SPRING 2023

Adam Posen,
Eswar Prasad,
and Katherine Tai
with dueling
perspectives
on the rise of
protectionism.
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Carbon dioxide removal
is essential to achieve
global climate goals,
and the Global South Read FP Analytics’
new synthesis report

is leading the way

“Mobilizing to Scale
Solutions for Carbon
Removal” to explore
key points of agreement
Foreign Policy, in partnership with Thunderbird School of Global
and learn how these
Management at Arizona State University and the Presidency
efforts will help inform
of Kenya, convened experts, technologists, policymakers, and other projects around
leaders at COP27 in November to discuss how the Global Carbon the world: fpanalytics.
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 Cover Stories
35 Trade-Off
Why current U.S. industrial policy is
not just misguided but likely to backfire.
ADAM P O SEN
SPRING 2023
42 Zero-Sum Game
Shockwaves have shredded the
Arguments globalization script, with profound

6
consequences for poorer countries.
Time to Plan for Russia’s Collapse
E S WA R P R A S A D
A L E X A N D E R J. M O T Y L

9 What Putin Got Right 47 Protect and Defend

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai
S T E P H E N M . WA L T
counters accusations of unfair competition.

12 Change the Way We Study Russia R AV I A G R AWA L

A RT E M S H A I P OV A N D
Y U L I I A S H A I P O VA
Objects of the Global Moment
14 Ukraine’s War Has
Made Europe a Home 53 Face Masks Are Our
CAROLINE DE GRUYTER
COVID-19 Memorial
BLAKE SMITH
15 Tie India to the West
C . R A JA M O H A N 56 Aviators Make Joe Biden
an All-American Badass
17 The Philippines Is VIRGINIA P OSTREL
America’s New Star Ally
DEREK GROSSMAN 58 A Tank by Any Other Name
ELLIOT ACKERMAN
19 Beijing Needs to Junk
Its Economic Playbook
Z O N GY UA N Z O E L I U
Review

22 ‘Strategic Ambiguity’ Has 61 What Marvel Teaches

the U.S. and Taiwan Trapped Us About Geopolitics
R AY M O N D K U O One is a fantasy universe mostly invented
in the 1960s—and the other has Spider-Man.
24 How Africa Can Avoid D A N I E L W. D R E Z N E R
Getting Scrambled
H O WA R D W. F R E N C H
65 Trysts With Sri Lanka’s Ghosts
A Booker Prize-winning novel excavates
26 Corruption and Misrule Made memories of the country’s civil war.
Turkey’s Earthquake Deadlier V.V. G A N E S H A N A N T H A N
GONUL TOL
68 Why Is Adam Smith
27 Unconditional U.S. Support Still So Popular?
of Israel Fuels Extremism Debates about the Scottish economist have
T A R I Q K E N N E Y - S H AWA
raged with special passion in the United States.
ASHLEY LESTER
29 Can Lula Rein In Brazil’s Military?
OLIVER STUENKEL
85 Quiz
Cover illustration by DOUG CHAYKA SPRING 2023 1
FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS
Gonul Tol is the founding director Tariq Kenney-Shawa is a U.S. policy
of the Middle East Institute’s Turkey fellow at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian
program and author of Erdogan’s Policy Network. He holds a master’s
War: A Strongman’s Struggle at degree in international affairs from
Home and in Syria. Columbia University.

Adam Posen is the president of the Eswar Prasad is a professor of

Peterson Institute for International trade policy at Cornell University’s
Economics and author or editor of Dyson School and senior fellow at
seven books, including Restoring the Brookings Institution. He is the
Japan’s Economic Growth and Facing author of The Future of Money: How
Up to Low Productivity Growth. the Digital Revolution Is Transforming
Currencies and Finance.

Virginia Postrel is a visiting fellow at V.V. Ganeshananthan is a novelist

Chapman University’s Smith Institute and member of the board of the
for Political Economy and Philosophy, American Institute for Sri Lankan
contributing editor for Works in Progress, Studies. She is the author of
and the author of four books, including Brotherless Night and Love Marriage.
The Power of Glamour and, most recently,
The Fabric of Civilization.

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FROM THE EDITOR

REMEMBER WHEN COVID19 shut the whole world down?

