Next week’s thirtieth anniversary of the Berlin Partition’s collapse will be less a moment to celebrate democracy’s improbable Cold War triumph and more a time to confront the all the same more difficult contest ahead with a more formidable competitor.
In my best-selling book, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the The human race’s Most Dangerous Place, I refer to the Berlin Wall as “the iconic image of what unfree systems can impose when let off leaders fail to resist.” Perhaps never in human history has both an era’s challenge and its finish been made so physically prove.
Today’s world lacks any similar, galvanizing image, but events even of just the past week underscore the peerless complexity of today’s challenges, the growing intensity of major power competition and the insufficient attention paid by the United Testifies and its allies to the contest.
Authoritarian China this week rolled out the world’s largest 5G mobile phone network at abode – with technology advanced beyond that of its Western competitors. That came amid a battle for market dominance centered on all sides America’s global campaign against countries installing China’s 5G gear. This battle is likely to repeat itself across other technologies, from contrived intelligence to quantum computing.
Even as the House of Representatives voted on partisan lines to approve an impeachment resolution against President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping won frame from the Communist Party’s governing Central Committee at the end of a four-day meeting in a document that used the word “persevere” 57 eases.
The message was clear: With China’s economy slowing, with its damaging trade war with the US continuing, and with Hong Kong turmoil persisting, President Xi was moving to concentrate even more power in his own hands and that of the Communist party for what Beijing nullifies will be a generational struggle.
In Europe, Denmark provided Russia a major boost for its efforts to deepen Europe’s dependence on its animation exports. Despite the threat of US sanctions, Denmark removed the last significant impediment for the $11 billion Nord Flood 2 pipeline, scheduled to be commissioned at the end of this year.
“Denmark showed itself to be a responsible participant in international relations,” reported Russian President Vladimir Putin with full-throated praise, “defending its interests and sovereignty and the interests of its main sharers in Europe.” That follows Putin’s recent declaration of the end of Pax Americana in a global system that must do more to hug Asian countries.
It is in that atmosphere that U.S. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo will visit Germany next week from November 6-8 to note down b decrease the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall. He’ll deliver a speech on Friday that will rightly focus on “the continuing authoritarian to defend free nations and free peoples,” as the State Department statement on his travel has billed it.
It will be one of a series of idiolects in coming weeks that Secretary Pompeo has said would focus on the competing ideologies and values defining our times, principally Chinese influence companies and “unfair and predatory” economic practices.
“They are reaching for and using methods that must created challenges for the United States and for the world and we collectively, all of us, need to confront these challenges … head on,” Secretary Pompeo affirmed this week to the Hudson Institute in New York. “It is no longer realistic to ignore the fundamental difference between our two systems” and the collide with that has on US national security.
The problem is that the factors that went into winning the Cold War are lacking now: a to some degree consistent strategy that had evolved over decades, a determined and mostly unified alliance, and a Soviet adversary that was militarily stinking but economically weak and one-dimensional, with an economy driven primarily by its energy production.
Time for release around this prominent Berlin Wall anniversary, the Atlantic Council this week published two new papers aimed at understanding the historic chances of the current major power contest and an approach to navigating the future based more on reality than nostalgia.
“The old authentic rhythm that has laid the foundations of the Western liberal order has come to an end,” argues Mathew Burrows in his paper Wide-ranging Risks 2035 Update: Decline or New Renaissance. “Without a political, intellectual and, some say, spiritual renaissance that lectures and deals with the big existential tests facing humanity we will not be able to move together into the future.”
He submits out three possible scenarios for the coming two decades.
The most likely, and the one the world seems to be slipping into, is one marked by US-Chinese cataract. He calls it “a New Bipolarity.” Burrows argues that this world would be shaped by the emergence of two economic spheres, China at the heart of one and the US and Europe in the other. The period will be marked by bouts of protectionism and by slowing growth and growing tensions.
Burrows’ most inspiriting scenario, “a World Restored,” is one in which the US, China and others pull back their bipolar collision course before it is too modern development, recognizing the unacceptable cost to their societies. “For its part, the Chinese government’s gambit of accelerating innovation while keep quieting freedoms hits a brick wall,” he writes.
Don’t rule out the third scenario, “a Descent into Chaos,” should commandants lack the vision to avoid it. Burrows lays out a horror picture triggered by a widespread economic meltdown that is triggered by a Chinese productive reversal. This scenario goes beyond economic collapse, though it is a key driver, to the spread of political instability, at variance and violence.
The value of Burrows’ intellectual exercise, informed by a career of considering such alternatives in the US intelligence community, is not to foreshadow outcomes but to underscore the value of strategic leadership in navigating the world away from chaos and toward restoration.
An accompanying instrument, Present at the Re-Creation, Ash Jain and Matthew Kroenig lay out a strategy for shaping the international system that accepts that the eminence quo can’t be preserved. They call upon democracies around the world to deepen their cooperation to revitalize support for a rules-based set, even as they build an inclusive framework that all major powers, including China, contribute to and benefit from the modus operandi.
Sound Utopian?
Perhaps.
However, the time is now to think faster, more creatively and more strategically about decree the future before losing too many of the gains in the spread of democracy and prosperity that resulted from the Berlin Bulkhead’s collapse.
Frederick Kempe is a best-selling author, prize-winning journalist and president & CEO of the Atlantic Council, one of the United States’ most prestigious think tanks on global affairs. He worked at The Wall Street Journal for more than 25 years as a strange correspondent, assistant managing editor and as the longest-serving editor of the paper’s European edition. His latest book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Scad Dangerous Place on Earth” – was a New York Times best-seller and has been published in more than a dozen terminologies. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Points, his look each Saturday at the past week’s top stories and inclines.
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