Great Powers

by Thomas P. M. Barnett

  As with so many emerging powers that are experiencing a rise in nationalism as they engage the world more deeply, Russia’s heightened chauvinism is both natural and unstoppable, for it signals a growing national pride that should be shaped and not merely opposed. In general, rising nationalism reflects simple pride in one’s own economic advance. When countries get wealthier, most of them also become more nationalistic, which in turn is often historically related to increased rule of law and decreased corruption (clearly not yet the case in energy-rich Russia). The rising nationalism created by globalization’s spread, hardly a uniform menace that needs be stamped out, should be viewed by America as simply the collective pursuit by a society of a firm identity amid all this growing connectivity, much like growing religiosity. A country with a rising income and a firm national identity should be far easier to cut deals with than one whose income remains flat or declines and whose people seek refuge in some combination of religious and ethnic identity. In short, the more nationalistic a country becomes in response to globalization’s many promises and perils, the more likely it is to remain a real state not subject to remapping by the global economy’s progressive penetration. As Gustavo de las Casas has argued, “In a world where war is expensive, borders are largely settled, and the actions of nations are usually tied to some moral code,” today’s rising nationalism “often leads citizens to look inward and focus their energies on bettering their countries.”

  Quite frankly, a good expression of such rising nationalism is found in Russia under Putin. There, as longtime observer Dmitri Trenin argues, we see, virtually for the first time in recorded history, a Russian state that’s both nationalistic and nonexpansionistic, even as it has long sought clear spheres of influence in its so-called near abroad (i.e., former Soviet republics it now views as its last buffer against an expanding NATO/EU). Truly postimperial for the first time in centuries, the current “Russia Inc.” mindset of the leadership projects a decidedly “In capital we trust” nonideology that should strike most Americans as reminiscent of our own, post-Civil War economic brutalism, including our open bullying of small neighboring states. And like America in that period of history, Russian society today has seen social trust replaced with widespread cynicism, even as collective economic fortunes have risen. Values are viewed as unimportant, the crude but accurate assumption being that private and corporate interests control most political decisions. In a Dickensian world where dog-eat-dog competition reigns and “homo economicus” is considered the most evolved state of being, Russians today sense little difference between their universe and the larger globalization process at work around the world. In that way, you could describe Russia as possibly the most well-adjusted great power out there, its lack of illusions being one of its greatest strengths. As Trenin puts it, Russian leaders “enjoy being an energy power” and essentially view the world’s governments as all being equally imperfect and therefore separated primarily by the power they wield.

  In many ways, Russia today embodies both Karl Marx’s description of bureaucratic capitalism (i.e., big business is the state), as well as Theodore Roosevelt’s fears concerning a “stationary state” in which ruthless competition within the economy is tempered primarily by the rise of authoritarianism in politics and the dominance of markets by giant trusts to which the government is beholden. Russian leaders view a harshly competitive global landscape with equanimity, their sense of expansionism—much like Roosevelt’s—limited to market domination. In that sense, Russia today is incredibly transparent in its desires and tactics: What the state wants is what Russian business wants—like no competing Western pipelines in the Caucasus. Russian society is likewise becoming ever more familiar to America. With its crude individualism and crass materialism, it grows more American and less European with each passing year.

  In its foreign policy, Russia represents a crudely utilitarian partner for an American grand strategy of pushing globalization’s advance: Willing to use force in international crises, but exceedingly businesslike—sometimes to a brutal fault—in its economic diplomacy, it views any state as both partner and competitor. With a complete lack of emotion, Moscow pragmatically sees America for what it truly is right now: militarily overextended, financially overdrawn, and ideologically overwrought. As such, we make an easy target for domestic propaganda about a cruel world that Moscow must engage with equal cruelty, but even that anti-Americanism is largely for show, as America has long polled better in Russia than in most European nations. Even after its conflict with Georgia, Moscow wonders openly why Washington would choose Tblisi’s manic nationalism over its cool Machiavellianism. In the end, Putin & Co. see the same multipolar world that Washington, in its recent failures, has finally come to recognize, and welcomes it for the opportunities to make Russia once again powerfully relevant in global affairs. Since we need that as well, Russia’s renewed willingness to exercise force should be managed with great pragmatism on our side—much like the way Theodore Roosevelt managed the rising Japan and Germany of his day—because trying to influence Russia’s internal developments through a renewed Cold War stance will simply play into the hands of al Qaeda by dividing the Core against itself.

  In the coming years, the United States is going to bump up against plenty of younger versions of itself, like Russia. If we’re lucky, the Putinesque “supercorporation” package will become a familiar one: a rising power joining the global economy on its own nationalistic terms, headed up by a heavy-handed, rather clannish business elite that is more technocratic than ideological in outlook, and whose aim is to maximize the economy’s international leverage and network connectivity based on the country’s most strategic assets. Simply put, these are economic rivals we should naturally want on our team: They are not interested in challenging the dominant liberal trade order but merely exploiting its opportunities for maximum selfish benefit. More important, they view globalization as vital enough to their continued growth in wealth and power that they are willing to defend it.

