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War and Peace After the Age of Liberal Globalisation

François Heisbourg

To cite this article: François Heisbourg (2018) War and Peace After the Age of Liberal Globalisation, Survival, 60:1, 211-228, DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2018.1427378

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2018.1427378

Published online: 29 Jan 2018.

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Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of

all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish

the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations,

with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are

swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can

ossify. All that is solid melts into air … [The] cosmopolitan character to

production and consumption in every country … has drawn from under

the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.1

I In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels hit the nail on the head when they described, 169 years ago, what was not yet called ‘glo- balisation’. Their remarkable statement does not demonstrate, as one would say in French, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Rather the opposite.

Notwithstanding the Hegelian foundations from which they developed dialectical materialism, the authors of the Manifesto may have underes- timated the ‘cunning of Reason’: in the following decades, nationalism developed with a strength and a ferocity entirely out of keeping with Marx and Engels’s assumption that the internationalisation of productive forces

Closing Argument

War and Peace After the Age of Liberal Globalisation

François Heisbourg

François Heisbourg is Chair of the IISS Council. This closing argument is adapted from his 2017 Alastair Buchan Memorial Lecture, titled ‘War and Peace After the Age of Liberal Globalisation’ and delivered at Arundel House, London, on 16 November 2017.

Survival | vol. 60 no. 1 | February–March 2018 | pp. 211–228 DOI 10.1080/00396338.2018.1427378

212 | François Heisbourg

would lead to the triumph of a global proletarian revolution. (A similar fate awaited Francis Fukuyama when he decreed his own neo-Hegelian end of history.) The more useful lesson from the Manifesto is the reminder that international and security relations are not an immutable given but a human construct whose nature, players and rules are susceptible to wrenching damage.

During the past six centuries, as the globalisation of international relations gathered pace, several sea changes occurred in the nature of global affairs. These started with the emergence of the first lasting global empire in the Spanish conquests, underpinned by a common religion and the preponderance of dynastic polities. That empire was challenged, and eventually cut down to size, by the forces unleashed by the Reformation, a revolution which began exactly five centuries ago. The Westphalian order it eventually led to, in 1648, has proven to be exceptionally durable as an eventually globalised modus operandi of inter-state relations. The nature of the players of the Westphalian system has, however, undergone upheav- als, initially as a consequence of the Enlightenment and culminating in the paroxysm of the French Revolution, which ushered in the global triumph of the nation-state and its non-hereditary rule. Then came the monumental imperial and ideological clashes of the twentieth century.

This attempt to pot six centuries of world history in 150 words serves not only to stress the malleable nature of the very notion of international and security relations, but also to underline the pre-eminent role played by belief systems – not simply massive changes in the productive forces, to use Marx’s vocabulary – in redefining these relations. Even if the latter feed into the former, there is no mechanical correlation between the virulence of a belief system and the state of the economy: 9/11 was a middle-class affair; while in the 1930s, the Great Depression led to the New Deal in the United States, and to the rise of Hitler in Germany. Prosperous societies are not immune to radical narratives, and hardship is no excuse for extremism.

Ongoing changes – similar in force, if not in form, to those above – are tearing apart and eventually will remodel the global security system. They can be summarised as follows.

War and Peace After the Age of Liberal Globalisation | 213

The increasing acceleration of innovation in information technology is having massive effects at all levels, from individuals to the global collec- tive. While Moore’s law – the maxim, coined by Gordon Moore in 1965, predicting the increase of information processing at an exponential pace – will eventually reach its empirical limits, the new potential of quantum data processing promises to give a new boost to the digital revolution, one in which China appears to be one of only two leaders. In parallel, the convergence between biotech (specifically genomics) and information tech- nology (IT) is another wave of the tsunami which is sweeping away old certainties, within the space of less than a generation.

This rapid IT innovation has combined with changes in the develop- ment of air transportation and container shipment of goods to drive globalisation, which became truly global a quarter-century ago, with China’s opening to the world market and the collapse of the closed Soviet empire. Globalisation has relied on and created an increasingly dense network of close-to-real-time connectivity in all areas of social activity unprecedented in its scale but more importantly in its pace.

