What Remains of the West’s Grand Strategy
The three lines of the post-1989 era and their exhaustion
When the Soviet Union dissolved, a substantial part of the Western political establishment concluded that foreign policy had lost its organising principle. For forty years containment had supplied a single legible criterion — who the adversary was, what the dangers were, by what means they were to be met — and its disappearance seemed to leave a void. That fear, as will be shown, was unfounded: a strategy existed, it was formulated, and it held for a quarter of a century. But its principal instrument has long been misunderstood, because one is inclined to treat the liberalisation of trade as an essentially technical matter, the province of negotiators and economists, measurable in tariffs removed and volumes exchanged. It never was. The commercial opening the West promoted after 1989 was an economic instrument in the service of a precise and by no means neutral political premise: that economic integration would work upon authoritarian systems from within, as water wears away stone, generating wealth, middle classes, and finally a demand for representation, until those systems became liberal democracies — or, in the less ambitious version that nonetheless sufficed, actors with a stake in preserving the order that had enriched them. The reason this outcome appeared strategically decisive was not moral but security-related, and it follows from one of the most firmly established propositions of liberal thought: that two democracies do not go to war with one another, and that a world composed of democracies is therefore structurally safer. Free trade was, in the last analysis, a security architecture disguised as economic policy. Thirty years on, the two principal autocracies have not been transformed into liberal democracies: China has been integrated into the trading system without becoming either a democracy or a guarantor of the liberal order in Asia, and together with Russia it pursues designs alien to that order when not contrary to it. Which poses a question. If that was the grand strategy of which containment had been only one component, and if that strategy has not worked, what remains? What, today, is the grand strategy of the liberal democracies?