EPILOGUE
To Build a Better World
When we were young, we were fortunate to be able to play small parts in a great common enterprise to replace a divided world with a better one. This enterprise was successful.
Leaders can only do so much. But sometimes, what they can do is make choices or build structures that channel the countless streams of human endeavor in different directions, maybe more constructive.
This particular set of leaders had grown up with the Second World War. They had lived their lives as part of a “postwar” generation. Think about the shadow that adjective describes. They had lived their lives preparing for the next world war, one that could be apocalyptic. They were not nostalgic for the international system in which they had come of age. They hoped they could leave a better inheritance for their children. And they did.
Of course, it was not perfect. Their solutions engendered new problems, new issues. The world was freer, up to a point. Most superpower nuclear weapons were stored or dismantled, but not nearly all. The scale and burden of military confrontation was greatly reduced, the specter of international aggression diminished, but not nearly gone. The globalization of capital liberated flows of investment and reduced interest rates, while bringing chronic financial crises. The globalization of commerce reduced global inequality at an unprecedented rate, but within some countries—as diverse as China, Russia, and the United States—inequality grew.
We did not write this book because we want to turn the clock back to the world of 1992. The problems are different now. Institutions that handled those problems may not work as well in tackling new ones.
We wrote this book because we believe the world may be drifting toward another great systemic crisis. To prepare for such a crisis, we recall why and how we got through the last one. To redesign the global system, we recall why and how leaders designed the current one.
Principles, Partnership, and Practicality
Looking back, again and again we notice the power of this combination. At different times, across many pivotal choices, a variety of leaders were effective when they brought these elements together.
In chapter 1 we mentioned one example not well known among Americans: the partnership of the Frenchman Jacques Delors and the British official Arthur Cockfield as they created the basic design of the Single European Act in 1984 and 1985. Delors was a socialist, yet also an observant Catholic and banker. He was typecast as a bland, bespectacled “Eurocrat,” yet he was well known for his emotional outbursts and his passionate regard for local communities (one reason he fought so hard over European agricultural subsidies during the knock-down and drag-out talks in concluding the Uruguay Round).
Cockfield was in and out of government, a civil servant who also became the managing director of the Boots drugstore chain in Britain, then was back in political life again. He was considered a doctrinaire advocate of privatization and a Thatcher acolyte. But he—a man born a month after his father had been killed on the Somme in 1916—became a key architect of a single European market.1 He deeply alienated Thatcher in the process, yet attained his objects through his close partnership with Delors—who in turn was constantly working with and through Kohl and Mitterrand and their teams, along with many others.
In this one story the roles of principles and partnership are obvious—but also practicality. Delors and Cockfield related broad ideals to practical solutions, with concrete choices about agendas, trade-offs, and outcomes, even if on a breathtaking scale.
Or, for another very concrete example of what we mean, reproduced above is a copy of a Baker paper for one of his meetings. This particular meeting was on December 4, 1991, as the Soviet Union was about to break up. The paper leads with concern for the fate of would-be democrats in their new post-Soviet republics. This particular paper was drafted by Dennis Ross. The handwritten markup is Baker’s, in his usual style.
The paper, and there are scores like it, opens with principles, with an immediate discussion of possible partnerships with Europeans, Japanese, or even Saudis, and then a very specific discussion of pending concrete moves and money. It blends urgent humanitarian needs with longer-term plans. It then ties back to wider institutional moves (e.g., a “donors conference” to set up a “division of labor approach”) and then back to core principles. Note too that the paper is not fearful or just oriented to threats—the basic thrust is constructive. What can we help build? How can we help? For instance, Baker notes in the bottom right-hand corner that the U.S. can “Give the [former Soviet] Repub[lics] who want to get rid of nukes the cover for doing so.”
This sort of work defies many of the usual bumper-sticker caricatures so beloved of opinion writers and international relations theorists. Is this “realist” or “idealist”? Is it “conservative” or “liberal”?
Since the world so wants such labels, Baker himself would struggle to make one up, trying out phrases like “principled pragmatism.” When the authors of this book were in office together again at the State Department, the two of us grappled with this sort of phrasemaking exercise. We first tried out “practical idealism.” Rice then fell back on “uniquely American realism.”
