Category: World

But the world’s most powerful countries have rarely used force to . . . set up client states in their region.

David Leonhardt, Why Ukraine Is Different, N.Y. Times (Feb. 21, 2022).

Yes, I know that David Leonhardt is only talking about the past 80 years. But he’s still laughably, embarrassingly, pathetically, naively wrong.

Does he not realize that the government that we set up in Afghanistan was a client government? (And if we set up a client state in a place, does it not become “our region”?)

Sure, the Ghani government fell when we left last summer, but, you know, that wasn’t on purpose! We were planning to have the Ghani government—or an equally pliable replacement—as a client for a long, long time to come.

It just didn’t work out as planned, which is why that evacuation was so last-minute.

And that’s just the most obvious recent example.

Because we also invaded Iraq twenty years ago . . . and Iraq is now a client state!

Does Leonhardt really think that a government that we put into power and which we have since used military intervention to save repeatedly from falling to the Islamic State is in any position to say “no” to a serious request from us?

And what about Kuwait, which owes its existence to a bit of set-piece military fun called the First Gulf War? If President Biden—nay, an obscure undersecretary of state—picks up the phone and calls Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah to ask for something is he going to get a “no”?

Oh, and then there’s Vietnam. Let’s date American military involvement to 1961 to 1975, comfortably within Leonhardt’s 80-year time frame.

Does anyone think that South Vietnam during this period was not one of our client states, and that if we’d won the war that relationship would not have continued for a very long time?

But 80 years takes us all the way back to 1942!

Which means we also need to come to terms with the fact that we created lots and lots of client states when we won the Second World War.

We can debate whether they’re still clients today, whether they have so prospered under the sun of our love, so come to accept our global dominance, that the relationship looks more like friendship than control.

But certainly in the decades after the war they were clients.

There’s Germany, which fought against us in two world wars but has been awfully friendly (the eastern part during the Cold War aside) ever since we conquered the western bit, and within the borders of which we continue to maintain a large troop presence to this day.

And there’s Japan, which used to hate us but changed its tone after we defeated it and set up a friendly government there. We still station a ton of soldiers in Japanese territory, as well.

And then of course there is South Korea. We didn’t want that territory to fall into enemy hands, so we conquered it back from that enemy in the early 1950s and set up a friendly government there and continue to station a ton of troops there, as well. If South Korea isn’t a client now, it certainly was in, say, 1965.

I’m not saying that World War Two or the Korean War weren’t good fights (indeed, we went to war with Germany and Japan only after they declared war on us). And I’m not saying that there aren’t lots of Koreans and Japanese and Germans who are happy about their countries’ relationship with the United States.

But let’s get real.

None of these countries posed an imminent threat of invasion to the United States. (Hawaii was not a state at the time of Pearl Harbor and anyway the Japanese aim at Pearl Harbor was to destroy a fleet that it believed would be used to interfere with its conquest of Asia, not to occupy the Hawaiian Islands.)

But we conquered them because we (quite reasonably, in my view) didn’t like what they (or in the case of Korea, China) were doing in their own backyards and realized that if they got away with it our own ability to project influence into those backyards, some of which were also our backyards, would wane.

And after we conquered these countries we set up friendly governments.

And you can make the case that they are all still dependent on us, not least for security, which is the root of all power.

The United States is a great power.

Great powers are great powers because they can make other people in other countries do what they say, by military force if necessary.

We can feel good about being a great power because we think what we tell others to do is better than what other powers would tell them to do.

Or because we are better or more humane at running the world than others would be.

But, please, don’t tell me that we somehow manage to be a great power without exercising power!

What makes Ukraine different is not that it’s the first time in 80 years that one country is trying to make a client state out of another. We do that all the time. It’s that for the first time in 25 years a great power not called the United States is trying to make a client state by military force.

Ukraine is significant only because it reminds us that the brief period during which the United States was the world’s sole great power is probably over.

As the United States comes now to face Russia and China in great power competition, one feels intensely the lack of a unified Muslim world. For one need only take a look at a map to appreciate that it is a dagger at once aimed at the Russian belly and the Chinese back—and has historically been an important antagonist of both empires. There is no question that, were Islam not the geopolitical non-entity that it is today, Russian and Chinese horizons would be badly limited by the need to protect their flanks. Instead, the only threat the Muslim world presents to these countries today is as an enticement to conflict in dividing up its territories in Central Asia.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States believed, correctly, that they were the world’s only remaining great power. China was poor. Europe had long been exhausted by its two great 20th century wars, and political collapse in Russia had reduced her to the rank of a middle power—an echo of this view is found in the observation, oft-repeated these days, that the Russian economy is the size of Italy’s. The question then became whether the United States should use its power to police the world, or whether it should allow the lesser powers to mistreat each other or their people.

The first Gulf War seemed to say that, at least when it came to the revision of borders, the United States would police the prevailing territorial status quo. Iraq had annexed Kuwait, and the United States rode in to reverse that outcome. American-led military action also put a stop to Serbian expansionism a few years later, seemingly reinforcing this signal.

The American commitment to protecting individual persons around the world, as opposed to sovereign nations, seemed somewhat weaker, but was by no means non-existent. There was much hand-wringing in Washington about failure to intervene to quell genocide in Rwanda, for example.

The picture of America as sole great power was reinforced over the ensuing decade. The September 11 attacks, carried out by a ragtag group without the backing of any government, suggested that the United States were without any substantial adversary. And the response—the invasion of Afghanistan and the adventure in Iraq—suggested that the United States could strike any nation at will without fear of anything more than a brief tut-tutting from global public opinion.

