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Five of the 10 most valuable companies in the world—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Meta (Facebook)—are based in the U.S., generating their value and profits by creating and operating multisided platform marketplaces. A recent proposal to regulate these platforms (see “Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren: When It Comes to Big Tech, Enough Is Enough” in the New York Times on July 27) ignores economic principles, undermines consumer value, neglects international competition and abuses the notion of freedom. The Network Effect Most traditional businesses make and sell a product whose value is unrelated to who else is using the product. My shoes, for example, are comfortable because of how they were made, not because of who else is also wearing the same kind of shoes. Contrast this with the services provided by Big Tech: the value that each consumer enjoys from these companies’ product is directly related to the number of other people who are also using the product. For example, as more people shop on Amazon, more vendors recognize the marketplace as a vital source of sales. The result is a wider diversity of sellers. Moreover, these vendors compete against each other, lowering prices for consumers. Similarly, as more people post content on Facebook (and its siblings Instagram, WhatsApp, and the new Threads), other people on the platform have more information to peruse. This principle is called the network effect, where the value of a platform service is directly related to the number of people using that service. The network effect concludes that a company’s growth increases consumer value. As opposed to most traditional business, where large corporate size creates inefficiencies and sclerotic decline-making, larger platforms offer more value for each customer. Bigger is better for buyers and seller on a platform. If regulators are successful in narrowing the reach, scope, and features of these platforms, fewer people will join and participate, reducing the value for existing and future participants. That degradation of consumer value seems to run counter to the purpose of government regulation. Indeed, the examples of regulatory agencies cited by legislators in the NYT editorial tackled business concepts that did _not_ employ or enjoy the network effect. That legislators do not make this distinction is troubling, since it suggests that they are misidentifying both the problem and the solution. Anecdotal Evils The editorial mentions several purported evils perpetrated by Big Tech. For example, concerns over consumer privacy are legitimate. However, these are not specific to Big Tech; they apply to all modern companies, from neighborhood landscaping companies that might learn the layout of your house to electricity companies that can determine when you are at home or away based on your energy consumption. More fundamentally, American companies and consumers do not need a new agency for these protections. For privacy, if Congress deems its current laws inadequate, it could either look to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or to existing U.S. regulations on the protection of patients’ medical data as enshrined in the 25+ year-old Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). No new agencies or immature regulatory frameworks required. In another example, the editorial offers anecdotes of the “dark side” of Big Tech’s business practices. Yes, open forums contain extreme and dangerous opinions, especially social media, which continues to struggle to eliminate harmful content. Yet to accuse Big Tech’s of human harm is almost laughable given Congress’s impasse on gun, pharmaceutical, and cryptocurrency regulation. In 2022, almost 50,000 died from gun violence in the U.S. How many people died as an immediate result of using Google’s search engine or Apple’s App Store? Regulating AI The legislators in the editorial also cite the potential for Artificial Intelligence to increase structural, embedded bias. And although AI does indeed contain algorithmic bias, regulation does not offer a solution. AI relies on “large language models” – in other words, everything that is available on the internet – to make predictions about the next word in a sentence. We all recognize that most content on the internet was written by dominant groups; marginalized populations do not write as much as, say, university professors, who tend to be white American males. But correcting this bias is almost impossible. How can anyone know what pieces of history are underreported? More generically, how can we know what we do not know? Even if we can reconstruct this information, what weight and credibility should we give to this new information? And who should adjudicate disputes about expansions of human knowledge? Do we really want to give such power to fill in these gaps to the most exclusive club in the nation, the U.S. Senate, whose members bare almost no resemblance to the diversity of race, wealth, education, or age of the American people? American Competitiveness Perhaps more worrying, these proposals for regulation seem to target Big Tech because of their brand awareness and market capitalization. Yet Amazon’s annual sales are smaller than that of Walmart. Apple has less than 30% market share of global smartphone sales. Is the regulation punishing market value instead of market share? If regulators hobble these large platform companies, other companies will happily take their place. Alibaba, TenCent, and Bytedance (the makers of TikTok) are poised to entice American consumers to their Chinese owned marketplaces. As they gain consumers, they, too, will harness the network effect to increase the value for each consumer. Such a migration would reduce American employment, American prosperity, American geopolitical power, and American intellectual property rights. In the past, anti-trust regulators did not need to consider the specter of international competition. After all, railways and energy grids do not cross oceans. Yet online platforms have no geographical limitations. Instead of trying to limit Big Tech power at home, why aren’t American legislators trying to increase Big Tech’s influence as part of U.S. economic resurgence, especially in Asia? Freedom American politicians repeatedly declare that Big Tech’s “unelected CEOs” are curtailing “individual freedom.” This is an absurd power grab. Whereas every American is represented by two Senators and one Representative for a total of three out of 535 votes (0.6%) in Congress as required by the Constitution, any American has the freedom to use or avoid services from Big Tech. The purchase of an Apple phone or use of Google’s search engine is entirely voluntary. Far from being “unaccountable,” these companies lose customers instantly if they cease to provide value. Twitter is only the most recent illustration of the consequences of a consumer revolt. Big Tech does not infringe upon our freedom or other enumerated rights. If anything, these companies expand our freedom to read, watch, play, interact, or disconnect as we choose. I wish I could say the same about this proposal from members of Congress.

In 2024, we will see courts and regulators around the world demonstrate that tech exceptionalism, when it comes to the applicability of legal rules, is magical thinking. The tide has already started to turn on the assumption that law and regulation cannot keep up with technological innovation. But, in 2024, the sea change will come: not through new rules, but by old rules being applied aggressively to new problems. In the United States, in the absence of federal privacy legislation, regulators have already started to repurpose laws and rules they do have at their disposal to address some of the most egregious examples of Big Tech playing fast and loose with our rights and personal data. In 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continued to expand the regulatory heft of consumer protection regulations. It took on the problem of dark patterns—deceptive design used by apps and websites to trick users into doing something that they didn’t intend to, like buying or subscribing to something—with a half-billion-dollar fine against Fortnite maker Epic Games. The FTC also issued massive fines to Amazon for significant breaches of privacy through Alexa and Ring doorbell devices. There are no signs that, in 2024, the FTC will slow down, with rules in the pipeline to govern commercial surveillance and digital security. In 2024, we’ll see regulators in other fields and other parts of the world follow suit, bolstered by the FTC’s successes. In 2022, the French Data Protection Authority, the CNIL, fined Clearview AI a record €20 million (around $21.9 million) for failure to comply with an earlier 2021 ruling, which had ordered the company to stop collecting and using data of persons on French territory. Further overdue penalties will be racking up in the millions of euros in 2023. In 2024, we will see regulators such as the CNIL taking more radical legal steps to show that no company is above the law. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, started 2023 with a call for global AI regulation, but balked at the actual prospect of EU regulation in the shape of the EU AI Act. While AI doomers asked for a pause on innovation to allow regulation to catch up, regulators including the Italian DPA found ways to clip their wings by stopping ChatGPT on their territory, albeit temporarily, with existing regulations. Ongoing intellectual property lawsuits, such as the one against Microsoft which charges the company to have illegally used code created by others, may well result in a turbulent 2024 for the fundamental business model of generative AI. It is not only the individual impacts of technology that courts and regulators have in their sights. In 2024, they will also be considering the impacts on society, markets, and businesses. For instance, antitrust actions in the US and the EU launched in 2023 call into question Google’s dominance in the ad tech market, potentially shaking the monolithic logic of the programmatic advertising model that has helped create the internet as we know it today. In 2024, we will see the regulatory void long enjoyed by Big Tech come to an end. While new laws and regulations like the AI Act, the Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act in the EU start to take shape, courts and regulators will continue to apply existing law and regulation to the new ways that technology affects our daily lives. We will see the full panoply of legal tools coming to meet the challenges. Human rights and civil liberties law, competition law, consumer rights law, intellectual property, defamation, tort, employment law, and a plethora of other fields will be engaged to tackle the real-life harms already being caused by existing technology, including AI.

