你听清了？淳朴要重返亚太了

亚太，自然是太平洋彼岸的亚洲了，“重返亚太”，是指美国明为连接世界上人口最多最稠密经济发展最快的区域，实为制衡中国的战略措施，具体体现是“泛太协议”（TPP，Transpacific Trade Partnership）。

 

“抛弃世界利用美国的一切枷锁”，包括“泛太协议”，是淳朴（Donald Trump，人称特朗普或川普）的竞选纲领之一，也是他上任后不久就履行的政令之一，深得自己阵营的支持，是当时首席参谋辩能（Stephen Bannon，人称班农，美国国家民族主义的领袖之一，不久前得罪老朴被挤哒到一边）目标。此举，左右精英都大肆反对，不过，在淳朴看来，这只是顺从民意而已，现有实力的反对反而证明了此举的正确。

 

“重返亚太”，就是重新加入“泛太协议”，这是几天前的新闻，对于讲究“体制”“联盟”的精英和统治阶层，这无异是大喜事，终于转过弯来了！

 

对此反应最强烈的，是日本。日本政府和精英界的共识是中国是头号大敌（朝核试第一风险），不论如何，得靠美国。

 

Japan ready to welcome U.S. back to TPP, diplomat says

 

然而，虽然日本政府本身在公开很少表示，但日本精英界对美国淳朴当局信不过，觉得它不仅毫无计划、目标，让人摸不着头脑，还出尔反尔，到处宣扬“交易、实利”为主导，即使出卖盟友也不在乎。

 

《路透社》Tokyo fears Trump could link security with trade at summit with Abe

 

其实重返泛太甚至在美国国内大家都觉得空言戏语，大家如果仔细（即使在美国，专家能人成堆，大家也没动脑子），整个胡诌，连他自己新上任经济办主任克罗（Larry Kudlow，人称库德洛，中文媒体《华尔街见闻》有篇介绍还不错：人物 | 白宫首席经济顾问库德洛：扛着自由贸易大旗的贸易战鼓吹手。克罗其实只是个大嘴，连科班都不是，但出了名鼓吹“自贸”、“减税”，富人救穷人）都说事前不知道（《纽约时报》Trump Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership）。淳朴之所以提这事儿，在我看来很简单，他意识到（中美）贸易战的结果是农民首当其冲，受害最甚，但农民大多是白人基层，自己的基地，不能得罪，所以他打算想办法救济。

 

第一个想到的法子是动用大萧条的特殊法律来救济农民，是那种啥也不懂却自以为啥都懂，不愿学，还高高在上、有权有势的人家常，因为这马上得罪了欧洲农民的利益，直接把中美贸易战扩大到欧洲，把欧洲推向中国，正是中国想要的。也许有人说此招不灵，他才想到泛太。其实靠泛太救美国农民是一点戏也没有，大家的乐观有点愚不可昧。

 

《华尔街日报》

Trump Talks TPP, but Trade Partners Say, Not So Fast

U.S.’s Re-Entry in Pacific Trade Deal Would Come at a Price

 

真是所有国家都像日本那样啥都接受吗？不然，大家意见大着呢。

 

重返亚太，淳朴总统他老人家在年初达沃斯论坛已经说过了：“如果大家还要求我们美国，我会再想想。”大家没求，所以这一想，没下文了。难道这回来真的了？逗人吧？

 

况且，现在十一国已经签了协议（协议改了不少，包括除去知识产权一项，美国核心），大家可没像美国孩子似的，说哭就哭，说笑就笑，啥都一句话。一个多国间的协议，是关系到几亿老百姓生计的天大的事儿，哪能用美国政坛的闹剧方式商谈呢？

 

除此之外，淳朴还坚持大家让步，否则不予考虑。保守估计，淳朴任内谈判没法完成。退一步，如果达成新的、美国能接受的协议，国会还得重新通过，大家又要再打一战。

 

就是说，儿戏。

 

 

几乎所有华裔淳粉都死挺淳朴，我很服。我常说淳朴脑子不好使，大家嘲笑说“一个这般成功商人脑子不好使？是你自己脑子不好使吧？”

 

其实大家这么想，是把金钱地位名声当作成功的标志了，也不怪大家，不过你看看中国的贪官就知道，有时金钱地位名声并不一定是衡量成功的标志，况且从中国人养身的处世养身之道，这不利身心。不过就不废话了，讲个故事。

 

几周前俄国一个在英国养老的间谍被毒杀，西方气炸了，普京也确实胡闹，在西方心脏杀人。眼里还有咱们吗？西方能做的，都做了：统一立场，共同驱逐俄国驻西方的外交人员。这对俄国打击不小，主要是人才都被赶走了，不利工作。最出乎意料的是美国的反应，驱逐60名外交官，比其他任何国家都多一大截。对此，整个西方阵营雀跃。你也许觉得淳朴终于站到美国、西方的利益这一边来了。

 

周末《华盛顿邮报》揭了个内幕（Trump, a reluctant hawk, has battled his top aides on Russia and lost），最后的人数是如何决定的。其实淳朴坚持“有节制”，不能“过分”，拥有实权的班子马上说：“您放心，我们只是跟欧洲盟友一致（match）。”过了好几天，淳朴才反应过来，“你们这群混蛋，蒙我！”手下的班子却说：“我们是要跟欧洲盟友总数一致。”

 

 

《金融时报》US-China trade war prompts rethink on supply chains
Suppliers to Google and Hoover among those looking to shift production out of China

Steve Madden is shifting handbag production to Cambodia, Vietnam is sucking up some production for Hoover-maker Techtronic Industries and Google’s hardware maker Flex is seeking new production centres from Mexico to Malaysia.

The escalating US-China trade war is pushing China-based manufacturers and their US clients to rethink the complex and extensive supply chains that bind the world’s two biggest economies together.

“While China will remain an important part of our global manufacturing platform for the next decade, we have accelerated the ramp-up in other low-cost countries and the US,” said Joseph Galli, chief executive of Techtronic, which makes the majority of its power tools in China and generates three-quarters of its revenue from the US for products including Hoovers. “The focus on Vietnam in the short term is offsetting the future tariff impact we might see in the US.”

The Trump administration has so far levied 25 per cent tariffs on $50bn of Chinese industrial goods and is considering putting similar tariffs on another $200bn of Chinese exports, punishing Beijing for “unfair trade practices” including forced technology transfers and intellectual property theft.

Most consumer goods have been left off the tariff lists to reduce the pain felt by US consumers. But manufacturing and retail executives fear that, with Beijing and Washington both refusing to concede, the range of affected products could widen.

