History's Back

...The absence of great power competition, it turns out, was a brief aberration...

...They have seen that people making money will keep their noses out of politics, especially if they know their noses will be cut off...

...Nor has anyone bothered to adjust that judgment now that the United States appears to be winning in Iraq...

...The global shift toward liberal democracy coincided with the historical shift in the balance of power toward those nations and peoples who favored the liberal democratic idea, a shift that began with the triumph of the democratic powers over fascism in World War II and that was followed by a second triumph of the democracies over communism in the Cold War...

...Nor do China’s rulers, or they wouldn’t spend billions policing Internet chat rooms and waging a campaign of repression against the Falun Gong...

...But historically the spread of commerce and the acquisition of wealth by nations has not necessarily produced greater global harmony...

...Russia’s invasion of Georgia will accelerate this trend, but it was already underway, even if masked by the international uproar over the Iraq war...

...The world may not be about to embark on a new ideological struggle of the kind that dominated the Cold War...

...They were just wrong to believe that this evolution was inevitable...

...so long as the American public continues to support American predominance, as it has consistently for six decades...

...Today when Russians speak of a multipolar world, they are not only talking about the redistribution of power...

...Instead of an imagined new world order, there are new geopolitical fault lines where the ambitions of great powers overlap and confl ict and where the seismic events of the future are most likely to erupt...

...The military power of China and Russia has increased over the past decade, but American military power has increased more...

...So what to do...

...Six decades ago American leaders believed the United States had the ability and responsibility to use its power to prevent a slide back to the circumstances that had produced two world wars and innumerable national calamities...

...Now their feeling of dependence on the United States will grow dramatically...

...Of course there is strength in the liberal democratic idea and in the free market...

...According to Russia’s foreign minister, “For the fi rst time in many years, a real competitive environment has emerged on the market of ideas” between different “value systems and development models...

...Unfortunately, the core assumptions of the post-Cold War years have proved mistaken...

...In the long run, rising prosperity may well produce political liberalism, but how long is the long run...

...The rise of the great power autocracies has been gradually pushing the great power democracies back in the direction of the United States...

...Does the United States have the strength and ability to lead the democracies again in strengthening and advancing a liberal democratic international order...

...So long as the United States remains at the center of the international economy, the predominant military power, and the leading apostle of the world’s most popular political philosophy...

...The world’s democracies have an interest in keeping the hopes for democracy alive in Russia and China...

...There is another paradigm—call it “rich nation, strong army,” the slogan of rising Meiji Japan at the end of the 19th century— in which nations seek economic integration and adaptation of Western institutions not in order to give up the geopolitical struggle but to wage it more successfully...

...Autocrats learn and adjust...

...It is contingent on events and the actions of nations and peoples—battles won or lost, social movements successful or crushed, economic practices implemented or discarded...

...In the meantime, the new economic power of the autocracies has translated into real, usable geopolitical power on the world stage...

...The apparent failure in Iraq convinced many people that the United States was weak, hated, and in a state of decline...

...This won’t be easy, given the strong tendencies, especially in Europe, to seek accommodation with autocratic Russia...

...They fi tfully stamp out even the tiniest hints of political opposition because they live in fear of repeating the Soviet collapse and their own near-death experience in 1989...

...Despite all the recent noise about America’s relative decline, the answer is most assuredly yes...

...The future is not determined...

...It is easy to look at China and Russia today and believe they are impervious to outside infl uence...

...The fact is, Europe never expected to face this kind of challenge at the end of history...

...They do not see what accommodation of the great power autocracies may look like...

...Robert Kagan, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author most recently of The Return of History and the End of Dreams...

...And the good news, from the Russian point of view, is that “the West is losing its monopoly on the globalization process...

...The world’s democracies need to show solidarity with one another, and they need to support those trying to pry open a democratic space where it has been closing...

...Great power confl ict and competition were a thing of the past...

...Nations that traded with one another would be bound together by their interdependence and less likely to fi ght one another...

...Then came Russia, rebounding from economic calamity to steady growth built on the export of its huge reserves of oil and natural gas...

...It is shaped by confi gurations of power...

...That means they face an unavoidable problem of legitimacy...

...But this is nothing new—even during the Cold War, France and Germany sometimes sought to stand somewhere between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...Often it has only spurred greater global competition...

...International order does not rest on ideas and institutions alone...

...Instead of fi guring out how to accommodate the powerful new autocracies, the United States and the world’s other democracies need to begin thinking about how they can protect their interests and advance their principles in a world in which these are once again powerfully challenged...

...Increasingly commercial societies would be more liberal both at home and abroad...

...The only question is whether the democratic world will once again rise to the challenge...

...The optimists in the early post-Cold War years were not wrong to believe that a liberalizing Russia and China would be better international partners...

