What I am most interested in is what is new in this post–post–Cold War world: how the simultaneous accelerations of the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law are reshaping international relations and forcing America in particular and the world generally to reimagine how we stabilize geopolitics. As much as at any time since the start of the Cold War, we are, again, Present at the Creation, which was how Secretary of State Dean Acheson titled his memoir about his tenure at the State Department in that very plastic period after World War II (1949–1953), a period that saw the emergence of the Soviet Union as a global superpower, the spread of nuclear weapons, the fading of empires, and the emergence of a multiplicity of new states.
The age of accelerations in geopolitics is an equally plastic period, but it is not yet clear that we have the ability or imagination to build the alliances and global institutions to stabilize it the way the post–World War II statesmen did—yet that is our calling.
I see several new challenges emerging. The first come with the world’s rising interdependence; in particular, interdependence has created some unusual geopolitical inversions that now influence every decision America makes in foreign policy. For example: During the Cold War your allies helped to protect you from your enemies. In the post–post–Cold War world, where we are now so interdependent, your allies—such as Greece—can now kill you faster than your enemies. If Greece cannot pay back its sovereign and private debts, or the European Union begins to fracture because of the British exit, it could set off a chain of falling dominoes that would undermine the European Union and NATO—just as profoundly and quickly as anything Russia or China could do. That would have huge strategic consequences for the United States, since the EU is the other great center of democratic capitalism in the world and is America’s primary partner in promoting those values globally and in stabilizing the world generally.
A parallel inversion governs America’s relations with Russia and China in an age of interdependence. It is not clear today what threatens America more, their strength or their weakness. If either were to collapse into the World of Disorder it would be a disaster. Russia spans nine time zones and still has thousands of nuclear warheads that need to be controlled and hundreds of nuclear bomb designers. We need a reasonably functioning Russian state to keep a lock on its nuclear weapons, Mafia bosses, drug traffickers, and cybercriminals. And we need a stable Russia to serve as a counterbalance to China, to be a global energy supplier to Europe, and to take care of its aging citizenry. If China, for its part, were to collapse into disorder, it would negatively impact everything from the cost of the shoes on your feet and the shirt on your back to the mortgage on your house to the value of the currency in your wallet. China may be America’s rival, but, in today’s interdependent world, its collapse would be far more threatening to America than its rise. Probably the worst thing a rising China might do is bully all its neighbors into toeing its line, take over more islands in the South China Sea, or demand more economic concessions from foreign investors. But a falling China could melt down the U.S. stock market and trigger a global recession, if not worse.
While this high degree of interdependence poses one set of new challenges, the rising risk of state failure in a number of countries poses another. These risks can be seen around the world. Julian Lindley-French, vice president of the Atlantic Treaty Association and a visiting research fellow at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., warns of what he calls “weakism” or “disintegrationism”—which is disintegration down to the level of gangs and tribes and the emergence of groups such as the Islamic State and Boko Haram that fill power vacuums. The very real disintegration of weak states in Africa and the Middle East is now reaching a scale that is creating large emerging zones of disorder, or Kaos, to borrow from Get Smart, and these are spilling out so many refugees and economic migrants that the stability of the World of Order is starting to be threatened—witness the splintering of the European Union.
In the Cold War, the biggest challenge for American foreign policy was almost always managing strength—our own strength, that of our allies, such as the European Union and Japan, and that of our main rivals, Russia and China. Today, the American president spends much more time managing and navigating weakness: the weakness of our allies in the EU and Japan, the weakness of an angry, humiliated, and economically frail Russia, the weakness of states that have disintegrated, and the economic weakness of America after 9/11 and the 2008 crash. Managing weakness is an enormous headache. If you are America, and you don’t intervene to prop up disintegrating states, you get spreading disorder. And if you put your foot down and intervene, you can find that your foot has gone right through the floorboards, which can be excruciatingly painful to remove. You also get a big bill. (See: Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq.)
The weakism and disintegrationism that Lindley-French speaks of coincide with and help shape another new challenge that we face today: Moore’s law and the Market are also birthing a whole new category of international actors that I call super-empowered breakers. We discussed earlier how the power of makers was being amplified by the supernova. That same energy source is, however, enabling jihadists, rogue states such as North Korea, angry lone wolves, and cybercriminals to compete with superpowers and super-empowered makers across a vastly expanded attack surface—including your home computer, which cyberattackers can now lock up until you agree to pay a ransom.
