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The Right Way to Thwart the New Autocratic Convergence
By Stephen Hadley| Foreign Affairs, November 1, 2024
The United States is contending with the most challenging international environment it has faced since at least the Cold War and perhaps since World War II. One of the most disconcerting features of this environment is the burgeoning cooperation among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Some policymakers and commentators see in this cooperation the beginnings of a twenty-first-century axis, one that, like the German-Italian-Japanese axis of the twentieth century, will plunge the world into a global war. Others foresee not World War III but a slew of separate conflicts scattered around the globe. Either way, the result is a world at war—the situation is that serious.
What should be done about this cooperation is another matter. Some strategists argue for ruthless prioritization, focusing on the members of the axis that represent the greatest threats. Others believe that only a comprehensive effort will succeed. But the best strategy would borrow elements of both approaches, acknowledging that China is the primary long-term concern for U.S. national security strategy—“the pacing threat,” in the U.S. Defense Department’s framing—but also a different kind of global actor than its rogue-state partners. Accordingly, Washington’s aim should be to make clear to Chinese President Xi Jinping how counterproductive and costly to Beijing’s interests these new relationships will turn out to be. That means effectively countering Iran, North Korea, and Russia in their own regions, thereby demonstrating to China that tethering itself to a bunch of losers is hardly a path to global influence.
BROTHERS IN ARMS
Cooperation among the members of this twenty-first-century axis has been heavily centered on military, industrial, and economic support for Russia in its war on Ukraine, which could not be sustained without such help. The resulting defense industrial cooperation and incipient integration is likely to go well beyond what existed among the twentieth-century axis partners. North Korea is providing artillery shells, other munitions, military personnel, and industrial workers to Russia and getting oil and missile and space technology in return. Iran is providing missiles and drones produced in its defense plants as well helping build such plants in Russia itself, and getting assistance with its own missile, drone, and space programs and perhaps with civil nuclear power as well. China is so far providing everything short of actual weapons: dramatically increased trade and purchases of oil, gas, and other natural resources; dual-use technology that is being integrated into Russian air-defense, electronic-warfare, drone, and other weapons and communications systems; and as of recently, actual components for Russian weapons. There is even talk of producing drone and weapons systems for Russia in Chinese factories. What China is getting in return is not fully clear at this point, aside from discounted energy—and potentially unrivaled influence over Russia. Beyond the war in Ukraine, China and Russia and their axis partners have increased joint training and operations, including with bombers, ships, and even ground forces.
The axis partners have also accelerated their diplomatic coordination, with Beijing and Moscow using their veto power in the UN Security Council to protect each other and Tehran and Pyongyang from adverse resolutions. Reciprocal high-level visits by leaders and top officials have yielded a series of agreements to cooperate in economic, technological, and other fields
This twenty-first-century axis may not be a formal alliance, but it nonetheless represents an increasingly close, highly functional, and flexible alignment of interests that does not need to become an alliance to advance its members’ aims or undermine the interests of the United States and its allies in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Even without real ideological affinity, there is a shared anti-Westernism, opposition to democracy, and embrace of authoritarian alternatives. What truly binds the axis is not ideology but a common opposition to U.S. power and the international system it sustains—fueled by a belief that this power represents a mortal threat to their regimes’ interests, aspirations, and even survival.
The link between China and Russia is especially important. It is built on the strong personal relationship between Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin, forged in more than 60 meetings during their time in office. There are, of course, both historical and contemporary sources of tension between China and Russia: a long common border with lots of empty space on the Russian side and a large population on the Chinese side; Beijing’s suspicion of Moscow’s revived relationship with North Korea, and Moscow’s suspicion of Beijing’s growing economic influence in Central Asia; and considerable xenophobia in both countries. But these tensions, although real, are unlikely to be allowed to disrupt the relationship between the two governments as long as Putin and Xi are in charge
THE CHINA CARD
Although some commentators have recommended trying to pull the members of the axis apart, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leans in the opposite direction, proposing that policymakers seek to “slam them together and make them deal with the consequences of the fact they don’t actually have all that much in common.” There is much to be said for this approach. Any effort to pry Putin away from the axis will most certainly fail; he is too dependent on these partners for support in Ukraine. To try to separate North Korea or Iran from the axis would require concessions that no U.S. administration is likely to be willing to make.
But China may be a different matter. Unlike its axis partners, China is integrated into the global economy. The prospect of broad secondary sanctions—which have been limited and targeted to date—in the event that China crosses Western redlines by providing weapons to Russia could threaten to exact real economic costs. Meanwhile, the war on Israel being waged by Iran and its proxies threatens to disrupt China’s critical oil supplies and other trade with the Middle East. And North Korea’s increasingly bellicose attitude toward its neighbors has roiled China’s diplomatic and economic relations with South Korea and Japan.
More fundamentally, China has made its prestige hostage to the success of its axis partners. If they should be seen to be failing in their respective efforts to impose their will on their neighbors by force, it would become clear to the world that Beijing has cast its lot with losers. That would not only undermine China’s effort to project itself as the global leader of a new kind of international order; it would also damage Xi’s personal standing, at home and abroad.
Washington should demonstrate to China that tethering itself to a bunch of losers is hardly a path to global influence.
How might this goal be accomplished? With respect to Russia, it means preventing Putin from achieving his strategic objectives in Ukraine. This will require enough sustained Western diplomatic, economic, and military support to enable Ukrainian forces to stop the current Russian advance and, if not win back occupied territory, at least establish a stable line of contact between Ukrainian and Russian forces. Such an outcome would allow Kyiv to get on with the job of building a sovereign, prosperous, noncorrupt, and democratic state increasingly integrated with European economic and security institutions.
With respect to Iran, it means quashing Tehran’s hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East. In part, this can be done by supporting Israel in delivering strong blows against both Iran and its proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and more—to reestablish deterrence and open the way to a more stable Middle East. Stability will allow continued reconciliation between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the beginning of a more promising future for the Palestinians, and the chance for the people of Lebanon to free their country from domination by Hezbollah.
And with respect to North Korea, it means demonstrating that Pyongyang’s fixation on nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them will not bring the country security or leverage over its neighbors. That will require strengthening the diplomatic, economic, and military capabilities of Australia, Japan, South Korea, and other regional allies and partners to work with the United States to deter North Korea and defend against any military action it might undertake—all with the aim of continued progress toward a free, open, and peaceful Indo-Pacific.
EXISTENTIAL RECONSIDERATIONS
Each of these steps would advance the interests of the United States and its friends and allies, leaving aside the message they would send China. But if pursued successfully, they could cause Beijing to limit and ultimately reduce its commitment to the failing adventurism of its renegade partners.
