China Has Already Remade the International System - Michael B.G. Froman (Foreign Affairs) (via Mauricio David)

 Dica de leitura, proposta por Mauricio David

(repostando um trabalho que elaborei recentemente para uma aula: 4869. “Relações Estados Unidos-China: uma visão não imperial”, Brasília, 11 março 2025, 7 p. Notas para aula, Disponível na plataforma Academia.edu (link: https://www.academia.edu/128207302/4869_Relacoes_Estados_Unidos_China_consideracoes_historico_geopoliticas_2025_); blog Diplomatizzando (14/03/2025, link: https://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com/2025/03/relacoes-estados-unidos-china.html).

 "China Has Already Remade the International System- How the World Adopted Beijing's Economic Playbook" (by Michael B.G. Froman-Presidente do Council on Foreign Relations)

 

Chamo a atenção dos nossos interlocutores que se interessam pela economia política internacional - em especial os nossos queridos e admirados embaixador Rubens Ricupero (ex-diretor geral da Unctad por dois períodos) – e o embaixador Paulo Roberto de Almeida (o mais prolífico dos experts do Itamaraty em política internacional) – para este artigo do Presidente do Council on Foreign Affairs sobre as reconfigurações do Sistema Internacional. Em um ensaio com dados e análises relevantes, o Presidente do Council on Foreign Affairs introduz considerações de extrema relevância para que possamos entender o conflito entre a China e os Estados Unidos que está em curso. Ao contrário das análises tolas e superficiais que vicejam na nossa grande imprensa escrita e televisada ( confesso que não aguento mais ler e ouvir as análises sobre o que chamam de “guerra tarifária” supostamente iniciada por Trump – todos eles bradam veementemente sobre o iminente fracasso das medidas protecionistas de Trump, o “demônio solto na arena internacional...”, misturando previsões catastrofistas com desejos ocultos que só Freud poderia explicar...

Por tudo isto, o artigo do Michael Froman merece uma leitura e reflexão atenta, o que muito recomendo...

MD

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... In the 1990s and the early years of this century, there was every indication that China was on an inexorable march toward economic liberalization. Building on a process that began in the late 1970s under the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, China opened up to foreign investment. President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji then kept China on a remarkable, if painful, path of economic reforms. They restructured state-owned enterprises and fired tens of millions of their workers, created more space for private sector activity, allowed businesses to adjust prices in response to market conditions, and ushered in China’s entry to the World Trade Organization...

... From 2009 to 2017, I served first as deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs and then as U.S. trade representative. During that time, I consistently warned my Chinese counterparts that the benign international environment that had enabled China’s success would disappear unless Beijing modified its predatory economic policies. Instead, China largely maintained its course of action. If anything, it doubled down on its approach. When Xi came to power in 2012, he effectively ended the era of “reform and opening” that had already stalled under Hu, set China on a course to dominate critical technologies, increased production to the point of overcapacity, and committed to export-led growth. Today, as the economist Brad Setser has noted, China’s export volume is growing at a rate three times as fast as global trade. In the automotive sector, it is on a trajectory to have the capacity to produce two-thirds of the world’s automotive demand. And its dominance extends beyond cars; China also produces more than half the global supply of steel, aluminum, and ships...

... China’s electric vehicle manufacturers innovate faster and produce high-quality vehicles far more cheaply than U.S. firms; some Chinese vehicles are as much as 50 percent less expensive than their American equivalents, and China accounts for nearly 60 percent of global electric vehicle sales worldwide. China’s battery producers, solar panel manufacturers, and clean energy equipment companies have similar advantages...

...  it is important to recognize a fundamental truth: the United States is now operating largely in accordance with Beijing’s standards, with a new economic model characterized by protectionism, constraints on foreign investment, subsidies, and industrial policy—essentially nationalist state capitalism...

... In the war over who gets to define the rules of the road, the battle is over, at least for now. And China won...

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China Has Already Remade the International System

How the World Adopted Beijing’s Economic Playbook

Michael B. G. Froman

Foreign Affairs, March 25, 2025

 

MICHAEL B. G. FROMAN is President of the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as U.S. Trade Representative from 2013 to 2017 and Deputy National Security Adviser for International Economic Affairs from 2009 to 2013.

 

In early February, as he flew in Air Force One above the body of water he’d recently renamed the Gulf of America, President Donald Trump declared that he would levy tariffs on all imported steel and aluminum. Two weeks later, he issued a presidential memorandum laying out new guidance for screening investment from Chinese firms in the United States and U.S. firms into China. And throughout the early weeks of his administration, Trump has emphasized the importance of bringing manufacturing back home, telling firms that, to avoid tariffs, they should make their products in the United States.

Tariffs and protectionism, restrictions on investment, measures designed to drive domestic production: Washington’s economic policy suddenly looks an awful lot like Beijing’s policies over the last decade or so—like Chinese policy with American characteristics.

The U.S. strategy of engagement with China was based on the premise that, if the United States incorporated China into the global rules-based system, China would become more like the United States. For decades, Washington lectured Beijing about avoiding protectionism, eliminating barriers to foreign investment, and disciplining the use of subsidies and industrial policy—with only modest success. Still, the expectation was that integration would facilitate convergence.

There has indeed been a fair degree of convergence—just not in the way American policymakers predicted. Instead of China coming to resemble the United States, the United States is behaving more like China. Washington may have forged the open, liberal rules-based order, but China has defined its next phase: protectionism, subsidization, restrictions on foreign investment, and industrial policy. To argue that the United States must reassert its leadership to preserve the rules-based system it established is to miss the point. China’s nationalist state capitalism now dominates the international economic order. Washington is already living in Beijing’s world.

OPENING UP?

In the 1990s and the early years of this century, there was every indication that China was on an inexorable march toward economic liberalization. Building on a process that began in the late 1970s under the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, China opened up to foreign investment. President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji then kept China on a remarkable, if painful, path of economic reforms. They restructured state-owned enterprises and fired tens of millions of their workers, created more space for private sector activity, allowed businesses to adjust prices in response to market conditions, and ushered in China’s entry to the World Trade Organization.

Jiang and Zhu declared repeatedly that China would inevitably continue to open up. Many in the West went so far as to believe that this economic liberalization would lead to China’s political liberalization, that a capitalist society would become a more democratic one over time. That assumption proved false. China’s leaders never seriously contemplated political reform, but China’s economic advancement was impressive nonetheless. The country’s GDP grew from $347.77 billion in 1989 to $1.66 trillion by 2003 to $17.79 trillion in 2023, according to the World Bank. Hopes were high that integrating China into the rules-based trading system could lead to a more peaceful and more prosperous world. Globalization did lift more than a billion people out of poverty, an astounding feat. But the benefits of that progress were not evenly shared, and some workers and communities in industrialized countries ended up paying the price for the rise of the rest.

Then President Hu Jintao entered the picture, followed by President Xi Jinping. China’s economic trajectory turned out to be less linear and less inevitable than initially expected. Under Hu, China leaned more heavily into state intervention in the economy by aiming to create “national champions” in strategic sectors through massive subsidies. In other words, the government expanded its role rather than pursuing further market liberalization. At the same time, a flood of cheap Chinese imports accelerated the trend toward deindustrialization in the United States—and did so at a rate that few, if any, fully anticipated. China became the world’s manufacturing floor, overtaking the manufacturing giants of Japan and Germany in the first decade of this century. In 2004, China made up nine percent of the world’s manufacturing value added, leapfrogging to a massive 29 percent in 2023, according to the World Bank.

HOW CHINA WON

Washington pressed Beijing to deliver on its reform agenda throughout this period, urging China to open its markets and refrain from imposing high tariffs and other barriers on products being exported from the United States. It advocated for U.S. firms to be allowed to invest in China without being excluded from certain sectors or required to enter joint ventures with—and transfer U.S. technology to—local firms. And Washington demanded that the Chinese government stop subsidizing the production and export of goods, which distorted the global marketplace. But this litany of complaints fell largely on deaf ears.

In 2009, the Obama administration led an effort to terminate the Doha Round—a multilateral trade negotiation under the WTO launched in 2001. It did so in large part because the resulting agreement would have enshrined China permanently as a “developing country” under WTO rules. This would have allowed China to enjoy “special and differential treatment,” which meant that China would have been able to avoid assuming the same level of obligations and disciplines—on market access, intellectual property rights protection, and other issues—as the United States and other industrial countries. Washington faced near-universal criticism at the time for encouraging a rethink of the premises of the negotiation. But it was clear even then that, left unaddressed, China’s economic practices would significantly disrupt the global trading system.

The United States is already living in China’s world.

Similar concerns motivated the Obama administration to pursue the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a high-standard trade agreement negotiated among 12 countries around the Pacific Rim. This initiative was designed to give countries in the Asia-Pacific region an attractive alternative to the model China offered. It brought together a group of diverse countries that were willing to set strong labor and environmental protections, limit the use of subsidies, impose discipline on state-owned enterprises, and address various China-specific concerns, such as intellectual property rights protection. By the time TPP negotiations were completed in 2015, however, trade agreements—even those designed to counterbalance China—had become politically toxic at home, and the United States ended up pulling out of the agreement.