Clara Chan, the head of a lobby group for 150 Hong Kong manufacturers that employ more than 1m people in China, said that while factory executives were used to managing disruptions from rapid wage rises to raw material price increases, the scale of the uncertainty connected to the trade war made it a “very different” challenge.

“This is a moment for the manufacturing industry to think about how to diversify risk, whether to upgrade products and add more value or expand production to other regions,” said Ms Chan, president of the Hong Kong Young Industrialists Council and chief executive of a metal production business in China.

China is by far the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods. But some factory owners began moving production to other developing countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam over the past decade in search of cheaper wages and a hedge against the political and economic risk that comes from reliance on one country.

Factory owners and US buyers say the trade war will intensify this shift.
When handbags were included on the proposed $200bn tariff tranche, it sent US executives scrambling to look at alternative production sites outside China.
Steve Madden, which started moving some of its handbag production from China to Cambodia three years ago, told investors recently that it was working on a plan to double its Cambodian production next year to about 30 per cent of its total, in addition to considering price rises in the US.

Michael McNamara, chief executive of Flex, which produces electronics for everyone from Bose to Google, believes it is “inevitable” that companies will reduce their reliance on China, although it will take time.

“Long term, we believe many customers will request a more regional manufacturing footprint to shorten their supply chain and reduce the risk of tariff impacts,” he said on an earnings conference call.

But unless companies have existing relationships with factories, suppliers and governments, it is difficult to jump into new developing markets where investment laws are often unclear, and labour and environmental standards lax.

 

Spencer Fung, chief executive of Li & Fung, which helps US retailers including Walmart and Kohl’s source their goods from factories around the world, said that while “a lot of people are desperate to move out of China”, it can take one or two years to stabilise production in a new country.

Vietnam has been at the heart of many companies’ “China plus” manufacturing strategies in recent years, attracting investments from the likes of Samsung, the South Korean electronics group, Daikin, the Japanese air conditioning group, and Techtronic.

Many apparel makers producing for fashion brands in Europe and the US have also moved from China to Vietnam. Sheng Lu, an assistant professor of fashion studies at the University of Delaware, said there were few spare workers or production facilities left. “If you’re not in Vietnam at this point, you’re probably too late,” he said.

Larry Sloven, an executive at Capstone, which sells China-made LED lighting in the US, said it was much easier to move sewing machines to a new country than to replicate the complicated network of suppliers needed in the electronics industry.

“Everybody is looking for a way to hedge but it’s not that easy,” he said. “Think about all the components that go into making an electronic product — they all come from China.”

US-China tariffs in numbers

Tariffs — and uncertainty about the direction of US-China relations — have unnerved manufacturers, but executives say China is likely to retain its dominant position.

Despite losing some market share to lower-wage countries, China still accounted for 35 per cent of global clothing exports last year, compared with just 6.5 per cent from Bangladesh, 5.9 per cent from Vietnam and 1.6 per cent from Cambodia. It is in a similar position for office and telecoms equipment, according to the World Trade Organization.

Rather than fold in the face of pressure, Mr Fung said he expected Chinese factories to respond by looking for ways to boost competitiveness, from automation to developing higher value-added products.

“I don’t think if you’re a factory owner in China you will just let business go and shut the door; they’re going to start sharpening their pencils,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll see capacity reduce drastically in China.”

 

The Committee to Save the World Order
America’s Allies Must Step Up as America Steps Down

2018.09.30

By Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay

The order that has structured international politics since the end of World War II is fracturing. Many of the culprits are obvious. Revisionist powers, such as China and Russia, want to reshape global rules to their own advantage. Emerging powers, such as Brazil and India, embrace the perks of great-power status but shun the responsibilities that come with it. Rejectionist powers, such as Iran and North Korea, defy rules set by others. Meanwhile, international institutions, such as the UN, struggle to address problems that multiply faster than they can be resolved.

The newest culprit, however, is a surprise: the United States, the very country that championed the order’s creation. Seventy years after U.S. President Harry Truman sketched the blueprint for a rules-based international order to prevent the dog-eat-dog geopolitical competition that triggered World War II, U.S. President Donald Trump has upended it. He has raised doubts about Washington’s security commitments to its allies, challenged the fundamentals of the global trading regime, abandoned the promotion of freedom and democracy as defining features of U.S. foreign policy, and abdicated global leadership.

Trump’s hostility toward the United States’ own geopolitical invention has shocked many of Washington’s friends and allies. Their early hopes that he might abandon his campaign rhetoric once in office and embrace a more traditional foreign policy have been dashed. As Trump has jettisoned old ways of doing business, allies have worked their way through the initial stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. In the typical progression, acceptance should come next.

But the story does not have to end that way. The major allies of the United States can leverage their collective economic and military might to save the liberal world order. France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the EU in Europe; Australia, Japan, and South Korea in Asia; and Canada in North America are the obvious candidates to supply the leadership that the Trump administration will not. Together, they represent the largest economic power in the world, and their collective military capabilities are surpassed only by those of the United States. This “G-9” should have two imperatives: maintain the rules-based order in the hope that Trump’s successor will reclaim Washington’s global leadership role and lay the groundwork to make it politically possible for that to happen. This holding action will require every member of the G-9 to take on greater global responsibilities. They all are capable of doing so; they need only summon the will.

Economic cooperation is a good place to start, and G-9 members are already creating alternatives to the trade deals Trump is abandoning. But they will have to go further, increasing military cooperation and defense spending and using a variety of tools at their disposal to take over the U.S. role as the defender and promoter of democracy, freedom, and human rights across the globe. If they seize this opportunity, the G-9 countries will not just slow the erosion of an order that has served them and the world well for decades; they will also set the stage for the return of the kind of American leadership they want and that the long-term survival of the order demands. Indeed, by acting now, the G-9 will lay the basis for a more stable and enduring world order—one that is better suited to the power relations of today and tomorrow than to those of yesterday, when the United States was the undisputed global power.

The World America Made
The emergence of a rules-based order was not an inevitability but the result of deliberate choices. Looking to avoid the mistakes the United States made after World War I, Truman and his successors built an order based on collective security, open markets, and democracy. It was a radical strategy that valued cooperation over competition: countries willing to follow the lead of the United States would flourish, and as they did, so, too, would the United States.

