March / april 2023 • volume 102 • number 2

M A RC H / A P R I L 2 0 2 3

Samantha
Power

Innovation
The Future
of Democracy
Andrew J.
Bacevich

Power The Unlearned

Lessons of Iraq
Dara
Massicot
How Technology Will Reshape Geopolitics The Next Year
Eric Schmidt ∙ Lant Pritchett ∙ Dan Wang in Ukraine
 Volume 102, Number 2

Essays

The Reckoning That Wasn’t 6

Why America Remains Trapped by False Dreams of Hegemony
Andrew J. Bacevich

How Democracy Can Win 22

The Right Way to Counter Autocracy
Samantha Power

Innovation Power 38
Why Technology Will Define the Future of Geopolitics
Eric Schmidt

People Over Robots 53

The Global Economy Needs Immigration Before Automation
Lant Pritchett

China’s Hidden Tech Revolution 65

How Beijing Threatens U.S. Dominance
Dan Wang

Cover illustration by Edward Tuckwell 1

 Essays

What Russia Got Wrong 78

Can Moscow Learn From Its Failures in Ukraine?
Dara Massicot

The Limits of the No-Limits Partnership 94

China and Russia Can’t Be Split, but They Can Be Thwarted
Patricia M. Kim

Disunited Kingdom 106

Will Nationalism Break Britain?
Fintan O ’ Toole

How Commerce Can Save the Climate 119

The Case for a Green Free Trade Agreement
Gordon H. Hanson and Matthew J. Slaughter

Asia’s Third Way 130

How ASEAN Survives—and Thrives—
Amid Great-Power Competition
Kishore Mahbubani

After the Iran Deal 142

A Plan B to Contain the Islamic Republic
Suzanne Maloney

2 foreign affairs
Reviews and Responses

The Divided Diplomat 156

Ralph Bunche and the Contradictions of Liberal Order
Zachariah Mampilly

Behind Enemy Lines 162

The CIA’s Cold War in China
Jane Perlez

The Cult of Secrecy 168

America’s Classification Crisis
Patrick Radden Keefe

Blundering Into Baghdad 176

The Right—and Wrong—Lessons of the Iraq War
Hal Brands

Recent Books 185

The Archive 212

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march / april 2023 3

 march/april 2023 · volume 102, number 2

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 Return to Table of Contents

The Reckoning
That Wasn’t
Why America Remains Trapped
by False Dreams of Hegemony
Andrew J. Bacevich

O
ver the course of many evenings in 1952 and 1953, when I
was a kindergartner, my family gathered around a hand-me-
down TV in the Chicago housing project where we lived to
watch Victory at Sea. With stirring music and solemn narration, this
26-part documentary produced by NBC offered an inspiring account of
World War II as a righteous conflict in which freedom had triumphed
over evil, in large part thanks to the exertions of the United States.
The country had waged a people’s war, fought by millions of ordinary
citizens who had answered the call of duty. The war’s outcome testified
to the strength of American democracy.
Here was history in all its seductive and terrible magnificence. Here,
too, was truth: immediate, relevant, and compelling, albeit from a strictly
American point of view. If the series had an overarching message, it was

Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor Emeritus of International Relations and

History at Boston University and Chair of the Board of the Quincy Institute for
Responsible Statecraft, which he co-founded.

6 foreign affairs
Illustration by Matt Chase 7
 Andrew J. Bacevich

this: the outcome of this appalling conflict had inaugurated a new age
in which the United States was destined to reign supreme.
The series had a profound effect on me, reinforced by the fact that
both of my parents had served in the war. For them and for others of
their generation, the great crusade against Germany and Japan was to
remain the defining event of their lives and seemed destined to define
the lives of future generations, as well.
Yet Victory at Sea hinted at difficulties ahead. The concluding
episode was titled “Design for Peace” but offered nothing of the
sort. Instead, it conveyed something more akin to a warning. “One
bomb from one plane and 78,000 human beings perish,” the narrator
intoned, as a camera panned across images of a devastated Hiroshima.
“Two bombs, and World War II is over.” Grainy footage of liberated
concentration camps and scenes of homeward-bound troops flickered
across the screen. Then, with a cryptic reference to “the free world
on its march to tomorrow” and a quote from British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill extolling the importance of resolution, defiance,
magnanimity, and goodwill, the series simply ended. To discern what
the most devastating conflict of all time signified politically or morally,
viewers would have to look elsewhere.
The abrupt ending made a certain amount of sense. After all, by
the time Victory at Sea aired, certain wartime U.S. allies had become
bitter adversaries, a race was underway to build nuclear weapons even
more lethal than those the United States had dropped on Japan, and
American troops were once more engaged in combat, this time in
Korea, in a conflict that would not end in even the approximation of
victory. If anyone had a design for peace, it had been shelved. This much
appeared certain: American global supremacy would not be uncontested.
Even so, for most Americans, World War II remained the authorita-
tive source of relevant memory, with the Cold War a sequel of sorts. Just
as U.S. leadership in World War II had defeated the Third Reich and
imperial Japan, so, too, would Washington turn back the Soviet threat and
ensure the survival of freedom. As the two events merged in the country’s
collective imagination, they yielded a canonical lesson: U.S. global leader-
ship backed by superior military power had become a categorical imperative.
In fact, the hard-won victory of 1945 would turn out to be neither
validation nor harbinger. It proved instead to be a source of illusions.
In the 1960s, the costly and divisive war in Vietnam seemed to demol-
ish those illusions; the collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s

8 foreign affairs
 The Reckoning That Wasn’t

momentarily revived them. The post-9/11 misadventures Washington

undertook in pursuing its global “war on terror” once again exposed
the claims of U.S. military supremacy as specious.
The disappointing outcomes of the protracted wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq should have sounded a wake-up call akin to the one experi-
enced by the United Kingdom in 1956, after the British government
orchestrated an intervention to reassert its control of the Suez Canal
and, more broadly, put Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in
his place. The ensuing debacle resulted in a
singular humiliation that cost British Prime
Minister Anthony Eden his job. Eden’s rival, The Iraq war
British Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell, represents the
described the Suez operation as “an act of
disastrous folly” that did “irreparable harm to
acme of American
the prestige and reputation of our country.” military folly.
Few observers disputed that judgment. The
crisis obliged the British to acknowledge that their imperial project had
reached a dead end. The old way of doing things—whipping weaker
peoples into line—was no longer going to work.
The past two decades might have functioned as an extended “Suez
moment” for the United States. But the U.S. foreign policy establishment
has refused to move on, clinging to the myth that what the world needs is
more American military power. The failure in Iraq did not prevent Wash-
ington from doubling down on its “good war” in Afghanistan—an act of
rashness that culminated in a chaotic, humiliating withdrawal in 2021.
That spectacle could have served as an occasion to declare an end
to the era defined by World War II, the Cold War, and the aspirations
to which they gave rise. But thanks in no small part to Russian Pres-
ident Vladimir Putin, the moment soon passed. Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine has revived the postwar tradition of American muscle flexing.
The Afghan war, the longest in U.S. history, has all but vanished from
memory, as has the disastrous war of choice that Washington launched
20 years ago in Iraq. Partly as a result, the country seems poised to con-
tinue making the same mistakes that led to those debacles, all justified
by the ostensible obligations of global leadership.
The war in Ukraine might offer one last chance for Washington to
learn a Suez-style lesson—and without even suffering a defeat. So far,
U.S. policy on Ukraine has been pragmatic and arguably restrained.
But President Joe Biden and his team routinely talk about the war in

March / april 2023 9

 Andrew J. Bacevich

ways that suggest an outmoded, moralistic, and recklessly grandiose vision

of American power. Aligning his administration’s rhetorical posture with a
sober assessment of the true stakes involved in Ukraine might allow Biden
to wean the establishment from its obsession with hegemony. Demonstrat-
ing that Americans do not need their country’s role in the world explained
to them in the style of a children’s bedtime story would be a bonus.
The danger is that the opposite could happen: Biden’s framing of
Ukraine as a crucible for a new era of military-backed American dom-
inance might lock him in, and his administration’s carefully calibrated
policy could come to more closely resemble his soaring, ill-considered
rhetoric. That, in turn, would lead to an altogether different and more
disastrous reckoning.

WITH US OR AGAINST US
The most authoritative expression of the postwar worldview—the
Rosetta stone of American statecraft in the Cold War—is NSC-
68, a highly classified document drafted in 1950 by the U.S. State
Department’s Policy Planning Staff, led at the time by Paul Nitze.
Testifying to “the marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the law-
fulness of the free society,” this ideologically charged document
established the parameters of U.S. policy throughout the Cold War.
Juxtaposed against that free society was “the slave society” of the
Soviet Union, which demanded “total power over all men within
the Soviet state without a single exception” along with “total power
over all Communist Parties and all states under Soviet domination.”
With compelling clarity, NSC-68 made a case for American hege-
mony. It drew bright lines and erased ambiguities. “In a shrinking
world,” the document asserted, “the absence of order among nations
is becoming less and less tolerable.” This fact imposed on the United
States “the responsibility of world leadership” along with an obliga-
tion “to bring about order and justice by means consistent with the
principles of freedom and democracy.” Merely containing the Soviet
threat would not suffice. Nor would feeding the world’s hungry or
succoring the afflicted. What the United States needed was the
capacity and willingness to coerce. With that in mind, Washington
committed itself to establishing a dominant military configured as a
global police force. Statecraft became an adjunct of military might.
Undiminished by the passage of time, the Manichaean outlook
woven into NSC-68 persists today, decades after the Cold War that

10 foreign affairs
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 Andrew J. Bacevich

inspired it. Biden’s frequent insistence that the fate of humankind

hinges on the outcome of a cosmic struggle between democracy and
autocracy updates Nitze’s central theme. The necessity of U.S. military
supremacy—whether measured by Pentagon spending, the number of
bases abroad, or a propensity to use force—has become an article of faith.
As the world continues to “shrink” thanks to globalization and technolog-
ical progress (and also to expand into space and cyberspace), the reach of
U.S. military forces grows accordingly, a process that stirs little controversy.
But if the aim of U.S. hegemony has been to establish global order
and justice through the prudent use of hard power, the results have been
mixed at best. Since 1950, people in the English-speaking world and
those living in some proximity to Paris and Tokyo have fared relatively
well. By comparison, the benefits accruing to the billions living in the
global South have been spotty; only occasionally has the opportunity
to live longer and healthier lives translated into personal freedom and
security. Government respect for individual rights and adherence to
the rule of law remains more hope than reality.
Things could have been worse, of course. Imagine, for example, if
during the Cold War, the United States had used any of the thousands
of nuclear weapons it had acquired at enormous cost. Yet what actually
did occur was bad enough. To reflect on the conduct and the conse-
quences of American wars (and sundry covert interventions) since 1950 is
to confront an appalling record of recklessness, malfeasance, and waste.
The Iraq war, which began 20 years ago, represents the acme
of American military folly—second only to the Vietnam War.
Launched with expectations of unleashing a tidal wave of liberation
that would transform the Middle East, Operation Iraqi Freedom
instead produced a mournful legacy of death and destruction that
destabilized the region. For a time, supporters of the war consoled
themselves with the thought that the removal from power of the Iraqi
tyrant Saddam Hussein had made the world a better place. Today,
no amount of sophistry can sustain that claim.
Many ordinary Americans might consider it too harsh to declare
that all the sacrifices made by U.S. troops since World War II have been
for naught. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the result in Iraq
was more akin to a rule than to an exception. President Harry Truman’s
decision to send U.S. troops north of the 38th parallel on the Korean
Peninsula in 1950 was an epic blunder, albeit one eclipsed 15 years
later by President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to commit U.S. combat

12 foreign affairs
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 Andrew J. Bacevich

troops to Vietnam. Beginning in 2001, the war in Afghanistan gave

new meaning to the term “quagmire.” As for Iraq, it remains impossible
to refute Barack Obama’s 2002 denunciation, delivered when he was a
state senator in Illinois, of the approaching U.S. invasion as a “dumb,”
“rash,” “cynical attempt” by “weekend warriors” to “shove their own
ideological agendas down our throats.”
Yet in each case, those choices served as concrete expressions of
what American global leadership seemed to require in the moment.
According to the logic embedded in NSC-68, to pass by the oppor-
tunity to liberate and unify the two Koreas or to allow the Republic
of Vietnam to fall to communism would have been the height of
irresponsibility. So, too, would allowing the Taliban to retain power
in Kabul. Take seriously the claim that Saddam possessed weapons of
mass destruction (and was intent on developing more), and his removal
could be seen as a political and moral imperative.
In each instance, however, egregiously faulty judgment squan-
dered—there is no other word—vast troves of American wealth and
thousands of American lives (not to mention hundreds of thousands of
non-American lives). Brown University’s Costs of War project has esti-
mated that U.S. military actions since the 9/11 attacks have cost around
$8 trillion, a sum several dozen times greater than that approved for
the Biden administration’s highly touted “Building a Better America”
infrastructure initiative. And it is hard to see how the benefits of those
military operations outweighed the costs.
Yet the basic logic that favored intervention in all those cases
remains intact. Even Biden, who as vice president opposed a major
surge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and who as president ultimately
withdrew the troops, has not forsaken a fundamental belief in the
enduring efficacy of American military power. His response to defeat
in Afghanistan was to propose an increase in Pentagon spending.
Congress not only agreed but chipped in a bonus.

WHICH IKE DO YOU LIKE?

The clout wielded by the sprawling U.S. national security apparatus
partially explains why this mindset has persisted. On that score, the
famous admonition conveyed in President Dwight Eisenhower’s fare-
well address in January 1961 has lost none of its relevance. In that
speech, Eisenhower warned against “the disastrous rise of misplaced
power” in the hands of “the military-industrial complex.” He also

14 foreign affairs
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 Andrew J. Bacevich

proposed a solution: “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” to keep

the country’s “huge industrial and military machinery of defense” in
check “so that security and liberty may prosper together.” But his hope
was misplaced. On matters related to national security, Americans
have proven to be more indifferent than watchful. Many Americans
still revere Eisenhower. But it is not the president of 1961 to whom
they tend to look for inspiration but the general of 1945, who secured
the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich.
The victory in World War II bestowed a new sense of purpose on U.S.
policy, which was subsequently codified in NSC-68. But it also imposed
a straitjacket. As the scholar David Bromwich has recently written,
“The Second World War is the picture that has held us captive.”
In important respects, the story of U.S. national security policy over
the past seven decades centers on an effort to preserve and update that
picture. The overarching aim has been to engineer another such victory,
thereby delivering security, prosperity, deference, and privilege—or,
more broadly, a world run on American terms, a dominance justified
by a self-assigned mission to spread freedom and democracy.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, followed by the collapse of commu-
nism and the U.S. victory in the 1990–91 Gulf War seemed, for a
brief moment, to bring that world within reach. Here were victories
that, taken together, arguably compared in scope to that of 1945. The
alleged “end of history” had resulted in a unipolar order over which
a sole superpower presided as the world’s “indispensable nation.”
Today, such phrases fall into the same category as “white man’s bur-
den” and “the war to end all wars”: they can only be employed ironi-
cally. Yet they accurately reflect the intoxication that overtook political
elites after 1989. Never has a country putatively devoted to noble causes
created or underwritten more mayhem than did the United States
following the Cold War, as it set out to smite evildoers everywhere.
Washington’s ideology-fueled bender lasted until 2016, when Donald
Trump upended American politics. As a candidate for president, Trump
vowed to chart a different course, one that would put “America first.”
That seemingly benign phrase had explosive connotations, harking
back to widespread popular opposition to possible U.S. intervention
on behalf of the United Kingdom as it resisted Nazi aggression.
Trump was not simply promising a less belligerent foreign policy.
Knowingly or not, he was threatening to jettison the moral underpin-
nings of postwar American statecraft.

16 foreign affairs
 The Reckoning That Wasn’t

NATO countries were “not paying their fair share” and were “ripping
off the United States,” Trump complained during a characteristic rant
at a 2016 campaign rally. “And you know what we do? Nothing. Either
they have to pay up for past deficiencies or they have to get out. And
if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO.” He returned to this theme
again and again, including in his inaugural address. “We’ve defended
other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own, and spent
trillions and trillions of dollars overseas, while America’s infrastructure
has fallen into disrepair and decay,” Trump
declared. “We’ve made other countries rich
while the wealth, strength, and confidence of Trump’s heresies
our country has dissipated over the horizon.” triggered a nervous
Not anymore, he pledged: “from this day for-
ward, it’s going to be only America first.”
breakdown in the
Such heresies triggered a nervous break- U.S. foreign policy
down from which the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
establishment has yet to fully recover. Of
course, Trump’s mendacity and historical illiteracy made it hard to tell
whether he even grasped what the phrase “America first” signified.
And even if he did, his staggering incompetence and short attention
span allowed the status quo to survive. During Trump’s term in office,
the endless war that started after 9/11 dragged on. Alliances remained
intact. With minor adjustments, so, too, did the country’s military foot-
print abroad. At home, the military-industrial complex prospered. A
costly modernization of the U.S. nuclear strike capabilities continued,
attracting minimal attention. All in all, the essentials of the NSC-68
paradigm survived, as did the conviction that World War II somehow
retained its relevance as a policy touchstone. “Isolationist” remained
an epithet hurled at anyone not supporting the vigorous use of U.S.
power abroad to cure the world’s ills.
Yet even as establishment thinking about the U.S. role in the
world remained mired in the past, the world itself was undergoing
profound changes. And herein lies a central paradox of the Trump
presidency: Trump’s vow to abandon the postwar paradigm led the
establishment to circle the wagons and mount a spirited defense of
the NSC-68 framework—even as the United States confronted a ris-
ing tide of problems to which that framework was all but irrelevant.
The list is long: the rise of China, a deepening climate crisis, a loss of
control of the U.S. southern border, the evaporation of working-class

March / april 2023 17

 Andrew J. Bacevich

opportunities, skyrocketing drug-related fatalities, a brutal pandemic,

and domestic upheaval spurred by polarization along racial, ethnic,
socioeconomic, partisan, and religious lines. Those divisions fueled
Trump’s election in 2016, allowed him to win an even larger number
of votes in his losing reelection campaign, and made possible his
effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power and overthrow the
constitutional order in the wake of his defeat.

THE MYTHMAKERS
These cascading failures and shortcomings and the inability of
the postwar vision of U.S. power to contend with them seemed to
herald a Suez moment. Instead, in the history of U.S. statecraft,
the Biden presidency marks a turning point when things didn’t
turn. Midway through Biden’s term, U.S. grand strategy is mired
in a tangle of unacknowledged contradictions. Preeminent among
them is Washington’s insistence that the United States must sustain
the now hallowed model of militarized global leadership even as
the relevance of that model diminishes, the resources available to
pursue it dwindle, and the prospects of preserving the country’s
privileged place in the international order decline. Yet the foreign
policy establishment insists there is no conceivable alternative to
militarized American leadership—pointing above all to the Russian
invasion of Ukraine to make its case.
In this view, the war in Ukraine revalidates NSC-68. But the Rus-
sian army is not the Red Army—not even close. Unless Putin opts to
use nuclear weapons, an unlikely scenario, Russia poses a negligible
threat to the security and well-being of the United States. A Russian
army that can’t even make it to Kyiv doesn’t pose much of a danger to
Berlin, London, or Paris, much less to New York City. The ineptitude
displayed by Russia’s military reinforces the argument that European
democracies, should they make the effort, are more than capable of
providing for their own security. In sum, for Washington, the war
should have bolstered the case for classifying Russia as someone else’s
problem. If the United States has nearly $50 billion to spare (the
amount that Congress allotted to assist Ukraine between February
2022 and November 2022), it should use that money to alleviate cli-
mate change, address the border crisis, or ameliorate the distress of
working-class Americans—vital tasks that the Biden administration
treats with far less urgency than arming Ukraine.

18 foreign affairs
 The Reckoning That Wasn’t

Biden has spoken of the war in Ukraine in sweeping terms that echo
the rhetoric of earlier eras. “Now is the hour: our moment of responsibility,
our test of resolve and conscience of history itself,” he intoned in a State of
the Union address delivered barely a week after Russia invaded Ukraine,
in February 2022. “And we will save democracy.” Such a moment and
such a task would seem to involve not only demonstrating commitment
and resolve but also making sacrifices and hard choices. But the U.S.
effort in Ukraine has not required those things; it is a proxy war, and
Biden has wisely pledged that despite the alleged existential stakes for
democracy, no U.S. troops will fight on behalf of Ukraine. Harking back
to NSC-68, administration rhetoric, compounded by an endless stream of
media commentary, has created the impression that the Ukraine war has
summoned the United States to once again grab the tiller of history and
steer humankind toward its intended destination. But this is precisely the
sort of hubris that has led the country astray time and again.
It is hard to imagine a better chance to move past this self-satisfied
posturing and find a more responsible way to talk about and under-
stand the U.S. role in the world—but Biden seems determined to miss
the opportunity. Consider this passage from the administration’s 2022
National Security Strategy:

Around the world, the need for American leadership is as great as it

has ever been. We are in the midst of a strategic competition to shape
the future of the international order. Meanwhile, shared challenges
that impact people everywhere demand increased global cooperation
and nations stepping up to their responsibilities at a moment when
this has become more difficult. In response, the United States will lead
with our values, and we will work in lockstep with our allies and part-
ners and with all those who share our interests. We will not leave our
future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision
for a world that is free, open, prosperous, and secure.

This word salad offers something for everyone but is devoid of spec-
ificity and cannot serve as a basis for a coherent policy. Marketed as
a statement of strategy, it instead testifies to the absence of strategy.

THE KENNAN WAY

What the United States needs today is a clear statement of strategic
purpose that will replace the zombie NSC-68 paradigm. Almost unno-
ticed, such an alternative has been available ever since the heady days

March / april 2023 19

 Andrew J. Bacevich

following the U.S. victory in World War II. In 1948, at the outset of
the Cold War, George Kennan, Nitze’s predecessor as director of policy
planning, proposed an approach to measuring the success of U.S. policy
that was devoid of ideological fantasies. Noting that the United States
at that moment possessed “about 50% of the world’s wealth but only
6.3% of its population,” he suggested that the task ahead was “to devise
a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position
of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”
The aim was to keep Americans safe while preserving and even
enhancing the material abundance that made the United States
the envy of the world. Achieving that goal, according to Kennan,
would require the United States “to dispense with all sentimental-
ity and day-dreaming” and concentrate “on our immediate national
objectives.” The country could ill afford “the luxury of altruism and
world-benefaction,” Kennan wrote.
Kennan’s long memorandum outlined in considerable detail how
the United States should deal with the problems of the postwar world.
That world no longer exists. So it is not the particulars of his analysis
that should command attention today but the spirit that informs it:
realism, sobriety, and an appreciation of limits, along with an empha-
sis on purposefulness, discipline, and what Kennan called “economy
of effort.” In 1948, Kennan feared that Americans might succumb to
“the romantic and universalistic concepts” that had sprouted during
the recent war. He was right to worry.
Since 1948, the economic disparity to which Kennan referred has
dwindled. Yet it has not disappeared: today, the United States accounts
for just over four percent of the world’s population but still holds
around 30 percent of the world’s wealth. And within the country, the
distribution of that wealth has shifted dramatically. In 1950, the richest
0.1 percent of Americans controlled around 10 percent of the country’s
wealth; today, they control close to 20 percent of it. Meanwhile, the
country’s fiscal health has declined: the total U.S. national debt now
exceeds $31 trillion, with the federal deficit having averaged more than
a trillion dollars per year since 2010.
A combination of grotesque inequality and feckless profligacy goes a
long way toward explaining why such an immense and richly endowed
country finds itself unable to contend with dysfunction at home and
crises abroad. Military might cannot compensate for an absence of
internal cohesion and governmental self-discipline. Unless the United

20 foreign affairs
 The Reckoning That Wasn’t

States gets its house in order, it has little hope of exercising global
leadership—much less prevailing in a mostly imaginary competition
pitting democracy against autocracy.
Washington urgently needs to follow the advice that Kennan
offered in 1948 and that generations of policymakers have ignored:
avoid needless war, fulfill the promises in the country’s founding doc-
uments, and provide ordinary citizens with the prospect of a decent
life. A place to begin is to reconfigure the U.S. military into a force
designed to protect the American people rather than to serve as an
instrument of global power projection. The United States should
require the Defense Department to defend.
What might that look like in practice? For starters, it would mean
taking seriously the obligation, embedded in the Nuclear Nonpro-
liferation Treaty, to eliminate nuclear weapons; closing down var-
ious regional military headquarters, with U.S. Central Command
first on the chopping block; reducing the size of the U.S. military
footprint abroad; prohibiting payments to military contractors for
cost overruns; putting a lock on the revolving door that sustains the
military-industrial complex; reinvigorating congressional war powers
as specified by the U.S. Constitution; and, barring a declaration of
war, capping military spending at two percent of GDP—which would
still allow the Pentagon to lead the world in military expenditures.
In 1947, in perhaps the most famous essay ever to appear in
Foreign Affairs, Kennan, using the byline “X,” wrote that “to avoid
destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best
traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”
Today, those traditions may be in tatters, but Kennan’s counsel has
lost none of its salience. The chimera of another righteous military
triumph cannot fix what ails the United States. Only the “alert and
knowledgeable citizenry” that Eisenhower called for can fill the
needs of the moment: a polity that refuses to tolerate the further
misuse of American power and the abuse of American soldiers that
have become the hallmarks of our time.

March / april 2023 21

 Return to Table of Contents

How Democracy
Can Win
The Right Way to Counter Autocracy
Samantha Power

W
hen U.S. President Joe Biden took office in January 2021,
the United States had just witnessed four of the most
turbulent years in recent memory, culminating in the
failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Without a doubt,
American democracy had been shown to be far more fragile than it
was when Biden left the vice presidency in 2017.
The picture abroad wasn’t much brighter. Populist parties with
xenophobic and antidemocratic tendencies were gaining momentum
in both established and nascent democracies. The world’s autocracies
seemed newly emboldened. Russia was clamping down on dissent
at home and encouraging authoritarianism abroad through elec-
tion interference, disinformation campaigns, and the actions of its
paramilitary Wagner Group. Meanwhile, China’s government had
become even more repressive at home and more assertive abroad,

SAMANTHA POWER is Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

From 2013 to 2017, she served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

22 foreign affairs
Illustration by Chloe Cushman 23
 Samantha Power

stripping Hong Kong of its autonomy and leveraging its vast bilateral
financial investments to secure support for its policies in international
institutions. In February 2022, just three weeks before Russia’s full-
scale invasion of Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian
President Vladimir Putin announced a new strategic partnership that
they claimed would have “no limits.”
But early 2022 may prove to be a high-water mark for authori-
tarianism. Putin’s ambitions to dominate Ukraine failed miserably,
thanks to the unwavering resolve and courage of the Ukrainian people.
Putin made mistake after strategic mistake while the free people of
Ukraine successfully mobilized, innovated, and adapted.
The root causes of Moscow’s disastrous showing are numerous,
but several bear the hallmarks of authoritarianism. Graft has rotted
the Russian military from within, yielding reports of soldiers selling
fuel and weapons on the black market. Russian commanders have
taken massive risks with the lives of their soldiers: conscripts arrive
at the front having been lied to and manipulated rather than prop-
erly trained. To avoid upsetting their superiors, military leaders have
supplied overly rosy assessments of their ability to conquer Ukraine,
leading one pro-Russian militia commander to call self-deception
“the herpes of the Russian army.”
Russia’s ghastly conduct in Ukraine has left Moscow more isolated
than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Most European coun-
tries are in a race to decouple their economies from Russia, and Finland
and Sweden are on the brink of joining an expanded and united NATO.
Public opinion of Russia and Putin has plummeted in countries around
the world, reaching record lows, according to the Pew Research Center.
In Russia’s immediate neighborhood, Moscow’s traditional security and
economic partners are staying neutral, refusing to host joint military
exercises, seeking to reduce their economic dependence on Russia,
and upholding the sanctions regimes. Russians themselves are voting
with their feet: officially, hundreds of thousands of citizens have fled,
but the true number is likely well over one million and includes tens
of thousands of valued high-tech workers.
The past few years have also demonstrated the shortcomings of
Beijing’s model. In 2020 and 2021, senior Chinese officials claimed
that the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the
superiority of their system. They regularly took potshots at the United
States for its high COVID-19 death toll. Unquestionably, the United

24 foreign affairs
 How Democracy Can Win

States and other democracies made mistakes in handling COVID-19.

But unlike Chinese citizens, dissatisfied voters in these countries
were able to elect new leaders and consequently change their gov-
ernments’ approach to the pandemic. By contrast, Beijing withheld
vital data from the World Health Organization, refused to work
with other nations in developing a vaccine, and stuck with its harsh
“zero COVID” policy until late 2022. It continues to be opaque about
the COVID-19 situation in China, limiting the international commu-
nity’s understanding of potential variants.
Elsewhere, public support for populist
parties, leaders, and antipluralist attitudes The world’s
has dropped significantly since 2020, in part autocrats are
because of how populist-led governments
mishandled the pandemic. Between mid-
finally on the
2020 and the end of 2022, populist leaders defensive.
saw an average decline of 10 percentage
points in their approval ratings in 27 countries analyzed by researchers
at Cambridge University. In the same time frame, prominent leaders
with autocratic tendencies lost power at the ballot box. And American
democracy has proved resilient; the U.S. Congress passed meaningful
electoral reforms and held powerful public investigations into the
events leading up to January 6.
Autocrats are now on the back foot. Under Biden’s leadership,
the United States and countries around the world have joined forces
to protect and strengthen democracy at home and abroad and to work
together on challenges such as climate change and corruption. After a
year of faltering authoritarianism and stubborn democratic resilience,
the United States and other democracies have a chance to regain their
momentum—but only if we learn from the past and adapt our strate-
gies. For the last three decades, advocates of democracy have focused
too narrowly on defending rights and freedoms, neglecting the pain
and dangers of economic hardship and inequality. We have also failed
to contend with the risks associated with new digital technologies,
including surveillance technologies, that autocratic governments have
learned to exploit to their advantage. It is time to coalesce around a new
agenda for aiding the cause of global freedom, one that addresses the
economic grievances that populists have so effectively exploited, that
defangs so-called digital authoritarianism, and that reorients traditional
democracy assistance to grapple with modern challenges.

march / april 2023 25

 Samantha Power

NOT A FRAGILE FLOWER

In his address to the British Parliament in 1982, U.S. President
Ronald Reagan observed that “democracy is not a fragile flower;
still, it needs cultivating.” Since then, the cultivation of democracy
abroad has largely meant the provision of what we call democracy
assistance: funding to support independent media, the rule of law,
human rights, good governance, civil society, pluralistic political
parties, and free and fair elections.
This assistance from the United States, which grew from just over
$106 million in 1990 to over $520 million in 1999, supported dem-
ocratic actors in countries locked behind the Iron Curtain as they
became proud, thriving members of a free Europe. After brave pro-
testers broke the grip of Soviet rule, our assistance helped newly inde-
pendent countries establish everything from public broadcasters to
independent judiciaries. Similar initiatives aided reformers throughout
Africa, Asia, and Latin America as they solidified their democracies.
Although it is difficult to measure just how much these programs
have advanced democratic progress around the world, multiple studies
have identified ways in which democracy assistance from the United
States and other donors has supported positive outcomes. The U.S.
Agency for International Development, the institution I lead and the
largest provider of democracy assistance in the world, has had “clear
and consistent impacts” on civil society, judicial and electoral pro-
cesses, media independence, and overall democratization, according
to one study of the agency’s democracy promotion programs between
1990 and 2003. A later study commissioned by USAID found that every
$10 million of democracy assistance it provided between 1992 and 2000
contributed to a seven-point jump on the 100-point global electoral
democracy index maintained by the nonprofit Varieties of Democracy.
But the same study showed that these positive effects began to falter
in the years after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Between 2001
and 2014, the same amount of investment only saw an increase of a
third of a point—still two and a half times more than the average
annual change among countries in the electoral democracy index over
that period, but a much more diminished impact than in previous years.
Of course, a host of interrelated factors contribute to democracy’s
struggles: polarization, significant inequality and widespread eco-
nomic dissatisfaction, the explosion of disinformation in the public
sphere, political gridlock, the rise of China as a strategic competitor

26 foreign affairs
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of the United States, and the spread of digital authoritarianism

aimed at repressing free expression and expanding government
power. Many of these challenges can only be solved domestically.
But those of us invested in the global renewal of democracy must help
societies address economic concerns that antidemocratic forces have
exploited; take the fight for democracy into the digital realm, just as
autocracies have; and adapt our toolkit to meet not just long-standing
challenges to democracy but also new ones.

BLINDED BY THE RIGHTS

At the core of democratic theory and practice is respect for the dignity
of the individual. But among the biggest errors many democracies have
made since the Cold War is to view individual dignity primarily through
the prism of political freedom without being sufficiently attentive to the
indignity of corruption, inequality, and a lack of economic opportunity.
This was not a universal blind spot: a number of political figures,
advocates, and individuals working at the grassroots level to advance
democratic progress presciently argued that economic inequality
could fuel the rise of populist leaders and autocratic governments that
pledged to improve living standards even as they eroded freedoms.
But too often, the activists, lawyers, and other members of civil society
who worked to strengthen democratic institutions and protect civil
liberties looked to labor movements, economists, and policymakers to
address economic dislocation, wealth inequality, and declining wages
rather than building coalitions to tackle these intersecting problems.
Democracy suffered as a result. Over the past two decades, as
economic inequality rose, polls showed that people in rich and poor
countries alike began to lose faith in democracy and worry that
young people would end up worse off than they were, giving popu-
lists and ethno­nationalists an opening to exploit grievances and gain
a political foothold on every continent.
Moving forward, we must look at all economic programming that
respects democratic norms as a form of democracy assistance. When we
help democratic leaders provide vaccines to their people, bring down
inflation or high food prices, send children to school, or reopen mar-
kets after a natural disaster, we are demonstrating—in a way that a
free press or vibrant civil society cannot always do—that democracy
delivers. And we are making it less likely that autocratic forces will
take advantage of people’s economic hardship.

28 foreign affairs
 How Democracy Can Win

Nowhere is that task more important today than in societies that

have managed to elect democratic reformers or throw off autocratic or
antidemocratic rule through peaceful mass protests or successful polit-
ical movements. These democratic bright spots are incredibly fragile.
Unless reformers solidify their democratic and economic gains quickly,
populations understandably grow impatient, especially if they feel that
the risks they took to upend the old order have not yielded tangi-
ble dividends in their own lives. Such discontent allows opponents
of democratic rule—often aided by external
autocratic regimes—to wrest back control,
reversing reforms and snuffing out dreams We must break
of rights-regarding self-government. down the
The task before reformist leaders is enor-
mous. Often they inherit budgets laden with
wall that separates
debt, economies hollowed out by corruption, democratic
civil services built on patronage, or a combi- advocacy from
nation of all three. When Zambian President economic
Hakainde Hichilema took office in 2021 after
winning a landslide victory over an incumbent
development work.
whose regime had arrested him more than a
dozen times, he discovered that his predecessors had accumulated
over $30 billion in unserviceable debt, nearly one and a half times the
country’s GDP, with very little new infrastructure or return on borrow-
ing to show for it. In Moldova, where the anticorruption advocate Maia
Sandu was elected president in 2020, a single corruption scandal had
previously siphoned off a whopping 12 percent of the country’s GDP.
To help rising democracies overcome such hurdles, USAID has
stepped up with additional support. We have identified and increased
our investment in a number of democratic bright spots, including the
Dominican Republic, Malawi, the Maldives, Moldova, Nepal, Tanza-
nia, and Zambia. That list is by no means comprehensive, and admit-
tedly some of these bright spots shine more intensely than others in
their commitment to democratic reform. But all are working to fight
corruption, create more space for civil society, and respect the rule of
law. Biden has also created a special fund at USAID so we can move
quickly to help bright spots deliver on their key economic priorities as
they pursue reforms and consolidate democratic gains.
But we don’t just want to boost our assistance to these countries;
we want to help them prosper beyond the impact of our programming.

march / april 2023 29

 Samantha Power

The U.S. government’s flagship food security initiative, Feed the Future,
which works with agribusiness, retailers, and university research labs
to help countries improve their agricultural productivity and exports,
recently expanded to include Malawi and Zambia. USAID has also
partnered with Vodafone to expand the reach of a mobile app called
m-mama to every region in Tanzania. The app is akin to an Uber for
expectant mothers, helping pregnant women who lack ambulance ser-
vices reach health facilities and contributing to a significant decrease
in maternal mortality. In Moldova, which is pushing ahead with anti-
corruption reforms despite ramped-up economic pressure from Russia,
USAID has worked to increase the country’s trade integration with
Europe. And at the UN General Assembly in September, U.S. Secretary
of State Antony Blinken and I gathered the heads of state of many of
these rising democracies, together with corporate executives and private
philanthropies, to encourage new partnerships.
That event illustrated a crucial point: strengthening democratic
reformers cannot be the task of government alone. All who believe
in the importance of transparent and accountable governance must
mobilize whenever there is a democratic opening, helping reform-
ers deliver tangible benefits to their people. For governments and
multilateral institutions, that could mean enacting favorable pol-
icy reforms, lowering tariffs or quotas, or simply making high-level
official visits to visibly embrace reformers. For foundations, philan-
thropies, and civil society, that could mean offering new grants and
partnerships. And for businesses and financial institutions, it could
mean expanding existing investments or exploring new ones. Even
individuals can do their part to support democracy by considering a
democratic bright spot for their next vacation.

PRINCIPLED AID
Everywhere they provide assistance, democratic countries must be
guided by and seek to promote democratic principles—including
human rights, norms that counter corruption, and environmental
and social safeguards. In contrast to the approach of autocratic
governments, we showcase the potential benefits of our democratic
system when we provide assistance in a fair, transparent, inclu-
sive and participatory manner—strengthening local institutions,
employing local workers, respecting the environment, and provid-
ing benefits equitably in a society.

30 foreign affairs
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 Samantha Power

The gift of grain: unloading USAID wheat shipments, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, September 2021

Over the past four decades, Beijing has transformed from one of the
largest recipients of foreign assistance to the largest bilateral provider
of development finance, mostly in the form of loans. Through its enor-
mous infrastructure investments, Beijing has helped many developing
countries build seaports, railways, airports, and telecommunications
infrastructure. But the second-order effects of China’s financing can
undermine the long-term development objectives of partner countries
and the health of their institutions. Much of the development financ-
ing China offers, even to highly indebted poor countries, is provided
at nonconcessional market rates through opaque agreements hidden
from the public. According to the World Bank, 40 percent of the debt
owed by the world’s poorest countries is held by China. And attempts
by highly indebted borrowers such as Zambia to restructure their debts
to China have been slow and fractured, with Chinese lenders rarely
agreeing to reductions in interest rates or the principal.
J. CO U N T ES S / G E T T Y I M AG ES

Because they are subject to little public oversight, Beijing’s loans

are often diverted for personal or political gain. A 2019 study in the
Journal of Development Economics found that Chinese lending to
African countries increased closer to elections and that funds dispro-
portionately wound up in the hometowns of political leaders. These
loans skirt local labor and environmental safeguards and help the

32 foreign affairs
 How Democracy Can Win

Chinese government secure access to natural resources and strategic

assets, boosting state-owned or state-directed enterprises.
Democratic donor countries and private businesses must increase
their investments in projects that elevate economic and social inclusion
and strengthen democratic norms—decisions that ultimately yield not
only more equitable results but also stronger development performance.
Together with the rest of the G-7, the United States plans to mobilize
$600 billion in private and public investment by 2027 to finance global
infrastructure. Crucially, we will do so in a way that advances the needs
of partner countries and respects international standards—a model for
all such investments moving forward. This new Partnership for Global
Infrastructure and Investment will finance clean energy projects and
climate-resilient infrastructure; fund the responsible mining of metals
and critical minerals, directing more of the profits to local and indige-
nous groups; expand access to clean water and sanitation services that
particularly benefit women and the disadvantaged; and expand secure
and open 5G and 6G digital networks so that countries don’t have to
rely on Chinese-built networks that may be susceptible to surveillance.

DIGITAL DANGERS
Like inequality and economic privation, potentially dangerous dig-
ital technologies have not received nearly enough attention from
most democracies. The role that such tools have played in the rise of
autocratic governments and ethnonationalist movements can hardly
be overstated. Authoritarian regimes use surveillance systems and
facial recognition software to track and monitor critics, journal-
ists, and other members of civil society with the goal of repressing
opponents and stifling protests. They also export this technology
abroad; China has provided surveillance technology to at least 80
countries through its Digital Silk Road initiative.
Part of the problem is a lack of global norms and legal or regu-
latory frameworks that embed democratic values into tech design
and development. Even in democratic countries, programmers often
have to define their own professional ethics on the fly, developing
boundaries for powerful technologies while also trying to meet
ambitious quarterly goals that leave them little time to reflect on
the human costs of their products.
Biden came into office recognizing the vital role technology will
play in shaping our future. That is why his administration partnered

march / april 2023 33

 Samantha Power

with 60 other governments to release the Declaration for the Future

of the Internet, which outlines a shared positive vision for digital tech-
nologies as well as a blueprint for an AI bill of rights so that artificial
intelligence is used in line with democratic principles and civil liber-
ties. In January 2023, the United States also assumed the chair of the
Freedom Online Coalition, a group of 35 governments committed to
reinvigorating international efforts to advance Internet freedom and
counter the misuse of digital technology.
To build resilience to digital authoritari-
anism, we are kicking off a major new digital
Democracy is not democracy initiative that will help partner
in decline. Rather, governments and civil society assess the
threats that misuse of technologies pose to
it is under attack. citizens. We launched a new initiative with
Australia, Denmark, Norway, and other part-
ners to better align our export controls with our human rights poli-
cies. We blacklisted flagrant offenders, such as Positive Technologies
and NSO Group, both of which sold hacking tools to authoritarian
governments. And in the coming months, the White House will
finalize an executive order barring the U.S. government from using
commercial spyware that poses a security threat or a significant risk
of improper use by a foreign government or person.
But perhaps the biggest threat to democracy from the digital realm is
disinformation and other forms of information manipulation. Although
hate speech and propaganda are not new, the rise of mobile phones and
social media platforms has enabled disinformation to spread at unprec-
edented speed and scale, even in remote and relatively disconnected
regions of the world. According to the Oxford Internet Institute, 81
governments have used social media in malign campaigns to spread
disinformation, in some cases in concert with the regimes in Moscow
and Beijing. Both countries have spent vast sums manipulating the
information environment to fit their narratives by disseminating false
stories, flooding search engines to drown out unfavorable results, and
attacking and doxxing their critics.
The most important step the United States can take to counter
foreign influence campaigns and disinformation is to help our
partners promote media and digital literacy, communicate credibly
with their publics, and engage in “pre-bunking”—that is, seeking to
inoculate their societies against disinformation before it can spread.

34 foreign affairs
 How Democracy Can Win

In Indonesia, for example, USAID has worked with local partners to

develop sophisticated online courses and games that help new social
media users identify disinformation and reduce the likelihood that they
will share misleading posts and articles.
The United States has also helped Ukraine in its fight against the
Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation. For decades, USAID has
worked to enhance the media environment in the country, encouraging
reforms that allow greater access to public information and support-
ing the emergence of strong local media organizations, including the
public broadcaster Suspilne. After Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine
in 2014, our work expanded to help the country’s local journal-
ists produce Russian-language programming that could reach into
Kremlin-occupied territories, such as Dialogues With Donbas, a You-
Tube channel that featured honest conversations with Ukrainians about
life behind Russian lines. We also helped support the production of
the online comedy show Newspalm, which regularly racks up tens of
thousands of views as it skewers Putin’s lies. And even before Moscow’s
full-scale invasion began in February 2022, we worked with the govern-
ment of Ukraine to stand up the Center for Strategic Communications,
which uses memes, well-produced digital videos, and social media and
Telegram posts to poke holes in Kremlin propaganda.

A RECIPE FOR RENEWAL

Despite these successes, the global fight against digital authoritarianism
remains fragmented and underfunded. The United States and other
democracies must work more closely with the private sector and civil
society groups to identify challenges, build partnerships, and increase
investments in digital freedom around the world. At the same time,
we must react to new challenges that journalists, election monitors,
and anticorruption advocates face, updating democracy assistance pro-
gramming to respond to ever-evolving threats.
To that end, the United States has launched several new initiatives—
many of them inspired by activists, civil society, and pro-democracy
nongovernmental organizations—under the banner of the Presidential
Initiative for Democratic Renewal, which Biden unveiled at his 2021
Summit for Democracy. For instance, we have heard from independent
journalists around the world that one of the major impediments to
their work, in addition to death threats and intimidation, is lawsuits
brought against them by those whose corruption they seek to expose.

march / april 2023 35

 Samantha Power

These frivolous lawsuits can cost journalists and their outlets millions
of dollars, putting some out of business and creating a chilling effect
for others. In addition to helping strengthen the physical security of
news organizations, therefore, USAID has established a new insurance
fund, Reporters Shield, that will help investigative journalists and civil
society actors defend themselves against bogus charges. In recognition
of the economic challenges all traditional media outlets face even in
the United States, we have also organized a new effort to help media
organizations that are struggling financially develop business plans,
lower costs, find audiences, and tap into new sources of revenue so that
they do not go bankrupt when independent journalism is needed most.
The United States is also working with its partners to support free
and fair electoral processes around the world. Autocrats no longer
simply stuff ballot boxes on election day; they spend years tilting the
playing field through cyber-hacking and voter suppression. Together,
the leading global organizations that support electoral integrity, both
within governments and outside them, have formed the Coalition for
Securing Election Integrity to establish a consistent set of norms for
what constitutes a free and fair election. The coalition will also help
identify critical elections that the United States and other donor coun-
tries can help support and monitor.
Finally, we are taking a much more aggressive and expansive
approach to fighting corruption, going beyond addressing the
symptoms—petty bribes and shady backroom deals—to tackle the
root causes. In late 2021, for instance, the Biden administration
announced the first U.S. strategy on anticorruption, which recog-
nizes corruption as a national security threat and lays out new ways
to tackle it. We are also working with partner governments to detect
and root out corruption that is occurring on a grand international
scale, abetted by an industry of shadowy facilitators. In Moldova, for
instance, we helped the country’s electoral commission to encourage
greater transparency in financial disclosures so that external actors
looking to exert influence over elections cannot hide their contri-
butions. And in Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Slovenia, where USAID had
previously closed its missions, we have restarted assistance to local
institutions in part to support their efforts to curb corruption.
At the same time, we are raising the costs of corruption by bringing
to light massive multinational schemes to hide illicit gains. We support
global investigative units that unite forensic accountants and journalists

36 foreign affairs
 How Democracy Can Win

to expose illicit dealings, including those detailed in the Luxembourg

Leaks and the Pandora Papers. And as corruption grows more complex
and global in scope, we are helping link investigative journalists across
borders, including in Latin America, where such efforts have uncovered
the mismanagement of nearly $300 million in public funding.

BACK FROM THE BRINK

Democracy is not in decline. Rather, it is under attack. Under attack
from within by forces of division, ethno­nationalism, and repression.
And under attack from without by autocratic governments and leaders
who seek to exploit the inherent vulnerabilities of open societies by
undermining election integrity, weaponizing corruption, and spreading
disinformation to strengthen their own grip on power. Worse, these
autocrats increasingly work together, sharing tricks and technologies
to repress their populations at home and weaken democracy abroad.
To fend off this coordinated assault, the world’s democracies must
also work together. That is why in March 2023, the Biden administra-
tion will host its second Democracy Summit—this time, held simul-
taneously in Costa Rica, the Netherlands, South Korea, the United
States, and Zambia—where the world’s democracies will take stock of
their efforts and put forward new plans for democratic renewal.
After years of democratic backsliding, the world’s autocrats are
finally on the defensive. But to seize this moment and swing the
pendulum of history back toward democratic rule, we must break
down the wall that separates democratic advocacy from economic
development work and demonstrate that democracies can deliver for
their people. We must also redouble our efforts to counter digital sur-
veillance and disinformation while upholding freedom of expression.
And we must update the traditional democratic assistance playbook
to help our partners respond to ever more sophisticated campaigns
against them. Only then can we beat back antidemocratic forces and
extend the reach of freedom.

march / april 2023 37

 Return to Table of Contents

Innovation Power
Why Technology Will Define
the Future of Geopolitics
Eric Schmidt

W
hen Russian forces marched on Kyiv in February 2022,
few thought Ukraine could survive. Russia had more than
twice as many soldiers as Ukraine. Its military budget was
more than ten times as large. The U.S. intelligence community esti-
mated that Kyiv would fall within one to two weeks at most.
Outgunned and outmanned, Ukraine turned to one area in which
it held an advantage over the enemy: technology. Shortly after the
invasion, the Ukrainian government uploaded all its critical data to
the cloud, so that it could safeguard information and keep function-
ing even if Russian missiles turned its ministerial offices into rubble.
The country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, which Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky had established just two years earlier,

Eric Schmidt is Chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project and former CEO and
Chair of Google. He is a co-author, with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher, of
The Age of AI: And Our Human Future.

