America's Great-Power Opportunity. Ali Wyne

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СКАЧАТЬ grievances did not register as loudly in the first two decades after the Cold War, in part because America’s margin of preeminence was much more significant. Today, though, Beijing and Moscow are considerably more capable of channeling long-lived dissatisfaction into meaningful resistance, individually and collectively. China possesses the world’s second-largest economy and is both the largest exporting and the largest trading country. It occupies a commanding position within the vast mesh of global supply chains, and its Belt and Road Initiative has deepened its commercial heft across vast stretches of the developing world. Investing heavily in the development and application of frontier technologies, China is emerging as a center of global innovation. It is rapidly modernizing its armed forces and continues to militarize the South China Sea on the basis of a “nine-dash line” that the Hague unanimously ruled illegal in July 2016. It is also using economic coercion and aggressive diplomacy to make the world more conducive to authoritarianism.

      As for Russia, it continues to threaten provocations along its own periphery, to inflame social divisions in western democracies, and to prop up Assad in war-ravaged Syria. And, while the entente between Beijing and Moscow may not be a natural one—their historical interactions give them reasons to be suspicious of each other and their national interests sometimes diverge—it is nonetheless gaining momentum.

The Need for an Affirmative Vision

      Great-power competition would appear, then, to have clear virtues as an organizing principle of US foreign policy. It distills, in broad brushstrokes, a core element of contemporary geopolitics, intensifying strategic tensions between the world’s most powerful democracy and two significant authoritarian competitors. Because it occupies a central role in high-level government documents such as the NSS and the NDS, it lends coherence to interagency priorities and efforts. And, in keeping with Kennan’s Council on Foreign Relations address, it puts policymakers in a familiar frame of mind: that of dealing with a menacing other (or others, in this case).

      Certain realities, though, bely that familiarity. The United States has won three decisive victories over overt challengers: Nazi Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, imperial Japan surrendered just under four months later, and the Soviet Union formally dissolved on December 26, 1991. But the United States is less accustomed to achieving and sustaining stable cohabitations with complex competitors; the putative “long peace” that prevailed during the Cold War discounts not only the number of times Washington and Moscow came to the brink of nuclear conflict but also the maelstrom of proxy wars, civil wars, and genocides that sowed instability across the world during that period. It is not clear what “victory” over China or Russia would look like, nor how either one’s collapse would advance US national interests. During its sole experience of long-term multifaceted competition that was the Cold War, the United States was a relatively ascendant power that contested just one other. Today it is a relatively declining power that contests two others.

The United States will face considerably different circumstances as it competes today. Amy Zegart accordingly cautions against policy by analogy, warning that “in a genuinely new moment, the old playbook won’t win.”⁵⁷ There is a more fundamental problem, though, with elevating great-power competition to the position of defining America’s role in the world: it is descriptive, not prescriptive. That is to say, interstate competition is a characteristic of world affairs—much like the balance of power—not a blueprint for foreign policy. Competitive dynamics vary in nature, scope, and intensity over time, but they are always present. As Matthew Kroenig explains, “recognizing that competition exists is not a strategy”—and neither is treating competition as an imperative unto itself.⁵⁸ A foreign policy that is centered upon repelling Chinese and Russian assertions of influence would be risky on at least three grounds:

       It could lull the United States into an increasingly expansive, yet poorly specified struggle against two formidable powers, undermining America’s sense of strategic balance and unnerving its allies and partners: these countries have little desire to be instrumentalized in the service of a reactive US foreign policy, however potent their apprehensions about China and Russia may be.

       It could elicit defensive, even alarmist US responses to Beijing and Moscow, accelerating Sino-Russian rapprochement in the process.

       Given that transnational challenges increasingly shape geopolitics, such a policy could undercut the United States’ vital national interests if it sets the United States on a path of permanent antagonism with China and Russia.

      While Washington will increasingly have to contend with and manage the challenges posed by a resurgent Beijing and a revanchist Moscow, it should not pursue a foreign policy that is driven by or beholden to their actions. It should instead articulate a forward-looking conception of its role in the world, identifying cases where circumscribed competition with China and Russia might further that vision. Near the end of his famed “long telegram,” Kennan exhorted the United States to “formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of [the] sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in [the] past … And unless we do, [the] Russians certainly will.”⁵⁹

The second part of his judgment may not obtain to the same extent as it did during the Cold War. Russia’s vision—to be recognized as a great power within a system it hopes will continue to grow more multipolar—does not rouse individuals across the developing world in the way the Soviet Union’s appeals to the proletariat did. China’s vision, meanwhile, traffics in underspecified abstractions—“a community of common destiny for mankind,” for example—that have acquired a more ominous dimension as the country’s aggregate power has grown and its abandonment of foreign policy restraint has become more apparent. What both Beijing and Moscow can do, though, even if they lack compelling alternative visions of their own, is to highlight the weaknesses of the present order, which COVID-19 has amply displayed. They can also, disingenuously yet potently, adduce the convulsions now roiling US domestic politics as evidence that the United States is unfit to govern itself, let alone lead others. The more traction such critiques gain globally, the harder it will be for the United States to marshal either the internal or the external support it will require to pursue a sustainable foreign policy.

      It remains critical, then, according to the first part of Kennan’s judgment, for the United States to offer an affirmative vision that can elicit enduring support from the American public as well as from its longstanding allies and partners. A starting point for constructing that vision is the recognition that, despite renewed concern over the prospect of deglobalization, transnational challenges are increasingly likely to define our future, be they climate change, pandemic disease, or macroeconomic instability. With tragic irony, COVID-19 may leave the world less prepared to manage such challenges, for it has reduced the agency of core international institutions, amplified nationalistic sentiments, and, perhaps most concerningly, undercut the willingness of great powers to cooperate with one another: transnational challenges are increasingly exacerbating a competition that renders their mitigation less likely.

      The more the demand for collective action outstrips the supply of it, the greater the strategic return on investment will be for actors that transcend parochial impulses and undertake to narrow that gap. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman argue that “a retreat from globalization would make generosity an even more powerful tool of influence for states that can afford it.”⁶⁰ Two kinds of mobilization must occur in parallel among governments, corporations, philanthropies, advocacy organizations, and other stakeholders in today’s geopolitics: short-term, emergency mobilizations to contain crises when they arise; and long-term, patient mobilizations to boost collective resilience against transnational challenges.

The United States is one of the countries that are best positioned to play the role of chief galvanizer. It has the world’s largest economy, accounting for roughly a quarter of gross world product (GWP). The US dollar remains the sole reserve currency, and its position has endured despite concerns that the global financial crisis and America’s СКАЧАТЬ