Saving the System
04.29.2014 at 02:05pm
Saving the System by David Brooks, New York Times
All around, the fabric of peace and order is fraying. The leaders of Russia and Ukraine escalate their apocalyptic rhetoric. The Sunni-Shiite split worsens as Syria and Iraq slide into chaos. China pushes its weight around in the Pacific.
I help teach a grand strategy course at Yale, and I asked my colleagues to make sense of what’s going on. Charles Hill, who was a legendary State Department officer before going to Yale, wrote back:
“The ‘category error’ of our experts is to tell us that our system is doing just fine and proceeding on its eternal course toward ever-greater progress and global goodness. This is whistling past the graveyard…
This is an extremely prescient article, but he gets one thing wrong I think. In the article he asks “How do you get the electorate to support the constant burden of defending that liberal system?” The electorate isn’t the real problem. The real problem are the political elites. They don’t seem to recognize the worth of the system and if they don’t they can’t convince the electorate of anything. So the question should actually be “How is the liberal system supposed to stand if its most prominent members don’t believe in it and don’t believe it is worth the struggle to preserve it?”
This is a terrible pity because the forces assailing us as mentioned by Mr. Brooks aren’t that powerful and there are many potential allies available to us. Putin’s Russia is economically very weak and the front line NATO countries, because of their history, seem quite willing. Red China has no naval tradition, as bad a geographical position as a naval aggressor could have and there are many quite capable countries who fear them. But all of that avails us nothing if we don’t show some willingness to actually do something to defend the system. We, the US, and whether we like it or not it is we that is the leading light of that system and if we don’t step up, now, that system will be destroyed. As mentioned in the article, the replacement system will not be a nice one and time may not be on our side.
Brooks would seem to have the shoe on the wrong foot.
Using Brooks own criteria, one can see that it is the United States here who better fits the role of international “bad actor:”
“When Hill talks about the modern order he is referring to a state system that restrained the two great vices of foreign affairs: the desire for regional dominance and the desire to eliminate diversity.”
During the Cold War, what restrained the United States from pursuing the twin vices of foreign affairs (the desire for regional and, indeed, global dominance and the desire to eliminate diversity) was not a “state system” but, indeed, the character of the international environment (bi-polar) and, specifically, the power of its (the United States’) great power rival, to wit: the former Soviet Union. Once the Soviet Union was gone, the United States was free to pursue both of these vices; which it did with a vengeance.
“Throughout recorded history, large regional powers have generally gobbled up little nations. Powerful people have generally tried to impose their version of the Truth on less powerful people.”
This description aptly fits the actions of the United States, post-the Cold War, as it (the United States) undertook — via all its instruments of power — its mission to undermine, eliminate and replace (with western models) the ways of life, ways of governance and values, attitudes and beliefs of other states, societies and peoples.
“But, over these centuries, civilized leaders have banded together to restrain these vices.”
This how we should see the actions of — not the United States — but, indeed, China, Russia and the entities of the Middle East, as they have acted, as best they could:
a. To prevent the United States from achieving regional and/or global dominance.
b. To prevent the United States from eliminating political, economic, social, etc., diversity. And
c. To prevent the United States from imposing its version of the Truth on less powerful people.
So: If the “fabric of peace and order is fraying,” then look, I suggest, to the actions of the United States. This, because it is the US, post the Cold War, that traded “stability” for the chance to transform other states and societies more along modern western lines. China, Russia and the actors of the Middle East simply reacting to this blatant grab for greater power by the United States.
I bet that all the monarchs in Europe had this same conversation around 1850. We should not be trying to save the system. We should be trying to understand the change and then manage the consequences.
Brooks is such a scholar and practitioner, he teaches a course at Yale? Only the very best scholarship, eh Yalies? Is that Yale dept. Walter Russell Mead territory, the man of the trip to India and Pakistan where he essentially blogged, “I don’t know much about this part of the world, but trust us, we Americans will get the policy right.” Or is he somewhere else?
Our elite classes only know the system so they cannot help the American people transition to a new and better one. They lack imagination and know-how for this sort of stuff. Plus, how can they admit we need less of their kind of foreign policy spinners-of-magic and that the old ideas don’t work? Unless a Victoria Nuland type is outed, most Americans have no idea all the meddling these fools do behind the scenes. Given the Gene Sharp love of some in the SF community, I guess I am barking up the wrong tree around here. Meddle meddle toil and trouble….
Given that Brooks has referred us to Walter Russell Mead, let us look at what Mead said earlier about “stability,” “the system” and who, in truth, is threatening same:
“So again, the interesting thing for me about American foreign policy in all this, and something I write about in the book, is that America is a contradictory force in the world. On the one hand, we want stability. We’re a hegemonic, status-quo power. We want everything in the world to stay more or less the way it is. But at the same time, our economy is a transformative revolutionary force, and our democratic ideology is a transformative revolutionary force. So we are changing everything with the one hand, and with the other we’re trying to keep everything the same.”
http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Mead/mead-con2.html
Thus, once again, and as relates to threats to “the system”/”stability”, etc, I suggest that we look:
a. Not at the small fry (or the “reactors” as I would call them), to wit: Russia, China and entities within the Middle East, but, instead,
b. To the world’s premiere and most powerful actor, to the elephant in the room, to the 800 pound gorilla, to the winner of the Cold War and to the mover and shaker of the post-Cold War world, to wit: to the United States.
Herein we might ask: Should the United States, realistically, expect to be able to both have its cake (stability; the status quo) and eat its cake also?