Angry Planet - America’s Foreign Policy Has a Cold War Hangover

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

Thinking about geopolitics is all about picking the right metaphor. After World War II, America’s elite conceived of a world engaged in a Cold War, where the United States and Soviet Union played a game of spies and skirmishes to spread political ideology across the planet. In the 19th century, the British and Russian Empires engaged in the Great Game, a political and diplomatic game of shadows that played out in Afghanistan and its neighboring territories. The problem with metaphors is that the map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal and if you get caught up in a great power competition, it can be hard to see the world any other way.Here to help us sort through this, and try to figure out what metaphors best fit our troubled times, is Ali Wyne. Wyne is a policy analyst at RAND, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center on International Security, and a nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute. His work, especially on this topic, has appeared in The National Interest.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. But China is not the Soviet Union 2.0. And we were talking earlier about the use or lack thereup of metaphors and analogies. And I worry that the growing tendency to analogize China to an overarching, sort of unalloyed antagonist threatens to obscure more than clarify.

You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. Producer Kevin Nodell is still in the Middle East, but we'll be hearing from him soon. Thinking about geopolitics is all about picking the right metaphor. After World War II, America's elite conceived of a world engaged in a Cold War, where the United States and Soviet Union played a game of spies and skirmishes to spread political ideology across the planet. In the 19th century, the British and Russian empires engaged in the great game, political and diplomatic game of shadows that played

out in Afghanistan and its neighboring territories. But the problem with metaphors is that the map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. And if you get caught up in a great power competition, say, it can be hard to see the way the world really works or see the world any other way. Here to help us sort through this and try to figure out what metaphors best fit our troubled times is Lee Wine. He's a policy analyst at Rand, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Snowcroft Center on International Security, and a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute. His work, especially on this topic, has appeared in the national interest. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure.

Okay, so let's define some terms and really explain the metaphor that we're going to be talking about today, which is the great power competition, right? So what is this great power competition? Who are the great powers? And what does it mean for those powers to see themselves this way? So my understanding of great power competition, first in terms of the origins. So if you look at the national security strategy and the national defense strategy put out by the White House, the impetus for shifting to great power competition, and an impetus that I would say is widely shared across ideological lines, is that the United States, for too long, going on two decades

now, has been preoccupied with convulsions in the Middle East, particularly the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, but also more broadly what some have called a global war in terrorism that while centered in or centered on the Middle East is a continues to expand in geographical reach. And so the impetus for shifting to great power competition is one, a conviction, which I think is right, that the United States has been preoccupied with counterterrorism for too long, or at least has accorded counterterrorism too high a strategic priority for quite some time, and that in light of a resurgent China and a revanchist Russia, that we need to focus on more traditional great power competition.

And so going to the second part of your question, at least if you look at the national security strategy and the national defense strategy, and I think it's fair to say if you look at most of the commentary on gray power competition, the two great powers that are the principal protagonist or antagonists in this competition, depending on your perspective, are China and Russia. So Russia certainly is a pale shadow of its former self, its former imperial self. it nonetheless is a major power. It has the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. It has veto power on the United Nations Security Council. It has a world's largest landmass.

And although Russia faces a bleak demographic outlook and it faces declining coercive energy leverage, it nonetheless is a formidable power. And I think that Russia has concluded that while it doesn't have the economic wherewithal to offer something in the vein of a Belt and Road initiative like China does, it nonetheless feels that it can remind the international community of its great power status and great power influence by upsetting the apple cart. And so if you look at various Russian efforts, whether it is hiving off territories in its near abroad, conducting disinformation operations to be stabilized democratic societies, supporting the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, there isn't necessarily a grand strategic arc that connects those different vectors of effort. But if you recognize that Russia is thinking less in grand strategic terms and more in tactical terms. And here I think we need to distinguish between tactical agility, which Putin has demonstrated amply and strategic foresight, which I feel that he has demonstrated less of. You see that Russia through its tactical agility has been able to remind the international community of its influence.

