“Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.” – Calvin Coolidge, Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (July 5, 1926).
After China’s ill-fated accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its day in the sun during the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008, Xi Jinping consolidated his grasp on power as head of the Chinese Communist Party. A debate began to form among the chattering classes. You could call it the Beijing Consensus vs the Washington Consensus. The Beijing Consensus, that centralized economic and political decision making could move faster and see farther than its decadent, decentralized, dysfunctional democratic adversaries, always struck me as a warmed-over Cold War Soviet debate; a question, historically speaking, that had been settled. But I was wrong. Today, it seems, the Beijing Consensus is winning, and the Washington Consensus – the Free World – is on the back foot. Xi Jinping’s new consensus is really not new, but a return to something old: one driven by blood and soil nationalism, by spheres of influence and predatory, tributary diplomacy, and by aggressive wolf warrior diplomacy.
At War with Ourselves: Civilizational Erasure and American Decline
I don’t want to appear too unsympathetic. This debate erupted in the West just as the sub-prime crisis hit, in the heart of two enduring wars in the Middle East, and the crescendo of the Islamic State. The Arab Spring, which seemed to offer optimism, in fact turned out disastrously; red lines were named and crossed, a region already deep in chaos descended further into darkness. Perennial and existential problems of American politics – entitlement reform, immigration – were left only for courageous politicians disinterested in reelection.
Now let’s add to that the geopolitical chaos of Russia’s invasions, the pandemic accelerant, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the inflation, the instability, the fear. We could understand, maybe, why the Beijing Consensus began to look romantic. Bipartisan dysfunction on the most pressing political questions placed the legitimacy of the whole system in question. Maybe Xi Jinping had it right. Maybe in order to beat them you must join them.
This is more or less how I read the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy, a belated Christmas present to close 2025. While there are specific arguments that I think are right, the overall premise that the United States of America is a declining power seems culturally and politically terminal to me. The solutions that it reaches for are premised on this decline, and yet they are also ones which will accelerate rather than reverse it. I would not accept the premise, and so I would doubt the efficacy of the solutions. In the debate between the Beijing Consensus and the Washington Consensus the conclusion is not simply one of rhetoric or theatre: there is a right and a wrong answer, and history here is our guide. As Calvin Coolidge put it, “these ideas are not more modern, they are more ancient.” And no progress will be made in this direction.
It is ironic that just as the Americans accuse the Europeans of civilizational erasure, they do so from a position of such fragility, insecurity, and anxiety about their own sources of civilizational strength. It cannot only be that the goal is to goad Europeans into better policy – higher defense spending, more serious immigration debates. These goals are worthwhile, but as the opinions made public by Signal-Gate suggest, somewhat conclusively, that the contempt in which Europeans are held by members of the administration is not a strategy: it is very genuine. It is culture war by other means, taken global. There seems to be a real conviction, among some, that the welfare states of Sweden and Norway are more of a threat to American influence and power than the blockade exercises of the Chinese navy around the island of Taiwan.
There was a multicultural moment, and a certain myth attached to it as part of the postwar order. It is probably best encapsulated in the premise that more economic and political integration would create stronger ties and wealthier states. It guessed that the wealthier and more integrated states became in the international order, the more their interests would align, the more they would evolve elements of both liberalism and democracy. This was Fukuyama’s much misunderstood and maligned argument about the “end of history”: not that no other options were available, or that liberal democracy was inevitable, but that some mixture of liberal democratic capitalism was the best system discovered to date for delivering long run prosperity and justice. That was the main point Fukuyama made, and he was – I strongly believe – correct.
This got mixed up into inevitability: that richer societies would become more plural and democratic, more liberal and more alike. This was actually not a stupid idea, but it was wrong. It did happen in some places. It did appear to be happening in others. But it was wrong for exactly the reasons Fukuyama suggested in that same article it might be: religion and nationalism.
So, Europe and America, and the West generally, overspent the peace dividend of the end of the Cold War, over-invested in the myth of multiculturalism, and began to focus their energy and their power on more mundane political problems.
I have noticed some Americans, I think here especially of Vice President Vance, tend to focus on idealism and naiveté which conspired to produce European impotence in the face of the unexpected return of Russian imperialism, Chinese, and now also American belligerence. A few short years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s Angela Merkel was still imagining a new gas pipeline – Nord Stream 2 – to feed the continental economy. She badly misunderstood what was happening. But she was not the only one, and while the Americans came to this realization a few years before the Europeans, they also have been caught flat-footed in the now well recognized deficiencies of their defense industrial base and the, how else to name it, catastrophic immigration wars spilling out across American streets. The overstretch was a feature, not a bug, of American diplomacy in the unipolar moment because the presumption was the dividends would pay back a hundred-fold – like Germany, like Japan. The principles were not wrong. But the prediction was.
In other words, wealth and welcome are not enough: the political infrastructure of pluralism must have some recourse to virtues, to principles, apart from which no amount of money or hospitality will make for peace or prosperity. This rediscovery and retrieval of the sources of the American founding lands at an auspicious time – the 250th anniversary of the great Declaration. I have not lost confidence in the enduring moral weight and political, and yes geopolitical, convictions of that Declaration. I pray the Americans themselves will rediscover that confidence, for which so many of them have died, and for which the world – including my home, Canada – owes them very much.
Spheres of Influence: Tributary Diplomacy
Retrenchment is a very understandable human response to an experience of loss or fragility. This is such a commonly understood problem, in fact, that much of the postwar order was designed to prevent a relapse into the conditions that were diagnosed as having catalyzed the Great Depression and ultimately the Second World War. The central goal of the United Nations, of the Bretton Woods institutions of the IMF, World Bank, and the G.A.T.T. (in 1995 W.T.O) was to manage and mitigate these entirely natural responses.
In a world where suddenly unexpected threats emerge, where scarcity appears more common, and where potential challengers grow in size and ability, retrenchment seems an easy and obvious response. Ross Douthat in his book Decadence argues that liberalism’s defeat is, in part, owed to liberalism’s victory. American postwar hegemony did create a world in which very imperfect and yet nonetheless remarkable economic and technological growth took place. And America’s geopolitical position became a victim of its own success. President Trump’s beta-test for these grievances made a first appearance in the 1980s, when Japan appeared on the threshold of world economic domination. Japan’s miraculous recovery was the result of enormous investment on the part of postwar America. Yet the United States, too, got richer. Much, much richer. This is macroeconomics 101: it is not a zero-sum game. Japan does not need to lose for America to win. Both can win. Both have won.
The NSS does not use the term spheres of influence, though it appears now and again in official government statements. It is a slippery term, that Stephen Walt complains in Foreign Policy its critics and its advocates get wrong. It is somewhat unintelligible apart from a clear understanding of national interest, a core Realist concept. And I would say that national interest itself is not always empirically and materially self-evident, it depends also on identity.
Into that confusion arrives the ‘Donroe Doctrine,’ a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, not unlike Theodore Roosevelt’s own. The original 1823 doctrine was an essentially anti-imperial argument, although one which ironically depended on the British Navy. Roosevelt’s corollary was also anti-imperial intent but designed to keep European creditors out of the hemisphere, placing the obligation on the United States to interfere if needed. It was a corollary that had, it’s fair to say, rather mixed results.
The Trump Corollary is focused on drugs, immigration, border control, and pushing other belligerent or peer powers out of the hemisphere. This is one of the implicit places the Chinese geopolitical rivalry appears, whose challenge is largely articulated in terms of trade in the rest of the NSS.
Soft and cultural power are mentioned, but with the collapse of USAID and the chaos in other soft power agencies (Radio Free Europe, for example) it is hard to imagine what resources exactly are being called upon.
President Trump’s critics have long been wrong to call him isolationist, though retrenchment is still an accurate way to describe his goals. Iranian nuclear facilities will still be bombed. So will militants in Nigeria. Breathtaking operations in Venezuela designed to bend regimes to purpose, and reestablish American deterrence are on the menu. But these are short run, smash and grab, low investment high return strategies. PEPFAR, the shamefully demolished program of President George W. Bush, which gave hope and medication to so many in sub-Saharan Africa suffering from the scourge of HIV/AIDS, that’s off the menu. High theatre, short attention span politics can extract and intimidate in the short run, but it is a recipe for the very weakness and decadence the NSS decries in the long run. It is not the stuff of an “American dream.”
It is baffling to see all this described as winning. It is winning, I suppose, like calling the forty-yard line a touchdown. If you shrink the game and reduce your scope, if you accept the premise that you can’t make it that far anymore so anywhere down the field is a victory, sure, I guess that’s winning. It sounds like handing out participation trophies after kindergarten soccer games to me.
Wolf Warrior Diplomacy
Deng Xiaoping famously said to hide your strength and bide your time. Xi Jinping has decided that time is up. The moment has arrived to theatrically boast about your strength and crush your opponents into concessions through a whirl of intimidation. China calls it Wolf Warrior Diplomacy.
This diplomacy, too, is driven by grievance, which – also – carries a double irony, since China’s accession into the international economic order, effected by President Nixon, and finally realized fully in 2001, is responsible to a great degree for China’s unparalleled rise to prosperity and power.
Yet self-defeating aggression is often the calling card of Chinese diplomacy. I say self-defeating because China, also, is not in a vacuum. In fact, if anything China’s neighbors are far more capable than America’s. India, Japan, Australia, these are large, substantial economies, some of whom are not only technologically and economically competitors, but in the case of India even demographically. China has not risen in a vacuum. And the more it has boasted and bent the region – its sphere of influence – to its will, the more that region has labored to find new partners, new allies, new ways to balance its rise.
This is textbook realism. Aggressive geopolitical and economic behavior will produce a balancing counter-effect. What can Canada, or Mexico, or Denmark, or Germany do? In the short run, very little. These countries, too, have drunk deeply on the peace dividend of the post-Cold War. Their – our – industrial bases are anemic. Our economies are so deeply enmeshed into American markets that mere threats of tariffs are enough to cause our currencies to tumble. We have, in the oft used phrase in the White House, few cards to play.
But this is not a game of cards. Aggressive mercantilism and zero-sum economics make everyone poorer, everyone weaker, and everyone more divided. And while it is true that, for example, we Canadians or the Germans have been “free riders” on the goods of American security, that dependence has not come without American benefits. It has bought America not only credibility but also deference in international affairs. This deference seems cheap, because it is not going anywhere soon. Not yet. As Churchill memorably intoned, the Germans are either at your feet or at your throats. For 80-years they have been at the feet of the United States of America, and they have been there not because of imperial oppression, but because the American-led international order has been good for them, it has been worth it. Forced into reigniting their defense industrial base, the Europeans, the Canadians, they may not be much to think about in 5-years, maybe not even 10, but what about in 15? Suddenly these allies may no longer be quite so pliable to American interests. An outbreak of independent thought and interest may suddenly afflict these otherwise reliable tributaries, who – paying their own bills – no longer find the same kinds of common cause and interests as they once did. It is a weaker world. A more dangerous world. And a world in which the United States of America will finally have no need to indulge in future fantasies of narcissistic insecurity; it will already simply exist.
Mark Carney’s Davos Doxology
My Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech about some of this at Davos this past week. In it he called for a foreign policy driven by values, by likeminded countries who believed in likeminded things. He called an end to the rules based liberal international order, which – to paraphrase Voltaire – was neither liberal, nor international, nor an order, much of the time. But he argued for the retention of its basic goods: for countries who are defined by, who love, the old principles of that order to rebuild it together. Call it mini-multilateralism, pluri-lateralism, or, as Carney referred to it, a coalition of the willing. He also called it, ironically echoing page 8 of the NSS, pragmatic and principled.
I think Mr. Carney is basically right. And although he, too, hardly mentioned China’s geopolitical threat, implicit – also – in his argument is a coalition of states which precludes the brutal autocracies that dot the globe but fill human rights councils and refugee commissions in today’s mega-multilateral institutions. It is time, he said, to start being honest with ourselves. This does not mean, crucially, one cannot do any business or diplomacy with such regimes – Mr. Carney just returned from China and Qatar. But it does mean we have different expectations, different dependencies, and different supply chains with those we know we can trust, and those who have proven we cannot.
The fact of the matter is that the United States of America can and should be the champion of any such bloc. It is the origin and the architect of much that has now been passed on to many of the other states of the international system. These states owe their prosperity and their security in great measure to these American investments. But now, perhaps, like Great Britain’s own seeding of America’s rise to power, America will recede but remain. And I pray that coalition will make a world not fit for Xi Jinping and his Beijing Consensus, but for the “just and durable peace” of the American Declaration and its glorious vision of liberty and justice.
