike Konczal, the director o" problems but to its social and political the Progressive Thought Program at problems, too. People were reclassi#ed the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank as a form o" capital and told to invest in focused on economic inequality, goes beyond arguments in favor o" regulat- BINYAMIN APPELBAUM is a member of the ing markets or establishing new govern- New York Times editorial board and the author of The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free ment programs to redistribute income. Markets, and the Fracture of Society. “This book,” he writes, “argues that true
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freedom requires keeping us free from in the spotlight is the idea that the the market.” In his account, the market government should give people money, economy isn’t an engine o# broad perhaps in the form o! a universal basic prosperity, and it certainly isn’t comple- income. But giving people money is not mentary to political freedom. “Market the same thing as ensuring that people dependence,” he declares, “is a pro- have health care. Another corrective is found state o! unfreedom.” to provide services deemed essential. Konczal provides a compelling Public schools are a notable example. account o! the problems with markets. Konczal is a partisan o! the second But his indictment misses the ways in approach. He wants the government to which the expansion o! the market endow all Americans with the basics nec- economy has often produced precisely essary to participate fully in a modern the kinds o! changes he seeks. For all democratic society, a list that includes the skepticism o! the market on the left, health care, a college education, and it remains an important tool. broadband Internet. He argues that the government must do the job because the PRECONDITIONS FOR FREEDOM market won’t. “The distribution o! goods The progressive conception o$ freedom in a market economy doesn’t match what is the product o! several centuries o! we need to live free lives,” he writes. trial and error. First came the assertion Many policy books present theoreti- that people are entitled to freedom from cal arguments lightly studded with various forms o! oppression. That is the anecdotes. One gets the feeling that the kind o$ freedom that was enshrined in baker begrudged each chocolate chip he the Bill o$ Rights. But equality before the put into the pound cake. Konczal’s book law isn’t worth much without the is tastier. He built a name for himsel! as ability to participate in writing those laws, a blogger in the years after the 2008 so next came the assertion that freedom "nancial crisis, and he knows how to requires universal su%rage. But partici- narrate. His book is a retelling o! U.S. pation isn’t worth much unless people history as a long struggle to limit the can participate as equals. As U.S. President role o! the market. “For two centuries,” Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed in 1944, he writes, “Americans have been "ght- “We have come to a clear realization o! ing for freedom from the market.” The the fact that true individual freedom people have won some victories: food cannot exist without economic security stamps for children, unemployment and independence.” bene"ts for workers, Medicare for the The problem with relying on a elderly. Lately, however, the war hasn’t market economy to deliver economic been going so well. Increasingly, the security and independence is encapsu- quality o# life is determined by the ability lated in an old joke: “Ah yes, like the to pay—for health insurance, education, Ritz Hotel, open to rich and poor housing. The wealthy live well, and the alike”—that is, although everyone may poor struggle. A major obstacle, in be allowed to buy what he needs, not Konczal’s view, is that Americans have everyone can a%ord to do so. One been taught to equate markets with proposed corrective enjoying a moment freedom and to regard government as a
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constraint on markets and freedom. home—at least those who couldn’t a*ord “Battles for the future o+ our country and childcare without a government subsidy. society are not won on arguments about After the war, they successfully forced market failures, on the balance sheets o+ the closure o+ the federally subsidized accounts, or on narrowly tailored, daycare centers. In 1954, when Congress incremental solutions,” he writes in his introduced a tax deduction for childcare conclusion. “They are won on arguments expenses, it was initially restricted to about freedom.” To win, progressives women who could demonstrate that they need to reclaim the banner o. freedom. needed paid work. Konczal is right to argue that childcare should be readily NO ESCAPING THE MARKET available in the United States today. But Although Konczal’s commitment to a public support for childcare is not just a broader and more muscular de-nition matter o+ providing people with the o. freedom is admirable, he ultimately freedom to participate fully in society or misjudges the relationship between in democracy. It also a*ords the freedom markets and freedom. Reading Kon- to participate in the market economy. czal’s book, one is often struck that the The freedom to participate in the Americans he portrays were -ghting market can also strengthen democracy. not to escape from the market but to Konczal opens his narrative with one o+ participate in it more fully. They saw the formative episodes in the creation o+ government not as an alternative to the the modern United States: the redistri- market but as a means o+ shaping it. bution o+ western lands. He recounts In one chapter, set during World War II, the ferment on the densely populated Konczal tells o+ the creation o+ almost Eastern Seaboard that produced the three dozen daycare centers in Richmond, Homestead Act, the legislation that California, to tend to the children o+ allowed Americans to claim enough land women employed in the city’s sprawling for a family farm. “Are you an American shipyards. Families that used the centers, citizen?” brayed Horace Greeley’s or the more than 3,100 other wartime New-York Daily Tribune. “Then you are a daycare facilities that opened across the joint-owner o+ the public lands. Why not United States, paid only a nominal fee. take enough o+ your property to provide The government covered the balance. yoursel+ a home? Why not vote yoursel+ Konczal describes this as an instance o+ a farm?” Americans did just that: the Americans successfully escaping the polity established rules for the distribu- tyranny o+ market forces: the government tion o+ common property. According to provided mothers with a service other- Konczal, more than 46 million Ameri- wise unavailable or una*ordable. But the cans are descended from the homestead- government acted so women could ers who claimed pieces o+ the land. work—and it did so by paying other Konczal argues that the Homestead women to work in the daycare centers. Act re,ected “an unapologetic demand to Opponents o+ the daycare program keep something away from the market.” were the ones who sought to preserve a In fact, it was the means by which much space outside the market. They argued o+ the continent was commodi-ed. The that mothers should remain in the United States took land occupied by
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New to market: homesteaders in Custer County, Nebraska, 1889
Native Americans and rede#ned it as CAPITALISM IN THE SERVICE private property for white Americans. OF DEMOCRACY Many proponents and bene#ciaries o" The appeal o3 free-market rhetoric rests SOLOMON the Homestead Act envisioned yeomanry partly in its simplicity: the government as an alternative to wage labor, but not should protect economic freedom,
D. as an escape from the market economy: narrowly de#ned as property rights, and
BUTCHER corn, wheat, and other cash crops pre- facilitate free exchange. Progressives have dominated from the outset. The Home- struggled to articulate an alternative. stead Act should be seen as a lesson in What should Americans want instead? / NEBRASKA the power o" government to construct One powerful idea is to invert the markets, and in the lasting consequences subordination o" political freedom to o" its choices. Millions o" smallholders economic freedom. In the philosopher STATE gained a footing in the market economy, Debra Satz’s formulation, “Democratic giving greater substance to the egalitar- societies depend on the ability o" their HISTORICAL SOCIETY HISTORICAL ian rhetoric o" the country’s founders. citizens to operate as equals.” Therefore, At the same time, the exclusion o" where “markets undermine or block Native Americans from their lands, and egalitarian relationships between people, o3 Black people from land ownership, there is a case for market regulation, still weighs on American society and even when such markets are otherwise American democracy. e5cient.” Most market activities
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wouldn’t be a,ected by such a principle. home on Saturday. They wanted to place Satz also notes, importantly, that some capitalism in the service o* freedom. kinds o+ market activities serve to The Trump years provided Ameri- strengthen democracy. cans with a brutal lesson in the impor- In 1905, the Supreme Court, in tance o+ public policy. The dawn o+ a Lochner v. New York, struck down a new administration o,ers a chance to state law that said bakers could not work act on that lesson. Americans need more than ten hours a day or 60 hours a government help to obtain an educa- week. The majority held that the law tion, to care for themselves and for interfered with the freedom o+ workers family members, to pursue economic and employers to make voluntary opportunities. But progressives will arrangements. In a famous dissent, squander the moment i+ they frame Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., those goals as a -ght against markets. pointed out that the status quo was an What Americans need is a fuller meas- arti-cial construct. Every market has ure o* freedom—the freedom to partici- rules; it is just a question o+ what those pate in democratic society and in the rules should be. “Holmes was pointing marketplace.∂ out that a truly neutral market was a lie,” Konczal writes. By barring New York from acting, the Court wasn’t preserving the purity o+ markets. It was siding with employers. It already allowed various forms o+ interference, such as bank- ruptcy and limited shareholder liability. “The only time the courts would call foul was when laws provided better protections for workers.” Konczal describes the rise o+ the labor movement and its eventual success in the long battles to restrict the work- day and the workweek as an example o+ the antimarket tendency in American life. Workers, he writes, “wanted a space and time free from the marketplace.” There is another way to portray the same story, however. Union leaders and activists are justly celebrated as “the people who brought you the weekend.” But the value o+ the weekend is that it follows the workweek. Americans already enjoyed the freedom to refrain from working. What they wanted was the freedom to work and then to go home at the end o+ the workday and stay
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FA.indb 202 1/22/21 9:01 PM Independence Vision Scholarship Policy Nonpartisanship Debate A Century of Ideas. Analysis Deliberation Innovation
For 100 years, the Council on Foreign Impact Relations has championed bold ideas, expert research, and spirited debate about America’s role in the world. Thank you for participating in that conversation Diplomacy and for trusting us to convene it.
