International system
The Somali pirates have managed to invoke the multipolar 21st century:
- The European Union is sending a force of 20 warships to patrol around the Horn of Africa, including countries such as Spain and Sweden, an unusual display of military power by the organization.
- China is also sending three warships, a striking extension of its global reach. This is likely the first time a Chinese flotilla has operated in these waters since the great fleets of Admiral Zheng He, in the early 15th century.
Image: Ben Walther (Flickr)
Last week Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post wrote that he would “bet on America” when forecasting the dominant world power of 50 years from now.
He recites the “declinist” case, but argues that
The evidence for our nation’s downward spiral isn’t sufficient to rule out the very opposite possibility: that the United States will become, in purely geopolitical terms, even stronger in coming decades. The mistake we make is not so much overestimating our problems, but underestimating the problems of our potential rivals.
Achenbach notes the weaknesses of potential rivals:
- China’s economy is currently much smaller than that of the US, and the country is beset by environmental problems. It’s population is aging rapidly, and it “will be the first country to get old before it gets rich.”
- Russia, Japan, and Germany also all face demographic decline; Russia is already shrinking.
- The European Union lacks a level of unity basic to an effective nation-state.
The US, meanwhile, has completely unrivaled military power.
Achenbach does suggest these caveats:
- The American “machine for wealth creation has also been a machine for income inequality;” “geopolitical dominance doesn’t guarantee that we’ll have a country we can be proud of.”
- “Globalization may make the nation-state increasingly irrelevant.”
- As Joseph Nye Jr. puts it, “by traditional measures of hard power …. the United States will remain number one, but being number one ain’t going be what it used to be.”
Achenbach is correct the the US has the strongest shot at remaining number one for decades.
European nations and Japan are under fundamental constraints. China–and India too, though it is unmentioned in this article–are both more likely to stumble or even melt down than is the United States.
But 50 years is a long time. By 2050, some models project the Chinese economy to be considerably larger than that of the United States. India may have caught up by then as well.
Power follows economics. For those sure of America’s perpetual ascendancy, consider a statement at the start of the 20th century by the First Lord of the Admiralty of a then-dominant Britain, as he observed economic trends: “The United Kingdom by itself will not be strong enough to hold its proper place alongside of the U.S., or Russia, and probably not Germany. We shall be thrust aside by sheer weight.” (Quoted in Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 229.)
A recent LAT article illustrates two interwoven trends:
- China is expanding its presence in diverse ways in Africa and the rest of the Third World.
- This new presence and the power behind it are generating backlash.
In this instance, Zambian workers are feeling abused by Chinese mine owners.
The Chinese model will encounter this kind of difficulty abroad: the lack of human rights and worker rights that makes some aspects of development easier at home will create resentment when implemented elsewhere, further limiting China’s soft power.
Writing in America Abroad, Ivo Daalder points out the problems with the new UN Human Rights Commission.
The central problem is a perennial one: human rights abusers end up on the commission. New members include Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, Russia, and Cuba.
The ideal solution would some criteria for membership could be applied. Consider, for instance, the political rights rating from Freedom House. The problematic countries above are rated thus:
- Saudi Arabia — 7 (not free)
- Cuba — 7 (not free)
- China — 7 (not free)
- Pakistan — 6 (not free)
- Russia — 6 (not free)
If the countries with free and high partly free ratings (4 or less) were allowed to serve on a human rights body, they would still constitute a majority of countries, and would not include any of the worst violators.
It won’t happen of course, for any number of reasons:
- China and Russia would use their positions on the Security Council to block such a reform.
- Excluded countries and their friends would decry “cultural imperialism.”
- Many regions would be left with rather few representatives. For instance, the Middle East has only one “free” country — Israel — but it gets a “not free” rating (6, the same as Iran) in the areas it occupies, and would seemingly be excluded on that basis, leaving “partly free” Kuwait to represent everything from Morocco to Iran.
Imperfect mechanisms will have to do for now. Daalder concludes:
It may well be that the new requirement that the human rights activities of all UN members, starting with those elected to the council, be carefully examined provides an opportunity to prove this skeptic wrong. But first indications are hardly encouraging.
Two recent stories suggest that the rising powers of the world will find themselves with new roles and interests:
- Brazil and Bolivia, traditionally friendly and both led by leftists, got in a spat over Bolivian energy nationalism, which threatens Brazilian investments.
- Militants in Nigeria’s Niger Delta warned that they would target Chinese working to extract oil in their region.
Brazil and China thus find themselves cast in unfamiliar roles: status quo powers with an stake in the established system working smoothly, and accused bullies.
