Grand Strategy for a Divided America

[Edward Campbell]

Part 1 of 2

This article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The Telegraph is about the impact of America's strategic choices on Britain bit it also could be applicable in The Chinese Military, Political and Social Superthread, because there is a lot of focus on Sino-American relations, and even in Making Canada Relevant Again - The Economic Super-Thread, because the choicers which American straegy offers/forces on Britain will be similar to some that those American strategic choices offer or force on Canada:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11640302/Exclusive-interview-Ian-Bremmer-says-America-is-no-longer-indispensible-and-thats-bad-news-for-Britain.html

Now, I need to reiterate my well established (I hope) positions:

    1. America cannot afford the Indispensable America option; and

    2. There is no such thing as "American exceptionalism," so even if America decided to "go for broke" and try to be indispensable there is a very, very good chance that it would fail.

That leaves America with two rational and one irrational choices:

    1. Moneyball America, which would be, immediately and directly, bad for Canada but would force us to take advantage of other trade opportunities that might (in my opinion, would) be good in the mid to long term; (rational choice)

    2. Independent (Isolationist) America, which would have somewhat less economic impavct on Canada, because America would, likely want to maintain very close economic ties, but might, actually, threaten our sovereignty because the
        United States might decide that it needs a continental socio-economic base to prosper; (rational choice) or

    3. Incoherent America (what Dr Bremmer and I agree we have now) which means that we need to seek new socio-economic 'partners' in the world. irrational choice

My bet is on 3, 1 and 2, in that order, for the near to mid term, and then 1, for a while, followed by 2, in the mid to long term.

I believe that America has been adrift, strategically, since about 1960. I'm not blaming any one president (not even Kennedy who I think was vacillating and foolish) nor one group (not even the baby boomers) nor even one attitude (not even the deeply flawed belief in American exceptionalism) for America's problems, but the combination of a half century of weak, foolish leadership and flawed (statist) socio-cultural structures has, I fear, fatally weakened our best friend, good neighbour and protector.

Not everyone agrees with Ian Bremmer, including Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution, as he explains in this article which is reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The American Interest:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/08/14/should-america-power-down/

Should America Power Down?

THOMAS WRIGHT

Ian Bremmer argues that America should tender its resignation as the world’s superpower. But becoming Clark Kent, permanently, is not sound strategy.

In 1912, many people predicted that the United States would be one of the most powerful states in the 20th century. Its economy was strong and its potential seemingly limitless. But it would have been ludicrous to suggest that within a half-century it would be the dominant resident power in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East or that in less than a century it would be a unipolar power. After all, on the eve of World War I, German power was ascendant, Britain bestrode the world wearily but still as a Titan, and the United States had little appetite to venture outside its hemisphere.

Of course, the inconceivable happened. The United States became the world’s only superpower because it made better strategic decisions, and far fewer mistakes, than its competitors. Germany destroyed itself twice. Russia imploded and rose again under an ideology that contained the seeds of its future destruction. Britain was pulled into two world wars that sapped its power and forced it into retirement.

The lesson of the 20th century is that strategic choice matters. It is what great powers do geopolitically that makes history, not how much or how fast their economies grow. The contemporary debate on American power has mostly lost sight of this fact. Relying on a couple of crude metrics, like GDP and military spending, experts say with certainty whether this century will be Chinese, American, European, or run by no one at all. It is a little like declaring baseball season over before it begins and awarding the World Series to the team with the largest payroll or highest batting average.

The importance of strategic choice is the starting point for Ian Bremmer’s new book, Superpower: Three Choices for America’s Role in the World. Bremmer, a political scientist and the founder and CEO of the Eurasia Group, argues that the United States will remain a superpower for many years to come. The only question that matters is how it will use its power. Bremmer lays out three options for the United States and makes the best case he can for each. Only at the end does he tell us his preference. The book is written as a “Choose Your Own Adventure” with a gimmicky quiz to boot. But it is actually a manifesto in disguise.

Bremmer’s favored strategy is what he calls “Independent America,” whereby the United States would dramatically reduce its international commitments and pivot to the home front. Defense spending would be slashed and directed to homeland security, and Russia and China would each be allowed a sphere of influence. The United States would stop being the security guarantor of last resort for NATO and Japan, and would withdraw from the Middle East entirely.

Bremmer writes, “It’s time for a new declaration of independence—a proclamation of emancipation from the responsibility to solve everyone else’s problems.” He is exhausted by alliance commitments to defend those who won’t look out for themselves: “Why should Americans lead a fight to defend Latvia or Estonia if Germany, now one of the world’s wealthiest nations, won’t share more of the cost?” “America will be better off,” he says, “if we mind our own business and let other countries get along the best they can.” The United States should not get involved in wars or crises, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, and Ukraine, where the others “care more about the outcome than you do.” The superpower must explicitly tender its resignation: “Only a crystal clear signal from Washington that America will now lead mainly by example will force our traditional partners to stand on their own.”

Above all, Bremmer longs for what the United States could do without its heavy burden. “Imagine what might become possible,” he writes, “if we redirected the attention, energy, and resources that we now squander on a failed superhero foreign policy toward building the America we imagine, one that empowers all its people to realize their human potential.” He would slash military spending and shift what’s left away from aircraft carriers and toward intelligence, homeland security, and cybersecurity. With the money saved, he would increase spending on infrastructure, education, veterans’ benefits, and tax cuts. The only time he breaks with the pure version of Independent America, as detailed in an early chapter, is in his support for free trade.

The two strategies that Bremmer rejects, after laying them out in full, are Moneyball America and Indispensable America. The former is, of course, an allusion to Michael Lewis’s best-selling book Moneyball, about Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. Beane succeeded by jettisoning common baseball practice and using data and statistics to invest in players undervalued by the market. Under this option, Bremmer says, the President should invest in the value of America by making several calculated bets designed to deliver a significant return. However, he believes this will not work; America is not a corporation and cannot behave as if it is one. The U.S. government is simply too big and too complicated to achieve the nimbleness required for moneyball. And corporations make bad bets all the time. In the economy, failure is part of the process of creative destruction. But we can afford less risk when it comes to the nuclear codes.

Indispensable America is the latest iteration of traditional U.S. grand strategy dating back to the late 1940s. Here, the United States will continue to underwrite the liberal international order through alliances, military intervention, the provision of public goods, and an outsized leadership role. But Bremmer believes the U.S. doesn’t have the influence it needs to play this role any more. Even more importantly, he says, the American public is not prepared to play that role, especially if it means going to war with China over some rocks in the South China Sea or fighting Russia over the Baltics. “Indispensable America,” he writes, “was the right strategy at the end of World War II…But we can’t ignore the ways the world has changed.”

Bremmer’s choice, an Independent America, is not isolationist. Indeed, even the isolationism of the 1930s was not truly isolationist, since it allowed for commercial, political, and cultural engagement with the rest of the world. Independent America is, however, strictly non-interventionist. It is the product of what my colleague Robert Kagan has termed a desire to return to normalcy—that notion that the United States does too much as a superpower and should become a normal nation with normal interests.

The idea that the United States must retrench and reduce its international commitments has been percolating in academic circles over the past decade. The most advanced and sophisticated case is Restraint, a 2014 book by Barry Posen, a professor at MIT and perhaps America’s top academic defense expert. Restraint explains in detail why and how the United States should divest itself of its international security commitments and give up the liberal international order. Posen is not an outlier. Retrenchment is the preferred strategy of the majority of security studies scholars, especially in the younger generation of professors. It is the internationalists—William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks of MIT and John Ikenberry of Princeton University—who are in the minority.

End of Part 1 of 2

 

[Edward Campbell]

Part 2 of 2

Despite its success in academic circles, retrenchment has failed to gain much traction in the policy community, except at the Cato Institute. Others, including Richard Haass in his book Foreign Policy Begins at Home, have flirted around the edges of a greater domestic focus but none have called for an unwinding of the alliance system or a dramatic change in America’s global role. Bremmer makes the argument that U.S. strategy is terribly wrongheaded and has been for some time (for instance, he sees the expansion of NATO as a historic error). The entire global order is unsound and the United States needs to act unilaterally and pull the entire edifice down.

It is for this reason that Bremmer’s work is important. It marks the crossover point between academic critiques of U.S. grand strategy and the policy mainstream. It may be the beginning of a debate that the United States has not had since the mid-1940s—should it look out for itself or should it underwrite a liberal international order?

The first big question that retrenchers have to answer is this: what problem does retrenchment solve? For better or worse, American leadership is the status quo. For over sixty years, Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East have been organized around U.S. security guarantees. The abandonment of that leadership, especially in security, will radically change world politics and the international order. To make a case for such a change, one must first convincingly argue that the status quo is untenable. You wouldn’t blow the existing order up and replace it with something else just on a whim or to save some money. There must be a pressing need.

Bremmer suggested in an earlier book, G-Zero, that America’s economic problems were such that it would be unable to continue to play the role of world leader. But in Superpower, he is more optimistic about U.S. capacity. America can be a leader if it wants to, but it should choose not to, he says.

Instead, the problem is that the United States is currently adrift, and the uncertainty about its future role is destabilizing the international system. No one knows what the United States will do next. It is clear, he says, that the public wants to do less. America’s influence is also decreasing as other powers rise. Allies know all this and can’t trust the President. Adversaries know it too and do not fear U.S. power. America’s indecision is contributing to a heightened sense of geopolitical risk. Exhibit A is the red line debacle in Syria when President Obama reversed himself on airstrikes while the planes were fueling up on the runway.
But Syria is only a symptom of a much greater problem—America’s inability to make good on its commitments. The epicenter of this coming earthquake is America’s alliance system—those commitments that the United States is treaty-bound to uphold and where reneging on a red line is impossible without incurring a terribly high cost. Bremmer wants to effectively disband these alliances so the United States is no longer on the hook to protect others. He believes that the American public no longer supports the U.S. commitment to its allies, the allies themselves are not doing enough, and there is a risk that the United States will get dragged into conflicts that are not in its interests.