38 foreign affairs
Illustration by Daniel Liévano 39
 Eric Schmidt

repurposed its e-government mobile app, Diia, for open-source intel-

ligence collection, so that citizens could upload photos and videos
of enemy military units. With their communications infrastructure
in jeopardy, the Ukrainians turned to Starlink satellites and ground
stations provided by SpaceX to stay connected. When Russia sent
Iranian-made drones across the border, Ukraine acquired its own drones
specially designed to intercept their attacks—while its military learned
how to use unfamiliar weapons supplied by Western allies. In the cat-
and-mouse game of innovation, Ukraine sim-
ply proved nimbler. And so what Russia had
Increasingly, imagined would be a quick and easy invasion
AI systems will has turned out to be anything but.
Ukraine’s success can be credited in part to
start making the resolve of the Ukrainian people, the weak-
decisions ness of the Russian military, and the strength of
themselves. Western support. But it also owes to the defin-
ing new force of international politics: innova-
tion power. Innovation power is the ability to invent, adopt, and adapt
new technologies. It contributes to both hard and soft power. High-tech
weapons systems increase military might, new platforms and the standards
that govern them provide economic leverage, and cutting-edge research
and technologies enhance global appeal. There is a long tradition of states
harnessing innovation to project power abroad, but what has changed
is the self-perpetuating nature of scientific advances. Developments in
artificial intelligence in particular not only unlock new areas of scientific
discovery; they also speed up that very process. Artificial intelligence
supercharges the ability of scientists and engineers to discover ever more
powerful technologies, fostering advances in artificial intelligence itself as
well as in other fields—and reshaping the world in the process.
The ability to innovate faster and better—the foundation on which
military, economic, and cultural power now rest—will determine the
outcome of the great-power competition between the United States
and China. For now, the United States remains in the lead. But China
is catching up in many areas and has already surged ahead in others.
To emerge victorious from this century-defining contest, business as
usual will not do. Instead, the U.S. government will have to overcome
its stultified bureaucratic impulses, create favorable conditions for
innovation, and invest in the tools and talent needed to kick-start the
virtuous cycle of technological advancement. It needs to commit itself

40 foreign affairs
 Innovation Power

to promoting innovation in the service of the country and in the service

of democracy. At stake is nothing less than the future of free societies,
open markets, democratic government, and the broader world order.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
The nexus between technological innovation and global domination
dates back centuries, from the muskets the conquistador Francisco
Pizarro wielded to defeat the Inca Empire to the steamboats Com-
modore Matthew Perry commanded to force the opening of Japan.
But the sheer speed at which innovation is happening has no prece-
dent. Nowhere is this change clearer than in one of the foundational
technologies of our time: artificial intelligence.
Today’s AI systems can already provide key advantages in the mil-
itary domain, where they are able to parse millions of inputs, identify
patterns, and alert commanders to enemy activity. The Ukrainian
military, for example, has used AI to efficiently scan intelligence, sur-
veillance, and reconnaissance data from a variety of sources. Increas-
ingly, however, AI systems will move beyond merely assisting human
decision-making and start making decisions themselves. John Boyd, a
military strategist and U.S. Air Force colonel, coined the term “OODA
loop”—observe, orient, decide, act—to describe the decision-making
process in combat. Crucially, AI will be able to execute each part of
the OODA loop much faster. Conflict can happen at the speed of com-
puters, not the speed of people. As a result, command-and-control
systems that rely on human decision-makers—or, worse, complex
military hierarchies—will lose out to faster, more efficient systems
that team machines with humans.
In previous eras, the technologies that shaped geopolitics—from
bronze to steel, steam power to nuclear fission—were largely singu-
lar. There was a clear threshold of technological mastery, and once a
country reached it, the playing field was leveled. Artificial intelligence,
by contrast, is generative in nature. By presenting a platform for con-
tinuous scientific and technological innovation, it can lead to yet more
innovation. That phenomenon makes the AI age fundamentally differ-
ent from the Bronze Age or the steel age. Rather than natural resource
wealth or mastery of a given technology, the source of a country’s power
now lies in its ability to continuously innovate.
This virtuous cycle will only get faster and faster. Once quantum
computing comes of age, superfast computers will allow for the

march / april 2023 41

 Eric Schmidt

Liftoff: testing a prototype of a homemade weaponized drone, Kyiv, Ukraine, November 2022

processing of ever-larger amounts of data, producing ever-smarter

AI systems. These AI systems, in turn, will be able to produce break-
through innovations in other emerging fields, from synthetic biology
to semiconductor manufacturing. Artificial intelligence will change
the very nature of scientific research. Instead of making progress
one study at a time, scientists will discover the answers to age-old
questions by analyzing massive data sets, freeing the world’s smartest
minds to devote more time to developing new ideas. As a founda-
tional technology, AI will be critical in the race for innovation power,
lying behind countless future developments in drug discovery, gene
therapy, material science, and clean energy—and in AI itself. Faster
airplanes did not help build faster airplanes, but faster computers
will help build faster computers.
PA U L A B R O N S T E I N / G E T T Y I M A G E S

Even more powerful than today’s artificial intelligence is a more com-

prehensive technology—for now, given current computing power, still
hypothetical—called “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI. Whereas
traditional AI is designed to solve a discrete problem, AGI should be
able to perform any mental task a human can and more. Imagine an
AI system that could answer seemingly intractable questions, such as
the best way to teach a million children English or to treat a case of
Alzheimer’s disease. The advent of AGI remains years, perhaps even

42 foreign affairs
 Innovation Power

decades, away, but whichever country develops the technology first will
have a massive advantage, since it could then use AGI to develop ever
more advanced versions of AGI, gaining an edge in all other domains
of science and technology in the process. A breakthrough in this field
could usher in an era of predominance not unlike the short period of
nuclear superiority the United States enjoyed in the late 1940s.
Whereas many of AI’s most transformative effects are still far off,
innovation in drones is already upending the battlefield. In 2020, Azer-
baijan employed Turkish- and Israeli-made drones to gain a decisive
advantage in its war against Armenia in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh
region, racking up battlefield victories after more than two decades of
military stalemate. Similarly, Ukraine’s fleet of drones—many of which
are low-cost commercial models repurposed for reconnaissance behind
enemy lines—have played a critical role in its successes.
Drones offer distinct advantages over traditional weapons: they are
smaller and cheaper, offer unmatched surveillance capabilities, and
reduce soldiers’ risk exposure. Marines in urban warfare, for example,
could be accompanied by microdrones that serve as their eyes and ears.
Over time, countries will improve the hardware and software powering
drones to outinnovate their rivals. Eventually, autonomous weapon-
ized drones—not just unmanned aerial vehicles but also ground-based
ones—will replace soldiers and manned artillery altogether. Imagine an
autonomous submarine that could quickly move supplies into contested
waters or an autonomous truck that could find the optimal route to
carry small missile launchers across rough terrain. Swarms of drones,
networked and coordinated by AI, could overwhelm tank and infantry
formations in the field. In the Black Sea, Ukraine has used drones
to attack Russian ships and supply vessels, helping a country with a
minuscule navy constrain Russia’s mighty Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine
offers a preview of future conflicts: wars that will be waged and won
by humans and machines working together.
As developments in drones make clear, innovation power under-
lies military power. First and foremost, technological dominance in
crucial domains bolsters a country’s ability to wage war and thus
strengthens its deterrent capabilities. But innovation also shapes
economic power by giving states leverage over supply chains and
the ability to make the rules for others. Countries reliant on natural
resources or trade, especially those that must import rare or foun-
dational goods, face vulnerabilities others do not.

march / april 2023 43

 Eric Schmidt

Consider the power China can wield over the countries it sup-
plies with communications hardware. It is no surprise that coun-
tries dependent on Chinese-supplied infrastructure—such as many
countries in Africa, where components produced by Huawei make
up about 70 percent of 4G networks—have been loath to criticize
Chinese human rights violations. Taiwan’s primacy in semiconductor
manufacturing, likewise, provides a powerful deterrent against inva-
sion, since China has little interest in destroying its largest source
of microchips. Leverage also accrues to countries pioneering new
technologies. The United States, thanks to its role in the foundation
of the Internet, has for decades enjoyed a seat at the table defining
Internet regulations. During the Arab Spring, for example, the fact
that the United States was home to technology companies that pro-
vided the backbone of the Internet enabled those companies to refuse
Arab governments’ censorship requests.
Less obvious but also crucial, technological innovation buoys a
country’s soft power. Hollywood and tech companies such as Netflix
and YouTube have built up a trove of content for an increasingly
global consumer base—all the while, helping spread American values.
Such streaming services project the American way of life into living
rooms around the world. Similarly, the prestige associated with U.S.
universities and the opportunities for wealth creation created by U.S.
companies attract strivers from across the globe. In short, a country’s
ability to project power in the international sphere—militarily, eco-
nomically, and culturally—depends on its ability to innovate faster
and better than its competitors.

RACE TO THE TOP

The main reason innovation now lends such a massive advantage is
that it begets more innovation. In part, it does so because of the path
dependency that arises from clusters of scientists attracting, teaching,
and training other great scientists at research universities and large
technology companies. But it also does so because innovation builds
on itself. Innovation relies on a loop of invention, adoption, and adap-
tation—a feedback cycle that fuels yet more innovation. If any link in
the chain breaks, so, too, does a country’s ability to innovate effectively.
A lead in invention is typically built on years of prior research.
Consider the way the United States led the world into the 4G era of
telecommunications. The rollout of 4G networks across the country

44 foreign affairs
 Innovation Power

facilitated the early development of mobile applications such as Uber

that required faster cellular data connections. With that lead, Uber was
able to refine its product in the United States so it could roll it out in
developing countries. This led to many more customers—and much
more feedback to incorporate—as the company adapted its product
for new markets and new releases.
But the moat around countries that enjoy structural advantages in
technology is shrinking. Thanks in part to more accessible academic
research and the rise of open-source soft-
ware, technologies now diffuse more quickly
around the world. The availability of new Innovation
advances has helped competitors catch up at begets more
record speed, as China eventually did in 4G.
Although some of China’s recent technolog-
innovation.
ical success stems from economic espionage
and a disregard for patents, much of it traces back to innovative,
rather than derivative, efforts to adapt and implement new technology.
Indeed, Chinese companies have enjoyed resounding success in
adopting and commercializing foreign technological breakthroughs.
In 2015, the Chinese Communist Party laid out its “Made in China
2025” strategy to achieve self-sufficiency in high-tech industries such
as telecommunications and AI. As part of this bid, it announced
an economic plan of “dual circulation,” whereby China intends to
boost both domestic and foreign demand for its goods. Through
public-private partnerships, direct subsidies to private companies,
and support for state-backed companies, Beijing has poured billions
of dollars into ensuring it comes out ahead in the race for techno-
logical supremacy. So far, the record is mixed. China is ahead of the
United States in some technologies yet lags in others.
It is hard to say whether China will seize the lead in AI, but top
officials in Beijing certainly think it will. In 2017, Beijing announced
plans to become the global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, and
it may achieve that goal even earlier than expected. China has already
accomplished its goal of becoming the world’s leader in AI-based
surveillance technology, which it not only uses to control dissidents
at home but also sells to authoritarian governments abroad. China
still ranks behind the United States in attracting the best minds in AI,
with almost 60 percent of top-tier researchers working in U.S. uni-
versities. But China’s loose privacy laws, mandatory data collection,

march / april 2023 45

 Eric Schmidt

and targeted government funding give the country a key advantage.

Indeed, it already leads in the production of autonomous vehicles.
For now, the United States still retains an edge in quantum com-
puting. Yet over the past decade, China has invested at least $10
billion in quantum technology, roughly ten times as much as the
U.S. government. China is working to build quantum computers so
powerful that they will easily crack today’s encryption. The country is
also investing heavily in quantum networks—a way of transmitting
information in the form of quantum bits—
presumably in the hope that such networks
More than half of would be impervious to monitoring by other
all AI researchers intelligence agencies. Even more alarming,
the Chinese government may already be
in the United storing stolen and intercepted communica-
States hail tions with an eye to decrypting them once
from abroad. it possesses the computing power to do so, a
strategy known as “store now, decrypt later.”
When quantum computers become fast enough, all communications
encrypted through non-quantum methods will be at risk for inter-
ception, raising the stakes of achieving this breakthrough first.
China is also actively trying to catch up with the United States in
synthetic biology. Scientists in this field are working on a range of new
biological developments, including microbe-made cement that absorbs
carbon dioxide, crops with an increased ability to sequester carbon, and
plant-based meat substitutes. Such technology holds enormous promise
to fight climate change and create jobs, but since 2019, Chinese private
investment in synthetic biology has outpaced U.S. investment.
When it comes to semiconductors, China has ambitious plans, too.
The Chinese government is funding unprecedented efforts to become
a leader in semiconductor manufacturing by 2030. Chinese compa-
nies are currently creating what are known in the industry as “seven
nanometer” chips, but Beijing has set its sights further, announcing
plans to domestically produce the new generation of “five nanometer”
chips. For now, the United States continues to outperform China in
semiconductor design, as do U.S.-aligned Taiwan and South Korea.
In October 2022, the Biden administration took the important step
of blocking leading U.S. companies producing AI computer chips
from selling to China as part of a package of restrictions released
by the Department of Commerce. Yet Chinese companies control

46 foreign affairs
 Innovation Power

85 percent of the processing of the rare-earth minerals that go into

these chips and other critical electronics, offering an important point
of leverage over their competitors. 

A BATTLE OF SYSTEMS
The competition between the United States and China is as much a
competition between systems as it is between states. In the Chinese
model of civil-military fusion, the government promotes domestic
competition and funds emerging winners as “national champions.”
These companies play a dual role, maximizing commercial success and
advancing Chinese national security interests. The American model,
on the other hand, relies on a more disparate set of private actors. The
federal government provides funding to basic science but largely leaves
innovation and commercialization to the market. 
For a long time, the trifecta of government, industry, and academia
was the primary source of American innovation. This collaboration
drove many technological breakthroughs, from the moon landing to the
Internet. But with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government grew
averse to allocating funding for applied research, and it even lowered
the amount devoted to fundamental research. Although private spend-
ing has taken off, public investments have plateaued over the past half
century. In 2015, the share of government funding for basic research
dropped below 50 percent for the first time since the end of World
War II, having hovered around 70 percent in the 1960s. Meanwhile,
the geometry of innovation—the respective role of public and private
players in driving technological progress—has changed since the Cold
War, in ways that have not always yielded what the country needs. The
rise of venture capital helped accelerate adoption and commercializa-
tion, but it did little to address higher-order scientific problems.
The reasons for Washington’s reluctance to fund the science that serves
as the foundation of innovation power are structural. Innovation requires
risk and, at times, failure—something politicians are loath to accept.
Innovation can demand long-term investments, but the U.S. government
operates on a single-year budget cycle and, at most, a two-year political
cycle. Despite these obstacles, Silicon Valley (along with other hot spots
in the United States) has still managed to encourage innovation. The
American success story relies on a potent mix of inspiring ambition,
startup-friendly legal and tax regimes, and a culture of openness that
allows entrepreneurs and researchers to iterate and improve on new ideas.

march / april 2023 47

 Eric Schmidt

That may not be enough, however. Government support has long

played a critical role in jump-starting innovation in the United States,
and research in technologies that seem outlandish now may prove
critical in the not-too-distant future. In 2013, for example, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency invested in messenger RNA vac-
cines, working with the biotech company Moderna, which would later
develop and deliver a COVID-19 vaccine in record time. But such exam-
ples are rarer than they should be.
Competition with China demands a reenergizing of the interplay
among the government, the private sector, and academia. Just as the
Cold War led to the creation of the National Security Council, today’s
tech-fueled competition should spur a rethinking of existing policy-
making structures. As the National Security Commission on Artifi-
cial Intelligence (which I chaired) recommended, a new “technology
competitiveness council,” inspired by the NSC, could help coordinate
action among private actors and develop a national plan to advance
crucial emerging technologies. In a promising sign, Congress appears to
have recognized the need for decisive support. In 2022, in a bipartisan
vote, it passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which directs $200 billion
in funding for scientific R & D over the next ten years.

INVESTING IN THE FUTURE

As part of its effort to ensure that it remains an innovation superpower,
the United States will need to invest billions of dollars in key areas of
technological competition. In semiconductors, perhaps the most vital
technology today, the U.S. government should redouble its efforts to
onshore and “friend shore” supply chains, relocating them to the United
States or friendly countries. In renewable energy, it should fund R & D
for microelectronics, stockpile the rare-earth minerals (such as lithium
and cobalt) needed for batteries and electric vehicles, and invest in new
technologies that can replace lithium-ion batteries and offset China’s
resource dominance. Meanwhile, the rollout of 5G in the United States
has been slow, in part because government agencies—most notably, the
Department of Defense—control most of the high-frequency radio
spectrum that 5G uses. To catch up with China, the Pentagon should
open up more of the spectrum to private actors.
The United States will need to invest in all parts of the innovation
cycle, funding not just basic research but also commercialization. Mean-
ingful innovation requires both invention and implementation, the abil-

48 foreign affairs
 Innovation Power

ity to execute and commercialize new inventions at scale. This is often

the main stumbling block. Research in electric cars, for example, helped
General Motors bring its first model onto the market in 1996, but it took
two more decades before Tesla mass-produced a commercially viable
model. Every new technology, from AI to quantum computing to syn-
thetic biology, must be pursued with the clear goal of commercialization.
In addition to directly investing in the technologies that fuel inno-
vation power, the United States must invest in the input that lies at
the core of innovation: talent. The United States boasts the world’s
top startups, incumbent companies, and universities, all of which
attract the best and the brightest from around the world. Yet too many
talented people are prevented from coming to the United States by
its outdated immigration system. Instead of creating an easy path to
a green card for foreigners who earn STEM degrees from American
schools, the current system makes it needlessly difficult for top grad-
uates to contribute to the U.S. economy.
The United States has an asymmetric advantage when it comes to
employing highly skilled immigrants, and its enviable living standards and
abundant opportunities explain why the country has attracted most of the
world’s brightest AI minds. More than half of all AI researchers working
in the United States hail from abroad, and the demand for AI talent still
far exceeds supply. If the United States closes its doors to talented immi-
grants, it risks losing its innovative edge. Just as the Manhattan Project was
led in large part by refugees and émigrés from Europe, the next American
technological breakthrough will almost certainly rely on immigrants. 

THE BEST DEFENSE

As part of its efforts to translate innovation into hard power, the United
States must fundamentally rethink some of its defense policies. During
the Cold War, the country designed various “offset” strategies to coun-
terbalance Soviet numerical superiority through military strategy and
technological innovations. Today, Washington needs what the Spe-
cial Competitive Studies Project has called an “Offset-X” strategy, a
competitive approach through which the United States can maintain
technological and military superiority.
Given how much modern militaries and economies rely on digital
infrastructure, any future great-power war is likely to start with a cyber-
strike. The United States’ cyberdefenses, therefore, need a response time
faster than humans’ reaction time. Having faced constant cyberattacks

march / april 2023 49

 Eric Schmidt

Chipping away: on a semiconductor production line, Jiangsu Province, China, September 2022

even in peacetime, the United States should armor itself with redun-
dancy, creating backup systems and alternative paths for data flows.
What starts in cyberspace could easily escalate into the physical
realm, and there, too, the United States will need to meet new chal-
lenges. To counter possible swarm drone attacks, it must invest in
defensive artillery and missile systems. To improve battlefield aware-
ness, the U.S. military should focus on deploying a network of inex-
pensive sensors powered by AI to monitor contested areas, an approach
that is often more effective than a single, exquisitely crafted system. As
human intelligence becomes harder to obtain, the United States must
increasingly rely on the largest constellation of sensors of any country,
ranging from undersea to outer space. It will also need to focus more
on open-source intelligence, given that most of the world’s data today
is publicly available. Without this capability, the United States risks
being surprised by its intelligence failures.
When it comes to actual fighting, military units should be net-
worked and decentralized to better outmaneuver opponents. Facing
VCG / G E T T Y I M AG ES

adversaries with rigid military hierarchies, the United States could gain
an advantage by using smaller, more connected units whose members
are adept at network-based decision-making, employing the tools of
artificial intelligence to their advantage. For example, a single unit

50 foreign affairs
 Innovation Power

could bring together capabilities in intelligence collection, long-range

missile attacks, and electronic warfare. The Pentagon needs to provide
battlefield commanders with all the best information and allow them
to make the best choices on the ground.
The U.S. military must also learn to integrate new technologies into
its procurement process, battle plans, and warfighting. In the four years
that I chaired the Defense Innovation Board, I was astounded by how
difficult this was to do. A major bottleneck is the Pentagon’s burden-
some procurement process: major weapons systems take more than ten
years to design, develop, and deploy. The Department of Defense should
look for inspiration in the way the tech industry designs products. It
should build missiles the way companies now build electric cars, using
a design studio to develop and simulate software, looking for innova-
tions ten times as fast and as cost-effective as current processes. The
current procurement system is especially ill suited for a future in which
software primacy proves decisive on the battlefield.
The United States spends four times as much as any other country
to procure military systems, but price is a poor metric for judging
innovation power. In April 2022, Ukrainian forces fired two Neptune
missiles at the Moskva, a 600-foot Russian warship, sinking the vessel.
The ship cost $750 million; the missiles, $500,000 apiece. Likewise,
China’s state-of-the-art hypersonic antiship missile, the YJ-21, could
someday sink a $10 billion U.S. aircraft carrier. The U.S. government
should think twice before committing another $10 billion and ten years
to such a vessel. It often makes more sense to buy many low-cost items
instead of investing in a few high-ticket prestige projects.

PLAYING TO WIN
In the contest of the century—the U.S. rivalry with China—the decid-
ing factor will be innovation power. Technological advances in the
next five to ten years will determine which country gains the upper
hand in this world-shaping competition. The challenge for the United
States, however, is that government officials are incentivized to avoid
risk and focus on the short term, leaving the country to chronically
underinvest in the technologies of the future.
If necessity is the mother of invention, war is the midwife of
innovation. Speaking to Ukrainians on a visit to Kyiv in the fall of
2022, I heard from many that the first months of the war were the
most productive of their lives. The United States’ last truly global

march / april 2023 51

 Eric Schmidt

war—World War II—led to the widespread adoption of penicillin,

a revolution in nuclear technology, and a breakthrough in computer
science. Now, the United States must innovate in peacetime, faster
than ever before. By failing to do so, it is eroding its ability to deter—
and, if necessary, to fight and win—the next war.
The alternative could be disastrous. Hypersonic missiles could leave
the United States defenseless, and cyberattacks could cripple the coun-
try’s electric grid. Perhaps even more important, the warfare of the
future will target individuals in completely new ways: authoritarian
states such as China and Russia may be able to collect individual data
on Americans’ shopping habits, location, and even DNA profiles, allow-
ing for tailor-made disinformation campaigns and even targeted biolog-
ical attacks and assassinations. To avert these horrors, the United States
needs to make sure it remains ahead of its technological competitors.
The principles that have defined life in the United States—free-
dom, capitalism, individual effort—were the right ones for the past
and remain so for the future. These basic values lie at the founda-
tion of an innovation ecosystem that is still the envy of the world.
They have enabled breakthroughs that have transformed everyday
life around the world. The United States started the innovation race
in pole position, but it cannot rest assured it will remain there. Sil-
icon Valley’s old mantra holds true not just in industry but also in
geopolitics: innovate or die.

52 foreign affairs
 Return to Table of Contents

People Over Robots

The Global Economy Needs
Immigration Before Automation
Lant Pritchett

W
e live in a technological age—or so we are told. Machines
promise to transform every facet of human life: robots will
staff factory floors, driverless cars will rule the road, and arti-
ficial intelligence will govern weapons systems. Politicians and analysts fret
over the consequences of such advances, worrying about the damage that
will be done to industries and individuals. Governments, they argue, must
help manage the costs of progress. These conversations almost always treat
technological change as something to be adapted to, as if it were a force
of nature, barreling inexorably into the staid conventions and assumptions
of modern life. The pace of change seems irrepressible; new technologies
will remake societies. All people can do is figure out how best to cope.
Nowhere is this outlook more apparent than in the discussion of
automation and its impact on jobs. My local grocery store in rural

Lant Pritchett is Research Director of Labor Mobility Partnerships, RISE

Research Director at the Blavatnik School of Development at the University of Oxford,
and a former World Bank economist.

march / april 2023 53

 Lant Pritchett

Utah has hung, with no apparent sense of irony, a sign proclaiming the
company’s support for U.S. workers above a self-checkout machine, a
device that uses technology to replace the labor of an employee with
the labor of the customer. Much ink has been spilled in explaining
how automation threatens some low-skilled workers and what govern-
ments should do to help: for instance, countries could support retrain-
ing initiatives, revamp education systems, or invest in redistributive
schemes. At the same time, many governments hope that machines
can save their economies from the conse-
quences of demographic decline and aging.
Automation is Techno-optimists argue that the United
not inevitable; States and many other wealthy countries
need automation to make up for dwindling
it is a choice. working-age populations and looming gaps
in workforces. Happily, they suggest, the
advance of technology will sweep aside the troubles of demography.
But these debates and arguments miss a very simple point. As seis-
mic as it may seem, technological change is not a natural force but the
work of human beings. Of course, technology has radically improved
human lives: no one wants to live without electricity, flush toilets, or
(in Utah) central heating. In other cases, however, it is new policies,
and not new technologies, that societies need most.
Automation is often a solution in search of a problem. It is a choice
people have made, not an inevitability and certainly not a necessity.
For instance, the United States faces a scarcity of truck drivers. The
American Trucking Association has estimated that in 2021 there were
80,000 fewer drivers than the total needed and that, given the age
of current drivers, over a million new ones will have to be recruited
in the coming decade. To deal with this deficit, many tech moguls,
including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, have invested in the research
and development of self-driving vehicles, technology that would reduce
the demand for drivers. For Bezos, such technology makes corporate
financial sense; Amazon relies on low shipping costs to keep its prices
down. But it does not make wider economic sense because millions of
people would be happy to drive trucks in the United States—they just
need to be allowed to work in the country.
There is no global scarcity of people who would like to be long-haul
truck drivers in the United States, where the median wage for such
work is $23 per hour. In the developing world, truck drivers make

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 People Over Robots

around $4 per hour. Yet firms cannot recruit workers from abroad even
at the higher wage because of restrictions on immigration, so business
leaders in the United States are impelled to choose machines over
people and eradicate jobs through the use of technology. But if they
could recruit globally, they would have less incentive to destroy those
jobs and replace people with machines. The implacable fact of national
borders steers businesses toward investing in technology that does not
respond to global scarcities—and that no one really needs.
What is true for truck driving is also true for many other indus-
tries in the rich industrial world that require nonprofessional work-
ers in specific work environments. A 2021 report by the financial
services company Mercer estimated that, by 2025, the United States
would face a shortage of some 660,000 home health aides, lab
technicians, and nursing assistants.
Barriers to migration encourage a terrible misdirection of resources.
In the world’s most productive economies, the capital and energies of
business leaders (not to mention the time and talents of highly edu-
cated scientists and engineers) get sucked into developing technology
that will minimize the use of one of the most abundant resources on
the planet: labor. Raw labor power is the most important (and often
the only) asset low-income people around the world have. The drive
to make machines that perform roles that could easily be fulfilled by
people not only wastes money but helps keep the poorest poor.
To be sure, some social and political concerns regarding the
cross-national movement of economic migrants are legitimate, includ-
ing those about how such flows of people would be managed, affect
current domestic workers, and create social tensions. Advocates are also
right to worry about how migrant workers would be protected from
exploitation. From the perspective of individual firms and industries, it
is easier to figure out how to get artificial intelligence to drive a truck
than it is to lower the bureaucratic barriers of immigration restrictions.
But choosing devices over people is a mistake. It leads the world
to miss out on the real economic and humanitarian gains that would
come from letting people move to where they are needed instead of
trying to invent machines that can supplant humans. The refusal to
allow people to cross national borders as economic migrants, especially
to engage in jobs that require just core labor skills, massively distorts
the trajectory of technological change in ways that make everybody,
especially the world’s poor, worse off.

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RISE OF THE MACHINES

A popular view in the West holds that the governments of wealthy
societies do not need to bring more workers into their countries. If
anything, they can comfortably raise barriers as technological prog-
ress destroys so-called low-skill jobs. But this is just not the case.
Some technological changes are driven by progress in basic sci-
ence. Often, discussions of the future of labor assume that the path
and the pattern of technological change are already determined and
that the effects on jobs and workers are just natural consequences of
the inevitable progress of science. But economists have developed
increasingly nuanced understandings of how technological change
has reshaped labor markets and wages and how innovation is a con-
sequence—not just a cause—of the costs that firms face.
For decades, economic and policy discussions about labor markets
and technology had tended to focus on how shifts in wages reflected
the skills of workers, where “skill” was treated as synonymous with “cog-
nitive skill,” with a worker’s level of formal education as a rough proxy
for cognitive skill. The standard analysis was that advances in informa-
tion and communications technology have helped boost the incomes
of highly educated workers and reduced those of all less-educated,
low-skilled workers. But that is not what happened: although the wages
of the highly skilled have risen in the United States since 1979 relative
to those in the broad middle of earners, the wages in traditionally
low-wage occupations also rose in percentage terms more than those
in the middle—and over some periods by as much as those at the top.
Research by the economists David Autor, David Dorn, and others
shows that the demand for various occupations in response to tech-
nology does not change in a simple linear relationship with worker
skill but depends on the nature of the tasks that that worker must
perform. Jobs in service occupations, such as food preparation, clean-
ing and janitorial work, maintenance, in-person health assistance,
and security, involve manual and nonroutine tasks. Many manual
nonroutine tasks are very difficult to either automate or offshore, as
they require the direct physical presence of the worker, and so these
jobs remain in demand, and their wages have remained robust even
in the wake of technological advances.
Undoubtedly, truly revolutionary changes have occurred in how people
communicate, seek information, organize and process data, and enter-
tain themselves. But the notion that the rapid technological change

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 People Over Robots

in some sectors of the economy in recent decades has accelerated

the transformation of the entire economy is wildly off the mark. In
fact, the growth of economic productivity in industrial countries by
the standard measure of growth of “total factor productivity” (which
assesses productivity by dividing total production, or output, by its
costs, or inputs) has been considerably slower in recent decades
than it was between the early twentieth century and 1970. Nearly
every developed country has experienced a substantial deceleration
in productivity growth since 1980.
Meanwhile, the supply of workers for manual, nonroutine tasks has
markedly decreased in rich industrialized countries, thanks to dramat-
ically lowered fertility and rising levels of education. The number of
open jobs is increasingly out of sync with the number of domestic can-
didates available to fill those jobs. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Occupational Outlook Handbook forecasts that, between 2021 and 2031,
the occupational categories that require less than a college degree and
for which existing median earnings are less than $40,000 will see a net
rise of more than five million new jobs, with home health and personal
care aides adding around 924,000 jobs and cooks adding 419,000.
But according to UN demographic projections, the number of people
between the ages of 20 and 40 in the United States (not factoring in
any migration) will fall by more than three million in the same period.
The medium-term demographic future of the native born in the rich
industrial world is already clear: by the 2040s, there will be millions too
few native-born people in developed countries available to perform all
the essential, nonroutine, manual tasks in the economy.
The more than trillionfold increase in computing power over the last
century has radically changed those occupations in which people did routine
and repetitive tasks. The African American women who made the moon
landing possible (and were made famous in the movie Hidden Figures)
worked for NASA as “computers,” busily making numerous calculations
that machines can now make in an instant. There are no more human
computers, and machines called computers are just markedly more effec-
tive than humans at computing. But for many tasks, no increase in com-
puting power will make them more appropriate for machines to perform.
Machines are not better at personal care, machines are not better cooks,
and machines will not necessarily be better than people at driving trucks.
If self-driving trucks eventually proliferate on American roads,
it will not be evidence of the relentless march of scientific progress.

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Rather, their use will be a demonstration of something else entirely: the

consequences of barriers to the movement of labor that create massive
private financial incentives that, in turn, drive powerful people and cor-
porations to undertake enormous investments of scarce human resources
in technological innovation—with the wider result of replacing people
with machines. Ultimately, U.S. firms opt for automation because it is
far easier to solve even very hard technical problems, such as those that
self-checkout machines and driverless vehicles attempt to solve,
than it has been for countries to address the social and political obsta-
cles that prevent them from allowing foreigners to do those jobs.

PRIDE OF PLACE
The arbitrary facts of birth, nationality, and citizenship profoundly
affect people’s lives. Where people are born and where they can move
fundamentally shape how much money they can earn over the course
of their life. Restricting the movement of people across borders creates
a massive price differential between equally productive workers.
In research I did with co-authors, we looked at the earnings of
workers born and educated in 42 different countries. We compared the
earnings of those who remained in their home countries with those
who worked in the United States. We adjusted these earnings for the
differences in the price of goods and services between countries to take
into account discrepancies in purchasing power. The wage differential
for equally productive workers between the 42 countries we studied
and the United States ranged from two to ten times as much in the
United States, averaging around four times as much. Such proportions
are evident across occupations (including those of waiters and truck
drivers) and across education and skill levels.
This gulf in the wages of equally productive people in different
countries is the largest policy-induced price distortion in the world
today (and probably in all of human history). Barriers to migration
generate an artificial scarcity of labor. Many industries in the United
States struggle to find workers at labor costs they can afford. That
deficit spurs companies to search for solutions through automation
and other technologies that are unnecessary and inefficient.
Experience shows that letting more workers into a country would
indeed change patterns of innovation. The United States has run this
experiment before, in reverse. In the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury, the United States allowed the seasonal migration of agricultural

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 People Over Robots

guest workers from Mexico under the rubric of the Bracero Program.
The government eventually slowed the program and finally stopped it
entirely in 1964. Researchers compared the patterns of employment
and production between those states that lost Bracero workers and
those that never had them. They found that eliminating these workers
did not increase the employment of native workers in the agricultural
sector at all. Instead, farmers responded to the newly created scarcity
of workers by relying more on machines and technological advances;
for instance, they shifted to planting genetically modified products
that could be harvested by machines, such as tomatoes with thicker
skins, and away from crops such as asparagus and strawberries, for
which options for mechanized harvesting were limited.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but false necessity is
the mother of dumb inventions. Prohibition in the early twentieth
century banned the importation, production, transportation, and sales
of alcoholic beverages in the United States. These restrictions were an
enormous boon to illegal distillers of moonshine, who saw demand
M AT T C L O U G H

for their booze explode. But their product needed to be shipped to

thirsty drinkers. Just hiding flasks in boots (the origin of the term
“bootlegger”) was insufficient. To transport more moonshine, people

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 Lant Pritchett

built “moonshine runners”: vehicles that could speedily carry heavy

shipments of moonshine without drawing attention. The development
of moonshine runners required technological savvy and innovation, but
they still represented a dumb invention. The banning of a perfectly ordi-
nary economic transaction—buying alcohol—led not to better liquor
trucks but to the innovation of making a liquor truck look like a regular
vehicle, which was a pure waste of time and talent.

THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

Proponents of barriers to migration insist that they are necessary to
protect the wages of current citizens, but that is not true. There have
been times in the past century when governments were concerned that
their country could not provide sufficient jobs for their citizenry, but
the shifting demographics of the rich industrial world have changed
that logic completely. For the foreseeable future, the challenge will be
finding enough workers to fill available jobs. Even countries that have
traditionally not welcomed immigrants, such as Japan, are now aggres-
sively recruiting workers from abroad. They can do so with the knowl-
edge that immigrants do not necessarily hurt the wages of natives. A
2017 National Academy of Sciences review found that the net impact
of immigration on the average wages of domestic workers in the United
States was either zero or, more likely, slightly positive. In economic
terms, migrants are not substitutes for the typical U.S. worker, but
complements, so that more migrants actually raise the average wage
of citizens. Having more assistants, for instance, does not lower but
rather raises the wages of skilled workers, such as nurses, by freeing
more of their time for tasks that need their unique skills. Of course,
some particularly disadvantaged U.S. workers may compete directly for
jobs with migrants, but limitations on migration are neither an effective
nor an efficient way to help those native workers. Programs such as the
Earned Income Tax Credit are a vastly more cost-effective means of
buttressing the wages of domestic workers. I have done calculations to
show that, even under more pessimistic assumptions about the negative
impact of migrants on the wages of disadvantaged native workers, only
a modest increase in the EITC is required to completely offset those
losses—and it is a tiny fraction compared with the economic loss that
would result from banning migrants in the first place.
The main economic losers from the restrictions rich countries place
on labor mobility are the world’s poor. Decades of well-intentioned

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 People Over Robots

development programs and aid initiatives cannot equal the benefit of

permitting a person in a poor country to work in a wealthier, more
productive one. If they want to help the world’s poor, citizens of rich
countries should understand that all the worthy development proj-
ects, antipoverty programs, and foreign aid to poor countries have an
inconsequentially small effect compared with the benefits of just letting
people move to the rich countries that need them and work for the
going wage justified by their productivity.
For instance, a widely cited 2015 paper published in Science considered
the effects of an antipoverty program that transferred livestock across
six poor countries, with the goal of increasing the income of chronically
poor households. The program spent $4,545 per household in its first two
years. By the third year, annual household consumption was higher by
just $344 on average across five of the six countries where the program
produced positive results—Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Pakistan, and Peru.
(In Honduras, nearly all the livestock died.) And, given that so many
attempts through similar projects to raise the incomes of the poor had
failed, this modest gain of $344 in annual household consumption by
spending $4,545 was regarded by the authors as a major success.
By contrast, my research suggests that workers without a high school
degree would make, on average, as much as $13,119 more per year in
the United States than would their counterparts in the five countries
studied. Even if ten percent of the wage differential is absorbed in the
travel costs of moving back and forth for a year, allowing the same
low-skilled workers to be employed in the United States, rather than
consigning them to their home country, would produce a boost in
income 35 times larger than that enabled by an effective, well-designed,
and well-implemented antipoverty program.
The phenomenon of global poverty today is not one of “poor people”
but of people trapped in “poor places,” unable to leave because of bar-
riers limiting their movement. The derisive caricature of poverty has it
that people are poor because they lack “human capital,” but the reality is
that the massive expansion of education in the developing world since
the 1950s means that the average adult in Haiti today has had more
schooling than the average adult in France had in 1970. But Haiti is a
chaotic and low-productivity place to use any type of capital, including
human capital; hence, most Haitians who have escaped poverty have
done so by leaving their country. Some may fret about “brain drain,”
the spurious notion that a poor country will be further immiserated

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by losing its best and brightest overseas. The principal attraction of

arguments regarding “brain drain” seems to be that the words rhyme,
as there has never been any evidence that outward migration in general
has harmed a country’s prospects. It is worth remembering that many
of the richest countries in the world today—including Denmark, Italy,
Norway, Spain, and Sweden—had some of the highest emigration rates
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Wage differentials create a deep desire to traverse national bor-
ders. Between 2015 and 2017, Gallup asked
people around the world whether they would
False necessity move permanently to another country if they
is the mother of could and, if so, to which country they would
move. From these samples, one can estimate
dumb inventions. that around 750 million people would choose
to leave their home countries permanently if
they could (and even more people would be willing to move temporar-
ily). Based on the survey, 158 million additional migrants would want
to come to the United States; Australia, Canada, France, Germany,
and the United Kingdom would each receive around 30 million more
migrants. This is not to say that these countries should or would accom-
modate so many migrants, but it does suggest that there is no shortage
of people ready to come and work in rich countries.
The restrictions on mobility that create labor scarcity in rich coun-
tries perpetuate poverty for millions of people who are willing and
able to work productively—but are prohibited from doing so. And the
scarcity propels businesses to invest wastefully in technology that need
not exist. Automation, in other words, is not inevitable but driven by
the artificial scarcity of labor. Companies perceive a financial incentive
to choose machines over people. Without such an incentive, businesses
and households would make different choices. Walmart is not making
you ring up your own purchases on self-checkout machines because
it thinks you always had a hankering to work for the company but
because it cannot find all the workers it needs at viable costs. And
households, too, can make different decisions that benefit everyone
involved. Research in Singapore shows that highly skilled women are
much more likely to be in the labor force when care workers are avail-
able to take up tasks in the home. The availability of home aide workers
also allows the elderly to stay out of institutionalized care longer and
leads to greater quality of life at a much lower cost.

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 People Over Robots

DOORS IN THE WALLS

It would be no small thing, of course, to figure out how countries
could realize the potential of available labor in the world. The major
mechanisms for global cooperation—chiefly those institutions that
emerged after World War II, such as the United Nations, the Inter-
national Monetary Fund, and the World Bank—set in motion the
globalization of markets for goods and capital. But they did not put
in place any meaningful infrastructure to support and promote the
movement of labor. Money and shipping containers flowed freely
across borders, but people did not.
Today, every country unilaterally sets whatever restrictions it wants
on the entry of foreign nationals. Belying the facile right-wing talking
point that the United States maintains “open borders” or similarly dubi-
ous claims that the world is “flat,” all rich countries have transformed
their borders into cliffs, with the threshold for legal entry high and
often altogether unreachable. At great expense and with mixed results,
countries enforce these restrictions. In 2022, the United States allotted
$26 billion to border enforcement, more than it has devoted in most
years to its international development agency, USAID.
Instead of funneling resources into the quixotic pursuit of job-killing
technology, countries should pursue international cooperation with
regard to labor mobility. The potential gains for the countries from
which people emigrate, the migrants themselves, and the countries
that receive migrants are enormous. Rich countries should allow more
people to live and work in their countries not out of altruism but to
reckon with a growing demographic necessity.
The solution is the creation of a global mechanism for labor mobility.
It should recruit workers fairly without excessive costs and, based on
reliable information and contracts, place them in jobs that suit their
abilities, protect them from abuse while they are away from their home
countries, and, with time-limited mobility agreements, facilitate their
orderly return home. Larger flows of economic migrants will require
an industry to handle the key functions of recruitment, training, place-
ment, protection, and return. The trucking industry, the health-care
industry, and the hospitality industry cannot be expected to manage
the international movement of labor to meet their needs. Instead, the
task of moving people must be taken up by a globally connected and
networked group of organizations and individuals. Of course, such an
industry should be carefully regulated and monitored, as the risks of

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abuse are immense. But a well-functioning, ethical global industry that

moves workers can be a huge force for good by matching people who
want jobs with the enterprises that need them.
Global associations already cooperate with industry and govern-
ments to produce positive outcomes in the movement of people and
things. Look up from reading this article, and you will see items around
you that moved about the world as part of the 11 billion tons of mari-
time freight shipped every year. Or if reading online, don’t look up; your
device is almost certainly one of those items. Over 4.5 billion airline
passengers traveled around the world in 2019, with only 283 fatalities.
(My thinly populated home state of Utah alone had 320 traffic deaths
in 2022.) Safe worldwide travel on airlines has been created and sup-
ported by governments, international associations, and industry groups.
Similarly, in 2018, 1.4 billion tourists traveled internationally, supported
by a wide variety of industries and industry associations that facilitate
such a massive movement of people safely and reliably.
Political obstacles stand in the way of the orderly cross-border
movement of people to work. Countries are stuck in a Catch-22.
Politicians are reluctant to create the laws, policies, and regulations
that would allow labor mobility programs to flourish until such pro-
grams have been demonstrated to be safe, effective, and beneficial. But
existing wage differentials between rich and poor countries, as well
as the undeniable demand for workers, means that the movement of
people happens anyway, but without legal sanction and with the com-
plicity of employers. Invariably, such movement is unsafe, migrants
are exploited and abused, and they cannot easily return home. As a
result, the very idea of labor mobility is tainted.
It may seem paradoxical, but the pitfalls of labor mobility in the
present are reasons to facilitate even more movement, only through
legal and well-devised channels. The benefits of allowing people to
move where their labor is needed are huge for all concerned. Rich
and democratic societies need to stop blindly pursuing technological
advances that economize on precisely what is abundant around the
world. Wealthy countries have created strong incentives for their firms
and innovators to choose machines over people. It is time to make the
bet on a future built by and for people.

64 foreign affairs
 Return to Table of Contents

China’s Hidden
Tech Revolution
How Beijing Threatens U.S. Dominance
Dan Wang

I
n 2007, the year Apple first started making iPhones in China,
the country was better known for cheap labor than for techno-
logical sophistication. At the time, Chinese firms were unable
to produce almost any of the iPhone’s internal components, which
were imported from Germany, Japan, and the United States. China’s
overall contribution to the devices was limited to the labor of assem-
bling these components at Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen—what
amounted to less than four percent of the value-added costs.
By the time the iPhone X was released, in 2018, the situation had
dramatically changed. Not only were Chinese workers continuing to
assemble most iPhones, but Chinese firms were producing many of
the sophisticated components inside them, including acoustic parts,
charging modules, and battery packs. Having mastered complex tech-
nologies, these firms could produce better products than their Asian
and European competitors. With the latest generation of iPhones,

Dan Wang is the Technology Analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics.

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 Dan Wang

this pattern has only accelerated. Today, Chinese tech firms account
for more than 25 percent of the device’s value-added costs.
Although the iPhone is a special case—as one of the most intri-
cate pieces of hardware in existence, it relies on an exceptional range of
technologies—its expanding footprint in China captures a broader trend.
In a majority of manufactured goods, Chinese firms have moved
beyond assembling foreign-made components to producing their own
cutting-edge technologies. Along with its dominance of renewable
power equipment, China is now at the forefront of emerging technologies
such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. These successes
challenge the notion that scientific leadership inevitably translates into
industrial leadership. Despite relatively modest contributions to pathbreak-
ing research and scientific innovation, China has leveraged its process
knowledge—the capacity to scale up whole new industries—to outcompete
the United States in a widening array of strategic technologies.
In its growing rivalry with Beijing, the U.S. government has sought
to limit Chinese access to critical Western technologies and reinforce its
own tradition of scientific innovation. Thus, in 2022, the Biden adminis-
tration imposed broad new restrictions on selling advanced Western chip
technology to Chinese firms while bolstering U.S. technology through
the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act. That piece of legislation, in
addition to the Inflation Reduction Act, meaningfully helps the United
States recover some of its leadership in the production of semiconductors and
renewables. But the steadily advancing technological prowess of Chi-
nese firms suggests that this approach may be missing a more central
issue: China’s rise is not merely the result of copying and stealing from
Western firms; nor has it depended on scientific breakthroughs. To a
significant degree, it has been fueled by improvements in China’s own
industrial capabilities—gains that have come from the country’s vast
and sophisticated manufacturing workforce. Already, these strengths
are apparent in China’s response to U.S. chip restrictions of the past
few years. Previously, Chinese firms tended to avoid domestic Chinese
technologies, preferring to buy the best—which was usually American.
Now that Washington is preventing them from doing so, they are work-
ing harder to cultivate a thriving domestic chip industry.
For the United States and its allies, China’s arrival as a major tech
power holds crucial lessons. Unlike the West, China has grounded its
technology sector not in glamorous research and advanced science
but in the less flashy task of improving manufacturing capabilities.

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 China’s Hidden Tech Revolution

If Washington is serious about competing with Beijing on tech-

nology, it will need to focus on far more than trailblazing science.
It must also learn to harness its workforce the way China has, in
order to bring innovations to scale and build products better and
more efficiently. For the United States to regain its lead in emerging
technologies, it will have to treat manufacturing as an integral part
of technological advancement, not a mere sideshow to the more
thrilling acts of invention and R & D.

