Michael Beckley is a political scientist at Tufts University. He wrote a very interesting and informative article for Foreign Affairs titled Enemies of My Enemy: How Fear of China Is Forging a New World Order. His effort is marred by poor luck in timing. It arrived in my mailbox within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, it provides the background for some prognostication.
Beckley’s main point is that the period of international order we have been experiencing for several decades is coming unraveled. The reason for this devolution is the disappearance of the common enemy that generated the need for collaboration in the first place. He argues that international orders are not formed to propagate lofty ideals, but to counter a feared enemy.
“The history of international order, however, provides little reason for confidence in top-down, cooperative solutions. The strongest orders in modern history—from Westphalia in the seventeenth century to the liberal international order in the twentieth—were not inclusive organizations working for the greater good of humanity. Rather, they were alliances built by great powers to wage security competition against their main rivals. Fear and loathing of a shared enemy, not enlightened calls to make the world a better place, brought these orders together. Progress on transnational issues, when achieved, emerged largely as a byproduct of hardheaded security cooperation. That cooperation usually lasted only as long as a common threat remained both present and manageable. When that threat dissipated or grew too large, the orders collapsed.”
When the Soviet Union existed, it was clear who was the enemy and why. The battle was between liberal capitalism (or free-market democracy) and Soviet socialism.
“For decades, the United States and its allies knew what they stood for and who the enemy was. But then the Soviet Union collapsed, and a single overarching threat gave way to a kaleidoscope of minor ones. In the new and uncertain post–Cold War environment, the Western allies sought refuge in past sources of success. Instead of building a new order, they doubled down on the existing one. Their enemy may have disintegrated, but their mission, they believed, remained the same: to enlarge the community of free-market democracies. For the next three decades, they worked to expand the Western liberal order into a global one. NATO membership nearly doubled. The European Community morphed into the EU, a full-blown economic union with more than twice as many member countries. The Gatt was transformed into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and welcomed dozens of new members, unleashing an unprecedented period of hyperglobalization.”
Beckley argues that over the enemy-less decades long suppressed differences between the nations that composed the order began to emerge.
“The liberal order is, in fact, deeply exclusionary. By promoting free markets, open borders, democracy, supranational institutions, and the use of reason to solve problems, the order challenges traditional beliefs and institutions that have united communities for centuries: state sovereignty, nationalism, religion, race, tribe, family. These enduring ties to blood and soil were bottled up during the Cold War, when the United States and its allies had to maintain a united front to contain the Soviet Union. But they have reemerged over the course of the post–Cold War era…By slaying its main adversary, the liberal order unleashed all sorts of nationalist, populist, religious, and authoritarian opposition.”
The rise of China and its recent turn to more aggressive and threatening postures has provided the old liberal order with a need to coalesce and face a new enemy with a new strategy.
“There has never been any doubt about what China wants, because Chinese leaders have declared the same objectives for decades: to keep the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in power, reabsorb Taiwan, control the East China and South China Seas, and return China to its rightful place as the dominant power in Asia and the most powerful country in the world. For most of the past four decades, the country took a relatively patient and peaceful approach to achieving these aims.”
“In recent years, however, China has expanded aggressively on multiple fronts. ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy has replaced friendship diplomacy. Perceived slights from foreigners, no matter how small, are met with North Korean–style condemnation. A combative attitude has seeped into every part of China’s foreign policy, and it is confronting many countries with their gravest threat in generations.”
Beckley sees this coalescence already forming as the nations feeling threatened get organized. But China is not the Soviet Union, and it is too firmly embedded in free-market capitalism to use the same rallying cry. Instead, those who need to contend with China have chosen its trappings of autocracy as a fatal flaw when compared to democracy.
“The United States and its allies have awoken to the danger: the liberal order and, in particular, the globalized economy at its heart are empowering a dangerous adversary. In response, they are trying to build a new order that excludes China by making democracy a requirement for full membership. When U.S. President Joe Biden gave his first press conference, in March 2021, and described the U.S.-Chinese rivalry as part of a broader competition between democracy and autocracy, it wasn’t a rhetorical flourish. He was drawing a battle line based on a widely shared belief that authoritarian capitalism poses a mortal threat to the democratic world, one that can’t be contained by the liberal order. Instead of reforming existing rules, rich democracies are starting to impose new ones by banding together, adopting progressive standards and practices, and threatening to exclude countries that don’t follow them. Democracies aren’t merely balancing against China—increasing their defense spending and forming military alliances—they are also reordering the world around it.”
