Under the Dome

I materially agree with Jakub Grygiel’s Wall Street Journal op-ed but I think he’s missing something basic. His main points are that

1. The “rule-based international order” is an illusion and always has been.
2. Regional hegemons can and will break the rules.
3. Regional conflicts rarely have decisive conclusions.

Here’s a lengthy passage:

Over the past three decades these regional orders—in Europe, the Middle East and Asia—have been relatively stable and the local competitions subdued. The resulting impression was of a world order. Liberals saw this global stability as the product of international rules, a growing number of democracies, and greater international trade—a “rules-based order” enhanced by democracies and commercial peace. Realists saw a world order underwritten by a rough equilibrium between the great powers—the U.S., Russia and China—with nuclear weapons as an effective pacifying equalizer.

Both visions of world order put too much emphasis on the global nature of this stability. If we look at the world through the lens of regional orders, the picture is more worrisome.

Russia’s wars in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine since 2014, as well as Iran’s actions in Iraq, Yemen and Syria, and China’s military expansion in Asia, were signs of growing local volatility. But until now these had been tentative pushes, conducted by hesitant revisionist powers and checked by American power. Russia’s war in Ukraine is the first full-fledged military offensive that aims to change the local balance of power drastically. Russia seeks to be the decisive power in Europe, and for that it needs to dominate Ukraine.

Regional orders are fragile for two reasons. First, military force is more likely to be used in local contests than in disputes between distant rivals. The stakes are high for the local parties, the perceived risks limited. A revisionist power is likely to pursue its goals, such as conquest of territory or control over a neighboring state’s political life, through war more than through negotiations. And the revisionist power’s targets won’t accept a hostile takeover without a fight. In the end, both sides are interested less in preventing war than in making war usable for their own objectives. War is an enduring regional reality.

The U.S. tends to think of stability as a broad goal of its grand strategy. As President Biden has said, the goal is to “strive to prevent” World War III. But regional revisionists in Eurasia aren’t afraid of putting pressure on their own frontiers to extend their influence. The states they threaten will also choose war over submission, regional disorder over lost independence. The U.S. will have to figure out how to navigate, even embrace, instability and war in regions that are important to its national interests.

What he’s missing is that the “impression of a world order” he describes was created by U. S. global hegemony. As that hegemony has decreased, the perceived “rules-based order” has withered away along with it. We have helped that withering along by not conforming to the order we were purportedly trying to establish. Guess what? Other major powers chafe under the control of a global policeman particularly when the cop is on the take.

That hegemony was both military and economic and we have recklessly let both of them wither away.

Our European allies in particular have grown so used to living under that dome of U. S. hegemony they don’t recognize it for what it was. Are they coming to a rude awakening now or just pretending to? I guess time will tell. Germany is still importing a significant amount of gas from Russia every month.

IMO we have erred over the last 40 years, not just in failing to apply the rules to ourselves but in overestimating the value to us of what our European allies were willing to do and underestimating the role of the U. S. economy in keeping that dome active.