A decadencia auto-induzida do imperio americano - Fareed Zakaria (Foreign Affairs)

The Self-Destruction of American Power

Washington Squandered the Unipolar Moment

Fareed Zakaria

Foreign Affairs, July-August 2019

Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behavior? That is a question that will be debated by historians for years to come. But at this point, we have enough time and perspective to make some preliminary observations.

As with most deaths, many factors contributed to this one. There were deep structural forces in the international system that inexorably worked against any one nation that accumulated so much power. In the American case, however, one is struck by the ways in which Washington—from an unprecedented position—mishandled its hegemony and abused its power, losing allies and emboldening enemies. And now, under the Trump administration, the United States seems to have lost interest, indeed lost faith, in the ideas and purpose that animated its international presence for three-quarters of a century.

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire. Writers are fond of dating the dawn of “the American century” to 1945, not long after the publisher Henry Luce coined the term. But the post–World War II era was quite different from the post-1989 one. Even after 1945, in large stretches of the globe, France and the United Kingdom still had formal empires and thus deep influence. Soon, the Soviet Union presented itself as a superpower rival, contesting Washington’s influence in every corner of the planet. Remember that the phrase “Third World” derived from the tripartite division of the globe, the First World being the United States and Western Europe, and the Second World, the communist countries. The Third World was everywhere else, where each country was choosing between U.S. and Soviet influence. For much of the world’s population, from Poland to China, the century hardly looked American.

The United States’ post–Cold War supremacy was initially hard to detect. As I pointed out in The New Yorker in 2002, most participants missed it. In 1990, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued that the world was dividing into three political spheres, dominated by the dollar, the yen, and the deutsche mark. Henry Kissinger’s 1994 book, Diplomacy, predicted the dawn of a new multipolar age. Certainly in the United States, there was little triumphalism. The 1992 presidential campaign was marked by a sense of weakness and weariness. “The Cold War is over; Japan and Germany won,” the Democratic hopeful Paul Tsongas said again and again. Asia hands had already begun to speak of “the Pacific century.”

U.S. hegemony in the post–Cold War era was like nothing the world had seen since the Roman Empire.

There was one exception to this analysis, a prescient essay in the pages of this magazine by the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer: “The Unipolar Moment,” which was published in 1990. But even this triumphalist take was limited in its expansiveness, as its title suggests. “The unipolar moment will be brief,” Krauthammer admitted, predicting in a Washington Post column that within a very short time, Germany and Japan, the two emerging “regional superpowers,” would be pursuing foreign policies independent of the United States.

Policymakers welcomed the waning of unipolarity, which they assumed was imminent. In 1991, as the Balkan wars began, Jacques Poos, the president of the Council of the European Union, declared, “This is the hour of Europe.” He explained: “If one problem can be solved by Europeans, it is the Yugoslav problem. This is a European country, and it is not up to the Americans.” But it turned out that only the United States had the combined power and influence to intervene effectively and tackle the crisis.

Similarly, toward the end of the 1990s, when a series of economic panics sent East Asian economies into tailspins, only the United States could stabilize the global financial system. It organized a $120 billion international bailout for the worst-hit countries, resolving the crisis. Time magazine put three Americans, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, on its cover with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Just as American hegemony grew in the early 1990s while no one was noticing, so in the late 1990s did the forces that would undermine it, even as people had begun to speak of the United States as “the indispensable nation” and “the world’s sole superpower.” First and foremost, there was the rise of China. It is easy to see in retrospect that Beijing would become the only serious rival to Washington, but it was not as apparent a quarter century ago. Although China had grown speedily since the 1980s, it had done so from a very low base. Few countries had been able to continue that process for more than a couple of decades. China’s strange mixture of capitalism and Leninism seemed fragile, as the Tiananmen Square uprising had revealed.

But China’s rise persisted, and the country became the new great power on the block, one with the might and the ambition to match the United States. Russia, for its part, went from being both weak and quiescent in the early 1990s to being a revanchist power, a spoiler with enough capability and cunning to be disruptive. With two major global players outside the U.S.-constructed international system, the world had entered a post-American phase. Today, the United States is still the most powerful country on the planet, but it exists in a world of global and regional powers that can—and frequently do—push back.

The 9/11 attacks and the rise of Islamic terrorism played a dual role in the decline of U.S. hegemony. At first, the attacks seemed to galvanize Washington and mobilize its power. In 2001, the United States, still larger economically than the next five countries put together, chose to ramp up its annual defense spending by an amount—almost $50 billion—that was larger than the United Kingdom’s entire yearly defense budget. When Washington intervened in Afghanistan, it was able to get overwhelming support for the campaign, including from Russia. Two years later, despite many objections, it was still able to put together a large international coalition for an invasion of Iraq. The early years of this century marked the high point of the American imperium, as Washington tried to remake wholly alien nations—Afghanistan and Iraq—thousands of miles away, despite the rest of the world’s reluctant acquiescence or active opposition.

Iraq in particular marked a turning point. The United States embarked on a war of choice despite misgivings expressed in the rest of world. It tried to get the UN to rubber-stamp its mission, and when that proved arduous, it dispensed with the organization altogether. It ignored the Powell Doctrine—the idea, promulgated by General Colin Powell while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, that a war was worth entering only if vital national interests were at stake and overwhelming victory assured. The Bush administration insisted that the vast challenge of occupying Iraq could be undertaken with a small number of troops and a light touch. Iraq, it was said, would pay for itself. And once in Baghdad, Washington decided to destroy the Iraqi state, disbanding the army and purging the bureaucracy, which produced chaos and helped fuel an insurgency. Any one of these mistakes might have been overcome. But together they ensured that Iraq became a costly fiasco.

