by Greg R. Lawson
“But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of warre one against another; yet in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuall Spyes upon their neighbours; which is a posture of War.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Introduction
The intellectual battle between idealists and realists will never end. Idealists lean into the hope than man’s “better angels” will eventually emerge victorious and allow man to transcend the darker elements of human nature- his fearfulness, acquisitiveness, and aggressiveness. Realists embrace man as man has been and attempt to exist on a less exalted, but more stable plane that acknowledges those very darker elements.
Idealists often embrace a Kantian rationalist approach to human progression that ultimately leads to concepts of order like “democratic peace theory” and transcendental moralism. Realists prefer embracing Hobbes’ harsher “State of Nature” and a narrower, more immanent morality.
The largest theater in which this intellectual battle plays out is the establishment and maintenance of global order as various actors emerge, act, and fall, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, from the stage.
As the long-standing global superpower, the United States has been at the core of establishing and maintaining the current global order since the end of World War II. It became as close to a global hegemon as any power in the history of the world during the post-Cold War era. The U.S. helped midwife the United Nations and has been the most significant global agent pursuing, however imperfectly, human rights since the devastation of Europe and Asia in the first of the 20th century. The U.S. has used its position atop the global power hierarchy to form a more classically liberal global order that is friendlier to the concept of equality under law than any other in recorded history. Unfortunately, for the U.S. and the world more broadly, this is but an anomaly in the wide scope of world history. Most of history has been cursed by the more Hobbesian realities of anarchy, brutality, and torrents of blood.
Unlike in the past, when anarchy could lead to harsh but geographically limited outcomes, in both the contemporary and emerging world, dramatic power shifts, radical technological change, and demographic decline open the door to unprecedented catastrophe. The default legalistic and universalist American strategic approach to ensuring global order ironically risks breaking not only the current order, but any form of order while expediting a head long rush into catastrophe. Should this happen, the very concept of isonomia and global egalitarianism may become irrelevant in a world where normative law itself ceases to have practical meaning and the law of the jungle returns in force.
Alternatives to the emergence of global anarchy range from a loose federation that emerges peacefully and spontaneously to a constructed, Westphalian based balance of power approach to a tributary type system as long practiced by China under the notion of Tianxia. Leaders around the world, and especially American leaders, need to think through the implications of these various alternatives. A failure to arrest anarchy will crush any dreams of equality among people as the struggle for survival takes precedence.
Avoiding Hobbes’ curse of human life as one of “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” does not require a perfect order, it merely requires a good enough, if imperfect, order.
History is Multipolar
Whether called the “End of History,” the “rules-based-international order,” or even “Pax Americana,” the general order backstopped by American power after the Soviet collapse has been seen by several generations of American leaders as a final development of human political structure. Author Charles Krauthammer was more perceptive when he called this era the “Unipolar Moment.” While he acknowledged the moment could last decades, he also recognized there would have to be some end date on the order, even if that was at some point in the distant future, obscured by the fog of time.
The fog is now clearing and that point is now coming closer.
Resultantly, the U.S. needs a new strategy to erect a new global order that will be, by nature, multipolar. Given that this is the default situation of international relations throughout the majority of history, this should not be surprising. Even when empires bestrode various regions, there was never a global hegemonic power. Not even Rome’s power was able to dominate Imperial China or vice versa, much less any groupings in the Americas.
The U.S. grand strategy of pursuing a truly global “rules-based” liberal order was only possible in a time where most economic and military power was concentrated in its hands after the near collective suicide of much of the rest of the world during the two cataclysmic world wars and after the other main contender for that role, the Soviet Union, collapsed. The goal across both neoliberal and neoconservative dominated administrations in the first decade of the post-Cold War era was clearly to maintain the U.S. atop the global power hierarchy as a sort of quasi-“GloboCop” enforcing western-oriented values and legal notions. From an American perspective, even if sometimes used as a rhetorical fig leaf, these values were perceived as universal and embraced the spirit of isonomia.
Unfortunately, as time has moved along, the U.S. strategic class has increasingly risked overstretch while exacerbating tensions among other, now rising, powers with alternative views of what global, or at least their regional, order should look like. Indeed, it has proven that the U.S. desire to impose its unique form of perceived universal values is not shared by many other regional powers.
The four-year term of President Donald Trump shook up this ossified status quo and began to change this bi-partisan direction to one more in line with realism and the search for a balance of power. But it was not long enough to firmly implant a new direction for U.S. grand strategy. The post-Cold War status quo essentially has been restored by the current Biden Administration.