Memories of that period may be fading, but the pan-
demic has in fact altered how nations behave. Scarred
by the experience of scarcity, countries have begun to
safeguard their supply chains and focus on local pro-
duction instead of trade. Big economies, in particular,
have embarked on historic spending sprees, building
out infrastructure and favoring domestic business over
global competition. It’s a new era of industrial policy.
The decline of trade isn’t new, of course. So-called
de-globalization has been underway since the finan-
cial crisis that began in 2007. But the pandemic
sharply accelerated it and made geopolitics a cen-
tral factor in economic policy, giving rise to neolo-
gisms such as friendshoring. Today, perhaps more
than ever, trade policy is foreign policy.
The question is whether this new economic trend
is good for the world. Answers vary—sometimes
sharply—and Exhibit A in the debate is Washington’s
recent decision to direct more than $400 billion of
investment and subsidies toward green energy and
semiconductors. Europe’s capitals have been quick
to brand the United States’ moves as protectionist.
Fine, but one also has to acknowledge the benefits
that will come from a giant injection of cash into
technologies that might just save the planet.
Part of the impetus for the White House’s policies
is to compete with—and maybe even cut off—China.
With economics converging on geopolitics, FOREIGN
POLICY has to wade in. So we asked Adam Posen,
the president of the Peterson Institute for Interna-
tional Economics, to assess where U.S. economic
policy is headed (Page 35). Posen’s argument isn’t
against industrial policy—which has its benefits, he
writes—so much as it is against how Washington is
prioritizing domestic manufacturing over foreign
competition. The United States’ moves to withdraw
from trade with China, spark a subsidy race, and max-
imize local production over the global development
of new technologies, Posen argues, fly in the face of
poorer countries are destined to suffer, Prasad writes.
What about the Biden administration’s take? It
wouldn’t be fair to air out all these criticisms with-
out giving the White House a chance to rebut, so I
sat down for an FP LIVE interview with U.S. Trade
Representative Katherine Tai, and a transcript of
that conversation appears in this issue (Page 47).
Tai asserts that her government’s policies are the
result of democratic debate and wrangling; hers
is an admission that politics is a different beast,
and necessarily more practical, than the theoret-
ical science of economics. But she also makes an
eloquent case for how her government is setting
out to “de-risk”—and not de-globalize—in what was
already an unequal world, made more unfair by the
rise of a country that doesn’t play by the same rules
as everyone else. (I had to push her to say China.)
Is Posen, Prasad, or Tai correct? Read on and decide
for yourself.
As always, there’s lots more in our Spring 2023
issue, beginning with our sharpest arguments from
around the world. And consider our collection of
essays on objects that define the world today—masks,
tanks, and Joe Biden’s aviators—a chaser to the brac-
ing shot of industrial policy debate.
As ever,
ORIANA FENWICK ILLUSTRATION

centuries of economic theory.

Cornell University’s Eswar Prasad considers the
effects on smaller economies (Page 42). As China,
Europe, the United States, and even countries such as
India embrace industrial policies—downplaying free
trade in the process—many emerging markets and Ravi Agrawal

4
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ARGUMENTS
ASIA & THE PACIFIC | CHINA | MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA | AMERICAS
EUROPE

The sun sets behind

the Kremlin and St. Basil’s
Cathedral in Moscow
on April 19, 2022.

Time to Plan
ver since Russia’s failed considering the potential for Russia’s
attempt to take Kyiv and collapse and disintegration.

for Russia’s
install a puppet govern- In fact, the combination of a failed
ment in the early days of war abroad and a brittle, strained system
KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Collapse
the war, a defeat for the
Kremlin in Ukraine has looked increas-
ingly likely. What’s stunning, there-
fore, is the near-total absence of any
discussion among politicians, policy-
By Alexander J. Motyl makers, analysts, and journalists of
the consequences of defeat for Russia.
It is a dangerous lack of imagination,
at home is increasing the likelihood of
some sort of implosion with every pass-
ing day. Whether or not this will be good
for the West, it’s an outcome policy-
makers should prepare for.
There are various scenarios for what
might happen in Russia after defeat in
Ukraine. Most likely is Russian President