“The world America made,” as the historian Robert Kagan has put it, was never perfect. During the Cold War, the reach of American influence was small. The United States at times ignored its own lofty rhetoric to pursue narrow interests or misguided policies. But for all its shortcomings, the postwar order was a historic success. Europe and Japan were rebuilt. The reach of freedom and democracy was extended. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S.-led postwar order was suddenly open to all.

But that success also created new stresses. The rapid growth in the movement of goods, money, people, and ideas across borders as more countries joined the rules-based order produced new problems, such as climate change and mass migration, that national governments have struggled to handle. Economic and political power dispersed as countries such as Brazil, China, and India embraced open markets, complicating efforts to find common ground on trade, terrorism, and a host of other issues. Iran and Russia recoiled as the U.S.-led order encroached on their traditional spheres of interest. And the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the global financial crisis of 2007–8 raised doubts about the quality and direction of U.S. leadership.

Upon leaving office in 2017, U.S. President Barack Obama urged his successor to embrace the indispensability of U.S. leadership. “It’s up to us, through action and example, to sustain the international order that’s expanded steadily since the end of the Cold War, and upon which our own wealth and safety depend,” he wrote in a note he left in the Oval Office. Trump took the opposite approach. He campaigned on a platform that global leadership was the source of the United States’ problems, not a solution to them. He argued that friends and allies had played Washington for a sucker, free-riding on its military might while using multilateral trade deals to steal American jobs.

At the start of Trump’s tenure, his selection of proponents of mainstream foreign policy, such as James Mattis as secretary of defense and Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, for top national security jobs spurred hopes at home and abroad that he would temper his “America first” vision. But by withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Paris agreement on climate change, and the Iran nuclear deal; embracing mercantilist trade policies; and continuing to question the value of NATO, Trump has shown that he said what he meant and meant what he said. He is not looking to reinvigorate the rules-based order by leading friends and allies in a common cause. They are the foes he wants to beat.

Trump’s preference for competition over cooperation reflects his belief that the United States will fare better than other countries in a world in which the strong are free to do as they will. But he fails to understand that doing better than others is not the same as doing well. In fact, he is forfeiting the many advantages the United States has derived from the world it created: the support of strong and capable allies that follow its lead, the ability to shape global rules to its advantage, and the admiration and trust that come from standing up for freedom, democracy, and human rights.

Worse, by alienating allies and embracing adversaries, Trump is providing an opening for China to rewrite the rules of the global order in its favor. “As the U.S. retreats globally, China shows up,” Jin Yinan, a top Chinese military official, gloated last year. Beijing has positioned itself as a defender of the global trading system, the environment, and international law even as it exploits trade rules, builds more coal-burning power stations, and expands its control in the South China Sea. This bid to supplant the United States as the global leader is hardly destined to succeed. China has few friends and a lengthy list of internal challenges, including an aging work force, deep regional and economic inequalities, and a potentially brittle political system. But a world with no leader and multiple competing powers poses its own dangers, as Europe’s tragic history has demonstrated. The United States will not be the only country to pay the price for a return to such a world.

The New Guard
The consequences of the United States’ abdication of global leadership have not been overlooked abroad. If anything, Trump’s policies have highlighted how much other countries have invested in the rules-based order and what they stand to lose with its collapse. “The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership puts in sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course,” said Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign minister, early in Trump’s presidency.

That recognition has driven repeated efforts by U.S. allies to placate Trump. They have looked for common ground despite deep substantive disagreements—not to mention Trump’s ham-handed tactics, petty insults, and unpopularity among their own citizens. But so far, these efforts to compromise haven’t worked, and they aren’t likely to for one simple reason: what U.S. allies want to save, Trump wants to upend.

The United States’ friends and allies—with the G-9 countries in the lead—need to act more ambitiously. They must focus less on how to work with Washington and more on how to work without it—and, if necessary, around it. As German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told a Japanese audience in Tokyo last July, “If we pool our strengths . . . we can become something like ‘rule shapers,’ who design and drive an international order that the world urgently needs.”

European Council President Donald Tusk, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at the start of a EU-Japan summit in Brussels, Belgium, July 2017

Of the potential areas for G-9 cooperation, trade holds the greatest promise, as the G-9 pulls significant economic weight and has already looked for ways to blunt Trump’s protectionist policies. The G-9 countries clearly have the capacity to push their point. Collectively, they generate one-third of global output, more than double China’s share and nearly 50 percent more than that of the United States. And they account for roughly 30 percent of global imports and exports, more than double both China’s and the United States’ share.

As important as the economic pull of the G-9 countries is the willingness they have already shown to counter Trump’s mercantilist policies. After Trump withdrew the United States from the TPP shortly after taking office, Australia, Canada, and Japan led the effort to salvage the trade deal as a counterweight to China. In early 2018, the 11 remaining members agreed on a revised pact that preserved most of the deal’s market-opening provisions; it will create a free-trade zone of 500 million people that will account for about 15 percent of global trade. Colombia, Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand are among the nations that have expressed an interest in joining the so-called TPP-11, broadening its potential clout. The EU is also a logical partner for the TPP-11 countries. It has already negotiated separate trade agreements with Canada, Japan, and South Korea and has begun negotiating one with Australia; the EU-Japanese deal created a market of 600 million people, the largest open economic area in the world.

The TPP-11, the EU-Japanese free-trade agreement, and similar deals will intensify competition between the G-9 and the United States. The agreements give G-9 exporters an advantage over their U.S. counterparts in terms of market access and standards. But even with the growing need to work around or without the United States, the G-9 should still explore ways to cooperate with Washington. One example is the need to reform the World Trade Organization. Trump has repeatedly criticized the WTO, at times suggesting he might pull the United States out. That’s likely an empty threat, because leaving would decidedly disadvantage U.S. firms. But Washington and the G-9 share legitimate concerns about the global trading regime, particularly when it comes to China’s predatory practices. They might, for example, work to limit the sorts of subsidies that give state-owned enterprises in China and elsewhere a competitive advantage, replace the current system of “self-graduation” with objective standards for when developing countries must shoulder their full WTO obligations, and revamp the dispute-settlement process so that decisions are rendered more quickly and adhere more closely to the rules member countries have agreed on.

Cooperation Is Key
Security cooperation will be more challenging. European allies have the necessary mechanisms for cooperation through NATO and the EU, but they don’t spend sufficiently on defense. Asian allies spend more on defense, but they lack an equivalent to NATO or the EU. Yet if G-9 members can make good on commitments to invest more in their own security, the potential waiting to be tapped is impressive. The G-9 represents a military power second only to the United States. In 2017, G-9 countries together spent more than $310 billion on defense, at least a third more than what China spends and more than four times what Russia spends. Every G-9 country ranked in the top 15 of the largest military spenders in the world.