Whatever one thinks of the catchphrases to describe American policy, some principles can be expressed clearly. At the beginning of this book we introduced two East German success stories: a young physicist at the East German Academy of Sciences and a promising KGB officer working in an East German provincial center. Catalytic choices made by others swept away East Germany and the world they had known.
A different world offered new scope for their talents. The physicist became a politician, then a minister, and then Germany’s chancellor. The KGB officer became a political adviser to a Russian mayor, then an adviser to Russia’s president, and then he was Russia’s president.
They now represent different operating principles for public and international life. Their differences are not far from some of the basic differences that divided Orwell and Burnham during the 1940s, the clashing visions we sketched at the beginning of chapter 1.
The leaders who built a better world at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s favored open societies over closed ones. They favored freedom over tyranny. They favored a civilized world with at least some rules over a world that had none save force. They thought America and the world would be better off with a great and growing commonwealth of free nations. Those principles seem as relevant as ever.
Yet to apply these principles in action, they must be converted into practical choices that set vectors for change. To understand these choices—and we invite readers to understand and second-guess them—one must reimagine the mix of values, judgments about reality, and analyses of alternative actions that were reasonably available at the time, involving several countries.
At the beginning of 1989 there were many ways to define the problems or opportunities. In economics, freer global finance had created new problems of American debt, East European debt, and West European pressure for a monetary union that might help combat American financial pressure and complete the new Fortress Europe. The Cold War trading system was under stress and economic nationalism was rising.
The Soviet military was questioning its military commitments but was still trying to improve its forces. Western allies were torn by fresh debates about whether to again modernize their nuclear forces, as they had agreed to do in 1988.
Some East European communists sought compromise with their noncommunist enemies in order to gain a consensus on how to handle their debts. Preoccupied Soviet leaders wanted them to sort out their problems on their own. Some communist leaders hoped their countries would follow the example set by China, which crushed the largest mass movement for democracy in the world. China, in turn, had suppressed its protests in part to be sure the contagion of European democracy did not spread.
Our story shows how a handful of leaders, West and East, set the vectors for change through a series of very specific choices, which we have mapped. Throw some of those switches differently, and expect different results with chains of actions and reactions that are hard to predict.
There were so many volatile questions. Could change in Poland have turned violent or seemed hopeless? Should or could East Germany have been saved? Would a Soviet leader tolerate a unified Germany? What was the right design for Europe’s future security or economic structures? Were the designs for a united Germany the right ones? Did the push for a new European Union go too far, too fast, or not far or fast enough?
Should Gorbachev have cracked down on the Lithuanians, or should he have moved promptly to a voluntary federation and sought to lead the USSR’s rising democratic movement? Was there ever a chance for better Soviet or Russian economic reform? Would a different Western approach, including on the size or conditionality of aid, have caused different transitional outcomes for Eastern Europe—or for the Soviet Union? And so on.
What we saw was a constant struggle to assess people, countries, and situations. Practicalities of action were debated; choices were made; principles wrapped around them; dangers and opportunities confronted; and institutions devised or adapted.
The dust settled. Europe and its institutions were being transformed. Outlaw aggression was thrown back by a uniquely united world. Different structures to guide and mold a global security system and a global economy came into view: a revived UN, a transformed NATO, a transformed IMF, a new WTO, a new EU, and more.
As time has passed, scholars, practitioners, and even those who participated have naturally looked to make sense of what happened and to turn those events into grand narratives that simplify the past, gloss the present, and forecast a future. What do all the new precedents now mean? How should they be applied to the next case, the messier case? Do the old institutional solutions still work for the new problems?
The leaders of the late 1980s and early 1990s worked the problems their age presented. When they were most effective, they were always oriented more to figuring out what they could do. They prided themselves on their care and practicality. Later some would say that they had “ended history.” We rather doubt that these wise leaders thought that to be true. They were practical people. They did not linger long on issues of blame. They got on with the task of building a new order—leaving the next chapter to those who now meet new challenges.
One thing is certain: Their successors will face a world transformed by a digital revolution. This is not just about technology. It is about new ways of living, new forms of economic organization, and—most challenging for leaders—the emergence of new political communities that may cross traditional borders and allegiances. At this early stage, we can already see the faint outlines of how this technological revolution is affecting political life and the shape of the challenges facing leaders today.
