The most powerful foreign-policy instrument of the 1990s and 2000s was not a weapon or a diplomatic alliance. It was an idea. Like all powerful ideas, this one was simple: as countries embraced globalization, they would become more “responsible” members of the liberal international order and would, over time, liberalize domestically. Foreign-policy experts had faith in it. CEOs preached it. New York Times columnists wrote Pulitzer Prize–winning books about it. Presidents made it a core part of their national security strategies. Citizens of other nations believed it, too, including many Russians, Chinese, Indians, and Brazilians. It did not matter whether you were on the left or the right. Almost everyone bought into the basic notion of convergence, even if they were unfamiliar with the term.1
Convergence went far beyond the end of history predicted by Francis Fukuyama—Fukuyama noted the absence of ideological alternatives to capitalism but recognized that non-ideological struggles would persist.2 Convergence meant that major powers would stop treating each other as rivals and begin to work together to tackle common challenges. They would reform their economies to better compete in the global marketplace. They would develop common rules to govern how nations behave internationally. The story of the past quarter century is the rise and fall of this idea of convergence. Its initial success utterly transformed world politics and produced an unprecedented period of peace and cooperation among the great powers. Its collapse over the past five years has left U.S. strategy unmoored, allowed the reemergence of geopolitical competition between the great powers, and raised serious doubts about the future of the liberal international order.
AN UNBALANCED AMERICA
One might ask why the post–Cold War period was unique. What was it about an age of convergence that distinguished it from all other eras in modern history? Yes, the United States was a dominant power, but the period was hardly harmonious. Like other decades in modern times, it was tumultuous. The 1990s and 2000s saw financial crises, genocide, mass atrocities, rogue states, terrorist attacks, and wars. But a fundamental change had occurred. The defining and unique feature of world politics after the Cold War was the absence of balancing against the United States.3 Balancing is a term of art in political science to describe how a major power will push back against another country that it sees as especially powerful or threatening.4 It is, in effect, the act of engaging in a geopolitical competition. Balancing can include arming your rival’s enemies, building up your own military, creating an alliance to contain your rival, or setting down red lines over which you would go to war. History is replete with examples of balancing. The United States and the Soviet Union balanced against each other throughout the Cold War. The United States balanced against Imperial Japan. Britain, infamously, was slow to balance against Nazi Germany even though it played the role of balancer on the European continent for centuries, intervening on behalf of the weaker power to prevent any one country from controlling all of the European landmass.
The absence of balancing did not mean that other countries always agreed with the United States. They did not. Rather, it meant there were limits to how they would express their opposition. When Russia opposed the United States over Iraq in 2003, it did not arm Saddam Hussein, intervene on his behalf, or place military advisers in Iraq, as it would do in Syria in 2015. It confined itself to a vote in the UN Security Council. Russia also opposed NATO diplomatically but not by invading its neighbors. China pursued a much more restrained and multilateral foreign policy in Asia than it does today. It had claims on the South China Sea but it did not build islands on the scale it does now, it did not coerce its neighbors as it has in recent years, and its relations with the United States were much more relaxed.
There were occasional spasms of anger. In 1999, after the United States bombed Serbia into submission over Kosovo, Russian forces landed in Pristina airport in Kosovo to prevent it from being occupied by the United States. Wesley Clark, commanding general of NATO forces, was furious and gave the order for his troops to attack the Russians, but his deputy, a British general by the name of Michael Jackson, refused to carry it out. “I won’t start World War III for you,” Jackson told Clark. Another incident occurred on the other side of the world two years later. In April of 2001, two months after George W. Bush took office, a U.S. spy plane crash-landed on Hainan Island, off the coast of China, after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The Chinese held the American crew and plane and refused to release them until the United States apologized for spying. For a while, the crisis looked likely to spark a dramatic worsening of U.S.-China relations and accelerate a return to rivalry, but a face-saving solution was reached. These were isolated incidents of geopolitical tension, however, and did not represent a particular strategy of balancing by any power.
There is a widely held view that the world was simpler during the Cold War. But the single most complicating factor in world politics is when a large and prosperous country sees it as its mission to ensure that another country’s foreign policy fails. Contrary to widespread belief, world politics became easier and more straightforward after the Cold War. It was a permissive environment for the United States in which there was minimal great-power resistance to its foreign policy. The often vituperative debate on U.S. strategy in the 2000s masked the fact that the costs of failure had radically diminished from the height of the Cold War and that the scope for choice had widened accordingly.
The absence of balancing was an extraordinary revolution in world politics. It created a unique moment in history in which geopolitical competition subsided and countries were more inclined to cooperate with each other.5 For centuries states had competed and fought. The twentieth century was the bloodiest ever. But the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union provided the United States and the West with an unprecedented opportunity. The United States could lead all nations into a new era. The major powers would work with each other to tackle shared challenges. States would still compete with each other but over economic investment and trade opportunities, not to enhance their own security at others’ expense or to claim more territory.
This was no accident. It was a choice. The United States emerged from the Cold War as an unrivaled superpower—what some referred to as a unipolar power—and sought to do two things.6 The first was to maintain and extend its military primacy so that the gap between the United States and potential rivals was so large that it would be futile to challenge it. Research by political scientists has shown that this approach was generally effective: the extent of U.S. power meant that potential rivals were discouraged from balancing against the United States.7 The gap was simply too big. Why embark on a risky strategy when the odds of success were so low? As long as the United States remained vastly more powerful than its potential rivals, others would be strongly discouraged from balancing against it.
