Great Powers
Page 28
Part of the problem was the Bush administration’s desire, as Haass wrote in The Opportunity, to take advantage of the chance to “define an era” that was already favorably tilted in our direction: our liberal trade order triumphant, the global economy humming, no great ideological fault lines or overt great-power rivalries, a U.S. defense budget that remained overwhelmingly focused outside of our hemisphere, and our most profound advantage still in place—the ability to access military crises distant from our shores without the world’s considering that to be an additional crisis. Think about that last point for a second, because no other great power enjoys that luxury: the ability to finance a Leviathan force and use it with the tolerance of the international community. If we were to endure a true balance-of-power world, in which several great powers simultaneously pursued vigorous arms races and proxy wars throughout the Gap, not only would that drain our resources, it would sabotage any hope of an American grand strategy that consolidated, and made truly global, our American System-cum-globalization model of a liberal trade order. Some defense hawks will tell you that these dynamics already exist—witness China’s military buildup and Russia’s invasion of Georgia. I will tell you these sightings are but the tip of a far larger iceberg still—thankfully—submerged within globalization’s pacifying interdependency. Most people (and experts) have no idea how much more costly such balancing could really become.
Naturally, our current difficulties at home and in Southwest Asia have pushed many American experts and politicians to call for a grand strategy of detachment, which is arguably the worst possible proposal ever made in the entire history of American foreign policy. The dream, of course, is of energy independence—a chimera of a strategic goal that makes zero sense. Why America, right at the dawning of the most intensely integrating period our model of globalization has ever seen, considers autarky on energy to be an ideal is truly bizarre. It is, in fact, nothing but escapism, and in that perhaps it is an understandable product of our Middle East problem thus far this century. But guess what? The Middle East with no oil would still be a disaster at managing globalization. The Middle East without Israel would still be a disaster at globalization. The Middle East without a single U.S. military boot on the ground would still be a disaster at globalization. Wish away enough reasons for Western interventions and you turn the Middle East into Central Africa. Absolve the West’s sense of strategic responsibility through energy autarky and you simply invite the energy-dependent East to meddle in our place. But forget all that natural escapism and hold on to this one thought: An America that integrates with the global economy on everything but energy will also probably torpedo globalization. Why? Because such a selfish goal would encourage great powers toward trade protectionism of the sort unseen for decades, and that would set the stage for a fearsome age. So, by all means, diversify America’s energy sources and innovate at high speed, but please, no fantasy of “independence.”
Yes, it’s fun to watch the Lou Dobbs types rant about unfair trade, but we don’t have to imagine what the combined upshot of protectionist measures would produce in the global economy. We ran that experiment to ground in the 1930s, and once global trade, capital flows, and immigration started plummeting, the political movement that took greatest advantage was the fascists. Just applying such containment to the Middle East’s currently narrow participation in the global economy would only boost demand inside the Muslim and Arab worlds for more radicalism in the face of heightened authoritarianism. As Ian Bremmer wisely observes, “Left to their own devices, a few who are excluded from globalization’s benefits will turn to the only widely practiced methods of leveling the playing field available to them: insurgency and terror.”
That’s why the uncomfortable truth we face in this long struggle, something that will remain at the heart of any grand strategy we pursue to make globalization truly global, is that America will not leave the Middle East militarily until the Middle East joins the world in a comprehensive fashion. We cannot run away from this fight or the integration process that will ultimately overwhelm it. All we can really do is socialize the problem.
Here’s why we need to socialize this problem now, and by that I mean encourage not just NATO’s military efforts in the region, such as they are, but likewise attract—yes, I said attract—Eastern military powers into the mix, and as quickly as possible. Within a decade’s time, all the remaining major war scenarios for the United States will be gone. When that happens, there will be significant domestic pressure to lower overall defense spending, especially on the wildly expensive, big-ticket items that define the Leviathan force’s major capabilities. Within a decade’s time, it’ll be far harder to imagine a U.S.-China war over Taiwan (just see what the Kuomintang have accomplished since their return to power on the island), and there’s very little likelihood that North Korea will still exist as a separate entity (Beijing has made the decision to slowly pull the plug). Finally, Iran’s achievement of a nuclear capability will eliminate any potential for a U.S.-led “hard-kill” regime change operation there.
Those are the surviving big-war scenarios that the Pentagon uses to justify its Leviathan force, and all three will evaporate well before 2020, meaning America’s military-industrial complex will be reduced within a decade’s time to justifying its Leviathan primarily in terms of potential resource wars waged in Gap regions against other great powers. This is a Cold War storyline sure to gain favor in coming years, even as it completely ignores the reality of existing economic interdependence among the world’s great powers—namely, the world is no longer divided up into competing “mini-me” global economies hermetically sealed off from one another. The financial contagion of 2008 proved that.