After 9/11, Washington made major, consequential decisions that continue to haunt it, but it made all of them hastily and in fear. It saw itself as in mortal danger, needing to do whatever it took to defend itself—from invading Iraq to spending untold sums on homeland security to employing torture. The rest of the world saw a country that was experiencing a kind of terrorism that many had lived with for years and yet was thrashing around like a wounded lion, tearing down international alliances and norms. In its first two years, the George W. Bush administration walked away from more international agreements than any previous administration had. (Undoubtedly, that record has now been surpassed under President Donald Trump.) American behavior abroad during the Bush administration shattered the moral and political authority of the United States, as long-standing allies such as Canada and France found themselves at odds with it on the substance, morality, and style of its foreign policy.

OWN GOAL

So which was it that eroded American hegemony—the rise of new challengers or imperial overreach? As with any large and complex historical phenomenon, it was probably all of the above. China’s rise was one of those tectonic shifts in international life that would have eroded any hegemon’s unrivaled power, no matter how skillful its diplomacy. The return of Russia, however, was a more complex affair. It’s easy to forget now, but in the early 1990s, leaders in Moscow were determined to turn their country into a liberal democracy, a European nation, and an ally of sorts of the West. Eduard Shevardnadze, who was foreign minister during the final years of the Soviet Union, supported the United States’ 1990–91 war against Iraq. And after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russia’s first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, was an even more ardent liberal, an internationalist, and a vigorous supporter of human rights.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment was to simply stop paying attention.

Who lost Russia is a question for another article. But it is worth noting that although Washington gave Moscow some status and respect—expanding the G-7 into the G-8, for example—it never truly took Russia’s security concerns seriously. It enlarged NATO fast and furiously, a process that might have been necessary for countries such as Poland, historically insecure and threatened by Russia, but one that has continued on unthinkingly, with little concern for Russian sensitivities, and now even extends to Macedonia. Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive behavior makes every action taken against his country seem justified, but it’s worth asking, What forces produced the rise of Putin and his foreign policy in the first place? Undoubtedly, they were mostly internal to Russia, but to the extent that U.S. actions had an effect, they appear to have been damaging, helping stoke the forces of revenge and revanchism in Russia.

The greatest error the United States committed during its unipolar moment, with Russia and more generally, was to simply stop paying attention. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans wanted to go home, and they did. During the Cold War, the United States had stayed deeply interested in events in Central America, Southeast Asia, the Taiwan Strait, and even Angola and Namibia. By the mid-1990s, it had lost all interest in the world. Foreign-bureau broadcasts by NBC fell from 1,013 minutes in 1988 to 327 minutes in 1996. (Today, the three main networks combined devote roughly the same amount of time to foreign-bureau stories as each individual network did in 1988.) Both the White House and Congress during the George H. W. Bush administration had no appetite for an ambitious effort to transform Russia, no interest in rolling out a new version of the Marshall Plan or becoming deeply engaged in the country. Even amid the foreign economic crises that hit during the Clinton administration, U.S. policymakers had to scramble and improvise, knowing that Congress would appropriate no funds to rescue Mexico or Thailand or Indonesia. They offered advice, most of it designed to require little assistance from Washington, but their attitude was one of a distant well-wisher, not an engaged superpower.

Shamil Zhumatov / REUTERS

Unmarked Russian soldiers near Sevastopol, Crimea, March 2014

Ever since the end of World War I, the United States has wanted to transform the world. In the 1990s, that seemed more possible than ever before. Countries across the planet were moving toward the American way. The Gulf War seemed to mark a new milestone for world order, in that it was prosecuted to uphold a norm, limited in its scope, endorsed by major powers and legitimized by international law. But right at the time of all these positive developments, the United States lost interest. U.S. policymakers still wanted to transform the world in the 1990s, but on the cheap. They did not have the political capital or resources to throw themselves into the effort. That was one reason Washington’s advice to foreign countries was always the same: economic shock therapy and instant democracy. Anything slower or more complex—anything, in other words, that resembled the manner in which the West itself had liberalized its economy and democratized its politics—was unacceptable. Before 9/11, when confronting challenges, the American tactic was mostly to attack from afar, hence the twin approaches of economic sanctions and precision air strikes. Both of these, as the political scientist Eliot Cohen wrote of airpower, had the characteristics of modern courtship: “gratification without commitment.”

Of course, these limits on the United States’ willingness to pay prices and bear burdens never changed its rhetoric, which is why, in an essay for The New York Times Magazine in 1998, I pointed out that U.S. foreign policy was defined by “the rhetoric of transformation but the reality of accommodation.” The result, I said, was “a hollow hegemony.” That hollowness has persisted ever since.

THE FINAL BLOW

The Trump administration has hollowed out U.S. foreign policy even further. Trump’s instincts are Jacksonian, in that he is largely uninterested in the world except insofar as he believes that most countries are screwing the United States. He is a nationalist, a protectionist, and a populist, determined to put “America first.” But truthfully, more than anything else, he has abandoned the field. Under Trump, the United States has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and from engaging with Asia more generally. It is uncoupling itself from its 70-year partnership with Europe. It has dealt with Latin America through the prism of either keeping immigrants out or winning votes in Florida. It has even managed to alienate Canadians (no mean feat). And it has subcontracted Middle East policy to Israel and Saudi Arabia. With a few impulsive exceptions—such as the narcissistic desire to win a Nobel Prize by trying to make peace with North Korea—what is most notable about Trump’s foreign policy is its absence.