The advent of the Anthropocene means that human activity is changing the planet itself. Global warming, as a main component, is interacting with the unfolding impact of massive and differentiated demographic change: the early ageing of the twentieth century’s industrial powers in Europe and East Asia; the growth-sustaining youth bulge of economically compe- tent rising powers, notably China; and the unmitigated population growth of an ill-equipped sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, the rapid urbani- sation of the majority of the world’s population is creating unprecedented concentrations and inequalities of wealth and misery, power and frustra- tion. This process interacts in novel ways, both positive and negative, with the digitalisation of society, which facilitates entry into the formal economy while creating new injustices and vulnerabilities.

These forces are intertwined with effects that are mutually amplified. In their reshaping of the global security system, they can be bundled into four main categories. The first is the generally increased potential for what the French have labelled ruptures stratégiques, best translated as ‘strategic upsets’.2 Instant connectivity, strong differentials of power and wealth,

214 | François Heisbourg

rapidly decreasing entry barriers to disruptive technologies (including those of a war-making nature), and the increasing vulnerability of urban and coastal areas all lead to higher risks of unexpected and brutal catas- trophe. The pace of diplomacy, the functioning of multilateral institutions and the stabilising role of nuclear deterrence were not designed to cope with this type of universe. A Kantian order would be more inherently com- petent to deal with this brave new world than an anarchically Hobbesian system, but, in most respects, a Kantian order is not what we have, except at the regional level with the European Union.

Then there is the differentiating process between those countries which are acquiring the skill set and the technological base which allows them to translate globalisation, innovation, the youth bulge, the energy transi- tion and urbanisation into power and influence, and those that are left behind. This will largely determine the ranking of actors in peace and war. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) will sharpen this differentia- tion further. Here, it is worth quoting at some length from an article by a Chinese practitioner and thinker in this key area:

The AI revolution … is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation

of jobs … The solution to [this] problem of mass unemployment … will

involve [service] jobs that AI cannot do, that society needs and that give

people a sense of purpose [such as] accompanying an older person [or]

mentoring an orphanage.

And here comes the punchline:

This transformation will result in enormous profits for the companies

that develop AI [or] adopt it … Most of the money … will go to the

USA and China. AI is an industry in which strength begets strength

… Most countries will not be able to tax ultra-profitable AI companies

to subsidise their workers … They will be forced to negotiate with

whichever country supplies most of their AI software – China or the

United States – to essentially become that country’s economic dependent

… [Such] arrangements would reshape today’s geopolitical alliances.3

War and Peace After the Age of Liberal Globalisation | 215

Europe, broadly defined, is currently absent from this contest, which will begin to play out in the coming years, not decades.

Thirdly, increasingly powerful, non-state corporate actors are an ever- more-prominent part of the world system, not only in the absolute but also relative to a world in which 100 states out of 191 have a GDP of less than $40 billion, and some 40 members of the United Nations have a popula- tion of less than 2 million.4 Such corporate actors are ultimately beholden to the goodwill of only the most powerful states or, in the case of corpora- tions, those which have the largest marketplace. The ‘GAFAs’ (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) are ultimately American, and are also depend- ent on the EU’s regulatory authorities; Alibaba and Tencent are definitely Chinese. In other words, the power differential in the world will polarise further, with a few (the US, China and to some extent the EU) capable of reining in the tech giants. Some will be able to ride their coat-tails. Others (and sometimes the same) will try to carve out their own specialised niche. The larger number of countries may be condemned to the sidelines with the prospect of state capture or state failure.

Paradoxically, in such a world, powerful non-state actors increase rather than decrease the role of the limited number of key state players who can bring them under control, and will increasingly want to do so. The rise of the non-state thus leads to the reaffirmation of state power, not to its abdication.

Lastly, and possibly most portentously, by generating a sense of loss of control, the disruptive changes described earlier are having a massive political and ideological impact. This trend was exacerbated, but not created, by the great financial crisis of ten years ago, in which the overpaid Masters of the Universe were seen as destroying value on an epic scale. This reaction affects ageing populations pining for the restoration of a mythical Golden Age. It also animates middle classes thrown into disar- ray by the delayering of management and the loss of a secure place for themselves and their offspring in hierarchies threatened by the forces of technological change in the era of liberal globalisation. The yearning for authority, including state authority, is part of this broad movement to take back control.

216 | François Heisbourg

In the most violent way imaginable, it also inspires mainly young radicals violently searching for their own version of paradise. Coping with challenges such as the jihadi threat is a daunting but compara- tively straightforward task: there exist vast pluralities ready and able to do exactly that, and international coalitions are rightly seen as valuable, including by the likes of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Fighting ter- rorism does not, in and of itself, undermine the elements of order in the international system.

