This is the next chapter in my book, detailing the historical background to the current position and dynamics of the global order. The next one will take a more theoretical bent, covering the advantage of a Gramscian view of the World Order. That will be followed by analytical chapters on China, the US and Russia. The previous chapters can be found in previous posts.
The overwhelming power and transformative orientation of the United States during the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union was captured well by Zakaria “U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire” (Zakari 2019), Mearsheimer “My basic argument is that the United States was so powerful in the aftermath of the Cold War that it could adopt a profoundly liberal foreign policy, commonly referred to as ‘liberal hegemony’ … the United States has sought to remake the world in its own image” (Mearsheimer 2018, preface para. 1) and Huntington “The very phrase ‘the world community’ has become the euphemistic collective noun … to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western powers” (Huntington 1993, p. 39).
The process of globalization, which intensified from the 1980s onwards, can be seen as a consciously shaped process that increased the power of the US state/society complex (and to a lesser extent that of other Western ones with respect to non-Western ones) with respect to other nations. The US state’s domination of international bodies such as the IMF and World Bank, together with the liberalization of trade and capital flows, and the privatization of state assets, allowed the US state and US transnational capital to more directly affect the internal structures and processes of other states. Starrs (2013) noted the change in the way in which US power was projected and maintained. “As a consequence of sustained acquisitions by American firms in key markets around the world over the past couple decades, perhaps it is not surprising that by 2012 American firms combined own 46% of all publicly listed shares of the top 500 corporations in the world” (Ibid., p. 824). US capital, allied with the US state, had increased its global dominance “beginning with US-led globalization in the 1960s and US led liberalization in the 1980s, coupled with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the great opening and rise of China, among others, by the twenty-first century American structural power straddles the globe like never before” (Ibid., p. 828). This was reinforced by the centralization of global corporate command and control functions within the leading “global cities” (Taylor 2013) that predominantly reside within the US and other Western nations; controlling global supply chains that tend to concentrate profits at the corporate centre (Phillips 2017). Taylor noted that state sovereignty was a critical determinant of whether or not a nation would be able to produce global cities, with all their economic and political benefits, as against simply cities of slums and low cost manufacturing. He identified China as one of the few non-Western nations that maintained sovereignty, and therefore has been able to develop leading global cities such as Shanghai.
The predominant Western view in the last decade of the twentieth century was that as nations interacted with the liberal West they would be integrated into the US-led liberal hegemony. As Europe had become in the post-WW2 era, “European capitalists formed ties with American capitalists both within Europe and within the US, which actually reinforced the material foundation of American imperial hegemony. European capitalists no longer constituted ‘national bourgeoises’ inclined toward anti-American sentiments … by the early 1970s, [they] were becoming ‘Canadianized’” (Gindin & Panitch 2012, p. 115). The whole world would inevitably embrace liberalism, as captured by the concept of The End of History (Fukuyama 1992) or the view that the world was “Flat” (Friedman 2005); all nations would naturally converge, or would be “helped” to converge, toward a liberal capitalist state. Ideological conflict would be made irrelevant through a truly global liberal international order (LIO) overseen and safeguarded by the “enlightened” and “benevolent” leadership of the “indispensable nation” of the US acting as the “global policeman”. “Looking at the world at the end of the twentieth century, one could be excused for thinking that history was moving in a progressive and liberal internationalist direction” (Ikenberry 2018, p. 7). Ikenberry captures the liberal internationalist belief in the universalism and inevitable global triumph of liberalism when he asserts:
This is not a story about the rise and spread of Western liberalism. It is a story of modernity and the global search for universal principles of politics and economics. No region or people own this story. It is a story that is written on a world scale – and it is one of breakthroughs, crises, triumphs and transformations. The liberal international order is in crisis. But after liberalism there will be more, well, liberalism. (Ikenberry 2010, p. 521)
By replacing the words “liberalism” with “Christianity”, “politics and economics” with “religion”, and “liberal” with “Christian” the parallels with the Western Christian civilizing burden of a previous times are apparent. The world would become civilized and enlightened through the adoption of US capitalist democracy. A dissident alternative view was provided by Huntington (1993), who saw a global system rent by a “Clash of Civilizations” along cultural lines. In both cases major nation-state power rivalry was not seen as a significant part of the security agenda, although Huntington did quote Lucian Pye in seeing China as “a civilization pretending to be a state” (Ibid., p. 24). The events of 9/11 and the resulting “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) provided some support to Huntington’s thesis, while significantly re-orienting security concerns toward non-state actors in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The LIO acts as a convenient myth behind which US dominance hides, as Mearsheimer notes, between WW2 and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc the US headed a “Cold War order” that was “neither liberal nor international” (Mearsheimer 2019, p. 8). The construction of this Cold War order was the result of the overwhelming economic and military power of the US post-WW2; the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan had been defeated, devastated and occupied, the rest of Europe, Russia and China suffered overwhelming economic and social losses, and the United Kingdom was financially ruined (Barnett 1986); “America’s first unipolar moment” (Layne 2017, p. 261). To refer to it as a “liberal international order” is both mistaken and Eurocentric given its composition. It had liberal features, but the logic was predominantly one of realism by the US state/society complex, “quarantining” those states that it could not dominate (the USSR, China until the 1970s, Cuba etc.), while maintaining a hierarchical hegemony over those that it could. At the core of this hierarchy was a “West” consisting of Western Europe, and the white settler nations that shared a cultural and ideological history of Western colonial supremacy and liberal ideological constructs such as capitalist democracy (in differing forms, such as the German ordoliberalism [Biebricher & Vogelmann 2017] and the French dirigisme [Schmidt 1996]); “the liberal order is a club of the West” (Acharya 2018, p. 3).