There is good reason to think such a reconsideration is possible, since Xi has adjusted course under pressure before. Faced with street demonstrations and other clear expressions of public dissatisfaction, he abruptly abandoned his “zero COVID” policy. In response to the China strategy forged over the course of the Trump and Biden administrations, he changed his approach to the United States. Early in his tenure, Xi seemed to have concluded that the United States and the West more generally were in terminal decline, presenting an opportunity for China to assert itself on the global stage; a strong U.S. response backed by a clear bipartisan consensus, real strategic investment, and a common front with friends and allies prompted Xi to reconsider. The result was a decision to reengage with the United States, including by meeting with President Joe Biden in San Francisco last November, in an attempt to arrest the decline in U.S.-Chinese relations.
By decisively curbing the adventurism of Xi’s axis partners, Washington could cause him to change course once again. It would surely be in his interest to do so. For if the recklessness of his partners brings sustained global instability and conflict, Xi himself would bear much of the blame for preventing the Communist Party from fulfilling its pledges to make China a “moderately developed economy” by 2035 and a “strong, democratic, civilized, harmonious, and modern socialist country” by 2049. The right U.S. strategy could make Xi understand that he can best serve his own interests by breaking with the axis of losers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
STEPHEN HADLEY is a Principal at the international consulting firm Rice, Hadley, Gates, & Manuel and served as U.S. National Security Adviser from 2005 to 2009.
Nota inicial PRA a este importante artigo histórico-diplomático sobre a trajetória desviante do BRICS:
Nunca deixei de considerar a aventura inicial do BRIC ministerial (2006), depois oficializado como foro em nivel de cúpula (2009), expandido sorrateirameente pela China como BRICS (2011), dotado de um banco de fomento em 2014, a despeito do brutal imperialismo aberto demonstrado pela Rússia na Crimeia poucos meses antes, e agora continuamente ampliado para abrigar, no chamado BRICS+, novos membros criteriosamente escolhidos pelas duas grandes autocracias no encontro da África do Sul (2023) e agora novamente em Kazan (2024), retomo, nunca deixei de considerar toda essa aventura, mal pensada e mal concebida desde o início, como um insensata iniciativa da diplomacia lulopetista, animada em seu ativismo antiamericano como potencialmente PREJUDICIAL ao Brasil e à sua diplomacia, pois que submetendo nossa tradicional autonomia e independência nos assuntos de política internacional aos interesses nacionais e diplomáticos de duas grandes autocracias, cujos interesses geopolíticos são essencialmente diferentes — em vários sentidos CONTRÁRIOS— aos do Brasil como país em desenvolvimento plenamente integrado às tradições culturais ocidentais e alheio a todas as disputas interimperiais entre grandes potências. Infelizmente, o gesto insensato de Lula e de Amorim, em 2005-2006, converte, de certa forma, nossa diplomacia em CAUDATÁRIA das decisões e interesses dessas duas grandes potências, cujas motivações e iniciativas passam ao largo dos interesses e necessidades do Brasil como nação soberana e plenamente autônoma no cenário internacional.
O fato é que, em lugar de ser um ativo em nossa diplomacia, o BRICS+ se tornou agora um imenso passivo a ser administrado com todo cuidado pela diplomacia profissional, uma BOLA DE FERRO atada aos pés de um país que sempre desejou exercitar uma diplomacia completamente autônoma em relação aos interesses de grandes potências, pois que ingressamos agora numa etapa anti-G7, anti-OCDE e anti-Ocidente, que não corresponde EM NADA aos reais interesses do país. A outra ilusão da diplomacia lulopetista é, obviamente, essa pretensão tresloucada de ser lider de um diáfano e inexistente Sul Global, o que não a converte em coordenadora de NADA CONCRETO, a não ser de continuar a ser um conceito inventado por acadêmicos e usado de maneira oportunista por politicos sedentos de algum palanque internacional. Nossa “liderança” na América do Sul já é uma ilusão completa, para continuarmos ainda a ser um joguete no contexto de um bizarro e contraditório BRICS+.
Lamento pelo Brasil e por sua diplomacia profissional, embarcada involuntariamente numa aventura que nunca fez parte de seus estudos técnicos ponderados ou de um planejamento diplomático consciensioso, sendo apenas uma inserção política e ideológica, um contrabando totalmente artificial e desconectado de nossos reais interesses externos.
Ao que me consta, fui, e sou, o único diplomata da ativa, agora aposentado, a me manifestar ceticamente sobre as virtudes alegadas do BRIC-BRICS, e agora muito criticamente sobre esse BRICS+, desfigurado e desviado de suas pretensões originais, posto a servir a objetivos próprios de duas autocracias, e que não responde mais a nossas necessidades diplomáticas ou a nossos interesses nacionais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 25/09/2024
The Battle for the BRICS
Why the Future of the Bloc Will Shape Global Order
In late October, the group of countries known as the BRICS will convene in the Russian city of Kazan for its annual summit. The meeting is set to be a moment of triumph for its host, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who will preside over this gathering of an increasingly hefty bloc even as he prosecutes his brutal war in Ukraine. The group’s acronym comes from its first five members—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—but it has now grown to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia also participates in the group’s activities, but it has not formally joined. Together, these ten countries represent 35.6 percent of global GDP in purchasing power parity terms (more than the G-7’s 30.3 percent) and 45 percent of the world’s population (the G-7 represents less than ten percent). In the coming years, BRICS is likely to expand further, with more than 40 countries expressing interest in joining, including emerging powers such as Indonesia.
Putin will be able to claim that despite the West’s best efforts to isolate Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, his country not only is far from being an international pariah but also is now a pivotal member of a dynamic group that will shape the future of the international order. That message is not mere rhetorical posturing, nor is it simply a testament to the Kremlin’s skillful diplomacy with non-Western countries or to those countries’ self-interested, pragmatic engagement with Russia.
As the United States and its allies are less able to unilaterally shape the global order, many countries are seeking to boost their own autonomy by courting alternative centers of power. Unable or unwilling to join the exclusive clubs of the United States and its junior partners, such as the G-7 or U.S.-led military blocs, and increasingly frustrated by the global financial institutions underpinned by the United States, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, these countries are keen to expand their options and establish ties with non-American initiatives and organizations. BRICS stands out among such initiatives as the most significant, relevant, and potentially influential.
Since the group’s founding, 15 years ago, numerous Western analysts have predicted its demise. Its members were very different from one another, often at odds on various matters, and scattered around the globe—hardly the recipe for meaningful partnership. But BRICS has endured. Even following the global geopolitical earthquake unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the deepening of tensions between China and the United States in recent years, interest in joining BRICS has only grown, with many developing countries seeing the grouping as a useful vehicle to navigate the years ahead.
But despite its allure, the club must grapple with an internal fissure. Some of its members, chief among them China and Russia, want to position the grouping against the West and the global order crafted by the United States. The addition of Iran, an inveterate adversary of the United States, only deepens the sense that the group is now lining up on one side of a larger geopolitical battle. Other members, notably Brazil and India, do not share this ambition. Instead, they want to use BRICS to democratize and encourage the reform of the existing order, helping guide the world from the fading unipolarity of the post–Cold War era to a more genuine multipolarity in which countries can steer between U.S.-led and Chinese-led blocs. This battle between anti-Western states and nonaligned ones will shape the future of BRICS—with important consequences for the global order itself.
