Two realms, New Atlantis and the Greater Middle Kingdom, are relatively evenly matched, in a geopolitical duel that has stayed mostly peaceful, albeit hostile.
di Nicola Iuvinale
When the year 2022 began, few could have imagined that the West would witness the revival of an ancient vision: The lost territory of Atlantis, that mythical place of legend. Yet that’s what happened, beginning in the first year of the Russo-Ukrainian War: North America and Europe came together in a new, ocean-spanning geopolitical formation, popularly known as New Atlantis. And now that plenty of time has passed, it’s worth recalling how we get here.
As is so often the case with an alliance, New Atlantis emerged from the crucible of conflict: the Russian attack on Ukraine, which came to be seen as Russia’s attack on Europe, indeed, on all of Western civilization. That terrible violence cost tens of thousands of lives, displaced millions, and caused worldwide economic disruption. Yet amidst the tragedy, some notable impacts—which many recall as silver linings—could be seen:
First, it revived liberal nationalism; the West was snapped out of the narcissistic, even neurasthenic, ideologies of wokeism, pacifism, and isolationism. Indeed, Westerners were re-instructed in the enduring value of fortitude, loyalty, and courage. The wisdom of Winston Churchill—to whom Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now compared—rang loud: “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities ... because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”
Second, Zelenskyy’s courage revived liberal internationalism. The American president, Joe Biden, eagerly assumed the role, if not the personal energy, of his Democratic predecessor in the White House, Harry Truman. (The greater energy emanated from Biden’s Achesonian secretary of state, Antony Blinken.) Biden and Blinken sure-footedly trod a narrow path, mindful of the difference between aiding and crusading. Indeed, it helped that Biden had lived long enough to know that the United States did best when it was aiding an embattled country (a doctrine associated with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan), and worst when it did the crusading itself (the doctrine of Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush).
Meanwhile, other top Democrats, notably House speaker Nancy Pelosi—who had proved her realist credentials by strongly opposing the Iraq War—could also see the distinction between wrong-headed regime change and righteous regime defense. (As an aside, way back when, I, too, opposed the Iraq War.)
In 2022, other nations re-embraced, however fitfully, the liberal idea of collective security. Notably, Germany’s Zeitenwende: In June of that fateful year, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock summed it up: “This is the moment in which Germany says, ‘We are there when Europe needs us.’”
Third, 2022 also saw a revival of conservative internationalism, emerging from the ashes of Bush 43’s misadventures, as well as from the Republican Party’s MAGA detour. A key test came early on, in May 2022, when Biden asked Congress to vote for $40 billion in aid to Ukraine; the House voted “aye” 368-57, and the Senate, 86-11. Clear majorities of both parties. In fact, those lopsided vote totals actually exceeded the margins for the fabled Marshall Plan, which had been announced almost exactly seventy-five years prior. In addition, right-of-center governments—including in Poland, Britain, and Italy—rallied around Ukraine.
All that moral and material assistance enabled the Ukrainians to turn back the Russians. In fact, Ukraine was doing so well that cautious heads in the West feared a 1950-type overreach. That’s when American forces, having defeated the communist invaders, shifted from the defense of South Korea to the rollback of the North Korean regime. And so, Americans charged to the Yalu River, the frontier with China, only to find themselves now fighting Chinese “volunteers” —and thus dragging out the Korean War for three more years. With that grim precedent in mind, the imposed settlement on Ukraine was what one shrewd observer had prophesied from the start: a “dirty, contemptible compromise.” (Of course, the overthrow of Vladimir Putin made the deal easier for the Ukrainians to swallow.)
The Western victory strengthened NATO, of course, as well as the European Union, and yet some European leaders had grander ambitions. For instance, Guy Verhofstadt, a former prime minister of Belgium, put his large cards on the table even before the Ukraine War, declaring, “The world is developing into one not of nation states, but of empires. China is an empire. India is an empire. The U.S. is an empire. We need to create a European Union that is capable of defending our interests.” Verhofstadt has since been honored with the coveted annual prize ”for work done in the service of European unification”—and of course, that prize is named for the conqueror Charlemagne. (Across the centuries, Europeans haven’t changed that much.)
