The United States must decide if it wants to remain a liberal superpower. Being the world’s only superpower bestows great benefits. The United States leads and shapes an international order conducive to its long-term interests and values. Nobody else has that privilege. The United States also has a major, and often decisive, say in how to tackle global threats and challenges. But being a superpower also comes with an enormous price tag.1 The country has found itself engaged in places far from its shores and on issues well removed from a narrow understanding of national interests. Other nations free-ride on American leadership and do less than they can do. Looking at this price tag, many Americans wonder if the country should retire from its role as a superpower.2
Retirement may appear tempting after a decade and a half of low-intensity but grueling warfare against terrorist networks and insurgents, but it would be an egregious mistake. The liberal international order has been tremendously successful in safeguarding U.S. interests while bolstering the peace and prosperity of most of the rest of the world. A more anarchic world organized around regional spheres of influence would be much less stable and would encourage revisionist states to test the limits of American resolve. Trade and economic performance would suffer. Democracy would continue its retreat. The United States would quickly find itself embroiled in conflict and from a much weaker position than it now enjoys. The real question is, How can the United States maintain its superpower status and continue to lead a liberal international order?
This is not primarily a national power problem. Some experts have argued that if only the United States could fix its domestic problems, all would be well with its foreign policy.3 Such a view is flawed in two respects. First, the U.S. domestic economy is dependent on the global context. If the rest of the world stagnates or is troubled, the United States will not be immune. Second, America faces difficult strategic problems that will not become much easier to solve if the resources at the president’s disposal increased by 10 percent or even 20 percent. Resources always help, of course, but tackling revisionism or dealing with the Middle East would be extremely thorny problems regardless. The real challenge is the management of risk: How much risk should the United States incur to uphold the liberal international order?
Responsible competition offers the best way of preserving America’s status as a liberal superpower and the U.S.-led inter-national order. It provides a framework for competition with rival powers that preserves a liberal international order as the organizing principle of world politics. The word “competition” acknowledges the adversarial and zero-sum nature characterizing relations with rival powers. The word “responsible” acknowledges that this competition can and ought to be circumscribed, since the United States must still cooperate with rivals on areas of common interest. If the United States follows a strategy of responsible competition, it will be well placed to take advantage of its global power and the support of other nations. Responsible competition rests on the assumption that the strategy of convergence ultimately failed and cannot be successfully resuscitated until there is a fundamental change in the domestic governance of China and Russia and in the Middle East as a whole.
For the theoretically minded, responsible competition can be described as a strategy of liberal internationalism for a more geopolitically competitive world. It fits with this school because it defines U.S. interests as being bound up in the preservation of a liberal international order and recognizes that the United States must play a leadership role. Responsible competition, however, diverges from more recent variants of liberal internationalism such as convergence or liberal interventionism because it sees the liberal order as facing an existential geopolitical challenge and it puts this challenge at the heart of U.S. strategy.
A NEW MINDSET
The first and most important step is a change in mindset. The United States is in a competition with Russia and China for the future of the international order. It is also locked into a competition with multiple actors in the Middle East. It is not possible to fashion win-win outcomes. Rival powers will try to weaken the U.S. model of international order and advance their own. To compete successfully, one must accept that this is in fact a competition with rational opponents who will adapt and respond to U.S. strategy.
What does this mean in practice? Take, for example, the impasse between the United States and China over the South China Sea. This is not a misunderstanding that can be easily worked out to the mutual benefit of both countries. Rather, the tensions between the two countries are rooted in strategies that are designed to be in conflict with each other: China wants to control the South China Sea, and the United States wants to prevent this. Similarly, in Europe, the United States cannot deal with Russia simply by being more transparent and by reassuring Moscow about benign U.S. intentions, because Putin is engaged in a competition to weaken the European Union and remake the European security order along lines anathema to U.S. interests.
These interactions stand in stark contrast to noncompetitive relationships. The United States and India have their differences, but they are not engaged in a security competition with each other. India is not seeking to weaken the U.S. position in Asia nor does it have designs that bring it into conflict with vital U.S. interests. True, Washington may on occasion want India to do things that it would prefer not to do, but it certainly does not seek to frustrate Indian strategic goals as defined by its government. This dynamic also applies to relations among democracies in general, even if, as in the case of the United States and India, they are not formally allied.
There is a significant literature on the competitive strategy school of thought that is a useful reference but distinct from the strategy proposed here. The competitive strategy literature stems largely from the work of Andrew Marshall, the legendary head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment who retired in 2014 at the age of ninety-six, and his students. Marshall pioneered the approach of competitive strategies, which, as Stephen Peter Rosen describes, “try to get competitors to play our game, a game that we are likely to win. This is done by getting them to make the kind of mistakes that they are inclined to make, by getting them to do that which is in their nature, despite the fact that they should not do so, given their resources.”4 Competitive strategists tend to favor approaches that provoke a rival and encourage it to allocate resources in an inefficient manner. Such a strategy can be effective in long-term competitions, but it is also risky and difficult to execute.
In contrast, the kind of competition applied in a strategy of responsible competition has two components. The first is to identify your rival’s strategic objectives that threaten your vital interests and prevent their realization. For our purposes, this may mean denying China control over the South China Sea or denying Russia a weakened European Union. It does not mean stopping rivals wherever they are active. In fact, such an overreaction would be counterproductive. The world will not stay static and it is not realistic to be a purely status quo power, but the world can evolve in a favorable direction. As Henry Kissinger wrote, “An equilibrium can never be permanent but must be adjusted in constant struggles.”5
The second is to understand and advance your own strategic objectives, including by anticipating and overcoming resistance to them where necessary. This means defining today’s liberal international order and designing policies, both domestic and foreign, that advance its objectives. This is complicated by the fact that the United States is engaged in several competitions simultaneously. Some overlap, but each has its own distinct logic and characteristics. Consider again Russia and China as U.S. competitors. Russia is willing to consider limited war in order to achieve its objectives, seeing its superior willpower as a strategic advantage that could give it escalation dominance in a number of contingencies. By contrast, the Chinese government is determined to avoid war, even a limited one, despite benefiting from the illusion of looming conflict. Applying a single, one-size-fits-all strategy in Europe and East Asia that does not account for these differences will meet setbacks. And this doesn’t take into account the Middle East, an entirely different predicament in which the United States finds itself competing with friends and traditional rivals alike.