The world will be fortunate indeed if leaders today and tomorrow do as well in the work before them as those discussed in this book did in their day. Today, those responsible will have much to do. But three new vectors demand immediate attention if the global commonwealth is to survive and prosper: the rise of populism and the “rejection” of elites; the emergence of great power rivalry; and rebuilding a confident America that is once again willing to lead.
Balancing the Local and the Global
If indeed people have lost confidence in elites and their leadership, job one is to rebuild it. To be sure, elites deserve some disapproval. But, in most lines of work, from carpentry to computers, elites stand out because of some mix of expertise and experience.
The people who responded to the challenges from 1988 to 1992 did so from a deep reservoir of both. There is nothing wrong with having studied a subject or having met challenges before—and there is nothing particularly laudable about ignorance. Human beings will make mistakes, whether informed or not. The policy answers to international political problems defy scientific method: There are too many factors, personalities, and turns in the road to predict precisely what will work and what will not. Even medicine, which is clearly more scientifically based, cannot avoid the necessity of trained judgment. Most people understand this. It is why they continue to want their kids to be educated, why they want to acquire skills and experience in what they do. They do believe that expertise counts for something.
The issue may not be a rejection of expertise but a sense that elites are losing the competence to solve public problems and have separated themselves from those whom they govern and whose lives they affect: that they do not respect the “common wisdom” of the people. That would mean, for instance, that a gas tax on people who have no choice but to drive because of high housing prices in the city of Paris will come out badly.
In that regard, advocates of globalization are now a bit like those who are speaking to someone who doesn’t understand their language. If we address someone who speaks only Italian (which we do not), there is a tendency to speak louder and slower. Speaking louder and slower to an unemployed coal miner about the benefits of globalization will not get through.
Rather, the new governing contract will have to reconnect governing elites to practical public problem-solving, rooted in local knowledge and understanding. People understand that some of the problems are broad and difficult—inequality, failing public schools (assuring that the elite will never be penetrated by the children of those who are not already a part of it), and a gap between available jobs and skills to fill them. A growing economy is one part of the solution—and an open trading system helps that. But the other pillar is education and skills development. Economic nationalism and protectionism will continue to gain traction if people blame foreigners because they cannot connect their skills to useful work. Both of us have offered ideas about how to adapt America’s public agenda to this century’s problems.2
There are those who would address these concerns by denying the success of free markets in creating prosperity. They do the disaffected no favors. Socialist countries from the Soviet Union of the past to the Venezuela of the present have demonstrated that dismissing the importance of incentivizing work is a dead end. As Soviet citizens used to say, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”
When Russia emerged from communism, the leaders adopted free markets in theory but, in reality, the absence of institutions that could contain the worst of human behavior led to oligarchs and crony capitalism. We told that story in chapter 6. There is a lesson in that. Economic freedom without trustworthy institutions will not answer the problems of the disaffected either.
In Europe more than in the United States, market-based economies exist side by side with belief in a duty to address the well-being of the population through significantly greater government intervention. But this has been done through established institutions that are a part of the ecosystem of democracy.
Now, admittedly, governing institutions are stressed and viewed as failing by many. America’s founders understood that the people’s preferences could not be ascertained, nor their rights protected, without intermediation: That was the purpose of representatives, courts, and the right of assembly in civic organizations.
Populism is not necessarily antidemocratic, but it is anti-institutional. It encourages a direct line from a leader to the population without regard for the intermediaries, and intermediating structures, that safeguard rights and liberty. The founding fathers also knew that government closest to the people would likely be the most effective and trusted. Federalism and decentralization may be even more important given the complexities of governing today over diverse populations.
Moreover, we should separate the problems confronting consolidated democracies and those of younger ones. Institutions are only as good as the paper that they are written on until people come to trust them. That takes time, as citizens test courts, constitutions, and elections to see if they are fair. Each time they prove themselves, they gain authority.
If the institutional landscape is barren, with weak checks on executive authority, illiberalism will grow when populists take advantage of that imbalance. But if it is rich—as it is in more developed democracies—parliaments, courts, a free press, and others will check the power of even the most determined president or prime minister. Thus one answer to the democratic “recession” is to shore up these institutions, particularly where they are new. The CSCE, later the OSCE, turned out to be a very important place before and after 1989 for civil society and opposition leaders to develop, grow, and find support. That function should be reenergized.