So the grand strategic choices are relatively clear: (1) we accept the limits of our Leviathan (both operational and financial) and stay militarily connected to the Persian Gulf by encouraging an increased regional presence by Asian military powers (e.g., India, China); (2) we disengage unilaterally in the pursuit of “energy autarky”; or (3) in continuing to play regional Leviathan on our own and refusing to socialize the problem over time, we’re forced to disengage “multilaterally” down the road when those same Asian military powers feel compelled to show up and challenge our alleged control of the situation. I feel confident in saying that the liberal international trade order would not survive the second and third scenarios, leaving us truly with just one choice for an American grand strategy that seeks to complete the global project begun decades ago by the so-called greatest generation.
Why am I so adamant that America will be unable to maintain regional stability in the Persian Gulf without dramatically ramping up military cooperation with rising China and India? Right now, the United States takes only about 10 percent of the Persian Gulf’s total oil exports. That share will not rise over the next two decades, according to long-range forecasts by the U.S. Department of Energy. The Gulf’s share of America’s total oil imports is less than 20 percent today and should remain under 20 percent in 2030. That means that only one out of five barrels we import comes from the Persian Gulf and only one out of every ten barrels of oil that the Gulf exports comes to the United States. In contrast, Asia takes about half of the Persian Gulf’s oil exports today and will probably account for a 60 percent share in 2030, or roughly six times the flow to the United States. The Gulf accounts for over 60 percent of Asia’s imports today, and that percentage will likewise remain steady in the future, even as China’s dependence continues to grow rapidly.
I personally don’t find it strange that China is looking for landline connections to the Persian Gulf or endeavoring to create a “string of pearls” chain of naval facilities between itself and the Straits of Hormuz. If I expected to be taking upward of twice as many barrels of oil (approaching 6 million) each day out of the Persian Gulf region as the United States (3.5 million) in 2030, I surely wouldn’t leave that growing vulnerability to America’s good graces, either. But at the same time, with China’s drive to secure
access to Persian Gulf oil, we can expect the Pentagon to move consistently in the direction of increasingly justifying its big-war force on China’s rise as a presumed near-peer competitor and the clear and present danger it presents. While this thinking makes almost no sense on either strategic or economic grounds, it is nonetheless natural.
During the Reagan administration, the Pentagon began producing an annual report on the Soviet Red Army (Soviet Military Power) to justify its massive defense buildup—the biggest peacetime increase ever. The series ended, after eleven volumes, along with the Soviet Union in 1991. In 1997, the U.S. Congress mandated that a similar report be prepared each year on the Chinese military (Selected Military Capabilities of the People’s Republic of China). The thirteenth volume comes out later this year. The strategic horizon for the report is instructed to be the following:
The report shall address the current and probable future course of military-technological development on the People’s Liberation Army and the tenets and probable development of Chinese grand strategy, security strategy, and military strategy, and of the military organizations and operational concepts, through the next 20 years.
The U.S. Congress does not mandate a similar report on any other military in the world (but don’t be shocked if we soon get a new series on Russia). Last year’s volume noted that “improvements in China’s strategic capabilities have implications beyond the Asia-Pacific region” and that the lack of transparency regarding Chinese intentions “will naturally and understandably lead to hedging against the unknown” by the international community. Care to guess who constitutes the “international community” on this one? Because if you can’t, let me introduce you to 535 prime suspects, the vast majority of whom have a major Defense Department “program of record” in their home state or congressional district.
Okay, that’s a bit harsh. The truth is that several Asian countries (e.g., South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, India) also produce similar reports on Chinese defense spending. Why? Because China goes out of its way to hide what it procures and then slyly trots out its big-ticket items every so often to pointedly give our satellites a few snapshots. We have it within our power to alter this dynamic, but for now, it is simply too useful to too many members of the military-industrial complex on our side. Much as in the case of Iran, so long as we don’t link our demand for their transparency to some larger understanding of what they shouldn’t fear from us, we’re unlikely to change this situation. But remember this: We choose to force this military balancing dynamic on others—yet another example of why America’s grand strategy matters more than any other great power’s.
Beyond the Taiwan question for China, which has obviously driven much of its acquisitions up to now, the 2008 report also noted that China is currently the third-largest oil importer in the world and that its car population is expected to increase more than tenfold by the year 2030. I don’t know about you, but with almost two decades of professional service in this business, I would say the intentions behind China’s naval buildup are transparent. To argue objectively on the facts of future international oil flows, it is America’s huge military buildup in the Gulf of the last few years that seems suspiciously illogical.
Ah, but America loves its bogeymen, and we love to tether our force-acquisition policies to them, because the bogeyman that lives long and prospers is an ideal target against which to scale our ever-growing defense budget.