Massacre de Tiananmen: 30 anos depois China retorna aos tempos imperiais: documentos pos-massacre - Foreign Affairs

A revista Foreign Affairs transcreve excertos de uma reunião pós-massacre de Tiananmen que consolida o poder brutal do PCC contra modernizadores, liberais, democratas e "agentes do imperialismo", ratificando a linha do Comitê Central, e de Deng Xiaoping, de que a única forma de lidar com a dissidência era a repressão dos manifestantes na Praça da Paz Celestial.
Depois disso, a China embarcou numa experiência quase "helvética" de alternância no poder entre as diferentes linhas de liderança no Partido, por períodos determinados, o que foi rompido por Xi Jinping, quando ele decidiu retornar ao estilo imperial de dominação política, ou seja, eterna.
Não há muita novidade nas declarações dos velhos líderes do PCC, a não ser a repetição de velhos slogans stalinistas, profundamente idiotas, servindo apenas ao reforço da tirania do partido.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

The New Tiananmen Papers

Inside the Secret Meeting That Changed China

May 30, 2019

ESSAYForeign Affairs, May 30, 2019

Inside the Secret Meeting That Changed China

By Andrew J. Nathan

On April 15, 1989, the popular Chinese leader Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack in Beijing. Two years earlier, Hu had been cashiered from his post as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party for being too liberal. Now, in the days after his death, thousands of students from Beijing campuses gathered in Tiananmen Square, in central Beijing, to demand that the party give him a proper sendoff. By honoring Hu, the students expressed their dissatisfaction with the corruption and inflation that had developed during the ten years of “reform and opening” under the country’s senior leader, Deng Xiaoping, and their disappointment with the absence of political liberalization. Over the next seven weeks, the party leaders debated among themselves how to respond to the protests, and they issued mixed signals to the public. In the meantime, the number of demonstrators increased to perhaps as many as a million, including citizens from many walks of life. The students occupying the square declared a hunger strike, their demands grew more radical, and demonstrations spread to hundreds of other cities around the country. Deng decided to declare martial law, to take effect on May 20.

But the demonstrators dug in, and Deng ordered the use of force to commence on the night of June 3. Over the next 24 hours, hundreds were killed, if not more; the precise death toll is still unknown. The violence provoked widespread revulsion throughout Chinese society and led to international condemnation, as the G-7 democracies imposed economic sanctions on China. Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, had advocated a conciliatory approach and had refused to accept the decision to use force. Deng ousted him from his position, and Zhao was placed under house arrest—an imprisonment that ended only when he died, in 2005.

A little over two weeks later, on June 19–21, the party’s top decision-making body, the Politburo, convened what it termed an “enlarged” meeting, one that included the regime’s most influential retired elders. The purpose of the gathering was to unify the divided party elite around Deng’s decisions to use force and to remove Zhao from office. The party’s response to the 1989 crisis has shaped the course of Chinese history for three decades, and the Politburo’s enlarged meeting shaped that response. But what was said during the meeting has never been revealed—until now.

On the 30th anniversary of the violent June 4 crackdown, New Century Press, a Hong Kong–based publisher, will publish Zuihou de mimi: Zhonggong shisanjie sizhong quanhui “liusi” jielun wengao (The Last Secret: The Final Documents From the June Fourth Crackdown), a group of speeches that top officials delivered at the gathering. New Century obtained the transcripts (and two sets of written remarks) from a party official who managed to make copies at the time. In 2001, this magazine published excerpts from The Tiananmen Papers, a series of official reports and meeting minutes that had been secretly spirited out of China and that documented the fierce debates and contentious decision-making that unfolded as the party reacted to the protests in the spring of 1989. Now, these newly leaked speeches shed light on what happened after the crackdown, making clear the lessons party leaders drew from the Tiananmen crisis: first, that the Chinese Communist Party is under permanent siege from enemies at home colluding with enemies abroad; second, that economic reform must take a back seat to ideological discipline and social control; and third, that the party will fall to its enemies if it allows itself to be internally divided.

The speeches offer a remarkable behind-the-scenes look at authoritarian political culture in action—and a sign of what was to come in China as, in later decades, the party resorted to ever more sophisticated and intrusive forms of control to combat the forces of liberalization. Reading the transcripts, one can see serving officials closing ranks with the elderly retired officials who still held great sway in the early post-Mao period. Those who had long feared that Deng’s reforms were too liberal welcomed the crackdown, and those who had long favored liberal reforms fell into line.

The speeches also make clear how the lessons taken from Tiananmen continue to guide Chinese leadership today: one can draw a direct line connecting the ideas and sentiments expressed at the June 1989 Politburo meeting to the hard-line approach to reform and dissent that President Xi Jinping is following today. The rest of the world may be marking the 30-year anniversary of the Tiananmen crisis as a crucial episode in China’s recent past. For the Chinese government, however, Tiananmen remains a frightening portent. Even though the regime has wiped the events of June 4 from the memories of most of China’s people, they are still living in the aftermath.

THE PARTY LINE

Participants in the enlarged Politburo meeting were not convened to debate the wisdom of Deng’s decisions. Rather, they were summoned to perform a loyalty ritual, in which each speaker affirmed his support by endorsing two documents: a speech that Deng gave on June 9 to express gratitude to the troops who had carried out the crackdown and a report prepared by Zhao’s hard-line rival, Premier Li Peng, detailing Zhao’s errors in handling the crisis. (Those two documents have long been publicly available.)

It is not clear who, exactly, attended the Politburo meeting. But at least 17 people spoke, and each began his remarks with the words “I completely agree with” or “I completely support,” referring to Deng’s speech and Li’s report. All agreed that the student demonstrations had started as a “disturbance” (often translated as “turmoil”). They agreed that only when the demonstrators resisted the entry of troops into Beijing on June 2 did the situation turn into a “counterrevolutionary riot” that had to be put down by force. Each speech added personal insights, which served to demonstrate the sincerity of the speaker’s support for Deng’s line. Through this ceremony of affirmation, a divided party sought to turn the page and reassert control over a sullen society.

In analyzing why a “disturbance” had occurred in the first place, and why it evolved into a riot, the speakers revealed a profound paranoia about domestic and foreign enemies. Xu Xiangqian, a retired marshal in the People’s Liberation Army, stated:

The facts prove that the turmoil of the past month and more, which finally developed into a counterrevolutionary riot, was the result of the linkup of domestic and foreign counterrevolutionary forces, the result of the long-term flourishing of bourgeois liberalization. . . . Their goal was a wild plan to overturn the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, to topple the socialist People’s Republic of China, and to establish a bourgeois republic that would be anticommunist, antisocialist, and in complete vassalage to the Western powers.

