The actual 21st century is not following the path that many Western leaders had assumed it would take.
The 21st century has not progressed as the West had hoped, and now it’s paying the price for its wishful thinking.
A week or so ago, I wrote about the way in which the complacency fostered by a quasi-religious belief among Western elites in the inevitability of a curious, universalist vision of progress had “presented Putin with at least a moment of opportunity — and China with rather more.”
As I noted, this belief (and related matters) had been covered in some detail by Tom McTague in the Atlantic. The whole article is very well worth reading, but McTague’s first paragraph sets the stage:
There is a peculiar modern tendency to describe things we don’t like as belonging to the past. The Taliban are medieval, Donald Trump supporters backward, Brexiteers nostalgic for empire. Under this rubric, Vladimir Putin is a Soviet throwback and the war he may soon start in Ukraine, as John Kerry once remarked, is like some 19th-century skirmish transplanted into the 21st.
And so on Wednesday, on the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Charles Michel, president of the EU Council (to oversimplify, a body made up of the prime ministers of the various EU member states, the council’s president and the bloc’s top bureaucrat) tweeted that:
The use of force and coercion to change borders has no place in the 21st century.
I am calling a special European Council tomorrow in Brussels to discuss the latest developments related to #Ukraine and Russia
As we have again been horribly reminded, the use of force and coercion to this end does have a place in the 21st century. However, faith in the notion that that sort of thing was behind us helps explain why some EU countries, notably Germany and Italy, became so dangerously dependent on Russian natural gas, even after the course on which Putin had embarked had already become all too evident. And, as I highlighted in a post on Wednesday, that dependency is not confined to gas, nor is it confined to the EU. The U.S. has also become overly reliant on Russia as a supplier of products — such as titanium used in aerospace manufacture or gases critical to chip production — in areas where it is extremely unwise to have done so (a dependence that will be increased if Russia controls Ukraine after the invasion).
In part, the U.S. was lulled into doing so on the back of a similarly deterministic view of history. It was nonsense from the start, and it should not have survived previous encounters with Russian reality. Reacting to Russia’s attack on Georgia in 2008, President George W. Bush commented that it, yes, was “unacceptable in the 21st century.” Russia’s actions, which included the recognition of two Moscow-backed breakaway republics (sound familiar?) were disgraceful, but, 21st century or not, they were also successful, both militarily and geopolitically.
The first Nord Stream pipelines opened for business just four years later.
Closely connected to the conviction that the 21st century was destined to head, loosely speaking, in a liberal direction was the belief that closer economic ties would lessen the risk of conflict between old adversaries. After all, a good trading “partner” couldn’t behave that badly, could it?
On March 2, 2014, shortly after the first Russian assault on Ukraine, a New York Times report revealed that this kind of thinking prevailed in the Obama White House:
Administration officials said Mr. Putin had miscalculated and would pay a cost regardless of what the United States did, pointing to the impact on Russia’s currency and markets. “What we see here are distinctly 19th- and 20th-century decisions made by President Putin to address problems,” one of the officials said. “What he needs to understand is that in terms of his economy, he lives in the 21st-century world, an interdependent world.”
Specifically, Putin’s “miscalculation” lay in sending his forces into Crimea, an operation that began in late February 2014. In mid March, Russia annexed that peninsula, and it remains annexed to this day. Within a month or two, “separatists” had, with Russian assistance, established two “People’s Republics” in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which have endured, and have now been recognized by Russia. Moreover, in the eight years since Putin’s supposed miscalculation, Russia has substantially improved its financial position and is probably well-placed to weather the sanctions coming its way, at least for some time.
So the actual 21st century is not following the path that many Western leaders had assumed it would take, but that was not their only wrong call. They also overlooked how “interdependency” might work when one party had priorities that transcended the merely economic. To be sure, there was some European unease about developing such a dependence on Putin’s Russia. However, it was thought that, if some of Russia’s rougher instincts had lingered on, they would be held in check by commercial imperatives. Europe wanted the gas, and Russia wanted the money, and nothing would be allowed to get in the way of this mutually beneficial exchange.
But once it became (reasonably) clear that Moscow might wield the EU’s need for Russian gas as a weapon against it, even if it involved a significant financial cost, the interdependence that was meant to protect the West was transformed into a weapon that could be deployed against it. Would even the implicit threat of its use be enough to discourage an appropriately harsh response in the wake of the Russian invasion? We will find out.
Meanwhile, the (to me, surprising) suspension of the Nord Stream 2 approval process by Germany was both a punishment and a signal that any attempt by Moscow to bully Berlin into submission by turning off the taps will fail, and should, therefore, not even be tried. Perhaps that will work. If it doesn’t, and Russia cuts off gas sales, Europe will face tough times, economically and politically. These will be made even more treacherous if some countries are prepared to hold out longer than others, raising the prospect of major divisions within the EU and NATO, a goal perpetually on Putin’s agenda.
Should European nations have gotten themselves in this position? The question answers itself, but that they did shows how persuasive their particular vision of the future has been, a persuasiveness doubtless enhanced by the fact that it meant that they could take what seemed, however deceptively, like an easy option. As mentioned above, the U.S. has fallen into a similar trap.
Adding to the mess, much of the West has gone down the same route with China. The assumption was made that China’s adoption of its own variant of a mixed economy, the surge in living standards that ensued and a degree of political and social liberalization would combine to lead it in due course to something closer to the Western model. To be sure, there was a strong mercantilist strain running through the regime’s economic policy, the country was still a one-party state, and there was that bad business at Tiananmen Square, but these were surely just bumps in the road. In the meantime, labor was cheap, making China an appealing place to locate (or subcontract) production, and the country’s exports were attractively priced. What’s more, the opportunity to make some money out of selling into this hugely promising new market was too good to miss.
Fast-forward to 2022, and a richer, more sophisticated China is mounting an ominous technological challenge to the U.S., some of it possibly given an initial helping hand, one way or another, by U.S. capital or know-how. The regime’s governing ideology has evolved into a form of fascism, and its increasingly repressive leadership is using both new methods — it is the world’s most advanced surveillance state — and old: It has turned to genocide. Backed by the strength of an ever more powerful military, it is pursuing a revanchist territorial agenda in its neighborhood, and it is building political influence worldwide on the back of cash and investment, as well as by using the promise of access to its market as both carrot and stick. Hollywood knows how that works, and Germany, a massive exporter to China, is now finding out.
As with Russia, a deepened trade relationship has created dangerous vulnerabilities for the U.S. The example of rare earths is well known, as is our reliance on China for pharmaceuticals. And then there are the consumer goods. None in themselves may be “strategic” in the conventional sense, but the range supplied by China is so wide that trying to replace all or part of it, either domestically or from friendlier foreign sources would, at least for a while, cause mayhem.
And yet too many U.S. companies continue to do business in or with China — or they invest there directly. It is not a story that will end well.