New data shows the world is becoming safer, at least by one measure. The latest update of the Global Terrorism Database, compiled by the University of Maryland and published Wednesday (Aug. 1), shows terrorism has retreated for the third consecutive year. Attacks around the world dropped from about 17,000 in 2014 to about 11,000 in 2017. The number of fatal victims fell by almost half in the same period. But as the chart shows, the total number of attacks last year was still considerably higher than in the 1990s and 2000s. Though ISIL remained the most active terrorist group in 2017, it committed 10% fewer attacks, and caused 40% fewer deaths compared to 2016. The terror group reached its peak around 2014, when it made advances in the Middle East, conquering the cities of Raqqa, Syria and Mosul, Iraq. It also took credit for a series of deadly attacks in Europe and beyond. Since then it has lost much of its territory. Despite an improvement at the global level, some specific countries registered more terrorism than before. In the US, the number of lethal attacks almost tripled, with the deadliest case being the Las Vegas shooting in October.

This last point is worth emphasizing. Even in the remote case where an actor successfully acquires a nuclear weapon and primarily seeks raw numbers of casualties—whether due to outbidding or audience costs—other forms of WMDs are likely to be more appealing. As Aum Shinrikyo indicates, this is particularly the case for the group that overcomes the inevitable political and technological hurdles (Nehorayoff et al. 2016, 36–37). For these groups, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons (CBRW) are considerably easier to acquire, use, and stockpile. This is especially true when considered over time, rather than a single operation.18 While there are certainly downsides to CBRWs vis-à-vis nuclear weapons (delivery may paradoxically be easier and the maintenance risks comparatively smaller), they are undoubtedly easier to procure and produce (Zanders 1999). More importantly, CBRWs are perceived as easier to produce and thus likely to be viewed by targets as iterable. Unlike a nuclear attack, CBRW threats are more credible because a single CBRW attack can likely precipitate an indefinite number of follow-ups.

In addition to the problem of iterability, a terrorist organization must always worry about the possible ratchet effect of an attack—a problem Neumann and Smith (2005, 588– 90) refer to as the “escalation trap.” A terrorist organization is different than a state at war because it manipulates other actors primarily through punishment. Campaigns are a communicative activity designed to convince the public and the leaders that the status quo is unsustainable. The message is that the costs of continuing the target state’s policy (such as the United States in Lebanon, France in Algeria, or the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland) will eventually outweigh the benefits. Once an organization conducts a nuclear attack, it lacks options for an encore. Not even the most nightmarish scenarios involve an indefinite supply of weapons. If a single attack plus the threat of one or two others does not induce capitulation, the organization might unwittingly harden the target state’s resolve. The attack could raise the bar such that any future non-nuclear attack constitutes a lessening of costs vis-à-vis the status quo.

The exaggeration of terrorist capacities has been greatest in the many much overstated assessments of their ability to develop nuclear weapons or devices. It has been widely predicted for two decades now that, because al-Qaeda operatives used box cutters so effectively on 9/11, they would, although under siege, soon apply equal talents in science and engineering to fabricate nuclear weapons and then detonate them on American cities. A popular estimate was that such a disaster might well happen by 2014.29 Given the decidedly limited capabilities of terrorists, this concern seems to have been substantially overwrought: thus far, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and even less progress in going atomic. That lack of action may be because, after a brief exploration of the possible routes, they – unlike generations of alarmists – have discovered that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful.30

Graca 18 [Patricia Graca is a Project Assistant in the Europe and Central Asia Division at DCAF and holds a Master of Arts in Diplomacy and International Relations, an MBA in Business and Marketing, “Analysis of the U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Policy Digest, 12-31-2018, URL: ] sg

Since WWII, the US grand strategy has focused on pursuing geopolitical dominance, a unipolar strategy, which has revolved around maintaining its overwhelming military, economic, and political preponderance through the promotion of democracy and human rights abroad that is often touted as national security or foreign policy. With the end of the Cold War, the US has managed to maintain its great advantage by making its allies more secure and therefore, keeping its hegemony and the world order. The US continues to dominate the international system and thus discourages advanced industrial nations from challenging its leadership. Furthermore, the US has used a policy of reassurance to secure US interests and provide security to key allies which has prevented them from building their own military capabilities. Some may argue that this US unipolar strategy provoked terrorist attacks against the US and its allies, and it did not prevent the rise of new global powers. Thus, US primacy has not been entirely successful in guaranteeing its security or economic and political supremacy. Moreover, the US has moved far beyond counterterrorism to counterinsurgency, and from the temporary deployment of small anti-terrorism forces to a near-permanent military presence. The American response to terrorism has undermined critical elements of US ‘soft’ power in the international arena, even as its ‘hard’ power has been reinforced. Notwithstanding its unipolar status, the terrorist assaults on American and its allies’ homeland demonstrated dramatically that the US faces significant challenges beyond the realm of great power competition. In terms of security strategy, the Trump administration has clearly drawn away from the American grand strategic tradition of retrenchment or deep engagement. ‘America First’ seems to have to address US foreign policy by withdrawing from certain treaties and intervening in the pursuit of US security and prosperity. The US current administration aims to maintain its security and prosperity by allowing other great powers to promote a global liberal order. The Trump administration uses foreign policy more ambitiously because it considers an unprecedented grand strategy of illiberal hegemony. Traditional US liberal hegemony strategy used to focus on promoting democracy and human rights, creating multilateral institutions, and mirroring the international system vis-à-vis the US values. In contrast, Trump’s illiberal hegemony strategy seeks superior economic and military capability by portraying the US as the world’s arbiter. Such an expensive strategy has increased the US defense budget, security and military commitments, and nuclear modernization programs. Contrary to previous administrations that invested considerable sums of money in building democracy abroad, the Trump administration envisions engagement with the world’s security problems by targeting its main allies – Europe, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. Trump’s foreign policy in Europe intensified EU efforts to reduce an over-reliance on US protection. It seems that the US administration is trying to return NATO to Europe by mitigating its financial contribution and military spending for a NATO expansion. As a result, the EU launched a military joint-force, PESCO, that could pave the way for an EU army. PESCO was first established in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, as an EU defense cooperation. PESCO members have pledged to increase defense budgets in real terms regularly, genuinely pursue national investments with due consideration for joint capability needs, expose national plans to EU scrutiny, and, ultimately, provide more strategically deployable forces than currently available today. This force could play a leading role in scenarios such as peace support operations in the Western Balkans. Although the US has shown a hesitation to embrace the idea of deeper European defense integration fully, the US should support a more self-reliant EU. When it comes to defense, the goal is also to improve competitiveness and enhance innovation across the continent’s defense industry. In a post-Brexit world, the momentum behind PESCO offers an opportunity for the US to revisit the EU’s legacy goal of deploying and sustaining 60,000 ground troops as part of a joint force. In Asia, Japan is the most relevant US partner in some foreign policy areas, particularly in security concerns, which range from hedging against Chinese military modernization to countering threats from North Korea. In 2018, Japan’s military sees record spending, aiming at buying more US arms. Japan’s Ministry of Defense in August sought record spending of 5.3 trillion-yen next year to help pay for significant upgrades to defenses designed to shoot down any North Korean ballistic missile. Japan military budget has grown for the seventh year in a row. The US should allow Japan to pursue its own military capability, which would lead to a political, military and economic balance or rivalry within the region. As for the Middle East, US-Saudi alliance is extremely important for the US foreign policy due to the US national interests of economic prosperity, security, the fight against terrorism and energy supply. Trump’s first foreign visit as US president was to Saudi Arabia in May 2017, where a military deal worth $110 billion between the two countries was penned. The Trump administration has sought to strengthen ties to Saudi Arabia by signing this arms sales contract. Additionally, President Trump dismissed proposals to cut arms sales to the kingdom and backed the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman’s assertions that he did not order the killing, despite the reported conclusions of the CIA. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia is the top destination for US arms, with US defense sales to the kingdom totaling close to $90 billion for the past seventy years. In addition, both countries share security concerns about Iran. They both have ramped up efforts to counter Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival. Regarding energy supply, the US imports only 25% of Saudi oil reserves, whereas US allies – Europe and Japan – depend on the Middle Eastern oil, and therefore, should share the responsibility for stabilizing the region. By sharing with its allies the world’s security problems, the US strengthens the allies’ presence, shares information, and develops deep cooperation. Thus, the US and its allies need to work together and better balance the burden of democratic world order. Alliances are better for everyone and institutions facilitate iterated interactions amongst members. The US and European countries cofounded most of the world’s institutions in the aftermath of WWII. Such institutions helped shape the world we live in. Therefore, the US should maintain its robust presence in these institutions as well as in multilateral agreements. As for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, the US and its allies should increase their interaction regarding strategic intelligence based on allied security forces. Terrorism is the world’s problem that needs a collective effort to fight against it. Short-term military actions informed by long-term analysis, would reshape the international environment and constrain terrorist attacks. The Trump administration should develop a range of politically credible, clearly articulated indirect actions to support the allies’ efforts to improve their civil defense capabilities. By adopting a multipolar strategy, the US would allow other nations to build their military capabilities and provide for their own national and regional security. In this great geopolitical rebalancing, states share the burden of maintaining stability in various parts of the world, looking for absolute gains and more peaceful relations.

