Dangerous Assumptions
(excerpted from his book The Museum)
Sometimes the present is a boat adrift on a sea of assumptions. When they turn out to be wrong, the ride can get rough. There are several assumptions that have governed international relations and, in general, the way in which liberal democracies have viewed their morphing, shape-shifting adversaries.
At the end of the 20th century, it was thought that if communist powers China and Russia became capitalist, democracy would soon follow. We naively thought that trade would bring peace. And so, we invited China to become the earth’s manufacturing center and Russia, our main supplier of oil.
Today, these two powers represent our most dangerous dictatorships. China has pushed Asia to the edge of war and Russia is raining destruction upon Ukraine.
Neither seems concerned at the prospect of losing its Western markets. Yet for so long, we had assumed they needed us. Globalism was to be the wave of the future: bringing us all together, breaking down walls and erasing borders. Like osmosis, trade and prosperity would just flow naturally to all corners of the globe
Interdependence would make our differences seem small, and give us an incentive to eschew all forms of military action. We would depend so much on each other that conflict would become a thing of the past. Surely the peace dividend would outweigh the cost of armament and the even larger cost of destruction.
For the internationalists among us, this notion was seductive in the extreme. As seductive as the belief that free markets lead to free minds: where capitalism is allowed to take root, societies will become more open and liberal. One taste of freedom, and the appetite will surely grow. Everyone will want democracy.
We predicted sunshine. What followed was rain, sleet, and hail.
Today, China is no closer to democracy than it was under the most authoritarian of its communist leaders, Mao Tse-Tung. The current government remains unchanged as a one-party, one-man dictatorship. The opening of this nation’s markets has had exactly zero spillover effect on the political system. No softening of the Marxist political structure, no relaxing of the repression. Theirs is a society where each citizen’s move is on perpetual, Orwellian camera.
In Russia, the command economy of the Soviets has been replaced by the command economy of the oligarchs. What was once one-man, one-party Soviet rule has morphed into…the same thing today.
In both China and Russia, dissidents are imprisoned. Or worse.
How did our predictions end up being so very wrong? The answer is that we ignored the lessons of history.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, we allowed ourselves to get intoxicated on the notion that war was close to becoming obsolete. Only forty-four years had passed since the end of history’s worst conflict, WWII, and we felt lasting peace was upon us.
Hope became conviction.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair offered newly minted Russian President Vladimir Putin a seat at the table. An adversary was given regal treatment, believing it would assuage the Russian sense of ‘grievance’. The aim was to bring him over to our side.
What Blair and other leaders chose to ignore was the background from which Putin had emerged and who he really was. They chose to ignore as well Russia’s size, military power and history of imperial ambition. In other words, they turned a blind eye to a set of rather cold and compelling realities. They wanted the lion to turn itself into a lamb and they convinced themselves it would happen.
Similar fantasies led Western leadership into a mirage in the Far East. The year was 1997 and the British lease on Hong Kong was coming due. Beijing promised to respect the city’s traditions of democracy and free speech. They were taken at their word. Great Britain went ahead with the transference of power back to China.
Today, we can see the promise was anything but sincere. Twenty-five years have gone by, and the status quo has not been maintained. Nor have things changed for the better. Democracy has been trampled into submission. Free speech, smashed. Human rights advocates languish in prison. Hong Kong’s once exalted status as a world financial capital is no longer.
We make assumptions at our peril. As famed historian Jorge Santayana one said, those who forget the lessons of history will be condemned to repeat them.