Aug 26th 2014

The Overstretched West

by Joschka Fischer

Joschka Fischer, Germany’s Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998 until 2005, was a leader in the German Green Party for almost 20 years.

BERLIN – The chaotic consequences of the gradual disintegration of Pax Americana are becoming increasingly clear. For seven decades, the United States safeguarded a global framework, which – however imperfect, and regardless of how many mistakes the superpower made – generally guaranteed a minimum level of stability. At the very least, Pax Americanawas an essential component of Western security. But the US is no longer willing or able to be the world’s policeman.

The staggering accumulation of crises and conflicts facing the world today – in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, and Libya – are linked to America’s new stance. Should matters come to a head in another seismic zone of world politics – namely, East Asia – the world would confront a global catastrophe stemming from the synchronicity of numerous regional crises. Obviously, it would be a crisis that no one could control or contain.

The bipolar world of the Cold War is history; George W. Bush squandered America’s brief moment as the only true superpower. Economic globalization has so far not given rise to a framework for global governance. Perhaps we are in the middle of a chaotic process that will lead to a new international order – or, more likely, we are only at the beginning of that process.

The debate about a future global order is taking place primarily in the West – specifically, North America and Europe. With the emerging powers largely trying to adapt their strategic positions to their national aspirations and interests, they are unwilling or unable to articulate the ideas and binding rules that should underpin a new international order.

What, for example, does a Chinese or Indian formula for a new global order look like? (In light of events in eastern Ukraine, it is perhaps advisable not to inquire too closely about Russia’s views.) The old transatlantic West seems to be alone in this respect, and therefore remains indispensable to preserving global stability.

And yet the frequency of crises has also revived in Western countries an old, fundamental normative conflict between idealism and realism, or a value-based and an interest-based foreign policy. Though it has long been clear that Western polities rely on both, the contrast, however artificial, is now front and center once again.

The crisis in Iraq, and the horrific violence of the Islamic State (IS) there and in Syria, is largely the result of the West’s non-intervention in the Syrian civil war. The foreign-policy “realists” opposed a supposedly idealistic “humanitarian” intervention. The results are now clear: a humanitarian disaster and a grave challenge to the Arab Middle East as it has been constituted for the last century.

The controversy in Europe about arming the Kurds seems bizarre in light of the situation in Iraq. Before our eyes, the IS is threatening to kill or enslave all members of religious and ethnic minorities who do not immediately convert to Islam or flee. With the world watching the IS threaten genocide, taking action is a moral duty. Questions regarding, for example, what happens after the fighting ends to the weapons given to the Kurds are of secondary importance.

In terms of realpolitik, this argument is strengthened by the fact that Iraq’s national army is all but incapable of defeating the IS, while the Kurdish militias could – but only if they are equipped with modern weapons. A victory for the IS in northern Iraq, or even just the capture of Erbil, the Kurdish Regional Government’s capital, would cause not just an unparalleled humanitarian disaster; it would also pose an enormous political threat to the greater Middle East and world peace.

So the nexus between values and interests is self-evident and renders the conflict over fundamental foreign-policy principles irrelevant. This is particularly true for the European Union. A Middle East with a brutal, unfettered terrorist state at its center would be a direct threat to neighboring Europe’s safety. So why not help those in Iraq who are willing and able to confront this peril?

But if only the West assumes responsibility for maintaining global order, won’t it become overstretched, given the number and nature of the crises it faces? Most of these struggles are not clashes between states; they are asymmetrical conflicts, for which Western societies – including the US – are not equipped. These conflicts are further exacerbated by the ruthlessness that characterizes religious wars – just like those in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So, yes, the West does indeed face a high risk of becoming overstretched.

But what is the alternative, other than accelerating chaos, mushrooming security risks, and serial humanitarian disasters? For the West – and for Europe first and foremost – this dilemma cannot be avoided.

Today’s accumulating crises, accompanied by America’s strategic fatigue, are forcing Europe to define what role it will play in the future of Western – and global – stability. If the US can no longer bear the burden of Pax Americana, Europe must do more for collective security. But Europe cannot assume greater responsibility for global order and stability without unifying politically. Unfortunately, too many European leaders cannot – or will not – understand this.


