Common Conviction

The idea of an explicitly labeled “World War Three” has been gaining currency in the policy commentariat.  But just what is contested, between whom, and how do all the ends and means of conflict – economic, online, cyber, religious to name just a few – fit into the idea of war?”

The war in Ukraine, and the growing ties it has sparked between Russia and China, and now north Korea, give a flavor of global war, between them and the West.   Add to this the ongoing collaboration with Iran, and its own “axis of resistance” against Israel and the West, and the two sides plus the two wars, can look like a single contest.

In historical wars, though, and even in the Cold War, two coherent sides contest a defined set of stakes.  In the Cold War, the West contained the Soviets’ spreading of ideology and political dominance over other countries.  The Soviets aimed to keep political control over any potential threats, variously by contesting U.S. influence, expanding their physical and political “buffer zones” against us, and touting their ideology.  Their coercive politics, internal and external, alienated their own people and outsiders.   America’s steady opposition, plus the attraction of free societies’ economic and social development, forced a Soviet collapse much as George Kennan projected. 

Who are the “sides” today, what are they trying to do, what do they need, what methods are they committed to for those goals, and above all, what do we need and want?

Putin’s Russia, the Kims’ north Korea, and theocratic Iran have little to offer anyone outside their own domains.  Their focus on arms or armed insurgencies attest to this, and while Russia’s resources are deep, their struggles in Ukraine have underlined their limits.  Putin, in his perverse language, is actually fighting a defensive campaign for regime survival.  He needs the national stature that a war can provide.   Iran does claim a religious mission but has never had a geopolitical reach beyond its region, where Israel provides a durable and tangible foil for its purported mission. 

These three regimes really have nothing in common except their awful governing practices and international obnoxiousness – and a frustration that powers that embody democracy, capitalism, secularism, and independent law all impede their goals.  In the Ukraine War and other dynamics, they now see a chance to further their common interest against those powers. 

The Chinese Communist Party may feel it has something to offer the world.  China has emerged from poverty to world power.  It has cooperated with, manipulated, exploited, and now openly opposes the West, in technology, industrial capacity, and now military and geopolitical matters.  It has managed, too, to craft a narrative painting our rules as a power structure, erected selfishly for geopolitical sway and material prosperity, not anyone’s freedom or growth.  In this claim, China shares a common complaint with Russia, Iran north Korea, and any dictator who stands at odds with standards of rule of law, democracy, free enterprise, or international peace. 

What we have called a Liberal World Order encapsulates an opponent for these regimes.  It gives their pragmatic collaboration an easily-labeled focus.  They perceive our sanctions based on liberal rules, from money laundering to human rights abuses, as biased – we do not sanction Israel for civilian deaths, for example.  The idea that we make up rules just to keep them down resonates for many dictators, and for supporters and allies at home and abroad.

As contests deepen into standoffs and threaten to trigger armed conflict, the dynamics of rivalry raise further complications.  As strategist Maya Karlin notes, we are in an era of “comprehensive conflict.”  Direct combat is not the only channel for conflict.  First of all, the preparations for combat, industrial, demographic, and diplomatic, also expand national security concerns into industrial practices, cellphone technology, even cultural initiatives.  Second, for an unfree state to weaken a powerful Liberal nation, it need only discredit our intent or capacity in one or two matters.  But any nation that aims to stand up for liberal practices needs to constrain everyone else in a sprawling range of arenas.  An autocracy could secure its objectives against us very easily.

Furthermore, the West has done our own share to undermine Liberalism’s moral sanction.  Many voters in the democracies do not trust their governments or institutional systems, as polls, and the rhetoric of populist and “illiberal” parties attest.  It seems the Liberal World Order has an operating class, variously characterized as technocrats and educated elites, whose prescriptions for liberal systems feel oppressive to non-elites. 

As author Bruno Macaes put it, the systemic ideological liberalism of those elites would

… tell you how to think about [political] questions.  You almost forgot the whole point of a free society was to let people decide important questions in their own lives … by the point an individual was ready to start living, every important question would already have been decided.  Not on substantive grounds but as part of a detailed specification of what needed to be the case if people were to be free to decide how they wanted to live.  The paradox could drive you mad.

If democratic electorates reward the political entrepreneurs who rail against condescending technocrats who run our societies, then the external authoritarians will be all the more encouraged to concert their efforts against our governments.

Our internal political disorders also provide showcases for, if no one else, the CCP.  Their authoritarianism offers a picture of effectiveness that, weakened though it is post-Covid, still confers an aura of competence.  Our liberals, meanwhile, rail back at the populists but lose elections and call the voters “deplorable.” 

If there is in fact a World War Three brewing, we risk setting it up as on behalf of “Liberalism” and its “World Order.”  This invites everyone who chafes at our LWO operating class to join them.  America must not allow this to happen.  This nation conceived itself on premises that are liberal in spirit, but not on some system that prescribes a doctrinaire Liberalism.  Our political operators have turned their differences, over how to carry our ethos of rights, into a contest between interpretations of that ethos, motivated not by principled concern for freedom but for who wins the internecine contest.  More racial quotas on one hand, more leeway for profitmaking on the other. 

The Liberal amongst us need to reassert a comity, on the abstract principle of unalienable rights rather than the advantages or disadvantages of life outcomes.  The publicly active, the politically ambitious, need to take some humility in their pursuits and acknowledge that they vie with each other over mere means to the larger ends, not fundamental values.  The rest of us, in our own pursuits, need to moderate “my” claims for the sake of that odd creature, a shared public ethos to best enable each person’s private pursuits.

When Americans and other free peoples are clear on the stakes we pursue in the world, we will no longer undermine them in our focus on overcoming our opponents.  Indeed we should find we dilute other peoples’ motivation to oppose us.  Dictators will be weakened even as we simply restore our own comity and resolve.  Policy that organizes international policy around protecting and nurturing unalienable rights, that competes with others for that end rather than simply to “win,” will best avoid undermining our true ends.