The Return of Geopolitics
The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers
So far, the year 2014 has
been a tumultuous one, as geopolitical rivalries have stormed back to
center stage. Whether it is Russian forces seizing Crimea, China making
aggressive claims in its coastal waters, Japan responding with an
increasingly assertive strategy of its own, or Iran trying to use its
alliances with Syria and Hezbollah to dominate the Middle East,
old-fashioned power plays are back in international relations.
The United States and the EU, at least, find such trends disturbing.
Both would rather move past geopolitical questions of territory and
military power and focus instead on ones of world order and global
governance: trade liberalization, nuclear nonproliferation, human
rights, the rule of law, climate change, and so on. Indeed, since the
end of the Cold War, the most important objective of U.S. and EU foreign
policy has been to shift international relations away from zero-sum
issues toward win-win ones. To be dragged back into old-school contests
such as that in Ukraine doesn’t just divert time and energy away from
those important questions; it also changes the character of
international politics. As the atmosphere turns dark, the task of
promoting and maintaining world order grows more daunting.
But Westerners should never have expected old-fashioned geopolitics
to go away. They did so only because they fundamentally misread what the
collapse of the Soviet Union meant: the ideological triumph of liberal
capitalist democracy over communism, not the obsolescence of hard power.
China, Iran, and Russia never bought into the geopolitical settlement
that followed the Cold War, and they are making increasingly forceful
attempts to overturn it. That process will not be peaceful, and whether
or not the revisionists succeed, their efforts have already shaken the
balance of power and changed the dynamics of international politics.
A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY
When the Cold War ended, the most vexing geopolitical questions seemed largely settled.
When the Cold War ended, many Americans and Europeans seemed to think
that the most vexing geopolitical questions had largely been settled.
With the exception of a handful of relatively minor problems, such as
the woes of the former Yugoslavia and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute,
the biggest issues in world politics, they assumed, would no longer
concern boundaries, military bases, national self-determination, or
spheres of influence.
One can’t blame people for hoping. The West’s approach to the
realities of the post–Cold War world has made a great deal of sense, and
it is hard to see how world peace can ever be achieved without
replacing geopolitical competition with the construction of a liberal
world order. Still, Westerners often forget that this project rests on
the particular geopolitical foundations laid in the early 1990s.
In Europe, the post–Cold War settlement involved the unification of
Germany, the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and the integration of
the former Warsaw Pact states and the Baltic republics into NATO and the
EU. In the Middle East, it entailed the dominance of Sunni powers that
were allied with the United States (Saudi Arabia, its Gulf allies,
Egypt, and Turkey) and the double containment of Iran and Iraq. In Asia,
it meant the uncontested dominance of the United States, embedded in a
series of security relationships with Japan, South Korea, Australia,
Indonesia, and other allies.
This settlement reflected the power realities of the day, and it was
only as stable as the relationships that held it up. Unfortunately, many
observers conflated the temporary geopolitical conditions of the
post–Cold War world with the presumably more final outcome of the
ideological struggle between liberal democracy and Soviet communism. The
political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s famous formulation that the end
of the Cold War meant “the end of history” was a statement about
ideology. But for many people, the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t
just mean that humanity’s ideological struggle was over for good; they
thought geopolitics itself had also come to a permanent end.
At first glance, this conclusion looks like an extrapolation of
Fukuyama’s argument rather than a distortion of it. After all, the idea
of the end of history has rested on the geopolitical consequences of
ideological struggles ever since the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel first expressed it at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. For Hegel, it was the Battle of Jena, in 1806, that rang the
curtain down on the war of ideas. In Hegel’s eyes, Napoleon Bonaparte’s
utter destruction of the Prussian army in that brief campaign
represented the triumph of the French Revolution over the best army that
prerevolutionary Europe could produce. This spelled an end to history,
Hegel argued, because in the future, only states that adopted the
principles and techniques of revolutionary France would be able to
compete and survive.
Adapted to the post–Cold War world, this argument was taken to mean
that in the future, states would have to adopt the principles of liberal
capitalism to keep up. Closed, communist societies, such as the Soviet
Union, had shown themselves to be too uncreative and unproductive to
compete economically and militarily with liberal states. Their political
regimes were also shaky, since no social form other than liberal
democracy provided enough freedom and dignity for a contemporary society
to remain stable.
To fight the West successfully, you would have to become like the
West, and if that happened, you would become the kind of wishy-washy,
pacifistic milquetoast society that didn’t want to fight about anything
at all. The only remaining dangers to world peace would come from rogue
states such as North Korea, and although such countries might have the
will to challenge the West, they would be too crippled by their obsolete
political and social structures to rise above the nuisance level
(unless they developed nuclear weapons, of course). And thus former
communist states, such as Russia, faced a choice. They could jump on the
modernization bandwagon and become liberal, open, and pacifistic, or
they could cling bitterly to their guns and their culture as the world
passed them by.