Layne (1998) identified a security/interdependence nexus at the base of past-WW2 US policies. The imposition of liberal democratic structures in West Germany, its integration within the US-dominated North American Treaty Organization and the European Coal and Steel Community, the major deployment of US troops to the country, and a US-led reconstruction, remade the nation as a non-threatening member of a peaceful Western Europe. Within such an environment, economic interdependence could flourish. Japan was placed in the same position, with the occupying force driving through extensive land redistribution and liberal democratic structures, an imposed constitution that renounced the right to war, a “Red Scare” to crush socialist elements, and a security alliance with the US; “Japan was forced to adopt (and then adapt to) political and economic institutions that were literally imposed on them from abroad” (Steinmo 2010, p. 89). After the end of the occupation the CIA “spent millions of dollars to support the conservative party that dominated Japan's politics for a generation” (Weiner 1994). The two major Axis powers were internally reconstructed, and integrated within security and economic alliances, that made them safe for democratic capitalism and extensive economic interdependence. The lesser member of Italy was also restructured, and internally manipulated well into the post-war years; with interventions by the CIA into Italian politics to make sure that the populace voted the “right” way. In Greece, the left-wing WW2 resistance movement was militarily defeated, and a right-wing regime installed, while in France the left wing was undermined to facilitate a bourgeois friendly government coalition (Blum 2004, 2013). The resulting order was “rules-based inasmuch as it is solidified in liberal global institutions established by and centered on US power, but also crucially underpinned by a preponderant military with a global reach” (de Graaff & Van Apeldoorn 2018, p. 113).
Overall, a peaceful liberal core was constructed whereby “the plutocracy that dominates the system is centered in the United States, but has powerful allied branches in Western Europe and Japan especially” (Shoup 2015, preface, para. 2). This structure facilitated the post-WW2 economic “miracle” that came to a halt in the 1970s, a hegemonic order that provided extensive benefits to its core nations and their populations through an enforced mixture of US-provided security, liberal democracy and economic integration. It also fully supported the Open-Door policies that facilitated the international growth of the globally dominant US international corporations. This “security/interdependence nexus” (Layne 1997, p. 86) required a strategy of preponderance. The “creation and maintenance of a U.S.-led world order based on preeminent U.S. political, military, and economic power, and on American values; maximization of U.S. control over the international system by preventing the emergence of rival great powers in Europe and East Asia; and maintenance of economic interdependence as a vital U.S. security interest” (Ibid., p.88); the US as the sovereign of its world order. This was based upon “a historically rooted belief that to be secure, the United States must extend abroad both its power and its political and economic institutions and values” (Ibid.). This concept of preponderance integrates the Offensive Realist view of the need for a maximization of relative power and the Defensive Realist view that “The spread of democracy, economic interdependence, and the development of international institutions can help accomplish” (Ibid., p. 93) security; the latter being somewhat consistent with liberal internationalism.
The vast majority of humanity existed outside this bounded sphere, with many of the non-Soviet bloc nations existing within economic and political “lesser than” spheres of influence dominated by the sovereign or one of the senior members – such as Central and Southern America (the US) and the West African CFA franc nations (France) – that were maintained through economic, political, cultural and if necessary military, power. In many cases formal colonialism was replaced with the economically more efficient, and politically more expedient, neocolonialism. As Yates states with respect to the French dominated Gabon:
Gabon was an African country, geographically shaped by the French, colonized by the French, forested by the French, led by a francophone assimilated elite who spoke French, read French writing, received French education, practiced French law, worked for French businesses, and who adopted a French system of government that was additionally dominated by France through a system called ‘cooperation’ (a term coined by the French in a series of military, economic, and diplomatic accords). (Yates 2012, p. 28).
Others became proxy battlegrounds between the two competing blocs, such as the Koreas, Vietnam, the Middle East, Somalia and Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Cuba. “The order often operated more through coercion than consent. It was hardly ‘orderly’ for the Third World, where local conflicts were magnified by capricious great power intervention, including the United States and its Western allies” (Acharya 2018, p. 4).
With the breakdown of the post-WW2 US-dominated order in the 1960s, as the Western nations started to “catch up” with the US (both creating greater competition and reducing opportunities for profitable investments), the US state funded both the Great Society and the Vietnam War, and the US became a net oil importer, a new mode of global domination was required. Through a number of tactical steps and extensive elite consensus building, neoliberalism came to replace the post-WW2 embedded liberalism class compromise of the New Deal. Neoliberalism differed from classic liberal theory (as against the actual reality of pre-WW2 “liberal” capitalism [Polanyi 2001]), and the post-WW2 embedded liberalism (Ruggie 1982), through the explicit role of the state in engineering markets (in contrast to laissez faire) and the extensive state privatization, removal of state social services, and deregulation (in contrast to embedded liberalism) respectively.
