The Coming Multipolar World?

It occurs to me that when I posted on the National Intelligence Council's Mapping the Global Future exercise I managed not to discuss the report's main theme -- that economic growth in India and China along with the broadening and deepening of the UN are going to create a world 15 years from now in which the US is still preeminent, but less preeminent. We're looking, in other words, at the coming multipolarity. I'm not sure how useful it is to pretend to know what future economic growth trends in China will be, but assuming the general form of the predictions is right, I still find the analysis somewhat confused.

First off, we ought to broadly distinguish between the economic and the military realms. As you can see in this draft (PDF) of Dan Drezner's forthcoming Who Rules?, in purely economic terms the world already is multipolar. The "great powers" of global economic regulation are the players with very large domestic markets, to wit: the United States and the European Union, with Japan counting as a kind of second-tier player. When these actors agree, everyone else must follow. When they disagree, coordination fails to emerge. The growth of China and India will alter this dynamic somewhat, but since the US is already non-hegemonic it can hardly end American hegemony. Now if you did get a standoff between a US-EU "Western" bloc and a Japan-China-India "Asian" bloc, that would be interesting. But it's pretty hard to see why that would happen. The main possible change in dynamic I can see is that maybe a combination of the US (or the EU) with Japan and China and India would have enough market power to muscle over the EU (or the US) and produce a uniform result, whereas under present conditions a split like that would simply remain a split. Maybe.

In military terms, I think there's also less here than meets the eye. As India and China get richer, their militaries will grow more powerful. But it's not as if the American military is so powerful right now that we can credibly threaten to invade China or India (or the EU, for that matter). American global military supremacy simply doesn't take the form of giving the ability to just muscle anybody around. In practice, only fairly ramshackle nations like Serbia and Iraq can really be subdued by the force of our conventional arms. Nothing about Sino-Indian growth is going to change that. What makes us special is basically that we have a unique ability to deploy our power on a global scale. The United States is nowhere near Serbia or Iraq, and yet that fact has done little to nothing to hinder our ability to beat those countries in wars. Where we're having serious problems in Iraq, the sheer distance still isn't relevant to the problems. Nothing about Sino-Indian growth is going to reduce our capacity to deploy power globally, nor will it degrade our already pretty poor abilities in the field of post-conflict reconstruction.

The only possible change here would be if China or India were to somehow acquire the ability to deploy power in this manner. That would certainly have important results, but it's hard to see it happening. The gap right now between Chinese and Indian military capacities is huge and, in fact, growing. China is nowhere near acquiring a large fleet of aircraft carriers, for example, and as far as I can tell no one even thinks they're trying to acquire one. What's more, the United States has a global network of military bases and other facilities. China not only has none, but doesn't seem to me to have any ability to acquire one. I've been reading Man, The State, and War and the excerpts of A Theory of International Politics included in Neorealism and Its Critics lately, but this seems to be one area in which regime type clearly does matter. Barring some radical change in the nature of the Chinese polity, no country in, say, South America is going to host PRC military facilities in the way that South Korea and Japan do in East Asia.

At best, China and/or India might acquire greater military capacities vis-à-vis their neighbors. But looking around the scene, it's hard to see dramatic shifts here, either. Mostly, China neighbors India and vice-versa. If either engages in a big military buildup, their armies will probably be geared toward fighting/deterring each other and nothing will happen. The only live issue I can see here is that maybe China could acquire the capacity to credibly threaten an invasion of Taiwan. Since that seems to be the real question on the table, I think it's worth addressing directly, which the NIC report doesn't. Instead, they have a vague allusion to Japan needing to choose between strategies of balancing China and bandwagoning with it. But what is the content of this Sino-Japanese conflict supposed to be? And what is China supposed to be able to threaten to do to Japan that it can't already threaten (i.e., launch nuclear missles at it)? I'm not an enthusiast about paranoid "must encircle China" theories of 21st century security policy, but this is in part because it would be so damn easy to do if it really became necessary. You've got a potential democratic Asia coalition anchored by India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan joined by others as circumstances permit and underwritten from afar by the USA. China's got nothing but access to outdated Russian military equipment.

As I see it, the only real reason to think there might be a retreat from US unipolarity (insofar as that's really what we've got, as I noted above the list of countries we can't really go to war with is quite long and involves the majority of the world's population) is that we might not want to continue dedicating such a large portion of our economy to the Department of Defense. Expenditures on Social Security and public sector health care are both certain to rise as a proportion of GDP, and expenditures on education are likely to do so as well. That money will have to come from somewhere. My guess is that it won't all come from higher taxes, some of it will come from the military taking a smaller share of the national economic pie. As to how much smaller, I won't hazard a guess. By 2020, probably not enough to generate qualitative change in our global power-projection capacity. Further down the road, very probably.

The main thing to worry about, I think, is not that putative rivals will grow too strong, but that potential friends won't be as strong as they could be. American military spending should probably shrink over the medium to long term. It would be nice if that didn't just result in a global anarchy. If the other rich democracies spent a sum somewhere between what they're spending now and what we're spending now, then the overall capabilities of the free world would be enhanced, the burden on America lessened, and we could have a more even sharing of the decision-making, less crazy overreactions on our part, less resentments and blowback from elsewhere, and a bunch of other good stuff.

But I don't really believe in long-term forecasting, so take this all with several grains, etc., etc., just thought I'd throw my two cents in. For all we really know, China will suffer a massive political upheaval between now and 2020, or the United States will be forced into a debt default, or aliens will arrive, or the Middle East will be dominated by a belt of dynamic Shiite democracies, or God knows what else. Weird and wacky stuff happens, and it's all pretty unpredictable. Nobody I'm aware of sat around in January 1990 and accurately predicted what things are looking like in 2005.