Can America Adapt to the Multipolar Age?
Can an increasingly ossified national security system and dysfunctional domestic politics allow the United States to evolve its position and policies to cope with a changing international order?
IT IS now apparent that we are reaching the end of a thirty-year cycle in world events, where geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts are rewriting the source code of international affairs. Whereas the start of the cycle was marked by a series of dramatic events that heralded the triumph of the U.S.-led liberal-democratic system—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the nearly bloodless U.S.-led coalition victory in the Gulf War, and the lowering of the red banner of the hammer and sickle over the Great Kremlin Palace for the last time on December 25, 1991—the terminus of this post-Cold War era and the birth pangs of a new and yet-unnamed epoch could not be more different. It has been marked by the slow-motion trainwreck of a global pandemic and the termination of the twenty-year effort, following the September 11 attacks, to prove that American power, unlike its Soviet and British imperial antecedents, could remake Afghanistan (and by extension, other societies) in a liberal-democratic image. We are now entering the 2020s, where the familiar landmarks and lodestones are eroding, with growing uncertainty as to what will replace them—and the extent to which a new era will be shaped by Washington.
U.S. leadership was indispensable in bringing the Cold War to a largely peaceful end and to creating conditions for the rapid emergence of a much more interconnected and prosperous world. And while the most ambitious goals of post-1989 American efforts were not fully met—a post-Soviet Russia has not been integrated into the Euro-Atlantic world and China did not accept becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in a U.S.-led order—the past thirty years, as those who were present at the start like Steven Sestanovich and John Cloud have noted, bought time for the enlargement of the democratic communities of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific basins. It is not that the general thrust of post-Cold War American grand strategy and foreign policy has failed—although plenty of mistakes have been made—but that its motive power is largely exhausted. Indeed, the primary indictment that can be levied against the U.S. foreign policy community is that it was clinging to the chimerical belief that the post-Cold War cycle could be prolonged indefinitely, rather than taking steps to prepare for the emergence of the next cycle.
GIVEN THE overwhelming superiority the United States possessed at the end of the Cold War, it was foolish to think, even if countries sought partnership with the United States, that major powers would also not seek to develop capabilities and tools to offset U.S. advantages. As former Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy noted at the 2019 Drell Lecture, having observed the U.S. victory in the Gulf War, other major powers looked for ways to negate or overcome those advantages. Over the past three decades, whether it was through the development of new anti-access/area-denial techniques and systems, to pioneering asymmetric ways of competing with the United States that would cancel out areas of definitive U.S. superiority, to setting up alternate financial and economic arrangements that would offer the possibility of bypassing the U.S. hub, the rest of the world has looked for ways to limit and contain the American hyperpower. Even as they took part in and derived benefits from U.S.-led arrangements, other powers—even U.S. allies—have wanted to maintain different choices.
Of particular importance here is that the two principal powers most inclined to seek some revision in the post-Cold War order—Russia and China—do not want to compete on America’s terms, especially in those areas where the United States has an overwhelming advantage. They have thus sought to shift the basis of competition to regions and functional areas where they have a home-field advantage or are better equipped to compete. Russia, in particular, looks for ways to avoid a direct conventional conflict with the United States or to keep the basis of action just below the threshold of triggering U.S. alliance commitments while using other means to gain an advantage.
Additionally, technological shifts have enabled not only the erosion of geopolitical unipolarity—by allowing other states to hold the application of U.S. power in check by leveraging new technologies to develop asymmetric capabilities (usually grouped together under the rubric of “anti-access/area-denial” tools)—but also facilitated the rise of nonpolarity by offering the opportunity to delink core social engagements from not only state foundations but even physical localities. The development of blockchain technologies, for instance, allows for the rise of new forms of currency and payments systems (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.) that are not just issued without the “full faith and credit” of any one state, but also are unconnected to any physical stockpiles or reserves. Likewise, private firms, such as SpaceX, are able to send satellites into orbit and are developing telecommunications networks that can bypass a country’s physical infrastructure.
