https://nipp.org/wp-content/uploads/202 ... -No.-2.pdf
commentary on biden's national security strategy, relevant title:
The World in Transition, and What the Biden Administration Tries to Do About It
What we can see, especially in European history (where the largest body of recorded evidence for this exists) is that often two, sometimes three ordering principles coexisted in
competition with one another.1
At the risk of great oversimplification, one can identify four patterns, if we leave aside complete anarchy.
The first and probably most natural was that of a
number of polities—city states in Ancient Greece and
Medieval Italy, larger principalities in Ancient India and
medieval and early modern South-East Asia—trading with
each other but also vying for pre-eminence. Several times,
this became a balance-of-power contest, with alliances
forming to check an increasingly rich or even visibly
expansionist power or rival alliance
Underpinning ideologies like that which grew on the back of Hinduism in India and then Southeast Asia or in China,
describing the predominance of one such power over all
others, as a “mandate of heaven”, or in the Christian and
Islamic case, linking predominance with a divine injunction
to proselytize, or Communism with its missionary zeal,
often led to wars when there was resistance to conquest, the
latter checked only, eventually, by the danger of nuclear
war.
1) interesting to note that the idea of hinduism and the mandate of heaven have been used in the same category, the "the predominance of one such power over all
others", but that conflates a religion with a concept of ruling potential, odd pairing this, maybe the author just classed all oriental heathen politic in one category to avoid further paperwork
2) classification of the abrahamic creed with communism, interesting notion
For the bid for pre-eminence and even total domination can
take any form along a long spectrum: from utterly
malevolent, incarnated by Adolf Hitler and his strategy for
the domination of the Aryan race and the extermination and
enslavement of what he saw as inferior races, to intentions
of truly bringing peace and prosperity to all of mankind.
sounds like freedom and democracy talk to me, or the author has identified and is in the process of codifying a new doctrine
For all their sins, and the admixture of the craving for power
and enrichment, Islam, Christianity, Communism and the
Western democracies’ promotion of human rights all aimed
to benefit the rest of mankind. This quest for a universal
system ensuring peace, then, was the ordering principle
opposed to balance-of-power relations: the ideal, only ever
partly realised, of a world in which all entities were
integrated into a larger union ensuring peace among them.
intriguing notion
1) a universal system-of-system that was born of the premise of islam, christianity, and communism spreading human rights (the author is shockingly not being facetious) opposed the balance-of-power that had existed before between civilisation states (such as the afore mentioned might-is-right status of hinduism and mandate of heaven) but gave rise to lasting peace
2) islam's benign promotion of human rights across the world has been occasionally dipped in red blood, their intention was i am certain well-meaning, but it caused many holocausts (the word is holy in the annals of thinkers who have created the modern west) during their campaign to spread enlightened ideals, this paradoxically gave rise to peace... the peace of death maybe, the author does not clarify
the United Nations (UN) were founded to create
such a universal system, a world-wide order of peace. It
should make America’s enemies think, that the USA never
endeavoured to establish a world empire based on
universal physical dominion.
Entities thus making their independence the
highest principle guiding their policies were at loggerheads
with the inferred or open claim to universal authority made
by the two successive Roman Empires. When they were not
opposing a power showing signs of imperial expansionism,
sovereignist polities would revert to balance-of-power
strategies among themselves, and to settling quarrels by
war. Thus, the insistence on sovereignty and the reversion
to the ordering principle of balances of powers was indeed
antithetically opposed to the aim of creating a larger union
or sphere of peace.
A third ordering principle emerged when among
multiple competing powers there were a handful of powers
greater than the others who felt entitled to determine the
fate of the world. Three times, such a group of five great
powers jointly set out to bring order to the world by
adjudicating the quarrels of minor powers: with the
Congress System that existed in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, with the League of Nations created in 1920,
and again with the UN founded in 1945.
All three
pentarchieswere flawed, however. Already in the first, the
great powers did not put aside their own national and
colonial ambitions which led them both within and outside
Europe. The Congress System that had aimed to settle
issues for the greater good of Europe as a whole was thus
contaminated by balance-of-power thinking among the five
great powers, to which it gave way altogether by midcentury.
Fourthly, several times in history balance-of-power
patterns were fused with alignments of powers according
to ideology (counting religious or confessional differences
as ideologies). These could take several forms: alliances of
ferociously selfish (i.e., nationalist) powers, keeping each
other’s backs free when they set out on wars of conquest or
fought a common enemy, or a hunted down a common prey
as Hitler and Stalin did in their joint occupation of Poland
in 1939.
By contrast, alliances sharing values that they
believed should spread to all of humanity, such as a
proselytising religion or ideology, proved more enduring.