China ’ s Moonshots
Many observers are justifiably skeptical about China’s tech leadership.
For one thing, the country has created few multinational firms or glob-
ally recognized brands. Unlike Japan and South Korea, China has failed
to establish new categories of consumer electronics, such as digital
cameras or game consoles; nor has it been able to compete with Europe
and the United States in automobiles or airliners. Instead, for the most
part, Chinese companies have concentrated on making products they
can sell at lower price points in the developing world. The relative lack
of prominent Chinese brands has reinforced a Western understanding
of China as a factory floor rather than a hotbed of innovation.
China also remains well behind the West in several critical technologies.
China’s chip industry has a few notable achievements, including in
the design of mobile phone chips and certain advanced memory chips.
But in the fabrication of logic chips—the processors inside all digital
products—Chinese firms are at least five years behind TSMC, the Tai-
wanese company that is the global leader in advanced semiconductors.
They are even weaker when it comes to developing the specialized tools
required for making chips. For the all-important lithography machines,
used for printing patterns on silicon wafers, and metrology equipment,
used for quality control in a production process that demands hundreds
of steps, Chinese firms rely overwhelmingly on imports from Japan, the
United States, and Europe. And they are barely out of the starting gate
in creating the software tools needed to design the most advanced chips.
A similar dynamic exists in China’s aviation industry. Consider the
Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), China’s answer
to Airbus and Boeing, a state-owned venture backed by an estimated
$71 billion in government funding. Fifteen years after its founding,
it has scarcely begun to produce its first operational commercial airliner.
Chinese firms in both the chip and the aviation industries are achingly

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 Dan Wang

aware that many of their core components continue to be supplied by

the West: production equipment and advanced software tools in the
case of chip manufacturers, and the engine as well as the avionics
systems in the case of COMAC jets. It is this kind of reliance on West-
ern technology that gives new U.S. chip restrictions the potential to
throw Chinese firms into turmoil.
But amid these serious vulnerabilities, China is making rapid progress
in many other technologies. Chinese firms have quickly gained ground
against their European and Japanese counterparts in the production of
advanced machine tools such as robotic arms, hydraulic pumps, and
other equipment. As the iPhone demonstrates, China now rivals
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in its mastery of the electronics supply
chain. And in the digital economy, despite recent efforts by President
Xi Jinping to tighten government control of Internet companies such
as Alibaba, Tencent, and Didi, China remains strong. Chinese compa-
nies can still offer spirited competition to Silicon Valley’s tech giants,
as ByteDance’s TikTok has been doing to Facebook. China leads the
world in building modern infrastructure, including ultrahigh-voltage
transmission lines, high-speed rail, and 5G networks. In 2019, China
became the first country to land a rover on the far side of the moon;
a year later, Chinese scientists achieved quantum-encrypted commu-
nication by satellite, pushing the country closer to creating unbreach-
able quantum communications. These achievements are emblematic of
China’s steady effort to master more and more difficult tasks.
Taken as a whole, then, China’s technological development is consid-
erably more dynamic than the country’s image suggests. China remains
behind in several critical areas, and some of its most important tech firms
face regulatory squeezes—whether from Washington or Beijing itself.
Regardless of these challenges, Chinese industries are reaching world-class
standards, and the country’s science is steadily advancing. Along the way,
Chinese firms have begun to make significant innovations of their own,
including in strategic areas that the United States has prioritized.

SOLAR SUPERPOWER
One of China’s major tech triumphs in recent years has been in renew-
able power equipment. When a commercial market emerged for solar
technologies early in the twenty-first century, most innovations came
from the United States, and it seemed logical that U.S. firms would
drive the industry. In 2010, however, China’s State Council, the central

68 foreign affairs
 China’s Hidden Tech Revolution

government’s executive branch, designated solar power generation as

a “strategic emerging industry,” triggering a cascade of government
subsidies and business creation, much of it aimed at expanding man-
ufacturing capacity. In the process, Chinese firms learned the basics
of solar photovoltaics and began to improve on existing methods of
producing them. Today, Chinese firms dominate almost every segment
of the solar value chain—from processing polysilicon used in solar cells
to assembling solar panels. They have also advanced the technology
itself. Chinese solar panels are not only the
cheapest on the market; they are the most
efficient. The breathtaking decline in solar China’s tech
costs over the past decade has been driven innovations have
by manufacturing innovations in China.
Over the last few years, Chinese firms have
been made in
also staked out strong positions in the produc- factories, not labs.
tion of large-capacity batteries that power elec-
tric vehicles. As the world moves away from internal combustion engines,
advanced battery technology has become the most critical component
in car manufacturing. China has led the way: CATL, a Chinese com-
pany founded in 2011, is now the biggest battery manufacturer in the
world, partnering with major car companies such as BMW, Tesla, and
Volkswagen. In addition to having far greater manufacturing capacity
than its rivals—which matters for lowering costs—CATL has taken
the lead in developing new and more efficient chemical mixtures, for
example in its sodium-ion batteries, which can be produced without
using scarce lithium and cobalt minerals.
The Biden administration has recognized the risks of depending
on China for the critical technologies it needs for the United States’
green transition. But various rounds of U.S. tariffs, as well as U.S.
investigations into forced labor allegations in China’s polysilicon sup-
ply chain, have failed to dislodge Beijing from its dominant position
in the solar industry. One such investigation by the U.S. Commerce
Department, which threatened retroactive tariffs on solar imports of
up to 250 percent, threw American solar buyers into turmoil, and in
June 2022, President Joe Biden was forced to issue an executive order
forestalling any tariffs for the next two years. Meanwhile, although
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022, aims to dra-
matically accelerate the transition to electric vehicles in the United
States, the legislation is off to a halting start because it has made many

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 Dan Wang

current EVs on the market potentially ineligible for federal EV subsidies.

For now, the United States and many of its Western allies will remain
significantly dependent on China in their drive to decarbonize.
China has not achieved dominance in such industries as solar
components, EV batteries, and electronics in a vacuum. This rapid
progress connects directly to the country’s strengths in manufactur-
ing and quality control. From the early 1990s to today, the Chinese
workforce has moved from producing simple toys and textiles to
conducting the extraordinarily complex operations needed to produce
sophisticated electronics such as the iPhone. Along the way, Chinese
firms have often made significant advances of their own: in China,
tech innovations have come not from universities and research labs
but through the learning process generated by mass production itself.
At the heart of the country’s ascendancy in advanced technology,
then, is its spectacular capacity for making things.

Better Chefs, Better Omelets

By any account, China’s technological progress has come at enormous cost.
In the most generous reading, Beijing has established the country’s
position through a fantastic waste of government resources. These giant
subsidies have a distorting effect: a study published in December by the
National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
found that Beijing has a poor record of picking winners and the recip-
ients of Chinese government subsidies tend to have lower productivity
growth. More often, according to many critics, Chinese advances have
been spurred by extreme protectionism and widespread intellectual
property theft. Although there is some truth to all these claims, they are
not sufficient to account for China’s rise. For every example of a Chinese
industry that has benefited from protectionism—such as the Internet
platform Baidu, which thrived behind the Great Firewall—there is
another, such as China’s car industry, for which such measures have
failed to produce world class companies. Forced technology transfers
and intellectual property theft may well have helped the development
of some industries, and it is right for the United States and its allies to
push back on these practices. But they do not explain China’s emergence
in such fields as batteries, hydrogen, and artificial intelligence.
Instead, the most important factor in China’s burgeoning tech indus-
tries is its manufacturing ecosystem. Over the past two decades, China
has developed an unrivaled production capacity for tech-intensive

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 China’s Hidden Tech Revolution

industries, one that is characterized by a deep labor pool, dense clusters

of suppliers, and extensive government support. This strength draws in
part on China’s industrial history. In earlier decades, the government
gave industry special importance: disastrously during Mao Zedong’s
Great Leap Forward, and more effectively under Deng Xiaoping in
his Four Modernizations. Beginning in the 1990s, central government
initiatives were less important than market drivers, with China’s man-
ufacturing capacity taking off in the wake of the country’s accession to
the World Trade Organization in 2001.
Over the past decade, Xi has put China’s industrial obsession into
overdrive. Two years after taking office, he launched Made in China
2025—a sweeping policy framework aimed at lifting China’s manu-
facturing base from labor-intensive industries to high-technology sec-
tors. And in 2021, in its latest five-year plan, the central government
announced a campaign to turn China into a “manufacturing super-
power.” That is not an idle goal: over the past few decades, Beijing has
directed vast sums of cheap credit and energy to advanced tech firms,
even when they are years away from profitability.
The solar industry is a case in point. By showering subsidies on all
comers, the government encouraged too many firms to enter the field.
But it also provoked greater entrepreneurial risk-taking, creating a bru-
tally competitive industry in which the strong muscled out the weak. As
a result, Chinese firms today dominate a strategic industry that the rest
of the world depends on. This approach—promoting manufacturing to
the point of excess capacity—is in sharp contrast to the economic ortho-
doxy in much of the West, which stresses high-value activities such as
R & D and product branding while downplaying the value of physical
production as something that can be done cheaply offshore, often in Asia.
Beijing’s manufacturing-driven approach has become critical to its
ability to challenge the West in advanced technology. To understand
why, it is crucial to recognize the forces that go into successful innova-
tions. Producing new technology can be likened to preparing an omelet:
ingredients, instructions, and a well-equipped kitchen are helpful, but
they will not in themselves guarantee a good result. Even people with
the fanciest equipment and the most exquisite recipe may not be able to
make a delicious omelet if they have never cooked before. An additional
element is required: practical experience—skills that can only be learned
by doing. These skills can be referred to as process knowledge, and they
are part of what has helped China become a major tech innovator.

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 Dan Wang

Although process knowledge is difficult to measure, it can be gauged

by a workforce’s general level of experience and by the creation of clus-
ters of varied industrial activity. China has notable strengths in both.
The country’s most significant technological achievement over the past
two decades has been its development of a vast and highly experi-
enced skilled workforce, which can be adapted as needed for the most
tech-intensive industries. For example, Apple still counts on China
as the only country that can call up hundreds of thousands of highly
trained workers on short notice, quickly access dense networks of
component suppliers, and rely on government support to help solve
the manifold problems that come with producing millions of iPhones
each year. Equally striking, however, is the way that China has used
foreign firms to help build industrial clusters, or what economist Brad
DeLong calls “communities of engineering practice.” American firms
such as Caterpillar, General Electric, and Tesla have become large
employers in China. And most of Apple’s products are produced by
contract manufacturers such as Foxconn and Pegatron, which manage
workers in China. Unlike Japan, which maintained a mostly closed
market during its decades of postwar growth, China has significantly
boosted its industrial rise by learning directly from foreign firms.
Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war, Beijing refrained
from significant retaliation against U.S. firms in China, partly because
it recognizes the managerial expertise they bring and their transmission
of manufacturing skills to Chinese workers.
Through continual exposure to the world’s leading manufacturing
processes, Chinese workers have acquired skills they can take to domes-
tic firms. Consider the production of EV batteries. Manufacturing these
units requires around a dozen discrete steps, each of which demands a
near-perfect handoff from the preceding stage. Chinese engineering
managers have gained the process knowledge needed for this task
through experience in consumer electronics. This transfer of manu-
facturing know-how has also been one of the keys to China’s dominance
of the solar industry. Goosed by subsidies and aided by their ready access
to skilled labor, Chinese firms were soon producing better and cheaper
solar panels than their U.S. and German counterparts. And these man-
ufacturing innovations have increasingly defined the global industry:
the advances in solar over the last decade have been driven less by
breakthroughs in science—America’s specialty—than by driving costs
down through more efficient production, which is China’s strength.

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 China’s Hidden Tech Revolution

The rise of Shenzhen as a global tech center is itself a validation of

the importance of process knowledge. In the years after it began mass
producing the iPhone in 2007, the city developed a vibrant local tech
industry optimized for producing intricate devices; soon, workers used
their engineering and production expertise to invent other products.
With R & D labs right next to manufacturing facilities, Shenzhen’s
engineers had unparalleled access to component suppliers, experienced
workers, and skilled designers. Today, Shenzhen has staked out a leading
position in consumer drones, virtual reality headsets, and other novel
electronics. Behind this dominance is a skilled workforce that has spent
years mixing with daring entrepreneurs in an era in which electronics
components such as cameras, batteries, and screens plummeted in cost.
Thus Shenzhen now resembles the Bay Area, where university researchers,
entrepreneurs, workers, and investors continually rub elbows. Small won-
der that Shenzhen has become the Silicon Valley of high-tech hardware.

Science, Not Industry

JULIA D UFOSSE

In the decades after World War II, the United States used its scientific
leadership to dominate many emerging tech industries, from computers
to aviation. For Washington, this made sense at a time when design

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 Dan Wang

breakthroughs and laboratory innovations were a major part of the

Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. The science-driven approach
also seemed to find support in the market. In the 1990s, Stan Shih, the
Taiwanese electronics entrepreneur, observed that most of the profits in
tech industries are made at the beginning of the value chain—design,
research, and development—and at the end, in marketing the product.
The least amount of profit is made in actual manufacturing, which is
the middle of the value chain. This so-called smiling curve is exempli-
fied by Apple, the world’s most valuable company, which handles the
development and marketing of its products, leaving the low-margin
manufacturing work to be done by its partners in China and elsewhere
in Asia. Drawing on this insight, U.S. companies have spent much of
the past two decades concentrating on R & D and marketing while
relying on China in particular for many of their manufacturing needs.
One result of this longtime emphasis is the continued U.S. lead-
ership in some industries that demand the complex integration of
different scientific disciplines. Although Intel and Boeing have seen
better days, the United States continues to be an industry leader in
semiconductor production equipment and aircraft engines. Signifi-
cantly, both industries are highly interdisciplinary: semiconductor
technologies demand synthesizing fields that include electrical engi-
neering, chemistry, and computer science; aviation involves aerody-
namics, materials science, mechanical engineering, and other highly
specialized fields. Unlike the United States, China does not have a
tradition of pushing scientific frontiers. In fact, it does less of the
groundbreaking science in these industries and has a relatively poor
track record of commercializing useful research.
But all is not well with the U.S. tech sector. Many companies
have taken the logic of the smiling curve too far in recent decades,
putting ever more resources into the tips of the curve while leaving
manufacturing capabilities to wither. Since 2000, the United States
has lost around five million manufacturing jobs—about a quarter of
its manufacturing workforce—prompting cascades of skill loss among
not just line workers but also machinists, managers, and product
designers. In the long term, this decline has left the United States
in a poor position to dominate emerging technologies. For example,
with its own science leading the way, the United States should have
dominated the solar industry. And Washington was prepared to help
it do so: as early as 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama imposed tariffs

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 China’s Hidden Tech Revolution

on Chinese solar imports in an effort to protect domestic produc-

ers. But even with these protections, U.S. manufacturers could not
compete. Whereas China had ready access to a huge base of skilled
workers and suppliers and could scale up production almost without
limit, the United States, after successive layoffs of millions of workers,
had lost much of its stock of process knowledge and did not have the
capacity to build a healthy manufacturing base. As a result, by 2022,
U.S. imports of solar technology reached $8 billion, much of it coming
from Chinese companies producing in Southeast Asia.
The failure of the U.S. solar industry is part of a bigger story of
decline in U.S. manufacturing. To a degree, this trend has been driven
by increasing automation. But the sector is also beset by internal weak-
nesses. Consider the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like other
countries, the United States needed vast quantities of personal protec-
tive equipment and other medical supplies. Yet U.S. firms struggled to
adapt their production lines to make facemasks and cotton swabs—
uncomplicated products by any measure—because they had lost much
of the requisite process knowledge. By contrast, Chinese manufacturers
were quickly able to retool for the emergency and produced many of
the medical supplies that the United States and other countries needed.
So far, U.S. efforts to reshore manufacturing jobs from Asia have
been disappointing. A big push by Apple to make more desktop
computers in Texas, for example, floundered after 2012 because it
lacked a supporting industrial ecosystem of component parts. One
exception has been the United States’ rapid production of messen-
ger RNA vaccines, which have proved more effective than China’s
inactivated virus vaccines. To compete against China’s advanced
industries in the years to come, however, the United States will
need far more than a one-off biotech victory.

Scale up or lose out

Even as it challenges the West’s approach to tech advances, Beijing has
recognized its weakness in scientific knowledge. In his report to the
20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October
2022, Xi declared that science and technology will be one of the party’s
top priorities. And although improving its research culture will take
time, China has been making steady progress, including in such areas
as space exploration and quantum communications. Beijing is espe-
cially keen to augment domestic semiconductor development now that

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 Dan Wang

Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and Chinese chip maker

SMIC have been denied access to U.S. and European semiconductor
technologies. One unintended result of Washington’s new chip restric-
tions has been to jump-start Chinese investments in science and R & D.
By contrast, the United States has not yet come to grips with its
own deficit in process knowledge. Certainly, Congress’s passage of the
CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 constitute major
steps forward in industrial policy, given that both allocate billions
of dollars of federal funding for advanced industries. But too much
of U.S. policy—including this legislation—is focused on pushing
forward the scientific frontier rather than on building the process
knowledge and industrial ecosystems needed to bring products to
market. As such, Washington’s approach to its growing tech rivalry
with China risks repeating the mistakes it made in the solar industry,
with U.S. scientists laying the foundation for a new technology only
to see Chinese firms take the lead in building it. Take the production
of electrolyzers, which extract hydrogen from water and have become
the crucial tool in the production of green hydrogen. As with solar,
China is poised to dominate the green hydrogen industry by manu-
facturing the most efficient products at scale.
To avoid repeating the solar story, the United States will have
to give greater priority to advanced manufacturing. Andy Grove,
the legendary CEO of Intel, recognized this problem a decade ago,
when he urged the country to focus less on “the mythical moment
of creation” and more on bringing innovations to market. “This is the
phase where companies scale up,” he wrote in an influential article in
2010. “They work out design details, figure out how to make things
affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands.” But to
get better at scaling up, the United States will also have to learn to
think differently about the value of manufacturing work. Policymak-
ers must resist the urge to scorn manufacturing as a mere “commod-
itized activity” that can be done overseas. Instead, the mass production
of new technologies needs to be seen as equal in importance to the
innovations themselves—an activity that depends on the kinds of
deep process knowledge that can only come from the better training
and integration of workers, engineers, and scientists.
The new U.S. investments in tech industries that flow from the
CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act will help reverse the tide.
But as China understands well, money is only the beginning of the

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 China’s Hidden Tech Revolution

process of building a durable technology sector. Such investments

must also be accompanied by efforts to end the cost overruns that
plague U.S. efforts to build better infrastructure. Local colleges and
elite universities must better train students for advanced manufac-
turing. And Washington should learn to follow Beijing’s lead and
court greater foreign investment. Like the Trump administration
before it, the Biden administration has invited Japanese, South
Korean, and Taiwanese firms to build chip factories in the United
States; these companies should also be wel-
comed for their expertise in batteries and
the broader electronics supply chain. The United States
The economic reality, of course, is that the will always be a
United States will always be a relatively dif-
ficult place to make things. Because of its
difficult place to
smaller population and higher wage require- make things.
ments—and the fact that the U.S. dollar
remains the global reserve currency, raising the relative cost of produc-
ing goods domestically—the United States cannot outcompete China
in most high-volume manufacturing. Nor is a campaign to revitalize
U.S. manufacturing capability likely to create many jobs; any such
effort will involve highly automated lines that rely more on capital
than on labor. And of course, the United States should not attempt to
make absolutely everything. U.S. policy must target strategic industries
in which it has a plausible comparative advantage.
Indeed, in several such industries, the United States is well-
positioned to outperform China. By strengthening its manu-
facturing potential, the United States could expand its lead in
biotech, semiconductor production equipment, and aircraft
engines. It should make sure it does not lose next-generation energy
technologies such as hydrogen electrolyzers. And it could attempt
to recover some of the electronics supply chain from Asia. More-
over, in the wake of Beijing’s repeated COVID-19 lockdowns and
after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, investors are increasingly rattled
about the risks of investing in China, and the United States has an
exceptional opportunity to win back manufacturing jobs. But as an
ideological starting point, a new industrial policy will need to be
centered on workers and their process knowledge rather than on
financial margins. Otherwise, it is likely to be China, not the United
States, that leads the next technological revolution.

march / april 2023 77

 Return to Table of Contents

What Russia
Got Wrong
Can Moscow Learn From
Its Failures in Ukraine?
Dara Massicot

T
hree months before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine,
CIA Director William Burns and U.S. Ambassador to Rus-
sia John Sullivan met in Moscow with Nikolai Patrushev,
an ultra-hawkish adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Burns
and Sullivan informed Patrushev that they knew of Russia’s invasion
plans and that the West would respond with severe consequences if
Russia proceeded. According to Burns, Patrushev said nothing about
the invasion. Instead, he looked them in the eye, conveying what Burns
took as a message: the Russian military could achieve what it wanted.
Once home, the two Americans informed U.S. President Joe Biden
that Moscow had made up its mind. Not long after, Washington began
publicly warning the world that Russia would attack Ukraine. Three
months ahead of the invasion, the Kremlin knew that the United States

DARA MASSICOT is a Senior Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Before

joining RAND, she served as a senior analyst for Russian military capabilities at the
Department of Defense.

78 foreign affairs
Illustration by Álvaro Bernis 79
 Dara Massicot

had discovered its war plans and that the world would be primed for an
assault—yet Putin decided to deny his intentions to Russia’s own troops
and most of its senior leaders. They did not learn of the invasion until
several days or even hours before it began. The secrecy was a mistake.
By orchestrating the attack with just a small group of advisers, Putin
undercut many of the advantages his country should have had.
These strengths were substantial. Before the invasion, Russia’s
military was larger and better equipped than Ukraine’s. Its forces
had more combat experience than did Kyiv’s,
even though both had fought in Ukraine’s
Russia stretched eastern territories. Most Western analysts
its logistics and therefore assumed that if Russian forces used
their advantages wisely, the Ukrainians could
support systems to not withstand the attack for long.
the breaking point. Why Russia did not prevail—why it was
instead stopped in its tracks, routed outside
major cities, and put on the defensive—has become one of the most
important questions in both U.S. foreign policy and international secu-
rity more broadly. The answer has many components. The excessive
internal secrecy gave troops and commanders little time to prepare,
leading to heavy losses. Russia created an invasion plan that was rid-
dled with faulty assumptions, arbitrary political guidance, and planning
errors that departed from key Russian military principles. The initial
invasion called for multiple lines of attack with no follow-on force,
tethering the military to operational objectives that were overly ambi-
tious for the size of its forces. And the Kremlin erroneously believed
that its war plans were sound, that Ukraine would not put up much
resistance, and that the West’s support would not be strong enough
to make a difference. As a result, Russia was shocked when its troops
ran into a determined Ukraine backed by Western intelligence and
weapons. Russian forces were then repeatedly beaten.
But as the war drags on into its second year, analysts must not focus
only on Russia’s failures. The story of Russia’s military performance
is far more nuanced than many early narratives about the war have
suggested. The Russian armed forces are not wholly incompetent or
incapable of learning. They can execute some types of complex oper-
ations—such as mass strikes that disable Ukraine’s critical infrastruc-
ture—which they had eschewed during the first part of the invasion,
when Moscow hoped to capture the Ukrainian state largely intact.

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 What Russia Got Wrong

The Russian military has learned from its mistakes and made big
adjustments, such as downsizing its objectives and mobilizing new
personnel, as well as tactical ones, such as using electronic warfare
tools that jam Ukrainian military communications without affecting its
own. Russian forces can also sustain higher combat intensity than most
other militaries; as of December, they were firing an impressive 20,000
rounds of artillery per day or more (although, according to CNN, in early
2023, that figure had dropped to 5,000). And they have been operating
with more consistency and stability since shifting to the defensive in
late 2022, making it harder for Ukrainian troops to advance.
Russia has still not been able to break Ukraine’s will to fight or
impede the West’s materiel and intelligence support. It is unlikely to
achieve its initial goal of turning Ukraine into a puppet state. But it
could continue to adjust its strategy and solidify its occupied holdings
in the south and east, eventually snatching a diminished variant of
victory from the jaws of defeat.

TOO MUCH AND NOT ENOUGH

Before the war in Ukraine began, the Russian military had several
known structural problems, each of which undermined its ability to
conduct a large invasion. Over a decade ago, Moscow deliberately dis-
mantled its army and turned it into a smaller force designed for rapid
response operations. The transformation required massive changes.
After World War II, the Soviet Union maintained an enormous force
designed to wage protracted, vast conflicts in Europe by conscripting
millions of soldiers and creating a huge defense industry to menace
NATO and enforce communist rule in allied states. The Soviet military
suffered from endemic corruption, and it struggled to produce equip-
ment on par with the West’s. But its size and sprawling footprint made
it a formidable Cold War challenge.
When the Soviet regime collapsed, Russian leaders could not man-
age or justify such a large military. The prospect of a land battle with
NATO was fading into the past. In response, starting in the early 1990s,
Russia’s leaders began a reform and modernization process. The goal
was to create a military that would be smaller but more professional
and nimble, ready to quickly suppress flare-ups on Russia’s periphery.
This process continued, on and off, into the new millennium.
In 2008, the Russian military announced a comprehensive reform
program called “New Look” that intended to restructure the force

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 Dara Massicot

by disbanding units, retiring officers, overhauling training pro-

grams and military education, and allocating more funds—
including to expand the ranks of professional enlisted soldiers and
to acquire newer weapons. As part of this process, Russia replaced
sizable Soviet divisions designed to fight major land wars with less-
cumbersome brigades and battalion tactical groups (BTGs). Moscow
also worked to reduce its dependence on conscripts.
By 2020, it seemed as if the military had met many of its bench-
marks. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu declared that 70
percent of his country’s equipment was new or had been modernized.
The country had a growing arsenal of conventional precision munitions,
and the military possessed more professional enlisted personnel than
conscripts. Russia had conducted two successful operations, one in
Syria—to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad—and another to
take territory in eastern Ukraine.
But the 2022 wholesale invasion of Ukraine exposed these reforms
as insufficient. The modernization effort neglected, for example, the
mobilization system. Russia’s attempts to build better weapons and
improve training did not translate into increased proficiency on the
battlefield. Some of the ostensibly new gear that left Russian factories
is seriously flawed. Russia’s missile failure rates are high, and many
of its tanks lack proper self-defense equipment, making them highly
vulnerable to antitank weapons. Meanwhile, there is little evidence
that Russia modified its training programs ahead of its February
2022 invasion to prepare troops for the tasks they would later face
in Ukraine. In fact, the steps Russia did take to prepare made proper
training more difficult. By deploying many units near the Ukrainian
border almost a year before the war and keeping equipment in the
field, the Russian military deprived its soldiers of the ability to practice
appropriate skills and conduct required equipment maintenance.
Russia’s modernization efforts also failed to root out corruption,
which still afflicts multiple aspects of Russian military life. The coun-
try’s armed forces frequently inflated the number of prewar personnel
in individual units to meet recruiting quotas, allowing some com-
manders to steal surplus funds. The military is plagued by missing
supplies. It generally has unreliable and opaque reporting up and
down the command chain, which possibly led Russia’s leadership to
believe its forces were better, quantitatively and qualitatively, than
they really were at the start of the invasion.

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 What Russia Got Wrong

Modernization may have helped Russia in its smaller, 2014 invasion

of Ukraine and its air campaigns in Syria. But it does not appear to
have learned from its operational experience in either conflict. In both,
for instance, Russia had many ground-based special forces teams to
guide incoming strikes, something it has lacked in the current war.
Russia also had a unified operational command, which it did not create
for the current invasion until several months after it began.
In at least one case, the modernization effort was actively incom-
patible with high-intensity warfare. As part of its scheme to culti-
vate trust with the Russian population after its wars in Chechnya, the
Kremlin largely prohibited new conscripts from serving in war zones.
This meant that Russia pulled professional soldiers from most units
across the country and deployed them as BTGs to staff its Ukraine inva-
sion. The move was itself a questionable decision: even a fully staffed
and equipped BTG is not capable of protracted, intense combat along
an extended frontline, as many experts, including U.S. Army analysts
Charles Bartles and Lester Grau, have noted. On top of that, according
to documents recovered from the invasion by the Ukrainian military,
plenty of these units were understaffed when they invaded Ukraine.
Personnel shortages also meant that Russia’s technically more modern
and capable equipment did not perform at its full potential, as many
pieces were only partly crewed. And the country did not have enough
dismounted infantry or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
forces to effectively clear routes and avoid ambushes.
The resulting failures may have surprised much of the world. But they
did not come as a shock to many of the experts who watch the Rus-
sian military. They knew from assessing the country’s force structure
that it was ill suited to send a force of 190,000 personnel into a large
neighboring state across multiple lines of advance. They were therefore
astonished as the Kremlin commanded the military to do exactly that.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS
To understand how Russia’s bad planning undermined its performance
and advantages, it is helpful to imagine how the invasion of Ukraine
would have started if Moscow had followed its prescribed military
strategy. According to Russian doctrine, an interstate war such as this
one should begin with weeks of air and missile attacks against an
enemy’s military and critical infrastructure during what strategists call
“the initial period of war.” Russia’s planners consider this the decisive

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 Dara Massicot

period of warfare, with air force operations and missile strikes, lasting
between four and six weeks, designed to erode the opposing country’s
military capabilities and capacity to resist. According to Russia’s theory,
ground forces are typically deployed to secure objectives only after air
forces and missile attacks have achieved many of their objectives.
The Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) did conduct strikes against
Ukrainian positions at the war’s beginning. But it did not systematically
attack critical infrastructure, possibly because the Russians believed they
would need to quickly administer Ukraine and
wanted to keep its leadership facilities intact,
The Kremlin its power grid online, and the Ukrainian pop-
aspires to do ulation apathetic. Fatefully, the Russian mili-
tary committed its ground troops on day one
more than just rather than waiting until it had managed to
hold the land it clear roads and suppress Ukrainian units. The
has already taken. result was catastrophic. Russian forces, rush-
ing to meet what they believed were orders to
arrive in certain areas by set times, overran their logistics and found
themselves hemmed in to specific routes by Ukrainian units. They were
then relentlessly bombarded by artillery and antiarmor weapons.
Moscow also decided to commit nearly all its professional ground
and airborne forces to one multiaxis attack, counter to the Russian
military’s tradition of keeping forces from Siberia and the Russian
Far East as a second echelon or a strategic reserve. This decision made
little military sense. By attempting to seize several parts of Ukraine
simultaneously, Russia stretched its logistics and support systems to
the breaking point. Had Russia launched air and missile strikes days
or weeks before committing ground forces, attacked along a smaller
frontline, and maintained a large reserve force, its invasion might have
looked different. In this case, Russia would have had simpler logistics,
concentrated fires, and reduced exposure for its advancing units. It might
even have overwhelmed local groups of Ukrainian air defenses.
It is difficult to know exactly why Russia deviated so wildly from
its military doctrine (and from common sense). But one reason seems
clear: the Kremlin’s political interference. According to information
obtained by reporters from The Washington Post, the war was planned
only by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest confidants in
the intelligence services, the armed forces, and the Kremlin. Based on
these accounts, this team advocated for a rapid invasion on multiple

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 What Russia Got Wrong

fronts, a mad dash to Kyiv to neutralize Ukrainian President Volodymyr

Zelensky through assassination or kidnapping, and the installation of a
network of collaborators who would administer a new government—
steps that a broader, more experienced collection of planners might
have explained would not work.
The Kremlin’s ideas were obviously ineffective. Yet it delayed import-
ant course corrections, likely because it believed they would be politi-
cally unpopular at home. For example, the Kremlin tried to entice ad
hoc volunteers in the early summer to plug holes created by severe
battlefield losses, but this effort attracted far too few personnel. Only
after the September collapse of the military’s front in Kharkiv did
Moscow order a mobilization. Later, the Kremlin did not allow a
retreat from the city of Kherson until months after their positions
became untenable, risking thousands of troops.

HOW RUSSIA PLAYED ITSELF

Before and during wars, countries rely on operational security, or
OPSEC, to keep crucial aspects of their plans secret and to reduce vul-
nerabilities for their own forces. In some cases, that entails deception.
In World War II, for instance, the Allies stationed troops and decoys
on a range of beaches in the southern United Kingdom to confuse
the Nazis as to which location would be used to launch an attack. In
other instances, OPSEC involves limiting the internal dissemination
of war plans to lower the risk that they will go public. For example,
in preparation for Operation Desert Storm, U.S. pilots who would
later be assigned to eliminate Iraqi air defenses trained for months
to conduct such strikes but were not told about their specific targets
until days before the attack began.
The Kremlin’s war plans, of course, were made public months
before the war. As a number of news outlets have reported, including
The New York Times and The Washington Post, U.S. intelligence agen-
cies uncovered detailed and accurate outlines of Russia’s plans and
then shared them with the media, as well as with allies and partners.
Rather than abort the invasion, the Kremlin insisted to journalists and
diplomats that the large contingents of troops massed on Ukraine’s
borders were there for training and that it had no intention of attack-
ing its neighbor. These claims did not fool the West, but they did fool
most Russians—including those in the armed forces. The Kremlin
withheld its war plans from military stakeholders at many levels, from

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 Dara Massicot

individual soldiers and pilots to general officers, and many troops and
officials were surprised when they received orders to invade. A recent
report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defense
and security think tank, which was based on extensive fieldwork and
interviews with Ukrainian officials, found that even senior members
of the Russian General Staff were kept in the dark about the invasion
plans until shortly before it started.
Because most military leaders were not brought into the planning
effort until the last minute, they could not correct major mistakes. The
government did not appear to undergo what is referred to in Russian
strategy as a “special period”—a time of categorizing, stockpiling, and
organizing resources for a major war—because its planners did not
know they needed to get ready for one. The excessive secrecy also
meant that Moscow missed several key opportunities to prepare
the defense industry to produce and store essential ammunition.
Even after they were stationed near Ukraine, Russian units were not staffed
or supplied at appropriate levels, likely because planners believed the troops
were conducting training exercises. And because the military did not have
time to coordinate its electronic warfare systems, when Russian forces
attempted to jam Ukraine’s communications, they also jammed their own.
Prewar secrecy led to problems that were especially pronounced in
the air. Before the invasion, Russian pilots had experience fighting in
Syria, but operations there had taken place over uncontested territory,
most often in the desert. The pilots had virtually no experience fighting
over a larger, forested country, let alone against an adversary capable of
hitting their jets with layers of air defenses. They were given little to no
training in such tactics before the invasion. That inexperience is partly
why, despite sometimes flying hundreds of missions per day, Russia has
been unable to dismantle Ukraine’s air force or air defenses. Another
factor was how Russia decided to employ its forces. Because Russia’s
ground troops were in grave danger within days, the VKS was quickly
reassigned from suppressing Ukrainian air defenses to providing close
air support, according to RUSI analysis. This adjustment helped prevent
Russia from establishing air supremacy, and it forced the Russians to fly
at low altitudes, within reach of Ukraine’s Stinger missiles. As a result,
they lost many helicopters and fighter jets.
Prewar secrecy and lies were not the only ways that the Kremlin
played itself. Once troops began rushing toward Kyiv, Moscow could
no longer deny the fact of its invasion. But for months, it continued

86 foreign affairs
 What Russia Got Wrong

to obscure the conflict or delay important decisions in ways that hurt

its own operations. At a basic level, Russia has refused to classify
the invasion as a war, instead calling it a “special military opera-
tion.” This decision, made either to mollify the Russian population
or because the Kremlin assumed the conflict would end quickly,
prevented the country from implementing administrative rules that
would have allowed it to gain quick access to the legal, economic,
and material resources it needed to support the invasion. For at least
the first six months, the false classification also made it easy for soldiers
to resign or refuse to fight without facing desertion charges.

Pay no heed
The Russian government appears to have assumed that the Ukrainians
would not resist, that the Ukrainian army would fade away, and that
the West would not be able to help Kyiv in time. These conclusions
were not entirely unsupported. According to The Washington Post,
the Russian intelligence services had their own prewar covert polling
suggesting that only 48 percent of the population was “ready to defend”
Ukraine. Zelensky’s approval rating was less than 30 percent on the eve
of the war. Russia’s intelligence agencies had an extensive spy network
inside Ukraine to set up a collaborationist government. (Ukraine later
arrested and charged 651 people for treason and collaboration, includ-
ing several officials in its security services.) Russian planners may also
have assumed that Ukraine’s forces would not be ready because the
Ukrainian government did not move to a war footing until a few weeks
before the invasion. They likely thought that Ukraine’s artillery muni-
tions would quickly run out. Based on the West’s response to Russia’s
annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its relatively small arms provisions
during the run-up to the war in 2022, Moscow might reasonably have
assumed that the United States and Europe would not provide major
support for Ukraine, or at least not in time.
But the Kremlin was evaluating data points that simply allowed it
to see what it wished to see. The same intelligence services poll, for
instance, suggested that 84 percent of Ukrainian respondents would
consider Russian forces to be occupiers, not liberators. The United
States and its allies broadcast Russia’s plans and various attempts to
generate a pretext for invasion, and they warned Russia privately and
publicly that the country would face enormous repercussions if it
started a war. Yet apparently, no one in Putin’s inner circle convinced

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 Dara Massicot

him that he should revise Russia’s approach and prepare for a differ-
ent, harder type of conflict: one in which Ukrainians fought back and
received substantial Western assistance.
Such a conflict is exactly what happened. The Ukrainians rallied to
defend their sovereignty, enlisting in the military and creating territo-
rial defense units that have resisted the Russians. Zelensky, domesti-
cally unpopular before the invasion, saw his approval ratings skyrocket
and became a globally recognized wartime leader. And the Ukrainian
government succeeded in getting historic
amounts of aid from the West. As of late
Just as the West January 2023, the United States has provided
overestimated $26.8 billion in security assistance to Ukraine
since Russia’s invasion, and European states
the Russians, have contributed billions more. The Ukraini-
it could now ans have been stocked with body armor, air
underestimate defense systems, helicopters, M777 artillery,
them. and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems
(HIMARS). They are receiving Western tanks.
The massive and diverse weapons provisions
enabled Ukrainian forces to gain a qualitative edge over Moscow’s
troops in terms of battlefield awareness during Russia’s initial push to
Kyiv, and it allowed Ukraine to conduct precision strikes on Russian
logistics depots and command centers in its eastern regions.
Washington also began providing a stream of what U.S. Deputy
Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks described as “vital” and “high-
end” intelligence to Kyiv. The director of the U.S. Defense Intelli-
gence Agency claimed that intelligence sharing with Ukraine has
been “revolutionary” in nature, and the director of the National
Security Administration and U.S. Cyber Command testified that
he had never seen a better example of intelligence sharing in his 35
years of government service. (According to the Pentagon, the United
States does not provide intelligence on senior leader locations or
participate in Ukrainian targeting decisions.)
This intelligence sharing has mattered at several pivotal points in the
war. In congressional testimony, CIA director Burns said he informed
Zelensky about the attack on Kyiv before the war, and U.S. Secretary of
State Antony Blinken warned Zelensky about Russian threats to him
personally. These alerts gave Ukraine time to prepare a defense that was
essential to protecting both the capital and Zelensky. According to senior

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 What Russia Got Wrong

defense officials, the United States also provided planning and war-
gaming support for Ukraine’s September counteroffensives in Kharkiv
and Kherson, both of which ended with tremendous success.

THE BEAR IS LEARNING

Ukraine’s supporters have had many reasons to celebrate in 2022, and
joyful scenes have emerged from recently liberated Ukrainian land.
But difficult scenes followed. Ukrainian and international investigators
have uncovered evidence of war crimes in recently liberated cities such
as Bucha, Izyum, and Kherson. And despite hopes to the contrary, it
is too soon to say that Russia’s campaign will collapse. Putin is cer-
tainly digging in for the long haul, and although wounded, the Rus-
sian military is still capable of complex operations, adaptive learning,
and withstanding a level of combat that few militaries in the world
can. Sustained high-intensity, high-attrition combined-arms warfare is
extraordinarily difficult, and Russia and Ukraine now have more recent
experience with it than any other country in the world.
Take, for example, the VKS. Although its pilots have failed to sup-
press Ukraine’s air defenses, analysts must remember that such missions
are notoriously time-consuming and difficult, as U.S. pilots have noted.
The VKS is learning, and rather than continuing to waste aircraft by
flying more-conservative and less-effective missions, it is trying to wear
down Ukrainian air defenses by using empty Soviet-era missiles and
Shaheed drones purchased from Iran.
The Russian military also appears to be getting better at performing
one of the most dangerous army maneuvers of all: crossing rivers under
fire. Such operations require planned withdrawals, discipline, force pro-
tection plans, and tight sequencing that few others demand. When
these operations are executed poorly, many soldiers can die; in May
2022, the Ukrainian military destroyed a Russian BTG as it attempted
to cross the Donets River. But the military’s November withdrawal
across the Dnieper River was comparatively smooth, partly because it
was better planned. Despite coming under artillery fire, thousands of
Russian forces successfully retreated east.
Russia has learned to correct for past mistakes in other areas,
as well. In late spring, Russian forces finally succeeded in jamming
Ukrainian communications without jamming their own. During Sep-
tember, the Kremlin declared a partial mobilization to compensate for
personnel shortages, pulling 300,000 draftees into the armed forces.

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 Dara Massicot

Russia’s Gains and Aims

What the Russian military controls—and wants next—in Ukraine

Occupied territory
seized before Feb. 24, 2022
BELARUS
Additional occupied
territory as of Jan. 19, 2023
Annexed territory not
occupied as of Jan. 19, 2023

Kyiv
Kharkiv
UKRAINE
Dnipro
Zaporizhzhia

M O L D O VA
Odessa
Kherson SEA OF
ROMANIA AZOV

RUSSIA

100 miles
BLACK SEA

Sources: Institute for the Study of War; OpenStreetMap

The process was chaotic, and these new soldiers have not received
good training. But now, these new forces are inside eastern Ukraine,
where they have shored up defensive positions and helped depleted
units with basic but important tasks. The government is also
incrementally putting the Russian economy on a wartime footing,
helping the state get ready for a long conflict.
These modifications are starting to show results. Russia’s defense
industrial base may be straining under sanctions and import restric-
tions, but its factories are intact and working around the clock to try
to keep up with demand. Although Russia is running low on missiles,
it has expanded its inventory by repurposing antiship cruise missiles
and air-defense missiles. The Russian military has not yet improved
its battle damage assessment process or its ability to strike moving
targets, but it is now hitting Ukraine’s electrical grid with precision.
As of January 2023, Russian strikes have damaged roughly 40 percent

90 foreign affairs
 What Russia Got Wrong

of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, at one point knocking out power

for more than 10 million people.
The Ukrainians’ learning curve has also been steep, and through
experimentation, they have been able to keep Russian forces off balance.
The military has shown creativity in its planning, and it has hit Rus-
sian air bases and the Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine’s pilots and soldiers,
like Russia’s, have garnered remarkable and unique combat experience.
Ukraine has benefited more from external support than has Russia.
But Russian forces have successfully adapted and experimented as they
have assumed a defensive posture. After weeks of devastating HIMARS
attacks during the summer of 2022, Russia moved its command sites and
many logistics depots out of range. Russian forces have shown more com-
petence on the defensive than on the offensive, particularly in the south,
where they created layered defenses that were difficult for Ukrainian
forces to fight through. General Sergey Surovikin, who was named Rus-
sia’s overall commander in October, was previously the commander of
the southern operational group, and he brought this experience to other
regions that Russia partly occupies. Troops have dug extensive trenches
and created other defensive positions.
Notably, Russia withdrew from the city of Kherson and transi-
tioned to defense only after Surovikin was appointed as the war’s
commander. Putin also began admitting that the conflict will be
challenging once Surovikin assumed charge. These changes suggest
that Putin may have received more realistic appraisals of the situation
in Ukraine under Surovikin’s tenure.
Yet in January 2023, Surovikin was demoted in favor of General
Valeriy Gerasimov. Although the reasons for this command change are
unclear, palace intrigue and cronyism may be behind it rather than any
specific failure of Surovikin’s leadership. And no Russian commander
has been able to break Ukraine’s will to fight even though Russia con-
tinues to launch missiles that inflict suffering on the Ukrainian peo-
ple. But the bombings and entrenchment may well degrade Ukraine’s
capacity, making it harder for the country to reclaim more of its land.

KNOWN UNKNOWNS
The Kremlin, however, aspires to do more than just hold the land
it has already taken. Putin has made it clear that he wants all four
provinces that Moscow illegally annexed in September—Donetsk,
Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia—and in a televised meeting

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 Dara Massicot

last December, he indicated that he is prepared to undergo “a long

process” to get them. Putin’s downsized objectives and sudden candor
about the campaign’s length show that the Kremlin can adapt to its
weakened position and condition its population for a long war. Russia,
then, is either evolving or buying time until it can regenerate its forces.
The question is whether its changes will be enough.
There are reasons to think the shifts will not salvage the war for
Russia, partly because so many things need to change; no single factor
explains why the war has gone so poorly for Russia thus far. The expla-
nations include problems that are not easy to address because they
are intractable parts of the Russian system, such as the self-defeating
deceit illustrated by the Kremlin’s decision to prioritize secrecy and
domestic stability over adequate planning. And Moscow has, if any-
thing, doubled down on silencing frank discussion of the conflict,
even going so far as to criminalize assessments of combat deaths
and forecasts about how the war might unfold. Although officials
can safely talk about some problems—for example, Russian military
leaders have called for an expansion of the armed forces—others
remain decidedly off-limits, including the larger issues of incompe-
tence and the poor command climate that has led to the military’s
horrific problems inside Ukraine. This censorship makes it hard for
the Kremlin to get good information on what is going wrong in the
war, complicating efforts to correct course.
Some of the major issues for Russia are largely beyond Moscow’s
control. Ukrainian resolve has hardened against Russia, something
the Russian military, for all its brutality, cannot undo. Russia has
also been unable or unwilling to interdict Western weapons flows
or intelligence to Ukraine. As long as these two factors—Ukrainian
resolve and Western support—remain in place, the Kremlin cannot
turn Ukraine into a puppet state, as it originally sought to do.
The Russian military has, however, corrected certain important
problems. To overcome a bad plan, it fixed its command structure
and changed many of its tactics. It has consolidated its positions
in Ukraine after heavy losses while adding more personnel, which
will make Ukrainian counteroffensives more costly. Russian mili-
tary leaders announced their intention to bring back many of the
larger divisions from before the 2008 reforms to partly correct
for force structure problems. As the Russian economy mobilizes,
the defense base could better produce more equipment to make

92 foreign affairs
 What Russia Got Wrong

up for wartime losses. Western defense industries, meanwhile, are

straining under the demands of replenishing Ukraine. Russia may
calculate that it can shore up its position while biding time until
Western supplies are exhausted or the world moves on.
But analysts should be careful about forecasting outcomes. The
classic adage still holds: in war, the first reports are often wrong
or fragmentary. Only time will tell whether Russia can salvage its
invasion or whether Ukrainian forces will prevail. The conflict has
already followed an unpredictable course, and so the West should
avoid making hasty judgments about what went wrong with Russia’s
campaign, lest it learn the wrong lessons, devise incorrect strategies,
or acquire the wrong types of weapons. Just as the West overesti-
mated Russia’s capabilities before the invasion, it could now under-
estimate them. And it could overestimate a similarly closed system,
such as the Chinese military. It takes time for analysts to learn how
a combatant adapts and changes its tactics.
Experts should not, however, toss out the tools they now use to
evaluate military power. Many standard metrics—such as the way a
force is structured, the technical specifications of its weapons, and the
quality of its training programs—are still valid. But although these
factors, along with a military’s doctrine and previous operations, are
important, they are not necessarily predictive. As this war and other
recent conflicts have shown, analysts need better ways to measure the
intangible elements of military capability—such as the military’s cul-
ture, its ability to learn, its level of corruption, and its will to fight—if
they want to accurately forecast power and plan for future conflicts.
Unfortunately, analysts will likely have plenty of time to develop
and hone such metrics. Because for all the uncertainty, this much is
clear: as Russia continues to mobilize and Kyiv and its supporters
dig in, the war is poised to continue.

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 Return to Table of Contents

The Limits of the

No-Limits Partnership
China and Russia Can’t Be Split,
but They Can Be Thwarted
Patricia M. Kim

O
n February 4, 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted
his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the opening
of the Olympic Games in Beijing. After talks, the two
sides released a joint statement declaring that China and Russia’s
bilateral partnership was greater than a traditional alliance and that
their friendship would know “no limits.” Twenty days later, Russia
invaded Ukraine. Putin’s brazen gambit immediately cast scrutiny
on Beijing; many observers perceived that it had backed Putin’s
offensive or, at best, willfully ignored it. Russia’s tight embrace
of China since then comes as no surprise, given its dire need for
partners in the face of global isolation. More striking is Beijing’s
steadfast refusal to distance itself from Moscow, despite the costs
to its global image and its strategic interests. Even as Russia has
become a pariah, Beijing has not paused bilateral exchanges and

PATRICIA M. KIM is David M. Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution with a joint
appointment to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies.