The United States must also balance its competitive instincts by behaving responsibly and bounding the competitions it is engaged in. The goal cannot be the destruction of the rival’s state or a full-on competition to contain that state’s influence wherever it pops up. Such unrestrained competition led to numerous strategic errors in the Cold War, such as mistaking Vietnamese nationalism for a global communist revolution. It is even less applicable in today’s environment of interdependence and regional competition. The United States and China are closely intertwined and rely on one another to tackle shared problems. And China is not seeking to overthrow the global order. Even Russia, which is more dissatisfied with the global order, has a constructive role to play on nuclear proliferation and other issues. The responsible part of responsible competition means understanding the specific challenge that rival powers pose to the international order and responding accordingly, without overreacting or jeopardizing cooperation in other realms.
Doubling Down on the “Liberal” in Liberal Order
One of the reasons that U.S. leadership is more acceptable to other nations than the alternatives is that Americans tend to define their interests inclusively and idealistically. By insisting that the international order be liberal (by its classical meaning of an open global economy, democratic, and multilateral), the United States is offering something that appeals to a wide swath of people across all continents and nations. Democracy, an open global economy that promises greater prosperity, human rights, and a formal say in multilateral structures all speak to basic standards that people have for how they want to live their lives. Even so, in recent years, the idea that the order must be liberal has been challenged from multiple directions.
Some leaders believe that promoting democracy, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the rule of law automatically alienates China and Russia and will undermine hopes of international cooperation in the long run. Skeptics argue that the United States has been hypocritical in its support for these values and it should be humble and let events take their natural course elsewhere without intervening. And then there is the argument of some U.S. strategists that a values-based foreign policy damages America’s interest, often resulting in the replacement of pro-American dictators with weak anti-American democracies, which many times are dominated by theocrats. On the economic front, those distrustful of global trade assert that Americans would be better served by a mercantilist approach that uses the country’s size to negotiate lopsided deals advantageous to the United States.
We can take these objections one by one, but first, it is important to underscore that if any one of these arguments were accepted, American leadership would morph into a more traditional form of hegemony—fostering an order that primarily serves the interest of the hegemon with little to offer other nations beyond a sense of security and predictability. This may play well among a subset of American voters, but it would bankrupt America’s legitimacy in the rest of the world. If the United States takes this path, it would become like every other hegemon or empire.
Turning to the first objection, it is true that the United States does have a choice to make as to whether to prioritize its inclusion of Russia and China in an international order over its promotion of liberal values. While inclusion seems like a good idea, it could ultimately backfire if it means compromising on the liberal nature of the order. Such a compromise would change the fundamental nature of the post–World War II order by gutting it of its legitimacy—its major advantage—and so taking the United States down a slippery slope.
Granted, the United States has a mixed record on democracy promotion. As is well known, the United States backed coups in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973. It also backed Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s and was an ally of Hosni Mubarak for several decades. But there is also another tradition whereby the United States has taken real risks to promote democracy to the vexation of pro-American authoritarian leaders—in Chile (1988), Indonesia (1998), and Egypt (2011), among others. U.S. pressure also helped promote democracy in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and in Burma in recent years. Yes, these examples show two clashing traditions, but the actions in support of democracy do refute the argument that the pro-democracy position is merely one of convenience.
In terms of economics, it is fashionable to slam trade agreements and argue that the global economy promotes inequality and unfair outcomes. There is no doubt that the international economic order is hemorrhaging legitimacy, regionally and globally. But the single greatest reason for this legitimacy deficit is not inequality, the terms of trade, overextension, or a democratic deficit. It is the lack of global growth. Economic stagnation, particularly since the 2008 financial crisis, has sapped support for globalization and internationalist politicians. Some economists believe that this is a long-term trend as technological innovation transforms the economy by decoupling productivity from employment. For instance, in his book The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen argues that the West has exhausted those innovations that create mass employment and growth and is now seeking small improvements on the margin.6
However, abandoning globalization and returning to an era of mercantilism and protectionism is likely to drive growth even lower. Imposition of trade tariffs and capital controls to discourage companies from “shipping jobs overseas” could ignite a disastrous trade war with China and other large economies. At best, mercantilism offers the most powerful countries a way to take a greater slice of an ever-decreasing pie, which ends up being bad for everyone. There are valid concerns about globalization, but as former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers has argued, there is scope to use globalization to manage the impact of integration on workers, including by eliminating corporate tax loopholes and promoting labor standards.7
America’s foreign-policy problem is not that there is too much liberalism. It is that many people are losing faith in liberalism because it is no longer delivering what it promised. It is also under assault as authoritarian forces—inside countries and in external state sponsors like Russia—undermine democratic and open systems and push nationalist, protectionist, and populist alternatives. Those who see the merit of maintaining a liberal order must reimagine and reinvigorate it so that it offers value to billions of people the world over in its new context just as it has in the past. This means being faithful to the core principles and values that the order was founded on. It means promoting economic activity between nations, including trade, to fuel global growth. It means insisting that all nations follow basic rules about international behavior, including not unilaterally changing territorial boundaries. It means supporting democracy and human rights where possible, even if inconvenient. On this last point, there will be times when it is not possible, but we should recognize these episodes as failings and look for opportunities to correct course. As my colleague at the Brookings Institution Tamara Wittes explains, it is “not possible to be consistent but it is possible to be persistent.”8
The U.S.-led order must be liberal, not because it is a nice approach for our global partners. Such an order must be liberal because that is in the long-term interests of America and its allies. The reason why U.S. strategy has succeeded far longer than anyone anticipated is because successive leaders fashioned a vision of the world that has appeal across boundaries and is viewed by the vast majority of nations as more just, legitimate, and advantageous than the alternatives. It is precisely when the world seems to be headed in the wrong direction and people are worried about their future that the United States ought to recommit to advancing liberal values as part of its foreign policy and international order.
