David P. Goldman
In his lead forum essay, Captain Jerry Hendrix addresses the challenges of a multipolar world by envisioning “a broad alliance structure made up of self-determined democracies pursuing free market economies” in opposition to the “new authoritarian bloc” of Russia and China. He has done a great service by resituating America’s strategic position in the face of great power competition’s return. Hendrix, however, maintains that today’s multipolar world is a return to business as usual. I argue, instead, that today’s great power competition is unlike anything we have seen in the past because China is a competitor unlike any we have encountered.
Imperial powers of the past filled the world and pursued conquest for the sake of, among other things, scarce resources. Roman soldiers were stationed from Mesopotamia to the Hibernian border, sending 100,000 or more slaves a year back to Rome. The “far-flung battle line” of the British Empire included large parts of Asia and Africa. Britain financed its trade deficit during most of the nineteenth century by growing opium in India and selling it to China. The empires of Spain and Portugal extracted bullion from the New World and spent most of it on luxury imports from China—this bullion in turn paid for China’s nineteenth-century opium imports. The French and British fought their eighteenth-century wars over control of colonies, the slave trade, and the East Indian trade. Even the world wars of the twentieth century were fought because of territory. France in 1914 wanted the return of Alsace and Lorraine; Serbia wanted Bosnia-Herzegovina. The frontier of German expansion into Slavic lands defined the conflict between Moscow, Vienna, and Berlin. Hitler, for his part, demanded Lebensraum.
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