The power gap may have been necessary, but it was not sufficient. After all, if the United States had become a threat to other great powers like Europe, China, and Russia, they could have united in a grand coalition to stop Washington in its tracks. But they did not because instead of conquering other major powers, the United States made its second choice. It offered participation in much of the Western liberal order to the rest of the world so that potential rivals could benefit from engaging with the United States.8
These choices and the absence of balancing opened the door for a new era of globalization as the United States spread the gospel of markets, deregulation, capital flows, foreign direct investment, and trade. Countries competed for a share of the ever-increasing pie, and they transformed their own economies and systems of government to be more competitive. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman captured the zeitgeist of the moment. Globalization, he wrote, “is the system that has now replaced the old Cold War system, and, like that Cold War system, globalization has its own rules and logic that today directly or indirectly influence the politics and economics of virtually every country in the world.”9
In a 2002 book titled The Ideas That Conquered the World, Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University argued that the world was dominated by three major ideas: “peace as the preferred basis for relations among countries; democracy as the optimal way to organize political life within them; and the free market as the indispensable vehicle for producing wealth.”10 These ideas provided the basis for a “market centered international order” that “commanded almost universal allegiance not only because every country saw potential benefit in it but also because there was no viable alternative.”11
Elites and governments the world over would recognize that their interests were best served by converging with the U.S.-led order. Thus China began to open up with incredible success while India, Brazil, and other developing economies experienced enormous societal changes and rapid economic growth. This assumption operated not just for Russia, China, and emerging powers, but also for Western countries, which were already part of the order. The political left would open up to the market and abandon notions of socialism. And this is exactly what happened as a new generation of globally minded center leaders came to power—in the United States with Bill Clinton pursuing a centrist and reform-minded economic policy, in the United Kingdom with Tony Blair, and in Germany with Gerhard Schroeder.
There were also some American strategists who believed that the United States could help the process of convergence along by giving history a little push. The International Monetary Fund thus came to impose strict conditions on how countries, like Russia, must reform their economies. The United States used its foreign economic diplomacy to further the so-called Washington Consensus, which required recipients of development aid and financial assistance to follow certain economic policies, such as fiscal discipline and privatization. On the security front, the United States embraced regime change and humanitarian interventions in order to remove the worst violators of liberal values and replace them with democratic regimes more open to integrating into the international community. There were also more subtle, light-touch strategies—for instance, the United States and Europe helped non-governmental organizations and international institutions work with other countries to aid the transition to market democracy.
It is not so much that geopolitics went away, but rather that the United States had a royal flush that it displayed in front of other players. Russia was a shattered country in the 1990s with no capability to stop NATO expansion or U.S. interventionism. China was very much in the “biding time” phase of its rise. Beijing could privately covet disputed territories in its neighborhood, but it had no viable strategy to confront Washington over them.
Over time, U.S. leaders would identify a third driver of convergence. The major powers faced the same threats—catastrophic terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, pandemic diseases, and economic volatility. These shared threats were so great that they eclipsed traditional security problems like territorial disputes and the threat of war among the great powers. Just as the European powers of the early nineteenth century had joined forces to combat the common threat of revolution, so too would today’s great powers work in concert against common threats. This belief existed in the 1990s, but it became an accepted fact after 9/11 and throughout the 2000s as the world struggled to deal with al-Qaeda and as transnational threats became a more pressing concern.
To its architects, the real genius of the convergence strategy was, and in some cases still is, that eventually it would create a global order that could survive the decline of the United States. Historically, order is created by powerful states—it never emerges organically or by accident—and it dies when those states decline. Great Britain and Russia created the Concert of Europe, which collapsed when Germany unified and rose to great-power status. Great Britain built the British Empire, which dissolved after World War II. The United States created the Western liberal order. Normally, the U.S. order would collapse upon the decline of the United States and the rise of a country like China. But some U.S. strategists, scholars, and leaders believed that they were creating an order that would become indispensable to rising powers because it transcended old notions of the national interest. Even after America had declined or reduced its leadership role, non-Western powers would need its rules and institutions to grow economically, to reassure other countries about their power, and to tackle common problems. The survival of the U.S.-led order would eventually become decoupled from American primacy because once non-Western powers had converged with it they would not go back.12 It was a strategy that had some prospect of success, not least because it objectively promised a better type of world than did those approaches whereby the great powers would struggle and fight with each other at the cost of possibly millions of lives, as well as miss opportunities for mutually beneficial, cooperative ventures.
CONVERGENCE UNDER THREE PRESIDENTS
The notion of convergence pervaded the three post–Cold War U.S. administrations. It was an explicit goal of their strategy and defined the parameters of it.
The Clinton Administration
Bill Clinton became president just after the collapse of the old order. It was not then clear that America would ascend during the 1990s to become the world’s unipolar power. Although several analysts did predict it, the mood was generally pessimistic. Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination in 1992, Paul Tsongas, had as his slogan, “The Cold War is over and Japan won.” The previous administration—of George H. W. Bush—had toyed with the idea of pursuing unipolarity, but it was roundly rejected by the president and his top aides after being floated by several people in the Pentagon, led by Paul Wolfowitz.13 In the early years of the Clinton presidency, the Clinton administration searched in vain for a foreign-policy doctrine. By the mid-1990s, however, it had begun to come into focus. The United States would “enlarge” Western institutions like NATO, it would promote market democracy in Russia, and it would push the globalization of the international economy.