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Jul 6th 2023
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Jun 27th 2023
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Jun 25th 2023
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Jun 18th 2023
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Jun 14th 2023
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Jun 9th 2023
EXTRACT: "Hardly a week goes by without various pioneers in artificial intelligence issuing dire warnings about the technology that they introduced to the world." ---- " I have my doubts. Since the start of my professional life in the 1980s (and of course for much longer), technological progress has repeatedly been held up as a major threat to jobs in key industries such as automobile manufacturing. Yet...."
May 31st 2023
EXTRACT: "In discussions about the implications of artificial intelligence (AI), someone almost always evokes the ancient Greek myth of Pandora’s box. In the modern fairytale version of the story, Pandora is depicted as a tragically curious young woman who opens a sealed urn and inadvertently releases eternal misery on humankind. Like the genie that has escaped the bottle, the horse that has fled the barn, and the train that has left the station, the myth has become a cliché. And yet the actual story of Pandora is far more apropos to debates about AI and machine learning than many realize. What it shows is that it is better to listen to “Prometheans” who are concerned about humanity’s future than “Epimetheans” who are easily dazzled by the prospect of short-term gains. One of the oldest Greek myths, the story of Pandora was first recorded more than 2,500 years ago, in the time of Homer. In the original telling, Pandora was not some innocent girl who succumbed to the temptation to open a forbidden jar. Rather, as the poet Hesiod tells us, Pandora was “made, not born.” Having been commissioned by all-powerful Zeus and designed to his cruel specifications by Hephaestus, the god of invention, Pandora was a lifelike android created to look like a bewitching maiden. Her purpose was to entrap mortals as a manifestation of kalos kakon: “evil hidden in beauty.”
May 31st 2023
EXTRACT: "Specifically, many believe that the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – an AI that can teach itself to perform any cognitive task that humans can do – will pose an existential threat to humanity. A carelessly designed AGI (or one governed by unknown “black box” processes) could carry out its tasks in ways that compromise fundamental elements of our humanity. After that, what it means to be human could come to be mediated by AGI."
May 29th 2023
EXTRACT: "In his 2018 book Destined For War, political scientist Graham Allison observes that the US and China are headed toward what he called the “Thucydides’ Trap,” a reference to the ancient Greek historian’s account of Sparta’s efforts to suppress the rise of Athens, which ultimately culminated in the Peloponnesian War. A better analogy, however, is the message sent by the Athenians to the inhabitants of the besieged island of Melos before executing the men and enslaving the women and children: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." ---- Allowing China and other authoritarian countries to shape the rules would result in a world order based solely on this “realist” principle. It is a nightmare scenario that the G7 countries and other liberal democracies must strive to prevent. ---- China’s assertions about the decline of the West reveal an underlying anxiety. After all, if liberal democracy is failing, why do Chinese officials consistently express their fear of it? The fact that leaders of the Communist Party of China have instructed rank-and-file members to engage in an “intense struggle” against liberal-democratic values indicates that they view open societies as an existential threat."
May 28th 2023
EXTRACTS: "Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) decreed that generative AI content must “embody core socialist values and must not contain any content that subverts state power, advocates the overthrow of the socialist system, incites splitting the country or undermines national unity.' ” .... "This implies that the harder the CAC tries to control ChatGPT content, the smaller the resulting output of chatbot-generated Chinese intelligence will be – yet another constraint on the AI intellectual revolution in China. Unsurprisingly, the early returns on China’s generative-AI efforts have been disappointing."
May 20th 2023
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May 11th 2023
EXTRACT: "....the US possesses advantages in developing large language models (LLMs). It benefits from close business-university collaboration, lubricated by a deep-pocketed venture-capital industry. It is no coincidence that ChatGPT came out of the US, and out of Greater Silicon Valley in particular." .... "Developing countries would seem to be at a significant disadvantage in this AI arms race and are at risk of losing their competitive advantage: abundant low-cost labor. Yet AI also holds out the promise of benefits for these countries." .... " however, economic development depends on human development – that is, on the accumulation of human capital. Where developing countries lack the resources, financial and otherwise, to increase significantly their spending on traditional modes of education, AI holds out hope for providing what is missing."
May 2nd 2023
EXTRACT: "The past decade has not been kind to neoliberalism. With 40 years of deregulation, financialization, and globalization having failed to deliver prosperity for anyone but the rich, the United States and other Western liberal democracies have seemingly moved on from the neoliberal experiment and re-embraced industrial policy. But the economic paradigm that underpinned Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and the Washington Consensus is alive and well in at least one place: the pages of the Economist."
Apr 25th 2023
EXTRACT: "Yet there is an important twist for the US: a chronic shortfall of domestic saving casts the economic consequences of conflict with China in a very different light. In 2022, net US saving – the depreciation-adjusted saving of households, businesses, and the government sector – fell to just 1.6% of national income, far below the longer-term 5.8% average from 1960 to 2020. Lacking in saving and wanting to invest and grow, the US takes full advantage of the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” as the world’s dominant reserve currency and freely imports surplus saving from abroad, running a massive current-account and multilateral trade deficit to attract foreign capital."