The European Union has a particular problem of distance between elites and the people. Brexit may turn out to have been an epic mistake. But the sentiments that caused more than 51 percent of the British people to reject membership in the European Union cannot be ignored. To date, the EU has not addressed the “democratic deficit.” There is a tendency to blame British politicians for the referendum in the first place or the British people for buying “a pig in a poke.” The essential question goes unaddressed and unanswered. What really is the right balance between an unelected European Commission and other supranational bodies—not to mention between the EU as a whole and national structures? Is the notion of a United States of Europe viable? Desirable?
Nationalism is going to continue to exist. As Americans, we are somewhat reluctant to tell Europeans this because we understand the negative connotation that it brings. But people do want to feel kinship with those who share their history, culture, language, and traditions. To ignore that is to cede the ground to those who would turn kinship into nativism.
The Emergence of Great Power Rivalry
Each region of the world has its threats and troubles. The men and women who designed a new Europe and a global commonwealth were concerned, above all, with the greatest dangers—a return of great power conflict that could convulse the world. Because they were the children of World War II, they wanted to make sure that such rivalries never dragged them and their descendants into horrific struggle again. They had an added incentive to avoid global war: Nuclear weapons had made it unthinkable to fight at that scale.
After the remarkable events we chronicle in our book, there was good reason to hope that these rivalries would not emerge again. The Soviet Union and its claim to an alternative political and economic system had collapsed. There was at least some hope that the successor states would join the commonwealth of free nations.
China was beginning to emerge, but policymakers would soon rush to encase the economic potential of its more than one billion people in the system of free trade and free economies. Western and Japanese leaders bet that the lure of the global commonwealth would be irresistible to both Russia and China.
That has not been the case. Both Moscow and Beijing, and lesser powers like Iran, seem quite determined to alter or perhaps destroy the global order that emerged after 1989. It is tempting to see the most important ones, Russia and China, as similar in the challenges that they bring. But they are very different.
Russia is a declining power with an economy roughly the size of Australia’s. It is based largely on extractive industries.3 When was the last time that someone celebrated the global dominance of consumer products or technological breakthroughs designed in Moscow? The Russian economy is an oil and gas syndicate with political and personal fortunes inextricably linked to it.
Without the capacity to influence the international economy, except through oil prices, Russia has turned to its historic strength, military power. There is an anecdote that makes the rounds among diplomats. The scene is from the Congress of Vienna in 1815. A British journalist spots the Russian tsar, Alexander I, standing alone in the hall, dressed in his splendid military uniform, the epaulettes on his shoulders and his headgear adorned with the double-headed eagle of Imperial Russia.
“Who is that?” the journalist asks a British diplomat.
“That is the Emperor and Sovereign of All the Russias, of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod; Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan, Tsar of Poland, Tsar of Siberia, Tsar of Taurian Khersones, Tsar of Georgia; Sovereign of Pskov and Grand Duke of Smolensk, Lithuania, Volhynia, Podolia, and Finland; Duke of Estland, Lifland, Courland and Semigalia, Samogitia, Bielostok, Korelia, Tver, Yugria, Permia, Vyatka, Bolgary and others; Sovereign and Grand Duke of Nizhni Novgorod, Chernigov, Ryazan, Polotsk, Rostov, Jaroslavl, Bielo-ozero, Udoria, Obdoria, Kondia, Vitebsk, Mstislav, and Ruler of all Northern territories; Sovereign of Iberia, Kartalinia, the Kabardinian lands and Armenian province: hereditary Sovereign and Ruler of the Circassian and Mountain Princes and of others; Sovereign of Turkestan, Heir of Norway, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, Stormarn, Dietmarsen, Oldenburg, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth.”
“But who is he?” the journalist presses.
The British diplomat again repeats his answer—“The Emperor and Sovereign of All the Russias…”
After several attempts to get his question answered satisfactorily, the exasperated journalist says, “Okay, I know who he is. But why is he here settling the fate of Europe?”
“Well…” The diplomat paused. “Because his armies are in Paris.”
Well, Moscow’s legions remain strong and feared.
Russia also enjoys a UN Security Council veto, and the Soviet Union once had a vast network of vassal states. The former remains; the latter is gone. This leaves the Russians largely with the capability to disrupt, and that has been Putin’s chosen course for some time now. The latest innovation has been to stir trouble within democratic political systems, the 2016 election in the United States being perhaps the boldest but by no means the only example of that strategy.