Take NATO, for example—one of Bremmer’s favorite targets. NATO, he says, made a historic error by expanding to include new members after the Cold War. The expansion aggravated Russia and bound America to protect states that are not strategically important. Now that the Russia threat is back, this is a big problem. The United States is not ready or willing to defend its new member states. The American public can’t locate Latvia or Estonia on a map and the Obama Administration has been ambiguous about its commitment, all of which makes it more likely Russia will do something to test its resolve. Bremmer writes,

    “If Russian troops one day cross the border into Latvia, whatever the pretext, will the president of the United States declare war on Russia? President Obama has suggested that he would be he hasn’t said it.

Europe needs to know. America’s men and women in uniform, their families, and America’s taxpayers need to know. Leave it ambiguous and Moscow might one day decide to find out what it can get away with.”

It’s a powerful charge, if true. But here his specific claim and broader case about a crisis begins to fall part. The footnote reveals that Bremmer is referring to President Obama’s speech in Estonia in September 2014. Yet in that speech the President said this:

    “We will defend our NATO allies, and that means every ally. In this alliance, there are no old members or new members, no junior partners or senior partners—there are just allies, pure and simple. And we will defend the territorial integrity
      of every single ally. Today, more NATO aircraft patrol the skies of the Baltics. More American forces are on the ground training and rotating through each of the Baltic states. More NATO ships patrol the Black Sea. Tonight, I depart for the
      NATO Summit in Wales, and I believe our Alliance should extend these defensive measures for as long as necessary. Because the defense of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius is just as important as the defense of Berlin and Paris and London.”

Now, one can believe that more must be done to protect the Baltics, but it’s hard to see how this speech supports the notion that the United States is unclear on whether it will fight Russia to defend them.
Certainly, the United States has been leading the charge to bolster Article V in the face of the Russian threat. There is also no reason to believe that Russia doubts America’s assurances about Article V because of Syria or anything else.

Indeed, there is a cottage industry in political science on the topic of credibility. Its primary finding is that credibility of commitments depends on the interests of the countries in each case and not on what they do elsewhere. In other words, the Syria red line debacle is unlikely to have any impact on Russian assessments of U.S. credibility in the Baltics or in Asia. Bremmer actually acknowledges this when he praises
Ronald Reagan for having the courage to renege on his own red line—when he withdrew U.S. forces from Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut which killed 241 Americans.

There is also no evidence to suggest that America’s alliances make war more likely. In fact, the opposite is true. Michael Beckley, an assistant professor at Tufts University, conducted a study of all of America’s alliance commitments since 1945 and found that entanglement almost never happens. It is much more common for alliances to restrain the United States or for the United States to restrain its allies.

Yet what of public opinion? Is Bremmer right that even if the political leadership wants to continue to play the role of the indispensable power, the public does not? He cites opinion polls that show only 56 percent of the American people would come to the aid of Britain if attacked. However, the political science literature finds that public opinion exerts little influence on U.S. foreign policy. There is no reason to think that the answer to a very general question about minding your own business is any indicator as to what the United States would or would not do if a sovereign allied state were invaded. In fact, the United States has previously gone to war to defend non-allied states that it had indicated it would not help (South Korea and Kuwait).

The question Bremmer can’t answer is if the American public is so dissatisfied with foreign policy activism, why does it keep voting for candidates who support it? Why is Rand Paul reversing his previous pro-retrenchment positions as he runs for president?

There is an alternative explanation for where the United States is right now. America’s default strategy is Indispensable America. President Obama has, in a very disciplined way, been trying to shift to a Moneyball America strategy. In fact, the chapter on Moneyball reads remarkably like the Administration’s current approach. The next president is likely to move back to a more ambitious foreign policy. But under either approach, America’s alliances are sound. There are foreign policy challenges, but the foundation of world order—America’s system of alliances—is not falling apart and much of the world relies on it.
Even if there is no pressing need to change strategies, what would happen if we gave retrenchment a try? Isn’t it possible that it would improve America’s position by reducing foreign commitments and freeing up resources at home? No, not even close. The reason is simple: it will inject unprecedented risk and uncertainty into world politics.

Retrenchment is a revolutionary strategy. The day after the President of the United States gives the Independent America speech will be the day that every defense planner and diplomat the world over scrambles to understand how to survive in the post-American world. Alliances will be worthless. The glue that held everything together will no longer stick. The United States would have created the mother of all vacuums.
Japan would likely rearm, and may even go nuclear, to defend itself against China. China would see a window of opportunity to establish its dominance over East Asia. In Europe, Russia would likely move on the Baltics to put the final nail in NATO’s coffin and would establish full control over Ukraine. Some western European countries would rearm, but the overwhelming impulse would be to seek a balance of power. It is unlikely that globalization would survive the return to full-throated rivalry.

This is not some far-fetched scenario. Bremmer himself writes:

    “A drive to refocus Washington on domestic priorities will inflict significant damage on relations with allies like Japan, Israel, and Britain. We will forfeit some of the already limited influence we have with China’s leaders as they make critical decisions.”

Other advocates of retrenchment like Barry Posen recognize that the world will become a much more dangerous place. They just believe that these regional conflicts will not affect the United States. America can protect itself behind its oceans and nuclear deterrent. The United States only has to worry about other regions if one rival power is poised to dominate East Asia, Europe, or the Middle East. The sheer physics of balancing mean this is very unlikely to happen but if it did there would be enough time to intervene and tip the balance against the rival. They even argue that the United States could manipulate regional tensions to its benefit.

This belief could not be further from the U.S. post-war tradition. For over seven decades, the United States has sought to quell and reduce regional security competition in Western Europe and East Asia. Yes, the alliances were intended to contain the Soviet Union. But they were also intended to create a community of nations that did not fear each other. And they were designed so that the United States could influence its allies to exercise restraint. Thus, the United States provides for much of Japan’s security so it will not build capabilities that worry South Korea or others. It is also the reason why, even after the Soviet threat disappeared, the United States has gone to extraordinary lengths to promote regional integration and cooperation in Asia and Europe. EU and NATO expansion helped to consolidate democracy in Eastern Europe and reduce the potential for rivalries and territorial disputes.

It is worth pondering how much more dangerous Eastern Europe would be if Bremmer had his wish and NATO expansion never happened. It’s possible that in such a world Russia would not be revisionist because it would not be insecure, but Russian history suggests otherwise. More likely is the possibility that Russia would try to move on the Baltics and parts of Eastern Europe. NATO expansion took those countries of the chessboard.

The United States has also intervened militarily to prevent regional rivalries from rising. U.S. military actions in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, and Kosovo were not in response to a direct threat to a U.S. vital interest. Instead, they were wrapped up in broader notions of what constitutes security. This is not to say that all interventions are good—the Iraq War being the obvious example. In that war, however, the U.S. did not intervene to preserve regional stability but rather to attempt to impose it. It was a break from tradition, not a continuation of it.

Bremmer will no doubt argue that retrenchment must be done in a sensible and prudent way. The United States should not abandon its alliances overnight but rather give fair warning and a timetable—Posen has suggested a decade—after which those alliances would no longer be operative. The American president should deepen diplomacy with Russia and China to dissuade them from destabilizing actions that would hurt everyone involved. Additionally, the United States should redouble its efforts to increase cooperation and burden-sharing to tackle common threats and challenges.

It sounds lovely, but it is awfully hubristic to believe that a president or strategist is capable of undertaking such an awesome task and preventing it from getting out of control. A superpower retreat of this magnitude would be without parallel. And there are too many actors to manage. But surely, some might say, the difficulty of retrenchment is more manageable that being the world’s policeman? Perhaps, yet that is a comparison between the known and the unknown. America is an imperfect leader, but its track record over seventy-odd years is well known. Iraq may be a mess, but Western and Eastern Europe are in pretty good shape, as are U.S. alliances in East Asia.

By voluntarily liquidating its own order, the United States would be placing the mother of all bets that it would be significantly safer in a much more dangerous world. This is the reason why any president, even Rand Paul, would be reluctant to run the experiment. Ultimately, America’s expansive security commitments are not a favor to the allies, even though they work to their benefit. They were created and supported because the United States believes that reducing rivalry through forward-deployed forces is in America’s long-term interest. There is little reason to think anything has changed. Indeed, if the big bet on retrenchment does not work out and a combination of nuclear weapons and two oceans is not enough, the United States will find itself having to deal with severe threats without its alliances and forward-deployed forces. These could prove impossible to put back together.

One is left puzzled that an expert on geopolitical risk, like Bremmer, would opt for the strategy that seems most likely to turn the world upside down. In an earlier book, Bremmer coined the term “G-Zero world” to describe the lack of international leadership after the financial crisis. At the time, this seemed like a call for more leadership to fill the vacuum and reduce geopolitical risk. But Superpower does the opposite. The inescapable reality is there is no way to reverse the G-Zero dynamic unless America does more in the world. Yes, others should step up to the plate, but no one expects that they will. Thus, G-Zero has gone from a diagnosis to a recommendation.

Bremmer doesn’t clearly state why he changed his mind, but he does hint at it. He says that greater uncertainty is increasing volatility in world politics. The outcome of that volatility will depend on whether China becomes revisionist or not, whether Japan pushes back or not, whether Russia keeps Putinism or not, and so on. The United States will have very little influence over these decisions, so the better course of action is to stand aloof from them and find another purpose for American energy and values. He has come to terms with what he feared.

