The Routledge Handbook of Diplomacy and Statecraft [2 ed.] 9780367860424, 9781032164137, 9781003016625

Citation preview

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DIPLOMACY AND STATECRAFT

Reflecting the profound changes in international society in the past decade and the challenges that all Powers’ diplomacy and statecraft face, whether opposing or encouraging these changes, this fully revised and updated edition provides a unique multifaceted assessment by experts of the new international order. Built around the thesis that Great Power rivalry dominated after the end of the Cold War, it examines how this multi-​polarity has become more extreme. The Handbook assesses the diplomacy and statecraft of individual powers in seven key sections: • • • • • • •

The Context of Diplomacy The Great Powers Middle Powers Developing Powers International Organisations and Military Alliances The International Economy Issues of Conflict and Co-​operation

It shows how diplomacy and statecraft have transformed on issues such as the evolving “America First” strategy; the strengthening of the People’s Republic of China; the growth of non-​state actors in foreign policy; the unravelling of international arms control agreements; the aggressive nature of Russian foreign policy; and the emergence of major armed conflicts and the rise of terrorism and armed insurgencies around the world. It will be of interest to government and non-​governmental actors, established scholars and students in the fields of international relations, history, and military studies. B.J.C. McKercher, FRHistS, is Professor of International History at the University of Victoria, Canada and, since 2007, the editor of the journal, Diplomacy & Statecraft.

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF DIPLOMACY AND STATECRAFT Second Edition

Edited by B.J.C. McKercher

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Cover image: © Getty Images Second edition published 2022 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, B.J.C. McKercher; individual chapters, the contributors The right of B.J.C. McKercher to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2012 British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: McKercher, B. J. C., 1950– editor. Title: The Routledge handbook of diplomacy and statecraft / edited by B.J.C. McKercher. Other titles: Handbook of diplomacy and statecraft Description: 2nd edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039802 (print) | LCCN 2021039803 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367860424 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032164137 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003016625 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Diplomacy–Handbooks, manuals, etc. | International relations–Handbooks, manuals, etc. | World politics–21st century–Handbooks, manuals, etc. Classification: LCC JZ1305 .R684 2012 (print) | LCC JZ1305 (ebook) | DDC 327.2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039802 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039803 ISBN: 9780367860424 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032164137 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003016625 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003016625 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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For some past diplomats and statesmen who would work well in the era of increasing international anarchy. Armand du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu Wenzel Anton Reichsfürst von Kaunitz-​Rietberg Charles-​Maurice de Talleyrand-​Périgord Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Fürst von Metternich-​Winneburg zu Beilstein Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston Otto Eduard Leopold Fürst von Bismarck, Herzog zu Lauenburg Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon Franklin Delano Roosevelt Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  Notes on Contributors  List of Abbreviations  Prologue: Diplomacy and Statecraft in an Era of Increasing International Anarchy  B.J.C. McKercher PART I

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The Context of Diplomacy 

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1 The Value of Diplomatic History in a Changing World  Halvard Leira

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2 Theorising Diplomacy  Christer Jönsson

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PART II

The Great Powers 

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3 Imperial Recessional: The Erosion of American Predominance During the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations  Christopher Layne

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4 China’s Rise and the New World Order  Baohui Zhang

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5 Brexit, British Foreign Policy, and Governance  Jamie Gaskarth

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Contents

6 Unravelling the Enigma: Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-​First Century  Jeffrey Mankoff 7 France: A European Middle Power with Still a Global Ambition  Christian Lequesne 8 German Foreign Policy and Statecraft since 2000: Regional Hegemon, Global Dwarf?  Klaus Brummer 9 Alliance vs. Alliance “Plus”: Japanese Foreign Policy Post-​9/​11  Yuki Tatsumi PART III

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Middle Powers 

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10 Australian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-​First Century  Brendon O’Connor and Danny Cooper

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11 Changing Contours of Indian Diplomacy under Narendra Modi  Harsh V. Pant

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12 The End of the Innocence: Canada and the Fading Liberal International Order  Asa McKercher

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13 Austria’s Foreign Policy in the Early Twenty-first Century: Between Domestic Restraints and an International Agenda  Erwin A. Schmidl

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14 Change in Turkey’s Foreign Policy: Global Shifts and Domestic Politics  171 Meliha Benli Altunışık PART IV

Developing Powers 

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15 Change and Continuity in Cuba’s Foreign Relations  Philip Brenner and Jina Shim

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16 Peru: A Model for Latin American Diplomacy and Statecraft  Ronald Bruce St John

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17 Thailand: A Master of Reinvention Through Diplomacy  Pavin Chachavalpongpun

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18 Indonesia’s Foreign Policy since the Reformasi  Song Xue and Kai He

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PART V

International Organisations and Military Alliances 

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19 The European Union in International Relations: Great Power under Strain?  Rikard Bengtsson

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20 Human Rights in an Illiberal World  Jennifer Kandjii and Andrew S. Thompson

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21 The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and Its Current Challenges  Michael Rühle

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22 The United States, Israel, and the Conflict over Iran, 2009–​2019  Henry Rome

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PART VI

The International Economy 

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23 The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: From Institutional Anchors of Liberalism to Geopolitical Rivalry?  Morten Bøås

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24 The Belt and Road Initiative: Prospects and Pitfalls  Michael Clarke and Matthew Sussex

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25 Regionalism in the Global South: Understanding the Evolution of Mercosur  Mahrukh Doctor

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26 The Globalised International Economy: The Need to Rebuild International Co-​operation  Andreas Freytag and Leo Wangler

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27 Measuring Globalisation: Myths, Trends, and Variation Across Countries 330 Steven A. Altman and Caroline R. Bastian

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Contents PART VII

Issues of Conflict and Co-​operation 

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28 Nuclear Modernisation and the Disdain for Arms Control and the Non-​Proliferation Regime  Aiden Warren and Joseph M. Siracusa

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29 The Return of Great Power Competition and the Importance of Military Statecraft  Michael Roi

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30 The Middle East: Strategic and Military Balance of Power  Ash Rossiter and Christopher Bolan

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31 The Balance of Power in South Asia  Sumit Ganguly

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32 Non-​governmental Organisations and International Security: Navigating the New Global (dis)Order  Jonathan Goodhand and Oliver Walton 33 Personal Diplomacy  Hendrik W. Ohnesorge

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34 From Soft Power to Reputational Security: Rethinking Public Diplomacy and Cultural Diplomacy for a Dangerous Age  Nicholas J. Cull

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35 Three Strikes and You’re Out? Implications of “Hyper-​Globalisation”, the New Cold War, and the Coronavirus for the Future of Multilateralism  420 David G. Haglund Select Bibliography  Index 

431 447

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ILLUSTRATIONS

8.1 8.2 8.3 18.1 27.1 27.2 33.1 33.2

Foreign deployments and size of the Bundeswehr  German military expenditures  Germany’s export surplus  Indonesia’s foreign policy behaviours in the context of the Bebas-​Aktif principle  Globalisation trends on DHL, KOF and Elcano Indexes, relative to 2001 baseline  Regionalisation, Average Distance, and DHL Global Connectedness Index Breadth trends  The effects of personal diplomacy between two actors  Perceptions of the United States and its President amongst key allies 

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97 99 100 223 334 336 399 405

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CONTRIBUTORS

Editor B.J.C. McKercher, FRHistS, is Professor of International History at the University of Victoria, Canada and, since 2007, the editor of the journal, Diplomacy & Statecraft. He has written widely on British foreign policy in the era of the two world wars of the twentieth century. His most recent monograph is Britain, America, and the Special Relationship since 1941 (2017); and two co-​ edited books: with Antoine Capet, Winston Churchill: At War and Thinking of War before 1939 (2019); and with Erik Goldstein, Aspects of British Policy and the Treaty of Versailles: Of War and Peace (2020).

Contributors Steven A. Altman is a Senior Research Scholar at the New York University Stern School of Business and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in NYU Stern’s Department of Management and Organizations. He is also Director of the DHL Initiative on Globalization at NYU Stern’s Center for the Future of Management. Meliha Benli Altunışık is Professor in the Department of International Relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara. She writes mainly on the Middle East in international relations and Turkey’s foreign policy and, with O. Tur, is the author of Turkey: Challenges of Continuity and Change (2005). Her articles have appeared in Security Dialogue, Mediterranean Politics, Journal of Historical Sociology, and Turkish Studies among others. Some of her recent publications focus on cusp states, rentier state theory, humanitarian diplomacy, regional Powers, regional rivalries, and regionalism. Caroline R. Bastian is a Research Scholar at the New York University Stern School of Business. She is based in the DHL Initiative on Globalization at NYU Stern’s Center for the Future of Management. Her research interests include international economic policy, data science, statistics, and data visualisation.

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Notes on Contributors

Rikard Bengtsson, Associate Professor of Political Science at Lund University, previously worked at Malmö University and the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. Between October 2012 and June 2016 on leave from the University, he worked for the Swedish government. As senior advisor in the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry for Foreign Affairs, he assisted the government with long-​term strategic and security-​political analysis. A recent book with co-​editor Malena Rosén-​Sundström is The EU and the Emerging Global Order: Essays in honour of Ole Elgström (2018). Morten Bøås is Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. He conducts fieldwork in Africa and the Middle East. His most recent books include Africa’s Insurgents: Navigating an Evolving Landscape (2017) and Doing Fieldwork in Areas of International Intervention: A Guide to Research in Closed and Violent Contexts (2020). Christopher Bolan is Professor of Middle East Security Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute of the United States Army War College where he researches, publishes, and teaches graduate level courses on American national security, foreign policy, and the Middle East. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and served as a foreign policy advisor on the Middle East and South Asia affairs for Vice Presidents Al Gore and Dick Cheney from 1997–​2003. He holds a PhD in International Relations and Master of Arts Degree in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Philip Brenner is a Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at American University (Washington, DC) and a member of the board of directors of the Washington Office on Latin America. Klaus Brummer holds the chair of International Relations at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-​ Ingolstadt. He served as co-​ editor-​ in-​ chief of the journal Foreign Policy Analysis (2018–​2020) and president of the Foreign Policy Analysis section of the International Studies Association (2015–​2016). He has published in a range of British, American, and European journals and is co-​editor of Foreign Policy Analysis Beyond North America (2015) and Foreign Policy as Public Policy? (2019). Pavin Chachavalpongpun is Associate Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. He is the chief editor of Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia –​all articles are translated from English into Japanese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesian, Filipino, and Vietnamese. A former diplomat, Pavin earned his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and his latest publication as editor is Coup, King, Crisis: A Critical Interregnum in Thailand (2020). His previous books include Reinventing Thailand: Thaksin and His Foreign Policy (2010). Michael Clarke is a Visiting Fellow at the Australia-​China Relations Institute, University of Technology, Sydney. His research focuses on Chinese governance of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Chinese foreign and security policy, and American grand strategy. He is the author of Xinjiang and China’s Rise in Central Asia –​A History (2011); editor, Terrorism and Counter-​Terrorism in China: Domestic and Foreign Policy Dimensions (2019); and editor with Matthew Sussex and Nick Bisley, The Belt and Road Initiative and the Future of Regional Order in the Indo-​Pacific (2020).

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Danny Cooper is a Lecturer at Griffith University, Australia, and the author of Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy: A Critical Analysis (2020). Nicholas J. Cull, originally from Britain –​PhD (History), University of Leeds –​launched the Centre on American Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1997. Moving to the University of Southern California in 2005, he was the founding director of the master’s programme in public diplomacy and part of the team recognised by the Department of State with the Benjamin Franklin award. From 2004 to 2019, he served as president of the International Association for Media and History and has provided advice and training in public diplomacy to a number of foreign ministries and cultural agencies around the world including those of the United States, Britain, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. His many books include Public Diplomacy: Foundations for Global Engagement in the Digital Age (2019). Mahrukh Doctor is Professor of Comparative Political Economy at the University of Hull. Her research interests include Brazilian political economy and foreign policy, and regionalism in Latin America (especially Mercosur). She is author of Business-​State Relations in Brazil: Challenges of the Port Reform Lobby (2017). She previously taught at Johns Hopkins University (SAIS-​ Europe) in Bologna, the Universidade Federal Fluminense, and Universidade de São Paulo; she was a Research Fellow, Centre for Brazilian Studies, Oxford, an economist at the World Bank, and received her doctorate from the University of Oxford in 2000. Andreas Freytag is Professor of Economics and Chair of Economic Policy at the Friedrich-​ Schiller-​University Jena and Honorary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch. He is also a member of the CESifo Research Network, an STIAS Fellow, director of Tutwa Europe, and associated with many international academic organisations and think tanks. He has published widely on economic policy, international trade policy, development economics, and international policy co-​ordination. He has been an economic consultant to numerous international organisations, domestic government agencies, and private clients. Sumit Ganguly is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and holds the Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. Professor Ganguly is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book co-​edited with M. Christopher Mason, is The Future of US-​ India Security Cooperation (2021). Jamie Gaskarth is Professor of Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Open University, Britain. He is co-​editor of the ISA Journal of Global Security Studies and the author/​ editor of six books on British foreign policy, intelligence, and international relations. His most recent book is Secrets and Spies: UK Intelligence Accountability after Iraq and Snowden (2020). Jonathan Goodhand is Professor of Conflict and Development Studies in the Department of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London, and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, School of Social and Political Sciences. He is the Principal Investigator of a four-​year Global Challenges Research Fund project “Drugs & (dis)order: Building sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war”. His research interests include the political economy of conflict, war economies, war to peace transitions, and the role of borderlands, with a particular focus on Central and South Asia.

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David Haglund is a Professor of Political Studies at Queen’s University, Kingston. His research focuses on transatlantic security and Canadian and American international security policy. Among his books are Latin America and the Transformation of U.S. Strategic Thought, 1936–​1940 (1984); Alliance Within the Alliance? Franco-​German Military Cooperation and the European Pillar of Defense (1991); Will NATO Go East? The Debate Over Enlarging the Atlantic Alliance (1996); The North Atlantic Triangle Revisited: Canadian Grand Strategy at Century’s End (2000); and The US “Culture Wars” and the Anglo-​American Special Relationship (2019). His current research project focuses on strategic culture and the Franco-​American security and defence relationship. Kai He is Professor of International Relations in the Griffith Asia Institute and Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University, Australia. He is also Visiting Chair/​ Professor of International Relations at Zhou Enlai School of Government, Nankai University, China (2018–​2021) and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2017–​2020). Christer Jönsson is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Lund University and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Academic Council on the United Nations System (2009–​2012). His publications include Communication in International Bargaining (1990); Essence of Diplomacy (co-​author 2005); and The Opening Up of International Organizations (co-​author 2013); along with several articles in leading academic journals. He has contributed to The SAGE Handbook of Diplomacy (2016) and The Encyclopedia of Diplomacy (2018). Jennifer Kandjii is a Ph.D. candidate [ABD] in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the University of Waterloo. Her research interests include migration and forced displacement, African politics and development, human rights in liberal democracies, and gender in international politics. Jennifer’s doctoral research examines the impact of migration governance and civil society on forcibly displaced populations in South Africa. She worked with the United Nations Refugee Agency [UNHCR] in Southern Africa, focusing on refugee protection and camp management in Namibia. Jennifer holds a Masters in Refugee Studies (with Distinction) from the University of East London. Christopher Layne is University Distinguished Professor of International Relations and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A & M University. He focuses on international relations theory, Great Power politics, American foreign policy, and grand strategy. The author of two books –​The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (2006), and, with Bradley A. Thayer, American Empire: A Debate (2006) –​his current project, After the Fall: International Politics, U.S. Grand Strategy, and the End of the Pax Americana, is forthcoming. He has also contributed extensively in a number of scholarly and policy journals. Professor Layne is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Editorial Board of both International Security and Security Studies. He previously served as an Intelligence Community Associate. Halvard Leira is Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. He has published extensively in English and Norwegian on international political thought, historiography, foreign policy, and diplomacy, more often than not with an emphasis on historical international relations. His work has appeared in a number of international journals. Professor Leira is co-​editor of the four-​volume SAGE Major Works collections, International Diplomacy

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(2013) and Historical International Relations (2015), as well as The Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations (2021). Christian Lequesne is Professor of Political Science at Sciences Po, Paris. Formerly Sciences Po-​LSE Professor at the European Institute, London School of Economics, he is also a regular Visiting Professor at LUISS University, Rome and the Diplomatic Academy, Vienna. A co-​ editor-​in-​chief of the European Review of International Studies, he has published and edited 20 books on European Union politics, the sociology of diplomatic practices, and French foreign policy. His latest edited book, with Simon Bulmer, is The Member States of the European Union, Third Edition (2020). Jeffrey Mankoff is a Distinguished Research Fellow at National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies. He is the author of Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics (2009, 2011) and Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security (2021). He also writes for Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, CNN, and other outlets. Until May 2020, Mankoff was a senior fellow with the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program. He holds a Ph.D. in diplomatic history from Yale University. Asa McKercher is Assistant Professor in the Department of History, Royal Military College of Canada, a senior fellow of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, and a fellow at Queen University’s Centre for International and Defence Policy. He is the author of Canada and the World since 1867 (2019) and Camelot and Canada: Canadian-​American Relations in the Kennedy Era (2016); and co-​editor of Undiplomatic History: Rethinking Canada in the World (2019) and Mike’s World: Lester B. Pearson and Canadian External Affairs (2017). Brendon O’Connor is Associate Professor in the United States Studies Centre and the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. His recent books include Anti-​Americanism and American Exceptionalism (2020); and with John Callaghan and Mark Phythian, Ideologies of American Foreign Policy (2019). Hendrik W. Ohnesorge is Managing Director at the Center for Global Studies and Research Fellow at the Chair in International Relations at the University of Bonn. His research interests include the phenomenon of soft power, global power shifts, United States foreign policy, and transatlantic relations, as well as the influence of decision-​makers on international politics and diplomatic history. His most recent book is Soft Power: The Forces of Attraction in International Relations (2020). Harsh V. Pant is a Professor of International Relations at King’s College London. He is Director of Studies and Head of the Strategic Studies Programme at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. He is also Director (Honorary) of the Delhi School of Transnational Affairs at Delhi University. His current research focuses on Asian security issues. His most recent books include New Directions in India’s Foreign Policy: Theory and Praxis (2019), India’s Nuclear Policy (2018), The US Pivot and Indian Foreign Policy (2015), and the Handbook of Indian Defence Policy (2020). Michael Roi is a strategic advisor to the Commander of the Canadian Joint Operations Command. His previous appointments include: Head of the Defence Planning Team in the Assistant Deputy Minister (Policy) organisation (2012–​2016); and the Director of Strategic xvi

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Operations Analysis on the Strategic Joint Staff (2007–​2012). Dr. Roi joined the Operational Research Division in July 2002 as a strategic analyst. He is a graduate of the Senior Executives in National and International Security program from Harvard Kennedy School (2009) and, in 2019, was awarded the Canadian Joint Operations Command Commendation. Henry Rome is a senior Iran and Global Macro analyst at Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm. His scholarship has appeared in Diplomacy & Statecraft, the Non-​ Proliferation Review, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and Foreign Affairs. He is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Cambridge. The views presented here are personal. Ash Rossiter is Assistant Professor of International Security at Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi. He has published widely on technology and international security, strategy, warfare, and the modern Middle East. His work has appeared in peer-​reviewed journals such as Intelligence & National Security, Defence Studies, and Diplomacy & Statecraft, as well as many other outlets. Before entering academia, he pursued a career across the Middle East spanning both governmental and private sectors. Michael Rühle is Head of the Hybrid Challenges and Energy Security Section in the Emerging Security Challenges Division in NATO’s International Staff. Previously he was Head, Speechwriting, and Senior Political Advisor in the NATO Secretary General’s Policy Planning Unit. Before joining NATO’s International Staff in 1991, Mr. Rühle was a Volkswagen-​Fellow at the Konrad-​Adenauer-​Stiftung in Germany and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the United States. He has published widely on international security issues in, amongst others, Comparative Strategy, International Affairs, NATO Review, Parameters, and Politico. Erwin A. Schmidl is a historian in the Austrian Ministry of Defence and Director of the Institute for Strategy and Security Policy at the Austrian National Defence Academy in Vienna. He also teaches at the Institute of Contemporary History of the University of Innsbruck. His most recent book is Hitlers Spion, Österreichs Stimme: die zwei Leben des Wilhelm Hendricks-​ Hamburger (1917–​2011) (2020). Jina Shim is completing her MA in Ethics, Peace and Human Rights at American University (Washington, DC). Joseph M. Siracusa, formerly Professor of Human Security and International Diplomacy, RMIT University, is Adjunct Professor of Political History and International Security, Curtin University, Perth, and President Emeritus of Australia’s Council for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. With over 45 years dedicated to Australian higher education and research, Professor Siracusa’s expertise lies in nuclear weaponry and non-​proliferation, international security and diplomacy, the war on terror, human security and globalisation, and presidential politics. He has published over 50 books with translations into Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese. Ronald Bruce St John has lectured at the Diplomatic Academy of Peru on a repeat basis and served as a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and media outlets. His publications on Peru include The Foreign Policy of Peru (1992), La Política Exterior del Perú (1999), Toledo’s Peru: Vision and Reality (2010), and “The Peruvian Response to the Rise of xvii

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Brazil: Developing a Strategic Relationship”, in Foreign Policy Responses to the Rise of Brazil (2016). His most recent book is Bolivia: Geopolitics of a Landlocked State (2019). Matthew Sussex is Adjunct Associate Professor at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University, Australia. His research specialisations centre around security studies with a particular focus on Russia and Eurasia that incorporates Australian foreign and security policy and Great Power competition in Asia and Europe. Amongst his recent publications are as editor, Conflict in the Former USSR (2012); with Matt Killingsworth and Jan Pakulski Violence and the State (2015); edited with Roger E. Kanet, Power, Politics and Confrontation in Eurasia (2015); and Russia, Eurasia and the New Geopolitics of Energy (2015). Yuki Tatsumi is a Senior Fellow and Co-​Director of the East Asia Program and Director of the Japan Program at the Stimson Center. She previously worked as special assistant for political affairs at the Embassy of Japan, Washington. In 2012, she received the Letter of Appreciation from the Ministry of National Policy of Japan for her contribution in advancing mutual understanding between the United States and Japan. A native of Tokyo, she holds degrees from International Christian University in Tokyo and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Andrew S. Thompson is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Balsillie School of International Affairs, and Special Advisor to the World Refugee Council. He has written two books on human rights –​On the Side of the Angels: Canada and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (2017) and In Defence of Principles: NGOs and Human Rights in Canada (2010) –​ along with numerous journal articles and book chapters. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Waterloo. Oliver Walton is a Senior Lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath specialising in the political economy of war-​to-​peace transitions, NGO politics, conflict, and peacebuilding. His research has focused on the political economy of war to peace transitions, civil society, NGOs, and NGO legitimacy. Recent work has examined the role of borderlands and brokers in post-​war transitions in Nepal and Sri Lanka and the role of alcohol in conflict-​ affected regions. Leo Wangler is an economist working mainly on innovation, industrial, and technology policy issues. He advises, evaluates, and conducts research on behalf of the EU Commission, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. Wangler is senior research associate at VDI/​VDE Innovation +​Technik GmbH. In the context of previous and current activities, he is the author of numerous studies and scientific articles on topics including digitalisation, innovation financing, start-​ups, industrial policy and energy transition. Aiden Warren is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. His works include publications on the areas of international security, United States national security and foreign policy, American politics, international relations –​ especially Great Power politics –​and issues associated with arms control and emerging technologies. He is a Fulbright Scholar and has spent extensive time in Washington, DC completing

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several fellowships including at George Washington University. He is the author of US Foreign Policy and China: Security Challenges Across the Bush, Obama and Trump Administrations (2021). Song Xue is Assistant Professor of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University, China. Her research focuses on Indonesian politics and foreign relations, ethnic studies, and China-​ASEAN relations. Her research has appeared in Contemporary Southeast Asia, Asian Ethnicity, and journals in Chinese. Baohui Zhang is Professor of Political Science at Lingnan University, Hong Kong and was the Director of Lingnan’s Centre for Asian Pacific Studies (2010–​2020). His research interests include Chinese foreign policy, East Asian international relations, Sino-​American relations, and nuclear deterrence. A recent book is China’s Assertive Nuclear Posture: State Security in an Anarchic International Order (2015). He is currently studying the effects of polarity change on Sino-​American relations to understand similarities and dissimilarities between their strategic competition and Cold War Soviet-​American rivalry.

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ABBREVIATIONS

ASEAN BRIC BRICS EC EMS ESEU EU ISAF JCPOA Mercosur MFA NATO nd NGO OECD OSCE PESCO PMC SCO TTP UN UNESCO WHO

Association of Southeast Asian Nations Brazil, Russia, India, and China Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa European Community European Monetary System Eurasian Economic Union European Union International Security Assistance Force [Afghanistan] Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Southern Common Market Ministry of Foreign Affairs North Atlantic Treaty Organisation no date Non-​governmental Organisations Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development Organisation for Security and Co-​operation in Europe Permanent Structured Co-​operation Private Military Corporations Shanghai Co-​operation Organisation Trans-​Pacific Partnership United Nations United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation World Health Organisation

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PROLOGUE Diplomacy and Statecraft in an Era of Increasing International Anarchy B.J.C. McKercher

Errors in the policy of the cabinets of the Great Powers bring no immediate punishment, either in St. Petersburg or Berlin, but they are never harmless. The logic of history is even more exact in its revisions than our chief audit office. Otto von Bismarck, 18981 Since the first edition of this Handbook appeared in 2012, international politics have continued to change markedly. Despite the rise of internationalism after 1945 and the Cold War’s end in 1989–​1991, international politics reverted to an “international anarchy” after the turn of the century. Moreover, Great Power rivalry increasingly dominated the new international order that evolved –​and is still evolving –​after the mid-​1990s. In essence, the collapse of the bi-​polar world shaped by the United States and Soviet Russia and their competing alliance systems moulded the architecture of this international order by the recrudescence of the multi-​polarity that marked global politics for at least three centuries before 1939. Quite simply, in the rough decade after 2012, this multi-​polarity has become more extreme and the international atmosphere progressively more muddled in which states, multilateral organisations, and non-​governmental organisations function. Most important, the United States of President Donald Trump, in power from 2017 to 2021, pursued an “America First” strategy harkening back in some ways to American isolationism before 1941. America’s international position weakened and, although this attenuation began in the first years on the new millennium, the Trump Administration’s foreign policy added significantly to the process. These developments opened possibilities for its rivals, particularly Great Powers like the Peoples Republic of China and Vladimir Putin-​led Russia, lesser ones like Iran and North Korea, multilateral regional organisations like the European Union [EU] and Mercosur, and terrorist/​national liberation movements to exploit American disinterest by expanding or protecting their interests. Whilst still an important element of international politics in social and humanitarian endeavours, the United Nations [UN] seems to have less relevance in maintaining peace and security.

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In this context, the means by which states and non-​states are meeting this growing uncertainty –​diplomacy and statecraft –​has not changed, something best grasped by contrasting the present state of affairs with diplomatic history and international relations theory. Diplomacy, the actions and expertise of how Powers and organisations handle international relations, has at its core not much altered since the advent of the modern state system through the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Neither has statecraft, the classical means of managing state responses to the international situation through formulating foreign policy, marshalling economic and military resources, and devising grand strategy to co-​ordinate all of them. What has changed are the challenges of an evolving international order that diplomacy and statecraft need to confront. Historical studies demonstrate that such problems are not unique to the first quarter of the twenty-​first century. European crises over 300 years after 1648 –​everything from the War of the Austrian Succession to the defeat of Napoleonic France to peace-​making at Paris after the First World War –​forced diplomats and statesmen to build new expressions of international stability. It was the same in East Asia, say, with the weakening of Imperial rule in China after the 1839–​1841 Opium War or the end of the Tokugawa shogunate by the 1860s and the rise of modern imperialist Japan in its wake. In what is now the developing world, change also confronted a range of leaders, from the fall of indigenous polities on every continent to colonialism beginning in the sixteenth century to European and American expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the advent of independent regimes in the first two decades of the Cold War. The essence of diplomacy and statecraft –​admittedly with some periodic new wrinkles, some potent, like the pursuit of human rights, xenophobic national self-​determination, or “soft” power –​has never changed. The series of chapters in this volume attest to the increasing international anarchy –​ ironically, a term first popularised after the First World War to explain its genesis.2 Built around an analysis of Great Power rivalry and the machinations of alliance politics –​Wilhelmine Germany, the Habsburg Empire, and Italy on one side in the Triple Alliance and, on the other, the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and tsarist Russia –​the argument was that the anarchy of Great Power rivalry before 1914 led inevitably to general war in Europe. A range of explanations for the 1914 “July crisis” have emerged since before 1918: the culpability of individual Great Power governments, the calculations of key decision-​makers in the two opposing coalitions and those of their allies, strategic failure, misperception, crises in other regions –​in this case, the Balkans –​that embittered Great Power relations, nationalism, economic and imperial competition, and more.3 Some agreed that the anarchy led to inevitable war; others were less deterministic. One recent and compelling assessment sees the guilt for the First World War spread amongst the belligerent Powers that all “sleep walked” to war.4 None of the contributions to this collection sees an inevitable war, although a few argue that the Western Powers, especially within their alliances, should better prepare their military capabilities to meet one; important in these and some other analyses is that strengthened armed forces are an effective deterrent to aggressive adversaries. In all of these observations, there is an emerging view that the notion of “superpowers” no longer exists. About this development, there is no doubt. The possession of nuclear weapons girded by firm alliances and with bases abroad that allow the global projection of strength are no longer the sine qua non for being “super”. Three Powers might have pretentions to this designation, but the reality of the 2020s and probably beyond for some time shows such beliefs as hollow. Post-​Soviet Russia certainly is no longer super –​its parlous economy, replacement of lost allies with client states, and territorial losses including the glacis of pro-​Moscow Eastern European regimes established after 1944 are problematic for the Kremlin.

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Since Xi Jinping rose to power as supreme leader in China in 2013, the country has increasingly pursued aggressive foreign policy –​so-​called “wolf warrior” diplomacy5 –​to cement its claim as the leading Asian Power, underpin its ambitions to global Power status, and rebuff aggressively any foreign criticism of its domestic policies, especially those touching human and political rights. China is also making substantial efforts to move beyond its regional hegemony by supplementing its decided military power through the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI] to build economic and strategic links with parts of Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North America, and Latin America. Like those of Russia, however, Beijing’s strategic relationships are not with firm allies but with less-​than-​loyal client states; and with a self-​perception as a hegemon in the offing by employing wolf warrior diplomacy and the BRI, it has consciously created adversaries beyond the United States in South Asia and the Pacific. With Democratic or Republican Washington’s sometime diffidence towards external military commitments –​and Trump’s antipathy to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] fostering perceptions of uncertainty about the United States amongst American allies and in the wider world –​and rising numbers of Americans no longer seeing value in the liberal international order, America’s claim to superpower status lays shattered. It is certainly first amongst equals, but equal as a Great Power amongst other Great Powers. Of course, definitions of what constitutes and does not constitute a Great Power abound.6 But perhaps more instructive is how the pre-​eminent nineteenth century realist diplomat who functioned successfully in another era of Great Power rivalry, Otto von Bismarck, looked at the issue: “All [foreign] politics reduces itself to this formula: try to be one of three, as long as the world is governed by the unstable equilibrium of five great powers.”7 What this means in tangible form is that Great Powers are simply recognisable by their power and influence. Although it would discomfort him to support any view of Bismarck –​he disliked him intensely –​the iconoclastic British historian, A.J.P. Taylor, argued, “Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one”.8 This identification has been the case since the rise of modern Great Powers through the advent of the 1648 Westphalian peace settlement that ended the Thirty Years War. In the course of the almost four centuries since then –​as there is at present –​a hierarchy of these Powers always existed. In the mid-​seventeenth century, Britain, France, Habsburg Spain and Austria, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire; in the late nineteenth century, Austria-​Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Italy; and before the Second World War, Britain, France, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, militaristic Japan, Soviet Russia, and the United States. As the 2020s unfolds, the latest pyramid is equally short: at the top, the United States and China; beneath them, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and Japan. In addition, and significantly in an age still with powerful vestiges of internationalism, the multilateral EU can be considered a Great Power of the second rank given both its economic and financial strength and member-​states as allies within NATO. Beneath the Great Powers are the middle and lesser Powers. One contributor has pointed out when assessing the position of Canada as a middle Power in the present international system, its foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, decried a “Metternichian world defined … by a ruthless struggle between great powers governed solely by the narrow, short-​term and mercantilist pursuit of self-​interest”. Although understanding neither the reconstruction of Europe after the Napoleonic wars nor Prince Metternich’s “system” that looked for Great Power balance,9 she called for the protection and preservation of the multilateral rules-​based system –​unsurprisingly and quite hypocritically for the minister, this system would benefit narrow Canadian national interests.10 In this context, whilst multilateralism is not going to disappear as it is now an immutable component of international architecture even with fewer rules, the advent of

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international anarchy and its deepening sees amplified Great Power rivalry. For instance, whilst expanding Sino-​American enmity might not lead to war –​America has regional support from its Indo-​Pacific allies concerned about Chinese hard-​line economic diplomacy, expansion into the South China Sea, and apparent irredentism about the Sino-​Indian frontier –​the threat of armed conflict is possible. It might occur from a breakdown of relations over a miscue from one side or the other, the need to meet calculated armed aggression, or if facing collapse and hoping to preserve the regime, China’s client state of North Korea threatens the United States homeland with nuclear weapons or the security and sovereignty of America’s ally, South Korea.11 And what is so for Sino-​American relations is equally so for the other Great Powers, although only Russia now seems willing to use armed force to expand its territory and strengthen its strategic position on its western marches. Moscow used armed force to seize Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and remains involved in supporting pro-​Russian Ukrainian militias in seeking to detach eastern Ukraine from the rest of the country –​and, perhaps, force the collapse of the Ukrainian government so Russia can create another regional client state.12 After ignoring the results of a general election in August 2020 that voted in the opposition, the authoritarian regime in Belarus crushed dissent, faced Western sanctions, and looked to Putin for diplomatic, economic, and military support. In all of this, the Western Powers including both the Barack Obama and Trump United States and the EU imposed heavy sanctions against Putin’s regime.13 Concurrently, Russia built up its forces on the frontiers with the Baltic States –​all NATO members –​suggesting their annexation. NATO responded by a major deployment to the region to deter further Russian adventurism –​although from the Russian perspective, actions in the Ukraine, Belarus, and adjacent to the Baltic States are a seeming effort to reacquire historic territories formerly tsarist and Soviet.14 But Moscow can act only if an opportunity emerges –​say a crisis elsewhere that diverts Western attention or should the resolve of Europe’s NATO Powers and that of its North American allies erode. Russia’s problem is its relative weakness vis-​à-​vis the United States and NATO, requiring efforts since 2014 to improve Moscow’s political and economic relations with Beijing as counterpoise. In this dimension, however, Russia clearly is the junior partner of an entente –​not an alliance –​and a client state. In Europe, the triplice of Britain, France, and Germany as the locus of power in the EU ended with the British decision by plebiscite to leave the organisation in June 2016. It took four and one-​half years of messy domestic political squabbling in Britain –​and three prime ministers –​ tied to seeming interminable diplomacy with the EU for Britain to exit the organisation on 31 January 2020.15 Brexit has two dimensions: one each for the British and Europeans. In Britain, support for leaving the EU involved arguments about ensuring the country’s sovereignty, criticism of supposedly heavy financial losses in the form of dues, and a backlash against Brussel’s bureaucracy; importantly, nevertheless, whilst England voted for departure, the other parts of the “United Kingdom” –​Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland –​voted to remain. Although still a key member of NATO, London is now in the midst of negotiating trade agreements with a range of other Powers, including the EU –​a long and difficult process in which the British economy will long remain relatively weak within the G-​7. Moreover, nationalists who control Scotland’s regional government will almost certainly move to separate from Britain and, as an independent state, remain within the EU.16 Even if this bid fails –​as one did in 2014 –​Britain will see the domestic cohesion crucial for effective foreign policy diminish for some time. And for a Power that has sought security since the reign of Elizabeth I by pursuing the balance of power on the continent,17 Britain’s ability to influence intra-​European politics is lessened significantly. For the EU, Britain’s departure will probably create some dilution of its international strength, but in the short term –​say, less than a decade –​it can make up for any economic and political xxiv

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deficiencies with the effective leadership of Germany and France, both more influential than before by benefitting from British withdrawal. Yet, for the EU and its supporters in Europe, Brexit has given succour to some political elements in member-​states that essentially parrot the rhetoric of British Brexiteers –​safeguard sovereignty, demand national fiscal management, and denounce over-​reach by Brussels. In France, for instance, the ultra-​conservative Rassemblement national led by Marine Le Pen –​who finished second in the 2017 presidential elections –​ remains highly critical of the EU, holds decidedly anti-​American views, wants France to leave NATO, and seeks to re-​order the international economic system by replacing the World Trade Organisation and eliminating the International Monetary Fund.18 Alas, Le Pen’s vision of a Great Power France is of a pre-​1940 vintage, when it last occupied the first rank. Regardless of such misperceptions of national strength, such groups abound in other EU member-​states –​ some seeking reform of the organisation and others leaving it –​which like post-​Brexit Britain reckons that protecting national sovereignty with a smaller independent economy outside the multilateral EU is essential for national amour-​propre and a made-​at-​home foreign policy.19 Tied to some EU member-​states adopting illiberal domestic policies to curtail political dissent and eschew established EU guidelines in accepting large numbers of refugees and migrants from the war-​torn Moslem Middle East and North Africa –​Poland and Hungary talk about protecting their Christian cultures –​some key ideals of European integration promoted after the end of the Cold War are being jettisoned.20 Like in Britain, the result is the possibility of a weakening of the cohesion needed for EU member-​states and the organisation to function more effectively in their overall diplomacy. The Russians will certainly move to exploit this situation, and they have friends in Europe: Le Pen for one sees Franco-​Russian rapprochement as a positive result in the Rassemblement national’s desire to move away from EU multilateralism and America’s orbit.21 In the past decade, the world’s hot spots have not cooled. In the Middle East, there has been a rapprochement between Israel and several Arab countries: particularly the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. But the regional balance of power remains unsteady as the two leading Powers –​Israel and Iran –​remain at swords drawn.22 The Iranians utilise proxies like Hamas, the Palestinian nationalist organisation, to harass Israel from bases primarily in Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza. They also support Hamas forces in Syria that are propping up the regime in its long-​running civil war. The issue is not for Hamas to defeat Israel militarily –​the asymmetry of forces and weapons is heavily in Israeli’s failure; rather, it is to invite robust Israeli retaliation and then win propaganda points in the wider world to undercut Israeli support there by publicising the deaths of women and children and destruction of housing, hospitals, schools, and more. Shi’ite Iran also is competing with Sunni Saudi Arabia for the leading role in the Arab world. Thus, in the Yemeni civil war that broke out in 2014 and seven years later continued into the 2020s in full force, Tehran backs the Houthi rebels and Riyadh the government.23 Like Hamas operations, the Iranians probably do not want an end to this struggle; prolonging the war to tarnish Saudi Arabia’s international reputation is the goal. This strategy has worked: on 27 January 2021, the new Joe Biden Administration in the United States froze arms sales to Saudi Arabia and its United Arab Emirates ally and terminated Washington’s support for the pro-​government coalition.24 Nevertheless, other Powers will sell to Saudi Arabia. And looking to maintain the regional status quo and limit and weaken revolutionary Iran’s influence in the Middle East, the Saudis will continue using their pivotal position as a major petroleum producer, their economic strength, and the soft power of Sunni ascendency –​they control two of Islam’s most sacred holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Working always to have influence in maintaining the Middle Eastern balance, Israel does all possible to curtail Iranian diplomatic, strategic, and military capabilities.25 Fighting Tehran’s xxv

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proxies is one part, unleashing as much destruction whenever short-​term conflicts emerge –​ like against Hamas in a devastating outbreak in May 2021 –​regardless of criticism from abroad. It ties such actions to propaganda about protecting the lone expression of liberal democracy and the post-​Holocaust Jewish homeland in the Middle East. In the long run going back to the Iranian revolution in 1979, it does all it can overtly and covertly to enervate Iran’s economy and military strength. Working with the Americans but as much by themselves –​they cannot always rely on the so-​called “Israel lobby” in the United States –​they do several things. These include cyber attacks on both Iranian scientific establishments advancing nuclear technology and national infrastructure, supporting their own anti-​Iranian proxies like the People’s Mujahedin, finding common cause with key anti-​Iranian Arab Powers –​like agreements with Saudi Arabia brokered by Washington in February 2020 –​assassinating Iranian scientists, and contingency planning for major military operations against Iran should they be necessary. Although long-​standing Arab-​Israeli issues in various guises have made the Middle East unstable –​and the advent of the “Arab spring” in 2011 that saw several dictatorships fall and the civil wars in Syria and Libya add to this instability –​two Trump Administration ham-​ handed policies proved decidedly unhelpful. In December 2017, the president announced that Jerusalem constituted the Israeli capital and the American Embassy would move there from Tel Aviv.26 Certainly playing domestic politics hoping that support from his Christian right-​ wing supporters and Jewish Americans would benefit the Republican Party in the 2018 elections –​Jewish American voters were unswayed –​this initiative made no practical sense. Jews, Christians, and Moslems each see Jerusalem as a holy city and portions of it have Palestinian neighbourhoods. Trump’s plan came without consulting the Palestinian Authority –​ it wants East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital; there was no effective sounding of American friends in the Middle East like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; nor were there substantive discussions with American allies with Middle Eastern interests. Whilst these friends and allies did not follow suit –​the Biden Administration will continue Trump’s policy –​Trump’s initiative only deepened Palestinian and general Moslem antipathy towards the United States and created a needless problem in the already difficult effort to find an overall settlement. In terms of Iran, on 8 May 2018, Trump then took the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA] –​the so-​called Iran nuclear deal –​concluded in July 2015 between Iran, on one side, and all the Great Powers, including the EU, on the other.27 The Obama Administration had a central role in this success, which, in staged commitments between eight and one-​half and 25 years, would monitor Iran’s nuclear programme –​­enrichment, nuclear stockpile, advanced centrifuge research and development, and its Arak reactor –​with a Joint Commission. Violations would lead to sanctions. Iran’s pay off was the relaxing of existing UN, American, and EU sanctions if Tehran met the staged conditions, along with the cancellation of all UN resolutions “targeting Iran’s nuclear program … on implementation day”.28 Trump’s announcement came just before the American mid-​term election campaign and as the long electoral road to the 2020 presidential elections began. Playing on his electoral supporters’ nationalist and anti-​Moslem beliefs, he listed several reasons for doing so: Iran’s regime was duplicitous; it was evading JCPOA strictures; it continued to attack American interests; ending sanctions would strengthen Iran; and more. The reality is probably more prosaic. Trump had a pathological hatred of Obama.29 One can only speculate why, but the result was Trump’s determination after taking office to overturn all of Obama’s domestic and foreign achievements. He did so with the JCPOA but, unschooled in statecraft as he was, had nothing with which to replace it other than additional sanctions and harsh words; and in practical terms, American abrogation limited the Joint Commission’s authority. The other Great Powers continued to support the agreement, but Iran used the situation to seek revisions to its conditions. Whilst xxvi

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a certain degree of diplomatic flux ensued with the Americans on the outside of the process, the Biden Administration re-​confirmed in April 2021 that it wishes America to re-​join the agreement and diplomatic activity to this end began.30 A modified agreement will certainly emerge, but it will be a lesser one than the original. More telling, Iranian-​American relations will not improve, uncertainty about Iran’s nuclear intentions will remain, JCPOA is not immutable –​a new Republican Administration after the American elections in 2024 could again have America withdraw –​and the Middle Eastern balance of power will remain fragile. In South and East Asia, the potential for a major crisis ensuing has not diminished over the past decade because of Great Power rivalry in the pursuit and protection of narrow regional interests. In large part, this is a consequence of the increasing intensity of China’s wolf warrior diplomacy. For 70 years, rivalry between Beijing and New Delhi to be the dominant Asian Power have marked Sino-​Indian relations and affected the South Asian balance of power. The two Powers first competed with one another for leadership in the post-​colonial Afro-​Asian world at the Bandung conference in April 1955 by supporting an idealistic diplomatic programme built around neutrality, non-​alignment, and building economic and political ties with minimal Western involvement in the developing world.31 But the Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, wanted more; for both domestic and foreign policy reasons, his regime’s army invaded Indian territory and bloodied India in a short war in 1962.32 With India then perceived as the lesser of the two Powers, China demonstrated its dominance in East and South Asia and acted as a regional hegemon. Since then, there have been several Sino-​Indian border skirmishes –​one from May 2020 to January 2021 was particularly intense33 –​with India always on the defensive. Beijing’s goal is not to destroy Indian power, but to weaken it and lessen its image –​that both Powers have nuclear weapons seems to restrict any major escalation. But the possibility of major armed struggle lies beneath the surface precisely because of the varied reasons that led to the outbreak of Great Power war in 1914: strategic failure, misperception, crises in an adjacent region –​in this case, Afghanistan or Pakistan –​that embittered Great Power relations, nationalism, or economic and strategic competition. Pakistan also exists as a major Indian adversary in the region. Beginning in 1947 with the end of British India, independent Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan have gone to war three times and have had several major skirmishes over Kashmir, a Moslem-​majority region given to New Delhi in the partition of the colony; India has also dealt with Kashmiri separatists.34 In this context, Indo-​Pakistani relations have remained septic. When civil war broke out in East Pakistan in 1971, India intervened on the rebel side and helped create the new state of Bangladesh, thus weakening Pakistan.35 This has added to the poison in Indo-​Pakistani relations; and because Pakistan also possesses unstable government and nuclear weapons, the expansion of a Kashmiri dispute could erupt into major war. In addition, terrorism might provoke a major conflict. In 2008, Pakistan-​based terrorists undertook an attack in the heart of Bombay that saw more than 166 killed and 300 wounded.36 Supportive of India, American intervention along with British efforts averted a major crisis.37 The Pakistanis promised to root out the terrorists, but their efforts were lengthy and rarely effective. Thus, this settlement did not offer a long-​term Indo-​Pakistani solution. Further instability has come to this region as the Biden Administration and its NATO allies fully withdrew their troops and, thus, military support for the Afghan government on 30 August 2021. This constituted the dregs of a poisoned chalice –​Trump had ordered all American troops out of the country by 21 May 2021; Biden delayed full withdrawal till late August to try to give the Kabul government extra time to consolidate and strengthen.38 This ploy did not work, as Afghan government control evaporated within days of American withdrawal and the insurgent Taliban and its forces seized power in the country. The Taliban had controlled Afghanistan prior xxvii

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to 9/​11 and provided safe haven for Al Qaeda before and after the attack. The Americans and their allies then overthrew the Taliban regime and, for almost 20 years, with NATO support tried to create effective government in Afghanistan whilst fighting against a now Taliban insurgency. It was America’s longest war and the appetite of American leaders and their people to continue nation building in South Asia had reached its limits. In the 2020s, if not beyond, Afghanistan will see the Powers surrounding it –​China, India, Pakistan, and Iran –​seek to influence its fate by efforts defined by differing national interests and, thus, ongoing instability.39 In East Asia and the Pacific, China’s wolf warrior diplomacy has several dimensions. First is ensuring that its neighbours, the United States, and American allies respect what it considers its territorial integrity. This translates into keeping Hong Kong firmly under Beijing’s control –​in apparent violation of the agreements by which Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1999 –​ and maintain the fiction that Taiwan is an integral part of the People’s Republic.40 Concurrently, the Xi government has embarked on harsh measures in China’s western marches to force the Uighurs and other minorities into accepting China’s culture and language –​there are, of course, political overtones; and concentration camps are an instrument of Chinese suppression.41 The Hong Kong and Uighur imbroglios have caused decided anti-​Chinese feelings in the Indo-​ Pacific region and the West embodied by the EU, the United States, a number of neighbouring states, and Australia and Canada. In true wolf warrior style, Beijing does not care, saying, for example, that Western employment of the Uighur issue is “an attempt to disrupt China from within”, there are “destabilizing forces in Hong Kong”, and simultaneously pointing to supposed Western human rights violations.42 For the foreseeable future, these issues constitute an incurable diplomatic chancre that will impede any substantive Indo-​Pacific and Western reconciliation with China. In the Southwest Pacific, China is seeking to make the South China Sea its sovereign territory, a policy that has brought the United States and its allies into the mix, as well as states on the Sea’s littoral: Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam.43 A significant amount of international trade passes through these waters. In fact, Chinese policy has led to the establishment of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue in 2017 composed of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States –​an earlier rendition appeared in 2007, but died when Sino-​American tensions discomforted Australia’s government led by Kevin Rudd. The Quad is now a cornerstone in the Indo-​Pacific region and has had Washington’s backing since the Obama Administration.44 Another version emerged in September 2021: AUKUS, a tripartite defensive alliance of Australia, Britain, and the United States, with a strong submarine component, designed to deter Chinese aggression.45 The point of both agreements is to contain Chinese aggressiveness in the South China Sea and western Pacific. The balance of power in this region remains as delicate as that in South Asia. In all of this increasing international anarchy, life for all Powers Great, middle, and small remains. As this volume attests, a range of middle and lesser Powers continue to pursue their own foreign policies and defend and extend their national interests in the shadow the Great Power rivalry. Some are allies of the United States like Australia and Canada –​and, again, China and Russia have no allies; they have client states whose loyalty might be fluid in a major crisis. In Europe, Austria, given independence in the early Cold War by the British, French, Russians, and Americans, remains a Western ally but must always look to the East in determining its foreign policy. With Ankara’s leadership wanting to make Turkey the leading Power in the Middle East, its leadership is balancing between NATO, of which Turkey is a member, and Russia, with which it has a contiguous border. It seems to be playing one off against the other for regional advantage. The developing Powers in Latin America and Southeast Asia have always had to confront Great Power machinations, and they continue to do so. xxviii

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Despite the increasing international anarchy and the weakening of the liberal international order, multilateralism has not disappeared, although it is under attack from nationalists in various Powers –​like Le Pen in France –​and some governments like that of Trump. In some senses, international organisations like the EU, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank are too robust to collapse –​they are there for the next decade and most certainly longer –​as they have a key place in the international economy. For the United States and Western Powers, these economic organisations will serve as an effective counterweight to China’s BRI –​experts remain divided over whether this is part of a new Cold War between China and the United States.46 In areas outside acute Sino-​Western dispute, like Latin America –​China and the West do compete there –​the creation of Mercosur, the Southern Common Market, is an expression of regional diplomacy to improve the economic and social well-​being of its citizens. In the midst of overcoming a number of problems, some created by COVID, it will remain in place in South America. Whilst some South American states like Peru have been pursuing a reasonably effective independent foreign policy in the anarchy and before, the chief difficulty in South America remains Venezuela, with a corrupt authoritarian government and failed economy –​ although a founding member of Mercosur, the organisation has suspended its membership because of the regime’s failure to respect electoral results. It will not recover soon. One striking element suffusing all facets of the advent of the present international anarchy –​ Great Power rivalry, problems in the Middle East, South and East Asia, and the Pacific, and a weakening of the liberal international order –​is an argument about the decline of the United States as the pre-​eminent global Power and maybe its replacement by China.47 Although another exists about China’s collapse,48 the role and position of the United States is fundamental. The rise and fall of Great Powers has long been an issue of interest to international historians and others. A major study by Paul Kennedy in 1987 looked at the fates of all the Great Powers since 1500 –​Hapsburg Spain, France in various guises from Louis XIII to the Third Republic, Prussia/​Germany, Britain, China, the Ottoman Empire, and so on.49 It was a heavily economic determinist analysis, a key point being that the United States emerged as the greatest of the Great Powers by 1918 because of the wealth it acquired during the First World War and its overwhelming agricultural, industrial, and financial strength. Like Kennedy’s analysis, most considerations of America as a Great Power are largely economic determinist, which is a weak reed on which to understand international power. In response to Kennedy’s analysis, a group of historians of British foreign policy compared Britain and the United States from before the First World War to the Second, concluding that America might have had the potential to be a major Power in 1918 but had not replaced Britain as the world’s only global Power; Britain with its Empire was unrivalled.50 The key issues, especially in the interwar period, are instructive about international power. First, Britain’s economy in international finance was equal to the American one, and the British competed favourably with the United States in investments abroad –​and in China after 1918, they successfully repelled an effort by American banks to dominate the Chinese economy. Second, strategically, in an era when sea power was crucial to projecting power globally, the Royal Navy remained larger and far better deployed than the United States Navy. Only Britain possessed bases around the world from which to project both naval and military power –​the Americans admittedly won the right to full naval equality with Britain at the 1930 London naval conference but because of the cost of naval construction never built to that level and did not equal the Royal Navy until 1942. Third, politically, Britain was a member of the League of Nations, stood at the head of its Empire that was transforming into the Commonwealth, and rarely avoided working with other Powers to protect and extend British interests and maintain the international status quo. America, on the other hand, was isolationist, something entrenched in August 1935 with xxix

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the first Neutrality Law forced by Congress on the Franklin Roosevelt Administration; nonetheless, throughout the interwar period, neither Republican nor Democrat Washington offered little of substance in international politics. Most essential in all of this was that the British had the will to intervene abroad to protect their national and Imperial interests, for instance, in China in 1926. Outside of its emerging empire in Latin America where no first class Power was a threat, the United States simply did not possess the will to take any firm position on any issue –​except collecting war debts from its former allies after 1919 that only weakened other Powers, damaged the international economy, and led to abject failure by 1934. To transpose these issues on to the United States and the rise of China at the dawn of the 2020s, the Americans have all of the requisites of power that the British enjoyed before the stress of fighting the Second World War and the dissolution of their Empire saw Britain lose its global Power status. Thus, with the willingness to engage more after the political demise of Trump, and recognising that pre-​eminence is not omnipotence –​Trump and his advisors believed the opposite with unfavourable results for the United States and its allies and friends –​the Biden Administration offers a return to earlier foreign policy nostrums. Consequently, despite China’s economic gains, the United States has the world’s leading economy and, with globalisation, is a trading giant. It has the best-​financed armed forces in the world,51 the most advanced weapons, and, unlike China, access to bases around the globe via its alliances and some local agreements with other countries. Crucially, it is a leading member of a host of international organisations, most especially the UN and the economic bodies that it played a central role in setting up at the end of the Second World War; moreover, as the lynchpin of NATO, the Quad, and AUKUS it has a necessary strategic presence in Europe and the Indo-​Pacific. Although working to advance BRI, China remains largely a regional Asian Power. Biden went on a major visit to Europe in mid-​June 2021 to repair the damage to relations with American allies that Trump had done. He also met Putin in Geneva to say that Washington would not ignore unacceptable Russian behaviour –​apart from Russian pressure on Ukraine and the Baltic States, Russian-​ based hackers three weeks before had disrupted domestic American oil supplies.52 Regardless of Putin’s reaction, that vital issue of will returned to guide American foreign policy, demonstrating that America remains the greatest of the Great Powers in the era of increasing international anarchy. None of this is to say that within the next decade the contours of international politics will change in some particulars. There could be a return in the 2024 American elections of a Trump-​like Republican president with isolationist beliefs; in France, the advent of Le Pen to the presidency or a similar nationalist anti-​EU politician in another European country; or even the death of Putin and the rise of a more liberal Russian leadership. In the great course of international relations and for its handmaidens, diplomacy and statecraft, however, the anarchy is here to stay. Multilateralism will remain in some form, and humanitarian and other benevolent efforts through governments and non-​governmental organisations will make important contributions to meet human needs. As a reading of diplomatic history shows, this period has decided similarities to others in the past. This era of increasingly multi-​polar international anarchy is the reality for political leaders, diplomats, and the states and people they serve.

Notes 1 Otto von Bismarck [A.J. Butler, translator], Bismarck, The Man and the Statesman: Being the Reflections and Reminiscences of Otto Prince von Bismarck, Volume II (NY, 1898), 239. 2 G. Lowes Dickinson, International Anarchy, 1904–​1914 (NY, 1926). 3 Cf. Theodor Bitterauf, Deutsche politik und die entstehung des krieges (München, 1915); Camille Bloch, Les causes de la guerre mondiale; précis historique (Paris, 1933); Vincent Chambarlhac, Véronique Liard,

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An Era of Increasing International Anarchy Fritz Taubert, and Bertrand Tillier, eds., Veilles de guerre: Précurseurs politiques et culturels de la Grande Guerre (Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2018); Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des Kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/​18 (Düsseldorf, 1961); David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–​1914 (Oxford, NY, 1996); Hew Strachan, Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford, 2004). 4 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914 (NY, London, 2012). 5 Hon-​min Yau and Bheki Mthiza Patrick Dlamini, “Wolf Worries: China’s Representatives Embrace Aggressive New ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomacy”, Strategic Vision, 9/​146(June 2020): https://​en.csstw.org/​ upl​oad/​files/​SV46-​Wolf%20Worr​ies.pdf. 6 For instance, Daniel Abebe, “Great Power Politics and the Structure of Foreign Relations Law”, Chicago Journal of International Law, 125(2009), 125–​41; G.R. Berridge and John W. Young, “What Is ‘a Great Power’?”, Political Studies, 36/​2(2006), 224–​34; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and the Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (NY, 1987); Thomas G. Mahnken, Forging the Tools of 21st Century Great Power Competition (Washington, DC, 2020). 7 C.J. Bartlett, Peace, War and the European Powers, 1814–​1914 (London, 1996), 106. 8 A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London, 1961), 15. Then cf. idem, Bismarck, The Man and the Statesman (NY, 1955). 9 The classic study is Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–​1848 (Oxford, 1994), 443–​804 passim. Cf. James R. Sofka, “Metternich’s Theory of European Order: A Political Agenda for ‘Perpetual Peace’ ”, Review of Politics, 60/​1(1998), 115–​49. 10 “Address by Minister Freeland when receiving Foreign Policy’s Diplomat of the Year Award” (13 June 2018): www.canada.ca/​en/​global-​affairs/​news/​2018/​06/​address-​by-​minister-​freeland-​when-​ receiving-​foreign-​policys-​diplomat-​of-​the-​year-​award.html. 11 Bruce W. Bennett et al., “Countering the Risks of North Korean Nuclear Weapons”, Rand (April 2021): www.rand.org/​content/​dam/​rand/​pubs/​perspectives/​PEA1000/​PEA1015-​1/​RAND_​PEA 1015-​1.pdf; H. Binnendijk, “U.S. Constraints Limit Assertiveness”, in Friends, Foes, and Future Directions (2016): www.jstor.org/​stable/​10.7249/​j.ctt19jcj3h; Evans J.R. Revere, “Lips and Teeth: Repairing China-​North Korea Relations”, Global China (November 2019): www.brookings.edu/​wp-​content/​ uploads/​2019/​11/​FP_​20191118_​china_​nk_​revere.pdf. 12 Jonathon Cosgrove, The Russian Invasion of the Crimean Peninsula, 2014–​2015: A Post-​Cold War Nuclear Crisis Case Study (Baltimore, MD, 2020); Michael Kofman, Katya Migacheva et al., Lessons from Russia’s Operations in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine (Santa Monica, CA, 2017). 13 Joerg Forbrig, “What Is the Kremlin up to in Belarus?”, German Marshall Fund (August 2020): www. gmfus.org/​news/​what-​kremlin-​belarus. 14 “Baltic States Join NATO Allies in Kicking Out Russians for Spying”, Reuters (23 April 2021): www. reuters.com/​world/​europe/​baltic-​states-​join-​nato-​allies-​kicking-​out-​r ussians-​spying-​2021-​04-​23/​ ; “Baltic States Vow to Tighten Defense Ties with an Eye on Russia”, NATO Priorities (24 May 2021): www.defensenews.com/​global/​europe/​2021/​05/​24/​baltic-​states-​vow-​to-​tighten-​their-​defenseties-​with-​an-​eye-​on-​russia/​; Aliide Naylor, The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front (London, 2020). 15 Cf. Sylvie Bermann, Goodbye Britannia: le Royaume-​Uni au défi du Brexit (Paris, 2021); Stephen Coleman, How People Talk about Politics: Brexit and Beyond (London, 2021); Richard W. Mansbach and Yale H. Ferguson, Populism and Globalization: The Return of Nationalism and the Global Liberal Order (Cham, 2021). 16 Eve Hepburn, Michael Keating, and Nicola McEwen, Scotland’s New Choice. Independence after Brexit (Edinburgh, 2021); People’s Vote, The Impact of a Chaotic and Disorderly Brexit on Scotland. Demand a Peoples’ Vote on the final Brexit deal (2018): https://​d3n​8a8p​ro7 vhmx.cloudfront.net/​in/​pages/​15379/​ attachments/​original/​1534326256/​scotland_​dossier.pdf?1534326256. 17 The classic examination of the efficacy of the balance as the long-​time core of British strategy is a major analysis by Eyre Crowe, the German expert in the pre-​1914 British Foreign Office. See Crowe “Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany”, 1 January 1907, with Grey [foreign secretary] minute, 28 January 1907, FO [Foreign Office Records, The National Archives, Kew] 371/​257/​73/​73. Cf. Jeffrey Stephen Dunn, The Crowe Memorandum: Sir Eyre Crowe and Foreign Office Perceptions of Germany, 1918–​1925 (Newcastle, 2013). 18 Gilles Ivaldi, “Contesting the EU in Times of Crisis: The Front National and Politics of Euroscepticism in France”, Politics, Special Issue (April 2018), 1–​17; Adam Nossiter, “Marine Le Pen Leads Far-​Right Fight to Make France ‘More French’ ”, NY Times (20 April 2017).

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B.J.C. McKercher 19 Moritz Jesse, eds., European Societies, Migration, and the Law: The “Others” Amongst “Us” (Cambridge, 2021); Michael Kaeding, Johannes Pollak, and Paul Schmidt, eds., Euroscepticism and the Future of Europe: Views from the Capitals (Cham, 2021); Juan Santos Vara and Ramses A. Wessel, eds., The Routledge Handbook on the International Dimension of Brexit (Abingdon, NY, 2021). 20 See Karolina Follis, “Rejecting Refugees in Illiberal Poland: The Response from Civil Society”, Journal of Civil Society, 15/​4 (2019), 307–​25; “Hungary is Determined to Silence Any Critics Left Standing”, euronews (17 July 2018): www.hrw.org/​news/​2018/​07/​17/​hungary-​determined-​silence-​ any-​critics-​left-​standing. Cf. Gabriel Power, “Is it Time the EU Took on Hungary and Poland over ‘Illiberal Democracy’?”, The Week (19 November 2020): www.theweek.co.uk/​108714/​ is-​it-​time-​european-​union-​took-​on-​hungary-​poland-​illiberal-​democracy. 21 “Transcript Marine Le Pen Andrew Marr”, BBC (nd but November 2016): http://​news.bbc. co.uk/​ 2/​shared/​bsp/​hi/​pdfs/​000000.pdf. 22 Anders Jägerskog, Michael Schulz, and Ashok Swain, “Perspectives on Middle East Security: An Introduction”, in idem, eds., Routledge Handbook on Middle East Security (London, 2019); Dalia Dassa Kaye, Alireza Nader, and Parisa Roshan, Israel and Iran: A Dangerous Rivalry (Santa Monica, CA, 2011); Ewan Stein, International Relations in the Middle East: Hegemonic Strategies and Regional Order (Cambridge, 2021). 23 Kali Robinson, “Yemen’s Tragedy: War, Stalemate, and Suffering”, Council on Foreign Relations (5 February 2021): www.cfr.org/​backgrounder/​yemen-​crisis; Peter Salisbury, “Yemen and the Saudi-​Iranian ‘Cold War’ ”, Chatham House (February 2015): www. chathamhouse.org/​2015/​02/​ yemen-​and-​saudi-​iranian-​cold-​war. 24 “Biden Administration Halts Arms Sales to UAE and Saudi Arabia”, Deutsche Welle (28 January 2021): www.dw.com/​en/​biden-​administration-​halts-​arms-​sales-​to-​uae-​and-​saudi-​arabia/​a-56365478. 25 Ehud Eilam, Containment in the Middle East (Lincoln, NE, 2019), 3–​15; Chuck Freilich, “Israel’s National Security Policy”, in Reuven Y. Hazan, Alan Dowty, Menachem Hofnung, and Gideon Rahat, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Israeli Politics and Society (Oxford, 2021), 413–​30; Dalia Dassa Kaye and Shira Efron, “Israel’s Evolving Iran Policy”, Survival, 62/​4(2020), 7–​30. 26 Alexia Underwood, “The Controversial US Jerusalem Embassy Opening, Explained. As the Embassy Event Took Place, Israeli Soldiers Killed Dozens of Palestinian Protesters along the Gaza Border”, Vox (16 May 2021): www.vox.com/​2018/​5/​14/​17340798/​jerusalem-​embassy-​israel-​palestinians-​us-​trump. 27 “Iran Nuclear Deal: Trump Pulls US Out in Break with Europe Allies”, BBC (9May 2018): www.bbc. com/​news/​world-​us-​canada-​44045957. 28 Arms Control Association, The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) at a Glance (March 2021): www.armscontrol.org/​factsheets/​JCPOA-​at-​a-​glance; United States State Department, The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (January 2017): https://​2009-​2017.state.gov/​e/​eb/​tfs/​spi/​iran/​ jcpoa/​index.htm. 29 Noam Shpancer, “The Psychology of Trump’s Preoccupation with Obama”, Psychology Today (3 September 2019): www.psychologytoday.com/​gb/​blog/​insight-​therapy/​201909/​the-​psychology-​ trump-​s-​preoccupation-​obama; Robert Brent Toplin, “Strange Obsession: President Trump’s Obama Complex”, History News Network (19 January 2020): https://​his​tory​news​netw​ork.org/​arti​cle/​174​073. 30 Michael Hirsch, “U.S. Mounts All-​Out Effort to Save Iran Nuclear Deal”, Foreign Policy (15 April 2021): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2021/​04/​15/​iran-​nucl​ear-​deal-​biden-​talks-​vie​nna/​. 31 Christopher J. Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH, 2010). 32 S.K. Bhutani, “Sino-​Indian War, 1962 and the Role of Great Powers”, Journal of Defence Studies, 6/​ 4(2012), 109–​24. 33 Arzan Tarapore, “The Crisis after the Crisis: How Ladakh will Shape India’s Competition with China”, Lowy Institute (6 May 2021): www.lowyinstitute.org/​publications/​crisis-​after-​crisis-​howladakh-​will-​shape-​india-​s-​competition-​china. 34 Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War (London, 2021). 35 Guru Saday Batabyal, Politico-​Military Strategy of the Bangladesh Liberation War, 1971 (Abingdon, 2021). 36 “Revisiting the Night of Mumbai Terror Attack: When 10 Pak Terrorists Attacked India’s Financial Capital”, Economic Times (6 November 2019): https://​econom​icti​mes.ind​iati​mes.com/​news/​ defence/​ revisiting-​the-​night-​of-​mumbai-​terror-​attack-​when-​10-​pak-​terrorists-​attacked-​indias-​financial-​capital/​articleshow/​72235424.cms. 37 Polly Nayak and Michael Krepon, The Unfinished Crisis: US Crisis Management after the 2008 Mumbai Attacks (Washington, DC, 2012).

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An Era of Increasing International Anarchy 38 Paul D. Shinkman, “Trump Administration Confirms Withdrawals from Iraq, Afghanistan Days Before Inauguration”, US News & World Report (15 January 2021): www.usnews.com/​news/​national-​ news/​articles/​2021-​01-​15/​trump-​administration-​confirms-​withdrawals-​from-​iraq-​afghanistan-​ days-​before-​inauguration; Bruce Reidel, “Biden’s Afghan Gamble”, Brookings Institute (27 April 2021): www.usnews.com/​news/​national-​news/​articles/​2021-​01-​15/​trump-​administration-​confirms-​ withdrawals-​from-​iraq-​afghanistan-​days-​before-​inauguration; David Zucchino, “The U.S. War in Afghanistan: How It Started, and How It Ended”, NY Times (7 October 2021): www.nytimes.com/​ article/​afghanistan-​war-​us.html. 39 For example, cf. Rudra Chaudhuri and Shreyas Shende, “Dealing With the Taliban: India’s Strategy in Afghanistan After U.S. Withdrawal”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (June 2020); “China’s Revealing Afghan Strategy. A Suspicious China Prepares for America to Pull Out of Afghanistan”, The Economist (29 May 2021): https://​www.econom​ist.com/​china/​2021/​05/​29/​chi​ nas-​reveal​ing-​afg​han-​strat​egy. 40 Lindsay Maizland and Eleanor Albert, “Hong Kong’s Freedoms: What China Promised and How It’s Cracking Down”, Council on Foreign Relations (17 February 2021): www.cfr.org/​backgrounder/​ hong-​kong-​freedoms-​democracy-​protests-​china-​crackdown; Jieh-​Min Wu, “The China Factor in Taiwan: Impact and Response”, in Gunter Schubert, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Modern Taiwan Politics and Society (London, 2016), 425–​45. 41 Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, “ ‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims”, NY Times (16 November 2019): www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2019/​11/​16/​world/​asia/​china-​xinjiang-​documents.html. 42 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, People’s Republic of China, “Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying’s Regular Press Conference on March 26, 2021” (27 March 2021): www.fmprc.gov.cn/​ mfa_​eng/​xwfw_​665399/​s2510_​665401/​t1864659.shtml. 43 See Oriana Skylar Mastro, “How China is Bending the Rules in the South China Sea”, Lowy Institute (17 February 2021): www.lowyinstitute.org/​the-​interpreter/​how-​china-​bending-​rules-​south-​china-​sea. 44 Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Defining the Diamond: The Past, Present, and Future of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue” (16 March 2020): www.csis.org/​analysis/​ defining-​diamond-​past-​present-​and-​future-​quadrilateral-​security-​dialogue. 45 “Aukus: UK, US and Australia Launch Pact to Counter China”, BBC (16 September 2021): www. bbc.com/​news/​world-​58564837. 46 Cf. Thomas J. Christensen, “There Will not Be a New Cold War”, Foreign Affairs (24 March 2021): www.foreignaffairs.com/​articles/​united-​states/​2021-​03-​24/​there-​will-​not-​be-​new-​cold-​war; Robert D. Kaplan, “A New Cold War Has Begun”, Foreign Policy (7 January 2019): https://​foreig​npol​ icy.com/​2019/​01/​07/​a-​new-​cold-​war-​has-​begun/​. 47 Cf. Michael Cox, “Is the United States in Decline –​Again? An Essay”, International Affairs, 83/​4(2007), 643–​53; Samuel P. Huntington, “The U.S.: Decline or Renewal?”, Foreign Affairs, 67/​2(1988), 76–​96; Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “The rise and fall of American hegemony from Wilson to Trump”, International Affairs, 95/​1(2019), 63–​80. 48 Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China (NY, 2001); Brahma Chellaney, “Will China’s “Imperial Overstretch” Lead to its Decline and Fall in the Way the Soviet Empire Imploded?”, Stagecraft and Statecraft (13 June 2020): https://​chella​ney.net/​2020/​06/​13/​will-​chi​nas-​imper​ial-​over​ stre​tch-​lead-​to-​its-​decl​ine-​and-​fall-​in-​the-​way-​the-​sov​iet-​emp​ire-​implo​ded/​. 49 Kennedy, Rise and the Fall of the Great Powers. 50 Gordon Martel, “The Meaning of Power: Rethinking the Decline and Fall of Great Britain”; J.R. Ferris, “ ‘The Greatest Power on Earth’: Great Britain in the 1920s”; K.E. Neilson, “ ‘Greatly Exaggerated”: The Myth of the Decline of Great Britain before 1914’; B.J.C. McKercher, “ ‘Our Most Dangerous Enemy’: Great Britain Pre-​eminent in the 1930s”: all in International History Review, 13/​4 (1991). Then see B.J.C. McKercher, Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-​eminence to the United States, 1930–​1945 (Cambridge, 1999). 51 For 2020, United States defence spending was an estimated $778 billion; China’s estimated at $252 billion: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, “World Military Spending Rises to Almost $2 Trillion in 2020” (26 April 2031): www.sipri.org/​media/​press-​release/​2021/​ world-​military-​spending-​r ises-​almost-​2-​trillion-​2020. 52 Michael Kimmiage, “When Biden Meets Putin: The High-​ Stakes, Low-​ Expectations Summit”, Foreign Affairs (9 June 2021): www.foreignaffairs.com/​articles/​russia-​fsu/​2021-​06-​09/​when-bidenmeets-​putin.

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PART I

The Context of Diplomacy

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1 THE VALUE OF DIPLOMATIC HISTORY IN A CHANGING WORLD Halvard Leira*

There has never been a better time to read diplomatic history than right now. The topic is covered in broader, deeper, and more engaging ways than it has ever been before.1 The intellectual value of diplomatic history in giving an increased appreciation of the past is thus undeniable.2 However, when discussing the “value” of history more generally, one typically alludes to its ability to inform decision-​makers or its capacity to increase understanding in the broader public. The question is the extent to which the past speaks to the present, one that seems particularly pressing for a world in perceived upheaval. The answers provided here are ambiguous. On one hand, there are many reasons for being cautious about the capacity to learn from history and, even if learning is possible, to learn the appropriate lessons. On the other, decision-​makers from the lowest to the highest level rely on their understanding of history to make decisions every day.3 Finally, there is the potential that historical analogies –​or even myths –​based on diplomatic history have had for political purposes.4 In times of perceived upheaval, there is typically an upsurge in interest in history. Faced with an uncertain future, decision-​makers and the public alike turn to history for guidance. The current international predicament is certainly no exception. In 2020–​21, historians of disease, Great Power competition, and hegemonic decline have had few problems getting speaking engagements –​over Zoom –​or book contracts. History has long been considered the provider of “lessons” –​informing those who perceive them correctly, misleading those who misperceive them, and damning those who ignore them. Turning to history for guidance is understandable, but also problematic. It is understandable in that the past, unlike the present and future, is somewhat accessible as a repository of knowledge. The problematic dimension lies in the past as only accessible through already narrated history and that few of the alleged lessons of the past are unambiguous. Turning to history in a time of upheaval adds an additional layer of uncertainty. In stable times, what happened yesterday is often a good guide for what will happen today. In unstable times, this continuity is threatened, and there is an urge to cast further about to find guidance from the past. Yet the more removed from the present, the less likely this guidance is going to be fitting. The degree of “fit” is nevertheless only one aspect of the use-​value of history, diplomatic or otherwise. Another, possibly even more important issue, concerns usability. Repeatedly, history has proved highly useful as a “shortcut to rationality” for diplomats and bureaucrats and as a legitimising device for political leaders.5

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-2

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Halvard Leira

Can humans learn from history and, if so, what? Various philosophers of history have answered this question in different ways and, here, it is necessary first to look at the theoretical challenges of what one can know and if learning is possible, and then at the problems of learning the “right” lessons. The issue of whether one can learn from history is really two questions baked into one: whether there is any certain knowledge about the past and, if so, whether that past has anything to tell about the present? It needs emphasis straight away that a layperson would probably answer both in the affirmative. Philosophers and theorists of history have been less certain. The nineteenth-​century German historian, Leopold von Ranke, the founder of modern history, believed that it was possible at least to get close to certain knowledge of the past. Most historians since the middle of the twentieth century have been much more sceptical. At the outset, the modern world lacks “remains” of much of the past. And “in the absence of remains, there can be no evidence, and in the absence of evidence, there can be no history”.6 A lot of the past is simply unknowable for lack of “remains”. Furthermore, few, if any, believe that “remains” –​often referred to as “facts” –​speak for themselves. The historian inescapably intervenes, first in the selection of which “remains” to include and exclude as evidence. Following from that decision, to become meaningful, evidence needs connexion to theory and narrative; and as soon as one adds ideas about how evidence hangs together, one requires interpretation. To become history, then, remains of the past must survive, be chosen, narrativised, and interpreted. This should raise immediate concerns about what the past can teach. If referring to lessons from Thucydides, the only source for much of what happened during the Peloponnesian War, are there lessons to learn from that struggle or from Thucydides’ necessarily partial interpretation of it? To most working historians, these are obvious epistemological concerns; the past is only accessible through the more or less random “remains” left behind and the histories that have narrated them together. When discussing the use-​value of any kind of history, this should lead readers to a great degree of humility –​one can never reach certainty about what one knows about the past. This uncertainty has nevertheless not led to despair. Even “postmodernist” historians refer to some form of knowledge of the past. This form of broadly accepted knowledge can usefully be described as “working truths”,7 widely accepted accounts about what happened in the past and perhaps even causal chains, but still in principle open for falsification.8 There are often widely differing interpretations of synthetic accounts of the past, whilst there might at the same time be a fairly broad consensus on the building blocks. There have been, for instance, numerous competing narratives about the outbreak of the First World War, whilst there is hopefully unanimous acceptance that it broke out in 1914. It needs noting here that one of the concerns of traditional diplomatic history, namely the construction of timelines and chronologies,9 is one that typically has been easy to convert into “working truths”. The seemingly nitty-​g ritty work of establishing when events happened and sorting them in order remains a key value that diplomatic history brings to understanding the past. So far, so frustratingly, not good. Knowledge of the past is at best partial and contingent. This situation obviously raises problems for how possibly to learn from the past. But this is not the only issue. Whether or not the past –​or, more accurately, history –​offers any lessons is a question where philosophers of history have differed dramatically. To put the proposition in the simplest possible terms, if there is a supposed ability to learn anything from the past, one must have some sort of belief in recurring patterns. In the ancient world, this was the standard view of how the world hung together. History –​understood as the unfolding of events –​was considered to repeat itself, thus insights about the past were directly applicable in the present. This belief remained deeply held into the Early Modern period. The key work of the humanist 4

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Justus Lipsius, one of the most read scholars of early seventeenth century Europe, for instance, consisted largely of a curated collection of citations from ancient historians such as Tacitus.10 To Lipsius, the past spoke directly to the present.11 When, during the eighteenth century, history was reconfigured as a dynamic developmental process –​history as thought of today –​this form of argumentation became harder to sustain.12 Thus, returning to Ranke, he was bullish on the capacity to get precise knowledge of the past. On the other hand, he had no belief in its predictive powers. History was to inform, not to predict. Whilst many historians would agree with Ranke, there is a distinct divide here in all historically oriented science, between those who believe that the past is “familiar” –​that is repetitive or following known path(s) –​and those who believe that it is “unfamiliar” –​random or following unknown path(s).13 If one believes the latter, it is obviously also hard to refer to lessons of the past –​or history. The political realism underpinning mid-​twentieth-​century International Relations theory, as well as much traditional diplomatic history, implies a static or cyclical view of history, where lessons of the past seem both likely and useful. Likewise, liberal and Marxist theories, with their emphasis on a knowable linear development/​progress, can easily turn to history to provide insight into likely future developments. Even beyond that consideration, many researchers who in principle would believe the past to be “unfamiliar” will still refer to similarities in processes and institutions, at least within specific contexts. In sum, Jürgen Habermas might have provided the best, yet somewhat unsatisfying answer to the question of whether one can learn from history: “That is one of those questions to which there exists no theoretically satisfying answers”.14 Moving from theoretical concerns to practical action, it would seem to be a fairly well accepted “working truth” that historical actors have tried to learn from history, to copy successes but perhaps even more to avoid mistakes. It is certainly possible to read much of European history over the last 75 years as deeply concerned with avoiding the mistakes that led to the two world wars and the Holocaust. Even if accepting that it might be possible to know the past, and enough recurrence to warrant comparisons and thus learning lessons, there remains a number of practical challenges. As famously laid out in a seminal treatment,15 misperception is maybe even more likely than correct perception.16 To learn the right lesson from history, one must understand both past and present situations correctly and be able to identify the causal mechanisms that led to past outcomes, thus to judge their applicability in the present. Getting either the past or present wrong can be disastrous. For instance, one could argue that this was what happened in summer 1914, where decision-​makers could look back at a decade of bigger and smaller crises and assume that the current one would blow over just as the previous ones had. Looking at prior outcomes of diplomatic crises and assuming that the current one would lead to the same conclusion bypassed the necessary analysis both of what had led to those earlier peaceful outcomes and whether the earlier and current situations were in meaningful ways comparable. This returns somewhat more prosaically to the problem discussed above: getting the past “right”. History always remains narrated, and if it is to be of any use as a lesson or analogy, it must carry a surplus of meaning.17 History that provides no additional understanding or guidelines for action is simply unusable. Mere chronology will not do. This surplus of meaning also implies that analogies, even though powerful vehicles for conveying meaning and framing action, are never fully stabilised. On one hand, alternative narrations of the original situation can lead any analogy to support competing causes of action. On the other, different analogies might make competing sense of the same current event.18 Where there is one narrative, there can also be another narrative. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis can serve as an example; at a general level, the doves learnt the dangers of nuclear weapons whilst hawks the usefulness of the very same weapons.19 At a more detailed level, sources –​“remains” –​that became available after 5

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the end of the Cold War seriously undermined the accepted knowledge of the missile crisis as a success of United States brinkmanship, instead emphasising the eagerness of both sides to find a negotiated solution.20 This example thus underscores both how a surplus of meaning makes it possible to draw different lessons and analogies from the same event and how analogous argumentation can never be fully stabilised. For students of diplomatic history, it also serves as a reminder about the risks inherent in relying on analogies for decision-​making in times of crisis.21 Accordingly, the capacity to know the past is limited; it is at best unclear whether history can logically be a provider of lessons; and even if learning from history, it remains difficult to know whether one learns the “right” lessons. This caution, however, has hardly stopped academics and practitioners from referring to the lessons of history. The philosophical problems involved in knowing the past, to say nothing about learning from history, have mattered little in the everyday unfolding of human life. On the contrary, the whole logic underpinning what is now known as experiential learning is to apply past lessons to be better equipped to the future; and in order to be prepared for situations that one has not experienced, one studies how others have handled them before. This is the idea behind everything from cookbooks and IKEA manuals to classics of diplomatic theory from Abraham van Wicquefort to Ernest Satow. Diplomacy remains typically seen as tied particularly closely to experiential learning. For centuries diplomacy was considered an art form or science of the aristocracy, and seen as beyond learning if one lacked an aristocratic upbringing.22 Even after the twentieth century opening up of diplomacy to other classes, a combination of diplomatic manuals and on-​the-​job training remained essential to master diplomacy. This is not to say that active diplomats are the only people utilising –​diplomatic –​history. On the contrary, decision-​ makers more broadly, as well as the wider public, turn to history for several different reasons. It is valuable to discuss these reasons from the specific to the general, exploring the use of history for localised decision-​making before moving on to “sense making” and legitimation and showing the importance of history for constituting collectives. This process moves from lessons and analogies towards myths –​analytically understood –​although the boundaries between these categories are blurred. It would seem a relatively uncontroversial “working truth” that decision-​makers on all levels believe themselves to be utilising history as a guide for making decisions. It is a completely unsurprising effect of the way the human mind and human bureaucracies work. The first response of humans to a new situation will tend to be to go for automated responses and quick solutions, to look for something that reminds them of something they already know how to understand.23 At the level of decision-​making, Charles Lindblom long ago famously defined this as “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’ ”. When faced with a policy-​problem, administrators would most likely not examine all possible outcomes, nor go through a theory-​ guided comparison of all possible policies that would lead to value-​maximisation. No, they would define their goal narrowly and compare a limited number of polices that they believed to be opportune. Disregarding theory, they would “rely heavily on the record of past experience with small policy steps to predict the consequences of similar steps extended into the future”.24 Beset by potentially infinite information, decision-​makers always rely on some cognitive tools for simplification. In bureaucracies and political systems, tradition is a key one, codified in law or remembered as history.25 In domestic political systems, law typically provides the grounding in tradition. Whilst international law plays a prominent role in the working of the ministries of foreign affairs across the globe, the international system remains obviously much less regulated than most domestic systems. For diplomats, history has thus played an important role in day-​to-​day decision-​making. If all things appear equal, choosing the course that has 6

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been successful in a previous historical situation makes good sense; turning to historical lessons and analogies offers what Robert Jervis refers to as a useful “shortcut to rationality”.26 In this daily work, diplomats appear like every day historians. When recounting their on-​ the-​job training in the second half of the twentieth century, different Norwegian diplomats for instance told parallel stories of instructions to handle their first tasks: “look in the dossiers”.27 Spelled out, the course of action would be to check the archives for handling similar tasks in the past, and if that course of action had been successful or not. If previously successful, they would apply the same procedures to the new task. As one would expect in a system of bounded rationality –​an assumption for most ministries most of the time –​satisficing rather than maximising was the goal of the process. Lather, rinse, repeat. Such localised lessons about policy in all likelihood are the ones that come closest to the lay understanding of “learning from history”: applying an understanding of the past more or less directly to the present. As alluded to above, such procedures make good sense in stable times and in stable relations. When planning President Barack Obama’s state visit to Britain in 2011, the Protocol Directorate of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office hardly needed to rethink procedures. They could mix and match, copy and paste from the programmes of President George W. Bush’s state visit in 2003 and that of President Bill Clinton’s in 1995; there was a wreath to be laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey and an address to a joint session of Parliament. Even though massive protests related to the Iraq war met Bush in 2003, the official parts of the programmes caused little problem for the planners. When times and relationships appear more unsettled, standard operating procedures might not be applicable. When President Donald Trump was to pay a state visit to Britain, the Protocol Directorate could not simply follow routine. The Commons speaker, John Bercow, was a vocal opponent of Trump addressing Parliament, and opposition leaders refused the invitation to the official banquet. The actual visit only came in 2019, two years after the invitation had first been issued. Drawing lessons from previous diplomatic experience can be challenging in unsettled times. It can be downright disastrous if the degree of unsettledness is underestimated. This was the case in 1914, as mentioned above, and it was most certainly the case in the late 1930s. Lessons learnt about how Great Powers could be appeased through a recalibrating of the balance of power and some territorial reshuffling were catastrophically unfit when confronting an aggressively expansionist regime. More generally, it constitutes the challenge of returning to the dossier –​when things are not as before. Looking at recent history might be excellent for decision-​making in stable times, but under periods of upheaval, recent history could be a terrible guide for what to do next; rather than a shortcut to rationality, they risk short-​circuiting prudence. In unstable times, in situations where there are no immediate precedents and the situation requires more than bureaucratic muddling through, decision-​makers, media, and pundits often turn to analogy. Crisis-​situations are the archetypical examples. Whereas lessons, even of a more general kind, try to distil some core insight from the past, analogies are also more directly involved in “sense making” and legitimation of action.28 Accordingly, analogical reasoning is usually more about the present than about the past; or to be more precise, analogies are used to interpret the past and infer the future, at least in part to control the present.29 At the stage of public opinion, “sense making” can come in a multitude of forms, highlighting special comparable aspects of the situations or entire causal chains as recently demonstrated in an analysis of the use of historical analogies in different leading newspapers.30 The point is to make at least parts of the new situation familiar by drawing on something already known. In punditry and when applied by decision-​makers, the menu is typically narrower. The point of “sense making” is at this stage typically to make some specific sense of what is going on, and to justify and legitimate a specific course of action –​or non-​action.31 In October 2020, for instance, former American 7

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national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, likened the Trump Administration’s Afghanistan policy to the appeasement of Adolph Hitler at Munich, implicitly strongly suggesting a change of course.32 More famously, when discussing the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 as analogous to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the point was not the specific likeness between the situations, but a narrative of innocence, a cowardly attack, and the need for revenge, in the last instance a justification for war. In such instances, diplomatic history seems clearly deemed useful by policy-​makers. Other analogies are more open-​ended and less oriented towards decision-​making –​employed to create a framework for understanding or a distinct feeling. When drawing parallels between the present changing world and the years predating the First World War or the interwar years, the point is again not the direct similarities between the periods. The function of the analogies is not to establish a 1:1 relationship. Rather, they are employed to convey a notion of possible impending disaster, with dangers stemming from such general phenomena as Great Power rivalries, diplomatic complacency, authoritarian politics, and nationalism. Using further specifications like these can in their turn frame desired actions. Such generalised analogies between relatively distant times and today illustrate well the challenges of analogical thinking in periods of upheaval. For what exactly is there to compare? Scholarly genres such as those epitomised in works like The Rise and the Fall of the Great Powers and Der Untergang des Abendlandes create powerful lessons and potential analogies.33 But to just mention one unique factor, the world has never before been in a situation of Great Power flux with three major nuclear Powers and a number of regional nuclear ones. It is hardly obvious how, for example, the breakdown of European order following the Reformation or the revolutionary wars around 1800 are useful for predicting how a current shakeup of the international order is likely to play out. This does not imply, however, that pundits and policy-​makers will shy away from making sweeping analogies between past and present. On the contrary, it seems as if the more unsettled the times, the bolder the analogies. One relatively recent example draws parallels between ancient Greece and the present age. The discipline of International Relations hails Thucydides as a forerunner –​or the father –​of political realism, serving up pithy lessons about the impossibility of neutrality and the inevitability of war in periods of Great Power transition. Historians have found this reading both of the actual Peloponnesian War and Thucydides highly unpersuasive,34 but this debunking has hardly registered in International Relations. In 2012 –​and in expanded form in 2017 –​ Graham Allison drew on this invented tradition of IR to warn against a “Thucydides Trap” in the Sino-​American relationship.35 In his reading, the Peloponnesian War was a paradigmatic example of how war can follow from fear in established Powers when faced by rising Powers. The analogy was obvious, with the United States substituted for Sparta and China for Athens. Complete with policy proposals, Allison presented this analogy to staffers of the National Security Council in May 2017,36 and it has allegedly found traction in policy circles in both the United States and China. This form of “usefulness” of diplomatic history, connected to legitimation and justification, can rub academics the wrong way. The typical scholarly way to deal with the use of an historical analogy is to gauge its accuracy as a first order representation –​is there enough similarity between the past situation and the current one for the analogy to make sense? However, analogies must also occur as second order constructs; they are interpretations of already interpreted events. In that perspective, the accuracy of the representation is decidedly subordinate to its political functions.37 To continue with the example, Allison’s discussion of the Thucydides Trap probably tells more about Allison and his reading of the current relationship between the United States and China than Thucydides, ancient Greece, or current international affairs. 8

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Moreover, another obvious example concerns the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, equated in the run-​up to the 2003 Iraqi war to Hitler through a representation of the Munich-​analogy. Scholars of the interwar years, Nazism, Middle East politics, or war might not have found this analogy historically sound, but that was never the key point of the analogy. It was supposed to set particular narratives in motion and induce specific political effects.38 Such use of analogy is certainly not new,39 but it has become more obvious over the last decades through expressing domestic or intra-​alliance disagreements more explicitly as competing analogies. The blatantly ideological use of analogies also illustrates the problems with drawing on lessons and analogies from history if there is no agreement on the current situation. Domestic polarisation might reduce the value of any appeal to history. If no agreement exists on what sort of situation one is living through, it is unlikely to find any unifying lesson or analogy of history to set the course for the future. Some understandings of –​diplomatic –​history have moved beyond lesson and analogy into the realm of the mythical. The mythical does not refer here to untrue or misunderstood stories. Rather, in line with scholarly usage, myths are forms of narrative providing meaning and significance. Myths in this sense are an inescapable part of the life of human collectives, telling decision-​makers who they –​and others –​are and with what everyone should be concerned and provide blueprints for arguments about policy choices. Myths could thus be understood as a form of constitutive lessons of history and, like the analogies discussed above, approached as second-​order constructs; the story they tell is more important than the history. A first example of how myths can summon we-​ness and guide action resides in the genesis of the Kosovo war in 1999. Meeting in London in early spring, the United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had to convince the other Western leaders present that the use of force might be necessary if the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic failed to meet Western demands. Her pithy argument rejected an analogy and called upon its attendant myth: “This is London, remember, not Munich”.40 Soon thereafter, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation started bombing Serbia. Invoking “Munich”, Albright not only made an argument through inverted analogy. The point was not primarily to contrast the present with the failed appeasement of the past, but to reference a broader myth of what “the West” was all about, and how it accordingly ought to act. This example also illustrates how myths go beyond lessons. They project on to present debates and decision-​making the judgement of the past. In this constitutive way, myths become stories about who we are, but also why we are. Through myths, the present is bundled with the past, interwoven with the moral fabric of historical and future purpose. The invocation of the myth of “Munich” in 1999 must also be understood in the aftermath of “Rwanda” in 1994 and “Srebrenica” in 1995, historical events now myths in their own right and entwined with the overall narrative of the West implied by “Munich”. When referencing these two instances of genocidal violence, the point is typically not the events on the ground but the perceived moral failure of the West to act. This inaction was in turn partly a product of ingrained myths about tribalism and eternal conflict, exemplified by the importance of the book Balkan Ghosts in the Balkan discourse of the West in the 1990s.41 It might be tempting to conclude that one is facing a case of “myths all the way down”, but that would be too fatalistic. Coming full circle at the end, does diplomatic history really have much value in the changing world beyond justification of political action and the forging of collective consciousness? If the capacity to know history and learn from it is at its best in localised and stable contexts, the more fluid present might contain challenges for which diplomatic history provides few answers. And if insisting on looking back to other periods of transition, it might end up comparing the incommensurable. Broadening the scope will enhance the value of diplomatic history by 9

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looking beyond the traditional remits of the subject. Stressing some relatively general lessons from such an expanded diplomatic history might offer lessons to learn. There is no denying that diplomatic history has traditionally been Eurocentric, state-​centric, and focused on official sources –​“remains”. This clearly reflects in the lessons, analogies, and myths referred to above. However, if as seems likely, the present world diverges in important ways from the world that diplomatic history has known, a broadening of the scope, ceteris paribus, would yield more insights that are valuable. Luckily, such a broadening has been under way for a decade or more under the heading “new diplomatic history”. On the one side, this literature has incorporated other actors and topics than just states and their actions, including questions of culture, ritual, gender, and race. This alone should make it able to generate a wide menu of new lessons. On the other side, there has been a growing urgency in studying diplomatic history beyond the West. If, for instance, interest exists in how relations between China and the West in the South China Sea might play out, there is no a priori reason to look to ancient Greek history rather than to ancient Asian history. Again, reading other histories would serve to bring forth potentially new lessons.42 The importance of alternative histories and lessons should be a cure against short-​ sightedness, and in a wider perspective, it would fit well with a humble reading of diplomatic history, not focused on blueprints for action, but on increased understanding. Stressed above is how earlier periods of upheaval might provide few analogies for today. Nevertheless, looking back to previous systemic upheavals can be useful in sensitising those today to the plethora of developmental possibilities and the likely importance of the unexpected and random. Taking diplomatic history seriously should be a strong antidote against teleology. As a corollary, since lessons and analogies obviously inform decision-​making, an open-​ended reading of diplomatic history should demonstrate the different possible analogies that can illuminate the present and how they provide sets of alternative scenarios.43 Thus, much as was the case with Kennedy and the missile crisis, the most enduring lessons from diplomatic history might be the necessity of exercising prudent judgement when making life-​and-​death decisions.

Notes * Work on this chapter has been financed by the Research Council of Norway, under the project CHOIR, project number 288639. 1 This chapter refers to diplomatic history as a topic, not as a specific academic field within the discipline of History. On the contrary, the current study of diplomatic history is strikingly interdisciplinary, and it has greatly increased its reach and relevance. A number of observations in this chapter apply to history’s value more generally, not solely to diplomatic history. In the spirit of self-​reflexivity, my background is formally in the discipline of International Relations. This indubitably colours the view of the topics at hand and how to deal with them. 2 This argument follows the convention of distinguishing between the past –​all that has happened –​and history –​how historians represent the past. 3 There are significant literatures on learning from history, the use of historical analogies, and historical myths. The point of this chapter is not to give an exhaustive review, but to highlight some overarching challenges and possibilities involved in turning to the past to shed light on the present. 4 The thinking herein about historical analogies, historical myths, and learning from history has been developed in close co-​operation with Benjamin de Carvalho. Cf. in particular H. Leira and B. de Carvalho, “The Function of Myths in International Relations: Discipline and Identity”, in A. Gofas, I. Hamati-​Ataya, and N. Onuf, eds., Sage Handbook of the History, Philosophy and Sociology of International Relations (London, 2018), 222–​35. 5 As discussed below, one could thus argue that one of the more enduring “lessons” of history is that decision-​makers will turn to their alleged “lessons” to reach and justify their decisions. 6 J. Wilkinson, “A Choice of Fictions: Historians, Memory, and Evidence”, PMLA, 111/​1(1996), 80.

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Diplomatic History in a Changing World 7 M. Kornprobst, “Comparing Apples and Oranges? Leading and Misleading Uses of Historical Analogies”, Millennium, 36/​1(2007), 34. 8 This chapter relies on such a notion of “working truths”, both about specific lessons and analogies and about the learning of them. If not, it would collapse under self-​referential incommensurability. 9 T.G. Otte, “The Inner Circle: What is Diplomatic History? (And Why We Should Study it): An Inaugural Lecture”, History, 105(2020), 13. 10 H. Leira, “Justus Lipsius, Neostoicism and the Disciplining of 17th Century Statecraft”, Review of International Studies, 34/​4(2008), 669–​92. 11 Whatever one might think of Lipsius’s approach to history as repeating, his explorations of the military tactics of ancient Rome became highly influential in the establishment of Dutch, Swedish, and Prussian military practices of the seventeenth century, such as volley fire and the counter march. Military reformers took lessons from Lipsius in what they assumed to be history. Cf. J. De Landtsheer, “Justus Lipsius’s De Militia Romana: Polybius Revived, or How an Ancient Historian Was Turned into a Manual of Early Modern Warfare”, in K. Enenkel, J.L. de Jong, and J. de Lanrtsheer, eds., Recreating Ancient History: Episodes from the Greek and Roman Past in the Arts and Literature of the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2001), 115. 12 See in particular, R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (NY, 1985). 13 J. MacKay and C.D. Laroche, “The Conduct of History in International Relations: Rethinking Philosophy of History in IR Theory”, International Theory, 9/​2(2017), 213. 14 J. Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany (Lincoln, NE, 1997 [1995]), 13. 15 R. Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ, 1976). 16 To Jervis, the likelihood of misperception stems from humans’ cognitive makeup. Others have been more sanguine about the capacity to learn the right lessons from history; classics include E.R. May, “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (NY, 1973); R. Neustadt and E.R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers (NY, 1996). 17 In the literature, “lessons” and “analogies” often occur interchangeably. However, strictly speaking, lessons concern only an interpretation of the past, whilst analogies also involve comparison –​drawing on a lesson of the past and a present situation. That said, there are often implicit analogies in play when referred to as lessons. In common usage, there is also a difference in scalability between the two. Processes great and small can allow “lessons” learnt in the immediate past just as well as long ago. “Analogies”, on the other hand, typically require some temporal distance and for the process to be important enough to have entered some sort of collective memory. 18 J. Angstrom, “Mapping the Competing Historical Analogies of the War on Terrorism: The Bush Presidency”, International Relations, 25/​2(2011), 224–​42. 19 L. Scott and S. Smith, “Lessons of October: Historians, Political Scientists, Policy-​Makers and the Cuban Missile Crisis”, International Affairs, 70/​4(1994), 661. 20 Ibid., 680–​83. 21 It is worth noting that President John F. Kennedy tried to learn from history during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Having recently read Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (NY, 1962) about the outbreak of the First World War, he was determined not to stumble into war, as he believed the Great Powers had done in 1914. He also wanted to avoid what could appear a “Pearl Harbor in reverse”. On the other hand, these were rather abstract lessons about the virtue of prudence and the importance of moral action, rather than lessons about cause and effect. 22 H. Leira, “Kinship Diplomacy, or Diplomats of a Kin”, in Kristin M. Haugevik and Iver B. Neumann, eds., Kinship in International Relations (Milton Park, UK, 2018), 62–​80; idem, “The Emergence of Foreign Policy”, International Studies Quarterly, 63/​1(2019), 187–​98. 23 D. Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (NY, 2011). 24 C.E. Lindblom, “The Science of ‘Muddling Through’ ”, Public Administration Review, 19/​2(1959), 79. 25 For example, J.G.A. Pocock, “Law, Sovereignty and History in a Divided Culture: The Case of New Zealand and the Treaty of Waitangi”, McGill Law Journal, 43/​1(1998), 481–​506 discusses this issue at length. 26 Jervis, Perception and Misperception, 220. 27 I.B. Neumann and H. Leira, Aktiv og Avventende i hundre år. Utenrikstjenestens liv 1905–​ 2005 (Oslo, 2005). 28 Thus, analogies have a double potential, both guiding action and legitimising policy –​both reason and rhetoric –​to follow J. Meirenrich, “Analogies at War”, Journal of Conflict and Security Law, 11/​ 1(2006), 1–​40.

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Halvard Leira 29 This is a specification of a more general point made in A. Hom, “Time and Historical International Relations”, in B. de Carvalho, J.C. Lopez, and H. Leira, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations (London, 2021). 30 R. Axelrod and L. Forster, “How Historical Analogies in Newspapers of Five Countries Make Sense of Major Events: 9/​11, Mumbai and Tahrir Square”, Research in Economics, 71/​1(2017), 8–​19. 31 Y.F. Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich Dien Bien Phu and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton, NJ, 1992) remains the classic study on this topic. 32 J. Rogin, “McMaster Says Trump’s Taliban Deal is Munich-​like Appeasement”, Washington Post (20 October 2020): www.washingtonpost.com/​opinions/​2020/​10/​19/​mcmaster-​says-​trumps-​taliban-​ deal-​is-​munich-​like-​appeasement/​. 33 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and the Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (NY, 1987); Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes; Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (München, 1963 [1918, 1922]). 34 Cf. D.A. Welch, “Why International Relations Theorists Should Stop Reading Thucydides”, Review of International Studies, 29/​3(2003), 301–​19. 35 G.T. Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston, MA, 2017). 36 M. Crowley, “Why the White House Is Reading Greek History”, Politico Magazine (21 June 2017): www. politico.com/​magazine/​story/​2017/​06/​21/​why-​the-​white-​house-​is-​reading-​greek-​history-​215287. 37 See H. Leira, “Political Change and Historical Analogies”, Global Affairs, 3/​1(2017), 81–​88; Leira and Carvalho, “Functions of Myths”. 38 M.V. Rasmussen, “The History of a Lesson: Versailles, Munich and the Social Construction of the Past”, Review of International Studies, 29/​4(2003), 499–​519 thus suggested that it would make sense to move on from the “lessons of history” to “the history of lessons”. 39 I thus disagree with A. Mumford, “Parallels, Prescience and the Past: Analogical Reasoning and Contemporary International Politics”, International Politics, 52/​1(2015), 1–​19, who sees ideological uses of analogy as a recent phenomenon. 40 Rasmussen, “The History of a Lesson”. 41 Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History (NY, 1993). L. Hansen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (Milton Park, UK, 2006) provides incisive analysis. 42 For example, A. Kopper and T. Peragovics, “Overcoming the Poverty of Western Historical Imagination: Alternative Analogies for Making Sense of the South China Sea Conflict”, European Journal of International Relations, 25/​2(2018), 360–​82; J. Palmer, “Oh God, Not the Peloponnesian War Again”, Foreign Policy (28 July 2020): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2020/​07/​28/​oh-​god-​not-​the-​pelopo​ nnes​ian-​war-​again/​. 43 Kopper and Peragovics, “Overcoming the Poverty”, 367–​69.

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2 THEORISING DIPLOMACY Christer Jönsson

Whilst there is a rich and growing literature on diplomacy, theories of diplomacy are less abundant. In view of its pivotal role in International Relations, diplomacy until recently received surprisingly little attention amongst theoretically oriented International Relations scholars. Indeed, a description of diplomacy is that it is “particularly resistant to theory”,1 and the well-​ known Israeli diplomat and foreign minister, Abba Eban, argued in 1983 that the “intrinsic antagonism” between theory and practice was more acute in diplomacy than in most other fields.2 This proposition may be less tenable today, as recent decades have seen a growing interest in, and several efforts to theorise, diplomacy. What is lacking, however, is “any meta-​ theory of diplomacy –​a theory of the theories of diplomacy –​which might present all the different things that people want to identify and discuss in a single set of coherent relations with one another”.3 Why, then, has diplomacy not been the object of more meta-​theorising? There may be several reasons for the relative dearth of diplomatic theory. Two major factors relate to the conceptualisation of diplomacy and the character of the authors writing about diplomacy. A consensual conceptualisation of diplomacy that can serve as a foundation for theorising does not exist. Diplomacy “emerged as a contested concept”, and it “has repeatedly been contested over the last two centuries”.4 The use of the words “diplomacy” and “diplomatic” have several different meanings. In fact, the words have been characterised as “monstrously imprecise”, simultaneously signifying “content, character, method, manner and art”.5 According to Peter Marshall, a retired British diplomat, at least six related meanings may be distinguished. First, “diplomacy” sometimes refers to the content of foreign affairs as a whole. Diplomacy then becomes synonymous with foreign policy. This means that theories of foreign policy are applicable. Second, “diplomacy” may connote the conduct of foreign policy. The word then becomes a synonym of statecraft. Henry Kissinger’s book, Diplomacy, which draws on his experiences as United States secretary of state, is a case in point.6 A third connotation of diplomacy focuses on the management of international affairs by negotiation; thus, the Oxford English Dictionary defines diplomacy as “the conduct of international relations by negotiation”. A similar definition is “negotiations between political entities which acknowledge each other’s independence”.7 Theories of negotiation, which are well developed, are then necessary to understand diplomacy. Fourth, understanding diplomacy resides in the use of diplomats, organised

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-3

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in a diplomatic service. This usage is more time-​bound, as the organisation and professionalisation of diplomacy is rather recent. Fifth, diplomacy, and especially the adjective “diplomatic”, often refers to the manner of conducting relations. To be diplomatic means to use “intelligence and tact”, to quote Ernest Satow’s classic formulation.8 A sixth, related conceptualisation is to understand diplomacy more specifically as the art or skills of professional diplomats. One definitional controversy concerns the non-​ violent character of diplomacy. Some experts conceptualise diplomacy in terms of “the peaceful conduct of relations”9 or “the establishment and development of peaceful contacts”,10 regarding diplomacy as the opposite to war or any use of force. Conversely, others are reluctant to draw such a clear-​cut line, arguing either that the opposition of war and diplomacy is a Western notion;11 or that the blurring of the line between diplomacy and violence is one of the characteristics of modern diplomacy.12 During the Cold War, the coining of the phrase “coercive diplomacy” denoted the use of threats or limited force in diplomatic persuasion.13 In short, the lack of an agreed definition has been an obstacle to rigid theorising. As developed below, different conceptualisations of diplomacy entail different theoretical approaches. A second major factor impeding the development of theory concerns the authorship of most works on diplomacy. Until recently, either practitioners or diplomatic historians wrote the bulk of the vast literature on diplomacy. Neither category of authors was particularly interested in theory building. Practitioners tended to be anecdotal rather than systematic, and diplomatic historians idiographic rather than nomothetic.14 Just as historians are interested in a particular past, practitioners draw on their own particular experiences. Neither practitioners nor diplomatic historians have been prone to generalise from different historical experiences and insights. Diplomats have been prolific writers. Many have had scholarly ambitions and credentials and have reflected on their own practice to an extent that few other professions can match. Much of this literature is in the form of memoirs. In these works, there is a clear prescriptive bent. What characterises the good diplomat? How best to conduct diplomacy? These are questions occupying authors from antiquity to today. In addition to this prescriptive tendency, modern day ambassadorial memoirs tend to emphasise and exaggerate the profound changes that their authors claim to have experienced in their time of service whilst overlooking elements of continuity. Diplomatic historians, for their part, have amassed a wealth of information about specific eras or incidents from antiquity onwards but have failed to forge any strong links with International Relations theorists. Although diplomatic history and International Relations have been characterised as “brothers under the skin”,15 academic parochialism as well as stereotypical and caricatured readings of one another’s sub-​field have hampered interdisciplinary cross-​fertilisation. These and other aggravating factors notwithstanding, a number of theoretical approaches to diplomacy exist and continue to be developed. The remainder of this analysis reviews the most important of these, beginning with the long tradition of prescriptive tracts, offering observations and advice concerning the conduct of diplomacy. Realism, the predominant school of thought in International Relations scholarship after the Second World War, encompasses a conceptualisation of diplomacy tied to state power in an anarchic world. The so-​called English School offers a rivalling approach and different understanding of diplomacy, anchored in an international society with rules and institutions guiding state behaviour. After juxtaposing these two chief alternative approaches, this exegesis discusses other, more recent attempts at theorising diplomacy, drawing on post-​positivist approaches, diplomatic understandings of international relations, suggestive metaphors, social anthropology, and gender studies.

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History is replete with reflections on diplomacy. For instance, the ancient Indian treatise on statesmanship, Arthasastra, written by Kautilya in the fourth century BC, offers observations and advice concerning the conduct of diplomacy. But it was only in seventeenth-​century Europe that diplomatic practice became sufficiently standardised to make practitioners able to theorise about it. As early as 1436, Bernard du Rosier, provost of Toulouse, who frequently served as an ambassador, wrote the first European textbook of diplomatic practice entitled Short Treatise About Ambassadors. The development of a diplomatic system based on resident ambassadors in Renaissance Italy saw the production of hundreds of similar works over the next few centuries. The proper behaviour and necessary skills of an ambassador was a common theme of these early works. To mention a few prominent examples, in 1620 the Spanish scholar, courtier, and diplomat Don Juan Antonio De Vera published El Embajador, translated into French –​its title became Le parfait ambassadeur –​and Italian, and was read thoroughly by most aspiring diplomats throughout the next century. In L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions, the Dutch diplomat and purveyor of political intelligence, Abraham van Wicquefort, criticised De Vera. First published in 1681, his book appeared in English in 1716 as The Embassador and His Functions.16 Wicquefort identified the resident ambassador as the principal institutional device, tracing its development over two centuries. De Vera and several other authors focused on resident ambassadors as well, but they tended to describe an ideal of conduct. Dismissing this type of moral speculation, Wicquefort was equally critical of the literature produced by jurists, preoccupied with an envoy’s legal status rather than his functions. He aimed at delineating what, in practice, makes for a successful ambassador, paying tribute to the diplomats he most admired. Focusing on diplomacy’s representational significance, Wicquefort saw ambassadors as primarily representatives of sovereigns and regarded “the right of embassy” as a crucial mark of sovereignty. Ambassadors represented one sovereign whilst being dependent upon the whims of another. Wicquefort described the ambassador’s insecure predicament as that of “an honourable spy”, an expression enjoying wide currency at the time. In short, The Embassador and His Functions received description as “the first guide to the diplomatic practice of the European States-​system as it emerged from the Congress of Westphalia”.17 The most renowned work on the European diplomatic system, based on the activities of resident envoys, is François de Callières’ De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, published in 1716. Along with Wicquefort’s book, it became one of the standard references on diplomatic practice throughout the eighteenth century.18 Callières was an active diplomat in the service of France’s Louis XIV. Whilst he built on Wicquefort in describing actual diplomatic practice, what mattered, in his view, was not so much the attributes of individual ambassadors as the character of the European system of interdependent sovereigns. He viewed diplomacy as an essentially moderating influence, making the pursuit of state interests compatible with civilised behaviour. The self-​assertive European states could therefore be “membres d’une même republique”. Callières thus contributed to an understanding of diplomacy as an international institution. Like Cardinal Richelieu before him, Callières emphasised the need for continuous diplomacy, arguing that negotiation should not be a one-​time affair, but a constant and necessary ingredient in collecting information needed for policy-​making. Callières was the first to regard diplomacy as a profession in its own right. In fact, he was active in launching the first school devoted to the training of future diplomats, and he probably wrote his book with the school in mind. His short book, reprinted several times, has been hailed as “a mine of political wisdom” by Satow19 and as “the best manual of diplomatic method ever written” by Harold Nicolson.20

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Satow and Nicolson were modern followers of the early tradition. Both had a background as professional diplomats in the British Diplomatic Service. An exceptional linguist and noted Orientalist, Satow maintained his scholarly interest throughout his distinguished diplomatic career. He shared a taste for history with such writers as Wicquefort and Callières. In his view, diplomatic manners may change over time, but the essence of sound diplomacy will not. His most famous work, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice, first published in 1917, has since appeared in several revised editions. Satow’s famous definition of diplomacy, “the application of intelligence and tact to the conduct of official relations between the governments of independent states”, is frequently quoted. Nicolson entered the Diplomatic Service in 1909 and distinguished himself as a member of the British Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1918–​1919. After the conference, he became private secretary to Sir Eric Drummond, the first secretary-​general of the newly established League of Nations. An erstwhile Wilsonian idealist, Nicolson grew increasingly disillusioned in the immediate post-​war years. In 1929, he gave up his diplomatic career to become a journalist and eventually Member of Parliament. His reputation as a writer on diplomacy rests largely on his Diplomacy (1939) and the smaller treatise, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (1954). They both join Satow’s encyclopaedic work as modern-​ day classics. To Nicolson, diplomacy was a lubricant that guaranteed the smooth conduct of international affairs. A description of his examination of diplomacy is “an attempt to render an a posteriori justification of his own conversion in the 1920s from a Wilsonian idealist to a more pragmatic realist”.21 Authors from du Rosier to Nicolson were practitioners, who not only aimed at describing and explaining diplomacy but also had a clear prescriptive bent, offering recommendations as to the best conduct of diplomacy. In this long tradition of prescriptive tracts, one can find similar but rather vacuous advice; “the striking thing is how little over the centuries the recommendations have changed”.22 Garrett Mattingly, the historian of early modern diplomacy who died in 1962, commented on the continuity from Bernard du Rosier to his own time, arguing that the clichés of the fifteenth century were similar to those of the twentieth and that students in foreign service schools around the world were still learning much of the same generalities.23 In short, although the term diplomatic theory is often used when referring to these early works, they cannot be said to offer anything amounting to a positive theory of diplomacy. Containing a wealth of useful information in need of systematisation, these prescriptive and value-​laden treatises are rather embryos of a normative theory of diplomacy. With Nicolson, the study of diplomacy stepped away from idealism in the direction of realism –​the school of thought that came to dominate the study of post-​1945 international relations. Classic realism provides a state-​ centric perspective on international relations. Proceeding from a core assumption that world politics unfolds in an international anarchy, that is, a system with no overarching authority, realists conceive of international politics as a struggle for power amongst states, ensuing in inevitable conflicts ultimately resolved by war. With states seen as protectors of their territory, population, and way of life, the assumption is that they do not to see beyond their national interests in the conduct of their foreign policy. War and military strategy are treated in greater detail than diplomacy in realist works. To the extent that realists pay attention to diplomacy at all, they tend to regard it as a state asset. Diplomacy then becomes a component, or reflection, of state power. Hans Morgenthau, the pioneering realist thinker, is emblematic of this perspective. In his 1948 Politics Among Nations, he included “the quality of diplomacy” amongst elements of national power.24 Considering all the other factors that determine national strength as the raw material of power, Morgenthau argued that the quality of a nation’s diplomacy combines these different factors into an integrated 16

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whole, turning potentialities into actual power. To Morgenthau, the conduct of a nation’s foreign affairs by its diplomats is for national power in peace what military strategy and tactics by its military leaders are for national power in war. Diplomacy, in this view, is included amongst, and dependent on, other more material capabilities; hence, it reflects state power. On the other hand, the quality of diplomacy may modify the value of other elements of state power. Thus, skilful diplomacy can increase a nation’s power beyond what one would expect in view of other material factors. Conversely, poor diplomacy may prevent otherwise powerful states from making full use of their power potential. Morgenthau cites France in the period from 1890 to 1914 as an example of an out-​classed state in material terms wielding power chiefly by virtue of its brilliant diplomacy. Furthermore, he argues that British power co-​varied with the quality of British diplomacy, and that a long period of mediocrity or even ineptitude followed the first decades of skilful American diplomacy. Thus, diplomacy is seen as a second-​order lever or instrument used to communicate promises or threats to deploy other instruments. To put it another way, the advantages diplomacy confers are more likely to come from being good at it, rather than possessing a lot of it. Diplomacy, in short, is to be regarded as what economists and strategists call a multiplier, not an element of power in itself.25 Whilst recognising the role of individual diplomats –​asking rhetorically what French power would have been without Richelieu, Mazarin, and Talleyrand –​Morgenthau concluded, “it is of the utmost importance that the good quality of the diplomatic service be constant”. Also that “constant quality is best assured by dependence upon tradition and institutions rather than upon the sporadic appearance of outstanding individuals”.26 Raymond Aron, another classic realist, viewed diplomacy and war as “complementary modalities, one or the other dominating in turn, without one ever entirely giving way to the other except in the extreme case either of absolute hostility, or of absolute friendship or total federation”.27 Citing Clausewitz, Aron espoused the subordination of war to policy.28 Drawing on the experience of the First World War, he warned of diplomacy becoming a prisoner of military mechanisms prepared in advance.29 According to Aron, “diplomacy might be called the art of convincing without using force –​convaincre –​and strategy the art of vanquishing at the least cost –​vaincre”.30 Like Morgenthau, Aron understood diplomacy as an element of state power. On one hand, diplomacy implies the use of economic, psycho-​political, and violent means and the choice of appropriate ones amongst them; on the other, “pure” diplomacy relies on persuasion alone, without economic and political pressure or violence. Yet Aron doubted that pure diplomacy exists. To be sure, states may make every effort to convince both adversaries and on-​lookers that they want to persuade or convince, not constrain; and adversaries may have the illusion of freedom, even when they are in fact yielding to force. Yet according to Aron, persuasion not backed by power has little chance of success.31 In 1979, Kenneth Waltz published his influential Theory of International Politics, which became the main source of inspiration for so-​called neo-​realism. Whilst proceeding from similar assumptions about an anarchic system of independent states, Waltz departed from classic realism by ignoring its normative concerns, trying to provide a scientific International Relations theory inspired by economics. Whereas state leaders are the centre of attention in classic realism, the structure of the system is the central analytical focus in neo-​realism. Aron had argued, “the principal actors have determined the system more than they have been determined by it”.32 Waltz, by contrast, posited that structures, rather than individual actors, determine action. His is a theory of international politics, not of foreign policy.33 17

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In the neo-​realist system-​level approach, diplomacy loses its relevance as an analytical category. Diplomacy may matter only occasionally “as one of those contingent factors about which it is neither possible nor necessary to theorize”.34 Diplomatic skills are epiphenomenal; the decentralised structure of anarchy between functionally similar states provides continuity; the shifting balances of power provide the dynamics of international politics. It is symptomatic that “diplomacy” does not appear at all in the index of Waltz’s book; nor have other neo-​realist authors taken any interest in it. If neo-​realism implies a move from unit-​level to system-​level analysis, it posits an anarchic system without any institutional constraints. In the word of one leading neo-​realist, “institutions have minimal influence on state behavior”.35 However, with institutions allowed into the picture, diplomacy assumes renewed importance in system-​level analysis. An institutionalist perspective on diplomacy is primarily associated with the so-​called English School. Its adherents argue, in opposition to realists, that beyond an international system however anarchic, there exists an international society reflected in certain international institutions with concomitant norms, rules, and practices. Diplomacy is one of these institutions. Martin Wight, in fact, characterised diplomacy as “the master-​institution” of international relations,36 and other authors in the school’s tradition count diplomacy amongst the central international institutions along with sovereignty, war, and international law. As one of the major institutions of the society of states, diplomacy has a moderating influence on state power, “taming the sovereigns”.37 Diplomacy is one crucial component in the set of institutional arrangements that for the most part allows states to co-​exist peacefully and interact in rule-​bound environments that enhance the opportunities for mutual communication, trade, and flows of people and ideas. By providing links of communication and representation between states and regulating their day-​to-​day intercourse, diplomacy sets limits to the unrestricted use of state power. There is today a revived interest in the English School.38 A useful overview of these studies of diplomacy argues that the first generation of English School scholars –​Wight and Herbert Butterfield, in particular –​placed diplomacy at the centre of international relations, producing taxonomic and historical diplomatic studies. These studies, however, did not focus on diplomacy as a practice or diplomacy as an integrated part of social life but aimed at formulating a philosophy of history.39 The next generation of English School scholars, represented by Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, largely discarded Wight and Butterfield’s writings on diplomacy as speculation and rumination. Both had experience as serving diplomats. Bull listed diplomacy as one of five central institutions of international relations, along with the balance of power, international law, war, and Great Power concert. To Wight’s list of diplomacy’s functions –​information, negotiation, and information gathering –​Bull added “minimisation of the effects of friction” and “symbolising the existence of the society of states”.40 In addition to emphasising diplomacy’s symbolic functions, he postulated the existence of a diplomatic culture, defined as “the common stock of ideas and values possessed by the official representatives of states”,41 but never fully developed the idea. Bull, in short, conceived of diplomacy as reflecting, rather than constituting, international society. His treatment of diplomacy was primarily taxonomical.42 Watson focused much more on diplomacy as a practice. Following Wight, he saw diplomacy as dialogue, emphasising that it has a recorded history stretching back to the Amarna Letters from the fourteenth century BC. Rather than making sovereignty a pre-​condition, he defines diplomacy as “negotiation between political entities which acknowledge each other’s independence”.43 Watson was interested in the institution of diplomacy rather than its different manifestations: “To Watson, then, diplomacy is a practice which by preceding, succeeding and 18

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also accompanying war emerges as a constant institution of international society”.44 In sum, the contributions by the second generation of English School scholars consisted of further developing the historical perspective and improving upon the taxonomical work of the first generation. Bull and Watson provided several fruitful and stimulating observations rather than full-​fledged theories of diplomacy.45 In recent decades, Barry Buzan has made significant efforts to revive and reappraise the English School approach. With his ambition to build on previous English School research to develop a rigorous theoretical framework on a foundation with application to contemporary globalisation, Buzan highlights conceptualisations of world society and international institutions.46 He makes a distinction between “primary” and “secondary” institutions. Primary international institutions are durable and recognised practices that are constitutive of both polities and international society, whereas secondary institutions regulate practices amongst political units once legitimate actors are established, the basic rules are in place, and the game of international relations is underway. The distinction between primary and secondary institutions is not always easy to uphold, and different authors suggest varying lists of primary international institutions.47 However, most English School writers, including Buzan, include diplomacy amongst the primary institutions. He suggests that the various issue-​based regulative arrangements analysed by regime theorists can represent secondary institutions. The English School has followers beyond the British Isles. For example, the Canadian Kalevi Holsti investigates change over time in eight major international institutions: statehood, territoriality, sovereignty, international law, diplomacy, international trade, colonialism, and war.48 Reminiscent of Buzan, he makes a distinction between “foundational” and “procedural” institutions, where foundational ones define and give privileged status to certain actors and procedural ones regulate interactions and transactions amongst actors. He places diplomacy amongst the procedural institutions, along with trade, colonialism, and war. Foundational institutions, according to Holsti, include statehood, sovereignty, territoriality, and international law.49 Holsti dates the institutionalisation of diplomacy to the end of the seventeenth century.50 By then, diplomatic practices had become increasingly standardised with growing consensus on how to understand diplomacy: the establishment of norms of sovereign representation, immunity, and extraterritoriality of permanent embassies; the bureaucratised administration of foreign relations; and the diplomatic career taking its first steps towards professionalisation. Before then, “diplomatic practices were so diverse, unpatterned, and unregulated by custom, etiquette, or formal rules that the degree of institutionalization was low”.51 Focusing on institutional change, Holsti distinguishes different notions of change: novelty or replacement, addition or subtraction, increased/​decreased complexity, transformation, reversion, obsolescence.52 He characterises changes in diplomacy since the end of the seventeenth century as increased complexity and addition, refuting arguments about its obsolescence or transformation.53 States have multiplied, and their interconnectedness has grown; means of rapid communication developed that have facilitated summits and multilateral conferences; and the scope of diplomacy expanded to encompass the whole range of issues generated by modern societies. All this has added complexity, according to Holsti, but the traditional functions of diplomacy have stayed intact and the diplomatic institution remains robust. With the exception of Watson, writers in the English School tradition have been interested primarily in the significance of institutions generally in international society and have identified sets of institutions of varying importance, rather than singling out diplomacy for in-​ depth treatment. The effort by Christer Jönsson and Martin Hall to formulate a pre-​theory of diplomacy, drawing on the English School and historical sociology, is an exception.54 They aim to make International Relations theory relevant to diplomacy and diplomacy relevant 19

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to theory. Jönsson and Hall view diplomacy as a trans-​historical phenomenon, as a perennial international institution structuring relations not only amongst states, but also amongst different kinds of political authorities through the ages, so-​called polities. Proceeding from an approach focusing on processes and relationships contributing to the differentiation of political space, they focus on processes of institutionalisation and ritualisation. Their theorising aims at uncovering those timeless parameters within which change occurs in a long-​term historical perspective. Jönsson and Hall identify three essential dimensions of diplomacy: communication, representation, and reproduction of international society. Their conception of communication emphasises its constructive elements and poses diplomats as “intuitive semioticians”. Drawing on the literature on representative democracy, they distinguish between representation as behaviour –​acting for others –​and status –​standing for others –​arguing that representation is a process of mutual interaction between principals and agents. And they refer to diplomatic recognition and socialisation as key mechanisms by which diplomacy contributes to the reproduction of a given international society. In short, Jönsson and Hall emphasise the continuity of basic parameters whilst pointing to constant change within these parameters, painting an overall picture of an institution characterised by great resilience and adaptability. In 1987, James Der Derian published On Diplomacy, a “post-​classical” theoretical treatise building on a doctoral thesis supervised by Bull and dedicated to his memory. Characterised as “the most mature work on diplomacy to emerge out of the English School”,55 it, however, takes a new direction. Whilst acknowledging his debt to Wight and Bull, Der Derian draws on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault in developing a genealogy of diplomacy, a history of the present told in terms of the past. He also deploys the theories of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Sartre, and others to explain how diplomacy arises as a mediation of mutual estrangement amongst individuals, groups, or entities, suggesting: Hegel’s philosophical account of alienation can be used to explain two critical moments in diplomatic history: when the mutual estrangement of states from Western Christendom gives rise to an international diplomatic system; and when the Third World’s revolt against Western “Lordship” precipitates the transformation of diplomacy into a truly global system.56 Der Derian views diplomacy as embedded in a larger social order. In other words, the integration of the practice of diplomacy with other social practices requires study in its historical context. In his view, not only do Great Powers and great events define diplomacy, but so do “the ‘petty’ rituals and ceremonies of power”.57 He analyses the origins and transformations of diplomacy in terms of “six interpenetrating paradigms”: mytho-​diplomacy, proto-​diplomacy, diplomacy, anti-​diplomacy, neo-​diplomacy, and techno-​diplomacy. Mytho-​diplomacy emerged from mediation of man’s alienation from God, as chronicled in the Bible and systematised by Augustine. The cleric, the warrior, and the trader were prototypes of diplomacy,58 with Carolingian missi as links “in a chain of mediatory relations between rulers of various ranks, stretching from the late stages of mytho-​diplomacy to the early stages of proto-​diplomacy”.59 Diplomacy “develops as a mediation of mutual estrangements between states”.60 Anti-​diplomacy refers to the intra-​national estrangement in the newly formed states, giving rise to utopianism aiming at ending diplomacy. The French and the Russian revolutions transformed anti-​diplomacy into neo-​diplomacy; and recent global communication processes have given rise to techno-​diplomacy.

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Costas Constantinou, building on the work of Jacques Derrida and others in using textual analysis to capture social phenomena, takes a different post-​positivist approach without any anchoring in the English School.61 Proceeding from the assumption that diplomacy is a primary example of a practice where the textual plays a key role, Constantinou focuses on the language that underwrites and directs diplomacy. He notes that etymologically, the word “diplomacy” derives from the Greek verb diploun, “to double”, and from the Greek noun diploma, which refers to an official document written on double leaves joined together and folded.62 Diploma has the double connotations of a secret message and an official paper conferring certain rights to the bearer. Constantinou examines the career of the word theoria and its etymological-​philosophical association with both theory and diplomacy. In particular, he focuses on linguistic reflections of common associations of diplomacy with deception, ambiguity, and manipulating ambiguous identities. Noting that in ancient Greece, Hermes was the god not only of diplomacy but also of language and travellers as well as deceit and double-​talk, he points to the etymological links with hermeneutics.63 In his multi-​faceted deconstruction of diplomacy, Constantinou comments on such different aspects as the representation of diplomacy in art and gastronomic diplomacy. A pervading theme is that the duplicity associated with diplomacy is present in all social life. More recently, Constantinou highlights the humanist legacy, characterising diplomacy as a knowledge practice concerning how we can live together in difference. The diplomatic “mode of living” involves “homo-​diplomacy” –​negotiating identity borders and one’s own interests and needs –​in addition to “hetero-​diplomacy” –​persuading and controlling others. A well-​ balanced diplomacy requires both. If there is only advocacy, diplomacy becomes just a bargaining game; if there is only reflection, it becomes just philosophy and endless problematisations.64 Whilst most other theorising efforts involve applying International Relations approaches to diplomacy, Paul Sharp identifies a specifically diplomatic tradition of international thought that can say interesting and useful things about international relations as well as human relations in general.65 He is interested in what diplomats themselves, rather than International Relations scholars, have had to say about international relations, contending that diplomatic theory –​a coherent and distinctive set of propositions –​“can be derived if not from the utterances of diplomats always, then from the place which is distinctly theirs in international relations”.66 Sharp draws on the English School in different ways. First, he employs Wight’s schema of three traditions of Western thought about international relations –​the Machiavellian or realist, the Grotian or rationalist, and the Kantian or revolutionary tradition –​to develop his argument that diplomacy and diplomats remain peripheral and mysterious in International Relations theories. Second, he uses Bull’s attempts to identify international theory as his point of departure for developing diplomatic theory. Third, the international society idea is central in his theorising. Conditions of separateness are at the core of Sharps’ diplomatic theory. Diplomacy is a response to a plural world in which groups of people want to live separately whilst seeing the need to conduct relations with others. These conditions provide the space in which diplomacy and diplomats work. Diplomats occupy positions amongst human communities. They are, as it were, professional strangers, experiencing distance from both home and abroad. This makes for a specifically diplomatic understanding of the world, “with a sense of distance from the issues and interests which their senders and receivers think that their international relations are about”.67 This understanding, in turn, makes diplomats think diplomatically about specific issues –​Sharp discusses specifically problems of rogue states, economic globalisation, religion, and public diplomacy. Diplomatic thinking emphasises sustaining dialogue and seeking modes 21

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of co-​existence, rather than taking an unequivocal stand. Prescriptively, it implies, first, one should accord the content of existing worldviews, including one’s own, a provisional and relative character; second, one should regard the existence of peoples holding different worldviews as a primary fact of international relations.68 In conclusion, Sharp identifies three injunctions that anyone engaged in diplomatic theorising or diplomatic practice has to follow: be slow to judge; be ready to appease; and doubt most universals.69 Metaphors are essential parts of conceptual systems and often constitute building blocks in scientific theories. Three metaphors, in particular, have inspired theorising about diplomacy: Raymond Cohen’s use of “theatre” as a metaphor for the repertoire of visual and symbolic tools used by diplomats and statesmen; Robert Putnam’s coinage of “two-​level games” to direct attention to the nexus between internal and external negotiations; and Jorge Heine’s distinction between “club” and “network” models of diplomacy. Cohen proposes a dramaturgical approach to diplomatic signalling: “The international system is like a great stage on which the states are, at one and the same time, both actors and audience”.70 He identifies three ways in which diplomatic communication differs from interpersonal communication. First, it is bound to seek cross-​cultural comprehensibility; hence the development of a specific language of diplomacy. Second, it is always the product of careful deliberation. Third, it cannot escape from an insatiably inquisitive audience.71 Cohen emphasises the dramaturgical tasks of leadership and the importance of stage-​managing. In diplomacy, as in the theatre, there is a script, a prearranged text. The setting is meticulously prepared, and every gesture premeditated, whether the length of a handshake or the warmth of an embrace. In the dramaturgical analogy, the conventional distinction between words and actions, or appearance and substance, loses much of its usefulness. Cohen emphasises non-​ verbal signalling in particular. One of its advantages lies in it being ambiguous and deniable. Moreover, non-​verbal communication is able to capture the attention and interest of mixed audiences and possibly to induce them to act.72 Whilst culturally specialised gestures pose difficulties, protocol and diplomatic convention permit dialogue even in the absence of shared cultural assumptions.73 Putnam’s two-​level game metaphor resonates with the experience of diplomatic negotiators who often emphasise the problems of internal bargaining, arguing they spend as much or even more time achieving consensus within their own side.74 The metaphor draws attention to the fact that diplomacy has internal as well as external aspects. An edited volume uses this metaphor as a “conceptual springboard” to analyse the interaction of domestic and international processes in various episodes of diplomatic negotiations.75 Diplomacy, in this perspective, involves influencing domestic and international actors simultaneously. Diplomatic strategies and tactics are constrained both by what other states accept and by what domestic constituencies will ratify. Diplomacy is a process of strategic interaction in which actors simultaneously try to take account of and, if possible, influence the expected reactions of other actors, both at home and abroad.76 Analyses of such “double-​edged” diplomacy tend to focus on statesmen, rather than diplomatic agents, as the central strategic actors. Not only do strategies at the interstate level determine the “win-​set” in any international negotiation, but so, too, preferences and coalitions as well as institutions at the national level. The empirical studies suggest that the relative autonomy of statesmen decreases over the course of diplomatic negotiations. They may be in the driver’s seat in formulating international agendas but become increasingly constrained by mobilised interest groups with international options more clearly defined.77 22

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Heine designed “club” and “network” metaphors to capture contemporary transformations of diplomacy.78 In the club model, diplomats meet primarily with government officials, fellow members of the club, with whom they feel most comfortable. In the network model, diplomats interact with a vastly larger number of players, many of whom are far from “the rarefied atmosphere of the salons and private clubs the diplomats of yesteryear used to frequent”. Thus, “diplomacy is becoming ‘complexity management’ to a degree that earlier master practitioners like Cardinal Richelieu would not have imagined”.79 Whereas the theoretical efforts discussed thus far have taken their point of departure in, or formulated in counterpoint to, International Relations theory, diplomacy has attracted attention in other disciplines as well. Notably, social anthropological approaches have addressed two aspects: the origin and ubiquity of diplomats, on the one hand, and the daily experience of being a diplomat, on the other. Ragnar Numelin’s inquiry into “the general human and social groundwork of diplomatic relations” is an early study of diplomacy amongst less differentiated –​ in his terminology “primitive” –​societies.80 He noted that the inviolability of messengers seems an accepted principle amongst aboriginal peoples and points to the exchange of gifts as a pri­ mordial method to create goodwill and peaceful relations.81 Similar more recent works in this genre have dealt with such specific topics as diplomacy amongst American First Nations and in pre-​colonial Africa. However, they tend to be more descriptive than analytical or theoretical. A prime example of theoretically informed anthropology is Iver Neumann’s study of diplomatic practice and knowledge production, based on his own experiences serving at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.82 He proposes that being a diplomat implies balanc­ ing different scripts of self. Diplomats in the field engage in the gathering and processing of information; when stationed at home, text production preoccupies them. Rather than negotiating, contemporary diplomats mostly find themselves charged to mediate between other people’s positions. Another balancing act is how to integrate one’s public persona with one’s personal life. The notion that diplomacy rests on forms of practical knowledge that remain poorly understood in International Relations theory is key to the so-​called “practice turn” in theorising. Practice theory is an umbrella label for diverse approaches with certain things in common, such as a focus on everyday habits and professional codes, a relational perspective, and a desire to build bridges between scholarship and actual practice. Diplomacy is then not an instrument of foreign policy but a practice that constitutes, reproduces, maintains, and transforms significant facets of world politics. Thus, the way in which diplomats perform their trade is the basis for explaining world politics.83 Recently, diplomacy has caught the attention of gender studies. Diplomacy is then theorised as a gendered institution. The gendered nature of diplomacy manifests itself in a hierarchical ordering of men and women. Elite women with ties to royal courts were involved informally in diplomatic practices for many centuries of European history, but with the professionalisation of diplomacy, women became prohibited from holding official diplomatic positions –​concomitantly, the unpaid “diplomatic wife” became institutionalised as an important function of formal diplomacy. Despite conscious efforts at redressing the gender imbalance during the past half-​ century, the pattern of women in support units and men in core functions remains. Moreover, male predominance has nurtured homo-​social environments with ingrained masculinity norms, scripts, and practices.84 As this overview has demonstrated, there are several different attempts at theorising diplomacy but no single widely accepted meta-​theory. The absence of a consensual definition of diplomacy has contributed to this situation, in combination with the lack of theoretical aspirations in much of the early literature on diplomacy. Still, it allows identifying a number of contested 23

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issues in the existing theoretical attempts. First, a dividing line exists between those who associate diplomacy with individual actors and those who regard it as an international institution. The former view sees diplomacy as an asset of states, speaking, for example, of British, French, and Chinese diplomacy; or they relate it to individual agents, such as Talleyrand, Metternich, or Kissinger. The latter sees diplomacy as a universal institution that constitutes, and is constituted by, international society rather than individual states. Another disagreement concerns the relative emphasis on continuity or change. Those observers, who highlight continuity, point to the timeless features of diplomacy, such as immunity, ceremonial, and protocol. Several fundamental ingredients of diplomacy, they argue, have existed throughout recorded history. Those who emphasise change usually point to the role of technological developments. Today, for instance, the revolution in information and communication technology is often seen as transforming diplomacy, depriving diplomats of their former monopoly of cross-​border communication. A middle position in this controversy may be to try to “uncover those timeless parameters, within which change occurs in a long-​term historical perspective”.85 Whether diplomacy should be linked exclusively to the powers-​that-​be, or exists beyond formal political authority, is another issue. Despite diplomacy’s traditional association with state-​ to-​ state activity, monopolised by professional diplomats representing sovereigns or governments, many argue that examples exist of diplomatic agents and practices beyond that narrow circle throughout history. The role of non-​state actors in contemporary diplomacy has attracted considerable attention. For example, one overview of current scholarship on diplomacy distinguishes between traditional, nascent, and innovative schools of diplomatic thought, based on the relative importance they ascribe to new, unorthodox variants of diplomacy and diplomatic agents.86 A final observation concerns the existing dearth but potential usefulness of multi-​disciplinary approaches. Most diplomatic studies have occurred within the disciplinary borders of history and International Relations. Yet a broader spectrum of social sciences and humanities seems relevant to the study of such a multi-​faceted phenomenon as diplomacy. Anthropology has demonstrated its value, but psychology may be equally useful.87 Linguistic approaches appear pertinent to studying diplomacy as a practice where the production of texts is a key component.88 Moreover, given the prominence of visual images in diplomacy, the arts offer untapped potential for diplomatic studies.89 In short, just as diplomacy entails crossing physical borders, there is a need to cross disciplinary borders in approaching diplomacy theoretically.

Notes 1 J. Der Derian, “Mediating Estrangement: A Theory for Diplomacy”, Review of International Studies, 13/​2(1987), 91. 2 A. Eban, The New Diplomacy (London, 1983), 384–​85. 3 C.M. Constantinou, P. Kerr, and P. Sharp, “Introduction: Understanding Diplomatic Practice”, in idem, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Diplomacy (London, 2016), 3. 4 H. Leira, “A Conceptual History of Diplomacy”, in ibid., 28. 5 P. Marshall, The Dynamics of Diplomacy (London, 1990), 7. 6 H.A. Kissinger, Diplomacy (NY, 1994). 7 A. Watson, Diplomacy: The Dialogue Between States (London, 1982), 33. 8 E. Satow [Lord Gore-​ Booth, ed.], Satow’s Guide to Diplomatic Practice, Fifth Edition (London, 1979), 3. 9 K. Hamilton and R. Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London, 1995), 1. 10 J.C. De Magalhães, The Pure Concept of Diplomacy (NY, 1988), 59.

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Theorising Diplomacy 11 R. Cohen, “Reflections on the New Global Diplomacy: Statecraft 2500 BC to 2000 AD”, in J. Melissen, ed., Innovation in Diplomatic Practice (London, 1999), 4. 12 R.P. Barston, Modern Diplomacy (London, 1988), 1. 13 A.L. George, Forceful Persuasion: Coercive Diplomacy as an Alternative to War (Washington, DC, 1991); A.L. George and W.E. Simons, eds., The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy (Boulder, CO, 1994). 14 Cf. J.S. Levy, “Explaining Events and Developing Theories: History, Political Science, and the Analysis of International Relations”, in C. Elman and M.F. Elman, eds., Bridges and Boundaries: Historians, Political Scientists, and the Study of International Relations (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 39–​ 83; idem, “Too Important to Leave to the Other: History and Political Science in the Study of International Relations”, International Security, 22/​1(1997), 22–​33. 15 S. Haber, D.M. Kennedy, and S.D. Krasner, “Brothers Under the Skin: Diplomatic History and International Relations”, International Security, 22/​1(1997), 34–​43. 16 See M. Keens-​ Soper, “Wicquefort”, in G.R. Berridge, M. Keens-​ Soper, and T.G. Otte, eds., Diplomatic Theory from Machiavelli to Kissinger (Basingstoke, UK, 2001). 17 Ibid., 92. 18 Cf. M. Keens-​Soper, “François de Callières and Diplomatic Theory”, in C. Jönsson and R. Langhorne, eds., Diplomacy, Volume I (London, 2004); K.J. Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns: Institutional Change in International Politics (Cambridge, 2004), 184. 19 Keens-​Soper, “Callières”, in Berridge et al., Diplomatic Theory, 107. 20 H. Nicolson, The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (London, 1954 [1998]); reprinted by the Diplomatic Studies Programme, Centre for the Study of Diplomacy, University of Leicester. 21 T.G. Otte, “Nicolson”, in Berridge et al., Diplomatic Theory, 154. 22 H. Bull, The Anarchic Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London, 1977), 182. 23 G. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London, 1955), 39. 24 H.J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Third Edition (NY, 1966 [1945]), 139–​43. 25 P. Sharp, Diplomatic Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, 2009), 56. 26 Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 141. 27 R. Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (NY, 1966), 40. 28 Ibid., 45. 29 Ibid., 43. 30 Ibid., 24. 31 Ibid., 61. 32 Ibid., 95. 33 K.N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA, 1979). 34 Sharp, Diplomatic Theory, 55. 35 J.J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions”, International Security, 19/​3(1995), 7. 36 M. Wight, Power Politics (Leicester, UK, 1978), 113. 37 Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns. 38 Cf. T. Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (London, 1998); B. Buzan, From International to World Society? English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge, 2004). 39 I.B. Neumann, “The English School on Diplomacy”, Discussion Papers in Diplomacy, No. 79 (The Hague, 2002), 7. 40 Bull, Anarchic Society, 171–​72. 41 Ibid., 316. 42 Neumann, “English School”, 9. 43 A. Watson, Diplomacy: The Dialogue Between States (London, 1982), 33. 44 Neumann, “English School”, 11. 45 Cf. ibid., 14. 46 Buzan, From International to World Society? 47 See ibid., 167–​76. 48 Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns. 49 Ibid., 24–​27. 50 Ibid., 179–​89. 51 Ibid., 180–​81. 52 Ibid., 12–​17.

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Christer Jönsson 53 Ibid., 190–​210. 54 C. Jönsson and M. Hall, Essence of Diplomacy (Basingstoke, UK, 2005). 55 Neumann, “English School”, 17. 56 J. Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford, 1987), 23. 57 Ibid., 114. 58 Ibid., 80–​95. 59 Ibid., 73. 60 Ibid., 110. 61 C.M. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy (Minneapolis, MN, 1996). 62 Ibid., 77. 63 Ibid., 35, 150–​51. 64 C.M. Constantinou, “Between Statecraft and Humanism: Diplomacy and Its Forms of Knowledge”, International Studies Review, 15/​2(2013), 141–​62; idem, “On Homo-​Diplomacy”, Space and Culture, 9/​4(2006), 351–​64. 65 Sharp, Diplomatic Theory. 66 Ibid., 7. 67 Ibid., 102. 68 Ibid., 294. 69 Ibid., 296–​311. 70 R. Cohen, Theatre of Power: The Art of Diplomatic Signalling (London, 1987), 21. 71 Ibid., 2–​3. 72 Ibid., 19–​42. 73 Ibid., 103. 74 R.D. Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-​Level Games”, International Organzation, 42/​3(1988), 428–​60. 75 P.R. Evans, H.K. Jacobson, and R.D. Putnam, eds., Double-​Edged Diplomacy (Berkeley, CA, 1993). The quotation is from P.B. Evans, “Building an Integrative Approach to International and Domestic Politics”, in ibid., 398. 76 A. Moravcsik, “Introduction: Integrating International and Domestic Theories of International Bargaining”, in ibid., 17. 77 Evans, “Building an Integrative Approach”, in ibid., 399. 78 J. Heine, “From Club to Network Diplomacy”, in A.F. Cooper, J. Heine, and R. Thakur, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford, 2013). 79 J. Heine, “On the Manner of Practising the New Diplomacy”, in A.F. Cooper, B. Hocking, and W. Maley, eds., Global Governance and Diplomacy: Worlds Apart? (Basingstoke, UK, 2008), 273. 80 R. Numelin, The Beginnings of Diplomacy: A Sociological Study of Inter-​tribal and International Relations (Oxford, 1950), 14. 81 Ibid., 147–​52, 254. 82 I.B. Neumann, At Home with the Diplomats (Ithaca, NY, 2012); idem, “To Be A Diplomat”, International Studies Perspectives, 6/​1(2005), 72–​93. 83 V. Pouliot and J. Cornut, “Practice Theory and the Study of Diplomacy: A Research Agenda”, Cooperation and Conflict, 50/​3(2015), 297–​315; O.J. Sending, V. Pouliot, and I.B. Neumann, eds., Diplomacy and the Making of World Politics (Cambridge, 2015); G. Wiseman, “Bringing Diplomacy back in: Time for Theory to Catch up with Practice”, International Studies Review, 13/​4(2011), 942–​58. 84 See K. Aggestam and A. Towns, eds., Gendering Diplomacy and International Negotiation (Basingstoke, UK, 2018); K. Aggestam and A. Towns, “The Gender Turn in Diplomacy: A New Research Agenda”, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 21/​1(2019), 9–​28. Cf. c­hapter 5, “Diplomats gendered and classed”, in Neumann, At Home with the Diplomats. 85 Jönsson and Hall, Essence of Diplomacy, 3. 86 S. Murray, “Consolidating the Gains Made in Diplomacy Studies: A Taxonomy”, International Studies Perspectives, 9/​1(2008), 22–​39. 87 Cf. T. Gärling, G. Backenroth-​Ohsako, and B. Ekehammar, eds., Diplomacy and Psychology: Prevention of Armed Conflicts after the Cold War (Singapore, 2006). 88 Cf. Neumann, “English School”, 25. 89 I.B. Neumann, “Diplomacy and the Arts”, in SAGE Handbook of Diplomacy.

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PART II

The Great Powers

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3 IMPERIAL RECESSIONAL The Erosion of American Predominance During the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations Christopher Layne

If, as British Prime Minister Harold Wilson quipped, “a week is a long time in politics”, then 20 years is a long time in international politics. The past two decades of American foreign policy –​spanning the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and the beginning of the Joe Biden administrations –​prove the point. In 2000, the geopolitical, economic, ideational, and domestic political certainties that girded American foreign policy since the Second World War’s end seemed securely in place. The United States was at the zenith of its power, and no other Powers contested its international dominance. The “liberal rules-​based international order” [LRBIO] –​in reality the post-​1945 Pax Americana –​was unchallenged. The “end of history” was in. Great Power politics were out. Today much has changed. After a single term in office, Trump’s “America First” foreign policy –​at least rhetorically –​broke commitments to alliances, multilateralism, and international institutions that had been the guiding principle of American foreign policy since 1945. In America, and Europe, there has been a populist backlash against elites perceived to benefit disproportionately –​and unfairly –​from the post-​war international economic system, specifically globalisation. In the United States, the populist critique saw America in decline, as Trump’s slogan –​“Make America Great Again” –​implicitly admitted. But China posed the most significant challenge to the Pax Americana/​LRBIO. Thirty years after the Soviet-​American Cold War ended, Washington and Beijing found themselves engaged in a Second Cold War. The First Cold War’s end did not bury bipolarity. China’s rise resurrected it. What one observer called the post-​1989 “holiday from history” was over.1 History had “returned” –​it never left –​with a vengeance; and with it, the growing risk of a Great Power war between the United States and China. The First Cold War ended in 1989–​1991 with the Berlin Wall’s fall and Soviet collapse. With Soviet implosion, the purportedly bipolar –​two superpower –​international system that existed since 1945 ended and America’s “unipolar moment” began.2 Because of America’s unchallenged military, economic, and soft power, many regarded the United States –​not necessarily happily outside the United States –​as a global hegemon. The distribution of power geopolitically was so lopsided in America’s favour that after 1989, “it was neither easy nor worthwhile to identify the second mightiest country”.3 The United States was so powerful DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-5

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that the then-​French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, coined a new term –​“hyper-​power” [hyper-​puissance] –​to describe “a country [the United States] that is dominant or predominant in all categories”.4 When the twenty-​first century began, American policy-​makers and pundits revelled in the magnitude of United States power and never tired of reminding the rest of the world that the United States was the “sole remaining superpower”. In the1990s and early 2000s, in books and articles, it was usual to see America described as the most powerful actor in international politics since the Roman Empire at its peak. In this vein, in neo-​conservative circles, it was fashionable to talk about creating a “new American Empire”, an outlook that contributed importantly to the George W. Bush Administration’s disastrous military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.5 American security studies scholars argued that unipolarity would be stable and durable.6 Maintaining American dominance –​making permanent the unipolar moment –​has been the overriding grand strategic imperative of each post-​Cold War administration. For example, the George H.W. Bush Administration’s draft Defense Planning Guidance for Fiscal Years 1994–​99 stated that the United States “must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”.7 The Clinton Administration declared the United States both “the world’s preeminent power” and its “indispensable nation”.8 In the military sphere, during Clinton’s Administration, the Pentagon’s Joint Vision 2020 set the goal of American “full spectrum dominance” over any potential rivals. The George W. Bush Administration’s grand strategic aim was to prevent any other Power from “surpassing, or equaling the power of the United States”.9 Unsurprisingly, because many Clinton Administration foreign policy officials returned to office in the Obama Administration, that Administration's policy-​makers were wedded to preserving American primacy. The Obama Administration declared that it was “focused on renewing American leadership”, and also that “going forward there should be no doubt that the United States of America will continue to underwrite global security”.10 And, as the New York Times reported, the Obama Administration’s 2015 National Security Strategy used the phrase “American leadership” –​code for American hegemony (or primacy) –​or variations thereof, nearly 100 times in a 29-​page document.11 For its part, Trump’s Administration appeared as committed to maintaining America’s –​purportedly –​preponderant power in international politics. Its 2017 National Security Strategy –​the chief architect reportedly was Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis –​emphasised the need to “overmatch” the military capabilities of all potential adversaries.12 Trump’s foreign policy decision-​ making was chaotic and erratic, and he was not intellectually engaged in the process. It is difficult to know whether Trump was committed to preserving American primacy in the sense that American policy-​makers and security studies scholars have understood that concept during the post-​1945 era. But those serving in key positions –​like Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security advisors H.R. McMaster and John Bolton –​were primacists. In addition to heralding the advent of the unipolar international system, 1989–​1991 also was said to mark the “end of history”: the final triumph of America’s political and economic modes of liberal democracy, capitalism, and international economic openness –​“globalisation”. The end of history notion was a product of the triumphalist euphoria that washed over America’s foreign policy establishment following the Soviet Union’s implosion. American liberalism’s victory supposedly meant not only ending ideological conflict, but also Great Power politics. In part, this was simple math: in a unipolar –​one Great Power system –​Great Power war obviously cannot occur. Still, there was more. Even as the First Cold War wound down, the diplomatic historian John Lewis Gaddis said that, since the Second World War, international politics –​at least at the Great Power level –​could be characterised as a “Long Peace”, similar to that prevailing in Europe from 1815 to 1914.13 In 1989, the political scientist, John Mueller, 30

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went farther, claiming that changing norms had made Great Power conflict obsolete.14 Then, in a widely-​discussed 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, a Harvard psychologist, Stephen Pinker, argued that the “Long Peace” had morphed into a “New Peace” marked by the general diminishing of conflict and violence in human affairs, and international relations specifically.15 All in all, as the twenty-​first century began, most American foreign policy experts believed that the United States was on the threshold of a long era of geopolitical pre-​eminence based both on its material –​“hard” –​and ideational –​“soft” –​power. Fast forward a couple of decades and the world looks different. In explaining these changes, it is fashionable to point at Trump. In the wake of his November 2016 election victory, it was widely feared that in pursuit of his “America First” foreign policy agenda, Trump would overturn the LRBIO. In Washington, and in the capitals of American allies, the fear was palpable that Trump, a self-​styled disrupter, would demolish the alliances and institutions that were the international order’s bedrock. If, however, Trump Administration foreign policy was disruptive, the disarrangement was more rhetorical than substantive. For example, although Trump carped loudly –​and he was hardly America’s first official to do so –​and often that American allies were not paying their “fair share” of defence costs –​or as he put it, their “membership dues” –​he did not actually unwind America’s security commitments to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO], Japan, or South Korea. Although Trump withdrew America from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Paris climate change accord –​both negotiated by Obama’s Administration –​and began the formal process of leaving the World Health Organisation, there was no wholesale dismantling of core international institutions that Washington created after 1945. Trump, of course, did repudiate the Trans-​Pacific Trade Partnership [TTP] –​another Obama policy –​but so did his 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, on whose watch as secretary of state the TTP was negotiated. Trump’s rejection of TTP was part of his Administration’s effort to reorient American trade policy along neo-​mercantilist lines. In this endeavour, however, he enjoyed significant bi-​partisan support –​especially for his hard-​line with Beijing on trade and technology. The Biden Administration has embraced a broadly similar approach to trade policy. Whilst campaigning for the presidency, Biden promised to restore American leadership by reinvigorating American alliances and renewing Washington’s engagement with international institutions. In contrast to perceptions of Trump Administration unilateralism, Biden pledged a return to multilateralism and promised that during his presidency, American foreign policy would revert to what he asserted was its pre-​Trump norm. As he said at the 2019 Munich Security Conference, referring to Trump’s foreign policy, “This too shall pass”.16 Whether he can make good on this vow, however, is doubtful. Trump’s critics were right to fear for the LRBIO’s future, but Trump was a symptom, not the cause, of LRBIO troubles. Following his 2019 Munich remarks, Biden told America’s allies upon taking office, “we’re back and you can count on us again”.17 According to Council on Foreign Relations president, Richard Haass, Biden’s message was simple: “We believe in multilateralism, we believe in American leadership, we believe in alliances”.18 It is understandable that Biden would reaffirm the commitment to the foreign policy that the United States has charted since 1945. The five years following the Second World War constituted a remarkable period –​“the Creation”, as dubbed by Dean Acheson –​when the United States constructed the post-​war international order.19 It could do this because 1945 was the United States’ first unipolar moment: In terms of absolute power, the United States, in 1945, greatly surpassed the rest of the world. In addition to her vast industrial capacity, the U.S. virtually monopolized or controlled the three sources of power in the modern world: nuclear weapons, monetary reserves, and petroleum. She alone had the atomic bomb and the knowledge 31

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to produce what at the time was called the absolute weapon. American factories produced over 50 percent of the world’s output, and America held approximately 50 percent of the world’s monetary reserves.20 The United States also had a huge store of “soft power” –​the attractiveness of its political (liberal democracy) and economic (capitalist) models, and culture. After 1945, the United States leveraged its immense power to create an open international economic system. It led in constructing the international institutions that constituted the LRBIO’s foundation, and still do: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that morphed into the World Trade Organisation [WTO] in 1995; the World Bank; the International Monetary Fund [IMF]; NATO; and the United Nations. Through the Marshall Plan, the United States promoted recovery in war-​torn Western Europe, whilst also fostering the creation of an integrated market on the continent.21 To provide the security that the post-​war open international economic system required, the United States acted as a regional stabiliser in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East. After the Cold War, Washington used its unipolar moment to consolidate the Pax Americana by expanding both its geopolitical scope –​through NATO enlargement and a vastly enhanced military Middle Eastern presence –​and its ideological ambitions –​via democracy promotion and nation building. Biden and the American foreign policy establishment of which he is a part understandably remain attached to the post-​1945 order. However, this is not 1945. As the great Bob Dylan said, “the times they are a-​changing”. The halcyon age of unassailable American power is over and cannot be restored. The post-​1945 international order is fraying precisely because of the relative decrease of America’s hard –​military and economic –​power and the discrediting of its ideational power. A momentous transition in international politics is occurring. After 500 years of Western dominance, the international system’s geopolitical and economic centres of gravity are shifting from the Euro-​Atlantic world to Asia.22 As China’s president, Xi Jinping, declared in March 2021, “the East is rising, and the West is declining”.23 For the American foreign policy establishment, of course, decline is a dirty word. As Obama said in his 2012 State of the Union Address, “anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence in the world has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about”. Every time American power is characterised as declining, someone in the foreign policy establishment quickly notes that fear of decline is old hat. Subconsciously embedded in America’s political and social cultures, it periodically bubbles to the surface of national debate and always, or so it is said, turns out to be a false alarm.24 Moreover, the notion of decline is supposedly incompatible with American Exceptionalism. Decline is antithetical to the optimistic spirit that is part of America’s national character. Indeed –​one cannot make this stuff up –​as Jon Huntsman said, “Decline is un-​American”.25 In fact, America’s relative decline has been ongoing for many decades. This mostly went unnoticed during the 1970s and 1980s because America’s allies like West Germany and Japan were chipping away at United States economic supremacy. Dependent on the United States for their security during the Cold War, their gains in relative economic power posed no geopolitical threat. But in 1987, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers triggered an intense debate about America’s geopolitical and economic trajectories.26 The book resonated because it dovetailed with growing popular anxiety that Japan –​and, to a lesser extent, West Germany –​were surpassing a United States enervated by the Cold War’s costs. The widespread loss of jobs in industrial sectors like automobiles and steel –​and accompanying social dislocation –​was blamed on “unfair” Japanese and West German competition.27 Polling during the 1988 election campaign captured this unease: more Americans worried about the threat 32

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to America’s economic security posed by Japan than national security dangers embodied by the Soviet Union. These fears appeared in books like Herman Kahn’s The Emerging Japanese Superstate and Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One. They also penetrated popular culture with movies like Rising Sun and Gung Ho. But Kennedy took the argument to another level by demonstrating a pattern in the life cycle of Great Powers: none remains at the top of the pecking order forever. Although The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers struck a chord with the public, America’s foreign policy establishment lashed out at the notion of United States decline. Two leading establishment scholars from Harvard, Samuel P. Huntington and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., labelled Kennedy as a declinist, a subtle twist of the English language insinuating that he was advocating American decline.28 Contrary to this deprecation, Kennedy and the others were not Chicken Littles claiming the sky was falling. Rather, he predicted that the American economy would experience a gradual –​termite-​like –​decline that over time would see a shift in the global distribution of power. This gradual erosion of American relative power was driven by two interlocking factors: fundamental structural economic weaknesses nibbling away at the foundations of United States economic power; and the effect of differential growth rates amongst states in the international system. Kennedy explicitly was looking ahead to the effects this termite decline would have on America’s world role in the twenty-​first century.29 Looking back from the vantage point of the early 2020s, Kennedy’s analysis was prescient. It is the big, impersonal forces of history –​the cycle of Great Power rise and decline –​that is unwinding the post-​1945 international order, specifically, the Sino-​American power shift. American policy-​makers and scholars talk about China’s rise. Yet, from the Chinese perspective, China’s ascent is not a rise but, rather, a restoration. During the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth centuries, China possessed the world’s largest economy. In the nineteenth century, internal decay and Western imperialism combined to knock China out of the Great Power ranks. But with the economic policies instituted by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the “reform and opening up” process jump-​started China’s economic growth and modernisation. In the years immediately following the Great Recession 0f 2007–​2008, the fruits of these reforms became evident. China successively became: the world’s leading exporter, displacing Germany; the biggest trading state surpassing America; and world’s leading manufacturing power –​a crown held by the United States for a century.30 In 2014, the IMF announced that measured by purchasing power parity, China had surpassed the United States as the world’s largest economy.31 Because of a strong rebound from the COVID-​19 pandemic’s economic effects, projections are that, measured by market exchange rates, China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy in 2028, if not sooner. Moreover, well before the pandemic, it was apparent that the America was falling behind in key metrics of economic and societal health, which led Obama to call for a policy of “nation building at home”.32 In medieval times, theologians supposedly debated the question of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Today, many American scholars –​denialists –​spend their time on similarly dubious exercises to show that America’s relative power has not eroded and that world still is unipolar.33 For example, there is the argument that the economic gap between the United States and China is so vast that China has no realistic hope of catching up.34 This is apparently because the United States enjoys a “robust technological dominance over China”.35 A corollary is that in contrast to the United States, China is not good at innovating.36 The argument that China cannot innovate is cultural solipsism ignoring its long history of innovation –​gunpowder, the printing press, the compass. This claim is implicitly racist and reminiscent of how American military and policy-​making elites viewed Japan before the Second World War: a nation of buck-​toothed, near-​sighed people –​whose glasses were as thick 33

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as the bottom of Coca-​Cola bottles –​only capable of manufacturing cheap toys. When the war began, America paid a steep price for this racially-​tinged view of Japan: Japan had the best fighter in the Pacific, the famed Mitsubishi Zero; the best night-​fighting optical equipment, important because many warships had yet to be fitted with radar; and the best torpedo, the Long Lance.37 Actions, of course, speak louder than words. Members of America’s foreign policy establishment say the Chinese cannot innovate; but Washington’s panicky reaction to Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” plan to establish China as a global leader in key emerging technologies sends a rather different message: that American officials, in fact, deeply fear China’s innovation capabilities. Trump’s Administration all but declared war on China’s high-​tech industries by, amongst other things: pressuring other states not to utilise Huawei technology to build out their 5G systems; limiting Chinese firms’ access to advanced micro-​chips; heightening scrutiny of Chinese-​born scholars at American universities; and imposing draconian regulations on the export of advanced American equipment and technology to Chinese firms.38 China’s recent achievements should dispel any notion that “China can’t innovate”. In 2016, China began operating the world’s largest radio telescope and launched the first quantum satellite.39 China is on the cutting edge of quantum computing. Also in 2016, China claimed the lead –​since relinquished –​with the world’s fastest supercomputer that used made-​in-​China microprocessors.40 Equalling the United States in developing artificial intelligence, China has also moved into the first rank in the development of green technologies –​solar panels, wind-​generated power, batteries, and electric vehicles.41 Overall, China is investing considerably more in Research and Development than the United States and, according to a National Science Foundation report, is “rapidly closing the innovation gap”.42 Another denialist argument asserts that the distribution of military power remains unipolar.43 However, respected military analysts conclude differently about the Sino-​American military balance. For example, in a 2015 study, the RAND Corporation stated, the “frontier of U.S. military dominance” in East Asia is “receding”.44 The report noted how quickly China was narrowing the gap with the United States in military capabilities. In a separate study, another RAND analyst reckoned that by 2020 –​which has come and gone –​American military dominance in East Asia would significantly erode and, later in the decade, China would be in a position to establish regional hegemony in East Asia.45 It is textbook “Realist International Relations Theory 101” that when one state becomes too powerful, others will “balance” against it to prevent it from gaining hegemony. When the First Cold War ended, however, the American foreign policy establishment rejected this historically based perspective in favour of “unipolar optimism”. Leading foreign policy establishment scholars have argued –​and still do –​that the United States can buck the historical trend of hegemonic failure. Distilled to its essence, this argument rests on two claims. First, the gap between the United States and its nearest rivals is so wide that it is insurmountable.46 Second, building on “hegemonic stability theory”, it said that far from being fearful of American power, many states welcome it: they derive benefits from American primacy because the United States provides “public goods” for the international system in the realms of security and economics. Hence, American hegemony is benevolent, not threatening. The idea that a dominant Great Power can be a benevolent hegemon is akin to believing in unicorns: people talk about them, but no one actually has seen one. International politics is a hard ball, competitive arena. States that reach the top of the league table do not do so by being nice. Since the international system is anarchic –​lacking a central authority to make and enforce rules –​it is a self-​help system in which states must ensure their own survival.47 Acutely sensitive to the distribution of power between or amongst them, Great Powers are quick to 34

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respond whenever any amongst their number appears to be getting too powerful. There may be imperatives for Great Powers to seek hegemony, yet there are even stronger reasons for other Great Powers to prevent a would-​be hegemon from succeeding. States that bid for hegemony are seeking absolute security for themselves. This poses an existential threat to the others. As Henry Kissinger famously observed, absolute security for one state means absolute insecurity for the others. That is why hegemons –​or would-​be hegemons –​always face resistance; and it is why the fate of hegemons is failure. Prior to 1989, there were two previous “unipolar moments”: France under Louis XIV and Victorian Britain. Both periods ended by the rise of new Great Powers that counterbalanced the hegemon’s power. French hegemony under the Sun King ended by the rise of Britain as a Great Power –​a “fiscal-​military state”; and the dominance of Victorian Britain undone by the near simultaneous emergence of three new Great Powers in the latter part of the nineteenth century –​the United States, unified Germany, and Meiji Japan.48 The manner in which the hegemonies of Louis XIV’s France and Victorian Britain ended highlights a key point: in a unipolar world, there is at least one “Great Power-​in-​waiting” –​a state that has yet to attain Great Power status but with the potential to do so. Contrary to widespread belief, this is why Great Power politics did not end in 1991. To put it another way, even in a unipolar system, Great Power politics is always bubbling just beneath the surface; it may be absent temporarily, but it always is imminent. Great Powers-​in-​waiting have powerful incentives to pursue a Great Power emergence strategy. They are able to vault into the Great Power ranks because of the effect of differential growth rates. Over time, “differential growth in the power of various states in the system causes a fundamental redistribution of power in the system”.49 The competitiveness of international politics operates as a kind of forcing mechanism. To avoid being smacked down by the established dominant Power, Great Powers-​in-​waiting need to rise quickly. If they wait too long, or are unable to convert their potential power into actual power, they may fall victim to the hegemonic Power’s predations. The fate of nineteenth century China is instructive.50 The two Opium Wars –​1839–​1842, 1856–​1860 –​demonstrated that China as a nation did not adapt effectively to the challenge as the Industrial Revolution brought new power to the Western nations. Because of China’s weak response, stronger imperialist powers from the West dominated relations with China, and even dominated industry and trade along the China coast.51 Led by Britain, Great Power intrusion meant that China was forced out from its period of untroubled prelapsarian stagnation under the Qing to one in which it was vulnerable to nations that had become rapidly much more powerful and had the capacity to impede on its domestic space.52 Since the First Cold War ended, America’s foreign policy establishment has made some major mistakes about China. One was failure to think about the long-​run geopolitical consequences of admitting China into the WTO. Washington viewed this decision through the prism of the liberal triumphalism that accompanied the First Cold War’s end. The foreign policy establishment believed that if enmeshed in international institutions and integrated into the global economy, China would liberalise economically and politically. Rather than being conflictive, the Sino-​ American relationship –​“Chimerica” –​would be one of mutually beneficial co-​operation and economic interdependence.53 As then Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said in 2005, China would become a “responsible stakeholder” –​America’s junior partner –​in upholding 35

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the post-​1945 LRBIO. It was foolish, however, to believe that a rising China would settle for playing a secondary role to Washington. G. John Ikenberry has advanced a similarly mistaken argument. Unlike many members of the foreign policy establishment, he is willing at least to entertain the notion that the hard power foundations of the Pax Americana/​LRBIO may erode in the coming decades. Nevertheless, he believes that an ever-​more powerful China will not seek to overturn the post-​Second World War order since its rise to Great Power status took place within, and was facilitated by, that order.54 To be sure, for three decades following the inauguration of its “reform and opening up” policy, China took a low profile internationally and avoided confrontation with both the United States and its regional neighbours. Moreover, to spur its economic growth and modernisation, China integrated itself into the American-​led international order. It did not mean, however, that its long-​term intentions were benign. China may have risen to Great Power status within the LRBIO, but it did not rise to preserve it. Its long-​term goal was to convert its economic gains into the military capabilities that would allow Beijing to contest American preponderance in East Asia. China’s leaders have internalised the lessons from the nation’s “century of humiliation”. As Theda Skocpol argued in her classic book, States and Social Revolutions, the failure of state institutions to respond effectively to external-​competition in the realms of economics, security, and status is a potent generator of modernising revolutions: In late-​eighteenth-​century France, early-​twentieth-​century Russia, and mid-​nineteenth through early-​ twentieth-​ century China alike, the monarchies of the Old Regimes proved unable to implement sufficiently basic reforms or to promote rapid enough economic development to meet and weather the particular intensity of military threats from abroad that each regime had to face. And revolutionary political crises emerged precisely because of the unsuccessful attempts of the Bourbon, Romanov, and Manchu regimes to cope with foreign pressures.55 These revolutions were a form of state building or, more correctly, state rebuilding. A main driver of the Chinese Communist Party’s quest for power was to sweep away the decayed political and social structures that failed to meet the Great Power challenges to China’s security and sovereignty in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Party “was always a resiliently nationalist party, one which was focused on achieving the renaissance of the modern Chinese state after the injustices and humiliations visited on it by colonial oppressors since 1839”.56 Two shadows from the past loom over the Sino-​American relationship today: the First World War and First Cold War. Because of what IR scholars call power transition dynamics, an unsettling parallel exists between today’s Sino-​American relationship and the pre-​1914 Anglo-​ German one. The dramatic shift in the American foreign policy establishment’s perceptions of China today mirrors the formation of the “Cold War consensus” in 1945–​1947, catalysed by George F. Kennan’s “Long Telegram”, Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, and the Clifford-​Elsey report. America’s China policy is repeating the mistakes that Washington made in dealing with Moscow during the 1945–​1947 period. Power transitions are perilous because they typically culminate in Great Power war, which is why the on-​going deteriorating Sino-​ American relations –​the Second Cold War –​is so concerning. When the Obama Administration ended, the foreign policy establishment was hopeful about the future of the Sino-​American relationship. Early in the Trump Administration, however, the foreign policy establishment’s views about China policy underwent a sea change. This shift occurred before the COVID-​19 pandemic, China’s crackdown on Hong Kong, and 36

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widespread American awareness of Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang province. In July 2019, the Financial Times’s Edward Luce, a keen observer of American politics, confessed, “The speed with which U.S. political leaders of all stripes have united behind the idea of a ‘new cold war’ is something that takes my breath away”.57 When the Obama Administration ended, the notion of the United States and China engaged in a new Cold War was dismissed as “fringe scaremongering”. Now, Luce said, “it is consensus”. The First Cold War’s origins suggest how the Sino-​American relationship is going off-​track. In 1945–​1947, American policy-​makers struggled with two questions. Was preserving the co-​operative wartime relationship with Moscow possible? Or was the Soviet Union an implacable adversary needing to be confronted? These duelling perspectives are, respectively, the Yalta, and Riga axioms.58 In the historical debate on Cold War origins, the Riga axioms conform to orthodox and neo-​orthodox interpretations; the Yalta ones parallel “revisionist” accounts. The Yalta axioms, broadly reflecting President Franklin Roosevelt’s outlook, “downplayed the role of ideology and the foreign policy consequences of authoritarian domestic practices, and instead saw the Soviet Union behaving like a traditional Great Power within the international system, rather than trying to overthrow it”.59 The Riga axioms regarded the Soviet Union as a dangerous, aggressive, revolutionary state with an odious form of government that posed a dire threat to both America’s interests and ideals. For those subscribing to the Riga axioms, the contest between the United States and Soviet Union was between good and evil. With respect to shaping American post-​Second World War policy, the Riga axioms carried the day. Regarding historical understanding, however, the Yalta axioms have had much the better of the argument. Its adherents have shown that American policy made a modus vivendi with Moscow impossible. Contrary to claims made by Riga proponents, Soviet policy in the immediate post-​war years was cautious and ambiguous, not expansionist or aggressive.60 On the other hand, the post-​war fusion of America’s geopolitical aims with its liberal ideology resulted in policy toward the Soviet Union that was expansive and assertive. To grasp why the Cold War began, “the breadth of the American conception of national security that emerged between 1945 and 1948 must be appreciated”.61 American strategy called for encircling the Soviet Union with bases and alliances and American control of Western Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East.62 The scope of America’s ideological ambitions was similarly immense. Although the Riga axioms posit that Soviet communist ideology largely caused the First Cold War –​a form of psychological projection –​America’s liberal ideology foreclosed the possibility of post-​war agreement between Washington and Moscow.63 If the United States wanted to conduct its post-​ war relationship with the Soviet Union in the mould of traditional Great Power diplomacy, East Central Europe –​especially Poland –​was the place where it ought to have happened. American policy-​makers understood that Moscow’s interests in the region long pre-​dated the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and that the Soviets had legitimate security interests in the region.64 To ensure that East Central Europe remained a reliable buffer against external threat, the Soviets believed they required a “closed” sphere of influence, which meant controlling the domestic politics of nearby states. American policy-​makers understood that Washington had minimal leverage to shape developments in the region.65 Nevertheless, they insisted that the region remain open to America’s ideological and economic penetration. For the United States, liberalism was universal, and Washington could not tolerate closure in any region. Post-​war policy-​makers believed that America’s interests legitimately extended to all “corners” of the globe.66 American policy-​makers “wanted a world safe both for liberal democracy and liberal capitalism” and, therefore, for the “best of reasons”, the United States opposed Moscow’s attempt to close off East Central Europe to America’s economic and ideational penetration.67 37

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The broad scope of post-​war United States policy aims transformed what should have been a traditional Great Power Soviet-​American relationship into a Manichean struggle.68 The pre-​1914 Anglo-​German relationship offers another cautionary note about how the increasingly tense Sino-​American relationship will play out. During the run-​up to the 1914 July Crisis centenary, it was commonplace to see articles comparing the pre-​First World War Anglo-​German relationship with the Sino-​American one. The parallels are troubling. The pre-​ war naval race alone did not fuel rising tensions between the two Powers.69 Economic competition and ideological differences were also contributing factors. Economic rivalry may not have been the cause of the conflict in 1914, but it injected elements of distrust and anxiety into British perceptions of Germany that spilled over into British debates about strategy and policy. Economic rivalry fed into the ideological gap between Germany and Britain. Inspired by the mercantilist doctrine of Friedrich List, Germany’s economic policy ran against the grain of Britain’s liberal political economy based on free trade and comparative advantage.70 Many in the British commercial and political establishments blamed Britain’s relative economic decline on unfair German trade and industrial policies: tariffs, state-​sanctioned cartels, and state subsidised exports. Moreover, when British elites gazed across the North Sea, they saw a nation whose institutions, political culture, and values were different –​indeed, in many ways, antithetical –​to their own. Consequently, they formed an image of Germany as a “Hohenzollern autocracy, jackboots and mailed fists and preventive wars, of distaste for civilian and pacifist values, of obsequiousness to authority and a Prussian lust for conquest”.71 Taken together, heightened economic rivalry and ideological antipathy created a perception spiral that helped to cement in British elites an “enemy” image of Wilhelmine Germany. The geopolitical context of pre-​1914 Anglo-​German relations magnified this perception spiral. Anglo-​German rivalry was a classic example of what IR scholars call a power transition.72 Power transitions signal that a major shift in the distribution of power is in the offing and, as such, are the geopolitical equivalent of a hurricane warning: trouble is coming. Power transitions are easily visualised. Imagine side-​by-​side up and down escalators. The incumbent hegemon is on the down escalator, the rising challenger on the up one. As they approach each other heading in opposite directions, one of them leaps over the rail to the opposite side and begins pummelling the other. An on-​going debate exists amongst IR scholars about which of the Powers initiates conflict. Regardless, power transitions cause heightened tensions between the two leading Powers and usually result in war.73 Power transitions are powder kegs as they are about the nature of the international order. Will the declining Power preserve what for it is a beneficial status quo, or will the upstart challenger overthrow the old international order and replace it with a new one that advances its interests? Power transitions, thus, are about whether the status quo can prevail over the forces of geopolitical revisionism. In one assessment, the outbreak of Anglo-​German war in August 1914 resulted from power transition dynamics.74 Posing the question of why Britain and Germany went to war, the answer comes in a comparison with today’s Sino-​American relationship. Political scientists might say the fact that Germany and Britain found themselves on opposite sides in the Great War was foreordained, the result of the clash between a major global power feeling its advantage slip away and a rising challenger. Such transitions are rarely managed peacefully. The established power is too often arrogant, lecturing the rest of the world about how to manage its affairs, and too often insensitive to the fears and concerns of lesser powers. Such a power, as Britain was then, and the United States is today, inevitably resists its own intimations of mortality and the 38

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rising one is impatient to get its fair share of whatever is on offer, whether colonies, trade, resources, or influence. Of course, whilst history never repeats itself, striking –​ominous –​parallels exist between pre-​ 1914 Anglo-​German rivalry and today’s deepening Sino-​American competition.75 As their British counterparts did concerning Germany before 1914, the American foreign policy elite now views China as both an economic and ideological threat. During Obama’s second term, the implications of China’s stunningly swift economic rise began to sink in with America’s foreign policy establishment. As was the case with British elites before 1914, American officials and policy analysts increasingly ascribed China’s economic success to alleged unfair economic practices. In response, the Obama Administration began toughening its trade policies with China. A big reason for Obama’s changing outlook was his anger at “Beijing’s refusal to play by the rules in trade” and frustration over “the United States’ lack of leverage to do anything about it”.76 Charging that China illegally subsidised its exports of cars and auto parts, Washington filed a complaint with the WTO in September 2012. As Obama said, “These are subsidies that directly harm working men and women on the assembly lines in Ohio and Michigan and across the Midwest. It’s not right; it’s against the rules and we won’t let it stand”.77 During the Trump Administration, Sino-​American economic relations deteriorated dramatically. Trump ran for the presidency in 2016 promising to revive the American manufacturing base, the decline of which he blamed on unfair Chinese trade practices. Trump’s views were influenced by those of the anti-​China economics professor, Peter Navarro, who became a key White House advisor on trade issues.78 The Administration declared a trade war on China, imposing tariffs both to force Beijing to open its markets more widely to American exports and reform its unfair trade policies. Alarmed by China’s technological advances and –​blurring if not erasing the line between trade and national security –​it pressured American allies not to use Huawei 5G technology to build their 5G networks. Concurrently, Washington sought to reduce China’s access to American –​and third country –​advanced technology, including the machines and software necessary for producing the most advanced semi-​conductors. The Biden Administration is maintaining a similarly hard-​line, respecting trade and technology. During her confirmation hearings, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin “took a hawkish tone”, vowing “to use the ‘full array’ of America’s tools to combat China’s ‘illegal, unfair and abusive’ practices. She has also criticised China’s practices of stealing intellectual property and subsidising state-​ owned enterprises”.79 For his part, Biden declared that Washington’s policy respecting China would be one of “extreme competition”.80 His Administration is trying to drum up allies, in Biden’s words, to “push back” against China’s “economic abuses and coercion that undercut the foundations of the international economic system”.81 In the realm of geopolitics, there are strong parallels between present Sino-​American relations and Washington’s Soviet policy in the First Cold War’s early years. Trump’s Administration made clear that the United States would seek to maintain the extra-​regional hegemony in East Asia that it had attained by virtue of its victory over Japan in the Pacific War. Moreover, it extended the geographical scope of American interests into the Indian Ocean and South Asia. Washington re-​christened the previous Asia-​Pacific strategy as the Indo-​Pacific strategy. In June 2019, Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan declared the United States a “resident power” in the Indo-​Pacific region.82 This strategy and consequent cultivation of closer defence co-​operation amongst the United States, Japan, India, and Australia –​“the Quad” –​ was explicitly aimed at countering China.83 The Biden Administration also is pursuing a hard-​ line policy towards Beijing with its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance: China is “the only 39

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competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system”.84 Biden’s first summit meeting occurred in mid-​March 2021 when he attended –​virtually –​the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.85 During the Trump Administration, the United States also began playing up the ideological differences between the United States and China. Whilst lacking the kind of lurid and incendiary rhetoric found in the 1950 NSC-​68 –​which referred to the “grim oligarchy of the Kremlin” and stated, “the world cannot exist half slave and half free” –​Trump’s Administration said that international politics today is “defined by geopolitical rivalry between free and repressive world order visions”.86 It sought to cast China as a “bad” state by castigating its repression in Hong Kong and accusing Beijing of committing “genocide” against the Uighurs in Xinjiang province.87 One of the first acts of Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was to reaffirm Trump Administration accusations that China is guilty of genocide against the Uighurs.88 Biden has touted a “summit of democracies” to concert against China’s geopolitical, economic, and technological ambitions. Indeed, he explicitly views international politics as a competition between democracy and authoritarianism: “We are in the midst of a fundamental debate about the future and direction of our world” that pits those who believe “autocracy is the best way forward and those who understand that democracy is essential”.89 This is more than an echo of Washington’s Cold War rhetoric. Once again, Washington is dividing the world based on ideology. In his study on the origins of the Pacific War, the diplomatic historian Jonathan Utley said, Nations do not choose to go to war … they choose to follow a course of action that results in war, which is a very different thing. To avoid war one must see it coming, but to go to war it is only necessary to take step after step and make decision after decision until leaders finally resort to war because they have exhausted all other options. It is doubtful that American policy-​makers or the broader foreign policy establishment desire a Sino-​American war or even really believe it could happen.90 Yet, one-​step at a time, the United States is taking actions that are likely to culminate in war: challenging Beijing in the South China Sea, tightening its commitment to Taiwan, and attempting to orchestrate China’s strategic encirclement. Moreover, American officials and policy analysts keep adding fuel to the fire by depicting the competition with China as ideological in nature. After the First Cold War’s conclusion, the American foreign policy establishment fell into a state of smug self-​satisfaction, seduced by their own exceptionalist myths about unipolarity and the final triumph of American liberalism. Today, they have awakened with a start to the rise of China. Their reaction, however, has been schizophrenic: clinging to notions of American primacy whilst dreading China’s growing economic, technological, and military power. To be sure, the shifting power balance is a cause of American anxiety. But on a deeper level, the cause of the foreign policy establishment’s anxiousness about China is more primal. For them, the real Chinese threat is to America’s exceptionalist self-​image and the asserted universality of its liberal ideology. Indeed, “For Americans the success of a mainland [Chinese] regime that blends authoritarian rule with market-​driven economics is an affront”.91 The foreign policy establishment, however, ought to have learnt from the First Cold War that drawing lines dividing the world into rival spheres based on ideology is dangerous. Power transitions –​such as the on-​going Sino-​American one –​can end in two ways. The declining hegemon can accommodate the rising challenger or it can dig in its heels and attempt to contain the challenger, a course of action that –​even if not actively seeking 40

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conflict –​invariably leads to war. During the run-​up to the Great War, London debated this precise issue. In a famous exchange of memoranda, Sir Thomas Sanderson, the permanent under-​secretary in Britain’s Foreign Office, argued that Britain should conciliate Wilhelmine Germany’s rising power. His colleague, Sir Eyre Crowe, maintained that Germany was expansive and aggressive; hence, seeking accommodation was dangerous, and futile. Crowe’s views prevailed and, in August 1914, Britain and Germany were at war. In a telling assessment, “The proper lesson”, to be drawn from pre-​1914 Anglo-​German rivalry, “is not so much the need for vigilance against aggressors, but the ruinous consequences of refusing reasonable accommodation to upstarts”.92 Today, there are too many Crowes in America’s foreign policy establishment and too few –​if any –​Sandersons. The obstacles to détente, accommodation, and rapprochement between the United States and China are formidable. They all pretty much lay on the American side. Gradually, Washington has converted what should be a traditional Great Power rivalry with China into what is threatening to become a titanic ideological struggle. It is dangerous. Adroit diplomacy can modulate Great Power competitions. Conversely, ideological clashes invariably become zero-​sum contests. Demonising a rival restricts the room for diplomacy. After all, negotiating with a state labelled as evil is “appeasement”. In the Cold War’s early days, Walter Lippmann, the foreign policy thinker, understood this dynamic and feared it. Seeking accommodation with Moscow was preferable: The history of diplomacy is the history of relations among rival powers, which did not enjoy political intimacy, and did not respond to appeals to common purposes. Nevertheless, there have been settlements. Some of them did not last very long. Some of them did. For a diplomat to think that rival and unfriendly powers cannot be brought to a settlement is to forget what diplomacy is about. There would be little for diplomats to do if the world consisted of partners, enjoying political intimacy, and responding to common appeals.93 Lippmann feared that demonising the Soviet Union based on ideology would constrict the room for effective diplomacy. The First Cold War ensued. The stakes in the Sino-​American relationship are high. In terms of regional hegemony in East Asia, there cannot be two hegemons simultaneously. As a Chinese saying has it, “two tigers cannot live on the same mountain”. Whether America can, or will, yield its dominance in East Asia is an open question. There is also the question of whether Washington can, or will, acknowledge Beijing’s push for status and prestige equal to that of the United States.94 There is little reason for encouragement on this count: “U.S. decision makers value their country’s status of primacy”.95 From 1989 until the Trump Administration, successive administrations sought to rein in a rising China by employing both carrots –​engagement –​and sticks –​containment. On the American side today, sticks are in. Those in the foreign policy establishment who support “the Second Cold War consensus” surely do not want a real Sino-​American war. However, gradually, they are sleepwalking toward the abyss.