From 2009 to 2017, I served first as deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs and then as U.S. trade representative. During that time, I consistently warned my Chinese counterparts that the benign international environment that had enabled China’s success would disappear unless Beijing modified its predatory economic policies. Instead, China largely maintained its course of action. If anything, it doubled down on its approach. When Xi came to power in 2012, he effectively ended the era of “reform and opening” that had already stalled under Hu, set China on a course to dominate critical technologies, increased production to the point of overcapacity, and committed to export-led growth. Today, as the economist Brad Setser has noted, China’s export volume is growing at a rate three times as fast as global trade. In the automotive sector, it is on a trajectory to have the capacity to produce two-thirds of the world’s automotive demand. And its dominance extends beyond cars; China also produces more than half the global supply of steel, aluminum, and ships.

Eventually, even American businesses, which had always been the ballast in the bilateral relationship, soured on China as their intellectual property was stolen or forcibly licensed, their market access to China was severely restricted or delayed, and China’s subsidies and preferences for domestic firms ate into their opportunity. Without any semblance of reciprocity, the relationship deteriorated. Politicians of both parties and the American public hardened their stance on China. European and major emerging economies grew hostile to Beijing’s policies, as well. In short, the benign international environment disappeared.

Working on an electric vehicle production line in Zhejiang province, China, March 2025Florence Lo / Reuters

 

Washington, having failed to convince Beijing to change its predatory economic policies or to move forward with an alternative trading bloc to counterbalance China, was left with one option: the United States had to become more like China. After decades of berating China for imposing high tariffs and other restrictions on U.S. exports, the United States is now putting up the same barriers. As calculated by the economist Chad Bown, Trump imposed tariffs that increased the average rate on imports from China from three percent to 19 percent in his first administration, covering two-thirds of all imports from China. President Joe Biden maintained those tariffs and added tariffs on other Chinese products, including personal protective equipment, electric vehicles, batteries, and steel, slightly increasing the average tariff on imports from China. Less than two months into his second administration, Trump has imposed an additional 20 percent tariff on all U.S. imports from China—a bigger move than the tariffs of his first administration and the Biden administration combined.

Similarly, the United States changed its approach from opposing barriers to most bilateral investment flows to severely restricting China’s investment in the United States and U.S. investment in certain sensitive sectors in China. Annual Chinese investment in the United States plummeted from $46 billion in 2016 to less than $5 billion in 2022, according to the Rhodium Group. And, having urged Beijing to abandon subsidy and industrial policies, Washington itself went all-in on industrial policy during the Biden administration, laying out at least $1.6 trillion on the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

IF YOU CAN’T BEAT THEM, JOIN THEM

To take the Chinese approach one step further could mean adopting a key tool in Beijing’s toolbox: requiring Chinese firms that invest abroad to establish joint ventures with domestic firms and engage in technology transfers. Such a strategy could enhance not just American industrial competitiveness but also that of other countries negatively affected by China’s overcapacity, including many in Europe.

Take the clean energy sector as an obvious example. China’s electric vehicle manufacturers innovate faster and produce high-quality vehicles far more cheaply than U.S. firms; some Chinese vehicles are as much as 50 percent less expensive than their American equivalents, and China accounts for nearly 60 percent of global electric vehicle sales worldwide. China’s battery producers, solar panel manufacturers, and clean energy equipment companies have similar advantages.

In the United States, China’s market share in electric vehicles is nearly nonexistent. Current tariffs and other restrictions are likely to prevent any future influx of imports. At the same time, European auto manufacturers, particularly those in Germany, are getting squeezed by domestic preference policies and the competitiveness of domestic firms in the Chinese market, which they have depended on for growth. And lately, China has been making inroads in the European market, too. The European market share of Chinese electric vehicles grew from virtually zero percent in January 2019 to over 11 percent in June 2024.

Following the United States’ lead, Europe introduced tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles late last year. This slowed the growth in China’s market share. But just holding off a rise in imports may not solve the European auto industry’s problems. To maintain jobs and manufacturing capacity, Europe appears to be open to Chinese investment in electric vehicle production in Europe. (By contrast, it is unclear whether Trump would welcome such investment or would continue to ban Chinese electric vehicles in the U.S. market because of their potential to track citizens’ movements or shut down traffic.) If Europe is to avoid becoming merely a destination for final assembly of Chinese electric vehicles, it might have to borrow a tactic from Beijing and require Chinese companies to enter into joint ventures with European firms and transfer technology and know-how to them.

HOW TO OUT-CHINA CHINA

It is not yet clear whether the United States can outmaneuver China with its own playbook. Beijing seems to have near-unlimited capacity to mobilize capital and manipulate trade and investment policy in service of its long-term objectives. Washington’s Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, meanwhile, were more likely historic anomalies than first steps in a broader trend toward greater industrial policy, given the uneasiness among Republican lawmakers over their passage. Indeed, even as he seeks to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry, Trump has called for the repeal of the CHIPS and Science Act, which provides subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing. The subsidies provided by the Inflation Reduction Act are likely to face political challenges, too.

There is an active debate over whether the Biden administration got sufficient bang for its industrial policy buck beyond a few key sectors. U.S. investment in manufacturing has surged, and arguably industrial capacity has expanded. But as the economist Jason Furman pointed out in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, “The proportion of people working in manufacturing has been declining for decades and has not ticked back up, and overall domestic industrial production remains stagnant—in part because the fiscal expansion Biden oversaw led to higher costs, a stronger dollar, and higher interest rates, all of which have created headwinds for the manufacturing sectors that received no special subsidies from the legislation he championed.” Wherever one comes down in this debate, one thing is clear: even in the sectors that the Biden administration subsidized, such as semiconductors and green energy, the path to regaining global leadership is long and uncertain.

The United States may play the protectionist game as well as others, but soon, inflation, higher costs of living, and job losses in industries or sectors affected by other countries’ retaliation will begin to bite. Trump appears to believe that a wall of tariffs—as well as the uncertainty about whether tariffs are on or off at any particular moment in time—is a powerful incentive for companies to locate their production in the United States, where they can be sure their goods will not be subject to tariffs. But as a general matter, companies that consider making the necessary capital investments to spur industrial production in the United States are looking for predictable policy environments, not tariffs that are imposed in the morning and withdrawn in the afternoon. Most may decide to sit on the sidelines, keeping their powder dry, until it becomes clearer what tariffs are going into effect, against whom, and for how long.

After berating Beijing for its restrictions, Washington is putting up the same barriers.

The historical record of tariffs driving expanded production and manufacturing jobs in the United States is far from definitive. Take, for example, the tariffs imposed by Trump in 2018 on Chinese imports. As a 2024 paper by Federal Reserve researchers Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce found, “Tariff increases enacted since early 2018 are associated with relative reductions in U.S. manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices. In terms of manufacturing employment, rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs account for the negative relationship, and the contribution from these channels more than offsets a small positive effect from import protection.” Some research estimates 75,000 lost downstream manufacturing jobs as a direct result of the tariffs, not to mention additional losses from retaliatory tariffs. The economic experts Benn Steil and Elisabeth Harding have also found that productivity in the U.S. steel industry tanked while productivity in other sectors rose since Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on steel imports in March 2018. Output per hour in the U.S. steel industry has tumbled by 32 percent since 2017.

Perhaps Trump’s approach to moving production back to the United States will bear fruit, but for that to happen, the U.S. government would have to permit foreign firms to actually make such investments. Both Biden and Trump opposed the Japanese company Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel, and U.S. policymakers are still debating whether Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund can acquire a controlling stake in the PGA Tour, which organizes U.S. golf tournaments—hardly a critical industry.

The United States and others are imitating China in large part because China succeeded in a way that was unexpected. Its success in electric vehicles and clean technology did not come from liberalizing economic policies but from state interventions in the market in the name of nationalist objectives. Whether or not the United States can compete with China on China's playing field, it is important to recognize a fundamental truth: the United States is now operating largely in accordance with Beijing’s standards, with a new economic model characterized by protectionism, constraints on foreign investment, subsidies, and industrial policy—essentially nationalist state capitalism. In the war over who gets to define the rules of the road, the battle is over, at least for now. And China won.

 

The Fragile Axis of Upheaval (China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia) - Christopher S. Chivvis (Foreign Affairs)

The Fragile Axis of Upheaval

Christopher S. Chivvis

Foreign Affairs, March 18, 2025

 

CHRISTOPHER S. CHIVVIS is Director of the American Statecraft Program and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

 

Even regional wars have geopolitical consequences, and when it comes to Russia’s war on Ukraine, the most important of these has been the formation of a loose entente among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Some U.S. national security experts have taken to calling this group “the axis of upheaval” or “the axis of autocracy,” warning that the United States must center this entente in its foreign policy and focus on containing or defeating it. It is not only Washington policymakers who worry about a new, well-coordinated anti-American bloc: in a November 2024 U.S. public opinion poll by the Ronald Reagan Institute, 86 percent of respondents agreed that they were either “extremely” or “somewhat” concerned by the increased cooperation between these U.S. adversaries.

