In the eyes of others, the US is not the benign power it thinks it is

Dani Rodrik

• America’s foreign policy goals are often self-serving, while its designs for a rules-based international order primarily reflect the interests of its business and policy elites
• What’s good for the US may not be good for the world. The sooner Washington recognises that, the better

When I started teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School in the mid-1980s, competition with Japan was the dominant preoccupation of US economic policy. The book Japan as Number One by Harvard’s premier Japan expert at the time, Ezra Vogel, set the tone of the debate.

I remember being struck back then by the degree to which the discussion, even among academics, was tinged by a certain sense of American entitlement to international pre-eminence. The United States could not let Japan dominate key industries and had to respond with its own industrial and trade policies – not just because these might help the US economy, but also because the US simply could not be No 2.

Until then, I had thought that aggressive nationalism was a feature of the Old World – insecure societies ill at ease with their international standing and reeling from real or perceived historical injustices. American elites, rich and secure, may have valued patriotism, but their global outlook tended towards cosmopolitanism.

But zero-sum nationalism was not far from the surface, which became clear once America’s place atop the global economic totem pole was threatened.

After three decades of US triumphalism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, a similar process is now playing out on a vastly greater scale. It is driven both by China’s rise – which represents a more significant economic challenge to America than Japan did in the 1980s and is also a geopolitical risk – and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The US has responded to these developments by seeking to reassert its global primacy – a goal American policymakers readily conflate with that of establishing a more secure and prosperous world. They regard US leadership as central to the promotion of democracy, open markets and a rules-based international order.

What could be more conducive to peace and prosperity than that? The view that US foreign policy goals are fundamentally benign underpins the myth of American exceptionalism: what is good for the US is good for the world.

While this is undoubtedly true at times, the myth too often blinds American policymakers to the reality of how they exercise power. The US undermines other democracies when it suits its interests and has a long record of meddling in sovereign countries’ domestic politics. Its 2003 invasion of Iraq was as clear a violation of the United Nations Charter as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.

US designs for “open markets” and a “rules-based international order” often primarily reflect the interests of US business and policy elites rather than smaller countries’ aspirations. And when international rules diverge from those interests, the US simply stays away (as with the International Criminal Court, or most of the core International Labour Organization conventions).

Many of these tensions were evident in a recent speech by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on America’s approach to China. Blinken described China as “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”, arguing that “Beijing’s vision would move us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress”.

Blinken is correct that many of the elements of the post-World-War-II order, such as the UN Charter, are not purely American or Western. But it is far from certain that China poses a greater threat to those truly universal constructs than the US does. For example, much of the trouble that US policymakers have with Chinese economic practices relates to domains – especially trade, investment and technology – where universal rules hardly prevail.

According to Blinken, the US “will shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system”. Again, who could possibly oppose such a vision?

But China and many others worry that US intentions are much less benign. To them, Blinken’s statement sounds like a threat to contain China and limit its options, while bullying other countries into siding with America.

None of this is to claim an equivalence between current US actions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s gross human rights violations in Xinjiang and land grabs in the Himalayas and South China Sea.

For all its faults, the US is a democracy where critics can openly criticise and oppose the government’s foreign policy. But that makes little difference to countries treated as pawns in America’s geopolitical competition with China, which often struggle to distinguish between the global actions of major powers.

Blinken drew a clear link between China’s authoritarian practices and the country’s presumed threat to global order. This is a mirror-image projection of America’s belief in its own benign exceptionalism. But just as democracy at home does not imply goodwill abroad, domestic repression need not inevitably lead to external aggression. China also claims to be interested in a stable, prosperous global order – just not one arranged exclusively on US terms.

The irony is that the more the US treats China as a threat and attempts to isolate it, the more China’s responses will seem to validate America’s fears.

With the US seeking to convene a club of democracies openly opposing China, it is not surprising that President Xi Jinping cosied up to Putin just as Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine. As the journalist Robert Wright notes, countries excluded from such groupings will band together.

To those who wonder why we should care about the decline of America’s relative power, US foreign policy elites respond with a rhetorical question: would you rather live in a world dominated by the US or by China?

In truth, other countries would rather live in a world without domination, where smaller states retain a fair degree of autonomy, have good relations with all others, are not forced to choose sides, and do not become collateral damage when major powers fight it out.

The sooner US leaders recognise that others do not view America’s global ambitions through the same rose-tinted glasses, the better it will be for everyone.

