Realist: Gideon Rachman

. Gideon Rachman: Twitter; blog; video; Zero-Sum Future. American Power in an Age of Anxiety (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) [abstract] [blog] [Twitter] [book review].

[DOCUMENT - NOT required reading!] (From Rachman’s book). During the years between the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, globalisation created common interests between all the world’s major powers. A world that had once been divided between capitalist and communist systems – and between a small group of rich countries and a much larger group of underdeveloped nations – was now united by a single economic system. For a tantalising 20 years, globalisation seemed to promise rising living standards for all nations, and a more peaceful world. The economic crash of 2008, however, has changed the logic of international relations. In a new economic situation, the win-win logic that allowed the major powers to embrace globalisation is now being replaced by a zero-sum logic, in which one country’s gain looks like another’s loss. Both as individuals and as a nation, Americans have begun to question whether the “new world order” that emerged after the cold war still favours the US.

The rise of Asia is increasingly associated with job losses for ordinary Americans and with a challenge to American power from an increasingly confident China. Chinese thinkers, for their part, are increasingly suspicious that a wounded America is intent on thwarting their nation’s rise. Tensions between established and rising powers are the traditional stuff of international relations. But the financial and economic crisis has also disrupted the intellectual narrative that helped western leaders to make sense of the world, in the 20 years after the end of the cold war. A western Age of Optimism between 1991 and 2008 was underpinned by a set of ideas, which might be called liberal internationalism. As a journalist at The Economist for most of the period, I was deeply familiar with these ideas, since we argued for many of them on a weekly basis. In retrospect, I think there were five key elements to the ideology of the period before the financial crisis.

The first was a faith in the onward march of democracy – expressed most famously by Francis Fukuyama’s essay on the “end of history”, which appeared in 1989, just as the Soviet empire was collapsing. The second, linked belief was a faith in the triumph of markets over the state. This was also the era of the rise of the personal computer and the internet, and so a third key belief was in the transforming power of technology, as a force driving forward prosperity, democracy and globalisation. The fourth idea, which knitted all these notions together, was the theory of the “democratic peace”: the belief that in a world in which democracy and capitalism were on the rise, the risk of conflict between nations inevitably diminished. The fifth and final idea – a sort of insurance policy – was the faith that in the last resort the US military could defeat any power on earth. By the time Barack Obama took office, each of the five ideas that had underpinned American self-confidence during the Age of Optimism had taken a battering.

The faith in the onward march of freedom had been shaken by the difficulties of exporting democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the rising confidence of authoritarian China. The belief in the power of free markets took a terrible blow with the economic and financial crisis of 2008. The technological revolution no longer seemed the magical cure-all that it had promised to be, as problems as diverse as climate change and the mechanics of military occupation proved impervious to a technological fix. The theory of the “democratic peace” looked less persuasive, as Russia flexed its military muscles, almost over-running democratic Georgia in August 2008 and China became more assertive in territorial disputes with Japan and India.

Finally, the belief in the unstoppable nature of American power looked much shakier with US troops bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the American economy reeling. I got an early hint of how the psychology of international relations was shifting when I visited the campus of Beijing University, just two weeks after the fall of Lehman Brothers, and met Pan Wei, director of the Center for Chinese and Global Affairs. “My belief,” he said, “is that in 20 years we will look the Americans straight in the eye as equals. But maybe it will come sooner than that. Their system is in chaos and they need our money to rescue them.”