Put all of these old and new challenges together and you would understand why we, in America at least, had it so relatively easy during the Cold War, when we could latch on to a single unifying policy—containment of the Soviet Union—and find that it answered almost every question we had when it came to foreign policy. The challenge of the post–post–Cold War world, as it is being reshaped by the age of accelerations, is so much more complex. It requires deterring traditional big power rivals, as in days of yore, and simultaneously doing what we can to shrink the World of Disorder and stem the disintegration of weak states, with their spillover human migrations that threaten the cohesion of the European Union in particular; at the same time, we must contain and degrade the super-empowered breakers—all this in a much more interdependent world.
That is why reimagining geopolitics in the age of accelerations is so vital today—but bring your humility. As Henry Kissinger testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 29, 2015: “The United States has not faced such diverse crises since the end of the Second World War.” The problem of peace, he added, “was historically posed by the accumulation of power—the emergence of a potentially dominant country threatening the security of its neighbors. In our period, peace is often threatened by the disintegration of power—the collapse of authority into ‘non-governed spaces’ spreading violence beyond their borders and their region.” This is particularly acute in the Middle East, Kissinger noted, where “multiple upheavals are unfolding simultaneously. There is a struggle for power within states; a contest between states; a conflict between ethnic and sectarian groups; and an assault on the international state system. One result is that significant geographic spaces have become ungovernable, or at least ungoverned.”
The standard American foreign policy playbooks were not written for this world; our traditional tools were not designed for this world; global institutions have not yet adapted to this world; and our domestic debates are not really attuned to the challenges of this world. What does it mean to be a “liberal” or a “conservative” in foreign policy terms in this post–post–Cold War world?
So, yes, we are indeed present again at the creation of something new in the geopolitical arena, and much responsibility will fall to America to figure it out and offer the policy innovations, and generosity, to manage it. What follows is my take on how we got here and how to at least begin thinking about navigating forward.
But one piece of advice: if any president calls and offers you the job of secretary of state, tell him or her you’d love the plane, but you really had your
heart set on secretary of agriculture.
The Holocene of Geopolitics
It is easy to forget today just how much the global order that settled on our planet after World War II and lasted through the post–Cold War era was—in retrospect—the geopolitical equivalent of the Holocene climate era. That is, just as the Holocene presented the perfect Garden of Eden climate for Mother Earth, and the perfect economic climate for middle-class workers, it also presented the perfect climate for newly independent states. And there were a lot of them.
In the wake of World War I and the fall of several empires, scores of new independent nations were created. The Austro-Hungarian Empire gave way to Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Russia ceded Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire also birthed a new Poland and Romania. The Ottoman Empire gave way to a raft of newly independent or colonized states, including Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Cyprus, and Albania. And in Africa the dismantled German Empire was carved into states such as Namibia and Tanzania. Then, in the wake of World War II, a wave of decolonization was unleashed, giving birth to an independent India, Pakistan, Libya, Sudan, Tunisia, Ethiopia, Morocco, Mali, Senegal, the Republic of the Congo, the Somali Republic, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, Algeria, Rwanda, Eritrea, Zambia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea—and more. And then after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, all of its peripheral satellite states were set free, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova, not to mention the various parts of Yugoslavia—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Lithuania, Latvia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Estonia also became independent.
While very few of these new states had the economic, natural, or human resources to develop into strong industrial democracies, or even autocracies, their weaknesses were masked for many years—during the Cold War and immediately after—by a variety of factors that made being an “average” or “below average” state quite sustainable.
For starters, the global geopolitical environment around them was, relative to a century that saw two world wars, quite stable. Neither system was led by a Hitler or a jihadist. The two superpowers even maintained a “hotline”—a special communication system connecting the White House and the Kremlin—so each could clear up any misunderstanding with the other to prevent any direct hot wars with nuclear weapons. Strategically, both sides deployed enough nuclear weapons to guarantee not only a first-strike capability but also a retaliatory second-strike capability if the other side fired first, creating a system of “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, which all but guaranteed that neither side would ever use any of their atomic weapons.
More important, though, the intense competition between America and the Soviet Union to collect allies on their respective sides of the chessboard provided a steady flow of resources to create and reinforce order in so many of these new states, which enabled many of them to get by with just C+ leadership—or, to put it in human terms, to get by without exercising regularly, lowering their cholesterol, building muscle, studying hard, or increasing their heart rate. Why should they, when the two superpowers would ply them with cash to build roads, technical assistance to run their governments, and weapons to build internal security services to control their borders and their people? Moscow and Washington also sent billions of dollars and rubles in foreign aid to average countries and leaders to help them balance their budgets, run their schools, and build their stadiums. They also offered their youth scholarships to enroll at the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia or the University of Texas in America.