6
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Vladimir Putin’s departure from office,
followed by a vicious power struggle
among right-wing nationalists who
want to continue the war and destroy
the existing political hierarchy, author-
itarian conservatives with a stake in the
system, and a semi-democratic move-
ment committed to ending the war and
reforming Russia. We don’t know who
will win, but such a power struggle would
weaken the regime and distract Russia
from what remains of its war effort. In
turn, a weakened regime and malfunc-
tioning economy will bring disgruntled
Russians onto the streets—perhaps with
arms—and likely encourage some of the
non-Russian political units in the Rus-
sian Federation to seek greater self-rule;
candidates include Tatarstan, Bashkor-
tostan, Chechnya, Dagestan, and Sakha.
If Russia survives this turmoil intact, it’s
likely to become a weak client state of
China. If it does not, the map of Eurasia
could look very different.
Given Russia’s vast expanse, his-
tory of restive regions, and large non-
Russian ethnicities—all a result of cen-
turies of imperial conquest—the one
scenario that deserves much more atten-
tion is the disintegration of centralized
control and breakup of the federation.
There is a rich history of state collapse
following wars and other epochal events.
Napoleon’s empire collapsed after his
disastrous march on Moscow and sub-
sequent defeat at the Battle of Leipzig.
In 1918, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian,
German, and Russian empires all col-
lapsed in military defeat. People, deci-
sions, and policies all played a role, but
ultimately it was war and the attendant
economic and social crises that pushed
these states over the edge.
Consider, as well, the dissolution
of the Soviet Union, an outcome very
few Russians wanted or even imagined
when Mikhail Gorbachev took power as
leader of the Soviet Communist Party
in 1985. As late as early 1991, a major-
ity of Soviet citizens voted in a refer-
endum to retain the union. True, all
the republics, including Russia, had
8
declared sovereignty in 1990, and all
but Russia declared full independence
in the aftermath of a failed hard-liner
coup in 1991. But the system collapsed
primarily because Gorbachev tried to
rejuvenate the Soviet Union by disman-
tling its core features—totalitarianism
and central planning—thereby setting
political, social, and economic forces in
motion that ultimately compelled most
of the republics to seek refuge from the
chaos in autonomy and independence.
If today’s Russia collapses, it will have
little to do with the Russian elite’s will
or Western policies. Bigger structural
forces are at work. Putin’s Russia suf-
fers from a slew of mutually reinforc-
ing tensions that have produced a state
that is far more fragile than his brag-
gadocio would suggest. They include
military, moral, and economic defeat
in the war—but also the brittleness and
ineffectiveness of Putin’s hypercentral-
ized political system; the collapse of
his macho personality cult as he faces
defeat, illness, and visible signs of aging;
the gross mismanagement of Russia’s
petrostate economy; untrammeled cor-
ruption penetrating all levels of soci-
ety; and the vast ethnic and regional
cleavages in the world’s last unrecon-
structed empire. Few may desire Rus-
sia’s dissolution today, but it’s not too
difficult to imagine a scenario where
growing political, economic, and social
instability will, at some point, compel
Russia’s constituent units to seek safety
in independence.
Under today’s conditions, it may only
take a trigger to push the system toward
collapse. The failed war with Ukraine
could very well be the spark that ignites
the frayed timbers of Russia’s institu-
tions. Of course, sparks are unpredict-
able, and Russia could weather the
current crisis and survive in its present
form, whether under Putin or a succes-
sor. But even if it does, it will be severely
weakened as a state, and all the struc-
tural tensions will remain. Putin may
even suspect this. In his 2023 New Year’s
address, he invoked the war’s potential
threat to Russia’s independence—some-
thing he has not said before.
But if the spark does come, would
a likely Russian collapse be destabi-
lizing and violent, perhaps including
civil war? Marlene Laruelle, the direc-
tor of the Institute for European, Rus-
sian, and Eurasian Studies at the George
Washington University, thinks so. “A
collapse would generate several civil
wars,” she said, as “new statelets would
fight with one another over borders and
economic assets.” Meanwhile, Moscow
elites “would react with violence to any
secessionism.”
Similarly, former U.S. Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger has argued that
“the dissolution of Russia or destroy-
ing its ability for strategic policy could
turn its territory encompassing 11 time
zones into a contested vacuum.” Rus-
sian groups might turn on one another
and use violence, while outside pow-
ers could use force to expand their
claims. “All these dangers would be
compounded by the presence of thou-
sands of nuclear weapons,” Kissinger
wrote in December 2022. The best
course of action, he advised, would be
to avoid rendering Russia “impotent
by the war,” instead including Russia
in a “peace process” whose details and
enforceability remain nebulous.
Laruelle’s and Kissinger’s prophecies
are worst-case scenarios that need to be
taken with a huge grain of salt. History
shows us that while imperial collapse
is often chaotic for the countries doing
the collapsing, the outcome is not
always bad for their neighbors or the
rest of the world. Napoleon’s demise
ushered in an era of relative peace
in Europe. The breakup of Austria-
Hungary saw some initial fighting,
including between Poles and Ukrai-
nians, but conditions stabilized after
a few years. Even the Soviet collapse
was remarkably peaceful—most likely
because the newly independent former
Soviet republics and the newly sover-
eign European satellite countries all
had long-standing borders, functioning

