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Head of the FTC Lina Khan, using Amazon as an example, argued in a 2017 Yale Law Journal article that the consumer welfare standard, which she described as particularly concerned with price and output effects, is “unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy.” Then a third-year law student at Yale, Khan asserted that the potential harms posed by Amazon’s market dominance are underappreciated by the prevailing antitrust framework partly because concerns about the competitive harms of predatory pricing and vertical integration have waned in recent decades—but also because “the undue focus on consumer welfare is misguided” and ignores “a host of political economic ends” that Congress intended in passing antitrust legislation. In other words, according to Khan and other reformers, allowing companies to get too big can have negative societal consequences even when prices don’t go up. Massive economic power can be translated into massive political power, undermining democratic legitimacy. Pervasive control over digital communications can threaten free speech and privacy. A few banks with enormous influence in the financial system can lead to instability. But is antitrust the best tool for addressing all those concerns? The US has the FTC to help regulate privacy (along with its role in promoting competitive markets), the Federal Reserve to help keep the banking system steady, and campaign-finance laws enforced by the Federal Election Commission to safeguard democracy. If those institutions are inadequate to their tasks, is it the role of antitrust enforcement to backstop them?

As discussed in this report, many of social media’s harms stem from the design of these platforms — algorithmically engineered feeds and endless scroll features designed to addict users, recommendation models that send users down extremist rabbit holes, dark patterns intended to point you toward certain features. Recalibrating these features will alter the content that users see automatically on their feed and how they engage with this content, but these changes don’t prevent any user from searching for or posting content, and therefore doesn’t limit any user’s freedom of expression. Ensuring safety and privacy by design is both the most impactful and the most politically feasible path forward for social media reform. Additionally, Big Tech companies should implement, or be required to implement, the strongest possible safety and privacy changes by default. Too often, the social media platforms respond to criticism by creating a new “tool,” that can be used to protect your privacy, limit your exposure to harmful content, or mitigate an addictive feature of the website. But these tools are often hard to find, difficult to implement, and require a threshold of tech expertise. When this happens, the implicit message remains the same: It is always someone else’s job to prevent a user of social media from becoming addicted to or harmed by their addictive and harmful products — a parent, an educator, a user themself, rather than the social media company. Defaulting to the strongest possible safety and privacy settings would change this calculus. We have to move toward a system where users must opt out, rather than opt in, of the strongest safety and privacy settings. This approach still gives users the freedom to modify or curate their experiences on social media, but it also ensures that the onus is not on users to pull themselves out of an addictive or harmful spiral created by Big Tech. When it comes to protecting minors, features like targeted advertisements, endless scrolling, and curated feeds should be off by default. And when it comes to privacy, social media platforms must limit data collection, processing, and transfers to what is strictly necessary to provide the service requested by users, and that settings like geo-tracking and public sharing of content are turned off automatically. Lastly, it is crucial that policymakers take a holistic view of social media reform. Because Congress has not passed any major tech reform laws in nearly three decades, it is tempting to see new legislation as a one-shot proposition. But this approach pits important reform priorities against each other. Ensuring a safer and healthier version of social media will require a series of reforms — comprehensive privacy protections for all Americans, additional safeguards for minors, and a transparency regime to ensure greater oversight of these platforms. These priorities aren’t mutually exclusive or in opposition. They work in tandem, forming three pillars that will lift up a better online ecosystem for our kids, our communities, and our democracy. We cannot wait any longer. The social media crisis is here, and it is only getting worse. For our children, for our communities, and for our democracy, we need a national solution now. The Council for Responsible Social Media is committed to ensuring a safe and healthy online ecosystem. We hope Congress will join us in this fight.

Experts are blaming AI and misinformation on social media for pushing embattled democracies around the world toward a tipping point of distrust. Why it matters: The rise of cheap and easy-to-use generative AI tools, the lack of legal guardrails for their deployment and relaxed content moderation policies and layoffs at tech companies are creating the conditions for a perfect misinformation storm. Driving the news: X, which in its former incarnation as Twitter was the go-to platform for breaking news developments, has flooded with misinformation in the wake of Hamas' attack on Israel. X users were presented with false information ranging from video game footage and fireworks footage passed off as deadly attacks to fake pictures of soccer superstar Ronaldo holding the Palestinian flag, Wired reported. X owner Elon Musk was part of the problem: In a post he later deleted, he recommended that his 150 million-plus followers get their info from accounts known for spreading unverified, debunked and anti-semitic content. The problems at X come barely a week after the company made further cuts to its civic integrity team and EU officials slammed it as the social media platform harboring the most political disinformation. What's next: India, the United States and Indonesia — the world's three biggest democracies — will hold national elections in 2024, alongside the 27-country European Parliament. Nations at geopolitical flashpoints — including Ukraine, Taiwan and South Korea — will also hold elections, and Israel, which has held five elections since 2019, could head back to polls. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who co-led the investigation into Russian interference in the U.S. 2016 election, told Axios that Russia's actions were "child's play, compared to what either domestic or foreign AI tools could do to completely screw up our elections," given the scale of information AI can now generate. The big picture: A global trend in the late 20th century toward democracy has reversed today, and there are now more autocracies than liberal democracies in the world. Experts differ on the percentages but agree that the number of people living outside free countries is growing: Freedom House says it's 56%, while Sweden's University of Gothenburg says it's 72% and "back to 1986 levels." "If these trends since 2016 are not changed, democracy falls off the cliff," Rappler CEO and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa told Axios. Be smart: The Poynter Institute recommends users ask themselves three questions when encountering social media posts about the Hamas-Israel war: Who's behind the information? What's the evidence? And what do other sources say? What they're saying: "Politicians absolutely understand that their livelihoods could be completely disrupted — in a completely bipartisan way — by these tools," Warner said. "The goal of information warfare is not to make you believe one thing, it's to make you doubt everything," Ressa told Axios. "When you don't have facts, you don't have election integrity," she said. "Online violence became real world violence in America — and we saw how fragile institutions are, even in America," Ressa said

Different kinds of international systems confront hegemons with varying relationships between military capabilities (protection) and the economy (production). In different ideal-type “worlds,” complementarity between protection and production—and therefore the costs and benefits of hegemony—add up very differently. These worlds map on to different historical international 5 Cf. Christopher Layne, “This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana,” International Studies Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2012): 203–13; quote on 207. systems and, it turns out, different key arguments often propounded as universal in the literature on hegemony. The first set of highly relevant interactions that vary through time concerns productive economic activity and military strength. Here the key variation pertains to the degree to which military strength is necessary for wealth and the degree to which civilian economic productivity is necessary for military power (see Table 1). When strong states can grab economic resources by force, military power is necessary to protect and acquire wealth. Under these circumstances, militarily weak states can create wealth, but they cannot protect wealth. Militarily powerful states do not need to create wealth; they can acquire wealth by conquering and looting weaker states. Under these conditions, states can be affluent without a productive civilian economy but not without military capability. Easy lootability clearly has implications for the profitability of being a militarily potent economic predator. When civilian economic productivity is not required for military power, we are in a stark “state-of-nature” world in which economically unproductive military powerhouses routinely subjugate and loot more productive polities (northwest quadrant of Table 1). In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun proposed a cyclical theory of history that presumed just such a world.6 Unproductive but militarily powerful societies conquered productive polities until the erstwhile barbarians themselves succumbed to the weakening effect of civilization, only to be 6 Susan Strange, “Political Economy and International Relations,” in International Relations Theory Today, ed. Ken Booth and Steve Smith (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 172. conquered by the next set of barbarians. 7 In such a world, the economic benefits of military primacy are obvious. In other cases, wealth is easily lootable, but civilian productivity is necessary for military power (southwest quadrant). Militarily strong states can still raid, but the spoils of conquest are insufficient to finance military prowess: indigenous economic capability is required. When the positive relationship between those who have military power and those who have wealth breaks down, a trade-off emerges. Developing productive economic activity diverts resources from maintaining a coercive capability, and vice versa. Managing this trade-off is necessary for political and economic survival. States exclusively relying on booty for enrichment to fund military prowess will be outcompeted by states mixing predatory looting with a productive civilian economy. Until the mid-twentieth century, this hybrid strategy was necessary to achieve great-power status, explaining the advantage of colonial powers (for example, Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Italy’s) over noncolonial powers.8 Relatively unproductive states may seek to overwhelm that trade-off through massive resource extraction, as the Soviet Union did in the mid-twentieth century (northeast quadrant). But the postindustrial and information revolutions stacked the odds against that approach.9 Because the Soviet empire was created and maintained in a systemic setting 7 For a theoretical discussion, see Kai A. Konrad and Stergios Skaperdas, “The Market for Protection and the Origin of the State,” Economic Theory 50, no. 2 (June 2012): 417–43. 8 Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 9 Scholars continue to debate the question; cf. Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Stephen G. Brooks, Producing hostile to pillaging, it was short-lived by historical standards. This overall setting prevailed with increasing strength after the industrial revolution and into the twenty and twenty-first centuries (southeast quadrant). During this time, however, military power continues to play a role in establishing and enforcing property rights. To some degree, therefore, wealth still emerges from the barrel of a gun.1 These four “possible worlds” derived from the relationship between military strength and wealth creation under conditions of low versus high barriers to plunder directly contradict a long tradition of rise-and-decline scholarship: there can be no universal theory of imperial overstretch. The costs and benefits of establishing and sustaining military primacy are contingent upon a Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Changing Calculus of Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), with the case for declining economic benefits of conquest strengthening in later twentieth century. 10 Douglass C. North, Structures and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). “barbarian” hordes; Mongols Soviet Union in mid 20th Athens, Rome, European imperialism Latter 20th -21st century constantly changing potential for complementarity between protection and production. In premodern worlds, specializing in military conquest could be profitable for centuries. Yet the complementarities and trade-offs captured in Table 1 did not figure prominently in the 1980s hegemony literature. This underlay the era’s focus on public-goods theory and the popular contention that security provision by a dominant actor will tend to prove too burdensome, as others free ride.15 The key benefit of free riding on US security was reaping the obvious welfare benefits associated with economic competition. The debate at the time centered on whether the United States itself could somehow exit the “atavistic” world of militarized competition or get dependent allies to assume greater burdens. The whole debate assumed a power–protection trade-off. You could be a trading state or an atavist military juggernaut—not both. As the next section shows, however, this debate missed the core argument here: even in the southwest quadrant, complementarity may emerge through the logic of raison de l’Hégémonie.

