A Solution to China Is the West's Biggest Challenge - The Atlantic - 0 views
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fully understanding the invasion of Ukraine is impossible without considering the geopolitical environment in which it is taking place. Russia is emboldened in its quest to recapture lost influence in Europe partly because of its alliance with China and the calculation that American power is giving way.
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China’s rise challenges the notion of the West itself. Where the Soviet Union posed a direct threat to Western Europe, China threatens America’s liberal democratic protectorates on the other side of the world: Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and others. Suddenly to think of the West comprising only the two sides of the North Atlantic no longer makes much sense. If there is a “West” today—a free world allied to the U.S.—it stretches from Western Europe to the Far East and Australasia.
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unlike in the ’40s, Western institutions show little sign of changing to meet the new reality. The old order has been so solidly constructed that it appears to have trapped its defenders, who are unable to muster the energy, ambition, or imagination to build anything new.
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Like the Holy Roman Empire that was once dismissed as being neither Holy, Roman, or an Empire, the Western alliance today is neither Western nor an alliance.
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All the while, the West’s central foreign-policy calculation—that trade and engagement with China and Russia would see these two powers liberalize, democratize, and take their place in the (American-led) international order—has collapsed under the weight of its absurdly utopian assumptions
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Since the turn of the century, the U.S. and its allies have lost one war, failed in at least one other, and seen the American-centered financial system implode, imposing huge costs on ordinary voters, many of whom have seen their industries hollow out and their wages stagnate.
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the policies that led to these failures were supported by the apparently functioning political consensus that Blair, Clinton, and others now believe needs to be resurrected to protect Western strength.
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this idea grew into what is the European Union today, in which German economic might is managed through a common market, with common rules and a common currency set by a common institution. Germany is the undisputed leader of the EU, the biggest, wealthiest, and most productive economy on the continent, yet France and Germany remain the closest of allies.
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You cannot blame voters for their loss of faith in a system that has failed them and enriched a country that Western leaders now say is the main threat to global democracy.
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this order gave us Trump and Brexit, and facilitated the rise of Putin and Xi. The world that confronts the West today exists not because the West had too little faith in itself, but because it had too much.
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In the U.S., pressure was mounting for a collective European response to the continent’s crises. Monnet argued that the only way to stop the cycle of Franco-German antipathy from reasserting itself was to remove the source of tension—Germany’s industrial might. France could not simply requisition German coal and steel production, so Monnet suggested that it be Europeanized, managed by a new High Authority that looked out for the interests of Europe generally, not Germany or France specifically.
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The proposal’s genius was that it created a policy out of a need, but did so in a way that smuggled a revolutionary idea into a living, breathing institution. The policy itself was small enough to be politically acceptable
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et it was based on a radical idea: supranationalism. Suddenly, under Monnet’s plan, national interests would become common interests, and so German power and wealth would not become an existential threat to France.
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they rarely offer an explanation as to why the West lost its faith in itself and became so apparently dysfunctional. Bad leaders did not emerge from nowhere, nor did voters suddenly became stupid.
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The lesson for Western leaders is to find a similar combination of pragmatism and idealism based on a reasonable analysis of the global balance of power.
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The most obvious power play America can make to contain China’s rise, for example, is to seek to split up its emerging alliance with Russia.
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such a policy, debatable only a few months ago, now seems almost impossible—destroyed by Putin’s bloody megalomania.
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An alternative would be to accept the reality of this new authoritarian axis and endeavor to protect Western democracies from it.
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The problem is, the more the West builds a democratic alliance against China and Russia, as U.S. President Joe Biden has suggested, the more the West strengthens the very alliance that it fears. And if the world descends into a new cold war, the West will be forced to buddy up to decidedly undemocratic regimes
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A less radical suggestion is for the U.S. to become the center of the Venn diagram where the two circles of Europe and Asia overlap—an offshore balancing power that has a foot on each side of the world, guaranteeing stability but allowing Europe to take the lead in the West while it corrals a new, more cohesive alliance in the East
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there appears to be little appetite in Asia for its own NATO, little appetite in the U.S. to become even more committed to other countries’ defense, and little appetite in Europe to seriously step forward and allow such a notion to be viable.
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what remains clear is that not building anything new to meet the reality of the changing circumstances risks allowing Chinese power to grow even more.
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This economic hole has to be filled if the West is to mean anything. Greater economic tools need to be available with which the free-world can defend itself
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whatever new organization or framework—if any—is created to empower the broader Western world in its rivalry with China must reflect the reality of power as it exists today. It must build on shared interests, not utopian idealism
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To do otherwise would be to remake the mistakes of the past 20 years, when hubristic assumptions about the triumph of a universal liberal order wormed their way into policy making, with disastrous consequences.
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It is now a common argument that if the leading military powers in the Western world—the U.S., Britain, and France—had shown more commitment to their mission, the world would be safer and more orderly.