[This is a longer than usual post. It is my chapter contribution to The Great Awakenkng: New Modes of Thinking Amid the Ruins of Capitalism (2020) edited by Anna Grear & Davd Bollier. My text is preoccupied with the decline of the state as an efficient problem-solving instrument in a period where global scale challenges are generating an ethical-ecological-bio crisis. The intensity of the crisis is magnified by the absence of globally oriented geopolitical leadership, which had previously been supplied by the United States. Restored liberal internationalism would likely give more time to devise more functional responses to the gathering storm, but would not address the underlying structural causes of the crisis: predatory capitalism, global military, apathetic empathy, materialism.
I urge reading The Great Awakening and bringing the book to the attention of friends. It is an undertaking of love and commitment by the editors.
Punctum Books is a progressive, independent publisher. To learn more about its vision and the book go to its website, and check out links below:
the official press release about The Great Awakening, published by Punctum Books:
https://punctumbooks.pubpub.org/pub/the-great-awakening-edited-by-anna-grear-and-david-bollier
https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-great-awakening-new-modes-of-life-amidst-capitalist-ruins/
….and here is where you can download a (free) PDF of the book:
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/42480]
Twilight of the Nation-State (at a Time of Resurgent Nationalism
The presence of systemic challenges in a world order reality that is sub-system dominant (that is, shaped by sovereign states, especially those that are dominant) has yet to be sufficiently appreciated. True, there is attention given to the advent of the Anthropocene, in recognition of the extent to which human activities are now principal drivers of important changes in the quality and even sustainability of the global habitat.[16] Yet problem-solving is still caught up in the structures, practices, and procedures of the Holocene, which dealt with habitat and security challenges by way of sub-systemic responses and policies that assume that crises could be devastating, but not threatening to the system as a whole.[17] In different ways, climate change and nuclear weapons are illustrative of the global challenges facing humanity in the age of the Anthropocene, but there are others— the protection of biodiversity, eradication of poverty, the prevention of hunger and malnutrition, and the control of pandemic disease.
From a conceptual perspective, climate change is a clear instance of the limits of statist problem-solving in circumstances where the global scope of the problem is acknowledged. The unevenness of state responsibility for the buildup of greenhouse gases, which is aggravated by the difficulty of establishing causal connections between emissions and harm, creates controversy and tensions. With a strong consensus within the community of climate scientists and among civil society activists, the governments of the world came together to negotiate an historic agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to minimize increasing harm from global warming. The result was a notable achievement: 193 governments signed onto the Paris Climate Change Agreement in 2015, and there resulted a celebration among the participating diplomats. Yet the success of the Paris Agreement, as measured by maximizing the cooperative potential of a statist problem-solving procedure, was, from another point of view, an ominous failure. The Agreement, although impressive as an exercise in inter-state lawmaking, was disappointing if the measure of success was prudently addressing the challenge. The Paris Agreement was neither responsive enough to the dangers nor sufficiently obligatory to provide a credible and responsible response to the dangers of global warming if measured against the limits on CO2 dissemination urged on governments by the overwhelming majority of climate specialists.
Until ten years ago, the idea of a statist twilight was seen mainly as a recognition that the state, as it had evolved in Europe since the seventeenth century, was being displaced transnationally by economic globalization and was newly threatened by transnational mega-terrorism and cyber attacks.[26] At the same time there was an emerging awareness that the most manifest threat to human wellbeing was being posed by the effects of global warming brought about by the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions. The recent confrontation between North Korea and the United States, which has featured apocalyptic threats from the leaders of both countries, has reawakened the world to the dangers of nuclear war and to the fragility of existing global security arrangements.