Join us in celebrating the last century and welcoming the next: cfr.org/100 Purpose Education feature o" great-power politics: think, for Recent Books instance, o" Anglo-German and Franco- German relations in the decades before World War I. But Rosato concludes that Political and Legal even in more favorable situations (such as relations between the United Kingdom G. John Ikenberry and the United States at the turn o" the twentieth century), leaders were never able to acquire “#rst hand information” o" Intentions in Great Power Politics: the other state’s true intentions. Rosato’s Uncertainty and the Roots of Con#ict argument verges on a simple truism: BY SEBASTIAN ROSATO. Yale there are inherent epistemological limits University Press, 2021, 376 pp. on what a state can know for sure about another state. His theory yields a “de- ne o" the oldest insights in the pressing prediction” regarding U.S.- study o" international relations Chinese relations, which he sees as Ois that peaceful relations among burdened with cultural, ideological, and great powers hinge on trust. In this institutional barriers to understanding engaging book, Rosato surveys great-power each other’s intentions. relations across the modern era and concludes that it is mistrust—not trust— After Democracy: Imagining Our that is deeply rooted and ubiquitous. His Political Future key claim is that a state can build trust BY ZIZI PAPACHARISSI. Yale only when it has credible knowledge o" University Press, 2021, 176 pp. another state’s true intentions and that, even under the best o" circumstances, Liberal democracy has fallen on hard acquiring such knowledge is di5cult. times, besieged by populist and authori- Obviously, mistrust is famously a de#ning tarian challengers. In this fascinating, i"
It is with sadness that we note the recent passing o" RICHARD COOPER, who had been the magazine’s regular reviewer o$ books on economics since 1993. For decades, Cooper taught international economics, #rst at Yale and later at Harvard, training three generations o" the best minds in the #eld. Cooper was not only a scholar but also a practitioner, serving in a number o$ high-level government positions during his long career, including as U.S. undersecretary o" state for economic a!airs. We were honored to publish him for so many years, and we will miss his insight, his concision, and his wisdom. We are lucky to have as his replacement BARRY EICHENGREEN, whose #rst set o" re- views appear in this issue. Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee pro- fessor o" economics and political science at the University o" California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau o3 Economic Research and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His books in- clude The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era and Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses—and Misuses—of History.
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slightly meandering, rumination on the “grand transitions”—in population, future o" democracy, Papacharissi sees agriculture, energy, economics, and the glimmers o$ hope amid growing obstacles. environment. Smil has an eye for From its ancient roots in classical interesting details, but he is better at Greece, government “by the people” has showing the interconnections, turning repeatedly been in crisis, faced extinc- points, and pathways o" societal change tion, and enjoyed moments o" rebirth. than in pinpointing cause and e!ect. Papacharissi is particularly interested in Nevertheless, he tells a remarkable story the impact on citizens o" the information o" the human capacity to innovate, revolution and Internet-based communi- build, and integrate societies across vast cation platforms. Social media tools distances. He worries, however, that such as Facebook and Twitter appear to economic inequality and the rapid degra- provide a “public space” for conversa- dation o" the environment will overwhelm tions, but not a “public sphere” in which the human talent for adaptation. citizens can engage with one another as members o" a political community. The The Frontlines of Peace: An Insider’s Guide book is organized as a sort o" travelogue, to Changing the World studded with interviews with people BY SEVERINE AUTESSERRE. Oxford from a variety o" countries. Across diverse University Press, 2021, 240 pp. political settings, these interviewees emphasize that they value democracy Through memoir and reportage, not just as a framework for the protec- Autesserre tells the story o" international tion o" rights but also as a way o" recon- peacekeeping and humanitarian relie" ciling di!erences and preserving the operations through her own eyes and greater good o" the country. Papacharissi those o" aid workers and victims o" distills his conversations into an agenda violence. Drawn from several decades for the repair o" the liberal democratic o" experience in war-torn countries such way o$ life: invest more in civic education, as Afghanistan, the Democratic Repub- reduce economic inequality, and foster a lic o" the Congo, and Kosovo, more public interest media environment Autesserre paints a harrowing portrait that prizes the truth. o" nongovernmental organizations, diplomats, and peacekeepers struggling Grand Transitions: How the Modern to resolve con4icts. Along the way, she World Was Made sharply critiques the top-down, outsider- BY VACLAV SMIL. Oxford University led approach to international peace- Press, 2021, 384 pp. making, or what she calls “Peace, Inc.,” in which 7+ and Western diplomats run Smil o!ers a sweeping account o" the the show. Autesserre argues that in deep material forces that have shaped these sorts o" operations, outside the modern world. He argues that the peacekeepers and aid o5cials tend to centuries-long move o$ humanity from interact primarily with national-level traditional agricultural societies into a political and military leaders and rarely more complex, globe-spanning indus- venture into the local con4ict zones or trial civilization has been driven by #ve come equipped with in-depth knowledge
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o" the history, politics, and culture o" minded states committed to a shared the countries they seek to help. vision o" international order, multilateral Autesserre calls her preferred alterna- institutions will increasingly be shaped tive “Peaceworld,” a bottom-up ap- by short-term transactional politics. proach in which aid workers immerse themselves in local areas and build ties to grassroots organizations. The book’s Economic, Social, and evocative and often moving stories all Environmental illustrate her core insight: that “peace communities” are built at the local level, neighborhood by neighborhood. Barry Eichengreen
Ideology and International Institutions BY ERIK VOETEN. Princeton The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing University Press, 2021, 224 pp. Societies, Waning Inequality, and an In#ation Revival In this impressive book, Voeten argues BY CHARLES GOODHART AND that although multilateral bodies such as MANOJ PRADHAN. Palgrave the World Trade Organization may Macmillan, 2020, 260 pp. appear to be “neutral” and “universalis- tic,” they more often than not re4ect the n this thought-provoking book, values and ideological orientations o" Goodhart and Pradhan seek to explain their most powerful sponsors. The U.S.- Ithe rising inequality, stagnant led postwar multilateral system provided wages, and disin4ationary pressures o" a framework for an open and rules-based recent years. They describe how the global economy, but it also privileged the integration into the world economy o" classical liberal values o" private prop- China and other emerging markets, erty, individual rights, and limited with their initially young populations, government. The collapse o" the Soviet added billions o" workers to the global Union ended the Cold War era o" labor force. In the advanced economies, ideological contestation, but Voeten sees this disadvantaged less skilled workers, U.S.-style liberalism facing a new reduced the power o" workers and labor challenge from an upsurge in national- unions, and increased inequality. In ism, Islamism, populism, authoritarian- addition, a 4ood o" new supply into ism, and state-led capitalism. The book’s global markets, together with China’s primary contribution is how it identi#es high savings, put a lid on global in4a- the ideological elements o" interstate bar- tion. But as populations now age, includ- gaining over multilateral rules and ing in China, and as the high savings institutions. Voeten concedes that many rates o" more elderly populations come o" the political disputes that take place in down, the same dynamics will run in multilateral forums are old-fashioned reverse. This will make for falling inequal- parochial struggles over the distribution ity, rising wages, and higher in4ation. o" economic gains. He argues that in the Perhaps, as the authors argue, demogra- absence o" a dominant coalition o$ like- phy is destiny. Still, one wonders
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whether politicians might also have The Mismeasure of Progress: Economic something to say about what happens to Growth and Its Critics the distribution o" wealth and income BY STEPHEN J. MACEKURA. and whether central banks will really be University o" Chicago Press, 2020, powerless to shape the course o" in4ation. 320 pp.
