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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 05/02
Right Makes Might: Freedom and Power in the Information Age
David C. Gompert
Institute for National Strategic Studies
National Defense University
May 1998
Introduction; Freedom, Power, and the Rise of China
China's emergence begs a fresh look at power in world affairs — more precisely, at how the spread of freedom and the integration of the global economy, due to the information revolution, are affecting the nature, concentration, and purpose of power. Perhaps such a look could improve the odds of responding wisely to China's rise.
The natural worry of Americans who came of age during the Cold War is that the makings exist for another bipolar confrontation. For decades, the growth of Soviet power relative to U.S. power was deemed so alarming that the United States would go to any length and any cost — trillions of dollars! —to preserve parity. From such history, American anxiety about China should surprise no one, not even the Chinese.
The timing of China's ascendance is especially eerie: Exactly a century ago, German leaders convinced themselves that England had no right to deny equality to their rising state and would be Germany's main enemy for trying. The British regarded this German attitude, particularly the building of a high-seas fleet, as menacing. England's response — building dreadnaughts fast enough to stay ahead — gave German hawks the enemy they sought. The ensuing hegemonic rivalry spiraled into conflict. 1
The Anglo-German and U.S.-Soviet cases bear out the theory that the most destabilizing factor in world politics is the changing power relationships that result from differential rates of economic and technological growth. 2 Once convinced that relative power matters absolutely — because the strong can have its way with the weak — challenger and incumbent alike are drawn toward a showdown that can devastate other, more real human values, as in World War I and, but for the grace of God, World War III. Does this logic of relative power still explain world politics? Does it apply to the rise of China?
Some take comfort in the fact that China cannot amass enough power to rival the United States for several decades. 3 Yet Chinese economic growth appears sustainable; requisite investments are being made; support for economic reform runs deep; and the potential for mobilizing human resources is awesome. The Chinese are likely to maintain parallel, proportional growth in military power. To them, national modernization presents an opportunity to ensure that China is never again molested by foreign powers as it was in the past two centuries. Moreover, unlike the Japanese, the Chinese have no political reason to omit military strength from their portfolio of power.
Whether and how China will challenge the United States and how the latter should react are questions that cannot be deferred until Chinese power nearly matches U.S. power. It is the anticipation — the Germany and England of 1898 — that sets the logic. Opinions already abound about the implications, ranging from the view that the United States and China are headed for a collision to the view that the United States, using geopolitical agility rather than confrontation, can balance and moderate Chinese power. 4
The rise of China is a puzzle of capabilities and intentions. Veterans of the Cold War were taught to respond to capabilities, not intentions. Because intentions can be murky and fluid, potentially threatening capabilities can never be assumed to be benign. But there is a deeper reason to be concerned about capabilities. To the extent that power is an end in itself in world politics, or the hard currency needed to gain other ends, capabilities define strategic conditions. Given the weakness of international law, power is presumed to be dangerous unless it is balanced. Growing power reveals ambition. It is resisted by status quo powers, lest their own positions decline relatively. For the system as a whole, power shifts can be disastrous, as can clumsy strategies to block such shifts. The world went to war, in part, because of Anglo-German hegemonic competition, and later split in half because of U.S.-Soviet confrontation.
The United States has shown that its unrivaled power is threatening only to those who, by broad consensus, need to be threatened, e.g., Iraq and Serbia. As a rule, Yankees are too pragmatic to be power-hungry. Yet their self-righteousness motivates them to oppose the growth in power of any state they think might be irresponsible. The United States will resist the rise of an Asian hegemonic threat not only to protect concrete U.S. interests in Asia, but also out of a conviction that only it can be trusted with superiority. Enthusiasm among some American thinkers for a unipolar world springs not from the urge to dominate but from faith in the goodness of American power. 5
But what if the information revolution has turned the relationship between capabilities and intentions on its head? What if nations of "good intention" — Iet us say, democracies given to responsible international behavior — are inherently more capable? Suppose that democracies are not only disinclined toward aggression, as is widely accepted, but also more able to build national power, by virtue of their economic and political openness. Imagine, further, that joining the existing democratic powers in a community of interests and values is the surest path any nation can take to growth, success, and power. If, in fact, the information revolution has such effects, the prospect of a mighty but hostile China would be remote. Increased Chinese capabilities would be accompanied by restraint, not increased belligerence.
This essay examines the relationship of intentions and capabilities — more precisely, of openness and power — in the information age. China is the case in point; but the query is a general one. Its hypothesis is that although power remains important in world politics, globalization has transformed its character, correlates, and consequences: Power now depends on freedom.
Notes
Note 1. Robert Massie, Dreadnaught: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991). Back
Note 2. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Back
Note 3. Joseph S. Nye, Survival 39, no. 4 (Winter 1997-98): 65-79. Back
Note 4. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997); and, Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Back
Note 5. Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1991): 23-33; and, Zalmay Khalilzad, "Losing the Moment," Washington Quarterly 2, no. 18 (Spring 1995): 87-105. Back
