The Expansionist West Meets The Immovable East

The US can be seen as the vanguard of the Western civilizational project that started in Western Europe, claiming Greco-Roman origins, and spread across the globe through conquest and settler colonization. Its core members consist of Western Europe, a Japan where a Western state/society configuration was imposed by force, and the white settler colonies of Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand; it is no coincidence that the latter four and the UK are the members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing arrangement.  The generally lighter-skinned elites of Central and Southern America also tend to identify with a European civilizational heritage, facilitating their comprador status as leaders of nations generally deferent to the West. Such deference is also seen in many of the post-colonial elites that have been socialized and schooled within Western institutions and social milieu. The shared Western beliefs, together with cultural, friendship and familial ties, greatly aided the US in the development and maintenance of its post-WW2 hegemonic position.

As detailed in the chapter covering the US, the nation became dominated by its national bourgeois and plantation white protestant elites with independence in 1776, and the resulting removal of British rule. During the following century, the US expanded across the continent through the ethnic cleansing of the Amerindian population, and the conquest and purchase of large swathes of territory, with the “closure of the frontier” in 1890. With the victory of the bourgeois North over the Southern plantation elite in the US Civil War in 1865, the US became dominated by a more purely bourgeois ruling class than the European nations where the bourgeoisie ruled in conjunction with aristocratic elements (e.g. the Junkers in Germany). Between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, much larger corporations developed due to the establishment of a truly national market facilitated by technologies such as the railway and the telegraph. These worked collaboratively with the functions of the still small US state apparatus, such as local militias and the legal system, to defeat challenges to capitalist class hegemony by labour unions and small farmers organizations. The capitalist elite developed and maintained its ability to act as “a class for itself” through such integrating structures as the Rockefeller foundation established in 1913 and the Council for Foreign Relations established in 1921; the latter being central to the conceptualization and implementation of the post-WW2 global Open-Door policy (Shoup & Minter 1977; Shoup 2015; Wertheim 2020). Cox states that “A world hegemony is thus in its beginnings an outward expansion of the internal (national) hegemony established by a dominant social class” (Cox 1983, p. 171) and sees Britain as the global hegemon from 1845-1875, a non-hegemonic period between 1875 and 1945, then a period of US hegemony.

With hegemony fully established at home, and no more territory within the current US borders to settle, the US was in a good position to exploit the weakness of the Spanish Empire with the 1898 Spanish-American War through which it gained the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam. Between 1898 and 1934, in what became known as the Banana Wars, the US would also repeatedly occupy parts of the Caribbean. During this period, the US developed a more efficient way of dominating other nations through the use of local comprador rulers and co-opted militaries in response to a rising nationalism that increased the cost of interventions; for example, in Nicaragua where the nationalist guerrilla forces fought the US marines to a stalemate. The multi-decadal period of nearly constant military interventions (including those in China against the Boxer Rebellion and in Russia in an attempt to defeat the Bolsheviks) puts the lie to any assertion that the US capitalist class was “isolationist”. Instead it was the general population that resisted the calls to war, with extensive subterfuge, propaganda, censorship and coercion required to man the military forces sent to fight in WW1; carried out by a President that had been elected with his promises not to enter that war. President Roosevelt was also re-elected for a third term in 1940 espousing an anti-war position but then oversaw actions that incrementally brought the country into the war (e.g. the oil embargo on Japan).

The two world wars greatly benefitted the US capitalist class and massively expanded the nation’s productive base, while its major global competitors committed fratricide. By 1945 Europe, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union were in ruins and had suffered huge population losses (e.g.  27 million in the Soviet Union, 20 million in China). This was the first unipolar moment for the US which it used to establish its hegemony across the parts of the world outside the cordoned-off Soviet bloc and China.

Hegemony at home was extended to hegemony within the West, with an “Atlantic ruling class, which continues to occupy the commanding heights of the global political economy” carrying out a strategy designed to “open up contender state/society complexes, dispossess the state classes, and replace them by a governing class submitting to liberal governance and ‘open for business’” (Van Der Pijl 2012, p. 504). The second unipolar moment arrived in the 1990s with the outright collapse of the Soviet bloc and the opening up of both China and India. The US elites saw the collapse of the Soviet-bloc not as the collapse of the preeminent security threat that would allow for a more peaceful world and a reassignment of resources away from the security state, but rather as the opportunity to fulfil a multi-century elite mission of US, and Western, global dominance and the opening of all nations to US, and Western, exploitation and profit making. Within this context, the expansion of NATO (and the EU) in the wake of the collapse of the very threat that NATO was supposedly constructed to address, becomes comprehensible. The unwillingness to include a Russia with any semblance of sovereignty within the Western alliance, together with the aggressive regime change operations within its bordering nations, also becomes understandable. Only after the Others of China, Russia (and Iran) have been subjugated can the US fulfil its role as the “New Jerusalem” and carry the Western civilizational “burden” of ruling the world as the “indispensable nation” and the global “policeman”. As shown with the US entry into World War 1 and more recent wars, and noted by Goering, the Reischmarschall of Nazi Germany, in an interview given at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946:

Naturally, the common people don’t want war, neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood, But the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. (Goering 1946)

With the capitalist class dominating the state, together with the media (both in the US and the West in general), consent can be manufactured for war. The infamous examples of the “Gulf of Tonkin” (1964) incident that was used to escalate the US military intervention in Vietnam), the “babies being thrown out of incubators” congressional testimony by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US (who did not reveal her real identity) used to create support for the Gulf War (1990-1991) and the “weapons of mass destruction” used for the same purposes with respect to the invasion of Iraq (2003), lend support to Goering’s words. Another example is the propaganda used to gain a UN resolution against Libya (2011), which was quickly escalated from a “limited intervention to protect civilians” to “an opportunist policy of regime change” (House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee 2016, p. 3). The widespread Western claims that the Libyan leader was targeting civilians and women was manufactured rather than supported by the facts on the ground:

the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence … The disparity between male and female casualties suggested that Gaddafi regime forces targeted male combatants in a civil war and did not indiscriminately attack civilians. (Ibid., p. 14)

The most advanced country for human development in Africa as judged by the UN, with a GDP per capita rivalling some European nations and with both a government budget surplus and a sizeable sovereign wealth fund, was turned into a failed state; a “humanitarian” intervention that greatly reduced the quality of life for the population of that country.

The result [of the intervention] was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa. (Ibid., p. 3)

The Libyan “intervention” was not carried out for the benefit of the Libyan people, nor the Iraq invasion for the benefit of the Iraqi people, nor the two-decade occupation of Afghanistan for the Afghan people, nor the current US occupation of parts of Syria for the Syrian people. They were instead carried out in an effort to maintain US, and Western, global dominance; whilst also enriching corporations of the Military Industrial Complex. In the case of Libya, the major obstacle to the expansion of Western influence in North Africa was removed. The dialectical nature of change is most evident in the US, with the extreme economic cleavages created by four decades of neoliberalism interconnecting with a history of racist Othering that has not been properly surfaced and addressed by economic, political and cultural elites. The “post-war miracle” years are far in the past, with the capitalist class rolling back the New Deal and returning the US to the levels of wealth and income inequality of the Gilded Age; overseen by a two political parties that differ little in economic policy and are both dependent on the capitalist elite for campaign funding and post-office career options. With only candidates acceptable to the capitalist class allowed to stand for office, US “democracy” can be uncomfortably compared to that of the Soviet Union where the Party would preselect the candidates before the façade of “elections” would occur. As Martin Luther King so eloquently stated:

History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture, but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals … few members of a race that have oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed. (King 1963)

The intensification of these fault lines during President Trump’s term and the COVID crisis, and the inability of even “progressive” elites to adequately conceptualize and address them, points to the possibility of an intensifying internal strife which may significantly affect foreign policy decision-making and the ability of elites to command societal resources when necessary. In such circumstances, the identification and scapegoating of threatening Others may serve both to distract and discipline the general populace.

The hegemonic elites within the differing state/society complexes of the West are significantly integrated, but they are still dominated by a national US elite. This integration was aided by the establishment of formal international organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), but also such bodies as the Ditchley Foundation in 1958 (the “spiritual home” of the US-UK relationship), the Atlantic Council in 1961 (with a mission of “shaping the global future together” that galvanizes US leadership in the world), the German Marshall Fund in 1972 (to promote elite cooperation between North America and Western Europe), and the Trilateral Commission in 1973 (to foster cooperation between North American, Western European and Japanese elites). The latter reflecting the recovery of the Western European and Japanese economies, whereby “the plutocracy that dominates the system is centered in the United States, but has powerful allied branches in Western Europe and Japan” (Shoup 2015, preface, para. 2). This plutocracy may be somewhat transnational, but it is still heavily grounded within the nation-state, with the US nation-state providing the prevalence of force to facilitate the protection and expansion of its hegemonic zone.

Such a position contrasts with those that see the existence of a truly transnational capitalist class, independent of national linkages, such as Robinson (2005, p. 11) “Globalization is not a ‘national’ project but a class project without a national strategy, or rather, with a strategy that seeks to utilize the existing political infrastructure of the nation-state system and simultaneously to craft TNS structures” (Robinson 2005, p. 11). Such a conceptualization is shown to be overly extreme by analyses that show the concentration of TNC ownership by US nationals (Starrs 2013), the dominance of global value chains by US-domiciled corporations (Phillips 2017), and the dominance of US citizens among the extremely wealthy (Credit Suisse 2019), together with the US dominance of NATO. Even in a hegemonic order, the policy making elite is specific to a given nation and will be reflective of that nation’s political, economic, and social past and present.