The Double X Economy: The Epic Gross national product is a familiar Potential of Women’s Empowerment measure o" the size o" an economy, and BY LINDA SCOTT. Farrar, Straus and the change in *+6 is a familiar measure Giroux, 2020, 384 pp. o" the rate o" economic growth. But decisions about what to include in *+6 Scott has crafted an impassioned account and how to value those components o" the personal and societal costs o" turn on how economic activity is denying economic opportunity to women. conceptualized by the social scientists The book is part synthesis o" scholarship and statisticians responsible for and part polemic—not a bad thing constructing the measure. Macekura when one is addressing a wide audience. traces the genesis and trajectory o" the Her analysis is informed by #eldwork in idea over the course o" the twentieth Ghana, South Africa, and Uganda and century. He shows how the invention o" also by reams o" data from international *+6 encouraged a focus on aggregate institutions and nongovernmental economic growth as the objective o" organizations. Scott documents the costs, economic policy and describes the long in terms o" equity but also in terms o" line o" skeptics who have criticized *+6 economic development and growth, o" for neglecting nonmarket work, ignor- gender gaps in education, pay, and access ing the distribution o" income, failing to #nance, shedding light on the societal to account for resource depletion and origins o" these disparities. She shows how environmental degradation, and focus- simple interventions in developing ing on output rather than human countries—providing sanitary pads to welfare or happiness. The reader comes encourage school attendance by young away persuaded that *+6, although an women, for instance—can make a imperfect summary indicator o" the di!erence. As for why such interventions state o" an economy, plays an outsize are not more extensive, Scott points to role in contemporary conceptions o" patriarchal societies that deny women a economic policy and performance. seat at the decision-making table. She applies the same critique to advanced Angrynomics countries and to the economics profession BY ERIC LONERGAN AND MARK itself, which she indicts for its limited BLYTH. Agenda, 2020, 192 pp. attention to issues o" gender inequality. Framed as a dialogue between a hedge fund manager (Lonergan) and a political scientist (Blyth), this equally entertaining and rigorous book locates the roots o" today’s angry, antiestablishment politics
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in macroeconomic and #nancial insta- chaos and arbitrariness o" the war: bility, technological change, and rising soldiers die as they enter a supposedly inequality, which together have created friendly Afghan base, are maimed step- a sense o" economic exclusion and ping on mines, try to keep wounded insecurity. But despite emphasizing the colleagues alive as they wait for an evacua- economic origins o" political move- tion helicopter to arrive, and inadver- ments, the authors build less than one tently call in an airstrike on a hospital, might expect on the extensive scholarly killing doctors and patients. Donati literature on economic populism and speaks with military wives who recall the give short shrift to explanations that moment they heard about the death o" focus on culture and identity politics. their partner and with veterans trying to The book is strongest when it o!ers make their way in civilian life. Her novel policies for stabilizing the econ- vivid, uncompromising reporting presents omy and for addressing stagnation and U.S. politicians and senior military insecurity, including two-tier interest commanders as disconnected from the rates (one at which the central bank reality o" the war as they 4ounder in lends, and another that it pays on deposits search o" a satisfactory way out o" it. or reserves), cash transfers to house- holds (“helicopter money”), and a Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries national wealth fund to tackle inequality. Change in Wartime BY DAVID BARNO AND NORA BENSAHEL. Oxford University Press, Military, Scienti#c, and 2020, 440 pp. Technological U.S. armed forces are commonly described as in4exible, too easily caught Lawrence D. Freedman out by the unexpected features o" a con4ict. Barno and Bensahel trace the factors that enable more nimble adapt- Eagle Down: The Last Special Forces ability: technology, shrewd leadership, Fighting the Forever War and sound doctrine. They examine how BY JESSICA DONATI. PublicA!airs, these factors have helped account for 2021, 320 pp. U.S. military successes and failures in operations dating back to World War II. lmost two decades after the 9/11 U.S. armed forces adapted well in attacks, U.S. Special Forces are learning to work with the Northern Astill #ghting in Afghanistan and Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 and with trying to keep the Taliban at bay. This tribal coalitions during the so-called long war consists o" numerous small Anbar Awakening in Iraq in 2005. engagements, barely noticed back home Then, however, General David McKier- unless the casualties are unusually heavy nan in Afghanistan and General George or the government in Kabul loses Casey in Iraq struggled to adjust their control o" some vital city. Covering the tactics to conditions on the ground and #ghting since 2015, Donati captures the so failed to stem the tide o" violence.