The non-violent response to the sense of a loss of control is possibly more important in terms of transforming the international system. For instance, will there still be a West if President Trump’s transactional and bilateral world vision strikes long-lasting roots in the United States? As we wait for the answer to that question, lesser actors in the global system have to hedge against the eventuality, while others, such as Russia or China, may welcome it. Indifference is not an option.

From Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and the generals in Thailand to the populist wave in Central Europe, to messy Brexit in the UK and the triumph of Trump in America, we may be witnessing the end of what the late Gerald Segal called a ‘Westernistic’ order.5 Ours is a world in which Chinese President Xi Jinping stated at the Communist Party Congress this autumn that ‘it is time for us to take centre stage’. China is ‘standing firm and tall in the East’, and presenting ‘a new choice for other countries’.6

II In the recent past, non-liberal states, such as China and the Gulf monar- chies, were beneficiaries of a global order whose rules and regulations were Western-centric and liberal in their inspiration. Today, this Western- centric character is waning in a rather Hegelian cunning-of-reason manner, as its non-Western beneficiaries have grown in power, especially China, while the Western powers, not least the US and the UK, question their own role as key liberal rule-makers. If non-Western powers are thrust into the rule-making role, what will that system look like?

In attempting to answer that question, we must recognise the limits of what we know about ourselves, let alone others. Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t

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wrong when he distinguished between three types of knowledge: known knowns; known unknowns; and unknown unknowns.7 But it’s even more complicated than that: there are also the ‘unknown knowns’ – that is, information which is at hand but the availability of which we don’t actu- ally recognise. Big data increases our ability to tease out these unknown knowns, with, for instance, its practical and possibly decisive use by the Leave campaign or Trump’s electoral strategy in 2016. Those entities which will have direct or indirect control over maximising this category of knowledge will have an edge in domestic and international power. Think Cambridge Analytica – the company that worked for Trump’s presidential campaign and for the Leave camp in the run-up to the UK referendum on EU membership – multiplied by several orders of magnitude.

For the time being, the nature and the name of the new era remain undefined by key agents of the transformation, except in the negative. We were told by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif at this year’s Munich Security Conference that we have entered ‘the post-Western global order’.8 His Russian colleague Sergei Lavrov, at the same venue, stated that ‘the post-Cold War era has come to an end … The world has become neither “Western-centric” nor a safer and more stable place.’9 We are told what the world has ceased to be, but not what it is becoming. When the Cold War ended, and notwithstanding Lavrov’s choice of words, we didn’t simply enter a post-Cold War era defined by an absence: as early as 1991, Charles Krauthammer wrote about ‘America’s unipolar moment’,10 opening the way to Hubert Védrine’s hyperpuissance trope.11

The new era, for want of a better name, can be described as one of ‘bipolar disorder’, with bipolarity in the form of US–Chinese rivalry, and disorder in the sense that unlike its Cold War predecessor, this system will be both unstable and inchoate. To make this case, we should first assess the basic alternatives.

One alternative to bipolar disorder would be the return of the American moment, as China collapses into division and anarchy. Historically, China has indeed witnessed a number of such episodes, tumbling most recently from pre-eminence and unity a mere two cen- turies ago to chaos and marginalisation during much of the twentieth

218 | François Heisbourg

century. However, the quantum of power and wealth accumulated by China during the last 40 years is such that its great-power momentum cannot be easily stopped. And China’s government, and probably its people as well, are desperate to avoid a return to the horrors of times which still belong to the living memory of many.

A second alternative is China’s unipolar moment, with the United States becoming the functional equivalent, in strategic terms, of other continental-scale nations such as Brazil or Indonesia. But even with Donald Trump at the helm, it is difficult to imagine how this could happen.

A third is a truly multipolar system, in which the European Concert of Nations, as it prevailed for close to 100 years after Waterloo, is replicated at the global level. Because we know that the concert eventually crystal- lised into world war between the Entente and the Central Powers, we tend to forget how broadly power was spread around, with countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Austria–Hungary possessing great- power status, notably through their imperial possessions. Indeed, elements of such multipolarity will figure in a bipolar-disorder system – but the head start of the United States, and more recently of China, will make it unlikely for a true global concert to emerge. Of the alternatives, though, this is less unlikely than the unipolar ones described above.