Notes 1 Gideon Rachman, Zero-​Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety (NY, 2012). 2 Charles Krauthammer, “Unipolar Moment”, Foreign Affairs, 70/​1(1990/​91), 23–​33. 3 Janan Ganesh, “The Awesome Stakes of Biden’s Presidency”, Financial Times (19 January 2021). 4 “To Paris, U.S. Looks Like a ‘Hyperpower’ ”, International Herald Tribune (5 February 1999). 5 For an overview, see Christopher Layne and Bradley A. Thayer, American Empire: A Debate (NY, 2006).

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Christopher Layne 6 William C. Wohlforth, “The Stability of a Unipolar World”, International Security, 24/​1(1999), 5–​41. 7 “Excerpts from Pentagon’s Plan: ‘Prevent the Re-​emergence of a New Rival’ ”, NY Times (8 March 1992); Patrick E. Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop”, ibid. (8 March 1992) A1 (emphasis added). 8 William J. Clinton, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington, DC, 1995). Then-​Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described America as the world’s “indispensable nation” during a 19 February 1998 television interview on NBC’s Today Show 9 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC, 2002), 30 (emphasis added). 10 National Security Strategy (Washington, DC, 2010), 1. 11 Peter Baker and David E. Sanger, “Security Strategy Recognizes U.S. Limits”, NY Times (5 February 2015). 12 National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC, 2017), 28. 13 John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (NY, 1987). 14 John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (NY, 1989). 15 Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature; Why Violence Has Declined (NY, 2011). 16 “Biden Inauguration: What Will Joe Biden Do First?” BBC News (20 January 2021): www.bbc.com/​ news/​world-​us-​canada-​54774814. 17 Ibid. 18 Quoted in William Maudlin, “Biden Defends Democracy at Summits With European Allies, Seeing China as ‘Stiff’ Competition”, Wall Street Journal (19 February 2021). 19 Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years In the State Department (NY, 1969). 20 Robert Gilpin, U.S. Power and the Multinational Corporation: The Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment (NY, 1975), 103–​04. For a similar picture of American economic, military, and financial dominance by 1945, see Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (NY, 1987), 357–​61. 21 Cf. Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–​1952 (Cambridge, 1987); Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (NY, 2018). 22 Gideon Rachman, Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond (NY, 2017). 23 Chris Buckley, “ ‘East is Rising,’ Xi Declares, Mapping China’s Post-​Covid Role”, NY Times (4 March 2021), A13. 24 For example, Josef Joffe, The Myth of America’s Decline; Politics, Economics, and a Half-​Century of False Prophecies (NY, 2013); Robert Lieber, Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States is Not Destined to Decline (Cambridge, 2012); Michael Beckley, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (Ithaca, NY, 2018); Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, America Abroad: The United States Global Role in the 21st Century (NY, 2016). 25 Huntsman, a Republican, was governor of Utah and then served as ambassador to China during Obama’s first term. He ran unsuccessfully for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination and was ambassador to Russia during Trump’s Administration. 26 Kennedy, Great Powers. Other prominent scholars made the same case: David Calleo, The Imperious Economy (Cambridge, MA, 1982); James Chace, Solvency: The Price of Survival (NY, 1981); Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton, NJ, 1987). 27 See David Halberstam, The Reckoning (NY, 1986). 28 Samuel P. Huntington, “Coping With the Lippmann Gap”, Foreign Affairs, 66/​3(1988), 453–​77; Joseph Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (NY, 1990). 29 Kennedy, Great Powers, 534 30 Ralph Atkins and Geoff Dyer, “Germany Loses Export Leader Title to China”, Financial Times (10 February 2010); Jamil Anderlini and Lucy Hornby, “China Overtakes U.S. as World’s Largest Goods Trader”, ibid. (10 January 2014); Peter Marsh, “China to Overtake US as Largest Manufacturer”, ibid. (10 August 2008); idem, “China Noses Ahead as Top Goods Producer”, ibid. (13 March 2011). 31 Keith Fray, “China’s Great Leap Forward: Overtaking the US as the Largest Economy”, Financial Times (8 October 2014). 32 On domestic causes of America’s relative economic decline, see Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (NY, 2012); Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaurm, That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (NY, 2011). 33 Beckley, Unrivaled; Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad

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Imperial Recessional: Bush, Obama, Trump 34 Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad, pp. 16–​17. 35 Ibid., 28. 36 For example, Lieber, Power and Willpower. 37 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (NY, 1986), 98–​105. On the role of race and racial stereotypes in American foreign policy, see Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 1987). 38 For example, Ellen Barry, “Colleagues Rise to Defense of Professor Accused of Hiding Ties to China”, NY Times (24 January 2021), A24; Demetri Sevastopulo and Kiran Stacey, “U.S. Sets Out New Powers to Block China Technology”, Financial Times (15 January 2021), 4; Jeanne Whalen and Ellen Nakashima, “U.S. Bans Technology Exports to Chinese Semiconductor and Drone Companies, Calling Them Security Threats”, Washington Post (19 December 2020). 39 Chris Buckley and Adam Woo, “China Hunts for Scientific Glory and Aliens, With New Telescope”, NY Times (25 September 2016), A8; Edward Wong, “China Launches Satellite in Bid to Lead Quantum Research”, ibid (17 August 2016), A5. 40 John Markoff, “China Crowds Top Computer List”, ibid. (21 June 2016), B1. 41 Paul Mozur, “China Sets Goal to Lead in Artificial Intelligence”, NY Times (21 July 2017), B1; Keith Bradsher, “China Hastens a Global Move to Electric Cars”, ibid (10 October 2017), A1. 42 Matthew Slaughter, “To the Moon and Back, Chinese R & D is Leaving America Behind”, Financial Times (15 December 2020), 17. 43 Cf. Brooks and Wohlforth, America Abroad; Nuno Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (Cambridge, 2014). 44 Eric Hegenbotham and Michael Nixon, eds., The United States-​ China Military Scorecard: Forces, Geography, and the Emerging Balance of Power, 1996–​2017 (Santa Monica, CA, 2015), 321. 45 Roger Cliff, China’s Military Power: Assessing Current and Future Capabilities (Cambridge, 2015), 246. 46 William C. Wohlforth, “U.S. Strategy in a Unipolar World”, in G. John Ikenberry, ed., America Unrivaled: The Future of the Balance of Power (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 98–​120. 47 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA, 1979). 48 For elaboration, Christopher Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise”, International Security, 17/​4(1993), 5–​51. 49 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge, 1981). 50 Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832–​1914 (London, 2011). 51 Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 696, 52 Kerry Brown, China’s Dream: The Culture of Chinese Communism and the Secret Sources of it Power (Cambridge, 2018), 27. 53 Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, “Chimerica and the Global Asset Market Boom”, International Finance, 10/​3(2007), 215–​39, coined “Chimerica” to describe what they characterised the “symbiotic” economic relationship that developed by the early 2000s between the United States and China. 54 G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ, 2011). 55 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, 1979), 50 (emphasis added). 56 Brown, China’s Dream, 44. 57 Edward Luce, “Getting Acclimated to the U.S.-​China Cold War”, Financial Times (18 July 2019). 58 Daniel Yergin, The Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston, MA, 1977). 59 Ibid., 11. 60 Cf. Walter Lafeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–​2006 (Boston, MA, 2008); Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA, 1992); Norman Naimark, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA, 2019). 61 Melvyn P. Leffler, “The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War”, American Historical Review, 89/​2(1984), 379. 62 Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 97. 63 Yergin, Shattered Peace, 8. 64 On the factors driving –​and limiting –​American attempts to keep open the Soviet sphere in East Central Europe, see Geir Lundestad, The American Non-​Policy Towards Eastern Europe, 1943–​1947: Universalism in an Area Not of Essential Interest to the United States (Tromso, 1978), especially 39–​80. Cf. Eduard Mark, “Charles E. Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe: A

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Christopher Layne Memorandum of 18 October 1945”, Diplomatic History, 3/​2(1979), 201–​14; Robert L. Messer, “Paths Not Taken: The United States Department of State and Alternatives to Containment”, ibid., 1/​ 4(1977), 279–​319. 65 See the 1943 Joint Strategic Survey Committee analysis in Mark A. Stoler, Allies and Adversaries: The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and U.S. Strategy in World War II (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 127. During the war, Roosevelt acknowledged that the United States could do little to prevent the Soviets from dominating the regions occupied by the Red Army: ibid., 126, 189. Truman concurred: Leffler, Preponderance of Power, 34. 66 Lundestad, American Non-​Policy, 41. 67 Yergin, Shattered Peace, 84. 68 Odd Arne Westad, “The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms”, Diplomatic History, 24/​4(2000), 554, asserts it “was largely American ideas and their influence that made the Soviet-​American conflict into a Cold War” (emphasis in original). 69 Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-​German Antagonism, 1860–​1914 (Boston, MA, 1980). 70 On List, see Edward Meade Earle “Adam Smith, Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List: The Economic Foundations of Military Power”, in Peter Paret, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert, eds., Makers of Modern Strategy From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 217–​61 71 Kennedy, Anglo-​German Antagonism, 397–​98. 72 Cf. A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago, IL, 1980); Jacek Kugler and Douglas Lemke, eds., Parity and War: Evaluations and Extensions of the War Ledger (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996); William R. Thompson, ed., Systemic Transitions: Past, Present, and Future (NY, 2009); Jack Levy, “Power Transition Theory and the Rise of China”, in Robert Ross and Zhu Feng, eds, China’s Ascent: Power, Security, and the Future of International Politics (Ithaca, NY, 2008), 11–​33. 73 Graham Allison, Destined for War? Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston, MA, 2017). 74 Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War (NY, 2013), 273–​74, 294. 75 Christopher Layne, “The Sound of Distant Thunder: The Pre-​World War I Anglo-​German Rivalry as a Model for Sino-​American Relations in the Early Twenty-​First Century”, in Asle Toje, ed., Will China’s Rise Be Peaceful? Security, Stability, and Legitimacy (NY, 2017), 123–​42. 76 Mark Landler, “Obama’s Journey to Tougher Tack on a Rising China”, NY Times (20 September 2012). 77 Idem, “In Car Country, Obama Trumpets China Trade Case”, ibid (18 September 2012). 78 See Peter Navarro and Greg Autry. Death by China: Confronting the Dragon –​A Global Call to Action (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2011). 79 Ana Swanson, “Biden Administration on ‘Short Leash’ as Administration Rethinks U.S.-​ China Relations”, NY Times (17 February 2021). 80 Demetri Sevastopulo, “Biden Warns China Will Face ‘Extreme Competition’ From U.S.”, Financial Times (7 February 2021). 81 Idem, “U.S. vs. China: Biden Bets on Alliances to Push Back Against China”, ibid. (6 March 2021), 15. 82 Acting Secretary Shanahan’s Remarks at the IISS Shangri-​La Dialogue 2019, Singapore (1 June 2019): www.defense.gov/​Newsroom/​Transcripts/​Transcript/​Article/​1871584/​acting-​secretary-​ shanahans-​remarks-​at-​the-​iiss-​shangri-​la-​dialogue-​2019/​. 83 Department of Defense, Indo-​Pacific Strategy Report: Preparedness, Partnerships, and Promoting a Networked Region (Washington, DC, 2019), 8: https://​media.defe​nse.gov/​2019/​Jul/​01/​200​2152​311/​-​1/​-​1/​1/​ dep​artm​ent-​of-​defe​nse-​indo-​paci​fic-​strat​egy-​rep​ort-​2019.pdf. 84 Sevastopulo, “Biden Bets on Alliances”. 85 Demetri Sevastopulo and Amy Kazmin, “Joe Biden Enlists ‘Quad’ Allies to Counter China”, Financial Times (8 March 2020), 3. 86 Indo-​Pacific Strategy, 53 (emphasis added). 87 Edward Wong and Chris Buckley, “U.S. State Dept Accuses China of Uighur Genocide”, NY Times (20 January 2021), A9. 88 Demetri Sevastopulo, “Blinken Blasts China in First Phone Call”, Financial Times (6 February 2021). 89 Sevastopulo, “Biden Bets on Allies”. 90 On this point, they are mistaken. See Christopher Layne, “Coming Storms: The Return of Great Power War”, Foreign Affairs, 99/​6(2020), 42–​49. 91 Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (NY, 2011), 44 (emphasis added).

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Imperial Recessional: Bush, Obama, Trump 92 David Calleo, The German Problem Reconsidered: Germany and the World Order From 1870 to the Present (Cambridge, 1979), 6. 93 Walter Lippmann, The Cold War (NY, 1947), 60 94 On the importance of status and prestige in international politics, see Joslyn Barnhart, The Consequences of Humiliation: Anger and Status in World Politics (Ithaca, NY, 2020); Jonathan Renshon, Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Status in World Politics (Princeton, NJ, 2017); Steven Ward, Status and the Challenge of Rising Powers (Cambridge, 2017); T.V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson, and William C. Wohlforth, eds., Status in World Politics (Cambridge, 2014). 95 William C. Wohlforth, “Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War”, World Politics, 61/​ 1(2009), 52.

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4 CHINA’S RISE AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER Baohui Zhang

The rise of China has transformed international politics. Today, every part of the world and every facet of international relations feels China’s power and influence. Concurrently, however, China’s rise has been accompanied by the resurgence of geopolitics and Great Power rivalry, which were not predicted by liberal depictions of the world order as the Cold War ended. Then, a surmise: liberal peace would rule the world through economic interdependence, multilateral institutions, and spreading democracy.1 Now, it seems that a new Cold War remains possible between China and the United States, both seeing their increasingly competitive relations affecting international politics. This analysis examines the rise of China, how its success has rekindled the realist dynamics of international relations, and results in the resurgence of geopolitics and Great Power rivalry. Important in this context is the insights of realist international relations theory on state motives and preferences in an anarchic international order. In particular, structural realist theory emphasises state quest for security in this anarchy. Whilst defensive realism, a variant of structural realism, argues that states are prudent actors and content with a balance of power, offensive realism posits that states opt to maximise their power to gain as much security as possible. Whilst this debate has divided realist scholars for decades, recent evidence suggests that major Powers tend to seek to increase their relative power and influence, thus affirming the insights of offensive realism. Clearly, China has sought to improve its relative power and influence since the 1980s. Analyses indicate that Beijing has pursued pragmatic strategies to enhance its comprehensive national capabilities as well as international influence. A succession of Chinese strategic ideas and policies have enabled China’s “national rejuvenation”, a goal highly coveted by Chinese leaders from the Late Qing to the Communist era. However, recent Chinese success has contributed to the resurgence of geopolitics and Great Power rivalry. Again, realist international relations theory, ranging from offensive realism, power transition theory to dynamic neorealism, sheds important light on the gathering momentum of strategic competition between a rising China and a United States in relative decline. The likelihood of a new Sino-​American Cold War may transform world politics. Such a scenario would generate a system-​wide impact, leading to a new world order. What motivates state’s international strategies and foreign policies has long been a key issue for scholars of international relations. However, they employ diverging approaches in their 46

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-6

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studies. For example, by focusing on different types of regimes at the state level, some scholars suggest that states possess different preferences and thus pursue different foreign policies. A strand of such scholarship posits that democracies behave more peacefully –​at least toward each other.2 Other studies suggest that different state ideologies make some rising Powers revisionist whilst others status quo-​oriented.3 Still, others focus on domestic forces as drivers of state foreign policies: different ruling coalitions of domestic groups possess divergent preferences and thereby pursue different foreign policies.4 In essence, studies that focus on domestic-​level factors, such as political regimes, ideologies, and interest groups, tend to see different preferences amongst states. In contrast, structural realism focuses on the international system’s impact on state preferences, motives, and behaviours. Rather than studying variations amongst the parts of the international system –​sovereign states –​a structural approach emphasises the constraining roles of the anarchic international order. With all states subjected to the same anarchic imperative, they are supposed to possess similar preferences and motives –​a seminal structural realist approach advanced in 1979.5 Nonetheless, before this exegesis, the study of international relations was influenced by classic realism, which included “all the realist works of the interwar and early cold war years” best represented by Hans Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations.6 However –​this argument goes –​ classical realism failed to develop a rigorous theory of international politics. The response was a deductive approach to build a rigorous structural theory of international relations: neorealism. Accordingly, the anarchic international system is an active and autonomous causal force that constrains states, and scholars can deduce expected state motives and preferences from that anarchic order: System theories, whether political or economic, are theories that explain how the organization of a realm acts as a constraining and disposing force on the interacting units within it. From them, we can infer some things about the behavior and fate of the units: namely how they will have to compete with each other and adjust to each other if they are to survive and flourish.7 This structural approach suggests that anarchy –​the organising principle of the international system –​profoundly affects a state’s motives and preferences. In particular, the anarchic order forces a state to be highly concerned with its survival: the aims of states may be endlessly varied: they may range from the ambition to conquer the world to the desire merely to be left alone. Survival is a prerequisite to achieving any goals that states may have, other than the goal of promoting their own disappearance as political entities.8 To ensure their survival, states practice self-​help, as no higher authority can provide them with security, like governments in a domestic situation. Power is therefore essential to ensure national security. However, unlike classic realism that attributes the quest for power to human nature, the source of the behaviour devolves from the imperatives generated by an anarchic international order. Power is essential for state security under the condition of anarchy. However, whilst neorealism or structural realism points toward the vital importance of power for state security and survival, international relations scholars cannot agree on the relative importance of power versus security. Defensive realism, a variant of structural realism, suggests that states care about security more than power, as the latter is only the means to an end: security. As such, states only seek appropriate amounts of power and do so prudently. In 47

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contrast, offensive realism, another variant of structural realism, argues that states seek to maximise power as they cannot possibly know how much is sufficient for their security and survival.9 In fact, defensive realism is a direct offshoot of neorealism, and Kenneth Waltz, as the founder of neorealism, contributed to the thinking about defensive realism. As he points out, “The first concern of states is not to maximise power but to maintain their position in the system”.10 In fact, according to defensive realism, excessive quest for power is counter-​productive for states. This insight finds basis on that expert’s own balance of power logic. As states care greatly about their own survival, they tend to balance against those states accumulating power, negating the gains in relative power by the latter. Excessive pursuit of power is essentially futile: “In international politics, overwhelming power repels and leads others to balance against it”.11 Therefore, according to defensive realism, whilst states care greatly about their security and survival, they only pursue power prudently. It is because they seek security, not power. The latter is only the means to an end. Moreover, states are rational and understand that excessive power will lead to counterbalancing by other states. This insight of defensive realism has invited criticism and correction. Whilst accepting the same assumption about state concerns for security in an anarchic order, offensive realism argues that states need to maximise power to optimise security. They therefore tend to look for opportunities to gain power and influence. In a pithy view, “Simply, a state with more power is more secure than a state with less power”.12 One of the best statements on offensive realism came in 2001.13 It points out that there is a status quo bias in defensive realism, that states merely crave security and the preservation of balance of power. In this sense, the problem is that states can never be certain that they have sufficient power to ensure their own security, as power is ambiguous and difficult to measure. Moreover, power shifts among states pose another problem. History is replete with cases of power transition between states, a process that sees a rising Power quickly overtaking a declining dominant one. As a result, states thereby prefer to have as much power as possible: “The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states”.14 Under the anarchic international system, states recognize that the more powerful they are relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival. Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon, because no other states can seriously threaten such a mighty power.15 Offensive realism thus sees gaining power a vital goal, especially for Great Powers. As such, they all seek to improve their relative standing in the global hierarchy of power. Indeed, “There are no status quo powers in the international system, save for the occasional hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating position over potential rivals. Great powers are rarely content with the current distribution of power; on the contrary, they face constant incentives to change it in their favor”.16 The debate between defensive and offensive realism regarding states’ motives and preferences has important implications understanding their foreign policies and strategies. Whilst defensive realism sees states as prudent actors merely seeking a balance of power to ensure their security, offensive realism points to their constant efforts to improve their relative power vs. other states. Recent developments in international politics, especially in the past decade, indicate the superiority of offensive realism in explaining and predicting state behaviour. The return of geopolitics, defined by Great Power rivalry, confirms offensive realist insights. Indeed, all major Powers have been seeking to increase their relative power, influence, and status. Even the United States, already the most powerful country in the international system, has been making 48

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continuous efforts to increase its power advantages over other states. The United States is the “posterchild” for offensive realism.17 Indeed, the American quest for hegemonic dominance is a behaviour consistent with offensive realist theory.18 Other major Powers such as Japan, Russia, and India have also been seeking to increase their relative power and elevate their international status. Under the Shinzo Abe government, Japan has made significant changes to the Yoshida Doctrine that had practised strategic restraint and influenced Japanese foreign and security policies since the 1950s. Tokyo has modified Japan’s security posture by acquiring offensive military capabilities, such as cruise missiles and aircraft carriers, removed constitutional constraints on the use of military forces, and sought to elevate its diplomatic influences in both East Asia and the world.19 Russia has been actively seeking to restore its Great Power position under President Vladimir Putin, who has pursued a full spectrum of policies to rebuild Russian military power, project Russia’s presence in different regions of the globe, and regain influence in countries and regions once belonging the former Soviet empire.20 In fact, Putin’s relentless efforts have paid off and, once again, Russia has returned to the rank of great powers, exerting major influences in international relations. India has set its eyes on becoming a Great Power. Indeed, it has pursued multi-​pronged strategies to elevate its hard power, influence, and status. For the last decade, India has consistently been the largest importer of weapons in the world, turning the Indian military into a formidable force. New Delhi has also attempted to exert influence in South Asia to turn it into its own sphere of influence, with becoming the dominant Power in the Indian Ocean a long-​term geopolitical objective. Moreover, at the global level, India has tried to elevate its status by a greater presence in global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In fact, since 2014, Prime Minister Narandra Modi’s nationalist vision has sought to transform India from a mere “balancing” to a “leading” Power in global politics.21 China has been no exception. In fact, China has pursued coherent strategies since the 1980s to enhance its relative power, when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping initiated a wide range of reforms to enable its rise. However, China’s quest for power had long pre-​dated Deng’s reforms. Their determined pursuit of fuqiang, shorthand for “wealth and power”, has united Chinese leaders in the late Qing Dynasty, the Republican period, and the Communist era.22 After the Qing’s humiliating defeat by Britain in the 1839–​1842 Opium War, China’s century-​ long decline aroused Chinese ambitions of national rejuvenation.23 In particular, the quest for “wealth and power” has inspired Chinese leaders since the British intervention. A revived China that is rich and powerful would be “able to defend itself against foreign incursion”. Indeed, China’s quest for fuqiang “proved a unique dynamo fueling the country’s constant and fervent pursuit of self-​reinvention and rejuvenation”.24 Contemporary Chinese scholars also see fuqiang as the end objective of China’s grand strategy. According to Men Honghua, a professor at the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China, grand strategies seek “rich and powerful countries” as their fundamental objective.25 In the Chinese context, “After the establishment of the new China, becoming a powerful country, realizing national rejuvenation, and building an industrialized socialist country quickly became the goals of Chinese leaders”.26 However, it was under Deng that China finally realised its potential for national rejuvenation, his broad reforms allowing China to embark on its path to international prominence. Indeed, both Chinese and foreign scholars have attributed China’s spectacular rise to Deng and his impact on China’s strategies for its rise and national rejuvenation included both economic reforms initiated during the 1980s and strategic tenets in the early 1990s that guided Chinese foreign policy for the next decades. China’s rise fundamentally rests on the enhancement of its hard power. Mao Zedong’s legacies left China in tatters. When Deng assumed the Chinese leadership in the late 1970s, the 49

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country was poor and backward when compared not only to advanced countries but also to its newly industrialised neighbours like South Korea and Taiwan. Deng astutely recognised the need to pursue broad domestic reforms, both economic and political, that could unleash China’s economic potential. Moreover, China needed to open up to the world and become a participant of the global economic system.27 At the same time, China’s foreign policy needed a favourable international environment to facilitate Deng-​led domestic reforms and development. In 1982, China began mending its relations with the Soviet Union and, by late 1980s, normalised the relationship. Towards Western countries, Deng recognised that China required their advanced technologies and capital to achieve its economic rise. He thereby put a high premium on relations with the United States, Japan, and Western Europe. Indeed, his first trip overseas after taking the leadership was the historic 1979 visit to the United States.28 Due to far-​reaching economic reforms in agriculture, industry, trade, and finance, as well as integration with the world economy, China saw rapid economic growth in the 1980s. In essence, successful domestic reforms and economic development formed the basis of China’s rise by enhancing its hard power. Nevertheless, co-​operative relations cultivated with the West, especially the United States, assisted and reinforced China’s domestic reforms. In essence, domestic reforms and foreign policy complemented each other in pursuit of China’s national rejuvenation. Toward the end of 1980s, China was already on its path toward becoming a rich and powerful country. However, China’s remarkable progresses in the 1980s toward national rejuvenation faced much uncertainty during the 1989–​1991 period. Favourable relations with the West came to a grinding halt after the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen incident, which resulted in economic sanctions by America, Japan, and the European countries. Moreover, the rapid end of the Cold War ushered in a new international system and, by 1990, the Soviet Union was clearly on its way toward disintegration, which occurred in 1991. These external developments suddenly presented scenarios of reversal of China’s 1980s successes that rested on good relations with the West and a stable international environment. The uncertainties and flux generated by the collapse of Communist rule in Eastern Europe, Soviet dissolution, and the Cold War’s end elevated the importance of China’s external strategies for its continued path towards national rejuvenation. It was in this context Deng’s strategic wisdom offered vital tenets for China’s foreign policies and strategies. During a series of internal discussions in 1989 and 1990, Deng formulated China’s strategies to cope with the new world order, this advice condensed into the famous “lay low, hide our brightness, never take the lead, and achieve something” strategy.29 His “keeping a low profile” advice tailored to meet the new post-​Cold War world order that saw the emergence of Western primacy in the international system. By laying low, China would invite less concern for rising Power: “Deng believed that the West was always apprehensive about China’s rise and would like to obstruct its further development”.30 His teaching thus rested on a keen understanding of the fundamental logic of international politics –​that power shifts trigger concern among other countries and, for Beijing, could provide them with incentives to limit China’s abilities to enhance further its power. In essence, Deng showed a remarkable affinity with structural realism insights on anarchic order, state insecurity, and balancing dynamics. In one Chinese estimate: As history indicates, all rising states experience a highly sensitive stage during their ascendance. During this stage, if rising states are not prudent, they will face much significant hurdles for their ascendance. China is a rising power and is going through this sensitive stage. It thus needs to minimize resistance by avoiding attentions to itself.31 50

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Deng’s “keeping a low profile” profoundly affected Chinese foreign policy for the next two decades. In essence, it served as China’s grand strategy for its rise. However, during the latter half of the 1990s, Deng’s doctrine crystallised into specific foreign policies promoting China’s broad agenda of minimising international resistance to its rise. Aware that China’s rise caused concerns in other countries, Beijing began formulating detailed diplomacy to reassure these countries and deny them the incentives to balance against it.32 China’s concerns that its rise could trigger resistance from the United States and its allies resulted in efforts to “reassure potential adversaries who had grown increasingly worried about China’s rise and also efforts to encourage the other major powers to view China as an indispensable, or at least attractive, international partner”.33 A particular driver of these Chinese efforts centred on an unexpected era of American unipolarity rather than the dawn of multipolarity anticipated by Beijing after the Cold War ended. This reality forced China to pursue a strategy for its rise in the context of “surprisingly robust American primacy”. The results were a “relatively coherent approach” to enable China’s continuous rise.34 Beijing thus pursued a two interrelated strategies. The first involved assuring others that China was not a rising revisionist Power determined to challenge the existing international order; it wanted to project an image that China was a “responsible and cooperative player”.35 The main approach to reassurance was to integrate itself with multilateral institutions of the existing international order largely controlled by America. Starting from the mid-​1990s, Beijing began participating in a variety of these bodies –​like the World Trade Organisation in 1999 –​ to indicate China’s acceptance of the existing rules and norms of international relations.36 The second strategy involved China’s efforts to make itself an indispensable partner in the eyes of other major Powers, a course also designed to pre-​empt the incentives to resist China’s rise. For this purpose, China formulated a wide network of strategic partnerships with all major Powers, including the United States, Russia, Japan, Britain, France, and Germany.37 Of course, among China’s relations with other major Powers, those with the United States commanded top priority. Beijing sought to highlight shared Sino-​American strategic interests –​for example, in issue areas ranging from global governance to the Korean Peninsula –​thus the necessity of working together through a partnership framework. At an October 1997 summit in Washington, Sino-​American agreement emerged to foster “a constructive strategic partnership”. Therefore, after the mid-​1990s, China translated Deng’s strategic tenets and principles into specific and operationalised foreign policies, their goal consistent with Deng’s teaching: China must avoid suspicions on the part of other countries in order to pre-​empt their motives to stifle its further rise. A 2000 study of China’s grand strategy since the 1980s argued that a hybrid “weak-​strong” state security strategy defined China’s efforts. This weak-​strong state security approach combines elements of traditional ‘strong state’ efforts to control the strategic periphery through military and political means with elements of a ‘weak state’ approach employing primarily territorial-​defense-​oriented force structure and a relatively high level of involvement with diplomatic balance and maneuver.38 China’s weak-​strong state security approach produced a “calculative” grand strategy: characterized by (a) a nonideological policy approach keyed to market-​led economic growth and the maintenance of amicable international relations with all states, especially the major powers; (b) a deliberate restraint in the use of force, whether toward the periphery or against other more distant powers, combined with efforts to modernize 51

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and incrementally streamline the Chinese military; and (c) an expanded involvement in regional and global interstate politics and various international, multilateral fora, with an emphasis, through such interactions, on attaining asymmetric gains.39 The notion of “calculative strategy is defined in substantive terms as a pragmatic approach” for achieving China’s core national interests.40 The reasons “are ultimately rooted in the fact that China today requires high levels of undistracted growth, geopolitical quiescence, to both ensure domestic order and well-​being and to effectively protect its security interests along the periphery and beyond”.41 China’s calculative grand strategy was consistent with Deng’s strategic tenet that China must avoid tensions with other countries to pre-​empt their concerted efforts to stifle its rise. Therefore, China had to pursue non-​confrontational and pragmatic foreign policies, hoping they would lead to a benign international environment allowing China to continue its domestic growth and enhance its overall power. In this calculative strategy, Sino-​American relations remained crucial, which entailed a double effort of “co-​optation” and “prevention”. The former involved the development and maintenance of friendly ties with Washington central to backing the advances in Chinese power; the latter, seeking to obviate any American initiatives to imperil “the expansion of Chinese capability, status, and influence”.42 China’s co-​ optation involved efforts to persuade Washington to see rising China as a steadying influence in the East Asian region and beyond, assuring the Americans that China’s certain advent as a major Power remained desirable –​of course, it was also fundamental in thwarting any challenges either by the United States or its Asian allies or other regional Powers. Fundamentally, China’s co-​optation efforts “sought to secure U.S. support for the political, economic, and social transition and transformations currently under way in China”.43 Prevention efforts included attempts to convince other Asian countries that the American-​led bilateral alliance system in the region was outdated for the age of globalisation and multilateral co-​ operation. Rather, Asian countries should pursue an “Asia for Asians” approach relying on multilateral regional institutions to enhance security and economic collaboration. This Chinese effort sought to “nurture a wedge between the United States and its formal and informal allies in Asia”.44 As the above analysis shows, during the 1990s China developed a coherent strategy that translated Deng’s strategic tenets into a foreign policy that sought to assure other Powers, especially the United States, that China’s rise was not a threat to the existing international system. Concurrently, Beijing also sought to convince other countries that the new China would be beneficial to them and the world, and they should thereby accept China’s expanding power and influences. By the turn of the new century, however, with the same aims of assuring other Powers that it remained a status quo state and its growing power and influence would remain internationally advantageous, China developed new concepts for its rise. The most influential concerned the “peaceful rise” strategy. On 3 November 2003, Zheng Bijian, widely considered a key advisor to the new Chinese leader, President Hu Jintao, delivered a speech at the Boao Forum. This speech, “China New Path of Peaceful Rise and Asia’s Future”, outlined a new strategic idea for the first time.45 Hu then highlighted the concept at an event commemorating the one hundred-​tenth anniversary of Mao’s birth. The peaceful rise concept was a continuation of Deng’s teaching with adjustment to the new reality of the twenty-​first century. Indeed, by the advent of the new century, the “rise of the rest” was already a reality and indicated profound power shifts in the international system. A Goldman Sachs economist, Jim O’Neill, proposed the BRIC idea in 2001, highlighting growing power and influence of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.46 In this context, China needed a new concept to reconcile the reality of its rise with 52

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the long-​term goal of pre-​empting concerted international resistance to its expanding power and influence. The peaceful rise concept acknowledged China’s ascendance but continued to project a benign image to assure the world that it is a status quo Power. China no longer hides its goal to rise in the international system but, simultaneously, tries to convince other countries that its rise will not disrupt international peace and stability of the world. According to Zheng, “China pursues a path that sees strenuous efforts for its rise but also champions peace and shuns quest for hegemony”.47 This formula thus saw slight revisions of Deng’s tenets in that China was now openly discussing its rise and the associated implications for the world, hence tweaking the “keeping a low profile” principle. However, by pledging China to a peaceful rise, respect for the existing international order, and the shunning of hegemony, the new formula was consistent with Deng’s tenets as they both sought to pre-​empt other countries’ counter-​balancing incentives. In this sense, peaceful rise represented both a continuation and extension of Deng’s strategic ideas. Indeed, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabo elaborated the benign intentions of China’s peaceful rise at a news conference for the second plenary of the tenth National Congress of China on 14 March 2004.48 According to Wen, peaceful rise first meant that China would utilise a pacific world order to “develop and strengthen itself ”. However, “China’s rise would not threaten anyone or harm their interests. China does not seek hegemony and will not do so even after becoming a powerful country”. Lastly, Wen also conveyed that the path for China’s rise would continue to be long, as it would require the efforts of several generations to realise it. Wen therefore showed consistency between the peaceful rise concept and Deng’s teaching. By highlighting the long road for China’s national rejuvenation, Wen re-​affirmed both Deng’s advice that China should not attract concerns for its increasing strength and re-​affirmed his assertion that China would not seek hegemony. These continuities between the new concept and Deng’s strategic ideas indicated China’s continuing efforts during the Hu-​Wen era to manage other countries’ perceptions of its intentions. During the Hu-​Wen administration that governed from 2002 to 2012, China managed to achieve high-​speed economic growth whilst simultaneously avoiding systematic efforts by other countries to stifle its ambitions. As a result, in 2014, measured in purchasing parity terms, the Chinese economy became the largest in the world.49 The American National Intelligence Council predicted in 2012 that based on population, Gross Domestic Product, military spending, and research and development spending, China’s aggregate power could converge with that of the United States around 2030.50 With its advancing strength and influence, China started to pursue increasingly activist foreign policies after the 2008–​2010 global financial crisis. For example, together with other BRIC countries, China sought and successfully elevated its presence in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. President Xi Jinping then took office at the end of 2012 and, under his leadership, China has become even more proactive on the world stage. Whilst Deng’s strategic tenets advised China to both keep a low profile and try to achieve something, the latter was in practice subjected to the former. In the new era, what defines Chinese foreign policy is its efforts of “striving for achievement”.51 A signature policy that represents this activist Chinese foreign policy concerns the massive Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to use China’s new found economic and financial power to connect countries in different continents through trade and infrastructure enhancements. By many measures, China has risen. This implies that Deng’s strategic tenets and consequent Chinese strategies and policies have succeeded at achieving China’s national rejuvenation as represented by its enhanced power, status, and influence. In 2019, the Lowy Institute, Australia’s 53

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leading international affairs think tank, conducted a study of state power of 25 countries in the Asia-​Pacific region. It evaluates state power through 126 indicators across eight thematic measures: military capability and defence networks, economic resources and relationships, diplomatic and cultural influences, as well as resilience and future resources. According to this study, power indices of the United States and China are respectively 84.5 and 75.9. Japan ranks third with 42.5.52 This study indicates China’s remarkable achievement at elevating its power and influences since the 1980s: the Lowy study classifies countries with a power index above 70 as superpowers. Another measure of China’s stunning rise concerns its impact on the global distribution of power. Here, the issue is whether China’s rising power has been able to transform the polarity of the international system, which until recently was defined by American-​led unipolarity. China’s rise has profoundly transformed the structure of global distribution of power; and the combined effects of the narrowing power gap between America and China and the widening power gap between China and any third-​ranking Power suggests the emergence of a new bipolar system.53 Looking at China’s rise from a polarity perspective, with China’s economic, political, and military rise, “it seems increasingly clear that the ‘unipolar moment’ in world politics is approaching its twilight”.54 Moreover, while it is doubtful that China will become a superpower of the same scale as the United States, China does not have to perfectly equal U.S. power and influence to have enough global reach for the system to be considered bipolar. China and the United States will stand apart from the rest of the world in the coming decades, thus returning the international system to a condition of rough or “loose” bipolarity.55 Whilst China’s rising power and influence suggests its remarkable success at achieving the goal of national rejuvenation, which eluded generations of Chinese since the nineteenth century, China’s very success has also triggered international developments that may threaten its further ascendance. Realist international relations theories have long held pessimistic views on the effects of power shifts. Offensive realism, power transition theory, and dynamic neorealism all predict intensifying conflicts, even wars, between risings states and states in relative decline. Offensive realism argues that as all Great Powers seek to maximise their power to achieve hegemony in the international system, rivalry between a rising China and the United States in relative decline will be inevitable. Indeed, one authority has consistently argued that the two countries remain locked in a long struggle over power and primacy, with war a distinctive possibility.56 Power transition theory suggests the trapping of rising states and the dominant state in relative decline in a power struggle over which should set the rules for the international system. Whilst rising Powers are dissatisfied countries wanting to revise the existing international order, declining states try to defend it. Power transition theory therefore predicts intensifying strategic Sino-​American rivalry, even a hegemonic war between them. Indeed, a recent study uses power transition theory to predict Sino-​American relations; its forecast is pessimistic.57 Dynamic neo-realism questions the premise of power transition theory that rising Powers tend to challenge declining states, thereby precipitating conflicts between the two. Accordingly, it is irrational for rising states to do so as they are still less powerful than the declining states and time is on their side. Rising Powers can simply wait for the moment of their overtaking of the declining states. Instead, declining states are compelled to take offensive means to stabilise their decline and prevent the power transition. These means include preventive wars or containment 54

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of rising Powers. These scenarios are more likely if declining states foresee a steep decline of future their power, and if they perceive a bipolar international system that leaves them with no potential allies to confront rising states.58 China has been astutely aware of the realist dynamics of international relations. Hence, it has pursued international strategies and foreign policies to pre-​empt conflicts with states in relative decline, especially the United States. China understands fully that American counter-​balancing and containment would seriously complicate its rise. For decades, various Chinese strategies and policies have largely succeeded in preventing this worst-​case scenario. However, China’s remarkable success has finally seen the emergence of trends that may hinder its further rise. Specifically, the looming prospect of a new cold war with the United States presents challenges that China has not seen for its foreign relations since the 1980s. Since 2018, the Donald Trump Administration has unveiled a coherent strategy that seeks to limit China’s future power and influence. This development to some extent surprised many. Indeed, whilst Trump has long championed hard-​line policies toward China on trade issues, there was a widespread perception that he did not harbour realist mind-​sets emphasising Great Power rivalry and American primacy. Therefore, influential American strategic thinkers, such as Robert Kaplan, used to believe that Trump was not a “realist”.59 In fact, the establishment elite of the United States, both Democrat and Republican, once worried that Trump would surrender American primacy to China. In 2018, the Donald Trump Administration began to unveil a coherent strategy that sought to limit China’s future power and influence. He also used many occasions to lavish generous words on Xi and their friendship. However, the January 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States revealed a realist turn in Trump Administration foreign policy: Great Power rivalry is once again the main driver of international relations, and the United States must compete effectively against its two main competitors, China and Russia.60 Soon after, the Trump administration started to roll out a new China policy centring on strategic competition. The first element concerns a trade war. Whilst Trump has publicly emphasised the unfair and unequal trade relations between the two countries and his attempts to rectify it, observers have also noticed broader agendas such as denying China its relative gains from trade with the United States. To this end, the Trump Administration even intends to pursue an eventual “decoupling” of the two economies. Observers suggest that these are essentially “geoeconomics” agendas motivated by concerns for the long-​term balance of power between the two countries.61 Another element of Trump’s competition-​oriented China policy involves, as former Secretary of Commerce Henry Paulson put it, a “Cold War-​ style technology denial regime”.62 Measures include containment of China’s high-​technology industries –​such as the highly restrictive measures against Huawei –​and prevention of Chinese access to American science and technologies –​for instance, restrictions on visas for Chinese students who study engineering and applied sciences in American universities. The third element of Trump Administration’s new China policy relates to heightened geopolitical competition with Beijing. For example, in November 2017, it unveiled its Indo-​Pacific strategy, which promotes a “free and open Indo-​Pacific”. Whilst China is unnamed anywhere in the strategy, it is widely believed that the strategy sought to boost security linkages between the United States and its allies as well as strategic partners to counter rising Chinese influence in the region.63 The Administration also significantly upgraded relations with Taiwan through new rules for high-​level American officials to visit Taipei, expanded co-​operation between the two militaries, and a more robust American military presence in the Taiwan Strait.64 The Biden administration’s China policy continues to emphasize strategic competition. As claimed by Kurt Campbell, the US coordinator for Indo-​Pacific affairs on the National 55

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Security Council, “The period that was broadly described as engagement has come to an end”. Instead, US policy toward China will operate “under a new set of strategic parameters” and “the dominant paradigm is going to be competition”.65 The administration has therefore not relaxed any of the restrictive measures imposed by the Trump government on trade and technologies. In fact, the administration has expanded the domains of strategic competition to new areas such as global infrastructure building and Covid-​19 vaccine diplomacies. Moreover, the administration, differing from the Trump government, emphasizes the multilateral dimension of US global competition with China. Strengthening US alliances and building new security partnerships constitute top foreign policy priorities of the administration. The AUKUS pact, a new trilateral partnership created by the United States, Britain and Australia in September 2021, represents a major example of the administration’s efforts. The new Sino-​US relations pose the prospect for a new cold war, a scenario that would fundamentally re-​orient international politics. Indeed, scholars have been studying both the possibilities and implications of a new cold war with increasing intensity. For example, there are analyses comparing the dynamics that underlie Sino-​American relations and the Cold War.66 For instance, the current bipolar Asian order does not bode well for the future, as it repeats the dynamics driving the Cold War: “In a bipolar world, one’s adversary is clear: it is the other superpower. Gains by one superpower are viewed as losses for the other”. Thus, Trump administration policies were “consistent with the expectations of bipolarity”.67 In addition to similarity in power distributions, namely bipolarity, other similarities exist between current Sino-​American relations and the Cold War. One is the ideological contest –​a competition between the Beijing and Washington consensuses, two ideas that preach very different ways to organise society and state: “Hence, like Cold War 1.0, the challenge posed by the rising power to America involves both power and ideology; the two elements reinforce each other and elevates the stakes of the contest”.68 Others, however, criticising the deterministic views of power transition theory and offensive realism, do believe that a new cold war is avoidable. Leadership and policy choices matter in international politics.69 The current trend toward rising conflicts between China and the United States is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Pragmatic leaders on both sides can contribute to constrained conflict and greater co-​operation, thereby avoiding a new cold war. Although scholars cannot agree on the prospect for a new cold war, it remains a distinctive scenario with profound implications for both China and the world. For China, such a scenario could reverse its good fortune so far at enhancing its relative power in an anarchic international order. A new cold war with America could seriously constrain China’s future rise. For international relations, a new cold war would reshape the world order due to its systematic effects on every aspect of international relations. According to a recent report by the American National Intelligence Council, “The growing contest between China and the United States and its close allies is likely to have the broadest and deepest impact on global dynamics”.70 As it elaborates: The United States, along with its longstanding allies, and China will have the greatest influence on global dynamics, supporting competing visions of the international system and governance that reflect their core interests and ideologies. Their rivalry will affect most domains, straining and in some cases reshaping existing alliances and international organizations that have underpinned the international order for decades.71 Therefore, China’s remarkable rise has transformed the world with profound implications. Its singular success has contributed to the end of the post-​Cold War order defined by American-​led

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unipolarity. Whilst there is now the distinctive possibility of a new bipolar order on the horizon, this prospect has also triggered various scenarios and rising uncertainties for the future. In particular, the intensifying and increasingly globalised strategic rivalry between China and the United States will have a major impact on the world order, affecting its organising principles, institutions, and each individual country. As such, China’s rise has been a truly transformational event that has redefined the world order and its underlying dynamics.

Notes 1 For a classic liberal statement, see Bruce Russet and John R. Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (NY, 2000). 2 For further studies on democratic peace theory, see Alex Mintz and Nehemia Geva, “Why Don’t Democracies Fight Each Other? An Experimental Study”, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 37/​3(1993), 484–​503; Sabastian Rosato, “The Flawed Logic of Democratic Peace Theory”, American Political Science Review, 97/​4(2003), 585–​602. 3 See Jason W. Davidson, The Origins of Revisionist and Status-​Quo States (NY, 2006). 4 Richard Rosecrance and Arthur A. Stein, eds., The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY, 1993). 5 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (NY, 1979). 6 William Wohforth, “Realism”, in Duncan Snidal and Christian Reus-​Smit, eds., The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (NY, 2008), 136. 7 Waltz, International Politics, 72. 8 Ibid., 91–​92. 9 For a survey of defensive and offensive realism, see Steve E. Lobell, “Structural Realism/​Offensive and Defensive Realism”, in Robert A. Denemark, ed., International Studies Encyclopedia (Oxford, 2010), 6651–​69. 10 Waltz, International Politics, 126. 11 Idem, “Evaluating Theories”, International Security, 25/​1(2000), 916. 12 Lobell, “Offensive and Defensive Realism”, 6653. 13 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (NY, 2001). 14 Ibid., 2. 15 Ibid, 3. 16 Ibid. 2. 17 Christopher Layne, “The ‘Posterchild for Offensive Realism’: America as a Global Hegemon”, Security Studies, 12/​2(2002), 120–​64. 18 John J. Mearsheimer, “Imperial by Design”, National Interest, 111(January/​February 2011), 16–​34. 19 See Christopher W. Hughes, “Japan’s Grand Strategic Shift: From the Yoshida Doctrine to an Abe Doctrine?”, in Ashley J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills, eds., Strategic Asia 2017–​18: Power, Ideas, and Military Strategy in the Asia Pacific (Seattle, WA, 2017), 73–​105. 20 Dina Rome Spechler, “Russia Foreign Policy during the Putin Presidency”, Problems of Post-​ Communism, 57/​5(2010), 35–​50. 21 Abhijnan Rej, “The BJP and Indian Grand Strategy”, in Milan Vaishnav, ed., The BJP in Power: Indian Democracy and Religious Nationalism (Washington, DC, 2019). 22 Orville Schell and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-​First Century (NY, 2013). 23 Ibid., 4. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 Men Honghua, Zhongguo guoji zhanlue daolun (Beijing, 2009), 165. 26 Ibid., 176. 27 For comprehensive analysis on Deng’s reforms, see Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA, 2013). 28 For Deng’s foreign policies that sought to enable China’s domestic reforms and economic development, see Honghua, Zhongguo guoji zhanlue, 190–​91. 29 See Gong Li, “Deng Xiaoping yu taoguang yanghui yousuo zuowei di zhanlue fangzhen”, Zhonggong Zhongyang dangxiao xuebao, 18/​4(2014), 19–​21.

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Baohui Zhang 30 Ibid., 22. 31 Ibid. 32 Avery Goldstein, “The Diplomatic Face of China’s Grand Strategy: A Rising Power’s Emerging Choice”, China Quarterly, 168(2001), 836. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 837. 35 Ibid., 842. 36 Ibid., 842–​45. 37 Ibid., 846–​51. 38 Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tellis, Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future (Washington, DC, 2000), xi. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 97. 41 Ibid., 98. 42 Ibid., 114. 43 Ibid., 115–​17. 44 Ibid., 118–​19. 45 Zheng Bijian, “Zhongguo heping jueqi di xin daolu yu zhong ou guanxi”, Wenhuibao (21 March 2004). See also Zheng Bijian, China’s Road to Peaceful Rise: Observations on Its Cause, Basis, Connotations, and Prospects (Abingdon, UK, 2011). 46 Jim O’Neill, “Building Better Global Economic BRICs”, Goldman Sachs Global Economics Paper, No.66 (NY, 2001). 47 Zheng, “Zhongguo heping”. 48 See “Wen Jiabao xiangjie zhongguo heping jueqi wu yaoyi”, 14 March 2004: http://​news.sohu.com/​ 2004/​03/​14/​23/​news21​9432​367.shtml. 49 See Keith Fray, “China Leaps Forward, Overtaking the US as World’s Biggest Economy”, Financial Times (8 October 2014). 50 National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (Washington, DC, 2012). 51 Yan Xuetong, “From Keeping a Low Profile to Striving for Achievement”, Chinese Journal of International Politics, 7/​2(2014), 153–​84. 52 Lowy Institute, Asia Power Index 2019: Key Findings (Sydney, 2019). 53 Oystein Tunsjo, The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics: China, the United States, and Geostructural Realism (NY, 2018). 54 Richard Maher, “Bipolarity and the Future of U.S.-​China Relations”, Political Science Quarterly, 133/​ 3(2018), 497. 55 Ibid. 56 John Mearsheimer, “Clash of the Titans”, Foreign Policy, 146(2005), 46–​50. 57 Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (NY, 2017). 58 Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY, 2001). 59 Robert Kaplan, “On Foreign Policy, Donald Trump Is No Realist”, Washington Post (1 November 2016). 60 White House, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC, 2018). 61 Aaron L. Friedberg, “A New U.S. Economy Strategy toward China”, Washington Quarterly, 40/​ 4(2018), 97–​114. 62 Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Henry Paulson Sounds Alarm: U.S.-​China Relations May Only Get Worse”, NY Times (21 November 2019). 63 Matthew Sullivan, “Trump’s Indo-​Pacific Strategy at Year Two”, Japan Times (29 October 2019). 64 See Edward Wong, “U.S. Tries to Bolster Taiwan’s Status, Short of Recognizing Sovereignty”, NY Times (18 August 2020). 65 Peter Martin, “Biden’s Asia Czar Says Era of Engagement With China Is Over”, Bloomberg News (27 May 2021): www.bloomberg.com/​news/​articles/​2021-​05-​26/​biden-​s-​asia-​czar-​says-​era-​ofengagement-​with-​xi-​s-​china-​is-​over. 66 Yuen Foong Khong, “The U.S., China, and the Cold War Analogy”, China International Strategy Review, 1(2019), 223–​37.

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China’s Rise and the New World Order 67 Ibid, 225. 68 Ibid., 229. 69 Robert S. Ross, “It’s Not a Cold War: Competition and Cooperation in U.S.-​China Relations”, China International Strategy Review, 2(2020), 63–​72. 70 The National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World (Washington, DC, 2021), 94. 71 Ibid., 92.

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5 BREXIT, BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY, AND GOVERNANCE Jamie Gaskarth

British foreign policy is undergoing its most significant crisis since the Suez emergency in 1956 in the form of Brexit. With longstanding assumptions disrupted, British policy-​makers are renegotiating their relationships with the region and the wider world. The key question for this chapter is how far this disruption has implications for order and governance in the twenty-​first century. Does Brexit signal a fragmentation in international or regional governance, a broader crisis in multilateralism, liberalism or capitalism, or is it a largely localised product of domestic British politics and intra-​regional issues? To investigate these questions, the chapter explores four ways in which Brexit challenges important assumptions underpinning European integration since signature of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. These assumptions are: that sovereignty is more meaningful if it is shared with other states at a supranational level; intra-​regional freedom of movement is a public good; establishing a common regulatory regime in Europe will facilitate trade; and international governance is more effective if it is institutionalised. Advocates of Brexit take issue with each of them. They view sovereignty as eroded rather than bolstered by membership of the European Community, with important implications for democracy. They depict immigration negatively, as having put domestic harmony under strain. They portray European regulation as hampering global trade and distorting markets in an illiberal fashion. Lastly, they argue the dense institutionalisation of regional governance hampers adaptation and resilience in a crisis. This analysis is not concerned with the validity of these arguments so much as the implications they might have for future thinking about governance and international co-​operation. Arguments about sovereignty hung over Britain’s attempts to join the European Community in the 1960s and have persisted ever since.1 During the accession process, there was extensive commentary suggesting that British political and legal traditions were not compatible with those of the continent.2 Britain’s lack of a written constitution and its common law system were portrayed as essential features of its liberalism. In the early 1960s, key opponents such as Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, and Enoch Powell, the Conservative minister of health, framed joining the European Community as the end of Britain as an independent actor in global affairs. Gaitskell famously declared that joining a federalised Europe would be “the end of Britain as an independent European state. … It means the end of a thousand years of history.”3 Meanwhile, Powell rejected attempts to pool or divide sovereign jurisdictions and seemed to 60

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-7

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favour a “unitary state founded upon a single institutional source of sovereignty”.4 Powell apparently viewed initiatives to promote internationalist ideals, from the Commonwealth to the European Community, as “dangerous abridgements of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the autonomy of British statecraft”.5 As this quotation indicates, two aspects of sovereignty are at play. One is the importance of democratic accountability. If Parliament is sovereign, then the public can hold it accountable in elections; as such, the public is ultimately sovereign in terms of being able to shape who decides political outcomes.6 Second, sovereignty is about freedom of action for British governments. These arguments continue in the present era, with proponents of Brexit asserting that it allows the people to hold government accountable in a way not possible when Britain was a member of the European Union [EU].7 As Sir Bernard Jenkin, a senior Conservative MP, puts it “the future of liberal democracy must be founded on a more engaged, accountable and democratic constitutional settlement, based on the nation state and international cooperation, rather than rather less accountable and less transparent supranationalism”. 8 In other words, Brexit was to be more than a standalone event. Rather, it was to herald a broader retreat from the logic of regional integration. Indeed, Michael Gove, a pro-​Brexit Conservative cabinet minister, predicted in 2016, “Britain voting to leave will be the beginning of something potentially even more exciting –​the democratic liberation of a whole Continent”. This “contagion” argument represents a significant challenge to the EU’s existence and legitimacy. Thus far, it does not seem to have been borne out. Support for leaving the EU has generally declined across Europe in light of the difficult process Brexit had to navigate.9 If Brexit does not lead to a wave of “exits” from the EU, that does not invalidate the argument that sovereignty, in terms of democracy and accountability, may be more realisable in a national rather than supranational context; yet, it does imply that this argument has failed to resonate such that the EU is in danger of unravelling. The second assertion, that the British government is perceived to have more direct impact on outcomes if it is able to act independently, continues to be central to Brexit discourse. As Sir David Frost, Britain’s final Brexit negotiator, put it: “We believe sovereignty is meaningful and what it enables us to do is to set our rules for our own benefit. Sovereignty is about the ability to get your own rules right in a way that suits our own conditions.”10 Thus, the definition of sovereignty posited by Brexiteers emphasises particular national circumstances over general interests that states may share. By implication, it also downplays different and competing needs within nation states, as well as common interests between sub-​national groups across a wider geographical space. Whether Brexit does increase sovereignty in real terms remains hotly debated. Regime theorists have long argued that pooling sovereignty on a multilateral basis leads to more meaningful influence over events than the illusion of national-​level policy-​making.11 Those outside but inter-​connected with the EU are framed as “rule takers” rather than “rule makers”. This means that they are not able to benefit from the thin form of sovereignty that comes from participating in decision-​making and, even if they are not always able to achieve their preference, arguing for any negative effects to be mitigated. Yet, the need to subsume national interests within a larger group inevitably means there are some things one cannot do as a member of a multilateral organisation that one could do outside. Obversely, lack of group obligation means that the British government is now able not to do some things it might otherwise have been compelled to do –​if it chooses. Indeed, this negative idea of sovereignty was perhaps the most prominent in the referendum debate, as seen in the slogan “Vote Leave, Take Back Control” –​ with control implying the freedom to restrict or inhibit. 61

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This was particularly the case when it came to immigration. During the 2000s, Britain experienced an unprecedented influx of migrants because of the accession of Central and Eastern European countries to the EU.12 Although studies generally showed this immigration brought net economic benefits to Britain as a whole,13 the disconnect between government predictions of migrant numbers and the actuality led to public mistrust on the issue.14 In the year before the referendum, over one million refugees crossed the Mediterranean and television news regularly reported on the danger of their crossings. As a response, Germany unilaterally gave access to over a million refugees from Syria, ultimately allowed to work and travel across the region, including in Britain. In the run up to the 2015 General Election, immigration was a significant issue –​ranked either first or second for the previous five years, alongside the economy, and only being pushed out by health as polling day neared.15 The opposition Labour Party, led by the son of an immigrant, Ed Miliband, even produced campaign mugs calling for “Controls on Immigration”. Dominic Cummings, who became an advisor to Prime Minister Boris Johnson in July 2019, argued prior to the EU referendum campaign, “Immigration is now such a powerful dynamic in public opinion that … no existing political force can stop people being so worried about it”. Indeed, he suggested, it was so prevalent as a public issue that “it is … not necessary for the main campaign to focus on it”, as it was generally assumed amongst swing voters that “the government has ‘kept the floodgates open’ and ‘made the problem worse’ ”.16 Immigration became a central issue to Brexit as it underlined the compromises inherent in EU membership. Enshrined in the Treaty of Rome, freedom of movement was a central organising principle of the single market. Bound by common agreements, member-​states could not impose unilateral controls.17 In seeking to re-​impose differences between the rights of British and EU citizens as part of his renegotiation of Britain’s membership of the EU, Prime Minister David Cameron risked the integrity of this foundational principle and so the changes he was granted focused around access to benefits. These failed to quell concern over the extent of immigration in preceding years.18 The fact that Britain could have chosen to delay full movement rights to accession countries in the 2000s according to the agreed framework –​as many other EU countries did –​was moot by the time of the referendum, as the process had concluded –​although the Leave campaign exploited the fear of future accession by Turkey. The immigration debate carried a number of implications for the EU. If Britain had been able to undermine the principle of freedom of movement, that would have had significant ramifications for multilateral co-​ordination of migration, and refugees. Allowing any single member-​state to unpick one of the four freedoms that the EU was designed to promote could have also led to further cherry picking and the potential collapse of integration as a process in favour of retrenchment or even dissolution. In the event, although the publics of many EU member-​states express concern about immigration, general agreement exists on the need to resist reform that might jeopardise the workings of the single market. As such, Brexit’s impact has been limited. Since the referendum, Brexit supporters have shifted from raising fears of non-​European immigration via the EU to arguing that leaving the EU would actually allow a fairer system that opened immigration to people from around the world. Priti Patel, the home secretary, asserted, “This marks the delivery of our promise to the British people to regain control of our borders and consider new arrivals on the basis of the skills they have to offer and the contribution they can make, not where they come from”.19 In that sense, Brexit in itself does not mean an end to the idea of immigration as a potential public good, even at high levels. Moreover, the British government was highly reluctant to close its borders in response to the COVID-​19 pandemic –​despite the obvious geographic advantage of being an island. This suggests fears over 62

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immigration have not yet translated into a wish to row back on the transnational movement of people globally. The issues of sovereignty and immigration, although clearly linked to external processes, remained largely internally focused. Sovereignty arguments repeatedly emphasised the connexion between democracy and accountability and so wished to repatriate the link between who makes decisions and the public on whose behalf they do so. Immigration debates centred on the government’s ability to establish its own rules on all visitors to Britain after Brexit, rather than have its powers curtailed by the rights of EU citizens to move freely. What they share is the perception that regional governance inhibits both democratic control and efficacy. A similar attitude in the discourse surrounds regulation, with the EU portrayed as an impediment to global free market principles and competitiveness due to its dense regulative framework, which supposedly acts as a barrier to trade with outside parties –​and thereby channels economic activity within the region.20 Here, the extent of British trade with the continent is supposedly less evidence of the EU’s success in breaking down intra-​regional trade barriers and more proof that potential global trade is being stifled. In 2020, Johnson defended Britain’s exit from the EU by arguing, “the reason we do not seek membership or part membership of the customs union or alignment of any kind, is at least partly that I want this country to be an independent actor and catalyst for free trade across the world”.21 Similarly, in 2016, Gove asserted, What will enrage, and disorientate, EU elites is the UK’s success outside the Union. Regaining control over our laws, taxes and borders and forging new trade deals whilst also shedding unnecessary regulation will enhance our competitive advantage over other EU nations.22 Again, the link is made between exiting the Union and restoring democratic control, and the effect of this autonomy is that “our influence on the world stage will only grow”.23 The evidence of trade figures does not seem to bear out the assertion that the EU was stifling Britain’s ability to trade with the world –​according to the House of Commons Library, exports to the EU declined as a proportion of British trade from 54 per cent in 2006 to 43 per cent in 2019.24 Nevertheless, it is possible that this difference could have been greater without EU membership. Brexit brought out some interesting divergences of opinion when it came to the business community. Manufacturers largely opposed it and spent much of the negotiation period pressing for a “soft Brexit” involving close regulatory alignment. The plurality of voices in manufacturing and exports spoke out against Brexit. Although not formally taking a position, the Confederation of British Industry, the leading business lobby group, issued a report on Brexit’s likely negative impact on growth, warning that it would be “a real blow for living standards”, and a survey of members of the British Chambers of Commerce saw two-​thirds express opposition.25 A few prominent individuals, such as Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Sir James Dyson, were vocal Brexit supporters but have since made business choices that appear to contradict their previous statements that Brexit would be good for the economy. Ratcliffe’s Ineos Automotive decided to build a new car based on the Land Rover in France rather than Wales –​as originally intended; and Dyson moved his Head Office to Singapore to build a new electric car there rather than in Britain. Similarly, the financial sector was generally opposed to Brexit and keen to mitigate its effects; yet, certain sections, notably “traders in financial assets –​in particular hedge-​fund managers” –​ were in favour, supposedly, due to the “speculative opportunities created by Brexit”.26 Some of the most prominent Eurosceptic figures in British politics, like Nigel Farage, John Redwood, and Jacob Rees-​Mogg, have worked in the financial sector and run or advised investment funds. 63

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The Brexit campaign also received support from individuals instrumental in establishing, or benefitting from, tax avoidance schemes.27 Suggestions exist that EU proposals to reduce the efficacy of these arrangements and co-​ordinate action on tax avoidance and offshore tax havens is an underlying reason for their enthusiasm for the Leave campaign. These groups often co-​opted arguments over sovereignty and immigration, but one could detect a level of self-​interest in locating regulation at the national level, where controls may be weaker. In a world of individual states, the mobility of international finance puts national attempts to regulate at a disadvantage –​if the rules get too restrictive, fund managers can always invest elsewhere. By contrast, large regional governance organisations like the EU are able either to avoid this effect or limit the damage by virtue of their greater economic and geographical size. This has two major impacts on the more speculative side of the financial sector. First, regional organisations (designed to reduce economic volatility and increase predictability), limit the risks and hence rewards for speculative investment. Second, and importantly, increased monitoring and regulation means greater transparency about who is investing and profiting from these investments –​exposing them to tax liabilities. In that sense, the successful effort to break up the EU by encouraging its second largest economy to exit has important ramifications for regional and global governance. Should Britain become, as advocated since the referendum, a low tax, low regulation economy with London a “Singapore on Thames”,28 it would have been achieved with significant political pressure from financial capitalists and would underline the power of non-​state, transnational capitalist actors.29 Although this is a prevalent discourse about how Brexit has played out, there are complicating factors. For one, Britain’s regulators settled on a preference for greater autonomy rather than convergence –​even at the expense of the financial sector in the short term. Given the City of London’s integration into the single market, one would expect them to favour close regulatory alignment with the rest of the EU.30 In reality, they preferred more independence to be able to respond to crises in ways that suit particular British needs. Thus, it is ironic that regulators and those elements of the sector most resistant to regulation supported greater separation from the EU, albeit for opposing reasons. There is also a question mark over how far Britain and the EU are on divergent paths when it comes to tax avoidance. Certainly, there have been criticisms of Britain over its support for tax havens. The non-​governmental organisation Tax Justice Network lists the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, and Bermuda, overseas territories of Britain, as the three worst offenders for facilitating global corporate tax abuses in 2021, with Jersey, a Crown dependency, ranked eighth.31 Yet, the EU has a mixed record on regulating tax avoidance; and in some regards, it has followed British initiatives.32 EU member-​states like the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Ireland have benefitted from companies locating offices in their jurisdictions to minimise tax liabilities, with the former two listed in the same top ten. Indeed, the level of divergence between the EU and Britain, in terms of fiscal policy and regulation, is likely to be limited even after Brexit –​especially in light of the global COVID-​ 19 pandemic. Expectations are that taxes will increase in the coming years to address Britain’s debt situation following COVID. Financial capitalists are unlikely to be able to push through “beggar thy neighbour” tax policies due to the public interest in providing a base level of welfare provision and assistance to businesses seeking to recover from the economic shock of 2020. The EU-​British Trade and Co-​operation Agreement signed in December 2020 provides a level of harmonisation and co-​operation on tax affairs. A preliminary survey of the post-​Brexit regulatory environment saw major changes in only two areas, immigration and agriculture.33 Even here, greater long-​term convergence may be necessary in the latter to resolve issues over Northern Ireland. During the Brexit negotiation process, David Davis, the secretary of state for 64

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exiting the EU, asserted that “Britain’s plan –​its blueprint for life outside of the EU –​is a race to the top in global standards”,34 and this was echoed in subsequent government speeches.35 Furthermore, EU influence on global regulation means that it will continue to have an impact on Britain, directly and indirectly, after Brexit.36 Whilst they may have contributed to the Brexit outcome, by exploiting the compressed time frame and binary outcome of a referendum, the long term influence of individual financial capitalists on Britain’s external relations is likely to be less significant. A larger issue raised by Brexit is whether long-​ term, increasingly dense multilateral institutions such as the EU best manage international governance; or if ad hoc patterns of co-​operation are more effective at serving foreign policy goals, especially in a crisis. The EU attracted significant criticism of its handling of the Eurozone’s problems and Greek bailout in 2010. In setting out his reasons for supporting Brexit in 2016, Gove argued, “The EU is an institution rooted in the past and is proving incapable of reforming to meet the big technological, demographic and economic challenges of our time.”37 Dominic Cummings, a key figure in the Leave campaign, provided a rationale for Brexit in his blog based on the idea that the EU is structurally incapable of adapting and responding to crises. Discussing EU handling of the Eurozone crisis, he asserted a general failure not only to grip the problems but even to show that they understood what the problems were. There was clearly no sensible movement for reform of the EU. As it lurched from crisis to crisis, its only response was “the EU needs more power”.38 Rather than facilitating state co-​operation, the EU is viewed as inhibiting it, and the existence of longstanding institutional ties means that when circumstances change, organisations like the EU are too large and unwieldy to capitalise on opportunities as they emerge. According to Cummings, “Unhealthy and ineffective systems like the EU … block error-​correction. They are extremely centralised and hierarchical therefore information processing is blocked and problems are not solved”.39 On this reasoning, moving decision-​making from the supranational to the national level allows better adaptability to crises. In addition, it is more responsive to emerging opportunities, especially in new technologies and industries. For Frost, repatriating regulation from the regional to the national arena will mean, “we are going to have a huge advantage over the EU –​the ability to set regulations for new sectors, the new ideas, and new conditions –​quicker than the EU can”.40 If Britain proves more adaptable outside the EU, and can ride out shocks more effectively than EU member-​states, then Brexit would represent a serious challenge to the basic assumptions of European co-​operation, the foundation of the European Community.41 Clearly, it is too soon to provide a definitive conclusion about the wisdom of this logic. When the COVID-​19 pandemic struck, Britain was criticised for excluding itself from European consortiums purchasing personal protective equipment and vaccines; yet, in the latter case, Britain was better able to acquire and distribute vaccines than their European counterparts –​albeit at a higher cost. That would imply that the warnings of Cummings and Gove about the EU’s poor record of adaptability have been borne out. That said, there are clear benefits to establishing long-​term patterns of governance in terms of predictability and consistency over time. Judging policy-​making machinery only in terms of its crisis response would be to ignore its longer term and everyday impact on interactions between the various parts of the system. That effect is most apparent in the trade sphere. The introduction of significant non-​tariff barriers to trade is likely to have a major impact on British trade with the EU, at least in the 65

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short term. It is very hard to separate out the effects of Brexit from those of the COVID-​19 pandemic and current figures will inevitably see revision; however, initial indications are of a sizeable reduction in trade following the introduction of the new terms on 1 January 2021. The Road Haulage Association suggested that British exports to the EU fell by 68 per cent in that month, based on a poll of its members.42 Meanwhile, the German government estimated that German exports to Britain fell by 30 per cent –​although stockpiling in December 2020 may have skewed this figure. Over 2020, German exports to Britain declined by 15.5 per cent and British exports in the other direction by 9.6 per cent compared to the previous year.43 In short, regional governance organisations like the EU may adapt poorly to crises, but they provide longer-​term benefits in regularising and facilitating co-​operation in areas such as trade. The important question for students of governance is whether having the ability to react quickly to disruptive events is a net benefit, given the costs that autonomy imposes on everyday interactions between Britain and its EU neighbours. With Britain now in a position of relative autonomy, a groundswell of commentators have argued for a more contingent and ad hoc diplomacy based on groups of states co-​operating on specific issues or interests.44 This view was evident in Prime Minister Theresa May’s February 2018 Munich speech, when she called for more bilateral and ad hoc groupings on security after Brexit; but this has arguably moved from a side-​line to a governing ideal under Johnson. Rather than align closely with the EU on foreign and defence matters, Britain has favoured discussions amongst the E 3 –​Britain, France, and Germany –​in negotiating questions of European order, often in a way that calculatedly side-​lines EU foreign policy mechanisms, contrary to earlier assumptions that Britain might continue to contribute to EU foreign policy after Brexit.45 In the Indo-​Pacific sphere, Britain is urged to join various groupings. They include the Quadrilateral Dialogue, the “Quad” –​Japan, India, Australia, and the United States –​co-​operating on regional security; strengthen existing arrangements like the Five Powers Defence Agreements –​Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Britain; work in new configurations depending on the issue with Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea –​on maritime security and defence investment; or in trilaterals with Japan and America.46 In terms of global partnerships, there is a small but vocal group calling for the formation of “CANZUK” –​Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain –​to co-​ordinate defence and trade policies.47 Sir John Sawers, the former chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, suggested forging a compact of major Powers made up of France, Germany, Britain, the United States, Russia, and China, to respond to global security problems.48 More tangibly, the British government has provided rhetorical support for a “D10” of leading democracies to co-​ordinate global action amongst supposedly like-​minded states. The Johnson administration sought to make this a reality by inviting India, Australia, and South Korea to the G7 meeting hosted by Britain in 2021. It also had a central role in convening the AUKUS security pact in 2021 between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, creating further divisions between Britain and a key European partner, France. The extent to which these groups represent an ad hoc and non-​institutionalised alternative to the formalised co-​operation of the EU is questionable. For one thing, they usually involve explicit agreements and commitments: thus, the Five Eyes intelligence network is built on the 1946 UK-​USA agreement. For another, international regimes often shape perceptions of global issues and the responses that emerge to confront them, as in the case of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Ad hoc groups aiming to affirm freedom of navigation in the South China Sea will do so on the basis that all parties, including rival states, agree to abide by common rules and norms in this regard. Furthermore, Britain has opened discussions 66

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with the 11 member-​states of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-​Pacific Partnership [CPTPP] to join this free trade arrangement –​membership of which would entail institutionalised commitments to common regulatory standards and practices.49 In that sense, it is not multilateral governance per se, but its regional manifestation in the form of the EU that the British government has rejected. Often portrayed as an insular act, Brexit is supposedly part of a wave of authoritarian and populist movements across Europe and the United States decrying the multilateral liberal order and heralding greater protectionism. Certainly, there are aspects of Brexit that challenge the EU’s particular form of liberal institutionalism. Brexiteers’ national view of sovereignty is at odds with the EU’s founding philosophy that sovereignty shared is more real since it allows influence over a greater swathe of regional and international matters. The emphasis on controls on immigration challenges the EU’s linkage between free trade and freedom of movement. Associating EU governance with protectionist regulation and sclerotic responses to crises questions the liberal character and effectiveness of EU integration. But Brexit does not constitute a wholesale rejection of liberal values –​or even liberal institutionalism as such. Britain paid lip service to liberal values in its robust response to China’s imposition of a new security law in Hong Kong,50 the call for an Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development investigation into the Belarus election in 2020,51 condemnation of China’s treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang province,52 and criticism of the military coup in Burma in 2021.53 Its portrayal of the EU as overly regulative and poor to adapt to crises does not translate into a dismissal of multilateral governance as a means to facilitate international co-​operation. As noted, joining the CPTPP would necessitate abiding by shared rules and well-​ defined principles. Moreover, whilst some supporters of Brexit may have been motivated by insular and protectionist instincts, the outcome is likely to be a more expansive British foreign policy in the future. Britain’s tilt to the Indo-​Pacific as an outcome of its Integrated Review in 2021, its active courting of relationships with extra-​regional Powers, its desire to co-​ordinate policies with the “D10” of leading democracies, and its framing of itself as “Global Britain”, all suggest that future British foreign policy will be heavily informed by liberal internationalism. Nor, as an aside, does Brexit appear to constitute a rupture in the capitalist system. Brexit will have an impact on the logistical aspects of transnational economic activity but, in any case, the pandemic tested the resilience of “just in time” supply chains. Overall, Brexit is as likely to reinforce as much as challenge international governance structures. Britain will need to re-​double its efforts in international fora to compensate for its loss of influence in the EU. At the same time, rather than herald the disintegration of the EU, Brexit could be the catalyst the organisation needs to renew member-​states’ commitment to integration, as the costs of non-​membership become apparent. Either way, both parties will have to find a way of working together given the brute facts of geography, politics, and history that bind their fates.

Notes 1 Oliver Daddow, Britain and Europe Since 1945: Historiographical Perspectives on Integration (Manchester, UK, 2004); idem, New Labour and the European Union: Blair and Brown’s Logic of History (Manchester, UK, 2011). 2 N. Piers Ludlow, “Safeguarding British Identity or Betraying It? The Role of British ‘Tradition’ in the Parliamentary Great Debate on EC Membership, October 1971”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 53/​ 1(2015), 18–​34. 3 Hugh Gaitskell, “Speech Against UK Membership of the Common Market –​‘The End of 1,000 Years of History’ ”, Labour Party Conference, Brighton (3 October 1962).

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Jamie Gaskarth 4 Lindsay Aqui, Michael Kenny, and Nick Pearce, “ ‘The Empire of England’: Enoch Powell, Sovereignty, and the Constitution of the Nation”, Twentieth Century British History, (2020), 1–​23: https://​doi.org/​ 10.1093/​tcbh/​hwaa​022. 5 Ibid. 6 Vernon Bogdanor, “Europe and the Sovereignty of the People”, Political Quarterly, 87/​3(2016), 348–​51. 7 Sir David Frost, “Brussels Needs to Shake Off Its Remaining Ill-​will and Treat Brexit Britain as an Equal”, Telegraph (7 March 2021); Patrick Timms, “The Europeans May be Our Brethren, but the Anglosphere are Our Kin” (21 January 2020): https://​brexit​cent​ral.com/​the-​europe​ans-​may-​be-​our-​ breth​ren-​but-​the-​angl​osph​ere-​are-​our-​kin/​. 8 Sir Bernard Jenkin, “How Brexit Has Shaken up Our Constitutional Settlement” (16 July 2019): https://​ brexit​cent​ral.com/​how-​bre​xit-​has-​sha​ken-​up-​our-​con​stit​utio​nal-​set​tlem​ent/​. 9 Catherine De Vries, “Benchmarking Brexit: How the British Decision to Leave Shapes EU Public Opinion”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 55/​3(2017), 43–​44. 10 Sir David Frost, “Britain’s Brexit Position”, Speech to ULB Brussels University (18 February 2020): https://​react​ion.life/​david-​frost-​spe​ech-​in-​full-​brita​ins-​bre​xit-​posit​ion/​. 11 Nicolas Jabko and Meghan Luhman, “Reconfiguring Sovereignty: Crisis, Politicization, and European Integration”, Journal of European Public Policy, 26/​7(2019), 1038. For a punchy explanation, see Stephen D. Krasner, “Sovereignty”, Foreign Policy, 122(2001), 20–​29. 12 The British Office for National Statistics provides a useful summary (2015): www.ons.gov.uk/​ peoplepopulationandcommunity/​populationandmigration/​internationalmigration/​articles/​internatio nalmigrationarecenthistory/​2015-​01-​15. Updated ONS statistics in April 2021 suggest these figures may have actually significantly underestimated the numbers: https://​ukan​deu.ac.uk/​as-​net-​migrat​ion-​ falls-​huge-​unce​rtai​nty-​rema​ins/​. 13 Oxford Economics, The Fiscal Contribution of EU Migrants: Update and Scenario Analysis. A Report for the Migration Advisory Committee (London, 2020): https://​ass​ets.pub​lish​ing.serv​ice.gov.uk/​gov​ ernm​ent/​uplo​ads/​sys​tem/​uplo​ads/​atta​chme​nt_​d​ata/​file/​861​246/​Oxford​_​Eco​nomi​cs_​​​​-​_​Fiscal_​Cont​ ribu​tion​_​of_​EU_​M​igra​nts.pdf; Christian Dustmann and Tommaso Frattini, “The Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the UK”, Economic Journal, 124/​580(2014), F593–​F643. 14 Rachel Shabi, “How Immigration Became Britain’s Most Toxic Political Issue”, Guardian (15 November 2019): www.theguardian.com/​politics/​2019/​nov/​15/​how-​immigration-​became-britainsmost-​toxic-​political-​issue. 15 William Jordan, “Health Overtakes Immigration as an Issue for Voters”, YouGov (15 April 2015): https://​you​gov.co.uk/​top​ics/​polit​ics/​artic​les-​repo​rts/​2015/​04/​15/​hea​lth-​tops-​immi​grat​ion-​ sec​ond-​most-​import​ant-​issu. 16 Dominic Cummings, “My Report for Business for Britain on the Dynamics of the Debate over the EU, and a Small but Telling Process Point on the EU”, Blog (30 June 2014): https://​domi​nicc​ummi​ ngs.com/​2014/​06/​30/​my-​rep​ort-​for-​busin​ess-​for-​brit​ain-​on-​the-​dynam​ics-​of-​the-​deb​ate-​over-​the-​ eu-​and-​a-​small-​but-​tell​ing-​proc​ess-​point-​on-​the-​eu/​. 17 That is to say, controls must be an agreed mechanism as part of a wider multilateral agreement, usually with the consent of other parties. 18 For a brilliant discussion of the negotiation process, see the comments by Ivan Rogers, UK Permanent Representative to the EU, 2013–​2017, in https://​ukan​deu.ac.uk/​interv​iew-​pdf/​?perso​nid=​43562. 19 Sam Lister, “Priti Patel Hails Taking Back Control of Immigration for First Time in a Generation”, Express (12 November 2020): www.express.co.uk/​news/​uk/​1359171/​priti-​patel-​immigration-​act-​brexit. 20 “Cost of the EU –​Let’s Spend Our Money on Our Priorities”: www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/​ briefing_​cost.html; Jacob Rees-​ Mogg, “Speech at Churcher’s College, Petersfield” (25 January 2018): https://​brexit​cent​ral.com/​read-​full-​text-​jacob-​rees-​mogg-​bre​xit-​spe​ech/​; Barnabas Reynolds, Restoring UK Law: Freeing the UK’s Global Financial Market (London, 2021). 21 Boris Johnson, “PM Speech in Greenwich” (3 February 2020): www.gov.uk/​government/​speeches/​ pm-​speech-​in-​greenwich-​3-​february-​2020. 22 Michael Gove, “The Facts of Life Say Leave”, Speech (19 April 2016): www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/​ assets-​d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/​voteleave/​pages/​271/​attachments/​original/​1461057270/​ MGspeech194VERSION2.pdf. 23 Ibid. 24 Matthew Ward, “Statistics on UK-​EU Trade”, Briefing Paper 7851 (10 November 2020): https://​com​ mons​libr​ary.par​liam​ent.uk/​resea​rch-​briefi​ngs/​cbp-​7851/​.

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Brexit and British Foreign Policy 25 “EU Referendum: CBI Warns of UK Exit ‘Serious Shock’ ”, BBC (21 March 2016): www.bbc.co.uk/​ news/​uk-​politics-​eu-​referendum-​35855869. According to the Director General, Carolyn Fairburn, 80 per cent of CBI members thought that remaining in the EU would be best for their business: Jamie Robertson, “EU Referendum: 1975 and 2016, a Tale of Two Campaigns”, BBC News (24 March 2016): www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​business-​35811941; Heather Stewart, “British Chambers of Commerce Boss Suspended in Brexit Row, Reports Say”, Guardian (4 March 2016): www.theguardian.com/​politics/​2016/​mar/​04/​british-​chambers-​of-​commerce-​boss-​suspended-​in-​brexit-​row-​reports-​say. 26 Peter Oborne, “I Was a Strong Brexiteer. Now We Must Swallow Our Pride and Think Again”, Open Democracy (7 April 2019): www.opendemocracy.net/​en/​opendemocracyuk/​i-​was-​strong-​brexiteer-​ now-​we-​must-​swallow-​our-​pride-​and-​think-​again/​. 27 Juliette Garside, Hilary Osborne, and Ewen MacAskill, “The Brexiters Who Put Their Money Offshore”, Guardian (9 November 2017): www.theguardian.com/​news/​2017/​nov/​09/​brexitersput-​money-​offshore-​tax-​haven. 28 James Warrington, “Sir Martin Sorrell: Post-​Brexit Economy Should be ‘Singapore on Steroids’ ”, City AM (12 November 2019): www.cityam.com/​sir-​martin-​sorrell-​post-​brexit-​economy-​should-​ be-​singapore-​on-​steroids/​. 29 Heather McKeen-​Edwards and Tony Porter, Transnational Financial Associations and the Governance of Global Finance (London, 2013); Philip Cerny, Rethinking World Politics: A Theory of Transnational Pluralism (Oxford, 2010). 30 Scott James and Lucy Qualgia, “Rule Maker or Rule Taker? Brexit, Finance and UK Regulatory Autonomy”, International Political Science Review, (2020), 1–​14: https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​01925​1212​ 0967​380. 31 Mark Bou Mansour, “Tax Haven Ranking Shows Countries Setting Global Tax Rules Do Most to Help Firms Bend Them”, Tax Justice Network (9 March 2021): www.taxjustice.net/​press/​tax-​haven-​ ranking-​shows-​countries-​setting-​global-​tax-​rules-​do-​most-​to-​help-​firms-​bend-​them/​. 32 Politax, “Is Brexit Really About Tax Avoidance?” (12 October 2019): www.politax.com/​post/​ is-​brexit-​really-​about-​tax-​avoidance. 33 For a fuller survey of the level of harmonisation in different sectors, see Hussein Kassim, Sean Ennis, and Andrew Jordan, eds., UK Regulation after Brexit (London, 2021). 34 David Davis, “Delivering Our Future Economic Partnership”, Speech in Vienna (20 February 2018): https://​brexit​cent​ral.com/​full-​text-​david-​dav​iss-​road-​bre​xit-​spe​ech-​del​iver​ing-​fut​ure-​econo​ mic-​part​ners​hip/​. 35 Johnson, “PM Speech”. 36 Anu Bradford, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Runs the World (Oxford, 2020). 37 Michael Gove, “Why I’m Backing Brexit”, The Spectator (20 February 2016): www.spectator.co.uk/​ article/​michael-​gove-​why-​i-​m-​backing-​brexit. 38 Dominic Cummings, “On the Referendum #21: Branching Histories of the 2016 Referendum and ‘the Frogs Before the Storm’ ”, Blog (9 January 2017): https://​domi​nicc​ummi​ngs.com/​ 2017/​01/​ 09/​on-​the-​referendum-​21-​branching-​histories-​of-​the-​2016-​referendum-​and-​the-​frogs-​before-​the- ​ storm-​2/​. 39 Ibid. 40 Frost, “Britain’s Brexit Position”. 41 Alan Riley and Francis Ghilès, “Brexit: Causes and Consequences”, CIDOB (October 2016): www. cidob.org/​en/​publications/​publication_​series/​notes_​internacionals/​n1_​159/​brexit_​causes_​and_ ​ consequences; Peter Wilding, What Next? Britain’s Future in Europe (London, 2017). 42 “Exports from UK to EU Down 68% since Brexit Trade Deal, Say Hauliers”, Reuters (7 February 2021): www.reuters.com/​article/​uk-​britain-​eu-​exports-​idUSKBN2A70G1. 43 Paul Carrel and Rene Wagner, “German Exports to UK Fell Almost a Third in January as Brexit Hit”, Reuters (2 March 2021): www.reuters.com/​article/​uk-​germany-​economy-​britain-​idUSKBN2AU0QZ. 44 Christopher Hill, The Future of British Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2019), 109–​15, 161–​63. 45 Richard Whitman, “Missing in Action: The EU-​ UK Foreign, Security and Defence Policy Relationship after Brexit”, European View, 19/​ 2(2020), 222–​ 29; Patrick Wintour, “UK Quietly Shifts Away from Promise of ‘Deep’ Foreign and Security Links with EU”, Guardian (28 December 2020): www.theguardian.com/​world/​2020/​dec/​28/​uk-​quietly-​shifts-​away-​from-​promise-​of-​deep-​ foreign-​and-​security-​links-​with-​eu; Foreign Affairs Committee, The Future of UK Diplomacy in Europe, Second Report of Session 2017–​19 (London, 2018). 46 Alessio Patalano, UK Defence from the “Far East” to the “Indo-​Pacific” (London, 2019), 22–​23.

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Jamie Gaskarth 47 Nik Martin, “CANZUK —​Could It Be Britain’s New EU?”, DW (5 December 2020): www. dw.com/​en/​canzuk-​could-​it-​be-​britains-​new-​eu/​a-​55810928. Cf. www.canzuk.org/​. 48 Sawers corrected oral evidence: Select Committee on the European Union, External Affairs Sub-​ Committee, “Brexit: Sanctions Policy”, Evidence Session 5 (19 October 2017), 14: http://​data.par​ liam​ent.uk/​writ​tene​vide​nce/​commit​teee​vide​nce.svc/​evide​nced​ocum​ent/​eu-​exter ​nal-​affa​irss​ubco​ mmit​tee/​bre​xit-​sancti​ons-​pol​icy/​oral/​71916.html. I am grateful to Erica Moret for this reference. 49 Department for International Trade, “UK Takes Major Step Towards Membership of Trans-​Pacific Free Trade Area” (9 September 2020): www.gov.uk/​government/​news/​uk-​takes-major-steptowards-​membership-​of-​trans-​pacific-​free-​trade-​area. 50 Aubrey Allegretti, “Hong Kong: Dominic Raab Offers Citizenship Rights to 2.9 Million British Nationals”, Sky News (1 July 2020): https://​news.sky.com/​story/​citi​zens​hip-​r ig​hts-​offe​red-​to-​all-​brit​ ish-​nation​als-​in-​hong-​kong-​raab-​says-​12018​810. 51 Wendy Morton, “UK Statement on Belarus: OSCE Special Permanent Council 2020” (28 August 2020): www.gov.uk/​government/​speeches/​uk-​statement-​on-​belarus-​osce-​special-​permanent-​council2020. 52 Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, “UK Government Announces Business Measures over Xinjiang Human Rights Abuses” (12 January 2021): www.gov.uk/​government/​news/​ uk-​government-​announces-​business-​measures-​over-​xinjiang-​human-​r ights-​abuses. 53 Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, “UK Sanctions Further Myanmar Military Figures for Role in Coup” (25 February 2021): www.gov.uk/​government/​news/​uksanctions-​further-​myanmar-​military-​figures-​for-​role-​in-​coup-​february-​25-​2021.

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6 UNRAVELLING THE ENIGMA Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-​First Century Jeffrey Mankoff*

The 2014 annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine marked a turning point for Russian foreign policy, one that reconfigured the nature of Russia’s relationship with its post-​ Soviet neighbours, as well as with Europe, the United States, and China. It also marked a conceptual shift for Russian analysts and officials who had struggled since the collapse of the Soviet Union a generation earlier to articulate a coherent framework for making sense of Russia’s role in the world. This process had unfurled sporadically after 1991, in part because the Russian Federation was fundamentally new as a state, its identity and interests still loosely defined for several years after independence. What is Russia? It is not a nation-​state, given its vast territorial expanse and wide range of peoples inhabiting its territory, but no longer quite an empire either; and clearly not a superpower –​although it continues to maintain the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat on the United Nations [UN] Security Council. Nevertheless, whilst the Soviet Union may have lost the Cold War, it was not bombed out, crushed, and occupied the way Germany and Japan were in 1945. Post-​1991 Russia remained a major, if diminished Power, especially in its own neighbourhood, where other new states were still weaker and more chaotic –​and continued to look to Moscow as the principal arbiter of their conflicts. But was this post-​Soviet neighbourhood a burden to be shed in the rush to globalisation, a source of strategic vulnerability that only the projection of Russian power could contain, the site of markets and natural resources to be dominated, or a building block for constructing a new sphere of influence to sustain post-​Cold War Russia’s global relevance? This uncertainty about what precisely the Russian Federation is has spilled over into debates about the country’s foreign policy as well. More so than that amongst the Cold War victors on both sides of the Atlantic, the Russian debate centres on basic principles as much as on specific policy choices. Should the focus of Russia’s diplomatic activity be on the West or its post-​Soviet neighbours –​or perhaps on East Asia? Can Russia ultimately merge its identity with that of the West, in the same way that Germany joined its one-​time enemies in the post-​Second World War European Economic Community and post-​Communist states such as Poland became part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] and European Union [EU] more recently? Or is Russia just too big and too foreign? Is it condemned always to play a separate role on the world stage? Can Russia become a modern, technologically driven economy, or is its perpetual role to be a supplier of natural resources to its more developed neighbours? DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-8

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The Vladimir Putin era in Russia (2000–​present) has seen the emergence of answers to at least some of these questions. Though Putin early in his presidency emphasised Russia’s commitment to democracy and a European identity, mounting confrontations with the West would lead him to place greater emphasis on Russia’s distinct civilisational identity, emphasising a political culture separate from the West’s –​and less accepting of Western-​style liberal democracy. That shift entailed rejecting what Putin saw as interference in Russian domestic politics on the part of democracy-​ promoting non-​ governmental organisations and cracking down on perceived “foreign agents”. It also saw Russia focus increasingly on consolidating a new regional order in post-​Soviet Eurasia, rather than seeking convergence and integration with the trans-​Atlantic West, based on a perception that “great powers do not dissolve in some other integration projects but forge their own”.1 That regional order’s design was to give Russia the ability to act as a pole in an increasingly multipolar world, maintaining its strategic independence between a United States-​dominated West and an emerging Sinocentric East Asia. Whilst these trends had been underway for close to a decade by 2014, the invasion of Ukraine and ensuing confrontation with the United States and EU accelerated them. Western sanctions aiming to isolate Russia from the Western-​dominated financial architecture and damage its economy were perceived in Moscow as part of a new containment strategy whose long-​term objective was nothing less than fomenting a “coloured revolution” like those that broke out over the previous decade in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union in Russia itself. In response, the Kremlin accelerated efforts at domestic consolidation, economic autarky, and regional integration, coupled especially after 2014 with active disruption targeting the West. In turning away from the West, Russia “has ‘pivoted’ to itself, as a major independent player, with China its key strategic partner”.2 Underpinning this shift is a recognition amongst much of the Russian political elite that large, powerful states will continue to be the drivers of international affairs in the twenty-​first century, and that Russia must remain one of these leading Powers. This outlook is in many ways at odds with the focus on shared sovereignty animating the EU, not to mention the emphasis on multilateral responses to global challenges that many Western Powers inside and outside of Europe articulated after the Cold War. Russian foreign policy continues to focus on other states –​and those multilateral institutions that remain Great Power clubs and do not impose Western-​derived behavioural norms on their members. Hard security issues remain fundamental as well, with the Russian government continuing to spend large sums to modernise and upgrade its military even as austerity has increasingly affected military budgets throughout the West. Although Western observers tended to perceive Russia as comparatively marginal in addressing global challenges like climate change and pandemic disease, the effects of global warming on Russia’s Arctic regions and Russian development of an effective, low cost vaccine against COVID-​19 suggest Moscow will be more of a force to contend with on these and similar issues in the future. Well before American and European observers were lamenting the demise of the so-​called liberal international order, Russian analysts were insistent that United States domination of the post-​Cold War world was both temporary and damaging to overall security and stability. They saw unilateral American actions in the security sphere, such as the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 or invasion of Iraq in 2003, as profoundly de-​stabilising to a world order based on a roughly balanced concert of major Powers. Instead, they subscribed to a worldview in which international law, embodied in the consensual decisions of the UN Security Council –​ where Russia is a veto-​wielding permanent member –​is the principal source of legitimacy.3 Of course, Russia has been more than willing to violate international law when doing so 72

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serves its interests, as with the annexation of Ukrainian territory in 2014. Moscow’s position in practice is less that international law is binding on all states at all times than that, as a Great Power like the United States, Russia, too, has the right to decide for itself when and under what circumstances to consider international law as binding. This worldview does not necessarily condemn Russia to a confrontational relationship with the West. Even after the conflict in Ukraine began, Russian diplomats repeatedly emphasised their desire for good relations with the United States and the other major Powers, insofar as those Powers respected Russia’s interests and did not seek to undermine Russian security through military expansion or the promotion of political change –​like democracy promotion in countries Russia considers vital to its own security. Relations with the West have in fact gone through cycles of rapprochement and confrontation over the course of the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, even as Russian views on the nature and goals of foreign policy have remained reasonably consistent.4 In the early 1990s, a coterie of liberal Westernisers around President Boris Yeltsin sought to bring Russia rapidly into Western institutions. Their failure prompted a backlash in the mid-​late 1990s, punctuated by serious clashes over the Balkans and Russia’s invasion of Chechnya. With Putin’s ascension to power at the beginning of 2000, relations began warming again, particularly in the aftermath of the 9/​11 attacks in the United States and the despatch of American forces to Afghanistan, which Moscow viewed as a hotbed of radicalism and instability threatening its Central Asian allies as well as Russia itself. The Iraq invasion in 2003 and Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule at home bred renewed confrontation, which reached a climax during Russia’s five-​day war with Georgia in August 2008. Barely six months later, however, the new United States president, Barack Obama, was proclaiming his intention to “reset” relations with Moscow, and a new era of partnership appeared on the horizon.5 Whilst the “reset” achieved some notable successes, including gaining Russian assent for new sanctions against Iran’s nuclear programme and support for the American-​led effort in Afghanistan, it would soon run out of steam in the face of diverging interests and renewed confrontation over domestic politics. Putin’s announcement that he intended to return to the presidency in late 2011 following four years as prime minister, replacing the more liberal, Western-​oriented Dmitry Medvedev, touched off the largest protests Russia had seen since the Soviet collapse. Putin and his inner circle perceived the United States and its democracy-​promotion apparatus as having a hand in the protests. At one point, Putin even charged that American secretary of state –​and future presidential candidate –​Hillary Clinton, was paying the protestors out of her own pocket.6 These concerns took on new urgency with the outbreak of Ukraine’s Euromaidan protests, which culminated in the ousting of Russian-​backed President Viktor Yanukovych in March 2014, which many Russian observers perceived as a model for what the United States sought to achieve in Russia itself. Ever since, the idea of Russia eventually reconciling with the West has given way to a more globally assertive foreign policy, with Moscow emphasising consolidation of its own influence in Eurasia, projection of power globally, and working with China to challenge the institutional and normative hegemony of the West. This worldview was a product of the debate over Russia’s post-Cold War, post-Soviet identity. Some argued that shorn of the distorting veneer of Marxism-​Leninism, Russia was re-​ joining the European/​Western family from which it had been cut off 70 years earlier, and it should embrace the norms and institutions of the West just as its one-​time satellites in Eastern Europe were doing. Others saw the Russian Federation more as the lineal descendant of the Soviet Union, arguing that the new country should continue to resist the spread of American hegemony that the end of the Cold War appeared ready to unleash. Others looked back to 73

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the Russian Empire or the Grand Princedom of Moscow as a more authentic embodiment of Russia’s geopolitical and cultural identity, arguing that Moscow should develop new hierarchical, but de-​ideologised relationships with its historical periphery, above all the East European Slavic-​majority states of Belarus and Ukraine –​along with the Eastern Slav regions of Moldova and Kazakhstan.7 Some more idiosyncratic visions found space as well –​such as the one, promoted by a range of populist movements, that portrayed Russia as a state for its ethnic Russian majority at risk of being over-​run by hordes of migrants from its largely Moslem, largely poor post-​Soviet neighbours to the South. The principal axis around the identity/​foreign policy debate has circled, however, is over the question of Russia’s position vis-​à-​vis the West. Of course, this debate is hardly new. Peter the Great’s opening to Europe in the early eighteenth century provoked a furious reaction from a clerical and aristocratic establishment that viewed Russia as a unique civilisation defined by its autocratic and Orthodox heritage. For much of the nineteenth century, too, the debate between Westernisers such as Aleksandr Herzen and Slavophiles, amongst the most prominent of whom was Fyodor Dostoevsky, defined Russian intellectual life. The Cold War largely subsumed this debate, since what defined the Soviet Union as a global Power was less its Russian heritage than its promotion of Marxist-​Leninist ideology, itself originally a Western import. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation lacks an official ideology and global appeal –​notwithstanding the rhetorical emphasis that Putin and other leaders sometimes place on “traditional” values associated with the Russian Orthodox Church. What it retains is its historical position on the eastern edge of Europe, with borders stretching deep into Asia and a traditional aspiration to play a central role in world affairs. During their heyday in the early 1990s, the young reformers around Yeltsin pursued integration with Western institutions and the re-​shaping of Russia along Western lines. Yeltsin’s first foreign minister, Andrey Kozyrev, argued that failing to bind itself to the West “would mean the loss of a historic opportunity to facilitate the formation of a democratic, open Russian state and the transformation of an unstable, post-​confrontational world into a stable and democratic one”.8 For Russian liberals like Kozyrev, now in exile in Florida, the basic tenets of Russian foreign policy should therefore be close co-​operation with the West, integration into global institutions, and the consolidation of liberalism and democracy at home. This pursuit of liberalism and integration foundered in the mid-​1990s, in part because the economy plunged into a steep crisis that called into question the reforms that Yeltsin’s government was undertaking. Equally important was the perception that the West itself was unwilling to accept Russia as a full-​fledged member of the club. Rather than the Marshall Plan with which the United States greeted Europe after the Second World War, Russia after the Cold War received limited financial assistance from a West eager to enjoy a post-​Cold War peace dividend – along with a significant amount of advice from Western financial advisors and consultants about how to institute a market economy. When that experiment brought about a still steeper economic decline in percentage terms than the Great Depression, many Russians turned against the Westernisers in Yeltsin’s government, and against the West itself, for leading Russia down the road to ruin. At the same time that the West was peddling what many Russians saw as disastrous and self-​serving economic advice, it was busy consolidating its strategic position in Russia’s backyard. Most galling was the decision to expand NATO, bringing an alliance whose raison d’être was containment of Soviet power, closer to the frontiers of the new Russia. If the Warsaw Pact no longer existed and Russia was no longer an enemy, why should the West expand NATO, unless it was still committed to surrounding and weakening the new Russia? As Kozyrev had presciently warned, NATO expansion would only vindicate those inside Russia 74

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arguing that the West remained a foe and calling for a less accommodating approach to foreign policy.9 Indeed, the beneficiaries of this backlash were those who stood for both a curbing of the market economy and a foreign policy that focused less on joining the West than on restoring Russian influence within the borders of the former Soviet Union. The main apostle of this approach inside the government was Kozyrev’s successor as foreign minister, the ex-​spymaster Yevgeny Primakov, who took over the reins of Russian foreign policy in 1996. Primakov argued that Russia could not accept a subordinate role to the major Western Powers, and it should instead focus on re-​establishing itself as a major independent pole in the world –​not necessarily opposed to the West, but apart from it –​whilst focusing its attention on dominating the post-​Soviet space.10 Primakov and his successors found intellectual backing from a philosophical movement known as Eurasianism –​sometimes neo-​Eurasianism to distinguish it from its White Russian and Soviet antecedents –​whose adherents emphasise Russia’s special role as a civilisation straddling the boundaries between East and West.11 Since the Primakov years, Russian foreign policy has emphasised restoring influence over the states of the former Soviet Union whilst keeping the West at arms’ length. That aspiration has since 2016 been fixed in Russia’s official Foreign Policy Concept, which identifies “further strengthening integration structures within the CIS involving Russia” as Moscow’s top regional policy priority.12 Even though officials of institutions such as the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union [EAEU], and the Russia-​Belarus Union State downplay their ideological content and connexion to Russian foreign policy objectives, members of the Eurasianist movement in Russia are amongst their most enthusiastic champions. Eurasian integration is not, as critics in the West sometimes charge, a veiled attempt to restore the Soviet Union so much as a strategy for consolidating a new regional order centred on Russia and where Moscow mediates the interactions of its smaller neighbours. It is also, as Putin claimed in his essay announcing the intention to create what became the EAEU, a strategy for turning post-​Soviet Eurasia into “one of the poles of the contemporary world and … a [link] between Europe and the dynamic Asia-​Pacific region”.13 Russia’s emphasis on maintaining a sphere of influence in Eurasia also contributes to the sensitivity that Moscow has shown toward the expansion of Western influence, and the extension of Western military power, into the post-​Soviet space. One of the principal reasons for the anti-​Western backlash that characterised Russian foreign policy under Primakov and later Putin was a belief that the West –​above all the United States –​was taking advantage of Russian weakness to roll back Russian influence from its historical periphery. NATO expansion was a particular bête noire for Moscow, but other Western initiatives in the post-​Soviet space –​and Eastern Europe –​also contributed to this narrative. For instance, American support was instrumental in bringing about the construction of the Baku-​Tbilisi-​Ceyhan oil pipeline, which allowed Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to export oil directly to Europe, bypassing Russia’s pipeline network and weakening Russian diplomatic leverage in the Caspian and the Caucasus.14 Also detected was Washington’s hand behind the so-​called “coloured revolutions” that broke out in several post-​Soviet countries (starting with Georgia in 2003) in response to corruption and misrule, and that –​at least in Georgia and Ukraine –​brought to power governments that openly aspired to membership in NATO and the EU. These revolutions were amongst the most important drivers of the split between Russia and the West and, with it, Moscow’s pivot to a more assertive approach to securing its interests in post-​Soviet Eurasia. On the one hand, Russian officials’ perception of Western involvement in the ouster of governments in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004 and 2013–​2014), Kyrgyzstan (2005), and Armenia (2018), as well as the failed uprising in Belarus that began in early 2020, fed a belief that the United States and its 75

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allies remained engaged in a strategy of containment against Russia. They supposedly sought to implant anti-​Russian regimes on its borders, and –​perhaps one day –​in Moscow as well. The uprisings also touched off more generalised upheaval at odds with the Kremlin’s emphasis on maintaining stability and predictability. Even more than in the former Soviet Union itself, this concern was central when it came to the Arab Spring upheavals that began in 2011. Whilst Obama’s Administration initially saw the revolutions against aging autocrats like Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak as the crest of a democratic wave long building in the Middle East, Moscow saw them as removing stabilising autocrats and not just unleashing short-​term chaos, but creating a vacuum that radicalism and extremism would rush in to fill. Given Russia’s own significant Moslem population –​around 15 to 20 per cent of the total –​and the volatility of the Moslem-​majority North Caucasus, Moscow worried about the potential for extremist ideas and movements spreading from the Middle East to Russia itself –​and to other Moslem majority regions of the former Soviet Union, especially Central Asia. Over time, Moscow would move from merely critiquing what it saw as the West’s dangerous support for revolutionary upheaval to taking concrete measures to push back, first in post-​Soviet Eurasia, and then in the Middle East and more generally. Putin fired a warning shot with his notorious speech to the 2007 Munich Security Conference, where he noted that “One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way . … this is extremely dangerous”.15 Just over a year later, Russian forces invaded Georgia in response to pro-​Western President Mikheil Saakashvili’s attempt to bring the breakaway region of South Ossetia back under Tbilisi’s control. The Russian invasion was not only motivated by animus toward Saakashvili, but also to the prospect of Georgia’s NATO membership, which the Atlantic Alliance had affirmed would happen in the future at its 2008 Bucharest summit. In a television interview following the conflict, Russia’s new president, Medvedev, laid out a five-​point programme for Russian foreign policy in which he emphasised that the post-​Soviet space constituted a zone of “privileged interests” for Russia.16 Medvedev argued that whilst Russia was not seeking conflict with the West, it could not accept undue interference in a region it still considered fundamental to its security. In this interview, Medvedev re-​emphasised the importance of a multi-​polar world order, essentially telling the West that what Russia did in the Caucasus was none of its business –​and Russia justified its recognition of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence by pointing to American and European support for Kosovo’s campaign to break away from the Russian partner, Serbia. Similar concerns apparently drove Russia’s decision to seize Crimea and invade eastern Ukraine following the ousting of Yanukovych at the culmination of the Euromaidan protests in early 2014. Even though –​or perhaps because –​Yanukovych was corrupt, unpopular, and ineffective, Moscow supported his attempt to hang onto power through a disputed election and large-​scale protests –​which Yanukovych’s stubbornness and inclination to violence only fed. Once again, the perception of an American hand in the Euromaidan reinforced the Kremlin’s belief that the demonstrations were less an organic manifestation of opposition to the corruption and brutality of the Yanukovych regime than another stage in the American-​led campaign to promote regime change around Russia’s borders –​in line with the perception of the protests that accompanied Putin’s return to the Kremlin a few years earlier. NATO’s expansion –​and, this time, that of the EU –​played a role as well. Ukraine had been promised eventual NATO membership at the Bucharest summit, and it had been Yanukovych’s decision –​under Russian pressure –​to abandon a planned trade agreement with the EU that would have severed many of Ukraine’s inherited economic connections with Russia 76

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that sparked the Euromaidan in the first place. Once Yanukovych fled the country, upending Russian plans for a managed transition that it could control, Putin and a small group of advisors made the seemingly rash decision for Russia’s “little green men” to seize Crimea. Regime change in Ukraine and the effects of the mooted EU association agreement threatened to strike a blow to Russian economic and political influence in the country, much of it exercised through overlapping business networks. During the Putin era, Russia saw a close fusion between big business and the state, with state-​owned companies playing an increasingly prominent role not only in the vital energy sector, but also across the economy. Alongside the gas monopoly, Gazprom, top political figures were appointed to senior positions in state companies such as Rosneft –​oil –​Rostekhnologii –​defence –​Rosnano –​nanotechnology –​and United Shipbuilding, which acted as an extension of the Russian state. This nexus of money and power –​sometimes described as Sistema [The System] –​is in some way the operating system of Russian politics and has its analogues across much of post-​ Soviet Eurasia.17 Russian influence over its neighbours frequently operates through this web of corruption; for that reason, Moscow opposes uncontrolled political change in its neighbours not only because of the potential to bring Western influence closer to its borders, but also because disruption to these countries’ post-​Soviet operating systems would rupture many of the relationships and mechanisms through which Russian influence operates. That concern helps explain why Moscow remained so perturbed by the possibility that Ukraine would sign an association agreement with the EU. The agreement, which required Ukraine to reform its regulatory, judicial, and administrative institutions in line with European standards, in theory would make a substantial contribution toward severing Ukraine from its post-​Soviet institutional heritage that was one of the key mechanisms of Russian influence. This nexus has echoes outside of the post-​Soviet region as well. Indeed, one way of reading Russia’s approach to the West, especially since the crisis engendered by the war in Ukraine, has been –​in an ironic reversal of Western attempts since the end of the Cold War to democratise Russia –​to implement elements of Sistema elsewhere.18 Bribery, undeclared financial and political support for politicians and parties, targeted investment in strategically important sectors, and other forms of “strategic corruption” have allowed Russia to gain influence within democratic states’ political systems in Western Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Throughout much of the Western world, such payoffs are “leveraged to gain specific policy outcomes and to condition the wider political environment” in line with Russian interests.19 “Strategic corruption” also intersects with Russia’s support for anti-​establishment political parties and candidates across much of the Western world. On the one hand, Putin and other officials are eager to portray their support for far-​r ight groups like Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France or the German Alternative für Deutschland as part of a campaign on behalf of “traditional values”. In fact though, politicians and parties of multiple political orientations have received Kremlin support; for instance, Moscow was closely associated with the left-​wing Syriza Party that led Greece from 2015 to 2019.20 Russian support is less about ideology than about seeking allies and partners willing to work with it and capable of posing problems for the system of liberal multilateralism that has defined the West since the end of the Cold War. For the first two and a half post-​Cold War decades, the primary arena for strategic competition between Russia and the West lay in the borderlands of the former Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia. Washington and Brussels sought to integrate these regions, directly or indirectly, into Western-​designed and Western-​ backed multilateral institutions emphasising liberalism and democracy. Russia, which was too big, too unruly, and too unwilling to sacrifice its strategic autonomy to follow a similar path, 77

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often objected to what its elites perceived as the progressive rolling back of Russian influence. Yet Russia remained not only too weak to prevent the drift of its post-​Soviet periphery into the Western orbit but, amid its post-​Soviet identity crisis, failed to offer a more appealing alternative. Military interventions in Georgia and Ukraine helped check NATO and EU expansion –​ not only through deterring European states from challenging Russian redlines, but also by challenging the assumption of inevitable liberal democratic expansion. In other ways, however, the Georgia and Ukraine interventions failed. Rather than knuckle under, both countries’ populations increasingly turned against Russia and sought to accelerate their respective post-​Soviet transitions, even if the results have been mixed. The failure to compel Ukraine –​a country with which Russia shares deep historical and cultural ties that led Putin to term Russians and Ukrainians “one people” –​to turn back toward Russia left the future of Moscow’s vision of post-​Soviet integration uncertain.21 It also left Russia facing serious economic sanctions from both the United States and EU. On the assumption that sanctions would remain in place more or less indefinitely –​an assumption reinforced by the mounting list of activities for which Western governments imposed sanctions –​the longstanding belief in the inevitability of Russia’s convergence with Western models and partnership with the West lost much of its force. The simultaneous breakdown of plans for post-​Soviet integration centred on Ukraine and the idea of Russia’s ultimate turn back toward the West marked a turning point for Russian foreign policy; the Ukraine crisis in that sense can appear as indicating the end of the post-​Cold War era. In its place, Putin’s Russia embraced an increasingly global role. The hallmarks of this new era included a willingness to project military and quasi-​military power outside the confines of the former Soviet Union –​most notably to Syria –​and a deepening strategic partnership with China, which was by the second decade of the twenty-​first century rapidly emerging as a strategic rival to the United States. Of course, most of the old problems between Russia and the West related to Ukraine and European security more broadly remained unresolved, and this new combination of military adventurism and an entente with Beijing only made relations with the United States and EU worse. In this context, Moscow’s embrace of disinformation and other forms of political interference in Western democracies took hold, setting the stage for an increasingly volatile era of great power competition. Whilst Moscow had always made clear its opposition to the upheavals associated with the Arab Spring, its decision to intervene militarily in Syria in September 2015 caught observers in the West by surprise. Russian/​Soviet forces had not conducted large-​scale operations outside the borders of the former Soviet Union since the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, whilst Russia’s military was widely believed to lack the sea and air-​lift capability to project power outside its immediate neighbourhood. Yet Russian intervention helped save Syrian President Bashar al-​ Assad from following in the footsteps of Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak. Russian air support, military advisors, and mercenaries from private military corporations [PMCs] like the Wagner Group were instrumental –​along with ground forces supplied by Iran and Hezbollah –​ in turning the tide of the conflict; and in the process, inflicting a strategic defeat on the United States, which had called for Assad’s ousting but backed away from direct intervention itself.22 Even if Russia –​along with Iran and Turkey, which also ended up intervening in the conflict –​was unable to impart a lasting peace deal, its ability to keep Assad in power at a limited cost in Russian lives and money provided a proof-​of-​concept for an approach that Moscow subsequently applied elsewhere. Wagner and other PMCs allowed the Kremlin to outsource much of the cost of interventions. These corporations, which recruited from veterans of the Russian military and paid much of their costs through securing access to natural resources, gave Moscow a degree of deniability that allowed it to evade diplomatic complications and 78

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reduce the backlash over casualties that had occurred in previous conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya.23 They acted as low-​cost force multipliers that Russia used to back up friendly regimes in countries as diverse as Central African Republic, Libya, and Venezuela, turning Moscow into a valued partner for many regimes considered pariahs in the West, and an increasingly visible global actor. The second component of Russia’s post-​2014 shift was deepening strategic co-​operation with China, even at the expense of economic and political concessions that Russia had never been prepared to make with the West. The Sino-​Russian rapprochement dates to the final years of the Soviet Union, when Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his Chinese counterpart, Deng Xiaoping, undertook an ambitious effort to demarcate the border and resolve the mistrust stemming from the Sino-​Soviet split of the 1960s. Co-​operation continued after the Soviet collapse, with Beijing becoming an important customer for the Russian militaryindustrial complex and Moscow seeking to attract Chinese investment to develop Siberia and the Russian Far East, but China as such was never a top-​level priority in the Yeltsin years. By the mid-​2000s, the growth of China’s economic and military capabilities fed concerns about the changing balance of power in Eurasia, contributing to a steep drop-​off in military sales. Similarly, economic co-​operation fell short of its potential –​both because Chinese investors, like their Western counterparts, remained wary of Russia’s lagging investment climate, and because Moscow opposed giving China access to strategic resources. The fallout over the Ukraine crisis, however, produced a rapid improvement in Sino-​ Russian relations, facilitated in part by Moscow’s decision to accept that the relationship would be somewhat unbalanced. In May 2014, just weeks after American and EU sanctions were announced, Moscow and Beijing reached an agreement to construct the Power of Siberia gas pipeline, which had been held up for almost a decade by disputes over terms and prices. Russia also allowed Chinese companies to take equity in energy projects like the liquefied natural gas facility on the Yamal Peninsula. Russian military sales picked up as well, with the Kremlin effectively overruling voices in the armed services concerned about arming a potential rival. Beyond sales, the two militaries stepped up joint training, both bilaterally and through the Shanghai Co-​operation Organisation [SCO]. In late 2019, the two countries announced they would build a joint early warning system to track missile launches, a step requiring an unprecedented degree of technical and operational integration.24 Although neither wants to undertake military commitments on the other’s behalf –​Russia, for instance, has little desire to be dragged into a conflict over the South China Sea –​Putin has suggested that a full military alliance is at least conceivable.25 Russia and China also came increasingly to champion a non-​democratic, state-​capitalist political model as an alternative to the liberal democracy whose spread the West had argued since the end of the Cold War was inevitable. Beijing and Moscow instead collaborated to build up new illiberal –​or at least non-​liberal –​international institutions, such as the SCO, and articulate a critique of democracy on normative grounds. Both also began learning from one another how to influence democratic politics in third countries –​with China adopting some of the techniques of disinformation and social media manipulation pioneered in Russia, and Russia in turn developing Chinese-​style surveillance capabilities.26 With Russia likely to remain under sanctions for the foreseeable future and relations between the United States and China increasingly hostile, Moscow and Beijing have multiple incentives to continue aligning their approaches to their shared neighbourhood and on larger questions of global order. Many Western governments perceive Moscow’s ties to their own political class and Russian influence in their economies as part of a wider campaign of de-​stabilisation, “hybrid warfare”, or “grey zone” tactics driven by either the Putin regime’s inherent wickedness or a kind of 79

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doomed attempt to prove that Russia still matters despite a stagnant economy and sclerotic political system. Yet Russian efforts to reach into the domestic politics Western states is inextricable from the entire post-​1991 history of the West’s efforts to remake Russia in its image. The framework adopted by the United States and its allies in the 1990s, in which Russia would essentially follow the path laid out by Japan and Germany after the Second World War failed –​that is trading geopolitical autonomy to become part of a collective security community dominated by the United States. Meanwhile, not only did many Russians, not all of them sympathetic to Putin, come to blame the West for the chaos, crime, and corruption of post-​Soviet Russia, they also reckoned that it took advantage of Soviet collapse to impose an inequitable geopolitical settlement. NATO expansion, American-​led wars in the Balkans and Iraq, the “coloured revolutions”, and an enduring belief that Washington regarded the Russian political regime as illegitimate have fed into a sense of grievance long instrumental to Russian foreign policy. At least until the war in Ukraine, however, Moscow recognised that it still had much to gain from maintaining a workable relationship with the United States and EU. Since 2014, that recognition has increasingly given way to a resigned belief that no matter what Russia does, it will continue to face sanctions and military pressure, and that the only way to secure its own interests is by paying the West back in its own coin. Overseas military intervention, political interference inside Western states, and the creation of new Russia-​centric institutions in Eurasia are all part of this reaction. Whilst Russia faces numerous challenges, not least questions about the durability of the Putin government and an uncertain succession process, belief in Russian exceptionalism remains widespread and, with it, a commitment to maintaining Russia’s role as an autonomous Great Power. For now, with its emphasis on democratic norms and opposition to Russian power projection, the West poses the biggest obstacle to Moscow’s strategic ambitions. With or without Putin, relations between Russia and the West will likely remain challenging well into the middle of the century.

Notes * The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not an official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the United States government. 1 Timofey V. Bordachev and Andrei S. Skriba, “Russia’s Eurasian Integration Policies”, in David Cadier, ed., The Geopolitics of Eurasian Economic Integration (London, 2014), 18. 2 Jongsoo Lee, “Russia, China, and the Indo-​Pacific: An Interview with Dmitri Trenin”, The Diplomat (18 September 2020): https://​thed​iplo​mat.com/​2020/​09/​rus​sia-​china-​and-​the-​indo-​paci​fic-​an-​interv​ iew-​with-​dmi​tri-​tre​nin/​. 3 Sergey Lavrov, “Article by Sergey Lavrov, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, ‘The Law, the Rights and the Rules’, Moscow, June 28, 2021”, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (28 June 2021): www.mid.ru/​ en/​foreign_​policy/​news/​-​/​asset_​publisher/​cKNonkJE02Bw/​content/​id/​4801890. 4 Angela E. Stent, The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-​Russian Relations in the Twenty-​First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014): 255–​75. 5 “Transcript of President Obama’s Interview with Novaya Gazeta,” The White House (6 July 2009): https://​obam​awhi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​the-​press-​off​i ce/​tra​nscr​ipt-​presid​ent-​oba​mas-​interv​iew-​ with-​nov​aya-​gaz​eta. 6 David M. Herszenhorn and Ellen Barry, “Putin Contends Clinton Incited Unrest Over Vote”, NY Times (8 December 2011): www.nytimes.com/​2011/​12/​09/​world/​europe/​putin-​accuses-​clinton-​of-​ instigating-​russian-​protests.html. 7 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Kak nam obustroit’ Rossiyu? Posilnye soobrazheniya”, Solzhenitsyn.ru (July 1990): www.solzhenitsyn.ru/​proizvedeniya/​publizistika/​stati_​i_​rechi/​v_​izgnanii/​kak_​nam_​obustroit_​ rossiyu.pdf. 8 Andrei Kozyrev, “The Lagging Partnership”, Foreign Affairs, 73(May/​June 1994), 59–​71.

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Russian Foreign Policy in 21st Century 9 Ibid. 10 “Lavrov: v nedal’ekom budushchem istoriki sformuliruyut takoe ponyantie kak ‘doktrina Primakova’ ”, TASS (28 October 2014): https://​tass.ru/​polit​ika/​1537​769. 11 See especially Marlène Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Washington, DC, 2008). 12 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Kontseptsiya vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii (utverzhdena Prezidentom Rossiiskoi Federatsii V.V. Putinym 30 noyabrya 2016 g.)” (1 December 2016): www.mid. ru/​ru/​foreign_​policy/​official_​documents/​-​/​asset_​publisher/​CptICkB6BZ29/​content/​id/​2542248. 13 Vladimir Putin, “Novyi integratsionnyi proekt dlya Yevrazii: Budushchee kotoroe rozhdaetsya segodnya”, Ekho Moskvy, (4 October 2011): https://​echo.msk.ru/​blog/​sta​tya/​ 817588-​echo/​. 14 Frederick S. Starr and Svante E. Cornell, eds., The Baku-​Tbilisi-​Ceyhan Pipeline: Oil Window to the West (Washington, DC, 2005). 15 Vladimir Putin, “Vystuplenie i diskussiya na Myunkhenskoi konferentsii po voprosam politiki bezopasnosti”, The Kremlin (10 February 2007): http://​krem​lin.ru/​eve​nts/​ president/​transcripts/​ 24034. 16 “Interv’yu Dmitriya Medvedeva telekanalam , Pervomu, NTV” (31 August 2008): www. kremlin.ru/​text/​appears/​2008/​08/​205991.shtml. 17 Alena Ledeneva, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks, and Informal Governance (Cambridge, 2013). 18 Brian Whitmore, “Putin’s Dark Ecosystem: Graft, Gangsters, and Active Measures”, CEPA (20 September 2018): https://​cepa.org/​put​ins-​dark-​ecosys​tem/​. Fiona Hill, “The Kremlin’s Strange Victory: How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline,” Foreign Affairs, 100/6 (2021). 19 Philip Zelikow et al., “The Rise of Strategic Corruption: How States Weaponize Graft”, Foreign Affairs, 99/​4(2020). 20 “New Greek Government Has Deep, Long-​Standing Ties With Russian ‘Fascist’ Dugin”, RFE/​RL (28 January 2015): www.rferl.org/​a/​greek-​syriza-​deep-​ties-​russian-​eurasianist-​dugin/​26818523.html. 21 Vladimir Putin, “Obrashchenie Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii” (18 March 2014): http://​krem​lin.ru/​ eve​nts/​presid​ent/​news/​20603. 22 “President Obama: ‘The Future of Syria Must be Determined by Its People, but President Bashar al-​Assad Is Standing in Their Way,’ ” The White House (18 August 2011): https://​obam​awhi​teho​use. archi​ves.gov/​blog/​2011/​08/​18/​presid​ent-​obama-​fut​ure-​syria-​must-​be-​det​ermi​ned-​its-​peo​ple-​presid​ ent-​bas​har-​al-​assad. 23 András Rácz, “Band of Brothers: The Wagner Group and the Russian State”, CSIS (21 September 2020): www.csis.org/​blogs/​post-​soviet-​post/​band-​brothers-​wagner-​group-​and-​russian-​state. 24 Dmitry Stefanovich, “Russia to Help China Develop an Early Warning System”, The Diplomat (25 October 2019): https://​thed​iplo​mat.com/​2019/​10/​rus​sia-​to-​help-​china-​deve​lop-​an-​early-​warn​ing-​ sys​tem/​. 25 “Zasedanie Diskussionogo Kluba ‘Valdai,’ ” The Kremlin (22 October 2020): http://​krem​lin.ru/​eve​ nts/​presid​ent/​news/​64261. 26 Heather A. Conley et al., “Countering Russian and Chinese Influence Operations”, CSIS (2020): www.csis.org/​features/​countering-​russian-​chinese-​influence-​activities.

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7 FRANCE A European Middle Power with Still a Global Ambition Christian Lequesne

When rising to power in September 1944 after German defeat in France, General Charles De Gaulle had two main political concerns. First, the collaborationist regime of Vichy did not legitimately represent France. For De Gaulle, French institutions had stopped existing in June 1940 until his return to Paris in August 1944. Second, despite the necessary support of the United States and Britain to get rid of the Nazis, France existed as a “Great Power” belonging to the camp of the winners of the war. The concept of French “grandeur” became a structural element of Gaullist ideology on foreign policy, and more generally on politics.1 Back in the political wilderness after 1946, De Gaulle wrote in his War Memoirs: All my life, I have had a certain idea of France. This feeling inspires me as well as my reason. … If it happens that mediocrity marks, nevertheless its acts and gestures, I feel the sensation of an absurd anomaly, attributable to the faults of the French, not the genius of the country. But also, the positive side of my mind convinces me that France is really only herself in the first rank; that only the vast enterprises are capable of compensating for the ferments of dispersion that people bear within themselves. That our country, as it is, amongst the others, as they are, must under threat of mortal danger, aim high and stand upright. In short, in my opinion, France cannot be France without grandeur.2 Gaullist ideology considering France a “Great Power” has underpinned all the foreign policy of the Fifth Republic since 1958. Factual elements underpin this narrative: being a nuclear Power, having a permanent seat on the United Nations [UN] Security Council, and being the sixth economic Power of the world. But symbolic elements also augment the social construction of “grandeur”: a long-​lasting history, an established tradition of democracy resulting from the 1789 Revolution, and a global influence of culture and language. However, since the presidency of Georges Pompidou, who succeeded to De Gaulle in 1969, there have been discussions in France about the concrete challenges to grandeur.3 Bipolarity between the Soviet Union and United States, the emergence of China and the BRICS –​Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa –​after the end of the Cold War, and the decrease of the French economy in world exchanges have produced concerns about the evolution of France towards Middle Power status.

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The liberal president of the Republic between 1974 and 1981, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, first recognised officially that France had some structural characteristics of a middle-​size Power. But he and his followers until Emmanuel Macron’s election in 2017 have never forsaken behaving on the international scene as a “Great Power”. All presidents of the Fifth Republic, from De Gaulle to Macron, have conducted a foreign policy that has the global ambition of behaving like a Great Power. Hubert Védrine, the foreign minister between 1997 and 2002, summarised this ambition: “France remains a middle-​size power with a global ambition” –​“une puissance moyenne d’influence mondiale”. It means that the institutions, practices, and geographic priorities of France shall remain global and universal. By 2021, as far as foreign policy institutions are concerned, France had the third largest network of embassies and consulates in the world after the United States and People’s Republic of China. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs maintains 160 bilateral embassies and permanent representations to international organisations, 206 consulates, and 500 honorary consulates. In addition, there are 125 French cultural institutes, 26 research institutes, and 74 French schools directly managed by the French state globally, as well as the offices of the agency in charge of development aid –​Agence Française pour le Développement [AFD]. Regarding embassies and consulates, French diplomacy makes the choice of maintaining diplomatic posts in small countries where there is a limited volume of work. The Quai d’Orsay never really tried to promote regional embassies competent for several countries or, as in Britain or Austria, “laptop ambassadors” based at the central administration and moving once a month to the country of accreditation. The French model remains built on the sending of permanent representatives attesting the physical presence of the state on the ground, even if a very small staff sometimes surrounds ambassadors. In Chisinau, Moldova, for example, the French ambassador works with one senior colleague within the chancery. Behind the institutional choice of maintaining permanent representatives worldwide, there is the belief that the presence of the French state must remain universal. With the advent of digital technologies, it is perfectly legitimate to challenge this choice. Several states in the world have developed virtual presence embassies with no physical existence. The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for instance, has an embassy specialising in digital issues –​the TechEmbassy –​operating within a global mandate and its staff based in three different locations: Copenhagen, the Silicon Valley, and Beijing. Meetings amongst the embassy staff take place online. The objective of this new form of representation is also universality, but without considering –​as it firmly remains the case of France –​that universality requires posting individuals to materially identified sites.4 Being amongst the first states to send permanent ambassadors abroad in the first half of the sixteenth century,5 France remains attached to this classic model of representation. This policy of world presence confronts the concrete decrease of state budgets since 2000 in the field of foreign affairs. Between 2007 and 2020, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs lost 20 per cent of its budget and 20 per cent of its human resources, representing 3,000 agents. According to the state programme, “Action Publique 2022”, approved in 2018, the wage bill must still face a 5.7 per cent reduction by 2022. It clearly forces the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to cut some expenses abroad, particularly those devoted to public diplomacy. In the cultural domain, the number of agents working for the cultural services in embassies and consulates, the Institut Français but also the Alliance Française, has seen cutbacks in the last 20 years. Less expensive local contracts increasingly replace expatriates.6 Second, France has a foreign policy that deploys the whole range of diplomatic practices. Here, again, there are states that decide to limit their foreign policy scope or emphasise some practices rather than others: it is the diplomacy of mediation for Norway or economic and trade

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diplomacy for Canada. In the French case, all available practices are mobilised: bilateral and multilateral diplomacy; hard power diplomacy –​military diplomacy; soft power diplomacy –​ economic, cultural, development aid, and climate change; and secret diplomacy –​including the use of intelligence –​as public diplomacy that French practitioners prefer naming “diplomacy of influence”. At a time when China and the United States are questioning multilateralism, French diplomacy is still defending the crucial role of international organisations. This priority finds measurement through material but also discursive practices. Material practices include the number of diplomatic missions. In 2020, the French government maintained 26 representatives and delegations to international organisations. Of these, two have established themselves as influential and well-​staffed workplaces: the Permanent Representation to the UN in New York and the Permanent Representation to the European Union [EU] in Brussels. The ambassadorial posts there are amongst the most prestigious of the French Diplomatic Service. Nevertheless, France also maintains a presence in lesser-​ known international organisations such as the International Civil Aviation Organisation in Montreal and the International Meteorological Organisation in Geneva, and even in regional groupings of which France is not a member such as the Organisation of American States. This institutional presence testifies to the conviction that negotiations in multilateral fora continue to influence international relations. A second material marker of France’s priority towards multilateralism concerns the budget allocated to international organisations. In 2020, France’s contribution to institutional multilateralism reached €439 million, that is, €292 million for international organisations, €100 million for commitments taken in the context of the G7, and €47 million for the International Organisation of the Francophonie.7 On the other hand, discursive practices testify to the priority given to multilateralism. Whilst President Donald Trump openly questioned American involvement in UN agencies such as the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation and Agency for Palestinian Refugees, Macron delivered the opposite message relayed by the Quai d’Orsay. In May 2020, the secretary general of the Ministry spoke of multilateralism as no longer an “automatic stabiliser” of the international system because of the withdrawal of the United States.8 In spring 2020, the COVID-​19 crisis provided the French government with the opportunity to propose the creation of an “Alliance for multilateralism”. Jean-​Yves Le Drian, the minister of foreign affairs, who invited his colleagues around the world to join the declaration of 20 April 2020, spearheaded this initiative.9 In France, there is the firm conviction that multilateral diplomacy continues to serve the national interest. The instrumental approach of the EU also reflects this position. Military diplomacy remains a fully-​fledged element of French foreign policy. A decision-​ making process Withdraw largely concentrated in the hands of the executive and, more particularly, with the president of the Republic largely facilitating this dimension of external policy under the Fifth Republic.10 Continuing to maintain military bases outside Europe, particularly in Africa and the Persian Gulf, France does not hesitate to deploy troops in bilateral and multilateral operations. In a report published in 2011, General Bernard Thorette, the former Army chief of staff, estimated that France had participated in no less than 126 external military operations since 1964.11 Unsurprisingly, the main area of troop deployment has been Africa –​44 per cent –​followed by Europe –​26 per cent. A “defence diplomacy” also exists in which the military and diplomats closely interact.12 It is based on bilateral –​via embassy defence attachés –​and multilateral international co-​operation programmes, but also on arms sales. This latter activity also involves representatives of the arms industry. Since the end of the Cold War, the French arms industry has largely reoriented its production towards exports, 84

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entering into increased competition with European and non-​ European manufacturers. Between 2009 and 2018, France’s main arms customers were India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, and Kuwait.13 As this list shows, a majority of the countries have authoritarian political regimes. It is therefore normal that when they conduct military operations condemned by public opinion, arms sales expose French governments to foreign and domestic critics. This was the case of arms sold to Saudi Arabia during the military intervention in Yemen in spring 2015. However, French governments generally accept the contradiction between arms sales and the defence of human rights because realism marks foreign policy –​in the sense of international relations theory. Nevertheless, debates sometimes arise, including inside the Quai d’Orsay. After long hesitation, for instance, France finally decided in 2014 not to sell two aircraft carriers ordered by Russia after the latter invaded Crimea. In this case, the pressure of European public opinion –​ especially from Eastern Europe –​prevailed over diplomatic realism, but after long procrastination inside the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.14 Joseph Nye introduced the concept of “smart power” in the early 2000s to distinguish countries whose diplomatic practices combined elements of hard and soft power.15 France is in this category. Parallel to its military diplomacy, it has had a cultural diplomacy since the end of the nineteenth century, which in a recent estimate now represents –​without the staff costs –​ €625.3 million.16 It is reflected in the action of the French institutes throughout the world, the international students grant schemes, and programmes to promote the French language. Cultural action, carried out through the embassies’ co-​operation and cultural action services –​ the Cultural and Scientific Department –​in conjunction with the French Institutes, however, is a field where the decrease of resources has resulted since the early 2000s in the contradiction between objectives and means mentioned above. Concurrently, decreasing resources have sometimes enabled French diplomacy to move away from a “top/​down” and unilateral approach of cultural action to the search for partnerships. As noted by two parliamentarians responsible for evaluating France’s cultural diplomacy, Africa offers a good example of this evolution. Expectations are that, as a formal colonial Power, France should develop a cultural policy on an equal footing with African cultural actors.17 Within cultural diplomacy, the promotion of the French language or Francophonie remains a priority for French diplomacy. Nevertheless, one question remains unanswered: should the promotion of French language be a policy in reaction to the domination of English or should it accept this supremacy to develop its proper actions? Since the 2010s, the policy evolution favours a Francophonie that is not defensive. In March 2018, Macron delivered a discourse in which he clearly said that the defence of the French language should be included in a positive strategy to promote cultural diversity and multilingualism in the world.18 Then in practice, there has never been a consensus within the French administration on this subject. Diplomats who consider that France’s influence now depends on a pragmatic acceptance of the de facto supremacy of English sometimes still have difficulty breaking the rampart woven by supporters of a defensive Francophonie that is totally counter-​productive. Economic diplomacy is also an increasing domain inside the field of public diplomacy. In a country where state and business elites often come from the same schools, ambassadors have long been in charge of promoting French trade and investments. It became an explicit priority of French diplomacy when Laurent Fabius was foreign affairs minister between 2012 and 2016.19 The strong trade deficit –​€67 billion in August 2020 –​and the high rate of structural unemployment created by the COVID-​19 pandemic –​nine per cent of the working population in December 2020 –​explain the priority. With the support of specialised agencies like Business France, French ambassadors and general consuls are to facilitate French investments abroad and 85

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foreign investments in France –​such as those of China in the industrial and agricultural fields. Big companies often benefit more from this diplomatic action than small and medium size enterprises. There is a French tradition to concentrate on “big” contracts realised by the champion firms of the French stock market, the CAC 40. France also has an old tradition of bilateral and multilateral development aid, notably via EU development aid policy. French aid continues to give priority to former African colonies, despite an evolution to diversify subsidies to other regions of the world since the election of President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. In 2018, French development aid amounted to €10.3 billion. It represented 0.43 per cent of Gross National Product [GNP], which still falls short of the 0.7 per cent target set by international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development. Rising since 2014, French development aid expects to reach 0.55 per cent of GNP in 2022, despite the budgetary difficulties linked to the COVID-​19 crisis. The concrete implementation of development aid has become a political issue for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, increasingly downgraded by a specialised agency and a bank, the AFD. It creates bureaucratic tensions between ambassadors and heads of the AFD offices, especially in Africa where development programmes and funds to distribute are the highest. Finally, France’s diplomacy is taking foreign policy decisions on all world issues. Contrary to some states that clearly focus their diplomacy on a limited number of geographic and thematic priorities, France still has the ambition to have a say on everything. The legacy of grandeur legitimises this global choice. Of course, France has in practice some priorities resulting from history and interests. Western Africa and Europe remain the main concern, with Asia a growing interest for economic but also strategic reasons. There is still a huge mobilisation of diplomatic, security, and intelligence resources in the former colonies of Western Africa. Yet this does not mean that French diplomacy totally ignores other parts of the world, for instance, Latin America. Take two concrete examples. In January 2019, the French government expressed clear support to the Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, when he declared himself the elected president. In August 2019, Macron also openly criticised Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s inertness against the deforestation of Amazonian forest. Asia has become a growing priority since the 1990s, not only for economic but also security reasons. France is one of the rare EU member-​states that has permanent troops and a fleet posted in the Pacific Ocean, notably through the naval base of Nouméa in Nouvelle-​Calédonie.20 Since the 2000s, an increasing number of naval manoeuvers has occurred with Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia. French vessels are also patrolling the South China Sea to contribute to the defence of the freedom of navigation. In April 2019, Beijing officially filed a complaint against the presence of the French frigate Vendémiaire in the Taiwan Strait.21 In terms of geographic commitment, French foreign policy ambition remains therefore worldwide. France’s European commitment is not incompatible with the legacy of grandeur. Quite the contrary. In the post-​Gaullist era, a large part of the French political elite considers European integration as the best way to maximise the national interest. Beginning under Pompidou, this trend has not stopped. When accepting Britain into the European Community in 1973 –​ unlike De Gaulle –​Pompidou had in mind limiting the rise of German power, economically but also geopolitically due to Bonn’s affirmation of Ostpolitik.22 All the presidents of the Fifth Republic who followed Pompidou considered Europe as a new vector of French power. It is not by chance that the White Paper on France’s foreign policy drawn up in 2008 is entitled “France and Europe in the world”. This document asserts, “Europe is not a simple issue of foreign policy, but an entity to which we [France] belong and which will become what we make of it; there is no strong France without Europe”.23 It does not mean that there have not been political movements in French since 1969, and even more so since the end of the Cold War in 86

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1991, challenging the legitimacy of European integration. In 2005, 54.68 per cent of French voters even rejected the European Constitutional Treaty, which was supposed to give the EU a greater federal design.24 Still, believing that there was little choice but to perpetuate France’s interests, the political elites supporting the “no” –​Fabius, for e­ xample –​played the European game when they were in power after 2005. France’s commitment to the EU has three characteristics: the affirmation of European autonomy regarding both the United States and China; the belief –​sometimes ambiguous –​in a co-​leadership with Germany; and the temptation to break away from European solidarity when it better suits French interests. The affirmation of European autonomy vis-​à-​vis the United States is one of the legacies of Gaullist foreign policy. For De Gaulle, there was no doubt that France belonged to the West, but it also had a duty to promote within this camp a political and strategic autonomy for Europe. This led to De Gaulle’s decision to veto twice, in 1963 and 1967, British accession to the European Communities on the ground that Britain was behaving too much as a junior partner of the United States.25 It was probably in the monetary and military fields that the French assertion of a European autonomy was most striking. In the monetary arena, Giscard d’Estaing’s effort to convince German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt about creating a European Monetary System [EMS] in 1979 was above all a desire for more autonomy against a dollar no longer convertible into gold. Later on, President François Mitterrand’s France also supported the creation of the euro as an instrument of monetary independence. Paris also considered the simple fact that the euro increasingly becoming a reserve currency for the world’s central banks was a positive trend. However, France’s quest to internationalise the euro has not always been successful inside the EU. A relevant example is the United States president, Trump, re-​introducing sanctions against Iran in November 2018 and breaking up with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the July 2014 agreement concerning the Iranian nuclear programme. Fearing sanctions from American courts, European –​including French –​companies trading in dollars have not taken any risks in circumventing the new sanctions imposed by Washington. In 2019, the French government proposed a barter trade mechanism to its European partners to circumvent the sanctions that never actually worked with Iran. In the military field, De Gaulle took the decision in 1966 to leave the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] Command Structure, and it was only in 2009 that Sarkozy returned to it. France has never completely moved away from transatlantic solidarity, as its contribution to the NATO interventions against Serbia in 1999 showed. Still, within the EU, France has always been the member-​state that has pushed for a European defence autonomous as much as possible from the United States.26 Whilst defending this position during the negotiation of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, which created the EU, Mitterrand failed to impress the Germans and British, each very attached to the transatlantic security framework; Macron put forward his concept of strategic autonomy for European defence in 2019. France had always been relatively isolated on the issue of military autonomy inside the EU, although the Trump presidency had given more legitimacy to the concept. The reasons for this isolation are twofold: on one hand, a difficulty for other Europeans in assuming the budgetary costs that a genuine European defence would entail; on the other, difficulty in conceiving that in the case of a crisis –​for example with Russia –​the Americans could remain indifferent to the fate of Europeans. The election of Joe Biden as American president in November 2020 has brought many EU member-​states back to the traditional belief in the transatlantic security relationship. In November 2020, Germany’s defence minister, Annegret Kramp-​Karrenbauer, did not hesitate to speak of Europe’s strategic autonomy as an “illusion”.27 A few days later, Macron reacted: “I profoundly disagree”.28 In November 2019, criticising the impossibility for NATO to oppose Turkish intervention in Syria, he had described the transatlantic organisation as suffering from “brain death”.29 87

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By pointing out French attempts to make Europe autonomous from the United States, one understands why discursive concepts such as “Power Europe” –​“L’Europe Puissance” –​and now “European sovereignty” are of French origin. Jean-​François Poncet, Giscard d’Estaing’s foreign minister from 1978 to 1981, first used the concept of “Europe Puissance” –​sometimes difficult to translate into other languages. It essentially intended to describe a European Community that had developed a military capacity to become a Power. In this rather realist approach, soft power remained insufficient to secure the interests of any polity. More recently, the concept of “European sovereignty” appears in Macron’s discourses after his election in 2017. There is a direct link in his speeches between “European sovereignty” and Europe’s strategic autonomy. However, unlike “Europe Puissance”, the concept of “European sovereignty” no longer primarily refers to the military tool but more to economic and technological issues. For Macron, the EU has no other choice in areas such as digital technologies or 5G than to assert itself as a sovereign polity vis-​à-​vis the United States but also China.30 From 2020, the COVID-​19 crisis has reinforced the use of the concept of “European sovereignty” to affirm that the EU should not depend on the rest of the world to ensure its health against the pandemic. Other European actors took up the French use of “European sovereignty” to claim EU technological independence. Politicians such as Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Peter Altmaier, Germany’s minister for the economy in the last Angela Merkel government, have no hesitation in taking over the concept. Second, co-​leadership with Germany is a structural trend in France’s European policy. However, it has never been without ambiguity or contradiction. Begun by Pierre Mendès-​ France, the French premier, as early as 1954, the Elysée Treaty signed by De Gaulle and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on 22 January 1963 officially sealed Franco-​German reconciliation. Supplemented on 22 January 2019 by the new Franco-​German Treaty on Co-​operation and Integration signed in Aachen, it has enabled the two former enemies to develop bilateral programmes –​such as youth exchanges –​over the past 60 years, but also to co-​ordinate in the European institutions.31 The Franco-​German couple, symbolised by regular meetings between the president of the Republic and the chancellor, has thus been able to initiate major advances in European integration, such as the creation of the European Council in 1974, the establishment of the EMS in 1979, the Maastricht Agreement introducing the euro in 1993, and the European Recovery Plan in 2020. Scholars observing European negotiations concluded that an agreement between France and Germany could be a prerequisite for any major reform of the EU. This assertion entered particularly into the popular opinion of the French political elites. Throughout the Cold War, the Franco-​German relationship was based on a “balance of imbalances” between West Germany’s economic strength and France’s political power –​a permanent seat at the UN Security Council and nuclear weapons.32 The end of the Cold War changed the state of the compromise as reunified Germany in 1990 could once again claim to be a political Power. Moreover, the difference in economic competitiveness between France and Germany tended to widen from the decade 2010 onwards, and the evolution of German domestic policy led to a less systematic support of European integration. In the 2010s, Germany began to be more critical of the French public deficit and debt exceeding the criteria allowed by the European treaties, whereas German macroeconomic policy was tending to reduce them seriously. For its part, France was critical of the German lack of enthusiasm for military investments to consolidate Europe’s defence policy. Because of Germany’s economic weight resulting from its industrial exports, other Europeans began to see Germany as the leader of the EU, a problematic issue for Paris. During the economic crisis of 2009–​2013, France appeared to be supporting the “southern” member states –​Italy, Greece, and Portugal –​ that benefited from EU financial aid versus the claim for reforms coming from Germany and 88

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the other “northern” member states –​the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, and Sweden.33 It resulted in regular tensions between Paris and Berlin but with a possibility of settlement by compromises. The main point of the Franco-​German relationship within the EU is to be a peaceful system of conflict management. In 2012, the two countries therefore agreed to adopt the Treaty on Fiscal Compact requiring balanced budgets at the national level. After he was elected, Macron was convinced that the EU could only exist thanks to the co-​leadership of France and Germany. His ambition for a major institutional reform of the EU, expressed in a speech at the Sorbonne University in September 2017, did not receive a response from Merkel at first.34 Real feedback came three years later in the context of the COVID-​19 crisis. The two countries agreed to initiate a European compromise that came on 21 July 2020 with the €750 billion European Recovery Plan –​€360 billion in loans and €390 billion in grants. Paris’s ability to make compromises with Berlin explains why, despite memories of the two world wars, the French population has a massively positive perception of Germany. A November 2020 poll showed that 91 per cent of French people said they had a good image of Germany, whilst 73 per cent also indicated that they did not know the country very well or at all.35 Despite the importance of the EU to maximise the national interest, the final characteristic of France’s European policy is its capacity of still playing solo. In this case, France frees itself from European solidarity to rediscover the reflexes of the “old” Great Power. The temptation to go alone rarely concerns internal market issues where France’s interest is to play a collective European game. Nonetheless, it may concern economic and monetary union. Since the establishment of the so-​called Maastricht macroeconomic criteria in 1993, France has never respected the 60 per cent debt threshold. From 1993 to 2016, its public deficit has always exceeded three per cent of GDP. In 2017 after Macron’s election, it fell to less than three per cent for the first time; but the COVID-​19 crisis requiring intervention from the national budget caused it to jump exceptionally to 11 per cent of GDP. Public debt amounted to 98.1 per cent of GDP in 2019, reaching 122.4 per cent of GDP in the first half of 2021 due again to the COVID-​19 crisis. Beyond the exceptional situation of COVID-​19, there is a structural French difficulty in not letting the debt slip away to the detriment of European criteria. This trend reduces France’s credibility and leadership in the eyes of the northern EU member-​states, which are parsimonious in budgetary matters. However, it is in the field of foreign and security policy that France still has the greatest capacity to go its own way to the detriment of European solidarity. Russia is particularly a terrain for solo diplomacy. In August 2008, Sarkozy, then president of the European Council, set up a mediation process with a view to a ceasefire between Russia and Georgia without any real prior consultation of his European partners. Similarly, in August 2019, Macron launched the idea of a “strategic dialogue” with Russia with the essential aim of better resolving the crises in the Middle East –​Iraq and Syria –​that was not co-​ordinated within the EU. The Central and East European and Baltic states saw this offer to Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, as a concession that went against their security interests. Yet, the French temptation to go alone diplomatically and militarily can also serve the interests of other Europeans who are reluctant to act. In January 2013, President François Hollande decided that French troops should intervene in Mali to counter Islamic armed groups entering the capital city Bamako. The other members of the EU approved the intervention and provided logistical support but let France lead the military operation to contain indirectly the advance of terrorism in the EU. In this case, France’s solitary intervention serves an EU whose decision-​making mechanisms based on consensus are not always adapted to quick military operations. It is not by chance that France finds the main attributes of leadership within the EU in the area of military interventions. Since the 2000s, there has been scholarly discussions 89

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about a French policy of active “liberal interventionism” in military matters.36 The explanation is not only the growing need to manage asymmetrical conflicts in the post-​Cold War context. It resides on a French political determination to counter the rise of German economic leadership in the EU by activism in an area where Germany has neither the resources nor necessary public support to play a leading role. France’s EU membership definitely appears as a resource for enhancing national interests on the world stage. There is a functionality in France’s approach to European integration in the sense that there is no contradiction at all between the “use” of Europe and the preservation of France’s grandeur.37 If it is not useful, France will go solo. France’s support for European integration has less to do with the ideology of a federal Europe than the rationality of interests on which the realist and neorealist theories of international relations insist. In the context of the new bipolar confrontation between the United States and China, France appears to be a middle Power with still global ambitions. Although France has less material power than in the last century to develop its influence, it retains a tradition of universality and some institutional resources –​like its seat on the UN Security Council –​to influence the course of world politics. Above all, France seeks to use European integration to preserve its influence between the two superpowers. Many French political and bureaucratic elites consider this utilitarian strategy as the way of preserving France’s grandeur. However, such a policy is not always easy to implement, as it constantly requires a compromise with other Europeans and the agreement of their public opinions. From this point of view, Brexit has paradoxical consequences for France. On one hand, it deprives France of a major partner in the EU, particularly in the defence and security field. On the other, it makes decisions for Europeans easier amongst themselves. It is highly likely that acceptance of the COVID-​19 Recovery Plan would not have occurred in July 2020 if Britain still belonged to the EU.

Notes 1 Philip Cerny, The Politics of Grandeur: Ideological Aspects of De Gaulle’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 1980). Maurice Vaïsse, La Grandeur: La politique étrangère du Général De Gaulle (Paris, 1998). 2 Charles De Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre (Paris, 1954); Pernille Rieker, French Foreign Policy in A Changing World (Basingstoke, UK, 2017), 17. 3 Frédéric Charillon, La France peut-​elle encore agir sur le monde? Eléments de réponse (Paris, 2010). 4 Casper Klynge, Mikael Ekman, and Nikolaj Juncher Waedegaard, “Diplomacy in the Digital Age: Lessons from Denmark’s TechPlomacy Initiative”, Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 151/​2(2020), 185–​95. 5 Françoise Autrand, Lucien Bely, and Isabelle de Richefort, eds., L’invention de la diplomatie. Moyen-​Age et Temps Modernes (Paris, 1998). 6 National Assembly, report of Anne Genetet on the budgetary law in preparation, Action extérieure de l’État, Volume 1 (10 October 2019), 22. 7 Intervention de François Delattre, secrétaire général du Quai d’Orsay, devant la commission des Affaires étrangères et des Forces armées du Sénat (30 octobre 2019). 8 Intervention de François Delattre, secrétaire général du Quai d’Orsay, devant la commission des Affaires étrangères de l’Assemblée nationale (22 mai 2020). 9 France, Diplomatie, “L’Alliance pour le multilatéralisme”: www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/​fr/​politique-​ etrangere-​de-​la-​france/​la-​france-​et-​les-​nations-​unies/​l-​alliance-​pour-​le-​multilateralisme/​. 10 Olivier Schmitt, “L’épée et la carte. Les forces françaises et la présence militaire dans le monde”, in Frédéric Charillon, ed., La France dans le monde (Paris, 2021), 179. 11 Général Bernard Thorette, ed., Rapport du groupe de travail “monuments aux morts en operations extérieures” (Paris, 2011). 12 Thierry Balzacq, Frédéric Charillon, and Frédéric Ramel, eds., Manuel de Diplomatie (Paris, 2018), 307–​19. 13 Schmitt, “L’épée”, 191.

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France: A Middle Power with Ambition 14 Christian Lequesne, Ethnographie du Quai d’Orsay. Les pratiques des diplomates français (Paris, 2020). 15 Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (NY, 2004). 16 Assemblée Nationale, Avis sur l’Action extérieure de l’Etat pour le projet de loi de finance 2019, n° 1304 (12 octobre 2018). 17 Michel Herbillon and Sira Sylla, La diplomatie culturelle et d’influence de la France, rapport à l’Assemblée Nationale (31 Décembre 2018), 12. 18 Emmanuel Macron, “Une ambition pour la langue française et le plurilinguisme” (20 March 2018): www.elysee.fr/​emmanuel-​macron/​2019/​03/​20/​une-​ambition-​pour-​la-​langue-​francaise-et-​leplurilinguisme. 19 Lequesne, Ethnographie. 20 Nicolas Rigaud, “La France et la sécurité en Asie-​ Pacifique depuis la fin du premier conflit indochinois”, Revue de Défense Nationale, 800/​5(2017), 113–​27. 21 Laurent Lagneau, “Un rapport plaide pour européaniser les interventions françaises en mer de Chine méridionale”, Opex.360.com (31 May 2019). 22 Pierre Gerbet, La France et l’intégration européenne: essai d’historiographie (Berne, 1995). 23 Alain Juppé and Louis Schweitzer, La France et l’Europe dans le monde. Livre Blanc sur la politique étrangère et européenne de la France 2008–​2020 (Paris, 2008). 24 Gérard Grunberg, “Le référendum français de ratification du Traité Constitutionnel Européen”, French Politics, Culture and Society, 23/​3(2005), 128–​44. 25 Vaïsse, La Grandeur. 26 Jolyon Howorth, Security and Defence Policy in the European Union (Basingstoke, UK, 2014). 27 Annegret Kramp-​Karrenbauer, “Europe Still Needs America”, Politico (2 November 2020). 28 “The Macron Doctrine. A Conversation with the French President”, Le Grand Continent (16 November 2020): https://​geopo​liti​que.eu/​en/​mac​ron-​grand-​contin​ent/​. 29 The Economist (7 November 2019). 30 Salih Bora, French National Interest in the 21st Century: The Politics of Digital Transformation as a Case Study (Master thesis, Sciences Po, 2020). 31 Joachim Schild and Ulrich Krotz, Shaping Europe: France, Germany and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to 21st Century Politics (Oxford, 2013). 32 Stanley Hoffmann, French Dilemmas and Strategies in the New Europe, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, Working Paper 38 (1992), 14. 33 Erik Jones, The Year the European Crisis Ended (Basingstoke, UK, 2014). 34 “Sorbonne speech of Emmanuel Macron” (26 September 2017): http://​intern​atio​nal.blogs.ouest-​fra​ nce.fr/​arch​ive/​2017/​09/​29/​mac​ron-​sorbo​nne-​verba​tim-​eur​ope-​18583.html. 35 Survey IFOP/​German Embassy in France, “L’image de l’Allemagne en France”, https://​allema​gnee​ nfra​nce.diplo.de/​fr-​fr/​-​/​2433​124. 36 Schmitt, “L’épée”. 37 Christopher Bickerton, European Union Foreign Policy: From Effectiveness to Functionality (Basingstoke, UK, 2011).

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8 GERMAN FOREIGN POLICY AND STATECRAFT SINCE 2000 Regional Hegemon, Global Dwarf? Klaus Brummer

Germany has received many international roles over the last couple of decades: for example, the continent’s “reluctant hegemon” and even the “leader of the free world”.1 At the same time, Germany’s global clout, vision, and ambition have been called into question, as has its alleged predominant position on the continent.2 Against this background, this chapter discusses Germany’s foreign policy on the regional and global level since 2000 to explore whether the country is a “regional hegemon” and a “global dwarf ”. It does so by addressing three key dimensions of statecraft, namely diplomacy, the military, and the economy. In line with the general thrust of this Handbook, developments since 2010 and the implications of respectively American President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy and Brexit are emphasised. Germany has a global diplomatic presence and reach. It operates 227 missions abroad, including 153 embassies, 54 consulate-​generals, seven consulates, 12 permanent missions –​for example, to the United Nations [UN] –​and one other mission.3 Around 3,100 members of the Foreign Service work at those missions, which is slightly more than the 2,900 staff at headquarters.4 Those numbers put Germany in seventh place in the 2020 “Global Diplomacy Index”.5 All of this suggests that it is impossible in this section to capture in its entirety Germany’s diplomatic activities over the last two decades. Rather, the subsequent discussion focuses on the country’s five key relationships: France and the European Union [EU] more broadly; the United States; Russia; China; and the UN. The discussion places particular emphasis on episodes of German leadership and policy entrepreneurship as well as on instances of policy disputes and failure. The further “deepening” of European integration continues to be amongst Germany’s foreign policy priorities.6 Acting most often in close collaboration with France,7 Germany has long been at the forefront of advancing the integration process. Some ten years ago, the country’s strong role and standing inside the EU even led observers to call Germany the organisation’s “reluctant hegemon”8 –​reluctant insofar as for a number of reasons, including Chancellor Angela Merkel’s leadership style9 and increasing domestic debates over European affairs, Germany shied away from assuming such a predominant role. In a sense, it was “hegemony by default” since other key member-​states at that time, most notably France and Britain, were incapable or unwilling to assume a co-​leadership role with Germany. Hence, when the Eurozone crisis –​“The tipping point … in Germany’s transition to ‘reluctant hegemon’ ”10 –​struck in the late 2000s and early 2010s, all eyes were on Germany for a lack of alternatives. 92

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Yet the focus on Germany was due to not only structural reasons such as the country’s economic prowess but also Merkel and her earlier accomplishments in Europe. Most notably, Merkel had managed to overcome the impasse to which the EU succumbed after the rejection of the “Constitutional Treaty” in referenda in both France and the Netherlands in 2005. Based on an intricate process of bilateral intergovernmental consultations and negotiations, she succeeded in transferring most of the changes foreseen by the Constitutional Treaty into a new reform treaty adopted in late 2007, the Treaty of Lisbon. The EU response to Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in 2014 is another example of German leadership under Merkel. She has been instrumental in establishing and sustaining the organisation’s strictures on Russia, which includes diplomatic measures, targeted restrictions against individuals and entities, and an array of economic sanctions.11 Concomitantly, Germany has been leading the efforts in finding a political solution to the conflict. Together with France, it represents the EU in the “Normandy format” –​talks with the Ukraine and Russia. Whilst no overarching solution has emerged, those talks have produced intermediary steps towards that goal, most notably the 2015 “Minsk II” agreements that continue to serve as a key reference point in ongoing conflict-​resolution efforts. In taking the lead during the constitutional crisis or aftermath of the Ukraine invasion, Germany lived up to the expectations held by other European states. The most prominent comment in this regard arguably came from a Polish foreign minister, who opined that he “fears Germany’s power less than her inactivity”.12 However, other developments during the first half of the 2010s exposed the limits of the alleged German hegemony in Europe, most notably the Eurozone crisis and the “migration crisis”. Germany accomplished its goals during both emergencies to a limited extent because the country –​trying to “multilateralise” its leadership role in the hope of increasing legitimacy for it –​sought primarily to promote German regulatory models and principles that in turn provoked strong pushback from other EU states.13 Indeed, the more Germany advocated narrow national interests, rather than trying to incorporate the preferences of other member-​states from the outset in formulating its ambitions, the less successful it was in guiding, let alone steering EU policy. If it ever existed, German hegemony in the EU was transitional. Under President Emmanuel Macron, France at the very least re-​assumed its co-​leadership role with Germany. In his “Sorbonne speech” of September 2017, he set forth an ambitious agenda for the EU calling for far-​reaching changes in areas ranging from monetary union to defence policy.14 Merkel has been slow to respond to Macron’s reformist agenda. As a result, the Franco-​German pair has not much to show as of yet, with one key exception that came during the Coronavirus pandemic when Merkel and Macron proposed an EU recovery fund. The “surprisingly ambitious” suggestion was remarkable insofar as common borrowing by EU member-​states was to finance the fund, a first in the organisation’s history and something that Germany had hitherto vehemently opposed.15 Despite a few modifications, the EU’s heads of states or government eventually adopted the proposal. Therefore, whilst leadership in the EU has become more complicated because of the organisation’s successive enlargements, the COVID-​19 rescue fund “NextGenerationEU” shows that whilst not dictating the specifics, Franco-​German impulses can still set the agenda and overall direction of the organisation. Indeed, with Britain having left the EU, diminishing the “big three” into the “big two” with no viable replacement for the British in sight, the Franco-​German “engine” might still further increase in relevance in the years ahead.16 Yet within this leadership dyad, Brexit is likely to shift the balance towards France as it moved the centre of gravity within the EU southwards to countries with which Germany has less in common –​especially in economic and financial matters –​than with countries from Europe’s north that until recently included Britain. For 93

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this reason, Germany should and arguably could have done more to keep the British in the organisation. In hindsight, the best opportunity to accommodate British demands probably came during the negotiations that led to the February 2016 “EU reform deal”.17 Maybe additional concessions at that point for Britain on issues such as migration or the repatriation of policy competencies would have sufficed for the then prime minister, David Cameron, to tip the volatile balance in Britain towards eventually remaining.18 The outcome was different, and Germany has to live with the consequences of Brexit that in all likelihood are going to weaken its position within the EU relative to France. Germany’s relationship with the United States has been rocky for many years. Controversial issues included fall-​out over the Iraq War in 2003 and the Libyan intervention in 2011, the wiretapping of Merkel’s mobile phone by the National Security Agency, and German under-​ spending on defence as well its huge trade surplus with the United States. Accordingly, the bilateral relationship was not short of challenges prior to Trump entering office. However, with Trump, the relationship suffered further strain. Indeed, an array of additional substantive disagreements have arisen in recent years. Those included Trump’s wavering commitment to NATO and Article 5 of the alliance’s treaty on mutual defence, as well as Germany’s allegedly too cosy relationship with Russia, as testified by the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. In 2018, Trump also withdrew the United States from the “Iran nuclear deal” that Germany and other states have since tried to keep alive; and in late July 2020, he decided to move some 12,000 American soldiers out of Germany. With the latter decision, Trump acted on his repeated complaints about German free riding: “Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO and the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany”.19 As a result, Germany increasingly perceived the United States under Trump as an erratic and unreliable partner, not only politically and economically but also respecting security and defence. In this sense, Merkel remarked, “The era in which we could fully rely on the other is over to some extent. … We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands”.20 The German population more broadly shared the growing distrust of the political elite. In a recent poll, only 26 per cent of the German respondents held a favourable view of the United States, and a mere 10 per cent trusted Trump.21 Clearly, Germany under Merkel has not become the new “leader of the free world” in lieu of the United States.22 At the same time, the country depends politically and economically on the rules-​based liberal order that America set-​up and fostered after the Second World War; the Joseph Biden Administration seems willing to revert to before 2017. Nevertheless, Germany tries to maintain this order where possible and, to that end for instance, together with France, established an informal network of states called “Alliance for Multilateralism”, whose participants were brought together for the first time in September 2019 during the UN General Assembly’s opening week. It is not anti-​American, but the at-​best-​lacklustre support of the Trump Administration for multilateral institutions and a rules-​based international order was clearly one of the key drivers for setting up this alliance, whose main aim is “to renew the global commitment to stabilise the rules-​based international order, uphold its principles and adapt it, where necessary”.23 Action in the military realm complement diplomatic activities, including the intensification of defence collaboration within the EU framework. Over the last two decades, the Russo-​German relationship has noticeably deteriorated. It started rather well during Gerhard Schröder’s chancellorship (1998–​2005); he developed amicable personal relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he called a “flawless democrat”.24 Most prominently, both sides objected to the American-​led intervention in Iraq in 2003 and agreed to build the Nord Stream gas pipeline directly from Russia to Germany. However, 94

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after the transitional period of President Dmitry Medvedev (2008–​2012), whose ideas for a new European security architecture Berlin accepted but ultimately led to nothing,25 the relationship deteriorated rapidly after Putin’s return to presidency in 2012. Indeed, the differences in not only political principles and norms promoted by the two countries but also their underlying visions for the international political order have become ever more pronounced in recent years. The most obvious cause has been Russian intervention in Ukraine, which Merkel called “a violation of fundamental principles of international law”26 and for which she has sought to find a political solution ever since. However, Germany and Russia also find themselves on different sides in numerous other conflicts, ranging from Belarus to Syria to Libya to Venezuela. Incidents like the assassination of a former Chechen rebel commander in a Berlin park or the electronic hacking of the German Parliament –​in both cases, Germany suspects the involvement of Russian authorities27 –​have further soured the relationship. After the poisoning of Putin critic Alexei Navalny in summer 2020, the bilateral relationship has reached a “new low point”.28 Germany has responded to all of this bilaterally and multilaterally, for instance by leading the way for EU sanctions against Russia or contributing to NATO operations in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, at the end of the day, Realpolitik prevails in Berlin’s interactions with Moscow considering the involvement of Russia –​which also is a key provider of oil and gas for Germany –​necessary to find solutions to any of the aforementioned conflicts.29 In this sense, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas stated in June 2020 that Germany would continue to “uphold a constructive-​critical dialogue with Moscow on such foreign policy issues as the conflict in East Ukraine, or Libya, or Syria”.30 Economic considerations have dominated Germany’s interactions with China for decades.31 Indeed, China represents one of the key non-​European markets for Germany. Still, whilst it is fair to say that economics continues to trump politics, the bilateral relationship has experienced increased politicisation in recent years. Since 2011, the two countries conduct intergovernmental regular consultations led by the respective German chancellor and Chinese prime minister. A broad array of dialogue mechanisms and consultative fora at the ministerial and working levels underpin these high-​level meetings, which cover issues such as human rights, the rule of law, trade, and the environment. Taking those efforts together, an interesting picture emerges. Germany’s institutional ties on the political level with China –​let alone economically –​seem more diverse and deeper than those it has with democratic countries from the East Asian region notwithstanding recent efforts to expand relationships with “value partners” such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea.32 The politicisation of the bilateral relationship with China has led to increasing differences. The latter concerns specific policy areas such as human rights protection in Hong Kong, Tibet, or Xinjiang and, progressively, strategic issues both in the Indo-​Pacific region –​like freedom of navigation –​and closer to Europe where the growing Chinese footprint in Southeast Europe including some of the EU’s member-​states is watched with mounting unease.33 Like the economic realm, Germany seeks to increase its diplomatic leverage vis-​à-​vis China by multilaterally embedding its policy, but arguably also to avoid confronting China head-​on. Indeed, one of the key foreign policy events of Germany’s chairmanship of the EU Council in the latter half of 2020 was a –​virtual –​EU-​China summit in September where EU representatives voiced their concerns to Chinese President Xi Jinping over developments in Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang amongst other issues.34 This notwithstanding, close to the end of Germany’s chairmanship in December 2020, the EU and China agreed in principle on a “Comprehensive Agreement on Investment”. Overall, increasing, albeit still fledgling efforts are underway in Germany to step up its involvement in Asia. Amongst other things, this has led to the adoption of “guidelines” on 95

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the Indo-​Pacific region in August 2020 that lay out Germany’s interests in the region, key policy areas, and the instruments at the country’s disposal to become involved in the region.35 However, the latter discussion highlights the limited capabilities of Germany, particularly in case of military conflict. Consequently, whereas China and the Indo-​Pacific region more broadly have moved onto the radar of German decision-​makers, the political and military means for active German involvement in the region remains limited. The UN is amongst the key institutions through which Germany seeks to maintain a “rules-​ based international order on the basis of international law”.36 Accordingly, the country has been a key contributor to the UN in several dimensions. For instance, in terms of financial contributions, Germany currently covers around 6.1 per cent of both the organisation’s regular budget and financing for peacekeeping operations, making it the fourth largest contributor, trailing only the United States, China, and Japan but well ahead of three other permanent members of the Security Council.37 In terms of military contributions, Germany has been a regular, albeit selective contributor to peacekeeping operations. It has predominantly focused on operations, whilst mandated by the Security Council, conducted by either NATO or the EU. Conversely, notwithstanding exceptions like bigger past contributions to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon or, at the time of writing, the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilisation Mission in Mali [MINUSMA], Berlin has been less involved in UN-​led peacekeeping operations. Germany ranks in the low thirties amongst troop-​contributing countries to blue-​helmet operations.38 Finally yet importantly, in terms of political contributions, Germany has assumed responsibility as a non-​permanent member of the Security Council. Indeed, since unification in 1990, the country has been rather successful in securing a seat on this key UN decision-​making body –​in 1995–​1996, 2003–​2004, 2011–​2012, and 2019–​2020. During the most recent stint as non-​permanent member, whose second year was overshadowed by the Coronavirus pandemic, Germany sought to place particular emphasis on issues like the “women, peace and security agenda”, the connection between security and climate change, and disarmament and arms control.39 For more than two decades, Germany has used its financial, military, and political contributions to the UN for making a case for a permanent seat in the Security Council. However, those efforts have been to no avail. Germany’s ambition is not uncontested even from within the EU, most notably by Italy, which is not convinced by German reassurances that a permanent seat would represent an intermediate step towards a seat for the EU, something stipulated in the “coalition agreement” of the fourth Merkel government.40 Admittedly, there is also no obvious reason as to why France would want to give up its single permanent seat for a shared EU one, and Brexit has rendered obsolete the idea of merging the seats of two EU member-​states into one for the organisation. The end of the Cold War and German unification ushered in a sea change in German security and defence policy. On one hand, Germany cashed in on the peace dividend by significantly reducing military expenditures, which amounted to 2.6 per cent of Gross Domestic Product [GDP] in 1990 and fell to 1.4 per cent by the end of the decade.41 On the other, the German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, experienced a fundamental adjustment on the operational level in that participation in multinational military operations became an increasingly relevant task next to territorial defence.42 Since 2000, Germany’s security and defence policy has continued to evolve, although more incrementally than in the previous decade. Major triggers for change came in the form of the 9/​11 attacks in 2001 and Russia’s 2014 intervention in Ukraine. Whilst adding additional urgency, Trump’s “America First” policy and Brexit have primarily reinforced policies and developments that had already been underway. In this sense, four major trends in German security and defence policy have occurred since the 2000s 96

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evolving around foreign deployments, institutional frameworks, force structure, and military spending. Foreign deployments have become more frequent as well as increasingly “non-​European” in terms of operational theatres. Figure 8.1 shows that the number of deployments per year has fluctuated greatly over time, ranging from four operations in 2000 to 18 in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Throughout the 2010s, the Bundeswehr has been active in almost 14 operations per year on average, up from an average of around 11 per year in the 2000s and less than four per year in the 1990s.43 Along with the increasing number of operations has come a broadening of their geographical scope. Whilst the Bundeswehr was already active in Africa –​Somalia and Rwanda –​and Asia –​Cambodia and East-​Timor –​the focal point during the 1990s was the Balkans. Since the 2000s, the situation has reversed. Although the Bundeswehr continues to be present in Kosovo, the Balkans have significantly declined in importance. Conversely, operations in Mali and the Horn of Africa in Africa, and Afghanistan in Asia, as well as Lebanon and Syria/​Iraq in the Middle East, are now front and centre not only in terms of personnel but also in political terms. Amongst the 2,903 German soldiers currently deployed abroad in NATO operations, 64 are in the Kosovo Force whilst some 1,000 are on duty each with MINUSMA and “Resolute Support” in Afghanistan.44 Overall, Germany has come a long way after reunification in using its military as a tool of statecraft. Since then, Berlin has deployed some 430,000 soldiers abroad in around 50 different operations that incurred costs of some 19.4 billion Euros.45 The institutional frameworks through which Germany contributes to multinational military operations have seen a shift in emphasis. During the 1990s, German soldiers acted primarily within operations led by either the UN or NATO. Conversely, an exclusively European framework, as represented by the now disbanded West European Union, was hardly relevant. It

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changed with the establishment of the EU’s “European Security and Defence Policy” [ESDP], which became operational in 2003 and renamed the “Common Security and Defence Policy” [CSDP] in 2009. ESDP/​CSDP has become an attractive framework in that it allows for military action when NATO –​essentially the United States –​wants to avoid engagement, which has been the case for conflicts on the African continent in particular. In addition, ESDP/​CSDP contains a strong civilian dimension that NATO does not offer, thereby rendering possible non-​military interventions in post-​conflict zones, for instance by sending in police officers or experts on the rule of law. Thus, with the UN, NATO, and the EU, Germany now has three institutional frameworks to choose from when sending its armed forces abroad. Amongst those organisations, the UN has ranked last for most of the last 20 years; despite participating in several blue-​helmet missions, Germany has tended to contribute fewer personnel to UN-​led operations than to those led by either NATO or the EU. Regarding the latter two organisations, Germany considers CSDP as complementary to NATO, which remains the country’s primary security institution. However, both Trump’s “America First” policy and Brexit have set something in motion in this regard. To be sure, German decision-​makers continue to emphasise the importance of NATO. Moreover, the country has not been the driving force behind recent efforts to strengthen the EU’s ability in the realm of security and defence under the label “strategic autonomy” as France has been. At the same time, the policies of the United States and Britain, as two major NATO but not EU members, have definitely reinvigorated efforts to strengthen CSDP further. Indeed, it was not accidental in the creation of the so-​called Permanent Structured Co-​operation [PESCO], whose underlying goal is to deepen defence co-​operation amongst “capable and willing” EU member states.46 It had been introduced “on paper” in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty and formally established only in 2017 after Britain had decided to leave the EU. The same year, Merkel made her statement quoted above concerning the necessity for Europe to become more independent –​“take our fate into our own hands” –​with American military support no longer assumed. Therefore, both Trump Administration policies and Brexit are likely to turn out as key catalysts for the development of a more autonomous and capable CSDP within which Germany is to play a prominent role. The Biden administration’s hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan and the conclusion of the AUKUS security pact are likely to reinforce this development. The German military has experienced major structural adjustments in recent decades. The most obvious indicator are changes in the number of Bundeswehr personnel. The 1990 “Two-​ plus-​Four-​Treaty” negotiated on unification stipulated that reunited Germany had to downsize its armed forces from around 500,000 to 370,000 soldiers. During the 2000s, the numbers decreased further, from around 319,000 in 2000 to 247,000 in 2009.47 Two years later, the federal government decided to “suspend” conscription, which led to another significant downsizing. Today, the Bundeswehr comprises some 184,000 soldiers –​see Figure 8.1 (above).48 Key drivers behind those adjustments have been a trend towards greater professionalisation of the military; budgetary constraints; and changes in the Bundeswehr’s operational reality. Regarding the latter, Bundeswehr deployment increasingly centres on multinational peacekeeping and stabilisation operations abroad, as already discussed. This not only meant that fewer soldiers were needed compared to the requirements associated with territorial defence. It also ushered in changes in the country’s force structure, adjusted to increase the deployability of the Bundeswehr as well as its ability for rapid reaction. However, the Russian invasion in Ukraine led to at least a partial reversal of this trend in the sense that the task of territorial defence has quite unexpectedly risen back to prominence. Indeed, the invasion drove home the point that European borders are violable and that a 98

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“traditional” state-​led military attack against a state in the EU neighbourhood –​and maybe even against an EU member-​state –​is still possible. In this sense, the most recent White Paper on German security policy in 2016 not only highlighted the need for “stronger national and collective defence” in general terms but explicitly emphasised the necessity of “collective defence and increased resilience” –​next to “co-​operative security and sectoral co-​operation” –​when discussing Russia.49 In a similar vein, the Bundeswehr’s Inspector General just recently referred to national and collective defence as “the most demanding task” for the German armed forces.50 Germany has responded to this new, or rather re-​emerging, security threat through adjustments in several dimensions, including force structure, procurement, and operations. Regarding the latter, for instance, Germany has contributed to NATO’s Baltic Air Policing as well as to the organisation’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force set up at the September 2014 NATO summit in response to developments in Ukraine. In addition, there has been a steep increase in Germany’s military expenditure in recent years. More precisely, this increase relates or rather finds itself confined to defence expenditures in absolute terms –​Figure 8.2. In 2000, the country spent €29.2 billion on defence, lower than in 1990 with €33.4 billion. In 2010, the amount increased to €33.9 billion, and in 2019 to €44 billion. Having said that, in terms of military expenditures as a percentage of German GDP, outlays decreased over the last 20 years, from 1.4 per cent in 2000 to 1.3 per cent in 2019 –​as mentioned above, in 1990, it was 2.6 per cent.51 The primary trigger for the recent increase in defence spending was the Russian invasion in Ukraine. Since then, expenditures increased both in terms of the percentage of GDP –​from 1.1 in 2014 to 1.3 in 2019 –​and in absolute terms –​from €33.3 billion in 2014 to €44 billion in 2019. In 2021, the defence budget is set to increase further to €46.8 billion.52 So despite still having to cope with the long-​term effects of the Eurozone crisis, Germany has managed to expand its defence budget significantly. At the same time, notwithstanding constant prodding by Trump, the country is not even close to fulfilling the NATO goal of spending two per cent of GDP on defence. It remains highly unlikely that punitive measures undertaken by the

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Trump Administration in response to Germany’s “delinquency” will change this.53 The huge stimulus packages that Berlin has adopted nationally as well as through the EU in response to the Coronavirus pandemic make significant increases in the defence budget in the foreseeable future less likely. Whilst its share of global GDP has declined from 4.9 per cent in 2000 to 3.2 per cent in 2018,54 Germany continues to be an economic heavyweight, including one of the leading trading nations of the world. In 2019, it was the world’s third largest trader of goods and commercial services, trailing only the United States and China.55 The majority of Germany’s exports is in fact “sub-​regional” in that it goes to other EU member states –​59.1 per cent in 201856 –​making the country a major beneficiary of the single market. In a sense, the country’s net contributions to the EU budget amounting to €13.4 billion in 2018 stands as part of an export-​promotion strategy.57 Outside of Europe, Germany’s key trading partners in terms of both exports and imports are the United States and China. Germany continues to run big trade surpluses –​see Figure 8.3. The surplus amounted to €59 billion in 2000, climaxed in 2016 with €249 billion and was still a formidable €223 billion in 2019.58 However, with respect to the two main non-​European trading partners, the situation could not be more different. Indeed, in terms of the balance of trade with all of its trading partners in 2019, Germany ran its biggest surplus with the United States –​€47 billion –​and its biggest deficit with China –​€14 billion.59 Those imbalances have further politicised the trade relationships with those two countries. In case of the United States, Trump was an outspoken critic of the trade imbalance that in his view had to be rectified: “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change”.60 Regarding the economic dimension, Trump threatened, for instance, to impose tariffs on German car imports, a move embedded in a broader trade dispute between the United States and Europe.61 In the case of China, Germany seeks to rectify the imbalance. Together with its European partners, Germany wants a more level playing field by pushing for changes concerning market access, transparency, and the protection of intellectual property rights, amongst other things.