The usage of strategic culture allows for the group identity and belief systems of those that constitute the policy making elite of the state/society complex, pushing aside the rational and deterministic instrumentality assumed in much of mainstream IR and political-economy conceptualizations (e.g. rational choice theory). Chomsky makes the point well, specifically with reference to the intellectual elite, but his point can be extended to the rest of the elite given their shared group socialization processes and elite schooling:

my guess is that you will find that the intellectual elite is the most heavily indoctrinated sector, for good reasons. It’s their role as a secular priesthood to really believe the nonsense that they put forth … for the intellectual elite themselves, it’s crucial that they believe it because, after all, they are the guardians of the faith. Except for a very rare person who’s just an outright   liar, it’s hard to be a convincing exponent of the faith unless you’ve internalized it and come to believe it. (Chomsky 1987, p. 35)

The efficiency and effectiveness of the US policy elite in maintaining a given set of beliefs and cultural values over time, even when integrating “non-traditional” members is documented by Layne (2017). Chomsky also notes the seeming inability of US elite members to comprehend the points that he makes which contradict their indoctrination, when a more general audience does not seem to have “much difficulty” (Chomsky 1987, p. 35). The core of the US elite belief system is what used to be known as the White (protestant) Man’s Burden to spread Western-civilization from the “Lockean heartland” (Van Der Pijl 2012, p. 504) to the rest of the globe; more recently cast in more politically correct cultural terms such as “liberal capitalist democracy”, “human rights”, and “liberal internationalism”. With the US as the Shining City On A Hill, the freest and most just society in the world that is full of Horatio Alger-like upward mobility, and The Global Policeman that strives for power only so that it can act as the compassionate tutor to the less civilized. Within such a belief system those that do not accept such tutoring can be Othered as a dangerous force that must be removed or contained; whether it be Amerindians, “gooks”, “godless-communists”, “Moslem-terrorists” or “autocracies”; resurfacing the Terror Dream of the colonial era. The underlying racist and religious underpinnings may manifest themselves in such things as the conceptualization of a Democratic Peace Theory that is blind to the overthrow of non-white democracies (e.g. Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) by white democracies and the racial undertones of the reaction to the economic rise of first Japan and then China. This US and Western elite self-righteousness and conceptual blindness may create significant policy errors and create a greater level of international risk than would otherwise be the case:

Morgenthau’s warning against the tendency to take the interests of our own group and make them into the moral law of the universe has never been more timely in an age in which liberal states earnestly debate the degree to which they should tolerate the polities founded on another basis. (Thompson & Clinton 2006, p. xxiii)

It is only within such a belief system that China could be expected to “naturally” progress toward liberal capitalist democracy or otherwise fail (a good recent example being Kroenig 2020) and that Russia could be seen as an aggressor in the face of an expanding and encircling West. The threat of China to the US is not one of competing hegemony, but rather one of the degradation of US and Western hegemony, even within the Western nations themselves. The Chinese Party-State can be seen as hegemonic, and as a “class for itself”, within China but on the international stage it lacks the shared history, culture and values that the US enjoys with its Western counterparts and comprador allies. In addition, it is faced with historical enmities and competing civilizational projects within the Asian region, together with the Orientalist Othering of the West. A tributary system, rather than a hegemonic order, based upon non-interference and the acceptance of social, political and economic heterogeneity may much better fit China’s circumstances. At an ideological level China provides “the threat of a good example” (Chomsky 1993, p. 22) as a country that has raised itself from sub-Saharan levels of destitution to become a huge middle-income nation, using its own form of modernity that is antithetical to much of liberalism and the “development” prescriptions of the Western-dominated global institutions.

The Chinese state/society complex is dominated by a Party-State, with “a state class [that] to varying degrees confiscates its society from above, relying on state initiative to accelerate and sustain the pace of social change and develop the economic and military assets necessary to hold its own against the West” (Van Der Pijl 2012, p. 504). The “commanding heights” of the economy, such as the financial system and fossil fuel sector, are directly controlled by the Party-State, and significant control is maintained over the rest of society. Concepts such as an independent bourgeois class (Starrs 2017) or civil society lose much of their meaning with the extensive Party-State integration and cooption of such possible independent sectors. This Party-State has resisted the movement toward liberal democratic capitalism, and has certainly not allowed the “Atlantic ruling class … to open up [its state/society complex], dispossess the state classes, and replace them by a governing class submitting to liberal global governance and ‘open for business’” (Van Der Pijl 2012, p. 504). This is competition between two very different state/society complexes with China providing the greatest challenge to the West to date – significantly greater than that of the Soviet Union. For a Chinese high-technology corporation such as Huawei to better its Western rivals, or for the BRI to facilitate others to follow China’s developmental lead while accepting state/society diversity, is heretical to liberal internationalism and the (neo)LIO, and therefore a direct threat to US and Western hegemony – both at home and abroad.