Restoring the Balance of Power by Strengthening Allies
China and Russia, and a number of actors in the Middle East, have calculated that the regional balance of power has shifted in their favor. This calculation is not rooted in overall defense spending or in GDP growth. It is based on a sophisticated assessment of deployable power in particular scenarios, such as the contest for the South China Sea, the struggle for influence in Ukraine, or internal interference in the domestic politics of Arab states. A common thread in all three theaters is that the United States and its allies are not willing or able to counterbalance revisionist actions in a real and meaningful way.
To restore a stable equilibrium, the United States must first restore a favorable balance of power. As an isolated statement this may seem absurd—after all, is the United States not an unrivaled superpower? Yes, but the imbalance of power has emerged in specific and vital theaters. There are actions the United States can take: it can pursue a federated defense in East Asia by encouraging Australia, India, Japan, and others to deepen their cooperation; it can permanently station troops in the Baltics to deter Russia; and it can work with Sunni states to counter Iranian interference in their politics and violent Sunni extremism.
On the face of it, restoring a balance of power may be seen as an escalation. But as Andrew Shearer, a former Australian national security adviser, has argued in the case of East Asia, it “should be seen as stabilizing rather than provocative.” Improving allied capabilities, he argues, is “instrumental to ensuring that Beijing has realistic expectations about the extent to which other countries will tolerate changes to the regional order—and thereby positively influence China’s behavior and choices.”9 The same can be said in Europe and the Middle East. The United States must deepen its engagement with its allies in these regions to convince revisionist powers that it has its allies’ back and will be steadfast in opposition to geopolitical challenges to the regional order.
Viewing Free-Riding in Its Proper Perspective
Alliances are the linchpin of U.S. strategy. The U.S. alliance system has been the secret of America’s grand-strategy success more than any other factor. Alliances are a power multiplier, a stabilizing force in the regions, and a source of legitimacy. Some people, including Presidents Obama and Trump, have become frustrated with America’s alliances because many of them free-ride on American power, which is to say they rely on the United States to provide their security without “paying for it.” Americans ask why the allies should not spend more on defense or take care of their own neighborhood. It’s tempting to try to square the circle and say that allies must do more, and the United States less, if the alliances are to remain valid. But while this sounds good in theory, it does not work in practice.
To begin with, the allies do not believe that the arrangement is a one-way street. They point out that they repeatedly side with the United States even when they may have disagreed with it. The Iraq War of 2003 is a case in point. Many countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and others, supported the Bush administration in large part because the United States asked them to. Being faithful to the alliance is what mattered, not just the merits and demerits of the case at hand. One can disagree with the invasion of Iraq, but it is important to remember that the loyalty of allies has been a strategic asset of the United States for decades. Japan, for instance, paid for a large part of the first Gulf War. The allies would argue that this solidarity across time is a form of burden sharing.
Beyond this, it is important to realize that some free-riding is part of the price the United States must pay for the benefits of being a superpower. Free-riding has been a complaint of every American president going back to Eisenhower. It occurs because the United States sees it in its interest to partially provide for the security of others. For instance, the United States does not want Japan to build up its defenses, including acquiring its own nuclear weapons, to the point that it worries its neighbors. It is better to have Japan enmeshed in an alliance with the United States. Moreover, if allies are partly dependent on the United States, it is less likely that they will act in ways that undermine U.S. interests. Consider the case of Saudi Arabia. In recent years, Saudi Arabia has done more to provide for its own security because Riyadh worries about the U.S. commitment to the alliance. But this newfound strategic independence has made Saudi Arabia more insecure and willing to take risks, which included launching an ill-advised intervention in Yemen. You can have allies that engage in some free-riding or you can have allies that might act in ways that the United States does not like. You cannot have the best of both worlds.
The real issue is how to strengthen the alliances to make them more effective. By all means, presidents should press the country’s allies to spend more and do more. Donald Trump’s surprising victory in the 2016 presidential election provides an opportunity to make this argument anew. Trump can push other nations to spend more on their defense, which he raised as an issue in the campaign. But he should not threaten to disengage from alliance relationships, nor should he demand direct payment to the United States for security commitments. In this more competitive world, both the United States and the allies will have to do more. The United States will inevitably take on a disproportionate share of the burden, but this has never been without recompense.
PROMOTING RESPONSIBLE COMPETITION IN EUROPE
The United States has long seen the value in a stable Europe and played an active role in the formation of the European Union and its predecessor, the European Economic Community. U.S. security guarantees and quiet diplomacy empowered Europe’s leaders to make enlightened choices that were previously unthinkable. This resulted in a more united Europe that served U.S. interests in multiple ways, most importantly by transforming Europe from a source of conflict into a bastion of peace and freedom (first in Western, then in Central and Eastern Europe). In addition, a united Europe provided an effective counterweight to the Soviet Union and offers the United States a partner that has been a constructive force in world affairs.
The United States now faces two problems in Europe—a weakened European Union that is gradually disintegrating, and a revisionist Russia that is using hard power to remake the European security order. The United States cannot be impartial or disinterested about the future of the European Union, and it cannot let aggravations about burden-sharing tempt it to disengage from Europe’s security problems. It must also recognize that Putin’s strategic objective is to weaken the European Union and NATO in order to remake Europe’s security order into a great-power spheres-of-influence system. Putin sees the European Union as an existential threat to his regime and has sought to destroy it through a variety of tactics, including funding far right and far left parties, weaponizing refugee flows from Syria to the European Union as a political tool, backing Brexit, and using force on Europe’s periphery. This reality is often lost in discussions about whether to extend or suspend sanctions or to reengage with Russia. Regardless of whether the European Union seeks to renormalize relations with Russia, it will have to live with a thinking opponent perched on its border, one dedicated to its demise. If Putin’s regime somehow collapsed and Russia became a failed state, the repercussions could be even greater.
