AT THE CENTER OF THE SOUTH CHINA SEA DISPUTE ARE ISSUES THAT have caused much conflict over time—essentially trade, freedom of navigation, taxation and the interpretation of international law.
In the eighteenth century, American insurgents fighting British colonialism finally won independence in 1763 after a campaign lasting more than thirty years. The seeds of their discontent, however, had been sown more than a century earlier with the introduction of the Navigation Act, aimed at ensuring that all trade was carried out in the interests of Britain. Although amended and overtaken many times by new legislation, the principle remained throughout Britain’s colonial conquests. From Mombasa to Mumbai to Shanghai, Britain designed systems to benefit itself, often at the expense of others. The Americans were the first to expel Britain from one of its foreign areas of control.
After victory, the newly independent nation concentrated on security within its own region of the western hemisphere. Latin America was becoming restless against its own European colonizers. Brazil was given self-government in 1815, then became a full republic in 1889; Argentina got its independence in 1816; Chile in 1818; Peru in 1821. But the United States believed these new nations would be susceptible to continuing hostile influence from European colonial powers.
So, in 1825, very much as China is acting now in Asia, America introduced the Monroe Doctrine banning European interference in the Caribbean and Latin America, an area that became known as “America’s backyard.” “It was in effect early America’s way of saying ‘hands off’ to predatory outsiders,” writes James Holmes of the US Naval War College. “Latin America had largely cast off European rule early in the nineteenth century. US statesmen wanted to lock in these gains. They feared the European powers would attempt to reclaim lost empires in the New World, either through conquest or by creating client states.”135
At the time, the United States had no navy or coast guard of any note, and President James Monroe bravely announced his new doctrine without having the wherewithal to enforce it. With the pragmatism that has come to underpin American foreign policy, the government hired the naval vessels of its old enemy, the British, to ward off intrusions by other Europeans testing America’s resolve.
As the embryonic United States consolidated, fractures widened, and from 1861 to 1865 the growing pains of the new nation erupted into the Civil War. The issues were the economy, control, sovereignty, and of course slavery and race. Even after the Union won, it took another hundred years, until 1964, for the Civil Rights Act to make racial discrimination illegal. Race still remains a thorn in the American consciousness.
China has followed a comparable trajectory. Its rebellion against the American-backed nationalist government and the occupation by Western colonial powers lasted almost thirty years, until 1949, albeit interrupted by Japan’s invasion in the 1930s. China immediately turned its mind to securing its territory, resulting in military action in Taiwan and Tibet and on the Korean Peninsula. There followed growing pains similar to America’s, with the economic experiment of the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s that caused dire famine, and the quasi–civil war of the Cultural Revolution that pitted families against each other. It ended in 1976 when Mao Zedong died, but China still carries the scars.
America’s path to becoming a superpower began in earnest in 1919 after the First World War and cemented itself with victory in the Second World War and the use of the nuclear bomb. China followed a less predictable track that was not defined by its wars. Reform followed the Cultural Revolution, but was interrupted in 1989 by democracy protests and the killing of activists, which temporarily made China an international pariah. It picked up again in the early 1990s to bring China to where it is today.
There are similarities, too, in Russia’s path. The 1917 revolution was the culmination of almost a hundred years of unrest, and its catalyst was the First World War. The overthrow of the czarist monarchy was followed by civil war and Russia taking control of neighboring territories to create a protective cordon around itself to form the Soviet Union, which became a superpower on the back of its Second World War victory. The Soviet Union ultimately failed, not so much because of its repressive system of government but because it did not integrate with the global economy, a lesson which China has learned. The other East Asian power, Japan, had its government torn down and rebuilt after the Second World War. Only India has undergone no revolutionary change. Its independence movement, despite appalling bloodshed, never evolved to full-scale war. It inherited and accepted the British parliamentary and judicial system through which it is governed today.