On the international stage, neoliberalism was first implemented under the direction of the Milton Friedman led “Chicago School” by the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship of 1973-1990 (brought into power by a US-supported military coup) and then by the US-supported Argentinian military dictatorship of 1976-1983 (Gandin 2006; Undurraga 2015); the latter only fully taking “root a decade later with President Menem’s (1989-1998) implementation of the ‘convertibility plan’. During the 1990s” (Ibid., p. 11). In the late 1970s and early 1980s it became established in both the US and UK (Harvey 2005; Mitchell & Fazi 2017). With respect to the former, the New York fiscal crisis of the mid 1970s served as somewhat of a “dry run” for the national imposition of neoliberal policies and the reassertion of elite interests (Phillips-Fein 2017). In 1983 the French government of Francois Mitterand “faced with a choice between abandoning major elements of its dirigiste policies or the European Community, decided in favour of the latter and, therefore, of liberalism” (Schmidt 1996, p. 378). It turned away from its attempts to “revive and extend the post-war dirigiste model” (Mitchell & Fazi 2017, p. 78) and embraced a more neoliberal and austerity-focused orientation “in what became known as the tournant de la riguer (‘turn to austerity’)” (Ibid., p. 80) and later dismantled “the core institutions of the post-war dirigiste model” (Ibid., p. 81).
Aided by the reinvention of global economic governance organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) along the neoliberal lines of the “Washington consensus” (Kentikelents & Babb 2019), together with the 1980s Third-World debt crisis (created by the combination of high oil prices and greatly increased US interest rates due to the “Volcker shock”), peripheral nations could also be forcibly “structurally adjusted” along neoliberal lines. “From the 1970s onwards, a similar therapy [to that implemented in Chile] was imposed – through financial blackmail, coercion, violence and even outright military intervention – on several countries, from Latin America to Asia to Eastern Europe to the Middle East” (Mitchell & Fazi, p. 102). With respect to Brazil “an alliance of agro-mineral and finance capital, involving both foreign and local capitalists” supported the election of President Cardoso in 1994, which “led to a decisive break with the national statist policies of the previous 60 years” (Petras 2013, p. 471); a process started by Collor, the first elected President after the end of the military dictatorship. This neoliberal regime was “sustained and deepened by the Lula regime” of 2003 to 2010 (Ibid., p. 472).
Such direct intervention into national economic and social structures by global governance organizations, together with Western powers and TNCs, represented a significant reduction in sovereignty for the peripheral nations. A new neoliberal order was being imposed upon the Western bloc and its areas of influence. The illegal guerrilla “contra” war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, and the invasion of Panama in 1989 also demonstrated that the US was the sovereign, unconstrained by the rules or norms of the order that it led (Karabell 1999). A position underlined by its response to a 1986 International Court of Justice ruling against it with respect to its aggression toward Nicaragua; it refused to recognize the court’s jurisdiction and used its UN Security Council veto to reject a resolution calling for full compliance to the court’s ruling (Gandin 2006, p. 118; Highet 1987).
It was in this context that the West received the dividends of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and Chinese market liberalization. With no offsetting international grouping, the Western powers seemed to be free to impose a true (neo)LIO, “The sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union inflated America’s ambition for its role in the world, as reflected in Washington’s strenuous efforts in the post-Cold War era to create a unipolar world and expand the liberal hegemonic order to the rest of the globe” (Wu 2018, p. 1000). An ambition reflected in the side-stepping of the United Nations to carry out an illegal (under international law) invasion of Iraq, followed by the occupying forces’ illegal imposition of a fundamental neoliberal restructuring of the Iraqi constitution, law and institutions without the consent of the Iraqi people (Whyte 2007; Baker 2014).
With the collapse of the Soviet-bloc and the entry of China into the global market place, it was assumed that the US would remain as the sovereign of its now fully global order, setting the rules of that order with some consent from its constituents (including the new ones such as Russia and China) but reserving the right to be above those rules when it deemed such an exception to be required; acting as the “policeman” who is also the judge and jury. Those that did not acceptably accede to the sovereign’s authority would continue to be treated as they were in the Cold War era, as threats to be co-opted (China after its break with the Soviet bloc), subdued (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Argentina 1955 & 1976, Bolivia 1964, Brazil 1964, Chile 1973, Uruguay 1973 [Gandin 2006; Dehghan & Norton-Taylor 2013]), or contained (the Soviet Bloc, China before its break with the Soviet bloc, North Korea, Cuba, post-Shah Iran). The contingent nature of the commitment to democracy (as against capitalism) is shown by the US recognition and ongoing support for extremely illiberal regimes, such as Saudi Arabia and Central/South American and African dictatorships; especially when such elites are of a subservient comprador type. The US would also extensively interfere in the electoral processes of other nations; Levin identified 81 cases of US intervention in the democratic processes of other nations between 1946 and 2000 (Levin 2019). Democracy seemed to be only an option if it was within a capitalist system, while capitalism seemed to be an option with or without democracy; a position taken by the highly influential economist Hayek during a visit to totalitarian Chile “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than a democratic government devoid of liberalism” (as cited in Gandin 2006, p. 172).
The Western nations would continue to represent the senior members of this order, with the US as the sovereign while the others were able to maintain lesser spheres of influence while being subservient to the sovereign. Individual Western nations may be allowed limited independence, as with France’s decision not to maintain a full membership of NATO in 1966 (reversed in 2009), but such independence was limited - as shown by the punitive actions of the US toward the UK and France during the Suez Crisis.
Within the academy, the end of the Cold War intensified the intellectual reassessment of the concept of security that had arisen during the 1970s and 1980s in response to “the intense narrowing of the field of Security Studies imposed by the military and nuclear obsessions of the Cold War” (Buzan, Waever & de Wilde 1998, p. 2). This involved both a widening and a deepening “in favour of deepening the referent object beyond the state, widening the concept of security to include other sectors than the military, giving equal emphasis to domestic and trans-border threats, and allowing for a transformation of the Realist, conflictual logic of international security” (Buzan & Hansen 2009, p. 188). The process of globalization also reinforced this process, as it was perceived by many as reducing the power of the state (incorrectly, as noted above) and introducing new actors such as transnational corporations, international non-governmental organizations, and city networks together with the general facilitation of cross-border horizontal connections independent of the state (Robinson 2004; Scholte 2005; Sassen 2007; Castells 2009; Sassen 2012; Taylor 2013; Sprague 2015; Curtis 2016; Pingeot 2016). In addition, with the “unipolar moment” removing major power confrontation as a significant security issue, in the post-9/11 period terrorist organizations became a privileged threat.