There is no question that these countries threaten U.S. interests, or that their cooperation has strengthened lately. But the axis framing overstates the depth and permanence of their alignment. The coalition has been strengthened by the Ukraine war, but its members’ interests are less well fitted than they appear on the surface. Washington should not lump these countries together. Historically, when countries roll separate threats into a monolithic one, it is a strategic mistake. U.S. leaders need to make a more nuanced and accurate analysis of the threats that they pose, or else the fear of an axis of autocracies could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the war ends, the United States and its allies should seize opportunities to loosen the coalition’s war-forged bonds.

INTERIM ORDER

Cooperation among these four countries is not entirely new. North Korea has been dependent on China for almost 75 years. Moscow’s relationships with both Beijing and Tehran were often rocky during the Cold War, but the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse opened the door to rapprochements. During Donald Trump’s first presidency, signs that China and Russia were deepening their partnership began emerging. Russia and Iran, meanwhile, found themselves on the same side of the Syrian civil war after Moscow intervened in 2015 to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The war in Ukraine, however, has poured high-octane accelerant on these embers of cooperation, and the resulting collaborations have damaged Western interests. There is no question that Russia’s recent cooperation with China, Iran, and North Korea has helped the Kremlin resist the West’s military and economic pressures. Iran’s provision of drones and medium-range ballistic missiles in return for Russian intelligence and fighter aircraft allowed Russia to hammer Ukraine’s military and civilian infrastructure without depleting its stocks of other weapons and weakening its defenses against NATO. By contributing 11,000 troops as well as munitions, artillery, and missiles to Russia’s war effort, North Korea has helped Russia gradually push back the Ukrainian occupation of Kursk; Russia’s compensations of oil, fighter aircraft and potentially other weapons blunt the effect of international sanctions on North Korea and may embolden Pyongyang to further provoke Seoul. And Beijing’s decision to look the other way as Chinese firms supply Moscow with dual-use goods (in exchange for certain defense technologies and less expensive energy) has helped Russia produce advanced weaponry despite Western sanctions.

In June 2024, Russia and North Korea signed a mutual defense treaty. Iran and Russia have promised to strengthen their economic cooperation and, in January, signed their own defense agreement. China, Iran, and North Korea—like many other countries around the world—have also refused to join U.S.-led sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, Russia has blocked UN sanctions monitors from continuing their work in North Korea.

These four countries will no doubt continue to parrot one another’s criticisms of the United States well after the war in Ukraine ends. For the most part, however, the forms of cooperation that have most worried Washington have directly involved that war, and its end will attenuate the coalition’s most important new bonds. It is not at all uncommon for wartime coalitions to fall apart once a war ends, and after the war, the Kremlin is likely to renege on some of its wartime promises. Russia will have less need to pay off Iran, for example. Likewise, as the pressure to refill its depleted supply of troops dissipates, the Kremlin will become less keen to get entangled in North Korea’s conflicts in East Asia.

Beijing’s wartime support for Moscow was already restrained and conditional: going too far to back Russia’s war would have damaged China’s relations with Europe and exposed it to secondary sanctions. China’s support has also been driven by fear that a Russian defeat could yield a Western-oriented Kremlin or chaos on the Chinese-Russian border. Once the war ends, however, that fear will recede, and with it, China’s enthusiasm for materially supporting Russia. If Russian energy begins to flow back toward Europe, that would also loosen the economic bond the war generated between these two powers.

REVERSE TIDES

When the wartime closeness of these countries is projected linearly into the future, their divergent national interests become obscured. China, for example, has long sought closer relations with the EU; deepening its partnership with Russia impedes this strategic objective. China and Ukraine once had a productive bilateral relationship, and both may wish to return to it once the war is over. Russia, meanwhile, is suspicious of China’s growing economic influence in Central Asia, which the Kremlin considers its own privileged sphere. These tensions are likely to resurface once the war is over. Notably, China almost certainly would prefer to be at the center of a reformed global order, not at the center of a coalition whose other three members are economic and political pariahs.

Some analysts claim that a common autocratic ideology will bind China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia together in the long term. But autocracy is not an ideology. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its Marxist-Leninist allies were bound by a real ideology that not only called for revolution across the liberal capitalist world but also offered a utopian vision for a new global order. No such common cause binds Iran’s religious theocracy, Russia’s neoimperialist nationalism, the hereditary despotism of North Korea’s regime, and the blend of nationalism, Confucianism, and Marxism-Leninism that animates the Chinese Communist Party. Instead, this coalition is bound by a fear of the United States and an objection to an international order that they believe reflects U.S. preferences. Although many other states share this critique of the international order, the varied ideologies of this coalition offer no positive vision that could replace the existing system.

Furthermore, although Washington has conceived of its autocratic adversaries as a cohesive unit, almost all their cooperation has been through bilateral channels. If the war in Ukraine continues, some military institutionalization might grow out of it, but right now, the institutional foundations of the autocracies’ relationships are very weak. What has been cast as an axis is actually six overlapping bilateral relationships. Since 2019, for example, China, Iran, and Russia have occasionally conducted joint military exercises in a trilateral format, but these exercises had little strategic relevance. These states have not congealed into anything remotely resembling the Warsaw Pact. In the absence of new institutions, coordinated action will be much more difficult.

DIVIDE AND NEUTRALIZE

Even though the bonds that unite China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are currently weak, they could still strengthen with time. Western countries need to adopt a statecraft that reduces this risk. Their first step should be to focus on ending the war in Ukraine. Trump has initiated an ambitious and controversial opening to Moscow that may result in a cease-fire and a negotiated settlement. Trump has indulged in overly optimistic rhetoric about Moscow’s sincerity, and questions about his true aims linger. Nevertheless, a cease-fire would greatly reduce the pressures that bind the so-called axis of upheaval together. If U.S. leaders negotiate with Moscow, that would also signal to Beijing that they are willing to consider wider-ranging negotiations with it, and these could further disrupt the coalition.

Indeed, the second way to loosen the coalition’s bonds is for the United States to stabilize or improve its own relations with China, by far the most powerful member of the group. Steering the U.S.-Chinese relationship toward more stability will be hard, but—perhaps as part of a larger deal on trade and investment—Trump could reassure Beijing that the United States does not want outright economic decoupling or to change the status quo on Taiwan. China needs the other three coalition powers far less than they need China, which means it may be the most willing to make its own deal with the United States.

Stabilizing relations with Beijing is thus a more realistic near-term goal than trying to bring Russia swiftly back into the European fold. Too sudden and dramatic a U-turn in U.S.-Russian relations would alienate key U.S. allies in Europe and needlessly entrench a transatlantic rift. It would be similarly unwise for the United States to take the Kremlin’s assurances about Ukraine or Europe at face value, given Russia’s deep grievances toward the West and its leaders’ proclivity for deception. With a cease-fire in place, however, the United States and Europe could consider making limited improvements to their economic relations with Russia, which would help attenuate Russia’s ties with China. And just as an end to the war in Ukraine would almost certainly weaken the coalition’s bonds, so would a new nuclear agreement between the United States and Iran that reduces the need to launch military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear program and allows the country to find outlets for its oil other than China.

UNTIE THE KNOT

If, however, the United States insists on treating this new coalition’s emergence as if it were a revival of the Warsaw Pact, the putative axis of autocracies will probably coalesce and end up posing a much greater danger. Russia and China once supported international nonproliferation efforts, including attempts to prevent Iran and North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons. China and Russia should not want a global nuclear cascade, but if the United States remains implacably hostile to them, that might lead Moscow to adopt an “if you can’t stop them, help them” approach and back Pyongyang’s and Tehran’s nuclear programs. Both Iran and North Korea could then use Russian nuclear and missile technology to develop advanced weapons that would hamper the U.S. military’s response options in East Asia and the Middle East—and even threaten the American homeland.

Of equal concern is the possibility that China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia will use their wartime cooperation as a model for opportunistic coordination in the future. In general, autocratic countries struggle to make the kind of credible commitments that joint military planning requires, but a coordinated attack on U.S. interests in multiple regions might still emerge through improvisation. For example, if China attacks Taiwan, and the United States comes to the island’s defense, Russia could take advantage of Washington’s distraction to seize a slice of the Baltic states, and Iran could see an opportunity to attack Israel. Such a multifront assault on U.S. allies would stretch American resources to the maximum or beyond it.

These possibilities make it important for the United States to get its strategy right today. Bundling the threats the four so-called axis states pose is politically convenient in Washington, because it placates interest groups in the U.S. national security ecosphere that would otherwise compete for resources. But the hidden costs will be high.