Still a? Or are you anxious about the latest, warning of faster-rising oceans? Or do you ? Or can’t we just talk about the ? No, we can’t. Read ’s new book, (Knopf, 2018), and you’ll find a full-throated case for drop-everything-emergency aid for something more existential, the colorless oxygen of today’s civilization we dangerously take for granted: . This plain-spoken senior fellow of Brookings wants to grab you by the lapels and scream urgency in your face—because if we lose the American-guaranteed collection of laws, democratic values, economic and defense treaties that have produced seven unprecedented decades of peace and prosperity, you’ll wonder why you ever worried about anything else. If U.S. global leadership slides, Kagan asserts, the invisible protective bubble we’ve enjoyed since 1945 won’t just deflate. It will explode. Good-bye , hello shortages of food and essential products. . . magnitudes beyond the crises of today’s detention centers and Mediterranean rescues. Dark Forces Re-emerging The botanical metaphor in Kagan’s book title began our recent conversation. “We’ve been living in a tranquil garden of largely peaceful practices and liberal expectations across much of the world, ignoring the dark forces of jungle multiplying under the rocks. If we don’t defend civilization’s cultivation—especially American’s guarantee of peace and economic integration across the world—the toxic creatures and weeds will roar back.” Thus , ,. As Kagan continued, “—he too seems to have forgotten what good it has delivered—but actually America’s desire for maintaining the global order has been diminishing for years. After , people talked about —that America didn’t have to worry anymore about war or aggression. History doesn’t end, it simply paused. The ugliest aspects of human nature are surging again.” Vanishing Leadership, Vanishing Peace Kagan’s apocalyptic message, repeated , is lucid and terrifying, all the more devastating for its relentless use of history. It’s a footnoted plea that “we’ve seen this movie before.” He reminds us that Americans have frequently turned away from defending world order, with regrettably familiar outcomes: to be dragged in later at greater cost (e.g. ); or, simply hoping that “the problem would go away,” to watch it get ten times worse (e.g. ). Kagan acknowledges that America has sometimes misstepped (e.g. Viet Nam, Iraq), but he still argues that overall our foreign engagement has produced more peace and prosperity than not. “History shows,” he summarized, “that world order has never been achieved without some constructive force to keep the peace. The relative harmony and fair play we’ve created in the modern world will vanish if the U.S. forsakes international leadership.” Can Today’s Peaceful Garden Be Saved? “The odds are against our preserving today’s world order,” Kagan flatly commented. “But the game isn’t over, and demise isn’t inevitable. But any rescue will require lots of new thinking and bucking current political tides.” I turned our discussion to leadership, probing about the skills and mindsets of the people who built the postwar liberal order. So what would take to rebuild it now? His replies led to several interesting insights beyond the book per se. Four have implications for all of us who should care about keeping the garden safe--as leaders in our own right, citizens of this country, and future voters in important elections forthcoming. 1. Today’s global liberal order was built piecemeal, evolving more through continuous improvement than “grand design.” Kagan quickly listed the post-WWII building blocks of the order, led by the U.S—“first undoing the military capability of Japan and Germany, and then fostering their financial success; economic integration for them and others based on open trade and fair competition with America; creating a democratic and liberal culture among allies, guaranteed by America’s power, and our willingness to punish those who threatened it.” Yet he resisted the idea of any detailed vision. “The system emerged step by step as different American statesmen took on this or that immediate problem. How to keep Germany and Japan from causing war again? OK, next how to make it worthwhile for them and other nations to invest in trade and business, not more armies? And then, later, how to push back on Russia and Communism when they started to threaten the order?” “It wasn’t a vision but a process. As broader benefits started to accrue, allies saw the value, and with that we built further on what had been achieved. When we made mistakes—like Viet Nam—we had the strength to learn and course-correct, as .” So perhaps, I reflect, thinking of our discussion, we need to stop worrying about big theoretical frameworks, and start tackling specific problems to protect the garden we have—and just keep learning from mistakes and building on progress. 2. Today’s order emerged from “generational leadership.” Though Kagan acknowledges contributions of well-known policy makers—, , , et al-- he de-emphasized any “." “The legacy was created by a whole generation, people born in the 1890s, who lived through the optimism of the early 20th C., and then watched it collapse in forty years of conflict. They had a shared experience, animated by fear and memory of war, so they worked together to prevent reemergence of the same horror. American Presidents have implicitly accepted that challenge and reliably invested in the order—until recently.” And as we all join political debates and go to the polls in coming weeks, we might thus ask: has the current generation of American leaders lost touch with the risk of abandoning our global role? 3. The best leaders refuse the “either/or” choice between domestic and foreign policy investment. Kagan railed about . “Americans have periodically shied away from foreign affairs, claiming ‘we can’t afford to maintain military bases and also take care of our own people.’ Or that our own ‘social justice’ is more important than ‘freedom in the world.’ When we turn inwards we threaten our own prosperity and even survival. The greatest advances in racial justice in this country happened while we were building the liberal world order. Our guarantees of world commerce is what allows our own economy and people to flourish. Our military leadership is what protects us from the evil actors gunning for us today.” As we spoke further, I came to appreciate the complex leadership needed to build and maintain the liberal world order that we still enjoy—engagement and capabilities on three levels at the same time: first, leaders with strength and courage against foes; second, leaders that also have empathy and ability to collaboratively guide fractious allies; third, also leadership skills for teaching and inspiring the citizens of our country. This third element in fact sparked Kagan’s final thoughts and the insight below. 4. We desperately need leaders who can explain and mobilize the rebuilding of this most precious asset. Kagan had a ready list to save the flagging liberal order (indeed reversing Trump’s current approach)—“rebuild our ; strengthen our ; ; and pressure .” But most important, he called for new American leadership that can rally tomorrow’s citizens around what our fathers’ generation collectively and intuitively knew—that the world is fundamentally dangerous; that peace and prosperity are not natural; that preserving an international liberal community depends critically on America’s political will to invest money and lives to keep open markets, and prevent violence against our allies and values. Kagan closed with a blend of pessimism and aspiration. “It’s very difficult to explain all this to the American people. Even the gifted FDR struggled with the challenge. But we need a president now who can convince Americans that preserving our global liberal system is absolutely worth doing. That the cost of letting it come undone will be so much more than saving it. We have to find leaders who can motivate tomorrow’s generation to join this cause, and do whatever it takes, so our nation can reassert our fundamentally benign—even if self-interested—hegemony in the world.”

We have shown that the grand strategy yields a net gain in security that is favorable to US national interests and a major increase in opportunities for interstate cooperation. Both of these outcomes are hugely consequential for addressing terrorism and other forms of nonstate violence. A more violent and unstable interstate setting would arguably increase the incentives, opportunities, and capabilities of terrorist organizations. Even if the terrorist challenge did not increase, the task of effectively addressing it would be immeasurably harder and more complicated if the United States simultaneously had to grapple with a much more challenging and threatening interstate strategic setting than the one it faces today. By helping to keep that world at bay, deep engagement’s security alliances are an important part of counterterrorism strategy. Moreover, the clear verdict of scholarship is that those alliances enable far more, and far more efficient, intergovernmental cooperation in the fight against terrorism than would occur in a less institutionalized setting without a clear leading state. The grand strategy would only contradict rather than complement the struggle against terrorism if it could be shown to exacerbate terrorism or cause terrorists to direct their attention to the United States. In chapter 8 we demonstrated that this objection is unwarranted: there is no evidence that deep engagement’s forward-leaning military posture in Asia and Europe generates anti-US terrorism. And in the Persian Gulf deep engagement does not require a major onshore military posture of the type most worrying to some terrorism specialists. Moreover, because critics of deep engagement still wish to retain the ability to undertake massive military interventions in the region if necessary, the military postures they recommend do not diverge from deep engagement as much as it may seem. There is no theoretical or empirical basis for concluding that differences of this scale would affect the disposition of actors like al-Qaeda and ISIS/ISIL toward the United States.