China’s rise has been neither unpredictable nor a surprise. It has been evident for at least the past quarter century, following as it did on the economic success of East Asia as a whole. The United States only began to address the situation proactively in 2011 with its Pivot to Asia, an announcement that was mismanaged and seen as a military plan to contain China, immediately causing wires to become crossed between Beijing and Washington, DC.
Kurt M. Campbell, who as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs worked with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to design the Pivot, argues that the policy represented Asia’s new high profile in the global balance. “It is the leading destination for US exports, outpacing Europe by more than 50 percent,” he writes in The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia. “The verdict on which economic principles will define the twenty-first century will be reached in Asia, home to three of the world’s four largest economies and increasing levels of interdependence. On so many issues central to the world’s future, Asia is at the center of the action.”136
The Asian giants of China, India, and Japan make up three of the four biggest global economies after the United States. The US National Intelligence Council estimates that, by 2030, Asia will be wealthier, have a bigger population and greater purchasing power, and spend more on defense than Europe and North America combined. The European, Japanese, and US share of global income is projected to fall from 56 percent today to well under half by 2030.137
Within the Pivot, however, the United States also raises the subject of democracy that for Beijing can be like a red flag to a bull. “[Asia’s] militaries are drifting between conflict and peaceful coexistence. Its transitional states are deciding whether to embrace democracy or fall back on authoritarianism,” Campbell writes. “A crucial and enduring component of the pivot will be to bend the arc of the Asian Century more toward the imperatives of Asian peace and prosperity and longstanding American interests. … Within Asia, the pivot reassured allies of the US presence and sent a clear signal to Beijing that America would remain engaged there for decades to come.”138
The view from Beijing, however, was that the Pivot sent a wrong and confusing message. “It told Europe and the Middle East, ‘You guys need to take care of things yourself now. We’re leaving you for Asia,’” explained one senior Chinese official who didn’t want me to use his name.
And then what happened? Russia took Crimea because it thought it could, and you had war in Ukraine. Japan nationalized the Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands, and a week later there is the problem with Huángyán Dao (Scarborough Shoal) because the Philippines and Japan believed they could do what they wanted because America would come and help them. It has divided ASEAN countries, and damaged the US-China relationship. We ask them, “For what? What is this pivot?” They tell us that the United States only wants to reassure its allies in the region. We say, “For what? So, they can think they have Uncle Sam behind them so they can kick China around?”
In 2012, as China began intensifying its island building in reaction to the Pivot, two leading China scholars, Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, and Wang Jisi, dean of the School of International Studies at Beijing University, published a paper arguing that “strategic distrust” had become a central concern in US-China relations.
“Beijing realizes that China-US cooperation must be based on mutual strategic trust,” they write. “Meanwhile, in Beijing’s view, it is US policies, attitude and misperceptions that cause the lack of mutual trust between the two countries. Chinese strategic distrust of the United States is deeply rooted in history.” Lieberthal and Jisi argue that from Beijing’s viewpoint China’s model of strong political leadership has managed social and economic affairs in a way that provides an alternative to Western democracy, adding, “Many Chinese political elites suspect that it is the United States that is on the wrong side of history.”139
Harvard University professor Graham Allison reached far back into history with an article in The Atlantic entitled “The Thucydides Trap: Are the US and China Headed for War?” In 2017 he turned it into a book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, which received plaudits at the highest policy-making levels, including from former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon, former US defense secretaries Ash Carter and William Cohen, and former CIA director David Petraeus.
Allison uses an example from the fifth century BC, when there were no nuclear weapons, smartphones, or satellites in space. It was the time of city-states when the expansion and growth of power in Athens alarmed Sparta, 130 miles to the southwest, to such an extent that it led to war. In all, Allison studied sixteen similar cases over a five-hundred-year period and found that twelve had ended in bloodshed. To avoid war, he concludes, there had to be “huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions” on both sides.140 No such adjustment had accompanied the twentieth-century rises of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Each enveloped us in some kind of war. There was no indication that, with the entry of China, any adjustment was unfolding now in the minds of either Beijing or Washington.
