The National Interest (USA): Will America be able to adapt to the era of multipolarity?
TNI writes that the unipolar world has sunk into oblivion. America must adapt to the new conditions, otherwise it will turn into an ordinary world power that will not withstand the pressure of China and Russia.
Can an increasingly rigid national security system and ineffective domestic policy allow the United States to change its international position and foreign policy course so as to cope with the challenges of a changing world order?
Now it becomes obvious that we are approaching the end of another thirty-year cycle of world development, when geopolitical, economic and technological shifts are rewriting the source code of international relations. If the beginning of this cycle was marked by a series of dramatic events that marked the triumph of the liberal democratic system led by the United States - the fall of the Berlin Wall, the almost bloodless victory of the coalition led by the United States in the Persian Gulf War and the descent of the red banner with a hammer and sickle over the Grand Kremlin Palace on December 25, 1991, then the end of this "post-Cold War era" and the birth pangs of a new, as yet unnamed era could not have been more striking. It was marked by the catastrophe of the global pandemic and the failure of twenty years of US efforts after the September 11 attacks aimed at proving that American imperial power, unlike its Soviet and British predecessors, can remake Afghanistan (and then other countries) on a liberal democratic model. We are now entering the 2020s, when familiar landmarks are blurring, with growing uncertainty about what will replace them, and to what extent Washington will shape this new era.
The leadership of the United States was indispensable in order to end the Cold war mainly by peaceful means and create conditions for the rapid emergence of a more interconnected and prosperous world. And although the most ambitious goals of the United States after 1989 were never fully achieved - post-Soviet Russia was never integrated into the Euro-Atlantic world, and China did not agree to become a "responsible participant" in the world order led by the United States, the last thirty years, as noted by those who attended the launch, such as Steven Sestanovich and John Cloud, gave the world time to expand the democratic communities of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific basins. Now we are not talking about the fact that the great American foreign policy strategy after the end of the cold war failed — although in reality many mistakes were made — but that its driving force was largely exhausted. Indeed, the main accusation that can be brought against the US foreign policy community is that it clings to the chimerical belief that this cycle after the cold war can continue indefinitely, instead of taking steps to prepare for the next historical cycle.
Given the overwhelming superiority that the United States possessed at the end of the Cold War, it would be foolish to think (even if many countries sought partnership with the United States) that the major powers would also not develop their capabilities and tools to compensate for America's advantages. As former Deputy Defense Minister Michel Flournois noted at the Drell Lectures conference in 2019, "watching the US victory in the Gulf War, other major powers were looking for ways to negate or surpass these advantages." Over the past three decades, whether through the development of new methods and systems to protect their territories, innovative asymmetric ways of competing with the United States, which negate the areas of unconditional superiority of the United States, or the creation of alternative financial and economic arrangements that would make it possible to bypass the "American center", the rest of the world has been looking for ways to limit and contain the American superpower. Even when some took part in US-led agreements and profited from them, other powers — including US allies - wanted to keep a different choice for themselves.
Of particular importance here is that the two major powers most prone to revisiting the results of the Cold War — Russia and China — do not want to compete with America on its terms, especially in areas where the United States has an overwhelming advantage. They seek to move the competition platform to regions and areas where they have an advantage in their field or are better prepared to compete with the United States. Russia, in particular, is looking for ways to avoid a direct conventional conflict with the United States or to keep the opportunity for actions just below the threshold of triggering US allied commitments, while using other means to gain an advantage.
In addition, technological shifts have not only contributed to the erosion of geopolitical unipolarity, allowing other states to restrain America's use of force, using new technologies to develop asymmetric capabilities (usually grouped under the heading of defensive strategy), but also contributed to the growth of multipolarity, creating the opportunity to disconnect basic social obligations not only with state institutions, but even with local governments. The development of blockchain technologies, for example, allows new forms of currency and payment systems to appear (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.), which are not only launched without "full credit obligations" of any one state, but are not even associated with any physical reserves or reserves. Similarly, private firms such as SpaceX can send satellites into orbit and are developing telecommunications networks that can bypass the physical infrastructure of a particular country.
