Bipolarity Returns

There’s plenty to chew on in Andrew Michta’s recent article in The American Interest:

How we see ourselves is not how our adversaries see us, and perhaps more importantly, how we see them is not how they see themselves. When it comes to Russia and China, we have been laboring under a core misconception: that economic modernization would lead to a greater demand for political participation of the kind we find familiar; and that this, in turn, would yield a kind of universal global culture that at its most basic would be at least recognizably “quasi-Western.” The key theory that underpins this worldview, simply put, is that institutions ultimately trump culture. The bold post-Cold War liberal claims—that history had been conquered by economics and institutions, and that culture, in turn, adapts—stand some comparison to the ideological certitude of Marxist revolutionaries of the early 20th century who believed they had unlocked the inner workings of human progress.

In the wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the goal of “state-building”—which involved laying the institutional foundations for representative democratic government—has been seen as a self-evidently desirable strategic end state. That these projects have foundered has been acknowledged among more introspective analysts, but even among them, the goal itself has rarely come into question. From a wider perspective, our misadventures in state-building have been costly but ultimately affordable blunders and distractions. But our certainty in the inevitable triumph of liberalism has cost us dearly in our dealings with China, and to a certain extent Russia as well. Since the end of the Cold War, the Chinese have benefitted from decades of unfettered access to American technology and research, while Russia has leveraged America’s preoccupation with counterterrorism to reclaim its sphere of privileged interest along its periphery. Until recently neither was questioned on strategic grounds, since the direction of history was properly understood.

But the ideology was more than just strategically harmful. It provided a set of palatable self-delusions that have hurt us much more profoundly. “Globalization” was a tidy way to explain away concessions on technology and knowledge transfer made to Beijing for the sake of the balance sheet. Short-horizon money-making was given a patina of virtue since it was thought to be fueling systemic modernization. Corporate greed was allowed to masquerade as a respectable ideology. We are now reaping the rewards of this self-delusion. The de-industrialization of America, with the attendant breakdown of our traditional societal bonds, is but the most glaring and politically salient example. Unlike the not insignificant costs surrounding failed state-building, however, these cannot simply be written off. We have been significantly weakened as a society.

How did we get here? A combination of wishful thinking, avarice, and reflexive antagonism. Russia didn’t have to be our adversary. Even in the article Mr. Michta claims that the Russians invaded Georgia 12 years ago. That isn’t what the European investigators determined. They decided that the Georgians had started the war and the Russians had responded.

The wishful thinking was in believing that China would modernize its economy and adopt liberal values along with it. They didn’t. The avarice resides in 98% of the economic surplus from offshoring manufacturing, mostly to China, was captured by producers. I’ve already provided an example of reflexive antagonism. IMO we have far too many Poles and Ukrainians informing our foreign policy with respect to Russia. I wonder who’s informing our Iran policy?

It didn’t help that we sapped our military strength, not to mention our reputation, by decades of quixotic campaigns to create liberal democracies were there weren’t even nations.

We aren’t doomed to a bipolar world and decline is not inevitable but it will be a lot harder and less fun to build ourselves back up than it was to tear ourselves down.

God, I miss Walt Kelly.