Andrew A. Michta
At the twilight of globalization, as the next U.S. National Security Strategy is about to be finalized, America’s current and future strategic choices are being impacted by a misreading of the drivers of state behavior, as well as the degree to which Washington can shape the global systemic transformation lurking over the horizon. The second Trump administration’s policy decisions that are reshaping the international security environment are not simply, as POTUS’s critics imply, the product of a mercurial presidency. Rather, they are a consistent manifestation of the US policy community’s shared world view, steeped in a historically derived though ultimately flawed diagnosis of what drives great power competition. We seem to have consensus that the prospect of the United States’ relative decline as a great power stems from changes in global power distribution, but what’s missing is a clear recognition that we are locked into an ideological framing of our own making that constrains how we approach the increasingly unstable world. Simply put, we are continuing to misread history.
Three decades of unprecedented U.S. power in the wake of our victory in the Cold War have conditioned America’s policy elites to assume that the international system will ultimately always bend to our will. Drawing on abundant military stocks accumulated during the Cold War, after 1991 successive presidents saw their wins generously rewarded while their policy missteps routinely carried but a marginal penalty. This state of affairs quickly gave rise to a sense of ideological certitude bordering geostrategic arrogance, one that still infuses the nation’s policy debates. The Washington policy community continues to operate on the assumption that the U.S. retains the ability to impose its priorities on other principal players without first incurring additional costs, even though Russia and China have demonstrated repeatedly that the enemy gets a voice when it comes to shaping regional balances close to home and beyond. We believe that we have agency in world affairs, while we remain unwilling to pay for properly resourcing our military and our defense industry, as though we were still living in the post-Cold War world.
The Trump administration’s policy choices, especially in its relations with European NATO allies and of late with India, have accelerated the process of a systemic transformation toward what Beijing and Moscow like to call the “multipolarization” of the world. We have yet to acknowledge that this transformation will inevitably impact America’s ability to protect its national interests. A case in point: Repeated efforts to reset the United States’ relations with Russia to woo it away from China’s embrace have failed, and yet the administration keeps returning to this formula, seemingly convinced that this time the result will be different. And so, instead of communicating to the nation that to retain its competitive edge the United States will need to commit significant additional resources to rebuild its military and its defense industry, our defense planners stipulate that this can be achieved through a strategic sleight of hand, whether through a pivot from Europe to Asia, or perhaps even away from both theaters.
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