The conceptualization of Human Security and a Democratic Peace Theory both reinforced the self-perceived civilizational superiority of the US (and other Western nations), and provided theoretical justification through the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) for the West to forcibly impose its rules, norms and institutions upon others (Menon 2016). Nations that did not align with Western norms and values (e.g. capitalist democracy) could be defined as the “ontological Other” (Zhang 2016, p. 805) that were not “civilized” enough to deserve the full protection of Westphalian sovereignty; “with a liberal zone of law constituted by liberal states practicing a higher degree of legal civilization, to which other states will be admitted only when they met the requisite standards” (Kingsbury 1999, p. 90). This “discourse of ‘democracy as civilization’” (Zhang 2016, p. 805) supported a dominant Western position that “In the name of democracy, violence and war as well as regime change can be and indeed have often been justified as necessary evils in the course of either establishing or defending a ‘superior’ liberal political and legal order and punishing or disciplining ‘rogue states’, ‘pariahs’ and ‘outlaws’” (Ibid., p. 806). The rhetorical support for liberal interventionism continued as before to be at odds with the reality of US foreign policy actions. In 1993 Russia President Yeltsin “won enthusiastic support from both the Clinton administration and virtually all of the U.S. media” (Cohen 2001, p. 126) when he carried out a violent coup against the democratically elected Russian Parliament. In 2009 the Honduran coup-leaders who overthrew a democratically elected president were supported by the US and Canada (Shipley 2017) – support repeated after 2016 elections that the Organization of American States (OAS) judged to be marred by “irregularities, mistakes and systemic problems” (HRW 2017). Noting the reality of geopolitical considerations over supposed humanitarian ones, Menon asked “Would the Saudis ever face a Security Council - R2P resolution? Would the United States, Britain or France vote for an R2P resolution condemning Israel’s use of force … in the West Bank or Gaza?” (Menon 2016, p. 98). Such an interventionist stance can also be seen as violating the basic liberal international tenets of state sovereignty and pluralism that are embedded in the United Nations charter. From this perspective, the diplomatic positions of the Western powers and that of Russia and China may be seen as differing selections from the liberal international values pallet, rather than one being liberal and the other illiberal.
US, and other Western, policy elites expected that Russia, China, the Eastern European and Baltic nations, Central Asia, and Yugoslavia would accept the necessity of US dominance and security, and take their place within its now fully global order. For the successor states of Yugoslavia, the Baltic States and Eastern Europe this assumption generally became reality, with integration for many within both NATO and the European Union. It has been argued that US policies forestalled the integration of Russia (Cohen 2001), while the sheer scale, independent stance and the specific state/society complex of China ruled out a compliant acceptance of a subservient position within a US-led global order.
With the West focused on the GWOT and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the increasing variance between the assumptions of Russian and Chinese integration into the US-lead world order and reality did not fundamentally affect US foreign policy. The US-backed ascension of China into the World Trade Organization, just two months after 9/11, facilitated a decade of double-digit yearly GDP growth that turned it into a significant power and transferred much of US manufacturing capacity to its shores. After a disastrous last decade of the twentieth century, during which Russia descended into a deep depression, oligarchic dominance and vassalage, Vladimir Putin came to power. At first he was seen by the West as a “sober Yeltsin”, a non-drunk comprador, but aided by the rise in oil prices he slowly reasserted the power of the state and Russian nationalism. As Cohen had so presciently noted:
what will be the reaction of our own opinion shapers and policymakers when Russian realities explode the prevailing myths about America's post-Communist friend and partner, as they soon will? If missionary dogmas persist, the American backlash is easy to foresee - at best, cynicism and indifference to Russia's plight; at worst, a sense of betrayal and a revival of reflexive Cold War attitudes . . . Russia can find its own way only within the limits of its own traditions and possibilities, not ours. Such a reformation does not need our political tutelage. If the United States cannot accept this first principle of post-Communism everywhere, the sequel to the Cold War is likely to be a very cold peace. (Ibid., pp. 111-112)
The decisive move away from the shock therapy neoliberal experiment of the 1990’s by the Putin government, toward a more dominant state and nationalist position (which included financial and legal measures against economic elites/oligarchs deemed to be non-compliant), placed Russia outside the neoliberal capitalist democratic orientation acceptable to the Western powers. This was most evident in the fossil fuel sector, where after a period of privatization in the 1990’s the Russian state has worked to reassert control, with state backing becoming “a vital factor determining the success of [fossil fuel] players in Russia’s state managed capitalism” (Kretzschmar et, al 2013., p. 778). The result has been state management but not necessarily nationalization, “even state behemoths such as Rosneft and Gazprom are organized like private companies, geared primarily to pay dividends to shareholders – of which the state is simply the largest” (Wood 2018, p. 171).
