A Bipolar Future in Asia

The old “Washington consensus” described a post-Cold-War recipe for success for developing nations—chop regulations, spread the tax base, pour on foreign direct investment, etc. It became commonly conflated with the ideological commitments that characterized the 1990s kickoff of hyperglobalization. A specific program of fiscal discipline and trade liberalization diffused into dreams of an ever-more efficient, totally integrated global economy reinforced by multinational institutions and an almighty U.S.A.

But the American unipolar moment is over, and with it—after the Great Recession, failure in the Middle East, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, COVID, and war in Ukraine—the era of inevitable globalism. Now in Washington, a new consensus has started to emerge, as figures in both parties conclude that developed nations need industrial policy and protectionisms like tariffs to meet the challenges of the moment.

One challenge is bigger than the rest. China failed to behave as expected by the old groupthink—to emerge from the chrysalis of globalized trade-wealth a gossamer-winged liberal democracy. And now this very hungry caterpillar is wrecking everyone’s gardens. In the last two decades, China has grown into a great power that rivals the United States in its global reach and ambitions. International relations are bipolar now; as multilateralism looks increasingly fake and fragile, and the world increasingly divides along economic and military lines between U.S. and Chinese spheres of influence.  

A problem the United States faces, as I recently outlined through the lens of the vice presidential nomination of JD Vance, is whether the emerging new Washington consensus—that a trade war with the CCP must continue—also makes a shooting war inevitable. As Vance himself has said, “China should not make our stuff, and we should try to avoid war with China.”

Revision of the U.S.-China trade relationship, and skepticism that the normal function of international institutions can reconcile the two powers, has become bipartisan. And while there are prominent voices calling for regime change in Beijing—former Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger and former U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher recently argued in Foreign Affairs that there is “No Substitute for Victory“—what I have called the WWIII preparers, for now, remain a vocal minority. Instead, the politburo behind the Biden-Harris administration has pursued a policy that can perhaps be called America First with Green New Deal characteristics, protecting and investing in so-called clean energy production as it has retained tariffs on many Chinese imports and sought to “de-risk” U.S. industrial dependence on this strategic rival.

The nightmare of an Eagle and Dragon at war in the Pacific resists prediction and interpretation. We can better prepare for it, if the U.S. defense industrial base can figure out how to build anything on time—the first-in-class USS Constellation, a frigate line meant to become the backbone of Pacific Naval operations, is slated to be delivered three years late, in 2029. But such a conflict, with its risks of escalation, also represents a rupture in futurity, with too many branching potentialities for useful commentary.

But perhaps we can ask ourselves profitably what the world might look like if America were to win the trade war with China while keeping the peace. What would it mean in geopolitical terms for the U.S. to succeed at—not a full decoupling, in this case—but ending her dependence on Chinese manufacturing, and reestablishing herself as a productive powerhouse?

The global politics of today would remain largely unchanged. Bipolarity would persist, and, even under the most optimistic of speculative conditions, strategic competition would, too.

The chief concern of American policymakers is not only that the United States currently depends on a rival for critical supply chains—along with a host of security vulnerabilities inherent to business and science integration—but that the Chinese Communist Party, ruling Asia’s preponderant power, will dominate the Asian economic sphere. The world’s largest market area, the continent is home to almost two-thirds of humanity and, of course, other wealthy powers in their own right, such as India and Japan.

Even a United States rebuilding behind a big, beautiful wall of tariffs and protectionism would want access to Asia’s economies on bilateral terms, without CCP-imposed distortions. Indeed, under current trends, we might expect that in trading less with China, Americans will necessarily trade with other Asian nations even more.

And so bipolarity will persist in another, less specifically Chinese or even political way, too. In considering Asia’s scale and potential, it may behoove us to recall the late Samuel Huntington and the balance of civilizations. Even if China fails to dominate the Pacific by martial and economic means, or to further capture multinational institutions like the World Trade Organization or the U.N., Asia will remain, as an aggregated whole, an enormous sphere of influence with particular political and religious values foreign to the American-led West.