Fear generates an impulse to fight back against U.S. adversaries on all possible fronts. But if a country gives in to the impulse to fight everywhere all at once it sows the seeds of its own decline. Before World War I, for example, Germany tried to challenge the United Kingdom at sea while also dominating France and Russia on the European continent. It ended up fatally overstretched. Likewise, when Japan in the 1930s attempted to meet both its army’s aspirations for an Asian empire and its navy’s demands for a Pacific fleet, it ended up bogged down in China and at war with the world’s foremost industrial power, the United States. Instead of treating China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia as an inexorable bloc, the United States and its allies should work to loosen their ties by exploiting the fissures that the war in Ukraine has concealed.

The Key to Ukraine’s Survival: How a United Europe Can Help Kyiv Keep Up the Fight - Celeste A. Wallander (Foreign Affairs)

 The Key to Ukraine’s Survival

How a United Europe Can Help Kyiv Keep Up the Fight

Celeste A. Wallander

Foreign Affairs, March 17, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/key-ukraines-survival

CELESTE A. WALLANDER oversaw U.S. military assistance to Ukraine as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Biden administration. She is a Senior Adviser at WestExec Advisors and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

 

The United States’ sudden, although ultimately temporary, suspension of all security assistance to Ukraine in early March raised alarms about Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. A lasting suspension of the aid would certainly have changed the course of the war. But even a complete stop to U.S. assistance would not have reversed the progress that Ukrainians have made over the past three years. With its existing stocks and production, Ukraine would be able to sustain its defense for months on its own. Although U.S. aid is again flowing, at least for now, Ukraine does not need to surrender if Washington slows or pauses its support again.

But the pause in U.S. aid served as a dramatic wake-up call: the most crucial factor in determining how long and how effectively Ukraine will be able to defend against Russian attacks in the coming months will be the extent to which European powers step up to fill in any gaps.

No one country in Europe has the financial and industrial resources to replace the United States, but together they can add up to formidable support to Ukraine. With or without Washington, European powers will need to surge financing, procurement, and production of Ukraine’s most urgent resupply needs: ammunition and air defense interceptors. Denmark, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and many others are already doing so. Over the past three years, Europe has increasingly provided Ukraine with capabilities that the United States has not, such as maritime strike assets, sustainable battle tanks, short- and medium-range air defense interceptors, cybersecurity systems, and industrial components. At the same time, Ukraine’s own production of strike drones and ammunition has expanded, accounting now for at least 40 percent of Ukraine’s daily operational requirements. Ukraine has also proved adept at fighting asymmetrically and capitalizing on Russian disadvantages, as demonstrated by its use of drones to find and destroy Russian units and equipment. Moreover, as Russian tactics have adapted, Ukraine has been ahead of the curve in building more lethal and silent drones within months and even weeks, rendering Russia’s adaptations rapidly out of date.

Even with limited U.S. assistance, Ukraine could, with Europe’s support, still achieve advantages that would strengthen its hand against Russia and thwart the Kremlin’s intention to outlast Ukraine and force Kyiv to surrender to Putin’s demands.

THE PAST IS PRESENT

The structure of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine over the past three years has ensured that the aid has not only supplied the country’s weekly battlefield needs but also helped strengthen its military force for the longer term. The aid has been funneled through three different programs, each authorized and appropriated by Congress. The most prominent program—and the most affected by the temporary U.S. hold on aid—is the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which Washington first employed to meet Ukraine’s urgent, immediate battlefield needs. PDA allows the Department of Defense to pull U.S. systems from its military stocks and deliver them swiftly to partners and allies in need—sometimes within weeks, sometimes within months. Ukraine is not the only recipient of PDA: the United States has used the authority to supply both Israel and Taiwan with weapons systems. But after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine has become by far the largest recipient of this aid. Congress massively enhanced the scale of PDA support to Ukraine from $200 million in 2021 to a total of $33.3 billion for 2022 through 2024. In January 2022, U.S. weapons deliveries surged, with Javelin and Stinger missiles, armored personnel carriers, battle tanks, radars, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), artillery systems, artillery rockets, ammunition, missiles, and air defense systems and interceptors all making their way to Ukraine. The donations—reinforced by comparable donations from European militaries—not only provided ammunition for immediate defense against Russia’s invasion and occupation but also enabled Ukraine to amass the core of a modern and durable NATO-style military.

In addition, in 2022, Congress authorized the creation of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, providing $33.3 billion in funding from 2022 to 2024 to defend Ukraine against the longer-term threats that Putin poses to European security. Unlike PDA, USAI does not draw from U.S. military stocks—it is a fund to contract and procure military capabilities for Ukraine that the United States itself does not have on hand to donate in sufficient quantities or exportable types. For example, USAI has funded the procurement of resources with longer lead times, including hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, hundreds of air defense interceptors, UAVs, coastal defense systems, and air defense systems. It has also funded investments in Ukraine’s defense industrial production and the maintenance and sustainment of military equipment that has already been donated so that Ukraine can build on U.S. and European donations instead of driving them broken and useless into the ground, as Russia has been doing. Europe, for its part, has also invested in similar contracting and procurement of resources for Ukraine, with states participating in such efforts both individually and through the European Union.

Finally, the Foreign Military Financing program has strengthened Ukraine’s medium- to longer-term security. The program allows the United States to work with partners across the globe on missions that address a host of defense issues, including counterterrorism and threats from common adversaries such as China, Iran, and Russia. A country’s FMF funding usually ranges in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but since the full-scale Russian invasion began, Congress has provided Ukraine with $6.7 billion in funding through FMF. The funding has been used for new contracts and procurement from U.S. defense companies of big-ticket items, including air defense, armored vehicles, anti-armor systems, and radars.

These programs have massively boosted Ukraine’s defenses for the past three years—enough so that a temporary pause in assistance would not cripple the country’s military. Indeed, in late 2024, U.S. officials assessed that Ukraine’s existing stocks, the delivery of the fourth-quarter PDA packages and USAI contracts, European donations, and, most important, Kyiv’s own surging domestic production of ammunition and UAVs could sustain Ukraine’s plans for defense through mid-2025. Russia is a brutal aggressor, but its military method of relentless assaults, sacrificing masses of personnel and equipment, produces only incremental gains over weeks and months, and its attacks on civilian targets and critical infrastructure with missiles and UAVs has not broken Ukrainians’ will to continue fighting. Ukraine is suffering, but it is unlikely to face imminent defeat.

UNITED FRONT

Continued U.S. support is key to Ukraine’s long-term survival, but Kyiv and its European partners should not undersell their independent capabilities and concede too quickly to Russian demands during negotiations. By all indications, Europe has the determination to meet Ukraine’s defense requirements, and it could take up the task. Over the past three years, the standard flow of U.S. assistance sufficient to keep Ukraine supplied with ammunition, interceptors, rockets, and UAVs was valued at biweekly packages of $300 million to $400 million (the last two U.S. PDA packages were larger than usual, to prepare Ukraine for the likely uptick in Russian assaults in the spring and summer of this year). Although Europe is already spending a great deal on its own assistance to Ukraine, it still has additional financial, procurement, and industrial production means that could fill potential future gaps in Kyiv’s defense. In addition to drawing from its own weapons stocks and production capabilities, Europe can also procure ammunition and components for Ukraine on international arms markets, as the United States has done over the past three years.

A few billion euros to sustain Ukraine’s resources for active defense in 2025 is well within Europe’s means. In early March, the European Union announced plans to create new defense financing mechanisms that enable members to devote more resources to defense production and procurement, generating as much as $840 billion in defense spending that addresses domestic spending requirements and assistance to Ukraine. Individual European countries (including Norway and the United Kingdom in recent weeks) have also announced new aid packages and others are preparing to do so. Kyiv, for its part, has demonstrated significant resolve and capacity for innovation. Together, Europe and Ukraine can present a strong enough front in support of U.S.-led negotiations to push Putin to the table.

Ukraine and the United States will be in a better position to negotiate peace and to deny Russia’s unacceptable demands for a settlement with Washington committed diplomatically and financially to Kyiv’s defense. But if that path becomes lost, all will not be lost to Ukraine. After withstanding repeated Russian aggression that began in 2014, building an army that repelled Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and maintaining a strong defense in the three years since, it seems very unlikely that Ukrainians will unilaterally surrender now. And with Europe heeding the call to a united defense, they may not need to.

 

The Return of Spheres of Influence - Monica Duffy Toft Foreign Affairs

 The Return of Spheres of Influence

Will Negotiations Over Ukraine Be a New Yalta Conference That Carves Up the World?