And in China, on the other hand, I see China as a selective revisionist. It is a rapidly research in power, particularly in the domains of economics and technology, but also militarily and even ideologically. And I see China as a power that it doesn't necessarily seek to displace the United States as the undergirder of a global order. But it does see itself as pursuing a more ambitious foreign policy for restoring a certain degree of preeminence that it once enjoyed in the Asia Pacific or the Indo-Pacific. And I do think that it can plausibly envision with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the like. I do think that China can plausibly envision in decades to come the establishment of a somewhat unified Eurasian economic zone at which it sits at the center. So in any event, so I think the great power competition is trying to shift away from counterterrorism. It's trying to restore our strategic focus on great powers, in this case, China and Russia.

And we may, I'm sure we'll get into this later in the conversation. It is interesting that because the NSS and the NBS, they place China and Russia, they often place them in immediate juxtaposition. It's interesting to think about how we define great powers. I mean, China and Russia are countries that have very different economic capacities, very different military capacities, very different strategies. And the economic imbalance in particular between China and Russia is growing a pace. It's growing more lopsided in China's favor. So it's interesting to think about how the U.S. policymaking community and analytical community define great power. But why don't I leave it there?

Because I do have a propensity to ramble. So why don't I leave it there? Well, no, I think that that's a really interesting question. I would argue that it's, Russia is part of what Russia does now is argue for itself as a great power. You know, if we want to keep this metaphor going. And like you said, it does still have nukes. and it is willing to use a new form of soft power that I think it's pioneered through the internet. And these border skirmishes, if I want to call them that, which is maybe not the right term,

to prove to itself and the people around it that it is still a global player. Right. So is there a downside to seeing the world this way? Is this how America should be conducting itself? Is this all a competition? So those are all really important questions and questions that I've been grappling with in recent months, and I think at least as I attend events around town and read the literature on Great Power Competition, I feel that the questions that you posed are taking on a heightened urgency.

My concern is that there seems to be not only a marked gap between the prescriptive momentum the great power competition is generated and the, I think, the comparative lack of analytical rigor that informs the construct, but also that that gap is growing at an accelerating pace. And that is to say when you, it's virtually axiomatic now to state in Washington that we've entered a new era of great power competition and that competition has become, and that competition has become the defining strategic comparative of our time. But there are several questions that present, that present themselves, and you broached many of them. First, who is our principal competitor? I think most observers would say China, but nonetheless,

we do tend to, in the analytic community, we do tend to refer to China and Russia often in immediate juxtaposition when talking about great power competition, even though, as I suggested earlier, these are two countries that have very different material capacities, very different strategies, very different geopolitical strategies for advancing their national interests. And I would suspect very different long-term ambitions. I think that Russia's long-term ambitions to the extent that one can discern them, they revolve less around becoming a truly global power and more about upsetting the Apple card, consolidating power in its near abroad, but they're more limited, more limited objectives, whereas I do think that China's objectives are much more global,

global in scale. So the first question is who is our principal competitor? Two, what is, what is what is America's long-term objective in conducting great power competition? What are some plausible end states or steady states for great power competition? And the answers would seem, or the answer or answers would seem to be self-evident. So if you ask people, what is America's goal in competing with China and or Russia? Most observers would say that its objective is to stay number one, or to maintain preeminence and or primacy, or at a minimum to maintain a favorable global balance of power.

And again, those answers, they seem self-evident, and I suspect that they would command pretty widespread traction across the ideological spectrum. But if you start interrogating those end states or steady states a bit more, you recognize that their meanings are quite fuzzy. And I would regard them less as clearly defined end states than as kind of abstract aspirations. So take, for example, saying number one,

How do we define number one? What metrics do we use? And to take one metric that a lot of people often cite is absolute economic size or gross domestic product. And so China along current trend lines, despite the deceleration and its growth and despite some of the economic headwinds that it's facing, it's likely that China in a not too distant future will overtake America an absolute economic size. but would that changing of the economic guards make China into a global superpower? Would it make China number one? I'm not so sure. And we just need to look at recent history to see why we should be skeptical of that type of proposition.

So if you look at the power transition between the United Kingdom and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States had actually overtaken Britain in absolute industrial heft and absolute economic size by the late 19th century. And depending on which historians you consult and which metrics you use, some observers would say that that transition occurred in the 1870s, other others would say in the 1880s or 1890s. But regardless, the United States had become the world's largest economy in the late 19th century. But it didn't actually become the world's preeminent power. I think if you look at most historians' assessments, it didn't become the world's preeminent power until after the Second World War. And even then, it became the world's preeminent power less by design than by default.