Clinton’s national security adviser, Anthony Lake, outlined the first element of this strategy in a speech at Johns Hopkins University in September 1993: “Throughout the Cold War we contained a global threat to market democracies; now we should seek to enlarge their reach, particularly in places of special signi-ficance to us. The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement—enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.”14
James Steinberg, who served as Clinton’s deputy national security adviser, later said that “Clinton was an anti-realist. He didn’t see that there had to be inherent competition among nations. The success of some was not threatening to others. It was their failure that was threatening.”15 Clinton’s favorite book, which he wove into speeches on his worldview, was Robert Wright’s Nonzero, which posits that the world is becoming more complex, thus creating greater rewards for cooperation. Clinton did not believe that this would happen automatically or that it was irreversible, but he did think that if democracy and prosperity took root, the world would become a cooperative place.
The signs were good. Russia and the United States were working together and overcame differences on NATO expansion. Clinton would later write, “While not an expert on Russia, I knew one big thing: on the twin issues that had constituted the casus belli of the Cold War—democracy versus dictatorship at home and cooperation versus competition abroad—Yeltsin and I were in principle on the same side.”16 Clinton brought China into the World Trade Organization “in order to continue China’s integration into the global economy, and to increase both its acceptance of international rules of law and its willingness to cooperate with the United States and other nations on a whole range of other issues.”17 Of Jiang, Clinton wrote that although he didn’t always agree with him, “I became convinced he was changing China as fast as he could, and in the right direction.”18 This did not prevent Clinton from pushing China on economics or human rights, but it did mean that he was optimistic about the future trajectory of relations and China’s ultimate role in the order.
In his memoir, Clinton wrote, “The world will continue its forward march from isolation to interdependence to cooperation because there is no other choice.”19 This is not to say that Clinton expected a harmonious world. “The interdependent world,” Clinton wrote, “is inherently unstable, full of both opportunity and forces of destruction.”20 A more integrated world would be vulnerable to what he privately called “organized assholes” like al-Qaeda.21 There would also be rogue states, nuclear proliferation, and financial crises. This was the dark side of globalization. It was this dark side that Americans expected to pose the security threats and challenges of the future, not old-style geopolitical competition. These were issues on which the major powers could find common ground.
The George W. Bush Administration
The George W. Bush administration bought into all three explanations for convergence—American primacy, the international order, and common interests. In a speech at West Point in June 2002, President Bush told the cadets: “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.”22 This was a radical statement. He was arguing that great-power rivalry occurred as nations became more equal in power. The United States would do the world a favor by ensuring that never happened so the great powers could focus on common challenges.
But Bush also believed that the great power peace was rooted in common interests. In the introduction to his first National Security Strategy, he wrote:
Today, the international community has the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. Today, the world’s great powers find ourselves on the same side—united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos. The United States will build on these common interests to promote global security. We are also increasingly united by common values. Russia is in the midst of a hopeful transition, reaching for its democratic future and a partner in the war on terror. Chinese leaders are discovering that economic freedom is the only source of national wealth. In time, they will find that social and political freedom is the only source of national greatness.23
Bush believed that the common threat of terrorism would reduce regional rivalries. There are also echoes of Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis, which predicted that after the fall of communism, liberal democracy was the only viable pathway to modernization.24 In 2005, the Bush administration’s deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, would explicitly articulate the idea that emerging powers could advance their interests within a liberal order. Zoellick said that once it became “a responsible stakeholder, China would be more than just a member—it would work with us to sustain the international system that has enabled its success. Cooperation as stakeholders will not mean the absence of differences—we will have disputes that we need to manage. But that management can take place within a larger framework where the parties recognize a shared interest in sustaining political, economic, and security systems that provide common benefits.”25
The Zoellick speech was hugely influential and reflected the hope that as China’s power continued to rise, China’s leaders would exercise it in a manner consistent with the U.S.-led international order. This is not to say that the balance-of-power approach completely disappeared in the Bush administration. That administration sought, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it, to “change the relationship with … [another] emerging power”—India—which had been a goal since the very beginning of the administration in 2001 and was designed as a hedge against a rising China.26 It negotiated and signed an agreement for civil nuclear energy cooperation with India, which also served to end U.S. isolation of India after its nuclear test in 1998.
It was in the Middle East where the Bush administration most controversially sought to give convergence a push. Bush believed that the Arab world would embrace democracy if it was given the opportunity. Thus, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Bush invaded Iraq, in part because he believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but also because he believed that once Saddam was gone, Iraq, and the region, would work with the United States and the U.S.-led order instead of against it.
The Obama Administration
The Obama administration tried to build on the Bush administration’s great-power approach, although with some differences. By the 2008 election, Democratic foreign-policy experts were generally expressing the belief that the United States and the rest of the international community shared the same major threats and challenges, including terrorism, climate change, pandemic disease, instability in the global economy, and nuclear proliferation.27 States would continue to have their differences—such as China and the United States over Taiwan, or Russia and the United States over Georgia—but these differences would be secondary to what they held in common. Unlike its predecessor, the Obama administration was comfortable with moving away from American primacy as a strategic goal. Senior administration officials began to use the term multipolarity, which they associated with greater cooperation and burden-sharing instead of competition and less cooperation. For instance, Vice President Joseph Biden, speaking in 2009 in Ukraine, which was to become a global flashpoint in the return of power politics, said, “We are trying to build a multi-polar world, in which like-minded nations make common cause of our common challenges—the stronger our partners, the more effective our partnerships.”28
President Obama’s “reset” was a major strategic initiative to bring Russia back into the fold as a partner in the international order. Meeting in London in 2009 during the G20, Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev issued a joint statement declaring that they were “ready to move beyond Cold War mentalities and chart a fresh start in relations between our two countries.”29 Obama also reached out to China in an effort to deepen the bilateral relationship. He supported institutionalizing the G20 at the leaders’ level and giving it responsibility for management of the global economy. At the London G20 summit, Obama explained his view on why the United States needed to bring non-Western powers into the fold: “Well, if there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy, that’s a—that’s an easier negotiation. But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in.”30
The Obama administration began with a worldview in which the role of the United States was to lead in solving problems that all major states had in common. The notion that Russia or China or any other major power (with the exception of so-called rogue states like North Korea) would have interests that conflicted directly with those of the United States was anathema. Or if they did have conflicting interests, it was assumed that they paled in comparison to shared interests.