administrations, and their own elites
ready to build or rebuild states.
On the negative side of the ledger, the
Ottoman Empire’s collapse led to hor-
rific fighting between Turks and Greeks;
the Russian Empire’s collapse spawned
conflict from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific
Ocean; and the German Empire’s fall in
1918 arguably led straight to World War II.
Which of these trajectories might
apply if Russia were to collapse? No
one—including Laruelle and Kissinger—
knows, and the history of empires shows
that both relatively peaceful transitions
and violent conflagrations are possible.
Pessimists will point to the likeli-
hood that a rump Russia would fight
wars with secessionist states. Opti-
mists would counter that Russian
forces will be degraded after their
defeat in Ukraine and in no posi-
tion to fight on multiple fronts. Pes-
simists might argue that new states
in the North Caucasus or elsewhere
would fight one another, while opti-
mists would say that new states would
already have administrative bound-
aries, existing regional governments,
and ample economic resources (now
drained by Moscow) that would let
them avoid conflict with their neigh-
bors. Optimists might also say that
things can’t get any worse compared
with the genocidal war Russia just pur-
sued. Pessimists would counter that
they could get very much worse indeed
and point to Russia’s nuclear arsenal.
The only point of agreement among
observers is that a rump Russia would
be a likely candidate for civil war, not
least because of the existence of large
and well-armed private armies.
In the end, it’s inconsequential
whether you’re an optimist or pessi-
mist—we can only observe the unfold-
ing drama of Russia’s likely collapse.
Neither Western policies nor Putin
himself can do much to stem it. That’s
because Russia is already beset by
deeply rooted institutional crises, much
exacerbated by the man who made
Russia so brittle and unstable. It is Putin
who generated the likely spark to pro-
duce Russia’s demise.
That doesn’t mean the West should
just sit back. It’s imperative to prepare
for a possible disintegration. Laruelle’s
and Kissinger’s worst-case scenarios,
as unlikely as they are, should inform
policymakers as they hope for the best,
expect the worst, keep cool heads, and
prepare for contingencies. They should
avoid repeating the mistakes of the past,
such as trying to help a dying Soviet
Union survive and thereby prioritiz-
ing the needs of Russia over those of
its neighbors. The countries along
Russia’s border—from the Baltic states
to Central Asia—will be key to form-
ing a cordon sanitaire and containing
whatever instability takes place within
Russia. They will also be key to helping
Russia’s newly independent successor
states stabilize and behave with mod-
eration. Seen in this light, continued
strong Western support for Ukraine—
and key countries such as an eventually
free Belarus and Kazakhstan—is the
best guarantee that the aftershocks will
be minimized if Putin’s empire comes
to an end. Q then hoped that imposing these sanc-
ALEXANDER J. MOTYL is a professor
of political science at Rutgers
University-Newark.
What Putin
Got Right
By Stephen M. Walt
ussian President Vladi-
mir Putin got many things
wrong when he decided to
invade Ukraine. He exag-
gerated his army’s mili-
tary prowess. He underestimated the
power of Ukrainian nationalism and the
ability of its outmanned armed forces
to defend their home soil. He appears
ARGUMENTS
to have misjudged Western unity, the
speed with which NATO and oth-
ers would come to Ukraine’s aid, and
the willingness and ability of energy-
importing countries to impose sanctions
on Russia and wean themselves off its
energy exports. He may also have over-
estimated China’s willingness to back
him up. Put all these errors together,
and the result is a decision with nega-
tive consequences for Russia that will
linger long after Putin has left the stage.
But if we are honest with ourselves,
we should acknowledge that Russia’s
president got some things right, too.
None of them justify his decision to start
the war or the way Russia has waged it;
they merely identify aspects of the con-
flict where his judgments have been
borne out thus far. To ignore these ele-
ments is to make the same mistakes
he did: that of underestimating one’s
opponent and misreading key elements
of the situation.
What did he get right?
The Biden administration hoped that
the threat of “unprecedented sanctions”
would deter Putin from invading and
tions would strangle his war machine,
trigger popular discontent, and force
him to reverse course. Putin went to war
convinced that Russia could ride out
any sanctions the West might impose,
and he has been proved right up till
now. There is still sufficient appetite
for Russian raw materials (including
energy) to keep the economy going with
only a slight decline in GDP. The long-
term consequences may be more severe,
but he was right to assume that sanc-
tions alone would not determine the
outcome of the conflict for quite a while.
Second, Putin correctly judged that
the Russian people would tolerate high
costs and that military setbacks were
not going to lead to his ouster. He may
have begun the war hoping it would be
quick and cheap, but his decision to
keep going after the initial setbacks—
and eventually to mobilize reserves
and fight on—reflected his belief that
SPRING 2023 9