This study set out to explore how the U.S. foreign policy, driven by realpolitik and neoliberalism in Iraq and Syria, resulted in the rise of violent extremist groups such as ISIS. Previous research has focused on the commission of state crimes abroad, however there has been no criminological research examining the U.S. involvement in Syria of how their policies and interventions create power vacuums that allow for and facilitate the rise of terrorist groups vying for power. Empirical Findings After analyzing the data collected, it was evident that the United States' prioritization of realpolitik and the exercise of geopolitical interests as priority in Iraq ultimately resulted in the creation of a power vacuum in which Al Qaeda gladly filled. The forcible removal of Saddam Hussein by the United States incited anarchical conditions that the United States and the Coalition Provisional Authority failed to quell. U.S. privatization and deregulation of the Iraqi economy left its citizens without jobs and acted as a catalyst for the ensuing sectarian schism between the ruling Shia and the disenfranchised Sunnis. Likewise, Assad's regime in Syria has created a deeply seeded schism between the ruling Alwite Shias and the remaining Sunnis. Given the similarity in make up between the two countries, by utilizing the aforementioned data regarding the United States' use of realpolitik and neo-liberalism in Iraq, it is reasonable to conclude that if the United States were to remove the Assad regime and dismantle the Alawite ruling class as it did with the Hussein regime and the Ba'ath party in Iraq, it would leave Syria 89 with an immediate power vacuum that could easily be filled by Sunni backed extremist groups, including ISIS. Theoretical Implications The empirical findings of this study exemplify both Foucault's notion of regimes of truth, which is encompassed by the overarching integrated theory of violations of international criminal laws, and the realpolitik theoretical frame. The promotion of democracy in the Middle East using neo-liberal ideologies and realpolitik became the truth and was further ingrained in the overarching regime of truth, thus solidifying its role as the only viable option for the United States. Further, the realpolitik theoretical frame was epitomized by the United States' actions in Iraq and Syria of condemning oppressive regimes, namely the Hussein and Assad regimes, while at the same time pursing its own political and economic interests in the region. By utilizing both the integrated theory of violations of international criminal laws and the realpolitik theoretical frame, this study provides a more holistic explanation of the United States' involvement in Iraq and Syria and the subsequent rise of extremist groups such as ISIS.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy declared himself ‘‘haunted’’ by the expectation that the club of nuclear weapon states would grow to 15 or even 25 members by the mid-1970s, unless the world could come together on a global nuclear test ban treaty.1 Despite Kennedy’s efforts, his hoped-for Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty finally materialized only in 1996, and as of 2013 the treaty had still not yet garnered enough state adherents to enter into force.2 Nevertheless, there are fewer than 10 nuclear weapon states in the world today, 50 years after Kennedy’s dark prediction. Why are nuclear weapons arsenals still so uncommon? Political scientists have wrestled with this puzzle ever since the proliferation issue surged to prominence after the end of the Cold War. Despite its diversity of theoretical and empirical approaches, the political science literature has come to a rough consensus on the slow pace of proliferation. Simplistic ‘‘realist’’ arguments that ‘‘nuclear weapons are a wonderful deterrent, that’s why states love them’’3 have been falsified—as the realists themselves increasingly acknowledge. Instead, scholars of proliferation point out that most states are naturally reticent to take a step that could unleash highly uncertain and potentially revolutionary consequences. It is therefore actually quite easy to understand why most states are not seeking to obtain the bomb; what is harder to understand is why a handful of states still do seem to want it. The political science literature also emphasizes that, despite global technical and economic progress since 1945, building nuclear weapons systems remains complex, costly, dangerous, and potentially very time-consuming. Therefore, even among the small number of genuine nuclear weapons aspirants, failure to achieve their ultimate goal is at least as likely as success. Indeed, in recent decades the failure rate has sharply increased. The overall political science finding of the great proliferation slowdown needs to be recognized by policy analysts focusing on single countries of concern, such as Iran or North Korea. Proliferation is a serious problem, but there is no cause for panic.

Yet this "mother of all assumptions" is simply asserted and rarely examined. The obvious question to ask is this: did prior acts of nuclear proliferation have the same fearsome consequences that Iran hawks now forecast? The answer is no. In fact, the spread of nuclear weapons has had remarkably little impact on the basic nature of world politics and the ranking of major powers. The main effect of the nuclear revolution has been to induce greater caution in the behavior of both those who possessed the bomb and anyone who had to deal with a nuclear-armed adversary. Proliferation has not transformed weak states into influential global actors, has not given nuclear-armed states the ability to blackmail their neighbors or force them to kowtow, and it has not triggered far-reaching regional arms races. In short, fears that an Iranian bomb would transform regional or global politics have been greatly exaggerated; one might even say that they are just a lot of hooey. Consider the historical record. Did the world turn on its axis when the mighty Soviet Union tested its first bomb in 1949? Although alarmist documents like NSC-68 warned of a vast increase in Soviet influence and aggressiveness, Soviet nuclear development simply reinforcedthe caution that both superpowers were already displaying towards each other. The United States already saw the USSR as an enemy, and the basic principles of containment were already in place. NATO was being formed before the Soviet test and Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe was already a fait accompli. Having sole possession of the bomb hadn't enabled Truman to simply dictate to Stalin, and getting the bomb didn't enable Stalin or his successors to blackmail any of their neighbors or key U.S. allies. It certainly didn't lead any countries to "reorient their political alignment toward Moscow." Nikita Khrushchev's subsequent missile rattling merely strengthened the cohesion of NATO and other U.S.-led alliances, and we now know that much of his bluster was intended to conceal Soviet strategic inferiority. Having a large nuclear arsenal didn't stop the anti-commnist uprisings in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or Poland, and didn't allow the Soviet Union to win in Afghanistan. Nor did it prevent the USSR from eventually collapsing entirely. Did British and French acquisition of nuclear weapons slow their decline as great powers? Not in the slightest. Having the force de frappe may have made De Gaulle feel better about French prestige and having their own deterrent made both states less dependent on America's security umbrella, but it didn't give either state a louder voice in world affairs or win them new influence anywhere. And you might recall that Britain couldn't get Argentina to give back the Falklands by issuing nuclear threats -- even though Argentina had no bomb of its own and no nuclear guarantee -- they had to go retake the islands with conventional forces.  Did China's detonation of a bomb in 1964 suddenly make them a superpower? Hardly. China remained a minor actor on the world stage until it adopted market principles, and its rising global influence is due to three decades of economic growth, not a pile of nukes. And by the way, did getting a bomb enable Mao Zedong--a cruel megalomaniac who launched the disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1957 and the destructive Cultural Revolution in the 1960s -- to start threatening and blackmailing his neighbors? Nope. In fact, China's foreign policy behavior after 1964 was generally quite restrained. What about Israel? Does Israel's nuclear arsenal allow it to coerce its neighbors or impose its will on Hezbollah or the Palestinians? No. Israel uses its conventional military superiority to try to do these things, not its nuclear arsenal. Indeed, Israel's bomb didn't even prevent Egypt and Syria from attacking it in October 1973, although it did help convince them to limit their aims to regaining the territory they had lost in 1967. It is also worth noting that Israel's nuclear program did not trigger a rapid arms race either. Although states like Iraq and Libya did establish their own WMD programs after Israel got the bomb, none of their nuclear efforts moved very rapidly or made it across the finish line. But wait, there's more. The white government in South Africa eventually produced a handful of bombs, but nobody noticed and apartheid ended anyway. Then the new government gave up its nuclear arsenal to much acclaim. If anything, South Africa was more secure without an arsenal than it was before. What about India and Pakistan? India's "peaceful nuclear explosion" in 1974 didn't turn it into a global superpower, and its only real effect was to spur Pakistan -- which was already an avowed rival -- to get one too. And it's worth noting that there hasn't been a large-scale war between the two countries since, despite considerable grievances on both sides and occasional skirmishes and other provocations. Finally, North Korea is as annoying and weird as it has always been, but getting nuclear weapons didn't transform it from an economic basket case into a mighty regional power and didn't make it more inclined to misbehave. In fact, what is most remarkable about North Korea's nuclear program is how little impact it has had on its neighbors. States like Japan and South Korea could go nuclear very quickly if they wanted to, but neither has done so in the six years since North Korea's first nuclear test.  In short, both theory and history teach us that getting a nuclear weapon has less impact on a country's power and influence than many believe, and the slow spread of nuclear weapons has only modest effects on global and regional politics. Nuclear weapons are good for deterring direct attacks on one's homeland, and they induce greater caution in the minds of national leaders of all kinds. What they don't do is turn weak states into great powers, they are useless as tools of blackmail, and they cost a lot of money. They also lead other states to worry more about one's intentions and to band together for self-protection. For these reasons, most potential nuclear states have concluded that getting the bomb isn't worth it. But a few states-and usually those who are worried about being attacked-decide to go ahead. The good news is that when they do, it has remarkably little impact on world affairs. 

