In the autumn of 1943, a group of strategists assembled in the Pentagon to imagine the world that would emerge from the ashes of war. France, Germany, the United Kingdom—the powers that made the Age of Empire—were being bled of their industrial and financial wealth. From this, they presciently recorded, would emerge “a world profoundly changed in respect of relative national military strengths, a change more comparable indeed with that occasioned by the fall of Rome than with any other change occurring during the succeeding fifteen hundred years”.
“The United States and the Soviet Union will be the only military powers of the first magnitude”. The power and wealth of the one always greatly exceeded the second; within decades, there was but one.
In recent weeks, the world has begun to see the contours of an America turned reticent about the responsibilities which it inherited from the Imperial world. The United States did not, as it has done more than once in the past, lead efforts to terminate the Israeli-Palestinian crisis; is on the cusp of withdrawing from Afghanistan; and a $1 trillion plan to expand its Navy to confront China will almost certainly be shelved. Through the pandemic, American leadership has been conspicuous by its absence.
“Every single thing—from the deck of an aircraft carrier, to a railing in a new building—is going to be built by an American company, American workers, American supply chain so that we invest American tax dollars in American workers,” President Joe Biden declaimed earlier this month, in an emphatic rejection of globalism.
America’s inward-turn comes at, arguably, the most significant time of geopolitical reordering since the end of the Second World War. There’s little doubt the Covid-19 pandemic will accelerate the relative rise of China, allowing it to project power across its peripheries, as well as across South Asia and Africa. Middle Powers, like India and the major European states, have by contrast shown themselves ineffective at managing their internal problems, let alone being effective providers of global goods.
The conventional wisdom holds this is bad news for India, threatened by the rise of an increasingly aggressive China. Perhaps. It could also, however, mean opportunity. Lacking a geopolitical insurer of last resort, India could be compelled to pursue policies that more realistically marry its national means to its ends, avoiding seduction by polemic. It could compel more creativity and discipline in national defence; the removal of self-imposed obstacles to competitiveness and economic growth.
For this to happen, though, it is critical for New Delhi to understand that the United States’ strategic direction is not a temporary shifting of the wind. It is, instead, a course the world’s preeminent power has set for itself as a result of bitter learnings.
Energy drove the United States geopolitical strategy in the years after the Second World War. The United States had supplied almost 80% of the petroleum needs of its allies from the end of 1941 to August 1945. The end of the war, though, saw a lifting of price controls on hydrocarbons; the dollar reserves of European states were severely hit, endangering their fragile economic recovery. The United States responded by encouraging the private sector to expand production across West Asia.
Even though the United States had not earlier envisaged a strategic role for itself in West Asia, ensuring stability across the region now became critical. The Soviet Union—and the threat of Communism—had to be kept out of the region.
To do that meant inheriting the physical infrastructure of British power in the region. In the course of the Second World War, the United States had set up bases at Abadan in Iran as well as Salalah and Masirah in Oman, and Sheikh Uthman in Saudi Arabia. To these, it would add Royal Air Force facilities in Iraq, Bahrain and Pakistan; new bases would spring up North Africa, too.
At the outset, it was clear to the United States that its aim was not to control these regions. Instead, these new “strongpoints” were to ensure the Soviet Union could not do so, either. “This was a goal consistent both with the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries,” the great chronicler of the Cold War, John Gaddis, has argued, “and with the fact that the United States had only limited capabilities to bring to bear on their defence.”
Europe, North America and Japan were critical elements of the new American order; West Asia and the rest of the world less so. The United States expected Great Britain to take principle military responsibility for fighting the Greek communist insurgency in 1946 and refused to militarily intervene in Palestine in 1947. Even in the 1956 Suez crisis, the United States refused to back its allies, France, the United Kingdom and Israel.
Indeed, countries like France and the United Kingdom were sceptical of the real value of United States security guarantees. Fearful that the United States would not risk the annihilation of New York to defend Paris or London, both countries sought an independent nuclear deterrent soon after the end of the Second World War.
From the 1950s, though, the United States found itself drawn into increasingly expansive commitments to fight distant wars with ideological enemies—ranging from Communists in Vietnam to jihadists in Afghanistan. That great arc of American geopolitics is coming to an end, ground down by a realisation that the stronger side does not always win wars, and by a public increasingly sceptical of the costs of endless foreign campaigns.
The post 9/11 expeditionary wars—an effort to remake the world around the neoliberal convictions of the circle around President George H.W. Bush—were not a new dawn. They were the result of a stubborn unwillingness to learn from history; that willful ignorance which was brutally ground down in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Fundamental shifts in the United States polity make it profoundly unlikely at least two generations of Americans will seek global greatness. Economists Christopher Kurz, Geng Li, and Daniel Vine have noted that millennials—broadly, the generation born between 1981–1996—tend “to have lower incomes than members of earlier generations at comparable ages”. Millennials have more educational debt; their healthcare is more precarious.
The concerns of this youth cohort have manifested themselves in a raft of new social movements, as well as the rise of Left-leaning politicians—as well as a similarly anti-globalist far-Right, focused on questions of race and religion. These will be the defining forces in American politics for the foreseeable future.
For countries long dependent on United States security guarantees, the consequences are profound. There’s real doubt, flagged by experts like Michael O’Hanlon, if the United States would act to militarily defend allies like Taiwan in the event of an invasion by China—a prospect senior American military commanders have been warning of. More likely than not, United States retaliation for any military offensive against Taiwan would consist of little more than economic sanctions.
Though the United States might well provide intelligence assets and some assistance to allies in need—as it did for India in the course of the Ladakh crisis early this year—it is profoundly unlikely to commit its own military to any regional conflicts.
Insecure about the real worth of United States security guarantees, countries like South Korea, Australia and Japan may well seek independent nuclear deterrent capabilities in years to come. Smaller countries like the Philippines have already begun to muscle up, hoping at least to give China a bloody nose should push come to shove; others, almost certainly, will see virtue in making their peace.
New Delhi must accept that the certainties of the pre-Covid world have evaporated in a few short months; the order that emerges will have only small resemblance to that which preceded it. In this uncertain new world, victory will be won by those who think smart, not talk big.
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