Every so often, a grand thesis captures the world’s imagination, at least until it is swept away by events or by a newer, more plausible thesis. The latest one to do so, in policy think tanks, universities, foreign ministries, corporate boardrooms, editorial offices, and international conference centers, is that America’s time of global dominance is finished, and that new powers, such as China, India, and Russia, are poised to take over. It’s an idea that has had as much currency within the United States as elsewhere.
All great empires set too much store by predictions of their imminent demise. Perhaps, as the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy suggested in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” empires need the sense of peril to give them a reason to go on. Why spend so much money and effort if not to keep the barbarians at bay?
Still, the current economic growth of China—and also of India and Russia—is impressive. In “Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade” (Harcourt; $26), the former Economist editor Bill Emmott refers to a World Bank analysis predicting that both China and India “could almost triple their economic output” in the next ten years or so. By the late twenty-twenties, China could overtake the United States as the world’s biggest economy. The spectacle of Chinese turbo-capitalism is inspiring Marco Polo-like awe in some Western commentators. Mark Leonard, the author of “What Does China Think?” (PublicAffairs; $22.95), reports, with more enthusiasm than plausibility, that “a town the size of London shoots up in the Pearl River Delta every year.” Parag Khanna, in “The Second World” (Random House; $29), informs us, rather gleefully, that “Asia is shaping the world’s destiny—and exposing the flaws of the grand narrative of Western civilization in the process. Because of the East, the West is no longer master of its own fate.”
It has been a while since policy mavens have used terms like “destiny” with a straight face. But that’s the kind of language we are beginning to hear, now that American “hyper-power” (as a former French foreign minister liked to call it) is being challenged. There are good reasons for skepticism about such grand forecasts. Economic statistics in autocracies such as China are notoriously unreliable, and it’s worth recalling all those breathless predictions, a few decades ago, of Japan’s imminent global domination. But, even if we aren’t so quick to write off America’s cultural, political, economic, and military clout, the fact that the American economy has to rely on infusions of cash from China, Singapore, and the Gulf states suggests that something important is taking place.
Exactly what is happening, and with what consequences, are matters of dispute. Some see great opportunities. At the start of “The Post-American World” (Norton; $25.95), Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, states that his book is “not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else.” He’s among those who argue that the newly rich powers should be embedded quickly and snugly in international institutions such as the G8, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Others say that it’s naïve—so very “old Enlightenment,” as Robert Kagan, the author of “The Return of History and the End of Dreams” (Knopf; $19.95), puts it—to imagine that the aggressive ambitions of great nations can be muzzled that way. Protecting the Free World, Kagan thinks, will require a stiffer military backbone. He envisages a clash between the global constellation of democracies and the nouveau-riche autocracies. Khanna, for his part, describes a vigorous East united against a more and more decadent West. (He is fond of quoting Oswald Spengler—always a bad sign.)
Zakaria sees the future in less belligerent terms. His is the voice of what might be called the Davos consensus, after the Swiss resort where, under the auspices of the World Economic Forum, financial and political élites gather each year for convivial networking. What’s striking about that consensus, though, is how swiftly it can change. The first time I visited this august assemblage, around the turn of the century, the received opinion was that the United States was so far ahead of the rest of the world that no one could ever catch up. This year in Davos, America’s fall was on everyone’s lips.
Zakaria, who is judicious, reasonable, smooth, intelligent, and a little glib, predicts nothing so rash. He points out that, aside from some pockets of backwardness, the whole world has been getting much richer. Global capitalism has been a huge success. Far from menacing local cultures, as some fear, globalization has, by his accounting, been good for cultural diversity. France and South Korea, “long dominated by American movies, now have large film industries of their own,” he writes, omitting to mention that France had one before Hollywood threatened to wipe it out, and that its revival in France, as in South Korea, has been due more to state subsidies than to global capitalism. Still, even though the economic scene looks gloomier now than it did when he finished his book, Zakaria is correct to insist that many people everywhere have benefitted from the global boom.
The problem, Zakaria writes, is that “as economic fortunes rise, so does nationalism.” This is apparent in Russia, of course, but it is equally so in China, where he talked to a young businessman, and felt as if he “were in Berlin in 1910.” Actually, the prickly nationalism of many Chinese may have less to do with their newfound prosperity than with China’s fraught combination of political autocracy and economic liberalism: nationalism and economic boosterism are all the autocrats have at their disposal to try to legitimatize their continuing monopoly on power. In any case, Zakaria is inclined to think that rational calculation will ultimately prevail. He maintains that the Chinese are by nature a pragmatic people, who will surely realize that it is in their interest to be embedded in the liberal global order. “The veneration of an abstract idea,” he explains, “is somewhat alien to China’s practical mind-set.”