Peng Zhen, the former chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, echoed those sentiments:

For some time, an extremely small group of people who stubbornly promoted bourgeois liberalization cooperated with foreign hostile forces to call for revising our constitution, schemed to destroy [Deng’s] Four Cardinal Principles [for upholding socialism and Communist Party rule] and to tear down the cornerstones of our country; they schemed to change . . . our country’s basic political system and to promote in its place an American-style separation of three powers; they schemed to change our People’s Republic of democratic centralism led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant alliance into a totally westernized state of capitalist dictatorship.

Others put an even finer point on this theme, evoking the early days of the Cold War to warn of American subversion. “Forty years ago, [U.S. Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles said that the hope for the restoration [of capitalism] in China rested on the third or fourth [postcommunist] generation,” railed Song Renqiong, the vice chair of the party’s Central Advisory Commission. “Now, the state of political ideology among a portion of the youth is worrisome. We must not let Dulles’ prediction come true.”

THE FALL GUY

Many speakers contended that ideological rot had set in under Hu, Zhao’s predecessor. Hu had served as general secretary from 1982 to 1987, when Deng’s reform policy began to introduce foreign trade and investment, private enterprise, and elements of market pricing. Along with these reforms, China had seen an influx of pro-Western ideas among journalists, writers, academics, students, the newly emerging class of private entrepreneurs, and even the general public. The conservatives who had prevailed on Deng to remove Hu from office had blamed Hu for failing to stem this trend. They had hoped that Zhao would do better. Instead, they charged, Zhao did not pay sufficient attention to ideological discipline, and the party lost control over public opinion.

Former Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang in the garden of his home in central Beijing, China, June 1998

The speakers at the Politburo meeting believed that most of the people who had joined in the demonstrations were misguided but not hostile to the regime. They had been manipulated by “an extremely small number of bad people,” as one put it. Song Ping, an economic planner and Politburo member, even claimed that Zhao and his reformist allies had hatched a nefarious plot to split the party, overthrow Deng, and democratize China. Several other speakers supported this idea, without offering proof.

The speakers also railed against foreign enemies who they alleged had colluded to worsen the crisis. According to Song, “During the student movement, the United States stuck its hands in, in many ways. The Voice of America spread rumors and incitement every day, trying to make sure that China would stay in chaos.” Vice President Wang Zhen expressed a widely shared view that Washington’s interference was just the latest move in a decades-long plot to overthrow communism:

After the October Revolution [of 1917], 14 imperialist countries intervened militarily in the newborn Soviet regime, and Hitler attacked in 1941. After World War II, U.S. imperialists supported Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese Civil War and then invaded Korea and Vietnam. Now they’d like to achieve their goal the easy way, by using “peaceful evolution”: . . . buying people with money, cultural and ideological subversion, sending spies, stealing intelligence, producing rumors, stimulating turmoil, supporting our internal hostile forces, everything short of direct invasion.

By demonizing domestic critics and exaggerating the role of foreign forces, the victorious conservatives revealed their blindness to the real problems affecting their regime. Prime among them was the alienation that the party’s atavistic methods of political control had produced in students, intellectuals, and the rising middle class. Instead, they blamed the reforms. The party’s now ascendant conservative faction had been worried about Deng’s policies all along, as Zhao recounted in his secretly composed and posthumously published memoir, Prisoner of the State. He had battled conservative critics throughout his tenure as premier (from 1980 to 1987), when he served as the chief implementer of Deng’s vision, and Deng had often been forced to compromise on his ambitions in order to placate hard-liners.

The conservatives who condemned Zhao at the Politburo meeting often did so by attacking policies that were actually Deng’s. Wang, for example, warned that economic reforms were leading China into a convergence with the West, but he pretended that these reform ideas were Zhao’s, not Deng’s. (He and others referred to Zhao as “comrade” because Zhao was still a party member.) Wang said:

We need to acknowledge that the reform and opening that Comrade Xiaoping talked about was different in its essence from the reform and opening that Comrade Zhao Ziyang talked about. Comrade Xiaoping’s reform and opening aimed to uphold national sovereignty and ethnic respect, uphold the socialist road, uphold the combination of planned economy and market regulation, continue to protect the creative spirit of bitter struggle and to direct investment toward basic industries and agriculture. Comrade Zhao Ziyang’s reform and opening was to take the capitalist road, increase consumption, generate waste and corruption. Comrade Zhao Ziyang was definitely not the implementer of Comrade Xiaoping’s reform-and-opening policy but the distorter and destroyer of it.

Speakers also pilloried Zhao for failing to adequately support the People’s Liberation Army, even though military affairs had been under Deng’s control. Marshal Nie Rongzhen defended the military’s centrality to the stability of the state in stark terms:

In recent years, with the relaxation of the international situation and under the influence of the bourgeois liberal thought trend, our awareness of the need for dictatorship [that is, armed force as a guarantee of regime stability] weakened, political thought work became lax, and some comrades mistakenly thought that the military was not important and lashed out at military personnel. There were some conflicts between military units and local authorities in places where they were stationed. At the same time, some of our comrades in the military were not at ease in their work and wanted to be demobilized and return home, where they thought they had better prospects. All this is extremely wrong. I think these comrades’ thinking is clear now, thanks to the bloody lesson we have just had: the barrel of the gun cannot be thrown down!

Although policy disagreements among the party’s leadership had paved the way for the Tiananmen crisis, the armed crackdown did nothing to set a clear path forward. Indeed, the Politburo speeches betrayed the lack of solutions that the party leadership was able to offer for China’s problems, as members fell back on hollow slogans, with calls to “strengthen party spirit and wipe out factionalism” and to “unify the masses, revitalize the national spirit, and promote patriotic thought.” Owing to this paucity of genuine policy thinking, the consensus that formed in the wake of Tiananmen was fragile from the start.

