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2019-12-03 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
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The sources of the west's decline.
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[American Interest] Only five years ago, the general consensus among U.S. and European policy wonks was that, notwithstanding occasional glitches, the so-called liberal international order would remain the dominant global paradigm. For decades, the cognoscenti had assumed that export-driven modernization would eventually transform the likes of communist China into a mega-scale Japan, and that Russia, though authoritarian, would nonetheless adhere—at least in Europe—to the rules-based order. In hindsight it doesn’t really matter whether we fell victim to our own wishful thinking or refused to admit what was in front of us all the time—namely, a brief pause in great power competition followed by two great powers intent on revising the international order, in terms of both its principles and its geostrategic fault lines. We finally awoke to the geostrategic dimension of the ongoing rivalry when Russia seized Crimea and stoked a war in eastern Ukraine, and when China militarized the South China Sea by deploying military assets on its artificial islands. But the West has yet to fully grasp the realities of the system’s overall transformation, and especially its emerging axiology. The reason for the latter is not a lack of data points, but rather our inability to own up to the ideological shift underway within our own culture.
At the geostrategic level, the state of global affairs today is defined by two principal trends: the growing assertiveness of Russia and China, the two principal revisionist states; and the accelerating realignment of states worldwide in response to this rising pressure. More importantly, this challenge to the West runs in parallel with the apparent determination on the part of China to supplant democratic governance with a system built around authoritarianism, framed around a party elite. And for the first time the West seems too divided to launch a coherent response to this ideological pressure from abroad.
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On paper, the West stands head-and-shoulders above any real and potential peer-competitors according to any reasonable economic measure. Judging by the numbers alone, the West should be able to dominate its adversaries: The GDP of the European Union totals about $17 trillion (all figures from World Bank, 2017), and that of the United States, around $19 trillion (as opposed to $12 trillion for China and $1.5 trillion for Russia). Likewise, given the combined EU population of roughly 512 million and the United States of close to 330 million (not counting the economic resources and population of our principal allies in Asia—Japan, for example, has a GDP of close to $5 trillion and a population of more than 126 million), Western democracies should be uniquely positioned to sustain their supremacy into the foreseeable future. And there are other geostrategic advantages that have accrued to the democratic world: Europe’s key position as the doorway to Eurasia, the U.S. status as a “continental island” advantageously positioned to project power in the Pacific and the Atlantic, with alliances, partnerships, and forward military deployments to match. In short, the democratic world does not have a shortage of usable power, whether one views it in terms of economics, population, or geography. And while it is true that we have made our situation worse by offshoring our supply chain to Asia and, most importantly, allowing the Chinese to acquire, whether legitimately or by theft or extortion, some of our most valuable intellectual property and technology, Beijing’s growing economic and financial muscle is no match for the combined heft of the West.
The real trouble for the West, rather, is what has been happening within our own societies. Internal changes have made us more vulnerable than any economic calculus would indicate. For the first time since the end of World War II, the so-called declinists may be onto something fundamental when they argue that the West’s heyday may be a thing of the past. The problem is not the economy or technology, but the centrifugal forces rising within the Transatlantic alliance: in short, the progressive civilizational fracturing and decomposition, fed by the growing disconnect between political and cultural elites and the publics across the two continents. Alongside this is an even more insidious trend of fragmenting national cultures and the concomitant debasement of the idea of citizenship, the latter increasingly defined almost exclusively in terms of rights, with reciprocal obligations all but relegated to the proverbial dustbin of history. The growing disunity of the West, exacerbated by tensions caused by the rejection by some in the Transatlantic community of a historical and cultural narrative that once inspired pride and admiration, both across state lines and internally, is now arguably the key national security challenge confronting us. It is this deepening sense of self-doubt that has made it all but impossible for the United States and its European allies to move beyond personal acrimony and articulate a strategically coherent common response to the devolving international power structure. 
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Posted by 3dc 2019-12-03 05:52||
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File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life,
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Posted by M. Murcek 2019-12-03 06:41||
2019-12-03 06:41||
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Posted by lord garth 2019-12-03 08:05||
2019-12-03 08:05||
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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2019-12-03 10:24||
2019-12-03 10:24||
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Posted by rjschwarz 2019-12-03 11:19||
2019-12-03 11:19||
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Posted by Abu Uluque 2019-12-03 11:44||
2019-12-03 11:44||
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