Dani Rodrik is professor of international political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Copyright: Project Syndicate

Russia-Ukraine war: Europe failed by not building alliances with Asia

Chandran Nair

• After outsourcing its security to the US and Nato, Europe now finds itself in a pseudo-proxy war. Asia should learn from this lack of strategic leadership
• European leaders lacked the spine to embrace China, India or Russia with an independent foreign policy – instead drinking deeply from America’s warlike doctrine

Lost in the fog of war is the truth that the Russia-Ukraine crisis has revealed the failings of Europe’s leaders on two fronts.

First, why did they not see this coming? Because they are in denial about the nature of their subservient relationship with an increasingly reckless and hegemonic United States.

Second, why do they maintain this relationship with America? Because they lack the spine to embrace the alternative: an independent foreign policy on a more equal standing with the rest of the world – especially with Asian powers such as China and India.

If Europe, with its history of triggering global wars, is to move towards peace once more then it must first face up to these leadership failings and chart a new course based on something more than narrow alliances rooted in a shared European heritage and race.

Wars must be avoided at all cost and it takes true leadership to maintain peace, not ideological posturing and pandering to special relationships. Countries always act in their self-interest – the protection of national security, for example – but in this instance the leaders of Europe failed to protect their citizens by imposing a national security threat upon Russia.

This is not a defence of Vladimir Putin. Instigating war and its horrors is unforgivable, and he must be held responsible for his actions. But we should not be blindsided: it is a geopolitical reality that any country would feel its national security was at risk when faced with a military coalition, which it cannot join, expanding towards its borders. This type of provocation is intolerable and Western leaders should not have expected it to be endured.

Yet many in the West still arrogantly believe all other nations must mirror their ideologies and are deserving of antagonism if they do not. This stance is naively insufficient for a multipolar, globalised world that is sadly also overmilitarised – something Europe should have already recognised.

If China, India or Venezuela began a process similar to Nato’s expansion with their neighbouring countries, it would cause geopolitical uproar – the mere presence of Chinese ships at the edges of the South China Sea triggers anti-China sentiment from the West.

War is avoided through diplomacy, communication, and an acute understanding of the fears and concerns of others. Leaders in Asia understand this, for the most part, given the wars the region has endured – many of which have their roots in the colonial era – and as such, they invariably push for peace and not military escalation. Witness Southeast Asia, which since the end of the Vietnam war – fought to liberate the country from centuries of foreign domination – has not seen a major conflict. Despite the presence of foreign military powers like the US, the region has maintained a non-aligned foreign policy and tried not to take sides.

America’s determination to dominate Asia militarily has typically been justified by a carefully crafted and crafty narrative that Asian nations are apparently incapable of building and enjoying peace without the military presence of the most warlike nation on the planet.

Europe’s leaders have gone to great lengths to conceal their lack of leadership by transforming Putin into a pariah and even calling for regime change, instead of pursuing a diplomatic approach. In doing so, they and the international commentators that echo them abdicate responsibility for not pre-empting the war; they can instead lay the blame entirely at Putin’s door and paint him as a movie-style villain. So it was with Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and anyone else seen as unsavoury by the West. The same treatment is now being meted out to Chinese President Xi Jinping. But diplomacy means forging friendships, even with enemies, to avoid catastrophic outcomes. This simple logic and calculus was cast aside as Europe outsourced its security to the US and Nato.

Which leads us to the first front: European leaders were helpless to prevent this war from occurring because of their coveted close relationship with America.

This relationship is ultimately predicated on a shared European heritage and the post-war ideological unification of the US and Europe as leaders of the “free world”, which the rest of the world now largely sees as an outdated coalition of Caucasian nations spearheaded by the Anglosphere. Europe – Britain especially – has desperately tried to maintain this “special” relationship with big brother America in recent decades, leading many European leaders to outsource decision-making to Washington on issues of geopolitical importance, from interventions in the Middle East to trade agreements, economic restructuring, and sanctions. This in turn further emboldened the US and encouraged its belligerence.

It has also prevented Europe’s leaders from creating an independent strategic foreign policy approach that places them in control of their own regional security. A key tenet of this strategy should have been cultivating ties with Russia and China 20 years ago to build world peace. Instead, the Europeans chose to tether themselves to an insecure America and allow themselves to be drawn into an ideological partnership of global dominance and supremacy, based on Cold War mindsets – a position that is singularly unsuited to guarding Europe’s self-interest and its critically important role in the emerging post-Western world.

Europe saw China simply as a trading partner and a threat, rather than an ally. More often than not, it chose to follow the prescriptions of the US – a country that has been at war for much of its existence, and that allows domestic politics to become the catalyst for militaristic intervention in other parts of the world.