A few days after the Politburo meeting, the party gathered its full 175-person Central Committee, together with alternates, members of the Central Advisory Commission, and high-ranking observers, for the Fourth Plenum of the 13th Central Committee. Zhao’s successor as general secretary, Jiang Zemin, delivered a speech in which he tried to fudge the differences between Deng and the conservatives. He claimed that Deng had never wanted to loosen ideological discipline: “From 1979 to 1989, Comrade Xiaoping has repeatedly insisted on the need to expand the education and the struggle to firmly support the Four Cardinal Principles and oppose bourgeois liberalization. But these important views of Comrade Xiaoping were not thoroughly implemented.” Jiang pledged to unify the party and to seek advice from “the old generation of revolutionaries.”

Despite Jiang’s promises, the former Politburo member Bo Yibo worried that the new leadership would continue to face opposition. “We cannot afford another occurrence” of division, he warned. “In my view, history will not allow us to go through [a leadership purge] again.”

After 1989, the conservatives remained ascendant for three years, until the aging Deng made his attention-getting “trip to the South” in 1992. By visiting “special economic zones” (places where the government allowed foreign-invested, export-oriented enterprises to operate) and issuing statements such as “whoever is against reform must leave office,” Deng forced Jiang and his colleagues to resume economic liberalization. This was Deng’s last political act. It helped usher in rapid economic growth but did nothing to revive political liberalization.

CORE BELIEFS

After coming to power in the wake of the Tiananmen crisis, Jiang spent more than a dozen years as general secretary, from 1989 to 2002. But like Zhao, he was never able to achieve complete control over the party. Indeed, none of Zhao’s successors was able to do so—until Xi. Zhao’s failure on this count was discussed at the enlarged Politburo meeting in a way that reveals why the Chinese system tends toward one-man rule, despite the costs and risks of concentrated power.

The words of President Yang Shangkun are especially interesting because he was Deng’s most trusted lieutenant and personal representative and in that capacity had participated as an observer and mediator in a series of crucial Politburo Standing Committee meetings during the Tiananmen crisis. He also served as Deng’s emissary to the military during the crackdown. Yang faulted Zhao for failing to make himself what would later be called a “core” (hexin) leader—that is, for failing to build a working consensus among all the other senior acting and retired leaders, even though many of them fundamentally disagreed with him. Zhao, he complained, “did not accept the opinions raised by others, nor did he perform any serious self-criticism. On the contrary, he kept the other members at a distance and did things by himself, which pushed the work of the Standing Committee into a situation where there was only a practical division of labor and not a collective leadership. This was a serious violation of the supreme organizational principle of collective leadership of the party.”

What does it mean to establish an effective collective leadership? Peng, the former chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, explained how it worked as an ideal:

In the party, . . . we should and must implement complete, true, high-level democracy. In discussing issues, every opinion can be voiced, whoever is correct should be obeyed, everyone is equal before the truth. It is forbidden to report only good news and not bad news, to refuse to listen to differing opinions. If a discussion does not lead to full unanimity, what to do? The minority must follow the majority. Only in this way can the Four Cardinal Principles be upheld, the entire party unified, the people unified.

But the party has seldom, if ever, achieved this ideal. Zhao, his critics agreed, never found a way to work with those who disagreed with him and instead listened to the wrong people. “He took advice only from his own familiar group of advisers,” Song Ping charged. “[We should not] lightly trust ill-considered advice to make wholesale use of Western theories put forward by people whose Marxist training is superficial, whose expertise is infirm, and who don’t have a deep understanding of China’s national conditions.”

Zhao’s detractors complained that instead of trying to persuade them, Zhao would turn to Deng for support. Wan Li, chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, complained that at a meeting in December 1988, Zhao ignored critical comments. “Worse,” Wan declared, “he went and reported to Comrade Xiaoping what [the critics] had said, and then . . . bragged about how Comrade Xiaoping supported him. Isn’t this using Comrade Xiaoping to suppress democracy?”

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

These vivid portrayals of life at the top—rife with factionalism and backstabbing—demonstrate the dilemma created by the party’s leadership doctrine. The leader must solve problems decisively while also accepting, and even inviting, criticism and dissent from a host of elders and rivals who, given the complexity of China’s problems, are bound to have different ideas about what to do. Mao Zedong did not do so (he purged a long series of rivals instead), and neither did Deng, who contended with powerful equals who frequently forced him to rein in his reform ideas. Deng devised the idea of a core leader after the Tiananmen crisis to encapsulate this demand, reflecting his and other senior leaders’ anxiety that an inability to work together would cripple the leading group going forward, as it had done in the recent crisis.

Although the first post-Tiananmen leader, Jiang, claimed the label of “core,” he did not establish true dominance over the system, and his successor, Hu Jintao, did not even claim the label. Xi has made himself a true core and awarded himself the label in 2016, after four years in office. He achieved that position by purging all possible rivals, packing the Politburo and the Central Military Commission with people loyal to him, creating an atmosphere of fear in the party and the military with an anticorruption campaign that targeted his opponents, and moving quickly to crush any sign of dissent from lawyers, feminists, environmental campaigners, and ordinary citizens. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the Chinese political system abhors genuine democracy and presses its leaders toward dictatorship.

Yet centralized leadership has not resolved the abiding contradiction between reform and control that generated the Tiananmen crisis 30 years ago. The more China pursues wealth and power through domestic modernization and engagement with the global economy, the more students, intellectuals, and the rising middle class become unwilling to adhere to a 1950s-style ideological conformity, and the more conservative party elites react to social change by calling for more discipline in the party and conformity in society. That tension has only worsened as Xi has raised incomes, expanded higher education, moved people to the cities, and encouraged consumption. China now has a large, prosperous middle class that is quiescent out of realistic caution but yearns for more freedom. Xi has responded by strengthening the state’s grip on the Internet and other media sources, intensifying propaganda, constraining academic freedom, expanding surveillance, fiercely repressing ethnic minorities in western China, and arresting lawyers, feminists, and other activists who dare to push for the rule of law.