Matthew Kroenig highlights a number of reasons why US policymakers seek to limit the spread of nuclear weapons: “Fear that nuclear proliferation might deter [US leaders] from using military intervention to pursue their interests, reduce the effectiveness of their coercive diplomacy, trigger regional instability, undermine their alliance structures, dissipate their strategic attention, and set off further nuclear proliferation within their sphere of influence.”8 These are not the only reasons for concern about nuclear proliferation; also notable are the enhanced prospects of nuclear accidents and the greater risk of leakage of nuclear material to terrorists.9 Do deep engagement’s security ties serve to contain the spread of nuclear weapons? The literature on the causes of proliferation is massive and faces challenges as great as any in international relations. With few cases to study, severe challenges in gathering evidence about inevitably secretive nuclear programs, and a large number of factors in play on both the demand and the supply sides, findings are decidedly mixed.10 Alliance relationships are just one piece of this complex puzzle, one that is hard to isolate from all the other factors in play. And empirical studies face the same selection bias problem just discussed: Nuclear powers are more likely to offer security guarantees to states confronting a serious threat and thus facing above-average incentives to acquire nuclear weapons. Indeed, alliance guarantees might be offered to states actively considering the nuclear option precisely in order to try to forestall that decision. Like a strong drug given only to very sick patients, alliances thus may have a powerful effect even if they sometimes fail to work as hoped. Bearing these challenges in mind, the most relevant findings that emerge from this literature are: • The most recent statistical analysis of the precise question at issue concludes that “security guarantees significantly reduce proliferation proclivity among their recipients.”11 In addition, states with such guarantees are less likely to export sensitive nuclear material and technology to other nonnuclear states.12 • Case study research underscores that the complexity of motivations for acquiring nuclear weapons cannot be reduced to security: domestic politics, economic interests, and prestige all matter.13 • Multiple independently conceived and executed recent case studies nonetheless reveal that security alliances help explain numerous allied decisions not to proliferate even when security is not always the main driver of leaders’ interest in a nuclear program.14 As Nuno Monteiro and Alexandre Debs stress, “States whose security goals are subsumed by their sponsors’ own aims have never acquired the bomb. … This finding highlights the role of U.S. security commitments in stymieing nuclear proliferation: U.S. protégés will only seek the bomb if they doubt U.S. protection of their core security goals.”15 • Multiple independently conceived and executed recent case research projects further unpack the conditions that decrease the likelihood of allied proliferation, centering on the credibility of the alliance commitment.16 In addition, in some cases of prevention failure, the alliances allow the patron to influence the ally’s nuclear program subsequently, decreasing further proliferation risks.17 • Security alliances lower the likelihood of proliferation cascades. To be sure, many predicted cascades did not occur.18 But security provision, mainly by the United States, is a key reason why. The most comprehensive statistical analysis finds that states are more likely to proliferate in response to neighbors when three conditions are met: (1) there is an intense security rivalry between the two countries; (2) the prospective proliferating state does not have a security guarantee from a nuclear-armed patron; and (3) the potential proliferator has the industrial and technical capacity to launch an indigenous nuclear program. In sum, as Monteiro and Debs note, “Despite grave concerns that more states would seek a nuclear deterrent to counter U.S. power preponderance,” in fact “the spread of nuclear weapons decelerated with the end of the Cold War in 1989.” Their research, as well as that of scores of scholars using multiple methods and representing many contrasting theoretical perspectives, shows that US security guarantees and the counter-proliferation policy deep engagement allows are a big part of the reason why.

Libertarians assume that in the absence of an alliance with the United States, other countries would simply increase their defense spending if they felt threatened. However, internal balancing is not a mechanical process. According to John Mearsheimer, leaders of states facing security competition are likely to use nationalism to garner support from their populations for the necessary regeneration of military capabilities.87 Writing at the end of the Cold War, Mearsheimer suggested that Europe would revert to a pattern of recurrent warfare. The absence of the United States and the Soviet Union would leave Europe, once again, an anarchic multipolar system. The structure of the system would force the states to compete with one another, as they had prior to the Cold War. Mearsheimer argued that pre-1945 “hypernationalism” was a product of “security competition among the European states, which compelled elites to mobilize public support for national defense efforts.”88 American retrenchment could similarly lead to an anarchic, multipolar Europe—thus increasing the chances of war on the continent. Such a system could engender nationalist sentiments among the populations of Europe, heightening animosities between national groups. These heightened animosities could help erode norms against military aggression that have facilitated the decline in interstate war. Nationalist groups within a country can seize on these sentiments to pursue confrontational and expansionist policies.89 Encouraging support for increased military capabilities through nationalism might lead populations to see war as once again a means to national glory or maintaining national honor. Matters of national prestige and honor can lead to the initiation of wars when bound up in territorial claims, while at the same time increasing the intensity and duration of a conflict.90 Nationalism and security competition might also erode the pacifying effects of economic openness. Realism suggests states are concerned about relative gains.91 States in security competition might be wary of trading with one another due to concerns about how a potential rival’s economic gains might provide it with an advantage if translated into military power. They may also adopt autarkic policies for fear of undermining their economic and military self-sufficiency.92 Territorial conquest has become increasing anachronistic in international politics. However, the proliferation of protectionist policies might once again make aggression and preventive war seem like strategically sensible ways for states to secure the resources necessary to reduce the ability of potential rivals to cut them off economically. If the risk of territorial aggression increases, the possession of nuclear weapons would become an attractive option for some states whose security was previously guaranteed by the United States. Nuclear weapons are most useful for deterring major territorial aggression, meaning their potential utility increases as the potential for war does.93 A number of U.S. allies have either previously pursued nuclear weapons or have the capability to do so. They might choose to obtain a nuclear arsenal once responsible for their own security. There are at least two reasons why increasing the number of nuclear weapons states may not have the pacifying effect some realists suggest they do. First, states do not always adopt the second-strike—that is, retaliatory—postures realists assume they will. Recent research shows that even in the paradigmatic case of mutual assured destruction—the Cold War superpower standoff—neither the United States nor the Soviet Union abandoned the search for a first-strike capability.94 Moreover, political scientist Vipin Narang’s research on India-Pakistan nuclear relations has demonstrated that states sometimes adopt risky postures in pursuit of goals other than deterrence.95 Second, an increased number of nuclear weapon states will increase the chances nuclear weapons will be used even if states do adopt second-strike postures. On the one hand, simple organizational pathologies or political instability in a new nuclear state could lead to an accidental or unauthorized nuclear launch.96 On the other hand, even for retaliatory postures, effective deterrence requires that states credibly signal that they are willing to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for an attack. To do so requires that nuclear states in competition with one another must maintain a willingness to risk nuclear war. The greater the number of these “competition[s] in risk taking,” as Thomas Schelling called them, the more likely it is that nuclear weapons will be used at some point.97 The situation in Northeast Asia helps illustrate how increasing the number of nuclear weapons states increases the probability that nuclear weapons will be used. Absent U.S. security guarantees, there is a real possibility that Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea would build nuclear arsenals of their own given their concerns about China and North Korea.98 There are currently two nuclear dyads in the region: the United States and China, and the United States and North Korea. If Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all acquired nuclear weapons, there would be at least five additional dyads: China and Taiwan, China and Japan, China and South Korea, North Korea and South Korea, and North Korea and Japan. Given lingering tensions from its pre-1945 occupation of the Korean Peninsula, a South Korea-Japanese nuclear dyad is entirely plausible as well.99 Each new dyad adds a contest in risk-taking, which increases the chances that nuclear weapons will be used in the region.100 Though America’s geographic isolation insulates it from many the threats of an increasingly competitive and unstable world, it does not provide absolute immunity. As noted above, Christopher Layne rightly highlights the major wars in Europe in which the United States did not become involved. However, the question should not be about frequency of American involvement in major power wars in Eurasia. Instead, it should be about the cost when the United States does become involved in such a conflict. The purpose of insurance is to protect against low frequency, high-cost events. There was a relatively low probability that the Soviet Union would have invaded Western Europe during the Cold War, but the United States invested in deterring an invasion because the costs of an actual war would have been higher.101 While the United States avoided involvement in a number of European wars, the major conflicts the United States did become involved in were high-cost events. At the height of World War II, the United States spent 37 percent of its gross domestic product on its military.102 More than 8 percent of the U.S. population was in uniform at the war’s peak.103 The size of the American state expanded massively during this time.104 The United States did not need a formal military alliance with any of the belligerents prior to either of the world wars to become involved in the conflicts. America’s involvement in World War II suggests that one way the United States might become involved in another major war is if some former U.S. allies fail to build their military capabilities in the face of aggressive powers. Neoclassical realist scholars refer to this problem as “underbalancing.”105 According to this theory, states may fail to internally balance against a threat due to domestic political factors.106 If states fail to check an aggressive power, it could pave the way for the type of hegemonic threat realists believe would require American military action. If such a threat materialized, and if frontline states failed to contain it, the offshore balancing logic underpinning retrenchment recommends the United States regenerate its military capabilities to defeat it. Mearsheimer argues that these periodic military buildups are a feature of offshore balancing strategies. He writes: Offshore balancers like the United Kingdom and the United States tend to maintain relatively small military forces when they are not needed to contain a potential hegemon in a strategically important area… [W]hen it is necessary for an offshore balancer to check a potential hegemon, it is likely to sharply expand the size and strength of its fighting forces, as the United States did in 1917, when it entered World War I, and in 1940, the year before it entered World War II.107 Retrenchment assumes that this process would be somewhat mechanical. The United States, aware of a new threat and the inadequacy of frontline states to counter it, would convert its latent material strength into military power to confront, and if necessary, militarily defeat the threatening state.108 However, the process is unlikely to be as automatic or frictionless as realists suggest. Drawing on America’s economic resources to tap its latent military power would not provide the same advantage it did before World War II for two reasons. First, changes in military technology would make it difficult for the U.S. military to return to regions where it previously positioned forces. While modern technology enables the United States to project military power around the globe, it also makes it easier for potential adversaries to increase the cost of doing so. A number of states hostile to American interests have already procured anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) capabilities as a cost-effective means to prevent the U.S. military from operating near their respective territories.109 Second, tapping American economic power to mobilize for war would not be the same as it was before World War II. The economic conditions that obtained before the world wars are no longer with us. There is no great surplus of labor and idle manufacturing capacity as the Great Depression had provided the United States when it converted to a war economy prior to World War II.110 Converting to a war economy today would therefore require far-reaching political and social disruptions. In light of those disruptions, any effort to mobilize the American public for war would require a unifying mechanism. Realists assume nationalism is that mechanism. Ordinary Americans are unlikely to get worked up over the abstract threat of a distant regional hegemon in Eurasia. Confronted with a new military threat in Eurasia, American leaders are likely to rouse what historian Walter Russell Mead refers to as the populist “Jacksonian” tendency in American foreign policy. This tendency, Mead argues, leads to American wars that are particularly violent and destructive.11

