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Chapter 5. The Other Perspective of Geopolitics
Walter Russell Mead had illustrated how the geopolitics played an important role in current international relations after the world order led by the United States declined.
On the contrary of his perspective, John Ikenberry, the international relations theorist and foreign policy maker of U.S., had blatantly argued that the geopolitics could be only an illusion and the liberal world order would be an absolute outcome. There are several reasons behind his theory. First of all, he supposed that Mead had
overestimated the capability of the “axis of weevils” (led by China, Russia, Iran) to undermine the existing liberal order.
Secondly, they were seeking opportunities to resist the United States’ global leadership, especially when they confronted in their own neighborhood. However, these conflicts were fueled more by weakness- their leaders’ and regimes’- than by strength. In other word, they have no appealing brand.
Thirdly, as Ikenberry said: “the construction of a U.S.-led global order indeed did not begin with the end of the Cold War, it just won the Cold war. In the nearly seven decades since World War II, Washington has undertaken sustained efforts to build a far-flung system of multilateral institutions, alliances, trade agreements, and political partnerships.”
Although the United States will really come down from the peak of hegemony that it occupied during the unipolar era, its power is still undoubted and unrivaled. Its wealth and technological advantages remain far out of the reach of China and Russia, not to mention those of Iran.
Strategically speaking, one of the requirements to be the hegemony is the amount of a state’s allies, Ikenberry wrote in his article:
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According to a study led by the political scientist Brett Ashley Leeds, the United States boasts military partnerships with more than 60 countries, whereas Russia counts eight formal allies and China has just one (North Korea). As one British diplomat revealed to Ikenberry, “China doesn’t seem to do alliances.” But the United States does, and they pay a double dividend: not only do alliances provide a global platform for the projection of U.S. power, but they also distribute the burden of providing security.20
On the other hand, there is also the logic of mutual assured destruction behind the nuclear weapons, they do radically reduce the likelihood of great-power war. The atomic age has deprived China and Russia of this opportunity to expand their own international order. Nuclear weapons also make China and Russia more secure, giving them assurance that the United States will never intrude. It reduces the possibility that they will resort to desperate moves resulting from insecurity.
What’s more, the geographic conditions reinforce the United States other benefits. As the only great power not surrounded by other great powers, the country has appeared less threatening to other great powers and was able to rise dramatically over the course of the last century without causing a war. After the Cold War, when the U.S.
was the world’s sole superpower, other global powers, oceans away, did not even attempt to balance against it. As a matter of fact, the United States’ geographic position has resulted in other countries to worry more about its abandonment than domination. Allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have sought to draw the U.S.
into playing a greater role in their regions. The outcome is what the historian Geir Lunderstad has called an “empire by invitation.”
The United States’ geographic advantage is on full display in Asia. Most countries in
20 Ikenberry J. 2014. “The Illusion of Geopolitics: The Enduring Power of the Liberal Order” Foreign Affairs. 93 (3): 80-90.
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the region see China as a greater potential danger- due to its proximity. Except the U.S., every major power in the world lives in a crowded geopolitical neighborhood where shifts in power routinely provoke counterbalancing- including by one another.
China is discovering this dynamic today as neighboring states react to its rise by modernizing their militaries and reinforcing their alliances.
It was during these post-war years that geopolitics and order building converged. A liberal international framework was the solution that statesmen such as Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and George Marshall offered to the challenge of Soviet expansionism. The system they built strengthened and enriched the U.S. and its allies, to the harm of its authoritarian opponents. It also stabilized the world economy and established mechanisms for handling global problems. The end of the Cold War has not changed the logic behind the huge project.
Fortunately, the liberal principles that Washington has pushed enjoy widely-accepted appeal, because they have tended to be a good fit with the modernizing forces of economic growth and social advancement. As the historian Charles Maier has argued,
“the United States surfed the wave of twentieth-century modernization.” However, some have argued that this congruence between the American project and the forces of modernity has weakened in recent years. The 2008 financial crisis, the thinking goes, marked a world-historical turning point, at which U.S. lost its pioneer role in facilitating economic advancement.
No matter how seriously-challenged by the status-quo, the United States is yet very hard to be replaced by other super powers such as China and Russia. The global economy so far still regards U.S. as the standard-bearer. Even Mead did not argue that China, Russia, or Iran offers the world a new alternative model of modernity. If these illiberal powers really do threaten Washington and the rest of the liberal capitalist world, then they will need to find and ride the next wave of modernization. Yet, they
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are unlikely to do that. As Mead concluded:
Mead’s vision of a competition over Eurasia between the United State and China, Russia, and Iran misses the more profound power transition under way: the increasing excellence of liberal capitalist democracy. To make it sure, many liberal democracies are struggling at the moment with slow economic growth, social inequality, and political instability. But the spread of liberal democracy throughout the world, starting in the late 1970s and accelerating after the Cold War, has drastically strengthened U.S’ position and tightened the geopolitical circle around China and Russia. […] The wide-spreading of liberal democracy nowadays makes it hard to imagine how rare it was. Until the twentieth century, it was only restricted to the West and parts of Latin America. After World War II, however, it began to reach beyond those borders, as newly independent states established self-rule. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, military coups and dictatorship make pauses on democratic transitions. But in the late 1970s, what the political scientist Samuel Huntington termed “the third wave” of
democratization washed over southern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. Then the Cold War ended, and a cohort of former communist states in eastern Europe were brought into the democratic fold. By the 1990s, 60 percent of all countries in the world had become
democracies.21
The emergent group of democratic middle powers, including Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea, and Turkey, lends the liberal world order new geopolitical heft. As the political scientist Larry Diamond has mentioned, if
Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey regain their economic footing and strengthen their democratic rule, the G-20, which also includes U.S. and
21 Ikenberry J. 2014. “The Illusion of Geopolitics: The Enduring Power of the Liberal Order” Foreign Affairs. 93 (3): 80-90.