The United States and its allies have confronted Russia largely through sanctions and, in Europe, through NATO deployments in the Baltic states and Poland. The latter are meant to demonstrate resolve and fealty to Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, the defense pledge. Eastern Ukraine continues to suffer from Russian military activities that have made that region resemble a failed state. And the West seems to have no answer for Russian influence in Syria and the devastating consequences of Bashar al-Assad’s continued rule.
Still, the NATO response to the territory within its jurisdiction has been impressive. The allies have maintained a united front on sanctions. But disagreements over energy policy continue to rise within the alliance and the EU, particularly over the Nord Stream II plan, a pipeline intended to run from Russia to Germany while bypassing Poland and Ukraine. Moscow will take every opportunity to sow division between the United States and Europe.
The sanctions have held, but it is important to remember that they are a blunt instrument. One challenge for the West will be to punish and isolate Putinism while keeping an open door for those in Russia who want to take a different course. A lot has changed in the nearly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Younger Russians and even some older city dwellers love to travel, spoil their children at McDonald’s, and furnish their mortgage-enabled apartments. In the elections of 2012, Vladimir Putin won less than 50 percent of the vote in Moscow, even in a fraudulent election. (He made certain that he would win in 2018 through widely acknowledged fraud.)
There are also many young Russians who have studied in the United States, in law schools and MBA programs. They have worked in Western banks, corporations, and law firms. These young people thought they had found a patron in Dmitri Medvedev, who did seem to want to take Russia in a different direction. He believed that his country could be influential in the knowledge-based economy. At Stanford in June 2010, dressed in his Armani jacket and jeans and reading from his iPad, he told a small group of venture capitalists this: “Russia has the best mathematicians and software engineers in the world.” It was very tempting to tell him that many of them were now working in Tel Aviv and Palo Alto.
There is no doubt that the Russian people are among the world’s most creative and brilliant. The problem is that the system has not allowed them to flourish. Many of them know this, so continuing to find ways to connect to the “other” Russia should be a high priority. There is some evidence that sanctions, and the associated problems with travel and visas, are beginning to harm those whom we should help, in hopes of a better day for Russia.
If the challenge with Russia is to contain the disruptive activities of a declining power, the issue with China is to channel the significant capabilities of a rising one. Academics have long debated whether a status quo power can accommodate a rising one without war or at least conflict. Graham Allison’s controversial book The Thucydides Trap concludes that conflict is likely. Kori Schake’s insightful history of Britain’s reaction to America’s rise suggests a different possibility.4 But in the latter case, the two powers shared values—it was a kind of a handoff of responsibility from one member of the club of democracies to another.
For a time, there were two narratives about China. One—let’s call it the security narrative—saw an aggressive China, intent on driving the United States out of the Asia-Pacific region. The exhibits for this view were many: Chinese aggression in the South China Sea, and military modernization aimed at denying American naval forces the ability to protect U.S. allies, friends, and the principle of freedom of navigation. When, in 2007, China tested a sophisticated antisatellite missile, the possibility of denial in space appeared to be a real one. And of course, there were all of the nefarious cyberattacks ranging from industrial espionage to hacking the records of the Office of Personnel Management. China was seen to be a military adversary and needed to be treated as such.
But there was a counternarrative—let’s call it the CEO narrative. China was a market too big to ignore, and even if there were challenges in accessing it, companies were making money there. The ability to manufacture in China was an undeniable boon to consumers, who got cheaper goods as a result. The intermingling of the U.S. and Chinese economies was evident in everything from semiconductors to smartphones to goods sold at Walmart. There was shared benefit—China grew dramatically and the international economy drafted on that growth.
In the last two or so years, that second narrative has collapsed, or, more correctly, been absorbed into the first. China, it turned out, was not “joining” the international economy as a full partner devoted to reciprocity. Instead, it was cherry-picking: continuing to close large segments of its market to foreign competition; allowing the creation of joint ventures with the intent of forcing technology transfer; outright stealing intellectual property through espionage; and privileging “national” champions like Alibaba and Baidu over foreign competitors.
Now the Chinese challenge looked different—the new narrative was one of the merger of an economy destined to become the world’s largest with military power great enough to one day dominate the Asia-Pacific region.
One question about China remained, however. What was its intent? How would it use this marriage of military and economic prowess?
