Eurasia Press & News
There is something clarifying about the fact that the opening of high-level U.S.-Russian talks this week to discuss the crisis Moscow has provoked over Ukraine comes just days after the one-year anniversary of the storming of the U.S. Capitol. The two events are not directly related, but they both make up parts of a difficult challenge facing U.S. policymakers: how to preserve Washington’s global leadership role at a time when its model of governance, both domestically and internationally, is increasingly called into question.
That dual-pronged challenge has come into sharper focus in the past five years, as the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and more recently the U.S. public, has woken up to two stark facts shaping the geopolitical landscape in which U.S. power operates. First, Washington more often faces competitors that can if not rival its ability to project power globally, frustrate its efforts to leverage that global pre-eminence locally. Second, though the primary object of that competition is power, it is in important ways being driven by systemic and ideological factors, at a time when the United States’ bona fides as a champion of democratic ideals and institutions have been tarnished by four years of erosion under the presidency of Donald Trump.
Both realizations, though salutary, are belated, as the rivals in question—primarily Russia and China—have for more than a decade had no illusions about the nature of the contest and their goals in pursuing it. By contrast, the U.S. has spent most of that time distracted by costly, if ultimately peripheral, crusades, its vision obscured by wishful thinking and self-delusion about the attractiveness of a global order under Washington’s hegemony to countries that aspire to more than subordinate status, no matter how lucrative and well-compensated it might be.
Perhaps no phrase more succinctly epitomizes the dangers of that self-delusion than the oft-repeated bromide that the United States’ rivals are on “the wrong side of history,” a formulation that confuses the pendulum swings of action, reaction and counterreaction that make up human history with a neat linear progression toward some idealized endpoint. This isn’t to say that the ideal of self-determination and the values of democratic governance that the U.S. is defending aren’t just. But no matter how comforting it is to know that one has the force of moral authority on one’s side in a dispute, it is no guarantee of the contest’s outcome.
The overuse of this phrase in Washington over the past decade is telling, though, as it is in this period that it began to be clear that policymakers in Moscow and Beijing don’t share their U.S. counterparts’ historical understanding of both the recent past and the near-term future.
This is perhaps clearest in Eastern Europe, where Russian President Vladimir Putin is currently seeking to relitigate with the threat of force the post-Cold War settlement in the states that used to make up the former Soviet Union. In so doing, Putin has resorted to concepts and tactics—spheres of influence and military conquest—that seem more at home historically in the 19th century. That doesn’t make them any less effective today.
The challenge posed by China’s growing economic power and influence is greater in its long-term implications, if less acute in its immediate urgency. Under President Xi Jinping, Beijing has adopted similar concepts and coercive tactics in its approach to its own neighborhood, though inflected with Maoist framings and—for now—a greater sense of strategic patience than displayed by Putin. If Putin is more at ease with Clausewitz’s maxim that war is politics by other means, Xi seems satisfied with Mao’s corollary that politics is war by other means.
What is clear in both cases, however, is that the United States’ rivals have achieved a strategic stalemate in which they can neutralize the value of Washington’s preponderant military superiority to effectively counter U.S. efforts to deepen and expand its influence, without yet being able to roll that influence back.
If the Kremlin’s artificially manufactured crisis over Ukraine is any indication, Putin now senses that the time is ripe to move from defensive stalemate to an offensive initiative, perhaps believing that U.S. President Joe Biden is open to making some sort of deal. After all, Biden has demonstrated a pragmatic realist streak since taking office, illustrated most prominently by his resolute determination to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, as well as his signing of a security pact with Australia and the U.K., known as AUKUS.
Perhaps no phrase more succinctly epitomizes the dangers of Washington’s self-delusion over the past decade than the oft-repeated bromide that the United States’ rivals are on “the wrong side of history.”There is a case to be made for seeking to accommodate Russia as a way of resolving a second-order problem so that the U.S. can concentrate on the bigger challenge that is China. But Putin’s maximalist demands to undo the post-Cold War status quo are unacceptable in Washington, to say nothing of Kyiv, Warsaw and Brussels. Besides, it’s unlikely that Putin would respect any meaningful mutual compromises that might be negotiated.
Moreover, Putin’s hand may be weaker than it seems. The reality is that there is little the U.S. and its European allies can do to prevent a Russian invasion of Ukraine, or to effectively counter Russia’s efforts to play the spoiler in Eastern Europe and beyond. But there is a great risk for Moscow that a war of choice—of the sort the U.S. has only just managed to extricate itself from, to Russia’s great benefit—could backfire over time, soaking up resources needed elsewhere and souring domestic public opinion on Putin’s neo-imperialist vision. Given the measure of instability Russia faces throughout the post-Soviet space—from Belarus and Nagorno-Karabakh to Kyrgyzstan and most recently Kazakhstan, to say nothing of the continued possibility of spillover from Afghanistan—now is arguably a better time to keep its powder dry.
So Biden would do well to avoid any rash concessions that would empower Moscow, embolden Beijing and discourage U.S. allies across Europe and Asia. The United States’ confrontation with Russia, as with China, is destined to be for the long haul, and here, the second aspect of the equation—that of values and systemic competition—comes into play. Biden has portrayed the current geopolitical landscape generally, and the U.S. rivalry with China specifically, as a contest between democracy and autocracy. In so doing, he has repeatedly emphasized the premise that, to strengthen their appeal, democracies must demonstrate they can deliver better outcomes for their populations than autocracies.
However, this framing of democratic erosion in the face of authoritarian, populist leaders as a sort of balance sheet to be assessed by rational bean-counters misreads the trends that have fueled it. Most importantly, it ignores the ways in which affect and emotion have driven the hyper-political backlash against cold, unfeeling technocratic governance, particularly pronounced over the past five years. This should be clearly evident to observers in Washington, given its prominent display on Jan. 6, 2021, which was itself the culmination of dynamics that put Trump in the White House.
Here, too, an element of conflicting historical visions is at play, this time with regard to the conception of individual and collective identities and how they are formed and explained. In many ways, autocratic leaders like Putin, but also Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Poland’s Law and Justice government, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Trump are channeling a rejection, whether implicit or explicit, of a certain style of individual identity, shaped by the 20th-century psychological approach that puts the family and related personal traumas at the heart of an individual’s identity formation.
In its place, they offer a return to a pre-psychological, 19th-century model based on character and a hierarchy of values, in which strength and honor predominate, and the family functions as an incubator forging identities anchored by the nation and church. This is reflected in the demographic base of support for these movements, a coalition of socially conservative, religious and non-urban constituencies that are historically the most hostile to the modern and post-modern approach to identity characterized by the psychological prism.
These movements are all clearly driven by affect—predominantly anger and resentment, but also pride and belonging—but instead of relegating it to the private sphere, they channel it into the public sphere of politics. In this sense, they in many ways represent the countervailing socio-political force to the liberal-progressive coalition’s maxim that the personal is political. As such, they represent a substantial, complex and nonrational component driving support for these authoritarian leaders that not only won’t respond to Biden’s rational cost-benefit analysis, but often tolerates net-loss outcomes—Brexit is the case study—so long as they are emotionally satisfying.
That’s not to say that Biden’s focus on delivering better outcomes won’t drive positive reform and change that, over time, might reduce popular grievances and discontent. But it’s far from certain, and ultimately, in the framing of a competition between democracy and autocracy, it is probably irrelevant.
History’s pendulum has swung, much as Francis Fukuyama warned it would in the often forgotten post-script to his frequently cited book. And it did so while Washington was busy tilting after windmills and satisfying itself with self-congratulatory narratives of the end of history.