94 foreign affairs
 The Limits of the No-Limits Partnership

joint military exercises or dialed down its public exhortations on

deepening strategic coordination with its friend to the north.
Beijing’s resolve to maintain ties with Moscow is partly practical.
Chinese leaders want to keep their nuclear-armed neighbor and former
rival on their side as they look ahead to intense, long-term competition
with the United States. But China’s alignment with Russia is not only
a matter of realpolitik. Beijing sees Moscow as its most important
partner in the wider project of altering a global order that it perceives
as skewed unfairly toward the West. In this order, according to the
Chinese and Russian line, the United States and its allies set the rules
to their advantage, defining what it means to be a democracy and to
respect human rights while retaining the power to isolate and punish
actors for failing to uphold those standards. Beijing and Moscow pur-
port to seek a “fairer,” multipolar order that better takes into account
the views and interests of developing countries.
Such revisionist aspirations undoubtedly resonate in the global South
and even in some quarters of the developed world. But Xi’s designation
of Putin as a key ally in the push for a less Western-centric world has
ultimately set Beijing back in accomplishing its objectives. China’s asso-
ciation with a revanchist Russia has only drawn more attention to its
own aggressive posture toward Taiwan. The perception of a hardening
Chinese-Russian axis has, in turn, reinforced ties among U.S. allies and
partners. And China’s proximity to Russia has undermined the credibility
of Beijing’s claims of being a champion for peace and development.
In short, the Chinese-Russian alignment has proved far more
threatening to the U.S.-led order in its conception than in its opera-
tion. To be sure, the partnership can still cause damage—for instance,
by shielding the likes of Russia and North Korea from punitive mea-
sures at the United Nations and enabling their continued aggression.
But Beijing’s and Moscow’s conflicting priorities and the latter’s
generally dismal prospects limit the pair’s ability to revise the existing
global order in a truly coordinated and radical way. Western leaders
should nevertheless accept that efforts to push Beijing to cut its ties
with Moscow are likely to fail. In the near term, the United States
and its allies should focus instead on preventing the partnership
from veering down a more destructive path by taking advantage of
Beijing’s strong interest in the preservation of global stability. More
broadly, Washington and its allies should recognize that China and
Russia are channeling real disaffection with the existing international

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 Patricia M. Kim

order in many parts of the world—and should get to work bridging

the gap between the West and the rest.

FRIENDS in need
Since Xi’s rise to power in 2012, Russia has become one of China’s
key partners with the steady strengthening of economic, political, and
military ties. Moscow and Beijing may have started off as allies in the
early days of the Cold War, but decades of rivalry and mistrust followed
a split over ideological differences that emerged in the late 1950s. Bei-
jing and Moscow have been brought together again in the twenty-first
century by shared grievances with the West and the clear parallels they
perceive in their respective situations, with Russia accusing NATO of
encirclement and China feeling hemmed in by U.S. alliances in Asia.
Chinese and Russian leaders also share a fear of “color revolutions”—
popular uprisings that have ousted autocratic governments around
the world, including in former Soviet states—which they allege are
Western-sponsored attempts at regime change.
Last year’s rhetoric about a friendship with “no limits” followed an
earlier upgrade to relations in 2019, when China and Russia announced
they had forged a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordina-
tion for a new era” during Xi’s visit to Moscow. China accords this
deliberately long moniker to relations with no other state. And by
invoking “a new era” (a phrase Xi coined to reflect China’s bid for
national rejuvenation in a shifting geopolitical landscape), the label
also underscored the two states’ intention to work hand in hand
during a period of strategic opportunity.
In recent decades, China has shunned formal alliances for both prag-
matic and ideological reasons and has criticized the United States’ vast
alliance network as a “vestige of the Cold War.” But Beijing has increas-
ingly resorted to semantic gymnastics to talk about its alignment with
Russia. Chinese statements regularly insist that the bilateral partnership
is “not an alliance” and “not targeted” against any third party while also
making the case that China and Russia’s relationship “surpasses” tradi-
tional alliances. Even before the joint statement in February 2022, Beijing
had stressed that no areas of cooperation were off limits and that the
partnership would stand firm in the face of international headwinds.
Hard military ties have grown alongside this rhetorical camaraderie
since the first joint Chinese-Russian military exercise conducted in 2005.
Since 2012, the two sides have engaged in increasingly ambitious and

96 foreign affairs
 The Limits of the No-Limits Partnership

frequent training, including naval exercises in the East China and South
China Seas and joint engagements with third parties, such as Iran, South
Africa, and members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO),
a China-led grouping of states. In late 2021, China and Russia made
headlines by holding their first joint naval exercise in the western Pacific,
during which their vessels sailed through key waterways around Japan.
Economic ties, too, have deepened in the last decade, with the
two sides signing dozens of agreements outlining cooperation on
energy, infrastructure, agriculture, finance, and technology. Bilateral
trade has grown in volume over the last two decades, but it has also
become increasingly unbalanced, with China’s economy rapidly
eclipsing Russia’s. As of 2021, China accounted for 18 percent of
Russia’s total trade, while Russia only accounted for two percent of
China’s. Russia’s top exports to China are natural resources, such as
gas, oil, and coal, that may be important today but will become less
so as Beijing turns more toward renewable energy sources. China’s
top exports to Russia, however, are largely manufactured goods,
such as machinery and electronics. Russia depends overwhelmingly
on the more advanced Chinese economy for technology imports,
from semiconductors to telecommunications equipment.

WOULD-BE REVOLUTIONARIES
This material relationship sits alongside an intensifying ideological
alignment. China and Russia both seek to challenge what they perceive
to be a Western-dominated global order that allows the United States
and its allies to impose their interests on others. The two countries
have frequently protested the primacy of “Western values” in inter-
national forums and have argued for a conditional understanding of
human rights and democracy, defined “in accordance with the specific
situation in each country.” In their joint statement from February
2022, China and Russia insisted that they, too, are democracies and
took a swipe at “certain states” for using the “pretext of protecting
democracy and human rights” to sow discord among other countries
and intervene in their internal affairs.
Beijing and Moscow accuse Washington of unfairly using its eco-
nomic power, including the privileged position of the U.S. dollar in
the global financial system, to impose punitive measures on its rivals.
China and Russia have both pushed back on Western sanctions, despite
employing economic coercion themselves against others. Beijing has

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 Patricia M. Kim

argued that sanctions levied outside the auspices of the UN violate

states’ “right to development,” a framing that has its roots in the Chi-
nese Communist Party’s efforts after the 1989 Tiananmen Square
protests to prioritize the “right to subsistence” above civil liberties
and political freedoms. Although China no longer struggles with con-
cerns about basic subsistence, Beijing has criticized high-tech export
restrictions and other decoupling measures adopted by the United
States and its allies as unfairly constraining China’s development and
“right to rejuvenation.” Beijing has also used this language to object to
Western sanctions on Russia regardless of its offenses, claiming that
the sanctions infringe on Russia’s economic rights and have damaging
side effects on developing countries.
In the global South, China continues to market itself as an apo-
litical champion for development, a position that Russia supports.
The two have extolled the virtues of Chinese projects, such as the Belt
and Road Initiative, a vast infrastructure development program, and
the more recently announced Global Development Initiative, a still
vaguely defined scheme seen as a successor to the BRI that, according to
Beijing, brings development “back” to the center of the global agenda.
Such initiatives, along with Chinese messaging about development,
have found receptive audiences in the global South, given that many
low-income countries want rapid development but remain averse to
international scrutiny on their domestic governance.
Over the years, Beijing and Moscow have advanced various measures
to weaken U.S. control of the international economy. They have cooper-
ated to create alternative financial institutions and mechanisms to dent
the dollar’s dominance and blunt the impact of Western sanctions. This
effort has gained greater urgency since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and
the subsequent cutting off of major Russian banks from the SWIFT inter-
national payment system. Since Beijing and Moscow agreed in 2019 to
boost the use of national currencies in cross-border trade, the Russian
central bank has significantly reduced its dollar holdings and increased its
investment in Chinese yuan. About a quarter of Chinese-Russian trade
is now settled in renminbi and rubles, and this percentage will increase
following the announcement last fall that China will begin to pay for
Russian gas half in renminbi and half in rubles. Beijing and Moscow’s
efforts to reduce the dominance of the dollar have been warmly wel-
comed in friendly groupings such as the SCO and the BRICS, which brings
together Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

98 foreign affairs
 D E T E R , D I S R U P T,
OR DECEIVE
ASSESSING CYBER CONFLICT

as an I N T E L L I G E N C E C O N T E S T

R O B E R T C H E S N E Y A N D M A X S M E E T S , E D I TO R S

FOREWORD BY AMY ZEGART

Subversion Deter, Disrupt, Cold Rivals

“In this rich and complex work or Deceive “With an all-star assemblage of
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 Patricia M. Kim

At the heart of China and Russia’s ideological alignment is a com-

mon desire to weaken the vast U.S.-led alliance architecture in Europe
and Asia. The two countries accuse Washington and its allies of violating
the principle of “indivisible security” by advancing their security interests
at the expense of others’. The Kremlin has employed this argument to
justify its war in Ukraine and to redirect blame for the conflict on NATO.
And this narrative has caught on in many parts of the global South,
thanks in part to Chinese state media amplifying Russian talking points.
In Asia, Beijing has pointed to the strengthening of the U.S. alliance
network—including the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a security
partnership between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, and
AUKUS, a partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the
United States—as evidence of the U.S.-led containment of China. But
Beijing faces an uphill battle in challenging the U.S. presence, given
that many Asian governments are concerned about China’s aggressive
behavior and welcome the United States’ balancing role in the region.
Despite seeking to change elements of the current global order,
Beijing and Moscow do not wish to revise all elements of the existing
architecture. They continue to stress that the United Nations and UN
Security Council should play a leading role in the international arena.
This position is unsurprising, given the privileges China and Russia
enjoy as permanent members of the Security Council and their ability
to rally developing world partners at the UN.

DOUBLING DOWN
Until February 24, 2022, when Russian troops stormed Ukraine, Bei-
jing saw little downside to its burgeoning relationship with Moscow.
It is unclear just how much Chinese leaders knew of Putin’s plans in
advance. But they were likely taken aback when the Russian attack
floundered and placed a heavy spotlight on China. Even so, Beijing
has ultimately chosen not to distance itself from Russia. Chinese
leaders have yet to explicitly condemn Putin’s ongoing aggression in
Ukraine and have spoken in defense of Russia’s “legitimate security
concerns.” Chinese state media outlets have also amplified Russian
propaganda and disinformation about the war in Ukraine.
At the same time, China maintains that it is not a party to the conflict
and that it supports peaceful negotiations, as well as the sovereignty and
territorial integrity of all states. It has expressed concern about the “pro-
longed and expanded crisis” in Ukraine, including its negative spillover

100 foreign affairs

 The Limits of the No-Limits Partnership

Squad goals: a Chinese warship taking part in a joint exercise with Russia, East China Sea,
December 2022

effects. China also abstained on three UN resolutions last year that con-
demned Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territory. Chinese
officials privately insist that these abstentions were a sign of Beijing’s
disapproval of Russian behavior and that they went to great lengths to
rebuff Moscow’s repeated requests that Beijing veto these resolutions.
Chinese leaders have also made clear to their Russian counterparts
that they oppose the threat or use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine
and underlined their expectations that Moscow pursue a diplomatic
resolution to the conflict. Moreover, China has not supplied weapons
or extended any direct material assistance to Russia’s military efforts.
Chinese banks and businesses have also largely complied with sanctions
by curtailing shipments of restricted goods and suspending select oper-
X U W E I / X I N H UA V I A G E T T Y I M A G E S

ations in the Russian market, although last year, the U.S. Department
of Commerce accused five Chinese firms of violating sanctions.
Beijing has nevertheless made a point of maintaining normal
trade ties with Moscow, and nonsanctioned sectors of bilateral trade
have ballooned as a result. Just weeks before the Russian invasion,
the two countries signed oil and gas deals worth nearly $120 billion
and announced the lifting of Chinese restrictions on Russian wheat
and barley imports. China replaced Germany as the largest importer

march / april 2023 101

 Patricia M. Kim

of Russian energy last year, and Chinese-Russian trade reached a

record-breaking $180 billion in 2022.
China and Russia have also kept up their steady pace of diplomatic
engagement. According to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, top Chinese
and Russian officials have met 21 times since last February. Russian state
media has reported that Xi may pay Putin a visit in Moscow this spring.
Perhaps most remarkably, Beijing and Moscow have maintained
their steady pace of joint military exercises, even as the Russian military
is bombarding Ukrainian cities. Last May, as U.S. President Joe Biden
traveled in the region, Chinese and Russian bombers flew over the Sea
of Japan, the East China Sea, and into South Korea’s air defense iden-
tification zone. China participated in Russian exercises in the Russian
Far East and in the Sea of Japan in September, and the two capped the
year off with a major joint naval exercise in the East China Sea in late
December. Their first joint military exercise of 2023 has been planned
for February, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of Russia’s inva-
sion of Ukraine, and will include South Africa, a BRICS partner.

BLOWBACK
China’s decision to double down on its alignment with Russia even after
the latter’s naked aggression in Ukraine has raised grave concerns on
the part of the United States and its allies. Polling by the Pew Research
Center indicates that the percentage of Americans with unfavorable
views of China, which was already at historic highs in 2021, increased
further, from 76 percent to 82 percent, in 2022. Moreover, 62 percent
believed the relationship between China and Russia is a “very serious”
problem for the United States. Views of China have soured, particularly
in Europe, dashing Beijing’s hopes that the European Union would
adopt a more benign posture than that of the United States. Polling by
the German Marshall Fund last September found that many Europe-
ans preferred a “tougher” approach to China, even if such policies would
come at an economic cost. Although Tokyo has long been wary of the
threat posed by China, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and fears of a
similar scenario in Asia have inspired the recent, historic changes in
Japan’s defense policies, including its moves to develop counterstrike
capabilities, to double its defense budget, and to sign unprecedented
security pacts with Australia and the United Kingdom.
The most damaging consequence of Russia’s aggression for China is
the heightened global awareness and sense of urgency about Taiwan.

102 foreign affairs

 The Limits of the No-Limits Partnership

Preventing Taiwan from becoming “the next Ukraine” has become a

topic of grave concern, not just in Washington but among U.S. allies
in Europe and Asia, many of whom once viewed Taiwan’s fate as only
vaguely relevant, if at all, to their own security or a matter too politically
sensitive to discuss. A record number of lawmakers from countries
including Australia, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and
the United States have visited Taipei in the last year to express sup-
port for the island. Fears about Chinese and Russian revisionism have
strengthened ties between NATO and the United States’ Indo-Pacific
allies, as well. Last year, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South
Korea participated in a NATO summit for the first time. Leaders there
jointly recognized the danger of conflict in the Taiwan Strait and called
for greater coordination among like-minded European and Asian partners.
Although negative views of China have spiked among developed
democracies, that has not been the case in the developing world,
especially among nondemocratic states. As a study published last fall
by the Bennett Institute for Public Policy found, China’s and even
Russia’s favorability ratings remain relatively high in many parts of
Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Bounds in the boundless

Partnership with Russia has hurt China’s image in the West and has
inspired more concerted coordination among the United States and
its partners to the detriment of Chinese ambitions. But China will
not forsake Russia anytime soon. Beijing must keep Moscow close as
it looks ahead to decades of competition with Washington. It cannot
afford to be distracted by tensions with a militarily formidable neighbor
with which it shares a 2,600 mile border. In addition, Xi has invested
a great deal in his relationship with Putin, the two having met a
remarkable total of 39 times since 2012. The Chinese state cannot
backpedal away from this personal commitment without suggesting
that Xi, its “core leader,” has erred.
Nonetheless, Beijing’s behavior since February demonstrates that
there are indeed some limits to its partnership with Moscow. Although
China and Russia share revisionist goals and seek privileged positions
for themselves at the top of the international hierarchy, the two coun-
tries do not always agree about how to achieve these objectives. Even
as China grapples with a relative economic slowdown after decades
of rapid growth and faces various challenges at home, it remains the

march / april 2023 103

 Patricia M. Kim

world’s second-largest economy. It has much more to lose than Russia

does from global instability and economic isolation. Chinese leaders
and citizens know well that their country’s integration into the global
economy, along with the flow of investments and people in and out of
China, has fueled the country’s economic miracle. China still has great
capacity to influence other countries through its economic offerings,
such as investments, loans, and infrastructure and trade agreements, all
of which have allowed Beijing to project power and promote its agenda
globally in recent years. Russia, on the other hand, is a lopsided power
that has significant military capabilities but dismal economic prospects.
With fewer tools of influence at its disposal, Moscow has turned to brute
force to achieve its aims and has become increasingly isolated as a result,
with years of economic contraction looming. Chinese leaders have staked
their legitimacy on achieving their country’s revitalization, so they are
less likely to emulate or join in the Kremlin’s violent revisionism.
Moreover, the fact that China has yet to provide Russia with direct
military assistance, whether in the form of weapons or operational
support, suggests that military coordination between the two countries
remains more performative than geared to actual joint combat. In fact,
Beijing is likely to refuse any direct Russian military assistance in the
event of a war over Taiwan, given the deep nationalist sentiments that
undergird its quest to consolidate rule over the island. Similarly, it is
hard to imagine Moscow welcoming any operational presence of the
People’s Liberation Army in its own backyard. Despite the official
rhetoric of friendship, China and Russia ultimately lack close cul-
tural and people-to-people ties that could inspire their citizens to die
in war for each other—a high bar to meet even for countries that
share such bonds. These factors suggest that the prospect of a joint
Chinese-Russian military campaign remains remote for the time being.
China and Russia’s partnership is real and likely to endure for the
foreseeable future. But its strategic implications should not be over-
stated or underestimated. The fundamental differences between their
respective outlooks, along with Russia’s growing limitations, will curb
the alignment’s appeal and its ability to revise the existing global order,
which requires exerting influence among both developing and devel-
oped countries. A limited partnership between the two countries can
still be destabilizing, particularly if China serves as Russia’s economic
lifeline and the pair continue to partner in protecting fellow autocracies
and enabling their transgressions at home and abroad.

104 foreign affairs

 The Limits of the No-Limits Partnership

The United States should neither expect the disintegration of this

alignment nor resign itself to the further consolidation of Chinese-
Russian ties. Instead, U.S. officials should appeal to Beijing’s fundamental
interest in stability to push Chinese leaders to rein in Russian recklessness.
Recent efforts by Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and others to
press Xi to oppose the threat or use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine offer
a good example of how Western powers can work with China to send
the right signals to Moscow. The same approach should be used to advo-
cate for a peace agreement that delivers justice
for the people of Ukraine, once a road map for
such an accord emerges. Skeptics may question Xi and Putin have
whether attempting to work with Beijing will met in person 39
be worth the effort, given that it is unlikely to
endorse tough measures that jeopardize its ties
times since 2012.
with Moscow. China will also seek credit for its
cooperation, which should be given when due. It will attempt to link its
willingness to cooperate with Western powers on Ukraine to concessions
in other areas, such as easing export restrictions on Chinese companies or
curbing diplomatic support for Taiwan. The United States and its partners
will need to manage such demands by setting proper expectations with
Beijing. China’s words and actions, as a member of the UN Security Coun-
cil and as Russia’s most consequential ally and trade partner, will affect
Moscow’s decisions in Ukraine and beyond. As such, securing China’s
cooperation in working toward peace in Europe will be essential.
The United States and its allies should also give serious thought
to why Chinese and Russian accusations of Western hypocrisy and
hegemony resonate in many parts of the world and to how they might
address these grievances. They will have to grapple with tough issues,
such as the damaging humanitarian consequences in the global South
of the West’s mounting use of non-UN sanctions. And they will have
to find ways to ensure powerful international institutions, including
the UN Security Council, the G-20, and the vast array of international
standard-setting bodies that shape the rules and norms on everything
from global finance to AI research, can better account for the voices and
priorities of developing states. To prevent further global division and the
exploitation of this gap by China and Russia, the United States and its
partners should foster enduring ties with developing countries and actively
consider where alterations to the existing international order are necessary
rather than ceding the ground to Beijing and Moscow.

march / april 2023 105

 Return to Table of Contents

Disunited Kingdom
Will Nationalism Break Britain?
Fintan O ’ Toole

I
n September 2022, the body of Queen Elizabeth was driven across
Scotland from Balmoral Castle, where she died, to the royal pal-
ace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. The coffin was draped in
the Royal Standard of Scotland and carried by members of the Royal
Regiment of Scotland, who wore tartan kilts. For the first six days after
her death, the queen’s passing seemed a very Scottish affair indeed.
Only then was her body flown south to London, where the rest of the
United Kingdom got to show its respects.
This last journey echoed another royal passage, prompted by the
death of a previous Elizabeth, that can reasonably be taken as a
point of origin for the United Kingdom itself. In April 1603, King
James VI of Scotland, then just 36, began a much slower ride from
Edinburgh to London, where he would succeed the childless Queen
Elizabeth I as James I of England and Wales. A year later, in his

Fintan O ’ Toole is Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton. He is the author of

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.

106 foreign affairs

Illustration by Lincoln Agnew 107
 Fintan O’Toole

first address to the English Parliament, he compared the union of

his two kingdoms to a marriage from which there could be no divorce:
“What God hath conjoined then, let no man separate. I am the hus-
band, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife.” Taking the hint, James’s
court dramatist, William Shakespeare, wrote his most terrifying play,
King Lear. It warns of all the dreadful things that can happen if a
united kingdom is foolishly broken up.
Anxiety about the future of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland is not new. It goes back to the beginning of the story. Yet for many
British citizens, the death of Queen Elizabeth II has given a sharp new
edge to these old apprehensions. The stability she embodied for so long
has been, as Shakespeare might have put it, interred with her bones.
Liz Truss, the prime minister whom the queen swore in two days before
she died, plunged the United Kingdom almost immediately into a fiscal
crisis and was gone just weeks later. Since then, the country has faced
soaring energy prices, widespread strikes, and what will likely be the
worst economic contraction in decades. Having abandoned Europe,
the British government now finds itself not only less influential in the
world but also increasingly at odds with Scotland and Northern Ireland,
where large majorities voted to stay in the EU. And the monarchy, once
an imposing symbol of British influence and British identity, is now
the breeding ground for lurid tabloid tales of petty fratricidal wars and
princes mired in scandal and enmity.
Of course, the United Kingdom has endured existential crises before.
Formally inaugurated in 1707, when Scotland dissolved its own parlia-
ment and joined with England and Wales, the kingdom has grown and
shrunk over the centuries, with the addition of all of Ireland in 1801
and the loss of most of it in 1922. Yet this peculiar multinational state
persists. The first modern book on the topic of dissolution—The Breakup
of Britain, by the brilliant Scottish socialist intellectual Tom Nairn—
was published in 1977. Nairn asserted with absolute confidence, “There
is no doubt that the old British state is going down.” Nearly a half
century later, it is still afloat.
Although Nairn’s dire prognosis may have been premature, it could
nonetheless have been quite prescient. He described the end of the
United Kingdom as “a slow foundering rather than the Titanic-type
disaster so often predicted”—a useful metaphor for the way the good
ship Britannia now seems to be holed below the waterline. Scottish
politics are now dominated by the Scottish National Party (SNP), for

108 foreign affairs

 Disunited Kingdom

which leaving the kingdom is a defining mission. For the first time,
Northern Ireland has lost the Protestant majority that for more
than a century has formed the backbone of its union with Britain;
demography alone suggests that its population will, over the coming
decades, be ever more inclined toward unification with the Republic
of Ireland. Even Wales, which England annexed as far back as 1284,
has become increasingly distinct from it. In December, the interim
report of the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future
of Wales, established by the devolved government in Cardiff, found
that current political arrangements with London are not sustain-
able. The commission pointed to more radical options, including the
possibility of Wales becoming a fully independent country.
Most intriguing, as popular support for Brexit revealed, English
voters themselves are increasingly asserting an English nationalism
that was previously buried under British and imperial identities.
These multiplying challenges leave the United Kingdom unsure about
not just its place in the international order but also whether it can
continue to be regarded as a single place. A polity that once shaped
the world may no longer be able to hold its own shape.

Shaky Legs
The United Kingdom may still stand, but its foundations are shallower
than they have been for many centuries. The first of those foundations
was empire. To create one, England needed peace on its home island
and control over its troublesome and fractious near neighbor, Ireland.
It needed to know that if it went to war with Spain or France, it would
not be attacked from the north by claymore-wielding Scots and that
its European rivals could not use Ireland as a base from which to
invade the homeland. Conversely, especially for the Scottish elites,
England could offer a lucrative share in its rapidly growing mercantile
power. The bargain made sense for both sides: England could dom-
inate the island of Great Britain, but by joining it, Scotland could
help it dominate the world.
Second, there was Protestantism. In the sixteenth century, the Refor-
mation took different forms in the various British nations. Over time,
Scotland became typically Presbyterian, Wales strongly Methodist,
and England loyal to the official Episcopalian church that grew out
of Henry VIII’s split with Rome. The tensions between these faiths
were bitter. Ultimately, however, they carried much less weight than

march / april 2023 109

 Fintan O’Toole

the imperative of not being Catholic. Ireland, where the majority held
on to a strongly Catholic identity, was therefore a perpetually fraught
presence in the United Kingdom. But Protestantism solidified the sense
of commonality among the other nations.
A third footing was provided by the industrial revolution. Until the
1980s, anyone traveling around the United Kingdom would have been
struck by the deep shared history of physical labor that encompassed the
Welsh coalfields, the potteries of the English Midlands, the cotton mills
of Manchester, the ironworks of Glasgow, and
the shipyards of Belfast. This world forged
In the postwar era, its own bond of unity—the trade unions and
the British Empire the Labour Party that came, in the twentieth
century, to represent a national working class
was replaced by that cut across regional divisions. Labour may
the Rolling Stones have been, at least some of the time, radically
and James Bond. reformist, but in terms of national identity, it
was also deeply conservative. It gave ordinary
people a powerful sense of common political purpose. The welfare
state it created after World War II, buttressed by common institu-
tions like the National Health Service, provided the same benefits
to ordinary people regardless of what part of the United Kingdom
they inhabited.
Finally, there was prestige. Britishness was a winning brand. The
subject peoples of the empire may not have felt the same way, but for
the denizens of the mother country, the “great” in Great Britain came
to seem, even more than a geographic qualification, an obvious expres-
sion of moral and political supremacy. After the rather unfortunate
business of the loss of the American colonies, the United Kingdom
had an amazing run of successes: crushing Napoleon; smashing (with
a violence it was rather good at forgetting) revolts in Africa, the Carib-
bean, Ireland, India, and elsewhere; defeating Russia in the Crimean
War; humiliating China; and winning two world wars.
Even during its postwar decline, when the empire was dissolving
and the United Kingdom was settling into its role as junior partner
to the new Anglophone world power across the Atlantic, the coun-
try was extraordinarily good at replacing hard power with soft. Its
sclerotic Establishment was slow to appreciate them, but the Beatles
and the Rolling Stones, Judi Dench, and Monty Python cast a spell
of glamour over Britishness. The physical empire was replaced by a

110 foreign affairs

 Disunited Kingdom

cultural realm. In the arts and entertainment, in science and thought,

Britishness retained a cachet for British citizens themselves as well as
for foreigners. Rule Britannia became Cool Britannia.
The success of this branding lay in the ability to encompass two
kinds of coolness. The idea of a chic, dynamic pop culture was twinned
with the self-image of phlegmatic Brits. Like James Bond’s martinis,
the British people could be shaken by world events—the Suez Crisis of
1956, the collapse of the pound sterling in 1992—but they would never
be stirred enough to make their own system of government, rooted in
the mysteries of its unwritten constitution, truly volatile.
These are deep foundations. Many countries that now seem quite
stable have shakier legs to stand on. The weakening of one, or even two,
of the United Kingdom’s pillars would not seem to pose an existential
threat to the country. But how about all four? For on any objective
analysis, it is impossible to believe that any of these underpinnings of
Britishness remain firmly in place today.

The Setting Sun

The death of Queen Elizabeth II marked, in a belated way, the demise
of empire. When she ascended the throne in 1952, her subjects consti-
tuted more than a quarter of the world’s population. When she died, the
United Kingdom had scarcely more than a dozen overseas territories,
most of them island tax havens. Even the Commonwealth—long a con-
venient way to sustain a more symbolic form of cultural imperium—has
lost much of its meaning. Such prominent members as Australia and
New Zealand are considering following Barbados, which became a
republic in 2021, in ditching the British monarch as head of state. The
carnival of empire is now, at best, a nostalgic display. At worst, and
arguably more realistically, it is a nightmare of unfinished business:
the wages of slavery, racism, and savage brutality. (Recent work, such
as Caroline Elkins’s Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire,
make one marvel at the United Kingdom’s ability to sustain for so long
its self-image as a benign and civilized colonizer.) One of the attrac-
tions of Scottish or Welsh nationalism is the distance it creates between
those nations and the guilt of imperialism: shame can be attributed to
the United Kingdom and sloughed off as the country is left behind.
As for Protestant identity, the 2021 British census provides a rude
awakening. For the first time ever, less than half the country’s 67 million
citizens—46 percent—describe themselves as Christian, a staggering

march / april 2023 111

 Fintan O’Toole

decline from 2001, when 72 percent did. Never mind the historic divide
between Protestants and Catholics; basic Christian identity no longer
serves as a marker of Britishness.
The United Kingdom’s prime minister throughout the 1980s,
Margaret Thatcher, smashed Britain’s industrial base along with its
trade unions. During her decade in power, manufacturing output
grew by 21 percent in France, 50 percent in Japan, and 17 percent in
the United States. In the United Kingdom, it fell by nine percent.
This decline began a decisive collapse from which the United King-
dom’s reputation as an industrial powerhouse has never recovered.
Manufacturing now represents ten percent of the country’s economic
output and just eight percent of its jobs.
For one part of Thatcher’s agenda—breaking organized labor—
this was a triumph. But for another—the reassertion of British-
ness—it was a long-term problem. As long as the Cold War was still
a dominant narrative, Thatcher’s projection of Britain as a warrior
nation facing down enemies from Berlin to the Falklands compen-
sated for the real loss of industrial power. A mythically militant
Britishness could mask the day-to-day experience of decline. But
only for so long. Thatcher was simultaneously pumping up a British
national identity and eroding its social foundations. Over time, this
contradiction was bound to have consequences for the viability of
the United Kingdom. When Thatcher carpet-bombed the working
class’s political base, the collateral damage was a once potent sense
of shared belonging that is now greatly diminished. The common
culture in which huge numbers of people in England, Scotland, and
Wales did the same jobs, belonged to the same unions, and voted for
the same party (Labour) is almost gone.
Since the turn of this century, the prestige of Britishness has had
to compete with the emergence of new centers of power in Scot-
land, Wales, and—albeit in more complex ways—Northern Ireland.
Tony Blair’s Labour government, elected in 1997, gambled that the
establishment of devolved administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff, and
Belfast would be enough to mollify all but the most fervent Scottish,
Welsh, and Irish nationalists. Yet at least in Scotland and Wales, the
very existence of those elected assemblies, and of ministers and lead-
ers who behave like governments, has created a sense that significant
political spaces, with their own agendas and discourses, exist beyond
the reach of the London-based elites.

112 foreign affairs

 Disunited Kingdom

Meanwhile, the tradition of British military élan has finally lost its
luster. During the Iraq invasion in 2003, when he stood shoulder to
shoulder with U.S. President George W. Bush, Blair imagined that
he could use, as Thatcher had done, military victory to consolidate a
sense of shared British patriotism. But even within the larger disaster
of Bush’s wars, Britain’s experience was a stark tale of hubris and nem-
esis. In 2016, at the release of his official inquiry into the Iraq war, the
career civil servant John Chilcot issued a blunt assessment of British
power: “From 2006, the U.K. military was conducting two enduring
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. It did not have sufficient resources
to do so.” Chilcot described the country’s “humiliating” performance in
the city of Basra, where British forces had to make deals with the same
local militias that were attacking them. After these painful failures, it is
no longer possible to see military might as part of the allure of British-
ness. The United Kingdom still has important military and intelligence
capacities, and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s moral and prac-
tical support for Ukraine had a very real impact. But it is striking that
Truss’s signature promise to increase the military budget to three percent
of GDP evaporated along with her ill-fated premiership. Even among
conservative hawks, there is almost no appetite in London for fantasies
about renewed global military power and no sense that glory of arms on
foreign fields can ever again paper over the cracks on the home front.

Littler England
Brexit was in part an attempt to compensate for the waning of British
hard power. As the former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-
Mogg framed it at his party’s conference in October 2017, a break
with Brussels would be a continuation of historical English triumphs
on the continent: “It’s Waterloo! It’s Crécy! It’s Agincourt! We win all
these things!” Well, not all of them. If Brexit was intended to provide a
great psychological victory over the European Union, it instead swept
away any notion of British immunity to a politics of mass delusion.
Amid mounting evidence that leaving Europe has made the United
Kingdom’s long-term economic problems both deeper and more acute,
the political pantomime performed by five different prime ministers
in the six years since the Brexit referendum has destroyed all notions
of British calm, competence, or coherence.
For a while, the English (although certainly not the Scots or the
Welsh) entertained themselves with the spectacle of Johnson’s know-

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 Fintan O’Toole

ingly ironic clowning, but the joke ceased to be funny after the COVID-19
outbreak. As Johnson and his circle dithered and broke the lockdown
rules they had imposed on the public, the devolved regional administra-
tions appeared far more capable. For the first time in many centuries, in
the face of a common threat, people in Scotland looked to Edinburgh
for leadership, and those in Wales looked to Cardiff. The bitter truth
was that their respective first ministers, Nicola Sturgeon and Mark
Drakeford, did not have to be spectacularly brilliant to seem impressive
compared with the chaos-inducing Johnson.
Beneath the political farce of Brexit lies
The greatest threat the mundane tragedy of impoverishment.
to the United “The truth is we just got a lot poorer,” Paul
Johnson, the director of the London-based
Kingdom may be Institute for Fiscal Studies, said, after the
England’s own British government announced its latest
nationalists. budget assessment this past November. He
likened the country’s disastrous recent poli-
cies—a list that includes, along with Brexit itself, ill-considered cuts to
education and other social investments—to “a series of economic own
goals.” According to the independent spending watchdog the Office
for Budget Responsibility, living standards are expected to fall by an
alarming seven percent over the next two years, with the country’s
economic contraction nearly on par with Russia’s. This harm can rea-
sonably be called self-inflicted, but employing that description raises
the awkward question of which national self is being talked about.
After all, Brexit was decisively rejected by the people of Scotland and
Northern Ireland, who have good reason to think that the ensuing
economic debacle was needlessly imposed on them by the English.
Indeed, at least since the 1980s, the smaller nations in the United
Kingdom have been thinking about Europe very differently from their
English counterparts. Before the United Kingdom joined what was
then called the European Economic Community in 1973, almost all
nationalists—English, Northern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh—distrusted
and feared it as a burgeoning superstate that would destroy their indi-
viduality. (In 1975, when the United Kingdom held its first referen-
dum on continuing EEC membership, the SNP claimed that staying in
Europe would “strike a death blow to [Scotland’s] very existence as a
nation.”) As the EU expanded and became ever more multilingual, how-
ever, it began to offer the United Kingdom’s non-English constituencies

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a new kind of buffer from London: an international body in which they

could advocate for their own interests and remain connected to bigger
powers without being dominated by them. Thus, in the EU era, the SNP
promoted the rapid expansion of trade and professional ties between
Scotland and the continent, allowing it to ditch its image as a throw-
back and project itself as modern, open, cosmopolitan, and European.
English nationalists, to the contrary, tended to see any pooling of
sovereignty with Brussels as a betrayal of their own superior destiny.
As Enoch Powell, the highly influential former cabinet minister and
right-wing member of Parliament, put it in 1977, “submission to
laws this nation has not made” raised the haunting prospect “that we
. . . will soon have nothing left to die for.” It was not accidental that
Powell—and such political heirs as former UK Independence Party
leader Nigel Farage—combined opposition to EU membership with
rage against immigrants: both stood for the surrender of English
greatness to foreign interference.
In this sense, English nationalism today has become an out-
lier among nationalist movements in the United Kingdom: more
obviously right-wing, anti-immigrant, nostalgic for past greatness,
and, above all, anti-European. It is also in part driven by a justified
resentment at the way in which England was left without its own
specific political identity during Tony Blair’s devolution. Unlike its
Scottish, Northern Irish, and Welsh counterparts, Englishness was
given no positive expression in political life. It remained incoherent
and poorly articulated—until, of course, the Brexit referendum gave
it a cause and an opportunity. This was what almost no one who was
thinking about the future unity of the United Kingdom had consid-
ered: that its most successful nationalist eruption might come not
on the Celtic fringes but in the English heartland.

You Can Check Out, But You Can ’ t Leave

Driven as it was by English politicians and English voters, Brexit
could only increase disaffection from the United Kingdom in both
Northern Ireland and Scotland. According to the most recent report
of the authoritative British Attitudes Survey, more than half the
population of Scotland—52 percent—now say they favor Scottish
independence—even though just 45 percent voted for it in the 2014
referendum. Likewise, the proportion of people in Northern Ireland
wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join with the rest of Ireland,

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 Fintan O’Toole

which before Brexit rarely exceeded 20 percent, has risen dramati-

cally. Now, as many as 30 percent favor a united Ireland, and only 49
percent—no longer a majority—support remaining in the United
Kingdom, with the rest undecided and arguably persuadable either
way. Especially remarkable is the growing overlap between those
who voted to remain in the EU and those who are now drifting away
from Britishness. In Scotland in 2016, only 44 percent of Remainers
favored independence; now, 65 percent do so. In Northern Ireland,
64 percent of those who voted Remain wanted to stay in the United
Kingdom. Now, just 37 percent do so.
This drift is not just a matter of sentiment. In legal fact, Brexit
has set in train a process of detaching Northern Ireland from Great
Britain. In November 2022, British Foreign Minister James Cleverly
told a House of Commons committee that Northern Ireland was as
integral to the United Kingdom as was his own constituency in the
east of England. “Northern Ireland. North Essex. They are part of the
U.K.,” he said. But Brexit has already made Northern Ireland quite
unlike North Essex: Northern Ireland has stayed in the EU’s single
market and customs union, thanks to the controversial Northern
Ireland Protocol of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal agreement,
whereas North Essex has, along with the rest of the country, left
them. This sets an extraordinary precedent. No polity that was con-
fident about its future integrity would allow one of its constituent
parts to be governed by a very different international regime, and
both Johnson and his immediate predecessor, May, had strenuously
disavowed the possibility of such an arrangement. But in the end, the
need to, in Johnson’s words, “get Brexit done” trumped the imperative
of preserving the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
There is, however, a further irony in the effects of Brexit on national
identities within the United Kingdom. In another play that Shake-
speare wrote for James I, Macbeth, the porter jokes about the effects
of alcohol on “lechery”: “it provokes the desire, but it takes away
the performance.” Brexit has greatly enhanced the desire for inde-
pendence among the United Kingdom’s constituent parts, especially
Scotland. But it makes the performance a lot more difficult. Before
Brexit, political, economic, and trade relations between England and
an independent Scotland would have been eased by the continuity
of shared participation in Brussels’s structures and processes. Now,
were England to remain outside the EU and Scotland to rejoin it, the

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barriers between the two nations would be formidable. Brexit may

have inclined the Scots more toward independence, but it has also
provided a rather scary example of how hard it is to leave a union,
whether European or British. And whereas the United Kingdom
was in the EU for less than 50 years, Scotland has been in the United
Kingdom for more than three centuries.
Even the mechanics of holding another vote on independence are
fraught. In November 2022, the British supreme court unanimously
ruled that “the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to leg-
islate for a referendum on Scottish independence.” This means that
no such plebiscite can be lawful unless the British government in
London agrees to it. Sturgeon is too canny to press ahead in these
circumstances, her natural wariness no doubt reinforced by the bit-
ter experience of the Catalan government, which in 2017 staged an
unconstitutional and ultimately abortive referendum on indepen-
dence from Spain. Her response to the ruling has been to declare
that Scotland’s vote in the next British general election will be a
“de facto” independence referendum. But this approach, too, is rife
with uncertainties: a general election is not a referendum, and if
pro-independence parties win a majority, it would still not be clear
how their aims could be put into effect without London’s consent.
Nor is a serious push for a united Ireland likely to take place
soon. There may no longer be a unionist majority in Northern Ire-
land, but there is no nationalist majority either. The most notable
political trend is the large number of Northern Irish voters who
say they are open-minded about the future but in no hurry to leave
the United Kingdom. Over the long term, the prosperity of Ireland,
the dynamic effects of Northern Ireland’s alignment with the EU,
and its changing demography will make Irish unity increasingly
likely—but not in the next decade.

REFORM OR DIE
What all of this means is that there may yet be a chance for the
United Kingdom to save itself. Everything will depend on who
forms the next British government—the next general election must
take place no later than January 2025—and what that government
does about constitutional reform. The current prime minister, Rishi
Sunak, is a technocrat at heart and seems to have little interest
in identity politics. Yet if the economic reality continues to look

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 Fintan O’Toole

grim, his party may have little option but to double down on the
defense of an archaic Britishness. An intransigent Conservative
party that somehow wins reelection by appealing to English vot-
ers to stand firm against the rebellious Scots and rally around the
existing political order could turn a slow process of dissolution into
an immediate crisis. It is not hard to imagine that, amid a deep-
ening economic recession and with Sturgeon already a hate figure
for the Tory press in England (in December 2022, one column in
Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun compared her to the mass mur-
derer Rosemary West), some Conservatives might actually relish a
“patriotic” rhetorical war against Scottish and Welsh nationalists.
The result, however, would be merely to exacerbate divisions and
speed up the end of the United Kingdom.
The current likelihood, however, is that Labour leader Keir Starmer
will be the next prime minister. Starmer has endorsed a plan, drawn
up by a commission headed by former Prime Minister (and proud
Scot) Gordon Brown, to clean up the British Parliament, replace the
unelected House of Lords with an elected second chamber of “nations
and regions,” and devolve more power to local governments in what
Brown calls “the biggest transfer of power out of Westminster . . .
that our country has seen.” If Starmer does achieve power, he may
not be quite so enthusiastic about giving it away. And even these
reforms may not be enough to save the United Kingdom. The case
for the creation of a fully federal state seems strong. It has worked
well for the former British dominions of Canada and Australia. If
Quebec, which came very close to voting for independence in 1995,
has settled down as a distinct society within a larger union, might
not the same be possible for Scotland and Wales? But the English
habit of muddling through—what Winston Churchill called KBO, for
“keep buggering on”—is a powerful force for inertia.
The United Kingdom created a beta version of democracy in the
eighteenth century: innovative and progressive in its day but long
since surpassed by newer models. The country has, however, been
extremely reluctant to abandon even the most egregious anachro-
nisms. The biggest transformation in its governance was joining the
European Union, and that has been reversed. It now has to make a
momentous and existential choice—between a radically reimagined
United Kingdom and a stubborn adherence to KBO. If it chooses the
latter, it will muddle on toward its own extinction.

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 Return to Table of Contents

How Commerce Can

Save the Climate
The Case for a Green
Free Trade Agreement
Gordon H. Hanson
and Matthew J. Slaughter

C
risis looms for the planet. In November 2022, world leaders
met in Egypt at the UN’s annual forum on climate change,
known as the Conference of the Parties. Much like the pre-
vious 26 rounds of negotiations, COP27 did little to solve the world’s
environmental emergency. The summit marked another failure to
secure meaningful commitments. It is now virtually certain that coun-
tries will fail to reach the long-standing goal of limiting average plan-
etary warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. A UN Environment Program
report from October 2022 projected that current climate pledges will
result in planetary warming of approximately 2.5 degrees Celsius by
the end of the twenty-first century. The damage done by the past

GORDON H. HANSON is Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at the Harvard

Kennedy School.
MATTHEW J. SLAUGHTER is Paul Danos Dean and Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of
International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He served
as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2005 to 2007.

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 Gordon H. Hanson and Matthew J. Slaughter

inaction of governments is increasingly palpable and irreversible,

but that is no reason to give up.
Humanity must change its habits of consumption to limit greenhouse
gas emissions. Replacing carbon-intensive goods and services with green
counterparts (that is, products made with dramatically reduced or no
carbon emissions) will help curb overall global emissions. Indeed, some
of the world’s leading climate voices are more openly acknowledging
the necessity of such a transition. Last year, in an unusual move, the
annual climate-assessment report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change included chapters on efforts to create new envi-
ronmental goods and services. And promising discoveries have sparked
hope for future progress. In December 2022, U.S. scientists announced
the breakthrough, after decades of trying, of the first-ever controlled
nuclear fusion reaction. Nuclear fusion technology, however, will not be
commercially viable anytime soon.
The world cannot wait any longer to forestall the coming climate cri-
sis. Countries must accelerate the invention and deployment of low-cost
green products in key areas, including energy generation, distribution, and
transportation. Chief among the needed policies is the implementation of
a meaningful world carbon price, in the form of a charge on greenhouse
gas emissions. Such a price would make new green products cheaper than
existing carbon-intensive ones. Without it, the pace of any energy transition
would continue to be alarmingly slow: inventors will not have sufficient
financial incentive to make bold bets in their research and development,
and companies will drag their feet in adopting existing green technologies.
But the prospect of a high and harmonized world price on carbon
is not on the horizon. In the United States, for instance, imposing
an economically meaningful carbon price is unfeasible, at least in the
medium term. The political right derides carbon prices as an intrusive
new form of taxation, whereas the political left sees them as tacitly
condoning the continued use of fossil fuels.
A more immediate and practical solution would be a free trade agree-
ment for green technology. Under the auspices of the World Trade Orga-
nization, countries should expedite necessary inventions and lower the
cost of green products by establishing an accord that liberalizes trade in
green-tech products, investment in environmental industries, and the
immigration necessary to foster entrepreneurship and build skilled work-
forces. Think of this as a green technology version of the Information
Technology Agreement (ITA), a WTO deal initially signed by 29 countries

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 How Commerce Can Save the Climate

in 1996 that eliminated tariffs on hundreds of information technology

(IT) goods. Governments have struggled to muster the necessary politi-
cal will and capacity to address the climate crisis. It is time to allow the
global market to speed the transition to a green economy.

GREEN ENERGY, RED TAPE

Too many countries impede the creation and production of low-cost
green goods by erecting barriers to international trade and investment.
The United States has been a leading culprit in this regard.
For years, the United States has been restricting the importation of
low-cost solar panels and other environmental goods, especially from
China. In 2012, the U.S. government concluded an investigation into
whether China was unfairly subsidizing local manufacturers of solar
panels and parts, in violation of China’s commitments to the WTO.
After finding that China was indeed running afoul of WTO rules, the
United States imposed tariffs on Chinese solar imports. Those restric-
tions were extended in 2014 to imports from Taiwan after U.S. officials
determined that the guilty Chinese companies had shifted production
to Taiwan to evade U.S. tariffs. In 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump
expanded those tariffs and extended their reach to imports from almost
every country on the globe. Around that time, the United States lev-
ied new tariffs on other environmental products, such as material for
wind-turbine towers from Canada, South Korea, and Taiwan.
More recently, the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided
tax incentives to companies and consumers to buy electric vehicles and
other environmental products—but only if the vehicles are ultimately
assembled in North America and if their batteries contain enough
materials processed in the United States.
These Inflation Reduction Act provisions have provoked fury in
many European capitals. The European Union is now claiming that
several key parts of the IRA, including tax credits and subsidies, vio-
late WTO rules on discrimination against imports. Many EU leaders are
now demanding not just a WTO investigation but retaliatory measures
against the United States. In December 2022, Ursula von der Leyen, the
president of the European Commission, seemed to hint at a tit-for-tat
response: “We also need to act to ensure the European Union keeps its
global leadership in the clean-tech sectors.” The EU’s new carbon border
adjustment tax, which will levy tariffs on imports based on their carbon
emissions, reflects the region’s assertiveness in advancing climate policy.