For years, the Chinese claimed that their interest was only in domestic development. It was sometimes frustrating to hear officials claim that China wanted only “peace and prosperity and a calm international environment. We are still a developing country,” they would say. In other words, Beijing steadfastly denied having any ambition for global leadership, let alone global dominance.
Something changed with Xi Jinping. He seemed to crave the mantle that his predecessors had avoided. From Xi’s October 2017 speech at the 19th Communist Party Congress in Beijing: In an obvious take-off from Reagan’s famous invocation of America’s place as a “shining city on a hill” for the rest of the world, Xi praised the “China system” as a new type of “shining city on a hill” for other countries, saying that it “offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence, and it offers Chinese wisdom and a Chinese approach to solving the problems facing mankind.”5
Said Xi, “No one should expect China to swallow anything that undermines its interests.” But he added, “China’s development does not pose a threat to any other country. No matter what stage of development it reaches, China will never seek hegemony or engage in expansion.”
China’s policies have begun to reflect that aspiration. It has been active in Africa in infrastructure development and trade for a long time, a trend that could be chalked up to mercantilism—support for the Chinese economy. But more recently, the Chinese have talked openly about a future in which the renmimbi was a rival for the dollar (even if that was a long way off) and have sought to increase the number of international transactions in their own currency. The decision to launch the Belt and Road Initiative is a marker that China intends to influence other states—and not just those on its periphery.
As a good recent study from a group of scholars at the Rand Corporation observed, “The principal Chinese challenge is not that it will impose authoritarian governments on its trading partners but that, over time, it will skew global standards for trade and investment in its favor to the disadvantage of its competitors.”6
The Chinese leaders, who study at least their version of history, are very familiar with the way the British Empire worked during the nineteenth century. That empire gained much of its global influence from dominating the basic infrastructure of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution and that age of globalization. Its influence was found in the control of ports, the Suez Canal, shipping, railroads, finance and exchange, mines, insurance, commercial standards, manufactures that drew in the world’s commodities, and the telegraph cables that connected it all. In China, the decaying Qing dynasty even relied on British servants to collect the customs revenue that was the kingdom’s principal means of paying its debts.7
Any student of British imperial history can only smile in studying China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It finances land and sea connectivity in a twenty-first-century global system built to Chinese norms and standards of cooperation, financed by a network of Chinese-funded banks and funds. It welcomes trade with everyone; it is indifferent to how others govern themselves, so long as they behave appropriately toward China.
If borrowers cannot pay, the Chinese take over facilities, natural resources, and revenue streams. Ecuador is far from China, in South America, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. But China now takes 80 percent of Ecuador’s most valuable export, its oil, to pay debts, mainly for a failed dam project.8 The Chinese navy now sails in every ocean; its interests are on every continent. China is the largest contributor to UN peacekeeping forces. Beijing launched an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in 2016, a possible competitor to the American-led Asian Development Bank. The pursuit of policies that would cement China’s role as a great power is well under way.
China is setting itself up to become the twenty-first-century builder of the Pax Sinica. But its governing philosophies in the 2010s are very different from those that animated Britain in the 1880s.
Great powers, though, have a view of how human history ought to unfold. China has always maintained that it believed in noninterference in the internal affairs of others. It would be a mistake, though, to see noninterference as synonymous with disinterest: It might be possible for Beijing to have its cake and eat it too. There are many strongmen who would love to have a patron who doesn’t have a view about matters like individual liberty, press freedom, or human rights. Even better to have a patron whose views are closer to your own.
A new kind of coalition against freedom has emerged. Some suggest that Russia and China will lead it in order to balance and counter the United States. While this is possible, it is well to remember a few facts about these two powers. First, Russia has little to offer China in economic terms. Cheap oil would serve China—it would not serve the interests of Gazprom and Russia’s ruling clique. Second, the two have a long history of animosity, in part driven by Russia’s irrational fears, bordering on xenophobia, of Asians. Russia has always contended that its wealthy but underpopulated Far East would tempt Asian conquerors. Finally, Moscow as a handmaiden to a rising power doesn’t quite accord with Vladimir Putin’s illusions of grandeur for the great Russian nation. There may well be shared tactical interests, but it is harder to see the Moscow-Beijing axis as an enduring alliance.
Still, as the United States reacts to the inevitable rise of China, it will be important not to overreact in a way that ensures conflict. China may well want to cherry-pick the international economic order—but it is a policy choice to find ways to prevent that. In fact, the Chinese themselves know that their current economic model has run out of steam. They are no longer the low-cost labor provider. The long-awaited transition to a consumer-oriented innovation economy has stalled time and again.
The problem for Beijing is that it does not know how to move toward greater marketization of the economy without a loss of political control. This has caused the regime to fall back on old tropes about ideological purity. It has also led to clear discomfort with the role of China’s biggest private-sector companies. Rumors persist that there will now be Communist Party officials on boards of directors—and that the Alibabas of the world are under pressure to support the party’s priorities at home and abroad.
China’s pursuit of economic reform has thus been halting and erratic. The United States and the rest of the world would benefit if the Chinese can find a path forward. It is hard to imagine international economic growth without Chinese economic growth—and eventually that will implicate America’s prospects too.
So, how to deal with China’s rise? Clearly, its military adventurism has to be challenged, and the United States is right to insist (including with demonstrations of the principle) on freedom of navigation. U.S. military modernization will have to account for China’s path, attentive to the new challenges—denial on the seas, weapons in space, and in cybersecurity.9
One wonders if the Chinese investment will really pay off with countries that are not known for their creditworthiness but are known for their craftiness. There is already a backlash in places like Malaysia about China’s demands and willingness to enforce unequal bargains on the indebted. Sometimes the truth is the best defense—the United States should draw attention to these practices.
American leaders might also learn from the wisdom of their predecessors chronicled in this book. First, remember our point in the Introduction about the Cold War’s “ups and downs.” Second, just as European allies played such a large role in our story, America’s powerful Asian allies—including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and those in Southeast Asia—should be partners in the work to be done. And the important friendship with India, which shares our values, can also play a constructive role in Asia’s future. And this whole book underscores the possible value and lasting wisdom of an enduring Atlantic partnership among the world’s great democracies.
Moreover, when the leaders who were building a better world had a chance, they found ways to accommodate the pride and aspirations of a dying Soviet Union. It is equally important to do so with a rising China when possible. Would it have been so bad to support the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank? We could have said, “We need infrastructure. Let’s start in Afghanistan.” And then help to define that organization in ways that are consistent with the global commonwealth that we helped build.
The question of China’s challenge to the United States in so-called frontier technologies—artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing—is more complicated. Xi Jinping, we believe, made a mistake in declaring a frontal assault on the U.S. dominance in these areas. It has provoked an American response that is alarmed, angry, and bipartisan. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has been transformed into a body to review every Chinese investment in America’s technology sector—and that sector is being defined quite broadly.
China’s lead horse in telecommunications is under fire from the United States and several of its allies. Not only have counterintelligence charges been brought against Huawei officials, but the United States is in an all-out campaign to prevent its allies from installing its networking equipment.
More troubling, though, is the response that targets Chinese students studying in the United States. It is true that “China’s intelligence agencies are expanding efforts to collect information from Chinese students doing research on U.S. university campuses in areas relevant to China’s key technology targets.”10 There are those who believe that American universities should limit the access of Chinese graduate students to academic programs in AI, machine learning, and other high-end technologies. This would require universities to renege on one of their most important principles—that knowledge should have no boundaries and no nationality tests.
In our view this would be a mistake. First, it assumes that the Chinese will never innovate on their own. Second, it prioritizes the short-term goal of preventing technology transfer over the longer-term one of influencing a generation of China’s best and brightest. No one can guarantee that the latter will bear fruit—but the evidence from the past is that it will.
Can a Confident America Rise Again?
This brings us to the final challenge and one that has no easy answer. The rise of China seems to have pushed Americans and their leaders onto their back foot. So much was invested in a China that would liberalize and play a constructive role in a global commonwealth. Now there is widespread disappointment and frustration. The mistake, though, would be to adopt strategies that try to “out-China China.” Denying Chinese students access to America would be just one of the many ways in which we could try to do that.
The United States has been through crises of confidence before. The Soviet Union was going to beat us in the space race. Japan’s industrial policy would lead it to dominate the United States in the global economy. Now, China—admittedly with a stronger hand than the Soviet Union and with troubling values, unlike Japan—is going to surpass the United States for global leadership. Of course, Sputnik produced a uniquely American response—make the next generation better at science and math; teach people to speak Russian; support private fundamental research with government funding. Japan would soon learn that its industrial planning was no match for dorm rooms in Cambridge and garages in Palo Alto. Innovation, it turned out, came from distributed excellence, not centralized mandates.