And that is to say that at the end of the Second World War, much of Europe lay in ruins, much of Asia lay in ruins. And so the United States de facto, because it relatively had suffered less damage than Europe or Asia during that conflict, it became present at the creation. And it had a singular opportunity and was kind of thrust into this opportunity to fashion what we now call the post-war order. And so that is to say that there's often a gap between absolute achieving preeminence and absolute economic terms and becoming a global power. So the question that I have when we think about these goals of staying number one, maintaining primacy, maintaining favorable balance of power, we need to be much clearer about how we define those abstractions, how we concretize those abstractions. And my sense is that, and I'm just hypothesizing here, speculating, I haven't actually

done this experiment, but I wouldn't be surprised if you were to, if you were to assemble a a group of 20 strategic luminaries convene them around a roundtable in Washington and say what should the objective of great power competition be even if all 20 of them agreed on the abstractions say staying number one or maintaining preeminence I suspect that they would won they would have very different understandings of what that abstraction actually entailed and they might even they might also have different criteria for how to define it so that's the second question is with these plausible or or or sort of intuitive steady states or n states, how do we define them in what criteria do we use? Number three, if there isn't an end state or if there isn't a steady state, and there are some of observers who argue that particularly vis-vis China, we aren't entering a competition that is neatly circumscribed. We are headed for a multifaceted long-term competition without any parent-ended

site. Essentially, we're preparing for infinite competition. And if we are prepared for preparing for infinite competition, we need to be very candid with the American public, because it's not clear to me that the American public either has countenanced infinite competition with an economic competitor, the likes of which, the likes of which we've never seen before. It's also not clear to me that the American public would be willing to make the requisite sacrifices. It's also not clear to me that American society is structured in a way that would be conducive to infinite competition. So those are some of the, so those are some of the questions that I have, and my modest plea, but I think one that I feel, an exhortation that I feel like

giving more and more urgently is, if we are indeed embarking on a new era of great power competition, we need to define the term much more rigorously, we need to be much clear about where we want to go, we need to be much clear about whether we actually can achieve certain studies or end states, and we need to have a much more candid conversation with the public about what a new era of infinite or indefinite great power competition would look like so that we can get them on board. What do you think the end of that struck me? What do you think that the effect of a long-term or infinite competition would be on the public? It's, I mean, the science are not, it's, it's hard to say.

And the American public, you know, throughout history, it's demonstrated that when it is called upon, that it is willing to make sacrifices and willing to make investments to prepare for those types of competitions. If you look at American history, just in terms of our struggle against fascist Japan or Nazi Germany, in particular to the Soviet Union, it's not that the United States lacks the capacity to mobilize public opinion and mobilize the American public to steal for long-term conflicts or competitions, but I do think that that, I do get the sense of that patience has diminished, particularly in this century, I think that there's less of a patience for long-term competitions. I think that the public largely is war-weary.

We've seen the war in Iraq now going on for over 15 years. The war in Afghanistan is approaching 20 years. And we haven't seen, we meaning the American public, we haven't really seen concrete strategic dividends. We've hemorrhaged a tremendous we've hemorrhaged trillions of dollars in these conflicts. it's not clear that we've accrued strategic dividends in the process. We've lost thousands of American soldiers. The Middle East seems to devolve into ever further instability.

And so I do think the American public is questioning the prudence of long-term conflicts and or competition. So, one, I'm not clear if we were ready. And number two, we're not prepared for this particular type of competition. And I often think of a speech that George Kennan gave on the occasion of his 90th birthday at the Council on Foreign Relations. So he gave a speech in 1994, and he was asked, the council asked him to reflect on containment, how well had the construct held up analytically and prescriptively. And he issued a warning in 1994 that, that I would say roughly 30 years later proved to be quite prescient. But his warning was kind of drowned out, or at least it didn't receive the attention that I think it deserved.