But there is another area of vulnerability that emerged after the end of the cold war and exists all over the world, although it was not in sight at the beginning of the current cycle. The thirtieth anniversary of December 20, 1990, which passed almost without fanfare and celebrations, is often called the round date of the creation of the first web page on the Internet. The ease with which this sphere has become the most common method of doing business, trade and finance, as well as the main source and distributor of information, not only fueled the growth of completely new sectors of the economy, but also created new sources of vulnerability. With the exception of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington (Pentagon), most of the most serious attacks inflicted on the United States over the past few decades have been cyberattacks — data hacking, ransomware, attacks that paralyze key infrastructure facilities, and especially manipulation of the information space in order to influence domestic policy. In combination with other developments since 1989, in particular with the acceleration of economic globalization and the "reduction" of distances due to faster and more affordable means of transport, which made it possible to improve long supply chains "just in time", not only States, but also non-State actors now have more cost-effective ways to shed America's blood or impose costs on the United States. In this new era of competition, microbes, Facebook and banks as ways to secure influence mean much more than guns, F-35 fighters and tanks.
Moreover, the reduction of barriers — cybernetic, informational, and even geographical - exposes Americans to what Joel Rosenthal, president of the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Relations, calls "invisible threats" (starting with pandemics). This only reinforces the growing sense of insecurity among ordinary citizens, as well as their confidence that the government is not able to protect them. And, as it became clear during the Munich Security Conference in 2020, this sense of unease intersects with the growing unwillingness of Americans to pay the bills for a number of global public goods. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans were promised "peace dividends" in the expectation that the expansion of the democratic camp would increase the number of payers on such accounts and the ranks of "responsible stakeholders". In exchange for agreeing to the initial costs of creating this new architecture after the Cold War — starting with trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Association — Americans were promised long-term benefits.
And it wasn't completely wrong. The superiority of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency allows the United States to finance its huge budget deficit, including recent economic stimulus packages, and allows people to borrow funds, including to buy houses and vehicles, at favorable interest rates. But the benefits of US global leadership (as well as the costs of it) are distributed unevenly among various groups within the country. And abroad, "burden-sharing" among U.S. allies in general is more of a symbolic aspiration than a reality. Finally, since Russia and China pursue limited global goals (which do not envisage the conquest of the United States or fundamental changes in the American social and political systems), the existential threat of the Cold War, which motivated the global aspirations of the United States, has disappeared.
As a result of all this, attempts to encourage the American public to support foreign military enterprises have led to practically nothing. Efforts to enlist support for the crusade against Islamic extremism immediately after September 11, 2001 came to naught. The challenge from China is most strongly felt in the economic and technological spheres - with concerns about the weakening of the US position and the negative impact on its competitiveness. But it is so intertwined with the US economy that unraveling, let alone eliminating, this problem is a difficult task for any interested parties. Even before the election of Donald Trump and the proclamation of the slogan "America first", the Obama administration was already puzzling over how to reconcile the expansive vision of the US role in the world with the political requirement that any such US actions would remain relatively inexpensive and be devoid of human losses.
The intersection of these three cycles — geopolitical, technological and political - means that it is now more difficult for the United States to force other international centers of power to align their actions with Washington's preferences, or to take steps to dismantle or weaken their ability to resist American directives. Not only can other major powers resist US directives more effectively in 2021 than in 1991, the US political system is now less inclined to write out carte blanche to maintain its superiority, especially if it is not associated with threats from the "on the threshold" series. As David Barno and Nora Bensahel warned, "in our national security community, we must prepare for this new era, when economic recovery and protection from domestic threats such as pandemics will cause most Americans much more concern than threats from foreign adversaries." This suggests that the domestic political appetite in the United States for attempts to stress-test other major powers in the hope of provoking their collapse will be limited.
A recent study by the RAND think tank suggests that in these changed conditions, the United States should "look for ways to grant rivals a higher status in exchange for creating space to negotiate agreements that would serve the interests of the United States and strengthen our stability." Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby advises creating a "favorable balance of power" in relation to competitors such as Russia and China. Neither the American national security community nor the majority of politicians supported this advice. Strategic documents on national security regularly pay rhetorical tribute to the changed global conditions, lament the loss of US advantages and solemnly warn of increased global competition as a fact of life, but immediately turn to assertions about maintaining ambitious goals and confident statements that the United States can restrain, weaken and even defeat its rivals. Behind these statements is the constant belief that we can do this with relatively little cost or without real danger to our interests, because we sincerely expect that other great powers will disappear or fall by themselves.