the bulk of the Russian people would
go along with his decision and that he
could suppress any opposition that
did emerge. The mobilization of addi-
tional troops may have been shambolic
by Western standards, but Russia has
been able to keep large forces in the field
despite enormous losses and without
jeopardizing Putin’s hold on power.
Third, Putin understood that other
states would follow their own interests
and that he would not be universally
condemned for his actions. Europe, the
United States, and some others have
reacted sharply and strongly, but key
members of the global south and some
other prominent countries, such as Saudi
Arabia and Israel, have not. The war
hasn’t helped Russia’s global image (as
lopsided votes condemning the war in
the U.N. General Assembly have shown),
but more tangible opposition has been
limited to a subset of the world’s nations.
Most important of all: Putin under-
stood that Ukraine’s fate was more
important to Russia than it was to the
West. It is by no means more important
to Russia than it is to Ukrainians, who are
making enormous sacrifices to defend
their country. But Putin has the advan-
tage over Ukraine’s principal supporters
when it comes to being willing to bear
costs and run risks. He has an advantage
not because Western leaders are weak,
pusillanimous, or craven but because
the political alignment of a large coun-
try right next door to Russia was always
bound to matter more to Moscow than
it was going to matter to people farther
away—and especially to individuals liv-
ing in a wealthy and secure country on
the other side of the Atlantic.
This fundamental asymmetry of
interest and motivation is why the
United States, Germany, and much of
the rest of NATO have calibrated their
responses so carefully and why U.S.
President Joe Biden ruled out sending
U.S. troops from the get-go. He under-
stood (correctly) that Putin might think
Ukraine’s fate was worth sending sev-
eral hundred thousand troops to fight
10
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a news
conference at the Kremlin in Moscow on Feb. 15, 2022.
and possibly die but Americans didn’t
and wouldn’t feel the same way about
sending their sons and daughters to
oppose them. It might be worth sending
billions of dollars in aid to help Ukraini-
ans defend their country, but that objec-
tive was not important enough for the
United States to put its own troops in
harm’s way or to run a significant risk of
a nuclear war. Given this asymmetry of
motivation, the United States is trying
to stop Russia without its own troops
getting directly involved. Whether this
approach will work is still unknown.
This situation also explains why
Ukrainians—and their loudest support-
ers in the West—have gone to enormous
lengths to link their country’s fate to
lots of unrelated issues. If you listen
to them, Russian control over Crimea
or any portion of the Donbas would be
a fatal blow to the “rules-based inter-
national order,” an invitation to China
to seize Taiwan, a boon to autocrats
everywhere, a catastrophic failure of
democracy, and a sign that nuclear
blackmail is easy and that Putin could
use it to march his army all the way to
the English Channel. Hard-liners in the
West make arguments like this to make
Ukraine’s fate appear as important to
people in the West as it is to Russia, but
such scare tactics don’t stand up to even
casual scrutiny. The future course of the
21st century is not going to be deter-
mined by whether Kyiv or Moscow ends
up controlling the territories they are
currently fighting over but rather by
which countries control key technolo-
gies, by climate change, and by politi-
cal developments in many other places.
Recognizing this asymmetry also
explains why nuclear threats have only
limited utility and why fears of nuclear
blackmail are misplaced. As Thomas
Schelling wrote many years ago, because
a nuclear exchange is such a fearsome
prospect, bargaining under the shadow
of nuclear weapons becomes a “compe-
tition in risk-taking.” Nobody wants to
use even one nuclear weapon, but the
side that cares more about a particular
issue will be willing to run greater risks,
especially if vital interests are at stake.
For this reason, we cannot entirely dis-
miss the possibility that Russia would
use a nuclear weapon if it were about
to suffer a catastrophic defeat, and this
realization places limits on how far we
should be willing to push it.
Does this mean we are succumbing
to “nuclear blackmail”? Could Putin
use such threats to win additional con-
cessions elsewhere? The answer is no,
MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
because the asymmetry of motivation
favors the West the further he tries to
go. If Russia tried to coerce others into
making concessions on issues where
their vital interests were engaged,
its demands would fall on deaf ears.
Imagine Putin calling Biden and saying
he might launch a nuclear strike if the
United States refused to cede Alaska
back to Russia. Biden would laugh and
The Lionel
Gelber Prize
2023 Finalists
The Lionel Gelber Prize is presented by the
University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global The world’s most
Affairs & Public Policy, in partnership with
Foreign Policy magazine. Named for the important prize
Canadian scholar and diplomat Lionel Gelber,
the Prize is awarded annually for the best
for non-fiction.
English-language book on international affairs. —The Economist