There are two strategic questions to answer in designing a strategy for competing responsibly in Europe. The first is how to reengage with European allies in order to strengthen the European Union, liberal democracy, and internationalism so that Europe is a partner in upholding the liberal international order. It is not obvious what role Washington can play in restoring European growth, tackling populist movements, or bolstering the European Union. The second question is how to balance Russia responsibly so as to avoid a new cold war or an actual war. While Putin has no intention of starting a war with the United States, he is willing to use force as a tactic to advance his agenda. He believes that Russia may prevail in a limited war thanks to its superior willpower and its nuclear arsenal. This makes the situation particularly perilous.
To strengthen the European Union, the United States must fully reengage with it. Some parts of this reengagement will be fairly straightforward and uncontroversial. U.S. diplomats cannot talk about pivoting away from Europe or leaving Europe. The president should spend time developing strong personal relationships with European leaders based on a shared commitment to building a liberal international order. The United States should reinstate exchanges and deepen engagement with large European countries, especially Germany. During the Cold War, there were many opportunities to build networks of American and European politicians, military officers, academics, businesspeople, and journalists. This interconnectedness helped shape a shared worldview.
Apart from greater diplomatic engagement, there are real changes the United States could make to its Europe policy today if it were to adopt a strategy of responsible competition. First, the United States should not jeopardize European security to make a point about free-riding. President Obama once told the Atlantic that “it was precisely in order to prevent the Europeans and the Arab states from holding our coats while we did all the fighting that we, by design, insisted” that they lead the Libya intervention. “It was part of the anti–free rider campaign.”10 The failure of the Libya intervention exacerbated the refugee and migration crisis and the ISIS threat. If a similar crisis occurs in the future, the United States should make a realistic assessment about what Europe is capable of, and its primary objective should be resolving the crisis in a way that enhances U.S. and European security, not grandstanding about burden-sharing.
Second, the United States should work with the European Union and individual European states to find a diplomatic solution to several of the crises that Europe faces. One example is EU-Turkish diplomacy in early 2016. The European Union sought a deal with Erdog˘an to stem the flow of asylum seekers to Europe from Turkey, but Erdog˘an was aggressive and obstructionist. An imperfect deal was finally reached. At the time, senior German officials privately noted the absence of any American engagement in the talks with Ankara. Had the United States directly inserted itself into these negotiations and used a mixture of carrots and sticks to encourage a deal that would resolve the crisis, the talks would undoubtedly have borne a more effective, legitimate, and less controversial outcome.
Another example is Brexit and the future of European integration. The United States will never be a central player on these issues, but it does have an important supporting role to play. On Brexit, America’s objective must be a successful independent Britain and a successful European Union. Washington can work with London to deepen U.S.-UK relations, it can support deeper integration in the rest of the EU, and it can use quiet diplomacy to lobby both sides to avoid grandstanding or excessively hard lines in the Article 50 negotiations, which will determine the mechanics of Brexit.
Third, and this may be the most sensitive issue between the United States and Europe, the United States must revisit economic policy. The United States believes in a Keynesian fiscal policy and in using monetary policy to encourage growth. Germany is a stringent critic of this position and believes in balanced budgets, even with negative interest rates, and a tight monetary policy. There is no easy way to square this circle, but it is clear that the European approach is contributing to a prolonged period of stagnation that endangers the European Union itself. Most other EU member states share these concerns. The United States must continue to press Germany on economic policy and it should not be shy about intervening diplomatically in a time of political crisis, such as the Greek crisis of 2015.
Fourth, the United States should not accommodate Russia’s demand to remake the European security architecture so that it has special great-power privileges and influence over the regional order. Russia may frame this issue as one of inclusion and fairness, but in truth it is a means of undermining the principle that all states are equally sovereign and get to decide their own system of government and manage their own foreign relations with other countries. In practical terms, the Russian model of order would mean the substantial weakening, and maybe even the end, of the European Union and NATO.
We need to be very clear-sighted about what rejecting the Russian proposal means. Russia will not accept a return to normality whereby it accepts and engages with a NATO- and EU-dominated Europe. Russia will push back, threatening the European security order at three different pressure points: non-allied countries, the internal politics of the European Union, and NATO deterrence. Let’s take these one by one.
Of all three threats, competition over non-allied countries (non-NATO and non-EU) to build a sphere of influence may be the toughest. As described in detail earlier, Russia has a key strategic advantage in its near abroad—it is more willing to fight for its sphere of influence than is the United States or Western Europe. If the West arms the Ukrainian government, Russia will likely respond with further escalation, up to and including a proxy war with Western powers. Some of the other solutions commonly suggested are also not as strong as they first appear. For example, economic assistance to Ukraine is ineffective when Russia can dial up the security threat to the government, both externally through aggression and internally by activating its intelligence assets.
Rather, the United States should deploy to Ukraine nonlethal assistance—such as radar, unmanned aerial vehicles, and body armor—and promise to provide lethal assistance and new sanctions in the event of further Russian aggression. Sanctions are the West’s asymmetrical advantage over Putin. Sanctions must be used sparingly, but they are entirely justified in response to territorial aggression. It is true that they are not always effective in the short term—they did not persuade Putin to pull out of eastern Ukraine or to reverse the annexation of Crimea. But they have had a significant effect on his strategic calculations. The fighting in Donbass was largely contained, even though many analysts believed that Putin would strike out to Mariupol and even farther. It is likely that these decisions were affected by the threat of much more severe financial sanctions. The United States should also work with Ukraine and other countries to harden the target by encouraging political and economic reform, including anti-corruption measures; initiating market reforms; strengthening the rule of law; and fostering cooperation between the intelligence communities. This type of cooperation can also occur during peacetime, when it is more likely to be effective.
Meanwhile, the United States and the European Union ought to learn lessons from the Ukraine crisis and exercise caution to avoid providing Putin with a pretext for dramatically escalating a crisis. For instance, the United States can deepen its cooperation with Georgia and Ukraine but it should not press for NATO Membership Action Plans that would very likely lead to immediate military action by Russia and to which Washington would struggle to respond.
