Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
The United States needs to redefine its role in world affairs, what does that mean and what will it take?
The liberal rules-based international order it built and sustained in the years after the Second World War is disintegrating at an accelerating pace.
After a period of comity following the end of the Cold War, great-power competition has returned with a vengeance, pitting the United States against two major revisionist powers, China and Russia, meanwhile, smaller powers cozy up to one or multiple members of this unfriendly trio.
The Trump administration stressed the return of great-power competition in its National Security Strategy, and the Biden administration only amplified that view on its own. In these administrations’ telling, America’s rivals are disputing the foundations of the liberal order, including the democratic values that inspire it and the U.S. power that undergirds it.
As the United States’ margin of superiority over other powers thins, new, mostly illiberal centers of global power such as China, arguably India, and possibly Russia, gain authority and influence. More generally, world power and dynamism are flowing away from the Euro-Atlantic community, the core of the liberal order. Although the United States resists the idea, the world is moving toward illiberal, if not necessarily anti-liberal, multipolarity.
Avoiding Multipolarity: The Grand American Tradition
Although the United States has confronted a multipolar world before, it has rarely engaged actively as a pole of power. To be sure, from the moment it gained independence to the end of the nineteenth century, it exploited European rivalries to advance its interests as it spread across a continent. However, she made a determined effort to avoid entanglement in European affairs, as Washington and Jefferson had counseled, while stoutly defending its neutrality, that is, its refusal to engage in multipolar competition.
As her geopolitical ambitions expanded overseas beginning around the twentieth century, the United States was challenged to devise a way to engage a multipolar, balance-of-power world that was consistent with its profound belief in its exceptionalism as a uniquely moral force in world affairs.
Americans rejected Theodore Roosevelt’s enthusiastic practice of realpolitik and they felt uneasy with Woodrow Wilson’s effort at the end of the First World War to transcend balance-of-power politics with a world system grounded in law and collective action against aggressive states.
That sustained U.S. global engagement until the Cold War ended in a U.S. triumph and gave birth to a unipolar world. That arrangement allowed the United States to continue to combine moral purpose with leadership, as it sought to spread the benefits of liberal democracy across the globe and consolidate the foundations of a liberal, rules-based order that would sustain American primacy well into the future.
How Not to Engage the Multipolar World: Retrenchers and Restorers
Today, the unipolar world is no longer and new centers of power are emerging. The question that confronts the United States is how to react to the nascent multipolarity. The debate has been dominated by two schools of thought: the retrenchers and the restorers.
The retrenchers seek to limit U.S. engagement, harkening back to U.S. foreign policy of the pre-Second World War era; the restorers seek to fashion a bipolar framework as a basis for engagement, replicating the approach since that war. Neither is aimed at positioning the United States for active engagement in a genuinely multipolar world.
For that reason, neither school is adequate for American purposes. Retrenchers are right in the belief that the United States is a fundamentally secure country because of its geopolitical location and power potential. However, the United States cannot afford to remain aloof from global developments.
In today’s interconnected world beset by great-power competition, regional balances need constant tending. The United States need not be present everywhere abroad; it can and should set priorities. But it will still need to be an active presence in many places abroad, particularly on the periphery of the vast Eurasian supercontinent: Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, and the Arctic.
Restorers, by contrast, are firm in the belief that the United States needs to be an active presence abroad. But they want the United States to be engaged across the globe in the promotion and defense of liberal democratic values, not simply in regions vital to America’s security. In this spirit, they seek to reduce the emerging multipolarity to a bipolar world, to a struggle between democracy and autocracy.
The current effort by many restorers to forge an axis of upheaval out of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea is a clear manifestation of this tendency, even if it overlooks the critical tensions among those countries and the clear preference of each to deal with the others bilaterally and not as part of a broader coalition. The rest of the world, however, rejects the bipolar framing, beginning with U.S. allies in Europe and East Asia. In short, despite the restorers’ preference, the rest of the world is stubbornly determined to foster multipolarity.
Shaping a Multipolar Order
Rather than seeking to evade the challenges of multipolarity or create a bipolar world, the United States should embrace the emerging multipolar order and seek to shape it in ways that advance American interests. American leadership would be manifested not in policing the world but rather in the careful, deliberate construction of regional balances of power that combine to create a global balance that promotes U.S. interests and values across the globe.
