AS I wrote the last post it occurred to me that it might be interesting to speculate about the desired world order for each of the United States, Russia, and China. I suspect I’ll get the most disagreement about what I think our preferred world order is.
Basically, I think that you can get a glimpse of the U. S.’s preferred world order by considering the world between 1988 and 1993 or, to stretch things a bit, until 1999. The U. S. was clearly the preeminent world power. We were prosperous. We had successfully negotiated a free trade agreement with Canada and, building upon that, with Mexico. When we went to war it was with UN Security Council authority. It was the apogee of internationalists’ aspirations.
IMO things began to go downhill with Security Council Resolution 678. The United States persuaded the Soviet Union to support 678 which gave Iraq a deadline for withdrawing from Kuwait after which Iraq would be removed “by all necessary means”.
Basically, from our perspective all of the systems put in place after World War II were working as they should.
I do not believe that Americans in general are particularly interested in other countries and by preference are not expansionary.
Both China and Russia are irredentist meaning that they want to restore vanished glory. It’s easier to describe China’s objectives than Russia’s. China wants to restore its Qing Dynasty borders which includes Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, and parts of Central and East Asia including areas presently parts of Russia, North Korea, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, India, and Pakistan. It wants to be respected as the world’s preeminent nation and the top members of the CCP and their families want to be rich.
Russia wants the restoration of Byelorussia and Ukraine (or at least parts of them). It wants to be acknowledged as the champions of
Russians
Slavs
people of the Orthodox faith
in that order. It wants to be free of threats which, in Russia’s paranoid way, means that any country that borders Russia must either be neutral or a Russian vassal.
It should be obvious that those preferred orders are not consistent with one another. We could probably come to a modus vivendi with Russia. We cannot come to one with China.
The Han Empire won’t be satisfied with the Qing Dynasty borders. Expansionist regimes by their very nature continue to expand until they are forceably stopped or when expansion becomes ruinously expensive (and often not even then). Obvious low-hanging fruit would be the rest of Korea, Singapore (Han), and more chunks of Siberia.
Ditto Russia. Worse is once they vassalize or neutralize all neighboring countries they will necessarily need to vassalize and neutralize countries bordering Russian vassals, and so on.
Islam is quite irredentist. A stated first step for ISIS and Al-Qaeda was recovery of the lost lands (Span, Sicily, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the old Crimean Khanate, the former lands of the Golden Horde) followed by the rest of the world.
Is it a surprise that those who hold power in Moscow, Beijing, DC all want a world where their power is maximized?
The more interesting question is what do the people of US, China, Russia want (if they had a free choice)?