By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Monday, December
06, 2021
In Washington, there is a habit of
talking about “the liberal world order,” as if this is something we protect.
The liberal world order isn’t NATO or the EU. It’s not the WTO, or America’s
defense relationships with Japan and South Korea. Those are all real things,
with relatively legible meanings. The “liberal world order” is said to include
all those things but also much more. It apparently includes the integrity of
Ukraine’s national borders, as Comrade Stalin redrew them in 1954. It includes
the relative independence of Taiwan. And occasionally, its defenders
say it includes
the Paris climate agreement, too.
Basically, the liberal world order is the
geopolitical status quo as a transnational class of political elites would have
it. It’s a world where Russia is supposed to stay behind the 700,000 square
miles of territory it gave up peacefully after 1991, and it’s supposed to take
whatever trading relationships the United States sees fit for it. It’s a world
where China is making that international elite much richer than before.
Consequently, conflicts with China are minimized by the liberal world order’s
institutions, or blamed on foolish “America First” presidents.
The United States under President Joe
Biden is expected to defend this liberal world order, to restore it, or even expand upon it somehow.
I wouldn’t count on it.
The vast Russian military buildup on the
border of Ukraine and the provocative military exercises conducted by China
near Taiwan show us powers that are at least thinking about testing the
boundaries of this liberal world order, at least where the commitments of the
United States are ambiguous.
In all likelihood, neither of these powers
wants to commit to an all-out hot war right now.
China would prefer that Taiwan come under
its control without a major military confrontation. It would prefer the fait
accompli it executed on Hong Kong’s relative independence. A hot war over
Taiwan would risk one of the island nation’s most important assets, the very
reason anyone would want to capture Taiwan: its hammerlock on the semiconductor
industry. But just as American policy-makers worry that a failure to stand up
for Taiwan could lead to a dramatic domino effect, in which America’s friends
in the region would become anxious, lose faith in American support, and as a
result align with a Chinese-led Pacific order, so surely do Beijing’s hawks
hope that China’s taking Taiwan could deliver them dramatic upsides. These
fears and hopes may be illusions, but wars are often stumbled into over dreams
and nightmares like these.
Russia’s situation is trickier. It clearly
wants to gain greater control over Ukraine without resorting to a dramatic
invasion of regular uniformed Russian forces. Military exercises like the ones
Russia is now conducting are a long-term feature of Russia’s coercive
diplomacy. Already the Ukrainian authorities are begging for more clarity about
the commitments of NATO and the United States. They need the clarity if they
are to weigh their options. But even if the U.S. commits to more military aid
to Ukraine, if it stops short of Kyiv’s desire
for American, British, and Canadian troops on the front lines, Russia may up the stakes by encouraging proxies in the Donbas region
to raise some hell and force the issue. Nothing about this is surprising.
Russia has always sought to have guaranteed access to the Black Sea, and it
prefers some buffer between it and Europe. After decades of watching NATO
expand to its borders, Russia could attempt to draw some lines for itself.
Let’s put aside where you ultimately fall
on whether America should commit more to Ukraine or to Taiwan’s defense. I tend
to view both as ultimately peripheral to our core interests, but dear to heart
for our rivals. You may feel
differently.
But what should keep us all up at night is
the fact that the United States does not have leaders ready for these
challenges. Joe Biden has never met a foreign-policy idea he couldn’t screw up.
He has a history of trying to write off problems by resorting to the most
divisive solution imaginable, the partition
of nations. Biden is also shockingly unpopular and
widely considered a lame-duck by
his own party.
Most worrisome of all is that he does not
appear to be in great shape; he often looks and sounds every day of his 79
years. He could very well be succeeded by his vice president, Kamala Harris —
who is widely believed to be loathed by the staff of the current White
House, as well as by
her own staff. She is known for not doing her homework
on important questions, for not standing behind her own words, and she could
potentially inherit Biden’s staff.
World history is full of satrapies,
colonies, and revisionist powers who wait until an abdication crisis, or a
leadership vacuum — however temporary — before taking their big gamble. The
chance of an epic miscalculation — by us, by our rivals, or by our friends — is
growing by the day.
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