Slouching Towards Spin Dictators: The Revolution and Chip War: The Fight Overreach:
Utopia: An Economic Changing Face of Dictatorship: The Violent for the World’s Most How China Derailed its
History of the Twentieth Tyranny in the 21st Origins of Durable Critical Technology Peaceful Rise
Century Century Authoritarianism Chris Miller Susan L. Shirk
J. Bradford DeLong Sergei Guriev and Steven Levitsky and Scribner, an imprint of Simon Oxford University Press
Hachette Book Group (Basic Daniel Treisman Lucan Way and Schuster
Books) Princeton University Press Princeton University Press

Learn more about the shortlisted books and listen to author podcasts at:

www.munkschool.utoronto.ca/gelber
tell him to call back when he was sober.
A rival’s coercive nuclear threats have
little or no credibility when the bal-
ance of resolve favors the country being
threatened, and it is worth remember-
ing that neither the United States nor
the Soviet Union ever engaged in suc-
cessful nuclear blackmail during the
long Cold War—even against non-
nuclear states—despite the enormous
arsenals at their disposal.
There is one way in which this situa-
tion may be changing, however, and it is
not a comforting thought. The more aid,
weaponry, intelligence, and diplomatic
To repeat: None of the above sug-
gests that Putin was right to start the
war or that NATO is wrong to help
Ukraine. But Putin hasn’t been wrong
about everything, and recognizing
what he got right should shape how
Ukraine and its supporters proceed in
the months ahead.
STEPHEN M. WALT is a professor of
international relations at Harvard
University and columnist at FOREIGN
POLICY.
Shortly after the breakup of the Soviet
Union into its constituent republics in
1991, Russia set about reestablishing its
empire, piece by piece. These efforts
included Russian-instigated separatist
movements in neighboring countries,
military invasions, illegal annexations,
Q mercenary deployments, cyberattacks,
manipulated elections, the poisoning
of politicians, and massive disinforma-
tion campaigns. Inside Russia, which
remains a tapestry of lands and peoples
conquered and colonized under tsars
and communists, these efforts have
included warfare and mass atrocities,

support that the United States and NATO
provide to Ukraine, the more their repu-
tations become tied to the outcome. This
is one reason why President Volodymyr
Zelensky and the Ukrainians keep
demanding more and more sophisti-
cated forms of support; it is in their
interest to get the West tied as closely as
possible to their fate. I don’t blame them
for this in the slightest, by the way; it’s
what I would do if I were in their shoes.
Although reputational consequences
are often exaggerated, such concerns can
keep wars going even when vital mate-
rial interests are not at stake. In 1969,
U.S. National Security Advisor Henry
Kissinger understood that Vietnam was
of little strategic value to the United
States and that there was no plausible
path to victory there. But he insisted that
“the commitment of 500,000 Americans
has settled the issue of the importance
of Vietnam. For what is involved now
is confidence in American promises.”
Based on that belief, he and President
Richard Nixon continued U.S. involve-
ment in the war for another four years,
in a futile search for “peace with honor.”
The same lesson may apply to sending
Abrams tanks or F-16s to Ukraine: The
more arms the United States commits,
the more committed it becomes. Unfor-
tunately, when both sides start thinking
that their vital interests require inflict-
ing a decisive defeat on the opponent,
ending wars gets harder, and escalation
becomes more likely.
Change
the Way We
Study Russia
By Artem Shaipov and Yuliia Shaipova
s a fact of history and
problem of contem-
porary geopolitics,
Russia’s nature as an
imperial power is incon-
trovertible. After World War I, the Rus-
sian Empire avoided the permanent
dismemberment that befell other
multiethnic land empires, such as
Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman
Empire. The Soviet Union not only
reconquered most of the non-Russian
lands that had declared independence
from Moscow in the wake of the 1917
Bolshevik Revolution—including
Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia,
and Azerbaijan—but even expanded
the empire in the course of World War
II, annexing Moldova, the western part
of Ukraine, and other lands. Nor did the
Soviet Union participate in the decol-
onization era. Even as the French and
British empires were being dissolved,
the Soviet Union was expanding its colo-
nial reach, tightening its grip deep into
Eastern and Central Europe with bloody
crackdowns and military actions.
as in Chechnya.
So why has this fundamental, foun-
dational fact about Russia been all but
ignored in the West for so long, includ-
ing among those who study and analyze
the region? Why has it taken a brutal
war of conquest for most Russia experts
in the West even to begin addressing
Russia’s nature as a vast colonial enter-
prise? Many continue to see Ukraine
and other former Soviet republics from
Moscow’s perspective, despite the obvi-
ous nature of Russian aggression since
the 1990s and long before.
It’s high time to decolonize Rus-
sian, Eastern European, and Eurasian
studies—and stop viewing the region
through Moscow’s imperial lens.
During the Cold War, Western uni-
versities, research institutions, and
policy think tanks opened numerous
centers and programs for Soviet, Rus-
sian, and Eurasian studies in a bid to
better understand the Soviet Union and
its heritage. However, these efforts had
a strategic flaw: Born in an era when
Moscow’s control reached far beyond
today’s Russian borders, these programs
inevitably framed the region through
a Moscow-centric lens. Today, even
as they have dropped “Soviet” from
their names, most of these programs
have inherited this old Moscow-centric
framing, effectively conflating Russia
with the Soviet Union and downplaying
the rich histories, varied cultures, and
unique national identities of Eastern