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Figure 8.3  Germany’s export surplus (in billion Euros) Source: Based on Statistisches Bundesamt: “Außenhandel. Exporte, Importe, Außenhandelssaldo.”

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A key step in this regard could be the “EU-​China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment” that, as mentioned above, was agreed in principle in late 2020.62 However, arguably the most contentious [geo-​]economic issue is the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline running from Russia through the Baltic Sea directly to Germany. Russia already provides around one-​half of Germany’s gas imports, as well as circa one-​third of its oil imports.63 That share, and with it Germany’s dependence, is likely to increase further with the new pipeline. What is more, the pipeline bypasses traditional transit countries of Russian gas –​or oil for that matter –​to Europe such as Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland. For instance, the decision in 2005 to build the original Nord Stream pipeline received heavy criticism from Poland, whose minister of defence likened the agreement to the Hitler-​Stalin Pact.64 Reactions by several EU member-​states to the subsequent decision to add Nord Stream 2 have not been much friendlier. The American response to Nord Stream 2, by both the Trump Administration and members of Congress, has been just as harsh.65 Yet the geostrategic justifications offered by American policy-​makers in support of their critique –​Europe would further increase its dependency on the autocratic Russian regime –​were undercut by simultaneous American overtures to sell liquefied natural gas to Europe instead. More recently, the Biden administration’s conciliatory policy towards Germany in regards to Nord Stream 2 together with German pledges to further increase its political and economic support for the Ukraine have defused the salience of the issue, at least for the time being.66 So is German a “regional hegemon” as well as a “global dwarf ”? This chapter suggests that neither label is entirely accurate, nor entirely wrong for that matter. Regarding the regional dimension, Germany certainly is a key EU member-​state, politically and economically and to a lesser extent militarily. However, it is by no means in a position to control let alone dominate the other member-​states, as for instance the “migration crisis” has shown. Rather, what Germany has been doing most of the time, and quite successfully, is to act as co-​leader with France. Whilst this “motor” of the integration process has lost some of its thrust because of the “big bang” enlargement of the EU between 2004 and 2007, the two countries remain crucial for moving the integration process forward as highlighted during the Coronavirus pandemic. If anything, Brexit has reinforced the centrality of those two countries. Concerning the global level, Germany is a relevant player in the realms of diplomacy and economics, although hardly in military terms. It deliberately seeks to increase its leverage by acting within and through multilateral frameworks such as the EU, the UN, or, more recently, the “Alliance for Multilateralism”. The main objective is to uphold, to the extent possible, the rules-​based multilateral system from which Germany has greatly benefitted. Efforts in that direction would have also been prudent if Hillary Clinton had won the presidential elections in 2016, since the liberal order is under attack not only from the American side but also from countries such as China and Russia. However, to end with one of Merkel’s favourite expressions, in light of Trump Administration behaviour, efforts to increase Germany’s global footprint have become “alternativlos” –​without any alternative. Whether Merkel’s successor as chancellor will be up to this task remains to be seen.

Notes 1 William E. Paterson, “The Reluctant Hegemon? Germany Moves Centre Stage in the European Union”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 49/​1(2011), 57–​75; Rick Noack, “How Angela Merkel, a conservative, became the ‘leader of the free world’ ”, Washington Post (21 November 2016): www. washingtonpost.com/​n ews/​worldviews/​w p/​2 016/​1 1/​2 1/​h ow-​a ngela-​m erkel-​a -​c onservativebecame-​the-​leader-​of-​the-​liberal-​free-​world/​; Klaus Brummer and Friedrich Kiessling, eds.,

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Klaus Brummer Zivilmacht Bundesrepublik? Bundesdeutsche außenpolitische Rollen vor und nach 1989 aus politik-​und geschichtswissenschaftlichen Perspektiven (Baden-​Baden, 2019). 2 Rick Noack, “Germany Won’t Become the ‘Leader of the Free World’ after all, and the Germans Don’t Mind”, Washington Post (21 February 2018): www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​worldviews/​ wp/​2018/​02/​21/​germany-​wont-​become-​the-​leader-​of-​the-​free-​world-​after-​all-​and-​germans-​dont-​ mind/​; “Waking Europe’s Sleeping Giant”, Economist (3 October 2020), 21–​22. 3 Federal Foreign Office, “The German Missions Abroad”: www.auswaertiges-​amt.de/​en/​aamt/​ auslandsvertretungen/​-​/​229722. 4 Idem, “The Foreign Service Staff”, www.auswaertiges-​amt.de/​en/​aamt/​auswdienst/​mitarbeiter-​node. 5 Lowy Institute, “Global Diplomacy Index. 2019 Country Ranking”: https://​globa​ldip​loma​cyin​dex. lowyin​stit​ute.org/​count​ry_​r​ank.html. 6 Federal Government, White Paper 2016 on German Security Policy and the Future of the Bundeswehr (Berlin, 2016), 25. 7 Ulrich Krotz and Joachim Schild, Shaping Europe: France, Germany, and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-​First Century Politics (Oxford, 2015). 8 Paterson, “Reluctant Hegemon?”. 9 On Merkel’s leadership style, see Christian Rabini et al., Entscheidungsträger in der deutschen Außenpolitik. Führungseigenschaften und politische Überzeugungen der Bundeskanzler und Außenminister (Baden-​Baden, 2020), ­chapter 4. 10 Ibid., 73. 11 European Council/​Council of the European Union, “EU Restrictive Measures in Response to the Crisis in Ukraine”: www.consilium.europa.eu/​en/​policies/​sanctions/​ukraine-​crisis/​. 12 Radoslaw Sikorski, “I Fear Germany’s Power Less than Her Inactivity”, Financial Times (28 November 2011): www.ft.com/​content/​b753cb42-​19b3-​11e1-​ba5d-​00144feabdc0. 13 Sebstian Harnisch, “Internationale Führung und ihre Kontestation. Zur Dynamik der außenpolitischen Rolle der Bundesrepublik in Europe”, in Klaus Brummer and Friedrich Kiessling, eds., Zivilmacht Bundesrepublik? Bundesdeutsche außenpolitische Rollen vor und nach 1989 aus politik-​und geschichtswissenschaftlichen Perspektiven (Baden-​Baden, 2019), 126. 14 “Initiative pour l’Europe –​Discours d’Emmanuel Macron pour une Europe souveraine, unie, démocratique”, Elysée (26 September 2017): www.elysee.fr/​emmanuel-​macron/​2017/​09/​26/​ initiative-​ p our- ​ l - ​ e urope- ​ d iscours- ​ d - ​ e mmanuel- ​ m acron- ​ p our- ​ u ne- ​ e urope- ​ s ouveraine- ​ u nie-​ democratique. 15 “The Merkel-​ Macron Plan to Bail Out Europe is Surprisingly Ambitious”, Economist (21 May 2020): www.economist.com/​europe/​2020/​05/​21/​the-​merkel-​macron-​plan-​to-​bail-​out-​europe-​issurprisingly-​ambitious. 16 Charlotte Wagnsson, “Divided Power Europe: Normative Divergences among the EU ‘Big Three’ ”, Journal of European Public Policy, 17/​8(2010), 1089–​1105. 17 European Council, “European Council Meeting (18 and 19 February 2016). Conclusions. Document EUCO 1/​16” (19 February 2016, Brussels). 18 For a comparison of Cameron’s initial demands and the eventual negotiation outcomes, see “EU Reform Deal: What Cameron Wanted and What He Got”, BBC (20 February 2016): www.bbc.com/​ news/​uk-​politics-​eu-​referendum-​35622105. 19 Trump on Twitter (18 March 2017). 20 Giulia Paravicini, “Angela Merkel: Europe Must Take ‘Our Fate’ into Own Hands”, Politico (28 May 2017): www.politico.eu/​article/​angela-​merkel-​europe-​cdu-​must-​take-​its-​fate-​into-​its-​own-​hands-​ elections-​2017/​. 21 “U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly”, Pew Research Center (15 September): www.pewresearch.org/​global/​2020/​09/​15/​us-​image-​plummets-​ internationally-​as-​most-​say-​country-​has-​handled-​coronavirus-​badly/​. 22 See, for instance, Noack, “Merkel”. 23 “What is the ‘Alliance for Multilateralism’?”, Alliance for Multilateralism (nd): https://​mult​ilat​eral​ism. org/​the-​allia​nce/​. 24 “Schröder: Putin weiter ‘lupenreiner Demokrat’ ”, FAZ (7 March 2012): www.faz.net/​aktuell/​politik/​ ausland/​nach-​der-​wahl-​in-​russland-​schroeder-​putin-​weiter-​lupenreiner-​demokrat-​11675278.html. 25 Auswärtiges Amt, “20 Jahre nach der KSZE-​Charta von Paris –​Perspektiven europäischer Sicherheit, Rede von Staatsminister Werner Hoyer” (28 September 2010): www.auswaertiges-​amt.de/​de/​newsroom/​100928-​hoyer-​euroatlantsicherheit/​219436.

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Germany: Regional Hegemon, Global Dwarf? 26 Federal Government, “Policy Statement by Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel on the Situation in Ukraine, 13 March 2014 in German Bundestag” (13 March 2014): www.bundesregierung.de/​breg-​en/​chancellor/​policy-​statement-​by-​federal-​chancellor-​angela-​merkel-​on-​the-​situation-​in-​ukraine-​443796. 27 “Vorwurf: Staatsterrorismus”, Süddeutsche Zeitung (18 June 2020): www. sueddeutsche.de/​politik/​ mord-​im-​kleinen-​tiergarten-​vorwurf-​staatsterrorismus-​1.4940181; “Hackerangriff auf den Bundestag: Auswärtiges Amt erhöht Druck auf Russland”, Deutsche Welle (28 May 2020): www. dw.com/​de/​hackerangriff-​auf-​den-​bundestag-​ausw%C3%A4rtiges-​amt-​erh%C3%B6ht-​druck-​auf-​ russland/​a-​53601175. 28 Wolfgang Ischinger, “ ‘Es gilt das Recht des Stärkeren’ ”, Der Spiegel (29 August 2020), 17. 29 On Germany’s “economic Realpolitik” towards Russia, see Stephen F. Szabo, Germany, Russia, and the Rise of Geo-​Economics (London, 2015). 30 Auswärtiges Amt, “Wir können uns aus dieser Krise nicht heraussparen” (4 June 2020): www. auswaertiges-​amt.de/​de/​newsroom/​maas-​la-​repubblicca/​2346786. 31 Sebastian Heilmann, “Volksrepublik China”, in Siegmar Schmidt, Gunther Hellmann, and Reinhard Wolf, eds., Handbuch zur deutschen Außenpolitik (Wiesbaden, 2007), 580–​90. 32 Bundesregierung, Leitlinien zum Indo-​ Pazifik. Deutschland –​Europa –​Asien. Das 21. Jahrhundert gemeinsam gestalten (Berlin, 2020), 16. 33 Deutscher Bundestag, “Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die Große Anfrage der Abgeordneten Jürgen Trittin et al. und der Fraktion BÜNDNIS 90/​DIE GRÜNEN. Weg zu einer gemeinsamen wertebasierten und realistischen China-​Politik der EU”, Drucksache 19/​20346 (Berlin, 24 June 2020). 34 Those were the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and Merkel as chair of the EU Council. See European Council/​ Council of the European Union, “EU-​China Leaders’ Meeting via Video Conference” (14 September 2020): www.consilium.europa.eu/​en/​meetings/​ international-​summit/​2020/​09/​14/​. 35 Bundesregierung, Leitlinien zum Indo-​Pazifik. 36 Federal Government, White Paper, 25. 37 UN Secretariat, “Assessment of Member States’ Advances to the Working Capital Fund for 2020 and Contributions to the United Nations Regular Budget for 2020”, Document ST/​ADM/​SER.B/​1009 (NY, 30 December 2019); UN General Assembly, “Scale of assessments for the apportionment of the expenses of UN peacekeeping operations. Implementation of General Assembly resolutions 55/​235 and 55/​236”, Document A/​73/​350/​Add.1 (NY, 24 December 2018). 38 It ranked thirty-​ seventh in late August 2020. “Troop and Policy Contributors”, United Nations Peacekeeping: peacekeeping.un.org/​en/​troop-​and-​police-​contributors. 39 Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany to the United Nations, “Member of the United Nations Security Council in 2019–​20”: new-​york-​un.diplo.de/​un-​en/​news-​corner/​sr-​ mitgliedschaft-​2019/​2313032. 40 CDU/​CSU/​SPD, Ein neuer Aufbruch für Europa. Eine neue Dynamik für Deutschland. Ein neuer Zusammenhalt für unser Land. Koalitionsvertrag zwischen CDU, CSU und SPD (Berlin, 2018), 149. 41 SIPRI, “SIPRI Military Expenditure Database”: www.sipri.org/​databases/​milex. 42 Klaus Brummer and Kai Oppermann, “Poliheuristic Theory and Germany’s (Non-​)Participation in Multinational Military Interventions. The Non-​compensatory Principle, Coalition Politics and Political Survival”, German Politics, 30/​1(2021), 106–​21. 43 “Auslandseinsätze der Bundeswehr”, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (9 August 2018): www.bpb. de/​politik/​g rundfragen/​deutsche-​verteidigungspolitik/​243585/​weltkarte-​auslandseinsaetze. 44 Bundeswehr, “Personalzahlen der Bundeswehr [as of 6 April 2021]”: www.bundeswehr.de/​de/​ueber-​ die-​bundeswehr/​zahlen-​daten-​fakten/​personalzahlen-​bundeswehr. 45 Deutscher Bundestag, “Antwort der Bundesregierung auf die auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abgeordneten Andrej Hunko, Dr. Alexander S. Neu, Michel Brandt, weiterer Abgeordneter und der Fraktion DIE LINKE. –​Drucksache 19/​5562. Kosten der Auslandseinsätze der Bundeswehr seit 1990”, Drucksache 19/​6011 (Berlin, 26 November 2018). 46 PESCO, “About PESCO”: https://​pesco.eur​opa.eu/​. However, except for Denmark and Malta, every EU member-​state participates in PESCO, which in turn calls into question the idea of having only “capable” states participate. 47 “Information on Defence Expenditures”, NATO: www.nato.int/​cps/​en/​natohq/​topics_​49198.htm. 48 Bundeswehr, “Personalzahlen der Bundeswehr”: www.bundeswehr.de/​de/​ueber-​die-​bundeswehr/​ zahlen-​daten-​fakten/​personalzahlen-​bundeswehr. 49 Federal Government, White Paper, 8, 32.

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Klaus Brummer 50 Eberhard Zorn, “Die anspruchsvollste Aufgabe der Bundeswehr”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (30 September 2020), 8. 51 “SIPRI Military Expenditure Database”. 52 Deutscher Bundestag, “Gesetzentwurf der Bundesregierung Entwurf eines Gesetzes über die Feststellung des Bundeshaushaltsplans für das Haushaltsjahr 2021 (Haushaltsgesetz 2021)”, Drucksache 19/​22600 (Berlin, 25 September 2020), 28. 53 Robbie Gramer and Jack Detsch, “Trump Undercuts Pentagon over Germany Troop Withdrawal”, Foreign Policy (29 July 2020): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2020/​07/​29/​penta​gon-​trump-​troop-​wit​hdra​ wal-​germ​any-​pun​ishm​ent/​. 54 International Monetary Fund, “5. Report for Selected Countries and Subjects. Germany”: www. imf.org/​external/​pubs/​ft/​weo/​2019/​02/​weodata/​weorept.aspx?sy=​2000&ey=​2024&scsm=​1&ssd=​ 1&sort=​country&ds=​.&br=​1&pr1.x=​90&pr1.y=​19&c=​134&s=​PPPSH&grp=​0&a=​. 55 World Trade Organisation, World Trade Statistical Review 2020 (Geneva, 2020), 15. 56 “Anteil der Exporte aus Deutschland in die Europäische Union (EU) am gesamten deutschen Export von 1991 bis 2018”, Statista: https://​de.stati​sta.com/​statis​tik/​daten/​stu​die/​226​630/​umfr​age/​ant​eil-​ des-​eu-​hand​els-​am-​deutsc​hen-​expor​than​del/​. 57 European Commission, EU Budget 2018. Financial Report (Luxembourg, 2019), 75. 58 Statistisches Bundesamt, “Außenhandel. Exporte, Importe, Außenhandelssaldo”: www.destatis.de/​ DE/​Themen/​Wirtschaft/​Aussenhandel/​Tabellen/​lrahl01.html;jsessionid=​5663E42CE82C6CDF5D FA2E38CB8E7ADE.internet8712#fussnote-​1-​242370. 59 Idem, Außenhandel. Rangfolge der Handelspartner im Außenhandel der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (vorläufige Ergebnisse) (2020). 60 Trump on Twitter (30 May 2017). 61 “EU Trade Bodies Slam US Decision to Retain Tariffs”, Deutsche Welle (13 August 2020): www. dw.com/​en/​us-​tariffs-​eu-​products/​a-​54548656. 62 European Commission, “EU-​ China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment” (23 February 2021): https://​trade.ec.eur​opa.eu/​doc​lib/​press/​index.cfm?id=​2115. 63 Statista, “Verteilung der Erdgasbezugsquellen Deutschlands im Jahr 2019”: https://​de.stati​sta. com/​statis​tik/​daten/​stu​die/​151​871/​umfr​age/​erdg​asbe​zug-​deuts​chla​nds-​aus-​versch​iede​nen-​laend ​ ern/​; idem, “Deutsche Rohölimporte nach ausgewählten Exportländern in den Jahren 2012 bis 2019”: https://​de.stati​sta.com/​statis​tik/​daten/​stu​die/​2473/​umfr​age/​ rohoelimport-​hauptlieferanten-​ von-​deutschland/​. 64 “Polen vergleicht Pipeline-​ Vertrag mit Hitler-​ Stalin-​ Pakt”, Handelsblatt (30 April 2006): www. handelsblatt.com/​politik/​international/​vorwuerfe-​polen-​vergleicht-​pipeline-​vertrag-​mit-​hitler-​ stalin-​pakt/​2647380.html?ticket=​ST-​5202298-​vsQMelXhnS2lKhfxJWmA-​ap3. 65 “US Steps up Threats Over Nord Stream 2 Pipeline”, Financial Times (15 July 2020): www.ft.com/​ content/​ff3edd61-​a404-​48b0-​adb8-​65b91bc90486. 66 “Was die Einigung zu Nord Stream 2 für die Ukraine bedeutet”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (23 July 2021): www.faz.net/​aktuell/​wirtschaft/​nord-​stream-​2-​was-​die-​einigung-​fuer-​die-​ukraine-​ bedeutet-​17451670.html.

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9 ALLIANCE VS. ALLIANCE “PLUS” Japanese Foreign Policy Post-​9/​11 Yuki Tatsumi

Driven by two major factors, the evolution in recent Japanese foreign policy began at the end of the Cold War. One was a fundamental change in the geostrategic environment triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the primary goal for Japanese foreign policy was to stay squarely in the Western bloc led by the United States. The second, as Japan rose from defeat in the Second World War and began to go down the road of national reconstruction and economic recovery, it strove to prove to the world that it made a clean break from its militarist past. Within the well-​known “Yoshida Doctrine”, Japan anchored its foreign policy primarily on its economic policy tools to advance its interests abroad whilst counting on its bilateral alliance with the United States to safeguard its national security from external threats. For Japan, the end of the Cold War meant the culmination of the post-​Second World War international order. Ironically, Japan’s economic success has also peaked at the end of the Cold War, and its economy began a long descent from its zenith in the early 1990s. Thus, for Japan, the end of the Cold War not only meant the end of the international order in which Japan achieved its economic success, but also that the core of its post-​Second World War foreign policy approach –​protecting its national interests primarily by leveraging its economic prowess –​no longer worked as its economy began to slow. The 1991 Gulf War was a rude awakening for Japan of this new reality. Despite its eventual financial contribution to the war efforts that totalled $13 billion, Japan’s inability to make its contribution more “tangible” in the form of allowing the Japan Self-​Defence Force [JSDF] to participate in the operations of Allied multinational forces resulted in intense criticism of Japan’s “chequebook diplomacy”. Tokyo’s eventual despatch of Japan Maritime Self-​Defence Force [JMSDF] minesweepers to the Persian Gulf after the conclusion of war did not receive much recognition but rather criticism as “too little, too late”. This humiliating experience left a long-​ lasting “Gulf War trauma” amongst Japan’s national security bureaucracy.1 Since then, Japan has been searching for a new national consensus on the core principles of its foreign policy in the post-​Cold War era. However, long before it got close to such a consensus, a series of external and internal national security challenges prompted Japanese policy-​ makers to shape a new set of foreign policy priorities as they scrambled to respond to them. Externally, these challenges included North Korea’s nuclear and other security threats, the 9/​11 terrorist attacks against the United States, Washington’s long distraction by the wars in DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-11

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the Middle East that followed, and China’s emergence as first a powerful economic rival and, now, a national security challenge because of its increasingly aggressive behaviour in the East and South China seas. Domestically, the challenges included the earthquake in Kobe and sarin gas attack by the cult group Aum Shinrikyo –​both in 1995 –​the revelation of North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens, and the 2011 “Great Eastern Japan Earthquake” when the country was hit by a triple major natural disaster: earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown. Each of these events tested Japanese policy-​makers’ ability to respond to unforeseen national security and foreign policy crises. As Japanese policy-​makers struggle to respond to these challenges, two major trends emerged in Japanese foreign policy. One is to double-​down on its bilateral alliance relationship with the United States; the other is to pursue bilateral relationships with other countries whilst still trying to anchor them in the broader framework of Japanese-​American alliance co-​operation. Such efforts include institutionalisation of Tokyo’s bilateral security relationship with countries such as Australia, India, the Philippines, and some European powers. In the last few years, particularly as confidence in the American commitment to continue playing a leadership role in upholding the existing liberal international order increasingly came into question during the four years of the Donald Trump administration, Japan’s efforts in this area have become more energised. Examining the evolution of these two major trends, this chapter identifies some of the enduring challenges for Japanese foreign policy as it sees an even more complicated geostrategic picture of Sino-​American strategic competition. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and Japan have gone through two rounds of updating their joint “Guidelines for Defense Cooperation”, more commonly referred to as “the Guidelines”2, first in 1997 and again in 2015. A sense of urgency shared by American and Japanese government officials triggered the first round: the alliance needed to be redefined and its institutional framework reorganised. Specifically, their bilateral defence co-​operative framework required modernisation to remain viable in the post-​Cold War security environment when there was no longer a tangible enemy –​the Soviet Union –​to justify the existence of the alliance. Redefining the Japanese-​American alliance in the mid-​1990s resulted from two intense crises in East Asia that exposed the alliance’s structural vulnerabilities about meeting new security challenges: the first North Korean nuclear crisis and Sino-​American tension over the Taiwan Strait issue raised during the 1996 presidential election in Taiwan. It became apparent in Washington and Tokyo that the framework of bilateral defence co-​operation established in 1978 was completely outdated and could not be utilised to mobilise Japanese support in case of a major American military operation in East Asia. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War and disappearance of the Soviet Union stirred serious discussion within Japan about the necessity of the Japanese-​American alliance moving forward. This discussion was exacerbated by a tragic incident in 1995 in which a schoolgirl in Okinawa was kidnapped and raped by three United States service members. The angry reaction against this crime spread throughout Japan and grew into a call for withdrawing the American military from Japan, particularly Okinawa. In addition to the necessity of updating the defence co-​operative mechanism to take into account the changes in the security environment, it added an additional imperative for the Americans and Japanese to provide a new purpose for their alliance, making the United States military presence in Japan politically sustainable. The recasting of the Japanese-​American alliance, which began in 1995 following the rape incident in Okinawa, culminated in three key documents giving a new sense of purpose to the agreement.3 In April 1996, the American president, Bill Clinton, and his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, unveiled their countries’ vision for the future 106

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of the alliance by issuing the “Japan-​U.S. Joint Declaration of Security: Alliance for the 21st Century”. The reference to the alliance as “the cornerstone” of peace and security in the Asia-​ Pacific region based on common shared values remains relevant to the present.4 This shared vision for the future of the alliance translated into a more concrete set of actions for bilateral defence co-​operation when the two governments released the revised “Guidelines for U.S.-​ Japan Defense Cooperation” in 1997. Compared to the original 1978 version, whose sole focus was the defence of Japan, the 1997 Guidelines created three situational frameworks for bilateral defence co-​operation (peacetime, “situation in the areas surrounding Japan [SIAS-​J]”,5 and defence of Japan) and established a division of labour between the United States and Japan under each circumstance.6 Finally, the two governments issued the “Special Action Committee on Okinawa [SACO] Final Report” in December 1996. The Report recommended the return of Marine Corps Air Station [MCAS] Futenma, along with several training zones within Okinawa, and their relocation to the areas much less populated either within Okinawa or outside Okinawa prefecture.7 Restructuring the alliance prompted Tokyo to pass legislation requiring legal authorisation for the Japanese government, including the JSDF, to make necessary changes to implement the agreed Guidelines. These laws included the “Situation in the Areas Surrounding Japan Law” enacted in 19998 and the 2003 “Response to Armed Attacks against Japan and Other Emergencies Law”.9 However, in less than five years, the 9/​11 terrorist attacks against the United States ushered in yet another new security environment for Japan. Simply put, the nature of 9/​11 –​a non-​ state actor successfully waging terrorist attacks against the United States, the world’s only superpower –​presented Japanese policy-​makers with challenges very similar to those their predecessors had faced during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Even though Japan was no longer the economic powerhouse it was a decade before, the fact that it still had the world’s second biggest economy raised the question of how the country could or should respond to the terrorist attacks in co-​operation with the rest of international community. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage used the phrase “show the flag” when meeting with the Japanese ambassador at Washington, Shunji Yanai.10 Demonstrating American expectation of Japan’s participation in the United States-​led international response that resulted in Operation Enduring Freedom, this phrase became the mantra for Japanese policy-​makers. This time, however, Japan fared much better than in the 1991 Gulf War. Three major factors helped. First, compared to 1991, when Japan was led by Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu –​more of a consensus builder –​Japan was under the leadership of Junichiro Koizumi. Known to be a “maverick” within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party [LDP], he won the party presidential election in April 2001 with the mantra that he would “destroy the old LDP” and promised to bring much-​needed reform to Japan. Koizumi’s commitment to reform, his decisive leadership style, and his stance as a staunch supporter of the American-​Japanese alliance allowed him quickly to forge a close personal relationship with the American president, George W. Bush. Following his first meeting with Bush in June 2001, Koizumi characterised his relationship with Bush as “a heart-​to-​heart” one, whilst Bush praised Koizumi as “a courageous leader” and stated that he believed he would “have a good personal relationship. … after all, he’s the only world leader I’ve played catch, with a baseball”.11 By expressing Japan’s support for the United States and condemning Al-​Qaeda’s act immediately after 9/​11, Koizumi not only gave reassurance to Bush that Tokyo stood with Washington but also bought his government time to work out the details for Japan to “provide whatever the support and cooperation necessary”.12 Building on the updated frameworks to allow the JSDF to participate in overseas activities, Japan under Koizumi oversaw the enactment of the “Anti-​Terrorism Special Measures Law” in November 2001. It allowed for JMSDF despatch to the Indian Ocean to refuel coalition partner 107

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vessels and send the Japan Air Self-​Defence Force [JASDF] to Kuwait coalition headquarters for transport missions. When the United States waged a war against Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003, this law became the basis for Japan to draft, pass, and enact the “Iraq Reconstruction Special Measures Law”, allowing the Japan Ground Self-​Defence Force to participate in the international coalition’s reconstruction efforts in Iraq. As the nature of more urgent security threats changed from those primarily originated by the behaviour of nation-​states to those of non-​state actors, America and Japan launched the Defence Policy Review Initiative [DPRI] in 2002. Occurring in tandem with the United States’ own Global Defense Posture Review, the DPRI’s goal was to transform the Japanese-​ American alliance into a twenty-​first century agreement, updating the shared vision for the alliance and further modernising both the American force presence in Japan and the division of responsibility between these forces and the JSDF. The process fell short of “transforming” the alliance due to legal and political constraints persisting in Japan, but nonetheless resulted in several important decisions. These included the establishment of the Joint Task Force-​ capable United States Army I Corps Forward in Camp Zama and, at Yokota Air Force Base, the relocation of JASDF’s Air Defence Command and formation of the Bilateral Joint Operation Co-​ordination Centre; in aggregate, these initiatives deepened bilateral defence relations.13 However, when Koizumi left the office in June 2006 and Japan entered a period of leadership vacuum,14 the Japanese-​American alliance entered a period of drift. The “alliance adrift” came especially after the Democratic Party of Japan [DPJ] won the general election in July 2009 and took office in September. The Barack Obama Administration first began to question the policy orientation of the first DPJ prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, when the New York Times published his opinion piece, “A New Path for Japan”, a few weeks before his inauguration. It suggested that Hatoyama was trying to pull Japan away from a close alliance with the United States and re-​orient Japanese foreign policy closer to China.15 The sense of doubt in Hatoyama’s ability to lead further grew when, despite him telling Obama to “trust me” to settle the relocation of MCAS Futenma in Okinawa, he essentially let the relocation process fall apart.16 Even though the DPJ’s last prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, in power between August 2011 and December 2012, paved the way for many important foreign policy decisions on which his successor, Shinzo Abe, capitalised,17 Japan’s alliance relationship with the United States reached a plateau. Upon returning to the premiership in December 2012 –​having previously served a first term from September 2006 to September 2007 –​Abe began an effort to revitalise the Japanese-​ American alliance in earnest. Less than two months after he assumed office, Abe travelled to the United States to meet with Obama. During his stay, he delivered a speech, “Japan is Back”, declaring his intention to ensure Japan remained the world’s “rules-​promoter, a commons’ guardian, and an effective ally and partner to the U.S. and other democracies”.18 In the nearly eight years that followed, Abe redirected his government’s effort to make important policy changes that enabled Japan to deepen further its alliance relationship with the United States. The most notable of these changes are: the release of the first-​ever National Security Strategy (December 2013); the enactment of a Secrecy Law to improve Japanese government’s system of protecting classified information to allow Tokyo to deepen intelligence co-​operation with Washington and other partners (December 2013); the revision of Japan’s arms export policy that culminated in establishing the new “Three Principles of Defence Equipment Transfer” (April 2014); the reinterpretation of the Article 9 of the Constitution to allow Japan to exercise the right of collective self-​defence under certain circumstances (July 2014); and the enactment of “Peace and Security” legislation to reflect the re-​interpretation of the Constitution (September 2015). 108

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Under Abe, Tokyo also worked closely with Washington to conclude the Trans-​Pacific Partnership [TPP] negotiations that the Obama Administration considered essential to its Asia re-​balance strategy. By taking these steps, Abe earned the confidence of Obama as a reliable partner, greatly improving the atmosphere surrounding the Japanese-​American alliance. As Japanese policy under Abe’s watch took these important steps, Japan and America also took a renewed look at the bilateral Guidelines and concluded their second round of revision in August 2015.19 Under the new Guidelines, the three categories of defence co-​operation that existed in the 1997 version –​peacetime, SIAS-​J, and armed attacks against Japan –​were replaced with three different categories –​“peacetime”, “emerging threats to Japan’s peace and security”, and “armed attacks against Japan” –​providing greater flexibility for bilateral defence co-​operation. Looking for “seamless, robust, flexible and effective” bilateral defence co-​operation, the 2015 Guidelines also established an “Alliance Co-​ordination Mechanism” to facilitate better information sharing and communications between the two governments.20 When Abe left office in August 2020, maintaining a robust Japanese-​American alliance within which Japan plays a greater role had been firmly set as one of the pillars of Japan’s foreign policy. In its post-​Second World War history, beyond the Japanese-​American alliance, Japan has always maintained a careful balance between having a strong American connection, on the one hand, whilst, on the other, exploring its own diplomatic manoeuvring room, sometimes independent of the United States. For instance, Japan’s relations with Russia, Iran, and Myanmar are the examples of areas in which Tokyo often pursued policy approaches different from Washington. More often, however, Japan has sought to expand its partnerships around the globe through its alliance with the United States. As American engagement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has continued since 2001, Japan, along with other Indo-​Pacific countries, have grown increasingly concerned that the American preoccupation with the Middle East would come at the expense of engagement in their region. These concerns deepened as, in both the Bush and Obama administrations, despite their rhetoric about how they considered the Indo-​Pacific region the most important strategically, their behaviour did not back up their statements. Concerns grew even greater as China’s assertiveness in the region developed, particularly in avowing their territorial claims in the East and South China seas. A perception emerged of the United States merely standing by –​regardless of multiple strong-​worded statements by its senior officials condemning Chinese behaviour –​emboldening Beijing to continue its assertiveness. Like the rest of the world, Japan’s apprehension grew even deeper with the inauguration of Trump as American president in January 2017. Trump’s Administration began to withdraw the United States from significant multinational agreements that previous American administrations had pursued, such as TPP, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action curtailing Iran’s nuclear programme, and the Paris Climate Accords. In taking a transactional approach, Trump’s foreign policy saw the reliability of the United States as an ally increasingly come into question. Even though Japan fared much better compared to other American allies thanks to the extensive outreach to Trump by Abe, the four years of Trump’s Administration planted a deep scepticism amongst Japanese policy-​makers about whether America’s post-​1945 foreign policy orientation of internationalism and willingness to take a leading role in preserving the existing liberal international order could ever return. Tokyo’s concern has grown even more acute in recent years as Chinese pressure on disagreements over the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands has intensified over the last decade. Japan has translated its concern into investing in a number of relationships with other American allies and partners; these include Australia and India in the Indo-​Pacific region, as well as major North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] powers in Europe. With Australia, 109

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Japan has probably institutionalised its bilateral security relationship most deeply. The two countries have three key agreements to facilitate their bilateral defence relationship –​a 2012 agreement on the Security of Information,21 a 2014 agreement on Defence Equipment and Technology Transfer (2014),22 and, in 2017, an Acquisition and Cross-​Service Agreement.23 These bilateral agreements not only allowed bilateral defence co-​operation to deepen, but they created a foundation on which Japan has been accelerating trilateral co-​operation with the United States that now includes regular joint air, sea, and land exercises. Similarly, with India, Japan also put in place an information security agreement,24 as well as a defence equipment and technology transfer agreement,25 which created a foundation for American-​Japanese-​Indian trilateral co-​operation beyond policy consultations. In a notable dimension about Japan’s relationships with Australia and India, they continue to deepen with bipartisan support in Japan. In fact, with both India and Australia, even though strengthening the relationships accelerated after 2012 when Abe returned to office, Japan’s outreach first began whilst Koizumi was in office, with the efforts continuing at a steady pace through Abe’s first administration, as well as those of Taro Aso, Yasuo Fukuda, and three years of DPJ rule. In Europe, as well, Japan has been working to strengthen its relationships with Britain, France, and more recently Germany, as these countries have begun to demonstrate greater interest in the security environment in the Indo-​Pacific region as well as NATO writ large. With France, Japan signed a Defence Equipment and Technology Transfer agreement in 2015.26 With Britain, Japan signed information security agreement27, defence equipment and technology transfer agreement28, as well as Acquisition and Cross-​Service Agreement [ACSA].29 Most recently, Japan and Germany also signed the information security agreement on 22 March 2021.30 Japan has also been steadily deepening its engagement with Southeast Asia. The dynamics of Japan relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN], which had a greater focus in economic relations before the turn of the century, began to shift in early 2000s as China’s economic influence in the region began to grow. Tokyo and Beijing disagreed over the future of regional economic architecture, as well as the membership of the East Asia Summit [EAS] launched in 2005.31 Similar to Japan’s approach to Australia and India, Tokyo’s efforts to buttress its relationship with Southeast Asia was also domestically bipartisan and moved forward steadily since 2000. It is exemplified with the signing of the Japan-​ASEAN Bali Declaration in 2011 in which Tokyo expressed its support for political and security co-​operation and the importance of ASEAN’s centrality in the regional architecture in the Asia-​Pacific region. The Bali Declaration focused much more on co-​operation in political and security issues, identifying it as one of the “three pillars” of collaboration. It also expressed Japan and ASEAN’s collective support for the “Code of Conduct” in the South China Sea.32 Japan reconfirmed its support for ASEAN, including ASEAN plus Three [APT], EAS, the ASEAN Regional Forum, and the ASEAN Defence Ministerial Meeting Plus amongst others.33 In addition, Japan’s Ministry of Defence established a Capacity-​Building Office within its Defence Policy Bureau in the financial year 2012, focusing on supporting ASEAN countries’ efforts to develop various capabilities for their militaries, including humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and maritime domain awareness. Tokyo also began to discuss more publicly the “strategic use of the official development assistance [ODA]”, opening up the possibility of directing ODA to develop the capabilities of their coast guards in the context of the “strategic use of ODA”. Building on Tokyo’s growing emphasis on “strategic use of ODA”, Japan’s focus of co-​operation with ASEAN has been shifting more into security issues in the last decade. In particular, Japanese security co-​operation with ASEAN accelerated when Abe regained premiership in December 2012. He chose Southeast Asia as his first foreign visit destination as prime minister. 110

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Whilst this visit was cut short in January 2013 due to an incident of several Japanese taken hostage in Nigeria, Abe took the opportunity to announce the “Abe Doctrine”, laying out five principles of Japan’s ASEAN diplomacy: (1) Protect and promote together with ASEAN member states universal values, such as freedom, democracy and basic human rights; (2) Ensure in cooperation with ASEAN member states that the free and open seas, which are the most vital common asset, are governed by laws and rules and not by force, and to welcome the United States’ rebalancing to the Asia-​Pacific region; (3) Further promote trade and investment, including flows of goods, money, people and services, through various economic partnership networks, for Japan’s economic revitalisation and prosperity of both Japan and ASEAN member states; (4) Protect and nurture Asia’s diverse cultural heritages and traditions; (5) Promote exchanges among the young generations to further foster mutual understanding.34 Upholding these views, Abe brought a renewed focus in Japan’s engagement with ASEAN, especially Tokyo’s co-​operation with the claimant states in the South China Sea territorial dispute. Whilst maintaining momentum in the efforts that pre-​dates Abe’s return to the office, such as participating in American joint military exercises with Southeast Asian countries,35 the Abe government accelerated re-​focusing Japan’s engagement with ASEAN more sharply by supporting the littoral countries in Southeast Asia, many of which are South China Sea dispute claimants. These measures include Japan transferring used Coast Guard vessels to the claimant nations such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam through the Japan International Co-​operation Agency, the Japanese Coast Guard conducting joint exercises with Filipino and Vietnamese Coast Guards, and co-​chairing a workshop on maritime domain awareness.36 As demonstrated so far, post-​Cold War Japanese foreign policy has developed with two main pillars: doubling down on its effort to solidify its alliance relationship with the United States, whilst actively cultivating its relationships with the American allies and partners around the world for the last three decades. In the meantime, Japan has been successful in modernising its alliance relationship with the United States, making it not only politically sustainable but also turning the defence relationship into a more practical one in which Japan plays a greater role. Tokyo also has seen success in expanding its security relationship beyond the Japanese-​ American alliance, deepening relationships with not only the countries in the Indo-​Pacific region but beyond. Still, looking ahead, Japan continues to grapple with a few enduring challenges in its foreign and security policy. First, even though Abe launched a grand vision for Japan’s foreign policy, the legacy of issues from the post-​Second World War era continues to limit Japan’s ability to translate his vision into concrete policy initiatives. Japan’s relationships with Russia and North Korea are two examples. When dealing with these two powers, Japan often had to pursue its own bilateral agenda –​resolution of the Northern Islands territorial disputes and diplomatic normalisation with Russia and confronting the abduction issues with North Korea –​at the expense of being marginalised in the international diplomacy. In case of Russia, when Abe invited Russian President Vladimir Putin for a summit meeting in 2015, it created tension with the United States. In case of North Korea, Japan’s isolation from the multinational diplomacy involving Pyongyang appeared particularly pronounced in June 2019. In the flurry of regional diplomacy that emerged following Trump’s surprise summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Abe was the only regional leader who had failed to meet Kim despite a repeated public appeal that he would welcome a meeting with the North Korean leader “with 111

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no preconditions”. Lack of reconciliation between Japan and South Korea over Japan’s behaviour whilst the Korean Peninsula was under Japanese colonial rule continue to limit Tokyo’s ability to co-​operate with Seoul on issues important for Japan, including North Korea’s nuclear threat. Furthermore, the developments in Japanese foreign policy in the last 30 years have taken place without a national consensus on Japan’s place in the world. All the evolutionary changes that the Japanese foreign and defence policy establishments have accomplished since the end of the Cold War, particularly after 9/​11, have taken place without broad debate on what Japan’s core foreign policy principles should be. Rather, they have been taking place by incrementally reinterpreting the existing legal framework for Japan’s foreign and security policy. Abe’s partial success to reinterpret Article Nine of the Constitution to enable Japan to exercise the right of collective self-​defence still came with a limited set of circumstances, and his decision to legislate these changes sparked substantial opposition from the public. In fact, public opposition against the Japanese government enacting the Peace and Security legislation resulted in mass demonstrations across Japan in the fall of 2015. This included the ones in the areas surrounding Japanese Diet building, which was the largest such demonstration since the anti-​Japanese-​ American Security Treaty renewal protest in 1960.37 Most importantly, questions remain on whether Japan will be able to maintain steady political leadership that is required to implement its foreign policy in the post-​Abe era. For the time being, Abe’s successors have been keeping Japanese foreign policy on the course that Abe set. If anything, his successors have made attempts to intensify the efforts in some of the initiatives that Abe has launched, even sharpening some aspects of his approaches. For instance, his immediate successor Yoshihide Suga pursued efforts to substantiate Tokyo’s commitment to support the Free and Open Indo-​Pacific concept by exploring more concrete co-​operation among Quad countries. Suga’s choice of travelling to the United States to attend an in-​person Quad summit in mid-​September, merely weeks before he stepped down as the prime minister, was a reflection of his personal commitment to promote Quad co-​operation. While in office, Suga also doubled down on the efforts to forge a close personal relationship with President Joe Biden His effort culminated in his visit to the United States to hold an in-​ person summit with the president on 16 April 2021, as the Biden Administration’s first foreign guest at the White House. At the end of Suga’s meeting with Biden, the two leaders issued a joint statement, the “U.S.-​Japan Global Partnership for a New Era”, in which both Powers reaffirmed their respective commitment to leverage the Japanese-​American alliance to build a free and open Indo-​Pacific region.38 After Suga stepped down facing harsh criticism for his government’s response to COVID-​ 19, Fumio Kishida took office on October 2021. Kishida, who had long served under Abe as his first foreign minister, moved swiftly to announce new initiatives that aimed to sharpen the focus of some of the foreign policy goals that Abe set out. Such initiatives include the establishment of new positions that advise him on economic security issues and human rights issues, and broaden the scope of the National Security Secretariat’s jurisdiction to include economic security. He also intends to revise Japan’s National Security Strategy –​currently seven years old –​and updates two key defence policy planning documents: National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG) and Mid-​Term Defense Program (MTDP). However, to what degree these policy reviews can take place will ultimately be affected by whether the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)-​Komeito coalition can maintain a comfortable majority with a leader who can demonstrate decisiveness when necessary. For the last 30 years, Japanese foreign policy has evolved considerably as it struggles to reorient its foreign policy from the Cold War-​era model of primary dependence on its economic 112

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power to adapt to the challenges that geostrategic changes presented to the country. Tokyo has tried such reorientation through doubling down on deepening the Japanese-​American alliance whilst investing in its relations with American allies and partners to hedge against the potential of a declining United States commitment to play a leading role in upholding a liberal international order. Japan’s effort has yielded some successes by elevating its international profile as the staunch supporter of the liberal international order exemplified in the Free and Open Indo-​ Pacific concept. Without national consensus on the trajectory of Japanese foreign and security policy, however, the consistency of Japan’s post-​9/​11 foreign policy principles will continue to depend on the stability of leadership in Tokyo.

Notes 1 Hiroshi Nakanishi, “Wangan Sensou to Nihon Gaikou”, Nippon.com (7 December 2011): www. nippon.com/​ja/​features/​c00202/​. 2 The March 2021 Security Consultative Committee –​more commonly known as “2 plus 2” –​also suggested that some adjustments, if not a complete revision, of the Guidelines may be possible, as the two sides committed to update the division of responsibilities in roles, missions and capabilities between United States forces and the JSDF. See Ministry of Defense of Japan. “Joint Statement of the U.S.-​Japan Security Consultative Committee (2+​2)” (16 March 2021): www.mod. go.jp/​e/​d_​act/​us/​ docs/​20210316b_​e-​usa.html. 3 For a chronicle of the process of redefining the Japanese-​American alliance during this period, see, for example, Yoichi Funabashi, Alliance Adrift (NY, 1999). 4 United States Embassy in Japan, “Joint Japan-​U.S. Declaration on Security: Alliance for the 21st Century” (17 April 1996): https://​jap​an2.usemba​ssy.gov/​pdfs/​wwwf-​mdao-​joint-​decl​arat​ion 1​996.pdf. 5 In practice, the concept of SIAS-​J was synonymous to “regional contingencies”. However, given the political sensitivities of the term, “regional contingencies”, at the time inside Japan, explaining the SIAS-​J was a “situational” concept, not tied to specific contingency scenarios. 6 Ministry of Defense of Japan, “The Guidelines for Japan-​U.S. Defense Cooperation” (16 September 1997): www.mod.go.jp/​e/​d_​act/​us/​anpo/​19970923.html. 7 Department of State, “SACO Final Report” (2 December 1996): https://​1997-​2001.state.gov/​www/​ regi​ons/​eap/​japan/​r pt-​saco_​f​i nal​_​961​202.html. With many of the recommendations made in this Report implemented, the most significant item, the return of MCAS Futenma, remains unachieved after 25 years. 8 Revised and renamed as the “Situation that Gravely Affects Japan’s National Security Law” in 2016, this legislation incorporates the re-​interpretation of the Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution on the right of collective right of self-​defence. 9 Revised and updated in 2016, this law reflected the new constitutional re-​interpretation. 10 See, for example, Kenneth Pyle, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose (NY, 2007). 11 White House, “Remarks by the President and Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan in Photo Opportunity” (30 June 2001): https://​geor​gewb​ush-​whi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​news/​relea​ses/​2001/​06/​20010​630-​ 2.html. A former American official intimately familiar with the planning of the June 2001 summit later described that a catch between Bush and Koizumi was completely spontaneous on the part of both leaders, not choreographed at all. 12 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, 2002 Diplomatic Bluebook: www.mofa.go.jp/​ mofaj/​gaiko/​ bluebook/​2002/​gaikou/​html/​honpen/​chap01_​02_​03.html. 13 Government Accountability Office, Marine Corps Asia Pacific Realignment (April 2017): www.gao.gov/​ assets/​690/​684242.pdf. 14 Between June 2006 and December 2012, Japan had a musical chairs of prime ministers –​a new one every year. 15 Yukio Hatoyama, “A New Path for Japan”. NY Times (26 August 2009): www.nytimes.com/​2009/​ 08/​27/​opinion/​27iht-​edhatoyama.html. 16 Shigeya Ando, “Ningen Hatoyama Yukio wo Saigo made Rikai Dekinakatta Obama Daitouryou”, Diamond Online (8 June 2010): https://​diam​ond.jp/​artic​les/​-​/​8363.

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Yuki Tatsumi 17 For instance, Noda’s decision to apply a “comprehensive exemption” to Japan’s F-​ 35A fighter acquisition –​a decision made to enable Japanese industry to participate in the multinational development program –​laid the groundwork for Abe’s government to establish the new “Three Principles for Defense Equipment Transfer” in April 2014. 18 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, “Japan is Back. By Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan. 22 February 2013 at CSIS” (22 February 2013): www.mofa.go.jp/​announce/​pm/​abe/​us_​20130222en. html. 19 United States Department of Defense, “U.S.-​Japan Guidelines for Defense Cooperation” (27 August 2015): www.mofa.go.jp/​files/​000078188.pdf. 20 Ibid. 21 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Government of Australia concerning the Security of Information. Signed 17 May 2012: www.mofa.go.jp/​mofaj/​press/​ release/​24/​5/​pdfs/​0517_​04_​02.pdf. 22 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Government of Australia concerning the Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology. Signed 8 July 2014: www.mofa. go.jp/​press/​release/​press4e_​000349.html. 23 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Government of Australia Concerning Reciprocal Provision of Supplies and Services between the Self-​Defense Forces of Japan and the Australian Defence Force. Signed 14 January 2017: www.mofa.go.jp/​mofaj/​files/​000241536.pdf. 24 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Republic of India Concerning Security Measures for the Protection of Classified Military Information (12 December 2015): www. mofa.go.jp/​mofaj/​files/​000117472.pdf. 25 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Republic of India Concerning the Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology (12 December 2015): www.mofa.go.jp/​ mofaj/​files/​000117470.pdf. 26 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Bouei Soubi oyobi Gijutsu no Iten ni kansuru Nihon koku Seifu to Furansu Kyouwakoku Seifu tono aida no Kyoutei (15 March 2015): www.mofa.go.jp/​mofaj/​files/​ 000071906.pdf. 27 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Government of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland On the Security of Information (4 July 2013): www. mofa.go.jp/​mofaj/​files/​000016358.pdf. 28 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Concerning the Transfer of Arms and Military Technologies Necessary to Implement Joint Research, Development and Production of Defence Equipment and Other Related Items (4 July 2013): www.mofa. go.jp/​mofaj/​files/​000016357.pdf. 29 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Government of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Concerning Reciprocal Provision of Supplies and Services Between the Self-​Defense Forces of Japan and The Armed Forces of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (16 January 2017): www.mofa.go.jp/​mofaj/​files/​000241583.pdf. 30 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. Agreement Between the Government of Japan and the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany on the Security of Information (22 March 2021): www.mofa.go.jp/​mofaj/​ files/​100164533.pdf. 31 Japan advocated United States membership in EAS, whilst China insisted Russia should be also included. 32 National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, “Joint Declaration for Enhancing ASEAN-​Japan Strategic Partnership for Prospering Together”. World and Japan Database (18 November 2011): worldjpn.grips. ac.jp/​documents/​texts/​asean/​20111118.D2E.html. 33 Ibid. 34 Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Japan, “Factsheet on Japan-​ ASEAN relations”, ibid. (February 3013): https://​world​jpn.grips.ac.jp/​docume​nts/​texts/​asean/​20130​200.O1E.html. 35 For instance, Japan has been participating in the United States-​Thai Cobra Gold exercise since 2005. Japan also conducted a Japan-​Australia-​America joint exercise in the South China Sea in summer 2011 and participated in the Filipino-​American Balikatan exercise in spring 2012. See Ken Jimbo, “Japan-​ Southeast Asia Relations: Implication of US Rebalance in the Asia-​Pacific Region”, in Yuki Tatsumi, ed., Japan’s Relations with East Asia: Views from the Next Generation (Washington, DC, 2014), 56.

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Alliance vs. Alliance “Plus”: Japan 36 Cabinet Affairs Office of Japan, Kaiyou Seisaku Reiwa 2-​nen ban Nenji Houkoku (Tokyo, 2020): www8. cao.go.jp/​ocean/​info/​annual/​r2_​annual/​pdf/​r2_​annual_​print.pdf. 37 About the scale of mass protest against the “Peace and Security Legislation”, see, for example, Taichiro Yoshino, “Anpo Houan Hantai Demo Kokkai mae wo umetsukusu: Zenkoku de Daikibo na Kougi Koudou”, Huffington Post (30 August 2015): www.huffingtonpost.jp/​2015/​08/​30/​story_​n_​8061286.html. 38 The White House. “U.S.-​Japan Joint Leaders’ Statement. ‘U.S-​Japan Global Partnership For a New Era” (16 April 2021): www.whitehouse.gov/​briefing-​room/​statements-​releases/​2021/​04/​16/​u-​s-​ japan-​joint-​leaders-​statement-​u-​s-​japan-​global-​partnership-​for-​a-​new-​era/​.

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PART III

Middle Powers

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10 AUSTRALIAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE TWENTY-​F IRST CENTURY Brendon O’Connor and Danny Cooper

Scholars often refer to Australia as a Middle Power aiming to achieve a number of core strategic goals: maintaining a firm alliance with the United States, engaging with Asia, and playing a role in constructing international norms broadly compatible with a liberal international order.1 Not all governments approach these tasks with the same level of enthusiasm, but they have been important goals guiding practitioners of Australian diplomacy. This chapter charts the course of Australian foreign policy during the first two decades of the twenty-​first century. Following the conservative Howard government’s election loss in 2007, Australia suffered a rapid turnover of prime ministers –​attributable to internal party machinations and growing domestic disillusionment with national leaders. However, the key strategic goals during this period remained much the same: remain closely aligned with America for reasons of national security and continue to capitalise on China’s rapid economic growth through trade to reap the economic dividends conferred by Australia’s boom in commodities. For most of the first two decades, Australia’s performance in consolidating its American alliance whilst increasingly dependent economically on a rising China was reasonably well handled. Dependency on China can be seen in the following figures: in August 2020, Australia reached a new monthly record of 49 per cent of its exports going to China;2 total per annum exports to China increased from A$8.8 billion in 2001 to A$153 billion in 2019.3 In recent times, the challenges have become more acute. Australia has always affirmed its “special” relationship with the United States,4 but the election of an erratic president in 2016 less swayed by emotional appeals of shared values and more inclined to view international relationships in transactional terms raised more questions than answers about the future of American foreign policy in the Asia-​Pacific region. The first telephone conversation between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 was extremely tense, with the recently elected president railing against an agreement forged during the Barack Obama Administration that would see America resettle a number of asylum seekers stationed near Australia.5 Likewise, the consolidation of power of President Xi Jinping in the People’s Republic of China, Beijing’s increased regional assertiveness, and the ongoing violation of human rights in Hong Kong and amongst the Uighurs, seemingly foreshadowed what many International Relations [IR] realist scholars had long predicted: a self-​confident China eager

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-13

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to displace America as the region’s pre-​eminent Power. Given Australia’s growing economic dependence on China, it began a very difficult time for policy-​makers in managing one of the central dilemmas of Australian foreign policy: remaining a loyal American ally whilst preserving deepening economic ties to China. That these two Great Powers are often identified as potential rivals jockeying for influence and prestige in the Asian region only heightens Australian anxieties. This chapter examines how policy-​makers have managed this dilemma. Prime Minister John Howard, in power from 1996 to 2007, was arguably the most enthusiastic supporter of the alliance with the United States. Regionally, he was blessed with a more propitious set of circumstances than some of his successors and tended to demonstrate Australian loyalty to the United States through his government’s support for America’s “war on terror” under George W. Bush. In March 2003, this included the decision to invade Iraq. Those that followed Howard were not as lucky: the regional balance of power tended to shift toward China, making the argument that Australia did not have to choose between its American alliance and economic ties to China increasingly complicated. Nonetheless, for much of the first two decades of the twenty-​first century, Australian diplomacy was moderately successful in managing this juggling act. The Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard between 2007 and 2013 demonstrated much continuity with Howard’s support for the American alliance, encouraging Washington to deepen its ties to the region, often through global and regional fora. Inheriting the office after Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull served relatively brief stints as Liberal prime ministers, Scott Morrison, another Liberal, has faced a tougher task since 2018, both in dealing with former President Trump and a more aggressive Xi. Whatever difficulties Australian foreign policy-​ makers experienced in handling this dilemma, other policies have been less successful. Although with Australian diplomacy often discussed in terms of its activism on behalf of global causes such as nuclear disarmament, policy-​makers have floundered badly through the last two decades on the twin issues of asylum seekers and climate change. In fact, the way these policy challenges have been managed casts some doubt on any overarching and unwavering Australian commitment to the liberal international order. Productive policy solutions have tended to founder on the tribalism of Australian politics, illuminating divisions between the Liberal and Labor parties and even within them. Indeed, the issue of climate change has contributed to the turnover of Liberal Party leaders, as a split amongst moderates, led by Turnbull, who seemed willing to reduce emissions, and the hard right led by Abbott, who disputed the science of global warming. Likewise, the issue of asylum seekers during the Rudd-​Gillard governments bedevilled these national leaders, the mismanagement of which contributed to the decline in their popularity and led to the rise of a revitalised opposition led by Abbott showing little empathy for the plight of asylum seekers. The Liberal Party under Abbott was quick to exploit Labor’s divisions and policy shortcomings on this issue, demonstrating a political ruthlessness that facilitated its rise to power. Ultimately, Australia’s record throughout this period remains decidedly mixed, with a number of the same unanswered questions still casting a shadow over the future of Australian foreign policy. References to Australia’s “special” relationship with the United States are a constant theme in the speeches of national leaders. Even taking into account their testy first phone conversation, Trump and Turnbull were quick to issue a joint statement on the enduring nature of the Australian-​American relationship.6 Of course, what makes a relationship “special” is arbitrary, but the term points towards something beyond a mere convergence of narrowly defined national interests. This does not suggest that Australia’s relationship with the United States has no strategic rationale. The 1951 ANZUS Treaty encapsulates that rationale in Article IV: 120

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Each Party recognises that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.7 The immediate concern was a rearmed Japan, but the strategic rationale remained consistent through the ensuing decades: rely on Washington as the regional guarantor of security and stability. Over the years, a number of other benefits have accrued to Australia, including access to American military hardware and technologies, access to American intelligence, and greater access to the key centres of power in Washington.8 However, the relationship is also deeply sentimental, with regular references to shared values, similar culture, and common battlefield experiences. Australian leaders often cite the fact that Australia fought with the United States in every major war since the First World War as evidence of the country’s reliability as a loyal ally. Nobody excelled more in emphasising these values and this history of joint sacrifice than Howard. In Washington at the time of the 9/​11 terrorist attacks, Howard was quick to align Australia with the United States, invoking ANZUS for the first time in the alliance’s history and promising Australian support for the war against international terrorism. In his 2002 address to the United States Congress, Howard reminded his audience: Successive generations of Australians and Americans have fought side by side in every major conflict of the twentieth century –​in the jungles of New Guinea, in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Gulf, in skies and oceans around the globe and now, in another new century, amongst the rock-​strewn mountains of Afghanistan.9 Fighting in America’s wars to strengthen the alliance and hope that the United States will remain engaged in the Asia-​Pacific region has sparked much academic controversy. Critics argue that Australian compliance bespeaks a lack of independence, perhaps even subservience, to America.10 More persuasively, revisionist scholars argue that Australian policy-​makers have willingly encouraged the United States to involve itself, even militarily, in the affairs of the region.11 Whilst these scholars referred specifically to the Vietnam War, their scholarship raises a generally applicable point about Australian enthusiasm for deep American engagement and lingering fears of abandonment. This has always required Australia to pay attention not just to the regional balance of power but also global trends. If America acted in accordance with Australian preferences, it was imperative that America’s attention and resources not shift elsewhere around the world –​a key national security goal of Australia’s foreign policy-​making elites. As Professor Hugh White, a former deputy secretary in Australia’s Department of Defence, fairly argues, Australia’s security has always been directly affected by developments at the global level, because Australia has always depended on a distant global power to keep Asia stable, to safeguard our regional interests, and to defend us directly if that failed.12 After 11 September 2001, there was an obvious shift in the direction of American foreign policy, with the Middle East taking centre stage. Australia supported the wars both in Afghanistan and Iraq, hopeful that after tepid American support for Australia’s intervention in East Timor in 1999, the newly elected conservative Administration under George W. Bush would provide a window of opportunity to further strengthen the alliance.13 It was an opportunity Howard’s government seized with alacrity. After being in Washington at the time of the attacks, Howard spoke about the personal impact, claiming that no other 121

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event in his public life had such a “profound impact”.14 He subscribed fully to the American doctrine of pre-​emptive war, which in reality blurred the lines between what IR scholars call pre-​emption and prevention.15 As Howard put it, “Having experienced 9/​11, who could blame Americans for thinking that the next time a hijacked plane headed for a tall building, it might contain a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons”.16 Whilst the Bush Administration worked through the United Nations [UN] in 2002, however reluctantly and half-​heartedly, to bring additional pressure to bear on Saddam Hussein to abolish his weapons of mass destruction, Howard could foresee the inevitable. “By mid-​2002”, he later claimed, I had formed the view that if Iraq did not satisfactorily respond to international pressure about her WMD capacity, the Americans would almost certainly take military action against her, and that Australia would need to decide whether or not to join that action.17 For Howard, the decision was not difficult. When referring to Howard’s decision-​making, a veteran Australian journalist put it best: “Howard chose to become a 100 per cent US ally. It was fatuous to think he would support the United States in Afghanistan but avoid Iraq –​that would have been a violation of Howard’s history, character and faiths”.18 On 4 February 2003, Howard laid out his most explicit case yet before Australia’s Parliament justifying why military action would most likely be necessary. Reciting the long history of Saddam’s alleged defiance of the international community, and emphasising the importance of the UN having the will to back its resolutions requiring Saddam to give a full account of his weapons, Howard ended with further reflections on the importance of the American alliance. He stated, “Australia’s alliance with the United States has been and will remain an important element in the government’s decision-​making process on Iraq.” He added, “In an increasingly globalised and borderless world, the relationship between Australia and the United States will become more and not less important”.19 This did not overly persuade public opinion: a majority of Australians only supported military action if sanctioned by the UN Security Council.20 Howard shrewdly ensured that Australia’s commitment was modest –​ special forces, navy frigates, a small deployment of Royal Australian Air Force aircraft. He made clear that Australia would not involve itself heavily in the post-​invasion phase, citing regional responsibilities to East Timor and the Solomon Islands to justify Australia’s light post-​war footprint.21 This also ensured minimal backlash against the government as Canberra largely avoided the more protracted and deadly phase of the invasion. By 2004, Howard could talk triumphantly not just about his government’s record in strengthening military ties with the United States, but also its record in strengthening personal, institutional, and trade ties, culminating in the 2005 Australia-​ United States Free Trade Agreement. However, the broader strategic question was whether Australia could continue strengthening the American alliance with China’s rise becoming increasingly evident and Australia’s economic dependence on China particularly strong. Howard gave his government high marks in this regard: I count it as one of the greatest successes of this country’s foreign policy that we have simultaneously been able to strengthen our longstanding ties with the United States of America, yet at the same time continue to build a very close relationship with China.22 This balancing act: 122

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worked effectively so long as American and Chinese interests in the world were broadly aligned, and whilst China’s leaders adhered to Deng Xiaoping’s foreign policy dictum that China should ‘hide brightness, and nourish capabilities’ –​in other words, keep its head down whilst it built up its resources.23 During the 2000s, it was much easier to believe that China could transform into a “responsible stakeholder” in the liberal international system, that it could be “socialised” into the governing norms of the world order, and that its rise would be peaceful as the country began inching towards a democratic future.24 Although the issue of Taiwan always loomed large, scholars were providing a relatively upbeat picture of the future, concluding that balancing “Australia’s relationships” with America and China “should not pose undue difficulties”.25 This reflected the same level of optimism infusing many of Howard’s speeches. In 2001, with the exception of Taiwan, the issue of missile defence –​a big priority for the George W. Bush Administration –​ and Sino-​American differences over regional security architecture, Australia stood relatively well positioned so long as it adhered to the “one China policy” and avoided using ANZUS as an alliance against China. Accordingly, Beijing was showing “little sign of engaging in threatening behaviour in the contemporary regional security environment, apart from its posturing on Taiwan and perhaps its hard-​line territorial position on the Spratly Islands”.26 Other scholars were less convinced. In 2005, in one of the more pessimistic appraisals, it was stated: China’s aims are more ambitious than simply fitting into a US-​led international system. As China’s power and self-​confidence grows, it will probably become more overtly competitive with the US, and more reluctant to define its future as a subordinate element of a US-​led regional and global system.27 The best outcome, it was argued, would be a power-​sharing arrangement in the Asia-​Pacific between a rising China and a declining America, something in Australia’s best interests. However, the precise nature of this co-​operative relationship is hard to articulate and faces resistance within both China and America.28 One part is attributable to beliefs that with rising power comes rising ambitions, and another is also attributable to believing that America is unaccustomed to accommodation and prefers hegemonic leadership –​as most Great Powers that have attained this status would. Nevertheless, it is also a product of the peculiar structural and normative circumstances of China’s evolution as a state. As Henry Kissinger put it, When urged to adhere to the international system’s “rules of the game” and “responsibilities,” the visceral reaction of many Chinese –​including senior leaders –​has been profoundly affected by the awareness that China has not participated in making the rules of the system.29 Whether those rules relate to state sovereignty, freedom of navigation, economic development, or advancing human rights, China’s perspective is very different. This is not to say that co-​operation is impossible, but the relationship requires deft management. In the Howard era, much optimism existed regarding the balancing act that Australia would have to undertake in the years ahead. The 2000 Defence White Paper acknowledged that strategic environments can change quite suddenly, but nonetheless remained firm that globalisation and American primacy would shape the strategic environment for decades to come. Australia would fashion its defence policy in this “global context”.30 According to this document, 123

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Australia’s predominant interests extended outward, from defending Australia’s territorial integrity –​arguably the leading, if not primary goal, of defence planning since the 1970s –​to the possibility of more ambitious regional undertakings to preserve stability and fashion a benign security environment. The last objective in this paper was to strengthen the UN and American-​ led “global order” through the possible deployment of Australian forces around the globe.31 Ironically, when committing military resources after 9/​11, Howard’s government was consumed with the “war on terror” and deploying Australian troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, continuing a decades-​long trend of posting forces further afield to combat a host of transnational problems from state collapse and civil war to fighting terrorists and curbing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Policy-​makers couched Australian involvement as serving the “national interest”, strengthening the American alliance and reaping all the benefits this alliance supposedly brought. In short, Australian forces were fighting –​and eventually dying –​in countries nowhere near the country’s immediate neighbourhood. By the time Howard’s prime ministership ended in 2007, Sino-​Australian relations had reached new heights. With China spending tremendous sums on Australia’s minerals and agriculture, it was difficult to resist Howard’s conclusion that Australia was prospering through its economic relationship with China whilst strengthening its strategic alliance with the United States. Admittedly, Australia involved itself in the war in Iraq, the legal foundations of which were shaky at best. This commitment would decline in popularity, but Australia’s modest involvement shielded Howard from any lasting backlash as he won re-​election in 2004 –​ although by 2007, the close connexion between Howard and Bush started to become more of an electoral liability. In the Asia-​Pacific, the commodities boom promised to enrich Australia and foster habits of greater co-​operation with China. Chinese President Hu Jintao addressed Australia’s Parliament in October 2003, promising, “China and Australia will shape a relationship of all-​round cooperation that features a high degree of mutual trust, long-​term friendship and mutual benefit”.32 When Rudd defeated Howard at the polls in 2007, the Sino-​Australian relationship entered new territory. In a telling assessment: Between 1996 and 2006 Australian exports to China grew by 626 per cent, an average annual rate of 18 per cent. From 2003 the commodity boom began and by 2007 China had displaced Japan as Australia’s largest trading partner. Australia had to adapt to an important new reality: For the first time in its history, its major economic partner was not also part of the same alliance system.33 Howard’s successors would contend with this new reality but, in addition to operating in a more favourable climate, a realist edge to Howard’s foreign policy facilitated smoother relations with China. Howard’s government attempted to construct a “Sino-​Australian relationship independent of its ties with the United States and centred on the political and economic interests of Australia and China”.34 This supposedly included toning down criticisms of the authoritarian nature of China’s political system, supporting Chinese entry into the World Trade Organisation, and refusing to “join Washington in lobbying the European Union to maintain restrictions on weapons sales to China”.35 The governments following Howard faced a less favourable set of global circumstances and attempted to hold firm on the American alliance when structural pressures pushed Washington to retrench. They would also have to respond to a more challenging set of leadership dynamics in both China and the United States that made forging a consensus around national security policy a difficult undertaking. By the time Rudd became prime minister, the world was on the cusp of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Although few regions of the world were immune, that the 124

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crisis originated in the United States, due largely to decades of lax financial regulations and a banking culture of easy credit, encouraged some leading scholars to predict that America was entering a period of steady decline.36 Drained by the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the crisis seemed to confirm predictions that American unipolarity was unsustainable, reinforcing “the shift of global wealth –​and power –​from West to East” and questioning “the robustness of the economic and financial underpinnings of the United States’ primacy”.37 It was much easier to speak of the “rise of the rest”, which was meant to underscore the degree to which the rest of the world was catching up to the United States, especially in the “industrial, financial, educational, social and cultural” dimensions of national power.38 Australian foreign policy-​makers were more than aware of these debates. Whilst dealing with the global financial crisis marked the Rudd-​Gillard years –​an unprecedented wave of asylum seekers arriving by boat, mining tax and climate change debates, and the swift collapse of Rudd’s support within the party, seeing him replaced as prime minister in 2010 by his deputy, Gillard –​the broader goals of Australian diplomacy remained consistent during this period. Rudd, a former diplomat with postings in Sweden and China, was a committed internationalist who spoke fluent Mandarin and was very much within the broader Labor tradition emphasising Australian Middle Power activism and engagement with regional and international organisations. During the Rudd-​Gillard years, the Labor government chalked up several diplomatic successes attributable to its activism, including persuading the Obama Administration to use the G20, to which Australia belonged, as the dominant economic forum to address the financial crisis. Due to extensive lobbying efforts, the Labor government got Australia a seat as a non-​permanent member of the UN Security Council between 2013 and 2014. As one of his first acts as prime minister, Rudd also signed the Kyoto Protocol, the multilateral treaty requiring signatories, especially developed countries, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, Rudd called climate change the great “moral challenge of our generation”.39 His apology to indigenous Australians, taken from their families as part of the “Stolen Generations”, also presaged what many hoped would be a more humane approach to the most vulnerable, especially asylum seekers fleeing persecution. The 2009 and 2013 Defence White Papers tended to hedge their bets when it came to the broader strategic environment, declaring that the United States “will remain the most powerful and influential strategic actor”, even as the document spoke of a “multipolar world” in which states would have to remain “interdependent” and “co-​operate” if peace was to be maintained.40 The authors of the 2009 Defence White Paper stressed the possibility that the United States “might find itself preoccupied and stretched in some parts of the world such that its ability to shift attention and project power into other regions, when it needs to, is constrained”.41 Exactly the type of scenario the Rudd-​Gillard governments wished to avoid, they often acted as if Australia’s Middle Power responsibilities now required Australian policy-​ makers to remind the United States, reeling from two wars and a mass economic downturn, of its “exceptionalist” role in world affairs and Asia-​Pacific’s centrality to global stability and prosperity. Before addressing the United States Congress in 2013, Gillard told her staff that she would “do whatever she could with the voice she had to reinforce American self-​belief ”.42 Recalling American landings at Normandy in 1944 and her own experience watching the moon landing in 1969, she waxed lyrical about America’s promise in the world. When referring to the latter in her address, she argued, For my own generation, the defining image of America was the landing on the moon. My classmates and I were sent home from school to watch the great moment on television. I’ll always remember thinking that day: Americans can do anything.43 125

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For Gillard, this still apparently held true. By this stage, America had re-​committed to bolstering its presence in the Asia-​Pacific, and the fact that it was working with an Administration seemingly in deep agreement with the importance of this region buoyed the Labor government. In visiting Australia in November 2011, Obama had spoken about the “unbreakable alliance” with Australia and touted the much-​discussed “pivot” to Asia, claiming, “the United States has been, and always will be, a Pacific nation”.44 Likewise, in 2011, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, wrote a piece for Foreign Policy, with the lengthy title encapsulating Administration thinking: “America’s Pacific Century: The Future of Geopolitics will be Decided in Asia, not in Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States should be right at the center of the action”.45 Despite conservative rumblings and doubts about Obama’s commitment to American global leadership, his Administration was intent on winding down America’s post-​9/​11 wars, which still saw Australian forces fighting alongside the United States in Afghanistan, and recommitting to the Asia-​Pacific. The pivot to Asia saw the Obama Administration send more cruisers, destroyers, and other warships to this region and further strengthen the inter-​operability of regional forces by establishing new training facilities in places like Darwin, Australia –​which was the broader strategic context for Obama’s announcement that 2,500 American troops would pass through Darwin on a rotational basis.46 The president also presided over a shift in military doctrine, supporting the concept of “Air-​Sea” battle, which ultimately called for greater Air Force and Navy resources to combat China’s anti-​access area denial strategies.47 In addition to the increased military build-​up, Obama’s Administration also emphasised the importance of greater involvement in multilateral fora such as the East Asia Summit, promoted trade liberalisation through the Trans-​Pacific Partnership, and attempted to summon the force of international law and norms when China started pressing its claims in the South China Sea.48 Suffused by a hard edge, all of the policies in this shift aligned nicely with a Labor government eager, in Gillard’s words, to achieve a “peaceful, open, rules based Asian system. Effective regional institutions, respect for all countries of the region, large and small. Space for a rising China. A robust alliance between Australia and the United States”.49 In this period of Australian diplomacy, the Labor government made its choice, despite regular assurances that no choice was necessary: Australia would double down on its commitment to the American alliance, believing that American dominance would “provide the best prospects for stability and prosperity”.50 The answer to why Australian leaders were attempting to lock the United States into a greater regional commitment was simple: increasing nervousness about Chinese capabilities and intentions. First, although policy-​makers would continue to express hope that Sino-​American relations would continue evolving in a positive direction, an underlying anxiety existed about the possibility of growing Chinese assertiveness, supported by large investments in its military modernisation programmes. The 2009 Defence White Paper argued: A major power of China’s stature can be expected to develop a globally significant military capability befitting its size. But the pace, scope and structure of China’s military modernisation have the potential to give its neighbours cause for concern if not carefully explained, and if China does not reach out to others to build confidence regarding its military plans.51 This concern was not without foundation. China’s then military challenge to the United States was threefold. First, invest in missile technology that could deter American power projection capabilities in any dispute over Taiwan in the Western Pacific. Second, spend on 126

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intercontinental missile technology to give China a secure second-​strike nuclear capability; this could then undermine confidence in America’s nuclear umbrella –​a concern undoubtedly shared by Canberra as Australia has long dwelt under this umbrella. Finally, begin advancing Chinese naval capabilities to secure access to a vast and expanding global network of economic interests.52 As the 2009 White Paper put it, China’s military modernisation appeared to go “beyond the scope of what would be required for a conflict over Taiwan”.53 The second reason related more to specific cases that tended to aggravate Sino-​Australian relations and heightened concerns about Chinese intentions. Some of these related to human rights abuses such as the jailing of Stern Hu, an Australian business executive, and Australia granting visas to prominent Uighur human rights activists. Others related more to traditional security concerns pertaining to growing Chinese assertiveness in the South and East China Seas, and their shielding North Korea from international sanctions –​which included blocking UN Security Council action –​for the deaths of 46 South Koreans in 2010 when a North Korean submarine torpedoed the Cheonan, a South Korean naval vessel on a routine patrol.54 Apparently, Rudd was deeply frustrated with Beijing’s resistance when it came to agreeing to a binding set of targets at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference by which the international community was to make headway on a new climate change accord to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.55 According to WikiLeaks documents, Rudd apparently referred to himself as “a brutal realist on China” and, in conversations with Clinton, even suggested that using force against China in future may be necessary if the People’s Republic failed to integrate into the liberal international order.56 Regardless of whether this was accurate and reflected Rudd’s true feelings, a concerted attempt to bind America more tightly to the security of the region marked the Rudd-​Gillard years. Of course, when coming to foreign policy during this period, other issues often intruded into a crowded policy space. Challenges accumulated, leadership tensions boiled over, and important foreign policy questions became entangled in Australia’s domestic political debates. Nowhere was this more evident than on climate change and asylum seekers. After failing to pass his emissions trading scheme in the Australian Parliament in 2009, the result of both the Greens and Liberal-​National Coalition opposing it –​albeit for very different reasons –​Rudd invested his hopes in the Copenhagen Conference. When Copenhagen failed to bridge the divide between developed and developing countries on binding targets, he was personally shattered. According to a senior Cabinet minister, Wayne Swan: He [Rudd] had spent months in the lead up, doing all these midnight video things, he couldn’t stop talking about it, he was obsessed with it. I think he really thought he was going to play a critical role in bringing together the grand bargain. I honestly think he felt it was going to be his moment on the world stage.57 Critical observers argue that Rudd’s government entered a period of policy drift following Copenhagen, with Rudd unwilling to call a double dissolution election in early 2010 and fight for his climate change legislation.58 With his approval rating falling, Rudd lost the support of his party and Gillard replaced him in June 2010. Only just clinging to power with a minority government after the 2010 election, Gillard proposed a carbon-​pricing scheme for Australia’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases and succeeded in legislating this policy with Green Party support. However, the Liberal-​National coalition under Abbot’s conservative leadership was merciless in reframing this policy: “With audacity, he said the issue was not climate change but tax”.59 Hence, Abbott launched a three-​year assault on the policy, culminating with the Labor government’s defeat in 2013 and a swift repeal of the “carbon tax”. 127

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Likewise, dealing with asylum seekers could never avoid the politics of the moment. Rudd and Gillard operated in the shadow of the Howard years. Following the 9/​11 attacks, the Tampa, a Norwegian freighter, had rescued 433 Afghan asylum seekers and was being denied entry into Australian waters; Howard recast himself as a border protectionist willing to defend Australian sovereignty in an age of religious terror.60 The 2001 federal election in which the Howard government returned to office was built on the government’s reputation for “toughness” when it came to border protection. As Howard’s biographers, put it: “In spare but purposeful language Howard summed up his position on border protection: ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’ ”61 His policy for dealing with boat arrivals, known as the Pacific Solution, included offshore processing of refugees in places such as Nauru and Manus Island, the excision of Christmas Island from Australia’s migration zone, implementing temporary protection visas, and boat “turn-​backs”. When rising to the prime ministership, Rudd was eager to dismantle what many considered the overly draconian and inhumane policies of the Howard years, the most prominent of which was off-​shore processing. However, both Rudd and Gillard floundered badly on this issue as they faced a large influx of asylum seekers from countries such as Afghanistan –​where the Taliban was making a strong comeback –​and Sri Lanka –​beset by civil war. Rudd was deeply critical of the Pacific Solution, drawing on religious parables and claiming that it was not how we “should respond to the vulnerable stranger in our midst”.62 He was eager to avoid demonising asylum seekers, instead lambasting people smugglers for their cruel trade.63 Yet, over time, as the boats kept coming and domestic political pressures built, the Abbott-​led conservative opposition appropriated Rudd’s moral rhetoric. It argued that weakening the Howard government’s border protection regime was directly responsible for the inevitable rise in deaths at sea –​that the increase in asylum seekers was more attributable to “pull factors” –​government policy –​than “push factors” –​domestic conditions in countries like Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. Faced with these growing pressures, Rudd controversially re-​instituted offshore processing and exposed himself to accusations of moral hypocrisy. It also set in motion a characteristic tendency of how Australian governments dealt with asylum seekers through this whole period. It was relying on other countries, from Indonesia to East Timor, from Papua New Guinea to New Zealand, from Malaysia to the United States, to solve a problem that tears at the heart of Australian politics –​how to deal with irregular maritime arrivals in a humane way that avoids the intrusion of ugly racial politics. Many of the “deals” forged with neighbouring partners during the Rudd-​Gillard years collapsed for a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which was the Gillard government’s so-​called Malaysian Solution, a deal requiring Australia to accept 4,000 confirmed refugees in return for sending Malaysia 800 asylum seekers who would then have the UN process their applications.64 When Australia’s High Court struck down this deal –​with Malaysia not a signatory to the Refugee Convention, there would be insufficient safeguards relating to human rights –​the messiness of asylum seeker politics in Australia was palpable. It illustrated the complexities of navigating a more disaggregated and challenging world in which partisan domestic politics can pull leaders in directions at odds with their more noble instincts. Since 2013, Australia has had three conservative prime ministers starting with Abbott (2013–​ 2015). His government moved swiftly to negate the issue of asylum seekers, instituting a tough “turn back”-​the-​boats policy built on the already toughening stance of the Rudd government in 2013 before Labor was defeated at the polls. Abbott was more a national security conservative than a multilateralist speaking about the liberal order. His early tenure as prime minister was marked by his government’s handling of the MH17 disaster in which 38 Australians died after Russian-​backed forces in Eastern Ukraine shot down a civilian airliner, and the rise of 128

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the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria –​which saw a number of Australians travel to the Middle East to join the fight. Because of a series of domestic political missteps, Malcolm Turnbull, a party moderate who toned down some of the more alarmist rhetoric regarding global terror and urged greater action on climate change, replaced Abbott in 2015.65 Indeed, Abbott and Turnbull had previously traded blows over Rudd’s emissions trading scheme back in 2009, with Abbott uniting conservative forces at that time to win the opposition leadership after Turnbull supported Rudd’s reforms. Turnbull’s brief Prime Ministership was not without its successes, and his foreign minister, Julie Bishop, has received high marks for her performance in that role.66 However, just as asylum seekers were a point of vulnerability for the Labor Party, the Liberals remained deeply divided over climate change policy. The issue was incapable of solution outside a very partisan framework within the Liberal Party: conservative forces led by Abbott; and members of the Liberal coalition partner, the National Party, uniting to oppose whatever reforms Turnbull was keen to propose. Turnbull had initially agreed to legislate the Paris Climate Change targets, requiring Australia to reduce its total emissions to 26–​28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, and bundled this policy in a broader legislative package also aiming to regulate the supply of affordable electricity. However, by 2018, he faced a backbench revolt on emissions targets and flirted with the idea of simply regulating standards before finally postponing the introduction of the legislation altogether. All of this occurred to ward off an internal leadership challenge, which culminated in the rise to power of Morrison, Turnbull’s deputy. Australia’s revolving door of leadership was continuing. In the words of a well-​sourced journalist who provides a detailed account of this episode, “It was a mess. The differences in the party appeared irreconcilable”.67 It was almost as if where one stood on climate change was a litmus test for one’s credentials as an Australian conservative. Of course, none of this exists outside a global context. Xi’s rise to power by 2013 and Trump’s election in 2016 loomed large in Australian foreign policy. Morrison’s 2019 electoral victory confirmed his hold over the Liberal Party, but he inherited a challenging set of circumstances when it came to an increasingly assertive China and an equally unpredictable United States. Under Xi, much early optimism collapsed regarding China becoming a responsible stakeholder in the international system. His concentration of power, use of cyber technologies to suppress dissent, and brutal crackdown in Hong Kong, all suggested History was far from ending as autocratic governments around the world pushed back against the liberal order. In Australia, stories relating to Chinese interference at all levels of its society proliferated, including at universities, in commercial real estate, and even at the highest echelons of Australian power as MPs like Labor’s Sam Dastyari and the Liberal Gladys Liu had their loyalties called into question.68 Unsurprisingly, Australian attitudes towards China began hardening during this period. According to the Lowy Institute’s most recent annual poll, “trust in China” has reached its lowest point, “with 23% saying they trust China a great deal or somewhat ‘to act responsibly in the world.’ ”69 Much of this has led Australian policy-​makers, including Morrison, to acknowledge a “higher degree” of Sino-​American strategic competition, with bipartisan references of Australia entering a “new phase” in its relationship with China a constant refrain.70 The perimeters of this new phase are still being determined and recent Sino-​Australian interactions have been far from promising. Indeed, following the outbreak of COVID-​19 in China, Chinese authorities demonstrated a heightened sensitivity to any rhetoric or actions that could indict China, whether rightly or wrongly, for the pandemic and global suffering it has caused. When Morrison’s government was one of the first to call for a global enquiry into the origins of the health crisis in China, commentators generally divided between those thinking this should 129

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be an urgent priority given the scale of the crisis and those accusing Morrison’s ministry of “megaphone diplomacy” without doing the necessary groundwork to build a broader international coalition.71 Whilst China arguably had much to answer for regarding its initial response to the outbreak, with legitimate questions raised about how well international institutions were prepared for this global cataclysm, the Morrison government’s calls were complicated by the Americans. Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo were taking an increasingly hard-​line against China, culminating in unverified claims that the virus emerged in a Chinese laboratory –​claims that Morrison’s government, to its credit, did not echo.72 Still, global pandemic politics proved difficult for Canberra, and it once again underscored how difficult reconciling Australia’s security ties to the United States with its economic ties to China could be. Still, Beijing’s response to the Morrison government’s calls for an enquiry was swift and overblown. The Chinese ambassador to Australia, Cheng Jingye, threatened significant disruption to the economic relationship, questioning why tourists and students would visit Australia and stating that Chinese citizens might have second thoughts when it came to consuming Australian exports such as wine and beef.73 Chinese actions promptly followed the threats: an 80 per cent tariff on Australian barley and further restrictions on lobster, beef, timber, wine, and wheat. These actions hurt some Australian industries more than others, but they hurt China, too. In addition to China having to purchase these goods from other sources, there is a reputational cost as other countries considered their trading relationships with China: “Australia and China have no historical conflicts, no border disputes and Australia is the one with the trade surplus. If China can’t get along with Australia, who can it get along with?”74 Again, these disputes occur in a global context, simply comprising one more dimension of the liberal order under strain –​ free trade having once been an article of faith. In this context, the rise of Trumpism in America is important. No friend of the liberal international order, Trump provoked confrontation with American allies, coddled dictators from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-​Un, launched trade wars, subverted democracy at home and neglected it abroad, and withdrew America from international institutions such as the World Health Organisation when the world experienced the worst pandemic in over 100 years. As Hal Brands, the American diplomatic historian, put it during the early days of Trump’s presidency, “If Dean Acheson was ‘present at the creation’ of the American-​led system, Trump’s campaign rhetoric frequently lent the impression he intended to be present at the destruction”.75 The rise of Trump’s conservative populism, simmering beneath the calmer surface of Obama’s presidency, would have posed challenges for any Australian prime minister. If anything, Trump was committed to a form of illiberal hegemony –​unquestionable American military strength and a broader neglect, if not a wilful undermining, of the liberal norms to which elite policy-​makers regularly pay homage.76 Morrison sought constructive engagement with the Trump Administration, even if he somewhat embarrassingly attended what appeared to resemble a campaign rally in Ohio with the president in September 2019.77 Still, he also occasionally flirted with Trump era populist rhetoric. In a speech delivered to Australia’s Lowy Institute the next month, Morrison spoke about the primacy of “sovereign nation states” and the disconnect between “mainstream” and “elite opinion”. In clear echoes of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, he argued that Australia should avoid “any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often-​ill-​defined borderless global community. And, worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy”.78 However, whilst “negative globalism” was a jarring turn of phrase picked up in press reports of the speech, Morrison summoned themes in the Lowy address compatible with Australia’s more liberal internationalist tradition. He suggested an underlying nervousness about the ease with which some liberal democratic countries –​not 130

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mentioning America by name –​were losing faith in their own national creed and the broader liberal ethos: We will continue to bring clear objectives and enduring values to our international engagement. Freedom of thought and expression, of spirit and faith, of our humanity, including inalienable human rights. Freedom of exchange, free and open markets, free flow of capital and ideas. Freedom from oppression and coercion, freedom of choice. These have never been more important. And they are under threat, not just from the direct challenge of competing worldviews, but the complacency of western liberal democratic societies that owe their liberty and prosperity to these values.79 This was no coincidence. There has been a renewed emphasis on “values” and “rules-​ based orders” during the conservative years, reflected in speeches and key policy documents such as the 2016 Defence and 2017 Foreign Policy White Papers.80 Moreover, there is especially Canberra’s “enthusiastic re-​embrace of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Japan, India and the United States, and the associated commitment to a ‘free and open’ Indo-​Pacific region”.81 Whilst this might be true in relation to alliance partners acting as a counter-​weight to China, policies on asylum seekers and climate change have fallen well short from any liberal ideal. However, with Biden’s election, more pressure will inevitably be brought to bear on all countries to move towards “net-​zero” emissions well before the Paris Climate Accords target date of 2050. The central strategic dilemma of balancing security ties with the United States against economic engagement with China is as pressing as ever and more challenging as broader structural shifts have taken place. With Biden, Australia’s strong relationship with the United States will continue, but balanced against a better awareness of American domestic political trends. After all, support for the “liberal international order” remains more confined to the policy-​making elite than the average American citizen.82 Although proclaiming commitment to the liberal order, Biden will tread carefully when it comes to winding back Trump-​ era tariffs and entering into free trade agreements, lest voters in key battleground states be offended. As such, scholars such as Hugh White deserve some credit for encouraging a conversation about the extent to which America will remain militarily committed to the Asia-​ Pacific region. Nevertheless, in much writing on current trends, profound pessimism exists about the prospects of peace between the United States and China, and the difficult choices ahead for Australia’s foreign policy elite. If anything, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction, moving away from hopeful discussions of China’s integration into a rules-​based order and more towards the possibility of conflict. However, Australia is in no position to assume that conflict with China is inevitable. Good defence planning requires imagining worst-​case scenarios, but responsible statecraft requires leaders and diplomats, even in a complicated multipolar world without hegemonic leadership, to consider the basis of inter-​ state co-​operation. The hope is the current Australian government and those that follow will dedicate themselves to this task.

Notes 1 See Allan Gyngell and Michael Wesley, Making Australian Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2007), 214–​17.

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Brendon O’Connor and Danny Cooper 2 Matthew Cranston, “China hits 48.8pc of Australian Exports”, Australian Financial Review (4 August 2020). 3 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, “Australia’s Exports to China 2001 to 2011”: www.dfat. gov.au/​sites/​default/​files/​australias-​exports-​to-​china-​2001-​2011.pdf; idem, “Composition of Trade. Australia 2018–​2019”, www.dfat.gov.au/​sites/​default/​files/​cot-​2018-​19.pdf. 4 See Lloyd Cox and Brendon O’Connor, “That ‘Special Something’: The U.S.-​Australia Alliance, Special Relationships, and Emotions”, Political Science Quarterly, 135/​3(2020), 409–​38. 5 “Full Transcript of Trump’s Phone Call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull”, Guardian (28 January 2017): www.theguardian.com/​us-​news/​2017/​aug/​04/​full-​transcript-oftrumps-​phone-​call-​with-​australian-​prime-​minister-​malcolm-​turnbull. 6 See U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Australia, “Joint Statement by United States President Donald J Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull” (23 February 2018): https://​au.usemba​ ssy.gov/​joint-​statem​ent-​uni​ted-​sta​tes-​presid​ent-​don​ald-​j-​trump-​aus​tral​ian-​prime-​minis​ter-​malc​olm-​ turnb​ull. 7 See Parliament of Australia, “Australia’s Defence Relations with the United States –​Appendix B (The ANZUS Treaty)”: www.aph.gov.au/​Parliamentary_​Business/​Committees/​ Joint/​Completed_​ Inquiries/​jfadt/​usrelations/​appendixb. 8 See Nick Bisley, “ ‘An Ally for all the Years to Come’: Why Australia is Not a Conflicted US Ally”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 67/​4(2013), 403–​18. 9 “Transcript of the Prime Minister the Hon John Howard MP address to joint meeting of the US Congress”: https://​pmtran​scri​pts.pmc.gov.au/​rele​ase/​tra​nscr​ipt-​12906. 10 See A. Broinowski, Allied and Addicted (Carlton North, 2007); J.A. Camilleri, Australian-​American Relations –​The Web of Dependence (South Melbourne, 1980); H. McQueen, Gallipoli to Petrov: Arguing with Australian History (London, 1984); D. Phillips, Ambivalent Allies: Myth and Reality in the Australian American Relationship (Ringwood, 1988). 11 See Michael Sexton, War for the Asking: Australia’s Vietnam Secrets (Ringwood, 1981); Coral Bell, Dependent Ally: A Study in Australian Foreign Policy (Melbourne, 1988); Peter Edwards, A Nation at War: Australian Politics, Society and Diplomacy during the Vietnam War (Sydney, 1997). 12 Hugh White, How to Defend Australia (Carlton, 2019), 76. 13 Lloyd Cox and Brendon O’Connor, “Hound Dog Not Lapdog: Australian Participation in the US-​led Wars in Vietnam and Iraq”, Australian Journal of Political Science, 47/​2(2012), 181–​82. 14 Cited in Greg Sheridan, The Partnership: The Inside Story of the US-​Australian Alliance under Bush and Howard (Sydney, 2006), 38. 15 For a good discussion on these types of wars, which also helps distinguish between them, see Dan Reiter, “Exploding the Powder Keg Myth: Preemptive Wars Almost Never Happen”, International Security, 20/​2(1995), 5–​34; Marc Trachtenberg, “Preventive War and U.S Foreign Policy”, Security Studies, 16/​1(2007), 1–​31. 16 John Howard, Lazarus Rising: A Personal and Political Biography (Sydney, 2010), 423. 17 Ibid., 427–​28. 18 Paul Kelly, The March of Patriots: The Struggle for Modern Australia (Melbourne, 2009), 580. 19 “Howard’s Statement to Parliament on Iraq”, Sydney Morning Herald (4 February 2003): www.smh. com.au/​world/​middle-​east/​howards-​statement-​to-​parliament-​on-​iraq-​20030204-​gdg7v5.html. 20 See M. Goot and B. Goldsmith, “Australia”, in R. Sobel, B. Barratt and P. Furia, eds., Public Opinion & International Intervention: Lessons from the Iraq War (Dulles, VA, 2012), 47–​68. 21 Howard, Lazarus Rising, 435. 22 Cited in Allan Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment: Australia in the World since 1942 (Victoria, 2017), 288. 23 Ibid., 288. 24 He first made this claim in 2005. For his current reflections, see Robert Zoellick, “Can American and China be Stakeholders?” (11 December 2019): www.brunswickgroup.com/​bob-​zoellick-​can-​ america-​and-​china-​be-​stakeholders-​i14750/​. 25 Stuart Harris, “China-​US Relations: A Difficult Balancing Act for Australia?”, Global Change, Peace & Security, 17/​3(2005), 238. 26 William Tow and Leisa Hay, “Australia, the United States and a ‘China Growing Strong’: Managing Conflict Avoidance”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 55/​1(2001), 49. 27 Hugh White, “The Limits to Optimism: Australia and the Rise of China”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 59/​4(2005), 472. 28 Ibid., 474–​75.

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Australian Foreign Policy: 21st Century 29 H.A. Kissinger, World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (London, 2014), 225. 30 Defence White Paper 2000: www.defence.gov.au/​publications/​wpaper2000.pdf. 31 Ibid., 29–​45. 32 “Full Text –​Hu’s Speech”, Sydney Morning Herald (24 October 2003): www.smh. com.au/​national/​ full-​text-​hus-​speech-​20031024-​gdhnfs.html. 33 Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment, 287. 34 Michael Wesley, The Howard Paradox: Australian Diplomacy in Asia 1996–​2006 (Sydney, 2007), 126–​27. 35 Ibid., 127. 36 For another interesting discussion on Obama’s strategy, see Adam Quinn, “The Art of Declining Politely: Obama’s Prudent Presidency and the Waning of American Power”, International Affairs, 87/​ 4(2011), 803–​24. 37 Christopher Layne, “This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana”, International Studies Quarterly, 56/​1(2012), 203. 38 Fareed Zakaria, The Post-​American World (NY, London, 2008), 4–​5. 39 Kevin Rudd, “Transcript of the Opening Remarks to the National Climate Change Summit Parliament House, Canberra” (31 March 2007): https://​parli​nfo.aph.gov.au/​parlI​nfo/​downl​oad/​media/​press​rel/​ H4OM6/​upload​_​bin​ary/​h4o​m62.pdf. 40 Fitzgibbon, J., & Australia. Dept. of Defence (2009), Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific century: Force 2030: Defence white paper 2009. Dept. of Defence, 32. 41 Ibid., 32. 42 Cited in Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment. 43 “Transcript of Julia Gillard’s Speech to Congress”, SBS News (23 August 2013): www.sbs.com.au/​ news/​transcript-​of-​julia-​gillard-​s-​speech-​to-​congress. 44 “Remarks by President Obama to the Australian Parliament”: https://​obam​awhi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​ the-​press-​off​i ce/​2011/​11/​17/​rema​rks-​presid​ent-​obama-​aus​tral​ian-​par​liam​ent. 45 See Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century: The Future of Geopolitics Will Be Decided in Asia, not in Afghanistan Or Iraq, And The United States Should Be Right at the Center of the Action”, Foreign Policy (11 October 2011): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2011/​10/​11/​ameri​cas-​paci​fic-​cent​ury/​. 46 Nina Silove, “The Pivot before the Pivot: U.S. Strategy to Preserve the Power Balance in Asia”, International Security, 40/​4(2016), 45–​88. 47 Matteo Dian, “The Pivot to Asia: Air-​Sea Battle and contested commons in the Asia-​Pacific region”, Pacific Review, 28/​2(2015), 237–​57. 48 For an insider account that explores these themes, see Jeffrey Bader, Obama and China’s Rise: An Insider’s Account of America’s Asia Strategy (Washington DC, 2012), 413. 49 Cited in Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment, 317. 50 Bisley, “An Ally for the Years to Come”, 404. 51 Defence White Paper 2009, 34. 52 Aaron Friedberg, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (NY, 2011), 215–​45. 53 Defence White Paper 2009, 34. 54 Bisley, “An Ally for all the Years to Come”, 413. 55 Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment, 339. 56 Geoffrey Garrett, “Rudd’s Chinese Whispers Will Have Been Heard Loud and Clear”, Sydney Morning Herald (7 December 2010): www.smh.com.au/​politics/​federal/​rudds-​chinese-​whispers-​will-​have-​ been-​heard-​loud-​and-​clear-​20101206-​18mpa.html. 57 Cited in Paul Kelly, Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation (Victoria, 2014), 272. 58 Ibid., 269–​94. 59 Ibid., 270. 60 See David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory (London, 2003). 61 Wayne Errington and Peter Van Onselen, John Winston Howard: The Biography (Victoria, 2007), 309. 62 Kevin Rudd, “Faith in Politics”, The Monthly (October 2006): www.themonthly.com.au/​ monthly-​essays-​kevin-​rudd-​faith-​politics-​-​300#mtr. 63 Katja Cooper, “The Rudd/​ Gillard Government, Asylum Seekers, and the Politics of Norm Contestation” (PhD Dissertation, Griffith University, 2019). 64 Gyngell, Fear of Abandonment, 334–​38. 65 Ibid., 330–​33.

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Brendon O’Connor and Danny Cooper 66 For balanced analysis, see Susan Harris Rimmer, “Foreign Policy under the Coalition: Turbulent Times, Dwindling Investments”, in Mark Evans, Michelle Grattan and Brendan McCaffrie, eds., From Turnbull to Morrison: The Trust Divide (Victoria, 2019), 59–​72. 67 Niki Savva, Plots and Prayers: Malcolm Turnbull’s Demise and Scott Morrison’s Ascension (Victoria, 2019), 109. 68 For a review of these events, see Rory Medcalf, “Australia and China: Understanding the Reality Check”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 73/​2(2019), 109–​18. 69 Lowy Institute Poll 2020 (24 June 2020): https://​poll.lowyin​stit​ute.org/​rep​ort/​. 70 Benjamin Day, “Issues in Australian Foreign Policy July to December 2019”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 66/​2(2020), 310. 71 For an excellent overview of this period, see Daniel Baldino, “Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to June 2020”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 66/​4(2020), 646–​62. 72 David Dziedzic, “Scott Morrison Distances Himself from Donald Trump’s Claim Coronavirus Originated in a Wuhan Lab”, ABC News (1 May 2020): www.abc.net.au/​news/​2020-​05-​01/​scott-​ morrison-​donald-​trump-​coronavirus-​wuhan-​lab-​claim/​12207322. 73 Joshua McDonald, “Australia and China Trade Blows over Calls for a Coronavirus Inquiry”, The Diplomat (8 May 2020): https://​thed​iplo​mat.com/​2020/​05/​austra​lia-​and-​china-​trade-​blows-​over-​ calls-​for-​a-​coro​navi​rus-​inqu​iry/​. 74 Melissa Tyler, “It Might Look like China Is Winning the Trade War, but Its Import Bans are a diplomacy fail”, The Conversation, (10 February 2021): https://​thec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​it-​might-​look-​like-​ china-​is-​winn​ing-​the-​trade-​war-​but-​its-​imp​ort-​bans-​are-​a-​diplom​acy-​fail-​154​558. 75 Hal Brands, American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump (Washington, DC, 2018). 76 On Trump’s commitment to primacy, see Peter Harris, “Why Trump Won’t Retrench: The Militarist Redoubt in American Foreign Policy”, Political Science Quarterly, 133/​4(2018–​2019), 611–​40. 77 Day, “Issues”, 306–​10. 78 “The 2019 Lowy Lecture: The Prime Minister Scott Morrison”, Lowy Institute (3 October 2019): www. lowyinstitute.org/​publications/​2019-​lowy-​lecture-​prime-​minister-​scott-​morrison. 79 Ibid. 80 Benjamin Reilly, “The Return of Values in Australian Foreign Policy”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 74/​2(2020), 116–​23; Defence White Paper 2016: www1.defence.gov.au/​about/​publications/​ 2016-​defence-​white-​paper; Foreign Policy White Paper 2017: https://​www.dfat.gov.au/​sites/​defa​ult/​ files/​2017-​fore​ign-​pol​icy-​white-​paper.pdf. 81 Reilly “The Return of Values”, 117. 82 Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz, “Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States”, International Security, 32/​2(2007), 7–​44, provides an excellent snapshot of the growing party polarisation that led to the eventual emergence of Trumpism.

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11 CHANGING CONTOURS OF INDIAN DIPLOMACY UNDER NARENDRA MODI Harsh V. Pant

Indian foreign policy has undergone a remarkable transformation since Narendra Modi’s government came to office in May 2014, something reflected in the academic and policy debates that have emerged in the last few years.1 No prime minister before has generated the kind of voluminous literature that Modi’s foreign policy has in such a short span, forcing even critics to concede that something has indeed shifted on the diplomatic front. The Modi government has been successful in leaving its unique imprint in a short period, making clear its objective of positioning India as a leading global player. Instead of the empty talk on non-​ alignment, focus has been on building strong partnerships with like-​minded states to enhance India’s economic and diplomatic profile. From giving greater operational autonomy to the military in border areas to re-​envisioning the country’s defence policy as an integral part of diplomacy, the Indian strategic evolution has entered uncharted waters in the Modi era. In the last few years, the Indian government’s biggest foreign policy and national security success has been in keeping its interlocutors on tenterhooks. The unpredictability of a nation whose responses had become all too easy to predict over the last few decades has generated a new sense of expectation. From Pakistan to the United States, from Africa to the Association of South East Asian Nations, there is now an expectation that the Modi ministry is serious and there cannot be business as usual. This sense of drive and purpose, distinctively lacking in the recent past, has become the hallmark of Modi’s India. This chapter examines the rapidly evolving Indian diplomatic style as well as substantive shifts under Modi’s premiership. Modi has become India’s best ambassador, marketing Brand India to the wider world rather imaginatively. His unabashed selling of India as an investment destination has been one of the most striking aspects of his global outreach. In this, he is more in tune with the changing nature of global diplomacy than his predecessors and most of Delhi’s foreign policy bureaucracy and commentators. One of the most important roles that leaders of major economies are expected to play today is that of a salesman. From China’s Xi Jinping to France’s Emmanuel Macron, from Japan’s Fumio Kishida to Britain’s Boris Johnson, the first order of government business is usually to sell their countries as welcoming places for business. Modi is a salesman par excellence. Pledging a stable and transparent tax regime, he has busily wooed global investors, arguing that development is “not a mere political agenda” but an “article of faith” for his government.2 Seeking international support to achieve the objectives crucial

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-14

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for growth, he has also been underlining that his government means business. “India is a now changed country … our regulatory regime is much more transparent, responsive and stable”, Modi has suggested even as he promised investors that his government is working on a “war footing” to improve further the business environment.3 Long wanting to hear such ideas from Indian leaders, global investors today see a leader with a mandate to deliver on his commitments; they seem impressed. As prime minister, Modi must sell India effectively to an audience waiting to hear a positive story. Critics notwithstanding, a large part of diplomacy today involves selling a national narrative that inspires confidence in foreign observers about one’s future. If any political leader in India can do that effectively today, it is Modi. The Indian story is much more attractive today than it was in 2014, with Modi best positioned to narrate it to a largely receptive audience. Towards this end, he has masterfully used India’s soft power assets. Previous Indian governments had also recognised to some extent the value of soft power to further India’s foreign policy goals, but their attempts were largely ad hoc. Under Modi, India is taking a strategic approach in using its soft-​power resources to enhance the nation’s image abroad. During his travels, he promotes India’s Bollywood, Sufi music, and yoga, as well as a shared heritage in art, architecture, cuisine, and democratic values. It is too early to assess if these efforts are having any substantive impact in meeting the nation’s foreign policy objectives but, for the first time, a coherent effort is underway to raise India’s brand value abroad. It is likely to have significant implications for the conduct of Indian diplomacy and the broader role of India in global politics in the coming years. The Modi government’s attempt to leverage soft power seeks to position New Delhi at a critical juncture whilst much of the world continues to regard India as a multicultural democracy with a largely benign international influence as well as an emerging economy with the potential of becoming hugely successful.4 Cultural links with East and Southeast Asia as well as the Middle East and Central Asia underscore India’s centuries-​old role as the font of various religions and cultures. Buddhism spread from India to China and beyond; Hinduism travelled to Southeast Asia; and Islam linked India to Central Asia. His words about India’s aspirations for a permanent seat on the United Nations [UN] Security Council underscored his ability to link India’s past effectively with its aspirations. Where previous Indian governments had been diffident in highlighting the contribution of Indians to the two World Wars, Modi paid a tribute to about 10,000 Indians who died fighting alongside their French counterparts in the First World War, underlining the fact that Indians have been sacrificing their lives for world peace and stability for over a century. As such, India’s place on the Security Council is the nation’s right. This is an argument needed making long before, but previous governments were reluctant to take it up for ideological reasons. Modi’s impressive outreach to the Indian diaspora is also key to his approach to foreign affairs. As the first prime minister to view the diaspora as critical to Indian economic growth, he unsurprisingly reaches out to the Indian community in all the countries he visits. At the 2017 Pravasi Bharatiya Divas in Bengaluru, Modi announced that India is moving from “brain drain to brain gain”, making his vision clear that “there is only one dream: Bharatiyata [Indian-​ ness]”.5 The Modi government’s policies aim at encouraging the diaspora to contribute to India’s growth through philanthropy, knowledge transfers, innovation investments, and assistance in other development projects. If the Indian political leadership succeeds in cultivating the diaspora and giving it a sense of a stake in the Indian economic regeneration, it will pay dividends in many ways. Indian soft power has worked its magic before without much government support. The most notable case is Bollywood –​the world’s largest film industry in terms of the number of films produced. Large parts of the world from the Middle East and North Africa to Central 136

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Asia watch and enjoy Indian movies and music. Yet Bollywood trails Hollywood in its global reach.6 Previous governments created structures like a new Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs in 2004 to tap into the growing influence of Indian expatriates and, in 2006, a public policy division within the Ministry of External Affairs to enhance cultural exchanges in support of official diplomatic engagements. Yet, so far, given India’s many soft-​power advantages, little evidence exists to suggest that it has made a dent in global public opinion. According to a 2013 Pew Global Attitudes survey, less than one-​half –​46 per cent –​of Americans had a favourable impression of India. Compared to the British Council, Alliance Française, and even the Confucius Institutes, the performance of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, with centres in about 35 countries and aimed at promoting Indian culture, has been lackadaisical. India has failed to build its brand value abroad. Recognising this problem, Modi’s government seems keener than its predecessors were to leverage India’s multifaceted soft-​power resources from spiritualism, yoga, and culture to its democratic ethos in service of Indian interests. In diplomatic engagements around the world, even as economic turmoil in the West is generating apprehensions about the value of democracy, the Modi government consistently highlights India’s democratic credentials and the virtues of a democratic political order. Even when visiting Mongolia, Modi praised the nation as the “new bright light of democracy”7 in the world, marking a distinction between the democratic values of India as well as Mongolia and those of authoritarian China.8 The effort to leverage soft power occurs to better position New Delhi at a critical juncture. Modi wants to not only revive national pride in the country’s ancient values, but also enhance India’s hard power by using its soft-​power advantages. India today is more confident about projecting its past heritage as well as its contemporary values onto the global stage, which can only be good news for a global order in dire need of positive exemplars. An economically successful, pluralistic democracy is the best antidote to authoritarianism and extremism rampant around the world. But for this to happen, India will have to learn to meld its soft and hard power more effectively, something missing in the past. To be clear, India’s foreign policy matrix has not lacked the use of hard power. By contributing nearly 100,000 military, police, and civilian personnel as part of more than 45 operations so far, India has played a vital role in UN peacekeeping activities. Along with Bangladesh and Pakistan, it has been one of the top three sources of peacekeeping contributions. Many important UN operations like those in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea-​Ethiopia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan saw deployments of Indian troops and police personnel, despite significant domestic demands on Indian security forces to tackle insurgencies in different parts of the homeland. Like other contributing states, without undermining the neutrality of UN blue helmets, India has also faced the dilemma of using force when the ground situation warranted. Whilst not shying away from undertaking robust measures, India has, as a matter of principle, emphasised the danger of mixing traditional features of peacekeeping –​like non-​use of force and non-​partisanship –​with peace enforcement and peacemaking, as tended to happen during the post-​Cold War phase.9 Whilst India has been a devoted supporter of the UN globally, until the 1980s New Delhi tended to resist intervention within South Asia by forces from outside the region. Instead, it has relied more heavily on its own use of force. New Delhi viewed Western intervention in the region as unwelcoming to its interests although it could not keep Great Powers out of its periphery. In one estimation of its regional security doctrine, India strongly opposes outside intervention in the domestic affairs of other South Asian nations, especially by outside powers whose goals are perceived to be inimical 137

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to Indian interests. Therefore, no South Asian government should ask for outside assistance, it should seek it from India. A failure to do so will be considered anti-​India.10 The non-​intervention principle has always been one of the main official strands of Indian foreign policy. Historically, even as it berated the West for interfering in what it perceived to be internal matters of other sovereign states, New Delhi has never been shy of intervening in what it considered its own “sphere of influence”. In 1961, when justifying the use of force to evict Portugal from Goa, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, underlined that “any attempt by a foreign power to interfere in any way with India is a thing which India cannot tolerate, and which, subject to her strength, she will oppose”.11 Even though India’s version of the Monroe Doctrine, involving spheres of influence, has not been fully successful, it nevertheless “has been an article of faith for many in the Indian strategic community”.12 When it comes to the sub-​continent, Indian policy-​makers often suggest that New Delhi retains a special role in maintaining peace and order. This, not surprisingly, has shaped the perception of India’s immediate neighbours in South Asia about its often-​hypocritical commitment to the principle of non-​intervention, as most have found themselves at the receiving end of Indian interventions. In consonance with this worldview, India has used coercive policies in its own vicinity to assert its regional supremacy. New Delhi’s failed counter-​insurgency campaign in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 1990, its 1988 deployment of Special Forces to prevent an attempted coup in the Maldives, and the 1989–​1990 trade blockade of Nepal after Kathmandu’s decision to buy weapons from China underscore this tendency. Despite its historical rhetoric globally, India had used coercion in dealing with its neighbours quite frequently, although after the Sri Lanka debacle, it has been averse to hard power intervention even in its own neighbourhood. With over 1.3 million men and women in uniform, and an additional one million reserves, the Indian armed forces constitute the third-​largest volunteer war-​fighting force in the world. Sustained rates of high economic growth over the last decade have given New Delhi greater resources to devote to its defence requirements. In the last few years, India has emerged as one of the largest arms buyers in the global market, accounting for 15 per cent of global arms imports from 2010 to 2014. Though India’s arms imports declined by 33 per cent between 2011–​15 and 2016–​20, it remains the world’s second-​largest importer after Saudi Arabia.13 In the initial years after independence in 1947, India’s defence expenditure as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product [GDP] hovered around 1.8 per cent. This changed with the 1962 war with China, in which India suffered a humiliating defeat due to its lack of defence preparedness. Over the next 25 years, defence expenditures eventually stabilised around 3 per cent of GDP. Over the past two decades, military spending has been around 2.75 per cent, but since India has been experiencing significantly higher rates of economic growth over the last decade compared to any other time in its history, the overall resources allocated to its defence needs has grown significantly. As a result, India has asserted its military profile in the past ten years, setting up military facilities abroad and patrolling the Indian Ocean to counter piracy and protect lines of communication. As its strategic horizons broaden, military acquisition is shifting from land-​based systems to airborne refuelling systems, long-​range missiles, and other means of power projection, with all three services articulating the need to be able to operate beyond India’s borders.14 Whilst all major Powers historically have demonstrated an ability to use the military skilfully as an effective instrument of national policy, India is unclear under what conditions it would be willing to use force to defend its interests. Even the decision by the Indian Navy to patrol the Gulf of Aden in 2008 was not easy, with the civilian leadership dragging its feet in granting these forces permission to tackle piracy. New Delhi remained hesitant to expand its military 138

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presence in Afghanistan, withholding weapons from the Afghan government despite repeated requests, even when it was evident that India’s soft power was not yielding any dividends.15 The Indian armed forces remain obsessed with China and Pakistan, whilst civilian leaders lack a substantive understanding of the role of force in foreign policy. India’s reluctance to evolve a more sophisticated understanding of power –​and military power in particular –​will continue to underline the strategic diffidence associated with Indian foreign and security policy. India’s ambivalence about power and its use has resulted in a situation where, even as India’s economic and military capabilities have gradually expanded, it has failed to evolve a commensurate strategic agenda and requisite institutions to mobilise and use its resources most optimally. This has most significantly affected the role that the Indian military has come to play in the nation’s strategic decision-​making. There are signs, however, that Modi’s government is beginning a new approach to India’s power conundrum. The National Security Advisor, Ajit Doval, suggesting, “India has a mentality to punch below its weight”, argues, “we [India] should not punch below our weight or above our weight, but improve our weight and punch proportionately”. Underlining that a “nation will have to take recourse to all means to protect itself ”, he has contended, “if you are not able to exercise power, it is as good as not having it”.16 With this, Doval is challenging India’s traditional wariness in the use of power in pursuit of national objectives and its failure to harness power effectively. India’s friends and enemies have long stopped taking India seriously as a military Power.17 A nation’s vital interests, in the ultimate analysis, can only be preserved and enhanced if the nation has sufficient power capabilities at its disposal. But India must also have a willingness to employ the required forms of power in pursuit of those interests. India’s lack of an instinct for power is most palpable in military policy where, unlike other major global Powers of the past and present, India has failed to master the creation, deployment, and use of its military instruments to support its national objectives.18 An ability to monopolise the use of force and operate effectively in an international strategic environment underpins a state’s legitimacy, and India has lacked clarity on the relationship between employing force and its strategic priorities. The Modi government has indicated that it is willing to take some serious steps toward rectifying some of these problems and rethink the military’s role as an instrument of foreign and security policy. From giving greater operational autonomy to the military in border areas to re-​envisioning India’s defence policy as integral to diplomacy, India’s strategic evolution has entered uncharted waters. It is now undertaking military exercises with like-​minded states in Asia and beyond, including America, Japan, Australia, and Vietnam, something thought controversial in light of China’s reservations in the past. New Delhi has decided to move ahead and deliver Indian Air Force attack helicopter gunships to Kabul to buttress Indo-​Afghan security ties. Co-​operating with the United States, India is wading into the South China Sea dispute between China and its neighbours by calling for “freedom of navigation in international waters, the right of passage and over-​flight, unimpeded commerce and access to resources in accordance with recognized principles of international law including the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea”.19 Defence and security co-​operation is now integral to India’s outreach to its partners from Europe to Africa, and a newfound focus exists on making India less reliant on foreign sources for military hardware. India’s rise as a major global player will depend on the ability of its policy-​makers to leverage their hard power more effectively than before.20 For a long time, New Delhi’s use of hard power lacked a clear sense of purpose. At a time when Indian interests are becoming global in nature, India had to update its approach, even if in fits and starts. It is the civilian leadership’s responsibility to determine a credible policy on the use of armed forces, and that of the military 139

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leadership to provide them with sound guidance. India has always been a nation of great ambition. It has not been clear, however, if the Indian elites understand the implications of their nation’s rise. India can no longer afford to sit on the side-​lines of unfolding global events that impinge directly on its vital interests. What is the point of building muscle and continuing to shy away from a fight? The Modi government seems to be more aware of the answer than its predecessors were. Nevertheless, it is too early to assess if the initial steps taken will be enough to alter India’s strategic evolution. A significant strand of the Modi foreign policy has been a careful nurturing of relations with major Powers and deft management of an ever-​shifting global and regional balance of power in Asia and beyond. At a time when China’s rise is a reality and America’s domestic debate about its foreign commitments is spilling over onto the global landscape, Modi’s government has managed to carve out a robust relationship with the United States, even as it stabilised ties with Moscow.21 This might not be easy to sustain, as warming Sino-​Russian relations will have serious implications. Nevertheless, New Delhi has so far succeeded in conveying its concerns to all major Powers with a degree of confidence absent in the past. India’s engagement with Europe, too, is now more forward and devoid of the unnecessary rhetoric of perpetual inferiority. There is a clear message that India will act on its own terms and conditions and can play the role of a balancer in Asia. Modi’s regional outreach has also made a difference in this regard. In its own neighbourhood in the Indo-​Pacific, India is now perceived as a credible balancer as China’s maritime assertiveness has grown, creating space for Indian diplomacy. New Delhi’s outreach to like-​ minded states in the region such as Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia has become substantive. Gone is the past diffidence when India trod carefully for fear of offending China. The government wants to enhance its footprint in Africa, Latin America, and West Asia to underscore the distinct advantages that India possesses in comparison to China’s more mercantile approach. The focus is now on delivering the commitments that India has made to other regions, a diplomatic dimension where India lags considerably behind China and other major Powers. Modi’s shift away from Nehru’s legacy is a significant departure from New Delhi’s traditional foreign policy approach. Indian policy-​makers’ fixation with non-​alignment has remained a central component of Indian identity in global politics.22 Although having to accept help from the two global Powers throughout the Cold War –​notably, the United States in 1962 against China and the Soviet Union in 1971 against Pakistan –​the country has preserved a facade of non-​alignment, at least rhetorically. The dominance of the Congress Party in Indian politics and intellectual life meant that as late as 2012, Indian strategic thinkers struggled to move beyond this approach with the release of “Non-​alignment 2.0”, a policy report that pulled the post-​Cold War threads of strategic autonomy into a full revival of Nehru’s non-​alignment for modern times.23 Still, Modi’s foreign secretary, Vijay Gokhale, asserted in 2019, “India has moved on from its non-​aligned past. India is today an aligned state –​but based on issues”. Underscoring that it is time India became part of the rule-​making process, Gokhale argued, “In the rules-​based order, India would have a stronger position in multilateral institutions”.24 The foreign secretary was categorical that the role New Delhi manages to play in the G-​20 and Indo-​Pacific future would largely shape India’s future, signalling clearly the changing priorities of Indian foreign policy establishment. The reason that Gokhale’s assertions did not raise many eyebrows is that since coming to office, Modi’s government has gradually, but decisively, shifted the discourse on Indian foreign policy without many in the Indian strategic community even recognising this change. Critics of the government have continued to be sceptical about anything substantive changing even as the 140

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government has continued to re-​define Indian foreign policy priorities –​both in substance and style. Whilst delivering the Fullerton lecture at the International Institute for Strategic Studies on “India, the United States and China” in 2015, Gokhale’s predecessor, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, had suggested that today’s India “aspire[s]‌to be a leading power, rather than just a balancing power” and, consequently, was willing “to shoulder greater global responsibilities”.25 He took his cue from Modi, who soon after taking office challenged his senior diplomats “to help India position itself in a leading role, rather than [as] just a balancing force, globally”.26 New Delhi faces a new set of challenges, in particular the rise of China. Indian policy-​makers confront a conundrum in calculating the benefits and risks of an increasingly assertive neighbour and a network of alliances with like-​minded countries. With considerable pragmatism, Modi has gradually but decisively shifted Indian foreign policy in directions that few would have dared try before. Whilst sections of the Indian intellectual establishment retain a somewhat reflexive anti-​Americanism, Modi has used his decisive electoral mandate to carve a new partnership with the United States to harness its capital and technology for his domestic development agenda. Moreover, he is not ambivalent about positioning India to challenge China’s growing regional might and assertiveness. With this in mind, he signed the bilateral Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement with the United States in 2016 for facilitating logistical support, supplies, and services between American and Indian militaries on a reimbursable basis and providing a framework to govern such exchanges. The signing of the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement in 2018, enabling transfer of secure communication equipment to enhance inter-​operability, followed. Modi is also pursuing strong partnerships with American allies in the region including Japan, Australia, and Vietnam. He has taken a strong position on the South China Sea dispute in favour of Vietnam and the Philippines, as well as expanded Indo-​American bilateral naval exercises to include Japan. India’s quadrilateral engagement with the United States, Japan, and Australia is beginning to take shape. As Modi surmised at the end of his address to the American Congress in June 2016, the “constraints of the past are behind us” and “there is a new symphony in play”.27 As this new symphony would have been impossible without a master conductor, Modi deserves the credit for this remarkable transformation in Indo-​American ties. From its beginning, Modi’s government has been a strong proponent of a “Neighbourhood First” policy, resulting in a significant outreach to neighbours as well as recalibrating New Delhi’s approach vis-​à-​vis Pakistan.28 A dramatic shift in South Asia’s strategic landscape came when Indian Army Special Forces took out several suspected terror camps across the volatile “Line of Control” in Kashmir; it came in response to a September 2016 attack on an Indian army post in Kashmir by Pakistan-​based terrorists. The Indian response came almost 11 days after the initial attack and reflected an attempt by the Modi government to pressure Pakistan on multiple fronts, thereby gaining leverage over an adversary that long used terrorism and proxies to challenge India. Even as it deliberated on its options after the initial terror attack, India launched a diplomatic blitzkrieg against Pakistan. Modi reached out directly to the Pakistani people –​he asked if they could find quicker solutions to developmental issues than India could and contemplate “why does India export software and your country export terrorists”.29 His External Affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, used her speech to the UN General Assembly to deliver a stinging rebuttal to Pakistani President Nawaz Sharif, who had paid tribute to Burhan Wani, the separatist militant whose killing had triggered the violence in Kashmir. At the regional level, the Modi government ensured the postponement of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-​operation summit after several member-​states took India’s lead and boycotted the Islamabad meeting in November 2016. It constituted one of the rare occasions when regional states spoke in one voice against Pakistan’s use of terror as an instrument of state policy. 141

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Even as Pakistan was reeling from these pressures, Modi’s government decided to employ military power –​a tool New Delhi long avoided using. What was new about 2016 was not that cross-​border raids took place, but that India decided to publicise them to the extent it did. New Delhi has been able to raise the costs for Pakistani adventurism and ensure that Islamabad paid a price for trying to bleed India with “a thousand cuts” using Pakistan-​based terrorist organisations like Lashkar-​e-​Taiba and Jaish-​e-​Mohammed. And when 40 forty soldiers were killed in the terror attack claimed by Jaish-​e-​Mohammed in February 2019, India conducted an aerial strike at a terror training centre in Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. These actions have underscored the new Indian appetite for imposing costs on Pakistan for supporting and sponsoring terror activities in India, and nuclear weapons would not be viewed as a deterrent by New Delhi in resorting to conventional cross-​border assault. Equally significant has been the Modi government’s decision to call the world’s attention to the plight of Balochi people resisting the Punjabi-​dominated military establishment of Pakistan. New Delhi warned that if Pakistan continued meddling in Kashmir, inciting violence and terror, India would expose the atrocities committed in restive Balochistan. Pakistan annexed the region in 1948 and has since crushed numerous uprisings. Whilst New Delhi sought to isolate Pakistan, it has proactively reached out to other neighbours. India’s ties with Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and, in particular, Bangladesh deepened, with New Delhi deciding to step up military co-​operation with Kabul, reach out to Colombo, and resolve a boundary dispute with Dhaka. Beijing continues strongly to back Pakistan. The Sino-​Pakistani relationship is blossoming with China poised to deploy its naval ships along with the Pakistani navy to safeguard the strategic port, Gwadar, and trade routes under the $46 billion Sino-​Pakistani Economic Corridor. If this move progresses as planned, it will be the logical culmination of long-​drawn Chinese involvement in Pakistan and unsurprising given China’s growing interest in the region and Pakistan’s eagerness to counterbalance India’s naval might. India’s Pakistan problem today is largely a sub-​set of India’s China problem. As Beijing and New Delhi struggle to manage their complex relationship, India developed a more nuanced approach in dealing with its most important neighbour. Even as it seeks to engage China on a range of issues despite differences, there is now a new realism in New Delhi acknowledging and articulating these bilateral differences. A new self-​confidence in asserting Indian vital interests vis-​à-​vis China has replaced the diffidence of the past.30 The Doklam crisis in 2017 underscored this situation. Trouble began at the India-​Bhutan-​ China tri-​junction on 16 June 2017 when Indian soldiers detected construction activity on what is considered disputed territory on the Doklam Plateau. Chinese workers seemed to be building a road to allow China to project power further into territory claimed by Bhutan, thereby giving Beijing an ability to isolate India’s northeast from the mainland. India’s response was immediate and firm. The government sent troops into Bhutan to halt the roadbuilding, demanding restoration of the status quo ante. As the external affairs minister explained in the Indian Parliament: “Our concerns emanate from Chinese action on the ground which have implications for the determination of the tri-​junction boundary point between India, China and Bhutan and the alignment of India-​China boundary in the Sikkim sector”. Swaraj added, “dialogue is the only way out of the Doklam standoff … and this should be seen in the context of the entire bilateral relationship”.31 China, for its part, demanded that India withdraw unconditionally from Doklam before holding any meaningful bilateral talks, and state-​owned media launched a shrill campaign at times threatening war and issuing reminders of the 1962 conflict between the two countries and India’s humiliating defeat. New Delhi was responsible in handling the crisis: neither drawn into escalation by bellicose rhetoric nor losing its nerve. Tensions continued to rise through 26 August with disengagement announced and an understanding 142

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reached with the withdrawal of Indian troops and cessation of Chinese road construction in the area. It was a diplomatic triumph of the Modi government. The China conundrum continues nonetheless to be a challenge with Sino-​Indian tensions rising seriously in 2020 as the two Asian giants faced off against each other along the Line of Actual Control [LAC], the more than 4000-​kilometre un-​demarcated boundary between them. Emerging in March 2020, these border tensions have shown no sign of abating, and defence positions have only been hardening in violation of all bilateral agreements, China mobilised a large number of troops, weapons, and ammunition on the LAC in Eastern Ladakh. There have been reports of the People’s Liberation Army deploying around 52,000 troops, which led to a similar Indian deployment. The LAC remains extremely volatile with the soldiers of the two Powers in a face-​to-​face confrontation. Both sides seem more interested in reinforcing their troop presence along the LAC than in any kind of de-​escalation. The trust deficit is high and high-​level negotiations have not generated enough confidence between the two sparring nations. In June 2020, there was a deadly clash resulting in the deaths of 20 Indian and an unspecified number of Chinese soldiers. Since then, sporadic incidents of firing across the LAC have seen the two nations blame each other. The shots fired for the first time in 45 years along this border broke a 1996 pact between both countries that barred using guns and explosives along the LAC. As the two nations brace for a protracted standoff with substantial force deployments, the LAC is likely to continue to remain “hot” with military activity in the form of occasional violent clashes mirroring the Line of Control that is the de facto boundary dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan. In its attempt unilaterally to define the LAC, Beijing has disregarded the central tenets of all agreements signed with India since 1993 to keep the border peaceful. It will significantly alter the trajectory of the Sino-​Indian relationship, premised on an understanding that even as the boundary questions remain unresolved, the two nations could move forward on other areas of engagement –​global, regional, and bilateral. That fundamental assumption has now been seriously undermined. In some ways, China’s assertiveness today is understandable. As long as China was the dominant party along the border, it could continue with the facade of upholding peace and tranquillity. After all, that was on its terms. India’s assertion of its interests in the last few years has emerged as the sticking point. The militarisation of LAC is taking place at an unprecedented pace today partly because Indian infrastructure is in much better shape and Indian patrolling is far more effective. A more heated LAC is a result of India’s military presence in areas where the Chinese military is not used to seeing it. That India is ready to take Chinese aggression head-​on reflects in the scale of casualties that both sides lately suffered in the Galwan Valley. The Indian military is operationally more nimble and prepared now than it has ever been. Therefore, if a lasting solution to the border problem remains impossible, more such action will occur along the LAC. China remains a significantly more powerful entity and its infrastructure is in much better shape. Nonetheless, Indian infrastructure development has reached a critical point, and it is not without reason that Chinese opposition to the 255 kilometre strategic Darbuk-​Shyok-​Daulat Beg Oldie road has been so vehement. Connecting Leh to the Karakoram Pass, this all-​weather road is India’s frontal challenge to China’s expansionist designs in the region. Despite Chinese objections, India has continued to pursue this project given its strategic importance. China raising the temperature on the border is a pre-​emptive move to dissuade India from moving ahead. China’s recent behaviour remains linked to the global situation where Beijing has come under pressure and is facing a backlash for its aggression. India’s emergence as a more credible 143

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global actor at a time of severe distress is something of which China is wary. The top leadership of the Communist Party of China is facing internal turmoil as its policies on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Belt and Road Initiative are not only facing global opprobrium, but are also being critically dissected at home. For President Xi, an easy answer to managing this turmoil is to create problems abroad to generate a sense of nationalism amongst a disillusioned populace. Still, Chinese actions are producing exactly the opposite effect of what they are probably intended. Indian public opinion, already negative about China, has now turned even more strongly anti-​Chinese. Those in India talking about maintaining an equidistance from China and the United States will find it hard to sustain that position; and New Delhi will now be even freer to make policy choices, both strategic and economic, which will have a strong anti-​China orientation. From trade and technology to regional and global partnerships, Indian foreign policy and national security choices are now more explicitly targeting China than ever before. In many ways, the Sino-​Indian border crisis will not only shape the trajectory of future Indian foreign policy but will be highly consequential for regional and global security. By standing up to China –​diplomatically and militarily –​India is making it clear that it will challenge China’s aggression. It might even further galvanise a global pushback against China’s rise. Sino-​Indian relations have thus entered uncharted territory as New Delhi seeks to engage Beijing strictly on reciprocity, resetting the terms of bilateral engagement. The future of Asia, in several dimensions, depends on how the two regional giants relate to each other in the coming years. The Modi government has tried to ensure that India will not be the one to blink first despite the capability gap. The underlying forces that drive foreign policies do not alter radically. More often than not, they evolve gradually over time. But the agency of political leadership is often able to impose a new dynamism to achieve significant outcomes. Modi has been able to give not only a new style to the conduct of Indian diplomacy but also a new sense of purpose to Indian foreign policy. India is at an important moment in its evolution in the global order and Modi’s foreign policy approach aims at positioning India towards its rightful place in the comity of nations. His success will depend on how effectively he is able to harness Indian aspirations by building an institutional infrastructure commensurate with those ambitions.

Notes 1 For a sample of this debate, see Harsh V. Pant, ed., New Directions in Indian Foreign Policy: Theory and Praxis (Cambridge, 2018). 2 “Development: An Article of Faith for Us: PM Modi Writes in German Newspaper”, Times of India (13 April 2015): https://​times​ofin​dia.ind​iati​mes.com/​india/​Deve​lopm​ent-​an-​arti​cle-​of-​faith-​for-​us-​ PM-​Modi-​wri​tes-​in-​Ger​man-​newspa​per/​arti​cles​how/​46903​876.cms. 3 “ ‘India is a Changed Country Now’, Says PM Narendra Modi to Germany” NDTV (13 April 2015): https://​www.ndtv.com/​cheat-​sheet/​india-​is-​a-​chan​ged-​coun​try-​now-​says-​pm-​naren​dra-​modi-​ to-​germ​any-​754​556. 4 For discussion of India’s global rise, see Harsh V. Pant, Indian Foreign Policy: An Overview (New Delhi, 2018). 5 “Narendra Modi at Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas: Govt Changing ‘Brain Drain’ to ‘Brain Gain’ ”, First Post (8 January 2017): www.firstpost.com/​india/​narendra-​modi-​at-​pravasi-​bharatiya-​diwas-​2017-​our-​ government-​changed-​brain-​drain-​to-​brain-​gain-​3193658.html. 6 Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and KPMG, “Hitting the High Notes: FICCI-​KPMG Indian Media and Entertainment Industry Report 2011” (2011): www.in.kpmg. com/​securedata/​ficci/​ Reports/​FICCI-​KPMG-​Report-​2011.pdf. 7 “Mongolia ‘New Bright Light’ of Democracy for the World: PM Modi”, Business Standard (17 May 2015): www.business-​standard.com/​article/​news-​ani/​mongolia-​new-​bright-​light-​of-​democracy-​for-​ the-​world-​pm-​modi-​115051700087_​1.html.

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Indian Diplomacy under Narendra Modi 8 “PM Narendra Modi Announces $1 Billion Line of Credit for Mongolia”, Times of India (17 May 2015): http://a​ rtic​les.econom​icti​mes.ind​iati​mes.com/2​ 015-0​ 5-1​ 7/n ​ ews/6​ 2277​ 032_​ 1​ _c​​ yber-securityindian-​prime-​minister-​narendra-​modi. 9 C.S.R. Murthy, “Assessing India at the United Nations in the Changing Context”, International Studies, 47/​2(2010), 214–​16. 10 Devin T. Hagerty, “India’s Regional Security Doctrine”, Asian Survey, 31/​4(1991), 351. 11 Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Foreign Policy: Selected Speeches, September 1946-​April 1961 (Delhi, 1961), 113–​15. 12 C. Raja Mohan, “What If Pakistan Fails? India Isn’t Worried … Yet”, Washington Quarterly, 28/​ 1(2004/​2005), 127. 13 “India’s Arms Imports Down by 33%, says Sipri Report”, Hindustan Times (15 March 2021). 14 Harsh V. Pant and Kartik Bommakanti, “India’s National Security: Challenges and Dilemmas”, International Affairs, 95/​4(2019), 835–​57. 15 On the changing trajectory of India’s in Afghan policy, see Harsh V. Pant, India’s Afghan Muddle (New Delhi, 2014). 16 Srinath Rao, “NSA Ajit Doval Underlines Use of Power: India Should Stop Punching below Its Weight”, Indian Express (5 August 2015). 17 For an overview of the challenges facing contemporary Indian defence policy, see Harsh V. Pant, ed., Handbook of Indian Defence Policy: Themes, Structures and Doctrines (London, 2015). 18 Ashley J. Tellis, “Future Fire: Challenges Facing Indian Defense Policy in the New Century”, Carnegie Endowment, transcript of a speech made at the India Today Conclave (13 March 2004): http://​carneg​ ieen​dowm​ent.org/​files/​fut​uref​i re.pdf. 19 “India Calls for Early Conclusion of S China Sea Code of Conduct”, Indian Express (5 November 2015): http://​indian​expr​ess.com/​arti​cle/​india/​india-​news-​india/​india-​calls-​for-​early-​con​clus​ion-​of-​ south-​china-​sea-​code-​of-​cond​uct/​#sth​ash.nB2v3​Pxp.dpuf. 20 Pant and Bommakanti, “India’s National Security”. 21 Harsh V. Pant and Yogesh Joshi, “Indo-​US Relations under Modi: The Strategic Logic Underlying the Embrace”, International Affairs, 93/​1(2017), 133–​46. 22 Harsh V. Pant and Julie Super, “India’s Non-​Alignment Conundrum: A Twentieth Century Policy in a Changing World”, International Affairs, 91/​4(2015) 747–​64. 23 Sunil Khilnani et al., NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century (New Delhi, 2012). 24 “India is No Longer ‘Non-​Aligned’, says Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale”, The Print (10 January 2019): https://​thepr​int.in/​diplom​acy/​india-​is-​no-​lon​ger-​non-​alig​ned-​says-​fore​ign-​secret​ary-​vijay-​ gokh​ale/​176​222/​. 25 Ministry of External Affairs, “IISS Fullerton Lecture by Dr. S. Jaishankar, Foreign Secretary in Singapore” (20 July 2015): www.mea.gov.in/​Speeches-​Statements.htm?dtl/​25493/​iiss+​fullerton+​lecture+​by+​dr+​s+​jaishankar+​foreign+​secretary+​in+​singapore. 26 “PM to Heads of Indian Missions” (7 February 2015): www.mea.gov.in/​Speeches-​Statements.htm?dtl/​ 25493/​iiss+​fullerton+​lecture+​by+​dr+​s+​jaishankar+​foreign+​secretary+​in+​singapore. 27 “ ‘There Is a New Symphony in Play’ –​PM Ends His Speech with Quote by Walt Whitman”, India. com (8 June 2016): www.india.com/​news/​india/​live-​narendra-​modi-​addresses-​us-​congress-​1245531/​. 28 For an overview of India’s neighbourhood policy under Modi, see Harsh V. Pant, ed., India’s Neighbourhood Challenge (New Delhi, 2021). 29 “India Exports Software, Pakistan Exports Terror: PM Modi’s Blistering Response to Uri Attack”, Times of India (24 September 2016): https://​times​ofin​dia.ind​iati​mes.com/​india/​India-​expo​rts-​softw​ are-​Pakis​tan-​expo​rts-​ter​ror-​PM-​Modis-​bli​ster​ing-​respo​nse-​to-​Uri-​att​ack/​artic​les how/​54497875. cms. 30 Harsh V. Pant, ed., China Ascendant: Implications for India (New Delhi, 2019). 31 “Sushma Swaraj: Doklam Not Only Issue, Solution Will Emerge Through Dialogue”, Indian Express (4 August 2017): https://​indian​expr​ess.com/​arti​cle/​india/​dok​lam-​not-​only-​issue-​with-​chinasolut​ion-​will-​eme​rge-​thro​ugh-​dialo​gue-​sus​hma-​swa​raj-​4781​525/​.

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12 THE END OF THE INNOCENCE Canada and the Fading Liberal International Order Asa McKercher

“Pax Americana is probably behind us”, remarked Canadian Foreign Minister Francois-​ Philippe Champagne in 2020. “Now”, he added, “we need to see what’s [sic] our interests, our values and our principles. We can advance them with our traditional partners and also with new alliances”.1 The previous year, at a conference in Berlin, Champagne emphasised Canadian support for a continued “rules-​based system” that had “provided avenues for states to peacefully manage competing national interests, helped reduce the use of hard power between states, facilitated international cooperation and advanced global prosperity for everyone’s benefit”. At that point, Canada had joined with the Alliance for Multilateralism, the Franco-​German effort to promote the existing structures of the so-​called liberal international order. Battered by populism, protectionism, and nationalism –​personified by figures such as American President Donald Trump and exemplified by political movements like Brexit –​the multilateral institutions and mechanisms that Canada had supported for over half a century seemed increasingly shaky. The task ahead, as Champagne put it, was that those who believe in the fundamental importance of international cooperation in promoting the prosperity, security and basic human rights of the greatest number of people must come together and work concretely to ensure that the institutions of the rules-​based international order are fit for purpose in the twenty-​first century.2 Part assertion, part elegy, Champagne’s comments make clear Canadian foreign policy-​makers’ sense of a fading international order and the challenges to a relatively stable system that has benefitted Canada since 1945. Further, they highlight the importance of the United States in bearing the burden of leadership. For Canada, a status quo Power, this shifting situation is a cause of concern. Through the fortune of geography –​three ocean borders and a neighbouring superpower –​successive generations of Canadian officials were able to craft a foreign policy from a position of security, whilst gaining market access to and drawing investment dollars from the wealthiest country in history. Yet the rise of Trump and “America First” Trumpism has made clear the drawbacks of Canadian propinquity to the United States. Moreover, challenges to seven decades of American foreign policy from the left and right, combined with the increasing diffusion of power internationally, portends ill for the stability that has benefitted

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Canada. These developments did not begin with Trump’s 2017 inauguration. The George W. Bush Administration’s challenges to the liberal international order upset Canadian-​American relations as did American protectionism, the latter driving home the need for Canada to seek new trade partners, particularly in Europe and the Asia-​Pacific region. However, as the world transitions toward renewed Great Power competition, Canada’s geographic position as well as its adherence to what remains of the American-​led international order limits its choices. Support for more open markets and multilateral institutions –​the basis of the liberal international order –​were the hallmarks of post-​1945 Canadian foreign policy. Ottawa supported the United Nations [UN] and its various offshoots such as the World Health Organisation and International Civil Aviation Organisation –​based in Montreal –​as well as more focused groupings like the Commonwealth and –​eventually –​La Francophonie. Canada launched its first foreign aid programme in 1950 and pioneered the practice of UN peacekeeping, whilst also deploying troops to uphold collective security in Western Europe as a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO]. Canadians have engaged in myth making about these efforts and a supposed “golden age” in the 1940s and 1950s when Canada pursued a selfless, active, and influential foreign policy. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that caution prevailed in Ottawa, as did an awareness of Canada’s limited capabilities. In a famous 1947 speech, Louis St-​Laurent, the foreign minister –​and prime minister from 1948 to 1957 –​ announced a new approach to global affairs marked by a “willingness to accept international responsibilities”. Yet, he also underscored that there was “little point in a country of our stature recommending international action if those who must carry the major burden of whatever action is taken are not in sympathy”.3 The United States bore the brunt of that burden. During the Second World War, senior Canadian officials praised the Americans for their growing “disposition to take decisions and accept responsibilities”.4 The Cold War only accelerated this Canadian predisposition to welcome American participation. For instance, in 1948, as talks began over forming what became NATO, Lester Pearson, the deputy foreign minister and an architect of much of post-​war Canadian foreign policy, affirmed it vital to have “continuing certainty about the long-​term position of the United States as a partner in a North Atlantic security system”.5 Two years later, as the Americans intervened at the outset of the Korean War, Pearson, now foreign minister, emphasised to his Cabinet colleagues that this development was a welcome one, for Canada “had every interest in strengthening the US position as leader in the struggle against Communism”. In the House of Commons, he applauded how America was meeting its “special responsibility” by committing itself to uphold collective security in Korea.6 However, the Korean War raised fears in Ottawa about a more belligerent force in American political and military circles, and there was much regret over the conflict’s expansion to include China and threats to deploy nuclear weapons. “Our preoccupation”, Pearson explained in a much-​publicised speech, “is no longer whether the United States will discharge her responsibilities, but how she will do it and how the rest of us will be involved”.7 Alongside Canadian enthusiasm for increased United States involvement in the world, there also existed concern over American dominance and belligerence. The emerging “Pax Americana” was welcome, one senior diplomat contended, but propinquity to the United States “gives rise to all sorts of problems for us and it makes it necessary for us to subscribe to the main lines of United States policy”.8 Over subsequent decades, governments in Ottawa came to champion a consensus built around support for multilateral organisations and acceptance of overall American leadership. There were flashpoints of disagreement with Washington such as Cuba and Vietnam, and some instances where new governments placed a different emphasis than their predecessors. Nevertheless, the main lines of Canadian policy held.

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Seemingly, the greatest challenge to the consensus over Canadian foreign policy came during the Pierre Trudeau years: 1968–​1984. Soon after becoming prime minister, Trudeau considered setting Canada on a new course. As he told British officials, in the postwar decade, when she was the “Fourth Power” in the world, Canada had become involved in a great many things which were not really appropriate to her present relative position. Then she had been “the smallest of the Great Powers, now she was just one of the smaller powers”.9 To this end, Trudeau pursued independent initiatives to improve Canada’s relations with Communist bloc countries and states in what was then the Third World. There was even consideration of pulling Canadian military forces out of Western Europe, but in the end NATO solidarity won out. For all the talk about reconfiguring Canada’s place in the world, Trudeau stuck to the main lines of Canadian foreign policy.10 Canadian-​American relations were a flashpoint in the Trudeau era and to some extent foreshadowed more recent developments. Famously, in 1969, on his first official trip to Washington, he outlined his sense of the stifling nature of Canada’s relationship with the United States. “Living next to you”, Trudeau told American reporters, “is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-​tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt”.11 Several of Trudeau’s policies, such as recognising Communist China, were efforts to escape the American elephant’s shadow and did not go unnoticed in the White House. Complaining of that “son of a bitch Trudeau”, President Richard Nixon recognised that “Canada has its own right to its destiny and no Canadian politician could survive without that ideology”, but added, “we have to look out for our own interests”.12 The “Nixon Shock” of 1971 alarmed Canadians, used to favourable economic treatment at the hands of the Americans and resenting that Canada had not received an exemption from Washington’s import surcharge. As Treasury Secretary John Connally told Jean-​Luc Pépin, Canada’s trade minister, he and Nixon had decided “to shock the world. And that, brother, includes you!”13 Through extensive lobbying efforts, Canada won an exemption. But the experience, exposing Canadian vulnerability, led policy-​makers in Ottawa to embark on an effort to diversify Canada’s international economic and cultural links. The so-​called “Third Option” –​from its ranking on a government White Paper –​became a quixotic guidepost for future policy-​makers aiming to find trade and investment partners beyond North America and to safeguard against Americanisation in all its attractive guises. For all the trouble Trudeau caused them, the Americans took Canadian actions in their stride: in 1976, despite the Canadian prime minister’s much-​publicised trip to Cuba, Washington backed Canada’s entry into the G-​6. Moreover, the 1970s saw an increasing profusion of bilateral ties across the whole range of government agencies, from trans-​border law enforcement and intelligence sharing to joint environmental efforts. These contacts existed outside normal diplomatic channels, leading Marcel Cadieux, Canada’s ambassador at Washington, to complain of the constant flow of dignitaries and bureaucrats: “I run a pissoir and a hot dog stand and no one comes near me unless they want to use one or the other”.14 Further, the extent of what often appeared to be Trudeau’s anti-​American inclinations was overblown. Meeting with Ronald Reagan in 1983, he told the president, While he did not always agree with USA policy he thought that the USA, as a major power with strategic interests and rights, was justified in trying to defend them … he had no philosophical difficulty with the USA acting as a great power.15 148

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The Third Option aside, Canadian-​American economic integration continued apace, and it was American –​not Canadian –​protectionism that led Ottawa to pursue what became the 1988 Canada-​United States Free Trade Agreement [CUSFTA]. Brian Mulroney, whose Tory government took power in 1984, advanced the agreement: “Good relations, super relations, with the US will be the cornerstone of our foreign policy”.16 Free trade fitted this theme, although it was also vital for Canada to preserve if not expand Canadian access to its most important market against Congressional protectionists. Hence CUSFTA and, in 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] involving Mexico. Whilst critics charged Mulroney with tying Canada too closely to the United States, he also championed a broader multilateral foreign policy, engaging the Commonwealth, La Francophonie, and the UN and bringing Canada into the Organisation of American States and the newly formed Asia-​Pacific Economic Co-​operation. Concurrently, he pursued expanded economic relations with China. Canada stuck to these lines under Mulroney’s Liberal successor, Jean Chrétien (1993–​2003) remaining within NAFTA and pursuing new trade deals with countries beyond North America. “Canada’s geographic location gives it an important advantage as new poles of political and economic power emerge”, declared the Chrétien government’s 1995 foreign policy strategy.17 Moreover, Ottawa backed the economic globalisation policies pushed by the so-​called Washington Consensus institutions. An assessment from Canada’s Privy Council Office emphasised the country’s support for globalisation: “Based on the standard measure of information technology, finance, trade, travel, personal communications and international engagement, Canada is in fact considered to be one of the most globalized nations in the world”.18 Globalisation engendered great enthusiasm about the possibilities for Canada. “Canadians are on the road to global citizenship”, enthused Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s foreign minister from 1996 to 2000, adding, “we win in a stable, equitable, cooperative world”.19 Under Axworthy, Canada embarked on a host of multilateral initiatives characterised as promoting human security and reflecting new global sensibilities about the international and transnational impact of issues connected to gender, health, crime, and the environment. Yet critics pilloried the Chrétien Liberals for pulling back from the world, both through austerity measures that limited the money available for development, diplomacy, and defence spending and through an unwillingness to engage in serious issue areas. The title of a 2003 bestseller put the matter succinctly: While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World.20 Nor were these criticisms confined to academic circles. “We are still trading on a reputation that was built two generations and more ago but that we haven’t continued to live up to”, John Manley, Canada’s foreign minister stated in October 2001. “You can’t just sit at the G8 table and then, when the bill comes, go to the washroom”.21 Manley’s comments came a month after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, a geopolitical turning point. As Chrétien recognised, “The world just changed”.22 Whilst Ottawa offered political support to Washington, and committed troops to anti-​al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan, differences soon arose. The George W. Bush Administration’s 2002 enunciation of a policy of preventive warfare alarmed Canadian officials.23 Matters reached a head over Iraq. Canadian intelligence analysts doubted the accuracy of American and British reports indicating that Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction.24 Meanwhile, Chrétien asserted that Canada’s participation in a potential military intervention in Iraq rested on UN authorisation or, failing that, a clear indication of an Iraqi threat.25 Washington’s failure to produce convincing evidence or secure a UN resolution approving war saw Ottawa sit out the conflict. Whilst Trump’s challenge to the so-​called liberal international order would be viewed as unprecedented, the Bush Administration’s pursuit of war against Iraq also damaged the 149

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multilateral system. Certainly, Canadian policy-​makers saw the push toward war in this light. “We have developed a strong belief in the value of a multilateral approach to global problems”, affirmed Chrétien a month before the fighting began, and “if it must come to war, I argue that the world should respond through the United Nations”.26 Late the previous year, Bill Graham, Canada’s foreign minister, had asserted, “unilateral action may have the benefit of clarity, but it lacks legitimacy. It risks destabilising world order”.27 As Canadian policy-​makers had recognised since the 1940s, American unilateralism was a very real concern (though the Chrétien government had acted outside UN channels in participating in NATO operations in Kosovo). Canada’s stance on Iraq did not go uncontested. Opposition leader Stephen Harper assured the Wall Street Journal’s readers that “Canadians Stand With You”.28 Other commentators worried about the impact on Canada’s vital relationship with the United States. “If Americans don’t see us as a close ally, they will want to treat us as something else”, stated Thomas d’Aquino, head of a business lobby.29 Allan Gotlieb, a veteran diplomat and much celebrated ambassador to Reagan-​era Washington, complained that by not supporting the United States, Chrétien’s government was failing to promote “the security and prosperity of Canadians”.30 This reasoning for war was premised on the deep economic integration of the two countries, an important fact to be sure, particularly in the wake of the 9/​11 terror attacks when enhanced security measures at the border slowed down trade flows. Upset with Ottawa’s stance, Paul Cellucci, the American ambassador, bluntly warned, “security will trump trade”.31 In a speech, written in collaboration with the White House, he pointedly criticised Canada’s position on the war but also anti-​American statements made by Liberal MPs. It was because of these statements, and Chrétien’s perceived inability to quiet his caucus, that Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, told her Canadian counterpart that the bilateral relationship was “irreparably broken”.32 Happily, fears of American economic retaliation were overblown. Still, bilateral relations were hardly smooth. In a sign of the future ideological divide between Trump’s Washington and Justin Trudeau’s Ottawa, American conservative media figures lambasted Canada over its unwillingness to support Bush’s agenda. One contributor to the National Review mused about bombing Canada –​“a northern Puerto Rico with an EU sensibility” –​with the aim of toughening it up and giving it “manly resolve”.33 Given stark Canadian-​American differences over climate change, Fox News presenter Neil Cavuto asked, “Could our neighbours to the north soon be our enemies?” Meanwhile, far right commentator Tucker Carlson –​later, one of Trump’s favourite Fox hosts –​likened Canada to America’s “retarded cousin”.34 There were criticisms, too, from conservative Canadians. One forceful tract accused the Liberals of living in a “Dreamland” and pursuing a “pretend foreign policy” that prioritised antagonising the United States.35 Still other Canadians across the political spectrum wrestled with the extent to which Ottawa should support Washington in a period of seemingly untrammelled American power.36 The short-​ lived Liberal government of Paul Martin (2003–​ 2006) took some of these criticisms to heart. In a 2005 foreign policy White Paper, his government boasted of being “in a position to reinvest in our international role” and committed “to rebuild for Canada an independent voice of pride and influence in the world”.37 To this end, Martin increased development and defence spending, sought to tackle better climate change, and committed Canada to an expanded role in NATO’s Afghan War. “As members of NATO, which is after all a self-​ defence pact, we had a moral if not legal duty to support them”, recounted Martin. “We also had a self-​interest in doing so”.38 However, differences with Washington remained, for despite Martin’s efforts to forge a better working relationship with Bush, they clashed over Canadian participation in the United States Ballistic Missile Defence shield. Martin had originally signalled a willingness to commit to the programme, but because of domestic opposition –​he led 150

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a minority government –​he backed away, angering the White House. Perhaps Martin’s greatest international contribution came from his time as Chrétien’s finance minister when, in 1999, he and American Treasury Secretary Larry Summers had founded the summit meetings of G-​20 finance ministers and central bank governors, which he then promoted as a model for meetings amongst government leaders.39 The first G-​20 leaders’ summit occurred in 2008. By that point, the Conservative Party’s Harper had become prime minister, serving from 2006–​2015. An ideological conservative, he pursued policies more in line with the thinking in Bush’s Washington: spurning climate change initiatives, cutting development spending, championing religious freedom, and distancing Canada from pariah states like China and Iran. Harper declared that Canada’s “purpose is no longer just to go along to get along with everybody else’s agenda”, adding, in a dig at successive generations of Liberal –​and liberal –​ policy-​makers, “I don’t know why past attempts to do so were ever thought to be in Canada’s national interest”.40 Critics charged the Harper government with engaging in a counter-​productive and unsophisticated “bullhorn diplomacy”.41 Others –​both Canadian and foreign –​ saw that through his policies, he was breaking with Canada’s traditional support for liberal internationalism. “Faithful ally of Britain in two world wars”, wrote British journalist Robert Fisk, “peacekeeper to the world, NATO member but neutral across the globe, it’s difficult to believe that Canada’s democracy might have come adrift”.42 Canada’s failure to win a seat on the UN Security Council in 2010 –​the first lost since 1946 –​was viewed as a rebuke by the international community of Harper government policies. Whatever the value of the Conservatives’ efforts to reorient Canadian foreign policy, one interesting aspect of those efforts is the extent to which Harper saw Canada acting in a world where shifts in the balance of power were perceptible. In 2011, he mused that “the ability of our most important allies, and most importantly the United States, to single-​handedly shape outcomes and protect our interests, has been diminishing, and so I’m saying we have to be prepared to contribute more, and that is what this government’s been doing”.43 The comment is revealing of Harper’s sense of relative American –​and Western –​decline. Indeed, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2013, he warned that the West was “at a crossroads” given the “unprecedented shift of power and wealth away from the Western world”.44 Harper’s government sought to take advantage of this shift by embarking on a free trade blitz, signing nearly a dozen bilateral deals with various countries, including Colombia, South Korea, and Peru. By far the two most important agreements were the Canada-​European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement [CETA] and the interim Trans-​Pacific Partnership [TPP] deal in 2015. Such moves were important for Canada in finding economic counterweights to the United States. As Harper stated concerning CETA, it would “broaden our trade beyond the US”.45 Diversifying Canada’s economic links had been a perennial goal for Canadian governments for over one-​half century, a counterpoise to North American economic integration. Although CUSFTA and NAFTA had ensured market access and a flow of American investment, the threat of United States protectionism remained and, in the post-​ 9/​ 11 era, an additional factor was the introduction of various security measures creating a thickening border. The Chrétien, Martin, and Harper governments had worked out several bilateral programmes with the Americans to lessen the economic impact of anti-​terror measures, but Canada’s vulnerability to American policies underscored the need for new economic partners. For instance, President Barack Obama’s refusal on environmental grounds to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta to Texas angered the Harper government. Bruce Heyman, the American ambassador at Ottawa, was “frozen out” of meetings with the prime minister and government ministers, and one member of Harper’s Cabinet publicly berated him: “We died for you in 151

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Afghanistan! We died for you around the world! You should approve Keystone! You should not be holding this up!”.46 The Keystone dispute, combined with Congressional protectionism, left the Harper era Canadian-​American relationship in a “rotten period of stasis”.47 A sea change came with the election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government in October 2015. Youthful and far more progressive than Harper, Trudeau seemed ready to recommit Canada to its supposed liberal internationalist orientation. In his first press conference as prime minister, he declared, I want to say this to this country’s friends around the world: Many of you have worried that Canada has lost its compassionate and constructive voice in the world over the past 10 years. Well, I have a simple message for you on behalf of 35 million Canadians. We’re back.48 Speaking at the UN General Assembly in September 2016, Trudeau spoke in glowing terms about the “need to focus on what bring us together, not what divides us”, and affirming a commitment to “re-​engaging in global affairs through institutions like the United Nations”, he proclaimed, “we’re Canadian. And we’re here to help”.49 This rosy rhetoric belied a lack of real action to assert better Canada’s place in the world. There was little attention to international development or peacekeeping –​hallmarks of Canada’s multilateral image –​the foreign service fell further into decrepitude, and the prime minister showed little interest in the world beyond photo ops at summits. In 2020, Canada again failed in its bid for a UN Security Council seat, a repudiation of the Trudeau government’s penchant for prizing selfies over substance.50 Still, under Trudeau, the optics of Canadian-​American relations improved. Heyman recalled that in contrast to the Harper period, the “Trudeau months were warm, invigorating, and youthful from the moment Justin stepped into power. … From our point of view, the change could not have been more dramatic”.51 A more dramatic change came with Trump’s election in November 2016. The media –​domestically and abroad –​immediately cast Trudeau as the “anti-​Trump”. To The Economist, Trudeau was an exception to the populist “wall-​builders, door-​slammers, and drawbridge-​raisers” who had taken power in the United States, Britain, and other Western countries.52 Despite obvious ideological divisions between Trudeau’s government and Trump’s Administration, the former sought to bridge any differences through aggressive outreach to members of the White House, including Ivanka Trump in what reporters dubbed “daughter diplomacy”.53 Moreover, rather than bash Trump, a move that would have played well with anti-​American forces domestically, Trudeau avoided criticisms of the new Administration’s policies and shrugged off barbs from Washington. “It is the job of the Canadian prime minster”, Trudeau noted, “to have a constructive working relationship with the president of the United States and that is exactly what I intend to do”.54 Trudeau’s sensible attitude reflected not just a desire to have constructive relations with a neighbouring government but also the reality of Canadian economic reliance on the United States. Here, the chief issue was Trump’s repeated threats to tear up NAFTA, leaving Canada vulnerable to rampant American protectionism, popular not only amongst Trump’s far-​right “anti-​Globalist” base but the opposition Democratic Party’s progressive wing. In his statements, Trump underlined both the power imbalance in the relationship and his apparent willingness to strong-​arm Canada. Campaigning during the 2018 mid-​term election, for instance, he accused Canadians of “ripping us off” and threatened his country’s northern neighbour with “ruination” by imposing significant new automobile tariffs.55 As for NAFTA, Trump’s decision to renegotiate the agreement resulted in months of tense negotiations. Concurrently, Canada 152

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undertook a full court lobbying effort of Congress, American government agencies, and media outlets utilising Canadian politicians –​from all major parties and across different levels of government –​diplomats, and retired officials.56 Pioneered by Canadian diplomats in the 1980s as “the New Diplomacy”,57 this approach to influencing domestic opinion makers, lawmakers, and policy-​makers in Washington had served Canada well. And it helped produce a new North American trade pact that –​Trump’s boasting to the contrary –​differed little from the original agreement. The NAFTA renegotiation ended with an agreement, but the process was dispiriting from the perspective of bilateral relations. A key issue for Canadians was the White House’s imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminium imports in 2018. The measure was directed at a number of countries, mainly American allies, but what enraged Canadians specifically was the Trump Administration’s justification for the move on national security grounds, amounting, in effect, to declaring Canada a threat to the United States. Everyday consumers responded by boycotting American-​made goods. Trudeau, meanwhile, dismissed the measure as “absurd … an affront to the long-​standing security partnership between Canada and the United States”.58 The tariff disagreement contributed to the dramatic events at the G-​7 Summit at Charlevoix, Quebec in June 2018, when Trump left early after opposing the joint communiqué over wording supporting the liberal international order. When Trudeau responded to a reporter’s question by softly criticising the tariffs, Trump flew into a rage, tweeting that Canada’s prime minister was “dishonest & weak”.59 The following year, after Canada’s public broadcaster cut Trump’s cameo from its airing of the 1992 film Home Alone 2 to make room for advertising, the president tweeted “I guess Justin T doesn’t much like my making him pay up on NATO or Trade!”.60 The president’s tendency to criticise his country’s allies and fawn over authoritarian strongmen is an alarming aspect of Trumpism. In the run up to Charlevoix, Trump had pressed for an invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin, excluded from G-​7 meetings after his country’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. Canada’s government refused Trump’s request and continued to do so over the remainder of his presidency.61 An equally alarming development was the president’s stated doubts about the American role in NATO. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump declared that the alliance was “obsolete” and, once in office, he publicly questioned the value of Article 5, the pact’s key collective security clause. According to reports, in 2018, he considered leaving the alliance altogether.62 Beyond his concerns over the collective security commitment, Trump’s opposition stemmed from a sense that alliance members were not spending enough on their own defence and that, as he tweeted: “@NATO, very unfair to the United States!”63 Low levels of alliance defence spending have been a perennial complaint of American policy-​ makers for decades. In 2011, Robert Gates, Obama’s defence secretary, had warned of the dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress –​and in the American body politic writ large –​to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.64 Whilst Canada had been a major force contributor to the alliance in its first decade and one-​ half, Canadian defence spending had plummeted from the mid-​1960s onwards. And despite occasional injections of cash into badly-​needed procurement efforts, Canada’s military remained small. One senior Defense Department official in President Bill Clinton’s Administration once explained, “we look to Canada, frankly, with a bit of alarm. … We are the only country in the world that wants a stronger military power on its border”.65 Although not responding to Trump’s admonishments with a spending boost, the Trudeau government maintained military 153

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deployments to NATO missions in Iraq and Latvia, where Canadian troops played a major role in efforts to deter Russian aggression. Ironically, Trump’s undermining of NATO led the other allies to rally around the alliance. Meanwhile, by undermining Article 5 and threatening to leave the alliance, Trump’s statements on NATO went beyond traditional American appeals for increased spending. The Trumpist threat to abandon the Atlantic alliance, and the president’s criticisms of other multilateral institutions and agreements, led Canadian officials to worry about the liberal international order’s future. Shortly after the Charlevoix fiasco, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland received Foreign Policy magazine’s Diplomat of the Year award. Accepting the honour, she addressed the liberal international order and “the threat that resurgent authoritarianism poses to liberal democracy itself ”. Speaking of the international system, she rejected a “Metternichian world defined … by a ruthless struggle between great powers governed solely by the narrow, short-​term and mercantilist pursuit of self-​interest” and called for the protection and preservation of the multilateral, rules-​based system.66 Trump soon responded, calling Freeland a “nasty woman” and telling a rally of devotees that she “hates America”.67 Yet, Freeland’s comments were not anti-​American. Rather, they were anti-​Trumpian as the previous year she had spoken in favourable terms about the importance of the American role in the world. “The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership”, Freeland stated, “puts into sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course”.68 By the end of Trump’s presidency, Canadian-​American relations reached an inflection point. As a former Trudeau foreign policy advisor put it, “Canadians won’t forget Trump’s disgraceful treatment of Canada. Our economic partnership has been reaffirmed, but trust can’t be rebuilt with the stroke of a pen”.69 Whatever Trump’s lasting impact on public opinion, the official bilateral relationship is resilient in that it encompasses a wide array of inter-​governmental operations and interactions that occur on a daily basis. For David MacNaughton, Trudeau’s first ambassador in Washington, the relationship “is so broad and so deep that if you spend all day talking about the things you agree on, you’ve run out of time to talk about the one you disagree on”.70 Still, Trumpism remains a factor in the United States, and the protectionist, unilateralist, and authoritarian sentiments that came to the fore during Trump’s presidency are a cause for concern for all American allies, but especially Canada. In a sign of the seriousness of the situation, shortly after the Charlevoix summit, the Cabinet Committee on Canada-​ United States Relations became the Cabinet Committee on Canada-​United States Relations, Trade Diversification, and Internal Trade. It was clear that Ottawa was looking to continue the decades-​long effort –​accelerated by the Harper government –​of broadening Canada’s economic linkages beyond North America. Indeed, the Liberals had supported entry into the TPP and CETA, finalising Canadian adherence to these agreements. Outside of government, calls for lessening Canadian economic vulnerability to the United States abounded.71 The problem with any effort to shift Canada’s orientation is partly geographic: the United States is the closest market and most Canadians live within a close proximity to the Canadian-​ American border. Further, whilst trade with Europe and TPP members will undoubtedly grow, few other countries or regions offer the potential of a huge market or source of investment. Some Canadians have held out hope of China as a potential counterweight to the United States. Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating during the 1990s, Canadians sought to expand into China and curry Chinese investment, overlooking or downplaying human rights issues. “I’m sure that opening of the market, the opening of these countries to outsiders coming with our values and traditions will help a bit”, Chrétien had remarked in a defence of engaging China, a position common amongst Western officials.72 Harper’s government had 154

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initially taken a dim view of relations with China, rejecting the warm ties forged by Chrétien. “I think Canadians want us to promote our trade relations worldwide, and we do that”, Harper had remarked in 2006, “but I don’t think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values. They don’t want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar”.73 Following the 2008 global financial crisis, and because of lobbying by domestic groups, the Harper government altered its China policy. Rhetoric about China softened, Harper and Chinese officials exchanged visits, and Canada courted Chinese investment especially in the resource sector. The centrepiece of this effort was the 2014 Foreign Investment Protection Agreement, a stepping stone toward a free trade deal.74 Under Justin Trudeau, Sino-​ Canadian relations only improved, at least initially. In September 2016, he exchanged back-​to-​back state visits with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who proclaimed a “golden decade” ahead.75 To this end, Ottawa and Beijing entered into talks on a free trade agreement as well as a possible extradition treaty. Critics of these actions, such as David Mulroney, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to China from 2009 to 2012, characterised Trudeau as being “smitten with the dynamic, entrepreneurial, and innovative China that dominated the business pages, whilst remaining largely silent about the China that tramples human rights at home and intimidates rivals abroad”.76 Canada got a taste of Chinese intimidation following Canadian authorities’ arrest of a senior Huawei official in December 2018 in response to an extradition request from Washington. Beijing responded by embargoing Canadian agricultural goods and arresting two Canadian expatriates, who were held as hostages for nearly three years. In effect, Canada had become collateral damage in the Trump Administration’s trade war against China, a stark reminder that as a middle Power, Canada is susceptible to the whims of its Great Power neighbour and ally.77 Like all middle Powers entering the third decade of the twenty-​first century, Canada is confronting an increasingly difficult international situation in which long-​standing diplomatic axioms underpinning its foreign policy have either shifted or disappeared completely. Similarly, with its Great Power neighbour having questioned its own diplomatic verities in the past 15 years –​and with jarring rapidity after 2017 –​Ottawa’s position is doubly complex given the asymmetric economic and financial links between the two Powers. Despite Freeland’s rejection of a “Metternichian world”, such a world is now the reality with the liberal international order under assault. The Trump Administration spent –​squandered? –​a significant amount of American soft power resources in dealing with United States allies, especially Canada to achieve a new trade agreement the contents of which changed little from NAFTA. His policies significantly undermined American credibility. Joe Biden made decided rhetorical claims before and after taking office saying he could end Trumpist foreign policy: “American leadership, backed by clear goals and sound strategies, is necessary to effectively address the defining global challenges of our time. In order to lead again, we must restore our credibility and influence”.78 His Administration’s difficulty will centre on “America Firsters” and American protectionists –​ the latter from both the Republican right and the progressive wing of Biden’s Democratic Party. For each, Canada is not a friend. Nevertheless, given its self-​interest, Canada will continue along its internationalist path in the near future, serving as a staunch NATO ally and working within the array of organisations of which it is a member from the UN to the Commonwealth. Relations with the United States will remain cordial, but with a dose of untrustworthiness from north of the forty-​ninth parallel. The arch-​realist Pearson put the Canadian problem to a colleague in 1951, noting the “deep-​seated, though often unconsciously felt, origins” of Canadian disquiet over seemingly close and constructive relations with the Americans was “I suppose, our feeling of dependence on the United States and the frustration over the fact that we can’t escape this no matter how hard we try”.79 155

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Notes 1 Mike Blanchfield, “Five Things about Canada’s Foreign-​policy End Run Around Donald Trump”, Toronto Star (30 October 2020): www.thestar.com/​politics/​2020/​10/​30/​five-​things-​about-​canadas-​ foreign-​policy-​end-​run-​around-​donald-​trump.html. 2 Global Affairs Canada “Address by Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois-​Philippe Champagne” (10 December 2019): www.canada.ca/​en/​global-​affairs/​news/​2019/​12/​address-​by-​minister-​of-​foreign-​ affairs-​at-​a-​human-​r ights-​conference.html. 3 Louis St-​Laurent, The Foundations of Canadian Policy in World Affairs (Toronto, 1947), 33; Adam Chapnick, “The Canadian Middle Power Myth”, International Journal, 55/​2(2000), 188–​206; Hector MacKenzie, “Golden Decade(s)? Reappraising Canada’s International Relations in the 1940s and 1950s”, British Journal of Canadian Studies, 23/​2(2010), 179–​206. 4 Robertson to Mackenzie King, 22 December 1941, John Hilliker, ed., Documents on Canadian External Relations [DCER], Volume 9: 1942–​1943 (Ottawa, 1980), 1125–​31. 5 Memorandum to Cabinet, “North Atlantic Treaty”, 4 October 1948, ibid., 14: 1948, 610. 6 Cabinet Conclusions, 27 July 1950, RG 2 [Privy Council Records, Library and Archives of Canada, Ottawa] Volume 2645; Canada, House of Commons, Debates (28 June 1950), 4251. 7 Department of External Affairs [DEA], Statements & Speeches, 51/​14 (10 April 1951). 8 Wilgress to St-​Laurent, 25 April 1947, DCER 13: 1947, 365. 9 Lintott to James, 29 April 1968, FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office Records, The National Archives, Kew] 49/​107. 10 J.L. Granatstein and Robert Bothwell, Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto, 1990). 11 Ibid., 51. 12 John English, Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968–​2000 (Toronto, 2009), 171. 13 Canada, Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Proceedings (25 March 1975), 18. 14 Arthur Andrew, The Rise and Fall of a Middle Power (Toronto, 1993), 122. 15 Washington telegram [4330] to DEA, 2 May 1983, RG 25 [External Affairs Records, Library and Archives of Canada, Ottawa] Volume 12504/​20-​America Central. 16 John Urquhart, “An Outspoken US Friend in Ottawa”, Wall Street Journal (24 September 1984). 17 Government of Canada, Canada in the World (Ottawa, 1995). 18 Privy Council Office, Toward an International Policy Framework for the 21st Century (Ottawa, 2003), 14. 19 Lloyd Axworthy, Navigating a New World: Canada’s Global Future (Toronto, 2003), 1. 20 Andrew Cohen, While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World (Toronto, 2003); Dean Oliver and Fen Hampson, “Pulpit Diplomacy: A Critical Assessment of the Axworthy Doctrine”, International Journal, 53/​3(1998), 379–​406; Kim Richard Nossal, “Pinchpenny Diplomacy: The Decline of ‘Good International Citizenship’ in Canadian Foreign Policy”, ibid., 54/​1(1998–​1999), 88–​105. 21 Paul Wells, “We Don’t Pull Our Weight: Manley”, National Post (5 October 2001). 22 Idem, “How Our Leader Reacted”, ibid. (20 September 2001). 23 Eddie Goldenberg, The Way It Works: Inside Ottawa (Toronto, 2006), 289. 24 Timothy Andrews Sayle, “Taking the Off-​Ramp: Canadian Diplomacy, Intelligence, and Decision-​ Making before the Iraq War”, in Ramesh Thakur and Jack Cunningham, eds., Australia, Canada, and Iraq: Perspectives on an Invasion (Toronto, 2015), 210–​27; Alan Barnes, “Getting it Right: Canadian Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, 2002–​2003”, Intelligence and National Security, 35/​7(2020), 925–​53. 25 “Canada Will Go to War if UN OKs It: PM”, National Post (11 October 2002); Bill Graham, The Call of the World: A Political Memoir (Vancouver, 2016), 274. 26 Jean Chrétien, “Don’t Act Alone”, Globe and Mail (14 February 2003). 27 Canada, House of Commons, Debates (1 October 2002). 28 Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day, “Canadians Stand With You”, Wall Street Journal (28 March 2003). 29 Eric Reguly, “Iraq Stance Will Burn Canada”, Globe and Mail (20 March 2003). 30 Allan Gotlieb, “The Paramountcy of Canada-​US Relations”, National Post (22 May 2003). 31 “Trade Concerns as Canada Sits Out War”, NY Times (1 April 2003). 32 Goldenberg, Way it Works, 307; Stephen Azzi and Norman Hillmer, “Intolerant Allies: Canada and the George W. Bush Administration, 2001–​2005”, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 27/​4(2016), 734–​35. 33 Jonah Goldberg, “Bomb Canada: The Case for War”, National Review (25 November 2002). 34 Beth Graham, “US Pundits Bash Canada”, Globe and Mail (19 December 2005).

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Canada and Fading International Order 35 Roy Rempel, Dreamland: How Canada’s Pretend Foreign Policy has Undermined Sovereignty (Montreal, 2006). 36 J.L Granatstein, Whose War Is It? How Canada Can Survive in the Post-​9/​11 World (Toronto, 2007); Linda McQuaig, Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the US Empire (Toronto, 2007). 37 Paul Martin, “Foreword”, International Policy Statement –​Overview (Ottawa, 2005). 38 Idem, Hell or High Water: My Life In and Out of Politics (Toronto, 2008), 391. 39 Idem, “A Global Answer to Global Problems”, Foreign Affairs, 84/​3(2005), 2–​6. 40 Laura Payton, “Harper’s Speech Fires Up Convention Crowd”, CBC News (10 June 2011). 41 Jeffrey Simpson, “The Trouble with Bullhorn Diplomacy”, Globe and Mail (2 August 2014). 42 Robert Fisk, “Linchpin of Anglophone world no more –​liberal Canada loses its way”, The Independent (10 October 2015); Joe Clark, How We Lead: Canada in a Century of Change (Toronto, 2017). 43 Kenneth Whyte, “In Conversation: Stephen Harper”, Maclean’s (5 July 2011). 44 Robert E. Rubin, “A Conversation with Stephen Harper”, Council on Foreign Relations (16 May 2013). 45 Janyce McGregor, “Stephen Harper Confident as Final EU Trade Deal Released”, CBC News (26 September 2014): www.cbc.ca/​news/​politics/​stephen-​harper-​confident-​as-​final-​eu-trade-dealreleased-​1.2778715. 46 Bruce Heyman and Vicki Heyman, The Art of Diplomacy: Strengthening the Canada-​US Relationship in Times of Uncertainty (Toronto, 2019), 75, 78. 47 Luiza Ch. Savage, “Has the Battle over Keystone XL Wrecked Canada-​U.S. Relations?”, Maclean’s (24 February 2015). 48 Jeffrey Simpson, “Want to Be a Major Player, Canada? Get Ready to Spend”, Globe and Mail (30 October 2015). 49 “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Address to the 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (20 September 2016): https://​pm.gc.ca/​en/​news/​speec​hes/​2016/​09/​20/​prime-​minis​ter-​jus​tin-​trude​ aus-​addr​ess-​71st-​sess​ion-​uni​ted-​nati​ons-​gene​ral. 50 Jocelyn Coulon, Un selfie avec Justin Trudeau : regard critique sur la diplomatie du Premier ministre (Montréal, 2018). 51 Heyman and Heyman, Art of Diplomacy, 79, 110, 165, 190. 52 Ishaan Tharoor, “The Many Ways Canada’s Trudeau is the Anti-​Trump”, Washington Post (29 February 2016); “Liberty Moves North”, The Economist (29 October 2016). 53 Daniel Dale, “Daughter Diplomacy: Trudeau’s Unorthodox Play for Donald Trump’s Approval”, Toronto Star (16 March 2017). 54 Ian Austin, “Justin Trudeau Facing Pressure to Oppose Donald Trump, Opts to Get Along”, NY Times (3 February 2017). 55 T. Mellnik and A. Williams, “Is Canada ‘Ripping Us off’? Or Is it the Best U.S. Trade Partner?”, Washington Post (21 September 2018). 56 Guy Lawson, “First Canada Tried to Charm Trump. Now It’s Fighting Back”, NY Times Magazine (10 June 2018). 57 See Allan Gotlieb, “I’ll Be With You in a Minute, Mr. Ambassador”: The Education of a Canadian Diplomat in Washington (Toronto, 1991). 58 Tom Yun, “A Patriot’s Shopping Guide”, Maclean’s (August 2018); John Bowden, “Trudeau: Trump Tariffs ‘Are an Affront’ to Canadian Soldiers Who ‘Fought and Died’ alongside Americans”, The Hill (31 May 2018): https://​theh​ill.com/​pol​icy/​intern​atio​nal/​390​106-​trud​eau-​trump-​tari​ffs-​are-​an-​affr​ ont-​to-​canad​ian-​soldi​ers-​who-​fou​ght-​and. 59 “Trump Accuses Canadian Leader of Being ‘Dishonest’ and ‘Weak’ ”, Washington Post (20 June 2018); Aaron Wherry, Promise and Peril: Justin Trudeau in Power (Toronto, 2019), 29. 60 Trump, Twitter Post, 26 December 2019, 7:03 PM EST: https://​www.thet​rump​arch​ive.com/​. 61 Mike Blanchfield, “Trump Missed Having Putin at Canada’s 2018 G7 Leaders’ Summit Dinner: Senator”, CTV News (18 January 2021): www.ctvnews.ca/​canada/​trump-​missed-​having-​putin-​at-​canada-​ s-​2018-​g7-​leaders-​summit-​dinner-​senator-​1.5270873?cache=​%2F5-​things-​to-​know-​for-​monday-​ september-​16-​2019-​1.4594485; Steve Scherer, “Russia Not Welcome at G7, Canada’s Trudeau Says”, Reuters (1 June 2020): https://​www.reut​ers.com/​arti​cle/​us-​g7-​sum​mit-​can​ada-​idUSKB​N238​32L. 62 “Donald Trump Says NATO is ‘Obsolete’, UN is ‘Political Game’ ”, NY Times (2 April 2016); “Trump Discussed Pulling US from NATO, Aides Say Amid New Concerns Over Russia”, ibid. (14 January 2019). 63 Trump, Twitter Post, 21 August 2019, 1:43 PM EST: www.thetrumparchive.com/​.

