The clash of…ideologies

I’ve just read Robert Kagan’s latest book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams. It can probably be seen as a superior, though more brief, meta-narrative of the strategic future, but more qualified and careful than other blockbusters, such as Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations or the various over-confident predictions of American decline, Europe’s rise or the Asian century.

The whole game of predicting the winners and losers of strategic competition over the next century is mightily difficult. Few other than de Tocqueville get it right.

There is one point that bugged me, though. Kagan’s overall argument is that the world will broadly re-divide along the fault line of autocracies and democracies. This is a non-trivial argument, as Kagan advises John McCain’s foreign policy. To his credit, Kagan acknowledges the other kinds of relationships between states that complicates his vision, such as the powerful role of energy needs and economic interdependence.

But ultimately, it will be a profound difference over world order, particularly the issue of sovereignty, that will set the likes of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation against an evolving Concert of Democracies.

One example he repeatedly uses is the huge multinational naval exercise that recently happened in the Bay of Bengal, where the likes of the US, Singapore and Australia demonstrated their tight affiliations.

The problem is, Australia also sells uranium to China. With its political hat on, it may feel oriented more to Washington than Beijing. But with its economic hat on, if the price is right, it has a lucrative resource that is almost irresistible to sell.

Kagan might respond that the democratic link will ultimately outweigh the economic one. After all, two of the most interdependent economies in the world were Germany and Britain on the eve of World War One. But how confident can we be that one impulse will outbid the other?

Strategic cultures are messy, contradictory things, full of ambiguity and conflicting interests. Dicatorships and democracies do not necessarily line up neatly in international conflicts, I believe statistical research illustrates, and a large part of Australia’s history for decades was its cosy relations with the Jakarta dictatorship, even while formally aligned in the cause of democracy during the Cold War.

Overall, its not clear that searching for the major leitmotif is the best way to forecast the future. Maybe we should switch to the different internal lines of conflict and competition within each society, to recognise the genuine incoherence of much foreign policy. Otherwise, this latest blockbuster futurology will be mentioned in the same ironic breath that meets Fukuyama, Huntingdon and Khanna, not to mention Kruschev.