THE KREMLIN’S BRICOLAGE
The BRICS summit in Kazan follows years of diplomatic efforts by the Kremlin to turn this alphabet soup of a group first cooked up by Goldman Sachs analysts into a proactive global organization. In 2006, Russia assembled the first meeting of BRIC foreign ministers in New York during the UN General Assembly. In June 2009, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev hosted the leaders of Brazil, China, and India for an inaugural summit in Yekaterinburg. And in 2010, the group added South Africa, completing the acronym as it is known today.
Fifteen years ago, the global financial crisis that originated in the United States stoked interest in the BRIC grouping. The failure of American regulators to prevent the crisis and the exposed inefficiency of the BrettonWoods institutions—not to mention China’s sustained spectacular growth as Western economies struggled—spurred calls to redistribute global economic power and responsibility from the West to the developing world. BRICS was the most representative club to express this sentiment. Back then, however, Moscow and its partners largely workedto improve the existing order, not torpedo it. BRICS announced the New Development Bank (NDB) in 2014 to complement existing international institutions and to set up a financial safety net that offered liquidity should any of its members face short-term difficulties. It was meant to supplement, not rival, the World Bank and the IMF.
Russia saw greater purpose and value in BRICS following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the war in eastern Ukraine, and the coordinated Western sanctions against Russia that followed. Russia portrayed the BRICS summit it hosted in 2015 as a sign that it was not isolated, and that the group could serve as an alternative to the G-7—formerly the G-8, from which Russia had just been evicted. The Kremlin’s sense that BRICS can be a refuge from the domineering hegemony of the United States has only grown more pronounced since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Interest in joining BRICS has grown significantly in recent years.
Russia’s ties to its fellow BRICS members China and India have allowed the regime to weather the Western sanctions campaign. But U.S. sanctions on Russia still affect those countries that don’t intend to punish the Kremlin for the war in Ukraine. U.S. pressure forced many Chinese banks, for example, to end transactions with Russian counterparts this year, thereby disrupting payment schemes and increasing transaction costs for Russian importers. Moscow was troubled to discover that Washington’s toolkit affects not only payments in U.S. dollars but even those in Chinese yuan. Those punitive restrictions also apply to the NDB, which Russia had hoped would serve as a source of funding as Western sanctions shut off other avenues, but the BRICS bank has frozen all projects in Russia.
These complications notwithstanding, BRICS still plays a major role in Russia’s evolving grand strategy. Before February 2022, Moscow hoped for a multipolar order in which Russia could balance relations with the two most powerful countries, China and the United States. The war in Ukraine has smashed the remnants of pragmatism in the Kremlin’s foreign policy. Since Putin perceives the war as part of a broader confrontation with the West, he now seeks to undermine the United States’ positions wherever he can—including by undermining various aspects of current global institutions and by helping to strengthen China’s challenge to U.S. hegemony. This approach can be seen in multiple areas, including Russia’s sharing of advanced military technology with China, Iran, and North Korea; its work to destroy the UN sanctions regime against Pyongyang; and its tireless promotion of payment schemes that can bypass instruments under Western control. Putin summarized the agenda of Russia’s BRICS presidency in remarks in July as part of a “painful process” to overthrow the “classic colonialism” of the U.S.-led order, calling for an end to Washington’s “monopoly” on setting the rules of the road.
In this fight against the Western “monopoly,” Putin identified the most important campaign as the quest to weaken the dominion of the dollar over international financial transactions. This focus is a direct result of Russia’s experience with Western sanctions. Russia hopes that it can build a truly sanctions-proof payments system and financial infrastructure through BRICS, involving all member countries. The United States may be able to pressure Russia’s partners one by one, but that will be much harder or even impossible if these countries have joined an alternative system that features important U.S. partners, such as Brazil, India, and Saudi Arabia. The NDB’s decision to suspend projects in Russia served as a potent reminder that BRICS needs to evolve further to reduce its members’ vulnerabilities to Western sanctions.
CHINA AT THE HELM
Russia may be the angry vocal spearhead of the bid to use BRICS to create an alternative to the U.S.-led global order, but China is the real driving force behind the grouping’s expansion. During the global financial crisis of 2008–10, Beijing shared Moscow’s desire to make BRICS more relevant. China wanted to position itself as part of a dynamic group of developing countries that sought to gradually rebalance global institutions to more fairly reflect shifts in economic and technological power. Under Chinese President Hu Jintao, however, Beijing was unwilling to claim leadership of the grouping, still guided by Deng Xiaoping’s formula of “keeping a low profile.”
Things started to change soon after Xi Jinpingbecame China’s paramount leader, in 2012. In 2013, Beijing concocted an ambitious project that became the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast global infrastructure investment program. Around the same time, China helped launch regional financial institutions in which it would have strong influence: first came the NDB, in 2014, then the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, set up in 2016. The People's Bank of China also pushed the internationalization of the yuan by expanding the use of the Chinese currency in settling trade, extending national currency swaps with other central banks to boost the global liquidity of the yuan, and lobbying for the inclusion of the yuan in the IMF’s special drawing rights basket, making it the only nonconvertible global reserve currency. Through the NDB, through initiatives to use local currencies in bilateral trade, and through efforts to create a pool of national reserve currencies, BRICS plays a significant role in building the multilateral institutions that increase Chinese clout inside the current global order.
China is the real driving force behind the expansion of BRICS.
As U.S.-Chinese relations have plummeted in the last decade, Beijing’s foreign policy has grown more radical. Chinese leaders are convinced that the United States won’t willingly allow China to become the dominant power in Asia, much less deign to share global leadership with Beijing. China believes that the United States is instrumentalizing the alliances and institutions that underpin the current global order to constrain China’s rise. In response, Beijing has embarked on projects such as Xi’s overlapping Global Security Initiative, Global Development Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative, all of which challenge the West’s right to unilaterally define universal rules and seek to undermine the notion of universal values in areas such as human rights. These initiatives point to China’s desire to build a different order rather than simply reform the current one.
China and Russia now have similar ambitions for the BRICS, making Putin and Xi a powerful tandem. Both want to dethrone the United States as the global hegemon, and to that end, Beijing and Moscow seek to make alternative financial and tech platforms immune to U.S. pressure. Deepening multilateralization through BRICS seems like the best path forward. Like Putin, Xi casts this effort in moral terms. As he said at a BRICS summit in 2023, “We do not barter away principles, succumb to external pressure, or act as vassals of others. International rules must be written and upheld jointly by all countries based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, rather than dictated by those with the strongest muscles or the loudest voice.”
Beyond rhetoric, China has led the effort—with Russian backing—to add members to the BRICS. Beijing advocated a maximalist approach, trying to rope in as many countries as possible. It wants to be the leader of a strong and sizable bloc. Lengthy negotiations behind closed doors narrowed the list of new members down to six, which became five after Argentina reneged its commitment to join in the wake of the triumph of the libertarian Javier Milei in presidential elections last fall.
