Two lonely powers

by Pratap Bhanu Mehta

September 19, 2014 

The process of giving up on hubris has left America neither feared nor loved.

If one steps away from the exigencies of different global crises and contemplates the existential predicament of the two pre-eminent global powers, the United States and China, what strikes you most is their peculiar loneliness. Of course, the US and China are as different as you can imagine. But, despite their power, they are, in distinctive ways, struggling to carry the world with them.

Take the two big challenges preoccupying the US at the moment: the IS and Russia. President Obama’s address to the American people, calling for action against the IS, seemed like a sad speech at many levels. It did not carry much conviction. It could not disguise the fact that it reversed what was left of Obama’s ideological identity as president: disengagement from war. For all his ruthlessness in going after terrorism, and the Libyan misadventure, Obama’s reversal of US expansionism was genuine. He cuts a bit of a sorry figure for doing much of what he said he would do: withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. The American people wanted it; and the world saw this as a recovery of American leadership from the moral hubris of the Bush years.

But it is precisely this process of giving up on hubris that has left America neither feared nor loved. Both the left and the right in the US, somewhat disingenuously, criticise this relative modesty as an abdication of leadership. And the rest of the world says, giving up on nation-building hubris is all right, but please clean up the mess before you leave. And thus the central paradox of American power: cleaning up requires the exercise of power that the world will not accept; not cleaning up earns you a reputation for weakness. And this is exactly what those who want to taunt the US exploit: the IS seems to very explicitly want to draw the US back in, knowing full well that the scale of intervention will never be powerful enough to fix the region.

So while there is global condemnation of the brutality of the IS, the alliance against it is very tepid. This is for familiar reasons. It is not easy to be too enthusiastic about siding with many of the region’s powers, such as Saudi Arabia, which helped create the ideological conditions for the IS to flourish in the first place. The US’s colossal misjudgements on politics in the Middle East make it a liability to partner with. It has sided with dictatorships against political movements in the region, often short-circuiting a necessary process of churning; Libya was a misjudgement that made building future international coalitions difficult.

This is also evidenced in its dealings with Russia, and again, Obama’s flat Nato speech could barely disguise it. Russia is redrawing boundaries and may unleash a process it cannot control. Europe is exercised about it. But the rest of the world seems oddly complacent. It may be partly because of a different diagnosis: Putin may be unsavoury, too bad for poor Ukraine, but the fallout will be limited. America is again seen as caught between half measures. It cannot not be seen to be taking a hard line against Putin. Yet it does not have enough power to force an outcome. But again, this is seen as an American battle with powerless Europeans in tow, while the rest of the world has no skin in the game.

So America is left with neither the moral authority of principle, nor the full force of power to draw significant world opinion behind it. One of the most brilliant accounts of American policy in recent years, Peter Beinart’s The Icarus Syndrome, makes the powerful point that acknowledging that something is beyond the US’s power is perilous in American political culture. Obama had come closest to saying that; now he is being excoriated for it even by Hillary Clinton, who has suddenly discovered her Kissingerite mantle. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t is the surest sign of being lonely.

If America’s relative loneliness is the loneliness of half measures, China’s is of a different order. In Asia, there is more yearning for America to play a balancing role. There is also, at the same time, more doubt about its ability to do so. But China’s alienation of Asia continues. There is no question that its influence has grown: South Africa will not receive the Dalai Lama, and China will get several countries to veto investments it does not like. It is building the rudiments of a new architecture like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. But it still remains remarkably friendless. It has disputes with major powers in Asia. In part, this is because its foreign policy has grown assertive in ways that seem to threaten, rather than elicit, friends. Even regimes and countries close to China take a Chinese approach to the relationship, that is, being quite openly transactional. Such transactional power can have enormous consequences. But one thing the Chinese are learning quickly is that mere power does not translate into enduring friendship or alliances that easily. For good or for ill, the US, through power and ideological projection, anchored a set of international norms and rules for the world order. The Chinese would like to reconstitute some of those rules, including those governing the global maritime order. But they are finding few backers.

It is sometimes easy to be awed by Chinese power. It is, at one level, impressive indeed. But it also runs into limitations very fast. Its fragility is evidenced by the fact that China responds very quickly to the prospect of clubs it might be left out of. Whether the Trans-Pacific Partnership will come to fruition is an open question. But its very prospect did preoccupy China and arguably made it play more ball with the global trading order. India’s overtures to Japan also seem to have elicited a response from the Chinese.

In international politics, there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. But the Chinese are finding it difficult to convert power into enduring influence. China has often spoken of a new architecture for Asia Pacific security cooperation, but its ability to create one is in doubt. In Asia now, the doubts are whether the US can continue to convert its traditional friendships into real power, and whether China can convert its power into friendships. The result is a world with two major powers that, instead of being able to enhance their capacity to mobilise effective support behind them, are finding themselves, on many security issues, more alone than they can publicly acknowledge.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi, and a contributing editor for ‘The Indian Express’

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