In that neo-Carolingian spirit, in 2022, France’s President Emmanuel Macron advanced the idea of an even larger European confederation, beyond the union. This proved attractive to Britain, which was then suffering Brexit Remorse. Yet England’s slow-motion reentry into Europe had a paradoxical effect: English reasserted itself as the preferred language. After all, in European meetings of all kinds, English was the one language that everyone knew—wits called it the lingua anglica.
Yet papers and parliaments notwithstanding, there was still the issue of Europe’s military weakness. Nobody could say that Ukraine would have survived the Russian attack without the aid of the United States; indeed, nobody could say that Europe would have survived. Blood and iron still had their place in world politics.
Macht Regionalism
Even before the Russo-Ukrainian War, democracy-minded internationalism was in retreat. The failure of the United States to establish stable democracies in Afghanistan and Iraq was a lesson; the ability of China to build “Market Leninism” was an even louder lesson.
Indeed, economists, once a mostly free-trading tribe, had come to learn that no-tariff commerce with low-wage, mercantilist countries led to deindustrialization and social disruption at home. Moreover, elites were chagrined to learn that while the nations of the world were economically interacting, they were not politically converging. As Macron said in September 2022, “The pandemic broke apart production chains. It re-regionalized, and sometimes re-nationalized certain production chains ... it de-globalized a significant portion of global production for the long term.”
But the crisis was deeper than just supply chains, which strategists agreed needed be re-shored as a matter of security. The deeper and blunter reality was that many around the world—from terrorists to tribalists, from religious zealots to autocrats in palaces, kremlins, and forbidden cities—emphatically rejected liberalism. Of course, anti-liberalism was hardly a new phenomenon; as George Orwell had written in 1940, totalitarians know that “human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control.” Instead, he continued, they want “struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.” A century later, the mailed fist still possesses its cruel appeal—and probably always will. To put the matter another way, the world really is diverse. Champions of globalism had settled for less than universalism; the most they could hope for was regionalism.
Indeed, given the obvious Otherness of much of the world, another other, the United States, guns and all, didn’t seem so bad. And so, the Eurocentrism of Monnet, Schuman, de Gaulle, and Macron gave way to a larger vision of shared values and interests on both sides of the Atlantic. Hence the revival of the idea of a place in between the two continents—and belonged to both. This was the Atlantis imagined by the ancients, as well as by latter-day figures such as Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon. The original Atlantis might never have existed in anything more than imagination, and yet now a new Atlantis was becoming tangible, stretching from America to Armenia. Indeed, as Marshall Plan Two led to a surge in the number of cargo ships and airplanes traversing the Atlantic, the ocean seemed sometimes to be almost solid, loaded with people and materiel. (Given the throng, the idea of the “Atlantunnel” took off.)
Yet just as light implies dark, just as positive presupposes a negative, a rival region emerged. The Huntingtonian Clash of Civilizations was real, same as it ever was. For their part, the Russians, even after Putin, hoped that their prison-of-a-nation could exist as an autarkic regime—that was, after all, an idea with deep roots in Russian culture. At the same time, energetic Russian diplomacy had conjured up geopolitical front groups—the Collective Security Treaty Organization, Eurasian Economic Union, and the Eastern Economic Forum—as hoped-for bulwarks for Muscovy.
But most of all, Russia hoped that its “no limits” partnership with China, announced just days before the start of the Ukraine War, would keep Moscow’s place in Eurasia secure. Yet the surprising collapse of Russia led to its subordination to China; it was no longer a partner, it was very much the second of two in this axis of autocrats, even as China took the lead on Russia’s alliances, shifting their focus from Moscow to Beijing.