One particular area of vulnerability that has developed since the end of the Cold War exists within an entire domain that did not exist at the start of this cycle. Another thirty-year anniversary that passed by with almost no fanfare or celebration—December 20, 1990—is often identified as the date that the first webpage on the internet was created. The ease in which this realm became the preferred method for conducting business, commerce, and finance as well as the principal source and distributor of information not only fueled the growth of entirely new economic sectors but also created new sources of vulnerability. With the exception of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, most of the most consequential strikes taken against the United States over the past several decades have been cyber blows—hacking of data, ransomware attacks paralyzing key points of infrastructure, and especially the manipulation of the information space in an effort to influence domestic politics. When combined with other post-1989 developments—particularly the acceleration of economic globalization and the “shrinking” of distance by more rapid and affordable ways of transport, which has permitted the development of long-distance, just-in-time supply chains—not only states but non-state actors now have more cost-effective ways to be able to draw blood or impose costs on the United States. In this new era of competition, germs, Facebook, and banks matter more than guns, F-35 fighters, and tanks as a way to gain influence.
Moreover, the lowering of barriers—cyber, information, even geographic—exposes Americans to what Joel Rosenthal, president of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, describes as the “invisible enemies” (starting with pandemics). This only heightens the direct and growing sense of insecurity among “ordinary” citizens, along with the belief that the government is less capable of protecting them. That sense of unease intersects with a growing reluctance, as the Munich Security Conference identified in 2020, on the part of Americans to foot the bill for a series of global public goods. After the collapse of the USSR, Americans were promised a “peace dividend,” whereby democratic enlargement would increase the number of billpayers and responsible stakeholders. In return for accepting the upfront costs of building this new post-Cold War architecture—starting with trade deals like the North American Free Trade Association—Americans were promised longer-term benefits.
This was not entirely wrong. The supremacy of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency allows the United States to finance its deficit spending—including recent stimulus packages—and allows people to borrow funds—including for homes and vehicles—at advantageous interest rates. But the cumulative benefits of U.S. global leadership (as well as the costs) have been unevenly distributed to different domestic constituencies. Abroad, burden-sharing is more of an aspiration than reality among U.S. allies. Finally, with other major powers like Russia or China pursuing more limited global aims (which do not envision the conquest of the United States or fundamental changes to its social and political systems), the existential threat of the Cold War that motivated support for U.S. global engagement does not exist.
Attempts to rouse the U.S. public in support of foreign ventures have thus been met with negligible results. The effort to rally support for a crusade against Islamic extremism in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, petered out. The China challenge is most strongly felt in the economic and technological realms—with concerns about the erosion of the U.S. position and its impact on competitiveness—but is sufficiently interwoven with U.S. economic activity that disentanglement, let alone decoupling, is a hard proposition for various actors to contemplate. Even prior to the election of Donald Trump and the articulation of “America First,” the Obama administration was already grappling with how to reconcile an expansive vision of the U.S. role in the world with the political requirement that any U.S. action remain bound by a low-cost, no-casualty paradigm.
THE INTERSECTION of these three cycles—geopolitical, technological, and political—means that it is now harder for the United States to either induce other centers of power in the international system to align their actions with Washington’s preferences or to take steps to dismantle or degrade the sources of their ability to resist America’s directives. Not only can other major powers more effectively resist U.S. directives in 2021 than in 1991, but the U.S. political system is less willing to write blank checks for maintaining pre-eminence—especially if that is disconnected from “doorstep” concerns. As David Barno and Nora Bensahel warned, “We in the national security community must ready ourselves for this new era, where economic recovery and preparing for domestic threats like pandemics will be far greater concerns for most Americans than threats from foreign adversaries.” This suggests that the domestic political appetite for attempting to stress-test other major powers in the hopes of provoking their collapse would be limited.
A recent RAND study suggests that, under these changed conditions, the United States should “look for ways to grant rivals increased status in exchange for creating a trade space for arrangements that would serve U.S. interests and enhance stability.” Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby advises creating “favorable balances of power” vis-a-vis competitors like Russia and China. Neither the American national security community nor most politicians have embraced this advice. National security strategic documents routinely pay rhetorical homage to the changed conditions of the international system, lament the loss of U.S. advantages, and solemnly warn about competition as a fact of life before going on to retain expansive goals and confidently assert that the United States can deter, degrade, and even defeat its rivals. Behind these proclamations is the continuing belief that we can do this at relatively low-cost or no real danger to our interests, especially since we expect other great powers to fade or fall.
