The Contest of the Century

by Geoff A. Dyer

  China also has its own list of grievances about American obstruction at the UN, starting with the large number of vetoes that Washington has exercised to protect Israel from criticism about human-rights abuses. And, like many other developing countries’ governments, China is quick to point out the double standards in American moral leadership. Washington does not like our support of Mugabe, Chinese officials would say, but it backed Mubarak for so many decades. The U.S. complains when we buy oil from Iran, they ask, but is the situation in that country really much different from Saudi Arabia? Or Equatorial Guinea? Chinese diplomats can play these games all night. Beijing is also not shy about using the anti-colonial card, suggesting that noninterference is a bulwark against the sort of exploitation China itself suffered at the hands of the imperial powers in the nineteenth century. At the United Nations, China often listens closely to what other developing countries are saying and then, if it does not have big issues of its own at stake, will follow their views. It has become very skilled at channeling anti-colonial resentment in the developing world against America’s messianic tendencies. “We are very different from you,” a senior official at the Foreign Ministry once told me. “We do not think that we are the world’s savior.”

  China’s defense of sovereignty has a lot of support at the UN from developing countries with colonial pasts. There is even sympathy among such big democracies as Brazil and India, on whom the humanitarian evangelism of the West often grates, and who were appalled by the aggressive unilateralism of the Iraq War. Plenty of developing countries, democratic and authoritarian, would like to see limits placed on the moralizing interference of the U.S. in the affairs of others. All of this makes nonintervention an extremely important policy for China. It provides international protection for the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, it gives the government a powerful anti-colonialist calling card as it seeks to expand its international influence. We will do business with you and not ask any questions about how you run your country, China tells other developing nations. It is not just autocrats who find this extremely appealing.

  But then there was Darfur. The fierce debates about Sudan in the early years of the 2000s put China at the center of UN politics in a way it had never been before. China came under intense political pressure because its support of Sudan appeared to be making a mockery of the post-Rwanda “never again” rhetoric at the UN, even as diplomats were drafting the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. For all the attractions that China’s opposition to outside interference holds for many governments, there is also a powerful downside—in the hands of a veto-holding, permanent member of the Security Council, it can render the UN mute at the very moment when it should be at its most active.

  The burden of proof for genocide is a very high one, and for some of the most informed observers of the events in Darfur, that bar was not reached by the Sudanese government. Human Rights Watch, for instance, declined to define what happened as genocide. It is also true that the complex events in Darfur were not a one-sided affair—the government in Khartoum was responding to a rebellion in the province. At the same time, there exists ample documented evidence to show that, between 2003 and 2010, widespread and grotesque human-rights abuses were committed by the Sudanese government or by the local proxy it used, a militia group called the Janjaweed. There is extensive testimony of villages burned to the ground, the men then killed and the women raped. In a country that had seen constant outbreaks of civil unrest since its independence, this was more than the usual burst of violence. A decade after Rwanda, Africa was witnessing again an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing.

  Yet the early years of the conflict were also the time when China’s oil investments started to bear real fruit, and Beijing did everything it could to shelter its Khartoum ally from international pressure, often with the support of Russia. In 2003 and 2004, when Kofi Annan was trying to draw the world’s attention to the emerging catastrophe, China tried to keep the Darfur situation off the agenda at the UN. In 2004, it threatened to veto a resolution which merely raised the prospect of sanctions. A year later, with African Union peacekeepers struggling to control the situation, it blocked the idea of a UN peacekeeping operation. Chinese officials argued that, however bad things were in Sudan, they would become much worse if heavy-handed intervention by outside powers led to the downfall of the Khartoum regime. “The country would have become another Somalia,” a Foreign Ministry official told me a few years later, still with a tone of indignation that China had come in for such intense criticism.

  In the near-decade since the Darfur crisis, the same debates about outside intervention have continued to rage. The fiercest dispute has been over the civil war in Syria that started in 2011. In this case, Russia took the lead in blocking sanctions on the Assad regime as it waged war on its people, but China moved in lockstep at each stage in the process—both countries vetoing three separate UN Security Council resolutions. The international community remains deadlocked. Almost a decade after the “Responsibility to Protect” was negotiated, the leading powers at the UN are no closer to agreeing on how to respond to these types of crises.

  The bruising arguments over Sudan and Syria have prompted anguished discussion in the West about a new “axis of authoritarians,” with China and Russia using their vetoes at the UN to protect dictators around the world from outside pressure. There is widespread criticism in the West about the deadening impact that China’s noninterference principle is likely to have on international politics. As François Godement of the European Council on Foreign Relations puts it, the effect of China’s growing influence is a “hollowing out of the international system.” Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian intellectual-turned-politician who was one of the leading voices in the interventionist debates of the 1990s, has also become one of the fiercest critics of the new axis between China and Russia. “Syria tells us that the era of humanitarian intervention, ‘responsibility to protect,’ is over, because it assumed a historical progression that has turned out to be false,” he wrote. “When they look at the world this way, the Russian and Chinese regimes mock our view of history.”