The second problem with retrenchment involves nuclear proliferation. If the United States pulled out of NATO or ended its alliance with Japan, as many realist advocates of retrenchment recommend, some of its allies, no longer protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, would be tempted to acquire nuclear weapons of their own. Unlike the progressives for retrenchment, the realists are comfortable with that result, since they see deterrence as a stabilizing force. Most Americans are not so sanguine, and rightly so. There are good reasons to worry about nuclear proliferation: nuclear materials could end up in the hands of terrorists, states with less experience might be more prone to nuclear accidents, and nuclear powers in close proximity have shorter response times and thus conflicts among them have a greater chance of spiraling into escalation.

Despite the reasons for optimism, there are better reasons for pessimism. History provides ample reasons for why Latin America would resent U.S. hegemony. Nevertheless, there is significant evidence that American hegemony acted as a powerful booster for international security and stability.8 Beginning with economic historian Charles Kindleberger, a wide range of international relations theorists have posited that a liberal hegemon is a necessary and sufficient condition for the creation of an open global economic order.9 In a unipolar system, the lone superpower can provide an array of public goods in exchange for the cooperation of other states.10 Dartmouth professor William Wohlforth has made the strongest set of theoretical arguments for this position during the post-Cold War era. He argues, contra balance-of-power theorists, that unipolarity is the most stable and peaceful of all possible international systems because it eliminates unproductive great power rivalries.11 The post-Cold War era offers strong evidence for reduced security rivalries and greater stability in a hegemonic world order. The Human Security Report Project has tracked a marked and secular decline in interstate violence since the end of the Cold War.12 There has been a further decline in other forms of violence, such as civil war and extrajudicial killings. Consistent with the logic of hegemony, global military expenditures declined dramatically following the end of the Cold War. Global expenditures on defense as a percentage of global output averaged 5.1 percent between 1972 and 1990. In the decade after the September 11th attacks, defense expenditures as a percentage of global output averaged only 2.5 percent.13 Latin American defense spending as a percentage of output was even smaller during this period. The peace dividend from hegemony was significant. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the perception of waning U.S. hegemony has been widespread. It is therefore worth noting that this perceived decline has been matched by a dramatic increase in Latin American defense spending. By one measure, absolute defense spending in Latin America practically doubled between 2006 and 2011.14 By 2012, defense spending accounted for approximately 4 percent of total GDP—significantly higher than in the rest of the world.15 In 2013, Latin America increased its defense expenditures, even as the rest of world decreased its military spending. To be sure, much of this defense spending is in response to U.S. preferences, such as combatting narco-trafficking. Yet the region’s increased military budgets are somewhat puzzling, given the ostensible absence of tensions among the countries. They suggest that even if war is comparatively rare in Latin America, security dilemmas and militarized tensions are more common.16 Beyond the insecurity posed by a multipolar world, however, is the uncertainty that comes from an institutionally thicker world.17 This sounds paradoxical. Nevertheless, the proliferation of nested and overlapping regimes does not necessarily lead to an increase in rule-based outcomes. Institutional thickening allows different governments to engage in forum-shopping to find the regime most friendly to their preferences. Forum-shopping weakens the power of pre-existing focal points, raises the costs and complexity of monitoring and compliance, and creates conflicting legal obligations at the regional level. This situation endows great powers with fewer constraints and greater capabilities to affect outcomes. In the process, institutional proliferation erodes the causal mechanisms through which regimes ostensibly strengthen international cooperation. Paradoxically, after a certain point, the proliferation of global governance structures shifts the international system towards a more Hobbesian environment.

For if America falters, the world is unlikely to be dominated by a single preeminent successor -- not even China. International uncertainty, increased tension among global competitors, and even outright chaos would be far more likely outcomes. While a sudden, massive crisis of the American system -- for instance, another financial crisis -- would produce a fast-moving chain reaction leading to global political and economic disorder, a steady drift by America into increasingly pervasive decay or endlessly widening warfare with Islam would be unlikely to produce, even by 2025, an effective global successor. No single power will be ready by then to exercise the role that the world, upon the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, expected the United States to play: the leader of a new, globally cooperative world order. More probable would be a protracted phase of rather inconclusive realignments of both global and regional power, with no grand winners and many more losers, in a setting of international uncertainty and even of potentially fatal risks to global well-being. Rather than a world where dreams of democracy flourish, a Hobbesian world of enhanced national security based on varying fusions of authoritarianism, nationalism, and religion could ensue. The leaders of the world's second-rank powers, among them India, Japan, Russia, and some European countries, are already assessing the potential impact of U.S. decline on their respective national interests. The Japanese, fearful of an assertive China dominating the Asian mainland, may be thinking of closer links with Europe. Leaders in India and Japan may be considering closer political and even military cooperation in case America falters and China rises. Russia, while perhaps engaging in wishful thinking (even schadenfreude) about America's uncertain prospects, will almost certainly have its eye on the independent states of the former Soviet Union. Europe, not yet cohesive, would likely be pulled in several directions: Germany and Italy toward Russia because of commercial interests, France and insecure Central Europe in favor of a politically tighter European Union, and Britain toward manipulating a balance within the EU while preserving its special relationship with a declining United States. Others may move more rapidly to carve out their own regional spheres: Turkey in the area of the old Ottoman Empire, Brazil in the Southern Hemisphere, and so forth. None of these countries, however, will have the requisite combination of economic, financial, technological, and military power even to consider inheriting America's leading role. China, invariably mentioned as America's prospective successor, has an impressive imperial lineage and a strategic tradition of carefully calibrated patience, both of which have been critical to its overwhelmingly successful, several-thousand-year-long history. China thus prudently accepts the existing international system, even if it does not view the prevailing hierarchy as permanent. It recognizes that success depends not on the system's dramatic collapse but on its evolution toward a gradual redistribution of power. Moreover, the basic reality is that China is not yet ready to assume in full America's role in the world. Beijing's leaders themselves have repeatedly emphasized that on every important measure of development, wealth, and power, China will still be a modernizing and developing state several decades from now, significantly behind not only the United States but also Europe and Japan in the major per capita indices of modernity and national power. Accordingly, Chinese leaders have been restrained in laying any overt claims to global leadership. At some stage, however, a more assertive Chinese nationalism could arise and damage China's international interests. A swaggering, nationalistic Beijing would unintentionally mobilize a powerful regional coalition against itself. None of China's key neighbors -- India, Japan, and Russia -- is ready to acknowledge China's entitlement to America's place on the global totem pole. They might even seek support from a waning America to offset an overly assertive China. The resulting regional scramble could become intense, especially given the similar nationalistic tendencies among China's neighbors. A phase of acute international tension in Asia could ensue. Asia of the 21st century could then begin to resemble Europe of the 20th century -- violent and bloodthirsty. At the same time, the security of a number of weaker states located geographically next to major regional powers also depends on the international status quo reinforced by America's global preeminence -- and would be made significantly more vulnerable in proportion to America's decline. The states in that exposed position -- including Georgia, Taiwan, South Korea, Belarus, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, and the greater Middle East -- are today's geopolitical equivalents of nature's most endangered species. Their fates are closely tied to the nature of the international environment left behind by a waning America, be it ordered and restrained or, much more likely, self-serving and expansionist. A faltering United States could also find its strategic partnership with Mexico in jeopardy. America's economic resilience and political stability have so far mitigated many of the challenges posed by such sensitive neighborhood issues as economic dependence, immigration, and the narcotics trade. A decline in American power, however, would likely undermine the health and good judgment of the U.S. economic and political systems. A waning United States would likely be more nationalistic, more defensive about its national identity, more paranoid about its homeland security, and less willing to sacrifice resources for the sake of others' development. The worsening of relations between a declining America and an internally troubled Mexico could even give rise to a particularly ominous phenomenon: the emergence, as a major issue in nationalistically aroused Mexican politics, of territorial claims justified by history and ignited by cross-border incidents. Another consequence of American decline could be a corrosion of the generally cooperative management of the global commons -- shared interests such as sea lanes, space, cyberspace, and the environment, whose protection is imperative to the long-term growth of the global economy and the continuation of basic geopolitical stability. In almost every case, the potential absence of a constructive and influential U.S. role would fatally undermine the essential communality of the global commons because the superiority and ubiquity of American power creates order where there would normally be conflict.