This piece of cultural analysis does not quite explain the veneration, fairly recently, of Chairman Mao’s highly abstract ideas. In fact, ideology has always played a large role in Chinese politics, and Robert Kagan, perhaps the cleverest of the neoconservatives, points out the limits of Chinese pragmatism. Like the Russians, he writes, the Chinese leaders have “a comprehensive set of beliefs about government and society and the proper relationship between rulers and their people,” and are convinced that the chaos and uncertainties of democracy pose threats to their nation. “Chinese and Russian leaders are not just autocrats therefore. They believe in autocracy.” This is indeed what Chinese rulers have believed for thousands of years, drawing support from some highly abstract ideas expressed in Confucian philosophy.
Zakaria says that China, like India, wants “to gain power and status and respect, for sure, but by growing within the international system, not by overturning it. As long as these new countries feel they can be accommodated, they have every incentive to become ‘responsible stakeholders’ in this system.” But can powerful autocratic regimes really be accommodated in global economic institutions, without undermining either their own autocratic powers or the liberal democracies? As Kagan says, “Power is the ability to get others to do what you want and prevent them from doing what you don’t want.” Something may have to give.
Zakaria’s answer is “consultation, cooperation, and even compromise.” The United States, he reminds us, is still ranked by the World Economic Forum as “the most competitive economy in the world.” What’s needed to perpetuate American supremacy is greater knowledge of the world outside, a willingness to open the borders to new immigrants, and, above all, a policy of consulting foreign leaders instead of lecturing them or going it alone. “The chair of the board who can gently guide a group of independent directors is still a very powerful person,” Zakaria observes.
The harder edge of Robert Kagan’s prose is bracing after Zakaria’s smooth assurance. Reading Kagan is like reading the work of a very clever Marxist: the logic is impeccable, even when the premise is wrong. His main premise is not particularly new. In a line of thought popular among German conservatives between the two World Wars, Kagan holds that liberals are dreamers who believe that nations will behave decently once they are part of a rational world order, where all are free to pursue their enlightened self-interests within a framework of internationally agreed-on rules, as promulgated by such institutions as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Trade, and the mutual dependencies that result from it, will eliminate belligerence between powers, liberals suppose. But, in Kagan’s view, liberalism, or what he sometimes calls “Enlightenment liberalism,” is deluded. Like the German conservatives, Kagan sees a very different world, one that is “embedded in human nature” and animated by what the ancient Greeks called thumos, “a spiritedness and ferocity in defense of clan, tribe, city, or state.” Here such phrases as “national destiny,” shaped by history and blood, have a congenial home. The United States, he points out in his new book—as he did at greater length in his previous book, “Dangerous Nation” (2006)—has “intervened and overthrown sovereign governments dozens of times throughout its history.” An “expansive, even aggressive global policy was consistent with American foreign policy traditions,” because the essence of Americans’ patriotism “has been inextricably tied to a belief in their nation’s historic global significance.” Once a red-blooded interventionist, always a red-blooded interventionist. That, for Kagan, is the nation’s destiny—and a good thing, too.
Kagan’s account of America’s essential nature ignores long-standing traditions of isolationism, Lincoln’s fierce opposition to the Mexican War, because of his respect for sovereign boundaries, and Woodrow Wilson’s promotion of the kind of international institution that Kagan discounts. In Kagan’s view, the debacle of the Vietnam War dented American confidence in an expansive foreign policy. The neoconservative project, accordingly, has been to regain the confidence to carry out America’s destiny once more, in the name of democracy and “the belief that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights that must not be abridged by governments.” To people who share this faith, he writes, “wars that defend these principles” can be right “even if established international law says they are wrong.” They think that the United States shouldn’t let international institutions hamper its interventions in foreign countries.
But, Kagan argues, autocratic powers like China and Russia have no love for those institutions, either. To them, he writes, “the international liberal order is not progress. It is oppression.” They will therefore form alliances with fellow-autocrats, who will oppose any encroachment on their sovereignty. International institutions, for them, represent just such an encroachment. And the Europeans, despite their enthusiasm for the international system, will nevertheless see that it’s in their interest, as fellow-democrats, to stick with the United States. The idea of embedding the growing powers of Asia, Russia, and the Middle East in the kind of new liberal order favored by people like Fareed Zakaria is, for Kagan, a hopeless dream.