Still, simply swapping in the Chinese because we no longer have the Soviets is not grand strategy but rather something more akin to a jobs bill—nice (home-district) work if you can get it. But it’s not a stretch to say that this kind of stubborn, strategic bias is killing our military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan today by default. When you insist on buying one military (the Leviathan) while constantly operating another (the SysAdmin), personnel are most definitely going to be needlessly sacrificed in a long war. I find that sort of thinking strategically unsound, and I believe the associated greed to be morally indefensible. I prefer America’s natural greed for market domination—along with everybody else’s—be more suitably incentivized for this frontier-integrating age.
THE NEW NORMAL: AMERICA THE CONTAINED
Once Hurricane Katrina prematurely triggered the postpresidency of George W. Bush in the summer of 2005, America found itself subject to a universe of players all seeking to contain its use of power internationally. Some were internal, like a U.S. military that became increasingly and openly critical of Bush administration decision-making and an intelligence community whose November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran—which significantly downplayed the threat—constituted a mini-revolt within national security establishment ranks. The White House, thus challenged openly, took the highly unusual step of removing Admiral William J. Fallon from command of Central Command in early 2008 following an Esquire article by yours truly that detailed his long-standing—and highly public—opposition to military strikes on Iran. According to Bob Woodward’s War Within, Fallon and President Bush had locked horns from the start over the admiral’s contrary desire to “get engaged with these guys” somehow. This time “Truman” removed “MacArthur” because the latter resisted adding a third country to the war. But most such resistance across Bush’s second term was external, such as a growing chorus of small- and medium-sized rogues whose leadership (the classic here being Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez) began insulting the United States openly in international forums like the United Nations, where White House attempts to further isolate Iran economically were likewise frustrated by a mini-bloc of rising powers determined to rein in our “global war.” Naturally, the Bush administration covered this diminution of our international standing the best it could, discovering the concept of diplomacy very late in the second term after the November 2006 midterm elections confirmed the White House’s growing irrelevance. (As soon as your president starts boasting to the press that he’s still relevant, his presidency is basically finished.) With our secretary of state reduced to trotting around the world delivering talking point after talking point, America effectively yielded its global leadership for the first time since the end of the Carter administration—our “humbler” foreign policy finally achieved.
The good news, of course, is that America’s new president will face a world eager to herald our return. Our new commander in chief is looking at 50 percent being taken off the top in terms of other leaders’ price tags for renewed friendship and alliance. No surprise there, as the world greatly fears for its future whenever America is perceived to have gone off on an ideological bender. Nonetheless, President Obama is looking at a serious task: getting other powers to recognize that we now realize the limits of our power. If that realization cannot be demonstrated, or if the Obama administration somehow fails at signaling such awareness (the temptation to circle the West’s wagons here is great), then America will most definitely be looking at (1) a continuing effort by many of our true allies to dissuade us from further overextension, and (2) increasingly open displays by rising powers of their willingness to seek one another’s solidarity on security issues while pointedly excluding the United States.
If we remain on this ill-advised course, then the most likely great-power flash point for the United States in coming years will be either China or Russia, with the latter vaulting now into the lead thanks to its invasion of Georgia. Neither represents a systemic threat, because each supports globalization’s advance, and so regards the world’s dangers much as we do. But it’s also clear that while the rest of the world fears globalization primarily in terms of a perceived extension of U.S. soft power, in America we now essentially view globalization in terms of a perceived extension of Chinese soft power, much as Europe fears Russia’s growing domination of its energy markets. But since China’s soft sell will only grow more oblique in its application over time (i.e., they continue to “hit ’em where we ain’t”), Russia, under Putin’s continued stewardship, is more likely to become the East’s de facto standard-be
arer in any future attempts to contain a United States that refuses to mend its ways, much the way Brazil and India, with great diplomatic skill, manage to represent the Gap’s economic interests in global forums.
If the Obama administration does not seek a more discreet and less martial tack with the world, then engaging Russia negatively on this score will be a big mistake—the ultimate diversion in this long war. I realize the temptation here is great for many—and overwhelming for some—following Russia’s conflict with Georgia. But here’s where we misdiagnose Russia’s grand strategy: Its move on Georgia was less an attempt to redefine intra-Core security (i.e., Georgia’s ill-fated attempt to join NATO) than to make clear its strategic ambition to reintegrate the Caucasus into its economic orbit (i.e., the question of who controls the pipelines—thus the energy flow—from East to West). In effect, Russia’s historically inevitable resurgence has progressed to the point where Moscow’s bosses now feel empowered enough to launch their own “transformations” of neighboring Gap regions. Again, where did they learn such strategic chutzpah? From America—of course. Contrary to neocon imagination, the terrorist strikes of 9/11 did not grant the United States a permanent—much less exclusive—global concession on identifying and punishing “rogues.”