As their interests continue to diversify and globalize, Brazil, China, and other rising powers will find their traditional outlooks challenged. Simple verities like South-South solidarity and noninterference will no longer suffice, and new perspectives on many issues — trade rules and intellectual property are only the beginning — will be required.
PBS has been airing “Fire and Ice,” a history of the 1939-1940 Winter War, which began when Stalin’s Soviet Union attacked its tiny neighbor Finland. Heroic Finnish resistance held off massive Soviet offensives for months, until the weight of men and materiel became too great for the Finns.
Stalin was practicing preventive war: the Finnish border was quite near Russia’s second-most important city, Leningrad, and Stalin seems to have felt that that this could constitute a future threat. And he proved correct, when Finland allied with the Germans in the Second World War. (That Stalin probably brought about the threat he imagined is not really germane; states of all kinds do that frequently.)
Stalin’s actions appear to be permissible under the Bush administration’s preventive war doctrine, which ultimately uses a nation’s sense of being threatened as the criteria for whether it can engage in war.
Most advocates of preventive war doctrine would reject that idea, so it is worth considering whether there are rules for preventive war that would define the idea more palatably. Candidate rules:
- Nations may do what they can; moral rules do not apply — This hyperrealist argument has its backers, but few Americans are truly among them, even in the ranks of preventive war advocates. It would allow everything, and most people in the world believe that many state actions should be forbidden.
- The US may practice prevention, but no one else may — The international system simply does not work this way, and not even Americans claim this level of privilege. Whatever one nation may do, so too may all others.
- Democracies may engage in preventive war — There are three problems with this rule: it is not how the international system allocates rights, democracies can be aggressive and often make mistakes, and there are many potential democracies that will feel strongly threatened in the future. For instance, Iran and Iraq might still feel threatened by Israel even if they were fully democratic, and Pakistan’s wariness of India will not abate if democracy returns.
- The threat must be real — The basic problem here is that there is no consensus about reality. Stalin was “proven correct” by events, after all, and most observers thought that Iraq did not present a truly plausible threat to the United States before the invasion. On the other hand, this concept would justify preventive war by Iran against the US or Israel. Americans still see the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as the deepest perfidy, but it clearly was a response to a real, gathering threat to Japan, as war was widely anticipated. Until they decide that Pearl Harbor was permissible, Americans do not really believe in this rule.
- The UN must sign off — This rule, derided by Americans as “the permission slip,” is in theory how the international system operates: only the Security Council can authorize force in the kinds of situations related to preventive war. Abiding by this rule constrains everyone’s behavior, as it is meant to, but gives the US effective veto power over the legitimacy of other states’ preventive wars.
Ultimately, it appears difficult to write plausible rules for preventive war that Americans could actually live with, given that others may invoke the same rules. That in itself signals the potential perils of the concept.
The NYT reports on the growing relationship between China and Saudi Arabia.
This relationship is one aspect of a transformative trend: the growing role of China in the world as an alternative to established economic and political powers.
Some salient points from the article:
- “‘Saudi leaders are moving from benign neglect of China to considering it as a long-term partner,’ said Samuel Blatteis, a Fulbright fellow who has studied the growing ties between China and the Persian Gulf.”
- China takes a no-strings-attached attitude, as it is unconcerned with matters such as democracy or reform.
- Trade between the two countries has been growing at 41% a year since 1999.
- “The recent outcry from Congress and the American public over the possibility of having ports controlled by a company in Dubai sent a loud message to the Arab world, convincing many businessmen that their fortunes now lie in the East,” analysts say.
The latter point illuminates the deep foolishness of the anti-Dubai reaction from the standpoint of long-term American interests.
(It is worth keeping in mind that China’s wealth is still quite moderate: its economy is still smaller than Germany’s at exchange rates, the measure that matters in assessing global economic power. But that caveat will grow less important with each passing year, as China’s economy grows.)
The Washington Post reports that US warships opened fire on suspected pirates in international waters off the coast of Somalia. A US naval officer notes that waters around Somalia ‘are infested with pirates, seaborne armed robbers who board any boat or ship they can approach and rob the crew at gunpoint.’
Somalia is the least-governed country on the planet. That it is harboring pirates suggests why these holes in international order can matter. It is also thought to be a potential al Qaeda refuge, and is prime breeding ground for diseases such as avian flu, as there is no healthcare system in place.
It would be ripe for the kind of international trusteeship applied in Bosnia and Kosovo, but is so disordered and violent that it would take more will to enforce such an arrangement than international actors have.