12

Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus,
and Central Asia—not to mention
the many conquered and colonized
non-Russian peoples inhabiting wide
swaths of the Russian Federation.
The continuity from Soviet-era area
studies matters. For example, the Insti-
tute for European, Russian, and Eur-
asian Studies at the George Washington
University lumps together all 15 former
Soviet republics. Chatham House’s Rus-
sia and Eurasia program looks at the
same countries minus the Baltic states
and Moldova, and Leiden University’s
Russia and Eurasia studies program
covers Russia and its former colonies.
Even if these larger institutes some-
times created new subdivisions, such
as GW’s programs on Central Asia and
Ukraine, the effect of studying these
nations and regions alongside Russia
highlights the latter as the main coun-
try to be studied and respected. This
unwittingly creates a paradigm whereby
Russia’s former colonies are perceived
as remaining within Russia’s orbit long
after the collapse of the Russian Empire
and Soviet Union. Imagine lumping
Algeria into France studies or creat-
ing a contemporary Britain and India
program—it would emphasize one
relationship over others, keep the old
colonial framing, and suggest that
one country is the logical appendage
of another as a subject of study.
Take Ukraine. Only a handful of U.S.
universities even offer a Ukrainian
history course, despite the fact that
Ukraine, a country of more than 40 mil-
lion people, has a culture, language, and
national tradition that have developed
differently from Russia’s for hundreds
of years. Especially since it regained its
independence in 1991, Ukraine presents
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
a coherent set of geopolitical choices
signaling to the world that it is an inde-
pendent state with a European identity
and orientation. Yet Western academia
continues to shoe-horn the country into
the Russian space.
Worse yet, the label “Eurasia” used
today by many university and think
tank programs echoes a central tenet of
Russian nationalism—that it’s Russia’s
destiny to dominate Eurasia from Por-
tugal to the Bering Strait. There is an
entire ideology of Eurasianism, whose
main advocate, Aleksandr Dugin, is one
of Russia’s most zealous fascist ideo-
logues. Dugin and his followers pro-
mote the creation of a Eurasian state by
reconquering Russia’s former colonies,
establishing Slavic and Orthodox domi-
nance, and marginalizing other nations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fan-
tastical vision of Russian history and
destiny increasingly echoes Eurasianist
ideas as well. When Ukraine, Georgia,
Moldova, and Belarus are placed under
the “Eurasia” label, the implicit mes-
sage is that these are former Russian
colonies remaining in Russia’s sphere
of influence. For Ukrainians fighting for
the existence of their nation and culture
against Russia’s genocidal aggression,
this label is simply offensive.
In many cases, Western academic
programs require students to study the
Russian language—often including
courses in Moscow or St. Petersburg—
before they have the option of studying
any of the region’s other languages, if
they are so inclined and if those lan-
guages are even offered. A similar prob-
lem affects cultural studies, including
literature and art, which rarely address
“Yermak’s
Conquest of Siberia,”
a 19th-century
historical painting
by Vasily Surikov,
depicts a Russian
attack on Siberian
Tatars.
ARGUMENTS
the many ways Russian works—includ-
ing the classics read by countless high
school and university students—trans-
port Moscow’s imperial ideology. This
only perpetuates the habit of looking
at the former Soviet-controlled and
Russian-occupied space through the
prism of the world’s last unrecon-
structed imperial culture. Unwittingly,
today’s Russian studies in the West still
replicate the worldview of an oppressor
state that has never examined its history
and is nowhere near having a debate
about its imperial nature at all—not
even among the Russian intellectuals
or so-called liberals with whom West-
ern students, academics, and analysts
generally interact and cooperate.
Finally, Western academia also pres-
ents Russia itself as a monolith, with
little or no attention paid to the coun-
try’s Indigenous peoples. By now,
many who study Russian history are at
least vaguely familiar with the Stalin-
era genocide of the Crimean Tatars
and their replacement on the penin-
sula by Russian settlers. But why not
shed more light on the Russian conquest
and subjugation of Siberia, one of the
most gruesome episodes of European
colonialism? Or Russia’s 19th-century
mass murder of the Circassians, Europe’s
first modern-era genocide? What have we
learned about the short-lived Idel-Ural
SPRING 2023 13
state, a confederation of six autono-
mous Finno-Ugric and Turkic repub-
lics crushed by the Bolsheviks in 1918?
Why not highlight Tatarstan, which pro-
claimed its independence from Russia
in 1990? Nascent efforts to give Russia’s
Indigenous peoples a voice have gotten
underway, including the Free Peoples of
Russia Forum that last convened in Swe-
den in December 2022, but they have
hardly registered in Western academia.
Not only are Western scholars’ interests
and relationships Russia-centric—they
are Moscow-centric. It’s as if Russia’s
highly diverse regions do not exist.
What should be done in practice to
decolonize Western studies of Russia
and the region?