Then came Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, which challenged America’s claim to sole great power status that had by then prevailed for the past quarter century. The first Gulf War, in 1991, had been a warning to the world: the United States, as sole great power, would not tolerate the revision of borders. Now Russia had chosen to revise a border. Would the United States seek to do to Russia—a country it had treated like a middle power for a quarter century—what it had done to Iraq in 1991?

The response was: crickets. The United States did nothing. And just like that, two new great powers (re)appeared on the world stage: Russia and China.

Things had changed over the past decade or so. First, Russia’s weakness, which had fundamentally been a political weakness caused by the collapse of the Soviet state, was gone; the country had regained political stability and was now once again capable of acting decisively on the world stage. And it still had its nuclear weapons, and plenty of delivery channels, which its Italian-sized economy was more than enough to maintain. Second, breakneck economic growth had vaulted China’s economy into competition with the United States, and her wealth was buying her the military capabilities she would need to be a great power as well.

Great power status is not just about wealth and military power, however. It is a mindset. Britain, France, and Germany could all ramp up military expenditures and challenge the United States. But they do not because they were exhausted mentally by their attempts to maintain their great power status in the 20th century. They are content to play second fiddle to the United States. Russia, however, emerged triumphant from the same wars that exhausted Britain, France, and Germany. And China has waited two centuries to regain what it sees as its rightful place as center of the world. Both countries have the great power mindset.

America’s failure to respond to Crimea suggested that perhaps America had lost it—not the mindset needed to be a great power, but the mindset needed to be the sole great power. For any country that fears war more than it fears loss of status loses its status immediately, and what was at stake was America’s claim to be the guarantor of world order. But America’s stated justification for failing to respond to Crimea was precisely that it feared war.

Russia got the hint immediately, and within the year intervened militarily in the Syrian civil war, propping up a regime that the United States opposed, not least on human rights grounds. With that, Russia had challenged not only America’s commitment to protecting states against states (Ukraine against Russia) but also America’s admittedly much more equivocal commitment to protecting people against human rights violations.

Again, the response was: crickets. The United States was willing to tolerate Russian policing of the very region over which the United States had most asserted its own control over the past 25 years. Americans themselves didn’t seem to notice, but anyone who was paying attention (i.e., the rest of the world) understood this to be a signal humiliation.

Meanwhile, even before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Chinese had embarked on a campaign of island building in international waters that China claimed as its own. This was another territorial revision and so another direct challenge to America’s claim to guarantee the territorial status quo.

Here, too, the response was: crickets. And the islands have become a sprawling archipelago.

What we have witnessed over the past ten years is the collapse of the unipolar world order over which the United States presided after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It should be no surprise that Russia would continue to expand territorially in the wake of such a collapse. It will be no surprise when China does as well, not least by retaking Taiwan.

At present, the United States remain the strongest power both economically and militarily. But, particularly in respect of China, that may not continue.

The first question America must answer for herself is: does she want to reestablish her former role as the world’s sole great power? If the answer is yes, then she must fear continued loss of that status more than she fears war. Russia, certainly, values her return to great power status more than she fears war. And that is precisely why she has returned to that status.

So, where do the United States stand on this?

The answer would seem to be: no, America does not want to defend her sole great power status.

And despite enjoying it mightily while it lasted, she perhaps never was willing to suffer anything to protect it. There was, after all, no real risk involved in the first Gulf War; it afforded America the equivalent of “cheap talk” in game theory—an opportunity for empty posturing.

Moreover, if America had wanted the role of sole great power to begin with, she would have exploited the vast nuclear advantage she enjoyed immediately after World War Two to deny Russia the superpower status she later enjoyed.

Having failed to do that, America would, in any event, later have exploited the collapse of the Soviet Union to ensure that Russia never again could pretend to empire.

And America would never have promoted Chinese economic growth in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, for America would have heeded the warning attributed to Napoleon, to wit: “let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.”

It makes sense to annex territory that welcomes you. That’s why Crimea went off without a hitch. And so, perhaps, Donbas, too. But Kiev? There would be an insurgency. And the West would supply it. And who would want that? So it’s the Donbas or just a bit of fun watching the West sweat. Either way, the Orange Revolution will still have left the West way, way ahead on this one, for Russia’s longstanding, historic buffer zone (“krain” is a slavic word for a march, and a march is a borderland) will still mostly be on the West’s side. At least for now.

One is struck by how unlike 1939 the situation really is.

Back then, Russia’s buffers were buffers against Germany, and those same buffers were also Germany’s buffers against Russia. And the West, in the sense of Britain and France, did not border those buffers at all. When Poland (the buffer at issue back then) sided with the West, it had no prospect of support across a land border.

In siding with the West, Poland became of no value to either Germany or Russia, each of which would otherwise have wanted to support it as a buffer against the other. Instead of being a friend of one and a threat to the other, Poland became a threat to both. And so the two powers got together and agreed to divide Poland between themselves via the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The West could not oppose this by fomenting trouble in-country—as it certainly can do with Ukraine today—because the West had no land borders with Poland across which to run supplies. To stop it, the West had to go to war. Which it did. Although it never did succeed at saving Poland.

But today, Germany, defeated in the Second World War, is now with the West. And Poland is now with the West. And Russia is down to its last buffers, Belarus and Ukraine. And Ukraine wants out. And has plenty of friends on its western borders.