Just as Cold War thinking, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, created a certain ideological clarity, this clean division between the democrats and the autocrats is invigorating in its simplicity. The real world, alas, is rarely so clean. Kagan acknowledges that the United States sometimes has to support authoritarian regimes to further its interests. But, like the Cold Warriors of old (who were slow to recognize the sharp divisions between China and the Soviet Union), he tends to see potential enemies as a common front. As an example of the new axis of autocracy, Kagan cites the Shanghai Coöperation Organization, a loose alliance consisting of China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. These are all autocracies, but is their alliance really based on a shared horror of democratic intervention, as Kagan believes? As Bill Emmott points out, the S.C.O. was formed because of concerns about Islamist movements in China, Russia, and Central Asia, but also because China doesn’t want Russia to dominate Central Asia and thinks that the S.C.O. can boost its influence there.
Kagan may well be correct to argue that the Chinese see themselves as a traditional rising power, like Germany and Japan in the nineteenth century, both of which stressed military as much as economic strength. The question for the United States and other democracies is how to keep autocratic powers safely contained. Compared with Russia and China, the United States still has overwhelming military might. But how useful is that as an instrument of policy? Emmott points out that things are very different from the days when imperial Germany and Japan started throwing their weight around. A rising power no longer needs a strong military to secure natural resources. They can be bought on open markets, or acquired from unsavory regimes in exchange for easy credit. And the democratic countries have business interests that are at odds with a staunch opposition to autocracies that have poor human-rights records. We like those cheap Chinese imports.
Nor is it so clear that military muscle is a better way to defend democratic interests than international institutions. Both are needed, to be sure. But Kagan himself observes that Russian and Chinese leaders are right to worry about those institutions. He poses the key question: “Can autocrats enter the liberal international order without succumbing to the forces of liberalism?” If the answer is no, that would be a pretty good reason to try to ensnare them in it.
About twenty years ago, there was a common belief that military power meant little, that the soft power of Germany and Japan would rule the world. This was a mistake. But hard power can easily be overrated, as the war in Iraq and the “war on terror” demonstrate. Kagan rather skates over the subject of the war in Iraq, which he ardently supported: “A stable, pro-American Iraq would shift the strategic balance in a decidedly pro-American direction.” Well, yes.
He does, however, make a significant point that is overlooked by those who believe that the combined blessings of trade, capitalism, and rising prosperity lead inexorably to liberal democracy. And this is the international appeal of autocracy. The Soviet Union, after an initial spurt of industrialization, was a model of economic failure. Contemporary China, so far, is not. As Kagan says, “Thanks to decades of remarkable growth, the Chinese today can argue that their model of economic development, which combines an increasingly open economy with a closed political system, can be a successful option for development in many nations.”
Some commentators, like Mark Leonard, see this as a revolutionary intellectual breakthrough. In fact, the Chinese experiment has antecedents: Pinochet’s Chile, South Korea under military dictatorship, and, to some extent, Bismarck’s Germany. (Zakaria’s previous book, “The Future of Freedom,” explored the topic of pro-development autocracies in some detail.) It’s not surprising that Third World dictators should be attracted to this model. More worrying is the allure it has for technocrats, businessmen, architects, and politicians even in the democratic West. Who wouldn’t prefer to make deals in a country without independent trade unions? Who would turn down the chance to redesign entire cities without public interference?
In foreign policy, as Leonard points out, China has a distinct advantage over the United States, especially after the Iraq misadventure: “Where American policy-makers champion the Washington Consensus, the Chinese talk about the success of gradualism and the ‘Harmonious Society.’ Where the USA is bellicose, Chinese policy-makers talk about peace. Whereas American diplomats talk about regime change, their Chinese counterparts talk about respect for sovereignty and the diversity of civilizations.” Such talk is self-serving and disingenuous, but in most of the world it is also more appealing. Moreover, a dogmatic insistence on isolating dictators, such as the Burmese junta, does little to oust them, and actually diminishes America’s influence.
In some Asian countries, China’s economic success has strengthened the notion that democracy is just another outmoded Western idea hopelessly unsuited to Asians. Parag Khanna is inclined in this direction. Somewhat oddly for a man whose résumé includes fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, and the New America Foundation, he is enthralled by the idea of Western democratic decadence, an idea that’s promulgated with particular enthusiasm in Singapore. (The name of Kishore Mahbubani, Lee Kuan Yew’s promoter of “Asian Values,” duly appears in his book and in several of the others under review.) In its contempt for liberal democracy, Khanna’s “The Second World” would be refreshing if it were not so wrongheaded and so badly written: “Located at the mouth of the Yangtze River, Shanghai subsumes China’s best and brightest into a culture of doing in the way New Yorkers are known for, its first world urban culture and cosmopolitan design already earning it the status of a global hot spot.”