At first, it all seemed to work. With history over, the focus shifted
from geopolitics to development economics and nonproliferation, and the
bulk of foreign policy came to center on questions such as climate
change and trade. The conflation of the end of geopolitics and the end
of history offered an especially enticing prospect to the United States:
the idea that the country could start putting less into the
international system and taking out more. It could shrink its defense
spending, cut the State Department’s appropriations, lower its profile
in foreign hotspots -- and the world would just go on becoming more
prosperous and more free.
This vision appealed to both liberals and conservatives in the United
States. The administration of President Bill Clinton, for example, cut
both the Defense Department’s and the State Department’s budgets and was
barely able to persuade Congress to keep paying U.S. dues to the UN. At
the same time, policymakers assumed that the international system would
become stronger and wider-reaching while continuing to be conducive to
U.S. interests. Republican neo-isolationists, such as former
Representative Ron Paul of Texas, argued that given the absence of
serious geopolitical challenges, the United States could dramatically
cut both military spending and foreign aid while continuing to benefit
from the global economic system.
After 9/11, President George W. Bush based his foreign policy on the
belief that Middle Eastern terrorists constituted a uniquely dangerous
opponent, and he launched what he said would be a long war against them.
In some respects, it appeared that the world was back in the realm of
history. But the Bush administration’s belief that democracy could be
implanted quickly in the Arab Middle East, starting with Iraq, testified
to a deep conviction that the overall tide of events was running in
America’s favor.
In very different ways, China, Iran, and Russia are all seeking to revise the status quo.
President Barack Obama built his foreign policy on the conviction
that the “war on terror” was overblown, that history really was over,
and that, as in the Clinton years, the United States’ most important
priorities involved promoting the liberal world order, not playing
classical geopolitics. The administration articulated an extremely
ambitious agenda in support of that order: blocking Iran’s drive for
nuclear weapons, solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, negotiating a
global climate change treaty, striking Pacific and Atlantic trade
deals, signing arms control treaties with Russia, repairing U.S.
relations with the Muslim world, promoting gay rights, restoring trust
with European allies, and ending the war in Afghanistan. At the same
time, however, Obama planned to cut defense spending dramatically and
reduced U.S. engagement in key world theaters, such as Europe and the
Middle East.
AN AXIS OF WEEVILS?
All these happy convictions are about to be tested. Twenty-five years
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, whether one focuses on the rivalry
between the EU and Russia over Ukraine, which led Moscow to seize
Crimea; the intensifying competition between China and Japan in East
Asia; or the subsuming of sectarian conflict into international
rivalries and civil wars in the Middle East, the world is looking less
post-historical by the day. In very different ways, with very different
objectives, China, Iran, and Russia are all pushing back against the
political settlement of the Cold War.
The relationships among those three revisionist powers are complex.
In the long run, Russia fears the rise of China. Tehran’s worldview has
little in common with that of either Beijing or Moscow. Iran and Russia
are oil-exporting countries and like the price of oil to be high; China
is a net consumer and wants prices low. Political instability in the
Middle East can work to Iran’s and Russia’s advantage but poses large
risks for China. One should not speak of a strategic alliance among
them, and over time, particularly if they succeed in undermining U.S.
influence in Eurasia, the tensions among them are more likely to grow
than shrink.
What binds these powers together, however, is their agreement that
the status quo must be revised. Russia wants to reassemble as much of
the Soviet Union as it can. China has no intention of contenting itself
with a secondary role in global affairs, nor will it accept the current
degree of U.S. influence in Asia and the territorial status quo there.
Iran wishes to replace the current order in the Middle East -- led by
Saudi Arabia and dominated by Sunni Arab states -- with one centered on
Tehran.
Leaders in all three countries also agree that U.S. power is the
chief obstacle to achieving their revisionist goals. Their hostility
toward Washington and its order is both offensive and defensive: not
only do they hope that the decline of U.S. power will make it easier to
reorder their regions, but they also worry that Washington might try to
overthrow them should discord within their countries grow. Yet the
revisionists want to avoid direct confrontations with the United States,
except in rare circumstances when the odds are strongly in their favor
(as in Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and its occupation and
annexation of Crimea this year). Rather than challenge the status quo
head on, they seek to chip away at the norms and relationships that
sustain it.