One gets the impression, however, that Americans, and America’s allies, still believe in the notion of an international order, even if they disagree about how to sustain it. If the United States has a conversation about strategic choice at the next election, one hopes that it will dwell, at least for a few moments, on the rationale behind underwriting an order that transcends narrow national interests and dollars-and-cents accounting. Some may also recall that the United States tried all three strategies in the 20th century. When World War I broke out, Wilson pursued an Indispensable America. In the 1920s, the United States switched to a Moneyball approach, but this fell apart after 1929 and led to an Independent America, despite Roosevelt’s best efforts. After that collapsed in ruins, Roosevelt put together the post-war Indispensable America grand strategy that has been largely with us since.

Ultimately, choice is relative. By reminding people of the alternatives, Bremmer may have done more to help Indispensable America than he intended.

Thomas Wright is a fellow and director of the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution.

 

[Edward Campbell]

This month's edition of Foreign Affairs takes a long, critical look at American grand strategy over, mainly, the past decade.

               

The articles are too numerous and too long (even by my standards) to post, but here are some links (Foreign Affairs link titles are self explanatory) some, at least should be free to non-subscribers:

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/what-obama-gets-right

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/what-obama-gets-wrong

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/obama-and-middle-east

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/obama-and-asia

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/obama-and-europe

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/obama-and-latin-america

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/obama-and-africa

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/obama-and-terrorism

The focus is on President Obama, of course (see the cover), but most articles delve deeper and offer some prescriptive thoughts, too.

Foreign Affairs should be available in most school, public and base libraries ~ if it's not complain, loudly. Sometimes you can buy individual copies in bookstores.

My, personal judgement is that President Obama came into office with a strong domestic agenda which, perforce, required a liberal-isolationist foreign policy (disengagement from the Bush Wars and then retrenchment) but "force majeure" and all that, or, as the late Prime Minister Harold MacMillan may have said, "events, dear boy, events" transpired and he has found himself, unwillingly, engaged in battles he would rather not fight, at home and abroad. he is, I think, looking for the least bad way out of the Arab<->Persian<->Israeli<->Arab quagmire in the Middle East and he is trying to back away from a military confrontation with China. But "events" and an aggressive China strategy aimed at keeping him 'engaged' in (strategically) counter-productive or unproductive activities makes his life more difficult: add in Putin and the GOP and the budget and race and, and, and ... why, I wonder, do I keep thinking about Joel Chandler Harris "Uncle Remus" stories (published in 1881 but still popular (and taught in our schools, in Canada, anyway) until the 1950s)?


                   

 

[a_majoor]

Donald Trump may be a case of the symptom that defines what is wrong with America and the body politic. The key is the note by Instapundit at the end: this is the worst political class in American history and the American people are waking up to the fact that the very institutions that are supposed to govern and protect them have become rigged agains them instead, and are willing to listen to whoever is going to talk about the problem. (If Trump somehow becomes President, would he be able to do anything about it? That is an interesting question for another day)

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/213357

PEGGY NOONAN ON DONALD TRUMP:

You know the latest numbers. Quinnipiac University’s poll this week has Mr. Trump at a hefty 28% nationally, up from 20% in July. Public Policy Polling has Mr. Trump leading all Republicans in New Hampshire with 35%. A Monmouth University poll has him at 30% in South Carolina, followed 15 points later by Ben Carson.

Here are some things I think are happening.

One is the deepening estrangement between the elites and the non-elites in America. This is the area in which Trumpism flourishes. We’ll talk about that deeper in.

Second, Mr. Trump’s support is not limited to Republicans, not by any means.

Third, the traditional mediating or guiding institutions within the Republican universe—its establishment, respected voices in conservative media, sober-minded state party officials—have little to no impact on Mr. Trump’s rise. Some say voices of authority should stand up to oppose him, which will lower his standing. But Republican powers don’t have that kind of juice anymore. Mr. Trump’s supporters aren’t just bucking a party, they’re bucking everything around, within and connected to it.

Since Mr. Trump announced I’ve worked or traveled in, among other places, Southern California, Connecticut, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey and New York’s Long Island. In all places I just talked to people. My biggest sense is that political professionals are going to have to rethink “the base,” reimagine it when they see it in their minds.

I’ve written before about an acquaintance—late 60s, northern Georgia, lives on Social Security, voted Obama in ’08, not partisan, watches Fox News, hates Wall Street and “the GOP establishment.” She continues to be so ardent for Mr. Trump that she not only watched his speech in Mobile, Ala., on live TV, she watched while excitedly texting with family members—middle-class, white, independent-minded—who were in the audience cheering. Is that “the Republican base”? I guess maybe it is, because she texted me Wednesday to say she’d just registered Republican. I asked if she’d ever been one before. Reply: “No, never!!!”

Something is going on, some tectonic plates are moving in interesting ways. My friend Cesar works the deli counter at my neighborhood grocery store. He is Dominican, an immigrant, early 50s, and listens most mornings to a local Hispanic radio station, La Mega, on 97.9 FM. Their morning show is the popular “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” and after the first GOP debate, Cesar told me, they opened the lines to call-ins, asking listeners (mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican) for their impressions. More than half called in to say they were for Mr. Trump. Their praise, Cesar told me a few weeks ago, dumbfounded the hosts. I later spoke to one of them, who identified himself as D.J. New Era. He backed Cesar’s story. “We were very surprised,” at the Trump support, he said. Why? “It’s a Latin-based market!”

“He’s the man,” Cesar said of Mr. Trump. This week I went by and Cesar told me that after Mr. Trump threw Univision’s well-known anchor and immigration activist, Jorge Ramos, out of an Iowa news conference on Tuesday evening, the “El Vacilón” hosts again threw open the phone lines the following morning and were again surprised that the majority of callers backed not Mr. Ramos but Mr. Trump. Cesar, who I should probably note sees me, I sense, as a very nice establishment person who needs to get with the new reality, was delighted.

Well, Peggy, he’s got you pretty well figured out. And yes, America has the worst political class in its history, average people are figuring it out, and — finally — the political class is beginning to figure out that average people are figuring it out.

Does this mean that Trump should be President? No, but it means someone capable of absorbing, and putting into practice, the things that Trump is making clear should be.

 

[cupper]

Very interesting discussion on how the push by the religious right (specifically the Christian Right) for protection of religious freedoms may backfire and ultimately become a self defeating shot in the foot. But it also speaks (in my opinion) to the larger divide that I see existing in the US today, with social and religious conservative views clashing with the more liberal and progressive social population.

How the GOP’s Religious Freedom Rhetoric Could Undermine the Party
If conservatives want to insist on the priority of rights, they shouldn't be surprised when they see their other goals slipping away.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/republicans-religious-freedom-backfire-213130

Has anyone noticed that the further right Republican conservatives move, the further left their rhetoric becomes?
Consider the way current Republican contenders for president have reacted to the case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who spent Labor Day weekend in jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. “This,” Mike Huckabee told ABC’s “This Week,” “is what [President Thomas] Jefferson warned us about. That’s judicial tyranny.”

Huckabee is not the only Republican presidential candidate who invokes the language of the radical left to defend the positions of the radical right. “I’ll tell you, I stand with Kim Davis unequivocally,” echoed fellow candidate Ted Cruz. “I stand with her or anyone else the government is trying to persecute for standing up for their faith.”

“She’s not going to resign,” one of her lawyers, Mat Staver, declared. “She’s not going to sacrifice her conscience, so she’s doing what Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote about his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, which is to pay the consequences for her decision.”

Not too long ago, religious conservatives were happy to be the moral majority, wielding government power against people too extreme in their demands and too outlandish in their lifestyle to be accepted as normal. But with gay marriage now legal everywhere in the United States except American Samoa, and with the majority of Americans now in favor of it, right-wing politicians are increasingly falling back on the language of rights—transforming from a moral majority to an aggrieved minority. Liberal elites, they insist, constitute an establishment persecuting the godly the way the Romans crucified Christ. The Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of gay marriage, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told his followers after the decision, “will pave the way for an all out assault against the religious freedom rights of Christians. … This ruling must not be used as pretext by Washington to erode our right to religious liberty.”

Freedom, liberty, rights, resistance to tyranny—these words are quintessentially American. What conservatives seem to forget, however, is that they usually constitute the rallying cry of those seeking greater social justice, enhanced equality and toleration of difference. If conservatives want to insist on the priority of rights, God bless them. But they should not be surprised when the other goals they seek—limited government, opposition to affirmative action, the importance of moral obligation, and the defense of hierarchy and authority—all become more difficult to achieve.

Rights, for one thing, while offering protection against an intrusive state, cannot be enforced without the help of the state. To be sure, there exists something called negative liberty, or the freedom to be left alone. But neither Jindal nor Huckabee resembles Henry David Thoreau, an earlier signatory to a Grover Norquist-like no-tax pledge. Thoreau was an abolitionist who retreated as far from politics as possible, not a presidential candidate relying on votes from white southerners.

Today’s conservatives, rather, seek a form of positive liberty: not just the right to have a belief, but the accumulation of the resources necessary to turn that belief into reality. Everyone’s favorite example of what is at stake here, at least until Kim Davis came along, illustrates the point. Both liberals and conservatives would agree that a Christian baker has the right to regard homosexuality, in her heart of hearts, as a sin; freedom of private conscience is widely accepted in the United States. The real test, however, is whether that same baker can refuse to provide a public service to a gay couple that she willingly provides to everyone else—a clear act, whether one supports it or not, of discrimination. Conservatives believe she should have such freedom. The problem is that this can only happen when government establishes an exception to a general law and backs that up exception with its enforcement powers. As we have seen, abolishing discrimination requires an active government. What Republicans tend to forget is: So does permitting it.

Here’s another reason why Republicans may come to regret their hasty support for religious rights. Calls for positive liberty nearly always come to support one version or another of affirmative action. It is not difficult to imagine conservative Christians demanding something similar; indeed as they talk about their exclusion from universities and the media, let alone the war directed against them every Christmas, it seems we are already halfway there. Once groups start viewing themselves as helpless victims against unjust tyranny, their burning sense of injustice will know few bounds. No one in America likes affirmative action—except when he benefits from it. Let their anger at perceived victimization fester, and conservative Christians will find the language of diversity perfectly compatible with, as well as a proposed remedy for, their sense of exclusion from top-fight colleges, the senior ranks of the military and major corporations.