The summit in Kazan will be the first meeting of the expanded BRICS. But Beijing’s aggressive push to enlarge the grouping and expand its role on the international stage comes with a cost. The grouping has become less cohesive and more fragile; not all countries within it share Xi’s and Putin’s anti-Western agenda.
THE SEARCH FOR MIDDLE GROUND
The fissure is apparent among the bloc’s founding members. China and Russia may be on the same page, but Brazil and India remain largely committed to pursuing the reform of global governance without trying to assail the international system as it is currently constructed. Decision-makers in Brasília and New Delhi are keen to take a nonaligned stance and find a middle ground between the West, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other. Both Brazil and India have largely sat on the fence when it comes to the war in Ukraine, reluctant to support the West's attempts to isolate Russia but equally unwilling to explicitly side with Moscow, recognizing that the invasion amounts to a flagrant violation of international law. Both countries have benefited in economic terms from the trade diversion caused by Western sanctions against Russia. Brazil purchases discounted Russian fertilizer and last year was one of the biggest buyers of Russian diesel. India, too, buys discounted Russian energy commodities. But neither country desires to cut ties with the West or consign itself to an anti-Western bloc.
Brazil and India are therefore wary of the BRICS’ hardening orientation. Both were initially opposed to China’s push to expand the group, which Beijing first proposed in 2017 under the rubric of “BRICS Plus.” Brazil and India were keen to retain the club's exclusivity, worried that adding more members to the bloc would dilute their own influence within it. In 2023, China stepped up its diplomatic campaign and pressured Brazil and India to support expansion, mostly by casting their resistance as tantamount to preventing the rise of other developing countries. Keen to preserve its own standing in the global South, India dropped its opposition, leaving Brazil no choice but to go along with expansion. Brazil did lobby against adding any overtly anti-Western countries—an endeavor that failed spectacularly when Iran was announced as one of the new members that year.
The way China imposed its preferences at the 2023 summit took Brazilian diplomats by surprise, confirming fears that their country’s role would be diminished in an expanded group helmed by a much more assertive China. These developments have raised concerns in Brazil that being part of BRICS may complicate its strategy of nonalignment. For now, a broad consensus that membership generates significant benefits still holds. Brazil appreciates the chance to deepen ties with other BRICS member states and the added leverage it brings to negotiations with Washington and Brussels. BRICS membership has also helped countries such as Brazil and South Africa, whose bureaucracy had limited knowledge about the non-Western world, adjust to a multipolar order. And it comes with significant face time with Xi and other Chinese decision-makers—a perk that is far from trivial, considering how important Chinese investment and trade have become for countries across the global South.
Brazil and India are keen to take a nonaligned stance between the West and China.
Despite the growing divergence between the explicitly anti-Western camp in the BRICS and the nonaligned camp, all members still agree on a number of fundamental issues that explain why the grouping has become vital to its members. In the view of most countries in the grouping, the world is moving from U.S.-led unipolarity to multipolarity, with geopolitics now defined by the competition among several centers of power. The BRICS grouping, despite its internal tensions, remains a key platform for actively shaping this process. Indeed, seen from capitals across the global South, multipolarity is the safest way to constrain hegemonic power, which, unrestrained, represents a threat to international rules and norms and to global stability. Western policymakers often overlook this baseline agreement among BRICS countries and the part it has played in keeping all members committed to the grouping since its inception.
This shared perspective also explains why much of the developing world looks forward to greater multipolarity in the global order and does not pine for Washington’s or the West’s undisputed preeminence. For many countries, joining BRICS is a seriously attractive proposition. For their part, China and Russia welcome the large number of countries that have expressed interest in joining, including Algeria, Colombia, and Malaysia.
Yet any country that joins BRICS will have to grapple with a key question: Which side are they on? Will they band together with Brazil, India, and other nonaligners, or with the anti-Western faction led by China and Russia? Iran, itself a pariah on the international stage, will strengthen the anti-Western camp. But most other countries will likely view accession to BRICS as a way to strengthen their ties to China and other countries in the global South without downgrading their ties to the West.
Saudi Arabia is a prime example. While Riyadh remains a key ally of Washington, it has sought to deepen ties to Beijing, and has initiated an unprecedented diplomatic outreach in regions where Saudi Arabia traditionally played no role, such as in Latin America and the Caribbean, accompanied by investments in countries such as Chile and Guyana. Latin American governments embrace these initiatives with the same rationale: in an increasingly unstable world heading fitfully toward multipolarity, they would do well to diversify their economic and diplomatic strategies.
CRACKS IN THE WALL
In the West, some critics of BRICS dismiss the outfit as a motley crew that deserves no serious attention. Others believe it is a direct threat to the global order. Both views lack nuance: the emergence of BRICS as a political grouping reflects genuine grievances over the inequities of the U.S.-led order and cannot simply be waved away. But owing to changes in Chinese and Russian grand strategy, the divergences within the group are also growing, and the recent expansion is likely to weaken its cohesiveness.
For now, China and Russia have the upper hand in the internal debate about shaping the future of BRICS. But that may not always be the case. It is true that power in the club is not distributed equally—China's economy is larger than those of all the other founding members combined—but that does not mean that other members cannot resist the transformation of the grouping into a Beijing-led bloc copiloted by Moscow. Brazil and India have for years worked behind the scenes to tone down Russia’s more assertive language in summit declarations, and China, too, will find that it cannot ignore their moderating influence. For example, Brazil’s president explicitly rejects the framing of the BRICS as a counterpoint to the G-7 and often states that the group is “against no one.” Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic adviser to the government of India, recently urged New Delhi to leave the grouping, as its expansion was tantamount, in his view, to a takeover by Beijing and its agenda. But Brazil or India still have significant leverage within the BRICS: their departure would severely weaken the entire outfit in a way that is not in China’s or Russia’s interest.
The grouping will have to manage these tensions and contradictions in the years ahead. The fissures within BRICS are likely to grow but are unlikely to lead to its breakup. To be sure, the group could face very real strains. The technology competition between China and the United States may lead to the erection of a digital iron curtain and the emergence of two separate and incompatible technological spheres, which would make fence-sitting more challenging. Finding a common denominator in the grouping will become more difficult, particularly on sensitive geopolitical issues such as the war in Ukraine. Those differences might make the bloc less influential on the international stage, even as its efforts to advance alternative currencies to the U.S. dollar gather strength.
For the United States and other Western powers, the dynamics inside BRICS underline the necessity of taking the grouping—and the underlying dissatisfaction with the current order—seriously. It is entirely reasonable for rising powers such as Brazil to search for hedging options and to feel dissatisfied with how the United States has steered the existing system. Western powers should focus on not making things worse by, for example, trying to scare middle powers away from joining BRICS, which smacks of paternalism and quasi-colonial interference. In the same way, Western attempts to warn middle powers in the global South about being too dependent on China have proved ineffective.
