In Conversation with Ali Wyne
In conversation —
ALI Wyne discusses
America’s Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition
21 September 2022
This month we enjoy a fascinating conversation with Ali Wyne where we discuss his new book America's Great Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition.
Arriving at a moment of heightened geopolitical contestation, Wyne’s latest book offers an excellent critique of the concept of ‘great power competition’ thereby making it an indispensable contribution to better understanding much of what is taking place in our world today.
You describe strategic competition with China and Russia as America’s “great power opportunity”. But to succeed, you write, the United States will have to “reinvent itself” by renewing its commitment to multiparty democracy and buttressing an international order capable of withstanding the pressures of globalisation. Is this just wishful thinking?
AW: The United States will not be able to seize its great-power opportunity if it succumbs to fatalism. Nor, however, should it underestimate the challenges that it will have to overcome to do so. That it has weathered many periods of domestic upheaval and defied many prognostications of terminal decline does not guarantee its success this time around.
Many observers argue that US democracy is uniquely stressed today; Suzanne Mettler and Robert Lieberman’s book Four Threats and David Leonhardt’s article “Democracy Challenged” come to mind. The United States’ internal challenges will threaten its external competitiveness over the long run at least as much as the various steps that China and Russia take to undercut its national interests, if not more.
Meanwhile, the more that the United States’s relative influence declines, the harder — and the more important — that it will be for Washington to resist the impulse to pursue a principally reactive foreign policy. That challenge looms larger against the backdrop of the strategic inertia that has accumulated over some three-quarters of a century. Between the late 1930s and the late 1980s, the United States largely oriented its foreign policy around three external competitors: imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. Then, for roughly a quarter-century after the Cold War, it searched for a successor to the Soviet Union that could guide its role in world affairs. The emergence of great-power competition as a policy framework owes in part to a hope that, in contending with a resurgent China and a revanchist Russia, the United States can revisit a familiar script.
In your book, you explain how US foreign policy became adrift after the fall of the Soviet Union and the United States went in search of a new national identity in the post-Cold War unipolar era. If the lack of a unifying common enemy caused this drift and led Americans to turn on one another as we sought a new national identity, could today’s great power competition potentially soothe our internal divisions?
AW: Competitive anxiety can spur the United States to make investments in its economic foundations: that sentiment played an important role in getting the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act across the finish line. There is little evidence, however, that great-power competition will ease political polarisation among Americans; on the contrary, the latter phenomenon is only growing more acute. It would be unwise to hope — and unrealistic to expect — that they will ignore or overcome their ideological divisions in the service of contesting China and Russia.
You explain how the Cold War is not an apt parallel or precedent through which to view today’s strategic competition with China. If not the Cold War, is there a more fitting historical precedent to consider?
AW: There is good reason to consider the analogy: the Cold War furnishes the United States’s only example of long-term strategic competition. It is problematic for several reasons, though, one of which is that it inclines the United States to envision a decisive resolution to strategic competition with China when an indefinite cohabitation between Washington and Beijing seems more probable.
A growing number of observers are examining the interwar period anew, again with good reason: democracies are under stress from within and without, a confluence of headwinds threatens the global economy, and the prevailing order is fraying. This analogy, too, though, is limited. There are far more democracies today than there were in the 1930s. The prospect of a protracted global depression is distant, and the rhetoric around deglobalisation significantly outpaces the reality. Finally, China and Russia face far more significant constraints in revising today’s order than Japan and Germany did during the interwar period.
Observers should also consider the prelude to World War I, which saw growing nationalism in Eastern Europe as well as an ambitious yet inchoate German effort to contest the prevailing order. But that period also witnessed deepening globalisation across Europe (albeit more so in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe), which probably goes some way to explaining why the continent’s major powers did not think — or perhaps could not imagine — that their brinkmanship would culminate in the conflagration that eventually occurred. Today, however, US and Chinese policymakers can feign no such ignorance.
In your chapter on China, you touch on the connection between popular perceptions of China and official US foreign policy. Can you expand on this linkage: is US policy leading public attitudes, or do those popular perceptions tend to lead US policymaking?
AW: There is a voluminous body of scholarship that considers whether US foreign policy informs public attitudes, whether those attitudes inform US foreign policy, or whether those two vectors act in parallel and influence one another. My gut says that the former is likely more important, even though both would appear to be at work. As China’s capabilities and influence have grown, so has concern among US officials and lawmakers. Policymakers across the ideological spectrum now identify China as the United States’ principal strategic competitor, and candidates running for elected office increasingly try to cast themselves as “tougher on China” than their opponents. The dimmer a view that policymakers and candidates take of China’s conduct, the more likely that public attitudes will be to follow.
Whichever vector one concludes to be more important, it is important to bear in mind a caveat that Elizabeth Saunders stipulates in a recent essay: polarisation “makes it harder to assess the relationship between elites and public or societal preferences….for arguably the major issue in [international relations] for the next decade, namely US-China competition, polarisation in the United States may be a significant factor.”
Elsewhere, you touch on the concept of multipolarity. You write that “Strategic tensions between the United States and China play a critical role in the Asia-Pacific’s evolution, but not a determinative one”. Could you elaborate on how you see the future of Asia’s multipolarity?
AW: The vast majority of countries in the Asia-Pacific reject the presumption that they will eventually have to make a strategic “choice” between the United States and China. Many have concurrent apprehensions about the growing unpredictability of US foreign policy — owing in large measure to the vagaries of US domestic politics — and the growing assertiveness of Chinese foreign policy. In addition, even those that are increasingly aligned with the United States — Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea, notably — will bristle at the suggestion that they, formidable economic and military powers in their own right, cannot formulate and advance their national interests outside of a G2 construct.
China’s neighbours will likely continue to participate in both US-led initiatives (such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework) and Chinese-led ones (such as the Belt and Road). We should also expect to see more Asia-Pacific-centric arrangements that include neither the United States nor China (such as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership).
You conclude, “We are unlikely to witness a power transition between the United States and China — or, more expansively, between the West and a Sino-Russian condominium.” Many international relations theorists of the 2000s and 2010s focused heavily on the imminent power transition. Why do you rule out the possibility of such a global transition moment, and what do you see in its stead?
AW: The United States and China each have important competitive advantages that the other cannot readily replicate. It is reasonable to project that China will overtake the United States in overall economic size before the middle of the century. But the attainment of global preeminence requires more than the possession of the world’s largest economy. Consider that while the United States’s gross domestic product surpassed that of the United Kingdom in the late 19th century, the United States did not become the world’s dominant power until after World War II (and that power transition may have occurred later had it not been for the devastation that Europe and Asia suffered).
China is reducing the United States’ degree of military overmatch in the Asia-Pacific, and it is cultivating global influence — particularly in the developing world — through its infrastructure and technology offerings. But it is difficult to see how China would relegate the United States to a marginal position in world affairs without a reserve currency, a strong diplomatic network, and a coherent conception of world order — especially if that conception were to fail to gain traction among the advanced industrial democracies that still wield the balance of aggregated power.
The United States should neither assume that China will suffer a Soviet-style disintegration nor despair that China is on a glide path to global hegemony; it should instead formulate policy towards a manageable competitor that will likely endure, considering how to envision and operationalise a path towards competitive cohabitation.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Biography
Ali Wyne is a senior analyst with Eurasia Group’s Global Macro practice. He is the author of America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing US Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition which is available here.