The irony in all of this is that conservatives not long ago opposed gay claims by arguing against “special” rights. It was never clear what conservatives meant by that term, but it seemed to imply that gays were demanding rights held by no one else, such as immunity from criticism or rendering “conversion therapy,” efforts by conservatives to “cure” homosexuality, illegal. As recently as this past April, Gov. Bobby Jindal, as if failing to recognize that the conservative script was undergoing serious revision, spoke about gay-friendly New Orleans on “Meet the Press”: “My concern about creating special legal protection is [that] historically in our country, we have only done that in extraordinary circumstances,” he said. “It doesn’t appear to me we are in one of those moments today.”

Jindal should have cleared his remarks with Huckabee, easily the most radical of all the conservative Christians running for president. Unlike Jindal, Huckabee believes that we face extraordinary, indeed momentous, circumstances. The right to marry, in his view, is not some ordinary privilege like opening a business or even worshipping in church. Only God, he believes, not some random collection of judges, can redefine marriage. Talk about special rights! Women seeking an abortion only want a state-recognized right, not a God-given one, as do gays seeking to marry. But in Huckabee’s world, conservative Christians would be granted a right possessed by no one else—and it would be enforced by an authority greater than that of the state. No wonder Kim Davis concluded that the law did not apply to her; God was clearly on her side.

As if support for special rights and positive government were not enough, conservative Christians also want to expand the list of those eligible for rights. The concept of rights, as developed by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill in his brilliant and still relevant On Liberty, was reserved for human beings, creatures who singularly possess the capacity to plan their own course of life. Unless people can think and decide for themselves, Mill argued convincingly, rights are superfluous.

In the Hobby Lobby case decided last year, the five conservative U. S. Supreme Court justices disagreed. In his controlling opinion, Justice Samuel Alito held that requiring employers to include coverage for birth control methods in health insurance plans violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because closely held business corporations can be considered persons whose religious liberties must be respected. “A tremendous victory, not only for Hobby Lobby, but for all those being forced violate their deeply held convictions as a result of this Administration’s assault on religious liberty,” wrote Cruz. Christian colleges, the Catholic Church, non-profits—all now can share the status of religious dissenters such as Roger Williams or Anne Hutchinson, determined to practice their faith in spite of governmental efforts stop then. In this, conservatives have gone further in their quest for rights than liberals ever have: Liberals believe in expanding rights, but, other than those who back them for animals, they never expanded them as far as conservative politicians and judges have in the past year.

But Republicans might find that this victory ends up undermining a key tenet of their platform. As Boston College law professor Kent Greenfield has pointed out, corporations routinely insist that they are responsible only to their share-holders. This mantra is at the heart of the idea of “free enterprise.” But what if corporations are persons? Would that mean they have they have other obligations, in the way that people do? Firms that harm the environment, for example, may be under an obligation to improve the land. Greenfield believes that the left should welcome the move toward corporate personhood because it would give corporations (or closely held ones at least) more public responsibility.

Indeed, every right gained comes with corresponding obligations. [Too many people forget this in my opinion :nod: ] In the 1960s, that most left-wing of decades, extreme leftists and counter-cultural drop-outs approached lawless anarchy in the way they talked about rights: The whole point of having them was to be free of arbitrary restraint. Much like private corporations claiming the right to do as they wish, leftists of that era believed in conceptions of freedom that were extreme in their refusal to take the needs of others into account. My right to abortion ought to be fundamental and unrestricted, some claimed, while others argued that the substances they ingested mattered only to themselves.

Thankfully, this is no longer the case. The right to an abortion, a majority of now women recognize, cannot be allowed to become just a form of birth control; it must be treated as a serious decision with deep moral consequences for others. A number of determined protestors of the Vietnam War, myself included, later came to recognize that there are situations, such as the genocide in Rwanda, where rich nations do have a moral obligation to intervene abroad in the name of justice. The symbol of the gay rights movement was once the bathhouse, a place in which, sexually speaking, anything went—including HIV-AIDS. Now the symbol of gay rights in the wedding ring, as those who once sought liberation now seek considered legal and moral commitment.

If there is any place where the anarchism of the radical left in this country is kept alive, it is with those Christian conservatives for whom compromise is evil, politics useless and reason oblivious. Unlike freedom of speech or assembly, claims to freedom based on the will of God tend to be absolute: One does not disobey the Lord’s truth or carry out the designs of Satan. But here’s the rub: If you invoke a right to religion, you must also recognize that a society like ours has many religions, and therefore many truths. Huckabee, Jindal and the others are only at the first stage of rights assertion. They need to move to the second: the willingness to give in on some of their rights so that they can live together with others. Mormons did that when they abandoned plural marriage. Conservative Christians can do the same thing.

There is, in spite of all this, reason to cheer conservative Christians on in their quest for religion rights. For all their claims to be victims—and this in a society as religious and as Christian as any advanced liberal democracy in the world—Christians seeking rights will always be better than Christians bent on persecuting others, unless, of course, claims to rights become a form of persecution. (The right to broadcast Christian prayers at a Texas high school football game, for example, violates the rights of non-Christians and non-believers in the audience, as the court ruled in in 2000 in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe.) This country could benefit from a national conversation about rights: having them, asserting them and realizing them are what makes America great.

The trouble seems to be that in their quest for rights, conservative Republican politicians have lost all sense of the invisible ties that keep Americans of all faiths, or of no faith at all, united. The society they envision is one that caters only to their needs. If they had their way, we could all pick and choose only those truths that please us, those traditions that enrich us, those authorities that govern us and those ideals that move us. But that is anarchy—just by another name.

More than ever, Americans need visions that appeal to us all. In the past few years, we have begun to witness the emergence a younger generation more willing to question authority, develop innovative career paths, experiment with new ways of living together and willing to take their future financial security into their own hands. Let someone from the older generation, even perhaps myself, preach to them that they are going too far in their rejection of the tried-and-true, and they can reply that these days everyone wants to decide for themselves the best way to live, Christian conservatives definitely included. Where, one wonders, are conservatives when we need them?

 

[tomahawk6]

The US is by and large a conservative country.If you doubt that just see the results of the last Congressional elections where the GOP won control of both houses.Trump has tapped into the dissatisfaction in the country with the GOP congressional leadership which has been blocking things like defunding Planned parenthood and the very bad Iran nuclear deal.

 

[a_majoor]

American power still exists, and it is interesting to contemplate just how different things would be if there were a steady and competent hand weilding this power. The US Federal Reserve could be used to collapse the economies of American rivals like Russia through the simple act of raising interest rates, for example, and holding that threat over Putin would probably bring him to heel in double quick time. While there are many arguments not to do so, the real point here is there are lots of tools the American political and economic establishments have access to which could be used to make major changes, but have refrained from using to date:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/09/18/decline-that-never-quite-becomes-a-fall/

Decline that Never Quite Becomes a Fall

One big reason the Federal Reserve decided against raising rates had nothing to do with the state of the domestic economy, The Financial Times reports:

The Federal Reserve held interest rates at historic lows as concerns about an increasingly brittle global economy overshadowed evidence of a resilient US recovery.

The US central bank maintained its 0 to 0.25 per cent target range for the federal funds rate, ending weeks of feverish speculation over whether it would raise rates for the first time since before the financial crisis.

For years, we’ve been hearing  about the ongoing American decline. We’ve been told that emerging markets and particularly the BRICS are transforming the world and that the old rules no longer apply. We created the G-20 because of the widespread belief that the U.S., even with the other G-7 countries, was no longer strong enough economically to set the agenda.

Yet here we have the G-1 holding the switch on which that the global economy depends. The vaunted BRICS have to be protected from the economic disaster that a Fed rate rise would be for them. The Federal Reserve System of the United States is the world’s de facto central bank.

That doesn’t mean that the world economy is in a good place; clearly when interest rates can’t be raised from their present derisory level something is seriously wrong. One suspects that several factors are at work: the over-saving of Asian and oil economies accumulating huge reserves; rapid falls in prices not fully captured by economic statistics so that real interest rates (interest rates minus the rate of inflation or plus the rate of deflation) may be higher than the numbers we are looking at; the gradual deflation of a vast global bubble in excess manufacturing capacity and the consequences of government efforts to enable a soft landing; under-reporting of the shadow economy of, for example, oligarchs in Russia and princelings in China. To say nothing of vast off-the-books liabilities for pensions and other entitlement type spending in the advanced world. Central bankers have their work cut out for them these days.

The United States, especially to those of us looking from up close, often seems to be a stumblebum lurching from one folly to the next. And that’s often true. But what we forget is that, erratic as our national performance might be, the other big economic and political groupings—Europe, China, Japan, India, Brazil and so on—have problems of their own. Even with all its flaws, the U.S. still looks like the fastest runner in a slow field.

 

[cupper]

The US is by and large a conservative country.If you doubt that just see the results of the last Congressional elections where the GOP won control of both houses Managed to achieve the status quo, while winning a majority of seats in the Senate .Trump has tapped into the dissatisfaction in the country with the GOP congressional leadership which has been blocking things like defunding Planned parenthood and the very bad Iran nuclear deal.

I agree with your basic premise, but don't really think that the GOP won control of anything. All the 2014 midterm's achieved was to switch majority and minority positions in the Senate, and a more fractured House. In fact you could argue that they actually lost control of the Senate by becoming the majority and putting the Dems in the position of dictating what gets through and what doesn't, providing more cover for the President by not having to carry out a veto.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Part 1 of 3

Prof Graham Allison, the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and author of Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe and co-author of Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World, suggests, in this (long) article which is reproduced, in three parts, under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The Atlantic, that history teaches us that "man’s capacity for folly" is, apparently, boundless and he suggests that a war between China and the USA is not just possible, it is likely:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/united-states-china-war-thucydides-trap/406756/
(There are many very useful hyperlinks in the original article which I have not included. Those with a deeper interest shoudl go to the source article.)