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The authors warn o" the coming radical system, and shows *.98’s operational changes in the strategic environment, importance to the conduct o" colonial including increasing tension with China, and postcolonial con4icts, including the and argue that the U.S. military has to 1982 Falklands War. transform the way it goes about its business, resisting doctrinal rigidity and Diagnosing Dissent: Hysterics, Deserters, organizational inertia and #nding new and Conscientious Objectors in Germany kinds o$ leaders. This is a thoughtful and During World War One informed analysis, even though it has BY REBECCA AYAKO BENNETTE. quite a narrow focus on land forces and Cornell University Press, 2020, 240 pp. doesn’t consider the political contexts o" U.S. military operations, especially in German veterans o$ World War I were con4icts in which the United States has treated callously when they exhibited had to work closely with local forces. symptoms o" shell shock, labeled “war tremblers” or branded as hysterics and Behind the Enigma: The Authorised cowards. Some psychiatrists described History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber- forms o" conscientious objection—defy- Intelligence Agency ing conscription and refusing to #ght on BY JOHN FERRIS. Bloomsbury, 2020, ethical grounds—as a medical pathol- 848 pp. ogy. All o" this foreshadowed the later practices o" the Nazis. Drawing from Given that until recently the British meticulous research into patient records, government refused to acknowledge the Bennette complicates this picture. She existence o" its World War II–era code- shows that many psychiatrists were actu- breaking organization, this informative ally more sympathetic than previously o5cial history o" the Government imagined to those patients su!ering Communications Headquarters, or from the trauma o" their time on the *.98, one o" the United Kingdom’s lead- front. Her investigations also reveal that ing intelligence agencies, is remarkable. many more Germans were conscientious Ferris’s narrative takes on the breaking o" objectors than had been assumed. the Nazi’s Enigma code at Bletchley Park Although they could be harsh and dismis- during World War II and the e!orts to sive, many psychiatrists provided a replicate that achievement during the space in which traumatized veterans Cold War. G.98 now plays a major role and dissidents could express themselves. in all areas o" cybersecurity. Its activities, along with those o" the U.S. National Ho Chi Minh Trail, 1964–1973: Steel Security Agency, were compromised Tiger, Barrel Roll, and the Secret Air War when a former +-, contractor, Edward in Vietnam and Laos Snowden, revealed them in 2013. Ferris’s BY PETER A. DAVIES. Osprey, 2020, account avoids sensationalism. It pro- 96 pp. vides a careful judgment o3 Bletchley Park’s impact, points to how signals intel- The publisher Osprey’s short books on ligence during the Cold War usefully particular military campaigns can be illuminated the lower levels o" the Soviet invaluable for students o" contemporary
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warfare. They feature matter-of-fact subtleties o" policy debates, and convey descriptions, burnished with plentiful “what it’s like to be the president o" the illustrations and maps. The Ho Chi Minh United States.” Although he has suc- Trail, which helped supply North ceeded in each, these multiple ambitions Vietnamese and Vietcong forces during mean that what was intended to be a the Vietnam War, certainly deserves a single-volume, 500-page memoir ended volume o" its own. The trail was a up being 700 pages and only covering logistical marvel, dipping in and out o" the #rst 30 months o$ his presidency. The Cambodia and Laos, running more than book’s length is also the result o" 12,000 miles over mountains and through thoughtful but un#nished conversations jungles, and employing over 100,000 he holds with himsel" on nearly every workers. The route sustained North subject. Phrases such as “To this day I Vietnam’s war e!ort and was kept open wonder . . . whether I should have been despite numerous bids to shut it down. bolder” appear on page after page. Davies outlines the various U.S. at- Obama began writing only a month after tempts—including airstrikes and the the end o$ his eight-year tenure as employment o" sensors and physical president. Had he taken longer to digest barriers—to stop the North Vietnamese the experience, more o" these open-ended from using the trail. He concentrates on re4ections might have reached conclu- the actions o" the U.S. Air Force, neglect- sions. Perhaps that will come in the next ing the contribution o" U.S. Navy and installment, which may also address some Marine 4yers. Despite the military and o" the odd omissions in this volume, technological prowess o" the Americans, such as the nuclear policy issues to which the North Vietnamese were su5ciently he devoted so much e!ort while in o5ce. resourceful to keep their supplies moving. The American Crisis: What Went Wrong. How We Recover. The United States BY THE WRITERS OF THE $TL$NTIC. Simon & Schuster, 2020, Jessica T. Mathews 576 pp. This collection o" some o" the best recent writing in The Atlantic delays discussion A Promised Land o" U.S. President Donald Trump and BY BARACK OBAMA. Crown, 2020, Trumpism until the second hal" o" the 768 pp. book. It begins with considerations o" the destabilizing forces that have grown bama is a gifted writer. His in recent decades: widening economic prose is lean, supple, graphic, inequality, declining social mobility, Oand lively. In a dozen words, he structural racism, and a fractured health- can snap a memorable picture o" a care system still impervious to full political interlocutor or a foreign leader. reform. The next set o" essays turn to He set out to recount what happened politics, parsing the roles o" individuals during his presidency, elucidate the (such as former Republican House
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Speaker Newt Gingrich and the former Republican determination to repeal the Trump aide Paul Manafort) and broader law and replace it with an unde#ned sources o" political dysfunction, includ- alternative has prevented legislators from ing voter suppression, gerrymandering, correcting the inevitable defects in a expanded presidential powers, and social massive new government program, media. The collection o" pieces on leaving the law weaker than it should be. Trump, his family, his advisers, and his Cohn traces the debate over the ,., as it policies includes great reporting and unfolded in think tanks, lobbyist o5ces, gripping insights, especially in the legislative committees, and the Oval shortest piece in the book, “The Cruelty O5ce with impressive clarity and in an Is the Point,” by Adam Serwer, which engaging, highly readable narrative that was originally published in 2018 but is makes arcane issues accessible. His own equally applicable to the emotions let bias in favor o" universal coverage is loose in the attack on the U.S. Capitol in explicit, but he treats fairly the philosoph- January. The last section, weak only by ical and economic arguments o" the comparison to what precedes it, turns to opposing view. This valuable history will the future, not so much with policy help inform the continuing battle for an recommendations as with reminders o" e5cient, equitable, and a!ordable U.S. the “tools still at our disposal—values, health-care system. outlooks, attitudes, instincts.” This volume is a superb resource in helping America in the World: A History of U.S. Americans understand how they have Diplomacy and Foreign Policy arrived where they are now. BY ROBERT B. ZOELLICK. Twelve, 2020, 560 pp. The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Un"nished Crusade for Universal Coverage In approaching his ambitious subject, BY JONATHAN COHN. St. Martin’s Zoellick combines a practitioner’s Press, 2021, 416 pp. wisdom, gleaned from hal" a dozen jobs in senior government posts, with schol- The “ten year war” o" the title refers to arly research and deep knowledge o" the decade from U.S. President Barack how Washington works. The book is not Obama’s election in 2008 to the defeat o" quite what the title promises, instead the House Republican majority in 2018, o!ering a highly selective retelling o" in which no political issue was more notable incidents in U.S. diplomacy. The; decisive than the A!ordable Care Act, rationale for what Zoellick includes and the most important piece o$ legislation in omits is not always clear. His chapters the country in hal" a century. Cohn on the pathbreaking contributions o" recognizes that the law is “highly 4awed, three secretaries o" state—Elihu Root, distressingly compromised, [and] woe- who served under President Theodore fully incomplete,” but he nonetheless Roosevelt and championed international credits the act with representing a major law, Charles Evans Hughes, who served step toward establishing a!ordable health in the 1920s and secured agreements on care as a universal right, as it is in every arms control, and Cordell Hull, who other developed country. Unrelenting served under President Franklin Roo-
