Rise of the Revisionists

Gary Schmitt

Description

Rise of the Revisionists: Russia, China, and Iran is a five-essay volume, edited by the American Enterprise Institute’s Gary J. Schmitt, that examines the three rising powers as they challenge the US and the global order in three critical regions of the world. Essays by the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick W. Kagan on Russia and Dan Blumenthal on China and by Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Senior Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht on Iran analyze the historical roots of each country’s ambitions, their strategic goals, and possible US policies for meeting the challenges and threats posed by each. Those essays are framed by an introduction by Gary Schmitt that places the tests facing the US foreign policy in a broader strategic framework and by a concluding essay by Hudson Institute Scholar Walter Russell Mead that looks to the Father of History, Thucydides, to provide insight into the complex set of domestic and foreign realities that shape American statecraft in this most challenging time.

Sujets

• Security International
• Security National
• Political Science

Informations

• Publié par: AEI Press
• Date de parution: 02 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780844750156
• Langue: English

Extrait

Rise of the Revisionists
Rise of the Revisionists
Russia, China, and Iran
Essays by
Gary J. Schmitt • Frederick W. Kagan Dan Blumenthal • Reuel Marc Gerecht Walter Russell Mead
Edited by Gary J. Schmitt
T HE AEI P RESS
Publisher for the American Enterprise Institute WASHINGTON, DC
ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-5013-2 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-5014-9 (paperback)
© 2018 by the American Enterprise Institute. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute except in the case of brief quotations embodied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI.
American Enterprise Institute 1789 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20036 www.aei.org
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction: The Challenge Ahead
Gary J. Schmitt
1. Russia: The Kremlin’s Many Revisions
Frederick W. Kagan
2. China: The Imperial Legacy
Dan Blumenthal
3. Iran: The Shi’ite Imperial Power
Reuel Marc Gerecht
4. Not a Trap but a Minefield: The Thucydidean Challenge to American Foreign Policy
Walter Russell Mead
About the Authors
Introduction: The Challenge Ahead
GARY J. SCHMITT
I f the vast majority of foreign policy analysts and commentators agree on one thing, it is that “the unipolar moment” has passed. American dominance—be it political, economic, or military—is no longer so overwhelming that history can be said to have ended. 1 To the contrary, the security challenges the US confronts are spread across the globe and are as complex as any the country has faced since its infancy.
While al Qaeda, ISIS, and North Korea present deadly serious problems, America’s geopolitical situation is unique in that we are confronted by the rise of revisionist powers in each of the three regions traditionally seen as crucial to our own peace and prosperity and to the larger goal of global stability: Russia in Europe, China in East Asia, and Iran in the Middle East. If the US is to develop effective, sustainable policies that truly serve its national interests, we must first understand the roots and the character of the challenges these three countries pose.
The chapters that follow (Frederick Kagan’s “Russia: The Kremlin’s Many Revisions,” Dan Blumenthal’s “China: The Imperial Legacy,” and Reuel Marc Gerecht’s “Iran: The Shi’ite Imperial Power”) attempt to spell out the specific nature of each country’s revisionist drive and how, broadly speaking, the US and its allies should respond. The volume concludes with Walter Russell Mead’s “Not a Trap but a Minefield: The Thucydidean Challenge to American Foreign Policy,” which argues that, when properly read, the great Athenian historian’s analysis of war, regimes, and statecraft is far richer and more nuanced than what current international relations theorists can offer for coming to terms with China, Iran, and Russia and for understanding the potential and pitfalls of a democratic nation’s response.
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The essays make no effort to consolidate the revisionist drives of China, Iran, and Russia into one overarching model. Each is unique—a fact that makes America’s possible responses no less difficult. 2
As Kagan notes at the start of his chapter, Russia’s revisionist behavior is driven by a trio of factors: overturning what Moscow argues are flawed, unfavorable agreements with former Soviet states; revising what it means to be Russia and Russian; and upending the existing international order. Each would be difficult enough to address alone. Combined, they make doing so even more complicated—but also, Kagan writes, just as necessary: “The superficial validity of some of Russia’s grievances must not blind us to this reality. The West must find a way to uphold the settlements of the early 1990s, defend the principles of international law and order, and help Russia settle on a new identity within those parameters.”