The fear that President Donald Trump is returning the world to the nightmare years of the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation was an ever-looming threat, got more intense over the weekend with the news that the United States Air Force is preparing to put B-52 bombers on 24-hour alert for the first time since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. According to the news site Defense One, the Air Force is anticipating an escalation in its deterrence duties as part of a general shift in America’s nuclear posture, sparked by “North Korea’s rapidly advancing nuclear arsenal, President Trump’s confrontational approach to Pyongyang, and Russia’s increasingly potent and active armed forces.” General David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff, told Defense One that “the world is a dangerous place and we’ve got folks that are talking openly about use of nuclear weapons.” Goldfein wants the military to ask itself questions like, “What does conventional conflict look like with a nuclear element?” When it comes to the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal, it has been easy to imagine the worst-case scenarios under Trump. Republican Senator Bob Corker warned that the president might be stumbling on “the path to World War III.” Speaking on MSNBC, Vanity Fair writer Gabriel Sherman reported that “a very prominent Republican” was “saying that they imagine [Chief of Staff Jim] Kelly and [Defense Secretary James] Mattis had conversations about if Trump lunged for the nuclear football, what would they do? Would they tackle him? I mean literally, physically restrain him from putting the country at, sort of, perilous risk.” Trump and Mattis wrestling over the nuclear football is a scene worthy of Stanley Kubrick’s classic Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove. The principal worry is that we live in a world where Dr. Strangelove feels more like a documentary than a black comedy. But the danger comes not just from Dr. Strangelove-style scenarios in which Trump lurches into the apocalypse, with his hapless military staff in tow. It also comes from a degradation of America’s nuclear policy, caused by a combination of Pentagon hubris and Trump’s punch-drunk diplomacy, which taken together would cause the other nations of the world to abandon diplomacy and put their faith in their own nuclear stockpiles. The longer-term danger isn’t that Trump blows up the world, but that he pushes the international system towards a world with many more nukes in many more hands. The dangers of America undermining nuclear non-proliferation predate Trump. As the world’s sole superpower, the United States has been torn between pushing for international agreements on nuclear issues and trying to maintain its hegemony at all cost. George W. Bush’s enthusiasm for missile defense led to a fraying of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which America withdrew from in 2002. Barack Obama’s nuclear modernization program, sold to the public on the promise of greater safety, intensified America’s ability to launch a successful first strike that could disarm a rival power. Obama’s modernization program did not end up creating a new era of nuclear competition, in part because it was coupled with the pursuit of nuclear non-proliferation in other areas, notably with Iran. Obama was able to argue to the Chinese and Russian governments that their main concern should be limiting the size of the nuclear club, not competing with other members of the club. But with Trump, we’re entering a very different era, where calls for modernization are coupled with a disregard for the diplomacy needed for non-proliferation. This is why Trump’s hostility toward the Iran nuclear deal, combined with his blustery threats against North Korea, present such a danger. Trump is in effect saying that America is pushing ahead with a new generation of more powerful nuclear weapons while also abandoning global leadership on non-proliferation. Given this toxic mix, there’s little reason for other nations, whether great or small, to abide by existing treaties. Trump’s intemperate handling of the nuclear portfolio is entirely predictable. He has been talking about nuclear non-proliferation since the 1980s, when he offered himself unbidden as the man who should settle the standoff with the Soviet Union. But as analyst Cheryl Rofer rightly notes, Trump’s approach to nuclear issues has been consistently crude, with a few key themes persisting over the decades: that Trump is a great deal-maker, that other people make bad deals, and that America and Russia should team up against the lesser powers. These are not points that are likely to persuade other foreign powers, possibly not even Russia, to put their faith in the United States. (Putin’s Russia, after all, sees the value of the Iran deal Trump wants to jettison). Trump’s approach to nuclear issues is to make big threats that he can’t necessarily carry out. This is already encouraging other nations to think about acquiring their own nuclear weapons. Writing in The Washington Post, Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan argued that, since the U.S. won’t be willing to sacrifice its own cities to protect South Korea, South Korea and Japan should acquire their own nuclear arsenals. In a similar vein, former CIA Director John Brennan has warned that scuttling the Iran deal could lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. One area where Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump find themselves in agreement is in believing that their countries are being held back by nuclear arms treaties. As Adam Taylor noted in The Washington Post, “Putin has spoken recently of the need to ‘strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces,’ while Trump reportedly denounced an Obama-era treaty that capped the number of nuclear weapons fielded by the two nations during a February call with Putin. Some people, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, worry that Washington and Moscow may ultimately end up scrapping these agreements.” We’re used to worrying about the nuclear era leading to a sudden apocalypse: the mushroom cloud that ends the world. But there is a slower path to destruction: a world where international agreements are scorned, so the great powers push ahead with deadlier weapons while the smaller nations also acquire nuclear weapons since there is no reward for restraint. It is a world where so many more conflicts could end in nuclear war.