When it comes to defense, much of Trump’s criticism of U.S. allies is misguided, if not outright wrong. Despite Trump’s griping that allies don’t pay their fair share, they in fact cover a substantial part of the cost of the United States’ military presence in their countries: Germany contributes 20 percent of the cost, South Korea contributes 40 percent, and Japan pays half. What is more, the integrated command structures of U.S. and NATO forces act as a force multiplier to deliver a far bigger punch than would be possible if the United States had to act on its own. It should also not be forgotten that large numbers of allied troops have fought and died alongside Americans in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

But Trump’s complaint about free-riding allies—which several of his predecessors shared but expressed more diplomatically—has some merit with regard to both European and Asian allies. No alliance can survive if its members refuse to carry their own weight, and many U.S. allies, especially in Europe, depend too heavily on Washington for their security. They conceded as much in 2014, when every NATO member pledged to spend at least two percent of GDP on defense by 2024. Although the United States’ global security responsibilities require it to spend far more, the two percent target would still represent a significant increase for many countries and allow Europe to carry its fair share of the overall defense burden.

If all of NATO’s European members met the two percent target, their combined annual defense spending would jump from about $270 billion to $385 billion—an increase nearly twice the size of Russia’s total defense budget. An increase of that scale would allow for a major upgrade in military capabilities, especially if new funds were spent with an eye toward enhancing cooperation and connectivity among the armed forces. That is precisely the goal of the EU’s Permanent Structured Cooperation, founded earlier this year, which aims to deepen European defense cooperation. The challenge is to make sure that the aggregation of this military potential adds up to more than the sum of its parts by avoiding duplication, consolidating research-and-development expenditures, and procuring complementary military capabilities.

EU leaders on the launching of the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) in Brussels, Belgium, December 2017

When it comes to military cooperation, U.S. allies in Europe have an edge over those in Asia. Asia has no equivalent to NATO and is unlikely to develop one anytime soon. U.S. allies there are, however, strengthening their defense and security cooperation in the face of China’s growing power and concerns over the reliability of the United States as a military partner. In January 2018, Australia and Japan pledged to work together more closely, including by allowing joint exercises of their armed forces. The two countries are also developing ties with India and exploring ways to conduct joint naval exercises. These early steps toward collaboration could evolve into regular planning, training, and cooperation on defense research, development, and procurement.

The lack of deep, multilateral military cooperation among Asian allies is partially offset by their willingness to invest in defense. Australia and South Korea both spend at least two percent of GDP on their militaries. Australia and New Zealand have long sent forces in support of major military operations in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and even Europe, demonstrating their belief that their own regional security is linked to security worldwide. Japan spends just one percent of GDP on defense, in accordance with its unique pacifistic constitution drafted by occupying U.S. forces after World War II. In spite of constitutional constraints, the Japanese military is one of the most capable in Asia, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has opened an important national debate about changing the constitution and increasing the country’s military capabilities.

For the G-9 to function as a unit when it comes to security, European and Asian countries will need to collaborate more directly. Although the major European military powers are unlikely to take on a large defense role in Asia, they can and should do more. The threat posed by North Korea has long preoccupied European capitals, and European forces continue to be part of the UN command established at the onset of the Korean War. China is a major concern as well. Europe has a critical interest in ensuring freedom of navigation throughout the Asia-Pacific region and sustaining a balance of power there. Strengthening defense ties between Europe and Asia will be key to counterbalancing China’s rise. During a May 2018 visit to Sydney, French President Emmanuel Macron had this goal in mind when he called for an alliance among Australia, France, and India, saying, “If we want to be seen and respected by China as an equal partner, we must organize ourselves.”

Stepping Up
Liberal democracy has come under assault after many decades of advancing across the globe. Led by China, authoritarian countries are openly challenging global rules and ideas about freedom and making the case that their sociopolitical systems work better than liberal democracy. The rise of populist movements in many Western countries has led to increased support for illiberalism even within established democracies. A growing refugee and migration crisis is challenging liberal norms regarding tolerance and diversity. But the loss of the United States as a strong global leader is perhaps the biggest change.

For 70 years, Western allies shared a commitment to democracy, freedom, and human rights and a belief that advancing them globally was an essential contribution to international peace and prosperity. The G-9 needs to carry on this work, even if Washington bows out. It can start by taking the lead in international institutions, such as the UN and the World Bank. Washington’s voice has fallen silent in these forums. The G-9 countries must speak up loudly, clearly, and in unison in favor of democracy and freedom wherever and whenever these are challenged.

Political exhortation is unlikely to be sufficient on its own. The G-9 needs to flex its economic muscles, too. For example, it could use trade preferences and development assistance as leverage (a strategy China never shies away from). In 2017, the G-9 spent more than $80 billion on official development assistance, well over twice what the United States spent. Conditioning aid on the protection and promotion of democracy, freedom, and human rights would be a powerful way for G-9 countries to defend and extend these core values.

The G-9 will also have to use military force independent of Washington. France and the United Kingdom have already led military interventions for humanitarian purposes, mainly in northern and western Africa. In June 2018, together with seven other EU allies, the British and the French agreed to establish a joint military force to intervene in times of crisis. This is another small but important step that could serve as a model for similar collaborations.

Protecting The Order
To be effective, the G-9 will have to institutionalize in some form. Annual leader summits and regular meetings of foreign, defense, and other ministers will be needed to give the group’s efforts weight and significance. The G-9 could also form an informal caucus in international institutions, such as the UN, the WTO, and the G-20. In strengthening formal ties and cooperation, the G-9 should avoid appearing exclusive; it should at all times welcome the participation and support of like-minded countries, including the United States. The goal should be to uphold and rejuvenate the existing order, not to create a new, exclusive club.

The primary obstacle the G-9 will face, however, isn’t likely to be institutional; it will be a lack of political will to step up and defend the order. Washington has exhorted its European and Asian allies to carry more weight for years and has been met mostly with shrugs and excuses. Meanwhile, countries such as Germany and Japan have grown comfortable complaining about U.S. policy but remain unprepared to take on more responsibility. European countries have tended to look inward, and U.S. allies in Asia have preferred to deal with Washington bilaterally rather than work with one another.

