In a world that is not working very well, and probably never will, we need to return to Kissinger’s ideas and instincts to manage our way through the recovery.
The crusaderism during the Cold War containment battle against the myth of monolithic communism, ending horribly in Vietnam; and then reawaken in the post-Cold War era to end evil regimes, finishing tragically in Iraq, has all but exhausted itself. After this, no one wants anything to do with transforming the world anymore, at the point that Americans put an isolationist, Donald Trump, in the white house to shut the country off from the world.
The corona virus inspired a second wave of “America First” isolationism reversing the U.S. economic off shoring to respond to China’s “predatory trade and economic policies” and deceptions of the origins of the pandemic. With the presidential race, Democrats too, are sounding like Cold Warriors towards China, with Joe Biden hammering Trump for his occasional praise for Chinese Xi Jinping. And as a party, Democrats are questioning liberal internationalist institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO)—largely because of a growing sense of grievance that China has exploited and violated WTO rules to rob middle-class Americans of their jobs.
The United States is not ready for any of this. U.S. Diplomats have not figured a way out of it. The liberal international order and the system of alliances still exist, and we will continue to make use of them. But mistrust among allies is high, cooperation nonexistent, and every country seems inclined to go its own. In the past century, we have witnessed the debunked of monarchy, authoritarianism, fascism, communism, and totalitarianism, each of them tried and tested to destruction. To a degree, we are experiencing the failures of democracy, now seems polarized into paralysis, as in Washington, drowning in memes of disinformation and hacked by malignant external forces like Russia. We have also seen how capitalism—though it bested Cold War communism in terms of ownership of the means of production—has proved grossly unequal to the test of producing social equity. Therefore world’s chosen system is prone to continual collapse.
American prestige and power are as low as they’ve been in living memory, especially following Trump’s divisive and polarizing first term. It is difficult now to remember how high American prestige was less than two decades ago, as recently as Sept. 10, 2001—that post-Cold War unipolar moment when the Yale University historian Paul Kennedy observed that the lone superpower had surpassed even ancient Rome in economic and military dominance. China, meanwhile, rose and spread its monied influence across the world, Vladimir Putin groom and plotted, and the Viktor Orbans, Narendra Modis, and Jair Bolsonaros went their own ways. In the meantime, Americans, disgusted with how badly they’d been misled, responded first by electing a freshman senator (Barack Obama) who rose to prominence by calling Iraq a “dumb war” and who then vacillated for eight years over U.S. involvement overseas and finally by embracing America First populism.
Global anarchy draw, and proliferating great-power rivalries demand savvy, hardheaded strategic diplomacy and brings us directly back to Kissinger type of savvy mind, specially at a moment when Sinophobia is surging and Beijing is giving back as good as it gets.
The answer to the future of U.S.-China relations—and the global peace and stability that largely depend on getting them right—may lie in the past, Washington needs a reversion to tried and tested realpolitik that will be deft enough to turn great-power rivalry into a stable and peaceable way of life. China and the United States are both likely to emerge from this crisis significantly diminished. And if the same path continues, the result will be a steady drift toward international anarchy.
That is what every great statesman has known—that the “choices he faced were not between good and evil … but between bad and less bad,” This describes much of Kissinger’s career, including the opening to China, the 1973 truce in the Middle East, even the chaotic and bloody end to the Vietnam War and the thousands of lives lost Kissinger must have on his conscience.
But Kissinger’s ideas have more resonance now because we are clearly in a place similar to the American weakness in the ’70s, when foreign-policy elites weren’t thinking of triumph but just survival, as they should be now, especially when America’s internal problems are arguably as enervating as they were back then. After a quarter century in which it became fashionable in Washington to think that co-opting China into the post-Cold War system of global markets and emerging democracies would gradually nudge that country toward Enlightenment norms. Such illusions have faded away. All we have left is an emerging superpower. And if Kissinger’s analysis is correct—as it probably is—the United States and China can find accommodation if they work at it, with preaching kept to a minimum.
What the post-Cold War triumphalists didn’t understand, is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union we confronted “a world without ideology, in which transcendent prescriptions for democracy were no answers to the problems at hand.”
We should confront the postmodern reality that all hopes for the perfectibility of society and governance have fallen short; there is no longer any Great Cause to launch a revolution over. As the democratic consensus of the post–Cold War order has given way to great-power competition and the pursuit of self-interest, these politicians have stopped hiding behind a facade of nominal compliance. They are openly attacking democratic institutions and attempting to do away with any remaining checks on their power. in particular pointing to failures in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, saying that there are “fewer democracies in the region today than at any point since the annual report was launched in 1995.”(Freedom House documents.) Democracies and autocracies like the United States and China will remain in contention with each other. But no one should delude themselves any longer that this clash of wills will yield to a resolution in favor of one form of social and political organization over another.
Credits: Welcome Back to Kissinger’s World by Michael Hirsh – Foreign Policy