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sevelt and helped lay the groundwork for exits from power, but . . . remain as the postwar liberal order—are particu- traces within the body o" their people” larly interesting, as is his treatment o" could not be more timely. the science administrator Vannevar Bush, whose work under Roosevelt during World War II laid the foundation for Western Europe later U.S. preeminence in science and technology. But in most cases, the Andrew Moravcsik important subject areas these discus- sions open up do not reappear. Dismis- sive o" doctrines, Zoellick points instead to #ve enduring “traditions” that Quo vadis Hungaria? (Where Is Hungary should guide U.S. policymakers: the Heading?): Foreign Policy Dilemmas and need for U.S. dominance in North Strategic Vision America, the importance o" trade and BY ISTVAN SZENT 212 %&'()*+ ,%%,)'- FA.indb 212 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books confusing, and unsuccessful”—as some o3 #rms with stricter controls on immi- might see Orban’s recent surrender to gration and a general (i" vague) respect for the Council o" the (7 on legal disputes. “the ethnic and cultural identities o" Although such insider critiques o" one’s white Britons.” How current Conserva- country’s foreign policy are common- tives would accept and enact this odd mix place in the United Kingdom and the remains a mystery. United States, this sophisticated account is a pathbreaking exception in central A Velvet Empire: French Informal Europe and worthy o" a wide readership. Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century BY DAVID TODD. Princeton Remaking One Nation: The Future of University Press, 2021, 368 pp. Conservatism BY NICK TIMOTHY. Polity Press, In the nineteenth and early twentieth 2020, 224 pp. century, European imperial powers preferred to control certain colonial Timothy, the top political adviser to territories by indirect means: they sought former British Prime Minister Theresa to co-opt local economic and cultural May, pleads for a reorientation o" the elites rather than establish full territorial British Conservative Party toward a new control. This strategy o" “informal centrist ideology. The fundamental imperialism” required far fewer resources problem facing the Tories—much like than direct rule and allowed the imperial- what their Republican cousins across the ists to focus on economic exploitation pond are facing—is the unpopularity o" rather than governance. The more formal the neoliberal agenda o$ lower taxes and “scramble for Africa” in the 1880s only economic deregulation that the party has intensi#ed when imperial powers began espoused since the election o3 Margaret bumping up against one another. British Thatcher 40 years ago. The consequent informal imperialism is well studied, but rise in inequality, social exclusion, regional Todd examines its less well-known blight, environmental degradation, French counterpart, which took shape substandard schooling, and rocky race especially in North Africa. Whereas relations has bred cynicism about govern- London enjoyed unmatched competitive- ment. Tory evangelizing about Brexit ness in cotton textiles, ironwork, trans- and nationalist identity politics generated port, and #nancial services, Paris domi- some blue-collar support in national nated in luxury goods such as silk and elections in 2019, but what now? Timothy velvet, women’s couture and cosmetics, seems sure about what the Tories should home furnishings, and #ne food and oppose: he lambasts stereotypical liberal drink. The French also took advantage “elites” who combine free-market eco- o" their strong legal services sector and nomics with pro-immigrant identity poli- state-supported banks. The luxury tics. Yet he struggles to #nd an alterna- trade was pro#table enough that, contrary tive. He proposes a new “communitarian” to what one often reads, neither France capitalism, combining a traditionally nor the United Kingdom was willing to left-wing agenda o$ higher taxes, stricter risk war with the other late in the regulation, and worker co-management nineteenth century in an attempt to March/April 2021 213 FA.indb 213 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books extend its possessions—leaving open Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a the question o" why governments Mystery established formal colonies at all. BY WENDY LESSER. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, 288 pp. Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music One o3 Europe’s oddest cultural exports BY ALEX ROSS. Farrar, Straus and in recent decades has been “Scandina- Giroux, 2020, 784 pp. vian noir” crime #ction. Lesser, a bicoastal American writer and critic Richard Wagner was Europe’s most who has followed these novels, 2/ in4uential artist o" the nineteenth shows, and movies since the 1980s, uses century. His virulent anti-Semitism and them (and a trip to Scandinavia) as a Adol3 Hitler’s obsessive love for his bridge to understanding contemporary operas have led many to treat him Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. simply as a bombastic proto-Nazi—a Readers undeterred by self-consciously view that Ross, a music critic at The ironic narrators who describe them- New Yorker, challenges. Wagner, he selves in the third person may #nd this observes, was in fact the most left-wing frothy mix o" travelogue, literary and antimilitaristic o" the great compos- criticism, and autobiography engaging. ers. Exiled from Germany for nearly Spoiler alert: in the end, the book’s two decades after he manned the premise explodes. Fictional Scandina- revolutionary barricades o" 1848 as an vian detectives closely resemble their anarchist, he produced a string o" counterparts anywhere else. Over- operas that belie his typical association whelmingly male, they resist dull with right-wing politics, including his middle-class lives, chafe under sti4ing four-opera Ring cycle, a socialist moral- bureaucracies, feel alienated in cities ity play about the triumph o$ love over full o" strangers, express ambivalence power, and his #nal work, Parsifal, a about strong women, drink too much, thinly disguised meditation on Bud- and fail to vanquish the evil rot at the dhism. Ross focuses especially on the core o" society. Their real-world coun- transformative impact that Wagnerian terparts are nothing like this. Instead, opera had not just on musicians but also the author encounters enlightened and on generations o$ leading painters, fair-minded professionals—many o" poets, theater directors, choreographers, them women—working closely with philosophers, classicists, psychologists, social workers to employ international and #lmmakers—not to mention best practices in societies where the feminists, environmentalists, gay rights rate o" violent crime is a fraction o" that activists, Zionists, African American in an average American city. intellectuals, and elected politicians— most o" whom were on the left. Wag- ner’s art allowed them all to unlock their own creativity because his operas let each listener take away something di!erent and profound. 214 %&'()*+ ,%%,)'- FA.indb 214 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books Hitler: Downfall, 1939–1945 Western Hemisphere BY VOLKER ULLRICH. TRANSLATED BY JEFFERSON CHASE. Knopf, 2020, 848 pp. Richard Feinberg Few #gures have been more thoroughly debated and dissected than Adol" Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Hitler. Today, one can only hope to Saved the American City retell his tale in clear prose, striking a BY A. K. SANDOVAL March/April 2021 215 FA.indb 215 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books borhoods. The book also includes a The Costs of Inequality in Latin America: smart overview o" national immigration Lessons and Warnings for the Rest of the legislation and its often unintended World consequences. BY DIEGO SÁNCHEZ 216 %&'()*+ ,%%,)'- FA.indb 216 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books Go%ng V%ral: COVID-19 and the Eastern Europe and Former Accelerated Transformat%on of Jobs %n Lat%n Amer%ca and the Car%bbean Soviet Republics BY GUILLERMO BEYLIS, ROBERTO FATTAL JAEF, MICHAEL MORRIS, Maria Lipman ASHWINI REKHA SEBASTIAN, AND RISHABH SINHA. World Bank, 2020, 109 pp. 1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution BY PAUL W. WERTH. Oxford This study is a reminder o" the abiding University Press, 2021, 240 pp. di5culty o" predicting how technological innovations will a!ect the future shape n Werth’s view, 1837 was a pivotal o" the workforce. The World Bank year in Russian history, witnessing economists who wrote this report lament Imajor developments in technology, the “premature deindustrialization” o" art, and intellectual life that then Latin America, where industrial employ- unfolded over time and marked Russia’s ment as a share o" total jobs declined entry into the modern age. The year before economies reached maturity. began with a symbolic and literal bang: Meanwhile, the rapidly expanding service in January, the great poet Aleksandr sector—a very broad grouping that Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel. includes the #nancial, accounting, retail After his death, Pushkin became a trade, communications, sports and symbol o3 Russian national identity, entertainment, hospitality, and tourism still commonly referred to as “our industries—is generally less productive everything” in both o5cial and popular than the manufacturing sector and o!ers parlance. Elsewhere, Russia’s #rst workers lower wages and few bene#ts. railroad opened. Tsar Nicholas I issued The authors’ central policy recommenda- a decree allowing the publication o" tions target the region’s Achilles’ heel: provincial newspapers, which played an the enduring de#cits in quality education important role in the subsequent and training for all age groups. The growth and consolidation o" the intel- authors do point to some grounds for ligentsia across the vast empire. The optimism, however. Jobs o!shored from philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev wrote advanced economies are expanding (rather Apology of a Madman, which, along with than hollowing out) positions for middle- his earlier, highly controversial work, skilled workers in places such as Mexico set the terms o" an essential (and and the countries o" Central America. ongoing) debate about whether Russia And the emergence o" digital platforms should strive to emulate Europe or could empower Latin American work- follow its own path. Werth combines ers to market their competitive skills and solid historical research with a lively innovative products worldwide. and occasionally playful style that makes his book an entertaining read. March/April 2021 217 FA.indb 217 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books Substate Dictatorship: Networks, Loyalty, The Things of Life: Materiality in Late and Institutional Change in the Soviet Soviet Russia Union BY ALEXEY GOLUBEV. Cornell BY YORAM GORLIZKI AND OLEG University Press, 2020, 240 pp. KHLEVNIUK. Yale University Press, 2020, 464 pp. Comradely Objects: Design and Material Culture in Soviet Russia, 1960s–80s In the second hal" o" Joseph Stalin’s rule, BY YULIA KARPOVA. Manchester Gorlizki and Khlevniuk write, the Soviet University Press, 2020, 248 pp. leader became a “surprisingly disciplined delegator.” He still presided over a regime Two books explore the meaning and built on fear and repression, but concerns impact o" material objects in the Soviet about e5ciency pushed him to accord his Union. Golubev’s intriguing work regional party leaders greater authority. closely follows a recent academic trend In their rigorous academic study based on that focuses on how objects facilitate a vast collection o" archival documents historical change. He delves into the and memoirs, the authors trace the signi#cance o" a number o" everyday evolution o" those territorial leaders from things and spaces, including scale the late 1940s to the 1970s. This choice o" models, the 2/ set, bodybuilders’ dumb- time frame is unusual, as it cuts across bells, and apartment building stairwells Stalin’s death, the removal o$ his succes- and basements, tracing their in4uence sor Nikita Khrushchev, and the early on Soviet attitudes and social practices. years o3 Leonid Brezhnev’s rule. To the The scale models o" ships and planes authors, however, those three decades are that children would build in youth united by one “outstanding feature”: the centers emphasized the historical conti- gradual decline in acts o" repression nuity o3 Russian and Soviet technologi- against members o" the communist cal breakthroughs, implicitly undermin- leadership. Stalin controlled local leaders ing the o5cial narrative o" the Bolshevik through an array o" institutional measures Revolution’s radical break from the and occasional purges. Khrushchev also prerevolutionary era. Iron weights were exercised tight controls, such as through a key element in shaping what Soviet political marginalization, but mostly bodybuilders imagined to be the proper dispensed with overt repression. The Soviet body and character. Although system opened up further under Brezhnev, bodybuilding was not o5cially sanc- who relied more on co-optation than tioned until the late 1980s, bodybuilders exclusion, began to recruit regional sought to discipline, often by force, leaders locally, and avoided the “unjusti- alternative, “non-Soviet” collections o" #ed turnover o" cadres.” The territorial youths, such as hippies or punks. At party leaders in Stalin’s time were “sub- times, the author drifts away from his state dictators,” who built their own focus on materiality. In the chapter #ercely coercive systems o" administration. about the 2/ set, for instance, he dwells Under Brezhnev, they became “party more on the social context o" 2/ viewing governors,” who maintained standards o" and on speci#c 2/ shows than on the 2/ decorum in everyday conduct. set itsel" as a material object. 218 %&'()*+ ,%%,)'- FA.indb 218 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books Karpova’s research into Soviet objects considered classics o" children’s literature. goes beyond the study o" material culture Most o" the texts selected for this and makes a great contribution to late volume are tales o" wonder that contain Soviet intellectual history. After Stalin’s remnants o" pagan beliefs, such as nature death, the political thaw and the partial spirits, miraculous transformations, opening to the West resurrected debates, returns from the dead, and poor but abandoned after the 1920s, about ways fearless heroes who must undergo many to make Soviet commodities a strong trials before winning the hearts o" alternative to capitalist ones. Karpova’s beautiful princesses. These tales don’t meticulous analysis includes grand always o!er easy morals. The seemingly projects, such as the construction and weak and silly may turn out to be the furnishing o" the Palace o3 Pioneers in smartest and luckiest. Humility and hard Moscow, a youth center she describes as work are commonly rewarded, but some- iconic and emblematic o3 Khrushchev-era times even laziness is a winning strategy; Soviet modernism; the 1960s design o" Emelya the Fool, for instance, owes his everyday items, such as alarm clocks, success to lying on the stove all day. The refrigerators, and kitchenware; and the translator also includes animal tales, in shift away from practical functionality which the wol" is strong but stupid, the toward objects charged with symbolic hare is cowardly, and the cunning fox meaning. Intense artistic and philosophi- easily outsmarts everybody. A third type cal debates accompanied the evolution o" o" stories, household tales, often show Soviet design. Karpova chronicles the wily peasants or soldiers outwitting transition from the functionalism o" the landlords or priests. Such impiety led the Khrushchev era, which praised basic tsar’s censors to ban many o" Afanasyev’s interiors and useful objects, to the more tales. Unfortunately, those censored tales 4orid “neodecorativism” o" the late don’t appear in this volume. 1960s, which emphasized a diversity o" tastes and spirituality, and, later still, to a conceptual move away from objects and Middle East toward integrated and balanced environ- ments in which objects and materials Lisa Anderson were well organized. Tales From Russian Folklore BY ALEXANDER AFANASYEV. Street Sounds: Listening to Everyday Life TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN in Modern Egypt PIMENOFF. Alma Classics, 2020, BY ZIAD FAHMY. Stanford University 320 pp. Press, 2020, 312 pp. In the mid-nineteenth century, the veryone who has ever been to ethnographer Afanasyev published around Cairo notices the city’s cacoph- 600 Russian folktales—the world’s Eony. This book is the story o" that largest academic collection o" such texts. din. Working in the relatively new In Russia, these tales have long been discipline o" sensory history, Fahmy March/April 2021 219 FA.indb 219 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books presents a fascinating account o" the “everyday activism,” and he links much accumulation o" sounds in Egypt. In the o" that activism’s organization and late nineteenth century, older notes—the ideology to the modernist urban planning call to prayer issuing from mosques, the o" the last 50 years. Authorities decanted slap o" sandals on pavements, the clack the populations o" crowded cities into o" dominoes and backgammon tiles on vast, new suburban housing tracts with café tables, the yelling o" peddlers modern conveniences, long straight hawking their wares—began to jostle streets, and wide sidewalks (unused, o" with the noises o" mechanical and course, in the hot local climate), in the electri#ed devices. Readers may be put hope that suburban living would depo- o! by the academic jargon (the author liticize the citizenry. Instead, these urges the abandonment o" an “ocular- suburbs have served to accentuate the centric” view o" the world), but wonder- alienation o" generations o" young people fully evocative descriptions and anecdotes who have found it di5cult to socialize leaven the book. Donkey carts clank, and and develop social networks outside their bicycles whistle; loud jubilation and families. For several decades, Islamist anguish mark weddings and funerals. The groups, including the Muslim Brother- advent o" electricity extended social hood, worked to #ll the void, providing hours and gave rise to a raucous nightlife afterschool and summer camp programs. that still spills onto the streets o" Cairo. Today, government repression has Radios and televisions would eventually restricted even these modest e!orts at blare from open windows and sidewalk social mobilization, leaving the pro- cafés, as railway and tram whistles foundly alienated youth o" the kingdom pierced the air. Finally, the 4ourish o" with few places to turn. the ubiquitous car horn punctuates the commotion, perfecting what residents Embodying Geopolitics: Generations of know as “the Cairo Opera.” Women’s Activism in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon Graveyard of the Clerics: Everyday BY NICOLA PRATT. University o" Activism in Saudi Arabia California Press, 2020, 328 pp. BY PASCAL MENORET. Stanford University Press, 2020, 264 pp. In an era when they are increasingly in positions o" power around the world, Typically, the smallest unit on the organi- women leaders seem conspicuously zational chart o" the Muslim Brother- absent in the Middle East. But as Pratt hood is called a “family,” a close-knit group shows, at least some o" the failure to see o" a dozen or so adherents. Menoret powerful