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Such talk is not propitious. Unfortunately, many governments have a

history of erecting investment barriers in the energy industry, for instance,
by limiting foreign investment in electricity generation and distribution.
Others provide loans and fiscal support to firms deemed to be national
energy “champions.” As a result, energy companies have often focused
on political strategies rather than business ones, seeking to curry favor
among policymakers instead of developing strategies for reducing emis-
sions. Today, environmental and energy companies should not spend time
and resources navigating trade barriers. As the planet faces increasing
peril, they should accelerate the energy transition as boldly as possible.
International trade in electricity could also facilitate that transition.
Just as the abundant winds of the United States’ Great Plains region
and the ample solar energy of the Southeast could, if fully harnessed,
power much of the Eastern Seaboard, so, too, could the underexploited
potential of hydropower in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and
British Columbia help address the electricity needs of cities in the U.S.
Northeast and Northwest. But connections between the Canadian,
Mexican, and U.S. electricity grids remain poorly developed. In 2020,
the United States renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agree-
ment with Canada and Mexico. The result—the U.S-Mexico-Canada
Agreement—did not expand North American trade but rather impeded
it by applying more stringent rules regarding the national origin of
parts for cars and other goods. The USMCA has a 270-page chapter on
rules of origin but devotes just one page to environmental cooperation
and green goods and services. Washington missed an opportunity in
this accord to fortify regional trade in green electric power. It should
seize that chance now by working with its neighbors to improve the
integration of electricity grids. Allowing electricity to flow freely across
national borders would lower energy prices and mitigate shortages.
Such cross-border flows do exist. But they are intermittent and small.

Take a page from tech

World leaders concerned about climate change should note the dyna-
mism of the IT industry that churns out new product innovations
while lowering costs for producers and, in turn, for consumers. Not
coincidentally, the sector is truly global, with elaborate networks of
production, investment, and people spanning borders.
Much of the success of the IT sector over the past decade can be
chalked up to free trade. The WTO’s tariff-busting ITA eventually

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 How Commerce Can Save the Climate

expanded from 29 to 82 countries, covering roughly 97 percent of world

trade in high-tech products. In 2015, over 50 members concluded an
auxiliary ITA agreement, known as ITA-2, that widened coverage to
an additional 201 products valued at over $1.3 trillion a year. The ITA
remains the WTO’s most comprehensive free-trade agreement.
The ITA helped spur innovation, trade, and investment around the
world. Through the agreement, companies invented new goods and
services and then grew global production networks to scale up, reduce
costs, and benefit from comparative advantage.
Skill-abundant countries, such as the United
States, tend to specialize in designing tech- Washington is
nology, whereas labor-abundant countries, guilty of impeding
including China, concentrate on assembly. For
example, Qualcomm, a U.S. chipmaker, bene-
international
fits from the ITA by designing chips for mobile green trade.
phones in San Diego, contracting out the chip
manufacturing to Taiwan, and having the components assembled in
China before the finished products are exported worldwide. Without
the ITA, trade in components would have been taxed at each link in
the supply chain, as they moved from the United States to Taiwan to
China and to consumer markets. These cumulative trade taxes would
have reduced the value of Qualcomm’s investments in chip technology.
The ITA exemplifies the upsides of globalization. The agreement
encourages innovation and reduces costs over time, benefiting not
only tech firms but also other companies and consumers who use
the technology. A WTO study calculated that between 1996 and 2015,
the value of world exports of products covered in the ITA more than
tripled, from $549 billion in 1996 to $1.65 trillion in 2015. Rising
trade and investment flows led to lower prices. In the ten years after
the ITA came into force, U.S. import prices relative to U.S. export
prices stopped rising and began a decadelong decline—with falling
import prices for IT products leading the way. Between 1996, when
the ITA was created, and 2022, overall U.S. consumer prices rose by a
cumulative 79.5 percent. But at the same time, the price of a personal
computer in the United States fell by an astonishing 97 percent.
These striking declines in IT prices are the result of the rapid inven-
tion of new products and processes—and, with cause and effect running
in both directions, of expanded globalization and freer trade. In many
countries, such as China, Singapore, and South Korea, this virtuous cycle

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between innovation and globalization helped spur growth in productivity

and incomes, not only in the IT sector but across the whole economy.
Again, consider the U.S. experience. From 1973 to 1995, productivity
for nonfarm workers grew at just 1.5 percent per year. From 1995 through
2007, this rate grew to an average of nearly 2.5 percent per year. A study
by Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson concluded that IT-producing
industries “have been the source of most of aggregate U.S. productiv-
ity growth throughout the 1990s.” Key to these economy-wide gains
was the accelerated investment in IT goods and services throughout the
economy. As IT became cheaper, governments, companies, and house-
holds “accumulated computers, software, and communications equip-
ment much more rapidly than other forms of capital.” The IT industry
alone contributed to nearly two-thirds of the economy-wide growth in
productivity: about one-third of it directly, and about one-third driven
by other industries investing more in IT goods and services.
But even more than flows of goods and capital, the migration of
highly talented people contributed to the success of the IT industry.
A 2007 study from the University of California, Berkeley, found that a
B R I A N S TA U F F E R

quarter of all U.S. high-tech firms established between 1995 and 2005
had at least one foreign-born founder. In 2005, these new companies
employed 450,000 people and generated more than $50 billion in sales.

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 How Commerce Can Save the Climate

A follow-up study from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

similarly showed that a quarter of the high-tech companies created
between 2006 and 2012 were founded by immigrants.
Increased global flows of highly skilled labor allowed the ITA to have
maximum impact. In 1990, Congress created the H-1B visa program,
which supplied 65,000 work permits to specialized foreign workers for
three-year stints, with the chance to renew the visa once. Major U.S.
tech companies were the primary beneficiaries as workers in IT quickly
dominated the take-up of H-1Bs. For example, Apple’s iPhone was
designed in California by an international team of electrical engineers
and software developers; tremendous innovation was possible because
the United States encouraged the arrival of the best talent.

TRADE FREE OR DIE

The ITA’s success in IT can be reproduced in green products. Like-­
minded countries should create a similar agreement for green tech-
nology, built on the pillars of trade, investment, and immigration, that
could harness the innovative power of globalization.
For the first pillar, this accord would start with a free trade deal in
environmental goods and services. The WTO began pursuing a green free
trade deal in 2001, but those negotiations accomplished little. Enthusi-
asm revived in 2014 when 14 WTO member countries announced their
intention to pursue an Environmental Goods Agreement to eliminate
all tariffs on green goods in trade among themselves. They launched
formal negotiations later that year, and the group eventually expanded to
include 46 countries. But the talks collapsed in 2016 amid disagreements
over which goods the agreement should cover. For example, countries
advocated to include products in which they were already net exporters.
A rejuvenated agreement for free trade in green products must build
on these earlier efforts by being broad, dynamic, and unfettered. A
new green free trade agreement must include not just goods but also
services, such as the construction of green energy infrastructure and
insurance for extreme weather events, and it must err on the side of
including rather than excluding products. Consider bicycles. In ear-
lier negotiations, China advocated that bicycles should be viewed as
environmental goods and exempted from tariffs. But the United States
and the EU resisted—perhaps because each had already been levying
duties on imports of Chinese bicycles. But bicycles, including electric
ones, provide transport without emitting greenhouse gases and therefore

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belong in any effective green trade agreement. Many countries have a pet
green sector they want to protect. By having an agreement that covers
an expansive set of products, no individual country would be seen as
gaining at the expense of others in the export and import of green goods.
A new green free trade agreement should include not just final
products but also intermediate inputs and capital goods, which are
items that make up a final product and the machines used to man-
ufacture them. For example, an agreement should include equip-
ment to capture the carbon emitted by steel mills and replacement
parts for wind turbines. And the agreement should expand its list
of covered products annually as new green goods and services are
invented. Such flexibility will allow a green trade agreement to gen-
erate even greater impact than the ITA did. The original ITA did
include intermediates and capital goods. It also called for members
to meet periodically to discuss incorporating additional goods in the
deal as more were invented. But such reviews stalled in 1998 because
members could not agree on which products to add. By 2012, the ITA
had finally become so stale that a sufficient coalition of signatories
felt the urgency of reviving negotiations. It took four more years to
agree to and implement the ITA-2 with an expanded list of covered
products, such as video games that use a television receiver. Today,
many business leaders and governments are clamoring for an ITA-3. A
green free trade agreement should preempt such bureaucratic delays.
Member countries must commit to annual reviews whose default is
to automatically include new green products. Without annual and
automatic expansions, a new green free trade agreement will soon
become as outdated as the original ITA.
Additionally, a new green free trade agreement must not be neu-
tralized by carbon border taxes. In December 2022, the EU agreed to
levy such a tax. A worldwide tariff on carbon is impractical and hard to
enforce, and it would undercut free green trade, a more feasible climate
solution. For a new green free trade agreement to work, all the products
it covers must be exempted from carbon border taxes.
The second pillar of a green free trade agreement should be unfet-
tered cross-border flows of foreign direct investment in environmental
goods and services. Many countries, such as China, explicitly restrict
foreign investment in sectors deemed sensitive or strategic. Others,
including India, indirectly prevent capital inflows by subjecting mul-
tinational companies to nearly insurmountable approval processes.

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Trading green goods often requires services provided on site by the

foreign seller, which can only happen if the seller has a foreign subsid-
iary. Therefore, liberalizing foreign direct investment in green sectors
would boost green trade. For example, to import wind turbines from a
Danish multinational manufacturer, a country needs a foreign subsid-
iary of the Danish company to be on hand to guide installation. Mul-
tinationals lead the way in green innovation. Loosening restrictions
on foreign direct investment will make it easier for foreign affiliates
to operate and spread the expertise of their parent companies.
A boost in manufacturing is one upside of progress in environmental
technology, but for most countries, the creation of jobs and the overall
value provided by green-tech services are more important. Take the solar
industry in the United States. With a green free trade agreement, a U.S.
solar company might lower the price of its product by importing low-cost
solar panels from China instead of manufacturing them domestically.
In turn, the company sells more solar panels, creating more jobs in the
United States in solar panel installation and maintenance. A 2020 study
from the Solar Energy Industries Association estimated that only 14 per-
cent of all U.S. solar workers were employed in manufacturing, whereas
two-thirds worked in installation and research and development. In 2021,
the U.S. government predicted a 27 percent increase in solar-installation
employment over the next decade, in contrast with a projected average
growth rate across all U.S. occupations of just five percent. Governments
should not try to hold on to manufacturing jobs with white knuckles.
More jobs will be created through the productivity gains of a green free
trade agreement, particularly in services.
The third pillar of a green free trade agreement should be the unen-
cumbered movement across borders of highly talented people working
in green industries. In the United States, immigrants generate more pat-
entable ideas and technologies than do native-born workers—and these
immigrants are more likely to found companies, which create jobs that
benefit everyone. Skilled immigrants complement rather than replace
skilled native-born workers. Immigrants were central to the success of
the IT industry and will likely be pivotal for green technology as well.
As green technology becomes the locus of innovation, the sector will
attract the best global talent, as IT has. In industries that are undergo-
ing rapid technological change, the strongest firms flourish and attract
skilled labor. Companies tend to innovate as their employees gather and
exchange ideas in proximity to employees of other firms. As companies

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become more productive, they draw more skilled labor. This virtuous
cycle of innovation and growth achieves its maximum potential when
the most talented workers are allowed to move across national borders
through relaxed immigration controls. But in the United States, for
instance, the H-1B program does not go far enough. Had the United
States allocated more visas in recent decades, the ITA would likely have
been more effective. Congress should avoid this mistake by doubling
or tripling the annual allocation of H-1Bs.
On top of a green free trade agreement, countries should commit to
funding research and production of some of the world’s most promising
green innovations, just as the United States hastened the discovery and
manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed.
For companies attempting to create vaccines, the program reduced costs
and uncertainty by providing standards that stipulated the research
hurdles a company had to clear to receive government support. A
similar initiative would accelerate the discovery, production, and cost
reduction of green technology, complementing a free trade agreement.
In a green Operation Warp Speed, countries would commit to purchas-
ing the most promising technologies in long-duration energy storage,
carbon capture, grid digitization, and broad-based electrification, no
matter where the successful innovators are. The up-front commitment,
made before the technologies are invented, would reduce uncertainty
for innovators and short-circuit efforts by individual countries to limit
support to their domestic champions.
Governments should also fund university education for engineers
and scientists in the field of emerging green technology and train
technical workers for jobs such as repairing wind turbines. In addi-
tion, governments should simplify regulations on green technology, for
example, by making it easier to link new forms of electricity generation
to the grid. Such government support would complement a global
green free trade agreement without propping up specific companies.

Innovation Nations
A global agreement to liberalize cross-border flows of products, cap-
ital, and people would advance innovation and lower clean energy
prices. Instead of lobbying for domestic protections, green compa-
nies could focus on global ideas, inputs, and customers. Firms and
consumers would see the progress evident in smartphones replicated
in green technologies such as hybrid vehicles and renewable power.

128 foreign affairs

 How Commerce Can Save the Climate

National security concerns about green technology, such as a fear

of relying on other countries for energy needs, are overblown. In an
industry as large and as rapidly growing as clean energy, no single
country has all the talent and other resources it needs to be able to
rely only on its own production. Climate change is the threat that
most countries should be worried about. For the planet, what matters
is maximizing the speed of invention, the scale of production, and the
uptake of green goods and services.
It is now in vogue for political leaders to call for creating green
jobs at home. But such efforts are misguided for two reasons—one
old, one newer. The old reason is that government efforts to protect
and nurture certain industries have largely failed over the long term:
the target industries and companies often do not thrive, the per-job
costs of government support often vastly exceed the wages of those
jobs, and other countries often retaliate in a cycle that harms everyone.
The newer reason is that when it comes to addressing the climate
emergency, the key issue is not which countries end up producing new
clean goods and services. It is how many countries end up consuming
them. Countries must stop chasing the long-elusive goal of selecting
and supporting winning industries and companies. Instead, they must
start focusing on the immediate imperative of inventing and deploying
green innovations as fast and as broadly as possible.
Globalization will reduce the costs of critical green technologies.
A 2022 study in the scientific journal Nature calculated the costs
that arise when countries restrict “the free flow of capital, talent,
and innovation.” The authors have estimated that the globalization
of the solar photovoltaic supply chain lowered the cost of photo-
voltaic units, saving installers $36 billion in China, $24 billion in
the United States, and $7 billion in Germany between 2008 and
2020. Had tariffs been eliminated, the savings would have been
greater. This study further estimates that if this globalization of solar
production is not allowed to continue, global solar prices will be
around 25 percent higher in 2030 than they would be if globalized
production continues in its current state.
To meet the grave climate risks confronting the world, countries
must enact bold new policies. Motivated by the gains from the ITA,
the world should find clean energy solutions by quickly negotiating
and implementing a green free trade agreement. What worked for
smartphones and other tech products can also work for the planet.

march / april 2023 129

 Return to Table of Contents

Asia’s Third Way

How ASEAN Survives—and Thrives—
Amid Great-Power Competition
Kishore Mahbubani

T
he defining geopolitical contest of our time is between China
and the United States. And as tensions rise over trade and Tai-
wan, among other things, concern is understandably mounting
in many capitals about a future defined by great-power competition.
But one region is already charting a peaceful and prosperous path
through this bipolar era. Situated at the geographical center of the
U.S.-Chinese struggle for influence, Southeast Asia has not only man-
aged to maintain good relations with Beijing and Washington, walking
a diplomatic tightrope to preserve the trust and confidence of both
capitals; it has also enabled China and the United States to contribute
significantly to its growth and development.
This is no small feat. Three decades ago, many analysts believed
that Asia was destined for conflict. As the political scientist Aaron

KISHORE MAHBUBANI is a Distinguished Fellow at the National University of

Singapore’s Asia Research Institute and the author of The Asian 21st Century. He served
as Singapore’s Permanent Representative to the UN from 1984 to 1989 and from 1998 to 2004.

130 foreign affairs

 Asia’s Third Way

Friedberg wrote in 1993, Asia seemed far more likely than Europe to
be “the cockpit of great-power conflict.” In the long run, he predicted,
“Europe’s past could be Asia’s future.” But although suspicion and
rivalry endured—particularly between China and Japan and between
China and India—Asia is now in its fifth decade of relative peace,
while Europe is once again at war. (Asia’s last major conflict, the
Sino-Vietnamese war, ended in 1979.) Southeast Asia has endured a
measure of internal strife—in Myanmar especially—but on the whole,
the region has remained remarkably peaceful, avoiding interstate con-
flict despite significant ethnic and religious diversity.
Southeast Asia has also prospered. As the living standards of Amer-
icans and Europeans have languished over the last two decades, South-
east Asians have achieved dramatic economic and social development
gains. From 2010 to 2020, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN), made up of ten countries with a combined GDP of $3 tril-
lion in 2020, contributed more to global economic growth than the
European Union, whose members had a combined GDP of $15 trillion.
This exceptional period of growth and harmony in Asia is not a
historical accident. It is largely due to ASEAN, which despite its many
flaws as a political and economic union has helped forge a cooperative
regional order built on a culture of pragmatism and accommodation.
That order has bridged deep political divides in the region and kept most
Southeast Asian countries focused on economic growth and develop-
ment. ASEAN’s greatest strength, paradoxically, is its relative weakness
and heterogeneity, which ensures that no power sees it as threatening. As
the Singaporean diplomat Tommy Koh has observed, “The U.S., China,
and India are not able to take the role of driving the region because they
have no common agenda. ASEAN is able to drive precisely because the
three great powers cannot agree. And we can continue to do so as long
as the major powers find us neutral and independent.”
ASEAN’s nuanced and pragmatic approach to managing geopolitical
competition between China and the United States is increasingly seen
as a model for the rest of the developing world. The vast majority of the
world’s population lives in the global South, where most governments
are primarily concerned with economic development and do not wish
to take sides in the contest between Beijing and Washington. China
is already making deep inroads across Africa, Latin America, and the
Middle East. If the United States wants to preserve and deepen its ties
with countries in these regions, it should learn from the ASEAN success

March / april 2023 131

 Kishore Mahbubani

story. A pragmatic, positive-sum approach that looks past political

differences and is open to cooperation with all will be more warmly
received in the global South than a zero-sum approach that aims to
divide the world into opposing camps.

peace and pragmatism

ASEAN was not always seen as evenhanded. Established with strong
U.S. backing in 1967, the body was initially condemned by China
and the Soviet Union as a neoimperialist American creation. But in
recent decades, as China opened up its enormous economy, Beijing
has embraced the regional bloc. ASEAN signed a free trade agreement
with China in 2002, leading to a spectacular expansion of trade. In
2000, ASEAN’s trade with China was worth just $29 billion—roughly
a quarter of the region’s trade with the United States. But by 2021,
ASEAN’s trade with China had exploded to $669 billion, while its trade
with the United States had increased to $364 billion.
Trade with both China and the United States has helped power
ASEAN’s remarkable economic rise. The region’s combined GDP in
2000 was just $620 billion, an eighth of Japan’s. In 2021, it was $3
trillion, compared with Japan’s $5 trillion. And projections show that
the ASEAN economy will be larger than Japan’s by 2030. Clearly, closer
economic ties between the 680 million people who reside in ASEAN
countries and the 1.4 billion people in China have delivered signif-
icant benefits to ASEAN. And this mutually beneficial relationship
is just beginning. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partner-
ship—a free trade agreement among Australia, China, Japan, New
Zealand, South Korea, and the members of ASEAN—came into force
in January 2022 and will likely spur even more significant jumps in
economic growth in the coming decade.
Even as it cultivates closer relations with China, ASEAN is deter-
mined to maintain equally close ties with the United States. U.S.
President Donald Trump largely ignored Southeast Asia (as he did
the rest of the world), but U.S. President Joe Biden has made a major
effort to work with ASEAN, and its member states have responded
enthusiastically. In May 2022, Biden hosted an ASEAN summit at the
White House that was attended by most of the union’s key leaders.
Later that month, the Biden administration launched its Indo-Pacific
Economic Framework, which aims to deepen U.S. economic engage-
ment with partners in the region. Seven out of ASEAN’s ten countries

132 foreign affairs

 Asia’s Third Way

BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

ASEAN trade in goods with the U.S. and China, 2003–2021

$600B
China
United States
$500B

$400B

$300B

$200B

$100B

$0
2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020

Source: ASEAN Secretariat via [Link]

signed on, together with Australia, Fiji, India, Japan, New Zealand,
and South Korea, demonstrating again that ASEAN wants to preserve
its strong ties with Washington.
Geographic proximity to China inevitably means that ASEAN will
have more challenges dealing with China than with the United States.
Already, disputes have arisen over the South China Sea and Chinese 5G
technology, among other issues. China contests the territorial claims of
four ASEAN countries—Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Viet-
nam—but its conduct in the South China Sea disrupts relations with
all association members. In 2012, for instance, China unwisely pres-
sured Cambodia, then the chair of ASEAN, to exclude any mention of
conflicts over the South China Sea from a joint communiqué following
an ASEAN ministerial meeting. Indonesia was able to step in to resolve
the impasse by brokering a common ASEAN position a week later. But
Beijing subsequently mishandled its relations with Jakarta. Although
the so-called nine-dash line on Chinese maps showing Beijing’s claims
in the South China Sea runs close to Indonesia’s Natuna Islands,
China had previously assured Indonesia that there were no overlapping
claims. Yet in 2016 and 2020, Chinese fishing vessels entered Indone-
sia’s Exclusive Economic Zone, prompting Indonesian President Joko

March / april 2023 133

 Kishore Mahbubani

Widodo to make high-profile visits to the Natuna Islands to reaffirm

his country’s sovereignty over the region.
The ambiguous nature of the nine-dash line will likely remain
an irritant in ASEAN-Chinese relations. So will the inability of both
parties to conclude a long-awaited “code of conduct” agreement for
the South China Sea that would reduce the risk of conflict in the
disputed waterway. But it is also clear that the culture of pragma-
tism that envelops ASEAN-Chinese relations will prevent any major
flare-ups. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam have all
increased their economic engagement with China, despite their dis-
puted territorial claims in the South China Sea. In the past, China has
also made pragmatic compromises with its smaller ASEAN neighbors,
including removing two dashes from its original 11-dash line as a
show of friendship to Vietnam in 1952. It would be wise for China
to make similar pragmatic compromises in the future.
Another source of friction in ASEAN-­­Chinese relations is Washing-
ton’s global campaign against the adoption of Chinese 5G technology.
The choice of a 5G telecommunications system is a national decision,
so ASEAN has no collective position on whether its members should deal
with Chinese telecom giant Huawei. Yet the union’s signature pragma-
tism has prevailed, with each member state making its own decision
according to its needs. Indonesia and the Philippines have contracted
with Huawei to build their 5G networks, while Malaysia, Singapore,
and Vietnam have not. These decisions indicate that ASEAN countries
consider American concerns but balance them against their own interest
in having access to cheap technology that benefits their people.
Sometimes, those interests demand that ASEAN countries largely
ignore American concerns. The United States has campaigned equally
hard against China’s Belt and Road Initiative, but this campaign has
essentially failed: all ten ASEAN countries have participated in various
BRI projects, and the region as a whole has been among the most
receptive to China’s mammoth infrastructure investment scheme.
According to Angela Tritto, Albert Park, and Dini Sejko of the Hong
Kong University of Science and Technology, ASEAN countries had
launched at least 53 projects under the BRI umbrella as of 2020.
These projects have brought substantial rewards. Laos remains one
of the poorest countries in the world, but thanks to the BRI, it now
boasts a high-speed train linking the capital, Vientiane, to China’s
Yunnan Province. With a top speed of 100 miles per hour, the sleek

134 foreign affairs

Think Global Health
Better health begins with ideas.

Get the latest on how the climate, infectious diseases,

military conflicts, and more are impacting the health
of the world around us.
an initiative from

[Link]
 Kishore Mahbubani

new bullet train cuts what was once a 15-hour road trip to under four
hours, promising a new tide of trade and tourism from China. Indo-
nesia also turned to China for help building a high-speed train from
Jakarta to Bandung, a little more than 90 miles away. It could have
purchased a train from any country in the world but chose China after
Widodo took a rail journey of similar length in China in less time than
it took him to finish a cup of tea. The United States simply has not
put forward a viable alternative to the BRI, so the choice to embrace
the Chinese initiative over American objections has been an easy one.

bellwether of the global south

ASEAN’s approach to managing geopolitical competition between
China and the United States holds lessons for the rest of the
developing world. As China deepens trade and investment ties
with states across the global South, more and more countries are
adopting a similarly pragmatic approach to balancing Beijing’s and
Washington’s concerns. This should not come as a surprise. Many
developing countries respect and admire ASEAN’s achievements and
see the region’s experience as a guide.
As it has in Southeast Asia, China has cultivated deeper eco-
nomic relations with Africa. Western countries, including the
United States, have warned African governments to be wary of
Chinese exploitation, but such admonitions have been met with
skepticism, not least because of the West’s long and painful record
of exploiting Africa. Moreover, the empirical evidence shows that
Chinese investment has boosted economic growth and generated
new jobs on a continent where jobs are scarce.
According to the development economist Anzetse Were, Chinese
investment in Africa has grown at an annual rate of 25 percent since
2000. Between 2017 and 2020, Chinese investment created more jobs
than any other single source of foreign investment and accounted
for 20 percent of Africa’s incoming capital. And Chinese companies
“are not in the business of just hiring their own,” as some critics have
alleged, Were writes. “African employees make up on average 70 per-
cent to 95 percent of the total workforce in Chinese firms.”
By comparison, the United States and other Western countries
have offered mostly empty promises and inaction. For much of the
last decade, U.S. foreign direct investment in Africa has lagged
Chinese foreign direct investment by roughly half, and much of the

136 foreign affairs

 Asia’s Third Way

development aid the United States delivers to the continent—like

much Western aid in general—ends up in the hands of Western
consultants and companies. As the journalist Howard French has
observed, the United States has grown “increasingly stingy and
scornful” about development assistance at the same time as China
has “gotten into the global public goods game with both feet.”
Hypocritical moralizing about climate change, corruption, and
human rights has also undermined the standing of Western countries in
Africa. The United States and many European
powers have long lectured Africans about the
need to transition away from fossil fuels, but The United States
they suddenly stopped after Russia invaded simply has not
Ukraine and they needed Africa’s oil and gas.
By contrast, China has been less sanctimo-
put forward a
nious, delivering aid and investment without viable alternative
the burdensome conditions placed on West- to the Belt and
ern aid. As Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta Road Initiative.
said in January 2022, “Our partnership with
China is not a partnership based on China
telling us what to do. It is a partnership of friends, working together to
meet Kenya’s socio-economic agenda. . . . We do not need lectures about
what we need, we need partners to help us achieve what we require.”
China has had similar success in deepening ties with Latin America.
Between 2002 and 2019, total Chinese trade with Latin America and
the Caribbean increased from less than $18 billion to more than $315
billion, according to the Congressional Research Service. By 2021, Chi-
nese trade with the region had ballooned to $448 billion. That figure is
still less than half of U.S. trade with Latin America, but 71 percent of
U.S.–Latin American trade is with Mexico. In the rest of the region,
Chinese trade has overtaken U.S. trade by $73 billion.
The growth of Chinese trade with Brazil, Latin America’s largest
economy, has been particularly striking. In 2000, Brazil’s exports to
China stood at $1 billion per year. Now, Brazil exports $1 billion worth
of goods and services to China every four days. Some of this growth
occurred during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, who was far closer to
Trump than he was to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Even during the
two years that Trump and Bolsonaro overlapped in office, Brazil con-
tinued to pursue deeper economic integration with China, suggesting
that an ASEAN-like culture of pragmatism is taking hold in Brasília.

March / april 2023 137

 Kishore Mahbubani

The Gulf is yet another region where China is making inroads. Tra-
ditionally, the oil-rich states of the Gulf have looked to Washington
for protection. Yet close political and security ties with the United
States have not prevented Gulf countries from deepening their eco-
nomic ties with China. In 2000, trade between the Gulf Cooperation
Council and China stood at just under $20 billion. By 2020, it had
grown to $161 billion, and China replaced the EU as the GCC’s largest
trading partner. During the same period, U.S. trade with the GCC grew
much more modestly, from nearly $40 billion to $49 billion. In 2021,
the GCC’s trade with China, at $180 billion, surpassed its combined
trade with the United States and the EU.
The GCC countries have some of the largest sovereign wealth funds
in the world. Their decisions about where to invest are not driven by
concerns about politics or a conception of friendship. They are driven
by cold calculations about which region is likely to deliver the highest
growth. In 2000, the GCC sovereign wealth funds were invested almost
entirely in the West. That year, GCC countries accounted for less than
0.1 percent of foreign direct investment into China. But by 2020, most
GCC sovereign wealth funds had significantly stepped up their invest-
ment in China, although exact investment figures are hard to come by
because most of these funds do not disclose their holdings publicly.
Clearly, Gulf countries do not wish to compromise their relations
with the United States—and with the Abraham Accords, Bahrain
and the United Arab Emirates arguably drew closer to Washington
in 2020—but neither do they wish to forgo the economic benefits of
deeper integration with China. A pragmatic approach that seeks to
accommodate both powers is gaining sway.

guns and butter

Given that many developing countries are beginning to adopt ASEAN’s
approach to managing competition between the United States and China,
Washington would do well to learn from the association’s experience. The
strategy ASEAN has used to balance the concerns and sensitivities of China
and the United States (and other major powers such as India, Japan, and
the European Union) could also enable the rest of the global South to
do the same. China is already pursuing deeper trade and investment ties
across the developing world. The United States must decide whether
to deal pragmatically with these regions or continue with its zero-sum
approach to competition with China and risk driving them away.

138 foreign affairs

 Asia’s Third Way

What would a more pragmatic U.S. approach look like? Consider

three simple rules to follow when dealing with ASEAN and, by exten-
sion, the rest of the global South. The first is not to ask any country to
choose between Beijing and Washington. There is a practical reason
for this: compared with China, the United States has little to offer
ASEAN. Strained finances and congressional resistance to expanding
foreign aid mean that Washington has provided only a fraction of the
assistance that Beijing has provided to the region. At the U.S.-ASEAN
summit in May 2022, for instance, Biden pledged to spend $150 million
on infrastructure, security, pandemic preparedness, and other efforts
in ASEAN countries. Compare that with the $1.5 billion Xi pledged in
November 2021 to help ASEAN countries fight COVID-19 and rebuild
their economies over the next three years.
True, Washington has more to offer in terms of defense cooper-
ation and arms sales. But relying too heavily on military rather than
civilian cooperation could end up hurting the United States. As Paul
Haenle, a China expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, remarked to The Financial Times, “The risk is that the optics
in the region become the U.S. coming to the table with guns and
ammunition and China dealing with the bread and butter issues of
trade and economics.” It would be a huge mistake for Washington
to be associated with guns while Beijing is associated with butter.
The simple truth is that for most people in the global South, the first
priority is economic development.
And for good reason. Having grown up in Singapore in the 1950s
and 1960s, when the country’s per capita income was as low as Ghana’s,
I understand how psychologically debilitating poverty can be. I also
understand how psychologically uplifting it can be for the people of a
poor country to experience development successes. Even as a child, I
could feel the quality of my life improve as our family acquired a flush
toilet, a refrigerator, and a black-and-white TV set.
This is why it has been a mistake for Washington to campaign against
China’s BRI. Western governments and media have portrayed the BRI as
a pernicious plan to ensnare countries in debt-trap diplomacy. But of
the UN’s 193 member states, 140 have rejected that interpretation and
signed agreements to join the BRI. The advantages many have reaped
from doing so underscore the folly of asking countries to take sides.
The second rule is to avoid passing judgment on countries’ domes-
tic political systems. ASEAN demonstrates why this rule is critical.

March / april 2023 139

 Kishore Mahbubani

The association’s ten member states include democracies, autocracies,

communist regimes, and an absolute monarchy. In the rest of the
developing world, the variety of regime types is even greater. For this
reason, Biden’s decision to frame world politics as a struggle between
democracies and autocracies is a mistake. In practice, Biden under-
stands that the world is more complicated, which is why he traveled
to the Middle East to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman in July 2022, despite having previously called Saudi Arabia
a “pariah.”
The United States is only diminishing its
Any U.S. effort own stature by calling on countries to shun
to counter Chinese China. Neither of the other two largest
democracies in the world—India and Indo-
influence in the nesia—see themselves engaged in an ideolog-
global South is ical struggle with Beijing, even if they have
doomed to fail. concerns about China’s rise. Nor do they feel
that Beijing threatens their democracies. By
carving the world up by regime type, Washington is just exposing its
own double standards at the same time as many other countries are
becoming more sophisticated and subtle in their political judgments.
Given the deep ideological conviction of many U.S. policymakers
and opinion-makers that the United States should always be seen as a
defender of democracy, it will be difficult for Washington to explicitly
renounce this commitment. Yet the United States learned to work
cooperatively with nondemocratic regimes (including communist
China) during the Cold War. If it resuscitates that old culture of
pragmatism, it can do so again today.
The third rule for engaging ASEAN and other developing regions
is to be willing to work with any country on common global chal-
lenges such as climate change. Even if Washington is uncomfortable
with Beijing’s growing global economic influence, it should embrace
China’s rise as a leader in clean energy and renewable technologies.
China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the biggest user
of coal today, but its investments in green technology will be crucial in
fighting climate change. China leads the world in the production and
consumption of renewable energy, manufacturing more solar panels,
wind turbines, and electric car batteries than any other country. In
short, there can be no feasible plan to fight climate change without
involving China and its global economic partners.

140 foreign affairs

 Asia’s Third Way

Chinese investment will also be critical to ensure that other

countries can fulfill their climate obligations while meeting their
development and infrastructure needs. The Export-Import Bank of
China has funded major solar and wind projects around the world,
including Latin America’s largest solar plant, in Jujuy, Argentina, and
a major wind farm in Coquimbo, Chile. China is also taking steps to
make the BRI more climate-friendly, including by developing green-
power, transportation, industry, and manufacturing projects. And it
is expanding cooperation in green finance—for instance, by working
with the EU to develop a common taxonomy for sustainable finance.
Taken together, these efforts arguably exceed anything the Bretton
Woods Institutions have done to combat climate change.
In short, U.S. policymakers should at least privately recognize that
China’s growing economic influence can be an asset when it comes to
solving shared global problems. In addition to climate change, poverty
and pandemics could also be dealt with more effectively through greater
cooperation between the United States and China. Such cooperation
will remain elusive, however, unless Washington stops viewing any win
for China as a loss for the United States and vice versa.
These three rules reflect an emerging reality to which Washing-
ton must adapt: developing countries are growing more sophisti-
cated and better able to make autonomous decisions. The United
States has done itself a big disfavor by framing the world in binary
terms, as divided between good and evil, democracy and autocracy.
If Washington can only work effectively with like-minded govern-
ments, it will be locked out of the global South, where most people
have a different view of the world.
The vast majority of developing countries are clearly willing to
work and cooperate with China. As a result, any U.S. effort to reduce
or counter Chinese influence in the global South is doomed to fail.
The United States should stop trying to cut China off from the rest
of the world and start trying to identify areas where the two great
powers can work together. As for the developing countries that wish
to partner with both Beijing and Washington, the United States
should look to ASEAN for guidance. Its pragmatic balancing act, or
something like it, is the future for the rest of the developing world.

March / april 2023 141

 Return to Table of Contents

After the
Iran Deal
A Plan B to Contain the Islamic Republic
suzanne maloney

W
hen U.S. President Joe Biden assumed office, he was
determined to resuscitate the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran,
known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),
from which his predecessor, Donald Trump, had unilaterally withdrawn
the United States in 2018. Biden quickly appointed a special envoy to
begin negotiations with Tehran and the five great powers that remain
party to the agreement: China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United
Kingdom. In his first speech before the United Nations, he declared
that his administration was “prepared to return to full compliance” and
was engaged in diplomacy to persuade Iran to do the same. Reaching a
new agreement would be difficult. Senior Biden administration officials
and many outside experts hoped for a “longer and stronger” deal. But
Tehran had advanced its nuclear program since the Trump administra-
tion’s withdrawal and demanded a stiff price to roll that progress back.

suzanne maloney is Vice President of the Brookings Institution and Director of

its Foreign Policy program.

142 foreign affairs

Illustration by Alex Nabaum 143
 Suzanne Maloney

Biden nonetheless hoped his team could create a new understanding

that would lower the risk of nuclear proliferation.
Despite the challenges, trying to salvage the deal made tremendous
sense for Biden. The president was eager to shake off the United States’
post-9/11 entanglements in the Middle East, and he wanted to show the
world that after the tumultuous Trump era, Washington was again com-
mitted to diplomacy. Resurrecting the deal was central to Biden’s plan for
restoring U.S. leadership in the world—a tangible step toward undoing the
reputational damage incurred by Trump’s abandonment of the agreement.
But as the boxer Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until you
get punched in the face.” And Biden’s Iran aspirations have suffered from
multiple blows. The first came in February 2022, when Russia invaded
Ukraine and irrevocably shattered the great-power coordination that
had enabled the nuclear deal to take place. A second punch landed in
August, when Iran began shipping drones to Russia, making Tehran an
even more prominent and harmful nemesis. And a third blow arrived in
September, when protests erupted across Iran against the government’s
brutality, captivating the world, undermining the regime’s control, and
making any agreement that would send Tehran massive new resources
both dangerous and unsavory. By itself, each of these jolts was enough
to keep JCPOA on the ropes. Together, they constituted a knockout.
Yet so far, the Biden administration has not seriously rethought its
Iran policies. Consumed by the war in Ukraine and competition with
China, the government has instead sought to navigate this new environ-
ment with purposeful ambiguity, offering symbolic support to the pro-
testers while soft-pedaling (but not publicly disavowing) the prospect of
a new nuclear accord. This strategy may temporarily prevent a crisis over
Iran, but it cannot indefinitely stave off disaster. Indeed, the stalling may
invite a crisis by encouraging Iranian brinkmanship or Israeli impatience.
The time has come for the Biden administration to acknowledge that
the JCPOA cannot be reinstated and to craft a new strategy that addresses
the totality of the Iran challenge, not just the nuclear issue. The demise
of the nuclear deal marks more than the end of a particular diplomatic
initiative: it represents the final failure of decades of American efforts
to engage the Islamic Republic. U.S. policy toward Iran has long been
predicated on the conviction that Washington can work with many other
states—including adversaries—to reduce Tehran’s antagonism, that the
Iranian leadership is willing to seriously talk with the United States, and
that the regime’s grip on power is unshakable. Whatever validity those

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assumptions once had, they clearly no longer apply. The moment when
Washington and Europe might have tempted Tehran to moderate its
behavior is lost to history. Today, the states with the most leverage over
Iran are Russia and China, and they have little incentive to upset the
status quo. The Iranian government may have once sought a limited
truce with the United States, but the regime has now forsaken access
to the West and staked Iran’s future on relationships with other author-
itarian states. Meanwhile, the ordinary Iranians who have confronted
the regime in street protests for months despite incalculable risks are
paving the way for a different future for their country.
Changing course is never easy, and Biden’s political and diplomatic
investment in the JCPOA makes it especially difficult to abandon the
deal. But the agreement no longer offers a realistic pathway for miti-
gating the threats posed by Tehran. If Biden wants to secure interna-
tional visibility for Iran’s nuclear activities, he must rally like-minded
states to ensure that the country abides by its obligations under the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. And if Washington wants to stop
Iran’s malevolent behavior at home and abroad, it must preserve space
for the protests. The mobilization of the Iranian people represents
the world’s best shot at bringing about positive and lasting change
in the country’s role in the world.

SORDID HISTORY
Iran has occupied a central place in U.S. foreign policy since Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi, the country’s last shah and a strategic partner to Washington,
was ousted in a 1979 revolution. The government forged in the aftermath,
which refashioned itself as an “Islamic Republic,”sought to upend the regional
order through terror and subversion and was steeped in hostility toward the
United States. As if to announce Iran’s newfound animosity toward Wash-
ington and the norms of international relations, a group of militant students
seized the country’s embassy in November 1979. They then took 66 U.S.
government personnel hostage, demanding a variety of economic and
political concessions from Washington in exchange for their release.
It would take 15 months of false starts and a failed rescue mission
before the United States negotiated the release of all the hostages. But
almost immediately after the embassy attack, the administration of U.S.
President Jimmy Carter created a two-track strategy that would come
to define Washington’s Iran policy for decades. The United States
would, on the one hand, penalize Iran for its destabilizing behavior.

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On the other hand, it would keep the door open for negotiations.
For the next 40 years, every U.S. president followed this dual path,
sanctioning and threatening Iran while also offering to speak with the
country’s leaders. Even Trump, who authorized the killing of a senior
Iranian military official in 2020, floated the possibility of meeting with
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in 2019.
All this has been to little avail; the American track record on Iran
has been modest at best. Washington and its partners have slowed
Tehran’s 30-year endeavor to gain the resources needed to build nuclear
weapons, and they have blunted the reach of some Iranian proxies. But
there have been few meaningful breakthroughs or sustained reversals
in Iran’s most problematic policies, and Washington’s closest partners
have typically proved reluctant to jeopardize their trade or diplomatic
ties with Tehran. At times, U.S. actions have even helped the Islamic
Republic. By eliminating Iran’s principal adversary, the 2003 U.S. inva-
sion of Iraq significantly amplified the regime’s capacity and readiness
to stoke instability and violence at home and abroad.
The seeming intractability of the Iran challenge has made the coun-
try a perennial object of partisan U.S. contention, culminating with
the pitched battle over the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal,
which loosened sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits to the coun-
try’s nuclear program. For its proponents, that agreement vindicated
multilateral diplomacy as a tool for resolving even the toughest chal-
lenges posed by Tehran. But for critics, the fact that the deal’s restric-
tions eventually expired represented an unthinkable capitulation. After
Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, Iran increased its regional
aggression and violated many of the agreement’s tenets.
The Biden administration sought to undo Trump’s actions, but its
efforts to resurrect the JCPOA quickly ran into trouble. Tehran refused
to engage directly with U.S. diplomats, forcing Washington to negotiate
through its European partners. Iran insisted that the Biden adminis-
tration guarantee that no future president could withdraw from the
agreement, a requirement that Biden had no power to fulfill. And
whenever the two sides came close to a deal, Tehran threw up demands
for additional concessions, continually postponing any settlement.
Still, for the first year of Biden’s presidency, U.S. diplomats hoped
that they would eventually break the logjam. The original deal, after
all, had taken nearly two years to hammer out. Then came Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, upending the international

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ecosystem in which the deal had survived. The original nuclear agree-
ment depended on Western cooperation with Moscow, which had
cultivated a stake in Iran’s expanding nuclear infrastructure and there-
fore had the power to nudge, cajole, and occasionally extort Tehran
to come to terms with the West. The war not only quashed Russia’s
appetite for coordination with the United States; it also gave Moscow
an incentive to end the deal altogether. Any sanctions relief for Iran
would permit the country to again sell oil on world markets, lowering
Russia’s oil revenue. By contrast, prolonging
the Iranian nuclear crisis helps nudge Tehran
more firmly into the Kremlin’s orbit. Today’s Iranian
Iran’s leadership appears to have made a protesters are
similar calculation. Iran’s president, Ebrahim
Raisi, traveled to Moscow a few weeks before
less afraid.
the invasion, a visit that he and other officials
described as a “turning point” in the bilateral relationship. Iran has since
sold Moscow thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles that Russia has
used to degrade Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. Iran is also helping to
train Russian soldiers and transfer drone production systems to Russia,
and according to the Biden administration, it may start sending Russia
ballistic missiles next. In return, Moscow has promised Iran helicopters,
newer air defense systems, and fighter jets. Iranian pilots are already
training to operate Russian Sukhoi Su-35 combat aircraft headed to
their country. Moscow has also said it will invest $40 billion in Iran’s oil
and gas development (although that pledge remains speculative), and
it has promised to create sanctions-proof trade corridors and financial
mechanisms between the two countries.
Iran’s decision to align itself with Russia’s war reflects more than
short-term opportunism: it is evidence of a dramatic evolution in the
attitudes and interests of the Islamic Republic’s ruling elite. Ten years
ago, the Iranian regime considered access to Western markets and sys-
tems, such as the European-based SWIFT financial messaging service,
so vital to the country’s economy and the regime’s stability that they
overcame more than 30 years of aversion to direct negotiations with
Washington. As Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
himself said in 2015, “The reason why we entered into negotiations and
made some concessions was to lift sanctions.” But today, the regime
no longer sees the West as a necessary—or even viable—conduit for
economic benefits. “Today, the U.S. is not the world’s dominant power,”

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 Suzanne Maloney

Khamenei proclaimed in a speech last November commemorating the

embassy seizure. “Many of the world’s political analysts believe that
the U.S. is declining,” he continued. “It is gradually melting away.” He
and other Iranian leaders instead see the new global locus of power
shifting eastward. “Asia will become the center of knowledge, the center
of economics, as well as the center of political power, and the center
of military power,” Khamenei exulted. He added: “We are in Asia.”
Iranian policymakers have tried to operationalize Khamenei’s vision
by forging closer ties with multiple Asian countries, especially China.
Beijing and Tehran concluded a blockbuster economic deal in July
2021 valued at $400 billion. The following year, Tehran agreed to join
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a group that links China,
India, Russia, and several Central Asian and South Asian countries. The
influential Iranian newspaper Kayhan celebrated this step by describing
it as a newfound convergence among “the three great powers”—that is,
China, Russia, and Iran. Although it’s hard to imagine that Beijing or
Moscow views Iran as anything close to a peer, they see some economic
and strategic benefits in tactical cooperation. Unlike the United States
or Europe, Beijing and Moscow rarely condition trade or diplomatic
ties on liberal norms of domestic or foreign policy. For Iranian theo-
crats, these are much more convenient relationships.
Emboldened by having stronger patrons, Iranian leaders have
demonstrated a greater readiness to engage in malign behavior. The
Iranian regime and its proxies have terrorized neighbors, especially
Iraq and the Gulf states, with missiles and drones and have helped fuel
insurgencies and civil wars in Syria and Yemen. According to reporting
by The New York Times and The Washington Post, Iran has sought to
assassinate dissidents and government officials in the United States.
Such actions speak even louder than Tehran’s pugnacious rhetoric, and
they do not suggest that Iran’s leadership is prepared to make a historic
accommodation with its oldest adversary.

UNDER PRESSURE
In September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian,
was arrested by the country’s morality police for supposedly wearing
her legally mandated headscarf improperly. According to multiple
reports, she was then beaten and tortured by government security
forces until she lost consciousness. She was taken to a hospital
in Tehran, where she spent two days in a coma before she died.

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Amini’s family courageously went public with the truth despite gov-
ernment pressure to accept an official cover-up.
Protests erupted almost immediately, and within a week the unrest
had spread to 80 cities across the country. Many of the demonstra-
tors demanded that Iran’s dress code for women be abolished and the
morality police disbanded. But the protests quickly escalated into calling
for the downfall of the regime. As with past protests, security forces
responded with a brutal crackdown, arresting more than 19,000 pro-
testers and killing more than 500, including in a string of horrifically
unjust executions meant to terrorize a deeply disaffected population. But
the repression has not stopped the uprising. Since Amini’s death, Iran
has experienced a steady tempo of small-scale demonstrations, labor
strikes, and confrontations between ordinary people and senior officials.
Longtime observers of Iran tend to be cynical about the prospects for
meaningful political change. The Islamic Republic has endured seem-
ingly every imaginable crisis—civil war, invasion, terrorism, earthquakes,
drought, a pandemic, and routine episodes of internal unrest—but still,
the nezam, or ruling system, has survived. And there are plenty of rea-
sons why this round of unrest could fizzle out, including the lack of any
defined leader, central organization, or affirmative vision for the future.
But there is something different about this latest outbreak of internal
turmoil. Perhaps it’s the extraordinary courage of Iranian women in
challenging mandatory veiling and in galvanizing a movement, or the
extraordinary participation of a wide array of ethnic groups and social
classes, or the newfound unity among ideologically divergent segments
of the population. Perhaps it is the protesters’ nascent efforts to deploy
tactics beyond demonstrations, including labor strikes and cyberattacks
on state banks and media. What is clear is that today’s protesters are less
afraid than those of the past, returning to the streets again and again
despite the certain knowledge that they risk arrest and death. Famous
Iranian athletes, film directors, actors, and other cultural luminaries
have also defied threats to voice support for the uprisings, even after
some of their colleagues were imprisoned.
The grassroots movement has captured attention and support
around the world. In November, the UN Human Rights Council
launched an independent investigation into the regime’s actions, and
in December, the UN Economic and Social Council took the unusual
step of removing Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of
Women. Governments on every continent have spoken out in favor

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 Suzanne Maloney

of the demonstrations. This support is necessary and important, but

it has further undermined the JCPOA. Iran’s regime is more embattled
than ever, and it could see its nuclear infrastructure as increasingly
essential to withstanding domestic and international pressure. Over-
whelmingly focused on survival, the government is unlikely to con-
duct much diplomacy, especially with the West. Khamenei recently
said the demonstrations were “designed by the U.S., the usurping
fake Zionist regime, and their mercenaries.” It is difficult to see how
a regime that blames Washington for its
existential crisis would endorse any kind of
The facts are the agreement with U.S. policymakers.
facts: the nuclear Some U.S. and European analysts believe
otherwise. In their view, Iran’s domestic tur-
deal cannot be moil could actually prompt new flexibility
rescued. at the negotiating table because reviving
the nuclear deal would alleviate economic
pressures and could therefore buoy the government. They point
to Iran’s 2009 demonstrations, when people took to the streets en
masse over the contested reelection of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. Then, as now, the world rallied around the Iranians’
cry for freedom. Then, as now, the Iranian government blamed the
United States. In the months that followed, government repression
and the opposition’s exhaustion won out, but the specter of popular
turmoil and the intense economic pressure generated by multilateral
sanctions helped persuade Iran’s leaders to grudgingly embrace pre-
viously unimaginable negotiations with Washington.
The appeal of another pragmatic Iranian pivot under pressure is
understandable, but the shifts within Iran and in the international
system rule it out. In the past decade, factional divisions within
the regime have narrowed; a hard-line consensus has ossified. The
government’s claim to legitimacy has been attenuated by corrup-
tion and nepotism, and its promises of a better future have been
revealed as hollow. Ordinary Iranians no longer harbor any illusions
of gradual reform bringing about meaningful progress. A decade
ago, negotiations with the West offered Tehran the only way out
of catastrophic sanctions; today, Tehran sees China and Russia as
offering an attractive alternative. And without the cooperation of
Beijing and Moscow, Washington cannot apply sufficient pressure
on Tehran to persuade its leaders to compromise.