Overall, the increasingly global scope of policymaking and problem-solving was regarded as making it dysfunctional to rely on state-level governance and calculations of national interest. This is because the items on the political agenda most likely affect the totality of lives and the collective destiny of humanity—especially future generations—regardless of where one is situated on the planet.[27] Revealingly, these globalizing concerns have not led governments to create stronger structures of global governance. The dangerous inability to protect at-risk global and human interests might have been expected to induce more responsible governments and their citizens to work feverishly to establish a more independent and adequately-resourced United Nations, but this failed to happen. Addressing global challenges successfully seems impossible without augmented instututional capabilities backed up by the level political will required to generate and implement appropriate legal norms. [LR1] Whether and how these norms will be delimited is a major adaptive challenge to a fundamental realization that the Westphalian framework, even if responsibly reinforced by geopolitical leadership—which is presently at low ebb—cannot satisfy minimum requirements of world order. It is a disappointing part of these dire circumstances that there is such a weak popular mobilization around this twenty-first-century agenda of challenges. It is time to acknowledge that, despite the seriousness of global challenges, states separately and aggregately have shown little ability, and inadequate political will, to respond in a manner that is adaptive.[28] In effect, the non-decline of the state, or even its seeming resurgence as an exclusivist nation-state, is accentuating the weakness of global governance when it comes to global, systemic issues. In this respect, the state continues to bask in sunlight, as if awaiting twilight to subdue its anachronistic orientation and priorities.
Instead of a rational and convincing pattern of adaptation, this rendering of a radiant twilight has produced a series of institutional innovations that were supposed to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of multilateral cooperative arrangements on world affairs. This gave rise to such diverse arenas as the G-7, G-8, G-20, annual gatherings of the IMF and World Bank, BRIC meetings, Shanghai Infrastructure Investment Bank, as well as to private sector initiatives such as the World Economic Forum, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Such constellations of institutional configurations contribute to the impression of organizational decline, as does the emergence of a variety of anti-capitalist initiatives associated with the World Social Forum, Non-Aligned Movement, including commoning in various forms.[29]
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States chose to constitute itself as the first “global state” in history, relying on a network of hundreds of foreign bases, navies in every ocean, and the militarization of space and even cyberspace, aiming to establish a global state that eclipsed the sovereignty of all other states, which are unwilling to dilute the traditional scope of their sovereign rights when it comes to national security (except to some extent China and Russia).[32] This American global state relies on the consent of many, and on coercion toward a few, in pursuit of its goals. This is most clearly evident in relation to the conduct of counterterrorist warfare and counter-proliferation diplomacy, using non-territorial innovations such as drones, cyber sabotage, special ops elite covert forces, as well as relying on traditional territorial instruments of hard power such as military intervention. Such a heavy investment in achieving globalized military control is also seen as supportive of neoliberal capitalism, it also tends to downgrade the relevance of the Westphalian state to either of its prime roles— in relation to development and to internal and external security.[33]
In addition to war, the dense causal complexity of global warming, in terms of the locus of greenhouse gas emissions being substantially disconnected from the locus of harm, offers another kind of deterritorializing in which ecological security depends on the behavior of the global whole as well as on that of certain national parts. Related issues of biodiversity pose analogous issues in relation to the global dependence on on diversity being out of sync with the territorial sovereignty relied upon to preserve the world’s most biologically diverse rainforests.
[1] Emblematic of this zeitgeist was the first World Forum organized by TRT World (a Turkish English-language radio and TV channel similar in format and intent to CNN or to Al Jazeera English) around the theme of “Inspiring Change in an Age of Uncertainty,” featuring several world leaders, prominent media personalities, government officials, and even a few academics, including myself. Hotel Conrad, Istanbul, October 18-19, 2017. No one took issue with this theme, which would never have been chosen in the last half of the twentieth century when the structure of international relations, at least, seemed stable, if not certain, and hardly worth problematizing.
[2] The linearity of the metaphor can also be questioned and subjected to doubt in this chapter. The degree of certainty that night will follow twilight does not pertain in the political domain where reversibility and stagnancy could persist, that is, the state could recover its salience or at least achieve a new stasis.
[3] This is the central argument of Richard Falk, Power Shift: On the New Global Order (London: Zed, 2016).
[4] On the U.S. providing a global leadership that achieves many of the positive goals associated with world government, see Michael Mandelbaum, The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as a World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).
[5] For an understanding of the scale and scope of past catastrophic change see Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005).
[6] Richard Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?” in Falk, Power Shift, 253-262.
[7] We perceive the future “through a glass, darkly” if at all, which provides ample reason to rely on an epistemology of humility to sustain hope. That is, since we cannot know the future, we should strive for what is necessary and desirable. This view is elaborated upon by Falk, “Horizons of Global Governance,” 101-128.
