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Chapter 4. Winning of Liberal World?
When we are making the analogy of history, we have to be very careful, especially the ones that are related to the international relations, or say, the international security. I have also quoted a journal article from the renowned Foreign Affairs written by the American academic Walter Russell Mead. In his arguments, he believes in the revenge of the revisionist powers against the hegemonic United States and the return of
geopolitics, but he doesn’t agree with the influences that these revisionist powers have are as big as those of the Soviet Union.
His intention is to remind those who wholeheartedly and optimistically have faith in the ideological triumph of liberal capitalist democracy and the so-called global governance. They do deem that the collapse of Soviet Union has been to shift
international relations away from zero-sum issues toward win-win ones. What’s more, they consider that after the Cold War, the winning United States and EU would rather move past geopolitical questions of territory and military power and focus instead on ones of world order and global governance: trade liberalization, nuclear
nonproliferation, human rights, the rule of law, climate changes, and so on. However, due to the latent power the revisionist powers have, the particular geopolitical
foundations laid in the 1990s would not remain the same anymore. Mead listed the facts that in the year of 2014 Russian forces seized Crimea, China made aggressive claims in its coastal waters, Japan responded with an increasingly assertive strategy of its own, and Iran tried to use its alliances with Syria and Hezbollah to dominate the Middle East all shaken the balance of power and changed the dynamics of
international politics. To sum up, the geopolitics is coming back.
The over-optimistic belief in this liberalist ideology of world order could be traced back to the famous philosopher in the nineteenth century—Georg Wilheim Friedrich
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Hegel, he expressed that the geopolitical consequences were the extension of
ideological struggles. In his era, in order to fight against the West which was once the most dominant region successfully, a certain nation would have to become like the West. The more modern equivalence of Hegel was the American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama. His most well-known formulation is the end of the history and the last man in it. For many people, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t just mean that humanity’s ideological struggle was over for good; they thought geopolitics itself had also come to a permanent end.
Furthermore, the conflation of the end of geopolitics and the end of history offered an especially enticing prospect to the United States: the idea that the country could start putting less into the international system and taking out more from the global
economic system. To be more specific, the U.S. could shrink its defense spending, cut the State Department’s appropriations, lower its profile in foreign hotspots.
This vision was not only appealing to the liberals but also to the conservatives in the United States. Mead looked into the history of the recent decades of the United States as an example to prove his argument in his article:
The administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton began to take the aforementioned actions and assumed with his policymakers that the international system would become stronger and wider-reaching while continuing to be conductive to U.S. interests. For example, former Representative Ron Paul of Texas argued that the United States could dramatically cut both military spending and foreign aid while continuing to benefit from the global economic system. Afterwards, following 9/11, U.S. President George W. Bush made defeating the Middle Eastern terrorists as the first priority for his foreign policy. In some respects, it appeared that the world was back in the realm of history and geopolitics. Nevertheless, the Bush administration still believed with prospect that democracy could be implanted quickly in
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the Arab Middle East. President Barack Obama convicted that the “war terror” was overblown and history was really over. He built his foreign policy through promoting the liberal world order rather than playing classical geopolitics. The administration’s ambitious agenda in support of that kind of order included: blocking Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons, solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, negotiating a global climate change treaty, striking Pacific and Atlantic trade deals, signing arms control treaties with Russia, repairing U.S.
relations with the Muslim world, promoting gay rights, restoring trust with European allies, and ending the war in Afghanistan.17
Although there have been some challenges from the perspective of the United States by other super powers, both regional and global, Mead argued that “one should not speak of a strategic alliance among them, and over time, particularly if they succeed in undermining U.S. influence in Eurasia, the tensions among them are more likely to grow than shrink.” For example, he pointed out that “China has no intention of contenting itself with a secondary role in global affairs, nor will it accept the current degree of U.S. influence in Asia and the territorial status quo there.”
