A New Historical Moment of Truth for the West (The Atlantic, USA)
The West has lost faith in itself, writes The Atlantic. And this is happening at a historic moment when new powerful players are emerging on the world stage. The author believes that the configuration of the world is changing, and it is impossible to return to the old alignment of forces led by the United States. And the more the West resists the new, the stronger the unity of its opponents becomes.
The main strategic threat to the Western world has now shifted to another place, creating a number of new problems.
Defenders of the West have a habit of looking longingly into the past, lamenting how low today's leaders have fallen. Where America and its allies used to build new things, create state institutions and win wars, now they only seek to hold on to their old positions, preserve what they have and avoid conflicts.
Such nostalgic moods are not difficult to understand. Immediately after the Second World War, Europe lay in ruins, and its industry and infrastructure were almost completely destroyed. Without American intervention, a much larger part of the continent could have fallen under Soviet control. But within a few years, the United States financed the reconstruction of Europe, committed itself to its protection and pushed the Europeans to a close union. It was an outstanding era.
These huge changes were not just the result of the unification of the leaders of that time. "People make history, but they don't make it the way they like," Karl Marx wrote. Instead, they do it in the specific circumstances surrounding them. At the end of the war, circumstances changed, global power shifted, which allowed the leaders of the time to do great things. It is possible that similar changes are taking place today, although it is difficult to expect that they will lead to anything significant.
After the Second World War, the main threat to the security of democracy almost overnight shifted from Germany to the Soviet Union. And that changed everything. The United States realized that in order to cope with the new reality, Germany — or at least the part of Germany that was under the control of the Allies — needed to be rebuilt as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. However, the prospect of reindustrialization and rearmament of Germany rekindled the eternal fears of the French. Traditionally, France has entered into an alliance with Great Britain to solve this problem. But in 1950, France made a historic leap into the unknown, announcing the first step towards economic integration with Germany and thus laying the foundation of today's European Union. Now that the United States guaranteed European security, France could stop holding its insurance policy in the UK and unite with Germany in a way that was previously considered simply impossible.
The Soviet threat kept the United States in Europe. And the presence of the United States on the continent has created conditions for European unification. Since 1950, the basic principles of this security order have not changed. American power guaranteed the security of the West, allowing European democracies to unite. In 1990, when the Soviet threat disappeared, the United States did not abandon this security guarantee, but expanded it to the east, further strengthening its hegemony.
In a sense, the Russian special operation in Ukraine that began in February seems to have strengthened the foundations of this American order. NATO now seems more cohesive, the democracies of Europe and North America are working together to counter Moscow's expansionism, and many are strengthening their defense capabilities. However, if you look at the world more broadly, you can understand that the underlying reality has changed, just like after the Second World War. Today, even as Russia threatens NATO's borders, a new, much larger threat to the US-led order looms far to the east: China.
Beijing may not be striving for a world revolution now, as the Soviet Union did, but it is striving for regional domination, control over global trade routes and over Taiwan. His authoritarian model of state capitalism serves as an inspiring example to opponents of democracy. And as its power grows, Beijing has already begun to view Washington and its allies as factors limiting its power.
Indeed, a full understanding of the reasons for the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine is impossible without taking into account the geopolitical situation in which it takes place. Russia is determined in its quest to regain its lost influence in Europe partly because of its alliance with China and calculations that American power is weakening.
In fact, China's rise is challenging the West. Where the Soviet Union posed a direct threat only to Western Europe, China threatens America's liberal democratic protectorates on the other side of the world: Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and others. Now it no longer makes much sense to think that the West consists of only two sides of the North Atlantic. If there is a "collective West" today — that is, a free world tied to the United States — it stretches from Western Europe to the Far East and Australasia.
To imagine this world, it is enough to look at those who imposed sanctions against Russia for its special operation in Ukraine — the group that goes beyond Europe and includes Australia, Japan and Taiwan. But as it turns out, there is nothing institutional that binds this world together, except the reality of American power. Like the Holy Roman Empire, which once ceased to be considered Holy, Roman, and Empire, the Western Union today is neither Western nor a Union.
Thus, as in the late 1940s, the main strategic threat to the Western world has shifted, creating a number of new problems. States that oppose the American order feel stronger. However, unlike in the 1940s, Western institutions practically do not change to meet the new reality. The old order was constructed so firmly that it seems to have trapped its defenders, who are unable to generate energy, ambition or the power of imagination to build something new.