[8] Among recent instances, Scotland, Iraqi Kurdistan, and Catalonia are of relevance. For an analysis of the international issues in the political and historical context of the 2017 encounter of Spain and Catalonia see John Dugard, Richard Falk, Ana Stanic, and Marc Weller, The Will of the People and Statehood (report at the request of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, 30 October 2017). For a focus on the conflictual aspects of internal struggles to reshape the dynamics of self-determination see Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed., 2012).
[9] See Richard Falk, “Ordering the World: Hedley Bull After 40 Years,” in The Anarchical Society at 40: Contemporary Challenges and Prospects , eds. Hidemi Suganami, Madeline Carr, and Adam Humphreys (Oxford, UK: Oxford Un iversity Press, 2017), 41-55, in geopolitical sequel to role of “Great Powers.” On role of Great Powers, see Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University, 1977).
[10] See Stephen Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy: Change and Persistence in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); see also Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty: The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (Hants, UK: Edward Elgar, 1992).
[11] Most extravagantly expressed by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Even Huntington’s far more accurate anticipation of renewed conflict was based on a new era of inter-civilizational rather than inter-state warfare, see: Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). Both of these influential formulations can be read as alternative expressions of the twilight hypothesis. For a negative assessment of economic globalization as shaped by neoliberal ideology see Richard Falk, Predatory Globalization: A Critique (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000).
[12] For discussion see unpublished paper, Richard Falk, “After 9/11: The Toxic Interplay of Counterterrorism, Geopolitics, and World Order,” presented at a workshop on “Is there an After After 9/11?” Orfalea Center on Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara, January 20-21, 2018.
[13] There was some thinking along this line, most explicitly by Robert D. Kaplan, Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Random House, 2000); also, Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, but Fukuyama’s twilight is followed by the presumed forever sunshine of globalized liberalism.
[14] Perhaps the most graphic assertions along these lines were made by the American president, George W. Bush, shortly after the 9/11 attacks: “We have the best chance since the rise of the nation state in the seventeenth century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.” Further, “[m]ore and more civilized nations find themselves on the same side, united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos:” Address to the Graduating Class, West Point, June 2002; also, in the cover letter to National Security Strategy of the United States, White House, Washington, D.C, September 2002.
[15] Most significantly argued by Daniel Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[16] See Richard Falk’s chapter, “The World Ahead: Entering the Anthropocene?” in Exploring Emergent Thresholds: Toward 2030, eds. Richard Falk, Manoranjan Mohanty, and Victor Faessel (Delhi, India: Orient Black Swan, 2017), 19-47.
[17] These terms used to classify geological eras are here used metaphorically to identify the scope of problems and problem solving in the context of global governance.
[18] See the text of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (2015) to discern its essentially voluntary compliance framework. “Paris Agreement,” New York: United Nations, 2015.
[19] Trump has not yet formally expressed objections to the Paris Agreement beyond suggesting, in vague generalities, that it is “a very bad deal for America” and hurts the competitiveness of American business by raising costs of production via constraints on carbon emissions.
[20] The climate change policies of California are a dramatic example, accentuated by the anti-environmental posture of the Trump presidency. Individuals and communities may voluntarily adopt climate-friendly behavioral patterns including vegan diets, electric cars, solar power.
[21] See “nuclear famine” studies. There are also other indications of toxicity and disruption of ecological and social structures on a more or less permanent basis. For human impacts via food see the briefing paper by Ira Helfand, “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk: Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition,” Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2013.
[22] For elaboration see Richard Falk and David Krieger, The Path to Nuclear Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Danger (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012).
[23] Even when a cautious call for steps toward a world without nuclear weaponry is set forth, as by Barack Obama in his Prague Speech of 2009, nothing happens as the roots of nuclearism are too deep to challenge effectively.
[24] See Richard J. Barnet, Who Wants Disarmament? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960) for a strong early critique of disarmament diplomacy that publicly advocated disarmament while bureaucratically opposing it. Over the decades, nuclearism has become entrenched in the governmental structures of the main nuclear weapons states that have been identified as the “deep state” or “military-industrial-complex.”