U.S. allies are also tempted to avoid taking action by the hope that Trump might not actually do what he threatens or that a new president will take office in January 2021, and the storm will pass. But Trump’s first 20 months in office suggest that he believes his nationalist, unilateralist, and mercantilist policies have produced “wins” for the United States. And even if Trump serves only one term, his successor may pay a political price for trying to reclaim a global leadership role for the United States. Although recent polls by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and others have shown that the American public rejects critical parts of “America first”—support for an active U.S. role in the world, for trade deals, and for defending U.S. allies has increased markedly since Trump took office—the idea that lingering resentment toward ungrateful allies propelled Trump to victory has become conventional wisdom in some circles. Without evidence that the United States’ partners are doing their fair share, a new president may choose to remain on the sidelines of international politics and focus on domestic issues.

The G-9 must act now to prepare for such risks. Yet at the same time, it should recognize that without U.S. help, it can sustain the order for only so long. In the long run, the best the G-9 can hope to accomplish is to keep the door open for the eventual return of the United States. The challenges to the postwar order are too broad and the task of collective action too great to expect G-9 members to sustain alliances, maintain open markets, and defy democratic regression indefinitely. Unlike the United States, the G-9 consists of nine different political entities (including one that represents 28 nations), each of which faces distinct political pressures and requirements. Their ability to act in concert and to lead globally will invariably be less effective than that of a single great power.

Fortunately, “America first” need not become America’s future. Instead, it could be a productive detour that reminds Washington and its allies why the order was created in the first place. Indeed, by investing more in that order and carrying a greater share of the burdens and responsibilities of global leadership, the G-9 may not only help sustain the order but also place it on a more stable and enduring foundation. The outcome may be one many U.S. leaders have long sought—a more balanced partnership with European and Asian allies in which everyone contributes their fair share and has a say in how the order should evolve to meet the new challenges.

Allied leaders know that they need to take more action. They understand that although the demise of the liberal order will cost the United States dearly, it will cost them even more. Great-power competition will intensify, predatory trade practices will spread, and the democratic reversal already under way will pick up speed. “The times when we could completely count on others, they are over to a certain extent,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked a few months after Trump came to office. “We Europeans really must take our fate into our own hands.” Now is the time for Germany and the other G-9 countries to match deeds to words. If they settle for complaints and laments, they will have more than Trump to blame for the passing of the rules-based order.

 

The End of the Democratic Century

Autocracy's Global Ascendance

2018.05

By Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa

 

At the height of World War II, Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine, argued that the United States had amassed such wealth and power that the twentieth century would come to be known simply as “the American Century.” His prediction proved prescient: despite being challenged for supremacy by Nazi Germany and, later, the Soviet Union, the United States prevailed against its adversaries. By the turn of the millennium, its position as the most powerful and influential state in the world appeared unimpeachable. As a result, the twentieth century was marked by the dominance not just of a particular country but also of the political system it helped spread: liberal democracy.

 

As democracy flourished across the world, it was tempting to ascribe its dominance to its inherent appeal. If citizens in India, Italy, or Venezuela seemed loyal to their political system, it must have been because they had developed a deep commitment to both individual rights and collective self-determination. And if Poles and Filipinos began to make the transition from dictatorship to democracy, it must have been because they, too, shared in the universal human desire for liberal democracy.

 

But the events of the second half of the twentieth century can also be interpreted in a very different way. Citizens across the world were attracted to liberal democracy not simply because of its norms and values but also because it offered the most salient model of economic and geopolitical success. Civic ideals may have played their part in converting the citizens of formerly authoritarian regimes into convinced democrats, but the astounding economic growth of western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, the victory of democratic countries in the Cold War, and the defeat or collapse of democracy’s most powerful autocratic rivals were just as important.

 

Taking the material foundations of democratic hegemony seriously casts the story of democracy’s greatest successes in a different light, and it also changes how one thinks about its current crisis. As liberal democracies have become worse at improving their citizens’ living standards, populist movements that disavow liberalism are emerging from Brussels to Brasília and from Warsaw to Washington. A striking number of citizens have started to ascribe less importance to living in a democracy: whereas two-thirds of Americans above the age of 65 say it is absolutely important to them to live in a democracy, for example, less than one-third of those below the age of 35 say the same thing. A growing minority is even open to authoritarian alternatives: from 1995 to 2017, the share of French, Germans, and Italians who favored military rule more than tripled.

As recent elections around the world indicate, these opinions aren’t just abstract preferences; they reflect a deep groundswell of antiestablishment sentiment that can be easily mobilized by extremist political parties and candidates. As a result, authoritarian populists who disrespect some of the most basic rules and norms of the democratic system have made rapid advances across western Europe and North America over the past two decades. Meanwhile, authoritarian strongmen are rolling back democratic advances across much of Asia and eastern Europe. Could the changing balance of economic and military power in the world help explain these unforeseen developments?

That question is all the more pressing today, as the long-standing dominance of a set of consolidated democracies with developed economies and a common alliance structure is coming to an end. Ever since the last decade of the nineteenth century, the democracies that formed the West’s Cold War alliance against the Soviet Union—in North America, western Europe, Australasia, and postwar Japan—have commanded a majority of the world’s income. In the late nineteenth century, established democracies such as the United Kingdom and the United States made up the bulk of global GDP. In the second half of the twentieth century, as the geographic span of both democratic rule and the alliance structure headed by the United States expanded to include Japan and Germany, the power of this liberal democratic alliance became even more crushing. But now, for the first time in over a hundred years, its share of global GDP has fallen below half. According to forecasts by the International Monetary Fund, it will slump to a third within the next decade.

 

At the same time that the dominance of democracies has faded, the share of economic output coming from authoritarian states has grown rapidly. In 1990, countries rated “not free” by Freedom House (the lowest category, which excludes “partially free” countries such as Singapore) accounted for just 12 percent of global income. Now, they are responsible for 33 percent, matching the level they achieved in the early 1930s, during the rise of fascism in Europe, and surpassing the heights they reached in the Cold War when Soviet power was at its apex.

 

As a result, the world is now approaching a striking milestone: within the next five years, the share of global income held by countries considered “not free”—such as China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia—will surpass the share held by Western liberal democracies. In the span of a quarter century, liberal democracies have gone from a position of unprecedented economic strength to a position of unprecedented economic weakness.

It is looking less and less likely that the countries in North America and western Europe that made up the traditional heartland of liberal democracy can regain their erstwhile supremacy, with their democratic systems embattled at home and their share of the world economy continuing to shrink. So the future promises two realistic scenarios: either some of the most powerful autocratic countries in the world will transition to liberal democracy, or the period of democratic dominance that was expected to last forever will prove no more than an interlude before a new era of struggle between mutually hostile political systems.