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Asa McKercher 64 “Defense Secretary Warns NATO of ‘Dim’ Future”, NY Times (11 June 2011). 65 Stephen J. Randall, “Great Expectations: America’s Approach to Canada”, in Michael Behiels and Reginald C. Stuart, ed., Transnationalism: Canada-​United States History into the Twenty-​first Century (Montreal, 2010), 284. 66 “Address by Minister Freeland When Receiving Foreign Policy’s Diplomat of the Year Award” (13 June 2018): www.canada.ca/​en/​global-​affairs/​news/​2018/​06/​address-​by-​minister-​freeland-​when-​ receiving-​foreign-​policys-​diplomat-​of-​the-​year-​award.html. 67 Wherry, Promise and Peril, 154–​55. 68 “Address by Minister Freeland on Canada’s Foreign Policy Priorities” (6 June 2017): www.canada.ca/​ en/​global-​affairs/​news/​2017/​06/​address_​by_​ministerfreelandoncanadasforeignpolicypriorities.html. 69 Rob Gillies, “Canada Relieved Trade Deal Done, Won’t Forget Trump Attacks”, Associated Press (4 October 2018): www.apnews.com/​562d0376782d4d4aabdc8a18a8ab5b90. 70 Paul Wells, “The Interview”, Maclean’s (April 2019). 71 Philippe Lagassé and Srdjan Vucetic, “Coronavirus Shows Why Canada Must Reduce Its Dependence on the US”, The Conversation (4 May 2020): https://​thec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​ coronavirus-​showswhy-​canada-​must-​reduce-​its-​dependence-​on-​the-​u-​s-​136357. 72 “PM Confident Asia Tour Will Help Human Rights”, Toronto Star (18 November 1994). 73 “Won’t ‘Sell Out’ on Rights Despite China Snub: PM”, CBC News (15 November 2006): www.cbc. ca/​news/​world/​won-​t-​sell-​out-​on-​r ights-​despite-​china-​snub-​pm-​1.570708. 74 Kim Richard Nossal and Leah Sarson, “About Face: Explaining Changes in Canada’s China Policy, 2006–​2012”, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, 20/​2(2014), 146–​62. 75 Giuseppe Valiante, “Chinese Premier Calls for ‘New Golden Decade’ with Canada”, Toronto Star (23 September 2016). 76 David Mulroney, “Trudeau’s Embrace of China Exposes His Naivete”, Globe and Mail (14 January 2017). 77 Meredith B. Lilly, “Hewers of Wood and Drawers of Water 2.0: How American and Chinese Economic Nationalism Influence Canadian Trade Policy in the Twenty-​First Century”, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, 26/​2(2020), 167–​81. 78 Biden Harris Democrats, “The Power of America’s Example: The Biden Plan for Leading the Democratic World to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century” (nd): https://​joebi​den.com/​ame​r ica​ nlea​ders​hip/​. 79 Pearson to Wrong, 16 April 1951, MG 26 N [Lester B. Pearson fonds, Library and Archives of Canada, Ottawa], Volume 35/​Korea: Canadian Policy 1950–​1951.

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13 AUSTRIA’S FOREIGN POLICY IN THE EARLY TWENTY-​F IRST CENTURY Between Domestic Restraints and an International Agenda Erwin A. Schmidl

Austria is a small, landlocked country in Central Europe. During the “Cold War”, it belonged to neither of the two blocs, adopting instead a policy of “active neutrality” after re-​gaining its sovereignty in 1955. Vienna focused on an active participation in international affairs and a multilateral approach through the United Nations [UN].1 This policy was largely shaped by long-​time foreign minister and then chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, a Social Democrat with experience abroad –​during the Nazi period, he had spent some years in exile in Sweden –​and a deep understanding of foreign affairs. Austria promoted its capital as an international meeting place and venue for international conferences.2 Vienna became the seat of several international organisations, and from 1960, Austria contributed military personnel to international peace operations.3 Partly because of Allied caveats against closer economic ties between Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria could not join the emerging European Communities [EC], opting instead for membership in the European Free Trade Association. It was only in July 1989, in the end phase of the Cold War, that Austria applied for membership in the EC and joined the (by then) European Union [EU] in January 1995. In retrospect, the quest to regain its sovereignty during the Allied post-​war “occupation period” from 1945 to 1955, and the efforts to join the EU from 1987 to 1995, appear to have been the only two periods with a clear and domestically uncontested foreign policy agenda. Beyond this, basic elements of Austria’s foreign policy included engagement in international affairs, offering good offices, strengthening human rights, and –​from the 1990s onwards –​advancing European integration.4 In some fields, however, persisting on “neutrality” hampered this course, as the notion evolved from a legal concept to an element of Austria’s identity. Although Austria had joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s [NATO] Partnership for Peace in February 1995, and participated in the development of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy as defined in the 1997 Amsterdam and 2007 Lisbon Treaties –​respectively in force in 1999 and 2009 –​“neutrality” remains a key word of Austria’s foreign policy.5 In practice, it can be difficult for outsiders to understand: in DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-16

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1999, for example, Austria welcomed NATO’s actions against Yugoslavia, but –​invoking neutrality –​closed its airspace for NATO flights. The end of the Cold War and accession to the EU certainly brought a re-​orientation for Austria and its foreign policy. Austrian diplomats, accustomed to networking in the multilateral arena, had to co-​ordinate their positions with colleagues from other EU countries. Of course, although the federal government traditionally shaped Austrian state foreign policy, the nine provinces –​ Länder –​maintain relations of their own with neighbouring countries and have their own representations in Brussels. For a long time, foreign policy remained outside of domestic political debates in Austria. All parties welcomed the country’s prominent position in the UN system and, in 1979, Vienna officially became the third seat of the UN headquarters –​after New York and Geneva –​with the handing over of the Vienna International Centre to the UN. The UN Office in Vienna is the world organisation’s only headquarters in an EU member-​state. With Vienna also the seat of the Organisation of Petrol Exporting Countries since 1965 and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE], Austria is home to over 40 other international organisations. In July 2015, the city once again played host to major international negotiations with the Iran “Nuclear Deal”. Only in recent years, after 1989 and its consequences, including the wars in Yugoslavia, but even more since EU-​accession in 1995 and in the context of global problems such as climate change and migration, foreign affairs became more of an issue of internal political debates in Austria. The EU’s ill-​advised and short-​lived “sanctions” against Austria after the election of a centre-​r ight coalition in February 2000 certainly played a role here –​a coalition member was the far right Freedom Party [FPÖ] –​Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs. Most EU members reduced bilateral relations for some months, which obviously dampened Austrian enthusiasm for the EU. Although two-​thirds of voters had favoured accession to the EU in the referendum of June 1994, attitudes became increasingly critical in the early 2000s. In 2020, according to a recent Eurobarometer poll, no less than 45 per cent of Austrians were of the opinion that the EU moved in a wrong direction. Whereas the European average of positive attitude towards the EU was 63 per cent, in Austria it was only 41 per cent.6 From 1970, Austria had experienced three decades of governments dominated by the Social Democrats [SPÖ] –​Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs.7 When talks to form a new coalition between the SPÖ and the Christian Social People’s Party [ÖVP] –​Österreichische Volkspartei –​ collapsed in February 2000, the latter entered a coalition with the FPÖ. Although the FPÖ always had a liberal, pro-​European wing, as well as a more nationalistic, far right leaning one, the latter clearly dominated in the 1990s under Jörg Haider. Like its sister parties in most European countries, the FPÖ adopted an increasingly populist agenda, going beyond the traditional “left” versus “right” characteristics. One important element was hostility against foreign, especially Moslem, immigration. Despite the FPÖ’s increasingly anti-​EU agenda, the ÖVP-​FPÖ government supported EU enlargement in the early 2000s. The “big bang” enlargement of 2004 brought most neighbouring countries –​with the exception of Switzerland and Liechtenstein –​into the EU, most of which soon followed into the Schengen system, allowing for free travel and the abolition of border controls. This policy continued in January 2007, when a coalition between the SPÖ and ÖVP again came to power after the elections of October 2006, replacing the uneasy ÖVP-​FPÖ coalition that had been in office since 2000, and leading to a more consensual foreign policy.8 National elections again took place in 2008 and 2013, both times leading to a renewal of the SPÖ-​ÖVP coalition government –​which, however, increasingly suffered from internal tensions. 160

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Concerning the development of the EU, the Constitution Treaty for Europe then under discussion appeared as a useful basis for further integration in 2007. At the same time, the government programme noted, “the EU should only occupy itself with those functions that can be really solved better on a Union level in Brussels, and stronger in taking national parliaments into account [subsidiarity]”.9 This was a clear sign of the growing scepticism of the EU in Austria as well as in other EU countries. Still, Austria reaffirmed its commitment to EU efforts in foreign and security policy, including the “EU headline goals 2010” and participation with military and civilian personnel in peace and stability operations, with an emphasis on South Eastern Europe, where Austria participates in the EU-​, NATO-​and UN-​led missions in Bosnia-​Herzegovina since 1995 and the NATO-​led operation in Kosovo since 1999. It specifically mentioned this as an “emphasis” for Austrian engagement “because stability in this region means security for Europe and for Austria”.10 EU enlargement saw such emphasis on integrating South Eastern European countries: “European integration is incomplete without the West Balkan countries,” the 2007 government programme stated.11 Austria therefore advocated Croatia’s accession to the EU that eventually took place in 2013. Apart from Croatia, “West Balkan” included Albania, Bosnia-​ Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Serbia. Austria continuously favoured closer relations between –​and the eventual accession of –​these countries to the EU. In October 2019, Vienna therefore opposed French President Emmanuel Macron’s veto of accession talks with North Macedonia and Albania at the EU summit.12 For obvious historical as well as geographical reasons, South Eastern Europe remains a key area for Austria. Economic engagement in this region is very strong. Austria also participated in international peace efforts in this region, starting with NATO’s Peace Implementation Force and its successor, the Stabilisation Force [SFOR] in Bosnia-​Herzegovina in 1996, and the Kosovo Force in Kosovo in 1999, as well as several smaller operations. In 2004, the EU-​led European Force “Althea” [EUFOR Althea] replaced SFOR in Bosnia-​Herzegovina, and Austria increased its commitment there. Since 2009, the EUFOR commander has always been an Austrian general. As for the country’s stance in the UN, the changes in government did not significantly affect Austria’s position. It continued active engagement in the organisation and, in 2008, was –​for the third time after 1973–​1974 and 1991–​1992 –​elected as a non-​permanent member of the UN Security Council for the period 2009–​2010. The 2007 government programme stressed the importance of Vienna as the seat of several UN organisations and OSCE.13 It also reaffirmed continued participation in UN peace operations, although the Austrian battalion –​one of two battalions in UN service since the early 1970s –​had been withdrawn from the Cyprus operation in 2001.14 From 2012 on, Austria regularly contributes personnel to EU “Battle Groups”, battalion-​sized elements for peace operations deployable at short notice. Declarations about foreign policy in general, and commitment to the EU in particular, did not significantly change during this period. This is not surprising, as the Foreign Ministry had been under ministers from the ÖVP since 1987, and this continued despite the changes in the coalitions in 2000 and 2007. Following the government programmes of the SPÖ-​ÖVP coalitions from 2007 to 2017, little change occurred regarding foreign affairs. In some cases, the programmes’ creation clearly became “copy and paste” procedures, sometimes even replicating spelling mistakes. Notably, though, the programme adopted in 2013 moved foreign policy from one of the first items on the agenda down to page 77 –​of 124 pages –​behind social and economic aspects and education. The weak position of foreign affairs in the government programme of 2013 illustrated well the changed priorities: following the economic crisis of 2008, economic and social issues evidently took first place. Unsurprisingly, the government programmes continued to mention 161

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Austria’s commitment to the EU and deepening European integration. They also stressed subsidiarity and a more bürgernah approach –​that is, bringing the EU closer to the citizens.15 Often, foreign ministers had a diplomatic background, such as Benita Ferrero-​Waldner (2000–​2004) and Ursula Plassnik (2004–​2008), who had both served in bilateral as well as multilateral functions before. In December 2008, however, then ÖVP chairman and vice chancellor, Michael Spindelegger, took over the Ministry; in 2013, he was succeeded by Sebastian Kurz as minister for foreign affairs and integration. Both had made their careers in the Party and had limited knowledge of and interest in foreign affairs. This led to further budget cuts and personnel reductions in the following years. In 2011, retired Ambassador Thomas Nowotny openly deplored this development. In Washington, he said, of all EU countries “only Malta and Cyprus had fewer embassy staff than we”: “I consider the general austerity [regarding the Diplomatic Service] not only bad, but almost suicidal.”16 Not understanding the value of nourishing bilateral relations and permanent representations in a foreign capital –​often claiming that the advent of e-​mail and tele-​conferences made them superfluous –​the number of embassies and consulates was significantly reduced, from 91 embassies and 17 consulates-​ general in 2005 to 82 embassies and ten consulates-​general by 2019.17 These cuts included –​for the first time –​embassies in EU capitals (in the Baltic countries and Malta) to the detriment of Austria’s relations with smaller EU member-​states. Austria currently still maintains embassies in 82 countries: out of 196 with whom diplomatic relations exist. The permanent staff of the Foreign Ministry decreased from 1,489 in 2000 to 1,113 in late 2019, with the number of university-​trained diplomats –​“A level”, in Austrian bureaucratic lingo –​going down from 482 in 2000 to 426 in 2019. Almost 50 per cent of personnel are women. To save expenditures, “roving ambassadors” emerged, based in Vienna and moving from one capital to another –​a model adopted for some military attachés before, and did not work too well. Currently, there are some 22 resident military attachés, most of them co-​accredited in several other countries as well.18 Apart from traditional diplomacy, budget cuts also affected “cultural diplomacy”, with the number of separate cultural institutes –​now called Kulturforum –​reduced from ten in 2000 to two by 2020, the others becoming part of the respective embassies, with reduced staffing.19 The cultural institutes had been within the competences of the Foreign Ministry since 1973 and are considered a crucial asset for a country’s perception and interests. For a nation conscious of its cultural heritage, this development was certainly nothing of which to be proud.20 The achievements of Austria’s “cultural diplomats” under these adverse conditions are all the more remarkable. The 2013 government programme reiterated the importance of multilateral co-​operation within the framework of the UN, including campaigning for a world free of nuclear arms and announcing a conference on this theme for 2014–​2015.21 It also declared a minimum number of 1,100 troops for deployment in peace operations worldwide.22 This figure was also included in the “Austrian Security Strategy” adopted by Parliament in 2013. Not surprisingly, the 2013 programme reinforced Austria’s commitment to a policy of “neutrality”.23 Whilst verbally stressing Austria’s engagement in peacekeeping operations, the government withdrew the battalion serving with the UN Disengagement Observer Force on the Golan Heights, there since the mission’s start in June 1974, at short notice in June 2013. This occurred despite earlier promises to the contrary, when fighting between various factions in Syria increasingly affected the UN-​supervised disengagement zone between Syrian and Israeli forces.24 This decision seriously damaged Austria’s standing in the international community, illustrating how little attention the government of the day paid to international affairs in practice.

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Five years later, the government made a similar decision regarding an area closer to home. From the late 1980s onwards, developments in Central Europe had been of major importance for Austria, and especially to some elements of the conservative ÖVP around long-​time Vice-​ Chancellor Erhard Busek. In 1989, Austria had been one of the four founding members of the Central European Initiative [CEI].25 Despite various subsequent commitments to co-​operation in Central Europe, Austria ended its membership in June 2018, strengthening its support for the OSCE instead. Many observers criticised this decision as short-​sighted, and Busek deplored it as “one contact less in a region where we most need these contacts”.26 Not long before, in late 2014 at the CEI’s annual meeting in Vienna, the organisation had been hailed as an “engine for peace and stability” in Europe, as it was a platform for co-​operation between EU and non-​ EU countries and had contributed to the Minsk process in the Russo-​Ukrainian dispute over Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.27 Perhaps because of its proximity to South Eastern Europe, and aware of Turkish ambitions in this region as well as in Europe at large, in addition to the size of the country and its migratory potential, Austria had always been reluctant regarding a closer association between the EU and Turkey. Turkey had been a member of the Council of Europe since 1949 and signed a customs union agreement with the EU in 1995; however, the issue of a future full membership divided the EU in the early 2000s. The Helsinki summit of December 1999 had recognised Turkey as a candidate, but Austria as well as Germany in 2005 advocated a “privileged partnership” instead. The 2007 government programme stressed the “open nature” of all negotiations between Brussels and Ankara. The wording used for relations with Turkey was “to bring [Turkey] up to European values” –​Heranführen.28 Like France, Austria would have to ratify an eventual accession of Turkey to the EU by a referendum. As the negotiations started in 2005 soon stalled, this was not an issue of immediate concern, however. Nonetheless, Austria’s cautious attitude towards Turkey was not without consequences. After the alleged 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, and allegations of Turkish meddling in several European elections, Austrian politicians called on the EU to end membership talks. This in turn led Turkey to block Austria’s partner programmes with NATO.29 The 2007 government programme also used the formula “to bring up to European values” to describe the EU’s relations with Ukraine and Moldova, and this continued to be an element of Austrian foreign policy towards Eastern Europe. The government programme of 2013 included Belarus and the South Caucasus region as well, coinciding with a period when Austria added the Black Sea region to areas of interest for Austrian policy and economy.30 A traditional element of Austria’s Eastern European policy has always been to maintain friendly relations with Russia. To some extent, this traces to the days of the Cold War, when the proximity of the Warsaw Pact as well as the supply of Russian gas had been important factors. The 2007 government programme stressed the special importance of relations with Russia.31 Interestingly, in many European countries, parties on the far right, usually critical of closer EU integration, are the ones favouring close ties to Russia. Moreover, rumours persist of financial aid from Russia to these parties. Austria’s FPÖ is no exception, with leading personalities having close relations with Russia or Russian-​influenced organisations. This included the Party’s deputy head, Johann Gudenus, who with several colleagues was an “observer” of the Crimean referendum of March 2014 supporting the annexation of the peninsula by Russia.32 The coalition between the SPÖ and the ÖVP held for ten years, but did not always work smoothly. Following elections in October 2017, it was replaced by a new coalition between the ÖVP and the –​renewed, more right-​leaning, and even stronger anti-​EU –​FPÖ. Interestingly, the programme adopted by this ÖVP-​FPÖ coalition once again put Europe and international

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affairs in a more prominent place, after reform of the state administration but ahead of internal affairs, future, education, science, and economic affairs. Possibly in view of the sometimes-​open hostility of parts of the FPÖ against the EU, and to pacify fears about a hostile attitude towards the EU in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum and criticism of the less than glorious EU leadership of former Luxembourg prime minister Jean-​Claude Juncker, the commitment to European integration was strongly reaffirmed. But so was the emphasis on “subsidiarity” and stressing Austrian neutrality.33 The 2017 government programme announced reforms in the Diplomatic Service and in the embassies abroad.34 At the same time, a reassignment of Cabinet responsibilities moved EU affairs from the Foreign Ministry to the Chancellery. To some extent, this was a logical move, since –​especially after the changes introduced by the Lisbon Treaty in 2009 –​EU affairs by now went far beyond the traditional spheres of foreign policy. This also relates to the domestic political context: as a junior partner in SPÖ-​dominated governments, the ÖVP, heading the Foreign Ministry, refused transfer of European matters to the SPÖ-​ruled Chancellery. In 2017, this changed: With the new foreign minister, Karin Kneissl, proposed by the FPÖ, it seemed prudent to move EU affairs to the ÖVP-​dominated Chancellery. This followed examples in other EU countries, but also reflected a shift in prime ministers taking increased interest in foreign affairs, if only for the occasion for nice photographs of handshakes with prominent personalities, and to the detriment of the role of foreign ministries. The announcement of the new government coincided with preparations for Austria’s presidency of the EU Council in the second half of 2018.35 Kneissl, a distinguished author and journalist, was a diplomat who had left the Foreign Ministry after ten years of service. She always stressed that although nominated by the FPÖ, she was not a party member, but an “independent expert minister”. An experienced linguist having studied in the Middle East and speaking fluent Arabic as well as Hebrew, she stunned journalists and diplomats when she addressed Arab journalists in their native language and used four of the UN languages, including Arabic, when speaking to the UN General Assembly in 2018. She also made the point that she wrote her speaking texts herself.36 The 2017 government programme for the main part continued along traditional lines. Referring to the UN, it mentioned Austria’s candidatures for a seat in the Human Rights Council for 2019–​2021 and a non-​permanent seat in the Security Council for 2027–​2028, as well as the commitment to a “nuclear-​arms-​free world”.37 With the big “migration crisis” of 2015, uncontrolled and illegal migration from crisis-​and war-​torn areas in Asia and Africa became a major issue for all European governments. Austria –​ like Germany and Sweden –​was and is a destination of choice for migrants seeking a better life and served as a transit country for migrants aiming for Germany via Italy or the “Balkans route”. As the EU proved unable to do much about the flow of illegal migrants –​often wrongly labelled refugees –​Austria increased co-​operation with countries along the Balkans route to stop the influx. From 2015 on, the armed forces were deployed in support of the police for internal security and border surveillance. In December 2018, Austria –​like eight other EU countries, Switzerland, and the United States –​refused to sign the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, although some preparatory consultations had occurred in Vienna, out of fears of this compact reducing Austria’s sovereignty and mixing the difference between illegal and legal immigration as well as that between economic and humanitarian immigration.38 In another field and with some success, Kneissl placed emphasis on restoring the much-​ strained relations between Austria and Turkey. In the dispute over a possible future accession to the EU, Turkey had expelled Austrian archaeologists from the Ephesos excavation site and 164

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blocked Austrian participation in NATO activities from 2016 on. Visiting Turkey in 2018, Kneissl succeeded in having the Austrian archaeologists return to Ephesos.39 She also stressed the importance of keeping communication channels open with Russia.40 When Western countries expelled 153 Russian diplomats in connection with the Skripal case in April 2018 –​the poisoning of the former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal living in Britain together with his daughter Yulia, Western countries blaming Russian intelligence for the attack –​Austria did not participate in the “tit-​for-​tat” action. Whilst Vienna supported the EU Foreign Affairs Council’s statement on 19 March expressing “its unqualified solidarity with the UK”, Austria –​like six other EU countries and Switzerland41 –​refused to join in the mutual expulsion exercise, stressing instead the importance to maintain open communication channels especially in times of crisis. In view of Austria’s economic connections with Russia, this was a wise move, although some observers accused Austria of a pro-​Russian bias. Reputedly, pressure occurred on the country behind the scenes to correct its “pro-​Russian” attitude. In August 2018, Kneissl made worldwide headlines when Russian President Vladimir Putin showed up at her wedding on his way to a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Critics abroad as well as within Austria criticised this as “a grave foreign policy mistake”, but it did not result in the predicted “isolation of Austria in Europe”.42 When Kneissl planned to visit Russia again in December 2018, however, a “friendly” intelligence service, possibly from Germany, hinted that a retired Austrian officer had supplied information to Russia decades ago, and she had to cancel her trip. Evidently, there are limits to the diplomatic freedom of movement for a small country.43 Looking back on her experience as minister, Kneissl deplored the loss of communication in diplomacy, with statements read from speaking notes replacing true dialogue, especially in the context of EU meetings. “We talk more about each other than with each other.” Tongue-​in-​ cheek, she noted that she was still received with a bunch of flowers east of Vienna, whereas in Western Europe increasingly hectic schedules made real dialogue difficult.44 A new element in the 2017 government programme was increased emphasis on Austria’s “protective role” for South Tyrol. The region became part of Italy in 1918–​1919, and the status of its German-​speaking majority had been a major issue in the interwar years and again in the 1960s. South Tyrol today still has a clear German-​speaking majority, and Italy and Austria reached a functioning compromise about the region’s autonomy status in 1992.45 To reopen this issue in 2018 probably stemmed from the FPÖ’s traditional commitment to supporting the German-​speaking population in the region, and there even were proposals to issue Austrian passports to ethnic German/​Austrian South Tyroleans. In itself, this would have been without real consequence, as both countries are EU members and South Tyroleans enjoy a special status in Austria anyway; but it affected bilateral relations and led to further questions. Would this, in due course, lead to Slovenia issuing Slovene passports to Slovene-​speakers in Austria’s Carinthia, for example? Fortunately, with the fall of this government in May 2019, this issue lapsed. The ÖVP-​FPÖ coalition eventually had to step down after the release of a video secretly filmed in Ibiza in 2017, showing two leading FPÖ politicians –​Party chief Hans Christian Strache and his deputy, Johann Gudenus –​discussing possible bribes and political favours to Russian investors. Kneissl continued in office in the short-​lived interim government without FPÖ participation headed by Hartwig Löger from 28 May until 3 June 2019. For about half a year, Austria was then governed by a “civil servants’ cabinet” led by Brigitte Bierlein and composed of leading experts rather than politicians. This was possibly the best government the country had in years. A professional diplomat, Alexander Schallenberg, who negotiated the ÖVP position on foreign policy in drawing up of the 2017 government 165

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programme, took over the post of foreign minister. Over the centuries, the counts of Schallenberg have provided more than one loyal servant for Austria, and his father had been ambassador and secretary-​general in the Foreign Ministry. Schallenberg continued as minister when the ÖVP again, now in a coalition with the Green Party –​Die Grünen –​took over the government in January 2020. The co-​ordinating role for EU affairs remained with the Chancellery, with Strasbourg-​experienced Karoline Edtstadler as minister for EU and constitutional affairs, although some European competences returned to the Foreign Ministry in January 2020. Not only was participation in a government on federal level a new experience for the Green Party, the new joint government programme was the first ever to have a proper publication imprint. Foreign and European issues were relegated to Chapter Four, however, starting on page 122 –​of 226 pages. This might indicate that in finding a compromise agenda between two parties with such a different outlook, issues of society, economy, and –​most important for the Greens –​environment and climate change took precedence over foreign affairs, where both parties held similar perspectives anyway. Compared to earlier programmes, there were few changes in European policy, most notable perhaps the wish for a new “Treaty for Europe” and stressing European co-​operation for the big issues in the future.46 The programme reaffirmed “active neutrality policy” –​a mantra of Austrian foreign policy –​as well as Austria’s contribution to the EU’s common foreign and security policy and increased co-​operation in the fields of security and defence.47 The EU should have “one voice” in the international arena, including –​perhaps a new wording –​a joint permanent seat in the UN Security Council. EU foreign policy decisions should in future occur with a qualified majority.48 It stressed continuation of the “strategic partnership” with the United States, as well as the need of continued good relations with Russia –​including the bilateral civil-​society “Sochi dialogue” –​as well as Ukraine.49 Engagement for the rule of law, human rights, and against racism and anti-​Semitism, continued as standing phrases, as was the emphasis on development co-​operation –​the latter as usual not followed by adequate financial means at all. Currently, Libya, Yemen, and Syria are the most important countries for Austrian development aid.50 There was a reiteration of the importance of Vienna as seat of international organisations, as was participation in international operations, again reaffirming a minimum of 1,100 troops deployed in peace operations –​ although the real figure had always been lower since the withdrawal of the Austrian battalion from the UN operation on the Golan Heights in 2013.51 Migration continued to be a major matter of dispute in Austria. Although the Greens traditionally supported an “open arms” policy towards migrants, the 2020 government programme reaffirmed the strict anti-​migration policy, supporting a firm division between the granting of asylum for real refugees and the treatment of migrants. Refugees should remain close to their home countries and be repatriated as soon as possible. Increased international co-​operation should assist combatting human trafficking.52 Not surprisingly, the COVID crisis in 2020 had negative consequences for international relations. Video conferences replaced face-​to-​face meetings; almost all European countries closed their borders and issued “travel warnings” in spring 2020. This was quite often detrimental to good relations –​such as when Austria at very short notice issued a travel warning against Croatia in mid-​August 2020, resulting in a chaotic situation at the borders when thousands of Austrians and Germans broke off their holidays, hurting Croatia’s tourist sector.53 For a long time, Austria had supported human rights and advocated treaties restraining the use of weapons and force. For a small country, this was a logical policy. Austria also supported the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The negotiations, initiated at the UN General Assembly by Austria, Mexico and Norway, started in 2016 and eventually 166

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led to the adoption of a text by representatives from 122 countries on 7 July 2017.54 In January 2021, the treaty went into effect.55 Whilst certainly a symbolic gesture for a better world, this engagement actually affected Austria’s relations with NATO countries, including Austria’s close neighbours, for whom nuclear deterrence obviously remains an important element for their national security. As a young Czech diplomat put it at a conference in 2019, how would one feel when one suddenly discovers that a good friend is sawing off a leg of the stool on which one sits? Advocates of the treaty maintain, however, that nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to mankind regardless of whether one believes in nuclear deterrence or not. In short, Austria in the past decades has continued a foreign policy based on multilateralism and engagement in the EU, but without a clear strategy. In this, the country is probably not atypical of many other democratic countries where governments, focused on re-​election, discard far-​reaching foreign policy aims in favour of items closer to the hearts –​and the pocketbooks –​ of the electorate. Moreover, for small countries, the leeway for foreign policy is limited. The possibilities for diplomatic activities as well as their framework have changed considerably over the past decades. Hectic schedules leave little time for contemplation or creative discussions. Developments overtake plans within days or even hours. For diplomats serving abroad, closer control by the ministries back home and interference from political leaders often hamper their activities. Short-​term media coverage has become more important than the traditional quiet work “behind the scenes”. International meetings are more important for shake-​ hands photographs than for discussions of important questions. As domestic issues take priority over foreign affairs, diplomatic relations and activities have changed –​not always for the better, and possibly affecting smaller countries more than larger ones. Many of the leading political figures lack experience abroad as well as the necessary linguistic abilities to communicate with their counterparts within and outside of the EU. Lack of proper qualifications often goes hand in hand with a distrust of civil servants, who are the backbone of the state’s administration. A drastic example was Vice-​Chancellor Strache, in connection with Austria’s refusal to sign the UN Migration Compact, accusing civil servants acting “on auto-​pilot”, “doing what they always did … without properly evaluating the issues”.56 In contrast, the members of the Diplomatic Service continue to be possibly the best-​trained and qualified personnel in the Austrian civil service. Although the requirement to be fluent in French in addition to English was recently replaced by fluency in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, or Spanish as alternatives to French, candidates for the Diplomatic Service still must pass a special exam –​ examen préalable –​before being admitted on a probation basis. Out of 1,125 employees of the Foreign Ministry in early 2021, some 400 are diplomats in the proper sense of the word, usually serving abroad for two periods of three to four years before returning to the Ministry for a few years.57 Personnel reductions hamper career prospects, and –​like in other ministries –​ the uneven distribution of age groups will soon result in a dramatic loss of knowledge when “baby boomers” retire. The old Chinese curse of “living in interesting times” continues to be of relevance for Austria and its diplomats and the country today.

Author’s Note This paper was finalised in spring 2021. In October 2021, following a corruption scandal, Sebastian Kurz had to step down as chancellor, and Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg took over the chancellery for a few weeks, returning to the Foreign Ministry in early December. In the meantime, another experienced career diplomat, Ambassador Michael Linhart, acted as foreign minister. By and large, there are no indications of a change in the government’s foreign policy. 167

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Since writing this piece, retired ambassadors Franz Cede and Christian Prosl published another interesting book about Austrian foreign policy: Diplomaten im Dialog: Zeitzeugnis einer Generation (Vienna, 2021), which presents interviews with twenty top diplomats, providing enlightening insights into their experience. At this point, the author would also like to thank several colleagues from the Foreign Ministry who read the draft manuscript and contributed additional insight. Needless to say, while this paper could not have been written without them, the mistakes are all mine.

Notes 1 For an overview of Austrian foreign policy, see Michael Gehler, Österreichs Außenpolitik der Zweiten Republik: Von der alliierten Besatzung bis zum Europa des 21. Jahrhunderts, two volumes (Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen, 2005). See also Franz Cede and Christian Prosl, Ambition and Reality: Austria’s Foreign Policy since 1945 (Innsbruck, Bozen, Wien, 2017). The annual Außenpolitischer Bericht [since 2010: Außen-​ und Europapolitischer Bericht], originally the Foreign Ministry’s report about its activities to Parliament, can be downloaded from the Ministry’s website back to the 2000 report: www.bmeia.gv.at/​das-​ ministerium/​aussen-​und-​europapolitischer-​bericht/​. Earlier versions from 1975 on are accessible online via the University of Innsbruck library: https://​dig​lib.uibk.ac.at/​ulbti​rol/​per​iodi​cal/​struct​ure/​ 114​432. 2 Erwin A. Schmidl, “Wien als internationales Zentrum”, in Michael Dippelreiter, ed., Wien: Die Metamorphose einer Stadt [Geschichte der österreichischen Bundesländer seit 1945; Schriftenreihe des Forschungsinstitutes für politisch-​historische Studien der Dr.-​Wilfried-​Haslauer-​Bibliothek, Salzburg] Band 6/​9 (Wien, Köln, Weimar, 2013), 703–​30. 3 For an overview of Austrian participation in international operations, see Erwin A. Schmidl, Going International –​In the Service of Peace: Das österreichische Bundesheer und die österreichische Teilnahme an internationalen Einsätzen seit 1960, Seventh Revised Edition (Graz, 2019 [recte 2020]). 4 The Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs –​Bundesministerium für auswärtige Angelegenheitenn –​became the Ministry for European and International Affairs –​Bundesministerium für europäische und internationale Angelegenheiten, BMeiA) in 2007. In 2014, integration [of migrants] became an additional task of the Foreign Ministry due to a government reshuffle, the Ministry becoming the Ministry for Europe, Integration and Foreign Affairs [Bundesministerium für Europa, Integration und Äußeres –​keeping at least the acronym and the e-​mail address]. In 2020, it again became the Ministry for European and International Affairs. 5 For an overview, see Gunther Hauser, Das europäische Suicherheits-​und Verteidigungssystem und seine Akteure, Ninth Revised Edition (Vienna, 2019). For an assessment of the “neutrality issue”, see Gerhard Jandl, “Nun sag, wie hast du’s mit der Neutralität?”, in Manfred Matzka, Peter Hilpold, and Walter Hämmerle, eds., 100 Jahre Verfassung (Wien, 2020), 147–​ 49; Gerhard Jandl, “Some Observations on the Neutrality of Austria, and Its Participation in the European and Euro-​Atlantic Security Structures”, in Andreas J. Kumin, Kirsten Schmalenbach, Lorin-​Johannes Wagner, and Julia Schimpfhuber, eds., Außen-​und sicherheitspolitische Integration im Europäischen Rechtsraum: Festschrift für Hubert Isak (Wien, 2020), 343–​52; Gerhard Jandl, “Die Neutralität als Allheilmittel gegen das Böse?”, in Michael Steiner, ed., Das Böse (Graz, 2018), 260–​61. 6 “EU gewinnt insgesamt an Zustimmung –​in Österreich jedoch nicht”, Tiroler Tageszeitung, (12 February 2021): www.tt.com/​artikel/​30778821/​eu-​gewinnt-​insgesamt-​an-zustimmung-inoesterreich-​jedoch-​nicht. 7 Until 1991, the SPÖ was the Sozialistische Partei Österreichs despite its clear anti-​communist stance. 8 Austria at the time had legislative periods of four years, extended to five years in 2007. Elections in 2002 renewed the ÖVP-​FPÖ coalition, but the FPÖ eventually dissolved, with the part in government becoming the Bündnis Zukunft Österreich in 2005. 9 Regierungsprogramm für die XXIII. Gesetzgebungsperiode (2007), 8. 10 Ibid., 10. 11 Ibid., 7–​8. 12 Hugo Blewett-​ Mundy, “The EU Tries to Revive Western Balkan Enlargement in Midst of a Pandemic”, Global Risks Insight (7 December 2020): https://​glo​balr​iski​nsig​hts.com/​2020/​12/​the-​eu-​ tries-​to-​rev​ive-​west​ern-​bal​kan-​enla​rgem​ent-​in-​midst-​of-​a-​pande​mic/​.

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Austria in the Early 21st Century 13 Since the 1950s, promoting the role of Vienna as a centre for international negotiations and as the seat for international organisations was a key element of Austrian foreign policy. From its start in 1957, the International Atomic Energy Agency is based in Vienna; the UN Industrial Development Organisation later joined it in 1965, and others followed. See Schmidl, “Wien als internationales Zentrum”, 703–​30. 14 Regierungsprogramm für die XXIII. Gesetzgebungsperiode (2007), 20. 15 Erfolgreich. Österreich. Arbeitsprogramm der österreichischen Bundesregierung für die Jahre 2013 bis 2018 (Wien, 2013), 77: https://​ima​ges.ders​tand​ard.at/​2013/​12/​12/​reg​ieru​ngsp​rogr​amm%202​013%20-​ %202​018.pdf. 16 Georg Hoffmann-​Ostenhof, “Geradezu selbstmörderisch” [Interview with Thomas Nowotny], Profil, 28 (11 July 2011), 59–​60. 17 In addition, there continue to be six permanent representations, such as at the UN in New York or the EU in Brussels. Not counted are the honorary consulates. 18 See also Thomas Rapatz and Rolf M. Urrisk, eds., Der militärdiplomatische Dienst in der österreichischen Armee (Wien, 2016). 19 Cf. also Verwaltungsreform: Übersicht gemäß § 42 Abs. 4 BHG 2013 (December 2015), 18: https://​serv​ ice.bmf.gv.at/​BUD​GET/​Budg​ets/​2016/​beila​gen/​Ver​walt​ungs​refo​r m_​2​016.pdf. 20 An overview of Austrian cultural activities abroad is on the Ministry website: www.bmeia.gv.at/​ europa-​aussenpolitik/​auslandskultur/​publikationen/​#c1008600. 21 Erfolgreich. Österreich. Arbeitsprogramm, 82. 22 Ibid., 82–​83. 23 Ibid., 84. 24 Stefan Thaller, “Der Abzug vom Golan –​was wirklich geschah”, Truppendienst, 53/​4 (2014), 343–​ 52: www.bundesheer.at/​truppendienst/​ausgaben/​artikel.php?id=​1732. The official justification was that the Syrian government was no longer able to support the UN operation, and the supply line via Israel interrupted: “Bundesheer am Golan: Fragen zum Abzug” (nd): www.bundesheer.at/​ausle/​ undof/​faq.shtml. 25 The co-​operation’s original name was “Quadragonale” for the four member-​states: Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Yugoslavia. In 1990, it became the “Pentagonale”, when Czechoslovakia joined; and in 1991, the “Hexagonale” with Poland’s admission. In 1992, the current name was adopted; presently, the CEI counts 17 member-​states. 26 Adelheid Wölfl, “Österreich tritt aus der Zentraleuropäischen Initiative aus”, in Der Standard (11 June 2018): www.derstandard.at/​story/​2000081380223/​oesterreich-​tritt-​aus-​der-​zentraleuropaeischen-​ initiative-​aus. Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl held, however, that the CEI’s activities by then duplicated the work of the OSCE, preferring to concentrate on the latter, including raising Austria’s financial contributions. I am grateful to Dr. Kneissl for this explanation. 27 “Zentraleuropäische Initiative als Motor für Frieden und Stabilität”, in Parlamentskorrespondenz, Nr. 1076 (18 November 2014): www.parlament.gv.at/​PAKT/​PR/​JAHR_​2014/​PK1076/​index.shtml. 28 Regierungsprogramm für die XXIII. Gesetzgebungsperiode (2007), 8. 29 Georgi Gotev, “NATO Urges Turkey, Austria to End Spat Blocking Programmes”, EURACTIV (15 March 2017): www.euractiv.com/​section/​politics/​news/​nato-​urges-​turkey-​austria-​to-​end-​spat-​ blocking-​programmes/​. 30 Erfolgreich. Österreich. Arbeitsprogramm. 31 Regierungsprogramm für die XXIII. Gesetzgebungspriode [2007), 8. 32 “FPÖ-​Vizeparteichef Gudenus lobt den Ablauf des Wahlvorgangs. Auch Ewald Stadler wies die Kritik an dem Votum”, Die Presse (16 March 2014): www.diepresse.com/​1575646/​fpo-​undstadler-​als-​wahlbeobachter-​referendum-​sei-​legitim. 33 Zusammen. Für unser Österreich. Regierungsprogramm 2017–​2022 (Wien), 12, 22: www.oeh.ac.at/​sites/​ default/​files/​files/​pages/​regierungsprogramm_​2017-​2022.pdf. 34 Ibid., 23. 35 This was the third time Austria had the EU Council presidency since joining the organisation in 1995. The first time had been the second half of 1998; the second in the first half of 2006. 36 Karin Kneissl, Diplomatie Macht Geschichte: Die Kunst des Dialogs in unsicheren Zeiten (Hildesheim, 2020), 136. 37 Zusammen. Für unser Österreich, 12, 24. 38 “Sebastian Kurz Rejects UN Migration Pact”, The Local (31 October 2018): www.thelocal.at/​ 20181031/​austria-​rejects-​un-​migration-​pact/​.

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Erwin A. Schmidl 39 Ephesos, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2015, had been a centre of Austrian archaeological activities from the late 1890s on. In 1898, the German archaeologist, Otto Benndorf, founded the Austrian Archaeological Institute, which still plays a leading role in Ephesos today. In Vienna, the Ephesos Museum forms part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. 40 Kneissl, Diplomatie Macht Geschichte, 17, 296. 41 See the list on: https://​en.wikipe​dia.org/​wiki/​Poisoning_​of_​S​erge​i_​an​d_​Yu​lia_​Skri​pal# European_​ Union_​and_​member_​states. 42 “Kritik an Knicks und Putin-​Einladung”, Salzburg 24 (21 August 2018): www.salzburg24.at/​news/​ welt/​kneissl-​hochzeit-​kritik-​an-​knicks-​und-​putin-​einladung-​60075616. 43 Eventually found guilty of spying for Russia, the retired officer received three years in prison in 2020. See Peter Mühlbauer, “Mutmaßlicher russischer Spion in Österreich enttarnt”, Telepolis (10 November 2018): www.heise.de/​tp/​features/​Mutmasslicher-​russischer-​Spion-​in-​Oesterreich-​enttarnt-​4218415. html; “Ex-​Bundesheeroffizier wegen Spionage zu drei Jahren Haft verurteilt” Wiener Zeitung (9 June 2020): www.wienerzeitung.at/​nachrichten/​politik/​oesterreich/​2063689-​Ex-​Bundesheeroffizier-​wegenSpionage-​zu-​drei-​Jahren-​Haft-​verurteilt.html. 44 Kneissl, Diplomatie Macht Geschichte, 14, 48, 57f. 45 Zusammen. Für unser Österreich, 24. 46 Aus Verantwortung für Österreich. Regierungsprogramm 2020–​ 2024 (Wien, 2020), 124: www. bundeskanzleramt.gv.at/​bundeskanzleramt/​die-​bundesregierung/​regierungsdokumente.html. 47 Ibid., 126. 48 Ibid., 128. 49 Ibid., 131. 50 Ibid., 135. 51 Ibid., 132, 164. 52 Ibid., 136. 53 “Österreich verhängt Reisewarnung für Kroatien”, ORF (14 August 2020): https://​orf.at/​stor​ies/​ 3177​464/​. 54 In 2017, 69 nations did not vote, amongst them all of the nuclear weapons states and all NATO members, except the Netherlands, which voted against; Singapore abstained. Two months later, the signing process started. The treaty went into effect on 22 January 2021, having obtained the required 50 ratifications. 55 Thomas Hajnoczi, “Nuklearwaffenverbot: Vertrag tritt in Kraft”, Militär aktuell (22 January 2021): www. militaeraktuell.at/​nuklearwaffen-​verbotsvertrag-​tritt-​in-​kraft/​. 56 TV interview, ORF Zeit im Bild 2 (31 October 2018): https://​neu​wal.com/​tra​nskr​ipt/​20181​031-​ armin-​wolf-​heinz-​christ​ian-​stra​che-​zib2.php. 57 These figures according to the Foreign Ministry website: www.bmeia.gv.at/​das-​ministerium/​ karrieremoeglichkeiten/​laufbahn-​im-​bmeia/​hoeherer-​auswaertiger-​dienst/​.

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14 CHANGE IN TURKEY’S FOREIGN POLICY Global Shifts and Domestic Politics Meliha Benli Altunışık

There has been a growing interest in Turkey’s foreign policy especially since the end of the Cold War. Studies have proliferated after the Justice and Development Party –​Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi [AKP] –​came to power with a majority at the end of 2002 and has remained in power since then. Mostly written as single case studies, the literature on AKP foreign policy has largely engaged with two particular literatures, namely foreign policy change1 and emerging Middle Power/​Regional Power foreign policy.2 Although the same party has been in power in the last 20 years, there have been significant shifts in Turkey’s foreign policy during this period. Therefore, several studies focus on identifying and understanding changes in AKP foreign policy as well as analysing its causes. Related literature, on the other hand, centre on Turkey’s foreign policy as one of a Middle Power –​ Turkey’s traditional place.3 Accordingly, during the reign of the AKP, there has been a renewed interest in Turkey’s Middle Power status in global politics.4 The early discussion of Turkey as a Middle Power found basis generally on a classification done according to material power capabilities, whereas the recent discussion of foreign policy under AKP rule, as is the case for other Middle Powers, focuses on Turkey’s behavioural attributes as a Middle Power, namely Middle Power diplomacy. AKP foreign policy in its early years seemed to fit this framework, emphasising “zero problems with neighbours”, displaying the role of a constructive power through initiatives for co-​operation as well as peace and stability. During those years generally, Turkey’s Middle Power roles centred on improving relations with its traditional allies, the United States and European Union [EU]. However, recently, Turkey’s foreign policy and its tools began to change dramatically. Ankara started not only to experience increasing problems with its traditional allies but also more recently in some cases began co-​operating with a global challenger, Russia. Regionally the “zero problems with neighbours” policy has collapsed as Turkey increasingly experienced problems with its neighbours and became isolated. In terms of foreign policy tools, the AKP government started to resort to military means, frequently using military intervention, escalation, and gunboat diplomacy to achieve foreign policy objectives. Thus, in the discussion of Turkey’s foreign policy, the issue of change links with the discussion of Turkey as a Middle Power and its behavioural attributes, including the differentiation between traditional and emerging Middle Powers as well as their foreign policy responses to the recent transformations in global politics.5 DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-17

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How to explain this shift towards a more assertive foreign policy? Why and under what conditions has Turkey changed its foreign policy approach and tools? Furthermore, does this have any relevance for Middle Power foreign policy shifts? What does it say about Middle Power foreign policy especially at a time of global transformation, as well as defining Middle Powers through behavioural attributes? The literature on foreign policy change argues that wholesale change in states’ foreign policy is rare;6 this is even truer in the case of rule by the same party. Thus, the frequency and the extent of foreign policy changes under the AKP is quite remarkable. The first shift in AKP foreign policy occurred around 2010–​2011, followed by another one in 2016–​2017. Although it is possible roughly to identify the timing of foreign policy change, it should also be noted that except in cases such as revolutions, foreign policy changes are not abrupt but incremental, culminating in more significant shifts.7 This is what happened with Turkish foreign policy, and these dates merely reflect culmination points rather than ruptures. In analysing foreign policy change under the AKP, there are three aspects of change: goals, methods, and orientation.8 In its first period, the AKP government’s main foreign policy goal was “Europeanisation”9 as well as restoring relations with the United States damaged after Turkey’s decision not to join the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. The AKP government was able to restore its ties with Washington largely by becoming an active participant of the George W. Bush Administration’s post-​9/​11 policies, particularly sending non-​combat troops to Afghanistan and becoming an active participant in its policy of “forward strategy of freedom” in the Middle East.10 Using mainly soft power tools and economic relations in its foreign engagements, the AKP government also started accession negotiations with the EU in 2005. In a stark reversal of Turkey’s traditional Cyprus policy, it supported United Nations [UN] Secretary-​General Kofi Annan’s 2004 plan for the unification of the island; and it improved relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq from 2008 onwards. Overall Ankara adopted the “zero problems with neighbours” policy aiming to improve relations with all its neighbours. During this period, Turkey linked its “Western” orientation with its increasing activism in other regions. As in the cases of Turkish participation in the American-​led “Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative” or efforts to harmonise Turkey’s foreign policy with the EU, the ultimate aim was strengthening Turkey’s relations with traditional allies whilst remaining increasingly active in Turkey’s neighbourhoods as the two was seen as complementary. Towards the end of the 2000s, there were already arguments that Turkey’s foreign policy was shifting from emphasis on Europeanisation to “soft Euro-​Asianism”11 or “Middle Easternism”.12 The change became much more pronounced in 2010–​2011, especially with the Arab uprisings. During this period, foreign policy goals related more to the Middle East as Turkey embarked on a policy of asserting itself as a leading Regional Power, particularly seeing the changes brought by the Arab uprisings as a window of opportunity.13 Similarly, Turkey became more active in parts of Africa whilst developing relations with Asian and Latin American countries. During this time, relations with the EU began to stall, and divergences on issues such as Iran’s nuclear capacity and Turkey’s policy towards Israel became more pronounced in relations with America. Methods of foreign policy also began to change as Turkey engaged in a regime-​change policy in Syria, actively supporting, hosting, and militarily training the Syrian opposition and becoming part of regional polarisation in the Middle East. Global and regional shifts, as well as the AKP’s domestic objectives, including its domestic alliances and worldviews of rising or declining AKP political figures, very much influenced foreign policy in these two periods. The recent change in Turkey’s foreign policy became quite visible in 2016–​2017. Since then, Turkey’s relations with its Western allies have deteriorated as Ankara began to argue that a divergence of interest existed on several issues, most significantly on some that Turkey defined 172

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as a crucial national security interest.14 Thus, a deeper scepticism marked AKP policy towards the United States despite continuing episodes of co-​operation. Especially in the context of the Syrian war, Turkey perceived Washington’s relations with the Syrian Kurdish group, the Democratic Union Party [PYD], and its armed force, the People’s Protection Units [YPG] as a threat to its national security. The PYD/​YPG has close ties with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighting against the Turkish state since the 1980s. This issue led to an erosion of trust between the two sides and at times highly inflammatory discourse.15 Contrary to the traditional balancing policy of Turkey within the Western alliance, namely between the United States and Europe, during this period Turco-​EU relations also deteriorated.16 Facing significant problems of its own such as the Euro crisis, the rise of the new right, and later Brexit, the EU became less eager to continue accession negotiations with Turkey. Brussels also became increasingly critical of the AKP government on issues like the rule of law, human rights, and freedom of expression.17 The AKP for its part was less eager about ultimate EU membership and dismissed Brussels’ criticisms by framing the EU an “unwanted intruder” in Turkey’s domestic affairs.18 The discourse against some European leaders and countries at times became highly inflammatory and hostile, leading to the erosion of what trust remained at the leadership level.19 As a result, in the last five years, Turco-​EU relations became more transactional, something demonstrated by the refugee deal of March 2016. Furthermore, Ankara seemed to prefer issue-​specific bilateral relations with individual EU members, such as Italy in Libya or Germany in Syria. Finally, although Turkey traditionally valued its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] membership and perceived it as an important anchor to its Western identity, as well as an important venue to influence Western politics, even Turkey’s relations with NATO have at times started to be questioned.20 Conversely, Turkey’s relations with Russia seemed to take off after 2016. The two Powers already established deep economic ties; in natural gas supplies, Turkey was relying heavily on Russia. Accordingly, facing the reality of Russia’s direct military intervention in Syria in summer 2015 and unable to persuade both the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations to cut Washington’s support to PYD/​YPG, Ankara increasingly co-​operated with the Russian axis in Syria. Its rapprochement with Moscow allowed it to launch two military operations against the PYD/​YPG in northern Syria –​in 2016 and 2018. With a third military operation in 2019 with Washington’s consent, Turkey pre-​empted a PYD-​controlled contiguous area across its border. Similarly, Turkey and Russia created a de-​escalation zone in Idlib, Syria, with 12 observer points controlled by Turkey. Turkey also became partners with Russia and Iran in the Astana process, a political rival to the Western-​led Geneva process, which aimed to manage their relations in Syria and work towards a political solution to the conflict. Thus, in co-​operating with Russia, Turkey has become an important actor in the Syrian war. More significantly, in relations with its traditional allies, despite Washington’s warnings and threats of sanctions, Turkey decided to acquire the S-​400 missile defence system from Russia in 2016 and received the first shipments in 2019 –​although postponing activating them so far.21 Deepening economic, political, and security ties to Moscow have been accompanied by Turkey’s increasing interest in developing relations with other Asian countries, leading to discussions about Turkey’s perceived pivot to Eurasia.22 During this period, the AKP government clearly tried to expand its relations with the Asia-​Pacific region and, in August 2019, launched the “Asia Anew Initiative”. Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs explains this interest as a corollary of Turkey’s “multi-​dimensional foreign policy”, referring to the recent rise of Asia as well as Turkish “historical, cultural, linguistic and religious ties” with several countries in this vast region as reasons for growing interest.23 Turkey, thus, elevated its relations with six Asian Powers –​China, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore –​to a 173

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strategic partnership and widened its diplomatic network to several other countries in the region.24 In terms of trade, the share of Asia in Turkey’s foreign economic relations began to rise. Specifically, economic relations with China have flourished where bilateral trade surged to $21.6 billion in 2019.25 Turkey also responded enthusiastically to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the global infrastructure project aiming to create a China-​centred global trading network. Turkey’s bourgeoning interest in Asia seems focused mostly on economic relations, but Ankara has also engaged with different regional organisations since 2010.26 In this respect, AKP government interest in the Shanghai Co-​operation Organisation [SCO] is especially interesting. At times, President Recep Erdoğan presented Turkey’s interest in joining the organisation in binary language, saying, “Turkey should not be ‘fixated’ on the idea of joining the European Union and should look at other opportunities, such as the Russia-​led Shanghai Pact”.27 In 2012 “Turkey became the first NATO country to become an observer and dialogue partner” in SCO, which is widely regarded as the “alliance of the East”28 although Turkey’s possible membership has not been so far brought to the agenda of the organisation. Therefore, in recent years, Turkey has started to diversify relations away from its traditional partners. Even more, “Turkey seems to increasingly adopt an aggressive and confrontational foreign policy vis-​à-​vis the West”.29 The question is to what extent this amounts to a shift in Turkey’s foreign policy from the West towards Eurasia. Clearly, Turkey’s rift with the West grew deeper in the 2010s, and it is difficult to explain all of this as only intra-​alliance bargaining, especially since 2016. In the case of Turco-​American relations, unlike earlier periods, “current problems emanate from different areas but form an interactive cluster”, thus overall eroding mutual trust “and the feeling of belonging to the same security community”.30 Turkish relations with its traditional allies have been especially tense since the 15 July 2016 failed coup attempt against the AKP government. It argues that it has not received enough support from its allies against the followers of Fethullah Gülen, the American-​based Islamic preacher accused by Ankara of masterminding the coup attempt, or other groups it deems terrorists. All this amounts to a significant drifting away from the Western alliance. Yet, there are limits to Turkey’s “turn to Eurasia”. Although Turkey has co-​operated and worked with Russia especially in Syria, their relations suffer from divergences of interest in other areas, like Libya or the South Caucasus, and with tensions in Syria, as over the Idlib crisis.31 Relations with China, on the other hand, are mainly economic and work so far for the benefit of Beijing. Thus, although Turkey seems to be diversifying its relations with Great Powers, it is not shifting from one pole to another. Rather, the AKP government seems to prefer transactional dealings and compartmentalised foreign policy instead of anchoring itself on one pole. The government demonstrated a preference for unilateralism, reluctance to rely on traditional alliances, and implementing a balancing policy between different major Powers whilst seeking autonomy in its recent foreign policy, despite its difficulties. What is significant in this new posture is that with the addition of other foreign policy choices and methods, it amounts to a reorientation as it mainly undermines the idea of an anchor in Turkey’s foreign policy and ideational aspect of alliances.32 In this new paradigm, Turkey may and does ally with any country or any organisation based on the issue at hand, rather than acting on a common basis of overall strategic common interests and shared ideational characteristics. Therefore, more than any other period under AKP, there is now a change in Turkey’s global relations. As an important sign of changing diplomatic strategy, Turkey’s policies in its neighbourhoods also began to transform. In the Middle East where Turkey was already very active in the previous period, its new policy started to find basis on threat perceptions and securitisation of issues. Accordingly, Turkey became part of geopolitical polarisation in the region and engaged 174

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in zero-​sum competition with other Regional Powers. Overall, it became a party to civil wars in Syria and Libya. Turkey’s bilateral relations with almost all Middle Eastern Powers have deteriorated. In its other neighbourhoods as well, Ankara did not shy away from in engaging confrontational policies and showing military muscle. In the South Caucasus more than in the past, Turkey actively supported Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia that erupted in October 2020; in the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey became increasingly isolated in the emerging geo-​ economic and geopolitical alliances. Nonetheless, it is more ready to project military power and engage in risky behaviour and brinkmanship. In explaining this recent change in Turkey’s foreign policy, one can refer to the literature that argues that systemic factors influence foreign policy change.33 International systemic changes as well as global events can produce a “re-​conceptualization of security threats and challenges, a re-​prioritization of foreign policy objectives, and the emergence of new means of actions and foreign policy options”.34 A response to the changing global context can also explain Turkey’s foreign policy change. Since the beginning of the twenty-​first century, but especially in the last five years, significant transformations in the global order have occurred through Great Power rivalry and shifts. Trump’s “America First” policy, Britain’s Brexit decision in 2016, long-​term trends such as the rise of China, and Russia’s challenge to the American-​led global order, all challenge global power politics and the norms and principles of the dominant international order.35 The expectation, if not the reality, of the emerging new world order has led other actors to develop strategies to prepare themselves for this transformation. As these developments in the international system exacerbated the sense of insecurity and led to increasing uncertainty, there has been a significant amount of resorting to power politics, characterised as “the return of geopolitics”.36 Even the EU prizing itself as the epitome of a normative and soft power began emphasising more robust security and defence policies.37 This has accompanied the undermining of international institutions as, in addition to the UN, more effective institutions like NATO and even the EU came under severe criticism and challenge. In such an increasingly turbulent and changing international environment, general expectations are that states change their foreign policies fundamentally to deal with this environment. These global changes have affected Turkey, a NATO member and country in accession negotiations with the EU. In addition to the impact of global transformation, regional political shifts and events are equally important. The Middle East regional security complex,38 of which Turkey has increasingly become a part under the AKP, entered a period of turbulence and insecurity notably after the Arab uprisings of 2010–​2011. It soon became clear that rather than leading to a transformation towards more democratic and participatory governance, the Arab uprisings have largely led to the consolidation of authoritarian regimes and, worse yet, civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Post-​Arab uprisings regional (dis)order is rife with the intensification of violence and instability –​plus military interventions by regional and international actors –​multi-​layered and complex conflicts where states and non-​state actors engage in a myriad of shifting alliances. Perceiving the uprisings as a window of opportunity, Turkey changed its policy towards the region and actively participated in the race for Middle Eastern influence. However, post-​ uprising developments exposed Turkish limitations in its quest for regional leadership and ability to influence events to its liking. The 2013 toppling of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the general backlash against the Moslem Brotherhood movement and parties curtailed AKP expectations of the coming to power of like-​minded governments in the Arab world through the popular vote. Turkey also suffered from instability on its Syrian and Iraqi borders, including large-​scale terrorist attacks and massive refugee flows. In the process, Turkey became directly involved, including militarily, in the ongoing regional civil wars in Syria and Libya. Developments in Syria, a neighbouring country with more than an 800-​kilometre border with 175

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Turkey, were of paramount interest, having a direct impact on the way Ankara developed its new Middle East policy. In the early years of the Syrian crisis, Turkey’s main objective was to topple the Bashar al-​Assad regime, thus Ankara organised and supported an opposition force politically and militarily. However, especially after 2016, Turkey’s strategic priorities in Syria changed. The declaration in March 2016 of a “federal democratic system” in northern Syria called “Rojava” by the PYD and its allies led to a shift in Turkish policy.39 In the context of global and regional turmoil, Turkey started to perceive more challenges to its security whilst simultaneously engaging to redefine its place and policies in a shifting environment. In a regional context, perceptions of United States retrenchment and uncertainties about American grand strategy not only led to intensified insecurity and a sense of self-​help, it increased the room for manoeuvre for Regional Powers like Turkey. Hence, the recent changes in Turkey’s foreign policy goals, methods, and orientation can be seen as an attempt to respond to the shifts in the global and regional environment. In this environment, many actors seem to “return to geopolitics” and increasingly to military means. After all the same party is in power, so structural factors rather than agency may have led to the foreign policy shift. In fact, the AKP political elite in their narratives to explain Turkey’s foreign policy and its recent change towards issues and other actors –​as well as change in methods –​refer to the global and regional geopolitical shifts. Their accounts assume that global turmoil and regional flux, somehow, inevitably led Turkey to adopt a foreign policy of offensive realism. The speeches and the writings of the AKP political elite, including political figures working closely with the President’s office as well as academics close to the AKP, emphasise that a new multipolar global order is emerging and requires Turkey to not only redefine its place but also act independently to protect its interests. In such an environment, the old alliances and institutions are losing their importance. More important in this discursive framing, the global shifts are not only used to present the necessity to develop a new set of policies for Turkey to find its place in the emerging new world order, but to undermine and criticise Turkey’s Western frame and strengthen the call for “autonomy”. In this discursive framing, Turkey’s Western allies are not supporting its causes but rather undermining them. Ibrahim Kalın, one of Erdoğan’s chief advisors and a presidential spokesman, said, “the world is bigger than the US and Europe. Since we are not just limited to these states remaining in the Europe-​centred global order is a concept we should avoid”.40 After all, Burhaneddin Duran, an academic heading a pro-​government think tank, SETA, and sitting on Erdoğan’s Security and Foreign Policy Council, argues, NATO did not provide Ankara with the Patriot missiles it requested, nor did it convince Washington or Paris not to co-​operate with the PYD/​YPG in Syria.41 Similarly, he has argued that although Turkey recently aligned itself with Russia on many issues, this does not prevent Turkey from criticising Russia on Syria, or Idlib specifically.42 Therefore, in the evolving global order, Turkey can co-​operate with any of the global actors based on its interests, but none of these relations remain fixed. According to this view, Turkey cannot rely on international institutions, a bloc of states, or even traditional allies. Instead, there are shifting alliances. In this narrative, the regional flux is constantly framed as threatening. Added to the uncertain global environment, the regional context, it is argued, also presents new threats where “more and more countries are now eager to use military means to resolve rivalries, differences, or even disputes which has escalated the tensions, paved the way for diplomatic deadlocks, triggered proxy wars, and exacerbated the ongoing conflicts”.43 In such an environment, Turkey should adopt robust strategies to deal with threats. For Burhaneddin Duran, for instance, those politicians calling for Turkey to return to its older soft power policies are operating according to

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faulty understandings dating to the “pre-​Arab uprising era”, calling on Turkey to be “dependent and passive” in its foreign policy decisions.44 Therefore, the AKP explains the new shift in its foreign policy in reference to global and regional changes. Yet global shifts alone do not explain everything. For instance, although feeling more insecure and worrying about their place in the evolving international order, not all Middle Powers are behaving in the same way.45 However, in Turkey’s case, global shifts are taking place when there is significant regional turmoil. Yet, similarly, regional shifts also do not explain everything. In previous instances of regional turbulence, the AKP government adopted radically different foreign policy stances. For instance, after America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, creating regional turmoil and taking place in the shifting global environment of post-​ 9/​11, Turkey responded by seeking to expand its political engagement with the region and to play constructive roles. Furthermore, after coming to power, the AKP was an ardent critic of Turkey’s Middle East policies of the 1990s calling them highly militarised although those policies were decided again in the context of global shifts and regional turmoil created by the end of the Cold War and the Gulf Crisis. Therefore, international transformations, especially if coinciding with regional shifts, may explain the need for policy reconsideration. Nevertheless, global and regional flux, in and of itself, cannot predict the nature of a response. Thus, as structural global change and events as well as regional shifts by themselves cannot explain the shift in Turkey’s foreign policy, it is necessary to consider domestic politics and agency. There are two variables that are the most significant: political coalitions and the political and foreign policy-​making structure. Although the same party has held power in Turkey since late 2002, there have been important changes in both of these variables and the recent foreign policy shift coincided with significant changes in domestic politics. After 2016, major shifts have occurred in the AKP’s domestic political alliances. Since taking power, the AKP has governed through different coalitions with societal actors and movements. Initially, it relied on liberals for intellectual capital and the Kurdish political movement to consolidate its rule. This alliance strengthened, especially through policies of “Europeanisation” and the Kurdish peace process. In the meantime, inside state institutions, the AKP relied on the Gülen movement, also working with it to eradicate the Kemalist/​nationalist elite from the ranks of the bureaucracy, especially the judiciary and army. However, these alliances unravelled one by one. The AKP increasingly shifted towards populist “competitive authoritarianism”;46 the Europeanisation process stalled; and the Kurdish peace process ended in 2015. The alliance with the Gülen movement also began cracking in 2013, culminating in the failed coup attempt in July 2016. Since then, the AKP formed an informal coalition with the ultra-​nationalist National Action Party [MHP] and other nationalist actors in the system under the banner of “National Alliance”, which became necessary for the AKP staying in power. Such a transformation led to AKP adoption of more nationalist foreign policy agendas and militaristic diplomatic tools, like reactions to Syrian Kurdish political actions, Eastern Mediterranean developments, the Azerbaijan-​Armenian conflict, and scepticism towards the United States and EU. Respecting ideology, this new alliance created a new layer –​nationalism –​on top of the two existing ones in the AKP ideological mix –​Islamism and populism. Whilst the Islamist worldview can explain Turkey’s problematic relations with Israel or Egypt after the coup attempt, it does not explain other policies on topics traditionally deemed “existential” by Turkey’s foreign policy and security elite. Similarly, populism may explain the rhetoric, but it does not explain specific responses on certain foreign policy issues and changing course entirely.47 Hence, new domestic political realignments can explain Turkish responses to the global and regional turmoil.48

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In a study on populism and foreign policy in the Global South, the immediate effect of populism in foreign policy is in centralisation and personalisation of foreign policy-​making.49 In fact, Turkey has been going through this process for some time, yet it became consolidated through recent changes in the political system. Therefore, another related domestic-​level variable is the structural changes in the domestic political environment and foreign policy-​making. In 2017, Turkey changed its political system from a parliamentary to a presidential system. It led to a large-​scale institutional re-​ordering, including the rise of presidentially led diplomacy and personalisation of foreign policy decision-​making. These two trends have promoted a gradual erosion of the influence of the highly professionalised and traditionally autonomous Foreign Ministry. The Ministry’s declining influence had already started under the AKP. The diplomats received criticism as disconnected from “the people” and ridicule as “Western wannabees”;50 it led to a declaration signed by 72 retired diplomats in 2010 that criticised AKP scorn as well as the government’s foreign policy. In July 2013, a new Organisational Law further weakened the Foreign Ministry. Although the Foreign Ministry had previously surrendered some space to other actors, the advent of the presidential system marginalised it further. Yet, what has happened with this domestic structural change has not only been necessarily a one-​man-​ taking-​the-​decisions scenario; rather it is the ease of making some decisions without much bureaucratic and parliamentary scrutiny. Therefore, changes in the domestic political structure further facilitated foreign policy change. A third dimension of foreign policy change focuses on individual decision-​makers. Amongst agency-​based perspectives, some studies of Turkey’s foreign policy look at the individual level, placing individual decision-​makers at the centre of analysis.51 So far, how this links with foreign policy change under the same leadership is unclear. One possible explanation could be the notion of a window of opportunity.52 A policy change already desired by an individual policy-​maker could develop by structural change allowing an individual decision-​maker to change course. Such an explanation can explain foreign policy change in 2010–​2011 when Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu saw the Arab uprisings as an opportunity to steer foreign policy towards the Middle East and allow Turkey to spearhead the political transformation in the region. However, there is more to explain the shift in goals, methods, and orientation. Finally, exploiting foreign policy can increase a government’s political power domestically. Although the research on the relationship between foreign policy and electoral politics is generally sceptical and argues that foreign policy does not significantly affect people’s votes,53 there seems to be a common-​sense view in recent years that, somehow, states act in the international arena to garner votes and/​or support domestically. A variant of this argument relates to war, as both diversionary war and scapegoat theory sees leaders use war or foreign policy crises to affect domestic politics, specifically to shore up support by stirring up nationalist feelings.54 In Turkey’s case, AKP foreign policy decisions taken to bolster domestic political support has been quite popular. However, it cannot explain Turkey’s recent foreign policy shift. First, the impact of the electoral politics on recent foreign policy shift is dubious at best. Since 2016, there have been a presidential election under the new system and a parliamentary election –​ both in 2018. In each of these elections, domestic political concerns after the coup attempt and elite-​level coalition politics between the AKP and MHP played the most important role. In local elections in 2019, on the other hand, the opposition parties by coming together were able to capture all major cities despite escalated nationalist rhetoric about regime security and internal and external threats to Turkey. Second, although wars may increase a rally-​around-​the-​ flag feeling, it is not certain how long their impact continues. More significantly, they do not explain by themselves shifts in foreign policy. Third, foreign policy issues can become a more important part of electoral politics when the parties have clearly contrasting positions on them, 178

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whereas as many such foreign policy issues framed in a nationalist discourse garnered support from almost all parties. Finally, AKP’s framing of Turkey’s foreign relations have gone through major extremes, and yet its support base continued more or less the same. However, not all this means that the AKP does not use foreign policy in domestic politics. Foreign policy issues have featured prominently in AKP domestic policy since the beginning. The overarching theme has been framing Turkey as a “rising Power” and “central Power” in global politics. Also used to contribute to AKP’s popular image are specific foreign policy issues, such as relations with Israel, the anti-​Morsi coup in Egypt, or specific policies towards the United States. To conclude, Turkey’s foreign policy under the rule of the same party has been going through significant change in recent years. This change occurred because of the interaction between important global and regional shifts and domestic transformations. Globally and regionally, there has been a shift towards unilateralism, a zero-​sum mentality, and balance of power politics. Domestically there have been important changes in terms of the AKP’s political alliances and the foreign policy-​making structures. The interaction of these two environments produced change in foreign policy. Understanding this change for Turkey has repercussions when discussing the foreign policy of Middle Powers. The real or perceived shifts in the global system may provide enhanced space for Middle Powers and/​or Regional Powers like Turkey. Yet their policy preferences are largely a factor of domestic variables. Clearly, the discussion has to go beyond behavioural attributes to understand better this new phase of Turkish foreign policy.

Notes 1 Meliha B. Altunışık and Lenore G. Martin, “Making Sense of Turkey’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East under AKP”, Turkish Studies, 12/​4(2011), 569–​87. 2 Emel Parlar Dal, “Conceptualising and Testing the ‘Emerging Regional Power’ of Turkey in the Shifting International Order”, Third World Quarterly, 37/​8(2016), 1425–​53; Ziya Öniş and Mustafa Kutlay, “The Dynamics of Emerging Middle-​power Influence in Regional and Global Governance: The Paradoxical Case of Turkey”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 71/​2(2017), 164–​83; Meliha B. Altunışık, “Turkey’s ‘Return’ to the Middle East”, in Henner Fürtig, ed., Regional Powers in the Middle East (NY, 2014), 123–​42. 3 William Hale Turkish Foreign Policy 1774–​2000 (London 2000); Meltem Müftüler and Müberra Yüksel, “Turkey: A Middle Power in the New World Order”, in Andrew F. Cooper, ed., Niche Diplomacy: Middle Powers After the Cold War (Houndmills, UK, 1997), 184–​96; Dilek Barlas, “Turkish Diplomacy in the Balkans and the Mediterranean: Opportunities and Limits for Middle-​ Power Activism in the 1930s”, Journal of Contemporary History, 40/​3(2005), 141–​64; Meliha B. Altunışık and Özlem Tur, Turkey: Challenges of Continuity and Change (London, 2005). 4 Emel Parlar Dal, Paul Kubicek, and H. Tarık Oğuzlu, eds., Turkey’s Rise as an Emerging Power (London, 2015); Oniş and Kutlay, “The Dynamics”, 164–​83; Kohei Imai, The Possibility and Limit of Turkey’s Liberal Middle Power Policies, 2005–​2011 (Lanham, MD, 2018). 5 Eduard Jordaan, “The Concept of a Middle Power in International Relations: Distinguishing between Emerging and Traditional Middle Powers”, Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 30/​1(2003), 165–​81. For the relevance of this discussion for Turkey, see Öniş and Kutlay, “The Dynamics”, 165. 6 Jerel A. Rosati et al., Foreign Policy Restructuring: How Governments Respond to Global Change (Columbia, SC, 1994). 7 Tim Haesebrouck and Jeroen Joly, “Foreign Policy Change: From Policy Adjustments to Fundamental Reorientations”, Political Studies Review, 98(2020), 3. 8 Charles F. Hermann, “Changing Course: When Governments Choose to Redirect Foreign Policy”, International Studies Quarterly, 34/​1(1990), 5–​6. 9 Ziya Öniş and Suhnaz Yılmaz, “Between Europeanization and Euro-​ Asianism: Foreign Policy Activism in Turkey during the AKP Era”, Turkish Studies, 10/​1(2009), 7–​24. 10 Turkey actively participated in the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative that was an American-​led plan professing to promote political and social reform in the Middle East.

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Meliha Benli Altunışık 11 Onis and Yılmaz, “Between”, 7–​24. 12 Tarık Oğuzlu, “Middle Easternization of Turkish Foreign Policy? Does Turkey Disassociate from the West”, Turkish Studies, 9/​1(2008), 3–​20. 13 For the importance of “window of opportunity” in foreign policy change, see Fredrik Doeser and Joakim Eidenfalk, “The Importance of Windows of Opportunity for Foreign Policy Change”, International Area Studies Review, 16/​4(2013), 390–​406. 14 Turkish-​American relations had suffered strain over several issues by 2011 due to divergent interests and perceptions. See, for instance, Ömer Taşpınar, “The Rise of Turkish Gaullism: Getting Turkish-​ American Relations Right”, Insight Turkey, 13/​1(2011), 11–​17. 15 Didem Buhari Gulmez, “The Resilience of the US-​Turkey Alliance: Divergent Threat Perceptions and Worldviews”, Contemporary Politics (2020): DOI 10.1080/​13569775.2020.1777038. 16 Relations with the EU also begun to diverge over foreign policy before 2016. Meltem Müftüler-​Baç, Divergent Pathways: Turkey and the European Union (Opladen, 2016), ­chapters 3 and 8. 17 See, for instance, “EU Report Slams Turkey over Rule of Law, Free Speech” (10 November 2015): www.euractiv.com/​section/​global-​europe/​news/​eu-​report-​slams-​turkey-​over-​rule-​of-​law-​freespeech/​. 18 Senem Aydın-​Düzgit, “De-​Europeanisation Through Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis of AKP’s Election Speeches”, South European Society and Politics, 21/​1(2016), 45–​58. 19 See, for instance, “Turkey’s Erdogan Warns Europeans ‘Will Not Walk Safely on the Streets’ if Diplomatic Row Continues”, The Independent (22 March 2017): www.independent.co.uk/​news/​ world/​europe/​turkey-​erdogan-​germany-​netherlands-​warning-​europeans-​not-​walk-​safely-​a7642941. html; “Turkey-​Netherlands Row: Erdogan Slams Dutch Over Srebrenica”, BBC News (15 March 2017): www.bbc.com/​news/​world-​europe-​39270095. 20 Buhari Gulmez, “The Resilience”. 21 United States Vice President Mike Pence speaking at NATO: this week we formally notified the Turkish government that the United States is immediately suspending shipments of all F-​35 Joint Strike Fighter related equipment and materiel to Turkey. Turkey must choose: Does it want to remain a critical partner in the most successful military alliance in history of the world? Or does it want to risk the security of that partnership by making reckless decisions that undermine our alliance?. “Remarks by Vice President Pence at NATO Engages: The Alliance at 70” (3 April 2019): www.atlanticcouncil.org/​commentary/​transcript/​ us-​vice-​president-​mike-​pence-​at-​nato-​engages/​ 22 Emre Erşen and Seçkin Köstem, Turkey’s Pivot to Eurasia: Geopolitics and Foreign Policy in a Changing World Order (London, 2019). 23 Turkish Foreign Ministry, “Turkey’s Relations with the Asia-​ Pacific Region”: www.mfa.gov.tr/​ turkeys-​relations-​with-​east-​asia-​and-​the-​pacific.en.mfa. 24 Ibid. 25 “Turkey Eyes Sustainable, Balanced Trade with China”, Anadolu Ajansı (12 June 2020): www.aa.com. tr/​en/​asia-​pacific/​turkey-​eyes-​sustainable-​balanced-​trade-​with-​china/​1874843. 26 Turkey’s accession to the Treaty of Amity and Co-​operation of ASEAN in 2010, becoming a sectoral dialogue partner of ASEAN in 2017; membership in the Asia Co-​operation Dialogue in 2013; active participation in the Pacific Islands Forum as Post-​Forum Dialogue Partner; and the Shanghai Co-​operation Organisation as Dialogue Partner. 27 “President Erdoğan: EU Not Everything, Turkey May Join Shanghai Five”, Hurriyet Daily News (20 November 2016): www.hurriyetdailynews.com/​president-​erdogan-​eu-​not-​everything-​turkey-​mayjoin-​shanghai-​five-​106321. 28 Parlar Dal, “Conceptualising”. 29 Oya Dursun-​Ozkazanca, Turkey-​West Relations: The Politics of Intra-​Alliance Opposition (Cambridge, 2017), 20. 30 Ilter Turan, “Avoiding Further Deterioration in Turkish-​ U.S. Relations: Less Emotion, More Wisdom”, GMF on Turkey, No. 009 (4 September 2018): www.gmfus.org/​news/​avoidingfurther-​deterioration-​turkish-​us-​relations-​less-​emotion-​more-​wisdom. 31 Burhaneddin Duran, “Yerevan’s Mistake and Ankara-​Russia Competition”, Daily Sabah (30 September 2020): www.dailysabah.com/​opinion/​columns/​yerevans-​mistake-​and-​ankara-​moscow-​competition.

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Turkey: Global Shifts, Domestic Politics 32 Hermann, “Changing”, 5, defines international orientation change: “the most extreme form of foreign policy change involves the redirection of actor’s entire orientation toward world affairs”. 33 Jakob Gustavsson, “How Should We Study Foreign Policy Change?” Cooperation and Conflict, 34/​ 1(1999), 73–​95; Rosati et al., Foreign Policy Restructuring; Spyros Blavoukos and Dimitris Bourantonis, “Identifying Parameters of Foreign Policy Change: An Eclectic Approach”, Cooperation and Conflict, 49/​4(2014), 483–​500; Jonathan Rynhold, “Cultural Shift and Foreign Policy Change: Israel and the Making of the Oslo Accords”, Cooperation and Conflict, 42/​4(2007), 419–​40. 34 Blavaoukos and Bourantonis, “Identifying”, 6. 35 G. John Ikenberry, “The End of Liberal International Order?” International Affairs, 94/​1(2018), 7–​23; Alexander Cooley and Daniel H. Nexon, “How Hegemony Ends: The Unraveling of American Power”, Foreign Affairs (July/​August 2020), 143–​56. 36 Walter Russell Mead, “The Return of Geopolitics: The Revenge of the Revisionist Powers”, Foreign Affairs (May/​June 2014). 37 M. Hoijtink and H. L. Muehlenhoff, “The European Union as a Masculine Military Power: European Union Security and Defence Policy in ‘Times of Crisis’ ”, Political Studies Review, 18/​3(2020), 362–​77. 38 Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge, 2003). 39 “Syria Conflict: Kurds Declare a Federal System”, BBC News (17 March 2016): www.bbc.com/​news/​ world-​middle-​east-​35830375. 40 Anadolu Ajansı, “Cumhurbaşkanlığı Sözcüsü Kalın: Dünya, Avrupa’dan ve ABD’den daha büyüktür” (3 March 2019): www.aa.com.tr/​tr/​turkiye/​cumhurbaskanligi-​sozcusu-​kalin-​dunya-​avrupadan-​ve-​ abdden-​daha-​buyuktur/​1407898. 41 Burhaneddin Duran, “Tek Eksen Milli Çıkar”, Sabah (8 February 2020): www.sabah.com.tr/​yazarlar/​ duran/​2020/​02/​08/​tek-​eksen-​milli-​cikar. 42 Ibid. 43 “Foreword”, in Murat Yeşiltaş et al., SETA Security Radar: Turkey’s Geopolitical Landscape in 2020 (Ankara, 2020): 7, https://​setav.org/​en/​ass​ets/​uplo​ads/​2020/​01/​R15​1En.pdf. 44 Burhaneddin Duran, “Türkiye’ye yeni yol haritası çizenler”, Sabah (22 February 2020), www.sabah. com.tr/​yazarlar/​duran/​2020/​02/​22/​turkiyeye-​yeni-​yol-​haritasi-​cizenler. 45 For instance, Norway feeling insecure due to “geopolitical revival and the contestation of the liberal order” opted to seek “shelter” with “multilateral organizations like NATO; stable bilateral relationships with great powers (the US); formal agreements … with the EU …; and finally, participation in issue-​ specific groupings”. Nina Gaeger, “Illiberalism, Geopolitics, and Middle Power Security: Lessons from the Norwegian Case”, International Journal, 74/​1(2019), 84–​102. 46 Berk Esen and Sebnem Gumuscu, “Rising Competitive Authoritarianism in Turkey”, Third World Quarterly, 37/​9(2016). 47 Sandra Destradi and Johannes Plagemann, “Populism and International Relations: (Un)predictability, Personalisation, and the Reinforcement of Existing Trends in World Politics”, Review of International Studies, 45/​5(2019), 711–​30. 48 Joe D. Hagan and Jerel A. Rosati, “Emerging Issues in Research on Foreign Policy Restructuring”, in Jerel A. Rosati et al., eds., Foreign Policy Restructuring: How Governments Respond to Global Change (Columbia SC, 1994), 265–​79. 49 Destradi and Plagemann, “Populism”, 711–​30. 50 Using the French term “mon cher” –​ monşer in Turkish. 51 Ç. Esra Çuhadar et al., “Turkish Leaders and Their Foreign Policy Decision-​ making Style: A Comparative and Multi-​method Perspective”, Turkish Studies, 22/​1(2020), 1–​27: https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​14683​849.2020.1724​511. 52 Doeser and Eidenfalk, “The importance”, 390–​406. 53 See, for instance, John H. Aldrich, et al., “Foreign Policy and the Electoral Connection”, Annual Review of Political Science, 9/​1(2006), 477–​502. 54 For instance, Amy Oakes, Diversionary War: Domestic Unrest and International Conflict (Stanford, CA, 2012).

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PART IV

Developing Powers

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15 CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN CUBA’S FOREIGN RELATIONS Philip Brenner and Jina Shim

When Cuba’s National Assembly elected Miguel Díaz-​Canel Bermúdez as president in April 2018, few expected him to pursue a foreign policy that departed fundamentally from the one Presidents Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro had established. Cuba’s senior officials and much of the population seemed to share a consensus that Cuba should continue its centuries-​old quest to keep Cuba independent from the dominance of a single foreign power, and its 60-​year embrace of the ideals of South-​South solidarity.1 Yet given the economic, demographic, and international political challenges that Cuba faced by 2018, Díaz-​Canel needed to find new ways for Cuba’s foreign policy to help sustain the Cuban Revolution.2 Raúl Castro undoubtedly would have liked the country to go farther on many fronts by the end of his term of office. He acknowledged in mid-​2016 that Cuba’s economy was suffering severe problems and warned that it would be “imperative to reduce expenses of all kinds that are not indispensable, to promote a culture of conservation and the efficient use of resources available”.3 By the time the COVID pandemic closed the island to tourism in early 2020, the country already was labouring under the consequences of both Venezuela’s catastrophic economic decline, which vitiated its ability to provide Cuba with discounted oil, and United States President Donald Trump’s reversal of improved relations, which Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro had begun in 2013. As first vice president, second secretary of the Cuban Communist Party [PCC], and minister of defence before becoming president, Raúl Castro shared in developing Cuba’s foreign policy with his more famous brother. They championed a framework of “proletarian internationalism”, which embraced a vision of former colonies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia working together to develop sustainable economies that provided for basic human needs universally. In practice, proletariat internationalism took many forms, including supporting revolutionary movements against colonial powers and governments led by exploitative authoritarians, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet in the 1970s, Cuba also began to emphasise expanding positive diplomatic relations with Third World countries and strengthening its standing in international organisations.4 In addition, by the mid-​1980s, approximately 15,000 Cubans –​one out of every 625 –​ were working in civilian foreign aid missions in more than 30 countries. At the same time, Cuban high schools and universities enrolled 24,000 students from 82 countries. In 1984,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-19

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three-​quarters of them studied at “internationalist schools” on the Isle of Youth.5 In 1999 Cuba opened the Latin American School of Medicine, a tuition-​free institution in Havana created to train students from under-​served populations in Africa, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere, including the United States.6 These programmes contributed to Cuba’s fabled “soft power”, a term connoting the ability of a country to influence others by example rather than coercion. In addition to international medical and co-​operative aid programmes, Cuba developed its soft power by appealing to other poor countries as an underdog resisting American oppression; focusing on Cuba’s own war against terrorism and its suffering from terrorism; show-​casing the prowess of its athletes; and exporting Cuban films, music, and ballet.7 Each effort contributed to a positive image globally that enabled Cuba “to be seen as a trusted and valued partner in many international arenas and institutions”, despite its lack of Western liberal democracy.8 Cuba’s soft power contributed to its success at the 2012 Summit of the Americas in Colombia. Despite Cuba’s absence from the meeting, the other hemispheric countries forced the traditionally dominant United States to back down and allow Cuba to participate in future summits. This case is also an example of a strategy of the “weak”, by which small states rely on their “collective power” to champion common interests against a state with greater military and economic resources.9 Apart from its ideological roots, “proletarian internationalism” was a strategy for diversifying Cuba’s economic dependency. Whilst the country’s reliance on the Soviet Union from 1960 to 1990 was different from its neo-​colonial relationship with the United States until 1958, Cuba’s leaders were wary of any dependency. They aspired to diversify trade relations by engaging similarly situated countries on a basis of mutual interest and equality.10 The Soviet Union had long opposed Cuba’s engagement in liberation conflicts, in part because it had sought détente with the United States and worried that Cuba’s actions would undermine improved Soviet-​American relations. Indeed, American officials like Secretary of State Henry Kissinger viewed Cuba as nothing more than a stalking horse for Soviet interests. Their contrasting positions on supporting revolutionaries was a source of friction between Havana and Moscow for nearly 30 years.11 Cuba notably maintained its commitment to “proletarian internationalism” even when the collapse of the Soviet Union and dissolution of its trading bloc, the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance [CMEA], saw Cuba’s Gross Domestic Product [GDP] decline by 30 per cent between 1990 and 1993.12 Nearly 85 per cent of Cuba’s trade occurred within the CMEA, often with barter-​like transactions that in effect provided subsidies for the island. The resulting economic collapse –​known as the “Special Period” –​ weakened Cuba’s famed ability to provide high-​quality basic social services for its population and maintain essential equity throughout the island. By 2006, when Raúl Castro took the leadership reins from his ailing brother, Cuba had rebounded by opening its doors to foreign investment, revitalising its tourist industry, enabling the development of a non-​state sector, and obtaining discounted oil from Venezuela. Cuba also was at a high point in its relations with Latin American, African, and Asian countries, and a nadir in relations with the United States and Europe. In December 2006, Cuba hosted the summit of the Nonaligned Movement [NAM] for the second time and became chair for the next three years. The goals that prior leaders established continued to guide Cuban foreign policy at the start of the 2020s. Yet domestic and international constraints ultimately shaped the Díaz-​Canel administration’s decisions aimed at fulfilling them. Consider that the country’s GDP for 2020 declined by 11 per cent from 2019, and that the 2021 sugar harvest was expected to yield the smallest crop since 1908.13 The major effort to restructure the economy –​intended to make it more productive, generate increased amounts of hard currency essential for imports, reduce 186

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the need for imported goods by producing more food domestically, and sustain growth –​began in 2011 with PCC adoption of the Lineamientos, a set of guidelines opening the way for some privatisation. Further efforts occurred in 2016 with the introduction of a “Conceptualisation” platform for a revitalised socialism and a development plan for 2030. However, the result was “no haste and much pause”.14 Apart from a generalised resistance to change from some officials, the potential modifications generated significant debate in the country about the extent to which restructuring would vitiate Cuba’s vision of an egalitarian society. Indeed, privatisation and foreign investment had already generated inequalities that were noticeable in living standards and rising prices for basic necessities and housing.15 Still, Cuba’s vision for overhauling the economy focused on increasing foreign investment. For example, the revised constitution approved in 2019 declares, “The State promotes and provides guarantees for foreign investment, which is an important element for the economic development of the country”.16 Yet several obstacles discouraged foreign investors, especially Cuba’s dual currency that created wild distortions between the cost of inputs and the price of outputs.17 Notably, on 1 January 2021, the government finally retired the dual currency system as part of a major economic restructuring that included expanding the categories of permissible self-​employment occupations in February 2021 and relaxing restrictions on sales and purchases by small farmers in April.18 Between 2018 and 2020, Cuba’s economy also suffered the loss of three important sources of internationally convertible currency. First, Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia ended their reliance on Cuban medical personnel paid for in hard currency. Second, the Trump Administration issued regulations that reduced the size of remittances that American citizens could send to Cuba. Finally, tourist dollars disappeared as Cuba closed its doors to international visitors for eight months in 2020 because of COVID and the Trump Administration added restrictions on American travel to Cuba. In this context, Cuba’s foreign policy played out in four areas. The first was Cuban-​American relations. Following United States embarrassment over Cuba at the 2012 Summit of the Americas, President Barack Obama sought to make lemonade out of that lemon. Early in 2013, he authorised two foreign policy aides to begin negotiations with Cuba over a range of issues, including normalising diplomatic relations.19 On 17 December 2014, Raúl Castro and Obama revealed what had been in the works for the previous 18 months, announcing a resumption of diplomatic relations. In the next two years, they sought to make the new relationship “irreversible” by negotiating 22 agreements across a range of issues, including environmental co-​operation, law enforcement, combating trafficking in persons, and property claims. Regularly scheduled airline service, direct postal services, advanced telecommunications connections, and new commercial ties also became possible when Washington relaxed some sanctions and the State Department removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.20 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump asserted in 2016 that as president he would have the authority to reverse nearly all of Obama’s initiatives, because Obama had achieved them through executive orders not legislation. By the end of Trump’s term, he had kept his promise, by either reversing Obama’s initiatives, or failing to implement them. In addition, the State Department labelled a series of illnesses experienced by 24 United States Embassy personnel in Havana as “sonic attacks”, for which it asserted Cuba should bear responsibility. The illnesses, which in the most severe cases mimicked the kind of concussion that occurs from a physical blow to the head, occurred over a period of eleven months in late 2016 and 2017. Despite uncertainty about the aetiology of the medical problems,21 and with no evidence that Cuba had caused or taken insufficient action to prevent the harm, Trump’s Administration evacuated most of the Embassy staff from the country. It then demanded that the size of Cuba’s 187

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Embassy staff in Washington be reduced and issued a travel warning about Cuba. Consequently, several American organisations cancelled planned educational trips to the island, and Cubans seeking visas for travel to the United States had to go to a third country to obtain one. Subsequently, American National Security Advisor John Bolton launched a series of attacks on Cuba that brought relations close to their most contentious since the end of the Cold War. Following his November 2018 characterisation of Cuba as one of three countries in a “troika of tyranny”, the Trump Administration cancelled licenses for organisations taking Americans on “people-​to-​people” educational trips, limited the amount of remittances Americans could send to their Cuban families, and banned American cruise vessels from docking in Cuba –​ these last accounted for 60 per cent of trips to the island by American visitors. It also tried to use sanctions to prevent Cuba from importing Venezuelan oil.22 In April 2020, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the president would no longer waive Title III of the 1996 Helms-​Burton Act, as every United States leader had done since the law’s passage. Strongly opposed by American allies because of its extraterritorial provisions. Title III allows former owners of Cuban property –​including those who were not United States citizens at the time –​to sue international companies engaged in commerce with the expropriated properties. It was intended to discourage foreign investment in Cuba. Two months later, the Treasury Department began a concerted effort to deny hard currency to Cubans by focusing on remittances, for example, forcing the closure of Western Union offices on the island, the primary outlets through which Cubans received cash from abroad. Remittances were the largest source of Cuba’s hard currency earnings, accounting for an estimated $3.7 billion in 2019.23 The final blow came as Trump was leaving office. In January 2021, the State Department returned Cuba to its List of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Even though the designation had no merit, it added an obstacle to Cuba’s international transactions. The routing of many payments goes through New York banks, which must comply with restrictions for listed countries. Whilst many Cubans celebrated the December 2014 announcements on diplomatic relations and welcomed the opening to the United States, there were some notable dissenters wary of the influence the United States might have on Cuba. Fidel Castro remarked in a letter to the Cuban Federation of University Students, “I do not trust the policy of the United States”.24 A year later, he wrote in Granma, the PCC newspaper, following Obama’s historic March 2016 trip to Cuba, “Obama … uses the most sweetened words to express: ‘It is time, now, to forget the past’ ”. Yet Obama himself did so, Castro suggested, by ignoring “a ruthless blockade that has lasted almost 60 years, and what about those who have died in the mercenary attacks on Cuban ships and ports, an airliner full of passengers blown up in midair, mercenary invasions, multiple acts of violence and coercion?”25 Still, both Raúl Castro and Díaz-​Canel repeatedly affirmed Cuba’s strong interest in both maintaining Cuban-​American diplomatic relations and extending commercial and cultural engagements. This affirmation continued throughout the Trump Administration and into the first year of President Joseph Biden’s term of office, even though the Biden Administration maintained all of Trump’s sanctions.26 To be sure, Cuban officials protested each new sanction and denounced repeated verbal attacks made by American officials. And it continued, as it had done since 1992, to sponsor a United Nations [UN] General Assembly resolution calling for an end to the American economic embargo.27 Pragmatically, Cuba also searched for ways to defend itself against United States pressures, open new commercial links to avoid relying on too few sources of investment and export opportunities, and gain allies in international organisations. Yet changing global circumstances, especially in Latin America, created additional hurdles. 188

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The second foreign policy area centres on Cuban-​Latin American relations. Latin America was the region offering the greatest promise for Cuba at the start of the century. By 2009, all Western Hemispheric countries except the United States had established diplomatic relations with Cuba. In November 2008, Cuba also became a full member of the Rio Group, an informal association of 23 hemispheric countries formalised in 2011 as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States [CELAC]. It seemed to offer a potential challenge to the Organisation of American States as the main forum for handling hemispheric issues. In addition, nearly every country in the region experienced meaningful economic growth between 1990 and 2010. For example, Brazil’s GDP grew by more than 40 per cent and it moved from eleventh to seventh place in the world’s ranking. Cuba engaged Brazil in several ways. It established a joint venture with Odebrecht, the Brazilian engineering conglomerate, to reconstruct the Port of Mariel at a cost of $1 billion. Cuban officials envisioned that the port, which opened in January 2014 with a capacity to handle one million containers annually and service super cargo ships traversing the recently widened Panama Canal, would be a hub for commerce with both North and South America. In addition, following the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as its president in 2002, Brazil began relying on Cuban doctors to provide medical care in the country’s poorest areas. Brazil’s political support also was critical in Cuba gaining full membership in the Rio Group. The leftward shift in Latin America in the first decade of the twenty-​first century brought to power several leaders who had long admired Cuba. This was one reason the CELAC countries selected Cuba to host the organisation’s second summit in January 2014 in Havana. Also meeting in Havana at the same time were peace negotiators from the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the main insurgent group in the country. Their negotiations began in mid-​November 2012 in Oslo and quickly moved to Havana, where Cuban diplomats played an essential role in helping to bring about an agreement four years later to end the civil war. Cuba also contributed to the settlement by offering 1,000 medical school scholarships to Colombians.28 Until at least 2013, the most important institution that helped to strengthen Cuba’s bilateral relations in the region was the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America [ALBA]. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez put forward the idea of integrating the hemisphere via ALBA in 2001; it began operations in 2004, backed by Venezuela’s oil wealth. In conjunction with ALBA, Cuba provided free medical aid –​including a programme to restore eyesight to more than two million people –​in several Latin American and Caribbean countries beginning in 2004. By 2011, the international medical programme was sending about 41,000 health workers to 68 nations.29 Whilst the commitment to medical internationalism continued apace under Raúl, despite setbacks in the domestic economy, it also became an important way for Cuba to earn hard currency and increase Cuban doctors’ wages –​Cuba charged fees to countries that could afford them. The services provided in Brazil, Bolivia, Haiti, Jamaica, Venezuela, and Ecuador brought medical care to rural communities and urban pockets of poverty that had never seen a doctor. In turn, it strengthened popular support for the leaders in those countries, which reinforced their inclination to support Cuba. However, by 2020, circumstances in Latin America had changed in ways much less favourable to Cuba. Between 2013 and 2020, Venezuela’s economy declined significantly due to a drop in world oil prices, corruption, government failure to maintain the petroleum industry’s infrastructure, the out-​migration of technical experts, and international sanctions. It could no longer provide the same level of subsidies to Cuba or support ALBA, and its oil shipments to the island declined by 50 per cent. In 2017, Cuba turned to Algeria to replace some of the oil it could no longer obtain from Venezuela.30 189

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Corruption also led to the downfall of Brazilian governments that had good relations with Cuba. In 2018, Brazilian President-​elect Jair Bolsonaro effectively ended the Cuban medical assistance programme by demanding doctors meet untenable conditions. The demand removed 8,000 doctors from under-​served Brazilian areas, with a loss to Cuba of several hundred million dollars. Elections in Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia brought arch-​conservatives to power who sought to gain favour with Washington by distancing their countries from Cuba. The decline in Cuba’s engagement with Latin America is evident from its decreased regional trade. In 2018, 13.4 per cent of Cuban imports came from the region; in 2019, it dropped to 2.8 per cent.31 Still, Cuba located a few new sources of capital from the region. In 2016, the Development Bank of Latin America signed its first collaboration agreement with Havana, designed to foster technical co-​operation in socio-​economic development projects on the island and further regional integration. Cuba also joined the Central American Bank for Economic Integration in 2017.32 Yet the most important economic support came from China and Russia, the third policy area. Whilst Cuba was the first Western hemisphere country to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China –​in 1960 –​the Cold War contributed to unfriendly relations between Beijing and Moscow. China viewed Cuba as part of the Soviet bloc; Cuba was critical of China’s 1979 invasion of Vietnam and support for UNITA, the South African-​ backed guerrilla group fighting the Angolan government that Cuba was assisting. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, China sent 500,000 bicycles to Cuba to help fill the transportation void on the island created by the loss of Soviet assistance. In the next decade, China’s President Hu Jintao travelled to Cuba twice, signing trade and investment agreements that included forming a joint venture to exploit Cuba’s nickel reserves –​the world’s sixth-​largest –​and extending repayment of Cuba’s loans. In 2016, China became Cuba’s largest trading partner, and Cuba is China’s largest in Latin America. At that point, total trade between the People’s Republic and Cuba reached $2.6 billion.33 Since 2016, when Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited Cuba, the countries have signed more than 30 economic co-​operation agreements covering science, environmental protection, energy, public health, and agriculture. In 2018, Cuba joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Whilst their balance of trade is lopsided favouring China, Cuba’s imports –​like Yutong buses, inter-​city trains, and electronic equipment –​have improved its public transportation facilities and modernised communications.34 The two countries have also initiated several bilateral projects, such as a biomass plant that was Cuba’s first utility-​scale renewable energy project. In 2020, they established two significant biotechnical joint ventures: one in Hunan province and the other in Havana, for producing and selling pharmaceuticals worldwide.35 China also helped Cuba bypass American sanctions as the Asian giant sought to send medical supplies to the island to address the COVID pandemic.36 Still, Cuban leaders remained wary of Chinese power. As one insightful analyst explains, Cuban-​Chinese relations have not responded, neither before nor now, to sharing the same model of socialism … [and] their reunion in the post-​cold war era is not based on the same type of agreements that marked Cuba’s relations with the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.37 Cuba’s engagement with China is best understood not as an end goal but as a means for Cuba to diversify its trade and even create openings to other Asian countries. These intentions are evident in Cuba’s deepening ties with Vietnam, Cuba’s second-​largest Asian trading partner, from which it imports rice, electronics and textiles. Cuba mainly exports 190

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pharmaceuticals to Vietnam. Notably, Vietnam supported the work of Cuban medical teams in Asia combatting the COVID pandemic and, in April 2020, committed itself to reaching a goal of $550 million in bilateral trade by 2022.38 Díaz-​Canel made Asia the location for his first presidential trip outside of the country, in November 2018, when he went to China, Vietnam, and Laos.39 Growing engagement with Asia also provides Cuba with political support against attacks by the United States. Cuba’s improved relations with Russia similarly serve security interests, although the “new warmth between Moscow and Havana,” one long-​time observer of Cuba aptly remarked in 2020, “is still a far cry from the close embrace of Soviet times”.40 In 2016, Cuba’s trade with Russia was $225.5 million, even less than trade with the United States –​$241.8 million.41 Even though Cuban-​Russian bilateral commerce doubled by 2018, it remained well below Cuba’s level with China and Spain –​$2 billion and $1.39 billion, respectively.42 Still, “the frequency of visits to each other by the political elites of both countries” is a manifestation of the political significance the relationship retains for Cuba and Russia.43 Díaz-​ Canel lauded with unusually high praise the eight agreements that Cuba signed with Russia in October 2019. Granma then featured them in a major story headlined, “Why are relations with Russia at their best moment in 20 years?”44 The agreements involved generous terms for revitalising Cuba’s electrical grid and purchasing trains, rail equipment, spare parts for aging airplanes, agricultural equipment, and digital technology. Russia also forgave loans and provided oil that Cuba no longer obtained from Venezuela.45 For both countries, the level of their bilateral trade is less important than the signals it sends. Cuba views the relationship as a statement to its enemies about Russia’s renewed commitment to Cuban security, without reproducing the dependency Cuba experienced during the Cold War.46 From Russia’s perspective, its actions “are intended to allow President Vladimir Putin to create trouble in the US’s backyard without incurring major liabilities”.47 The fourth area concerns the European Union [EU]. As a way of recovering from its steep economic decline during the “Special Period”, Cuba turned to the EU for investment. By 2003, more than 50 per cent of direct foreign investment came from EU states, 25 per cent from Spain alone. It was thus a potentially serious blow when the EU announced that year it was freezing “the procedure to consider the admission of Cuba into the Africa-​Pacific-​Caribbean [ACP] Cotonou Agreement”.48 It also reaffirmed its “Common Position”, articulated in 1996, to condition aid to Cuba on improving human rights. In part, the decisions were a reaction to Cuba’s arrest of dissidents whom the government alleged were American-​paid provocateurs. In addition, Spain’s right-​wing government led by Prime Minister José María Aznar responded to demands from Washington to sanction Cuba. Cuban leaders were willing to risk a break with Europe, because they feared that internal dissent might encourage George W. Bush to launch a military attack. The Bush Administration’s bombastic rhetoric in 2003 set off alarm bells in Havana, as American officials had used similar language prior to the March invasion of Iraq undertaken on the basis of manufactured evidence.49 Fidel Castro defiantly dismissed the importance of Europe’s decisions. “Cuba does not need the aid of the European Union to survive”, he asserted bluntly, noting that the EU had donated only an average of about $4 million annually over the prior three years.50 Fast forward to 2015. Both international factors and conditions in Cuba and the EU had changed sufficiently to warrant EU reconsideration of its hostile orientation towards the island. The United States established diplomatic relations with Cuba that year. In 2016, it even abstained in UN General Assembly voting on the annual embargo resolution. Meanwhile, Cuba had approved new laws that ended severe limits on foreign travel for its citizens and made the internet more accessible. In Spain, the left-​of-​centre Socialist Workers’ Party controlled the 191

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government from 2004 to 2011, and domestic issues dominated Spanish politics afterwards. Moreover, the EU had changed course, emphasising “principled pragmatism” as its foreign policy mantra in lieu of a normative approach prioritising the promotion of human rights and democracy.51 Whilst easing restrictions on foreign investment, Cuba still had to overcome a key hurdle to access capital markets and attract large-​scale investment. In 1986, it had defaulted on repaying billions of dollars to international creditors. For example, it owed more than $11 billion to members of the Paris Club, a group of 19 major creditor nations. In 2015, the Club wiped out $8.5 billion of that debt and reached a restructuring agreement, which Cuba dutifully began paying in 2016.52 This was the context in December 2016, when the European Council overturned its Common Position. Following the Council’s vote, Cuba and the EU signed a major treaty –​ the Political Dialogue and Co-​operation Agreement –​moving them towards a more normal relationship.53 Eighteen months later, the EU announced it would contribute €18 million over five years in a programme marking the bloc’s first financing to the island since the co-​operation agreement came into force. Cuba was to direct the funds to its multi-​billion dollar green energy expansion plan, with the goal of providing 24 per cent of the island’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030. The EU also said it would grant €19.7 million to Cuba to finance a food security support programme.54 In October 2020, the Paris Club defied pressure from the United States, a member of the group, by allowing Cuba to forgo the annual debt payment negotiated in 2015.55 Much like EU diplomacy, a fair description of Cuba’s foreign policy is “principled pragmatism”, although its principles and those of the EU were not identical. Cuba’s principles account for much of the continuity in its foreign policy during the last 60 years and are likely to provide the framework for its international relations in the foreseeable future. As the 8th Communist Party Congress reaffirmed in April 2021, Cuba remains committed to international proletarianism, a worldview presuming the country’s fate is inseparable from the well-​being of other nations.56 This presumption is not only evident in the international medical brigades deployed around the world. For the last 30 years, the government has prioritised spending Cuba’s limited resources on environmental protection to a greater extent, based on relative wealth, than most other countries. The Environmental Defence Fund [EDF] reports that Cuban scientists have identified more than 100 “of the most important marine habitats for conservation and strategies for coastal zone management” representing “nearly 25 per cent of its marine area”.57 Similarly, Cuba’s 2019 Fisheries Law required policy-​makers to focus on strategies to end over-​fishing and recover depleted stocks. In addition, its Framework for Integrated Stock and Habitat Evaluation, pioneered with EDF, is a tool for identifying fish species vulnerable to over-​fishing that other countries in the Caribbean Basin are now using.58 A quest to be independent has also guided Cuba. For a small country 90 miles from the world’s most powerful one, this quest invariably has led Cuba to be hyper-​vigilant about potential threats to its sovereignty. Havana’s strategies for enhancing Cuban security have at times undermined other important values it claims to honour, like human dignity and even independence. Its current spending on the military and national security is a small fraction of that of the 1970s and 1980s.59 Yet, the earlier expenditures prevented it from focusing sufficiently on diversifying its economy so that Cuba would be able to rely less on imported goods, especially food. Whilst these two principles –​international proletarianism and the quest for independence –​provide the continuing foundation of Cuba’s foreign policy, the pragmatism that informs specific policies inevitably responds to contemporaneous factors. These include the leaders’ capabilities, styles, and perceptions of external threats, changes in the global context such as the 192

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Soviet collapse, and the country’s capacity to manifest its principles in practice, including the agility of its institutions. Consider, for example, the way in which Raúl adapted the two principles when he became president. He honoured well-​defined lines of authority and sought to establish accountability for achievements and errors, perhaps because he led the Ministry of the Armed Forces for nearly 50 years, or his personality was so different from his brother’s. Fidel, in contrast, preferred a decision-​making process that placed him at the hub of competing groups. Consequently, no one felt secure in making decisions, every action waited for the comandante’s approval, and stagnation tended to accompany any policy initiative. Raúl was also more willing to risk Cuba’s independence in dealing with the United States than his brother was –​for instance, their different responses to Obama’s 2016 visit. Moreover, the younger Castro tended to be more cautious in provoking the United States, seeming to presume that conflict with the superpower was not inevitable.60 Cubans may have hoped that the 2020 American presidential election would create new possibilities for rapprochement with the United States. As a candidate in 2020, President Joe Biden promised to reverse many of the Trump administration regulations intended to weaken the Cuban economy and subvert the Cuban government.61 Yet in his first nine months, the new United States leader merely asked the intelligence community to assess the basis for Cuba’s inclusion on the List of State Sponsors of Terrorism and the State Department to lead a review of Cuba policy. The White House spokesperson observed that a “Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities”, and the director for the National Security Council’s director for the Western Hemisphere asserted that “political moment has changed significantly” for advancing improved relations.62 In mid-​ 2021, the Biden Administration imposed sanctions on officials in the Cuban government whom it blamed for violent repression against dissenters, and it requested proposals for a new multi-​million dollar programme aimed at supporting opposition on the island.63 It is still unclear what particular changes in Cuban foreign policy will result from Díaz-​ Canel’s 2018 election as president and 2021 elevation as PCC first secretary. First, there has not been significant turnover amongst key officials in the foreign and defence ministries. For example, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla continues in the post he has held since 2009. Second, the 2019 constitution potentially diminishes presidential power. The National Assembly meets for approximately six weeks each year. In its absence, the Council of State can approve laws and regulations. Until 2019, the national president also headed the Council of State, but now the president of the National Assembly does so. What remains clear is that the new Cuban leadership views itself as part of a revolutionary continuum, heirs of a foreign policy that has had a remarkable continuity for 60 years. The PCC’s Eighth Congress was held on the 60th anniversary of the United States-​sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, and the theme of the Congress was “We are Continuity”.64 As they respond pragmatically to a changing global context, they aspire to maintain a commitment to the principles that their predecessors established.

Notes 1 Philip Brenner and Peter Eisner, Cuba Libre: A 500-​Year Quest for Independence (Lanham, MD 2018). 2 Some of the information and analysis in this article is based on Teresa García Castro and Philip Brenner, “Cuba 2017: The End of an Era”, Revista de Ciencia Política, 38/​2(2018), 259–​79. 3 Raúl Castro Ruz, “The Revolutionary Cuban People will Again Rise to the Occasion, Speech to the closing session of the National Assembly” (18 July 2016): http://​en.gra​nma.cu/​cuba/​2016-​07-​13/​the-​ revolu​tion​ary-​cuban-​peo​ple-​will-​again-​r ise-​to-​the-​occas​ion.

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Philip Brenner and Jina Shim 4 H. Michael Erisman, Cuba’s Foreign Relations in a Post-​Soviet World (Gainesville, FL, 2000), 62–​90; William M. LeoGrande, “The Danger of Dependence: Cuba’s Foreign Policy After Chavez”, World Politics Review (2 April 2013). 5 Donna Rich, “Cuban Internationalism: A Humanitarian Foreign Policy”, in Philip Brenner, William M. LeoGrande, Donna Rich, and Daniel Siegel, eds., The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society (NY, 1988), 607; Oscar Elejalde Villalün, “Cubans Sharing Education: The Isle of Youth”, in Anne Hickling-​Hudson, Jorge Corona Gonzalez, and Rosemary Preston, eds., The Capacity to Share: A Study of Cuba’s International Cooperation in Educational Development (NY, 2012). 6 John M. Kirk, Healthcare Without Borders: Understanding Cuban Medical Internationalism (Gainesville, FL, 2015), ­chapter 2. 7 Michael J. Bustamante and Julia E. Sweig, “Cuban Public Diplomacy”, and Sandra Levinson, “Nationhood and Identity in Contemporary Cuban Art”, both in Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande, eds., A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution Under Raúl Castro (Lanham, MD, 2014), 261–​70, 335–​42; Sujartha Fernandes, Cuba Represent!: Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Durham, NC, 2006); Paula Pettavino and Philip Brenner, “More than Just a Game”, Peace Review, 11/​2 (1999), 523–​30. 8 Bustamante and Sweig, “Public Diplomacy”, 269. 9 Tom Long, “Small States, Great Power? Gaining Influence Through Intrinsic, Derivative, and Collective Power”, International Studies Review, 19/​2(2017), 198–​200. 10 Rafael Hernández, “Cuba and China: A Long March (I)”, OnCuba News (15 May 2020): https://​ onc​uban​ews.com/​en/​cuba/​cuba-​and-​china-​a-​long-​march-​i/​; Erisman, Post-​Soviet World, 42–​45, 148–​58. 11 James G. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba’s Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis (Lanham, MD, 2002); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–​1976 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); idem, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–​1991 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013). 12 Jorge I. Domínguez, “Cuba’s Economic Transition: Successes, Deficiencies, and Challenges”, in Jorge I. Domínguez, Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, and Lorena Barberia, eds., The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2004), 19. 13 Marc Frank, “Sugar Harvest no Sweetener for Cuba’s Ailing Economy”, Reuters: (11 March 2021): www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​cuba-​economy-​sugar/​sugar-​harvest-​no-​sweetener-​for-​cubas-ailingeconomy-​idUSKBN2B325F. 14 Ricardo Torres, “Cuba’s Economy: Reforms and Delays, 2014–​ 2018”, in Philip Brenner, John M. Kirk and William M. LeoGrande, eds., Cuba at the Crossroads (Lanham, MD, 2020), 41–​42. 15 Katrin Hansing and Bert Hoffmann, “Cuban Society: Becoming More Unequal, Connected and Diverse”, in ibid., 87–​89. 16 “Constitución de la República de Cuba”, Article 28; www.presidencia.gob.cu/​media/​ filer/​public/​ 2019/​04/​11/​constitucioncuba.pdf. The 2019 Constitution also restructured the government –​creating a prime minister and installing the president of the National Assembly as head of the Council of State –​and establishing the right to habeas corpus and strengthening civil rights. See Geoff Thale and Teresa García Castro, “Cuba’s New Constitution, Explained”, Washington Office on Latin America (26 February 2019): www.wola.org/​analysis/​cubas-​new-​constitution-​explained/​. 17 Ricardo Torres, “Cuba’s Dual Currency is Due for revision”, Progreso Weekly (14 February 2018): http://​pro​gres​owee​kly.us/​cubas-​dual-​curre​ncy-​due-​revis​ion/​. See also Richard E. Feinberg, Cuba’s Economy After Raúl Castro: A Tale Of Three Worlds (Washington, DC, 2016), 3–​4, 8–​10; Emily Morris, “How Will US-​Cuban Normalisation Affect Economic Policy in Cuba”, in Eric Hershberg and William M. LeoGrande, eds., A New Chapter in US-​Cuba Relations: Social, Political, and Economic Implications (NY, 2016), 115–​27. 18 Yudy Castro, “Sesenta y tres medidas para incrementar la producción de alimentos en el país,” Granma, (15 April 2021): www.granma.cu/​cuba/​2021-​04-​15/​sesenta-​y-​tres-​medidas-​para-incrementarla-​produccion-​de-​alimentos-​en-​el-​pais. 19 William M. LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), “Epilogue”. Also see: Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House (NY, 2018), 209–​16. 20 Ministry of Foreign Relations, Cuba, “Bilateral Instruments Adopted Between Cuba and the United States after 12/​17/​14” (1 February 2017): https://​misio​nes.min​rex.gob.cu/​en/​artic​ulo/​bilate​ral-​inst​ rume​nts-​adop​ted-​betw​een-​cuba-​and-​uni​ted-​sta​tes-​after-​121​714.

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Change and Continuity in Cuba’s Relations 21 Dan Hurley, “Was It an Invisible Attack on U.S. Diplomats, or Something Stranger?”, NY Times Magazine (19 May 2019). Ana Swanson, Edward Wong, and Julian E. Barnes, “As U.S. Diplomats Fell Sick, Washington Minimized the Danger”, NY Times (20 October 2020), reported that recent investigations pointed to a Russian programme aimed at Central Intelligence Agency personnel as the cause of the illnesses. 22 Jon Lee Anderson, “In Its Fight with Venezuela, the Trump Administration Takes Aim at Cuba”, New Yorker (10 October 2019). 23 Sara Marsh, “Trump Administration Orders Marriott to Cease Cuba Hotel Business,” Reuters (5 June 2020): www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​cuba-​usa-​hotel-​exclusive/​exclusive-​marriott-​says-​trumpadministration-​orders-​it-​to-​cease-​cuba-​hotel-​business-​idUSKBN23C298; Center for Democracy in the Americas Explainer, “Recent Policy Changes on Cuba Remittances” (27 October 2020): www.democracyinamericas.org/​all-​press-​releases/​recent-​policy-​changes-​on-​cuba-remittancesan-​explainer2020915. 24 Fidel Castro Ruz, “Para mis compañeros de la Federación Estudiantil Universitaria”, Granma (26 January 2015). See also Philip Brenner and Colleen Scribner, “Spoiling the Spoilers: Evading the Legacy of Failed Attempts to Normalize U.S.-​Cuba Relations”, in Margaret E. Crahan and Soraya M. Castro Mariño, eds., Cuba-​US Relations: Normalization and Its Challenges (NY, 2016). 25 Fidel Castro Ruz, “Brother Obama”, Granma (28 March 2016): http://​en.gra​nma.cu/​cuba/​ 2016-​03-​ 28/​brother-​obama. 26 William LeoGrande, “Biden Stalls on Reinstating Cuban Remittances for no Good Reason”, Responsible Statecraft (21 July 2021): https://​respon​sibl​esta​tecr​aft.org/​2021/​07/​21/​biden-​sta​lls-​on-​rein​ stat​ing-​cuban-​remi​ttan​ces-​for-​no-​good-​rea​son/​. 27 Since the beginning of the twenty-​first century, the resolution has been approved by nearly unanimous votes. The June 2021 vote was 184 in favour, 2 against (United States and Israel), and 3 abstentions (Brazil, Colombia and Ukraine): https://​news.un.org/​en/​story/​2021/​06/​1094​612. 28 “Cuba Offers Colombia 1,000 Medical School Scholarships”, Associated Press (16 March 2017): https://​ apn​ews.com/​827ae​08af​1144​c868​8bcc​3732​f5e5​a1f/​cuba-​off​ers-​colom​bia-​1000-​medi​cal-​sch​ool-​schol​ arsh​ips. 29 Kirk, Healthcare Without Borders, ­chapter 4. 30 “Algeria Sends More Oil to Cuba as Venezuelan Supplies Fall”, Reuters (10 January 2018): www. reuters.com/​article/​us-​algeria-​oil-​cuba/​algeria-​sends-​more-​oil-​to-​cuba-​as-​venezuelan-​supplies-​fall-​ idUSKBN1EZ28O. 31 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, “International Trade Outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2019” (Santiago, 2019): https://​repo​sito​r io.cepal.org/​bitstr​eam/​han​dle/​ 11362/​44919/​6/​S190​0747​_​en.pdf. 32 “Firman primer acuerdo de colaboración Cuba y Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina”, Radio Rebelde (2 September 2016): www.cmhw.cu/​nacionales/​2684-​firman-​primer-​acuerdo-​ de-​colaboracion-​cuba-​y-​banco-​de-​desarrollo-​de-​america-​latina?utm_​source=​twitterfeed&utm_​ medium=​twitter; Prensa Latina, “Cuba Joins the Central American Bank for Economic Integration”, Granma (29 August 2017): http://​en.gra​nma.cu/​cuba/​2017-​08-​29/​cuba-​joins-​the-​cent​ral-​ameri​can-​ bank-​for-​econo​mic-​inte​grat​ion. 33 “Capítulo 8: Sector Externo”, Table 4, Oficina Nacional de Estadisticas e Informacion [ONEI], Anuario Estadístico de Cuba 2018 (Havana, 2019): www.onei.gob.cu/​node/​13804. 34 Rafael Hernández, “China and Cuba: A Long March (II)”, OnCuba News (28 May 2020): https://​ onc​uban​ews.com/​en/​opin​ion/​china-​and-​cuba-​a-​long-​march-​ii/​; Dave Makichuk, “Cuba Building on ‘New Era’ of China Ties”, Asia Times (27 November 2019): https://​asiati​mes.com/​2019/​11/​cuba-​ marks-​new-​era-​of-​china-​ties/​. 35 “Concluye montaje de primer centro conjunto de innovación biotecnológica Cuba-​ China”, CubaDebate (2 January 2020): www.cubadebate.cu/​noticias/​2020/​01/​02/​concluye-​montaje-​de-​ primer-centro-​conjunto-​de-​innovacion-​biotecnologica-​cuba-​china/​#.X6COxFBOmHt; “Cuba y China trabajan en el primer parque biotecnológico conjunto para producir fármacos”, Granma (12 May 2020): www.granma.cu/​cuba-​china/​2020-​05-​12/​cuba-​y-​china-​trabajan-​en-​el-​primer-​parquebiotecnologico-​conjunto-​para-​producir-​farmacos. 36 Li Qiao, “Chinese-​Donated Medical Supplies Arrive in Cuba after Delay due to US Sanctions”, Global Times (3 May 2020): www.globaltimes.cn/​content/​1187335.shtml; “Cuba to Distribute Donation from Chinese Alumni to Combat COVID-​19”, Xinhuanet (2 May 2020): www.xinhuanet.com/​english/​2020-​05/​02/​c_​139024819.htm.

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Philip Brenner and Jina Shim 37 Hernández, “China and Cuba: A Long March (II)”. 38 “Cuba-​ Vietnam Trade Agreement in Force Despite Pandemic” Telesur (28 April 2020): www. telesurenglish.net/​news/​cuba-​vietnam-​trade-​agreement-​-​in-​force-​despite-​pandemic-​20200428-​ 0003.html; Tom Fawthrop, “Cuba’s Improbable Medical Prowess in Asia”, The Diplomat (24 April 2020): https://​thed​iplo​mat.com/​2020/​04/​cubas-​imp​roba​ble-​medi​cal-​prow​ess-​in-​asia/​. 39 Ruvislei González Sáez, “Why Relations with the Asia-​Pacific Are Central to Cuba’s Future”, Asia Power Watch (22 June 2020): https://​asi​apow​erwa​tch.com/​why-​relati​ons-​with-​the-​asia-​paci​fic-​are-​ cent​ral-​to-​cubas-​fut​ure/​. 40 Marc Frank, “Russia Fills the Void in Cuba Left by Tougher US Embargo”, Financial Times (1 January 2020): www.ft.com/​content/​cbc7cc88-​1c0a-​11ea-​9186-​7348c2f183af. 41 United States Census Bureau, “Trade in Goods with Cuba”: www.census.gov/​foreign-​trade/​balance/​ c2390.html. 42 ONEI, Anuario Estadístico de Cuba 2018, Table 8.4. 43 Mervyn Bain, “Russia and Cuba”, in H. Michael Erisman and John M. Kirk, eds., Cuban Foreign Policy: Transformation under Raúl Castro (Lanham, MD, 2018), 237. 44 Gladys Leidys Ramos, “¿Por qué las relaciones con Rusia están en el mejor momento de los últimos 20 años?” Granma (3 December 2019): www.granma.cu/​mundo/​2019-​12-​03/​por-​que-​las-​relaciones-​ con-​rusia-​estan-​en-​el-​mejor-​momento-​de-​los-​ultimos-​20-​anos-​03-​12-​2019-​00-​12-​53. 45 Marc Frank, “Russia Resumes Oil Shipments to Cuba, Helps Fill Venezuelan Breach”, Reuters (3 May 2017): www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​cuba-​energy-​russia-​idUSKBN17Z2B8. 46 John M. Kirk, “Cuban Foreign Policy, 2014–​2019: From Raúl Castro to Miguel Díaz-​Canel”, in Brenner, et al., Cuba at the Crossroads, 74–​75. 47 Frank, “Russia Fills the Void”. 48 Joaquín Roy, “The European Union’s Perception of Cuba: From Frustration to Irritation”, in Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande, eds., A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution (Lanham, MD, 2007), 254. 49 Wayne S. Smith, “Provocation, War Spawned Cuba Crackdown”, Baltimore Sun (15 April 2003); Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, The Italian Letter: The Forgery That Started the Iraq War (Amazon Digital: Kindle Edition, 2014). 50 Fidel Castro Ruz, “Speech at the Ceremony Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Attack on the Moncada, Santiago de Cuba” (26 July 2003): www.cuba.cu/​gobierno/​discursos/​2003/​ing/​ f260703i.html. 51 Susanne Gratius, “Cuba and the European Union”, in Erisman and Kirk, Cuban Foreign Policy, 131–​34. 52 Marc Frank, “Cash-​strapped Cuba Makes Debt Payment to Major Creditors: Diplomats”, Reuters (18 October 2017): https://​uk.reut​ers.com/​arti​cle/​us-​cuba-​econ​omy/​cash-​strap​ped-​cuba-​makes-​debt-​ paym​ent-​to-​major-​credit​ors-​diplom​ats-​idUKKB​N1CN​2W3. 53 Eur-​Lex, “Treaties Currently in Force”: https://​ec.eur​opa.eu/​world/​agr​eeme​nts/​pre​pare​Crea​teTr​eati​ esWo​rksp​ace/​trea​ties​Gene​ralD​ata.-​do?step=​0&redir​ect=​true&treat​yId=​11281. 54 “EU, Cuba Build Ties in Face of US Pressure”, Euractiv (16 May 2018): www.euractiv.com/​section/​ global-​europe/​news/​eu-​cuba-​build-​ties-​in-​face-​of-​us-​pressure/​. 55 Alonso Soto, Ben Bartenstein, and Alessandra Migliaccio, “Wealthy Nations Defy Trump With Debt Lifeline to Ailing Cuba”, Bloomberg News (16 October 2020): www.bloomberg.com/​news/​articles/​ 2020-​10-​15/​wealthy-​nations-​defy-​trump-​with-​debt-​lifeline-​to-​ailing-​cuba. 56 Raúl Castro Ruz, “Informe Central al 8vo. Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba,” Granma, Special Supplement (17 April 2021): www.granma.cu/​file/​pdf/​2021/​04/​17/​G_​2021041717.pdf. 57 “Securing a Sustainable Future for Cuba’s Fisheries”: www.edf.org/​oceans/​securing-​sustainable-​ future-​cubas-​fisheries. Also see Giselle Garcia Castro, Lista Quinta (2019): https://​vimeo.com/​ 362058​407. 58 “Engaging with Cuban Fishing Communities”: www.edf.org/​oceans/​engaging-​cuban-fishingcommunities. 59 Hal Klepak, “The Defense Contribution to Foreign Policy”, in Erisman and Kirk, Cuban Foreign Policy, 28–​29. 60 At a 1992 conference, Fidel was asked why Cuba was willing to provoke the United States by supporting revolutionary organisations opposed to American interests. He responded that the United States did not need a Cuban provocation to act aggressively. “You never know what the next reason is going to be”, he said. James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis and the Soviet Collapse (Lanham, MD, 2002), 298, 300.

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Change and Continuity in Cuba’s Relations 61 Carmen Sesin, “Biden Slams Trump on ‘Abject Failure’ on Venezuela, as well as Cuba Policies”, NBC News (6 September 2020): www.nbcnews.com/​news/​latino/​biden-​slams-​trump-abjectfailure-​venezuela-​well-​cuba-​policies-​n1239356. 62 The White House, “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki” (9 March 2021): www.whitehouse. gov/​briefing-​room/​press-​briefings/​2021/​03/​09/​press-​briefing-​by-​press-​secretary-​jen-​psaki-​and-​ deputy-​director-​of-​the-​national-​economic-​council-​bharat-​ramamurti-​march-​9-​2021/​; Juan Carlos López, “Joe Biden no es Barack Obama en la política hacia Cuba y no habrá dialogo con Nicolás Maduro, según alto funcionario de la Casa Blanca”, CNN Español (8 April 2021): https://​cnn​espa​nol. cnn.com/​2021/​04/​08/​juan-​gonza​lez-​biden-​obama-​cuba-​mad​uro-​dire​cto-​usa-​orix/​. 63 U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Sanctions Cuban Police Force and Its Leaders in Response to Violence Against Peaceful Demonstrators”, Press Release (30 July 2021): https://​home.treas​ury. gov/​news/​press-​relea​ses/​jy0​298; U.S. Agency for International Development, “Notice of Funding Opportunity Number: 7200AA21RFA00024 –​Supporting Local Civil Society and Human Rights in Cuba”, 30 June 2021: https://​govs​hop.com/​opport​unit​ies/​sup​port​ing-​local-​civil-​soci​ety-​and-​ human/​. 64 Raúl Castro Ruz, “Informe Central al 8vo. Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba”, Granma Suplemento Especial (17 April 2021): www.granma.cu/​file/​pdf/​2021/​04/​17/​G_​2021041717.pdf.

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16 PERU A Model for Latin American Diplomacy and Statecraft Ronald Bruce St John

After winning its independence from Spain, the Republic of Peru quickly distinguished itself in terms of the professionalism of its diplomacy and statecraft. In early August 1821, General José de San Martín, soon after declaring Peru independent from Spain, established the Ministry of State and Foreign Relations and appointed Juan García del Río as the country’s first minister of foreign affairs. Less than five months later, García del Río was sent abroad to establish formal diplomatic relations with other states, and Bernardo Monteagudo replaced him as foreign minister.1 Over the next two decades, the conduct of foreign affairs was largely the purview of a small coterie of often highly competent aristocrats, some of whom had previous experience in the Spanish administration. The decisive patriot victory at Ayacucho in 1824 secured Peruvian independence, and the capabilities, options, and constraints of Peruvian foreign policy began to clarify. As with many of its neighbours, Peru’s boundaries were in dispute and would remain so well into the next century. The commercial advantages at stake often complicated these territorial issues as the Pacific coast states of South America quarrelled over trade routes and seaports. Peru shared with its neighbours a profound awareness of interlocking interests; consequently, bilateral disputes often assumed multilateral dimensions as states shifted alliances in search of relative advantage. The conflicting demands of independence and inter-​dependence, as determined by this potpourri of domestic and international forces, influenced the content and expression of Peruvian foreign policy long after 1824.2 The first two decades after independence were a time of considerable internal strife, bordering on civil war, in which Peruvian caudillos battled to determine the future of the state. In this confused and shifting milieu, successive administrations struggled to define the frontiers of Peru, not in the narrow sense of planting boundary-​markers, but in the broader sense of determining whether Peru would be divided, federated with Bolivia, or stand-​alone. Like many new states, Peru achieved statehood long before it achieved nationhood, and in its early years, it struggled to maintain the former as it strove to develop the latter.3 The election of Ramón Castilla to the presidency in April 1845 proved a milestone in the development of Peruvian foreign policy. Prior to his Administration, Peru was a weak, divided nation with only vague, limited ambitions. Under Castilla, Peru acquired for the first time the degree of internal peace, centralised and efficient state organisation, adequate and reliable public funding, and emerging sense of national unity necessary for the formulation, articulation, and

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execution of an active foreign policy. In addition, Castilla was able to draw on the nation’s newly developed guano wealth to create the machinery and professionalism required to pursue its international aims without which foreign policy itself would have been valueless.4 Peru’s approach to foreign relations in 1821–​1845 mirrored that of its neighbours in that it lacked direction and structure; therefore, a high priority of Castilla’s first Administration (1845–​1851) was a thorough reorganisation of the consular and diplomatic services to improve their efficiency and effectiveness. The president’s motivation lay with the indignities suffered by Peru in the past because it either did not command respect abroad or lacked a vigorous foreign service capable of presenting its case competently to foreign governments. José Gregorio Paz Soldán, widely considered the most efficient Peruvian minister of foreign affairs in the nineteenth century, ably assisted Castilla in upgrading the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.5 On 31 July 1846, Castilla signed decree 90, reorganising the consular and diplomatic corps and outlining job classifications as well as remuneration and retirement practices. Ratified by the Congress in 1853, it was the first diplomatic law worthy of the name in Peru or elsewhere in Latin America and became the country’s longest-​standing diplomatic legislation. Additional statutes later strengthened the structure outlined in the 1853 law, notably decree 553, which in 1856 detailed the duties of the minister of foreign relations.6 Castilla took full advantage of the new legislation to upgrade the quality of Peruvian diplomats and expand the number of missions abroad. By 1857, Peru enjoyed widespread diplomatic representation with missions throughout Latin America, the United States, and Europe. In 1862, the final year of the second Castilla Administration, one-​half of the 36 appointed consuls were salaried where only two had been 15 years earlier.7 When Castilla left office, the challenge for his successors was to build on his achievements in a manner that advanced the Peru’s national interests. Unfortunately, little new or lasting was accomplished in the 1860s, a decade lost in terms of advancing Peruvian foreign policy goals. The Spanish intervention of 1863–​1866 produced a temporary alliance of Andean republics, but the volatile nature of the coalition, coupled with the meagre results of the Second Lima Conference in 1864–​1865, highlighted the limited prospects for broader hemispheric unity. Moreover, rivalry with Chile, temporarily set aside during the Spanish intervention, resumed with a new intensity, leading to armed conflict less than 10 years later.8 During the 1870s, Peru enjoyed another opportunity to put its political and economic house in order and regain the sense of direction and regional leadership achieved under Castilla. The Manuel Pardo (1872–​1876) and Mariano Ignacio Prado (1876–​1879) governments tried unsuccessfully to ensure Peru’s security and compensate for reduced military strength by entering into treaties with neighbouring states.9 To move away from excessive state reliance on foreign loans, Peru also restructured the marketing of guano and nationalised the nitrate industry.10 Unfortunately, the economic policies of the Pardo and Prado administrations were not wholly successful and later contributed to Peru’s defeat in the 1879–​1883 War of the Pacific. In the interim, the ongoing need for labour led to new efforts at European immigration and ground-​ breaking treaties with China and Japan.11 The 1873 treaty with Japan was Peru’s first with an Asian state as well as Japan’s first with a Latin American country. In August 1872, in a natural extension of Castilla’s efforts to enhance the foreign policy machinery of the state, Pardo authorised the creation of a consultative commission at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This newly created body consisted of past foreign ministers, congressional foreign policy experts, former diplomats, and eminent scholars and international lawyers. The first Consultative Commission of Foreign Relations was named on 31 August 1872, and a second in June 1886 during the Administration of Andrés Avelino Cáceres (1886–​1890).12

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The relative positions of Bolivia, Chile, and Peru on the Pacific coast made naval power the crucial factor in the War of the Pacific. Once Chile gained control of the sea, the outcome of the war was inevitable. After four years of bloody fighting and protracted negotiations, the 1883 Treaty of Ancón re-​established peace between Peru and Chile. It was a punitive pact, with heavy indemnities, guaranteed to retard any improvement in regional relations. The treaty provisions related to the final disposition of the Peruvian provinces of Tacna and Arica were particularly unfortunate because they constituted an open sore that poisoned hemispheric relations for decades to come.13 After ten years of Chilean occupation, the Treaty of Ancón called for a plebiscite to determine whether Tacna and Arica would remain Chilean or revert to Peru. However, the ten-​year period came and went without a plebiscite, as the two sides could not agree on the terms of its execution. In the meantime, Chile initiated a policy of Chileanisation in Tacna and Arica to ensure it would win any future plebiscite.14 Whilst Chile remained the central issue on the foreign policy agenda, Peruvian diplomacy also made some progress in its complicated, often inter-​related boundary disputes with Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. The 1887 Espinosa-​Bonifaz Convention saw Peru and Ecuador agree to submit their territorial dispute to arbitration by the king of Spain, a process promising an outcome favourable to Peru. Later, Peru and Colombia agreed to a papal arbitration of their dispute, subject to the outcome of the Ecuador-​Peru dispute. Bilateral relations with the United States, soured by Washington’s amateurish diplomacy during the War of the Pacific, also improved. Given United States economic and political ascendancy, Lima’s ongoing need for development capital and diplomatic support clearly dictated better relations with Washington.15 Between 1908 and 1930, President Augusto B. Leguía served two non-​ consecutive terms, totalling 15 years. His first Administration (1908–​1912) accomplished several major achievements, including the resolution of the Bolivian and Brazilian boundary disputes. The 1909 treaty with Brazil conceded to the latter only the territory over which it had de facto possession, whilst the treaty with Bolivia, an agreement based on an earlier arbitral decision, awarded 60 per cent of the disputed territory to Peru.16 During Leguía’s second Administration (1919–​1930) he negotiated the 1922 Salomón-​Lozano Treaty with Colombia, granting the latter frontage on the Amazon River in return for ceding to Peru territory south of the Putumayo River that Colombia had received from Ecuador in 1916. Even though the agreement greatly enhanced Peru’s regional position vis-​à-​vis Ecuador, its terms were poorly understood and widely condemned by Peruvian nationalists. In 1929, Leguía concluded an agreement with Chile that divided the two occupied provinces: Tacna going to Peru and Arica remaining with Chile. Weary of the dispute, the 1929 treaty and additional protocol were well-​received by a majority of citizens in both Peru and Chile; nevertheless, fulfilling their provisions remained a subject of debate for the remainder of the century.17 Over the next three decades, the challenges and opportunities of Peruvian foreign policy expanded in scope and direction, and Peru regained the leadership role in continental affairs that it had earlier abandoned. Having withdrawn from the League of Nations after it refused to consider the Tacna-​Arica question, Peru was a founding member of the United Nations [UN] in 1945 and the Organisation of American States [OAS] in 1948. It also joined the Latin American Free Trade Association [LAFTA] created in 1960. Dissatisfied with private investment as the primary means to generate economic development, Peru explored alternative sources for financial and technical assistance, including the UN and the OAS. Tentative steps in the direction of an increasingly multilateral approach to foreign affairs paralleled a decline in the power and prestige of the United States. In response, a heightened sense of nationalism marked Peruvian foreign policy in which successive Peruvian governments displayed the capability and determination to resolve international issues on their own terms.18 200

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Peru also demonstrated a growing interest in regional economic co-​operation and development, participating in multilateral conferences on mineral resources and maritime fishing. In 1947, it stated its intent to exercise national sovereignty over the continental shelf and insular seas to a distance of 200 nautical miles. In 1954, Peru, Chile, and Ecuador issued a joint declaration stating they would not unilaterally diminish without prior agreement their common claim to exercise national sovereignty over the continental shelf and insular seas out to 200 nautical miles.19 Earlier, to manage better the mounting level of international discourse, President Oscar R. Benavides (1933–​1939) reconstituted the Consultative Commission of Foreign Relations that ceased to function after 1903. Thereafter, this small group of foreign policy specialists regularly advised on key foreign policy issues like the Leticia dispute with Colombia in 1932–​1934, the 1942 Rio Protocol, and the 1998 Brasilia Accords with Ecuador. In 1999, the Commission also played a role in the negotiation of a package of agreements executing the 1929 Tacna and Arica Treaty and Additional Protocol, ending 70 years of controversy with Chile.20 Concurrently, Peru continued to improve the professionalism of the diplomatic corps through more stringent recruitment, better training, and higher advancement standards. During the Manuel Prado Administration (1939–​1945) the Organic Foreign Relations Bill in 1941 and the Review of the Peruvian International Law Society in 1944 advanced a plan for training diplomats, leading to the creation in 1955 of the Diplomatic Academy of Peru. It was one of the first such institutions in Latin America and, over time, it became a first-​class educational body with a strong faculty and a demanding curriculum, eventually earning university status in 2005. In the process, it became the sole entry point into the diplomatic service, turning out generations of well-​trained diplomats.21 In conjunction with the growing strength and increased capability of the diplomatic corps, Peruvian foreign policy after 1962 moved in new directions as Peruvian diplomats addressed unfamiliar issues, adopted fresh approaches, and solidified new ties. Successive administrations diversified arms transfers, expanded trade links, advocated a radical reorganisation of the inter-​American economic and political system, and pressed for enhanced sub-​regional economic co-​operation.22 Peru was a founding member of the sub-​regional trade bloc known as the Andean Group in 1969, and it joined other Powers in signing the multilateral Treaty for Amazonian Co-​operation in 1978. Peru also was a founding member in 1980 of the Andean Reserve Fund [ARF], a lending facility associated with the Andean Group, as well as the 1988 Latin American Reserve Fund, an extension of the ARF. At the same time, the second Belaúnde Terry Administration (1980–​1985) pursued a more open economic system, a policy seen by some observers as softening Peru’s commitment to Andean development. Thought to have been resolved in 1942, the boundary dispute with Ecuador led to renewed conflict in 1981 and, the next year, Peru refused to sign the UN Law of the Sea Convention because it was unconstitutional.23 The second Belaúnde Administration searched for a more positive relationship with the United States but, in the end, the conflicting demands of Peruvian nationalism and need for American support to achieve key foreign policy goals left little room for improvement. Economically, Lima clashed with Washington over the level of economic aid and American imposition of countervailing tariffs on Peruvian textiles. Politically, the harsh methods used by Peru to stem a growing wave of terrorism created a storm of protest from United States human rights groups. Diplomatically, Peru criticised American support for Britain in the 1982 Falklands War and the United States intervention in Grenada in 1983. In turn, the United States criticised Peruvian backing for the Contadora Support group, which advocated a negotiated peace in war-​torn Central America.24 The Alan García Pérez Administration (1985–​1990) played an active role in the Non-​ Aligned Movement, opposed apartheid in Southern Africa, and promoted a close association 201

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with social democratic groups in Western Europe. Bilateral talks with Bolivia and Ecuador produced limited results, and an otherwise unproductive disarmament initiative led to the creation in Lima in 1986 of the UN Regional Centre for Peace, Disarmament, and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean. To avoid the label “communist”, García’s Administration attempted to maintain an independent posture toward the socialist states of the world; however, its activist foreign policy left little room for improving relations with the United States. Peru’s response to narco-​trafficking and terrorist activities won limited praise from Washington, but the García Administration’s confrontational style left bilateral relations strained as the decade ended.25 Throughout the 1990s, President Alberto Fujimori enjoyed more success in advancing the core goals of Peruvian foreign policy than any other administration in the second half of the century. In terms of regional co-​operation and development, he attended the Andean Pact Summit in La Paz in late 1990 and, in February 1991, presided at the opening meeting of the Andean Parliament when it convened in Lima. Three months later, Fujimori joined the chief executives of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela in committing to the establishment of a free trade zone by January 1992 and a common market by 1995. In August 1992, after Fujimori suspended the 1979 constitution, padlocked the Congress, and dismantled the judiciary in a so-​called “autogolpe”, Peru suspended co-​operation temporarily with the Andean Group; however, by 1998, it had returned to full participation.26 In August 1991, Peru joined Chile and Mexico in renewing calls for active membership in the Pacific Economic Co-​operation Council, a goal all three states later achieved. Peru also became a full member of the Asia-​Pacific Economic Co-​operation [APEC] forum. The Fujimori Administration advocated the integration of Peru and other Latin American states into the North American Free Trade Agreement as part of a strategy to create an economic grouping of developing countries.27 In support of Bolivia’s perennial quest for a seaport, Peru leased an industrial park and duty-​free port on the Pacific Ocean at Ilo in return for similar facilities at Puerto Suarez on the Paraguay River. In October 1998, Peru negotiated the Brasilia Accords with Ecuador, ending the longest standing boundary dispute in the Americas. In December 1999, the Fujimori Administration also concluded an agreement with Chile, resolving outstanding issues from the 1929 Tacna and Arica Treaty and Additional Protocol and ending another contentious and prolonged foreign policy issue.28 Recognising the need for American support to restore Peru’s international standing after the disastrous policies of the García Administration, Fujimori concentrated initially on the related issues of drug production and narco-​trafficking, the policy concerns of greatest interest to Washington. Later, the bilateral relationship expanded to include other areas of mutual interest, including debt, democracy and human rights, development, and defence issues. By the end of the decade, Peru under Fujimori’s Administration enjoyed the most positive relationship with the United States since the second Leguía Administration.29 The Alejandro Toledo Administration (2002–​ 2006) pursued nine inter-​ related foreign policy goals. First, it promoted democracy and human rights, often tying a second policy goal, the struggle against poverty, to supporting democracy. Third, the Administration worked to broaden bilateral relations with neighbouring states, emphasising economic development in the borderlands. Fourth, it encouraged a reduction in regional arms spending, with the money saved to reduce poverty. Fifth, Toledo’s Administration promoted increased unity and stronger integration within the Andean Group and, sixth, targeted stronger relations with the major industrialised Powers and the Asia-​Pacific region. The seventh goal called for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to become more effective in promoting the domestic economy abroad, and the eighth encouraged it to do a better job of serving Peruvians overseas. Finally, the Toledo 202

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Administration promised to reform personnel practices at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a goal driven by the scandalous treatment of diplomats in the Fujimori years.30 From the outset of his tenure in office, as just noted, Toledo emphasised the central role of democratic values and respect for human rights in any workable strategy to eliminate poverty. In so doing, he repeatedly stressed the need to reduce arms spending throughout Latin America, arguing the funds would be better spent on education, health, and social welfare programmes.31 The Toledo Administration also continued the familiar Peruvian emphasis on expanded integration with sub-​regional, regional, and extra-​regional bodies, from the Andean Community of Nations [CAN] to the OAS to the UN. In January 2004, an Extraordinary Summit of the Americas adopted a Peruvian proposal, the Declaration of Nuevo Leon, saying no American state should be a refuge for corruption or corrupt people. Later that year, Peru hosted the Third Summit of South American Presidents that witnessed the creation of the South American Community of Nations, later known as the Union of South American Nations. Active in a plethora of international organisations, Peru suffered from summit overload, an affliction common to developing Powers. All of them belong to a growing number of economic and political groupings, most of which hold annual summits with the expectation that heads of state attend, putting a severe strain on the limited capacity of countries like Peru to staff them.32 The Toledo Administration also worked to promote regional co-​operation and development through stronger ties with neighbouring states. In the wake of the 1998 Brasilia Accords, relations with Ecuador focused on executing their provisions, principally borderland development, whilst dialogue with Colombia mostly centred on the related issues of terrorism and narco-​trafficking. In 2003, Toledo met with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and signed a strategic alliance that proved a major foreign policy success. The agreement provided for increased economic co-​operation within the context of the Initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America, a multi-​year plan to criss-​cross Latin America with ten hubs of economic development, three of which passed through Peru.33 Peruvian relations with Bolivia were generally positive in the early years of the Toledo Administration but deteriorated after the inauguration of Bolivian President Evo Morales in January 2006. Morales moved Bolivian domestic and foreign policy in new directions that were often antithetical to the policies of Toledo. The starkly different personalities, philosophies, and policies of Toledo and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías also strained bilateral relations with Venezuela.34 Fujimori Administration policies enjoyed a high level of congruence with core elements of United States foreign policy in the post-​Cold War era; consequently, Toledo inherited a highly favourable bilateral climate. In March 2002, President George W. Bush became the first sitting American president to visit Peru, and over the next four years, Peruvian-​American relations moved from strength to strength. In February 2003, the Peace Corps returned to Peru after a 28-​year hiatus; and in 2006, Toledo’s Administration concluded a free trade agreement with the United States.35 Even as it maintained a positive working relationship with Washington, the Toledo government was able to challenge core elements of American policy, an indication of the professionalism of Peruvian statecraft. Lima opposed the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq, advocated UN Security Council reform, and pushed for a regional approach to combat drug trafficking. It also accepted the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, turning aside entreaties from Washington to conclude a bilateral immunity agreement shielding United States citizens from prosecution.36 The foreign policy of the second García Administration (2006–​2011) largely mirrored the policies of the Toledo government. Support for market-​friendly economic policies replaced the emphasis on socialism in the first García Administration, and multiple visits to the White House contrasted with the earlier policy of confrontation with the United States. García did 203

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not achieve the close personal relationship with Bush enjoyed by his predecessor, but his three invitations to the Bush White House were a decided accomplishment for a chief executive who was in effect persona non grata in Washington by the end of his first term. In mid-​2010, García also visited the Barack Obama White House.37 In the course of the 2006 election campaign, García pledged to give priority to bilateral relations with neighbouring states, and in so doing, his Administration largely followed the approach of his predecessor. With Ecuador, the focus remained on implementing the agreements constituting the 1998 Brasilia Accords with major emphasis on development of the borderlands. In the case of Chile, García’s second Administration finalised a commercial accord largely negotiated during the Toledo Administration and secured the extradition from Chile to Peru of former president Fujimori, a policy holdover from the previous government. In addition, the second García Administration advocated reduced arms purchases throughout the region and in Chile in particular, a policy it had championed in 1985–​1990 and later adopted by the Toledo Administration.38 With Brazil, the García Administration worked to strengthen the strategic relationship negotiated by Toledo. Early in García’s tenure, new agreements covered technical co-​operation, health, education, biotechnology, energy mining, and Amazon security; commercial and other accords followed later. In the case of Colombia, bilateral relations continued to centre on border issues related to questions of national defence and security.39 When it came to Bolivia and Venezuela, García faced many of the same problems encountered by his predecessor. Harshly critical of Morales and Chávez during the presidential campaign, García reached out to them after his election in an attempt to calm the rhetoric. At the same time, he cast his Administration, with its emphasis on democracy and free markets, as the antithesis to Bolivia and Venezuela, an approach that played well in Washington but not in La Paz or Caracas. With Bolivia, the more divisive issues included a Bolivian agreement with Venezuela for the latter to fund military bases along the Bolivia-​Peru border and Bolivia’s reluctance to accept the modifications to the CAN agreement required for Peru to implement a free trade agreement with the United States. With Venezuela, there was ongoing concern over the activities and goals of the Venezuelan-​funded Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and periodic complaints that Venezuela continued to meddle in Peru’s domestic affairs.40 Elsewhere, García continued the participatory policies of the Fujimori and Toledo administrations in a wide variety of regional and international organisations like the OAS and UN. In May 2008, Peru hosted the Fifth Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the European Union, Latin America, and the Caribbean and, six months later, the Sixteenth APEC Summit. The García Administration also continued Toledo’s efforts to increase trade with China and attract Chinese investment to Peru, as well as earlier efforts to broaden commercial relations with Japan and South Korea. García negotiated free trade agreements with China and Singapore, in addition to Canada and the European Union.41 In important ways, the foreign policy of the Ollanta Humala Tasso government (2011–​2016) resembled those of the Toledo and García administrations. Peru continued its participation in a variety of regional and international organisations and continued to pursue international trade agreements. Free trade treaties with Japan and South Korea –​concluded during the second García Administration –​took effect, and in 2012, Peru and Colombia concluded a comprehensive trade pact with the European Union. The latter treaty marked an important milestone as it meant Peru now had similar trade agreements with every major economy in the world. In February 2014, Pacific Alliance members agreed to remove tariffs on 92 per cent of goods and

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services; in February 2016, Peru joined other Pacific Rim states in signing the controversial Trans-​Pacific Partnership.42 Regionally, President-​elect Humala’s first stop in a weeklong tour of South America was Brazil where he met with President Dilma Rousseff, reaffirming their strategic relationship. Humala also threw his support behind the ongoing process at The Hague aimed at resolving the maritime dispute with Chile. Policy continuity on this issue led to a January 2014 International Court of Justice decision awarding Peru well over one-​half the disputed maritime space. Representatives of Peru and Ecuador met regularly in a continuing attempt to implement fully all aspects of the Brasilia Accords. In February 2013, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil concluded a tripartite agreement to fight organised crime and drug trafficking in their borderland areas. In July 2015, Peru and Bolivia concluded a “strategic alliance” consisting of more than 90 separate accords and, in January 2016, initialled an agreement aimed at the environmental restoration of Lake Titicaca.43 During the 2011 presidential campaign, Humala was highly critical of the United States; nevertheless, Obama reached out to him in the course of the latter’s June 2011 informal visit to Washington. Thereafter, the Humala Administration softened its tone and expressed a desire to improve bilateral co-​operation in areas like combating drug-​related crime and terrorism. At the same time, it pursued increasingly friendly policies toward big business and multinational corporations. Reflecting the new mood, the weekly magazine, Caretas, titled its coverage of Humala’s June 2013 official visit to the White House “El Nuevo Consenso” [The New Consensus]. In December 2015, Lori Berenson, an American jailed for 20 years for terrorism, concluded her sentence and returned to the United States, ending a controversy that had long complicated bilateral relations.44 Elsewhere, the foreign policy of the Humala Administration reflected the growing multipolarity of today’s world. Relations with the Middle East expanded with a state visit by the Emir of Qatar in February 2013, the inauguration of a Peruvian embassy in Saudi Arabia in March 2013, and a state visit by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in February 2016. In addition, Humala visited Israel as well as Palestine and Qatar in February 2014. Bilateral relations with Russia reached a level not seen since the military ruled Peru during the docenio (1968–​1980). In November 2014, Humala made a state visit to Russia, signing agreements on trade, climate protection, and tourism and, in November 2015, with Russian president, Vladimir Putin, concluded a “strategic partnership agreement”. In 2011, China surpassed the United States as Peru’s main trading partner, and by early 2013, bilateral trade had more than doubled since a China-​Peru trade agreement took effect in 2010. In April 2013, Humala visited China where he met with President Xi Jinping and promoted Peruvian exports and Chinese investment. In December 2015, a Chinese naval hospital ship paid a seven-​day service call at Lima’s port of Callao, its first-​ ever stop at a South American port and a fresh sign of China’s growing influence in the region.45 Pedro Pablo Kuczynski won the 2016 presidential election by the narrowest of margins, and his political party won only 18 of 130 congressional seats. In the uncertain political milieu that characterised his two years in office, foreign policy initiatives were limited in number and significance. A respected economist, Kuczynski sought market-​oriented policies and won immediate United States support. Obama visited Lima in November 2016 to attend the APEC summit and, in February 2017, Kuczynski was the first Latin American head of state to visit the Donald Trump White House. In February 2018, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Lima where he met with Kuczynski and highlighted Peru’s regional leadership. The Kuczynski government also cultivated ties with China, Peru’s largest trading partner and biggest investor. Kuczynski’s first trip abroad was to China, and he later hosted Xi Jinping in Lima. At the same

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time, he sought to dampen Chinese enthusiasm for a transcontinental railway, arguing it could be too expensive and environmentally harmful to build. Facing corruption charges, impeachment threats, and mass mobilisations, Kuczynski resigned in March 2018.46 With this resignation, the first vice president, Martín Vizcarra, assumed the presidency. A provincial politician who had never aspired to the office, Vizcarra focused on domestic issues, namely anti-​corruption and anti-​impunity reforms. Once again, domestic political instability later combined with the coronavirus pandemic severely limited the capacity of the executive branch to launch foreign policy initiatives. Instead, the Vizcarra Administration focused on retaining good relations with neighbouring states, participating in longstanding regional and international organisations, and balancing interaction with the Great Powers, namely China and the United States. Comfortable in the role of caretaker, Vizcarra announced early on that he would not be a candidate in presidential elections scheduled for April 2021.47 In November 2020, the Peruvian Congress voted to remove the widely popular Vizcarra from office on the nebulous grounds of “moral incapacity”. Several factors contributed to his downfall, including resistance to his anti-​corruption reforms, the absence of stable, institutional political parties, and a unicameral legislature in which checks and balances were fragile. With the post of vice president vacant, Manuel Merino, Speaker of the Congress and architect of Vizcarra’s downfall, replaced him as president on 10 November 2020. Faced with unprecedented public demonstrations, Merino stepped down after only five days. Congress then elected centrist lawmaker Francisco Sagasti as acting president, the third in a week, with a charter to ensure fair and transparent elections in April 2021. José Pedro Castillo Terrones, a school teacher, union leader, and self-​proclaimed Marxist, was the surprise winner of both the first and second rounds of the 2021 elections. Following a prolonged period of opposition challenges, he was inaugurated on 28 July 2021, the bicentennial of Peru. President Castillo was expected to focus on domestic issues in the early days of his presidency with any significant change in foreign policy coming at a later date.48 Stable governments, secure societies, strong economies, and significant military strength have all, at one time or another, been a problem for a developing Power like Peru. As it successfully addressed the shortcomings of its political economy, Peru widened the scope of its foreign policy, expanding its ties to multilateral organisations and the global economy. In the process, the focus of Peruvian foreign policy gradually evolved from one centred largely on bilateral questions, notably the resolution of multiple boundary issues, to one having an impact on a variety of regional and international issues. In pursuing Peru’s national interests, politicians and diplomats regularly employed economic, military, and political means, the traditional attributes of power; however, the professionalism of its diplomatic service often separated Peruvian diplomacy and statecraft from those of neighbouring states. Concerted efforts to improve the effectiveness of the diplomatic corps began after independence, increased in the mid-​nineteenth century, and continued to the present. On more than one occasion, the executive branch attempted to politicise the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the Fujimori Administration being the most recent example, but for the most part, the chief executives of Peru have looked to the professionals in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to guide the external relations of the state. At the same time, the stature and decisiveness of chief executives, like Castilla, Leguía, and Fujimori, clearly played a major role in shaping political outcomes. In a more institutionalised state, the role of the chief executive in leading the foreign policy process might not be so important, but in a developing Power like Peru, it was critical. Working with the professionals in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, strong chief executives implemented well thought out, coherent foreign policies that reflected domestic concerns and interests and were well suited to the international milieu. 206

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Notes 1 Juan Miguel Bákula, Perú: Entre la Realidad y la Utopía, 180 Años de Política Exterior, Volume 1 (Lima, 2002), 51–​59; Pedro Ugarteche, Valija de un Diplomático Peruano (Buenos Aires, 1965), 21–​22. 2 Alberto Wagner de Reyna, Historia diplomática del Perú, 1900–​1945, Volume I (Lima, 1964), 9–​14; Ronald Bruce St John, The Foreign Policy of Peru (Boulder, CO, 1992), 10–​11, 20. 3 Modesto Basadre y Chocano, Diez Años de Historia Política del Perú (1834–​1844) (Lima, 1955), 1–​166; Alvaro Pérez del Castillo, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile y el Perú: Diplomacia y Política, 1825–​1904 (La Paz, 1980), 13–​128, 144–​86, 196–​202. 4 Rosa Garibaldi, La Política exterior del Perú en la era de Ramón Castilla: Defensa hemisférica y defensa de la jurisdicción nacional (Lima, 2003), 23; St John, Foreign Policy, 45. 5 Garibaldi, La Política exterior, 23–​24; Bákula, Perú, 1, 172–​96. 6 Jorge Basadre, Historia de la república del Perú, 1822–​1933, 6th Edición, Volume III (Lima, 1968), 113–​ 14; Garibaldi, La Política exterior, 24–​32. 7 Garibaldi, La Política exterior, 32–​38. 8 Basadre, Historia, Volume V, 201–​363; St John, Foreign Policy, 80–​81. 9 Evaristo San Cristoval, Manuel Pardo y Lavalle: Su vida y su obra (Lima, 1945), 49–​262; Peter Flindell Klarén, Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes (Oxford, 2000), 172–​82. 10 Heraclio Bonilla, Guano y Burguesía en el Perú, 3rd Edición (Quito, 1994), 127–​90; Robert G. Greenhill and Rory M. Miller, “The Peruvian Government and the Nitrate Trade, 1873–​1879”, Journal of Latin American Studies, 5/​1(1973), 107–​31. 11 Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, 1849–​1874 (Durham, NC, 1951), 175–​76, 189–​90; Amelia Morimoto, Los japoneses y sus descendientes en el Perú (Lima, 1999), 32–​33. 12 Pedro Ugarteche, La Comisión Consultiva de Relaciones Exteriores del Perú (Lima, 1948), 1–​15. 13 For an introduction to the extensive literature on the War of the Pacific, see William F. Slater, Chile and the War of the Pacific (Lincoln, NE, 1986); Bruce W. Farcau, The Ten Cents War: Chile, Peru, and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, 1879–​1884 (Westport, CT, 2000). 14 Raúl Palacios Rodríguez, La Chilenización de Tacna y Arica, 1883–​1929 (Lima, 1974). 15 Juan Miguel Bákula, Perú y Ecuador: Tiempos y testimonios de una vecindad, Volume III (Lima, 1992), 19–​170; Heraclio Bonilla, Un siglo a la deriva: Ensayos sobre el Perú, Bolivia y la Guerra (Lima, 1980), 71–​105. 16 Alberto Ulloa, Posición Internacional del Perú (Lima, 1941), 229–​34; René Hooper López, Leguía: ensayo biográfico (Lima, 1964), 153–​62; Bákula, Perú, 1, 519–​28, 712–​14. 17 Pedro Ugarteche, La Política Internacional Peruana durante la dictadura de Leguía (Lima, 1930), 69–​93; Manuel A. Capuñay, Leguía: Vida y obra del constructor del gran Perú (Lima, 1951): 206–​52; López, Leguía, 163–​76. 18 Fernando Belaúnde Terry, President of Peru (1963–​1968, 1980–​1985), interview with author, Denver, Colorado (16 May 1969); Luis Velaochaga, Políticas Exteriores del Perú: Sociología, Histórica y Periodismo (Lima, 2001), 187–​203; Cynthia McClintock and Fabian Vallas, The United States and Peru: Cooperation at a Cost (London, 2003), 18–​25. 19 Félix C. Calderón U., La Negociación del Protocolo de 1942: mitos y realidades (Lima, 1998); José Manuel Rodríguez Cuadros, Delimitación Marítima con Equidad: El caso de Perú y Chile (Lima, 2007), 59–​74, 141–​87. 20 St John, Foreign Policy, 176. 21 Ugarteche, Valija de un Diplomático Peruano, 9–​20. 22 Pedro-​Pablo Kuczynski, Peruvian Democracy under Economic Stress: An Account of the Belaúnde Administration, 1963–​1968 (Princeton, NJ, 1977), 106–​25, 152–​61, 260–​76; C. Hélan Jaworski, “Peru: The Military Government’s Foreign Policy in Its Two Phases (1968–​1980)”, in Heraldo Muñoz and Joseph S. Tulchin, eds., Latin American Nations in World Politics (Boulder, CO, 1984), 200–​15. 23 Fernando Belaúnde Terry, President of Peru (1963–​1968, 1980–​1985), interview with author, Lima, Peru (11 July 1983); Eduardo Ferrero Costa, “Peruvian Foreign Policy: Current Trends, Constraints and Opportunities”, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 29/​2(1987), 55–​78. 24 Velaochaga, Políticas Exteriores del Perú, 224–​42; St John, Foreign Policy, 206–​09. 25 John Crabtree, Peru under García: An Opportunity Lost (Pittsburgh, PA, 1992), 40–​41, 78–​82, 188–​209; Velaochaga, Políticas Exteriores del Perú, 242–​58; Lawrence A. Clayton, Peru and the United States: The Condor and the Eagle (Athens, GA, 1999), 264–​65, 288–​89.

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Ronald Bruce St John 26 Ronald Bruce St John, La Política Exterior del Perú (Lima, 1999), 218–​21. 27 Ronald Bruce St John, “Peru: Atypical External Behavior”, in Gordon Mace and Jean-​Philippe Thérien, eds., Foreign Policy and Regionalism in the Americas (Boulder, CO, 1996), 133–​34; Mark Huband, “Fujimori Looks for a Place in Nafta, a Place in the World”, Financial Times (14 May 1998). 28 Fernando de Trazegnies Granda, Foreign Minister of Peru (1998–​2000), interview with author, Lima, Peru (2 September 1999); Ronald Bruce St John, The Ecuador-​Peru Boundary Dispute: The Road to Settlement (Durham, 2000); idem, “Chile and Peru: The Final Settlement”, Boundary and Security Bulletin, 8(Spring 2000), 91–​100; Bákula, Perú, Volume II, 1133–​44. 29 David Scott Palmer, “Relaciones entre Estados Unidos y el Perú durante el decenio de 1990: dinámicas, antecedentes y proyecciones”, Política Internacional, 53(July–​September 1998), 23–​45; St John, La Política Exterior, 213–​18. 30 Diego García-​Sayán, Foreign Minister of Peru (July 2001–​July 2002), interview with author (11 March 2008); José Manuel Rodríguez Cuadros, Deputy Foreign Minister of Peru (July 2001–​December 2003), Foreign Minister of Peru (December 2003–​August 2005), interview with author, Lima, Peru (14 March 2008). 31 Alejandro Toledo Manrique, President of Peru (2001–​2006), interview with author, Lima, Peru (19 April 2006). 32 Óscar Maúrtua de Romaña, Foreign Minister of Peru (August 2005–​July 2006), interview with author, Lima, Peru (18 April 2006); Perú, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Un Líder sin Fronteras: Diplomacia Presidencial, 2001–​2006 (Lima, 2006), 235–​40. 33 José Manuel Rodríguez Cuadros, Deputy Foreign Minister of Peru (July 2001–​December 2003), Foreign Minister of Peru (December 2003–​August 2005), interview with author, Lima, Peru (4 March 2008); Ronald Bruce St John, Toledo’s Peru: Vision and Reality (Gainesville, FL, 2010), 137–​42, 147–​53. 34 Alejandro Toledo Manrique, President of Peru (2001–​ 2006), interview with author, Palo Alto, California (12 September 2008); St John, Toledo’s Peru, 142–​47, 153–​60. 35 Alejandro Toledo Manrique, President of Peru (2001–​2006), interviews with author, Lima, Peru (9 May 2003 and 19 April 2006); St John, Toledo’s Peru, 174–​76. 36 Allan Wagner Tizón, Foreign Minister of Peru (1985–​1988, July 2002–​December 2003), interview with author, Lima, Peru (9 May 2003); Óscar Maúrtua de Romaña, Foreign Minister of Peru (August 2005–​July 2006), interview with author, Lima, Peru (18 April 2006); St John, Toledo’s Peru, 176–​80. 37 Cynthia McClintock, “An Unlikely Comeback in Peru”, Journal of Democracy, 17/​4(2006), 107; “Barack Obama felicitó a Alan García: ‘El Perú ha tenido un éxito extraordinario’ ”, El Comercio (1 June 2010). 38 “Equipo peruano inició el análisis de la contramemoria chilena”, El Comercio (12 March 2010); “Rafael Correa: ‘La Paz entre Ecuador y el Perú es irreversible’ ”, ibid. (9 June 2010). 39 “Alan García: ‘Estoy satisfecho de que el presidente Lula salido a empuñar la bandera de la integración’ ”, ibid. (16 June 2010); “Jefe del Comando Conjunto de las FF.AA. descartó presencia de las FARC en territorio peruano”, ibid. (3 August 2010). 40 “El Perú y Venezuela tendrán relaciones plenas con llegada de embajador”, ibid. (12 August 2009); “Evo Morales no tiene autoridad para criticar al Perú”, ibid. (1 October 2009). 41 “AGP aboga por transparencia y homologación de gasto militar”, La República (4 June 2010); “Lo positivo y negative de los cuatro años de gestión de Alan García”, El Comercio (11 July 2010). 42 Rafael Roncagliolo Orbegoso, Foreign Minister of Peru (July 2011–​May 2013), interview with author via e-​mail, Lima, Peru (20 October 2014); Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Memoria institucional de 15 de Mayo de 2013 al 24 de junio de 2014 (Lima, 2014), 38–​43, 81–​84, 144–​54, 210–​18; Ronald Bruce St John, “Peruvian Foreign Policy in the New Millennium: Continuity and Change”, Revista del Instituto de Riva-​Agüero, 2/​2(2017), 103–​04. 43 Ronald Bruce St John, “The Peruvian Response to the Rise of Brazil: Developing a Strategic Relationship”, in Gian Luca Gardini and Maria Hermínia Tavares de Almedia, eds., Foreign Policy Responses to the Rise of Brazil: Balancing Power in Emerging States (London, 2016), 154–​55; Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Memoria (Lima, 2014), 25–​26, 31–​33, 136–​37, 162–​64. 44 “El Nuevo Consensus”, Caretas (13 June 2013); Luis Miguel Castilla, “Las perspectivas políticas y económicas con los Estados Unidos de América”, in Fabián Novak and Jaime García, eds., La Política Exterior Peruana en el Siglo XXI: Agenda y Propuestas (Lima, 2015), 73–​86. 45 Chris Alden and Álvaro Méndez, “Perú, China y la Nueva Multipolaridad –​Navegar en la Política Internacional en Tiempos Inciertos”, in Álvaro Méndez, Javier Alcade, and Chris Alden, eds., La conexión China en la Política Internacional del Perú en el siglo XXI (Lima, 2019), 285–​92; Rafael

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17 THAILAND A Master of Reinvention Through Diplomacy Pavin Chachavalpongpun

Despite being a medium-​sized country with an unstable political system, Thailand’s practice of shrewd diplomacy that successfully served to maintain its independence throughout difficult periods in the country’s history is long recognised.1 Thai leaders carefully crafted their diplomacy not only to defend their nation from all kinds of threat, but to raise the global Thai profile as one of the predominant players in mainland Southeast Asia. In retrospect, at least two major international events tested Thai diplomacy: the colonial period and the Second World War. These historical episodes allowed Thai leaders to sharpen their diplomatic skills as they dealt with the outside world. Siam, the former name of Thailand, was the only country in Southeast Asia never to have been formally colonised by foreign Powers.2 It was able to escape colonialism, according to the majority of Thai historians, because of the resilience and flexibility of Thai diplomacy, buttressed by its geographical position as a buffer state between Britain and France and the far-​sightedness and ingenuity of King Chulalongkorn (1868–​ 1910).3 The king apparently attempted to create a balance of power between two European Powers by blurring the line of allegiance to make the kingdom somewhat independent. Equally, sharp-​witted diplomacy during the Second World War saw Thailand succeed in being on both sides, the Axis and Allies. Whilst the Phibun Songkhram government (1936–​1944) formed an alliance with Japan and declared war on the United States, the Thai ambassador in Washington, Seni Pramoj, lent his support to the pro-​Allied “Free Thai” movement. At the war’s end, the Free Thai movement claimed to represent the real stance of wartime Thailand, an argument broadly accepted by the Americans. This reflected a rare feat of foreign policy flexibility. Through several centuries, Thai leaders have prided themselves on a mastery of “bamboo diplomacy”.4 As Thailand entered another difficult period characterised by the ideological conflict of the Cold War, its leaders resurrected the “bending with the prevailing wind” strategy to cope with changes in the country’s foreign affairs. That the United States came to Thailand’s rescue at the end of the Second World War and rapidly emerged as a superpower leading the Western world compelled Thailand to endorse a pro-​American foreign policy. Internal and external circumstances reinforced Thailand’s pro-​American stance, ranging from the persistent military regimes at home to the outbreak of the communist threat in the neighbourhood. The United States was content to tolerate Thailand’s despotic regimes so long as Bangkok continued to implement an anti-​communist foreign policy.5 Aligning with America, in return, legitimised 210

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the role of the military in politics in which protecting national security represented the quintessential goal of Thai diplomacy. Hence, as the regional balance of power shifted with the fallout between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and China and the departure of the United States at the end of the Vietnam War in 1973–​1975, the ruling elite needed to find a new guarantor of national security. They breathed new life into the famous bamboo diplomacy, with the establishment of diplomatic relations with communist China in 1975, despite the latter previously perceived as a threat to national security. Together with China, Thailand, as a frontline state, fully engaged in the Cambodian conflict, providing arms and ammunition to the Khmer Rouge to battle against the advancing Vietnamese menace. At the same time, Thailand sought support from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN], established in 1967, of which it was a founding member, to regionalise its anti-​communist policy. Thai strategy reiterated a survival technique for a developing Power on a mission to define and redefine its national interests whenever the regional order was reorganised, overcome certain limitations in the conduct of diplomacy, and strike a balance in dealing with outside Powers to ensure a degree of autonomy and create room for policy manoeuvring. The post-​Cold War world has witnessed a similar pattern of traditional Thai diplomacy, albeit under rather different and more complex circumstances shaped by both the current political crisis in Thailand and the region’s new geopolitical landscape. Most studies of Thailand’s diplomacy and statecraft seem to agree on one finding: the foreign policy flexibility and the ability to adjust to the altering balance of power.6 An ancient Siamese proverb likens foreign policy to the “bamboo in the wind”: always solidly rooted but flexible enough to bend whichever way the wind blows to survive. More than mere pragmatism, this adage reflects a long-​cherished, philosophical approach to international relations, the precepts of which are very much enshrined in Thai culture and religion.7 The Thai traditional perception of national interests is explicit: as far as possible, Thai leaders have sought to maintain national sovereignty and territorial integrity and minimise external interference with the domestic system.8 Without failure, successive regimes fortified the sentiment of having to safeguard national sovereignty. However, as a mid-​range Power constrained by certain vulnerabilities, Thailand possessed a few alternatives in determining foreign policy strategy. Pragmatism was one option; and it had so far proven effective. The uncertainty of international politics obliged Thailand to bend with the wind to retain its influence whilst managing its foreign affairs vis-​à-​vis major Powers and neighbouring countries. For example, Siam’s relations with China in ancient times, through the despatch of envoys and royal gifts –​a symbol of political submission –​in exchange for economic benefits reflected a high degree of realism in the kingdom’s foreign policy thinking.9 Siam was traditionally sensitive to shifts in the distribution of power. The arrival of the first Portuguese trade envoy to the kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1511 and the subsequent appearance of European merchants were an indication of a change in the regional order and political landscape to the Siamese kings. China was no longer the region’s supreme Power in Siamese eyes. The European colonialists represented both a real and present danger as well as an opportunity for Siamese kings. Understanding the limits and constraints of foreign policy, Siam took the stance of accommodation to appease the hegemons of the day so as to preserve its autonomy and gain other benefits, both in its relations with the colonial Powers and its own internal power arrangement. The key understanding of Thai diplomatic pragmatism is that Thai leaders came to terms with their country’s capabilities and acted eagerly in response to the reality, rather than to idealist goals or uninhibited ambitions. They made foreign policy based on practicality, seeing the country in terms of its history, form of government, and relationship with other Powers.10 211

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Meanwhile, they pursed a conventional strategy of adjusting to whatever stance best-​maintained friendly relations with the Great Powers. Opportunism, alliance, and bandwagoning were vital elements of this strategy. Thai leaders also learnt to be assertive if situations permitted and to be compliant when foreign policy choices seemed to be inadequate. The principle of pragmatism and resilience passed to the subsequent generations of Thai leaders in designing Thailand as a bamboo that leans with the prevailing wind. But doing so also induced a policy dilemma. Because of the lack of colonial experience, and unlike its neighbouring countries, Thailand tended to entertain the politics of alliance usually with extra-​regional Powers instead of strictly upholding neutralism and non-​ alignment. Thai foreign policy heavily depended on the interests and policies of other Powers, whilst also taking advantage of them in the fulfilment of the country’s interests. Thailand kept its open door policy, despite some brief periods of isolationism, and invited interested Powers to compete amongst themselves to win over their alliance with the kingdom. This was a component of Thailand’s balance of power strategy. Thailand understood that its survival rested on the ability to bend with the wind and its appeasement of major Powers, even at the expense of occasionally compromising its own moral stance and principles. The end of the Cold War in 1990–​1991 brought about a new urgency for Thailand to reformulate its foreign policy to react more appropriately to the region’s new distribution of power. The reality in which the United States, a long-​term guardian of Thai national security, was reducing its presence in Southeast Asia and, therefore, its regional influence challenged Thai leaders. American policy created a power vacuum, but it also paved the way for China, a rising Asian Power, to assert its role as it readjusted the regional equilibrium to its own benefit. Thailand felt that it could no longer depend on America alone in times of trouble. The Asian financial crisis that hit Thailand in 1997 reaffirmed this belief. That the United States did not rush to Thailand’s aid, particularly with the financial crisis regarded as a new form of threat to the country’s economic security, disappointed Bangkok. Instead, the Chinese and the Japanese contributed substantial amounts to the International Monetary Fund bailout fund for Thailand.11 A reduced United States presence was not the only major phenomenon in the post-​Cold War period. A number of rising international trends required that Thailand rethink its traditional foreign policy that, hitherto, was primarily concerned with the state and the quest to protect its national sovereignty. The new world order is one of multipolarity, a world with several balancing centres of power driven by the force of globalisation.12 In Southeast Asia, the mushrooming of new regional and multilateral platforms has gradually eroded the traditional concept of state sovereignty. A corollary to this development is the diversification of actors like non-​governmental organisations and multinational conglomerates, as well as increasingly important non-​traditional issues and challenges like environmental protection, humanitarian disaster relief, terrorism, and epidemics. Under these circumstances, the need to redefine what constituted national interests to survive the latest shift in international politics was imperative. Domestic conditions equally contributed to the remoulding of perceptions of national interest. Traditionally, a tiny elite in the military and the bureaucracy dominated the foreign policy decision-​making process. It often depicted the international environment as a highly dangerous domain filled with uncertainties. With the compelling thrust to safeguard national security constantly in their minds, they searched for protection from outside Powers and, by doing so, legitimised their role in foreign policy formulation. This explains why they were reluctant to abandon the traditional concept even after the Cold War had ended: they feared that they could lose their legitimacy in the conduct of diplomacy. 212

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The first two decades after the Cold War witnessed new developments in Thai foreign policy, fundamentally a response to the changes in the international system.13 The Cold War was over, so was the prominent role of the military in foreign relations. Prime Minister Chatichai Choonhavan (1988–​1991) strove to de-​traditionalise the conduct of Thai diplomacy by transforming the battlefields in neighbouring countries into lucrative marketplaces made possible by a new business-​oriented policy designed to boost the nation’s economic growth.14 Chatichai concentrated mostly on taking full advantage of globalisation to revitalise the Thai economy, opening the country for foreign investment and tourists and finding new niche markets for Thai exports –​a direction closely followed by his successors, including billionaire Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (2001–​2006). In the context of Thailand’s Great Powers politics, it is only relevant to focus attention on the role of China –​the only Great Power in the region supposedly capable of contesting United States influence on Thai foreign affairs. China has epitomised the most commensurate contender to face United States supremacy since both Powers have been competing to win Thailand’s alliance, willing to invest resources, and perfecting strategies to accomplish its goals. So far, European Great Powers have exercised little leverage in the way Thai diplomacy has been conducted. In fact, their role in Thailand’s foreign affairs has plunged into obscurity since the end of the colonial period. Likewise, certain obstacles delay the improvement of Russo-​Thai relations, including the lack of a real interest, and perhaps capability, on the part of Moscow to venture beyond its immediate Asian frontier. In other words, Russia has given more emphasis to its Northeast Asian neighbours in comparison with those in Southeast Asia, including Thailand. The strategic shift at the regional level has opened the door for Thailand to reformulate a new foreign policy that conveniently accommodates China’s rise, instead of having to rely on the United States as the sole provider of peace and security as in the past. Analysts have interpreted Thailand’s accommodation with China in various ways; but all seem to have followed the similar theme of “bamboo diplomacy”. For example, some consider it the traditional strategy of “bending with the wind”, where Thailand grasped the political and economic opportunities that came with China’s rise to assert its own interests. Some construe Thailand’s move to strengthen ties with China as a return of a balance of power policy to employ counterweights against American influence. Others also liken Thai accommodation as a policy of bandwagoning, in which Thailand overtly sides with China at the same time that China is building its own exclusive spheres of influence.15 Amid various analyses, the rise of China creates a space for Thailand to construct its foreign policy in a less restricted manner because of the decentralisation of the international order. As China gets politically stronger and economically more robust, it is also increasingly becoming Thailand’s most attractive partner and ally. In this period, Thailand has diversified its sources of political and economic benefits. Never having to put all its diplomatic eggs in one basket has effectively meant not being held foreign policy hostage as was evident during the Cold War. For Beijing, befriending a middle-​sized Thailand can help cement its status as the rising Asian Great Power. Thailand has gone the extra distance to please China because of clear advantages that would ensue. First, China clarifies its position of not interfering in Thai domestic affairs. For instance, it refused to criticise the heavy-​handed policy of Thaksin vis-​à-​vis the Moslem separatists in the south of Thailand; and Beijing purposely downplayed the question of Thaksin’s legitimacy at home –​non-​interference also served the Chinese regime. Thaksin chose not to condemn China for alleged violations of human rights against its minorities on several occasions. Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej (January–​September 2008) insisted on adhering to the non-​interference principle, as he remained silent over China’s brutal crackdown on Tibetan pro-​democracy 213

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protesters prior to Beijing-​hosted Olympic Games in August 2008.16 China also appeared to be neutral in the Thai political conflict that emerged after the downfall of Thaksin, whereas the pro-​democracy movement, crudely identifying themselves as red shirts, collided with the royalists clad in yellow. The now known colour-​coded politics did not deter Sino-​Thai ties. China never condemned the coups in Thailand, including the most recent one in 2014. These mutual benefits have boosted Thailand’s confidence as it played the game of Great Powers politics. At a deeper level, as the regional order has moved away from the use of hard power seen in the Cold War, China’s rise symbolises another aspect of diplomacy under the modernised term of “soft power”: growing Chinese economic clout simply means business opportunities for Thailand. The thrust for closer economic relations with China has met with an encouraging response from Thailand’s commerce-​driven policies and capitalist agenda. The economic rise of China, in particular, has set the tone of Asia’s international affairs in which business interests have priority at the expense of political ones, such as the promotion of democracy and respect for human rights. As a result, the Sino-​Thai free trade agreement [FTA], signed and taking effect on 1 October 2003, was first between China and a Southeast Asian country. Initiated to slash tariffs for the fruit and vegetable flows in each other’s markets, the FTA was part of the “Early Harvest Programme” under the 2010 ASEAN-​China FTA. The Thaksin government, the driving force behind the Sino-​Thai FTA, claimed that bilateral trade reached US$31 billion, a 23 per cent increase in 2007 when compared with that of the previous year.17 In 2018, the total value of this bilateral trade stood at US $80.14 billion.18 Thailand has been quietly sliding into China’s warm, embracing arms. Most Thai cabinet ministers, including many former prime ministers and powerful businesses in Thailand, have significant investments in China.19 Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand, one of Southeast Asia’s largest companies, has been doing business in China since 1949. Bangkok Bank still has the largest foreign branch on Shanghai’s Bund waterfront, where only recently have a few other foreign banks gained token footholds on China’s pre-​eminent business address.20 Regularly conducted activities between Thai and Chinese business conglomerates occurred, with the exchange of visits and sharing of business information. In the cultural realm, since the Chinese language has been re-​introduced into Thailand’s schools and universities after a long period of official sanction, Chinese popular culture is much celebrated, and imported Chinese soap operas have been highly popular.21 New Chinese language schools have been mushrooming in Bangkok and in major cities throughout the kingdom: “Thailand has been taking the Chinese language seriously, so seriously that Thaksin asked China to send teachers”.22 Noticing the growing intimacy between Thailand and China, the United States, although criticised for neglecting Southeast Asia, has not really been a passive Great Power in this part of the world. It has participated in a number of regional frameworks that involve both Thailand and China, such as the Asia-​Pacific Economic Cooperation [APEC], the ASEAN Regional Forum [ARF], and the East Asia Summit [EAS].23 The United States and China have been locked in a new form of “Cold War” involving other Great and middle Powers in Northeast Asia, a situation reflecting their disagreement on numerous issues. The problems include nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula, cross-​ straits relations –​China-​ Taiwan –​the American military base in Japan, and human rights violations inside China. One expert asked, “As the world’s two Great Powers are growing dangerously hostile to one another, could this be worse than the Cold War?”24 Not only have bittersweet Sino-​ American relations governed the balance of power in Asia’s northern hemisphere; they have also reconfigured the political landscape of Southeast Asia. In Thailand’s case, Washington has been competing with China to regain its influence on the kingdom, albeit using a different approach than Beijing. 214

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In 2003, as a reward for supporting the American war on terror, Thailand received major non-​North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally status, which made the kingdom eligible for priority delivery of defence materials and military co-​operation. The annual “Cobra Gold” military exercise, the largest in Asia, further strengthened bilateral relations. “Cobra Gold” later lent its form to the Chinese leaders, who proposed a similar annual military exercise with Thailand. The George W. Bush Administration also went ahead with FTA negotiations with Thailand, but these are now in a stage of inertia because of the onset of a political crisis in Thailand. Unlike the Chinese, the Americans have been directly involved in the Thai political turmoil, re-​kindling its Cold-​War policy strategy of maintaining its command over Thailand’s domestic and international political life. More importantly for Washington, this strategy serves to maintain the level of American dominance in Thailand and Southeast Asia at a time when the rise of China and its expanding influence in the region is increasingly threatening United States regional interests. What does this mean to Thailand? Thailand has gleefully opened itself to both as the United States and China vie for a Thai alliance. In particular, if one of them ever turns hostile to Thailand, Bangkok could play one off against the other, thus revisiting bamboo diplomacy. Thaksin was a master of manipulating Thailand’s bending-​ with-​ the-​ wind strategy. When Washington failed to defend the Thaksin government against United Nations’ criticism of his brutal war on drugs in 2003 that led to more than 2,500 Thais killed, Thaksin labelled Washington a “useless friend”. He then flirted with China, attaching great importance to solidifying bilateral economic linkages to the point where Bangkok often bent over backwards to avoid offending Beijing on a range of political issues.25 Hence, the argument that Thaksin’s embrace of Chinese power was a strategic response to the United States’ ambivalent position toward his government. The dynamism imbued within the complex relations between Thailand and two Great Powers emerges more clearly and sensationally as the country has fallen deeper into its political crisis –​a crisis in which China and the United States have been contesting with each other to entrench further their positions inside Thailand. Since the 2006 military coup, Thailand has continued to be rooted in political stalemate. As mentioned earlier, the colour-​coded politics has come to define Thailand’s new political landscape and unleashed a powerful impact on its foreign relations. In this sense, the United States and China have been pursuing two different approaches: whilst China practised a more pragmatic diplomacy, the United States chose an interventionist approach that has occasionally irked the traditional elite in Bangkok.26 To protect the country’s autonomy as much as their own interests from potential American intervention in domestic politics, Thai leaders have moved closer to China. The idea is to counter-​balance America’s dominant role. Nonetheless, Thai leaders have been careful not to damage the country’s traditional status as a “permanent friend” of the United States. Thus, they have been cautious to avoid perceptions of adopting an overtly hostile attitude toward the United States even when disapproving of the American diplomatic style. This course highlighted a conventional Thai strategy of engineering a foreign policy less reliant on a single Power, which would restrain their diplomatic freedom. In the military field, the first Sino-​Thai joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Thailand took place in 2005 as an equivalent military exercise, albeit on a much smaller scale, to “Cobra Gold”. Not only have these joint naval exercises been designed to cement military links between the two countries, they have served to erase the image of a Chinese threat in the eyes of the Thai leaders; and they have acted to undermine traditional Thai-​American strategic ties underpinned by a supposed common enemy. In an interview with the Asia Times, China’s ambassador to Bangkok, Guan Mu, who speaks Thai fluently and served in Thailand for 18 years in different capacities, underscored his country’s strategy of befriending Thailand 215

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by avoiding interference in its domestic problems.27 It is apparent that China has been ramping up economic and cultural diplomacy, all encapsulated within a discourse of Chinese soft power, which is more relevant and attuned to Thailand’s future interests than the United States’ still strong emphasis on security issues.28 The United States, on the contrary, has frequently intervened in Thailand’s domestic politics –​during both the Cold War-​era and the present period. In an attempt to influence Thailand’s domestic policy and dictate the behaviour of certain political actors in the current crisis, Washington has managed to peeve both sides of Thailand’s political divide. It was reported that United States intelligence officials eavesdropped on Thaksin and warned the Abhisit government (2008–​2011) against possible sabotage during the red-​shirts’ rally, supposedly at the order of Thaksin.29 This report infuriated red-​shirt leaders, who felt that the Americans did nothing to support their pro-​democracy movement. At other times, the United States displeased the traditional elite in the anti-​Thaksin camp by demanding a meeting between core red-​shirted leaders and United States Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, who was keen to mediate between the two opposing factions. The American ambassador at Bangkok, Eric John, arranged the meeting; but he was later criticised by the Thai government for inappropriately interfering in Thailand’s domestic politics and lacking cultural sensitivity and diplomatic skills. Viewing such intervention as a violation of the country’s national interests, Bangkok employed statecraft to reprove the United States’ indiscreet and ill-​advised diplomacy; it sent a special envoy, Kiat Sitheeamorn, to Washington to protest against American intervention. Kiat said, “The position of the United States has always been if we call for help and support, they will extend a helping hand, but it is up to us to request and we have not asked”.30 In the meantime, to show his country’s favourable view of China, Kiat commented that the closeness between Thailand and China has been unique and special: “Do we have the same ties with the United States? Not similar, not at the same level”.31 From the perspective of the two Great Powers, Thailand represents their primary interest as a country strategically located in the heart of mainland Southeast Asia. The United States, as a long-​time Thai ally, has continued to exert its influence and power over the kingdom and demand its allegiance, even when the regional balance of power has shifted. The American interventionist approach did nothing but drive Thailand into the arms of China. China has quietly bid to capitalise on Washington’s indiscreet approach and now finds itself locked in a subtle, and intensifying, competition with the United States for Thai influence. Ultimately, China’s soft power appears as the front edge of a longer-​view strategy to neutralise the American strategic presence in this part of the world.32 Because of its neutral position in the Thai crisis, China would be able to work with whichever side triumphs in the Thai conflict and in a future government. In this power game, it is thus likely that China stands to gain what the United States may lose. When faced with a threat, Thailand traditionally seeks help from another Power. The rise of China had widened foreign policy choices for Thailand and, hence, given more room for diplomatic manoeuvring. In many ways, Thai leaders have taken an opportunistic approach that allowed Thailand to gain from the mounting rivalry between China and the United States in Southeast Asia. In its search to counter-​balance America, Thailand has invited China to take a stake in the region and kingdom, for instance, through bilateral co-​operation in wider regional platforms like ASEAN and EAS. It is clear that despite its persistent political crisis, Thailand has continued to play a major role in American and Chinese foreign policy considerations. But for a while now, Thailand has seen its interests aligned more with those of China and will therefore cement its intimate ties with Beijing.