Rather than working with Russia to prioritise peace, European leaders drank deeply from US doctrine and ultimately capitulated to it. Now, Europe is caught in a bind: looking to American foreign policy as its North Star when this was what got it into this unnecessary war in the first place. After all, the US is unlikely to come to Europe’s aid if the conflict worsens – funding and weapons are one thing, but ground, naval, and air support against another nuclear power is not on America’s agenda. And there is no reason to expect a domestically insecure Joe Biden will sue for peace when he is desperate to strengthen his position with the American public by showing how tough and righteous he is. If that means war in Europe against one of America’s detractors, so be it.

The business of war

European leaders should have been acutely aware that the US has the largest military-industrial complex in the world. Since 9/11, one-third to one-half of the Pentagon’s US$14 trillion in spending has gone to for-profit defence contractors, while dozens of members of Congress and their families own millions of dollars’ worth of stock in these companies. America is the most capitalist country in the world, and the arms industry is big business. But the market can only grow if conflict and military expenditure increase around the world. For European leaders to be aware of this and not act accordingly is a failure of strategic leadership. There is a lesson here for Asia, too: make military spending a large part of your national budget and economy, and ruin awaits on many fronts.

Why did the Europeans not act on this knowledge? Answering this question brings us to the second front: they do not have the backbone to stand up to Washington and sacrifice elements of their relationship with the US, which offers them a disproportionate place in the global hierarchy of nations, so they can be free of American influence in their affairs. By the same token, how much longer will Japan kowtow to a US foreign policy that is increasingly dictated by neocons and instead forge one that is independent and built with its Asian neighbours?

It should have been clear to the Europeans since the turn of the millennium that America’s political system was beginning to become a destabilising global force, rather than a unifying one. Yet no European leader has taken concrete steps to limit US interventionism or create an independent foreign-policy approach. The result is that Europe now finds itself in a pseudo-proxy war with Russia – a conflict that is right on its doorstep, not in some faraway place in the Middle East or Asia.

Where is the European leader willing to call this out with one simple statement? And better yet, follow it up with diplomatic action? What is the principle that European leaders think they are defending when negotiations break down and lives continue to be lost?

Moral posturing

Europe’s lack of leadership was not much talked about before the crisis. But just as war has united the West in its desperation to maintain the anachronistic “struggle of light over dark” (an actual quote from The Economist to describe the conflict) that so defines its moral posturing, so has it given voice to those observers and commentators seeking to bring periphery conversations to the surface. European leaders should heed such opinions, even if they are a departure from the actions of their forebears.

Europe should come to terms with the end of empire, and centuries of privilege, and reach out to Asian powers that are going to shape the course of the 21st century. That means making allies of China, India, and Indonesia – total population 3 billion – rather than condescendingly viewing them as former colonies not worthy of a “special” relationship. They may not share a common European heritage, but do such archaic and even racist ideas still matter in the 21st century?

Europe needs to come to terms with the harsh reality that America is not on its side, because what drives the US geopolitically is ultimately domestic gain – both bolstering its position as global hegemon and retaining its economic privileges, such as its dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Asian leaders, meanwhile, need to understand that despite the significant build-up of US military power in the region over the last half-century, it is not in their best interests to allow “Nato-isation” to occur. Asia needs to work collectively to curb US military expansion and make sure Washington understands that the region is not made up of client states, and is in fact capable of maintaining peace without outsourcing its security like the Europeans.

After spouting righteous rhetoric against Russia and Putin, European leaders are finding themselves face-to-face with militaristic escalation that they are not equipped to deal with. This is not a war that generals marched into; it is a war that politicians lacking strategic leadership skills allowed to happen. Across Asia, political leaders need to be aware of this all important lesson.

Chandran Nair is founder and CEO of the Global Institute for Tomorrow and member of the Club of Rome’s executive committee. He is also the author of ‘Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World’ and ‘The Sustainable State: The Future of Government, Economy and Society’.

American aggression needs to be reined in for the good of Asia and the world

 Chandran Nair

• Decades of exceptionalism, ideological obsessions and a deep-rooted sense of superiority is catching up with the United States
• The world needs to appreciate the rapid shifts in the global order arising from the US’ toxic domestic situation, and how its political elite distracts people from its decline with an aggressive foreign policy anchored in outdated doctrines

US President Joe Biden visited Asia last week and triggered panic across the region when he spoke out of turn and unproductively about war with China.

At a time when the world is reeling from the effects of the war in Ukraine and when so much of the region is still trying to recover from the pandemic, including the economic fallout, Biden chose not to speak about peace and collaboration but instead deliberately fuelled tensions. This is unconscionable.

