American order did not, and cannot, function as domestic liberal preferences writ large. This is partly because its behaviour abroad reflects the constraints and pressures that come with power-seeking. Washington got a taste of this problem in July 2010, when the Obama administration competed against Beijing for the favour of Indonesia, a semi-authoritarian Asian power that is getting larger and richer. After an internal debate, Washington lifted a longstanding ban on Kopassus, an Indonesian special forces unit with a long record of atrocities in East Timor, Aceh and Papua. It did so after the Indonesian government hinted it might cancel the president’s visit to Jakarta and explore military ties with China unless the ban was lifted.1 In order to balance against one authoritarian state, it might be necessary to tolerate the illiberality of another. These are the grim choices of international life. If such a dilemma imposed itself when America’s relative power over China’s was greater, it will increasingly feature in an era of increasing competition.
We have been delivered into a new world. It is a world of power shifts, political revolts and multipolar competition, in which homilies about global leadership will prove a poor intellectual resource. The world unfolding now is one of competitive multipolarity, when powers compete for influence and standing under the shadow of war, a world defined by issues that states are willing to bleed for. The pursuit of international dominance in the belief that liberal values exempt American power from the tragic limits that afflicted previous hegemons has made policymakers insensitive to the limits of power, neglectful of the problems of security dilemma, presumptuous about how others see the assertion of power and heedless of how ordering abroad can inflict disorder at home. The USA ought to approach the unfolding disorder as a ‘Machiavellian moment’. In such a moment, anticipated in medieval debates, a republic must reckon with the survival of its institutions and civic virtues in an increasingly hostile world. It should do so by abandoning the core historical claim of liberal order, which the USA itself secured by domesticating the world to its liberal values under its hegemony, as well as the idea that the USA or any one power can dominate the globe. As we have seen, post-war American statecraft worked differently. Even while Washington tried to reshape the world, the international system and its inherent dilemmas also imposed themselves upon the superpower. America’s ‘ordering’ activity was in fundamental ways illiberal, whether in its actions or in its results. Revisiting that past is needed. A richer historical consciousness can widen our sense of possible options. By confronting the historical reality that ordering is a rough and compromised process full of betrayals, and that attempts to expand liberalism have had tragic results, the USA can better husband its power and temper its ambitions. It can return to its original purpose, to secure its interests as a constitutional republic in a plural world. In this chapter, I will assess where the USA fundamentally ‘is’. I will then show that the mytho-history of liberal order, which recognizes danger predominantly in the retreat from global domination, will not help understand how to make the USA more secure in an increasingly multipolar world. Lastly, I offer an alternative road ahead. Without offering an exhaustive programme of policies, I identify a number of steps Washington could take, to secure itself better.
The foundational purpose of American statecraft is to ‘preserve the US as a free nation with our fundamental institutions and values intact’.2 That means shaping an international environment that is conducive to a way of life. If so, as things stand, the United States is imperilled. As the last chapter demonstrated, the rise of Donald Trump was symptomatic of a deeper crisis in the country, as disorder at home and abroad feed off one another to fray the cohesion and even the legitimacy of its ideals, its institutions and the state. Rather than a mere course correction, to return to the default settings of the pre-Trump era, the country should realize that it has reached a Machiavellian moment. Such a moment is a more profound point of reckoning, where a republic originally concerned for virtue could unravel, threatened by hostile forces (and in his time, the threat of invasion) from without, corruption and disorder within, and the intrusion of chaotic time – what Robert Kagan rightly called the ‘Return of History’ – into what it once thought was a stable permanence.3 In that instance, a clash between universal morality and a morality of virtu opens up, as public necessity requires ‘actions that private ethics and religious values might condemn as unjust and immoral’.4
Few debates are genuinely new. The debate over liberal order restages in secular language older debates about the possibility of moral and Christian order in the public sphere. Central was the tradition of the Florentine diplomat and political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) and reactions to him.5 To Machiavelli, politics was about the gaining and holding of power. The irresponsible misuse of power had led to chaos and invasion. Machiavelli counselled that the prudent prince cannot bring private morality into the public sphere, because most men ‘are not good’. Instead, the prudent exercise of power on behalf of the ruled should be guided by an alternative moral standard, the reason of state. The securing of the republic, especially when threatened, requires dirty hands. In such a world, virtue meant the capacity to behave ‘usefully’, in the form of bloody ruthlessness or cold restraint as circumstances dictate. Christian charity, suited for private life, could be a dangerous indulgence for the state. Timid passivity could jeopardize the common good. Equally, gratuitous violence could trigger dangerous reactions or threaten the republic’s soul. In the mind of the prince, Christian sentiment must yield to a different steely morality of virtu, guided by public necessity. The cut-throat world Machiavelli inhabited, of competing Italian city-states, lent the question high stakes. Crucially, beyond mere survival was concern for the health and freedom of the republic. Indeed, the order of the domestic realm and the potential menace of external forces were interlinked: that cities had become faction-ridden had led to their fall. The state could only learn how to survive these dangers by studying how states actually live – the real – not by dreaming up the ideal, ‘republics and kingdoms that bear no resemblance to experience and never existed in reality’.6
Against Machiavelli’s brutally direct arguments for a separate morality ran a counterblast of Christian universalism, variously driven by ‘false nostalgia for a world at peace within one empire’, a utopian search for a universal monarchy as ‘saviour of mankind’, or a ‘spiritually motivated attempt to take the world back into the temporal control of the universal church’. Whether by means of the Inquisition, or the prohibition of his books, or subtler efforts at dilution, there was a concerted effort to repudiate Machiavelli and keep alive the promise of a transcendent order that harmonized private and public morality.
Like the medieval papacy and moral critics ever since, liberal order visions resist Machiavelli’s public–private dualism. Against the notion of a dualistic international order, they look to the possibility of an order domesticated by a guiding leader. They insist that American-designed order is born of a moral statecraft that infuses benign, altruistic liberal values into the international system. In the Wilsonian tradition, America did, and can, remake the world with the clean hands of institutions, alliances, free trade and far-sighted leadership, constraining itself like no former hegemon. As President Woodrow Wilson exhorted the Senate in his Address of 1917, the USA should fight for a transcendent order, a ‘just and secure peace’, ‘not a balance of power, but a community of power’.7
As with Machiavelli and the papacy, so too with arguments about America acting abroad. The pursuit of such a transformed world, a ‘peace without victory’, required actual victory and a violent rebalancing of power, achieved partly via illiberal and coercive means at home, culminating in a punitive settlement at Versailles that he strongly defended.8 Wilsonianism is a conflicted thing – some emphasize President Woodrow Wilson’s historic stress on international law and institutions, others the need to spread democratic freedom at the point of a bayonet if necessary.9 Rather than reconciling this, we should recognize it as the core problem of liberal order. As one historian notes, such contrasts reflect the ‘fundamental paradox of Wilson’s security strategy – the paradox of practising power politics to end power politics’.10 Liberalism as an engine of American statecraft is jealous, intolerant and messianic. Applied unchecked, from Wilson to the Bush Doctrine, it leads to its own illiberal opposite.11 The practitioners of rough geopolitics often believed they were serving the ultimate cause of forging a liberal peace under American oversight, but that, to do so, they had to accommodate illiberal allies and pitilessly destroy liberalism’s enemies. In this way, a superpower presuming to create a liberal order permits itself to employ unsentimental methods.
In thinking about liberal order, two decades of unipolar hegemony in this century suggest that the Machiavellian insight holds. The world cannot be domesticated, but instead imposes its constraints on powers that would presume to transform it. The greater the exertion to domesticate the world into liberal values, the more the effort depletes power and strains liberalism at home.
