The West Should Not Aim for Containment. It Should Aim for a Principled Landing.

It's time to radically rethink our assumptions about what effective western opposition to despotism looks like.

[Photo Credit: by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Michael Singley - Wikimedia Commons]

Adam Webb, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Nanjing Center in China and author of Deep Cosmopolis: Rethinking World Politics and Globalisation (2015), continues, in what follows, our Symposium on Containment. He does so in a spirit of constructive criticism vis-à-vis the earlier contributions from Gordon Hahn, Paul Robinson, Victor Taki and James Carden. Webb advocates neither US-led hegemony nor what he views as a stance of undue accommodation with ‘top-heavy’ states.  The ‘arrogance’ of a new Containment policy, he insists, is also not what we need. What is wanted instead are new principles, applicable everywhere, for a non-technocratic global order.

No doubt there is much that will be very useful to ponder in Webb’s proposal. At the same time, the past many centuries of history in places like Russia and China tell us that tradition, and normal life on the planet more generally, can certainly survive the absence of ‘open’ societies. As for the ability of tradition itself to survive the ‘open society’ — that is far less clear. But perhaps this is no argument: Webb, after all, is seeking a kind of openness that goes well beyond liberal clichés. — The Editors

Last month’s Foreign Affairs article urging “Containment 2:0” lays out an ambitious vision of American grand strategy for what the four authors dub a “New Twilight Struggle with Russia.”  Given the “geopolitical agenda” of Putin’s régime and its “immense global disruptive power,” they draw insights from the Cold War to map out a long term approach to hemming Russia in along its periphery.  They see the ongoing Ukraine struggle as just one piece on the Eurasian chessboard.

As the authors hail from the centre of the Washington foreign policy network, the continuity between their hawkishness and that of the mid twentieth century should not surprise us.  But they do gesture at the need to rethink old assumptions.  They would “lean on U.S. allies” more in spreading the burden.  And they note that “[i]mportant regional powers such as India and South Africa have bad memories of Western colonialism and see the West’s invocation of a moral struggle as self-serving and hypocritical.”  Containment 2:0 thus must have the U.S. treating more lightly in the Global South, by making “support for democratic governance and civil society a centerpiece of its foreign policy.”

These are the two prongs of adaptation in Containment 2:0: an allegedly more global perspective, and an alleged eagerness to engage more softly and effectively with societies.  Nonetheless, the article has more blind spots than its modest concessions to an evolving world acknowledge.  At the same time, the critiques that have prevailed so far on this site also amount to picking odd bedfellows and misdiagnosing the problem in other ways.  It can be equally true that Western hawks suffer from hubris and cling to fast fading hegemony, and that Eurasian despots pose a global threat and need thwarting.

For my sins, I deal regularly with people who breathe the power-hungry air of Washington and/or Beijing.  I see no reason for any of us to hold a brief for either, in intent or in effect.  A more genuinely global perspective and engaging with societies in the right way could indeed cut through the Gordian knot of both problems.  But as with any such severing of easy assumptions, an alternative might be tougher on both the Western hawks and the Eurasian despots than the current misframed choice around how far to indulge or balance each side’s security paranoia.

The West should not be aiming for containment.  It should be aiming for a principled landing.  This means a landing in the sense of an honourable conclusion to its own trajectory of declining hegemony, but also a landing that will ram bridgeheads into despotism more effectively.  Both landings are best framed around principles rather than interests, if they are to invite the rest of the world to join in.

Critics of the Foreign Affairs article rightly point out that it downplays the Chinese giant that lurks behind Russia.  The former is at least nine times larger than the latter in both population and economic weight.  While the authors in passing urge accounting for “resource commitments to the Indo-Pacific,” they airily presume that a globalised NATO can handle Russia as “the principal threat to the international order” while maintaining Western primacy globally.  America’s declining weight globally is real, though the blind spots around it in Washington linger, just as it took until the 1940s for predecessors in London and Paris to get the sinking feeling that history had caught up with them.  I have noted elsewhere how much further the collective West’s influence will shrink by the second half of this century—as, crucially, will also befall both Russia and China with their demographic and economic stagnation.

Even if the key players in this new Cold War are facing grim fates in parallel, the global landscape still is tilting inexorably away from any scenario where even a fully mobilised West can overpower all comers.  Containment on the grandest scale—and it surely would be aimed at China along with Russia—would be rather more to take on than the Foreign Affairs authors assume.  To be sure, there may be sound reasons for a people to bear an even greater burden against far greater odds, to roll the dice and perhaps go down fighting, as some have risked in living memory.  Yet those reasons do not generally pivot on windy hubris about throwing one’s weight around, so much as on principles and the legacy one might leave to history even if one fails.

The principles on offer so far in this debate over Containment 2:0 versus appeasement are both too particular and too thin to speak to the evolving global landscape.

