Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;
Graham Allison, o teórico do processo decisório, ao analisar o famoso caso da crise dos mísseis soviéticos em Cuba, em 1962, discorre sobre o que ele chama de grande mito do nosso tempo: o de que vivemos sob uma ordem econômica liberal no pós--guerra.
Few ideas have gained more widespread currency within the U.S. foreign policy community in the past few years than that of the “liberal international rules-based order.” My article in the July edition of Foreign Affairs entitled “The Myth of the Liberal Order” provoked a firestorm. Forty-three distinguished international relations scholars (many of them friends from whom I have learned over the decades) bought space in The New York Times to publish a manifesto arguing that “the international order formed after World War II contributed to the longest period in modern history without war between major powers” (emphasis added).
As I noted in my response to this piece and others that the Editor of Foreign Affairs chose to publish, “contributed to” is carefully chosen language. It artfully avoids the question: by how much?
The only element of the postwar order that was, by itself, necessary to maintain the “long peace” was the combination of U.S. military and economic power with the determination of American leaders to use that power to contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union.
The central driver of U.S. engagement in the world during these decades was neither the desire to advance liberalism abroad nor the need to build a liberal international order. It was instead leaders’ determination to do whatever they deemed necessary to preserve liberal democracy in just one country—the United States—from what they saw as the existential threat of Soviet communism. Had there been no Soviet threat, can one imagine the Marshall Plan or NATO?
As we Americans are now struggling to make liberalism work at home, U.S. foreign policy should not cling to the status quo or attempt to return to an imagined past when the United States molded the world in its own image. Instead, we should revisit JFK’s concept of a “world safe for democracy”—liberal and illiberal alike.
I’m hoping the debate the article has provoked can help shed more light on this fuzzy, but extremely important, topic. If you have further reactions, I’ll be interested.
Graham Allison Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, Harvard Kennedy School Follow me on Twitter
Graham Allison | August 28, 2018 | Foreign Affairs
Few ideas have gained more widespread currency within the U.S. foreign policy community in the last few years than that of the liberal international order. In my recent essay, “The Myth of the Liberal Order,” I identified three core claims made by advocates of the order about its significance: “First, that the liberal order has been the principal cause of the so-called long peace among great powers for the past seven decades. Second, that constructing this order has been the main driver of U.S. engagement in the world over that period. And third, that U.S. President Donald Trump is the primary threat to the liberal order—and thus to world peace.” Each claim contains grains of truth, I argued, but each is more wrong than right.
Since the article was published, several scholars have pushed back. Rebecca Friedman Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper argue that the “liberal order is more than a myth.” And Michael J. Mazarr suggests that I have misread the order’s history and purpose. Their responses are serious and thoughtful, but they do little to undermine my argument.
The Long Peace
The most inconvenient fact for those who argue that the liberal order has played a major role in the long peace since World War II is that more than 40 of the 70 peaceful years took place during the Cold War. The absence of major power conflict, as I wrote, “was not the result of a liberal order but the byproduct of the dangerous balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States.” On this point, I quoted the historian John Lewis Gaddis in his definitive article on the long peace: “Without anyone’s having designed it,” he wrote, “and without any attempt whatever to consider the requirements of justice, the nations of the postwar era lucked into a system of international relations that, because it has been based upon realities of power, has served the cause of order—if not justice—better than one might have expected.”
Neither Lissner and Rapp-Hooper nor Mazarr attempts to defend the proposition that the liberal order led to the long peace. Mazarr comes closest to engaging with this argument directly when he says that he is “not aware of anyone who holds such an extreme view of the order’s importance.” But in my article, I quote the international relations scholar Joseph Nye making precisely this claim when he refers to “the demonstrable success of the order in helping secure and stabilize the world over the past seven decades.” Indeed, in recent years, many authors have asserted versions of this point in Foreign Affairs. Consider G. John Ikenberry’s suggestion, made last year, that “the defenders of the order should start by reclaiming the master narrative of the last 70 years. . . . The world has been spared great-power war.”
Last month, 43 distinguished international relations scholars bought space in The New York Times to publish a manifesto titled “Why We Should Preserve International Institutions and Order.” The strongest claim they make there is that “the international order formed after World War II . . . contribut[ed] to . . . the longest period in modern history without war between major powers.” “Contributed to” raises the question: By how much?
Determining the relative importance of the factors that prevented great power wars over the last 70 years is not just an academic exercise. If the long peace was no accident, something on which Lissner, Rapp-Hooper, Mazarr, and I all agree, then figuring out which factors mattered most is crucial to keeping it going. Mazarr claims that the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other institutions were “a complement to other factors underwriting peace and prosperity.” For each, we should ask: Was it necessary? Had it not existed, that is, would the great powers have gone to war? Then we should ask: Was it sufficient to ensure peace?