[25] See Richard Falk. “Challenging Nuclearism: The Nuclear BAN Treaty,” Global Justice in the 21st Century, July 14, 2017; “Nobel Peace Prize 2017: International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)”, October 8, 2017, https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2017/10/08/nobel-peace-prize-2017-international-campaign-to-abolish-nuclear-weapons-ican/
[26] For speculation along these lines see Richard Falk, The Great Terror War (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2003).
[27] For stimulating conjecture along these lines, see Robert W. Cox with Timothy J. Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Stephen Gill, ed., Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
[28] See Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?”—raising the biopolitical question as to whether there is a sufficient species will to survive as distinct from individual, communal, and national wills to survive that are robust, and actually, part of the distinctive problem of superseding and complementing responses at lower levels of social integration by reliance on species and global scale responses.
[29] See also the networked adaptation to the new era as depicted by Anne-Marie Slaughter, The New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
[30] The idea of nationality is purely juridical, given practical relevance by passport and international identity papers. In some countries, for example Israel, the state draws a distinction between citizenship and nationality, privileging the latter on the basis of Jewish ethnicity.
[31] The Trump presidency has illustrated the dynamic of the double coding of nationalism and love of country. For Trump’s white political base, the acclamation accorded to America is understood in a non-plural white-supremacist manner, which terrifies and angers those Americans who are non-white or socially vulnerable. It raises the critical question as to what is “America” as state and nation. Such interrogation should be directed at many states that are trying to build various forms of exclusionary governing structures. These issues are well explored in Mazen Masri, The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State (Oxford, UK: Hart, 2017).
[32] This sense of establishing a global security system administered by Washington was most clearly put forward during the presidency of George W. Bush in the National Security Doctrine of the United States of America (2002): see advice to China to concentrate on trade, and not waste resources competing with the U.S. in the domain of security.
[33] The “Westphalian state” should be contrasted with the “global state” constructed by the United States, as well as with the concept of “empire.” See generally: Richard Falk, The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), especially 3-65; also Falk, “Does the Human Species Wish to Survive?”.
[34] For instance, overseeing the negotiation of several multinational agreements, including the Law of the Seas Treaty in 1982, and generally seeking to combine its national interests with sensitivity to the interests of others, but still largely within a state-centric imaginary.
[35] See Gill, Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership.
[36] See Mathew Horsman and Andrew Marshall, After the Nation State: Citizens, Tribalism, and the New World Disorder (London, UK: HarperCollins, 1994) somewhat prophetically arguing that the future will witness the decline of the state due to the rise of anti-internationalist values and political movements.
[37] Not explicitly formulated in Robert J. Lifton and Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism (New York: Basic Books, rev. 2nd ed., 1991).
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Will China Run the World? Should it?
14 Dec[Prefatory Note: Interview Responses to Questions of Javad Heiran-Nia on world order in the time of COVID-19, with emphasis on China & United States, especially as reflected in the restructuring of the world economy. The underlying issue is whether the Chinese or U.S. approach to global policy and world order will gain the upper hand, and at what costs to humanity. The interview will be published in a forthcoming issue of Age of Reflection, a monthly magazine. (http://www.asreandisheh.com/). This post adds some observations at the end that do not appear in the interview.]
Yes, I think it has become extremely relevant to talk about the comparative approaches of China and the U.S. to problem-solving and political order, both their differences and similarities. There exists a preliminary question relating to the seemingly unusual character of American political leadership during the past four years of the Trump presidency, and the probability that it is about to change in style and substance shortly after Joe Biden is inaugurated as the next president. Trump is the first American leader to reject the authority of science and expert guidance in a period of national crisis, greatly aggravating the harm caused by the Corona-19 virus through the advocacy of behavior that contributes to the spread of the disease rather than to its containment. It is also notable that other illiberal leaders of important states have also acted in extremely irresponsible ways during the crisis, including Bolsonaro, the leader of Brazil, and to some extent, Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, among others.
The comparison between China and the United States, current leadership aside, suggests some important differences. The most important difference relates to the role of the central government, and in China’s case, the state. China has more of a unitary system in which policy is set in Beijing for the entire country. In the United States, the reality of federalism means that all 50 internal states enjoy a measure of autonomy, which results in diverse responses to the COVID challenge, some following the approach taken by Trump while others following health guidelines and produce overall better results.
