As the war in Ukraine grinds on, it looks like the Washington-focused foreign policy establishment — aka the Blob — is pivoting from its once-confident belief that the world is best understood through the prism of self-interested great powers.
Now, a flagship essay in Foreign Affairs magazine has ripped the heart out, declaring: “There’s no such thing as a great power.”
Sure, it’s just one essay, but it’s where it’s published that matters: in the house journal for the US foreign affairs establishment. And when the Blob shifts, Australia’s security commentariat is rarely far behind.
What’s driving the rethink? Russia’s failure to overrun its much smaller (and militarily far weaker) neighbour. The sudden display of weakness is shattering the understanding of the way great-power thinking tells us the world is supposed to work. (So, too, did the ultimate failure of the US intervention in Afghanistan and occupation in Iraq.)
The concept, says essay author Phillips P O’Brien, is not just out of date; it’s dangerous, distorting geopolitics and encouraging bad decision-making. It’s based on the Cold War school where, as Thucydides put it more than 2000 years ago in the infamous Melian dialogues: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Trouble is, as Russia is finding in Ukraine, there are real limits to what the strong can actually do — and what the supposedly weak are prepared to put up with. All those “realists” arguing that the interests of a strong Russia should be accommodated in its near abroad of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova turned out to be wrong. Worse, they encouraged Putin’s confidence in the West’s indifference and weakness.
Turns out all of those collaborative networks committed to a more liberal order of human rights and democracy, such as the European Union and NATO, were more powerful than they seemed.
The shift in how the US establishment thinks is already having an impact — at least rhetorically. This week, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen closed off her breakthrough meeting in China.
“Some see the relationship between the US and China through the frame of great power conflict: a zero-sum, bilateral contest where one must fall for the other to rise,” Yellen said.
“President Biden and I don’t see it that way. We believe that the world is big enough for both of us.”
This will be bad news for Australia’s deep thinkers on security matters, fresh from this week’s latest argument in the country’s footy fan-style obsession about our place in the great power conflict between China and the US (kicked off by former prime minister Paul Keating in response to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s trip to the NATO summit in Vilnius).
What is a great power anyway, the essay asks? Most “were in fact midranking Potemkin states whose militaries served as façades for otherwise weak power bases. This was true of Benito Mussolini’s Italy, and it is true of Putin’s Russia”.
Rather, O’Brien argues, we should think about “full spectrum” powers that not only have strong militaries, but the economic and technological capacity to sustain and, most importantly, renew them. In the modern world, that means just two: the US and China.
But even “full spectrum power” has limits, he says. “Politics and society shape the creation and use of power far more than many realist scholars acknowledge”.
Exercising power — whether in democracies or dictatorships — requires “societal commitment”, a difficult-to-measure sense of public buy-in to endure the military casualties and economic disruption that war brings.
It’s not only hard to measure. It’s hard to create and sustain (as the US neoconservatives — and their Australian allies — discovered when their publics found out they’d been misled over the justifications for war). It was these constraints that led the US under Obama to look the other way when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014.
A proper understanding of all the dimensions of power would, the essay argues, puncture the “realist” illusion that power can be used decisively in war — even by the full-spectrum powers themselves.
The greatest risk? “The kind of analytical mistakes that led to the current catastrophe in Ukraine.”
It’s all part of the Blob shaking off the Trump populist nationalist disruption. That includes recognising that maybe the position in Asia is a lot more stable than it thought; that the US need not act aggressively to China, and that China understands (or can be encouraged to understand) that it would take an “almost certainly self-destructive risk” in challenging the status quo.
These sorts of early ruminations out of the US Blob take a while to become accepted wisdom. The sure sign that they’ve got there is when they morph into the noddingly wise opinions of Australia’s security media commentators.
Hopefully, this time, it’ll come quickly.
Fair enough. But there’s an earlier example that seldom gets mentioned: the British Empire’s unprovoked grab for the two Boer Republics in Southern Africa, resulting in the Boer War, 1899 to 1902. The huge military and financial resources of the Empire, which liked to think it was at the zenith of its power, was opposed by a couple of isolated statelets run by expatriate farmers. The war was a series of crushing humiliations for the British Empire at the hands of the highly motivated, tactically innovative Boers, who at first fought and often won fairly conventional battles but finally, in the face of overwhelming numbers of fresh Empire soldiers, switched to guerilla war, until the British resorted to a ‘total war’ strategy of rounding up as many Boer civilians as possible into concentration camps where they died in large numbers from maltreatment, malnutrition and disease while the British used scorched earth methods, burning houses and crops, to starve out the guerillas. So the British won, but it was a longer and more costly war than Crimea and the rest of the world saw clearly how weak, blundering, bullying and savage the supposedly mighty and civilised British really were.
Just reading about the Crimea war and Britain’s reason for it.
What a Dog awful example of the politicians and the newspapers of the time
Followed up by the usual British catastrophic series of colossal blunders by the Aristocratic Military Leaders.
Yes. It’s sometimes overlooked that Britain was taken into that war by a Liberal government led by the Earl of Aberdeen, and it came out of the war after that government was replaced by the Tories led by Lord Palmerston. In the 19th C the Liberals were often more jingoistic and keen on foreign adventures (bringing civilisation, shouldering the white man’s burden, spreading free trade and so on, always full fit to burst with Good Intentions) than the Tories. As for the British newspapers, the loudest cheerleader for the Crimean War was the eternally progressive Manchester Guardian.
