By Brian Steward
Friday, May 15, 2020
Times of trial have a way of revealing essential truths
about the human condition. The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the ferocious
appetite among people everywhere not only for freedom but for order and the
common good.
Our present global crisis offers an opportunity to come
to grips with the uncomfortable truth that our current social order is
unsustainable. At risk is the postwar order as we know it–characterized by the
ascent of democracy, the spread of market economics, and the suppression of
geopolitical competition.
It has rightly been said that the underlying societal
danger of this moment lies not so much in the coronavirus outbreak as what it
may trigger: a new Great Depression, and a corresponding surge in political
radicalism. An acute risk is that escalating public distrust in the democratic
system engenders belief in the technocratic skill and general prestige of
authoritarian rule. Such a development could in turn incite a reversion to an
era of bitter ideological struggle.
Of course, for politically engaged citizens the
breathtaking corruption, official deceit, and malign ineptitude of
authoritarian powers has exposed the yawning chasm between the supposed aura of
arbitrary rule and the unpleasant reality of a system that brooks no dissent
and does not submit to democratic audit. Nonetheless, it is clear that the
People’s Republic of China has sought, thus far with some success, to exploit
the rampant insecurity bred by a lethal virus that it unleashed on the world.
The potential for the PRC and other authoritarian powers
to shift the global equilibrium and put the liberal order under siege is
evident in their conduct during this crisis. In response to the Covid-19
pandemic, governments around the world have implemented stringent measures to
arrest the spread of the virus. However effective these techniques of
surveillance and quarantine orders are at blocking vectors for the virus,
authoritarian regimes and ruling parties in immature democracies have often
followed Beijing’s lead and used these emergency powers as a pretext to
consolidate power. This continues a pattern
of authoritarian advance and democratic retreat that has been pronounced for
more than a decade.
The democratic world is increasingly left supine before
this severe authoritarian challenge. If it remains disengaged, disunited, and
paralyzed, the assertiveness of the authoritarians could serve, as Daniel
Twining notes, as a “springboard for global contestation” that may beget a
terminal crisis for many democracies. There is no natural law that holds the
flourishing of a democratic order simply because it is superior to its
alternatives. To uphold an order conducive to the finest traditions of free
society, constitutional government and individual rights, it behooves us to
recall the history before that order arose in the world, and apply its lessons
to defend pluralist politics against the depredations of dictatorships.
In a famous anecdote that Phillip Ziegler recounts in his
book Between the Wars: “At the end of 1918 an American historian began
to write a history of the Great War. ‘What will you call it?’ he was asked.
‘The First World War,’ was his bleak response.”
The history of the 1930s vindicated this judgment when
the international order broke down again under the combined aggression of Nazi
Germany, Imperial Japan and fascist Italy. When the Axis Powers began to wreak
havoc on their vulnerable neighbors and the fragile democratic order of the
interwar years, none of the mature and powerful democracies of the day claimed
any great responsibility for the world’s problems. Without a credible and
committed guarantor of peace, the world system didn’t stand a chance.
The fragility of the interwar order had not been secret
knowledge. Almost as soon as war had broken out in 1914, American
internationalists as ideologically discrepant as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow
Wilson believed that after the war––a war fought, the president famously
declared, to make the world “safe for democracy”––America would not be able to
secure its interests or advance its principles without taking a much more
active role in the world. The international environment was too chronically
hazardous, and the fears and interests and ambitions of nations too ubiquitous,
to permit any nation to safely indulge in “splendid isolation.”
The world of globalization was too interconnected to
shield national economies from the turbulence of overseas markets. It was
simply not enough for the United States to seek only “our own defense,”
Roosevelt argued. A more eminent, and more onerous, vocation loomed. Americans
had to prove themselves worthy of global leadership, which meant a willingness
to act in defense of others. Through the provision of essential security and
welfare to the foreign world, America established a new liberal order they
would also benefit from.
To create and maintain that order, America would be
compelled to take its place in a consortium of great powers, an “international
posse comitatus” to deter and, if necessary, punish aggression in strategic
areas around the globe. This “great World League for the Peace of
Righteousness,” as Roosevelt dubbed it, was not a form of international social
work. Rather, it was a hard-headed calculation of national interest, rightly
understood.
After the guns fell silent on the Western Front, however,
the summons to global responsibility issued by Roosevelt and Wilson went
unheeded by their countrymen. Such an extraordinary world-historical role for
the United States, which would have entailed the deployment and exercise of
power far from American shores, proved too much for Americans to countenance.
The Senate rejected both the League of Nations and American participation in
the Versailles Treaty. When “the League fight” ended with the United States
refusing to endorse its charter or adhere to its membership, the cause of
collective security was dead on arrival.
In the interwar years, Americans appeared to be weary of
direct involvement in “foreign wars,” and they elected leaders who promised to
look after “America First.” This “return to normalcy” helped assure that the
world would return to a normalcy of its own––however shortlived. Economic
nationalism and autarkic societies became the norm. With every nation going its
own way, geopolitical competition flared up and eventually brought about a vast
conflagration.
It was only in the aftermath of the Second World War that
American leaders determined to avoid the catastrophic mistakes of their
predecessors, and decided to be the harbingers of a new world. This meant
eschewing a passive and accommodating approach to foreign affairs that had left
so much of the earth’s surface a cratered wreck. Only the creation of a durable
liberal order–featuring global organizations that promoted free trade and human
rights, but ultimately backed by American power–could prevent the return of
international anarchy and instability.
