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The "new normal:" a return to the 19th century?

Colin P said:
and they vote here as well, so it's not surprising Harper's stance on the issue. I suspect Putin has more respect for Harper, than Obama, although he has no reason to fear Harper as there is little we can do.

We could always send Eddie.

 
Long article from the American Interest which suggests that things are more like 1814 than 1914, and we are looking at a sort of "Congress of Vienna " on an almost global scale:

Part 1

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/06/16/a-world-reimagined/

A World Reimagined
Parag Khanna
Why 1814 should tell us more than 1914 about 2014.

Published on June 16, 2014


This year brings a slough of World War I centennial books, many bearing foreboding questions as to whether we stand on the cusp of another calamitous 1914 moment. The emotive power of the analogy is sufficient to make most of us forget to ask whether the onset of World War I is actually a useful comparison for our times. It turns out that it isn’t. The allure of self-fulfilling centennialism is, as Henry Ford once said of history more generally, bunk. If one insists on applying supposed lessons from the centennial cycle, 1814 is more relevant than 1914.

Certainly, the differences between the canvass of World War I and that of our own time matter more than any similarities. The world of 1914 was a European order, not a global one. The globalization of a century ago pales in every respect with the scale, intensity, and depth of globalization and interdependence today. The major powers of 1914 could not foresee the speed with which their alliances would propel an escalation into a multi-party, cataclysmic war, nor did they restrain their proxies. (Indeed, Germany stoked Austrian wrath as it made demands on Serbia after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.) Today, by contrast, all the great powers have much better knowledge of each other’s capabilities and interdependencies, and are volubly risk-averse when it comes to direct confrontation. No doubt the existence of nuclear weapons contributes to this sobriety, and so constitutes a major break on World War III occurring out of the blue.

Perhaps most important, 1914 was not a year in which statesmen sought to build or nurture a new world order, or were even mindful of the task. It was rather a year in which a taken-for-granted order fell apart. As is widely recognized, what today’s world needs most is to recast and strengthen the partial settlement of 1989–91 into a new equilibrium among major powers before the outbreak of war, rather than wait for crisis, conflict, and aftermath. For that, 1814 is a much better guide than 1914 or even 1919, which by almost any measure was a miserable failure.

Whereas in 1914 a war began, in 1814 an order was built. Immanuel Kant’s liberal idea of a universal federation of republics was the most notable modern expression of the idea of global governance beyond the hegemony of empires. Just two decades after his On Perpetual Peace (1795), the first instantiation of global governance was born—but one directed by conservative statesmen rather than Enlightenment philosophers.

In Vienna between September 1814 and June 1815, ministers of Europe’s major powers—Britain’s Lord Castlereagh, France’s Talleyrand, Russia’s Czar Alexander I and Count Nesselrode, and Austria’s Prince Metternich—redrew Europe’s political map after the defeat of Napoleonic France. They represented a Europe that was multipolar and multi-regime, with autocratic Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire alongside more liberal and proto-democratic Britain and France. Motivated by their exhaustion and desire to prevent any singular hegemon from emerging in Europe, the parties to the Congress of Vienna brought an end to nearly three decades of war and gave birth to a negotiated system of great power relations that maintained relative continental peace for a century.





The effort to restore stability to the continent was of course complemented by the feudal atavisms of the European aristocracy. European monarchs ceded and traded territories as if they were family heirlooms. Having already been thrice partitioned, Poland was reduced once more to the Romanov’s advantage, and Napoleon’s wife Mary Louise was accorded several newly created Italian duchies such as Parma, while other duchies were slated to revert ownership upon her death. But there is a deeper lesson in this seeming anomaly: European royalty represented what was broadly understood as civilization, and civilizations thrive on account of a network of often implicit rules. The rules, which legitimate power into authority, matter.

Thus, while the Vienna system rested on balance-of-power politics underpinned by ambient fear of another hegemonic war, it was as much about building habits of dialogue as it was about building formal institutions. Henry Kissinger saw the magic of the Vienna system resting in its autopoietic nature, organically self-replicating and re-creating to adjust to circumstances. In A World Restored (1954) he wrote, “Civilization, then, was the degree to which change could come about ‘naturally,’ to which the tension between the forces of destruction and conservation was submerged in a spontaneous pattern of obligation.” Similarly, the great English scholar Herbert Butterfield argued in Diplomatic Investigations (1966) that Vienna symbolized the beginning of diplomacy’s potential to civilize international relations through negotiation and international law.

The concert system was fluid, dynamic, and cooperative. It is true that its lubricant allowed for competition and a host of sub-hegemonic wars at the fringes of Europe and beyond. But this is a far cry from today’s slow, bureaucratic, sanctimonious, and largely symbolic diplomatic ritualism, embodied in the mummified procedures of the United Nations, which, for all its self-congratulatory buffoonery, is less capable of restraining geopolitical maneuverings and political violence than the concert system was in its time. It also compares favorably to the mess that European statesmen—and one noteworthy American pretender along with them—made in 1919.

As is well known, but nevertheless deserves to be remembered afresh, for six months in Paris in 1919, France’s Georges Clemenceau, Britain’s David Lloyd George, Italy’s Vittorio Orlando, and the American President, Woodrow Wilson, negotiated military disarmament, exchanges of territory, payment of reparations, the dismantling of empires and colonies, and the creation of a League of Nations. It seemed the whole world was in their hands, and in a way it was. But they dropped that particular ball, otherwise known as the globe.

British diplomats and scholars, always fearful of losing their advantage as an offshore arbiter of continental affairs, were the most cynical of the lot, but not the most damaging. Halford Mackinder, the godfather of modern geopolitical theory, wrote in Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919):


The temptation of the moment is to believe that unceasing peace will ensue merely because tired men are determined that there shall be no more war. But international tension will accumulate again, though slowly at first; there was a generation of peace after Waterloo. Who among the diplomats round the Congress table at Vienna in 1814 foresaw that Prussia would become a menace to the world?

Two decades later, arch-realist E.H. Carr famously delivered his own blistering critique of ungrounded utopianism in The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939), faulting in particular Wilson’s League of Nations as a technocratic exercise divorced from the emotional realities of geopolitics. Both Mackinder and Carr clearly preferred to put their faith in the balance of power rather than in hopes of voluntary restraint.

Carr’s influence is clearly visible in Kissinger’s Cold War-era contention that the supreme challenge of diplomacy lay in grafting a multilateral order on what was actually a bipolar system. That is what Franklin D. Roosevelt had looked to do as World War II drew near its end. Taking first 1814, then 1919, as guidance, he envisioned a global version of the Concert of Europe, this time with “Four Policemen” guaranteeing global stability: the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. The United Nations was to be but a global congress to ratify this structural reality. And so it was. The real diplomatic story of the Cold War did not unfold at the high table of the UN Security Council but at the U.S.-Soviet summits in Yalta, Vienna, Helsinki, and Reykjavik.

Luckily, the Cold War ended without nuclear catastrophe, but no new global architecture that reflects the rapidly changing realities of power and influence has emerged in its wake. The partial settlement of the Cold War in 1989–91 marked an unrequited beginning still without an end. The 19th-century world was run by a few key powers overseeing their colonies, and the 20th-century by power blocks. The 21st century, however, is far too complex for a U.S.-China summit at Sunnylands in California to re-order the world.

We are left, then, with the same dilemma Metternich, Carr, and Kissinger face. The United States and China agree on little of lasting consequence, and visibly intrude into each other’s supposed spheres of influence. At the same time, international society is not evolved enough for states to cede authority to supposedly neutral global authorities. To the extent that international organizations have built any independent room to maneuver, it has been in morally urgent but strategically peripheral issues such as humanitarian relief and research. The capacity of international diplomacy to live up to the Renaissance ideal of forging a transnational community to represent common interests beyond narrow raison d’état still has a long way to go. In the meantime, we must cope.
 
Part 2:

It is tempting to believe that the presence of China as an ascendant superpower automatically entails the resumption of a familiar balance-of-power pattern, whether creakily bipolar or perhaps something more broadly distributed. It probably does, but alongside that pattern is a potentially more fundamental trend toward systemic entropy. The units central to the system, the Westphalian territorial states, are increasingly out of sync with economic realities, demographic dynamics, and the normative vapor trails of the accelerated cultural pluralization that issues from both. This entropic trend is more by accident than design, but it is what it is.

One crucial reason to study both 1814 and 1919 together is that we are, in a way, still experiencing both 1814’s negotiation among empires and the continuation of 1919’s imperial collapse. Wilson’s ideal of popular self-determination, scraped and molded from the bloody dust of empires, continues to play out across the former eastern Ottoman territories: Witness the dissolution of Iraq and Syria, and the current birth pangs of Palestine and Kurdistan. Only in the past decade have the former western Ottoman (and, before that, mostly Hapsburg) nations of the Balkans been sorted out—first through the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s and now through their membership applications to the European Union.

Taken together, 1814 and 1919 remind us that we are still seeking a global arrangement that has space for both large states and small, an arrangement that can bind them all in a system that is flexible enough to reward effort but restrained enough to allay envy, fear, and violence. While Wilson’s League of Nations dream quickly collapsed in the face of German rearmament, today’s European Union as a commonwealth of peace would probably impress him. After all, it has expanded not by conquest but through an ensemble of economic and cultural attraction—mergers and acquisitions, as it were. It therefore generated a brief fad among international relations scholars to speak of a global Europeanization toward a supranational “global state.” The European Union suited as the role model for humanity’s broader geopolitical evolution.

The idea proved premature in more ways than one. Yet there is a sense in which that expectation still rings true, for while global institutions have proven remote, weak, and hard to consolidate, regional organizations beyond Europe are rapidly becoming the building blocks of world order. This is logical in the context of a system no longer populated by around fifty but instead nearly 200 countries. Africa has built increasingly meaningful subregional groupings such as ECOWAS (for West Africa) and the East African Community (EAC); both coordinate customs, investment promotion, and cross-border infrastructure projects. The same is happening with the Union of South American Nations (USAN) and the Gulf Cooperation Council’s (GCC) graduation into an Arabian Gulf Union (AGU). ASEAN, Southeast Asia’s regional grouping, is now making rapid advances in trade facilitation and shared infrastructure, and is becoming a demographic and economic force in Asia.

Though this process has been organic, it is no accident: Small states must band together or succumb to the divide-and-conquer practices of modern empires such as China. The major world regions are thus Europeanizing in function and form, even if European mores are nowhere to be found. Yet with Europe’s own history and present as a guide, we can see that interregional relations account for more of the variance in the world today than international relations.

A landscape of more interdependent and stronger continents and regions rather than a repeat of bipolar hegemony or a supranational Leviathan is thus the most likely scenario for the decades ahead. It is a milieu unseen since the Middle Ages, when the dynastic empires of China, India, and the Middle East (Umayyads, Abbasids and so on) were more powerful than Europe’s Holy Roman Empire. In the past decade alone, America’s stature has swung from that of a preponderant colossus to a bankrupt and distracted debtor; China’s from an unstoppably ascendant superpower to a fragile, corrupt oligarchy; and Europe’s from a coalescing superstate to a limping, over-bureaucratized cross between a retirement community and a theme park. Perhaps the world is waxing 19th century-ish, with multiple Habsburg-like dynasties, each self-absorbed with getting their own houses in order while doing the bare minimum to contribute to, or willfully disrupt, global stability.

We are already beginning to appreciate the new geographic logic of such a leitmotif. The “East” of the East-West Cold War has fallen away, replaced by the real East of the Pacific Rim’s populous nations. And indeed, the Pacific theaters of World Wars I and II are more instructive for today than the Atlantic ones, for it was then, as well, that Western powers sought to maintain maritime supremacy in the face of a rising Asian giant, Japan. Furthermore, the “West” maintains impressive advantages in any competition among regions. It now includes Latin America as a third pillar, ever less taken for granted as merely its backyard. Canada’s tar sands and America’s shale, combined with South America’s hydrocarbons and biodiversity—and the greatest freshwater reservoirs on the globe—make an autarkic West more plausible than ever. William Seward’s post-Alaska purchase dream of a unified hemispheric pan-region (with its second capital in Mexico City) is becoming reality.
 
Part 3:

This is the new shape of the world, and with it comes a novel diplomatic logic. It is a world of strong states but no clear global hierarchy. There is no single global order, but diverse regional orders. There is massive interdependence inter-regionally with global economy and supply chains, but only limited global integration in terms of military and political systems. During the 1990s, many thought that post-Soviet republics, Arab monarchs, and Asian authoritarian regimes would necessarily become Western-style democracies. By now we appreciate the permanent plurality of political regimes. The West barely preaches democracy anymore in the sour aftermath of the “forward strategy for freedom.” “Good governance” is the new mantra, exported as much by Singapore as by Sweden.

Diplomacy has become mercenary by inspiration, too. Emerging powers from Turkey to Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan do not align with one superpower; they “multi-align” to get the best deal for themselves. NATO member Turkey has just arranged to buy missiles from a Western-sanctioned Chinese arms dealer. Saudi Arabia has signed up to $60 billion in arms from the United States, but contracts most of its oil to China and has ramped up its defense dealings and investments with China as well.

The disjointed correlation between investment and alliances is perhaps the most profound reversal of historical logic before us, suggesting a shift from a traditional geopolitical paradigm to one rooted in systemic complexity. For centuries the volume of bilateral investment between countries was the surest predictor of the strength of their alliance. This still holds for Transatlantic relations, but it holds at a time when a great economy’s largest foreign investor can simultaneously be its most worrisome geopolitical rival. We could name the two countries implied here, but of course we don’t need to.

China so dominates investment and trade with Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar that these countries are now passing laws to dilute Chinese control over their natural resource supply chains. China is not trying to conquer colonies but to buy them, a mix of motive and method that both enables and pushes targeted zones to open up to other suitors such as the United States. Thus the Burmese junta once coddled by China now receives state visits and investor delegations from the same countries that once led sanctions against it. Mongolia, with two giant neighbors, informally calls its foreign policy the “third neighbor” strategy. Only in a world where complexity is more foundational than traditional geopolitical alignments could such behaviors occur.

Call it the post-post-colonial world: (Almost) every nation has something to offer, yet neither checkbook nor coercive diplomacy guarantees holding onto allies for long. Lesser powers can say “no.” So not only has Burma quickly swung away from China’s embrace to cancel its major hydroelectric dam projects, but African countries are also dealing China blowback over its heavy-handed tactics of acquiring massive quantities of raw materials. What took centuries to develop in the context of British and French colonial history has descended within a mere decade upon China.

Such geopolitical fluidity is reminiscent of the 19th-century concert system, and is also a reminder of how global stability can exist—and persist—with an ever present but not dominant America. As Metternich wrote in 1807,


The great axioms of political science derive from the recognition of the true interests of all states; it is in the general interests that the guarantee of existence is to be found, while particular interests—the cultivation of which is considered political wisdom by restless and short-sighted men—have only a secondary importance. . . . Modern history demonstrates the application of the principle of solidarity and equilibrium . . . and of the united efforts of states against the supremacy of one power in order to force a return to the common law.

People talked like that circa 1814; they did not talk like that circa 1914.

Stability in the multipolar 19th and bipolar 20th centuries resulted from stalemate in the contest of wills. The question in the 21st century is whether there can be a progressive rather than a competitive dynamic among the major power centers. This is what President Obama had in mind when he spoke of a “new kind of great power relationship” with China. The phrasing is clearly influenced by Kissinger’s most recent book, On China. Kissinger’s noble obsession in A World Restored, which became his professional mission vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and eventually China, was how to accommodate revolutionary powers into a system in such a way that the order remains legitimate and stable. His decades of exposure to China’s leadership have made him an oracle on the return of the oldest superpower, but his counsel for maintaining equilibrium is vague: “co-evolution.”

Vagueness is not its only problem. While a term like “co-evolution” creates an escape route from thinking of history as a series of repetitive cycles—which is a good thing—it also propagates the assumption that a complex global system can be boiled down to simple formulas such as a “G-2” world dominated by the United States and China, with other regions being peripheral or inert—not such a good thing. That would be, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, neat, simple, and wrong. What is the point of proposing formulations that evade historical traps if they rely on diplomatic configurations that perpetuate them?

Perhaps a stable Sino-American “co-evolution” can exist, depending, of course, on how we define what that is. But if it does, or if instead there is an eventual rupture in U.S.-China relations, we will still be faced with the need for some kind of global governance framework appropriate to a complex, post-Cold War world. During the Cold War, economic interdependence outside the West was sparse. Today, interregional interdependence is vast and deepening. China cannot and should not be “contained”, since its economic engagement with the world is crucial for growth. But China must not be allowed or enabled to turn a multiple-sum “game” into funnel for selfish aggrandizement, either.

This challenge suggests that reigning metaphors comparing geopolitics to chess games are anachronistic. A Massive Multiplayer Online Game seems more appropriate: many players, multiple levels, shifting alliances, and no winner or end-state. The new physics of geopolitics is not premised on quantities of static power, but on maintaining a gravitational pull while constantly exercising leverage in diverse strategic contexts—military, financial, cultural, and normative. Diplomacy operates in networked constellations, not bilateral transactions.

Today’s world lacks strong but complex institutions capable of governing a complex global society. The great debate, then, is whether we have transitioned to a global system whose multiplying organic networks and connections sustain themselves, or whether this globalization ultimately requires a hegemonic anchor. Hierarchies have always depended on networks, but the question now is do we need hierarchies if networks suffice for the purposes at hand? Most American scholars are pessimistic. Conservative realist Robert Kagan believes that without American leadership the open global system would collapse. As he cleverly puts it, “Rules and institutions are like scaffolding around a building: they don’t hold the building up; the building holds them up.” The view is not much different from that of liberal theorist John Ikenberry, who argues that restrained American leadership can maintain the global credibility of what has become a very strong liberal order and underpin security even in Asia and other regions where those norms are less well institutionalized. It is restrained leadership, but it is still American leadership.

So even where such scholars appreciate evolution, they still often mistake it for teleology. The United States and China may co-evolve, but ultimately the system must be underpinned by American primacy and its “soft” imposition of global norms and institutions. The unstated assumption, or presumption, it that the evolution points in a direction we recognize and like. Rarely does such thinking admit the possibility that emerging regions are learning to govern themselves, or that the networks across them constitute new and robust foundations of globalization that require no American arbitration or guidance.1

Thus far the evidence suggests a world of stable decentralization, one that the Bush Administration’s failed unilateralist policies helped to accelerate, and which the Obama Administration acknowledges through mantras such as “leading from behind.” The most obvious indicator of this new reality is the so-called global financial crisis, which proved not to be so global at all. In 2009, the Financial Times and other media confidently predicted that China’s economy had “hit a wall” and that China’s entire political order could come crashing down as both imports and exports collapsed in the wake of the financial crisis. By 2010, after China undertook a massive fiscal (as well as monetary) stimulus focused on infrastructure and job creation, the headlines suddenly read that developing economies were geared to lead the global economic recovery. The contrast within just one year reflects our broader ambivalence and ignorance about the dynamics of high-growth markets.

It also ignores how the interregional dimensions of the global economy are advancing globalization without a Western anchor. As Pankaj Ghemawat has noted, almost all world trade growth today is accounted for by emerging markets.2 Over the past decade, trade and investment flows among South America, Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia have risen anywhere from 700 to 1,500 percent—yes, quadruple digit growth. Of course, what was once called “South-South” trade is rising from a very low base, but China has surpassed America as Africa’s second-largest trade partner and source of investment, behind Europe. As new supply-chain connections flourish across various pairs of high-growth regions, a new pattern of diversified interdependence has taken shape. It is not entirely unlike what happened in Europe after the Congress of Vienna; it is entirely unlike what happened in Europe after Versailles.

Those waiting for China to publish the organizational chart of a rival to the Western-led multilateral system are therefore missing the plot. The risk is not that emerging powers will reject the existing order and provide an alternative one to rally around, but rather that they will usurp it from within while also evading it where it suits their interests to do so. This is evident in global trade, where bilateral and regional agreements have progressed while the WTO has stalled, or in security matters, where regional bodies authorize peacekeeping operations without consulting the UN Security Council. The most relevant symptom of America and the West’s relative decline is not merely the rising material power of thriving regions such as Asia, but rather these regions’ diplomatic confidence in building internal and external connections with each other on their own terms rather than those of the West.

This pattern will continue to unfold. A world of new investment opportunities for China has opened, allowing it to reduce its exposure to U.S. treasuries and financial institutions as its main capital destinations abroad, and instead deepen relationships with alternative partners. If globalization is unwinding without American hegemony, tell that to the beneficiaries of China’s annual outward FDI of approximately $150 billion per year
 
Part 4:

The age of great men has passed. Thomas Carlysle’s once interesting quip about the history of the world being the biography of great men—the “Great Man Theory of History”—is interesting no longer. Great change is afoot, but no group of leaders seems to either understand or be in charge of it. In that sense our time is unlike either 1814 or 1914. In place of Metternich we have Russia’s Sergei Lavrov, a conservative reactionary from a weakened power, to be sure, but hardly a man to build global order. Meanwhile, America’s top diplomats have been little more than celebrity firemen and firewomen, leaving little dent on the international arena other than the weight of their self-congratulatory autobiographies. Our leaders scarcely seek to nudge history, let alone shape it.

Grand strategy is supposed to be an interconnected set of doctrines and policies that link means to ends. It should leverage, wherever possible, trends that are advantageous to its objectives. Since the end of the Cold War, American grand strategy—insofar as it was conscious of its calling—has traced an arc from hegemonic internationalism to deferential retrenchment. Diplomatic minimalism is the order of the day. One might think, judging from from Cold War history, that only immigrants to America are capable of global strategic thought. But President Obama’s international childhood and travels fed hopes that he would not only redress the Bush Administration’s foreign policy failures, but also deploy a fresh strategic vision. But hopes are not self-fulfilling anymore than hope is a policy. The Obama Administration has been mostly reactive to events. The platitudes in the President’s inaugural address are long forgotten amid the collapse of allies in Egypt and mass murder in Syria. The Fed’s monetary policy, once hailed as having saved the financial system, is now viewed as a driver of future economic instability, to say nothing of the government shutdown in October 2013. The NSA surveillance revelations have damaged relations with allies from Germany to Brazil. The “reset” with Russia was stillborn, and then buried once and for all when Russia harbored NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and recently invaded Ukraine. The much touted “pivot” to Asia caused more confusion than reassurance, and feels all but empty (except, perhaps, to the Philippines).

Obama’s resumption of communication with Iran’s leadership is truly historic, if long overdue. Some have argued that Obama should treat Iran as Nixon and Kissinger did China, as an opportunity to wrench a major emerging power out of revolutionary self-isolation and out of some other power’s orbit. Then, it was the Soviet fraternity with China; now it is China’s patronage of Iran. But like China was then, Iran now is nobody’s stooge. Not only might it retain a covert nuclear weapons program regardless of how current negotiations play out, but opening ties with Iran through the removal of sanctions will open the floodgates to everyone to befriend Iran, not just America.

Three recent examples prove the point. When the U.S. government lobbied the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the IAEA to allow India and the United Arab Emirates to purchase nuclear power technology, the main contracts went to French and Korean companies, respectively, not Westinghouse. The U.S. government was also instrumental in lifting sanctions on Myanmar, and while Coca-Cola and General Electric have begun distribution there, it was a Norwegian-Qatari consortium that won the prized telecom contract. And needless to say, Iraq’s oil, whose return to the global market cost 5,000 American lives, flows mostly to China and Europe. In Iran’s case, count on Turkey to continue its (currently illicit) thriving energy and commodities trade, while Arabs and Europeans will most likely lead in infrastructure and construction projects. Dubai will be the offshore capital of Iran for decades. Few will remember Obama’s phone call to Rouhani; wheeler-dealer nations will just be glad that America finally got out of their way.

What America could meaningfully do in the Middle East, with its unique diplomatic convening power, is to support the creation of a genuine regional security order, one that outlasts America’s commitments in the region (which should decrease commensurate with the ebbing of its reliance on Mideast energy supply) and remains robust in the face of Chinese encroachment. This would require bringing Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Israel into the same institutional fold.

This proposal, known presently as the “Gulf Security Conference”, has been widely discussed in inter-governmental fora such as the IISS Manama Dialogue. It has never been taken seriously by U.S. officials, however, on the grounds that neither Israel nor the Arabs trust Iran. But the time for these neighbors to pretend they inhabit different continents has passed. “Balancing” Iran has been code for attempting to freeze time, yet it has merely meant wasting it—decades of it. No state should rely permanently on America as a crutch, nor should America endlessly drain its treasury in the name of an offshore balancing policy that incentivizes belligerence. Geography is still destiny. These four regional anchors should be urged to encourage organic bridges to form across the region—like the Ottoman Hejaz Railway, which connected Istanbul to Mecca, with a branch to Haifa—as they did back when the Vienna Concert spelled the rules of civilized conduct among nations. But they won’t do it without American prodding.

This is just one of the opportunities to change how America operates both for its own sake and to reignite the sentiment that America’s leadership is necessary in the world, which has been abandoned in far more quarters than Washington would care to admit. In the two most crucial geopolitical theaters, the Persian Gulf and Far East, the new philosophical underpinning to policy would conceive of institutions not as a tool to extend U.S. hegemony or preeminence, but rather to make it ultimately unnecessary. Much like the posture toward Iran, America’s “pivot” to Asia has accelerated at the behest of insecure Pacific allies and has been conducted in a highly bilateral fashion. Rather than promote a regional security organization to induce maritime neighbors to settle their own disputes, the current policy may instead embolden the Philippines to drag the United States into a wag-the-dog confrontation with China over the insignificant Scarborough Shoals. In both regions, the lesson is that external hegemony, long considered a stabilizing force, these days is capable of little more than putting a lid on tensions temporarily until they blow.

Unlike neoconservatives, who believe in the pursuit of hegemony in the name of a morally uplifting global stability, classical realists are content to accept spheres of influence outside their core arenas of interest. Had China not in recent years begun to alienate several of its maritime neighbors through aggressive handling of South China Sea disputes, the United States would have had little occasion to declare a “pivot” or “rebalancing” to Asia. In the longer term, given Obama’s no-show at the APEC summit in October 2013 (due to the government shutdown) and the broader fiscal crunch that is hampering defense, America will likely return to the receding offshore posture in Asia that characterized the Clinton and Bush Administrations, allowing China to advance what amounts to a regional co-prosperity sphere. The threat of American retaliation against Chinese aggression can remain, but as long as the threat remains sheathed its function would actually be to assist as it shapes China’s peaceful ascent. It would not in the longer run assert America’s co-hegemony over East Asia.

This would anyway be the wisest course. Even the supposed universality of American values does not denote the universality of its interests. American power can be deployed prudently to defend its interests while being more restrained in promoting its values. America remains exceptional without being universal—and by so being saves itself from imperial overstretch. Being great means, in this formulation, not being too great for our and others’ own good. We can be a convener, a kind of webmaster, without insisting on controlling the content of the exchanges.

The Shell Corporation, known for its in-depth, interdisciplinary future modeling exercises, recently published a scenario playing on the Congress of Vienna titled “Concert of the Great.” It paints a picture of the 21st century in which “countries simply learn to live with each other” in order to “avoid the sort of competitive scramble that leads to mutual harm.” Pragmatic self-interest leads to a sort of deferential coordination among great power elites in America, China, Europe, India, Brazil, and other powers.

The landscape painted is essentially where we find ourselves today, with the concert embodied in the G-20, which actually represents a range of coalitions around issues such as trade and climate change. The problem, however, is that while the concert is stable, it isn’t genuinely embedded, and “people around the world begin to take the concert for granted just as they did its 19th century predecessor in the years leading up to 1914.” (Shell’s strategists, it seems, have been reading Mackinder.) The concert of powers suddenly becomes a cacophony of powers as medium and lesser states fall out of line, wag-the-dog-scenarios unfold, and conflict spirals out of control thanks to either excessively passive or excessively frenetic styles of leadership.

The 19th-century Concert of Europe, in Kissinger’s view, was not an inevitable product of peace but of the willful construction of a legitimate order. Peace does not guarantee its own continuity; the legitimacy of the order does. Today’s major powers have learned the lesson that, as Kissinger wrote, “force might conquer the world but it cannot legitimize itself.” Thus it is precisely in this time of great power peace that a legitimate order must be designed, as it was in 1814–15. For that purpose the G-20 is a convenient if so far underdeveloped tool, and the G-2 is a dangerous fiction. Neither is as legitimate an order as one in which organic regional consolidation leads to a distributed but networked system of engagement. That kind of order does need American leadership, but a leadership of a different sort than that habituated by the security crises and ideological manias of the 20th century.

The lesson of history is not to wait for events to force the need for strategy. We need strategies to avoid undesirable events. Ultimately, then, neither 1814 nor 1914 is a guide to the future. If they were, World War II would never have happened. Much as we have to stop fighting the last war, we also have to stop building the last peace. Let’s hope that in 2019, the raft of books to be published on the centennial of the Paris Peace Conference aren’t advising us on how to end World War III.


1This vision is a combination of Berkeley scholar Steve Weber’s “World Without the West” thesis and my focus on diplomatic dynamics among “second world” powers. See The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (Random House, 2008).

2See Ghemawat and Steven A. Altman, DHL Global Connectedness Index 2012 (IESE Business School, 2012).

Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order (2008) and How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (2011).
 
An error in the first part, it was 1/2 a century of peace, not a century, although he makes a passing remark about Prussia but never mentions 1870, odd. The last part is Bush-failed again and again, but although he admits Obama has not lived up to his billing, he seems bent on excusing his actions. He also fails to mention Bush attempting to improve relations in Africa, something that administration gets zero credit for.
 
Prussians were stirring the pot in Denmark in 1848 and again in 1864.  It was the turn of the Austrians in 1866 before the French were hit in 1870.

48-14=34 years of "peace" - excluding war by other means - labour strife and rebellion.
 
I stumbled across an article that seems to agree with the views in this thread on where the world's political situation has gone.  The following was also published in the Edmonton Journal under the title Consider the merits of ‘inclusive nationalism’.
Rise of the nationalist
World leaders must do more to include irate exclusionists

Shannon Gormley
The Ottawa Citizen
28 July 2014

Whether they're shooting passenger jets out of the sky along the frayed, grassy fringes of Ukraine, brandishing swords and swastikas in the cluttered immigrant neighbourhoods of Greece, stalking the streets in a mad midnight hunt for Syrian refugees in Bulgaria, railing against the International Criminal Court in Kenya, attacking the Rohingya and the aid workers supporting them in Burma, or glorifying wartime atrocities in Japan, volcanoes of exclusionary nationalist-type movements are springing up across the Earth, spewing dark clouds of political distrust and scorching resentment.

Predictably, vulnerable people are getting burned. But while exclusionary nationalism has infected myriad states with fear and posturing, inclusive nationalism may be the antidote.

For better or worse, nation states remain the most powerful authors of the global political anthology, and can write a strong and compassionate role in global affairs into the narrative of what makes themselves great.

They're not telling that story very well. In interviews with me, director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth, vice-president of research at Freedom House Arch Puddington and world-renowned liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum all suggested that much of the world is slipping through an international leadership gap. National political figures are generally failing to inspire their citizens to embrace cultural inclusion, global justice and international co-operation. Worse still, many aren't even trying.

That can change, and needs to. While exclusionary and confrontational nationalist movements increasingly threaten global peace, prosperity and justice, the rise of nationalist sentiments doesn't have to signal the fall of the world.

To identify the common foundation that underpins far-flung exclusionary movements, it's helpful to use nationalism broadly. But as Roth puts it, "often nationalism is paired with something else."

Sometimes that something else, like sectarian strife, is the core concern, even as sects drape religious attachments with a flag.

"If you look at both (Bashar) Assad and (Nouri al-) Maliki ... there's an effort to foment sectarian tensions as a way of solidifying their control to rally behind them," Roth says.

Elsewhere, religious identity and national identity are more closely bound together. Burmese Buddhist extremists exhibit a clear "nationalist appeal," says Roth, and religion and nationalism "work very much in tandem."

In Europe, Roth, Nussbaum and Puddington all point out, nations are anxious to preserve cultural uniqueness. "There's a refusal to recognize the cultural character of Europe, and a desire to go back," Roth says.

Of course, that desire is absurd, leading to cases that Puddington calls "a little bit laughable."

The prime minister of Hungary, for instance, is giving citizenship and voting rights to Hungarian enclaves in other countries.

Occasionally, nationalism is more political distraction than populist demand. China may wave the red flag to "divert attention away from other problems," according to Roth. African leaders have rallied nationalism against the Big Bad International Justice System to escape accountability.

"It's no surprise that the people who are at the forefront of this are the people in trouble," Roth says.

Exclusionary nationalism has picked up a clumsy dance partner: isolationism, which pirouettes away from the world.

"You list the countries: Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. One, two, three, four there's a competition to see how big of a majority says we should not be involved," Puddington says. During the crisis in Darfur, "there was an impressive movement of Americans who wanted us to do more ... compared to American attitudes today towards Syria in a humanitarian crisis. It's horrible."

Warlike nationalists give nationalism a bad name and push some countries away from internationalism. But the type of nationalism that chomps at the bit, the kind with something to prove and something to fight about, isn't the only brand.

Rather than ethnicity or religion, a nation can gather around ideas, and those ideas can be compassionate and open toward people who don't necessarily belong to the group.

"Rights, relief of poverty: these dreams are for the world. You can have values that link all nations together in the common struggle," Nussbaum says. "And then, what is the nation? Well, it's still a particular place, and you love that place."

But values like cultural inclusivity, global justice and international cooperation can't solidify if national leaders let those values drown in populist tidal waves of distrust and resentment, or if leaders dilute those values to shore up popular support. Currently, strong internationalist leadership is absent from even countries and regions once teeming with it.

Though Roth acknowledges that the globe isn't the most "radically isolationist" it's ever been, he points to vast deserts of leadership that colour the map a timid beige.

On the United States: "Obama seems to want the world to disappear so he can focus on domestic issues."

On the European Union: "It's never lived up to the idea that the 28 are greater than the sum of its parts."

And on Canada: "Canada traditionally punched above its weight in international affairs, and that's no longer the case ... (It is) engaged in a very selective way, a very partisan way ... Canada at this point is picking-off the easiest adversaries."

A strong national champion for international engagement would appeal to both sides of constituents' brains, making a rational argument for how cultural inclusivity, global justice and international co-operation serve the longterm interests of citizens, but also making citizens feel something for that argument.

The White House isn't hitting citizens' rational register, and it's not even really reaching for it. It hasn't convinced citizens that events erupting beyond America's borders can send shock waves through them.

"Our political leadership is failing to connect the dots between what happens internationally and the impact it has on Americans," Puddington says. "Americans look at international problems as alien developments that don't have much of an effect on their lives."

On the other side of the Atlantic, the arguments in support of the EU are easy to understand, but the EU itself is hard to love.

"The EU thought that it could achieve union just by talking about an economic deal and not worrying about people's political emotions," Nussbaum says. "What would it mean in your heart to be a European? No one has given any guidance on that."

Emotional resonance is rarely the topic of policy discussions, but for citizens to support policies they must feel emotionally attached to them. National leaders aren't giving citizens good enough reasons to feel attached to the world. If we ignore the yawning chasm between global issues and the issues that citizens care about, we may fall through it.


Shannon Gormley is a Canadian journalist based in Istanbul.
 
Methinks they pine for the fjords of the International Socialist Movement, an overarching message of a utopia just over the hill. To me nationalism is basically large scale tribalism, not that it is a bad thing. Nationalism allows allows more than tribalism. The assumption is that more is better, so if nationalism can be broaden to globalism them all will be well. The problem I see is scaling up does not work, there is less and less buy in as the model gets bigger, less perceived benefits as well. Give people 2 generations of peace and they likely will not value it as much as those that just found it. So I suspect "regionlism" to give a name to something like the EU is about as big a model that is at all sustainable even then only in the short term. 
 
Well said Colin.

I think this is the key take-away:

In Europe, Roth, Nussbaum and Puddington all point out, nations are anxious to preserve cultural uniqueness. "There's a refusal to recognize the cultural character of Europe, and a desire to go back," Roth says.

Of course, that desire is absurd, leading to cases that Puddington calls "a little bit laughable."

I would suggest there is a refusal amongst these pundits to recognize that the individual does not wish to be subsumed into the collective 7 Billion.  And that much to the chagrin of the communards resistance is NOT futile.

There is no European collective culture - as MacKinder apparently recognized back in 1904.  There is a multitude of distinct local cultures with strong blood ties amongst each other and with equally strong geographic roots.  What is true for Europe is equally true for the mountains of the Middle East (Which encompass the Caucasus, Turkey, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Afghanistan and the Punjab), the jungled mountains of South East Asia and the islands of the Pacific.

The problem is that as people see layers of bureaucracy piled one on top of each other they perceive themselves as being more and more isolated from the controlling authorities.  Their interests are no longer addressed.

In a world where God/Allah/Yahweh is no longer the final arbiter people no longer are willing to accept random outcomes.  They expect rational outcomes.  If the outcomes are consistently counter to their expectations then they will look to the authors of those decisions and determine that:

A) the authors are acting against their interests
B) the authors are acting rationally
C) the authors are continually demonstrating a bias against them
D) the authors are just people like themselves, and no better than themselves, and are replaceable.

Protestantism succeeded in large part because the individual felt empowered to discuss their fate with the Ultimate Authority.  Even in the older religions, priests may intercede but the conversation was a personal one.

In the UK the ultimate statement of the individuals worth was the ability to petition the King.

In the modern world would your average Brit or Catalonian petition Barrossa and expect an effective redress of their grievance?  Would anybody expect anything from Ban-Ki-Moon?

Heh, would anybody expect an effective redress of grievance from petitioning any Western Parliament?

Of course people are turning away from the institutions when the institutions both lack "Majesty" and are ineffective.

"Majesty" - that characteristic of anything that sets it apart from the mundane, the work-a-day.

 
True, I felt the British Royalty missed an opportunity in the 90's to be the court of "faint Hope". When all else fails one can petition the Queen or a member of the royal family on duty to represent the Queen. They should have put themselves out there as the heart and conscious of the UK government, a place to go to make a last ditch plea against a heartless and soulless bureaucracy. That function is something they can do and would be seen by the general public as a "useful function" and endear them. In some sense I think the current Queen has instinctively been able to carry that role, but some of the family did not come even close to meeting the criteria. 
 
I can't find anything to add here except to say that Landpower needs to be projected from secure bases and always needs a clear evacuation route.  We can't afford the Bighorn 1876 or Kabul 1842 or .... so many others.  The Navy can provide secure bases for many operations "in that period of neither war nor peace."


Global Conflicts Make the Case for Strategic Landpower


(Source: Lexington Institute; issued August 26, 2014)
 


For the past several years, the U.S. Army has been struggling to define its purpose in what was expected to be a post-war environment marked by an aversion on the part of the American public to overseas military involvement, in general, and land wars, in particular.

The 2012 Defense Strategy and 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review made clear that the nation was not going to conduct any more large-scale, long-term stability operations nor more than a single all-out major contingency operation involving substantial land forces. As a consequence, the Army saw a future in which its end-strength declined from a high of 570,000 to no more than 450,000 and possibly below 400,000.

Having spent more than a decade fighting and dying in Southeast Asia, the Army is being told “thanks for your contributions to national security but we are not going to be doing your kind of operations in the foreseeable future.” Even those who saw the continuing need for a strong U.S. military tended to be focused on the Chinese military and the corresponding requirements for more air and naval power.

The Army, along with the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command, responded by articulating the concept of strategic landpower. Cynics saw this effort as an attempt by the Army to justify force structure and command billets in an era of declining resources and reduced relevance for land forces. But as intensifying conflicts in the Middle East (and elsewhere) make clear, there is a real and growing requirement for U.S. strategic landpower.

Strategic landpower is based on a simple but increasingly compelling set of principles set out in an eponymously titled white paper.

The first and most important of these is that armed conflict is a contest of wills between two or more parties. The goal in employing U.S. military power, generally, and in the use of strategic landpower, specifically, is to win this clash. One need look no farther than the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, the fourth since the latter took power in Gaza, to appreciate that both sides are attempting, so far without success, to break the will of the other.

The second principle is that because war is a clash of wills it is one of the basic human-centered activities not only conducted on land amidst populations but shaped by human factors such as culture, ideology and social organizations; what the white paper terms the “human domain.” It is vital to understand and be able to influence those human factors in order to achieve a strategic victory This was a lesson the U.S. military learned at great expense in terms of treasure and lives over the last decade but apparently forgotten almost immediately as we withdrew from Iraq and Afghanistan. The sudden rise of ISIL, in particular, but also events in Crimea and Ukraine, the fighting in Libya, the growing strength of Boko Haram in Nigeria, etc., speak to the power of human factors and the absolute importance of having a deep appreciation of the human domain.

The third principle is that strategic landpower is uniquely suited to exercising influence and control within the human domain. Air and naval power can have a decisive effect on the course and outcome of military operations but only landpower can operate in what one recent commentary described as “the space between peace and war,” either before or after a conflict.

The collapse of the fragile central authority in Libya following the successful air war against Gadhafi and a similar failure of Iraqi forces in the face of ISIL’s assaults speak to the important role of U.S. military forces, but most particularly landpower in supporting the creation and maintenance of local security and political stability, and the consequences of our withdrawal of that capability. Even before it had decided to initiate air strikes on Islamic State forces, the Obama Administration sent hundreds of advisors into Iraq to assess the situation and coordinate with local forces.

Strategic landpower can be just as important in peacetime, providing reassurance to friends and allies, deterring aggression, building relationships and credibility with local governments, militaries and populations, and developing the understanding of the human domain essential to intelligence and diplomatic efforts. The emergence of so-called ambiguous warfare as practiced by Moscow and others only heightens the importance of U.S. forward deployed land forces in that period of neither war nor peace.

Strategic Landpower is that rarest of tracts, a political manifesto masquerading as a statement on military doctrine. It is rare also because recent events have demonstrated that its authors were prescient.

Its basic message, that all forms of conflict, and not just wars, are essentially political in nature, and [are] contests of will [which] must be treated as such, should guide the administration’s thinking as it seeks to respond to a growing array of international crises and conflicts.

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/article-view/release/156486/crises-show-need-for-strategic-land-power.html
 
Doug Saunders, a somewhat left of centre analyst, idemtifies five 'schools of thought' on the strategic future, in this article which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Globe and Mail:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/five-schools-of-thought-about-where-the-world-may-be-headed-next/article20812161/?page=all#dashboard/follows/
gam-masthead.png

Five schools of thought about where the world may be headed next

DOUG SAUNDERS
The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Sep. 26 2014

It has been 26 years since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev stood before the United Nations General Assembly and used Woodrow Wilson’s phrase “new world order” to describe the “profound social change” that was about to take place in the relations between the world’s nations and their people. The world, he said, was about to experience a major change driven by “new nations and states, new public movements and ideologies.”

Over the next quarter-century, Mr. Gorbachev’s new world order became, simply, the world order: a world built on a broad agreement among most major countries that democracy and liberal economy were desirable goals; a world with only one superpower; a world where international institutions could govern trade, monetary and financial affairs and military conflicts; a world in which poorer countries gradually adopted the values and institutions first popularized in the West; and a world dominated by the United States, its military and its dollar.

As the UN once again convenes its General Assembly this week – and surprising words emerge from the speeches of Iranian, Chinese, Russian and American leaders – there is a profound sense, among many observers, that the world is once again reordering itself. The old certainties have collapsed or faded, and new threats challenge them.

The United States no longer always calls the shots, and when it tries to, as in the Middle East, it sometimes fails badly. It may no longer be the only superpower, as China expands to become one and uses its military to torment Japan and to bid for control over the South China Sea. Rival models of nationhood, far more economically and politically authoritarian, are increasingly influential, if not united.

The failures of Iraq and Afghanistan and the tumult of the post-2008 economic crisis have left many countries searching for other influences. An authoritarian, territorial and anti-Western Russia has brought back some of the harsh logic of the Cold War. And a group of defiantly anti-democratic states and violent non-state movements are exercising their own influence – most notably in the failed states created by Iraq’s aftermath, where the Islamic State’s well-financed bid for a brutal theocracy is provoking a new, very different sort of international war, one whose bizarre coalitions we saw emerging in New York this week.

Old-style nationalism, from China to Scotland, has become a force once again. And international institutions have failed to solve some of the world’s most damning problems, notably carbon-driven atmospheric change.

In a recent lecture, Michael Ignatieff, now at Harvard University, spoke of the failure of the old institutions and powers to hold together “the tectonic plates of a world order that are being pushed apart by the volcanic upward pressure of violence and hatred.” The old rules don’t seem to apply any more. People who make a living observing the interactions between nations almost all say that some form of an even newer world order is taking shape around us – but there is little agreement as to what it looks like.

Here are five major, competing visions of the emerging international order, and the thinkers who argue on behalf of each. If history is a guide, the world of the next decade will not resemble any one of them purely, but will be influenced by many of them. In 1988, Mr. Gorbachev’s “new world order” seemed to be a fringe prognostication, dismissed by many. What we are witnessing today may be an equally unpredictable shift.

The world becomes rudderless

The United States is declining in power and influence. That may not be true in any way you could measure or prove, but it is what much of the world believes today – and when it comes to power and influence, perceptions are often as important as reality.

At the same time, many believe that no other country, or bloc of countries, is really interested in becoming the world’s cop, banker, supermarket, sugar daddy or scold. Europe is struggling to maintain its own unity and restore its economy, Japan is looking inward, China is mainly interested in China’s interests, and blocs of new powers such as the so-called BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have failed to act in any co-ordinated way. As a result, this argument goes, the world is increasingly fragmented, without a single vision (or a single big bully) to shape its direction. Those who buy this see it as either a good thing or a bad thing.

On the “bad thing” side of the equation are U.S. scholars Ian Bremmer and Nouriel Roubini, who argued in an influential 2011 essay, and in a book by Mr. Bremmer, that “we are now living in a G-Zero world [as opposed to a well-organized G-20 or G-8 world], one in which no single country or bloc of countries has the political and economic leverage – or the will – to drive a truly international agenda.” On crucial issues such as climate change, international trade, facing up to Russian or Islamist threats, or controlling nuclear arms, it has become nearly impossible to reach international consensus, and the result, they say, “will be intensified conflict on the international stage over vitally important issues.”

A less pessimistic version of this rudderless-world is proposed by Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations. He sees an “unruled world,” but one of ever-changing coalitions and improvisations, rather than the dark nihilism of the G-Zero vision.

“I see even more ad hoc actions taking place, with more fluid coalitions to deal with global problems and selective use of frameworks – there’s going to be a lot more compartmentalizing of issues,” he says.

But none of it will be permanent: There will be neither guaranteed Western influence over events, nor an organized anti-Western bloc of nations taking shape as there was during the Cold War (because their mutual rivalries and disagreements tend to trump any solidarity).

Mr. Patrick points to Barack Obama’s UN speech this week, in which he called for world order – but in the form of ad hoc coalitions, among countries that might otherwise be enemies, to deal with the threats of Russia and the Islamic State. Other issues, such as the climate threat and Internet governance, may not be dealt with at all. “There’s very little appetite to remake things,” he says, but at the same time the old institutions won’t have the same drivers at the wheel – or, sometimes, any driver at all.

A new Cold War erupts

What if this new world isn’t fragmented by chaos and disharmony, but instead is divided in two by conflict and enmity? A number of influential thinkers believe that the signature event of our age is not the messy ad hoc coalition of the Middle East but rather Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea and military meddlings in eastern Ukraine and northern Georgia. In this vision, the new world order is being replaced with something a lot like what came before it – a showdown between ideological blocs allied against one another.

In the view of this school of thinkers, Mr. Putin’s Crimean adventures are not simply a regional problem to be dealt with through tough sanctions and military postures, but one event in a longer showdown between either Russia and its allies – often called the “revisionist states,” for their desire to turn back the clock to pre-1989 days – and the West.

“China, Iran, and Russia never bought into the geopolitical settlement that followed the Cold War, and they are making increasingly forceful attempts to overturn it,” Walter Russell Mead, a leading New Cold War theorist, argued this summer. “That process will not be peaceful, and whether or not the revisionists succeed, their efforts have already shaken the balance of power and changed the dynamics of international politics.”

Critics of this view point out that Mr. Putin’s embrace of ethnic nationalism and the military meddling do not appear to be part of some imperial bid to dominate the world, but rather to make the most of decline and weakness – and that there is nothing you’d call a proper alliance between Russia, China (which Moscow often sees as an enemy) and Iran and Syria (given that Russia often sees Islamic states and its own large Muslim population as a principal threat).

But the Russian-provoked violence in Ukraine, including the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, has certainly changed the way people look at international affairs: Russia has not just been kicked out of the G8, but out of the old world of interational co-operation. Edward Lucas, a writer with The Economist who warned of a “new cold war” with Russia in a 2008 book of that title, argues that this can be seen only as part of a major new East-West showdown.

“Russia is a revisionist power. It has the means to pursue its objectives. It is winning; and greater dangers lie ahead,” Mr. Lucas said in testimony to the British parliament this month. “Our weakness over Ukraine (and before that, Georgia) has set the stage for another, probably more serious challenge to European security. … Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are loyal American allies and NATO members. These are our frontline states: The future of the world we have taken for granted since 1991 hangs on their fate.”

A Chinese superpower takes hold

On the other hand, some believe that the end of superpower dominance is really a transition. What if Beijing overtakes Washington not just economically, but militarily and politically as well? A number of people believe this is the major emerging trend.

“The question of whether China is becoming a status quo power, a contented power, a country that’s basically willing to live within the confines of the existing system – it seems to me increasingly that that is not the case,” says Aaron Friedberg, a national-security official in the George W. Bush White House and now a political scientist at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. “When you look at what Beijing is doing, for example, with the maritime disputes with their neighbours, they’re trying to change the status quo in some pretty significant ways.”

The main critique of this vision is that China does not appear to desire to be a global superpower, in the conventional Cold War sense: Its interests are largely mercantile; its only territorial ambitions seem to involve securing its borders; and it does not seek to impose its ideology or culture on the countries with which it engages – even those in Africa where it has a colonial-like economic role. China depends almost entirely on its economic relations with the wider world and would not dare to jeopardize them.

But a number of influential thinkers – as well as senior Pentagon officials – believe this is changing, especially under Xi Jinping, who since becoming president in 2012 has increasingly brought the military’s voice into Beijing’s discourse. This has led many to argue that China is looking to challenge the United States – certainly within the South China Sea region and the eastern hemisphere, and maybe even more widely. It has become increasingly self-confident and independent – and, because it has eliminated severe poverty and raised living standards within its borders, it is not quite as dependent on outside trade as it once was.

This has led a number of scholars, most on the right, to argue that Western countries should prepare a policy of containment for China, much like that imposed on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. “In his final years in office,” military scholar John Hemmings wrote in an essay this summer, “Obama must decide with regional allies and partners what the red line is for China. And then he must act, if that line is crossed.”

His rhetoric echoes that of Robert Kaplan, the apocalyptic-minded U.S. political scientist, who argued in 2005 that “the American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the 21st century.” That hasn’t come true yet, but there are an alarming number of people, in both the U.S. and the Chinese military, who believe that it will and who are actively preparing for such a conflict – and military timetables have an alarming habit of being put to use.

More hawkish voices argue that Beijing is preparing for superpower status in other ways. “Do they intend to conquer the Philippines? No. But would they like to exercise a dominant influence across their entire region, I’d say yes,” says Mr. Friedberg, whose most recent book is A Contest for Supremacy: China, America and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. “They’ve never liked or accepted American alliances, and they’re increasingly dissatisfied with those. They’re trying to use economic leverage to strategic ends as well.”

We fight over climate and scarce resources

What if no specific superpower or alliance becomes a major enemy, but the Earth itself does? As petroleum becomes more scarce and valuable, will we have global wars and conflicts over access to it? Will the devastating effects of climate change create new rifts in the global order?

This is not a new model. The idea of dwindling resources or an unstable climate becoming the main sources of global conflict has been around for almost 25 years; just such a resource-and-climate showdown has been predicted by observers such as Mr. Kaplan (in his 1994 essay, The Coming Anarchy) and Canada’s Thomas Homer-Dixon (in such 1990s works as Environmental Scarcity and Global Security and Environment, Scarcity and Violence).

It also has become a theme for environmental historians and activists such as Jared Diamond and Bill McKibben, who argue that climate and resources will soon trump all other politics.

Surprisingly, this has not yet happened. While petroleum rights have played a role in a few conflicts such as the 2011 NATO-supported overthrow of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, in general, conflicts during the past quarter-century have not been “about oil” – most of the big ones have been about the old motives of territory, religion and ethnicity (although many have been financed with petroleum revenues). And the notion of climate-driven conflict, beyond a few marginal examples, remains largely a hypothesis.

But there is a distinctly new dynamic to the politics of energy and climate, one that could, some believe, create a difficult relationship between the major powers and their people.

“Resources aren’t becoming scarce as much as they’re becoming increasingly problematic – those that were easy to obtain are depleted, and those that are left are difficult, in many respects,” says Michael Klare, the U.S.-based author of such works as Resource Wars and The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources.

“Either they’re in contested areas like the South China Sea or the Arctic, or you’re relying more on natural gas, which gives Russia and Iran a lot more clout … or they’re causing a domestic struggle over practices such as hydro-fracking.”

This, he notes, leads to a paradoxical problem: Increasingly, countries see these hard-fought resources as necessary tools for their own independence (a petro-centric belief that afflicts everyone from Vladimir Putin to Canada’s Conservatives to Greenland’s independence-minded Inuit to the militants in the Islamic State). By relying on this tool – at the same time as countries such as Germany walk away from non-polluting technologies such as nuclear power – they are further evading any confrontation with a looming climate crisis.

While the result may not play out like the global apocalypse some members of this group foresee, it is increasingly likely that both energy resources and climate change are going to be major components in the emerging world order.

The world muddles through as it has before

Any of the preceding visions could become the one that people in the 22nd century use to describe our era: as one of chaos, as one of division, as one of a new superpower conflict, or as one of resource panic. But it is just as likely, given recent history, that all four will provide at least some sources of tension in a world order that is not so much new as slightly different – one where the same old creaky institutions, and a new set of compromises, allow the world to muddle through.

What if conflicts don’t drive nations apart, but bring them together? This is not as farfetched as it sounds, a number of scholars say.

That case is made most assertively by political scientist John Ikenberry of Princeton University, who notes that, despite limited-scale regional conflicts, the liberal order established after the Second World War remains robust and unchallenged. Russia and China, he writes, “are not full-scale revisionist powers but part-time spoilers at best.” Both countries are deeply integrated into the liberal institutions of the world: “They are geopolitical insiders, sitting at all the high tables of global governance.” And, he notes, most of the values and principles that 50 years ago were considered “Western” are now truly universal, practised and embraced even by those countries that most aggressively oppose the United States. He feels that the best response from Western countries is not to engage in conflict but to deepen engagement – economic and institutional – between countries.

Daniel Drezner of Tufts University, in a book this year titled The System Worked, noted that the period after the 2008 economic crisis was one of surprising international co-operation: Not only did the major powers (including China and the United States) make important compromises and agreements to avoid global ruin, but the postwar international organizations – the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the G20 – suddenly started functioning well as problem-solving bodies. Problems such as piracy, offshore banking, currency imbalance and lax banking regulations have been resolved in recent years through deep international co-operation – some of it involving countries, such as China and Iran and Russia, that are opposed to one another in other spheres. Tensions and conflicts exist, but they have not led to isolation; the world is not divided in two.

These thinkers could be equally wrong – their views sound like those which were popular on the eve of the First World War. But they provide a reminder that awkward, yet ultimately successful compromise and stumbling, rather than global cataclysm, have been the norm for seven decades, and may still be the cornerstone of the newest world order.
 
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