The concept of the Thucydides Trap has been discussed widely by diplomats and academics. Chinese president Xi Jinping referred to it when meeting a delegation of scholars, politicians, and businessmen in the Great Hall of the People in 2013.141 It is as if a four-letter word and a mostly forgotten Athenian general have come to sum up the entwined dangers looming between America and China.
Allison’s use of a crisis that happened two and half thousand years ago is also unsettling because it underlines that human nature itself has failed to evolve along with our education, technology, and political mechanisms. Thucydides argued that relations between states were constructed not on pragmatism but on fear and self-interest. If he was right, we need to be worried.
IN 2016, THE security-minded RAND Corporation published War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable. Among its many conclusions was that the United States might be better off fighting a war now than a decade hence when China’s military would be much more advanced. “If hostilities erupted, both have ample forces, technology, industrial might, and personnel to fight across vast expanses of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Thus, Sino-US war, perhaps a large and costly one, is not just thinkable; it needs more thought. Improvements in Chinese military capabilities mean that a war would not necessarily go the way US war planners plan it. Whereas a clear US victory once seemed probable, it is increasingly likely that a conflict could involve inconclusive fighting. The United States cannot expect to control a conflict it cannot dominate militarily.”142
The report also calculated economic damage. “Although war would harm both economies, damage to China’s could be catastrophic and lasting: on the order of a 25–35 percent reduction in Chinese gross domestic product in a yearlong war, compared with a reduction in US GDP on the order of 5–10 percent. Even a mild conflict, unless ended promptly, could weaken China’s economy. A long and severe war could ravage China’s economy, stall its hard-earned development, and cause widespread hardship and dislocation.”143
In the same year, the Center for Naval Analysis published Becoming a Great Maritime Power: A Chinese Dream. The author, former Carrier Battle Group commander Mike McDevitt, concluded that by 2020 the Chinese Navy would be the biggest in the world. The China Coast Guard was already the world’s largest maritime law enforcement fleet, with more than two hundred vessels, almost half of which weighed over a thousand tons. China’s civilian cargo fleet had tripled in the past decade, and Beijing had identified thirty key trade routes, linking 1,200 ports in 150 countries, that it needed to keep secure. “Washington can do little that would be likely to deflect China from its goal,” writes McDevitt. “The maritime power objective is inextricably linked to Chinese sovereignty concerns.”144
There was also China’s maritime militia, deployed as a lead military element in Beijing’s South China Sea operations. The United States categorizes this as classic insurgency tactics, using civilians as soldiers, the difference being that this militia operates at sea and not on land in deserts or jungles. “It is irregular warfare at sea,” Tom Culora of the Naval War College told me, comparing the militia to the unarmed troops used by Russia to take Crimea in 2014. “You don’t have a very clear idea of who’s a combatant and who’s not a combatant and what role they’re playing. It’s hard to discern what people are doing, and that creates limitation on the norms of the Geneva Convention and the traditional law of war of what a navy can and cannot do.”
China argues that the use of a civilian force in such as way is a legitimate tactic of war. “Victory comes from both the military and civilian quarter,” General Xu Guangyu told me in Beijing. “We salute the Chinese fishermen who support the motherland.”
Xu also underlined the Communist Party military expansion policy announced in 2012: “We will develop six aircraft carriers and guided missile destroyers and attack submarines to lead our maritime force. We will have ten bases overseas, at least one on every continent. The United States and China do not want to have a war. But a small thing can cause trouble, and if you can’t control it, it could become a big war, and if the Americans try to remove us from the Spratly Islands, if the Japanese occupy the Diaoyu (Senkaku) islands, there will be war.”
War talk benefits militaries and allows defense contractors to apply for more funding. Yet new technologies and better weapons are never enough to take the war option completely off the table. That requires a change of mind-set on both sides, of the type that came about with the introduction of nuclear weapons and the concept of mutually assured destruction. The Pentagon refers to the current main threats from China, Iran, the Islamic State, North Korea, and Russia as the four-plus-one scenario for which the 2017 budget of $600 billion is inadequate. Yet the United States cannot afford to spend more, which in itself requires new thinking.