The United States must also think through the implications of Russia’s interference in Western elections, not just in Europe but also in the United States. Special steps must be taken to increase intelligence-sharing in order to counter Russian infiltration and covert actions designed to help pro-Russian political parties. If Russia does launch cyber attacks to influence an election in a NATO country, the target state should consider invoking Article 5, NATO’s mutual defense clause, which was updated in the 2016 NATO summit in Warsaw to include cyber contingencies. NATO should then consider an appropriate and unified response, possibly including a cyber response or sanctions. The United States should also engage diplomatically and economically in Central and Eastern Europe to help democratic and internationalist politicians stave off the new wave of authoritarianism and nationalism. As a superpower and the provider of security in NATO, the United States has special leverage in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and other nations.
Finally, strengthening deterrence in NATO will be the mission most familiar to Americans. The challenge is that Russia may wager that many NATO member states would not go to war to defend the Baltic states from a limited Russian attack or incursions. If true, this would give Putin an opportunity to discredit Article 5, whereby an attack on one is treated as an attack on all. NATO officials are aware of this risk and have already taken steps to bolster deterrence by creating a task force of five thousand soldiers that could deploy at short notice. The key to effective deterrence is to convince Moscow that any attack on the Baltics would immediately involve U.S. forces. This means a tripwire force in the Baltics—whether permanent or on continual rotation—as well as clear statements from the U.S. president that he or she regards Article 5 as inviolable.
With a responsible competition strategy, the United States should also make it clear that it is balancing Putin’s Russia, not Russia itself. This is a shift from the Cold War, when containment was directed against the Soviet Union, not the Soviet leader. Thus when Stalin died, the United States refused to countenance détente with the new Soviet leadership, even though Winston Churchill, then Britain’s prime minister, strongly supported exploring it. Churchill saw Stalin, not the USSR, as the problem and he believed that Eisenhower’s refusal was a historic error that would prolong the Cold War. This time, the United States should make clear that it is open to détente with a Russia that remains authoritarian as long as it abandons Putinism.
JUGGLING A RANGE OF INTERESTS AND RISKS
IN EAST ASIA
U.S. balancing against China must be focused on East Asia. East Asia is a strategically vital region for U.S. interests, and Chinese attempts to upend the East Asian order are stoking nationalism and security rivalries. If China succeeds in building a spheres-of-influence order there, it would destabilize the regional and global orders. By contrast, the westward expansion of Chinese influence—into Pakistan, Central Asia, and the Middle East—is relatively benign to U.S. interests and the global order so the United States should take a much more relaxed view of it. In addition, a growing Chinese economy is in the interests of the United States and its allies, even if it means greater Chinese economic influence in Europe and East Asia. U.S. leaders must clearly communicate that their problem is not with rising Chinese power per se; it is with where and how this power is directed and toward what end. The truly disturbing aspect of Chinese strategy is that its primary goal is the revision of the regional order in East Asia. A secondary concern is that China might try to advance illiberal goals globally—something it has flirted with, although not to the extent Russia has.
The key to crafting U.S. strategy in East Asia is to understand something very fundamental about the Chinese strategy: it requires the avoidance of war to achieve its goals. It is not about preparing to fight and win a conflict with the United States. It is not about preparing to invade its neighbors. It is about changing the balance of power in peacetime so that one day the region and the United States will realize that China has achieved power parity and a sphere of influence, so that the path of least resistance will be to accept that and accommodate China. If war were to break out, it would shatter this plan. Chinese military installations in the South China Sea, which would otherwise have geopolitical influence, would be wiped out quickly. The Chinese leaders also know that if a war occurred and if China were defeated, the Chinese Communist Party regime would surely come to an end.
Current U.S. strategy toward China is confused. Some believe that China can only displace the United States in East Asia by winning a major war and that the primary goal of U.S. strategy must be to prepare to fight and win such a war, which would help deter China from ever starting it. Others take the opposite view, citing the 1914 scenario of inadvertent conflict, and argue that the United States must exhibit great caution to avoid misunderstandings and accidents that could spiral out of control. According to this view, the United States can impose some costs on China for revisionist actions, but it must also reassure China that it is exercising restraint.
Both approaches—war preparations and reassurance—miss the point. Yes, the United States should maintain its military advantage because if that gap closed significantly Chinese strategists could revisit their opposition to war with America. But focusing exclusively on preparation for the next major war misses the peacetime challenge that China poses. And reassurance plays right into China’s hands. While the United States should not be careless or overly provocative in its behavior toward China, working relentlessly toward a code of conduct that China rejects or practicing restraint while China pushes its advantage would give Beijing the time and space for its strategy to succeed.
The United States must prepare to wage a peacetime competition to strengthen the U.S.-led regional order and to prevent China from achieving its vision of a spheres-of-influence order. In reality, great-power peace (properly understood as the absence of war) is relatively stable and durable in East Asia, even though it is in China’s interest to pretend it is fragile. Even if there were a collision of vessels or a standoff over an island, China would maintain its strategy of incremental revisionism while avoiding war. The United States has considerable geopolitical space to push back against China in peacetime without triggering a crisis or a conflict. This is one way in which East Asia is distinct from Europe, where Russian strategy condones war as a tactic to achieve its goals.
The objective of America’s China strategy ought to be twofold. The first is to deny China a significant sphere of influence in East Asia, particularly in the South and East China Seas. This approach would not entail preventing every act of land reclamation or building military installations. China will have individual successes that the United States can do very little about. What matters is the overall strategic effect and preventing the South China Sea from becoming a Chinese lake. The United States should not and cannot allow the Chinese navy to control access to the South China Sea and to bequeath open seas to other nations with the option to take them away. It is a similar story in the East China Sea, where the United States and Japan cannot allow the Chinese navy to become the dominant force.