After the accession of Putin to the Russian presidency, the Russian state had continued to have good relations with the US and had provided extensive support to the US invasion of Afghanistan (as did Iran). Putin had been lauded in the Western press, with The Economist as late as September 2003 describing the Bush-Putin relationship as “warm and fuzzy” and Putin as “one of his [Bush’s] few real remaining friends on the world stage” (The Economist 2003, p. 49). The very next month the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, purported to be the richest man in Russia, was arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion. The Yukos oil and gas company, that he had gained control of through the infamous “Loans for Shares” privatization process in the 1990s, was broken up with substantial parts being taken over by the government controlled Rosneft. By acting against the most powerful private actor in Russia, Putin asserted and solidified the power of the Russian state apparatus and rebalanced the relationship between the state and the remaining oligarchs. The arrest of Khodorkovsky may also have been precipitated by the possibility of a sale of a major stake in Yukos to Exxon (Jack & Hoyos 1993), which would have placed a strategic Russian fossil fuel asset under US influence. Putin’s actions both rebalanced the power of the Russian state with respect to capital, and blocked US corporate access to a strategic asset. Given the orientation of the US state, as noted above, it would be expected that responses to such actions would be extremely negative. This became very apparent in US mainstream press coverage, with Kristof (2004) asserting, “the West has been suckered by Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin. Rather, he's a Russified Pinochet or Franco. And he is not guiding Russia toward free-market democracy, but into fascism”.
Relations were also damaged by Russian resistance to Western influence in Ukraine, a former member of the USSR with an extensive border with Russia and the host of the Russian naval base at Sevastopol. Any attempt by Russia to establish its own sphere of influence to maintain its security was not acceptable to the US. Cohen quotes Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times as stating that US “Russia specialists say [Putin’s] involvement in Ukraine is his most serious offense yet in American eyes” (Cohen 2005). The deterioration continued with the 2008 Russia-Georgia war (with the US providing support to Georgia) and the continuing Russian opposition to the eastward march of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) toward the Russian border. Tensions between Russia and the US escalated further after the NATO regime change intervention in Libya in 2011, which was seen as a misuse of the UN mandate by both Russia and China:
Russia and China learned their lessons in Libya. Neither country opposed Security Council Resolution 1973, which, in 2011, authorized military action, undertaken by a coalition of NATO and Arab states, to protect Libyan civilians; but they complained bitterly, well before the mission had ended, that ‘regime change’ was afoot and had never been part of the mandate. They became determined not to allow a repeat performance in Syria and have acted accordingly. (Menon 2016, p. 9)
This was followed by the Ukraine crisis of 2014, which resulted in the Ukrainian civil war, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the resultant escalating Western economic sanctions. Russian intervention in Syria in 2015, couched in terms of Syrian state sovereignty and self-determination, then underlined a newfound independence in Russian foreign policy that stood in opposition to the US-led discourse of universalist capitalist democracy, humanitarian intervention and regime change. This opposition was enunciated clearly by the Russian President in 2019 in a speech at the 16th meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club:
since all nations are obviously different, uniformity and universalisation are impossible by default. A system is required whereby different values, ideas and traditions can co-exist … in the 19th century they used to refer to a “Concert of Powers.” The time has come to talk in terms of a global “concert” of development models, interests, cultures and traditions where the sound of each instrument is crucial, inextricable and valuable, and for the music to be played harmoniously rather than performed with discordant notes, a cacophony. It is crucial to consider the opinions and interests of all the participants in international life. Let me reiterate: truly mutually respectful, pragmatic and consequently solid relations can only be built between independent and sovereign states. (Putin 2019)
Such a position fundamentally challenges the US role as the sovereign of the global international community; placing it as one among a number of equal great powers (each with their own accepted sphere of influence) with no single power empowered to take unilateral action. Russia’s increasingly independent stance is reflected in significant differences between the Russian National Security Strategy (NSS) documents of 2009 (Russian Federation President 2009) and 2015 (Russian Federation President 2015). The latter portrays “the EU, along with NATO and the US negatively” (Raik et al., 2018) and uses much more explicit language to identify the source of major state threats, such as “the Russian Federation’s implementation of an independent foreign and domestic policy is giving rise to opposition from the United States and its allies, who are seeking to retain their dominance in world affairs” (Russian Federation President 2015, Article 12). Russia’s position is captured well in Putin’s interviews with Oliver Stone (Stone 2017), and summarized succinctly by the Brookings Institute, a leading US foreign policy think tank:
Putin’s vision of international order is fundamentally at odds with the interests of the United States. Putin believes that the existing order is a façade. It is shrouded in the language of universal values and global institutions but the order is actually designed to promote American dominance of the international system. Consequently, Putin has made it his mission to weaken this order and replace it with something much more conducive to Russia’s interests … Putin believes that America’s penchant for intervention in the Middle East destabilized the region and empowered Islamist forces that threaten Russia. Globally, in his view, the United States has weaponized the international financial system to unilaterally impose sanctions on countries that it disagrees with, including on Russia over the annexation of Crimea and destabilization of Ukraine. (Chollet et. al. 2017, pp. 18-19)
The relationship between Russia and the US and its allies has only deteriorated further with the Skripal incident and the continuing clash of interests in Syria. The most recent Western media coverage of the Russiagate allegations of Russian tampering in the democratic processes of the USA and its allies is highly reminiscent of the Red Scare at the beginning of the Cold War during the early post-WW2 years. The extremely negative and demeaning discourse is reflected in the US foreign policy establishment, through such documents as the US National Security Strategies (see below) and reports from highly influential think thanks. A case of the latter is the identification of Russia as a “Rogue, Not a Peer” (Dobbins, Shatz & Wyne 2018, p. 1) by a RAND Corporation report that goes on to state that “Russia is not a peer or near-peer competitor but rather a well-armed rogue state that seeks to subvert an international order it can never hope to dominate” (Ibid., p. 2). This explicitly “Others” Russia and places it among the non-civilized “rogue states” that should not enjoy the status and protections of the higher level of legal civilization.