Monica Duffy Toft

Foreign Affairs, March 13, 2025

 

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz speaking about negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, March 2025 Saul Loeb / Reuters

 

MONICA DUFFY TOFT is Academic Dean, Professor of International Politics, and Director of the Center for Strategic Studies at Tuft University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was never simply a regional conflict. His illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 was the proof of concept for a broader Russian test of the so-called rules-based international order, probing how far the West would go to defend that order. The ensuing war forced Europe to consider its dependence on the United States and required U.S. leaders to reassess their appetite for foreign commitments. It ushered China into a new role as Russia’s backer and made countries thousands of miles away grapple with essential questions about their futures: How should they balance partnerships with large, warring powers? What material and moral stances taken now will seem prudent decades down the line?

During the two decades that followed the Cold War, many of these questions seemed less central. The collapse of the Soviet Union greatly reduced the West’s fear of another world war—a fear that had led Western leaders to tolerate Soviet spheres of influence in central and eastern Europe. Many political leaders and analysts hoped that multilateralism and new efforts toward collective security would diminish the relevance of zero-sum geopolitical rivalries for good. But after the 2008–9 global financial crisis took a toll on Western economies, Putin consolidated power in Russia, and China’s global influence rapidly expanded, geopolitics swiftly began to revert to a more ancient, hard power–based dynamic. Larger countries are again using their advantages in military force, economic leverage, and diplomacy to secure spheres of influence—that is, geographic areas over which a state exerts economic, military, and political control without necessarily exercising formal sovereignty.

Even though another world war is not yet on the horizon, today’s geopolitical landscape particularly resembles the close of World War II, when U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin sought to divide Europe into spheres of influence. Today’s major powers are seeking to negotiate a new global order primarily with each other, much as Allied leaders did when they redrew the world map at the Yalta negotiations in 1945. Such negotiations need not take place at a formal conference. If Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump, and Chinese President Xi Jinping were to reach an informal consensus that power matters more than ideological differences, they would be echoing Yalta by determining the sovereignty and future of nearby neighbors. 

Unlike at Yalta, where two democracies bargained with one autocracy, regime type no longer appears to hinder a sense of shared interests. It is hard power only—and a return to the ancient principle that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” In such a world, multilateral institutions such as NATO and the EU would be sidelined and the autonomy of smaller nations threatened.

It is no accident that over the past two decades, the nations now driving the return of power politics—China, Russia, and the United States—have all been led by figures who embrace a “make our country great again” narrative. Such leaders dwell on a resentful comparison between what they perceive to be their country’s current, restricted position—a constrained status imposed by both foreign and domestic adversaries—and an imaginary past that was freer and more glorious. The sense of humiliation such a comparison generates fuels the belief that their country’s redemption can come only by exercising hard power. Commanding and extending spheres of influence appears to restore a fading sense of grandeur. For China, Taiwan alone will not suffice. For Russia, Ukraine can never be adequate to fulfill Putin’s vision of Russia’s rightful place in the world. The United States begins to look toward annexing Canada.

Another trajectory remains possible, one in which the EU and NATO adapt rather than wither. In such a scenario, they could continue to serve as counterbalances to U.S., Russian, and Chinese efforts to use hard power to achieve narrow state interests, threatening the world’s peace, security, and prosperity in the process. But those potential counterbalancing forces will have to fight for such an alternative—and take advantage of the obstacles that a more globalized world poses to great powers’ wish to carve it into pieces.

VICIOUS CIRCLES

The term “sphere of influence” first cropped up at the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, during which European colonial empires formalized rules to carve up Africa. But the concept had shaped international strategy long before that. During the 1803–15 Napoleonic Wars, France attempted to expand its influence by conquering nearby territories and installing loyal puppet regimes, only to be countered by coalitions led by the United Kingdom and Austria. The British and Russian Empires engaged in protracted struggles for dominance over Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan. The Monroe Doctrine, adopted in 1823 by the United States, asserted that European powers would not be allowed to interfere in the Western Hemisphere, effectively establishing Latin America as a U.S. sphere of influence.

It is worth noting that the Monroe Doctrine was, in part, inspired by Russian Emperor Alexander I’s efforts to counter British and American influence in the Pacific Northwest by expanding its settlements and asserting its control over trade. In an 1824 accord, however, Russia agreed to limit its southward expansion and acknowledge American dominance over the Western Hemisphere. Alexander I recognized that encouraging further European colonization of the Americas risked sparking more instability and war.

Great powers’ drive to establish spheres of influence persisted through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shaping new alliances and ultimately triggering World War I. In his wartime effort to delegitimize the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman Empires, however, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson pointed out that colonialism amounted to an oppressive boot on the neck of nations’ self-determination. In the process, U.S. allies—in particular, France and the United Kingdom—suffered collateral damage and struggled to maintain their colonies in the face of a rising tide of nationalist sentiment. Given the close connection between “spheres of influence” and colonialism, by the end of World War II, both concepts came to be seen as backward and a likely catalyst for conflict.

After the Cold War, spheres of influence appeared to lose relevance.

Yalta marked a decisive return of politics based on spheres of influence, but only because the participating democracies tolerated it as a necessary but hopefully short-lived evil, the best available means to prevent another catastrophic world war. The United Kingdom and the United States had each become war-weary. By August 1945, no democratic politician could reasonably oppose demobilization. Stalin did not suffer from this problem. But if deterrence could not be supplied, the only other way to prevent Stalin from ordering the Red Army westward was to engage his demands.

In the nineteenth century, power politics had hinged on military and economic might. In the second half of the twentieth century, the ability to shape global narratives through soft power became almost as vital: the United States exerted influence through its dominance in popular culture, provision of foreign aid, higher education, and investments in overseas initiatives such as the Peace Corps and democratization efforts. The Soviet Union, for its part, actively promoted communist ideology by mounting propaganda and ideological-outreach campaigns that attempted to shape public opinion in far-flung countries. Moscow even pioneered a new kind of attack on democratic states under the broader banner of “active measures”: a long-game strategy aimed at polarizing democratic publics by propagating disinformation.

But after 1991, as ideological battles gave way to market liberalization, democratization, and globalization, spheres of influence appeared to lose relevance. Without the stark ideological divide of the Cold War, many political scientists assumed that world politics would shift toward economic interdependence, demonstrating through action the benefits of working in teams to solve hard problems. The global spread of democratic norms and the swift integration of former Soviet and Eastern bloc states into international institutions reinforced the belief that power could—and should—be diffused through collective frameworks; the Cold War’s geopolitical fault lines seemed to vanish. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, a pivotal agreement intended to define NATO’s relationship with Russia after the Cold War, was seen as a case in point. And the act explicitly committed its signatories to avoid establishing spheres of influence, directing NATO and Russia to aim to create “in Europe a common space of security and stability, without dividing lines or spheres of influence limiting the sovereignty of any state.”

HARD RETURN

But in truth, power politics had begun to resurface well before Russia invaded Ukraine. NATO’s U.S.-led intervention in Kosovo in 1999 (which particularly incensed Putin) and the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq (over the objections of close U.S. allies) both suggested that the leaders of the supposed new era of collective security still believed that when a strong state does not get its way, it is acceptable to escalate militarily. More recently, the United States and China have been locked in a struggle for global technological and economic dominance, with Washington imposing sanctions on Chinese tech giants while Beijing invests heavily in alternative supply chains and its massive Belt and Road Initiative. China has also militarized the South China Sea and has pursued expansive and legally disputed territorial claims. The United States and its allies, meanwhile, have increasingly used financial sanctions as tools to constrain adversaries.

Russia, for its part, has continued to innovate brilliantly from a position of material weakness. It has effectively deployed hybrid warfare to weaken the West, including with cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to, for example, affect the 2016 Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election that same year. It is clear from Putin’s many recent speeches that he had never really abandoned an understanding of geopolitics that rested on spheres of influence and always struggled to understand why NATO should continue to exist, much less to expand. If the alliance’s purpose had been to defend the West against the Soviets, after the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO’s expansion effectively made the entirety of Europe—and particularly the former Warsaw Pact states—an American sphere of influence. For Putin, this was an unacceptable outcome. Beginning with its assault on Georgia in 2008, Russia has relied on hybrid warfare and the use of proxy armed forces—efforts that escalated with the illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea and culminated in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Ukraine war—and the settlement terms that now appear to be emerging—mark an even more pronounced return to nineteenth century–style geopolitics in which great powers dictate terms to weaker states. Russia, along with the U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has demanded that Ukraine accept territorial losses and remain outside Western military alliances, an outcome that would render the country a satellite of Russia. If these pressures succeed, the final outcome will normalize the use of military force to advance national interests—and, more dangerously, reward its use. That distinction is crucial and new. Although major powers have attempted to use force to get their way throughout the past few decades, their attempts have consistently backfired and failed to prove that force is an effective tool for advancing national interests. The U.S. military’s interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were all costly failures. Russia’s military efforts on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad failed, and its incursion into Ukraine was faltering. The greatest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II has now gifted it victory.

