Walter Russell Mead, who comments on foreign affairs for the Wall Street Journal, discerns several long-term shifts underway in international affairs.[1]
First, Europe continues to decline as a force in world politics. This can be seen as the latest stage in a long-running process. The “European Civil War” of 1914-1945 wrecked the basis of European global power. The Eastern and Western parts of the Continent then found themselves bound to alliances with the Soviet Union and the United States. However, in Western Europe, dramatic post-war economic modernization and the construction of the European Union (EU) allowed a revived role.[2]
Now it seems that the wheels have come off in a serious way. It’s possible to point to all sorts of current problems: the collapse of French influence in Africa; the EU’s confrontation with a Turkish Republic that uses refugees as a weapon; and the dangers to Germany posed by China’s automobile industry, and to all Europe by its trade practices. More fundamental, says Mead, are the rapid aging and eventual shrinking of Europe’s population; all the policies and incrustations that have produced a low growth economy; the follow-on effect of robbing national security to pay for social security; and the surrender to wishful thinking in diplomacy.
Second, there is the “emergence of India as one of the world’s leading powers and as an increasingly close partner of the U.S.” This should not be misunderstood as a real reflection of Indian economic or military power. What matters much more is that Europe’s long-term decline has created a tension between the rising nations of Asia and the “South,” on the one hand, and international institutions in which European countries are over-represented, on the other hand. The advance of India represents an entering wedge for other countries. Their ambition is a “reform” that shoulders aside the doddering countries of Europe.
Third, China, Russia, and some follower-countries are intensifying their challenge to the “American-led”[3] post-1945 world order. Part of their effort—as it was in the Cold War—is an attack on the existing, Western-dominated, international institutions. This is intended to play to the ambitions and frustrations of the Indo-Pacific and Global South.
This convergence of factors creates a dilemma for American policy makers. It is likely to take some time to resolve because it requires making painful choices. Mead, a not-unfriendly critic since the start of the Biden Administration, chooses to emphasize the “woke” agenda of current American diplomacy. The Administration assigns great importance to the Democratic causes of climate-change, human-rights, and democratic government. The trouble is that most of the countries that need to be courted don’t assign the same importance to these issues as does the Administration. If anything, they resent being harped-at by American progressives. Which will you have?
There is also the far more important issue of American national reconstruction. No one seems to speak for higher taxes, lower spending, trying to shift values and culture, and pursuing national reconciliation. Yet those issues matter too, and perhaps most of all.
[1] Walter Russell Mead, “The G-20 Reveals a Shifting World Order,” WSJ, 12 September 2023.
[2] All the same, the post-war fantasies of Charles de Gaulle seem absurd. Even French historians and policy-makers must be circumlocuting their way around calling him “not very realistic,” to use Stalin’s judgement.
[3] “American-led” always makes me think of “first among equals,” a label claimed by Octavian.
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