Still, on balance, the U.S. has been a positive force in the world, especially for a unipolar power. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine many other countries acting as benignly if they possessed the amount of relative power America had at the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the British were not nearly as powerful as the U.S. in the 19th Century and they incorporated most of the globe in their colonial empire. Even when it had to contend with another superpower, Russia occupied half a continent by brutally suppressing its populace. Had the U.S. collapsed and the Soviet Union emerged as the Cold War victor, Western Europe would likely be speaking Russian by now. It’s difficult to imagine China defending a rule-based, open international order if it were a unipolar power, much less making an effort to uphold a minimum level of human rights in the world.¶ Regardless of your opinion on U.S. global leadership over the last two decades, however, there is good reason to fear its relative decline compared with China and other emerging nations. To begin with, hegemonic transition periods have historically been the most destabilizing eras in history. This is not only because of the malign intentions of the rising and established power(s). Even if all the parties have benign, peaceful intentions, the rise of new global powers necessitates revisions to the “rules of the road.” This is nearly impossible to do in any organized fashion given the anarchic nature of the international system, where there is no central authority that can govern interactions between states.¶ We are already starting to see the potential dangers of hegemonic transition periods in the Asia-Pacific (and arguably the Middle East). As China grows more economically and militarily powerful, it has unsurprisingly sought to expand its influence in East Asia. This necessarily has to come at the expense of other powers, which so far has primarily meant the U.S., Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. Naturally, these powers have sought to resist Chinese encroachments on their territory and influence, and the situation grows more tense with each passing day. Should China eventually emerge as a global power, or should nations in other regions enjoy a similar rise as Kenny suggests, this situation will play itself out elsewhere in the years and decades ahead.¶ All of this highlights some of the advantages of a unipolar system. Namely, although the U.S. has asserted military force quite frequently in the post-Cold War era, it has only fought weak powers and thus its wars have been fairly limited in terms of the number of casualties involved. At the same time, America’s preponderance of power has prevented a great power war, and even restrained major regional powers from coming to blows. For instance, the past 25 years haven’t seen any conflicts on par with the Israeli-Arab or Iran-Iraq wars of the Cold War. As the unipolar era comes to a close, the possibility of great power conflict and especially major regional wars rises dramatically. The world will also have to contend with conventionally inferior powers like Japan acquiring nuclear weapons to protect their interests against their newly empowered rivals.¶ But even if the transitions caused by China’s and potentially other nations’ rises are managed successfully, there are still likely to be significant negative effects on international relations. In today’s “globalized” world, it is commonly asserted that many of the defining challenges of our era can only be solved through multilateral cooperation. Examples of this include climate change, health pandemics, organized crime and terrorism, global financial crises, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, among many others.¶ A unipolar system, for all its limitations, is uniquely suited for organizing effective global action on these transnational issues. This is because there is a clear global leader who can take the initiative and, to some degree, compel others to fall in line. In addition, the unipole’s preponderance of power lessens the intensity of competition among the global players involved. Thus, while there are no shortages of complaints about the limitations of global governance today, there is no question that global governance has been many times more effective in the last 25 years than it was during the Cold War.¶ The rise of China and potentially other powers will create a new bipolar or multipolar order. This, in turn, will make solving these transnational issues much more difficult. Despite the optimistic rhetoric that emanates from official U.S.-China meetings, the reality is that Sino-American competition is likely to overshadow an increasing number of global issues in the years ahead. If other countries like India, Turkey, and Brazil also become significant global powers, this will only further dampen the prospects for effective global governance.

That shift may come too late. It was in the 1920s, not the 1930s, that the democratic powers made the most important and ultimately fatal decisions. Americans’ disillusionment after World War I led them to reject playing a strategic role in preserving the peace in Europe and Asia, even though America was the only nation powerful enough to play that role. The withdrawal of the United States helped undermine the will of Britain and France and encouraged Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia to take increasingly aggressive actions to achieve regional dominance. Most Americans were convinced that nothing that happened in Europe or Asia could affect their security. It took World War II to convince them that was a mistake. The “return to normalcy” of the 1920 election seemed safe and innocent at the time, but the essentially selfish policies pursued by the world’s strongest power in the following decade helped set the stage for the calamities of the 1930s. By the time the crises began to erupt, it was already too late to avoid paying the high price of global conflict. In such times, it has always been tempting to believe that geopolitical competition can be solved through efforts at cooperation and accommodation. The idea, recently proposed by Niall Ferguson, that the world can be ruled jointly by the United States, Russia, and China is not a new one. Such condominiums have been proposed and attempted in every era when the dominant power or powers in the international system sought to fend off challenges from the dissatisfied revisionist powers. It has rarely worked. Revisionist great powers are not easy to satisfy short of complete capitulation. Their sphere of influence is never quite large enough to satisfy their pride or their expanding need for security. In fact, their very expansion creates insecurity, by frightening neighbors and leading them to band together against the rising power. The satiated power that Otto von Bismarck spoke of is rare. The German leaders who succeeded him were not satisfied even with being the strongest power in Europe. In their efforts to grow still stronger, they produced coalitions against them, making their fear of “encirclement” a self-fulfilling prophecy. BEIJING, CHINA - OCTOBER 20: President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Chinese President Xi Jinping review the honor guard as they attend a welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People on October 20, 2016 in Beijing, China. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is on a four-day state visit to China, his first since taking power in late June, with the aim of improving bilateral relations. (Photo by Thomas Peter-Pool/Getty Images) Give ‘em an inch, they’ll take a mile This is a common trait of rising powers — their actions produce the very insecurity they claim to want to redress. They harbor grievances against the existing order (both Germany and Japan considered themselves the “have-not” nations), but their grievances cannot be satisfied so long as the existing order remains in place. Marginal concession is not enough, but the powers upholding the existing order will not make more than marginal concessions unless they are compelled to by superior strength. Japan, the aggrieved “have-not” nation of the 1930s, did not satisfy itself by taking Manchuria in 1931. Germany, the aggrieved victim of Versailles, did not satisfy itself by bringing the Germans of the Sudetenland back into the fold. They demanded much more, and they could not persuade the democratic powers to give them what they wanted without resorting to war. Granting the revisionist powers spheres of influence is not a recipe for peace and tranquility but rather an invitation to inevitable conflict. Granting the revisionist powers spheres of influence is not a recipe for peace and tranquility but rather an invitation to inevitable conflict. Russia’s historical sphere of influence does not end in Ukraine. It begins in Ukraine. It extends to the Baltic States, to the Balkans, and to the heart of Central Europe. And within Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, other nations do not enjoy autonomy or even sovereignty. There was no independent Poland under the Russian Empire nor under the Soviet Union. For China to gain its desired sphere of influence in East Asia will mean that, when it chooses, it can close the region off to the United States — not only militarily but politically and economically, too. China will, of course, inevitably exercise great sway in its own region, as will Russia. The United States cannot and should not prevent China from being an economic powerhouse. Nor should it wish for the collapse of Russia. The United States should even welcome competition of a certain kind. Great powers compete across multiple planes — economic, ideological, and political, as well as military. Competition in most spheres is necessary and even healthy. Within the liberal order, China can compete economically and successfully with the United States; Russia can thrive in the international economic order upheld by the democratic system, even if it is not itself democratic. But military and strategic competition is different. The security situation undergirds everything else. It remains true today as it has since World War II that only the United States has the capacity and the unique geographical advantages to provide global security and relative stability. There is no stable balance of power in Europe or Asia without the United States. And while we can talk about “soft power” and “smart power,” they have been and always will be of limited value when confronting raw military power. Despite all of the loose talk of American decline, it is in the military realm where U.S. advantages remain clearest. Even in other great powers’ backyards, the United States retains the capacity, along with its powerful allies, to deter challenges to the security order. But without a U.S. willingness to maintain the balance in far-flung regions of the world, the system will buckle under the unrestrained military competition of regional powers. Part of that willingness entails defense spending commensurate with America’s continuing global role. For the United States to accept a return to spheres of influence would not calm the international waters. It would merely return the world to the condition it was in at the end of the 19th century, with competing great powers clashing over inevitably intersecting and overlapping spheres. These unsettled, disordered conditions produced the fertile ground for the two destructive world wars of the first half of the 20th century. The collapse of the British-dominated world order on the oceans, the disruption of the uneasy balance of power on the European continent as a powerful unified Germany took shape, and the rise of Japanese power in East Asia all contributed to a highly competitive international environment in which dissatisfied great powers took the opportunity to pursue their ambitions in the absence of any power or group of powers to unite in checking them. The result was an unprecedented global calamity and death on an epic scale. It has been the great accomplishment of the U.S.-led world order in the 70 years since the end of World War II that this kind of competition has been held in check and great power conflicts have been avoided. It will be more than a shame if Americans were to destroy what they created — and not because it was no longer possible to sustain but simply because they chose to stop trying.