In general, it is possible to suggest that the role of the state is more effectively and efficiently deployed in China in response to COVID, although exhibiting a disturbing disregard for the freedom of citizens and their human rights, especially with regard to political dissent and peaceful opposition. The extraordinary success of the Chinese economy over the course of the past 50 years, confirms the importance of providing centralized guidance in promoting technological innovations and in managing the allocations of capital investment in rapid and sustainable patterns of development.
The U.S. has long suffered from the effects of massive over-investment in military capabilities, which has led to a series of costly foreign policy failures going back to Vietnam, compounded by a refusal to adapt to a global setting in which the politics of national resistance prevails over the superior weaponry of the United States, producing endless wars with unfavorable political outcomes for the intervening. So far China has avoided this trap, expanding through reliance on a variety of soft power instruments, but whether it can maintain this posture in the face of the U.S. current disposition toward confrontation and the initiation of a second cold war is not clear.
The U.S. also suffers from ideological inhibitions that are leftovers from the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. Any reliance on government to perform roles relating to health, education, and social protection are labeled as ‘socialism,’ which is treated as such an evil mode of governing as to foreclose serious discussion. The result has been disinvestment in the social justice agenda, which is compounded in bad effects by the continuing over-investment in the militarist agenda.
This is a crucial question. There is no doubt that neoliberal globalization led to a surge in international trade and investment, fueling sustained economic growth, but it also led to great inequality of benefits from economic development, sharpening class tensions, and in the American case caused acute alienation among workers and rural communities. The Trump phenomenon arose as an ultra-nationalist impassioned backlash to these negative domestic impacts of liberalism. Trump’s insistent call for ‘America First’ coupled with a rejection of all phases of globalism resonated with many Americans. Such a strident outlook struck heavy blows against global cooperation and hospitality to asylum-seekers and refugee, and even immigrants, at the very time these more cosmopolitan behavioral patterns were most needed to address such serious challenges as climate change and migration flows that could not be handled satisfactorily by states acting alone. In some respects, this retreat behind borders worked politically and economically for Trump until the unanticipated COVID pandemic came along. Trump missed no opportunity to boast about the stock market reaching historic highs, low unemployment figures, and somewhat rising wages for workers. The down side of Trump’s approach led to repudiations of the authority of international economic institutions, produced accelerating inequality, and was accompanied by ugly reactions against immigrants and people of color who were denied the full benefits of citizenship and were treated as hostile threats to nationalist identities of supremacy claimed by discontented white Americans who felt understood, energized, and supported by the Trump leadership.
In contrast, China was able to benefit from market forces while simultaneously overcoming the impoverished condition of more than 300,000,000 of its citizens and rapidly building an efficient modern market society on the largest national scale ever known. China’s state-guided public investment policies have seemed very well coordinated to develop an economy that is not only remarkably productive in industrial era manufacturing, but has started to dominate the technological frontiers that have military and reputational implications as threatening to the West as was post-1945 decolonization. China managed to combine taking advantage of liberalism while avoiding most severe forms of domestic alienation, and found win/win ways to help with infrastructure development of less developed countries without seriously interfering with their sovereign rights or political independence, thereby raising its status internationally. From a human rights perspective, China built an impressive record with respect to economic and social rights, while limiting political and civil rights rather severely, and imposing an unacceptably discriminatory regime on the large minority Uighur population in Xinjiang province.
The Biden approach to China reflects a bipartisan, and largely mistaken, view that China has taken unfair advantage of world economy through improper subsidies of exports and by way of strict regulation of imports and foreign investment in China, including with respect to technology. I am not equipped to assess the reasonableness of these grievances, nor of the Chinese concerns with unfair responses to their activities in global markets. There is a danger arising from this attempt to control Chinese economic behavior that it will lead China to retaliate and give rise to the sort of protectionism that caused the Great Depression of the 1930s, characterized as a ‘beggar thy neighbor’ ethos in foreign economic policy. There is also present an impression that the United States is neglecting its own economic shortcomings by shifting blame to China rather than making reforms such as a more prudent allocation of resources and a more effective and equitable public allocation of public sector revenues to promote research and development in non-military projects. The U.S. political taboo preventing even discussion of the shrinking the military budget and the worldwide network of overseas bases is more explanatory of American decline than are accusations of improper behavior directed at China. The U.S.’s military budget is larger than the combined military expenditures of the next ten countries, and yet the U.S. has never felt more insecure throughout its entire history. It is these realities that are at the root of the relative world decline in the economic sphere, and the overall crisis confidence, currently besetting the United States.