 

East Germans climb the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate the opening of the border, November 1989.

REUTERS

East Germans climb the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate the opening of the border, November 1989.

 

THE WAGES OF WEALTH

Of all the ways in which economic prosperity buys a country power and influence, perhaps the most important is that it creates stability at home. As the political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi have shown, poor democracies often collapse. It is only rich democracies—those with a GDP per capita above $14,000 in today’s terms, according to their findings—that are reliably secure. Since the formation of the postwar alliance binding the United States to its allies in western Europe, no affluent member has experienced a breakdown of democratic rule.

 

Beyond keeping democracies stable, economic might also endows them with a number of tools to influence the development of other countries. Chief among these is cultural clout. During the apogee of Western liberal democracy, the United States—and, to a lesser extent, western Europe—was home to the most famous writers and musicians, the most watched television shows and movies, the most advanced industries, and the most prestigious universities. In the minds of many young people coming of age in Africa or Asia in the 1990s, all these things seemed to be of a piece: the desire to share in the unfathomable wealth of the West was also a desire to adopt its lifestyle, and the desire to adopt its lifestyle seemed to require emulating its political system.

 

This combination of economic power and cultural prestige facilitated a great degree of political influence. When the American soap opera Dallas began airing in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, for example, Soviet citizens naturally contrasted the impossible wealth of suburban America with their own material deprivation and wondered why their economic system had fallen so far behind. “We were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the [Soviet] empire,” Larry Hagman, one of its leading stars, boasted years later. It was, he claimed, not Soviet citizens’ idealism but rather “good old-fashioned greed” that “got them to question their authority.”

 

The economic prowess of Western democracies could also take on a harder edge. They could influence political events in other countries by promising to include them in the global economic system or threatening to exclude them from it. In the 1990s and the first decade of this century, the prospect of membership in organizations from the European Union to the World Trade Organization provided powerful incentives for democratic reforms in eastern Europe, Turkey, and parts of Asia, including Thailand and South Korea. Meanwhile, Western sanctions that prevented countries from participating in the global economy may have helped contain Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the years following the Gulf War, and they were arguably instrumental in bringing about the fall of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic after the war in Kosovo.

 

Finally, economic power could easily be converted into military might. This, too, did much to enhance the global standing of liberal democracies. It ensured that other countries could not topple democratic regimes by force and raised the domestic legitimacy of such regimes by making military humiliation a rarity. At the same time, it encouraged the spread of democracy though diplomatic leverage and the presence of boots on the ground. Countries that were physically located between a major democratic power and a major authoritarian power, such as Poland and Ukraine, were deeply influenced by the greater material and military benefits offered by an alliance with the West. Former colonies emulated the political systems of their erstwhile rulers when they gained independence, leaving parliamentary democracies from the islands of the Caribbean to the highlands of East Africa. And in at least two major cases—Germany and Japan—Western military occupation paved the way for the introduction of a model democratic constitution.

 

In short, it is impossible to understand the story of the democratic century without taking seriously the role that economic power played in spreading the ideals of liberal democracy around the world. This also means that it is impossible to make informed predictions about the future of liberal democracy without reflecting on the effects that the decline in the relative economic clout of the democratic alliance might have in the years and decades to come.

 

THE DANGERS OF DECLINE

At first glance, the conclusion that affluence breeds stability seems to bode well for the future of North America and western Europe, where the institutions of liberal democracy have traditionally been most firmly established. After all, even if their relative power declines, the absolute level of wealth in Canada or France is very unlikely to fall below the threshold at which democracies tend to fail. But absolute levels of wealth may have been just one of many economic features that kept Western democracies stable after World War II. Indeed, the stable democracies of that period also shared three other economic attributes that can plausibly help explain their past success: relative equality, rapidly growing incomes for most citizens, and the fact that authoritarian rivals to democracy were much less wealthy.

 

All these factors have begun to erode in recent years. Consider what has happened in the United States. In the 1970s, the top one percent of income earners commanded eight percent of pretax income; now, they command over 20 percent. For much of the twentieth century, inflation-adjusted wages roughly doubled from generation to generation; for the past 30 years, they have essentially remained flat. And throughout the Cold War, the U.S. economy, as measured by GDP based on purchasing power parity, remained two to three times as large as the Soviet economy; today, it is one-sixth smaller than China’s.

 

Of the 15 countries in the world with the highest per capita incomes, almost two-thirds are nondemocracies.

 

The ability of autocratic regimes to compete with the economic performance of liberal democracies is a particularly important and novel development. At the height of its influence, communism managed to rival the ideological appeal of liberal democracy across large parts of the developing world. But even then, it offered a weak economic alternative to capitalism. Indeed, the share of global income produced by the Soviet Union and its satellite states peaked at 13 percent in the mid-1950s. Over the following decades, it declined steadily, falling to ten percent by 1989. Communist countries also could not provide their citizens with a lifestyle that would rival the comfort of the capitalist West. From 1950 to 1989, per capita income in the Soviet Union fell from two-thirds to less than half of the western European level. As the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger put it, playing off the title of an essay by Lenin, Soviet socialism proved to be “the highest stage of underdevelopment.”

 

New forms of authoritarian capitalism may eventually suffer similar types of economic stagnation. So far, however, the form of authoritarian capitalism that has emerged in Arab Gulf states and East Asia—combining a strong state with relatively free markets and reasonably secure property rights—is having a good run. Of the 15 countries in the world with the highest per capita incomes, almost two-thirds are nondemocracies. Even comparatively unsuccessful authoritarian states, such as Iran, Kazakhstan, and Russia, can boast per capita incomes above $20,000. China, whose per capita income was vastly lower as recently as two decades ago, is rapidly starting to catch up. Although average incomes in its rural hinterlands remain low, the country has proved that it can offer a higher level of wealth in its more urban areas: the coastal region of China now comprises some 420 million people, with an average income of $23,000 and growing. In other words, hundreds of millions of people can now be said to live under conditions of “authoritarian modernity.” In the eyes of their less affluent imitators around the world, their remarkable prosperity serves as a testament to the fact that the road to prosperity no longer needs to run through liberal democracy.

 

AUTHORITARIAN SOFT POWER

One of the results of this transformation has been a much greater degree of ideological self-confidence among autocratic regimes—and, along with it, a willingness to meddle in Western democracies. Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election have understandably drawn the most attention over the past two years. But the country has long had an even greater influence on politics across western Europe. In Italy and France, for example, Russia has helped finance extremist parties on both sides of the political divide for decades. In other European countries, Russia has enjoyed even more remarkable success in recruiting retired political leaders to lobby on its behalf, including former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and former Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer.