  In harshly realistic terms, I’m hard-pressed to describe a better Russia for our grand strategic purposes right now: a brutally ambitious builder of economic empire that’s willing to crush obstacles in its path. I mean, haven’t we long complained that none of our allies want to go anywhere and kill anybody? So now that Russia proves itself up to the game, we immediately toss it out of all our great-power clubs? But none of that will register with a Washington hell-bent on defining our current age as a “global war of survival” or a bloc-defined clash between democracies and autocracies. Potentially useful allies like Russia aren’t interested in any of that because they see it as our transparent attempt to limit their global economic power while maximizing our own.

  And they’re right.

  THE GLOBAL ACCELERANT: SOFT-POWER BALANCING

  Even as many emerging powers are starting to “feel their oats” in sharp contrast to America’s growing world-weariness, few are willing to engage in anything but the most passive-aggressive containment strategies with regard to our self-declared “global war,” the best examples being the collective efforts of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to slowly shrink our military footprint in Central Asia. In effect, most of the world logically expects we’ll eventually run out of money and come to define these threats in less earth-shattering terms, or maybe some new global crisis will catch our attention and we’ll redirect ourselves (Thanks, Wall Street!). Plus, with the amount of anti-Americanism in the world as of late, it is getting harder and harder for the United States to access crises without the locals’ seeing that as more additive than subtractive, the assumption being that once we show up, we’ll decide to label someone an enemy of global order and then the shooting will start. The longer the world maintains that impression of us, the more it’ll be happy to see our continued tie-down in Southwest Asia extended.

  On some level, the high-consumption approach of the Bush administration preordained this outcome. By using up the force, piling up unprecedented budget
deficits, and spending virtually all of the political goodwill extended to us after 9/11, it effectively condemned the next president to one of two pathways: (1) staying the course in Iraq segueing to Afghanistan/Pakistan, which extends our strategic myopia and draws down our national power for another half-decade or longer; or (2) a period of relative quietude during which we endeavor to unwind both our strategic tie-down and our financial crisis by reengaging the world with a new brand of global leadership. My fear is that the first path effectively rules out the second, because by the time we come to our senses, too many opportunities and rising powers would have passed us by.

  This is the true ideological threat posed by China: the continued diminution of our national brand and our historical association with this liberal trade order. Our disavowing that historical parentage effectively cedes globalization’s future to the China model—a painfully limited alternative. But in the absence of America’s sustained leadership, emerging powers will inevitably begin emulating China’s mercantilist mindset on trade, mimicking its growing fears of resource dependency, which it defines in very mid-twentieth-century terms (i.e., I have to own the barrel in the ground, as well as the grain in the soil). Once such self-fulfilling prophecies are launched from enough players (e.g., Saudi Arabia already mimics China’s push to buy up arable land abroad), America’s big-war national security community will feel justified in pushing a mirror-imaging strategic mindset, and soon enough we’ll all be off to many races—for Africa’s raw materials, for Arctic energy, for South America’s farms, for whatever resource we deem panic-worthy. In that pathway, the only surfeit we’ll enjoy is unlimited numbers of Chicken Littles—academic chin-pullers and their Greek chorus in the blogosphere dispensing predictions of “perpetual war.”

  This would be a crying shame, given the progressive upgrading of leadership we’ll definitely see in both Washington and Beijing over the next decade, as the Boomers depart from top political ranks here and the fifth and sixth generations of Chinese leadership begin asserting themselves over there. In both instances, we’ll see emerging elites with a far greater understanding of globalization’s inherent complexity and rising interdependency. But that’s what makes the next ten years so incredibly important: Unless the United States can begin articulating a grand strategic vision within which emerging powers like Russia and China can logically locate themselves, we’re likely to find ourselves increasingly downgrading our own perceived global reach. What was once a liberal trade order that opened doors the world over to American business, and has allowed the U.S. military to access crises virtually the world over, will inevitably suffer partition as competing rule sets, offered in contrast to our manic focus on terrorism and WMD, fence off regions of the world from our influence. This is the essential forecast of Parag Khanna in The Second World: America largely contained to the Western Hemisphere, Europe owning the Mediterranean littoral Roman-style, and China’s soft-power networks managing Asia and the rest. (Khanna discounts Russia as a dominant power.) Like most big-picture books published at the end of the Bush administration, Khanna’s extrapolates America’s exceedingly narrow, post-9/11 grand strategy ad infinitum. Such is the state of our grand-strategy debate.

  The problem is, of course, that we have little historical basis upon which to forecast a global future that features the sole military superpower allowing rising economic pillars to continue free-riding on its military efforts long enough for them to construct viable hemispheric security regimes on their own, replete with their own military capacity to play Leviathan. Given Europe’s past negative experiences, Russia’s demographic decline, and China’s complete lack of experience in this regard, it gets hard to generate plausible global scenarios where globalization’s burgeoning network trade does not force a similar “chain reaction”—if you will—upon the security realm. I mean, why would the global economy embrace such production-chain connectivity only to parcel out the associated security responsibilities on a regional or even hemispheric basis? Surely the global business community will eschew such inefficient partitioning, making it hard for business-sensitive elites to move down this pathway without suffering a profound loss of competitiveness in a flat world. Putin, for example, must keep Russia’s oligarchs happy, lest they, like a disgruntled board of directors, dump their company’s CEO in search of better returns on investment.

