The Toxic Effects of Great Power 'Competition'

Great power rivalry will take the political divisions in this country and make them even worse in an atmosphere of supercharged nationalism and suspicion.

Spencer Ackerman identifies the most absurd part of Robert Kagan’s latest essay on rivalry with China:

But those are the trees. This line is the forest: "If ever there could be a cure for American political polarization, a conflict with China would be it."

Of all the terrible arguments for the coalescing China Cold War, this one is perhaps the worst. U.S. policymakers must never be allowed to believe this, since if they do, they'll pursue confrontation with China as a means of political power. I can tell you from writing REIGN OF TERROR that many politicians, journalists and intellectuals convinced themselves after 9/11 that the War on Terror would be a force through which a history-chastened America would put away childish disputes and reclaim its destiny. We know thoroughly how false this is. It's measured in an unknown number of lives ruined, freedom stolen, demagogues empowered and anti-democratic forces mobilized. The China Cold War wouldn't redress that. It would scale it all up. "The Cure for American Political Polarization" will not include your Asian-American neighbors any more than the post-9/11 "national unity" included your Muslim neighbors.

Every time that the U.S. embarks on some major struggle against an enemy, the loudest supporters trot out this conceit that it will have a great unifying effect on the country. To the extent that there is briefly a period of unity, it is imposed through smashing dissent, vilifying and abusing whichever minorities are perceived as being too sympathetic to the other side, and a culture defined by fear and conformity. The truth is that such conflicts exacerbate existing divisions and create new ones within the country, especially when they involve sending U.S. forces off to fight in some distant country that has nothing to do with American security.

It takes a propagandist to look back at the history of the Cold War and pretend that it was a period of profound American political unity that we should want to emulate. If there were a direct conflict with China, that would probably have even more toxic political effects because the costs of such a war would be high. If the U.S. were to lose the war or fight to a stalemate, the recriminations at home would never end. The global disruptions that a U.S.-Chinese war would cause would impose significant economic pain on the U.S. and the world, which would likely trigger a sharp political backlash.

Supposing that the rivalry remains a cold one, the picture is still an ugly one. In prolonged rivalries, wartime hysteria and paranoia become near-permanent features of the political landscape. Partisan sniping and demagoguery predictably get worse during periods of intensified rivalry with another major power, and hawks routinely accuse their domestic opponents of disloyalty, appeasement, and defeatism. As Ackerman says, all of this should be obvious from the experience of the last two decades when all of this happened as part of the “war on terror,” but it is important for an ideologue like Kagan to bury the memory of the last disastrous war so that he can sell the new one.

The recent panic over the dreaded spy balloon is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. If an incident as relatively minor and harmless as this one can send Washington into convulsions, we can expect much worse when there is a more serious incident that involves U.S. and Chinese forces. There is no sign of the political unity that the hardliners promise anywhere to be found. Instead you have the Speaker of House screeching about the president’s “failure” to act sooner and denouncing the “atrocity” of a balloon passing overhead:

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

McCarthy claims on Fox News that the Chinese balloon is a kitchen table issue and is an "atrocity happening to America"

There are huge numbers of Americans primed to believe the worst about their fellow countrymen, and McCarthy is catering to many of them with these ridiculous comments. These divisions might be temporarily suppressed in an emergency, but they will quickly reemerge and will express themselves again. Great power rivalry will take the political divisions in this country and make them even worse in an atmosphere of supercharged nationalism and suspicion.

Hyper-competitiveness is one of the pathologies of U.S. foreign policy. Framing U.S.-China relations primarily in terms of a competition that the U.S. must “win,” as the president did on Tuesday, feeds that pathology and seems certain to produce misguided and dangerous policies that will have serious costs for the country and perhaps for the entire world. Chris Fettweis discussed this at length in The Pathologies of Power in his chapter on the pathology of glory: “In fact, a good case can be made that competitiveness is even more destructive for a country than it is for a person, whether it be in security, economics, or social realms.”¹ While competition may drive people to excel in certain respects, it has corrosive and harmful effects. For one thing, it makes the competitors more aggressive and belligerent. Fettweis writes, “Like the credibility imperative, competition increases belligerent behavior and discourages cooperation.”² Competition also breeds distrust and causes competitors to assume the worst about their rivals.³ Fettweis concludes that the “consequences for foreign policy of the continuing importance of glory are, however, uniformly pathological.”⁴

One of the pitfalls of defining the relationship with China in terms of such a competition is that the more intensively that both of our countries “compete” for dominance, the more likely it is that everyone will lose and end up worse off than we are now. Even if the rivalry doesn’t lead to war and even if such a war doesn’t escalate to a nuclear exchange, we will all be poorer and less secure with more of our resources wasted on military buildups that could have been used for other purposes. The danger is that a rivalry defined by competition that we supposedly have to “win” will sooner or later escalate into direct conflict, because the prospect of “losing” will be intolerable to the people invested in pursuing the rivalry. The problem is the zero-sum competitive framing itself, and if we don’t get rid of it our country will end up in a much worse position in the future.

1. Fettweis, The Pathologies of Power: p.154.

2. Fettweis, p. 161.

3. Fettweis, p. 162.

4. Fettweis, p.168.