An older style of power politics is fast becoming entrenched in other ways, too. Establishing spheres of influence involves a dominant power abridging the sovereignty of geographically proximate states—as Trump is seeking to do with Canada, Greenland, and Mexico and as China is attempting with Taiwan. A political order based on spheres of influence also relies on other great powers’ tacit agreement not to interfere in each other’s spheres.

OPEN CIRCUIT

Measured by its economic and military might, Russia is no longer a great power. But the way today’s Russia is often conflated with the Soviet Union gives it perceived power beyond its actual means—it remains a potent nuclear power. In a scenario in which the United States, China, and Russia all agree that they have a vital interest in avoiding a nuclear war, acknowledging each other’s spheres of influence can serve as a mechanism to deter escalation. Negotiations to end the war in Ukraine could resemble a new Yalta, with China playing a role akin to the one the United Kingdom played in 1945. At Yalta, Britain—weakened by World War II but still considered a great power thanks to its legacy of empire—balanced U.S. and Soviet interests while securing its own geopolitical concerns.

Neatly carving up spheres of influence, however, has become a much trickier project than it was at Yalta. It was easier to delineate—and to respect—geographically coherent spheres of influence in a less globalized world dependent on steel and oil; today, the critical resources that large powers need are spread out across the globe. Taiwan is a particular flash point because the chips it produces are critical to countries’ growth and national security; the United States cannot afford to let China dominate access to those chips. Neither does the United States want to permit Russia sole access to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals. A country’s maritime strength has become much more important: it is more possible than ever to imagine Japan and Taiwan within a U.S. sphere of influence, even though they neighbor China. This is why China is seeking to become a maritime power and working tirelessly to disrupt U.S. maritime influence.

Even if Trump and Putin move toward a more cooperative relationship with Xi, that could leave European states to fend for themselves. Countries such as Germany and France may be forced to develop independent security strategies. Eastern European states, particularly Poland and the Baltics, would likely push for greater defense commitments that their fellow European states may be unable or unwilling to provide. That outcome would also undermine the strategic importance of U.S. allies in Asia, forcing them to seek alternative defense arrangements—or even nuclearization. The European Union could be moved to evolve into a sovereign federal state more closely resembling the United States. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom each remain capable middle powers, and France and the United Kingdom have their own nuclear deterrent, but together—and perhaps only together—a united Europe would have significantly less to fear from China, Russia, and the United States both militarily and economically.

The rules-based international order might still reassert itself.

If, instead, the United States and Russia align against China, then Japan and South Korea in particular may find themselves trying to balance between Washington and Beijing, yielding more independent foreign policies, increased military self-reliance, and efforts to diversify their security and economic agreements. Japan might accelerate its military buildup and seek closer ties to regional partners such as Australia and India, while South Korea could attempt to hedge its position by deepening its relationship with China.

If Russia aligns more closely with China—and Europe remains firmly aligned with the United States—that would reinforce a Cold War–style two-bloc system. If Russia (wary of giving the impression that it is subordinate to China) and European states pursue a more independent path, however, that could contribute to a more multipolar world in which they act as swing powers, leveraging their influence between China and the United States. In this case, global geopolitics would resemble a hybrid of nineteenth-century great-power maneuvering with twenty-first-century strategic blocs. Australia would face difficult choices regarding its economic and security alignments. It could strengthen its defense cooperation with the United States, deepen its engagement with India and Japan, and increase military spending to bolster its deterrence. But if China were to secure its desired sphere of influence in Asia, Australia might seek to emerge as a regional stabilizer, asserting greater autonomy instead of remaining a junior partner in a U.S.-led bloc.

Spheres of influence are rarely static; they are constantly contested. The reemergence of spheres of influence signals that the nature of the global order is being tested. This shift could lead to a transition back to the power politics of earlier eras. But there is an alternative: after experiencing a few cycles of destabilizing crises, the international system might reassert itself, reverting to a rules-based order centered on multilateral cooperation, economic globalization, and U.S.-led or collective security arrangements that discourage expansionist ambitions.

For the time being, however, the United States is no longer serving as a reliable stabilizer. Where Washington, until recently, was considered the primary check on regionally expansionist regimes, it now appears to be encouraging those same regimes, and even imitating them. Whether this transition ultimately returns to a predictable balance of power or inaugurates a prolonged period of instability and war will depend on how effectively spheres of influence are contested—and how far countries such as China, India, Iran, Russia, and the United States are willing to go to secure them.

 

O Caminho para o Autoritarismo Americano - Steven Levitsky e Lucan A. Way (Foreign Affairs)

O Caminho para o Autoritarismo Americano

Steven Levitsky e Lucan A. Way

Foreign Affairs

11 de fevereiro de 2025

Ilustração de Emmanuel Polanco

Traduzido por IA Deepseek e ChatGPT

A primeira eleição de Donald Trump para a presidência em 2016 desencadeou uma defesa vigorosa da democracia por parte do establishment americano. Mas seu retorno ao cargo foi recebido com uma indiferença impressionante. Muitos dos políticos, comentaristas, figuras da mídia e líderes empresariais que viam Trump como uma ameaça à democracia oito anos atrás agora tratam essas preocupações como exageradas — afinal, a democracia sobreviveu ao seu primeiro mandato. Em 2025, preocupar-se com o destino da democracia americana tornou-se quase ultrapassado.

O momento dessa mudança de humor não poderia ser pior, pois a democracia está em maior perigo hoje do que em qualquer outro momento da história moderna dos EUA. Os Estados Unidos vêm regredindo há uma década: entre 2014 e 2021, o índice global de liberdade da Freedom House, que classifica todos os países em uma escala de zero a 100, rebaixou os EUA de 92 (empatados com a França) para 83 (abaixo da Argentina e empatados com Panamá e Romênia), onde permanecem.

Os famosos freios e contrapesos constitucionais do país estão falhando. Trump violou a regra cardinal da democracia ao tentar anular os resultados de uma eleição e bloquear a transferência pacífica de poder. No entanto, nem o Congresso nem o Judiciário o responsabilizaram, e o Partido Republicano — apesar da tentativa de golpe — o renomeou para presidente. Trump conduziu uma campanha abertamente autoritária em 2024, prometendo processar seus rivais, punir a mídia crítica e implantar o exército para reprimir protestos. Ele venceu e, graças a uma decisão extraordinária da Suprema Corte, desfrutará de ampla imunidade presidencial durante seu segundo mandato.

A democracia sobreviveu ao primeiro mandato de Trump porque ele não tinha experiência, plano ou equipe. Ele não controlava o Partido Republicano quando assumiu o cargo em 2017, e a maioria dos líderes republicanos ainda estava comprometida com as regras democráticas do jogo. Trump governou com republicanos do establishment e tecnocratas, e eles em grande parte o contiveram. Nada disso é verdade agora. Desta vez, Trump deixou claro que pretende governar com leais. Ele agora domina o Partido Republicano, que, purgado de suas forças anti-Trump, aquiesce a seu comportamento autoritário.

A democracia americana provavelmente entrará em colapso durante o segundo mandato de Trump, no sentido de que deixará de atender aos critérios padrão de uma democracia liberal: sufrágio universal adulto, eleições livres e justas e ampla proteção das liberdades civis.

O colapso da democracia nos Estados Unidos não dará origem a uma ditadura clássica, em que as eleições são uma farsa e a oposição é presa, exilada ou morta. Mesmo em um cenário de pior caso, Trump não será capaz de reescrever a Constituição ou derrubar a ordem constitucional. Ele será limitado por juízes independentes, federalismo, as forças armadas profissionalizadas do país e as altas barreiras para reformas constitucionais. Haverá eleições em 2028, e os republicanos poderão perdê-las.

Mas o autoritarismo não requer a destruição da ordem constitucional. O que está por vir não é uma ditadura fascista ou de partido único, mas um autoritarismo competitivo — um sistema em que os partidos competem em eleições, mas o abuso de poder pelo titular inclina o campo de jogo contra a oposição. A maioria das autocracias que surgiram desde o fim da Guerra Fria se enquadram nessa categoria, incluindo o Peru de Alberto Fujimori, a Venezuela de Hugo Chávez e a atual El Salvador, Hungria, Índia, Tunísia e Turquia. Sob o autoritarismo competitivo, a arquitetura formal da democracia, incluindo eleições multipartidárias, permanece intacta. As forças de oposição são legais e atuam abertamente, competindo seriamente pelo poder. As eleições são frequentemente batalhas acirradas em que os titulares têm que suar para vencer. E, de vez em quando, os titulares perdem, como aconteceu na Malásia em 2018 e na Polônia em 2023. Mas o sistema não é democrático, porque os titulares manipulam o jogo, usando a máquina do governo para atacar oponentes e cooptar críticos. A competição é real, mas injusta.