With this recurring debate in mind, consider a brief audit of where the USA ‘is’, after two decades of ambitious exertion in this century and the sustained attempt at ‘global leadership’. Looking back, it must reflect on disappointment.12 Despite a declared aim to destroy threats, it has failed on most fronts, either failing to extinguish them or leaving greater ones in place. It failed to prevent North Korea from acquiring deliverable nuclear weapons, and then failed to disarm it. It failed to persuade Russia to submit to the US-led order or to abandon its empire-building in Ukraine or Georgia, or its international campaign of political subversion. It failed to persuade China to submit to the US-led order in Asia, where China now bids aggressively for hegemony. Its forces are deadlocked against the Taliban in Afghanistan, which is still a kleptocratic state despite years of nation-building. It has not eliminated terrorism. Militant jihadism proliferates. It has failed to broker an Israel–Palestine settlement. It failed to guide the Arab Spring revolutions towards a stable, democratic Middle East. Bashar al Assad and his Alawite regime still rule Syria. Libya after its liberation is politically shattered and economically much poorer. Iraq is more an Iranian client than an American one, and Operation Iraqi Freedom unleashed sectarian conflict which spawned the Islamic State. America is engaged in escalating confrontations with the ruling regimes in Iran and Venezuela. Despite maximum pressure and threats of annihilation, it has failed to dissuade Iran from conducting missile tests or expanding its influence in the Middle East. The attempt to create an unchallengeable balance of power in its favour has failed to dissuade challenge or permanently transform the world away from competitive power politics. At home, economic policies did not lead to sustained and stable growth, but to the global financial crisis and the Great Recession.
It is sobering to consider that America suffered these failures when its power was at its post-war apex. Even when the USA enjoyed a relative power unprecedented in history, it could still be effectively fought to a stalemate or defeat, as in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq. And increasingly, the international environment is making it harder for the USA – or any state – to impose itself as a hegemon. As its relative power and economic strength wanes, the weight of its commitments is increasing. The concept of single global leadership looks back to a different time, when the distribution of power was far more lopsided in Washington’s favour. Underpinning these arguments, there is a distinctively American theme, that of the ‘sleeping giant’. That is, the assumption that despite recent strains, the USA has not tapped its full potential power. Maintaining global order is a task that can only be assumed by an exceptionally powerful state. Primacists assume that, since primacy in the world is eminently affordable, if only Washington could recover its will and cohesion, it could readily regenerate itself and its ordering capacity. This sense of great latency derives from the scale of American capabilities but also its peculiar historical pathway to hegemony.13 The USA rose to power relatively inexpensively compared to other great powers. Americans typically remember the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941 awakening a sleeping giant that only then realized its capacity. As Daniel Yergin noted, ‘American leaders – moved by a traditional missionary impulse, convinced of their global responsibility, full of the self-confidence that comes of success, fundamentally unhurt by war in a wounded world – eagerly reached for their mandate of heaven.’14 Few periods in history had seen such a sudden power shift on so large a scale. As rivals destroyed themselves and allies exhausted themselves, the USA emerged from the war holding most of the cards.15 Stimulated by industrial and military mobilization, America experienced unprecedented industrial expansion. Its GDP doubled. Its industrial base was unmolested by bombardment and blockade, it reached the highest per capita productivity in the world. It had the highest standard of living, domination of the world’s gold reserves and the Bretton Woods economic system. It exerted great influence through the dollar as reserve currency, and became the largest creditor and exporter. Its capacity to project power with long-range bombers and carrier task forces was unparalleled. It had an atomic monopoly. There was worldwide demand for its loans, arms, expertise and patronage. The manner of this ascent, and the centrality of the mid-twentieth-century moment in the consciousness of policymakers, encourages a long-term way of thinking about American primacy. It predisposes its admirers to assume that the main problems faced by the order are not systemic but intellectual or ideational.
This attitude loses sight of the significant change in material conditions. Consider the economic foundations that are the fundamental basis for power. As a general observation, wealth is shifting from West to East. Across different measures of relative size, there is a pattern of contraction. In 1960, the USA produced 40 per cent of global GDP, measured in terms of Purchasing Power Parity. By 2017, that had fallen to 15 per cent.16 The IMF estimates it will fall to 14.2 per cent by 2022.17 The USA is no longer the largest trading nation. This shift has consequences. It does not mean that America is finished as a great power. It still has the largest share of global GDP in terms of market exchange rates, and the dollar is still the reserve currency. It remains militarily the most powerful state, with the greatest reach and striking power, and a large nuclear arsenal. It is demographically more cohesive than its competitors. Neither does it mean the trendline is irreversible. A Chinese contraction, an Indian meltdown, another Asian financial crisis, European stagnation: all are possible, and the USA could recover some ground as it did in the Reagan era. It does mean that we are witnessing the decline of unipolarity, America’s capacity to dominate the international system. The distribution of material strength has passed an inflection point, making it unlikely that it will ever predominate as it did in 1960. As difficult as China’s and India’s internal problems are, for instance, they are unlikely to return to their weaker, more agrarian pasts. As a more multipolar world emerges and the pecking order is more unsettled, America’s diplomatic position has been gradually weakening. Its allies are now in many instances hedging their bets and proving reluctant to align themselves unambiguously. India triangulates with China; Turkey purchases air defence weapon systems from Russia; and, against American urgings, allies like Australia and Britain join the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), and others like New Zealand join China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
A shift in strategic conditions is also reducing America’s edge. None of its rivals are likely to supplant the USA as an equivalent superpower. Rather, the world for a number of reasons is now no one’s to conquer. It is harder to dominate militarily than it was in the unusual – and brief – post-war period. Outright conquest and expansion are difficult, because the diffusion of military technologies is defence-dominant in its overall effect, making the world larger strategically.18 Especially significant is the coming of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) systems, a panoply of sensors, missiles, air defences and electronic instruments that can destroy or disable surface ships, bases, satellites, logistical hubs and ground forces. In Asia, the focus of wealth, growth and great power rivalries, we have entered a period of sea denial rather than sea control, where conquest across water, when resisted, is increasingly difficult. The coming of anti-ship weaponry that can be based on land – with information technology and long-range precision munitions such as the anti-ship missile – makes it easier to find and sink ships, even without a blue water navy, than to command the maritime commons. The rapid spread of technology in an accelerated international marketplace makes it harder for any one state to exert an overwhelming preponderance of power for long. In the aggregate, while the USA is militarily stronger than its rivals in Europe and Asia, those rivals now possess enough capability to raise costs significantly, enough to make their regions the contested ones. This is a double-edged problem, for the same forces that now make it harder for the USA to project power affordably can also be the basis for preserving a workable balance against rising challengers.
Just as international conditions make unrivalled hegemony a thing of the past, the United States faces the mounting problem of ‘insolvency’.19 This is a dangerous state in which a country’s commitments, power and political will are unbalanced, or misaligned. Overextension abroad, exhaustion and fiscal strain at home, and political disorder all feed off one another in a downward spiral, cumulatively threatening the survival of the republic.20 It has too many commitments, for resources that are increasingly scarce, in an environment that is more resistant to it. It cannot proceed on its present course without the imbalance of means and ends getting worse.
As it is currently organized, US grand strategy gives Washington a proclivity to continuous wars that it pays for through deficits. Ballooning deficits have created a debt level larger than the US economy. America’s deficit has grown to $895 billion a year, as tax cuts, interest on debt, defence build-ups and rising domestic costs outstrip revenue gains from economic growth. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) warns that ‘the prospect of large and growing debt poses substantial risks for the nation’.21 According to it, federal debt will reach 150 per cent of GDP by 2047, with the share of GDP devoted to interest repayments doubling from 1.6 to 3.1 per cent, becoming the third largest programme behind Social Security and Medicare.22 Unfunded liabilities and the fiscal imbalance are likely to worsen with an ageing population. The Trump administration has not reversed this imbalance, but aggravated it with tax cuts as well as a renewed deficit-financed military build-up. Heavy fiscal burdens beyond a certain proportion of debt-to-GDP tend to choke economic growth, by crowding out private investment and raising interest rates.23 A growing debt load directly impedes the country’s ability to sustain its way of life alongside its extensive international commitments. The CBO describes the scenarios that rising deficits could lead to: ‘Higher interest rates would increase concerns over repayment, which would continue to raise interest rates even further. Even in the absence of a full-blown crisis, such risks would lead to higher rates and borrowing costs for the US government and private sector.’ It would also likely result in a political crisis. Confronted with foreign investors’ doubts about the USA’s capacity to repay its debts and hold down inflation, or even doubts over the dollar as reserve currency, Washington would be pressured to cut expenditure, reduce entitlements, and raise taxes and interest rates.24 That would induce a political fight over resources, and a collision between defence and welfare expenditure, that would exceed the polarizations of recent time. The current fiscal imbalance also leaves open the possibility of another financial crisis, but without the reserves this time to combat it. Of course, some argue that deficits don’t currently matter much, that the USA as a wealthy, creditworthy country enjoys exceptional trust in international investment markets that will not take fright, and can sustain its deficit-financed model. While that could be true, the hazards of running that experiment and being wrong are unacceptable, as the last global financial crisis demonstrated. As Deborah Lucas argues:
The laws of gravity have not been repealed. Debt, whether issued by households or by governments, is an obligation that will almost certainly crowd out the capacity to pay for pressing future spending needs. The unprecedented levels of peacetime debt accumulation in the developed world, and the cost of caring for an aging population, are on a collision course … the growing social discontent is nothing compared to the consequences of running down future fiscal capacity to dangerously low levels.25
Regarding America’s own military casualties, primacists might claim that the casualties of these campaigns are affordable. Max Boot infers that permanent frontier war is well within America’s means, given that fatalities in Afghanistan hardly rise above the loss rate of normal training accidents.26 That disregards the increasing burden of survivors’ mental and physical wounds, the costs of non-fatal casualties in disability benefits, through-life care, and loss of income to families, with the costs of care likely to climax decades into the future. Military suicides average twenty per day, higher than the rate of the general population.27 That these wars are tormenting minds is evident in the appeal to veterans’ audiences of classical Greek tragedies about the moral injuries of war, like Sophocles’ Ajax, about a returning Greek warrior driven to suicidal rage by the Trojan War.28
Then there is domestic division. Americans disagree profoundly over their country’s international posture. Public attitudes to foreign policy are a mixed picture. Out-and-out isolationist sentiment has dwindled, and the majority still wants the USA to remain sole military superpower and favours the continuation of treaty-based alliances. At the same time, the majority also believes that America ‘does too much in helping solve world problems’, and prefers a ‘shared’ than a ‘sole’ leadership role.29 Political elites predominantly prefer a single leadership role, are oriented to continuous military activity, and assert American indispensability in solving world problems.