Marshal Nie was right when he told the post-Tiananmen Politburo meeting that “the counterrevolutionary riot has been pacified, but the thought trend of bourgeois liberalization is far from being eliminated. The battle to occupy the ideological front will remain a bitter one. We must resolve to fight a protracted battle; we must prepare for several generations to battle for several decades!” The party did indeed prepare, and the battle rages on today, with Xi counting on the power concentrated in his hands to stave off divisions within the party and opposition in society. So far, he seems to have succeeded: economic development has continued, and another episode of dissent on the scale of the Tiananmen incident seems unthinkable today.

A diplomacia americana vai se recuperar algum dia do trumpismo? - Daniel W. Drezner (Foreign Affairs)

(Eu fico pensando o mesmo da diplomacia brasileira sob o bolsonarismo. PRA)

This Time Is Different

Why U.S. Foreign Policy Will Never Recover

By Daniel W. Drezner Foreign Affairs, May-June 2019

This Time Is Different

Why U.S. Foreign Policy Will Never Recover

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a foreign policy community in possession of great power must be in want of peace of mind. Climate change, the Middle East, terrorism, trade, nonproliferation—there is never a shortage of issues and areas for those who work in international relations to fret about. If you were to flip through the back issues of Foreign Affairs, you would find very few essays proclaiming that policymakers had permanently sorted out a problem. Even after the Cold War ended peacefully, these pages were full of heated debate about civilizations clashing.

It is therefore all too easy to dismiss the current angst over U.S. President Donald Trump as the latest hymn from the Church of Perpetual Worry. This is hardly the first time observers have questioned the viability of a U.S.-led global order. The peril to the West was never greater than when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik—until U.S. President Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system. The oil shocks of the 1970s posed a grave threat to the liberal international order—but then came the explosion of the U.S. budget and trade deficits in the 1980s. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks seemed like an existential threat to the system—until the 2008 financial crisis. Now there is Trump. It is worth asking, then, whether the current fretting is anything new. For decades, the sky has refused to fall.

But this time really is different. Just when many of the sources of American power are ebbing, many of the guardrails that have kept U.S. foreign policy on track have been worn down. It is tempting to pin this degradation on Trump and his retrograde foreign policy views, but the erosion predated him by a good long while. Shifts in the way Americans debate and conduct foreign policy will make it much more difficult to right the ship in the near future. Foreign policy discourse was the last preserve of bipartisanship, but political polarization has irradiated that marketplace of ideas. Although future presidents will try to restore the classical version of U.S. foreign policy, in all likelihood, it cannot be revived.

This time really is different.

The American foundations undergirding the liberal international order are in grave danger, and it is no longer possible to take the pillars of that order for granted. Think of the current moment as a game of Jenga in which multiple pieces have been removed but the tower still stands. As a result, some observers have concluded that the structure remains sturdy. But in fact, it is lacking many important parts and, on closer inspection, is teetering ever so slightly. Like a Jenga tower, the order will continue to stand upright—right until the moment it collapses. Every effort should be made to preserve the liberal international order, but it is also time to start thinking about what might come after its end.

The gravity of the problem is dawning on some members of the foreign policy community. Progressives are debating among themselves whether and how they should promote liberal values abroad if they should return to power. Conservatives are agonizing over whether the populist moment represents a permanent shift in the way they should think about U.S. foreign policy. Neither camp is really grappling with the end of equilibrium, however. The question is not what U.S. foreign policy can do after Trump. The question is whether there is any viable grand strategy that can endure past an election cycle.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

In foreign policy, failures garner more attention than successes. During the Cold War, the “loss of China,” the rise of the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis all overshadowed the persistently effective grand strategy of containment. Only once the Soviet Union broke up peacefully was the United States’ Cold War foreign policy viewed as an overarching success. Since then, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, along with the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of populism, have dominated the discussion. It is all too easy to conclude that the United States’ recent foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster.

At the same time that all these negative developments were taking place, however, underlying trends were moving in a more U.S.-friendly direction. The number of interstate wars and civil wars was falling dramatically, as was every other metric of international violence. Democracy was spreading, liberating masses of people from tyranny. Globalization was accelerating, slashing extreme poverty. The United States could take a great deal of credit for these gains, because the liberal order it nurtured and expanded had laid the foundations for decades of relative peace and prosperity.

Washington made mistakes, of course, such as invading Iraq and forcing countries to remove restrictions on the flow of capital across their borders. As misguided as these errors were, and as much as they alienated allies in the moment, they did not permanently weaken the United States’ position in the world. U.S. soft power suffered in the short term but recovered quickly under the Obama administration. The United States still managed to attract allies, and in the case of the 2011 intervention in Libya, it was NATO allies begging Washington to use force, not vice versa. Today, the United States has more treaty allies than any other country in the world—more, in fact, than any country ever.

The United States was able to weather the occasional misstep in large part because its dominance rested on such sturdy foundations. Its geographic blessings are ample: bountiful natural resources, two large oceans to the east and the west, and two valued partners to the north and the south. The country has been so powerful for so long that many of its capabilities seem to be fundamental constants of the universe rather than happenstance. The United States has had the most powerful military in the world since 1945, and its economy, as measured by purchasing power parity, became the biggest around 1870. Few people writing today about international affairs can remember a time when the United States was not the richest and most powerful country.

Long-term hegemony only further embedded the United States’ advantage. In constructing the liberal international order, Washington created an array of multilateral institutions, from the UN Security Council to the World Bank, that privileged it and key allies. Having global rules of the game benefits everyone, but the content of those rules benefited the United States in particular. The Internet began as an outgrowth of a U.S. Department of Defense initiative, providing to the United States an outsize role in its governance. American higher education attracts the best of the best from across the world, as do Silicon Valley and Hollywood, adding billions of dollars to the U.S. economy. An immigrant culture has constantly replenished the country’s demographic strength, helping the United States avoid the aging problems that plague parts of Europe and the Pacific Rim.