...Their citizens would seek prosperity and comfort and abandon the atavistic passions, the struggles for honor and glory, and the tribal hatreds that had produced confl ict throughout history...

...It remains the sole superpower, even as the other great powers get back on their feet...

...If Moscow is now bent on restoring its hegemony over its near neighbors, the United States and its European allies must provide those neighbors with support and protection...

...That was true even before Russia invaded Georgia...

...So where is the relative decline...

...Despite the opinion polls, America’s relations with both old and new allies have actually strengthened in recent years...

...They fear foreign support for any internal political opposition more than they fear foreign invasion...

...America’s share of the global economy has remained steady, 27 percent of global GDP in 2000 and 26 percent today...

...There are the ethnic nationalisms that continue to bubble up in the Balkans and in the former republics of the Soviet Union...

...Today, the reemergence of the great autocratic powers, along with the reactionary forces of Islamic radicalism, has weakened that order and threatens to weaken it further in the years and decades to come...

...It is up for grabs...

...The Chinese have their own phrase for this: “a prosperous country and a strong army...

...In the 1990s the liberal democracies expected that a wealthier Russia would be a more liberal Russia, at home and abroad...

...The struggle continued then, and it continues today...

...Nationalism, and the nation itself, far from being weakened by globalization, has returned with a vengeance...

...As Francis Fukuyama famously put it, “At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy...

...Japanese leaders came to a similar conclusion a decade ago...

...It is a response to changing international circumstances and to lessons learned from the past...

...Unfortunately, Europe is illequipped to respond to a problem that it never anticipated having to face...

...The international order in the coming decades will be shaped by those who have the power and the collective will to shape it...

...Having failed to imagine that the return of great power autocracies was possible, they now argue there is nothing to be done and the wise policy is to accommodate to this new global reality...

...There is a real question as to whether Europe is institutionally or temperamentally able to play the kind of geopolitical games in Russia’s near-abroad that Russia is willing to play...

...Growing national wealth and autocracy have proven compatible, after all...

...The rise of these two great power autocracies is reshaping the international scene...

...After the Second World War, another moment in history when hopes for a new kind of international order were rampant, Hans Morgenthau warned idealists against imagining that at some point “the fi nal curtain would fall and the game of power politics would no longer be played...

...But lately France, Germany, and the rest of Europe have been moving in the other direction...

...Despite predictions that other powers would begin to join together in an effort to balance against the rogue superpower, especially after the Iraq war, the trend has gone in the opposite direction...

...The European Union is deeply divided about Russia, with the nations on the frontline fearful and seeking reassurance, while others like France and Germany seek accommodation with Moscow...

...By the beginning of the 21st century, Japan had begun a slow economic recovery and was moving toward a more active international role both diplomatically and militarily...

...There is some question about the United States, as well...

...A few years ago, Gerhard Schr?der and Jacques Chirac fl irted with drawing closer to Russia as a way of counterbalancing American power...

...The fall of the Communist empire and the apparent embrace of democracy by Russia seemed to augur a new era of global convergence...

...Fukuyama and others counsel accommodation to Russian ambitions, on the grounds that there is now no choice...

...Yet, looking back on the Cold War, many of these same Europeans believe that the Helsinki Accords of the 1970s had a subtle but eventually profound impact on the evolution of the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc...

...At least some portion of American elite opinion has shifted from post-Cold War complacency, from the conviction that the world was naturally moving toward greater harmony, to despair and resignation and the belief that the United States and the world’s democracies are powerless to meet the challenge of the rising great powers...

...One of these fault lines runs along the western and southwestern frontiers of Russia...

...Reinhold Niebuhr, who always warned against Americans’ ambitions and excessive faith in their own power, also believed, with a faith and ambition of his own, that “the world problem cannot be solved if America does not accept its full share of responsibility in solving it...

...The liberal international order that emerged after these two victories refl ected the new overwhelming global balance in favor of liberal forces...

...The autocracies of Russia and China have fi gured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity...

...Nor has the growth of the Chinese and Russian economies produced the political liberalization that was once thought inevitable...

...These autocratic regimes may be stronger than they were in the past in terms of wealth and global infl uence, but they still live in a predominantly liberal era...

...But one should not overlook their fragility and vulnerability...

...It may be too long to have any strategic or geopolitical relevance...

...The illusion is just true enough to be dangerous...

...Yet again, however, their imagination fails them...

...Yet by any of the usual measures of power, the United States is as strong today, even in relative terms, as it was in 2000...

...History’s Back Ambitious autocracies, hesitant democracies BY ROBERT KAGAN One wonders whether Russia’s invasion of Georgia will fi nally end the dreamy complacency that took hold of the world’s democracies after the close of the Cold War...