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Thailand’s political crisis exacerbated following the coup of 2014 that ousted Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s sister. The military installed the coup leader, General Prayuth Chan-​ocha, as premier, a position he held until 2019. But the election in that same year brought him back to the premiership. Once again, the domestic political struggle, arisen from the fear of the continued domination of power of the Shinawatras, legitimised the role of the military in politics. Yet, this situation, like a decade before, generated inevitable foreign policy implications. The American government imposed sanctions against the Thai military government. Although considered “soft” since the United States only suspended financial support for the Thai military amounting to US$4.7 million, the sanctions symbolised American frustration about the relentless crisis in Thailand.33 The United States found itself torn between the need to punish Thailand for the coup and apprehension that sanctions would drive the country further into China’s orbit. This dilemma has deepened at a critical time in American politics with Donald Trump elected as president in 2017. His inclination toward American isolationism has left Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand, little choice but increasingly to depend on China. Meanwhile, the multipolar system has turned extreme. The major Powers are busy dealing with their own domestic complications, hence neglecting a needed concerted effort amongst them to secure the world order. The tendency towards international anarchy has been palpable. Combined with political conflict inside Thailand, it has powerfully shaped a new direction in Thai foreign policy. In terms of the increasing anarchic global system, the trend toward democracy and regionalism is less promising elsewhere in the world. Britain left the European Union on 1 February 2020 via “Brexit”. Whilst Brexit would not possibly mark the end of regionalism, the British decision remains a negative blow to regional co-​operation.34 With perceptions of supra-​nationality as an erosion of sovereignty, a tendency exists in which states would rekindle their nationalistic fervour against the tide of regionalism and globalisation. In the United States, the Trump phenomenon led to a progressively divisive America. Some claim his policies promote racism and protectionism whilst highlighting American superiority, under the slogan “Make America Great Again”, which seems to undermine multipolarity whilst denying shared responsibility. Such a condition might threaten the UN’s work. Domestically, the racial and health issues, exacerbated by the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-​19 pandemic, respectively, continue to challenge both the United States political stability and international standing. Indeed, they have accelerated the American isolationist process. In Asia, its orthodox principle of non-​interference has hindered ASEAN’s progress. Ironically, the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights inaugurated in 2009 has failed to tackle human rights issues in Southeast Asia. The advent of Rodrigo Duterte as president of the Philippines challenged democratic values. The Rohingya crisis in Myanmar cast doubt on the democratic credentials of Aung San Suu Kyi, the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. It appears that countries in this region, Thailand included, have exploited the power vacuum in global society for their own narrow national interests. Under this circumstance, the Thai bamboo has tilted towards like-​minded countries in the region, using diplomacy to promote the regime at home as a way of strengthening its position internationally. In the aftermath of the 2014 coup, a number of Southeast Asian leaders from Myanmar to Cambodia visited Bangkok to give support to the Thai military government. Old historical enemies become friends. Myanmar’s supreme commander, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, during his trip praised the Thai junta for “doing the right thing” in seizing power. He also compared his country’s experience during the political upheaval that took place in Yangon in 1988, when the tatmadaw, the Myanmar army, launched deadly crackdowns against pro-​ democracy activists.35 Without the United States standing in the picture, Thailand has switched

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to work with regional authoritarian regimes. Gradually, the political interests of Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia appear to have converged. With China’s backing, the three states on mainland Southeast Asia have increasingly emerged as a large “dark hole” that could potentially threaten democracy in the region. However, the collaboration amongst these states has hardly been unique to Southeast Asia. It conforms to a larger global trend in which democracy is reversing whilst anarchy takes its prominent role. The coup in Myanmar in February 2021, without a protest from Thailand and China, reflected this trend of illiberalism in Southeast Asia. The advent of Joe Biden as American president may influence another shift in Thai foreign policy. Should Biden’s Administration prove more determined than the previous American government in pursing democratic agenda, it will affect the direction of Thai diplomacy: whether Thailand will incline further towards China? The democratic decline is no longer concentrated in one region or one continent. Today’s decline includes a far wider array of nations from more regions of the globe and is unlikely to be stoppable. Many countries that are regressing from democracy are regional Powers, like Thailand and the Philippines. And with authoritarian states like China wielding more power and established democracies in the West and the developing world reluctant to stand up for their values or pursuing democracy promotion strategies that too often focus on rhetoric, elections and process, the international environment has become far more complicated and challenging for democracy in the new millennium.36 China has successfully made inroads into Myanmar and Cambodia. Some of the most visible evidence testifying to the strong link between China and Cambodia comes from the 2012 ASEAN gathering in which Cambodia played host. For the first time in its 45-​year history, ASEAN foreign ministers failed to issue a joint communiqué following their annual consultations regarding the South China Sea dispute. Under Chinese pressure, Cambodia announced that the dispute was bilateral and the joint statement need not mention it. Cambodia suffered reproach for allowing its national interests with China to trump regional solidarity.37 In the Thai case, China now serves as a legitimacy provider in defiance of international sanctions. The new alliance between Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and China has the potential to affect negatively peace and stability of the Southeast Asian region. As long evident, Thai diplomacy has been highly malleable depending on the changing global landscape. Today, multipolarity has redefined Thai diplomacy: from valuing an alliance with the United States, playing with a balance of power between Washington and Beijing, to now engaging in a loose and informal consortium of illiberal states in Southeast Asia –​with the latter promoted to consolidate the position of domestic power holders. As an expert once observed: “Whatever new winds blow in the region, Thailand will undoubtedly try to accommodate them. With an emphasis on flexibility, and a remarkable history of continuity, Thai foreign policy –​like the bamboo –​faces new challenges with solid roots”.38

Notes 1 The description of Thailand experiencing an “unstable political system” is because since the abolition of absolute monarchy in 1932, Thailand has endured 17 military coups, and that throughout much of the Cold War, a series of military regimes with short interventions of civilian rule have dominated the country. 2 In 1939, during the first Phibul Songkhram administration (1936–​1944) the name of the country changed from Siam to Thailand, purportedly because it was suitable to call the nation by a name that represented the country’s majority and was popular with the people –​an argument that remains fiercely debateable to this date. 3 Likhit Dhiravegin, Siam and Colonialism (1855–​1909): An Analysis of Diplomatic Relations (Bangkok, 1975), 78.

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Thailand: Reinvention Through Diplomacy 4 See Duncan McCargo, “Foreword”, in Pavin Chachavalpongpun, Reinventing Thailand: Thaksin and His Foreign Policy (Singapore, 2010), vii. 5 Daniel Fineman, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947–​ 1958 (Honolulu, HI, 1997), 3. 6 See Russell F. Fifield, The Diplomacy of Southeast Asia: 1945–​1958 (NY, 1958), 230; D. Insor, Thailand (NY, 1963), 125; Donald E. Neuchterlein, Thailand and the Struggle for Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY, 1965), 23; Charles E. Morrison, Strategies of Survival: The Foreign Policy Dilemma of Smaller Asian States (NY, 1979), 109. 7 Arne Kislenko, “Bending with the Wind: The Continuity and Flexibility of Thai Foreign Policy”, International Journal, 57/​ 4(2002), 537. Also see, William J. Klausner, Reflections on Thai Culture (Bangkok, 1981), 79–​80. 8 Anuson Chinvanno, Thailand’s Policies Towards China, 1949–​1954 (Oxford, 1992), 20. Cf. Likhit, Siam and Colonialism, 78–​79; Tej Bunnag, The Provincial Administration of Siam, 1892–​1915: The Ministry of the Interior under Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (Kuala Lumpur, 1977). 9 Sarasin Viraphol, Tribute and Profit: Sino-​Siamese Trade, 1652–​1853 (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 1. 10 For further discussions, see Chachavalpongpun, Reinventing Thailand, 67–​70. 11 Kusuma Snitwongse, “Thai Foreign Policy in the Global Age: Principle of Profit?”, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 23/​2(2001), 206, argued that the United States became the main target of a resurgent Thai nationalism, which sometimes degenerated into xenophobia. 12 Cailean Bochanan, “Globalisation: Multipolar World or New World Order?”, These New Times (11 March 2010): http://​inth​esen​ewti​mes.com/​2010/​03/​11/​global​isat​ion-​mul​tipo​lar-​world-​or-​new-​ world-​order/​. 13 Leszek Buszynski, “Thailand’s Foreign Policy: Management of a Regional Vision”, Asian Survey, 34/​ 8(1994), 724. Buszynski also noted that the pursuit of an independent foreign policy became possible because Thailand’s reliance on external security support slowly disappeared after the end of the Cold War. 14 Sunai Phasuk, Nayobai Tang Prathet Khong Thai: Suksa Krabuankarnkamnod Nayobai Khong Ratthaban Pon-​ ek Chatichai Choonhavan Tor Panha Kumphucha, Si Singhakom 1988–​ 23 Kumphaphan 1991 (Bangkok, 1997), 69–​73. 15 Various scholars and analysts have interpreted Thailand’s position vis-​à-​vis China differently. For example, Chulacheeb Chinwanno, “Thai-​Chinese Relations: Security and Strategic Partnerships”, RSIS Working Paper, Number 155 (Singapore, 2008), 25, argued that Thailand has pursued a balanced engagement policy with external Powers to achieve national interests. On the contrary, Kavi Chongkittavorn explicitly asserted that Thailand, under Thaksin, sometimes spoke on behalf of China and this might lead other ASEAN members to think of Thailand as a conduit for China’s foreign policy. Quoted in Chantasasawat, “Burgeoning Sino-​Thai Relations”, 11. 16 In August 2008, Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej, largely known as Thaksin’s political nominee, declared his pro-​China position in the aftermath of the brutal crackdown on the Tibetan demonstrators. See “Thai PM Proud to Host Olympic Torch”, USA Today (18 April 2008). 17 Department of East Asian Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Thailand. 18 Statistics from Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, January–​December 2018. 19 Many former Thai prime ministers are in some way of Chinese descent, including Chuan Leekpai, Banharn Silpa-​Archa, Chavalit Yongchaiyuth, Thaksin Shinawatra, and Abhisit Vejjajiva. 20 David Fullbrook, “So Long U.S., Hello China, India”, Asia Times (4 November 2004). 21 Patrick Jory, “Multiculturalism in Thailand: Cultural and Regional Resurgence in a Diverse Kingdom”, Harvard Asia-​Pacific Review, 4/​1(2000), 18–​22. 22 “The Soft Power of Happy Chinese”, International Herald Tribune (18 January 2006). 23 APEC, a forum for 21 Pacific Rim economies that seeks to promote free trade and economic co-​ operation throughout the Asia-​Pacific region was established in 1989. Founded in 1994, ARF has two major goals: to foster constructive dialogue and consultation on political and security issues of common interest and concern; and to make significant contributions to efforts towards confidence-​ building and preventive diplomacy in the Asia-​Pacific region. The EAS is an annual forum of leaders of 16 countries in the East Asian region, meeting after the annual ASEAN leaders’ meetings. The first summit occurred in Kuala Lumpur on 14 December 2005. 24 Ian Bremmer, “China Vs America: Fight of the Century”, Prospect, 169(March 2010): www. prospectmagazine.co.uk/​2010/​03/​china-​vs-​america-​fight-​of-​the-​century/​.

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Pavin Chachavalpongpun 25 See Busakorn Chantasasawat, “Burgeoning Sino-​ Thai Relations: Seeking Sustained Economic Security”, China: An International Journal, 4/​1(2006), 86–​112. 26 Ibid. 27 Shawn Crispin, “US Slips, China Glides in Thai Crisis”, Leave Freedom (19 July 2010: http://​leave​free​ dom.blogs​pot.com/​2010/​07/​us-​slips-​china-​gli​des-​in-​thai-​cri​sis.html. 28 Guan Mu estimated that there are 12 million Sino-​Thais amongst Thailand’s 65 million population: Ibid. 29 “UDD Submits Letter to US Embassy”, Bangkok Post (17 March 2010). 30 Crispin, “US Slips, China Glides”. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 State Department Daily Press Briefing, 22 May 2014: https://​2009-​2017.state.gov/​r/​pa/​prs/​dpb/​ 2014/​05/​226​459.htm. 34 See Rohan Bahi, “Regionalism in Hard Times: Brexit and the Limits of Hegemonic Regionalism”, Reviews of Economics and Political Science, 2/​1(2017), 1–​14. Cf. Wendy C. Grenade, “Paradoxes of Regionalism and Democracy: Brexit’s Lessons for the Commonwealth”, Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, 105/​5(2016), 509–​18. 35 Nirmal Ghosh, “Thailand and Myanmar: Traditional Rivals now Brothers in Arms”, Straits Times (14 July 2014): www.straitstimes.com/​asia/​thailand-​and-​myanmar-​traditional-​r ivals-​now-​brothers-​in-​arms. 36 See Joshua Kurlantzick, Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government (New Haven, CT, 2014). 37 Ernest Z. Bower, “China Reveals its Hand on ASEAN in Phnom Penh”, Center for Strategic and International Studies (20 July 2012): www.csis.org/​analysis/​china-​reveals-​its-​hand-​asean-​phnom-​penh. 38 Kislenko, “Bending with the Wind”, 561.

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18 INDONESIA’S FOREIGN POLICY SINCE THE REFORMASI Song Xue and Kai He

In May 1998, Indonesia experienced a turbulent political transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic system. After 32 years in power, President Suharto stepped down and Indonesian politics began a new phase of democratisation –​also called the beginning of the reformasi [reform]. Five presidents –​B.J. Habibie (May 1998–​October 1999), Abdurrahman Wahid (October 1999–​July 2001), Megawati Sukarnoputri (July 2001–​October 2004), Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (October 2004–​October 2014), and Joko Widodo (October 2014–​ present) –​successively came to power. In this context, Indonesia’s reformasi exists in two stages: democratic transition and democratic consolidation. Whilst the first three presidents experienced the first stage of democratic transition, Yudhoyono was the first directly elected president; hence, he experienced the process of democratic consolidation followed by Widodo. This analysis examines Indonesia’s foreign policy after Suharto in the era of the reformasi. Democratisation brought both opportunities and challenges to Indonesia’s foreign policy decision making. On one hand, as a new democracy, Indonesia aspires to play multiple roles in international politics, including “a regional leader, the voice for developing countries, an advocate for democracy and a bridge-​builder”.1 On the other, Indonesia’s foreign policy ambition is constantly constrained by its geopolitical location amongst many Great and regional Powers like the United States, China, India, and Japan, as well as hindered by domestic economic and political obstacles. Since independence, Indonesian leaders have followed a foreign policy principle of “bebas aktif” –​independent and active –​set by the two most prominent nationalist leaders: President Sukarno and his vice president, Mohammad Hatta, after 1945. Whilst bebas refers to the independence or autonomy of its foreign policy, aktif indicates the degree of pro-​activeness of foreign policy behaviour in international affairs. Although this “bebas-​aktif” principle is rooted in Indonesia’s legacy of anti-​colonialism, it is still a guiding doctrine of Indonesia’s foreign policy in the era of the reformasi because “bebas” and “aktif ” are two fundamental goals in the country’s foreign policy decision-​making process. Two factors shape how Indonesian leaders pursue these two goals in foreign policy: international pressure and domestic support. Whilst the autonomy of Indonesia’s foreign policy is mainly influenced by the political support that its leaders obtain in domestic and party politics, the pro-​activeness of its foreign policy behaviour is constrained by pressure from the international system. The interplay of these two factors has been shaping the dynamics of Indonesia’s foreign policy since the reformasi. DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-22

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There are three popular theoretical approaches to explaining Indonesia’s foreign policy. The first stems from the realist tradition, suggesting that national interests and power relations with other countries shape foreign policy in the anarchic international system. For instance, amongst Southeast Asian countries, those with stronger national capacities, such as Indonesia, are more likely to choose soft balancing against China’s challenges.2 However, this realist approach finds criticism as simplistic and ambiguous, because the mere power configuration in the international system does not automatically lead to a certain foreign policy such as soft balancing. Moreover, it sometimes makes some contradictory predictions on a state’s foreign policy choices.3 The second approach is rooted in role theory, aiming to bridge the gap between realism and foreign policy analysis. It suggests that Jakarta’s policy-​makers’ “role conceptions” of Indonesia in the world shape its foreign policy.4 For instance, Indonesia’s leaders have enacted several role conceptions, such as “advocate of democracy”, “regional power in Southeast Asia”, and “supporter of multilateral co-​operation”, in making foreign policy decisions. Those different role conceptions have guided the agenda-​setting strategies of Indonesia’s foreign policy in articulating its middle Power status in world politics.5 One criticism of role theory in general and its application to the study of Indonesia’s foreign policy in particular is that it fails to explain where these role conceptions come from as well as why some are more important than others in shaping a state’s foreign policy. Popular amongst Indonesian researchers, the third approach focuses on exploring domestic sources of foreign policy, suggesting, “foreign policy starts at home”. On the one hand, some scholars suggest that Indonesia’s foreign policy aims to serve leaders’ domestic agendas. Therefore, Indonesia is no exception from other developing countries or new states whose foreign policy mainly responds to domestic conditions rather than external problems.6 On the other hand, research also emphasises that domestic politics can limit and constrain Indonesia’s foreign policy resources and objectives. For example, the elite split in Indonesia has led to the absence of balancing against China;7 and the lack of leadership legitimacy prohibited a proactive attitude in Indonesia’s foreign policy after Suharto.8 One problem of this domestic politics-​ driven approach is that the causal mechanisms between domestic politics and foreign policy decision-​making remain ambiguous in Indonesia –​a nascent democracy in which many new social and political actors are still waiting revelation. This assessment adopts an eclectic approach to theorise and analyse Indonesia’s foreign policy after the reformasi. The democratic transition in Indonesia since 1998 has not only added international pressures to the government in making foreign policy, but also introduced more social and political actors and stakeholders into the decision-​making circle of foreign policy. Therefore, both external pressures and domestic dynamics have been shaping Indonesia’s foreign policy since the reformasi. By juxtaposing concepts and theories from various paradigms, this eclectic approach also excels at advancing problem solving and the practical usage of theory.9 The dependent variable is Indonesia’s foreign policy orientations, measured by two indicators: the degrees of autonomy and activeness in foreign policy. As mentioned before, when proposed in 1948, the bebas-​aktif principle meant that Indonesia would not align with any Great Powers but play an independent and active role in contributing to the world peace. However, the Jakarta-​Hanoi-​Phnom Penh-​Beijing-​Pyongyang axis during the last years of Sukarno’s rule in the 1960s and Suharto’s reliance on American aid in his so-​called “New Order” suggest the difficulty in maintaining true “independence” in the context of Great Power rivalries during the Cold War.10 This guiding principle still matters in defining the characteristics of Indonesia’s foreign policy orientations. Bebas indicates the degree of autonomy or scope of Indonesian foreign policy objectives. A high level of autonomy means that Indonesia’s policy behaviour is more outward looking 222

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Low

High

1. Proactive and outwardlooking behaviour

3. Reactive and outwardlooking behaviour

Low

2. Proactive and inwardlooking behaviour

4. Reactive and inwardlooking behaviour

Bebas [autonomous]

Figure 18.1  Indonesia’s foreign policy behaviours in the context of the Bebas-​Aktif principle

and oriented toward its long-​term strategic goals, such as leading regional and international co-​operation beyond the Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN] and engaging the Non-​Aligned Movement [NAM]. A low level of autonomy refers to an inward-​looking foreign policy orientation with a limited outreach and urgent domestic focus. Aktif measures the degree of proactivity of its foreign policy behaviour. Indonesia’s foreign policy conduct is proactive when it makes moves to uphold its foreign policy objectives, for instance, proposing a new initiative or taking up leadership in multilateral organisations. On the contrary, Indonesia’s policy behaviour is passive or inactive when it does not vigorously pursue foreign policy objectives but merely responds impassively to external demands and pressures. Figure 18.1 shows the four variations of Indonesia’s foreign policy behaviour through re-​interpreting the “bebas-​aktif” principle. They are “proactive and outward-​looking behaviour” [Cell 1], “proactive and inward-​looking behaviour” [Cell 2], “reactive and outward-​looking behaviour” [Cell 3], and “reactive and inward-​looking behaviour” [Cell 4]. The two independent variables are international pressure and domestic support, which explain the variations of Indonesia’s foreign policy. International pressures influence the aktif [proactive] characteristic of Indonesia’s foreign policy. With mounting external pressures, it is difficult for political leaders to make any proactive moves and launch policy initiatives. On the contrary, a low level of international pressure provides more room for proactive decision-​ making. Domestic support constrains the government’s resources and capacity to carry out foreign policies and thereby shapes the scope or autonomy of Indonesia’s foreign policy. A high level of political support will provide more confidence to Indonesian leaders to carry out outward-​looking policies. A low level of political support, however, will constrain capabilities and ambitions and lead to more inward-​looking foreign policies. Here, international pressure measurements come from external economic and political difficulties and obstacles imposed by other states directly, as well as those indirectly generated by the international system in the context of Great Power rivalries. Since Indonesia possesses a presidential political system, the president is the ultimate foreign policy decision-​maker, although other bureaucracies and interest groups might also play an important role in the process. For the “domestic support” variable, this research focuses on the political support that the president obtains in domestic politics, influenced by various factors such as the president’s political legitimacy, the number of seats the president’s own party holds in the legislative body, and the strength of the political opposition. The interplay of these independent variables shapes the variations of Indonesia’s foreign policy orientations. 223

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Under conditions of tremendous financial difficulties and political turmoil, Vice President Habibie came to power after Suharto’s resignation in May 1998. As one of Suharto’s protégés, Habibie’s political legitimacy was weak and fragile by default. He was not trusted to eradicate the Suharto family’s political legacy and lead a thorough democratic reform. International donors did not show much confidence in Habibie’s leadership either. The International Monetary Fund [IMF] threatened to suspend the $1 billion loan, as they were sceptical of Habibie’s capacity to root out cronyism and corruption. Washington took a similar wait-​and-​see stance and withheld financial support for Indonesia.11 The lack of political legitimacy and the high level of international pressure left Habibie with no choice: focus on urgent domestic priorities to show both his competence and determination to break ties with the ousted dictator. Habibie remained aloof from foreign affairs and his foreign policy orientation was reactive and inward looking in nature. For example, he skipped the 1998 NAM summit in South Africa, which used to be Indonesia’s foreign policy priority in the past decades. To improve Indonesia’s image in the eyes of international donors as well as win legitimacy for himself, he ratified a few United Nations’ [UN] conventions on human rights, signed the UN Ocean Charter to show commitment to protecting the marine environment, loosened media restrictions, and began the big-​bang decentralisation and anti-​corruption reforms supported zealously by the World Bank. The most surprising foreign policy breakthrough that he made was the decision to grant a referendum to Portugal’s former colony, East Timor, which was predominantly the result of foreign pressure and low legitimacy.12 However, the referendum backfired on Habibie’s legitimacy and Indonesia’s image. After the referendum took place on 30 August 1999, the East Timorese militia backed by the Indonesian military went on a terror campaign. The United States Congress passed the Leahy Amendment, which suspended the American military sales, commercial transfers, and training programmes to Indonesia. Abdurrahman Wahid was the first elected president after Indonesia resumed free and fair elections in 1999. His high legitimacy and domestic support during the early days of his term stemmed from the procedural legitimacy as an elected president by the People’s Consultative Assembly [MPR] –​the Parliament. His distinguished career also entailed being the respected chairperson of the largest Sunni Moslem organisation in Indonesia, the Nahdlatul Ulama, as well as his history of opposing Suharto’s authoritarian regime.13 Therefore, both the reform-​minded nationalists led by Megawati Sukarnoputri and her election-​winning party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle [PDIP], and conservative Moslems not ready to accept a female president welcomed Wahid. The removal of General Wiranto, the minister of political, legal, and security affairs, for misdeeds in East Timor did not instigate unrest in the army, which was a strong testament of the solid domestic support for Wahid. However, the Wahid administration still faced tremendous international pressures from the West, especially the United States. The Americans initially were optimistic about Wahid, but he failed to deliver on what he promised. Instead, Wahid appointed cronies to high positions, involved himself in corruption, and failed to resolve the East Timorese refugee issue.14 Washington warned that it would punish Indonesia by suspending economic aid again, an admonition that ill received amongst Indonesian elites. Wahid’s high level of political legitimacy at the beginning of his presidency provided him considerable leverage and resources to conduct outward-​looking foreign policies. However, the high level of international pressure made Wahid’s foreign policy more reactive than proactive in nature. It meant that its main purpose was to solve problems and difficulties caused by external pressures and extend Indonesia’s influence and interests in the regional and international settings. To cope with Western donor economic and political pressures, Wahid launched the 224

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“Look Towards Asia” policy envisioning a pan-​Asian strategic co-​operation partnership, in which Indonesia, China, and India would form a political axis to balance against the Western democracies’ intervention, and Japan and Singapore would constitute an economic axis to provide financial resources and technical advantages to boost regional prosperity. In addition, Wahid proposed the idea of a West Pacific Forum, which would comprise Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor. Other countries as well as many domestic and international professionals cold-​shouldered both policy ideas, as they would potentially undermine ASEAN, the traditional cornerstone of Indonesia’s foreign policy.15 By the end of his term, Wahid’s idiosyncratic foreign policy alienated many countries such as the United States, Australia, and Singapore.16 The MPR did not elect Megawati Sukarnoputri, who automatically succeeded the presidency after Wahid’s impeachment in July 2001. Therefore, her legitimacy was less solid at the beginning of her tenure, but she had reliable supporters in the Parliament as her party, the PDIP, won most votes –​34 per cent –​in the 1999 election and held most seats –​31 per cent. Her identity as the eldest daughter of the first president, Sukarno, provided her with additional aura and authority needed to be the first female leader of the largest Moslem country. During her time as vice-​president, her hawkish stance on domestic separatism in Aceh and Papua won the military’s allegiance. Thus, domestic support for her presidency was somewhere between Habibie and Wahid. Besides inheriting economic difficulties from her predecessors, Megawati faced a new international challenge –​the American war on terror –​after the 11 September 2001 attack. United States operations created a political dilemma for her. If co-​operating with Washington, she would encounter a domestic backlash from conservative Moslem groups. If she refused to support the war on terror, Indonesia could face both economic and political consequences from the United States reaction. Initially, Megawati did not support the American war on terror wholeheartedly. Whilst condemning terrorism, she disagreed with both United States actions in Afghanistan and military intervention in Iraq. After the Bali bombing in 2002 and the Jakarta bombing orchestrated by the Islamist terror group, Jemaah Islamiyah, in 2003, Indonesia had no choice but to confront domestic terrorism related to al-​Qaeda and co-​operate with the United States and Australia on intelligence sharing. With a relatively low level of international pressure compared to that faced by Wahid and Habibie and a relatively high level of domestic support, Megawati’s foreign policy was more proactive than that of her predecessors. Economically, she strengthened bilateral relations with China.17 She established pragmatic relations by evoking the memory of the old friendship of her father with China and established the energy forum with Beijing during her visit in China –​ the first non-​ASEAN country that she visited –​in March 2002. Megawati also managed to obtain Chinese financial resources to support infrastructure projects in Indonesia, such as the Surabaya–​Madura Bridge. ASEAN was the other mechanism through which she strengthened economic relations with China. In 2004, she released Presidential Decree No. 48/​2004 to ratify the framework agreement on comprehensive economic co-​operation between ASEAN and China. Eight days after the September 11 attacks, Megawati visited the United States as scheduled. As the leader of the world’s largest Moslem country, her visit had an important symbolic meaning for President George W. Bush’s global war on terror. During the visit, Washington offered to lift a ban on commercial sales of non-​lethal military items and host the annual Indonesia-​American strategic dialogue; moreover, it also offered a package of financial aid worth $657 million. Although Megawati faced broad criticisms from domestic conservative Moslems, the Americans rewarded Indonesia’s co-​operation by demanding less of its human 225

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rights conditions, for instance, lifting restrictions on military training programmes in 2002 and acquiescing in Megawati’s harsh military action in Aceh that endangered many civilian lives. The United States also opened its market to Indonesia, especially in the energy and mineral resources sectors. Megawati also redirected foreign policy to its conventional orbit by appointing the experienced diplomat, Nur Hassan Wirajuda, as the minister of foreign affairs, who re-​instated the New-​Order-​era model of “Concentric Circles” that placed Southeast Asian countries at the centre of Indonesia’s foreign strategy.18 Soon after taking office, Megawati visited all other nine ASEAN countries in August 2001 to reassure Indonesia’s neighbours of its commitment to regional solidarity, as well as to seek support for Indonesia’s counter-​terrorist and counter-​ separatist policies. She also took the opportunity when Indonesia chaired ASEAN in 2003 to promote the signing of Bali Concord II, which laid the foundations for the creation of the ASEAN economic community by 2015. In 2004, Yudhoyono came to office as the first directly elected president and, since then, Indonesia has entered a new phase of democratic consolidation. The international environment affected Indonesia positively, since its image and status as an emerging democracy improved on the world stage during the Yudhoyono era. After taking office, Yudhoyono immediately accelerated the peaceful resolution of the insurgency in Aceh and reached an agreement with the separatist group Free Aceh Movement –​Gerakan Aceh Merdeka –​in 2005, which improved military-​civilian relations and human rights conditions in Aceh. Indonesia’s economy was gradually recovering as well, and it paid off its debt to the IMF ahead of schedule in October 2006, which relieved pressure from foreign donors’ demands. Yudhoyono’s political legitimacy was also undoubtedly solid. Although his election vehicle, the newly established Democratic Party [PD], scored low –​7.5 per cent –​in the 2004 legislative election, his vice-​president, Jusuf Kalla secured the chairmanship of Golkar, the largest party in the People’s Representative Council of Indonesia by the end of 2004; it moved from an opposition party to part of a pro-​government coalition. Five years later in 2009, Yudhoyono again won a landslide victory in the presidential election –​60.8 per cent. When the PD came first in the 2009 legislative election with 20.9 per cent of votes, Yudhoyono’s domestic support at the beginning of his second term was the strongest of all the democratically elected Indonesian presidents so far. Under the circumstance of low international pressure and strong domestic support, Yudhoyono’s foreign policy was the most proactive and outward looking amongst these five presidents in the reformasi era. He did not need to utilise all foreign policy resources to address immediate domestic problems. Instead, Yodhoyono started to redirect Indonesia’s foreign policy beyond ASEAN as well as reshape Indonesia’s image as a leader of emerging Powers on the global stage, a multi-​ethnic and Moslem-​majority democracy, and supporter of human rights. He actively promoted these ideas in bilateral relations and multilateral co-​operation and improved Indonesia’s relationship with all the major Powers. Indonesian-​American relations strengthened dramatically –​both nations claiming their relations to be at an all-​time high. This rapprochement found basis on the success of Indonesia’s democratic transition as well as its effective counter-​terrorism strategies as part of the American war on terror.19 Washington liked Yudhoyono for his decisive attitude of cracking down on terrorism in co-​operation with the America, Australia and its neighbours –​he was also a former military officer trained in the United States. The Americans started to fund the Indonesian special counter-​terrorist elite unit, Densus 88, under its Anti-​Terrorism Assistance programme in 2004. The Indian Ocean Tsunami at the end of 2004 provided an opportunity for the United States to resume military

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co-​operation with Indonesia in the name of disaster relief and, the next year, also restored International Military Education and Training funding. During President Barack Obama’s first term (2009–​ 2012) the United States gradually changed its policy on the war on terror and reignited strategic interests in Asia. Consequently, Indonesian society began to view the United States more favourably than before. Seizing this rare opportunity, Yudhoyono and Obama launched “The United States-​Indonesia Comprehensive Partnership” in 2010 to “broaden, deepen and elevate bilateral relations”.20 The partnership extended in a wide variety of aspects with particular focus on higher education and climate change. In 2010, the United States lifted the ban on Kopassus, Indonesia’s Special Forces, over earlier human rights violations and normalised military relations. In terms of Yudhoyono upgrading diplomatic relations with other major Powers, a Sino-​ Indonesian Strategic Partnership Agreement signed in 2005 set out plans for co-​operation in many sectors. Bilateral co-​operation in the defence industry was most notable. China has been Indonesia’s second-​largest trading partner since 2011, just one year after the creation of the China-​ASEAN Free Trade Area. In 2013, Jakarta and Beijing elevated their bilateral relations to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Although this co-​operative framework did not create much momentum under Yudhoyono as his tenure ended the following year, it paved the way for deepening co-​operation under the aegis of the China’s Belt and Road Initiative [BRI] in the Widodo era. Indonesia-​Australia relations also improved under Yudhoyono through the bilateral co-​ operation on counter-​terrorism. This anti-​terrorist co-​operation gradually broadened to other traditional and non-​traditional security challenges, which culminated in the signing of the Lombok Treaty in 2006. In 2010, Indonesia and Australia upgraded their bilateral relations to an enhanced comprehensive relationship. However, the disclosure of Australia’s spy agency monitoring Yudhoyono and his family’s mobile calls in 2013 damaged bilateral relations. Yudhoyono visited India three times in 2005, 2011 and 2012. Indonesia signed the “Joint Declaration on Establishing a Strategic Partnership” with India in 2005. The two states launched negotiations on the India-​Indonesia Comprehensive Economic Co-​operation Arrangement during Yudhoyono’s visit in 2011. Yudhoyono managed the relations with all major Powers with great caution. He coined the term “a thousand friends, zero enemies”, or in Minister of Foreign Affairs Marty Natalegawa’s words “dynamic equilibrium”, meaning that Indonesia sought to maintain good relations with other countries whilst keeping major Powers at equal distance. This strategy manifested itself in the way that Yudhoyono managed bilateral relations with major Powers, for instance, in 2005 Indonesia signed two similar strategic partnership agreements with both China and India. He also upgraded Indonesia’s bilateral relations with both Australia and China in his second term. This “dynamic equilibrium” principle also extended to Yudhoyono’s regional strategy. By including all the major Powers and stakeholders in multiple regional mechanisms and keeping ASEAN firmly in the driver’s seat, Indonesia intended to prevent any major Power from dominating the regional order. A well-​known example was Yudhoyono insisting on including India, Australia, and New Zealand as attendees to the nascent East Asia Summit in an attempt to prevent Beijing from steering the summit’s wheels; this occurred over opposition from Malaysia and China.21 On multilateralism, Yudhoyono’s foreign policy intended to shape Indonesia’s image as a promoter of democracy, supporter of human rights and active participant in global governance. Indonesia was particularly active in UN-​related intergovernmental organisations: elected to the UN Security Council as a non-​permanent member for the 2007–​2008 term and, by 2012,

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some 2,000 Garuda peacekeepers served in six of the UN’s most difficult missions, making Indonesia the largest contributor of UN peacekeeping troops in Southeast Asia.22 Indonesia was the UN Human Rights Council’s founding member in the period of 2006–​2007 and elected two times under Yudhoyono for the periods of 2007–​2010 and 2011–​2014.23 In 2008, Indonesia initiated the annual Bali Democracy Forum to promote democracy in the spirit of encouraging equality, mutual understanding, and respect. Indonesia was also the only representative of Southeast Asian countries in the G-​20 after the 2008 global financial crisis. Yudhoyono never missed any G-​20 summits during his two terms in office. However, under Yudhoyono, Indonesia showed less commitment to NAM and the developing world that it used to represent.24 It is clear that Yudhoyono’s foreign policy ambition had gone beyond Indonesia’s traditional domain of influence. To a certain extent, his proactive and outward-​ looking strategy toward multilateral institutions also undermined the role of ASEAN. However, it is worth noting that Indonesia under Yudhoyono also fostered ASEAN’s solidarity against the background of globalisation. At the nineteenth ASEAN Summit in 2011, Indonesia as the chair facilitated the signing of the Bali Concord III, which helped ASEAN outreach to the global community to tackle global governance issues. The same year saw the adoption of the Joint Declaration on Comprehensive Partnership between ASEAN and the UN. Amid the disagreement on whether to mention the South China Sea disputes in the joint communiqué of ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in 2012, the Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, embarked on a two-​day “shuttle diplomacy” and achieved a six-​point consensus amongst member-​states, which prevented an open split between ASEAN members. As Fitriani commented, “by the time he left office in 2014, it appeared that Indonesia had indeed defied the inauspicious circumstances at the beginning of Yudhoyono’s term in office and re-​ emerged as a respected player on the global map of international affairs”.25 When Widodo assumed office in 2014, Indonesia’s global image had passed its zenith. In Yudhoyono’s second term, Indonesia went through democratic stagnation at best and democratic recession at worst. Some of the incidents and policies that tarnished Indonesia’s reputation included the societal abuse of the Ahmadiyah and Christian religious minorities, the violence in Papua and West Papua provinces, and the near miss of local direct elections just before Yudhoyono left office. Yudhoyono was also criticised for his costly and high profile foreign policy that did not immediately serve Indonesia’s national interests, and his thirst for a reputable personal image. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s economic growth bottlenecked in expanding exports, upgrading industries, and investing in human resources. As the successor of Yudhoyono, Widodo had to carry out the long-​overdue political and economic reform and redirect foreign policy towards a more pragmatic route. Widodo started his political career with a humble background as a businessman, but his phenomenal success as mayor of Surakarta and governor of Jakarta helped him rise to the top very quickly. The 2014 election was a sweeping victory for him and his nominating party PDIP. The popular support for him was undeniable. Although his nominating party, the PDIP, was the largest party with 109 seats in the Parliament, the alliance of the opposing parties –​291 seats –​was bigger than Widodo’s coalition –​208 seats –​at the beginning of his term. Widodo’s relations with the People’s Representative Council were bumpy at first. It took him almost two years to attract opposing groups to his camp before the pro-​government coalition finally secured 69 per cent of seats in Parliament and outnumbered the opposition by mid-​2016.26 Entering the second decade of the twentieth century, Indonesia faced a new type of international pressure generated by the geostrategic competition between the United States and China. In 2010, China became the world’s second-​largest economy, Sino-​American strategic

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rivalry in the Asia-​Pacific mounted, and Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, became caught at the crossroads of the uneasy competition between these two Powers. The territorial disputes between some Southeast Asian countries and China in the South China Sea became the centrepiece of the Obama Administration’s “pivot toward Asia” strategy, aiming to undermine China’s influence in the region. Back in the 1990s, Indonesia tried to play a neutral mediator role between the disputing parties. However, since ASEAN members began to take sides openly on this issue in the 2010s, Indonesia worried that the differences amongst ASEAN states would split the group as well as undermine regional stability in Southeast Asia. The Donald Trump Administration after 2018 escalated the tension with China to an open confrontation and decoupling in many aspects. The escalating Great Power rivalry between the United States and China posed a major challenge to Indonesia’s independent foreign policy principles and made hedging between Washington and Beijing an increasingly risky policy choice. Under a medium level of international pressure with a relatively strong level of domestic support, Widodo’s foreign policy can be characterised as ambitious and outward looking. He proposed the “global maritime fulcrum” [GMF] strategy in his first term, highlighting seven pillars to turn Indonesia into a global maritime hub. But by the end of 2019, only a small portion of this grand strategy had been translated into concrete actions, including strict fishing regulations, vessel-​sinking policy, port construction, and modernisation of the navy. This maritime diplomacy primarily focused on the protection of sovereignty and the preservation of Indonesia’s marine resources, whilst it contributed little to reaching out to other countries or organisations to create collective solutions to the problems on the “blue sea”. Moreover, because the implementation of the GMF strategy met with multiple institutional and regulative hindrances, Indonesian bureaucracies seemed to be reluctant to carry it forward. Widodo did not mention GMF in the inauguration speech for his second term in 2019, nor did the Ministry of Foreign Affairs list it in its priorities in 2020. These signs indicate the side lining of the GMF or Widodo’s “blue sea” ambition in his second term. In response to international pressure caused from Great Power rivalry, Widodo has chosen to keep Indonesia at some distance from both the United States and China so that their strategic competition would not challenge the centrality of ASEAN and regional stability. As a de facto leader of ASEAN, Indonesia is concerned that China’s expansionism in the South China Sea poses security challenges to some ASEAN countries, threatens ASEAN solidarity, and, most important, encroaches upon Indonesia’s rights in the Exclusive Economic Zone [EEZ] near the Natuna Islands, which mingles a domestic anti-​China narrative and nationalism. Under Widodo, Indonesia’s policy toward the South China Sea has gradually tilted away from China –​ something observed in Indonesia’s changing attitude on the 2016 arbitration award of an international tribunal on the South China Sea dispute, which ruled in favour of the Philippines. Initially Indonesia remained tacit on arbitration. Later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs became more outspoken in backing the arbitration result, upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and thereby rejecting China’s “nine-​dash-​line” claim based on historic rights.27 Indonesia’s stance on the Natuna also turned strongly against China. After a few confrontations with Chinese fishing boats and patrol vessels in Natuna, Indonesia re-​named its EEZ the “North Natuna Sea” and established a new military unit in Natuna to upgrade defence. Widodo also cautiously responded to the American Free and Open Indo-​Pacific Strategy [FOIP]. Indonesia was supportive of the Indo-​Pacific concept, in fact, attributing the birth of the “Indo-​Pacific” concept to Marty Natalegawa. The Indo-​Pacific notion also bore geographical similarity to Widodo’s envisioned boundary of the GMF or Pacindo –​the Pacific and Indian oceans. However, Indonesia remained ambivalent as the Trump Administration

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slowly unwrapped the details of the FOIP. Distrust toward Trump was one of the reasons behind Indonesia’s aloof attitude. Before the visit of his vice president, Mike Pence, to Asia in 2018, Washington relied on the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, also known as the Quad, to buttress the FOIP, which challenged ASEAN centrality in regional co-​operation. Indonesia was upset about American interference in the regional order, immediately took the leadership role in drafting an ASEAN common outlook on the Indo-​Pacific concept, and spent 18 months lobbying ASEAN members. Finally adopted at the ASEAN Summit in June 2019, the document, “ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-​Pacific”, reaffirmed the central role of the existing multilateral mechanisms and open platforms led by the organisation.28 Compared with Yudhoyono, Widodo’s political power is largely constrained by his lack of political experience as well as the mounting domestic challenges. Consequently, Widodo’s foreign policy is not so proactive and outward looking on the global stage that of Yudhoyono. Instead, Widodo reoriented a few foreign policies to address domestic priorities. For example, he participated in China’s BRI and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to obtain financial and technical resources for domestic infrastructure projects. Moreover, to cater to domestic nationalism, Widodo’s foreign policy emphasised the protection of sovereignty, marine resources, and overseas Indonesian workers. As the fourth most populous country in the world, a democracy with the largest Moslem population, the only Southeast Asian country in the G20, and a fast-​ g rowing economy, Indonesia’s presence in world politics has been increasingly visible in the last two decades. In the reformasi era, Indonesia’s foreign policy has experienced dramatic changes and reorientation under the five successive leaders. In essence, the interplay between international pressure and domestic political support shaped Indonesia’s foreign policy. In the early years of the reformasi, Indonesia faced tremendous economic and political pressures from the West. In this context, the different levels of domestic support shaped the dissimilar foreign policy strategies that Habibie, Wahid and Megawati chose to address these external pressures and threats. Entering the democratic consolidation era, Yudhoyono faced much less international pressure than his predecessors. More importantly, the strong domestic support he enjoyed provided more leverage for him to pursue a more proactive and outward-​looking foreign policy, aiming to achieve a proper position for Indonesia in the international community. During the Yudhoyono decade, Indonesia achieved multiple roles on the world stage, including a global model of new democracy, a human-​r ights promoter, and a supporter of multilateralism. When Widodo came to power, Indonesia encountered a new type of international pressure –​systematic pressure that devolved from Sino-​American rivalry in the international system. Indonesia faced a hard strategic choice of taking sides between Washington and Beijing. This increasing pressure has reduced the manoeuvrability and autonomy of Indonesian foreign policy in dealing with the Great Powers. Consequently, Widodo started to retreat from Yudhoyono’s proactive and outward-​looking policy orientation by refocusing on ASEAN. By trying to make ASEAN speak in one voice on critical regional issues, Widodo actually postponed having to take sides between the United States and China. As Sino-​American rivalry amplifies, especially in the post-​COVID era, how to manage relations with Great Powers will become the toughest challenge for Indonesia’s policy-​makers in the next decade or two. It will be increasingly difficult for Indonesia to keep equidistance between the United States and China whilst at the same time pursuing its own foreign policy agenda. As a leading country of ASEAN, Indonesia might be able to work together with other ASEAN countries to play a true bebas-​aktif –​independent and active –​role in managing the regional security and stability in the turbulent periods of Great Power rivalry and the ongoing international order transition. 230

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Notes 1 Moch Faisal Karim, “Middle Power, Status-​Seeking and Role Conceptions: The Cases of Indonesia and South Korea”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 72/​4(2018), 344. 2 Derek McDougall, “Responses to ‘Rising China’ in East Asian Region: Soft Balancing with Accommodation”, Journal of Contemporary China, 21/​73(2012), 14. 3 Cheng-​Chwee Kuik, “Making Sense of Malaysia’s China Policy: Asymmetry, Proximity, and Elite’s Domestic Authority”, Chinese Journal of International Politics, 6/​4(2013), 429–​30. 4 Jürgen Rüland, “Democratizing Foreign-​Policy Making in Indonesia and the Democratization of ASEAN: A Role Theory Analysis”, TRaNS: Trans-​Regional and-​National Studies of Southeast Asia, 5/​1(2017), 51. 5 Karim, “Middle Power, Status-​Seeking”. 6 Dewi Fortuna Anwar, “Megawati’s Search for an Effective Foreign Policy”, in Hadi Soesastro, Anthony L. Smith, and Han Mui Ling, eds., Governance in Indonesia: Challenges Facing the Megawati Presidency (Singapore, 2003), 71. 7 Emirza Adi Syailendra, “A Nonbalancing Act: Explaining Indonesia’s Failure to Balance Against the Chinese Threat”, Asian Security, 13/​3(2017), 237–​55. 8 Kai He, “Indonesia’s Foreign Policy after the Cold War: Political Legitimacy, International Pressure, and Foreign Policy Choices”, in B.J.C. McKercher, ed., Routledge Handbook of Diplomacy and Statecraft (London, 2012), 215. 9 I Gede Wahyu Wicaksana, “The Changing Perspective of International Relations in Indonesia”, International Relations of the Asia-​Pacific, 18/​2(2018), 153. 10 For a detailed discussion of the meaning of “bebas aktif” principle, see Franklin B. Weinstein, “The Meaning of an Independent Foreign Policy”, in idem, Indonesian Foreign Policy and the Dilemma of Dependence: From Sukarno to Suharto (Ithaca, NY, 1976), 161–​205; Rizal Sukma, “Indonesia’s bebas-aktif Foreign Policy and the ‘Security Agreement’ with Australia”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 51/​2(1997), 231–​41. 11 Richard Stevenson, “U.S., IMF Await Evidence of Economic Change from Habibie”, NY Times (22 May 1998). 12 Bilveer Singh, Succession Politics in Indonesia: The 1998 Presidential Elections and the Fall of Suharto (Houndmills, 2016 [2000]), 242. 13 Edward Aspinall, Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia. (Stanford, CA, 2005), 49–​85. 14 Ann Marie Murphy, “US Rapprochement with Indonesia: From Problem State to Partner”, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 32/​3(2010), 369–​70. 15 Anwar, “Megawati’s Search”, 90. 16 Ibid., 70–​90. 17 Eko Saputro, Indonesia and ASEAN Plus Three Financial Cooperation: Domestic Politics, Power Relations, and Regulatory Regionalism (Singapore, 2017), 76. 18 Ristian Atriandi Supriyanto, “Indonesia and India: Toward a Convergent Mandala”, India Review, 12/​ 3(2013), 216. 19 Murphy, “US Rapprochement”, 362. 20 Office of the Press Secretary [White House], “The U.S.-​Indonesia Comprehensive Partnership” (27 June 2010): https://​obam​awhi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​the-​press-​off​i ce/​us-​indone​sia-​compre​hens​ive-​ part​ners​hip. 21 Evelyn Goh, “Institutions and the Great Power Bargain in East Asia: ASEAN’s Limited ‘Brokerage’ Role”, International Relations of the Asia-​Pacific, 11/​3(2011), 390. 22 Ban Ki-​ moon, “Opening Remarks at Joint Press Conference with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia” (20 March 2012): www.un.org/​sg/​en/​content/​sg/​speeches/​2012-​03-​20/​ opening-​remarks-​joint-​press-​conference-​president-​susilo-​bambang. 23 Eka Yudha Saputra, “Indonesia Wins Top Vote to Secure UN Human Rights Council Seat”, Tempo (18 October 2019): https://​en.tempo.co/​read/​1261​171/​indone​sia-​wins-​top-​vote-​to-​sec​ure-​un-​ human-​r ig​hts-​coun​cil-​seat. 24 Evi Fitriani, “Yudhoyono’s Foreign Policy: Is Indonesia a Rising Power?” in Edward Aspinall, Marcus Mietzner, and Dirk Tomsa, eds., The Yudhoyono Presidency: Indonesia’s Decade of Stability and Stagnation (Singapore, 2015), 77. 25 Fitriani, “Yudhoyono’s Foreign Policy”, 73.

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PART V

International Organisations and Military Alliances

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19 THE EUROPEAN UNION IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Great Power under Strain? Rikard Bengtsson

The European Union [EU] makes an odd entity in global affairs. Since the beginning of the integration process in the 1950s, somewhere between a state in the conventional sense and an international organisation, the EU and its predecessors, the European Communities, have developed an advanced arrangement for co-​operation amongst its member-​states in a wide array of policy areas. In addition, this multi-​layered political system has attained a degree of actorness in international relations based on a set of institutions, a range of resources, and a degree of strategic thinking. In some areas, notably trade, the EU has actually come to replace the member-​states as the key actor in external relations. In other central areas of international affairs –​primarily security and defence –​the member-​states retain their control and primacy. In yet other areas, like development assistance, there is the parallel existence of EU and member-​ state policies and instruments that implies a clear need for co-​ordination and simultaneously involves a risk for duplication. The EU’s emergence in global politics is a principally important issue both because newcomers are relatively rare in the international arena and because the sui generis character of the EU –​combining supranational qualities with the intergovernmental logic of traditional international organisation –​brings conceptualisations of international actorness to the fore. The key to understanding the EU as an international actor is to focus on the relationship amongst member-​states and the various institutions of the EU system. That relationship has evolved over time, both in terms of formal structures and regarding the mind-​sets of European politicians. Ultimately, a major obstacle for developing an effective foreign policy at the EU level lies with the diverging views of member-​states on important issues, at times reducing EU foreign policy to a least-​common-​denominator outcome and a weak, reactive posture. Simultaneously, important steps in terms of institutional developments and strategic orientation have emerged to manage this challenge. This chapter focuses on the diplomatic, security, and defence dimensions of EU foreign policy. As such, the notion of foreign policy denotes a wide array of external policy areas, in some of which the EU occupies a globally leading role. Even after Brexit, it is the largest

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-24

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international trade actor in the world –​in terms of the share of global trade but also preferential trade agreements –​and without comparison, the global leader in development assistance.1 Moreover, in the process of developing the EU’s single market, regulatory regimes have implied an increasingly deliberate external dimension, as external actors adapt to gain access to the internal market. This so-​called “Brussels effect”2 has led commentators to label the EU a “global regulatory hegemon”3 and “contractual superpower”.4 In foreign policy proper, however, the dynamic is vastly different. The EU is much more complex as actor and decision-​maker, institutional balance is different, and the effectiveness and impact is much more questionable despite improvements in institutional pre-​conditions. This complexity returns a set of questions in this chapter regarding pre-​conditions, objectives, and resources for EU actorness in international relations. A set of institutional and ideational developments are here in focus. EU actorness is however not only a reflection of internal developments, ambitions, and conflicts, but fundamentally also a reflection of changes in the global power configuration and, more concretely, the foreign policy behaviour of not least the Great Powers in the international system. In short, the external context co-​constitutes the EU as a foreign policy actor. Developments in the last decade, not least Russia’s annexation of Crimea, China’s increasing global political –​and not only economic –​prevalence, and America’s reoriented foreign policy all speak to this dynamic –​and also render the EU a more challenging position in international relations. A fruitful point of departure regarding actorness is the distinction between presence and actorness, in which the former denotes a passive or latent form of agency and the latter independent activity based on strategy and concrete capabilities.5 Employing such a conceptualisation, one may begin unpacking observations of increasing EU involvement on the global stage. In all relevant aspects –​frequency, scope, and depth –​the EU has been expanding its international presence over the last decades. Nevertheless, does EU foreign policy contribute in any independent way to global processes or events? Do EU-​level institutions add any autonomous value –​or are the EU dimensions of European foreign policy simply the sum of the foreign policies of EU member-​states? To what extent do others recognise the EU as an actor in its own respect? Although it certainly remains important to analyse EU-​internal developments, such as institutional changes, to understand the development of EU foreign policy actorness, the EU does not exist in a vacuum. In the end, what is fundamentally important is to take account of these developments from the perspective of different actors involved in the current order and how EU actions influence them and they the EU. Overall, it implies an analytical framework based on strategic interaction and the reciprocal constitution of actorness. Recognition –​the mutual constitution of a relationship through parallel actor-​internal developments and external expectations –​helps conceptualise the elusive notion of actorness. Although an actor may hypothetically have great ambitions over a given issue, it matters little as long as others do not recognise the impact of the actor. Conversely, external expectations may be rather substantial in some cases whilst, at the same time, pre-​conditions in terms of actual capacity to deliver may be limited. The argument rests on constructivist logic in focusing on how actual behaviour has shaped and shapes perceptions in a constantly ongoing process.6 A central argument here is that both internal capacity –​“capability” –​and external events –​ “opportunity” –​are important, and how the former relates to the latter influences an actor’s “presence” on the international stage. Presence should not be regarded in terms of concrete –​ purposive –​action but, rather, as a “consequence of being”.7 Such an analysis highlights two essential elements to actorness. One concerns an actor’s power resources in terms of ability or capacity to influence a desired outcome; the other concerns the image or identity of the actor in the eyes of others. 236

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Taking note of the increasing ambitions of the EU on the world stage begs the questions of how the Union sees itself and what kind of goals and ends it wants to pursue. Before analysing the emergence of EU structures for foreign policy co-​operation and the means at its disposal, the issues of the identity and international agenda of the EU need consideration. The most authoritative expression of the EU self-​image resides in the Lisbon Treaty, which entered into force in 2009 and is the current legal basis of the EU. The preamble of the treaty declares: The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. The Union’s aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-​being of its peoples.8 Regarding the international ambitions, the following passage of the Lisbon Treaty is to guide subsequent external policy development: The Union’s action on the international scene shall be guided by the principles which have inspired its own creation, development and enlargement, and which it seeks to advance in the wider world: democracy, the rule of law, the universality and indivisibility of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for human dignity, the principles of equality and solidarity, and respect for the principles of the United Nations Charter and international law. The Union shall seek to develop relations and build partnerships with third countries, and international, regional or global organisations which share the principles referred to in the first sub-​ paragraph. It shall promote multilateral solutions to common problems, in particular in the framework of the United Nations.9 Three main conclusions derive from these official expressions, as well as from numerous statements by EU representatives. First, the EU constitutes a community of values, in essence a security community but not a military alliance –​although the Lisbon Treaty provides for mutual assistance in times of severe crisis without specifying the form of such support. Second, the EU has an external agenda –​a willingness, indeed, an obligation –​to promote its values onto the international scene. Third, the values referred to above are not unique for the EU, or for Europe, but generally embraced in the Western zone of peace.10 In the end, what is special about the EU –​strength or weakness depending on the observer –​is the combination of resources and strategies available and the peculiar policy posture of the organisation in international relations. The EU Global Strategy [EUGS] from 2016 provides further conceptualisation of the objectives for external action.11 Analysed in more detail below, the strategy reflects an ambition to upgrade the basis for EU-​level foreign policy and adapt the entity to a changing, indeed deteriorating, external environment. More concretely, the EUGS pinpoints five central priorities for EU foreign and security policy: • The security of the EU itself, based on a recognition of the links between internal and external security of the EU and a stated ambition to develop further the defence element of its foreign policy. • Regional development, emphasising societal resilience in the neighbourhood to the East and the South. • An integrated approach to conflicts, meaning engagement at various political levels and various stages of the conflict cycle with a comprehensive set of means. 237

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• As a reflection of its own development, promotion of “cooperative regional orders” as a way for groups of countries to enhance their security and economic development through institutional means. • Reform and upgrade of the multilateral rules-​based order, with a focus on human rights, sustainable development, and access to the global commons.12 Foreign policy co-​operation amongst EU states has a long history, although it took time before it became part of formal treaty regulation. Aimed at co-​ordinating the foreign policies of individual member-​states, the so-​called “European Political Co-​operation” evolved in the 1970s, but outside the organisation’s formal structures. The Maastricht Treaty formally establishing the EU –​entering into force in 1993 –​introduced the EU’s pillar structure. The first pillar contained already existing co-​operation characterised by a supranational logic, in short the Single Market and adjacent areas, whereas the second and third pillars were new and based on strictly inter-​governmental logic. The EU in effect became a very complex organisation, with different political dynamics –​varying elements of supranationality and institutional competences –​for different policy areas. The second pillar established the Common Foreign and Security Policy [CFSP], whereas the third involved Justice and Home Affairs, another sovereignty-​sensitive area hitherto not subject to formal co-​operation. The CFSP as well as subsequent developments have been largely events-​driven. In consequence, the development of the CFSP cannot be explained without reference to the end of the Cold War and the new geopolitical landscape in Europe and globally. Specifically, the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia often appear as catalysts for this development. The intergovernmental nature of CFSP co-​operation, in effect granting all member-​states veto power, simultaneously made it acceptable to the member-​states and contributed to its inherent weakness. To be sure, the label of common policy was misdirected and, from the outset, the CFSP was plagued by a lack of resources and an obvious “capability-​expectations gap”,13 which EU representatives contributed to by claiming that the EU was indeed going to make a difference, not least in the greater European context. The ongoing conflicts in the Balkans showed that despite the CFSP formally in place, the EU was not a coherent actor making such a difference. Again, largely events-​driven, the CFSP in the late 1990s took two steps that with the benefit of hindsight proved fundamentally important. The first was to construct the office of the High Representative for the CFSP, formally in place through the Amsterdam Treaty of 1999. EU leaders chose to assign Javier Solana, the former secretary-​general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] to the task. Formally, the position of high representative rested on diffuse ground –​to assist the six-​month rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers –​but with entrepreneurial efforts, tireless global diplomacy, and skilful staff at the Council Secretariat, Solana came to play a distinctly important role in giving the EU a face in the rest of the world. However, this process occurred in parallel to the rotating presidency and the Commission being involved in external relations, resulting in a degree of bureaucratic turf wars and a certain amount of competition for visibility if not in substance amongst the top people involved.14 The other important development in the late 1990s was the decision to enter into military security and defence collaboration under an EU heading. This initiative was originally taken by France and Britain at St Malo in 1998, but formally agreed at the EU level at the Cologne European Council in spring 1999 under the heading of European Security and Defence Policy [ESDP, later renamed the Common Security and Defence Policy, CSDP]. This development opened up the area of civilian and military crisis management operations –​so-​called Petersberg tasks. The EU has subsequently set up 36 CSDP missions of civilian, military, or joint civil-​ military natures –​see Appendix.15 Creating the office of the high representative and setting up 238

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the ESDP proved to be mutually reinforcing in that Solana took on a leadership role in an area with member-​state priorities not yet fully fixed.16 Finally, there is the issue of institutional developments. In the aftermath of the St Malo and Cologne decisions, a number of organisations emerged within the CFSP/​ESDP, the most important being the Political and Security Committee, charged with developing crisis management policy as well as overseeing concrete operations. Over time, this body has become the central locus of CFSP/​ESDP/​CSDP institutional development, reporting directly to the Council. In addition, more specific organs have emerged for different military and civilian purposes, such as the EU Military Staff, the EU Military Committee, and the Committee for Civilian Crisis Management.17 Despite the evolution of the CFSP over time, some generic problems remain: internally, the institutional division of labour; and externally, visibility and impact. Some of the major new provisions of the Lisbon Treaty speak directly to these problems. A first such element concerns abolishing the pillar structure. Against the background of the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, the drawbacks of having some external policy issues in the first pillar and others in the second became all too evident. The Lisbon Treaty does away with the pillar structure and instead introduces two policy domains: internal and external. The result is that all aspects of external relations –​trade, development, security, and defence policy –​fall under the same heading. However, and fundamentally important, the CFSP [and hence CSDP] remains intergovernmental in nature, implying that differences in competences and decision-​making procedures remain along with the inherent problems that these differences entail. Still, the pre-​conditions for policy coherence and a holistic perspective on security and development have improved. The second element concerns the institutional structure of foreign policy-​making.18 Before Lisbon, three institutional actors were active in the foreign policy area: the Commission, the Council headed by the presidency, and the high representative. Changes to the treaty have effectively ended formal presidency involvement in CFSP. The novelty was to combine the posts of the high representative and the commissioner for external relations, which again improves the pre-​conditions for effective policy-​making and decreases the likelihood for bureaucratic competition. As of 1 December 2009, the new position is the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.19 The high representative is thus accountable to the EU system as a whole, rather than only to the Council, and is potentially important because the position encompasses both serving as vice-​president of the Commission and presiding over the Foreign Affairs Council comprising the foreign ministers of the member-​states. It is important to underline that Council decisions are unanimous –​with a few exceptions regulated in the Treaty –​implying that the impact of the high representative will continue to be subject to the spectrum of national interests. Still, the position implies a degree of potential agenda-setting and framing. The third novelty of the Lisbon Treaty concerns recognition of the European Council –​ comprising the heads of government or, in a few cases, the heads of state of member-​states –​as one of the official EU institutions and the assignment of a permanent president of the European Council, tasked with, amongst other things, representing the EU to the world. Earlier, the country holding the presidency also led the European Council as part of the responsibilities of the rotating six-​month term. Now, a permanent president holds the post for two-​and-​a-​half-​ years, with a possible one-​time re-​election.20 In the realm of foreign policy, this means that both the president and high representative represent the EU externally. The division of labour between the two is not fully clear and occasionally gives rise to confusion inside and especially outside the EU. 239

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Fourth, the Lisbon Treaty created the European External Action Service [EEAS]. Sometimes thought of as a foreign ministry of sorts for the EU, its mandate is not consular but, rather, to co-​ordinate and represent the Union, report to the high representative, and promote EU trade, development, enlargement, and foreign and security policies. It is imperative to note that the EEAS does not replace the national foreign ministries, but many times plays a key role in co-​ordinating member-​states in foreign capitals. The basis for its work abroad is its 140 plus delegations around the world. Finally, the new treaty opened up enhanced co-​operation, that is, the possibility for groups of member-​states to co-​operate more closely on issues in which not all member-​states have the capacity or interest to move further. This possibility also includes the CFSP/​CSDP under the heading of Permanent Structured Co-​operation [PESCO], established by the Council in 2017 and one of the key strategic developments in recent years. PESCO is intergovernmental in nature, based on binding commitments for those states deciding to participate and organised in project form. Currently 25 member-​states participate in PESCO in 60 projects altogether (with varying member-​state composition) on a range of aspects such as capacity-​building, development of new equipment, training, communication, and cyber. The stated ambition of PESCO is to enhance the EU’s capacity as an international security actor.21 A tentative conclusion about the novelties of the Lisbon Treaty concerning foreign policy is the alleviation of some of the weaknesses of the old system and the improvement of pre-​conditions for effective external action. However, fundamental challenges remain, both in inter-​institutional terms and as far as the relationship between the member-​state level and EU-​level logistics is concerned. Moving from institutions to instruments, what are the means of disposal for EU foreign policy? A standard distinction amongst economic, diplomatic, and military means is a fruitful point of departure. Economic instruments are a key means in EU external relations. In the context of the CFSP specifically, the long line of preferential trade agreements is not of immediate interest; rather, comprehensive agreements such as association agreements are important, linked to changes in the behaviour of countries outside the EU in a direction desired by the organisation. More precisely, this concerns if and how political conditionality may be attached to prospects of economic interaction, in effect inducing political and societal change –​good governance, democracy, human rights –​in third countries via the market attraction of the EU: single market, preferential trade rules, and the like. Coercive economic means come primarily in the form of economic sanctions. The EU currently has more than 40 different sanctions regimes in place –​some mandated by the United Nations [UN], others adopted independently by the EU. Many of the sanctions involve a combination of economic measures –​most often arms embargoes and freezing of assets –​and diplomatic measures –​primarily travel restrictions.22 Amongst the most extensive examples are the sanctions against North Korea, Iran, and Syria. In recent years, the different sanctions regimes responding to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine –​in place since 2015 –​have received the most political attention. They reflect Russia’s key importance to European security and the fundamental deterioration of EU-​Russian relations, whilst simultaneously signalling the achievement of reaching unanimity in CFSP on a very sensitive matter, given the variance of member-​state relationships with Russia. Diplomatic instruments employed by the EU come in various forms. In addition to diplomatic sanctions referred to above, they involve making public statements, sending démarches, conducting political dialogue, and engaging in high-​level visits with countries around the globe. Instruments also include sending election observers and assigning special representatives to conflict regions such as in Africa and the Middle East, or civilian experts to state-​building processes –​for instance in Kosovo and Iraq –​and making cease-​fire or peace proposals. As a 240

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foreign policy actor, the EU thus holds a broad range of diplomatic instruments. Some of these are primarily declaratory in nature and often criticised for not being sharp enough, whereas others are part of informal or formal negotiation processes, such as the nuclear agreement with Iran. A special political-​diplomatic instrument unique for the EU is to offer membership. Such an offer, based on political conditionality, is a strong but geographically limited instrument. The military part of the arsenal of instruments is the newest, but a principally important one in that it changes the profile of EU external action.23 Whilst the EU has set headline goals for troop deployment and developed a set of battle groups for employment in crises, such groups remain thus far unused. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the EU has deployed a number of military missions, including joint civilian-​military ones, under the EU flag –​see Appendix. Nonetheless, these military missions are voluntary for member-​states in terms of participation and funding. This inventory highlights two critical and related questions: one regarding consistency, the other effectiveness. As regards consistency, issues arise both in the relationship amongst individual member-​state foreign policies and EU-​level policy –​vertical consistency –​and amongst various EU institutions and policies, primarily between the Commission and the Council –​ horizontal consistency.24 As for effectiveness, the challenge for the EU as a foreign policy actor is to conduct a credible diplomacy whilst utilising means that yield few, if any, immediate tangible results. With the profile it has chosen –​been granted by member-​states largely unwilling to cede sovereignty in this area –​criticism for inefficiency and inability to deliver will likely be enduring. Recent initiatives discussed towards the end of the chapter deal with these challenges. Clearly, then, EU foreign policy development has been largely events-​driven. This is not unique to the EU; rather, it is a generic feature of foreign policy practice. It comes, however, with specific characteristics in the case of the EU as a multi-​level polity, as external events trigger communicative and decision-​ making processes on two levels of the polity simultaneously –​the capitals of member-​states and EU headquarters in Brussels –​and comprises a complex process of co-​ordination –​and at times contestation. To enhance the strategic element of EU foreign policy but also reflecting the passivity, division, and weakness in relation to key developments in international relations, the EU has developed two security strategies to guide and enhance future behaviour, in 2003 and 2016, respectively. A brief comparison between the two yields insights into both the self-​image of the EU as a foreign policy actor and the context in which the EU is to pursue its policy.25 The birth of the European Security Strategy [ESS], written by High Representative Solana and adopted by the Council in December 2003, reflects a complex mix of factors. They include the institutional maturing of the CFSP, continued differences amongst the member-​states on the scope of EU foreign policy, Solana’s ambition to develop EU actorness, and a drive to overcome discord with the United States over unilateralism and the Iraq war. A product of its time, the ESS embodied a clear tone of optimism, referring to “a period of peace and stability unprecedented in European history”.26 The strategy was outward-​oriented and transnational in orientation in identifying key threats and security challenges to the EU: terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, organised crime, regional conflict, and state failure; the 2008 ESS Implementation Report added climate change and energy security to the list, whilst also pointing to the importance of cyber and maritime security.27 The strategy comprises three dimensions that define the EU’s self-​conception as a foreign policy actor. First, an explicit link exists between the foundational values on which the EU rests as proclaimed in the treaties and its foreign policy action. Key to EU thinking –​and acknowledging the community of values with the United States –​is the focus on democracy as a fundamental dimension for internal as well as external development. This in turn implies promoting 241

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both a specific conceptualisation of security along the lines of the UN human security doctrine –​linking security, human rights, and development –​and a multilateral rules-​based global order promoting “a fairer, safer and more united world”.28 The second dimension revolves around being a relevant partner to other leading security actors with the same set of fundamental values and principles, notably NATO and most importantly the United States: “Acting together, the European Union and the United States can be a formidable force for good”.29 Third and final is the aspiration to become a global Power. The EU “is inevitably a global player”,30 the ESS states and goes on to conclude, “to make a contribution that matches our potential, we need to be more active, more coherent and more capable”.31 Institutional development, policy innovation, and attempts at hammering out independent actorness –​evident, for instance, in civilian and military missions and operations –​in the short decade until the Arab Spring and the euro crisis speak to this aspiration. In conclusion, the ESS returns the self-​conception of the EU as a values-​based global security actor in a liberal, American-​led global order. In contrast, the EUGS from 2016 displays a fundamentally different outlook on the world and strategic perspective on the EU’s role in international relations. The combination of external challenges –​ranging from Syria, the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea to the adverse effects of globalisation –​and internal rifts –​not least the euro crisis and contestation over the future of the integration process –​led to a rather pessimistic context for EU foreign policy: We live in times of existential crisis, within and beyond the European Union. Our Union is under threat. Our European project, which has brought unprecedented peace, prosperity and democracy, is being questioned.32 In this “difficult, more connected, contested and complex world”,33 markedly different terms compared to the ESS underline the EU’s perceived role. Three aspects capture the essence of the new thinking. The first concerns an emphasis on the European neighbourhood and the EU’s responsibility as a regional security provider at a time when “peace and stability in Europe are no longer a given”.34 Second, reflecting its longstanding focus on institutionalised relations is the EU’s portrayal as a responsible stakeholder in global governance, promoting reform and development of the multilateral system. Third, still aligning idealist aspirations and a realistic assessment of the global context is the idea of a “principled pragmatist”, capturing a new direction for EU foreign policy with EU security as the starting point and a stronger focus on territorial control and defence –​see further below. In comparing the two strategies, certain fundamental elements remain –​multilateralism and European responsibilities –​whilst simultaneously key shifts yield a different conception of actorness. Notably, this concerns conceptualisations of security dynamics, perspectives on transatlantic relations, and foundational concepts –​in the ESS, democracy; in the EUGS, societal resilience.35 In one important assessment: “Unlike its 2003 predecessor, the European Security Strategy, which was bold, confident and even occasionally hubristic, the EUGS is realistic, modest and constructive”.36 Returning to the notion of foreign policy actorness as co-​constituted by internal and external pre-​conditions, the Lisbon Treaty has brought new institutional pre-​conditions for EU foreign policy and not least the institutionalisation of the office of the high representative, and the establishment and operation of the EEAS have enhanced the relevance of the EU in global affairs. Simultaneously, internal as well as external developments have fundamentally challenged the EU.

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Internally, Brexit has rocked the foundations of the EU. The outcome of the referendum in Britain in June 2016 sent shockwaves through the Union, and the unprecedented developments since have left the EU with dramatically new realities also in the realm of external relations –​ given the free trade profile and importance of Britain as well as its hesitancy towards further defence integration. But Brexit is not the only EU-​internal development of importance, given the link between the value base of the EU and its foreign policy profile. The nationalist turn found in a number of member-​states, as well as the deterioration of the rule of law and democracy in certain others, contribute to making the EU less inclined to and less potent in pushing for elements dear to the EU foreign policy in the past, such as good governance and institutionalised frameworks for international co-​operation. Fundamentally, despite institutional developments, the limits of member-​state unity on foreign policy remain a defining feature: “Despite the impressive development of extensive machinery to foster common EU foreign policies, the logic of diversity arguably is as strong as it ever was”.37 Externally, the international context over the last two decades has changed dramatically. As noted by Nathalie Tocci, the key drafter of the EUGS on behalf of the high representative, Federica Mogherini, “In 2003 the international liberal order seemed unchallenged –​9/​11 notwithstanding –​and EU soft power was at its peak. … In 2015 that world was gone”.38 Behind this observation lay a number of factors that have two dimensions that speak to the deteriorating security environment of the EU. The first is due primarily to Russia’s assertive foreign policy in relation to Ukraine but also in the Syrian context, and the outcome of the Arab Spring, resulting in –​or maintaining –​a complex mix of failing and failed states close to the EU. The second is the reorientation of American foreign policy –​the pivot to Asia –​as well as the rise of China and, with it, an increasingly important geo-​economic dynamic to which, it needs noting, the EU as a globally leading economic and regulatory actor contributes. All these elements preceded Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Yet, in so many ways, the Trump years exacerbated the already challenging situation for the EU, ranging from the downgrading of transatlantic co-​operation and NATO’s key role for European security; a lack of appreciation for, indeed flawed understanding of, the EU itself; American withdrawal from global leadership and responsibilities; and a disqualification of the merits of institutionalised multilateral co-​operation. Importantly, these challenging developments have also led to policy responses in the EU. In the area of foreign policy, they entail the idea of strategic autonomy for the EU. Whilst not completely novel given past European discussions and reintroduced in the EUGS along with an enhanced emphasis on hard security and defence, this notion has gained new ground during –​ due to –​the Trump years, coinciding with the new political EU dynamic after Brexit. An elusive concept yet to be filled with meaningful content, traces of thinking regarding EU strategic autonomy can for instance be found in the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2018 speech to the European Parliament. Europe, she concluded, needs to take more responsibility for its own security.39 Moreover, the current (2019–​2024) European Commission under the presidency of Ursula von der Leyen presents itself as “the geopolitical Commission”.40 The statement by the high representative, Josep Borrell, that the EU needs to “re-​learn the language of power and conceive of Europe as a top-​tier geostrategic actor” echoes this sentiment.41 Still, what ultimately matters is what the EU does, not what it says. Developments in security and defence, the PESCO innovation as well as the European Defence Fund,42 and the annual review of defence capabilities43 are all manifestations of such developments in a novel direction. Yet again, whilst potentially important, these are internal developments, reflecting the will of the member-​states. In the external realm, realities are harsh. Continued Russian dismissal, even ignorance, of EU

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claims about violations of the founding principles of the European security order, as well as of civil and political rights in Russia, is all too apparent;44 and China’s prioritisation of strategic relations with individual EU states rather than the EU as an entity brings scepticism about the EU’s foreign policy clout. Against this background, the election of Joseph Biden as American president may prove fundamentally important to the EU, especially in the foreign policy area.

Appendix Ongoing Common Security and Defence Policy Missions and Operations Name

Nature

Initiated

EU military operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUFOR Althea) EU police mission in the Palestinian territories (EUPOL COPPS) EU border assistance mission in Gaza (EUBAM Rafah) EU civilian monitoring mission in Georgia (EUMM Georgia) EU rule of law mission in Kosovo (EULEX Kosovo) EU anti-​piracy mission off the Somali coast (EUNAVFOR Atalanta) EU training mission in Somalia (EUTM Somalia) EU maritime law enforcement capacity building (EUCAP Somalia) EU capacity-​building mission (CAP SAHEL Niger) EU training mission (EUTM Mali) EU border assistance mission (EUBAM Libya) EU civilian mission (EUCAP SAHEL Mali) EU mission to advise on security sector reform (EUAM Ukraine) EU military training mission (EUTM RCA Central African Republic) EU mission to advise on civilian security sector reform (EUAM Iraq) EU mission to advise on security sector reform (EUAM RCA) EU mission to help implement the arms embargo on Libya (EUNAVFOR MED IRINI) EU military training mission in Mozambique (EUTM Mozambique)

Military Civilian Civilian Civilian Military Military Civilian Civilian Military Civilian Civilian Civilian Military Civilian Civilian Military

2004 2005 2005 2008 2008 2008 2010 2012 2012 2013 2013 2014 2014 2016 2017 2020 2020

Military

2021

Information as of November 2021. For information about all EU missions and operations, see https://​ eeas.eur​opa.eu/​top​ics/​milit​ary-​and-​civil​ian-​missi​ons-​and-​ope​rati​ons/​430/​milit​ary-​and-​civil​ian-​missi​ ons-​and-​operat​ions​_​en.

Notes 1 World Trade Organisation database: www.wto.org; European Commission, Press Release, “The European Union remains the world’s leading donor of Official Development Assistance with €75.2 billion in 2019” (16 April 2020): https://​ec.eur​opa.eu/​intern​atio​nal-​partn​ersh​ips/​news/​europ​ean-​ union-​rema​ins-​wor​lds-​lead​ing-​donor-​offic​ial-​deve​lopm​ent-​assist​ance​_​en. 2 A. Bradford, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2020). 3 Ibid. 4 M. Leonard, “Introduction: Connectivity Wars”, in idem, ed., Connectivity Wars: Why Migration, Finance and Trade are the Geo-​economic Battlegrounds of the Future (London, 2016), 23. 5 R.H. Ginsberg, The European Union in International Politics: Baptism by Fire (Lanham, MD, 2001). 6 See R. Bengtsson, The EU and the European Security Order: Interfacing Security Actors (London, 2009). 7 C. Bretherton and J. Vogler, The European Union as a Global Actor, Second Edition (London, 2006), 27. 8 Articles 2–​3, Consolidated Version of the Treaty on European Union: https://​eur-​lex.eur​opa.eu/​resou​rce. html?uri=​cel​lar:2bf14​0bf-​a3f8-​4ab2-​b506-​fd718​26e6​da6.0023.02/​DOC_​1 &for​mat=​PDF.

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The EU in International Relations 9 Article 21, ibid. 10 For elaboration, see R. Bengtsson, “Constructing Interfaces: The Neighbourhood Discourse in EU External Policy”, Journal of European Integration, 30/​5(2008), 597–​617; idem, European Security Order. 11 European External Action Service, Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe –​A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy (Brussels, 2016). 12 Ibid., 9–​10. 13 C. Hill, “The Capability-​Expectations Gap, or Conceptualising Europe’s International Role”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 31/​3(1993), 305–​25. 14 D. Allen and R. Bengtsson, “Exploring a Triangular Drama: The High Representative, the Council Presidency and the Commission”, in G. Müller-​Brandeck-​Bocquet and C. Rüger, eds., The High Representative for the EU Foreign and Security Policy –​Review and Prospects (Baden-​Baden, 2011). 15 G. Grevi, D. Helly, and D. Keohane, eds., European Security and Defence Policy: The First Ten Years (1999–​2009) (Paris, 2009). 16 Grevi, “ESDP Institutions”, in ibid., 21–​ 67; Allen and Bengtsson, “Exploring a Triangular Drama”. 17 Grevi, “ESDP Institutions”, 31–​46. 18 For an introduction, see K.E. Smith, “The European Union’s Post-​Lisbon Foreign Policy Ten Years On”, in M. Westlake, ed., The European Union’s New Foreign Policy (Berlin, 2020). 19 Its first incumbent was Baroness Lady Ashton (2009–​2014), followed by Federica Mogherini (2014–​ 2019), and Josep Borrell (2019–​present). 20 Since 2019, Charles Michel is president of the European Council. Donald Tusk (2014–​2019) and Herman von Rompuy (2009–​2014) preceded him. 21 For further information, see PESCO: https://​pesco.eur​opa.eu. 22 For comprehensive information about EU sanctions, see https://​ec.eur​opa.eu/​info/​busin​ess-​econ​ omy-​euro/​bank​ing-​and-​fina​nce/​intern​atio​nal-​relati​ons/​rest​r ict​ive-​measu​res-​sanct​ions​_​en. 23 I. Manners, “Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40/​2(2002), 235–​58. 24 C. Gebhard, “Coherence”, in C. Hill, M. Smith, and S. Vanhoonacker, eds., International Relations and the European Union, Third Edition (Oxford, 2017). 25 For a longer analysis, see R. Bengtsson, “The European Union’s Self-​Conception of Its Roles in Global Affairs”, in M. Grossman, F. Schortgen, and G. Friedrichs, eds., National Role Conceptions in a New Millennium: Defining a Place in a Changing World (London, forthcoming 2022). 26 Council of the European Union, European Security Strategy. A Secure Europe in a Better World (Brussels, 2009), 27. 27 Ibid., 13–​15, 30–​32. 28 Ibid., 29–​30, 36, citation on 43. 29 Ibid., 42. 30 Ibid., 28. 31 Ibid., 39. 32 European External Action Service, Shared Vision, 13. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 33. 35 Bengtsson, “European Union’s Self-​Conception”; W. Wagner and R. Anholt, “Resilience as the EU Global Strategy’s New Leitmotif: Pragmatic, Problematic or Promising?”, Contemporary Security Policy, 37/​3(2016), 414–​30. 36 J. Howorth, “EU Global Strategy in a Changing World: Brussels’ Approach to the Emerging Powers”, ibid., 390. 37 Smith, “Post-​Lisbon Foreign Policy”, 244. 38 N. Tocci, “The Making of the EU Global Strategy”, Contemporary Security Policy, 37/​3(2016), 464. 39 “Speech by Chancellor Angela Merkel to the European Parliament 13 November 2018”: www.bundesregierung.de/​breg-​en/​chancellor/​speech-​by-​federal-​chancellor-​angela-​merkel-​to-​ the-european-​parliament-​strasbourg-​13-​november-​2018-​1550688. 40 “Speech by President-​elect of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen to the European Parliament Plenary Session” (27 November 2019): https://​ec.eur​opa.eu/​info/​sites/​info/​files/​ president-​elect-​speech-​original_​1.pdf. 41 J. Borrell, “Embracing Europe’s Power”, Project Syndicate (8 February 2020).

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Rikard Bengtsson 42 Established in 2017, the European Defence Fund began operating 2019 with the objective of co-​financing joint equipment development and procurement to avoid fragmentation and duplication in European defence. 43 Established in 2017, the Co-​ordinated Annual Review on Defence was in full operation by 2019. It reviews national capabilities and plans and identifies areas of potential co-​operation in defence amongst EU member-​states. 44 “EU Foreign Policy RIP”, Politico (13 February 2021).

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20 HUMAN RIGHTS IN AN ILLIBERAL WORLD Jennifer Kandjii and Andrew S. Thompson*

The liberal international order founded after the Second World War is under assault, threatened by shifts in geopolitics, most notably by the rise of Asia, particularly China, as an economic rival to the West following the global financial crisis of 2008. It is being challenged by a toxic combination of economic nationalism and illiberal populism that are reactions to the inequities and displacement of a globalised economy in which the rewards have hardly been distributed fairly or equally. New technologies are also disruptive –​surveillance technologies that allow governments and corporations to watch their citizens, and social media platforms that have become vehicles for misinformation and divisiveness. A resurgent Russia willing and able to flex its political muscle on the global stage is also undermining it. At the same time, arms control agreements that have brought much-​needed stability to the world are being discarded. Meanwhile, some governments continue to violate their citizens’ rights with impunity, with refugees denied access to a state to seek asylum, despite well-​developed human rights and refugee systems. International organisations –​principally the United Nations [UN] –​have weakened, as states, particularly the Great Powers, have come to see the international order and institutions that uphold it as too much of a constraint on their behaviour, rather than as the vehicle for advancing common aims and interests. States more focused on enforcing sovereignty and perpetuating a global culture of impunity increasingly undermine institutions responsible for international justice, such as the International Criminal Court [ICC]. More recently, the COVID global health pandemic unravels it further, the full economic, social, and political ramifications of which will remain unknown for years to come. None of this is good for the protection of international human rights. It is this global context of incongruent antagonistic forces that render human rights protections critical yet arduous. How did the world get to this place? How did international rules and laws get weaker and less legitimate, not more robust and effective? It is, admittedly, a complicated story with lots of room for disagreement. One explanation is that the liberal international order was never that strong to begin with as it was never much of a departure from previous orders based on Realpolitik and that its demise is hardly surprising and possibly even inevitable. A similar argument espousing this inherent weakness of the human rights project argues that human rights in their foundation are largely a Western concept conceived in Western thought and do not in their formation represent the dignity of the entire human population.1 This critique of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-25

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Western dominance in thought and authorship results from the inherent tensions around the universality claims of human rights, leading to a not fully embraced, solidified, or harmonious project.2 Another explanation is that liberalism failed to deliver and spread its economic benefits evenly within and across societies.3 From this explanation, the combination of rising inequality, declining political legitimacy in the context of polarised and radicalised nationalism and populism, and the 2008 global financial crisis proved formidable challenges to the global liberal order and the human rights regime.4 At their core, human rights define the relationship between citizens and the state, placing constraints on what the latter can do to the former.5 As scholars of human rights have long argued, this redefining of the relationship has been a long process, one that was neither inevitable nor pre-​ordained. The story begins with the League of Nations. The League, the predecessor to the UN established after the First World War, was an utter failure on questions of human rights. The founders of the League understood that ethnic and religious violence had been one of the triggers of the First World War. They recognised that the world, particularly in Eastern Europe, constituted multi-​ethnic nation-​states, that no amount of shifting borders would eliminate this reality, and that tensions amongst groups could potentially escalate into war. The solution was to establish minority rights treaties between the League and the minority-​hosting states whose ratification became a prerequisite to entry into the League. The treaties in turn found basis on a “Guarantee Clause”, which stated that the protection of minorities was an international matter that fell under the League’s jurisdiction.6 The system the League created was highly susceptible to political manipulation, in which minority states, minorities, and kin-​states all promoted nationalist agendas, instead of co-​operating to settle disputes in question. Moreover, the protection of minority rights was not the League’s first priority, but rather the maintenance of collective security.7 The League’s unwillingness to enforce the rule of law, including the 1938 Convention on Refugees Coming from Germany, meant that it would neither prevent war nor protect minorities, including granting asylum to those fleeing the Nazis.8 As such, Adolph Hitler was able to exploit the “minorities question” using the plight of German populations in surrounding countries to justify his expansionist agenda, the subsequent atrocities culminating in the Holocaust.9 Despite League failures, the idea that individuals have rights and states have a duty to uphold those rights began to gain traction, even if the reasons for embracing individual rights over minority rights devolved from self-​interest rather than morality.10 The August 1941 Atlantic Charter that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill signed identified the protection of rights and liberties, and the need to defeat fascism, as a core rationale for defeating Germany. Whilst sceptics have suggested that the Atlantic Charter was nothing more than war sloganeering and propaganda, other scholars have pointed to it as the key moment in what they call the “rights revolution”, or the internalisation of the idea that human beings are rights-​bearing individuals.11 Founded in the wake of the Second World War, the UN embodied the new liberal international order. Part of its role was to set the human rights standards that are the basis of international law, foster international co-​operation, and, as stated in the opening lines of the UN Charter’s preamble, save “future generations from the scourge of war”.12 Article 1.3 of the Charter authorises the UN to promote respect for human rights, although it falls short of charging the organisation with protecting or enforcing human rights. Still, the founders of the UN were more interested in preserving the world order that emerged from the Second World War –​ including maintaining empires –​than in more radical transformations.13 Article 2.7 of the UN Charter enshrined the principle of non-​interference in the domestic affairs of member-​states unless the Security Council deemed those affairs a threat to international peace and security. At least in the 1940s, state sovereignty brought order, stability, and predictability, things sorely 248

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missing in the inter-​war years. Sovereignty was necessary if humanity was to have any hope of achieving any lasting peace. Even so, the individual became the subject of international law. For the times, it was quite an innovation. The Charter also called for the creation of an inter-​governmental Commission on Human Rights [CHR], whose purpose was to lead the nascent international organisation’s human rights project. Established a year later, housed within the Economic and Social Council, and chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, the CHR devoted much of its energy to setting standards for international human rights law. The CHR spent two years drafting, negotiating, and reviewing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR] adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948.14 Complementing the Commission were two sub-​commissions made up of independent experts –​the Sub-​Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, and the Sub-​Commission on Freedom of Information and of the Press, dissolved in 1951 –​and a separate Commission on the Status of Women, which dealt exclusively with questions of women’s human rights. Over the course of its 60-​year history, the Commission and complementary bodies produced a wide range of legal instruments that –​eventually –​ promoted compliance with the standards it set. But it was also a forum that at times floundered, a place where ideological and political contests were fought and member-​states used their seats at the table to shield themselves and their allies from scrutiny. A new Human Rights Council [HRC] replaced the CHR in 2006; so eroded was CHR credibility that the organisation was not salvageable. Even so, the CHR “helped to reposition, quite fundamentally, the individual vis-​à-​vis the state”.15 The Commission’s first and perhaps most celebrated accomplishment was the adoption of the UDHR at the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. Although non-​binding, the UDHR has become the bedrock of international human rights law. One of its significant contributions is that it codified into law both civil and political rights, as well as economic, social, and cultural rights, and affirmed the principle that rights are indivisible, inalienable, and interdependent –​that individuals cannot enjoy one set of rights without the other and these rights are not subject to change over time.16 Of course, the Declaration is a product of a particular moment. In 1948, the Cold War had begun to define international relations. The Soviets, who could not support the individualism of human rights or Article 13, which provides for the rights of citizens to leave their countries, abstained from voting on the Declaration. From that moment on, the Cold War cast a long shadow over the UN human rights project, as each side co-​opted rights into the larger ideological struggle between East and West. For this reason, some academics have suggested that the UDHR was not nearly as significant as scholars of human rights claim, that human rights were just one of many utopian ideas being debated in the 1940s and hardly the most popular at the time. Nonetheless, the genie was out of the bottle, even if the full extent of its magic was not apparent at the time. Shortly after its adoption, the Commission turned its attention to binding international law, specifically the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR] and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights [ICESCR]. In addition to customary international law, general principles, and other sources of international law, these treaties laid down obligations of governments to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of individuals or groups. The other major force that influenced international human rights and the liberal international order was decolonisation. Indeed, many newly independent states used the language of universal human rights, at least at the UN, to liberate themselves from the shackles of European empires.17 Beginning in the early 1950s, states from the Global South insisted on the right to 249

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self-​determination. Fearful of infringements of their sovereignty, they advocated for the right to determine their own fates and control their own affairs and destinies. It is no accident that Article 1 of each of the Covenants protects the “right to self-​determination of peoples”. All other rights were to flow from this first initial right. With decolonisation came greater calls for racial equality. The March 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa that saw the racist police kill 67 protestors and wound 186 exposed the Apartheid system’s violence and prompted a flurry of activity at the UN. The Security Council deemed the situation a threat to international peace and security. On 14 December 1960, the General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. It established the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples “to deal with the racial practices of the Republic of South Africa”.18 The CHR also began drafting new international law, specifically the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination –​adopted by the General Assembly on 7 December 1962 –​ and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination –​ adopted on 21 December 1965. The Convention was particularly noteworthy for not only the speed with which it was drafted but because, more importantly, it was the first human rights instrument to include a treaty-​monitoring body, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, tasked with ensuring compliance with the instrument. It was also in the mid-​1960s that Western member-​states began to sour on the UN human rights project. Membership of the Commission expanded from 21 to 32 in 1966, with countries from Africa and Asia making up the bulk of new members. These members “transformed” the Commission, often aligning with the Soviet Bloc to form “a new majority that regularly outvoted Western and Latin American members”.19 Governments in the West were not amused. For example, disenchanted with the CHR, British officials argued that “its attention almost completely [shifted] away from technical questions of human rights to become another propaganda organ of [the] UN for Afro-​Asian and Communist Bloc views on such subjects as Vietnam, Rhodesia and South Africa”.20 The “postcolonial transformation” affected the UN human rights project in other ways. At the first World Conference on Human Rights in 1968 in Tehran, the very concept of universalism came under attack by states from the Global South. Western Powers, particularly the United States, had failed to defend the concepts of universality and rights of the individual against a collectivist, post-​colonial, cultural-​relativist, centralised and autocratic development agenda. This revealed, “with remarkable clarity the altered balance of forces in the UN following decolonisation”, in which the “greatest global powers in the world were having their diplomatic agenda dictated to them by a collection of militarily weak and economically impoverished states”.21 A shift in balance threatened Western countries with a history rooted in dominance, conquest, and empire. Countries that had been under the yoke of the European Empires were fiercely protective of their sovereignty, and understandably so. Nevertheless, the transition from colony to the state was far from smooth in many parts of the world. Nationalist movements gave way to autocratic governments in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, many with little patience for universal human rights broadly or minority rights specifically. Decolonised countries significantly struggled with reconciling the freedoms of political independence and the continuing economic dominance and land ownership of white settlers in their backyards.22 The situation remains particularly pronounced in Southern Africa, where disparity of land-​ownership, corruption, socio-​economic inequality, and unemployment rates means that political independence did not translate into economic freedoms for the majority of the liberated peoples. 250

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Decolonisation also occurred in confluence with the structural adjustments of the 1980s to the early 2000s. The decolonised, impoverished reality for many post-​independence states rendered them ripe to the structural adjustments project of the two Bretton Woods organisations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The duo’s policy package on development, commonly referred to as the Washington Consensus, imposed conditions on their loans in a concerted push to turn lending to crisis-​and poverty-​stricken developing countries into springboards for reform.23 Critics argue the measures portrayed the use of conditional loans as a tool of neo-​colonialism that operated to the detriment of developing nations.24 The proof of this exploitation, critics argued, is the increasing capital flight from developing countries, particularly from Sub-​Saharan Africa, to the rest of the world.25 In many cases, these supposed bailouts by developed countries to developing ones –​their former colonies –​in exchange for reform have subjected developing countries to exploitative investment by multinational corporations and international trade and finance institutions.26 Enough evidence had accrued from the 1980s to the late 2000s showing that the combination of structural adjustments of international trade and financial institutions and capital outflow often reduced the standard of living and hampered public service delivery. For instance, despite racking up $177 billion in external debt by 2008, Africa’s net capital flight flow between 1970 and 2008 was $1.56 trillion, including interest.27 Consequently, there is a “revolving door” connecting external debt and capital flight, in which loans to African governments are channelled into the pockets of corrupt political elites and then flow out of the continent in the form of capital flight.28 Tellingly, “77,000 excess infant deaths per year” were preventable if the hundreds of billions went to public health.29 Overall, the policy package of the Washington Consensus was “more damaging than sensible”, as governments slashed public spending in education and health care –​in the process compromising the fulfilment of social and economic rights –​to balance budgets and fulfil loan requirements of the austerity regime.30 Given these developments, unsurprisingly, the worst situations of a mass exodus in the latter half of the twentieth century emanated from the South. Something changed in the 1970s. Rights took on a transnational importance that they previously lacked. Temporary détente in the Cold War allowed for the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which raised the importance of rights as an issue of international concern. It was also a time when the nascent grassroots human rights movement of the 1960s gave way to a highly professionalised and increasingly influential movement.31 At the UN, new treaty-​ monitoring mechanisms emerged, along with special rapporteurs holding thematic or country-​ specific mandates, who “have played a critical role in shaping the content of international human rights norms, shedding light on how states comply with such norms, and advancing measures to improve respect for them”.32 Economic, social, and cultural rights also took on a heightened importance. The ICCPR and ICESCR came into force in 1976 and, together with the UDHR, completed the international bill of human rights. But more than this, UN member-​states were more committed to enforcing the former than they were the latter and resisted developing thematic special procedure implementation mechanisms that would position economic, social, and cultural rights at the same value-​plane as their civil and political rights counterpart.33 Perhaps the greatest development of the decade was the beginning of the process of expanding rights standards to include those in need of special protections –​also known as third generation rights –​most notably the codification in law of women’s human rights. However, are human rights women’s rights? Remarkably, even this question needed debate.34 In response to the international feminist movement of the 1970s, the UN General Assembly declared 1975 “International Women’s Year” and organised the first World Conference on Women in Mexico City. At the urging of this Conference, the UN subsequently declared the 251

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years 1976–​1985 as the Decade for Women and established a Voluntary Fund for the Decade.35 In 1979, the General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and explicitly defined discrimination against women, setting up an agenda for national action to end all forms of gender-​based discrimination.36 The 1995 Beijing Conference, the fourth World Conference on Women, asserted those women’s rights as human rights and established the Beijing Platform for Action to commit specific actions that actualise respect for women’s rights.37 Despite these provisions and frameworks, women still bear the greatest burden of social, political, and economic inequality, experience disproportionate adversity, and are denied significant opportunities to realise their full potential.38 The world’s women and girls disproportionately experience the burden of poverty and economic distress.39 Women remain under-​represented at all levels and scales of political leadership and decision-​making –​local, national, regional, and global.40 Marking the female lived-​experience is unequal access to opportunities: in education, healthcare, and economic pursuits.41 Moreover, women and girls excessively experience sexual exploitation, violence, and assault at home, in the public domain, and in armed conflict.42 The societal system inherently lacks respect for and inadequately protects the rights of women and girls across the globe. Females face discrimination, their rights violated mostly by males. Overall, women and girls are not experiencing the same freedoms and rights entitled to them as humans, as citizens, as equals to men.43 Societal, cultural, and religious traditions prominently favour the advancement of men over that of women.44 Therefore, power, perpetration, and pleasure largely shape the male experience. Debates within feminism have also illuminated the need to utilise an intersectional lens to represent the experiences of diverse groups of women in society, namely those inscribed by various intersections of ethnicity, class, colonisation, religion, sexual orientation, disability, indigeneity, and gender.45 Black and lesbian feminists argued that cultural essentialisms and false universalisms deny the diverse experiences of women’s oppression from finding voice in dominant human rights debate.46 When the experience of marginalised women “within racially segregated societies, within the oppressive class and caste systems and as members of indigenous populations” is contrasted to the male equivalent of social categorisation, “if poor men are double oppressed by their colour and race, poor women experience a triple yoke of oppression”.47 Intersectionality analyses reveal this triple oppression and exploitation showing how different social identities and structural factors shape a women’s understanding of being oppressed, acknowledging their experience of subordination from human rights discourse48 and respecting the experience of difference amongst diverse backgrounds in current feminist and human rights dialogue to achieve universality.49 Although the COVID pandemic’s full effects are not yet realised, early evidence shows women hit disproportionately hard by its economic fallout, specifically that service sector jobs predominantly held by women were the first eliminated during lockdowns, whilst the burden of home care rested predominantly on their shoulders. Many pundits and politicians fear that many women pushed out of the workforce may never return. The pandemic is as such unravelling the economic, social, and political gains women secured in the past decade and exacerbating gender inequality and sexual and gender based violence. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked a “unipolar moment” for the United States, a time when both the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, along with their allies in the West, championed a liberal international order that favoured open markets, democracy, and human rights.50 Indeed, after taking office, Clinton’s Administration adopted a policy of “enlargement” based on four inter-​related pillars. They were “strengthening the core community of major market democracies”; “consolidating democracy and markets in states of 252

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special significance or opportunity”; “countering the aggression –​and supporting the liberalisation –​of states hostile to democracy and markets”; and “pursuing humanitarian goals and limiting sectarian conflict in regions of greatest concern”.51 In short, the aim was to remake the world in America’s image by exporting democracy and liberal economic markets to countries and regions like Russia, China, Southern Africa, and Latin America.52 The 1990s were “the golden age” of a United States-​led liberal international order.53 It was no accident that the 1990s saw a massive expansion of the global human rights system. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose mandate is to promote and protect human rights, was established in 1994, a direct outcome of the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights. International tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia prosecuted perpetrators of atrocities and, in 1998, states gathered at Rome to finalise a treaty creating a permanent ICC, which came into force in 2000. In 1998, the former Chilean dictator’s, Augusto Pinochet’s, arrest in Britain for his crimes whilst in office, following an extradition request from Spain, sent a signal to the world that former heads of state were no longer immune from prosecution. Meanwhile, a number of states introduced universal jurisdiction laws to try alleged perpetrators of mass atrocities whose crimes “shocked the conscience” of humanity. For a brief moment, it appeared as though no one was above the law. Everything changed with 9/​11, the subsequent United States-​led War on Terror, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Simply stated, rights gave way to national security. Governments around the world –​including liberal democracies –​committed “lesser evils”, a euphemism for rationalising crimes of torture, extraordinary rendition, and indefinite detention in the name of protecting their publics. The United States detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a maximum-​security facility used to hold “enemy combatants” captured by American forces –​mainly in Afghanistan –​and operating beyond United States and international law, became a symbol of a world in which power and might eclipse the rule of law. The “massive violence the U.S. deployed in response to 9/​11 was the defining feature of the first decade of the twenty-​first century”, violence that has made a mockery of the West’s claims of moral superiority.54 The UN Security Council’s refusal to authorise the war against Iraq in 2003 drew the wrath of the George W. Bush Administration, which in turn prompted a massive reform of the international organisation led by Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2005–​2006. The reform efforts produced some successes. At the annual Heads of State meeting in New York in September 2005, the General Assembly adopted the principle of the “responsibility to protect” [R2P], an idea that emerged from the Canadian-​sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. R2P attempted to reframe the concept of sovereignty from the absolute right of states to something that states earn by protecting the rights of their citizens. In turn, the international community has an obligation to intervene in situations where the state is unwilling or unable to protect its citizens from genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass human rights abuses, but only if authorised by the Security Council. The reform efforts also led the establishment of the Human Rights Council. The Commission on Human Rights had lost much of its credibility, in large part because states used their membership on the body to deflect criticism of their human rights records and those of their allies. The Council –​which reported directly to the UN General Assembly and not the Economic and Social Council and met three times per year versus the single annual meeting of the Commission –​included a “universal periodic review” process requiring all states to subject themselves to peer reviews every four years. Even so, despite the normative and institutional advances, neither the Security Council nor the HRC have been able to prevent atrocity crimes, whether in Darfur, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, or Myanmar. 253

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The ICC has also faced renewed attacks. Since its founding, many African states have become leery of the court, accusing it of a bias against the continent. In 2017, Burundi withdrew from the Court, and shortly thereafter, the Jacob Zuma government of South Africa attempted to follow suit and would have done so had the South African courts not ruled that doing so would be unconstitutional. Opposition was not limited to Africa. The Donald Trump Administration in the United States was particularly hostile to the Court, even going so far as to sanction its prosecutors for their willingness to investigate allegations of war crimes committed by American forces in Afghanistan. The UN turned 75 in 2020 at a time when the world was in turmoil. The latest budget crisis facing the organisation is reflective of a malaise that has infected an organisation that, despite its shortcomings and failures, remains indispensable to address collectively the critical challenges of the times. Preserving rights in an age of disruption remains one of the organisation’s pressing challenges. Admittedly, international human rights law developed at the UN has never had a particularly strong influence on state behaviour. The standards have been admirable, even noble, but enforcement has always been lacking. Whilst for a brief moment after the Cold War it appeared as though rights would occupy a more prominent role in world affairs, the hold international human rights had on humanity’s imagination has diminished. In the second decade of the twenty-​first century, it is common for observers to talk of “the end times of human rights” world, in which, with changing power dynamics and a relative decline in the power of the West, human rights as a concept may be verging on bankruptcy.55 It is far too premature to dismiss rights as an ideal of a passing era. The post-​Second World War human rights project is not irrelevant –​its resilience stemming, in part, from its ability to change with the times. Through rights, the world has articulated and codified into law a vision in which everyone can enjoy certain fundamental freedoms and entitlements and aspire to a life of dignity. Such rights may hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable for their actions through international criminal justice mechanisms. At least, this is the dream. Even so, human rights and the international order enabling them are under assault and have been for quite some time, arguably since states determined that these rights represented a threat to their sovereignty. Great Power rivalry amongst the United States, Russia, and China has become more intense, whilst the Trump Administration further undermined the UN human rights system with its decision in 2018 to withdraw from the HRC. The severity of these forces undermining human rights and the liberal order may be accelerating because of the COVID-​19 pandemic. Time will tell. Thankfully, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Youth around the world, led by the Swedish teenage environmentalist, Greta Thunberg, amongst others, and the Fridays for Futures movement continued their mass strikes calling on governments to take decisive action to address climate change. Still, the most significant impact of the pandemic was the worldwide mass protests demanding greater social justice and an end to systemic racism. In 2020, George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, galvanised mass demonstrations around the world led by the Black Lives Matter movement, demanding an end both to police brutality against blacks and systemic anti-​Black racism in all its manifestations. If the order is to survive another 75 years, international human rights will need strengthening. For as go human rights, so goes the world.

Notes * This article would not have been possible without the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 1 See, for example, Olivia Ball and Paul Gready, The No-​nonsense Guide to Human Rights (London, 2006).

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Human Rights in an Illiberal World 2 Ibid. 3 “The demise of the global liberal order”, IISS (last modified 17 January 2019): www.iiss.org/​blogs/​ survival-​blog/​2019/​01/​demise-​of-​the-​global-​liberal-​order. 4 Ibid. 5 “The Fundamentals of Human Rights”: http://​shape​sea.com/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2016/​02/​HR-​ Textb​ook-​Ch-​1-​Funda​ment​als-​Ed-​1.pdf. 6 Inis L. Claude, Jr., National Minorities: An International Problem (NY, 1955), 20. 7 C.A. Macartney, “The League of Nations’ Protection of Minority Rights”, in Evan Luard, ed., The International Protection of Human Rights (NY, 1967), 23, 25, 34. 8 See, for example, Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933 to 1948 (Toronto, 1983). 9 Claude, Jr. National Minorities, 9, 24, 28, 50. 10 Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–​1950”, Historical Journal, 47/​2(2004), 379–​98. 11 See, for example, Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Jan Herman Burgers, “The Road to San Francisco: The Revival of Human Rights Ideas in the Twentieth Century”, Human Rights Quarterly, 14/​4(1992), 447–​77; Daniel Cohen, “The Holocaust and the ‘Human Rights Revolution’: A Reassessment”, in Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock, eds., The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford, 2012), 53–​72; Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen, Second Edition (Philadelphia, PA, 2003). 12 “Charter of the United Nations”: www.un.org/​en/​about-​us/​un-​charter/​preamble. 13 See Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2009). 14 “Fundamentals of Human Rights”. 15 Paul Gordon Lauren, “ ‘To Preserve and Build on its Achievements and to Redress its Shortcomings’: The Journey from the Commission on Human Rights to the Human Rights Council”, Human Rights Quarterly, 29(2007), 320–​25. 16 Mark Philip Bradley, “Approaching the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, in Iriye, Goedde, and Hitchcock, Human Rights Revolution, 327–​43. 17 See Egon Schwelb, “The International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination”, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 15/​4(October 1966), 996–​1068; Steven L.B. Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge, 2016). 18 Roger S. Clark, “Human Rights Strategies of the 1960s Within the United Nations: A Tribute to the Late Kamleshwar Das”, Human Rights Quarterly, 21/​2(1999), 26, 316–​17. 19 Howard Tolley, Jr., “Decision-​Making at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1979–​ 1982”, Human Rights Quarterly, 5/​1(1983), 28–​29. 20 “International Conference on Human Rights, Tehran, 1968”, “Telegram from London to Ottawa”, 26 March 1968, 1, RG [Library and Archives of Canada, Ottawa] 6, box 119, file, pt. 2. 21 Roland Burke, “From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN International Conference on Human Rights, Tehran, 1968”, Journal of World History, 19/​3(2008), 276–​77, 282–​86. 22 John Luiz, “The Battle for Social and Economic Policy”, Discourse, Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand, 35/​2(2007). 23 Charles Gore, “The Rise and Fall of the Washington Consensus as a Paradigm for Developing Countries”. World Development, 28/​5(2000), 789–​804. 24 Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson. “Omission and Commission in the Development Economics of Daron Acemoglu and Esther Duflo”, Canadian Journal of Development Studies/​Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 40/​4(2019), 447–​63. 25 Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce, Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent (London, 2011). 26 Chernomas and Hudson, “Omission and commission”. 27 Ndikumana and Boyce, Odious Debts, 5. 28 Ibid., 4. 29 Ibid., 82–​83. 30 Chernomas and Hudson, “Omission and commission”, 450. 31 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA, 2010).

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Jennifer Kandjii and Andrew S. Thompson 32 Ted Piccone, Catalyst for Change: How the UN’s Independent Experts Promote Human Rights (Washington, DC, 2012), 1, 5. 33 Christophe Golay, Claire Mahon, and Ioana Cismas, “The Impact of the UN Special Procedures on the Development and Implementation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights”, International Journal of Human Rights, 15/​2(2011), 299–​318. 34 According to the UN, the last decade has produced some gains in gender equality: more girls go to school, more women serve in parliament and positions of leadership and decision-​making, fewer girls forced into early marriage or suffer from female genital mutilation, and law reform is advancing gender equality: www.un.org/​sustainabledevelopment/​gender-​equality/​. 35 UN, “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment –​United Nations Sustainable Development”: www. un.org/​sustainabledevelopment/​gender-​equality/​. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 UN Women, “Annual Report 2010–​2011”: www.unwomen.org/​-​/​media/​headquarters/​attachments/​ sections/​ l ibrary/​ p ublications/​ 2 011/​ 8 /​ u nwomen_ ​ a nnualreport_ ​ 2 010- ​ 2 011_ ​ e n%20pdf.pdf?la= en&vs=​1505. 39 S. de la Peña Espín, and G. Luchsinger, “Fund for Gender Equality Annual Report 2019–​2020”. Digital library: Publications 2020: www.unwomen.org/​en/​digital-​library/​publications/​2020/​07/​ fund-​for-​gender-​equality-​annual-​report-​2019–​2020. 40 UN, “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment”. 41 Janni Aragon and Mariel Miller, Global Women’s Issues: Women in the World Today, extended version (Washington, DC, 2012), 40–​152. 42 UN, “Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment”. 43 Marjorie Agosín, Women, Gender, and Human Rights: A Global Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ, 2001). 44 See Katarina Tomasevski, Women and Human Rights (London, 1993). 45 Rosemary Hunter, “Deconstructing the Subjects of Feminism: The Essentialism Debate in Feminist Theory and Practice”, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 6/​1(1996), 135–​62. 46 Dana Collins, Sylvanna Falcón, Sharmila Lodhia, and Molly Talcott, “New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights”. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12/​3–​4(2010), 298–​318: https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​14616​742.2010.513​096. 47 David Mosse, “Authority, Gender and Knowledge: Theoretical Reflections on the Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal”. Development and Change, 25/​3(1994), 497–​526. 48 See Ealasaid Munro, “Feminism: A Fourth Wave?” (2013):https://​journ​als.sage​pub.com/​doi/​abs/​ 10.1111/​2041-​9066.12021?jour​nalC​ode=​plia. 49 Rosemary Putman Tong, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction (Boulder, CO, 2009). 50 Graham Allison, “The Myth of the Liberal Order: From Historical Accident to Conventional Wisdom,” Foreign Affairs 97, no. 4 (July/August 2018), 130. 51 Clinton Presidential Library, “Enlargement: Purpose and Practice, Speech by National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, December 14, 1993”, 3, Folder “Lake –​ ‘Enlargement,’ CFR-​12/​14/​93”: https://​clin​ton.presid​enti​alli​brar​ies.us/​items/​show/​9016. 52 Ibid., 5. 53 G. John Ikenberry, “The End of the Liberal International Order?”, International Affairs, 94/​1(2018), 7. 54 Stephen Hopgood, The End Times of Human Rights (Ithaca, NY, 2013), 182. 55 Ibid.

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21 THE NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANISATION AND ITS CURRENT CHALLENGES Michael Rühle

In its comprehensive objectives and techniques used to accomplish them, NATO indeed moves beyond the limits of a traditional alliance toward a novel type of functional organization. Hans Morgenthau1 Hans Morgenthau’s lucid characterisation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO] remains as valid as ever. For over seven decades, NATO has been the central framework for security policy and defence co-​ordination amongst the United States, Canada, and an increasingly large part of Europe. To this day, it remains a key mechanism for harnessing the collective military might of North America and Europe and for legitimising the United States’ role as a “European Power”. NATO’s longevity continues to be the object of countless academic studies. Theories of realism, constructivism, and institutionalism have been applied in the hope to find a satisfying answer to the question of why NATO, initially perceived as a temporary construct to help advance Western Europe’s recovery after the Second World War, outlasted most predictions.2 Whilst it is possible to explain some aspects of NATO with specific theories,3 the simplest answer to the question about NATO’s longevity is that the Allies continue to have a strategic interest in being part of a transatlantic security framework. NATO serves its members as both a security blanket against the ill winds of international relations and a political and military “force multiplier” to shape the broader strategic environment in line with their collective interests. NATO ties the United States –​including its “nuclear umbrella” –​to Europe’s defence; it allows member-​states to spend less on defence than if left to their own devices; and the permanent consultation and co-​operation process creates a degree of predictability that governments cherish.4 For these reasons, the tendency amongst parts of the scholarly community and the media to portray NATO as being in a permanent state of crisis does not capture the essence of this alliance. NATO certainly had more than one “near-​death experience”,5 yet academic observers, in particular, sometimes misunderstand political debate as a sign of “NATO fatigue”, not realising that tackling difficult policy issues and ironing out disagreements is one of the most basic functions of an alliance. There is also a widespread tendency to mistake the debate about the future “course” of the alliance for disagreement over its fundamental “value”. This is not to DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-26

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predict NATO’s permanently assured future. Before 2021, American President Donald Trump, for example, openly questioned whether the alliance still served United States’ interests and, had he won a second term in office, might well have tried to lead the United States out of NATO.6 Moreover, even a strong US commitment and seven decades of successful transatlantic defence co-​operation say little about NATO’s future. After all, the Washington Treaty, a treaty so clear that “even a milkman in Omaha can understand it”,7 came at a time of security largely understood as a state-​centric affair, focusing on the defence of borders and territory against aggression by another state. Today, these traditional notions of security are increasingly giving way to a complex mix of military and non-​military threats that can also affect societies from within. For NATO, based on traditional notions of defence against an “armed attack”,8 and whose founding Treaty even defines the specific territory that is eligible for collective protection,9 this rise of “de-​territorialised”, non-​kinetic threats creates a whole series of challenges.10 How well NATO addresses them will determine its future as an effective security provider. The structural changes in international security are profound, and the transatlantic community is only just beginning to absorb them. Amongst them is the rise of non-​kinetic threats, such as cyberattacks, which offer little or no early warning, and whose ambiguous nature creates dilemmas of attribution. Failing states will continue to pose a major problem, as they provide terrorist groups with safe havens and act as breeding grounds for many other illicit activities, such as piracy and the trafficking of narcotics or people. The number of states able to master the nuclear fuel cycle, thereby becoming at least “virtual” nuclear weapons states, is growing; and the commercialisation of proliferation, namely by selling sensitive technologies to the highest bidder, will add yet another element of unpredictability to the international system.11 Climate change is now widely recognised as a security challenge, as it is seen both as a “threat multiplier” and a factor that transforms the environment in which NATO forces will have to operate.12 Moreover, fake news campaigns, notably on social media, seek to exploit and amplify political fault lines within Western societies, further complicating decision taking in NATO. Finally, as the fake news campaigns –​“infodemic” –​and cyberattacks against pharmaceutical companies during the COVID pandemic have demonstrated, even the handling of a health crisis is becoming part of the competition between democracies and autocratic regimes such as China.13 As the 2008 Russo-​ Georgian war and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 demonstrated, classical inter-​state wars in and around Europe remain a realistic prospect and thus require NATO to continue making considerable investments in military deterrence and defence. However, many future military conflicts are likely to be asymmetric, with uncertain legitimacy and duration, and with opponents that do not adhere to internationally agreed restraints on violence or the “rules of war”. Moreover, even a successful intervention will see an extended post-​conflict reconstruction phase generating additional political, military and financial burdens. Finally, as has been demonstrated by the course of events in the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, the outcomes of such interventions will often be ambiguous, as the results of even the most extensive nation-​building efforts will hardly ever meet initial expectations. A variety of “domestic” developments within the transatlantic community aggravates these challenges. One is defence budgets. In all Allied nations, defence budgets compete with other items. However, the degree to which national political leaders allow unforeseen developments, such as the COVID pandemic, to affect their respective defence budgets and force transformation processes varies considerably according to the importance that countries attach to national defence. In a similar vein, the increasing dominance of economic and resource considerations over traditional notions of military security could compromise the transatlantic security 258

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consensus. This “economisation of security”, that is, the priority given to national economic well-​being and access to energy and other resources over military alliance considerations, is just about to become visible; yet, it is likely to dominate national policies in the years ahead –​and possibly at the expense of Allied solidarity.14 This emerging security landscape challenges the unity of the transatlantic community on several levels. On the political level, the fact that most new threats are non-​existential and do not necessarily affect all Allies in the same way challenges the logic of collective action. Second, on the military level, the operations meant to address some of these new challenges collectively reveal significant differences in Allies’ “strategic culture”, whether with respect to risk-​taking, military doctrine and equipment, or different constitutional realities –​for example, national caveats. Third, on the institutional level, the new threats challenge NATO’s centrality, as many of them are non-​military in nature and thus do not lend themselves to a purely military response. Fourth, social-​media campaigns that create alternative realities to destabilise political communities challenge the political cohesion of individual societies and, by extension, NATO cohesion. Fifth, the fact that some of these new threats may require an early response –​ kinetic and non-​kinetic –​runs counter to the established practice of deliberate and lengthy intra-​alliance consultations. Sixth, with the “hybrid” combination of military and non-​military instruments, which blurs the boundaries between peace, crisis, and conflict as distinct phases, NATO’s situational awareness and, consequently, consensual decision-​making may become far more difficult. None of these structural changes invalidate the logic of an institution like NATO, the less so as the transatlantic community is going to remain far more like-​minded than other communities elsewhere on the globe, far more geared towards co-​ordination and co-​operation than others, and thus far better able to “co-​opt” others into a common approach. Nor do these changes invalidate NATO as an institution that combines military competence and Atlantic identity in unique ways. If North America and Europe want to enjoy a politically predictable and militarily relevant security relationship, they have little choice other than NATO, irrespective of cyclical waves of European self-​assertion, such as the clarion call for “strategic autonomy”. With Britain having left the European Union [EU], 80 per cent of NATO’s defence budgets are generated outside the Union.15 Finally, American frustrations about European military under-​performance will not change the fundamental fact that Europe provides a political “milieu” that is geared towards working with the United States, whereas in Asia, Washington must co-​operate through a complicated array of difficult bilateral relationships. In short, whilst the new strategic landscape does not endanger NATO’s survival, it challenges NATO’s centrality as the institution of choice for the Allies. For NATO to meet all of these challenges requires not just bureaucratic and military-​technical adjustments, but the rejuvenation of its political core.16 The grand unifying twin project of the immediate post-​Cold War period –​expanding NATO’s missions and membership –​has long run its course. The disappointing results of NATO’s interventions in Afghanistan and Libya have shattered the belief that NATO could derive new legitimacy from crisis management operations. Russia’s assertive policies, in turn, have compromised the assumption of a new Europe based on an ever-​expanding web of Western institutions, with Russia as a closely associated partner. In short, as the major assumptions about NATO’s post-​Cold War trajectory have been shattered, there is currently no unifying vision amongst Allies about NATO’s role. Even if NATO has long ceased to be a “single-​issue institution” and turned into a multi-​purpose security instrument, it can only act if all Allies share a similar security outlook –​and a related idea of what constitutes a desirable political order. Without the political and moral compass of a shared identity, the new threats could divide rather than unite the allies. 259

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How to deal with Russia, Europe’s most important security variable, remains amongst NATO’s foremost challenges. In the 1990s, Moscow accepted NATO’s offer to build a strategic partnership, yet it was hardly more than damage limitation, as Russia was too weak to oppose NATO.17 Russia’s interpretation of NATO’s eastward enlargement as an encroachment into its “zone of privileged interest” never changed. In addition, major setbacks, such as NATO’s 1999 Kosovo air campaign, which saw NATO conduct strikes against Russia’s old ally, Serbia, further fuelled Russian suspicions about NATO’s malign intentions.18 The fear of Russia’s leadership that “colour revolutions” like those in Georgia in 2004 and Ukraine in 2005 would ultimately also spread to Russia led to a further deterioration of the Russo-​NATO relationship. The Russo-​Georgian war in 2008 marked another low point in the relationship of Russia and the West; yet Moscow’s illegal annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and its undeclared low-​level war against Ukraine marked a sea change. Russia’s intervention did not amount to a direct threat to NATO; however, its change of a border by the use of force amounted to a fundamental assault on the foundations of Europe’s post-​Cold War order. NATO’s initial reaction to the Russo-​Ukrainian crisis was swift: it increased its military presence and exercises in its Eastern member-​states. Until then, NATO had been downplaying the military dimension of NATO’s enlargement process so as not to fuel Russian fears of encirclement. After Crimea, however, reassuring the easternmost Allies became the overriding objective. Russia’s assault on Ukraine therefore sparked NATO’s largest political and military reorientation since the end of the Cold War. An alliance that had shifted its focus from collective defence at home to crisis management abroad had to re-​discover its erstwhile core business of deterrence and defence against Russia. Given Russia’s geographical advantage in the Baltic region and Black Sea, the challenge of providing credible deterrence for exposed Allies is formidable. NATO has to re-​learn how to organise large-​scale reinforcements, including from across the Atlantic, how to move military hardware across several borders to its Eastern destinations, and how to cope with Russian hybrid campaigns and Anti Access/​Area Denial capabilities. To deny Russia an opportunity to use its regional military superiority to create a fait accompli, for example through a limited incursion into a Baltic State, some military experts envisage a posture focused less on reinforcements and more on standing, in-​theatre military capabilities.19 However, as long as Russia appears as a threat to its immediate non-​NATO neighbours –​and regime critics –​rather than to Allies, NATO’s military presence is unlikely to morph into a massive posture reminiscent of the Cold War.20 Adapting NATO’s military posture is a major challenge, yet developing a new policy towards Russia will be equally difficult. Not only do member-​states hold different views on Russia, Russia has changed in such a way that attempts to resurrect the over-​hyped NATO-​Russia Strategic Partnership seem futile. However, notions that NATO could remain in wait-​and-​see mode or that it had to build up more military muscle before engaging Russia in a new dialogue are equally short-​sighted. Russia’s permanent seat on the United Nations [UN] Security Council gives it veto power over NATO-​led operations beyond collective defence –​a fact that calls for at least some sort of dialogue. The same goes for the need to reduce the risk of military incidents. An even more important reason for engagement, however, is the unresolved issue of Russia’s future role in European security. The current focus on deterrence and military balances obscures the fact that the real issue at stake is geopolitical: Russia’s place in Europe. The West’s twin strategy of enlarging NATO and the EU whilst forging an ever-​closer relationship with Russia did not turn out as expected. Russia continues to see itself as being under siege and is reverting to a broad spectrum of means to keep the West at bay. The West, on the other hand, 260

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cannot renege on basic principles, such as the right for each state to choose its own security alignments. Still, Europe needs security arrangements that consider legitimate Russian interests without relegating certain NATO and EU aspirants to a permanent zone of limited sovereignty. Developing such arrangements will remain difficult, particularly as Russia’s behaviour has all but destroyed its credibility as a guarantor of agreed norms. However, NATO must not appear as having written off Russia. The logic of pursuing both deterrence and dialogue remains sound. With its military intervention in Syria, Russia has also become part of the challenge at NATO’s southeastern borders. However, problems in this region –​the Middle East and North Africa –​go way beyond Russia. Projecting stability to the South means dealing with unpredictable state and non-​state actors, sectarian and tribal issues, weak economies, and demographic pressures. Deterrence –​NATO’s preferred strategy vis-​à-​vis Russia –​does not apply in NATO’s South. This region requires decades of sustained engagement, with only a small part being military. Hence, NATO will not be the major player in this region, although it can offer a range of partnership tools such as Defence Capacity Building or training. Paradoxically, even if NATO’s role in the South is less clear-​cut than in Europe’s East, turmoil in the South is probably more likely to affect NATO than the current revisionist –​but opportunist –​Russia, whether through terrorist attacks or refugee flows. Moreover, if the West were to leave behind a vacuum in the Middle East and North Africa [MENA] region, others will fill it, as has been the case in Syria. There is yet another reason why NATO cannot simply revert to the Cold War, when the alliance was all about collective defence in its East: given that Allies have different regional concerns, it is crucial for NATO to avoid a division into two regional groupings. If NATO were to bifurcate into one group of Allies that looked South, whilst another group looked East, the resulting division could paralyse the alliance. As NATO’s post-​Cold War enlargement has shifted the alliance’s centre of gravity eastward, the southern Allies need to be reassured that NATO remains receptive to their concerns. In practice, this will manifest itself in a greater outreach effort to the MENA region and beyond. In their 2019 London Summit Declaration, NATO Allies recognised “that China’s growing influence and international policies present both opportunities and challenges that we need to address together as an Alliance”.21 This short statement indicated that NATO would from now on devote a greater effort to analysing China’s policies and their implications. This decision fitted into the broader context of increasing Western worries about the speed of China’s economic and military rise, as well as its assertiveness on territorial and other issues. Beijing’s handling of Hong Kong, its threats against Taiwan, its investments in key Western infrastructure projects, and not least its heavy-​handed approach to the COVID pandemic have all served to alert Western nations to the emergence of a new “systemic rival”.22 Whilst China’s military footprint outside Asia is still small, numerous steps –​from staging military exercises in the Baltic Sea to pushing for greater influence in the Arctic region –​suggest that the military dimensions of China’s rise will eventually require a collective addressing. How this will square with the deep economic ties between China and the West is impossible to predict, since a reversal of economic globalisation appears unrealistic. Moreover, most European Allies have neither military interests in Asia nor the military capabilities to project power to this region. Unless Europeans adopt a more global security outlook –​sustained by greater investments in naval forces –​much of their contribution to an eventual deterrence posture in Asia will consist in supporting the United States politically and preparing to “backfill” in case American forces would have to deploy from Europe to Asia in a crisis. Hence, what appears paramount at this stage is that the transatlantic community acquires expertise on China as it once did on the Soviet Union. Accordingly, the Allies will have to look at the sources of China’s conduct in all its manifestations, ranging from eventual economic dependencies resulting from 261

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participation in China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” to its military modernisation. This analysis needs diligence. “Getting China wrong” could ultimately turn out to be more costly than misreading Russia. Russia’s use of hybrid tools in its assault on Ukraine in 2014 forced NATO to not only re-​emphasise its core task of collective defence, but also examine responses to hybrid threats. This is all the more urgent as hybrid campaigns could undermine NATO’s collective defence preparations in a crisis, notably along NATO’s Eastern flank. Consequently, NATO has started enlarging its counter hybrid toolbox, which now encompasses, inter alia, enhanced intelligence sharing, a stronger focus on national resilience, the creation of specific tools –​such as Counter Hybrid Support Teams –​more responsive public diplomacy efforts, specifically tailored exercises, and closer relations with the EU.23 In addition, more analysis is devoted to the hybrid approaches of specific actors, such as Russia and China, and deterring hybrid threats, including by examining the role of the military in a predominantly non-​kinetic context. Even the difficult problem of attributing certain hybrid attacks to specific state or non-​state actors, which is essentially a national prerogative, is now being discussed in a NATO context. If the threat of attribution were supposed to act as a deterrent, collective attribution would appear to be even more effective. If one must assume that certain types of attacks will happen as they can hardly be deterred, the focus needs to shift towards resilience. Again, cyber provides a case in point. Since cyberattacks are happening all the time, an emphasis on upgrading cyber defences remains necessary, so that one’s networks will continue to operate even in a degraded environment. Similarly, the effects of attacks on energy infrastructure can be minimised if repairs to it can occur quickly. Such resilience measures are largely a national responsibility. However, NATO can assist nations in conducting self-​assessments that help identify gaps that need addressing.24 This new focus on resilience is also important for NATO’s traditional collective defence: an opponent seeking to undermine alliance collective defence preparations will do so primarily by non-​traditional, non-​kinetic means, such as cyberattacks or energy supply disruptions. In short, in the years ahead, “resilience” is likely to move into the centre of modern security policy on a par with deterrence and defence. The notion of defence will increasingly have to embrace “total defence”, as practised for instance by Nordic European countries, which includes many non-​military elements such as civil defence, civil emergency planning, or medical stockpiling. NATO must also remain focused on force transformation, including on the acquisition of new capabilities, such as missile and cyber defences. Whilst some “Europhiles” will continue to engage in assertive rhetoric about Europe’s need to act autonomously in military affairs, most analysts agree that any major military operation will have to involve the United States –​either in the driver’s seat or at least as an indispensable “enabler” of a European-​led coalition, as in the case of the 2011 Libya operation. As the military asymmetries between the United States and its Allies continue to grow, the need to ensure at least a basic level of transatlantic military “co-​operability” should be persuasive. The United States remains the military benchmark, and Europe will have to keep up, if only in certain areas. A purely European approach would tilt towards the lowest common denominator, which would make Europe even less relevant. Whilst ideas such as the pooling and sharing of certain capabilities, common funding and acquisition, or unified logistics will not make a major difference in terms of savings or fighting power, they could nevertheless contribute to new forms of burden-​sharing and thus help maintain the transatlantic military link. The nuclear dimension of NATO’s deterrence and defence policy and posture, which had moved to the backburner after the end of the Cold War, has seen a reaffirmation after Russia’s incursion in Ukraine in 2014. Russia’s “nuclear” rhetoric and its deployment of new 262

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nuclear-​capable missiles in violation of the 1987 Intermediate-​Range Nuclear Forces Treaty were further reminders that NATO has to remain a “nuclear alliance”.25 However, new legal developments, such the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which came into force in January 2021, will compel the allies to walk a fine line between making a cogent case for deterrence and persistently objecting to the Treaty, whilst demonstrating their credible commitment to create the conditions for a world free of nuclear weapons. Trump’s undiplomatic handling of the burden-​sharing challenge must not deflect from the fact that American criticism about European military under-​performance remains entirely legitimate.26 Hence, any American administration will continue to maintain pressure on its allies in this regard. However, NATO’s formula of spending two per cent of Gross Domestic Product, agreed only a few months after Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukraine, may have to give way to a more sophisticated approach. The financial fallout of the COVID pandemic –​which could well result in lower defence budgets –​as well as the growing importance of resilience in NATO’s approach to security, may require Allies to look for different indicators. NATO Allies have also become aware of the need to get a firm grasp on new technologies and their implications. Cyber defence is amongst those areas seeing the fastest progress, including the development of an agreed NATO policy, the definition of cyber as a distinct operational domain, and its mention in the context of the Article 5 collective self-​defence clause. However, the challenge is much greater than enhancing Allies’ cyber protection. For example, artificial intelligence, “big data” analysis, or block chain technologies may offer huge security benefits, yet they can also empower adversaries, enabling them to orchestrate smarter and stealthier attacks. Moreover, like autonomous vehicles, these “Emerging Disruptive Technologies” also raise legal and moral issues requiring thorough examination. Today, with many new technologies developed by the private sector rather than the military, and with many more actors gaining access to them, NATO’s erstwhile technological dominance cannot remain taken for granted. Consequently, the Allies need to turn NATO into a facilitator for robust innovation. Concurrently, the Allies need to discuss how to contribute to new arms control mechanisms that capture the speed of technological change, as well as how to set new norms of behaviour in new domains, such as space, and in new “virtual” domains, such as cyberspace. In short, NATO needs to prepare for an entirely new era of how to fight conflicts. This re-​think will also have to encompass the future of NATO’s partnership policies. The process of establishing relations with some 40 non-​NATO states, which started immediately after the end of the Cold War, is arguably one of the greatest successes in the alliance’s history, with many partner nations participating in NATO-​led operations or providing other kinds of support. However, NATO’s various partnership frameworks are disjointed and in need of a new overarching vision. In particular, allies must explore how to further intensify NATO’s links with like-​minded partners –​for example, Finland and Sweden –​whilst offering a more streamlined co-​operation menu to other, more distant partners, for example from Northern Africa or Central Asia. At the same time, NATO’s partnership with like-​minded Powers in the Asia-​ Pacific region –​Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the Republic of Korea –​will intensify. The rise of China requires a more systematic effort at sharing political-​military assessments as well as best practices in dealing with China’s economic strategies and other means of gaining influence. The logic of partnership is equally compelling when it comes to NATO’s relations with other institutions. The nature of non-​traditional security challenges makes NATO’s success increasingly dependent on how well it co-​operates with other organisations. This is true for its relations with other security stakeholders such as the EU and UN, but also with respect to non-​governmental organisations. Hence, enhancing NATO’s “connectivity” is a precondition for its future as viable security provider. The NATO-​EU relationship, which is perhaps the 263

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most important of all, has seen considerable progress in terms of staff-​to-​staff level co-​operation, yet remains nervous and incomplete. Whilst certain national sensitivities of NATO Allies and EU members need to be respected, the urgency for closer co-​ordination and co-​operation between both organisations is greater than ever. Many of the new challenges are both internal and external in nature. For example, terrorism can be home grown or imported, protecting cyber and energy infrastructures against hybrid threats are essentially national responsibilities, and a pandemic requires the early co-​ordination of national responses. This poses entirely new challenges for all actors involved. A stronger NATO-​EU relationship would be a major step toward overcoming such challenges. Another part of an adapted NATO is a sustained relationship with the private sector. Just as the urgency to enhance NATO’s cyber defence capabilities is leading to closer ties with software companies, the need to develop a more coherent approach to energy security will require NATO to reach out to energy companies. With most energy and cyber networks in private hands, it will be crucial to build public-​private partnerships. The goal should be to establish “communities of trust” in which different stakeholders can share confidential information, for example on cyberattacks. Creating such new relationships will be challenging, since national business interests and collective security interests may sometimes prove irreconcilable. Still, the nature of many emerging security challenges makes the established compartmentalisation of responsibilities between the public and private sectors appear increasingly anachronistic. Another obvious challenge for NATO is the speed of responding to certain threats and, consequently, the question of maintaining political control. Cyberattacks offer the most glaring example: they simply do not leave one with enough time to engage in lengthy deliberations, let alone with the opportunity to seek parliamentary approval of a response. Whilst this challenge is already significant on the national level, it is even more severe in a multinational context. To overcome it, nations have to agree on rules of engagement or pre-​delegate authority to certain entities. This quasi-​automaticity runs counter to the natural instinct of governments to retain political control over every aspect of their collective response; yet the slow, deliberative nature of consensus building may turn out to be ill suited for the challenges at hand. The consensus needs building before the actual event occurs. Consequently, NATO needs continuously to review its decision-​taking procedures and specific crisis response mechanisms –​and test them in exercises. NATO also needs to explore how to enhance flexibility in its decision-​making and the implementation of collective decisions. On the strategic level, the consensus rule must remain, as it prevents a majority to steamroll a minority into submission. The possibility of vetoing a decision –​even if rarely used in practice –​is the “emergency brake” that protects in particular the smaller nations from being forced to accept policies that run counter to their national interests. However, as the 2011 Libya operation demonstrated, the implementation of an agreed collective policy varies considerably, according to the interests and capabilities of the Allies involved.27 Moreover, as the International Security Assistance Force mission in Afghanistan has shown, the military and financial contributions of several non-​NATO nations, such as Australia, have exceeded those of many Allies, underscoring the need for NATO to prepare politically and structurally for “coalitions of the willing”. NATO will remain the pool from which such flexible coalitions will be drawn and around which larger coalitions will be built. Moreover, as these coalitions will not always consist of the same countries, the logic of maintaining close political and military ties through a standing arrangement like NATO remains unchanged. Given the potentially divisive nature of non-​traditional threats, Allies have understood that they also need to use NATO as a forum for discussing broader security developments. Whilst NATO is engaged on several continents, its collective “mind-​set” is still largely Eurocentric and reactive. By having political discussions on subjects hitherto considered “exotic” –​for instance, 264

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developments in Asia –​and supported by stronger analytical and forecasting capabilities, NATO is developing a “culture” of debate that should allow Allies to move away gradually from its reactive approach and towards more pro-​active policies. NATO’s image as an operations-​driven alliance may entail the risk that a political debate about any given subject could be misunderstood as a precursor to military engagement. However, with non-​traditional threats gaining in importance, the perception of NATO is likely to change. Not shying away from difficult debate will increasingly be considered an asset rather than a liability. However, the greatest challenge for NATO might well be maintaining its internal cohesion. Unlike the EU, which represents a historically unique project of economic and political integration, NATO remains an alliance of sovereign nation states and merely an instrument for co-​ ordinating different national security and military policies. Whilst the EU can punish members considered in violation of certain minimum standards of democratic behaviour, NATO has no equivalent mechanisms. Hence, whilst NATO was able to wield significant political influence over aspirant countries’ domestic reforms during the post-​Cold war enlargement process, the domestic political makeup of a member-​state is not the subject for inter-​alliance discussions. In the Cold War, the lack of democratic credentials by some Allies did not undermine the alliance. However, if it is correct that “[i]‌n the absence of a shared external threat, the binding force of liberal democratic values and institutions has become essential to the alliance’s effectiveness”,28 and assuming that illiberal countries are more vulnerable to subversion, NATO’s democratic credentials are a significant factor in determining its future. This is all the more important as competitors like China use their economic success as proof of the superiority of their illiberal political model over Western-​style democracy. How to achieve this democratic rejuvenation is an open question. Neither self-​referential statements about alliance unity and shared values, nor slick public diplomacy campaigns will enhance NATO’s credibility if governments fail to practice what they preach. Proposals that Allies “should pledge themselves to a code of good conduct to abide by the spirit as well as the letter of the North Atlantic Treaty”,29 “revisit and renew their collective commitment under Article 1 of the North Atlantic Treaty to ‘settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means’ ”, or “agree to an annual discussion on democratic principles, working towards a written Values Pledge”,30 demonstrate an awareness of the problem, yet are not likely to overcome it. Similarly, suggestions to call out the misbehaviour of an ally could easily backfire.31 At the end of the day, NATO will have to continue to live with the latent risk of an illiberal backsliding in some of its member-​states. If history is any guide, such developments will only be temporary and thus manageable, albeit with great difficulty. Still, as long as all member-​states, irrespective of their specific political orientation, continue to believe that being part of a transatlantic alliance best serves their security, they will assure NATO’s future.

Notes 1 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, Third Edition (NY, 1966 [1945]), 530. 2 A notable exception was the American political commentator Walter Lippman: The pact will be remembered long after the conditions that have provoked it are no longer the main business of mankind. For the treaty recognises and proclaims a community of interest which is much older than the conflict with the Soviet Union and, come what may, will survive it. Walter Lippmann, “Atlantic Pact Will Entail New Understandings”, The Argus (21 April 1949): https://​trove.nla.gov.au/​newspa​per/​arti​cle/​22723​693? bro​wse=​ndp%3Abro​wse%2Fti​tle%2FA%2Fti​tle%2F13%2F1 949%2F04%2F21%2Fp​age%2F1719​938%2Farti​cle%2F2​2723​693.

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Michael Rühle 3 NATO enlargement after the end of the Cold War, for example, is explained by realism –​consolidating the West whilst Russia was weak –​and idealism –​expanding the liberal democratic order. See Mark Webber, James Sperling and Martin A. Smith, NATO’s Post-​Cold War Trajectory: Decline or Regeneration? (London, 2012), for a comprehensive overview on how different theories relate to NATO. 4 See Wallace J. Thies, Why NATO Endures (Cambridge, 2009), especially ­chapter 8. For an excellent recent history of NATO, see Timothy Andrews Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca, NY, 2019). 5 The term was coined by the United States’ NATO ambassador with reference to the 2003 Iraq War, which deeply divided the Allies: R. Nicholas Burns, “NATO Has Adapted: An Alliance with a New Mission”, NY Times (24 May 2003): www.nytimes.com/​2003/​05/​24/​opinion/​IHT-​nato-​has-​ adapted-​an-​alliance-​with-​a-​new-​mission.html. 6 John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened. A White House Memoir (NY, 2020), ­chapter 5. However, realising Trump’s transactional view of the transatlantic relationship, and fearing American abandonment, most allies responded to Trump’s threats with a substantial increase in their defence budgets. See NATO, “The Secretary General’s Annual Report 2019” (19 March 2020), 41: www.nato.int/​nato_​ static_​fl2014/​assets/​pdf/​2020/​3/​pdf_​publications/​sgar19-​en.pdf. 7 See Lawrence S. Kaplan and Sidney R. Snyder, eds., Fingerprints on History: The NATO Memoirs of Theodore C. Achilles (Kent, OH, 1992), 21–​22. 8 Article 5: The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-​defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. North Atlantic Treaty (4 April 1949): www.nato.int/​cps/​en/ natolive/​official_​texts_​17120.htm 9 Article 6: For the purpose of Article 5, an armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack: on the territory of any of the Parties in Europe or North America, … on the territory of or on the Islands under the jurisdiction of any of the Parties in the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer. Ibid 10 Article 5 was invoked only once, namely after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, as a sign of solidarity with the United States. It did not serve to legitimise NATO’s subsequent operations in Afghanistan. 11 See Gordon Corera, Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the AQ Khan Network (NY 2006). 12 Jens Stoltenberg, “NATO Must Combat Climate Change” (27 September 2020): www.nato.int/​cps/​ en/​natohq/​opinions_​178334.htm. 13 See “NATO’s Approach to Countering Disinformation: A Focus on Covid-​19” (17 July 2020): www. nato.int/​cps/​en/​natohq/​177273.htm; as well as the Joint Communication by the Commission and the HRVP, “Tackling Coronavirus Disinformation: Getting the Facts Right”, (10 June 2020): https://​ ec.eur​opa.eu/​info/​splash​_​en?dest​inat​ion=​node/​134​571. 14 See Michael Rühle, “The Economization of Security: A Challenge to Transatlantic Cohesion”, American Foreign Policy Interests, 35/​1(2013), 15–​20. 15 See Jamie Shea, “The UK and European Defence: Will NATO be Enough?”, Foreign Policy Centre (16 December 2020): https://​fpc.org.uk/​the-​uk-​and-​europ​ean-​defe​nce-​will-​nato-​be-​eno​ugh/​. 16 This is the central message from a prominent Reflection Group that produced recommendations for NATO’s evolution. “NATO 2030: United for a New Era. Analysis and Recommendations of the Reflection Group Appointed by the NATO Secretary General” (25 November 2020): http://​nato.int/​ cps/​en/​nat​ohq/​news​_​174​756.htm. 17 See Alexander A. Sergounin, “Russian Domestic Debate on NATO Enlargement: From Phobia to Damage Limitation”, European Security, 6/​4(1997), 55–​71.

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NATO and Its Current Challenges 18 See Sharyl Cross, “Russia and NATO Toward the Twenty-​First Century: Conflicts and Peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo”, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 15/​2(2002), 1–​58. 19 See Kalev Stoicescu and Pauli Järvenpää, Contemporary Deterrence: Insights and Lessons from Enhanced Forward Presence (Tallinn, 2019): http://​icds.ee/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2019/​01/​ICDS_​Report_​ Contempo​rary​_​Det​erre​nce_​Stoi​cesc​u_​J%C3%A4rv​enp%C3%A4%C3%A4_​J​anua​ry_​2​019.pdf. 20 NATO’s military presence in Eastern Europe remains small, designed to remain compliant with the 1997 NATO-​Russia Founding Act, which stated that NATO would not deploy substantial combat forces or nuclear weapons on the territory of its new members. Whilst an argument exists that Russia’s behaviour has pulled the rug out from under these assurances, the Allies sought to avoid irreversible steps that could undermine a new rapprochement with Russia, however unlikely such a rapprochement may seem. 21 “London Declaration. Issued by the Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in London 3–​4 December”: www.nato.int/​cps/​en/​natohq/​official_​texts_​ 171584.htm. 22 “Both sides are committed to a comprehensive strategic partnership there is a … [y]‌et growing appreciation in Europe that the balance of challenges and opportunities presented by China has shifted. In the last decade, China’s economic power and political influence have grown with unprecedented scale and speed, reflecting its ambitions to become a leading global power”. European Commission, EU-​ China –​A strategic outlook (12 March 2019): www. europeansources.info/​record/​eu-​china-​a-​strategic-​ outlook/​. 23 See Michael Rühle and Clare Roberts, “NATO’s Response to Hybrid Threats”, in Marc Ozawa, ed., The Alliance Five Years after Crimea: Implementing the Wales Summit Pledges, NATO Defense College Research Paper No.7 (December 2019), 61–​69. 24 See Wolf-​Diether Roepke and Hasit Thankey, “Resilience: The First Line of Defence”, NATO Review (27 February 2019): www.nato.int/​docu/​review/​articles/​2019/​02/​27/​resilience-​the-​first-​ line-​of-​defence/​index.html. 25 Active Engagement, Modern Defence. Strategic Concept 2010, Paragraph 17 (19–​20 November 2010): www.nato.int/​nato_​static_​fl2014/​assets/​pdf/​pdf_​publications/​20120214_​strategic-​concept-​ 2010-​eng.pdf. 26 See the speech by United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in which he characterised NATO as a two-​tiered alliance. “Transcript of Defense Secretary Gates’s Speech on NATO’s Future”, Wall Street Journal (10 June 2011): https://​blogs.wsj.com/​washw​ire/​2011/​06/​10/​tra​nscr​ipt-​of-​defe​nse-​secret​ary-​ gat​ess-​spe​ech-​on-​natos-​fut​ure/​. 27 Out of 28 NATO allies, only nine took part in the air operations against Libya. 28 Celeste A. Wallander, “NATO’s Enemies Within: How Democratic Decline Could Destroy the Alliance”, Foreign Affairs, 97/​4(2018), 72. 29 “NATO 2030. United for a New Era”, 51. 30 “NATO 2030: Embrace the Change, Guard the Values. A Report by the NATO 2030 Young Leaders Group –​for This Generation and the Next” (4 February 2021), 10: www.nato.Int/​nato_​static_​fl2014/​ assets/​pdf/​2021/​2/​pdf/​210204-​NATO2030-​YoungLeadersReport.pdf. 31 “To deal with the growing frequency of single-​ country blockages involving external bilateral disputes … [NATO] should consider raising the threshold for such blockages to the Ministerial level”.: ibid., 15.

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22 THE UNITED STATES, ISRAEL, AND THE CONFLICT OVER IRAN, 2009–​2 019 Henry Rome

When examining American foreign policy in the Middle East, some scholars and analysts contend that Israel and an “Israel lobby” play an outsized role in shaping Washington’s decisions. In their view, this lobby is a “loose coalition of individuals and organizations” that has “diverted” American foreign policy in ways that “jeopardize US national security”.1 Whilst acknowledging that the “Israel lobby” does not always “get its way”, these critics cite a series of policy issues in which Israel and its allies significantly affected United States policy, including on Iran. They have argued, “since the early 1990s … American policy toward Iran has been heavily influenced by the wishes of successive Israeli governments”.2 Other analysts focus specifically on the United States-​Israel-​Iran triangle and argue that Israeli interests have long defined American policy toward Iran.3 The period from 2009 to 2019 provides a remarkable test case for these arguments. Israeli leaders were key in elevating the Iran nuclear issue globally, helping to mobilise Western nations to intensify economic and military pressure against Tehran. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, routinely defined a nuclear-​armed Iran as a threat to Israel’s existence. He clashed with President Barack Obama over the balance between sanctions and diplomacy, culminating in the protracted 2015 showdown over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA], known as the Iran nuclear deal. Three years later, Israel strongly advocated that President Donald Trump withdraw from the agreement and re-​impose sanctions on Iran, which he did. If the “Israel lobby” theory is valid, surely it must apply to the 2009–​2019 debate over Iran policy –​the paramount priority for Israel and its allies in Washington. There is no doubt that Israel and its allies were influential players. Throughout this period, the organisations that comprise the so-​called “Israel lobby”, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], spared no effort to highlight the threat posed by Iran. But Israeli influence was greatest only when it worked in concert with the established United States policy direction. When Israel stood against a core conviction of either the Obama or Trump administrations, it repeatedly lost; this dynamic proved true with two very different American presidents: one who prioritised international co-​operation and multilateralism, and one who unabashedly pursued a strategy of “America First”. Despite growing pressure toward American retrenchment and shifts in the global balance of power during this period, the limits to Israel’s influence in Washington

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has mostly remained unchanged. Israel and its allies were effective when they agreed with the president’s approach and ineffective when they did not. This chapter examines four pivotal episodes in the Israeli-​American debate over Iran. In the first case from 2010 to 2012, Israel urged Washington to intensify its pressure campaign against Iran. Israel’s efforts were successful because it was pushing the United States in a direction it had already decided to go; the disagreement was about intensity, not direction, and Israel pushed Obama to take a harder line. In the second case from 2013 to 2015, Israel launched a campaign to block the Obama Administration from concluding the JCPOA. It failed, demonstrating the limits of Israeli influence in cases when an American administration fundamentally disagreed with its position. In the third case –​2017 to 2018 –​the United States and Israel converged over dismantling the JCPOA, which Trump did. In the final case in 2019, the United States and Israel diverged on negotiations with Iran, with Trump ignoring Israel’s concerns. In sum, these cases cast doubt on the broader argument that Israel and an “Israel lobby” wield disproportionate power in Washington, given the limits to their influence on an issue they defined as existential to the survival of the Jewish state. Iran was an early and persistent focus for the Obama Administration. The president entered office intent on reversing the unilateral, military-​centric foreign policy of George W. Bush in the Middle East and resetting America’s relationship with the Moslem world. Obama was committed to avoiding another war in the region and worried about the risks of nuclear proliferation. He saw benefit in negotiating with longstanding American adversaries, believing that engagement could work where sanctions and pressure had failed.4 Obama and his team also embraced new tools short of war that could bolster their negotiating position and reduce risk, such as more sophisticated economic sanctions and cyber warfare.5 Iran presented a key test for these views, given decades of Iranian-​American hostility and the lack of progress in international negotiations over restraining its nuclear programme. Obama’s priorities and outlook worried Israeli leaders, none more than Netanyahu. For many Israelis, Obama’s initial cold shoulder –​he skipped Israel on his first Middle Eastern trip –​combined with his desire for American retrenchment in the region and interest in talking with Tehran, fed concerns that he was indifferent to Israeli security interests.6 Israel’s early concerns intensified in the subsequent eight years, as the Obama presidency featured two distinct periods for the Israeli-​American relationship over Iran. In the first, the United States and Israel remained broadly aligned about the importance of escalating pressure on Tehran, although the two sides disagreed about the intensity of that pressure. Israel largely succeeded in pushing Washington to take a harder-​line approach. From 2013 to 2015, however, the two sides diverged on the merits of diplomacy, with Israel campaigning against the nuclear agreement. Unsurprisingly, when it clashed with a core position of the Obama Administration, Israel lost. Shortly after taking office and wanting to test the prospects for an opening with Iran, Obama set a one-​year deadline to see if a breakthrough was possible.7 This effort collapsed in late 2009 amid domestic upheaval in Iran, and Obama decided to escalate sanctions pressure to persuade Iran to accept negotiations.8 In this context, Israeli leaders laboured to make sure Washington followed through. America favoured a gradual and multilateral approach to sanctions, slowly ratcheting up pressure, building international consensus, and avoiding major confrontations with other countries over trading restrictions. Congressional hawks, Israel, and Israeli allies in Washington wanted the Administration to be more aggressive. In their view, Iran’s nuclear programme was advancing faster than the West could apply economic pressure, and the United States had to play catch-​up. They also wanted to be sure that the Americans would commit

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to taking military action if necessary. Israel and its allies in Washington pushed the Obama Administration to go further down the path on which it had already embarked in terms of both sanctions and military preparations. Two major sanctions efforts led by Congressional hawks underscored this dynamic. The Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act, which advanced in late 2009 and 2010, tried to disrupt Iranian gasoline imports and international financial connections.9 The Israeli government, along with AIPAC, the Anti-​Defamation League, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, backed the bill. Yet, the Administration was concerned that it “might weaken rather than strengthen international unity” on the Iran issue, given that it could implicate companies in countries with which the United States was co-​operating, such as China and Russia.10 Congress acceded to some of the Administration’s revisions and passed the bill, which Obama signed into law. The president praised the bill as “a powerful tool against Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and support of terrorism” –​ affirming that the White House supported sanctions pressure even as it differed with hawks on its intensity.11 The pattern repeated in late 2011 with sanctions targeting Iran’s oil sector, considered a significant escalation given the risk of Iranian retaliation and the broader impact on the global economic recovery.12 The Obama Administration had been weighing various options to reduce Iranian oil exports and investigating whether other major oil producers could replace lost Iranian production.13 Nevertheless, the Administration’s pace frustrated a bipartisan group of lawmakers, backed by AIPAC, which tried to force its hand with new legislation. The Administration objected vociferously. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said the bill “threatens to undermine the effective, carefully phased, and substantial approach we have undertaken to build strong international pressure against Iran”.14 Facing strong political pressure, including a unanimous vote in the Senate, the Administration worked with Congress to fashion a compromise that allowed for a more phased approach.15 Once again, Israel and its allies persuaded the White House to take stronger action as part of its established sanctions policy. Obama officials later confirmed this interpretation. A senior State Department official, William Burns, said that Israel’s campaign “accelerated” the American sanctions timeline. Dan Shapiro, who served on the National Security Council [NSC] and as ambassador to Israel, said that the US was motivated to go the extra mile in part to show the Israelis that they didn’t need to do something on their own, that we were serious. … It’s fair to say that Israel probably did push us to go farther, faster on sanctions.16 In addition to stricter sanctions, Israel also tried to convince Washington to develop a more serious military option and public posture to deter an Iranian nuclear breakout. To do so, Israel essentially engineered a “war scare” in 2011 and 2012.17 Through a variety of steps –​public and secret, military and political –​Israel sought to give the impression it was planning a military assault on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Regardless of whether Netanyahu and his defence minister, Ehud Barak, were bluffing, the “combination of Israel’s genuine military moves and strict message discipline made the incredible look credible, and the unbelievable, believable”.18 Obama’s Administration feared that an Israeli attack would trap Washington in another costly Middle East war –​on the eve of a presidential election –​and it worked hard to restrain its long-​ time partner. The “war scare” factored into the sanctions campaign in Congress, but its impact was broader. The Americans tried to deter Israel from taking unilateral action by showing they took the Iranian threat seriously. Washington advanced its intelligence sharing and co-​operation 270

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with Israel and upgraded its own military tools necessary to carry out a strike on Iran. Obama took a stronger declaratory stance toward using military force to stop an Iranian dash toward a bomb;19 and Washington sent a constant stream of officials to Israel to reinforce this co-​operation and commitment. The Israelis referred to the US effort as a chibbuk –​Hebrew for “hug” –​a tight grasp that kept Israel close and restrained.20 American officials privately used more condescending terms, referring to the frequent visits as “Bibi-​sitting”, a spin on the premier’s nickname. Despite evident frustration on both sides, the Israeli strategy worked. The United States began to take military options more seriously and took steps to close significant gaps in American planning that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had raised as early as January 2010.21 Israel and its Washington allies succeeded in sharpening American policy from 2010–​ 2012 precisely because the Obama Administration had decided, at a strategic level, to take a more aggressive posture toward Iran. However, the second case under Obama, from 2013 to 2015, strikingly illustrates the limits of Israeli influence. As American sanctions and military preparations intensified, the Obama Administration tried to convert this leverage into a diplomatic opening, which culminated in the Joint Plan of Action [JPOA] and eventually the JCPOA, agreed by the United States, Iran, Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia, and the European Union. Obama saw the agreements as the natural conclusion of the sanctions campaign that America and Israel had pursued, and as the only effective way to avoid either an Iranian nuclear weapon or another war in the Middle East. He argued that the terms were the best the United States could achieve, recognising the already advanced nature of the Iranian programme. For Obama, implementing a deal with Iran was the paramount foreign policy priority of his second term, if not his presidency. Netanyahu decried the JPOA, reached in November 2013, as “a historic mistake” and the “deal of the century” for Iran: “The world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world”.22 Netanyahu’s harsh response foreshadowed the Israeli reaction to the comprehensive deal, the JCPOA, reached in July 2015. For Israel, the JCPOA contained unacceptable compromises. Instead of demanding that Iran surrender its domestic enrichment capacity, the deal imposed time-​limited restrictions on Iranian nuclear activity whilst allowing Tehran to retain its capabilities.23 After the deal’s main physical restrictions expired in ten to 15 years, Iran would face no limits on its uranium stockpile, enrichment level, or centrifuge deployments.24 The Israelis urged the Obama Administration to seek a “better deal” because they had a different assessment of the potency of American sanctions –​more pressure over a longer period could yield more Iranian concessions –​and a different view of the alternative to the deal. The Israelis were also concerned that the nuclear agreement signalled the end of United States willingness to use force against Iran and potentially broader disengagement from the region.25 Netanyahu tried to persuade the United States and its partner nations to improve the emerging agreement or abandon it altogether, but his efforts were in vain. His best opportunity was to convince the American Congress to obstruct or reject the agreement. For the better part of 2015, Israel worked with AIPAC and Congressional Republicans to wage a full-​throated campaign against the JCPOA. Republicans invited Netanyahu to address a joint meeting of Congress in March, where he branded the evolving nuclear agreement a “very bad deal” that would “all but guarantee” Iran would get nuclear weapons.26 AIPAC reportedly spent nearly $30 million in television advertising and lobbying efforts and arranged for hundreds of supporters to lobby their representatives in Washington that summer.27 The effort failed. The White House secured the votes necessary not only to sustain a presidential veto on a resolution of disapproval but to avoid a formal vote altogether. 271

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Deal supporters have portrayed this as a “David-​beats-​Goliath” victory over Israel and AIPAC.28 But the underdog narrative significantly under-​estimates an American president’s power to accomplish a top priority and significantly over-​estimates the power of Israel and its supporters in Washington to stop him from doing so. The White House campaign to secure the nuclear agreement rivalled its effort to accomplish healthcare reform earlier in Obama’s presidency. Obama was “the chief salesman” and took full advantage of the bully pulpit.29 Gone were the days when George H.W. Bush lamented that he was “one lonely little guy” up against AIPAC.30 Obama defended the deal in a high-​profile speech at American University and despatched an army of cabinet secretaries and advisors to Capitol Hill to make the Administration’s case.31 The White House leaned on outside advocacy groups and held private briefings with influential and sceptical members of the think tank community. It was a raw political fight between Israel and its supporters and an American president who defined the issue as a top foreign policy priority. Unsurprisingly, Obama won. Israel and its supporters, who had succeeded in urging the Administration to intensify its sanctions campaign, proved unable to sway an American president with whom they fundamentally disagreed. The political relationship between the United States and Israel changed significantly with Trump’s inauguration. The new president expressed strident and unequivocal support for Israel and Netanyahu. Indeed, despite Trump spending much of the presidential campaign decrying American policy in the region, his relationships with Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates would become closer than with any other country, including long time treaty allies. Throughout 2017–​2019, Trump took unprecedented steps to support Israel, such as moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognising Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and developing a peace plan tilted steeply toward Israel. He also entered office with clear, negative views on Iran and the nuclear agreement. In the speech announcing his candidacy in June 2015, he said the Obama Administration was negotiating a “horrible and laughable deal”.32 With the JCPOA reached one month later, criticism of the agreement became a frequent talking point during his campaign. He referred to the JCPOA as the “worst deal ever negotiated”, “a catastrophe that must be stopped”, and a deal that “will lead to at least partial world destruction”.33 Once president, Trump’s disdain for the agreement and support for Israel converged with a final factor that was perhaps most significant: a fixation on trying systematically to unwind Obama’s foreign and domestic policies, from the Paris Climate Agreement and healthcare to immigration and trade –​and certainly the Iran nuclear deal.34 Trump’s opposition to the deal presented a major opportunity for Israel. Whilst the Israeli defence establishment had reluctantly come to view the deal as beneficial to the nation’s security, Netanyahu and his political allies remained strongly opposed and wanted it either fundamentally altered or terminated.35 Trump did not need convincing about the JCPOA’s flaws, so Netanyahu and his team set out to ensure that he would follow through. Here was a classic example of Israel’s ability to nudge a US Administration to sharpen its own policy. Yet this alignment dissipated when it came to the question of negotiating with Iran in 2019. As occurred under Obama, Israel was unable to persuade the Trump Administration to change course. Initially, Trump did not act on his campaign commitment to alter or terminate the JCPOA, as his more cautious advisors tried to persuade him to keep the United States in the agreement. It was an uphill battle. United States law required Trump to issue waivers regularly that allowed Iran to receive sanctions relief. He also had to certify to Congress that Iran continued to abide by the accord and that sanctions relief was “appropriate and proportionate”. The waivers and certifications were a constant reminder that Trump had not fulfilled his campaign promise, and by late 2017, he ran out of patience.36 At the UN General Assembly in September, he said 272

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that the JCPOA was “one of the worst and most one-​sided transactions the United States has ever entered into” and warned, “I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it –​believe me”.37 The following month, he refused to certify to Congress that sanctions relief was appropriate and threatened to withdraw from the deal if Congress and American allies did not improve it.38 No solution was forthcoming, and in early January 2018, he again threatened to terminate American participation in the deal unless a fix could be implemented by May.39 Netanyahu concurrently delivered a series of speeches decrying the nuclear agreement and praising Trump’s hostility toward it. Netanyahu told the annual AIPAC meeting in March: President Trump has made it clear that his administration will not accept Iran’s aggression in the region. He has made clear that he too will never accept a nuclear-​ armed Iran. That is the right policy. I salute President Trump on this. And the President has also made it clear that if the fatal flaws of the nuclear deal are not fixed, he will walk away from the deal and restore sanctions. Israel will be right there by America’s side.40 He told his Cabinet and other world leaders that Trump was likely to pull the plug on the deal, comments that quickly leaked.41 He also tried to give Trump a clear pretext for withdrawal: alleged Iranian duplicity. In late January 2018, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency raided a warehouse of documents that purportedly detailed Iran’s prior nuclear weapons programme. Netanyahu privately briefed the president on the raid in a meeting in March and announced the findings publicly in late April.42 He tried to hold Trump to his word: praising his resolve, providing him ammunition to withdraw, and raising the political costs if he did not do so.43 Netanyahu later said in an interview that he believed Trump was keen to withdraw from the deal even before the 2016 election. “Of course”, Netanyahu said, “I looked for ways for him to bolster this decision”.44 Ultimately, the Israeli leader was “pushing on an open door”, given Trump’s longstanding opposition to the deal.45 Trump announced United States withdrawal from the deal on 8 May 2018 and triggered the re-​imposition of all American sanctions waived under the nuclear agreement. As with the Obama Administration decision to escalate sanctions in 2010–​2012, Israel succeeded less in shaping than in sharpening United States policy toward Iran. Netanyahu supported Trump in pursuing a policy he was predisposed to follow. Whilst Trump and Netanyahu clearly agreed on the near-​term goal –​removing America from the JCPOA and escalating pressure on Tehran –​they disagreed on what should come next. The two sides could paper over this longer-​term question whilst JCPOA withdrawal dominated the conversation, but over the next year and one-​half, it would come to the fore and quietly strain the Trump-​Netanyahu relationship. In this case, Israel would be unable to shift American policy. The key dispute was whether and how soon Washington should broach renewed negotiations with Tehran, and what the goal should be. Trump focused primarily on the JCPOA –​undoing it and proving that he could secure a better agreement than Obama. He opposed regime change as a goal –​his opposition to the Iraq war was an oft-​repeated talking point during the 2016 campaign.46 Trump was also supremely confident in his own negotiating skills and believed in the power of one-​on-​one talks, no matter the world leader.47 The confluence of these issues alarmed some in Israel. Some Israeli officials and American hawks feared that Trump was over eager for a deal and would accept only cosmetic changes to the JCPOA. They considered it essential to oppose Iranian-​American negotiations at all costs lest Trump get into a room with the Iranians and offer wide-​ranging concessions in exchange for a new, Trump-​branded agreement.48 Even when applying severe economic pressure on Iran, Trump dangled the opportunity for direct negotiations. In the 8 May 2018 JCPOA withdrawal speech, 273

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Trump said he was “ready, willing, and able” to make a “new and lasting deal” with Iran.49 He frequently repeated this sentiment in the coming months, including after meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Emphasising no preconditions for meeting, he said on 30 July, “If they want to meet, I’ll meet. Anytime they want”.50 Trump’s comments were consistent with his attitude about personal diplomacy and opposition to regime change, but discordant with what his Administration said was its Iran policy. On 21 May, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo outlined an expansive list of 12 demands, like the “end” of Iran’s nuclear programme and a fundamental shift in its foreign policy, including severing relations with non-​state actors and terrorist groups. Pompeo’s “basic requirements” were difficult to consider as anything but a call for regime change.51 For nearly a year, Trump’s flirtations with Iran persisted but went nowhere. The Iranian leadership insisted there was little to talk about as Trump escalated pressure, especially because it was unclear the extent to which other countries would stand up to American economic sanctions. Surprised by the success of the Trump economic campaign, the Israelis focused on pushing back on Iranian activity in Syria. But April and May 2019 represented a major turning point in the Iranian-​American conflict. Under intense domestic pressure, the Trump Administration cancelled all waivers permitting Iran to export crude oil, going farther than Obama.52 That step, combined with Europe’s inability to stand up to American pressure, forced the Iranian hand. The government announced it would ramp up its nuclear programme in violation of the JCPOA, and Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, publicly pledged to use all of Iran’s “pressure tools” to push back against Washington.53 This decision triggered a dramatic summer in which Iran broke through nuclear limits and staged attacks on commercial shipping in the Gulf as well as oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. Tehran also downed an American surveillance drone, bringing the two countries close to military conflict. The sharp increase in tension energised European interlocutors, especially French President Emmanuel Macron, who tried to reduce tension by arranging for limited American sanctions relief and direct meetings between Trump and either Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, or Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. These diplomatic efforts culminated at the G-​7 meeting in Biarritz in late August and the UN General Assembly in New York in late September. Macron was trying to broker an initial agreement in which the United States would permit Iran to export more oil and draw on an international line of credit in exchange for a return to JCPOA compliance and a reduction in regional tensions. In Macron’s view, the key to clinching the deal was a meeting between Trump and Rouhani or Zarif, and the French president invited Zarif for an unannounced visit to Biarritz on 25 August.54 Macron apparently kept Trump in the loop about his plan, and Trump “was generally inclined to take meetings, seeing no downside to just talking”.55 The potential meeting set off alarm bells in Israel. When news broke that Zarif was en route to Biarritz, Netanyahu “frantically tried to get President Trump on the phone” to block the meeting. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-​in-​law and advisor, apparently refused to let Netanyahu speak to Trump “because he didn’t think it was appropriate for a foreign leader to talk to Trump about whom he should speak to”.56 In the event, the meeting did not happen, but Trump publicly said he supported the credit line idea and was open to meeting Rouhani in the near future, triggering speculation a meeting could occur at the UN.57 In the coming weeks, Netanyahu publicly criticised the idea of negotiating with Iran and urged Trump to keep imposing sanctions pressure. On 30 August, Netanyahu told Macron that “this is not the time” for a Trump-​Rouhani meeting, and he added in early September: “We’re in constant contact with the United States, with President Trump and his team, about the need to continue to exert pressure on Iran”.58 Netanyahu held another presentation of documents from the 274

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nuclear archive on 9 September, similar to April 2018 that aimed to nudge Trump to withdraw from the nuclear agreement.59 Netanyahu was particularly motivated to demonstrate his influence for the general election in Israel the following week. His efforts failed to persuade Trump, who was keen to speak with Rouhani at the UN General Assembly later in September even after Iran launched a co-​ordinated attack on Saudi Aramco facilities. Macron went as far as setting up a secure line near Rouhani’s hotel room with Trump waiting on the other end, ready to talk.60 But Rouhani refused to take the call, apparently on orders from the supreme leader. Trump’s Administration was ready to deal but the Iranians were not. Whilst the talks did not happen, the Trump team made clear it would not let Israel’s objections stand in the way. From 2009 to 2019, the influence of Israel and its allies over the United States debate on Iran was limited. When the Obama and Trump administrations decided to intensify pressure against Iran in 2010–​2012 and 2017–​2018, Israel played a prominent role in ensuring it maximised its leverage. But when the administrations tried diplomacy, Israel’s strong objections failed to persuade the president to reverse course. The conclusion should not be surprising: a junior partner could encourage the senior partner to pursue a policy it prefers but could not persuade the senior partner to abandon one it does not. But the US and Israel are not ordinary partners, and the threat posed by a nuclear-​armed Iran is not an ordinary policy dispute. That this dynamic persisted despite changes in American administrations provides important nuance in assessing the post-​2016 international order and Trump’s impact. Trump had no qualms about breaking an international agreement, taking unilateral sanctions measures and threatening financial and trade penalties against American treaty allies in Europe. Given his commitment to Israel, however, the expectation might be that the United States would defer to Israel’s requests on an issue it defined as paramount to its own security. But just as under Obama, Trump disagreed strongly with Israel about the utility of negotiating with Iran, and Israel was unable to change his mind. Despite significant shifts in America’s foreign policy and the global balance of power, Israeli-​American power dynamics remained the same.