In the case of China, Blumenthal argues that the People’s Republic is intent on revising the balance of power in East Asia by returning China to its central place in the regional order, with its past “imperial” rule defining and guiding its efforts to become East Asia’s hegemon. Uniquely, Blumenthal writes, “Beijing rules over the world’s last remaining multiethnic empire,” and the drive to reclaim “lost” territories and prestige and secure that empire both domestically and internationally explains much of Chinese statecraft. But in key respects, Blumenthal notes, “China is in imperial overstretch,” and it should be America’s strategy to “begin to take advantage of this.”
As for Iran, Gerecht posits that, while the Islamic Republic has seen itself as revolutionary since 1979, the broader Islamic agenda has largely “lost its mojo.” It has effectively been replaced by a “militant Shi’ite fraternity” designed to give the regime new legitimacy at home and, potentially, a hegemonic position within the Middle East, by playing the Shi’ite card in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and among the oppressed Shi’a in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. But, Gerecht argues, “Iran is a volcano of [internal] contradictions,” and Washington would do well to “accentuate those contradictions, especially the century-old Iranian quest for representative government.”
In the concluding essay, Walter Russell Mead explains why international relations realists are inclined to define a state’s behavior narrowly. As a result, they do not provide an adequate road map for policymakers to use in developing strategies to confront that behavior. “Thucydides was no realist in the modern, American, and academic sense of that term.” Today’s realism “is a weak and denatured creature, compared to the complex vision of Thucydidean realism, and the costs to analytic coherence are serious.”
Certainly, in the limited sense of physical security, none of the three states can honestly claim their own behavior is driven by fear of an American-led invasion. With the end of the Cold War, both Russia and China were more secure than ever and, indeed, remained secure with the significant decline in military spending by the United States and its allies. Even Iran, which from the revolution onward has defined its foreign policy as anti-American, has never been confronted with an American administration determined to overturn its rule. If Tehran faces a possible military strike by its adversaries, it is largely because of the Islamic Republic’s own ambition to acquire nuclear weapons.
In Mead’s account, in the world of Thucydides, peoples and leaders are moved by a complex mix of interests, fate, and passions, and “no concept could be less congenial” to the Father of History “than the idea that domestic politics and regime type are largely irrelevant to the study of international relations”—which holds true for both autocratic and liberal regimes. In short, it pays to know, in depth, what is driving a state and its leaders; to understand that those drivers cannot be divorced from a country’s internal governance; and to realize that, even with such an understanding, unknown and uncontrollable factors will still intercede to shape and limit any strategy.
As important as it is to keep all this in mind, we should not be blind to the one thing that does tie the three revisionist powers together: ambition. None of the three states has been satisfied with an American-led international order, but their ambitions to challenge that order, at least regionally, were initially constrained by their relative lack of economic and military strength, compared to that of the United States and key allies. With the end of the Cold War, that dominance was unprecedented. America and its treaty-bound partners accounted for more than 70 percent of both worldwide military spending and total global gross domestic product (GDP). 3
Faced with such dominance, China’s strategy was “hide our capabilities and bide our time.” 4 Similarly, Russia, humiliated by the loss of its superpower status, had to wait until the spike in oil and gas prices unleashed a flood of new revenue to begin to try to reverse the various “capitulations” Yeltsin and Gorbachev had made to Washington and the West out of Soviet, and then Russian, weakness. And while Iran has never concealed its willingness to challenge the United States, its recent assertiveness is undoubtedly tied to the disarray in American Middle East policy, brought about by its multiyear fumbling in Iraq, half-hearted commitment in Afghanistan, and indecision over Syria and the chaos resulting from the Arab Spring. With the combined decline of American and allied economic and military power in recent years, and a general reluctance to use that power assertively, all three states have seized the opportunity to push their revisionist agenda forward.
Policies designed to satiate each of the three countries have not worked. In the cases of Russia and China, American administrations of both political stripes have tried to reset relations and have invited them to join various world forums (such as the World Trade Organization and G20) and generally to recognize their place in the international system. The results have at best been underwhelming. Although some common interests have emerged that have allowed for some cooperation, broader diverging interests and agendas have undermined any real progress toward either Russia or China accepting the responsibilities of having a seat at the table. They have been willing to take advantage of the international order—especially economically—but unwilling to support that order.
China, Iran, and Russia have each been willing participants in the global trading system. But expectations that such participation might help ge