The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?
In 12 of 16 past cases in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed.

GRAHAM ALLISON  SEP 24, 2015

When Barack Obama meets this week with Xi Jinping during the Chinese president’s first state visit to America, one item probably won’t be on their agenda: the possibility that the United States and China could find themselves at war in the next decade. In policy circles, this appears as unlikely as it would be unwise. 

And yet 100 years on, World War I offers a sobering reminder of man’s capacity for folly. When we say that war is “inconceivable,” is this a statement about what is possible in the world—or only about what our limited minds can conceive? In 1914, few could imagine slaughter on a scale that demanded a new category: world war. When war ended four years later, Europe lay in ruins: the kaiser gone, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the Russian tsar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of its youth and treasure. A millennium in which Europe had been the political center of the world came to a crashing halt.

The defining question about global order for this generation is whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’s Trap. The Greek historian’s metaphor reminds us of the attendant dangers when a rising power rivals a ruling power—as Athens challenged Sparta in ancient Greece, or as Germany did Britain a century ago. Most such contests have ended badly, often for both nations, a team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record. In 12 of 16 cases over the past 500 years, the result was war. When the parties avoided war, it required huge, painful adjustments in attitudes and actions on the part not just of the challenger but also the challenged.

Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not. Moreover, current underestimations and misapprehensions of the hazards inherent in the U.S.-China relationship contribute greatly to those hazards. A risk associated with Thucydides’s Trap is that business as usual—not just an unexpected, extraordinary event—can trigger large-scale conflict. When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen.

War, however, is not inevitable. Four of the 16 cases in our review did not end in bloodshed. Those successes, as well as the failures, offer pertinent lessons for today’s world leaders. Escaping the Trap requires tremendous effort. As Xi Jinping himself said during a visit to Seattle on Tuesday, “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.”

* * *

More than 2,400 years ago, the Athenian historian Thucydides offered a powerful insight: “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.” Others identified an array of contributing causes of the Peloponnesian War. But Thucydides went to the heart of the matter, focusing on the inexorable, structural stress caused by a rapid shift in the balance of power between two rivals. Note that Thucydides identified two key drivers of this dynamic: the rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway, on the one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo this engenders in the established power, on the other.

In the case about which he wrote in the fifth century B.C., Athens had emerged over a half century as a steeple of civilization, yielding advances in philosophy, history, drama, architecture, democracy, and naval prowess. This shocked Sparta, which for a century had been the leading land power on the Peloponnese peninsula. As Thucydides saw it, Athens’s position was understandable. As its clout grew, so too did its self-confidence, its consciousness of past injustices, its sensitivity to instances of disrespect, and its insistence that previous arrangements be revised to reflect new realities of power. It was also natural, Thucydides explained, that Sparta interpreted the Athenian posture as unreasonable, ungrateful, and threatening to the system it had established—and within which Athens had flourished.

              War between the U.S. and China is more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not.

Thucydides chronicled objective changes in relative power, but he also focused on perceptions of change among the leaders of Athens and Sparta—and how this led each to strengthen alliances with other states in the hopes of counterbalancing the other. But entanglement runs both ways. (It was for this reason that George Washington famously cautioned America to beware of “entangling alliances.”) When conflict broke out between the second-tier city-states of Corinth and Corcyra (now Corfu), Sparta felt it necessary to come to Corinth’s defense, which left Athens little choice but to back its ally. The Peloponnesian War followed. When it ended 30 years later, Sparta was the nominal victor. But both states lay in ruin, leaving Greece vulnerable to the Persians.

* * *

Eight years before the outbreak of world war in Europe, Britain’s King Edward VII asked his prime minister why the British government was becoming so unfriendly to his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany, rather than keeping its eye on America, which he saw as the greater challenge. The prime minister instructed the Foreign Office’s chief Germany watcher, Eyre Crowe, to write a memo answering the king’s question. Crowe delivered his memorandum on New Year’s Day, 1907. The document is a gem in the annals of diplomacy.

The logic of Crowe’s analysis echoed Thucydides’s insight. And his central question, as paraphrased by Henry Kissinger in On China, was the following: Did increasing hostility between Britain and Germany stem more from German capabilities or German conduct? Crowe put it a bit differently: Did Germany’s pursuit of “political hegemony and maritime ascendancy” pose an existential threat to “the independence of her neighbours and ultimately the existence of England?”

Crowe’s answer was unambiguous: Capability was key. As Germany’s economy surpassed Britain’s, Germany would not only develop the strongest army on the continent. It would soon also “build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” In other words, Kissinger writes, “once Germany achieved naval supremacy … this in itself—regardless of German intentions—would be an objective threat to Britain, and incompatible with the existence of the British Empire.”

Three years after reading that memo, Edward VII died. Attendees at his funeral included two “chief mourners”—Edward’s successor, George V, and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm—along with Theodore Roosevelt representing the United States. At one point, Roosevelt (an avid student of naval power and leading champion of the buildup of the U.S. Navy) asked Wilhelm whether he would consider a moratorium in the German-British naval arms race. The kaiser replied that Germany was unalterably committed to having a powerful navy. But as he went on to explain, war between Germany and Britain was simply unthinkable, because “I was brought up in England, very largely; I feel myself partly an Englishman. Next to Germany I care more for England than for any other country.” And then with emphasis: “I ADORE ENGLAND!”

However unimaginable conflict seems, however catastrophic the potential consequences for all actors, however deep the cultural empathy among leaders, even blood relatives, and however economically interdependent states may be—none of these factors is sufficient to prevent war, in 1914 or today.

In fact, in 12 of 16 cases over the last 500 years in which there was a rapid shift in the relative power of a rising nation that threatened to displace a ruling state, the result was war. As the table below suggests, the struggle for mastery in Europe and Asia over the past half millennium offers a succession of variations on a common storyline.

          Thucydides Case Studies
         

(For summaries of these 16 cases and the methodology for selecting them, and for a forum to register additions, subtractions, revisions, and disagreements with the cases, please visit the Harvard Belfer Center’s Thucydides Trap Case File. For this first phase of the project, we at the Belfer Center identified “ruling” and “rising” powers by following the judgments of leading historical accounts, resisting the temptation to offer original or idiosyncratic interpretations of events. These histories use “rise” and “rule” according to their conventional definitions, generally emphasizing rapid shifts in relative GDP and military strength. Most of the cases in this initial round of analysis come from post-Westphalian Europe.)

When a rising, revolutionary France challenged Britain’s dominance of the oceans and the balance of power on the European continent, Britain destroyed Napoleon Bonaparte’s fleet in 1805 and later sent troops to the continent to defeat his armies in Spain and at Waterloo. As Otto von Bismarck sought to unify a quarrelsome assortment of rising German states, war with their common adversary, France, proved an effective instrument to mobilize popular support for his mission. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, a rapidly modernizing Japanese economy and military establishment challenged Chinese and Russian dominance of East Asia, resulting in wars with both from which Japan emerged as the leading power in the region.

End of Part 1 of 3

 

[Edward Campbell]

Part 2 of 3

          The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent Russia. It is the impact of China’s ascendance.

Each case is, of course, unique. Ongoing debate about the causes of the First World War reminds us that each is subject to competing interpretations. The great international historian, Harvard’s Ernest May, taught that when attempting to reason from history, we should be as sensitive to the differences as to the similarities among cases we compare. (Indeed, in his Historical Reasoning 101 class, May would take a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle of the page, label one column “Similar” and the other “Different,” and fill in the sheet with at least a half dozen of each.) Nonetheless, acknowledging many differences, Thucydides directs us to a powerful commonality.

* * *

The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent Russia. It is the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order, which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years. As Singapore’s late leader, Lee Kuan Yew, observed, “the size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.” Everyone knows about the rise of China. Few of us realize its magnitude. Never before in history has a nation risen so far, so fast, on so many dimensions of power. To paraphrase former Czech President Vaclav Havel, all this has happened so rapidly that we have not yet had time to be astonished.

My lecture on this topic at Harvard begins with a quiz that asks students to compare China and the United States in 1980 with their rankings today. The reader is invited to fill in the blanks.

          Quiz: Fill in the Blanks
         

The answers for the first column: In 1980, China had 10 percent of America’s GDP as measured by purchasing power parity; 7 percent of its GDP at current U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 6 percent of its exports. The foreign currency held by China, meanwhile, was just one-sixth the size of America’s reserves. The answers for the second column: By 2014, those figures were 101 percent of GDP; 60 percent at U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 106 percent of exports. China’s reserves today are 28 times larger than America’s.

In a single generation, a nation that did not appear on any of the international league tables has vaulted into the top ranks. In 1980, China’s economy was smaller than that of the Netherlands. Last year, the increment of growth in China’s GDP was roughly equal to the entire Dutch economy. 

The second question in my quiz asks students: Could China become #1? In what year could China overtake the United States to become, say, the largest economy in the world, or primary engine of global growth, or biggest market for luxury goods?

          Could China Become #1?

          Manufacturer:
          Exporter:
          Trading nation:
          Saver:
          Holder of U.S. debt:
          Foreign-direct-investment destination:
          Energy consumer:
          Oil importer:
          Carbon emitter:
          Steel producer:
          Auto market:
          Smartphone market:
          E-commerce market:
          Luxury-goods market: 
          Internet user:
          Fastest supercomputer:
          Holder of foreign reserves:
          Source of initial public offerings:
          Primary engine of global growth:
          Economy:

Most are stunned to learn that on each of these 20 indicators, China has already surpassed the U.S.

