Europe and America: Managing the 21st Century's Agenda
German Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin, Germany
June 14, 2007
Comments by Wess Mitchell
Thank you Jan for that kind introduction. It’s a real pleasure to be here today and I’m happy to see so many friendly faces in the audience. I’m especially glad to see my good friend John Hulsman. You know, we miss John a lot in Washington these days. But now that I’ve had a chance to be here and see where he works and see the caliber of people he works with, I can completely understand why he’d want to live here.
We’ve picked a very good day to talk about the Future of the West. You know, it was on this same day back in 1949 that the great George Kennan was also sitting down to a very similar conversation at a seminar that he’d organized for the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department. And the topic was the future of the Western Alliance.
And back then, a lot like today, the critical question that American and European policymakers faced was the question of whether the countries of the West – and I mean that term in its most narrow Atlanticist sense to mean the United States and the countries of Europe – whether these countries could chart a common course in a rapidly and fundamentally changing international environment.
And if you look back at how Kennan and his colleagues answered that question, they did it by using what I like to call the three A’s: Anticipate, Audit, and Adapt:
First, they had to Anticipate Geopolitical Change – They had to get a clear picture of where the world was headed structurally and where exactly the West fit into that landscape.
Second, they had to Audit Current Policy – They had to evaluate – honestly and soberly evaluate – whether foreign policy as it was being conducted at the time was preparing their country for where the world was headed.
And finally, they had to Adapt to the Changing Reality – Where their country’s policies were out of step with reality, they had to suggest realistic alternatives.
And what I’d like to do is look at today’s topic using those three lenses. And just to state my thesis upfront, I think when you do that, what you see is:
- That the end of Western preeminence in global affairs is in fact rapidly approaching;
- That current policies have put us at a disadvantage for coping with that reality;
- But that we still have time to adjust, but it’s going to require some pretty drastic changes in how we do business.
So first of all, let’s start from square one and try to anticipate what the world of tomorrow is going to look like. Where’s the power? Who has it? Who doesn’t? And of course the quickest way to analyze any kind of power structure is to simply follow the money. And when you do that, when you look at where the world’s wealth is now and where it’s headed, the picture that emerges is pretty sobering:
- Right now, the West – the six richest Western economies – account for 65 percent of the world’s GDP.
- But if you fast forward just twenty years, economists tell us that the West will account for less than half of world GDP for the first time since the 1820s.
- And if you fast forward 40 years – the same amount of time that’s passed since The Bee Gees released their first hit single – the so-called BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China) will be the dominating economic force in the world.
Now, numbers can be tricky…but no matter how you look at it, I think it’s clear that we’re standing on the brink of one of the most fundamental re-orderings of the international system in recent history. And there’s two points I’d like to make about this:
First, the era of Western dominance – the era when we could create the rules of the game without really having to take into account the preferences of other global actors – that era is drawing to a rapid and definitive close.
Second, other powers are emerging to fill the vacuum. In your program for today’s session, you’ll see a question that was posed that I think is one of the most pressing questions of our time and it’s the question of whether these new up-and-coming powers are going to think and act in ways that are compatible with our own.
And to a certain extent they obviously will: All of them to one extent or another are market economies. And the great thing about markets is that they give countries a stake in the game and make them a lot less likely to want to upset the system.
But I think there’s a danger in expecting that markets are somehow going to suspend the normal laws of geopolitics. They don’t. Great power competition is still going to occur in the years ahead and the reason is that rising powers – powers like China and India – have their own distinct preferences and interests, and not all of those interests are going to be the same as ours. And these countries are also acquiring an enhanced ability to protect those interests.
The trick I think for us in the West is to realize that this process is underway and begin to prepare for it.
And how well are we doing that? Well the answer – and this brings me to my second major point – the answer’s that we’re not doing so well. We’re all familiar with the list of recent U.S. foreign policy setbacks and they read – as Churchill might say – like a catalogue of blunders. In the space of just six years, we’ve seen:
Two simultaneous land wars; Tragedy and humiliation in Iraq; A failed narco-state in Afghanistan; The collapse of the “greater Middle East” project; Failed democratic revolutions in Lebanon and Ukraine; The empowerment of Hezbollah; The empowerment of Iran; And a Middle East that appears to be well on its way to a massive regional meltdown.