Western countries can do more to not alienate those middle powers seeking greater space for maneuver and to ensure that BRICS does not become an anti-Western bloc. They should spell out more clearly how certain sanctions relate to violations of international law, and try to be consistent in applying those sanctions against all violators—not just against geopolitical adversaries. Countries in the global South want to escape the hegemony of the dollar when they see Western countries, for instance, freezing Russian central bank reserves in 2022 as a response to the invasion of Ukraine but receiving no punishment for similarly unlawful military interventions in the Middle East and Africa. Wealthy countries can also be better problem solvers for poorer countries, including by sharing technology and assisting with the green transition. And the West should make more genuine efforts to democratize the global order, such as by doing away with the anachronistic tradition that only Europeans head the IMF and only U.S. citizens lead the World Bank.
Such actions would build trust and undermine Chinese and Russian attempts to enlist the global South to an anti-Western cause. Rather than bemoaning the emergence of the BRICS, the West should court those member states that have a stake in making sure that the grouping does not become an overtly anti-Western outfit intent on undermining the global order.
ALEXANDER GABUEV is Director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.
OLIVER STUENKEL is AssociateProfessor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo and a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Liberals have engaged in a lot of catastrophic thinking during this “year of elections.” Many feared that authoritarian and populist politicians, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to India’s Narendra Modi, would consolidate their gains by increasing their shares of the vote. According to Freedom House’s February 2024 Freedom in the Worldanalysis, the world has been in a phase of democratic backsliding for nearly two decades, exacerbated by the rise of authoritarian great powers such as China and Russia, hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the ascendance or advancement of populist nationalists in countries that seemed to be securely democratic—Germany, Hungary, India, and Italy.
For liberals who want to preserve a world safe for democracies, perhaps the most alarming point came in mid-July, when Republicans confirmed former President Donald Trump as their party’s presidential nominee and ultra-MAGA JD Vance as his running mate. Although Trump tried to overturn the 2020 U.S. election, he was nonetheless the enthusiastic choice of his party. He had just survived an assassination attempt; his raised fists and call to “fight, fight, fight” drew a sharp contrast with the elderly sitting president, Joe Biden, whose debate performance the previous month made him a clear underdog.
But liberals’ fears that this year would reflect the global triumph of illiberal populism have so far been proved wrong. Although authoritarian ideologies have made clear gains in several countries, democracy in many parts of the world has shown surprising resilience and may yet prevail in the United States. Their belief in the trend of democratic decline has led many liberals to wring their hands and ask despairingly whether they can do anything to reverse it. The answers to this question are simple and boring: go out with your fellow citizens and vote or, if you are more actively inclined, work hard to mobilize like-minded people to help democratic politicians win elections. Liberal democracy is all about personal agency, and there is little evidence that traditional political engagement no longer works.
THE YEAR OF ELECTIONS
The year of elections is so named because an all-time-high number of citizens worldwide went to the polls; nearly 30 countries are holding elections that are both defining and competitive. This pivotal year really began in late 2023, most critically with the Polish election on October 15 that dethroned the populist Law and Justice party (PiS) and replaced it with a coalition of liberal parties. Law and Justice had been following a path blazed by Hungary’s right-wing Fidesz party, but the strong cooperation between Poland’s Civic Platform and other left-of-center parties—whose members worked hard to overcome their past differences and held massive rallies to get out the vote—drove a 41-seat loss for PiS, which also lost its majority in Poland’s lower house of parliament, the Sejm. This represented a major setback for populism in Europe, depriving Hungary of a major ally within the EU. The only other country in eastern Europe to move in a populist direction was Slovakia, as Robert Fico returned as prime minister in October and vowed to end his country’s strong support for Ukraine. Slovakia’s pro-Western president, Zuzana Caputova, declined to run for a second term and was succeeded this June by Fico’s ally Peter Pellegrini, who, like Fico, is more sympathetic to Russia. Although populists made gains, Slovakia remains a deeply polarized nation; in May, a would-be assassin shot Fico because of the prime minister’s opposition to military aid for Ukraine.
In November 2023, Javier Milei defeated Sergio Massa in the second-round presidential vote in Argentina. Many in the United States understood Milei to be an Argentine Trump, given his antiestablishment personal style and embrace of the former U.S. president. But Milei was riding a wave of popular disgust with the ruling Peronists, who had led the country into deep economic stagnation. Although many populists embrace a strong state bent on enforcing conservative cultural values, Milei is a genuine libertarian. The early success of his economic stabilization program allowed him to retain his popularity despite having a weak base in the Argentine National Congress. The chief danger Milei poses is not that he will move in an authoritarian direction but that he will go too far in weakening the Argentine state.
Liberals’ fears that this year would reflect the global triumph of illiberal populism have so far been proved wrong.
Early 2024 saw mixed results for democracy. In January, Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party defeated the pro-Chinese Kuomintang, and Finland remained in a solidly democratic camp. In both cases, the winning parties had worked quietly but vigorously to build their legislative majorities. On the other hand, the following month, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele was reelected president with a remarkable 85 percent of the vote—a reward for having dramatically decreased crime by using extrajudicial means to incarcerate a large part of the country’s gang leadership. In running for a second term, Bukele flouted the Salvadoran constitutional prohibition against consecutive reelection; he may well remain in power for years to come. The trend toward rewarding strongmen continued with the election of Prabowo Subianto to the Indonesian presidency. Human rights groups have accused Prabowo, a former special forces commander, of committing war crimes during Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste in the 1980s and 1990s; he had been banned from traveling to the United States from 2000 until 2020, when Trump’s State Department granted him a visa. But his victory may not have reflected anything more than the enormous popularity of his predecessor, Joko Widodo, whose legacy Prabowo has claimed he will perpetuate.
In Bangladesh, the corrupt Awami League party led by Sheikh Hasina held on to power in January amid countrywide protests against her rule. Her success, however, would prove to be transitory, as renewed protests after the election led Hasina to flee the country in early August. Whether Bangladesh can reclaim a democratic mantle is not certain, but it is clear that a huge number of citizens were fed up with a ruler who had been in power for 20 of the last 28 years.
POPULIST REMEDIES REJECTED
The middle of the year brought two important elections, in South Africa and Mexico, that did not fit easily into the populist-versus-liberal framework. In South Africa, the African National Congress, which had dominated the country’s politics since it transitioned to democracy in 1994, lost 71 seats and its majority in the National Assembly. The rise of a new party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), associated with the country’s corrupt former president Jacob Zuma, was troubling, but in the aftermath of the election, the ANC went into a coalition not with MK but with the Democratic Alliance, a party that tends to represent white and so-called colored, or mixed race,voters. The DA gained three parliamentary seats, and the radical left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters party lost five. For all the corruption scandals and economic decline that South Africa has experienced in the past decade, the 2024 election was in some ways reassuring. Voters held the ANC accountable for its corrupt stewardship of the country and did not turn wholeheartedly to populist remedies.
Mexico similarly demonstrated the strength of its democratic culture. Liberal analysts have characterized the country’s sitting president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as a Latin American populist, but he was popular against the backdrop of a corrupt and ineffective establishment. In daily speeches, he railed against the corrupt oligarchy that had ruled Mexico for decades. He dialed back the war against narcotraffickers, which brought a momentary reduction of violence while failing to solve an underlying problem that will plague Mexico for years to come. And he initiated a number of pro-poor policies while largely maintaining fiscal discipline. As the country’s first decidedly left-wing president since the 1920 Mexican Revolution, he became extremely popular, and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, won the presidency in June by more than 30 points over her conservative rival. Sheinbaum’s party, Morena, also won a supermajority in the Mexican Congress, giving it the option of changing the constitution after she takes office. López Obrador displayed many illiberal tendencies during his presidency, and his parting gift to the country will be a so-called reform of Mexico’s judiciary that, in fact, will severely weaken the institution’s independence. But it is not clear how Sheinbaum will use her substantial power once she comes into office. She does not seem to have inherited any of López Obrador’s zealotry. Barring any surprises, she is better thought of as a left-of-center Latin American politician than a left-wing populist.
Another pivotal election was in India, where the vote occurred in stages between mid-April and early June. Prime Minister Modi—a charter member of the populist-nationalist club who had weakened his country’s media, courts, and civil liberties—was expected to increase the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s majority in India’s lower house, the Lok Sabha. Instead, the BJP lost its majority and was forced to enter into a coalition with other parties. Its losses were particularly great in its former northern Indian heartland, where it shed 49 seats, including 29 in the poor state of Uttar Pradesh.
Less globally influential but still significant was the election in Mongolia at the end of June. Wedged between Russia and China, the country has been the only state in central Eurasia to realize and maintain a democracy after exiting Moscow’s orbit following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the ruling Mongolian People’s Party, the successor to the Soviet-era Communist Party, turned in an increasingly authoritarian and pro-Russian direction between 2022 and 2024. The election, however, saw the opposition Democratic Party more than double its seat count as voters rejected a system pervaded by corruption. This outcome did not make headlines in the West, but it demonstrated the power ordinary voters can wield to defend democracy.
UNSETTLING SHIFTS
Elections to the European Parliament took place in early June. Populist parties such as the Freedom Party in Austria, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in France, the Alternative for Germany, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy all made gains. Across the 27-member bloc, the biggest losers were the Socialists and the Greens. This shift was unsettling but did not amount to the earthquake that some had predicted. Center and center-right parties such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Poland’s Civic Platform hung onto or even increased their vote shares. Poland’s Law and Justice party lost seats, as did Fidesz in Hungary, where a dissident party member, Peter Magyar, split the vote by forming his own party following a corruption scandal in Fidesz.
The European Parliament election’s two most disturbing results came in France and Italy. Le Pen’s RN party swamped French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition, winning more than twice the vote share. This caused Macron to declare a snap national election at the end of June. The RN gained 37 seats, and the leftist alliance, the New Popular Front, added 32; for a moment, it looked as if the RN’s young standard-bearer, Jordan Bardella, was headed toward the prime minister’s office. But in the second round of voting in early July, the center and left parties withdrew their weaker candidates, and the RN was once again locked out of power. This happened only because the left-wing parties’ cooperated to streamline their candidates—the boring but necessary work of politics that previous coalitions had failed to do.
In Italy, the situation is less promising. In the European Parliament elections, Meloni’s populist Brothers of Italy increased its vote share substantially, and her right-wing coalition holds a comfortable majority in the Italian parliament. Meloni, who became prime minister in late 2022, initially portrayed herself as a centrist. Early in her tenure, she broke with pro-Russian populists such as Orban and Fico by expressing strong support for Ukraine, and many commentators speculated that she would back European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s bid for a second term. But after the EU parliament vote, she shifted to the right, and her party voted for only conditional support for Ukraine and opposed von der Leyen’s reelection.
The one large European country to hold an election without the threat that a rising populist party would gain power was the United Kingdom, where in early July, the Labour Party achieved a decisive victory over the Conservatives. The Tories had been in power for 14 years under five prime ministers and had led the country into prolonged economic stagnation by, among other things, supporting Brexit. When the Labour Party replaced its far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, with the more moderate Keir Starmer, voters responded favorably. Populist firebrands such as Nigel Farage were still around; his right-wing Reform UK party won 14 percent of the vote, more than the Liberal Democrats, who secured 12 percent. But Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system kept him far from power.
DEMOCRATIC RESISTANCE
There are still a number of important elections to come: in Moldova, where the liberal President Maia Sandu is likely to win reelection, and in Georgia, where the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party has a good chance of retaining power. But the most important election by far is the one occurring on November 5 in the United States between Trump and the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. At the time of the Republican National Convention in mid-July, a Trump victory against an aging Biden looked likely, but with Biden’s decision to step aside, the Democrats have been suddenly energized. Numerous polls, both nationally and in many of the critical swing states, now show Harris ahead of her opponent.
The outcome of the American election will have huge implications both for American institutions and for the world. Trump has expressed strong admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and at home, he has promised to weaken checks on executive power. He will almost certainly end U.S. support for Ukraine and has expressed great skepticism about the value of alliances such as NATO. He has vowed to end trade relations with China and to impose a ten percent across-the-board tariff on all foreign-produced goods. The Republican Party has decidedly abandoned the libertarian policies of the Ronald Reagan years and pledges to wield state power in the service of conservative ends.
But thus far, the year of elections has not been a terrible one for democracy worldwide. Populist and authoritarian parties and leaders have made gains in some countries, but they have lost in others. Citizens have expressed their opposition to authoritarian governance in other ways, as well. In July, Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly in favor of the opposition candidate Edmundo González, leading the regime of Nicolás Maduro to commit massive fraud in declaring him the winner. Maduro’s regime can survive only by turning openly authoritarian and abandoning any shred of democratic legitimacy. And in Myanmar, where a military junta abolished elections following a coup in 2021, an armed insurgency that allies the junta’s democratic opposition to a number of ethnic militias is making substantial territorial gains.
The outcome of the American election will have huge implications both for American institutions and for the world.
Elections by themselves do not guarantee good policies or outcomes. What they provide is the opportunity to hold leaders accountable for policy failures and to reward them for perceived successes. Elections become dangerous when they elevate leaders who do not just seek to impose questionable policies but also hope to weaken or undermine basic liberal and democratic institutions. In this respect, the United States has become something of an outlier. In no European or Asian democracy has a leader recently arisen who has blatantly refused to accept the outcome of an election or provoked popular violence to avoid stepping down from power. The willingness of many Republican voters to normalize the events of January 6, 2021, is a symptom of weakening democratic norms in the world’s leading democracy—a signal that will be picked up by like-minded populists (such as the supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who imitated the January 6 rioters when they stormed their Congress in 2023) if Trump returns to the White House in November.