In this essay I look at the evolving encounters between rising states and the post-war Western international order. My starting point is the classic “power transition” perspective. Power transition theories see a tight link between international order—its emergence, stability, and decline—and the rise and fall of great powers. It is a perspective that sees history as a sequence of cycles in which powerful or hegemonic states rise up and build order and dominate the global system until their power declines, leading to a new cycle of crisis and order building. In contrast, I offer a more evolutionary perspective, emphasizing the lineages and continuities in modern international order. More specifically, I argue that although America’s hegemonic position may be declining, the liberal international characteristics of order—openness, rules, multilateral cooperation—are deeply rooted and likely to persist. This is true even though the orientation and actions of the Trump administration have raised serious questions about the U.S. commitment to liberal internationalism. Just as importantly, rising states (led by China) are not engaged in a frontal attack on the American-led order. While struggles do exist over orientations, agendas, and leadership, the non-Western developing countries remain tied to the architecture and principles of a liberal-oriented global order. And even as China seeks in various ways to build rival regional institutions, there are stubborn limits on what it can do. Power Transitions and International Order There is wide agreement that the world is witnessing a long-term global power transition. Wealth and power is diffusing, spreading outward and away from Europe and the United States. The rapid growth that marked the non-Western rising states in the last decade may have ended, and even China’s rapid economic ascendency has slowed. But the overall pattern of change remains: the “rest” are gaining ground on the “West.” While there is wide agreement that the world is witnessing a global power transition, there is less agreement on the consequences of power shifts for international order. The classic view is advanced by realist scholars, such as E. H. Carr, Robert Gilpin, Paul Kennedy, and William Wohlforth, who make sweeping arguments about power and order. These hegemonic realists argue that international order is a by-product of the concentration of power. Order is created by a powerful state, and when that state declines and power diffuses, international order weakens or breaks apart. Out of these dynamic circumstances, a rising state emerges as the new dominant state, and it seeks to reorganize the international system to suit its own purposes. In this view, world politics from ancient times to the modern era can be seen as a series of repeated cycles of rise and decline. War, protectionism, depression, political upheaval—various sorts of crises and disruptions may push the cycle forward. This narrative of hegemonic rise and decline draws on the European and, more broadly, Western experience. Since the early modern era, Europe has been organized and reorganized by a succession of leading states and would-be hegemons: the Spanish Hapsburgs, France of Louis XIV and Napoleon, and post-Bismarck Germany. The logic of hegemonic order comes even more clearly into view with Pax Britannica, the nineteenth-century hegemonic order based on British naval and mercantile dominance. The decline of Britain was followed by decades of war and economic instability, which ended only with the rise of Pax Americana. For hegemonic realists, the debate today is about where the world is along this cyclical pathway of rise and decline. Has the United States finally lost the ability or willingness to underwrite and lead the post-war order? Are we in the midst of a hegemonic crisis and the breakdown of the old order? And are rising states, led by China, beginning to step forward in efforts to establish their own hegemonic dominance of their regions and the world? These are the lurking questions of the power transition perspective. But does this vision of power transition truly illuminate the struggles going on today over international order? Some might argue no—that the United States is still in a position, despite its travails, to provide hegemonic leadership. Here one would note that there is a durable infrastructure (or what Susan Strange has called “structural power”) that undergirds the existing American-led order. Far-flung security alliances, market relations, liberal democratic solidarity, deeply rooted geopolitical alignments—there are many possible sources of American hegemonic power that remain intact. But there may be even deeper sources of continuity in the existing system. This would be true if the existence of a liberal-oriented international order does not in fact require hegemonic domination. It might be that the power transition theory is wrong: the stability and persistence of the existing post-war international order does not depend on the concentration of American power. In fact, international order is not simply an artifact of concentrations of power. The rules and institutions that make up international order have a more complex and contingent relationship with the rise and fall of state power. This is true in two respects. First, international order itself is complex: multilayered, multifaceted, and not simply a political formation imposed by the leading state. International order is not “one thing” that states either join or resist. It is an aggregation of various sorts of ordering rules and institutions. There are the deep rules and norms of sovereignty. There are governing institutions, starting with the United Nations. There is a sprawling array of international institutions, regimes, treaties, agreements, protocols, and so forth. These governing arrangements cut across diverse realms, including security and arms control, the world economy, the environment and global commons, human rights, and political relations. Some of these domains of governance may have rules and institutions that narrowly reflect the interests of the hegemonic state, but most reflect negotiated outcomes based on a much broader set of interests. As rising states continue to rise, they do not simply confront an American-led order; they face a wider conglomeration of ordering rules, institutions, and arrangements; many of which they have long embraced. By separating “American hegemony” from “the existing international order,” we can see a more complex set of relationships. The United States does not embody the international order; it has a relationship with it, as do rising states. The United States embraces many of the core global rules and institutions, such as the United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and World Trade Organization. But it also has resisted ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (it being the only country not to have ratified the latter) as well as various arms control and disarmament agreements. China also embraces many of the same global rules and institutions, and resists ratification of others. Generally speaking, the more fundamental or core the norms and institutions are—beginning with the Westphalian norms of sovereignty and the United Nations system—the more agreement there is between the United States and China as well as other states. Disagreements are most salient where human rights and political principles are in play, such as in the Responsibility to Protect. Second, there is also diversity in what rising states “want” from the international order. The struggles over international order take many different forms. In some instances, what rising states want is more influence and control of territory and geopolitical space beyond their borders. One can see this in China’s efforts to expand its maritime and political influence in the South China Sea and other neighboring areas. This is an age-old type of struggle captured in realist accounts of security competition and geopolitical rivalry. Another type of struggle is over the norms and values that are enshrined in global governance rules and institutions. These may be about how open and rule-based the system should be. They may also be about the way human rights and political principles are defined and brought to bear in relations among states. Finally, the struggles over international order may be focused on the distribution of authority. That is, rising states may seek a greater role in the governance of existing institutions. This is a struggle over the position of states within the global political hierarchy: voting shares, leadership rights, and authority relations. These observations cut against the realist hegemonic perspective and cyclical theories of power transition. Rising states do not confront a single, coherent, hegemonic order. The international order offers a buffet of options and choices. They can embrace some rules and institutions and not others. Moreover, stepping back, the international orders that rising states have faced in different historical eras have not all been the same order. The British-led order that Germany faced at the turn of the twentieth century is different from the international order that China faces today. The contemporary international order is much more complex and wide-ranging than past orders. It has a much denser array of rules, institutions, and governance realms. There are also both regional and global domains of governance. This makes it hard to imagine an epic moment when the international order goes into crisis and rising states step forward—either China alone or rising states as a bloc—to reorganize and reshape its rules and institutions. Rather than a cyclical dynamic of rise and decline, change in the existing American-led order might best be captured by terms such as continuity, evolution, adaptation, and negotiation. The struggles over international order today are growing, but it is not a drama best told in terms of the rise and decline of American hegemony.

OUT WITH THE OLD Despite the disappointments of the past 25 years, the American foreign policy elite remains convinced that global leadership is their birthright and that Washington must continue trying to force other countries to conform to U.S. dictates. This perspective is an article of faith at almost every foreign policy think tank inside the Beltway and is repeatedly invoked in task-force reports, policy briefs, and op-eds. A similar groupthink pervades the U.S. media, where unrepentant neoconservatives and unchastened liberal internationalists monopolize the ranks of full-time pundits; proponents of realism, restraint, and nonintervention appear sporadically at best. The result is that foreign policy debates are heavily skewed in favor of endless intervention. Moving back to a more realist grand strategy will require broadening the parameters of debate and challenging the entrenched interests that have promoted and defended a failed foreign policy. The clubbiness of the foreign policy establishment has also produced a disturbing lack of accountability. Although the community contains many dedicated, imaginative, and honorable individuals, it is dominated by a highly networked caste of insiders who are reluctant to judge one another lest they be judged themselves. As a result, error-prone officials routinely fail upward and receive new opportunities to repeat past mistakes. Consider the officials responsible for (and the commentators who cheered on) the bungled Middle East peace process, the misguided expansion of nato, the botched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the cia's torture of detainees in the war on terrorism, the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of Americans, the disastrous nato intervention in Libya, and the American machinations in Ukraine that gave Russia a pretext to seize Crimea. None of those officials or commentators has suffered significant professional penalties for his or her mistakes or malfeasance. Indeed, nearly all of them still enjoy prominent positions in government, think tanks, the media, or academia. No one is infallible, of course, and a desire to hold people accountable could be taken too far. Policymakers often learn from past mistakes and become more effective over time. But when the same people keep making the same errors and neither recognize nor regret them, it is time to look for new people with better ideas. Despite the stagnation within the foreign policy establishment, the prospects for a more realist, more restrained U.S. foreign policy are better today than they have been in many years. For all his flaws, Trump has made it easier to propose alternatives to liberal hegemony by expressing such disdain for the elite consensus. Younger Americans are more skeptical of their country's imperial pretensions than are their elders, and some new members of Congress seem bent on clawing back some of the control over foreign policy that presidents have amassed over the past 70 years.

