History does not repeat itself, Mark Twain once said, but it does rhyme. The parallels between early-twentieth-century Germany and early-twenty-first-century China are close enough that concerns that China will follow the German path in challenging the international status quo, which could provoke a confrontation with the United States, are not groundless. But the differences between the two countries and the two eras are substantial enough, and the barriers to disruptive Chinese international conduct robust enough, to make a repetition of the fateful and destructive geopolitics of a hundred years ago anything but certain. China has a number of substantial incentives to accommodate itself to the existing international order that Germany lacked. Indeed, it may be that an end to, rather than the continuation of, China’s economic success would turn that country into a threat to peace in East Asia.
The weakening, let alone the end, of the communist regime’s proudest achievement, rapid economic growth, would remove one of its two principal sources of political legitimacy, forcing it to rely, in order to remain in power, on the other one: nationalism. An attack on Taiwan without a Taiwanese declaration of independence, if it should occur, is likely to arise from an effort by the government in Beijing to whip up nationalist sentiment to distract the population from hard economic times.
If, for whatever reason, China should come to threaten its neighbors, the United States would have to retrace its strategic footsteps, forsaking the post–Cold War task of reassurance for the more demanding, dangerous, and expensive Cold War mission of deterrence. In that case, the resources available to support deterrence would be less generous than during the Cold War. The United States would also labor under the handicap, in carrying out such a policy, of depending on China to fund a large part of its chronic current account deficit. It is not easy for a country to be on harsh terms with its banker.
If the deterrence of China became necessary, Washington would certainly try to form as broad a coalition as possible. It would seek to include in such a coalition not only its formal Asian allies, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea, but also the countries with which it has cultivated informal but increasingly close bilateral and military ties, such as Vietnam and India. With China’s growing economic importance, however, and in the absence of the mortal threat that communist China, with its revolutionary Maoist ideology, posed to the rest of Asia, it is unclear how many of them the United States would be able to enlist in the anti-Chinese cause.
“Let China sleep,” Napoleon once said. “When she wakes up, the world will be sorry.” In the last part of the twentieth century China awakened and the result has been, on balance, good, not bad, for the world. The balance of global gains and losses from this epic event, however, could still shift into the negative column: China could follow a German course, using its growing geopolitical weight to try to refashion the international order in East Asia in ways that threaten the interests of other countries. A revisionist course is not the likeliest direction for China but it is far from impossible.
Either an economically very successful and therefore self-confident Chinese regime or an economically very unsuccessful and therefore beleaguered one could well be tempted to assert itself in East Asia in ways its neighbors find unacceptable, perhaps even threatening, a temptation that America’s reduced fiscal circumstances could enhance. For the Chinese government’s decisions about whether and how to act on such a temptation would be affected by the resistance it would expect to encounter. That resistance would depend heavily on American political confidence, the American capacity to attract allies, and the size and power of the American military forces in the region. Each of these, in turn, will depend on how much money the United States has to spend in East Asia, and in the second decade of the twenty-first century and beyond, it will have less than in the past.
Still, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, if the People’s Republic of China had not yet fully become what American officials hoped it would eventually be—an international stakeholder committed to upholding existing global economic and security norms and contributing to their upkeep—neither did it explicitly oppose, and commit itself to overturning, these American-supported international norms. This was something that could not be said with anything like the same degree of confidence about the other large, strategically located, and formerly communist potential disturber of the international peace: Russia.
RUSSIA
Russia’s importance comes from its size—it is geographically the world’s largest country—its substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons, which rivals that of the United States, its considerable reserves of minerals, especially oil and natural gas, and its location. It is part of the world’s three most strategically important regions: the Middle East—the Persian Gulf with its even greater energy reserves lies to Russia’s southeast; East Asia, via the country’s long Pacific coastline and border with China; and Europe, where Russia has functioned as a great power since the time of the tsar Peter the Great in the seventeenth century.
Moreover, Russia was for almost all of its history until the last decade of the twentieth century part of a multinational empire in which Russians ruled other peoples, an empire that for centuries expanded from its Muscovite core eastward and southward until it reached the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. Ultimately it came to span eleven time zones. During the Cold War, Soviet control also extended far into Europe, to the middle of Germany to the west and the Balkans to the south. The drive to conquer territory and the experience of ruling non-Russians against their will is thus normal, not exceptional, in Russian history.
China’s historical international greatness is for all twenty-first-century Chinese a distant memory: the country’s era of international and even regional primacy had come to an end by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Russia’s years of imperial glory as the core of one of the world’s two superpowers, by contrast, fall within the living memories of most Russians. In 1991, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia suffered a steep and painful decline in international power and status. Resentment of that decline lingers among many Russians, fueling a wish among some to reverse the course of recent history.