A fourth alternative is for pandemonium to break out, as anarchy and chaos spread from their Middle Eastern and African abodes to Europe, Russia and the Indian subcontinent, with no power or grouping of powers having the ability to restore a modicum of order. The first part of this proposition can be considered a dystopian extrapolation of the million- strong march of refugees from the Middle East to Europe in 2015–16. The second assumption is much more questionable, as realpolitik coalitions of the willing tend to emerge, whether to get a grip on population movement as between the EU and Turkey, to face down the threat of jihadi terrorism or to cooperate against climate change and epidemics. There are what I would call ‘spoiler states’ such as Russia, with a GDP the size of Spain’s, which will seek to compensate for their relative weakness by weaponising, with the help of the IT revolution, every facet of human activity. And we also know that narrow-minded, dysfunctional governments can emerge

War and Peace After the Age of Liberal Globalisation | 219

in even the most robust democracies – but self-preservation is a powerful counter to the risk of pandemonium.

A final alternative to bipolar disorder, as improbable as the others but not impossible, is the triumph of the non-state vis-à-vis the state as the prime political organising principle of human societies. This assessment may appear to be questionable: after all, the tech giants are transforming our societies. As agents of political power, they have been able to engineer their own sophisticated version of state capture in order to shape their very own fiscally permissive environment. But as the current travails of Facebook and Twitter in the US political debate indicate, at the end of the day, they are more likely to join the ranks of the regulated rule-takers than to become rule- making regulators. And the Chinese Politburo can be counted on to remind the corporate world who calls the shots behind the Great Firewall.

Having eliminated or sidelined the alternatives, the default option is bipolar: the US will not fade into irrelevance, and China will neither collapse nor rule alone; both will have a vested interest in avoiding the triumph of pandemonium or the non-state, and other nations will not be in a position to catch up anytime soon.

III Twentieth-century history has witnessed two very different forms of global bipolar systems. The Cold War, from the late 1940s to the collapse of the Soviet empire, was comparatively long-lasting, remains close to the living memories of most senior decision-makers, and has left a legacy of insti- tutions which is still with us, in the form of the UN system, the Bretton Woods institutions, the American alliance system and the European Union. This comparatively stable and order-rich precedent makes it easy to forget that the two world wars were preceded by other bipolar systems. From the 1890s onwards, both the Triple Entente and the Central Empires developed and organised bipolarity, which made world war possible if not inevitable. From the mid-1930s onwards, the Axis formed its grouping of expansion- ist powers: its ambitions prompted the creation of a vast, extraordinarily diverse and eventually victorious coalition. Bipolarity does not in itself generate stability.

220 | François Heisbourg

In attempting to describe the instabilities of ‘bipolarity with disorderly characteristics’ (to paraphrase Deng Xiaoping’s statement about ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’), we need not be mechanically forecasting world war, twentieth-century style.12 But the picture will be a dangerously disturbing one nonetheless, more Game of Thrones than House of Cards, overtaken as the latter has been by such extravagant real-world happen- ings as the election of Mr Trump.

The most basic cause of instability is a product of the real-time connec- tivities and volatility of the global system, with its inherent potential for ruptures stratégiques alluded to earlier. This instability is not directly caused by the bipolarity itself, but it can magnify the effects of other sources of disorder. Civil engineers would talk about ‘entering into resonance’, as can happen if a company of soldiers is imprudently allowed to march in lock- step across a bridge. This is a global system in which a premium should be put on carefulness in the execution of one’s policies. Carefulness is not a synonym of prudence or patience: a spur-of-the-moment venture such as Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 invasion was handled with exquisite care. And strategic prudence, of the sort advocated and practised by presi- dent Barack Obama in Syria in 2013, was implemented with carelessness.

To make things worse, digitalisation fuels instability insofar as cyber operations straddle the increasingly fuzzy line between peace and war. Cyber weapons are in many ways the polar opposite of nuclear weapons: they are weapons not of deterrence but of use, indeed constant use; the attribution of an attack is difficult to prove; operating them is often both comparatively easy and relatively cheap; they belong both to the state and to the non-state. ‘Hybrid’, or ‘non-linear’, warfare is to a large extent a lazy misnomer for what has largely existed since the beginnings of history, including guerrilla warfare and ‘hearts-and-minds’ operations. But cyber warfare is the epitome of true hybridicity in the same way that nuclear weapons are its exact reverse, hence the sobriquet ‘weapons of mass dis- ruption’.13 In addition, new and frightening issues arise when the paths of cyber war and nuclear weapons happen to cross: what happens to the stability of nuclear deterrence if nuclear arsenals are hacked, as is currently being considered by the United States vis-à-vis North Korea?