The more immediate task, however, is to consolidate the pillars of a multipolar order. Today, there are four potential great powers in addition to the United States: China, India, Russia, and Europe. Each one poses unique challenges to the United States.
The task for the United States is to craft approaches to the peculiarities of each power that cohere in an overall approach to world affairs. In brief, China will have to be constrained as a great power; India, nurtured as one; Russia, preserved as one; and Europe, shaped into one.
China
As the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy argues, China is the only country, “with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” President Xi Jinping promotes the Chinese Dream, which foresees his country becoming the world’s dominant power by 2049, the centennial of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
To retain its margin of superiority, the United States will have to constrain Chinese geopolitical ambitions and national power, especially in the technology sector.
In this light, a core element of any China policy is domestic revitalization. The United States needs to gain control of its spiraling debt problem, raise stagnating educational and health standards, bolster its innovation ecosystem, and overcome acute political polarization to steel itself for the sharp competition ahead with China.
India
India’s capabilities have long fallen far short of its global ambitions. Prime Minister Narendra Modi isdetermined to change that. He has laid a path for his country to play a greater role on the world stage, starting with the Indian Ocean region.
Continuing American support should help India enhance its role as a global player. One particularly sensitive area will be India’s defense-industrial sector. The United States is right in the desire to reduce India’s relianceon Russian military equipment, but the goal should not be simply to replace over time Russian kit with Western production, rather, the United States should help India develop, expand, and modernize its indigenous defense-industrial sector.
Russia
There is no doubt that Russia wants to be a great power, and being respected by other great powers as such is a core element of Russia’s national identity.
Today, the challenge for Russia is retaining its strategic autonomy, especially given its ever-closer embrace of China, a consequence of Western sanctions and Russia’s rejection of the West. For all the talk of an equal partnership, the relationship is profoundly asymmetric. China’s economy is seventeen times the size of Russia’s, depending on how GDP is calculated, and the gap is only growing in China’s favor.
The United States will not be able to rupture the current China-Russia strategic alignment—there are compelling strategic reasons for closer relations, but the United States could attenuate them. Easing sanctions so that Russian and Western firms can cooperate in such places as Central Asia and the Arctic would help Russia counter growing Chinese influence in both regions.
Carefully restoring Europe’s energy relations with Russia to avoid an over-reliance on Russia would be another. The near-term goal is not to split Russia from China but to ensure that any deals Russia cuts with China, diplomatic or commercial, are not so heavily tilted in China’s favor as they are now.
Europe
Europe will present the greatest challenge.
It has all the economic and technological capabilities to be a great power, but it lacks the political will and cohesion. Since the Cold War, European countries have allowed their defense capabilities to atrophy, using the peace dividend to expand and deepen socio-economic well-being, and relying on the United States for security. Even in the face of the current acute Russian threat, major European countries are reluctant to increase defense spending to the necessary levels.
A change in the U.S. mindset will be needed to encourage Europe to assume the responsibilities of a great power. Washington needs to work with its allies to build a capable European pillar, one that has the hard power needed to deal with most security contingencies in its immediate neighborhood.
Redefining American Leadership
Success in a multipolar order will require Washington to rethink its conduct.
To start, it will have to reconcile itself to the reality that great powers by definition enjoy strategic autonomy. Even ones that share U.S. values may, at times, pursue interests that run contrary to the United States.
Washington will also have to acknowledge the limits of its power. Because of real-world limits, the United States will have to focus more sharply on a narrower set of priorities than in the past if it is to defend and advance its vital interests.
In the emerging multipolar world, the United States will no longer have the margin of superiority over other great powers necessary to bend other countries to its own will. Rather, leadership will come in the form of melding varying and often competing interests into a framework that favors U.S. interests, that is, in manipulating multipolarity more adroitly and confidently than other great powers.
The United States could, for instance, demonstrate leadership in rallying coalitions, which would include at least some of the other great powers to deal with urgent global issues.
There is space for moral leadership, especially for the great power that stands first among equals on the world stage. That is the role the United States should aspire to, in part because that is the only way it can retain its sense of exceptionalism and reconcile it with the permanent engagement it needs to defend its interests in an interconnected multipolar world it cannot dominate.