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The protests have also raised new questions about the value of a
nuclear agreement. Even if diplomacy could succeed at reviving the
JCPOA, it is far from clear that the benefits of doing so would out-
weigh the costs. Resuscitating the deal would generate a substantial
influx of resources for the regime, strengthening Iran’s ruling system
at the expense of its challengers in the streets. It would be viewed as
a betrayal by the courageous Iranians who have risked their lives and
livelihoods in the hope of effecting change. As the Iranian American
human rights advocate Roya Hakkakian said in October, “the most
awful thing we—the United States—can possibly do at the moment
is to sit beside the very people who are shooting at the demonstrators,
peaceful demonstrators, on the streets.”
Indeed, reviving the JCPOA now would undermine one of the deal’s
own original purposes: inducing Tehran to relinquish its most malevo-
lent policies. U.S. President Barack Obama insisted that the 2015 agree-
ment “doesn’t bet on Iran changing,” but he also declared that change
in Iran “is something that may end up being an important byproduct
of this deal.” Others were more explicit about this hope. According to
Philip Hammond, the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary during the
final stages of the nuclear-deal negotiations, “The prize was not just
the end of this nuclear arms race or any nuclear ambition by Iran. The
prize was a much wider rehabilitation of the relationship between Iran
and the West.” An agreement today—when the regime is engaged in
mass atrocities at home and helping Russia carry out a brutal assault
on Ukraine by supplying Moscow with drones—would reward Tehran’s
transgressions and make it much harder to prevent more of them.

BEST-LAID PLANS
Canceling the full-court press to restore the Iran nuclear deal will not
be easy for the Biden administration, in part because some of its most
senior foreign policy officials were key architects of the original agree-
ment. These officials know that at the time it was finalized, the JCPOA
represented a historic achievement: the first instance of sustained, direct,
high-level negotiations between U.S. and Iranian officials in decades and
a rare case in which the two states came to an understanding on a vital
national security issue. And to secure the deal, U.S. officials had to win
a multiyear battle against opponents in Washington and several of the
United States’ most influential partners in the Middle East, including
Israel and Saudi Arabia. For these policymakers, the fight was worth it

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 Suzanne Maloney

because the agreement promised to resolve one of the world’s greatest

challenges while underscoring the power of peaceful engagement.
The value of the agreement was increased by the absence of any
better alternative. A military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities would
risk an immensely costly regional escalation and at best offer only
temporary respite from the threat of a nuclear Iran. The Iranian nuclear
program is too far advanced to eliminate conclusively through air
strikes, with crucial facilities designed for invulnerability and situated
close to major population centers. “There is no long-term sustainable
solution other than a diplomatic one,” Robert Malley, a National Secu-
rity Council official under Obama and the current U.S. special envoy
to Iran, remarked in October 2022. In December, Malley told Radio
Free Europe, “Whatever happened in the last few months, we still
believe that the best way to ensure that Iran can’t acquire a nuclear
weapon is through a nuclear deal.” These sentiments are shared and
echoed by Washington’s European partners.
But the lack of an obvious alternative does not mean the present
course is feasible. The facts are the facts: between the protests, the
war in Ukraine, and Iran’s general intransigence, the deal cannot be
rescued. Biden has promised that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon
under his watch, and if he intends to fulfill that pledge, his adminis-
tration will have to find another solution.
The administration can begin by developing a consensus with
France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other like-minded states
on preventing Tehran from taking steps that would bring it to the
brink of nuclear weaponization. These include enriching uranium to
90 percent purity, ending or seriously impeding International Atomic
Energy Agency inspections of Iranian facilities, withdrawing from
the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and resuming weaponization or
weaponization-related activities, such as expanding its production of
uranium metal. Together with European partners, the Biden adminis-
tration should outline the compelling economic, political, and military
consequences that await Iran if it goes over these lines. Those repercus-
sions should include even more punishing trade and financial measures
and the readiness of the United States and its allies and partners to
use force to debilitate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. These redlines and
consequences must be communicated to Tehran quietly, at the high-
est levels, and through multiple trusted interlocutors to reinforce this
coalition’s unity of purpose in preventing Iranian nuclear proliferation.

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This message should be bolstered with a stepped-up pace of joint

military exercises in the region involving Israel, the United States, and
Arab countries that would signal a capability to strike Iran’s nuclear
facilities, similar to those that U.S. forces conducted with Israel in
November 2022 and again in January 2023. The Pentagon should
continue to bolster the nascent multilateral security planning and
coordination that Israel and the Gulf states have undertaken and
invest in strengthening an integrated regional air defense system as a
means of underscoring the United States’ readiness and willingness
to follow through on Biden’s stated commitment to ensure that Iran
does not acquire nuclear weapons.
Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States
should also plan how and when to deploy the so-called snapback pro-
vision of the JCPOA, which enabled any party to the deal to reimpose
UN sanctions on Iran that were suspended after the agreement came
into force. A snapback risks Iranian escalation, but it would end the
ambiguity over the possibility of any return to the deal, reimpose the
symbolic force of UN sanctions, and prevent the scheduled expiration
of the UN embargo on Iranian ballistic missile sales later this year.
The snapback provisions are not the only economic leverage
these countries have over Tehran. Many other countries have
viewed trade and investment in Iran as an important lever of
influence and have mostly resisted sanctioning the country except
during the run-up to the nuclear negotiations. The Islamic Repub-
lic has always relied heavily on trade and banking relationships
with Dubai, and until late 2022, Germany retained a program of
export credits and other trade promotions to incentivize, at least in
theory, economic cooperation with Tehran. But Iran’s destructive
role in Ukraine has hardened European views of the regime, as
demonstrated by the European Parliament’s decision in January to
declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organi-
zation. European countries could also, for example, target the assets
of Iran’s aghazadeh class of regime crony capitalists, much as they
targeted the assets of Russian oligarchs.
Iran may not be moved by the West alone, given its belief that
the United States and its allies are in decline. As a result, Washing-
ton and its partners should push hard to get China, one of Tehran’s
self-proclaimed partners and a major buyer of Iranian oil, to cooper-
ate. This will be uniquely challenging. Historically, Beijing has mostly

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 Suzanne Maloney

played a free-rider role in nuclear diplomacy with Tehran, and there

is no reason to believe that Chinese leaders are prepared to assume
greater responsibility for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear
weapons, especially as tensions between Beijing and Washington
reach new heights. But China is not Russia; it can still make deals
with the West. And China’s economy is dependent on energy from
the Persian Gulf, giving Chinese President Xi Jinping a strong incen-
tive to cooperate on any initiatives that would prevent a crisis in the
region—which an Iranian nuclear weapon would likely precipitate.
Beijing has played a hugely important role in sustaining the Iranian
economy by importing more than a million barrels of Iranian oil per
day over the last several years, in direct defiance of the JCPOA, to which
China was a party. The Biden administration should persuade China
to curtail those imports by making clear that Washington will enforce
sanctions on Chinese companies that continue to buy Iranian oil—a
step the United States has taken only sporadically and selectively.
A world without a diplomatic path toward stymieing Iran’s nuclear
ambitions will require much higher vigilance from the United States and
its partners in Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. The new reality will
frustrate the Biden administration’s desire to extract the United States
from the ruinous conflicts of the Middle East in order to focus on the
urgent strategic challenge posed by China. But presidents don’t have the
luxury of disregarding brewing crises. And as the war in Ukraine shows,
with foresight, skilled coordination, and leadership, even a polarized
world can rally in surprisingly effective ways to confront aggression.

KNOW YOUR LIMITS

There is one more way the United States can help stop Iran’s nuclear
ambitions—and the rest of the regime’s malevolence. The current Ira-
nian government may never agree to forfeit its nuclear program or
stop fueling conflicts across the world. But the Iranian demonstrators
have made it clear they want a democratic government focused on the
needs of its people rather than on adventurism abroad. Such a govern-
ment would almost certainly be far less interested in acquiring nuclear
weapons or promoting insurgencies, so Washington should do what it
can to help the protesters achieve their aims.
To be sure, there are serious limits to Washington’s power. The United
States has only the most tangential reach into the halls of power in Iran
and holds little sway in the streets. The future of Iran will ultimately

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depend on Iranians themselves. But U.S. policymakers can work with

allies and partners to ensure that the international community shines
a spotlight on the heroic efforts of Iranian protesters, exposes Tehran’s
repression, and finds ways to hold the Iranian government accountable
by working closely with a fact-finding mission established by the UN
in November to investigate the crackdown and by pressing partners
around the world to downgrade diplomatic relations with Tehran.
The United States can also assist the Iranian people by expanding
their access to information and communica-
tions. The Biden administration has already
stepped up its engagement with technology A polarized
companies to help Iranians communicate with world can still
one another and with the outside world. It
should also work with service providers to
rally to confront
create and distribute, with U.S. government aggression.
funding where necessary, a wider array of
communications tools and to expand Iranians’ access to virtual private
networks that can keep them connected to the open Internet. Wash-
ington can similarly help by investing in Persian-language broadcasting
capabilities to erode the regime’s media monopoly.
Supporting the protesters does not mean the United States should
close off all avenues of engagement with Iran, as some activists have
suggested. Nor should walking away from the JCPOA foreclose any
diplomatic contact. The Biden administration should keep talking with
Iran about discrete issues on which the two countries can achieve some
traction, including by continuing quiet efforts to free dual and foreign
nationals held by Tehran as hostages. The United States should also
do nothing to discourage the ongoing discussions between Iran and
its Gulf neighbors. It is unlikely that these talks will lead to anything
other than a cold peace, but the direct diplomacy might help prevent
any friction from escalating into a crisis.
Ultimately, preventing crises may be the best the United States can
do at this moment. For the foreseeable future, there are no transfor-
mative solutions that the West can invent or impose on Iran, and the
country will remain a profound and unpredictable threat to regional
stability, U.S. interests, and its own citizenry. The protests should give
the world hope: for the first time in a generation, the theocracy appears
to be in jeopardy. But until the regime falls, there will be no silver
bullets to stop Iran’s bad behavior.

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 Return to Table of Contents

REV I EW ES S AY

The Divided Diplomat

Ralph Bunche and the
Contradictions of Liberal Order
ZACHARIAH MAMPILLY

The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche,

the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire
by Kal Raustiala, Oxford University Press, 688 pp.

I
n September 1948, Folke Bernad- Johnson awarded Bunche the Presiden-
otte, the Swedish count serving as tial Medal of Freedom.
the UN mediator for Palestine, was Politically, Bunche was a key figure
shot dead on the streets of Jerusalem by in establishing the UN and a celebrated
the Stern Gang, a Zionist terror outfit. leader of the civil rights movement.
His American deputy, Ralph Bunche, Socially, he counted white liberals such
was quickly named as his replacement. as Eleanor Roosevelt and Black Marxists
Over the next 11 months, Bunche, who such as Paul Robeson among his wide
had planned to be in Bernadotte’s motor- network of influential friends. Culturally,
cade that fateful day but was absent he was feted for his accomplishments
because of a delayed flight, painstakingly with fawning comic-book portrayals, and
negotiated an armistice between the bel- he appeared at the Academy Awards,
ligerents. It was a brilliant achievement. where he was introduced by Fred Astaire,
He returned to a ticker-tape parade in and announced the prize for best picture.
New York City, and the mayor of Los Intellectually, he made seminal contri-
Angeles declared July 17 “Ralph Bunche butions to the study of African politics
Day.” In 1950, Bunche won the Nobel and went on to become the first Black
Peace Prize, the first Black person in any president of the American Political Sci-
field to be so honored, and that same ence Association. In his lifetime, per-
year, Ebony featured him on its cover haps only Martin Luther King, Jr., and
with the headline “America’s Most Hon- W. E. B. Du Bois could be considered
ored Negro.” In 1963, President Lyndon his peers. Despite his accomplishments,

ZACHARIAH MAMPILLY is Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School
of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College and an affiliate faculty member at the
Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a co-author of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change.

156 foreign affairs

 The Divided Diplomat

he is scarcely remembered today, as a is unsatisfying. As The Absolutely Indis-

new, deeply researched biography by pensable Man notes, Bunche remains an
the legal scholar Kal Raustiala makes awkward historical figure. As comfort-
clear. His academic contributions are able on the streets of Harlem as he was
rarely taught. His name is almost never in the corridors of power in Geneva and
included in the pantheon of American Washington, Bunche carved his own
civil rights leaders. Nor is his name path through the mid-twentieth century.
celebrated in the former European Charged with navigating some of the
colonies of Africa and Asia, many of thorniest crises of the time, Bunche,
whose founding fathers once relied on in Raustiala’s favorable assessment,
him to champion their causes. Even combined “optimism and realism” to
his signature accomplishments—the achieve considerable success. Bunche’s
Arab-Israeli armistice agreement and diplomatic accomplishments alone are
the founding of the UN peacekeeping impressive enough to justify studying
force—are seldom acknowledged. him today. But his enduring relevance
How did Bunche go from being lies in his role in the creation and oper-
“absolutely indispensable”—as Arthur ation of the liberal international order.
Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the Like so many U.S. strategists in the post-
UN, described him in 1966—to largely war era, Bunche strove to reconcile his
unknown? Part of the answer is that country’s interests with his liberal inter-
his achievements have aged badly. The nationalist values. Although he did not
Israelis and the Palestinians are even always succeed, these dueling impulses
further from peace than they were in defined his career—just as they have
the 1940s. Today’s racial justice advo- continued to define U.S. foreign policy
cates more commonly cite revolutionary in the decades after he left his mark.
figures such as Malcolm X and Angela
Davis rather than perceived compro- RADICAL YOUTH
misers such as Bunche. Within aca- Bunche was born in Detroit in 1903.
demia, where Bunche’s name remains He had a peripatetic childhood, mov-
most prominent—at least in terms ing around the Midwest before the
of buildings and centers named for family eventually settled in Albuquer-
him—social scientists have moved que. Following his father’s departure
away from the ethnographic methods from the family, in 1916, and his moth-
he pioneered toward detached analy- er’s death from tuberculosis, in 1917,
ses built on data sets. Even the UN, the Bunche moved to Los Angeles with
institution Bunche identified with most his grandmother and younger sister.
as he worked to build the architecture of His success began early, at UCLA, where
global governance, is much diminished, he studied political science. Inspired by
barely registering as a player in conflicts Du Bois, that great Black American
from Afghanistan to Ukraine. Its peace- polymath, Bunche became identified
keeping force is marred by ineffective- with the “talented tenth,” the segment
ness and accusations of corruption. of the African American population
Attributing Bunche’s erasure to the Du Bois thought had leadership poten-
unforgiving march of history, however, tial. Bunche graduated as valedictorian

march / april 2023 157

 Zachariah Mampilly

The peacekeeper: Bunche at a UN Security Council meeting, Lake Success, New York,
October 1946

of his class in 1927. Even then, his pre- the French had long ruled with those it
ternatural confidence in his own abilities had recently acquired under the League
was clear. Writing to Du Bois that same of Nations’ auspices, arguing that the
year, he proclaimed his readiness to lead: mandate system, from the perspective
“I have set as the goal of my ambition of its subjects, was indistinguishable from
service to my group. To some extent I formal empire. His dissertation went on
am even now fulfilling that ambition.” to win multiple prizes at Harvard and
Bunche next headed to Harvard for foreshadowed Bunche’s later role in
graduate school, with funds raised by developing the UN Trusteeship Council
the local Black community. In 1928, as a vehicle for shepherding African col-
25 years old and having received his onies toward independence.
master’s degree, he began his doctoral Bunche sought to situate the study of
studies in political science at Har- Africa within world history and global
vard while serving as a professor and change rather than treating it as separate.
founding head of Howard University’s In contrast to the prevailing arguments
B E T T M A N N A RC H I V E / G E T T Y I M AG ES

department of political science. that attributed the continent’s woes to

Bunche’s dissertation examined the some internal, civilizational deficiency,
performance of the mandate system of Bunche argued in favor of Africans’ read-
the League of [Link] mandate sys- iness for independence and against the
tem, which, after World War I, assigned idea that European empires were “devel-
colonies from the defeated powers to the oping” immature Africans for self-rule.
Western victors for administration, was During this period, Bunche was influ-
devised amid a surge of global anticolo- enced by radical Black thinkers, including
nial nationalism. Bunche compared lands Du Bois and Robeson. In 1936, Bunche

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 The Divided Diplomat

published his first book, A World History geted left-wing Black critics of the U.S.
of Race, in which he compared racism government, including Du Bois and
in the United States to European colo- Robeson, Bunche worked to escape the
nialism. He found common cause with perceived taint of his earlier radicalism.
African intellectuals who would go on It was a strategic calculation. “His rad-
to lead their countries’ anticolonial strug- ical past,” Raustiala notes, had become
gles, including Jomo Kenyatta, who was “an albatross to this new Bunche, one he
Bunche’s Swahili instructor during his tried to distance himself from as much
stay in London in 1937 and later Ken- as possible.” In time, he would denounce
ya’s prime minister. As the historian John his own book on race, damning it as
Kirby noted in Phylon (a journal founded hastily written. “I am not at all proud
by Du Bois) in 1974, Bunche in the 1930s of it,” he wrote decades later.
was “widely regarded as a militant black
political theorist and social critic.” NECESSARY COMPROMISES?
Bunche left academia in 1941. He Pitched as a political biography, the
joined what eventually became the book comes to life when Raustiala
Office of Strategic Services, the precur- analyzes Bunche’s diplomatic contri-
sor to the CIA, and later left the employ butions. The reader follows decades
of the U.S. government for the UN. In of negotiations, illuminated by Raus-
the process, he moved from the Marxist tiala’s considerable knowledge of
views championed by many of his Black international law. In the course of his
contemporaries to Cold War liberalism. career, Bunche navigated between the
Raustiala argues that Bunche disavowed demands of anxious anticolonial lead-
his early work on race and imperialism ers attuned to the shifting winds of the
because of the threat of Nazism, pre- emerging postwar order, recalcitrant
ferring the flawed democracy of the European leaders mourning the col-
United States to the racial totalitari- lapse of their imperial fantasies, and
anism of Hitler’s Germany. Although the interests of the new superpower,
Bunche was never blind to the flaws which busily sought to shape this new
of the United States, he believed that, world in line with its needs and beliefs.
unlike its totalitarian rivals, it could be Raustiala is particularly strong on
transformed through the contributions Bunche’s work to resolve crises on behalf
of its diverse population. His life, in of the UN. The armistice agreement that
many ways, served as proof of his thesis. Bunche negotiated between Egypt and
When World War II ended, the United Israel in 1949 is discussed in detail. So,
States stood as the guarantor of the inter- too, is his later work in the Democratic
national order that had been formulated Republic of the Congo, where Bunche
in response to the fascists’ vision. Bunche served as the commander of the UN
emerged as one of the defenders of the operation in the newly independent
liberal international order. Understand- country, one of the organization’s first
ing that his academic writing impinged efforts at peacekeeping.
on his ambitions in U.S. foreign policy Congo had been brutally misruled
circles, he set about to prove his patri- by Belgium for over 70 years when the
otic bona fides. As McCarthyism tar- winds of change blew through in the

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 Zachariah Mampilly

late 1950s. Belgium had little choice continent changed after he became a
but to concede. After Congo’s inde- diplomat. As with his assessment of Pal-
pendence in 1960, however, the Belgian estinian leaders, whom he compared in
government fomented the secession of his diary to “children,” he tended to regard
the mineral-rich Katanga Province to Africa’s independence leaders with sus-
ensure its continued control over Con- picion bordering on contempt. In 1960,
go’s vast resources. This was a blatant for example, he privately denounced
violation of the new nation’s sovereignty. Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah
The government of Patrice Lumumba, as an “unprincipled demagogue.” Bunche
the prime minister of Congo, appealed regarded Lumumba as “a madman,” a
to both the UN and the Eisenhower “Congolese ogre,” a “jungle demagogue,”
administration for help. and an “utterly maniacal child.” For Raus-
Neither party responded in the way tiala, Bunche’s handling of the Congo
Lumumba imagined. The UN set up crisis is evidence of his pragmatism when
a massive peacekeeping operation, negotiating between the United States
which Bunche led. But despite the and the Soviet Union: “It was his skill
Belgian government’s support for the at finding agreement,” Raustiala writes,
secessionists, Bunche and his boss, “that ultimately turned Ralph Bunche
Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, from a successful but largely anonymous
regarded the conflict as a purely domes- diplomat into a national and even global
tic dispute and refused to use the UN star.” But the episode also reveals why
force to bring Katanga back into the Bunche was criticized as a lackey of the
fold. The United States, for its part, so United States by many of the same people
feared Soviet encroachment in Africa he hoped would view him as a fair, if crit-
that after Lumumba appealed to Mos- ical, ally. Rather than serving as evidence
cow for help in uniting his country, the of his evenhandedness, Bunche’s assess-
CIA sought to assassinate him. Nor did ment of Lumumba echoed that of U.S.
the UN get involved as Lumumba was Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon,
arrested and killed with Belgian and who, after meeting Lumumba, dismissed
U.S. complicity. His body was dissolved him as “irrational” and “almost psychotic.”
in sulfuric acid, and the remains—teeth Throughout these discussions of the
and finger bones—were taken by a Bel- detailed work of international diplo-
gian police officer charged with dispos- macy, Raustiala presents a nuanced pic-
ing of the corpse. The remains would ture of a loyal diplomat committed to
not be returned to Congo until May the promise of global governance, wres-
2022. Lumumba’s army chief, Joseph tling with the compromises that inter-
Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko), national diplomacy requires. Letters to
orchestrated a coup and proceeded to his long-suffering wife, Ruth, provide a
misgovern the country until his over- sense of the isolation that Bunche felt
throw in 1997, all while remaining a while away. From these letters, readers
close ally of the United States. get a sense of his homesickness and the
Although Bunche had spent his career toll his work took. While in Cairo to
as an academic championing African negotiate the Arab-Israeli armistice, he
independence, his attitude toward the wrote to Ruth that “we keep hopping

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 The Divided Diplomat

from one [country] to another like Americans were integral to the coun-
mad in our plane and often on just a try’s success. In Congo and elsewhere,
few moments’ notice. As soon as we reflecting the United States’ common
land anywhere we begin to confer and tendency to operate against its stated
leave for someplace else immediately. . . .
values, Bunche too often appeared to
I get practically no sleep and miss many sacrifice his own beliefs and those of the
meals.” Writing from Congo in the UN in the interest of his home country.
midst of the crisis, Bunche told Ruth, “I The great risk for those who aim to
am dreadfully tired . . . as I got less than
be champions of compromise is that
three hours sleep last night and even they may, in the end, become com-
that was more than the night before.” promised themselves. For Bunche,
Bunche interacted with a who’s who of and many others who have followed
twentieth-century political and intellec-in his footsteps, the soaring rhetoric
tual leaders over his three-decade careerand ambition that characterizes lib-
as a diplomat and scholar. But outside eral global institutions could never be
of the galas and formal events, much squared with the stark reality of power
of his time was spent alone in hotel politics driven by the national interests
rooms. Although readers learn much that shape their actual behavior.
about his interior life, the biography These challenges may explain Bunche’s
does not delve much into the psyches of relative absence from our collective mem-
his family members. Readers interested ory. Although Bunche did more than
in learning more about Ruth, who bal- almost any other figure to demonstrate
anced raising the three Bunche children the promise of liberal internationalism,
with her own career as a teacher and he was not immune to its blind spots,
activist, must look elsewhere. nor could he resolve the fundamental
tension between nationalism and inter-
ON A PEDESTAL nationalism. Perhaps his closest analog
As the highest-ranking American— is former U.S. President Barack Obama,
not simply Black American—in the whose soaring rhetoric about promoting
UN, Bunche was acutely aware of his democracy was often at odds with his
role as an embodiment of the Ameri- continued support for Middle Eastern
can Dream even as he remained wary and African autocrats. Like Obama,
of nationalism’s inherent divisive- Bunche aspired to be an exemplar of
ness. The tension between Bunche’s Black excellence in the United States, but
unabashed patriotism and his universal- the contradictions that that desire pro-
ist dreams—“how to balance national duced could never be synthesized with
interest with multilateral cooperation,” his dream of an equitable and just world
as Raustiala puts it—defined his life. order. Although Bunche failed to over-
What emerges from this book is a come these challenges, his contributions
portrait of a man struggling to recon- to a different and more inclusive global
cile idealism with reality. Bunche was, community cannot be denied. Today, as
on the one hand, a committed interna- the promise of global cooperation recedes
tionalist and, on the other, a patriotic amid the rise of nationalism, Bunche’s
American seeking to prove that Black life still has much to teach everyone.

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REV I EW ES S AY

Behind Enemy Lines

The CIA’s Cold War in China
Jane Perlez

Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA’s Covert War in China
by John Delury. Cornell University Press, 2022, 408 pp.

Lost in the Cold War: The Story of Jack Downey, America’s Longest-Held POW
by John T. Downey, Thomas J. Christensen,
and Jack Lee Downey. Columbia University Press, 2022, 344 pp.

I
n the fall of 1952, two young CIA A grainy photograph shows the dazed
officers boarded an unmarked Americans, dressed in winter clothing,
C-47 plane in Korea, bound for standing in a field as a Chinese soldier
enemy territory in Manchuria, in binds their hands. This failed covert
northern China. Their mission: to mission was kept quiet for decades.
pick up a Chinese agent who had The captured spies, John Downey and
been in China for several months. Richard Fecteau, spent two decades
The Americans planned to fly low in grim Chinese jails, often in solitary
over the ground, release a hook that confinement. Fecteau was released in
would pluck the operative from the 1971 and Downey in 1973. The break-
cold and treacherous terrain, and then through came thanks to the diplomacy
return to the safety of Korea. The of U.S. President Richard Nixon and
officers and their two pilots had no Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and
cover and no exit strategy if anything the dogged campaigning of Downey’s
went wrong. They spoke only a few mother, Mary, who traveled to China
words of Chinese between them. As on five occasions to visit her impris-
the plane approached the pickup spot, oned son. The press, bamboozled by
a full moon above, a blaze of gunfire the U.S. government, had shown little
slammed into the fuselage. The C-47 interest in the case.
crashed, killing the pilots and stranding A pair of new books, Agents of Sub-
the officers, who were swiftly captured. version: The Fate of John T. Downey

Jane Perlez served as a New York Times correspondent and Bureau Chief in Beijing
from 2012 to 2019.

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 Behind Enemy Lines

and the CIA’s Covert War in China, memoir is published for the first time
by John Delury, and Lost in the Cold in Lost in the Cold War alongside com-
War: The Story of Jack Downey, Amer- mentary by Christensen and a moving
ica’s Longest-Held POW, by John afterword by Downey’s son, Jack.
Downey, Thomas Christensen, and The foundational story of American
Jack Downey, tell the story of this attitudes toward Communist China
botched secret operation and the dark recounted in these two books has new
and fantastical period surrounding it. relevance today, as relations between
Although the tale of the two impris- Washington and Beijing deteriorate
oned CIA agents remained a minor his- by the month. It shows what can hap-
torical footnote even after Washington pen when ideological intransigence
admitted who they were, it says much trumps rational decision-making and
about the United States’ approach to when policymakers are guided by
Communist China during the early implacable opposition to an adversary
stages of the Cold War. The memory they do not fully understand. Implicit
of “losing China” to Mao Zedong was in Delury’s tale is the United States’
fresh in the minds of American leaders, enduring desire to forge a democ-
stoking fears that Beijing was in step racy in the most populous country on
with the Soviet Union. Washington’s earth. But the two books show why
liberal-minded China hands despaired the urge is impractical, even unwise,
at the folly of trying to take down a when applied to a regime that derives
government in control of more than much of its strength from opposition
500 million people. to the United States.
Delur y, a professor of Chinese
studies at Yonsei University in South STIRRING DISSENT
Korea, uses his flair for narrative and Downey and Fecteau’s ill-fated flight
his eye for often surreal detail to to Manchuria was just one of many
describe the desperation in Washing- so-called Third Force operations car-
ton in the wake of the Korean War and ried out by the CIA during the Korean
the fateful decision to use the fledg- War. The idea of a Third Force, which
ling CIA to try to undermine Mao’s had been circulating since the 1940s,
China. He shows that U.S. President was that the right leaders for China
Dwight Eisenhower and members of were neither radical Communists nor
his administration refused to believe the authoritarian Nationalists but a
that Mao’s regime was fully in control centrist alternative. By backing a Third
of China, resulting in dysfunctional Force, the thinking went, Washington
policymaking by officials who knew could encourage subversion behind
little about the government that they enemy lines and destabilize its ideolog-
resolutely opposed. Downey offers a ical foes. Allen Dulles, then the CIA’s
more closely cropped portrait of the deputy director for plans, explained
era, hewing to the narrative of his long the logic behind the Third Force to an
captivity, but his account is nonetheless advisory group at Princeton University
revealing about this early chapter of in 1951: “You have got to have a few
U.S.-Chinese relations. Downey’s brief martyrs,” he said. “Some people have

March / April 2023 163

 Jane Perlez

Out at last: Downey leaving China for Hong Kong after his release, March 1973

got to get killed. I don’t want to start clandestine means. Policy, then, was
a bloody battle, but I would like to made isolated from the facts. Eisen-
see things started. I think we have hower liked the Nationalist leader
to take a few risks.” Chiang Kai-shek, who had decamped
A formal U.S. strategy for stirring to Taiwan. U.S. Secretary of State
resistance inside China was based on Dean Acheson did not, believing
a proposal by General Charles Wil- Chiang to be “a lost cause.” At one
loughby, a hard-line anti-Communist, point, the debate in the administra-
who had served as General Douglas tion veered toward engineering a coup
MacArthur’s chief of intelligence against Chiang as a way to give the
from 1940 to 1951. But Willoughby’s Nationalists a “fresh face.” Ultimately,
understanding of China was limited. Washington decided against unseating
In 1950, he had chosen to ignore Chiang, instead launching a haphaz-
the obvious signs that China would ardly managed program of sabotage
B E T T M A N N A RC H I V E / G E T T Y I M AG ES

intervene in the Korean War, even as against Communist rule.

250,000 troops massed in Manchuria. Hong Kong, the refuge for about
Nonetheless, in 1951, U.S. President one million Chinese who had fled
Harry Truman signed a document call- the Communists, became the center
ing for subversion efforts in China. of activity for the Third Force. The
The idea for a Third Force grew out CIA-backed Fight League for a Free
of a desire to do “something” about and Democratic China operating there
China under Mao. China was closed. recruited volunteers from among the
There was no way in or out except by refugees to train as anti-Communist

164 foreign affairs

 Behind Enemy Lines

foot soldiers to be smuggled onto the the Yalu River to pick up the agent,
mainland. They were sent for train- units of China’s People’s Liberation
ing in counterrevolution in Okinawa, Army were expecting them. Mao had
Japan, and in Saipan, a U.S.-controlled organized an all-seeing surveillance
island in the Western Pacific. To lead state based on tight organization of
the effort, the Americans hired a disaf- village committees and party cells.
fected general of Chiang’s Nationalist The dragnet of public security was
forces, Zhang Fakui. In a memorable almost impossible to escape. Mao’s
conversation at Hong Kong’s For- top-down system ensured a human spy
eign Press Club, Zhang warned one in every corner of society, a forerunner
of the American organizers, “Anyone of the high-tech, all-invasive security
who lands on the mainland will be apparatus of today’s Chinese state.
captured.” The Communists, he said, Long before Downey and Fecteau left
would outwit the foreign forces at every South Korea, the Communists had
turn. He also contended that much of captured a Third Force radio operator
the intelligence on what was going on and turned him, promising leniency if
inside China was fake. Zhang’s sus- he continued to radio the Americans
picions turned out to be correct, but in Japan and reassure them that all was
he nonetheless accepted a leadership normal. When the C-47 appeared, the
position in the American scheme. Communists were ready and waiting.
On Saipan, the CIA trained recruits
on ideological instruction, parachut- ABANDONED MARTYRS
ing, communications, and explosives. Records from the CIA show that of
The recruits were flown from Hong 212 Third Force agents dropped into
Kong to Saipan by Civil Air Transport, China during the Korean War period,
the CIA-owned airline founded by the 111 were captured and 101 killed. In
American aviator Claire Chennault other words, not a single one succeeded.
that later conducted operations during As Delury notes, instead of fomenting
the Vietnam War as Air America. The a counterrevolution, the activities of
airline’s director of operations, Joe Ros- the “martyrs” had the opposite effect.
bert, was not optimistic. “I’m disgusted Mao justified enhanced surveillance
with the so-called thinkers in Wash- and repression of the population on the
ington who work out these utterly grounds that Chiang and the Ameri-
stupid plans,” he wrote in his diary. can imperialists were ganging up on
Rosbert, a right-wing China hand, the new Communist state.
wanted a far bigger, more aggressive, For two years, Washington believed
and better-funded effort. that Downey and Fecteau had died in
All the while, agents were operating the crash. Surely, the CIA reasoned, if
in China. Downey and Fecteau were the Chinese had captured the Amer-
sent to collect one such operative and icans alive, they would have bragged
transport him safely back to Korea. As about it for propaganda purposes.
Downey and Fecteau set out for Man- But the Chinese kept quiet. Then,
churia, the trap had been set, and their on Thanksgiving Day in 1954, Mao
fates sealed. When the C-47 flew over announced that the men were alive and

March / April 2023 165

 Jane Perlez

were CIA agents. The news of Downey Downey’s mother kept her son’s
and Fecteau’s imprisonment rekindled plight in front of Washington, pub-
the debate in the Eisenhower adminis- licizing his confinement after each of
tration about what to do about China, her trips to China. Downey’s family
its very existence still gnawing at the sent him food, books, newspapers,
Cold War warriors. The Pentagon and the first issue of Sports Illustrated.
wanted to establish a naval blockade Downey taught himself some Russian,
along China’s coast, capture ships and and since his Communist guards were
crews, and hold them as bargaining more than happy to allow him access
chips for the two Americans. to Russian literature, he read parts of a
After the initial indignation sub- Russian edition of War and Peace.
sided, the U.S. mission in Geneva took In 1956, China made an offer
charge of the negotiations to release that could have led to the prison-
the two men. The CIA had concocted ers’ release. Beijing’s proposal was to
a story that Downey and Fecteau were invite American journalists to China
civilian employees of the Department to report on the state of the country,
of Defense. If word leaked that they and in exchange the American pris-
were in fact spies, agency brass had been oners would be released. The Chi-
prepped by their public relations assis- nese government also demanded that
tants “to go to the top man of a news Washington admit that Downey and
organization in order to kill a story,” as Fecteau were indeed CIA agents. U.S.
Delury recounts. But the two prisoners Secretary of State John Dulles, brother
were never a major focus of attention of Allen, refused to consider the plan:
for reporters in Washington, who were the United States would not make
blasé about China and Asia in the wake deals with the Communists, he said.
of the unsatisfactory end to the Korean Dulles’s obstinacy meant that Downey
War. It was Nixon, of all people, who became the longest-serving American
told a press conference in contorted lan- prisoner of war in history.
guage that the Downey case “involves a By 1958, the Saipan venture was
CIA agent.” The New York Times ran the closed. The CIA had set its sights on
headline “Nixon Acknowledges Amer- another Third Force project, in Tibet,
ican Jailed in China Is CIA Agent,” but almost a repeat of the doomed adven-
the story was buried inside the paper. ture in northern China. Inexperienced
Downey and Fecteau showed endur- American trainers inserted Tibetan
ance almost beyond belief as they rot- freedom fighters into western China,
ted in Mao’s jails. Downey’s son, Jack, even though the trainers did not know
recounts how his father was subjected Tibet and had never been there. Many
to two years of merciless interrogation, hundreds of U.S.-trained Tibetans
long stints in leg irons, and solitary con- were killed or captured. None of the
finement in a five-by-eight-foot cell. population was liberated.
When the judge announced a sentence During a meeting with Chinese
of life imprisonment, his interpreter Premier Zhou Enlai in 1971, before
smirked and said, in English, “You Nixon’s arrival in Beijing, Kissinger
could have been sentenced to death.” acknowledged that Fecteau and

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 Behind Enemy Lines

Downey had done things that any torian Jonathan Spence published To
country would consider illegal, a hint Change China. In this book, he detailed
at their real employer and enough of hundreds of years of well-meaning
an admission for Zhou. Fecteau was Western-led projects to change China,
released in December of that year. from the Jesuit Matteo Ricci’s attempts
In March 1973, Downey walked to to spread Christianity in the late six-
freedom across the bridge connecting teenth century to the deployment of a
southern China to Hong Kong. He phalanx of American generals at the
returned to his beloved Connecticut, end of World War II. Delury, who
went to law school, and became a judge. was a student of Spence’s at Yale, has
In his memoir, Downey put it followed in the footsteps of his dis-
bluntly: “I had been sent to fight for tinguished mentor with a riveting and
a country I didn’t know, to train guer- important case study, which comes to
rillas whose language I didn’t speak; a similar conclusion.
I had been shot down on a flight I Lost in the Cold War tells what hap-
wasn’t supposed to be on and sen- pens to an American who bears the
tenced to life in prison for sticking a brunt of foolish policymaking. Delury’s
pole out of an airplane.” In the Oval broader historical narrative—focused
Office, his freedom was noted as a win on Washington’s overarching fixation
for the administration, nothing more. on Communist China in the 1950s
Kissinger said to Nixon, “We got a good and, later, the diplomacy of Nixon and
play out of this Downey thing.” Kissinger—is implicit in Downey’s
Delury retells this remarkable episode story. The suffering that he and Fect-
in the history of U.S.-Chinese relations eau endured was the direct result of a
with fire and astonishment. You can failure to understand, or a blind unwill-
almost hear him asking: How could ingness to acknowledge, that the Com-
this have been approved? Why was it munists had fully captured China. That
so urgent to try to overturn the ruling failure went right to the top: during his
Communist regime by such sketchy presidency, Eisenhower consistently
means? His mining of Communist underrated Mao and overrated Chiang.
Party sources in Shanghai and Hong In his conclusion, Delury gets it
Kong archives yields intimate details right, arguing that the misguided pol-
of conditions in Manchuria—such as icies Americans hatched some 70 years
the disciplined organization of society ago provide a warning of what not to
into tiny cells—that are key to under- do in a moment of deteriorating U.S.-
standing Mao’s first years in power. Chinese relations. He writes, “The
The bravery of Downey and Fecteau temptation of reverting to Cold War
is a story within the story. patterns of covert subversion—playing
out not only on land, sea, and air but also
MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING in unseen domains from outer space to
In 1969, while Downey and Fecteau cyberspace—should give us pause in
remained behind bars and Wash- light of the history of how that went
ington still refused to recognize the the first time it was tried.” Washington
government in Beijing, the Yale his- should not forget that lesson.

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REV I EW ES S AY

The Cult
of Secrecy
America’s Classification Crisis
Patrick Radden Keefe

The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets
BY Matthew Connelly, Pantheon, 2023, 560 pp.

I
n August 2016, the United States exploits to launch audacious ransom-
suffered one of the most cataclysmic ware attacks, ultimately shutting down
leaks of classified information in his- millions of computers around the world
tory. An anonymous entity calling itself and paralyzing thousands of private
“the Shadow Brokers” exposed an arsenal businesses, from an auto plant in France
of cyberweapons that had been devel- to a chocolate factory in Australia.
oped—in great secrecy—by the National Foreign governments took advantage
Security Agency. The intelligence com- of the tools, as well. North Korea used
munity sprang into damage-control the NSA’s malicious code to attack the
mode. Because the NSA’s hackers rely British health-care system, forcing hos-
on a degree of plausible deniability, the pitals to turn away patients. Iran used
disclosure of such clandestine tools and it to target airlines in the Middle East.
their connection to the U.S. government Russia used it against Ukraine.
meant that the agency would be forced Even as these cyber-assaults prolif-
to devise new ones. But there was also a erated, officials in Washington had no
more pressing danger: with the source idea who was responsible for the breach.
code for these powerful weapons now They did not know whether it was a
published on the Internet, any unscru- foreign intelligence service that had
pulous actor could deploy them. It was compromised the NSA’s vaunted digital
the digital equivalent of “loose nukes.” defenses or some disillusioned agency
Practically overnight, cybercrimi- coder gone rogue. As if to compound
nals repurposed the NSA’s proprietary the government’s humiliation and alarm,

Patrick Radden Keefe is a Staff Writer at The New Yorker and the author of Say Nothing:
A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

168 foreign affairs

Illustration by John Lee 169
 Patrick Radden Keefe

the Shadow Brokers taunted the agency ever-larger cadre of federal employees.
in a series of online posts, mocking the Some 1.3 million Americans now hold
investigation in playfully broken English: top-secret clearances, roughly double the
“Is NSA chasing shadowses?” population of the District of Columbia.
In 2017, The New York Times reported The math becomes simple. Combine
that after 15 months of investigation, the vast dimensions of the classified
authorities were no closer to an answer. world with the huge numbers of people
If they have since managed to identify who need access to it to do their jobs, and
the perpetrator, then that, too, remains factor in the increasing ease of copying
classified. But the whole debacle high- and transferring enormous volumes of
lights the subtle Achilles’ heel of govern- digital information, and it seems almost
ment classification. The NSA is famously certain that wholesale leaks of classified
secretive; as the old joke has it, its ini- data will continue. Decades of bad habits
tials stand for “no such agency.” Yet here practiced by government agencies hooked
was a massive leak in which some of the on classification clearly undermine trans-
nation’s most closely guarded secrets were parency and democratic accountability,
spilled out for the world to see. Nor was and this impulse to classify indiscrim-
this the only recent jumbo leak of highly inately is often justified by invoking
classified material: there was the 2017 national security. But as Connelly points
leak of CIA hacking tools by an agency out, when everything is secret, nothing is
software engineer, Joshua Schulte; the secret: the “very size of this dark state . . .
2013 leak of surveillance programs by an has become its own security risk.”
NSA contractor, Edward Snowden; and If the dangers of excessive government
the 2010 leak of cables and videos by an secrecy are so widely acknowledged,
army private, Chelsea Manning. why has nothing been done about it?
This, as Matthew Connelly lays bare One reason, Connelly suggests, is that
in his timely new book, The Declassifi- the authority to classify has become a
cation Engine, is the paradox of contem- cherished prerogative of government
porary government secrecy. For decades, power—a tool used by presidents, gen-
blue-ribbon panels and incoming pres- erals, and various chieftains of lesser fiefs
idents have observed with surprising to enshroud their decisions in mystery
unanimity that overclassification has and ward off scrutiny or accountability.
grown out of control—and vowed to fix Reform efforts founder in the face of
it. Yet every year, more new documents bureaucratic recalcitrance. But another
are marked “top secret,” and more realms challenge is the sheer volume of restricted
of official activity are placed beyond the documents: because the government
scrutiny of citizens, journalists, and even classifies more quickly than it declas-
Congress. In 2017, the federal govern- sifies, the amount keeps growing every
ment spent over $18 billion maintaining year. How do you begin to declassify all
this classification system, almost double this information, and if you cannot, what
what it spent five years earlier. But pre- becomes of the historical record? In his
cisely because so much government work book, Connelly proposes what might just
now transpires behind a veil of secrecy, be an inspired solution—but only if the
it is necessary to grant clearances to an government takes him up on it.