Tories have returned to the 19thC?
Australia’s defence decisions should all be subbied out to a certain PJ Keating….the only one with any sense currently.
He’s not the only one talking sense. There are many others but they don’t have such public notoriety. Even Keating is framed by the media as a crackpot, which is the only reason his words become public.
Not after his uninformed comments about NATO and Stoltenberg, sounded like another ageing faux anti-imperialist using ‘analysis’ (loosely) by avoiding credible grounded analysis and facts on the ground from Europe, Ukraine and Russia?
His claims of NATO overreaching in Asia by setting up a branch office in Japan ignores 21stC facts but seems to follow 20thC tropes?
NATO already has a presence in the region via France, UK etc., many NATO nations cooperate with Asian on supply e.g. South Korea doing big contracts to supply Poland and shared interests on cyber security etc.
Such sentiments are also shared by Anglo & esp. US faux anti-imperialist tankies sharing talking points with right wing libertarians linked to Koch et al.?
Who knows?………………..
……….another fifty years and the Americans might even discover something called diplomacy.
Okay, so the Europeans discovered the wonder drug five hundred years ago, but like every occasion when the Americans arrive late at a revelation, it will become their discovery.
Is that part of the Melian Dialogues?
So America still doesn’t understand the meaning of power. To them it is like a drug to which they are addicted. Ukraine is a great power, because it refuses to be defeated. Just like Afghanistan, Vietnam. Great powers because they cannot be beaten. Australia would also be a great power. But true power is the ability to live in peace, have an educated population and have economic justice in a healthy environment. We’re a long way short, so far. But the ability and determination to mess with the neighbours is a weakness, not power. Bombing a bunch of strangers back to the stone age does not indicate strength.
The whole slant of this article is a simplistic regurgitation of the propaganda regarding the origins of the situation in Ukraine which is a tragedy, a tragedy mapped out by the Victoria Nuland, the Lindsey Grahams and McCains of the world. It states that Russia ‘invaded’ Ukraine in 2014 and blames Obama for looking the other way. It fails to mention Maidan and the Neo Con devised overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian Government, the murders committed in Kiev by the US armed militants, the setting on fire of a building full of innocent people in Crimea, the subsequent banning of Russian-speaking Ukrainians to speak their mother tongue and the ensuing plebiscites which voted to become part of Russia again, in both the Donbas and Crimea. Most readers would have no idea that Crimea had been Russian since 1785, and neither would they know that while the so-called Freedom-loving West decries that Putin invaded a ‘sovereign Country’ that same West had no problem when England and France tried to take Sebastopol in the 1850’s, The Charge of the Light Brigade etc – and most readers would have no idea that Donetsk had been predominantly Russified when a Mister Jones, a UK entrepreneur, opened the coal mines in Donetsk in the 1840s and was forced to recruit Russians to dig its coal. They would also have no idea that when Krushev ‘Ukrainised’ this area in 1954, it was for the purpose of Cartography, and, just as when Ayers Rock became Uluru, it was nothing but a cartographic gesture simply because it was still part of the Soviet Union.
So 2014 post-Maidan, when the Azov Nazis bombed and shelled the Donbas for 8 years killing over 14,000 people, when Putin sent help so they could defend themselves – remember the Plebiscite where Donbas voted to become part of Russia again – this article calls it a’ Putin attack’. Then there are the two broken Minsk Agreements, not to mention the document agreeing to a cease-fire in late March 2022, a cease-fire document signed by Russia and Ukraine, aborted by a flying visit by one fabulous man called Boris Johnson to another fabulously khaki-clad ex comedian called Zelensky, who, ironically was elected by Ukrainians by promising an end to the ban on the use of Russian – he only spoke Russian himself until 2013 or so – and the abandonment of the siege of Donbas.
But, you just keep writing and publishing and commenting on this academic junk, Crikey, maintaining the fantasy made up by Warmongering US/NATO entities, and we won’t even mention that Bush and Baker promised Gorbachev faithfully in 1991 that NATO would not go one inch further east than Germany.
Excellent precis – saved my having to write the same, yet again.
The Trump interregnum delayed this USofAholes attack on Russia for which HRC would have been gung-ho had she become president in 2016.
Strange that so reprehensible a creature as the orange one saved the world from the “It’s MY turn!” warmonger – on Gaddafi she cackled “We came, we saw,he died” then yukked it up.
Yep: it’s appalling how many hoi poloi refuse to think, or investigate, or even care about the truth. Thanks for your reply: we are a very small minority in this so-called ‘Civilized world – I spell it Syphilyzed’ – world.
Pearls and Irritations is always reassuring to read, for its sensible commentary.
Agree – it is superb and varied with articles all written BY adults with wide experience in the relativant fields … and FOR same.
But platforming too many tankies via minimal if any submission standards for articles.
Oh, you mean retired professional diplomats and foreign policy experts who aren’t going to make a profit out of drumming up more senseless wars?
Not to disagree with any of your points, but you seem to have concluded that the essay (or the article’s interpretation of it) has reached the wrong conclusion? My reading is that the US may finally be approaching a worthwhile subtlety of understanding that they’ve long missed, and hopefully signalling as such.