Will China be able to sustain economic-growth rates several times those of the United States for another decade and beyond? If and as it does, are its current leaders serious about displacing the U.S. as the predominant power in Asia? Will China follow the path of Japan and Germany, and take its place as a responsible stakeholder in the international order that America has built over the past seven decades? The answer to these questions is obviously that no one knows.

But if anyone’s forecasts are worth heeding, it’s those of Lee Kuan Yew, the world’s premier China watcher and a mentor to Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping. Before his death in March, the founder of Singapore put the odds of China continuing to grow at several times U.S. rates for the next decade and beyond as “four chances in five.” On whether China’s leaders are serious about displacing the United States as the top power in Asia in the foreseeable future, Lee answered directly: “Of course. Why not … how could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time the world?” And about accepting its place in an international order designed and led by America, he said absolutely not: “China wants to be China and accepted as such—not as an honorary member of the West.”

* * *

Americans have a tendency to lecture others about why they should be “more like us.” In urging China to follow the lead of the United States, should we Americans be careful what we wish for?

As the United States emerged as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere in the 1890s, how did it behave? Future President Theodore Roosevelt personified a nation supremely confident that the 100 years ahead would be an American century. Over a decade that began in 1895 with the U.S. secretary of state declaring the United States “sovereign on this continent,” America liberated Cuba; threatened Britain and Germany with war to force them to accept American positions on disputes in Venezuela and Canada; backed an insurrection that split Colombia to create a new state of Panama (which immediately gave the U.S. concessions to build the Panama Canal); and attempted to overthrow the government of Mexico, which was supported by the United Kingdom and financed by London bankers. In the half century that followed, U.S. military forces intervened in “our hemisphere” on more than 30 separate occasions to settle economic or territorial disputes in terms favorable to Americans, or oust leaders they judged unacceptable.

For example, in 1902, when British and German ships attempted to impose a naval blockade to force Venezuela to pay its debts to them, Roosevelt warned both countries that he would “be obliged to interfere by force if necessary” if they did not withdraw their ships. The British and Germans were persuaded to retreat and to resolve their dispute in terms satisfactory to the U.S. at The Hague. The following year, when Colombia refused to lease the Panama Canal Zone to the United States, America sponsored Panamanian secessionists, recognized the new Panamanian government within hours of its declaration of independence, and sent the Marines to defend the new country. Roosevelt defended the U.S. intervention on the grounds that it was “justified in morals and therefore justified in law.” Shortly thereafter, Panama granted the United States rights to the Canal Zone “in perpetuity.”

* * *

End of Part 2 of 2

 

[Edward Campbell]

Part 3 of 3

When Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s fast march to the market in 1978, he announced a policy known as “hide and bide.” What China needed most abroad was stability and access to markets. The Chinese would thus “bide our time and hide our capabilities,” which Chinese military officers sometimes paraphrased as getting strong before getting even.

With the arrival of China’s new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, the era of “hide and bide” is over. Nearly three years into his 10-year term, Xi has stunned colleagues at home and China watchers abroad with the speed at which he has moved and the audacity of his ambitions. Domestically, he has bypassed rule by a seven-man standing committee and instead consolidated power in his own hands; ended flirtations with democratization by reasserting the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power; and attempted to transform China’s engine of growth from an export-focused economy to one driven by domestic consumption. Overseas, he has pursued a more active Chinese foreign policy that is increasingly assertive in advancing the country’s interests.

          Never before in history has a nation risen so far, so fast. In 1980, China’s economy was smaller than the Netherlands’. Last year, the increment of growth in China’s GDP was equal to the Dutch economy.

While the Western press is seized by the storyline of “China’s economic slowdown,” few pause to note that China’s lower growth rate remains more than three times that of the United States. Many observers outside China have missed the great divergence between China’s economic performance and that of its competitors over the seven years since the financial crisis of 2008 and Great Recession. That shock caused virtually all other major economies to falter and decline. China never missed a year of growth, sustaining an average growth rate exceeding 8 percent. Indeed, since the financial crisis, nearly 40 percent of all growth in the global economy has occurred in just one country: China. The chart below illustrates China’s growth compared to growth among its peers in the BRICS group of emerging economies, advanced economies, and the world. From a common index of 100 in 2007, the divergence is dramatic. 

          GDP, 2007 — 2015
         

Today, China has displaced the United States as the world’s largest economy measured in terms of the amount of goods and services a citizen can buy in his own country (purchasing power parity).

What Xi Jinping calls the “China Dream” expresses the deepest aspirations of hundreds of millions of Chinese, who wish to be not only rich but also powerful. At the core of China’s civilizational creed is the belief—or conceit—that China is the center of the universe. In the oft-repeated narrative, a century of Chinese weakness led to exploitation and national humiliation by Western colonialists and Japan. In Beijing’s view, China is now being restored to its rightful place, where its power commands recognition of and respect for China’s core interests.

Last November, in a seminal meeting of the entire Chinese political and foreign-policy establishment, including the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army, Xi provided a comprehensive overview of his vision of China’s role in the world. The display of self-confidence bordered on hubris. Xi began by offering an essentially Hegelian conception of the major historical trends toward multipolarity (i.e. not U.S. unipolarity) and the transformation of the international system (i.e. not the current U.S.-led system). In his words, a rejuvenated Chinese nation will build a “new type of international relations” through a “protracted” struggle over the nature of the international order. In the end, he assured his audience that “the growing trend toward a multipolar world will not change.”

Given objective trends, realists see an irresistible force approaching an immovable object. They ask which is less likely: China demanding a lesser role in the East and South China Seas than the United States did in the Caribbean or Atlantic in the early 20th century, or the U.S. sharing with China the predominance in the Western Pacific that America has enjoyed since World War II?

And yet in four of the 16 cases that the Belfer Center team analyzed, similar rivalries did not end in war. If leaders in the United States and China let structural factors drive these two great nations to war, they will not be able to hide behind a cloak of inevitability. Those who don’t learn from past successes and failures to find a better way forward will have no one to blame but themselves.

At this point, the established script for discussion of policy challenges calls for a pivot to a new strategy (or at least slogan), with a short to-do list that promises peaceful and prosperous relations with China. Shoehorning this challenge into that template would demonstrate only one thing: a failure to understand the central point I’m trying to make. What strategists need most at the moment is not a new strategy, but a long pause for reflection. If the tectonic shift caused by China’s rise poses a challenge of genuinely Thucydidean proportions, declarations about “rebalancing,” or revitalizing “engage and hedge,” or presidential hopefuls’ calls for more “muscular” or “robust” variants of the same, amount to little more than aspirin treating cancer. Future historians will compare such assertions to the reveries of British, German, and Russian leaders as they sleepwalked into 1914.

The rise of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.3 billion people is not a problem to be fixed. It is a condition—a chronic condition that will have to be managed over a generation. Success will require not just a new slogan, more frequent summits of presidents, and additional meetings of departmental working groups. Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest level in both countries. It will entail a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger-Zhou Enlai conversations in the 1970s. Most significantly, it will mean more radical changes in attitudes and actions, by leaders and publics alike, than anyone has yet imagined.

First: I agree with Prof Allison's historical analysis: war between a rising power and the established great power is more likely than not.

Second: I am one of those who falls, too easily, into the "inconceivable" trap he describes in the second paragraph. I have said, and I remain convinced, that neither China nor the USA can win such a war. Our own Thucydides has explained the dragon vs the shark conundrum: each is paramount in its own environment, China as a great land power and the USA as the world greatest naval power, but the two cannot have a real war ... not without going nuclear and China can and would survive that.

Third: I agree, therefore, with Prof Allison's last two paragraphs. I hope US policymakers read this article, especially the conclusion ... but I doubt enough will.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Well, Hillary Clinton is against the TPP trade pact proving that (too) many of the people who are putting themselves forward as "leaders of the free world," Democrats and Republicans alike, are either charlatans, more interested in securing their own political goals than in the future of their country, or idiots.

 

[GAP]

Under NAFTA the US was the the big fish in a little pond......the pond just got larger, much larger.

The US is/has been so protective as to strangle it's own trade, the world is moving on....

Oh there still is a place for the US, and a good one, but not as Top Dog......

 

[tomahawk6]

There are aspiring top dogs.Perhaps you would prefer China to the US.I will take a democratic state over a totalitarian any day.

 

[Edward Campbell]

It isn't a top dog issue. The US remains, by any and every sensible metric, the top dog.

But: the US is starting to stagnate, and part of that is because it has turned protectionist (think Britain in the 1870s); and China, which is, relatively, a freer trader is growing in strength. The US is not in absolute decline: the pot is getting bigger and China's share is bigger still. It's all relative.

 

[tomahawk6]

You overlook China's current economic malaise which is of concern to the CCP.

 

[Edward Campbell]

America and Europe both recovered from the "economic malaise" of 2007-09. Business cycles and economic cycles (booms and busts) are normal ... China will have to find ways to adapt. Others have, China can. It might not and that would be interesting ... as the Chinese say in a curse.

 

[a_majoor]

Niall Ferguson goes to the real roots of America's foreign policy problems. While the Obama Administration has ramped the problem up to "11", the underlying factors will bedevil not only the next Administration, but others to come unless there is a rather drastic change to American political culture or society:

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/the-real-obama-doctrine-1444429036-lMyQjAxMTI1MjEwMDgxMTA1Wj

The Real Obama Doctrine
Henry Kissinger long ago recognized the problem: a talented vote-getter, surrounded by lawyers, who is overly risk-averse.
By NIALL FERGUSON
Oct. 9, 2015 6:17 p.m. ET

Even before becoming Richard Nixon ’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger understood how hard it was to make foreign policy in Washington. There “is no such thing as an American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in 1968. There is only “a series of moves that have produced a certain result” that they “may not have been planned to produce.” It is “research and intelligence organizations,” he added, that “attempt to give a rationality and consistency” which “it simply does not have.”