O autoritarismo competitivo transformará a vida política nos Estados Unidos. Como a enxurrada inicial de ordens executivas de Trump, de constitucionalidade duvidosa, deixou claro, o custo da oposição pública aumentará consideravelmente: doadores do Partido Democrata podem ser alvos da Receita Federal; empresas que financiam grupos de direitos civis podem enfrentar maior escrutínio fiscal e legal ou ver seus empreendimentos obstruídos por reguladores. Meios de comunicação críticos provavelmente enfrentarão ações judiciais por difamação ou outras ações legais, bem como políticas retaliatórias contra suas empresas-mãe. Os americanos ainda poderão se opor ao governo, mas a oposição será mais difícil e arriscada, levando muitas elites e cidadãos a decidir que a luta não vale a pena. A falha em resistir, no entanto, pode abrir caminho para o entrincheiramento autoritário — com consequências graves e duradouras para a democracia global.

O ESTADO ARMADO

O segundo governo Trump pode violar liberdades civis básicas de maneiras que subvertem claramente a democracia. O presidente, por exemplo, poderia ordenar que o exército atirasse em manifestantes, como ele supostamente quis fazer durante seu primeiro mandato. Ele também poderia cumprir sua promessa de campanha de lançar a "maior operação de deportação da história americana", visando milhões de pessoas em um processo repleto de abusos que inevitavelmente levaria à detenção equivocada de milhares de cidadãos americanos.

Mas grande parte do autoritarismo que está por vir assumirá uma forma menos visível: a politização e o armamento da burocracia governamental. Os estados modernos são entidades poderosas. O governo federal dos EUA emprega mais de dois milhões de pessoas e tem um orçamento anual de quase US$ 7 trilhões. Funcionários do governo servem como árbitros importantes da vida política, econômica e social. Eles ajudam a determinar quem é processado por crimes, cujos impostos são auditados, quando e como regras e regulamentos são aplicados, quais organizações recebem status de isenção fiscal, quais agências privadas obtêm contratos para credenciar universidades e quais empresas obtêm licenças críticas, concessões, contratos, subsídios, isenções tarifárias e resgates. Mesmo em países como os Estados Unidos, que têm governos relativamente pequenos e laissez-faire, essa autoridade cria uma infinidade de oportunidades para os líderes recompensarem aliados e punirem oponentes. Nenhuma democracia está totalmente livre de tal politização. Mas quando os governos armam o estado, usando seu poder para sistematicamente desfavorecer e enfraquecer a oposição, eles minam a democracia liberal. A política se torna como uma partida de futebol em que os árbitros, os jardineiros e os marcadores trabalham para uma equipe sabotar seu rival.

É por isso que todas as democracias estabelecidas têm conjuntos elaborados de leis, regras e normas para evitar o armamento do estado. Isso inclui judiciários independentes, bancos centrais, autoridades eleitorais e serviços civis com proteções de emprego. Nos Estados Unidos, a Lei Pendleton de 1883 criou um serviço civil profissionalizado em que a contratação é baseada no mérito. Funcionários federais são proibidos de participar de campanhas políticas e não podem ser demitidos ou rebaixados por motivos políticos. A grande maioria dos mais de dois milhões de funcionários federais há muito desfruta de proteção do serviço civil. No início do segundo mandato de Trump, apenas cerca de 4.000 desses funcionários eram nomeados políticos.

Os Estados Unidos também desenvolveram um conjunto extenso de regras e normas para evitar a politização de instituições estatais-chave. Isso inclui a confirmação pelo Senado de nomeados presidenciais, mandatos vitalícios para juízes da Suprema Corte, segurança de mandato para o presidente do Federal Reserve, mandatos de dez anos para diretores do FBI e mandatos de cinco anos para diretores da Receita Federal. As forças armadas são protegidas da politização pelo que o estudioso de direito Zachary Price descreve como "uma camada incomumente espessa de estatutos" que regem a nomeação, promoção e remoção de oficiais militares. Embora o Departamento de Justiça, o FBI e a Receita Federal tenham permanecido um tanto politizados até a década de 1970, uma série de reformas pós-Watergate efetivamente acabou com o armamento partidário dessas instituições.

Funcionários públicos profissionais frequentemente desempenham um papel crítico na resistência aos esforços do governo para armar agências estatais. Eles têm servido como a linha de frente da defesa da democracia nos últimos anos no Brasil, Índia, Israel, México e Polônia, bem como nos Estados Unidos durante o primeiro governo Trump. Por esse motivo, uma das primeiras medidas tomadas por autocratas eleitos como Nayib Bukele em El Salvador, Chávez na Venezuela, Viktor Orbán na Hungria, Narendra Modi na Índia e Recep Tayyip Erdogan na Turquia foi purgar funcionários públicos profissionais de agências públicas responsáveis por investigar e processar irregularidades, regular a mídia e a economia e supervisionar eleições — e substituí-los por leais. Depois que Orbán se tornou primeiro-ministro em 2010, seu governo retirou proteções-chave do serviço civil dos funcionários públicos, demitiu milhares e os substituiu por membros leais do partido governista Fidesz. Da mesma forma, o partido Lei e Justiça da Polônia enfraqueceu as leis do serviço civil, eliminando o processo de contratação competitivo e preenchendo a burocracia, o judiciário e as forças armadas com aliados partidários.

Trump e seus aliados têm planos semelhantes. Por um lado, Trump reviveu seu esforço do primeiro mandato para enfraquecer o serviço civil, reinstaurando o Anexo F, uma ordem executiva que permite ao presidente isentar dezenas de milhares de funcionários públicos das proteções do serviço civil em empregos considerados "de caráter confidencial, de determinação de políticas, de formulação de políticas ou de defesa de políticas". Se implementado, o decreto transformará dezenas de milhares de funcionários públicos em empregados "a vontade", que podem ser facilmente substituídos por aliados políticos. O número de nomeados partidários, já maior no governo dos EUA do que na maioria das democracias estabelecidas, pode aumentar mais de dez vezes. A Heritage Foundation e outros grupos de direita gastaram milhões de dólares recrutando e avaliando um exército de até 54.000 leais para preencher cargos no governo. Essas mudanças podem ter um efeito mais amplo de intimidação em todo o governo, desencorajando funcionários públicos de questionar o presidente. Finalmente, a declaração de Trump de que demitiria o diretor do FBI, Christopher Wray, e o diretor da Receita Federal, Danny Werfel, antes do fim de seus mandatos levou ambos a renunciar, abrindo caminho para sua substituição por leais com pouca experiência em suas respectivas agências.

Uma vez que agências-chave como o Departamento de Justiça, o FBI e a Receita Federal estejam repletas de leais, os governos podem usá-las para três fins antidemocráticos: investigar e processar rivais, cooptar a sociedade civil e proteger aliados de processos.

CHOQUE E LEI

O meio mais visível de armar o estado é por meio de processos seletivos. Praticamente todos os governos autocráticos eleitos implantam ministérios da justiça, promotorias públicas e agências fiscais e de inteligência para investigar e processar políticos rivais, empresas de mídia, editores, jornalistas, líderes empresariais, universidades e outros críticos. Em ditaduras tradicionais, os críticos são frequentemente acusados de crimes como sedição, traição ou conspiração para insurreição, mas os autocratas contemporâneos tendem a processar críticos por infrações mais mundanas, como corrupção, evasão fiscal, difamação e até violações menores de regras obscuras. Se os investigadores procurarem o suficiente, geralmente podem encontrar pequenas infrações, como renda não declarada em declarações de imposto de renda ou não conformidade com regulamentos raramente aplicados.

Trump declarou repetidamente sua intenção de processar seus rivais, incluindo a ex-deputada republicana Liz Cheney e outros legisladores que integraram o comitê da Câmara que investigou o ataque de 6 de janeiro de 2021 ao Capitólio dos EUA. Em dezembro de 2024, republicanos da Câmara pediram uma investigação do FBI sobre Cheney. Os esforços do primeiro governo Trump para armar o Departamento de Justiça foram em grande parte frustrados internamente, então desta vez, Trump buscou nomeados que compartilhavam seu objetivo de perseguir inimigos percebidos. Sua indicada para procuradora-geral, Pam Bondi, declarou que os "procuradores de Trump serão processados", e sua escolha para diretor do FBI, Kash Patel, repetidamente pediu o processamento dos rivais de Trump. Em 2023, Patel até publicou um livro com uma "lista de inimigos" de funcionários públicos a serem visados.

Como o governo Trump não controlará os tribunais, a maioria dos alvos de processos seletivos não acabará na prisão. Mas o governo não precisa prender seus críticos para causar danos a eles. Alvos de investigação serão forçados a dedicar tempo, energia e recursos consideráveis para se defender; eles gastarão suas economias com advogados, suas vidas serão perturbadas, suas carreiras profissionais serão desviadas e suas reputações serão prejudicadas. No mínimo, eles e suas famílias sofrerão meses ou anos de ansiedade e noites sem dormir.