The lesson to be drawn from the year of elections so far is that the rise of populist and authoritarian politicians is not inevitable. Democratic backsliding can and has been resisted in many countries that hold elections. But democratic norms cannot be secured with violence, judicial remedies (for example, the use of the 14th Amendment to disqualify Trump), the rise of a new charismatic leader, or any other quick fix.
What remains effective is the steady, often boring work of democratic politics: making arguments, convincing and mobilizing voters, adjusting policies, building coalitions, and, if necessary, making compromises where the best gives way to the possible. Even in a dispiriting time for global democracy, citizens still have agency to move toward better futures.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and is Director of Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy.
"Reagan Didn’t Win the Cold War - How a Myth About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Leads Republicans Astray on China"
Max Boot
Foreign Affairs, september 2924
...To be sure, there is a superficial allure to the thesis that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union and won the Cold War, because Reagan sometimes spoke of doing just that.
... As the journalist Fareed Zakaria has noted, the Soviet economy accounted for roughly 7.5 percent of global GDP at its peak; China today makes up about 20 percent of global GDP. There are no policies that the United States can plausibly implement that will “defeat” China—it is hard to know what “defeating China” even means. It is easy, however, to imagine that unrelentingly hard-line policies from both the United States and China could raise the risk of a nuclear war.
Reagan Didn’t Win the Cold War
How a Myth About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Leads Republicans Astray on China
U.S. President Ronald Reagan addressing a news conference in Washington, D.C., October, 1983
Mal Langsdon / Reuters
When Republicans strategize about how to deal with China today, many of them point to President Ronald Reagan’s confrontational approach toward the Soviet Union as a model to emulate. H. R. McMaster, who served as national security adviser under President Donald Trump, argued: “Reagan had a clear strategy for victory in the global contest with the Soviet Union. Reagan’s approach—applying intensive economic and military pressure to a superpower adversary—became foundational to American strategic thinking. It hastened the end of Soviet power and promoted a peaceful conclusion to the multi-decade Cold War.” A trio of conservative foreign policy experts—Randy Schriver, Dan Blumenthal, and Josh Young—made the case that the next president “should draw upon the example of former President Ronald Reagan in taking hold of China policy,” citing “the intent to win the Cold War against the Soviet Union” that “permeated” Reagan-era national security documents. And in Foreign Affairs, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and the former Republican representative Mike Gallagher cited Reagan to argue that “the United States shouldn’t manage the competition with China; it should win it.”
I would have been more sympathetic to these prescriptions before I spent a decade researching Reagan’s life and legacy—uncovering a historical record that is sharply at odds with the legends that have come to surround the 40th president. One of the biggest such myths is that Reagan had a plan to bring down the “evil empire” and that it was his pressure that led to U.S. victory in the Cold War. In reality, the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union were primarily the work of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—two consequences of his radically reformist policies (the former intended, the latter unintended). Reagan deserves tremendous credit for understanding that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader, someone he could do business with and thereby negotiate a peaceful end to a 40-year conflict. But Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union. To imagine otherwise is to create dangerous and unrealistic expectations for what U.S. policy toward China can achieve today.
WHAT REAGAN REALLY DID
To be sure, there is a superficial allure to the thesis that Reagan brought down the Soviet Union and won the Cold War, because Reagan sometimes spoke of doing just that. Richard Allen, Reagan’s first national security adviser, recounted to me a conversation that he had with the former governor in 1977 as he was preparing for his 1980 presidential campaign. “Do you mind if I tell you my theory of the Cold War?” Reagan said. “My theory is that we win, they lose. What do you think about that?”
Once in office, Reagan raised defense spending—he undertook the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history—and launched the Strategic Defense Initiative to create a “space shield” against nuclear missiles. He also provided arms to anticommunist insurgents in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua, along with secret, nonlethal assistance to the Solidarity movement in Poland. Reagan often talked tough about the Soviet Union and forthrightly called out its egregious human rights abuses. In 1982, he prophesied that “the march of freedom and democracy” would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” In a 1983 speech, he labeled the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world.”
The most compelling evidence to suggest that Reagan had a strategy to defeat the Soviet Union—cited by advocates of a get-tough approach to China today—is a pair of now declassified national security decision directives issued in 1982 and 1983 by Reagan’s national security adviser, William Clark. NSDD 32 called on the United States to “discourage Soviet adventurism” by “forcing the USSR to bear the brunt of its economic shortcomings, and to encourage long-term liberalizing and nationalist tendencies within the Soviet Union and allied countries.” NSDD 75 further elaborated on the need “to promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced.”
It is easy to draw a direct connection between the policies enunciated in NSDDs 32 and 75 and the epochal events that followed just a few years later and culminated in the end of the Cold War. Indeed, Clark’s admiring biographers, Paul Kengor and Patricia Clark Doerner, called the policies “the directives that won the Cold War.”
THE CONFLICT WITHIN
Reality, however, is a lot messier than this simplistic story line. “It’s tempting to go back and say, ‘You know, we had this great strategy and we had all these things figured out,’ but I don’t think that’s accurate,” Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz told me. “What is accurate was that there was a general ‘peace through strength’ attitude.”
Indeed, accounts that focus only on Reagan’s get-tough approach to the Soviet Union during his first term miss a big part of the picture. Reagan’s approach toward the Soviet Union was neither consistently tough nor consistently conciliatory. Instead, his foreign policy was an often baffling combination of hawkish and dovish approaches based on his own conflicting instincts and the clashing advice he received from hard-line aides such as Clark, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, and CIA Director William Casey and more pragmatic advisers such as Shultz and national security advisers Robert McFarlane, Frank Carlucci, and Colin Powell.
In dealing with the Soviets, Reagan was constantly torn between two opposing images. On the one hand, there was the human suffering behind the Iron Curtain: after an emotional Oval Office meeting on May 28, 1981, with Yosef Mendelevich, a recently released political prisoner, and Avital Sharansky, the wife of the imprisoned Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, Reagan wrote in his diary: “D—n those inhuman monsters. [Sharansky] is said to be down to 100 lbs. & very ill. I promised I’d do everything I could to obtain his release & I will.” On the other hand, there was the specter of nuclear destruction if the U.S.-Soviet confrontation spun out of control. This danger was brought home to Reagan by a nuclear war game, code-named Ivy League, on March 1, 1982. While Reagan watched from the White House Situation Room, the entire map of the United States turned red to simulate the impact of Soviet nuclear strikes. “He looked on in stunned disbelief,” the National Security Council staffer Tom Reed noted. “In less than an hour President Reagan had seen the United States of America disappear. . . . It was a sobering experience.” Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union was thus far less consistent than most of his admirers would admit. Although his meetings with Soviet dissidents pushed him toward confrontation, his knowledge of what a nuclear war would entail tempered him toward cooperation.