The only element of the postwar order that was, by itself, sufficient to maintain the peace was the combination of U.S. military and economic power with the determination of American leaders to use that power to contain and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union. I agree that in establishing the UN, creating the Bretton Woods institutions, reconstructing Germany and Japan as democracies, and promoting human rights, the United States was doing good and that undermining these aspects of global order harms U.S. national interests. But neither response makes a convincing case that any one of these was either sufficient or necessary for the long peace. It’s also worth noting that many illiberal alliances and alignments, from the Western alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II to the United States’ alignment with Communist China against the Soviet Union from the 1970s, also contributed to victory in both World War II and the Cold War.
The Soviet Threat
The second claim, that the need to build the liberal order drove the United States to abandon its traditional isolationism, is also well expressed by Nye. In his words, “The demonstrable success of the order . . . has led to a strong consensus that defending, deepening, and extending this system has been and continues to be the central task of U.S. foreign policy.”
I argue that, on the contrary, the central driver of U.S. engagement in the world during these decades was neither the desire to advance liberalism abroad nor the need to build a liberal international order. It was leaders’ determination to do whatever they deemed necessary to preserve liberal democracy in just one country—the United States—from what they saw as the existential threat of Soviet communism. Mazarr cites the historian Mark Mazower’s Governing the World to support his position that Washington’s original aim went beyond containment. But as Mazower himself rightly notes, “The model for [NATO] was the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance that had opened by talking about the UN and the need to avoid war among the signatories but was really a military alliance against a threat from outside the hemisphere.”
I agree with both responses that the liberal order forms part of the explanation for U.S. engagement abroad. As I argued, the United States has never aimed to preserve liberal democracy only at home. Its defining creed proclaims that God endowed all human beings with rights to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” When reconstructing its defeated adversaries after World War II and shoring up its allies in Western Europe, the United States sought to build liberal democracies with which it would share values as well as interests.
But those efforts were, I suggest, building blocks in an order designed first and foremost to defeat the Soviet Union. Had there been no Soviet threat, there would have been no Marshall Plan and no NATO. As I wrote, “The United States has never promoted liberalism abroad when it believed that doing so would pose a significant threat to its vital interests at home.”
Beyond Trump
When it comes to the third claim made by many proponents of the liberal order, that Trump marks the primary threat to global order, my respondents take a pass. We agree that Trump’s misunderstanding of the strength that comes from unity with allies and his withdrawal of the United States from initiatives championed by prior administrations aimed at promoting fair trade and constraining greenhouse gas emissions are undermining the international order. But I argue that the decline of U.S. global power, the meteoric rise of China, the resurgence of Russia, and, most of all, the long-term failures of American democracy are each more significant than Trump. Lissner and Rapp-Hooper seem to agree. As they aptly put it, “Trump may be more avatar than architect of the United States’ domestic unraveling,” and, “Global influence is shifting eastward, pushing the United States and Europe into second place.”
In the final chapter of my recent book on the China challenge, Destined for War, I ask, “What poses the single largest threat to America’s standing in the world?” “The answer,” I conclude, “is found in failures of the American political system.” The defining challenge for Americans today is nothing less than to reconstruct a working democracy within their borders. Unfortunately, too many Americans, especially in the foreign policy community, have lost the Founding Fathers’ keen sense of just how radical, audacious, and hazardous the U.S. experiment in self-government is. When Benjamin Franklin quipped that Americans had gotten “a Republic, if you can keep it,” and when Abraham Lincoln asked “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived . . . can long endure,” neither thought he was raising a rhetorical question.
As Americans try to make liberalism work at home, U.S. foreign policy should not cling to the status quo or attempt to return to an imagined past when the United States molded the world in its own image. As I wrote, Americans need “a surge of strategic imagination as far beyond the current conventional wisdom as the Cold War strategy that emerged over the four years after Kennan’s Long Telegram was from the Washington consensus in 1946.”
That is easy to say but hard to do. Americans might start by revisiting President John F. Kennedy’s call for a world order “safe for diversity”—liberal and illiberal alike—as they focus on the home front. Once again, Americans need to demonstrate the enduring truth of the idea on which their country was founded: that liberal democracy can deliver more of what citizens want than any other form of government known to mankind.
Ten years ago the journalist James Mann published a book called The China Fantasy, in which he criticized American policymakers for using something he called “the Soothing Scenario” to justify the policy of diplomatic and economic engagement with China. According to this view, China’s exposure to the benefits of globalization would lead the country to embrace democratic institutions and support the American-led world order. Instead, Mann predicted, China would remain an authoritarian country, and its success would encourage other authoritarian regimes to resist pressures to change.1
Mann’s prediction turned out to be true. China took advantage of the growing potential of unrestricted global commerce to emerge as the number one trading nation and the second-largest economy in the world. It is the top trading partner of every other country in Asia, not least because of its crucial position assembling parts that have been produced elsewhere in the region. Sixty-four countries have joined China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) infrastructure initiative, which was announced in 2013 and consists of ports, railways, roads, and airfields linking China to Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe—a “New Silk Road” that, if it succeeds, will greatly expand China’s economic and diplomatic influence. Twenty-nine heads of state attended Beijing’s OBOR conference in mid-May.
Meanwhile, China has remained an authoritarian, one-party state that is backed by an increasingly powerful military. China’s military budget has risen at the same rate as its GDP for the past quarter-century, from $17 billion in 1990 to $152 billion in 2017—a 900 percent increase. This has allowed China to acquire aircraft carriers, sophisticated missiles, advanced submarines, and cyberwar capabilities that challenge American military dominance in Asia. It has vastly expanded its naval presence in what it calls the “near seas” around its coast, and even into the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
China has attained this new position of power while mostly complying with the rules of the World Trade Organization, which it joined in 2001. Still, in 2016 Western governments found it necessary to renege on a commitment they made when China joined to give it full “market economy status” after fifteen years of membership. This status would have made it harder for other WTO members to sue China for “dumping”—selling products at less than market-price production cost to drive out competitors—but the promise to accord that status had been based on the expectation that China would turn into a Western-style market economy.
That has not happened. Instead, the state has continued to control the Chinese economy in its effort to expand the market share of Chinese enterprises both in China and abroad. Beijing has carried out industrial espionage to acquire advanced Western technology, forced the transfer of technology from Western to Chinese enterprises through joint ventures and merger agreements, and, for a time (although not now), suppressed the exchange value of its currency in order to stimulate exports. Since 2006, Beijing has used various forms of regulation that are not banned by the WTO to make it difficult for foreign businesses to enter and compete in its domestic market, and to give an advantage to Chinese enterprises—especially in cutting-edge fields like semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and information and communications technology.
China’s increasingly pervasive economic influence has contributed to the populist and antiglobalization movements that are now taking hold in many countries in the West, including in the US with Donald Trump. In a striking reversal, it was Chinese President Xi Jinping rather than a European or American leader who delivered a strong defense of globalization at the January 2017 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
President Barack Obama sought to strengthen US alliances in Asia in the hope of keeping China’s rise in check. By contrast, President Trump has questioned the value of alliances with Japan and South Korea, withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and for a time put a hold on American Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPS) in the South China Sea. At the Mar-a-Lago summit in April, Trump embarrassingly acted like Xi Jinping’s pupil on the question of North Korea’s growing nuclear menace, stating, “After listening [to Xi] for ten minutes, I realized it’s not so easy.” He then cast aside his campaign commitments to raise tariffs on China and challenge China on currency manipulation in what turned out to be the vain hope that China would solve the North Korea problem for him. To the contrary, the threat has only grown, with Pyongyang’s successful July 4 test of a long-range missile that may be capable of reaching Alaska.
To make matters worse, the Trump family have placed themselves conspicuously on China’s payroll, accepting future profits in the form of trademarks for both the Trump and Ivanka brands, and seeking Chinese investment in Kushner real estate projects. When China Labor Watch, a New York–based labor rights organization, published information on poor conditions in a factory where Ivanka’s brand-name shoes had recently been produced, China detained the group’s three field investigators, the only time CLW’s investigators have been detained for exposing the abuse of Chinese workers.2
These signs of confusion in American policy have accelerated the growth of China’s economic and political influence. In Asia, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte softened the previous Filipino administration’s position on its South China Sea territorial dispute with China and accepted a large Chinese trade and investment package; Malaysian leader Najib Razak agreed to the first purchase of Chinese vessels for his navy; Korean voters selected a new president, Moon Jae-in, who has promised closer relations with Beijing; and Vietnam has stepped up diplomatic and military relations with China.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has stuck to the American alliance, but if US policy continues to show weakness, Japan will ultimately face a choice either of compromising with China’s territorial claims in the East China Sea or of rearming itself more heavily, perhaps even with nuclear weapons. According to Graham Allison, director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, in his new book Destined for War, “As far ahead as the eye can see, the defining question about global order is whether China and the US can escape Thucydides’s Trap,” which he defines as a likely war between a dominant power and a rising power.
Two other recent books, however, while approaching the subject in very different ways, suggest that China is not as threatening as many commentators would have us believe. Michael Auslin, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institute, declares the end of the Asian Century before it has much begun, because leading Asian countries, including China, have not adopted the business-friendly economic practices, pro-democracy political reforms, and cooperative regional institutions that would enable them effectively to rival the West. Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian academic more on the left, argues instead that the emergence of China and other Asian powers is an accomplished fact that cannot be reversed, but that the power shift does not present a serious threat to Western interests. Although both books discuss all of Asia, China is central to their arguments.
Auslin’s analysis is grounded in the contested set of ideas that used to be called the Washington Consensus—the belief that free markets, free trade, and political democracy are necessary for economies to grow and political systems to be stable. Since the Chinese approach disregards this theory, Auslin thinks the country will stumble before it seriously challenges American preeminence. He sees many problems in the Chinese economy, including the excessive number and size of state-owned enterprises, opaque corporate governance, huge government debt (200 percent of GDP by some estimates), a property bubble, and overdependence on exports. But this adds up simply to a description of how the economy is run, not to an argument that this way of running it will not work.
In fact, the Chinese economy is not as vulnerable as Auslin thinks. First, because the Chinese currency, the yuan, is not freely convertible, it is difficult for yuan holders to invest on a large scale anywhere but China without government permission. To be sure, there is a dribble of capital abroad sufficient to allow the purchase of high-end real estate in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and New York, but this is hardly enough to starve investment in China or subject the yuan to currency speculation. Second, just as the US dollar enjoys the “exorbitant privilege” of being accepted everywhere as a bearer of value even though it is not backed by any tangible asset, so too the Chinese yuan is accepted by participants in the Chinese economy and even to a limited extent overseas as a bearer of value, which gives the government the ability to print money at will in order to stimulate economic growth, with limited risk of inflation.
Third, both the debtors and the creditors in the Chinese economy are mostly government entities, so the government can adjust their debt relationships without causing a financial crisis. Beijing worked its way out of previous debt overhangs by creating “asset management companies” (or “bad banks”) to take bad loans off the books of state banks, and it worked. Such tactics can be used again if necessary.
Auslin is more persuasive in suggesting the extent to which high-level corruption has damaged the legitimacy of China’s one-party rule, and how ineffective the regime’s heavy-handed propaganda is in its aim of reinforcing that legitimacy. Even so, surveys show that the Chinese public gives the regime credit for sustained economic growth and for carrying out a serious battle against corruption. Auslin agrees with an unnamed China specialist—apparently the well-respected George Washington University scholar David Shambaugh—that the Chinese regime has entered its “endgame.”3 This may be true, but the same prediction has been made so often for decades that it is hard to be convinced by it now. By seeing the Chinese regime and other Asian political systems like Thailand, Myanmar, and Malaysia that haven’t developed Western-style governments as examples of “unfinished revolutions,” Auslin commits the fallacy of conflating political stability with democratization.
Unlike Auslin, Stuenkel does not believe that Chinese power will fade, but he sees China’s ambitions as more economic than military. It is true that China has built and fortified sand islands in the South China Sea, increased its allocation of troops to UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, established a small naval base in Djibouti, used Chinese naval forces to evacuate some 36,000 Chinese workers from Libya, and dispatched ships to participate in the multilateral anti-piracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden.
But in Stuenkel’s view, these efforts are not likely to lead to the creation of a US-style global military empire. It would be difficult for China to defend its far-flung, fragile network of economic interests by chiefly military power. China’s enormous investments in resources and infrastructure abroad can pay off only if peace is maintained across these turbulent regions by political means, including respect for international law. According to Stuenkel, China wants nothing more than to preserve the main elements of the world trading order from which it has benefited so much, while gaining greater influence in the institutions that enforce and develop this order.
Donald Trump; drawing by James Ferguson
Because the US Congress refused until recently to authorize increased voting rights for China in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—and, one might add, because China accumulated a huge stock of foreign exchange that it needed to invest—Beijing set out to create what Stuenkel calls a “parallel order” of international economic institutions. He identifies twenty-two newly created multilateral institutions, ranging from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific, in which China is a participant and usually the leading member.
Stuenkel argues these are “parallel” rather than “alternative” institutions: they provide infrastructure investment, regulate trade, facilitate international payments, and carry out security and diplomatic dialogues in much the same way as similar Western-dominated institutions that they parallel. They operate according to rules that are consistent with existing institutions in the same fields, and their participants continue simultaneously as members of the older institutions. In Stuenkel’s view, their creation is a good thing:
[They] will provide additional platforms for cooperation (among both non-Western and between non-Western and Western powers), and spread the burden of contributing global public goods [such as UN peacekeeping operations, anti-piracy patrols, and the control of climate change] more evenly…. All these institutions will deepen China’s integration into the global economy, possibly reducing the risk of conflict, and lifting all boats.
Auslin and Stuenkel both present, to use James Mann’s phrase, “soothing scenarios”: either China’s rise will stall before it poses a serious threat to American interests, or it will bring new vitality to the existing international order. But both are too optimistic. Although China’s rate of growth has slowed from double digits to an official annual rate (which some economists think is exaggerated) of 6.7 percent in 2016, and will slow further as the economy matures, few believe it will fall below 3 percent in the foreseeable future.
As Stuenkel points out, at that rate it will inevitably overtake the US economy, even if the US were to accelerate its own rate of growth, simply because China’s population is four times as big as America’s. In a few more decades, China’s economy will be twice as big as that of the US. An economic or political crisis, if it occurs, can slow China’s rise, but China is not going back to the poverty of the pre-reform era.
Stuenkel is persuasive in arguing that Beijing cares chiefly about political stability at home and economic access abroad, and not about promoting its authoritarian political model to the rest of the world. Nor do China’s leaders seek, as some have suggested, to expel the United States from Asia, or to “rule the world.” They are, however, pursuing two goals that clash fundamentally with important American interests (leaving aside China’s abuse of the US–China economic relationship, which is a problem that can be gradually resolved through negotiations).
The first is its effort to alter the military balance in Asia. Along its long, exposed coastline, China is confronted with a string of American allies and partners: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam. There are some 60,000 American troops deployed in the area, and American bases in Guam and Pearl Harbor command the Pacific. Just beyond the line twelve nautical miles from the Chinese coast that defines its sovereign “territorial waters,” the US Seventh Fleet conducts regular intelligence-gathering and surveillance operations. Along its land borders China likewise confronts American deployments, alliances, and military cooperation arrangements—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, Mongolia, and India.
With China’s power rising, its rulers no longer accept being so tightly hemmed in. They are now in a position to press South Korea to reverse the deployment of an American Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system; to move Chinese military ships and submarines through strategic straits between the Japanese islands; to challenge the Japanese claim to the Senkakus, the disputed islands in the East China Sea; to pressure Taiwan to accept unification with China; and to harass US ships and planes in the South China Sea. These moves challenge the established American position in Asia.
The second serious clash of interests has to do with the freedoms of thought and speech. The regime is hypersensitive about its image because of its shallow legitimacy at home. This has led it not only to engage in standard public relations and media work around the world, but also to use diplomatic pressure, visa denials, financial influence, surveillance, and threats to try to control what journalists, scholars, and Chinese students and scholars abroad say about China. The effort to silence critics extends to human rights institutions like the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, where China works to assure that it and other authoritarian regimes are not criticized; it even reaches Hollywood, where studios eager to gain access to the Chinese market increasingly avoid unfavorable portrayals of China. This offensive poses a special challenge to the West, one in which the usual cliché about balancing values and interests in foreign policy does not apply. As China extends its efforts at thought control beyond its own borders, our values are our interests.
Some have suggested that the US scale back its position in Asia to accommodate China’s desire for greater military influence in its own region. In his 2011 book On China, Henry Kissinger proposed that the two sides agree on a “Pacific Community”—“a region to which the United States, China, and other states all belong and in whose peaceful development all participate.” Graham Allison’s ideas for how to avoid war are equally anodyne: “Understand what China is trying to do,” “Do strategy,” and “Make domestic challenges central.”
Other strategists have been more specific, proposing that the US and China establish a mutually acceptable security balance by making concessions to each other over Taiwan, the Senkakus, military deployments, and offensive and defensive missile systems. Through such an approach, Washington and Beijing could demonstrate that each does not seek to threaten the other’s core security interests.4
The difficulty with such proposals is that Beijing is likely to interpret them as asking it to accept an intrusive American presence just when the shifting power balance should allow that situation to be corrected. And on the US side, yielding preemptively to Chinese ambitions would destroy its credibility with all of its allies, not only in Asia but elsewhere as well. The resulting destabilization would not serve American or Chinese interests.
Auslin’s recommendations for managing the rise of China are for the US to strengthen its military presence in the region; build additional links—such as with India and Indonesia—on top of its existing alliance system; and intensify American pressures for democratic transformation. It should stick to these policies, he says, until “China’s leaders…come to appreciate the benefits of constructive engagement.” This is a grand vision that faces three obstacles—the lack of consistency across administrations in Washington needed to implement such a strategy; the unwillingness of countries like India, Indonesia, and even our formal allies South Korea and Japan to tilt so conspicuously against the largest and still-growing regional power; and the unlikelihood that China would come to accept this American posture as beneficial.
For his part, Stuenkel recommends that the United States enlarge the participation of the rising powers in existing institutions so they have a fair share of influence, encourage China and other rising powers to contribute even more to global public goods such as UN peacekeeping operations, anti-piracy patrols, and the control of climate change, and “fully embrace, rather than criticize or try to isolate” the new parallel economic institutions that China is creating. These are constructive ideas, but they do not address the core problems of regional security and human rights.
The US should cooperate with China in those areas where common interests exist, such as nonproliferation and climate change (the position of the Trump administration notwithstanding). And the US must push steadily to open the Chinese economy on a reciprocal basis—an effort that would have been greatly aided by staying in the TPP. But in order to respond successfully to China’s growing military power, the US must hold the line firmly where strategic interests clash, such as over Taiwan and the US naval presence in the South China Sea. Above all, the US must defend international standards of human rights and freedoms more strongly than it has in recent years; it makes no sense to defer to the loudly voiced sensitivities of the Chinese regime even as China interferes more and more often in our freedoms. Competition, friction, and testing between the United States and China are unavoidable, probably for decades. To navigate this process, the US needs an accurate assessment of China’s interests, but even more of its own.
Notes:
1 James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (Viking, 2007). ↩
2 John Ruwitch, “Activist Probing Factories Making Ivanka Trump Shoes in China Arrested: Group,” Reuters, May 31, 2017. ↩
3 David Shambaugh, China’s Future (Polity, 2016). ↩
4 For example, James Steinberg and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Strategic Reassurance and Resolve: US–China Relations in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), and Lyle J. Goldstein, Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US–China Rivalry (Georgetown University Press, 2015). ↩
Presidentes precisam, realmente, do conselho de historiadores? Precisam de um Conselho Assessor de Historiadores, como hoje possuem um para assuntos econômicos? Duvidoso que assim seja, ou melhor: seria desejável que assim fosse, mas eles provavelmente não têm tempo, nem paciência, para ficarem se encantando com histórias passadas para iluminar o presente e ficar planejando o futuro. Não tenho certeza de que os dois historiadores que assinam esta opinião pretendam criar um Historian of the Presidency Office, ou estejam buscando um emprego no próximo governo, mas parece bem assim: conselheiros do príncipe desejando evitar, por exemplo, uma nova confrontação estilo Guerra Fria, desta vez envolvendo a vigorosa China, ou mesma a decadente Rússia. Vamos ler, em todo caso... Paulo Roberto de Almeida
It isn’t
enough for a commander in chief to invite friendly academics to dinner. The
U.S. could avoid future disaster if policy makers started looking more to the
past.
It
is sometimes said
that most Americans live in “the United States of Amnesia.” Less widely
recognized is how many American policy makers live there too.
Speaking about his book Doomed
to Succeed: The U.S.-Israel Relationship From Truman to Obama, the American
diplomat Dennis Ross recently noted that “almost no administration’s leading
figures know the history of what we have done in the Middle East.” Neither do
they know the history of the region itself. In 2003, to take one example, when
President George W. Bush chose to topple Saddam Hussein, he did not appear to
fully appreciate either the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims or the
significance of the fact that Saddam’s regime was led by a Sunni minority that
had suppressed the Shiite majority. He failed to heed warnings that the
predictable consequence of his actions would be a Shiite-dominated Baghdad
beholden to the Shiite champion in the Middle East—Iran.
The problem is
by no means limited to the Middle East or to Bush. President Obama’s
inattention to the deep historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine led
him to underestimate the risks of closer ties between Ukraine and Europe. “I
don’t really even need George Kennan right now,” President Obama told The
New Yorker for a January 2014 article, referring to the great Cold War–era
diplomat and historian. By March, Russia had annexed Crimea.
To address this deficit,
it is not enough for a president to invite friendly historians to dinner, as
Obama has been known to do. Nor is it enough to appoint a court historian, as
John F. Kennedy did with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. We urge the next president
to establish a White House Council of Historical Advisers. Historians made
similar recommendations to Presidents Carter and Reagan during their
administrations, but nothing ever came of these proposals. Operationally, the
Council of Historical Advisers would mirror the Council of Economic Advisers,
established after World War II. A chair and two additional members would be
appointed by the president to full-time positions, and respond to assignments
from him or her. They would be supported by a small professional staff and
would be part of the Executive Office of the President.
For too long, history
has been disparaged as a “soft” subject by social scientists offering spurious
certainty. We believe it is time for a new and rigorous “applied history”—an
attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing precedents
and historical analogues. We not only want to see applied history incorporated
into the Executive Office of the President, alongside economic expertise; we
also want to see it developed as a discipline in its own right at American
universities, beginning at our own. When people refer to “applied history”
today, they are typically referring to training for archivists, museum
curators, and the like. We have in mind a different sort of applied history,
one that follows in the tradition of the modern historian Ernest May and the
political scientist Richard Neustadt. Their 1986 book, Thinking in Time,
provides the foundation on which we intend to build.
Mainstream historians take an event,
phenomenon, or era and attempt to explain what happened. They sometimes say
that they study the past “for its own sake.” Applied historians would take a
current predicament and try to identify analogues in the past. Their ultimate
goal would be to find clues about what is likely to happen, then suggest
possible policy interventions and assess probable consequences. You might say
that applied history is to mainstream history as medical practice is to
biochemistry, or engineering is to physics. But those analogies are not quite
right. In the realm of science, there is mutual respect between practitioners
and theorists. In the realm of policy, by contrast, there is far too often
mutual contempt between practitioners and academic historians. Applied history
can try to remedy that.
Imagine
that President obama had a Council of Historical Advisers today. What
assignments could he give it?
Start with the issue
that the president and his national-security team have been struggling with
most: isis. Recent statements indicate that the
administration tends to see isis as essentially a
new version of al-Qaeda, and that a top goal of U.S. national-security policy
is to decapitate it as al-Qaeda was decapitated with Osama bin Laden’s
assassination. But history suggests that isis is
quite different in structure from al-Qaeda and may even be a classic acephalous
network. When we searched for historical analogues to isis,
we came up with some 50 groups that were similarly brutal, fanatical, and
purpose-driven, including the Bolsheviks of the Russian Revolution. By
considering which characteristics of isis are most
salient, a Council of Historical Advisers might narrow this list to the most
relevant analogues. Study of these cases might dissuade the president from
equating isis with its recent forerunner.
The U.S. government’s
response to the 2008 financial crisis illustrates the value of this approach.
That September saw the biggest shock to the world economy since the Great
Depression. In a stroke of luck, the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the
time, Ben Bernanke, was a student of earlier financial crises, particularly the
Depression. As he wrote in his 2015 memoir, “The context of history proved
invaluable.” Bernanke’s Fed acted decisively, using unprecedented tools that
stretched—if not exceeded—the Fed’s legal powers, such as buying up
mortgage-backed and Treasury securities in what was called quantitative easing.
Bernanke’s knowledge of the Depression also informed the Fed’s efforts to
backstop other central banks.
To be sure, historical analogies are easy to
get wrong. “History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes,”
observed Henry Kissinger, the most influential modern practitioner of applied
history. “It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable
situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in
fact comparable.” Amateur analogies were commonplace in the wake of September
11, ranging from President Bush’s invocation in his diary of Pearl Harbor to
the parallels drawn by his administration between Saddam and the Axis leaders
in World War II. To guard against such faulty parallels, May advised students
and policy makers to follow a simple procedure: Put the comparison you are
considering—for example, isis and the
Bolsheviks—on a sheet of paper, draw a line down the page, and label one column
“similar” and the other “different.” If you are unable to list three
points of similarity and three of difference, you should consult a historian.
Were a Council of
Historical Advisers in place today, it could consider precedents for numerous
strategic problems. For example: As tensions increase between the U.S. and
China in the South and East China Seas, are U.S. commitments to Japan, the
Philippines, and other countries as dangerous to peace as the 1839 treaty
governing Belgian neutrality, which became the casus belli between Britain and
Germany in 1914?
The council might study
whether a former president’s handling of another crisis could be applied to a
current challenge (what would X have done?). Consider Obama’s decision
to strike an imperfect deal to halt or at least delay Iran’s nuclear program,
rather than bombing its uranium-enrichment plants, as Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu hoped he might. Obama’s deliberations have significant
parallels with Kennedy’s decision during the Cuban missile crisis to strike a
deal with Nikita Khrushchev, rather than invading Cuba or learning to live with
Soviet missiles off Florida’s coast.
A president might also ask the council “what if?” questions. What if
some action had not been taken, or a different action had been taken? (These
questions are too seldom asked after a policy failure.) In this spirit, the
next president could ask the council to replay 2013. What if Obama had enforced
his “red line” against the Assad regime, rather than working with Russia to
remove Syrian chemical weapons? Was this decision, as critics maintain, the
biggest error of his presidency? Or was it, as he insists, one of his best
calls?
Finally, the council might consider grand strategic questions, including
perhaps the biggest one of all: Is the U.S. in decline? Can it surmount the
challenges facing it, or will American power steadily erode in the decades
ahead?
Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offer answers to these questions.
Indeed, Trump proposes to “make America great again,” implying that decline has
already occurred, and to put “America first,” reviving a slogan with, to put it
mildly, a problematic history. The presidential campaign thus far gives us
little confidence that America’s history deficit is about to be closed.