This question points to another major deficiency in the global turn toward economic nationalism and away from economic multinationalism during the Trump presidency. China has taken intelligent advantage of the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which incidentally excluded China reflecting Obama’s interest in containing China’s regional outreach. China has helped fill the cooperation vacuum by adopting a multilateral framework designed to facilitate Asian growth of trade and investment. Trump’s preference for ‘transactional’ bilateral deals over negotiated cooperative frameworks seems ‘ is very shortsighted, and is almost certain to be rejected as an approach during the Biden presidency. But it is probably too late to reverse these regional developments by U.S. inclusion unless Biden’s leadership moves away from confrontation and toward accommodation, which seems unlikely. This China-led 10 country Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership includes Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and Brunei is off to an impressive start. This arrangement has been under negotiation since 2012, and just now formally endorsed by member governments. India had been expected to become a member, withdrawing recently because the expected lowering of tariffs was thought to harm Indian producers. As it is this Asian bloc comprises 30% of the world’s population, and just under 30% of the world’s GDP.
I anticipate a double movement with regard to the world economy: one movement would be toward restoring the spirit and substance of market driven transnational agreements and frameworks designed to encourage trade and investment within a rule governed framework that is mutually beneficial and inclusive; the second movement is more ideologically delimited, seeking frameworks that are ideologically and geopolitically more closely aligned, excluding China, and possibly Russia. This post-Cold War restructuring was somewhat anticipated by the Obama ‘Asia reset’ that deliberately excluded China from the TPP, and Biden is likely to go further in Asia, and possibly joining with India in adopting a new containment approach to foreign policy and world order. It is difficult at this stage to know how China will react if it is faced with geopolitical encirclement and a more exclusionary economic atmosphere. It is possible that China, which is more pragmatic and opportunistic than the West, will do its best to encourage a less conflictual new phase of economic globalization, which would spread benefits worldwide, is also responsibly concerned with the global public good, which translates into greater support for clean energy, environmental protection, human rights, denuclearizing initiatives, and a more equitable distribution of benefits of economic growth.
Biden’s efforts to find a consensus on foreign economic policy will definitely pose a crucial test for his presidency. If he seeks to act on the basis of domestic unity, policymaking will likely be paralyzed, especially if Republicans remain able to put roadblocks in the path of Democratic proposed initiatives. If Biden decides to ignore the priorities of this lingering large Trump support he will be confronted by resentment and disruption. It is a dilemma no recent American president has faced. Whether the dilemma can be overcome also depends on whether Trumpist Republicans retain control of the U.S. Senate, and that seems to rest on the Georgia reruns of the two senatorial elections, which will be decided in early January. Unless the Democrats win both races, the Republicans will control the Senate, and as they did with Obama’s second term, be in a position to obstruct and block most legislative initiatives that are seen as antagonistic to the Trump approach. Biden’s pledge to be president for all Americans sounds good, but whether it will be a successful governing style remains in doubt. My understanding is that most Trumpists want power not compromise or responsible government. In this regard, restoring civility to the American political scene will be welcomed even by some Trump supporters, but to uphold his policy goals it may well be necessary to confront Republicans and mobilize the support of the citizenry. With the recent election revealing the depth of polarization, further revealed by the Trump refusal to accept the outcome as certified by the long reliable voting schemes operative in the 50 states, including those presided over by Republican officials, there are many signs of domestic trouble ahead for Biden whether he gives way on his policy agenda or tries to have it fulfilled. Biden may have more success in reviving the bilateral consensus on foreign policy that existed during the Cold War, and would be now focus on restoring European alliance relations and challenging China regionally in South and East Asia, and globally with regard to a U.S. oriented revision of rule-governed globalization. Again, much depends on the degree to which the Biden leadership with continues to address global security through a militarist optic. Early indications suggest that the demilitarization of the American political and moral imagination will not be forthcoming in the near future whoever is president.