Looking ahead, America’s outlook abroad is one of continuous war, and possibilities of war that come hard on the heels of appeals to order. Washington now openly declares an era of great power competition.30 There is an ominous fatalism in the air. In May 2019, Vice-President Mike Pence told graduating students at West Point that it was a ‘virtual certainty’ that they would all see combat, naming multiple opponents in multiple theatres, including nuclear-armed ones: against ‘radical Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq’, on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific, ‘where North Korea continues to threaten the peace, and an increasingly militarized China challenges our presence in the region’, in Europe against an ‘aggressive Russia’, and even ‘in this hemisphere’.31 Pence too has invoked ‘rules-based order’.32 A state of continuous alarm persists. The Trump administration both depletes its State Department and steps up defence investments to keep America’s edge over opponents, raising defence spending by 9.3 per cent, while introducing tax cuts for wealthy classes, creating a combined shortfall in the budget that may outstrip even the fiscal benefits of economic growth. Despite – or because of – America’s attempt to double down on primacy, America’s allies are hedging their bets, for instance through their participation in the Asia Infrastructure Bank, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, their opposition to Washington’s abrogation of the JCPOA nuclear agreement and its new sanctions against Iran, all against Washington’s urging.33 Emerging powers, such as India, and established allies like Turkey also hedge, sharing intelligence with Washington while buying S-400 missiles from Russia and muting criticism of Beijing.34
One signature of a state’s relative decline is the interaction of war and debt, especially if it is regular war and unsustainable debt.35 America’s defence expenditure and its war-making are expensive in economic and human terms. The Costs of War project at Brown University estimates that the combined costs of the post-9/11 campaigns reached $5.9 trillion.36 The orthodox view is that America’s defence burdens, at a ratio of 3.6 per cent of GDP, are affordable, and indeed lower than their Cold War highs. This is misleading, however. First, real annual spending on national security as a whole approximates $1.25 trillion,37 if beyond the increased defence budget we factor in spending on contractors, the ‘war budget’ of current operations, the nuclear budget, intelligence, homeland security, the veterans affairs budget, military aid programmes, and the share of all this in interest repayments, and bureaucratic waste. The true call of overall national security investment on GDP is closer to 6.5 per cent.
Second, the historical era of higher defence budgets should not be taken as a precedent for sustaining record defence spending now, as the burden was not easily affordable for Cold War America. At its post-war height from the Korean War/Eisenhower to the Vietnam/Johnson era build-ups, it ranged from 14 per cent in 1953 to 10 per cent in 1968. These investments came with a grave ‘guns versus butter’ opportunity cost. As Eisenhower warned, it represented a serious diversion of material and human capacity from the poor, hanging humanity ‘from a cross of iron’.38 In those decades, the allocation of scarce resources to arms left one-fifth of the population in poverty, from rural agrarian and mountain coal workers to the African Americans and Hispanics who emigrated to the northern industrial cities living in penury and squalor, which left a bitter legacy that later erupted in racial violence and urban riots, with inner-city neighbourhoods being destroyed. If the internal state of the country is a guide to the affordability of the pursuit of global domination, then Cold War precedents, if nothing else, serve as a warning. Moreover, large deficit-financed military build-ups after external shocks – in the 1960s, 1980s and after 2001– were not part of a stable state of prosperity. Rather, by enlarging budget and current account deficits and leading to unsustainable credit booms and banking crises, they helped to feed a destructive ‘boom/bust’ dynamic in the business cycle.39
Third, another revealing measure of the defence expenditure burden is how much state capacity it consumes, at a time of pressing domestic need. Military spending is primarily a form of consumption. While defence spending can stimulate growth, it is relatively unproductive of wealth compared to other kinds of investment.40 Current defence spending represents roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays. It also represents the lion’s share of annual discretionary spending (for the financial year 2019, $1.45 trillion). By financial years 2017 and 2018, defence spending had risen to 53 per cent, and the Trump budget will take the proportion to 65 per cent by 2023.41 Security spending amounts to ‘more than the combined total outlays from 2001 to 2016 for the federal departments of education, energy, labor, interior, and transportation, and the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Environmental Protection Agency’.42 As a result, the country’s public infrastructure deteriorates. The American Society of Civil Engineers reports crumbling roads, rusting bridges, decaying railroads and transit systems. Whether measured in social cohesion or the tangible and visible signs of decay, efforts to expand liberal hegemony abroad are eroding civil society, and democracy, in America. What is to be done?
For believers in liberal order, there is one supreme historical lesson. It is this: that the surest pathway to security is American leadership of a particularly ambitious kind. Conversely, the main pathway to peril is retreat, a turning inwards from the pursuit of unrivalled dominance. The problems of inaction predominate, the problems of action almost disappear. In the words of Joseph Nye, the memory of the twentieth century is the folly of the USA as a ‘great power holding itself aloof from an increasingly turbulent world’.43 Granted, traditionalists acknowledge that there are multiple pathways to disaster. But their ‘primal scene’ is the prospect of a post-American world in which the superpower abdicates its responsibilities, leaving unacceptable chaos in its wake. The world, in this view, is a fragile and interconnected ecosystem. An American departure, pullback or even scale-down anywhere threatens to cause a chain reaction of insecurity everywhere. This worldview shares the logic of NSC 68, the seminal Cold War strategic planning document. According to that blueprint, the interlinked world required not just a positional grand strategy to counter specific enemies, but a systemic milieu-oriented strategy to maintain general order. In the words of the NSC 68 report:
In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of atomic warfare, it is not an adequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership.44
And because it associates the preservation of order with forward-leaning primacy, when things go wrong, especially when aggressive forces attack, the default explanation is that there was not enough American power or resolve present.
Primacists have a sense of the ‘tragic’.45 For them, the tragedy is that a successful superpower can forget the fragility of life, the possibility of chaotic breakdown and the need to confront unpleasant truths square in the face. It grows weary of its responsibilities and seeks to retire, forgetting its own indispensability in terms of maintaining the order, which then implodes. Informed by this logic, proponents of liberal order assume that the USA is obliged morally and strategically to maintain the pursuit of armed supremacy across the globe.