They are particular in that they are effectively indulgences of one or another power, not an articulation of rules that apply evenhandedly.  On the one hand, Western hawks cannot detach their reasons to contain the West’s rivals from Western hegemony itself.  There is little serious sense in Washington that the “liberal international order” genuinely belongs to everyone equally, even if Western weight within it declines.  On the other hand, critics of the article so far have latched on to Russia’s entrenched “notion of great power equality,” and the West’s unwillingness to accommodate Russia’s “legitimate interests” in security in its near abroad, even as Western security supposedly encompasses the whole world.  It is true, to be sure, that Western hypocrisy and intrusiveness abound.  NATO hardly has reciprocity hard-wired into its mission.  But the reality is that great powers always want equality upward but not downward.  In a world without Western overreach, Moscow would still expect deference from Kyiv commensurate with its own imagined status in the region, just as a former Chinese foreign minister told Southeast Asian neighbours bluntly that “China is a big country, and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”

To indulge such regional claims for unequal respect should be an uncomfortable price to pay for poking the West in the eye, even if the West may often tempt as much.  Such appeasement is the inevitable upshot of imagining “security architecture” compatible with regional powers’ claims on their neighbourhoods.  As a test case, imagine a scenario in which smaller countries around the world feeling pressure from larger neighbours pooled their resources in mutual defence arrangements, quite apart from NATO.  Perhaps Taipei would ship arms to Kyiv now, and later a hundred thousand battle-hardened Ukrainian veterans would encamp in the mountains of Taiwan to deter an invader.  Perhaps a dozen other such mutual defence arrangements among small countries would emerge across the world. Would regional bullies suddenly tolerate as much simply because a distant hegemon were not engaging in proxy warfare?  Or, to put it bluntly, would they still assert a right to kick downward locally?

Still, the problem runs deeper than such incoherent indulgences of zero-sum security paranoia and jostlings for relative status between a hegemon and second-tier powers.  Such a debate is also thin because it deals only in scale.  It ignores a qualitative question about how state and society relate.  When states of a certain character claim deference externally in their spheres of influence, they commonly also claim deference internally from their own societies.  Just as their preferred security architecture would operate over the heads of peoples, so too does their version of collective identity privilege the sovereign state over the multilayered free agency that otherwise would play out in different spheres of social life, including across borders.  The Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine probably has just claims to accommodation, along the lines of a Northern Ireland model that breaks down barriers and allows identities to be entangled ambiguously and transnationally in multiple ways.  But in that case—or indeed any case—giving free play to complex social patterns on the ground will be unlikely to happen in any sustainable way if overseen by régimes for which cross-border society must always be honeycombed by repression and blood-and-soil nationalism.

Here is where the irony comes among some critics of the Foreign Affairs article.  They are right to see in the West’s itching for a new Cold War all manner of arrogance, including a technocratic and manipulative modern conceit that would remake the world in its own image.  Standing with tradition against the modern West is heartening.  But standing, in effect, with strongmen who instrumentalise tradition and crush society into a kind of great-power Westphalianism that embodies the worst of the early twentieth century is self-defeating.  Or to put it in longer term perspective: one will not beat the West in any worthwhile sense by aligning with those who are weaving together an emerging Eurasian bloc that threatens to blend modern dystopian techniques of control with the ancient land-empire centralisation ably detailed by Wittfogel.  We should all pick our bedfellows carefully.  Sometimes those who would profit off anything that moves are repellent, but still less sinister than those who would yoke anything that moves.  Tradition flourishes when society is unleashed.  Overbearing and xenophobic states menace society at least as much as does an amoral market.

Western hawks are right, in short, that Eurasian despots of our time pose a global threat.  Accommodating that threat today would be a world historical error, not merely out of Western geopolitical self-interest, but more fundamentally because the majority of the world that is not American, European, Russian, or Chinese would hardly flourish under a global model in which states master societies.  The West’s final task, honourable in itself, may be to open a truly post-Western future while helping deal a death blow to the last despots.  That is what a principled landing would mean.

But Western hawks as they now exist will not deliver that alternative.  They remain unwilling truly to break continuity with centuries of Western global dominance and to become cosmopolitan in spirit rather than merely in the scope of their ambition.  It may be even harder for them to do so now than it was for the European establishment eighty years ago to pass the baton to a culturally similar America.  The Global South is larger and has no single kindred power centre of the familiar sort.  The future will be post-national in many senses.  The Western hawks will thus be unable to orchestrate a principled landing in a post-Western world, because their principles are bound to their interests and they deny the need for a landing at all in their or their children’s lifetimes.

They are also now part of the global new class and thus divorced from the best of the West’s own traditions of ordered liberty and sturdy social pluralism.  No doubt some elements remain of an alternative West.  Regrettably, those elements do not hold sway today in any Western capital and do not drive foreign policy.  If they did, they might have more inclination and credibility to engage seriously with non-Western philosophical and religious traditions that could press their own local cases against despotism.  Top-heavy states have long been common across much of Eurasia, but we should always remember that they have never been the whole story.

Still, history may yet come full circle.  Perhaps the insights of a past before Western overreach can illuminate a world after the West, in which an open and society-centred cosmopolitanism can recover the ends of the earth.  Such an alternative would be both more humble about the West’s diminishing agency, and more penetrating in rolling back the despots on their own turf.