Walt 19 Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. [“The End of Hubris,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 98, Iss. 3, (May/Jun 2019): 26-35, 4-16-2019, URL: ] DTS

IF IT AIN'T BROKE . . . In the nineteenth century, when the United States was weak, leaders from George Washington to William McKinley mostly avoided foreign entanglements and concentrated on building power domestically, expanding the country's reach across North America and eventually expelling the European great powers from the Western Hemisphere. In the first half of the twentieth century, U.S. presidents such as Wood- row Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt used the country's newfound strength to restore the balance of power in strategically critical regions outside the Western Hemisphere. But they let other great powers do most of the heavy lifting, and thus the United States emerged relatively unscathed-and stronger than ever-from the world wars that devastated Asia and Europe. Letting other states shoulder the burden was not possible during the Cold War, so the United States stepped up and led the alliances that contained the Soviet Union. American leaders paid lip service to democracy promotion, human rights, and other idealistic concerns, but U.S. policy was realist at its core. Through the Bretton Woods system and its successors, the United States also helped foster a more open world economy, balancing economic growth against the need for financial stability, national autonomy, and domestic legitimacy. Put simply, for most of U.S. history, American leaders were acutely sensitive to the balance of power, passed the buck when they could, and took on difficult missions when necessary. But when the Soviet Union collapsed and the United States found itself, as the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroftput it in 1998, "standing alone at the height of power . . . with the rarest opportunity to shape the world," U.S. leaders rejected the realism that had worked well for decades and tried to remake global politics in accordance with American values. A new strategy-liberal hegemony-sought to spread democracy and open markets across the globe. That goal is the common thread linking President Bill Clinton's policy of "engagement and enlargement," President George W. Bush's "freedom agenda," and President Barack Obama's embrace of the Arab revolts of 2010-11 and his declaration that "there is no right more fundamental than the ability to choose your leaders and determine your destiny." Such thinking won broad support from both political parties, the federal bureaucracies that deal with international affairs, and most of the think tanks, lobbies, and media figures that constitute the foreign policy establishment. At bottom, liberal hegemony is a highly revisionist strategy. Instead of working to maintain favorable balances of power in a few areas of vital interest, the United States sought to transform regimes all over the world and recruit new members into the economic and security institutions it dominated. The results were dismal: failed wars, financial crises, staggering inequality, frayed alliances, and emboldened adversaries. HEGEMONIC HUBRIS When Clinton took office in 1993, the United States was on favorable terms with the world's other major powers, including China and Russia. Democracy was spreading, Iraq was being disarmed, and Iran had no nuclear enrichment capacity. The Oslo Accords seemed to herald an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Washington seemed well positioned to guide that process. The European Union was adding new members and moving toward a common currency, and the U.S. economy was performing well. Americans saw terrorism as a minor problem, and the U.S. military seemed unstoppable. The wind was at the country's back. Life was good. But those circumstances fueled a dangerous overconfidence among American elites. Convinced that the United States was "the indispensable nation," as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously put it in 1998, they believed they had the right, the responsibility, and the wisdom to shape political arrangements in every corner of the world. That vision turned out to be a hubristic fantasy. Repeated attempts to broker peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians all failed, and the two-state solution sought by three U.S. presidents is no longer a viable option. Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. homeland on September 11, 2001, and Washington responded by launching a global war on terrorism, including invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Those campaigns were costly failures and shattered the U.S. military's aura of invincibility. Much of the Middle East is now embroiled in conflict, and violent extremists operate from Africa to Central Asia and beyond. Meanwhile, India, Pakistan, and North Korea tested and deployed nuclear weapons, and Iran become a latent nuclear weapons state. The collapse of the U.S. housing market in 2008 exposed widespread corruption in the country's financial institutions and triggered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression-a calamity from which the global economy has yet to fully recover. In 2014, Russia seized Crimea, and it has interfered in a number of other countries since then-and its relations with the West are now worse than at any time since the Cold War. China's power and ambitions have expanded, and cooperation between Beijing and Moscow has deepened. The eurozone crisis, the United Kingdom's decision to withdraw from the eu, and energetic populist movements have raised doubts about the eu's future. Democracy is in retreat worldwide; according to Freedom House, 2018 was the 13th consecutive year in which global freedom declined. Illiberal leaders govern in Hungary and Poland, and the Economist Intelligence Unit's annual Demoracy Index has downgraded the United States from a "full" to a "flawed" democracy. The United States was not solely responsible for all these adverse developments, but it played a major role in most of them. And the taproot of many of these failures was Washington's embrace of liberal hegemony. For starters, that strategy expanded U.S. security obligations without providing new resources with which to meet them. The policy of "dual containment," aimed at Iran and Iraq, forced the United States to keep thousands of troops on the Arabian Peninsula, an additional burden that also helped convince Osama bin Laden to strike at the U.S. homeland. Nato expansion committed Washington to defend weak and vulnerable new members, even as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom let their military forces atrophy. Equally important, U.S. efforts to promote democracy, the open-ended expansion of nato, and the extension of the alliance's mission far beyond its original parameters poisoned relations with Russia. And fear of U.S.-led regime change encouraged several states to pursue a nuclear deterrent-in the case of North Korea, successfully. When the United States did manage to topple a foreign foe, as it did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the results were not thriving new democracies but costly occupations, failed states, and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. It was delusional for U.S. leaders to expect otherwise: creating a functional democracy is a difficult process under the best of circumstances, but trying to do it in fractured societies one barely understands is a fool's errand. Finally, globalization did not deliver as promised. Opening up markets to trade and investment brought great benefits to lower and middle classes in China, India, and other parts of the developing world. It also further magnified the already staggering wealth of the world's richest one percent. But lower- and middle-class incomes in the United States and Europe remained flat, jobs in some sectors there fled abroad, and the global financial system became much more fragile. This sorry record is why, in 2016, when Trump called U.S. foreign policy "a complete and total disaster" and blamed out-of-touch and unaccountable elites, many Americans nodded in agreement. They were not isolationists; they simply wanted their government to stop trying to run the world and pay more attention to problems at home. Trump's predecessors seemed to have heard that message, at least when they were running for office. In 1992, Clinton's mantra was "It's the economy, stupid." In 2000, Bush derided Clinton's efforts at "nation building" and called for a foreign policy that was "strong but humble." Obama pledged to end foreign wars and focus on "nation building at home." These expressions of restraint were understandable, as surveys had repeatedly shown that a majority of Americans believed the country was playing the role of global policeman more than it should and doing more than its share to help others. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2013, 80 percent of Americans agreed that "we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home," and 83 percent wanted presidents to focus more on domestic issues than on foreign policy. Clinton, Bush, and Obama all understood what the American people wanted. But they failed to deliver it. So has Trump. Although his Twitter feed and public statements often question familiar orthodoxies, the United States is still defending wealthy nato allies, still fighting in Afghanistan, still chasing terrorists across Africa, still giving unconditional support to the same problematic Middle Eastern clients, and still hoping to topple a number of foreign regimes. Trump's style as president is radically different from those of his predecessors, but the substance of his policies is surprisingly similar. The result is the worst of both worlds: Washington is still pursuing a misguided grand strategy, but now with an incompetent vulgarian in the White House.

Patrick 18 Stewart M. Patrick is James H. Binger senior fellow in global governance and director of the International Institutions and Global Governance (IIGG) Program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) [“The World Order is Starting to Crack,” Foreign Affairs, 7-25-2018, URL: ] DTS