Notes 1 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (NY, 2007), 8. 2 Ibid, 8, 14. Stephen Walt, “The Art of the Regime Change”, Foreign Policy (8 May 2018): https://​ foreig​npol​icy.com/​2018/​05/​08/​the-​art-​of-​the-​reg​ime-​cha​nge/​; idem, “Why America Will Never Hit Reset With Iran”, Foreign Policy (3 August 2015): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2015/​n08/​03/​why-​amer​ ica-​will-​never-​hit-​reset-​with-​iran-​mark-​dubov​itz-​cont​ainm​ent/​, repeats the argument. 3 Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance (New Haven, CT, 2007); idem, Losing an Enemy (New Haven, CT, 2017). 4 Jay Solomon, The Iran Wars (NY, 2016), 168–​75; William Burns, The Back Channel (NY, 2020), 345–​46. 5 David Sanger, Confront and Conceal (NY, 2012), 188–​225. 6 Anshel Pfeffer, Bibi (NY, 2018), 312–​20; Dennis Ross, Doomed To Succeed (NY, 2015), 342–​52; Dana Allin and Steven Simon, Our Separate Ways (NY, 2016), 71–​87. 7 In his inaugural address, Obama addressed “those who cling to power through corruption and deceit” and offered, “we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist”, a veiled reference to Iran that mirrored George H.W. Bush’s outreach two decades earlier. “President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address” (21 January 2009): https://​obam​awhi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​blog/​2009/​01/​21/​presid​ent-​Bar​ ack-​oba​mas-​inaugu​ral-​addr​ess; Henry Rome, “United States Iran Policy and the Role of Israel, 1990–​ 1993”, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 30/​4(2019), 729–​54; Ross, Doomed to Succeed. 8 Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei pulled out of a fuel swap agreement involving the Tehran Research Reactor, evidently wary of a deal that gave up Iranian leverage after the brutal crackdown that followed the disputed presidential elections in June. See Burns, Back Channel, 349–​53; Hillary Clinton, Hard Choices (NY, 2014), 357; Barack Obama, “Remarks of President Obama Marking Nowruz” (20 March 2010): https://​obam​awhi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​the-​press-​off​i ce/​rema​rks-​presid​ent-​obama-​mark​ing-​ now​ruz; Robert Gates, Duty (NY, 2014), 390.

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Henry Rome 9 Kenneth Katzman, Iran Sanctions (Washington, DC, 2017); Richard Nephew, The Art of Sanctions (NY, 2018), 77–​78. 10 Josh Rogin, “Exclusive: State Department Letter to Kerry Outlines ‘Serious Substantive Concerns’ with Iran Sanctions Bill”, Foreign Policy (11 December 2009): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2009/​12/​11/​ exclus​ive-​state-​dep​artm​ent-​let​ter-​to-​kerry-​outli​nes-​seri​ous-​subs​tant​ive-​conce​r ns-​with-​iran-​sancti​ ons-​bill/​; Juan C. Zarate, Treasury’s War (NY, 2013), 335–​38. 11 Barack Obama, “Statement on Signing the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010”, American Presidency Project (1 July 2010): www.presidency.ucsb.edu/​documents/​ statement-​signing-​the-​comprehensive-​iran-​sanctions-​accountability-​and-​divestment-​act-​2010. 12 Solomon, Iran Wars, 193–​201. 13 Jay Solomon, “Nations to Weigh Impact of Possible Iran Oil Curbs”, Wall Street Journal (19 December 2011): www.wsj.com/​articles/​SB10001424052970204058404577106544032326610. 14 Josh Rogin, “Menendez Livid at Obama Team’s Push to Shelve Iran Sanctions Amendment”, Foreign Policy (1 December 2011): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2011/​12/​01/​menen​dez-​livid-​at-​obama-​teams-​ push-​to-​she​lve-​iran-​sancti​ons-​amendm​ent/​. 15 Nephew, Art of Sanctions, 107–​09. 16 Daniel Sobelman, “Restraining an Ally: Israel, the United States, and Iran’s Nuclear Program, 2011–​ 2012,” Texas National Security Review 1, no. 4 (2018), 11–​38. 17 Ibid. is the definitive study of this “war scare”. 18 Ibid. 19 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at AIPAC Policy Conference” (4 March 2012): https://​ obam​awhi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​the-​press-​off​i ce/​2012/​03/​04/​rema​rks-​presid​ent-​aipac-​pol​icy-​con​ fere​nce-​0; Jeffrey Goldberg, “Obama to Iran and Israel: ‘As President of the United States, I Don’t Bluff’ ”, The Atlantic (2 March 2012): www.theatlantic.com/​international/​archive/​2012/​03/​obama-​ to-​iran-​and-​israel-​as-​president-​of-​the-​united-​states-​i-​dont-​bluff/​253875/​. 20 Michael Oren, Ally (NY, 2015), 190. 21 Gates, Duty, 391–​93. 22 Herb Keinon and Henry Rome, “Netanyahu: I Will Not ‘Shut Up’ When Israel’s Interests Are at Stake”, Jerusalem Post (1 December 2013): www.jpost.com/​Diplomacy-​and-​Politics/​Olmert-​faults-​ Netanyahu-​on-​Iran-​nuclear-​diplomacy-​says-​PM-​has-​declared-​war-​on-​US-​333630; Israeli Missions Around the World, “PM Netanyahu on the Geneva agreement” (25 November 2021): https://​embass​ ies.gov.il/​MFA/​PressR​oom/​2013/​Pages/​PM-​Netany​ahu%27s-​rema​rks-​at-​the-​start-​of-​the-​wee​kly-​ Cabi​net-​meet​ing-​24-​Nov-​2013.aspx. On the back channel that preceded the JPOA, see Burns, Back Channel, 337–​81; Wendy Sherman, Not For The Faint Of Heart (NY, 2018), 33–​43. 23 Permitting Iran to retain a domestic enrichment capability departed from Washington’s longstanding position. Before the secret back channel began, Senator John Kerry reportedly offered this concession to Iran via Oman without co-​ordination with the Obama Administration. The Administration formally offered the concession in March 2013: John Kerry, Every Day Is Extra (NY, 2018), 492–​96; Burns, Back Channel, 364; Mark Landler, Alter Egos (NY, 2016), 250–​55. 24 As Obama acknowledged in 2015, Iran’s breakout time would go “almost down to zero” after the nuclear constraints expired. Steve Inskeep, “Transcript: President Obama’s Full NPR Interview On Iran Nuclear Deal”, NPR (7 April 2015): www.npr.org/​2015/​04/​07/​ 397933577/​transcript-​president-​ obamas-​full-​npr-​interview-​on-​iran-​nuclear-​deal; Department of State, “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (14 July 2015): https://​2009-​2017.state.gov/​e/​eb/​tfs/​spi/​iran/​jcpoa//​index.htm. 25 Shortly before the JPOA was agreed, Obama backed away from airstrikes in Syria following its use of chemical weapons, crossing a stated “red line”. 26 “The Complete Transcript of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress”, Washington Post (15 March 2015): www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​post-​politics/​wp/​2015/​03/​03/​full-​text-​netanyahus-​address-​ to-​congress/​. 27 Ron Kampeas, “AIPAC Fly-​in Launches Major Push against Iran Nuclear Deal”, JTA (23 July 2015): www.jta.org/​2015/​07/​23/​politics/​aipac-​fly-i​ n-l​ aunches-m ​ ajor-p​ ush-a​ gainst-i​ ran-n ​ uclear-d​ eal; Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Influential Pro-​Israel Group Suffers Stinging Political Defeat”, NY Times (10 September 2015): www.nytimes.com/​2015/​09/​11/​world/​influential-​pro-​israel-​group-suffers-​ stinging-​political-​defeat.html; Charles Freilich, “Opposing the Iran Deal Has Done Great Damage to AIPAC”, Newsweek (31 October 2015): www.newsweek.com/​opposing-​iran-​deal-has-​donegreat-​damage-​aipac-​382718.

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United States, Israel, and Iran, 2009–2019 28 Parsi, Losing an Enemy, 345. 29 David Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-​Policy Guru”, NY Times (5 May 2016): www.nytimes.com/​2016/​05/​08/​magazine/​the-​aspiring-​novelist-​who-​became-​obamas-​ foreign-​policy-​guru.html; Ben Rhodes, The World As It Is (NY, 2018), 329; Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Lobbying Fight Over Iran Nuclear Deal Centers on Democrats”, NY Times (17 August 2015): www. nytimes.com/​2015/​08/​18/​world/​middleeast/​lobbying-​fight-​over-​iran-​nuclear-​deal-​centers-​on-​ democrats.html; Jennifer Steinhauer, “Democrats Hand Victory to Obama on Iran Nuclear Deal”, ibid. (10 September 2015): www.nytimes.com/​2015/​09/​11/​us/​politics/​iran-​nuclear-​deal-​senate. html; Justin Sink, “White House Official: Iran Nuclear Deal Top Priority”, The Hill (31 October 2014): https://​theh​ill.com/​blogs/​blog-​brief​i ng-​room/​222​417-​white-​house-​offic​ial-​iran-​deal-​top-​ prior​ity. 30 George H.W. Bush, “Israeli Loan Guarantees’ Delay”, C-​SPAN (21 September 1991): www.c-​span. org/​video/​?21178-​1/​israeli-​loan-​guarantees-​delay. 31 Thomas L. Friedman, “Obama Makes His Case on Iran Nuclear Deal”, NY Times (14 July 2015): www. nytimes.com/​2015/​07/​15/​opinion/​thomas-​friedman-​obama-​makes-​his-​case-​on-​iran-​nuclear-​deal. html; Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Middle East Interview: President Obama on ISIS, Iran, and Israel”, The Atlantic (21 May 2015): www.theatlantic.com/​international/​archive/​2015/​05/​obama-​interview-​iran-​ isis-​israel/​393782/​; Inskeep, “Transcript: President Obama’s Full NPR Interview”; “Remarks by the President on the Iran Nuclear Deal” (5 August 2015): https://​obam​awhi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​the-​ press-​off​i ce/​2015/​08/​05/​rema​rks-​presid​ent-​iran-​nucl​ear-​deal. 32 “Presidential Announcement Speech”, TIME (16 June 2015): https://​time.com/​3923​128/​don​ald-​ trump-​annou​ncem​ent-​spe​ech/​. 33 Yeganeh Torbati, “Trump Election Puts Iran Nuclear Deal on Shaky Ground”, Reuters (6 November 2016): www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​usa-​election-​trump-​iran/​trump-​election-​puts-​iran-​nuclear-​dealon-​shaky-​g round-​idUSKBN13427E; Donald Trump, “Amateur Hour with the Iran Nuclear Deal”, USA Today (8 September 2015): www.usatoday.com/​ story/​opinion/​2015/​09/​08/​donald-​ trump-​amateur-​hour-​iran-​nuclear-​deal-​column/​71884090/​; Donald Trump, “The #IranDeal Is a Catastrophe That Must Be Stopped”, Twitter (11 August 2015): https://​twit​ter.com/​real​Dona​ldTr​ ump/​sta​tus/​631​1826​0993​0932​224. 34 David Smith, “The Anti-​Obama: Trump’s Drive to Destroy His Predecessor’s Legacy”, Guardian (11 May 2018): www.theguardian.com/​us-​news/​2018/​may/​11/​donald-​trump-​barack-​obama-​legacy. 35 Dalia Dassa Kaye and Shira Efron, “Israel’s Evolving Iran Policy”, Survival, 62/​4(2020): 7–​30. 36 Anne Gearan, “ ‘He Threw a Fit’: Trump’s Anger over Iran Deal Forced Aides to Scramble for a Compromise”, Washington Post (11 October 2017): www.washingtonpost.com/​politics/​ he-​threw-​a-​fit-​ trumps-​anger-​over-​iran-​deal-​forced-​aides-​to-​scramble-​for-​a-​compromise/​2017/​10/​11/​6218174c-​ ae94-​ 1 1e7-​ 9 e58- ​ e 6288544af98_ ​ s tory.html?utm_ ​ t erm= ​ . 8a1e65ba620c&itid= ​ l k_ ​ i nterstitial_ ​ manual_​16. 37 “Remarks by President Trump to the 72nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly” (19 September 2017): https://​br.usemba​ssy.gov/​rema​rks-​presid​ent-​trump-​72nd-​sess​ion-​uni​ted-​nati​ons-​ gene​ral-​assem​bly/​. 38 “Remarks by President Trump on Iran Strategy” (13 October 2017): https://​trum​pwhi​teho​use.archi​ ves.gov/​briefi​ngs-​sta​teme​nts/​rema​rks-​presid​ent-​trump-​iran-​strat​egy/​. 39 Secretary of State Rex Tillerson enlisted a senior aide, Brian Hook, to negotiate a supplemental, stronger agreement with France, Germany, and Britain, although Hook did not have the support of Trump: “Statement by the President on the Iran Nuclear Deal” (12 January 2018): https://​trum​pwhi​ teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​briefi​ngs-​sta​teme​nts/​statem​ent-​presid​ent-​iran-​nucl​ear-​deal/​. 40 Benjamin Netanyahu, “2018 Address to AIPAC”, Times of Israel (6 March 2018): www.timesofisrael. com/​full-​text-​of-​netanyahus-​2018-​address-​to-​aipac/​. 41 Barak Ravid, “Bibi to Europe: You Have to Pick America or Iran”, Axios (26 March 2018): www. axios.com/​netanyahu-​tells-​europeans-​they-​need-​to-​negotiate-​with-​trump-​on-​iran-​1522084543-​ da3279a6-​b69c-​415f-​a033-​0f67a188c0fd.html; “PM Said to Tell NATO: ‘Real Possibility’ Trump Will Nullify Iran Deal”, Times of Israel (9 January 2018): www.timesofisrael.com/​pm-​said-​to-​tell-​ nato-​real-​possibility-​trump-​will-​nullify-​iran-​deal/​. 42 Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, “The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran”, NY Times (4 September 2019): www.nytimes.com/​2019/​09/​04/​magazine/​iran-​strike-​israel-​america.html; Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “PM Netanyahu Presents Conclusive Proof of Iranian Secret

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Henry Rome Nuclear Weapons Program” (30 April 2018): https://​mfa.gov.il/​MFA/​PressR​oom/​2018/​ Pages/​PM-​ Netanyahu-​presents-​conclusive-​proof-​of-​Iranian-​secret-​nuclear-​weapons-​program-​30-​April-​2018. aspx. 43 Emily Tillett, “Netanyahu Says Trump Decertifying Iran Deal ‘Brave’ and ‘Right Decision’ ”, CBS (15 October 2017): www.cbsnews.com/​news/​netanyahu-​says-​trump-​decertifying-​iran-​deal-​brave-​and-​ right-​decision/​. 44 Bergman and Mazzetti, “Secret History”. 45 Author interview with Eric Brewer, Director for Counter Proliferation, NSC, 2017-​ 2018 (25 September 2020). Also see Kaye and Efron, “Israel’s Evolving Iran Policy”. 46 Maggie Haberman and David Sanger, “Highlights From Our Interview With Donald Trump on Foreign Policy”, NY Times (26 March 2016): www.nytimes.com/​2016/​03/​27/​us/​politics/​donald-​ trump-​interview-​highlights.html. 47 Anne Gearan, Robert Costa, and David Lynch, “Trump’s Hard Line Approach Appears to Soften in Meetings with World Leaders”, Washington Post (1 July 2019): www.washingtonpost.com/​politics/​trumps-​hard-​line-​approach-​appears-​to-​soften-​in-​meetings-​with-​world-​leaders/​2019/​07/​01/​ 93b470c2-​9c25-​11e9-​b27f-​ed2942f73d70_​story.html; Michael Hirsh, “Why Trump Fails at Making Deals”, Foreign Policy (21 August 2019): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2019/​08/​21/​why-​trump-​cant-​ make-​deals-​intern​atio​nal-​negot​iati​ons/​. 48 Michele Kelemen, “Pompeo’s Trip To Switzerland Could Signal The U.S. is Working to Talk With Iran”, NPR (30 May 2019): www.npr.org/​2019/​05/​30/​728053482/​pompeos-​trip-​to-​switzerland-​ could-​signal-​the-​u-​s-​is-​working-​to-​talk-​with-​iran; Mark Dubowitz, Reuel Marc Gerecht, and Behnam Ben Taleblu, “What ‘Yes’ With Iran Looks Like”, Foundation for Defense of Democracies (26 June 2019): www.fdd.org/​analysis/​memos/​2019/​06/​26/​what-​yes-​with-​iran-​looks-​like/​; Amos Harel, “How Trump and Netanyahu Split Ways on Iran, Pushing Israel to Reconsider Acting Alone”, Ha’aretz (17 December 2019): www.haaretz.com/​us-​news/​.premium-​how-​trump-​and-​ netanyahu-​split-​ways-​on-​iran-​pushing-​israel-​to-​act-​alone-​1.8187627; Ben Caspit, “Netanyahu’s Worst Nightmare: A Trump-​Rouhani Meeting”, Al-​Monitor (28 August 2019): www.al-​monitor. com/​pulse/​originals/​2019/​08/​israel-​us-​iran-​donald-​trump-​benjamin-​netanyahu-​macron-​g7.html. 49 “Remarks by President Trump on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (8 May 2018): https://​ trum​pwhi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​briefi​ngs-​sta​teme​nts/​rema​rks-​presid​ent-​trump-​joint-​compre​hens​ive-​ plan-​act​ion/​. 50 “Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister Conte of Italy in Joint Press Conference”, (30 July 2018): https://​it.usemba​ssy.gov/​presid​ent-​trump-​prime-​minis​ter-​conte-​joint-​press-​con​fere​nce/​. 51 Mike Pompeo, “After the Deal: A New Iran Strategy”, Heritage Foundation (21 May 2018): www. heritage.org/​defense/​event/​after-​the-​deal-​new-​iran-​strategy. 52 On the economic impact of this decision, see Henry Rome, “Iran’s Crisis Budget”, Iran Primer (16 December 2019): https://​ira​npri​mer.usip.org/​blog/​2019/​dec/​16/​irans-​cri​sis-​bud​get. 53 Idem, “Negotiations Have Already Started –​Just Not Face to Face”, The Hill (12 June 2019): https://​ theh​ill.com/​opin​ion/​natio​nal-​secur​ity/​448​014-​iran-​us-​negot​iati​ons-​have-​alre​ady-​star​ted. 54 Peter Baker and Aurelien Breeden, “Iranian Official Makes Surprise Appearance on Sidelines of G7 Summit”, NY Times (25 August 2019): www.nytimes.com/​2019/​08/​25/​world/​europe/​g7-​iran-​ trump-​biarritz.html; Parisa Hafezi, “Exclusive: Iran Says It Will Not Negotiate Missile Work, Wants to Export More Oil”, Reuters (25 August 2019): www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​g7-​summit-​iran-​ nuclear-​exclusive/​exclusive-​iran-​says-​it-​will-​not-​negotiate-​missile-​work-​wants-​to-​export-​more-​oil-​ idUSKCN1VF0QL. 55 Author interview with Richard Goldberg, Director for Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2019–​2020, NSC (30 June 2020). John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened (NY, 2020), 419. 56 Jonathan Swan and Barak Ravid, “Netanyahu Tried to Reach Trump to Block Zarif Meeting”, Axios (29 August 2019): www.axios.com/​scoop-​netanyahu-​tried-​to-​reach-​trump-​to-​block-​zarif-​meeting-​ 85a6a92d-​51fa-​4d55-​bb79-​e5163b0706ce.html; Bolton, Room Where It Happened, 420. 57 “Remarks by President Trump and President Macron of France in Joint Press Conference, Biarritz, France” (26 August 2019): https://​trum​pwhi​teho​use.archi​ves.gov/​briefi​ngs-​sta​teme​nts/​rema​rks-​ presid​ent-​trump-​presid​ent-​mac​ron-​fra​nce-​joint-​press-​con​fere​nce-​biarr​itz-​fra​nce/​. 58 Barak Ravid, “Netanyahu to Macron: ‘Not the Time’ for Trump Iran Summit”, Axios (20 August 2019): www.axios.com/​netanyahu-​macron-​phone-​call-​trump-​iran-​summit-​37882df9-​aa8f-​4fca-​ a183-​33e0abecdaa7.html; Raphael Ahren, “Netanyahu Says He’s Confident Trump Will Continue

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United States, Israel, and Iran, 2009–2019 to Press Iran”, Times of Israel (12 September 2019): www.timesofisrael.com/​netanyahu-​says-​hes-​ confident-​trump-​will-​continue-​to-​press-​iran/​. 59 Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran’s Nuclear Program” (9 September 2019): https://​mfa.gov.il/​MFA/​PressR​oom/​2019/​Pages/​Prime-​Minis​ter-​Benja​min-​ Netany​ahu-​on-​Iran-​s-​Nucl​ear-​Prog​ram-​9-​Octo​ber-​2019.aspx. 60 Robin Wright, “Trump’s Close-​Call Diplomacy with Iran’s President”, New Yorker (30 September 2019): www.newyorker.com/​news/​news-​desk/​donald-​trumps-​close-​call-​diplomacy-with-​iranspresident-​hassan-​rouhani.

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PART VI

The International Economy

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23 THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND AND THE WORLD BANK From Institutional Anchors of Liberalism to Geopolitical Rivalry? Morten Bøås

The international Monetary Fund [IMF] and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development [World Bank] are not only amongst the world’s most powerful international organisations in their own right, but they represent the most visible institutional “anchors” of the liberal post-​Second World War order. Thus, whilst some other institutional features of that period have seen their importance drastically reduced or simply wane into oblivion, the IMF and World Bank have continued to reflect power configurations and promote worldviews in accordance with a liberal Western-​dominated world order. This may be about to change because the IMF and the World Bank are primarily economic institutions and, thereby, bound eventually to reflect global economic realities; and from an economic perspective, these realities have for quite some time indicated a world that increasingly moves in a multipolar direction. Moreover, during the last decade, the turn to economic multipolarity has followed in the wake of increased Great Power rivalry between the United States and China, upheavals of the political landscape in a number of countries, including in advanced Western economies, and a reversal or resistance to globalisation. This constitutes an international environment in which global institutions anchored in a post-​Second World War mind-​set that depends on leadership and collaboration amongst advanced liberal-​minded economies will not necessarily thrive and may have to change to remain relevant.1 The IMF and the World Bank have undoubtedly occupied an important role in global economic affairs since the United States and its allies established them in 1944 by providing both much-​needed loans and technical assistance. Much analysis about them exists, and there is no shortage of technical information concerning their financing, lending, and impact. What is more difficult to find is a concise introduction that treats them as what they really are: political institutions that form an integral part of modern-​day economic diplomacy and statecraft. Because the IMF and World Bank are not only political in their very nature, but also vast and complex international bureaucracies performing a wide range of different tasks, it is unhelpful to see them as unitary actors totally under the control of majority shareholders.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-29

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A better approach entails highlighting their internal processes and politics, and how they relate to changes in their external environments. In 1944, a conference convened at Bretton Woods in the United States by the emerging victorious Powers in the Second World War. It was here that the IMF and the World Bank were born in the hope that they would provide the foundation for a peaceful and prosperous international future. The objective was to devise a stable global economic system to avert calamities such as the Great Depression and its lingering effects, which had culminated in the Second World War. The IMF was to provide a stable international monetary system that could promote trade whilst, initially, the World Bank was to aid Western Europe reconstruction after the Second World War, mainly by channelling American money to European development. It was only after the rebuilding of Western Europe went much swifter than expected and the process of decolonisation started that the World Bank turned its attention to development and development finance as known today. What is important to note is that the IMF and the World Bank also represented a form of international co-​operation that the world had not experienced before 1945. This entailed a significant transformation from the League of Nations and United Nations models in which all member-​states formally have an equal voice and vote. The joint-​stock model of private capitalist corporations, in which members are shareholders whose voting powers vary with their relative economic might, inspired the structure of both the IMF and World Bank. In other words, each member-​state’s share of the votes reflects the combined amount of capital that it contributes and guarantees. All member-​states are organised in country constituencies, headed by an executive director who controls the combined votes of his or her constituency and serves on the institution’s Board of Directors. The size and composition of the country constituency may vary, but the principle of organisation is similar.2 With the formation of the World Bank, the capital construction of all multilateral financial institutions was established. However, whilst the organisational principle was the joint-​stock model of private corporations, in the World Bank and similar institutions, public and not private sources provided capital subscriptions. In the World Bank, the initial capitalisation of US$10 billion consisted of 20 per cent in paid capital and 80 per cent in guaranteed capital. This distinction is crucial. Each member-​state subscription divides into two parts. The larger one is the so-​called “guaranteed capital”. Member-​states do not actually pay this amount but guarantees a certain sum of money. Therefore, the credit rating of the World Bank and the IMF finds its basis on the amount of capital guaranteed by the richest member-​states. This provides these institutions with the best possible credit rating –​for example, the triple A rating –​making it possible either for the World Bank to lend money on international capital markets and re-​ lend it to poorer member-​states or, in the case of the IMF, to member-​states in need of short-​ term loans to stabilise their finances and financial sectors. These financial arrangements are only possible by the membership of the strongest economies in the world and, hence, constitutes the backbone of their power in these institutions. The IMF and World Bank could not function without their wealthy member-​states, and this knowledge, shared by all the actors involved, implies that the Board of Directors rarely use votes. Quite simply, votes remain rare because the power relations on the Board are transparent, and the consequences of constantly working against them obvious to everybody concerned.3 This does not suggest that these institutions are free from political conflict and rivalry –​they are not –​only that if the real power configurations that they rest upon are to change, it must be through changes in ownership. It means that some members would have to increase their capital subscription to gain more votes, whilst others would have to accept a decline in the relative size of their votes. This has not happened very often and, to the extent that it has, most such 284

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changes has been mainly incremental. However, as fundamental transformations to global economic realities started to manifest as long-​term trends, changes also started to take place in these institutions, as they could not shield themselves from the economic transformations that were taking place. Their credit rating and thereby ultimately their ability to perform core functions depend on the creditworthiness of their main subscribing member countries, and the first that started to implement some modest reforms in this regard was the IMF. In November 2010, the IMF’s Executive Board approved far-​reaching reforms suggesting that the power structure that had prevailed since the birth at Bretton Woods in 1944 was coming towards its end. Speaking to the press immediately after the Board’s decision, the IMF’s managing director, Dominique Strauss-​Kahn, hailed this process as a “historical reform”, increasing the voice and representation of emerging markets and developing countries in the IMF.4 What this meant in practice is that the so-​called BRIC-​countries –​Brazil, Russia, India, and China –​ emerged amongst the IMF’s top shareholders because of a shift of six per cent of the total quota shares. Because 80 per cent of this shift comes from advanced economies –​the United States and Europe mainly –​what this meant when reform took full effect in October 2012 was that there were two fewer seats for Europe on the IMF Executive Board and two more for emerging market economies. This reform in the IMF had significant consequences for the debates and conflicts about the power structure of other important multilateral financial institutions –​the World Bank included –​as it signalled the beginning of an end to the power configurations that had lasted in the global institutions since immediately after the end of the Second World War. As such, what the November 2010 decision of the IMF Executive Board came to represent was the beginning of an unfinished process of reconfiguration of power relations in multilateral financial institutions more in line with current global economic realities. The reasoning of the IMF is the same as the World Bank, but its establishment differs because it resulted from lengthy discussions of four alternative proposals –​American, British, Canadian, and French –​during the Second World War. Whilst the Canadian and French proposals eventually faded, the British and American ones remained as topics for discussion. Britain’s Keynes Plan proposed an international clearing union that would create an international means of payment called “bancor”. The rival American plan, named after Harry Dexter White from the United States Treasury, suggested a currency pool to which members would make specified contributions only, and from which countries could borrow to help themselves over short-​term balance-​of-​payments deficits. In essence, the major difference between these two plans was that the Keynes Plan emphasised national autonomy, whilst the White Plan considered exchange-​ rate stability to be of primary importance. In the end, the thinking behind the White Plan constituted the IMF framework. When the IMF began operations from its headquarters in Washington, DC in 1946, its primary task was to monitor and manage a system of stable exchange rates with the value of all currencies based on gold and the American dollar. To ensure the stability of this system, Washington guaranteed the value of dollar in gold at a set rate of $35 per ounce. The IMF’s second major function was to provide countries with short-​term financing from its vast reserves of foreign currencies and gold to help them overcome temporary balance-​of-​payments deficits and support their exchange-​rate values. These reserves came from the contributions by IMF member-​countries based on the size of their economies. Until the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1971 because of inflationary pressure and the cost of the war it was fighting in Vietnam, these remained the two core functions of the IMF. It was the first major transformation in the post-​1945 multilateral system, coming from President Richard Nixon forced to acknowledge economic realities and unilaterally abandon the gold standard. Thereafter, the IMF’s main responsibility has been short-​term loans for balance-​of-​payment deficits. Currently, 285

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190 countries are members –​the most recent new members being South-​Sudan, Nauru, and Andorra –​and, on joining, each contributes a certain amount of money called a quota subscription. These quotas serve the following purposes: • they form the pool of money from which the IMF can draw to lend to member-​states in financial difficulties; • they are the basis for determining how much money a member-​state can borrow from the IMF or receive from the IMF in periodic allocations –​known as special drawing rights; and • they determine the voting power of each member-​state. Reviews of these quotas occur every five years and can be raised or lowered according to both IMF needs and the economic prosperity or decline of the member-​state in question. However, the quotas themselves may not provide sufficient money to meet the borrowing needs of members in a period of great stress in the world economy. Asia’s financial crisis in 1997 and the 2007–​2008 global financial crisis are illustrative. This is why the establishment of so-​called “general arrangements to borrow” already occurred in 1962. The arrangement is a line of credit with a number of governments and banks throughout the world to which the IMF pays interest on whatever it borrows and undertakes to repay the loan in five years. The IMF system for raising external funds is therefore different from that utilised by the World Bank but, in essence, the principle is the same. Both institutions borrow money on international capital markets based on the money paid in and guaranteed by its most affluent members.5 Importantly, contrary to the World Bank, the IMF is not a development institution. Its mission is much narrower, lending to member-​states with payment problems –​countries that do not earn enough foreign currency to pay for what they buy from abroad. The economic logic is quite simple: a country with a payments problem is spending more than it is earning, and this situation has to stop. It needs reform, but if a country goes to the IMF, it cannot choose any kind of reform. It must adopt measures approved by the IMF, and this procedure has developmental consequences. In accord with the neoliberal dogma of the IMF, reform plans should contain the following standard components: reduce government expenditure, tighten monetary policy, and deal with structural weaknesses by, for example, privatising inefficient public utilities and enterprises. More recently, this list has seen some “softer” items added: adequate social safety nets, “good” government spending, and good governance. It is often unclear what these terms mean in practice, but all potential borrowers have learnt the importance of including such items in their applications. Formally, the IMF does not possess much autonomy. The chain of command is supposed to run directly from the governments of member-​states to the organisation. Thus, when working out lending arrangements, including conditionalities, the IMF formally acts not on its own, but as an intermediary between the will of the majority of its membership and the individual member-​states. Yet, it is also clear that those contributing the most to the IMF possess the strongest voices in determining policies. Just as in the case of the World Bank, the IMF has a Board of Directors that constitutes resident representatives in Washington, DC. And just as in the World Bank, this Board rarely makes decisions based on formal voting. The usual procedure is the formation of a consensus; but this consensus is artificial given the distribution of voting power amongst Board members. The IMF and World Bank were initially established to solve one specific problem more than anything else: the reconstruction of Europe. However, as this took place faster than expected with little if any assistance by the IMF and World Bank –​the American Marshall plan did the job –​the World Bank refocused its attention to the challenge of development in the poorer 286

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parts of the world. The United States played an important role in this regard. A common belief is that President Harry Truman’s inauguration speech of 20 January 1949 marks the beginning of the modern development enterprise.6 In this speech, he presented the transfer and transfusion of scientific and expert knowledge as the solution to poverty and misery. Although transfer and transfusion were to be the means, increased prosperity and closer resemblance to Western societies were not only the original objective; they were clearly part of that age’s geopolitical necessities. For much of their history, the ends have remained whilst the means have slowly changed. However, most changes in the IMF and the World Bank have been incremental, most often without much attempt to place new objectives in a logical prioritised order. The process of transformation that has taken place in both institutions mainly resembles “change by adaptation”.7 The reason is that both bodies confront specific challenges when faced with demands to incorporate new issue areas. Their mission is never simple and straightforward as both member-​ states and other actors in their external environment may disagree on the interpretation of the mission –​the ends –​as well as on the tasks –​the means –​needed to accomplish it. In social units that function under such circumstances, organisational routines and standard operating procedures are preferred to substantive change. They accordingly favour one particular way of arranging and routinising their activities. Because the IMF and the World Bank have to satisfy not only their various member-​states constituencies but also, increasingly, civil society organisations, they try to avoid articulating competing views. Consensus becomes an objective in itself, but the kind of consensus established in the IMF and the World Bank relates to the power structure still prevailing in the two institutions. It adds an additional layer of artificiality to an already existing artificial consensus. Change has taken place over time in both institutions. The inclusion of new social and environmental components have modified projects, policies, and approaches, with regular safeguards introduced to ensure that environmental and social damage is avoided as much as possible. However, the IMF and World Bank approach is still of an engineering problem-​solving type, with policies and project papers written in the technical language familiar to staff, management, and the boards of the institutions. Whilst this approach worked remarkably well in the 1950s and 1960s, it gradually came into question in the 1970s and 1980s; by the 1990s, it was fully apparent that narrow technical approaches could no longer tackle new development challenges, and the IMF and the World Bank, in particular, started to experience more severe difficulties. The question was no longer simply a matter of finding the right technical solution to a functional problem. In the twenty-​first century, the challenge is to construct some sort of consensus around an increasingly politicised development agenda, constituted by a whole range of new crosscutting issues: political, economic and financial governance, involuntary resettlement, and indigenous people. The technocratic consensus had thereby reached its limits, as it was no longer possible in any credible way to define development solely in a technical and functional manner. Consequently, the internal artificial consensus has started to disappear, not only between donor and borrowing country members, but also internally in the IMF and World Bank. This new development agenda makes the process of political manoeuvring between donor and recipient countries and other stakeholders –​civil society and private sector actors –​increasingly difficult. The role of the United States is crucial in understanding both the establishment and early development of the IMF and the World Bank, and the policies pursued in the 1980s, the 1990s, and in the new millennium. The multilateral institutions that emerged out of Bretton Woods was first an American creation, second Anglo-​Saxon, and, only third, international. The United States supplied most of the resources necessary for making loans and served as 287

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the main market for their securities. Over the years, there have been two conflicting opinions of American influence in the World Bank. One held by many members of the American Congress argues that the United States has too little influence on World Bank activities and policies. The claim is that highly paid, aloof bureaucrats, unresponsive to American concerns, and accountable only to themselves run the Bank. The opposite view held by a substantial number of World Bank staff and many outsiders –​most non-​governmental organisations [NGOs] and some borrowing member-​states –​maintains that the United States runs the Bank. A more sober analysis supports neither of these extreme positions: American influence in the World Bank is important, but not absolute.8 Throughout the history of the World Bank, the United States has been the largest shareholder and the most influential member-​state. American support for, criticism of, and pressure on the World Bank have been central to its growth and the evolution of its policies, programmes, and practices. Underlying more than 80 years of American-​World Bank relations has been a fundamental ambivalence on the part of the United States toward both development assistance and multilateral co-​operation in general.9 However, whilst both interest in and support for the IMF and the World Bank has waxed and waned amongst different American presidents over 80 years, United States support for the World Bank has been based on the view that promoting economic growth and development in other parts of the world is in the national interest. Moreover, multilateral co-​operation is a particularly effective way of both leveraging and allocating resources for development purposes that serve American national interests. The United States Treasury Department has consistently emphasised these points, viewing both the IMF and World Bank as foreign policy instruments to support specific American aims and objectives. Thus, whilst various American administrations have supported the IMF and World Bank for their capacity to leverage funds and influence the economic policies of borrowing countries, America has also been uneasy with the autonomy on which the development role of the World Bank and the financial role of the IMF depend, and the power sharing that accompanies burden sharing. This ambivalence, a preoccupation with first containing and, more recently, having concerns about the relative change or reduction in United States power in the world explains much of the evolution of American relations with the IMF and the World Bank over the past decades. The United States Congress, unlike the legislatures in other member-​states, has been a major influence on the policies of multilateral institutions in general, and the IMF and World Bank in particular. For example, within the context of changing foreign policy concerns, Congressional involvement has significantly affected the style and approach of American participation in the World Bank. Having promoted the establishment, early financial growth, and expansion of the Bank, the United States in the 1970s often found itself at odds with the organisation. However, the debt crisis in the South, in particular in Latin-​America, and the collapse of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe led to renewed American interest in the Bank; and it occurred at the same time as pressure from NGOs caused Washington to push it to be more environmentally aware. Quite remarkably, from the 1980s, renewed United States attention to the World Bank accompanied a strange combination of a continuing decline in the American share of funding and a unilateral, dogmatic assertiveness on matters of Bank policies. This combination antagonised several other member-​states –​borrowing and donor members alike. As long as the United States stood as the sole superpower and the economic powerhouse of the world, there was toleration of the American Congress’s use of its power of the purse to direct as well as restrict American financial participation in the World Bank. Now, as United States economic hegemony is decreasing, China and some emerging Middle Powers contest American power in the Bank. 288

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It is important to recognise that the relationship between the United States and the World Bank/​IMF is ambiguous. As a starting point, foreign aid has never been popular in the Congress. Although muted objections occurred just after the Second World War, Congress quickly became dissatisfied and distrustful of multilateral institutions. Therefore, most members of Congress were uninterested and uninformed about World Bank operations. Even on key committees, there was much misunderstanding of what the World Bank did and how it operated.10 Increased appropriation requests became attractive targets. Over time, there has also been a general breakdown of discipline and effective leadership in Congress, making it increasingly difficult to manoeuvre unpopular aid requests through the labyrinthine authorisation and appropriation procedures. For example, no fewer than five committees have significant jurisdiction over American policy towards the World Bank. The most important are the House Banking Sub-​Committee on International Development Institutions and Finance and the Appropriations Sub-​Committee of Foreign Relations. This kind of institutional arrangement provides multiple entry points for interests groups with specific policy agendas –​for example, environmental NGOs –​and it creates a situation in which strategically placed members of Congress, and specific issues, may gain disproportional weight in the policy process.11 As long as Congress was passive in making policy towards the IMF and the World Bank, its basic dislike of foreign aid and multilateral institutions and cumbersome legislative procedures were of limited significance. However, as it became less deferential on matters of foreign policy, these factors became formative for American policy toward, and participation in, the IMF and World Bank. The basis of United States’ influence derives from the origins of the World Bank and the fact that its Charter and guiding principles have a distinctly American character. Traditionally, American thinking about the roles of government and markets provided the conceptual centre of gravity for World Bank debates, rather than those of Europe, Japan, other Asian states, and developing countries. Over the years, the United States has used its influence to ensure those principles. Other sources of American influence include its position as the largest shareholder in the World Bank, the importance of its financial market as a source of capital for the Bank and other multilateral financial institutions, and its hold on the position of the World Bank presidency and other senior management posts. These factors are reinforced by the World Bank’s location in Washington, DC. The great majority of its economists and other staff members, whatever their nationality, tend to have postgraduate qualifications from North American universities. And there are many subtle ways in which the Bank’s location in the heart of the American capital –​adjacent to the White House, Treasury, and Washington-​based think tanks –​ helps contribute to the way in which American premises structure the very mindset of most Bank staff. They read American newspapers, watch American television, and American English is their lingua franca.12 Although the relative importance of the United States in many of these fields and dimensions has declined, it remains the dominant member-​state in the World Bank in large part because no other country –​China –​or group of countries –​the European Union [EU] –​has so far chosen deliberately and openly to challenge American leadership.13 That said, the Sino-​American relationship became particularly tense in the World Bank during the two last years of the Trump presidency, and it remains to be seen what position the new one led by Joe Biden will take on this matter. Most likely, it will form one small, but still important part in their conflictual relationship: the danger that the United States believes China represents to the national interest is one of the few policy items seeming to have bipartisan support in America. Within the IMF, United States Treasury clearly carries a great deal of weight, but America is not entirely dominant, and the multilateral institutional arrangement that the IMF represents does place some constraints on the Treasury’s ability to act unilaterally in international financial 289

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politics. Formally, there are also clear limits to American power. Washington only controls 16.51 per cent of the votes. The managing director of IMF is by convention European, and Japan (6.15 per cent), Germany (5.32 per cent), China (6.08 per cent), France (4.03 per cent), and the United Kingdom (4.03 per cent) could easily outvote the United States if they combined in a co-​ordinated manner. This is, however, highly unlikely, and whilst China and other Asian countries are gaining prominence in the IMF, regional rivalries in the South China Sea and elsewhere in Southeast Asia means that this group of countries is still far from exercising this kind of joint authority. Accordingly, in practice, and despite the IMF becoming more and genuinely multipolar, the United States is usually able to achieve the major decisions it desires, exercising influence behind the scenes, often in informal interactions between the IMF’s first deputy-​managing director –​by convention an American –​and the deputy-​secretary of the United States Treasury.14 In normal times, the top American leadership largely does not get much involved in day-​ to-​day management of the IMF and the World Bank. The IMF’s main activity is financial surveillance, an activity that Washington feels comfortable leaving to the organisation. American power is exercised mainly under two circumstances: first, when the IMF is called upon to rescue a country in deep financial crisis, a situation in which the IMF and United States Treasury have the leverage to extract commitments in return for financial rescue packages; and, second, when American strategic interests are involved. The experience with the South Korean rescue package of December 1997 illustrates how this collaboration may work under extraordinary circumstances. As South Korea slipped within days of running out of hard currency to pay its debts in December 1997, it sent a secret envoy, Kim Kihwan, to work out a rescue package. “I didn’t bother going to the IMF”, Mr. Kim recently recalled. “I called Mr Summers’ office at the Treasury from my home in Seoul, flew to Washington and went directly there. I knew this was how this would be done”.15 When concluded and presented to the IMF and other multilateral institutions involved, the agreement was a done deal. Unhappy about this process, IMF staff were in no position to renegotiate a deal struck between the Treasury and the South Korean government –​their task entailed putting the financial rescue package together. The only member-​state that really has tried to challenge some of the underlying premises that the United States seeks to protect and promote in the World Bank is Japan. These encounters took place in the few years of Asia-​euphoria, before the emergence of the Asian financial crisis in 1997. At the centre of the debate was the role of the state in development. The dispute was a consequence of the World Bank’s neoliberal orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Bank under the influence of the American Ronald Reagan Administration and the British Margaret Thatcher government almost endorsed the principle of the self-​adjusting market: the necessity of “getting the prices right” and providing a “level playing field”. This Anglo-​American ideology claimed that a single set of rules should apply to all member-​states, and the basis for these rules was that the proper role of the state was to provide the framework for private sector activity in a financial system based on private capital. Prior to the 1980s, Japan had not expressed much opposition to the United States in the World Bank. However, during the 1980s, Japan increasingly questioned the neoliberal economic model, particularly its appropriateness for Asia. Tokyo then started to use its financial muscle to take a more active role in the multilateral system: not simply adapting but debating. Its objective was to modify the approach of the World Bank and other multilateral economic 290

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institutions, including the IMF, to become more in line with the economic systems of Japan and East Asia. In response to intense Japanese pressure over an extended period, the World Bank agreed to conduct a study of the causes of economic growth in East Asia. The United States Treasury opposed the idea but, when Japan promised to pay for the study, an agreement was finally reached. The findings from the East Asian Miracle report –​the study that Japan requested –​were controversial and caused much debate in the 1990s, and the argument emerged that the report’s conclusions had been tailor-​made to fit the ideology of the United States Treasury.16 This debate continued in the World Bank, the IMF, and several other agencies in the multilateral system until the Asian financial crisis and the South Korean rescue package of December 1997 dealt a devastating blow to Japan’s aspiration to mount an ideological challenge to American hegemony in the World Bank and similar global institutions. Since this time, EU co-​ordination with the World Bank and IMF has slowly become more evident but, so far, this group of countries has neither the interest nor ability to challenge United States hegemony in the multilateral system. What this means is that the most likely challenge will come from China; but it still remains whether China will continue to work to protect its more parochial interests or is ready for a larger showdown over power in global multilateral institutions. China’s share of the votes in IMF and the World Bank clearly is disproportionate to the relative global weight of its economy. One could therefore say that China rightly has argued that it should have a greater capital subscription. However, it also argues strongly that it maintain a developing country status in the World Bank. Whilst the latter obviously raises eyebrows in many corners of the world, it plays perfectly into American perceptions of China as a country that does not follow international well-​established procedures of global economic competition. Continuing to portray itself as a “developing country” in the World Bank allows China access to the same benefits as other developing member-​states. There is clearly an imbalance here as China simultaneously makes a bid for global primacy and has rolled out several new ambitious development initiatives that represents a challenge to the World Bank: the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [AIIB] with an asset value of $50 billion; and the trillion-​dollar Belt and Road Initiative [BRI]. For most critics, the question is not that China should stop borrowing, but that it should pay a higher price as it clearly does not possess a developing country economy.17 Even if the World Bank headquarters is only two blocks from the White House and Trump repeatedly tweeted his criticism of other global institutional arrangements that he saw as unfair to the United States, it took about two years into his presidency before it caught his attention. What changed this was the unexpected departure of the Obama Administration backed World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, in January 2019. This situation gave Trump the opportunity to place his mark on an important global institution. It did not take much time before he had a nominee ready for the vacant position: David Malpass, his under-​secretary for international affairs in the Treasury. Malpass, a former chief economist in the investment firm Bear Stearns, had been a vocal and quite public supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign and the Trump administration. It must have appeared as a good opportunity to have a close ally in the presidential seat in the World Bank that would be more receptive to American economic concerns about China than Kim –​Obama had handpicked Kim in 2012 to reform the Bank, but also engage more forcefully with China. When China launched the AIIB in 2014, the geo-​economic challenge to the World Bank was hard to miss; and as expected, the Obama Administration made clear that it would not have anything to do with it. Kim, however, said he welcomed any new player, went to Beijing, announced a new US$50 million joint anti-​poverty fund, and met with officials of the new 291

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Chinese-​led bank. This effort did not go well in Washington, and Kim’s departure in January 2019 caused more of relief than worry amongst those in Congress that cared about the Bank.18 Thus, even if Democratic Party members of Congress may not have liked Trump nominating a new World Bank president, having someone in that position who would stand up to China was welcome. In the end, however, Trump must have been quite disappointed with his nominee as, at least in the short run, Malpass was not able to make much of a difference. In December 2019, the World Bank agreed to continue lending $1–​1.5 billion a year to China until 2025. As expected, Trump turned to Twitter calling for all multilateral institutions to cease development assistance to China: “Why is the World Bank loaning money to China? Can this be possible? China has plenty of money, and if they don’t they create it. STOP”.19 Trump’s tweet certainly rallied his supporters, but it did little to change anything, and this debate will continue to be minor overall, but important in the larger geo-​economic Sino-​American conflict that the Biden Administration now has taken over. What impact this will have on the World Bank and the IMF remains unknown. The question is whether a compromise is possible that allows for a certain realignment of voting power with member’s economic size and importance in the global economy. If the World Bank and the IMF are to remain globally relevant, their power configurations will need reweighting towards emerging new Powers, especially in Asia. If not, China will most likely continue to roll out its own version of the institutions of the post-​1945 liberal order. The question that the United States must ask itself as the main architect and keeper of this order is whether its interests remain better served by striking a compromise with China to keep the country engaged in the current multilateral system even if it means some changes to the liberal order. Similarly, China could allow a renegotiation of the terms of its current borrowing in the World Bank and open its current institutional development designs –​the AIIB and BRI –​to transparent multilateral co-​operation with the World Bank and IMF. Without compromises of this kind, the global economic order will continue to bear the consequence of geopolitical and geo-​economic rivalry that eventually may have dramatic consequences for the most striking remaining institutional features of the post-​1945 liberal order, the IMF and World Bank. The main reason for this is that as global economic institutions, they must reflect to a certain extent global economic conditions of its member base. If not, they could slowly float into less and less relevance and eventually oblivion.

Notes 1 Martin Wolf, “The IMF Today and Tomorrow”, Finance & Development, 56(2019), 1–​4. 2 Morten Bøås and Desmond McNeill, Multilateral Institutions –​A Critical Introduction (London, 2003); Morten Bøås, “Multilateral Institutions and the Developing World”, in Vandana Desai and Robert B. Potter, eds., The Companion to Development Studies (London, 2008), 547–​50. 3 Bøås, “Multilateral Institutions”. 4 IMF, IMF Board Approves Far-​Reaching Governance Reforms (Washington, DC, 2010). 5 Bøås and McNeill, Multilateral Institutions. 6 Knut Nustad, “The Development Discourse in the Multilateral System”, in Morten Bøås and Desmond McNeill, eds., Global Institutions and Development: Framing the World? (London, 2004), 13–​23. 7 Ernst B. Haas, When Knowledge is Power: Three Models of Change in International Organizations (Berkeley, CA, 1990). 8 See Bøås and McNeill, Multilateral Institutions. 9 Catherine Gwin, U.S. Relations with the World Bank 1945–​92 (Washington, DC, 1994); Morten Bøås and Desmond McNeill, “Introduction –​Power and Ideas in Multilateral Institutions: Towards an Interpretative Framework”, in Bøås and McNeill, Global Institutions, 1–​12.

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IMF & World Bank: Geopolitical Rivalry? 10 Lars Schoultz, “Politics, Economics and U.S. Participation in Multilateral Development Banks”, International Organization, 36/​3(1982), 537–​74. 11 Morten Bøås, “Multilateral Development Banks, Environmental Impact Assessments and Nongovernmental Organizations in U.S. Foreign Policy”, in Paul G. Harris, ed., The Environment, International Relations and U.S. Foreign Policy (Washington, DC, 2001), 178–​96. 12 Robert Wade, “Showdown at the World Bank”, New Left Review, 7(January/​February, 2001), 124–​37. 13 Whilst the number of total votes that the United States controls in the World Bank has diminished from 34.1 per cent to 15.90 per cent by 2020, China’s share of the total votes is nowhere close to its global economic power: China only controls 5.07 per cent. 14 See Bessma Momani, “American Politicization of the International Monetary Fund”, Review of International Political Economy, 11/​5(2004), 880–​904. 15 David E. Sanger, “Runaway Agency or U.S. Pawn?”, in L. John McQuillian and Paul C. Montgomery, eds., The International Monetary Fund: Financial Medic to the World? (Stanford, CA, 1999), 23. 16 World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (Washington, DC, 1993); Robert Wade, “Is the East Asian Miracle Right?”, in Arthur Fishlow, Catherine Gwin, Stephen Haggard, Dani Rodrik, and Robert Wade, eds., Miracle or Design: Lessons from the East Asian Experience (Washington, DC, 1994). 17 See Alexander Nazaryan, “How Donald Trump Took Over the World Bank”, Yahoo News (24 April 2019); Richard Javed Heydarian, “What to Make of Trump’s Outburst over World Bank Loans to China”, Aljazeera Opinion (24 December 2019). 18 Nazaryan, “How Donald Trump Took Over”. 19 Heydarian, “What to Make of Trump’s Outburst”.

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24 THE BELT AND ROAD INITIATIVE Prospects and Pitfalls Michael Clarke and Matthew Sussex

The People’s Republic of China’s [PRC] ambitious Belt and Road Initiative [BRI] has caused significant debate amongst scholars and practitioners of regional and global security. For some, BRI represents the most comprehensive test so far of the post-​Cold War order centred on the United States. By developing a complex network of bilateral investment and infrastructure partnerships across the Asia-​Pacific, Eurasia and the Middle East –​with China as its political and economic centre of gravity –​the BRI potentially offers Beijing scope to reshape existing rules, norms, and security architecture in preparation for a Sino-​centric order.1 Others, however, are unconvinced that the BRI will help China supplant the United States as the leading economic and security actor.2 For them, BRI is a chimera: the externalisation of existing Chinese economic problems that will merely result in narrow, tenuous, and partial continental and maritime development that will ultimately overextend PRC trade and security commitments. Which view of BRI prospects is most accurate? This chapter examines BRI’s agenda against the reality of its initial performance. Specifically, it focuses on BRI’s scope, impact, and likelihood of reshaping existing orders in terms of military-​security issues, and the geo-​economic trading alignments and institutional-​normative contexts that have each served to underpin American post-​Cold War leadership. In doing so, a nascent Sino-​centric security order is already taking shape, especially in Central Asia. Yet, at the same time, BRI is exacerbating local security dilemmas and –​coupled to a more muscular line from Beijing on how to achieve Chinese national interests –​has prompted states from Oceania to Europe to reconsider their initial enthusiasm for participating too deeply in BRI. Hence, BRI poses risks for Beijing. A failed BRI could serve to marginalise China at a time when it is seeking to establish its credentials as a responsible steward of an Asia-​focused global economic order. Given that China’s leadership has invested significant domestic reputational capital on BRI’s success, it also threatens to damage Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, and by extension the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]. Yet, whilst the ultimate triumph or failure of BRI is yet to be determined, it will continue at the very least to undermine the Western consensus and American power when both internal and external confidence in Washington’s ability to exercise strategic primacy has been declining. As indicated above, there are several competing interpretations of the drivers and implications of BRI and how best to characterise it. There are in fact multiple drivers of BRI deriving from 294

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-30

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CCP desire to resolve enduring domestic, economic, and geopolitical challenges to the PRC. Domestically, China’s ongoing state-​building agenda in its traditional frontier regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan guide BRI. Economically, BRI flows from the CCP quest to ensure China’s ongoing economic growth on which its legitimacy depends by finding new outlets for Chinese capital and exports. Geopolitically, with its focus on developing trans-​Eurasian “connectivity” centred on China, BRI speaks to Beijing’s desire to construct a viable strategic and economic alternative to the current international order.3 Accordingly, BRI loosely constitutes a “grand strategy” in that it integrates these factors in pursuit of China’s decades-​long goal of returning to Great Power status without provoking overt counter-​reactions from its neighbours and the United States. As such, BRI is not the brainchild of Xi but, rather, builds on and incorporates elements of domestic governance, economic policy, and foreign policy concepts bequeathed to him by his predecessors over the past three decades. However, as with so-​called “top level design” policy in the PRC –​policy mandated by the CCP’s Standing Committee of the Politburo –​BRI exhibits elements of the diffusion of policy implementation to national ministries, institutions, and provincial governments.4 This reflects the emergence of a “Chinese-​style regulatory state” in which China’s top leaders issue “authoritative” guidelines to “steer” the bureaucracy, provincial governments, state-​owned enterprises, and state banks.5 Although this system retains authoritarian controls via the CCP’s “powers of cadre appointment, appraisal and discipline, and discretionary government control over laws, regulations and funding”, such actors “may influence, interpret or even ignore these guidelines” to produce domestic and foreign policy outcomes through a process of contestation.6 Since the beginning of the “reform and opening” era in 1978, there have been a number of important manifestations of such “steering” in domestic and foreign policy contexts that have resulted from “authoritative” remarks by whomever the CCP leader is. From Deng Xiaoping’s “bide time, build capabilities” guidance for foreign policy to Hu Jintao’s “harmonious world” and Xi’s “community of common destiny”, China’s diplomacy has often been framed by successive leaders’ “catchphrases and generalities” that provide “atmospheric guidance” through which subordinates then implement policy.7 In this environment, “officials must at least appear to be enthusiastic implementers of central directives” and “typically rush sycophantically to embrace leaders’ vague slogans, creating the misleading appearance of a tightly-​controlled, top-​ down governmental machine”.8 Xi’s BRI –​stemming from two speeches on state visits to Kazakhstan and Indonesia in late 2013 –​appears in important ways consistent with this understanding of PRC “top level” policy design. Here, various actors within the Chinese system such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Finance, and Party-​affiliated think tanks and institutes moved quickly to define and give content to BRI.9 Concurrently, however, BRI clearly serves Xi and the CCP’s political interests in two central ways. First, embodying the “China Dream” of “great national rejuvenation”, it supports the Party’s nationalist legitimacy in which China’s power and wealth will not only underpin Chinese prosperity but return of the country to its “rightful” place as a globally-​influential Power.10 Second, BRI strengthens Xi’s hold on the CCP and state as the BRI discourse now dominates “virtually every aspect of China’s foreign and economic policy”, compelling other actors to “orient themselves towards it, as loyal implementers of Xi’s ideas”.11 Despite these caveats, BRI arguably represents an overturning of Deng’s famous maxim of “biding time and building capabilities”. Embodied in BRI, Xi’s vision posits continued Chinese economic development and stability as an engine of regional and global stability. For this to occur, however, key domestic, economic, and foreign policy challenges need overcoming. A crucial domestic challenge for Beijing since the PRC’s establishment in 1949 has been integrating its traditional frontiers of Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Yunnan. Since 295

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that time, Beijing has remained vigilant about the security of these regions due to their non-​ Han Chinese ethnic populations, histories of autonomy, underdevelopment, and geopolitically important positions. In the post-​1978 “reform and opening” era, Beijing’s strategy to resolve its anxiety largely rested on assuming that if it could deliver the fruits of economic development and modernisation, not only will restive ethnic groups such as the Uighurs and Tibetans acquiesce in Chinese rule, but these regions’ integration into the PRC will be assured. The development model adopted in the 1980s –​emphasising the comparative advantages of China’s more heavily populated and industrially advanced eastern provinces –​resulted in widening regional economic disparities by the following decade. Beijing attempted to redress this imbalance through a variety of measures since the 1990s. Most notably, in 1999 President Jiang Zemin launched the Great Western Development campaign, which focused on six provinces, five autonomous regions, and one municipality.12 Essential to “reshaping” key frontier regions were major infrastructure projects like the Xinjiang-​Shanghai gas pipeline and the Qinghai-​Tibet railway that physically linked such regions to the centre and linked emergent regional transit and trade nodes to external markets.13 Generally, though, the campaign’s policies took a domestic focus: government-​led investment in projects that linked the west with the existing centres of production in the east. A significant problem, however, remained the lack of direct access to international markets that proved so successful for the eastern provinces in the 1980s. Perceptions of many countries adjacent to China’s land borders –​for instance, in Central Asia –​held them as underdeveloped, with poor governance, embryotic infrastructure, and difficult terrain. To pursue development successfully in its frontier regions, China had to “break the connectivity bottleneck”.14 Accordingly, the development of urban hubs or networks undertaken under the Great Western Development extended to six core economic corridors central to BRI. The Silk Road Economic Belt aims to intensify connections between Xinjiang and Central and South Asia via the China-​Central Asia-​West Asia Corridor and the China-​Pakistan Economic Corridor [CPEC]. Similarly, Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia stood as gateways to Mongolia and the Russian Far East. This area is central for developing a Eurasian high-​speed transportation corridor linking Beijing with Moscow, thereby lessening China’s dependency on current sea routes. China also wishes to leverage Tibet’s geographic location for extending a Silk Road node to Nepal. The focus under BRI on such development is designed to “reduce spatial barriers” to “facilitate flows of capital and bring products to market” and accelerate the development of China’s frontier regions.15 In a broader economic context, BRI contributes to China’s efforts to overcome key challenges to its economic model following the global financial crisis. Major issues in this regard are managing industrial over-​capacity, developing new export markets, securing access to natural resources, and finding use for surplus capital.16 BRI’s heavy emphasis on infrastructure development makes sense by moving excess production capacity out of China, which “helps reduce the supply glut at home whilst helping less developed countries to build up their industrial bases”.17 The need for new export markets is another economic driver of BRI. For example, “20,000 km of new railways … could create demand for as much as 85 million tons of steel” and “diversify exports to countries like Vietnam, Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia”.18 Enhancing Chinese access to natural resources, particularly energy resources, is transparently a driver of BRI. The majority of the six identified economic corridors involve significant energy-​related infrastructure developments and investments, including pipelines to Russia, Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean. Strategically, BRI’s focus on developing and diversifying overland supply routes is a means of extracting China from its “Malacca dilemma” –​reliance on seaborne supply routes that may be vulnerable to American maritime power in the event of a 296

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conflict with Washington.19 Finally, institutional bodies established by China to support BRI, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank [AIIB], demonstrate Beijing’s desire to harness surplus capital to support major infrastructure projects and enhance China’s financial influence. Indeed, Chinese officials view these institutions not only as means to address Asia’s “infrastructure deficit” but a way to promote “the internationalization of the renminbi”.20 BRI thus serves several of China’s core domestic, economic, and geopolitical interests. As such, it can be viewed as grand strategy as it constitutes an “intellectual architecture that gives form and structure to foreign policy” and is “a purposeful and coherent set of ideas about what a nation seeks to accomplish in the world, and how it should go about doing so”.21 BRI, as noted above, also results from the evolution of successive “steering” formulations for Chinese foreign policy that has proceeded in four major stages. First, after the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 and Soviet collapse in 1991, regime survival was the CCP’s paramount concern. For Deng, that goal could only be assured by coupling continued “reform and opening” and delivering economic growth and development with firm one-​party rule. To do so effectively, China required international stability characterised by a return to “multipolarity”. Waiting for this order to materialise, China’s foreign policy sought to “bide time and build capabilities” by developing multiple regional and global linkages to accelerate economic growth, resolve longstanding disputes with neighbours, and combat the ill effects of American predominance.22 Second, Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, built on this foundation, embedding preferences for co-​operation, multilateralism, and regionalism within the practice and discourse of China’s foreign policy. These watchwords became central to Beijing’s “new security diplomacy” of the late 1990s, aiming at dampening tensions in China’s external environment “to focus on domestic, political and social reform challenges”.23 In particular, belief in embedding China into regional and multilateral bodies was an important means to counter, co-​opt, or circumvent American influence and “hegemony” around the Chinese periphery.24 Guided by his formulation that the international environment was characterised by “one superpower, many great powers”, Jiang’s foreign policy effectively recognised rising Chinese power but acknowledged the constraints placed on the exercise of that power by continuing American primacy.25 Third, Hu Jintao perceived a “strategic opportunity” for China to transition from Deng’s approach of biding time and building capabilities to a foreign policy seeking to “do something, or striking some successes”, whilst maintaining a primary focus on the overarching goal of economic modernisation and development. Consequently, Hu emphasised China’s desire for “peaceful development” rather than “hegemony”, as this would send “a clear message to the world that China would achieve its development mainly through its own efforts” and assure others that its growing power would not tempt it toward pursuit of domination.26 This rationale was also evident in Hu’s “harmonious world” rhetoric signifying “the importance of the coexistence of diversified civilizations” and “consultation among all of the countries involved, rather than unilateralism driven by hegemonic ambitions”.27 Here, China’s “peaceful development” and international stability were conceived of as mutually reinforcing. Under Xi’s leadership, however, China has appeared to cast off this posture in favour of the more confident rhetoric of the “China dream”.28 For Xi, crucial steps on the journey to “great national rejuvenation” will be the achievement of the two “centenary goals”: achieving a “moderately prosperous society” by the one hundredth anniversary of the CCP in 2021 and becoming a “modern socialist country” that is “prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, and harmonious” by the PRC’s one-​hundredth birthday in 2049.29 Continued economic growth will be essential not only to realise these goals but also to achieve CCP legitimacy and longevity. As a result, some observers have discounted the China dream rhetoric 297

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as a purely domestically directed strategy to embed “consultative Leninism” as the foundation of the nation’s political order.30 Yet there is also a clear foreign policy element to the China dream. Achieving the two centenary goals would not only consolidate CCP rule but provide China with the capacity to “preserve” a favourable external environment. Xi has consistently asserted that realisation of the “China dream” will “benefit the people of the world”, as it is based on principles of “peace, development, cooperation and win-​win relations”.31 This will supposedly place China on par with the United States as a Power capable of providing global leadership and demonstrate the success of the Chinese model of development.32 Of course, the “China dream” stands in contrast to the existing, largely Western-​authored and -​led “liberal international order” by integrating “equality and hierarchy into a new form of statism involved in a global competition of social models”.33 The “China Dream” therefore combines a geopolitical narrative focused on acquiring the material attributes of power –​economic, technological, and military34 –​and a moral narrative centred on “rejuvenation” of the Chinese nation to redress the injustices of the “century of humiliation” suffered at the hands of foreign imperialism.35 Acquiring the material attributes of power has long been the means by which China could preserve “socialism with Chinese characteristics” in a system dominated by America.36 Nonetheless, Xi’s simultaneous emphasis on the moral narrative of “rejuvenation” fundamentally challenges the current international order by asserting the “moral superiority of Chinese civilization” and “the China Model as a globally important idea”.37 The importance attached to this normative or moral aspect of BRI is revealed by the concerted efforts made by Chinese actors to promote the initiative since 2013. Such efforts have not only included “normal” diplomatic positioning and rhetoric, but also developing and deploying targeted actor-​specific narratives across media, academic, and business domains “to shape foreign perceptions and behaviors in a manner favorable to BRI, while at the same time inhibiting potential attempts to criticize or counter it”.38 For instance, BRI is touted to global and regional business audiences in “Davos-​speak” as a mechanism for enhancing economic “interconnectivity” via infrastructure investment and new multilateral financing institutions like the AIIB.39 Global media and academia, in turn, are urged to understand BRI as a form of “geocultural power” wherein Beijing is facilitating the “rediscovery” of shared histories of cultural and economic “connectivity” along the “Silk Roads” of yore in a positive, so-​called “win-​win” scenarios.40 BRI remains clearly designed to loosen the Western grip over the so-​called international rules-​based order in place since the Washington Consensus. Nevertheless, it is not an attempt wholly to supplant it: rather, it seeks to utilise existing legal architecture as a base for its own investment initiatives –​BRI is deliberately bilateral in design and execution. This permits Beijing to woo individual states with cheap loans and other investment incentives with the attendant benefit that trade investment in key sectors of weaker states’ economies tends to translate to political influence. And whilst much scholarship focuses on China’s ability to court European states via the Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, as well as BRI investment in strategically significant arenas such as the Middle East, South Asia, and the South Pacific, BRI has had perhaps the deepest impact in Central Asia. Indeed, Central Asia is a useful case study in how BRI can solidify a China-​centric trading and, increasingly, security order. BRI has been the economic cornerstone of China’s attempts to bring Russia within its zone of influence, in addition to Central Asian states that Beijing regards as important trade conduits to Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East. Whilst important not to conflate BRI’s trade dimension with the broader diplomatic and political aspects of

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Chinese strategy, in truth they are not easy to separate. Here, for instance, Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, has long pushed the benefits of deepened Sino-​Russian trade, investment, and security ties. This effort has included regular meetings with Xi that progressively upgraded what was still until recently a mutually hostile relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” in 2019. But Russia has clearly accepted the role of junior partner vis-​à-​vis China; and whilst Xi lauds it as emblematic of his new model of Great Power relations,41 Russia has witnessed a significant decline in its ability to dictate the nature of co-​operation with the PRC. Beijing has resisted the creation of a military-​security pact to counterbalance the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and Chinese investment in Central Asia is supplanting Russian influence there. It also declined to endorse Moscow’s reintegration of the Crimean Peninsula or its ongoing military support for Donbas separatists. Similarly whilst Beijing has described Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union [EAEU] as running on parallel tracks to its own investment projects, it has done little to promote its development, instead championing the much grander BRI. Having substituted bandwagoning with China in favour of bandwagoning with the West, Russia therefore finds itself in the unenviable position of asymmetric clientism. European Union [EU] and American sanctions have starved its access to alternative sources of infrastructure funding to develop its oil and gas industries so that it can meet heightened Asian demands. Its desires to insulate former Soviet states from Western influence remain functionally undermined by increasing Chinese influence in Central Asia, where the PRC has invested in energy to avoid over-​reliance on Russian oil and gas. And although Putin often speaks of the BRI and the Russian-​supported EAEU in the same breath, the former dwarfs the latter in scope and ambition. The EAEU has only four other members in addition to Russia –​Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan –​plus a modest list of free trade agreements.42 Having previously shifted responsibility for managing Central Asian security affairs to Russia, Beijing quietly overtook Moscow in 2018 as the leading trade partner of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. In the same year, China’s overall trade with Central Asia grew to $30 billion, whilst Russian trade was only slightly more than one-​half that figure.43 A key lesson is that pushback against BRI, without substantial resources to develop alternatives, is difficult to engender. Moscow’s lack of “deep pockets” translated into little success in kick-​ starting integration efforts in the former Soviet space or harmonising the complex mix of institutional mechanisms representing past defensive and piecemeal Russian attempts to ring-​fence regional primacy. A plethora of organisations with different memberships, changing purposes, and competing agendas operate in former Soviet Russia, including those devoted to military-​ security organisations such as the Collective Security Treaty Organisation and politico-​economic vehicles like the Commonwealth of Independent States. They also include regional coalitions like the Organisation for Democracy and Economic Development and the Baltic Council designed to counter Russian power. In contrast, BRI space includes co-​operation agreements with 126 nations and 29 separate international organisations, with its investments expected to total $1.3 trillion and extending to every populated continent.44 It is telling that whilst Russia has promoted its own territory as a natural conduit for the BRI, only a single route –​the China-​Mongolia-​Russia corridor –​running from northern China to the Russian Far East has been operational. Poor infrastructure and Russian sanctions on EU products have previously hamstrung Beijing’s desire to develop the New Eurasian Land Bridge. Instead, it incorporated the Baku-​Tbilisi-​Kars rail line running from Azerbaijan to Turkey, bypassing Russia in the process. Russia only recently –​in 2019 and 2020 –​began developing the Meridian Highway, a 2,000-​kilometre toll road from the Russian town of Sargarchin on

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the Kazakh frontier to its border with Belarus.45 This would cut transit times from China to Western Russia threefold and turn the Eurasian Land Bridge into a true Silk Road, rather than leaving Russia a terminating node of BRI connectivity.46 Russia has therefore accepted that procrastinating over hosting BRI routes restricts its ability to exercise the strategic leverage that accompanies being a primary BRI transit nation. But it also compromises the flexibility of its security policy by compelling it to accept connectivity pathways mandated in Beijing not Moscow. The same is true of other Russian attempts to bypass BRI. They include the South Korean-​backed Eurasia railway, linking the Iron Silk Road Trans-​ Korea Railway [TKR] with the Trans-​Siberia Railway.47 This would allow Russian goods to transit the 17-​kilometre stretch of its border with North Korea and crossing into South Korea to link with its port of Busan without having to cross Chinese territory. Beijing has countered with plans of its own for a “Silk Road Express” under its BRI co-​operation agreement with Seoul. This combines links to the TKR from the Trans-​China Railway; the Tumen-​Manchuria Railway; and the Trans-​Mongolian Railway.48 Chinese routes are preferable since they can handle larger freight volumes and link to other BRI routes to South Asia and Europe.49 Chinese preferences are also winning in developing Arctic energy resources. Here, Russia’s problems are legal-​definitional, relating to sovereignty as well as funding. China sees the Arctic as part of the global commons and has invested diplomatically in the Artic Council as part of its 2018 Polar Silk Road strategy,50 as well as collaborate with Japan, Korea, and European nations with stakes in how the Arctic’s power politics play out. Seeing itself as a “near-​Arctic nation”, China has therefore sought to bolster its credentials as a lawmaker and norm promoter in a contested geopolitical space. Russia, meanwhile, claims virtually the entire continental shelf, which expands its exclusive economic zone by 1.2 million square kilometres. It has pressed ahead with developing the Northern Sea Route, ignoring calls for sovereignty questions to be resolved first. The completion in 2018 of the world’s largest liquid natural gas [LNG] plant on the Yamal Peninsula by the gas company, Novatek –​with plans to build two more –​promise an output capacity of some 60 million tons of LNG by 2030.51 Yet even there, Chinese interests remain heavily represented in development with the state-​run China National Petroleum Corporation taking a 20 per cent share in the project and the Silk Road Fund owning another ten. Moreover, Novatek’s plans on transporting Russian LNG to Japan and South Korea in three days, and China in six days, will rely heavily on Chinese investment to upgrade terminals at Murmansk and Kamchatka. Beijing’s plans to develop nuclear-​powered icebreakers also mean it does not need to rely on Russian assistance to transit the Polar Silk Road.52 A third avenue for Russia to develop alternatives to BRI trade routes concerns its negotiations with India to deepen co-​operation over energy. Echoing the failed Russia–​India–​ China “strategic triangle” proposals of the late 1990s,53 more recent Russian calls for trilateral co-​operation via an expanded Shanghai Co-​operation Organisation have not met with an enthusiastic Chinese response. Indeed, Russia has been compelled publicly to back BRI over Indian attempts to counter it, following deepened tensions between New Delhi and Beijing, as well as the increased closeness of Indo-​American ties. Symptomatic of Russia’s strategic policy contingent on the relationships of others, Indian concerns that Pakistan or Afghanistan would be the main transit zones for Russian energy have stalled Moscow’s proposals for the construction of an oil and gas pipeline.54 Activist Chinese trade diplomacy, which effectively captured Pakistan within BRI via the $68 billion CPEC, also outpaced those proposals. In the strategically vital arena of connectivity, then, China has constrained Russia from pursuing any other course than bandwagoning. More importantly, it is also increasingly dictating the conditions by which it does so whilst expanding its influence in Central Asia. Indeed, 300

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although official Kremlin narratives continue speaking of robust foreign and security policy independence, there are concerns in Russia that deep co-​operation with the PRC is in reality a recipe for isolation or entrapment.55 For Sergei Karaganov, head of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defence Policy, “Beijing is moving towards creating a Sinocentric system in Asia. We risk remaining on the periphery, albeit friendly, unless we propose our own ideas”.56 In December 2018, the Russian journal, International Affairs, a marker of internal Russian policy debates, claimed transformation of the Caucasus and Central Asia was taking place “against the background of a relatively new generation of leaders, fewer and fewer of whom see Moscow as a major historical partner”.57 Whilst important in Central Asia, as well as widening and deepening its strategic and economic footprint in Africa and the Middle East, BRI’s impact in East Asia and the broader Indo-​Pacific geopolitical space is more mixed. Part has to do with the fact that the Americans retain a number of security alliances in the region, many dating back to the post-​1945 San Francisco system of bilateral partnerships. But it, too, is linked to the reticence of states –​particularly in Southeast Asia –​fully to embrace BRI. An additional factor is that the Americans, both the Trump and Joe Biden administrations, effectively identified East Asia as the epicentre of Indo-​Pacific security competition. Still, the chaos, economic nationalism, and raw transactionalism of Trump’s years caused many regional states to re-​examine their assumptions about an unwavering American commitment to uphold a peaceful rules-​based order. It allowed China to seize narrative control on the idea that it had taken over as the main supporter of economic globalisation. This reflects in the postures of a number of Southeast Asian states that continue to prefer a hedge-​and-​balance posture towards security competition between major Powers. Singapore, for instance, signed five separate deals with China on enhancing BRI co-​operation in 2019,58 but it also enhanced its maritime security co-​operation with the United States. Indonesia, meanwhile, has been more open to BRI investment, but major projects such as the Jakarta-​ Bandung high-​speed railway have been slow to progress due to a combination of domestic politics and the downturn in activity following the onset of the COVID pandemic.59 The same has been true of Thailand, which nonetheless remains enthusiastic about BRI co-​operation. Bangkok has explicitly linked its “Thailand 4.0” development strategy to the Eastern Economic Corridor, which seeks to connect Thailand to CPEC via Laos, as well as pushing ahead with the controversial Kra Canal that would cut shipping distances through the Malacca Strait by 1,200 kilometres and offer a significant maritime gateway to Japan and China.60 Even so, other Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN] member-​states have faced significant pressure from Beijing due to a combination of historical animosities and contested claims. This is true of Vietnam, for instance, which has moved closer to America on security co-​operation; contrariwise, the Philippines under the erratic leadership of Rodrigo Duterte has continued professing friendship with China even whilst being subjected to civilian Chinese fleet incursions into its claimed territories around Whitsun Reef.61 Smaller South Pacific states, meanwhile, have been key targets of Chinese investment via loans from its large EXIMBANK conglomerate. Fiji, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea have all sought to capitalise on opportunities to develop commercial infrastructure, ports, and connectivity through an array of co-​operation partnerships under BRI’s auspices. Despite dire warnings from Canberra and Washington, this has not yet manifested as “debt-​trap” diplomacy.62 Indeed, different positions on BRI have generated often-​heated disagreements between the two main “Western” democracies in the region, Australia and New Zealand. For its part, Canberra has moved to shore up its American alliance ties, limit Chinese investment, engage in muscular rhetoric –​including statements by its security elites about the likelihood of war between 301

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China and the United States –​and dramatically tear up agreements like a memorandum of understanding on BRI signed by the state of Victoria.63 Wellington, conversely, remains a firm supporter of deepened trade relations with China. It refused to label Chinese internment camps in Xinjiang as “genocide”, publicly scotched the idea that the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement could be broadened to adopt deeper security functions, and criticised Australia for its hard-​line stance demanding an in-​depth enquiry into the World Health Organisation and China’s handling of the COVID pandemic.64 The response to BRI from Asia’s other major Powers, Japan and India, has been ambivalent. For Japan, BRI’s geopolitical, economic, and normative thrust in important ways runs counter to its own strategic concept –​the “free and open Indo-​Pacific strategy” –​enunciated by Prime Minster Shinzo Abe in 2007 –​as Tokyo stands enmeshed in and committed to the American-​ led post-​1945 San Francisco system. Abe’s strategy, stated during an address to India’s Parliament in August 2007, envisaged a “wide, open, broader Asia spanning the entirety of the Pacific Ocean, incorporating the United States and Australia” that would be “open” and “transparent” allowing “people, goods, capital, and knowledge to flow freely”.65 Meanwhile, as Xi unveiled BRI, Japan was pointedly noting in its 2013 National Security Strategy that as Beijing’s power rose, there was in fact “an expectation for China to share and comply with international norms, and play a more active and cooperative role for regional and global issues”.66 That this expectation proved forlorn from Tokyo’s perspective came from further Sino-​Japanese tensions over Chinese claims in the East China Sea throughout 2012 and 2013. Given this backdrop, Tokyo’s initial reaction to BRI was bound to be cautious and sceptical. Additionally, the lack of detail initially provided by Beijing on key BRI elements –​such as the absence of governance mechanisms for the infrastructure and investment components –​further bolstered Japan’s cautious response. Tokyo perceived Beijing’s desire to establish a new development bank –​the AIIB –​as intended to reduce Japan’s leadership in existing development banks such as the Asian Development Bank.67 Such was Tokyo’s wariness that it ultimately decided, unlike other American allies –​Britain, Germany, Australia, and South Korea –​not to join the AIIB after its establishment in October 2014.68 However, by 2017, Abe began suggesting that Tokyo was now ready to “extend co-​operation to China” on BRI. The timing for such a shift from non-​participation to what one observer described as “conditional engagement” with BRI appears influenced by shifts in American foreign policy with the advent of Trump’s Administration.69 Abe’s government sought to pivot to an “engage” and “hedge” strategy vis-​à-​vis BRI. Limited economic engagement with Beijing on BRI was “essential” given that Xi would remain at the helm in Beijing for the probable future and the Trump Administration had pulled out of the Trans-​Pacific Partnership [TPP]. However, increased strategic alignment with the United States and other regional allies would serve to hedge against BRI’s possible erosion of the “rules-​based order”.70 Ambivalence marked India’s response, too. Similar to Japan, India had pre-​existing tensions with Beijing over enduring territorial disputes along the shared frontier in the Himalayas, the Sino-​Pakistani alignment, and Beijing’s so-​called “string of pearls” strategy in the Indian Ocean that made a cautious response to BRI almost inevitable.71 In contrast to Japan, however, India has been more vocal in criticising BRI. After an initial period of positive caution to the broad concept of enhanced economic and infrastructure “connectivity” central to BRI during the final year of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government, New Delhi adopted a more critical stance after the right-​wing Bharatiya Janata Party-​led government of Narendra Modi was elected in May 2014. The Modi government rebuffed Chinese invitations to join the “Maritime Silk Road” component of BRI in August 2014 and undertook high-​level visits to states with known disagreements with Beijing such as Japan and Vietnam prior to Xi’s state 302

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visit to India in September 2014.72 Chinese Army incursions into Indian-​controlled Ladakh, Jammu, and Kashmir in mid-​September 2014 subsequently roiled bilateral relations, prompting Modi to warn Xi that such a “toothache” could in fact “paralyze the entire body” –​a rupture in Sino-​Indian relations.73 That rupture came when Xi unveiled the CPEC during a state visit to Pakistan in April 2015. Pakistan hailed this $46 billion project –​including planned rail and road corridors through disputed territory in Gilgit-​Baltistan –​as a “game changer” for the country’s development. New Delhi castigated it as a “military gambit in economic clothing that sought to shore up China’s access to the Arabian Sea and undermine Indian sovereignty claims in Kashmir”.74 From this point onward, New Delhi unfavourably compared the apparent geopolitical objectives of BRI’s bilateral elements like CPEC and multilateral aspects such as AIIB that India had joined. Whilst the former were designed to serve China’s national interests, the latter in contrast “were created by multilateral negotiations” and “governed” multilaterally.75 India’s full rebuke of BRI, however, came earlier, just prior to the convening of the inaugural Belt and Road Forum at Beijing in May 2013. On 13 May, India’s Ministry of External Affairs released a statement openly critical of BRI, suggesting that “connectivity initiatives” should be “based on universally recognised norms, good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency, and equality” and proceed “in a manner that respects sovereignty and territorial integrity”.76 India’s response has not simply been to critique BRI but, rather, establish networks with other like-​minded Powers “to promote a ‘free and open Indo-​Pacific’ ” through a number of multilateral initiatives like the Asia-​Africa Growth Corridor, the Quadrilateral security dialogue with the United States, Japan, and Australia –​the Quad –​and increasing political and economic bonds with Southeast Asia.77 Of particular note has been New Delhi’s efforts to mount the “debt trap diplomacy” counter-​narrative to BRI, arguing that the initiative is an outgrowth of Chinese “predatory state capitalism”.78 Here, so the narrative goes, Beijing entices developing countries into unsustainable loans for infrastructure projects and, when they can no longer service the loans, Beijing takes over the assets thereby increasing its strategic and economic influence. Whilst a number of studies refute the accuracy of this depiction, from India’s perspective the apparent fate of some BRI projects in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives suggests that China is using economic statecraft to compel such states to “accommodate Beijing’s security and foreign policy interests” in India’s neighbourhood.79 Additionally, New Delhi has also attempted to compete with Beijing by mounting its own infrastructure, development, and investment programmes like the $85 million invested in the Chabahar Port project with Iran; rail and road building under the South Asia Sub-​ Regional Economic Co-​ operation; and the India-​ Myanmar-​ Thailand Trilateral Highway.80 As noted above, because it is a loose series of bilateral projects, BRI’s design to fragment existing regional and sub-​regional economic and security orders is having a number of effects. First, Russia’s role of junior partner in the Sino-​Russian relationship as Beijing consolidated its strategic advantage over Moscow. China’s energy and connectivity projects give it powerful leverage over Central Asian states. Second, the Trump Administration’s failure to articulate a coherent Indo-​Pacific strategy means China is filling the vacuum left by Washington’s abrogation of leadership over liberalised regional trade. States like Japan remain to shoulder the burden of proposing alternative networks of trade and investment. Still, given that China is able to offer vastly more funding with fewer caveats related to outcomes such as good governance, smaller states especially in the South Pacific have found BRI engagement an attractive prospect: and why most ASEAN states favour BRI engagement. At the same time, BRI has deepened Sino-​ Indian rivalry in South Asia. Responding to Chinese “punishment” following its decision to 303

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block Huawei from bidding to construct its 5G network,81 coupled to a concerted domestic campaign against Chinese interference, Australia has sharpened its alliance with America. The re-​emergence of the Quad is at least partially due to the relative success of BRI projects in areas that each member respectively perceives as part of its vital geostrategic zone of interest. This also helps highlight the central paradox of BRI for states tempted to accept its trade and investment benefits: doing so will inevitably increase Beijing’s centrifugal pull, making China’s attractiveness as an investment partner somewhat more muted given the extent to which it deepens strategic competition with the United States. As a result, actors at the centre of that competition –​East Asia in particular –​are increasingly feeling forced to choose between pushing back and continuing to hedge for as long as possible. Moreover, BRI’s loose regulation gives Beijing room to manoeuvre, whilst potentially exposing weaker nations to exploitation rather than mutual benefit. Whilst smaller states might be able to influence the BRI agenda, they remain highly vulnerable to pressure from both China and America. However, even if BRI is only minimally successful in weakening the existing order, China will likely judge it successful. The main risks of a failed BRI are that it creates bridges to nowhere, increases debt burdens, and drives growth down. Nonetheless, even accounting for the significant economic cost of the COVID pandemic, which stalled many BRI projects, the PRC economy saw a record 18.3 per cent growth in the first quarter of 2021.82 Thus far, responses to BRI by “like-​minded” middle Powers have been largely piecemeal and partial, with the corollary that without deep American engagement, attempts to check BRI will likely fail. In setting out the architecture of its China policy, the Biden Administration has made much of an era of “extreme competition”. That said, it is unclear how –​or indeed whether –​this will translate into America’s own suite of investment incentives on the same scale as BRI. This becomes more problematic as American policy elites remain divided about the benefits and costs of maintaining United States primacy.83 Absent a coherent and comprehensive American response to BRI, the chances of a consolidated Sino-​centric order increase markedly. And even if Washington manages to construct a trade and investment project, perhaps leveraging off a revitalised TPP, doing so will reinforce Sino-​American competition rather than dampen it. At the very least, it will result in new rules-​based orders with two implications for smaller states. On one hand, pressure from both Beijing and Washington will subject them to participate in each major Power’s vision for trade and connectivity. On the other, there will be opportunities for some states, especially those blessed with vital natural resources or occupying key transit hub positions, to forum-​shop and potentially maximise the benefit of Sino-​American competition.84 That in turn has two further implications: trade and investment will become increasingly less rules-​bound –​at least in terms of common agreed frameworks; and it will also become potentially more exclusionary. This would reverse the post-​Cold War trend towards open regionalism in favour of multiple “closed” configurations.

Notes 1 See for example, Lina Benabdallah, “Contesting the International Order by Integrating It: The Case of China’s Belt and Road Initiative”, Third World Quarterly, 40/​1(2019), 92–​108; Ray Silvius, “China’s Belt and Road Initiative as Nascent World Order Structure and Concept? Between Sino-​Centering and Sino-​Deflecting”, Journal of Contemporary China, 30/​128(2021), 314–​29. 2 See for example, “Remarks by Vice President Pence on the Administration’s Policy Toward China”, Hudson Institute, Washington DC (4 October 2018): www.hudson.org/​events/​1610-​vice-​president-​ mike-​pence-​s-​remarks-​on-​the-​administration-​s-​policy-​towards-​china102018; W. Fasslabend, “The Silk Road: A Political Marketing Concept for World Dominance”, European View, 14/​2(2015),

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The Belt and Road Initiative 293–​302; Theresa Fallon, “The New Silk Road: Xi Jinping’s Grand Strategy for Eurasia”, American Foreign Policy Interests, 37/​3(2015), 140–​47. 3 Michael Clarke, “Beijing’s Pivot West: The Convergence of Innenpolitik and Aussenpolitik on China’s ‘Belt and Road’?”, Journal of Contemporary China, 29/​123(2020), 336–​53. 4 On the theory and practice of “top level design”, see Gunter Schubert and Björn Alpermann, “Studying the Chinese Policy Process in the Era of ‘Top-​Level Design’: The Contribution of ‘Political Steering’ Theory”, Journal of Chinese Political Science, 24/​2(2019), 199–​224; Yang Xuedong and Jian Yan, “Top-​level Design, Reform Pressures, and Local Adaptations: An Interpretation of the Trajectory of Reform since the 18th CPC Party Congress”, Journal of Chinese Governance, 3/​2(2018), 25–​48. 5 Lee Jones, “Theorizing Foreign and Security Policy in an Era of State Transformation: A New Framework and Case Study of China”, Journal of Global Security Studies, 4/​4(2019), 579–​97. 6 Lee Jones and Jinghan Zeng, “Understanding China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’: Beyond ‘Grand Strategy’ to a State Transformation Analysis”, Third World Quarterly, 40/​8(2019), 1417. 7 William J. Norris, Chinese Economic Statecraft: Commercial Actors, Grand Strategy, and State Control (Ithaca, NY, 2016), 52. 8 Jones and Zeng, “China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ ”, 1418. 9 Publications on BRI from Party-​affiliated think tanks and institutes, for instance, increased rapidly from 172 in 2014 to 4,392 in 2016. See ibid., 1422. 10 For example, William A. Callahan, “China 2035: From the China Dream to the World Dream”, Global Affairs 2/​3(2016), 247–​58. 11 Jones and Zeng, “China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ ”, 1420. 12 For the Great Western Development, see Qunjian Tian, “China Develops Its West: Motivation, Strategy and Prospect”, Journal of Contemporary China, 13/​41(2004), 611–​36; Hongyi Lai, “National Security and Unity, and China’s Western Development Program”, Provincial China, 8/​2(2005), 118–​43; Junxue Jia et al. “Place-​based Policies, State-​led Industrialisation, and Regional Development: Evidence from China’s Great Western Development Programme”, European Economic Review, 123(2020). 13 The campaign also created key urban “hubs”, or “networks” of development, such as Kashgar, Shihezi, and Urumqi in Xinjiang that focused on specific industrial or infrastructural features and opened major border “ports” such as Alashankou and Khorgos to facilitate trade with Central Asia. 14 Chen Dingding, “China’s ‘Marshall Plan’ Is Much More”, Diplomat (10 November 2014): http://​thed​ iplo​mat.com/​2014/​11/​chi​nas-​marsh​all-​plan-​is-​much-​more/​. 15 Tim Summers, “China’s ‘New Silk Roads’: Sub-​National Regions and Networks of Global Political Economy”, Third World Quarterly, 37/​9(2016), 1636. 16 Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri, Debunking the Myth of ‘Debt-​trap Diplomacy’. How Recipient Countries Shape China’s Belt and Road Initiative (London, 2020), 4–​5. 17 Peter Cai, Understanding China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Sydney, 2017), 13: www.lowyinstitute.org/​ sites/​default/​files/​documents/​Understanding%20China%E2%80%99s%20Belt%20and%20Road%20 Initiative_​WEB_​1.pdf. 18 Jonathan Holslag, “How China’s New Silk Road Threatens European Trade”, International Spectator, 52/​1(2017), 49. 19 David Brewster, “Silk Roads and Strings of Pearls: The Strategic Geography of China’s New Pathways in the Indian Ocean”, Geopolitics, 22/​2(2016), 269–​91. 20 Mike Callaghan and Paul Hubbard, “The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank: Multilateralism on the Silk Road”, China Economic Journal, 9/​2(2016), 121. 21 Hal Brands, “Barack Obama and the Dilemmas of American Grand Strategy”, Washington Quarterly, 39/​4(2016), 118. 22 For example, Bates Gill, Rising Star: China’s New Security Diplomacy (Washington, DC, 2010), 22–​25. 23 Suisheng Zhao, “China’s Periphery Policy and Its Asian Neighbors”, Security Dialogue, 30/​3(1999), 335–​46. 24 Gill, Rising Star, 29; Avery Goldstein, “The Diplomatic Face of China’s Grand Strategy: A Rising Power’s Emerging Choice”, China Quarterly, 168(2001), 835. In a regional context, this strategy was most successful in Central Asia. Beijing not only quickly established strong bilateral relationships with the post-​Soviet states but also resolved longstanding territorial disputes and took the lead in establishing a regional multilateral forum, the Shanghai Co-​operation Organisation. See Chien-​peng Chung, “The Shanghai Co-​operation Organization: China’s Changing Influence in Central Asia”, China Quarterly, 180(2004), 989–​1009. 25 See Zhou Jianming, “Zhengque renshi ‘yichaoduoqiang’ de guoji geju”, Shehui Kexue, 2(1998), 34–​37.

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Michael Clarke and Matthew Sussex 26 Wen Jiabao, “Our Historical Tasks at the Primary Stage of Socialism and Several Issues Concerning China’s Foreign Policy”, Beijing Review (12 March 2007): www.bjreview.com.cn/​document/​txt/​ 2007-​03/​12/​content_​58927_​3.htm. 27 Zhao Suisheng, “Chinese Foreign Policy under Hu Jintao: The Struggle Between Low-​Profile Policy and Diplomatic Activism”, Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 5/​4(2010), 363. 28 See Kerry Brown, The New Emperors: Power and the Princelings in China (London, 2014), 206–​08. 29 “CPC’s New Governance Theories Steer China on Fast Track to ‘Two Centenary Goals’ ”, Xinhua (4 May 2016): http://​news.xinhua​net.com/​engl​ish/​2016-​05/​04/​c_​13​5334​465.htm. 30 Steve Tsang, “Contextualizing the China Dream: A Reinforced Consultative Leninist Approach to Government”, in David Kerr, ed., China’s Many Dreams: Comparative Perspectives on China’s Search for National Rejuvenation (London, 2015), 10–​34. 31 Yang Jiechi, “Implementing the Chinese Dream”, National Interest (10 September 2013): http://​ natio​nali​nter​est.org/​com​ment​ary/​imple​ment​ing-​the-​chin​ese-​dream-​9026; Michael D. Swaine, “Xi Jinping on Chinese Foreign Relations: The Governance of China and Chinese Commentary”, China Leadership Monitor, 48(2015): www.hoover.org/​research/​xi-​jinping-​chinese-​foreign-​relationsgovernance-​china-​and-​chinese-​commentary. 32 William A. Callahan, “Identity and Security in China: The Negative Soft Power of the China Dream”, Politics, 35/​3–​4(2015), 219. 33 Idem, “History, Tradition and the China Dream: Socialist Modernization in the World of Great Harmony”, Journal of Contemporary China, 24/​96(2015), 986. 34 Expressed under the rubric of the “two centenary goals”, see “CPC’s New Governance Theories Steer China on Fast Track to ‘Two Centenary Goals’ ”, Xinhua (4 May 2016): http://​news.xinhua​net.com/​ engl​ish/​2016-​05/​04/​c_​13​5334​465.htm. 35 Callahan, “China 2035”, 251. 36 See Sulmaan Wasif Khan, Haunted by Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 170–​80. 37 Callahan, “China 2035”, 252. 38 Nadege Rolland, “Mapping the Footprint of Belt and Road Influence Operations”, Sinopsis (12 August 2019): https://​sinop​sis.cz/​en/​roll​and-​bri-​influe​nce-​ope​rati​ons/​. 39 See for example, Anna Bruce-​Lockhart, “Top Quotes by Xi Jinping at Davos 2017”, World Economic Forum (17 January 2017): www.weforum.org/​agenda/​2017/​01/​chinas-​xi-​jinping-​at-​davos-​2017-​top-​ quotes/​. 40 See Tim Winter, Geocultural Power: China’s Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the 21st Century (Chicago, IL, 2019); Parag Khanna, The Future is Asian: Commerce, Culture and Conflict in the 21st Century (NY, 2019). 41 See-​Won Byun, “China’s Major Powers Discourse in the Xi Jinping Era: Tragedy of Great Power Politics Revisited?”, Asian Perspective, 40/​3(2016), 493–​522 42 These are with the PRC and Iran –​both signed in 2018 –​Vietnam, Egypt, Tajikistan, Serbia, Uzbekistan, and Moldova, with Ukraine’s participation suspended since 2013. 43 Hiroyuki Akita, “Russia and China Romance Runs into Friction in Central Asia”, Nikkei Asian Review (29 July 2019): https://​asia.nik​kei.com/​Spotli​ght/​Comm​ent/​Rus​sia-​and-​China-​roma​nce-​ runs-​into-​frict​ion-​in-​Cent​ral-​Asia. 44 Andrew Chatzky and James McBride, “China’s Massive Belt and Road Initiative”, CFR Backgrounder (29 May 2019): www.cfr.org/​backgrounder/​chinas-​massive-​belt-​and-​road-​initiative. 45 The Meridian highway is underwritten by LLC Meridian, whose chief executive officer, Alexander Ryazanov, was a deputy chairman of Gazprom and sits on the board of Russia’s railway monopoly, RZD. 46 At the same time, it potentially cuts off Ukraine from BRI routes, indicating a clear geopolitical basis for Russian calculations. 47 Jae-​Young Lee, “Iron Silk Road: Prospects for a Landbridge through Russia from Korea to Europe”, Post-​Soviet Affairs, 20/​1(2016), 83–​105. 48 Inter-​Korea Economic Cooperation after the Moon-​Kim Summit in Pyongyang, Choson Exchange (4 October 2018): www.chosonexchange.org/​our-​blog/​2018/​10/​3/​inter-​korea-​economiccooperation-​after-​the-​moon-​kim-​summit-​in-​pyongyang. 49 Each of the projects remains stalled by North Korea’s closure of inter-​Korean rail, a position it has held since 2008.

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The Belt and Road Initiative 50 Jane Nakano, “China Launches the Polar Silk Road”, Energy Fact & Opinion (Washington, DC, 2 February 2018). 51 Alex Forbes, “Novatek Targets Huge Arctic Gas Reserves”, Petroleum Economist (7 May 2019): www.petroleum-​economist.com/​articles/​corporate/​company-​profiles/​2019/​novatek-​targetshuge-​arctic-​gas-​resources. 52 Trym Eiterfjord, “Checking in on China’s Nuclear Icebreaker”, The Diplomat (5 September 2019): https://​thed​iplo​mat.com/​2019/​09/​check​ing-​in-​on-​chi​nas-​nucl​ear-​ice​brea​ker/​. 53 Nezavisimaya gazeta (21 December 1999), 1. 54 Nicholas Trickett, “Can Russia Piggyback on China’s ‘String of Pearls’?”, The Diplomat (9 November 2017): https://​thed​iplo​mat.com/​2017/​11/​can-​rus​sia-​piggyb​ack-​on-​chi​nas-​str​ing-​of-​pea​rls/​. 55 On entrapment, see Victor Cha, “Abandonment, Entrapment, and Neoclassical Realism in Asia”, International Studies Quarterly, 44/​2(2000), 261–​91. 56 Quoted in Bobo Lo, “Once More with Feeling: Russia and the Asia-​Pacific”, Lowy Institute Analyses (20 August 2019): www.lowyinstitute.org/​publications/​once-​more-​feeling-​russia-​and-​asia-​pacific. 57 Andrei Kadomtsev, “Great Game in Central Asia –​Rivalry Persists”, International Affairs [Moscow] (11 November 2018): http://​en.inter​affa​irs.ru/​eve​nts/​745-​great-​game-​in-​cent​ral-​asia-​r iva​lry-​persi​ sts.html. 58 “Singapore, China Ink Deals on Trade, Belt and Road Projects”, Straits Times (30 April 2019): www.straitstimes.com/​ a sia/​ e ast-​ a sia/​ s ingapore-​ c hina-​ i nk-​ d eals-​ o n-​ t rade-​ b elt-​ a nd-roadprojects. 59 Tirta Nugraha Mursitama and Yi Ying, “Indonesia’s Perception and Strategy Toward China’s OBOR Expansion: Hedging with Balancing”, Chinese Economy, 54/​1(2021), 35–​47. See also Hongyi Lai, “Indonesia: The Belt and Road Initiative and Relations with China”, Asia Dialogue (14 October 2019): https://​thea​siad​ialo​gue.com/​2019/​10/​04/​belt-​and-​road-​ini​tiat​ive-​in-​indone​sia-​and-​relati​ons-​ with-​china/​. 60 Thitinan Pongshudirak, “The BRI as China’s ‘Manifest Destiny’? A Thai Perspective”, CARI ASEAN Research and Advocacy, October 2019. www.cariasean.org/​publications/​chinas-​belt-​and-​road-​ initiative-​bri-​and-​southeast-​asia-​publication/​the-​bri-​as-​chinas-​manifest-​destiny-​a-​thai-​perspective/ ​ #.YJc2ES8Rr5k. 61 Samir Puri and Greg Austin, “What the Whitsun Reef Incident Tell Us about Future Chinese Operations at Sea”, IISS Analysis (21 April 2021): www.iiss.org/​blogs/​analysis/​ 2021/​04/​ whitsun-​reef-​incident-​china. 62 Roland Rajah, Alexandre Dayant and Jonathan Pryke, Ocean of Debt? Belt and Road and Debt Diplomacy in the Pacific (Sydney, 2019): www.lowyinstitute.org/​publications/​ocean-​debt-​belt-​and-​road-anddebt-​diplomacy-​pacific. 63 Michael Clarke, “Why Scrap Victoria’s ‘meaningless’ Belt and Road Deal? Because it Sends a Powerful Message to China”, The Conversation (22 April 2021): https://​thec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​why-​ scrap-​victor ​ias-​mean​ingl​ess-​belt-​and-​road-​deal-​beca​use-​it-​sends-​a-​power​ful-​mess​age-​to-​beij​ing-​ 159​536. 64 Joshua MacDonald, “New Zealand Steps into Australia-​China Dispute”, The Diplomat (8 February 2021): https://​thed​iplo​mat.com/​2021/​02/​new-​zeal​and-​steps-​into-​austra​lia-​china-​disp​ute/​. 65 “Confluence of the Two Seas”, Speech by H.E. Mr. Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan at the Parliament of the Republic of India (22 August 2007): www.mofa.go.jp/​region/​asia-​paci/​pmv0708/​ speech-​2.html. 66 “National Security Strategy”, Japan Prime Minister’s Office (17 December 2013): http://​japan.kan​tei. go.jp/​96_​abe/​docume​nts/​2013/​_​_​i​csFi​les/​afi​eldf​i le/​2013/​12/​17/​NSS.pdf. 67 See Andrea A. Fischetti and Antoine Roth, “Japan’s Belt and Road Ambivalence”, Tokyo Review (18 May 2019): www.tokyoreview.net/​2019/​05/​sino-​japanese-​review-​japans-​bri-​ambivalence/​; Masafumi Iida, “Japan’s Reluctant Embrace of BRI?”, SWP Working Paper (3 October 2018): www. swp-​berlin.org/​fileadmin/​contents/​products/​projekt_​papiere/​Iida_​BCAS_​2018_​BRI_​Japan_​6.pdf; Asei Ito, “China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Japan’s Response: From Non-​ participation to Conditional Engagement”, East Asia, 36/​2(2019), 123–​24. 68 Iida, “Reluctant Embrace”. 69 Suresh Nanwani, “Belt and Road Initiative: Responses from Japan and India –​Bilateralism, Multilateralism and Collaborations”, Global Policy, 10/​2(2019), 285–​86. 70 Ito, “Japan’s Response”, 126.

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Michael Clarke and Matthew Sussex 71 For the Sino-​Pakistan alignment see Andrew Small, The China-​Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics (London, 2015); and for the “string of pearls”, see Bertil Lintner, The Costliest Pearl: China’s Struggle for India’s Ocean (London, 2019). 72 Ian Hall, “India and the Belt and Road Initiative: From Critic to Competitor”, in Michael Clarke, Matthew Sussex, and Nick Bisley, eds., The Belt and Road Initiative and the Future of Regional Order in the Indo-​Pacific (Lanham, MD, 2020), 163. 73 “Chinese Incursion in Ladakh: A Little Toothache Can Paralyze Entire Body, Modi Tells Xi Jinping”, Times of India (20 September 2014): https://​times​ofin​dia.ind​iati​mes.com/​india/​Chin​ese-​incurs​ion-​ in-​Lad​akh-​A-​lit​tle-​tootha​che-​can-​paral​yze-​ent​ire-​body-​Modi-​tells-​Xi-​Jinp​ing/​arti​cles​how/​42940​ 337.cms. 74 Andrew Small, Returning to the Shadows: China, Pakistan, and the Fate of CPEC (Washington DC, 2020), 8: www.gmfus.org/​publications/​returning-​shadows-​china-​pakistan-​and-​fate-​cpec. 75 Hall, “India and the Belt and Road”, 164. 76 India Ministry of External Affairs, “Official Spokesperson’s Response to a Query on Participation of India in OBOR/​BRI Forum” (13 May 2017): https://​mea.gov.in/​media-​briefi​ngs.htm?dtl/​28463/​ Ofic​ial+​Spokes​pers​ons+​respo​nse+​to+​a+​query+​on+​partic​ipat​ion+​of+​India+​in+​OBOR​BRI+​ Forum. 77 Lai-​Ha Chan, “Can China Remake Regional Order? Contestation with India over the Belt and Road Initiative”, Global Change, Peace and Security, 32/​2(2020), 200. 78 See for example, Brahma Chellaney, “China’s Debt-​Trap Diplomacy”, The Strategist (24 January 2017): www.aspistrategist.org.au/​chinas-​debt-​trap-​diplomacy/​; Brahma Chellaney, “China’s Creditor Imperialism”, Project Syndicate (20 December 2017): www.projectsyndicate.org/​commentary/​china-​ sri-​lanka-​hambantota-​port-​debt-​by-​brahma-​chellaney-​2017-​12?barrier=​accesspaylog; John Pomfret, “China’s Debt Traps Around the World Are a Trademark of Its Imperialist Ambitions”, Washington Post (27 August 2018): www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​global-​opinions/​wp/​2018/​08/​27/​chinas-​ debt-​traps-​around-​the-​world-​are-​a-​trademark-​of-​its-​imperialist-​ambitions/​. 79 Chan, “Can China Remake Regional Order?”, 207. For studies critical of the “debt trap diplomacy” thesis, see Jones and Hameiri, Debunking the Myth; Rajah, Dayant, and Pryke, Ocean of Debt? 80 See Chan, “Can China Remake Regional Order?”, 212–​13; Hall, “India and the Belt and Road”, 169–​71. 81 Dirk Van Der Kley, “Huawei Ban is Just the Start of the Great Decoupling”, Australian Financial Review (28 July 2020): www.afr.com/​policy/​economy/​huawei-​ban-​is-​just-​the-​start-​of-​the-​greatdecoupling-​20200728-​p55g2u. 82 Azhar Sukri, “China Posts Record Economic Growth after Plunge 12 Months Ago”, Al Jazeera (16 April 2021): www.aljazeera.com/​economy/​2021/​4/​16/​china-​posts-​record-​economic-​growth-​aftersteep-​year-​ago-​plunge. 83 See for example, John Glaser, Christopher A. Preble, and A. Trevor Thrall, Fuel to the Fire: How Trump Made America’s Broken Foreign Policy Even Worse (and How We Can Recover) (Washington, DC, 2019). 84 On “forum-​shopping”, see, for instance, Hannah Murphy and Aynsley Kellow, “Forum-​Shopping in Global Governance: Understanding States, Businesses and NGOs in Multiple Arenas”, Global Policy, 4/​2(2013), 139–​49.

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25 REGIONALISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH Understanding the Evolution of Mercosur Mahrukh Doctor The world economy, especially international trade in goods and services, was already slowing before the COVID pandemic hit the headlines in early 2020. Rising protectionism, worsening trade tensions between the United States and China, cantankerous negotiations for Britain’s exit from the European Union [EU], and an impasse in multilateral negotiations for global trade governance had already seen stagnation and disruption in world trade flows at the bilateral, regional and multilateral levels. Globalisation had not only increased international interconnectedness and interdependence, but also exacerbated national and regional vulnerabilities to external shocks. Unsurprisingly, the trends observed in global markets and trade were often as much about economic decision-​making as about diplomacy and statecraft. They often reflected the power shifts and power diffusion that became an increasingly prominent feature of the international system after the global financial crisis of 2008–​2009. In the above context, where globalisation seemed to be unravelling and national governments struggled to maintain agency in external policy, regionalism often presented itself as an attractive option for a competitive integration into the global economy. Here, regionalism refers to the state-​led formal process of closer relations amongst a group of countries in a region, involving greater inter-​state co-​operation and organisational cohesiveness that encourages the development of economic integration and societal interactions and regional awareness. This chapter considers the features of and theoretical approaches to examining the evolution of one of the most prominent and developed regionalism projects in the Global South, the Southern Common Market [Mercosur], which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2021. On 26 March 1991, the Treaty of Asuncion launched Mercosur –​Mercado Común del Sur in Spanish; Mercado Comum do Sul in Portuguese; and Ñemby Ñemuha in Guarani, the three official languages of the bloc –​with the aim of fostering economic development with social well-​being. In 1994, the Ouro Preto Protocol established Mercosur’s permanent bodies and conferred a legal personality on the bloc allowing it to negotiate with third parties and international organisations. Mercosur’s four original members were Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. A fifth member, Venezuela, formally joined in 2012 but was suspended in December 2016 –​and remains so, at the time of writing. A sixth state, Bolivia, signed an adhesion protocol in 2015 but had not formally joined by early 2022.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-31

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Mercosur’s original four territorially contiguous states cover about 15 million square kilometres of land, with a population of circa 295 million. It is a region rich in natural resources –​ energy, fresh water, minerals, and agricultural land. Mercosur’s official website describes itself as “a union of countries working as one to secure the well-​being of its people” and notes its main objective as “to promote a common space that generates business and investment opportunities through the competitive integration of national economies into the international market”.1 It is also proud of the social, cultural and human rights dimensions of its integration agenda. It is worth noting some of Mercosur’s key features: inter-​governmentalism, mixed economic and political objectives, incremental integration, low regional interdependence, non-​exclusivity, and willingness to engage in inter-​regionalism. First, Mercosur regionalism is a heavily state-​led process, adhering to strictly inter-​governmental decision-​making processes and avoiding the creation of supranational bodies and mechanisms. By December 2019, Mercosur had signed 163 international treaties, agreements, and memoranda.2 As such, it is significantly shaped by ongoing diplomacy and statecraft employed by its member-​states. This often takes place at the summit level, with presidents regularly getting directly involved in resolving regional policy issues and disputes. Second, regionalism remained closely linked to locking in each government’s liberalising reforms and easing their integration into global markets. Economic integration was expected to support Mercosur’s founding political objectives of boosting regional security, trust amongst leaders, and support for democracy.3 Third, inspired by the open regionalism ideas prevalent in the 1990s, Mercosur chose a gradual and incremental path to integration. It started life as an incomplete free trade area, aimed to become a customs union with a common external tariff by 1995, and then a common market by 2006.4 These ambitious deadlines proved difficult: for example, a common customs code arrived only in 2010, but remained unimplemented a decade later; and a Mercosur Trade Facilitation Accord was finally signed in December 2019 with implementation still pending. Thus, on its thirtieth anniversary, perhaps the best description of Mercosur is an incomplete customs union. Fourth, intra-​regional economic interdependence is rather limited, and the share of intra-​ regional trade in total regional trade modest, typically around 12 per cent in recent years. It has ranged from a high of 21.6 per cent in 1996 to a low of 7.8 per cent in 2002 and 9.9 per cent at the peak of the global financial crisis in 2009; it was 13.7 per cent in 2018.5 It is also notable that Mercosur economies have very similar factor endowments; they often competed against each other in international markets, which hampered member governments from endorsing steps to encourage regional-​level specialisation or scale economies. Deepening Mercosur integration and interdependence remained a challenge throughout, with economic asymmetries and institutional deficits at the heart of the problem.6 Fifth, its members are not bound exclusively to Mercosur within South America, but instead are a part of the “rich tapestry of complementary, competing and overlapping institutions” in the region.7 Periodically, Mercosur members raised questions about “dual velocity” or “variable geometry” in their relations with other trade partners: that is, respectively, the ability to open and engage in freer trade at different speeds and selective involvement in trade agreements with third countries. Additionally, many non-​traditional security threats, economic crises, political instability, constraints on development and policy autonomy, worsening environmental emergencies, and the pandemic all fed the desire to cater for alternative forms of diplomacy and opportunities to apply statecraft in the region. Nonetheless, they also created a rather messy set of overlapping regional projects.8 A final feature of Mercosur has been its willingness to engage in inter-​regional negotiations, especially with the EU. This is a key area where Mercosur collective diplomacy had a chance to develop. The literature discusses the EU’s “external federator” as well as regionalism “capacity 310

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building” functions as important elements for Europe, but these were also relevant for encouraging deepening integration within other regions.9 Thus, during the years of negotiation with the EU, Mercosur benefitted from EU technical training, administrative know how, and financial assistance to support its regionalism project.10 The external agenda of inter-​regional negotiations with the EU often receives credit for the survival of Mercosur through its many crises. However, it could not compensate for low institutionalisation or substitute for weak political willingness to deepen Mercosur integration.11 Mercosur’s sparse institutional structure relies on three main decision-​making organs: the Common Market Council, the Common Market Group, and the Mercosur Trade Commission. A number of permanent organs and over 300 other negotiating fora and ad hoc bodies supports their work usually with representatives from each member-​state. Amongst the most important permanent bodies are: the Mercosur Technical Secretariat, Mercosur Commission of Permanent Representatives, Permanent Review Tribunal, Mercosur Structural Convergence Fund, Mercosur Parliament, Mercosur Social Institute, Institute of Public Policies on Human Rights, and the Social Participation Unit. Given the consistently intergovernmental character of these bodies, with the partial exception of the Mercosur Parliament, the framing and resolution of issues within them are a highly complex political exercise involving both diplomatic tactics and statecraft. Mercosur regionalism developed along three fronts: widening membership and co-​operation with other economies and/​or regional organisations, deepening regional integration, and shifting the focus of integration efforts. The first refers to Mercosur’s expanding relations with others, whereas the latter two point to developments within the bloc. Engaging in diplomacy and statecraft was relevant on all three fronts. In the 1990s, Mercosur aroused much interest amongst its Southern American neighbours, a number of whom sought associate if not full membership in the bloc. Soon, Mercosur associate memberships expanded to include Chile, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Surinam. Amongst associate members, only Venezuela and Bolivia subsequently signed adhesion protocols for full membership in 2006 and 2015, respectively. As noted above, although Venezuela joined the bloc as a full member in 2012, it had its membership suspended in 2016 because it had never fully complied with its incorporation commitments and had raised concerns about its democratic credentials. Mercosur also managed to raise its international profile and gain recognition as a regionalism project that sought to emulate some of the values and integration goals of the EU. The EU’s external agenda often received credit for propping up Mercosur’s survival through times of internal crises. Initially, in 1995, the signing of an agreement to launch negotiations for an economic co-​operation and free trade agreement with the EU was instrumental in supporting regionalism and enhancing the bloc’s attractiveness as a trade and investment partner.12 Although EU-​Mercosur inter-​regional negotiations dragged on for years, the bloc signed free trade or preferential trade agreements with a range of other partners, including six Latin American economies plus Egypt, Israel, India, and two regional blocs –​the Andean Pact and the South African Customs Union. Finally, in 2019, after 39 rounds of negotiations over a period of 20 years, the EU and Mercosur signed an association agreement –​whose ratification was pending at the time of writing and likely to face a very rocky path. An agreement with the European Free Trade Area was signed in 2019 and also awaits ratification. In 2020, Mercosur was considering or already involved in negotiating agreements with Canada, Lebanon, Singapore, and South Korea. Given Mercosur members’ reluctance to delegate or pool authority, these negotiations always involve representatives from all four member-​states and as such engage considerable national resources in terms of diplomatic and ministerial personnel. 311

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Regionalism also implies deepening intra-​regional relations on a number of fronts, such as trade in goods and services, investment, infrastructure links, regulatory regimes, migration, and cultural exchange. Here Mercosur has had mixed and uneven results over time, and issue areas. Initially, the main concerns were that Mercosur was encouraging trade diversion, and that asymmetries in the distribution of costs and benefits of regionalism might actually be welfare worsening.13 Later, investment flows and industrial policy objectives became more pressing. In recent years, Mercosur made some progress on intra-​regional trade policy by streamlining processes, clarifying rules, standardising regulations, mitigating for technical barriers to trade, recognising rules for geographical denominations, and more. But there are still many issues that remain unresolved, for instance, rules of origin, use of anti-​dumping procedures, unilateral disruptions to trade flows, exceptions to the common external tariff, and incorporating sustainable development issues into the regional agenda. Often difficulties in the deepening agenda stemmed not from regional integration itself, but from other domestic crises both political and economic. Amongst the harshest economic crises were the Brazilian devaluation of 1999, Argentina’s near economic collapse in 2001–​2002, the global financial crisis of 2008–​ 2009, the Brazilian recession of 2014–​2016, and the COVID pandemic from 2020. Political or ideological incompatibility, especially between Argentina and Brazil, was also a recurring issue. Most striking was the dissonance between the Argentine president, Alberto Fernandez, and his Brazilian counterpart, Jair Bolsonaro, from 2020 onwards. Astonishingly, in contravention to past diplomatic practice, the two leaders only convened their first bilateral meeting on 30 November 2020, via an online conference call, on Argentina-​Brazil Bilateral Friendship Day, 11 months after Fernandez took office.14 Another problem facing Mercosur’s deepening integration was the failure to meet deadlines, non-​ incorporation into domestic legislation, and/​ or non-​ compliance with agreements. It constitutes the “Mercosur syndrome” of “empty promises”.15 Of all 1,033 policies adopted between 1994 and 2008, involving 3,560 incorporation processes in member-​states –​not all processes involved all four members –​only about two-​thirds of regional agreements saw incorporation nationally. Furthermore, rules requiring unanimity on almost every decision and national incorporation by all parties to an agreement further complicated progress on deepening integration. Effectively, the avoidance of any form of supranational institution-​ building debilitated the prospects for extending regionalism. These are issues raised by many authors in the academic literature.16 The final factor having an impact on the evolution of regionalism was the changing functional demands on regional institutions, mainly due to shifting political-​ideological and/​or economic policy contexts. At the time of its founding, Mercosur rose out of the so-​called “dual transitions” in the Southern Cone in the 1980s and 1990s –​political and economic liberalisation processes involving democratisation and adoption of Washington Consensus-​ recommended policies –​and the “open regionalism” discourse globally popular at the time.17 Thus, Mercosur regional institutions were set up to lock-​in both democracy and economic liberalisation. Likewise, although the diplomatic strategy behind the strongly state-​led, even presidential-​ led, regionalism initiatives aligned with reducing bilateral security tensions –​ Argentine-​Brazilian –​and propping up regional democratisation processes, Mercosur’s policy announcements in its first decade focused on economic aspects related to trade opening, investment flows, and production integration. It was only later, in 2003, that Mercosur presidents announced their intention to include social issues in the regional agenda. Regional elites also focused more on constructing a Mercosur regional identity and increasingly used identity discourse to appeal to public opinion in favour of regionalism.18 Thus, in the following years, bodies such as the Mercosur Parliament, 312

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Mercosur Social Institute, and the Social Participation Unit, with the slogan, “Somos Mercosur” [“We are Mercosur”], emerged to address the social deficits of regionalism.19 Additionally, Mercosur governments took initiatives to promote social participation in the regionalism process, for example, the Social and Participative Mercosur Programme in Brazil, the Civil Society Consultative Council in Argentina, and the Dialogue and Consultation System in Uruguay.20 As more left-​leaning progressive politicians with more developmentalist mindsets took office in South America –​not just in Mercosur –​regionalism swung from the previous “open” and “hegemonic” economically focused regional integration towards a more politically and socially focused one with distinctly South American attributes. The “post-​hegemonic regionalism” agenda first rose to prominence with the 2005 rejection of the American-​led initiative for launching a free trade area of the Americas [FTAA].21 Next, it went on to redefine regionalism in terms of development co-​operation and social justice in the region. The post-​hegemonic economic agenda prioritised regional infrastructure and energy security, rather than production integration via freer trade and investment flows.22 However, by the late 2010s, the political mood shifted again; and the approach to regionalism swung back to prioritising economic integration, if anything at all, with Brazil especially eager to see a “lean Mercosur”. Bolsonaro’s economic team revived discussions that toyed with abandoning the customs union and peddling Mercosur integration backwards into a free trade area.23 Clearly, post-​hegemonic regionalism had stumbled into irrelevance –​at least for the time being –​and the pandemic sealed Mercosur’s fate as a non-​priority policy project. With this discussion of Mercosur’s origins, features, and development, it is appropriate to turn to approaches analysing and explaining how Mercosur regionalism evolved over time. A better understanding of this regionalism also provides practical policy lessons in diplomacy and statecraft for other developing regions in the Global South interested in tackling the challenges and harnessing the opportunities of regional integration. Three approaches provide valuable lenses for analysing regionalism in Mercosur: liberal inter-​governmentalism, inter-​ presidentialism, and strategic diplomacy. The first two are closely associated with scholarship on regionalism in Mercosur, whereas the last applies an innovative approach to examining the challenges facing Mercosur. Liberal inter-​governmentalism is amongst the most influential theories of regional integration and closely associated with explaining EU regionalism. It sought to go beyond earlier theories of functionalism and neo-​functionalism that showed how emerging economic and societal needs drove demands for greater institutionalisation of regionalism and creation of supranational structures.24 Liberal inter-​governmentalism places great emphasis on economic interdependence as a pre-​condition driving regionalism, where regional institutions are set up to lock in and enforce trade and investment-​related economic agreements. Increased economic interdependence often requires strengthening regional institutions to facilitate decision-​making and settle disputes.25 But civil society participation plays a key role in the regionalism process, something that remains very limited in Mercosur.26 In the absence of substantial economic interdependence and/​or civil society participation, the Mercosur experience does not fit mainstream theories of the liberal intergovernmentalism of some analysts, or the supranational governance of others.27 Oddly, a theory called liberal inter-​governmentalism cannot explain the pure inter-​governmentalism of Mercosur! Of course, setting up regional institutions is not enough to gauge the depth of any particular instance of regionalism, since what really matters is the level of authority pooled or delegated to these institutions,28 as well as the effort put into upholding regional institutions and agreements. A comparative regionalism approach is vocal on the point that economic interdependence is not the only factor driving regional institution building. Rather, it is the result of a mix of 313

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factors such as functional demands arising from regional interactions, supply of regional integration via elite efforts at regional identity construction, and diffusion of regional institutional designs across regions.29 They develop their argument alongside a post-​functionalism approach, which adds security interdependence and regime stability to economic interdependence as factors driving the demand for regional institutions.30 It is essential to understand that the main policy objective of regionalism in the Southern Cone was ensuring policy autonomy over the region’s development path and insertion into global markets. Unsurprisingly, these objectives shaped the heavily state-​led but institutionalisation-​ resistant regionalism project. It guaranteed opposition to any move away from inter-​governmental decision-​making structures. Thus, although the expanding range of Mercosur areas of activity suggested opportunity for neo-​functional spillover, the inter-​governmental logic of securing national autonomy ensured that these spillovers were limited in scope. Given the focus on avoiding the creation of any supranational regional authority, Mercosur had to rely on consensus decision-​making, national incorporation of agreements, minimal compliance policies, and inter-​governmental fora to resolve any conflicts or co-​ordination issues. Thus, issues of bureaucratic politics in the EU, instead become points that required diplomatic engagement and negotiation in Mercosur. Moreover, regional organisations in non-​Western or developing economy contexts often seek to defend policy autonomy and resilience against external intervention.31 Thus, undertaking Mercosur initiatives occurred not only with an eye to secure policy space; it also involved untangling its members from any American-​led efforts, such as President George W. Bush’s “Initiative for the Americas” and the FTAA negotiations. In this situation, Mercosur added bargaining weight to the member-​states’ positions in international fora, but it did not much constrain their domestic policy space. In other words, liberal inter-​governmentalism, although not applicable for explaining what did happen, provides a useful lens to analyse why it did not happen. Given that embedding intra-​regional trade, boosting interdependence, and deepening economic policy co-​ordination were not the priority objectives of Mercosur members, there was less functional value placed on creating supranational institutions. Inter-​governmentalism adequately served the immediate interest in protecting national sovereignty. Unfortunately, this stance also discredited Mercosur as a regional organisation, partly because it failed to mimic the EU’s path to regional integration.32 Inter-​presidentialism or reliance on presidential diplomacy is an alternative approach to analysing and explaining Mercosur regionalism. A definition of presidential diplomacy is “political, summit diplomacy as opposed to institutionalised, professional diplomacy”.33 When this involves a number of presidents, as in Mercosur, it is inter-​presidentialism.34 Looking through this lens provides an image of regionalism from the inside out. It focuses on the domestic political-​institutional context and the level of autonomy accorded to presidents in the region. Presidential systems of government dominate Latin America, and given the levels of centralisation and personalisation, these regimes often have the label “hyper-​presidential”. Moreover, separation of powers and specialist knowledge requirements of foreign policy means both legislatures and the public typically defer to the executive. Hence, in their dual roles as head of state and head of government, presidents have considerable means at their disposal to shape foreign policy and diplomatic outcomes. Often viewed as “more accessible, more responsive, more effective, faster” actors,35 their qualities are essential in the fraught, crisis-​r idden regionalism process of Mercosur. Given Mercosur presidents’ ultimate, and frequently used, veto player status on foreign policy, the logic of two-​level games was less applicable here.36 Moreover, political elites strongly supported this type of presidential role, partly because there was little societal pressure to pursue –​or constrain –​measures for 314

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regional integration. Thus, Mercosur experienced an extreme form of inter-​governmentalism, appropriately labelled inter-​presidentialism.37 Mercosur regional integration heavily relied on presidential diplomacy in both bilateral and group relations. Presidents, individually and collectively, preferred informal negotiations to resolve issues, whether employing telephone calls, stopovers on trips abroad, or, more recently, even online conferences. In its earliest days, Mercosur presidents resorted to summit diplomacy or direct negotiations whenever needing crucial decisions or dispute settlement.38 The many crises that battered Mercosur in its 30 years so far, unsurprisingly, repeatedly called forth the need for nimble and resolute decision-​making at the highest level. In this sense, acceptance of the diplomatic practice of inter-​presidentialism appears as a strength of regionalism in Mercosur that could apply more generally in the Global South. In addition, even the EU resorted to direct negotiations amongst heads of government in emergencies. For example, the Greek financial crisis (2011–​2012), the refugee crisis (2014–​2015), and roll out of the vaccination programme during the pandemic (2020–​2021), all saw national leaders actively engage in regional-​ level decision-​making even with supranational structures in place. Inter-​presidentialism was especially effective in maintaining the status quo or settling disputes informally, with minimal need to deviate from Mercosur’s inter-​governmental governance style. Moreover, the inter-​presidentialism argument is more complex than simply allowing presidents to take decisions. Rather, presidents exercise what is an almost institutionalised decisional leadership. Thus, “presidential intervention in the management of Mercosur has become a structural element of the integration process”,39 with presidents simultaneously maintaining their domestic autonomy and regional leadership due to the absence of any regional-​level supranational institutions or veto players. Although slick and flexible responses made possible by inter-​presidentialism might have allowed for agile action in times of passing crises, its fragile institutional foundations also created dangers in a world rife with uncertainties. As such, some argued that although genuine innovation in foreign policy often emerged from direct and sustained presidential engagement –​most evident in Brazil40 –​it also caused disquiet, especially amongst investors and extra-​regional partners. Moreover, the inter-​presidential default arrangement meant Mercosur lacked an additional layer of supranational institutions to fall back on or cushion the impact of deeper structural changes in the global economy, not just due to the pandemic, but also driven by the fourth industrial revolution and the global power transition underway. Both liberal inter-​governmentalism and inter-​presidentialism viewed Mercosur, directly or indirectly, through a comparative lens centred on the EU. Mercosur’s problems and achievements tended to be analysed in terms of how far they deviated from the EU norm or model. Here, the emerging comparative regionalism literature does well to highlight that for most developing economies of the Global South, the value of regionalism might not lay in boosting economic interdependence with their neighbours –​in fact, their economic interdependence often resides in ties with the advanced economies of the Global North. Instead, it could enhance their security interdependence, especially non-​traditional security issues like narcotics, arms, and human trafficking, and mitigate their vulnerability to globalisation –​especially the challenges of competitive integration into global markets. Diplomacy and statecraft related to regionalism in the Global South often found themselves geared to addressing these challenges, but in an ever more uncertain world, it has become an increasingly arduous task. Diplomacy and statecraft linked to regionalism needs to make strategic choices with a long-​term perspective to enhance national and regional outcomes. Bearing this in mind, this chapter suggests a pioneering approach and third analytical lens through which to examine the prospects for and contributions of Mercosur. 315

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Strategic diplomacy is an innovative approach to understanding the challenges of systemic interdependence and globalisation, especially for states in the Global South. A recent effort developed the concept of strategic diplomacy, first applying it to Asia –​both northeast and southeast.41 Strategic diplomacy’s definition is “the process by which state and non-​state actors socially construct and frame their view of the world, set their agendas, and communicate, contest and negotiate diverging core interests and goals”.42 This approach emphasises that states need to focus on using diplomacy to navigate the highly interconnected international system, even where there is a fog of uncertainty and a world of “unknown unknowns”. Applying the insights of strategic diplomacy allows states to learn to navigate the system to maximise their policy space. The complex context of globalisation, with dwindling domestic policy space and growing vulnerability to external shocks, forces states to become adaptive and agile, satisfying rather than maximising their national interests, and constantly readjusting their behaviour in the system. Nonetheless, it is increasingly clear that the states of the Global South bear a harsher burden. Their asymmetrical dependence alongside lower state capacity reduces the ability to control global events and outcomes, influence transnational actors, or easily pursue their national interest in the context of power transitions, strategic surprises, and black swan events. All the above factors have significant and sometimes unintended consequences for diplomacy and statecraft. Given the disruption from frequent economic crises and longstanding issues of regional insecurity, Mercosur elites are alert to alternative forms of diplomatic statecraft. Looking beyond the region, their governments are well aware that the twenty-​first century has created a world where the hallmarks of global order are tightly coupled inter-​dependence and power struggle. They appreciate that how issues are framed is a “political exercise subject to strategy and statecraft”.43 As already mentioned, Mercosur members are especially sensitive to any attempts to pre-​empt their policy autonomy in the name of global and/​or regional governance and system functionality. Additionally, they are also cognisant of how hyper-​connectivity and system complexity require both agile and strategic responses to evolving global and regional situations. Interestingly, Mercosur leaders valued regional co-​operation and building a sense of community as the long-​term strategic objectives of regionalism.44 There was little divergence on these broad objectives between the more economically oriented regionalism of the 1990s and its more political and socially oriented variant from 2003 to at least 2016. Bolsonaro’s early foreign policy moves suggested this might change, but President Donald Trump’s electoral defeat could prompt a readjustment in Brazil’s foreign policy behaviour and a return to Mercosur’s longer-​ term integration trajectory. So what insights can the strategic diplomacy concept provide? It possesses four features.45 First, it takes a systemic view where diplomacy focuses on both navigating the international system and trying to reform it from within. Second, it is oriented towards achieving longer-​ term foreign policy goals that protect policy space and enhance the power, influence and/​ or status of the state in the system. Third, it has a dynamic understanding of the national interest, which is both socially constructed and responsive to systemic-​level changes and strategic surprises. Finally, it depends on engaged political leadership, with a strategic vision of system change and willingness to deploy resources and capabilities to deliver it. If the essence of deploying strategic diplomacy is a foreign policy focused on developing strategic foresight to protect and enhance the long-​term national interest, then viewing Mercosur through this analytical lens adds another dimension to understanding its evolution. Although the concept is usually deployed to explain the foreign policy actions of individual states, it can shed some light on understanding Mercosur regionalism both as part of the strategic diplomacy of individual member-​states and also their collective efforts to navigate the international system. 316

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Have Mercosur member-​states deployed strategic diplomacy successfully? The first feature, a systemic view, is apparent from Mercosur’s very foundation, with the clear statement of the regionalism project conceived around the aim to help its members navigate globalisation and achieve a competitive integration into the global economy. Moreover, dissatisfied with the Washington Consensus policies guiding the international financial institutions’ interactions with Mercosur member-​states in the 1990s, Mercosur governments set about challenging them as became evident after left-​leaning progressive governments took office across the region. Post-​liberal or post-​hegemonic regionalism, and the institutional arrangements it set up, were partly efforts to employ diplomacy and statecraft to reject hegemonic impositions and reform the system from within. The creation of the Union of South American Nations [UNASUR] is probably the best example of this type of strategic diplomacy, where Brazil took the lead in encouraging other South American nations to embrace a regional project that sought to manage wider regional issues from within.46 The second feature, protecting policy space and enhancing one’s status in the system, is evident from Mercosur’s heavy emphasis on inter-​governmentalism.47 A key objective of Mercosur was to maintain policy autonomy. This was especially true for its two larger members –​ Brazil and Argentina. A related objective was to protect themselves from entanglement with American-​led initiatives, and Mercosur’s larger members’ opposition to the FTAA effectively scuppered the project. Regionalism sometimes helped enhance its members’ status and influence in international fora, although at other times disagreements amongst the four members actually undermined their collective image. The literature often notes how Mercosur’s external agenda was central to attracting trade and investor interest in the member economies, something seen from the strategic importance given to inter-​regional negotiations between the EU and Mercosur.48 Mercosur’s evolution, as discussed above, demonstrated the third feature of strategic diplomacy. The regionalism process was dynamic and responsive to shifting political agendas and societal identities. The shift from open regionalism to post-​hegemonic regionalism is strong evidence of how Mercosur responded to the evolving national interests of its members as well as systemic structural change with power diffusion. Thus, for example, relations with China in some ways presented a conundrum for Mercosur members. On one hand, they competed with each other for Chinese markets and inward investment but, on the other, collectively benefitted from using China as a means of lessening American economic influence in the region. This situation in many ways depicts the very essence behind the concept of strategic diplomacy. Finally, strategic diplomacy relies on political leadership, specifically a willingness to employ financial and diplomatic resources to develop and embed a strategic vision that can survive individual presidents’ terms in office. Already difficult at the national level, strategic diplomacy at the regional level seems almost impossible to achieve. In fact, whenever regional electoral cycles and outcomes delivered compatible ideological positions across its members, Mercosur sought to present a strategic vision for its regionalism. However, this situation was often short-​ lived or ran into crises that shook the collective will to pursue integration. Economic volatility is certainly not conducive to practising strategic diplomacy for any state, and much less so for a group of states. Clearly, Mercosur states engaged in diplomacy with each other as well as with external partners and rivals with longer-​term objectives at stake. Thus, the concept of strategic diplomacy sheds some light on how regional integration –​by definition a process rather than a static situation –​benefitted from a strategic and future-​focused policy effort to tackle the uncertainties emanating from structural shifts in the international system. To conclude, Mercosur is an excellent example of how even economic logic of integration requires diplomacy to develop and sustain regionalism. Where political logic or social identities 317

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drive integration, both diplomacy and statecraft lay at the heart of interactions to construct a shared identity. This is especially marked in cases where inter-​governmentalism prevails, and it rejects any supranational structures or efforts at statecraft.

Notes 1 See Mercosur website for an overview of the regional organisation: www.mercosur.int/​en/​about-​ mercosur/​mercosur-​in-​brief/​. 2 Ibid. 3 Mahrukh Doctor, “Prospects for Deepening Mercosur Integration: Economic Asymmetry and Institutional Deficits”, Review of International Political Economy, 20/​3(2013), 515–​40. 4 Jeffrey Cason, The Political Economy of Integration: The Experience of Mercosur (London, 2011). 5 Tanja Börzel and Thomas Risse, “Grand Theories of Integration and the Challenge of Comparative Regionalism”, Journal of European Public Policy, 26/​8(2019), 1231–​52; Edmund Amann and Werner Baer, “Market Integration Without Policy Integration: A Comparison of the Shortcomings of Mercosur and the Eurozone”, Latin American Business Review, 15/​3–​4(2014), 327–​35. 6 See Doctor, “Prospects for Deepening”, for an extensive discussion of these problems. For more detail on economic aspects, Juan Blyde, Paolo Giordano, and Eduardo Fernandez-​Arias, Deepening Integration in Mercosur: Dealing with Disparities (Washington, DC, 2008). 7 Andrea Bianculli, “Latin America”, in Tanja Börzel and Thomas Risse, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism (Oxford, 2016), 154. 8 Andrés Malamud and Gian Luca Gardini, “Has Regionalism Peaked? The Latin American Quagmire and Its Lessons”, International Spectator, 47/​1(2012), 116–​33. 9 See Alan Hardacre, The Rise and Fall of Interregionalism in EU External Relations (Dordrecht, 2010); Fredrik Söderbaum, Patrik Stahlgren, and Luk van Langenhove, “The EU as a Global Actor and the Dynamics of Interregionalism: A Comparative Analysis”, Journal of European Integration, 27/​3(2005), 365–​80; Tobias Lenz, “Spurred Emulation: The EU and Regional Integration in Mercosur and SADC”, West European Politics, 35/​1(2012), 155–​73. 10 For example, see European Commission, Mercosur: Regional Strategy Paper 2007–​2013 (Brussels, 2007). 11 Mahrukh Doctor, “Interregionalism’s Impact on Regional Integration in Developing Countries: The Case of Mercosur”, Journal of European Public Policy, 22/​7(2015), 967–​84. 12 Ibid.; idem, “Why Bother with Inter-​regionalism? Negotiations for a European Union-​Mercosur Association Agreement”, Journal of Common Market Studies, 45/​2(2007), 281–​314. 13 Werner Baer and Peri Silva, “Mercosul: Its Successes and Failures During Its First Two Decades”, Latin American Business Review, 15/​2–​4(2014), 193–​208. 14 See “At 1st Bilateral Meeting with Argentine President, Bolsonaro Mourns Maradona’s Death”, Folha de Sao Paulo International (1 December 2020): www1.folha.uol.com.br/​internacional/​en/​world/​2020/​ 12/​at-​1st-​bilateral-​meeting-​with-​argentine-​president-​bolsonaro-​mourns-​maradonas-​death.shtml. 15 Christian Arnold, “Empty Promises and Non-​incorporation in Mercosur”, International Interactions, 4/​ 3(2017), 643–​67. 16 See, for example, Ibid.; Gerardo Caetano, “New Directions for Mercosur: A Change in Model and the Consequences of the Brazilian Crisis”, Foro Internacional, 59/​1(2019), 47–​88; Doctor, “Prospects for Deepening”; Laura Gómez-​Mera, Power and Regionalism in Latin America: The Politics of MERCOSUR (Notre Dame, IN, 2013); Andrés Malamud, “A Leader Without Followers? The Growing Divergence Between the Regional and Global Performance of Brazilian Foreign Policy”, Latin American Politics and Society, 53/​3(2011), 1–​24; José Antonio Sanahuja, “Post-​liberal Regionalism in South America: The Case of UNASUR”, European University Institute Working Paper RSCAS 2012/​05 (Badia Fiesolana, 2012). 17 See Oliver Dabène, The Politics of Regional Integration in Latin America: Theoretical and Comparative Explorations (NY, 2009); Jose Raul Perales, “The Hemisphere’s Spaghetti Bowl of Free-​ Trade Agreements”, Americas Quarterly (April 2012). Cf. Gian Luca Gardini, The Origins of Mercosur: Democracy and Regionalization in South America (NY, 2010), for an analysis of the role of democratisation processes for Mercosur’s origins and early evolution. 18 See Börzel and Risse, “Grand Theories of Integration” for the importance of elite efforts in region building, although they acknowledge that Mercosur never developed anything like “the ASEAN way” seen in Asian regionalism discourse.

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The Global South: Understanding Mercosur 19 See Mercosur, Construindo o mapa da participação social no Mercosul (January 2019). 20 Lucas Mesquita and Dawisson Belem Lopez, “Does Participation Generate Democratization? Analysis of Social Participation by Institutional Means in Argentine, Brazilian and Uruguayan Foreign Policies”. Journal of Civil Society, 14/​3(2018), 222–​40. 21 See José Briceño-​Ruiz and Andrea Rebeiro Hoffmann, “Post-​hegemonic Regionalism, UNASUR, and the Reconfiguration of Regional Cooperation in South America”, Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 40/​ 1(2015), 48–​ 62; Pia Riggirozzi and Jean Grugel, “Regional Governance and Legitimacy in South America: The Meaning of UNASUR”, International Affairs, 91/​ 4(2015), 781–​97; Pia Riggirozzi and Diana Tussie, eds., The Rise of Post-​Hegemonic Regionalism: The Case of Latin America (NY, 2012). 22 INTAL, Los Futuros del Mercosur: Nuevos rumbos de la integración regional, INTAL Technical Note No. IDB-​TN-​1263 (Washington, DC, 2017). 23 Sandra P. Rios, Pedro da Motta Veiga, Lucia Maduro, and Fernando J. Ribeiro, Informe Mercosul 2020 (Washington, DC, 2020). 24 See Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1998) for liberal intergovernmentalism theory. See Ernest Haas, The Uniting of Europe: Political, Social and Economic Forces 1950–​1957 (London, 1958) for functionalism and neo-​functionalism theories developed to explain European regional integration and institution building. 25 Walter Mattli, The Logic of Regional Integration: Europe and Beyond (Cambridge, 1999). 26 Carlos R. Caichiolo, “The Mercosur Experience and Theories of Regional Integration”, Contexto Internacional, 39/​1(2017), 117–​34. 27 See Moravcsik, Choice for Europe; Wayne Sandholtz and Alec Stone Sweet, eds., European Integration and Supranational Governance (Oxford, 1998) for more on their respective approaches. 28 Börzel and Risse, “Grand Theories of Integration”, 1235. 29 Ibid. 30 Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, “A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus”, British Journal of Political Science, 39/​1(2009), 1–​23. 31 Amitav Acharya, “Regionalism Beyond EU-​Centrism”, in Börzel and Risse, Comparative Regionalism, 109–​30. 32 Mahrukh Doctor, “Mercosur and the Challenges of Regional Integration”, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia –​Politics (Oxford, 2020). 33 Andres Malamud, “Presidential Diplomacy and the Institutional Underpinnings of Mercosur: An Empirical Examination”, Latin American Research Review, 40/​1(2005), 139. 34 Andres Malamud, “Presidentialism and Mercosur: A Hidden Cause for A Successful Experience”, in Finn Laursen, ed., Comparative Regional Integration: Theoretical Perspectives (London, 2003). 35 Malamud, “Presidential Diplomacy”, 138. 36 Robert Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-​level Games”, International Organization, 42/​3(1988), 427–​60. 37 Andrés Malamud, “Mercosur and the EU: Comparative Regionalism and Inter-​regionalism”, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia –​Politics. 38 Sérgio Danese, Diplomacia Presidencial (Rio de Janeiro, 1999). 39 Malamud, “Presidential Diplomacy”; also see Gomez-​Mera, Power and Regionalism. 40 Sean Burges and Fabrício Chagas Bastos, “The Importance of Presidential Leadership in Brazilian Foreign Policy”, Policy Studies, 38/​3(2017), 277–​90; Also, see Jeffrey Cason and Timothy Power, “Presidentialization, Pluralization, and the Rollback of Itamaraty: Explaining Change in Brazilian Foreign Policy Making in the Cardoso Lula Era”, International Political Science Review, 30/​2(2009), 117–​40. 41 Jochen Prantl and Evelyn Goh, “Strategic Diplomacy in Northeast Asia”, Global Asia, 11/​4(2016), 8–​13; idem, “Why Strategic Diplomacy Matters in Southeast Asia”, East Asia Forum Quarterly (April–​ June 2017), 36–​39. 42 Prantl and Goh, “Strategic Diplomacy in Northeast Asia”, 8. 43 Jochen Prantl, “Reuniting Strategy and Diplomacy for Twenty-​first Century Statecraft”, Contemporary Politics (forthcoming 2021), 5. 44 Goh and Prantl, “Why Strategic Diplomacy Matters”; Acharya, “Beyond EU-​Centrism”. 45 Mahrukh Doctor, “Development Banks as Instruments of Brazilian Strategic Diplomacy”, Contemporary Politics (forthcoming 2021).

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Mahrukh Doctor 46 On Unasur, see Briceño-​Ruiz and Hoffmann, “Post-​hegemonic Regionalism”; Sanahuja, “Postliberal Regionalism”. 47 Karl Kaltenthaler and Frank Mora, “Explaining Latin American Economic Integration: The Case of Mercosur”, Review of International Political Economy, 9/​1(2002), 72–​97. 48 Doctor, “Why Bother with Inter-​regionalism?”. For a more sceptical evaluation of inter-​regionalism’s impact, see idem, “Interregionalism’s Impact”.

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26 THE GLOBALISED INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY The Need to Rebuild International Co-​operation Andreas Freytag and Leo Wangler

Globalisation as performed under the multilateral economic order since the end of the Second World War has brought about many economic and political benefits. It has been a main source of a broadened public welfare in many countries and a major source of reduced global violence. Even though the potential was not fully utilised everywhere, both a vast majority of leading policy-​makers and the public accepted it. Although a sceptical political left never befriended an open trade and investment regime, it had to acknowledge that it lifted many people in developing countries and emerging economies out of poverty. This positive connotation has changed in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis after 2007. It became obvious that the process of globalisation intensified structural changes, particularly hurting middle-​class workers in old Heckscher-​Ohlin industries in the West. Globalisation increasingly became subject to criticism, without disentangling the exact problems and causal relationships.1 In addition, those defending globalisation did not properly account for the distributional challenges related to increasing international competition and social inequality. This process with its mixed blessing has contributed to the rise of new populists with an agenda mostly driven by very simple explanations of the world and short-​term-​oriented policy measures.2 One element of such an agenda is scorn for the multilateral economic order that has led to a new and negative perspective about international trade and co-​operation. It sees both trade and the multilateral economic order used increasingly as a strategic tool to push for national interests by defecting from existing agreements, increasing import tariffs, or excluding specific products completely from national markets. Beijing’s successful attempts to make use of the global order to favour its national interests in achieving short-​term advantages has intensified the new populist anti-​globalism –​whether it will benefit in the end is still highly doubtful.3 China made it implicitly and explicitly clear in the last few years that it sticks to international trade rules of reciprocity and non-​discrimination as long as it directly benefits from them. Otherwise, it applies a mix of subsidising state-​owned enterprises and interprets intellectual property rights in favour of its national interests. In addition, China uses its increasing international influence, not least with the help of its new Silk Road or Belt and Road Initiative. Its rising strength in combination with its interpretation DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-32

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of international achievements in its own favour has provoked protectionist responses in many other countries. The COVID crisis starting in early 2020 further triggered this unfortunate neo-​mercantilist trend.4 A fierce debate about the virtues and problems of international supply chains has begun, not least triggered by the unwillingness of governments to allow exports of medical goods, personal protective equipment, and medicine –​correctly labelled as “Sicken thy neighbour”.5 Mutual trust on the global level has suffered in the course of these developments. Multilateral co-​operation has experienced backlashes and attempts to maintain the global economic order have not resulted in breakthroughs –​at the time of writing this chapter. For instance, the World Trade Organisation [WTO] had just finished its search for a new director general and still needed to find a solution for its stalled dispute settlement mechanism. Under President Donald Trump, the United States decided to leave the World Health Organisation [WHO] as well terminate its membership in the Paris Climate Agreement. Under the current American president, Joe Biden, this might change in some areas, as America has re-​entered the Paris Agreement and re-​joined WHO. Less obvious, compared to the Trump Administration, Biden’s puts national interests on top with a domestic “Buy American” strategy. In the European Union [EU], the talk is about strategic autonomy and cross border adjustments as part of the so-​called “European Green Deal”. In sum, the post-​Second World War global order is under pressure from three of its major economies. In such a situation, it is increasingly important that individual countries or a group of countries show leadership and engage in measures to maintain or rebuild the global order. It seems obvious that the global economic order built after 1945 is no longer fit for its purpose –​the participants are too heterogeneous and external conditions have changed. But it is not obvious how this order has to be adapted and who will take the lead. In this chapter, the old trading regime with the WTO as a focus remains an adequate forum to reconstruct the globalised economic order. However, it seems necessary to allow for some flexibility. Already existing attempts to add Plurilateral agreements to the multilateral setting show the necessity of new rules for new problems despite the fact that some Powers block such efforts. Based on the economic theory of clubs, such Plurilateralism can overcome the vetoes of WTO members and thereby allow for an open system of variable geometry in world trade. The global financial and economic crisis after 2007 distorted the world economy and disrupted the Western order. However, it has been a highly complex process, the causes of which are difficult to disentangle. Several factors influencing the disruption are identifiable, found in both authoritarian regimes and democracies. In the latter, they appear on both the political left and political right. First, societies seem to be increasingly divided, which leads to the emergence of a new populist right that is in principle anti-​globalist and anti-​multilateral. In the United States, Britain, and Brazil, populist politicians were successful and took office. Before becoming British prime minister in July 2019, Boris Johnson successfully campaigned for Brexit. It is noteworthy, however, that the campaign was fuelled with the promise to get rid of overburdening EU regulation and the prospects of an Anglo-​American free trade agreement; importantly. Johnson did not delegitimise the WTO and the multilateral order. In the EU, illiberal democracies, notably Hungary and Poland, emerged with governments that exploit nationalist stereotypes. However, they are unable to exert influence on EU trade policy. Other than Johnson, Trump started on the first day of his presidency to campaign against multilateralism and alienate American allies, such as those within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. His four years in power (2017–​2021) document how quickly his policies jeopardised the international order: again, abandoning the Paris Climate Agreement and WHO, but also withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal framework. Under Biden, some elements of American 322

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policy have changed. Nevertheless, it is an open question how far the United States will place itself in the global arena, including confronting China or involvement in transatlantic relations. As a second point, the political right under politicians such as Trump formed a sort of coalition with the political left’s anti-​globalists. In Europe, protesters managed to prevent the so-​called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership planned for conclusion in the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency; its main purpose was to maintain the West’s ability to set and enforce product, social, and environmental standards. By the same token, the Obama Administration negotiated and concluded the so-​called Trans-​Pacific Partnership, an explicit multilateral instrument to contain Chinese influence in Asia –​Trump’s first act was to withdraw from the Treaty thereby strengthening China in Asia. Third, it is fair to assume that Beijing felt encouraged to increase the emphasis on national interests in its diplomacy in the region, but also towards the West, in an increasingly offensive if not aggressive mode. It seems willing to seize the opportunity to benefit from perceived Western weakness and dissent across the North Atlantic region. In spring 2021, this new stance materialised as a reaction to the Western critique of Chinese human rights violations, chiefly against the Uyghurs in Northwest China. Western politicians who supported sanctions and Western textile companies operating in China, which have clearly positioned themselves, have come under strong pressure from Beijing. Together, these actions against private companies and politicians are feeding suspicions that they comprise part of a political strategy that includes the so-​called concept of “dual circulation”.6 This concept appears as a threat because China uses its gains from trade to make its economy independent from the outside world by getting access to foreign high technology and gaining market share with subsidies for state-​owned enterprises. Other countries want Chinese trade and access to Chinese finance. This reasoning is a possible explanation why China increasingly deviates from the existing global economic order of reciprocity and non-​discrimination. In terms of the fourth point, after the 2007 crisis and during the COVID pandemic, governments have used trade-​related measures, in particular trade restrictions, to help their economies out of the crises. They thereby increasingly lost sight of the multilateral order, not least because of the complexity of international governance and its varying interests. With fewer and less binding commitments, defection might be a dominant strategy. Policy-​makers often believe gains are possible by defecting from international co-​operation. They are tempted to assume that the other country will maintain a co-​operative behaviour; but as soon as that country reacts to the defection, a prisoners’ dilemma emerges where both countries are worse off compared to an outcome characterised by co-​operation. In the aftermath of the 2008–​2009 financial and economic crisis, trade distortive measures –​ amongst them subsidies, in particular –​became increasingly relevant.7 For instance, in Germany, the amount of industrial subsidies paid by all governmental levels –​EU, federal, and state –​was raised in the early 2010s, reached almost €200 billion in 2019, and will –​without COVID measures –​exceed €200 billion in 2022.8 Even before the outbreak of the COVID crisis, industrial policies in combination with capital controls became popular. The pandemic itself triggered an even more aggressive stance towards trade in most countries. Currently, there seems to be a broad consensus, even in societies that most benefit from international trade and capital flows that global value chains need cutting back; the value added of production should be brought home. Politicians exert pressure on businesses to reorganise supply chains and strengthen their manufacturing sites. Finally, the EU is staging a concept labelled “strategic autonomy”, not yet clearly defined. In some industries, for example, the information and communication technology sector [ICT], the EU seems to follow the example of other countries increasingly engaged in ongoing 323

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trade conflicts. This became most obvious in the clash between China and the United States under the Trump Administration. Even though not publicly pushing for international trade restrictions, the EU is constructing more and more barriers. The EU bases these efforts partly on the argument to be strategically autonomous. The new keyword is “resilience”, meaning that national industries should be robust against too much import-​dependency. A second argument is climate protection. The EU wants to compensate national industries by so-​called “cross boarder adjustments” for costly climate regulations. Overall, it seems that the international trade order is more and more destabilised. There is the threat of sacrificing achievements in trade liberalisation of the post-​war decades on behalf of national interests, often special interests. Looking at particular sectors fundamental for current trade welfare demonstrates the fragility of the international trading regime. In this case, the ICT sector is exemplary. In Europe but also in a number of other countries, the switch to the new mobile communications standard 5G shows that technology issues became more and more dominated by geostrategic interests.9 In particular, the United States mainly under the Trump Administration portrayed the Chinese ICT company, Huawei, a major international supplier of 5G technology, as being under massive state political influence. The reasoning was simple: countries relying on technologies provided by Huawei threatened their national security because of surveillance by Chinese authorities over Huawei.10 In this case, the American side put considerable pressure on countries in Europe and beyond aiming to buy Huawei technology. In October 2020, for example, Sweden excluded Chinese companies from its procurement of 5G technology. Concurrently, Washington was further trying to escalate its threat to Huawei by restricting American companies from selling their technologies to Huawei; and since September 2020, America tried to prevent companies around the world from using software or hardware originally from America to manufacture components according to Huawei’s designs.11 In the case of G5, there was an obvious ongoing trade war with open-​ended consequences. The 5G issue shows how quickly technology dependency can become a strategic policy issue within the globalised framework. As Europe is unable to produce ICT with economic efficiency on its own despite its alleged European champions –​for example, Nokia or Ericsson –​exporting economies like the United States or China use their technology to apply political pressure. Put differently, the lack of European sovereignty in combination with network technologies and incomplete competition makes procurement of 5G technologies a sensitive political issue. Seen independently from the American threats, it seems a good strategy for policy-​makers deciding on 5G issues to avoid too much dependency on a particular provider regardless of the political nature of the source country. Thus, politicians supporting technological progress in the case of 5G have to make compromises. These devolve from finding the “optimal” trade-​off between technological dependency on a provider from abroad and national sovereignty; and as political leaders rather than those in the private sector influence the decisions of their countries’ technology-​requiring companies, the technology decision becomes highly political. This well documented trade war in the case of 5G and Huawei is just one example of current economic risk. Such issues might also threaten whole production chains, as demonstrated by the semi-​conductor industry. As microchips are obviously the fundamental basis of a wide range of current technologies used daily in the global economy, as well as any advances for the foreseeable future, digitalisation, communications, and data use are major drivers of innovation today. In April 2021, a shortage of available microchips began to limit automobile production in a number of countries. The value-​chain on semi-​conductors is a textbook example on the benefits of comparative advantages outlined by the early nineteenth century economist, David Ricardo. Countries around the world are specialised in a variety of ways along this value

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chain, leading to efficient production processes. From an innovation perspective, the industry is even more relevant: the semiconductor industry over decades was able to achieve exponential growth, thus, laying the foundation for a sizable element of current prosperity.12 Central characteristics of industrial chip production are technological progress and global division of labour. In industrialised economies, microchips are fundamental in almost all objects making up daily life. From this perspective, enterprises in the West heavily rely on countries or geographic territories that define this global value chain for microchip production, including Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and increasingly China –​to mention the most important –​next to the EU and America. It is one major characteristic of this value chain that no country or region is able to cover the production-​processes completely by itself. All countries are highly specialised in certain elements of it. Moreover, catching up in some elements to strengthen national technology sovereignty generates high inefficiencies in economic terms or, from a technical perspective, is decidedly difficult, if not impossible in the short run. Being more explicit, even if individual countries, for instance, China, would invest billions in catching up with certain technologies, they very likely would be unable to do so in other important technology fields, as it would cost too much in resources and, more crucial, time. The trajectories for development and production evolved over decades, which makes so-​called leapfrogging rather unlikely for certain relevant technologies.13 For example, current wafer steppers in semi-​conductor technology use extreme ultraviolet lithography, a technology-​development that took decades to achieve.14 Firms producing wafer steppers competed on this technology but, while one company succeeded, it was simply too demanding for its competitors to continue their efforts. At the technology frontier and its development, continuity and ingenuity in invention are the driving forces for technical progress not geostrategic considerations of politicians, who make use of technological progress to promote national interests. It is currently apparent that in the case of the semi-​conductor industry, American companies are dependent on Taiwanese suppliers to produce their chips. Taiwanese foundries are dependent on machines, chemicals, and silicon wafers from the United States, Europe and Japan.15 ASML, a Dutch company, is the leader in the production of wafer steppers operating on the technology frontier concerning extreme ultraviolet lithography. Over time, it outperformed its competitors and became a quasi-​monopolist with most important suppliers coming from Germany and its neighbours. High-​tech companies like Zeiss or Trumpf are strategically relevant suppliers.16 Semiconductor devices are of export relevance, with 6.51 per cent of international market shares.17 The machinery sector for chip-​production is of particular relevance for European countries.18 Political conflicts –​say, between America and/​or Europe, on one side, and China, on the other –​bear a risk for EU members in interrupting these value chains. This risk is not limited within this particular sector; as microchips are utilised widely, almost all other industries rely on these technologies. For this reason, the functioning of the extreme ultraviolet lithography value chain is an overriding global interest, as all countries depend on it. This gives hope that there could be a common global interest not to jeopardise the achievements of this internationally specialised value semiconductors chain. This example makes clear how important globalisation and international economic dependencies are for the functioning of a stable international world order. Even those countries that do not agree with this order are dependent on it. This argument might suggest that trade wars like that observed over Huawei might not escalate as much as in the case of the semiconductor industry, where highly integrated international industries make it difficult to manipulate their achievements for geostrategic interests.

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The global order seems somehow resilient against protectionist tendencies in this particular case. Of course, this strength comes with a certain weakness that might lead to controversy from the perspective of Western democracies: if countries involved in this global value chain begin using such technologies in ways that contradict democratic values, for instance, as a tool of mass surveillance of citizens, it is almost impossible to obviate such behaviour. The optimistic connotation of our contribution is therefore dependend on the willingness of governments to transform internal institutions in accordance with human rights, without discriminating particular minority groups. The global order after the end of the Second World War found premise on one assumption: governments are permanently under political pressure and therefore subscribe to an international order that helps isolate them from political pressure and special interests demanding special treatment and welfare distorting protection. Four basic principles have driven it. First, domestic economic policies and individual power are relevant determinants of the success of international co-​operation. Accordingly, the relative weight of power is decisive. If players are too small to exert influence, it might reduce chances for co-​operative behaviour. This explains the high risks and pressure for current international trade policy. As Great Powers like the United States –​at least until recently –​and China have reduced co-​operative behaviour, the system is destabilised. The EU is yet struggling to fill this void. Flowing from this is the second principle: an adequate national policy is a fundamental criterion for the basic rules for global governance policy. Under such preconditions, open markets for welfare and peace are possible, often phrased as “embedded liberalism”. In the case of China, it rather seems to be an “embedded illiberalism”. The third principle is awareness that international contracts come along with the positive result that national policy becomes more welfare oriented as it protects decision-​makers from the demands of national interest groups. Thus, domestic economic sovereignty gains when policy-​makers comply with international agreements by giving up national sovereignty. Like the first two principles, this third condition remains not fully realised. In China, the political apparatus, party and state, can maintain power by supervising its people and political leaders distributing economic benefits independent from the openness of its economy. In addition, the Chinese state has deep pockets to subsidise state-​owned enterprises, the rationale often strategic rather than economic. Finally, international agreements need basic rules to be successful. Many studies support the argument that international trade is an important element of inter-​state peace. As long as international value chains are highly integrated, international trade is able to maintain its peacekeeping function. This requires a biting enforcement mechanism, however, which is currently lacking. In principle, the WTO has such a device for resolving trade disagreements. Member-​ states can take another member to the Dispute Settlement Body [DSB] if they perceive a trade policy measure as unfair and not in accord with WTO rules. The DSB follows a predefined routine. After an ad hoc appointed panel issues a solution in bilateral disputes, the losing member-​state can appeal to the Appellate Body to deliver a final verdict. With the Appellate Body regularly staffed with seven judges –​and a quorum of three judges to be operational –​ WTO members were generally willing to accept the judgement. Nevertheless, the United States has blocked the DSB for many years –​and not just since Trump’s presidency. Because of Washington preventing the replacement of retiring judges –​due to age requirements –​for many years, the number of judges fell below the quorum in December 2019; and as of November 2020, there are no judges on the Appellate Body.19 The background of this obstruction is American dissatisfaction with the dispute settlement mechanism, which in principle many other member-​states share. 326

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This was not the only problem for the WTO by spring 2021. Two other issues stand out in the view of most observers: the WTO’s lack of the right of initiative and the principle of unanimity for decisions made by member countries. First, the WTO has no right to propose liberalisation initiatives and agreements, which must come from the member-​states. The organisation is thus member-​driven. However, it is obvious that a strong WTO leadership that networks well inside and outside the organisation and wants to use the concentrated expertise and motivation of its secretariat has some levers and can initiate new approaches by member countries. In this way, the director general can be more than a facilitator and indirectly provide the impetus for all kinds of initiatives. This seems to have been lacking recently in the WTO. Nevertheless, with the appointment of Ngozi Okonjo-​Iweala, a Nigerian-​American economist and international development expert, the WTO’s position in this respect probably has improved. Although Okonjo-​Iweala is the first female director general, the even better news is that a highly qualified candidate secured the approval of the 164 WTO membership. The principle of unanimity, combined with the rule that all partial agreements of international trade law are binding on each member –​single undertaking –​represents an increasingly effective barrier to reform, further liberalisation, and the resolution of general conflicts such as the dispute over the treatment of subsidies to state-​owned enterprises. This is because, in return, a single undertaking naturally means that each member has a right of veto. A way out is so-​called Plurilateralism, that is agreement amongst a few member-​states on certain issues such as e-​commerce, environmental protection, or investment promotion.20 Plurilateral initiatives already exist within the WTO on these and other issues. With an increasingly diverse and large number of members, some members will more often want to use this approach to bypass the opposition of member-​states with no interest in the issues in question. In this context as an aid to globalisation and as the process of variable geometry requires a set of rules, Plurilaterals are an option to overcome this deadlock. As just noted, there are agreements amongst a limited number of WTO members to progress in fields that individual members are blocking. Economically, it seems sensible to justify this approach with the theory of clubs.21 Likeminded countries sign an agreement –​thereby forming a club –​that provides rules in the common interest interpreted as a “club good”, defined as joined consumption and the possibility of excluding non-​club members. Plurilateral agreements fits this description well. Plurilateral agreements can take different forms ranging from Joint Statement Initiatives –​ for instance, on new rules for e-​commerce –​to market access in areas such as health and environmental goods or trade. Inside the WTO legal framework, several arrangements within the General Agreement on Trade in Services are Plurilaterals. In telecommunications, the “Telecommunications Reference Paper” –​the so-​called Fourth Protocol –​and the “Finance Reference Paper” are applicable examples.22 Some WTO members hold the opinion to reject Plurilaterals in general because they contradict the consensus principle.23 However, this is not the majority view, quite the opposite. For acceptance by the WTO, it seems sufficient that these Plurilaterals are open –​that is, the most-​favoured nation principle of the WTO must apply. In other words, they must be inclusive: a coalition of the willing forms the Plurilateral and invites the whole membership to join it on the specific issue, whenever countries feel ready to do so; this must not be confused with free-​r iding for non-​signatories. Any WTO member-​state outside the Plurilateral club can join, signing on without a vetting by the original signatories. A sub-​set of the issue relates to the danger of large member-​states concluding a Plurilateral agreement outside of the world body. This risk makes it even more important to allow for Plurilaterals within the organisation. With agreements concluded outside of the realm of the WTO, there is the hazard of developing countries or emerging economies left out or that the rulebook becomes inflated with new rules. Each needs avoidance. 327

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It is interesting to see that the concerns some members have with the WTO are fundamentally different. Whereas the United States is blocking the appointment of new judges for the Appellate Body, China is indifferent about solving the issue of subsidies, in particular those for state-​owned enterprises. The option to form clubs, to agree on Plurilaterals, may in the long run bring both nations back to the negotiating table. Imagine a setting with two Plurilaterals signed by almost all large trading nations: one on subsidies without China and one on the dispute settlement mechanism without America. Whilst these Plurilaterals start to work, and successfully so, both Great Powers may feel outside the action and find ways to settle their respective problems with the according signatories and join the respective clubs. In conclusion, in the context of globalisation, the current world trade order is under pressure and the WTO as a moderating element for world trade finds itself overburdened with existing political developments. There is too much policy space for domestic policy-​makers, in particular in large member-​states, to defect from the paradigm of international co-​operation and free trade. The electorate in many Western countries, as well as the publics in autocratic WTO members like China, obviously have neither the insights nor the political clout respectively to demand a welfare-​enhancing WTO compatible with trade policy from their governments. In addition, the WTO is not able to overcome the related international challenges. This generates high welfare losses for some countries’ citizens, and an efficient international trade regime is of high relevance for meeting challenges like climate change and the related costs of the current COVID pandemic. However, there is opposition. The EU has frequently undertaken to preserve the multilateral order as laid down in the WTO’s different treaties. To strengthen the international trading regime, one possible solution of the stalemate has attracted increasingly attention in recent years. Plurilaterals offer to strengthen international co-​operation and thereby take the best from two worlds: unilateral and multilateral trade regimes. Unilaterally, many countries have reduced trade barriers in the past. It is, however, politically unattractive to do so, even when a multilateral track is blocked by the veto of individual WTO members. By signing Plurilateral trade agreements, members can serve their interests best in a coalition of the willing or, put differently, a club. To be compatible with current WTO rules, this club has to be open –​embracing most favoured nation clauses –​for additional countries willing to join. This institutional setting can be a basis for further co-​operation within the WTO, however different from its current constitution, with different speed and intensified alliances amongst member-​states. In the end, different Plurilaterals may well become attractive for non-​co-​operative WTO members. When more members join such clubs, the international trade order moves back towards one multilateral agreement. Thus, in addressing different fields of co-​operation, they even might become building blocks of a new multilateral era, strengthening globalisation and its ability to enrich lives globally.

Notes 1 Cf. Alvaro Cuervo-​Cazurra, Yves Doz, and Ajai Gaur, “Skepticism of Globalization and Global Strategy: Increasing Regulations and Countervailing Strategies”, Global Strategy, 10/​1(2020), 3–​31; Randall D. Germain, ed., Globalization and Its Critics Perspectives from Political Economy (Houndmills, UK, 2000); Ivana Milojevic, “A Critique of Globalization: Not Just a White Man’s World”, in Jim Dator, Dick Pratt, and Yongseok Seo, eds., Fairness, Globalization, and Public Institutions: East Asia and Beyond (Honolulu, HI, 2006), 75–​87. 2 C.R. Kaltwasser and P. Taggert, “Dealing with Populists in Government: A Framework for Analysis”, Democratization, 23/​2(2016), 201–​20. 3 Julie Michelle Klinger, “The Uneasy Relationship between ‘China’ and ‘Globalization’ in Post-​Cold War Scholarship”, in Marion Burchardt and Gal Kirn, eds., Beyond Neoliberalism, Social Analysis after 1989 (Cham, 2017), 215–​34.

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The Globalised Economy: Need to Rebuild 4 As a note, it seems that the crisis has weakened the general perception of populists, leading to declining support. However, with respect to international trade and investment relations, the general scepticism has not vanished. 5 Simon Evenett et al., “Tackling COVID-​19 Together –​The Trade Policy Dimension”, Washington International Trade Association (23 March 2020): www.wita.org/​atp-​research/​tackling-​covid-​19-​ together-​the-​trade-​policy-​dimension/​. 6 Mark Leonard, “The New China Shock”, European Council on Foreign Relations (1 April 2021):https://​ecfr.eu/​arti​cle/​the-​new-​china-​shock/​?utm​_s​ ou​rce=​new​slet​ter&utm​_m ​ ed​ium=​email&utm_ c​ampa​ign=​ecfr​_​gen​eral​_​new​slet​ter. 7 Global Trade Alert, “Independent Monitoring of Policies that Affect World Commerce” (2020): www. globaltraderalert.org. 8 Claus-​Friedrich Laaser and Astrid Rosenschon, Kieler Subventionsbericht 2020: Subventionen auf dem Vormarsch (Kiel, 2020). 9 J.G. Andrews, S. Buzzi, W. Choi, S.V. Hanly, A. Lozano, A.C.K. Soon, and J.C. Zhang, “What Will 5G Be?” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 32/​6(2014), 1065–​82. 10 The United States demonstrated the relevance of such risks with the so-​called National Security Agency scandal. For several years, the Agency spied on citizens and governments nationally and internationally; it became obvious that control and surveillance happens even by allegedly friendly democracies. Cf. Hinda Mandell and Gina Masullo Che, eds., Scandal in a Digital Age (NY, 2016); Jörn Lamla and Carsten Ochs, “Der NSA-​Skandal als Krise der Demokratie?”, in Kornelia Hahn and Andreas Langenohl, eds., Kritische Öffentlichkeiten –​ Öffentlichkeiten in der Kritik (Wiesbaden, 2017), 83–​112. 11 “The geopolitics of 5G. America’s war on Huawei nears its endgame”, Economist (18 July 2020): www. economist.com/​briefing/​2020/​07/​16/​americas-​war-​on-​huawei-​nears-​its-​endgame. 12 Howard R. Huff, ed., Into the Nano Era. Moore’s Law Beyond Planar Silicon CMOS (Heidelberg, 2009). 13 Giovanni Dosi, “Technological Paradigms and Technological Trajectories: A Suggested Interpretation of the Determinants and Directions of Technical Change”, Research Policy, 11/​3(1982), 147–​62. 14 Martin Antoni, Wolfgang Singer, Jorg Schultz, Johannes Wangler, Isabel Escudero-​Sanz, and Bob Kruizinga, “Illumination Optics Design for EUV Lithography, Soft X-​ Ray and EUV Imaging Systems”, Proc. SPIE 4146, Soft X-​Ray and EUV Imaging Systems (8 November 2000), 25–​34. 15 Jan-​Peter Kleinhaus and Nurzat Baisakova, “The Global Semiconductor Value Chain. A Technology Primer for Policy Makers” (October 2020): www.stiftung-​nv.de/​sites/​default/​files/​the_​global_​semiconductor_​value_​chain.pdf. 16 “Die Deutschen spielen eine entscheidende Rolle im globalen Chipgeschäft”, Handelsblatt (20 May 2019): www.handelsblatt.com/​technik/​it-​internet/​halbleiter-​die-​deutschen-​spielen-​eine-​ entscheidende-​rolle-​im-​globalen-​chipgeschaeft/​24360844.html?ticket=​ST-​4028858-​MbJwMwNYART S9peyI2FG-​ap5. 17 Atlas of Economic Complexity, “Who Exported Semiconductor Devices in 2019?” (12 October 2021): www.atlas.cid.harvard.edu/​explore?country=​undefined&product=​1744&year=​2019&product Class=HS&target=​Product&partner=​undefined&startYear=​undefined. 18 Kleinhaus and Baisakova, “The Global Semiconductor Value Chain”. 19 WTO, “Appellate Body Members” (2021): www.wto.org/​english/​tratop_​e/​dispu_​e/​ab_​members_​ descrp_​e.htm. 20 Sait Akman, Axel Berger, Fabrizio Bottti, Peter Draper, Andreas Freytag, and Claudia Schmucker (2021), “Boosting G20 Cooperation for WTO Reform: Leveraging the Full Potential of Plurilateral Initiatives”, T20 Policy Brief, Task Force 3, Policy Brief 1 (2021). 21 James Buchanan, Economics: Between Predictive Science and Moral Philosophy (College Station, TX, 1987), ­chapter 14. 22 WTO, “History of the Telecommunication Negotiations” (nd): www.wto.org/​english/​tratop_​e/​serv_​ e/​telecom_​e/​telecom_​history_​e.htm; Idem, “Negotiating Group on Basic Telecommunications” (nd): www.wto.org/​english/​tratop_​e/​serv_​e/​telecom_​e/​tel23_​e.htm. 23 Idem, “The Legal Status of ‘Joint Statement Initiatives’ and Their Negotiated Outcomes”, WT/​GC/​ W/​819 (Geneva, 2021).