The United States has also benefited greatly from its financial dominance. The U.S. dollar replaced the British pound sterling as the world’s reserve currency 75 years ago, giving the United States the deepest and most liquid capital markets on the globe and enhancing the reach and efficacy of its economic statecraft. In recent decades, Washington’s financial might has only grown. Even though the 2008 financial crisis began in the American housing market, the end result was that the United States became more, rather than less, central to global capital markets. U.S. capital markets proved to be deeper, more liquid, and better regulated than anyone else’s. And even though many economists once lost sleep over the country’s growing budget deficits, that has turned out to be a non-crisis. Many now argue that the U.S. economy has a higher tolerance for public debt than previously thought.

Diplomatically, all these endowments ensured that regardless of the issue at hand, the United States was always viewed as a reliable leader. Its dense and enduring network of alliances and partnerships signaled that the commitments Washington made were seen as credible. American hegemony bred resentment in some parts of the globe, but even great-power rivals trusted what the United States said in international negotiations.

At the same time as the international system cemented the United States’ structural power, the country’s domestic politics helped preserve a stable foreign policy. A key dynamic was the push and pull between different schools of thought. An equilibrium was maintained—between those who wanted the country to adopt a more interventionist posture and those who wanted to husband national power, between those who preferred multilateral approaches and those who preferred unilateral ones. When one camp overreached, others would seize on the mistake to call for a course correction. Advocates of restraint invoked the excesses of Iraq to push for retrenchment. Supporters of intervention pointed to the implosion of Syria to argue for a more robust posture.

Thanks to the separation of powers within the U.S. government, no one foreign policy camp could accrue too much influence. When the Nixon White House pursued a strictly realpolitik approach toward the Soviet Union, Congress forced human rights concerns onto the agenda. When the Obama administration was leery of sanctioning Iran’s central bank, congressional hawks forced it to take more aggressive action. Time and time again, U.S. foreign policy reverted to the mean. Overreaching was eventually followed by restraint. Buck-passing led to leading. The results of these crosscutting pressures were far from perfect, but they ensured that U.S. foreign policy did not deviate too far from the status quo. Past commitments remained credible into the future.

For decades, these dynamics, global and domestic, kept crises from becoming cataclysmic. U.S. foreign policy kept swinging back into equilibrium. So what has changed? Today, there is no more equilibrium, and the structural pillars of American power are starting to buckle.

THE NEW NORMAL

Despite the remarkable consistency of U.S. foreign policy, behind the scenes, some elements of American power were starting to decline. As measured by purchasing power parity, the United States stopped being the largest economy in the world a few years ago. Its command of the global commons has weakened as China’s and Russia’s asymmetric capabilities have improved. The accumulation of “forever wars” and low-intensity conflicts has taxed the United States’ armed forces.

Outward consistency also masked the dysfunction that was afflicting the domestic checks on U.S. foreign policy. For starters, public opinion has ceased to act as a real constraint on decision-makers. Paradoxically, the very things that have ensured U.S. national security—geographic isolation and overwhelming power—have also led most Americans to not think about foreign policy, and rationally so. The trend began with the switch to an all-volunteer military, in 1973, which allowed most of the public to stop caring about vital questions of war and peace. The apathy has only grown since the end of the Cold War, and today, poll after poll reveals that Americans rarely, if ever, base their vote on foreign policy considerations.

The marketplace of ideas has broken down, too. The barriers to entry for harebrained foreign policy schemes have fallen away as Americans’ trust in experts has eroded. Today, the United States is in the midst of a debate about whether a wall along its southern border should be made of concrete, have see-through slats, or be solar-powered.The ability of experts to kill bad ideas isn’t what it used to be. The cognoscenti might believe that their informed opinions can steady the hands of successive administrations, but they are operating in hostile territory.

To be fair, the hostility to foreign policy experts is not without cause. The interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya were massive screwups. Despite what the experts predicted, globalization has not transformed China into a Jeffersonian democracy. The supposedly infallible advice enshrined in the Washington consensus ended up triggering multiple financial crises. Economists and foreign affairs advisers advocated austerity, despite the pain it caused the poor and the middle class, and consistently cried wolf about an increase in interest rates that has yet to come. No wonder both Barack Obama and Trump have taken such pleasure in bashing the Washington establishment.

Institutional checks on the president’s foreign policy prerogatives have also deteriorated—primarily because the other branches of government have voluntarily surrendered them. The passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which exacerbated the Great Depression, showed that Congress could not responsibly execute its constitutional responsibilities on trade. With the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, it delegated many of those powers to the president, marking the beginning of a sustained decline in congressional oversight. More recently, political polarization has rendered Congress a dysfunctional, petulant mess, encouraging successive administrations to enhance the powers of the executive branch. Nor has the judicial branch acted as much of an impediment. The Supreme Court has persistently deferred to the president on matters of national security, as it did in 2018 when it ruled in favorof the Trump administration’s travel ban.

Foreign policy analysts largely celebrated this concentration of power in the executive branch, and prior to Trump, their logic seemed solid. They pointed to the public’s ignorance of and Congress’ lack of interest in international relations. As political gridlock and polarization took hold, elected Democrats and Republicans viewed foreign policy as merely a plaything for the next election. And so most foreign policy elites viewed the president as the last adult in the room.

What they failed to plan for was the election of a president who displays the emotional and intellectual maturity of a toddler. As a candidate, Trump gloried in beating up on foreign policy experts, asserting that he could get better results by relying on his gut. As president, he has governed mostly by tantrum. He has insulted and bullied U.S. allies. He has launched trade wars that have accomplished little beyond hurting the U.S. economy. He has said that he trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin more than his own intelligence briefers. His administration has withdrawn from an array of multilateral agreements and badmouthed the institutions that remain. The repeated attacks on the EU and NATO represent a bigger strategic mistake than the invasion of Iraq. In multiple instances, his handpicked foreign policy advisers have attempted to lock in decisions before the president can sabotage them with an impulsive tweet. Even when his administration has had the germ of a valid idea, Trump has executed the resulting policy shifts in the most ham-handed manner imaginable.