For a onetime chaos candidate, Trump has been remarkably methodical in his efforts to destroy the liberal international order. His lacerating of trans-Atlantic relations has been on full display in recent weeks, from his disavowal of the G-7 communiqué to his trade war against U.S. allies to his undermining of NATO to his attacks on the European Union to his prostration before Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. In 18 short months, he has torn at the roots and hacked at the branches of Western solidarity that his predecessors painstakingly cultivated over seven decades. Stunned U.S. allies are now adapting to their new normal by taking steps previously unimaginable. They are hedging their bets in dawning recognition that the America of old may never return, regardless of who succeeds Trump. They are pursuing strategic autonomy, seeking to decouple from an unpredictable United States. And they are considering how to restore some semblance of international cooperation in a world left rudderless in the wake of the U.S. abdication of global leadership. Collectively, Trump’s actions have sent U.S. allies reeling, shaking their long-standing faith in the West as a community of shared values, interests, and institutions. In response, they are working with China to safeguard globalization, expanding their own strategic autonomy vis-à-vis Washington, and grasping to defend what remains of the open world from the depredations of its erstwhile creator. Aligning with China to defend globalization Trump’s trade protectionism has done the seemingly unimaginable. It has allowed mercantilist China—which flagrantly steals intellectual property, restricts foreign investment, and protects entire sectors from foreign competition—to portray itself as a bastion of multilateral trade. Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Chinese President Xi Jinping was in Davos, Switzerland, channeling former U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and depicting himself as the savior of globalization. Europeans increasingly agree. On July 16, the EU and China held their first summit in two years. They declared their commitment to a “rules-based, transparent, non-discriminatory, open and inclusive multilateral trading system with the WTO as its core.” The Trump administration, by contrast, has vowed to ignore adverse findings by the WTO’s dispute settlement understanding and is reportedly considering quitting the organization entirely, on the grounds that it restricts U.S. sovereignty and retaliatory options. This would be an extraordinary blunder for the nation that not only spearheaded the WTO’s founding but has won a whopping 91 percent of the cases it has brought before the dispute resolution body. While the EU has thus far resisted Chinese entreaties to enter into a full-fledged trade alliance against the United States, that prospect is becoming more likely. Such an alliance would be a pale imitation of the high-standard, liberalizing trade deals that the Obama administration pursued in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations. Otherwise, it’s clear that the bloc is not sitting still. The EU has signed a free trade agreement with Japan and is exploring another with Mercosur, the South American trade bloc. This is not the first time that Trump’s actions have pushed the EU into China’s arms. A year ago, when the president repudiated the Paris climate accord, Brussels and Beijing jointly reconfirmed their adherence. Whatever their qualms about China’s rise, European leaders are willing to partner with the country to prevent global economic fragmentation and preserve a fragile planet. Pursuing strategic autonomy Since January 2017, America’s allies have grappled with a split-screen presidency. The president’s advisors and underlings, including in the Defense and State departments, have reassured NATO and U.S. allies that U.S. security guarantees are ironclad. Meanwhile, Trump repeatedly has castigated those same allies for freeloading on U.S. generosity and suggested that solemn U.S. obligations are conditional. In a July 17 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump questioned the very core of NATO’s principle of collective defense, wondering why Americans should die to defend tiny Montenegro, which joined the alliance last year. Trump’s stance is likely to find support among many Americans—half of whom (according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll) believe that the United States should not come to the aid of its allies unless they increase defense spending. That reality has sent shudders through the alliance. Trump’s improvisational style—including announcing the suspension of what he called provocative military exercises on the Korean Peninsula without informing Seoul (or even the Pentagon)—and his readiness to appease Moscow, for instance by advocating for the loosening of Western sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, have unnerved U.S. allies. Reassurances from U.S. diplomats and defense officials increasingly ring hollow. They remind one of Richard Pryor’s famous question: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” To cope with uncertainty, the allies are hedging, building their own defense capacities as a form of self-insurance and decoupling themselves from life-or-death decisions made by the capricious, transactional leader in Washington. In Asia, Japan is spending unprecedented sums on defense, and South Korea is seeking national control over its military in the event of war with North Korea, rather than continuing to accept U.S. command. But in Europe the fallout has been most intense. Trump’s insults have engendered impatience with being America’s “doormat” and stimulated a quest for “strategic autonomy.” A swelling chorus calls on the EU to take responsibility for its own defense and to develop capabilities outside of a NATO dominated by a supreme allied commander who takes orders from the White House. This European bid for autonomy is in its infancy, but the signals are clear. In November 2017, the EU approved what it calls Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), an initiative permitting 25 of its 28 members to pool defense efforts. While a far cry from the integrated European Defense Community that the Europeans considered the 1950s, PESCO could be the kernel of a full-fledged continental defense arrangement. For those reasons, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, has criticized it as a threat to the alliance’s integrity and a diversion of allied resources. But the Trump administration cannot have it both ways. It cannot simultaneously insist on increased European defense spending while undermining allied confidence in U.S. security guarantees—and then be surprised when Europeans invest in autonomous capabilities. After all, the principle of collective defense presupposes a strong collectivity. This sense of solidarity is precisely what Trump undermines with his my-way-or-the-highway leadership style, which assumes that followers have no alternatives. If Europeans had any doubts about who the president thinks calls the shots, the scales fell from their eyes in May when Trump abandoned the Iran nuclear deal, despite entreaties from the leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. French President Emmanuel Macron, who had sought to win over Trump by cultivating a warm personal rapport, was denied—though not before Trump reportedly asked him, “Why don’t you leave the EU?” promising a bilateral trade accord as a sweetener. Filling the void In embracing the doctrine of America First, Trump has signaled that henceforth the United States will look after number one, rather than serve as the custodian of world order and the champion of human freedom. The U.S. return to a pre-1941 mindset has left its democratic partners wondering: Now that Atlas has shrugged, who will fill the void? Pundits have variously anointed Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the new leader of the free world. But none of these leaders commands anything close to the national power and diplomatic heft to assume that burden. If the rules-based international order is to survive, it will be a collective enterprise, spearheaded by the European Union, in close cooperation with other democratic partners both established (such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia) and emerging (such as India). “Can Europe save the world order?” ask Anthony Dworkin and Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations. The odds seem long. The bloc has been weakened by successive crises over mass migration, terrorism, the eurozone, and Brexit, and populist nationalists are on the rise in Italy and Eastern Europe. Trapped between a customs union and a political union—and overly reliant on a Franco-German axis without which nothing can happen but which often fails to deliver—the EU lacks the unity, dynamism, and decisiveness long associated with the United States. And without the latter by its side—in the Human Rights Council, among other places—the EU will find it hard to hold the line against authoritarian attacks from Russia, China, and other enemies of political freedom and liberal order. To lead the world, the EU will need to redouble its own internal reform efforts, hold the line against populist and nationalist forces, reaffirm its commitment to open trade, expand its autonomous military capabilities, ramp up its contributions to global public goods (particularly on climate change), and find its voice as a consistent champion of human rights. This is a tall order. The EU remains, however, the best hope for liberal internationalists as they wait to see whether the Trump revolution proves an enduring course correction in America’s global role or merely a temporary national detour at the hands of an impaired, sui generis leader. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” the Bible instructs. Donald Trump suggests that the reverse may also be true. The grim reaper of the liberal international order has sown discord that will outlive his departure.

Rosenberg 19 Mark Y. Rosenberg is the CEO of Geoquant and an adjunct professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. [“Experts Get Multipolarity All Wrong,” Foreign Affairs, 6-24-2019, URL: ] DTS

In our multipolar era, G-20 meetings have taken on growing importance as a forum to air and negotiate conflicts. Witness the upcoming summit this week among the group of leading rich and developing nations in Osaka, Japan, where deep threats to the existing world order will be addressed head-on: rising tensions between the United States and Iran, a growing trade war between the world’s two largest economies, the state and strength of NATO, unpredictability in the relationship between the world’s top two nuclear powers, and a lack of rules governing increasingly borderless tech companies. At the end of June, the world’s major players could make substantial progress addressing all of them. If they do, it will fly in the face of punditry dismissing summits as increasingly pointless diplomatic exercises, evidence of a rudderless international system following the decline of Pax Americana. In the “G-Zero” world, according to this line of thinking, power has been spread too wide and thin. And too many competing participants have been invited into too many multilateral decision-making bodies, diluting their impact and importance—to the detriment of the global economy and global markets. It is certainly true that a more diffuse distribution of power reduces stability, makes anarchy more likely, and undermines the provision of global public goods—indeed, that is effectively an axiom of international relations. But that doesn’t mean that institutions like the G-20 are obsolete. In fact, the more multipolarity accelerates, the more meaningful and relevant multilateral institutions will become. This is true for two main reasons. First, given the United States’ decreased appetite for providing public goods (including trade regimes, shipping lanes, and security guarantees), other powers such as China, Japan, Russia, and even the European Union are stepping in to fill the void. And even if the body is flawed, the G-20 can provide critical coordination and conflict resolution mechanisms for such efforts. Second, and relatedly, such forums provide business and markets with critical information about how alliances and power dynamics are shifting in a more fluid international system. That’s true even if global policymaking itself is less efficient. The upcoming Osaka summit should prove an excellent example. It offers a timely opportunity to gather together every key external player in the Iran imbroglio, for example. Although formal progress toward better U.S.-Iran relations is unlikely, the summit will provide important signals on the potential for war and peace. In addition, expect host and new G-20 president Japan to coordinate anti-protectionist nations at the summit, exploiting its star role in sustaining the (now sans-United States) Trans-Pacific Partnership and its new EU-Japan trade deal to do so. At the very least, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can provide positive atmospherics for a much-anticipated summit meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, the outcome of which could determine the fate, at least in the near-to-medium term, of the global economy. At the same time, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are also scheduled to meet, which is relevant not only in light of the breakdown of U.S.-Russian arms treaties but also in terms of growing conflict over Russia between the White House and the U.S. Congress. Meanwhile, G-20 finance ministers appear to have made significant progress in agreeing to a new digital tax on multinational firms, a major development in the growing conflict between tech companies and the state that will likely be reinforced at the approaching summit. Recent trends in U.S. and global markets help reinforce these points. First, increasing geopolitical risk has actually accompanied a boom in U.S. and global equity markets, suggesting that declining U.S. hegemony and growing multipolarity is not necessarily bad for business—or at least for stock prices. At the same time, markets have often turned downward around the time of recent G-20 summits. At the very least, this pattern indicates the G-20 events are important to markets, suggesting that developments at G-20 meetings may wake up the market to otherwise discounted or mispriced geopolitical risks. The importance of the G-20 and bodies like it will only grow in a more multipolar world. As rare but institutionalized gatherings of major global political economies and their leaders, G-20 forums will be the place to understand shifting alliances and power dynamics. They will provide information about major geopolitical and geoeconomic uncertainties. Political and economic deals will be done and undone; conflicts revived and resolved; grievances accelerated and appeased. The result will not be order, per se. But it will certainly be more order—and more information about that order. In short: something far greater than zero.