because in the early 1990s, we were in the kind of in the peak phase of post-colder triumphalism. But Kenan warned that for the past 60 years, so dating to the 1930s, he said that America's foreign policy energy had largely been preoccupied with and absorbed by dealing with real and or perceived overriding singular existential challenges. So again, Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union. And so he said that with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while the United States won a tremendous victory, it lost an orienting foreign policy ballast. And I think that in that strategic sense, we haven't, quote unquote, recovered from the, we haven't recovered from the absence of a

comparably orienting ballast. Now, some observers would argue that the China should, the China fits the bill, the China should be that external orienting competitor. But China is not the Soviet Union 2.0. And we were talking earlier about the use or lack thereup of metaphors and analogies. And I worry that the growing analogy or the growing tendency to analogize China to an overarching sort of unalloyed antagonist tends to obscure or it threatens to obscure more than clarify. While it is true that the United States is engaging in an increasingly competitive struggle with China in a range of domains, the United States and China, they maintain very robust economic and cultural linkages that really didn't exist between the United States and the Soviet Union, where the Soviet Union was largely quarantined and deliberately so from the U.S. led to pose for order. China has been one of the principal beneficiaries of that of integrating itself into that order, particularly over the past four decades.

And while it seeks to chip away at certain aspects of that system, that it often laments that it didn't play a role in designing. it nonetheless is more of a selective of revision because, again, it's benefited immensely by having integrated itself into that system. In the Cold War, unless you were an explicitly non-aligned country such as India, it would have been very difficult for most countries to simultaneously engage in business with the Americans of the Soviets. You either chose ideologically or you had a side imposed on you by the United States of the Soviet Union. Today, middle countries seek to maximize their freedom of strategic maneuver. They don't want to have to choose between greater security and diplomatic ties with the United States, on the one hand, and greater commercial and investment ties with China and the other. So there are a lot of differences between China today and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And also, as much as the United States and China might not want to admit as much, there are very few issues.

there are very few pressing issues of world order that can be meaningfully addressed without robust Sino-U.S. cooperation. So there are a lot of differences. And I think, and this is why I would say that when I think about competition with China, if indeed we are engaging in indefinite competition, I think we need to think less about how we out-China China and more about how we can become a more dynamic version of our best self. What are America's unique, singular competitive advantages, whether it is our openness to people and ideas from around the world, whether it is our system of higher education, our ecosystem of innovation, our network of alliances,

I think that the United States will be far more competitively poised for the long term if it focuses more on swimming its own race, as it were, than on trying to replicate every one of China's pronouncements and actions. So those are, I recognize kind of a smattering of somewhat disparate thoughts, but they reflect my overall conviction and my growing conviction that we need to be thinking more about playing our own game rather than trying to be China at its own game. Do you like this metaphor or are you just resigned to it? The metaphor of the Cold War? Of the great power competition.

It superficially makes sense. And I want to, I don't want to, or I would be remiss to disclaim the construct entirely. I mean, as I said at the beginning, competition. is growing undoubtedly, and I'd say particularly with China that some of our, some of the hopes and or assumptions that had undergirded America's policy towards China for the better part of 40 years have proven to be unfounded or at least much more dubious than we had believed. In particular, I think that Republicans and Democrats from Nixon to, from President Nixon to President Obama had hoped or had concluded that as China grew more prosperous, as it

grew more integrated into the global order, particularly the global economic order, and that as it achieved greater economic interdependence of the United States, that those forces, those economic forces would temper some of it to liberalism at home. But we've seen that China, if anything, it continues to grow more prosperous, but it also continues to grow more authoritarian, especially under Xi Jinping. So we are more competitive with China economically. There is a growing element to military competition, a growing element of ideological competition. Our relationship with Russia unfortunately continues to deteriorate, and there are more and more competitive elements.

So I'm not entirely disclaiming the construct. I think my pleas is to make it more. So on the one hand, I'm not disclaiming the construct entirely. I do have a certain sense of resignation that it is now the animated construct. If I had to pick one construct that really grounds foreign policy conversations, in Washington more than any other, it would be great power competition. So if we have resigned ourselves to that construct, and if it is the construct that is going to define how we conduct our foreign policy and how we formulate our grand strategy for,

not just the near future, but presumably for the long haul, then we need to think about it very seriously. We need to interrogate it. We need to ask what assumptions we're making about American power and American influence. So there are several stipulations that I would attach if we are indeed resigned of this construct. One, we need to appreciate the limits to American power and influence, and particularly our ability to refashion and often recalcitrant world in America's image. I think that America's post-war history demonstrates that even the world's preeminent power faces very sharp limits in terms of reconfiguring societies internally. or compelling them to refashion themselves in our image.