Most of these foreign policy moves have been controversial, counterproductive, and perfectly legal. The same steps that empowered the president to create foreign policy have permitted Trump to destroy what his predecessors spent decades preserving. The other branches of government endowed the White House with the foreign policy equivalent of a Ferrari; the current occupant has acted like a child playing with a toy car, convinced that he is operating in a land of make-believe.

After Trump, a new president will no doubt try to restore sanity to U.S. foreign policy. Surely, he or she will reverse the travel ban, halt the hostile rhetoric toward long-standing allies, and end the attacks on the world trading system. These patches will miss the deeper problem, however. Political polarization has eroded the notion that presidents need to govern from the center. Trump has eviscerated that idea. The odds are decent that a left-wing populist will replace the current president, and then an archconservative will replace that president. The weak constraints on the executive branch will only make things worse. Congress has evinced little interest in playing a constructive role when it comes to foreign policy. The public is still checked out on world politics. The combination of worn-down guardrails and presidents emerging from the ends of the political spectrum may well whipsaw U.S. foreign policy between “America first” and a new Second International. The very concept of a consistent, durable grand strategy will not be sustainable.

The combination of worn-down guardrails and presidents emerging from the ends of the political spectrum may well whipsaw U.S. foreign policy between “America first” and a new Second International.

In that event, only the credulous will consider U.S. commitments credible. Alliances will fray, and other countries will find it easier to flout global norms. All the while, the scars of the Trump administration will linger. The vagaries of the current administration have already forced a mass exodus of senior diplomats from the State Department. That human capital will be difficult to replace. For the past two years, the number of international students who have enrolled in U.S. university degree programs has fallen as nativism has grown louder. It will take a while to convince foreigners that this was a temporary spasm. After the Trump administration withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, it forced SWIFT, the private-sector network that facilitates international financial transactions, to comply with unilateral U.S. sanctions against Iran, spurring China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom to create an alternative payment system. That means little right now, but in the long run, both U.S. allies and U.S. rivals will learn to avoid relying on the dollar.

Perhaps most important, the Trump administration has unilaterally surrendered the set of ideals that guided U.S. policymakers for decades. It is entirely proper to debate how much the United States should prioritize the promotion of human rights, democracy, and the rule of law across the world. What should be beyond debate, however, is that it is worthwhile to promote those values overseas and enshrine them at home. Trump’s ugly rhetoric makes a mockery of those values. Although a future president might sound better on these issues, both allies and rivals will remember the current moment. The seeds of doubt have been planted, and they will one day sprout.

The factors that give the United States an advantage in the international system—deep capital markets, liberal ideas, world-class higher education—have winner-take-all dynamics. Other actors will be reluctant to switch away from the dollar, Wall Street, democracy, and the Ivy League. These sectors can withstand a few hits. Excessive use of financial statecraft, alliances with overseas populists, or prolonged bouts of anti-immigrant hysteria, however, will force even close allies to start thinking about alternatives. The American advantage in these areas will go bankrupt much like Mike Campbell in The Sun Also Rises did: “gradually and then suddenly.” Right now, the United States’ Jenga tower is still standing. Remove a few more blocks, however, and the wobbling will become noticeable to the unaided eye.

What would collapse look like? The United States would remain a great power, of course, but it would be an ordinary and less rich one. On an increasing number of issues, U.S. preferences would carry minimal weight, as China and Europe coordinated on a different set of rules. Persistent domestic political polarization would encourage Middle Eastern allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, to line up with Republicans and European allies, such as Germany and the United Kingdom, to back Democrats. The continued absence of any coherent grand strategy would leave Latin America vulnerable to a new Great Game as other great powers vied for influence there. Demographic pressures would tax the United States, and the productivity slowdown would make those pressures even worse. Trade blocs would sap global economic growth; reduced interdependence would increase the likelihood of a great-power war. Climate change would be mitigated nationally rather than internationally, leaving almost everyone worse off.

WHAT, ME WORRY?

It would be delightful if, ten years from now, critics mocked this essay’s misplaced doom and gloom. The state of U.S. foreign policy seemed dire a decade ago, during the depths of the financial crisis and the war in Iraq. That turned out to be more of a blip than a trend. It remains quite possible now that Trump’s successor can repair the damage he has wreaked. And it is worth remembering that for all the flaws in the U.S. foreign policy machine, other great powers are hardly omnipotent. China’s and Russia’s foreign policy successes have been accompanied by blowback, from pushback against infrastructure projects in Asia to a hostile Ukraine, that will make it harder for those great powers to achieve their revisionist aims.

The trouble with “after Trump” narratives, however, is that the 45th president is as much a symptom of the ills plaguing U.S. foreign policy as he is a cause. Yes, Trump has made things much, much worse. But he also inherited a system stripped of the formal and informal checks on presidential power. That’s why the next president will need to do much more than superficial repairs. He or she will need to take the politically inconvenient step of encouraging greater congressional participation in foreign policy, even if the opposing party is in charge. Not every foreign policy initiative needs to be run through the Defense Department. The next president could use the bully pulpit to encourage and embrace more public debate about the United States’ role in the world. Restoring the norm of valuing expertise, while still paying tribute to the wisdom of crowds, would not hurt either. Nor would respecting democracy at home while promoting the rule of law abroad.

All these steps will make the political life of the next president more difficult. In most Foreign Affairs articles, this is the moment when the writer calls for a leader to exercise the necessary political will to do the right thing. That exhortation always sounded implausible, but now it sounds laughable. One hopes that the Church of Perpetual Worry does not turn into an apocalyptic cult. This time, however, the sky may really be falling.

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters Obama at a meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in the Oval Office, Washington, DC, May 2015 Goran Tomasevic / REUTERS U.S. and Afghan soliders in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, November 2012 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters  Trump and Putin at the Helsinki Summit in Finland, July 2018