BRI represents a profound challenge to U.S. influence throughout large parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and southern Europe. China’s geoeconomic strategy is not a challenge susceptible to defense, deterrence or containment. China is offering large-scale financing to dozens of countries, with few of the conditions on which Western institutions normally insist” (Dobbins, Shatz & Wyne 2018, p. 13).

The Chinese elite is effective in maintaining shared beliefs and cultural values, but has also shown a flexibility and openness to other world views and an acceptance of civilizational heterogeneity that contrasts with US and Western elites that tend to believe in the universal nature of liberal capitalism and its place as the highest form of civilization. The words of Xi Jinping in 2015 are instructive when compared to the arrogant assertions of Western elites:

our commitment to upholding the basic components and methodology of Marxist political economy does not imply a rejection of the economic theories of other countries … At the same time, however, we must cast a discerning eye on the economic theories of other countries, particularly those of the West, making sure that we separate the wheat from the chaff … economics … does not exist in a vacuum, and therefore cannot be separated from social and political issues … For Marxist political economy to remain vital, it must evolve with the times. Practice is the source of theory. (Xi 2015)

For the Chinese Party-state class the “multiplex world … a world without a hegemon, culturally and politically diverse yet economically interconnected” envisaged by Acharya (2018, p. 6) holds no ontological challenges, but it may fundamentally destabilize the Ontological Security of Western elites as they are forced to come to terms with a liberal capitalism that is only provincial rather than universal. For a non-Western nation such as China to approach the income per capita levels of the core Western nations, overcoming the middle-income trap, creates not just a geopolitical competitor but also a competitor in racial, cultural and ideational terms in the minds of the Western elites who have assumed their natural superiority for centuries.

For the neorealist, US-China competition is simply that of a rising power with respect to the currently dominant power, with the US elite responding “rationally” to that challenge. For the liberal internationalist, the conundrum becomes the lack of alignment with “Western values” as the Chinese economy has become integrated into the global economy and the growing hostility between such highly integrated economies. The nuances that arise from the use of the analytical tools of Gramsci’s historical materialism are lost and the more comprehensive nature of the challenge of China’s Party-State to the US Plutocracy-State and the Western elite grouping that the latter dominates, remains unobserved.

The usage of strategic culture allows for the impacts of the lived experiences of policy making elites. The CCP elite share the visceral personal childhood impacts of the Cultural Revolution and the teachings of a Chinese history replete with societal collapses and external domination coalescing into a belief in the strong Party-State as the guarantor of national unity and sovereignty. China’s Century of Humiliation, during which the Middle Kingdom was reduced to the status of a supplicant, also provides collective memories of societal mistreatment, suspicion of the West, and the rightness of China’s reestablishment as a great power or even the greatest power. The long history of an activist state as the protector of the Chinese people and its culture also provides a level of state legitimacy and an acceptance of widespread state intervention among the general populace that is inimical to Western liberal traditions. The traditions of Legalism and Confucianism, when aligned with Marxist ideology, not only provide for an effective and strong state, but also one that rules in a way that maintains its legitimacy and its Mandate of Heaven,

Bell (2015, p. 179) typifies the unique Chinese political structure as “democracy at the bottom, experimentation in the middle, and meritocracy at the top”, with the long service and slow climb required of the senior members providing for a high level of cohesion and a long-term (i.e. decadal) policy orientation. In such a structure, “a person with Barack Obama’s presidential professional experience would not even be the manager of a small county in China’s system” (Li, quoted in Bell 2015, p. 187). Of course, such a system is open to the personal favoritisms, cliques, and corruption of any such authoritarian bureaucracy – as has been evident with respect to the Party-State. Notwithstanding this, the bureaucracy has displayed a high degree of competence and raison d’etat (with the continued success of the Party seen as a crucial element of the raison d’etat) and has been seen to carry out policies to ameliorate such tendencies. The recent actions taken against Jack Ma and the Ant Group (Neate 2020; Zhong 2020) may be seen as designed to reign in possibly dangerous financial activities (both to the Chinese financial system and to individual borrowers) as well as rentier and monopolistic tendencies that could damage the legitimacy of the Party-State. As Hudson (2015) has noted, a highly innovative financial sector may be beneficial to the economic elites but not to the general populace. The actions taken against Jack Ma and the Ant Group also remind the economic elites that the Party-State is preeminent and that private sector firms operate under its oversight.