“Is the United States at such a stage that it seriously needs to deter and defeat Russia and China in a war?” asks defense analyst Harlan Ullman in The Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts. “In the twenty-first century, no one knows what it takes to deter. Consider China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, and the Islamic State. What does it take to deter each, and from what?”145
There has been too little discussion about what to do after a war. If the United States wins, does it attempt complete defeat as with Germany and Japan, regime change as with Iraq and Libya, or containment as with the Soviet Union? None works and one billion Chinese would face a return to an era of humiliation which would be near impossible to manage.
“How does the US expect the billion surviving Chinese to respond?” asks Amitai Etzioni, Professor of International Relations at George Washington University. “Will they rebuild a nation focused on revenge, the same way the humiliated Germans did, leading to a regime like that of North Korea only 400 times larger?”146
If China wins, does it tear down the current world order and, if so, does it have the institutions and wherewithal to build a new one from scratch? No, it does not. And if there’s a stalemate, then what was the point?
The hostile talk from all sides about the South China Sea and China’s renewed hostility with Japan is already impacting economic growth. “It has a negative effect,” Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute for International Economics told me. “How big it is, you can’t say. It is raising eyebrows not just in the US government but also in private corporations that are thinking, do we want to invest more money in a country that is adopting expansionist and nationalistic positions with its nearby neighbors? China will ultimately pay a price if they continue down the current path.”
It is interesting to note that Lardy’s view is shared by economists in China itself. Like America in the early nineteenth century, China has reached a level of development where it needs to push out from its borders, but as yet it does not have the wherewithal to defend its policies militarily. Unlike America in 1825, however, it has no foreign gunboats to hire to do the job.
“The US still sits in the driver’s seat,” Liu Baocheng of the Center for International Business Ethics told me.
We import more than eighty million metric tonnes of soybeans from the US, not to mention wheat and many agricultural products. One-fifth of the arable land of the US is there to grow food for China. The US is stronger. Its domestic economy and industrial and energy base would remain intact if there were war. China is not prepared. Chinese troops are not properly trained. The US has strong allies, while China maintains a nonallied diplomatic policy. If you count how many countries are China’s friends, you don’t really have a large list. The US has us encircled and could still impose strategic containment over China in terms of trade embargo and world financial market manipulation. Cyberspace is still heavily dependent on the US architecture, encryption codes, the Internet, the banking industry, the financial world—all that is in the hands of the US. We are getting close to being equal to the US, even overtaking it in ten to fifteen years. Therefore, it is unthinkable that China would initiate such a war. Why would we?
Yet disagreement between China and the United States can very quickly dissolve into talk of missiles and conflict. In the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency, the specter of war involving China was raised in North Korea, the South China Sea, and the Taiwan Strait. During the Korean standoff in the summer of 2017, China made clear that should the United States carry out a preemptive strike against North Korea it would ally itself with the regime.
As early as his confirmation hearings in January 2017, US secretary of state Rex Tillerson described China’s building of South China Sea outposts as akin to Russia taking Crimea in 2014, adding, with a direct warning to Beijing, “Your access to those islands is not going to be allowed.”147 Although directed at his domestic American audience, Tillerson’s threat was heard around the world. Beijing’s government-controlled Global Times newspaper responded that the two sides had better prepare for a military clash.
WE ARE NOW in a very different era from that of the Soviet-US balance of power that emerged after the Cold War or the one that followed the collapse of communism and a misplaced sense that that one political system would envelop a global community operating under a single set of values and laws. The assumption then was that because a specific political formula worked in the West, it could be implanted in Africa, Asia, and Russia. As this experiment unfolded, China and Russia tended to stay quiet, and Western leaders pronounced shock and horror when one country or another descended into mayhem. There was little understanding of history, of the upheaval that had accompanied even America’s own path forward.