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European countries. “will have become a strong ‘club of democracies,’ with only Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia excluded.” The rise of a global middle class of democratic states has turned China and Russia into outliers, as Mead fears, legitimate participants for global leadership. Mead also further emphasized the situation of China under the influences of democracy:
Democracy is encircling China, too. In the mid-1980s, India and Japan were the only Asian democracies, but from then on, Indonesia, Mongolia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand have joined the same group. Myanmar has made cautious steps towards
multiparty rule-steps that have come, as China has failed to pay attention, in conjunction with warming relations with the U.S. China now lives in a very democratic neighborhood.22
Furthermore, one of China’s democratic neighbors, Taiwan, could be a predicament.
Although all the Chinese leaders faithfully believe that Taiwan is part of China, but not all the Taiwanese believe so. The current political system functioning in Taiwan also reaches the standard as democracy quite a lot. In addition, the democratic transition on the island has made its inhabitants’ claims to nationhood more deeply felt and legitimate. The 2011 Taiwan National Security Survey by the Election Study Center of National Chengchi University in Taiwan showed that if the Taiwanese could be assured that China would not attack Taiwan, a stunningly high 80 percent of them would support declaring independence. This is just an example of the fact that China desires geopolitical control over its neighborhood. However, the spread of democracy to all corners of Asia has made old-fashioned domination the only way to achieve that, and that option is costly and even self-destructing.
22 Ikenberry J. 2014. “The Illusion of Geopolitics: The Enduring Power of the Liberal Order” Foreign Affairs. 93 (3): 80-90.
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According to Ikenberry’s argument, while the rise of democratic states makes life more difficult for China and Russia, it makes the world safer for the United States.
Those two powers may count as U.S. rivals, but the rivalry occurs on a very unequal playing field: the United States has the most friends, and the most capable ones, too.
Washington and its allies occupy 75 percent of global military spending.
Democratization among the regions has locked China and Russia into a geopolitical box.
He also warned that Mead has not only underestimated the strength of the United States and the order it established, but he also overstated the extent to which China and Russia were seeking to resist both. Undoubtedly, China and Russia want greater regional influence. China has made aggressive claims over maritime rights and nearby contested islands, and it has embarked on arms buildup. Both great powers rage at U.S. leadership and resist it when they are able to.
Yet China and Russia are not true revisionists either. Former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami has said, “China, of course, is an actual rising power, and this does invite dangerous competition with U.S. allies in Asia. But China is not currently trying to break those alliances or overthrow the wider system of regional security governance embodied in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the East Asia Summit. And then if China harbors ambitions of eventually doing so, U.S. security partnerships in the region are, if anything, getting stronger, not weaker.
At most, China and Russia are spoilers. They do not have the interests- not to mention the ideas, capabilities, or allies-to lead them to upend existing global rules and
institutions.
In fact, even though they resent that the United States stands at the hegemonic top of the current geopolitical system, they still embrace the underlying logic of that
framework. Openness provides access to trade, investment, and technology from other
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countries. Rules give them tools to protect their sovereignty and interests. In other words, China and Russia have become deeply integrated into the existing international order. They are geopolitical insiders, sitting at all the high tables of global
governance.
China, despite its rapid ascent, has no ambitious global agenda; it remains looking inward, on preserving party rule. Yan Xuetong and Zhu Chenghu, for example, are symbolic of the Chinese intellectuals and political figures who have a wish list of revisionist goals. They regard Western system as a threat and expecting the day when China can reshape the international order. In 2007, at Central Committee meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, they replaced previous proposals for a “new
international order” with the appeal for more modest reforms centering on fairness and justice. About these action that the CCP had taken, the renowned Chinese scholar Wang Jisi has argued that it is “subtle but important,” shifting China’s orientation toward the role of a global reformer.
In the age of liberal order, revisionist struggles are not so wise according to Ikenberry.
Indeed, Russia and China know this. They do not have grandeur visions of an alternative order. For them, international relations are mainly about the search for commerce and resources, the protection of their sovereignty, and where possible, regional domination. They have shown no interest in establishing their own versions of order or even taking full responsibility for the current one and have offered no alternative visions of global economic or political progress. That’s a critical drawback, since international orders rise and fall not simply with the power of the leading state; their success also hinges on whether they are seen as legitimate and whether their actual operation solves problems that both weak and powerful states are concerned with. In the struggle for world order, China and Russia (and perhaps Iran) are simply not that evil kind of participants.
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