Whether pundits and policymakers admit it or not, the United States is a great power in relative decline. It is not like the former Soviet Union and soon to fall into the dustbin of history; nor is it akin to ancient Rome with the Goths at the gates. Nevertheless, with policymakers and analysts alike embracing the idea that a new era of great power competition is at hand, they simultaneously acknowledge that the United States’ “unipolar era” is over. Relative to rising great powers such as India or (more dramatically) China, the United States is declining.

Shaping American grand strategy to suit this new environment will require a host of diplomatic, economic, and military adjustments that strategists are only slowly coming to recognize. Indeed, the fact that proponents of “restraint” and “offshore balancing” are pitted against advocates of “deep engagement” and “liberal hegemony” in a vibrant debate highlights that the course corrections to manage the U.S. transition away from unipolar dominance remain up in the air.1 Any number of domestic and international factors will affect the precise nature of the strategy chosen. However, because the changing distribution of power and rise of new great powers largely drive the U.S. grand strategy debate, addressing U.S. strategic needs requires anticipating the likely future behavior of other great powers and the role of U.S. policy therein. We therefore need to know: what strategies are rising states themselves likely to adopt in response to U.S. decline and, relatedly, how might the different strategic options under discus- sion for the United States reinforce or reduce problematic aspects of rising state behavior?2

China has a few hundred nuclear warheads. The United States and Russia each have several thousand. There are questionable reports China may double the size of its nuclear stockpile by the end of this decade. Even if that’s true, China’s arsenal would still be five to six times smaller than the current arsenals of the two nuclear giants.

China has had the fiscal and technical resources to match U.S. and Russian numbers for quite a while. So, why is China’s nuclear arsenal still so small? That’s a question worth asking before publishing alarming and misleading headlines about a Chinese nuclear buildup.

Even if China is willing to fulfill its mission by launching a war with the U.S., can China afford it? First, the top Chinese leader is not ready for war with U.S. China will not be able to take a risk without internal coordination and support. The voice of China’s foreign policy comes from different departments. They are not well coordinated and lack a strategy with a long-term vision. China does not have a system for making consistent and workable foreign policy, and the top leader has not gained sufficient power to manage foreign relations. China is facing a mountain of domestic problems, including corruption in the military. The Chinese government has learned the lesson that a combination of internal violence and external conflict can contribute to the collapse of the regime. Now Xi Jinping is more likely to focus on China’s domestic issues especially the pandemic and its consequences in economic and financial areas. Xi’s top priority before the 20th Congress of the CCP is to carefully manage the power balance among factions in the party, attempting to ensure his third term of presidency. After the 20th Congress, Xi will take some time to reorganize the system and put new policies in place. It is not wise for the CCP to take military risks in dealing with territorial disputes with various countries at the same time as it tries to maintain domestic social stability. China cannot afford to fight against multiple countries at the same time because the U.S. has military treaties with several allies in the region. Taking military actions could possibly destroy Xi’s China Dream, his lifelong presidency, his domestic agenda and China’s global ambitions eventually. Considering all these challenges, Chinese leaders may continue their efforts to rebalance the relationship between China and the U.S. while boosting the economic growth and preparing the unification with Taiwan after the 20th National Congress of the CCP in 2022.

Second, China has understood that any conflict between China and the U.S. would be a global disaster, especially between the two nuclear powers.78 A war between the two giants is unthinkable.79 It could be a Third World War if the U.S. had a war with China.80 China now has 260 nuclear weapons in its stockpile, while the U.S. has 4670 or more. China promised that it would implement a “No first use” nuclear policy, implying that the country possesses nuclear weapons only to deter other states from a nuclear attack and expresses the purely self-defensive nature of China’s nuclear strategy. More fundamentally, it has demonstrated a viable path toward international nuclear disarmament.81 Many China experts “appear not to be worried by China’s rapidly growing nuclear capabilities, because Beijing’s official policy promises that China will not be the first to employ nuclear weapons in a conflict. Beijing promises that its nuclear forces are for deterrence and retaliation only, not for aggression.”82 However, China continues to develop its nuclear weapons. China is likely to double the size of its nuclear stockpile in a few years.83 U.S. military leaders are not as naïve as academics about China’s “no first use” pledge. Charles Richard, chief of U.S. Strategic Command, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that he could “drive a truck through China’s ‘no first use’ policy, because China’s unprecedented rapid expansion of its nuclear and missile capabilities is not consistent with a belief in ‘minimum deterrence’ and ‘no first use.’”84 In January 2022, five global nuclear powers who are the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the U.S., the UK, Russia, China, and France, signed a joint statement and agreed to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading and to ensure a nuclear war would not happen. The agreement itself is a positive sign, indicating that nuclear deterrence is working and there will be no massive war between China and the U.S.85 Practically, it is hard to trust a dictator’s words. In March 2022, Putin already put nuclear deterrent forces on high alert and attacked Europe’s largest nuclear plant just a month after Russia signed the joint statement.

From the money put into eliminating COVID-19, to investment in artificial intelligence (AI), big companies are rightfully taking credit. To support AI and machine learning startups, Google launched two funds, the Google Assistant Investment Program and Gradient Ventures. Amazon has pursued a similar strategy, spending over $20 billion to invest and acquire around 128 AI startups globally. These investments have led to astounding progress in wearables, autonomous vehicles, robots, and more. If we broke these companies up, it would also mean having to sacrifice the technological advancement and innovation that comes from them.b2. IMPRACTICAL MARKET FRAGMENTATION Although it may seem attractive to break up big companies, experts have argued about the practicality of such an endeavour. If the government broke up a social media giant into smaller social networks, for example, it could produce an illusion of choice. Despite this, the approach would be less desirable to users aiming to control all of their communications from one place. This could push many of them to select one social network, and undo the reason for the break-up. 3. HIGHER SERVICE COSTS It was believed that healthier competition between smaller companies would lead to a dip in prices, but experts are now signalling that this could be a myth. Given our dependence on them, big tech’s virtually free services and tools are hard to replace. However, splitting up big tech could still instil a fair market by encouraging smaller businesses to develop a new and competitive range of services and products. Despite this, startups aren’t able to benefit from a free business model, meaning there’s a good chance that end-users will pay heavily for every digital service they sign up for. This might even include digital navigation maps, daily emails, analytical tools for organisations, and more. A Final Word While free services are economical, the approach slowly but steadily kills innovation. “The ideal solution is really somewhere in between, continuing to have companies create value, but taking into consideration the European approach of fair allocation,” says Van Alstyne, Questrom professor and coauthor of “Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You". By ensuring interoperability and data portability across rival products and services, it is indeed possible to restore balance in trade.

In 2021, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) was estimated to be $22.99 trillion.17 As of 2021, Google, Facebook and Apple had a combined worth of at least $3.81 trillion, or almost 17% of the U.S. GDP.18 This astounding figure points to the unprecedented market dominance and monopoly power held by the hands of so few. In 2020, the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law of the Committee of the Judiciary (hereinafter the “Subcommittee”), published an investigation of competition in digital markets.19 The Subcommittee investigated four online platforms—Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook—that “play an important role in the U.S. economy and society as the underlying infrastructure for the exchange of communications, information, and goods and services.”20 The Subcommittee found substantial evidence of Big Tech monopolization that carries significant costs for the economy and society as a whole.21 Although the Subcommittee referenced Google’s use of trademark law to prohibit trademarked terms from being used in Google ads,22 there is no indication that trademark issues were the Subcommittee’s focus.