Russia had become, at the end of the first decade of the present century, more overtly committed to altering the global status quo than China. Russian leaders expressed more explicitly than their Chinese counterparts their unhappiness with the international distribution of power and influence. They expressed particular discontent with what they regarded as the undue importance of the United States, occasionally revealing their belief that it was deliberate American policy to weaken and perhaps even dismember Russia. The most powerful Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, publicly described the fall of the Soviet Union, which left the United States as the sole surviving superpower but also liberated 150 million non-Russians from Russian rule and 150 million Russians from the tyranny of the Communist Party, as the single greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.
The regime in Moscow came to regard the fourteen non-Russian former republics of the Soviet Union, which all became independent countries in 1991, as an area of special Russian geopolitical prerogatives, calling them, collectively, Russia’s “Near Abroad.” Russian president Dimitri Medvedev asserted that the region was one of “privileged interest” for his country, suggesting the ambition to exercise some degree of control there.
In August 2008, Russia fought a brief war with Georgia, one of the countries in the Near Abroad, defeating its small army and effectively ratifying the status as Russian protectorates of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two small pieces of territory legally recognized as part of Georgia. Russian leaders also occasionally proclaimed that they bear special responsibility for the more than 15 million ethnic Russians who live outside the borders of the Russian Federation. Many of these Russians live in neighboring Ukraine, whose independence some in Russia itself find difficult to accept after more than three centuries of Ukrainian inclusion in a larg
er Russian state. Adolf Hitler’s professed concern for Germans living outside Germany, it is perhaps worth noting, provided one of the rationales for the Nazi drive to the east in World War II.
Beyond what was once the Soviet Union, Russia has tried to exert its influence by manipulating its supplies of energy to European countries. Politically motivated interruptions in supply were presumably part of the Russian design to reassert itself globally by becoming an “energy superpower.”
Russian leaders may regret the passing of the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union and the policies it carried out (for which these same leaders also profess nostalgia) produced the Cold War, which divided Europe into two armed camps and sowed conflict throughout the rest of the world. The creeping expansion of NATO toward Russia’s borders, and Russia’s resistance to it, re-creates one of the Cold War’s signal features. All of this suggests that Russia’s policies—some of them, to be sure, in part the consequence of American policies—may push the United States to readopt an expensive policy of containment in Europe just as it enters a period of straitened fiscal circumstances. During the Cold War, NATO’s Western European allies shared the burden of containing the Soviet Union. If a new policy of containment were to become necessary, the Europeans, encumbered with large welfare states and slow growth rates, dependent on Russian natural gas and, partly for that reason, ambivalent about the dangers Russia poses, might well be reluctant to contribute to it.
As with China there are reasons to doubt that Russia will mount a stiff challenge to the American-led security order in Europe, although they are not all the same reasons as those that will likely restrain China. The principal difference between the two countries is that while China is a rising power, Russia is a declining one. China is destined to become stronger as the twenty-first century unfolds: Russia is likely to grow weaker.
The collapse of the Soviet Union left a Russian successor state with half the Soviet population, whose major demographic trend works against its aspirations for great international influence. The country is shrinking. It has a high mortality rate and thus an unusually low life expectancy—less than sixty years for males—due to epidemics of cardiovascular disease and alcoholism and to widespread tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Like all European countries, Russia has a low birthrate. Its population is therefore decreasing, by 700,000 people each year. Russia is on course to lose 20 million people between 1990 and 2025 and by 2050 may have a population of only 100 million rather than the 150 million it had at the dawn of the post-Soviet era in 1991.
Nor are its economic prospects much brighter. Its national income soared in the first decade of the twenty-first century because of a rapid rise in the price of energy, of which it is a major exporter. The authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin did nothing during these boom years, however, to cultivate other sources of economic growth, making Russia’s economic fortunes hostage to the price of fossil fuels.
Nor did the Putin regime, despite its sometimes bellicose rhetoric, take the opportunity that its energy windfall presented to rebuild to any significant extent the armed forces that had collapsed, along with the other institutions that had served the Soviet Union, after 1991. A country with, in effect, a one-crop economy, a shrinking population, and modest non-nuclear military forces is not a strong candidate to wield great power in the international system.
Nor, even if the country were (or were likely to become) stronger than it is, would it be easy for Russia to resume its long career as an imperial state. In the two decades following the end of the Soviet Union the territories that once were imperial possessions solidified their common status as independent countries, with working institutions—imperfect ones, to be sure, in most cases—and distinct national identities.