Leaders in all these challenging countries, such as China, Russia, and Iran also agree that U.S. power is the main obstacle to achieving their own revisionist goals. Not only do they hope that the decline of U.S. power will make it easier to reorder their
regions, but they also worry that Washington might try to overthrow them. China, which has the greatest capabilities among them, has paradoxically been the most frustrated. Its efforts to assert itself in its region have only tightened the links between the United States and its Asian allies and intensified nationalism in Japan. As
Beijing’s capabilities grow, so will its sense of frustration. China’s surge in power will
17 Mead, W. 2014. “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers” Foreign Affairs. 93 (3): 69-79.
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be matched by a surge in Japan’s resolve, and tensions in Asia will be more likely to spill over into global economic and politics.
The revisionist powers have a wide range of agendas and capabilities that none can provide the kind of systematic and global opposition that the Soviet Union did. As a result, Americans have been slow to realize that these states have undermined the Eurasian geopolitical order in ways that complicate U.S. efforts to construct a post-historical, win-win world. One can see the efforts of this revisionist activity in many places. The following paragraph from Mead’s article addressed the efforts that China had made in recent years:
In East Asia, China’s increasingly assertive stance has yet to yield much concrete geopolitical progress, but it has fundamentally altered the political dynamic in the region with the fastest-growing economics on earth. Asian politics today revolve around national rivalries,
conflicting territorial claims, naval buildups, and similar historical issues. The nationalist revival in Japan, a direct response to China’s agenda, has set up a process in which rising nationalism in one country feeds off the starting bilateral crises with greater frequently, and fixating more and more on zero-sum competition.18
On the other hand of the United States, there had been a developing unwillingness of holding the post-Cold War liberal world order due to the different public perception of the Americans developed from the different historical path:
The United States has not suffered anything like the economic pain much of Europe has gone through, but with the country facing the foreign policy hangover induced by the Bush-era
18 Mead, W. 2014. “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers” Foreign Affairs. 93 (3): 69-79.
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wars, an increasingly intrusive surveillance state, a slow economic recovery, and an unpopular healthcare law, the public mood has soured. On both the left and the right, Americans are questioning the benefits of the current world order and the competence of its architects.
Additionally, the public shares the elite consensus that in a post-Cold War world, the United States ought to be able to pay less into the system and get more out. When that doesn’t happen, people blame their leaders and government. In any case, there is little public appetite for large new initiatives at home or abroad, and a cynical public is turning away from a polarized Washington with a mix of boredom and despise.19
Although Chinese, Iranian, and Russian revanchism haven’t overturned the post-Cold War settlement in Eurasia yet, and may never do so, they have converted an
uncontested status quo into a contested one. U.S. presidents no longer have a free hand as they seek to deepen the liberal system; they are increasingly concerned with shoring up its geopolitical foundations.
The end of history, as Fukuyama reminded readers, was Hegel’s idea, and even though the revolutionary state (Napoleon France at that time) had triumphed over the old type of regimes for good, Hegel argued, competition and conflict would continue.
It still seems so based on the fact that in order to increase its power, China will clearly have to go through a process of economic and political development that will require the country to master the problems that modern Western societies have confronted.
The realities of personal and political life in post-historical societies, as Fukuyama investigated at the second part of his book, are very different from those in such countries as China, Iran, and Russia. The European bureaucrats and U.S. lobbyists resemble the nihilistic “last man” described by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: a
19 Mead, W. 2014. “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers” Foreign Affairs. 93 (3): 69-79.
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narcissistic consumer with no greater aspirations beyond the next trip to the mall.
These people would be unwilling to make sacrifices and focus more on the short-term, easily distracted, and lacking in courage. It is not just that those different societies bring different personalities and values to the fore; it is also that their institutions work differently and their public are shaped by different ideas. Therefore, societies filled with Nietzsche’s last men (and women) characteristically misunderstand and underestimate their supposedly primitive opponent in supposedly backward societies—a blind spot that could offset their countries’ other advantages and even bring conflicts.
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