Such a strategic objective certainly means expanding and sustaining freedom of navigation operations and rendering meaningless any Air Defense Identification Zone. It also means taking proactive steps by working with U.S. allies to ensure that the South China Sea is a contested space. The July 2016 decision by an international tribunal (the Permanent Court of Arbitration) that China’s claims in the South China Sea have no basis in international law provides a diplomatic opportunity to build an international coalition in favor of a multilateral approach to settling disputes. If China continues to push the envelope by building islands in the South China Sea, the United States could, for example, equip the Philippines and Vietnam with dredging equipment so they can do the same. The United States could sell anti-access/area-denial equipment to its allies and partners to raise the risk to Beijing of operating in the South China Sea. The United States could even pressure Taiwan to open the archives and release the original documentation on the nine-dash line (what Taiwan calls the eleven-dash line) and subject it to intense legal scrutiny—a step that China has long opposed. The United States should stop short of drawing red lines and threatening war if China continues to build its sphere of influence, however, because such a threat would be disproportionate, unwise, and not credible.
Preserving the liberal order in East Asia does not mean risking war to prevent every Chinese land reclamation, land strip, or maritime advance. The equilibrium in East Asia will never be fixed or permanent, but it can be maintained amid adjustments and persistent competition. The balance of power and the balance of influence may look modestly different than they do today but what is important is that they continue to favor the liberal order strategy instead of the spheres-of-influence alternative.
The second strategic objective must be to build, strengthen, and expand the U.S.-led liberal order so it is in robust health and provides a better alternative to the Chinese-led spheres-of-influence model. The United States should leverage Chinese assertiveness to deepen and strengthen its alliances and strategic partnerships with China’s neighbors. This is the most obvious way of imposing costs on Beijing for revisionist behavior and it serves to bolster the existing order. The United States must also provide an economic vision for the region. It can begin by reviving and reforming the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a mega trade deal with eleven other countries that was negotiated by President Obama but disowned and opposed by President Trump. The TPP could be renegotiated to address thorny issues like the role of state-owned enterprises in investment decisions and currency manipulation.11 The United States should deepen its relations with India, the world’s largest democracy. India’s strategic history precludes a formal alliance but there is a great deal that can be done short of that, including greater defense cooperation, assisting India in building its maritime capabilities, and working together on energy and climate change. The United States should also encourage closer strategic ties between Asian nations, including between Japan and Australia, India and Australia, India and Japan, and Japan and South Korea. As scholars from the Center for Strategic and International Studies have argued, Asia needs a federated defense whereby America’s allies work closely with one another through “aligned strategies, force postures, operating concepts, [and] training and logistics,” all of which would be “delivered through shared defense capabilities, facilities and other infrastructure, and jointly developed and acquired systems.”12
China does have some red lines that it could not avoid going to war over: three in particular. There is every reason to think that Beijing cannot accept Taiwanese independence and that it would go to war to prevent it from happening. It will also use economic sanctions and other punitive measures on any government, presumably a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government, that moves in that direction. The second red line is the collapse of North Korea. There is reason to believe that China would use its army to prevent a unified Korea allied with the United States from reaching the Chinese border, if the house of Kim falls. And the third red line is any threat that could topple the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. With its back to the wall, the Chinese government may choose war over regime collapse. It is hard to know what form this could take. It is unlikely to be simply nationalist disquiet over an island dispute. The United States must take these three red lines seriously. It should continue its balanced Taiwan policy; it should exercise great caution and consult with Beijing in the event that the house of Kim falls; and it should be careful not to take advantage of a Chinese domestic crisis to advance regime change in China.
North Korea poses a particularly difficult problem. Long the outlaw of Asia, North Korea has relied on blackmail, calculated aggression, and its nuclear program as the pillars of its foreign policy. The rise to power of Kim Jong-un has injected even more uncertainty and volatility into the situation. Kim has angered China with his behavior, including by killing his uncle, Jang Sung-taek, who was one of the leading interlocutors with Beijing. He has also accelerated North Korea’s efforts to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the continental United States with a nuclear weapon. Kim seems to believe that this would be a game-changer that would deter the United States from defending South Korea and would allow him a freer hand to engage in acts of aggression in the region.
China is stuck in a bind on North Korea. It has little sympathy for Kim but it does not want to see the country’s collapse, which could cause millions of refugees to pour into China and lead to a unified Korea allied with the United States. North Korea’s increasingly erratic behavior and its pursuit of an ICBM capability, however, change the equation. The United States cannot tolerate the threat of nuclear attack from North Korea and will be tempted to act preemptively. To avert this, Washington and Beijing must deepen their cooperation on North Korea before Pyongyang acquires such a capability and consider new ways of putting additional pressure on the regime and of imposing credible red lines regarding threats to the United States.
MIDDLE EAST: THE CASE FOR INCREASED
U.S. ENGAGEMENT
The U.S.-led regional order in the Middle East was never very liberal to begin with, but what was there lies in ruins. The question is whether the United States ought to proactively rebuild a new regional order in its place, keeping in mind the very real limitations about what is actually possible. In principle, a responsible-competition approach could include retrenchment from the region or engagement with it. The case for retrenchment mirrors that of a sharing of power: engagement of all kinds have failed; if the United States becomes involved, it will pay a heavy price; and there are better places for the United States to invest its resources. While these are good arguments, there is a compelling reason for increased engagement in the Middle East: the implosion of a region as large as the Middle East would inevitably undermine the current liberal order in Europe and beyond.
The view that the United States should disengage from the Middle East typically rests on the claim that the region is in the throes of a great upheaval rooted in old rivalries that is likely to last for decades, akin to Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. There is little the United States can do to arrest this descent into conflict, so it should try to stay out and limit its exposure to it, or so the argument goes. But this view is deeply problematic. Imagine that its premise is correct—the Middle East is in the early stages of a catastrophic, decades-long conflict that could kill more than a quarter of the population of the affected states. Or even suppose it was not as bad, but still the worst war since World War II. Such a disaster would have immense implications for the global order. It would utterly devastate and transform the region, and have a major impact on Turkey and the European Union, possibly to the extent of ending the six-decades-old European project.
The question in the Middle East is not whether certain narrow interests—such as maintaining the supply of oil, preventing terrorist safe havens, and protecting the security of Israel—are currently affected. The question is where the trajectory is headed. If the answer is anywhere close to the worst-case scenarios, then the United States, as the world’s only superpower and the leader of the international order, has an obligation to intercede, arrest the march of history, and help to achieve an equilibrium that may be imperfect but is far better than a decades-long conflict.