The current system emerged from the Second World War and comprised the setting up of institutions like the Bretton Woods financial architecture, the UN, and the World Bank.148 The First World War had spawned the League of Nations, which quickly failed. It took only twenty years for trouble to flare up again. These attempts to balance power between nations date back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, an agreement forged between various European governments to end wars that had been going on for more than thirty years. The cause then had been schisms between the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the Catholic Church. The Westphalian concept was to create a community of nations that controlled their own affairs under agreed international rule of law. “The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight,” writes Henry Kissinger in his book World Order. “It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power.” The Westphalian agreement became “the hallmark of a new system of international order,” he argues.149 A later attempt to forge a European peace came after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars with the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna aimed at settling differences. A similar sense of a need for equilibrium had given rise to the electoral college system in the United States, whereby smaller states get an equalizing say in the choice of president, and in the European Union, whereby Estonia, with its population of 1.3 million, has a vote equal to that of Germany with its eighty-one million people. The aim is to prevent hegemony, in which powerful states hold unfair sway over smaller ones.
The United States argues that its presence in Asia prevents hegemony and that China should not be allowed undue influence over small countries. Given the savagery that has ripped through Europe since the seventeenth century, it is far from clear how successful the Westphalian system has been at keeping the peace. Nor has it been a successful export.
British politician Rory Stewart served as a provincial governor in southern Iraq after the 2003 invasion and in his book Occupational Hazards: My Time Governing in Iraq he describes how, too often, what the West was attempting to deliver had little relevance on the ground.150 At one time, he was trying simultaneously to stop civil war breaking out between factions and to keep an oil refinery open to ensure his province had fuel. He wrote to his superiors asking if he could raise the salaries of oil workers. He got a response “telling us about democracy workshops and asking if we could provide Iraqi women to attend a women’s conference. … They talked of Iraq’s five-thousand-year-old civilization, insisted that Iraqis were educated middle-class people with secular, liberal sympathies, and attempted to build the utopia … rebranded corruption, crime and civil war as ‘governance capacity building,’ ‘security-sector reform,’ and ‘conflict resolution.’”
Iraq and Libya are recent modern failures of exporting the Westphalian system into other cultures and China has skillfully eased itself into areas where the West’s values and credibility have fallen short. “We are now moving into the Eastphalian system,” Dr. Zhu Feng, a Chinese defense analyst, told me in Beijing. “Asian history is different from European history. Our thinking is different from yours. The Eastphalian system will adopt some kind of Asian way so that our history and traditions will be prioritized in world affairs.”
This Eastphalian system would diminish American influence in Asia, and replace it with Chinese-led Asian values and the political mechanisms to implement them. It is notable that, as Malaysia and Singapore were advocating recognition of Asian values in the 1990s, there was little reference to India and South Asia. This is a Confucian East Asian initiative. As seen from Washington, the Westphalian view is a belief in democratic checks and balances, tempered by elections and the rule of law. The Eastphalian counterpart, as seen from Beijing, advocates a strong, appointed government where control flows from a politburo or a single leader, operating under a united governing party or the Mandate of Heaven as opposed to through the ballot box and the Will of the People.
In 1924 China’s first president Sun Yat-sen, who led the overthrow of the imperial dynastic system, gave a speech in Japan laying out the difference in Asian and European thinking. He said European science had used bombs and airplanes to oppress Asia and stop its progress. “European civilization is nothing but the rule of Might,” he said,
The rule of Might has always been looked down upon by the Orient. There is another kind of civilization superior to the rule of Might. The fundamental characteristics of this civilization are benevolence, justice and morality: This civilization makes people respect, not fear, it. Such a civilization is, in the language of the Ancients, the rule of Right or the Kingly Way. One may say, therefore, that Oriental civilization is one of the rule of Right. … Westerners consider themselves as the only ones possessed and worthy of true culture and civilization; other peoples with any culture or independent ideas are considered as Barbarians in revolt against Civilization. When comparing Occidental with Oriental civilization they only consider their own civilization logical and humanitarian. 151
Much of Sun Yat-sen’s sentiment of almost a hundred years ago is reflected among the Chinese leadership and academics today. “We don’t need Bibles and guns,” Liu Baocheng of the Center for International Business Ethics told me. “The US is exaggerating our differences. It’s as if those guys feel they didn’t finish the job after the Second World War. We do things a different way. We win friends by giving everyone a larger share of the benefits. This South China Sea dispute is a tiny issue. People will soon forget it.”