Yet, even as U.S. strategy returns to its embrace of the ultimately ephemeral, universal “rules-based order,” numerous contradictory trends are emerging, interacting with each other, and refracting in unpredictable ways. This is leading to a historical discontinuity as each trend undermines the pillars of long-standing post-Cold War U.S. strategy. Some trends reinforce international isonomia as newly emerging powers are able to exert power in ways previously unavailable to them. Other trends reinforce the more anarchical Hobbesian state of nature as technology empowers dictatorships, non-state actors, or even individual zealots or nihilists with various levels of devastation possible more quickly than in any previous historical epoch.
Thus, it has become critical for current and aspiring strategists in the U.S. to recognize and accept that in this new era, unparalleled U.S. dominance can no longer be expected and that a ceaseless pursuit of it will only lead to the further breakdown of any semblance of order. This would lead to the ever-present possibility of catastrophe as well as undermining the possibility of isonomic societies to flourish amidst the dangers of technologically charged global chaos.
Present Global Geopolitical Trends
Power, both economic and military, is shifting from the West to the East increasing global multipolarity.
Global demographic trends are raising fears about the continuation of broad-based, growing prosperity. Only the “Global South” has a population that continues to grow at a high rate, particularly in Africa. But Africa has yet to establish the institutions necessary to begin fully exerting its latent demographic and natural resource advantages and risks falling under the sway of Chinese economic power over time.
The specter of war stalks Europe and Asia. Europe continues to deal with the largest war on the continent since World War II as the Russia-Ukraine War slogs on, making it a less stable global actor. The Middle East is on a knife’s edge as the Israel-Hamas conflict threatens to expand to Lebanon and a proxy conflict between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah. The growing Asian superpower, China, continues to flex its muscles in the east raising fears of conflict over Taiwan.
A new tech cold war between the United States and China underlies everything from competition over semiconductors, AI, and 5G communication. This battle is over who gets to set global technological standards which has long been a cornerstone of American power and its ability to project that power on behalf of its ideals of a rules-based order. Should China establish itself in this way for the technologies of the future, the power shifts to the east will be even further consolidated and give China the chance to become more like its historical conception of itself as the ”Middle Kingdom.” This would make it capable of leveraging, if not absorbing, the labor and intellectual capital of those that use its technology. This could bring about a modern reinvigoration of the Chinese concept of Tianxia, or “Under Heaven.”
The United States itself suffers from a looming debt crisis, major domestic ideological battles, a toxic politics that is eroding citizens’ faith in its long-standing institutions, uncontrolled immigration, and the prospects of self-inflicted balkanization.
If all of that change isn’t enough to undermine the old global order, new technology, especially artificial intelligence or AI, growing nuclear weapons arsenals for the first time since the end of the Cold War, and even genetically modified viruses adds unprecedented instability, and democratized destructive capacity, on top of all of the other trends.
Cumulatively, these global changes are increasingly making the development of coherent policy almost impossible despite the need to construct a more durable order.
Alternatives to the Current American Order
There is a myriad of alternatives to the current grand strategy of America and the order it has maintained for the better part of three quarters of a century. Of interest to readers of this journal is the notion of an “interstate federation,” a concept similar to that as envisioned by Kant and specifically as articulated by Friedrich Hayek.
As Hayek outlined:
Unquestionably, the main purpose of interstate federation is to secure peace: to prevent war between the parts of the federation by eliminating causes of friction between them and by providing effective machinery for the settlement of any disputes which may arise between them and to prevent war between the federation and any independent states by making the former so strong as to eliminate any danger of attack from without.
The European Union (EU) represents the most relevant and contemporary example of what such a federation could look like. Similar to Hayek’s vision, it includes a common currency, market, and laws aimed at treating individuals from different individual countries broadly the same under a unified legal system. The goal of the EU is to achieve a lasting peace on the European continent and is intended to act as the apotheosis of lessons learned through the disasters of the early 20th century. Advocates of the EU have openly hoped that its model could be made universal and offer a replacement to the unipolar American order.
However, the EU has fallen on hard times. It is struggling to adapt to changing trends without betraying the principle of spontaneous, peaceful development. Uncontrolled refugee flows, multi-speed economies with variable debt patterns, and now, war on the continent. These issues have re-awakened the ever-present, but temporarily quieted tribal elements within individual nations. The 2016 pull out of the EU by Great Britain, or BREXIT, is one example. Another is the growing nationalism and opposition to overall EU policy by member states like Hungary. Yet another is the rise and electoral popularity of major populist movements in most European states. And, of course, fears over a revanchist Russia to the east is exacerbating cleavages between those members that are geographically closer to Russia, and have acute anxiety over Russian aims, and those further west that have a lesser sense of immediate danger.