Again, I think the way to consider such a departure from global scale, inclusive liberalism is to reevaluate the operation of the world economy during and after the ending of the Cold War in the early 1990s. On the basis of my prior responses is a return to a modified Cold War orientation toward foreign economic policy. Unlike the Soviet Union, China’s participation in the world economy is indispensable for world stability and sustainable development, which creates a realization of mutual benefits. There is no realistic prospect of resurrecting the ‘Washington consensus’ shaped by the Bretton Woods institutions as projecting American values onto the global stage as the more legitimate future than that projected by Moscow. What might be feasible is some reform within the neoliberal framework that gained certain concessions from China but more or less retained the inclusive structures of neoliberal globalization that have controlled the world economy since the Soviet collapse in 1992. Thinking optimistically, we might even witness an upgrading the quality of Chinese participation. If reform fails and geopolitical confrontation occurs, then a lose/lose future for the entire world looms as the likely outcome, which could work more to the disadvantage of the West than to China. It needs to realized that China has been adapting its public investment priorities in light of expanding the economic performance of its huge domestic market, including satisfying rising consumer demand, as well continuing with the largest international/transnational development in world history, The Road and Belt Initiative or One Belt, One Road (OBOR), a new Silk Road adapted to the circumstances of the present. As Deepak Nayyar has shown in his breakthrough book, Asian Resurgence (2019), China is no longer dependent on Silicon Valley and Europe for technological progress, but the West, including the United States, may increasingly look to China for the latest technological innovations. Undoubtedly, part of the rising tension with China reflects the threatening reality that the country has graduated from its non-threatening role as ‘the factory of the world’ to becoming dominant on some of the most dynamic technological frontiers, which is a symbolic as well as a substantive blow to America’s reputation and leadership credentials, and possibly even to its dominance with respect to innovations in military technology.
8. Given that liberalism is not in America’s best interests internationally, and theorists such as Prof. John Mearsheimer warn the US government against pursuing liberalism globally, what do you think will replace the current liberal order?
John Mearsheimer has long intelligently stressed the geopolitical dimensions of world order, which inevitably emphasizes patterns of conflict between major actors. As an extreme realist he regards ‘liberalism’ as naïve, and a sign of weakness, which invites cynical adversaries to take advantage economically and diplomatically. Mearsheimer is convinced that history is shaped by those political actors that prevail militarily, and as adjusted for present realities, the first priority of foreign policy should not be cooperation with rivals but their deterrence. He has gone so far as to credit nuclear weapons with the avoidance of World War III during the Cold War.
A complementary view to that of Mearsheimer has been influentially formulated by Graham Allison in his book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape the ‘Thucydides’s Trap’ (2017), which puts forward the thesis that high risks of war occur when the hegemonic hierarchy is challenged by an ascending actor in international relations. The present ascendant political actor that perceived a rising challenge from below is likely to provoke war rather than give way, which according to Allison is what has almost happened throughout world history.
Whether such abstractions should be given much weight considering several factors:
–the globalizing adaptations in the post-COVID world, giving increased role to WHO, and UN
Generally, as offset by persisting ultra-nationalist governance trends, despite defeat of Trump;
–a growing anxiety about global warming producing climate change with many harmful effects, including dangerous erosions of biodiversity;
–the Chinese challenge to American global primacy arising in a manner unlike earlier geopolitical confrontations, most notable with respect to economic performance, technological ascendancy, and soft power expansionism rather than by way of military challenge and territorial ambitions;
–U.S. relative decline globally, reflecting a continuing over-investment in military capabilities, a militarized permanent bureaucracy entrapped in an outmoded political imagination with a disposition that exaggerates security threats and under-invests in domestic infrastructure and social protection of its citizenry;
–a resulting intensification of uncertainty about the future of world order, some recovery of functional multilateralism under Biden leadership accompanied by increased reliance on coercive geopolitics involving relying on military ‘solutions’ for political problems.
Tags: Asian Economic Order, China, United States, world order