The ahistorical, Eurocentric and universalist shortcomings of neorealism with respect to a rising power such as China are evident in analyses such as Allison’s (2017), that rely upon the assumption that the small-scale Peloponnesian wars of more than two millennia ago are applicable to the modern world of superpowers and weapons of mass destruction, with the internal dynamics of each nation deemed to relative irrelevance. Furthermore, both classical realist and neorealist scholars may utilize simplistic readings of Thucydides, an author that may in fact be a highly unreliable narrator (Podoksik 2005). There is a great deal of disagreement among historians about who actually started the Peloponnesian wars; it could have been Athens, Sparta, Corinth or even a combination (Dickins 1911; Tannenbaum 1975; Kagan 2013), and therefore the main lesson to be learnt is the complexity of the real world, even the ancient one. In addition, as Bagby notes (1994, p. 133), “Thucydides thinks that an understanding of the political and cultural differences among city-states before and during the Peloponnesian War is crucial for understanding their behavior”; Sparta and Athens could easily be seen as greater ideological competitors than the Cold War US and Soviet Union. This is directly at odds with the ontology of neorealism, but compatible with Gramsci’s historical materialism. As noted in the chapter on China, learnings from the much larger conflicts that happened in that country during the same time period as the Peloponnesian War may be more applicable to the present.

With Putin acting as the skilled moderator between competing elite interests, with a sub-set that may be happy with comprador status, a hegemonic order and a dominant “class for itself” does not exist within Russia. Together with the historical enmities of many of its surrounding states, its Othering by the West, and the lack of the shared ideology of communism, it is unable to establish even a regional hegemony. In many respects, in contrast to the Cold War period, Russia does not offer a state/society complex that poses an ideological threat to liberal capitalism as currently practised in the US. The Russian state/society complex may be seen as a poorer and less developed version of that in the US; not a parallel that US elites would like to publicly emphasize or even internally accept, but the case for such a parallel can be made. An economically and politically dominant elite with extreme inequality in both wealth and income, electoral and media systems that serve to severely constrain acceptable political discourse, and with religion as a significant part of the national mythology and current political milieu; which country does this describe? The differences have only shrunk in the past two decades as the US has become increasingly authoritarian and power centralized within the Presidential office – the Imperial Presidency that Schlesinger (1973) warned about and was consolidated under Bush and Obama. Much more than in previous times, the creation of difference through propaganda is unlinked from actual social and economic realities in the case of Russia.

The Russian policy making elites, as well as the general populace, share the visceral personal impacts of chaos and collapse with their Chinese counterparts. In the Russian case from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos of the 1990s - during which Russia became a mere shadow of its previous glory and the West was seen to support a kleptocratic authoritarian state to further its own interests. The Western movement toward Russia’s borders and its extensive propagandist Othering of the nation can only have increased the suspicion of a West that refuses to deal with Russia as an equal. Combined with a history replete with Western interventions, a tendency toward stability, protection of sovereignty (for example in the tight control of foreign NGOs) and careful statecraft, can be seen as stemming from both the internal strategic culture and Russia’s geopolitical position. The lack of a cohesive elite also reinforces conservative tendencies as a careful balance must be maintained between competing interests.

In Russia, the individual Tsars, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and now Putin have not led to the establishment of the fully effective bureaucratic and administrative structures of either modern Western liberalism or the current Chinese Party-State. While the Mao-dominated China gave way to the institutional rebuilding of Deng, Jiang and Hu, the bureaucratic structures of the USSR were destroyed and replaced with a Russia dominated by individuals and cliques. In the US, regular elections, presidential term limits, political parties, and governmental structures limit the impact of any one individual. In China, the Party-State acts as a barrier to a Mao-like figure, as does the memory of Mao’s rule. In Russia, there are no such barriers, resulting in the greater importance of individuals - especially Putin. A central question for the future of Russia is the state of one man’s health and his ability to continue his rule through a chosen successor – as he himself was chosen by his predecessor and the oligarchs.