The decision to invade Iraq may have been a disaster, but after the worst of the war was over, the situation did not seem irretrievable. By 2008, the U.S. surge had restored some semblance of stability to Iraq and a government was in place. The election of Barack Obama provided hope that the United States could translate his enormous popularity into influence with ordinary Muslims throughout the Arab world. Obama gave a speech at Cairo University in June 2009 titled “A New Beginning.”31 His intention was to turn the page and encourage political change in the Arab world instead of imposing it through the use of force.32 The methods may have been different from those of his predecessor, but the assumption was similar: the interests and views of the peoples of the world were converging, and the future was bright.
As Obama described it to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, “I was hoping that my speech could trigger a discussion, could create space for Muslims to address the real problems they are confronting—problems of governance, and the fact that some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity. My thought was, I would communicate that the US is not standing in the way of this progress, that we would help, in whatever way possible, to advance the goals of a practical, successful Arab agenda that provided a better life for ordinary people.”33
The point here is not that these three presidents were necessarily wrong to see the world in this way. Clinton had reason to believe that China and Russia were trending in the right direction. Bush faced a major new threat from terrorism that united nations in a common purpose. And Obama saw an opportunity to increase cooperation after the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. But the expectations of all three went unfulfilled. The world did not continue to integrate so that nations could face shared challenges together, free from old rivalries. Instead, traditional geopolitics reimposed itself on the international system.
Why did the premise of the U.S. strategy turn out to be wrong?
The primary flaw in the idea of convergence was the assumption that all states perceived the liberal international order as benign and that convergence would operate independently of American power. A secondary flaw, which applied in the Middle East, was that it underestimated the power of sectarianism and ethnic divides. There was much about convergence that was bang on the money. American power discouraged balancing and caused states to look for other strategies. Globalization was appealing to many. But the flaws meant that it could not last. And as Herb Stein, an economic adviser to President Nixon, famously put it in what became known as Stein’s Law, “What cannot go on forever will stop.”
So what was the threat that the Russian and Chinese regimes perceived from the new liberal international order? Now it is often misunderstood as a conventional military threat whereby NATO expansion and U.S. forward positioning and surveillance in East Asia had created a security dilemma with Russia and China. They had not. NATO’s military capability in Europe actually plummeted during this time.34 And East Asian nations were ambivalent about their alliances with the United States prior to 2008. There are two specific risks, however, that the liberal order posed, and poses, to Moscow and Beijing.
The first is the threat that the liberal order would democratize Russia and China. The United States and Europe openly hoped and believed that Russia and China would become liberal democracies as they integrated into the order. There was no intention to forcibly topple Putin or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but the success of democratization elsewhere—the so-called color revolutions—led many to predict that the same thing would happen in Russia and eventually in China. While democracy is very probably in the interests of the Russian and Chinese people, it is certainly not seen that way by their governments and it is their governments that get to decide national policy. It was this threat—of democracy and color revolutions—that really lay behind Putin’s alarm about NATO and EU expansion. Even if the West wished to reassure Moscow and Beijing on this score, doing so would be impossible, because the threat emanated from the success of the order in other countries—in Eastern Europe in particular—and not from bilateral diplomacy with Russia and China.
American leaders were vocal about their desire to bring about democratic change in Russia and China. For instance, in a speech at Moscow State University in March 2011, Vice President Biden told students that “most Russians want to choose their national and local leaders in competitive elections. They want to be able to assemble freely, and they want to live in a country that fights corruption. That’s democracy. They’re the ingredients of democracy. So I urge all of you students here: Don’t compromise on the basic elements of democracy. You need not make that Faustian bargain.”35
The Chinese leadership believes that the United States is committed to undermining its regime and supporting a transition to democracy. Most Americans see support for political change in China as aspirational and not something that Beijing should be worried about. But to Beijing, it is an active American policy that includes support for democracy activists in Hong Kong, the use of media organizations like the New York Times to expose corruption in China and delegitimize the regime, military assistance for Taiwan, ambiguity about terrorism by Xinjiang separatists, pressure on human rights, support for religious freedom in China, and high-level meetings with the Dalai Lama. Chinese scholar Wang Jisi observed that Beijing’s distrust of the United States is “deeply rooted and in recent years it seems to have deepened.” Part of the reason, Wang says, is that “since the very early days of the PRC [People’s Republic of China], it has been a constant and strong belief that the US has sinister designs to sabotage the Communist leadership and turn China into its vassal state.”36
The second way the order threatened the interests of Russia and China was by depriving them of a sphere of influence. Since the Cold War, U.S. policy has been that all countries should be free to decide their type of government and their foreign relations for themselves, without interference by an outside power. Traditionally, great powers acquire a sphere of influence in which they have a say in the domestic politics of their smaller neighbors. The desire for such influence often arises from a sense of insecurity either deeply rooted in history or owing to the nature of the regime—both of which apply to Russia and China. Beijing and Moscow cannot understand why the United States has an unlimited sphere of influence while they are not allowed to expand their influence in East Asia and Eastern Europe, respectively. They dismiss the notion of consent and invitation that is the key feature of U.S. alliances, one that distinguishes these alliances from normal hegemonic or imperial arrangements. Putin hoped to secure more freedom to maneuver in his neighborhood in exchange for supporting the United States in Afghanistan and in the war on terrorism. The fact that this did not, and could not, happen was a contributing factor to his foreign-policy turn.