There are numerous instances where nations have begun working together to counter the rising might of China. The goals are to cap its dreams of dominance through its economic and military might.
“The architecture of the new order remains a work in progress. Yet two key features are already discernible. The first is a loose economic bloc anchored by the G-7, the group of democratic allies that controls more than half of the world’s wealth. These leading powers, along with a rotating cast of like-minded states, are collaborating to prevent China from monopolizing the global economy. History has shown that whichever power dominates the strategic goods and services of an era dominates that era.”
“To avoid becoming a cog in a Chinese economic empire, leading democracies have started forming exclusive trade and investment networks designed to speed up their progress in critical sectors and slow down China’s. Some of these collaborations, such as the U.S.-Japan Competitiveness and Resilience Partnership, announced in 2021, create joint R & D projects to help members outpace Chinese innovation. Other schemes focus on blunting China’s economic leverage by developing alternatives to Chinese products and funding. The G-7’s Build Back Better World initiative and the EU’s Global Gateway, for example, will provide poor countries with infrastructure financing as an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Australia, India, and Japan joined forces to start the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative, which offers incentives for their companies to move their operations out of China. And at the behest of the United States, countries composing more than 60 percent of the world’s cellular-equipment market have enacted or are considering restrictions against Huawei, China’s main 5G telecommunications provider.”
“Meanwhile, democratic coalitions are constraining China’s access to advanced technologies. The Netherlands, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, for example, have colluded to cut China off from advanced semiconductors and from the machines that make them. New institutions are laying the groundwork for a full-scale multilateral export control regime. The U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council creates common transatlantic standards for screening exports to China and investment there in artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.”
“The second feature of the emerging order is a double military barrier to contain China. The inside layer consists of rivals bordering the East China and South China Seas. Many of them—including Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam—are loading up on mobile missile launchers and mines. The goal is to turn themselves into prickly porcupines capable of denying China sea and air control near their shores. Those efforts are now being bolstered by an outside layer of democratic powers—mainly Australia, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These democracies are providing aid, arms, and intelligence to China’s neighbors; training together so they can conduct long-range missile strikes on Chinese forces and blockade China’s oil imports; and organizing multinational freedom-of-navigation exercises throughout the region, especially near Chinese-held rocks, reefs, and islands in disputed areas.”
Other initiatives that strive to counter China include trade restrictions that can be imposed on countries like China that are unable to demonstrate proper human rights or other attributes. The explicit message is being sent that the territorial status quo is to be preserved, including an implicit threat that Taiwan will be included in that goal.
If Beckley’s analysis is correct, it demonstrates a remarkable degree of collaboration between a diverse array of nations. It would appear that the next world war is planned to be an economic one. China will have noted these developments and will have developed strategies to counter them.
“This clash of systems will define the twenty-first century and divide the world. China will view the emerging democratic order as a containment strategy designed to strangle its economy and topple its regime. In response, it will seek to protect itself by asserting greater military control over its vital sea-lanes, carving out exclusive economic zones for its firms, and propping up autocratic allies as it sows chaos in democracies.”
In discussing the potential response of China to being surrounded by unfriendly nations, Beckley mentions no countries that might be allied with it. China does business with everybody but has not constrained itself with multiple formal alliances. It was somewhat startling then that just before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin and Xi met, made a few economic deals, and declared they had a friendship that “has no limits.” Observers have been trying to understand what that means ever since.
Russia and China are not natural allies, but in the spirit of Beckley’s title, “enemies of my enemies are my friends.” Russia’s actions seem to have coupled the US and EU tighter than ever, producing a more credible enemy than either country might have expected. In a time when both feel threatened by an alliance of democratic nations each could help the other avoid the pain of any economic sanctions that might be applied. Russia might also bring with it potential allies such as Hungary and India—and perhaps a Trump-led Republican Party.
The US and other NATO countries know that they cannot allow Putin and Russia to defeat Ukraine, yet they claim they will not enter Ukraine with troops as assistance because that would risk World War Three. It is not obvious that they will be able to maintain that stance. Combat between NATO and Russia does not have to be a world war, but combat including China as a Russian ally could definitely fall into that category.
It wasn’t long ago that one could have referred to World War Three as the existential battle of societies against the common threat of climate change. Now traditional national hostilities raise traditional warfare as a second existential threat. Having two such potential disasters to deal with virtually insures that at least one will not be avoided.
Is there something about human evolution that caused a species to be produced that is not designed for a long existence?
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