women in the region is in the reveals that in Saudi Arabia, however, eye o" the beholder: Western precon- there is a smaller unit still: the “car,” a ceptions often make women invisible. group o3 four or #ve men who get (A personal example: when I was together to drive around and debate piety appointed president o" the American and politics. In this fascinating account, University in Cairo, the U.S. press Menoret shows that this famously announced that I was the #rst female despotic country has seen quite a lot o" university president in Egypt. In fact, I 220 %&'()*+ ,%%,)'- FA.indb 220 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books was the third.) This volume, based on variety and inventiveness o" what the interviews with over 100 women editors call “experiments in practice” activists in Egypt, Jordan, and Leba- during and after the uprisings. For non, traces the involvement o" women instance, a lawyer who advised govern- in political mobilization over the last 70 ments in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen years. It is a compelling portrait o" o!ers candid re4ections on post-uprising women working inside, outside, and constitutional reform. The founder o" against systems o" power, often at Egypt’s most important independent considerable cost to their personal news outlet perceptively explores safety and security. Pratt ends on a journalism in the face o" censorship. pessimistic note, recounting the fail- And a senior adviser to an Egyptian ures o" the uprisings o" the so-called presidential candidate discusses the Arab Spring to produce genuine debilitating consequences o" political change. Since her focus is on activists, stereotypes. The many contributions o" this concern is understandable, but this volume reveal that the fertile women in government also merit political debate sparked by the uprisings attention: in 2020, women held a continues today. quarter o3 Egypt’s cabinet posts, on par with the United Kingdom and more The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews than in the United States. and the Politics of Belonging BY ALMA RACHEL HECKMAN. Citizenship and Its Discontents: The Stanford University Press, 2020, 344 pp. Struggle for Rights, Pluralism, and Inclusion in the Middle East Observers often imagine personal EDITED BY THANASSIS CAMBANIS political identities in the Middle East as AND MICHAEL WAHID HANNA. ancient, inevitable, and immutable. But Century Foundation, 2019, 480 pp. the twentieth-century history o3 Mo- rocco’s Jewish Communists is a compel- In this sobering edited volume, Cambanis ling testament to the contingency o" and Hanna showcase a broad spec- such a5liations. Heckman focuses on trum o" academics, analysts, and activ- the careers o3 #ve prominent members ists in serious and provocative re4ection o" the Moroccan Jewish community on the disheartening results o" the so- from the days o" the French protector- called Arab Spring. Many o" the con- ate, in the early twentieth century, to tributors were participants in the move- the end o" the reign o3 Hassan II, in ments across the Arab world that called 1999. These men had various allegiances for “bread, freedom, and social justice”; and ties, including Muslim and Spanish disappointment in their failure leaps out in-laws; Algerian-born comrades; and from virtually every page. Nor are the deep attachments to the Jewish commu- political theorists and historians san- nity, Moroccan nationalism, and inter- guine about the future; for them, the national communism. And over the recent movements were merely epi- course o" their lives, they dealt with sodes in long-standing struggles. Less dramatic changes in the political terrain, predictably bleak are the remarkable negotiating the patronage o" the royal March/April 2021 221 FA.indb 221 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books court, the contempt o3 French colonial public servants demand in exchange for authorities, Vichy anti-Semitism, routine actions such as granting licenses Zionist campaigning, and monarchical or providing medical care. The one despotism after independence in 1956. good kind is what Ang labels “access Fluid and 4exible political a5liations money,” large bribes or favors given to congealed into more #xed, con#ned high-level o5cials in exchange for land, identities later in the century. At the contracts, or credit. These payo!s push end o" their lives, after most Moroccan the economy forward at a fast pace, Jews had emigrated to Israel and com- although they also create longer-term munism had been all but vanquished, problems, including inequality, debt, these erstwhile agitators and activists and excessive risk-taking. China has were, as Heckman puts it, “commodi- curtailed the bad kinds o" corruption #ed” and ceremoniously trotted out to since the 1990s by routinizing payment visitors as putative evidence o3 Moroc- and accounting methods, prosecuting can enlightenment and tolerance. o5cials who steal public funds, and rewarding o5cials for economic growth through fringe bene#ts paid out o" Asia and Paci#c slush funds, so they don’t have to steal to share the bene#ts o" prosperity. But Andrew J. Nathan access corruption has persisted, sus- tained by the pressure Beijing puts on local leaders to promote growth any way they can. China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal BY YUEN YUEN ANG. Cambridge Campaign Against a Muslim Minority University Press, 2020, 266 pp. BY SEAN R. ROBERTS. Princeton University Press, 2020, 328 pp. conomists often claim that corruption hurts an economy, Roberts, a leading expert on the pre- Ebut it frequently accompanies dominantly Muslim Uighur minority in fast growth, as it did during the Ameri- China, reports that the frighteningly can Gilded Age and in China after the e!ective Chinese campaign to eliminate death o3 Mao Zedong. In a book that Uighur culture that started with mass combines deep insight into how the internments in 2017 has entered a new Chinese system works with innovative phase, with the transfer o" much o" the research, Ang resolves the paradox by rural Uighur population into factory distinguishing between three kinds o" labor both in the western region o" corruption that are bad for growth and Xinjiang and throughout the country. the one kind that is good. Prominent The government is also sending Uighur o5cials and ordinary bureaucrats children to Chinese-language boarding stealing directly from the public co!ers schools, destroying mosques and are two patterns that are bad for Muslim shrines, banning religious and growth; so are the payo!s that low-level cultural practices, and imprisoning 222 %&'()*+ ,%%,)'- FA.indb 222 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books members o" the Uighur cultural elite. policy, an initiative started in 2000 that These developments cap a long history encouraged Chinese investment over- o" settler colonialism dating back to the seas. She discerns a common pattern. mid-eighteenth century. In the 1980s, When a leader faces a national economic Chinese leaders considered integrating slowdown, he announces a program that Xinjiang by tolerating its cultural diversity. is both “ambitious and ambiguous” in But that path was soon abandoned, and order to mobilize enterprises and gov- after 2001, Beijing used Washington’s ernment entities to invest more boldly. declaration o" a “war on terror” to justify State-owned enterprises, ministries, and repression in the region. Harsh Chinese local governments scramble to #t what policies have provoked some reactive they are already doing or want to do violence from Uighurs and have driven under the new initiative’s umbrella and what is estimated to be tens o" thousands to secure authorizations, incentives, and o" them to join jihadis in Syria. Roberts #nancing. In this context, she says, provides fascinating new details on that “almost anybody was allowed to do almost relatively marginal phenomenon, anything.” The central government’s revealing that organized Uighur mili- initiatives have led in each case to a burst tancy is almost entirely illusory. Beijing’s o" activity that strengthened subnational policy o" repressive assimilation has now entities while diminishing the ability o" reached such an intense stage that Beijing to control these disparate actors. Roberts labels it “cultural genocide.” Despite their messiness, the programs succeeded in their ultimate goal: they The Belt Road and Beyond: State- kept the Chinese economy humming Mobilized Globalization in China, along and, in so doing, deepened China’s 1998–2018 integration into the global economy. BY MIN YE. Cambridge University Lampton and his colleagues study Press, 2020, 240 pp. the surge o" Chinese investment from the other end, as they examine Chinese Rivers of Iron: Railroads and Chinese railway projects in seven countries in Power in Southeast Asia Southeast Asia. Beijing has grandly BY DAVID M. LAMPTON, SELINA envisioned what will be the Pan-Asia HO, AND CHENG FA.indb 224 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books most Japanese policymakers knew their from Johannesburg. Harding is an country was not likely to win. Up to two unintrusive narrator and allows the rich days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, cast o" characters to tell their own versions the Japanese ambassador to the United o" the story. The details o" their accounts States, Kichisaburo Nomura, was trying accumulate inexorably into a searing to explain to U.S. President Franklin indictment o" contemporary South Roosevelt and Secretary o" State Cordell Africa. The casual racism o" the farmers Hull why the U.S. embargo on oil