Yet if this narrative is not baseless, it is overstated. For the idea that the era of American primacy has passed—that we are now entering or have already entered a truly multipolar world—is far from the truth. By virtually all key measures, the United States still has substantial, even massive, leads over its closest competitors. In 2015, the United States claimed a nearly $18 trillion GDP that was more than $7 trillion larger than China’s, and it possessed a per capita GDP (a crucial measure of how much money a government can extract from its citizens to pursue geopolitical ends) roughly four times that of China. In the military realm, U.S. annual defense spending is still roughly three times that of China, meaning that for all the talk of Beijing catching up to Washington, the absolute American lead in overall military investment and capabilities is actually getting substantially larger every year.11 Indeed, America’s global lead is probably far more significant than indicated by simple numerical measures like GDP and percentage of global military spending. GDP is a commonly used but problematic way of comparing U.S. and Chinese economic strength. It is merely a snapshot, rather than a fully explanatory measure, of how wealth accrues over time; it does not account for factors such as the damage that China is doing to its own long-term economic potential through the devastation of its natural environment; it understates important U.S. advantages such as the fact that American citizens own significant minority shares in foreign corporations. By a more holistic measure of national economic strength—“inclusive wealth,” which takes account of manufactured capital, human capital, and natural capital—the United States was still roughly 4.5 times wealthier than China as recently as 2010. Add in the enormous long-term economic problems that China faces, from declining growth rates to a massive asset bubble to a rapidly aging population, and forecasts of coming Chinese economic supremacy become more tenuous still.12 The U.S. military lead is even more extensive. As a recent study by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth concludes, although China’s ongoing military buildup presents significant regional challenges for the United States, at the global level there is still simply no comparison. The United States possesses massive advantages in high-end power-projection capabilities such as aircraft carriers, fourth- and fifth-generation tactical aircraft, nuclear powered submarines, AWACS, and heavy unmanned aerial vehicles. These advantages have been amassed over decades, through enormous and accumulating investments, and so it will take decades—if not longer—for China to come close to matching the United States. These metrics, moreover, do not reflect the other, more intangible advantages that the U.S. military possesses—the years of recent experience in complex operations, the extraordinarily high levels of human capital, the flexible command-and-control structures that permit initiative and adaptation. “Rather than expecting a power transition in international politics,” Brooks and Wohlforth write, “everyone should start getting used to a world in which the United States remains the sole superpower for decades to come.”13 Finally, any consideration of global power dynamics must consider the role of allies: The United States has dozens of them, whereas China and Russia have few, if any. (Those that they do have, countries such as Belarus and North Korea, make up a veritable international most-wanted list.) America’s allies give it geopolitical leverage, diplomatic influence, and military access that other countries can only envy; they add enormously to the overall weight of the Western coalition of which Washington remains undisputed leader. As of 2014, the United States and its core treaty allies in Asia and Europe accounted for roughly three-fifths of global wealth and global military spending—a share that was moderately diminished from twenty years earlier, but still very impressive by nearly all other historical comparisons. There may come a time when U.S. primacy has vanished or diminished to the point of strategic insignificance, but that day is still a long ways off. And so rather than abandoning a grand strategy that has worked well over the past 25 years, America should instead work to sustain and reinvigorate that grand strategy for a period in which its primacy remains impressive, even if more contested than before.

Despite everything that has happened, if we reject the counsels of the new “realism” and resume our support for the liberal world order, it is still within our capacity to defend it and put off its collapse, perhaps for quite some time. Today the order remains intact, despite the hostility of the present administration and the weakness of the last. The international structures supporting it are durable. This is partly because they rest on geographical realities and a distribution of power that still favor the liberal order and still pose obstacles to those who would disrupt it. It is also because liberal values, though under assault, remain a force that binds the democratic nations of the world together. Authoritarianism also has its appeal and will always compete with liberalism, but the authoritarian governments do not feel the same sense of commonality as the monarchies and aristocracies of the early nineteenth century. The Chinese and Russians are not adversaries, but they are not allies either. They share little except their antipathy to liberalism. The democratic nations, however, are bound together by more than common adversaries, as the post–Cold War era has proved. America’s alliances in Europe and Asia have so far held, therefore, despite the weakening of America’s commitment under two administrations. There is still a liberal world order to be salvaged, if the American people decide it is worth salvaging.

Despite the prediction of America’s declining influence, the reality of American hegemony is as strong as ever. Multiple factors are accounted for this prospect. One of the main theme of this book is about the prospect of American hegemony in the context of rising Asian nations. Rising nations—Japan, Germany, Korea, China and India— have all benefitted by American hegemony. America, either by “deliberate” or “accidental” design has empowered the past (e.g., Japan and Germany) rivals or emerging “power” nations (e.g., Korea, China and India) to the extent it is enriched. The rise of Germany, Japan, South Korea, China, and India has much to do with the international order that facilitated trade flows among nations in general and opening US markets in particular. The vision of international liberal order after the Second World War was to strengthen enough nations to stand firm to the Cold War challenges. In the following chapters, liberal international order needs to consider its impact on expanding global trade, promoting economic growth and facilitating the rise of Asia. Figure 1.2 shows that majority of regional conflicts occurred after 1991–2001, are Fig. 1.2 Shifting regional conflicts. Red spot areas refer to conflict regions (1991–2016) and pink circles present potential conflict regions (2017–2030 and beyond) mostly in Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa. These armed conflicts involved serious casualties ranging from 1,000s to 40,000s and more. Power shift is slowly moving from Europe and Middle East to Indo-Pacific Region. This does not minimize the strategic importance of Europe and Middle East. Rather, it examines the relative priority of Indo-Pacific Region (i.e., Northeast Asia, India and Southeast Asia), which is becoming greater than the regions that cover Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. This power shift reflects the reality of rising Asia in general and China in particular. It is also reflected of the relatively waning influence of Russia, in terms of relative decline in demographic strengths and economic growth factors despite its strong nuclear capabilities. Besides, the US is becoming energy independent and thus less dependent on the supply of oil from Middle East regions. Power shift is not merely demographic and political. It also reflects the huge stream of underlying economic reality that is changing rapidly. In Indo-Pacific Strategy Report: Preparedness, Partnerships and Promoting a Networked Region by the US Department of Defense (2019), the containment strategy is clearly specified with the US alignment network that connects Japan, Republic of Korea, Australia, New Zealand and India. The broad strategic alliance also includes Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The foundational principle is to “continue to ensure that the rule of law – not coercion and force” and to “ensure that this region remains peaceful, prosperous, and secure for decades to come”. No other country has yet established such formidable regional alliances.