So one, we need to appreciate the limits to our power and influence. We need to be more uncompromising and more rigorous in terms of distinguishing between our vital national interests and secondary national interests. We need to be more uncompromising and rigorous in terms of distinguishing between what one might call it the core of the post-war order and the periphery of the post-order order. We need to think about where it is that we want to go.

there's that there's that quip that's allegedly attributed to yoghibera and he says that if you don't know where you're going any path will get you there and so we need to be mindful that competition is not a strategy competition is a means it's an instrument but it's not a strategy and the risk is that if competition becomes an imperative unto itself or in and of itself and it's untethered from or only loosely tethered to an end state and or steady state there's a risk that we we run the risk of strategic disorientation and potentially even exhaustion. Now, the good news, but also the bad news, it's sort of a yin and a yang. Because the United States is so powerful and influential, arguably more powerful and influential

than any other single actor in human history, the United States has the luxury, you could say, to elide the necessity for prioritization for a far longer period of time than any other country. But even the United States eventually will confront that choice. And we need to think about when we do confront those choices. And I would rather that we make those choices proactively or those priorities proactively rather than having those priorities imposed upon us, whether by our fiscal situation, whether by emerging strategic realities or whatnot. But we need to think more clearly about where we're going. We need to think. And we also need to think, and this proposition I would say will be quite testing for the American psyche. but we do need to think about whether we are more focused sort of myopically on maintaining

America as number one, whatever that designation entails, or whether we are more focused on building a more resilient order in which America might relatively play a smaller role. I think that it's, now some people might say that sustaining America, sustaining America is number one and modernizing the poster order or strengthening this so-called liberal international order are one and the same. But I would make the argument that if we want a post for order that is more adaptive, more nimble, more resilient, we will have to make greater accommodations for a research in China. We will have to give Russia a certain seat at the table. And we will consequently and necessarily have to accept a relative diminution in our power and influence

for the sake of a more modern order. So we have very serious choices in front of us, whether it comes to what threats we prioritize, what geographic theaters we prioritize, what long-term objectives we seek. And if great power competition is going to be the defining construct for our conversations, and again, as I said in our conversation, I have my own reservations about the prudence and the granularity of the construct. But if it is to be the construct usure that animates and grounds of conversations, then I would put out a plea for us to think far more granularly about it. There's no dream at the end of this, right?

It really feels like, to me, right now, you know, just as an observer, that it is kind of, as you said, just about making sure that we don't lose anything. And that is not always the best place to be operating from. Do we have any idea what how China and Russia conceive of the world? Do they see themselves as engaging in great power competitions? I think they definitely do. And I think that they both do, although there are, I think that the differences between China and Russia are far greater in number and significance and the similarity. So is it true that is the China-Russia relationship becoming more robust undoubtedly?

And it's a relationship that's becoming more robust across the full range of dimensions, military, economic and diplomatic. But it's a relationship. And this is a paradox that I think is sometimes understated. in mainstream assessments of the Sino-Russian relationship. It's a relationship that is simultaneously becoming more robust and more asymmetric and more asymmetric in China's favor. If you look at not only the extant economic gap between China and Russia, but also the gap between their other growth rates, their respective growth rates, this is a relationship that is growing rapidly more asymmetric.

And Russia relies far more on China to establish its great power credentials of the other way around. And so Russia is increasingly, I would say, assuming a supplicant status vis-a-vis China. So that would be one point I would make. But they definitely are. I think they both definitely see the world in increasingly competitive terms. Russia continues to feel, you know, continues to wax nostalgic for its imperial days. It continues to believe that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was an irredeemable geopolitical a catastrophe and the evolution of the post-war order, the expansion of the North Atlantic

