The United States must resist a return to spheres of interest in the international system
By Robert Kagan | February 19, 2015
Brookings Institution
Brookings Institution
Great
power competition has returned. Or rather, it has reminded us that it
was always lurking in the background. This is not a minor development in
international affairs, but it need not mean the end of the world order
as we know it.
The
real impact of the return of great power competition will depend on how
the United States responds to these changes. America needs to recognize
its central role in maintaining the present liberal international order
and muster the will to use its still formidable power and influence to
support that order against its inevitable challengers.
Competition
in international affairs is natural. Great powers by their very nature
seek regional dominance and spheres of influence. They do so in the
first instance because influence over others is what defines a great
power. They are, as a rule, countries imbued with national pride and
imperial ambition. But, living in a Hobbesian world of other great
powers, they are also nervous about their security and seek
defense-in-depth through the establishment of buffer states on their
periphery.
Historically,
great power wars often begin as arguments over buffer states where
spheres of influence intersect—the Balkans before World War I, for
instance, where the ambitions of Russia and Austria-Hungary clashed. But
today’s great powers are rising in a very different international
environment, largely because of the unique role the United States has
played since the end of the Second World War. The United States has been
not simply a regional power, but rather a regional power in every
strategic region. It has served as the maintainer of regional balances
in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The result has been that, in
marked contrast to past eras, today’s great powers do not face
fundamental threats to their physical security.
So, for example, Russia objectively has never enjoyed greater security in its history than it has since 1989. In the 20th
century, Russia was invaded twice by Germany, and in the aftermath of
the second war could plausibly claim to fear another invasion unless
adequately protected. (France, after all, had the same fear.) In the 19th
century, Russia was invaded by Napoleon, and before that Catherine the
Great is supposed to have uttered that quintessentially Russian
observation, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.”
Today that is not true. Russia faces no threat of invasion from the
West. Who would launch such an invasion? Germany, Estonia, Ukraine? If
Russia faces threats, they are from the south, in the form of militant
Islamists, or from the east, in the form of a billion Chinese standing
across the border from an empty Siberia. But for the first time in
Russia’s long history, it does not face a strategic threat on its
western flank.
Much
the same can be said of China, which enjoys far greater security than
it has at any time in the last three centuries. The American role in
East Asia protects it from invasion by its historic adversary, Japan,
while none of the other great powers around China’s periphery have the
strength or desire now or in the foreseeable future to launch an attack
on Chinese territory.
Therefore,
neither Chinese nor Russians can claim that a sphere of influence is
necessary for their defense. They may feel it necessary for their sense
of pride. They may feel it is necessary as a way of restoring their
wounded honor. They may seek an expanded sphere of influence to fulfill
their ambition to become more formidable powers on the international
stage. And they may have concerns that free, nations on their periphery
may pass the liberal infection onto their own populaces and thus
undermine their autocratic power.
The
question for the United States, and its allies in Asia and Europe, is
whether we should tolerate a return to sphere of influence behavior
among regional powers that are not seeking security but are in search of
status, powers that are acting less out of fear than out of ambition.
This question, in the end, is not about idealism, our commitment to a
“rules-based” international order, or our principled opposition to
territorial aggression. Yes, there are important principles at stake:
neighbors shouldn’t invade their neighbors to seize their territory. But
before we get to issues of principle, we need to understand how such
behavior affects the world in terms of basic stability
On
that score, the historical record is very clear. To return to a world
of spheres of influence—the world that existed prior to the era of
American predominance—is to return to the great power conflicts of past
centuries. Revisionist great powers are never satisfied. Their sphere of
influence is never quite large enough to satisfy their pride or their
expanding need for security. The “satiated” power that Bismarck spoke of
is rare—even his Germany, in the end, could not be satiated. Of course,
rising great powers always express some historical grievance. Every
people, except perhaps for the fortunate Americans, have reason for
resentment at ancient injustices, nurse grudges against old adversaries,
seek to return to a glorious past that was stolen from them by military
or political defeat. The world’s supply of grievances is inexhaustible.
These
grievances, however, are rarely solved by minor border changes. Japan,
the aggrieved “have-not” nation of the 1930s, did not satisfy itself by
swallowing Manchuria in 1931. Germany, the aggrieved victim of
Versailles, did not satisfy itself by bringing the Germans of the
Sudetenland back into the fold. And, of course, Russia’s historical
sphere of influence does not end in Ukraine. It begins in Ukraine. It
extends to the Balts, to the Balkans, and to heart of Central Europe.
The
tragic irony is that, in the process of carving out these spheres of
influence, the ambitious rising powers invariably create the very
threats they use to justify their actions. Japan did exactly that in the
30s. In the 1920s, following the Washington Naval Treaty, Japan was a
relatively secure country that through a combination of ambition and
paranoia launched itself on a quest for an expanded sphere of influence,
thus inspiring the great power enmity that the Japanese had originally
feared. One sees a similar dynamic in Russia’s behavior today. No one in
the West was thinking about containing Russia until Russia made itself
into a power that needed to be contained.
If
history is any lesson, such behavior only ends when other great powers
decide they have had enough. We know those moments as major power wars.
The
best and easiest time to stop such a dynamic is at the beginning. If
the United States wants to maintain a benevolent world order, it must
not permit spheres of influence to serve as a pretext for aggression.
The United States needs to make clear now—before things get out of
hand—that this is not a world order that it will accept.
And
we need to be clear what that response entails. Great powers of course
compete across multiple spheres—economic, ideological, and political, as
well as military. Competition in most spheres is necessary and even
healthy. Within the liberal order, China can compete economically and
successfully with the United States; Russia can thrive in the
international economic order uphold by the liberal powers, even if it is
not itself liberal.
But
security competition is different. It is specifically because Russia
could not compete with the West ideologically or economically that Putin
resorted to military means. In so doing, he attacked the underlying
security and stability at the core of the liberal order. The security
situation undergirds everything—without it nothing else functions.
Democracy and prosperity cannot flourish without security.
It
remains true today as it has since the Second World War that only the
United States has the capacity and the unique geographical advantages to
provide this security. There is no stable balance of power in Europe or
Asia without the United States. And while we can talk about soft power
and smart power, they have been and always will be of limited value when
confronting raw military power. Despite all of the loose talk of
American decline, it is in the military realm where U.S. advantages
remain clearest. Even in other great power’s backyards, the United
States retains the capacity, along with its powerful allies, to deter
challenges to the security order. But without a U.S. willingness to use
military power to establish balance in far-flung regions of the world,
the system will buckle under the unrestrained military competition of
regional powers.
·
Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Project on International Order and Strategy
Robert Kagan is a senior fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller, The World America Made.
Kagan also serves as a member of the secretary of state’s foreign
affairs policy board and is co-chairman of the bipartisan working group
on Egypt. He writes a monthly column on world affairs for the Washington
Post, and is a contributing editor at The New Republic. He served in
the State Department from 1984 to 1988 as a member of the policy
planning staff, principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George P.
Shultz, and as deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American
Affairs.