When I began teaching at Harvard Kennedy School in the mid-1980s, competition with Japan was a major theme of US economic policy. I remember the extent to which discussion, even among academics, at the time was fueled by a certain sense of American authority for global superiority. The US could not allow Japan to dominate major industries and had to respond with its own industrial and trade policies. Not just because they can help the American economy, but also because America can’t be No.
Until then, I thought that this kind of aggressive nationalism was a feature of the Old World, in which insecure societies were sick of their international comforts and grappled with real or perceived historical injustices. The wealthy and secure American elite may have valued patriotism, but their global outlook was toward cosmopolitanism. But zero-sum nationalism was not far from the surface, which became apparent when America’s place on the pole, the global economic totem, was under threat.
After three decades of American conquest after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a similar process is now largely underway. This is driven by the rise of China, which represented a more significant economic challenge for the US than Japan in the 1980s, and also a geopolitical risk and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The US has responded to these developments by seeking to re-establish its global primacy, a goal policymakers readily cope with establishing a more secure and prosperous world. They see American leadership as central to the promotion of democracy, open markets, and a rules-based international order. What could be more than this for peace and prosperity? The idea that American foreign policy goals are fundamentally benign underscores the myth of American exceptionalism: what is good for America is good for the world.
While this is sometimes true, the myth also often boggles American policymakers with the reality of how they exercise power. The US undermines other democracies when it suits its interests and has a long record of meddling in the domestic politics of sovereign countries. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was as much a clear violation of the United Nations Charter as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.
American designs for an ‘open market’ and ‘rules-based international order’ often primarily reflect the interests of the American business and policy elite, rather than the aspirations of smaller countries. And when international rules diverge from those interests, the US simply stays away (as with the International Criminal Court or most of the main International Labor Organization conventions).
Many of these tensions came from US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s recent speech was candid on America’s approach to China. He described China as “the most serious long-term challenge to the international order”, arguing that “Beijing’s vision will lead us away from the universal values that have sustained so much of the world’s progress.” Blinken is correct that many elements of the post-World War II order, such as the United Nations Charter, are not purely American or Western. But it is not certain that China is actually more of a threat to those universal constructs than the US. For example, most of the trouble US policymakers have with Chinese economic practices relates to domains (particularly trade, investment and technology) where universal rules rarely prevail.
According to Blinken, the US will “shape the strategic environment around Beijing to advance our vision for an open, inclusive international system.” Who, then, can resist such a vision? But China and many others worry that America’s intentions are too less benign. to bully.
None of this is to claim an analogy between current US actions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or China’s blatant human rights violations in Xinjiang and land grabbing in the Himalayas and the South China Sea. For all its faults, America is a democracy where critics can openly criticize and oppose the government’s foreign policy. But that makes little difference to countries regarded as pawns in America’s geopolitical competition with China, which often struggles to differentiate between the global actions of major powers.
Blinken made a clear connection between Beijing’s authoritarian practices and the country’s perceived threat to the global order. It is a mirror-image projection of America’s belief in its own benign exceptionalism. But just as democracy in the country does not necessarily mean goodwill abroad, domestic repression need not necessarily lead to external aggression. China also claims to be interested in a stable, prosperous global order – just one not exclusively settled on US terms.
Ironically, the more the US treats China as a threat and tries to isolate it, the more China’s responses will seem to validate America’s fears. With the US openly seeking to convene a club of democracies opposing China, it is not surprising that President Xi Jinping struck a deal with Putin just as Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine . As noted by journalist Robert Wright, countries excluded from such groups will stick together.
For those who wonder why we should care about the decline of America’s relative power, the American foreign-policy elite responds with a rhetorical question: Would you rather live in a world dominated by America or China? Other countries will live in a world without domination, where smaller states maintain a fair degree of autonomy, have good relations with others, are not forced to choose sides, and do not suffer collateral damage when major powers fight it. Is. The sooner American leaders recognize that others do not see America’s global ambitions through the same rose-tinted prism, the better. ©2022/Project Syndicate
Dani Roderick is Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of ‘Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sensible World Economy’. Dani Roderick