  This is a powerful view, and one that is deeply pessimistic about the ability of the West to continue to shape the values at the heart of the international community. It fits into the narrative of decline, of a West that is now powerless to turn its ideas and instincts into coherent action in the face of the influence of rising powers. Yet it is also a mistaken view, because it misses two essential features about the emerging international environment, both of which are potential game-changers. It ignores the way in which China’s rapidly expanding interests around the world are undermining its reluctance to get involved in crises. And it also downplays the potential for the U.S. to find common ground with some of the other new rising powers, who are likely to have considerable influence in the coming years over the shape of the new global order.

  ENTER THE SWING STATES

  To the other members of the guerrilla group, she was known as Estela. When the Brazilian military arrested her in 1970, one of the worst years for violence during the two-decade-long dictatorship, she was subjected to a ferocious array of torture techniques. Her head, thighs, and breasts were given electric shocks, and she was suspended naked and upside down on a stick. She eventually suffered a hemorrhage of the uterus, which prevented her from having more children.

  Dilma Rousseff is now the first female president of Brazil, having won in a comfortable election in 2010 for the center-left Workers’ Party. But her first entry into national political life was as a member of the Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard, a far-left guerrilla group which took up arms to overthrow the military dictators who ran the country from 1964 to 1985. Her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was locked up by the military for his political activity against the dictatorship. His predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, fled to exile in Chile and then France after the military ordered his arrest. The man that both Lula and Dilma defeated to win th
e presidency, José Serra, was also an exile in Chile. For the last twenty years, Brazil has been run by a generation of leaders who got into political life to oppose the military dictatorship and to fight against the abuses committed against Brazilians by their own government.

  Yet, over the last decade, Brazil has been a persistent critic of Western-led efforts at humanitarian intervention in countries where other dictators were conducting grotesque abuses of their populations. Celso Amorim, Lula’s foreign minister, once described the idea of the “Responsibility to Protect” as “droit d’ingérence… in new clothes,” a concept dating back to the seventeenth century about interfering in the affairs of another nation. On the occasions when Brazil has been a rotating member of the UN Security Council, it has often used its votes to express skepticism about U.S.-backed pressure or interventions. In 2004, when international outrage at the violence in Darfur was escalating, Brazil joined China in opposing any resolution on Sudan that smacked of new international sanctions. When China and Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution in October 2011 which criticized the violent oppression of opposition in Syria, Brazil was again on the Security Council. This time it abstained.

  Just as in China, the defense of state sovereignty has been hard-wired into Brazilian elites for several generations. In the early twentieth century, Brazil was opposed to the use of military interventions to collect on the bad debts of countries that had defaulted on bond payments. (Before the IMF, it was the marines that enforced repayment of debts in developing countries.) Suspicions about the great powers hardened in the 1950s, with the era of decolonization. At the end of the Cold War, Brazil did not see the West’s new enthusiasm for humanitarian interventions as part of a welcome, modern activism in defense of the oppressed; instead, it saw this as the old wine of colonial interference, in new bottles.

  Among the elites of many other large developing countries, it is pretty easy to find similar sentiments, especially in nations with a recent colonial past. In that high-profile 2011 vote on Syria during which Brazil abstained, South Africa and India also happened to be on the Security Council at the time. They also abstained. In South Africa, the years of struggle against the apartheid regime left the African National Congress deeply cynical about the motives of Western governments in preaching humanitarian intervention. In the six decades since its independence, India’s self-image has been intimately linked to the concepts of the Non-Aligned Movement, making it another natural skeptic of Western motives. Susan Rice, who was the U.S. ambassador at the UN during the first Obama administration, chided Brazil, India, and South Africa for taking positions that “one might not have anticipated, given that each of them came out of strong and proud democratic traditions.” Yet, on the face of it, Brazil, India, and South Africa appear to have more in common with China about the basic ground rules of how the international system should work—at least more than they do with Washington.

  In many ways, the dispute over intervention and sovereignty is one part of a much broader challenge that the U.S. faces as a result of the big shifts in relative power that are taking place around the world. Even those who deny that America is in decline recognize that economic power is becoming more diffuse as a group of populous, developing nations try to turn strong growth rates into a bigger international presence. China is not the only potential challenger to the international order that the U.S. erected after the Second World War. There is now a new generation of powers, not just India, South Africa, and Brazil, but also Turkey, South Korea, and Indonesia, who are in some ways the floating voters of international politics, new entrants to the top table of global governance who have not yet decided how they want to apply the influence that their economic heft is accruing. If, more often than not, these governments were to side with China and Russia, it would represent a much broader threat to Washington’s ability to keep setting the international agenda.