The United States had no intention of facilitating a Russian or Chinese sphere of influence because it saw no need to concede any ground. Moreover, the countries that would be in such a sphere of influence have their own agency and would strongly resist, thereby potentially destabilizing U.S. alliances and strategic partnerships. After the Cold War, U.S. policymakers believed that playing a role in the U.S.-led order was in the interests of Russia and China and those in either country seeking a return of power politics were anachronistic and counterproductive. From the perspective of the United States, potential challengers like Russia and China as well as emerging powers like Brazil and India could play an increasing role in the international order only to the degree that they accepted the basic legitimacy of the existing arrangement.
The United States also hoped to enlarge the security order to include new countries and envisioned that this expanded order would have purposes other than fighting terrorism. According to this scenario, the seven-country enlargement of NATO in 2004 and the eastward movement of the European Union would create a Europe whole and free. The deepening of U.S. alliances in Asia and the engagement of non-allied countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Myanmar would strengthen the U.S.-led regional order. Existing alliances would also be deepened where possible to consolidate the U.S. presence in key regions.
But both Russia and China saw these efforts as having the purpose, at least in part, of constraining future opportunities for expansion of their own regional influence. Key pillars of the liberal order—the notion that countries should be able to modernize if they so choose, regardless of where they are located, and the belief that the world should consign spheres of influence to the past—improved life for many nations, but not all regimes saw it that way. When the dissatisfied accumulated enough power to push back, they did. Both China and Russia grew rapidly in the 2000s and thus became more geopolitically capable. Between 2000 and 2010 the Chinese economy grew fivefold, from $1.2 trillion to over $6 trillion; meanwhile the Russian economy expanded from a GDP of $259 billion in 2000 to over $1.5 trillion in 2010 (and more than $2.2 trillion in 2013 before it began to decline).37 With greater resources, they no longer had to acquiesce.
A separate dynamic operated in the Middle East. There U.S. policymakers mistook popular dissatisfaction with monarchical and authoritarian regimes as a sign that liberal democracy could take root. Unfortunately, the weakness of the state, the lack of safeguards for minority rights, and the sectarian context meant that revolution merely fueled regional disorder, the collapse of state structures, and counter-revolution. This is a subject to which we will return.
THE END OF CONVERGENCE
These strains on the convergence thesis were evident at the turn of the millennium. Bill Clinton suspected that Vladimir Putin was not a committed democrat. On his final visit to Russia as president in June 2000, Clinton dropped in to see Boris Yeltsin, who had retired six months earlier. “Boris,” Clinton confided, “you’ve got democracy in your heart. You’ve got the trust of the people in your bones. You’ve got the fire in your belly of a real democrat and a real reformer. I’m not sure Putin has that. Maybe he does. I don’t know. You’ll have to keep an eye on him.”38
The strategy of convergence might have otherwise come apart in the early 2000s, but the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the threat of weapons of mass destruction being used against civilian targets, revived it. The Bush administration prioritized the war on terrorism above all else, and Russia mistakenly believed that if it provided basing rights in Central Asia and generally cooperated in the war, significant U.S. concessions elsewhere would result. For instance, the United States might, Moscow hoped, withhold support for political change inside Ukraine or give Russia more leeway in its neighborhood. This expectation was based on a flawed assessment of the U.S. position. The United States never envisaged sacrificing its core strategic goals in Europe in exchange for cooperation in the war on terrorism. Indeed, it probably never occurred to U.S. policymakers that such a deal would ever be on the table. As the decade wore on, the contradiction between Russia’s expectations of what its support would buy and that support’s true value were laid bare. China had fewer illusions about a quid pro quo, but it was happy for the United States to be distracted given that it could have faced a tougher U.S. policy in Asia had the terrorist attacks of September 11 never occurred.
Convergence unraveled in fits and starts. By the beginning of President Obama’s second term, the trends were unmistakable. As Robert Kagan presciently wrote in 2008, “the tantalizing glimpse” of a transformed international order was disappearing and the world was becoming “normal” again.39 Each region had its own dynamic.
Russia
Putin’s frustration with the United States grew throughout the 2000s. From his perspective, Russia had helped the United States in Afghanistan but received no quid pro quo in its own neighborhood. Instead, the United States persisted with NATO expansion to the Baltics and partnership agreements with countries on Russia’s borders. The United States and European Union backed the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and were increasingly vocal about democracy promotion. What angered Putin most was the U.S. missile defense project, which would include sites in Eastern Europe. Russia had more than enough missiles to breach these defenses, but the project signaled that this part of Russia’s neighborhood was no longer to be considered a sphere of influence. By the mid-2000s, mutual trust was breaking down. Putin was eroding democracy at home and criticizing U.S. policy in Russia’s neighborhood. In May 2006, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking in Lithuania, admonished Russia, accusing Russian opponents of reform of “seeking to reverse the gains of the last decade.”40
Putin publicly broke with the West in February 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of senior officials and experts from either side of the Atlantic. He accused the United States of trying to create a “unipolar world” with “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making.” “It is a world,” he said, “in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.” In this new system, Putin warned, “we are witnessing the almost uncontained hyper use of force—military force—in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.”41 Putin’s speech marked the moment when the post–Cold War world turned away from cooperation and toward competition. But the turn would not follow a smooth trajectory. Over the next five years Russia oscillated between both postures, until it finally shifted toward rivalry abroad and authoritarianism at home.