Four decades of exponential growth have transformed China from a backward nation with per capita wealth on the same level as many African countries into a still fast growing upper middle-income nation with an economy larger than the United States on a purchasing power parity basis. It had been assumed by many that after its ascension to the World Trade Organization, China would increasingly converge with the liberal capitalist nations and take its place within the US-led (neo)LIO, rather than act as a “revisionist” state. This was reinforced by the Chinese stance of Keeping A Low Profile, under which “China passively adapted itself to changes in the international environment” (Yan 2014, p. 166) while it focused on national economic development. In 2010, Buzan could note that “China’s rise over the past 30 years certainly looks peaceful compared to that of most other recent great power arrivistes [Germany, Japan and the USSR]” and that “over the past 30 years, China has done a pretty good job of pursuing peaceful rise” (Buzan 2010, p. 15).
Buzan typified China as a “reformist revisionist” power that “accepts some of the institutions of international society for a mixture of calculated and instrumental reasons. But it resists, and wants to reform, others, and possibly also wants to change its status” (Buzan 2010, p. 18) and presciently observed that the “danger is that as China rises it will become less dependent on the United States, and more opposed to its leadership, and the United States will feel more threatened by its increasing power and revisionism” (Ibid., p. 22). The new stance under the leadership of Xi Jinping of Striving for Achievement and his promotion of the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation has been seen in the West as threatening an increasingly assertive foreign policy that will “’shape’ the international system to a higher degree”, expect “to be treated on an equal footing” and that “China will never compromise on China’s sovereignty and core interests “ (Sorensen 2015, p. 65). This new stance can be seen in China’s increasing opposition to the United States in the UN Security Council, its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and its actions to claim sovereignty within the South China Sea; “China’s foreign policy is transformed from weak-state diplomacy to strong-power diplomacy” (Yan 2014, p. 168). As well as providing demand for Chinese goods and services, the BRI (and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank [AIIB]) “reflect Beijing’s efforts to promote the reform of the existing international economic system dominated by the USA so as to allow China to play a more important role” reform that “can hardly be echoed and supported by status-quo powers, the USA in particular” (Cai 2018, p. 838).
It is interesting that in later work Buzan and Schouenborg (2018) note that China aligns with the classical Westphalian Global International Society (GIS) institutions of sovereignty, non-intervention, territoriality, balance of power and great power management, together with the newer ones of nationalism, human equality and development together with conditional acceptance of markets; “From the CCP’s [Chinese Communist Party’s] perspective, it is the liberal West that is aggressively revisionist, seeking to impose its liberal values [of democracy and human rights] on the rest of the world” (Ibid., p. 462). This statement helps problematize a Western-centric viewpoint that may be blind to the Western neoliberal interventionist (e.g. R2P and World Bank/IMF conditionality) revisionism that gained force in the post-Cold War period and the possible role of China in wanting to return to Westphalian principles.
China’s rapidly expanding economy, the ‘S-curve’ trajectories of Chinese R&D expenditures and patent applications in recent years (Li 2018), and increasing Chinese military capabilities (even with military expenditure capped at 2% of GDP) may in of themselves have triggered a more conflictual response from the United States; “By the early 2010s … the rise of Chinese power, its military power in particular, had become all the more evident and real, which inevitably made the status-quo powers and neighbouring states increasingly concerned” (Cai 2018, p. 839). Chinese state-supported technology development, together with the continued state ownership/control of the “commanding heights” of the Chinese economy, blocks US/Western corporate ownership and the integration of Chinese capital into the (neo)LIO, while at the same time threatening the dominant position of US/Western corporations within the leading technological sectors. Starrs questions whether an independent capitalist class even exists within China “the liberal concept of the ‘private sector’ itself does not exist in China, as there is no strict separation between public and private spheres … this throws serious doubt on whether there is any basis for the existence of an independent capitalist class in China that can challenge the state – and by extension, their integration with a global TCC [transnational capitalist class] against the policies of the state” (Starrs 2017, p. 647).
This parallels So and Chu’s (2016) typification of predominant Chinese state economic policies as ones of state neoliberalism, with deregulation, privatization and marketization being used to maintain the power of the state and CCP rather than reduce it. The successful co-option of the corporate and upper middle class (Feng, Johannsen & Zhang 2015) helps maintain the ascendancy of the Party over what could otherwise develop into an independent private sector and civil society. As van Apeldoorn and de Graaff (2018, p. 122) note “in the case of China the lack of state ownership does not imply lack of state control or state direction … Chinese private enterprizes above a certain size always have a party secretary and a party commission included in the organizational structure of the company”. In this context, the relatively sudden emergence of Huawei as the global leader in computer networking can be seen as a challenge to both US technological dominance and its specific state/society complex. The more assertive Chinese foreign policy and government statements, together with official state plans to leapfrog the US in critical high technologies (Morrison 2019), could only add to the sense of threat within US policy making and corporate circles.