Treaty Organization, the expansion of the European Union continue to grade it, to continue to grade Russia and to remind it of what it once was and what it perhaps seeks to become at some point again in the future. So I think that Russia is thinking about how it compete with the United States. It's not so much in conventional terms, but how it can be a spoiler. How can it frustrate U.S. foreign policy objectives, whether in Russia's near abroad, whether in the Middle East. And I do think that Russia is also looking to ramp up, particularly in the realm of information competition. So what Russia demonstrated in 2016, albeit on a small scale, and what Russia has continued to demonstrate is that while it might not be able to compete head-to-head

with the United States, it can certainly identify and amplify fault lines. societal fault lines within the United States. Now, that strategy of amplifying, or that tactic, I should say, of amplifying existing fault lines in the United States, it's hardly new. And Russia has been engaging in that type of tactic for decades now. But I do think that, I do think that Russia is able to do some more effectively because of social media. And what we've seen, again, in 2016 and what we've seen subsequently is that using relatively unsophisticated technical operations and using pretty poorly financed efforts than Russia less in reality, but more in perceptual, less in reality and more in perception, it can have an outsized effect.

And I do worry sometimes that in the United States, because we will never know the true impact of Russia's electoral interference in 2016, but I do think that the myth of what Russia achieved in 2016 has far outstrip the reality of what they likely actually did. And Russia looms very large in the American imagination. And that place that Russia occupies in the American mind, of course, plays to Russia's advantage. So I fully anticipate that as Russia, that in years to come, that Russia, in addition to continuing its efforts to frustrate U.S. foreign policy objectives in Russia's New York broader and in the Middle East, I think that it will intensify.

disinformation efforts. But it certainly is, it does see NATO and the Postalora more generally as an imposition, and it seeks to chip away at the foundations of that system. China absolutely under Xi Jinping, and I think that under Xi Jinping, as opposed to under Hu Jintou, not to say that China under Hu Jintao wasn't competing with the United States, but I think that Xi Jinping has been far more vocal about China's desire to assume, to move closer to center stage by the middle of this. this century, it has been far more explicit about engaging in ideological competition and rejecting Western ideological precepts. It certainly has been more vocal about the imperative of engaging in economic competition. I think that China, China had been for some time, particularly since the,

you know, since the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and since the global financial crisis a decade later, China had been gradually weeding itself off of or trying to weed itself off of dependence on the United States. But I think that in light of the U.S. imposition of tariffs, the U.S. steps against companies such as Huawei and CTE, I think that China is accelerating that tack, and it wants to rapidly, as rapidly as possible, increase itself reliance and diversify away from U.S. high-tech inputs. So China sees itself in an ideological competition, an economic competition, also military competition. It wants to make the U.S. Navy feel less comfortable in the Western Pacific. So they both see the world in increasingly competitive terms, but I again

would emphasize that the strategies that they're using are very different. China, because it is a resurgent power, and granted, even though its economy is growing at a slower pace, China nonetheless is a resurgent economic power that has the wherewithal to cultivate transactional partnerships around the world through a Belt and Road initiative. Russia doesn't have that economic wherewithal. And so what I envision is that China will continue to be a selective of revisionist. It benefits from certain aspects of the post-war order. It does not disclaim the post-war order entirely, whereas the Russians tend to feel far more aggrieved by it. I think that Russia, on the other hand, will continue to play more of the more of the world.

role of a spoiler rather than the role of a builder. And it will, I think, in particular, seek to intensify its disinformation efforts to amplify fault lines in American society. You've written about the parallels between the 1930s and today. Can you elaborate on that just a little bit? Sure. So there are, I was going to there are three parallels, at least when I do a cursory comparison of the present period in the 1930s, there at least superficially are

three comparisons that come to mind. The first is the sort of the woes of democracy. So in the 1930s, in the 1930s, there were very few electorate, and even actually through the 1940s, there were very few electoral democracies. And there were a number of militant authoritarian countries that were riding roughshod over a, over a de-globalizing or a de-globalized order. And the Great Depression in particular, because, one, the were very few electoral democracies. And then with the onset of the Great Depression, the Great Depression gave, was kind of a blessing for authoritarian regimes because they were able to make the argument that they

had insights into the cultivation of domestic order and domestic prosperity that democracies did not. So one, and today we also, we see concerns about democratic stagnation and or even recession. So that's similarity number one. Similarity number two is fears over de-globalization. In the 1930s, there really wasn't much, and there was the Great Depression, as I just mentioned. There really wasn't much in the way of sort of an international convening economic architecture

to help stem the tide of the Great Depression. And again, you had these militant authoritarian regimes that operated in this de-globalized space. Today, there are concerns about what impact continuing trade and technological tensions, between the United States and China might have on the global economy. There are increasingly pronounced concerns that the United States and China, if not immediately, then in perhaps the medium term or long run, will take steps to decouple their economies from one another. And given that economic interdependence between the United States and China has been a ballast not only for their relationship, but also for the global economy, there are real concerns.