Consequently, it is no longer clear that the EU will be capable of persisting in the manner envisioned by Hayek. It may break apart along some of these growing fault lines. Alternatively, should it remain together, this may be due more to the raw exercise of Leviathan-like power than shared values or a belief in a loose confederation of generally spontaneous and limited, dispersed political power.
Should the EU either splinter or be maintained in a coercive way, that outcome would strike a major, potentially fatal, blow against the Hayekian vision.
Another option, seemingly being pursued by China is a neo-tributary system. It is imperialistic in nature, though not as aggressively militaristic as the forms of imperialism more known in Western and colonial history. This notion of Tianxia envisions China as the central political entity in Asia with other nations seen as “civilized” to the degree they functionally act as tributaries. It reinforces the fundamental concept of China as the “Middle Kingdom,” and is now being reinforced through China’s technological and trade outreach through efforts like the Belt and Road Initiative.
The problem with this vision is that it risks becoming a form of hegemony in its own right and will open the door to fraught relations with the West, especially an America that has had to adjust from its previous position in the global hierarchy. Further, this vision does not hold onto the same notions of equality as the liberal notions pursued by America’s order. Rather, it tends to look at other nations in a strictly hierarchical fashion. Such an order would not be propitious for even domestic isonomia to flourish.
A more plausible, and acceptable, alternative order to replace the decaying American unipolar moment is one still based-upon the Westphalian notion of states- the old, seemingly discredited concept of balance of power.
While few American leaders since its rise to great power status have explicitly called for a balance of power approach to foreign policy, Theodore Roosevelt and especially Richard Nixon being rare exceptions, it is time for this idea to make a comeback in U.S. discourse. It should displace the more Wilsonian notions of crusading human rights that has, to varying degrees, animated most 20th and early 21st century administrations. It should also supersede distracting concepts like international federations.
As Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, said:
In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.
Given the present geopolitical and technological trends, hegemony is not practical. Meanwhile, hiding behind legalistic nostrums and fantastical beliefs in the unity of trading nations within peaceful federations will not ensure that the growing multipolarity avoids a descent into a more hellish version of Hobbes’ vision.
Again, Kissinger remarks:
These are the two great symbols of the attacks on the legitimate order: the Conqueror and the Prophet, the quest for universality and for eternity, for the peace of impotence and the peace of bliss.
Technology prevents impotence by democratizing all sorts of power. Meanwhile, differing perceptions of what constitutes an appropriate domestic or regional order prevents bliss since disagreements will always exist and underpin competitive tensions. But a balance of power seeks a middle ground that can adjust to changing trends. It does not seek hegemony, nor does it seek to universalize legal theories for equal application everywhere simultaneously.
A balance of power mindset respects the differing values of different nations and regional powers. It seeks to acquire a degree of power, but only so that it can defend its own area. Thus, by seeking a balance of power, the U.S. can construct a new global order that gives it the flexibility to ensure no other power dominates their regions. The threat of such hegemonic ambitions risk major power conflict if not outright war by creating a sense of fear among those that would fall into a hegemon’s tight embrace.
Additionally, a balance of power should give space to new, emergent powers to rise and take their place as more significant players on the global stage. Over time, a balance of power allows smaller nations that would otherwise be swallowed into larger orders, or fall victim to chaos, to retain the initiative of pivoting between bigger powers. This retention of strategic autonomy for smaller nations allows for a closer approximation of de facto, though not de jure, isonomia than under other variations of order. This would naturally be an imperfect order that will require constant tending and adjustment. But it would also be more structurally sound than decaying hegemonism, Chinese centrality, or temporary federations based on transcendent ideals rather than more concrete, immanent tribal loyalty. This is important for an age of persistent historical discontinuity and destabilizing trends.
To be clear, a balance of power will never guarantee a universally just global society where political equality reigns between nations. But it does allow for a pluralism of nations that at least gives those within an individual nation the opportunity for as much equality as the guiding principles of those residing within their boundaries are willing to embrace. Most critically, it limits the brutality of anarchy inflamed by destructive technologies by keeping a lid on hegemonic struggles and the fears those unleash. After all, equality and law are empty concepts amidst the ashes of ruin.
Greg R. Lawson is a contributing analyst at Wikistrat. Send him mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 