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27 MEASURING GLOBALISATION Myths, Trends, and Variation Across Countries Steven A. Altman and Caroline R. Bastian*

Questions about the state and trajectory of globalisation underpin many of the central debates about the future of diplomacy and statecraft. Is the world so deeply interconnected that foreign opportunities and threats increasingly drive developments within countries? Or is a globalised world fracturing along regional lines, requiring policy-​makers to rethink their approaches for a more multipolar era? Schools of thought in international relations offer contested views about the opportunities and challenges posed by globalisation. Realists have traditionally conceived of globalisation through the lens of competition amongst sovereign states, seeing it as solely driven by and serving the interests of states. Adherents of hegemonic stability theory argue that the openness underpinning globalisation is a public good supplied by the most powerful state in the system for its own benefit. Liberals, in contrast, postulate that a wider variety of actors influence the course of globalisation, including both firms and intergovernmental organisations. Thus, domestic politics and international diplomacy play important roles in states’ levels of openness. Such debates aside, there is broad agreement on the salience of globalisation to the practice of international relations. Myths about globalisation, nonetheless, hold sway not only amongst the public but also with decision-​makers in international politics. In his 2017 book, The Laws of Globalization, Pankaj Ghemawat recounts a meeting of national envoys to the World Trade Organisation [WTO] in which the overwhelming majority subscribed to the notion that the world had become “flat”, or fully globalised, even though this raised fundamental questions about why they still needed to negotiate about opening markets to international trade.1 In this context, it is necessary to begin by looking at how the development of measurements of globalisation has occurred and to compare actual and perceived levels of globalisation. The starting point for any measurement must be a clear definition of the phenomenon of interest. The following widely cited definition usefully identifies four measurable dimensions of globalisation: Globalization can be thought of as process (or a set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions –​assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact –​generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and the exercise of power.2 330

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In this analysis, the focus is mainly on measures of globalisation’s intensity or “depth”, which compares the magnitude of international relative to domestic activity, and its extensity or “breadth” that looks at the geographic distribution of international flows. Velocity measures are only discussed briefly for historical context, since the speeds of international passenger and freight transportation have not changed appreciably in recent decades, and real-​time information flows are already commonplace. Measures of globalisation’s impact are set aside because rigorous analysis of a phenomenon’s consequences is only possible in relation to separate measures of the phenomenon itself. The definition of globalisation above does not specify particular types of international activity for measurement, but trade, capital, information, and people flows are widely viewed as pertinent in research and practice.3 The DHL Global Connectedness Index measures the depth and breadth of these four categories of flows, and three highlights stand out about the current state of globalisation from that measurement effort. First, measures of the depth of globalisation show that most types of activity that could take place either within or across national borders are still domestic rather than international. Just about 20 per cent of global economic output –​including both goods and services –​ends up in a different country from that of its origin. In a typical year, less than ten per cent of global fixed investment comes from companies buying, building, or reinvesting in operations abroad. About seven per cent of voice-​calling minutes –​including calls over the internet –​are international. And a mere three per cent of people live outside of countries where they were born.4 There are exceptions to this pattern, but these pertain to much narrower slices of activity, such as trade in specific products and services. More than 70 per cent of microwave ovens produced in 2014, for example, were for export.5 Even if looking at broad measures of online activity, domestic still dominates. For example, in 2020, just about 12 per cent of friendships on Facebook were international.6 Second, measures of the breadth of globalisation highlight the enduring effects of geographic distance as well as other types of cross-​country differences. For most countries, international flows mainly involve connections to a small number of proximate or otherwise similar countries. In 2018, more than 40 per cent of all of the trade, capital, information, and people flows measured on the DHL Global Connectedness Index took place amongst countries and their top three origins or destinations. Most countries’ international flows are so narrowly concentrated that it hardly makes sense to call them global. Thousands of studies employing “gravity” models have quantified the effects of geographic distance and cross-​country differences on international flows.7 Such models show, for example, that if one pair of countries is one-​half as far apart geographically as another similar pair of countries, geographic proximity alone would be expected to more than triple the merchandise trade between the closer pair of countries and more than double the foreign direct investment between them.8 These results unambiguously debunk the popular notion that improvements in transportation and telecommunications technologies have made distance irrelevant. Third, perceived levels of globalisation often exceed actual levels by a wide margin, and such misperceptions can severely distort public policy debates. A representative sample of the United States population –​as well as samples of managers across six countries –​significantly over-​estimated the global depth measures pertaining to trade, fixed investment, voice calls, and migration cited earlier.9 The discrepancy between actual and perceived levels was greatest for immigration, with the average manager guessing that about 30 per cent of the world’s population were immigrants, roughly 10 times the actual level. This pattern of over-​estimating levels of globalisation holds even when respondents comment on hot-​button political issues in their own countries. Respondents in more than two-​thirds of 331

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the 37 countries included on a recent survey believed, on average, that there were twice as many immigrants or more than there really were in their own countries.10 Such misperceptions can exacerbate fears about potential harms from globalisation. Survey respondents who over-​ estimated trade, capital, information, and people flows more than others did were significantly more likely to worry about globalisation being a major cause of income inequality, global warming, and other problems. There is, however, conflicting evidence on whether correcting misperceptions about levels of immigration can change policy preferences.11 Thus, globalisation –​despite the large increases over recent decades –​remains limited in absolute terms. International flows tend to be smaller than many people think, and domestic activity in most countries overshadows them. The flows that do cross national borders are strongly constrained by distance and other types of cross-​country differences. Turning from the state of globalisation to its trajectory over time, the phenomenon of globalisation predates both the term itself and the data required to measure it. One analysis conceives of human history in terms of seven “ages of globalization”, beginning with the global dispersal of humanity during the Palaeolithic period.12 Another characterised the ancient Silk Road links between Europe and Asia as an example of “thin globalization”.13 A long-​run historical perspective highlights the growing reach over time of both the long-​distance flows that characterise globalisation and the political structures governing such activity.14 Europe’s “discovery” of the Americas and the development of the sea route around Africa to Asia in the late fifteenth century marked a key milestone toward globalisation on a planetary scale. However, consistent with the notion of “thin globalization”, economic links between distant markets remained extremely limited during that era. The proportion of exported world output grew very roughly from 0.5 to 2.5 per cent in 1500 AD, to 1 to 6 per cent 100 years later.15 Based on evidence of commodity price convergence across markets, the trade-​based integration of distant markets really began to take off in the 1820s.16 Recent estimates suggest that the global ratio of exports to Gross Domestic Product [GDP] rose from six per cent in 1830 to 13 per cent in 1913.17 As well, migration and foreign investment boomed during the final decades of the 1800s and the first decade of the 1900s, and information flows accelerated. Immigrants as a share of world population grew from about 0.6 per cent in 1870 to roughly 2.5 per cent at the beginning of the First World War and, at the same time, the ratio of gross foreign assets to GDP rose substantially.18 A major acceleration of international information flows accompanied –​and facilitated –​these developments. The introduction of transatlantic telegraph cables in the 1860s cut the time it took for price data to travel between the New York and London markets from several weeks to less than a day.19 What many scholars have termed the “first wave of globalisation” collapsed in the wake of the First World War and the Great Depression, highlighting both that globalisation can go into reverse as well as some of the conditions that have brought about such reversals in the past.20 Exports fell back down to less than seven per cent of GDP by the early 1930s. Immigrants were less than 1.8 per cent of the world population by 1940. The ratio of gross foreign assets to GDP in the largest advanced economies fell more gradually, from about 60 per cent before the First World War to less than 20 per cent at the end of the Second World War.21 The interwar period was not the first instance of “de-​globalisation”, and historical analysis points to several factors that have precipitated reversals of international integration in the past. International and domestic developments can both contribute to globalisation reversals. As realists in international relations highlight, shifts in the relative standing of major Powers can undermine the structures that support globalisation, as in cases of imperial overstretch. Likewise, within countries, as liberal thinkers would emphasise, anti-​globalisation backlashes 332

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can develop due to economic and/​or cultural concerns, particularly if large proportions of a country’s population do not feel that they have benefitted from an episode of rapidly advancing international integration –​especially during periods of heightened macroeconomic stress.22 International trade did not resume a strong upward trajectory until the 1960s, and it took until the 1970s for the ratio of world exports to GDP to surpass its 1913 level. By 2008, exports of goods and services had soared to 29 per cent of global output. Capital market integration began again slowly after 1945 and accelerated over time. Gross foreign assets reached nearly 300 per cent of advanced economy GDP by 2008. Foreign direct investment [FDI] stocks –​ generated by multinational firms buying, building, or reinvesting in their foreign operations –​ rose from five per cent of world GDP in the early 1980s to more than 30 per cent in 2007.23 Migration also began rising again, with the proportion of people living outside of the countries where they were born, surpassing three per cent in the late 2000s. Since the 2008–​2009 global financial crisis, there has been a marked divergence between the globalisation of trade and capital flows compared to those of information and people. For analysis of the recent trajectory of globalisation, multidimensional indexes can paint a richer picture of trends than was possible during earlier historical periods. Here reliance falls primarily on the DHL Global Connectedness Index and a comparison of findings from this measure with results from two others: the KOF Index of Globalisation and the Elcano Global Presence Index (Figure 27.1).24 The DHL Global Connectedness Index measures the depth –​intensity –​and breadth –​extensity –​ of international flows worldwide, as well as by country and region. It covers four types –​or “pillars” –​of these flows: trade (goods and services), capital (flows and stocks of FDI and portfolio equity), information (internet traffic/​bandwidth, voice calls, trade in printed publications), and people (migration, tourism, international education) over the period from 2001 through the most recent year. The DHL index results reinforce the sense from the narrower measures already discussed that globalisation was intensifying steadily in the run-​up to the 2008–​2009 global financial crisis. Between 2002 and 2007, the depth dimension of the index drove increases every year across all four categories of flows. International flows of trade, capital, information, and people all grew faster than their domestic counterparts, propelled by supportive public policy developments, technology trends, and macroeconomic conditions. During and after the global financial crisis –​through 2018 –​the information and people pillars of the index continued to set new records, whilst the trade and capital pillars failed to recapture their pre-​crisis peaks. Why the sluggish recovery of trade and capital flows? Several factors contributed: a slow macroeconomic recovery, prolonged in Europe by the Eurozone crisis; the growth of domestic supply chains in key emerging markets, especially China; and a less favourable public policy context, with trade protectionism rising and greater scrutiny of foreign investments on national security grounds.25 Since 2014, the information pillar expanded at a markedly slower rate than it had in prior years. The proliferation of data localisation policies in recent years may have contributed to this trend.26 In contrast, the strong expansion of people flows continued through 2018. Whilst many countries tightened their immigration policies, there was a broad trend toward loosening tourist visa requirements. From 2008 to 2015, the proportion of the world’s population, on average, who had to obtain a traditional visa before travelling abroad, fell from 77 to 61 per cent.27 Results from other globalisation-​related indexes bolster the conclusion that trends diverged between primarily economic aspects of globalisation –​trade and investment flows –​and primarily social or cultural aspects –​information and people flows –​during and after the 2008–​ 2009 crisis. The KOF Index of Globalisation measures globalisation along economic, social, and 333

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political dimensions; and the Elcano Global Presence Index measures countries’ presence abroad across economic, military, and soft –​mainly social and informational –​dimensions. On the KOF Index of Globalisation, de facto economic globalisation dipped during the global financial crisis and barely surpassed its pre-​crisis peak in 2017.28 In contrast, de facto social globalisation continued growing through the crisis period, decelerating over time with no further growth reported after 2014. Whilst there are many methodological differences across globalisation indexes, one key distinction in this context is that the global trends reported on the KOF Index of Globalisation are simple averages of that index’s normalised country scores, so changes across many small countries strongly affect them. Global trends on the DHL Global 334

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Connectedness Index, in contrast, track global aggregate flow patterns shaped mainly by larger countries.29 The Elcano Global Presence Index, consistent with findings from the DHL and KOF indexes, reports much faster growth of countries’ international “soft” presence since the global financial crisis as compared to their economic presence.30 This index measures “soft” presence based on indicators of migration, tourism, sports, culture, information, technology, science, education, and development co-​operation. Interestingly, looking back to the 1990s, this index shows that a decline in countries’ military presence preceded the recent increases in economic and soft presence. In 2020, a novel coronavirus pandemic –​COVID –​led to sharp declines in many types of international flows. International travel fell 74 per cent, whilst foreign direct investment flows declined 42 per cent. Global trade in goods also plummeted at the beginning of the pandemic, but rebounded swiftly to decline only 5 per cent over the full year. The growth rate of international internet traffic, in contrast, nearly doubled in 2020.31 This discussion of the trajectory of globalisation has focused thus far on depth measures –​ that is, how much of various types of activity that could cross national borders is international rather than domestic. However, a longstanding critique of such measures is that they track internationalisation, but not necessarily globalisation.32 In other words, they indicate how much crosses national borders but not the extent of the distribution of international flows around the world. This prompted the unique methodological choice in the DHL Global Connectedness Index to strive for parallel coverage of breadth –​see immediately below –​along with depth. Whilst measuring the depth of international flows is relatively straightforward, at least from a theoretical standpoint, measuring breadth is somewhat more challenging. Many international business studies focus on the proportion of activity taking place within rather than amongst world regions.33 But regionalisation measures require subjective choices about how to classify countries into regions, and results can vary greatly with small changes in region definitions.34 Another approach is to measure the weighted average distance traversed by a given flow. Average distance measures capture flow patterns across all country pairs, whilst eliminating the need for subjective region definitions. A third method, introduced in the DHL Global Connectedness Index, is to measure breadth by comparing the distribution of a country’s flows in one direction to the composition of the rest of the world’s flows in the opposite direction. This facilitates cross-​country comparisons by taking into account how countries’ international opportunities vary with the rest of the world’s distribution of activity across flows. Figure 27.2 compares global trends across these three approaches in measuring breadth. Contrasts amongst the trend lines shown highlight the value of a multifaceted approach to analysis of the geographic distribution of international flows. The longest historical series available pertains to merchandise trade. In the 1950s and 1960s, the inter-​regional proportion of trade and the average distance over which countries traded declined in tandem, and these measures moved together in the opposite direction between 2004 and 2012. Between those periods, however, a shortening of the average distance traversed by merchandise trade did not accompany a declining trend on the inter-​regional proportion of trade. This divergence occurred, in part, by the rising proportion of world trade taking place within the East Asia and Pacific region, where intra-​regional trade takes place over longer distances than in Europe or North America. Recently, many analysts have pointed to the falling proportion of trade taking place amongst regions as evidence that globalisation might be fracturing around regional blocs.35 It is indeed plausible that a more multipolar world, with worsening relations amongst the largest economies, could lead to a higher proportion of international flows happening within regions. Four 335

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points, however, suggest that this remains only a possibility rather than a historical fact. First, the average distance traversed by merchandise trade flows has not declined appreciably since 2012. Second, recent declines in the inter-​regional share of trade –​obtained with some region definitions but not others –​are small in comparison to longer-​run changes in levels of trade regionalisation. Third, such declines appear to have ended in 2016. Finally, rising regionalisation is not a generalisable phenomenon, beyond trade, across all the various flows measured on the DHL Global Connectedness Index.36 Proceeding to the third panel of Figure 27.2, the DHL Global Connectedness Index breadth measure presents an alternative perspective by showing how closely countries’ international flows resemble the rest of the world’s geographic distribution of the same flow in the opposite direction. The “goalposts” on this measure shift automatically with changes in the global composition of international flows. When this measure remains stable as others change, it suggests that shifts on the other measures mainly reflect changes in underlying patterns of activity, rather than changes in how distance, regulations, and other factors shape international flows. To summarise the discussion of trends over time, various measures point to the conclusion of a world more deeply interconnected than at almost any previous time; it follows decades of strong advances in the globalisation of trade, capital, information, and people flows. However, trends also indicate that economic globalisation has slowed or stalled since 2008–​2009. Additionally, the COVID pandemic represents a major shock, particularly to international people flows, although its long-​run effects remain uncertain.37 The final major topic in this analysis is variation across countries. Cross-​country variation in levels of globalisation is, arguably, even larger and more salient than recent changes over time in global levels of integration. Consider selected contrasts between the top-​and bottom-​ ranked countries in the 2018 edition of the DHL Global Connectedness Index: the Netherlands and Sudan. On depth, for example, the Netherlands exported eight times more as a share of its GDP than Sudan, attracted six times more FDI flows relative to its gross fixed capital formation, hosted six times more immigrants relative to the size of its population, and received almost 50 times more international travellers per capita. On breadth, the Netherlands engaged in significant trade, capital, information, and people flows with countries around the world. Its top two partners, the United States and Germany, accounted for a combined 24 per cent of its 336

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total flows. By contrast, Sudan’s international flows were much more concentrated, with 25 per cent taking place to and from just one country, Saudi Arabia, and two-​thirds involving just five immediate neighbours. In 2018, in descending order, the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland, Belgium, the United Arab Emirates, Ireland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Britain, and Germany held the top ten ranks on the DHL Global Connectedness Index. The countries that fell to the bottom of the rankings were, in ascending order, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Kiribati, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Timor-​ Leste, Eswatini, Comoros, and Uganda. Contrasts between the top-​and bottom-​ranked countries highlight three “structural” characteristics that explain 70 per cent of the variation across all countries’ levels of connectedness. The 2018 edition of the DHL Global Connectedness Index reports the results of linear models examining the relationship between connectedness and these structural characteristics.38 With all else equal, countries with higher levels of economic development, greater proximity to foreign markets, and larger population sizes exhibit higher levels of global connectedness. The top ten countries average 38 times higher GDP per capita –​in US dollars –​than the bottom ten, eight of the top ten are located in Europe –​the region where countries’ average the lowest “remoteness” from foreign markets –​and the top ten average ten per cent larger populations than the bottom ten. The positive and significant relationship between global connectedness and levels of economic development holds across the depth and breadth dimensions of the index. However, there are notable differences across types of flows. Emerging economies, on average, trade as intensively as advanced ones do. Nevertheless, advanced economies are about three times as deeply integrated into international capital flows, five times on people flows, and nine times with respect to information flows.39 Globalisation is not a uniform phenomenon across countries of differing levels of economic development. The relationship between proximity to foreign markets and global connectedness is strongest for depth, although it is also significant in some models for breadth. Luxembourg, at the heart of Europe, ranks first on proximity to foreign markets –​and fifth on depth of international flows –​whereas New Zealand ranks last on proximity to foreign markets and seventy-​ninth on depth. Other geographic factors, such as whether a country has direct access to the sea, also shape globalisation opportunities. Population size has opposing effects on the depth and breadth of global connectedness. Larger countries tend to rank lower on depth but higher on breadth.40 Consider, for example, the world’s two largest economies. Out of the 169 countries ranked on the 2018 DHL Global Connectedness Index, the United States ranked one hundred-​twentieth on depth but second on breadth. China ranked one hundred-​fiftieth on depth but sixteenth on breadth. These countries’ sizes combine with the breadth of their international flows to make their impact felt strongly around the world. But their low depth provides an important reminder that outcomes within these countries are far more sensitive to developments inside their vast domestic markets than to flows across their national borders. Thus far, the discussion of cross-​country variation in levels of globalisation has focused on countries’ structural characteristics, the factors that policy-​makers cannot meaningfully change at least over moderate time horizons. Given the importance of such factors, it is useful to control statistically for structural influences on connectedness in policy analysis. Such an approach highlights the importance of tailoring policy recommendations to countries’ unique globalisation challenges and opportunities. Policy analysis using the DHL Global Connectedness Index has focused primarily on depth rather than breadth, because of the stronger evidence linking depth to faster economic growth.41 One of most intriguing findings from this research is that policies designed to improve countries’ domestic business environments can often boost connectedness more than policies aimed 337

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directly at boosting international flows.42 Other globalisation-​related indexes also highlight substantial variation across countries in their international engagement. At the uppermost level of aggregation, scores on the KOF Index of Globalisation are highly correlated with scores on the DHL Global Connectedness Index (0.9 correlation coefficient with KOF de facto globalisation in 2017). By contrast, scores on the Elcano Global Presence Index only weakly correlate with those on the DHL Global Connectedness Index (0.27) and the de facto dimension of the KOF Index of Globalisation (0.28). Whilst a positive correlation between the DHL and KOF indexes is expected since both are designed to measure globalisation, the high correlation between them might be unexpected given that the DHL index assigns equal weight to depth and breadth; yet the KOF index has only very limited coverage of breadth.43 The reasons for this become clear in finer-​g rained analysis. Since KOF’s de facto economic and social globalisation scores are based mainly on depth measures –​measures scaled to indicators of domestic activity –​these parts of the KOF index are highly correlated with the depth dimension of the DHL index: 0.91 for economic and 0.73 for social. In contrast, there is no scaling of KOF de facto political globalisation measures based on domestic activity, resulting in higher scores for larger countries and, hence, a high correlation between KOF de facto political globalisation and the breadth dimension of the DHL index (0.73). The low positive correlation between Elcano Global Presence Index and the others discussed here reflects the distinct focus of that index on countries’ “global presence”, defined as “effective positioning, in absolute terms, of the different countries outside its borders in the economic, military and soft areas”.44 Thus, this index focuses on absolute presence abroad, rather than international relative to domestic activity –​depth –​or the geographic distribution of international activity –​breadth. The top-​ranked countries on the Elcano Global Presence Index in 2019, in descending order, were the United States, China, Germany, Britain, and Japan. The bottom ranked countries, in ascending order, were Madagascar, Afghanistan, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, and Nicaragua. The score of the top-​ranked United States was about 2,300 times higher than that of bottom-​ranked Madagascar. To summarise cross-​country variation in levels of globalisation, three points stand out. First, differences across countries in their levels of globalisation seem to be large enough to merit at least as much attention –​if not more –​in policy analysis than changes over time in global levels of connectedness. The second is that structural characteristics such as levels of economic development, proximity to foreign markets, and population size exert a large influence on countries’ globalisation opportunities and challenges. Lastly, countries can still pull a variety of policy levers to shape their international integration, and such policy analysis should incorporate both domestic and foreign policy choices. In conclusion, the measures discussed herein paint a picture of globalisation that highlights extensive variation across types of international activity, over time, amongst countries, and with regard to differences between actual versus perceived levels of globalisation. Despite large increases in levels of globalisation in recent decades, the world is less globalised than many presume, and there is vast heterogeneity in the depth and breadth of countries’ international flows. The measures discussed above imply a far more complex phenomenon than either a uniform pattern of globalisation erasing the effects of borders and distance or de-​globalisation heralding a world of self-​contained regions or nation-​states. The upside of this complexity is that it greatly expands the policy space within which countries can pursue their interests via participation in international flows. Globalisation’s limited depth, in absolute terms, softens the oft-​ cited conflicts between international economic engagement and domestic policy flexibility.45 338

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Moreover, an increasingly multipolar world implies that countries have greater opportunities to shape the breadth –​as well as the depth –​of their international flows.

Notes * The authors would like to thank Justin Melnick, New York University, for assistance with the preparation of this chapter. 1 Pankaj Ghemawat, The Laws of Globalization and Business Applications (Cambridge, 2017), 4. 2 David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford, CA, 1999), 16. This definition received the most citations in the business and economics literature between 2000 and 2015, according to a bibliometric analysis discussed in Pankaj Ghemawat and Steven A. Altman, “Defining and Measuring Globalization”, in Ghemawat, Laws of Globalization, 13–​15. 3 Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination”, Public Culture, 12/​ 1(2000), 1–​19, mentions “ideas and ideologies, people and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques”. 4 For details and source references for each of these measures, refer to Steven A. Altman and Caroline R. Bastian, DHL Global Connectedness Index 2019 Update (Bonn, 2019). 5 Based on Euromonitor Passport data as reported in Ghemawat, Laws of Globalization, 32. 6 Authors’ calculation based on Michael Bailey, Rachel Cao, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, and Arlene Wong, “Social Connectedness: Measurements, Determinants, and Effects”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32/​3(2018), 259–​80; “Facebook Data for Good”, Social Connectedness Index: https://​ data​forg​ood.fb.com/​; World Population Review (2021): https://​worldp​opul​atio​nrev​iew.com/​coun​ try-​ranki​ngs/​faceb​ook-​users-​by-​coun​try; NapoleonCat: https://​napo​leon​cat.com/​stats/​. 7 Keith Head and Thierry Mayer. “Gravity Equations: Workhorse, Toolkit, and Cookbook”, in Gita Gopinath, Elhanan Helpman, and Kenneth S. Rogoff, Handbook of International Economics, Volume 4 (Oxford, 2014), 131–​95. 8 Pankaj Ghemawat, The New Global Road Map: Enduring Strategies for Turbulent Times (Boston, MA, 2018), 29–​30. 9 Online surveys of 1,720 members of the United States general public conducted in 2012 and of 6,000 managers across Brazil, Britain, China, Germany, India, and the United States conducted in 2017: reported in Steven A. Altman, Pankaj Ghemawat, and Caroline R. Bastian, DHL Global Connectedness Index 2018 (Bonn, 2018), 12. 10 IPSOS Mori, “Perils of Perception 2018”: www.ipsos.com/​ipsos-​mori/​en-​uk/​perils-​perception-​2018. 11 See, for example, Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano, and Stefanie Stantcheva, “Immigration and Redistribution”, NBER Working Paper 24733 (Cambridge, MA, 2018); Daniel J. Hopkins, John Sides, and Jack Citrin, “The Muted Consequences of Correct Information about Immigration”, Journal of Politics, 81/​1(2019), 315–​20. 12 Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (NY, 2020). 13 Robert O Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr. “Globalization: What’s New? What’s Not? (And so What?)”, Foreign Policy, 118(2000), 104–​19. 14 See, for example, Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge, 2009). 15 Ranges based on lower and upper bound estimates reported in Figure I of Antoni Estevadeordal, Brian Frantz, and Alan M. Taylor. “The Rise and Fall of World Trade, 1870–​1939”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118/​2(2003), 359–​407. 16 Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Once More: When Did Globalisation Begin?”, European Review of Economic History, 6/​1(2002), 23–​50. 17 Giovanni Federico and Antonio Tena-​Junguito, “A Tale of Two Globalizations: Gains from Trade and Openness 1800–​2010”, Review of World Economics, 153/​3(2017), 601–​26. 18 Luís Catão and Maurice Obstfeld. Meeting Globalization’s Challenges: Policies to Make Trade Work for All (Princeton, NJ, 2019), figures I.1 and I.2. 19 Kenneth D. Garbade and William L. Silber, “Technology, Communication and the Performance of Financial Markets: 1840–​1975”, Journal of Finance, 33/​3(1978), 819–​32. 20 See, for example, Richard E. Baldwin and Philippe Martin, “Two Waves of Globalization: Superficial Similarities, Fundamental Differences”, NBER Working Paper 6904 (Cambridge, MA, 1999);

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Steven A. Altman and Caroline R. Bastian Geoffrey Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-​first Century (Oxford, 2005). Scholarly debate, however, continues about historical waves of globalisation, with other scholars arguing for alternative ways of structuring this history. 21 Catão and Obstfeld. Meeting Globalization’s Challenges, figures I.1 and I.2. 22 See, for example, Harold James, “Deglobalization: The Rise of Disembedded Unilateralism”, Annual Review of Financial Economics, 10(2018), 219–​ 37; Kevin H. O’Rourke, “Economic History and Contemporary Challenges to Globalization”, Journal of Economic History, 79/​2(2019), 356–​82. 23 UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2019 (12 June 2019): https://​unc​tad.org/​webfl​yer/​world-​inv​estm​ ent-​rep​ort-​2019. 24 Altman and Bastian, 2019 Update; Savina Gygli, Florian Haelg, Niklas Potrafke, and Jan-Egbert Sturm, “The KOF Globalisation Index –​Revisited”, Review of International Organizations, 14/​3(2019), 543–​ 74; Iliana Olivié and Ignacio Molina, “Elcano Global Presence Index”, Fundación Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estratégicos (2011). 25 Simon J. Evenett, “Protectionism, State Discrimination, and International Business since the Onset of the Global Financial Crisis”, Journal of International Business Policy, 2/​1(2019), 9–​36, discusses the Global Trade Alert database and post-​crisis policy trends. 26 William Alan Reinsch, “A Data Localization Free-​For-​All?”, Center for Strategic & International Studies (9 March 2018). See also, Martina F. Ferracane and Erik van der Marel, “The Costs of Data Protectionism”, ECIPE Blog (October 2018). 27 UN World Tourism Organization [UNWTO], World Visa Openness Report 2015 (January 2016): www.e-​unwto.org/​doi/​pdf/​10.18111/​9789284417384. 28 Savina Gygli, Florian Haelg, Niklas Potrafke, and Jan-​Egbert Sturm, “The KOF Globalisation Index –​ Revisited”, Review of International Organizations, 14/​3(2019), 543–​74. 29 See Altman, Ghemawat, and Bastian, Index 2018, 75–​76 for additional discussion on this topic and trend comparisons using comparable methods. 30 Iliana Olivié and Ignacio Molina, “Elcano Global Presence Index”, Fundación Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estratégicos (2011). 31 UNWTO World Tourism Barometer (January 2021); UNCTAD Global Investment Trends Monitor, No. 38 (24 January 2021); WTO Press Release, “World Trade Primed for Strong but Uneven Recovery after COVID-​19 Pandemic Shock” (31 March 2021); Paul Brodsky, “Internet Traffic and Capacity in Covid-​Adjusted Terms,” Telegeography Blog (27 August 2020). 32 Axel Dreher, Noel Gaston, Pim Martens, and Lotte Van Boxem, “Measuring Globalization –​Opening the Black Box. A Critical Analysis of Globalization Indices”, Journal of Globalization Studies 1/​1(2010), 179–​81. 33 Alan M. Rugman and Alain Verbeke. “A Perspective on Regional and Global Strategies of Multinational Enterprises”, Journal of International Business Studies, 35/​1(2004), 3–​18. 34 Altman and Bastian, 2019 Update. 35 See, for example, Joergen Oerstroem Moeller, “From Globalization to Regionalization”, YaleGlobal, (30 October 2018): https://​arch​ive-​yal​eglo​bal.yale.edu/​cont​ent/​global​izat​ion-​regi​onal​izat​ion; James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel, Jacques Bughin, Mekala Krishnan, Jeongmin Seong, and Mac Muir, Globalization in Transition: The Future of Trade and Value Chains, McKinsey Global Institute (January 2019). 36 See Altman and Bastian, 2019 Update, 20–​22, for additional discussion of the evidence for and against rising regionalisation. 37 Steven A. Altman, “Will Covid-​19 Have a Lasting Impact on Globalization?” Harvard Business Review (May 2020): https://​hbr.org/​2020/​05/​will-​covid-​19-​have-​a-​last​ing-​imp​act-​on-​global​izat​ion. 38 Altman, Ghemawat, and Bastian, Index 2018: ­chapter 2 discusses this analysis and regression results reported in appendix B. 39 For a more extensive discussion of globalisation-​related differences between advanced and emerging economies, refer to Pankaj Ghemawat and Steven A. Altman, “Emerging Economies: Differences and Distances”, AIB Insights, 16/​4(2016), 7–​10. 40 Whilst the top ten countries averaged only ten per cent larger populations than the bottom ten on the overall index, the top ten on the breadth dimension of the index averaged ten times larger populations than the bottom ten on the breadth dimension; the bottom ten on the depth dimension averaged 38 times larger populations than the top ten on the depth dimension. 41 This topic analysed in Pankaj Ghemawat with Steven A. Altman, DHL Global Connectedness Index 2011 (Bonn, 2011), ­ chapter 4. Studies of the relationship between globalisation and economic

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Measuring Globalisation: Myths & Trends outcomes using the KOF Index of Globalisation are reviewed in Niklas Potrafke, “The Evidence on Globalization”, World Economy, 38/​3(2015), 509–​52. 42 See Pankaj Ghemawat with Steven A. Altman, DHL Global Connectedness Index 2012 (Bonn, 2012), ­chapter 4. 43 The correlation between the depth and breadth dimensions of the DHL index is only 0.19. 44 Quoted from “Frequently asked questions about Elcano Global Presence Index” (2020): www. globalpresence.realinstitutoelcano.org/​en/​faq. 45 Cf. Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (NY, 2011); Pankaj Ghemawat, World 3.0: Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It (Boston, MA, 2011). Rodrik’s famous globalisation “trilemma” argues deep economic integration, the nation state, and democratic politics are mutually incompatible. In response, Ghemawat has argued that current levels of globalisation still afford countries extensive policy flexibility.

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PART VII

Issues of Conflict and Co-​operation

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28 NUCLEAR MODERNISATION AND THE DISDAIN FOR ARMS CONTROL AND THE NON-​PROLIFERATION REGIME Aiden Warren and Joseph M. Siracusa

This chapter examines the extent to which the Trump Administration’s nuclear strategy, encompassing nuclear modernisation and a clear disdain for arms control mechanisms and the nuclear non-​proliferation regime, contributed to the undermining of international security. In emphasising an “America First” approach, the Administration evidently moved toward a more assertive nuclear approach and, in doing so, exacerbated Great Power tensions. The pursuit of any semblance of global security, if at all attainable or legitimately pursued, is precariously dependent on delicate conditions that require the presence of cogent decision-​makers behind each nuclear arsenal, as well as the “absence of any rogue launches, human-​error incidents, or system malfunctions”.1 To assure nuclear stability, deterrence and fail-​safe mechanisms must work every single time and coexist with legitimate arms control mechanisms; for a nuclear devastation to take place, such mechanisms only have to fail once. This is not a reassuring calculation, particularly as states today continue to proliferate and/​or modernise their nuclear stockpiles, flout their Treaty on the Non-​Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons [NPT] obligations, depart from seminal arms control agreements, and overall, display forms of hubristic leadership and recalcitrance.2 To this end, the Trump Administration was a significant driver. Not long ago, at the beginning of his tenure in office, President Barack Obama boldly proclaimed “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons … and end Cold War thinking”.3 In fast forwarding to his successor, Donald Trump declared in early 2017 that he would seek to “greatly strengthen and expand [America’s] nuclear capability”, where the United States would be at the “top of the pack”.4 More specifically, his Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review [NPR] in February 2018 proposed two nuclear options for the United States. The first pertained to the development of a low-​yield warhead for the existing stockpile of Trident submarine-​launched ballistic missiles [SLBM]. The second was a sea-​launched cruise missile that would use an existing warhead. Both of these options would add to the available range of low-​yield nuclear options in the American suite, complementing bomber-​deliverable gravity bombs and air-​launched cruise missiles. In the document, the Administration articulated these applications as provisioning an essential “hedge against future nuclear ‘break out’ scenarios”.5 Clearly, such potential capability advancements spurred concerns relating to the security scenarios that could arise should they come to DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-35

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fruition, as well as the impact such American modernisation may have on the NPT and the broader NPT regime. Further, other Trump Administration actions pertaining to the American departure from the Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA]), as well as mixed developments relating to North Korea, the demise of the Open Skies Treaty, and feeble attempts to renew, if at all, the 2011 New START treaty –​were illustrative of Trump’s prevarication to put America on “top”, but at a marked cost. Now signed and ratified by 191 different members, the NPT came into effect in 1970. The treaty encompasses four main pillars: non-​proliferation of nuclear weapons, nuclear weapon disarmament, the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and ending nuclear arms competition. Article VI of the treaty pertains to the requirements of nuclear disarmament and nuclear competition. It states, Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.6 Despite nearly one-​half of the world’s Nuclear Weapons States [NWS] being excluded from the treaty’s provisions –​North Korea, Israel, India and Pakistan –​“the five nuclear weapon states party to the NPT possess more than 98 per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons”. The actions of these states, particularly the United States, remain paramount to the treaty’s future and, ultimately, its survival.7 The continuous fragmentation of the NPT membership has the potential to have a negative impact on other goals, including the further entry into force of comprehensive safeguard agreements and additional protocols, ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and negotiation of the Fissile Material Cut-​Off Treaty to name a few.8 Some have even gone as far as arguing that lacklustre efforts, in particular by NWS, has emanated from and contributed to a re-​adjustment of nuclear weapons in their respective strategic calculi where deterrence and responses to the intensification of power politics have seen some states vie for greater “flexibility”. Indeed, as this chapter reveals, there has been substantive investment in so-​called modernisation with rhetoric and planning gauged toward greater strategic, more targeted, and more usable nuclear weapons.9 Whilst some arms limitation advocates and policy-​makers earnestly attempt to keep the NPT buoyant and alive, there appears to be a broader disdain and very little understanding on the stresses the NPT suffers. One representative described the silent atmosphere in the Assembly Hall at the United Nations [UN] during a Preparatory Committee meeting in 2018 as “the quiet in a crowded room into which a hand grenade has just been tossed”.10 This somewhat embellished comparison of course was alluding to the significant issues emerging in recent international discourse and constituting a major challenge to the continued legitimacy of the treaty. The deterioration of the strategic relationship between the United States and Russia over the last several years –​the two leading nuclear weapon states possessing over 93 per cent of the global arsenal –​in conjunction with increasingly truculent statements and accusations of treaty violations, continue to pose significant challenges. Further, division within the NPT membership over the appropriate pathway forward for addressing nuclear disarmament commitments under Article VI of the treaty –​two-​thirds support the new nuclear weapon prohibition treaty whilst a dissenting minority of the nuclear-​armed states and their allies reject it –​has also exacerbated tensions. Additionally, in other developments, the Trump Administration decision to withdraw from the 2015 JCPOA deeply impacted the viability of the agreement or any other future arms 346

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control fora.11 Obviously, the multi-​billion dollar nuclear force modernisation programmes underway in nuclear weapon-​possessing states illustrate the duress the treaty and broader regime will continue to encounter. In one lamentation, the NPT was to “celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of its entry into force at the 2020 Review Conference”. Nevertheless, based on the state of the current geopolitical environment, COVID-​19, and the broader lack of political will, “it is an open question whether the Review Conference when re-​convened in 2021” was an “occasion for celebration or mourning”.12 Whilst there are substantially fewer nuclear weapons today than during the Cold War era, the nuclear security threat remains prevalent. In fact, it can be argued that the overall risks of nuclear war have expanded –​wherein more states in more unstable regions have attained such weapons, terrorists continue to pursue them, and the command and control systems in even the most sophisticated nuclear-​armed states remain susceptible to not only system and human error but, increasingly, to cyber-​attack.13 The failure of existing nuclear-​armed states to disarm, the inability to impede new states obtaining nuclear weapons –​Pakistan, India, North Korea –​the potential of non-​state actors gaining access to such weapons or radioactive material, and the proliferation potential of the expansion of nuclear energy present serious security challenges. Additionally, in contradiction to the treaty’s requirements, NWS that have signed on no longer look to maintain the substantial progress made towards total disarmament; instead, they work to expand and enhance their overall nuclear capabilities and, thus, “prolong the nuclear era indefinitely”.14 As such, the role, efforts and policy initiatives –​or lack –​of the United States can and will have a decisive impact on the extent to which disarmament and non-​proliferation efforts are strengthened. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has played largely a driving role in the global non-​proliferation regime: its leadership has been critical to the success or failure of virtually every non-​proliferation and disarmament initiative launched, including within the NPT review process. The election of Obama as American president promised significant changes in United States nuclear policy and priorities. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he pledged to set a new direction in American nuclear weapons policy, show the world that Washington believed in its existing commitment under the NPT, and would work toward the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons.15 He vowed to “take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons” and “put an end to Cold War thinking” by reducing “the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and urg[ing] others to do the same”.16 Since 2015–​ 2016, however, the United States has been moving away from these pronouncements. Aside from slowing down its nuclear stockpile reductions during its second term in office, the Obama Administration embarked on an overhaul of its entire nuclear weapons enterprise, encompassing the development of new delivery systems and modernising its enduring nuclear warhead types and nuclear weapons production facilities in a programme that scholars estimate could cost more than $1 trillion.17 The modernised B61-​12 warhead, for example, able to strike targets more accurately with a smaller explosive yield and reduce the radioactive fallout from a nuclear attack, could become more militarily attractive and potentially increase the likelihood of use. The Trump Administration pressed for other modifications such as inter-​operable warheads for use on land-​and sea-​based ballistic missiles that “could significantly alter the structure of the nuclear warheads”, require test explosions, and potentially introduce new uncertainties into the global nuclear order.18 Simply put, of most concern, work has been under way to design new weapons to replace current ones that could introduce new military capabilities to the weapons system. The United States has not been alone in this modernisation drive. That said, and whilst understanding that nuclear modernisation has been occurring amongst a group of NWS, a 347

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clear rationale exists for focusing on what the Americans can do to advance arms control and disarmament in an environment of declining trust amongst the Great Powers, particularly in considering its strategic weight and the leadership role it has played on such issues. Quite simply, what American experts and practitioners think and do significantly matters to the future of the non-​proliferation regime. Global power shifts have meant that the window is starting to close but remains tenuously open for United States non-​proliferation and disarmament leadership. However, the potential to make changes to its nuclear policy to reassure adversaries and stabilise strategic relationships, and which could then flow into renewed momentum on co-​operative disarmament and improving legal, normative, and strategic dynamics to this end, looks to be waning. If nuclear force modernisation programmes were to continue apace without a renewed focus on arms control and disarmament, the future prospects of the NPT –​almost universally acknowledged as the cornerstone of the nuclear non-​proliferation regime and one of the most important pillars of international security –​are bleak. Further, nuclear modernisation, particularly at the level to which the Trump administration espoused in its NPR, looked to open caveats in which the United States seemingly vied for ways to “let go” of its commitment to the NPT and abandon its leadership role in the broader non-​proliferation regime. Recent substantial investments by nuclear weapon-​possessing states in the upkeep and modernisation of their nuclear postures indicate a return of the nuclear factor in international politics –​where deterrence appears to be taking precedence over nuclear arms control, disarmament, and the ultimate global goal of nuclear abolition.19 Indeed, “all nations with nuclear weapons are modernising their arsenals, delivery systems, and related infrastructure”.20 The Trump Administration categorised the specific logistical and technical aspects of its nuclear modernisation plans as follows: refurbishment of nuclear warheads; modernisation of strategic delivery systems; refinement of command and control systems; adjustment of the production complex; and implementation of the Nuclear Force Improvement Program. Additionally, under the mask of a more palatable warhead life-​extension programme, the American military inaudibly emboldened and increased the devastating power of the highest volume warhead contained in the United States nuclear arsenal –​the W76, deployed on the Navy’s ballistic missile submarines. This enhancement in destructive power meant that all American sea-​based warheads would have the capacity to destroy subterranean sites including Russian missile silos, an ability formerly saved specifically for the highest-​yield warheads in the United States stockpile. Such development occurred away from the consumption of most government officials and policy-​makers more focused on lowering nuclear warhead numbers. As such, the nuclear arsenal transitioned toward a force capacity encompassing explicit features specifically aimed at undertaking surprise attacks against Russia and executing “successful” nuclear wars. In this regard, the paradoxical approach clearly embodied a marked increase in lethality and firepower, contrasted with a reduction of weapons possessed by United States and Russian forces. Of course, this could engender a significant increase in the susceptibility of Russian nuclear forces to an American first strike, and, with that, a form of response. According to some analysts, the contrast of arms reductions, combined with an increase in American nuclear capacity meant the United States could potentially terminate “all of Russia’s ICBM silos using only about 20 percent of the warheads deployed on U.S. land-​and sea-​based ballistic missiles”.21 Additionally, the prospect of super-​fuse technology could make it feasible for every SLBM and inter-​continental ballistic missile [ICBM] warhead in the American suite to execute the subterranean assignments originally intended for the MX Peacekeeper ICBM warheads. Overall, the W76 advancement signified a marked adjustment in which the American hard-​target kill capability had shifted from land-​to sea-​based ballistic missiles. In moving this capability to submarines that could position themselves much closer to launch missiles on 348

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their targets than land-​based missiles, the United States military secured a markedly improved capability to execute a covert first strike against Russian ICBM silos. An increased sea-​based offensive and defensive capacity, however, could potentially spur the chances of conflict and ultimately nuclear war with either Russia or China. With Russian silos more susceptible to W76-​1/​Mk4A warheads, the overall expanding capability of America’s forward-​deployed sea-​ based nuclear missiles could engender serious concerns in the minds of Russian military political leaders pertaining to Washington’s strategic intentions –​particularly in light of expanding American cyber, innovative conventional, and missile defence capabilities –​and almost certainly intensifying suspicion and worst-​case planning calculations in Moscow.22 Not surprisingly, these developments had clear implications for global disarmament efforts and were of particular concern given Washington’s capacity to act as a circuit breaker in the global nuclear order. Undeniably, the amplified declaratory statements and policy releases of the Trump Administration only widened the gap between the United States modernisation drive and meeting its NPT obligations. The Trump Administration’s NPR illustrated some significant shifts from the Obama review of 2010. The most noteworthy appeared to be a move away from seeking to decrease the number of American nuclear weapons and their role in United States military strategy. In its place, the Trump review embraced a more assertive tone and presented a posture that plainly sought to embolden the reliance on nuclear weapons, including plans to create new ones whilst also modifying and enhancing others. Additionally, the report seceded from the goal of establishing nuclear weapons’ sole purpose as deterring nuclear attacks and, more forthrightly, emphasised the role for nuclear weapons in discouraging “non-​ nuclear strategic attacks” and even cyber-​attacks. As a means to achieve this end, the review stipulated, “the United States would enhance the flexibility and range of its tailored deterrence options. … Expanding flexible U.S. nuclear options now, to include low-​yield options, is important for the preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression”.23 Over the long term, the Trump NPR asserted that the United States would “pursue a nuclear-​armed” submarine-​launched cruise missile to “provide a needed nonstrategic regional presence, an assured response capability, and [in light of] Russia’s continuing … violation of the Intermediate-​Range Nuclear Forces Treaty [INF Treaty]”, a response that it believed was acquiescent with the treaty. By pursuing this new type of missile, the United States “would immediately begin efforts to restore this capability by initiating a requirements study leading to an Analysis of Alternatives … for the rapid development of a modern [submarine-​launched cruise missile]”. Additionally, those who wrote the NPR argued that the U.S. pursuit of a submarine-​launched cruise missile may provide the necessary incentive for Russia to negotiate seriously a reduction of its nonstrategic nuclear weapons, just as the prior Western deployment of intermediate-​range nuclear forces in Europe led to the 1987 [Intermediate-​Range Nuclear Forces] Treaty.24 Further, the NPR declared that the nuclear arsenal would provide a more varied set of features enhancing the capacity to refine “deterrence and assurance; expand the range of credible U.S. options for responding to nuclear or non-​nuclear strategic attack; and enhance deterrence by signalling to potential adversaries that their concepts of coercive, limited nuclear escalation offer no exploitable advantage”.25 Aside from the security implications that the modernisation drive would yield, the scope of such an undertaking, encompassing all elements of the nuclear arsenal and the production complex within it, was significant to say the least. Notwithstanding frequent concerns pertaining to the exorbitant cost of the modernisation programme in its current formations, the 349

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NPR did not highlight or address the serious economic challenge. Whether Congress would endorse the funding of the costly programmes in lieu of constructing modest and cost-​efficient life-​extended versions of existing designs, remained a source of consternation. Additionally, significantly restructuring warheads clearly challenged the pledge of the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review report that the United States would “not develop new nuclear warheads” but instead consider the “full range” of life-​extension programme options, including “refurbishment of existing warheads, reuse of nuclear components from different warheads, and replacement of nuclear components”.26 This statement was to mitigate the recommencement of nuclear explosive testing and observe the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Further, the Trump NPR signified that any life-​extension programmes would “use only nuclear components based on previously tested designs and will not support … new military capabilities”. In this regard, adherence rested on the definitional basis of what constituted “new” military capabilities, particularly when considered in the context of new or improved dimensions outside the nuclear explosive suite that may embolden a weapon’s military proficiencies. For the Trump Administration, it was evident that a strategy encompassing improvement of nuclear weapons’ accuracy and agility via lower yield of modified warheads was an integral plank in its overall nuclear strategy. Whilst the Administration’s 2018 NPR adhered to the broad plans of the Obama Administration’s 2010 NPR to modernise the entire nuclear weapons arsenal, it encompassed numerous defining changes. The most substantial shift was a recommendation to expand the types and role of American nuclear weapons. Further, the Trump NPR embodied a combative tone, positing an assertive posture that almost welcomed “Great Power competition”, including proposals to build new nuclear weapons and modify others. More simply, the Trump NPR seceded from notions of seeking to limit the role of nuclear weapons to the sole purpose of deterring nuclear attacks and, instead, emphasised the broadening of such “US nuclear options to deter, and, if deterrence fails, to prevail against both nuclear and non-​nuclear strategic attacks”.27 Further evidence of the Trump Administration’s drive to redefine and readjust the United States’ nuclear weapons position was evident in the withdrawal from the INF Treaty. In October 2018, Trump loosely detailed at a Nevada rally that he would withdraw the United States from the INF with Russia. The pivotal 1987 agreement prohibited both the United States and Russia from possessing or manufacturing ground-​ launched cruise missiles with a range between 480 and 5,470 kilometres. For several years, the Americans accused Russia of breaching this deal by developing a variety of missiles, including “the Novator 9M729 –​ known to NATO as the SSC-​8”. In his announcement, Trump stated that the United States was “not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we’re not allowed to … if Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it” then “we are going to develop the weapons”.28 The main concern with the INF departure was that the Administration did not do anything substantive to persuade or coerce Russia back into compliance, which should have been the defining goal. In fact, it virtually eradicated legal and political pressure on Russia and essentially gave the Kremlin carte blanche to develop and deploy INF systems in greater numbers and without any treaty limitations. To some extent, these developments were hardly surprising given the deterioration of bilateral relations over the previous five to six years. Whilst Russia under Putin regularly contravened international agreements, the Trump Administration engaged in a pattern of withdrawing from such agreements. The president removed America from more than a dozen international commitments, pointing to an imperative to reassert America’s international control by “letting go”, and in doing so, undermine the very post-​Second World War liberal international order that United States had defined and orchestrated. Given the 350

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INF Treaty’s crucial stabilising contribution to Europe’s security, America’s NATO allies again questioned Trump’s commitment to the organisation and broader EU security.29 Clearly, Trump’s preparedness to end reciprocally beneficial agreements to placate his domestic base did not augur well for global stability. On 4 November 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Russia was in material breach of the landmark 1987 INF treaty and that Washington planned to suspend American requirements under the treaty in 60 days unless Russia returned to compliance. NATO foreign ministers collectively agreed, declaring “that Russia had developed and fielded a missile system, the 9M729, which violated the INF Treaty [and] it is now up to Russia to preserve the INF Treaty”. Yet, the Trump Administration’s 60-​day demand and “hope” that Russia would “change course”, came across as a concession that the INF Treaty was essentially dead.30 On 2 February 2019, the United States provided a six-​month notice of withdrawal from the INF treaty due to the Russian Federation’s continuing violation of the agreement. On 2 August 2019, pursuant to Article XV of the treaty, the United States formally withdrew “because Russia failed to return to full and verified compliance through the destruction of its noncompliant missile system –​the SSC-​8 or 9M729 ground-​launched, intermediate-​range cruise missile”.31 Many considered the American INF departure as a precursor to the Trump Administration’s desire to terminate yet another Obama signature agreement. Whilst bilateral relations had suffered significant strain since 2012, the Russo-​American arms control architecture in the context of New START had remained one of the few positive lights of the relationship. Ratified in 2011, the Treaty places a limit on the number of deployed strategic warheads to a maximum of 1,550 in both states, a target each met early in 2018, which is extensively below the tens of thousands of weapons that peaked in 1986. Trump’s Administration did very little to renew New START –​its expiration was to occur in February 2021; however, on 26 January 2021, six days after taking office, Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, and Putin agreed to extend the agreement until 2026.32 Indeed, without any substantive limitations in the form of New START, both states would most likely have moved apace to increase the number of weapons deployed. An extension until February 2026 maintains crucial security advantages –​in terms of not only numerical limits, but also the reciprocated pellucidity that the treaty’s verification mechanisms encompassing data exchanges, notifications, and inspections facilitate. More importantly, an extension enables more time for a political and diplomatic solution, as well as providing an opportunity to deliberate and conceivably limit various new systems under development by Russia and provide the foundation for dialogue that would contribute to decreasing both states’ nuclear arsenals. Additionally, whilst many analysts and commentators worried about what the Trump Administration might relinquish or trade away with Putin, extending New START has fostered a constructive environment conducive to lowering tensions in bilateral relations without offering imprudent or unreasonable concessions to Russia.33 Despite some Washington DC analysts querying the link between the Trump INF treaty departure/​non-​New START renewal and the potential to trigger the proliferation and/​or modernisation drive, others were deeply concerned that such developments could spur a modernisation arms race. In this regard, they argued, the demise of the only Russo-​American arms control pact limiting deployed nuclear weapons would make it more difficult for both states to assess the other’s intentions, giving both inducements to enlarge and improve their arsenals.34 Importantly, just preceding the Trump non-​ renewal drive, the New START Treaty had achieved an important milestone in February 2018 when both states proclaimed their respective concluded reductions of their strategic forces. As such, in not extending New START or negotiating a new treaty that would replace it –​as well as the demise of the INF treaty –​it was evident 351

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that both parties were preparing for greater agility. Russia clearly wanted to invest in a range of new systems and capabilities, perceiving traditional arms control mechanisms as being unable dependably to limit strategic competition or constrain several important capabilities –​from missile defence to conventional strike weapons and latent capabilities such as weapons in space. Further, it also questioned the extent to which treaties such as New START could actually limit the number of strategic launchers and warheads.35 Likewise, from the Trump Administration’s point of view, the drive to press for greater “flexibility” was not only in response to perceived Russian assertions, but also in response to China’s military and strategic aspirations.36 As time was running out on the last remaining Russo-​ American arms control treaty, Washington and Moscow became locked in an impasse with several impediments blocking the path to extending the agreement. Trump’s Administration indicated that it would only consider a short-​term extension of New START if Russia agreed to a framework for a new trilateral treaty that verifiably covered all nuclear warheads, including those of China in the future, and making changes to the meticulously negotiated New START verification regime. The discussions held between Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and American officials in Vienna on 22 June 2020 produced little movement, described by Ryabkov as having “no grounds for any kind of deal in the form proposed”. Whilst some commentators charged both states as holding out on a non-​renewal, Moscow’s position was one that in 2020 had seen it move toward supporting an unconditional five-​year extension of the treaty; but it called the American proposal “absolutely unrealistic”.37 The Trump approach engendered a range of questions, particularly in the context of whether the Administration was essentially concerned in extending New START at all: what the United States was prepared to give up in exchange for concessions from Russia and why the Administration believed that pausing on an extension provided the United States leverage in discussions? Taken together with Russia displaying limited inclination towards agreeing to the framework, the Trump Administration clearly faced decisions on whether to extend the treaty as is or set it on a route to termination. The Trump Administration also indicated that if Russia did not agree to a framework before the November 2020 election, it would incorporate extra provisions for New START extension. Prior to winning that election, Biden indicated that he would pursue the treaty’s extension and “use that as a foundation for new arms control arrangements”, according to his campaign website, thereby providing a much needed circuit breaker to the Trump Administration’s nuclear recalcitrance.38 Biden’s secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, elaborated on this sentiment in a statement posited after the final discussions on 3 February 2021: Extending the New START Treaty ensures we have verifiable limits on Russian ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers until February 5, 2026. The New START Treaty’s verification regime … provides us with greater insight into Russia’s nuclear posture, including through data exchanges and onsite inspections. … Especially during times of tension, verifiable limits on Russia’s intercontinental-​range nuclear weapons are vitally important. Extending the New START Treaty makes the United States, U.S. allies and partners, and the world safer. An unconstrained nuclear competition would endanger us all.39 The Biden Administration’s quick declaration of its objective to the seminal treaty’s extension was no doubt motivated by the limited amount of time available before its expiration. In terms of specifics, both parties consented to taking this move through the trading of diplomatic notes on 26 January 2021 and finalised the procedure through a further exchange of such notes on 3 352

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February.40 The stipulation authorising the extension of New START is contained in Article XIV, paragraph 2, of the treaty that states, If either Party raises the issue of extension of this Treaty, the Parties shall jointly consider the matter. If the Parties decide to extend this Treaty, it will be extended for a period of no more than five years unless it is superseded earlier by a subsequent agreement on the reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms.41 Since this requirement is encompassed in the text of the treaty, Biden was able extend New START without requesting the Senate for its endorsement. The Russian Parliament had to authorise new legislation advocating the extension, a move it undertook on 27 January 2021. Putin signed this legislation two days later.42 With only two days residual until its termination, the United States and Russia officially extended New START for five years, maintaining most importantly the treaty’s certifiable constraints on the deployed strategic nuclear arsenals of the world’s two largest nuclear states. Biden Administration officials underscored that the extension would also provide time and space to engage in future talks on new arms control arrangements.43 According to an estimate published in January 2019 by the United States Congressional Budget Office, modernising and operating the American nuclear arsenal and the facilities that support it will cost around $494 billion for the period 2019–​2028.44 Notwithstanding debates pertaining to limited resources, competing nuclear and conventional modernisation programmes, tax cuts, and the rapidly growing deficit will present significant challenges for the nuclear modernisation programme. The Trump Administration’s 2018 NPR clearly specified the circumstances under which to consider the use of nuclear weapons and proposed two new, “more usable” types of low-​yield nuclear weapons.45 Proponents of modernisation –​and many within the American nuclear establishment –​have argued that such changes are merely refurbishments/​improvements rather than wholesale redesigns, and thereby, fulfil the pledge of not producing a new nuclear weapon.46 However, much of the recent literature has focused on the newer “agile” applications with concern. These analysts argue that whilst the explosive entrails of revitalised weapons may not be entirely new, given their smaller yields and better targeting, they might be more conceivably usable in a limited or tactical conflict –​even to use first, rather than in retaliation.47 Whilst official statements continue to justify nuclear modernisation as simply extending the service-​life of existing capabilities, the “Pentagon now explicitly paints the nuclear modernisation as a direct response to Russia”.48 Despite the marked reductions in the overall number of nuclear weapons since the Cold War’s demise, all of the world’s nine nuclear-​armed states are busily modernising their remaining nuclear forces and appear to be clearly in it for the long haul. “None of the nuclear-​armed states appears to be planning to eliminate its nuclear weapons anytime soon. Instead, all speak of the continued importance of nuclear weapons … Perpetual nuclear modernisation appears to undercut the promises made by the five NPT nuclear-​weapon states.”49 Under the terms of that treaty, they are required to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament”.50 Fifty years after specifying this promise, the non-​nuclear-​weapon states, which in return for that commitment renounced nuclear weapons for themselves, can rightly challenge the notion of whether continued nuclear modernisation in perpetuity adheres to the core principles of the NPT.51 In looking at the Trump Administration’s attempted amplified modernisation strategy, it is evident that it markedly shifted away from the calculus of its previous arms control and non-​ proliferation efforts and, with this, vied to undermine the aging underpinnings of the NPT that 353

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the United States was so integral in creating.52 Additionally, Trump’s disdain for arms control/​ non-​proliferation agreements –​evident in the demise of the pivotal INF Treaty, the “letting go” of the Open Skies Treaty, leaving the JCPOA, and the lack of effort to renew New START –​ indicate that in pursuing an “America First” strategy, the Trump Administration contributed to exacerbating Great Power rivalry and, broadly speaking, international (in)security.

Notes 1 Ramesh Thakur, “Why Obama Should Declare a No-​First-​Use Policy for Nuclear Weapons”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (19 August 2016): http://​theb​ulle​tin.org/​why-​obama-​sho​uld-​decl​are-​no-​first-​ use-​pol​icy-​nucl​ear-​weap​ons9​789. 2 Ibid. 3 “Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague” (5 April 2009) https://​obam​awhi​teho​use. archives. gov/​the-​press-​office/​remarks-​president-​barack-​obama-​prague-​delivered. 4 Steve Holland, “Trump Wants to Make Sure U.S. Nuclear Arsenal at ‘Top of the Pack’ ”, Reuters (24 February 2017): www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​usa-​trump-​exclusive-​idUSKBN 1622IF. 5 United States Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review (February 2018): https://​dod.defe​nse. gov/​News/​Spe​cial​Repo​rts/​2018N​ucle​arPo​stur​eRev​iew.aspx. 6 United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, “Treaty on the Non-​ Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” (1970): www.un.org/​disarmament/​wmd/​nuclear/​npt/​text/​. 7 Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “Slowing Nuclear Weapon Reductions and Endless Nuclear Weapon Modernizations: A Challenge to the NPT”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 70/​ 4(2014). 8 Ibid. 9 Statement by Ireland, “Diplomatic conference to negotiate a new legal instrument for the prohibition of nuclear weapons leading to their total elimination-​Organizational Meeting” (16 February 2017): www. dfa.ie/​media/​dfa/​alldfawebsitemedia/​ourrolesandpolicies/​int-​priorities/​womenpeaceandsecurity/​ NWPTOrganisationalMeeting16Feb.pdf. 10 Paul Meyer, “Sleepwalking towards the 2020 review of the Nuclear Non-​Proliferation Treaty”, OpenCanada.org (8 May 2018): www.opencanada.org/​features/​sleepwalking-​towards-​2020-​review-​ nuclear-​non-​proliferation-​treaty/​. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Gareth Evans and Ramesh Thakur, eds., Nuclear Weapons: The State of Play (Canberra, 2013); Brian Martin, “Nuclear Winter: Science and Politics”, Science and Public Policy, 15/​5(1988), 321–​34; Peter King, “Undermining Proliferation: Nuclear Winter and Nuclear Renunciation”, The Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Working Paper No. 09/​1 (October 2009); Alan Robock, Luke Oman, Georgiy L. Stenchikov, Owen B. Toon, Charles Bardeen, and Richard P. Turco, “Climatic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts”, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 7/​8(2007), 2003–​12. 14 Kristensen and Norris, “Nuclear Weapon Reductions”. 15 See Aiden Warren, The Obama Administration’s Nuclear Weapon Strategy: The Promises of Prague (NY, 2014); Joseph M. Siracusa, Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction, Second Edition (Oxford, 2015). 16 “Obama in Prague”. 17 Jon B. Wolfsthal, Jeffrey Lewis, and Marc Quint “The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad”, James Martin Center for Non-​proliferation Studies (January 2014); Kingston Reif, “U.S. Nuclear Modernization Programs”, Arms Control Association (October 2016): www.armscontrol.org/​factsheets/​ USNuclearModernization; William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “U.S. Ramping Up Major Renewal in Nuclear Arms”, NY Times (22 September 2014). 18 Hans M. Kristensen, “Nuclear Weapons Modernization: A Threat to the NPT?”, Arms Control Association (May 2014): www.armscontrol.org/​act/​2014_​05/​Nuclear-​Weapons-ModernizationA-​Threat-​to-​the-​NPT. 19 Reif, “Modernization Programs”. 20 R. Acheson, ed., Assuring Destruction Forever: Nuclear Weapon Modernization Around The World (NY, 2012), 88. 21 Hans M. Kristensen, Matthew McKinzie, and Theodore A. Postol, “How U.S. Nuclear Force Modernization is Undermining Strategic Stability: The Burst-​Height Compensating Super-​Fuze”,

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Nuclear Power, Arms Control and the NPT Nuclear Watch (1 March 2017): https://​theb​ulle​tin.org/​2017/​03/​how-​us-​nucl​ear-​force-​modern​izat​ ion-​is-​unde​r min​ing-​strate​gic-​stabil​ity-​the-​burst-​hei​ght-​compe​nsat​ing-​super-​fuze/​. 22 Ibid. 23 Defense Department, “Nuclear Posture Review”, XII; Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “United States Nuclear Forces, 2020”, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 76/​1(2020), 46–​60. 24 Defense Department, “Nuclear Posture Review”, 35. 25 Ibid. 26 United States Defense Department, “Increasing Transparency in the US Nuclear Weapons Stockpile”, Fact Sheet (3 May 2010): https://​fas.org/​sgp/​other​gov/​dod/​stockp​ile.pdf. 27 Anna Péczeli, “The Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review: Back to Great Power Competition”, Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, 1/​2(2018), 238–​55. 28 Julian Borger and Martin Pengelly, “Trump Says US Will Withdraw from Nuclear Arms Treaty with Russia”, Guardian (21 October 2018): www.theguardian.com/​world/​2018/​oct/​20/​trumpus-​nuclear-​arms-​treaty-​russia. 29 Daryl G. Kimball and Kingston A. Reif, “U.S. INF Treaty Termination Strategy Falls Short”, Arms Control Association, 10/​10(2018): www.armscontrol.org/​issue-​briefs/​2018-​12/​us-​inf-​treatytermination-​strategy-​falls-​short. 30 Matt Korda and Hans M. Kristensen, “Trump Falls on Sword for Putin’s Treaty Violation”, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (29 October 2018): https://​theb​ulle​tin.org/​2018/​10/​trump-​falls-​on-​sword-​for-​put​ ins-​tre​aty-​violat​ion. 31 United States State Department, “U.S. Withdrawal from the INF Treaty on August 2, 2019, Press Statement, Michael R. Pompeo, Secretary of State”, (2 August 2019): https://​nl.usemba​ssy.gov/​u-​s-​ wit​hdra​wal-​from-​the-​inf-​tre​aty-​on-​aug​ust-​2-​2019/​. 32 “Biden and Putin Agree to Extend Nuclear Treaty”, NY Times (26 January www.nytimes.com/​2021/​ 01/​26/​world/​europe/​biden-​putin-​nuclear-​treaty.html. 33 Thomas M. Countryman, Kingston A. Reif, and Daryl G. Kimball, “Trump and Putin Can Put the Brakes on a New, Potentially More Dangerous, Arms Race”, InDepthNews (August 2018): www.indepthnews.net/​index.php/​opinion/​2046-​trump-​and-​putin-​can-​put-​the-​brakes-​on-​a-​ new-​potentially-​more-​dangerous-​arms-​race. 34 Arshad Mohammed and Jonathan Landay, “Treaty’s End Would Give U.S., Russia Impetus to Make More Nukes: Study”, Reuters (1 April 2019): www.reuters.com/​article/​us-​usa-​russia-​nuclear/​ treatys-​end-​would-​give-​u-​s-​russia-​impetus-​to-​make-​more-​nukes-​study-​idUSKCN1RD1AI. 35 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, “Comment by the Information and Press Department on the Latest Data regarding the Aggregate Numbers of US Strategic Offensive Arms Published by the US Department of State”, (27 February 2018): www.mid.ru/​en/​web/​guest/​foreign_​policy/​news/​-​/​asset_​publisher/​cKNonkJE02Bw/​content/​id/​3100658; Pavel Podvig, “Nuclear Strategies in Transition Russia’s Current Nuclear Modernization and Arms Control”, Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, 1/​2(2018), 256–​67. 36 Frank A. Rose, “The End of An Era? The INF Treaty, New START, and the Future of Strategic Stability”, Brookings Institution (12 February 2019): www.brookings. edu/​blog/​order-​from-​chaos/​ 2019/​02/​12/​the-​end-​of-​an-​era-​the-​inf-​treaty-​new-​start-​and-​the-​future-​of-​strategic-​stability/​. 37 Kingston Reif and Shannon Bugos, “New START in Limbo Ahead of U.S. Election”, Arms Control Association (November 2020): www.armscontrol.org/​act/​2020-​10/​news/​us-​russia-​hitimpasse-​new-​start. 38 Ibid. 39 Anthony J. Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, “On the Extension of the New START Treaty with the Russian Federation,” State, Press Statement Department (3 February 2021): www.state.gov/​on-​the-​ extension-​of-​the-​new-​start-​treaty-​with-​the-​russian-​federation/​. 40 Ibid. See also, “Statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation on the extension of the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms” (3 February 2021): www.mid.ru/​en/​foreign_​policy/​news/​-​/​asset_​publisher/​cKNonkJE02Bw/​content/​id/​4551078. 41 https://​2009-​2017.state.gov/​documents/​organization/​140035.pdf 42 See Russian Federation, “Statement … Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms”. 43 Kingston Reif and Shannon Bugos, “U.S., Russia Extend New START for Five Years”, Arms Control Today (March 2021): www.armscontrol.org/​act/​2021-​03/​news/​us-​russia-​extend-​new-​start-​five-​years.

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Aiden Warren and Joseph M. Siracusa 44 Congressional Budget Office, “Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces 2019–​2028” (24 January 2019): www.cbo.gov/​system/​files/​2019-​01/​54914-​NuclearForces.pdf. 45 Countryman, Reif, and Kimball, “Trump and Putin”. 46 Marina Malenic, “U.S. Completes first B-​61 LEP Flight Test”, Janes Defense Weekly (8 July 2015); See Matthew Kroenig, “How to Approach Nuclear Modernization? A U.S. response”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 71/​3(2015), 16–​18; idem, Matthew Kroenig “Why U.S. Nuclear Modernization Is Necessary”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (8 January 2015): http://​theb​ulle​tin.org/​mode​r niz​ing-​nucl​ ear-​arsen​als-​whet​her-​and-​how/​why-​us-​nucl​ear-​modern​izat​ion-​necess​ary. 47 John Mecklin, “Disarm and Modernize”, Foreign Policy, 211(March/​April 2015): https://​foreig​npol​ icy.com/​2015/​03/​24/​dis​arm-​and-​modern​ize-​nucl​ear-​weap​ons-​warhe​ads/​; William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy”, NY Times (11 January 2016): www.nytimes.com/​2016/​01/​12/​science/​as-​us-​modernizes-​nuclear-​weapons-​ smaller-​leaves-​some-​uneasy.html. 48 “Pentagon Portrays Nuclear Modernization as a Response to Russia”, Federation of American Scientists (11 February 2016): https://​fas.org/​blogs/​secur​ity/​2016/​02/​russ​iaju​stif​i cat​ion/​. 49 Kristensen, “Threat to the NPT?” 50 United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, “Treaty on the Non-​Proliferation”. 51 In fact, many non-​nuclear-​weapon states have already done so; as of 31 July 2019, 24 nations having ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. 52 Mecklin, “Disarm and Modernize”.

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29 THE RETURN OF GREAT POWER COMPETITION AND THE IMPORTANCE OF MILITARY STATECRAFT Michael Roi*

For many students of international politics, the word “statecraft” may conjure thoughts of a by-​ gone era of Great Power diplomacy, struggles for supremacy and major international congresses for the purposes of peacemaking, associated with nineteenth century names like Viscount Castlereagh, Prince Clement von Metternich, and, later, Prince Otto von Bismarck. But this age-​old practice should not be discounted as anachronistic and out of step with the twenty-​ first century. In fact, statecraft remains just as vital today, particularly given the return of Great Power competition. More specifically, this analysis will focus on the practice of military statecraft, defined briefly here as the skilful use of a country’s military resources, often together with other instruments of national power, to advance national interests. To be sure, the successful use of statecraft is more challenging today as the international system involves a greater number of diverse actors and has become more global than the nineteenth-​century European states system. However, the adroit application of military power, whether by individuals or as an outcome of national security deliberations of multiple decision-​makers, remains central to ongoing efforts to maintain peace, deter aggression, and manage escalation. In the event that deterrence fails, statecraft can play a role to terminate conflicts on terms favourable to one’s interests. What is statecraft and specifically military statecraft? Despite the frequent use of the term by scholars and practitioners, it is surprising that very few have attempted to provide a definition. This includes books with the word “statecraft” in the title specifically aimed at introducing the subject.1 The following discussion draws on the definition of statecraft as “the use of the assets or the resources and tools (economic, military, intelligence, media) that a state has to pursue its interests and to affect the behavior of others, whether friendly or hostile”.2 A particular emphasis falls on the state’s use of military assets and resources, hence the label military statecraft. The focus is primarily but not solely on the military statecraft of the United States as the principal democratic Great Power, but certainly much of what follows will be of interest to its democratic allies, many of whom have also been dealing with effects of the return of Great Power competition. This analysis does not deal with questions of the appropriate machinery of government and, therefore, does not advocate certain organisational structures for and specific processes used in the formulation of the national objectives to direct military statecraft. DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-36

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In the previous edition of this Handbook, this author posited that the absence of strategy prevented the effective use of military power by Western decision-​makers, which stemmed, in part, from the weaknesses in contemporary civil-​military relations.3 This “strategy gap” remains an ongoing concern as it continues to undermine the coherent use of military power to achieve political objectives. One may presume that the absence of national strategy will continue to undercut the effective application of a country’s limited military resources and, in the worst case, may lead to strategic failure and defeat. Ideally, the conduct of military statecraft would find integration within a larger government effort and used as a strategic tool, alongside all the instruments of national power, to achieve the objectives set by national strategy. Whilst recognising the importance of national strategy, military statecraft is the practice of effectively using limited military resources to attain the ends of policy and strategy.4 The following argument, therefore, accepts the premise that military power –​the “big stick” to use Eliot Cohen’s expression –​remains a central component of today’s international order and military statecraft is thus essential to achieve national objectives. Through a more focused look at military statecraft, one can better understand how military power can be used to achieve certain objectives such as deterrence of aggression, assurance and consolidation of alliance relationships, support collective defence and defeat of adversaries should conflict occur. Furthermore, successful military statecraft must move beyond theory and into practice. It not only requires a thorough understanding of the unique characteristics of military power but also the skilful employment of capabilities, especially applying and posturing force structures to underpin and credibly strengthen deterrence against any would-​be aggressors –​a task easier said than done. Deep knowledge of the military instrument of power is not commonplace amongst today’s civilian leaders in most democratic states. Much of the expertise is currently resident in defence departments, amongst military professionals as well as found outside of government in certain think tanks and university departments.5 Consequently, leveraging the required knowledge for the purposes of statecraft will be an organisational and national security policy challenge going forward. Successful statecraft, observed August Ludwig von Rochau in his nineteenth-​century treatise Foundations of Realpolitik, depended on an appreciation or accurate analysis “of the historical circumstances in which the statesman operated”.6 This remains essential today. To inform better the planning and implementation of effective military statecraft, it is therefore necessary to explore the nature of Great Power competition. In this sense, it requires an emphasis on how the actions and behaviour of the People’s Republic China and Russian Federation –​or, more specifically, the use of the instruments of national power by their political leaders –​are challenging the role and influence of the United States and its democratic allies in global affairs. The word “competition” here is in the context of a contest involving at least two actors that seek advantage over the other in pursuit of national objectives, giving rise to rivalry that can fluctuate in intensity over time depending on the issue at hand. In this particular case, the focus is on the competition between, on one side, China and Russia and, the other, the United States and its democratic allies. Competition is not always destabilising and dangerous nor does it preclude co-​operation amongst states. In most cases, it may be the unavoidable outcome, as many realists and like-​ minded analysts contend, when states pursue their national interests. Similarly, as a result of divergent national political and economic systems, decision-​makers often have competing visions for the international order that they deem will best ensure the success of their national systems and objectives. The competition for greater influence and prosperity can range from benign economic rivalry to intense political warfare where, in the words of George F. Kennan, the employment of all means at a nation’s command, short of war, are used to achieve national 358

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objectives.7 Competition amongst actors may well be a constant feature of the international system, as realists contend. But this current era of Great Power competition is arguably more troubling due to the aggressive statecraft of authoritarian national governments like those of China and Russia, who draw on all instruments of national power to pursue their objectives.8 In competition with the United States and its allies, these authoritarian adversaries contest the power and influence of democratic states, seeking to undermine their military and diplomatic influence in global affairs.9 Moreover, these authoritarian states are developing military and other tools to confront American military dominance to weaken American deterrence and, ultimately, achieve their ambitions without fighting. That said, both Beijing and Moscow are also developing their armed forces to win a high-​intensity conventional conflict, preferably of short-​duration, against the United States and its allies in their respective regions, if necessary, as a means to consolidate their regional power.10 The United States and its allies thus face increasingly dangerous competition from these hostile rival Powers including the potential threat of conventional armed conflict that should escalation not be managed may intensify and cross the threshold to nuclear warfare. These authoritarian rivals not only draw on all instruments of national power, they integrate their actions across multiple military/​operational domains, using a broad range of tools to pursue their strategies of competition.11 A recent study has described this multi-​domain challenge as “multidimensional”, encompassing inter alia economic statecraft, military modernisation, and political warfare.12 If the United States and its allies fail to respond to this mounting competition from China and Russia and uphold democratic principles, these authoritarian Powers will increasingly gain military, technological, and economic advantages. Over time, these advantages could weaken the ability of the United States and its allies to defend themselves against the coercive behaviour of China and Russia and undermine their ability to provide a credible deterrent to potential aggression. So far, this competition has occurred below the threshold of conventional armed conflict, at least in terms of direct violent clashes between the principal actors –​although clearly Russian and Ukrainian forces fought a limited conventional conflict in 2014 and 2015.13 As a result, there has been an element of complacency about the risks of conventional armed conflict linked to this Great Power competition. It has given rise to the muddled concept of the “gray zone”, a widely used label in relation to the spectrum of conflict that runs from peace to war to characterise the zone of activity and behaviour amongst international actors that occurs below the threshold of conventional armed conflict but is distinct from the state of peace. The concept of the gray zone remains contested, lacking a commonly accepted or doctrinal definition.14 Certainly, the gray zone concept deserves greater analytical scrutiny. Despite its conceptual shortcomings, it is perhaps best to think about the zone as an imprecise descriptor for a broad range of actions and behaviour of an adversary that can occur below the level of conventional armed conflict and appears to blur the line between the state of peace and war. Nevertheless, it would be dangerously misleading to view Great Power competition as confined solely within the gray zone –​however defined –​destined to remain below the threshold of conventional conflict in the absence of robust deterrence measures. The return of Great Power competition has brought with it the increased potential for Great Power war.15 Whilst one can dispute the likelihood that such competition might spawn such a war, particularly in the nuclear age, the United States and its allies increasingly see Great Power competition as a major feature of the international system and, using American military parlance, regard it as a “pacing threat” to drive force planning and force structure discussions.16 Having broadly described the nature of Great Power competition, what are some of the key military strategic and operational requirements stemming from this competition that should, in turn, shape the contours of military statecraft and frame the Western military response? The 359

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following discussion of these requirements is not proscriptive but rather acts as a guide to influence defence strategy and planning. The first requirement is the need to recover the military initiative that the West ceded to its authoritarian adversaries, who have been exploring ways and deploying systems to nullify Western operational advantages. It must move away from a purely reactive stance and make greater efforts to create potential operational dilemmas for its foes to place them on the defensive as a means to strengthen deterrence. It is time to shed the complacency that has hitherto influenced Western military planning towards the challenges posed by these adversaries and prioritise them as the focal point for planning in terms of thought, resources, and actions. This realisation, it would appear, has taken hold amongst American defence planners and their democratic allies, who increasingly consider these authoritarian adversaries as the pacing threats for military planning and capability development purposes. The absence of conventional armed conflict has, at times, left the United States and its allies slow to respond to hostile actions. Whilst below the threshold of war, these actions have clearly negative consequences for national interests and, over time, may lead to operational disadvantages for the armed forces of the United States and its allies that its adversaries can later exploit. A good example of this dynamic has been the island-​building effort in the South China Sea by the Chinese government. Beijing began this building slowly, somewhat surreptitiously, and eventually openly escalated to the point of deploying military capabilities on its artificially created islands. As a result, the Chinese government has created a formidable network of radar, missile, electronic warfare, and similar capabilities designed to control the air and sea spaces in the South China Sea, degrade the operational effectiveness of adversaries, and impede the ability of American and other forces from operating in the western Pacific.17 Moscow has likewise established anti-​access/​area denial [A2/​AD] systems in the Baltic Sea and Black Sea regions.18 The aggregate effect of China’s gradual build-​up is that its armed forces have improved their warfighting abilities in the First Island Chain, which stretches along China’s coast from the waters around Vietnam in the South China Sea to the Japanese Archipelago of the East China Sea. It has allowed the Chinese military to put at risk American forces operating within these waters to the point of raising doubts about whether Washington would intervene in a China-​Taiwan conflict.19 It is likely that Beijing sought to manage escalation by gradually challenging the American position without doing anything sudden or clearly militarily aggressive that might stir Washington to action before Chinese forces were ready to act. In retrospect, the gradual nature of the Beijing’s approach may have helped to mask its intentions at the time, but it does not change the outcome, which has been deleterious for American conventional deterrence in the western Pacific. This indicates a need to strengthen the way of assessing the capability development and actions of adversaries. Specifically, it means that regaining the initiative must also include improving one’s ability to “triage” adversarial actions based on distinguishing those that are low and modest in terms of risk to national defence or national interests compared to actions that need to be addressed, as they constitute an immediate threat or incrementally build into a strategic challenge. Another, and perhaps the most important, requirement is the need to prepare for the lethality of high-​intensity, Great Power conventional warfare and the potential loss of military technological superiority. Although the probability of a Great Power war may be low, the costs and consequences of such a conflict would be far-​reaching and may become protracted.20 The prospect of war has psychological, cognitive, and material implications. One has to be mentally prepared for the possibility of higher casualty rates and increased destruction –​including the loss of expensive infrastructure, platforms, and systems –​that Great Power war tends to generate. Related to this would be the psychological or social strains on societies caused by this level of destruction, which would be far greater than seen in Western democratic states for generations. 360

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In cognitive terms, the West must think deeply about the character of Great Power war, starting with thorough analyses of Great Power adversaries, the composition of their militaries, and their likely operational approaches. It is also important to note that adversaries are challenging the United States and its allies in domains such as cyber and space in addition to the traditional domains of land, sea, and air. In response, there is a requirement for a mind-​set able to meet this military challenge across multiple domains. Moreover, military planning must shift towards solving specific operational challenges in fighting Great Power adversaries, factoring in geography and local military balances into operational concepts, doctrine, and plans. As an example, the United States military would have to shift away “from the expeditionary posture it emphasised following the Cold War and focus more on buttressing its so-​called contact-​and-​ blunt-​layer forces –​adopting a more forward defence posture”.21 In material terms, it means investing in the right capabilities and developing necessary forces for Great Power military conflicts. Of course, the best way to avoid a Great Power conventional war is dissuading rivals from considering aggression in the first place. Not surprisingly, then, the return of Great Power competition has meant the resurgence of interest in deterrence. Conventional deterrence requires clarity in convincing the adversary of the credibility of defensive capability and the potential for retaliation or escalation in dealing with specific threats. Whilst the destructive capability of nuclear weapons remains well understood, estimates of the combat potential of conventional forces outside of actual combat remain more subjective.22 The point here is that if the intention is to deter, an adversary must be aware of the military capabilities of its rival. The adversary must also have a clear idea of the circumstances in which that rival would use them. Therefore, the credibility of a threat not only derives from demonstrated capability and stated willingness to use it, but it also rests on the subjective assessment of the adversary. In essence, does the potential foe believe that the threat of retaliation, escalation, or defensive action is genuine and the associated capability exists to carry out the threat? If an adversary is not convinced of the reality of the cost-​benefit calculus advanced by the strategy, it will likely fail.23 This means tailoring a conventional deterrence posture to reflect the local conventional military situation, including the geography of the region and the military capabilities of the actors involved. The emphasis must be on conventional force structures and their demonstrated effects as well as the specific military situations for their use. If the goal is to deter major conventional aggression, one must then demonstrate the ability to employ local, tailored forces, which communicate –​through statements, exercises, and posture –​an understanding of the adversary’s aims, the ability to prevent even a limited and quick strike, and retaining sufficient capability to ensure the conflict will escalate beyond the adversary’s risk tolerance or ability to achieve its aims. Given the importance of tailoring military posture to the local situation in strengthening deterrence, it is important to take a closer look at what this might require for deterring potential Chinese and Russian aggression against their neighbours. In addition to the local military situation, one must appreciate that the United States and its allies in Asia and Europe are ostensibly engaged in a form of extended conventional deterrence. The distinction here between a binary and an extended deterrence relationship is important, affecting the resources applied and strategic communication strategy used to support them.24 Framed by these considerations, what measures might be necessary to deter China, for instance, from seeking to achieve its ambitions through acts of aggression specifically against Taiwan or the Senkaku Islands? A good case exists for “archipelagic defence” as the basis of deterrence in the First Island Chain with the United States-​Japan alliance at its core.25 The military posture for archipelagic defence would require, amongst other things, substantially larger American forces forward deployed; over time, these forces might require more permanent regional bases. It would involve improving the ability of 361

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American and allied forces to operate in a contested environment, strengthening command, control, and sensor networks, as well as necessitating the reduction in the vulnerability of bases, ports, and surface ships. There would be a requirement for American and allied forces to counter Chinese air, sea, space, and cyber denial operations.26 These measures are only illustrative of the steps that might be required to strengthen deterrence of Chinese aggression against Taiwan or the Senkaku Islands. Similarly, in dealing with the Russian threat to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s [NATO’s] north-​eastern flank, American and allied military planners must estimate the range of possible Russian aggression, including what a major conventional attack would look like against, for example, the Baltic States, what Russian forces would be involved, direction of attack, routes/​axes of advance, and how rapidly they could achieve their objectives. They must also consider what Russian forces could do to prevent NATO forces from operating in the littoral region of the Baltic and Black Seas or over a NATO member’s airspace. In short, the United States and its NATO allies must have forces prepared and positioned for defensive operations to inflict sufficient damage that would cause Russian leaders to avoid contemplating aggression in the first place. In the event that deterrence fails, the United States and its allies must have in place a plan to force the cessation of military operations because the cost of continuing the attack would simply be too high. The consequences of a failure to deter are significant. Once deterrence has failed, the United States and its allies would face the difficult choice of accepting an adversary’s a fait accompli or, alternatively, embarking on the monumental task, in the case of Russian aggression in Europe, of retaking the Baltic States by driving Russian forces out, which would greatly increase risks of escalation beyond a conventional conflict.27 In step with the increased interest in deterrence, the risk of Great Power conflict has also brought a renewed attention to the need for managing escalation. Forrest Morgan defines escalation as “an increase in the intensity or scope of conflict that crosses threshold(s) considered significant by one or more of the participants”. It can be deliberate, inadvertent, or accidental.28 As escalation is a form of “competition in risk-​taking”, one of the ongoing challenges associated with building an effective deterrent to Chinese and Russian aggression will be to manage escalation.29 Should a conventional conflict occur either deliberately or inadvertently, it will be imperative to control further escalation, most notably in preventing a conflict from escalating across the so-​called “firebreak” threshold separating conventional and nuclear war. Thus, Great Power military statecraft once again must be concerned with both conventional and nuclear deterrence. The third military requirement stemming from Great Power competition is the importance of allies. Attracting allies and strengthening existing alliances should be a key objective of military statecraft, as necessary to success as posturing forces to deter or defeat adversarial aggression. Despite the enormous economic and military resources of the United States –​the single most powerful global Great Power –​Washington would find it difficult to meet the challenge of deterring both China and Russia without assistance from NATO and its Five Eyes allies as well as countries like Japan. These latter Powers possess important financial and military resources, geographical advantages due to proximity to the authoritarian challengers, and democratic credentials for marshalling in the battle over strategic narratives with China and Russia.30 Alliances and allies are a source of strength.31 In economic terms, the United States and just five of its NATO [Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy] and three Asian Pacific [Australia, Japan, and South Korea] allies account for more than 50 per cent of global GDP, the American share alone is approximately 25 per cent –​where it stood in 1980 –​whilst China has around 17 per cent.32 This same grouping of allies spend over US$1 trillion annually on defence –​about 54 per cent of global expenditure –​whilst China and Russia collectively account for roughly 17 per cent of global defence expenditure.33 The importance of Japan 362

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militarily to the deterrence of China and NATO allies in deterring Russia is set out above. But it goes beyond ensuring that military plans and preparations are tightly connected. The political, economic, and societal resources of likeminded democratic states will be essential to winning the contest against authoritarian adversaries to counter what a recent study calls their “comprehensive coercion”.34 Thus, the United States and its democratic allies must seek to strengthen their existing alliances and defence commitments, despite ongoing tensions over burden-​sharing, which in turn requires persistent diplomatic skill and adept military statecraft. Finally, Great Power competition is likely to persist over many years. In The Jungle Grows Back, Robert Kagan asks his readers to imagine how dangerous the world could become should the ambitions of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping be realised. Kagan answers with a further question: “Who can say whether such powers might in time become a threat on par with those we faced in the past, if they are allowed to expand their regional and global influence by military means?”35 Preventing such a dangerous situation arising and, by extension, authoritarian adversaries from achieving their ambitions through military means must be one of the primary objectives of Western military statecraft and national strategy. Yet, like the contest between Soviet Russia and the United States during the Cold War, today’s Great Power competition involves more than military strength. There are historical, economic, and political-​ideological dimensions to this competition. As such, military strength and military statecraft alone will be insufficient to counter, deter, and defeat all the actions and behaviours of these authoritarian Great Powers. Military statecraft remains vital, but it cannot possibly solve all problems, especially challenges in the political and economic spheres. The beginning of this chapter suggested that military statecraft is most effective when integrated in a larger national effort utilising all elements of national power with clear national objectives. This remains true in multinational sense as well. In this era of Great Power competition, like previous ones, the United States and its democratic allies will need to mobilise more than military resources to back their foreign policy objectives; they will also need to strengthen the resiliency of their societies at home and prepare them for the rigours of this long-​term contest. Military strength will certainly be indispensable to dealing with the risks of Great Power competition, which will necessitate a rediscovery of military statecraft, particularly the skilful application of military resources to deter aggression and manage the risks of escalation.

Notes * Disclaimer: The reported results, their interpretation, and any opinions expressed in this chapter remain those of the author and do not represent or otherwise reflect any official position of the Department of National Defence or the Government of Canada. 1 See, for example, Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Problems of Our Time, Third Edition (NY, 1995). As the book “focuses on the use of force as an instrument of statecraft”, one can presume that statecraft involves the use instruments of the state in support of some goal –​never stated –​desired by the state. 2 Dennis Ross, Statecraft and How to Restore America’s Standing in the World (NY, 2008), x. 3 Michael L. Roi, “The Strategy Gap: Contemporary Civil-​ Military Relations and the Use of Military Power”, in B.J.C. McKercher, ed., Routledge Handbook of Diplomacy & Statecraft (NY, 2012), 376–​87. 4 See Hew Strachan, “Strategy in Theory; Strategy in Practice”, Journal of Strategic Studies, 42/​2(2019), 171–​90, for a discussion of the historical differences that arose between the theory and practice of strategy. 5 See Roi, “The Strategy Gap”, 385. 6 John Bew, Realpolitik: A History (NY, 2016), 6, 300, writes approvingly of Rochau’s method of political analysis that examined situations on three levels: the existing distribution of power within a state; the socioeconomic structures within society; and the cultural and ideological setting of the time.

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Michael Roi 7 Kennan’s description of political warfare comes from a classified May 1948 Policy Planning Staff memorandum, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare”. See John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (NY, 2011), 316–​17. 8 The usage of the label “authoritarian” perhaps needs some further explanation. One can make a distinction between democracy and authoritarianism based narrowly on the single criterion of the presence of free and fair elections. However, some scholars have challenged this simple binary test. Marlies Glasius, “What Authoritarianism Is … and Is Not: A Practice Perspective”, International Affairs, 94/​3(2018), 515–​33, has added the criterion of a government’s pattern of behaviour towards accountability over people to whom it exerts control in addition to whether or not there are free and fair elections. She emphasises the importance of looking at governing practices “as patterns of action” for evidence of authoritarianism. “Authoritarian practices enable domination”, she explains, “they entail substantive and procedural rule-​breaking, interfere with the preference and inhibit the civic virtues of those to whom accountability is owed, and strictly control information flows”. Using Glasius’s explanation of authoritarian practice, it is reasonable to describe the actions undertaken and the pattern of behaviour exhibited by the governments of China and Russia towards their peoples as authoritarian. The Chinese and Russian governments also have similar characteristics with some of the authoritarian nationalist governments that emerged in parts of Europe during the interwar period. See the discussion in Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison and Definition (London, 1980), 3–​41. 9 Even the global health crisis of the coronavirus pandemic has not prevented both China and Russia from continuing to pursue their competition with the United States and its allies, including the aggressive use of disinformation about the origins and extent of the spread of COVID-​19. See Sergey Sukhankin, COVID-​19 as a Tool of Information Confrontation: Russia’s Approach (Calgary, 2020), 3–​5; Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi, “The Coronavirus Could Reshape Global Order: China Is Maneuvering for International Leadership as the United States Falters”, Foreign Affairs (18 March 2020): www.foreignaffairs.com/​articles/​china/​2020-​03-​18/​coronavirus-​could-​reshape-​global-​order; Mark McKinnon, “For China and Russia, Coronavirus Hoaxes Are Another Strain of Disinformation Warfare”, Globe and Mail (27 March 2020): www.theglobeandmail. com/​world/​article-​for-​china-​and-​ russia-​coronavirus-​hoaxes-​are-​another-​strain-​of/​. 10 See the chapters by Daniel Gouré, Aleksandre Golts, Keir Giles, and James Sherr in Stephen J. Blank, ed., The Russian Military in Contemporary Perspective (Carlisle, PA, 2019). Cf. Defense Intelligence Agency, China Military Power: Modernizing a Force to Fight and Win (Washington, DC, 2019); idem, Russia Military Power: Building a Military to Support Great Power Aspirations (Washington, DC, 2017); James E. Fanell, “China’s Global Naval Strategy and Expanding Force Structure: Pathway to Hegemony”, Naval War College Review, 72/​1(2019), 11–​55. 11 A military or operational domain is a major division within the military environment where specific activities, influence, and knowledge are applied. Both physical and non-​physical characteristics delineate domains, of which there are five primary operational ones: Air, Sea, Land, Space, and Cyber. Sometimes “Information” is included as a sixth operational domain but, in this author’s view, it is more appropriate to see information as cutting across all the five operational domains. 12 Thomas G. Mahnken, Forging the Tools of 21st Century Great Power Competition (Washington, DC, 2020), 5–​6. Also see Patrick M. Cronin and Ryan Neuhard, Total Competition. China’s Challenge in the South China Sea (Washington, DC, 2020), 1–​12. 13 Russian forces fought a limited conventional conflict in the high-​intensity fighting around Donetsk and Debal’tseve in 2014 and 2015. Since then, it has continued to be a largely a conventional conflict of lower intensity. See Amos C. Fox and Andrew J. Rossow, “Making Sense of Russian Hybrid Warfare: A Brief Assessment of the Russo-​Ukrainian War”, Land Warfare Papers, 112(2017), 5–​11; Andrew Monaghan, “The ‘War’ in Russia’s ‘Hybrid Warfare’ ”, Parameters, 45/​4(2015–​16), 68; Phillip Karber and Joshua Thibeault, “Russia’s New-​Generation Warfare” (20 May 2016): www.ausa.org/​ articles/​ russia’s-​new-​generation-​warfare; Robert G. Angevine, John K. Warden, Russell Keller, and Clark Frye, Learning Lessons from the Ukraine Conflict, Institute for Defence Analyses Document NS D-​10367 (Alexandria, VA, 2019), 5–​11. 14 Lyle J. Morris, Michael J. Mazarr, Jeffrey W. Hornung, Stephanie Pezard, Anika Binnendijk, and Marta Kepe, Gaining Competitive Advantage in the Gray Zone: Response Options for Coercive Aggression below the Threshold of Major War (Santa Monica, CA, 2019), 7–​12, has one of the more useful definitions. 15 Mahnken, Forging the Tools, 4. 16 The following list of national security and defence planning documents from the Five Eyes Allies is not exhaustive but illustrative of the emphasis on Great Power competition, sometimes referred to

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The Return of Great Power Competition as long-​term strategic competition: National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, DC, 2017), 2–​3; Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of The United States of America. Sharpening the American Military’s Competitive Edge (Washington, DC, 2018), 1–​3; Joint Staff, Description of the National Military Strategy 2018 (Washington, DC, 2018), 2; Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Doctrine Note 1–​19, Competition Continuum (3 June 2019); HM Government, National Security Capability Review (London, 2018), 5–​6; Ministry of Defence, Global Strategic Trends: The Future Starts Today. Sixth Edition (Swindon, UK, 2018), 17; Ministry of Defence, Joint Concept Note 1/​17, Future Force Concept (Swindon,UK, 2017), 1; Address by Minister Freeland on Canada’s foreign policy priorities (6 June 2017): www.canada.ca/​en/​global-​affairs/​news/​2017/​06/​address_​by_​ministerfreelandoncanad asforeignpolicypriorities.html; Government of Canada, Strong Secure Engaged: Canada’s Defence Policy (Ottawa, 2017), 50; Canadian Armed Forces, Pan-​Domain Force Employment Concept (May 2020), 11–​ 13; Australian Department of Defence, 2016 Australian Defence White Paper (Canberra, 2016), 40; Chief of Army, Army in Motion: Chief of Army Strategic Guidance 2019 (Canberra, 2019), 12. New Zealand’s most recent defence policy also declared defence of the current international order as a “vital interest”. It acknowledged, “The increasing importance of spheres of influence, with some states pursuing greater influence in ways that, at times, challenge international norms”: New Zealand Government, Strategic Defence Policy Statement 2018 (Wellington, 2018), 6–​7. 17 There has been a robust debate about the effectiveness of Chinese anti-​access and area denial capabilities in the First Island Chain in International Security. See Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/​Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia”, International Security, 41/​1(2016), 7–​48; Andrew S. Erickson, Evan Braden Montgomery, Craig Neuman, Stephen Biddle, and Ivan Oelrich, “Correspondence. How Good Are China’s Antiaccess/​Area-​Denial Capabilities?” Ibid., 41/​4(2017), 202–​13. Also see Bryan Clark and Timothy A. Walton, Taking Back the Seas: Transforming the U.S. Surface Fleet for Decision-​ Centric Warfare (Washington, DC, 2019), 10–​17; Thomas G. Mahnken, Travis Sharp, Billy Fabian, and Peter Kouretsos, Tightening the Chain: Implementing a Strategy of Maritime Pressure in the Western Pacific (Washington, DC, 2019), 13–​15. 18 Similar to the Chinese system, there is a debate about the effectiveness of Russia’s A2/​AD bubble. See Michael Kofman, “It’s Time to Talk about A2/​AD: Rethinking the Russian Military Challenge”, (5 September 2019): https://​waront​hero​cks.com/​2019/​09/​its-​time-​to-​talk-​about-​a2-​ad-​ret​hink​ing-​ the-​russ​ian-​milit​ary-​challe​nge/​; Robert Dalsjö, Christofer Berglund, and Michael Jonsson, Bursting the Bubble: Russian A2/​AD in the Baltic Sea Region: Capabilities, Countermeasures, and Implications, Report by the Swedish Defence Research Agency, FOI-​R-​4651-​SE (March 2019), 25–​44; Yuri Lapaiev, “Russia’s Black Sea Dominance Strategy –​A Blend of Military and Civilian Assets”, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 16/​193(2019): https://​jamest​own.org/​ program/​russias-​black-​sea-​dominance-​strategy-​ a-​blend-​of-​military-​and-​civilian-​assets/​; Defense Intelligence Agency, Russia Military Power: Building a Military to Support Great Power Aspirations (Washington, DC, 2017), 33–​35. 19 Ashley Townshend, Brendan Thomas-​Noone, and Matilda Steward, Averting Crisis: American Strategy, Military Spending and Collective Defence in the Indo-​Pacific (Sydney, 2019), 9–​22. 20 See the discussion of Great Power war in Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., Protracted Great-​Power War: A Preliminary Assessment (Washington, DC, 2020). 21 Ibid., 2. 22 Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 219, points out: “The accuracy of such estimates is not merely uncertain but actually indeterminate, because that combat potential is measurable only in the reality of specific forms of warfare that may never happen”. 23 John Mearsheimer’s historical case studies of conventional deterrence provide a helpful framework for understanding the cost-​r isk analysis of aggressors. Cost, he argues, is directly linked to the probability of success, as “the attacker’s aim is not merely success but also rapid achievement of objectives on the battlefield”. What is interesting in terms of the aggressor’s calculations are defensive capability of the defender and the potential for a prolonged conflict. John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY, 1983), 24, holds that if a more prolonged conflict appears possible, even if ultimate success appears likely, the heavier costs of the protracted nature of conflict will likely deter the aggressor. Cf. Edward Rhodes, “Conventional Deterrence”, Comparative Strategy, 19/​3(2000), 226–​34; John Stone, “Conventional Deterrence and Credibility”, Contemporary Security Policy, 33/​1(2012), 108–​23. 24 In a binary adversarial relationship, the objective of deterrence for Actor A is to threaten the use of military power to punish in retaliation for action taken by Actor B against Actor A or, through defensive means, deny any perceived benefit that Actor B might seek to attain by attacking Actor A. Under

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Michael Roi extended deterrence, the adversarial relationship changes in that Actor A now seeks to deter Actor B from attacking a protégé –​Actor C. Extended deterrence thus involves a slightly different approach to signalling than a more direct, binary adversarial relationship. See Paul Huth and Bruce Russett, “What makes Deterrence Work: Cases from 1900–​1980”, World Politics, 36/​4(1984), 496–​526 on the nature of extended deterrence. 25 Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., Archipelagic Defense: The Japan-​U.S. Alliance and Preserving Peace and Stability in the Western Pacific (Tokyo, 2017). 26 Ibid., 62–​99. 27 See the RAND studies, based on a series of war games, on defending the Baltic States against a conventional Russian incursion: David Shlapak and Michael Johnson, Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank: Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics (Santa Monica, CA, 2016); Scott Boston, Michael Johnson, Nathan Beauchamp-​Mustafaga, and Yvonne K. Crane, Assessing the Conventional Force Imbalance in Europe. Implications for Countering Russian Local Superiority (Santa Monica, CA, 2018), 6. Also see R.D. Hooker, Jr., How To Defend the Baltic States (Washington, DC, 2019); Alexander Lanosza and Michael A. Hunzeker, Conventional Deterrence and Landpower in Northeastern Europe (Carlisle, PA, 2019). 28 Morgan builds on the pioneering writings of Herman Kahn. See Forrest E. Morgan, “Dancing with the Bear: Managing Escalation in a Conflict with Russia”, Proliferation Papers, No. 40(2012), 19–​26; Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (New Brunswick, NJ, 2012), 4. Deliberate escalation occurs when a participant intentionally takes action that “it knows will cross one or more of an opponent’s escalation thresholds”. Inadvertent escalation happens “when one belligerent deliberately undertakes an action that it does not consider escalatory, but the action is perceived as such by an opponent”. Finally, “accidental escalation is unanticipated, but instead of being an unexpected result of deliberate action, it is the consequence of events that were not intended in the first place. Such events might be the results of pure accidents, such as sinking a ship belonging to a neutral state due to misidentification, or bombing the wrong target due to a navigation error or outdated map”. 29 Kahn, On Escalation, 3. 30 Should the United States face two Great Power conflicts simultaneously, it would be severely “overstretched” insists Hal Brands and Evan Braden Montgomery. They also remain sceptical that, even with the assistance of allies, the United States can manage challenges beyond a single region at a time without increasing investments in hard power capabilities. Hal Brands and Evan Braden Montgomery, “One War Is Not Enough: Strategy and Force Planning for Great Power Competition”, Strategist, 3/​2(2020), 80–​92. 31 There are interesting historical parallels with the situation Britain faced at the end of the nineteenth century in confronting several Great Power challengers in multiple regions. Britain sought allies to address its global weaknesses and resolve its interlocking imperial defence problems. See B.J.C. McKercher, “Diplomatic Equipoise: The Lansdowne Foreign Office, the Russo-​Japanese War of 1904–​1905 and the Global Balance of Power”, Canadian Journal of History, 24/​3(1989), 299–​302, 337–​339; Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–​1917 (NY, 1996). 32 Ruchir Sharma argues that the 2010s were a great decade for American economic recovery. In addition to holding on firmly to its 25 per cent share of global GDP, the United States dollar extended its stranglehold on global financial transactions –​90 per cent done in USD –​and loans –​75 per cent borrowed in USD. Ruchir Sharma, “The Comeback Nation: U.S. Economic Supremacy Has Repeatedly Proved Declinists Wrong”, Foreign Affairs (May/​June 2020): www. foreignaffairs.com/​ articles/​united-​states/​2020-​03-​31/​comeback-​nation. 33 The figures are for 2018 and come from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2019 Yearbook summary: www.sipri.org/​sites/​default/​files/​2019-​08/​yb19_​summary_​eng_​1.pdf. 34 Thomas G. Mahnken, Ross Babbage, and Toshi Yoshihara, Countering Comprehensive Coercion: Competitive Strategies against Authoritarian Political Warfare (Washington, DC, 2018), 3–​8. 35 Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (NY, 2018), 145.

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30 THE MIDDLE EAST Strategic and Military Balance of Power Ash Rossiter and Christopher Bolan

The modern Middle East has rarely enjoyed periods of stability or peace. Yet the decade since the so-​called 2011 Arab Spring uprisings –​a turning point in the region’s history –​has been more tumultuous than usual. To casual observers and area specialists alike, the pace of change in the Middle East since 2011 and the scale of violence can seem bewildering. It includes a brutal, decade-​long Syrian civil war displacing one-​half the country’s population, the sudden rise and fall of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-​Sham and other violent jihadi groups that thrived in the vacuum created by conflict in Syria and governmental dysfunction in Iraq, and internecine violence in Yemen and Libya that destroyed them as functioning states. Suffusing everything is an ongoing sectarian struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for regional hegemony. It would be hard to disagree with the argument characterising the hallmarks of the “new Middle East” as those of “rebellion and repression, proxy wars, sectarian strife, the rise of the Islamic State, and intraregional polarization”.1 Any story about the Middle East over the past decade is one where conflict is all too often at the centre. Indeed, political violence appears on the decline in every region of the world except the Middle East and North Africa. For this reason, this chapter unpacks both the endogenous and exogenous forces driving this conflict. Indeed, the underlying conditions that produced the so-​called “Arab Uprisings” –​the changes they brought and the deep fissures exposed –​have not disappeared. Neither have the trans-​boundary, ideational forces fuelling much of the ethno-​religious violence in the region’s modern history. What makes the Middle East especially volatile today is additional pressure exerted from structural change at the international system level –​a return to multipolarity.2 For the first time since the Cold War ended, Great Power politics is returning to the Middle East as a declining United States and a resurgent Russia reposition themselves in the region whilst a rising China is increasingly making its economic and diplomatic presence felt. In international politics, the units of greatest capability set the scene for others as well as for themselves. This fact is doubly important for the Middle East as the Great Powers are far from indifferent about the fate of this region. Rather than separating sources of change at the domestic level from those operating at the sub-​system and system level, this analysis looks at the interplay between them. Indeed, the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East is more complicated today because regional and extra-​regional actors are stoking the flames of ongoing conflicts. It adds a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-37

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further layer of complexity to enduring intra-​regional competition, most notably that between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Arab Uprisings that swept the region beginning in late 2010 exposed the scale of contemporary domestic political, economic, and social challenges confronting state governments. Whilst no two countries in the region are alike, many shared troubling signs of state fragility, as they simply proved unable to provide the basic needs for growing numbers of citizens –​ adequate housing, sanitation, health care, education, and jobs –​to combat poverty, narrow the gap between rich and poor, and generally improve the standard of living.3 A 2011 World Bank report detailed several drivers of Middle Eastern state fragility and conflict, including shrinking per capita incomes, economies overly dependent on energy resource exports, large and growing youth cohorts, stifling political repression, and poor governance.4 The impact of these protests, however, were not felt equally across the region, creating new intra-​regional fault lines as the Arab republics struggled whilst the Arab monarchies emerged relatively unscathed. In rapid succession, protests quickly saw the departure of aging pro-​American autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. However, other autocrats were not so quick to yield to mounting public calls for domestic political and economic reforms. In Yemen, Syria, and Libya, a combination of domestic protests, governmental repression, and the intervention of outside actors backing competing local groups and militias have culminated in civil wars that have decimated these societies and fostered broken and fragile states. In Egypt, a military coup in 2013 quickly reversed the early promise of free and fair elections in 2011. Whilst Egyptian state institutions remain intact, the country suffers under the yoke of a repressive regime conducting an aggressive campaign against any perceived political opponents, including by arbitrary arrests, detentions, torture, and extra-​judicial killings.5 In Algeria, widespread protests and demonstrations in urban areas eventually compelled octogenarian Abelaziz Boutefleka to withdraw his candidacy for a fifth term as president; as yet, there is no meaningful political reform of the ruling caste –​Le Pouvoir. For its part, whilst proving strikingly resilient despite absorbing millions of Syrian refugees, Lebanon now confronts a traumatic financial crisis shaking the government to its core.6 Whilst virtually every country in the region experienced some level of protests, those in the Arab monarchies were relatively mild and posed no serious threat to the ruling regimes. Having the advantage of large financial reserves, rulers in the wealthy Arab Gulf exporting countries proved especially adept by moving quickly to pacify their publics and reinforce their positions by providing $150 billion in social welfare and economic subsidies to their citizens.7 Meanwhile, King Abdullah II and King Mohammad VI in Jordan and Morocco, respectively, manoeuvred successfully to secure sizeable amounts of outside economic assistance whilst undertaking a series of limited domestic political and economic reforms that have thus far been sufficient to placate their publics. The region today is confronting several overlapping crises with important implications. Certainly, all regional governments will need to address more effectively the continued demands for political and economic reforms echoed in the streets during the Arab Uprisings. Regional governments will also need to confront the generational tasks of repairing the physical, economic, social, and psychological damage wrought by civil wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Iraq. In Syria alone, estimates indicate that between $250 and $400 billion will be required in reconstruction assistance.8 In addition, the spread of COVID could well plunge the region into further despair, killing hundreds of thousands and contributing to economic contractions of between 10 and 30 per cent.9 These challenges are causing some seasoned experts openly to wonder if the region can recover.10 The hard reality is that without massive international intervention, many countries will struggle, leaving the region vulnerable to further state collapse and exploitation by a range of internal and external state and non-​state actors. 368

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Leaders will also need to confront the changing geopolitical realities of the region. First, virtually every state in the region remains weaker and more vulnerable to both internal domestic pressures and external actors. Second, Sunni-​Shi’a sectarian conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran has intensified and metastasised throughout the region, fuelling conflict and competition with particularly devastating consequences in Yemen and Syria. Third, the weaknesses of the Arab states have contributed to the relative rise of the region’s non-​Arab states of Israel, Turkey, and Iran. Fourth, there is a further internal regional axis of competition emerging between those states viewing Islamic political movements as an existential threat –​led by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates [UAE], and Egypt –​and those supporting these movements as a natural expression of Moslem identity –​the Qatar-​Turkey bloc. Finally, there has been an internal regional shift power away from traditional Arab centres of power in Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad, and Damascus towards the Arab Gulf states. These internal fractures and divisions provide ample opportunities for external state actors to intervene in the region for better or for worse. At the global level, this is playing out by intensified competition for influence amongst the United States, Russia, and China. This competition has arguably contributed to disastrous outcomes by prolonging civil wars in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Libya. At the same time, co-​operation amongst these outside Powers could be a constructive ingredient in developing political resolutions to these same conflicts. Moreover, a co-​ordinated and co-​operative approach involving these outside Powers could help to ease sectarian competition, foster much needed reconstruction, and facilitate international support for pressing regional political and economic reforms. In the past, when determining what drove events in the Middle East, one might examine the actions taken by governments in Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad, what their leaders thought, and what they intended next to do. Today, these Arab capitals are no longer regional power centres: Damascus is nearing the end of an exacting civil war; whilst seeming to change, Cairo has focused almost exclusively on domestic political and security issues since 2011; Baghdad has increasingly looked inward since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003. That these three major Arab countries are no longer major players is a fundamental geostrategic departure from the historical norm. From being the most dynamic and significant actor in the Arab world from the 1950s to making little impact on regional affairs, Egypt’s exit from the geopolitical stage is remarkable. The country remains fragile and, since Abdel Fateh Al-​Sissi came to power in summer 2013, largely dependent on regular financial supplements from the Arab Gulf States, especially Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and, to a lesser extent, Kuwait. For a country with a 5,000-​year history and modern self-​image anchored to its independence, reliance on Arab world parvenus must be difficult to stomach. Nothing reflects the dramatic shift in power in the Arab world from traditional Powers to the Gulf monarchies more than Egyptian dependence on its Arab Gulf allies. However, the ability of Cairo’s Gulf backers to get Egypt to align its foreign policy with their own –​especially on the issues of Qatar and Iran –​has produced modest results at best and is now probably subject to diminishing returns.11 Nevertheless, one of the most striking features of the modern Middle East, compared to previous eras, is the rise of the Arab Gulf states and their increasingly activist role in regional and extra-​regional affairs. In sum, the region’s centre of gravity has tilted from the Levant toward the Gulf. For more than one-​half century, the hydrocarbon rich Gulf States have benefitted from staggering sums of money on account of their geological endowments. They have created not only wealthy welfare states but have used this fortune –​to various degrees of effectiveness –​to shape events within the region and beyond.12 The rise of global oil prices after the 1973 Arab-​Israeli war allowed the Middle East –​especially the oil-​producing monarchies –​to 369

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assume a central place in the world’s economic system. Even taking into account a lowering of oil’s market value, Gulf State wealth contrasts with economic stagnation elsewhere in the Middle East. Moreover, this economic power is starker given that the other oil-​rich Middle Eastern Powers –​Iraq, Iran, and Libya –​have seen oil revenues dwindle precipitously because of conflict and sanctions. Buoyed by oil wealth and increasingly prone to intervene in the region’s political and security affairs, the Arab Gulf States and especially Saudi Arabia, partnered closely with the UAE, are a major force in the Middle East’s geopolitical structure. Although Gulf activism is not entirely novel –​Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, for example, have long used oil wealth for foreign policy ends –​the reasons for a more interventionist approach are complex. They entail a response largely to the Arab Uprisings, the perceived void created by the diminishing role of traditional Middle Eastern Powers like Egypt and Iraq, the perception of American disengagement from the region, and heightened Iranian involvement throughout the area. Since the Arab Uprisings, the ruling families in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi have proved willing to take reactive –​and even pre-​emptive –​action to stem what they consider existential and contagious threats to their survival. Both believe they face a cocktail of material and ideological threats to their rule. Intervention in Bahrain in 2011, for example, undertaken by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to oppose Iran, countered calls for democratic representation and Shi’a political activism, a particularly sensitive issue for Saudi Arabia and its oil-​bearing Eastern Province. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE consider Iran their main bête noire and believe themselves locked in long-​term competition with Tehran. Despite expending considerable blood and treasure to counter Iran and Shiism more generally –​the two often thought of as the same –​ Saudi Arabia and the UAE have steadily been losing ground. Lebanon and Syria were essentially lost to the Iranians in the 1980s; the syrian civil war served to move the country even further out of the Saudi orbit; and the American invasion of Iraq and subsequent elections all but guaranteed Iranian penetration of the Iraqi political scene. The situation in Yemen is less clear-​cut, given localised issues at the heart of the conflict, but with Saudi Arabia and the UAE spending billions of dollars and the Iranians spending a fraction of this to keep its allies from collapsing, the cost-​exchange favours Tehran. Consequentially for the region, Arab Gulf interventionism lacked unity. Deep divisions have emerged between Qatar, backed by Turkey, on one side; and Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, on the other, with Kuwait and Oman –​the two remaining members of the Gulf Co-​operation Council [GCC] –​taking more neutral positions. Indeed, this division has come to exert a pernicious influence over many of the region’s conflicts, including in Libya and Syria. In Libya, regional rivalries manifest in a setting of domestic conflict through military and financial support for a plethora of armed factions.13 In turn, Turkey’s increased military intervention was a reaction to the growing support for General Khalifa Hafter, commander of the Tobruk-​ based Libyan National Army, from the UAE and Egypt, as well as Russia and France. Much of this intra-​Gulf division has its roots in the Arab Uprisings, where Doha became a magnet for Islamist groups, especially those associated with Moslem Brotherhood-​ type movements, seeking finance and, in the cases of Syria and Libya, military support. Saudi focus during the uprisings –​aside from Bahrain –​was Syria, where Riyadh sought to cultivate opposition elements operating outside the scope of the Moslem Brotherhood. The UAE leadership, in particular Abu Dhabi’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Zayed, have deep aversion to political Islam in all its forms, seeing it as a direct and existential threat to their political legitimacy. The UAE proved uncompromising towards the Moslem Brotherhood in most post-​Arab Spring arenas, especially Egypt, Yemen, and Libya. The UAE is also extremely concerned about Saudi stability and sees the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, as the key. 370

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The perceived need to buttress Saudi Arabia explains in good part UAE participation in the Yemen war. Ultimately, for all their fabulous wealth and impressive military kit, the small GCC states are dependent for their survival on others. Moreover, they are still mostly reliant on continuing to earn their income from hydrocarbon resources, despite major efforts to diversify their economies. If oil’s centrality declines in the Middle East, it will probably again change the configuration of Middle Eastern power with a return perhaps of the more populous and industrialised states as players of consequence. In the meantime, the Arab Gulf States will try to set the geopolitical agenda in the region as evidenced by the UAE and Bahrain normalising relations with Israel as part of the August 2020 Abraham Accords. The turmoil and uncertainties generated by the Arab uprisings and the civil wars have generated any number of opportunities for the non-​Arab countries in the region to extend and assert their influence. Iran has created an extensive network of mainly Shi’a militant proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen as useful tools to undermine the stability of Arab regimes.14 Under the leadership of President Recep Erdoğan, Turkey has gradually adopted an assertive nationalist foreign policy seeking an expanded regional leadership role. Meanwhile, Israel enjoys growing freedom of action as neighbouring states have either signed peace treaties –​Egypt and Jordan; are mired in civil war –​Syria; or are on the verge of being overcome by internal societal cleavages and massive economic challenges –​Jordan and Lebanon. Israel also benefits from the global and regional marginalisation of the Palestinian issue as the recently concluded normalisation agreements with the UAE and Bahrain demonstrate. These emerging non-​Arab centres of power are bound to exert growing influence over the geopolitics of the region. Iran is one of the largest states in the region with a population exceeding 80 million –​ second only to that of Egypt. According to Central Intelligence Agency estimates, it possesses the world’s fourth largest proven oil reserves and second largest natural gas reserves.15 It also benefits from a long history as a unified state, enjoying a strong sense of nationalism grounded in Persian culture and traditions. Consequently, Iran believes that it should play an influential role in the region. However, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 placed Tehran and its Arab Gulf neighbours on a collision course, creating a Sunni-​Shi’a rift that fuelled the Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni, and Iraqi civil wars and has the potential to ignite a larger regional conflagration. Today Western and Arab leaders express alarm about Iranian efforts to undermine regional stability. Perhaps of most immediate concern to Gulf leaders is Tehran’s efforts to build a regional network of proxy militias from Iran’s historically deep ties to fellow Shi’a communities in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.16 By funding and equipping these partners with advanced missiles, rockets, and drones, Tehran retains the capability to attack major Arab and Israeli population centres and critical infrastructure with a plausible degree of deniability. Simultaneously, Tehran derives at least some measure of deterrence from external attack with the implicit ability to order these proxies into action. Western and Arab leaders have worked to restrict Iran’s growing civil nuclear capabilities, limit its burgeoning arsenal of ballistic missiles, and deter it from closing the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz to international shipping. Despite these efforts, however, Iran is steadily progressing on all of these fronts as Tehran expands its civil nuclear programme, makes steady advances in its missile, drone, and space programmes, and demonstrates a willingness to attack international shipping transiting the Strait. Nonetheless, there are several inherent obstacles to Iranian aspirations for regional hegemony. With its Persian history and Shi’a religious identity, Iran is a distinct ethnic and religious minority in a region dominated by Sunni Arab Powers. Ideologically, its campaign to spread its revolution across the region a manifest failure, Iran remains the region’s sole Shi’a theocracy and the theological innovation of “rule by the clerics” enjoys little regional 371

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popularity.17 Moreover, militarily, the Arab Gulf States maintain significant advantages over their Iranian nemesis. For decades, they have fallen beneath the security umbrella provided by the United States and its European allies; and they have benefited immensely from billions of dollars in Western arms sales providing technologically advanced weapons systems far superior to those of Iran.18 Additionally, these same Iranian activities have generated strong international and regional opposition. For four decades, a complex web of international, European, and American sanctions have targeted Tehran’s support for terrorist organisations, its development of nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, and its abhorrent human rights record at home. More recently, massive demonstrations in late 2019 in Iraq, Lebanon, and inside Iran protesting Iranian adventurism abroad and failed domestic economic policies suggest that Iranian activities are creating a strong backlash both within the region and at home.19 In Turkey under Erdoğan’s leadership, a deepening sense of nationalism, Islamism, and anti-​Westernism are merging to produce a foreign policy more aggressive and assertive than traditionally the case,20 something seen in Turkey’s multiple military interventions into Syria, northern Iraq, Qatar, and, most recently, Libya. In the religious sphere, Erdoğan has claimed that Turkey is “the only country that can lead the Muslim world”.21 This assertion of Islamic leadership manifests in policies and programmes that include a global campaign of mosque-​ building, backing Islamist groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood, and supporting a range of Islamic humanitarian non-​governmental organisations.22 In terms of Turkey’s increasingly anti-​ Western stance, Erdoğan’s “suppression of journalists, academics, civil society organisations, and minorities … is inconsistent with the underlying principles of Turkey’s NATO membership”.23 Erdoğan’s decision to purchase Russian air defence missiles –​S-​400s –​and the resulting suspension of Turkey’s participation in the American F-​35 fighter programme are potentially fatal blows to Turkey’s position in the NATO alliance. Yet Turkish ambitions to assert greater Middle Eastern leadership sees strong regional and international resistance to Erdoğan’s foreign policy –​similar to than encountered by Iran. In a telling observation, there are “historical antibodies” at work in the Middle East as “many Arabs, like many Greeks, still view Turkey quite negatively as their former colonial overlord”.24 Furthermore, Turkish forces in northwestern Syria have suffered repeated attacks by Syrian government troops who enjoy the backing of both Moscow and Tehran. In the Libya conflict, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, and others oppose Turkey’s military intervention. Ankara’s “Blue Homeland” strategy seeking extended maritime claims in the Eastern Mediterranean finds similar opposition by a host of regional players including Israel, Greece, and Cyprus.25 Meanwhile, Erdoğan’s embrace of political Islamist movements, including the Moslem Brotherhood, has put him at odds with the Arab Gulf countries and Egypt that consider the group an existential threat. Finally, key trading partners in the European Union and United States have punished Turkish behaviour with sanctions.26 Of the non-​Arab Powers in the region, Israel is perhaps the strongest and least encumbered, possessing the region’s most technologically sophisticated and capable military force in no small measure due to more than $140 billion in American military assistance.27 American Congressional legislation literally guarantees Israel’s ability to dominate any potential combination of enemies. Domestically, Palestinian terrorist attacks have become exceedingly rare and Israel’s occupation of key terrain in both the Golan Heights and West Bank has solidified and expanded. Moreover, UAE and Bahrain decisions to normalise relations signify a potentially significant shift in regional geopolitics as these Gulf states demonstrate a willingness openly to seek Israeli co-​operation in addressing challenges including trade, economic integration, technology, healthcare, energy, agriculture, water, and the environment.28

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Today the most significant threat posed to Israel is distant Iran. Israeli concerns parallel those highlighted by Arab leaders and include Iran’s nuclear activities, ballistic missile arsenal, and regional network of proxy militias. Of immediate concern are 130,000 missiles and rockets possessed by Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy, in southern Lebanon capable of targeting major population centres in northern Israel.29 Additionally, with Israeli leaders declaring that they will not tolerate the presence of Tehran’s forces in Syria, Tel Aviv has conducted over 1,000 airstrikes against Iranian and Iranian-​backed forces there. In Iran itself, perhaps with passive support from the United States, Israel has reportedly undertaken a campaign of covert sabotage targeting Iranian nuclear and missile facilities to delay the prospect of a nuclear-​armed Iran.30 Yet even in this exceptionally permissive strategic environment, Israel will need to overcome significant obstacles if it hopes to achieve full acceptance in the region. The longstanding peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan remain limited to security co-​operation without realising a deeper peace amongst the peoples of these countries. Indeed significant majorities of Arab publics continue to view Israel as a threat rather than a partner.31 Likewise, Israeli pledges to annex portions of the West Bank in defiance of international law have been met with Palestinian threats to end security co-​operation,32 caused Jordan to reconsider its 1994 peace agreement with Israel,33 and provoked stern warnings from Arab diplomats that annexation would endanger any prospect for normalisation.34 As the traditional centres of Arab power in Damascus, Cairo, and Baghdad recede, the relative rise of the non-​Arab states will undoubtedly influence regional developments in novel ways. Iran and Turkey’s advent as regional Powers is compelling Arab states to look for support from any corner, whether American, European, Chinese, Russian, or even Israeli. Continued regional instability will tempt these emerging non-​Arab power centres to intervene in Arab internal affairs by backing competing factions that will only add fuel to civil wars in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Libya; and aggressive Israeli and Iranian military operations in Lebanon and Syria could spiral into a broader regional conflict drawing in global nuclear Powers on opposing sides.35 Meanwhile, several contemporary factors are conspiring to end America’s pre-​eminent position in the region: the geopolitical and economic shift to Asia; questions surrounding the effectiveness of American military power; and growing perceptions of a coming United States disengagement from the region. First, Asia has eclipsed the Middle East in importance as the central pillar of American foreign policy. As early as 2011, Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, observed that “Asia-​Pacific has become a key driver of global politics … [containing] many of the key engines of the global economy” and called for an associated “pivot” away from the Middle East.36 The 2017 American National Security Strategy expressly prioritised “Great Power” competition with a rising China and resurgent Russia whilst limiting American interests in the Middle East to combat terrorism. President Donald Trump repeatedly called for United States military withdrawal from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria whilst criticising American regional partners for not doing enough to guarantee their own security. More recently, President Joe Biden and his senior advisors have argued that the Middle East will be a diminished priority for American national security going forward. At the same time, as advances in energy extraction technology have enabled the United States to become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas whilst significantly reducing its dependence on Middle East energy resources,37 Arab governments, too, have been making their own pivot to Asia. More than 75 per cent of Middle East oil exports now head east to the growing economies in China, Japan, India, and South Korea.38 These twin developments make the Middle East at once less critical to American security interests whilst ties to Asia are increasingly important to regional leaders in the Middle East.

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Second, no amount of American military intervention or commitment has been able to stabilise the region. Afghanistan and Iraq remain weak and failing states despite American military intervention and massive nation-​building campaigns. At the same time, the American-​led global fight against terrorism has had real but limited successes. There has been no subsequent terrorist attack on the scale of 9/​11 against the United States, and an American-​led military campaign destroyed the physical caliphate constructed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Even so, radical Islamic terrorist groups like Al-​Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their offshoots today pose a sophisticated and diffuse threat to Western interests and a continuing one to existing Middle Eastern regimes. More recently, Iran has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to target international shipping in the critical Hormuz Strait, destroy critical oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, and strike exposed American troops operating inside Iraq. These developments have caused many Arab regional leaders to question the effectiveness of United States military power and deterrence. Last, the perception of prospective United States disengagement from the region has created incentives for even traditionally close American partners to intervene actively in the multiple ongoing regional conflicts to advance their own interests independent of Washington’s desires. Yemen serves as perhaps the most prominent example. Despite American reluctance, Saudi military intervention into Yemen has cost the Kingdom $100 billion,39 contributed to making Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian disaster,40 driven the Yemeni Shi’a Houthi minority deeper into the arms of Iran,41 and failed to stop Houthi missile attacks on Saudi military and civilian targets.42 Similarly, Israel is taking advantage of an increasingly permissive security environment to assert its own national security interests more aggressively. In Syria, it launches repeated airstrikes against Iranian targets without apparent repercussion. At home, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to annex major portions of the West Bank in direct defiance of international law and opinion. Meanwhile, Turkey has openly opposed American preferences by purchasing advanced Russian missile defence systems and expanding its military interventions in Syria, Libya, Qatar, and the eastern Mediterranean. China’s rise to the position of the world’s second largest or largest economy –​depending on the measurement criteria –​along with its appetite for energy and growing share of global military spending, is reshaping the international system.43 Russia has returned as a significant military player capable of projecting power into Africa, the Levant, and Latin America. Both Powers are pursuing strategies aimed at eroding America’s strength, diminishing its influence, and undermining its alliances, including in the Middle East. Growing Chinese economic and military power has prompted a re-​assessment of American strategic attention and resources towards the Indo-​Pacific –​although American influence in the Middle East is on the decline, the widely held perception of a United States retreat from the Middle East dramatically overstates reality. Nonetheless, the belief that the United States is a declining Power in the Middle East combined with Russia’s attempts to resuscitate its Great Power status and China’s increasing economic and diplomatic clout have all led to the most unsettled period of Great Power involvement in the region since perhaps the 1960s.44 American dithering over Syria and Russia’s decision to deploy forces there in 2015 –​returning significant Russian military power to the Middle East for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall45 –​ was perhaps the most important marker indicating that the region was entering uncertain times in terms of the involvement of external Powers. Putin is engaged in deliberate efforts to fill any gaps left by Washington, starting with Syria, even if it was never of great strategic importance to the United States. The Russians have been able to use a military presence there to gain outsized influence across the region precisely

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because its military engagement came at a time of America undertaking military withdrawal. In pursuing its Middle Eastern policy, Russia maintains a complex set of relationships. Whilst an important move in recent years has been an effort to build closer ties to Tehran, Moscow is just as invested in building ties to the Sunni states in the region and Israel. Pragmatism governs Russia’s Middle Eastern policy; it is non-​ideological, which gives it considerable flexibility. Moscow has sought improved ties with the GCC states, more successfully with some than others, even whilst co-​operating with Iran; and it has ties with all the major regional players irrespective of their internal politics. Perhaps the most complicated of all Russia’s regional relationships is that with Turkey as illustrated clearly in Syria. Here they are on different sides of the conflict with Putin backing the Bashar al-​Assad regime and Erdoğan supporting the opposition. China under Xi Jinping has divorced itself from the previous posture of “peaceful rise” in favour of a more assertive and nationalist strategic approach.46 It is difficult to say what this means for the Middle East. The largest consumer of Middle Eastern oil, China has a huge stake in the flow of petroleum from the region –​its relationship with the Middle East revolving around energy demand and the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI] launched in 2013. The centrality of economic co-​operation and development to China’s engagement with the Middle East reflects in two key Chinese government documents: the 2016 Arab Policy Paper and the 2015 Vision and Actions on Jointly Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.47 The co-​operation framework they outline focuses on energy, infrastructure construction, trade, and investment in the Middle East. Although China and Iran have recently signed a vast economic and military partnership, the situation does not see Great Powers aligned with specific regional ones.48 China –​also true of India –​pursues commercial interests primarily in all countries of the region and tries to avoid siding with either Iran or the Arab Gulf States against the others. However, China is likely to be increasingly reliant on energy from the region in the coming years. Given the Gulf monarchies’ close ties to the United States, Beijing is concerned that Washington could put pressure on them to disrupt the flow of oil into China: “in the event of a conflict in East Asia involving the United States, the ability to control Chinese access to Gulf energy would be a strategic plus”.49 This concern increases the perceived importance of Iran that China sees as more resistant to American policy. In response, Beijing has begun investing in instruments that over time may build Chinese influence in the region. With its main strategic rival able to threaten its energy security, China also has cause to expand its naval presence across the Indian Ocean –​in turn, a process that could eventually lead to a larger Chinese security presence in the Middle East. A number of Middle Eastern states are already adapting to this geopolitical change. In the face of inconsistent American policies and an eye to a future with greater Chinese regional power and influence, Middle Eastern leaders have been receptive to Chinese outreach. The BRI addresses their domestic development concerns and concurrently signals Beijing’s intention for greater investment in the region. The Gulf Arab States, the traditional American allies, have begun to hedge by turning to other external Powers for support whilst remaining dependent on the United States security guarantee: the United States is on its way out. Leaders in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Manama, and Muscat understand what is happening. They have been worrying about the US commitment to their security for some time and … making overtures to China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey.50

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The Obama Administration’s pursuit of an Iranian nuclear accord no doubt stimulated such activity –​the Gulf States feared it would lead to an improved overall relationship between Washington and their Iranian rival. Iran’s relations with Russia are closer than its ties to any other Great Power, due mainly to their joint intervention in Syria on behalf of the Assad regime. Still, neither Tehran nor Moscow wish to appear as the exclusive ally of the other. Indeed, Iran has recently signed a wider ranging strategic partnership with Beijing. The Iraqi government had close ties with Iran, but also with the United States, despite continued tension in Iranian-​American relations. Whilst Britain and France had security ties to the GCC states, they pursued improved economic relations with Iran along with other European countries. Greater involvement in the region from external major Powers is consequential for several reasons. First, Great Power rivalry can, and is, shaping existing conflicts, something most evident in Syria. But it is also significant for the emerging policies of Middle Eastern states. Libya, for example, is quickly becoming a site for Great Power competition, as the United States and Europe grow increasingly concerned about Russia gaining a foothold along the southern Mediterranean littoral. Second, military threats emanating from the region take on their greatest significance when bringing a Great Power rival into the equation. Iran on its own is a problem for the United States; Iran in conjunction with Russia –​including Russian military technology and nuclear knowledge –​becomes a very serious problem. Last, the trajectory of Great Power competition will mean a great deal for the future strategic landscape of the region. Nonetheless, Russia, China, or India for that matter will not fill the same type of role in the Middle East that the United States has played for several decades. In conclusion, a new geopolitical structure is evolving in the Middle East. It currently has six primary countries of greatest import –​Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Israel, the United States, and Russia. Others, like Egypt, maintain some of their past influence, although at significantly diminished levels. Whilst not yet playing a central role in directing regional affairs, but building its economic and diplomatic ties across the region, China is poised to be more influential in the future. The Middle East’s geopolitical sands are likely to shift still further with these seismic changes in the international system level as the post-​Cold War’s unipolar moment ends. How the persistent internal economic and social challenges facing most regional governments will influence the region’s trajectory is difficult to discern. The Middle East’s future post-​COVID is uncertain. Countries such as Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia have shown economic resilience despite the grave situation caused by the pandemic, as well as earlier compounding crises. One thing is clear: much of the region will remain mired in turmoil and violence –​as evinced by the seemingly intractable conflicts of Syria and Yemen. External actors and Powers have the capacity to ease or exacerbate these internal fractures and challenges. Unfortunately, evidence today suggests that these Powers will be inclined toward competition rather than co-​operation portending a dark and difficult road ahead for many in the region.

Notes 1 James L. Gelvin, The New Middle East: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2017). 2 On what multipolarity might mean for the Middle East, see Mehran Kamrava, “Multipolarity and Instability in the Middle East”, Orbis, 62/​4(2018), 598–​616. 3 Farzaneh Roudi-​Fahimi, “Population Trends and Challenges in the Middle East and North Africa”, Population Reference Bureau (1 December 2001): www.prb.org/​populationtrendsandchallengesinthemidd leeastandnorthafrica/​. 4 World Bank, “Reducing Conflict Risk: Conflict, Fragility, and Development in the Middle East and North Africa” (December 2011): www.worldbank.org/​content/​dam/​Worldbank/​document/​MNA/​ WDR2011-​Conflict-​MENA.pdf.

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Middle East: Strategic Balance of Power 5 Human Rights Watch, “Egypt, Events of 2019” (2020): www.hrw.org/​world-​report/​2020/​country-​ chapters/​egypt#. 6 Ben Hubbard, “Lebanon’s Economic Crisis Explodes, Threatening Decades of Prosperity”, NY Times (10 May 2020): www.nytimes.com/​2020/​05/​10/​world/​middleeast/​lebanon-​economic-​crisis.html. 7 Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, “To Stave Off Arab Spring Revolts, Saudi Arabia and Fellow Gulf Countries Spend $150 billion” (21 September 2011): https://​knowle​dge.whar​ton.upenn. edu/​arti​cle/​to-​stave-​off-​arab-​spr​ing-​revo​lts-​saudi-​ara​bia-​and-​fel​low-​gulf-​countr ​ies-​spend-​150-​ bill​ion/​. 8 Joseph Daher, “The Paradox of Syria’s Reconstruction”, Carnegie Middle East Center (4 September 2019): https://​carne​gie-​mec.org/​2019/​09/​04/​para​dox-​of-​syria-​s-​rec​onst​ruct​ion-​pub-​79773. 9 Paul Salem, “The Grim Year Ahead”, Middle East Institute (6 April 2020): www.mei.edu/​blog/​ grim-​year-​ahead. 10 Robin Wright, “Can the Middle East Recover from the Coronavirus and Collapsing Oil Prices?”, New Yorker (8 May 2020). 11 David Butter, Egypt and the Gulf: Allies and Rivals (London, 2020). 12 Rory Miller, Desert Kingdoms to Global Powers: The Rise of the Arab Gulf (New Haven, CT, 2019). 13 Divisions within Libya and foreign intervention in the war intensified after a military offensive launched against the United Nations-​backed government in Tripoli, the Government of National Accord, in April 2019. See Anna Jacobs, “Gulf Rivalries and Great Power Competition in Libya”, AGSIW (8 June 2020): https://​agsiw.org/​gulf-​r ivalr​ies-​and-​great-​power-​comp​etit​ion-​in-​libya/​. 14 Alex Vatanka, “Iran’s Use of Shi’a Militant Proxies”, Middle East Institute (June 2018): www.mei.edu/​ sites/​default/​files/​publications/​Vatanka_​PolicyPaper.pdf. 15 Central Intelligence Agency, “Iran”, in idem, The World Factbook (nd): www.cia.gov/​the-​world-​ factbook/​countries/​iran/​. 16 Vatanka, “Shi’a Militant Proxies”. 17 “Iran Was Not Destined to Become A Regional Hegemon”, Economist (9 February 2019): www.economist.com/​middle-​east-​and-​africa/​2019/​02/​09/​iran-​was-​not-​predestined-​to-​becomea-​regional-​hegemon. 18 Anthony H. Cordesman and Nicholas Harrington, “The Arab Gulf States and Iran: Military Spending, Modernization, and the Shifting Military Balance”, Center for Strategic and International Studies (12 December 2018): www.csis.org/​analysis/​arab-​gulf-​states-​and-iran-militaryspending-​modernization-​and-​shifting-​military-​balance. 19 Kasra Aarabi, “Iran’s Regional Influence Campaign Is Starting to Flop”, Foreign Policy (11 December 2019): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2019/​12/​11/​colla​pse-​iran​ian-​shi​ism-​iraq-​leba​non/​. 20 Nicholas Danforth, “The Nonsense of ‘Neo-​Ottomanism’ ”, War on the Rocks (29 May 2020): https://​ waront​hero​cks.com/​2020/​05/​the-​nonse​nse-​of-​neo-​ott​oman​ism/​. 21 “Only Turkey Can Lead the Muslim World, Says Erdogan”, Ahval (15 October 2018): https://​ahvaln​ ews.com/​islam/​only-​tur​key-​can-​lead-​mus​lim-​world-​says-​erdo​gan. 22 Gonul Tol, “Turkey’s Bid for Religious Leadership”, Foreign Affairs (10 January 2019): www. foreignaffairs.com/​articles/​turkey/​2019-​01-​10/​turkeys-​bid-​religious-​leadership. 23 Steven A. Cook, “Neither Friend Nor Foe: The Future of U.S.-​Turkey Relations”, Council on Foreign Relations (November 2018): http://​cfr.org/​Fut​ureU​STur​key?utm​_​med​ium=​email&utm​_​sou​ rce=​news_​rele​ase&utm_​cont​ent=​111​318. 24 “Erdogan’s Empire: The Evolution of Turkish Foreign Policy”, Washington Institute (27 September 2019): www.washingtoninstitute.org/p​ olicy-a​ nalysis/v​ iew/​erdogans-​empire-​the-​evolution-​of-​turkishforeign-​policy. 25 Ryan Gingeras, “Blue Homeland: The Heated Politics behind Turkey’s New Maritime Strategy”, War on the Rocks (2 June 2020): https://​waront​hero​cks.com/​2020/​06/​blue-​homel​and-​the-​hea​ted-​polit​ics-​ beh​ind-​turk​eys-​new-​marit​ime-​strat​egy/​. 26 Ross L. Denton, Nicholas F. Coward et al., “US and EU Authorize New Sanctions Targeting Turkey”, Sanctions and Export Controls Update, Baker McKenzie (18 October 2019): https://​sancti​onsn​ews. bakerm​cken​zie.com/​us-​and-​eu-​author​ize-​new-​sancti​ons-​target​ing-​tur​key/​. 27 “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel”, Congressional Research Service (7 August 2019): www.everycrsreport.com/​ reports/​RL33222.html#Content. 28 For details, see “READ: Full text of the Abraham Accords and Agreements Between Israel and the United Arab Emirates/​Bahrain”, CNN (15 September 2020): www.cnn.com/​2020/​ 09/​15/​politics/​ israel-​uae-​abraham-​accords-​documents/​index.html.

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Ash Rossiter and Christopher Bolan 29 Shaan Shaikh, “Missiles and Rockets of Hezbollah”, Missile Threat, Center for Strategic and International Studies (26 June 2018, last modified 27 September 2019): https://​missil​ethr​eat.csis.org/​ coun​try/​hez​boll​ahs-​roc​ket-​arse​nal/​. 30 David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, and Ronen Bergman, “Long-​Planned and Bigger than Thought: Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Program”, NY Times (10 July 2020). 31 “Israel or Iran: Which is the Greater Perceived Threat?” Arab Barometer (11 September 2019): www. arabbarometer.org/​2019/​09/​israel-​or-​iran-​which-​is-​the-​greater-​perceived-​threat/​. 32 David M. Halbfinger and Ben Hubbard, “Arab Envoy Warns Israelis that Annexation Threatens Warming Ties”, NY Times (19 June 2020): www.nytimes.com/​2020/​06/​12/​world/​ middleeast/​west-​ bank-​annexation-​israel-​uae.html. 33 “Jordan to Mull Cancelling Peace Deal If Israel Annexes”, Times of Israel (7 June 2020): www. timesofisrael.com/​jordan-​to-​mull-​canceling-​peace-​deal-​if-​israel-​annexes-​report/​. 34 Halbfinger and Hubbard, “Arab Envoy Warns Israelis”. 35 Judah Ari Gross, “Top Israeli Think Tank Warns: Potential for War with Iran is Growing”, Times of Israel (6 January 2020): www.timesofisrael.com/​top-​israeli-​think-​tank-​warns-​potential-​for-​war-​with-​ iran-​is-​growing/​#gs.gg20km. 36 Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century”, Foreign Policy (11 October 2011): https://​foreig​npol​icy. com/​2011/​10/​11/​ameri​cas-​paci​fic-​cent​ury/​. 37 “The United States Is Now the Largest Global Crude Oil Producer”, U.S. Energy Information Administration (12 September 2018): www.eia.gov/​todayinenergy/​detail.php?id=​37053; idem, “Oil and Petroleum Products Explained: Oil Imports and Exports”, www.eia.gov/​ energyexplained/​oil-​ and-​petroleum-​products/​imports-​and-​exports.php. 38 “Distribution of the Middle East’s Oil Exports by Region”, Statista Research Department (26 August 2020): www.statista.com/​statistics/​712229/​middle-​east-​oil-​exports-​by-​region/​. 39 Yoel Guzansky and Ari Heistein, “Saudi Arabia’s War in Yemen Has Been a Disaster”, National Interest (25 March 2018): https://​natio​nali​nter​est.org/​feat​ure/​saudi-​arab​ias-​war-​yemen-​has-​been-​disas​ter25064. 40 United Nations Office for the Co-​ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “About OCHA Yemen” (nd): www.unocha.org/​yemen/​about-​ocha-​yemen. 41 Steven Snyder, “If Yemen’s Houthis Weren’t Iran’s Proxies Before, They Could Be Soon”, Public Radio International (25 March 2017): www.pri.org/​stories/​2017-​03-​25/​if-​yemens-​houthis-​werentiranian-​proxies-​they-​could-​be-​soon. 42 Ian Williams and Shaan Shaikh, “Report: The Missile War in Yemen”, Center for Strategic and International Studies (9 June 2020): https://​missil​ethr​eat.csis.org/​rep​ort-​the-​miss​ile-​war-​in-​yemen/​. 43 Bruce Jones, “China and the Return of Great Power Strategic Competition”, Brookings Institute (Washington, DC, 2020). 44 Jakub J. Grygiel and A. Wess Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier: Rising Rivals, Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of American Power (Princeton, NJ, 2016). 45 Bobo Lo, Russia and the New World Disorder (London, 2015). 46 See inter alia, Alexander Sullivan, Andrew Erickson, Elbridge Colby, Ely Ratner, and Zachary Hosford, “More Willing and More Able: Charting China’s International Security Activism”, Center for a New American Security (19 May 2015): www.cnas.org/​publications/​reports/​morewilling-​and-​able-​charting-​chinas-​international-​security-​activism. 47 Jonathan Fulton, China’s Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (Abingdon, 2018), 7. 48 Farnaz Fassihi and Steven Lee Myers, “Defying U.S., China and Iran Near Trade and Military Partnership”, NY Times (11 July 2020): www.nytimes.com/​2020/​07/​11/​world/​asia/​china-​iran-​trade-​ military-​deal.html. 49 F. Gregory Gause III, “Should We Stay or Should We Go? The United States and the Middle East”, Survival, 61/​5(2019), 7–​24. On China’s evolving policy in the Middle East, see in particular, Camille Lons, Jonathan Fulton, Degang Sun, and Naser Al-​Tamimi, “China’s Great Game in the Middle East”, European Council on Foreign Relations Policy Brief (October 2019): https://​ecfr.eu/​publ​icat​ion/​china​_​ gre​at_​g​ame_​midd​le_​e​ast/​. 50 Steve Cook, “Iran Owns the Persian Gulf Now”, Foreign Policy (1 August 2019): https://​foreig​npol​icy. com/​2019/​08/​01/​iran-​owns-​the-​pers​ian-​gulf-​now/​.

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31 THE BALANCE OF POWER IN SOUTH ASIA Sumit Ganguly

The Indo-​Pakistani conflict over Kashmir and the Sino-​Indian border conflict constitute the two principal strategic fault lines in South Asia. Both of these conflicts emerged in the wake of the emergence of India and Pakistan as independent states following the end of the British Indian Empire in 1947. What is striking about these conflicts is their enduring quality. In the first instance, they have involved four wars –​1947–​1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999 –​and, in the second, a short vicious war in 1962. Despite multiple efforts made at multilateral and bilateral levels to resolve both disputes, neither is settled. The Cold War’s end did not have any discernible effect in moderating either of these two deep-​seated disputes. Worse still, in recent years, the People’s Republic of China [PRC] has increasingly come to view India as the only meaningful Great Power competitor in the region and its environs. Despite the growing disparity in material capabilities between these two states, the PRC remains unreconciled to India’s fitful rise and evincing no interest in settling the border dispute. On the contrary, it has resorted to exerting periodic military pressures on India’s disputed northern borders.1 Beyond these two major and seemingly intractable conflicts, India has minor disputes with Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. These, however, have less to do with the relationships of power and influence and more with tangible issues of hydrology, ethnic tensions, and trade. That said, the sheer structural differences of geography, size, economic clout, and military power make its smaller neighbours wary and distrustful of India. Indian policy-​makers have had only limited success in assuaging these misgivings. This chapter discusses the evolution of the regional balance of power in the region, its present state, and its likely future. In all likelihood, India will fitfully solidify its position as the dominant Power in the region, but the future of its competitive relationship with the PRC will remain very much in abeyance. Such a prediction is possible with considerable certainty because of India’s very substantial domestic infirmities, the inefficacy of a host of its domestic political institutions, and the rather substantial economic lead that the PRC enjoys over India. India and Pakistan had emerged as independent states from the collapse of the British Indian Empire in 1947.2 From the very outset, the two new Powers became involved in a conflict-​ ridden relationship over the status of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which abutted both nascent countries.3 This dispute proved acutely resistant to resolution because, at bottom, the self-​images of the two states long infused the issue. Pakistan had deemed that its

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-38

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identity as a Moslem homeland was incomplete without Kashmir, and India saw its control over this Moslem-​majority state as a demonstration of its secular credentials.4 However, over the past few decades, the underlying sources of the conflict have transformed. With the collapse of Pakistan in 1971 and the emergence of Bangladesh from its eastern reaches, Islamabad’s irredentist claim to the state lost all significance. Islam, alone, had failed to serve as a unifying force.5 Similarly, over the past several decades, and especially since 2019 under the Hindu-​nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government, India has given up any pretence of its adherence to secularism. Its claim to Kashmir today stems simply from the imperatives of statecraft.6 A far weaker Power than India, Pakistan has nevertheless long sought parity with its adversary. In pursuit of this end, it deftly managed to entice the United States into the region during the early Cold War years.7 Islamabad exploited American fears about communist expansion in Asia and forged a military pact with the United States as early as 1954 in an effort to balance Indian power. Nonetheless, in the early 1960s, a convergence of interests contributed to an enduring Sino-​Pakistani entente.8 Faced subsequently with what it perceived to be a growing Sino-​Pakistani-​American nexus in the aftermath of a clandestine trip to Beijing in 1970 by President Richard Nixon’s envoy –​Henry Kissinger –​to begin normalising of Sino-​ American relations, India signed a treaty of “peace, friendship and co-​operation” with the Soviet Union.9 It did so despite its professed non-​aligned credentials. Shortly thereafter, India became embroiled in a third war with Pakistan that led to Pakistani break-​up and the creation of the new state of Bangladesh. The break-​up of Pakistan substantially altered the balance of power in the region because India emerged as the dominant Power. From 1972 to 1979, South Asia remained mostly peaceful and stable because Pakistan was militarily too weak to provoke India. Even as the Pakistani-​American relationship waned for much of the 1970s, the Indo-​ American one remained strained. India’s policy-​makers, most notably Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, believed that American policy sought to alter what she and her advisors believed was the natural diplomatic balance in South Asia with India as the dominant Power. Furthermore, the American tilt toward Pakistan during the 1971 war profoundly coloured Gandhi’s views and those of her advisors toward the United States.10 Even the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan beginning in December 1979 did not result in a fundamental shift in Indian policies. If anything, the decision of the Republican Administration of Ronald Reagan, which took office in January 1981, to rely on Pakistan to prosecute the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan led Washington to bolster Pakistani military capabilities significantly. To ensure that it could maintain a military edge over Pakistan whilst coping with the capability threat from the PRC, India’s policy-​makers enhanced an arms transfer relationship with the Soviet Union.11 Throughout much of the 1980s, the United States uncritically backed the military regime in Pakistan because of the exigencies of prosecuting the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. With Pakistan the beneficiary of American military largesse, India increasingly relied on the Soviet Union for advanced weaponry. Simultaneously, the Indo-​Soviet relationship also rested on a common hostility toward the PRC. Consequently, during the 1980s, improvements in the Indo-​American relationship were mostly fitful and limited, despite some efforts by the Reagan Administration to wean India away from its military dependence on the Soviet Union. Consequently, after India adjusted to the shock of the Soviet invasion and the United States’ bolstering of Pakistan’s military capabilities, the balance of power in the region again reached an equilibrium. Steady Soviet military assistance to India ensured that the Pakistani-​American security nexus would not significantly affect India’s military dominance of the sub-​continent.

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In this context, during a significant part of the Cold War and despite its professed commitment to non-​alignment, India had a tacit strategic partnership with the Soviet Union, but one not based on ideological affinity. Instead, it stemmed from India’s strategic necessity to balance the power of the PRC; the Soviets, in turn, relied on India to act as a strategic bulwark against the Chinese. Moscow also found it useful to have friendly ties with one of the few democratic states of any consequence in the Third World. Despite occasional tensions, especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, this relationship remained remarkably durable. The end of the Cold War shattered the comfortable assumptions that had long undergirded India’s foreign and security policies. Abruptly, the highly reliable Indo-​Soviet arms transfer nexus ended.12 Simultaneously, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its alliance system, it became more than apparent to Indian policy-​makers that the principal successor state, Russia, was far too anaemic –​and unwilling –​a Power to serve as an effective counterweight to the PRC. Furthermore, Russia’s policy-​makers, from Mikhail Gorbachev onwards –​he came to power in March 1985 –​made it clear to India that it could not rely on Russian support in the event of a future conflict with the PRC.13 Faced with the end of the Indo-​Soviet relationship, confronting an uncertain future with the PRC, and viewing the emergence of the United States as the sole surviving superpower, India’s policy-​makers scrambled to reorient the country’s foreign policy. Initially, they publicly expressed significant misgivings about a United States-​dominated unipolar world order and made their preference known for a multipolar international system. Their unease about an American-​dominated order was unsurprising. During much of the Cold War, India had found itself at odds with the United States on a host of bilateral and global issues. Not surprisingly, its policy-​makers sought to make common cause with France, and even on occasion with Russia and China, to call for a multipolar global order. The dramatic shift in the global power structure forced Indian policy-​ makers to re-​ appraise the country’s fundamental foreign policy orientation. The principal security challenge confronting them remained the dramatic and seemingly inexorable growth of Chinese economic and military prowess, especially in an international order where Soviet Russia, its longstanding quasi-​ally, ceased to exist. Consequently, for all practical purposes, New Delhi abandoned its commitment to non-​alignment, a doctrine that had been the lodestar of Indian foreign policy since independence. Simultaneously, its policy-​makers sought to improve relations with the United States. This task proved to be arduous but Indian diplomacy did demonstrate a degree of dexterity in meeting the challenge.14 To that end, New Delhi ended its propensity to criticise the United States in a range of multilateral fora and terminated their reflexive anti-​American rhetoric. More substantively, they also dispensed with their longstanding policy of keeping Israel at bay and, in 1992, established full-​fledged diplomatic ties with this key American ally.15 Despite an interest in improving relations with the United States, India’s policy-​makers confronted three important hurdles. First, at an organisational level, bureaucracies on both sides remained sceptical about the desirability of altering and improving the relationship. The habits of mind, shaped during the Cold War, were not easy to discard. Second, two critical policy differences related to questions of nuclear non-​proliferation and human rights proved to be important impediments. The United States remained committed to inducing India to abandon its nuclear weapons programme and was harshly critical, especially during President Bill Clinton’s first term (1993–​1997), of India’s human rights record in suppressing a mostly indigenous insurgency in the Indian-​controlled portion of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. Suffusing everything, there was insufficient ballast in the relationship in the form of economic, strategic, or diplomatic ties to enable the two Powers simply to set aside these two issues and concentrate on other areas.

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Only in the waning days of the second Clinton term in 1999–​2000 did Indo-​American relations start to evolve dramatically and in a mostly positive direction. Earlier, an incipient commercial relationship had gotten underway after India’s fitful embrace of a market economy and the United States Department of Commerce’s designation of the country as one of the world’s eight “big emerging markets”. However, the Clinton Administration’s unambiguous condemnation of Pakistan’s military misadventure in the Kargil region of Jammu and Kashmir in May 1999 provided the basis of a transformation of Indo-​American relations. For once, India’s policy-​makers believed that Washington had not equivocated on a critical question involving an Indo-​Pakistani dispute.16 Accordingly, despite lingering differences about India’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons programme, the Indo-​American relationship underwent a profound change as the second Clinton Administration reached its end in January 2001. The legacy of the Clinton Administration created a political climate conducive to a dramatic transformation of the relationship during the two terms of George W. Bush’s presidency that culminated in the Indo-​American civilian nuclear agreement.17 Bush saw India as a possible strategic counterweight to the PRC. India’s policy-​makers in part shared this view but were not prepared publicly to admit to a convergence in strategic perspectives on this delicate question for fear of arousing the ire of the PRC. Such misgivings were hardly unreasonable because of the PRC’s extreme displeasure toward any significant improvement of Indo-​American relations. Apart from shared concerns about the growing military and economic clout of the PRC, Washington and New Delhi saw the strengthening of their bilateral relationship as crucial for other compelling reasons. For example, Indians were keen on improving ties to legitimise their nuclear weapons programme and obtain relief from a raft of sanctions that had long limited their access to dual-​use technology. They managed to forge a viable strategic partnership even though the two Powers could not find much common ground on the question of Pakistani complicity with terrorism after the 9/​11 al-​Qaeda attacks on the United States and the subsequent American-​led invasion of Afghanistan. In large part, American dependence on Pakistan to prosecute the war against the Taliban and their al-​Qaeda associates in Afghanistan could explain the divergence in American and Indian perspectives. In the wake of President Barack Obama’s visit to India in November 2010, some of these differences narrowed. However, Washington still proved unwilling or unable to dispense wholly with its reliance on Pakistan during the entire Obama era. The question of Afghanistan’s future remains fraught. In August of 2021 President Joseph Biden arranged a complete withdrawal of all American forces from Afghanistan. With the end of the American military presence in the country, the Taliban promptly took over the reins of government. Under these circumstances India withdrew all its diplomatic personnel from the country and evacuated the small number of Indian citizens who were working in Afghanistan. With both Pakistan and its ally, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) keenly interested in expanding their influence in the country, policymakers in New Delhi will have to devise possible strategies to ensure that India’s security interests are protected despite the collapse of the Ghani government. Beyond the future of Afghanistan, the key security challenge confronting Indian policy-​ makers involves their ability to forge a strategy to cope with the PRC’s growth and Beijing’s recent assertiveness along both India’s northern borders as well as in other parts of South Asia. The PRC’s rapid economic growth, including its recovery in the wake of the COVID crisis, requires little or no comment. Its per capita income has significantly outstripped that of India despite the latter’s economic development in recent years. What is of much greater concern to India’s security analysts and decision-​makers is the PRC’s successful penetration of Burma/​ 382

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Myanmar, its significant economic presence in Bangladesh, its involvement in Sri Lanka and Nepal, and its enduring alliance with Pakistan bolstered by the “Belt and Road Initiative”. In the end, four factors are likely to shape the future balance of power in the region and its environs. First, much will depend on the evolution of the Sino-​Indian relationship. If the economic and military gap between the two Powers continues to widen, India’s ability to play a role beyond South Asia may well become significantly constrained. On the other hand, if India can manage to restore economic growth in the post-​COVID era, pursue a balanced programme of military modernisation, and restore the efficacy of its domestic institutions, it can emerge as a peer competitor to the PRC in Asia. Faced with growing Chinese hostility along the disputed Himalayan border, despite a degree of ambivalence amongst segments of India’s foreign and security policy establishments under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has moved substantially closer to the United States. In the absence of adequate domestic capabilities to fend off the threat from the PRC, India has few viable alternatives but to balance it with a bolstered Indo-​American security partnership. Second, Pakistan’s political fate will also shape the regional balance of power. If the country continues its present pathway of continued internal discord, political turmoil, and institutional collapse, it may emerge as a greater challenge to India than the one that it currently poses. A nuclear-​armed adversary facing institutional collapse can pose security challenges on an unimaginable scale because of questions related to the security and safety of its nuclear arsenal. Furthermore, increased and widespread political instability in Pakistan may tempt its military establishment to resort to a diversionary conflict with India. Given the fraught state of Indo-​Pakistani relations, especially after India’s unilateral decision in August 2019 to abrogate the special status of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, such a prospect is especially disturbing. Conversely, if democratic consolidation within Pakistan proves viable, the country may finally be able to shed the embrace of periodic military rule. In turn, the emergence of a consolidated democratic regime may lead to the beginnings of a political rapprochement with India, thereby steadily easing the longstanding hostility and competition that has characterised this relationship. Third, within the past decade, India has started to forge a wider and deeper strategic partnership with Japan. This bilateral relationship, until the recent past, found its basis mostly on economic and commercial ties. However, with the PRC’s growing assertiveness in both South and East Asia, Indian policy-​makers recognised the strategic importance of bolstering the country’s ties with Japan.18 For the same reasons, it has sought to expand its links with Australia.19 Fourth and finally, much depends on the future evolution of the Indo-​American strategic partnership. Despite a dramatic improvement in the relationship since the Cold War’s end, some problems continue to dog it. Amongst other matters, divisions remain within India’s strategic community about the scope and the extent to which India should cast its lot with the United States.20 Unfortunately, even those within India’s policy-​making circles who have reservations about the partnership have not spelled out what they deem to be viable alternatives beyond some vague commitment to restoring the country’s “strategic autonomy”.21 Given India’s seeming inability to delineate a firm basis for this partnership, some within the United States policy-​making establishment also remain uncertain about the value and significance of the Indo-​American strategic nexus. That said, apart from increased diplomatic, commercial, and other ties, the two states share a common strategic interest: that the rise and assertiveness of the PRC does not fundamentally threaten to alter the existing balance of power in South Asia –​let alone Asia itself. In practical terms, amongst other matters, this strategy involves the pacific settlement of both territorial and maritime disputes and the freedom of navigation on the high seas, including the protection of 383

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seaborne communications. Whether India’s policy-​makers, who have long wanted the country to play a wider role in Asia, can actually meet these challenges remains an open question.

Notes 1 Sumit Ganguly and Manjeet Pardesi, “Why We Should Worry about China and India’s Border Skirmishes”, Foreign Policy.com (23 May 2020): https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2020/​05/​23/​india-​ china-​bor​der-​ski​r mis​hes/​. 2 The literature on this subject is vast. One important work remains Henry Vincent Hodson, The Great Divide (Oxford, 1969); also see G.D. Khosla, David Page, and Penderel Moon, The Partition Omnibus (New Delhi, 2004); see Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (NY, 2016), for an able journalistic account; another recent scholarly assessment is Vazira Fazila and Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia (NY, 2010). 3 On the status of the “princely state” in the British Indian Empire, see Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917–​1947 (Cambridge, 2002). 4 On this subject, see Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-​Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (NY, 2002). 5 Raonaq Jahan, Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (NY, 1972). 6 Sumit Ganguly, “Modi Crosses the Rubicon in Kashmir”, Foreign Affairs (9 August 2019): www. foreignaffairs.com/​articles/​india/​2019-​08-​08/​modi-​crosses-​rubicon-​kashmir. 7 Robert McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery (NY, 1996). 8 Andrew Small, The China-​Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics (NY, 2015). 9 On the Indo-​Soviet relationship, see Robert Donaldson, Soviet Policy Toward India: Ideology and Strategy (Cambridge, MA, 1974); Linda Racioppi, Soviet Policy Toward South Asia since the 1970s (Cambridge, 1994); Robert Horn, Soviet-​Indian Relations: Issues and Influence (NY, 1982). 10 Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide (NY, 2013). 11 S. Nihal Singh, “Why India Goes to Moscow for Arms”, Asian Survey, 24/​7(1984), 707–​40. 12 Sumit Ganguly, “South Asia after the Cold War”, Washington Quarterly, 15/​4(1992), 73–​84. 13 John W. Garver, “The India Factor in Recent Sino-​ Indian Relations”, China Quarterly, 125(1991), 55–​85. 14 Sunanda K. Datta-​Ray, Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium (NY, 2002). 15 Nicolas Blarel, The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change and Compromise Since 1922 (New Delhi, 2014). 16 Bruce Reidel, “Kargil Redefined Delhi-​Washington Ties”, Hindustan Times (23 July 2019). 17 Sumit Ganguly and Dinshaw Mistry, “The Case for the U.S.-​India Nuclear Agreement”, World Policy Journal, 23/​2(2006), 11–​19. 18 Rajesh Basrur and Sumitha Narayanan Kutty, eds. India and Japan: Assessing the Strategic Partnership (Singapore, 2018). 19 Fredric Grare, The India-​Australia Strategic Relationship: Defining Realistic Expectations (Washington, DC, 2014). 20 Sumit Ganguly and Christopher Mason, An Unnatural Partnership? The Future of US-​India Strategic Cooperation (Carlisle Barracks, PA, 2019). 21 Guillem Monsonis, “India’s Strategic Autonomy and Rapprochement with the United States”, Strategic Analysis, 34/​4(2010), 611–​24.

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32 NON-​G OVERNMENTAL ORGANISATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Navigating the New Global (dis)Order Jonathan Goodhand and Oliver Walton

This chapter assesses the growing involvement of non-​governmental organisations [NGOs] in the international security arena since the end of the Cold War, exploring why and how they have taken on a range of new roles under the rubric of “international security” including public diplomacy, Track Two negotiations, community reconciliation, post-​conflict peacebuilding, and peace advocacy. It identifies some of the key factors behind this trend, the effectiveness of NGOs in this policy arena, and the wider lessons and implications for those seeking to promote international security. A taxonomy of NGOs’ roles provides a framework for looking critically at notions of NGO comparative advantage in the area of peacebuilding. This leads to scrutiny of claims made during the early 2000s that NGOs had fallen short in performing these roles by becoming agents of “liberal peacebuilding”, associated with the marketisation, privatisation, and de-​politicisation of peacebuilding. In the 2010s, with the shift towards a multipolar and international order, there were concerns about growing threats to civic space posed by a resurgence of authoritarian modes of governance and global pushback against liberal democratic norms. Throughout this post-​Cold War period, NGO peacebuilding roles were heavily circumscribed by the complex processes of legitimation linked both to conflict-​affected regions and the domestic politics of the countries in which they are headquartered. Acknowledging the contingent and highly constrained nature of peacebuilding highlights the need for realism amongst policy-​makers and analysts about NGO potential to promote peace. The definition of “international” here is a pattern of relations and shared interests amongst states, multilateral organisations, and non-​governmental actors aimed at managing risks and maintaining order at the global level. Throughout history, “international order” has always been associated with and, indeed, depended on high levels of physical and structural violence. Traditional views of this international order is one forged by hegemonic Powers, not least the United States and its allies in the West since 1945, and sustained by a complex amalgam of actors including inter-​governmental organisations such as the United Nations [UN], the European Union, international financial institutions, and regional organisations. The post-​ Cold war period saw a blurring between security dynamics at the inter-​state, national, and inter-​ personal levels, opening space for non-​ governmental actors to play a growing role. DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-39

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Over the last 20 years, however, this terrain has grown more contested with global Powers including China, Russia, and India challenging Western dominance and liberal norms around global peace and security. NGOs, particularly international non-​governmental organisations [INGOs], and those working to support peacebuilding or human rights have faced growing pressure and restrictions. A 2019 report by CIVICUS, a body tracking the state of civil society globally, concluded, “fundamental freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and expression are backsliding across the world”. Their data show that the proportion of the world’s population living in repressed countries has risen rapidly from 19 to 40 per cent between 2018 and 2019.1 “Peace” is a value-​relative and often deeply contested term likely to be defined by more powerful actors. This understanding resonates with the differentiation between “negative peace” –​the absence of organised physical violence –​and “positive peace” –​the elimination of structural violence perpetuated by social inequalities and injustice.2 As already implied, the notion of international security has tended to find basis on the idea of a “negative peace”. However, as explored below, NGOs have been at the forefront of efforts to broaden the concept of security to incorporate “positive peace”. The concept of peacebuilding has covered a broad and shifting range of practices and aspirations. An uneasy combination of pragmatic problem-​solving approaches and idealistic visions based on broad models of societal and political change has often shaped peacebuilding practice.3 In one argument, “peace and peacebuilding are not terms with a proper descriptive utility and normative value … but they are political discourses which represent and serve to justify certain political interests and ideas”.4 One of the chief virtues of “peacebuilding” is the ambiguity and slipperiness of the term, since it allows organisations with very different objectives and approaches to sign up to it.5 Defined as “private, non-​profit, professional organisations with a distinctive legal character, concerned with public welfare goals”,6 NGOs straddle the public/​private boundary. They work at a range of levels and perform a variety of functions. The literature usually distinguishes amongst INGOs that work in several countries; national NGOs that work only in their country of origin but which have a countrywide focus; and community-​based organisations only working in one locality. Multi-​mandate organisations such as World Vision or Oxfam typically perform a range of activities, spanning the humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding fields, whilst niche ones focus on a single area –​for example, International Alert specialises in the field of peacebuilding. The NGO literature tends to assume that such third party organisations are part of civil society, defined as separate to the public and private sectors. There is also an assumption of NGOs’ comparative advantage over organisations in these two other spheres and that NGOs are more flexible, people-​centred, innovative, and responsive. The perception is that they carry over these comparative advantages into the field of security and peacebuilding. First, they appear as largely free from the traditional global and sub-​national security interests of state actors. Second, NGOs are valued for their detailed understanding of local political dynamics and awareness of the needs and concerns of communities, which often comes from an extended field presence in conflict zones.7 Third, NGOs seem uniquely positioned to play a mediating role in conflict. The so-​called “Norwegian model” of peace facilitation, for example, has drawn on Norwegian NGOs to establish backchannels between warring parties that initially would not engage with each other in direct talks. Fourth, NGOs’ apparent flexibility means that they may be well placed to exploit windows of opportunity that may occur during a war-​to-​peace transition to which official actors may be too slow to recognise and respond. This perspective on NGOs rests on an actor-​centred view of social change: individuals, and organisations having power to break free of and transform wider structural constraints. An 386

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essentially liberal, cosmopolitan view of politics has underpinned NGO expansion into the peace and international security field. From this perspective, political change promoted by extra-​ governmental actors is legitimate, so long as these actors pursue goals that conform to liberal norms. This view contrasts with a communitarian or nationalist view of politics, which tends to see foreign political interference as illegitimate. As illustrated below, NGOs have struggled to navigate the contrasting demands and expectations that arise from these two positions. This liberal perspective on NGOs is open to critical scrutiny. First, the notion of a clear divide amongst state, private sector, and civil society is problematic from a theoretical and empirical point of view. Close links between governments and NGOs have become increasingly apparent, as NGOs have become more financially reliant on governmental donors. NGO involvement in politically sensitive activities that seek to reduce, manage, and mitigate the effects of violent conflict have accentuated further these tensions. Second, it is questionable that declared norms rather than underlying material interests shape NGO behaviour.8 Their expansion into the peacebuilding sector may partly result from a search for market share in a competitive funding environment. NGOs proliferated rapidly from the 1980s. The number of INGOs tripled from 19,000 in 1986 to 59,000 in 2004, reaching circa 72,000 in 2020.9 A rapid growth of donor funding facilitated this precipitous rise. After tripling during the 1980s, official funding for NGOs doubled again in the 1990s: from $47 million or 0.18 per cent of total overseas development assistance [ODA] in 1980 to just over $4 billion or six per cent of ODA in 2002.10 By the mid-​1990s, donor funding accounted for an average of 30 per cent of NGOs’ total income, compared with 1.5 per cent in the early 1970s.11 Private funding to INGOs also increased, and net grants made by NGOs have grown steadily since 1990, rising from $5.2 billion to a peak of $42.1 billion in 2018.12 Since 2017, funding for large INGOs has tailed off slightly, a trend connected to a growth in funding for private sector contractors, diminishing political commitment to international development from Western donors, and growing uncertainties linked to the COVID pandemic.13 Donors’ previous enthusiasm for NGOs reflected several global, political, and ideological shifts. First, many Western governments saw NGOs as an antidote to failed state-​led development efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, providing flexibility and the capacity to transform societies from the bottom up instead of the perceived inertia and top-​down solutions presented by states.14 Second, NGOs found themselves linked to an associated need to counterbalance the retreat of the state associated with neoliberal structural reforms.15 Next, the rise in funding reflected a growing optimism about the scope for civil society to contribute to political transformation after the post-​Cold War revolutions in Eastern Europe. Finally, expansion had links to the growth of NGO relief programmes in response to the growing number of “complex political emergencies” at the end of the Cold War. As NGOs grew in numbers and geographical range, they also began expanding their operational scope. This was most conspicuous in conflict-​affected regions where humanitarian and development NGOs moved into new areas of work including human rights monitoring and peacebuilding.16 NGOs also began occupying a more prominent place in the global political arena. NGO coalitions such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Jubilee 2000 applied greater pressure on inter-​governmental organisations and conferences. Specialist peacebuilding NGOs have become significant players in the global aid industry; for example, Search for Common Ground has some 950 staff working in 30 different countries with an annual budget of $76 million.17 In addition to changes and adaptations within the NGO sector itself, a range of factors explain NGO expansion into new areas and their newfound role on the global stage including 387

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structural shifts in the post-​Cold War era and changing understandings of and discourses related to security and state sovereignty. This period of expansion coincided with a growth in Western governments’ geopolitical space for intervention and an unprecedented sense of confidence in the defining ideologies of the West –​democracy and capitalism. These factors combined to create a renewed assurance in Western capacity to intervene in areas of instability, prompting several key actors, including the UN, to become more active role in resolving conflict.18 Geopolitical change prompted several important shifts in understanding and framing war, peace, and interventions. A major underlying factor behind this shift was the growing prominence of internal violence. Although the total number of civil wars began to decline after the Cold War, a more rapid drop in international conflicts preceded this decline.19 The growing significance of civil wars, together with an apparent decline in the threat posed by hostile states, changed the way Western countries perceived security threats. The apparent threat was less rogue states than “fragile states”, which produced “public bads”, including regional instability, terrorism, illegal trafficking, and forced migration. So-​called “new wars” characterised by state breakdown, warlordism, and ethnic rivalries were seen as rooted in bad governance, under-​ development, and primordial conflicts.20 Involving freewheeling non-​state actors believed less amenable to traditional elite-​based diplomacy, this changed understanding and framing of conflict contributed to new intervention strategies and approaches. First, a tendency existed to view such civil wars as internal problems with external solutions. The growth of NGO involvement in international security parallels the expansion of the liberal peacebuilding “industry”, manifest in growing budgets, increased deployment of peacekeepers, and the proliferation of multi-​mandate peace operations; in this sense, NGOs are part of the growth of international peace promotion’s “supply side”. Second, policy-​makers’ growing focus on links between under-​development and conflict resulted in an enhanced emphasis on the potential for violence in “fragile states” to endanger the developed world by contributing to immigration pressures, causing regional instability, or promoting terrorism. Third, the justification and framing of intervention changed; security threats were less state-​centred and more likely to emerge from the Global South. Fourth, related to these developments was the emergence of the concept of human security as a challenge to traditional state-​centric models of “hard” security. This implied a greater focus on the security and welfare of populations within states.21 This framework questioned the traditional reliance on military forms of intervention to achieve international security and blurred established boundaries amongst the humanitarian, development, and security fields, drawing humanitarian and development NGOs into complex interventions that encompassed a wide range of objectives –​stabilisation, peacebuilding, development, and humanitarian. The shift involved a “radicalisation of development”, implying a more comprehensive model of societal transformation and growing focus on conflict issues.22 These concerns echoed in the peacebuilding approaches pursued by Western governments and the UN that increasingly framed peace as an outcome of the simultaneous pursuit of conflict resolution, neoliberal development, and democratisation and aimed to not only resolve existing conflicts but also prevent new ones by addressing root causes and transforming states and societies. Fifth, related to all of the above trends, Western-​led intervention emphasised “multi-​track diplomacy” and bottom-​ up approaches to peacebuilding. The assumption was that civil society constituted an autonomous sphere tasked with promoting an enabling environment for peace and reconciliation. Assessments of the legitimacy and effectiveness of liberal peacebuilding and NGO roles within it varied radically. Critical theorists argued that liberal interventionism was a thinly disguised form of imperialism serving to extend and entrench Western capitalist interests in the Global South.23 Liberals were essentially supportive of the liberal peacebuilding enterprise 388

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but argued that it needed to be pursued more effectively and with greater commitment.24 These positions led to different assessments of NGOs, since they were based on diverging assumptions about the relationships amongst violent conflict, globalisation, state, and non-​state public action. Critical theorists tended to view transnational public action as an extension of the interests of dominant Powers. Universal norms relating to rights, democracy, and peace are part of and help extend this hegemonic order. NGOs were therefore involved in processes of pacification, and they were at the forefront of efforts to turn socially and politically peripheral groups into subjects fit for governance. Tied in with the belief in a more limited role for the state and the transformative potential of civil society, the liberal position was more sympathetic to the claims of NGOs’ comparative advantage. Universal norms were seen to be important and constitutive of power, influencing the choices and behaviour of leaders and societal groups caught up in conflict. NGOs as the advocates of such norms –​including nonviolence –​are thus to play several positive roles –​explored below –​in relation to peacebuilding processes. Whilst the emergence of new peacebuilding approaches in the 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a rise in the number of NGOs engaged in peace work, this engagement was by no means a new phenomenon. Faith-​based traditions that informed the work of many NGOs provided a strong normative orientation towards peace work, with Quaker and Gandhian organisations particularly involved.25 Linked to a religious or peace studies tradition, these approaches argued that strategies to end conflict needed to address not only the needs of the key parties in a conflict but also the “human needs” of populations or “structural inequalities” of society.26 They advocated a shift from a “conflict management” model focused on resolving conflict through elite-​level negotiations towards a “conflict transformation” paradigm.27 This perspective posited that building peace relied on a broad portfolio of measures simultaneously focused on top (Track One), middle-​range (Track Two), and grassroots leadership (Track Three).28 This broad consensus papered over a number of latent tensions inherent in NGO peacebuilding strategies, for example, between the goal of ending violent conflict and aim of building just societies. These more emancipatory versions of peacebuilding pioneered and promoted by NGOs had an important normative influence on international peacebuilding efforts after the end of the Cold War. The space for NGOs to promote human rights and peacebuilding has diminished significantly over the last ten years, a shift partly linked to the changing nature of armed conflict. Conflict is increasingly protracted and transnational in character, sustained through complex cross-​border flows and closely intersecting with factors such as state fragility, poverty, organised crime, migration, modern slavery, and violent extremism. Globally, armed conflict and terrorism are more concentrated in regional hubs spanning North Africa, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and South Asia. Regionalised conflict systems involving multiple state and non-​state actors, from Great Powers to national governments to local militias, as in cases like Syria or Libya, are less amenable to either traditional elite-​led diplomacy or bottom-​up peacebuilding efforts. At least in part, liberal peacebuilding is implicated in the creation of these regional conflict systems, with interventions in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Libya in the name of the “responsibility to protect”, democratisation, or the war on terror contributing to state collapse and protracted transnational conflict. Liberal peacebuilding has therefore experienced a legitimacy crisis, and alternative ways of enforcing global and regional order through, for example, Chinese and Indian versions of “illiberal peacebuilding” may be increasingly attractive to rulers in the Global South.29 Relatedly, there has also been global pushback against liberal norms driven by geopolitical shifts, particularly the rise of China as a global economic and security Power. A rise in populism and authoritarian governance in the Global South has seen growing legal restrictions on 389

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NGO’s work and rising harassment, intimidation, and violence against aid workers.30 Some studies highlight a process of “lesson-​learning” amongst authoritarian states in relation to these measures.31 At the same time, growing populism in both the Global North and Global South has undermined Western governments’ commitments to development and humanitarian aid spending, posing emerging challenges to NGO financial sustainability. The COVID pandemic has accelerated these trends, providing further space for governments to impose restrictions on NGOs –​such as those imposed on Amnesty International in India in 2020 –​whilst also further undermining INGO finances.32 Longstanding questions about INGO accountability and legitimacy have intensified.33 In particular, issues around distributing power within large INGOs has led some large multi-​mandate ones to initiate structural reforms and shift power and resources to the Global South, for instance, by moving head offices outside the West. A series of scandals relating to sexual exploitation, gender, and racial inequalities within the aid industry have intensified calls for reform. NGOs working in conflict-​zones have faced specific challenges in recent years. To some extent, these challenges are attributable to NGOs getting too close to policy-​making elites and the liberal peacebuilding agenda. The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in 2001 notably stated, NGOs were “force multipliers” and “an important part of our combat team”.34 Inevitably, NGOs’ claims to neutrality or solidarity with the most marginalised were viewed sceptically by those on the receiving end of militarised interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Organisations working in conflict-​affected or post-​conflict regions such as Uganda or Sri Lanka felt growing restrictions on NGOs most acutely. A wider trend towards “bunkerisation” has shaped NGO work, whereby NGOs have sought to deliver humanitarian and peacebuilding interventions in ever more insecure environments and increasingly provided projects through “remote management” techniques. As violent attacks on them have risen, NGOs have been criticised for becoming detached from the communities they seek to serve and sub-​contracting risk to local aid workers.35 Growing use of digital technologies in both peacebuilding-​related advocacy work and humanitarian response have facilitated remote management approaches, a trend reinforcing detachment between NGOs and communities.36 Specialist peacebuilding NGOs have responded to these challenges in various ways. A review of strategic plans for several leading peacebuilding and conflict prevention NGOs highlights several key trends.37 First, these organisations have sought to re-​focus their approaches to exerting influence by reducing the number of contexts in which they work and increasingly looking to exert influence beyond the national level by bolstering work on regional, cross-​border, and sub-​national dynamics. This trend tracks a wider recognition of the importance of borderland regions in peacebuilding policy.38 Second, they are taking steps to diversify funding sources, particularly by drawing more resources from the private sector or increasing revenue from consultancy. Third, in line with wider sector trends, they are looking to shift power and resources to partners or offices outside the traditional headquarters. Reflecting the broadening of the notion of “security” and the profusion of donor efforts to tackle violent conflict, NGOs’ peacebuilding roles have developed considerably over the last 30 years. These roles can be divided into five main areas: complementing Track One negotiations; building a more peaceful and prosperous society; policy work designed to improve understanding of and responses to the dynamics of peace and conflict; fostering popular support for peace through movement building and media work; and support for justice, rights, and reconciliation. Different underlying theories of change, some in tension with one another, underpin these approaches. Whilst the first area of engagement assumes that “key people” are the primary drivers of peacebuilding, the fourth assumes that mass movements or constituencies 390

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for peace can play a defining role in the transition from war to peace.39 Both approaches can be criticised because they present an overly agent-​cantered view of power, downplaying the political economy dimensions of peacebuilding and the way that personal and popular interests intersect with structural factors. The last 20 years have seen both a rapid growth in international mediation efforts and a diversification in the kinds of actors involved in mediation. A multi-​dimensional or “third-​ generation” model of mediation has emerged, which involves bolstering elite-​level Track One negotiations with unofficial peacemaking efforts and use of incentives and disincentives.40 Contemporary peace processes typically involve a range of actors including opposing states, the UN, regional organisations, and NGOs. Several international NGOs such as the Humanitarian Dialogue Centre [HDC] and International Alert became engaged in directly facilitating Track One peace negotiations, as well as facilitating informal discussions between other conflict actors, including those excluded from the Track One talks, mid-​level leaders, or local actors. Geopolitics largely determine the scope for NGOs to perform these high-​level peacemaking roles. NGOs have tended to play roles that are more significant in contexts that have less strategic significance to the West such as Aceh –​HDC –​and the Philippines –​International Alert –​or where a formal peace process is underway. In regions of greater geo-​strategic importance such as Syria, state and inter-​state actors –​and non-​state military actors –​tend to monopolise the negotiation table. NGOs in such cases tend to focus their efforts on the societal level to create an “enabling environment” for peacebuilding. The high water mark for NGO mediation at the Track One level has already passed: the growing influence of Powers such as China, India and Iran, less comfortable with external engagement and more concerned with protecting state sovereignty, has placed tighter limits on the extent that Western Powers and their non-​governmental allies are permitted to exert influence on peacemaking processes. As the scope and number of international interventions in conflict-​affected regions grew in the 1990s, the capacity for foreign humanitarian and development aid to prolong or exacerbate violence became more widely recognised. Humanitarian and development NGOs began to develop “conflict-​sensitive” approaches to deal with these issues, finding support by operating frameworks such as the “Do No Harm” model, which attempted to provide means by which NGOs could identify and minimise the negative impact of their work in conflict settings.41 A growing number of multi-​mandate relief and development NGOs developed programming approaches that explicitly target the “root causes” and dynamics of violent conflict. This work rests on the assumption that tackling the underlying socio-​economic causes of conflict may contribute in both the short and long term to peacebuilding processes. Working on human security at the community level, with sensitivity to the distributional effects of relief and development aid, may address insecurities and grievances that fuel violent conflict. Capacity building, “empowerment”, and the fostering of social cohesion within civil society constitute important NGO peacebuilding functions.42 In post-​conflict contexts, donors often view NGO programmes as significant vehicles for delivering a peace dividend –​for example, during the Sri Lankan peace negotiations of 2002–​2006, increased funding channelled through NGO programmes in the northeast. Furthermore, international peacekeepers may see NGOs as effective agents of “stabilisation” –​this has taken them into increasingly sensitive programmatic areas in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, including post-​conflict state building and security sector reform. The simultaneous pursuit of multiple goals –​humanitarian, development, peace, and justice –​within the same organisation has exposed severe tensions. Several specialist peacebuilding organisations combine field-​based activities with policy work designed to influence governments and multi-​lateral institutions. Organisations such 391

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as International Alert, Saferworld, and Conciliation Resources seek to influence government policy in the field of peacebuilding and conflict, implement a range of peacebuilding programmes, and improve existing knowledge and understanding about peacebuilding issues. NGOs have played a leading role in several successful global advocacy campaigns such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and efforts to ban cluster munitions led by the Cluster Munitions Coalition. Many of these roles have historical ties to the activism of “middle Powers” such as Norway, Canada, and Sweden. For instance, the field experience and expertise of a range of Norwegian NGOs have supported Norway’s role as a specialist mediator since the 1990s. A process of “elite circulation” underpinned this co-​operation where individuals moved between government agencies, research, and field-​based NGOs.43 Similarly, the success of NGO advocacy campaigns such as the International Campaign to Ban Landmines was heavily reliant on the support of the political leadership of middle Powers. Several NGOs have been involved in developing systems designed to prevent conflict by detecting the early escalation of conflict. Established in 1997, the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response sought to establish a global network of organisations committed to early warning in the Caucasus, the Great Lakes Region of Africa, and West Africa. Other organisations such as the International Crisis Group seek to prevent and respond to conflict by combining an extensive global network with an influential Board capable of mobilising world policy-​makers into action. NGOs have played an active role in promoting peace in relation to a range of inter-​state and internal conflicts. The Stop the War Coalition, for example, led a campaign against Britain’s military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace played a critical role during the peace talks that ended the Liberian civil war in 2003. Therefore, NGOs have an important socialisation and educative function, by countering radicalisation and building wider constituencies for peace. The scope for NGOs to perform this kind of role is heavily contingent on both the historical relationship between state and non-​state arenas and the composition and character of civil society or the NGO sector in any given context. Although there has traditionally been a divide between NGOs working on peace and rights, this division has become increasingly blurred as humanitarian and development organisations have extended their mandates to incorporate rights and protection. Moreover, many human rights groups explicitly connect their work to peacebuilding, arguing that the absence of peace is rooted in the absence of justice. Within this broad sphere of work, there are many different actors and positions; and the tensions between specialist peace and rights groups continue, although on the ground, a division of labour often emerges with the former working on community-​level reconciliation processes and the latter speaking out against human rights abuses and for processes of accountability and truth telling. Assessing the impact of NGO peacebuilding interventions is challenging for several reasons. First, processes of peacebuilding are politicised and complex, typically occurring over a long period and involving many domestic and external actors. This complexity creates attribution issues and difficulties in determining causality –​since NGOs tend to work in collaboration with broad “strategic complexes” of state, non-​governmental, and private actors it can be hard to disentangle the effects of any one actor from others. Second, there is little consensus about what success looks like because NGOs pursue different peace-​related goals. Whilst some NGOs adopt the narrow goal of containing violence, others seek to transform social, political, and political relationships. These problems are compounded by the fact that NGOs’ normative and causal claims are often expressed in vague and general terms, a tendency often driven by a need to hedge their bets in environments where donors’ funding priorities are liable to shift.44 392

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Both the critics and supporters of NGOs working in conflict have tended to overstate the level of impact that NGOs can have on peace and conflict dynamics. The levels of resources controlled by NGOs are typically small compared with other elements of war economies –​like illegal trade. As a result, they are “unlikely to be a leading edge in moving towards or consolidating peace”, although they can play a support role when judiciously implemented.45 Some contexts may be more conducive to NGO peacebuilding than others. This “peacebuilding space” is dependent on a range of factors including the causes of hostility, local capacities for change, and scope of the international response. The historical relationship between the state and civil society heavily determines the kind of role NGOs can play. In Sri Lanka, for example, NGOs historically were deeply dependent on the patronage of the state. As the ceasefire broke down, whilst many donors and activists were keen for NGOs to play a more politically active role, NGOs found it difficult to exert political influence after the election of a government that was broadly opposed to a negotiated settlement and international engagement.46 Much of the debate in the literature on liberal peacebuilding centres on questions of local agency. Critical theorists often interpret liberal peacebuilding as “empire in denial” or a “hegemonic” project that seeks to “spread the values and norms of dominant power brokers”. Such perspectives ignore the potential for local actors –​even if co-​operating with more powerful ones –​in undermining, re-​negotiating, or re-​interpreting the agendas of international actors. The extent to which NGOs and civil society are capable of contributing to these “post-​liberal” models of peacebuilding depends on the extent to which they are capable of resisting liberal peacebuilding agendas. As argued above, years of heavy international intervention in countries such as the Occupied Palestinian Territories have changed the character of civil society, leading to the dominance of a group of local organisations’ whose “DNA is Western”. Much of the literature on local and national NGOs describes how they are capable of working closely with donors and aligning their priorities with donor agendas, whilst at the same time pursuing their own agendas. Organisations such as the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka, a national NGO with Gandhian and Buddhist roots, were major recipients of funding seen by donors as useful both in terms of building popular support for the Sri Lankan peace process and because of their capacity to implement a range of community-​based peacebuilding projects. Sarvodaya was able both to perform roles that conformed to donors’ objectives, whilst simultaneously pursuing its own vision of peace derived from nationalist and spiritual understandings of peace and development. Whilst donors were content to allow a degree of reinterpretation during the relatively stable part of the ceasefire period, tensions between these two approaches emerged as the ceasefire began to break down.47 This suggests that whilst opportunities for hybrid versions of peace can arise under certain circumstances, openings may be fleeting. NGO involvement in peacebuilding in part is a search for profile and market share, which leads to questions about the voluntary and norm-​based ethos of such organisations. In the humanitarian marketplace where there are many sellers –​aid agencies –​and few buyers –​ donors –​it is perfectly rational for aid agencies to act like private companies, competing with one another, rent seeking, information hoarding, and failing to co-​ordinate.48 Hard interests tend to trump declared soft ones. In unruly aid markets like Afghanistan and Iraq or post-​ tsunami Sri Lanka, there is often little difference between the behaviour and motivations of NGOs and private sector companies. Arguably, NGOs are symptomatic of a trend towards the marketisation and privatisation of the public sphere, leading to questions about their legitimacy to play a role in adjudicating disputes in the absence of a clear legal and ethical framework to take on such a role. 393

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NGO engagement in peacebuilding has been associated with broader changes in the composition and characteristics of civil society in conflict-​affected regions. In several regions where international actors have provided significant amounts of funding to support peace processes such as the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, various studies have highlighted a professionalisation of the NGO sector.49 These trends have often been associated with depoliticisation: NGO peacebuilding in these contexts has been characterised by a technical, project-​ based approach that distances organisations from indigenous modes of civil society. In these same cases, NGOs’ increasingly close association with governmental donors and their highly interventionist agendas have led to crises of legitimacy. As the 2002-​ceasefire agreement in Sri Lanka broke down, for instance, NGO support of the peace process and their heavy reliance on foreign funding made them prime targets for nationalist political groups keen to critique the heavily internationalised peace process.50 On the other hand, far from being an escape route from politics, the non-​governmental label or arena can provide certain groups and individuals with a way of “doing politics” in a political environment where this would otherwise be impossible. Furthermore, in many contexts, the divide between state and non-​state actors is far more blurred and dynamic than the advocates or critics of NGOs allow. The same actors are frequently crossing institutional boundaries amongst the state, private, and non-​governmental sectors.51 Following a period in the 1980s and 1990s characterised by mounting confidence in NGO capacity to foster political change and perform an expanded array of technical roles, NGOs experienced something of a backlash in the 2000s. Criticism focused on their lack of effectiveness, questions about legitimacy and accountability, and growing concerns about the close relationships between NGOs and their governmental funders. This backlash broadened in the 2010s, as global levels of conflict increased, and the war on terror and an expansion of populism and authoritarian governance increased restrictions on civil society. Geopolitical change and a shift towards a multipolar world order have seen an erosion of liberal norms around human rights and peacebuilding. These shifts have reduced NGO scope to promote peace in many conflict-​affected regions, whilst also undermining the traditional approaches of many INGOs working in the field. In particular, the traditional approach whereby INGOs are based and funded in the Global North, whilst conducting analysis and delivering programmes in the Global South, is increasingly open to challenge. Many of the leading peacebuilding specialists are seeking to re-​balance their operations to reflect this new reality. This partly mirrors the hard lessons that many NGOs have learnt over the last decade, that too close an alliance, politically and financially, with Western governments may undermine their legitimacy and capacity to act as peacebuilders. This chapter has drawn a more nuanced picture than outright condemnation or unquestioning championing of NGOs. There is certainly a need for more in-​depth and comparative research on NGO roles in this arena; but current evidence suggests that policy-​makers and analysts’ expectations become more realistic about NGO potential in engineering peace. Case studies suggest that NGOs may play a role in supporting pre-​existing trends towards peace, but they have limited capacity to challenge wider power structures and conflict dynamics. This analysis also points to the need to understand domestic politics and the complex ways of mobilising legitimacy in these contexts. It is only by developing a clear understanding of these processes of legitimation and de-​legitimation that identifying the appropriate peacebuilding roles for NGOs in any given context can occur. The analysis also highlights the importance of timing –​sudden shifts in the political arena can change the rules of the game and the legitimacy or otherwise of particular positions. Developing a detailed understanding of the broader dynamics of the political arena is also therefore required to identify spaces and moments conducive to NGO 394

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involvement. NGOs have emerged as important actors in the field of international security and, whilst their significance will vary from place to place, they will continue, for better or for worse, to be influential. The question is not whether to intervene but how to do it more effectively.