Os esforços de Trump para usar agências governamentais para assediar seus adversários percebidos não se limitarão ao Departamento de Justiça e ao FBI. Uma variedade de outros departamentos e agências pode ser implantada contra críticos. Governos autocráticos, por exemplo, rotineiramente usam autoridades fiscais para visar oponentes em investigações politicamente motivadas. Na Turquia, o governo Erdogan destruiu o grupo de mídia Dogan Yayin, cujos jornais e redes de TV estavam relatando corrupção no governo, acusando-o de evasão fiscal e impondo uma multa devastadora de US$ 2,5 bilhões que forçou a família Dogan a vender seu império de mídia para aliados do governo. Erdogan também usou auditorias fiscais para pressionar o Grupo Koc, o maior conglomerado industrial da Turquia, a abandonar seu apoio a partidos de oposição.

O governo Trump poderia implantar as autoridades fiscais contra críticos de maneira semelhante. Os governos Kennedy, Johnson e Nixon politizaram a Receita Federal antes que o escândalo de Watergate da década de 1970 levasse a reformas. Um influxo de nomeados políticos enfraqueceria essas salvaguardas, potencialmente deixando doadores democratas na mira. Como todas as doações individuais de campanha são divulgadas publicamente, seria fácil para o governo Trump identificar e visar esses doadores; de fato, o medo de tal visaria poderia desencorajar indivíduos de contribuir para políticos da oposição em primeiro lugar.

O status de isenção fiscal também pode ser politizado. Como presidente, Richard Nixon trabalhou para negar ou atrasar o status de isenção fiscal para organizações e think tanks que ele considerava politicamente hostis. Sob Trump, tais esforços poderiam ser facilitados pela legislação antiterrorismo aprovada em novembro de 2024 pela Câmara dos Representantes, que concede ao Departamento do Tesouro o poder de retirar o status de isenção fiscal de qualquer organização que suspeite estar apoiando o terrorismo, sem a necessidade de divulgar provas para justificar tal ato. Como o “apoio ao terrorismo” pode ser definido de forma muito ampla, Trump poderia, nas palavras do deputado democrata Lloyd Doggett, “usá-lo como uma espada contra aqueles que ele considera seus inimigos políticos”.

A administração Trump quase certamente usará o Departamento de Educação contra universidades, que, como centros de ativismo oposicionista, são alvos frequentes da ira de governos autoritários competitivos. O Departamento de Educação distribui bilhões de dólares em financiamento federal para universidades, supervisiona as agências responsáveis pela acreditação de faculdades e fiscaliza o cumprimento dos títulos VI e IX, leis que proíbem instituições educacionais de discriminar com base em raça, cor, origem nacional ou sexo. Essas capacidades raramente foram politizadas no passado, mas líderes republicanos pediram sua aplicação contra escolas de elite.

Autocratas eleitos também costumam usar processos por difamação e outras ações legais para silenciar críticos na mídia. No Equador, em 2011, por exemplo, o presidente Rafael Correa ganhou um processo de US$ 40 milhões contra um colunista e três executivos de um dos principais jornais do país por publicarem um editorial chamando-o de “ditador”. Embora figuras públicas raramente ganhem tais processos nos Estados Unidos, Trump tem feito amplo uso de diversas ações legais para desgastar veículos de mídia, tendo como alvos ABC News, CBS News, The Des Moines Register e Simon & Schuster. Sua estratégia já começou a dar frutos. Em dezembro de 2024, a ABC tomou a chocante decisão de resolver um processo por difamação movido por Trump, pagando-lhe US$ 15 milhões para evitar um julgamento no qual provavelmente teria vencido. Os proprietários da CBS também estariam considerando um acordo em um processo movido por Trump, demonstrando como ações judiciais infundadas podem ser eficazes politicamente.

A administração não precisa atacar diretamente todos os seus críticos para silenciar a maior parte da dissidência. Lançar alguns ataques de grande visibilidade pode servir como um poderoso efeito dissuasório. Uma ação legal contra Liz Cheney seria acompanhada de perto por outros políticos; um processo contra The New York Times ou Harvard teria um efeito inibidor em dezenas de outras mídias e universidades.

ARMADILHA DO MEL

Um estado instrumentalizado não é apenas uma ferramenta para punir opositores. Ele também pode ser usado para angariar apoio. Governos em regimes autoritários competitivos usam rotineiramente a política econômica e decisões regulatórias para recompensar indivíduos, empresas e organizações politicamente alinhadas. Líderes empresariais, empresas de mídia, universidades e outras instituições têm tanto a ganhar quanto a perder com decisões do governo sobre antitruste, concessão de licenças, contratos governamentais, isenções regulatórias e status de isenção fiscal. Se acreditarem que essas decisões são tomadas com base em critérios políticos e não técnicos, terão um forte incentivo para se alinharem aos governantes.

O setor empresarial é o exemplo mais claro desse potencial de cooptação. Grandes empresas americanas têm muito em jogo em relação às decisões antitruste, tarifárias e regulatórias do governo dos EUA, além da concessão de contratos governamentais. (Em 2023, o governo federal gastou mais de US$ 750 bilhões, quase 3% do PIB dos EUA, em contratos.) Para autocratas em ascensão, decisões políticas e regulatórias podem servir como incentivos e ameaças para atrair apoio empresarial. Essa lógica patrimonialista ajudou autocratas na Hungria, Rússia e Turquia a garantir a cooperação do setor privado. Se Trump enviar sinais claros de que agirá da mesma forma, as consequências políticas serão amplas. Se líderes empresariais perceberem que é mais lucrativo evitar financiar candidatos de oposição ou investir em mídia independente, mudarão seu comportamento.

De fato, essa mudança já começou. Em um fenômeno que a colunista do New York Times Michelle Goldberg chamou de “a Grande Capitulação”, poderosos CEOs que antes criticavam o comportamento autoritário de Trump agora correm para encontrá-lo, elogiá-lo e financiá-lo. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft e Toyota doaram cada uma US$ 1 milhão para financiar a posse de Trump, mais que o dobro de suas doações inaugurais anteriores. No início de janeiro, a Meta anunciou que estava encerrando suas operações de checagem de fatos—uma decisão que Trump se gabou de ter sido influenciada por suas ameaças de ação legal contra o proprietário da empresa, Mark Zuckerberg. O próprio Trump reconheceu que em seu primeiro mandato “todos estavam lutando contra mim”, mas agora “todos querem ser meus amigos”.

ESQUEMA DE PROTEÇÃO

Por fim, um estado instrumentalizado pode servir como um escudo legal para proteger funcionários do governo ou aliados que adotem comportamentos antidemocráticos. Um Departamento de Justiça leal a Trump, por exemplo, poderia ignorar ataques ou ameaças contra jornalistas, autoridades eleitorais, manifestantes e políticos oposicionistas.

Isso já aconteceu antes nos Estados Unidos. Durante e após a Reconstrução, o Ku Klux Klan e outros grupos supremacistas brancos ligados ao Partido Democrata travaram campanhas de terror no Sul, assassinando políticos negros e republicanos, queimando igrejas e intimidando eleitores negros. Esse terror, que ajudou a estabelecer quase um século de governo de partido único no Sul, foi possível devido à conivência das autoridades locais.

A primeira administração Trump viu um aumento na violência da extrema direita. As ameaças contra congressistas aumentaram mais de dez vezes. Essas ameaças tiveram impacto: segundo o senador republicano Mitt Romney, o medo da violência dos apoiadores de Trump dissuadiu alguns senadores republicanos de votar pelo impeachment após o ataque de 6 de janeiro de 2021.

A violência política diminuiu após janeiro de 2021, em parte porque centenas de participantes do ataque foram condenados e presos. Mas a promessa de Trump de perdoar quase todos os envolvidos no 6 de janeiro ao reassumir o cargo enviou a mensagem de que atores violentos ou antidemocráticos serão protegidos.

MANTER A LINHA

Os Estados Unidos estão à beira do autoritarismo competitivo. A administração Trump já começou a instrumentalizar instituições estatais contra opositores. A Constituição, sozinha, não pode salvar a democracia americana. Mesmo as constituições mais bem elaboradas contêm ambiguidades e lacunas que podem ser exploradas para fins antidemocráticos.

Trump será vulnerável. Seu apoio público limitado e seus inevitáveis erros criarão oportunidades para as forças democráticas—no Congresso, nos tribunais e nas eleições.

Mas a oposição só vencerá se permanecer no jogo. Enfrentar um regime autoritário competitivo pode ser exaustivo. Assediados e ameaçados, muitos críticos de Trump podem ser tentados a se retirar. Tal retirada seria perigosa. Quando o medo e a exaustão substituem o compromisso dos cidadãos com a democracia, o autoritarismo começa a se enraizar.

Autores:

Steven Levitsky é professor de Estudos Latino-Americanos e de Governo em Harvard e pesquisador sênior do Conselho de Relações Exteriores.

Lucan A. Way é professor de Democracia na Universidade de Toronto e membro da Royal Society do Canadá.

Eles são autores de Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump