Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.
Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future. For eight decades, they have inhabited a liberal international order shaped by America’s predominant strength. They have grown accustomed to the world operating in a certain way: Largely agreeable and militarily passive European and Asian allies cooperate with the United States on economic and security issues. Challengers to the order, such as Russia and China, are constrained by the combined wealth and might of the U.S. and its allies. Global trade is generally free and unhampered by geopolitical rivalry, oceans are safe for travel, and nuclear weapons are limited by agreements on their production and use. Americans are so accustomed to this basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world that they tend to think it is the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.
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If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.
Once again, I give you Charles Krauthammer in 2016:
At a time of such tectonic instability, even the most experienced head of state requires wisdom and delicacy to maintain equilibrium. Trump has neither. His joining of supreme ignorance to supreme arrogance, combined with a pathological sensitivity to any perceived slight, is a standing invitation to calamitous miscalculation.
Two generations of Americans have grown up feeling that international stability is as natural as the air we breathe. It’s not. It depends on continual, calibrated tending. It depends on the delicate balancing of alliances and the careful signaling of enemies. It depends on avoiding self-inflicted trade wars and on recognizing the value of allies like Germany, Japan and South Korea as cornerstones of our own security rather than satrapies.
It took seven decades to build this open, free international order. It could be brought down in a single presidential term. That would be a high price to pay for the catharsis of kicking over a table.
All predictable and predicted… and currently widely celebrated and excused. Brace yourselves.
On that note, Kagan is weirdly on the same page as Chris Smaje. They’re coming from, and going in, very different directions, but they have a good deal of diagnostic and predictive overlap.
Smaje quotes political scientist Michael Albert:
Some nation-states may retain effective governance capacities, but most would eventually fragment and give way to a complex neofeudal geography composed of political-economic and security assemblages cooperating and competing over territory and resources — including corporate quasi-states, city-states, feudalized rentier capitalists and warlords that offer livelihood protection in exchange for tribute, and numerous communities of surplas populations left to develop their own survival strategies.
Smaje later adds, “I’d argue that staying committed to the sun model of the present nation-state system as a way of avoiding troubled future times now looks pretty utopian.”
Kagan:
Even the most well-managed multipolar orders were significantly more brutal and prone to war than the world that Americans have known these past 80 years. To take one example, during what some call the “long peace” in Europe, from 1815 to 1914, the great powers (including Russia and the Ottoman empire) fought dozens of wars with one another and with smaller states to defend or acquire strategic advantage, resources, and spheres of interest. […]
Today’s equivalent of 19th-century multipolarity would be a world in which China, Russia, the United States, Germany, Japan, and other large states fought a major war in some combination at least once a decade—redrawing national boundaries, displacing populations, disrupting international commerce, and risking global conflict on a devastating scale. That was the world as it existed for centuries prior to 1945. To believe that such a world can never return would seem to be the height of utopianism.