Some will argue that China will bring many strengths, including the ability to feed machine learning and AI with huge amounts of data because privacy will not be an issue. This is one type of authoritarian envy, but it is evident in other arguments about Beijing’s “advantages.” They can get things done—look at Belt and Road, look at their infrastructure, look at their single-minded response to pollution in their cities.
Authoritarians can indeed get things done. They suffer, though, from the problem that while leaders can be omnipotent, they are rarely omniscient. Thus bad policy is also efficiently delivered. Forty years ago, China had an answer to its population explosion: the one-child policy. It was efficiently—even brutally—delivered. And now thirty-four million Chinese men don’t have mates.11
The modern-day version of authoritarian efficiency will be to harness the Internet for the purposes of political control. Yet can a country that is so frightened of its people that it insists on loyalty and conformity through social credits also motivate them to create and innovate?
America will—thankfully—never be China. But we do need to regain our confidence that the American way is alive and well. There are new sources for optimism. In many ways, the biggest change from 1989—let alone from 1945—is the pervasive importance of technology as a force in international politics. At its worst, it allows Russia to interfere in elections and China to pursue a strategy that is likely leading to the split of the Internet into two separate entities—one free and one controlled and censored. At its best, technology may help to solve the problems of educational inequality, through online learning that can reach underserved populations. At its most consequential, it can help to change the energy mix in addressing climate change. One thing is clear: The United States is still the most innovative country in the world, whether in educational initiatives or the production of electric cars. That is just one source of confidence as America’s leaders seek to reengage with the world.
It took a confident America to declare in 1949 that “an attack upon one is an attack upon all,” with Joseph Stalin astride Eastern Europe and having detonated a nuclear weapon in that same year—five years ahead of schedule. It took a confident America to bet on “the democratic peace,” and help to build a democratic West Germany so strong that it would absorb its communist neighbor and unify, the U.S. president helping to guide the outcome. It took a confident America to believe that the world’s economy did not have to be zero sum, but could grow through free trade and open economies, and to act on that, building the foundation for a global commonwealth that has already made the world more prosperous for a larger fraction of its people than ever before in human history.
America’s confidence was rewarded with seventy years of prosperity, and largely with peace. When one looks at China or Russia, they have few friends and fewer allies. When the National War College holds its classes this year, military people from thirty-two countries will participate. No great power in human history has had that many countries who share its interests—and in many cases its values. There is clearly work to do at home to make sure that all of our citizens are included in the positive bargain that the global commonwealth promised. But that should not obscure, or postpone, the work that must be done to make sure that, recalling Burnham’s and Orwell’s prophecies about the future of freedom, we once again prove that liberty actually works. The alternative would take humanity to a very dark place.
On August 25, 1943, having met with his team in Canada at another wartime strategy conference with Winston Churchill and the British team, the work of the conference done, Franklin Roosevelt spoke to the Canadian parliament and, through the radio microphones, to millions more. Tens of thousands of spectators cheered him as he entered and left the House of Commons.
He said he knew people were now thinking about the future. “There is a longing in the air,” he said. “It is not a longing to go back to what they call ‘the good old days.’ I have distinct reservations as to how good ‘the good old days’ were. I would rather believe that we can achieve new and better days.”
He and Churchill had announced some high principles toward a greater freedom from want, the freedom that would come from “driving out the outlaws and keeping them under heel forever.”
“I am everlastingly angry,” he went on with his old vigor, in that slow, rolling, rhythmic cadence of his, at those “who assert vociferously” that these principles “are nonsense because they are unattainable.
“If those people had lived a century and a half ago, they would have sneered and said that the Declaration of Independence was utter piffle. If they had lived nearly a thousand years ago, they would have laughed uproariously at the idea of Magna Carta. And if they had lived several thousand years ago, they would have derided Moses when he came from the mountains with the Ten Commandments.
“We concede,” FDR admitted, “that these great teachings are not perfectly lived up to today, but”—and here he paused to measure every word—“I would rather be a builder than a wrecker, hoping always that the structure of life is growing—not dying.”12