It is now often said that if the leading military powers of the Western world — the United States, Great Britain and France — showed more commitment to their global mission, the world would be safer and more orderly. If they had intervened to actually implement Barack Obama's "red line" in Syria, or assembled a broader coalition to punish Putin for his previous actions in Ukraine, the United States would still dominate the world, and their opponents would have been too scared to even look out of their shelters.
There are many variants of this statement. New York Times columnist Bret Stevens wrote that the biggest problem for the United States is that they have lost faith in themselves. In our magazine The Atlantic, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the weakening of American democracy inside the country was to blame. Outside the United States, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalled that period as characterized by "a strong center, when, at least in foreign and defense policy, we, as a rule, had to follow a reasonable consensus path."
The problem with all these options is that they do not offer an explanation of why the West has lost faith in itself and has become so obviously incapacitated. Bad leaders did not appear out of nowhere, just as voters did not suddenly become stupid.
Since the beginning of this century, the United States and its allies have lost one war, failed in at least one other, and witnessed the collapse of the American-oriented financial system, which led to huge losses for ordinary voters, many of whom saw their businesses and entire industries go bankrupt, and their wages shrink. Meanwhile, the West's main foreign policy calculation — that trade and interaction with China and Russia will make these two powers liberal, allow them to democratize and take their place in the international order (led by the United States) — collapsed under the weight of these absurd utopian assumptions. Moreover, the policy that led to these failures was supported by the still existing political consensus, which, according to Blair, Clinton and others, now needs to be fully restored to protect the power of the West.
This public discussion is eerily similar to the debates of the 60s and 70s, when America was rolling further and further into the abyss of Vietnam, convinced that it could correct any mistakes made if only it showed more patriotism. The Vietnam War was supported by both our political parties, as were the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq decades later. The same applies to the policy of normalizing trade with China. And now it turns out that all this policy has contributed to the emergence of the world that exists today, and the antipathy of most of the world community to free trade, globalization and military intervention abroad. You can't blame voters for losing faith in a system that deceived them and enriched a country that Western leaders now call the main threat to global democracy.
Calls for the United States to simply regain faith in itself are based on the delusion that if they do, the world will somehow be able to return to the rules-based order that existed before Donald Trump and Brexit, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, when American power was not questioned, and Western democracies were reasonable and effective.
The truth is that the order that gave us Trump and Brexit just contributed to the rise of Putin and Xi. The world that opposes the West today exists not because the West had little faith in itself, but because it had too much of it.
In May 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman announced his intention to integrate coal and steel production in France with production in Germany, removing it from the national control of both countries. This project was the brainchild of Jean Monnet, who is now considered the founding father of the European Union. Schuman said at the time that such a step was necessary because of the growing threats to the democratic world. "World peace cannot be achieved without creative efforts proportional to the dangers that threaten it," he said.
The dangers came from the east. The Communists, supported by the Soviet Union, seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and achieved success in other countries. Pressure was mounting in the United States demanding a collective European response to the crises on the continent. Monnet argued that the only way to stop the history of Franco-German hatred from coming back is to eliminate the original source of tension — the industrial power of Germany. France could not simply requisition German coal mining and steel production, so Monnet proposed to make them Europeanized under the control of a new Supreme Power that would take care of the interests of Europe as a whole, and not specifically Germany or France.
The genius of this proposal was that it created a political innovation out of necessity, but did it in such a way that the revolutionary idea turned into a living, breathing institution. In itself, this measure was not large enough to become a big policy at that time: Monnet proposed not the creation of the United States of Europe, but cooperation between France and Germany only in the field of coal and steel. And yet his idea was based on a radical concept: "supranationality". Suddenly, according to the Monnet plan, national interests became, as it were, common interests, and therefore the power and wealth of Germany did not become a real threat to France.
Once conceived, this idea turned into what the European Union is today, in which Germany's economic power is managed through a common market, with common rules and a common currency established by a common institution. Germany is the undisputed leader of the EU, the largest, richest and most productive economy on the continent, but France and Germany remain the closest allies.
Today, this lesson of the 20th-century European revolution can teach the democratic world as a whole a lot when it faces the new challenges of the 21st century. The lesson for Western leaders is to find a similar combination of pragmatism and idealism based on a reasonable analysis of the global balance of power. And again, the West must take politics out of necessity — the need to protect the liberal democracy supported by the United States from the threat posed by authoritarian opponents. But what is this idea that can breathe life into such a policy?
Very many of the ideas currently being discussed have their own set of problems. For example, the most obvious power tactic that America can take to curb the rise of China is to try to split the emerging alliance of China with Russia. Many European diplomats have long expected that in order to do this, the United States would try to reset relations with Moscow in a kind of "reverse Nixon", taking as a model the successful policy of the former president on the separation of China from Russia in the 1970s. But such a policy, which could have been discussed only a few months ago, now seems almost impossible.