Finally, although the Russian economy has, aside from energy, performed less well than the Chinese one, like the Chinese economy it has the potential to restrain aggressive foreign policies in two ways. First, like China, Russia depends on the American-centered open international economic order. Without access to well-functioning global markets the country’s major source of revenue—energy—would lose much of its value. Second, in Russia, as in China and as in every country, the working of a market economy tends, over the long term, to create the basis for political democracy, and democracies tend to carry out more cooperative, less aggressive policies toward their neighbors than do authoritarian governments of the kind that Russia had in 2010.
A Russian challenge to regional security arrangements that exerts pressure on the United States to make costly and therefore politically difficult increases in its contribution to European security is not, therefore, the most probable course for Russian foreign policy in the second decade of the twenty-first century and beyond. But such a challenge is far from impossible, and, like a comparable Chinese challenge in East Asia, it would require an American shift from a policy of reassurance back to one of deterrence. If a challenge should occur, it is more likely to arise out of Russian weakness than Russian strength. As in China, the political legitimacy that Russia’s undemocratic regime enjoys rests on two pillars: economic success and an ostentatious commitment to defend the nation’s interests against allegedly predatory foreigners.
To the extent that the economy falters and Putin or his successors come to rely on showy displays of nationalism, they are more likely to initiate quarrels with their neighbors. Russian weakness will make the kind of leaders it had in the first decade of the new century more inclined to contest the existing world order. As with its Chinese counterpart, whether and how the Russian government acts on such inclinations will depend on the resistance it anticipates meeting, which will in turn depend greatly on how much resistance the United States is able to muster.
In theory, the United States and its European allies have already made provision for such a contingency by expanding their alliance, NATO, eastward. In fact, NATO offers at best a weak and uncertain hedge against Russian revisionism in Europe. For one thing, membership has conspicuously not been offered to the most likely victims of Russian predation, Ukraine and Georgia. The alliance has declined to include them, contrary to American declarations that no country (except Russia itself) would be excluded, precisely because Russia’s strenuous objections made it clear that a commitment to defend these particular countries might actually have to be honored one day. Furthermore, as NATO expansion proceeded, the American Congress and the American public were reassured by the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations that the addition of new members would require no additional American military deployments, no further resources for European security, and no sacrifice of any kind from Americans. These political circumstances combine with the impending economic constraints on public policies of all kinds to make the United States less than ideally positioned to discourage and, if it should occur, to hold in check a Russian challenge to twenty-first-century European security arrangements. NATO expansion has given the United States the worst of both worlds: it has made dangerous Russian behavior more likely while rendering America less capable of responding effectively to such behavior.
To summarize: China and Russia are the two countries in a position to turn the economic constraints that will bind the United States into a setback and, in the worst case, a disaster for international security. A challenge to regional security arrangements by either or both is not inconceivable: each has grievances against the status quo in its own neighborhood and globally. Because the United States acts as the chief supporter of the status quo in East Asia, Europe, and the world at large, and because American foreign policy will have to operate under stricter limits than at any time in the past seven decades, such a challenge would come at a particularly inopportune moment in world history. The forces discouraging such a challenge do seem on balance to be stronger than the ones pushing China and Russia toward policies that would provoke a confrontation with the United States. The twenty-first century seems tilted toward peace, but this tilt is scarcely irreversible, and if it should be reversed, America�
�s fiscal position will hamper efforts to cope with the reversal.
To put it another way, as long as the world’s security and economic orders depend ultimately on the United States to sustain them, and the active exercise of American power is limited by economic considerations, global security and prosperity may be said to rest on something of a bluff. China and Russia are the countries in a position to call that bluff. The odds are—insofar as it is possible to calculate odds on the unknowable geopolitical future and the direction of the internal politics of two large, complicated countries with secretive governments—that neither will do so; but this is merely probable, not certain.
Even in that best case, however, even without the revival of the classic, age-old cut and thrust of ambition and fear backed by military force among the great powers of the international system, the danger of aggressive foreign policies with potentially far-reaching, damaging consequences will not have disappeared from the face of the earth. That danger will still be present in yet another part of the world where the United States has come to play an important, and expensive, military and political role: the Middle East.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE HEART OF GEOPOLITICS
THE MIDDLE EAST
During the Cold War, of all the world’s regions Europe and East Asia mattered most for American security policy. It was there that the United States deployed the majority of its armed forces. The war they were prepared to wage in Europe fortunately never took place, but America did become engaged in two serious conflicts in East Asia. By the first decade of the twenty-first century the focus of global security and American security policy had shifted to the Middle East. This region, consisting of the Arab world and the territory surrounding the Persian Gulf including Iran, had become the main theater of American military operations. As such, it was the focus of what are normally the most economically expensive and politically controversial foreign policies that a country undertakes. The major test of the American capacity to sustain the main elements of its global role in an era of economic scarcity will come in the Middle East.
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