The danger here, when faced with the reality of changing power balances in the global system, is that we overestimate our advantages—largely based on the legacies of the immediate post-Cold War system—and wish away the growing disadvantages that recent developments now impose. Jacquelyn Schneider’s recent sobering analysis about a possible U.S.-China clash over Taiwan points to a U.S. overreliance on its traditional “low-cost” tools—sending advisors to help train and equip Taiwanese forces and relying on the U.S. technological advantages for layered stand-off strikes—to deter China. Meanwhile, as Flournoy warned, China has been looking for ways to nullify these U.S. technological fixes, and Washington’s ability to make good on its pledges of defense (in the event deterrence fails) has not been followed up on. There is neither the spending required (and procurement needed) nor any preparation of the U.S. domestic political system for the very real costs that would be incurred if deterrence fails.
In other words, a major conflict—which we still mentally think of in terms of the overwhelming American success of the 1991 Gulf War—could look a lot more like the depressing scenario outlined by James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman in 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. In that novel, the United States finds itself caught by surprise by Chinese capabilities (especially cyber) and loses the ability to control events, and, ultimately, its position as the “chairman of the board” of the international system.
THE UNITED States remains the dominant power in the international system, but the power shifts of the last thirty years are real and, in my opinion, not reversible. Global affairs will be defined not only by increasing multipolarity, but also by nonpolarity. International relations will be defined by the interactions—a mix of cooperation and competition—among major states, rather than coordination by a hyperpower. American strategists need to become more adept at analyzing the trends of this power transition and determine not how to stop it, but how to manage the levers of power to secure the U.S. position in the world.
If the zeitgeist of 1989–1991 was one of optimism (either for escaping the Cold War, in the West, or that reforms would usher in a new age of prosperity, as in the East), the prevailing mood of this decade is uncertainty for the future. The upheaval in the domestic politics of the industrial democracies—driven by growing concerns about the possible loss of status and lifestyles—is matched by the “social contract” that underpins many regimes around the world, starting in China—that the state will seek to guarantee a middle-class level of consumption to as many of its citizens as possible. The belief that the spread of democratic governance was the pathway for prosperity for the world’s 5.2 billion people in 1989 is being replaced by concerns that climate and environmental shifts make it harder for the nearly 8 billion people in 2021 to all be able to access the basic resources necessary (starting with water, food, and energy) to enjoy a stable, predictable, and comfortable lifestyle. Politics may increasingly be driven by what Tom Nichols calls the “Three Days of the Condor” paradigm: populations will care less about what form of government they have—much less about the structure of international relations—and more about whether leaders can procure what they covet. This comes at a time when the U.S. public will be much less inclined to “share,” and where the utility of America’s partnerships and alliances will be judged by how they enable the United States to protect its ability to deliver the “American Dream” to its own citizens.
This is not going to end the globalized system that emerged after the end of the Cold War. But we are likely to see a “fractured” globalization. The defining motif of the 2020s, in contrast to the universalism of the “end of history” moment, will be the consolidation of ties to more “defensible” or “compact” linkages. In particular, we may see a renewed effort to reduce the length and vulnerability of supply chains, and create alternate sources of supply for everything from energy to electronics that do not require dependence on the revisionist powers.
We may speak less of a single “global community” and more in terms of a series of regional communities. It may also lead to a diminishing of the cosmopolitan/humanitarian ethos that has found a home in the U.S. national security establishment’s focus on fixing failed states. Likewise, campaigns for humanitarian intervention and disaster relief may fall in favor of prioritizing internal defense and regional cohesion. The quiet continuity of policies from the Trump to the Biden administrations, from the resilient supply chain initiative to the “remain in Mexico” program for dealing with migration, speaks to these trends.
