America's Great-Power Opportunity. Ali Wyne

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СКАЧАТЬ mating a nuclear warhead to an intercontinental ballistic missile and conducted two nuclear tests in 2016. Finally, on June 23, 2016, with 52 percent of voters in favor, the United Kingdom moved to leave the European Union, casting doubts on America’s “special relationship” and on the resilience of the European project.

Still, China and Russia began to occupy increasingly central roles in US foreign policy thinking, especially within the defense community. In December 2015, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work stated that the revival of great-power competition would be “the most stressing” challenge over the coming quarter-century. Tasked with implementing the “third offset” strategy that Chuck Hagel, the former secretary of defense, had announced in November 2014, Work argued that “Russia and China present the United States, our allies, and our partners with unique and increasingly stressing military capabilities and operational challenges.”⁴²

      Many of Work’s colleagues shared his concerns. In January 2016 the navy released a maritime strategy in which it warned: “For the first time in 25 years, the United States is facing a return to great-power competition. Russia and China both have advanced their military capabilities to act as global powers.”⁴³ The following month, Hagel’s successor, Ash Carter, observed: “Russia and China are our most stressing competitors. They have developed and are continuing to advance military systems that seek to threaten our advantages in specific areas. And in some cases, they are developing weapons and ways of wars that seek to achieve their objectives rapidly, before, they hope, we can respond.”⁴⁴

      Despite the Pentagon’s advocacy, the construct of great-power competition did not diffuse across the government.⁴⁵ In fact, the Navy Times reported in September 2016 that “a recent directive from the National Security Council ordered Pentagon leaders to strike out that phrase and find something less inflammatory.”⁴⁶ The authors of that guidance argued that the term mischaracterized a relationship with China that, albeit increasingly competitive, nevertheless retained important cooperative dynamics.

Under a new administration, though, the notion of great-power competition would soon assume center stage. Although Donald Trump and his top advisors did not forswear the possibility of multilateral cooperation, they stressed that countries would pursue their sovereign prerogatives and that competitive dynamics would predominate in world affairs. The president stated in his inaugural address that, while the United States would “seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world,” it would “do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first.”⁴⁷ National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn argued in an influential article that “the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors, and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”⁴⁸ In a September address to the UN General Assembly, President Trump focused on the theme of sovereignty, avowing that “we are renewing our commitment to the first duty of every government: the duty of our citizens.”⁴⁹ These various statements paved the way for the White House’s December 2017 NSS, which observed that the United States had pursued a misguided foreign policy after the Cold War:

      Since the 1990s, the United States displayed a great degree of strategic complacency. We assumed that our military superiority was guaranteed and that a democratic peace was inevitable. We believed that liberal–democratic enlargement and inclusion would fundamentally alter the nature of international relations and that competition would give way to peaceful cooperation.

      In truth, the document concluded, “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great-power competition returned. China and Russia began to reassert their influence regionally and globally.” And, it added, “they are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor.” While the NSS did not focus exclusively on Beijing and Moscow—it regarded “the rogue states of Iran and North Korea” and “transnational threat organizations” as two additional sets of challengers—its primary concerns were a resurgent China and a revanchist Russia.⁵⁰ The January 2018 NDS echoed the NSS’s core messages: warning that the United States was “emerging from a period of strategic atrophy,” it described “[l]ong-term strategic competitions with China and Russia” as the Pentagon’s chief priorities “because of the magnitude of the threats they pose to US security and prosperity today, and the potential for those threats to increase in the future.”⁵¹

The Follies of Triumphalism

The Trump administration rightly argued that the landscape it confronted was a far cry from the soaring prophecies that had pervaded much US commentary in the aftermath of the Cold War, and key trends that it spotlighted have endured. Democracy, for example, is under growing stress. Freedom House reported in 2021 that “[c]ountries with aggregate [freedom] score declines … have outnumbered those with gains every year for the past 15 years,” warning that 2020 contributed to “a new global status quo in which acts of repression went unpunished and democracy’s advocates were increasingly isolated.”⁵² While technological advances have aided those who seek to hold power to account, they have also proven far more conducive to the consolidation of authoritarian rule than most observers would have predicted at the turn of the century—or even in the early 2010s, when a series of revolutions across the Arab world spurred renewed optimism over the political power of social media platforms. “Between 2000 and 2017,” according to a recent study, “37 of the 91 dictatorships that had lasted more than a year collapsed; those regimes that avoided collapse had significantly higher levels of digital repression, on average, than those that fell.”⁵³ Chief among them is China, which, harnessing artificial intelligence-powered surveillance, has built a sophisticated apparatus for ensuring that it can censor information as it sees fit, prevent mass mobilizations that might challenge the CCP’s authority, and still give Chinese “netizens” a release valve for airing their grievances. Having defied many prognostications of collapse, the CCP is now one of the longest surviving authoritarian parties in history.

      Forecasts of deglobalization are overwrought, but resistance to integration—geographic, technological, and geopolitical—is growing. According to Elisabeth Vallet, there were fifteen border walls in 1989; today there are at least seventy.⁵⁴ Deteriorating relations between the United States and China, meanwhile, have led many observers to conclude that some degree of decoupling between the two countries’ economies is inevitable and has the potential to fracture global supply chains and even to produce technological blocs that may operate on the basis of different norms, standards, and arrangements. And countries as diverse as Austria, Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey are witnessing a revival of what Jan-Werner Müller calls “nationalist populism,” which threatens to yield “more closed societies and less global cooperation to address common problems.”⁵⁵

Finally, it seems highly misguided, in retrospect, to have hoped that either China or Russia would accept the post-Cold War settlement. Beijing was unnerved by the Soviet Union’s dissolution and continues to study it. The speed with which the United States defeated Iraq during the Persian Gulf War and the ease with which it conducted maritime operations in the vicinity of mainland China in the 1990s—perhaps most vividly during the 1995–6 Taiwan Strait Crisis—impressed upon the CCP that it had to accelerate the modernization of China’s armed forces in order to preempt challenges to its rule. Moscow, of course, viewed the disintegration of its erstwhile imperium as a colossal indignity, taking umbrage at Washington’s assertion that America’s conception of exceptionalism illuminated the path to a more just future. Russia felt further aggrieved by the discrepancy between its own experiences during the 1990s, marked as they were by economic hardship and societal convulsion, and those of the United States, characterized by growing prosperity and geopolitical ascendance.

      At the beginning of 2000, amid discussions of purported US unipolarity, Condoleezza Rice argued that one of the country’s five central tasks was to develop “comprehensive relationships with the big powers, particularly Russia and China, that СКАЧАТЬ