 

The big question now is whether Russia will remain alone in its attempt to influence the politics of liberal democracies. The answer is almost certainly no: its campaigns have proved that outside meddling by authoritarian powers in deeply divided democracies is relatively easy and strikingly effective, making it very tempting for Russia’s authoritarian peers to follow suit. Indeed, China is already stepping up ideological pressure on its overseas residents and establishing influential Confucius Institutes in major centers of learning. And over the past two years, Saudi Arabia has dramatically upped its payments to registered U.S. lobbyists, increasing the number of registered foreign agents working on its behalf from 25 to 145.

 

If the changing balance of economic and technological power between Western democracies and authoritarian countries makes the former more susceptible to outside interference, it also makes it easier for the latter to spread their values. Indeed, the rise of authoritarian soft power is already apparent across a variety of domains, including academia, popular culture, foreign investment, and development aid. Until a few years ago, for example, all of the world’s leading universities were situated in liberal democracies, but authoritarian countries are starting to close the gap. According to the latest Times Higher Education survey, 16 of the world’s top 250 institutions can be found in nondemocracies, including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.

 

Perhaps the most important form of authoritarian soft power, however, may be the growing ability of dictatorial regimes to soften the hold that democracies once enjoyed over the reporting and dissemination of news. Whereas the Soviet mouthpiece Pravda could never have dreamed of attracting a mass readership in the United States, the clips produced today by state-funded news channels, including Qatar’s Al Jazeera, China’s CCTV, and Russia’s RT, regularly find millions of American viewers. The result is the end of the West’s monopoly over media narratives, as well as an end to its ability to maintain a civic space untainted by foreign governments.

 

THE BEGINNING OF THE END?

During the long period of democratic stability, the United States was the dominant superpower, both culturally and economically. Authoritarian competitors such as the Soviet Union quickly stagnated economically and became discredited ideologically. As a result, democracy seemed to promise not only a greater degree of individual freedom and collective self-determination but also the more prosaic prospect of a vastly wealthier life. As long as these background conditions held, there seemed to be good reason to assume that democracy would continue to be safe in its traditional strongholds. There were even plausible grounds to hope that an ever-growing number of autocratic countries would join the democratic column.

 

But the era in which Western liberal democracies were the world’s top cultural and economic powers may now be drawing to a close. At the same time that liberal democracies are showing strong signs of institutional decay, authoritarian populists are starting to develop an ideological alternative in the form of illiberal democracy, and outright autocrats are offering their citizens a standard of living that increasingly rivals that of the richest countries in the West.

 

A demonstrator outside the European Parliament, in Brussels, April 2013.

Francois Lenoir / REUTERS

 

A demonstrator outside the European Parliament, in Brussels, April 2013.

It is tempting to hope that Western liberal democracies could regain their dominance. One path toward that end would be economic. The recent economic success of authoritarian countries could prove to be short lived. Russia and Saudi Arabia remain overly reliant on income from fossil fuels. China’s recent growth has been fueled by a soaring debt bubble and favorable demographics, and it may end up being difficult to sustain once the country is forced to deleverage and the effects of an aging population hit home. At the same time, the economic performance of developed Western economies could improve. As the residual effects of the Great Recession wear off and European and North American economies roar back to life, these bastions of liberal democracy could once again outpace the modernized autocracies.

 

Projections about the exact speed and degree of the shifting power balance between democratic and authoritarian countries should therefore be taken with a large grain of salt. And yet a cursory glance at Western GDP growth rates for the past three to four decades shows that, due to demographic decline and low productivity growth, Western economies were stagnating long before the financial crisis. Meanwhile, China and many other emerging economies have large hinterlands that have yet to experience catch-up development, which suggests that these countries can continue to make considerable gains by following their current growth model.

 

The era in which Western liberal democracies were the world’s top cultural and economic powers may be drawing to a close.

 

Another hope is that emerging democracies such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia may come to play a more active role in upholding an alliance of liberal democracies and diffusing their values around the world. But this would require a radical change in course. As the political scientist Marc Plattner has argued, these countries have not historically thought of “the defense of liberal democracy as a significant component of their foreign policies.” Following the Russian annexation of Crimea, for example, Brazil, India, and South Africa abstained from voting on a resolution in the UN General Assembly that condemned the move. They have also opposed sanctions against Russia. And they have tended to side with autocratic regimes in seeking a greater role for states in regulating the Internet.

 

To make things worse, emerging democracies have historically been much less stable than the supposedly consolidated democracies of North America, western Europe, and parts of East Asia. Indeed, recent democratic backsliding in Turkey, as well as signs of democratic slippage in Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines, raises the possibility that some of these countries may become flawed democracies—or revert to outright authoritarian rule—in the coming decades. Instead of shoring up the dwindling forces of democracy, some of these countries may choose to align with autocratic powers.

 

Hopes that the current set of democratic countries could somehow regain their erstwhile global position are probably vain. The most likely scenario, then, is that democracies will come to look less and less attractive as they cease to be associated with wealth and power and fail to address their own challenges.

 

It’s conceivable, however, that the animating principles of liberal democracy will prove deeply appealing to the inhabitants of authoritarian countries even once those peoples enjoy a comparable standard of living. If large authoritarian countries such as Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia undertook democratic reforms, the aggregate power of democracies would be boosted significantly. If China were to do so, it would end the era of authoritarian resurgence in a single stroke.

 

But that is just another way of saying that the long century during which Western liberal democracies dominated the globe has ended for good. The only remaining question now is whether democracy will transcend its once firm anchoring in the West, a shift that would create the conditions for a truly global democratic century—or whether democracy will become, at best, the lingering form of government in an economically and demographically declining corner of the world.

 

 

What the West Is Becoming

By Bruno Maçães

August 8, 2018 6:30 AM

British Prime Minister Theresa May and President Trump at the NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium, May 25, 2017. (Matt Dunham/Pool/Reuters)Countries that were once under Western influence are beginning to assert themselves, heralding a new, democratic — or chaotic — world order.

Political debates in Europe and America suddenly seem very poor when compared with the news. Imagination now takes place in the real world. And it all started in those months leading from Brexit to the Trump election.

A global political order that not so long ago seemed destined to live forever proceeded to crumble before our eyes. What is worse, no one has been able to convincingly tell us why or to what purpose. The crumbling could all be temporary, of course, but the problem is that extraordinary events cannot properly be temporary. Once the realm of the possible has been expanded, it is forever expanded.