exports and the miserable precariousness o" their to Japan would provoke an unnecessary Black employees are depressingly familiar, war. The chie" o" sta! o" Japan’s navy as are the divisions and resentments warned Emperor Hirohito that a between Black and white communities protracted con4ict o!ered no guarantee three decades after the end o" apartheid. o" victory. The o5cial in charge o" the The only thing that seems to unite South attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had Africans is pessimism about the future. long argued that Japan would lose a war Harding’s story also delivers a devastat- with the better-resourced United States. ing verdict on the country’s institutions. But when the cabinet decided on war, The leading South African political Yamamoto developed a brilliant attack parties lurked in the background o" the plan and executed it nearly 4awlessly, in trial, eager to score points from the maneuvers that Melber describes in proceedings with populist demagoguery. engrossing detail. Readers know how the No one involved in the case trusted the story ends, but Melber’s just-the-facts police or the justice system to do the narrative re-creates the tension o" the right thing. And incompetence perme- events as they were lived. ated all state agencies: the assaulted laborers were allowed to die after waiting for hours without treatment, an indig- Africa nity compounded by the fact that the coroner, the lawyers, and the judge Nicolas van de Walle consistently confused the identities o" the two victims during the trial. African Europeans: An Untold History These Are Not Gentle People: Two Dead BY OLIVETTE OTELE. Basic Books, Men. Forty Suspects. The Trial That Broke 2021, 304 pp. a Small South African Town BY ANDREW HARDING. MacLehose In a sweeping history extending from Press, 2020, 288 pp. the classical world to the twentieth century, Otele masterfully analyzes the his disturbing narrative relates changing relationship between Africa the 2016 deaths o" two Black and Europe through the lives o" indi- Tlaborers at the hands o" several vidual Africans who in some manner dozen white farmers and the 4awed, dealt with Europeans. She shows that three-year trial that subsequently took notions o" race and racial di!erence were place in a small town an hour and a hal" relatively 4uid until the seventeenth March/April 2021 225 FA.indb 225 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books century. In the Mediterranean world, in rights and develop the sense o$ being particular, religious di!erence was often wronged by other groups. Local elites more o" a dividing line than skin color, exploit these resentments for their own and Africans rose to prominent positions particular political ends, often leading to in Europe. Otele describes the careers o" explosive violence. Curiously, her study men such as Lucius Septimius Severus, a shows that violence is more likely where second-century Roman emperor from unequal access is in fact not particularly Libya, and Alessandro de’ Medici, high but where a local patron with probably the son o" an African servant in political ambitions can stoke people’s the powerful Medici household in dissatisfaction with the electoral process. Florence, who became the duke o" that Italian city in 1531. Otele argues con- The Delusion of Knowledge Transfer: The vincingly that the hardening o" racist Impact of Foreign Aid Experts on European views about Africans was the Policymaking in South Africa and Tanzania inevitable result o" the Atlantic slave BY SUSANNE KOCH AND PETER trade and the subsequent colonial WEINGART. Saint Philip Street Press, occupation o" the continent. But even 2020, 396 pp. in this more recent hate-#lled period, Otele #nds examples o" Africans or The use o3 foreign experts to provide people o" African descent who achieved technical assistance and “knowledge prominence in Europe against the odds. transfer” to low-income countries has long been criticized as an ine!ective Political Violence in Kenya: Land, form o3 foreign aid. Based on careful case Elections, and Claim-Making studies in South Africa and Tanzania, BY KATHLEEN KLAUS. Cambridge Koch and Weingart examine the recent University Press, 2020, 372 pp. record. Their critique is pretty withering even as they accept that these experts— Political violence has ebbed and 4owed engineers, economists, agronomists, and throughout Kenya’s postcolonial history, public policy analysts—harbor good often taking place around elections. And intentions. Foreign experts struggle to some regions o" the country have proved help poorer countries build local capaci- much more violent than others. Klaus’s ties; worse still, expert advice tends to superb study presents an overarching advance the agendas o$ big donors at the explanation for these outbreaks o" expense o" domestic control over policy. bloodshed in the country. Other theo- In a sharp chapter on the education ries o" political violence in Kenya have sector in Tanzania, the authors show that focused on weak institutions and the the interests o" donors often superseded grievances o" citizens but remain vague those o$ Tanzanians themselves. Disap- about the actual mechanisms that pointingly, they propose no speci#c precipitate carnage. Klaus’s extensive reforms beyond vague suggestions to #eldwork has allowed her to illuminate devote more funding to capacity build- the underpinnings o" this violence. She ing, albeit without foreign experts. Their argues that speci#c ethnic groups have exhaustive analysis o!ers no evidence unequal access to land and to property that such aid would be more e!ective. 226 %&'()*+ ,%%,)'- FA.indb 226 1/22/21 9:01 PM Recent Books What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short FOR THE RECORD History of Conquest and Rule The article “The Crisis Opportunity” BY MAX SIOLLUN. Hurst, 2021, 408 pp. (January/February 2021) misstated the month in which the number o" unem- In this readable history o3 British ployed Americans who were temporar- colonialism in Nigeria, Siollun traces a ily laid o! had fallen to nearly three broad arc from the #rst links between million. It was October 2020, not British explorers and various West September.∂ African precolonial states, in the six- teenth century, to Nigerian indepen- dence, in 1960, sketching a series o" fascinating episodes and characters along the way. Several excellent chapters cover the growth o3 British economic interests in the area during the nineteenth century, notably through the e!orts o" the mercantile National African Com- pany. This increasing involvement in the region would lead to the establishment o" two separate British protectorates, one in the south and one in the north, in 1900 and 1903, respectively. Siollun’s evenhanded assessment o" the roughly 60 years o" colonial rule that followed is also absorbing, particularly his descrip- tion o3 Nigerian resistance to the various injustices and humiliations in4icted by the British. Siollun con- cludes with what he calls “the mistake o" 1914”: his view that the British resolu- tion to join their northern and southern protectorates into one poorly integrated colony constitutes the single most consequential decision o" colonial rule in Nigeria. Ever since, the north-south divide has dominated the politics o" independent Nigeria. Foreign A!airs (ISSN 00157120), March/April 2021, Volume 100, Number 2. Published six times annually (January, March, May, July, September, November) at 58 East 68th Street, New York, NY 10065. Print subscriptions: U.S., $54.95; Canada, $66.95; other countries via air, $89.95 per year. Canadian Publication Mail–Mail # 1572121. Periodicals postage paid in New York, NY, and at additional mailing o5ces. "#$%&'$%(): Send address changes to Foreign A!airs, P.O. Box 324, Congers, NY 10920. From time to time, we permit certain carefully screened companies to send our subscribers information about products or services that we believe will be o" interest. I" you prefer not to receive such information, please contact us at the Congers, NY, address indicated above. March/April 2021 227 FA.indb 227 1/22/21 9:01 PM Has Trump Permanently Altered U.S. Foreign Policy? Foreign Affairs Brain Trust We asked dozens o! experts whether they agreed or disagreed that U.S. President Donald Trump irrevocably changed the course o! U.S. foreign policy. The results are below. 20 10 0 STRONGLY DISAGREE NEUTRAL AGREE STRONGLY DISAGREE AGREE DISAGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 9 AGREE, CONFIDENCE LEVEL 8 Bisa Williams Shivshankar Menon Former U.S. Ambassador to Niger Visiting Professor, Ashoka University, and former Indian National “Few things are irrevocable. The Biden administration will be challenged to articulate and Security Adviser practice a domestic and foreign policy that truly “Trump has changed U.S. foreign policy re"ect the ideals upon which the nation was founded. because the world now sees the United States Some governments might rebu# our e#orts, but di#erently, and because the world has gotten America’s appeal has always been among used to a less predictable and engaged the common people. If we meet the challenge of this America. The United States will therefore moment, I don’t expect that to change.” have to behave di#erently abroad.” See the full responses at ForeignA!airs.com/TrumpFP 24_Books_Blues.indd 228 1/25/21 2:04 PM Define your path to global leadership. *0" &$"",'( *' "21!'$" The Jackson Institute’s M.A. in Global Affairs prepares students to impact the global community through an academically rigorous, yet flexible interdisciplinary program. 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