Now, these setbacks impose very real costs: They cost us money, they cost us lives, they cost us credibility. But they also do something else that not many analysts talk about: They reduce our ability to cope with multipolarity. And they do this in a lot of different ways. One way they do this is by creating divisions among Western powers – between America and the states of Europe.
Another way they do this is by focusing America’s attention on the periphery of world politics and taking our attention away from center field.
But probably the biggest way they damage our ability to cope with multipolarity is by stoking insecurity among the very countries that are about to be playing a bigger role in the world.
You know, today happens to be the six-year anniversary of the founding of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization between Russia and China. And if you look at the stated goals of that organization, they read like a point-by-point rebuttal of the Bush doctrine:
- No to the “monopolization of power in the hands of one state”;
- No to that state’s “interference in the affairs of sovereign countries”;
- No to its promiscuous placement of military bases within the spheres of influence of other powers.
What I think we have to understand is that when leaders in these countries look at American foreign policy, they don’t look at it through the lens of our own goals about promoting democracy. They look at it through the lens of power politics. And what they see is an America that’s decided to become a revisionist power; They see an America that’s encroaching on their own spheres of influence. And their response, like any other great power in history, is to want to push back.
And I think you can see a pretty good example of the problems that this can create right here in Germany’s backyard. The increasingly aggressive behavior that Russia has displayed in its treatment of its former satellite states in Central and Eastern Europe is explained, at least by many Russian foreign policy analysts, as a direct response to what Moscow sees as Western encroachments on its own sphere of influence – as a response to US and European overtures in Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia; And as a response to the push for U.S. military bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and Poland and the Czech Republic and Bulgaria and Romania.
Now of course it’s one thing to criticize policies and it’s another thing to actually make them. So let me close by telling you how I think U.S. foreign policy might be adapted to better suit the multipolar world that I’ve described is emerging.
Let’s start at the general and work down to the specific. In principle, what I think we need is a recognition at a very fundamental level among U.S. policy elites that America today has no business being a “revolutionary” or revisionist power; We are in fact positioned to be a status quo power: The rules of the game are stacked in our favor. We shouldn’t have any ambitions or desires that would require us to re-order the “international commons.” And it’s a very peculiar thing that we’ve somehow managed to position ourselves as a revisionist power in the world today.
The strategy of a status quo power in a multipolar world should be a strategy that focuses on conserving as much strength as possible, on guarding primary interests, and on giving other powers room to pursue their own interests. I like to call these the three B’s: (First I gave you the three A’s and now the three B’s – but what can I say, I’m a simple guy?) The three B’s are base, boundaries, and bargains.
First, we have to Tend Our Base. In the same way that a presidential candidate takes care of his closest political allies before he moves into the most difficult phases of an election, the United States needs to take care of its closest allies in the West, in Europe before we move into the more complicated waters of multipolarity. And the way we should do this is the same way a smart candidate does it: by focusing on areas where we share strong primary interests and being willing to give ground on secondary interests in order to keep the base.
Second, we need to Set Boundaries. Once we’ve managed to hammer out common positions on issues where Western powers have overlapping primary interests, we should draw red lines around them and telegraph to other powers that these are areas where the West won’t be divided and where we’re going to push back collectively if the line gets crossed. Where I believe this is needed most right now is in the West’s relations with Russia – particularly with regard to Moscow’s treatment of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
And finally, we need to relearn the age old art of Striking Bargains. We should be willing to make concessions to outside powers on interests that fall outside the boundaries we’ve set.
We can talk during the Q&A about what this type of approach might look like in practice. But in principle, I think this type of approach would represent a big improvement over current policy, which seems to be based on the assumption that the unipolar moment is going to last forever. But it won’t. If ever there were a time for the leaders of the West to step back, take stock of our situation, and begin to prepare for the days when the world is a more complicated place, that time is now.
Thank you.