Bolstered by the rise in oil prices in the first decade of the new century, and his ability to mediate between and balance competing interests, Putin has been able to provide a relative stability and has been rewarded for this with legitimacy from the Russian citizenry. Putin has striven in recent years to institutionally and culturally embed the base of his power and his future legacy. To build a new nationalism, Putin has reached back to the Tsarist period and the founding myths of Russia. The tight alignment with the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates the Russian image of itself as the protector of Orthodox Christianity and conservative values. The “Great Patriotic War” has also been raised to the status of a founding myth, on par with the defeat of the Mongols, the expulsion of the foreign powers after the Time of Troubles, the Battle of Poltava, and the Battle of Borodino against Napolean’s Grand Armée (Walker 2018). There was much public appetite for the nationalistic myths upon which national pride could be rebuilt after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demotion of Russia in the international ranks, as shown by the growing demand for media that celebrated the pre-Soviet era (Norris 2012). As Walker (2018, p. 253) pointedly states, “Russia’s glorious past has become a national obsession, but a prosperous future still seems a long way off”. Such a yearning for past national greatness in the face of a much lesser present heavily parallels the mood of my native Britain which continues its shrinkage from the time when the “sun never set” on its Empire while its media continues to celebrate its past much more than its present. As Marx (1885) noted, the present is significantly path dependent upon the past, and that past can be used to legitimate the present:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new sense in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

Notwithstanding Putin’s efforts, Russia is still predominantly the kleptocratic and oligarchic nation that he inherited from his predecessor, with a significant liberal-western oriented constituency and a state/society complex that has not fully institutionalized his nationalist orientation, nor fully recovered from the economic devastation of the 1990s. Putin may be personally committed to the raison d’etat but there are domestic forces that may still yearn for a comprador rapprochement with the West and be able to place their personal interests above what is good for the nation. Ironically, the Western sanctions on Russia stemming from the Russo-Ukrainian conflict have aided Putin by making plain the derogatory attitude of the West to Russia, making the Russian oligarchs more dependent upon the Russian state, facilitating the closure of some liberal media and NGOs, and pushing many of the liberal-minded to leave the country. The “rally round the flag” effect has also increased popular support for Putin and his government, with Putin receiving approval ratings that Western politicians can only dream of.  In many ways, Putin’s position is stronger now than prior to the invasion of Ukraine.

Historical materialism allows for the inclusion and treatment of non-systemic, but system changing, variables such as the still ongoing process of global industrialization and the probable future transition of the global energy system to low carbon sources. The latter will have consequences far beyond those of simple technocratic changes, with highly divergent impacts between nations. The three nations covered in this work include both the possible greatest gainer (China) and one of the possible greatest losers (Russia) from such a transition. The relative positions of China and the US with respect to gains from such a transition, together with the differing balances of power within their state/society complexes, may provide China with geopolitical advantage. Within the US, the tension between fossil fuel interests and other elite groupings may intensify over time as the need for such a transition becomes more urgent.

The removal of the Soviet bloc removed a blockage to the dominance of the US capitalist class, and its lesser allies, allowing for a more aggressive geopolitical stance designed to subjugate all other nations; the more permissive international environment facilitating a full expression of the interests of the US elite within its foreign policy. After sensing victory in this drive for global dominance, the rejuvenation of Russia and the emergence of China now threaten a less permissive international environment of a multipolar world that will constrain US, and Western, expression of their capitalist class interests within their foreign policy; especially with a China that it is dominated by a Party-state class that has remained in place during China’s decades of rapid growth, rather than a liberal capitalist one. Over a period of hundreds of years, material capabilities, ideas and institutions have reinforced each other in the production of a Western common sense that sees liberal capitalist democracy as the only acceptable “modern” civilizational model, supported by a degree of inherent racial and religious arrogance – with the US as the epitome. The centrality of Western elite beliefs in the supremacy of “western civilization” was on display with the statements of Josep Borrell, the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy which likened Europe to a garden and most of the rest of the world to a jungle, entreating his European audience “to go to the jungle” to save the European garden from being destroyed by it (quoted in Bishara 2022). Another is the statement by the US Ambassador to China that the latter must accept US leadership in Asia; responded to with ridicule by the official CCP newspaper (Global Times 2023).

A parallel can be drawn between the current position of the West, one of civilizational arrogance and ideological dogmatism, and that of China prior to its Century of Humiliation. A China that considered itself as the peak of civilization, with a state/society complex operating with the ideational and institutional arrangements established during the Tang dynasty a millennium before, was unable conceptualize the West as a threat, and to reinvigorate itself when that threat was realized. The Century of Humiliation was one of a reconceptualization of Chinese society, a much slower one than the successful Japanese example of the Meiji Restoration, completed by Mao and then Deng. A reconceptualization that benefitted from the readiness to take lessons from many philosophical traditions, both from within and without China, while remaining generally faithful to the service of the welfare of the Chinese people (the Mandate of Heaven now transformed into a Performance Legitimacy). After the path of radical economic and political liberalization was rejected at the end of the 1980s, the pre-eminence of the Party-state was reinforced and a hybrid Chinese path to development and modernity – rejecting the Western liberal path – became the new common sense. A path that resulted in the growth miracle of the following three decades, one that greatly surpassed that experienced by the US during its period of rapid growth in the nineteenth century. In this context, the actions of Xi should not be surprising as they represent a redirection back toward the centrality of a less corrupt and more benevolent Party-state after the unequal and corrupting rapid growth of the first decade of this century. The actions to restrict rentier financial activities (e.g. subprime lending) and tighten controls and regulations over the creation of credit, together with the commodification of the social sphere (a primitive accumulation of the social commons and human psychological preferences) inherent in the business models of social media companies, serve to both protect the Chinese citizenry against exploitation and remove threats to the stability of the Chinese development model and the authority of the Party-state; quite the opposite of the position taken by the US state. The continued high competence and responsiveness of this Party-state is evidenced by its responses to domestic pollution concerns, the challenge of the COVID pandemic, the extensive infrastructural, economic and military upgrading of the past decade, and the creation of world-beating technological organizations such as Huawei.