Notes 1 CIVICUS, People Power under Attack: A Report Based on Data from the CIVICUS Monitor (4 December 2019): https://​moni​tor.civi​cus.org/​Peo​pleP​ower​Unde​rAtt​ack2​019/​. 2 J. Galtung, Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization (Oslo, 1996). 3 J. Heathershaw, “Unpacking the Liberal Peace: Dividing and Merging of Peacebuilding Discourses”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 36/​3(2008), 604. 4 Ibid. 5 M. Barnett, H. Kim, M. O’Donnell, and L. Sitea, “Peacebuilding: What’s in a Name?”, Global Governance, 13(2007), 35–​58. 6 G. Clarke, The Politics of NGOs in South-​East Asia: Participation and Protest in the Philippines (London, 1998), 2–​3. 7 R.L. Bryant, Nongovernmental Organisations in Environmental Struggles: Politics and the Making of Moral Capital (New Haven, CT, 2005). 8 A. Cooley and J. Ron, “The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action”, International Security, 7/​1(2001), 5–​39. 9 C. Agg, “Trends in Government Support for Non-​Governmental Organizations: Is the “Golden Age” of the NGO Behind Us?”, Civil Society and Social Movements Programme Paper Number 23, UN Research Institute for Social Development (23 June 2006). For latest figures, see https://​uia.org/​ ybio/​. 10 Kim D. Reimann, “Up to No Good? Recent Critics and Critiques of NGOs”, in O. Richmond, and H. Carey, eds., Subcontracting Peace: The Challenges of NGO Peacebuilding (Aldershot, 2005); Agg, “Trends in Government Support”. 11 David Hulme and Michael Edwards, NGOs, States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort? (Houndmills, UK, 2013). 12 Organisation for Security and Co-​ operation in Europe, “Table 2. Total Net Flows from DAC Countries by Type of Flow”, Statistical Annex, 2019 Development Co-​operation Report (Paris, 2018). 13 B. Tallack, “5 Existential Funding Challenges for Large INGOs”, BOND website (2 July 2020): www. bond.org.uk/​news/​2020/​07/​5-​existential-​funding-​challenges-​for-​large-​ingos. 14 Edwards and Hulme, NGOs, States and Donors; N.A. Zaidi, “NGO Failure and the Need to Bring Back the State”, Journal of International Development, 11/​2(2001), 259–​71. 15 See, for instance, Stephen Jackson, “The State Didn’t Even Exist: Non-​Governmentality in Kivu, Eastern DR Congo”, in J. Igoe, and T. Kelsall, eds., Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Durham, NC 2005), 170. 16 J. Goodhand, Aiding Peace? The Role of NGOs in Armed Conflict (Boulder, CO, 2006). 17 Search for Common Ground, “Power to the Peacebuilders: 2018 Impact Report”: www.sfcg.org/​ reports/​2018-​Impact-​Report-​Power-​to-​the-​Peacebuilders.pdf. 18 See B. Boutros-​Ghali, Report on the Work of the Organisation from the Forty-​Seventh to the Forty-​Eighth Session of the General Assembly (NY, 1993). 19 Human Security Centre, Human Security Report 2009/​2010 (Oxford, 2011). 20 M. Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (London, 2001). 21 UN Development Programme, Human Development Report, 199 (NY, 1994). 22 M. Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars (London, 2001). 23 Ibid.; David Chandler, “The Responsibility to Protect? Imposing Liberal Peace”, International Peacekeeping, 1/​1(2004), 59–​81. 24 R. Paris, “Saving Liberal Peacebuilding”, Review of International Studies, 36/​2(2010), 337–​65. 25 T. Woodhouse, “Conflict Resolution and Ethnic Conflict”, Department of Peace Studies, Working Paper (University of Bradford, 1994). 26 E. Azar and J. Burton, eds., International Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice (Sussex, 1986). 27 O. Richmond, “A Genealogy of Peacemaking: The Creation and Re-​ Creation of Order”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 26/​3(2000), 3.

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Jonathan Goodhand and Oliver Walton 28 J. Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC, 1997). 29 David Lewis, John Heathershaw, and Nick Megoran, “Illiberal Peace? Authoritarian Modes of Conflict Management”, Cooperation and Conflict, 53/​4(2018), 486–​506. 30 Kendra Dupuy, James Ron, and Aseem Prakash. “Hands Off My Regime! Governments’ Restrictions on Foreign Aid to Non-​Governmental Organizations in Poor and Middle-​Income Countries”, World Development, 84(2016), 299–​311. 31 David Keen, “ ‘The Camp’ and ‘the Lesser Evil’: Humanitarianism in Sri Lanka”, Conflict, Security & Development, 14/​1(2014), 1–​31. 32 M. Raza, G. Kiyani, and F. Bélaïd, “Impact of COVID-​19 on Civil Society Restrictions and Global Sustainable Development” (July 2020): SSRN 3643540; Tallack, 5 Existential Challenges. 33 O. Walton, T. Davies, E. Thrandardottir, and V. Keating. “Understanding Contemporary Challenges to INGO Legitimacy: Integrating Top-​down and Bottom-​up Perspectives”, VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 27/​6(2016), 2764–​86; Nicola Banks, David Hulme, and Michael Edwards, “NGOs, States, and Donors Revisited: Still Too Close for Comfort?”, World Development, 66/​C(2015), 707–​18. 34 Colin Powell, “September 11, 2001: Attack on America Secretary Colin L. Powell Remarks to the National Foreign Policy Conference for Leaders of Nongovernmental Organizations”, October 26 2001, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy. https://​ava​lon.law.yale.edu/​ sep​t11/​pow​ell_​brie​f31.asp. 35 Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge, 2014); Sarah Collinson, Mark Duffield, Carol Berger, Diana Felix Da Costa, and Karl Sandstrom, Paradoxes of Presence: Risk Management and Aid Culture in Challenging Environments (London, 2013). 36 Mark Duffield, Post-​Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity in the Digital World (Cambridge, 2018). 37 Strategic documents analysed include Saferworld, Strategic Plan 2017–​21 (London, nd); Search for Common Ground, Mapping the Next 10 Years at Search for Common Ground (Washington, DC, Brussels, 2018); International Alert, International Alert’s Strategy 2019–​2023 (London, 2019); International Crisis Group, International Crisis Group: Strategic Framework 2019–​2024 (Brussels, 2019). 38 S. Yousef Plonski, O. Walton, J. Goodhand, and P. Meehan, eds., Borderlands and Peacebuilding: A View from the Margins (London, 2018). 39 M. Anderson, Do No Harm: Supporting Local capacities for Peace thorough Aid (Boulder, CO, 1996). 40 O. Richmond, Peace in International Relations (London, 2008). 41 Anderson, Do No Harm. 42 T. Paffenholz and C. Spurk. “Civil Society, Civic Engagement, and Peacebuilding”, Social Development Papers, Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction, Paper 36 (October 2006). 43 T. Tvedt, “International Development Aid and Its Impact on a Donor Country: A Case Study of Norway”, European Journal of Development Research, 19/​4(2007), 614–​35. 44 O. Walton, “Between War and the Liberal Peace: National NGOs, Legitimacy and the Politics of Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka 2006–​7” (PhD Dissertation, University of London, 2010). 45 Goodhand, Aiding Peace? 46 O. Walton, with P. Saravanamuttu, “In the Balance? Civil Society and the Peace Process 2002–​2008”, in J. Goodhand, J. Spencer, and B. Korf, eds., Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka: Caught in the Peace Trap? (London, 2011), 183–​200. 47 Walton, “Between War and the Liberal Peace”; idem, “Peacebuilding Without Using the Word ‘Peace’: National NGOs’ Reputational Management Strategies During a Peace-​to-​War Transition in Sri Lanka”, Critical Asian Studies, 44/​3(2012), 363–​90. 48 Cooley and Ron, “NGO Scramble”. 49 See I. Jad, “NGOs: Between Buzzwords and Social Movements”, Development in Practice, 17/​4–​ 5(2007), 622–​29. 50 See Walton, “In the Balance?”. 51 David Lewis, “Using Life Histories in Social Policy Research: The Case of Third Sector/​Public Sector Boundary Crossing”, Journal of Social Policy, 37/​4(2008), 559–​78.

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33 PERSONAL DIPLOMACY Hendrik W. Ohnesorge

Few people in the history of diplomacy and statecraft have crossed the lines between the academic and political worlds with greater ease than Henry Kissinger. During his time as faculty member at Harvard University, he served as a political advisor for the New York governor, Nelson Rockefeller, in the 1960s, only to commit himself to politics full-​time by serving as the United States national security advisor (1969–​1975) and secretary of state (1973–​1977) in the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Throughout Kissinger’s tenure at the White House and State Department, his foreign travel became a hallmark of his modus operandi: whether the opening of relations with Beijing, the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords, or negotiations in the Middle East in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Kissinger pioneered “Shuttle Diplomacy”. In fact, Kissinger spent a total of 313 days on overseas diplomatic travels as secretary of state, an impressive figure given that his tenure lasted for only 39 months –​that is a little over 1,200 days.1 On his airplane, homeward-​bound after a January 1974 trip to the Middle East, Kissinger confided to a group of reporters, “As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces. But when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make”.2 Seldom has the longstanding dispute between history’s “impersonal forces” and “the difference personalities make” found more lucid expression than in these remarks. With a leg in both worlds, Kissinger arguably knew what he was talking about when making clear to his journalistic entourage: personalities matter in the art of diplomacy and statecraft. In line with this assessment, the list of diplomatic practitioners agreeing with Kissinger’s statements is long and illustrious. Amongst others, it includes Hillary Rodham Clinton, President Barack Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. In her memoirs, she confirmed, “Relations between nations are based on shared values –​but also on personalities. The personal element matters more in international affairs than many would expect, for good or ill”.3 Quoting diplomatic practitioners and piling up anecdotal evidence, however authoritative and convincing, can nonetheless only serve as a starting point for any cogent exploration of the role of the personality factor in diplomacy. In this sense, the following deliberations provide a conceptual approach to what is termed “personal diplomacy”.4 Questions regarding the influence of individuals in human and international affairs date back millennia and remain heavily contested to this very day.5 Whilst this is hardly the appropriate

DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-40

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place to plunge into the ontological disputes regarding the interplay of agents and structures that transcends multiple disciplines, it is an interesting observation that the role of individuals in international affairs is once more re-​emerging on the scholarly agenda.6 Although still a matter of scholarly controversy, most observers today would arguably allow at least for some influence of individual decision-​makers. National leaders –​presidents and prime ministers, monarchs, chancellors, and foreign ministers –​in particular have the power to engage effectively in diplomatic practice as individuals and, for better or worse, shape the perceptions of their countries abroad. The notion of soft power offers a promising starting point to grasp conceptually the influence of individuals in diplomacy and statecraft. With his seminal 1990 Bound to Lead –​and two concurrent articles –​Joseph Nye, can be regarded as the intellectual father of soft power.7 Elaborating on the concept in subsequent publications, primarily a 2004 monograph singularly dedicated to the issue, he argues, “there are several ways to affect the behavior of others. You can coerce them with threats; you can induce them with payments; or you can attract and co-​opt them to want what you want”.8 The latter variety of power, “soft power”, hence refers to “the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments”.9 Whereas hard power rests on such resources as military strength and economic prowess, Nye identifies three distinct soft power resources: “its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as legitimate and having moral authority)”.10 These soft power resources, which arguably are much harder to grasp and thus more intangible than their hard power counterparts such as military spending or Gross Domestic Product, are widely accepted and shared.11 Notably, however, a recourse to personalities as individual bearers of soft power is missing from Nye’s list. Still, despite the universal acceptance of the three resources, scholars have occasionally explored the role of individuals in the process of wielding attractive power, including Nye.12 For example, he has noted, “Even individual celebrities are able to use their soft power”.13 Concurrently, the attractive powers emanating from individuals have found their way into attempts to measure or rank the soft power of selected actors. In one instance, Ernst & Young, an international professional service group headquartered in Britain, have included the influence of what they called “icons” into their soft power index and cite the South African anti-​Apartheid activist and president, Nelson Mandela, as a prominent illustration.14 Another assessment likewise discussed the role of individuals in the process of wielding soft power: Heroes and celebrities can exert soft power in two ways. One is by their role models, and comments on charitable efforts for certain universal values, and the other is by instilling a sense of pride within their own countries. The former can set an international agenda to achieve certain national or international goals, while the latter provokes nationalistic cohesion or wide support for their government. Here, heroes or celebrities can act independently or in cooperation with their governments.15 The selection of the rock star/​environmentalist, Bono, as well as the philanthropic multi-​ billionaires, Bill and Melinda Gates, as TIME magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2005, for example, demonstrates that the role of celebrities as influential actors in diplomacy has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years.16 Recognising and seeking to conceptualise the growing importance of select individuals on the international stage has led to the coining of the term “celebrity diplomacy”, paying tribute to the observation that “[c]‌elebrities have the power to frame issues in a manner that attracts visibility and new channels of communication 398

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L1

L2

P1

P2

Figure 33.1  The effects of personal diplomacy between two actors

at the mass as well as the elite levels”.17 Whilst the present inter-​connected world of real-​time information flows arguably further increases their clout, the power of “celebrity diplomats” also involves a number of difficulties and caveats, including questions of legitimacy, attribution, and causation. With the instrument of personal diplomacy, involving official decision-​makers and thus much closer to the traditional avenues of –​governmental –​diplomatic practice, these difficulties dissolve. In this sense, the following illustration provides a simplified depiction of the way national leaders can wield personal soft power (Figure 33.1). On the one hand, governmental leaders [L1 and L2] can thus exude soft power towards each other on an elite level. Furthermore, and arguably even more important today, they may exert soft power towards foreign publics [P1 & P2]. In democratic societies at least, the public may in turn influence, confirm, or recall their leaders [dotted lines]. As noted by the arrows, soft power, in general, and personal diplomacy as one of its premier tools, in particular, take effect reciprocally inasmuch as its recipients are as important as its wielders. Besides other instruments, including most prominently public diplomacy, personal diplomacy can accordingly be conceptualised as a major set of means for wielding soft power in international affairs.18 Based on the phrasing of definitions of crucial components of public diplomacy by Nicholas J. Cull,19 a succinct definition of personal diplomacy is “an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by visiting foreign decision-​makers as well as publics and engaging actively with them through means of joint appearances, speechmaking, or symbolic acts”.20 As such, representatives of nation states or other international actors actively pursue and direct soft power, at least in part, towards other nations, their elites, and publics.21 As indicated by the proposed definition above, different aspects of personal diplomacy, although frequently supplementary in the field, can be conceptually distinguished: foreign travel, speechmaking, symbolic acts, and elite networks and relationships. Foreign travel remains a crucial component in the practice of personal diplomacy and statecraft. Political leaders, diplomats, and envoys have visited neighbouring tribes or cities to conduct exchanges or negotiations for millennia. A prominent early example in this regard is in the Annales, written by the Roman historian, Tacitus, who died about 120 AD. The second book of this work deals with Rome after the death of Augustus in 14 AD. Tacitus describes at length the extended mission of the Roman general and the presumptive heir to the Principate, Germanicus, which started in the year 17 AD.22 The new emperor, Tiberius, sent his nephew through the vast Eastern stretches of the Roman Empire, notoriously unruly regions that in the mind of the emperor demanded personal attention. Taking with him his wife, Agrippina, and his young son, known to posterity as Caligula, Germanicus visited different provinces and regions, amongst others Dalmatia, Greece –​famously including the city of Athens –​the Troad, 399

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Armenia, Syria, and finally Egypt, arriving in winter 18–​19 AD. Later that year, Germanicus fell ill and died in Antioch.23 Despite his untimely death, perhaps by poison, his mission was generally regarded an outstanding success, as later writers emphasised his “phenomenal ability to win the hearts” of the peoples he visited and gain their support.24 In this sense, Germanicus’ famous Eastern mission provides a prime –​and early –​example of soft power wielded by means of diplomatic travel. Whilst thus practised for ages, foreign travel by heads of state or other leading national emissaries saw a particular increase with the technological advances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Faster and more comfortable means of transportation, as well as advances in information and communication technologies, contributed to this development, as did the increasing importance ascribed to national and global public opinion. The first foreign leader to visit the United States, for example, was Hawaiian King Kalakaua in 1874.25 Some thirty years later, the first foreign travel by a sitting American president took place when Theodore Roosevelt visited Panama in November 1906.26 More recently, since air travel increasingly replaced other modes of transport, foreign travel and state visits have become an integral part in the conduct of international relations today. In his memoirs, the British foreign secretary from 1979 to 1982, Peter Lord Carrington, argued in 1988, “I believe that these days a Foreign Secretary must travel”.27 In line with the general developments outlined above, foreign travel by American presidents have not only increased six-​fold since the 1950s but also developed qualitatively: [N]‌ ow presidents also routinely appear in public when visiting other nations. For instance, presidents now commonly hold joint press conferences and public announcements with the leader of the foreign nation, give interviews with foreign journalists, visit locations of local symbolic importance, and directly address the local citizenry.28 For this practice, countless examples come to mind. For instance, in 1962, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s visit to France in July and French President Charles de Gaulle’s return visit in September not only held immense symbolic meaning but brought tangible political outcomes that contributed to improving relations between Bonn and Paris, in general, and anticipated the Franco-​German rapprochement embodied in the Élysée Treaty of 1963, in particular.29 This example not least illustrates foreign travel applied strategically to accomplish concrete foreign policy objectives by means of deliberation and persuasion amongst political elites. In fact, with particular respect to the example of German federal presidents, foreign travel has long been identified as an instrument of soft power.30 As already briefly hinted at above, speeches, news conferences, or other public statements by travelling decision-​makers frequently accompany their foreign visits. Delivering speeches, making remarks –​whether prepared or spontaneous –​or appearing at (joint) press conferences constitutes a further important component of personal diplomacy. Besides these more traditional varieties of oratory, modern social media services like Twitter provide further platforms for political leaders to address foreign and domestic audiences alike by means of personal diplomacy in today’s information age. One study has thus found that of the total Twitter followers of the then-​American president, Donald Trump, in September 2019, about 65 million, only 58.7 per cent actually lived in the United States.31 Like foreign travel, rhetoric and speechmaking have been practised for ages to set an agenda, “win the hearts and minds” of audiences, and, ultimately, achieve desired outcomes. Examples exist in the earliest surviving writings in Western literature, including Homer’s Iliad.32 Again, 400

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Tacitus provides a striking reminder of the potency of this aspect of personal diplomacy, this time in his Dialogus de Oratoribus: While things are going well with you, it is in the refuge it [the art of rhetoric] affords to others, and in the protection it gives them, that its efficacy and usefulness are most in evidence; but when danger hurtles round your own head, then surely no sword or buckler in the press of arms gives stouter support than does eloquence to him who is imperilled by a prosecution; for it is a sure defence and a weapon of attack withal, that enables you with equal ease to act on the defensive or to advance to the assault, whether in the law courts, or in the senate house, or in the Emperor’s cabinet council.33 The Eastern mission undertaken by Germanicus (referred to above) likewise included the component of speechmaking, not only by Germanicus, but apparently also by his infant son, Caligula, who on one occasion addressed the people of the town of Assos in modern-​day Turkey. The address seems to have borne political fruit afterwards as well: “Later, on Caligula’s accession, the people of Assos were keen to remind him of his visit with his father, and sent the new emperor a decree of loyalty”.34 More recently, Winston Churchill won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”,35 and he likewise emphasised the power –​ and mystique –​of the spoken word. In an 1897 letter, Churchill thus confided to his friend and political mentor, Bourke Cockran, I know that there are few more fascinating experiences than to watch a great mass of people under the wand of the magician. There is no gift –​so rare or so precious as the gift of oratory –​so difficult to define or impossible to acquire.36 Hence, frequently tied to the exercise of power –​including soft power –​rhetoric can also be linked to charisma. Max Weber, the polymath German intellectual of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is still the chief authority on the notion of charisma, a term he decisively coined a century ago.37 Thus, Weber identified what he called the “charisma of rhetoric”.38 A more recent argument in this sense posits, “The ability to articulate a compelling vision of a bright future is the sine qua non of charisma and greatness”.39 The Athenian strategos, Pericles, one of the few historical characters explicitly attributed with charisma by Weber, for instance, drew his powers not least from his persuasive rhetorical skills chronicled in the works of Thucydides and others.40 In modern times, Churchill’s influence on the course of European integration provides a further striking example in this regard. His personal charisma as well as his masterful oratory, especially his famous “United States of Europe” speech delivered at Zurich on 19 September 1946, –​by his own admission –​decisively influenced United States Secretary of State George Marshall to instigate the European Recovery Program.41 Accordingly, Churchill convinced Marshall not by means of coercion or inducements but by his attractive soft power. As these examples illustrate, rhetoric, perhaps more than any other component of personal diplomacy is apt to evoke collective emotions and commit an audience to a common goal by means of attraction and persuasion. Concurrently, some speeches stand explicitly as vital factors for projecting soft power and shaping national perceptions. Accordingly, with respect to the position of the United States president, there is “the considerable role presidential rhetoric plays in constructing, shaping, and reinforcing America’s image at home and abroad”.42 401

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In the final analysis, with a long and distinguished tradition tying rhetoric to the exercise of power, including soft power, recent developments in information and communication technologies have made acts of speechmaking, both traditional and digital, all the more important for wielding soft power through personal diplomacy today. Foreign travel by leading decision-​makers at times exceed routine state visits as well as speechmaking; and they often include symbolic acts defined as emblematic actions that epitomise a certain policy or programme and/​or attract broad or even global attention. Whether planned or spontaneous, such acts may frequently become emblematic for the relationships of states or peoples far exceeding the immediate context. Amongst others, they include wreath-​ laying ceremonies, the visiting of memorial sites, public displays of cordial friendship between representatives of states, amicable gestures, and comparable rituals or ceremonies.43 In fact, Germanicus’ Eastern mission once again provides a striking example in this regard. Tacitus notes that Germanicus entered Athens, considered by the Romans to be the cradle of civilisation, with just one lictor, an official’s bodyguard carrying the famous Roman fasces; Germanicus’ rank would legally have allowed for twelve such guardians.44 With his gesture of humility, Germanicus intended to “win the hearts and minds” of the Athenians: He then went to Athens where he displayed his full talents as a diplomat. Entering the city with only one lictor, in deference to its status as a civitas libera, he dressed in Greek clothes and sandals and lavished compliments on the citizens, who in turn heaped honours upon him.45 Accordingly, expressions of modesty, besides paying tribute to local customs and sensitivities, constitutes a powerful tool in a personal diplomat’s toolbox. More recently, the “Warsaw genuflection” in 1970 by German Chancellor Willy Brandt at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, the historic handshake of Barack Obama and Raúl Castro, and the hug between Obama and 79-​year-​old survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima Shigeaki Mori in May 2016 come to mind as famous symbolic acts.46 In fact, the very visit to a foreign country by a leading decision-​maker may constitute in itself a symbolic act. George W. Ball, the American undersecretary of state from 1961 to 1966 and ambassador to the United Nations in 1968, made this point regarding Richard Nixon’s impending visit to China in 1972: [I]‌n announcing arrangements for a personal visit, he [Nixon] quite deliberately adopted what might be called symbolic diplomacy –​a form of international maneuver in which the chosen method of diplomatic interchange is itself a political act producing major consequences regardless of any substantive agreement that may emerge.47 The same could be said for Donald Trump’s much-​anticipated encounter with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-​un, in Singapore on 12 June 2018. As with public oratory, symbolic acts by leading state representatives frequently exceed the communication of specific political programmes or intentions towards their foreign counterparts. Particularly with ever-​ growing media coverage, these symbolic acts find dissemination more broadly and rapidly than ever before. Consequently, they are of paramount importance as a means of personal diplomacy today. Finally, the establishment and cultivation of –​political –​elite networks as well as relationships between and amongst leading decision-​makers is a fourth component of personal diplomacy –​ and consequently an instrument of wielding soft power. With respect to the ramification of

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these components for an actor’s soft power, Nye has noted, “Elite relations and networks often play an important role”.48 To a certain extent, this particular instrument of personal diplomacy partly coincides with the public diplomacy instrument of exchange diplomacy.49 The American Fulbright exchange programme, founded in 1946,50 the German Academic Exchange Service and its programmes,51 or the exchanges organised by the Japan Foundation52 constitute famous examples. Defining such programmes as “an actor’s attempt to manage the international environment by sending its citizens overseas or reciprocally accepting citizens from overseas for a period of study and/​or acculturation”,53 reveals their broad and long-​term scope. Programmes such as the prestigious Rhodes scholarships to Oxford University as well as the United States’ International Visitor Leadership Program [IVLP] focus more explicitly on a smaller circle of –​presumptive future –​foreign elites. Christopher Midura, deputy director of policy, planning, and resources for the American US State Department’s under-​secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in 2008, “IVLP alumni have included 277 foreign heads of State”.54 Defined as “groups of individuals whose hold on power, positions, and potential resources provide them with opportunities for influence that enable them to play a decisive role in shaping policy, economics, and culture”,55 there is recognition of elites as being of paramount importance in the practice of personal diplomacy. Accordingly, “[t]‌he production of soft power is also highly related to opinion leaders”,56 and in a broad variety of contexts such elites may wield influence in bilateral relations, including political parties, foundations, think tanks, commissions, or chambers of commerce.57 Kissinger, a particularly dedicated proponent of fostering such networks, for example led the famous International Seminar at Harvard University after 1951.58 A 2010 study elaborated on its role for Cold War transatlantic relations –​as well as that of the Salzburg Seminar on American Studies founded in 1947.59 Recognising “European envy and resentment of American power and wealth, as well as ignorance or misunderstanding of the new superpower’s society, culture and politics”, the originators of these programmes focused on cultural or public diplomacy specifically targeted at European elites to persuade them that the USA was a force for good in the world, defending freedom and fighting tyranny; that its culture was deep and not shallow, that its material wealth was not alone the obsession of its culture, that it had an abiding and serious interest in abstract problems and ideas –​in art, music, and philosophy.60 Subsequently, the Harvard Seminar included amongst its alumni “such leaders as Japan’s Yasuhiro Nakasone (1953), France’s [Valéry] Giscard d’Estaing (1954), and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammed (1968)”.61 Consequently, both seminars “created enduring nuclei of scholars and other opinion-​formers, networked with American institutions and faculty, and with each other, functioning effectively long after the short Seminars were over”.62 Another example in this regard, operating in German-​American relations in particular, is the Atlantik-​Brücke. Established in 1952, the informal network has proven highly influential in fostering German-​American relations, although its operating principles and hence successes –​or failures –​are quite difficult to assess.63 Tied to the influence of elite networks in the practice of personal diplomacy is also the importance of personal relationships between leading decision-​makers –​see Figure 33.1 above. Highlighting the importance of personal and informal relations amongst top-​level representatives in international relations, an apt observation asserts,

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More lies behind international relations than the machinery of ministries and diplomacy, formal structures, and institutions. Foreign policy is also developed and influenced by people who can draw upon personal and informal relationships that enable them to pursue their aims outside their official contacts.64 Nye has likewise argued for the importance of “elite relations”.65 In this regard, noting that “leaders may be attracted and persuaded by the benignity, competence, or charisma of other leaders” and referring to the soft power wielded by Russian Tsar Peter the Great, Prussian King Frederick the Great, and –​more recently –​Obama vis-​à-​vis their contemporary leaders, he offered multifarious empirical evidence of this assumption.66 In the final analysis, the components of elite networks and top-​level relationships form further vital components of personal diplomacy, and therefore the wielding of soft power in international affairs. Taken together, the addition of personal diplomacy as a distinct set of instruments for wielding soft power pays tribute to the important role individuals at every level play in diplomacy and statecraft. As repeated recourse to historic evidence illustrated, its significance can be traced back millennia, its practitioners frequently agreeing to its effects. Today, advances in information and communication technologies have, if anything, increased the international clout of influential individuals on the global stage to wield attractive power. However, a number of issues need addressing to strengthen the concept and make it more resilient for research. The central question in this regard –​at least in part shared by the instruments of public diplomacy –​is how to determine its influence? Or, in terms of attractive soft power wielded by individuals, how to measure their success or failure? In fact, practitioners and champions of personal diplomacy are amongst the first to agree about this predicament. Confronted with reproach for having travelled too much during his time as foreign secretary, Lord Carrington confessed in this regard: If anybody thinks I travelled too much, some journeys unnecessary, I doubt if he has been Foreign Secretary. I believe that I travelled, on the whole, to good effect: but good effect which could seldom be measured and will never be exactly recorded. Mood, impression and personal influence can be neither quantified nor proved.67 Still, a number of conceivable indicators exist to understand elite perceptions and their ramifications, including opinion polls or surveys, elite views as noted in official documents or memoirs, as well as media analyses.68 A cursory look at the perception of the United States vis-​à-​vis three key allies in Europe, North America, and the Asia-​Pacific, as well as the respective confidence in the American president, illustrates both the importance and tangibility of personal diplomacy (Figure 33.2). As figures indicate, amongst the three countries selected –​the United Kingdom, Canada, and South Korea –​a correlation exists between confidence in the American president and opinion about the United States. In this regard, as one Australian commentator noted, “it helps a country’s public image when its head of state is widely liked rather than widely disliked”.69 With particular reference to the United States and the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, this assumption can be substantiated empirically. Of course, there are a myriad of reasons for the perception of the United States on the global stage, but, as the data suggests, at least a conspicuous correlation can be attested by the countries under consideration here. In line with these findings, the New York Times columnist, Charles M. Blow, observed in October 2017, “Trump is reviled around the globe and America’s reputation is 404

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Figure 33.2  Perceptions of the United States and its President amongst key allies Source: Based on data by Pew Research Center: “Global Indicators Database” (March 2020); www. pewresearch.org/​global/​database/​; “Global Attitudes and Trends: U.S. Image Plummets Internationally as Most Say Country Has Handled Coronavirus Badly” (14 September 2020): www.pewresearch.org/​ global/​2020/​09/​15/​us-​image-​plummets-​internationally-​as-​most-​say-​country-​has-​handled-​coronavirus-​ badly/​pg_​2020-​09-​15_​u-​s-​image_​0-​03/​. NB: There are gaps in the data for Canada and South Korea for some years.

going down with its captain”.70 Developments since then, especially after the inauguration of Joe Biden in January 2021, corroborate this assessment. In the final analysis, and despite its intricacies, the instrument of personal diplomacy should feature more prominently when assessing the diplomatic practice of international actors. Individuals do matter –​for better or for worse –​and political leaders in particular lastingly shape the perceptions, and ultimately the power, of their home countries. Foreign travel, speechmaking, symbolic acts, as well as elite networks and top-​level relationships are crucial factors in this regard. The brief recourse to the recent influence of personal diplomacy in the White House provides striking evidence in this respect.

Notes 1 Glenn Kessler, “Hillary Clinton’s Overseas Diplomacy versus Other Secretaries of State”, Washington Post (9 January 2013): www.washingtonpost.com/​blogs/​fact-​checker/​post/​ hillary-​clintons-​overseas-​ diplomacy-​versus-​other-​secretaries-​of-​state/​2013/​01/​08/​742f46b2-​59f3-​11e2-​9fa9-​5fbdc9530eb9_​ blog.html. 2 Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (NY, 1992), 13. 3 Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hard Choices (NY, 2014), 207. 4 Hendrik W. Ohnesorge, Soft Power: The Forces of Attraction in International Relations (Cham, 2020), 160–​ 71, elaborates on the concept of personal diplomacy.

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Hendrik W. Ohnesorge 5 Xuewu Gu and Hendrik W. Ohnesorge, “Wer macht Politik? Überlegungen zum Einfluss politischer Persönlichkeiten auf weltpolitische Gestaltung”, in Xuewu Gu and Hendrik W. Ohnesorge, eds., Politische Persönlichkeiten und ihre weltpolitische Gestaltung: Analysen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Wiesbaden, 2017), 3–​5. 6 Some recent examples in this regard include Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack, “Let us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back In”, International Security, 25/​4(2001), 107–​ 46; idem, “Beyond Great Forces: How Individuals Still Shape History”, Foreign Affairs, 98/​6(2019), 148–​60; Hendrik W. Ohnesorge and Xuewu Gu, eds., Der Faktor Persönlichkeit in der internationalen Politik: Perspektiven aus Wissenschaft, Politik und Journalismus (Wiesbaden, 2021). 7 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (NY, 1990). 8 Idem, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (NY, 2004), 2. 9 Ibid., x. 10 Ibid., 11. 11 Jean-​Marc F. Blanchard and Fujia Lu, “Thinking Hard about Soft Power: A Review and Critique of the Literature on China and Soft Power”, Asian Perspective, 36/​4(2012), 569. 12 Nye, Soft Power, 6. Cf. Nye’s work on leadership, including “Transformational Leadership and U.S. Grand Strategy”, Foreign Affairs, 85/​4(2006), 139–​45, 147–​48; The Powers to Lead (Oxford, 2008), 61–​69; Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era (Princeton, NJ, 2013), 12–​14. 13 Idem, “Hard, Soft, and Smart Power”, in Andrew F. Cooper, Jorge Heine, and Ramesh Thakur, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford, 2013), 568. 14 Ernst & Young, “Rapid-​Growth Markets Soft Power Index: Spring 2012”, 7–​8: www.skolkovo.ru/​ public/​media/​documents/​research/​SIEMS_​Monthly_​Briefing_​2012-​06_​eng.pdf. 15 Geun Lee, “A Theory of Soft Power and Korea’s Soft Power Strategy”, Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, 21/​2(2009), 213. 16 Andrew F. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy (Boulder, CO, 2008), 1. See also Alan Cowell, “Power of Celebrity at Work in Davos”, International Herald Tribune (29–​30 January 2005); Lena Partzsch, Die neue Macht von Individuen in der globalen Politik. Wandel durch Prominente, Philanthropen und Social Entrepreneurs (Baden-​Baden, 2014). 17 Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 7. 18 The designation is not a reverse of public diplomacy –​that is, understood as secret diplomacy. Rather, it emphasises the particular importance of individual agency and personal relations. 19 Nicholas J. Cull, “Public Diplomacy: Taxonomies and Histories”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Special Issue: Public Diplomacy in a Changing World, 616(March 2008), 32–​34. 20 Ohnesorge, Soft Power, 162. 21 Of course, foreign travel as well as the other components of personal diplomacy may also reverberate onto domestic audiences. Presenting oneself as a seasoned diplomat, au fait on the diplomatic stage and sought after by fellow world leaders, may also have beneficiary effects at home. 22 P. Cornelius Tacitus, Annalen/​Annales (München, 1992), 169. 23 Anthony A. Barrett, Caligula: The Corruption of Power (London, 1989), 12–​15. 24 Erich Koestermanns, “Die Mission des Germanicus im Orient”, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 7/​3(1958), 339 [author’s translation; original German: “Er gab dort den ersten Beweis für seine phänomenale Fähigkeit, die Herzen der Griechen wie später der Orientalen für sich zu gewinnen und diese gewiß auch für seine Pläne einzuspannen”]. 25 Office of the Historian, United States State Department, “Visits by Foreign Leaders in 1874” (nd): https://​hist​ory.state.gov/​depart​ment​hist​ory/​vis​its/​1874. 26 Idem, “Presidential and Secretaries Travels Abroad: Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt” (nd): https://​hist​ ory.state.gov/​depart​ment​hist​ory/​trav​els/​presid​ent/​roosev​elt-​theod​ore. 27 Peter Lord Carrington, Reflecting on Things Past: The Memoirs of Peter Lord Carrington (NY, 1988), 327. 28 Jeffrey E. Cohen, “Presidential Attention Focusing in the Global Arena: The Impact of International Travel on Foreign Publics”, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 46/​1(2016), 30–​31. 29 William R. Nester, De Gaulle’s Legacy: The Art of Power in France’s Fifth Republic (NY, 2014), 55–​56. 30 Lars C. Colschen, Deutsche Außenpolitik (Paderborn, 2010), 70–​71. 31 Monti Datta, “3 Countries Where Trump is Popular”, The Conversation (16 September 2019): https://​ thec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​3-​countr​ies-​where-​trump-​is-​popu​lar-​120​317. 32 Homer [Alexander Pope, translator], The Iliad (London, 1806), 38.

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Personal Diplomacy 33 Publius Cornelius Tacitus [M. Hutton and W. Peterson, translators; revised by R.M. Ogilvie, E.H. Warmington, and M. Winterbottom], Agricola/​Germania/​Dialogus, Loeb Classical Library 35 (Cambridge, MA, 1970), 241. 34 Barrett, Caligula, 13. 35 Nobel Prize, “The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953: Winston Churchill” (nd): www.nobelprize.org/​ prizes/​literature/​1953/​summary/​. 36 Quoted in Martin Gilbert, Churchill and America (NY, 2005), 26. 37 Max Weber [Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds.], Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, CA, 1978), 1111–​57. 38 Ibid., 1129. 39 Cynthia G. Emrich, Holly H. Brower, Jack M. Feldman, and Howard Garland, “Images in Words: Presidential Rhetoric, Charisma, and Greatness”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 46/​3(2001), 527. 40 Peter Spahn, “Perikles: Charisma und Demokratie”, in Wilfried Nippel, ed., Virtuosen der Macht: Herrschaft und Charisma von Perikles bis Mao (München, 2000), 23, 37. 41 Gilbert, Churchill and America, 26, 380–​81. 42 Rico Neuman and Kevin Coe, “The Rhetoric in the Modern Presidency: A Quantitative Analysis”, in Jason A. Edwards and David Weiss, eds., The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays (Jefferson, NC, 2011), 13. 43 For the role of symbols, rituals, and ceremonies, see Alisher Faizullaev, “Diplomacy and Symbolism”, Hague Journal of Diplomacy, 8/​2(2013), 91–​114. 44 Tacitus, Annalen/​Annales, 169. 45 Barrett, Caligula, 13. 46 On the episodes mentioned, see, for example, Michael Wolffsohn and Thomas Brechenmacher, Denkmalsturz? Brandts Kniefall (München, 2005); Christoph Schneider, Der Warschauer Kniefall: Ritual, Ereignis und Erzählung (Konstanz, 2006); Karen DeYoung and Nick Miroff, “Obama, Castro to Talk on Sidelines of Summit”, Washington Post (10 April 2015): www.washingtonpost.com/​world/​obama-​ raul-​castro-​speak-​by-​phone-​before-​heading-​to-​panama-​summit/​2015/​04/​10/​2da5c2f6-​de22-​11e4-​ b6d7-​b9bc8acf16f7_​story.html; Jonathan Soble, “Hiroshima Survivor Cries, and Obama Gives Him a Hug”, NY Times (27 May 2016): www.nytimes.com/​2016/​05/​28/​world/​asia/​hiroshima-​obama-​ visit-​shigeaki-​mori.html. 47 George W. Ball, “A Venture in Symbolic Diplomacy”, NY Times (2 August 1971), 23. 48 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., The Future of Power (NY, 2011), 94. 49 Cull, “Public Diplomacy”, 33–​34; Ohnesorge, Soft Power, 156–​59. 50 Bill Ivey and Paula Cleggett, “Cultural Diplomacy and the National Interest: In Search of a 21st Century Perspective”, The Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy, Vanderbilt University, 7–​8: www.interarts.net/​descargas/​interarts673.pdf. 51 Oliver Zöllner, “German Public Diplomacy: The Dialogue of Cultures”, in Nancy Snow and Philip M. Taylor, eds., Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy (NY, 2009), 265–​66. 52 Tadashi Ogawa, “Origin and Development of Japan’s Public Diplomacy”, in ibid., 272. 53 Cull, “Public Diplomacy”, 33. 54 United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, A Reliance on Smart Power: Reforming the Public Diplomacy Bureaucracy, Hearing Before the Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia Subcommittee, Washington, D.C., 23 September 2008, 110th Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC, 2009), 4–​5. 55 Felix Philipp Lutz, “Transatlantic Networks: Elites in German-​American Relations”, in Detlef Junker, ed. [Philipp Gassert, Wilfried Mausbach, and David B. Morris, associated editors], The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–​1990: A Handbook, Volume II: 1968–​1990 (Cambridge, 2004), 445. 56 Su Changhe, “Soft Power”, in Cooper, Heine, and Thakur, Modern Diplomacy, 549. 57 Lutz, “Transatlantic Networks”, 446. 58 Stephen R. Graubard, “Henry Kissinger’s Harvard Years”, NY Times (25 October 1992), 30. 59 Inderjeet Parmar, “Challenging Elite Anti-​Americanism in the Cold War: American Foundations, Kissinger’s Harvard Seminar and the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies”, in Inderjeet Parmar and Michael Cox, eds., Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Abingdon, 2010), 108–​20. 60 Ibid., 109. 61 Ibid., 114.

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Hendrik W. Ohnesorge 62 Ibid., 116. 63 Ludger Kühnhardt, Atlantik-​Brücke: Fünfzig Jahre deutsch-​ amerikanische Partnerschaft (Berlin, 2002), 347–​48. 64 Lutz, “Transatlantic Networks”, 445. 65 Nye, Future of Power, 94. 66 Ibid. 67 Carrington, Reflecting on Things Past, 328. 68 Ohnesorge, Soft Power, 171–​84, 204. 69 Quoted in Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Good Start, Long Road”, American Interest, 5/​3(2010), 13. 70 Charles M. Blow, “Trump, Chieftain of Spite”, NY Times (15 October 2017): www.nytimes.com/​ 2017/​10/​15/​opinion/​columnists/​trump-​spite-​obama-​legacy.html.

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34 FROM SOFT POWER TO REPUTATIONAL SECURITY Rethinking Public Diplomacy and Cultural Diplomacy for a Dangerous Age Nicholas J. Cull

On 20 January 2021, Joseph R. Biden took the oath of office as the forty-​sixth president of the United States of America. His inaugural address, amid his expected appeals to national unity and healing in domestic crisis, included a succinct pledge for American foreign policy: “we’ll lead not merely by the example of our power, but by the power of our example”. Biden’s words borrowed a favourite formulation of President Bill Clinton, used when he nominated the Barack Obama/​Joe Biden ticket at the Democratic convention in August 2008.1 Clinton’s resonant phrase in turn encapsulated the insight of Joseph Nye’s idea of “soft power”: that an ability to attract others through admirable values and culture enhances a nation’s ability to succeed in world affairs. This chapter revisits that seminal idea of soft power and examines its applicability to the post-​post-​Cold War era with its renewed landscape of Great Power rivalries. Soft power, from its first articulation at the end of Cold War, served as the core idea underpinning the public elements of diplomacy around the world. Public diplomacy had flourished in the Cold War as a set of activities by which the leading nations sought to advance their foreign policy through engagement with foreign publics. For the United States, where Nye coined the term, this meant investment in international broadcasting via Voice of America and other stations, funding for Fulbright exchanges and the multifaceted global infrastructure of the United States Information Agency. Despite their share in the credit for the successful conclusion of Cold War, such activities came under review with the end of that conflict. Then came the idea of soft power. With soft power as its justification, the zero-​sum communication competition of the bipolar Cold War evolved into a multipolar model in which many countries sought to reach out for international attention through a range of public diplomacy activities. Key concepts of the era included the notion of understanding national image as a brand. Yet, the Clinton formulation of power and example from 2008 hinted at an assumption that the hard power of the “example of power” was somehow independent of the soft power “power of example”. The reality was and is that they remain profoundly linked. The United States experience in the war on terror showed that the misuse of hard power could undermine the soft power of example. The war in Vietnam had pointed in the same direction. It led Obama to recall in his landmark speech in Cairo in 2009 the hope of Thomas Jefferson: “the less we use our power, the greater it will be”.2 The idea of soft power flourished regardless, crystallising DOI: 10.4324/9781003016625-41

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into very different policies in locations as different as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and the United States of both Obama and Donald Trump. By the 2020s, the differences in policies that term themselves soft power opened serious questions as to the utility of its formulation. This chapter looks at the world of the 2020s and considers whether and how soft power remains applicable and, if so, which policies are best suited to build it. It was only perceptible in retrospect but around 2015 the world changed. A new multifaceted crisis superseded that associated with the clash between radical Islam and the West, which broke into public consciousness for most Americans only with the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The post-​Cold War confidence in globalisation receded as multiple countries sought refuge in populism and international rivalries swung back to the fore. The global nature of that crisis speaks to global causes, and it seems certain that the general economic downturn of 2008 provided a shower of individual sparks to ignite decades of accumulating tinder. The reach of this crisis related to a parallel one in media, where new technologies had provided unprecedented access to information. Simultaneously the new network-​based platforms ensured that the guide through the volume of material available was similarity by ideology or taste or demographic niche to the person passing on the material. Hence, at the very moment in which the world had the potential to open to new possibilities, it closed around old certainties. To make matters worse, political forces for their own ends exploited an unintended consequence of a shift in media. Politicians found success when they championed old wounds. Foreign actors who saw an interest in chaos at home embraced weaponised media to serve their ends. Such moments of overlapping crisis have occurred before. Historically it was not uncommon for new communications technologies to bring political imbalance, especially when they coincided with pre-​existing social or economic upheaval. The human obsession with place and personality means that history remembers these crises by their protagonists or geographies rather than the media whose arrival deepened them. One speaks of the Kaiser’s War, Hitler’s War, or Senator McCarthy’s Cold War rather than the war of the popular press, the war of radio and newsreel, or the near war of television. These new media had an impact on their world rather like new strains of a virus, raging in an otherwise weakened body politic and unrestrained by the anti-​bodies that develop with familiarity. So it is in the 2020s. The world reads and acts without understanding the limits on its own media literacy. The crisis came at the worst possible moment. The world’s problems were too big for any single government to solve. The global economy, climate, migration, and extremism all spilled across frontiers and required collective responses. Yet at the same time, many governments around the world stalled in gridlock. They proved unable to mount adequate responses at a national level let alone the transnational one. As governments seemed inadequate to the tasks, so government voices seemed similarly insufficient to the associated messaging but, nonetheless, the march of technology accelerated the trend of making ordinary people ever more significant in international politics. Bruised, bewildered, and recognising the need to communicate, countries looked to their existing understanding of international image and attempted to press on with the familiar paradigm of soft power, missing the ways in which the approach as practised fell short of required needs. Soft power was the perfect idea for the post-​Cold War world. It succeeded because it fitted an international system looking to understand how the West did so well and Soviet Russia so poorly. It correctly drew attention to the great force of attraction in world affairs and the advantages to an international actor found in the perception of admirable values and culture. As such, it was a welcome justification for projects involving the projection of the arts and education. Institutions like the Germany’s Goethe Institute or Britain’s British Council clearly traded in soft power. In the wake of Brexit, Britain even added a soft power unit to the Foreign 410

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and Commonwealth Office –​now the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office. There was, however, a problem inasmuch as the discourse of soft power tended to focus the attention of the largest actors. One of the major attempts to measure soft power –​by Portland Communications –​limited its study to the so-​called Soft Power 30. Did this mean that there was no Soft Power 130? A similar triage had already emerged in the analysis of nation brands. Simon Anholt’s pioneering index begun in 2005 limited its scope to 50 countries whose images were strong enough as leading brands in the perception of audiences around the world. Where countries were practising what they identified as soft power-​driven policies, these ran such a gamut as plainly to dilute the concept. In America, soft power simply meant an emphasis on the popular culture exemplified by film, television, and music. Obama’s under-​ secretary of state for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Rick Stengel, summed this up when he spoke of singer Taylor Swift as “America’s #1 Public Diplomat”.3 The Chinese government in contrast emphasised teaching Mandarin around the world and building economic links in a charm offensive that seems at its core transactional. Russia defied the orthodoxy of the West and sought to build its soft power by asserting “traditional values” that appeal in some places around the world and include a dismissal of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. European soft power focused on law, heritage, and prosperity but had to explain institutional dysfunction and the departure of a prominent member-​state, Britain. The paradox at the heart of soft power –​and perhaps all power –​compounded the problem of finding a concept that worked for all countries: that its exercise was so unattractive. In interpersonal interaction, when growing up, one knows well about awareness of the negative implications of an obsession with one’s own image. Carly Simon memorably set the phenomenon to music in her 1972 song: “You’re So Vain”. The same seems true of nation-​states. Collective narcissism plays poorly overseas. Wise international cultural institutes like Goethe or the British Council have long since realised that their best approach is to frame their work as mutual learning or, in the British Council’s tag line, “Connecting Futures” and not simply highlighting achievement. Beyond simply the problem of exaggerating virtue is the challenge of venality. Regardless of the caveats in Nye’s original formulation, soft power has tended to appear in positive terms. Reality had shown that policy errors –​abuse of prisoners in American-​run jails in Iraq; cartoons offensive to Moslems in Danish newspapers and the mishandling of the aftermath –​have reputational consequence. The need is for a wider consideration of the role of reputation in world affairs. Reputation has long been a part of statecraft with ancient kings understanding the alchemy whereby their own person merged with the image and standing of the state. Disputes over precedence and deference were occupational hazards of international meetings. Consider the disarray to the alliance behind the Third Crusade stemming from an argument over the placement of flags on the battlements at the newly captured city of Acre in 1191. England’s fiery king, Richard-​the-​Lionheart, felt strongly that the ducal standard of Duke Leopold of Austria should not be placed on a par with his royal flag and the banner of the French monarch, Philip II. Richard ordered the duke’s banner thrown into the moat. Offended, Leopold abandoned the campaign forthwith.4 Diplomatic protocol evolved specifically to avoid such incidents. In the era of the Great Powers, publics proved supportive of decisive responses to reputational blows. In July 1870, Germans rallied to Otto von Bismarck’s hard line responding to the apparent slight to the monarch –​revealed in the so-​called Ems despatch –​and French publics rallied to their own wire services’ translation of the same document, with feeling boiling over into the Franco-​Prussian War.5 In the emerging United States, issues of national prestige remained plainly understood. The ultimate investments in such positive displays as the St Louis World’s Fair are well known. 411

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Hardly less interesting are the arguments from the negative side such as the bid to convince a sceptical United States Congress to fund the 1876 Philadelphia exposition. The chronicler of that event observed: as the U.S. had by its invitations to foreign powers to participate in the exhibition given to it an international character. … Congress was morally bound to aid the enterprise with a liberal appropriation, if for no other reason, for the simple purpose of sustaining the credit of the country in the eyes of the world.6 In spring 1914, when, as part of the resolution of a dispute, Mexican forces at Veracruz refused to salute the American flag, the insult –​the implicit insult to the reputation of the United States –​served as a justification for American forces to seize the city.7 In the nuclear age, issues of reputation and communicating resolution to potential enemies became a central part of the diplomacy of brinksmanship. The American National Security Council [NSC] strategy from 1950, NSC 68, moved the United States into a zero-​sum game where a setback for America was a setback everywhere. President John F. Kennedy especially elevated the strategic significance of credibility. In an often-​quoted Vienna interview with James Reston of the New York Times, bruised by the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, he explained: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place”. The thinking displaced the earlier domino theory in the Kennedy White House as the principal driver of escalating the United States military commitment to that corner of Southeast Asia.8 In one critical view: [T]‌he hypnotic justification which unified virtually all those who shape fundamental policy [towards Vietnam]. As an emotional belief credibility was immensely effective, especially for President Johnson, who equated it with the 20th century’s experience with appeasement and the faith American allies everywhere would have in their many security treaties with [the United States government].9 A similar interplay of image and reality existed in the thinking of President Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, as he explained when seeking to justify ongoing expenditure of conventional military strength in an NSC meeting in August 1970: We have to have forces in which we can believe before we can project. We must be able to project a credible power abroad in a situation where general nuclear war is no longer a likely or reasonable alternative. The general purpose forces are the way we are seen by allies –​they are the contact and the reality.10 Kissinger’s successor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw reputation as one of the issues at stake in the Iranian hostage crisis arguing: “Our credibility in the [Middle East] region and in Europe hangs on our willingness and ability to fight the Soviets on the ground in Iran and elsewhere, if horizontal escalation is necessary”.11 International relations theorists have addressed the concept of reputation in works like Jonathan Mercer’s prize-​winning 1996 study, Reputation and International Politics. The concept of reputation appears through the prism of signalling and estimating the likely responses to threats. There are moments when the fate of the world hung on the estimation of whether to call a bluff or have it operate as a deterrent. Yet the scholarship of reputation has focused on the reputations of leaders for resolution or irresolution and the contribution of reputation to 412

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the world of deterrence. There are limits to the dominant idea of reputation as relating to conflict: “fighting to create a reputation for resolution with adversaries is unnecessary and fighting to create a reputation for resolution with allies is unwise”.12 Scholars in marketing –​for their part –​were also engaging with issues of reputation but in a longer-​term economic sense. Theoretical breakthroughs included the Country-​of-​Origin Effect that explained how products associated with a particular nation traded as a premium.13 In the later 1990s, Anholt, the founder of the “Good Country Index”, refined the idea. To his subsequent regret, he suggested –​and mapped –​that a country’s reputation was analogous to a corporate brand. Anholt divided nation brands into six measurable components: Exports, People, Tourism, Policies/​Government, Culture/​Heritage, and Investment/​Immigration. As with later attempts to measure the strength of soft power in a particular place, he restricted his polling research on the comparative strength of individual national brands to 50 countries significant enough to draw forth emotion from a global audience.14 Yet the full impact of reputation stretches beyond the few nations favoured with the positive reputation in the transnational imagination. The history of crises suggests that a reputation or the absence of one can be a critical factor. There have been key moments in history when a limited reputation proved exceptionally damaging for a nation-​state. The problem seems acute during the early decades of a state’s independence before its distinct identity has permeated into the wider international consciousness as a fixed point on the international landscape. The genesis of the Second World War is revealing in this regard. When Adolf Hitler threatened the integrity of the two-​decades-​ old Czechoslovakia –​which had never existed until 1918 –​the issue failed to resonate with Britain’s public opinion. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, went so far as to say in a broadcast to the British people: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-​masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”. The implication was that if the public knew the people concerned, considered a crisis real and near, it would be easier to take a definitive stand. The abandonment of Czechoslovakia contrasts with the experience of Poland. Despite also winning its independence in 1918, Poland had a prior history –​Austria, Prussia, and Russia had divided it in 1795 –​and cultural presence in the British, European, and North American imagination. It was especially associated with music –​the Polonaise –​dances like the polka, and generations of performers from Frédéric Chopin to Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who seemed to arrive with regularity. T.S. Eliot’s 1914 poem, “Portrait of a Lady”, depicting upper class Boston life, includes the line, “We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole”. Irrespective of the technical merits of its case, Poland was a better-​known redoubt on which Britain and France could take a stand against Hitler and accordingly the country received a guarantee of territorial integrity on 31 March 1939.15 This did not translate into material support, but it drew a line; and when Hitler’s armed forces invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, Britain and France went to war against Germany to defend Polish sovereignty. In the longer term, the reputational salience of Poland did not prevent its transfer to Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta conference, but it certainly played into the decision of the Western Allies to rally against the declaration of martial law there in 1981 and warn the Soviet Union away from thoughts of greater involvement. Adjudging reputation as a resource enhances a polity’s position in a crisis even if it cannot work miracles. One wonders if Czechoslovakia would have fared better if it had been possible to call the entire new country Bohemia, being a place that already resonated in the European imagination as variously identified with free spirited artists. One of the cases in which the fate of a nation hinged on developing its reputation happened shortly after the crisis of 1939. Britain worked frantically to develop enough positive perceptions 413

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of itself in the neutral United States to make it possible for the American public to tolerate the extension of aid by the sympathetic president, Franklin Roosevelt. The British campaign included radio, literature, and film, but probably its most effective element was cultivating American reporters, who presented the actual responses of the British people to Germany’s aerial bombardment not as an expected reaction of a people to collective adversity but as a unique story of a people’s war and rebirth of a democratic spirit. Hitler had long since given Americans something to hate, but British government engagement of American public opinion provided something to love –​Winston Churchill’s Island –​and created a reputational dimension to British security not existing before the war and destined to be a welcome resource in later years.16 In present times, the focus that reputation can bring to a situation emerges in the contrasting fates of Afghanistan and Mali. In the 1990s, the emergence of an extreme political movement –​the Taliban –​threatened Afghanistan, and the world did nothing. The reputational frame attached to the country was that of “the Graveyard of Empires”, a rather unhelpful phrase that served as a face-​saver for the late nineteenth-​century British military rather than geopolitical gospel, but which had regained currency owing to the debacle of Soviet Russia’s invasion in the 1980s.17 It may have been that international help applied during the early 1990s could have staved off later catastrophe, but the world stood by as the country tumbled into civil war and the Taliban emerged. External interventions were few and proved counterproductive, such as Clinton’s Operation Infinite Reach missile strike on Al Qaeda training camps in August 1998. Watersheds in the international understanding of the Taliban’s extremity included images of the demolition of the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan, recognised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation [UNESCO] as a site of exceptional value to the culture of the world. A contrasting case is that of Mali that ran into difficulties in winter 2012–​2013 as Islamist extremists/​separatists advanced on its major cities. The world reacted. Part of the coverage focused on the wider relevance of Mali to world civilisation, including the vulnerability of the ancient city of Timbuktu –​proverbial in some countries as a distant place –​and the treasures in its ancient library. The Islamic library had UNESCO recognition and, in this case, the agency raised the alarm in advance of potential damage. Discourse around the value of Mali as a cultural treasure house broadened a positive reputation and contributed to the security of the country. France and a coalition of neighbours committed to intervening in the country and drove back the rebels, whilst local cultural workers ensured that the library’s valuable collections remained safely hidden until the danger passed.18 Reputation played a critical role in the Ukraine crisis of 2014. Despite false starts, the post-​ Soviet republic had essentially failed to teach the world for what it stood. The dominant idea of the country was that of a troubled leftover of the Soviet Union, which fitted the narrative of separatists and a rapacious neighbour rather than those seeking to preserve the integrity of the country. When the enemies of the Ukrainian state struck, most of the world felt only that principles were at stake and not some pillar of their internalised worldview under threat –​as they might if one of the countries with a better record of self-​presentation like Estonia were under attack. The significance of the reputational front stands underlined since reputations find themselves placed repeatedly in the crosshairs of social media. The emphasis of malign media on breaking reputations has emphasised the need for attention to their defence. In an era of renewed Great Power competition, when accepted borders are under threat, it is time to see the cultivation of soft power as security and effective public diplomacy as an extension of national defence. Some countries have already made the link. A national security review held in Britain in 2018 in the wake of the Brexit referendum instituted a new linked approach 414

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called the “Fusion Doctrine” under which economy, military, and image were to be viewed as an integrated whole. The renewed significance of reputation raises the question of which elements of reputation are most valuable to a nation. The prime delineation must be between positive values and actions and negative ones.19 On the positive side of the ledger, countries seen as rich and/​or strong have an advantage over those seen as poor and/​or weak; but there are also less tangible dimensions. Anholt’s analysis of motivations behind positive images found that the most useful thing was to be seen as “good”.20 The key to developing a positive image, and reputational security, is being seen to be good over a long period. Of course, good can come in a number of forms. Culture plainly serves as one form of good, with relevant dimensions such as entertainment, cuisine, or martial arts edging out a less immersive or more esoteric cultural achievements such as a highly refined calligraphy in a regionally specific script. Beyond this lays the ethical dimension of being “good”: aligning with internationally recognised standards set out by the world’s body of human rights law and religious faiths. To be credible in this endeavour, image must find basis on reality, and it follows that hostile attempts to disrupt a country’s reputation frequently take the form of work to show a discrepancy between image and reality. Perhaps the clearest evidence of the centrality of reputation in contemporary diplomacy and statecraft comes from the interest of malign media actors in eroding it. Kremlin-​funded media such the website Sputnik or TV channel now known as RT have made a habit of emphasising narratives of Western decadence, political division, and the unreliability of alliances of which those countries are part. In one sample, 80 per cent of RT/​Sputnik coverage of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation countries advanced negative frames, and some stories included multiple negative narratives.21 Some of the most admired countries –​the Nordics –​had experienced particularly concerted attempts to erode their reputations.22 Even positive stories like Nordic adoption of children from Russia received spin as evidence of decay through falling birth rates and, for good measure, illustrated with a picture of a creepy clown.23 In 2017, the European Union’s counter disinformation unit felt it necessary to publish a detailed rebuttal of false news stories with the title, “No, Denmark is not legalizing sexual abuse of animals”, to counter multiple lurid reports of zoophile brothels in the country then circulating in Russian media.24 Child protection is a common theme in such cultural attacks. Danish misjudgement of childcare was an issue in 2014, when Russian media expressed outrage at news that school children had been invited to watch the dissection of a giraffe recently euthanised at Copenhagen Zoo. For a nation like Denmark under reputational attack, it is important to be aware of the external malign stereotype and work not to confirm it. In autumn 2020, the foreign minister, Jeppe Kofod, admitting to having had sex with a 15-​year-​old some years previously did not help Danish attempts to live down an undeserved reputation for child or animal engagement. He apologised merely by saying that he was “drunk and stupid”. Sputnik honed-​in on the story and found further scope, the next day reporting that a Danish television show aimed at teens had included adults stripping naked for the purposes of health education. In early 2021, their headlines focused on the debut of a new television programme for children called John Dillermand, which featured the adventures of a man with a giant prehensile penis.25 Each of these incidents is in their own terms explicable but, together, they can combine into a problem for the state. For some states, the experience of external media coverage is so unremittingly hostile as to constitute a kind of theft. An Israeli communication scholar coined the term “Brandjacking” to describe the experience of his home country with its international image so shaped by hostile media.26 Historical examples of countries, whose image became so dominated by a single issue effectively publicised by opponents as to find other aspects of their international life severely 415

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limited, include Apartheid-​era South Africa. The justice of such “Brandjacking” may vary from case to case, but the phenomenon of demonisation is plain. A focus of reputational security should imply an awareness that one’s own shortcomings can be a source of tremendous vulnerability. Some countries seeking involvement in the fore of international life maintain systems of government that limit international regard. The problem is wider than simply the reputational damage implicit in dictatorships. Enforcement of laws of “lèse majesté” in Thailand challenges the Thai image as a gastronomic paradise.27 The expectation of the Gulf States that their royal families should be treated as above the law is untenable in the twenty-​first century, more especially when individuals expecting immunity are the same people involved in image promotion. A case in point is the shocking case of the British cultural worker, Caitlin McNamara, who suffered sexual assault at the hands of the United Arab Emirates [UAE] minister of tolerance during a business meeting in February 2020.28 In a similar vein, the ethical lapses made in the name of security appear counter-​productive. A good example here is the familiar defence of the authoritarian government that it would love to extend freedom of the press or some other human right but has to ensure the security of the state first. Reputational security suggests that human rights and security are not a trade-​ off but rather two sides of the same coin. Keeping oppositional journalists in jail will erode an authoritarian state’s security through the mechanism of reputation even as it seeks to enhance it through repression. Not all reputational damage is as spectacular as a misstep like Saudi Arabia’s association with the death of the dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, assassinated in the Saudi consulate at Istanbul in October 2018, or the UAE’s jailing in 2011 and 2017 of the free media activist, Ahmed Mansoor. Damage that comes from an approach to national branding emphasises unilateral approaches, especially when international problems require collaborative responses. All public diplomacy begins with listening, and it is in the nature of biases and shortcomings that we are blind to our own. The systematic study of reputation has revealed one finding above all others. Reputations are remarkably stable. Most people do not pay much attention to foreign countries and, when they do, their views seem fixed. This said, it seems that moments in international politics are sometimes so traumatic or far reaching in their implications as to open the potential for a major adjustment. The reputations of the moment pass into a period of flux. The two World Wars of the twentieth century operated as such a period. The successful transformation of Britain’s image is noted above, but one should also remember the impact of the slow-​burning crisis of the 1930s and flash disasters of 1940 on international perceptions of France. Two generations later, for instance, Americans identified the martial country of Napoleon, Austerlitz, and the deeds of the Foreign Legion with collapse and surrender. The pandemic of 2020 has the potential to be a moment of reputational adjustment. Polls revealed a dramatic fall in the prestige of China, the country identified with the initial outbreak of the COVID virus. The experience made heroes of some nations and exposed weakness in others. At a time when the credibility of entire systems was under scrutiny, the Asian approach with its cohesion and emphasis on the collective did especially well whilst the North European/​ North American emphasis on individual rights seemed ill suited to the demands of public health during the crisis. Scenes of civil disorder in the United States, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, and the disproportionately high mortality rates in America and Britain, contributed little to the reputations of the countries concerned. The race to first discover and then equitably distribute the vaccine added a new dimension of competition. For China –​all too aware of the risk in being associated with the origin of virus –​there followed a succession of gambits: for instance, Mask Diplomacy to deliver gifts of materials in short supply to communities in need in spring 2020, and Vaccine Diplomacy to supply 416

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vaccines to developing countries in spring 2021. Such strategies apparently did little to limit the reputational damage. China’s vested interest was too obvious not to dominate perception and, by October 2020, polls such as Pew reported unprecedented levels of anti-​Chinese feeling.29 The countries with demonstrably enhanced reputations are New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, South Korea, both of which managed to limit the local spread of the pandemic and display admirable cohesion in their response. Interestingly, both were also increasingly well regarded following periods of positive international coverage in multiple fields including, entertainment.30 One-​off gestures that helped in bilateral relationships included a gift of medical equipment from Taiwan to the City of Prague, both countries of which were in the midst of disputes of Beijing, and the supply of a team of medical personnel from Albania to Italy.31 The unexpectedness of the gift seems to have enhanced its impact, but such gestures are too limited for a general impact on a country’s reputation. One intriguing issue raised by the experience of the pandemic is the interplay of leadership and gender. It was noticeable that countries led by women like New Zealand fared better than were others overseen by men –​and especially men with a particular populist style. The causality at work is unclear. It may be that countries open to female leadership were predisposed to collaborative solutions of the kind necessary in a pandemic rather than the bravado displayed by the likes of Trump, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, or Britain’s Boris Johnson. Certainly, moving forward it may be that women in leadership will be a distinct aid to reputational security in terms of both enhanced image and an enhanced reality of attention to collaboration. The experience of Great Power competition and the pandemic at the turn of the second decade of the twenty-​first century has jolted the world back into a dual focus of reputation and collaboration. The problems of the world are too great for any one country to act alone: the economy, the migration crisis, climate, and now the pandemic all require collaboration. If positive relevance over time is the key to reputation, there is no alternative to sustained collaboration as a pathway to the reputational security. It is certainly no era for a country to attempt a unilateral solution. Public diplomacy can contribute to such a world –​for sure –​but the foundation of a positive message and a positive image must be a positive reality. It seems clear that in the decade ahead, the great goal of power –​security –​depends on the power of example, exchange, and collaboration. Such strategies all require a first step of listening.

Notes 1 “Transcript: Bill Clinton’s Prime-​Time Speech” (27 August 2008): www.npr.org/​templates/​story/​ story.php?storyId=​94045962. 2 Nicholas J. Cull, “Jefferson on Soft Power: Behind Obama’s Cairo Quote” (12 June 2009): https://​usc​ publ​icdi​plom​acy.org/​blog/​jeffer​son-​soft-​power-​beh​ind-​obama%E2%80%99s-​cairo-​quote. 3 Richard Stengel, “Is Taylor Swift America’s #1 Public Diplomat?” (16 December 2015): https://​usc​ publ​icdi​plom​acy.org/​story/​tay​lor-​swift-​ameri​cas-​1-​pub​lic-​diplo​mat. 4 John Gillingham, Richard I (London, 2002), 154. 5 On Bismarck’s thinking, see A.J.P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman (London, 1955). 6 James D. McCabe, The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1877), 167. 7 Robert Quirk, An Affair of Honor: Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Veracruz (Lawrence, KS, 1962). 8 Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (NY, 1983), 247. The interview was not made public at the time, however Reston revealed Kennedy’s feeling in a television interview after Kennedy’s death; see “Kennedy Decision in Vietnam Noted: Reston Lays War Step-​Up to Talk With Khrushchev”, NY Times (18 January 1966), 4. 9 Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (NY, 1985), 164. Others commenting on the phenomenon of credibility-​driven thinking include Jonathan Schell and Frederick Logevall, The Origins of the Vietnam War (London, 2014), 45–​47.

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Nicholas J. Cull 10 Memorandum of Conversation, 19 August 1970: https://​hist​ory.state.gov/​hist​oric​aldo​cume​nts/​frus1​ 969-​76v34/​d153. 11 “Summary of Conclusions of a Special Coordination Committee Meeting”, 22 August 22, 1980: https://​hist​ory.state.gov/​hist​oric​aldo​cume​nts/​frus1​977-​80v1​1p1/​d346. 12 Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1996), especially 228. 13 See Keith Dinnie, “Country of Origin 1965–​ 2004: A Literature Review”, Journal of Customer Behaviour, 3/​2(2004), 165–​213 for an overview. 14 See Simon Anholt and Jeremy Hildreth, Brand America (NY, 2005), for an overview of his approach. 15 See Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War (London, 1989), for a detailed history of the diplomacy of this period. 16 See Nicholas J. Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (Oxford, 1995), for a study of the campaign and associated movement in Britain’s reputation. 17 See Rod Nordland, “The Empire Stopper”, NY Times (30 August 2017), A8, for recent reflections on the phrase by the New York Times bureau chief in Kabul. 18 “Timbuktu Mayor: Mali Rebels Torched Library of Historic Manuscripts”, Guardian (28 June 2013): www.theguardian.com/​world/​2013/​jan/​28/​mali-​timbuktu-​library-​ancient-​manuscripts; Tochi Dreazen, “The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu”, New Republic (24 April 2013): https://​newr​epub​lic. com/​arti​cle/​112​898/​timbu​ktu-​lib​rari​ans-​duped-​al-​qaeda-​save-​books. 19 For the Fusion doctrine, see Cabinet Office, National Security Capability Review (March 2018): https://​ ass​ets.pub​lish​ing.serv​ice.gov.uk/​gov​ernm​ent/​uplo​ads/​sys​tem/​uplo​ads/​atta​chme​nt_​d​ata/​file/​705​347/​ 6.4391_​CO_​N​atio​nal-​Secur​ity-​Rev​iew_​web.pdf. 20 Simon Anholt, The Good Country Equation: How We Can Repair the World in One Generation (San Francisco, CA, 2020). 21 Gordon Ramsay and Sam Robertshaw, Weaponising News RT, Sputnik and Targeted Disinformation (London, 2019): www.kcl.ac.uk/​policy-​institute/​assets/​weaponising-​news. pdf. 22 For an overview of this attack, see Edward Deverell, Charlotte Wagnsson, and Eva-​Karin Olsson, “Destruct, Direct and Suppress: Sputnik Narratives on the Nordic Countries”, Journal of International Communication, 27/​1(2020), 15–​37. 23 For commentary and image, see “Norway –​A Nation in Moral Decay?” EU vs Disinfo (24 February 2017): https://​euvs​disi​nfo.eu/​nor​way-​a-​nat​ion-​in-​moral-​decay/​. 24 “No, Denmark is Not Legalising Sexual Abuse of Animals”, ibid. (9 September 2017): https://​euvs​ disi​nfo.eu/​no-​denm​ark-​is-​not-​leg​alis​ing-​sex​ual-​abuse-​of-​anim​als/​. 25 Igor Kuznetzov, “ ‘I Was Drunk and Stupid’: Danish Foreign Minister Apologizes for Sex With 15-​Year-​ Old Girl”, Sputnik (18 September 2020): https://​sput​nikn​ews.com/​eur​ope/​ 202009181080497579-​ i-​was-​drunk-​and-​stupid-​danish-​foreign-​minister-​apologises-​for-​sex-​with-​15-​year-​old-​girl/​; Svetlana Ekimenko, “ ‘Something Rotten in Denmark’: Netizens Slam Show Where Adults Strip Naked Before Kids”, Sputnik (19 September 2020): https://​sput​nikn​ews.com/​ viral/​202009191080514108-​ something-​ rotten-​ i n-​ d enmark-​ n etizens-​ s lam-​ s how-​ w here-​ a dults-​ s trip-​ n aked-​ b efore-​ k ids/​ ; Aleksandra Serebriakova, “Danish Children’s Show About Man with Giant ‘Ice-​Cream Stealing’ Penis Sparks ‘Biggest Controversy’ ”, Sputnik (7 January 2021): https://​sput​nikn​ews.com/​viral/​202​1010​ 7108​1689​743-​dan​ish-​childr​ens-​show-​about-​man-​with-​g iant-​ice-​cream-​steal​ing-​penis-​spa​rks-​bigg​ est-​cont​rove​rsy. 26 Eytan Gilboa, “Israel: Countering Brandjacking”, in Nancy Snow and Nicholas J. Cull, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, Second Edition (London, 2020), 331–​41. 27 For discussion see “Opinion: The King of Thailand is Jittery about His Image (and his Country’s Democratic Past)”, Washington Post (24 May 2017): www.washingtonpost.com/​news/​democracy-​post/​ wp/​2017/​05/​24/​the-​king-​of-​thailand-​is-​jittery-​about-​his-​image-​and-​his-​countrys-​democratic-​past/​. 28 “British Woman Accusing Senior UAE Royal of Sexual Assault to Fight on”, Guardian (2 November 2020): www.theguardian.com/​books/​2020/​nov/​12/​caitlin-​mcnamara-​alleged-sexual-​assault-sheikhnahyan-​bin-​mubarak-​al-​nahyan-​abu-​dhabi-​uae. 29 Laura Silver, Kat Devlin, and Christine Huang, “Unfavorable Views of China Reach Historic Highs in Many Countries”, Pew Research Center (6 October 2020): www.pewresearch.org/​ global/​2020/​ 10/​06/​unfavorable-​views-​of-​china-​reach-​historic-​highs-​in-​many-​countries/​. 30 On the 2020 Ipsos Anholt Nation Brands Index, see “Germany Retains Top ‘Nation Brand’ Ranking, the UK and Canada Round out the Top Three”, IPSOS (27 October 2020): www.ipsos.com/​en-​ca/​ news-​polls/​Germany-​Retains-​Top-​Nation-​Brand-​Ranking-​the-​United-​Kingdom-​emerges-​ahead-​ of-​Canada-​to-​Round-​Out-​the-​Top-​Three-​US-​and-​China-​Experience-​Significant-​Decline. New

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From Soft Power to Reputational Security Zealand joined the top five in both people and governance. South Korea merely moved up the rankings. 31 These stories are reported in Raymond Johnston, “Ventilators from Taiwan Delivered to Prague Hospitals”, expats cz (4 September 2020): https://​news.exp​ats.cz/​coro​navi​rus-​in-​ the-​czech-​repub​lic/​vent​ilat​ors-​from-​tai​wan-​delive​red-​to-​pra​gue-​hospit​als/​; Benet Koleka, “Albania Sends 60 More Nurses to Join Coronavirus Fight in Hard-​hit Italy”, Reuters (20 April 2020): www. reuters.com/​article/​us-​health-​coronavirus-​albania-​italy/​albania-​sends-​60-​more-nursesto-​join-​coronavirus-​fight-​in-​hard-​hit-​italy-​idUSKBN2222AW.

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35 THREE STRIKES AND YOU’RE OUT? Implications of “Hyper-​Globalisation”, the New Cold War, and the Coronavirus for the Future of Multilateralism David G. Haglund

These are gloomy days for contemplating with nostalgic affection the multilateral post-​Cold War international order. Commonly referred to of late as the “Liberal International Order” [LIO], that dispensation is seen to be increasingly under threat of such severity as to be virtually on life support –​if in fact, it has not already been tipped into the grave. A variety of challenges are apparently responsible for the dire situation of the contemporary LIO. Any of them on their own would be trouble enough for that order; but the combination of the challenges listed in this chapter’s subtitle –​a veritable triple whammy, with the latest affliction, the COVID pandemic of 2020, considered by some to be its coup de grâce –​is such as to conclude that the time has come to publish multilateralism’s obituary. At the risk of taking the label of a Panglossian exercise, this chapter will not argue that multilateralism is dead. Multilateralism is not synonymous with the LIO, thus if the latter disappears, there is no logical reason why the former must also vanish. Certainly, multilateralism is under strain. Indeed, one would probably have to go back to the inter-​war era of the twentieth century to encounter such a pervasive sense of despondency regarding this institution. The dysthymia that reigned during the “twenty years’ crisis” of those two decades stood in sharp contrast to the optimism that had characterised the years leading to August 1914.1 In the giddy aftermath of the Cold War’s ending, did anyone really not believe the world could begin anew as a result of the wonder-​working prowess of globalisation? If whisked back by a time machine to 1913, one might have found what appeared to be very familiar terrain. At that time, just as in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, it looked as if the spectre of Great Power war suffered banishment from an increasingly interconnected and cosmopolitan world. At that time, again just as in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, it really did seem as if ever growing interdependence had corroborated a new truth about international politics, namely that when people and goods could move freely across borders, armies would never again have to do so.2 It was possible in those heady years of peace to regard war, so long the scourge of the planet, as finally unmasked for what it was: the “great illusion”.3 420

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Of course, even during that era so often recalled, not only in France, as la belle époque,4 problems abounded. “The good old days”, in the words of the Billy Joel song, “weren’t always good, and tomorrow’s not as bad as it seems”.5 At least the singer got the first half of the couplet right, given that when contemplated from the good old days of la belle époque, the future actually turned out to be worse than anyone could have imagined. To be sure, those pre-​1914 decades were hardly paradisiacal, not even in “advanced” Europe, what with more than 15,000 people dying in terrorist attacks during the 15 years before 1914 and where the continent’s largest country, Russia, resembled nothing so much as a “constantly simmering civil war whose outbreaks of insurrection and reprisal punctuated a fragile stalemate in the state”.6 Conditions in Europe’s colonial empires were, needless to say, much worse. The era only looked so good because what came after it, the new Thirty Years’ War of 1914–​1945, was so evidently horrific.7 If there is such a thing as an historical learning curve, then the “international community” certainly clambered up one following the Second World War. Enabling this rapid and inspiring exit from the recent experience of Great Power war was the greatly reinvigorated geostrategic institution known as multilateralism.8 Fuelling it in large part was a sustained commitment of the liberal democracies of the wartime alliance –​above all, the United States and Britain –​to prevent the kind of geopolitical backsliding that had proven so costly after the First World War.9 Today, the latest –​post-​Cold War –​manifestation of that order is itself tottering, and to more than a few analysts, it is because like the order that ended in 1913, illusions lay at the base of the LIO. One concerned the relative painlessness of globalised free trade, such that in increasing overall global wealth –​which it did –​it could also ensure that the fruits of greater prosperity could be more ethically and equitably shared –​which it did not. Another of those illusions was that a liberal Power of such vast capacity –​in the event, the United States –​could be counted on to understand that as it was the principal beneficiary of the multilateral order, it must fall to it to become and to remain the order’s leading champion. Quite a few analysts felt moved to suggest that for the United States, the appropriate role to adopt had to be that of “hegemon”, even if it remained unclear what the concept of hegemony was actually supposed to mean in practice.10 But whatever it might have meant, the “h-​word” implied one certainty: there could be no “Amerexit” from the task of overseeing the LIO. One astute critic of American foreign policy has given to the post-​Cold War mind set a metaphorical label, the “Emerald City consensus”. Andrew Bacevich invokes this trope to identify that magical place to which the yellow brick road led in The Wizard of Oz –​a place of fulfilling all wishes and where all dreams come true. For Bacevich, this post-​1991 consensus rested on three core assumptions, all critically dependent on American superintendence. They were: “unfettered” capitalism worked best for Americans and everyone else; “unabashed” American military domination of the system worked best for Americans and everyone else; and the purpose of life after the Cold War had become, for Americans and everyone else, to enjoy to the fullest individual liberty whilst taking on as few civic responsibilities as possible. In light of this trio of assumptions, Bacevich finds it easy to understand Americans’ current disaffection with the LIO: they simply ceased to believe that it was still working to promote their interests. Bacevich and former President Donald Trump, with whom he stood in fundamental disagreement on so many issues, did at least share one important quality: membership in the same Baby Boom generation. During the period stretching from the mid-​1940s through the 1980s, as [Trump] and I passed from infancy and childhood into adolescence and then manhood, most Americans most of the time nurtured the conviction that the three versions of

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post-​war freedom to which they subscribed could coexist in rough equipoise. That their nation could be simultaneously virtuous and powerful and deliriously affluent seemed not only plausible, but essential.11 Somewhere along the road, however, the wheels began to fall off the cart that was supposed to lead to the Emerald City. Even though one might fairly object that the Emerald City consensus is so clearly America-​ centric, Bacevich’s argument cannot and really should not be considered synonymous with the entirety of the political institution known as multilateralism. Indeed, over the past few years, some might even be tempted to regard it as antonymous with that institution, and even a few optimists think it possible to keep alive an LIO from which America has absented itself. Still, the Emerald City metaphor does have the considerable merit of highlighting what is by far the leading –​albeit not the sole –​source of the current angst about the future of the LIO: the conviction that America has lost faith in the order it did so much to bring into existence after 1945. Accordingly, this analysis will be emphatically America-​centric and concentrate on two matters: America’s initial embrace of, and enthusiasm for, multilateralism; and the implications of the “triple whammy” of the reaction to hyper-​globalisation, the emerging Sino-​American Cold War, and the impact of the COVID pandemic. To restate, America does not represent the whole story; it is not the be-​all and end-​all of contemporary multilateralism. However, and in keeping with the baseball motif conveyed in this chapter’s title, one could do much worse than to regard it as playing the same role that one former New York Yankees star, Reggie Jackson, once arrogated to himself: the “straw that stirs the drink”. Illustrative of this assumption is a recent enquiry into the ongoing relevance –​or lack thereof –​of the mobilising role played by the geopolitical construction known as the “West” in the formulation of American foreign policy. Michael Kimmage rattled off a list of the leading contemporary challenges confronting multilateralism. High on the list of difficulties facing the LIO were the increase in democratic backsliding in many parts of Europe; the failure of the Middle East to embrace democratisation; the resurgence of a rebarbative and nationalistic Russia under Vladimir Putin; and, most important, the unstoppable –​or at least unstopped –​“rise” of China. Yet worrisome as the items on this list may be, today’s funk really has its roots in American soil. For Kimmage, applying terminology that reflects an easy identity amongst the constructs of “West”, “Washington consensus”, and LIO, the principal peril posed to multilateralism has been the American retreat from it. “With Trump’s election”, he writes, an American-​led West was becoming an object of nostalgia. It might still be a rhetorical figuration or a future option, but it was no longer the point of orientation for American foreign policy. The Washington consensus had unravelled most spectacularly not in Beijing or Moscow or Damascus but in Washington, DC.12 In effect, America had cast it aside as outmoded, and even dangerous, political junk. Assuming that Kimmage is correct in this assessment, it follows that the place to begin comprehending the current state and future prospects of multilateralism is with America’s experience as a “multilateral” player in the game of states. It has been a latecomer to the game, from the historical perspective. Whilst Kimmage and so many other authors have sought recourse in the notion of the oft-​commented post-​Cold War “Washington consensus” as a means of identifying some of the denotative qualities of American multilateralism, there had actually been another, much older and longer-​lived, Washington consensus conditioning the 422

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country’s relationship to the international balance of power. This earlier consensus stood as the very antithesis of multilateralism. As such, it meant that the blossoming of America’s newfound love after 1945 for multilateralism required the uprooting of the earlier Washington consensus. That older Washington consensus took its meaning from the famous “farewell address” given by America’s first president, George Washington, in September 1796.13 It was widely interpreted –​and correctly –​as guidance to future generations of Americans to avoid becoming enmeshed in the power politics of the leading European states, with whom Washington warned against the forging of “permanent” alliances –​a successor, Thomas Jefferson, endorsed and embellished the advice, substituting “entangling” for “permanent” as the sort of alliance that was to be shunned. The first Washington consensus enjoyed an extraordinarily long life, temporarily breached when America entered the European balance of power in 1917, but apparently only permanently overturned because of the country’s involvement in the Second World War. This first Washington consensus is often characterised by the label “isolationism”, but this latter word is, like “hegemony”, open to so many confusing and contradictory interpretations that it is probably wisest to replace it with the notion of “unilateralism”.14 One analyst advocates doing just that.15 Although not without complications in its own right, unilateralism at least helps gain some analytical purchase over the concept that is so central to this chapter’s analysis of American multilateralism. This is because post-​1945 American multilateralism started out, and for many decades remained, primarily –​although not exclusively –​a transatlantic phenomenon. And to the extent that there has been an upsurge in concern about America’s defecting from the multilateral frameworks it did so much to erect over the past 75 years, it is sparked by worry about its turning its back on the transatlantic framework of security and defence that had been the hallmark of multilateralism “American-​style”. To a degree difficult to over-​emphasise, that variant of multilateralism really did begin its existence as a Pax Atlantica.16 What situated America squarely in the multilateral geopolitical arena during the twentieth century were the two world wars, the first only temporarily, but the second more lastingly. Since Europe had been, for so long, the place where the world’s Great Powers “resided”, it was also by definition the part of the world that involved for America the most risk of entanglement. Worse, it was where the source of danger lay. If possible to avoid involvement in the European balance of power, it followed to generations of Washington’s successors that so, too, could the risk of entanglement be skirted and that of harm avoided. Ultimately, it proved impossible for presidents to continue to entertain this vision of an America hived safely off in “its” hemisphere, so in this sense it is correct to interpret the intervention decision of the Second World War as a reflection of the grand strategy of “offshore balancing”.17 It is less correct, however, to attribute the intervention decision during the First World War to this motive. In large measure because of this failure of American decision-​makers to construe the 1917 decision as motivated by concerns for their country’s physical security, it proved impossible to launch an era of security multilateralism in the two decades following the First World War. In that moment, la nécessité did not oblige. In retrospect, what would have been required to make post-​First World War multilateralism function in theory was impossible to achieve in practice: a close security and defence relationship between the United States and Britain. During the interwar years, a lasting Anglo-​American alliance remained a will-​o-​the-​wisp, for as some scholars point out, this all-​important bilateral relationship remained conditioned by a considerable degree of mutual suspicion and strategic rivalry.18 Americans, and those who led them in the interwar years, simply had great difficulty imagining that national security depended in any fundamental way on scrapping the first Washington consensus.19 To the contrary, safety and common sense required its maintenance. 423

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It is hardly any exaggeration, then, to link American multilateralism so tightly with the transatlantic security arrangements of the decades following the Second World War. The country’s new grand strategy contrasted radically with what had gone before; but if it was very much an “internationalist” and multilateralist one, it was not for all that, a “universalistic” grand strategy. Rather, it was, as George Kennan, the father of American containment policies, so memorably phrased it, a “particularistic” strategy. Europe was the cynosure, even if not the exclusive focus of strategy insofar as American policy-​makers saw things. And even when American involvement in other regions began seemingly to increase, it was in large measure for fear that non-​ involvement in regional security elsewhere –​for instance, Korea –​would redound negatively for America in what was its multilateralist geographic core, Europe.20 By the mid-​twentieth century, those who thought and wrote about America’s grand strategy embraced a new axiom: no piece of real estate outside of North America itself could be of such primordial significance for the country’s strategic interests as that large landmass often referred to as “Eurasia”. Control of this territory by any single adversary or league of adversaries would present a dire, perhaps even fatal, challenge to American prosperity and physical security alike. The prospect of such control, however, could remain at bay if America might prevent any foe from dominating Western Europe. Regarded as constituting the dynamic “rimland” of Eurasia, this region held the greatest concentration of industrial wealth, and therefore military potential, outside of the United States.21 The key to understanding America’s post-​1945 embrace of multilateralism was, therefore, in the “rational” assessment of leaders obliged to do all possible to enhance the nation’s security and other interests. But there was more to America’s love affair with the old multilateralism than simple self-​ interest based on a rational calibration of threats, set off against the requirements needed to parry those threats. There was also an ideational aspect to American grand strategy, a derivative of what many took to be the country’s “liberal” ideology. Over time, this second –​ideological –​ element of strategy would emerge as important in America’s embrace of multilateralism, pari passu the decline in anxiety regarding the Soviet “threat” once the alarmism of the late 1940s and early 1950s began to dissipate. If ideology never did or could supplant security completely as a principal motivational buttress of American multilateralism, it certainly became, as the Cold War settled down into an uncomfortable yet bearable stalemate, a powerful reinforcing element in the country’s Western-​oriented multilateral dispensation. Even the doctrine of “containment” needs regarding at least as much as a liberal –​therefore ideological –​strategy as it was a balance of power one.22 Americans have never been thoroughgoing realists. For so many of them, realism was a mid-​twentieth-​century European import that fitted only partially and uncomfortably into the country’s strategic culture.23 It did not resonate with America’s geopolitical DNA in the long period leading to the country’s involvement in the Second World War. And even after realist precepts started to entrench themselves in American policy-​making circles following that conflict, powerful ideological garnishing was required to mobilise elites and public behind strategic initiatives required for waging the new Cold War. During the post-​1945 period, and well into the first decade of the twenty-​first century, liberalism supplied that ideological garnish, interpreted in the American context through the cognitive filter of “Wilsonianism” –​or what one scholar termed the “Wilsonian impulse”.24 Yet another observation is that the “liberal tradition is not only in America, it is America. The realist tradition, in contrast, not only is rarely in America, it is un-​American”.25 Some might disagree with this attribution of such total ideological dominance to liberalism, but few would dispute that liberalism has been a –​some say, the –​cardinal feature of America’s mooted “exceptionalism”.26 Nor would be it easy to deny that following the Second World War, the 424

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Wilsonian variant of liberalism did come to represent a new standing injunction for many American policy elites to conceive their country’s place in the world in both multilateralist and interventionist terms. Security concerns made multilateral participation in global affairs mandatory; liberal ideology made it palatable. Not only did liberalism apparently pre-​dispose America to multilateralism; it also pre-​ disposed it toward a form of multilateralism that found anchor geographically in what was regularly referred to as the “West”, the principal institutional manifestation of which became, after 1949, the “democratic alliance”.27 That alliance, of course, was the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation [NATO], and though at its outset its purpose had been to endow its dozen members with collective defence, many regarded it as much more than a simple security pact. Instead, it was the very embodiment of the liberal multilateral order of the post-​war decades. Some scholars were even beginning to argue that, the first Washington consensus to the contrary notwithstanding, it was multilateralism rather than unilateralism that best reflected America’s “geopolitical soul”. This was a novel argument that developed increasing intellectual traction when the Soviet threat –​the phenomenon that had kept America involved in the post-​1945 multilateral order –​disappeared. Not surprisingly, when the Soviet Union collapsed shortly after the “threat” vanished, the argument gained greater voice. In this creative intellectual retelling, America during the first post-​Cold War decade was imagined as having been born with a multilateral gene, whatever previous historical reality might have suggested to the contrary. What, after all, had the entire American constitutional experience been if not a tutorial from its very beginning in applied multilateralism? Such was one claim, whose understanding of early American political tradition –​its “Philadelphian” constitutional order –​was one impregnated by the conviction that multilateral co-​operation came naturally to an America whose own early life and liberal character demanded constant attention to the requirements, as well as the benefits, of achieving ordered liberty through the spirit of compromise and “other-​help”.28 Although the institution of post-​Second World War multilateralism contained within it many different (sub)institutions, the one that mattered most was the Atlantic alliance, itself erected on the foundation of the pre-​existing –​wartime –​Anglo-​American alliance. This is why NATO’s post-​Cold War evolution would prove to be so interesting, at least from the perspective of International Relations theorists. For many theoretically inclined NATO-​watchers, the 1990s became a fascinating decade, one during which the alliance’s principal champions hailed from the epistemological precincts of liberal-​institutionalism and social-​constructivism. This is not to say that there had been a headlong retreat of realists from the ranks of NATO supporters during those years; it is just to remark the most creative intellectual energies came forth from non-​realist theoretical enclaves. Amongst some students of the alliance, the “new NATO” in constant evolution throughout the 1990s would so transform itself as to overstep the traditional boundary between international organisation and domestic institution.29 Henceforth, some argued, NATO “should be viewed as an evolving civic community whose pacific relations are the institutionalised norm rather than the calculated preference of states”.30 NATO both symbolised and enabled the “multilateral moment” in world affairs. It did so mostly because it fostered the shaping of a collective identity in the West. No longer merely a clearinghouse of discrete national interests, as imagined by realist theoreticians, constructivists came to see the alliance as something truly new under the international sun. A German assessment pushed this argument further than anyone else did. It asked to envision NATO not as a simple military pact, but rather the first, shining, example of post-​Westphalian governance by means of the “international state” –​a transnational, multilateral, entity able and willing to assume certain functions previously only fulfilled, if fulfilled at all, by the territorial state.31 425

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Amongst those functions, none was as essential as the provision of security, which is what NATO supposedly achieved by dint of its “joint control of organised violence potential in a transnational space”. To those who during the post-​Cold War decade and ever since so rhapsodised the transatlantic alliance, it has become child’s play to understand what had gone so horribly wrong with multilateralism over the past few years. They imagine Trump’s election in November 2016 drove multilateralism past the point of no return, because the forty-​fifth president decreed its extinction. This means of identifying the problem, however alluring to some, nevertheless remains unpersuasive. Trump was more a symptom than a cause of the much deeper malaise associated with the variant of multilateralism symbolised by the LIO. Because of the apparent seamlessness in correspondence many have established between the LIO and multilateralism, it is easy to assume that the perils facing the former must also put paid to the latter. What are those perils? For a country that supposedly possessed such a constitutional if not genetic inclination toward multilateralism and liberalism, the record of the past few years must constitute quite a puzzle. How could there has been such second-​guessing of late regarding America’s own continued belief in the order it worked so hard to erect following the Second World War? The easy answer, as noted above, is to put the blame squarely on the shoulders of Trump, who made no secret of his own lofty disregard for multilateralism and strong preference for bilateralism and, to some, unilateralism in his dealings with other states, friends or not, allies or not. A writer for the New York Times, on the final weekend prior to the November 2020 election that chased Trump from power, was only engaging in slight hyperbole when observing that the president had dominated news cycles and frayed nerves in almost every corner of the earth like few leaders in history. Having lived through his impulsiveness, and his disdain for allies and dalliances with adversaries, the world is on tenterhooks waiting to see whether the United States will choose to stay that rocky course.32 Tempting as it is to lay all the blame on Trump, one might be better guided by turning to a decidedly non-​Trumpian ideological perspective, “neo-​conservatism”, and reflect on the witticism of that perspective’s leading intellectual luminary, Irving Kristol. This one-​time Trotskyite-​turned-​conservative famously reflected on what occurs to people making them abandon previous ideological convictions and embrace ideas they once held to be abhorrent. Liberals, Kristol quipped, morphed into conservatives because they had been “mugged by reality”.33 With apologies to Kristol, one might better understand the recent retreat of America from the LIO of its own creation as being the consequence of a bruising confrontation with reality. The irony is that LIO’s failure did not lead to American disillusionment with it; rather, its success did so. In this sense, it is crucial to address three aspects of that “successful” record, to see what has led to such a radical rethinking in the United States about the merits –​or lack thereof –​of liberal multilateralism. The first of these explanations for cooling the ardour of so many Americans for the LIO can be traced to a kind of cost-​benefit calculus owing to “rational” contemplation of the relative distribution of gain from hyper-​globalisation, rather than from overheated imaginations of an untutored and blinkered public said to be too stupid to understand its own interests. Put at its simplest, there has been over time a growing belief that the gains from liberalised trade and investment flows have not been captured by America to anything like the extent initially envisioned by the architects of the post-​1945 multilateral order. It results from the frustration of the earlier promise contained in the idea of “embedded liberalism”,34 whereby workers in 426

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the domestic marketplace were to be protected against the ravages of de-​industrialisation by a combination of a social-​welfare safety net and “adjustment” assistance aimed at retraining them for more remunerative employment. Correct or not, there is a belief widely shared throughout the political class that hyper-​globalisation has fed the rise in inequality at home, and with it, the concomitant rise of social problems, including especially alarming increases in what two economists have tellingly referred to as “deaths of despair” across vast swaths of the country, in particular its hinterland.35 To put it mildly, these were not supposed to be the fruits of what some like to call “liberal hegemony”, a phenomenon probably better captured through Bacevich’s “Emerald City” metaphor. Hyper-​ globalisation has left too many Americans behind, which at least is what so many of them believe, and it is not possible to demonstrate that they are wrong. As hinted above, some say that the reason the LIO ceased to operate in America’s favour is not that it has worked so poorly, but that it worked so well globally. In this view, for there to be a growing distribution of wealth in the heartland of the liberal order, not just the United States but also other developed Western lands, it required exploitable surpluses available for skimming from the labours of those on the periphery of the international economic order. But as that periphery grew progressively more prosperous in step with the spread of globalisation, there was a natural decrease in the surplus available to the rich world, since the once-​poor precincts of the planet were becoming greater consumers of scarce resources, whether goods or capital. A critical International Relations theorist, Beate Jahn, explains the otherwise curious phenomenon of an order’s undoing by its own success: “The much despised ‘cosmopolitan establishment’ could now pursue its economic interests unimpeded across the globe”, she writes: Instead of protecting domestic populations in core liberal states from the inevitable downside of capitalism by importing and redistributing economic benefits from the international sphere, these populations now experienced the exact opposite: the export of investment and jobs into the international sphere … Instead of being able to export political conflicts, populations in core liberal states saw themselves confronted with the import of political tensions in the form of refugees and migrants.36 This diagnosis is hardly limited to critical theorists, and this leads to the second strike against the LIO, summarised in the notion of the “new Cold War”. Many realists have of late come around to the conviction that the system has ceased functioning in its interests, even though it has been America’s own creation –​aided and abetted by the British. Not only has it failed for reasons identified by those who focus on domestic inequality, there is another explanation, they say, of why the LIO has proved such a bust for America. Hyper-​globalisation has been the single most important “cause” of China’s ascent in the international pecking order. And whilst critical theorists might shed few crocodile tears for what they perceive as America’s “decline” –​ some would say comeuppance –​things are different amongst other International Relations theorists, realists in the vanguard, who worry about the strategic implications of that mooted decline.37 Some of these analysts subscribe to “power transition theory”, which fosters a dim view of the prospect of continued peace at a time when the relative capability of the system’s dominant Power is being challenged by another state’s bid for “parity” if not supremacy.38 In this variant of pessimism, the “relative gains” from hyper-​globalisation have obviously favoured China, not America. In so bolstering China’s economic and technological capability, the LIO has also bolstered its military capability. Put crassly but accurately, the United States, along with other Western countries, has given to China the rope by which the American-​led order has been able to be hanged. 427

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Adding insult to injury has been the third strike, the coronavirus pandemic. The causal “blame game” aside, it is incontrovertible that one of the new truths to emerge from the pandemic has been the danger –​from the perspective of public health –​of reliance on complicated and distant “supply chains” for essential goods, in the first instance personal protective equipment, but much, much more. Yet it is not just concerns for public health that motivate the current American –​and other Western –​desire to “de-​link” as much as possible from the Chinese economic orbit. The LIO was already on a shaky basis prior to the pandemic. What the latter has done –​and it is important –​is administer the final blow against the crumbling edifice. And to some, it also carries the risk of signing the death warrant for multilateralism, not only given the distressing record of international “co-​operation” in response to the pandemic, captured in the new worries about the rise of “vaccine nationalism”,39 but also in justifiable fears about demographic transfer. In a world reluctantly forced to embrace “social distancing”, there is a growing worry about hyper-​globalisation’s easy appearance as a necessary –​though not sufficient –​“cause” of pandemics. And with vaccines emerging by late 2020 to defuse the current pandemic, many think that another zoonotic plague similar to, if not worse than, SARS-​COVID lurks in the planet’s not-​too-​distant future. In light of the analysis above, what about the guarded optimism promised earlier in this chapter regarding the future of multilateralism? Ironically, it resides in one of the very same conditions said –​more rightly than wrongly –​to imperil the LIO: China’s emergence. A decade or so ago, it was possible for scholars to downplay the idea that China’s ballyhooed “rise” need prove problematical. To the contrary, it could be a “win-​win” for the world, with everyone growing richer together and, in the bargain, all “converging” around the political norms of liberal democracy. This is why one Australian scholar could airily dismiss “China-​threat” scenarios predicated in part on misleading analogies between the experience of the United States in dealing with Soviet expansionism and the challenges likely to face it from China’s increase in relative capability –​otherwise known as “power”. It was simply fallacious to draw any comparison between what had been a genuine problem posed by Soviet Russia and the overblown –​ in this view –​claim that China, too, must appear as some sort of threat to American and, by extension, Western interests.40 Fears that China would act as a “successor state” to the Soviet Union because of presumed ideological isomorphism between the two communist Powers –​ the Soviet Union and the “successor” China –​were groundless. More than a decade on, this optimism regarding a “threat” held to be more bogus than real looks misplaced, including and especially in Australia, where attitudes toward China have hardened considerably over the past few years. Yet if the optimism of a decade ago may be easy to fault, the analysis was certainly on the right track in highlighting –​even if in criticising –​the “successor-​state” analogy. In so doing, it actually signalled, however willy-​nilly, why a chapter such as this can conclude on a relatively optimistic note. To say again, whilst the LIO may be in danger, it does not follow that Western multilateralism is similarly imperilled. It is not just –​or even mainly –​because of the restorative tonic that Joseph Biden’s electoral victory over Trump provided to an American alliance network whose co-​operative juices desiccated during the Trump Administration. Even more, it is the prospect that the return of a bipolar, Cold War-​ like competition between the United States and a Great Power adversary will breathe life into an evolving American-​led “bounded” international order.41 Another International Relations scholar writing at the dawn of the post-​Cold War era of “unipolarity” observed that one of the virtues of bipolarity had been that it created incentives for the United States to commit to multilateralism. The logic here seemed impeccable: bipolarity helped to have allies close by one’s side.42

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So whilst it may well be that the time has come to say “Rest in Peace” for the LIO,43 one can foresee a great deal of life ahead for a Pax Americana whose geographic ambit admittedly is going to become a lot more “bounded” than that entertained by enthusiasts of the now-​defunct Emerald City consensus. There is a final irony here to complement the irony of success rather than failure undoing the ILO. For the more that the “risen” China, through its self-​destructive “wolf-​warrior” diplomacy, parades itself as a threat to the international system, the greater will be the likelihood of the re-​establishment of a reasonably healthy, security-​impelled, multilateralism amongst the cohort of America and its traditional allies. It will be redolent of the multilateralism that flourished between 1945 and 1990 prior to the American embrace of an Emerald City consensus that really envisioned for a time the Americanisation of the world.

Notes 1 See E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–​1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London, 1940). 2 Charles Emmerson, 1913: The World before the Great War (London, 2013). 3 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage, Fourth Revised and Enlarged Edition (NY, 1913). 4 Michel Winock, La Belle Époque: La France de 1900 à 1914 (Paris, 2002). 5 From his song, “Keeping the Faith”, featured in his 1983 album, An Innocent Man. 6 Philip Blom, The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–​1914 (NY, 2008), 113. 7 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (NY, 2006). 8 John Gerard Ruggie, “Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution”, International Organization, 46/​ 3(1992), 561–​98. 9 See James E. Cronin, Global Rules: America, Britain and a Disordered World (New Haven, CT, 2014); Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (NY, 2008); Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and The United States, 1939–​1950 (Princeton, NJ, 2017). 10 See Rosemary Foot, S. Neil MacFarlane, and Michael Mastanduno, eds., US Hegemony and International Organizations (Oxford, 2003). For a caution regarding potential misuse of this ill-​defined term, see David Wilkinson, “Unipolarity Without Hegemony”, International Studies Review, 1/​ 2(1999), 141–​72. 11 Andrew J. Bacevich, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory (NY, 2020), 15–​16, 88. 12 Michael Kimmage, The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (NY, 2020), 256 [emphasis added]. 13 Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ, 1961). 14 See Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–​1941 (Ithaca, NY, 1966); Charles A. Kupchan, Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (NY, 2020). 15 Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston, MA, 1997), 40. To McDougall, the country’s first “great tradition” was liberty. 16 Michael Lind, “Pax Atlantica: The Case for Euroamerica”, World Policy Journal, 13/​1(1996), 1–​7. 17 John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (NY, 2001). 18 B.J.C. McKercher, Anglo-​American Relations in the 1920s: The Struggle for Supremacy (Houndmills, UK, 1991); idem, Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Preeminence to the United States, 1930–​ 1945 (Cambridge, 1999); John R. Ferris, “ ‘The Greatest Power on Earth’: Great Britain in the 1920s”, International History Review, 13/​4(1991), 726–​50; Katherine C. Epstein, “The Conundrum of American Power in the Age of World War I”, Modern American History, 2(2019), 345–​65. 19 See, for this critique, Galen Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered: Realism, the Balance of Power in Europe, and America’s Decision for War in 1917”, Security Studies, 21/​3(2012), 455–​89. This critique reiterates earlier scepticism regarding the security rationale for intervention in 1917 advanced in Richard W. Leopold, “The Problem of American Intervention, 1917: An Historical Retrospect”, World Politics, 2/​3(1950), 405–​25; Daniel Malloy Smith, “National Interest and American Intervention, 1917: An Historiographical Appraisal”, Journal of American History, 52/​1(1965), 5–​24.

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David G. Haglund 20 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (NY, 1982). 21 See Nicholas John Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (NY, 1942). 22 Colin Dueck, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ, 2006). 23 See Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (NY, 2001). 24 Mary N. Hampton, “NATO at the Creation: U.S. Foreign Policy, West Germany and the Wilsonian Impulse”, Security Studies, 4/​3(1995), 610–​56. 25 James Kurth, “Inside the Cave: The Banality of I.R. Studies”, National Interest, 53(1998), 40. 26 As famously argued in Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-​ Edged Sword (NY, 1996). 27 Thomas Risse-​Kappen, Cooperation Among Democracies: The European Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ, 1995). 28 Daniel H. Deudney, “The Philadelphian System: Sovereignty, Arms Control, and Balance of Power in the American States-​Union, circa 1787–​1861”, International Organization, 49/​2(1995), 191–​228. Also see John Gerard Ruggie, “The Past as Prologue? Interests, Identity, and American Foreign Policy”, in Michael E. Brown et al., eds., America’s Strategic Choices (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 163–​99; David C. Hendrickson, “In Our Own Image: The Sources of American Conduct in World Affairs”, National Interest (1 December 1997): https://​natio​nali​nter​est.org/​arti​cle/​in-​our-​own-​image-​the-​sour​ces-​of-​ ameri​can-​cond​uct-​in-​world-​affa​irs-​776?page=​0%2C3. 29 On that evolution, see David S. Yost, NATO Transformed: The Alliance’s New Roles in International Security (Washington, DC, 1998). 30 Michael J. Brenner, “The Multilateral Moment”, in idem, ed., Multilateralism and Western Strategy (NY, 1995), 8. 31 Alexander E. Wendt, “Collective Identity Formation and the International State”, American Political Science Review, 88/​2(1994), 392. 32 David M. Halbfinger, “A Frazzled World Holds Its Breath as the U.S. Chooses Its Leader”, NY Times (1 November 2020), 12. 33 Quoted in Douglas Murray, “ ‘A Liberal Mugged by Reality’ ”, Spectator (26 September 2009): www. spectator.co.uk/​article/​-​a-​liberal-​mugged-​by-​reality-​. 34 A concept developed by John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order”, International Organization, 36/​ 2(1982), 379–​415. 35 Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ, 2020). 36 Beate Jahn, “Liberal Internationalism: Historical Trajectory and Current Prospects”, International Affairs, 94/​1(2018), 57. 37 Christopher Layne, “Coming Storms: The Return of Great-​ Power War”, Foreign Affairs, 99/​ 6(2020), 42–​48. 38 Most prominently, Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston, MA, 2017). 39 Thomas J. Bollyky and Chad P. Brown, “The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism: Only Cooperation Can End the Pandemic”, Foreign Affairs, 99/​5(2020), 96–​108. 40 Renée Jeffery, “Evaluating the ‘China Threat’: Power Transition Theory, the Successor-​State Image and the Dangers of Historical Analogies”, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 63/​2(2009), 309–​24. 41 John J. Mearsheimer, “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order”, International Security, 43/​4(2019), 7–​50. 42 Lisa L. Martin, “Interests, Power, and Multilateralism”, International Organization, 46/​4(1992), 765–​92. 43 Josef Joffe, “Is It Really RIP for the LIO?” American Interest (6 February 2019): www.the-​american-​ interest.com/​2019/​02/​06/​is-​it-​really-​r ip-​for-​the-​lio/​?.

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Select Bibliography Bundesregierung, Leitlinien zum Indo-​Pazifik. Deutschland –​Europa –​Asien. Das 21. Jahrhundert gemeinsam gestalten (Berlin, 2020). Butter, David, Egypt and the Gulf: Allies and Rivals (London, 2020). Cai, Peter, Understanding China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Sydney, 2017). Case, Anne and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ, 2020). Cason, Jeffrey, The Political Economy of Integration: The Experience of Mercosur (London, 2011). Catão, Luís and Maurice Obstfeld. Meeting Globalization’s Challenges: Policies to Make Trade Work for All (Princeton, NJ, 2019). Cede, Franz and Christian Prosl, Ambition and Reality: Austria’s Foreign Policy since 1945 (Innsbruck, 2017). Chachavalpongpun, Pavin, Reinventing Thailand: Thaksin and His Foreign Policy (Singapore, 2010). Chang, Gordon G., The Coming Collapse of China (NY, 2001). Charillon, Frédéric, La France peut-​elle encore agir sur le monde? Eléments de réponse (Paris, 2010). Chinvanno, Anuson, Thailand’s Policies towards China, 1949–​1954 (Oxford, 1992). Clark, Joe, How We Lead: Canada in a Century of Change (Toronto, 2017). Clarke, Michael, Matthew Sussex, and Nick Bisley, eds., The Belt and Road Initiative and the Future of Regional Order in the Indo-​Pacific (Lanham, MD, 2020). Cohen, Andrew, While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World (Toronto, 2003). Constantinou, C.M., P. Kerr, and P. Sharp, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Diplomacy (London, 2016). Cooper, Andrew F., Celebrity Diplomacy (Boulder, CO, 2008). Cooper, Andrew F., Jorge Heine, and Ramesh Thakur, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy (Oxford, 2013). Corera, Gordon, Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the AQ Khan Network (NY, 2006). Council of the European Union, European Security Strategy: A Secure Europe in a Better World (Brussels, 2009). Crahan, Margaret E. and Soraya M. Castro Mariño, eds., Cuba-​ US Relations: Normalization and Its Challenges (NY, 2016). Cronin, James E., Global Rules: America, Britain and a Disordered World (New Haven, CT, 2014). Cronin, Patrick M. and Ryan Neuhard, Total Competition. China’s Challenge in the South China Sea (Washington, DC, 2020). Cuadros, José Manuel Rodríguez, Delimitación Marítima con Equidad: El caso de Perú y Chile (Lima, 2007). Cull, Nicholas J., Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (Oxford, 1995). Daddow, Oliver, New Labour and the European Union: Blair and Brown’s Logic of History (Manchester, 2011). Dal, Emel Parlar, Paul Kubicek, and H. Tarık Oğuzlu, eds., Turkey’s Rise as an Emerging Power (London, 2015). Datta-​Ray, Sunanda K., Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium (NY, 2002). de Carvalho, B., J.C. Lopez, and H. Leira, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations (London, 2021). Dueck, Colin, Reluctant Crusaders: Power, Culture, and Change in American Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ, 2006). Duffield, Mark, Post-​Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity in the Digital World (Cambridge, 2018). Dursun-​Ozkazanca, Oya, Turkey-​West Relations: The Politics of Intra-​Alliance Opposition (Cambridge, 2017). Erisman, H. Michael, Cuba’s Foreign Relations in a Post-​Soviet World (Gainesville, FL, 2000), 62–​90. Erşen, Emre and Seçkin Köstem, Turkey’s Pivot to Eurasia: Geopolitics and Foreign Policy in a Changing World Order (London, 2019). European External Action Service, Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe –​A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy (Brussels 2016). Evans, Gareth and Ramesh Thakur, eds., Nuclear Weapons: The State of Play (Canberra, 2013).Fazila, Vazira and Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia (NY, 2010). Feinberg, Richard E., Cuba’s Economy After Raúl Castro: A Tale Of Three Worlds (Washington, DC, 2016). Fineman, Daniel, A Special Relationship: The United States and Military Government in Thailand, 1947–​1958 (Honolulu, HI, 1997). Friedberg, Aaron, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia (NY, 2011). Fulton, Jonathan, China’s Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (Abingdon, UK, 2018). Funabashi, Yoichi, Alliance Adrift (NY, 1999). Gaddis, John Lewis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (NY, 1987).

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Select Bibliography Ganguly, Sumit, Conflict Unending: India-​Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (NY, 2002). Ganguly, Sumit and Christopher Mason, An Unnatural Partnership? The Future of US-​ India Strategic Cooperation (Carlisle Barracks, PA, 2019). Gardini, Gian Luca, The Origins of Mercosur: Democracy and Regionalization in South America (NY, 2010). Gehler, Michael, Österreichs Außenpolitik der Zweiten Republik: Von der alliierten Besatzung bis zum Europa des 21. Jahrhunderts, two volumes (Innsbruck, 2005). Gelvin, James L., The New Middle East: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2017). Germain, Randall D., ed., Globalization and Its Critics Perspectives from Political Economy (Houndmills, UK, 2000). Ghemawat, Pankaj, The New Global Road Map: Enduring Strategies for Turbulent Times (Boston, MA, 2018). Ghemawat, Pankaj, ed., The Laws of Globalization and Business Applications (Cambridge, 2017). Ghemawat, Pankaj with Steven A. Altman, DHL Global Connectedness Index 2012 (Bonn, 2012). —​—​—​ DHL Global Connectedness Index 2011 (Bonn, 2011). Gill, Bates, Rising Star: China’s New Security Diplomacy (Washington, DC, 2010). Goodhand, J., Aiding Peace? The Role of NGOs in Armed Conflict (Boulder, CO, 2006). Goodhand, J., J. Spencer, and B. Korf, eds., Conflict and Peacebuilding in Sri Lanka. Caught in the Peace Trap? (London, 2011). Granatstein, J.L., Whose War Is It? How Canada Can Survive in the Post-​9/​11 World (Toronto, 2007). Granatstein, J.L. and Robert Bothwell, Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto, 1990). Grare, Fredric, The India-​Australia Strategic Relationship: Defining Realistic Expectations (Washington, DC, 2014). Grevi, G., D. Helly, and D. Keohane, eds., European Security and Defence Policy: The First Ten Years (1999–​ 2009) (Paris, 2009). Grygiel, Jakub J. and A. Wess Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier: Rising Rivals, Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of American Power (Princeton, NJ, 2016). Gu, Xuewu and Hendrik W. Ohnesorge, eds., Politische Persönlichkeiten und ihre weltpolitische Gestaltung: Analysen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Wiesbaden, 2017). Gwin, Catherine, U.S. Relations with the World Bank 1945–​92 (Washington, DC, 1994). Gyngell, Allan and Michael Wesley, Making Australian Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2007). Hamilton, K. and R. Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy: Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London, 1995). Hauser, Gunther, Das europäische Suicherheits-​und Verteidigungssystem und seine Akteure, Ninth Revised Edition (Vienna, 2019). Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford, CA, 1999). Herbillon, Michel, and Sira Sylla, La diplomatie culturelle et d’influence de la France, rapport à l’Assemblée Nationale (31 Décembre 2018). Heyman, Bruce and Vicki Heyman, The Art of Diplomacy: Strengthening the Canada-​US Relationship in Times of Uncertainty (Toronto, 2019). Hill, Christopher, The Future of British Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2019). Hill, Christopher, Michael Smith, and Sophie Vanhoonacker, eds., International Relations and the European Union, Third Edition (Oxford, 2017). Honghua, Men, Zhongguo guoji zhanlue daolun (Beijing, 2009). Hopgood, Stephen, The End Times of Human Rights (Ithaca, NY, 2013). Howorth, Jolyon, Security and Defence Policy in the European Union (Basingstoke, UK, 2014). Hulme, David and Michael Edwards, NGOs, States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort? (Houndmills, UK, 2013). Hunt, Michael, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT, 1987). Ikenberry, G. John, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, NJ, 2011). Iriye, Akira, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock, eds., The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford, 2012). Jägerskog, Anders, Michael Schulz, and Ashok Swain, eds., Routledge Handbook on Middle East Security (London, 2019). Jensen, Steven L.B., The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge, 2016). Joffe, Josef, The Myth of America’s Decline; Politics, Economics, and a Half-​Century of False Prophecies (NY, 2013).

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Select Bibliography Jones, Lee and Shahar Hameiri, Debunking the Myth of ‘Debt-​trap Diplomacy’. How Recipient Countries Shape China’s Belt and Road Initiative (London, 2020). Jönsson, C. and R. Langhorne, eds., Diplomacy, Volume I (London, 2004). Juppé, Alain and Louis Schweitzer, La France et l’Europe dans le monde. Livre Blanc sur la politique étrangère et européenne de la France 2008–​2020 (Paris, 2008). Kaeding, Michael, Johannes Pollak, and Paul Schmidt, eds., Euroscepticism and the Future of Europe: Views from the Capitals (Cham, 2021). Kahn, Herman, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (New Brunswick, NJ, 2012). Kaldor, M., New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (London, 2001). Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and the Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (NY, 1987). Kerr, David, ed., China’s Many Dreams: Comparative Perspectives on China’s Search for National Rejuvenation (London, 2015). Kimmage, Michael, The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy (NY, 2020). Kirk, John M. Healthcare Without Borders: Understanding Cuban Medical Internationalism (Gainesville, FL, 2015). Kissinger, H.A., World Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History (London, 2014). —​—​—​ Diplomacy (NY, 1994). Kneissl, Karin, Diplomatie Macht Geschichte: Die Kunst des Dialogs in unsicheren Zeiten (Hildesheim, 2020). Kofman, Michael, Katya Migacheva et al., Lessons from Russia’s Operations in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine (Santa Monica, CA, 2017). Krepinevich Jr., Andrew F., Protracted Great-​Power War. A Preliminary Assessment (Washington, DC, 2020). Krotz, Ulrich and Joachim Schild, Shaping Europe. France, Germany, and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-​First Century Politics (Oxford, 2015). Kupchan, Charles A., Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself from the World (NY, 2020). Kurlantzick, Joshua, Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government (New Haven, CT, 2014). Laaser, Claus-​ Friedrich and Astrid Rosenschon, Kieler Subventionsbericht 2020: Subventionen auf dem Vormarsch (Kiel, 2020). Lane, Max, ed., Continuity and Change after Indonesia’s Reforms: Contributions to an Ongoing Assessment (Singapore, 2019). Lanosza, Alexander and Michael A. Hunzeker, Conventional Deterrence and Landpower in Northeastern Europe (Carlisle, PA, 2019). Laruelle, Marlène, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Washington, DC, 2008). Layne, Christopher and Bradley A. Thayer, American Empire: A Debate ( NY, 2006). Ledeneva, Alena, Can Russia Modernise? Sistema, Power Networks, and Informal Governance (Cambridge, 2013). LeoGrande, William M. and Peter Kornbluh, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015). Leonard, M., ed., Connectivity Wars: Why Migration, Finance and Trade are the Geo-​economic Battlegrounds of the Future (London, 2016). Lequesne, Christian, Ethnographie du Quai d’Orsay. Les pratiques des diplomates français (Paris, 2020). Lintner, Bertil, The Costliest Pearl: China’s Struggle for India’s Ocean (London, 2019). Lippmann, Walter, The Cold War (NY, 1947). Lo, Bobo, Russia and the New World Disorder (London, 2015). Luce, Edward, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (NY, 2012). Mahnken, Thomas G., Forging the Tools of 21st Century Great Power Competition (Washington, DC, 2020). Mahnken, Thomas G., Travis Sharp, Billy Fabian, and Peter Kouretsos, Tightening the Chain: Implementing a Strategy of Maritime Pressure in the Western Pacific (Washington, DC, 2019). Mahnken, Thomas G., Ross Babbage, and Toshi Yoshihara, Countering Comprehensive Coercion:. Competitive Strategies against Authoritarian Political Warfare (Washington, DC, 2018). Mansbach, W. and Yale H. Ferguson, Populism and Globalization: The Return of Nationalism and the Global Liberal Order (Cham, 2021). Manyika, James, Jonathan Woetzel, Jacques Bughin, Mekala Krishnan, Jeongmin Seong, and Mac Muir, Globalization in Transition: The Future of Trade and Value Chains, McKinsey Global Institute (January 2019). May, E.R., “Lessons” of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (NY, 1973).

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Select Bibliography Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2009). McClintock, Cynthia and Fabian Vallas, The United States and Peru: Cooperation at a Cost (London, 2003). McDougall, Walter A., Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World since 1776 (Boston, MA, 1997). McKeen-​Edwards, Heather and Tony Porter, Transnational Financial Associations and the Governance of Global Finance (London, 2013). McKercher, Asa, Canada and the World since 1867 (London, 2019). McKercher, Asa, and Philip van Huizen eds., Undiplomatic History: Rethinking Canada in the World (Montreal, 2019). McKercher, B.J.C., Transition of Power: Britain’s Loss of Global Preeminence to the United States, 1930–​1945 (Cambridge, 1999). —​—​—​ Anglo-​American Relations in the 1920s: The Struggle for Supremacy (Houndmills, UK, 1991). McQuaig, Linda, Holding the Bully’s Coat: Canada and the US Empire (Toronto, 2007). Mearsheimer, John J., The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (NY, 2001). Mearsheimer, John J. and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (NY, 2007). Melissen, J., ed., Innovation in Diplomatic Practice (London, 1999). Méndez, Álvaro, Javier Alcade, and Chris Alden, eds., La conexión China en la Política Internacional del Perú en el siglo XXI (Lima, 2019). Miller, Rory, Desert Kingdoms to Global Powers: The Rise of the Arab Gulf (New Haven, CT, 2019). Morgenthau, H.J., Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, Third Edition (NY, 1966 [1945]). Morris, Lyle J., Michael J. Mazarr, Jeffrey W. Hornung, Stephanie Pezard, Anika Binnendijk, and Marta Kepe, Gaining Competitive Advantage in the Gray Zone: Response Options for Coercive Aggression below the Threshold of Major War (Santa Monica, CA, 2019). Ndikumana, L. and J.K. Boyce, Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent (London, 2011). Nephew, Richard, The Art of Sanctions (NY, 2018). Neustadt, R. and E.R. May, Thinking in Time. The Uses of History for Decision Makers (NY, 1996). Nicolson, H., The Evolution of Diplomatic Method (London, 1954 [1998]). Norris, William J., Chinese Economic Statecraft: Commercial Actors, Grand Strategy, and State Control (Ithaca, NY, 2016). Nye, Jr., Joseph, Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era (Princeton, NJ, 2013). —​—​—​ The Powers to Lead (Oxford, 2008). —​—​—​ Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (NY, 2004). —​—​—​ Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (NY, 1990). Ohnesorge, Hendrik W., Soft Power: The Forces of Attraction in International Relations (Cham, 2020). Pant, Harsh V., Indian Foreign Policy: An Overview (New Delhi, 2018). —​—​—​ India’s Afghan Muddle (New Delhi, 2014). Pant, Harsh V., ed., India’s Neighbourhood Challenge (New Delhi, 2021). —​—​—​ New Directions in Indian Foreign Policy: Theory and Praxis (Cambridge, 2018). —​—​—​ Handbook of Indian Defence Policy: Themes, Structures and Doctrines (London, 2015). Parmar, Inderjeet and Michael Cox, eds., Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Abingdon, 2010). Partzsch, Lena, Die neue Macht von Individuen in der globalen Politik. Wandel durch Prominente, Philanthropen und Social Entrepreneurs (Baden-​Baden, 2014). Patalano, Alessio, UK Defence from the “Far East” to the “Indo-​Pacific” (London, 2019). Piccone, Ted, Catalyst for Change: How the UN’s Independent Experts Promote Human Rights (Washington, DC, 2012). Plonski, S. Yousef, O. Walton, J. Goodhand, and P. Meehan, eds., Borderlands and Peacebuilding: A View from the Margins (London, 2018). Pyle, Kenneth, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose (NY, 2007). Rabini, Christian et al., Entscheidungsträger in der deutschen Außenpolitik. Führungseigenschaften und politische Überzeugungen der Bundeskanzler und Außenminister (Baden-​Baden, 2020). Rachman, Gideon, Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline from Obama to Trump and Beyond (NY, 2017).

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Select Bibliography Rajah, Roland, Alexandre Dayant and Jonathan Pryke, Ocean of Debt? Belt and Road and Debt Diplomacy in the Pacific (Sydney, 2019). Ramsay, Gordon and Sam Robertshaw, Weaponising News RT, Sputnik and Targeted Disinformation (London, 2019): www.kcl.ac.uk/​policy-​institute/​assets/​weaponising-​news.pdf. Rapatz, Thomas, and Rolf M. Urrisk, eds., Der militärdiplomatische Dienst in der österreichischen Armee (Wien, 2016). Rempel, Roy, Dreamland: How Canada’s Pretend Foreign Policy Has Undermined Sovereignty (Montreal, 2006). Richmond, O., Peace in International Relations (London, 2008). Rodrik, Dani, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (NY, 2011). Rosecrance, Richard and Arthur A. Stein, eds., The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY, 1993). Rosenboim, Or, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and The United States, 1939–​ 1950 (Princeton, NJ, 2017). Sachs, Jeffrey D., The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (NY, 2020).Saputro, Eko, Indonesia and ASEAN Plus Three Financial Cooperation: Domestic Politics, Power Relations, and Regulatory Regionalism (Singapore, 2017). Satow, E. [Lord Gore-​Booth, ed.], Satow’s Guide to Diplomatic Practice, Fifth Edition (London, 1979). Sayle, Timothy Andrews, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca, NY, 2019). Schell, Orville and John Delury, Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-​ First Century (NY, 2013). Schild, Joachim and Ulrich Krotz, Shaping Europe: France, Germany and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to 21st Century Politics (Oxford, 2013). Schmidl, Erwin A., Going International –​In the Service of Peace: Das österreichische Bundesheer und die österreichische Teilnahme an internationalen Einsätzen seit 1960, Seventh Revised Edition (Graz, 2019 [recte 2020]). Schofield, Victoria, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War (London, 2021). Sharp, P., Diplomatic Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, 2009). Sheridan, Greg, The Partnership: The Inside Story of the US-​Australian Alliance under Bush and Howard (Sydney, 2006). Shlapak, David and Michael Johnson, Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank: Wargaming the Defense of the Baltics (Santa Monica, CA, 2016). Singh, Bilveer, Succession Politics in Indonesia: The 1998 Presidential Elections and the Fall of Suharto (Houndmills, UK, 2016 [2000]). Siracusa, Joseph M., Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction, Second Edition (Oxford, 2015). Small, Andrew, The China-​Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics (NY, 2015). Smith, Anthony L. and Han Mui Ling, eds., Governance in Indonesia: Challenges Facing the Megawati Presidency (Singapore, 2003). Snow, Nancy and Nicholas J. Cull, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, Second Edition (London, 2020). Snow, Nancy and Philip M. Taylor, eds., Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy (NY, 2009). Solomon, Jay, The Iran Wars (NY, 2016). Stein, Ewan, International Relations in the Middle East: Hegemonic Strategies and Regional Order (Cambridge, 2021). St John, Ronald Bruce, The Foreign Policy of Peru (Boulder, CO, 1992). Stoicescu, Kalev and Pauli Järvenpää, Contemporary Deterrence: Insights and Lessons from Enhanced Forward Presence (Tallinn, 2019). Sukhankin, Sergey, COVID-​19 as a Tool of Information Confrontation: Russia’s Approach (Calgary, 2020). Swaine, Michael D. and Ashley J. Tellis, Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future (Washington, DC, 2000). Szabo, Stephen F., Germany, Russia, and the Rise of Geo-​Economics (London, 2015). Thakur, Ramesh and Jack Cunningham, eds., Australia, Canada, and Iraq: Perspectives on an Invasion (Toronto, 2015). Thies, Wallace J., Why NATO Endures (Cambridge, 2009). Tong, Rosemary Putman, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction (Boulder, CO, 2009). Townshend, Ashley, Brendan Thomas-​Noone, and Matilda Steward, Averting Crisis: American Strategy, Military Spending and Collective Defence in the Indo-​Pacific (Sidney, 2019).

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Select Bibliography Tunsjo, Oystein, The Return of Bipolarity in World Politics: China, the United States, and Geostructural Realism (NY, 2018). Vaïsse, Maurice, La Grandeur: La politique étrangère du Général De Gaulle (Paris, 1998). Vara, Juan Santos and Ramses A. Wessel, eds., The Routledge Handbook on the International Dimension of Brexit (Abingdon, 2021). Velaochaga, Luis, Políticas Exteriores del Perú: Sociología, Histórica y Periodismo (Lima, 2001). Vogel, Ezra F., Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA, 2013). Waltz, K.N., Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA, 1979). Warren, Aiden, The Obama Administration’s Nuclear Weapon Strategy: The Promises of Prague (NY, 2014). Watt, Donald Cameron, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War (London, 1989). Webber, Mark, James Sperling and Martin A. Smith, NATO’s Post-​ Cold War Trajectory: Decline or Regeneration? (London, 2012). Westlake, M., ed., The European Union’s New Foreign Policy (Berlin, 2020). Wilding, Peter, What Next? Britain’s Future in Europe (London, 2017). Zakaria, Fareed, The Post-​American World (NY, 2008).

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INDEX

9/​11 terrorist attacks, 105, 107, 112, 113, 253 Abe, Shinzo, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112; Abe doctrine, 111; and “free and open Indo-​Pacific strategy”, 302 Abbott, Tony, 120, 128, 129 Abraham Accords, 371 Acheson, Dean, 31, 130 Adalet ve Kalkınma Partis [AKP: Justice and Development Party], 171–​79 passim Adenauer, Konrad, 400 Afghanistan, xxvii–​xxviii, 30, 121, 124, 126, 128, 253–​54, 373–​74, 414; Operation Enduring Freedom, 107, 109, 149, 150, 152; and NATO, 258–​59, 264; and Russia, 78–​79; and United States, xxvii–​xxviii, 73, 107, 109, 149, 150, 152 Africa-​Pacific-​Caribbean [ACP] Cotonou Agreement, 191 Algeria, 189, 369 Alliance for Multilateralism, 146 Amarna Letters, 18 America First, xxi, 29, 31 American Exceptionalism, 32 Andean Community of Nations [CAN], 201, 202, 203 Anglo-​American free trade agreement, 322 Angola, 190; and UNITA, 190 Anholt, Simon, 411, 413 Annan, Kofi, 253 Anti-access/area denial [A2/​AD], 360 Arab uprisings [2010-​2011], xxvi, 76, 172, 175, 178, 367–​68, 370–​71 Arctic, 72 Armenia, uprising [2018], 75 American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], 268, 270–​73; and George W. Bush, 272 Armitage, Richard, 107

Aron, Raymond, 17 ASEAN-​China Free Trade Agreement, 214, 216, 217, 218, 301, 303 Asian financial crisis [1997], 212; South Korean rescue package, 290 Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank [AIIB], 297, 298, 302, 303 Asia-​Pacific Economic Co-​operation, 149, 202, 214, 219n23 Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN], 110, 111, 214 Atlantic Charter, 248 Augustine, Saint, 20 AUKUS, xxviii, xxx, 66 Aum Shinrikyo, 106 Australia, 39, 106, 109, 110, 121, 124, 126, 128, 362, 428; and Asian Development Bank, 302; and AUKUS, xxviii, xxx, 66; Defence White Papers [2000] 123, 124; [2009] 125, 126, 127; [2013] 125; [2016] 131; Foreign Policy White Paper [2017] 131; and Quad, xxviii, 39, 112 Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security Treaty [ANZUS], 120, 121, 123 Australia-​United States Free Trade Agreement [2005] 122 Austria, Austrian version of neutrality, 159–​60, 162, 164, 166; and EU, 159, 160–​61, 162, 163–​64, 166; and migration crisis, 166, 167; and NATO, xxviii, 159–​60, 161–​63, 164–​65, 167; and Turkey, 163, 164–​65 Austria-​Hungary, xxii Austrian Succession, War of [1740-​1748], xxii Axworthy, Lloyd, 149 Azerbaijan, 75 Bacevich, Andrew, 421 Bahrain, 370–​72

447

448

Index Ball, George W., 402 Ballistic missiles, 371–​73 Baltic Sea, 360, 362 Baltic States, xxiv, xxx, 362 Bamboo diplomacy, 210–​211, 213, 215, 217 Bangladesh, 379, 380, 383 Beijing Platform for Action, 252 Belarus, xxiv, 74; uprising [2020-​2021], 75 Belaúnde Terry, Fernando, 201 Belt and Road Initiative [BRI], xxiii, xxix, xxx, 291, 294–​304, 321; and Belt and Road Forum, 303, 305n24; and Cuba, 190 Biden, Joseph, xxx, 29, 31, 32, 39–​40, 94, 98, 101, 131, 322–​23, 405, 409; and Afghanistan, xxvii-​xxviii, Administration, 7, 29; and Canada, 155; and China, 55–​56, 301, 304; and Cuba, 188, 193; and Japan, 112; and Middle East, xxv; and nuclear weapons, 351, 352–​53; and Putin, xxx; and Russia, xxx Bierlein, Brigitte, 165 Bilateralism, 426 Bismarck, Prince Otto von, xxi, xxiii, 357, 411 Black Lives Matter, 254 Black Sea, 360, 362 Blinken Anthony, 30; and nuclear arms, 352 Bolivia, 187, 189, 190; and Peru, 200, 202, 204, 205 Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America [ALBA], 189, 204 Bolsonaro, Jair, 190 Bolton, John, 30, 188 Borrell, Josep, 243 Brandt, Willy, 402 Brazil, 187, 189, 190, 200, 203–​05, 322; and BRIC, 285; and BRICS, 82 Bretton Woods, 284, 287 Brexit, xxiv–​xxv, 60–​67, 98, 235, 243; and EU, 235, 243; and Germany, 92–​94, 96, 98, 101; and Regulation, 60, 63; and Trade, 66 BRIC [Brazil, Russia, India, China], 285 BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa], 82 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 412 Bull, Hedley, 18–​19 Bundeswehr, 96–​99 Burma, see Myranmar Busek, Erhard, 163 Bush, George H.W., 30, 252 Bush, George W., 29, 30, 107, 109, 120–​24, 147, 149, 150, 151, 203, 404; and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, 272; and Cuba, 191; and Middle East, 269 Butterfield, Herbert, 18 Cadieux, Marcel, 148 Callières, François de, 15, 16

Canada, xxiii, xxviii, 362; and Afghanistan war, 149, 150, 152; and Ballistic Missile Defense, 150; and China, 147, 148, 149, 151, 154–​55; and European Union, 151, 154; and La Francophonie, 147, 149; and G-​7, 153, 154; and North American Free Trade Agreement, 149, 151, 152, 153–​54, 155; and United States, xxviii, 149, 151, 155 Canada-​European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement [23017], 151, 154 Canada-​United States Free Trade Agreement, 149, 151 Carrington, Lord [Peter Carrington], 400 Castilla, Ramón, 198–​99 Castillo Terrones, José Pedro 206 Castlereagh, Viscount, 357 Castro, Fidel, 185, 188, 191, 193 Castro, Raúl, 185, 186, 187, 188, 193, 402 CANZUK, 66 Champagne, Francois-​Philippe, 146 Chavez, Hugo, 189, 203, 204 Chechnya, 73 Chile, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205–​06 China, People’s Republic, xxi, xxiii, xxviii, xxx, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95–​96, 100–​01, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 410, 416–​17, 427–​29; and nuclear arms control, 349, 350, 352; and ASEAN, 214; and Belt and Road Initiative, xxiii, xxix, xxx, 291, 294–​304; and BRIC, 285; and BRICS, 82; and Canada, 147, 148, 149, 151, 154–​55; and Cuba, 190; and EU, 236, 243, 244, 299; and France, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90; and “fuqiang” and national rejuvenation, 49; and Hong Kong, xxviii, 129; and International Monetary Fund, 49, 53; and India, xxvii, 49, 52, 142, 143, 300, 302–​303, 379, 380, 381–​83; and Japan, 49, 50, 51, 54, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 302; and Middle East, 367, 369, 373, 375–​76; and NATO, 258, 261–​263, 265; and North Korea, xxiv, 105, 106, 112, 346; and Pakistan, 300, 302, 303; and “peaceful rise” doctrine, 52–​53; and Russia, xxiv, 49, 51, 53, 55, 71, 72, 73, 78, 79, 298–​99, 299–​301, 303; and South Korea, 49–​50; and Taiwan, 49–​50, 55, 360, 362; Taiwan Strait, 55, 106; and Thailand, 211, 213, 214, 216; and Turkey, 173–​74, 175; and United States, xxi, xxiv, xxviii, xxx, 29, 33–​34, 35–​37, 39–​40, 41, 46, 48–​49, 51–​52, 53–​56, 57, 229, 294, 295, 298, 301–​02, 303, 304, 322–​23, 325; and “wolf warrior” diplomacy, xxiii, xxviii; and World Bank, 49, 53 “China Dream”, 295, 297–​98 China-​Pakistan Economic Corridor [CPEC], 296, 300, 301, 303 Chrétien, Jean, 149, 150, 154

448

449

Index Chulalongkorn, King, 210 Churchill, Winston, 36, 248, 401 CIVICUS, 386 Clausewitz, Carl von, 17 Climate Change, 120, 125, 127, 129, 131; Kyoto Protocol [1997] 125; Paris Climate Accords [2015], 109, 131, 322; and Trump, 322–​23 Clinton, Bill, 29, 30, 106, 153, 252, 409 Clinton, Hillary, 31, 73, 126, 397 Cluster Munitions Coalition, 392 Cohen, Eliot, 357 Cohen, Raymond, 22 Collective Security Treaty Organization, 75, 299 Colombia, 186, 189, 190; and Peru, 200, 201; and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 189 Commission on Human Rights [CHR], 249, 250, 25 Commission on the Status of Women, 249 Commonwealth, 147, 149, 155 Commonwealth of Independent States, 299 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States [CELAC], 189 Comparative regionalism, 313–​14, 315 Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-​Pacific Partnership [CPTPP], 67 Constantinou, Costas, 21 Containment, 424 Convention on Refugees Coming from Germany, 248 Conventional armed conflict, 359, 360 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference [2009] 127 Council on Foreign Relations, 151 Council of Mutual Economic Assistance [CMEA], 186, 190 COVID-​19, xxix, 72, 90, 93, 96, 100–​01, 112, 129, 130, 258, 261, 263, 247, 252, 254, 335, 368, 376, 416–​17; and Cuba, 185, 187, 190, 191; and trade, 322, 323 Crimea, and Russian annexation, xxiv, 71, 76; and EU, xxiv, 233, 240, 242 Crowe, Eyre, 41 Crusades, 411 Cuba, 147, 148; 2019 Constitution, 187, 193, 194n16; and Asia, 191; and China, 190; Cuban missile crisis, 5–​6, 11n21; “Conceptualisation” platform for a revitalised socialism, 187; Council of State, 193, 194n16; dual currency, 186, 187, 188, 189; economy, 186–​88; environmental protection, 192; Fisheries Law, 192; and foreign investment, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192; inequality, 187; international medical programme, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192; Latin American School of Medicine, 186; military spending, 192; national security, 192; National Assembly, 185, 193; nickel mining, 190; “Special Period”, 186, 191; sugar

production, 186; and Third World, 185; and United States, 185, 186, 187–​88, 191, 193; Cuban Communist Party [PCC], 185, 187; Eighth Congress [2021], 192, 193 Cummings, Dominic, 62, 65 Cyberattacks, 258, 262–​64 Cyprus, 172 Czechoslovakia, 413 d’Aquino, Thomas, 150 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 250 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, 250 Decolonisation, 249–​51 De Gaulle, Charles, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 400 De-​globalisation, 332–​33 Deng Xiaoping, 33, 49, 50, 51, 123, 295, 297 Denmark, 415 Der Derian, James, 20 Derrida, Jacques, 21 Deterrence, 358, 359, 361–​62, 363 De Vera, Don Juan Antonio, 15 DHL Global Connectedness Index, 331, 334–​38 Díaz-​Canel Bermúdez, Miguel, 185, 186, 188, 191, 193 Diplomacy, coercive, 14; actorness, 235–​36, 241–​42; celebrity, 398; and charisma, 401, 404; defensive realism, 48; definitions of, 13–​14, 15, 18, 21; dynamic neorealism, 54–​55; neorealism and structural realism, 47, 48; offensive realism, 48, 49, 54; and personal relationships, 403–​04; power transition theory, 54, 427; and public diplomacy, 399; and reputation, 411; and rhetoric, 400–​02; role theory, 222; and shuttle diplomacy, 397; strategic diplomacy, 313, 316–​17; and symbolic acts, 402; theories of, 13, 14, 16–​17, 18, 19–​20, 21–​22, 23–​24 Doklam Crisis, 142 Drummond, Eric, 16 East Asian Miracle Report, 291 East Asia Summit [EAS], 214, 216, 227 East China Sea, 106, 109, 302, 360 East Timor, 121, 122, 224, 225 Eban, Abba, 13 Ecuador 200, 201, 202 Edtstadler, Karoline, 166 Egypt, 368–​73, 376; coup [2013] 179 Elcano Global Presence Index, 334 Emerald City consensus, 422, 427, 429 English School, 14, 18–​20 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip, 174, 176 Escalation, 360, 361, 362, 363 Eurasian Economic Union [EAEU], 75, 299 Europe, and Japan, 106, 109, 110; states system, 357; sovereignty, 88

449

450

Index European Economic Community, 88; and Britain, xxiv–​xxv, 60–​67, 86, 87, 98, 235, 243 European External Action Service [EEAS], 240, 242 Europe Puissance, 87, 88 European Union, xxi, xxiii, xxviii, 84, 87, 88–​89, 92–​96, 98–​101, 124, 310, 310–​11, 315, 385; Austrian membership, 159, 160–​61, 162, 163–​64, 166; and Brexit, xxiv, 60–​67, 98, 235, 243; and Canada, 151, 154; and China, 236, 243, 244, 299; Common Foreign and Security Policy [CFSP], 238–​41; Common Position, 191–​92; Common Security and Defense Policy [CSDP], 98, 238–​40; CSDP missions and operations, 238, 241–​42, 244; and Crimea, 233, 240, 242; and Cuba, 186, 191–​92; and EU Global Strategy [EUGS], 237, 241–​43; and France, xxiv–​xxv, 87, 89; and Germany, xxiv–​xxv, 92–​96, 98–​101; and Great Britain, xxiv–​xxv, 60–​67, 98, 235, 243; and Lisbon Treaty, 237, 239–​40, 242; and Maastrict Treaty, 86, 88, 89; and Mercosur, 311, 317; and NATO, xxviii, 238, 242–​43, 259–​64; and Permanent Structured Co-​operation [PESCO], 240; Political Dialogue and Co-​operation Agreement, 192; Recovery Plan [2020], 88, 89; and Russia, xxiv, 71, 72, 76–​78, 80, 236, 240, 242, 243–​44; Russian sanctions, 79; and, sanctions, xxiv, 240; and trade, 322; and Trump, 243; and Turkey, 163, 171, 172, 173–​74, 175, 177; and Ukraine, 79; and United States, xxi, xxv, 241–​42, 82, 83, 84–​85, 87–​88, 89, 241–​42 European Union High Representative [for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy], 238–​43 Experiential learning, 3, 4, 5, 6 European Union-​Mercosur Association Agreement, 311, 317 Facebook, 331 Financial Crisis [2008], 247–​48 Financial sector, 63–​64 First Island Chain, 360, 361 Five Eyes, 302, 362 Five Powers Defence Arrangement, 66 Floyd, George, 254 Ford, Gerald, 397 Foreign Direct Investment [FDI], 331–​35 Foreign policy, and elite networks, 402; historical analogy, 3; and historical lessons, 3, 6, 7; historical myths, 3 Forum on Early Warning and Early Response, 392 Foucault, Michel, 20 Fox News, 150 France, xxii, 92–​94, 96, 98, 101, 362, 370, 376; and China, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90; and

European Union, xxiv–​xxv, 84, 86–​87, 88–​89, 90; far-​r ight in, xxv, 77; Fifth Republic, 82–​83, 84, 86; and Germany, xxiv–​xxv, 86, 87, 88–​90, 92–​94, 96, 98, 101; and Grandeur, 82, 86, 90; and Japan, 110; and Russia, xxv, 82, 85, 87, 89; and United States, xxv, 82, 83, 84–​85, 87–​88, 89 Franco-​German Relationship, 88–​89 Franco-​German Treaty on Co-​operation and Integration [2019], 88 Free Trade Area of the Americas [FTAA], 313, 314, 317 Freeland, Chrystia, xxiii, 154, 155 Fridays for Futures, 254 Frost, David, 61 Fujimori, Alberto 202 Fumio Kishida, 112 G-​7, xxiv, 153; Charlevoix Summit [2019], 153, 154 G-​8, 149 G-​20, 125, 151, 230 Gaddis, John Lewis, 30 Gaitskell, Hugh, 60 García Pérez, Alan, 201–​02, 203–​04 Gates, Robert, 153 Gender Studies, 22 Georgia, 72, 78; coloured revolution in [2003], 75; and NATO expansion, 76; and Russian invasion [2008], 73, 76 Germanicus, 399–​400, 401, 402 Germany, xxii, 35, 41, 362, 410; and Asian Development Bank, 302; and France, xxiv, 86, 87, 88–​90, 92–​94, 96, 98, 101; and European Union, xxiv–​xxv, 92–​96, 98–​101; far right in, 77; and Japan, 110; and NATO, xxviii, 94–​100; and Russia, 71, 92–​96, 98–​99, 101; and trade, 323; and United States, 32, 33, 38–​39 Ghemawat, Pankaj, 330 Gillard, Julia, 120, 125, 126, 127, 128 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 83, 87, 88 Global Financial Crisis [2008] 124–​25 Global South, 249–​50, 309, 313, 315, 316 Globalisation/​Globalism, 309, 316, 317, 321; breadth and depth, 331–​39; de-​globalisation, 332–​33; KOF Index of Globalisation, 333–​38; thin globalisation, 332 Gold standard, 285; hegemony, 291 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich, 79, 381 Gotlieb, Allan, 15 Gove, Michael 61, 63, 65 Great Britain, xxii, xxix–​xxx, 17, 18, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 60, 61, 63, 110, 357, 362, 376, 410, 411, 413–​14, 415, 417; and Asian Development Bank, 302; and AUKUS, xxviii, xxx, 66; and Brexit, xxiv–​xxv, 60–​67, 98, 235, 243; and European Union, xxiv–​xxv, 60–​67, 98, 235,

450

451

Index 243; and Germany, xxii, 41; and immigration, 62–​63; and trade, 322 Great Powers, xxix; and adversaries, xxiv, 361; competition, xxi, xxx, 357, 358–​59, 361, 362, 363, 345, 348, 350, 354; defined, xxiii; and diplomacy, 357, 367, 373–​74, 376; lists of, xxiii; and rise and fall of, xxix; and Trump attitude, xxx, 345, 348, 350; and war, xxii, 359, 360–​61, 362, 420–​21 Guantanamo Bay, 253 Gulf War [1991], 105, 107 Haider, Jörg, 160 Haiti, 189 Hall, Martin, 19–​20 Harper, Stephen, 150, 151–​52, 154, 155 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 20 Hegemonic Stability Theory, 330 Heine, Jorge, 22, 23 Helsinki Accords, 251 Hermeneutics, 21 Heyman, Bruce, 151, 152 Holocaust, 248 Holsti, Kalevi, 19 Hong Kong, xxviii, 129 Howard, John, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 128 Hu Jintao, 124, 190; and “harmonious world”, 295, 297 Huawei, 34, 39, 155, 324, 325–​26 Human Rights, 248–​54; enforcement, 251; individualism of, 249; intersectionality of, 252; minority rights, 248; right to racial equality, 250; “rights revolution”, 248; right to self-​ determination, 250; universality of, 247–​48; women’s human rights, 251–​52 Human Rights Council, 249, 253, 254 Humanitarian Dialogue Centre, 391 Hungary, xxv, 322 Huntington, Samuel P., 33 Huntsman, Jon, 32, 42n25 Hussein, Saddam, 122, 149 Hybrid threats, 259–​60, 262, 264 Ikkenberry, G. John, Immigration, 62–​63 India, 39, 106, 109, 110, 373, 375–​76; and BRIC, 285; and BRICS, 82; and China, xxiv, xxvii, 49, 52, 142, 143, 379, 300, 302–​303, 380, 381–​83; and “debt trap diplomacy”, 303; and Kashmir, xxvii, 379–​80, 381, 382, 383; and Modi, 49, 135–​44, 383; and Neighbourhood First Policy, 141; and non-​alignment, 140; and Quad, xxviii, 39, 112; and Pakistan, xxvi, 379–​80, 382–​83; and United States, 112, 141, 380–​83 Indonesia, 111, 301; and aktif, 221, 222–​23, 230; autonomy, 221, 222–​23, 230; and Bali

Concord, 226, 228; Bali Democracy Forum, 228; and bebas, 221, 222–​23, 230; and East Timor, 224, 225; and non-​alignment, 223, 224, 228; and reformasi, 221, 222, 223, 226, 230; and South China Sea, xxviii, 228–​29; and West Papua, 228; and United States, 227, 229 Indo-​Pacific, 109, 110–​111, 112, 113; Free and Open Indo-​Pacific, 112, 113 Indo-​Pacific security, xxviii, 301; and AUKUS, xxviii, xxx, 66; also see Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Intermediate-​Range Nuclear Forces Treaty [INF Treaty], 349, 350–​51, 354 International Alert, 386., 391, 392 International anarchy, xxii International Campaign to Ban Landmines, 387, 392 International Civil Aviation Organization, 147 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR], 249, 251 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights [ICESCR], 249, 251 International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 250 International Criminal Court [ICC], 20, 247, 253–​54 International Monetary Fund, xxv, xxviii, 49, 53, 251, 283–​92 passim; and China, 49, 53 Iran, xxv–​xxvi, 151, 346, 346–​47, 354, 367–​76; and Israel, xxv–​xxvi, 273–​75; and Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, 109; and United States, xxi, xxvi, 109, 269–​72, 274, 346, 346–​47, 354 Iraq, 108, 109, 154, 367–​74; 2003 war, 30, 72, 80, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 149–​50, 191, 253 Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] 129, 367, 374 Isolationism, xxi, 423 Israel, 273–​75, 369, 371–​76, 415–​16; and American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], 268, 270–​73; and Iran, xxv–​xxvi, 273–​75; and Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, 273–​75; and United States, xxvi, 268, 269–​73 Italy, xxii, 362 Jackson, Reggie, 422 Jahn, Beate, 427 Jaishankar, Subrahmanyam, 141 Jamaica, 189 Japan, xxii, 35, 95–​96, 108, 113, 362; and China, 49, 50, 51, 54, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 302; and collective self-​defence, 108, 112; and Democratic Party of Japan, 108, 110; and Germany, 110; and India, 106, 109, 110; International Co-​operation Agency, 111; and

451

452

Index Iraq, 108, 109; Japan Self-​Defence Force, 105, 107, 108; and Japanese-​American alliance, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112; Komeito, 112; Liberal Democratic Party, 107, 112; and Okinawa, 106, 107, 108; and Peru, 199, 204; and Russia, 71, 80, 109, 111; and Quad, xxviii, 39, 112; and World Bank, 290–​91; and United States, 31, 32–​33, 33–​34, 39; and Yoshida Doctrine, 105 Japan’s Guidelines for Defense Cooperation, 106, 107, 109; [1978] 106, 107; [1997] 107, 109; [2015] 106, 109 Jefferson, Thomas, 409, 423 Joel, Billy, 421 Johnson, Boris, 63, 322 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA, 2015], xxvi–​xxvii, 109; and Iran, 109; and Israel, 271–​73; and Trump, xxvi, 268, 269, 272–​73, 346, 346–​47, 354 Jönsson, Christer, 19–​20 Jordan, 368, 371, 373 “July crisis” [1914], 38 Juncker, Jean-​Claude, 164 Kagan, Robert, 363 Kahn, Herman, 33 Kalakaua, 400 Kashmir, xxvii, 379–​80, 381, 382, 383 Kautilya, 14 Kazakhstan, 74, 75 Kennan, George F., 36, 358, 424 Kennedy, John F., 412 Kennedy, Paul, xxix, 32–​33 Keystone XL Pipeline, 151–​52 Khashoggi, Jamal, 416 Kim Jong Un, 111, 130; and Trump, 274 Kimmage, Michael, 422 Kissinger, Henry, 13, 24, 35, 123, 186, 397, 403, 412 Kneissl, Karin, 164–​64, 169n26 Korean War [1950-​1954], 147 Kosovo War, 150 Kozyrev, Andrey Vladimirovich, 74–​75 Kramp-​Karrenbauer, Annegret, 87 Kreisky, Bruno, 159 Kristol, Irving, 426 Kuczynski, Pedro Pablo, 205–​06 Kurdistan Regional Government, 172 Kurds, and Syria, 173; and Turkey, 172, 177 Kurz, Sebastian, 162, 167 Kuwait, 369–​70 Kyoto Protocol [1997] 125 Kyrgyzstan, coloured revolution in [2005], 75 La Francophonie, 84, 85, 147, 149 Laos, 191 Latin America, 185, 186, 188, 189–​90 League of Nations, xxix, 248, 284

Lebanon, 368–​73 Leguía, Augusto B., 200, 202 Le Pen, Marine, xxv, xxix, xxx Leyen, Ursula von der, 243 Liberal International Order, xxix, 29, 31, 32, 36, 247–​49, 252, 420–​21, 426–​29; and peacebuilding, 385 Liberalism, 330, 332; embedded liberalism, 426 Libya, 258–​59, 262, 264, 367–​70, 372–​76 Line of Actual Control, Sino-​Indian, 143 Linhart, Michael, 167 Lippman, Walter, 41 Lisbon Treaty [2009], 237, 239–​40, 242 Louis XIV, 5, 15 Luce, Edward, 37 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inacio, 189 Maastricht Treaty [1993], 86, 88, 89 Macron, Emmanuel, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 161; and Germany, 93; and Russia, 89 Malacca dilemma, 296–​97 Mali, 414 Mandela, Nelson, 398 Manley, John, 149 Mansoor Ahmed, 416 Marshall, George, 401 Marshall, Peter, 13 Marshall Plan [1947-​1948], 286 Martin, Paul, 150–​51 Mattingly, Garrett, 16 Mattis, James, 30 Mazarin, Jules, 17 McMaster, H. R., 30 McNamara, Caitlin, 416 Medvedev, Dmitry Anatolievich, 73; and Russian “privileged interests”, 76 Mercer, Jonathan, 412 Mercosur, xxi, xxix, 309–​20; and EU, 311, 317; features 310–​11; founding; 309; institutional structure, 311, 312–​313; intra-​regional trade, 310, 312; membership, 309, 311 Merkel, Angela, 92–​96, 98, 101, 165; and EU, 243 Metternich, Klemens von, xxiii, 24 MH17 disaster [2014], 128 Middle East, xxv, 203, 205, 261; and Syria, 172–​73, 174–​75, 176, 177; and Trump Administration, xxvi; and Turkey, 172, 174–​75 Middle Powers, xxiii–​xxiv, 119–​34, 135–​45, 146–​158, 159–​70, 171–​81 Migration, 331–​35 Mitterrand, François, 87 Modi, Narendra, 49, 135–​44, 383 Moldova, 74 Morgenthau, Hans, 16–​17, 47, 257 Morrison, Scott, 120, 129, 130 Moslem Brotherhood, 370, 372

452

453

Index Mulroney, Brian, 149 Mulroney, David, 155 Multilateralism, xxiii, xxx, 83–​84, 420, 422–​23, 425 Myanmar, 109, 217, 382, 383 Napoleon I, xxii, xxiii Nehru, Jawaharlal, 138 Neo-​realism, 17–​18 Nepal, 379, 382 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 273–​75 Neumann, Iver, 23 New START Treaty [2011], 346, 351–​53, 354 New Zealand, 417 Nicolson, Harold, 15–​16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20 Nixon, Richard, 148, 285, 397, 402 Non-​alignment, 140 Nonaligned Movement [NAM], 186, 223, 224, 228 Non-​Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 345–​46 Nord Stream Pipeline, 2, 94, 101 North Africa, 261 North American Free Trade Agreement [1994] 149, 151, 152, 153–​54, 155 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, xxiii, xxiv, xxx, 31, 32, 71, 87, 109, 110, 181n45, 362, 363, 425; and Afghanistan, xxvii–​xxviii, 258–​59, 264; and Austria, xxviii, 159–​60, 161–​63, 164–​65, 167; and China, 258, 261–​263, 265; and cyberattacks, 258, 262–​64; and EU, 238, 242–​43, 259–​64; and expansion, 74–​75, 76, 77–​78, 80; and Germany, 94–​100, 109; and hybrid threats, 259–​60, 262, 264; and Libya, 258–​59, 262, 264; and nuclear weapons, 257–​58, 262–​63; and Russia, xxiv, 71, 74–​75, 77–​78, 80, 258–​62; and Turkey, xxviii, 173, 175, 180n21; and Trump, xxiii, 94, 98, 243, 258, 263, 266n6; and Ukraine, 260, 262–​63; and United States, xxiii, 31, 32, 243, 260, 258–​259, 261–​262 North Korea, xxi, 105, 106, 111, 112, 127, 147; abductions, 106, 111; nuclear programme/​ threat, xxiv, 105, 106, 112, 346 Nowotny, Thomas, 162 NSC-​68 [1950], 40 Nuclear Posture Review [NPR], 345, 348; and Trump Administration, 349–​50, 353 Nuclear weapons, xxii; and proliferation, 345–​54 passim; 371–​73, 376; and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, 346; and Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, 346; Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, xxvi, 109, 268, 269, 271–​73, 346, 346–​47, 354; and New START Treaty [2011], 346, 351–​53, 354; and modernisation, 347–​48, 353 Nuclear Weapons States [NWS], 346, 347–​48

Numelin, Ragnar, 23 Nye, Joseph S. , 33, 398, 403, 404, 409, 411 Obama, Barack, 29, 30, 31, 33, 39, 108, 109, 125, 126, 151, 153, 227, 345, 397, 402, 404, 409–​10; Administration, 29, 36–​37; and China, xxviii, 229; and Cuba, 185, 187, 193; and Indonesia, 227; and Iran, 272; and Israel, 269–​75 passim; and Middle East, 268–​75 passim; and nuclear weapons, 345, 347, 349, 350, 351; and Peru, 204, 205; pivot to Asia, 229; Russia, xxiv, 73, 76, 291; and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, 323; and Trans-Pacific Partnership323; and Trump’s hatred for, xxvii; and World Bank, 323 Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], 253 Oil, 369–​71, 373–​75 Okinawa, 106, 107, 108; Base relocation, 107, 108; rape incident [1995], 106 Operational domains 359, 361 Opium wars [1839-​1842, 1856-​1860], xxii, 35 Organization of American States, 149, 200, 203 Oxfam, 386 Pacific Economic Co-​operation Council [PECC], 202 Pacific Ocean, Western, 360 Pakistan, and China, 300, 302, 303; and China-​Pakistan Economic Corridor [CPEC], 300, 301, 303; and India, xxvii, 379–​80, 382–​83; and Kashmir, xxvii, 379–​80, 381, 382, 383; and United States, 380–​83 Palestinians, 371–​73 Paris Climate Accords [2015], 109, 131, 322; and Trump, 322–​23 Paris Peace Conference [1918-​1920], xxii, 16 Pax Atlantica, 423 Pearson, Lester, 147, 155 Peru, xxix, 198; arms spending 201, 202–​03, 204; and Bolivia 200, 202, 204, 205; and Brazil 200, 203–​05; and Chile 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205–​06; and China 199, 204, 205–​06; and Colombia 200, 201; Consultative Commission of Foreign Relations 199, 201; Diplomatic Academy of Peru 201; and Ecuador 200, 201, 202; and Japan 199, 204; and Middle East, 203, 205; and Pacific Alliance 204–​05; and regional economic co-​operation 201, 202, 203; and Russia, 205; and United States, 200, 201, 202–​04, 205; Spanish intervention [1863-​1866]; 199; and war of independence, 198; and War of the Pacific [1879-​1883], 200 Philippines, 106, 111 Pinochet, Augusto, 253 Poland, xxv, 37, 71, 322, 413 Pompeo, Michael, 30, 130; and Iran, 274

453

454

Index Siberian gas pipeline, 79; and Sistema, 77; and South Asia, 381; Soviet collapse, 105, 106; and Soviet Union, 30, 31, 363; Soviet Union and Cuba, 186, 190, 191, 193; and Syria, 78, 172–​73, 174–​75, 176, 177; and Ukraine, xxiv, 260, 262–​63; and United States, xxi, xxiv, 30, 31, 71, 72, 73, 80; and the West, 165

Pompidou, Georges, 82, 86 Powell, Colin, 390 Powell, Enoch, 60–​61 Primakov, Yevgeny Maksimovich, 75 Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich, xxi, xxiv, 72, 73, 75, 77, 79–​80, 89, 94–​95, 111, 130, 153, 165, 362; and assassination of dissidents abroad, 165; and Biden, xxx; and China, xxiv, 49, 299; and Cuba, 191; and Munich speech [2007] 76; and nuclear weapons, 350, 351, 352–​53; and Russian Orthodox Church, 74; and Trump, xxiv, xxx; and Ukraine, xxiv, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79 Putnam, Robert, 22 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue [Quad –​United States, India, Japan and Australia], xxviii, xxx, 39, 112, 131, 301, 303 Qatar, 369–​70, 372, 374 RAND Corporation, 34 Ranke, Leopold von, 4, 5 Reagan, Ronald, 148 Realism, 14, 16, 17, 330, 332; Neo-​Realism, 17–​18; Realpolitik, 95; Rochau’s Foundations of Realpolitik [1853], 358 Regionalism, definition, 309; identity, 312, 314, 317, 317–​18, 335–​37; objectives, 310, 315, 316, 317; open regionalism, 310, 312, 317; post-​hegemonic regionalism, 313, 317; social aspects, 312–​13, 317 Responsibility to Protect [R2P] 253 Rice, Condoleezza, 150 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis de, 15, 17, 23 Riga Axioms, 37 Rochau, August Ludwig von, 358 Roosevelt, Franklin, xxix, 37, 44n65, 248 Roosevelt, Theodore, 400 Rosier, Bernard du, 15, 16 Rudd, Kevin, xxviii, 120, 124, 125, 127, 128 Russia, xxii, 30, 31, 105, 106, 71, 72, 73, 80, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 410, 415; and BRIC, 285; and BRICS, 82; and Chechnya, 73; and China, xxiv, 49, 51, 53, 55, 71, 72, 73, 78, 79, 296, 298–​99, 299–​301, 303; and Commonwealth of Independent States, 299; and Crimea, 71, 76, 233, 240, 242; and Cuba, 190, 191; and Eurasian Economic Union, 75, 299; and EU, 236, 240, 242, 243–​44; and France, xxv, 82, 85, 87, 89; and Germany, 92–​96, 98–​99, 101, 128; and India, 381; and Japan, 109, 111; and Middle East, 367, 369–​70, 372–​76; and NATO, xxiv, 71, 74–​75, 77–​78, 80, 258–​62; and nuclear weapons, 346, 348–​53 passim; and Pakistan, 81; Russia-​Belarus Union State, 75; and Russian “privileged interests”; 76; and Turkey, xxviii, 78, 171, 173–​74, 175, 176; and

Saferworld, 392 St-​Laurent, Louis, 147 Sanderson, Lord Thomas, 41 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 86, 89 Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, 393 Satow, Ernest, 14, 15–​16 Saudi Arabia xxv, xxvi, 367–​72, 374, 376, 416 Schallenberg, Alexander, 165–​66, 167 Search for Common Ground, 387 Senkaku Islands, 361, 362 Shanghai Co-​operation Organisation [SCO], 79, 174, 300, 305n24 Sharp, Paul, 21–​22 Simon, Carly, 411 Skripal, Sergei, 164 Soft power, 398–​99, 400, 401, 402–​03, 404 Solana, Javier, 238–​39, 241 South Africa, 398, 416; and BRICS, 82; and Sharpeville massacre, 250 South Asia, 379–​83 South China Sea, xxviii, 86, 106, 109, 110, 111, 126, 360; and Indonesia, 228–​29; and Obama, 229 South Korea, xxiv, 31, 49–​50, 112, 147, 362, 417; and Asian Development Bank, 302; economic rescue package [1997], 290 Sri Lanka, 128, 379, 380, 383 Stop the War Coalition, 392 Sub-​Commission on Freedom of Information and the Press, 249 Sub-​Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, 249 Suharto, 221, 222, 224 Sukarno, 221, 222, 225 Superpowers, no longer exist, xxii–​xxiii Supranational institutions, 312, 313, 314, 315, 318 Syria, 172–​73, 174–​75, 176, 177, 367–​76; and Kurds, 173; 2015 Russian intervention [2015], 78 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 399, 401 Taiwan, 123, 126, 325; and China, 49–​50, 55, 360, 362; and Taiwan Strait, 55, 106 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, 17, 24 Taylor, A.J.P., xxiii Thailand, 416; and ASEAN, 214, 216, 217, 218; and Asian financial crisis [1997], 212; and Bamboo diplomacy, 210–​211, 213, 215, 217; and China, 211, 213, 214, 216; and

454

455

Index Cobra Gold Military exercise, 215; Free Thai movement, 210; and Myanmar, 217; as Siam, 210; and Sino-​Thai Free Trade Agreement, 214; and United States, 216, 229 Theory of clubs, 322, 327 Thucydides, 4, 8 Thucydides Trap, 8 Thunberg, Greta, 254 Trade, 330–​37; and China, 321–​22, 323; trade law, 327 Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, 322 Trans-​Korea Railway, 300 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons [1970], 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 353 Trans-​Pacific Partnership [TPP], 31, 108, 109, 126, 302, 304, 323; and Trump, 323 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons [2017], 166–​67 Trudeau, Justin, 150, 152, 153, 155 Trudeau, Pierre, 148 Truman, Harry, 287 Trump, Donald, xxi, xxx, 29, 30–​31, 39, 84, 87, 205, 254, 400, 402, 404, 410, 416, 421, 426, 428; Administration, 30, 31, 34, 36–​37, 39–​40, 41; and Trump Administration’s nuclear strategy, 345; and Australia, 119, 120, 129, 130; and Canada, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155; and China, 55, 301, 302, 303; and Cuba, 185, 187, 188; and EU, 243; and Iran, 268, 269, 272–​75; and Israel, 268, 269, 272; and Japan, 106, 109, 111; and Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, xxvi, 273–​75, 346, 347, 354; and Kim Jong Un, 274; and NATO, xxiii, 94, 98, 243, 258, 263, 266n6; and nuclear weapons, 345–​54 passim; and Obama, hatred for, xxvii; and Paris Climate Accord, 322–​23; and Russia, xxiv, xxx; and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, 323; unschooled in statecraft, xxvi; and World Bank, 291–​92 Turkey, 87, 369–​72, 374–​76; and 15 July 2016 coup attempt, 174, 177; and Austria, 163, 164–​65; and China, 173–​74, 175; and Cyprus, 172; and Eurasia, 173, 174; and EU, 163, 171, 172, 173–​74, 175, 177; and Kurds, 172, 177; and Middle East, 172, 174–​75; and NATO, xxviii, 173, 175, 180n21; and Russia, 78, 171, 173–​74, 175, 176; and Syria, 172–​73, 174–​75, 176, 177; and United States, 171, 172, 173, 175, 178 Turnbull, Malcolm, 119, 120, 129 Uighurs, xxviii, 127 Ukraine, xxiv, 93, 95–​96, 98–​99, 100, 414; and Crimea annexation, 71, 76; and Euromaidan protests, 73, 75, 76–​77; and EU, 79; and NATO, 260, 262–​63; and NATO expansion,

76; and Russia, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80; Russian invasion [2014], xxiv, 71, 72, 73, 76, 77, 79; and United States, xxiv Unilateralism, 423 Union of South American Nations [UNASUR] 203, 317 United Arab Emirates, xxv, 369–​72, 416 United Nations, xxi, xxx, 82, 84, 88, 92, 94, 96–​98, 101, 122, 124–​25, 127, 147, 150, 152, 155, 385; and Cyprus, 172; General Assembly, 141, 188, 191; Migration Compact, 167; Peacekeeping, 137; Security Council, 71, 72, 136, 151, 152 United States, xxi, 29–​41 passim, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 90, 94, 96, 98, 100, 175, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363; and Afghanistan, xxvii–​xxviii, 73, 107, 109, 149, 150, 152; and American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], 268, 270–​73; and ANZUS, 120, 121, 123; and AUKUS, xxviii, xxx, 66; and Canada, xxviii, 149, 151, 155; and China, xxi, xxiv, 29, 33–​34, 35–​37, 39–​40, 41, 46, 48–​49, 51–​52, 53–​56, 57, 229, 294, 295, 298, 301–​02, 303, 304, 323–​24, 325; and Cuba, 185, 186, 187–​88, 191, 193; and Embassy in Havana, 187; and EU, xxi, 241–​42, 82, 83, 84–​85, 87–​88, 89, 241–​42; and France, xxv, 82, 83, 84–​85, 87–​88, 89; and India, 112, 141, 380–​83; and Iran, xxvi, 273–​75, 346, 347, 354, 367, 369, 372–​76; and Iraq invasion, 191; and Israel, xxvi, 73, 268, 269–​73, 367, 369, 372–​76; and Japan, 31, 32–​33, 33–​34, 39, 361; and Japanese-​ American alliance, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 361; and Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, xxvi, 273–​75, 346, 347, 354; and NATO, xxiii, xxviii, 31, 32, 243, 260, 258–​259, 261–​262; and National Defense Strategy [2018], 55; and North American Free Trade Agreement, 149, 151, 152, 153–​54, 155; and North Korea, xxiv, 105, 106, 112, 346; and Nuclear Posture Review, 345, 348, 349–​50, 353; and nuclear weapons, 345, 347, 349, 350, 351; and Okinawa, 106, 107, 108; and Pakistan, 380–​83; and Paris Climate Accord, 322–​23; and Peru, 200, 201, 202–​04, 205; pivot to Asia, 229; and Quad, xxviii, 39, 112; and Russia, xxi, xxiv, 71, 72, 73, 80; and Russian sanctions, xxiv, 79; and State Department List of State Sponsors of Terrorism, 187, 188, 193; and Thailand, 216; and Turkey, 171, 172, 173, 175, 178; and Wilsonianism, 424; and World Bank, 287–​88, 290 Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR], 249, 251 Vedrine, Hubert, 30 Venezuela, xxix, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191

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Index Vienna, Conference on Human Rights [1993], 253; seat of international organisations, 159, 160, 161, 163, 166, 167n13 Vietnam, 111, 147, 190, 191, 360 Vietnam War, 121 Wagner Group [Russian private military corporation], 78–​79 Waltz, Kenneth, 17–​18 War on Terror, 120, 121, 124, 129, 253; 9/​11 terrorist attacks, xxvii–​xxviii, 105, 107, 112, 113; and Obama, 229 Washington consensus, first [1989], 423 Washington, George, 423 Westphalia, Congress of [1644-​1648], xxii, xxiii, 15 Wicquefort, Abraham von, 15, 16 Wilson, Harold, 29 Wilsonianism, 424 Wight, Martin, 18, 20, 21 Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, 392 World Bank, xxv, xxviii, 251, 283–​92 passim, and China, 49, 53; and Japan, 290–​91; and Obama, 291; and Trump, 291–​92 World Conference on Human Rights, 250 World Conference on Women, 252

World Health Organization, 147, 322 World Trade Organization, 124, 322, 326–​28; and international co-​operation, 321, 323, 326–​28; and theory of clubs, 322, 327 World Vision, 386 World Wars, First [1914-​1918], 410; and origins, xxii; Second [1939-​1945], 147, 410, 413 Xi Jinping, xxiii, 31, 53, 95, 119, 129, 294, 295, 297–​98, 299, 302, 303, 363; and “community of common destiny”, 295; and Trump, 55 Yalta Axioms, 37 Yanukovych, Viktor Fyodorovich, 73, 76, 77 Yellin, Janet, 39 Yeltsin, Boris Nikolaevich, 73, 74 Yemen, xxv, 367–​71, 373–​74, 376 Yoshida Doctrine, 105 Yugoslavia, and United States bombing [1999], 72, 76 Zarif, Javad, 274 Zemin Jiang, 296, 297; and Great Western Development, 296 Zoellick, Robert, 35–​36 Zuma, Jacob, 254

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