Having talked to hundreds of fellow think-tankers and pundits all over the world, Khanna has concluded, among other things, that “democracy is even less in demand because many Asian countries actually have good leaders.” This is an extraordinary statement, in light of the democratic movements that have arisen in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, China, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Indonesia in the past few decades. It’s true that spokesmen for the Chinese (and Singaporean) élites tend to be suspicious of democratic change, and to associate democracy with mob rule. According to Mark Leonard, “Many scholars complain that Chinese intellectuals have lost their traditional role as the social conscience of the nation—and been co-opted by the government.” In fact, advising the rulers is the traditional role of Chinese intellectuals. (Many of those with a social conscience are in exile, or in jail.) Still, advice can be critical, up to a point. The Chinese thinkers Leonard interviewed tend to be either neoliberals, who want more capitalism, or leftists, who want more socialism. Some are more pro-democratic than others; few share the naïve trust in their leaders that Khanna assumes is the natural habit of Asians.
Even less persuasive is Khanna’s belief in a united Asia, a kind of revival of Japan’s wartime Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, this time under a Chinese roof. He quotes a Malaysian diplomat (where does he find these people?) who claims that “creating a community is easy among the yellow and the brown—but not the white.” This claim isn’t supported by the rivalry between India and China. And it’s not supported, either, by the enormous difficulties that Southeast Asian nations have had in overcoming regional hostilities, and political differences, simply in order to institutionalize their shared economic interests in the trade bloc ASEAN.
To Robert Kagan, the increasingly warm relations between India and the United States, symbolized by a nuclear pact in 2006, are a sign that the democracies are beginning to line up together. India has been a democracy for some six decades, and its relations with the United States used to be much frostier than America’s relations with Pakistan under military dictators. But things changed after the Cold War. India no longer needs to play the United States off against the Soviet Union. Instead, it needs the United States as a counterweight against China.
India being a democracy, Khanna rather disapproves of it. China has order, he says, while India “achieves less because it is chaotic.” But Japan, which is hardly chaotic, has also edged closer to India, and shows little sign as yet of wanting to break away from America’s nuclear embrace. If anything, the Japanese are even more suspicious than the Indians are of a resurgent China. For the first time since the eighteen-seventies, Japan has a serious Asian rival, and politicians on both sides of the East China Sea are still picking at the wounds of the last great war. When it is in the interest of the Chinese government to stir up nationalism, usually for domestic reasons, memories of Japanese atrocities are recalled, and this invariably provokes nationalistic counterblasts from the Japanese.
However fast the economies of new powers are growing, then, forecasts of their world domination leave out a great deal. China has a demographic problem—too many boys—compounding its potentially catastrophic ecological problems. Russia’s wealth is dependent on the price of oil. India, with its messy democratic system, might well have staying power, but no one sees it as a threat to the United States. And, besides, the “Harmonious Society” of Asia could still be violently disrupted by conflicts over Taiwan, North Korea, Tibet, Kashmir, and various islands, some of them sitting on oil reserves claimed by Vietnam, India, China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. China is frightened that Japan might become a nuclear power, and makes every effort to keep it down, or at least out of the United Nations Security Council. Russia and China watch each other tensely across the Siberian border. North Korea periodically lobs missiles in the direction of Japan. And the South Koreans and the Southeast Asians are stuck between a democratic Japan they don’t trust and an autocratic China they must warily accommodate.
The one nation whose presence still guarantees a measure of stability in Asia is the very one whose influence commentators are so quick to write off: the United States of America. The Chinese may not like the fact that the United States has so many bases in Japan and South Korea, but they still prefer it to a nuclear-armed Japan. Cases of American G.I.s molesting local girls enrage the populations of South Korea and Japan, but they still feel safer with a U.S. military presence than without it. Aside from the disaster in Vietnam, the United States has been a reasonably good Asian cop. But how long can it continue to play that role? The longer this postwar arrangement goes on, the longer it will take the East Asian powers to manage their own security responsibly. The same can be said of the Europeans, as became painfully clear in the Balkan conflicts.
Kagan is right when he says that “the world’s democracies need to show solidarity for one another, and they need to support those trying to pry open a democratic space where it has been closing.” But this task would be made a lot easier if the United States were to depart from what Kagan believes to be its national destiny of “expansive, even aggressive, global policy,” and amplify its influence by fully engaging with international institutions, instead of seeing them as threats to its national sovereignty. Democracy would be a far more persuasive model than Chinese or Russian autocracy if some of its main proponents were less eager to believe that the open society comes out of the barrel of a gun. ♦
