As the war in Ukraine grinds on, it looks like the Washington-focused foreign policy establishment — aka the Blob — is pivoting from its once-confident belief that the world is best understood through the prism of self-interested great powers.
Now, a flagship essay in Foreign Affairs magazine has ripped the heart out, declaring: “There’s no such thing as a great power.”
Sure, it’s just one essay, but it’s where it’s published that matters: in the house journal for the US foreign affairs establishment. And when the Blob shifts, Australia’s security commentariat is rarely far behind.
What’s driving the rethink? Russia’s failure to overrun its much smaller (and militarily far weaker) neighbour. The sudden display of weakness is shattering the understanding of the way great-power thinking tells us the world is supposed to work. (So, too, did the ultimate failure of the US intervention in Afghanistan and occupation in Iraq.)
The concept, says essay author Phillips P O’Brien, is not just out of date; it’s dangerous, distorting geopolitics and encouraging bad decision-making. It’s based on the Cold War school where, as Thucydides put it more than 2000 years ago in the infamous Melian dialogues: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Trouble is, as Russia is finding in Ukraine, there are real limits to what the strong can actually do — and what the supposedly weak are prepared to put up with. All those “realists” arguing that the interests of a strong Russia should be accommodated in its near abroad of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova turned out to be wrong. Worse, they encouraged Putin’s confidence in the West’s indifference and weakness.
Turns out all of those collaborative networks committed to a more liberal order of human rights and democracy, such as the European Union and NATO, were more powerful than they seemed.
The shift in how the US establishment thinks is already having an impact — at least rhetorically. This week, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen closed off her breakthrough meeting in China.
“Some see the relationship between the US and China through the frame of great power conflict: a zero-sum, bilateral contest where one must fall for the other to rise,” Yellen said.
“President Biden and I don’t see it that way. We believe that the world is big enough for both of us.”
This will be bad news for Australia’s deep thinkers on security matters, fresh from this week’s latest argument in the country’s footy fan-style obsession about our place in the great power conflict between China and the US (kicked off by former prime minister Paul Keating in response to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s trip to the NATO summit in Vilnius).
What is a great power anyway, the essay asks? Most “were in fact midranking Potemkin states whose militaries served as façades for otherwise weak power bases. This was true of Benito Mussolini’s Italy, and it is true of Putin’s Russia”.
Rather, O’Brien argues, we should think about “full spectrum” powers that not only have strong militaries, but the economic and technological capacity to sustain and, most importantly, renew them. In the modern world, that means just two: the US and China.
But even “full spectrum power” has limits, he says. “Politics and society shape the creation and use of power far more than many realist scholars acknowledge”.
Exercising power — whether in democracies or dictatorships — requires “societal commitment”, a difficult-to-measure sense of public buy-in to endure the military casualties and economic disruption that war brings.
It’s not only hard to measure. It’s hard to create and sustain (as the US neoconservatives — and their Australian allies — discovered when their publics found out they’d been misled over the justifications for war). It was these constraints that led the US under Obama to look the other way when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014.
A proper understanding of all the dimensions of power would, the essay argues, puncture the “realist” illusion that power can be used decisively in war — even by the full-spectrum powers themselves.
The greatest risk? “The kind of analytical mistakes that led to the current catastrophe in Ukraine.”
It’s all part of the Blob shaking off the Trump populist nationalist disruption. That includes recognising that maybe the position in Asia is a lot more stable than it thought; that the US need not act aggressively to China, and that China understands (or can be encouraged to understand) that it would take an “almost certainly self-destructive risk” in challenging the status quo.
These sorts of early ruminations out of the US Blob take a while to become accepted wisdom. The sure sign that they’ve got there is when they morph into the noddingly wise opinions of Australia’s security media commentators.
Hopefully, this time, it’ll come quickly.