To be sure, China had its own problems. As de-globalization took hold, other nations concluded that the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) human rights record, as well as its continued fondness for coal, made it a bad trading partner, and so supply chains were rerouted to less scary partners. Speaking of scary, China’s endless, mindless, campaign against Covid phantoms—summoning up memories of the Cultural Revolution six decades before—caused internal weakening.
Yet even as China “Chexited” from the world trading system, it found new opportunities in its newest province ... Siberia. The Russians realized only too late that the Chinese had been playing weiqi with them, patiently situating “workers’ barracks” and “security guards” all across the vast expanse—China’s once and future domain. Indeed, as China turned away from the Pacific, it looked elsewhere in Eurasia, to new satrapies in North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and other countries on its extended periphery, such as Afghanistan and Azerbaijan.
By now it’s a cliche that the culmination of Xi Jinping thought—the Greater Middle Kingdom—was the reanimation of another old idea: the “World Island,” described in the previous century by the geographer Halford Mackinder. New Atlantis, of course, forms a part of Mackinder’s Crescent, the area surrounding the World Island. So whither the rest of the Crescent—and the rest of the world?
Atlantis: Open Platform for the Willing World
In this dynamic planetary situation, the West knew it could be no Fortress Atlantis. So, a new great game was on: the struggle to gain allies. One alliance fell quickly into place: The Quad, namely, India, Japan, Australia, and the United States. India had been historically pro-Russia, but also anti-China, and as China loomed larger, India grew colder to its northern neighbors. Moreover, India was also a member of another creative geopolitical formation, I2U2: India, Israel, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates. That geopolitical commonality, as well as the commonality of English, sealed the deal with New Delhi.
Still, much of the world was not in any of these blocs. And thus, the scramble was on to entice the other parts of Asia, as well as Africa and Latin America, to join one bloc or the other. For a time, China thought it had the lead, thanks to its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Yet the PRC discovered that an investment in someone’s else country has a way of becoming the property of that country. That is, China was unable to enforce debt-trap arrangements in countries outside of easy reach. So, the farther-flung BRI projects proved to mostly be a write-off.
As for Atlantis, a passive-but-effective strategy emerged: Be the receptacle of the Greater Middle Kingdom’s brain-drain. The exodus from Russia that began in late 2022 was simultaneously easy and devastating. In response, all the countries of China’s Eurasian bloc—which Tolkien-minded critics soon dubbed Mordor—eventually built new iron curtains to restrict emigration.
In the meantime, Atlantis flourished as an open, Anglophone, API to the world. It was hard to do business—any kind of business, anywhere in the world—without someone in Atlantis getting a piece of it.
Moreover, as new frontiers have opened up—from Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse to Elon Musk’s Mars—Atlantis has been in the lead; freedom is the friend of innovation. Yet all the while, intellectual property thieves, thriving on Atlantis’ openness, have been able to relay our IP to their masters on the other side of the divide.
So today, the two realms, New Atlantis and the Greater Middle Kingdom, are relatively evenly matched, in a geopolitical duel that has stayed mostly peaceful, albeit hostile. Thoughtful observers recall John F. Kennedy’s characterization of Cold War One as a “long twilight struggle.” That resonant phrase speaks to difficulty, of course, but it also bespeaks uncertainty. That is, when Kennedy said it in his 1961 inaugural, nobody could know the outcome of the struggle. And so, it is with Cold War II. All we know is that we must “bear the burden,” as JFK said, “year in and year out, rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation.”
That’s the burden borne by New Atlantis. Wish us luck.
Fonte: The National Interest.
James P. Pinkerton ha servito come aiutante di politica interna alla Casa Bianca dei presidenti Ronald Reagan e George HW Bush. Ha anche lavorato nelle campagne presidenziali del 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992 e 2008. Dal 1996 al 2016 ha collaborato con Fox News Channel.
Immagine: Reuters.
Comentários