The West finds itself unable to conceptualize China as a civilizational equal that it can learn significant lessons from; lessons that may threaten both the current wealth and position of the capitalist class and challenge the basic self-serving ontology through which it views the world. The co-creational relationship between material capabilities, ideas and institutions is evident; the prospect for significant ideational change is constrained by material capabilities and institutions, and any such change will result in concomitant changes in those other forces. In many ways the West can be seen as much a prisoner of its own liberal hegemonic culture as the Ming and Qing dynasties were by the hegemonic culture honed during the Han dynasty. The work of de Graaff and van Apeldoorn, as well as that of Layne, point to the workings of these inertial constraints within the US strategic culture. The possibilities for a rethinking of US foreign policy are constrained both by the material and institutional realities within which the strategic culture operates (e.g. sources of funding, future career paths), and the selection and socialization processes that work effectively to discipline and/or winnow out non-compliant individuals. The inability to conceive of an alternative to liberal capitalism or to accept a more pluralistic world order is evidenced by the repeated refrain to “Western values” in the criticism of China, with the civilizational Other still being expected to comply to Western civilizational ideals and the rules of a (neo)LIO that the West both constructed and places itself in the position of judge and jury over such compliance. At the same time, Western elites repeatedly point to the “inevitable” collapse of China, and its presumed inability to advance beyond the middle-income trap, due to its illiberalism. Tooze (2021) reflects this level of civilizational arrogance and rejection of unfortunate facts within the US military establishment when he states:

Now, the ultimate goal of the Pentagon planners is to loosen that link between economic performance and military force. They aim to secure US military dominance even as the centrifugal effect of global economic growth reduces America’s relative weight in the world economy. Ultra-advanced technology, not GDP, will be the decisive factor. As Washington torques the sinews of power, the entire world will feel the effect.

No acknowledgement of the development of advanced military technologies by Russia and China (e.g. hypersonic surface to surface and air to surface missiles), the repeated failure of so many US high technology military projects – from the “Star Wars program” of the Reagan era to the current F35, and the repeated US losses against China in war games situated in the South China Sea (Copp 2021). The co-creational dynamics of material capabilities, ideas and institutions drive the linkages between US economic, financial and military dominance in the creation of the institutions of the LIO in the immediate post-WW2 period and the (neo)LIO in the post-Soviet period. As relative material capabilities of liberal and illiberal powers change in the latter’s favour it should be expected that the institutions of the world order will also change, with the (neo)LIO being less resistant than some of the more sanguine US academics (Deudney & Ikenberry 2018; Ikenberry 2018) assert to being transformed into a multipolar order with institutions reflecting compromises between heterogeneous worldviews – including illiberal ones. The belief that “Both projects - the Westphalian and liberal internationalist—were founded on ideas that were implicitly universal in their normative and legal-political scope” (Ikenberry 2018, p. 24) is bereft of historical materialist insight while exhibiting the blinkers of Eurocentrism. The assertion that “The liberal order and its democracies will prevail because the stately ships of illiberalism readily run aground in turbulent times, while the resilient raft of liberalism lumbers along” (Deudney & Ikenberry 2018, p. 24) requires significant self-reflection with respect to the differing experiences of China and the West in the post Global Financial Crisis world (with the current COVID crisis offering another chance for such self-reflection).