Two distinctively American pathologies explained the fundamental absence of coherent strategic thinking. First, the person at the top was selected for other skills. “The typical political leader of the contemporary managerial society,” noted Mr. Kissinger, “is a man with a strong will, a high capacity to get himself elected, but no very great conception of what he is going to do when he gets into office.”

Second, the government was full of people trained as lawyers. In making foreign policy, Mr. Kissinger once remarked, “you have to know what history is relevant.” But lawyers were “the single most important group in Government,” he said, and their principal drawback was “a deficiency in history.” This was a long-standing prejudice of his. “The clever lawyers who run our government,” he thundered in a 1956 letter to a friend, have weakened the nation by instilling a “quest for minimum risk which is our most outstanding characteristic.”

Let’s see, now. A great campaigner. A bunch of lawyers. And a “quest for minimum risk.” What is it about this combination that sounds familiar?

I have spent much of the past seven years trying to work out what Barack Obama ’s strategy for the United States truly is. For much of his presidency, as a distinguished general once remarked to me about the commander in chief’s strategy, “we had to infer it from speeches.”

At first, I assumed that the strategy was simply not to be like his predecessor—an approach that was not altogether unreasonable, given the errors of the Bush administration in Iraq and the resulting public disillusionment. I read Mr. Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech—with its Quran quotes and its promise of “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”—as simply the manifesto of the Anti-Bush.

But what that meant in practice was not entirely clear. Precipitate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq, but a time-limited surge in Afghanistan. A “reset” with Russia, but seeming indifference to Europe. A “pivot” to Asia, but mixed signals to China. And then, in response to the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya, complete confusion, the nadir of which was the September 2013 redline fiasco regarding the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria and Mr. Obama’s declaration that “America is not the global policeman.”

An approximation of an Obama strategy was revealed in April last year, at the end of a presidential trip to Asia, when White House aides told reporters that the Obama doctrine was “Don’t do stupid sh--.”

I now see, however, that there is more to it than that.

The president always intended to repudiate more than George W. Bush’s foreign policy. In a 2012 presidential debate with Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama made clear that he was turning away from Ronald Reagan, too. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” he jeered, “because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.” Mr. Romney’s reference to Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe” now looks prescient, whereas the president’s boast, in a January 2014 New Yorker magazine interview, that he didn’t “really even need George Kennan right now” looks like hubristic rejection of foreign-policy experience itself. Two months later, Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea.

Mr. Obama also had his own plan for the Middle East. “It would be profoundly in the interest” of the region’s citizens “if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” Mr. Obama said in that same interview. “If we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between . . . predominantly Sunni Gulf states and Iran.”

Now I see that this was the strategy—a strategy aimed at creating a new balance of power in the Middle East. The deal on Iran’s nuclear-arms program was part of Mr. Obama’s aim (as he put it to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in May) “to find effective partners—not just in Iraq, but in Syria, and in Yemen, and in Libya.” Mr. Obama said he wanted “to create the international coalition and atmosphere in which people across sectarian lines are willing to compromise and are willing to work together in order to provide the next generation a fighting chance for a better future.”

The same fuzzy thinking informed Mr. Obama’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly last week, in which he first said he wanted to “work with other nations under the mantle of international norms and principles and law,” but then added that, to sort out Syria, he was willing to work with Russia and Iran—neither famed for spending time under that particular mantle—so long as they accepted the ousting of yet another Middle Eastern dictator.

A fighting chance for a better future in the Middle East? Make that a better chance for a fighting future.

It is clear that the president’s strategy is failing disastrously. Since 2010, total fatalities from armed conflict in the world have increased by a factor of close to four, according to data from the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Total fatalities due to terrorism have risen nearly sixfold, based on the University of Maryland’s Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism database. Nearly all this violence is concentrated in a swath of territory stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there is every reason to expect the violence to escalate as the Sunni powers of the region seek to prevent Iran from establishing itself as the post-American hegemon.

Today the U.S. faces three strategic challenges: the maelstrom in the Muslim world, the machinations of a weak but ruthless Russia, and the ambition of a still-growing China. The president’s responses to all three look woefully inadequate.

Those who know the Obama White House’s inner workings wonder why this president, who came into office with next to no experience of foreign policy, has made so little effort to hire strategic expertise. In fairness, Denis McDonoug h (now White House chief of staff) has some real knowledge of Latin America. While at Oxford, National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote a doctoral dissertation on Zimbabwe. And Samantha Power, ambassador to the U.N., has published two substantial books (one of which—“A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”—she will need to update when she returns to academic life).

But other key players are the sort of people Henry Kissinger complained about more than half a century ago: Michael Froman, the trade representative, was one of Mr. Obama’s classmates at Harvard Law School; Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken is a Columbia J.D.; éminence grise Valerie Jarrett got hers from the University of Michigan. What about Secretary of State John Kerry ? Boston College Law School, ’76. Not one of the people who advise the president could claim to have made contributions to strategic doctrine comparable with those made by Mr. Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski before they went to Washington.

Some things you can learn on the job, like tending bar or being a community organizer. National-security strategy is different. “High office teaches decision making, not substance,” Mr. Kissinger once wrote. “It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it.” The next president may have cause to regret that Barack Obama didn’t heed those words. In making up his strategy as he has gone along, this president has sown the wind. His successor will reap the whirlwind. He or she had better bring some serious intellectual capital to the White House.

Mr. Ferguson’s first volume of his Henry Kissinger biography has just been published by Penguin.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Niall Ferguson goes to the real roots of America's foreign policy problems. While the Obama Administration has ramped the problem up to "11", the underlying factors will bedevil not only the next Administration, but others to come unless there is a rather drastic change to American political culture or society:

http://www.wsj.com/article_email/the-real-obama-doctrine-1444429036-lMyQjAxMTI1MjEwMDgxMTA1Wj

...
But what that meant in practice was not entirely clear. Precipitate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq, but a time-limited surge in Afghanistan. A “reset” with Russia, but seeming indifference to Europe. [size=13pt]A “pivot” to Asia, but mixed signals to China. And then, in response to the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya, complete confusion, the nadir of which was the September 2013 redline fiasco regarding the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria and Mr. Obama’s declaration that “America is not the global policeman.”[/size]
...

And those "mixed signals" are not just to China. The whole of Asia is receiving "mixed signals" from Washington, from the White House, from Foggy Bottom (State Department) and from the Congress. Who, then, can blame Philippines for looking to Japan, rather than America, for military aid and, even (much) more important, who can blame the Republic of Korea (South Korea) for looking towards China as this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from Foreign Affairs, suggests it is doing?

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2015-10-08/path-less-chosun

A Path Less Chosun
South Korea's New Trilateral Diplomacy

By Victor Cha

SNAPSHOT, October 8, 2015

There was much handwringing in Washington at the sight of South Korean President Park Geun-hye standing with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing at the Victory Day celebrations on September 3, 2015. Park was the only head of state from a major Asian democracy that attended the military parade, which was aimed at showcasing the latest Chinese weaponry designed to counter U.S. power in the Pacific. In a calculated move, Park made sure to wear a pair of dark sunglasses to signal passive engagement in photos, but the pictures from the Chinese capital were worth a thousand words.

Several U.S. pundits opined about a Korea that was slowly but surely gravitating into the Chinese orbit and away from the United States and Japan. Others countered that Washington is missing the real picture—that Park was on the viewing stand rubbing shoulders with Xi in the spot traditionally occupied by the North Korean leader (whose representative was relegated to the cheap seats). Put another way, Park is not distancing South Korea from the United States; she is bringing Beijing closer to Seoul while distancing it from Pyongyang.

Both outlooks are shortsighted. There is no denying that each has its own logical coherence, but both represent the type of two-dimensional, zero-sum thinking that typified U.S. strategy during the Cold War era. What we are actually seeing is Diplomacy 2.0 on the Korean peninsula: a nuanced, three-dimensional foreign policy strategy designed to alter Chinese strategic thinking, engage U.S. interests, and ultimately build Northeast Asian cooperation where there was little in the past.

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye (R) and Chinese President Xi Jinping inspect Chinese honour guards during a welcoming ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing June 27, 2013.

UPGRADING THE SYSTEM

In Northeast Asia, Diplomacy 1.0 meant choosing the least controversial path on the international stage. Under this logic, the safe play would have been for Park to attend the Beijing celebrations and politely excuse herself before the parade of missiles began to roll. But if Park wished to send credible messages about positive atmospherics in South Korean–Chinese relations, and her wish to take their relations to the next level, that wouldn’t do. In this case, Park was willing to take a hit to her reputation in Washington. She has a larger three-dimensional game in mind, of which spoiling the party for North Korea is only a small part.

Seoul signed a free trade agreement with Beijing in June 2015, in addition to opening a dialogue between each nation’s national security council in November 2013. Earlier that year, Park had visited Tsinghua University in Beijing and, speaking in Mandarin Chinese, gave an address on the future of relations between China and the Republic of Korea. All these efforts were meant to alter Beijing’s assessment of its importance on both ends of the Korean peninsula. By any metric, China’s future is brighter if it is pegged to an economically vibrant, technologically savvy, and globally relevant South Korea rather than an aid-devouring black hole to the North. Many Chinese officials and scholars believe that North Korea’s regime belongs in a museum, but such clearheaded thinking is often obscured by two generations of “sealed in blood” policy embedded in Chinese bureaucracy and strategic culture. This is what Park is up against.

In this regard, few noticed Seoul’s casual reference to unification within its statement on Park’s meetings in China. The document states that “the two sides also had in-depth discussions on the issue of unification. The Korean side stressed that with the Korean Peninsula in its 70th year of division, peaceful unification was a pressing aim, the realization of which would also contribute to promoting peace and prosperity in the region. The Chinese side said that it supported "the peaceful unification of the Korean Peninsula by the Korean people.” This was, however, the first time that China has ever mentioned unification in a statement with South Korea, signaling that bilateral discussions between Seoul and Beijing on unification have entered new territory. Of course, gaining Chinese support for South Korean positions in a unification scenario is not all that Park is after: she is also looking to build a trilateral dialogue among China, South Korea, and her key ally the United States about the peninsula’s future.