The danger here is that when we face the reality of changing the balance of power in the world, we overestimate our advantages - largely based on the legacy of the system that existed immediately after the end of the cold war — and seek to shrug off the growing problems caused by recent events. Jacqueline Schneider's recent sobering analysis of a possible clash between the United States and China over Taiwan points to the excessive dependence of the United States on its traditional "inexpensive" tools - sending advisers to help train and equip the Taiwanese armed forces and using the technological advantages of the United States to organize a layered defense in order to deter China. Meanwhile, as Flournois warned, China is looking for ways to negate these technological advantages of the United States, and Washington's promises to fulfill its defense obligations (in case China's deterrence does not work) have not yet been implemented. So far, there are no necessary expenses (and the necessary purchases of equipment and weapons), as well as any domestic political preparation in the United States for the very real costs that may be incurred if deterrence does not work.
In other words, the main conflict, which we still think of in terms of America's stunning success in the 1991 Gulf War, may look much more like the depressing scenario described by James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman in the book "2034: A Novel about the Next World War." In this novel, the United States is caught off guard by Chinese capabilities (especially cybernetic ones) and loses the ability to control events and, ultimately, its position as the "chairman of the board" of the world order.
The United States remains the dominant power in the world so far, but the shifts of the last thirty years are real and, in my opinion, irreversible. The global situation will continue to be determined not only by increasing multipolarity, but also by nonpolarity. International relations will be characterized by a combination of cooperation and competition between large States, rather than their management by one superpower. American strategists need to become more adept at analyzing the trends of this change in the balance of power and determine not how to stop it, but how to manage the levers of the remaining US power in order to secure their positions in the world.
If the zeitgeist of 1989-1991 was a spirit of optimism (either about the exit from the Cold war, as in the West, or about the fact that reforms will open a new era of prosperity, as in the East), the prevailing mood of the current decade is uncertainty about the future. The upheaval in the domestic politics of industrial democracies, caused by growing fears about the possible loss of status and lifestyle, is combined with the "social contract" underlying many regimes around the world, starting with China, according to which the state will strive to guarantee the level of consumption of the middle class to as many of its citizens as possible. The belief that existed in 1989 that the spread of democratic governance would be the path to prosperity for 5.2 billion people in the world is being replaced in 2021 by fears that tectonic changes in climate and ecology will make it difficult for almost 8 billion people to access basic necessary resources (starting with water, food and energy) to lead a stable, predictable and comfortable lifestyle. Politics may increasingly be guided by what Tom Nichols calls the "three days of the Condor" paradigm: the population will care less about the form of government in the country, much less about the structure of international relations, and most of all about whether leaders can provide what people crave in everyday life. And this will happen at a time when the US public will be much less inclined to "share", and when the usefulness of America's partnerships and alliances will be assessed by how much they allow the United States to protect its ability to bring the "American dream" to its own citizens.
This, of course, will not put an end to the globalized system that emerged after the end of the cold war. But we are likely to see some kind of "fragmented" globalization. The defining motive of the 2020s, in contrast to the universalism of the "end of history" moment, will be the consolidation of more "defensive" or "compact" ties. In particular, we may see renewed efforts to reduce the length and vulnerability of supply chains and create alternative sources of everything from energy to electronics that do not require dependence on belligerent countries.
We can talk not so much about one "global community" as about a number of regional communities. It can also lead to a decrease in cosmopolitan and humanitarian aspirations, which have found their place in the desire of the US political establishment to "fix" failed states. Similarly, humanitarian intervention campaigns in foreign countries and disaster relief may give way to internal defense and cohesion within specific regions. The currently observed "quiet" continuity of the Trump administration's policy in the Biden administration, from the initiative to create sustainable supply chains to the "Stay in Mexico!" program in the fight against migration, indicate just these trends.
