America's Great-Power Opportunity. Ali Wyne

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America's Great-Power Opportunity - Ali Wyne


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mobilizations that might challenge the CCP’s authority, and still give Chinese “netizens” a release valve for airing their grievances. Having defied many prognostications of collapse, the CCP is now one of the longest surviving authoritarian parties in history.

      Forecasts of deglobalization are overwrought, but resistance to integration—geographic, technological, and geopolitical—is growing. According to Elisabeth Vallet, there were fifteen border walls in 1989; today there are at least seventy.54 Deteriorating relations between the United States and China, meanwhile, have led many observers to conclude that some degree of decoupling between the two countries’ economies is inevitable and has the potential to fracture global supply chains and even to produce technological blocs that may operate on the basis of different norms, standards, and arrangements. And countries as diverse as Austria, Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey are witnessing a revival of what Jan-Werner Müller calls “nationalist populism,” which threatens to yield “more closed societies and less global cooperation to address common problems.”55

      At the beginning of 2000, amid discussions of purported US unipolarity, Condoleezza Rice argued that one of the country’s five central tasks was to develop “comprehensive relationships with the big powers, particularly Russia and China, that can and will mold the character of the international political system.”56 Their grievances did not register as loudly in the first two decades after the Cold War, in part because America’s margin of preeminence was much more significant. Today, though, Beijing and Moscow are considerably more capable of channeling long-lived dissatisfaction into meaningful resistance, individually and collectively. China possesses the world’s second-largest economy and is both the largest exporting and the largest trading country. It occupies a commanding position within the vast mesh of global supply chains, and its Belt and Road Initiative has deepened its commercial heft across vast stretches of the developing world. Investing heavily in the development and application of frontier technologies, China is emerging as a center of global innovation. It is rapidly modernizing its armed forces and continues to militarize the South China Sea on the basis of a “nine-dash line” that the Hague unanimously ruled illegal in July 2016. It is also using economic coercion and aggressive diplomacy to make the world more conducive to authoritarianism.

      As for Russia, it continues to threaten provocations along its own periphery, to inflame social divisions in western democracies, and to prop up Assad in war-ravaged Syria. And, while the entente between Beijing and Moscow may not be a natural one—their historical interactions give them reasons to be suspicious of each other and their national interests sometimes diverge—it is nonetheless gaining momentum.

      Great-power competition would appear, then, to have clear virtues as an organizing principle of US foreign policy. It distills, in broad brushstrokes, a core element of contemporary geopolitics, intensifying strategic tensions between the world’s most powerful democracy and two significant authoritarian competitors. Because it occupies a central role in high-level government documents such as the NSS and the NDS, it lends coherence to interagency priorities and efforts. And, in keeping with Kennan’s Council on Foreign Relations address, it puts policymakers in a familiar frame of mind: that of dealing with a menacing other (or others, in this case).

      Certain realities, though, bely that familiarity. The United States has won three decisive victories over overt challengers: Nazi Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, imperial Japan surrendered just under four months later, and the Soviet Union formally dissolved on December 26, 1991. But the United States is less accustomed to achieving and sustaining stable cohabitations with complex competitors; the putative “long peace” that prevailed during the Cold War discounts not only the number of times Washington and Moscow came to the brink of nuclear conflict but also the maelstrom of proxy wars, civil wars, and genocides that sowed instability across the world during that period. It is not clear what “victory” over China or Russia would look like, nor how either one’s collapse would advance US national interests. During its sole experience of long-term multifaceted competition that was the Cold War, the United States was a relatively ascendant power that contested just one other. Today it is a relatively declining power that contests two others.

       It could lull the United States into an increasingly expansive, yet poorly specified struggle against two formidable powers, undermining America’s sense of strategic balance and unnerving its allies and partners: these countries have little desire to be instrumentalized in the service of a reactive US foreign policy, however potent their apprehensions about China and Russia may be.

       It could elicit defensive, even alarmist US responses to Beijing and Moscow, accelerating Sino-Russian rapprochement in the process.

       Given that transnational challenges increasingly shape geopolitics, such a policy could undercut the United States’ vital national interests if it sets the United States on a path of permanent antagonism with China and Russia.

      While Washington will increasingly have to contend with and manage the challenges posed by a resurgent Beijing and a revanchist Moscow, it should not pursue a foreign policy that is driven by or beholden to their actions. It should instead articulate a forward-looking conception of its role in the world, identifying cases where circumscribed competition with China and Russia might further that vision. Near the end of his famed “long telegram,” Kennan exhorted the United States to “formulate and put forward for other nations a much more positive and constructive picture of [the] sort of world we would like to see than we have put forward in [the] past … And unless we do, [the] Russians certainly will.”59


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