The conclusions reached in this thesis demonstrate how economic considerations within states can figure prominently into the calculus for future conflicts. The findings also suggest that security issues with economic or financial underpinnings will transcend classical determinants of war and conflict, and change the manner by which rival states engage in hostile acts toward one another. The research shows that security concerns emanating from economic uncertainty and the inherent vulnerabilities within global financial markets will present new challenges for national security, and provide developing states new asymmetric options for balancing against stronger states.¶ The security areas, identified in the proceeding chapters, are likely to mature into global security threats in the immediate future. As the case study on South Korea suggest, the overlapping security issues associated with economic decline and reduced military spending by the United States will affect allied confidence in America’s security guarantees. The study shows that this outcome could cause regional instability or realignments of strategic partnerships in the Asia-pacific region with ramifications for U.S. national security. Rival states and non-state groups may also become emboldened to challenge America’s status in the unipolar international system.¶ The potential risks associated with stolen or loose WMD, resulting from poor security, can also pose a threat to U.S. national security. The case study on Pakistan, Syria and North Korea show how financial constraints affect weapons security making weapons vulnerable to theft, and how financial factors can influence WMD proliferation by contributing to the motivating factors behind a trusted insider’s decision to sell weapons technology. The inherent vulnerabilities within the global financial markets will provide terrorists’ organizations and other non-state groups, who object to the current international system or distribution of power, with opportunities to disrupt global finance and perhaps weaken America’s status. A more ominous threat originates from states intent on increasing diversification of foreign currency holdings, establishing alternatives to the dollar for international trade, or engaging financial warfare against the United States.

Various scholars and institutions regard global social instability as the greatest threat facing this decade. The catalyst has been postulated to be a Second Great Depression which, in turn, will have profound implications for global security and national integrity. This paper, written from a broad systems perspective, illustrates how emerging risks are getting more complex and intertwined; blurring boundaries between the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological taxonomy used by the World Economic Forum for its annual global risk forecasts. Tight couplings in our global systems have also enabled risks accrued in one area to snowball into a full-blown crisis elsewhere. The COVID-19 pandemic and its socioeconomic fallouts exemplify this systemic chain-reaction. Onceinexorable forces of globalization are rupturing as the current global system can no longer be sustained due to poor governance and runaway wealth fractionation. The coronavirus pandemic is also enabling Big Tech to expropriate the levers of governments and mass communications worldwide. This paper concludes by highlighting how this development poses a dilemma for security professionals. Key Words: Global Systems, Emergence, VUCA, COVID-9, Social Instability, Big Tech, Great Reset INTRODUCTION The new decade is witnessing rising volatility across global systems. Pick any random “system” today and chart out its trajectory: Are our education systems becoming more robust and affordable? What about food security? Are our healthcare systems improving? Are our pension systems sound? Wherever one looks, there are dark clouds gathering on a global horizon marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). But what exactly is a global system? Our planet itself is an autonomous and selfsustaining mega-system, marked by periodic cycles and elemental vagaries. Human activities within however are not system isolates as our banking, utility, farming, healthcare and retail sectors etc. are increasingly entwined. Risks accrued in one system may cascade into an unforeseen crisis within and/or without (Choo, Smith & McCusker, 2007). Scholars call this phenomenon “emergence”; one where the behaviour of intersecting systems is determined by complex and largely invisible interactions at the substratum (Goldstein, 1999; Holland, 1998). The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. While experts remain divided over the source and morphology of the virus, the contagion has ramified into a global health crisis and supply chain nightmare. It is also tilting the geopolitical balance. China is the largest exporter of intermediate products, and had generated nearly 20% of global imports in 2015 alone (Cousin, 2020). The pharmaceutical sector is particularly vulnerable. Nearly “85% of medicines in the U.S. strategic national stockpile” sources components from China (Owens, 2020). An initial run on respiratory masks has now been eclipsed by rowdy queues at supermarkets and the bankruptcy of small businesses. The entire global population – save for major pockets such as Sweden, Belarus, Taiwan and Japan – have been subjected to cyclical lockdowns and quarantines. Never before in history have humans faced such a systemic, borderless calamity. COVID-19 represents a classic emergent crisis that necessitates real-time response and adaptivity in a real-time world, particularly since the global Just-in-Time (JIT) production and delivery system serves as both an enabler and vector for transboundary risks. From a systems thinking perspective, emerging risk management should therefore address a whole spectrum of activity across the economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological (EEGST) taxonomy. Every emerging threat can be slotted into this taxonomy – a reason why it is used by the World Economic Forum (WEF) for its annual global risk exercises (Maavak, 2019a). As traditional forces of globalization unravel, security professionals should take cognizance of emerging threats through a systems thinking approach. METHODOLOGY An EEGST sectional breakdown was adopted to illustrate a sampling of extreme risks facing the world for the 2020-2030 decade. The transcendental quality of emerging risks, as outlined on Figure 1, below, was primarily informed by the following pillars of systems thinking (Rickards, 2020): • Diminishing diversity (or increasing homogeneity) of actors in the global system (Boli & Thomas, 1997; Meyer, 2000; Young et al, 2006); • Interconnections in the global system (Homer-Dixon et al, 2015; Lee & Preston, 2012); • Interactions of actors, events and components in the global system (Buldyrev et al, 2010; Bashan et al, 2013; Homer-Dixon et al, 2015); and • Adaptive qualities in particular systems (Bodin & Norberg, 2005; Scheffer et al, 2012) Since scholastic material on this topic remains somewhat inchoate, this paper buttresses many of its contentions through secondary (i.e. news/institutional) sources. ECONOMY According to Professor Stanislaw Drozdz (2018) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, “a global financial crash of a previously unprecedented scale is highly probable” by the mid- 2020s. This will lead to a trickle-down meltdown, impacting all areas of human activity. The economist John Mauldin (2018) similarly warns that the “2020s might be the worst decade in US history” and may lead to a Second Great Depression. Other forecasts are equally alarming. According to the International Institute of Finance, global debt may have surpassed $255 trillion by 2020 (IIF, 2019). Yet another study revealed that global debts and liabilities amounted to a staggering $2.5 quadrillion (Ausman, 2018). The reader should note that these figures were tabulated before the COVID-19 outbreak. The IMF singles out widening income inequality as the trigger for the next Great Depression (Georgieva, 2020). The wealthiest 1% now own more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people (Coffey et al, 2020) and this chasm is widening with each passing month. COVID-19 had, in fact, boosted global billionaire wealth to an unprecedented $10.2 trillion by July 2020 (UBS-PWC, 2020). Global GDP, worth $88 trillion in 2019, may have contracted by 5.2% in 2020 (World Bank, 2020). As the Greek historian Plutarch warned in the 1st century AD: “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics” (Mauldin, 2014). The stability of a society, as Aristotle argued even earlier, depends on a robust middle element or middle class. At the rate the global middle class is facing catastrophic debt and unemployment levels, widespread social disaffection may morph into outright anarchy (Maavak, 2012; DCDC, 2007). Economic stressors, in transcendent VUCA fashion, may also induce radical geopolitical realignments. Bullions now carry more weight than NATO’s security guarantees in Eastern Europe. After Poland repatriated 100 tons of gold from the Bank of England in 2019, Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary quickly followed suit. According to former Slovak Premier Robert Fico, this erosion in regional trust was based on historical precedents – in particular the 1938 Munich Agreement which ceded Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. As Fico reiterated (Dudik & Tomek, 2019): “You can hardly trust even the closest allies after the Munich Agreement… I guarantee that if something happens, we won’t see a single gram of this (offshore-held) gold. Let’s do it (repatriation) as quickly as possible.” (Parenthesis added by author). President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia (a non-NATO nation) justified his central bank’s gold-repatriation program by hinting at economic headwinds ahead: “We see in which direction the crisis in the world is moving” (Dudik & Tomek, 2019). Indeed, with two global Titanics – the United States and China – set on a collision course with a quadrillions-denominated iceberg in the middle, and a viral outbreak on its tip, the seismic ripples will be felt far, wide and for a considerable period. A reality check is nonetheless needed here: Can additional bullions realistically circumvallate the economies of 80 million plus peoples in these Eastern European nations, worth a collective $1.8 trillion by purchasing power parity? Gold however is a potent psychological symbol as it represents national sovereignty and economic reassurance in a potentially hyperinflationary world. The portents are clear: The current global economic system will be weakened by rising nationalism and autarkic demands. Much uncertainty remains ahead. Mauldin (2018) proposes the introduction of Old Testament-style debt jubilees to facilitate gradual national recoveries. The World Economic Forum, on the other hand, has long proposed a “Great Reset” by 2030; a socialist utopia where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” (WEF, 2016). In the final analysis, COVID-19 is not the root cause of the current global economic turmoil; it is merely an accelerant to a burning house of cards that was left smouldering since the 2008 Great Recession (Maavak, 2020a). We also see how the four main pillars of systems thinking (diversity, interconnectivity, interactivity and “adaptivity”) form the mise en scene in a VUCA decade. ENVIRONMENTAL What happens to the environment when our economies implode? Think of a debt-laden workforce at sensitive nuclear and chemical plants, along with a concomitant surge in industrial accidents? Economic stressors, workforce demoralization and rampant profiteering – rather than manmade climate change – arguably pose the biggest threats to the environment. In a WEF report, Buehler et al (2017) made the following pre-COVID-19 observation: The ILO estimates that the annual cost to the global economy from accidents and work-related diseases alone is a staggering $3 trillion. Moreover, a recent report suggests the world’s 3.2 billion workers are increasingly unwell, with the vast majority facing significant economic insecurity: 77% work in part-time, temporary, “vulnerable” or unpaid jobs. Shouldn’t this phenomenon be better categorized as a societal or economic risk rather than an environmental one? In line with the systems thinking approach, however, global risks can no longer be boxed into a taxonomical silo. Frazzled workforces may precipitate another Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986), Deepwater Horizon (2010) or Flint water crisis (2014). These disasters were notably not the result of manmade climate change. Neither was the Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) nor the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004). Indeed, the combustion of a long-overlooked cargo of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had nearly levelled the city of Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug 4 2020. The explosion left 204 dead; 7,500 injured; US$15 billion in property damages; and an estimated 300,000 people homeless (Urbina, 2020). The environmental costs have yet to be adequately tabulated. Environmental disasters are more attributable to Black Swan events, systems breakdowns and corporate greed rather than to mundane human activity. Our JIT world aggravates the cascading potential of risks (Korowicz, 2012). Production and delivery delays, caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, will eventually require industrial overcompensation. This will further stress senior executives, workers, machines and a variety of computerized systems. The trickle-down effects will likely include substandard products, contaminated food and a general lowering in health and safety standards (Maavak, 2019a). Unpaid or demoralized sanitation workers may also resort to indiscriminate waste dumping. Many cities across the United States (and elsewhere in the world) are no longer recycling wastes due to prohibitive costs in the global corona-economy (Liacko, 2021). Even in good times, strict protocols on waste disposals were routinely ignored. While Sweden championed the global climate change narrative, its clothing flagship H&M was busy covering up toxic effluences disgorged by vendors along the Citarum River in Java, Indonesia. As a result, countless children among 14 million Indonesians straddling the “world’s most polluted river” began to suffer from dermatitis, intestinal problems, developmental disorders, renal failure, chronic bronchitis and cancer (DW, 2020). It is also in cauldrons like the Citarum River where pathogens may mutate with emergent ramifications. On an equally alarming note, depressed economic conditions have traditionally provided a waste disposal boon for organized crime elements. Throughout 1980s, the Calabriabased ‘Ndrangheta mafia – in collusion with governments in Europe and North America – began to dump radioactive wastes along the coast of Somalia. Reeling from pollution and revenue loss, Somali fisherman eventually resorted to mass piracy (Knaup, 2008). The coast of Somalia is now a maritime hotspot, and exemplifies an entwined form of economic-environmental-geopolitical-societal emergence. In a VUCA world, indiscriminate waste dumping can unexpectedly morph into a Black Hawk Down incident. The laws of unintended consequences are governed by actors, interconnections, interactions and adaptations in a system under study – as outlined in the methodology section. Environmentally-devastating industrial sabotages – whether by disgruntled workers, industrial competitors, ideological maniacs or terrorist groups – cannot be discounted in a VUCA world. Immiserated societies, in stark defiance of climate change diktats, may resort to dirty coal plants and wood stoves for survival. Interlinked ecosystems, particularly water resources, may be hijacked by nationalist sentiments. The environmental fallouts of critical infrastructure (CI) breakdowns loom like a Sword of Damocles over this decade. GEOPOLITICAL The primary catalyst behind WWII was the Great Depression. Since history often repeats itself, expect familiar bogeymen to reappear in societies roiling with impoverishment and ideological clefts. Anti-Semitism – a societal risk on its own – may reach alarming proportions in the West (Reuters, 2019), possibly forcing Israel to undertake reprisal operations inside allied nations. If that happens, how will affected nations react? Will security resources be reallocated to protect certain minorities (or the Top 1%) while larger segments of society are exposed to restive forces? Balloon effects like these present a classic VUCA problematic. Contemporary geopolitical risks include a possible Iran-Israel war; US-China military confrontation over Taiwan or the South China Sea; North Korean proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies; an India-Pakistan nuclear war; an Iranian closure of the Straits of Hormuz; fundamentalist-driven implosion in the Islamic world; or a nuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia. Fears that the Jan 3 2020 assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani might lead to WWIII were grossly overblown. From a systems perspective, the killing of Soleimani did not fundamentally change the actor-interconnection-interaction adaptivity equation in the Middle East. Soleimani was simply a cog who got replaced.