Because the stability of every square in the global chessboard mattered to Washington and Moscow, the Soviet Union was ready to rebuild the defeated army of Syria after it lost three wars to Israel in 1967, 1973, and 1982—and the United States was ready to support corrupt governments from Latin America to the Philippines, year in and year out. And when aid didn’t work, they intervened directly to prop up allies—the Russians in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan and the Americans in Latin America and South Vietnam. The Americans wanted to make sure that as their exhausted European allies lost their colonies or gave them independence, Russian-backed local communists would not take over; meanwhile, the Kremlin would spend almost any amount of money to hold Eastern Europe under its thumb or flip a country in Central America from the American camp to the Soviet one.
At that same time, it was not so hard to influence another country. Because the populations of new nations were relatively small and uneducated, and relatively few people were able to compare their circumstances with the circumstances of people elsewhere, foreign aid went a long way. Iran’s population in 1980, for instance, was forty million, as opposed to more than eighty million today—and climate change had not reached the disruptive extremes we’re seeing now, so growing seasons were more reliable. At the time, China had shut itself in and was not a threat to the low-wage workers of every country in the world. And of course there were no robots that could milk a cow or sew textiles.
Meanwhile, economic and demographic trends were also making it easy for America to support a lot of average countries. As Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point out in their book, the four key measures of an economy’s health (per capita GDP, labor productivity, the number of jobs, and median household income) all rose together for most of the Cold War years. “For more than three decades after World War II, all four went up steadily and in almost perfect lockstep,” Brynjolfsson noted in a June 2015 interview with the Harvard Business Review. “Job growth and wage growth, in other words, kept pace with gains in output and productivity. American workers not only created more wealth but also captured a proportional share of the gains.”
In hindsight, the period from World War II up to the fall of the Berlin Wall was “an incredible period of economic moderation,” argued James Manyika, one of the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute. And economic moderation drove political moderation and stability. It made inclusion and immigration easier to tolerate. Most countries were also still benefiting from improved health care and decreased child mortality, producing a demographic dividend of bulging youth populations and relatively few older people to take care of. This made more generous pensions easier to handle in many countries. And most countries had not eaten through their natural capital. All in all, it was relatively easy to be an “average” democracy or autocracy during the Cold War and even into the post–Cold War period. It was a geopolitical Holocene.
Well, say goodbye to all that as well.
Average Is Over for Countries
Virtually all of those things that made being an average weak state in the Cold War era and beyond relatively easy have now disappeared. Just go down the list: China or Vietnam can now vacuum up so many of the low-wage labor jobs in the world, particularly in first-rung-of-the-ladder industries, such as textiles. Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing. That has slowed. China’s total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today—a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China’s wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries.
In May 2011, I spent some time in Egypt covering the post–Hosni Mubarak turmoil. After being gone for about two weeks from my wife, I headed home. I had some time to kill at the Cairo airport, so I rummaged through the “Egyptian Treasures” shop, hoping to find a few souvenirs to bring back. I didn’t care much for t
he King Tut paperweights or the pyramids ashtrays, but I was intrigued by a stuffed camel, which, if you squeezed its hump, emitted a camel honk. When I turned it over to see where it was manufactured, I read: “Made in China.” Same with the pyramids ashtrays. So Egypt, a country where nearly half the population lived on two dollars a day and at least 12 percent of the population, and far more young people, were unemployed, found itself suddenly competing in a world where a country half a world away could make its national icons into an ashtray or a honking-humped camel, ship them transcontinentally, and still make a profit more efficiently than Egyptians could. Meanwhile, domestic unrest kept tourists from coming over to ride real camels.
As Warren Buffett says, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” All of this withdrawal of support from the big powers and these changes in the global economy were exposing who actually had built a domestic economy and who was just riding on the agricultural commodity and oil booms. Turns out, a lot of countries were buck naked. And some, such as Venezuela, which spent as it went and saved nothing for a rainy day, are now falling apart. But that’s not all. Climate change is now hammering many developing countries much harder, particularly in the Middle East and Africa, undermining their agricultural production. And in Africa and parts of the Arab world, as we’ve already shown, continued high population growth rates are multiplying every stress—all while the Internet, cell phones, and social media are making it much easier for the disgruntled to organize to take governments down and much harder to organize stable alternatives.
And that tide could recede a lot more. Antoine van Agtmael, the investor who coined the term “emerging markets,” argues that we are at the start of a paradigm shift around manufacturing that could actually bring a lot of jobs back to America and Europe from the developing world. “The last twenty-five years was all about who could make things cheapest, and the next twenty-five years will be about who can make things smartest,” says van Agtmael. The combination of cheap energy in America and more flexible, open innovation—where universities and start-ups share brainpower with companies to spin off discoveries; where manufacturers use a new generation of robots and 3-D printers that allow more production to go local; and where new products integrate wirelessly connected sensors with new materials to become smarter and faster than ever—is making America, says van Agtmael, “the next great emerging market.” Good for us, but maybe not for the emerging markets of old.
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