If the United States and China move to decouple and succeed even in partial measure in decoupling, what impacts might we see on the global economy? And also what impacts might we see on global supply chains? The United States and China, it's important to remember, are bound together not only by a traditional trade and goods and services, but also by very, very complicated and dense supply chains. And given how many important supply chains traverse both Washington and Beijing, any kind of decoupling, whether partial or full, between the two countries, would be enormously

disruptive. And then there are also are additional concerns about the erection of barriers, whether physical barriers, i.e. in the form of walls or border fences, the volcanization of cyberspace. So there are a number of concerns about de-globalization. And then the last parallel that some people posit or discern between contemporary geopolitics in the 1930s is, is the return of or the resurgence of great power competition. And we talked a little bit about great power competition as it's understood in the present context. But I think that there's a crucial difference. In the 1930s, there really wasn't a post-war order.

Well, obviously there wasn't a post-war order of which to speak because World War II hadn't happened yet. Whereas I would say that today when we worry that the post-war order is under perhaps unprecedented and duress from within and without, there is at least a post-war order of which to speak. In the 1930s, there wasn't an order of which to speak. Today, yes, it is true that we see a resurgence, a strongman rule, and we see authoritarianism in vogue, for lack of a better phrase. It's important, again, to take an historical perspective. In the 1930s and the 1940s, there weren't even 15 electoral democracy.

I think in 1941, if I recall correctly, there were only when President Franklin Roosevelt gave a very famous speech warning about the perils to democracies and the need to provision fuel to keep the flame of democracy alive. I think in 1941, there were only 11 electoral democracies. Well, today that number is closer to 115. Now, that number is down from 120, maybe a decade or so ago. And so it's concerning that that number is to close. But democracy to the extent that it is plateauing or even stagnating, it's doing so from a far higher baseline than it was in the 1930s. As for de-globalization, there is an international financial architecture. We're seeing a proliferation of regional and bilateral trading agreements. And it's also important to remember that today, unlike in the 1930s, we see not only we're not only talking about trade in goods, and services, but also trade in the digital space. And if you look at global digital flows, those have been surging. So I worry less about de-globalization today than I did in the 1930s.

And then, again, lastly, just to reiterate, with great power competition today, China and Russia are, I look at China and Russia not as posing frontal assaults on the postal order. I see China as a selective revisionist. I see Russia as a kind of an opportunistic disruptor. whereas in the 1930s, if I look at, or in the 1940s, if I look at Japan and Germany, and then in the Cold War, if I look at the Soviet Union, these were regimes that really were posing frontal assaults in the postal order, unlike today. And the United States is, whereas in the 1930s, the United States was still pretty parochially, still pretty inwardly focused, didn't really have much in the way of a global foreign policy. to date in the United States, despite the president administration's skepticism of international institutions

and it's skepticism about some of the preceptics that have animated U.S. foreign policy over the better part of three quarters of a century, it nonetheless remains the linchpin of today's post-war order. So while I understand the superficial comparisons between the 1930s and today, I think that if you scrutinized them a little bit more rigorously, and perhaps I'm being a little naive or a little bit overly sanguine, but I would rather deal with the challenges that we face today than those that we faced in the 1930s. All right. I think that's a good and I think that strikes a hopeful beat for the end of this conversation,

which we don't normally do on this show. Yeah, I wanted to do that because I realized that I realized that I had been somewhat downcast for the better part of our conversation. So I thought that it would be useful to end on a little bit of a hopeful note. Well, we usually end with a really depressing notes. So this is kind of a, this is a change for us, actually. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for coming on the show and walking us through all of this. Thank you for having me. It was really a pleasure.

That's all for this week. War College listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. War College is me, Matthew Galt, Kevin O'Dell, and Derek Gannon. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. Please follow us on Twitter at War underscore College. Like, subscribe, leave us a review on iTunes. We'll be back next week. Stay safe. Until then.