A new president and a wake-up call
Tuesday, 23 September 2008
Philip Stephens
Towards the end of next January, the US and Europe are going to wake up with a jolt. A new American president will be told that, for the first time in its history, the US is a nation entering relative decline. Europeans will discover simultaneously that the departure of George W. Bush has deprived them of an alibi.
Amid the stacks of briefing papers presented to John McCain or Barack Obama will be an assessment of the likely contours of the geopolitical landscape over the next 15 years. We can assume it will state the obvious: that if there was a unipolar moment after the end of the cold war, it passed as quickly as it emerged.
An important word in this analysis is "relative". The US can expect to be the sole superpower for some time yet, if we mean by the term a state capable of deploying effective power almost anywhere in the world. Measured by economic weight, technological capability or military prowess, the US will remain the pre-eminent power. But the shift in its relative position vis a vis the rising nations of Asia, particularly China, will tighten the constraints on the exercise of its power.
I say all this is obvious, but it may not seem so to the US voters listening to the two presidential candidates. Mr McCain speaks of using America's hard power more effectively, combining it with stronger engagement with US allies. His aides promote the (almost certainly doomed) idea of a global league of democracies. Mr Obama promises to rely more on the power of example than on the example of power in asserting US leadership.
Both, though, imagine the world as it appeared after the collapse of communism removed the only serious challenge to US primacy. The assumption is that the mistakes and events of the past eight years can be wiped from the slate. This is not the reality the winner on November 4 will encounter when he steps over the threshold of the White House.
To speak in Washington of a multipolar world is to invite opprobrium. The phrase carries too much baggage. The implication is of others ganging up against the benevolence of US hegemony. An image that springs to mind among many US policymakers is of Russia's Vladimir Putin standing shoulder to shoulder with France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schröder when the Atlantic alliance fractured over Iraq.
That particularly grubby coalition always said more about the character of Messrs Schröder and Chirac and the nationalist ambitions of Mr Putin than about any sustained strategic shift. A more contemporary version of the geopolitical nightmare is that of a new authoritarian alliance led by an energy-rich and belligerent Russia and a newly assertive China. Hence the call among some of Mr McCain's advisers for a countervailing partnership of democracies.
Such sinister scenarios speak to only one version, however, of a multipolar world - one of competing poles of attraction in which great powers are divided as between those, to borrow Mr Bush's phrase, who are "for or against" the US.
The reality is likely to be more fluid - a global environment in which there are indeed new poles, but of power rather than of attraction. This world would see shifting interests and alliances, regional and global, that defy the neat divisions of America's neo-conservatives.
To take one example: anyone who spends time in China, as I have done again only recently, will doubt the permanency of any Beijing-Moscow axis. I take away no sense of a Chinese leadership that wants to walk in lockstep with Mr Putin. The issues likely to divide China and Russia are likely significantly to outweigh in the long term the opportunism that might unite them momentarily.
Whatever the precise constellation of powers, the incoming US president will be told to abandon the preconceptions of the campaign trail. The past cannot be reclaimed. I caught a sense of the briefing he may be offered when the US National Intelligence Council co-hosted a conference recently with Chatham House in London. Near the top of the president's reading list will be the NIC's Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. This document, the subject of extensive consultation among experts within and outside the US, will offer the new administration as good a glimpse into the strategic future as he will get.
The final report has yet to be written, but I took from the Chatham House conference that it will foresee a fundamental upheaval in the multilateral order created by the US after the second world war. The question it may find harder to answer is whether there will be anything substantial to replace it.
More likely, we will face a mixed economy of crimped multilateralism, of great power competition and of balancing alliances. The relationship between these elements - between co-operation and competition, strategic stability and instability - will be shaped by decisions made in Washington, Beijing, Moscow and, to the extent that Europe claims a role, London, Paris and Berlin.
If the new US president will discover that the most powerful leader in the world is not quite as powerful as he was, Europe will find the new world disorder equally discomfiting. America's mistake has been to disdain multilateralism and to overreach itself. Europe's misjudgment has been to assume the inexorable advance of the rules-based system that it presents as a model to the world.
When things have gone wrong in recent years, the European reflex has been to blame Mr Bush's unilateralism. Europe too thought it could go back to the future. All would be well once Mr Bush had gone. In truth, a new US president will rob them of their excuses.
Mr Putin's invasion of Georgia has already provided a brutal demonstration of the limits of Europe's normative power. Subsequent negotiations with Moscow have served only to underline the latter's disdain for anything but force. Whether a European Union incapable of agreeing on how to counter Russian energy blackmail has learnt this lesson, I hesitate to say. I suppose the answer comes from looking around the continent's capitals at the quality of its leaders.
The conclusion I draw is that the US and Europe have only a small window of opportunity - a year or two after inauguration day, perhaps - to restore the credibility of the multilateral order.
If they are to seize it, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic will have to see the world as it is rather than as they would like it to be. Am I optimistic they will do so? Not really.