Reagan did not bring about Gorbachev’s reforms, much less force the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While many Reagan fans have suggested that NSDD 32 and 75 amounted to a declaration of economic warfare against the Soviet Union, Reagan repeatedly acted to reduce economic pressure on Moscow. In early 1981, he lifted the grain embargo that President Jimmy Carter had imposed the previous year in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. When a Soviet-backed regime declared martial law in Poland in December 1981, Reagan imposed tough sanctions on the construction of a Siberian gas pipeline to Western Europe before lifting them the following November in response to opposition from European allies. Hawks were frustrated by the president’s willingness to renounce one of the United States’ most powerful economic instruments without getting any concessions in return. Writing in The New York Times in May 1982, the editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, aired these frustrations under the headline “The Neo-Conservative Anguish Over Reagan’s Foreign Policy.” Podhoretz complained that Reagan’s reaction to the imposition of martial law in Poland was even weaker than Carter’s reaction to the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan: “One remembers easily enough that Carter instituted a grain embargo and a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, but one is hard-pressed even to remember what the Reagan sanctions were.”
Conservatives would have been even more horrified if they had known that Reagan was secretly reaching out to the Kremlin at the time. In April 1981, Reagan sent a sentimental handwritten note to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev professing his desire for “meaningful and constructive dialogue which will assist us in fulfilling our joint obligation to find lasting peace,” and in March 1983, two days after calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” the president privately told Shultz to maintain lines of dialogue with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. Indeed, Reagan hoped to meet with a Soviet leader from the start of his presidency and lamented during his first term that Soviet leaders “keep dying on me.”
Many admirers now give Reagan credit for a calculated strategy that combined pressure and conciliation, but this approach bore little fruit in his first term, instead baffling Soviet leaders: “In his mind such incompatibilities could coexist in perfect harmony, but Moscow regarded such behavior at that time as a sign of deliberate duplicity and hostility,” Dobrynin wrote in his 1995 memoir.
In 1983, a series of escalating crises—including the Soviet shootdown of a Korean civilian airliner, a false Soviet alert of a U.S. missile launch, and a NATO war game (code-named Able Archer) that some Soviet officials saw as a cover for a preemptive U.S. attack—raised the fears of nuclear war to their highest levels since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Realizing that the risk of Armageddon was very real, Reagan consciously dialed back his hawkishness. In January 1984, he delivered a conciliatory speech in which he spoke of how much the typical Soviet citizens “Ivan and Anya” had in common with the typical Americans “Jim and Sally” and promised to work with the Kremlin to “strengthen peace” and “reduce the level of arms.”
The problem was that Reagan had no partner for peace at the time: during his first term, the Soviet Union was successively led by the elderly hard-liners Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko. Only when Chernenko died in March 1985 did Reagan finally find a Soviet leader he could work with in Gorbachev, a true “black swan” who rose to the top of a totalitarian system only to dismantle it.
THE UNEXPECTED COLLAPSE
Those who argue that Reagan brought down the “evil empire” usually focus on Gorbachev’s ascension as the turning point, crediting the U.S. president and his defense buildup with the selection of a reformer as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The problem with this theory is that no one in early 1985—not even Gorbachev himself—knew how radical a reformer he would turn out to be. If his colleagues on the Politburo had known, they likely would not have selected him. They had no desire for the Soviet empire, or their own power and privileges, to end.
Gorbachev did not want to reform the Soviet system in order to compete more effectively with the Reagan defense buildup. In fact, it was the opposite. He genuinely worried about the dangers of nuclear war, and he was appalled by how much money the Soviet Union was spending on its military-industrial complex: an estimated 20 percent of GDP and 40 percent of the state budget.
This was not a reflection of a Reagan-induced crisis that threatened the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union but rather a product of Gorbachev’s own humane instincts. As the historian Chris Miller has argued, “When Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, the Soviet economy was wasteful and poorly managed, but it was not in crisis.” The Soviet regime, having survived Stalinist terror, famine, and industrialization, as well as World War II and de-Stalinization, could have survived the stagnation of the mid-1980s as other, poorer communist regimes such as China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam did.
There was nothing inevitable about the Soviet collapse, and it was not the product of Reagan’s efforts to spend more on the military and to curb Soviet expansionism abroad. It was the unanticipated and unintended consequence of the increasingly radical reforms implemented by Gorbachev, namely glasnost and perestroika, over the objections of more conservative comrades who finally tried to overthrow him in 1991. The Soviet Union broke up not because it was economically bankrupt but because Gorbachev recognized that it was morally bankrupt and he refused to hold it together by force. If any other member of the Politburo had taken power in 1985, the Soviet Union might still exist and the Berlin Wall might still stand, just as the demilitarized zone still divides North Korea from South Korea. Although he did not induce Gorbachev’s reforms, Reagan deserves credit for working with the Soviet leader at a time when most conservatives warned that the president was being hoodwinked by a wily communist.
Reagan and Gorbachev hardly saw eye to eye on everything. They clashed over human rights in the Soviet Union and Reagan’s beloved Strategic Defense Initiative. But despite temporary setbacks, the two leaders signed the first arms control accord to abolish an entire class of nuclear weapons, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, in Washington in 1987, and in 1988 the Reagans traveled to Moscow. During the visit, as the two leaders strolled through Red Square, Sam Donaldson of ABC News asked Reagan, “Do you still think you’re in an evil empire, Mr. President?” “No,” Reagan replied. “I was talking about another time and another era.”
PRESSURE DOESN’T MAKE PEACE
There is little evidence that pressure on the Soviet Union in Reagan’s first term made the Soviets more willing to negotiate, but there is a good deal of evidence that his pivot toward cooperation with Gorbachev in his second term allowed the new Soviet leader to transform his country and end the Cold War. Yet many conservatives conflate Reagan’s second-term success with his first-term failures, applying the wrong policy lessons to relations with communist China today.
Ramping up confrontation with Beijing regardless of the consequences risks a repeat of the war scares that brought the world to the brink of catastrophe in 1983, and such a strategy has even less of a chance of success today. Even if it was not on the verge of bankruptcy, the Soviet Union’s economy was weak in the 1980s, thanks to communist central planning and a fall in world oil prices. China, on the other hand, has successfully combined free-market economics and political repression to become the world’s second largest economy. As the journalist Fareed Zakaria has noted, the Soviet economy accounted for roughly 7.5 percent of global GDP at its peak; China today makes up about 20 percent of global GDP. There are no policies that the United States can plausibly implement that will “defeat” China—it is hard to know what “defeating China” even means. It is easy, however, to imagine that unrelentingly hard-line policies from both the United States and China could raise the risk of a nuclear war.
The United States should continue to contain and deter Chinese aggression, limit the export of sensitive technology, and support human rights in China while still engaging in dialogue with Chinese leaders to lessen the risk of war. This was the prudent approach to the Soviet Union that U.S. presidents of both parties adopted during the Cold War. But Washingtonshould not imagine that it can transform China. Only the Chinese people can do that. Today’s confrontation with China can only end if Chinese leader Xi Jinping is succeeded by a true reformer in the Gorbachev mold. Unless that long-shot scenario comes to pass, pursuing a one-sided caricature of Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union is likely to make the world a more dangerous place.
MAX BOOT is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Reagan: His Life and Legend.