Since Obama has been president, each of these powers has pursued a
distinct strategy in light of its own strengths and weaknesses. China,
which has the greatest capabilities of the three, has paradoxically been
the most frustrated. Its efforts to assert itself in its region have
only tightened the links between the United States and its Asian allies
and intensified nationalism in Japan. As Beijing’s capabilities grow, so
will its sense of frustration. China’s surge in power will be matched
by a surge in Japan’s resolve, and tensions in Asia will be more likely
to spill over into global economics and politics.
Iran, by many measures the weakest of the three states, has had the
most successful record. The combination of the United States’ invasion
of Iraq and then its premature withdrawal has enabled Tehran to cement
deep and enduring ties with significant power centers across the Iraqi
border, a development that has changed both the sectarian and the
political balance of power in the region. In Syria, Iran, with the help
of its longtime ally Hezbollah, has been able to reverse the military
tide and prop up the government of Bashar al-Assad in the face of strong
opposition from the U.S. government. This triumph of realpolitik has
added considerably to Iran’s power and prestige. Across the region, the
Arab Spring has weakened Sunni regimes, further tilting the balance in
Iran’s favor. So has the growing split among Sunni governments over what
to do about the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots and adherents.
Russia, meanwhile, has emerged as the middling revisionist: more
powerful than Iran but weaker than China, more successful than China at
geopolitics but less successful than Iran. Russia has been moderately
effective at driving wedges between Germany and the United States, but
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s preoccupation with rebuilding the
Soviet Union has been hobbled by the sharp limits of his country’s
economic power. To build a real Eurasian bloc, as Putin dreams of doing,
Russia would have to underwrite the bills of the former Soviet
republics -- something it cannot afford to do.
Nevertheless, Putin, despite his weak hand, has been remarkably
successful at frustrating Western projects on former Soviet territory.
He has stopped NATO expansion dead in its tracks. He has dismembered
Georgia, brought Armenia into his orbit, tightened his hold on Crimea,
and, with his Ukrainian adventure, dealt the West an unpleasant and
humiliating surprise. From the Western point of view, Putin appears to
be condemning his country to an ever-darker future of poverty and
marginalization. But Putin doesn’t believe that history has ended, and
from his perspective, he has solidified his power at home and reminded
hostile foreign powers that the Russian bear still has sharp claws.
Obama now finds himself bogged down in exactly the kinds of geopolitical rivalries he had hoped to transcend.
THE POWERS THAT BE
The revisionist powers have such varied agendas and capabilities
that none can provide the kind of systematic and global opposition that
the Soviet Union did. As a result, Americans have been slow to realize
that these states have undermined the Eurasian geopolitical order in
ways that complicate U.S. and European efforts to construct a
post-historical, win-win world.
Still, one can see the effects of this revisionist activity in many
places. In East Asia, China’s increasingly assertive stance has yet to
yield much concrete geopolitical progress, but it has fundamentally
altered the political dynamic in the region with the fastest-growing
economies on earth. Asian politics today revolve around national
rivalries, conflicting territorial claims, naval buildups, and similar
historical issues. The nationalist revival in Japan, a direct response
to China’s agenda, has set up a process in which rising nationalism in
one country feeds off the same in the other. China and Japan are
escalating their rhetoric, increasing their military budgets, starting
bilateral crises with greater frequency, and fixating more and more on
zero-sum competition.
Although the EU remains in a post-historical moment, the non-EU
republics of the former Soviet Union are living in a very different age.
In the last few years, hopes of transforming the former Soviet Union
into a post-historical region have faded. The Russian occupation of
Ukraine is only the latest in a series of steps that have turned eastern
Europe into a zone of sharp geopolitical conflict and made stable and
effective democratic governance impossible outside the Baltic states and
Poland.
In the Middle East, the situation is even more acute. Dreams that the
Arab world was approaching a democratic tipping point -- dreams that
informed U.S. policy under both the Bush and the Obama administrations
-- have faded. Rather than building a liberal order in the region, U.S.
policymakers are grappling with the unraveling of the state system that
dates back to the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided up the
Middle Eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, as governance erodes in
Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. Obama has done his best to separate the
geopolitical issue of Iran’s surging power across the region from the
question of its compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but
Israeli and Saudi fears about Iran’s regional ambitions are making that
harder to do. Another obstacle to striking agreements with Iran is
Russia, which has used its seat on the UN Security Council and support
for Assad to set back U.S. goals in Syria.
Russia sees its influence in the Middle East as an important asset in
its competition with the United States. This does not mean that Moscow
will reflexively oppose U.S. goals on every occasion, but it does mean
that the win-win outcomes that Americans so eagerly seek will sometimes
be held hostage to Russian geopolitical interests. In deciding how hard
to press Russia over Ukraine, for example, the White House cannot avoid
calculating the impact on Russia’s stance on the Syrian war or Iran’s
nuclear program. Russia cannot make itself a richer country or a much
larger one, but it has made itself a more important factor in U.S.
strategic thinking, and it can use that leverage to extract concessions
that matter to it.