At this stage, it is impossible to say what such an equilibrium would be, much as it was impossible to predict in 1620 what the 1648 Peace of Westphalia would look like. But America’s short-term goals are readily identifiable. The United States has a vital interest in stabilizing the region and halting the unraveling, to protect vital U.S. interests both in the region and further afield. Tempting as it is to focus exclusively on East Asia, Europe, and areas of greater economic opportunity, the crisis in the Middle East is not self-containing. It must be deliberately contained by U.S. policy.
There are no easy answers. Acknowledging that the United States should be engaged in the region diplomatically and militarily in order to seek a new equilibrium is itself a departure from America’s Middle East policy from 2011 to 2016. Such a change in mindset ought to create the political space in Washington for initiatives across a wide range of areas, from gaining leverage in the Syrian civil war by putting pressure on Russia and Assad to working with partners in the region to improve governance. For it is important to realize that the United States is not doing a favor to its allies by being so engaged; it is looking out for its long-term interests.
The United States is better at certain things than others. A decade of war in Iraq and repeated interventions in the greater Middle East show that there are limits on what the United States can accomplish in reforming states internally. This is not to say that reform should not be attempted, but we must be humble in our expectations of what can be accomplished. Moreover, the United States tends to be better at traditional geopolitics, including reassurance, deterrence, and alliance management. These strategies have been lacking in recent years, and it is in this domain that there is the greatest scope for improvement. Geopolitical approaches can also be a critical component in stabilizing the sectarian-infused geopolitical struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The best prospect for restoring stability to the Middle East is to reengage with America’s traditional Arab allies in the region. Yes, this approach has obvious flaws. These allies are much more problematic than America’s allies in Europe and Asia. They are authoritarian and some led the suppression of the Arab Spring. Nevertheless, there are no good options and this is far better than the alternatives of further disengagement or aligning with Iran.
Reengaging with allies could begin with Saudi Arabia, where there are glimmers of reform for the first time in over half a century. The deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is poised to be the next leader of Saudi Arabia and is driving a reform program to modernize the Saudi economy and take it off its reliance on oil by 2030.13 The United States should back the Saudi government in this effort. Bruce Riedel, a former senior intelligence official on Saudi Arabia, has argued that the only time the United States ever succeeded in persuading Saudi Arabia to reform was in 1962 when two conditions were met. The first was that Crown Prince Faisal (later king) wanted to abolish slavery but faced domestic opposition. The second was that President Kennedy pressed him privately and made reform a condition for American cooperation—something Riedel says no president did before or has done since. This combination meant that the reform package passed. Hillary Clinton would have been well positioned to repeat this feat as president given her commitment to women’s rights and the deputy crown prince’s commitment to domestic reform. That moment has passed, but if President Trump, or more likely a future president, were to make reform in Saudi Arabia a priority, it may not be beyond reach.14 On foreign policy, Washington should encourage Saudi Arabia to play a constructive role in the region, including with Israel where there has already been some informal behind-the-scenes cooperation. Having reestablished trust, the United States should work quietly to discourage the Saudis from imprudent actions, such as the ill-advised intervention in Yemen.
Egypt is, in many ways, the toughest case in the region for U.S. foreign policy. Abdel el-Fattah al-Sisi appears to have restored order to Egypt, but his suppression of the political opposition and reluctance to carry out far-reaching economic reform all but guarantee that Egypt will remain profoundly unstable and vulnerable to revolution. Moreover, if al-Sisi fails and Egypt descends into civil war or massive upheaval, the repercussions for the region would be severe. Ideally, the United States could make support for al-Sisi contingent on political reform, but it is abundantly clear that al-Sisi will not tolerate any role for the Muslim Brotherhood or political Islam more generally. The United States should avoid the temptation to unconditionally support al-Sisi. This would buy time but would make Egypt less stable over the long run. While political reform is out of reach for the time being, Washington should press al-Sisi hard on introducing economic reforms, linking their introduction to cooperation between the two countries. It should also make clear that the United States believes he should not serve more than two terms in office and it should engage with him on ensuring that the succession reflects the will of the Egyptian people.
Relations with Turkey plummeted after the attempted coup of 2016, for which Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an blamed the United States. Turkey remains a member of NATO and merits U.S. support. Toward this end, the United States should be more sensitive to Turkey’s legitimate security concerns in Syria. But Turkey’s NATO membership works both ways—NATO members are expected to adhere to democratic standards and the United States must hold Erdog˘an to this.
A key part of reengaging with America’s Arab and Muslim allies will be to balance against Iran. The United States should encourage greater cooperation, including formally, with Israel. This will require tough choices in the Arab world but it may also necessitate Israel’s reengagement with the peace process to remove one of the reasons that Arab publics oppose overt cooperation. The balancing of Iran should primarily be diplomatic, though to be successful in such conditions, diplomacy must include a coercive element backed by military power and the potential use of force. The United States can also encourage greater military cooperation between Arab states as a way of containing Iran by attaching conditions to arms sales to individual Arab governments. These conditions would require Arab states to work with one another on operations such as joint radar and air defense.15 In addition, the United States can push back against Iran by insisting on strict enforcement of the 2015 nuclear deal and by working with its partners to limit Iranian influence in the Gulf.
The United States should make clear to Tehran, however, that this balancing is a response to its aggressive and revisionist behavior. If Iran pursues a different and more cooperative course, the path will be open to greater engagement. It is containment with a view to engagement, not containment with a view to regime change. If this balancing strategy leads Iran to be more cooperative, the United States could work with Tehran on a negotiated federal settlement to the Syrian civil war and the tamping down of regional rivalries. If this diplomacy is fruitful it could continue with the long-term goal of a regional settlement that would both guarantee minority and majority rights within each state and establish the principle of non-interference by Iran.16 This endpoint is a very long way off and may never be achieved, but it could be explored if the conditions were right. From Iran’s perspective, the incentive would be threefold: guaranteed rights, influence, and status for Shiite populations in Sunni states; regional stability; and the conditions for greater economic engagement with the Arab world and the West.