Before things got temporarily better, they got much worse. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 sent U.S.-Russian relations into a deep freeze. Casualties in the Georgian War were fairly low. The official numbers provided by the three protagonists—Russia, Georgia, and the separatists—suggest somewhere around eight hundred, although these could be inflated. Nevertheless, as the late Ron Asmus titled his book on the subject, it was “a little war that shook the world.”42 The war demonstrated Russia’s determination to prevent the further expansion of NATO and Western influence. It showed that Moscow was willing to use force against another state (the first time it had done so since the Cold War). This was not Kosovo or Iraq where Russia would be satisfied with making statements at the UN Security Council. This time, the objections were backed up with force. This was a watershed event, but it did not appear that way at the time. The Russian invasion lasted only five days, after which Moscow agreed to mediation and a ceasefire. The newly elected U.S. president, Barack Obama, would promise a reset with Russia and held out hope that increased cooperation could ultimately transform the U.S.-Russia relationship for the better. Only over time would it become clear that this was an illusion.
When the Obama administration took office, it undertook the reset with Russia whereby it sought to cooperate on areas of common interest while recognizing that the two countries still had important differences. An underlying condition of the reset was that Putin had left the presidency and Washington was hoping that engaging with Dimitri Medvedev could strengthen his position and edge Russia toward a more normal democratic politics.43 The reset yielded several successes. The United States and Russia negotiated the New START Treaty, supply routes through Afghanistan, tough sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program, accession of Russia to the World Trade Organization (WTO), and even a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force in Libya. NATO expansion was also effectively off the table.
This all changed when Putin came back to the presidency in 2012. Senior U.S. officials at the time have noted that the Russian foreign-policy bureaucracy became notably more hardline upon the announcement of Putin’s return, which was months before he actually took office.44 And yet it took them some time to realize how much Russia had changed. Michael McFaul, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, later said, “We underestimated how big a change that was. I briefed the president with the view that there should be continuity since we assumed Putin played a central role in foreign policy.”45 Putin had seen where the reset was headed and he did not like it. There was no prospect of a new European security architecture, as Russia wanted. The West continued to press for human rights and democracy.
Putin believed that Medvedev was too soft—Medvedev had abstained at the UN Security Council on the West’s Libya intervention and he seemed open to liberal reforms at home.46 As Putin’s biographer Stephen Lee Myers put it, “Perhaps it was because he was younger, perhaps because he never served in the security services, or perhaps because of his convivial nature, but Medvedev did not share this bleak distrust of the West, of democracy, of human nature.”47
If there was even a faint possibility that Putin would continue to cooperate with the West, it evaporated even before he took office. After the 2012 election, hundreds of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest Putin’s return to power. Putin saw the hand of the West everywhere. It was, he believed, an attempted American coup. He became determined to consolidate his control of Russia, and even more paranoid about the West. Looking back, McFaul would say, “Had there been no demonstrations against the regime, the US-Russia relationship might have had a different trajectory.” He added, “It was those events that drove how Putin pivoted against the United States.”48 In reality, Putin’s pivot was already well under way, and was setting the stage for his actions in Ukraine in 2014.
Prior to 2008, China’s neighbors were relaxed about its rise. Leading scholars such as David Kang, a professor at the University of California San Diego, argued that East Asian nations were accommodating China instead of balancing against it.49 China was playing a constructive role in the region, which many contrasted with America’s heavy-handed clumsiness during the 1997 East Asian financial crisis. China supported greater regional cooperation and was careful to abide by multilateral rules and norms. In 2006, Joshua Kurlantzick wrote: “Since the late 1990s perceptions of China in Southeast Asia have shifted significantly, so much so that elites and publics in the majority of the ten members of ASEAN now see China as a constructive actor—and potentially the preeminent regional power.”50
That changed after the financial crisis. China pursued its claims in the South China Sea more assertively, engaged in a major spat with Google over Internet freedom, played an obstructionist role at the climate change negotiations in Copenhagen, sought to balance militarily against the United States in East Asia, pressured its neighbors not to support multilateral negotiations on territorial disputes, and regularly and openly criticized U.S. leadership. Most observers attributed this shift to a Chinese perception that America was in inexorable decline and now was the moment to act more assertively overseas. Chinese officials and experts argue that China was merely responding to the provocative actions of Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, and others.