Towards the end of next January, the US and Europe are going to wake up with a jolt. A new American president will be told that, for the first time in its history, the US is a nation entering relative decline. Europeans will discover simultaneously that the departure of George W. Bush has deprived them of an alibi.
Amid the stacks of briefing papers presented to John McCain or Barack Obama will be an assessment of the likely contours of the geopolitical landscape over the next 15 years. We can assume it will state the obvious: that if there was a unipolar moment after the end of the cold war, it passed as quickly as it emerged.
An important word in this analysis is "relative". The US can expect to be the sole superpower for some time yet, if we mean by the term a state capable of deploying effective power almost anywhere in the world. Measured by economic weight, technological capability or military prowess, the US will remain the pre-eminent power. But the shift in its relative position vis a vis the rising nations of Asia, particularly China, will tighten the constraints on the exercise of its power.
I say all this is obvious, but it may not seem so to the US voters listening to the two presidential candidates. Mr McCain speaks of using America's hard power more effectively, combining it with stronger engagement with US allies. His aides promote the (almost certainly doomed) idea of a global league of democracies. Mr Obama promises to rely more on the power of example than on the example of power in asserting US leadership.
Both, though, imagine the world as it appeared after the collapse of communism removed the only serious challenge to US primacy. The assumption is that the mistakes and events of the past eight years can be wiped from the slate. This is not the reality the winner on November 4 will encounter when he steps over the threshold of the White House.
To speak in Washington of a multipolar world is to invite opprobrium. The phrase carries too much baggage. The implication is of others ganging up against the benevolence of US hegemony. An image that springs to mind among many US policymakers is of Russia's Vladimir Putin standing shoulder to shoulder with France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schröder when the Atlantic alliance fractured over Iraq.
That particularly grubby coalition always said more about the character of Messrs Schröder and Chirac and the nationalist ambitions of Mr Putin than about any sustained strategic shift. A more contemporary version of the geopolitical nightmare is that of a new authoritarian alliance led by an energy-rich and belligerent Russia and a newly assertive China. Hence the call among some of Mr McCain's advisers for a countervailing partnership of democracies.
Such sinister scenarios speak to only one version, however, of a multipolar world - one of competing poles of attraction in which great powers are divided as between those, to borrow Mr Bush's phrase, who are "for or against" the US.
The reality is likely to be more fluid - a global environment in which there are indeed new poles, but of power rather than of attraction. This world would see shifting interests and alliances, regional and global, that defy the neat divisions of America's neo-conservatives.
To take one example: anyone who spends time in China, as I have done again only recently, will doubt the permanency of any Beijing-Moscow axis. I take away no sense of a Chinese leadership that wants to walk in lockstep with Mr Putin. The issues likely to divide China and Russia are likely significantly to outweigh in the long term the opportunism that might unite them momentarily.
Whatever the precise constellation of powers, the incoming US president will be told to abandon the preconceptions of the campaign trail. The past cannot be reclaimed. I caught a sense of the briefing he may be offered when the US National Intelligence Council co-hosted a conference recently with Chatham House in London. Near the top of the president's reading list will be the NIC's Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. This document, the subject of extensive consultation among experts within and outside the US, will offer the new administration as good a glimpse into the strategic future as he will get.
The final report has yet to be written, but I took from the Chatham House conference that it will foresee a fundamental upheaval in the multilateral order created by the US after the second world war. The question it may find harder to answer is whether there will be anything substantial to replace it.
More likely, we will face a mixed economy of crimped multilateralism, of great power competition and of balancing alliances. The relationship between these elements - between co-operation and competition, strategic stability and instability - will be shaped by decisions made in Washington, Beijing, Moscow and, to the extent that Europe claims a role, London, Paris and Berlin.
If the new US president will discover that the most powerful leader in the world is not quite as powerful as he was, Europe will find the new world disorder equally discomfiting. America's mistake has been to disdain multilateralism and to overreach itself. Europe's misjudgment has been to assume the inexorable advance of the rules-based system that it presents as a model to the world.
When things have gone wrong in recent years, the European reflex has been to blame Mr Bush's unilateralism. Europe too thought it could go back to the future. All would be well once Mr Bush had gone. In truth, a new US president will rob them of their excuses.
Mr Putin's invasion of Georgia has already provided a brutal demonstration of the limits of Europe's normative power. Subsequent negotiations with Moscow have served only to underline the latter's disdain for anything but force. Whether a European Union incapable of agreeing on how to counter Russian energy blackmail has learnt this lesson, I hesitate to say. I suppose the answer comes from looking around the continent's capitals at the quality of its leaders.
The conclusion I draw is that the US and Europe have only a small window of opportunity - a year or two after inauguration day, perhaps - to restore the credibility of the multilateral order.
If they are to seize it, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic will have to see the world as it is rather than as they would like it to be. Am I optimistic they will do so? Not really.