This ambitious internationalism was expressed in the
determination, as George Marshall put it, that the American flag would be
recognized “throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of
overwhelming force on the other.” In taking on such weighty global
responsibilities, Americans would lose what Reinhold Niebuhr called “the
innocency of irresponsibility.” What they stood to gain was the comparatively
dubious burden of responsibility for a better world, with all its attendant
material and moral costs, and a measure of pride in serving an intangible sense
of national honor.
***
This new international order gave birth to the United
Nations, which continues to serve many legitimate and laudable functions, from
peacekeeping to the provision of vital humanitarian supplies to communities in
hours of their most urgent and pressing need. But in strategic terms the world
body was always destined to have negligible affect. However noble the ideals of
the U.N. Charter, the universal social contract was rendered impotent by the
promiscuous interests of its most powerful member states. Ideologically, it
could hardly be expected to reinforce the domain of democracy given the
prevalent and perverse influence of the innumerable dictatorships nesting under
its roof.
To Roosevelt and the other principal architects of the
postwar order, the U.N. was nothing so utopian as Alfred Lord Tennyson’s
“parliament of man” in which the “battle-flags” of sovereign nations would be
“furl’d” forever. Pious declarations for “outlawing war” (as the Kellogg-Briand
agreement did in 1928) would be of little avail.
The stewards of American power were too grimly realistic
to imagine the world body could be the linchpin of a “rules-based order”
compelling nations to beat their swords into plowshares. Instead they conceived
of the U.N. more as Wilson had the League of Nations, which is to say, as a
forum to facilitate transnational cooperation under American leadership. There
was never any pretension that international law or international institutions
would obviate the need for American primacy in preserving the peace.
***
Today, the scale of the challenge posed by a rising and
revisionist China demonstrates that the strategic engagement of America is
necessary to world order but not remotely sufficient. The full strength of the
democratic world will be required in this titanic struggle. Europeans must come
to understand that America’s military predominance in the international system
is the ultimate bulwark of freedom, including their own. Without it, the PRC
would be behaving more rapaciously at home and abroad. In a similar manner,
Americans must come to understand that they still have a stake in the strength
and cohesion of European civilization.
In short, those who dream the U.N. Security Council might
fulfill this role and provide countervailing force to an implacable threat
arising from Beijing should continue slumbering.
Likewise for those who imagine that Washington can ever
rally an effective global alliance under the banner of “America First.”
Instead, the earth-shaking ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic should serve
to revive an old but venerable proposal: a league of democracies.
***
The deficiencies of collective security under U.N.
auspices, very often arising from an excessive deference to autocracies, have
been evident for some time. The supposed benefits of sticking with the Security
Council have been eclipsed by the accumulating costs of advancing
authoritarianism, which has used and abused global agencies such as the WHO and
WTO.
Democratic solidarity demands the creation of a new
organization that is immune from authoritarian blackmail, and actually supports
an open international economic system, enforces principles of international
behavior, and respects human rights. Such an organization will promote the kind
of world that suited Americans and those who shared their beliefs at the outset
of the liberal order.
When the United States walked away from President
Wilson’s project of defending the cause of democracy, a power vacuum was
created that was eventually filled by aggressive totalitarian dictatorships. A
league of democracies would have prevented that tragic lapse.
“The Western powers had hoped that their victory would
usher in an era modeled in their own image,” writes the historian Norman
Davies. In 1914, he notes, Europe was a continent of nineteen monarchies and
three republics. By 1919 it had fourteen monarchies and sixteen republics. But
democracy did not prove resilient on the continent. “Hardly a year passed when
one country or another did not see its democratic constitution violated by one
or other brand of dictator. It cannot be attributed to a single cause, save the
inability of the Western powers to defend the regimes which they had inspired.”
In our time, movements and regimes inspired by liberal
ideals are increasingly finding themselves on the defensive in a world
increasingly vulnerable to authoritarian mischief. Although excessive
centralization is not a winning strategy for states in building efficient
economies and nimble responses to pandemics, the PRC already has the economic
and military means to bully its neighbors, intimidate private enterprises and
undermine the liberal order. A pushback must be organized and new arrangements
must be formed to halt and reverse this dire trend. A league of democracies,
founded on the defense of open societies and the promotion of liberal values
rather than national sovereignty, is central to this mission.
Such an organization seems decidedly unlikely to
materialize with an administration in Washington that has so lavishly defiled
the cause of democracy and so wantonly forfeited American credibility. This
impression has scarcely been altered by America’s uninspired conduct in the
midst of the pandemic. So far from breaking down barriers of trust and trade
with foreign partners in order to align methods to hold China to account, the
Trump administration’s deplorable habit of solipsistic diplomacy––this time in
the form of White House controls over foreign production by U.S. companies––has
encouraged others to retaliate against American firms, seize scarce supplies
and even nationalize U.S. plants abroad.
As the former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt has
observed, it is remarkable during a crisis of this scope that “there’s not been
even a hint of an aspiration of American leadership.” It is a safe surmise that
no such leadership will be on offer until the current chief executive exits
office.
Whenever America comes to its senses and decides to
rejoin the struggle for democracy and decency, it should begin by putting its
weight behind an organization open to and supportive of the true “responsible
stakeholders” of the liberal order: the nations that govern by the consent of
the governed. The cause of liberty may depend on it.
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