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 The Cult of Secrecy

OPEN AND SHUT small to fill it—and would vacate the

Connelly is a historian at Columbia building when the fighting stopped so
University, where he runs the History that it could be repurposed as an annex
Lab, a group that focuses on applying to the National Archives.
the tools of data science to the problem It did not pan out that way. Indeed, it
of overclassification. When one consid- was the rise of the permanent defense
ers the full sweep of American history, bureaucracy and the military-industrial
he argues, widespread classification is complex in the immediate aftermath
not just a betrayal of the United States’ of World War II that gave birth to the
founding principles but also a relatively juggernaut of official classification.
recent anomaly. The first century and a Rather than roll back the culture and
half of the republic was characterized institutions of secrecy that had prevailed
by “radical transparency,” Connelly during wartime, the Truman adminis-
contends: when the nation was at war, tration institutionalized them with the
it engaged in espionage and secrecy, advent of the Cold War. The creation of
but during peacetime, these practices the CIA and other intelligence agencies
receded. The United States had no per- and the secrecy surrounding the United
manent intelligence agency until the States’ growing nuclear arsenal accel-
Office of Naval Intelligence was created, erated the professionalization of the
in 1882. As late as 1912, Woodrow Wil- classified state. “Our present security
son could remark, while campaigning system is a phenomenon of only the past
for president, “There ought to be no decade,” Senator Hubert Humphrey
place where anything can be done that remarked in 1955. “We have enacted
everybody does not know about.” espionage laws and tightened existing
Connelly demonstrates the degree laws; we have required investigation and
to which this ideal of accountability clearance of millions of our citizens; we
was explicitly linked to a tradition of have classified information and locked
record keeping and publicly accessible it in safes. . . . We have not paused in
archives. In 1853, long before President our necessary, though frantic, quest for
Donald Trump took to flushing official security to ask ourselves: What are we
papers down a White House toilet, it trying to protect, and against what?”
was declared a felony to destroy any fed- In theory, the passage of time should
eral records. A century and a half before enable Americans to look back at the
WikiLeaks published purloined State ostensible rationale offered for classify-
Department cables, the department ing various government activities and
began publishing such records on its determine, in retrospect, whether all that
own, voluntarily disclosing volumes of secrecy was justified. This is the sort of
letters that had recently been received enterprise that Connelly and his fellow
through embassies abroad. In one scholars at Columbia are engaged in.
poign­ant anecdote, Connelly recounts But such a project is frustrated in prac-
that when construction began on the tice by the slow pace of declassification.
Pentagon, in 1941, President Franklin Reams of important historical documents
Roosevelt anticipated that the postwar remain classified more than half a century
military establishment would be too after the events they describe. Even as the

March / april 2023 171

 Patrick Radden Keefe

government spends more money classify- such an arsenal, if it exists, should not
ing more documents each year, funding be freely accessible to the public. The
for declassification efforts has steadily same goes for sensitive details associated
eroded. The entire federal government with nuclear weapons or the names of
now budgets only about $100 million people spying for the United States. (In
annually for that purpose. As Connelly the case of covert assets’ identities, there
dryly notes, “The Pentagon spends four are compelling grounds for maintaining
times that just on military bands.” such secrets even decades after the con-
But Connelly and his colleagues have duct in question, since prospective spies
developed an innovative solution, study- abroad will be less likely to betray their
ing the records that the government has countries if they believe that the details
unsealed to see what they reveal about the of their betrayals may be automatically
dynamics of official secrecy. Over the last declassified a mere 20 years later.)
decade, his researchers have assembled If, from the beginning, official clas-
the world’s largest database of declassi- sification had been carefully confined
fied documents. Drawing on the tools of to these sorts of tailored categories, it
big data and machine learning, they have would never have blossomed into such a
developed a series of techniques to ana- rampant problem. But the basis for most
lyze this archive for patterns and anom- classification is less coherent. At some
alies. When Connelly suggests that in point early in that postwar expansion
some corners of the federal bureaucracy, of government secrecy, the authority to
the devotion to secrecy has evolved from a mark something classified gave rise to a
culture into “a cult,” it might seem hyper- bureaucratic reflex. For any government
bolic. But consider that when he under- officer making a quick decision in the
took this academic project—scanning the course of a busy workday, the penalties
redactions in declassified documents in for underclassifying are quite salient,
search of lessons about the pathologies of whereas penalties for overclassifying do
overclassification—the project was per- not exist. One way of accounting for how
ceived to be sufficiently threatening that the nation got to this juncture is to look
former government lawyers advised him at the incentive structure for that offi-
and his team that they could be accused cer deciding whether to classify a single
of violating the Espionage Act. document and extrapolate outward to all
the other functionaries invested with the
THE LEAKERS power to deem something “secret” in all
It should come as no surprise that the the other agencies every day of every year
gatekeepers of the classified world might over the last eight decades. The problem
feel defensive about such an inquiry. has assumed proportions that can be dif-
Even the staunchest critics of overclas- ficult to comprehend. In a single year,
sification generally acknowledge that 2012, U.S. officials classified information
the government must maintain at least more than 95 million times, or roughly
some secrets. Reasonable people can dis- three times per second.
agree about whether the NSA should be But that version of the story—in
developing an arsenal of cyberweapons, which genuine national security imper-
but most observers would concede that atives merged with bureaucratic path

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 The Cult of Secrecy

dependence and risk aversion and simply In a system in which so much infor-
snowballed—is the benign interpreta- mation ends up classified, selective
tion. For Connelly, who has scrutinized leaking might come to seem like a
actual classification decisions made over safety valve for when certain matters
those eight decades, the real explanation of national importance need to get
points to something more pernicious. out. The legal scholar David Pozen
Classification is an exertion of power, has argued that the “leakiness” of the
he argues, and as such, it has often been executive branch is not a sign of insti-
motivated not by the dictates of national tutional failure but, on the contrary, a
security but by considerations of raw strategic adaptation to prevailing reali-
political or bureaucratic leverage. ties, one that enables an administration
“It turns out that, from the very begin- to send “messages about its activities
ning, what’s secret has been whatever to various domestic and international
serves the interests of the president and audiences without incurring the full
all those around him who are invested diplomatic, legal, or political risks that
in executive power,” he writes. In any official acknowledgment may entail.”
bureaucracy, the ability to render some- As William Daley, President Barack
thing secret becomes an irresistible trump Obama’s chief of staff, once admitted,
card—a way to evade oversight, tout paro- “I’m all for leaking when its organized.”
chial priorities, and obscure shortcomings. Every White House has regularly
“After conjuring the power of secrecy, and leaked sensitive and often classified
setting it loose, presidents found that it information to the press. Whereas
had a power all its own,” Connelly con- penalties for rank-and-file employees
tinues. “Thousands more people, many who make unauthorized disclosures are
career civil servants, began creating their often severe, consequences for deliber-
own secrets, and jealously protecting ate leaks by highly placed officials are
them, making it harder to identify and practically unheard of. Consider the
protect what mattered to the president contrast between Reality Winner, the
personally. At the same time, they could NSA contractor who leaked an intel-
leak whatever they liked, undermining ligence report about Russia’s interfer-
the president’s ability to manage the news ence in the 2016 election, and David
cycle.” Connelly is particularly scathing Petraeus, the CIA director and four-star
about the role of military leaders, such as general who shared several notebooks
Douglas MacArthur and Curtis LeMay, full of highly classified information
who “employed leaks and spin no less with his biographer (who was also
than secrecy to protect their perquisites his mistress) and then lied to federal
and push their agendas,” lobbying to investigators about it. Winner was sen-
expand military spending and outright tenced to five years and three months
defying civilian authority. In 1978, he in prison; Petraeus received two years’
notes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stopped probation and a fine. Connelly invokes
preserving notes from their meetings, “as a quip by Sir Humphrey Appleby, of the
if America’s most senior military lead- BBC sitcom Yes Minister: “The Official
ership were running a numbers racket, Secrets Act is not to protect secrets. It
committing nothing to paper.” is to protect officials.”

March / april 2023 173

 Patrick Radden Keefe

LOCKED IN THE ARCHIVES By one estimate, it will take 250 years

What is maddening about the lack of at the government’s current process-
progress on overclassification is that ing rate to respond to the backlog of
anybody who has given the issue serious Freedom of Information Act requests
consideration would likely agree with at the George W. Bush Library alone.
the broad contours of Connelly’s argu- No effective system exists to auto-
ments. Nearly two decades have elapsed mate declassification, and the relevant
since the 9/11 Commission concluded federal agencies lack the personnel
that too much classification can actually and resources to manually review and
jeopardize national security. “Secrecy, redact billions of classified documents.
while necessary, can also harm oversight,” “If instead these records were withheld
the report argued, adding that the “best indefinitely, or destroyed, it would be
oversight mechanism” in a democracy impossible to reconstruct what officials
is “public disclosure.” But it is one thing did under the cloak of secrecy,” Con-
to acknowledge the problem and quite nelly points out. Thus, a problem that
another to do something meaningful on its face might seem like a dry tech-
about it. Obama came into office vowing nocratic riddle—with billions of new
to create “the most open and transparent classified documents generated every
administration in history,” yet in the end, year and no scalable method for safe and
as Connelly points out, “he presided over reliable declassification, what happens
exponential growth in classified infor- to the historical record?—assumes an
mation.” (He also initiated more crim- existential urgency. If the U.S. govern-
inal prosecutions of leakers than all his ment is “not even accountable in the
predecessors combined.) When outside court of history,” Connelly writes, then
groups have tried to pressure the federal “it truly is accountable to no one.”
government into greater transparency, As it happens, Connelly has a solu-
they have aroused staunch resistance tion. Because the aggregate volume
and occasionally retaliation. Connelly of still classified information is so
relates one galling story: in the 1980s, overwhelming, the only way to tackle
after the National Security Archive, a it will be to employ the wizardry of
nonprofit group affiliated with George big data. By scanning hundreds of
Washington University, filed Freedom of thousands of declassified documents
Information Act requests and initiated (some still redacted, others not), Con-
lawsuits to uncover abuses of govern- nelly and his colleagues were able to
ment power by the Reagan administra- search for certain words, themes, and
tion and the FBI, the FBI responded by connections to identify areas of par-
placing the National Security Archive ticular sensitivity. Comparing redacted
itself under surveillance. and unredacted versions of the same
Meanwhile, the daunting tonnage of declassified documents from a given
classified documents has compounded period, they compiled a jokey “Amer-
every year, to the point where even those ica’s Most Redacted” list of names
who earnestly want to do something most frequently blacked out (includ-
about the problem fear that it may ing Congolese Prime Minister Patrice
simply have become unmanageable. Lumumba and Iranian Prime Minister

174 foreign affairs

 The Cult of Secrecy

Mohammad Mosaddeq, both targets of tainly interest. At the State Department,

CIA operations). They devised a series of which produces more than two billion
technological methods to rapidly sort emails each year, one official informed
through extensive archives and select them that the need for the sort of tech-
documents that met certain criteria. If nology they were offering was “fright-
such techniques were harnessed for the eningly clear.” But the department had
declassification effort, they realized, it no money to authorize a pilot program
might be possible “to train algorithms or fund their research. Someone sug-
to look for sensitive records requiring gested that perhaps Columbia students
the closest scrutiny and accelerate the could be enlisted to work on the ini-
release of everything else.” This is the tiative and paid in course credit. “I was
“declassification engine” of the book’s struck by the notion that declassifica-
title: an ingenious technical solution tion could be treated as a kind of school
to an impossible bureaucratic problem. project,” Connelly writes.
For the moment, the machine is His group ended up in a meeting at
still in its infancy, with a beta ver- the Intelligence Advanced Research
sion concocted by the History Lab at Projects Activity, which has been
Columbia serving as a sort of proof of delegated to work with the National
concept. To date, it has only worked Archives to explore technological solu-
with material that has already been tions to the problem of overclassifi-
declassified. But Connelly and his cation. After listening to their pitch,
team wanted to improve its capabil- an IARPA official told the visitors that
ity and accuracy by pilot testing it she had been trying for years to build
on historical classified information, a similar engine—not to declassify,
and for that, they needed government but to classify. She found their ideas
buy-in. One might suppose that this intriguing but explained that building
would not be difficult to obtain. After a technology to help review and release
all, across the federal government, a classified documents would represent
great deal of lip service has been paid an “insufficient return on investment.”
to the idea that overclassification It is a dispiriting coda to Connel-
has reached crisis proportions. Here ly’s fascinating and urgent book, and
was a way of solving it that would be one hopes that he and his colleagues
cost-effective, especially as compared will ultimately find other, more hos-
with engaging human reviewers to pitable points of entry in the federal
manually process old classified mate- government that would allow them
rial before releasing it to the public. to test and improve their declassifica-
So Connolly and his band of data tion algorithms with actual classified
scientists and mathematicians went to raw data. If you believe in the found-
Washington to plead their case. They ing principles of the American form
met with the State Department, the of government, then the stakes could
National Declassification Center, the scarcely be higher. As Connelly recalls
CIA, the Public Interest Declassification thinking after he was shown the door
Board, and the Office of the Director at IARPA, “We cannot assign a dollar
of National Intelligence. There was cer- value to democratic accountability.”

March / april 2023 175

 Return to Table of Contents

REV I EW ES S AY

Blundering
Into Baghdad
The Right—and Wrong—Lessons of the Iraq War
hal brands

Confronting Saddam Hussein

by Melvyn P. Leffler. Oxford University Press, 2023, 368 pp.

T
“ he whole horrible truth about into an unnecessary conflict by finan-
the war is being revealed,” ciers, arms manufacturers, and foreign
wrote the theologian Rein- interests. “The moral pretensions of the
hold Niebuhr in 1923, just five years heroes,” Niebuhr went on, “were bogus.”
after World War I had ended. “Every In fact, the supposed revelations
new book destroys some further illu- about World War I were not quite what
sion. How can we ever again believe they seemed. Although the origins of
anything?” Americans had once hoped the conflict are endlessly contested,
that the Great War would make the they were grounded primarily in the
world safe for democracy. But by the tensions created by a powerful, provoc-
1920s, a darker interpretation held ative Germany. Corporate greed did
sway. Revisionist scholars argued that not drive Washington to war. Instead,
the Allies were just as responsible for issues such as freedom of the seas and
starting the war as the Germans were. outrage at German atrocities spurred
They contended that the conflict had it to enter the fight. American inter-
simply empowered one set of voracious vention was hardly fruitless: it helped
empires at the expense of another. Most turn the tide on the Western front
damningly, they claimed that Washing- and prevented Germany from consol-
ton’s war was rooted in avarice and lies— idating a continental empire from the
that the United States had been dragged North Sea to the Caucasus. But amid

Hal Brands is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute. He served as a civilian adviser in the U.S. Defense Department from
2015 to 2016. He is a co-author of The Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China.

176 foreign affairs

 Blundering Into Baghdad

the disillusion sown by a bloody war the United States intervened out of lust
and an imperfect peace, more cynical for oil or other hidden motives.
interpretations flourished—and indel- These are not the rantings of a luna-
ibly influenced U.S. policy. tic fringe. In 2002, in the run-up to the
In the 1920s, jaded views of the last invasion, Barack Obama, then a state
war informed the United States’ deci- senator in Illinois, labeled the coming
sion to reject strategic commitments conflict a “dumb war” motivated by the
in Europe. In the 1930s, concerns that Bush administration’s bid to “distract”
“merchants of death” had pulled the Americans from economic problems
country into war encouraged the passage and “corporate scandals.” As president,
of strict neutrality laws meant to keep it Donald Trump called the invasion
out of future conflicts. Leading isola- the “single worst decision ever made,”
tionists, such as Charles Lindbergh and blaming greedy defense contractors and
Father Charles Coughlin, channeled this trigger-happy generals for U.S. mili-
warped interpretation of World War I tary misadventures in the Middle East.
when they argued that selfish minorities Other critics have offered more judi-
and shadowy interests were once again cious explanations of the war’s origins.
scheming to draw the United States into But in many quarters, “Iraq” is still syn-
war. These dynamics made it harder for onymous with deception and bad faith.
the United States to do much more than Twenty years after the U.S. invasion,
watch as the global order collapsed. the passage of time has not obscured
Views of wars past invariably shape how the fact that the war was a tragedy that
the United States approaches threats took a heavy toll on the United States
present. In the interwar era, histori- and an even heavier toll on Iraq. If
cal revisionism in the world’s leading World War I was, in retrospect, a war
democracy abetted geopolitical revi- whose benefits surely outweighed its
sionism by totalitarian predators. costs for the United States, the Iraq war
When seemingly good wars go bad, was one Washington should never have
Americans often conclude that those fought. But as Melvyn Leffler shows in
wars were pointless or corrupt from the a new book, Confronting Saddam Hus-
get-go. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, sein, the war was an understandable
in 2003, many observers have viewed tragedy, born of honorable motives and
that conflict as Niebuhr once viewed genuine concerns. One might add that
World War I. There is now a biparti- it was an American tragedy: the war
san consensus that the war was a ter- was not the work of any cunning fac-
rible mistake based on faulty premises, tion but initially enjoyed broad-based,
which indeed it was. But many critics bipartisan support. Finally, Iraq was
go further, peddling what can only be an ironic tragedy: the U.S. failure in
called conspiracy theories: that the war a war often portrayed as the epitome
was the work of a powerful pro-Israel of American hubris was ultimately a
lobby or a nefarious cabal of neocon- result of, first, too much intervention
servatives, that President George W. and, then, too little.
Bush deliberately lied in order to sell The United States will not have a
a conflict he was eager to wage, or that healthy foreign policy until it properly

March / april 2023 177

 Hal Brands

understands its sad, complex saga in the U.S. geopolitical position, the con-
Iraq. A generation after the march on flict weakened it almost everywhere.
Baghdad, not the least of the lingering The war intensified a sectarian
challenges of the Iraq war is getting its maelstrom in Iraq and throughout the
history, and thus its lessons, right. Middle East while freeing a theocratic
Iran to expand its influence. By turn-
MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED ing Iraq into a cauldron of violence,
No serious observer can dispute one the invasion revived al Qaeda and the
early judgment on Iraq: it was a debacle. broader jihadist movement that had
The Bush administration decided to been pummeled after 9/11. Foreign
confront Saddam Hussein in 2002–3 to fighters flocked to Iraq for the chance
eliminate what it viewed as a growing to kill American soldiers. Once there,
and, after 9/11, intolerable threat to they created new terrorist networks
American security. The aim was to top- and gained valuable battlefield experi-
ple a brutal tyranny that was a fount of ence. The war also caused a painful rift
aggression and instability in the Middle with key European allies; it consumed
East through a brief, low-cost interven- American energies that might have
tion. Very little went according to plan. been applied to other problems, from
Victory over Saddam’s regime gave North Korea’s nuclear program to Rus-
way to raging insurgency and grue- sian revanchism and the rise of China.
some civil war. The military and eco- Yet critiques of the war have become
nomic costs spiraled upward. Between so hyperbolic that it can be difficult to
2003 and 2011, over 4,000 U.S. service keep the damage in perspective. One
members were killed in operations tied prominent commentator, David Kil-
to Iraq and over 31,000 wounded. As cullen, even deemed the war compara-
for the number of Iraqis killed, no one ble to Hitler’s doomed invasion of the
knows for sure, but researchers have Soviet Union. True, the human toll was
estimated a death toll between 100,000 devastating, but for the U.S. military, it
and 400,000 over the same period. amounted to roughly one-quarter of the
Meanwhile, the credibility of the war deaths that American forces suffered in
effort crumbled when Saddam’s sus- the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War.
pected weapons of mass destruction Once U.S. forces belatedly got a grip on
stockpiles turned out mostly not to the insurgency in 2007–8, Iraq became
exist. The U.S. reputation for com- a death trap for the jihadists that had
petence suffered from the deficient flocked there. Much of the worst dam-
planning and serial misjudgments— age to U.S. alliances had been patched
the failure to adequately prepare for up by Bush’s second term or simply
a vacuum of authority after Saddam’s overtaken by new challenges. By 2013,
fall, the deployment of too few troops with U.S. troops gone from Iraq, the
to stabilize the country, the ill-advised Middle East blunder that most preoc-
disbanding of the Iraqi army, and many cupied many European countries was
others—that marred the subsequent Obama’s decision not to intervene in
occupation and fueled the ensuing Syria after Bashar al-Assad used chem-
chaos. And rather than strengthening ical weapons against his own people.

178 foreign affairs

 Blundering Into Baghdad

Overall, the Iraq war dented American achievements and comprehending the
power but hardly destroyed it. In the excruciating pressures they felt. Good
early 2020s, the United States is still history demands empathy—seeing the
the world’s preeminent economic and world through the eyes of one’s subjects
military actor, and it has more trouble even when one disagrees with them—
keeping countries out of its unparalleled and Leffler’s work is suffused with it.
alliance network than bringing them in. Confronting Saddam Hussein is the
Where the war did leave a lasting most serious scholarly study of the
mark was on the American psyche. war’s origins, relying on interviews
A taxing, long-mismanaged interven- with key policymakers and the limited
tion undermined domestic confidence archival material that has been declas-
in U.S. power and leadership. It elic- sified. Leffler aims to understand, not
ited calls for retrenchment not simply condemn. His thesis is that the Iraq
from Iraq or the Middle East but also war was a tragedy, but one that cannot
from the world. By 2014, the percentage be explained by conspiracy theories or
of Americans saying that the United allegations of bad faith.
States should “stay out of world affairs” As Leffler demonstrates, before 9/11,
was higher than at any time since poll- U.S. officials believed the problem posed
ing on that question began. By 2016, the by an unrepentant, malign Iraq was
year the country elected a president who getting worse, but they showed little
revived the isolationist slogan “Amer- urgency in addressing it. After 9/11,
ica First,” 57 percent of respondents in long-standing concerns about Saddam’s
a Pew Research Center survey agreed weapons programs, his ties to terrorists,
that Washington should mind its own and his penchant for aggression inter-
business. This Iraq hangover was all sected with newer fears that failing to
the more painful because it made the deal with festering problems, particu-
United States strategically sluggish just larly those combining weapons of mass
as the dangers posed by great-power destruction and terrorism, could have
rivals were growing. If Vietnam had, as catastrophic consequences. Amid pal-
Henry Kissinger put it in his memoirs, pable insecurity, Bush brought matters
“stimulated an attack on our entire post- to a head, first by threatening war in a
war foreign policy,” here, history was bid to make Saddam verifiably disarm,
indeed repeating itself. and then—after concluding this coer-
cive diplomacy had failed—by invading.
STEPPING BACK IN TIME “Fear, power, and hubris,” Leffler writes,
How the United States got into this produced the Iraq war: fear that Wash-
mess is the subject of Confronting ington could no longer ignore simmer-
Saddam Hussein. No one is better ing dangers, the power that an unrivaled
suited to answer the question than Lef- United States could use to deal with
fler, a widely admired diplomatic his- such dangers decisively, the hubris that
torian. His landmark study of the early led Bush to think the undertaking could
Cold War, A Preponderance of Power, be accomplished quickly and cheaply.
is a model of how to criticize policy- Leffler’s book is no whitewash. The
makers’ errors while recognizing their bureaucratic dysfunction that impeded

March / april 2023 179

 Hal Brands

searching debate before the invasion U.S. military presence in Saudi Ara-
and competent execution thereafter is bia became an al Qaeda recruiting
on display. So is the failure to scruti- bonanza. The U.S. global image also
nize sketchy intelligence and flawed suffered from exaggerated claims
assumptions. The sense of purpose about the damage economic sanctions
that motivated Bush after 9/11, com- were inflicting on Iraqi citizens.
bined with his visceral antipathy to Saddam posed a growing threat, if
Saddam—who was, after all, one of not an imminent one. This is why, as
the great malefactors of the modern the political scientist Frank Harvey has
age—brought moral clarity, as well as demonstrated, any U.S. administration
strategic myopia. Bush and his close would have felt pressure to resolve the
ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Iraq problem after 9/11. It is also why
“detested Saddam Hussein,” and “their any responsible critique of the war
view of his defiance, treachery, and bar- has to take seriously the perils of not
barity” powerfully shaped their policies, removing Saddam from power—for
Leffler notes. But none of this criti- example, the prospect that he eventu-
cism is news in 2023, so Leffler’s real ally might have used force against his
contribution is in exploding pernicious neighbors again or that his ambitions
myths about the conflict’s origins. might have interacted explosively with
those of a nuclearizing Iran.
Correcting THE RECORD Leffler also rebuts the “rush to war”
One myth is that Iraq was effectively thesis, which holds that Bush had
contained circa 2001, so the ensuing been itching to invade Iraq before
invasion addressed an imaginary chal- 9/11. No senior policymaker was then
lenge. In truth, the Iraq problem— envisioning anything like a full-on
how to handle a regime that Wash- invasion, and Bush’s attention was
ington had defeated in the Gulf War elsewhere. Even Deputy Defense Sec-
of 1990–91 but remained a menace retary Paul Wolfowitz, who favored
to international stability—seemed a long-term effort to remove Sadd-
all too real. Saddam had kicked out am’s regime, “was not supporting a
UN weapons inspectors in 1998; as military invasion, or the deployment
the accompanying sanctions regime of U.S. ground forces” in early 2001,
eroded, Iraq increased funding for Leffler writes. After 9/11 dramatically
its Military-Industrial Commission increased U.S. sensitivity to all threats,
fortyfold. The regime cultivated Bush gradually became convinced of
myriad terrorist groups, in the Pal- the need to confront Saddam, but it
estinian territories, Egypt, and other was only in early 2003—after Iraq
Middle Eastern countries. Saddam continued its cat-and-mouse game
had secretly destroyed his stockpiles with inspectors readmitted because
of chemical and biological weapons of U.S. pressure—that he reluctantly
but not the infrastructure for devel- concluded that war was inevitable.
oping them. The decadelong effort Nor was the war the brainchild of
to contain Saddam was draining powerful neoconservatives bent on a
U.S. resources, while the supporting radical democracy-promotion agenda.

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 Blundering Into Baghdad

Quagmire: a U.S. Army officer posing after a battle at the Baghdad airport, April 2003

In truth, those nearest the center of the idea that democratizing Iraq would
decision—Secretary of Defense Don- have a constructive regional effect was
ald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick a reinforcing motive for war, and one
Cheney, and especially Bush himself, that Leffler underplays. But Bush didn’t
who rightly emerges from Leffler’s pursue democracy promotion because
book as the key actor—were hardly neo- the neocons wanted it—he did so
conservatives. Rumsfeld and Cheney because the traditional U.S. strategy for
might be better described as conser- defanging defeated tyrannies is to turn
vative nationalists. Bush himself had them into pacific democracies.
campaigned against nation-building Of course, the challenge Iraq posed
missions and called for a “humble” was less severe than Bush believed
foreign policy when running for pres- because Saddam had quietly divested
ident. Officials closer to the neocon- himself of chemical and biological
servative movement, such as Wolfow- weapons stockpiles in the mid-1990s.
itz, had little influence on Iraq policy. Yet the “Bush lied, people died” critique
When Wolfowitz sought to focus the falls flat: as Leffler shows, every major
S CO T T N EL S O N / G E T T Y I M AG ES

administration on Iraq just after 9/11, U.S. policymaker sincerely believed that
“Bush shunted his advice aside,” Leffler Saddam’s weapons programs were more
writes. There is no evidence, he argues, advanced than they were because this
that Wolfowitz significantly influenced was the consensus of the intelligence
Bush’s view of the issue. The depiction community. (Moreover, the stockpiles
of “an inattentive chief executive, easily were not totally nonexistent, although
manipulated by neoconservative advis- they were far smaller and less potent
ers,” adds Leffler, is simply wrong. True, than the intelligence community

March / april 2023 181

 Hal Brands

believed. U.S. forces in Iraq ultimately after three years of catastrophe, in late
discovered roughly 5,000 chemical 2006, the Bush administration finally
warheads, shells, and bombs, all made came to grips with the chaos engulf-
before 1991.) As two official investi- ing Iraq, fashioning a new counter-
gations concluded, the intelligence was insurgency strategy and supporting
flawed because of bad analysis—and it with the deployment of roughly
Saddam’s effort to deter his enemies 30,000 badly needed troops.
by pretending to possess weapons he As detailed empirical work by
did not have—rather than deliberate the scholars Stephen Biddle, Jeffrey
politicization. Bush and his aides were Friedman, and Jacob Shapiro demon-
overzealous in presenting the available strates, this “surge” provided security
evidence, but they were not lying. in key areas and bolstered an uprising
Nor did they need to. What is often of Sunni tribes against jihadists that
forgotten now is just how popular a had overrun their communities. Vio-
more assertive Iraq policy was. During lence plummeted; al Qaeda in Iraq was
Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Iraq brought to the verge of defeat. There
Liberation Act, which made it U.S. was political progress, with the emer-
policy “to support efforts to remove gence of cross-sectarian electoral coali-
the regime headed by Saddam Hus- tions. Had events stayed on this trajec-
sein,” passed Congress in 1998 with tory, they might have resulted in an Iraq
overwhelming support. In 2002, the that was a relatively stable, democratic,
authorization for war won 77 votes and reliable potential U.S. partner in
in the Senate and 296 in the House. the broader war on terror; Americans
“We have no choice but to eliminate might now view the conflict as a costly
the threat,” Senator Joe Biden declared victory rather than a costly defeat.
at the time. “This is a guy who is an Yet sustaining that trajectory would
extreme danger to the world.” The Iraq have required sustaining the U.S.
war was not foisted on the country by presence in Iraq. Bush’s successor had
ideological cliques or conflict-craving made his name opposing the war, had
zealots. It was a war the United States long argued that the conflict was lost,
chose in an atmosphere of great fear and had campaigned on a promise to
and imperfect information—and one end it, in part so his administration
that, for all its horrors, might have could focus on the “necessary war” in
yielded a winning outcome after all. Afghanistan. Once in office, Obama
did not immediately withdraw U.S.
AMERICA WALKS AWAY forces from Iraq. But after the failure
War, the French statesman Georges of a desultory effort to negotiate an
Clemenceau remarked, is a series of agreement that would keep a modest
catastrophes that results in a victory. stabilization force there beyond 2011,
Indeed, if the invasion of Iraq was a U.S. personnel withdrew in Decem-
mistake, that does not mean the war ber of that year. Even before that, the
was lost from that point on. Leffler’s Obama administration had pulled back
account ends with the botched han- from intensive, hands-on management
dling of the initial occupation. But of Iraq’s complex political scene.

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 Blundering Into Baghdad

The diplomatic and legal intricacies sectarian tensions after Iraq’s disputed
of the episode were considerable, but elections in 2010, would have had
studies by journalists, scholars, and several constructive effects. It would
participants show that Obama prob- have shored up Iraqi capabilities,
ably could have had a longer-term buoyed the self-confidence of Iraqi
U.S. presence had he wanted one. forces, mitigated the politicization of
Withdrawal had devastating conse- the country’s elite Counter Terrorism
quences. The pullout removed shock Service, and provided a combination
absorbers between Iraqi political fac- of reassurance and leverage in dealing
tions and left Prime Minister Nouri with the difficult Maliki. If nothing
al-Maliki free to indulge his most else, a U.S. presence of that size would
sectarian instincts. It helped a nearly have given Washington the ability and
vanquished al Qaeda in Iraq reemerge foreknowledge required to carry out
as the Islamic State (also known as counterterrorism strikes before ISIS
ISIS) while denying Washington the had gained critical momentum.
intelligence footprint that would have What is undoubtedly true is that
provided greater early warning of the by pulling back from Iraq, militarily
threat. It ultimately contributed to a and diplomatically, the United States
catastrophic collapse of Iraqi secu- lost its ability to preserve the fragile
rity and a terrorist rampage across but hopeful trends that had emerged
a third of the country, which led to there. The conviction that Iraq was a
another U.S. military intervention dumb war, a lost war, helped deprive
and caused many of the same baleful the United States of a chance to win it.
consequences—distraction from other
priorities, revitalization of the global IRAQ ’ S LONG SHADOW
jihadist movement, increased Iranian What lessons should the United States
influence in Iraq, global doubts about draw from its Iraq saga? Obama offered
Washington’s competence and judg- the pithiest answer: “Don’t do stupid
ment—that Obama rightly argued shit.” Washington should avoid wars
Bush’s war had caused. of regime change and occupation, limit
As ISIS advanced to within an hour’s military involvement in the Middle
drive from Baghdad in 2014, another East, and accept that hard problems
angry debate erupted over whether must be managed rather than solved.
the U.S. withdrawal was to blame. It That is the same message conveyed,
is impossible to say with certainty, and less colorfully, in the Biden adminis-
even an educated guess depends on the tration’s National Security Strategy,
size and composition of the force one released in October 2022.
assumes the United States would have At first glance, who can argue? The
left behind. Yet it seems likely that a Iraq war shows the difficulties asso-
force of 10,000 to 20,000 troops (the ciated with toppling hostile regimes
number that U.S. and Iraqi officials and implanting democratic alter-
considered plausible when negotia- natives. The complexities of such
tions began), combined with greater missions are often greater, and the
political engagement to dampen price higher, than they initially seem.

March / april 2023 183

 Hal Brands

Indeed, the arc of U.S. involvement much. If the Iraq war teaches any-
in Iraq—invading the country, then thing, it is that U.S. strategy is often
underinvesting in its stabilization, a balancing act between underreach
then withdrawing prematurely after and overreach and that there is no
things had turned around—may show single formula that can allow the
that these missions require a mix of United States to avoid one danger
patience and commitment that even a without courting the other.
superpower struggles to muster. The war also teaches the impor-
The trouble is that the same maxim, tance of learning and adapting after
if applied in earlier eras, would have initial mistakes. It is not unusual in
precluded some of the United States’ the U.S. experience: the real Ameri-
greatest foreign policy successes, such can way of war is to start slowly and
as the post–World War II transfor- make lots of deadly errors. When
mation of Japan and Germany. In the debacles turn into victories, as was
same vein, a long-term nation-building the case in the U.S. Civil War, both
program, underpinned by U.S. troops, world wars, and many other conflicts,
helped produce the South Korean mir- it is because Washington eventually
acle; post–Cold War interventions in masters a steeper learning curve than
Panama and the Balkans succeeded far the adversary while gradually bring-
more than they failed. Ambitious mil- ing its tremendous might to bear. The
itary campaigns do not always end in nice thing about being a superpower is
sorrow. Some have backfired; some have that even the most tragic and harm-
helped produce the remarkably vibrant, ful blunders are rarely fatal. How one
democratic world we inhabit today. recovers from mistakes that inevitably
The “no more Iraqs” mindset car- occur in war thus matters a great deal.
ries other dangers, as well. In an ideal But learning any lessons from Iraq
world, Washington would surely requires taking the messy history of
love to abandon an unstable Middle that war seriously. Accusations that
East. Yet it cannot because it still has neoconservatives, the foreign policy
important interests there, from coun- “blob,” or the Israel lobby are to blame
terterrorism to ensuring the smooth for American misadventures are echoes
functioning of the global energy mar- of the charges that bankers, merchants,
ket. A stubborn resistance to Middle and the British drew Washington into
Eastern wars might help avoid future World War I. These arguments may be
quagmires. Or as Obama discovered, ideologically convenient, but they do
it might lead to episodes in which not reveal much about why the United
violent upheaval builds, U.S. inter- States behaves as it does—and how
ests are threatened, and Washington intelligent, well-meaning policymakers
intervenes later, from a worse position sometimes go so badly astray. Good
and at a higher price. history offers no guarantee that the
The truth is that stupid comes United States will get the next set of
in many flavors. It includes unwise national security decisions right. But
interventions and hasty withdrawals, bad history surely increases the odds
too little assertiveness as well as too of getting them wrong.

184 foreign affairs

 Return to Table of Contents

Recent Books

Political and Legal offered them a blueprint for dealing

with the opportunities and miseries
G. John Ikenberry of modernity. The abiding appeal of
ideologies rests in how they present
a grand narrative of where the world
Ideological Fixation: From the Stone is going. Like the classical religions,
Age to Today’s Culture Wars they grant a glimpse of salvation. But,
By Azar Gat. Oxford University Gat warns, ideology is a double-edged
Press, 2022, 352 pp. sword: it is a necessary tool to navi-
gate the uncertainties and complex-

O
nly a few decades ago, some ities of modern life, but it can easily
observers saw “the end of his- become a dangerous “fixation” and a
tory” in the triumph of West- tool of political warfare.
ern liberalism and the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Today, however, the
clash of ideologies has returned with The Triumph of Broken Promises:
a vengeance. In this deeply probing The End of the Cold War and the
study, Gat explains why ideology is a Rise of Neoliberalism
necessary and deeply fraught feature By Fritz Bartel. Harvard
of the human condition. Philosophers University Press, 2022, 440 pp.
and scientists have long argued that
humans cannot fully grasp objective Why did the West win the Cold War?
reality. Ideology helps people under- In this powerful new interpretation,
stand the world, providing a frame Bartel argues that the struggle between
inside which the mind can produce democracy and communism was fun-
a picture of reality. Gat reaches back damentally a contest over which system
to the ancient past but dwells mostly of government could best harness
on the “secular religions”—liberal- industrial modernity to improve the
ism, socialism, and fascism—that lives of its people. The fateful moment
came to the fore with the rise of came in the 1970s, when economic and
industrial modernity. These ideolo- energy crises forced leaders in both the
gies sought to help people come to West and the East to shift from the
grips with a fast-changing world and “pursuit of plenty” to painful policies of

march/april 2023 185

 Recent Books

austerity and fiscal discipline. In these current rise of the global South.
new circumstances, capitalism and Today, however, that regime faces
state socialism competed over which threats from all directions. China
system could best navigate the disap- and Russia have worked to under-
pointment of citizens. In Bartel’s view, mine the global civil society groups
the Cold War ended because the Soviet that are the backbone of the human
system was simply unable to legitimate rights movement. The U.S.-Chinese
itself in an era of broken promises, rivalry has also sharpened the ideo-
whereas Western leaders were able to logical divide over the definition of
gain support for their austerity moves human rights and spilled into various
under the banner of neoliberalism. The UN venues. Populist politics in coun-
book’s originality lies in how it weaves tries such as Brazil, the Philippines,
together Soviet leader Mikhail Gor- Uganda, and even the United States
bachev’s program of reform, known have weakened the commitment of
as perestroika, and the conservative these states to human rights norms.
economic turn under U.S. President The authors offer an extensive set of
Ronald Reagan and British Prime recommendations for how to push
Minister Margaret Thatcher. Bartel back, insisting that the protection of
demonstrates that the Cold War was human rights can improve the lives
defined not just by military power and of people everywhere.
security competition but also by less
visible struggles within the opposing
camps to renegotiate their versions of Racism, Diplomacy, and
the social contract. International Relations
By Ko Unoki. Routledge, 2022,
282 pp.
Reclaiming Human Rights in a
Changing World Order Traditional theories of world politics
Edited by Christopher have mostly avoided or suppressed
Sabatini. Brookings, 2022, 386 pp. discussions of race and racism, focus-
ing instead on concepts such as power,
The rise of the post–World War II interests, sovereignty, and the nation-
international human rights regime is state. Unoki argues that without con-
one of the great achievements of the siderations of race, the field is incomplete.
modern era. But today that regime— Race and racism have always lurked
rules, processes, and institutions in the shadows of diplomacy and war.
anchored in the United Nations and He argues that racist ideas were deeply
the Universal Declaration of Human embedded in the rise of the West-
Rights—is in trouble. Sabatini, the ern great powers and the modern
editor of this impressive volume of state system, as well as in the writ-
essays, argues that this regime has ings of influential political figures
been strikingly resilient, surviving and intellectuals. Across the world,
the Cold War, the unipolar domi- race has defined identities, political
nance of the United States, and the boundaries, and social hierarchies.

186 foreign affairs

 Recent Books

The West did not invent empire or trade. Tucker’s book, completed
imperialism, but Unoki makes the before the release of that document,
case that race was an elemental fea- asks how democracies should deal
ture of Western imperialism in Asia with illiberal states while upholding
and Africa. Since the politics of the their own political and economic val-
modern world has been so fundamen- ues. He argues for cooperation among
tally influenced by race and racism, liberal states and for maintaining
Unoki finds it curious that academic economic distance from states on the
theorists do not give it more weight other side of the ideological divide.
in their research and teaching. The Concretely, this means “friend shor-
book’s most instructive example of the ing”: that is, relying on like-minded
role of race in international affairs is countries for imports and finance.
the long U.S. relationship with Japan, Tucker argues that the legitimacy of
revealing the complexities and limits an international economic system
of racism as a driving force. Although must ultimately rest on shared val-
Americans often viewed Japan nega- ues and on the responsiveness of its
tively, through a prism of Christianity institutions to the priorities of states
and white supremacy, they also recog- that uphold those values. He urges
nized the interests and political values the reform of the World Trade Orga-
they shared with Japanese people. nization, which currently operates
through the dictates of all-powerful
judges; of the International Mone-
tary Fund, which has weakened its
Economic, Social, legitimacy by straying from its core
and Environmental mission of supporting countries with
weak finances; and of the Bank for
Barry Eichengreen International Settlements, which
continues to extend privileged access
to the titans of global finance.
Global Discord: Values and Power
in a Fractured World Order
By Paul Tucker. Princeton The Long Shadow of Default:
University Press, 2022, 552 pp. Britain’s Unpaid War Debts to the
United States, 1917–2020

T
he Biden administration’s By David James Gill. Yale
October 2022 National University Press, 2022, 416 pp.
Security Strategy identified
China as a strategic competitor. That In this thought-provoking book, Gill
designation motivated Washington’s recounts the forgotten history of the
ban on exports to China of advanced United Kingdom’s 1934 default on
semiconductor designs and equip- its World War I debts to the United
ment, a measure that seems at odds States. One of the largest payment
with American values of economic suspensions in history, this episode is
liberalism and open international typically omitted from scholars’ lists

march/april 2023 187

 Recent Books

of sovereign debt defaults because it

was soon overtaken by World War II. The Cashless Revolution: China’s
Gill explains why the United Kingdom Reinvention of Money and the End
was the last country to suspend pay- of America’s Domination of Finance
ments, explaining that it would have and Technology
been difficult for the British govern- By Martin Chorzempa.
ment to stop meeting its debt service PublicAffairs, 2022, 320 pp.
obligations while insisting that British
households and firms keep repaying Chorzempa charts the rise and fall of
their debts. A default would also have economic reformers in the Chinese
created diplomatic difficulties at a time Communist Party through the lens
when the country was cultivating its of financial technology. The upstart
relations with the United States. But e-commerce and social-media com-
the British default happened anyway, panies Ant and WeChat developed
with significant consequences. Under payment “super-apps” Alipay and
the provisions of the Johnson Act of WeChatPay, respectively, as central
1934, which banned U.S. lending to elements of their business models.
governments in arrears, London lost Reform-minded officials, such as cen-
access to U.S. securities and money tral bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan, saw
markets. This, in turn, weakened the these innovations as a way of freeing the
United Kingdom’s ability to wage war Chinese economy from the dead hand of
against Germany. In 1945, the U.S. the banks. These super-apps combined
Congress terminated Lend-Lease, its making payments with other services;
World War II–era program of mili- their universal adoption brought vast
tary and economic aid to allies, early power to their parent companies and vast
because of lingering U.S. resentment wealth to their founders. Eventually, that
over the British default. The issue power and wealth, together with the rise
resurfaced in 1973, when members of of the economic traditionalist Chinese
Congress sponsored a bill instructing leader Xi Jinping, sparked a backlash.
the Treasury Department to pursue Officials cracked down on the founders
repayment of the World War I–era and their creations and even appropriated
debt. Gill makes a cogent case, as he their technology and data. For instance,
puts it in his title, that this history casts local governments used Alipay’s loca-
a long shadow. tion data and algorithms to determine
who was at risk of COVID-19 exposure;
authorities used the super-app to send
the dreaded “red code” that mandated a
two-week quarantine. Chorzempa sug-
gests that China’s commitment to issuing
a central bank digital currency should be
understood as an effort to replace these
private payments platforms altogether
and put tracking and predictive power
in the hands of the central government.

188 foreign affairs

 Recent Books

The United States vs. China: The Quest Chip War: The Fight for the
for Global Economic Leadership World’s Most Critical Technology
By C. Fred Bergsten. Polity, By Chris Miller. Scribner,
2022, 384 pp. 2022, 464 pp.

Many observers despair of the pros- At once edifying and entertaining,

pects for broad economic cooperation Miller’s book traces the history of the
between the United States and China. global semiconductor industry. Early
Not Bergsten. He offers a vision of on, firms producing semiconductors
“conditional cooperation” between depended on demand for their prod-
the two countries, in which their ucts from the U.S. defense and military
governments jointly lead the global establishment. Now, by contrast, that
economic order. Washington would defense establishment depends on the
acknowledge Beijing’s co-leadership; chip industry for critical strategic and
in return, China would accept the battlefield capabilities. Over time, the
responsibilities accompanying such decisions of charismatic entrepreneurs
a position. The two countries could and less charismatic government offi-
then collaborate on issues of systemic cials combined to produce the current
importance, such as maintaining an international division of labor, whereby
open global economic order. Doing advanced chip design is carried out in
so will require decoupling the eco- the United States; essential manufac-
nomic dimension of their relationship turing equipment is produced in Japan,
from other, more contentious subjects, the Netherlands, and the United States;
such as security. Bergsten recommends and over a fifth of all chip fabrication
that the countries join one another’s happens in Taiwan—a place that, as a
regional trade arrangements and reha- result, has become an economic and
bilitate the World Trade Organization geopolitical flash point. “Chip war”
and advocates that China be granted now characterizes the U.S.-Chinese
a louder voice in the World Bank and rivalry, with Beijing seeking to build
International Monetary Fund. The up design and manufacturing capabil-
two countries can best work together ities and Washington hoping to slow
in areas where no clear rules and insti- China’s progress. Miller is a fluent
tutions exist, including climate change, narrator, but he finalized the book
cybersecurity, and international invest- before recent shifts in U.S. policy,
ment. Some readers may dismiss these which seek to deny China advanced
recommendations as unrealistic in the chip-making technology. He deliv-
present geopolitical climate. But Berg- ers no verdict on whether U.S. export
sten makes a compelling case that the controls will succeed in containing the
risks associated with a leaderless global rise of China’s semiconductor industry
economy, or worse, one where China or whether they will only spur China
and the United States are at each oth- to further support the industry and
er’s throats, should get the two govern- maybe even lead it to move aggres-
ments to pursue his agenda. sively against Taiwan.

march/april 2023 189

 Recent Books

Military, Scientific, the English fleet, but English tactics

prevailed. Instead of boarding enemy
and Technological ships,as the Spanish sought to do, the
English bombarded their opponents
Lawrence D. Freedman at close range, helped by their abil-
ity to quickly reload guns midbattle.
English attacks scattered the armada,
Armada: The Spanish Enterprise and which was driven into the North Sea
England’s Deliverance in 1588 and then obliged to return to Spain,
By Colin Martin and Geoffrey suffering numerous shipwrecks and
Parker. Yale University Press, 2023, catastrophic losses.
768 pp. During the Napoleonic Wars in the
first decades of the nineteenth cen-
Convoys: The British Struggle Against tury, the Royal Navy had to protect
Napoleonic Europe and America the United Kingdom’s overseas trade
By Roger Knight. Yale University in order to keep the country supplied
Press, 2022, 416 pp. and able to wage war against France.
Knight’s focus is not on the great

T
wo new books chronicle Brit- naval battles such as Trafalgar, in 1805,
ish naval successes against but instead on the work of convoys,
foreign adversaries. Martin the large fleets of merchant and naval
and Parker’s superb account of the vessels that traveled across the world
ill-fated Spanish effort to invade to and from British ports and were
England in 1588 is remarkable in essential to the British military vic-
its level of detail, drawing on naval tory. It is a fascinating story well told,
archeology and manuscripts to pro- for Knight is not only impressed by
vide a full and vivid history. Readers the commitment, discipline, and sea-
can follow the decision-making of manship that made the convoys pos-
the Spanish King Philip II and grasp sible but also under no illusion about
the complexity of his motivations, his the misery of life on these ships and
deep religious conviction entangled the rancor between ship owners, the
with geopolitical and dynastic imper- Royal Navy, and their insurers. The
atives. The Spanish monarch wanted losses were heavy and constant, with
to overthrow his English counterpart, ships regularly seized and their sailors
Queen Elizabeth, and return England killed or taken prisoner. But as with
to Catholicism. To do so, he planned the armada, the weather was the main
to move his armada of roughly 130 killer; storms battered ships and often
ships into position in the English drove them onto rocks.
Channel to escort an invading force of
30,000 troops gathered by the Duke
of Parma in Flanders. Almost from
the start of the expedition, the armada
faced stormy weather. It managed to
reach the Channel and face off with

190 foreign affairs

 Recent Books

Western AI specialists to avoid becoming

Four Battlegrounds: Power in the complicit in that project.
Age of Artificial Intelligence Jensen, W hy te, and Cuomo’s
By Paul Scharre. Norton, thought-provoking book is less about
2023, 496 pp. the promise of the military uses of AI and
more about why that promise may not be
Information in War: Military realized. They argue that new technolo-
Innovation, Battle Networks, and the gies succeed when they fit into existing
Future of Artificial Intelligence institutional structures and when they
By Benjamin M. Jensen, have advocates who can explain how
Christopher Whyte, and they might make possible new forms of
Scott Cuomo. Georgetown warfare. The authors’ analysis rests on
University Press, 2022, 266 pp. full studies of information technologies
that have been adopted unevenly by dif-
Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, ferent countries and different military
is not an easy topic to write about. The branches. For instance, the United King-
technology is developing at a rapid pace dom successfully deployed radar in time
in ways that lay audiences struggle to for World War II because it had the right
understand. Two new books ably take mix of personalities and a clear strategic
up the challenge. Scharre is a thoughtful, need for the technology; France and the
knowledgeable, and capable guide. He United States did not. The construc-
explains why AI matters and charts the tion in the 1950s of the semiautomatic
areas that will determine which coun- ground environment network, or SAGE, to
try gets the most out of its investments, manage U.S. defenses against a bomber
focusing on data collection, computing attack faced few institutional barriers.
power, talent, and the institutional struc- The studies on the revolution in military
tures able to harness AI technology to affairs of the 1990s and the development
real-world applications, including those of the “Global Battle Network,” which
in military tactics and strategy. Artificial combined intelligence sensors with
intelligence is now considered to be one armed remotely piloted aircraft, explore
of the most important areas of compe- the mixed results of the experimentation
tition between the United States and of recent times, with the U.S. Army get-
China, one in which the United States ting higher marks for innovation than
currently has a lead. That advantage the Marine Corps.
cannot be taken for granted; Scharre
urges more cooperation among democ-
racies and recommends export controls Atomic Bill: A Journalist’s Dangerous
to limit Chinese technological devel- Ambition in the Shadow of the Bomb
opment. In this respect, AI poses a test By Vincent Kiernan. Three Hills,
of two systems: the more chaotic and 2022, 312 pp.
disaggregated U.S. model against the
centralized Chinese model. The Chinese Bill Laurence, a science reporter for The
government wants to use AI to better New York Times, was asked to join the
engineer social control, and Scharre asks Manhattan Project in its final months,

march/april 2023 191

 Recent Books

through the July 1945 Trinity Test and For decades, he was one of the most
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki admired men in the United States, but
in August 1945, to help draft the project’s within a few years of his death became
official press communiqués. Thereafter, one of its most disgraced. His career
he traded on his reputation as both an at the top of a major government
eyewitness to and the first chronicler of agency spanned an incredible eight
these momentous events. He has not presidents—four Republicans and
been fortunate in his biographer. Kier- four Democrats—but he was more
nan’s research was meticulous, and he than just a masterful bureaucrat. He
finds much to deplore in Laurence’s was a skilled leader and an institution
behavior: the journalist’s zeal for specula- builder who virtually created the FBI,
tive scientific breakthroughs that led him modernized and professionalized it,
to ignore skeptics; his exaggerated prose and never gave less than total dedica-
and occasional plagiarism; and most of tion to his work. On the other hand,
all, his loss of objectivity from getting too his personal life did not come close
close to power. Laurence did not tell the to meeting the standards he insisted
whole story about the bomb, including on for the thousands who worked for
the effects of radiation. The indictment is him. Although he preached devotion
compelling, although reporting during a to the law, the revelations of the Sen-
war, as any frontline correspondent could ate’s Church Committee showed that
testify, is always full of ethical traps. he freely ignored due process and reg-
ularly ordered his agents to commit
illegal acts. He was openly racist but
The United States was known for many years as a pro-
tector of civil liberties. He had many
Jessica T. Mathews triumphs against gangsters, Nazis, and
especially communists, contributing
enormously to the country’s secu-
G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the rity. But when his primary attention
Making of the American Century turned to the civil rights movement
By Beverly Gage. Viking, and Vietnam War protests, he allowed
2022, 864 pp. personal grudges to become obses-
sions and turned increasingly to sordid
The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How acts of secret surveillance, infiltration,
the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of manipulation, and distortion, perhaps
White Christian Nationalism most egregiously in the case of Martin
By Lerone A. Martin. Princeton Luther King, Jr. Gage deftly treads
University Press, 2023, 352 pp. this shifting ground, covering the key
events of an unparalleled career and