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Another facet of digitalisation is the advent of autonomous weapon systems with built-in machine-learning capabilities, in other words pos- sessing artificial intelligence. How weapons with a mind of their own will affect deterrence and crisis stability is anybody’s guess, but the impact of this Golem can only be massive.

In a time which calls for carefulness, cyber warfare and artificial intel- ligence make the duty of care all the more difficult to exercise. Arguably, this should reinforce the trend towards the reaffirmation of the power of the state as the indispensable regulator of these rising forces of disruption.

Then come the instabilities flowing from the lack of knowledge or the mistaken judgements made about one’s opposite number in a bipolar relationship. In an otherwise relatively stable US–Soviet order during the Cold War, it is these faulty assessments which continue to give one the greatest retrospective shivers – for instance, during the course of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. George Kennan, in his ‘Long Telegram’ of 1946, and others may have given the Americans a remarkably sound understanding of what made the Soviet leadership tick. But if this knowledge served as a remarkable guide for determining Cold War grand strategy, it was largely irrelevant in terms of forming a reasoned judgement during the 1962 crisis given, inter alia, the paucity of American intelligence on Soviet nuclear dispositions and procedures in and around Cuba. The current situation gives no cause to believe that mutual knowledge and understanding has improved. The contrary is more likely, if only because the number and the variety of players has increased.

The bipolar relationship between the US and China is also destabilised by the asymmetries between the two contenders. During the Cold War, each antagonist represented a clear ideological, cultural, economic and political alternative, underpinning the strategic contest. In the case of China today, this clarity is also present, even if market Leninism bears little resemblance to the USSR’s centrally planned economy. But what of the US, which, in counterpoise to this Chinese model, appears to be reconsidering its erst- while role as the pivot of, and a model for, the post-Second World War order? Even as it remains the wellhead of technological innovation, an as-yet peerless military power, a tried-and-tested constitutional democracy and

222 | François Heisbourg

a paragon of the rule of law, the US is tempted to turn its back on liberal globalisation, the concept of an open society and the network of influence sustained by its Asian and European allies. Some are tempted to broaden the question to the West in general. As a group of Atlanticist American schol- ars put it recently: ‘There is no post American West. There is a post liberal West.’14 This may seem excessive: after all, Trump was not elected in Paris or Berlin. But it may yet turn out to be true, in the same way that the end of the USSR was precipitated most decisively by Russia’s choice to free itself from what it considered to be the shackles of an exceedingly onerous Soviet system. To use an old saying, ‘the fish rots from its head’.

The US is hesitating between sustaining the status quo and turning inwards. China is turning its back on the status quo and reaching out- wards. China also strengthens its hand as a dynamic power by operating asymmetrically, projecting itself globally in the key technologies of tomor- row while doing its utmost to keep the outside world truly outside, on the other side of the Great Firewall. This is China’s version of being ‘some- where’ and ‘anywhere’ at the same time, while avoiding the fate of ending up ‘nowhere’, to use (and maybe abuse) David Goodhart and Prime Minister Theresa May’s choice of words.15 Dynamism versus stasis is not in itself a strategically winning proposition: history is littered with the wrecks of empires that overreached. But it is a destabilising combination.

Finally, there are what I would term the ‘derivative’ instabilities of a bipolar system, of the sort which played a key role in ensuring that the tensions and wars-by-proxy in pre-1914 Europe would open the gates to a full-fledged world war. Wilhelminian Germany’s so-called encirclement by its neighbours was the product of Berlin’s counterproductive foreign and security policy, but this self-fulfilling prophecy underpinned an extremely powerful perception in terms of its war-creating potential. This may become the case in East Asia as a coalition of regional states, from India to Japan, supported by the US, pushes back against a rising China: it is a mistake to call this a ‘Thucydides Trap’ but the interaction can be real enough.

