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March 5 - March 24, 2022
More important, these relations have taken a turn for the worse, especially between the United States and Russia.
Much of history is the result of friction leading to conflict between existing and rising powers, reflecting the difficulty in peacefully accommodating the changing power balance and relationship between the two. This pattern often goes by the shorthand of the “Thucydides Trap,” named for the ancient Greek historian who two and a half millennia ago chronicled the competition between a rising Athens and the established but suspicious power of Sparta, which resulted in the Peloponnesian War.
the spring of 1989, when Chinese students and others gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a former general secretary of the Communist Party and someone associated with a reformist orientation. The protests grew in size and intensity, and after much internal debate over how to respond, the government declared martial law and subsequently moved to clear the square with force. Thousands of students and some police were killed or injured.
To what extent should U.S. ties with other countries be based upon matters of state and foreign policy, and to what extent should U.S. attitudes and policies be shaped by what other countries did within their borders, by their domestic nature as much as or more than anything else?
protect the core relationship and maintain a dialogue.
Isolating China might have had precisely the opposite effect.
interest at stake with China was Taiwan. Again, the United States opted for what might be termed realism as opposed to idealism.
deterrence and economic interdependence
In foreign policy, managing a situation in a manner that fails to address core or what are sometimes described as final status issues can be preferable to attempting to bring about a solution sure to be unacceptable to one or more of the parties and that could as a result provoke a dangerous response.
Problem management...
From the U.S. perspective, the reasons include more assertive Chinese behavior in the region, such as the unilateral declaration of a large “air defense identification zone,” the staking out of expanded claims to territorial seas, and the physical expansion of islands in the South China Sea; a Chinese military buildup across the board; widespread theft of intellectual property; a persistent large trade imbalance in China’s favor that many in the United States judge to result at least in part from unfair trading practices; and an increase in Chinese political repression at home.
More significant, though, was the decision to enlarge NATO, which started in the late 1990s under the Clinton administration and was continued by its successors.
Seven more countries (Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) became NATO members in 2004, while talks were initiated that could lead to NATO membership for still others, including Georgia and Ukraine.
more specific crisis in U.S. relations with Russia emerged in Georgia in 2008.
military response was ruled out; not only was Ukraine not a member of NATO, but it would have been equal parts difficult and risky to try to defend territory of a weak country on Russia’s border.
A cease-fire and political agreement was signed by Russia, Ukraine, France, and Germany in early 2015 (the Minsk Accord), but it has never been fully implemented, with each side blaming the other for not observing one or more of its parts.17
It also reintroduced a military dimension to Europe that many observers thought had vanished with the end of the Cold War. And it weakened the global norm that military force should not be used to change borders. Russia paid a political and economic price for its actions, but not one high enough to reverse a policy that enjoyed the support of most of its people.
Three criteria are central to the degree or quality of order: the extent to which there is a widely shared definition of the rules and principles by which the world is to operate; the existence of a broadly accepted process for setting, adjusting, and applying these rules and principles; and a balance of power.
The driving force in many cases around the world was less a push for self-determination and the creation of a new state than it was some version of score settling or a winner-take-all effort to establish a new political, social, and economic hierarchy.
Ukraine, soon after it became independent, voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons in the early 1990s at the urging of the United States. Two decades later, it was invaded by Russian-backed forces and lost Crimea and forfeited significant control over its eastern provinces.
All this added up to a powerful lesson that nuclear weapons can offer protection against foreign intervention—and the lack of them can increase the odds of a country being attacked and its government ousted.
Red wine may improve with age, but policy choices rarely do.
More than anything else, Russian policy seemed to be motivated by a desire to show that it remained a major power able to make a difference on the world stage. There was as well a Russian interest in bolstering a long-term ally where it had a military base;
What I will say, though, is that the principal errors of policy were the decisions to launch the war in 2003 and the decisions made afterward to disband the army and ban far too many of those associated with what had been the ruling party.
Process is no panacea, but it can protect presidents, who too often opt for the decision-making process and staff they feel comfortable with and want, not the ones they need.
The result was a decision, announced in December 2009, to increase U.S. troop levels by some 50 percent (to one hundred thousand) but to begin the process of drawing them down in eighteen months.34 In so doing, the Obama administration made the serious error of basing policy on the calendar (which is inherently arbitrary) rather than local conditions.
most relevant here is the Russian conquest of Crimea, its blatant interference in eastern Ukraine, and the potential threat it poses to several of its small neighbors.
Policy design of course mattered, and agreement in principle was of course desirable, but what counted most was what actually got done.
The problem with the Security Council as currently configured is that it is not representative of today’s world.
The word I use to capture this reality of widely distributed power and capacity is “nonpolarity.” It is qualitatively and fundamentally different from the nature of the world in the past. The greater distribution of power that characterizes this era makes it more difficult to assemble all the relevant actors in one place and keep such a gathering workable.
Military power can help to create a context, but no occupation or attempt at nation building can transform culture or alter loyalties or entrenched behaviors.
as Thucydides wrote, rivalry between the major power of the day and rising competitors is the natural way of international affairs.
What it requires, on one hand, is effectively shutting down the idea or temptation that coercion or aggression will succeed.
This argues for the stationing of military forces in and around areas that either China or Russia might claim or move against, something that translates into maintaining increased U.S. ground and air forces in Europe and increased air and naval forces in the Asia-Pacific.
If sanctions are to be introduced versus Russia or China in response to some action on its part deemed illegitimate, they should be kept as narrow as possible lest the entire relationship suffer and with it the chance for selective cooperation.
History suggests, though, that sanctions alone can rarely accomplish big things.
Sanctions should be used by the United States when they exact a price from the intended target and do not cause collateral damage to other relationships.
Ideally, the economic loss that could accrue to them (in particular from sanctions) if they acted badly would deter them.
Tell that to Putin
the United States and NATO would be wise to focus on meeting existing obligations before taking on new ones.
Russia under Vladimir Putin has important decisions to make, above all whether it wants to be a spoiler, one heavily reliant on the use of military force for its external influence, or be part of international society.
It chose to be a spoiler...
a world in which borders are violated through the use of military force (and, increasingly, through the use of other tools, such as the offensive use of cyber instruments) is a world of increased danger and instability.
The result is that we no longer have the luxury of viewing all of what goes on in another country as off-limits.
the need to develop and gain support for a definition of legitimacy that embraces not just the rights but also the obligations of sovereign states vis-à-vis other governments and countries.
“sovereign obligation.”
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Genocide Convention.
the Responsibility t...
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it is sometimes better to attempt to resolve a problem in practice than in principle.
To be sure, the United States has a special role and unique obligations in the world, but it must also appreciate that when it appears hypocritical or looks to be guilty of double standards it forfeits influence.
the Helsinki Accord, more formally known as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE. This and associated arrangements work to, among other things, discourage the use of military means to change borders and promote measures and arrangements (confidence-building measures, or CBMs) that reduce the chance of accidental military incidents and of escalation if one occurs all the same.
Pakistan is not an ally and often not even a partner.