These events caught the Obama administration by surprise. Whereas the Bush administration had expressed the hope that China would be a “responsible stakeholder” in the international order, the Obama administration began by treating China as if it was already a responsible stakeholder in that order. It sought to deepen engagement with China multilaterally through the G20, and bilaterally through the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (SED) and a presidential visit to China in November 2009. U.S. officials avoided actions that could aggravate Chinese officials: for instance, the president deferred his meeting with the Dalai Lama in the fall of 2009, and the administration explored chang-ing the policies toward India that threatened to rile China.51
By early 2010, this policy had collapsed as the administration and outside observers questioned whether China shared U.S. objectives and was willing to take on the burdens of leadership in the international order. Some observers pointed out that China always had an assertive streak, but as Jeffrey Bader, who served as NSC senior director for Asia from 2009 to 2010, put it, “Beginning about 2008 and continuing into 2010 one could detect a changed quality in the writing of Chinese security analysts and Chinese official statements and in some respects in Chinese behavior. Citing the financial meltdown and subsequent deep recession in the United States in September 2008, some Chinese analysts argued that the United States was in decline or distracted or both.”52
By 2010, the United States had again shifted gears. The Obama administration played a crucial role in organizing Southeast Asia to push back against China in territorial disputes, it sold arms to Taiwan, it deepened its alliances and partnerships, and it put human rights back on the agenda. These initiatives led to the announcement of the pivot or rebalance toward Asia, which became one of the signature initiatives of the Obama administration. China responded with its own strategic initiatives, particularly in the South China Sea and East China Sea (see Chapter 3). East Asia was becoming a much more competitive place. But Beijing came to understand that there was no place for Chinese nationalist ambition in the U.S. worldview. As Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell have described, the various factions within the Chinese foreign-policy decision-making process all agree on one pessimistic conclusion: “as China rises, the US can be expected to resist.”53
For three decades after China’s modernization, Chinese leaders maintained a low-profile foreign policy. Deng Xiaoping understood that an assertive China risked choking off its source of economic growth by provoking its neighbors to unite against it. This was famously expressed in the phrase “tao guang yang hui,” which roughly means “develop capabilities but keep a low profile.” The leaders who followed Deng largely adhered to this approach. But as Bader, now at the Brookings Institution, notes, the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, inherited a China unlike any modern Chinese leader.54 It had developed vast capabilities thanks to over a decade of double-digit economic growth and massive defense-spending increases. As the first Chinese leader in thirty years not anointed by Deng, Xi was not bound by his formula. By the time Xi took office, China was already beginning to flex its muscles.
The Middle East
The story of how convergence came undone in the Middle East is very different from the story of this development in Europe or East Asia. The Islamic Republic of Iran was never a partner of the United States. In fact, successive presidents waged an economic war against Iran and threatened to attack it if it continued with its nuclear program. So unlike China and Russia, Iran did not turn against the United States and the liberal international order. It did not become revisionist. It has been a consistent enemy of the United States and a revisionist power since the Ayatollah’s revolution in 1979.
Nevertheless, convergence was a real force in U.S. strategy toward the Middle East. It was just not directed toward Iran. American presidents believed that the Middle East needed to modernize and democratize. They believed that the old Arab monarchies were living on borrowed time, they were creating more problems—Islamic extremism and a disaffected youth—than they were solving, and that in time their citizens would demand change. As we saw earlier, Bush and Obama differed on how this would be achieved. Bush thought that the invasion of Iraq and the demonstration of American power in the heart of the Arab world would set in motion a process of change that would ultimately lead to reform throughout the region. In November 2003, he told the National Endowment for Democracy: “Iraqi democracy will succeed—and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran—that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”55 Obama believed that engaging Muslim communities and turning the page on Bush’s war would generate change from below. In the end, both methods failed.
The initial failure of the Bush approach is well known. Freed from Saddam Hussein, Iraqis found themselves without a state structure to fall back on. Democracy became a sectarian headcount with civil war the inevitable result. There was some respite with the surge, but it could not bring about political reconciliation, and Obama ensured its failure by reducing U.S. diplomatic and military engagement with the Iraqi government.
Obama’s strategy began with great promise and excitement but it met its first real test with the Iranian Green Movement of 2009. The Obama administration remained silent and uninvolved, partly because it feared that the students would be tainted by association with an old enemy, but also because it worried that an intervention would damage U.S. diplomacy with Tehran. The brutal repression of the revolution was a sign of things to come and a big blow for anyone who had hoped that Iran’s vibrant youth movement heralded domestic change and integration into the international order.
The death blow to convergence came with the most hopeful moment in decades. The self-immolation of a fruit vendor in Tunis set in motion a series of incredible events that toppled authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and left others reeling. The Arab Spring seemed to offer incontrovertible evidence of the convergence thesis: Arab societies were modernizing and democratizing by choice. They were rejecting a transition of power from one set of monarchs to their kin. Unfortunately, and as we shall see in Chapter 4, the revolution failed because democracy was widely perceived as a thin veil for sectarian majoritarianism and Islamism.
By 2016, the Arab Spring had given way to a regional calamity with four civil wars, the rise of ISIS, a cold war between Tehran and Riyadh, and an emerging authoritarian regime in Turkey. The Obama administration shifted from a strategy that looked forward to transformational reform to one of callous indifference and disengagement. Obama put the crisis down to “millennia old” hatreds and tribalism.56 After two decades of trying to bring about change, the United States declared, in essence, that the Middle East was beyond saving.
The End of Global Convergence
The return of geopolitics and the collapse of convergence in the Middle East was accompanied by a third development: six weeks after the Russian invasion of Georgia, the United States was rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which triggered a full-scale global financial crisis. In its first year, the global crash of 2008 was actually worse than the 1929 crash with respect to all the major economic metrics—industrial production, world trade, and equity markets.57 The United States stood on the brink of a new Great Depression. Even when that fear passed, the recession would prove to be the worst since the 1930s. Meanwhile Europe was plunged into a severe economic crisis of its own that threatened the future of the euro.