...Putin himself does not think so, or he wouldn’t be so nervous about the democratic states on his borders...

...But nations do not need to choose...

...and so long as potential challengers inspire more fear than sympathy among their neighbors, the structure of the international system should remain as the Chinese describe it: “one superpower and many great powers...

...The most remarkable change has occurred in India, a former ally of Moscow which today sees good relations with the United States as essential to achieving its broader strategic and economic goals, among them balancing China’s rising power...

...If China continues to expand its military capabilities, the United States must reassure China’s neighbors of its own commitment to Asian security...

...Over the course of the 1990s, that competition reemerged as rising powers entered or reentered the field...

...And if there were an autocracy or two lingering around at the end of history, this was no cause for concern...

...But those victories were not inevitable, and they need not be lasting...

...But the new era, rather than being a time of “universal values,” will be one of growing tensions and sometimes confrontation between the forces of liberal democracy and the forces of autocracy...

...The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal and democratic international order would come about by the triumph of ideas alone or by the natural unfolding of human progress...

...New wealth gives autocracies a greater ability to control information—to monopolize television stations and to keep a grip on Internet traffi c, for instance—often with the assistance of foreign corporations eager to do business with them...

...The hope at the end of the Cold War was that nations would pursue economic integration as an alternative to geopolitical competition, that they would seek the “soft” power of commercial engagement and economic growth as an alternative to the “hard” power of military strength or geopolitical confrontation...

...First China, then India, set off on unprecedented bursts of economic growth, accompanied by incremental but substantial increases in military capacity, both conventional and nuclear...

...The collapse of the Soviet Union offered for many the tantalizing prospect of a new kind of international order...

...But more signifi cant is the return of great power nationalism...

...Ideological confl ict was also a thing of the past...

...The spread of democracy in the last two decades of the 20th century was not merely the unfolding of certain ineluctable processes of economic and political development...

...Georgia provides a glimpse of that future...

...In Europe there is also an unmistakable trend toward closer strategic relations with the United States, a trend that will be accelerated by Russian actions...

...Many Europeans insist that outside infl uences will have no effect on Russia...

...This is not out of renewed affection for the United States...

...What remains is for the United States to translate this growing concern into concerted action by the world’s democracies...

...Instead of an anticipated zone of peace, western Eurasia has once again become a zone of competition, in which military power— pooh-poohed by postmodern Europeans— once again plays a role...

...It is the post-American world...

...They, too, would eventually be transformed as their economies modernized...

...But progress toward these ideals has never been inevitable...

...If it is true, as some claim, that the United States over the past decade suffered from excessive confi dence in its power to shape the world, the pendulum has now swung too far in the opposite direction...

...Over time, France and Germany will have no choice but to join the majority of EU members who once again worry about Moscow’s intentions...

...In fact, a global competition is under way...

...If American predominance is unlikely to fade any time soon, moreover, it is partly because much of the world does not really want it to...

...In Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and even in the Balkans, a contest for infl uence is under way between a resurgent Russia, on one side, and the European Union and the United States on the other...

...Today the United States shares that responsibility with the rest of the democratic world, which is infi nitely stronger than it was when World War II ended...

...On balance, traditional allies of the United States in East Asia and in Europe, while their publics may be more anti-American than in the past, are nevertheless pursuing policies that refl ect more concern about the powerful, autocratic states in their midst than about the United States...

...It is also the competition of value systems and ideas that will provide “the foundation for a multipolar world order...

...Geo-economics had replaced geopolitics...

...Today, excessive optimism has been replaced by excessive pessimism...

...Whether or not China and Russia are susceptible to outside infl uence over time, for the moment their growing power and, in the case of Russia, the willingness to use it, pose a serious challenge that needs to be met with the same level-headed determination as previous such challenges...

...Chinese leaders race forward with their economy in fear that any slowing will be their undoing...

...The Chirac-Schr?der attempt to make Europe a counterweight to American power failed in part because the European Union’s newest members from Central and Eastern Europe fear a resurgent Russia and insist on close strategic ties with Washington...

...In Russia, Putin strains to obliterate his opponents, even though they appear weak, because he fears that any sign of life in the opposition could bring his regime down...

...They forget the many battles fought, both strategic and ideological, that produced that remarkable triumph...

...That includes in the great power autocracies themselves...

...This great 21stcentury entity, the EU, now confronts 19th-century power, and Europe’s postmodern tools of foreign policy were not designed to address more traditional geopolitical challenges...

...Many believe the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better worldview triumphed, as it had to, and that the international order that exists today is but the next stage in humanity’s forward march from strife and aggression toward a peaceful and prosperous coexistence...

...Is Putin’s Russia more impervious to such methods than Brezhnev’s Soviet Union...