But if he is right, China’s hand would be strengthened, and to what extent the United States would resist or allow Eastphalian culture is one of the great unknowns, not least because of the unpredictable nature of its own democratic system.
Zhu headed a relatively new think tank, the China Center for Collaborative Studies of the South China Sea, which was set up in 2013. It is based at the University of Nanjing, which is also the home of China’s prestigious People’s Liberation Army Naval Command College, where many elements of its naval war plans are drawn up.
With one foot in academia and the other in military briefing rooms, Zhu represents a new class of Chinese academic, at home in the coffee shops of Beijing and Washington, very much on the conference and panel circuit, and not afraid to take on the West’s arguments, whether about democracy, economics, or power rivalry. A generation ago this style of advocacy did not exist in China, where you could spend a couple of affable hours speculating on what would cause a Sino-American nuclear war with someone very much tasked with ensuring that, if there were such a conflict, China would win.
Zhu and his colleagues contributed an added twist. Never before had there been such a high level of debate and interaction between two societies that appeared to be on such a collision course. Some 230,000 Chinese were studying in the United States in 2016.152 In the same year, Chinese companies invested more than $50 billion there, an astonishing 360 percent surge on the previous year. It was as if the more hostile the rhetoric, the more Chinese money flowed into America. These were big-industry investments like movies, insurance, and hotels.153 A critical number of investors were linked to China’s most powerful families. A Bloomberg investigation in 2012 looked at descendants from the families of a group known as the “eight immortals,” key figures like Deng Xiaoping who had been involved in the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s. Of the 103 examined, twenty-three had been educated in the United States, eighteen had worked in American companies, and twelve owned property in America.
There were similarities here with the Russian billionaire oligarchs who capitalized on the collapse of Soviet communism in the 1990s. Ten years earlier these Chinese families, albeit keeping a lower profile, had begun taking advantage of this first wave of economic reform. “Someone was likely to get rich from this period of liberalization,” explains Kerry Brown in his book New Emperors: The Power and the Princelings in China. “It might just as well have been the families of leaders who were in charge of the Party then, who were, after all, most trusted, and the ones who had sacrificed the most to get where they were. … Their longevity and the fact that they survived purges, dangers and challenges gifted them with immense political capital.”154
But to what extent would any of this be enough to prevent conflict, whether over the clash of Westphalian and Eastphalian values or over remote islands of which few had ever heard? Western technology and investment had led to Japan’s emergence as the first industrialized Asian power in the early twentieth century, and it became an enemy. American and British links with 1930s Germany had also been vast. Many influential Americans viewed the order that Adolf Hitler had brought to his broken country as a perfect barrier against Soviet communism. American industrialists saw it as such a good place to do business that Hitler presented automaker Henry Ford and IBM chairman Thomas Watson with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle.
China is far from being 1930s Germany or Japan, and there is no direct parallel, except perhaps the historical truth that, however unlikely it might seem at the time, things do fall apart. In her 1985 book March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, historian Barbara Tuchman wrote how governments did things directly against their own interests, making wrong choices despite the right alternatives being available. Within this debate, it is impossible to forget that the Iwo Jima Memorial near the Pentagon commemorates a battle in February–March 1945 that cost sixty-eight hundred American lives, caused by a new Asian power with ambitions to oust the United States from its region.
THE PAST DECADE has seen a shift in values in the West itself. Certainties about the free market and liberal democracy were diminished by the 2003 Iraq War and the 2007 financial crisis. The politics of populism saw the election of leaders as diverse as Donald Trump and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and a free trading culture known as globalization which had allowed Asia to become an economic powerhouse came under scrutiny.