At the recent National Conservatism conference in Washington, D.C., during a discussion of India’s growing role in international affairs, Walter Russell Mead warned that Americans will have to recognize an Asian pole of influence on the world regardless of how the U.S. two-step with China proceeds. A multipolar Asia of independent nations may not a multipolar world make, in the classic international-relations sense, but it could still make up a kind of bipole, taken as a whole.

Here we move beyond the limits of an economic perspective. As the French intellectual Raymon Aron observed in 1955, we cannot speak of Asia as we do the West. It does not possess a unity, culturally or economically. India and China and Japan and Indonesia differ in deeper ways than do France and England, Germany and the United States.

Yet, at the same time, the Asian powers are in certain important ways deeply Westernized—some, like Japan, obviously so; others, like India and its ascendant Hindu nationalism, reaffirming Westernization with their explicit reaction against it. This tension is clearest perhaps of all in the CCP’s China, for as Aron put it: “Communism is par excellence a Western ideology, an ideology of history, action, and state power. Communism adopted by Asians is the last word in a significant Western movement in which Asians are taking back this Western ideology against the West. Still, they are adopting a kind of Western faith for the first time.”

Xi Jinping’s regime, with its emphasis on “Sinicization,” clearly recognizes this possibility of what we might term a spiritual unipolarity, and seeks to react against it. For, as Huntington wrote in his original “Clash of Civilizations” essay, “The very notion that there could be a ‘universal civilization’ is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another.” Yet the CCP’s commitment to technological development and technocratic rule continues a convergence with the trajectory of the West.

The old American expectation that economic integration with China would, in making China rich, transform China into a liberal democracy has turned out to be a fantasy. But the idea that growing commercial interdependence would prompt the two great powers to grow alike may not have been wrong. As political theorist N.S. Lyons argues in his magisterial essay “The China Convergence,” as an increasingly secular and materialist liberal regime in America clings to power with all the tools of the information age, its resemblance to the CCP only grows. Both are subject to a logic more fundamental than their ideological trappings.

Technological society—rationalized mass society subject to the apparent progress of technicity—has been the great survivor of the West’s wars of ideology, pushing aside religion and culture as Western regimes’ answer to humanity’s place in the natural order. The Asian powers seek to be modern states in this sense, and to maintain their civilizations. The Western world, which created this modernity, finds itself in the midst of a civilizational crisis of faith. It remains modern, but has become less Western.

The unipolar moment is dead; long live the unipolar moment. In American hard power terms, global hegemony turned out to be a blip, an accident of historical circumstance as the country found itself in 1989 the third-time victor in the West’s modern civil wars. An irresponsible elite squandered that hegemony, and so now we stumble forward into another era of bipolar geopolitics, which materially—with infrastructure and industry hollowed out—the U.S. appears evidently ill-prepared for. An emerging bipartisan consensus says it wishes to correct this.

If America succeeds and maintains the peace, the global future still remains within Homer’s mythic strait of Messina, between Scylla and Charybdis. This is true materially: Smaller powers will have to navigate in their own interests between the demands and desires of China and America as best they can—one thinks of Hungary and Vietnam. But it is also true spiritually, or civilizationally: As in China and India and Japan, Asian countries will continue their quest to be modern states but not Western, to uphold their cultural inheritances against the disruption of markets on the one hand and the corrosion of technology on the other.

Mirroring this, the West, and the U.S. in particular, may—given the chance to take the multipolarity of Asia seriously, on its own terms—more easily rediscover what makes it the West, and America. Economic protectionism, strategic diplomacy abroad, rebuilding at home—these could be foundations for national renewal. Or, the prospect of war averted, the walls might come down, as all succumb to the old dream again, of global economic efficiency and base animal comfort.