  Of course, the U.S. has faced a parallel challenge before, in the 1960s and 1970s, when the dominance it enjoyed after the war was put into question by the rise of Western Europe and of Japan. It seems obvious in retrospect that these countries would make common cause with the U.S. and become part of the unified political entity we now call the Western powers. But at the time it was not so clear—think about the Gaullist efforts to distance France from the U.S., or the period of intense economic rivalry with Japan that lasted well into the 1990s. Washington was able to find ways to integrate these new powers into the institutions and rules that it had established. The U.S. is facing another, similar inflection point. Either it finds a way to embrace some of these newer powers, or it will see its influence over the international community gradually slide. That is true for a range of issues, from trade rules to the membership of international institutions, but it is also very much the case with the values at the heart of the international system. It is hard to argue for the moral legitimacy of the U.S. approach to abusive dictators when several of the biggest democracies in the world are openly opposed. Handing out lectures to these countries about their democratic heritage will not do the trick.

  It might seem surprising at first, but one long-term U.S. objective should be to try not to alienate Russia. Of course, in many of the most contested votes at the UN in recent years, Russia and China have been very much on the same side. Indeed, Moscow has often been more of an obstacle than Beijing. Many Russia analysts suspect that Vladimir Putin has taken confidence from the success of Chinese authoritarianism as he has cemented his own control of power in Moscow. Some American neoconservatives warn that the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a security group that brings together Russia, China, and several Central Asian countries, is becoming an authoritarian anti-NATO. The antipathy in the U.S. toward Russia is particularly pronounced on the right—and was given voice when presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia “without doubt, our number one geopolitical foe.” Yet the obsession with Russia among some on the American right is itself something of a Cold War hangover that vastly overstates Moscow’s influence. Russian power rises and falls these days with the price of oil, not the potency of its political system or its economy. More to the point, it is a major strategic error to overplay the ideological affinity of the two countries. A China that behaves more and more like an ambitious great power is likely to be seen by Russia as being as much a rival as a partner. Moscow is already worried about the political and economic inroads that Beijing is making into Central Asia, about Chinese migration into eastern Siberia, and about Chinese naval intentions in the northern-Pacific Arctic region. As Chinese power grows in the coming decades, Russian anxieties are only likely to expand, too. During the Cold War, Washington was so intent on opposing communism around the globe that it ignored the emerging split in the Sino-Soviet relationship throughout the 1960s, until Richard Nixon finally exploited the opportunity when he met Mao in 1972. Some conservatives would have America make the same mistake again. Russia will never be a close partner to the U.S., but its own competition with Beijing will afford Washington opportunities to peel Russia away from China on the occasional issue. At the very least, the U.S. should be at pains to avoid pushing the two countries together by treating them as a new authoritarian axis.

  When it comes to finding more common ground with the large democracies in the developing world, the prospects are actually much better than their voting record at the UN over the last few years would suggest. Beneath the surface, there has been something of a revolution in political attitudes in the developing world toward human rights and outside interference in crises. Two decades ago, the dominant position in Africa and Latin America was an energetic defense of the Westphalian order and its rigid interpretation of sovereignty. There was little appetite for interference, and strong opposition to collective commitments on human rights. The Cold War had only added to the distaste for being manipulated by great powers. In recent years, however, there has been a gradual but important shift in attitude toward the sorts of ideas the U.S. and Europe would like to see at
the heart of the international system—not just toward democracy and the rule of law, but also toward regional agreements on human rights. Many developing countries have come to see the maintenance of stable democracies in their region as a bulwark against instability. In 2000, the African Union rejected the idea of nonintervention in favor of a concept it defined as “non-indifference”—a slightly vague formulation, to be sure, but one that leaves open the possibility of intervening in the event of crimes against humanity. Since 1997, no government that has come to power through a coup has been allowed to participate in an African Union summit. The organization’s limitations may have been exposed when it was tasked with running the peacekeeping operation in Darfur. But in terms of the political philosophy, the shift has been marked.

  In recent years, the Arab League has also sharply changed its approach to outside intervention, eagerly backing the U.S.-led operation in Libya and working energetically to encourage stronger measures against the Syrian regime in the face of opposition from China and Russia. Turkey, another important new swing state, joined forces with the Arab League in its efforts. Something similar has also been happening in South America, with Brazil in the lead. Mercosur, the regional grouping, has twice threatened coup plotters in Paraguay with expulsion, maintaining that only democracies can be members (although its criteria for democracy have been elastic enough to include Venezuela). In 2004, Brazil sent peacekeepers to Haiti under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which allows for the use of force. Across the developing world, there has been a steady erosion of support for the idea that national sovereignty should be defended at all costs. A political corner has been turned.