Alliances of Western democracies, not least due to their joint
decision-making, have proved less aggressive as there
tended to be some member(s) that would voice concerns
and veto action.
States trying
to support human rights find themselves at a loss of what
to do when free elections produce the return of intolerant,
war-mongering, terrorist-supporting or ultra-nationalist
governments.
??, i suppose having an ultra nationalist government disturbs the tranquillity of the established system-of-systems and tends to assert a balance-of-power system, which is dangerous for global peace
The new world is also marked by a shift away from the
inclusive multilateral International Organisations, most of
them outgrowths of the UN or founded on the UN’s
encouragement of regional co-operation through such
institutions, which were favoured by many states over the
last 70 years, even if some of these organizations were little
other than talking shops.
Instead, we currently see a shift away from binding
commitments that were designed to be long-lasting, in
NATO and the EU and of course the UN, to ad-hockery,
alliances of convenience and of temporary convergences of
interests, which undermine the ordering principle of firm mutual commitments based on common values that pertained during the Cold War.
Interestingly, this is the point that the MEA strongly emphasises whenever the quad is mentioned, a temporary convergence and convenience of parties with common interests, but not based on firm mutual commitments borne of common values, this would be the biggest difference between the unipolar and multipolar world
So how is the Biden Administration trying to influence
this transition with its new NS?
Essentially, there are three main options when
confronted with such a transition, the fourth being a mix of
them. The first is to try to stem the tide, the second is to
stand aside, and the third is to hasten it. Unsurprisingly,
neither the second nor the last are true options for the great
power that contributed most to bringing the current order
into being, even if it has occasionally shrugged off its rules
to act as it saw fit. Equally unsurprisingly, then, we find a
mix of approaches in the new U.S. NSS of October 2022.
Yet differences become clear when contrasted with the previous
Trump Administration’s NSS of 2017. They are, first and
most obviously, that the Biden NSS of 2022 recommits
America to uphold the UN’s norms which was relegated to
a much lower ranking in the previous NSS of 2017 issued
under President Trump.3 The latter had adopted a “Realist”
view of International Relations, assuming that “a contest for
power” was “a central continuity in history”. It had
recognised “that the United States often views the world in
binary terms, with states being either ‘at peace’ or ‘at war,’
when it is actually an arena of continuous competition.”
This airbrushed out of the picture the muting of this contest
for power that existed in its place, among the powers who prioritised, since 1945 if not since 1928, the year of the
Briand-Kellogg Pact, peaceful interaction globally where at
all possible, even peaceful coexistence with ideological
rivals, and close, restricting co-operation with likeminded
nations. The Trump NSS went on to say, “Our adversaries
will not fight us on our terms. We will raise our competitive
game to meet that challenge, to protect American interests,
and to advance our values.” By implication, this accepted
the result of the transition, the return to something very
akin to the Great Power Competition of the 19th century that
killed off the Congress System, by changing one’s own
game to mirror the adversary’s. The strategy adopted by
the Trump Administration aimed to “shift trends back in
favor of the United States, our allies, and our partners”, but
it was ready to do so by accepting the new rule of the game:
power struggle. In keeping with Donald Trump’s overall
policies, the 2017 NSS put the strengthening of America’s
sovereignty above that of any international co-operation—an
approach to the sovereignty of their own states on which
both Putin and Xi Jinping would have agreed.
There is of course, in America, just as among other states
founded on philosophical ideals, e.g., Communist regimes
past and present, the assumption that what is in the
American (or what is Communist) interest is ultimately in
the interest of the world, as countries the world over would
benefit from having the same constitution and way of life as
one’s own
By contrast, the Biden Administration is endeavouring
to stem the transformation of the international system,
maintaining the liberal commitment to create and uphold
“institutions norms and standards … [with] mechanisms
[that] advanced America’s economic and geopolitical aims
and benefited people around the world by shaping how
governments and economies interacted … in ways that
aligned with U.S. interests and values.”4
We also see a pragmatic
embracing of “minilateral” arrangements, which in the case
of the US in the Indo-Pacific is actually a step towards
greater multilateralism: previously, its security
arrangements in that part of the world were generally
bilateral.6
In short, the 2022 NSS is trying to find a middle way
between the preservation of the great acquis of the rulesbased order enshrined in the UN, and the reality of
competition from a militarily dangerous Russia and an
economically powerful China with an alternative set of
values
It tries to preserve as much as possible of
the post-1945 rules-based international order, in cooperation with the like-minded governments, while
optimistically asserting that its internal values allow the
U.S.A. to retain a competitive edge vis-à vis its competitors.
America’s friends and allies can only hope that this
optimism is well-founded.