YET THE real challenge is whether an increasingly ossified national security system and dysfunctional domestic politics will allow the United States to evolve its position and policies to cope with these changed conditions. Two areas, in particular, will be difficult for the post-Cold War generation now handling U.S. policy.
The first is how to cope with the reality that the strategy of democratic enlargement has reached its end, and an approach predicated on the gradual but inexorable transformation of Euro-Atlantic institutions (along with their rule sets and values) to encompass the world as a whole is no longer feasible. The optimistic assessment given to Secretary of State Warren Christopher in 1993 that Russia will be a full member of NATO by 2005—with the implication that Russian domestic and foreign policy institutions would have been reformed and reconstituted to conform with U.S. preferences—has long faded as a possibility. Yet the alternative—waiting and praying for an inevitable Russian collapse—also does not seem feasible, given Russian sources of resiliency and power. Similarly, China is neither becoming more “American” nor can we predicate policy on a hypothetical coming China collapse. (And grounding U.S. policy in the expectation of the inevitable Russia-China war of 2050 is similarly a foolhardy exercise.)
The United States has discovered that the UN Security Council resolutions it could shepherd through the council in the 1990s no longer pass muster against the double veto of Moscow and Beijing. Reluctantly, we will have to concede that, for the immediate future, global level questions will rest less on U.S.-led institutionalism and more on a set of negotiated bargains and ad hoc arrangements where nineteenth-century compromises, as distasteful as they may be to modern sensibilities, will have to be on the table. So far, the signs are not encouraging. Even a modest attempt—the German-American understanding on Nord Stream 2 and Ukraine that the White House acquiesced to in 2021—faces solid bipartisan opposition—one of the few issues that Democrats and Republicans in Congress can agree on. Yet such tacit arrangements are likely to be the norm as we move forward in the 2020s—and we must become more adept and comfortable with them.
The second matter is how to get a U.S. national security establishment to pivot from legacy systems and regions in order to align U.S. efforts more effectively with the actual realities of the mid-twenty-first century. For instance, U.S. power and prosperity are increasingly going to depend on control and management of a supply chain for minerals such as cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, and other rare earth minerals—which means that Latin America and Africa will become much more important for the United States. Yet U.S. strategic attention remains locked into a post-Cold War East-West axis, and shifting to a North-South orientation will require shattering a number of Pentagon and State Department bureaucratic rice bowls. China, meanwhile, has spent much of the last two decades attempting to integrate these regions into its larger Belt and Road Initiative. Despite that challenge laying right in front of us, it will take years to build the relations and construct the infrastructure needed to undertake this shift.
Yet we continue to focus our efforts on finishing the agenda of the 1990s and 2000s in the greater Eurasian space, while postponing the work that needs to begin now to be prepared for the next era in geopolitical and geo-economic competition. The United States does not need to abandon its previous efforts but it should be transitioning on helping its allies and partners facing Russia and China to improve their porcupine defense capabilities—in essence, to have a group of reliable partners capable of conducting holding actions to thwart Russian and Chinese movements, maintaining robust “barriers” so that U.S. attention can focus on areas of greater dynamism and long-term importance to U.S. interests. This not only includes shifting away from large, expensive legacy platforms towards smaller, more numerous unmanned systems, but building up the defenses to secure our communications, our information space, and our systems—especially as we continue to move towards the “Internet of Things”)—and reconceptualizing our understandings of the “Atlantic” and “Pacific” zones to incorporate Latin America and Africa.
Even before the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, a serious process was already underway within the U.S. national security community, especially work done by the late Colin Powell, to consider the impact of possible major changes in the international system and the implications for how U.S. national security ought to be configured to meet these new conditions. The agility of the U.S. defense, diplomatic, and developmental communities allowed the United States to quickly take advantage of the window of opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe to move ahead with a vision of a Europe “whole and free.” Conditions are changing once again, but we need to recapture that sense of agility and innovation—rather than attempt to recreate a past age.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a professor at the Naval War College and the Editor of Orbis. He also co-hosts the Doorstep podcast for the Carnegie Council. The views expressed here are his own.
Image: Reuters.