It is high time for leaders of the region to no longer remain passive to such bullying and reckless behaviour, or worse, exude subservience in the presence of Western leaders by outsourcing the management of regional issues and differences to them, including bilateral tensions.

Biden’s comments brought into clear focus Washington’s fearful obsession over the rise of China, which is an unprecedented challenge to its assumed role as global leader. This challenge is made much more uncomfortable for the US and its Western allies by the fact China is a non-Caucasian civilisation, and its rise upturns 400 years of Western dominance of world affairs, often referred to as the “rules-based” global order.

But the truth is that decades of exceptionalism, ideological obsessions and a deep-rooted sense of superiority is catching up with the US. There exists a major frontline within the nation that is tearing it apart but about which its leaders remain in full denial.

As soon as Biden returned to the US after his warmongering mission to Asia, he was greeted by the latest in an ongoing tragedy at home – 21 people, including 19 children, killed by a domestic terrorist armed by America’s home-grown merchants of death, the gun industry.

Biden’s response was to scold the nation, by lamenting, “When are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” A plea of a helpless man, coming from supposedly the world’s most powerful leader.

What, therefore, gives Biden the right to posture as the leader of the so-called free world? His statements are primarily based on an outdated reliance on projecting America’s military might and apparent willingness to go to war to defend the world against the US version of the “bad guys”. This is despite its defeat in all the major wars it has triggered over the last half a century, from Vietnam and Iraq to Afghanistan. All examples of people seeking to be free of foreign occupation.

The long-held fear across Asia of a reckless militaristic empire starting a war here is quickly being replaced by a new realisation and awakening: that all of these machinations are the desperate throes of a nation that is entirely unwilling to share power with others, and is internally wracked by conflict and social decline.

The US thus desperately seeks refuge or even reassurance in its self-appointed role as leader of the “free world”, driven by a desperate desire to retain its privileges by projecting aggression across the world.

Much of this hinges on the leveraging of fig leaves, such as leading the fight against authoritarian states, defending democracy or standing up for universal values and providing security guarantees for the nations of the world.

But in reality, the US is seemingly incapable of protecting even its children. So, Biden came to Asia, spoke and war mongered but he did not conquer. People across the world have begun to see through the veneer of American exceptionalism, as the bullying and intimidation has persisted for too long.

The hypocrisy is far too obvious to explain away. This is a tipping point, as formerly colonised populations around the world – subservient through centuries of indoctrination – are now beginning to see the emperor with no clothes on.

To understand the implications of the decline of the US on the rest of the world, one has to understand the true nature of the broken state of affairs. This means looking well beyond the supposed might of the American economy.

The reliance on economic performance indicators to assess the strength of the US and amplify its power, glosses over deep-rooted structural failings, and this is a grave mistake – and even a form of denial. These are wholly superficial and inappropriate indicators of a society’s well-being and resilience.

A true reflection of the realities in the US would include the following indicators:

• The unabated gun violence and the killing of its children, to which a corrupt political system has been unresponsive. A nation that cannot protect its children from such wanton slaughter is immoral and has no right lecturing the world about values, human rights or democracy.

• The continuing large-scale systemic discrimination of black people, including killings such as the one in Buffalo.

• An entrenched industrial military complex (IMC) that thrives on selling and exporting guns, weapons and war.

• A growing right-wing white supremacist movement now led by the former President who only last week sharing a post speaking about an impending civil war – incitement?

• Extreme and growing inequalities, yet a completely detached belief among the majority that a “thriving economy”, which in reality serves the very rich, represents success and progress. This is worsened by the degree of idolisation in American media.

• The widespread and slow death being inflicted on millions of Americans by the nature of their consumption habits, abetted by the structure of the US’ unfettered capitalist economy – in particular the stranglehold of the junk food and pharmaceutical industry. The Covid-19 pandemic further exposed the severity of this underlying health crisis.

• A public that is inured to foreign conflict and has scant regard for the death and destruction inflicted on non-Americans by the country’s never-ending wars.

This is not to say other countries do not have some of these issues. But none exist on this scale. Most importantly, no other country with these large scale internal challenges borne out of political failure and societal fissures seeks to relentlessly occupy the higher moral ground and impose upon or dictate to others in order to maintain economic dominance; not even China.

