Underrating Liberty, We Swapped One Cold War for Another... and it’s Heating Up
The most grievous miscalculation of American foreign policy over the last forty years was to underestimate the importance of Communism’s collapse. This miscalculation flowed naturally from the greatest weakness of the U.S. foreign policy establishment which is to underestimate the strategic importance of liberty.
As soon a modicum of freedom came to poor, very recently starving, rural China, pre-dating even Mao’s death, though not his decline, China’s wealth and power were destined to increase exponentially unless those developments were violently reversed.
It would be unfair to say that U.S. foreign policy types should have seen the implications or even been aware of the changes immediately. Beijing remained unaware for several years. Freedom came to the Chinese countryside on the QT and to the most desperately poor provinces first and by benign neglect not explicit policy.
Still, by the late 1980s importance of the Deng-era reforms—which raised benign neglect to a conscious policy--should have been clear to anyone sensitive to liberty’s power. A “pivot to Asia” mandated by China’s rise was imperative long before it was spoken of. Yet we spent another 30 years trying to run Europe and obsessing on the failure of middle eastern dictators to embrace a liberal, law-like international order.
Even today our China policy misses liberty’s importance. Republicans especially should know liberty by its fruits. They should grasp that China’s wealth testifies to its astonishing—if contested and imperfect--progress toward liberty. And yet they deny this as fervently as if they were Democrats.
New Gingrich, the intellectual leader of the GOP China hawks (I damn with faint praise) maintains not only that China is “the greatest threat to a free America that we have faced in our lifetime” but that the source of China’s power is its “totalitarian system, extraordinary organization, and immense population.” The reforms beginning with by Deng Xiaoping he dismisses as a “40-year-long propaganda campaign,” and “a false front for the real China.”
Really? Once free-market Republicans now believe that China owes its riches and technological prowess to its “totalitarian system” and “extraordinary organization”?
The hawks deny the crucial reality that there are two Chinas, locked in an almost 50-year struggle for dominance, the China of the autocrats and the China of the entrepreneurs, the China of irrelevant five-year plans and pathetic state-owned companies, and the China of exuberant even chaotic and fantastically productive free enterprise.
The Empire Strikes Back
To be sure, just now the autocrats look like the comeback kids. Nor is it obvious how the U.S. can affect the outcome of the struggle. At least though we should recognize that the future of Chinese liberty is the future of China. And we should recognize that what Trumpians call the Chinese threat—its fantastic growth and technological leadership--is the fruit of Chinese virtues and a bounty for the U.S.
Xi does seem to hold Mao as his hero, and he does seem to want to reimpose state control of the economy. He has already done far more damage than the American establishment—undervaluing freedom--grasps. The accelerating renewal of massive subsidies to the state-owned enterprises, which started more than a decade ago, has reduced China’s average national return on capital to low single digits. Xi’s envious abuse of some of the world’s most brilliant entrepreneurs is chasing away investment, not only foreigners but even domestically. His Covid lockdowns have set the CCP back on its heels.
Ironically if Xi succeeds our China “problem” disappears. Surrounded by enemies, a revanchist, poor, and socialist China will have a hard time dominating its region let alone the globe.
Russians and Germans vs. Communists and Nazis
Still more neglectful of liberty’s power has been our policy toward Russia. Establishment cluelessness or cynicism is summed up in the old chestnut that the purpose of NATO was to keep “the Americans, in Germany down, and Russia out.” NB: not “the Nazis” but the Germans; not “the Soviets” but the Russians. Who are these Germans, these Russians, to us?
The great tragedy of our age was Wilson’s delusion that who dominated Europe--Germany or Russia--mattered to America. As a result, we were twenty years later confronted with the altogether more desperate choice whether Europe should be run by Nazis or Communists.
To call the Nazis “Germans” and the Communists “Russians” may appear worldly wise. It is criminally foolish. Germany ceased to be a threat and became an ally the instant the Nazi Party was destroyed. Titillating as the myth of universal German guilt and a democratically elected Nazi regime may be, Hitler seized power violently after winning a minority of the vote and held it by murder and intimidation on a totalitarian scale.
Germany became an enemy when she lost liberty and a friend when she regained it—as a gift from America.
The Estonian Threat
When Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, the American foreign policy establishment was catastrophically indifferent. Yes, there were some overtures in the 1990s. There was even talk of inviting Russia into NATO, though with Russia in NATO it would be very hard to think of what threat NATO would oppose. Estonia?
With Communism out, the Warsaw Bloc dissolved, Russia’s economy and population reduced to less than 40% of the Soviet Union’s and Russian forces moved back from the Fulda Gap to the eastern borders of Ukraine, the U.S. should have announced its intention to exit NATO by 2000 at the latest.
For from that point on, the mission of NATO would inevitably be transformed into what the cynics always called it: keeping Russia out. No longer an anticommunist alliance it inevitably became an anti-Russian alliance. Instead of a new era of Russian-American amity, like unto the new era of German-American amity, we got a continuation of the cold war long after its purposes had dissolved.
US strategists from Kennan to Reagan rightly understood that our enemy was not Russia but Communism. Their successors, tone deaf to the power of liberty, and especially to the special threat of totalitarian rather than authoritarian regimes, refused to accept victory.
The consequences have been grave and grow perilous. The guiding principle of American foreign policy should always be to encourage Russia and China to suspect and fear each other and therefor cherish cordial relations with the U.S. By neglecting the power of liberty, we have achieved just the opposite and made our world more dangerous.