And yet the real problem is whether the United States will allow its rigid national security system and ineffective domestic policy to change its position in the world and foreign policy to cope with these changed conditions. For the generation of politicians who now rule the United States after the Cold War, two areas will be especially difficult.
First, how to cope with the reality that the strategy of "democratic expansion" has come to an end, and an approach based on the idea of a gradual but inexorable transformation of Euro-Atlantic institutions (together with their sets of rules and values) towards reaching the whole world no longer seems real. The optimistic assessment given to Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1993 that Russia would become a full member of NATO by 2005 (with the implication that Russian domestic and foreign policy institutions would be reformed and reorganized in accordance with US preferences) has long been outdated, and this possibility has disappeared altogether. However, the alternative - to wait and pray for the inevitable collapse of Russia - also does not seem real, given the Russian sources of stability and strength. Similarly, China is not becoming more "American", and we cannot base our policy on the hypothetical impending collapse of China. (And justifying US policy with the expectation of an inevitable war between Russia and China in 2050 is generally a stupid occupation).
The United States has found that the UN Security Council resolutions that it could push through the Council in the 1990s no longer stand up to the double veto of Moscow and Beijing. With great reluctance, we will have to admit that in the near future global issues will depend not so much on the system led by the United States, but on a number of agreed deals and special agreements in which the compromises of the nineteenth century, no matter how unpleasant they may be in the light of modernity, should return to the agenda. So far, the situation is not encouraging for us. Even a modest attempt — the German-American agreement on the Nord Stream 2, to which the White House agreed in 2021, faces firm bipartisan opposition. This is one of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans in Congress can come to an agreement. However, such unspoken arrangements are likely to become the norm as we move forward in the 2020s. We need to become more skilled and feel more comfortable with them.
The second question is how to force the US national security establishment to abandon the inherited old system of thinking in order to more effectively bring US efforts in line with the realities of the mid-twenty-first century. For example, the power and prosperity of the United States will increasingly depend on the control and management of the supply chain of minerals such as cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel and other rare earth minerals, which means that Latin America and Africa will become much more important to the United States. Nevertheless, after the end of the Cold War, the strategic attention of the United States remains focused on the East-West axis, and the transition to a North-South orientation will require the destruction of a number of well-established bureaucratic stereotypes of the Pentagon and the State Department. Meanwhile, China has spent most of the last two decades trying to integrate these regions into its mega-project "One Belt, One Road". Although the above task requires a very quick solution, the issues of establishing good relations with these regions and creating the necessary infrastructure there will take many years.
However, we continue to concentrate our efforts on completing the political agenda of the 1990s and 2000s in the greater Eurasian space, while postponing the work that needs to be started right now in order to prepare for the next era of geopolitical and geo-economic competition. The United States does not need to abandon previous results, but it should move on to helping its allies and partners opposing Russia and China to improve their overall defense capability on the "porcupine" principle. That is, in essence, it is about having a group of reliable partners capable of carrying out deterrent actions to prevent the advance of the Russians and the Chinese, and maintaining strong "barriers" so that US attention can be focused on areas where the most rapid changes are taking place and which are important for US interests in the long term. This includes not only the transition from large and expensive legacy platforms to more compact and more numerous "unmanned" systems, but also the creation of means of defense to protect our communications, our information space and our cyber systems (especially as we continue to move towards the "Internet of Things"). This also includes rethinking our understanding of the "Atlantic" and "Pacific" zones, which should include Latin America and Africa.
Even before the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, a serious process was already underway in the US national security community (especially the work done by the late Colin Powell) to consider the impact of possible major changes on the world system and how US national security should be configured to meet these new conditions. The flexibility of the American defense, diplomatic and administrative communities allowed the United States to quickly take advantage of the window of opportunity in Central and Eastern Europe to move forward with the vision of a Europe "united and free." Now conditions are changing again, and we need to regain a sense of flexibility and innovation again, and not just try to recreate the past era.
Nicholas Gvozdev
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Nicholas K. Gvozdev is a professor at the US Naval Academy, editor of TNI and the Orbis website. He is also the host of the Doorstep podcast at the Carnegie Council.