An unsettling parallel for US elites is that of the Soviet Union and the US during the 1980s, with a Russia handicapped by a slow growing economy and an increasingly corrupted and dysfunctional Party-state bureaucracy that was not able to keep pace with the US and the West. In the present, the US now sits in the slowly growing, corrupted and dysfunctional role, with a faster growing China seeming to possess a much more competent and focused elite class, and the US directing a much greater share of GDP toward military and security activities, together with rentier profits, while its domestic infrastructure, institutions, the social welfare of the majority, and the legitimacy of the capitalist elite and state, decay. As Tooze (2021) notes “Defining militarised spending more generally to include Homeland Security, the share [of US state discretionary spending] rises to two thirds or more”. The use of approximately US$8 trillion of resources for US military aggression, with little to show for it except within the pockets of corporate executives and shareholders, is a prime example of the unlinking of US state policy from basic competence and the raison d’état. The inability of the strategic culture to address the scale of this failure and to accept the need for a fundamental process of renewal reflects its locked in nature. In such a context the reactions to the retreat from Afghanistan, after twenty years of expensive failure, become comprehensible; a rejection of the inconvenient facts and shooting of the messenger required to forestall the acceptance of the need for a fundamental rethink of US foreign policy and the nature of its state/society complex.

The internal dynamics and historical trajectory of Russia place it as a weak secondary power requiring an alliance with a major power. The material, institutional and ideational history does not provide the basis for the kind of developmental state that China possesses. For a few decades, mostly under Stalin, successful industrialization was carried out, but the state was unable to move from an extensive mode of development into an intensive one. In the decades following Stalin the state ossified and became increasingly corrupted, which then became the basis of the corrupted and rentier oligarchic capitalist elite created during the 1990s. Although early in this century the balance between the state and the extractive oligarchs was rebalanced through actions taken against specific individuals (e.g. Khodorkovsky and Gusinsky), the vast majority remain and still represent a significant power base; reflected in the significantly neoliberal orientation of state policies. Putin has brought some stability and state oversight, greatly aided by the increase in oil prices in the new century, but is greatly restricted in his ability to carry out the required transformation required for Russia’s development beyond the status of a resource exporter with a relatively advanced military industrial sector. Attempts to gain the support of the West in such a transformation were rebuffed, and now Russia is heavily dependent upon its alliance with China; an alliance where it has come to accept its secondary role. Given the inability to endogenously upgrade its economy, Russia may be increasingly faced with the role of Mexico with respect the US, that of a resource exporter and location of Chinese-owned production sites. With Chinese GDP per capita at market exchange rates close to surpassing that of Russia, and growing at a much faster rate, this may become a distinct possibility during the current decade; especially if the Chinese currency appreciates and the transition to low carbon energy systems accelerates. As the Chinese equal and overtake average Russian incomes on a PPP basis over the next ten years, and Chinese technological achievements outstrip those of Russia, the legitimacy of the Russian state and elite may become more challenged while at the same time a window for more fundamental change may be opened. The management of the changing relationship between the two powers will be a crucial one for China, with the maintenance of Russian national prestige and state legitimacy a significant determinant.

The Chinese state/society complex has been “winning” for over four decades, aided in its early days by a highly supportive West that assumed that it would inevitably become more liberal and open to Western leadership and more recently by the West’s error in pushing Russia (and also Iran, Pakistan and most recently Afghanistan) toward an increasingly close alliance with China. The general geopolitical strategy of “winning without fighting” (Boyd & Ufimsteva 2021), backed up with a strong defensive military position, is highly effective for a development state with high levels of domestic legitimacy and capable of driving still fast economic growth and industrial upgrading. There is no need for any fundamental change in this strategy unless triggered by a militarily aggressive US, especially with a foreign policy and economic stance that has helped keep ASEAN out of any anti-China alliance. In contrast, the US is challenged with the need for a significant ideational, institutional and material renewal that will require a rebalancing of internal power relationships and quite possibly income and wealth distribution; together with a significant adjustment in its attitude toward the sovereignty of other nations. Without such a renewal, the US may face an accelerating decline in position with respect to China as it continues to fight using the assumptions of its “unipolar moment” and the first Cold War, in the face of an opponent with very different strengths, strategies and tactics and a significantly changed world system. Russia faces the same challenges, although allied with China, in striving to not become increasingly a natural resource supplier and provider of cheap production facilities – a Mexicanization.

For all three nations, the continued economic growth that supports relative economic, political and military power is an imperative. To not grow is to fall behind and weaken relative to the other great powers. The US, and Western in general, elites are unable to accept their demotion from the status of hegemon to that of major powers within a multipolar world; an inability reinforced by a hegemonic culture that celebrates the superiority of Western civilization over all others and assumes the need for Western global leadership. The Chinese Party-state elites understand that the nation must overcome the middle-income trap and become strong enough that it can resist Western resistance and help build a multipolar world. The Russian elite understands that their only chance of remaining independent is utilize its fossil fuel assets to the greatest and to increasingly align with China (and now also Iran) in the face of Western attempts to subjugate it. As we seem to be seeing with the Ukrainian conflict (in reality a proxy war between the West and Russia), and the escalation of tensions with respect to Taiwan, the dynamics of great power competition are increasingly evident and completely unsupportive of the deep levels of international cooperation required for a timely energy transition.