For almost two decades, the United States had championed the process of globalization, and especially the deregulation and integration of the world’s financial markets. This held the promise of continued high levels of growth and mutual prosperity but it made the global economy more crisis-prone. Indeed, there were major crises during this twenty-year period: in Mexico in 1994, East Asia in 1997, Russia in 1998, the United States in 2008, and Europe in 2009. Today, for the first time since the Cold War, the driving narrative behind the global economy is no longer how to increase the openness of markets and economies. Cornell University professor Jonathan Kirshner has observed that much of the world does not see the crisis as a black swan—that is, a rare and unpredictable event—but as a direct consequence of the particular model of global capitalism that has been pursued.58 The problems have not been fixed. As University of Chicago professor and former head of India’s central bank Raghuram Rajan put it, “There are deep fault lines in the global economy, fault lines that have developed because in an integrated economy and in an integrated world, what is best for the individual actor or institution is not always best for the system.”59 Banks that are too big to fail, financial instruments that are too complicated to understand, asset bubbles, and interconnectedness all but ensure continued volatility.
Moreover, the global economy is increasingly perceived as a threat to national economic success, not its driver. Over the past five years, Western democracies have become much more protectionist and nationalist in their economic outlook. Many voters see migration, international trade, and finance as threats to their livelihood. This sentiment caught the political establishment by surprise and culminated in the populist shocks of 2016—Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?
It is tempting to argue that convergence failed, that successive U.S. administrations were foolish, and that the United States and the world are worse off for having tried it. Indeed, some of the champions of convergence in the 1990s and 2000s have turned on it with all the zeal of converts. In a book titled Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum castigated the central thesis of his earlier work The Ideas That Conquered the World. The United States, he argued, used its power to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, economically and politically, to disastrous effect.60 Such a conclusion is tempting, but wrong. Convergence was a strategy with a reasonable chance of success. More than that, it partially succeeded. Much of the world gravitated to the U.S.-led liberal international order. India, most of Southeast Asia, Brazil, and most of Eastern Europe liberalized economically and politically and engaged with the West.
Despite these successes, the failures count. Russia and China are now actively balancing against the United States and its allies. The Middle East seems locked in a deadly downward spiral that threatens the European Union. Security competition between major powers has returned. The U.S.-led liberal order is under pressure from multiple directions. Meanwhile, the effect of these changes is only beginning to be felt in the global economy. The new era of great power rivalry will be as transformative to world politics as its absence was in the 1990s and 2000s.
We seem to be in the initial phase of a new era of geopolitical competition that may, if history is any guide, last for decades. But we do not have a good understanding of what this era will look like. What are Russia’s and China’s objectives and how do they intend to achieve them? How do we explain the differences between them and do they pose a real challenge to the United States? How important is the Middle East to this competition? What does the reemergence of great-power rivalry mean in an age of globalization? And what can and should the United States do in response?
The title of this book, All Measures Short of War, comes from U.S. strategy in the early years of World War II, when President Roosevelt sought to help Britain in every way he could without actually fighting Germany. Today’s great powers will compete vigorously with each other in order to shape, transform, or undermine the world order, but they all hope and intend to avoid a major war. The risk and cost are simply too great and the potential benefit too small. Of course, war could still occur inadvertently. Perhaps a leader will take a chance, thinking he or she can keep any war limited, but miscalculate. Or a leader may misunderstand the intentions of another and overreact. But as the United States, China, Russia, and several others engage in geopolitical competition with their rivals, they will do so with the intention of winning in peacetime. They will use their military to establish positions of strength; they will employ the tools of diplomatic coercion; they will seek to win the hearts and minds of other nations; they will ruthlessly exploit each other’s weaknesses; they will use economic leverage for geopolitical ends; and they may countenance the use of force against third parties or even fight each other in proxy wars.
The reemergence of great-power rivalry poses immense challenges to the United States. There are no easy answers or painless strategies. World politics is becoming more complicated and zero-sum. It will be filled with dilemmas and tough choices. The purpose of this book is to explain why great-power rivalry has returned, how to think about it, and how the United States can respond.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REGIONS
A useful starting point in navigating this world is to look closely at an apparent contradiction in Russian and Chinese behavior. Moscow and Beijing are more cooperative on global issues—including nonproliferation, counter-terrorism, and the global economy—than on regional problems like Ukraine and the South China Sea. Generally, too, the crises that dominate the news cycle tend to be regional while the broad global trends, such as economic development and infant mortality, are often positive. For some scholars and policymakers, this apparent contradiction suggests that talk of a geopolitical challenge is overblown. In their view, only if we see a rival peer competitor with a distinctive global ideology, like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, can we say that we are entering into a truly geopolitical era.
But there is another way of looking at global order and geopolitical risk. The most important piece of the liberal order is not the United Nations or international financial institutions, important as they are. It is healthy regional orders. America’s greatest success after World War II was to create a system in Western Europe and Northeast Asia that brought an end to German and Japanese imperialism and provided the basis for shared prosperity. If those regional orders fall apart, so will the global order. For example, a war between China and Japan—the world’s second and third largest economies—would have massive repercussions for the global economy. A Russian incursion into the Baltics would raise the risk of nuclear war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. And the general deterioration of order in Europe or East Asia—whether it is from economic crises or rising insecurity—can have a global impact.
It is for this reason that Russian and Chinese activities in their neighborhood are more indicative of their approach to the international order than their explicit policy on global issues, although those are also important. Ultimately, a country’s willingness to honor the norm against territorial conquest is much more important than its compliance to the dispute settlement mechanism of the World Trade Organization or voting weights at the International Monetary Fund. And it should come as no surprise that China and Russia are regionally focused—after all, major powers are usually primarily concerned with their immediate environment rather than abstract notions of global leadership. So how are the world’s regions faring?