Forced to choose sides, governments may face economic or diplomatic consequences, as proxy disputes play out in control over economic or geographic resources. The deepening of geopolitical fault lines and the lack of viable middle power alternatives make it harder for countries to cultivate connective tissue with a diverse set of partner countries based on mutual values and maximizing efficiencies. Instead, networks will become thick in some directions and non-existent in others. The COVID-19 crisis has amplified this dynamic, as digital interactions represent a “huge loss in efficiency for diplomacy” compared with face-to-face discussions.23 With some alliances weakening, diplomatic relationships will become more unstable at points where superpower tectonic plates meet or withdraw At the same time, without superpower referees or middle power enforcement, global norms may no longer govern state behaviour. Some governments will thus see the solidification of rival blocs as an opportunity to engage in regional posturing, which will have destabilizing effects.24 Across societies, domestic discord and economic crises will increase the risk of autocracy, with corresponding censorship, surveillance, restriction of movement and abrogation of rights.25 Economic crises will also amplify the challenges for middle powers as they navigate geopolitical competition. ASEAN countries, for example, had offered a potential new manufacturing base as the United States and China decouple, but the pandemic has left these countries strapped for cash to invest in the necessary infrastructure and productive capacity.26 Economic fallout is pushing many countries to debt distress (see Chapter 1, Global Risks 2021). While G20 countries are supporting debt restructure for poorer nations,27 larger economies too may be at risk of default in the longer term;28 this would leave them further stranded—and unable to exercise leadership—on the global stage. Multilateral meltdown Middle power weaknesses will be reinforced in weakened institutions, which may translate to more uncertainty and lagging progress on shared global challenges such as climate change, health, poverty reduction and technology governance. In the absence of strong regulating institutions, the Arctic and space represent new realms for potential conflict as the superpowers and middle powers alike compete to extract resources and secure strategic advantage.29 If the global superpowers continue to accumulate economic, military and technological power in a zero-sum playing field, some middle powers could increasingly fall behind. Without cooperation or access to important innovations, middle powers will struggle to define solutions to the world’s problems. In the long term, GRPS respondents forecasted “weapons of mass destruction” and “state collapse” as the two top critical threats: in the absence of strong institutions or clear rules, clashes— such as those in Nagorno-Karabakh or the Galwan Valley—may more frequently flare into full-fledged interstate conflicts,30 which is particularly worrisome where unresolved tensions among nuclear powers are concerned. These conflicts may lead to state collapse, with weakened middle powers less willing or less able to step in to find a peaceful solution.

The world economy is facing severe headwinds amid weak growth prospects, elevated inflation and heightened uncertainties. A confluence of factors – legacy effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lingering war in Ukraine, the ever-worsening impact of climate change and rapidly shifting macroeconomic conditions – are clouding the economic outlook, even as the global picture shows slight signs of improvement. Persistently high inflation has prompted the most aggressive interest rate hikes in decades, causing financial conditions to tighten sharply and exacerbating debt vulnerabilities. While economic prospects remain subdued, the slowdown in global growth in 2023 is likely to be less severe than previously expected, mainly due to resilient household spending in developed economies and recovery in China. Global growth is now projected to slow from 3.1 per cent in 2022 to 2.3 per cent in 2023, an upward revision by 0.4 percentage points from the January forecast. Global inflation is projected to decline from 7.5 per cent in 2022 to 5.2 per cent in 2023, mainly due to lower food and energy prices and softening global demand. Amid easing inflationary pressures, the global economy is expected to pick up some momentum in 2024, but at 2.5 per cent, growth is projected to remain well below the longer-term (2000-2019) average of 3.1 per cent. Against a backdrop of multiple interconnected crises and heightened macroeconomic uncertainties, monetary and fiscal policy challenges have further intensified. The recent banking sector turmoil in the United States and Europe has illustrated fragilities in the financial system, complicating the trade-off for central banks between fighting inflation and preserving financial stability. After a decade of loose monetary policy with low interest rates and quantitative easing in developed countries, which encouraged excessive leverage in the financial sector and generated negative global spillovers, the prospect of high interest rates and quantitative tightening now poses a massive challenge for developing countries. Lack of access to affordable finance limits the ability of many governments to invest in education, health, sustainable infrastructure and the energy transition, while threatening to push a growing number of countries into debt default.