Much of the distress has to do with the fact that the revolt against some of the basic principles of the global order comes not from the periphery but from the very center of world power. Not from the distant provinces, which wealth and ideas could not reach, but from the capital, or rather from the imperial palace standing at the very center of the capital. Something like that was not supposed to happen.

What was remarkable about the Brexit referendum was that the country that had invented free trade and taken it to the four corners of the world was now refusing to be part of the largest and freest economic bloc ever created. As for Donald Trump, he has come to symbolize a precipitous retreat from the previous American foreign-policy consensus. At times he seems to want to jettison the existing liberal world order and replace it with something else, defined around a strong national idea and appealing to a world of cut­throat competition. He has criticized a political culture that prizes the diffusion of power, hewing to the belief that without a strong state, citizens will have no one to defend them against other countries. He seems to regard a firm com­mitment to liberal values as a hindrance to American power. He has promised to pursue what he sees as better trade deals for America, even if that means unraveling the liberal world order as it exists at present. According to Trump, “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.”

The global order created after the Second World War had been endangered before, but in the past the threat had come from the out­side. Now it seems to be in danger of being abandoned by those who had been responsible for building it and who had always benefited from it. For some, Brexit and Trump have simply been an error of perception: It is true that the countries at the core of the system have to restrain their power and cannot come out on top every time, but over the long term they reap the largest benefits and have the most interest in preserving the system.

As domestic divisions in Europe and the United States became increas­ingly exposed, relations between elites and a large section of the electorate acquired something of the old, familiar dynamic between Europeans and those inhabiting the rest of the world. They sound like an effort by the rational and enlightened classes to persuade the irrational and the superstitious — professedly in the interest of the latter. Politicians and intellectu­als scrambled to explain the bizarre voting behavior through all sorts of economic and psychoanalytic theories, all the while insisting that a new effort at civic education had become urgent. Such mes­sages can only deepen the divisions and alienation.

Trump is the product of a new world where voters in the U.S. feel increasingly vulnerable to influences from the outside — influences which can no longer be controlled as they were in the past.

The truth is that for many in the United Kingdom and the U.S., there is no longer a functioning liberal order. Among the intellectual and the financial elites, beliefs and practices acquired over generations look as solid as ever, but many other people are suffering the impact from forces outside their national borders to which the state is unwilling or unable to respond. While the elites see a well-functioning international system of markets, trade, and the free movement of people, those at the bottom can find only the work of blind forces and competing states in an increasingly chaotic world. Factories are being closed because of competition from China and elsewhere, and the message communicated to workers is that their country is no longer able to compete. Growing numbers of immigrants have a measurable impact on neighborhoods and the provision of public services, predominantly affecting the poor. Finally, terrorists are seen to be capable of striking at will from their bases abroad and cells in Europe and the U.S.

Surprising? Perhaps, but we have seen it all before — in those societies first suffering the impact of European or Western expansion. One historical analogy is with the arrival of European civilization in the Muslim world. Until the 18th century the course of history still seemed to be favoring the great Muslim empires, and the ruling Ottoman, Safavid, or Mughal elites certainly never entertained any other possibility. When the shock arrived, in the form of a string of military defeats and growing trade dependence, no one was prepared. The initial reaction was to wait for the storm to pass while remaining faithful to traditional habits and principles. Two main strands of reaction were eventually considered. First, there was a call to purify Muslim society from later influences and deviations. The origin of the Wahhabi radical reinterpretation of Islam dates from this moment. The second response, moving in the opposite direction, was to try to reform Muslim society, to address its perceived weak­nesses and to appropriate some European ideas, at least in the area of military technology.

A similar process took place in China roughly a century later. Determined to open Chinese markets to foreign goods, Britain intro­duced the habit of opium smoking into the country and later defended its trade through military means, quickly dispatching the poorly equipped Chinese navy. The emperor sued for peace, opened five trade ports to foreigners, and ceded Hong Kong to the British in per­petuity. It was impossible to pretend that the world order as it had been conceived in Beijing since time immemorial could survive the onslaught, but the mandarins spent most of the next few decades doing just that, for their most treasured values prohibited the recog­nition of any alternative to Chinese civilization.

To understand what the West is becoming, travel to Turkey, Egypt, or Pakistan. These are countries that, while never admitted to the club, were always of enormous strategic importance for Western powers, whose constant involvement created a culture of suspicion and resentment. What has been taking place in the U.S. since the 2016 elections would look strikingly familiar to Turks or Egyptians. Some episode or other of foreign involvement in the democratic process is reported. That is bad enough as far as it goes, but it gets worse. Once the fatal virus of suspicion enters the political bloodstream, it will never leave. Foreign involvement as such becomes a political strategy. The different sides in the political contest will strive to win not by developing better policies but by turning their opponents into traitors and quislings.

The tools we use to manage the rest of the world are now available outside the West. When power and influence flow in all directions, the result is an order where everyone will rule and be ruled at once.

If you think the problem is Trump, think again. The forbidden fruit has been bitten. How could we go back? Why would Republicans refrain from lobbing the same accusations of foreign meddling against Democrats in the future? And why would foreign powers not attempt the same tactics again, now that they have seen how easy it is to sow chaos and discord? Trump did not bring this situation with him. He is in fact the product of a new world where voters in the U.S. feel increasingly vulnerable to influences from the outside — influences which can no longer be managed or controlled as they were in the past.

 

One could speculate endlessly about the root causes of the new situation, but the truth is notably straightforward. Technology — once the preserve of the West — is now universal. In both cases discussed above, the Muslim and Chinese worlds were faced with a new kind of civilization, carrying all the secrets of modern science, which at first must have looked like supernatural powers. The encounter between European and Asian empires in the mod­ern age had a very specific meaning to those involved: the superiority of European technology. Some Asian thinkers or polemicists went so far as to make the intriguing claim that the encounter was not between Asians and Europeans, but rather between Asians and European machines.

We have now entered a new age, one perfectly summarized by saying that Western machines are every day meeting Asian machines. After all, the same tools we have used — and continue to use — to manage and influence the rest of the world are now fully available outside the West. When power and influence flow in all directions at once, the result is, from one point of view, a democratic order where everyone will rule and be ruled at once. From a different point of view, it could be described as a field of forces where every action is a reaction in an endless chain. Countries, peoples, voters, and presidents are ultimately disturbances in a chaotic field.