We suggest that the charter for the future Council of Historical
Advisers begin with Thucydides’s observation that “the events of future history
… will be of the same nature—or nearly so—as the history of the past, so long
as men are men.” Although applied historians will never be clairvoyants with
unclouded crystal balls, we agree with Winston Churchill: “The longer you can
look back, the farther you can look forward.”
About the Authors
·Graham Allison is
the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the
Harvard Kennedy School, and a co-director of the Center's Applied History Project.
Acabo de ler, e achei interessante. Depois vou comentar...
Graham Allison é co-autor, com Philip Zelikow, do famoso The Essence of Decision, sobre a crise dos mísseis soviéticos em Cuba. Niall Ferguson não precisa de apresentação, não é mesmo?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Harvard University
Colleagues & Friends,
It is sometimes said that most Americans live in “the United States of Amnesia.” Less widely recognized is how many American policymakers live there, too. To address this deficit, Niall Ferguson and I have written an Applied History Manifesto, which appears in the September print issue of The Atlantic magazine. In it, we urge the candidates running for president to announce now that, if elected, they will establish a White House Council of Historical Advisers, analogous to the Council of Economic Advisers.
In an effort to revitalize Applied History both in universities and in policymaking, I am happy to announce that the Belfer Center is launching an Applied History Project. Niall Ferguson and I will serve as Co-Directors.
What is Applied History? In one line, it is the explicit attempt to illuminate current challenges and choices by analyzing historical precedents and analogues. We believe it is time to institutionalize historical analysis in the tradition of two great Harvard Kennedy School professors, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt – indeed, to create in universities beginning with Harvard a new and rigorous sub-discipline of Applied History.
The charter of the future Council of Historical Advisers should begin with Thucydides’s observation that “events of future history will be of the same nature – or nearly so – as the history of the past, so long as men are men.” Applied History does not offer a crystal ball – but which discipline does? We subscribe to Winston Churchill’s dictum, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”
Imagine that President Obama had a Council of Historical Advisers today. What assignments could he give it? How might the Council respond? He could, for example, ask about ISIS: Have we ever seen anything like this before? If so, what did who do, and how did that work out? For this question and a number of others, see the Project’s new website.
Applied historians take current predicaments and identify precedents and analogues that offer clues about what is likely to happen, suggest possible policy interventions, and assess probable consequences. In the “Applied History Manifesto,” we provide a number of examples. The Project website also features a curated selection of exemplary instances of applied history, a basic bibliography, and a catalog of quotations and insights on the topic by scholars and statesmen.
If you have thoughts, please let me know.
VISIT APPLIED HISTORY WEBSITE Graham Allison Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Subscribe to the Belfer Center
Eu já cruzei com homens de letras que escreveram sobre a história sem ter tomado parte em assuntos públicos, e com políticos que se ocuparam de produzir eventos sem jamais pensar sobre eles. Eu observei que os primeiros estão sempre inclinados a buscar causas gerais, enquanto os segundos, vivendo em meio a fatos diários desvinculados entre si, são levados a acreditar que tudo é devido a incidentes específicos, e que os fios que eles movimentam são os mesmos que movimentam o mundo. É de se presumir que ambos estão igualmente equivocados.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Extraído do frontspício do clássico de Graham Allison e Philip Zelikow: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis
(2nd edition; New York: Longman, 1999, 416 p.; ISBN: 0-321-01349-2)
Na introdução a esse clássico, os autores dizem que "The Cuban missile crisis stands as a seminal event." (p. 1), no sentido em que ela sucitou uma nova fase da Guerra Fria, novos procedimentos, e alguma contenção na corrida maluca aos extremos que estava representada pela "doutrina" do MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, ou seja, o pacto de aniquilamento recíproco que guiava as estratégias (ou táticas?) de dissuasão entre os dois principais contendores da Guerra Fria.
O mesmo poderia ser dito, e foi dito por George Kennan, da Grande Guerra (1914-1918), descrita por ele como "the greater seminal event of the 20th century", aquele do qual derivaram todas as tragédias do século mais mortal de toda a história humana.
Voltando ao Tocqueville, preciso buscar o locus dessa citação, mas desde já concordo com o publicista e grande pensador francês: acadêmicos estão sempre pretendendo generalizar eventos singulares e deles extrair causas gerais, geralmente inutilmente, enquando políticos, que são homens práticos, vivem apenas cada momento, sem pensar nos antecedentes ou consequentes.
Enfim, para que servem os pensadores que ficam encontrando falhas em todos os demais mortais comuns?
Para nosso prazer intelectual, unicamente.
Acho que isso basta...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 29/07/2017
Xi Jinping; drawing by Siegfried Woldhek