This account of order rests on a certain reading of history, and two regnant historical analogies that warn against the twin errors of isolationism and appeasement. The first is the Wilsonian precedent of the post-First World War period, when American policymakers repudiated international commitments such as alliances or the League of Nations. The second is the Munich analogy, whereby wishful statesmen attempted to appease the unappeasable Nazi Germany. Taken together, these twin errors allowed a super-threat to grow, one that could have been eliminated earlier. That miscalculation, committed by established powers that were unwilling to confront harsh realities, led to a worse war, genocide and catastrophe. Implicit in this analogical reasoning is an optimistic counterfactual claim of missed opportunities. In other words, it presumes that statesmen could have acted earlier and decisively, perhaps with anticipatory war, to destroy potential threats at source. Munich in particular functions as the master-analogy and universal template. It turns a particular, atypical historical episode, in which a fanatically, risk-prone militarist regime took command of a powerful host state, into a cosmic event with general applicability. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright repeatedly remarked, ‘My mindset is Munich.’46 Political analyst Bill Kristol was even more impressed by the salience of the precedent, invoking Churchill and Munich sixty-one times in public since 1997 to comprehend foreign policy problems.47
The Munich mindset has multiple defects.48 First, it offers a simplistic account of the dilemmas that confronted policymakers, too readily assuming that anticipatory military action would have worked. Contrary to myths that isolationism led to the Pearl Harbor attack, America was not dormant before 7 December 1941. As well as arming, funding and supplying Britain and creating garrisons and bases across the Atlantic, Washington was already involved in an escalating conflict with Japan over its rapacious occupation of China. From July 1941, its embargo on raw materials and oil, and asset freeze, placed a stranglehold on Japan. This presented Tokyo with the choice between abdicating its imperial ambitions and challenging American power, which it did. America’s war originated not primarily in a failure of appeasement in Europe, but in a failure of coercion and deterrence in the Pacific. Would an American alliance with France and/or Britain, and perhaps with American troops in Europe, have deterred Hitler’s aggression? That is possible, and to the extent that the policies that were undertaken failed to prevent war, such an attempt is preferable. We cannot be confident in the judgement, however. Such an Anglo-French-American alignment would probably not have been enough to arrest the deeply rooted forces for conflict in inter-war Europe. It probably would not have restrained France’s fiercely independent and belligerent attitude to Germany, or reassured a Stalin fearful of Western capitalist predation. Nor would it have reduced the Nazi regime’s appetite for a racial war in the East. And nor would it remove German leaders’ own pessimistic and preventive calculation that a dangerous Soviet threat was rising, given that its ideological adversary and geopolitical competitor to its east with three times its population and forty times its land mass was undertaking an accelerated industrial revolution. Germany also had a vote in the matter. The ‘earlier deterrence’ model assumes that Germany would have resigned itself to being restrained, as the USA ferried military forces over to the European continent. The same regime in Berlin that they rightly viewed as pathologically aggressive, they assume, would then cooperatively have agreed to be deterred from its deeply held, ideological commitment to expansion. That a build-up in Europe could have brought about a spiral, rather than a stand-down, leading to a German temptation towards preventive strikes, is hardly considered.
As for Britain, there were compelling strategic reasons to postpone a clash with Nazi Germany. Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain and others were hardly blameless in their suppression of dissent and innocent appraisals of the Führer. But every option seemed murky. Emerging from the Great Depression and in a world of many totalitarian potential threats, Britain was dealing with a weak hand of economic vulnerability, multiple commitments and scarce resources. It was trying to protect far-flung imperial interests in East Asia, the Mediterranean and in continental Europe with stretched navies and allies of whom they were wary. At home, its population constrained any belligerence. Having been branded a warmonger in 1935, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, for beginning rearmament, Chamberlain, by then the prime minister, was by 1940 denounced for his capitulations. As it was, Britain rearmed more slowly than it might have, for fear of causing economic dislocation. Time was a vital commodity. The country needed time to develop its air defence system of extended radar and effective fighter planes, which turned out to be critical to staying on the chessboard. Could a grand Anglo-French-Soviet coalition have done the job? Perhaps, but alliance blocs had seemed suspect ever since the July Crisis in 1914 that led to the start of the First World War. States were coy about chain-ganging themselves to the conflicts of distrusted others. Stalin’s purging of his officer corps did little to build faith in his ability to checkmate Hitler on the eastern flank. And as the subsequent war underlined, cooperating with the Soviet Union to destroy the Nazi threat would involve appeasement of Stalin’s territorial demands in Eastern Europe.
Neither is it clear that a preventive war in 1936 would have been a prudent alternative. As British decision-makers feared, along with even the most hard-line advocates of rebalancing like Winston Churchill, attacking Germany over the Rhineland remilitarization crisis of 1936 could have made the threat, and the underlying problem, even worse. The early action counterfactual proposes that a limited war would somehow have reversed the direction of a regime whose leader had desired major war ever since coming to power in 1933. It may have strengthened rather than weakened the Nazi regime domestically, and, like the earlier French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, may not instil a lesson of punishment and deterrence. It could well instead have inflamed grievances, increased Germany’s revisionist hyper-nationalism and growing public sympathy for the Reich, ‘feeding Hitler’s characterisation of Germany as besieged by hostile forces conspiring to keep it weak and suppressed’.49 Contrary to his retrospective claims, even Winston Churchill in 1936 did not advocate preventive war, but diplomacy, rearmament and collective security guarantees under the League of Nations, to protect the balance of power, a position shared by the government. Pre-empting rather than responding to Hitler would have meant initiating war without domestic consent or international support. Neither was the later Czechoslovakia crisis an auspicious opportunity to attack. War in 1938 would have sacrificed the participation of empire states like Australia, Canada and South Africa, which were not prepared to bleed for Czechoslovakia. And anticipatory war would probably have been denied the economic and material support of the USA that would prove so critical. Given these uncertainties and dilemmas, while appeasement did not prevent war, it bought Britain valuable time. In the battle of ideas and legitimacy, it left the burden of aggression on Germany. The suggestion that, instead, a limited war could have eliminated such an intense force for nationalist belligerence as Nazism is fanciful.
The analogy is also dangerous because it over-privileges one pathway to insecurity. There are multiple pathways through which a hegemonic power can fall into disaster. It is true that ‘under-balancing’ and restraint can allow dangerous threats to grow. Overbalancing – arming rapidly and on a large scale, forming more alliances, or making threats of preventive war – can also lead to disaster, as in the case of the Kaiserreich and a militarized Europe in 1914. In fact, of the major wars in history, a more prevalent pattern is not the Munich model of appeasing dangerous aggressors and under-reaction to a growing threat, but of established powers seeking to arrest their own decline by suppressing a rising challenger.50 States can also bring themselves down in the long run by saddling themselves with unaffordable debt and multiple, exhausting wars, as in the case of Philip II of Spain or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Hegemons can fall precipitously when they fail to anticipate changes in the balance of power, fail to diagnose its roots and so fail to adjust.51 History suggests strategies that bring a state’s power and commitments into balance and that can successfully prevent overstretch, insolvency or exhaustion.52 As Michael O’Hanlon argues:
[C]ompetitive great powers can produce cycles of insecurity, rivalry and provocation that lead to a war no one would have wanted. That kind of danger, in today’s world, is at least as real as the fear that an insatiable aggressor nation could keep expanding its appetite and ambitions the way that Nazi Germany or Tojo Japan did in the 1930s and 1940s. In other words, mutual overreaction to small crises can produce war just as easily as weakness and deterrence failure can.53
In 1936, having gone through the ordeal of the First World War, as a consensus shifted towards rearmament, British policymakers still worried that both pathways were possible.
The historian Margaret MacMillan has reasserted the Wilson and Munich analogies, only to demonstrate their limits as a guide. In her account, the tragic pattern of history points in one direction, the folly of retreat or inaction:
[T]he calamity of World War II owed as much to the failure of the democracies’ leaders in the interwar decades to deal with rule-breaking dictators such as Mussolini, Hitler, and the Japanese militarists. One wonders how history might have unfolded if London and Washington, instead of turning away, had built a transatlantic alliance with a strong security commitment to France and pushed back against Adolf Hitler’s first aggressive moves while there was still time to stop him…. Today’s world is not wholly comparable to the worlds that emerged from the rubble of the two world wars. Yet as the United States once again turns inward and tends only to its immediate interests, it risks ignoring or underestimating the rise of populist dictators and aggressive powers until the hour is dangerously late. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has already violated international rules and norms, most notably in Crimea, and others – such as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey or Chinese President Xi Jinping – seem willing to do the same. And as Washington and other democratic powers abdicate their responsibility for the world, smaller powers may abandon their hopes for a peaceful international order and instead submit to the bullies in their neighbourhoods. A hundred years on, 1919 and the years that followed still stand as a sombre warning.54
This is an ill-considered indictment. Today’s world is not ‘wholly comparable’, yet that insight does not preclude MacMillan from making sweeping and flawed comparisons. She overlooks the US attempt to ‘deal with’ Imperial Japan, a confrontation that led to genocidal war in Asia. She presumably calls for brinksmanship or preventive war against Germany and Italy in the 1930s, as evidently she regards the rearmament that happened as insufficient, on the assumption that the ‘aggressive’ ‘rule-breaking dictator’ could be easily stopped. MacMillan’s assertion that the US-led West is passive today is simply wrong. It overlooks the Trump administration’s intensification of US primacy, such as its dangerous brinksmanship abroad in the Gulf. She then demands, without spelling it out, simultaneous competition with China, Russia and Turkey, showing a cavalier disregard for the limits of power and the necessity of trade-offs.
With regard to Russia, against Macmillan’s claim that America is supine in the face of Putin’s aggression, the USA under two presidents has imposed increased sanctions, expelled scores of diplomats, increased NATO deployments and provided non-lethal, then lethal, equipment to Ukraine. While Trump may be instinctively conciliatory towards the Putin regime, the USA’s posture towards Russia is increasingly hostile.55 Trump’s advisors, the security bureaucracy and Congress have ensured a hard line on the basis that Russia is an aggressive revisionist power, bent on dominating its near abroad and shattering Western alliances. Trump has appointed hawkish American primacists and Putin critics to Russia-related official posts. He has expanded sanctions, including an extended list of targets under the Magnitsky Act. The Justice Department has forced the television channel Russia Today to register as a foreign agent. Trump has expelled Russian diplomats and he has armed Ukraine, Romania and Poland. The USA has reinforced NATO’s enhanced forward presence in Poland and the Baltic states with increased troop numbers and more exercises, and has presided over the expansion of NATO into Montenegro and Macedonia, against Russian efforts to keep its clients in the Balkans and resist EU-NATO enlargement, while courting Ukraine and Georgia as future alliance members. The USA also acquires low-yield nuclear weapons with the explicit rationale of creating competition against Moscow, to remain ‘top of the pack’ among nuclear powers. It abrogated the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, partly on the basis that Russia has been in violation of it for some time, and partly to free its hand in order to compete with China. Trump twice authorized airstrikes against Syria, Russia’s Middle Eastern client state, against Putin’s protests. He loosened the rules of engagement in Syria, struck Russian troops and mercenaries there, and bragged about it. So far, the USA refuses to recognize Crimea as part of Russia. The net effect in Moscow is to create the impression that détente with Trump’s America is impossible.
If such measures are not enough, MacMillan and other traditionalists should specify what more confrontational steps the USA should take. Such policy details go missing. Inattention to the fact of US coercive measures, and to the problem that there are multiple pathways to danger, serves MacMillan’s general and suspect point, that early and militarized confrontation works, that restraint fails, that the only danger worth worrying about is turning inwards, not belligerence. It reflects a worldview that can only comprehend disappointment as the result of isolation. The application of this reductionist mentality, the incautious use of the Munich analogy and the desire to play Winston Churchill, has a dismal record. It trapped decision-makers into thinking and acting with imprudent belligerence, and intellectually informed the disastrous expeditions into Korea beyond the 38th parallel in 1950, Suez in 1956, the Bay of Pigs in 1961, Vietnam in 1966 and Iraq in 2003.56 We should expect that persisting with the same mythology about the past will produce similar results in the future. Let us consider alternatives.
As a language of power, paeans to liberal order frame the discussion in narrow terms as a choice between the Pax Americana in updated or adjusted form, versus a replay of the disastrous inter-war period. This is a false choice. The order’s visionaries assume that their order is largely innocent of its own problems, or that it contains the source of its own remedies, and that the solution is more and better-applied American power. They scold Americans for their insularity and neglect of international duties, summoning them back to greatness. Their outlook is born of long success, an assumption of latent American power, and a mytho-historical memory rooted in the Wilson and Munich moments. They believe America must promote democratic capitalism abroad in order to secure it at home. The upshot is that America’s only prudent path is to maintain its leadership, its alliance and its commercial system, and assert its armed supremacy against its three main competitors, China, Russia and Iran, in the hope that they will one day become supplicants in an American-led order. The results of this wishful thinking were not encouraging when American power was at its height. Now that the margin of its relative power is narrowing, the supplication of rivals under American primacy is less and less likely. What, therefore, should the USA do instead?
Some critics conclude that America would be better off pulling back from some or all of the theatres traditionally valued for their power potential (Northeast Asia, Western Europe and the Middle East), and focusing instead on the critical region of Asia or coming home altogether.57 America can better secure itself, some argue, by bidding farewell to geopolitics, and relying on the dynamics of balancing, nuclear deterrence and distance to shield itself from threats.58 Key US allies in these regions, such as Japan, Germany, Britain, France and South Korea, are wealthy, militarily proficient and technologically advanced, with two also already possessing their own nuclear arsenals. A post-American Asia or Europe would pose little threat, because local states would balance against rather than bandwagon with the rising power and because nuclear deterrence would make expansion unlikely in the first place, and America would remain secure with its ocean moats, formidable material capability and its own nuclear deterrent. If balancing is the default condition of international relations, then, left to their own devices, America’s potential adversaries in Eurasia will have their hands full dealing with one another. Geographical proximity to one another, nationalism and the insecurities of an anarchic world would drive them into ceaseless balancing and counterbalancing, checking one another’s capacity to project power beyond their hemispheres/theatres. The heartland mostly checks itself. Progressive versions of this argument call for America to dismantle its empire and renounce geopolitical competition, renew nation-building at home and address common international problems like climate change.59
Before offering an alternative to ‘coming home’, we need a coherent account of American security. What are Americans supposed to protect, and how? The referent object – the thing supposed to be shielded – is not mere biological survival, or the mere maximization of power. Rather, it is the institutions and liberties of the republic. And in the weightiest American traditions of security thought, the gravest threat is not that of being annihilated by an external power, but of self-defeat. As Abraham Lincoln prophesied in his Lyceum speech of 1838, ‘If destruction be our lot’ it would not come at the hands of a ‘transatlantic military giant’. Rather, ‘we must ourselves be its author and its finisher’.60
Rather, two alternative insidious threats can destroy the republic’s character. First, a concentration of threatening power abroad could force America to become an illiberal garrison state. A hostile hegemony in Eurasia would be dangerous not primarily because it could lead to a direct assault on the USA. Rather, it would endanger the nation’s republican political life, by frightening it to turn itself into Sparta on a large scale. While America would remain a difficult target for conquest or strangulation and could well physically survive such a state of permanent emergency, it would be tempted to militarize and regiment its society, thereby weakening civil society, wasting resources and empowering the state and a military elite to such an extent that it would suffocate its constitutional liberties. Second, the excessive pursuit of power abroad also could destroy the republic, by turning it into a militarized, overextended empire in a permanent state of alarm. Both scenarios have driven the agonies of US debate about world affairs, especially after America became a ‘national security state’ during and after the Second World War.61
The task for US statecraft is to steer away from both perils: the scenario of leaving behind a vacuum where hostile imbalances form, and the scenario of militarized overreach that two decades of the War on Terror have partly realized. To preserve its way of life, the USA still has a strong interest in helping prevent one hostile power from acquiring hegemony over Europe or Asia. To this end, the USA does not have to choose between dominating the world and coming home. Neither can it abandon geopolitics outright, as the international system condemns its inhabitants to competing for security as well as cooperating. America should give up the pursuit of global dominance, which has proven to be more the problem than the remedy. It should cease trying to expand democratic capitalism and regime change abroad, a project that inadvertently breeds violent blowback, and undermines the republic at home. Attempting to hold on to hegemony globally and suppressing rivals in every major theatre will exhaust the USA, while incentivizing its rivals to cooperate. Equally, America should retain a hand in Europe and Asia, a hand that it uses to maintain a favourable balance of power, without inadvertently creating monsters to destroy. It can negotiate a new multipolarity, safe enough for its institutions to thrive.
America pulling back to its own hemisphere could lead to a Chinadominated Asia, or worse: the formation of a combined Eurasian adversary. China or Russia are not currently true peers of American power. They do possess enough latent potential and/or extant capability to threaten America’s core security interest. While Russia carries far less weight economically than China, a Moscow–Beijing axis remains a possibility in the right conditions. That may not be a probable outcome, but it is possible enough to hedge against. Sometimes empires and agglomerations of power are formed, rather than the more competitive dynamics that often accompany power transitions.62 Even if a reversion to balancing is probable, just how confident can we be that, without US presence, the world reverts to it, that rival hegemonies do not form and that nuclear and conventional deterrence would prevail? It is a question of knowledge and risk. And at its best, the tradition of realism stresses the uncertainty of things. Part of realism’s critique of the War on Terror and adventures in nation-building – alliance expansion – is that Washington has presumed, time and again, to know more than it does or can. Bandwagoning is less prevalent than balancing, historically, but not unknown. And while the logic of nuclear deterrence is powerful, we cannot know how likely it is to hold. Would it be wisest to ‘bet the farm’ on balancing and deterrence?
Consider a different prudential calculation, that retaining some forward presence is an extra layer of protection against the possibility of hostile rival hegemons even taking place, by keeping a balancing mechanism abroad. The ‘threat picture’ here is not that one foreign power would ‘run the table’ by sheer conquest. Rather, in the absence of a rival pole of power, smaller states, if not well coordinated or if offered the right mix of carrots/sticks, just might bandwagon, submitting themselves to the new hegemon’s authority. China’s exponential growth, if it continued, could prove attractive enough to bring Asian states under its sway. Indeed, we are already seeing much hedging behaviour by US allies in the region. Certainly, a state/bloc that obtained regional hegemony over Asia could become a peer. A hostile/ rival Asia organized in such fashion would likely frighten Americans. That in itself could create dangerous competition and confrontation, and the internal weakening of the republic. While such an outcome may not presently be likely, there are regional actors with both reason to find it tempting and sufficient capability to at least contemplate region-wide coercion in pursuit of dominance.63
Of course, remaining present abroad and attempting to hold on to pre-eminence carries its own obvious security risks. As things stand, and with the default setting of Washington as forward-leaning domination, it is the second scenario that is currently the most likely. With escalating rivalries under way against two Eurasian heavyweights, Russia and China, and potential confrontations with two designated proliferation ‘rogues’ in Iran and North Korea, the USA is in danger of being locked into combat, or collision course, with four adversaries simultaneously.
To correct this dangerous direction of travel, Washington should take three, interlinked, grand strategic steps: to contain a rising China, to divide China and Russia, and to reduce its footprint in the Middle East. Readers will likely disagree with some or all of these recommendations. If so, a general observation should hold: that, as in the past, successful statecraft will require Washington to make bargains with illiberal forces, and to compromise with liberal principles. To navigate ahead, Washington will need clear eyes about the nature of its choices. To contain China and reach an entente with Russia for the greater good, to limit its commitments in line with its power, the USA and its allies will have to flout rules, bend principles, betray populations and make dark bargains. That is true of every geopolitical competition in history. Repeating ahistorical mantras won’t make that ugly fact go away, and could hinder the effort to deal with it.
China, Russia and America are already in a security competition. The question is how to create a balance of power in Eurasia by keeping it divided. Designing an intelligent containment strategy against China’s expansion will be a difficult task, a ‘goldilocks’ problem of creating enough counterpower to limit Beijing’s capacity to dominate its region, without repeating the hubristic measures that made America’s last Cold War so dangerous and damaging. Judging from public pronouncements and observations from government advisors, China’s aspirations are dominance in the Asia-Pacific and the restoration of its historic role as the Middle Kingdom, predominant in eastern Eurasia with the United States side-lined.64 Across multiple dimensions, China asserts itself aggressively, seizing disputed territories in the South China Sea, infiltrating the domestic politics of America’s democratic allies as far away as Australia, openly threatening Taiwan with reunification by force and attempting to bring states into its orbit via the Belt and Road initiative of infrastructure development.
For its part, Russia places itself in a state of mobilization, enhancing its readiness to respond to emergencies in an arc of crisis around its borders.65 Whether it is primarily driven by revanchist imperial power ambitions, to rebuild its domination of the ‘near abroad’, or is defensively fending off the expansion of the Euro-Atlantic world into its orbit, it accepts security competition with the USA as a fact of life. Moscow fears that the superpower sponsors subversion and ‘colour’ revolutions along its frontiers and within its capital. Ominously, Moscow regards major war as possible, even likely.
Recognizing that any opportunity for a grand bargain with rivals has passed, seasoned policy hands have urged Washington to contain this or that revisionist power, whether China or Russia, or coerce rogue states to denuclearize.66 Any of these efforts may be justifiable. But they cannot be sustained all at once. Washington should decide which adversaries it most wishes to suppress or resist, and in rank order. It should then try to reduce the number of adversaries by limiting the terms of competition, and, if possible, create the conditions in which those adversaries compete with (or distance themselves from) one another. To divide adversaries would break from recent policy but not be a radical departure, historically. In the mid-twentieth century, the USA help defeat the Axis powers by allying with the totalitarian Soviet Union. It prevailed in the Cold War by actively dividing the Soviet Union against China. It defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq by realigning with former Sunni insurgents.
There is little sign of active splitting currently, however. Rather, the USA is encouraging the perception of a common enemy. By militarily positioning itself within striking distance through a semi-encircling presence, expanding alliances and entertaining further expansion, by establishing a reputation as sponsor of colour revolutions, and as an overthrower of regimes, Washington helps draw China and Russia closer together into a balancing coalition. A nascent Russia–China alliance, or at least convergence, is suggested by Russia’s own inter-agency enquiry into the possibility,67 the frequency of Putin–Xi contact, deliberate tightening of economic interaction and overt displays and declarations of close military ties through joint exercises and arms sales.68 A combined Eurasian competitor may be emerging.
It does not have to be this way. The USA has a geopolitical advantage, that it is based far away. Most powers, most of the time, are more concerned by the potential threat of other nearby land powers than of distant sea powers.69 Based in the Western Hemisphere, the USA has less of a compelling security interest in adversaries’ backyards than they themselves, and it can choose to adopt a more distant pose. Russia and China, by contrast, are neighbours, so cannot withdraw; both are primarily continental land-based military powers, and historically such proximity can exacerbate rivalries and mutual fears. Sino-Russian antagonism is not a natural condition. Only under the right conditions can these rivalries again grow. This is not a plea for a trilateral realignment whereby one state agrees to be the USA’s ‘geopolitical hammer’ and teams up with America to contain the other. Rather, it is to suggest that more American restraint in one theatre could make space for Russia–China frictions to take effect in another.
To assist a distancing between Russia and China, to concentrate effort and to stabilize the East European theatre, the USA will need to do something that liberal order orthodoxy would preclude: attempt a settlement with Russia with significant mutual concessions, including sacrificing the interests of non-NATO countries on its eastern flank, in order to ease the growing sense of mutual threat.70 To facilitate negotiations, the USA should revive government-to-government dialogue to reach a new bargain.
On the Western side, meeting Russia halfway will involve at minimum a cancellation of the Bucharest Declaration of 2008, the pledge to enlarge NATO into Ukraine and Georgia at a future date. Incursion, or the threat of incursion, into Russia’s self-declared sphere is a matter of existential importance to Moscow, far larger in importance than it is even for the most hawkish Americans. Russia has said so repeatedly, and acted on it. In reaction to the Bucharest Declaration, it struck into Georgia in the summer of 2008 by recognizing the independence of Russian exclaves in that country, bombing its coast and its capital. And in reaction to the unseating of a pro-Russian government in Kiev in 2014, Russia bit off the Crimean peninsula and sponsored an armed secessionist movement in eastern Ukraine. Since the USA cannot withdraw from NATO without risking the destruction of the alliance itself, it should visibly reaffirm its commitment to NATO countries and the Baltic States, as it is doing. It should also draw a line under further eastward expansion. Informally, the USA will have to concede that Crimea is gone and will remain in Russian hands, which American policymakers privately concede. This need not be the beginning of a juggernaut of Russian expansion. Putin’s acquisition of Ukraine has come at some cost to Russia, as its investments there are expensive, so imperial prestige does not come cheap. Given the correlation of forces and the limitations on Russia’s capacity to aggrandize its sphere, there is some basis for restoring stability. Washington should terminate the policy that effectively forces Ukrainians in an ethnically fractured country to choose between the Euro-Atlantic and Russia. Some argue that this should lead to a direct Russian sphere of influence, in which Ukraine and Georgia are ‘Finlandized’ or ‘Hong Kong-ized’, whereby a smaller country cedes control of its foreign policy to a more powerful neighbour in return for control over its domestic affairs.71 If this is too much to ask, a militarily non-aligned Ukraine with greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk, with Russian forces and arms removed from Ukrainian soil, would be a realistic and sustainable objective. More broadly, the USA should end its campaign of encouraging democratic regime change in Moscow, a commitment that makes it harder to credibly insist on an end to foreign electoral interference, and one that America has no trouble keeping with more authoritarian states like Saudi Arabia. Washington as the main security provider should also demand that Baltic governments more consistently respect ethnic Russians, both a real issue and a potential pretext for Russian aggression. On the Russian side, it will involve at minimum the end of sabotage operations, election interference and targeted assassinations against and within Western democracies. It will require a mutual commitment to cyber restraint. It will involve renewed negotiations over the bilateral nuclear strategic balance.
There is no guarantee that Russia would be willing to cooperate. But it is worth a try. Russia’s long-term stagnation, and the strain it is already suffering in waging competition, means that it may be open to a new and less expensive relationship. US-led sanctions have inflicted attrition and significant damage to Russia’s economy, adding to the incentives for concessions on non-core issues. Without such a possibility, to avert its long decline it may turn to a new strategic partner in Beijing. In fact, it already is. While Russia is not strong enough to bid for hegemony in Europe, it is strong enough to add significant capability to geopolitical competition. On multiple fronts, it has the capacity to divert China’s attention, to enlarge or reduce its overall position – through arms sales to China, their common border, or Russia’s UNSC veto.
Unlike Russia, China on its current trajectory is large, wealthy and determined enough to directly challenge America’s pre-eminence. If it cannot do so globally, certainly it can and is doing so in Asia. And Asia is the central theatre of power politics in the twenty-first century. China is now unmistakably challenging American primacy in its own large neighbourhood in the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region. But America is pushing back. If there was once an opportunity for the two Asian heavyweights to negotiate a settlement in which they would share power, that moment has probably passed.72 The People’s Republic may not pose a global ideological challenge in the way that Soviet communism did. Neither does it match America’s aggregate power as yet. It may, however, have an imbalance of resolve in its favour. By being located in Asia where the contest is, and with its history, it cares more, and is willing to run greater risks, than the USA, given its higher stakes in the region. Its autocratic system also enjoys rapid economic growth, something that confers legitimacy amongst its own vast population for the time being, and to purchase military capabilities that make it a difficult target. Should both countries ever go to the mat, although the USA would be most likely to prevail, China could now inflict grievous costs. The danger is not primarily that China will attempt a direct assault on America. Rather, it is that a gradual shift in the balance of power could lead to bandwagoning by other states. It could also lead to a dangerous fait accompli moment, where China seizes territory and places the burden of response on America, giving it the choice of dangerous military escalation or humiliating backdown. America’s choice, therefore, is whether to withdraw and abandon the field to Asian states to cooperate or compete as they choose, trusting in America’s other strengths for its security. Alternatively, it is to stay in Asia and apply an intelligent containment strategy.
What would an intelligent containment strategy against China look like? The USA and its allies are already taking prudent steps in some policy areas, to prevent hostile control of critical national infrastructure by screening the investments of state-owned enterprises from hostile powers, and reviewing digital defences and countermeasures against cyber infiltration by hostile actors.73 Washington can also capitalize on a general shift in the military offence–defence balance, to make it difficult for China to impose itself on other countries. Fortunately, the very forces that are reducing America’s military edge also make it difficult for adversaries to expand in the face of determined resistance. It can equip Asian states with the means to impose heavy costs on an aggressor in order to blunt attacks.74 This is important with regard to direct clashes, to deter attack. It is important also as a way of deterring fait accompli aggression, whereby China would launch focused attacks on a limited scale below the threshold of American retaliation, picking off US allies or initiating crises for stakes that are limited, forcing a climb-down. Placing small units as ‘tripwire’ forces, making it harder for China to attack smaller allies without attacking US forces, would help dissuade fait accompli measures, with further layers of more protected forces placed within range to reinforce. And reinforcing the A2/AD capabilities of Asian states is also important as a means to maintain a rough balance, making states secure enough not to give up and ‘bandwagon’ in the face of a preponderant Beijing. This would include arming Taiwan enough to make it a ‘porcupine’, a target that can inflict heavy losses on an amphibious invader. Of course, these efforts can only work with allied cooperation. US protective measures would help shape allies’ choices: resisting the rise of hegemon in their backyard would make more sense if a larger and more powerful state would help them do so.
As part of tending to the strategic balance in Asia and checking China’s adventurism without the process escalating out of control, the USA will need to cooperate with other balancing actors that are not permanent allies. This will include emerging middle powers like Malaysia and Indonesia, and major tier two powers like India. As with separating China from Russia, this will make it necessary to strike illiberal bargains. To get its way and to cultivate the support of other rising states in containing China, the USA will probably have to sacrifice the interests of others: for example, to limit or mute criticisms of India’s human rights violations in Kashmir, or Indonesia’s repression of groups within its own archipelago. To keep competition with China stable enough, with scope for bargaining once the outer limits of expansion are clear, the USA should disavow the cause of regime change within Beijing. To prevent North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and missile programme from becoming a flashpoint for catastrophic war, Washington will have to learn to live with Pyongyang’s bomb as a political reality, by abandoning the failed effort to coerce disarmament or bring about internal collapse, and instead attempting to build a stable deterrence relationship. And given the economic interdependence between China and America, part of the price of containment will be a reduction in economic growth. Limiting the access of Chinese state-owned companies and Chinese investment in areas critical to security capability, like public infrastructure, will be necessary.
An intelligent containment strategy will consciously differ from the excessive aspects of its Cold War precedent. It would conscientiously attempt to sustain a balance, doing enough to check China’s expansion without turning the competition into a generalized struggle without geopolitical limit. Avoiding minor, open-ended brushfire wars would be an important – and difficult – part of prudent containment. Brushfire wars are conflicts that seem to begin as minor engagements but are accompanied by extravagant and growing ambitions, without time limitations or well-defined goals. Such wars normally involve either overthrowing an embattled oppressive government or creating and supporting a corrupt and weak regime. Alternatively, they begin as efforts to curtail a humanitarian disaster or stabilize a war zone, only to inflict unanticipated costs. And they typically endure to the point where an additional ‘great power’ obsession takes hold, namely the feared loss of credibility. These minor conflicts can, and often do, turn out to be expensive in blood and treasure, compared to what decision-makers expected, and ‘there is always the chance that the great power could miscalculate and find itself embroiled in a protracted and bloody stalemate’.75
In a security competition, it is tempting to view all conflicts as interlinked, to obsess over saving face and waging wars to establish credibility. Powers are well advised to avoid becoming involved in continuous wars that lack specific, achievable political goals, especially those designed to exterminate ‘-isms’ that lack geographical boundary. Likewise, as far as possible, Washington should resist the temptation to shape the overall balance of power through the theatre of war to display strength to a global audience. Such struggles are likely to be internationalized and therefore longer and bloodier, as other powers intervene to bleed their competitor.76 Indeed, to get caught in a grinding minor war presents opportunities to one’s rivals to inflict attrition from a distance. Recall French support for American revolutionaries against the British Empire; British support for Yugoslav, Greek and Albanian insurgents against Nazi occupation during the Second World War; Soviet assistance to Viet Cong insurgents against the USA; and US sponsorship of the international mujahideen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Brushfire wars are also likely to involve client regimes whose interests do not harmoniously align with those of their patron, and recent history is a reminder of the ‘misalignment’ problem.77 If anything, getting embroiled in a drawn-out campaign against weaker but determined opponents, where an imbalance of will favours them, is more likely to drain precious resources and divert diplomatic energies, exhibit fatigue rather than strength, exacerbate domestic division and reveal the limits of one’s power. Indeed, a war to uphold ‘dominoes’ can trigger a political crisis in the heart of the metropole, jeopardizing in turn the domestic consensus needed to sustain competition abroad in the first place.78
In Washington, it is contentious to suggest that the USA should divide Russia and China, and accommodate one while resisting the other. The bipartisan consensus amongst security experts is to assume that only a state of supremacy over all rivals will suffice, and to assume that the problem lies in the insufficiency of means or the inefficiency of its application of power, and to call for the allocation of more resources and their smarter use in order to sustain US dominance. That the pursuit of dominance could be the source of the problem is scarcely considered. The 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission report, for instance, assumes dominance to be America’s obvious national interest. It complains that as rivals challenge American power, US military superiority and its capacity to wage concurrent wars have been eroded, because of reduced defence expenditure, and advises that the government spend more while cutting entitlements.79
Even the USA cannot prudently take on every adversary on multiple fronts. The costs of military campaigns against these adversaries in their backyards, whether the Baltic States or Taiwan, would outstrip the losses that the US military has sustained in decades. To risk escalation on multiple such fronts would court several dangers. It would overstretch the country. If in such conditions, current and lavish expenditure is not enough to buy enough security or military preponderance – and it may not be – then the failure lies not in an inability to spend even more. Neither does it lie in the lack of success in sacrificing the quality of civic life at home to service predominance abroad according to an increasingly unachievable ‘two war standard’. It lies, rather, in the pursuit of hegemony itself, and the failure to balance commitments and power.
To attempt to suppress every adversary simultaneously would drive enemies to operate together, creating hostile coalitions. It also may not succeed. Counter-proliferation in North Korea is difficult enough, but the task becomes more difficult still if China refuses to cooperate over enforcing sanctions. Concurrent competitions would also split American resources, attention and time. By exacerbating the strain on scarce resources between defence, consumption and investment, it would raise the polarizing question of what preponderance is for, undermining the domestic consensus needed to support it. At the same time, reduced investment in infrastructure and education would damage the economic foundations for conducting competition abroad in the first place. Altogether, indiscriminate competition would risk creating the thing most feared in traditional US grand strategy – a hostile Eurasian alliance leading to continuous mobilization against hostile coalitions, turning the republic into an illiberal garrison state. If the USA’s prospects as a great power face a problem, it is not the size of the defence budget, or the material weight of resources at America’s disposal, or popular reluctance to exercise leadership. Rather, the problem lies in the size of the policy that those capabilities must serve. To make the problem smaller, Washington should take steps to make the pool of adversaries smaller.
As well as dividing Russia and China, the USA should limit its liability in the Middle East. Those who advocate greater restraint towards that unrewarding region vary in the extent to which America should draw down. Some advocate a withdrawal offshore, to remain within striking distance and act as balancer of last resort. Others advocate a light footprint onshore. Still others, including the author, advocate a wholesale withdrawal from the region except for a minimal diplomatic presence. All agree that current commitments in the region impose too much cost and risk for not enough reward, that the region is declining in its international salience, and that an on-the-ground presence of garrisons, bases and ceaseless military activity does not reliably increase US security, and in many ways undermines it. The experience of permanent war for two decades has been an education in the limits of power, and a caution against reflexive interventionism. As Janan Ganesh argues:
[T]here is a record from which to draw some empirical judgement. The US, it is not ‘too soon to tell’, lacks the resources, knowledge or domestic public backing to direct the destinies of nations in other hemispheres with minimal democratic pedigree. That there will never be a good time to leave is not a reason to stay.80
The United States cannot afford, and does not need, to transform recalcitrant Middle Eastern societies, pursuing either regime change or ‘eliminationist vision of counter-terrorism’.81 Except in atypical circumstances, occupying countries does not stabilize them affordably or end conflict, but catalyses further conflict.
Return to modest, conventional counterterrorism – ending the War on Terror – is needed, delegating the task to coordinated and patient international police work, with fewer and more discriminate acts of force. The case for withdrawing outright from a theatre of declining importance is compelling. If that is too much to ask in today’s Washington, at the least the USA could initiate a ‘blank sheet’ policy with its regional allies. Beginning on the assumption that it may leave, the USA could ask its allies to outline how they will start the relationship afresh, and how they will do things differently. An ‘agonizing reappraisal’ is due.
Along with these large geopolitical moves, the USA should take other steps at home to strengthen its own governance, social cohesion and capacity for sound statecraft. These would include a reassertion of the role of Congress in foreign policy, and a return to proper congressional review over war-making decisions, as a check on an overmighty executive. It would also include ending the deficit financing of military campaigns, returning wars to citizen accountability. It would require a fiscal correction, along the lines of the Simpson/Bowles deficit reduction report of 2010, which outlined six reforms to reduce the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion. In short, in forging a new grand strategy, it should rebuild a coalition at home by consulting more, by saving more and borrowing and spending less, by restoring its negotiating power, to make its arms less central to its statecraft.
The measures outlined here would carry public opinion in its broad outlines. Against the polarization of our time, most people prefer a political, economic and diplomatic settlement somewhere in the middle. They would prefer to restore constitutional government at home while limiting the enthusiasm for liberal crusading adventures in regime change. They have no desire for escalating trade wars, but also believe the brute force of international markets should be tamed, with a mixed economy offering some protective intervention at home, and with trade agreements that include greater protections for labour. They value some alliances in principle, and some power projection abroad, but would like Washington to revise some commitments and some alliances, to stop expanding them, and to shift some burdens onto rich allies. They support a robust defence force, and also support raising the threshold for military action. On the question of homeland security, they would like to go beyond the reductionist debate over walls versus bridges, to balance humane generosity with secure borders. And they doubt whether the core interests, or values, of freedom-loving nations really are served by embroilment with Saudi Arabia and its bloc of Gulf monarchies. They sense that America should try to find an alternative path in its dealings with rivals, other than either pulling back or escalating rivalry without limit. And they accept that the USA ought to continue to be a major shaper of our world, but that solo leadership or primacy is no longer possible in a more contested planet where wealth and power have shifted.
However, it is not the broad populace that is most continuously engaged in making foreign policy. For the USA to revise its role prudently, it would require that the foreign policy establishment be receptive to them, and for the ideas to gain enough legitimacy. For a reassessment to be realistic, the country must be able to consider retrenchment, burden-shifting, the accommodation of (and triangulation between) potential rivals, and the limitation of commitments. To do this, decision-makers can draw on an American tradition of prudential, realist thinking about aligning resources and goals. As Samuel P. Huntington summarized it, to address the gap between ambitions and capabilities, states can
[attempt] to redefine their interests and so reduce their commitments to a level which they can sustain with their existing capabilities; to reduce the threats to their interests through diplomacy; to enhance the contribution of allies to the protection of their interests; to increase their own resources, usually meaning larger military forces and military budgets; to substitute cheaper forms of power for more expensive ones, thus using the same resources to produce more power; to devise more effective strategies for the use of their capabilities, thereby securing also greater output in terms of power for the same input in terms of resources.82
Primacists often treat any pullback, of any scale, as the prelude to a global retrenchment. They did so, too, after the withdrawal from Vietnam. Defeat in Vietnam, though, did not persuade Moscow that the USA would abandon Western Europe, any more than the Soviet Union’s bleeding in Afghanistan meant the Warsaw Pact was a paper tiger. Prudent retreats can be the prelude for successful rebalancing. The history of Sino-US relations suggests so. Recall that after withdrawing from its domino war in Vietnam, the USA made a grand bargain with Mao’s China that strengthened its position as the dominant state in Asia and put an end to Chinese-backed revolution in the region.
If Washington is held to a fictitious and demanding historical standard, considering any retrenchment will be impossible. If liberal order visions prevail, it will be deemed immoral even to consider an alternative of restraint. A pernicious by-product of such nostalgia is its reductionism, asserting a false choice between primacy, or global leadership, on the one hand, and inward-looking isolation on the other.
If Washington could look past cumulative and long-held assumptions, it could take the necessary measures to restore its solvency. To realign its power, commitments and public opinion, Washington could end its wasteful programme of permanent war in the Greater Middle East and lighten its footprint in that region; it could reduce its deficits through prudent retrenchments, cuts and burden shifts; divide adversaries (like Russia, Iran and China) rather than driving them together; manage threats by accommodating some and containing others; rebuild its diplomatic capability; promote republican democracy by exemplifying it rather than spreading it; and restore deterrence as the core of American security. The USA can do this. Only it is unlikely to, enough and in time. The habits of hegemony, a muscle memory acquired over decades of growing power, are hard to shake off. The foreign policy establishment is already resisting a shift in US grand strategy, and is doing so effectively. As much as allies, onlookers and American critics can urge a managed and graceful decline from its brief unipolar moment, it is hard for such a power in such a place to decline gracefully. It is hard, therefore, to be optimistic.