  Ah, but what if the main character in this drama, the United States, is actually the one great power within which leadership and political power is wielded by an elite with a drastically poor understanding of global economics, one given to populist tendencies and ideological slants reflecting its career status as lifelong politicos with little to no entrepreneurial experience? Granted, the EU’s insular technocracy could probably give our Boomers a run for their (tax) money in this regard, but isn’t it amazing to think that the oldest players in this globalization game, Europe and America, are arguably the least pragmatic (in a business sense) and the most ideological (in a political sense) with regard to the game’s long-term management? And that the former socialists—like India, Russia, and China—are actually more in tune with globalization’s evolution right now?

  If so, Joshua Kurlantzick’s recent book Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power Is Transforming the World is a valuable rendering of the current counternarrative being offered by Beijing regarding globalization’s advance into Gap regions. As he puts it, “In a short period of time, China appears to have created a systematic, coherent soft power strategy, and a set of soft power tools to implement that strategy.” Of course, a similar description could have been given to American efforts, starting with William McKinley’s administration through that of Woodrow Wilson’s first five years, including the naval buildup, the focus on conflict mediation, the use of “dollar diplomacy” to smooth market entry, the open-door policy, and so on. As the new power on the block, we enjoyed the same honeymoon period then that Kurlantzick describes China as exploiting today. The self-limiting aspect of this process, however, is that “with great power comes great responsibility,” with most of that responsibility defined by your nation’s business interests and expatriates abroad. The more you connect, the more those elements of your own network begin making demands, something the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to senior State Department officials involved in these high-level talks, now routinely quizzes its American counterparts about in terms of best practices and basic coping strategies. In short, the more successful you are in spreading your national brand, the more you’re required to protect it—and money doesn’t always talk loud enough.

  Still, China’s “charm offensive” tells us what’s selling best right now in the shadow of our myopic grand strategy of “kicking asses and taking names”: a willingness to join multilateral institutions, support for peacekeeping under UN auspices, doing whatever it takes to power economic growth in developing regions, and mediating other countries’ conflicts while espousing noninterference and persistent struggle against terrorism, extremism, and separatism. If that doesn’t sound like an ideal “good cop” counterpart to what we’ve been doing for the last eight years, I don’t know what does. The downside is, as Kurlantzick points out, China’s growing tendency to export its domestic problems, like poor environmental practices, political repression and censorship, and weak regulatory standards in general. Plus, with such a strong noninterference focus, China is naturally most welcome among the world’s many rogue regimes and small economies that undoubtedly hope that China’s economic domination will somehow improve upon the past versions offered by European colonial powers and “ugly Americans,” despite Beijing’s avowedly mercantilist mindset (dream on, I say). Still, there’s no denying that Chinese companies, having first grown adept at navigating China’s developing economy, bring a set of business skills logically more appropriate to the task of replicating capitalism in Gap economies.

  Naturally, as Kurlantzick points out, the local backlash on China’s economic expansionism is just beginnin
g. In this regard, China’s insistence that its foreign policy goal is to extend economic ties without attached political or security demands is as naïve as America’s claims were more than a century ago. Eventually, you end up having to use that big stick now and then, especially since trade ties create political ties and political ties typically engender shared security interests. If, in previous globalization eras, trade followed the flag, nowadays it’s more the other way around, as China will inevitably discover.

  This is what I tell Chinese long-range planners and policy analysts whenever I sit down with them in Beijing: “Your problem is not unlike what America faced in the last years of the nineteenth century. We began to realize that our economic and network connectivity with the outside world was ballooning, but our political-military capacity to do anything about it lagged far behind. That growing gap was our security problem—plain and simple. Eventually, our enemies both large and small would have discovered ways to exploit it, meaning we needed to close that gap either on our own or in alliance with others. But either way, we needed to mount a catch-up strategy on security that would synch up with our growing success in the economic realm.”

  If China can continue free-riding on the global security system maintained by America’s military forces, this gap might never be revealed—much less become crucial. But consider: Globalization’s advance, currently identical in the minds of many with becoming more Western, especially American, will soon enough start being identified with becoming more Asian, especially Chinese. As that inevitability unfolds, China will then find itself targeted the way America is today by those who violently oppose globalization. Extremists, seeking civilizational apartheid, or separation from a “corrupt, materialistic world,” will attack Chinese influence just as they today seek to limit Westernization. Eventually, their familiarity with China will breed contempt and the honeymoon period will end. In that future, a China that cannot adequately defend its economic interests globally in a manner similar to that of America—and, to a lesser extent, Europe through NATO—will represent a serious source of global instability. China will either be forced to retreat from the world or—in addition to paying protection money in all directions on the ground—rely on others to defend its overseas interests, neither being a path we should welcome for all the reasons America itself would find such a situation unbearable.