The ‘tail wagging the dog’, as an expression, does not carry a distin- guished pedigree, but it is an apposite metaphor to describe another type of instability: Austria–Hungary, for example, seizing on the assassination

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of Crown Prince Ferdinand to secure a blank cheque from Wilhelm II of Germany. A modern, and for the moment less dire, equivalent would be Saudi Arabia obtaining American carte blanche to isolate Qatar while drawing in the US against Iran. In the future, it could mean a comparatively weak Russia attempting to draw in a more powerful China to support it strategically in a cause of its own choosing; and if this possibility may seem contrived, one should not forget that this is already happening at the strictly diplomatic level, when Russia goes out of its way to convince China to back its reiterated vetoes in the Security Council on Syria-related issues (since 2011, China has joined Russia in five out of its seven vetoes on Syria).

Balanced against these instabilities are factors which did not prevail in 1914 Europe: nuclear weapons tend to dampen conflict between the great powers and their alliance systems, and common sense suggests that planet-threatening challenges such as climate change or global epidem- ics tend to compel cooperation rather than lead to fruitless confrontation. But it is unclear whether the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis and other episodes of nuclear brinkmanship have been universally absorbed by the world’s current and aspiring nuclear powers. Nor is agreeing on the Paris climate-change treaty a guarantee of strategic prudence across the board, not to mention the fact that common-sense cooperation on climate change is less prevalent than one would wish.

The volatilities of a Black Swan world and the fragilities of US–China strategic polarity are combining in a manner which could make the decision-makers and the peoples of the 2020s envious of the relatively soft ride which we are currently experiencing. Russian revisionism plagues Ukraine and other former Soviet lands, jihadi terrorism is dreadful, the Middle East is going from bad to worse, chemical and nuclear war are a distinct risk in the Korean Peninsula – but it could all become much worse, rapidly. Unlike the post-Cold War era, during which war was mainly the lot of failed states in Africa or the Middle East, or something involving non-state actors such as the Islamic State, war may return between sovereign states operating in concert with mercenary non-state actors.

This is a world in which the conditions that made possible the Long Peace between the great powers after the Second World War are disap-

224 | François Heisbourg

pearing, a point made in Lawrence Freedman’s recent book.16 This does not bode well for the future. As Michael Howard, president emeritus of the IISS, stated recently: ‘The great lesson of my lifetime is that all difficult problems are best addressed with partners and allies.’17 How will this be done in a volatile world of ‘frenemies’?

These reflections do not lend themselves to policy recommendations in the narrow sense. But there is a need for our countries and our societies to consider how to approach their international and security relations in line with the transformation of the global system sketched above. Such an approach can be summarised in six words, which should be considered in combination: integration, flexibility, resilience, selectivity, understanding and carefulness. Some of these lend themselves relatively easily to changes in organisation and method (such as integration) while others are of a mainly cultural or attitudinal nature (such as carefulness), which is more difficult to bring about.

Integration means that foreign and security policy, and the organisations they rest upon, must be integrated, in keeping with the diversity of the connectivities of the global system. National-security councils are indis- pensable; stove-piped ministerial fiefdoms are not fit for purpose.

Flexibility is important because there now exists a continuum in which war and peace are categories which coexist, with differences of degree rather than nature. Raymond Aron, the first president of the IISS, wrote about ‘impossible peace and improbable war’.18 Today, they exist simulta- neously. The strategic keyboard calls for flexibility, if not virtuosity.

Resilience, a word introduced into the lexicon of national security by David Omand shortly after 9/11,19 is a basic requirement given the poten- tial for ruptures stratégiques in an inherently volatile and unstable global system, putting a premium on our ability to roll with the punches of a disorderly world.

Selectivity was prevalent during the Cold War, during which the super- powers tended to read every problem through the lens of its impact on the East–West confrontation. This had its drawbacks, but it was an efficient principle through which to arrange issues in a hierarchy, according them differentiated status. This practice was largely lost during the subsequent

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quarter-century with ‘the end of history’, America’s unipolar moment and the West’s rewriting of the rules of armed intervention in the mistaken belief that it had somehow become omnipotent. In a nutshell, selectiv- ity implies that the American and Chinese superpowers overtly consider their bilateral relationship as the guiding principle of their international relations and their overriding priority; this entails in turn that the other players understand this (during the Cold War, this was readily done as it was a convenient way to extract leverage). For Europe, selectivity will be more complex: time and space make Russia and the broader Middle East the two essential external challenges (one could add Africa, but the broader Middle East is the interface through which African issues are filtered, for better or for worse). Arguably they cannot be met without restoring Europe’s domestic economic performance and its internal cohe- sion, which have become the overriding imperative. Given Europe’s current vulnerability and weakness this is best done in a practical manner with a minimum of effets d’annonce. To borrow from Deng Xiaoping, Europe should observe soberly and bide its time. It may actually be true, as Anne Applebaum puts it, ‘that what people really hate about Europe isn’t that it usurps national power, but that it seems powerless’.20 This is Emmanuel Macron’s ‘European sovereignty’ trope which was part of the narrative that got him elected president of France. It might be considered a European way of taking back control.