The geopolitical piece of the Middle East puzzle is not sufficient to stabilize the region, but it is a necessary component.
PROSPECTS FOR PROGRESS ON ESSENTIAL
GLOBAL ISSUES
As the United States competes with Russia and China, and as it works to impose stability in the Middle East, it cannot lose sight of the many areas in which the United States must cooperate with its rivals out of a shared interest. Volatility in the global economy, climate change, counterterrorism, and nuclear proliferation are challenges for all major powers regardless of their geopolitical ambitions—and they are problems for which progress is extremely unlikely without sustained cooperation. The issue is whether it is possible to cooperate on these problems while competing on others.
In theory, the answer should be yes. After all, the United States worked closely with Putin’s Russia to negotiate the nuclear deal with Iran even while the two countries were at loggerheads over Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The Paris Agreement on climate change, which included the United States, Russia, and China, came at a tense time in both Syria and the South China Sea. The United States must avoid the temptation to link negotiations on transnational issues to regional geopolitical competitions, for it is wise to try to keep all the rivals inside the tent when the stakes are universally high.
Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine that cooperation will become much more difficult over time. To take a small example, when Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing in 2014, countries in the region refused to fully share sensitive radar and satellite data because they worried that these data would reveal their military capabilities to rivals. China was circumspect because its capabilities were very advanced, whereas India initially refused to discuss its data for precisely the opposite reason—it had limited capabilities and little to offer, a weakness it did not want to reveal to others.17 Keep in mind that this was a Malaysian plane with 239 passengers, most of whom were Chinese. The interests of all parties should have been perfectly aligned, but the investigation was complicated by the shadow of future rivalry. Now think about how complex and difficult it would be to arrange a coordinated response to a new Asian financial crisis if it were to occur in the near future. China, and maybe Japan, would undoubtedly be thinking not just about how to end the crisis, but also how to do so in a way that would increase its own regional influence and possibly damage a rival.
There is no easy fix to this problem. The harsh truth is that Asian nations were not being paranoid to worry about revealing their radar capabilities in the search for MH370. They were right. Their vulnerabilities would have been noted and used against them by their competitors. It would be naïve and counterproductive to deny this basic fact, and it would be irresponsible to call on leaders to set those concerns aside. Countries will have to navigate these issues when they arise and they will need to remember that they have shared interests as well as conflicts of interest. They must adopt a balanced approach to relations with rivals, cooperating where possible and competing when necessary.
In this more geopolitically competitive world, the United States must think hard about how inclusive it wants the international order to be. Requiring the approval of Russia and China before acting could be a recipe for gridlock and failure. However, deliberately excluding them as a matter of principle would be equally foolhardy. Instead of following either of these paths, the United States should try to create an architecture of cooperation that works best if all countries participate but also functions adequately even if rival powers object. This means being able to fall back on coalitions of like-minded powers in the event that cooperation with Moscow or Beijing proves impossible.
It is important to remember that Russia and China have, by definition, an interest in effectively tackling shared challenges, especially climate change (more for China than Russia), nuclear proliferation, and terrorism. Linking geopolitical problems to transnational problems, then, could actually make cooperation on transnational problems less likely because it will give Russia and China an incentive to be obstructionist in the hope of making gains elsewhere. Compartmentalizing this cooperation can help. Nations should agree not to link these efforts to ongoing rivalries. As mentioned, it was right to keep Russia in the nuclear talks on Iran; it will also be necessary to engage Russia on other transnational challenges even if tensions are high over Ukraine or the Middle East. The most difficult problems will arise with China: because the levels of interdependence between China and the West are so high, China will be tempted to link issues. The West must be clear that it will not allow such linkages to be made and if they are, that Western nations are willing to pay the price of lower cooperation. Once that principle has been established, it is likely that the great powers will cooperate on these issues when it is in their interest to do so.
Cooperation with Russia and China on the global economy will be complicated by the fact that each country, including the United States, will be tempted to use for geopolitical purposes any leverage that it gains through engagement. If Russia is dependent on the United States for its banking system, an American president will be tempted to use that dependence in a time of crisis. No assurance given now can change that reality. Similarly, Russia would use any influence it has over the price of energy and China would use its economic influence over small countries and even over the United States, with which it is intertwined financially.
The United States should not allow itself or its allies to become dependent on geopolitical rivals except when absolutely necessary. In thinking this through, it is not enough to ask if both countries will benefit from the interaction. One must imagine the likely incentive structure at a time of heightened geopolitical tension. Would China be willing to take a hit financially to inflict pain on the United States? If the answer is yes or even if it is unclear, it may be a risky form of engagement. In practice, this means reducing U.S. exposure to China on U.S. Treasury holdings and other systemically important asset types. It also means helping U.S. allies to diversify in order to reduce their own dependencies on geopolitical rivals. Dependence can never be eliminated for smaller countries in the neighborhood of a geopolitical rival, but initiatives like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or other forms of economic engagement, can provide some protection.
The United States must also be cognizant of, and somewhat sympathetic to, the fact that Russia, China, and Iran will look for ways to reduce their exposure to U.S.- and Western-dominated systems. This will reduce U.S. leverage but it may have the effect of stabilizing great-power relations. There is a parallel here to the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union took some time to realize that it was better for both of them if neither side could beat the other by using nuclear weapons first. If your rival had a survivable nuclear arsenal, it would be more secure and so less likely to preemptively use nuclear weapons. Today, Russia and China worry that a lopsided economic order could give the United States added incentives to take action against them.
Responsible competition is a comprehensive strategy for a more competitive but still interdependent world. It requires increased U.S. engagement in the three most strategically important regions, but it is focused in its efforts and offers clear guidance on how U.S. leaders can set priorities in foreign policy. The goal of this strategy is not to defeat or collapse U.S. competitors, as it was during World War II and the Cold War. Rather, it is to create a global situation of strength that incentivizes these competitors to become status quo powers. In the Middle East, its objective is to reestablish a favorable balance of power so as to provide the foundation for future progress.