Globalization has taken wealth from people in the richer countries and propelled it into the developing world, enabling countries like Brazil, China, and India to improve the lives of their citizens and become regional powers. A single job for a Bangladeshi garment worker making shirts that would previously have been made in the United States opened up a chance for the family’s education and health care, even though it might put an American worker onto food stamps. China and Asia championed globalization, while a critical mass within the Western democracies resented this spread of opportunity and blamed it for the fall in their own living standards.
A January 2017 report from Bocconi University in Italy found a direct link within Europe between levels of Asian trade that is associated with globalization and support for nationalism. It researched seventy-six legislative elections in fifteen European countries, from 1988, when the Cold War was winding down, to the financial crash in 2007. It found that those in areas exposed to a high level of imports from China were more inclined to vote for radical right-wing parties. “The unequal sharing of the welfare gains brought about by globalization has resulted in widespread concerns and a general opposition to free trade,” wrote the report’s authors, Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig. They described this as “economic nationalism,” when political movements bundle “support for domestic free market policies with strong protectionist stances.”155
A 2015 Oxfam study found that from 2009 to 2013 the number of Europeans living with “severe material deprivation” rose by 7.5 percent, to fifty million people. Oxfam blamed an increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth.156
These trends have been driven by the influx of refugees from the Middle East and sluggish economic performance. More than 8 percent of European adults were unemployed in 2017, and that figure rose to more than 20 percent among the young. The US figure is 5 percent, with 10 percent youth unemployment.157 In 1960, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 24 percent of American workers had jobs in manufacturing, and today that figure is only 8 percent, five million jobs having been lost since 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed with Canada and Mexico.158
Americans and Europeans are feeling themselves to be victims of globalization, leading to a cry to restrict borders and put the brakes on the free flow of goods and people. Elected largely on protectionist and anti-China rhetoric, Trump immediately shelved the embryonic Trans-Pacific Partnership and announced that he would redesign the North American Free Trade Agreement and build a wall between Mexico and the United States.
In a 2016 referendum Britain chose to leave the European Union, curb immigration, control its borders, and regain what many felt was its sovereignty. In both the British and US debates, campaign claims were proven, point by point, to be false. But that counted for nothing. The West was entering a political era where sentiment superseded fact. Earlier the impetus had been to sacrifice a measure of sovereignty for membership of larger groups operating under a shared set of rules that would deliver material gain. Among such groups were the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, NATO, the World Trade Organization, and the European Union itself, which had absorbed and democratized Europe’s authoritarian nations after the Cold War.
During the Brexit campaign, professional after professional delivered advice warning that, should Britain sever its ties to such international institutions, living standards would suffer. But a key Brexit campaigner, cabinet minister Michael Gove, caught the public mood on both sides of the Atlantic when he said sharply, “People have had enough of experts.”159
The repercussions of this thinking cannot be overestimated. “The idea that the expert was giving considered, experienced advice worth taking seriously was simply dismissed,” writes US national security analyst Tom Nichols. “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to demonstrate their independence. … They want to weigh in and have their opinions treated with deep respect and their preferences honored not on the strength of their arguments or on the evidence they present, but based on their feelings, emotions, and whatever stray information they may have picked up here or there along the way.”160
The wealthy West had become a restless, unstable beast, with many of its citizens concluding that the system no longer delivered for them, that it was controlled by an unreachable and sophisticated elite who hoarded money and refused to spread wealth. Emotion supplanted material pragmatism. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign slogan that it was all about “the economy, stupid” no longer applied. It was about raising dignity even if that meant lowering living standards, or, as the millionaire veteran film star Sir Michael Caine put it, “I would rather be a poor master than a rich servant.”
The threat that this mood poses to the Westphalian democratic system is incalculable. Trust is collapsing, not only in experts and the elite but also in the elected representatives who rely on the advice of specialists and professionals to make policy and do their jobs. The Pew Research Center found that in 1958 73 percent of the population trusted the American government. In 2015, trust had dropped to just 19 percent.161
Into this uncertainty has stepped China’s President Xi Jinping.