T
wo new books explore the making full use of newly available
life and times of J. Edgar archival material.
Hoover. The FBI director Martin adds an important new
was a font of contradictions, posing aspect to Hoover’s story, also based
an unusual challenge for a biographer. largely on newly released material,

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 Recent Books

showing how he played a large role

in the rise of conservative, white, male, The Aftermath: The Last Days
Christian nationalism—what the FBI of the Baby Boom and the Future of
director called “Americanism.” The Power in America
FBI’s purpose, in his words, was to By Philip Bump. Viking, 2023,
“defend and perpetuate the dignity of 416 pp.
the Nation’s Christian endowment.”
He used a stable of FBI agents on the Generation Gap: Why the Baby
public payroll to write and to ghost- Boomers Still Dominate American
write for him essays that ran as lead Politics and Culture
articles in Billy Graham’s Christianity By Kevin Munger. Columbia
Today (a journal whose readership far University Press, 2022, 216 pp.
exceeded that of William F. Buckley’s
National Review). These writings were Nonverts: The Making of
preached, sometimes verbatim, from Ex-Christian America
pulpits. Hoover had them reprinted By Stephen Bullivant. Oxford
on Department of Justice letterhead— University Press, 2022, 272 pp.
embossed with the FBI emblem and
the notation “Reprinted from Chris- Three books chart significant portentous
tianity Today,” fusing the three insti- demographic trends underway in the
tutions—and distributed by the tens United States. Bump and Munger both
of thousands. Preachers and the pub- deal with the tectonic demographic
lic wrote to the FBI for both religious shift embodied in the departure from
and political guidance, and received the scene of the baby boom genera-
answers. In training, FBI agents took tion even as it retains unprecedented
a pledge that began, “I shall, as a min- political, economic, and cultural power.
ister, seek to supply comfort, advice Bullivant writes about a quite different
and aid.” Martin argues that the per- demographic change, the rapid rise of
vasive use of a government agency so-called nonverts, individuals raised in
over many decades to promote this some religion who now identify as hav-
particular brand of evangelicalism has ing “no religion.” All three authors make
had lasting effects on national poli- a convincing case that the consequences
tics. It explains in part why evangelical of these shifts are likely to touch most
leaders have valued pragmatism and aspects of American life.
power over morality, and it left the FBI Baby boomers, the most dominant
unprepared for the threat that mani- generation in American history, were
fested in the January 6 riot at the U.S. born between 1946 and 1964 and today
Capitol. Whereas the Department of make up 23 percent of the population.
Homeland Security had recognized They have passed their peak in terms of
“white supremacist extremism” as the raw numbers, but their power continues
chief domestic terrorist threat a year to grow. Today, they constitute 38 per-
earlier, as a result of the decades under cent of voters and 43 percent of home-
Hoover, “white, Christian nationalism owners and own more than 50 percent
has a home within the FBI.” of the country’s wealth. Among them

march/april 2023 193

 Recent Books

are four of the country’s 46 presidents (Joe Why this rapid shift is happening is
Biden is too old to count as a boomer) unknown, as are its likely consequences.
and 58 percent of members of Congress. It would be odd, Bullivant believes, if a
(The average age of lawmakers in both segment of the U.S. “religious market”
houses is currently the oldest in history.) should suddenly expand so enormously
Boomers control all the country’s major and so rapidly “without it playing havoc”
institutions (except technology compa- with the areas of American life shaped by
nies), the two main political parties, and religion including, to name a few, family,
the mass media. Boomers are predomi- morality, identity, marriage, sex, race, eth-
nantly white, making age and race insep- nicity, and community. It should change,
arable factors and a source of confusion in as well, the national self-image, from its
analyses of the changes in progress. earliest days, as a “Christian nation.”
Both Bump and Munger foresee sig-
nificant generational conflict in coming
years with the smaller Generation X The Great Displacement:
population, born between 1965 and 1980, Climate Change and the Next
and the much larger cohort of Millenni- American Migration
als, born between 1981 and 1996. Bump By Jake Bittle. Simon & Schuster,
argues that the discrepancies in wealth 2023, 368 pp.
and political opinion among them are
“simply unsustainable.” Munger empha- Bittle has overcome the great difficulty
sizes the tension between the world in writing about environmental crises:
boomers grew up in and the penetration in many cases, the story becomes so
of revolutionary information technology depressing that readers turn away in
that “changes all the rules.” Both books despair. In this valuable, well-written
include many graphs, some quite com- book, which breaks new ground, he
plex, some staggering in their impact. seamlessly blends an expert, policy-level
Death is certain: beyond that the coming treatment of the causes and consequences
changes can only be sketched. Among of the displacement of Americans being
the more definite problems ahead is the driven by climate change with a narra-
question of how boomers’ jobs will be tive of the often heart-rending impacts
filled as the number reaching retirement on particular individuals. Although the
age peaks near the end of this decade. book’s subtitle uses “migration,” he notes
Growth or decline in religious obser- that that word implies an intentional
vation generally occurs over generations. movement from one place to another,
Something else is occurring in the United whereas what is happening is a diffuse
States. The increase over the last 30 years movement in many directions that is
of the number of those who have con- unpredictable and chaotic. Driven by
verted from some religion to none—now fire, floods, and heat, this “shambling
one in six Americans—is “wholly unprec- retreat from mountain ranges and flood-
edented.” Nearly all were brought up in prone riverbeds, back from the oceans,
a Christian denomination. “Nones” now and out of the desert” will “reshape the
account for 30 percent of American adults demographic geography” of the United
and 44 percent of those aged 18 to 29. States, pushing even more Americans

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into metropolitan areas, in which around centralizing and maintaining politi-

80 percent of the country already lives cal power. He has packed the supreme
(and making the U.S. Senate even less court, rewritten the constitution, given
reflective of the country than it already government officials more discretion,
is). The economic impacts beyond the nationalized substantial portions of the
housing market will be felt in enterprises economy, and eroded human rights, fair
from meatpacking to outdoor theme elections, and checks and balances. Ram-
parks. Bittle shows where government pant corruption favors Orban’s cronies,
policy and the shortcomings of private and Fidesz controls, directly or indirectly,
markets have made a now unavoidable nearly 80 percent of the national media.
problem worse, and he addresses some Orban justifies his power grab through
of the changes that need to be made, criticisms of “the deep state,” praises
especially in the mortgage and insur- “illiberalism” and President Vladimir
ance markets, and the urgent need for a Putin of Russia, and deploys virulently
national plan for adapting to (as opposed anti-EU, anti-immigrant, and anti-gay
to slowing) climate change. rhetoric. Missing from Szelenyi’s analysis
is a convincing description of how and
why this extreme-right mix of electoral
Western Europe manipulation, media control, and eco-
nomic inducements has been so uniquely
Andrew Moravcsik effective in Hungary. But for readers
seeking a balanced analysis of Hungary’s
recent political evolution, this is the one.
Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orban and
the Subversion of Hungary
By Zsuzsanna Szelenyi. Hurst, Winston Churchill:
2022, 352 pp. His Times, His Crimes
By Tariq Ali. Verso, 2022, 448 pp.

H
ungary’s trajectory in the past
decade under President Viktor Ali is a legendary figure on the British
Orban illustrates how right- left: born in Lahore, Pakistan, he rose
wing populist nationalism can erode to prominence in the United Kingdom
liberal democracy from within. Szelenyi of the 1960s, which he spent preaching
describes that slide with balance, detail, Marxism and hanging out with John
and compelling authority, for she began Lennon and Mick Jagger. Since then,
her political career in the 1980s as a he has published around 50 books,
leading member of Orban’s own Fidesz mostly radical critiques of the conser-
Party—which at the time offered a lib- vative establishment. In this one, he
eral democratic alternative to commu- shows that Winston Churchill’s brave
nism in Hungary. By the early 2010s, resistance as British prime minister in
however, Szelenyi had turned against World War II was an exception. The rest
Orban. The Hungarian president is fol- of Churchill’s half century in public
lowing what she terms a “twenty-first life involved advocating reactionary and
century autocratic playbook” aimed at often foolhardy policies. He militantly

march/april 2023 195

 Recent Books

defended the British Empire, which they evenhandedly explain how this
led him to massacre national liberation conflict unfolded, and why the United
fighters in places as disparate as India, Kingdom, the United States, the EU, and
Ireland, and Kenya. He justified such the UN have not been able resolve [Link]
atrocities by explicitly espousing white propose a confederal solution, whereby
supremacism. He admired the Italian Cyprus unifies under a decentralized
dictator Benito Mussolini and coddled government, with absolute guarantees
the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. of minority rights. To break the current
He bombed German civilians and advo- logjam, they argue, the UN must threaten
cated a nuclear first strike, not just against to leave in six months and then impose
Japan in World War II but against the a choice on Greek Cypriots between
Soviet Union in peacetime. He ignored confederal unity or independence for
pleas from his own government to Northern Cyprus. Risky, perhaps, but if
address humanitarian crises, such as the such a decentralized arrangement works
Bengal famine of 1943, in which three for Canada, why not Cyprus?
million people perished. He abhorred
social democratic values, resisted the
social welfare state, and used the army Scotland: The Global History,
to repress striking workers. All this is well 1603 to the Present
known, yet Ali’s examination remains an By Murray Pittock. Yale
important corrective to the hagiographic University Press, 2022, 512 pp.
praise that Churchill receives to this day.
To understand why so many in Scotland
support independence today, one must
Cyprus: An Ancient People, a Troubled understand the nation’s history. In this
History, and One Last Chance for Peace book, a distinguished Scottish historian
By Lawrence Stevenson and offers a vivid, if perhaps overly detailed,
Glynnis Stevenson. Sutherland account of the remarkable successes
House, 2022, 280 pp. Scots have enjoyed through the centuries
in science, literature, art, business, and
Cyprus is home to a frozen conflict. The soldiering. He attributes this record of
country’s civil war flared hot and then achievement mostly to Scotland’s superb
cooled for a half century, leaving the education system. Yet to use their knowl-
island divided into one half that sits inside edge, most of its well-trained graduates
the EU and another that remains under had to emigrate from their economically
increasing Turkish influence. United stagnant homeland. Two hundred years
Nations peacekeepers have now been ago, Scots composed a quarter of Brit-
there for almost 60 years. The authors ons and a fifth of Americans, and they
of this book—two Canadians, one hav- could be found in substantial numbers
ing logged two tours as a UN peacekeeper elsewhere. Today, however, the country
in Cyprus, and the other, his daughter, has declined demographically and been
a professional historian—bring unique surpassed by other countries in educa-
experience and extensive interview data tional excellence. Scots remain attached
to the issue. Rather than taking sides, to their past: the romantic history, vivid

196 foreign affairs

 Recent Books

landscape, and distinctive regional tra- regulatory clout can help it become an
ditions. The book’s conclusion expresses independent global competitor, a junior
the hope that this attachment will be partner in a transatlantic alliance, or the
enough to make independence viable object of manipulation by China and
and attractive, yet it offers few concrete the United States. This book’s survey is
reasons to believe it will be. a good starting point to understanding
Europe’s current efforts to secure a place
in the future global economy.
EU Industrial Policy in the
Multipolar Economy
Edited by Jean-Christophe The Lost Future: And How to Reclaim It
Defraigne, Jan Wouters, By Jan Zielonka. Yale University
Edoardo Traversa, and Dimi- Press, 2023, 288 pp.
tri Zurstrassen. Edward Elgar,
2022, 446 pp. This book argues that the world faces
unprecedentedly rapid and complex
In today’s global economy, high-tech change that existing political institu-
rivalries, the transition to a green econ- tions are too slow and too weak to man-
omy, and security concerns have encour- age effectively. Politics simply protects
aged more and more countries to expand parochial and backward-looking interest
government intervention in industry. groups and opinions. Zielonka tries to
Although many observers focus on the transcend this familiar trope through
United States and China, the EU is eco- an engaging, if sometimes meandering,
nomically comparable in size to both reflection on “space and time,” written
countries. In an increasingly multipolar in the style of business journalism and
world, the policies Europeans adopt may peppered with political cartoons. In it,
be decisive for the future of the global he summarizes several generations of
economy. Most analysts are pessimistic, scholarly thinking about the difficult
given that the member states of the EU task of governing swift social and tech-
have failed to create the effective, cen- nological change. Yet the book ends with
tralized institutions they would need to no more than a few pages of what he
manage such a policy at a continental wryly terms “half-hearted” proposals for
scale. But these authors point to a silver the future, which amount to something
lining. Centralized subsidy policies no very much like the international system
longer really work, except where govern- that has existed since 1945: nation-states
ments buy the output—as happens in the would remain the primary actors, linked
areas of transport, energy, and military by international networks of gover-
arms production. Instead, key Euro- nance rather than strict hierarchies. If
pean interventions take the shape of the such familiar forms of politics can and
imposition of antitrust policy, regulatory should be made more enlightened, cos-
standards, coordinated trade policy, and mopolitan, and farsighted—and are
supply chain management—and here the to prevail over the vested interests the
EU wields much geo-economic power. author rightly condemns—another book
It remains to be seen whether Europe’s must explain how.

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Western Hemisphere experience rejection, isolation, and

dreadful anxiety; some developed a
Richard Feinberg lasting hostility toward U.S. society
and institutions. As arrestingly por-
trayed in several vignettes, even those
Somewhere We Are Human: immigrants who successfully climb
Authentic Voices on Migration, the career ladder may harbor a great
Survival, and New Beginnings deal of guilt and shame and feel that
Edited by Reyna Grande and they have never fully belonged to the
Sonia GuiÑansaca. HarperVia, United States. Contributors also often
2022, 376 pp. have contradictory feelings about
their homelands: they remember the
Solito: A Memoir warmth of family but also recall debil-
By Javier Zamora. Hogarth, itating poverty and demeaning social
2022, 400 pp. hierarchies. A few return to these
countries only to discover that time
You Know Who You Are: Recent has erased the homes and communi-
Acquisitions of Cuban Art From the ties frozen in their memories.
Jorge M. Pérez Collection Zamora’s deeply moving, highly
Catalog of the exhibition at personal memoir details his arduous,
El Espacio 23. El Espacio 23, 2022. heroic trek, at age nine, over seven
long weeks in 1999, from El Salvador

E
very day, desperate, determined through Guatemala and Mexico to
Latin Americans attempt to Tucson, Arizona. A top student at a
cross the United States’ south- good Catholic school, Zamora was
ern border in search of economic not among the poorest of the poor;
opportunity and political security. rather, he journeyed to the United
Three recent books reveal how such States to reunite with his parents, who
migrants are making their voices heard lived undocumented in California.
in literature and the visual arts. He undertook his treacherous odys-
Somewhere We Are Human is an sey more or less on his own and most
extraordinary anthology of short, largely likely would not have survived with-
autobiographical essays by undocu- out the loving compassion of other
mented and formerly undocumented migrants who took him under their
immigrants, mostly from Latin America wings. In this Homeric epic, Zamora
and the Caribbean. The stories add to graphically describes the many daunt-
a rapidly expanding body of literature ing obstacles migrants must overcome,
that explores the stresses and oppor- including the extreme, blistering
tunities of the migrant experience. weather of the Sonoran Desert; the
Many accounts record the psycholog- corrupt, brutal Mexican military; and
ical trauma experienced at the hands of the pitiless U.S. border patrol agents
the muddled, understaffed, and often (the “Migra”). The overcrowded,
cruel U.S. immigration system. Hiding degrading detention centers are espe-
in the shadows of illegality, the authors cially traumatizing. The professional

198 foreign affairs

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smugglers (“coyotes” and polleros, or

“chicken herders”) work with busi- The Chile Project: The Story of the
nesslike efficiency in Guatemala and Chicago Boys and the Downfall of
Mexico but prove to be less reliable at Neoliberalism
getting their cargo across the U.S. bor- By Sebastian Edwards. Princeton
der; Zamora had to attempt multiple University Press, 2023, 376 pp.
crossings. He makes no effort to ana-
lyze U.S. immigration policies, but his At the height of the Cold War, the
American readers will surely feel that far-right economics department of the
there must be better, more humane University of Chicago, with the sup-
ways to safeguard the southern border. port of the U.S. government, recruited
As evident in You Know Who You Are, students from then democratic Chile.
the catalog of an extensive exhibition When General Augusto Pinochet
at the Espacio 23 museum in Miami, seized power in 1973, he hired these
Cuban artists have long explored “Chicago boys” to apply their extreme
the trials and promise of migration. free-market fundamentalism to the
Standout works include Abel Bar- Chilean economy. Remarkably, the
roso’s humorous wooden sculptures left-of-center democratic govern-
wryly satirizing the Kafkaesque U.S. ments that succeeded Pinochet ’s
immigration system. René Francisco regime after 1990 maintained many of
Rodríguez and Luis Cruz Azaceta con- those market-friendly prescriptions.
template the mortal dangers encoun- Edwards, a Chilean-born economist
tered by migrants braving the Florida with a Ph.D. from the University of
Straits. With stark simplicity, Julio Chicago, narrates a fascinating insider
Larraz captures the duality of the blue intellectual history of the policies and
seas, as both path and barrier, while personalities behind Chile’s economic
also suggesting the nostalgia of the development in recent decades. But he
departed and the longings of those who struggles to explain the unanticipated
remain. Enrique Martínez Celaya, Iván popular uprising in 2019 against this
Capote, and William Osorio visualize doctrinal “neoliberalism” with which
the pathos of family separation and he largely sympathizes. Although the
of memories fragmented over space economic model had generated strong
and time. Other noteworthy paint- growth, reduced extreme poverty, and
ings are by Wifredo Lam, justifiably expanded the middle class, Edwards
renowned for blending exuberant trop- now finds that many policymakers
ical motifs with European cubism and neglected stark, persistent inequali-
surrealism, and by Belkis Ayón, who ties; corporate collusion had eroded
dramatically explores gender, race, and free-market competition; and pub-
Afro-Caribbean rituals. The exhibi- lic policy may have gone too far in
tion amply demonstrates the technical interjecting market competition into
virtuosity and revelatory insight of a education, health care, and retirement
host of graduates of top-tier Cuban pensions. Looking forward, Edwards
arts academies who have gone on to suggests that Chile may yet find a
work both on the island and abroad. more sustainable middle road as a

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 Recent Books

European-style social democracy, with

less spectacular economic growth but
Eastern Europe
greater social cohesion. and Former Soviet
Republics
Banzeiro Okoto: The Amazon Maria Lipman
as the Center of the World
By Eliane Brum. translated by
Diane Whitty. Graywolf, The Empress and the English Doctor:
2023, 408 pp. How Catherine the Great Defied a
Deadly Virus
A Brazilian investigative journalist BY LUCY WARD. Oneworld,
and a 2021 winner of the prestigious 2022, 352 pp.
Maria Moors Cabot Prize for journal-

B
ism in Latin America, Brum comes y 1980, the global smallpox vacci-
out guns blazing in this sardonic, nation campaign had resulted in
polemical work. She denounces the the complete eradication of the
dark forces annihilating the Amazon deadly disease. Ward’s captivating and
Basin and its remaining Indigenous informative book relates events that took
peoples: industrial and commercial place two centuries earlier and laid the
capitalism, white patriarchy, big min- foundation of this unique achievement.
ing companies, hydroelectric projects, In 1768, the Russian Empress Cather-
and predatory, reactionary Brazilians ine the Great invited the English doctor
as exemplified by former President Thomas Dimsdale to Russia to inoculate
Jair Bolsonaro. Critical of “European her and her teenage son, the heir to the
ways” of thinking and what she per- throne. Catherine was the first monarch
ceives as the flaws of Enlightenment to be inoculated against smallpox, at a
reasoning, Brum has relocated to an time when none of her European peers
Amazonian city and embraced what were willing to take the risk. (Smallpox
sometimes comes across as a roman- killed five reigning European rulers in
ticized animism. She never spells out the eighteenth century.) Both Catherine
what it would mean, in concrete policy and her doctor were ardent proponents
terms, to place the Amazon at “the of the Enlightenment; both believed
center of the world.” But Brum is a in science and valued persuasion over
powerful, poetic voice for those envi- coercion; and both worked tirelessly to
ronmental activists struggling to resist, overcome people’s prejudices and super-
before it is too late, the further degra- stitions. Catherine used the power of her
dation of her life-affirming Amazon. own example to encourage inoculation
across her empire. The doctor, inspired
by a vision of the wholesale eradica-
tion of smallpox, published treatises
to popularize his methods and cam-
paigned to extend smallpox inoculation
to the poor. Catherine granted him the

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hereditary title of baron and showered

him with gifts. They remained friends The Shortest History of the Soviet Union
even after he returned to England. In 1781, BY SHEILA FITZPATRICK.
Catherine brought him back to Russia Columbia University Press,
to inoculate her two young grandsons. 2022, 256 pp.

Fitzpatrick, a doyenne of Soviet his-

Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya torians, offers the lay reader a concise,
to Ukraine chronological account of the Soviet
BY MARK GALEOTTI. Osprey, Union premised on the notion that
2022, 384 pp. accidents, rather than inevitabilities,
drive human history. In 1917, Vladi-
Galeotti compiles an encyclopedic study mir Lenin’s takeover of the Russian
of the Russian armed forces. Based Empire came as a surprise even to the
on meticulous research, which he says Bolsheviks. Just as unexpected was the
includes “some 30 years of interacting Soviet Union’s end, a dissolution that
with soldiers,” he traces the evolution embarrassed the Sovietologists who
of the Russian military from its steep failed to predict it. Following Marx-
decline following the collapse of the ist precepts, the Bolsheviks declared
Soviet Union and the subsequent humil- they were building a dictatorship of
iation of the first Chechen war (fought the proletariat, but their state quickly
between 1994 and 1996) through the mil- evolved into the dictatorship of the
itary reforms carried out during Russian Communist Party. This arrangement
President Vladimir Putin’s rule. Those remained unchanged until the late
keen on martial matters will appreciate 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s
the in-depth examination of Russia’s mil- attempt to relax the party’s grip on
itary doctrine; the dissection of various society promptly destroyed the state
armed branches and services, including itself. Stalin’s nearly 30-year rule, in
those in charge of covert and subversive the first half of the twentieth century,
operations; the study of kit and arma- was built on mass violence, but as
ments; and much more. Galeotti also soon as the bloody dictator died, his
tells the story of Putin’s bid to rebuild, henchmen stepped forward with an
rearm, and modernize the military as a immediate program of radical reform—
way of restoring Russia’s global stature. a development often recalled today
These efforts bore fruit in the second by optimistic observers who seek a
Chechen war (actively fought between post-Putin Russia. The collapse of the
1999 and 2000) and in later operations Soviet Union was a cause for rejoicing
aimed at asserting Russia’s interests in the West, in Eastern Europe, and in
beyond its borders in Georgia, Crimea, some of the Soviet republics, but not
and Syria. But the debacle of his 2022 in Russia. The Soviet Union’s disap-
invasion of Ukraine suggests that 20 pearance, Fitzpatrick writes, “inflicted
years of high-spending military reform a trauma on the Russians that has
was wasted. Galeotti forecasts that the few equals, even in the trauma-filled
war in Ukraine will be a long, ugly slog. twentieth century.”

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The Zelensky Effect How the Soviet Jew Was Made

By OLGA ONUCH and HENRY E. BY SASHA SENDEROVICH. Harvard
HALE. Hurst, 2022, 224 pp. University Press, 2022, 368 pp.

Onuch and Hale artfully combine Senderovich’s book may be read as an

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zel- attempt to challenge Yuri Slezkine’s
ensky’s biography and a chronicle of broadly acclaimed work The Jewish
Ukraine’s postcommunist develop- Century, which sought to explain the
ment, rich with empirical data and rise and disproportionate prominence
rigorous research. The highly read- of Jews among the Soviet political, aca-
able narrative includes excerpts from demic, and cultural elites. Senderovich,
Zelensky’s routines as a comedian, his a literary scholar, looks instead at
prior career, as well as from his more “simple Jews” who, unlike Slezkine’s
recent political speeches, revealing protagonists, did not shed their Jew-
that in both pursuits, Zelensky has ish cultural heritage. His interest lies
dwelt on the same themes of civic in literary characters who undergo a
duty and belief in Ukrainian state- complicated and ambivalent transition
hood. Replete with numerous refer- from their traditional way of life to
ences to Ukrainian songs and quotes Soviet modernity. Senderovich focuses
from Ukrainian poetry, the book on the texts of several Jewish writers of
depicts the country’s amazing resis- the early Soviet period that depict the
tance to Russian aggression as a joint experience of Jews from shtetls who
achievement of the Ukrainian people found themselves under Bolshevik
and their leader. Zelensky, in this por- rule. His subtle literary analysis takes
trayal, is a Ukrainian “everyperson” in novels, short stories, and films. In
who has “embraced, embodied, and one novel, Jews are ambivalent about
affirmed” Ukrainianness as, first and the new Bolshevik authorities during
foremost, a civic identity. They chron- the civil war that broke out after the
icle Zelensky’s indefatigable work to Bolshevik takeover, in 1917. The Bol-
unite his nation, his masterful use of sheviks are expected to protect Jews
social media, and his extraordinary after the pogroms that roiled imperial
ability to connect with people. Given Russia, but Jews fear that the pogroms
Zelensky’s bravery and unique lead- will return. Besides, some Bolsheviks
ership qualities demonstrated over are antisemitic themselves. Another
the many months since the Russian novel takes place in a traditional Jewish
invasion, it is hardly surprising that family’s courtyard, charting how the
the book reads like a panegyric. But forces of modernization, such as the
looking ahead, the authors fear the electric grid, urban railways, and the
possible return of the country’s past cinema, led to the disintegration of
ills, including corruption, a politics of the old Jewish customs.
divide-and-rule along ethnocultural
lines, and a tolerance for autocrats.

202 foreign affairs

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Middle East
Creating Local Democracy in Iran:
Lisa Anderson State Building and the Politics of
Decentralization
By Kian Tajbakhsh. Cambridge
Educating Egypt: Civic Values and University Press, 2022, 304 pp.
Ideological Struggles
By Linda Herrera. American In this unusually revealing account of
University in Cairo Press, 2022, 264 pp. decentralization efforts in Iran, Taj-
bakhsh provides a deeply researched and

A
collection of studies con- often moving account of how contem-
ducted over the last 30 years porary politics in Iran actually works.
by the preeminent American Deploying a remarkable mix of personal
scholar of education in Egypt, this book memoir and professional expertise—Taj-
paints an evocative portrait of the edu- bakhsh was a student, an urban planner,
cational philosophies, institutions, and a government adviser, and ultimately a
practices that have so poorly equipped political prisoner in Iran—he endeavors
Egyptian young people for the world to make sense of his work there, notably
they encounter as adults. In the process, the failure of an initiative to decentralize
she reveals how decades of failure to local government by authorizing elec-
invest in education created perverse tions for local government councils. In
incentives for teachers, families, and, the late 1990s and the first decade of this
most important, generations of chil- century, reformists promoted decentral-
dren. Herrera’s inquiry ranges from ization as a way of making local govern-
a girls’ middle school in Cairo in the ment more responsive to the needs and
early 1990s, where discipline was more desires of citizens. Technocrats framed
important than learning, to the private such efforts as integral to the strength-
Islamist schools that proliferated later ening of local administration. And ruling
in the decade to the underpaid teach- Islamists supported decentralization as
ers and desperate families that have an opportunity for public mobilization
conspired to support a system of pri- in support of the regime. The reformists
vate after-school tutoring that makes lost, partly because of developments on
a mockery of the notion of free public the national and international stage but
education. Overcrowding in schools also, as Tajbakhsh persuasively suggests,
led Ministry of Education bureaucrats because of flaws in their understanding
to falsify year-end exam results, giving of decentralization itself, which they
students passing grades to make room often equated with democratization.
for incoming classes. Herrera ends on Tajbakhsh shows how local govern-
a note of cautious optimism, hoping ments were, in fact, deprived of taxing
the technologically minded strate- authority, which kept local policy tightly
gies of Minister of Education Tarek linked to central government largess.
Shawki will bear fruit; his departure in Candid, rueful, scholarly, and reflective,
the summer of 2022 suggests, however, this book opens a revealing window onto
that big problems remain. everyday politics in Iran.

march/april 2023 203

 Recent Books

Worldmaking in the Long Great War: The Arc of a Covenant:

How Local and Colonial Struggles The United States, Israel, and the
Shaped the Modern Middle East Fate of the Jewish People
By Jonathan Wyrtzen. Columbia By Walter Russell Mead.
University Press, 2022, 336 pp. Knopf, 2022, 672 pp.

The conventional wisdom about the By turns lyrical and dyspeptic, Mead
impact of World War I on the Mid- explores the role that Zionism and
dle East is that in the wake of the Israel have played in the American
collapse of the Ottoman Empire, imagination and in U.S. foreign policy.
European perfidy car ved up the He attributes Washington’s steadfast
region and determined its future. support for the Jewish state and the
Wyrtzen argues against this ortho- American fascination with Israel to a
doxy, insisting instead that World sometimes bewildering combination of
War I really started in 1911 with the culture and politics. Protesting, perhaps
Italian invasion of Libya and the too much, that pro-Israel lobbying is
French and Spanish occupation of perceived to be more influential than it
Morocco—and did not end until truly is, he looks instead to forces such
the mid-1930s, after the upheavals as religious conviction and realpolitik
of the Arab revolt in Syria, the Turk- to explain the U.S.-Israeli relationship.
ish independence struggle, the Saudi His account of the embrace of Israel
conquest of the Hejaz, the uprisings by Christian evangelical movements
in Kurdistan, the Rif rebellion in in the United States is subtle and
Morocco, and the Sanusi resistance revealing in explaining the substan-
in Libya. These events may have been tial influence of Christian Zionists in
erased from the standard textbook U.S. policy debates about the Middle
histories of the region, but they con- East. Mead suggests that the intermi-
tinue to burn bright in local memory. nable peace process, in which everyone
They were as influential in shaping genuflects to an ever-receding mirage
contemporary politics as were any of concord, has been a hard-nosed
imperial European efforts to manip- strategic choice, useful to virtually all
ulate local sentiment or draw regional parties to the conflict. Although the
boundaries. Indeed, many of the sites peace process has inhibited full-blown
of conflict in the 1920s still play host war, it has also built and sustained
to violent contests today, including troubling local power holders (nota-
the 2016 rebellion in Morocco’s Rif, bly an emboldened Israeli right wing
the ongoing Libyan civil war, and the and a feckless Palestinian Authority),
continuing struggles over Kurdish provided a rationale for continuing
autonomy in Iraq and elsewhere. U.S. arms sales to both Israel and the
oil-producing Gulf countries, and
guaranteed that the United States
remains the uncontested global power
in the Middle East.

204 foreign affairs

 Recent Books

Struggles for Political Change in the

Asia and Pacific
Arab World: Regimes, Oppositions, and Andrew J. Nathan
Eternal Actors After the Spring
Edited by Lisa Blaydes, Amr
Hamzawy, and Hesham Sallam. The Dalai Lama’s Special Envoy:
University of Michigan Press, Memoirs of a Lifetime in Pursuit
2022, 488 pp. of a Reunited Tibet
By Lodi Gyaltsen Gyari.
An unusually strong collection, this Columbia University Press, 2022,
volume showcases writing by some of 800 pp.
the best scholars working on politics

F
in the Arab world today, all of them or a quarter century, Lodi Gyari
at the top of their game. These essays was the Dalai Lama’s special
together offer a thorough and sophis- envoy in Washington and his
ticated examination of the political personal representative to the Chi-
change and contestation that has nese government, including in nine
shaped the decade after the uprisings rounds of formal negotiations from
in 2011, from Algeria to Sudan. The 2002 to 2010. Gyari, who died in
authors focus on three themes: the 2018, was recognized in infancy as
persistence of political mobilization a rinpoche, or reincarnated lama, and
among populations that are young, this fascinating memoir reveals the
dissatisfied, technologically adept, spiritual side of his work. But the
and unreconciled to autocracy; the long, frank accounts of how he devel-
adaptations of regimes that are also oped influence in Washington and
increasingly tech-savvy and equally managed contacts with China also
determined not to surrender their show him to be a hard-headed pol-
power and privileges; and the ever itician and diplomat. Rejecting the
more visible importance of interna- pro-independence position of the
tional and local actors in the dynam- Tibetan Youth Congress—which
ics of domestic conflict across the Gyari had helped found earlier in his
region. The authors puzzle over the career—the Dalai Lama sought what
unwillingness of many of the protest he called “genuine autonomy” within
movements to develop more coherent the Chinese state, involving the uni-
institutional forms, skeptical as they fication of the entire Tibetan Plateau
are of conventional organizations such under Tibetan administration, the
as political parties, ideological com- exclusion of Chinese troops from that
mitments such as Islamist or nation- vast territory, and other conditions
alist dogmas, and, it sometimes seems, that proved unacceptable to Beijing.
authority of any kind. Still, the book’s Gyari worked to overcome the eth-
contributors make a convincing case nic, religious, and political jealousies
that the Arab world will see continued that divide the Tibetan community
activism and growing regime ruthless- in exile. But in the end, he implies,
ness in the face of discontent. political rivals forced him to resign.

march/april 2023 205

 Recent Books

On Dangerous Ground: America’s Qing Imperial Illustrations of

Century in the South China Sea Tributary Peoples: A Cultural
By Gregory B. Poling. Oxford Cartography of Empire
University Press, 2022, 336 pp. Edited and Translated by
Laura Hostetler and
As the world worries about whether Wu Xuemei. Brill, 2022, 641 pp.
China will attack Taiwan, Poling
shows that Beijing has already deci- In 1751, the Qianlong emperor com-
sively changed the balance of power missioned an illustrated roster of some
in Asia without an effective U.S. 300 ethnic groups living around the
response, by establishing military periphery of his direct rule, including
bases on seven enormous manmade those as far away as Switzerland and
islands in the South China Sea and England and a couple of hundred liv-
crowding out the navies and fish- ing in places that are parts of today’s
ing fleets of regional neighbors. He China, such as Gansu, Guangdong, and
charts a masterful course through Yunnan Provinces. He viewed them as
the history and politics of the region, tributaries, peoples who bowed to the
and the tortured history of the law universal moral authority of the Chi-
of the sea, to explain the origins of nese ruler. This beautiful book, skillfully
the territorial disputes that China translated from a set of scrolls in the
has now effectively resolved by force. National Palace Museum in Taiwan,
The stakes today involve not just con- reproduces extraordinary color portraits
trol of undersea oil and gas reserves, of a male and female figure of each
fisheries, and commercial sea-lanes group in native costume and provides
but also the viability of the troubled a short description of each group’s dis-
U.S.-Philippine alliance and even the tinctive way of life. The A’zhe Luoluo
global legal principle of freedom of from Yunnan Province, for example, “are
the seas. Stepped-up U.S. “freedom foolish, but diligent. . . . Men go bare-
of navigation” operations by the U.S. foot. Women wear shoes. At weddings
Navy have not effectively defended they use cattle as bride price. The groom
any of these interests. Poling proposes carries the bride home on his back by
that the United States build a coali- himself.” Implicitly indexing the groups
tion to press China to compromise as more or less acculturated into Han
on fishing rights, joint management Chinese culture, the scrolls expressed
of the environment, and measures the assimilating mission of Confucian
to avoid accidents among crowds of China as it gradually absorbed most
armed ships. But he acknowledges of the groups into the dominant Han
that it is unlikely that China will see ethnicity. Today, China has only 55
any reason to cooperate. officially recognized “national minori-
ties,” including the Tibetans and the
Uyghurs, and it is working hard to
eliminate what remains of their distinct
cultural identities.

206 foreign affairs

 Recent Books

Dictatorship and Information: China’s Quest for Financial

Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Self-Reliance: How Beijing Plans to
Communist Europe and China Decouple From the Dollar-Based Global
By Martin K. Dimitrov. Oxford Trading and Financial System
University Press, 2023, 496 pp. By Diana Choyleva and Dinny
McMahon. Wilson Center,
Dimitrov brings to light the lesser- 2022, 203 pp.
known techniques of mass surveil-
lance in Leninist party-states—not In this lucid and data-rich analysis, the
the Internet surveillance and facial authors show how the use of the dollar
recognition cameras that are obvious in China’s trade transactions exposes
to everyone, but secret information Beijing to exchange rate risks it does
gathering through three institutional not control and to potential financial
channels: the party organization, the sanctions. The use of its own currency
state security apparatus, and the would tie economic partners more
internal reports of official media. closely to China, making imports of
Comparing China and Soviet-era energy, food, and other commodities
Bulgaria, with long side glances at more secure. But making the renminbi
other authoritarian regimes, includ- a truly global currency will be a hard
ing Cuba, East Germany, and the (and perhaps even impossible) task.
Soviet Union, he shows in remark- Because so many dollars flow through
able detail how such governments the international economy, traders pay
obsessively collected information on the lowest fees to borrow, convert,
dissenters, not just to target them remit, and otherwise transact in that
but to preempt protest by focusing currency. Despite sophisticated efforts
the delivery of economic largesse in to increase the international use of
restive areas. Regimes can head off the renminbi, including the partial
some protests, keep some small, and opening of China’s domestic markets
disarm others with concessions— to foreign investors, the creation of
what Dimitrov calls “a low-repression its own cross-border interbank pay-
equilibrium”—but only as long as ments system, and the launch of a
they command sufficient economic digital yuan, China faces a dilemma:
resources, which the Bulgarian regime it is hard to saturate the world with
eventually did not. In China, despite renminbi when it remains relatively
its unprecedentedly sophisticated expensive for merchants and bankers
intelligence-gathering systems, small- to use them.
scale protest is chronic. “Time will
tell how long such a system based on
routine disruptive contentious episodes
can persist,” Dimitrov concludes.

march/april 2023 207

 Recent Books

Under the Gun: Political Parties How Asia Found Herself: A Story of
and Violence in Pakistan Intercultural Understanding
By Niloufer A. Siddiqui. By Nile Green. Yale University
Cambridge University Press, Press, 2022, 472 pp.
2022, 272 pp.
Europeans created the concept of
Political violence between parties is Asia as a name for the huge swath
endemic to Pakistan, both during and of territories running from the Med-
between election cycles. In the sprawl- iterranean to the Pacific Ocean. But
ing, multiethnic megacity of Karachi, around the mid-nineteenth century,
which is flooded with guns from the Asians began to explore each other’s
period of the Soviet-Afghan war, both cultures for themselves, aided by new
the Awami National Party and the techniques in the printing of Asian
Muttahida Qaumi Movement have languages that had been developed
engaged in assassinations, extortion, by Christian missionaries and often
and violent protests in recent years motivated by the desire to counteract
to protect the physical and economic Christian proselytizing with missioniz-
turf of their ethnic constituencies. In ing of their own. In this fascinating and
the same city, the Pakistan People’s original study, Green explores sources
Party let an ethnic militia do its dirty in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and other
work. In Punjab, the Pakistan Muslim languages to see how Bahai, Buddhist,
League-Nawaz campaigned alongside Hindu, Muslim, and Zoroastrian trav-
leaders of a violent sectarian group elers, merchants, and polemicists tried
in order to get more votes. And in to understand and influence the soci-
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, the eties and cultures of China, Japan, and
same Awami National Party that used Southeast Asia. What they found was
violence in Karachi has run for office “the illusion of Asia”—a region char-
peacefully. Through resourceful case acterized by enormous diversity and
studies, Siddiqui teases out the dif- mutual ignorance. It was not until
ferences among these four parties. the 1920s and 1930s that The Ana-
She looks at how local authorities lects of Confucius appeared in Arabic
variously struggle to keep the peace. and Urdu and the Koran in Japanese
Where state capacity is weak, parties and Chinese, through translations
will use violence when they have the of European versions of these texts.
support of an ethnic, religious, or The rise of “Asianism,” whether as a
ideological constituency that toler- claim of Indian centrality or as an ideol-
ates or even rewards them for doing ogy of Japanese expansionism, was based
so. Finally, a party’s organizational on a myth of a culturally coherent Asia.
strength explains whether it may
deploy its own supporters to attack
rivals or get help from sectarian mili-
tias or criminal gangs.

208 foreign affairs

 Recent Books

Africa Revival and Reconciliation:

Nicolas van de Walle The Anglican Church and the
Politics of Rwanda
By PHILLIP A. CANTRELL II.
The Invention of Green Colonialism University of Wisconsin Press,
BY GUILLAUME BLANC. 2022, 248 pp.
Translated by Helen
Morrison. Polity, 2022, 180 pp. This history of the Anglican Church
in Rwanda combines compelling archi-

I
n this scathing polemic, Blanc val historical research and a probing
traces the origins of the interna- analysis of the church’s tendency to
tional conservation movement to hew closely to those in power. The
the colonial era and argues that con- church abetted the German and then
servation organizations have exhib- the Belgian colonial administrations
ited a complete disregard for the of the territory, the Hutu-dominated
welfare of people in Africa. Instead, governments of independent Rwanda
they focus on protecting what they between 1962 and 1994, and, since 1994,
imagine to be a threatened, pristine the Tutsi-dominated authoritarian rule
natural world, bedeviled by local pop- of President Paul Kagame. Throughout
ulations. Blanc argues that local pop- its history, the church hierarchy has
ulations live in harmony with nature felt insecure about its minority status
and should be left alone to do so. The relative to the more dominant Catholic
strength of the book lies in the his- Church in Rwanda, a perception that
torical material he marshals, which led the Anglicans to form closer rela-
often casts the conservation move- tions with the government. Cantrell
ment in an embarrassing light—from argues convincingly that this habit
its amateurish and self-serving use of encouraged the church to uncritically
bad data to its support for authori- accept many of the ethnic prejudices
tarian colonial practices designed to of successive governments. As a result,
save animals (creatures Blanc does he suggests, the Anglican Church did
not believe need saving). A lack of little to anticipate or prevent the 1994
nuance and a disregard for counterar- genocide, for which it shares at least
guments and countervailing evidence some responsibility. Cantrell shows
weaken the book, as does the absence that after the 1994 genocide, the church
of any specific policy recommenda- quickly adopted the official rhetoric of
tion beyond familiar bromides about the new government under Kagame,
the need to involve local populations and he worries it will one day regret
in decision-making. its acquiescence to the government’s
flawed narratives about the country’s
recent past that politicize the 1994
genocide and censor all discussion of
the subsequent, awful human rights
record of the regime.

march/april 2023 209

 Recent Books

WhatsApp and Everyday Life in West Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the
Africa: Beyond Fake News Congo Powers Our Lives
Edited By IDAYAT HASSAN and By Siddharth Kara. St. Martin’s
JAMIE HITCHEN. Zed Books, Press, 2023, 288 pp.
2022, 208 pp.
Kara provides a thorough and insight-
How is social media changing West ful investigation of the cobalt indus-
Africa? This first-rate collection of try in the southeastern Democratic
essays focuses on the end-to-end Republic of the Congo. He sheds light
encr yption messaging sof t w a re on the complex and highly decentral-
WhatsApp, taking on such disparate ized organization of cobalt mining in
topics as its adoption by political par- this region, in which a large number
ties in Gambia, Ghana, and Nige- of actors mine over two-thirds of the
ria; WhatsApp usage among elderly cobalt used in the world’s production
Nigerians; and the fashion industry’s of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries
use of the software for marketing. that power smartphones, laptops, and
Contributors note that the software electric vehicles. The technology giants
has become an integral part of elec- that produce these sleek electronic con-
toral campaigning but does not yet sumer goods argue that they observe
appear to have resulted in signifi- the necessary regulations with respect
cant changes in political messaging. to local labor practices and environ-
Others observe that WhatsApp has mental protection. In fact, the book
proven popular because it is particu- astutely shows how lax enforcement by
larly cheap to use, and its end-to-end a weak and corrupt Congolese state has
encryption means that it can provide allowed shocking abuses in the working
a specific community with a ready conditions and treatment of miners, as
tool for relatively private dialogue. A well as the degradation of the envi-
fascinating chapter by Naima Hafiz ronment in the region with appalling
Abubakar discusses how WhatsApp health consequences for locals. Kara
has affected women voters in the also reveals a system of intermediary
northern Nigerian city of Kano. agents that connects individual miners
She finds that the software gives to a diffuse array of buyers, depots, con-
women the sense of belonging to a cessionaires, processors, and refining
safe community, which allows them industries that all take in a share of the
to share information and exchange value of the mined cobalt. At the other
political views. The chapter argues end of this sequence of actors are the
that WhatsApp enhances their sense battery producers under contract with
of political empowerment but offers the global technology corporations,
no data as to whether, for instance, which can plausibly plead ignorance
its use has resulted in greater female about the many abuses occurring at the
participation in voting. far end of the chain.

210 foreign affairs

 Recent Books

nana (president from 2002 to 2009),

The Tragedy of Madagascar: and Andry Rajoelina (president from
An Island Nation Confronts the 2009 to 2014 and currently in power
Twenty-first Century since 2019). As Adams makes clear,
By Nathaniel Adams. Chronos electoral politics in the country have
Books, 2022, 416 pp. been dominated by intra-elite personal
conflicts and successive governments
Adams’s general introduction to a have been self-serving and ineffective.
country that remains largely ignored by The book improves once Adams turns
English-language scholars and journal- his gaze to the country’s long unad-
ists is welcome. The first half of the book dressed economic and social problems.
covers the country’s political history, An excellent final chapter focuses on
with a focus on the decades-long con- the southern half of the island, which
flicts between the three heavyweights of faces a looming environmental disas-
postcolonial Malagasy politics: Didier ter thanks to a combination of global
Ratsiraka (president from 1975 to 1993 warming and the central government’s
and 1997 to 2002), Marc Ravaloma- persistent neglect.

Foreign Affairs (ISSN 00157120), March/April 2023, Volume 102, Number 2. Published six times annually ( January,
March, May, July, September, November) at 58 East 68th Street, New York, NY 10065. Print subscriptions:
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march/april 2023 211

 Return to Table of Contents
THE ARCHIVE

April 1941

“War by Radio”
John B. Whitton

In 1941, John B. Whitton, a professor of politics at Princeton

University, considered how radio was shaping the ongoing
world war. Earlier, radio propaganda had mostly been the
preserve of totalitarian states, he wrote. But during the war,
all belligerents were making “radio propaganda integral
parts of their war machines.” Today, disinformation about
one’s enemy is spread through other media—namely,
social networks—yet its potency persists.

T
he miracle of radio has made people in the enemy territory to listen to
it much easier than before to its broadcasts. In the campaign against
spread propaganda in enemy enemy morale, enemy civilians are told
territory. The methods formerly used, of the corruption of their leaders in peace
such as dropping leaflets from airplanes and their inefficiency in war. Thus the
or free balloons, were very limited in BBC told the Germans: “And now, about
range and influence. Radio, however, Goebbels. . . . You know that modest way
penetrates the enemy frontier without of his? This probably accounts for the
difficulty—in fact, it circles fact that he has told you too
the earth seven times in a sin- little about his castle . . . on the
gle second. The Nazis early Bergensee, the walls of which
prohibited Germans from are decorated with marble,
listening to foreign stations. and also a country house . . .
The British did not; indeed, on the Langensee, and also a
the British newspapers very 50-room mansion in Berlin.”
obligingly noted the hours Similar opulence was charged
when the famous Lord Haw Haw against Goering, Himmler, Ley and
[an English-language propagandist Ribbentrop, who, it was alleged, were
for the Nazis] could be heard. Lately making a rather broad interpretation of
in England, however, such listening the Lebensraum slogan. The effort to
has been discouraged as “unpatriotic.” sow doubt, confusion and dissension in
Incidentally, each side announces over enemy territory—what might be called
the radio the names of newly captured dissolvent propaganda—is attempted by
prisoners of war in order to encourage all the belligerents.

212 foreign affairs

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