The world, and especially a fast-growing Asia, needs to appreciate the rapid and fundamental shifts in the global order arising from the US’ toxic domestic situation, and how its political elite distracts the world and Americans from its decline (and obvious lack of moral authority) with an aggressive foreign policy anchored in outdated doctrines. Their recklessness threatens all of us. This dangerous trend will reach a potentially catastrophic tipping point far more significant than those expressed at the World Economic Forum last week in response to the war in Ukraine.

It is time for the world, perhaps led by the large nations of Asia, to demilitarise the world of the American Military Industrial Complex (AMIC) by developing a 21st century doctrine of security and peace that is not tethered to the war machine that is the AMIC.

It is an oxymoron to talk about peace and security guarantees and expect to be led by a nation that has been at war for 93 per cent of the time since its independence and has the world’s largest defence spend – more than the next nine countries combined. With so much capital, the door is wide open for vested interests, and the defence industry has dangerously become a significant player in the US economy.

Europe is only beginning to understand, albeit rather late in the day, the consequences of outsourcing its security to a war industry with such interests, given that the AMIC now appears to have seen an opportunity to prolong the conflict in Ukraine and serve its interests.

The AMIC poses an existential threat to world peace because it has partially captured the political economy of the most powerful country on the planet.

Five of the nation’s biggest defence contractors spent a combined US$60 million to lobby the US government in 2020. The media worships military people – who have investments in defence stocks – and have them on their payroll. Many politicians have stakes in the military industrial complex, and the tech and finance industries are embedded in it.

For this reason, the US is believed to be one of the biggest threats to world peace. The military industrial complex has become so large that it does not care about winnable wars. It simply needs wars, period.

Overcoming the challenge presented by the AMIC can be compared with the task of decarbonising the world through a move towards more non-fossil fuel energy sources. It will be a long march, but the world did not start by asking the fossil fuel industry to come up with solutions, and nor does the world ever expect the sector to be fully supportive.

Instead, new frameworks and doctrines have been created for a new major transformation of our energy future. We need the same to tackle the AMIC and its natural penchant for war.

This is a massive industry with tentacles everywhere in the US, including among lawmakers, media groups and the tech and financial industry. Overseas it is omnipresent, with an unknown number of subsidiaries around the world, aided by corrupt governments who are clients.

It is no secret that defence budgets in most developing countries are where large-scale corruption is most prevalent. It is a money spinner just like the fossil fuel industry, and taming it will require bold new approaches about shaping the future of the world.

It will need to start with a revolution of the mind among Asian leaders, including the complete rejection of their subservience to the US and its Western alliance. Asian leaders should recognise that by curbing their need to emulate or seek guidance or legitimacy from America in foreign policy affairs, they will reduce opportunities to feed the AMIC and thereby sow the seeds for a less risky future based on regional self-determination.

This is the first step towards rebuffing the confrontational ideologies of the USA and it Western allies and for building a new framework that will once and for all toss the tensions of the past into the dustbin of history, which have been so expertly used by Western powers to continue to divide the nations of Asia.

This will allow for regional heavyweights like China, Japan, Korea, India, Indonesia to come together and map a new future for the region rather than continue to be actors in a divide and rule, neocolonial geopolitical theatre marshalled by the US.

It will compel a rising power like China to honour its commitment to a peaceful rise as the demilitarisation of the AMIC becomes an enabling doctrine for a new regional peace and security pact. This outcome is not a far-fetched undertaking, as the example of Asean has proven.

While far from perfect, Asean has slowly and surely built a doctrine of its own that has allowed for peaceful coexistence in a way that also works to improve the livelihoods of its people. It has, most importantly, avoided war despite the presence of the AMIC.

The behaviour of the Korean and Japanese leaders during the visit of the US president was awkward to watch and not befitting of these two great nations and their cultures and seemed to belong to a bygone era. Imagine a peace and security treaty involving China, Japan and Korea that does not involve current day security guarantees by the US and its Western allies, which to date have only served to divide and heighten tensions.

Asian leaders need to realise that a post-Western world is being born, and that means drawing new lines of alliances and steering a new course, which will be a departure from the highly dangerous drivers of US and Western intentions in the region, rooted in preserving an old archaic and even imperial order.

Ideally, Europe will be a willing partner, but it now seems unlikely as the war in Ukraine and the billions of dollars of US military aid flowing in is only going to make Europe behave like client states of the US, Nato and the AMIC.

Chandran Nair is the founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow and ExCom member of the Club of Rome. He is also the author of ‘Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World’ and ‘The Sustainable State: The Future of Government, Economy and Society’.

Chandran Nair is the founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow and ExCom member of the Club of Rome. He is also the author of ‘Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World’ and ‘The Sustainable State: The Future of Government, Economy and Society’.