In response the US state began to treat China more as a competitor than one accepting its leadership role within the (neo)LIO. This was seen first with the “pivot to Asia” under President Obama at the beginning of the last decade and the more recent aggressive stance of the Trump administration. The major US concern was about China’s ability to establish its own sphere of influence in the Western Pacific, as the US did in the Americas before extending its reach globally after World War 2:
Beijing believes that it can create a new Sino-centric status quo in the Western Pacific that the United States will be unable or unwilling to stop, that Washington will have little option but to accept it once established, and that U.S.-China relations will, in this context, become predominantly cooperative … If China succeeds, it will transform the regional order into one with a weaker U.S. role, Chinese control over vital sea-lanes (which will remain open but only with their consent), and a Sino-centric institutional order. This could have the effect of reshaping the international order as a whole. A spheres of influence order in East Asia … would weaken the U.S. position globally. (Chollet et. al. 2017, p. 23)
As with its actions toward Russia, the US stance is one of resisting the emergence of any regional competitors to the US-led (neo)LIO, a position reflecting that of the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine “The third goal is to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests, and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the U.S. and our allies. These regions include Europe, East Asia, the Middle East/Persian Gulf, and Latin America” (National Security Council 1992, p. 2). This stance has been reflected in the wording of a US National Security Strategy that explicitly identifies both Russia and China as state competitors (see below). There is also, as Buzan notes “a quite strong constituency in the United States that almost wants to cast China in the role of ‘peer competitor’ in order to resolve the clarity of purpose to US foreign policy which has been hard to find since the end of the Cold War” (Buzan 2010, p. 23). In an academic disciplinary and policy complex sense, a “Cold War 2.0.” would also significantly benefit many of those pushing the “China as threat” discourse at the expense of the wideners and deepeners.
The result has been a significant reordering of security discourses back toward a state-specific orientation, with both military and geo-economic competition being seen as major concerns by the US administration; leading to attempts at forcing a more neoliberal model upon the Chinese state-managed economy through tariffs. At the same time, the global governance of conflict has been significantly attenuated as the United Nations Security Council has also been rendered dysfunctional due to the differing agendas of the US, China and Russia; all of which possess veto power. This underlines the move away from liberal internationalist and GWOT conceptions of security and a return to a more state-centric and realist-oriented security paradigm. The competing interventions within the Ukraine and Syria, and more recently Venezuela and Iran, are symptoms of this new international environment. The rapid growth of India since the economic reforms of the early 1990’s has also added at the least an additional major regional power to the international system. I propose that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first of the new century may come to be seen as an interregnum between two periods of major power rivalry, with both global governance institutions and globalization becoming significantly attenuated. US foreign policy and national security elites seem to have reoriented themselves toward major power rivalry during the past decade, with a more forthright stance adopted during the Trump administration.
The 2010 US National Security Strategy (NSS) states that “there should be no doubt: the United States of America will continue to underwrite global security” (The White House 2010, p. 1); implicitly assuming that the US has the authority to define what is a threat to global security and will not accept a challenge to that authority – a redrafting of the blunter deliveries of the same message by the previous Bush administration. The USA will work “to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia, as well as increasingly influential nations such as Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia—so that we can cooperate on issues of bilateral and global concern, with the recognition that power, in an interconnected world, is no longer a zero sum game (Ibid., p. 3)”. In the section entitled “Security”, emphasis is given to the need to “Strengthen Security and Resilience at Home” and to “Disrupt, Dismantle, and Defeat Al-Qa’ida and its Violent Extremist Affiliates in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Around the World” as well as reversing “the Spread of Nuclear and Biological Weapons and Secure Nuclear Materials”. No mention of major power rivalry as a major security threat. The 2015 NSS, written after the Obama administrations pivot to Asia notes, “India’s potential, China’s rise, and Russia’s aggression all significantly impact the future of major power relations” (The White House 2015, p. 4). Apart from widening the security issues to be dealt with to include climate change, health and “Access to Shared Spaces” (Ibid., p. 12) such as space, the high seas and the internet, the document does though maintain the same general security focus as the previous one; great power rivalry is not listed as a security issue. Later in the document mention of the dependence of Europe upon Russian energy supplies is made, and that the USA “will closely monitor China’s military modernization and expanding presence in Asia, while seeking ways to reduce the risk of misunderstanding or miscalculation” (Ibid., p. 24).
Very early on in the 2017 US NSS, a very different emphasis is taken “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.” (The White House 2017, p. 2) and require “the United States to rethink the policies of the past two decades—policies based on the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners. For the most part, this premise turned out to be false” (Ibid., p. 3). In a major section entitled “Promote American Prosperity”, which states that “Economic security is national security” it is noted, “American prosperity and security are challenged by an economic competition playing out in a broader strategic context. The United States helped expand the liberal economic trading system to countries that did not share our values, in the hopes that these states would liberalize their economic and political practices and provide commensurate benefits to the United States. Experience shows that these countries distorted and undermined key economic institutions without undertaking significant reform of their economies or politics. They espouse free trade rhetoric and exploit its benefits, but only adhere selectively to the rules and agreements” (Ibid., p. 17). In a sub-section entitled “Promote and Protect the U.S. National Security Innovation Base” it states “Every year, competitors such as China steal U.S. intellectual property valued at hundreds of billions of dollars” and that “Losing our innovation and technological edge would have far-reaching negative implications for American prosperity and power” (Ibid., p. 21); explicitly securitizing intellectual property and innovation. Reference is also made to the increasing role of the USA as a fossil fuel exporter and that “As a growing supplier of energy resources, technologies, and services around the world, the United States will help our allies and partners become more resilient against those that use energy to coerce” (Ibid., p. 23).