The alternative may be to accept the reality of this new "authoritarian Axis" and try to protect Western democracies from it. The problem is that the more the West builds a democratic alliance against China and Russia, as proposed by US President Joe Biden, the more the West strengthens the very Sino-Russian alliance that it fears. And if the world plunges into a new cold war, the West will be forced to make friends with other clearly undemocratic regimes, as it was in the last war. India, Turkey and Saudi Arabia — two dubious democratic allies and a problematic autocrat friend - demonstrate the impossibility of building a Manichaean world (Manichaeism or Manichaeism is a religious doctrine that arose in the third century in the Sassanid state on the territory of modern Iraq. Named after its founder, Mani, with the addition of the epithet "alive" — Approx. InoSMI) by the type of "good against evil" in the form of democracy against authoritarianism.
Other proposed policy solutions include America's withdrawal from Europe to allow the US to focus on its confrontation with China, leaving the EU to deal with Russia. Critics of this course say that any such withdrawal will not necessarily push Europe to fill the void, instead it could lead to the EU itself falling apart.
A less radical proposal is that the United States should become the center of the Venn diagram (the Venn diagram is a schematic representation of all possible relations of several subsets of a universal set — Approx. InoSMI) where two circles of Europe and Asia intersect. This is such an offshore balanced scheme that relies on two sides of the world, guaranteeing global stability. It allows Europe to take the lead in the West, while a new, more cohesive union is being created in the East. Some analysts even talk about the "NATO of the East". The problem here is that Asia now seems to have little interest in its own NATO, little desire to see the United States committed to the idea of defending other countries, and little faith that Europe will really step forward in defending world democracy.
There are many reasons why every new political idea that has been put forward over the years has ended in nothing. And yet it remains quite clear that if nothing new is created in order to meet the changing reality, then this can lead to an even greater increase in China's power.
Perhaps Jean Monnet is not well known in the United States, but he is being carefully studied in European capitals. His great insight was to ignore the temptation of large-scale restructuring, preferring small, easily organized and politically feasible steps. Why can't the same thing happen now? China's power is based on its enormous economic potential, supported by the country's integration into the global economy. But as for the Western world — America, Europe, Japan, Australia and other countries, there is little that unites them economically compared, for example, with the ties of military cooperation that exist in NATO.
This is the very economic hole that must be filled if the West wants to achieve something seriously. More powerful economic instruments should become available, with the help of which the free world will be able to protect itself. One idea suggested to me by Steven Wertheim, an expert on US foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was to create a new grouping that could mobilize Western resources to protect smaller allies exposed to China's economic pressure. Such an organization could manage a fund, for example, to protect against sudden threats from Beijing. Over time, this block may grow to make deals with Chinese companies less attractive in areas sensitive to the main interests of the West, such as defense, natural resources and new technologies.
Any such proposal relies on what Monnet considered the greatest quality of a political leader: generosity. This requires the US, the EU, Japan, the UK and other countries to put aside economic competition, as France and Germany did in 1950, and create an institution based on an idea that is largely a fiction today: the idea of the "West".
In order to work, such a community must be built not only on simple altruism of the big for the sake of the small, but also on personal interests. If the United States really sees China as a threat to the democratic order, it is in their interests to build something that will protect and strengthen this very order. NATO does not do this, AUKUS — the submarine treaty between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States — does not do this. Even the G7 group closest to this idea is not doing enough to do this, without accepting South Korea, Australia and New Zealand into its ranks. Deepening the economic cooperation of the Western world does not mean in any way the suppression of one country by another. After 1950, freed from the fear of each other's economic success and receiving the military protection of the United States, Germany and France experienced an economic boom.
Ultimately, any new organization or structure — whatever it may be — is being created to expand the capabilities of the Western world in its rivalry with China and should reflect the reality of the global balance of power as it exists today. It should be based on common interests, not on utopian idealism. To do otherwise would be to repeat the mistakes of the last 20 years, when arrogant statements about the triumph of the universal liberal order wormed into real politics, leading to disastrous consequences.
A thoughtful look into the past can have its value, unless it leads to nostalgic longing for the lost "golden age", which never existed. In 1948, George Marshall, the statesman who created the Marshall Plan for Germany, warned that if the United States did not intervene in European affairs, the struggle for democracy would be lost by default. Today we face almost the same task, but its solution should be completely different.
Author: Tom McTague