If these revisionist powers have gained ground, the status quo powers
have been undermined. The deterioration is sharpest in Europe, where
the unmitigated disaster of the common currency has divided public
opinion and turned the EU’s attention in on itself. The EU may have
avoided the worst possible consequences of the euro crisis, but both its
will and its capacity for effective action beyond its frontiers have
been significantly impaired.
The United States has not suffered anything like the economic pain
much of Europe has gone through, but with the country facing the foreign
policy hangover induced by the Bush-era wars, an increasingly intrusive
surveillance state, a slow economic recovery, and an unpopular
health-care law, the public mood has soured. On both the left and the
right, Americans are questioning the benefits of the current world order
and the competence of its architects. Additionally, the public shares
the elite consensus that in a post–Cold War world, the United States
ought to be able to pay less into the system and get more out. When that
doesn’t happen, people blame their leaders. In any case, there is
little public appetite for large new initiatives at home or abroad, and a
cynical public is turning away from a polarized Washington with a mix
of boredom and disdain.
Obama came into office planning to cut military spending and reduce
the importance of foreign policy in American politics while
strengthening the liberal world order. A little more than halfway
through his presidency, he finds himself increasingly bogged down in
exactly the kinds of geopolitical rivalries he had hoped to transcend.
Chinese, Iranian, and Russian revanchism haven’t overturned the
post–Cold War settlement in Eurasia yet, and may never do so, but they
have converted an uncontested status quo into a contested one. U.S.
presidents no longer have a free hand as they seek to deepen the liberal
system; they are increasingly concerned with shoring up its
geopolitical foundations.
THE TWILIGHT OF HISTORY
It was 22 years ago that Fukuyama published The End of History and
the Last Man, and it is tempting to see the return of geopolitics as a
definitive refutation of his thesis. The reality is more complicated.
The end of history, as Fukuyama reminded readers, was Hegel’s idea, and
even though the revolutionary state had triumphed over the old type of
regimes for good, Hegel argued, competition and conflict would continue.
He predicted that there would be disturbances in the provinces, even as
the heartlands of European civilization moved into a post-historical
time. Given that Hegel’s provinces included China, India, Japan, and
Russia, it should hardly be surprising that more than two centuries
later, the disturbances haven’t ceased. We are living in the twilight of
history rather than at its actual end.
A Hegelian view of the historical process today would hold that
substantively little has changed since the beginning of the nineteenth
century. To be powerful, states must develop the ideas and institutions
that allow them to harness the titanic forces of industrial and
informational capitalism. There is no alternative; societies unable or
unwilling to embrace this route will end up the subjects of history
rather than the makers of it.
But the road to postmodernity remains rocky. In order to increase its
power, China, for example, will clearly have to go through a process of
economic and political development that will require the country to
master the problems that modern Western societies have confronted. There
is no assurance, however, that China’s path to stable liberal modernity
will be any less tumultuous than, say, the one that Germany trod. The
twilight of history is not a quiet time.
The second part of Fukuyama’s book has received less attention,
perhaps because it is less flattering to the West. As Fukuyama
investigated what a post-historical society would look like, he made a
disturbing discovery. In a world where the great questions have been
solved and geopolitics has been subordinated to economics, humanity will
look a lot like the nihilistic “last man” described by the philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche: a narcissistic consumer with no greater aspirations
beyond the next trip to the mall.
In other words, these people would closely resemble today’s European
bureaucrats and Washington lobbyists. They are competent enough at
managing their affairs among post-historical people, but understanding
the motives and countering the strategies of old-fashioned power
politicians is hard for them. Unlike their less productive and less
stable rivals, post-historical people are unwilling to make sacrifices,
focused on the short term, easily distracted, and lacking in courage.
The realities of personal and political life in post-historical
societies are very different from those in such countries as China,
Iran, and Russia, where the sun of history still shines. It is not just
that those different societies bring different personalities and values
to the fore; it is also that their institutions work differently and
their publics are shaped by different ideas.
Societies filled with Nietzsche’s last men (and women)
characteristically misunderstand and underestimate their supposedly
primitive opponents in supposedly backward societies -- a blind spot
that could, at least temporarily, offset their countries’ other
advantages. The tide of history may be flowing inexorably in the
direction of liberal capitalist democracy, and the sun of history may
indeed be sinking behind the hills. But even as the shadows lengthen and
the first of the stars appears, such figures as Putin still stride the
world stage. They will not go gentle into that good night, and they will
rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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