The Limits of Power

"This is the post-Iraq disillusionment times. It’s a very slim book, and it’s quite an angry book. Bacevich is an interesting figure. He’s a foreign policy academic who has broken with the conventional Washington establishment view about the use of American power and the basically beneficial aspects of the American military might – the consensus view that both Clinton and Bush would have embraced, even if they might have disagreed over when to use that power. I hesitate to compare him to Chomsky, because I like Bacevich and I’m not Chomsky’s biggest fan, but he’s a thinking man’s Chomsky, if you like. He is. And he has a personal story about it. He is a military veteran, and his son fought in Iraq and was killed there. So there is an undercurrent of anger in the book. The argument is that America has taken a terrible wrong turn, has become over-militarised, and that there is much more consensus in embracing this mistaken view of the world between Democrats and Republicans than is commonly recognised, or than there should be. That the mistaken view of American power, both of its strength and of how to use it, has gripped Washington in a way that is dangerous and that has led to policy errors. And there’s a second book which he wrote shortly afterwards called Washington Rules , which builds on that argument. He promotes realism in American foreign policy, which is a particular school [of international relations theory]. It’s about treating America as a state like any other state, which needs to protect and guard its interests. So it’s opposed to the school which believes that the US somehow embodies an idea which is superior to the ideas of other states. In Bacevich’s view, it’s just a state among others that needs to defend its interests, and have a more realistic and constrained view. There are traces of that, actually, in Obama’s thinking. If you ask why Obama is such a reluctant interventionist, it’s partly because he has imbibed some of the views expressed by Bacevich, albeit in a more moderate form: that the US has got carried away by a sense of its own power and what it can achieve, that intervention is often counter-productive and wrong headed. There’s rather a nice quote from the Bacevich book. He says American power has limits and we need to “shake off the ambition to which hubris and sanctimony has given rise.” And he quotes Chomsky saying that “terms like peace and freedom became code words for expansionism.” So he takes a much more cynical view of the neo con theories during the Bush years. That brings us full circle back to the China that Deng Xiaoping has created in retrospect. The big debate for America is how long it will remain the clearly pre-eminent global power. How much should it actively seek to do that, to quietly check China’s rise, and what are the best means of doing that? Those are separate questions. But on the last one, I think Obama is enough of a conventional president to believe that America has the ability to remain the pre-eminent power and that it should do so. But he believes much more in husbanding American power, and in rebuilding the economic, domestic strength that has been the basis of that power. When he talks of nation building at home, that is very much a Bacevich idea – that your first moral responsibility is to your people, so there’s no point being a global power if it’s against the background of massive income inequality, and no health and safety net. Power projection overseas won’t last unless it’s built on sure domestic foundations. And again Bacevich, and I believe Obama, argue that a series of foreign interventions drain that economic power. America hasn’t got limitless funds, limitless strength. It has to be much more calculating about how it uses its power, and that’s why I think Obama is visibly reluctant to get involved in Syria – because he feels that America has learnt some very costly lessons about intervention. And that raises the question of whether America should try to check China in a non-military way. Which again is a post-Clinton view. There was a feeling in the Clinton years that the rise of China would look after itself, because it would trigger a series of political changes in China that would make it much more congenial to live with. That hasn’t happened, and as we close in on the time when China becomes the world’s biggest economy, America is feeling weaker. What do you do about that? I feel Obama is balancing two opposite strategies. One is to stick with the Clinton convergence view of engagement with China – that engagement will build a mutually beneficial cooperative relationship which will ultimately change China. But equally America is now hedging against the rise of China with a pivot strategy, by building up or reinforcing alliances with Japan and South Korea, Australia and India. So there is a soft containment going on, a more traditional balance of power approach, which I think Clinton was trying to get away from and Obama is perhaps moving back towards. But he is doing both at the same time – it’s not either or. Totally absent. Europe’s Euro crisis is so absorbing that they have, I think, no intellectual energy left to think about the rise of China. The Europeans still largely think of China in economic terms as a commercial opportunity and a commercial threat, because Europe doesn’t have a network of alliances in Asia. Exactly. I think the Europeans have proved their relevance in a rather depressing way, in that people have become conscious that if the European economy collapses, it’s still large enough to bring everyone else down with them. It’s perhaps not the gauge of relevance that we would have sought. Europe hoped that their significance would be as a model for the world, a model for global governance, and that the EU would at some point be generalisable — perhaps through the G20. But that was always going to be a tough call, and it looks very delusory in the wake of the Euro crisis. If there is, I don’t think we’ve identified it yet. Maybe the idea is going to be Easternisation rather than Westernisation. The end of history thesis was about the spread of ideas – economic and political – that had developed essentially in the West. Global capitalism, democracy and so on. Now we have a huge shift of economic power from West to East. The untold part of the story is the implications of that, which will be commercial and economic in terms of living standards and where people do business, and geopolitical in the traditional sense of where the contest for power takes place – i.e. in Asia not in Europe. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The most interesting part of the story which is still playing out is in culture and values. You could still make the case that the Fukuyama view will prevail, that even China will ultimately have to embrace liberal, universal values. In that sense, the end of history was not wrong. Or maybe will we see new political and cultural ideas coming out of the rise of Asia – not only from China, but also from India and Southeast Asia – which will be different from the individualist ideas pushed by the Americans. More communitarian perhaps. I don’t know. We’ll see."