The “revisionist powers of China and Russia” that “want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests” (Ibid., p. 25) are identified as challengers to US power. “Contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others. China gathers and exploits data on an unrivaled scale and spreads features of its authoritarian system, including corruption and the use of surveillance. It is building the most capable and well-funded military in the world, after our own. Its nuclear arsenal is growing and diversifying. Part of China’s military modernization and economic expansion is due to its access to the U.S. innovation economy, including America’s world-class universities” (Ibid., p. 25) and “Russia aims to weaken U.S. influence in the world and divide us from our allies and partners. Russia views the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union (EU) as threats. Russia is investing in new military capabilities, including nuclear systems that remain the most significant existential threat to the United States, and in destabilizing cyber capabilities.” (Ibid., p. 25-26). The threat from China is seen as encompassing many areas of competition on a global basis, while that of Russia is seen on more regional basis and limited to military and energy competition. Overall, the “2017 NSS takes a bleak view of global realities. The struggle for power is on. Multilateral efforts to cope with global challenges are out. Multilateralism is viewed as competitive at best” (Raik et al. 2018, p. 21). With the Wolfowitz Doctrine still seeming to be in place, the US is not accepting of a rebalancing of the global system toward a pluralism that will constrain its actions and place geographically specific limitations upon the reach of US, and other Western, capital and transnational corporations. This reorientation of the international system, as perceived by the leading power of the (neo)LIO, supports the assumption of the state as the referent object of security.
The recent US actions to sideline such core global institutions as the United Nations and World Trade Organization through bilateral trade sanctions and tariffs, the ‘weaponization’ of the international payments system (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications: SWIFT) to reinforce sanctions regimes (Farrell & Newman 2019), and intellectual property rights to curb the development of Chinese technology corporations such as Huawei and ZTE, point to a US state focused on relative gains and a “win-lose” foreign policy orientation. Such actions fit very well within Zhou’s proposed version of power transition theory in which:
before a rising power overtakes it, the hegemonic power will take action to avoid losses, and that in response the rising power will passively take action to avoid its own losses [with the] inhibitive influence of nuclear deterrence, strategic competition between the hegemonic power and the rising power is limited to peaceful measures including diplomatic means. (Zhou 2019, p. 1)
The possibility of an escalating cycle is also possible, “Beijing cries foul, bemoans alleged U.S. efforts to ‘contain its peaceful rise’—a popular meme in Chinese commentary on U.S. strategic intentions toward Asia—further ramps up its military spending and bolsters its warfighting capabilities. A vicious, unavoidable, and tragic action-reaction cycle is born” (Liff & Ikenberry 2014, p. 53). A report from the RAND Corporation, one of the predominant US foreign policy institutes, using the following words, “War between the United States and China could be so ruinous for both countries, for East Asia, and for the world that it might seem unthinkable. Yet it is not [my italics]: China and the United States are at loggerheads over several regional disputes that could lead to military confrontation or even violence between them” (Gompert, Cavallos & Garafola 2016, p. iii) can also be seen as a warning of future aggression. The report goes further to identify a time window of 2015 to 2025 for successful US military action against China that is reminiscent of Germany’s concerns about the rapid industrialization of Russia prior to WW1:
Note that China’s enhanced A2AD [Anti Access/Area Denial] in 2025 will reduce the gap between its losses and U.S. losses at T1. Because it could be less clear which side is losing at T1, a severe war might be more likely to be prolonged in 2025 than in 2015, despite mounting costs (Gompert, Cavallos & Garafola 2016, p. 22)
As historians convincingly demonstrate, there was a relatively short window of opportunity, as perceived by German state managers (approximately 1912-17), for launching a preemptive strike against Russia before it completed its strategic railway lines, making German tactical war plans obsolete. (Anievas 2014, p. 27)
Such analyses support the proposition that the two states are in a period of relative power transition, and reinforce notions of a closing window for US action to curtail Chinese growth and/or force it into acceptance of US hegemony within the neo(LIO). With an economy still growing at over twice the rate of the US, and a defense budget of only 2% of GDP, China is capable of increasing military expenditures at a much faster rate than the US without significantly impacting its economy; the very position that the US enjoyed with respect to the USSR in the 1980s.
The very public attacks upon China by senior government officials are reminiscent of the official US discourses used against Russia during the Cold War (Perlez 2018), as is the increasingly Red Scare like US discourse with respect to Russia. To critical researchers such as Michael Hudson, such attacks are simply propaganda designed to obfuscate the real objective of obtaining Chinese and Russian subservience within a US and Western capitalist dominated (neo)LIO. He considers that the Chinese response is predictable:
There is no way that China will dismantle its mixed economy and turn it over to U.S. and other global investors. It is no secret that the United States achieved world industrial supremacy in the late 19th and early 20th century by heavy public-sector subsidy of education, roads, communication and other basic infrastructure … The U.S. idea of a ‘win-win’ agreement is one in which China will be ‘permitted’ to grow as long as it agrees to become a U.S. financial and trade satellite, not an independent competitor. (Hudson 2019).
This has many parallels with the US approach taken toward what was seen as the Japanese industrial and technological (specifically in semiconductors) challenge to US hegemony in the 1980’s. The result was “voluntary” restrictions on Japanese exports to the US, an agreed upon major upward revaluation of the Yen against the dollar, and domestic financial deregulation that helped trigger the Japanese financial crash in the following decade. The rhetoric of “unfair” competition and the need for significant structural changes (Fallows 1989) echoes the current US rhetoric toward China; it would seem that only if China becomes a “bigger version of Japan” will it be seen as an acceptable member of the US dominated (neo)LIO.
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Great stuff ! Appreciate your posting one chapter at a time for i'm likely to lose focus if had the entire book on hand to read...