The companion of all of the above is understanding: understanding oneself, and understanding others. The IISS makes it part of its job to increase our understanding of the complexities of the world. This is an endeavour which deserves a much higher degree of priority by all actors intent on reducing the risks flowing from a lack of understanding. What John Chipman has dubbed ‘strategic due diligence’ should become a general practice.21

Finally, most crucially, but also most improbably, we have carefulness. There is no institutional or process-based recipe which will create care- fulness, which belongs to the realm of culture (using the word culture in its anthropological sense). Cultures tend to change as a result of massive historical change, as when two world wars transformed Germany from

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a culture of forceful risk-taking to one of strategic reticence. Yet, without a culture of carefulness, our world will be condemned to the preva- lence of violent disorder in which bipolarity as an organising principle may become an aggravating rather than a mitigating circumstance. The meaning of bipolarity in a world of strategic upsets would come too close for comfort to its psychiatric version.

Notes

1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’, in Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 16.

2 Commission du Livre Blanc, Livre blanc sur la Défense et la Sécurité Nationale (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008).

3 Kai-Fu Lee, ‘The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence’, New York Times, 24 June 2017, https://www.nytimes. com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/ artificial-intelligence-economic- inequality.html.

4 See ‘IMF World Economic Outlook/ April 2017’, https://statisticstimes.com/ economy/countries-by-projected-gdp. php; and ‘World Population Prospects - The 2017 Revision’, https://esa. un.org/undp/wpp.

5 Gerald Segal and Barry Buzan, ‘A Western Theme’, Prospect, February 1998.

6 See Charles Clover, ‘Xi’s Tough Talk Signals End to China’s Low-Profile Foreign Policy’, Financial Times, 20 October 2017, https://www.ft.com/ content/05cd86a6-b552-11e7-a398- 73d59db9e399; and Banyan, ‘The Rise and Rise of Wang Huning’, The Economist, 4 November 2017.

7 US Department of Defense, ‘DoD

News Briefing – Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers’, 12 February 2002, http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/ Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636.

8 Mohammad Javad Zarif, speech to Munich Security Conference, 19 February 2017, http://en.mfa.ir/uplo ads/2_5280602869559459889_102059. pdf.

9 Sergei Lavrov, speech to Munich Security Conference, 18 February 2017, http://www.mid.ru/en/ press_service/minister_speeches/-/ asset_publisher/7OvQR5KJWVmR/ content/id/2648249.

10 Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 70, no. 1, 1990, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/1991-02-01/unipolar-moment.

11 Hubert Védrine, ‘Déclaration sur l’évolution du monde, la construction de l’Europe et la politique étrangère’, 26 February 1998, http://discours.vie- publique.fr/notices/983000629.html.

12 Deng Xiaoping, ‘Building Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, 30 June 1984, available at http://english. peopledaily.com.cn/dengxp/vol3/text/ c1220.html.

13 In a preliminary search, the earliest use I have found of this expression in a cyber context is in Timothy Killam,

War and Peace After the Age of Liberal Globalisation | 227

Weapons of Mass Disruption for the Operational Info-Warrior (PN, 1996).

14 Lily Gardner Feldman et al., ‘Europe’s Illusions’, Zeit, 31 October 2017, http:// www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2017-10/ transatlanic-partnership-joerg-lau- bernd-ulrich-criticism-response.

15 See David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2017); and Theresa May, speech to Conservative Party Conference, 5 October 2016, available at http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/05/ theresa-mays-conference-speech-in- full/.

16 Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

17 See Max Hastings, ‘Splendid Isolation’, New York Review of Books, 12 October 2017.

18 Raymond Aron, Le grand schisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).

19 See David Omand, ‘National Resilience Priorities for the UK Government’, Royal United Services Institute, 19 March 2004, https://rusi.org/commentary/ national-resilience-priorities-uk- government-sir-david-omand.

20 Anne Applebaum, ‘A New European Narrative?’, New York Review of Books, 12 October 2017.

21 See John Chipman, ‘Why Your Company Needs a Foreign Policy’, Harvard Business Review, September 2016.