Indeed, Park’s attendance at Beijing’s V-Day celebrations is but a part of her larger use of geometry diplomacy to bring Beijing, Seoul, and Washington together. And this fall appears to be the appropriate moment for her plan to come together: Park met with Xi in Beijing on September 2, Xi met with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on September 25, and Obama and Park plan to meet in Washington on October 16. Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean leaders are scheduled to hold a trilateral meeting in Seoul at the end of October or beginning of November. These meetings provide the building blocks for what Seoul hopes will be the first ever three-way discussion among China, South Korea, and the United States later this year or early next year. Although no formal date has been announced, a trilateral meeting could be held on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Turkey in November, the 2015 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in December, or the 2016 Nuclear Security Summit in Washington next March. If such a meeting were to occur, its agenda could be used to coordinate priorities, establish a division of labor to tackle these tasks (for example, to secure nuclear weapons, stem refugee flows, and stabilize the situation on the ground), increase transparency between actors, and reduce the potential for miscalculation along the way.

Admittedly, these are lofty strategic goals. The state of U.S.-Chinese relations today is challenging. But even broaching a discussion on formerly taboo topics, however, might be significant. Such a dialogue ties into the broader vision for Northeast Asian cooperation that Park officials have called the Northeast Asian Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI). The region’s unparalleled levels of economic growth and prosperity have not translated into the sort of political cooperation and institution building that the liberal paradigm upholds. To fix this, the NAPCI framework suggests the construction of incremental cooperation that is pragmatic, functional, and devoid of both history and ideology. Such cooperation could take form on issues such as nuclear safety, cybersecurity, climate change, health pandemics, and disaster response, where each party has an interest in sharing information and pooling resources. But as U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said during the recent gathering at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the region’s primary threat to prosperity and stability is North Korea.

The North Korean regime under Kim Jong-un grows more reclusive by the day, focusing solely on its burgeoning weapons of mass destruction programs at the expense of the well-being of North Koreans. Kim’s continued purge of high-level officials during the first four years of his transition into power has signaled that all is not well in Pyongyang. Although the country continues to lack food and energy, the leadership spends its resources on building amusement parks, ski resorts, and hosting Dennis Rodman, which is an embarrassment to Beijing. The Chinese president has refused to meet with the young, rambunctious Kim, while he has met several times already with Park. Chinese scholars and officials, as a result of past North Korean missile and nuclear tests, are now at liberty to express their frustration with Pyongyang and the lack of a way out. The nightmare scenario for the region is a North Korea in collapse, with loose nuclear weapons that heighten tensions and military competition between the United States and Japan and with China.

New ideas will always meet resistance because they are foreign and unfamiliar, and Park’s Diplomacy 2.0 is no different. This new form of diplomacy cuts against the grain in Asian diplomacy, where uncontroversial and one-dimensional thinking predominates. It is also not without its challenges. First, South Korea’s vision for Northeast Asian cooperation cannot happen without an improvement in Seoul’s bilateral relations with Tokyo. The estranged ties between Park and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appear to be on the mend, but should they deteriorate instead, Park’s plans will be almost moot. The second challenge is a North Korean provocation. The honeymoon in the Park-Xi relationship has not been tested by Kim’s misbehavior, as it was during the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan. Beijing’s silence following North Korea’s actions, which killed 46 South Korean sailors, soured Chinese–South Korean relations. Seoul will expect much from China in the event of a North Korean missile or nuclear test. But if China rises to meet these demands, then the region might be entering a new phase of diplomacy after all.

"New ideas" from e.g. South Korea are necessary because there are no ideas, none at all, from the USA: none from a tired, uninspired White House, none from a beaten down, defeated State Department and none from a Congress that is intellectually inferior, in my opinion, to any in American history.

America remains a great power ~ economically, militarily and, above all, socially. But the American people, great and powerful though they may be, have given up on their political processes. Maybe it's still OK at some local, school board and city hall, levels, but it looks broken, to me, at the state and national levels. There are still people, many, many people, in America of the like of Henry Stimson, George Marshall, Charles Bohlen, Dean Acheson, Dwight Eisenhower, John McCloy, George Kennan, and Averell Harriman (and many others) but they no longer choose to enter the public service, either in uniform or as "gifted amateurs" and seasoned professionals in government. Running America and, de facto, running the world no longer challenges Americans.  Instead we are left to ponder a world led by the likes of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. :dunno:

That's why Asia is "pivoting" away from America.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Further to the above, this article, reproduced under the fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from The Economist, examines the challenges to America's global strategic position:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21674699-american-dominance-being-challenged-new-game?fsrc=scn/fb/te/pe/ed/thenewgame

The new game
American dominance is being challenged

Oct 17th 2015 | From the print edition

A CONTINENT separates the blood-soaked battlefields of Syria from the reefs and shoals that litter the South China Sea. In their different ways, however, both places are witnessing the most significant shift in great-power relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In Syria, for the first time since the cold war, Russia has deployed its forces far from home to quell a revolution and support a client regime. In the waters between Vietnam and the Philippines, America will soon signal that it does not recognise China’s territorial claims over a host of outcrops and reefs by exercising its right to sail within the 12-mile maritime limit that a sovereign state controls.

For the past 25 years America has utterly dominated great-power politics. Increasingly, it lives in a contested world. The new game with Russia and China that is unfolding in Syria and the South China Sea is a taste of the struggle ahead.

Facts on the ground

As ever, that struggle is being fought partly in terms of raw power. Vladimir Putin has intervened in Syria to tamp down jihadism and to bolster his own standing at home. But he also means to show that, unlike America, Russia can be trusted to get things done in the Middle East and win friends by, for example, offering Iraq an alternative to the United States (see article). Lest anyone presume with John McCain, an American senator, that Russia is just “a gas station masquerading as a country”, Mr Putin intends to prove that Russia possesses resolve, as well as crack troops and cruise missiles.

The struggle is also over legitimacy. Mr Putin wants to discredit America’s stewardship of the international order. America argues that popular discontent and the Syrian regime’s abuses of human rights disqualify the president, Bashar al-Assad, from power. Mr Putin wants to play down human rights, which he sees as a licence for the West to interfere in sovereign countries—including, if he ever had to impose a brutal crackdown, in Russia itself. 

Power and legitimacy are no less at play in the South China Sea, a thoroughfare for much of the world’s seaborne trade. Many of its islands, reefs and sandbanks are subject to overlapping claims. Yet China insists that its case should prevail, and is imposing its own claim by using landfill and by putting down airstrips and garrisons.

This is partly an assertion of rapidly growing naval might: China is creating islands because it can. Occupying them fits into its strategy of dominating the seas well beyond its coast. Twenty years ago American warships sailed there with impunity; today they find themselves in potentially hostile waters (see article). But a principle is at stake, too. America does not take a view on who owns the islands, but it does insist that China should establish its claims through negotiation or international arbitration. China is asserting that in its region, for the island disputes as in other things, it now sets the rules.

Nobody should wonder that America’s pre-eminence is being contested. After the Soviet collapse the absolute global supremacy of the United States sometimes began to seem normal. In fact, its dominance reached such heights only because Russia was reeling and China was still emerging from the chaos and depredations that had so diminished it in the 20th century. Even today, America remains the only country able to project power right across the globe. (As we have recently argued, its sway over the financial system is still growing.)

There is nevertheless reason to worry. The reassertion of Russian power spells trouble. It has already led to the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine—both breaches of the very same international law that Mr Putin says he upholds in Syria (see article). Barack Obama, America’s president, takes comfort from Russia’s weak economy and the emigration of some of its best people. But a declining nuclear-armed former superpower can cause a lot of harm.

Relations between China and America are more important—and even harder to manage. For the sake of peace and prosperity, the two must be able to work together. And yet their dealings are inevitably plagued by rivalry and mistrust. Because every transaction risks becoming a test of which one calls the shots, antagonism is never far below the surface.

American foreign policy has not yet adjusted to this contested world. For the past three presidents, policy has chiefly involved the export of American values—although, to the countries on the receiving end, that sometimes felt like an imposition. The idea was that countries would inevitably gravitate towards democracy, markets and human rights. Optimists thought that even China was heading in that direction.

Still worth it

That notion has suffered, first in Iraq and Afghanistan and now the wider Middle East. Liberation has not brought stability. Democracy has not taken root. Mr Obama has seemed to conclude that America should pull back. In Libya he led from behind; in Syria he has held off. As a result, he has ceded Russia the initiative in the Middle East for the first time since the 1970s.

All those, like this newspaper, who still see democracy and markets as the route to peace and prosperity hope that America will be more willing to lead. Mr Obama’s wish that other countries should share responsibility for the system of international law and human rights will work only if his country sets the agenda and takes the initiative—as it did with Iran’s nuclear programme. The new game will involve tough diplomacy and the occasional judicious application of force.

America still has resources other powers lack. Foremost is its web of alliances, including NATO. Whereas Mr Obama sometimes behaves as if alliances are transactional, they need solid foundations. America’s military power is unmatched, but it is hindered by pork-barrel politics and automatic cuts mandated by Congress. These spring from the biggest brake on American leadership: dysfunctional politics in Washington. That is not just a poor advertisement for democracy; it also stymies America’s interest. In the new game it is something that the United States—and the world—can ill afford.

The Economist has hit it squarely on the head: the problem ~ and I assert that there is a problem ~ is with "dysfunctional politics in Washington" and that problem is created because the American people have lost interest in their country and the world. If the Americans, themselves, don't want to be bothered mattering then, sooner rather than later, they will not matter. America doesn't have to matter: China can fill the void if Americans don't want to be bothered.