First, universities and think tanks on
both sides of the Atlantic should strike
“Eurasia” out of their program names,
not least because it is a geopolitical con-
cept straight out of Russian far-right
nationalism. There is no shortage of
more appropriate terms to designate the
countries being studied. For instance,
geographical terms such as Eastern
Europe, Baltics, South Caucasus, and
Central Asia could easily be used.
Second, existing centers of Russian
studies should refocus their attention
to reflect the history and contemporary
experiences of Indigenous peoples liv-
ing in today’s Russian Federation. In
an academic world that is everywhere
addressing issues of diversity, represen-
tation, and respect, this is long overdue
and morally right. It would allow the
world to see Russia for what it actually
is: an empire made up of multiple peo-
ples craving a voice, agency, opportu-
nities, and freedom.
Third, we need to establish and
strengthen institutions that study
Russia’s former colonies. This would
include Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar
studies, Belarusian studies, Georgian
studies, Moldovan studies, and so on.
This will allow academic circles and
wider audiences to obtain a better under-
standing of the region and defy Russian
propaganda about “historically Russian
14
lands,” as the actual history of these
peoples, states, and national identities
finally comes to light in the West. A great
example of this approach is Cambridge
University’s Ukrainian studies program.
These efforts are necessary, but they
can only be the beginning in removing
Russian imperial narratives from the
Western academic and mental space.
They are a good start toward respecting
diversity, upholding norms of peace-
ful coexistence, learning history, and
eventually getting rid of Russia-centric
regional studies as we know them. Since
language is the mirror of thought, we
need to start mending the paradigms
that cloud our thinking of what Russia
and its neighbors really are. Q and its direct and indirect fallout—is
ARTEM SHAIPOV is a member of
the Aspen Institute’s NextGen
Transatlantic Initiative, and
YULIIA SHAIPOVA is a Ukrainian
parliamentary advisor and team lead
at the Centre for Economic Recovery.
Ukraine’s
War Has
Made Europe
a Home
By Caroline de Gruyter
n The Spirit of the Laws, published
in 1748, the French philosopher
Montesquieu argued that one of
the main elements binding the
Dutch provinces together was
their resistance to the Spanish crown.
Likewise, what unified Swiss cantons was
resistance to the Holy Roman Empire.
A similar process is now underway
in Europe as a result of Russia’s aggres-
sion in Ukraine.
In a Eurobarometer poll released in
January, 72 percent of citizens living
in the European Union said their coun-
try’s membership in the EU was ben-
eficial. That is the highest score in a
long time—Eurobarometer has been
asking the same question since 2005.
In 2010, just 50 percent of Europeans
thought their country benefited from
EU membership. Since then, slowly but
steadily, the percentage has been creep-
ing up, plateauing at 72 percent in 2020.
Inversely, today 22 percent say their
country does not benefit from mem-
bership. In 2010, that was almost twice
as much, at 39 percent.
Clearly, something interesting is hap-
pening here. Geopolitical turbulence—
mostly caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine
putting the EU under severe strain. It
has forced the 27 member states to argue
about sanctions, weapons deliveries,
and many other difficult issues. At the
same time, this situation has seemed to
unleash forces in the opposite direction,
too. A poll by the European Council on
Foreign Relations released in February
also showed that in Europe, the war is
increasingly seen not as an attack on a
neighboring country but as an assault
on the entire continent.
National politicians still regularly
complain about the loss of national sov-
ereignty, and political commentators
frequently predict the implosion of a
hopelessly divided EU. Yet more and
more European citizens think the EU is
good for them. And they do not define
the European interest just in economic
terms anymore. Here, too, a fundamen-
tal shift is underway. Europeans used
to tell pollsters that the benefit of their
country’s EU membership was mainly
economic. Another positive aspect, they
said, was that it fostered cooperation
between their country and others in
Europe. Nowadays, with war in Ukraine
raging, a different benefit has suddenly
appeared on the list: the fact that the EU
“contributes to maintaining peace and
strengthening security.” Thirty-six per-
cent of Europeans, according to Euro-
barometer, now think this is one of the

main benefits of EU membership, which
is 6 percentage points more than the year
before. In a country such as the Nether-
lands, which, like the United Kingdom,
has always emphasized the economic
benefits of membership and downplayed
the others, it is even 13 points higher than
the year before. In Sweden and Germany,
a similar shift is visible. It is telling that
even northern countries that have pre-
ferred to consider Europe as a market
have now started to look at the EU as a
security provider.
In 2013, during his state-of-Europe
speech in Berlin, then-European Council
President Herman Van Rompuy observed
that, over the years, Europe had turned
into a space “allowing goods, services,
and capital to circulate freely, allowing
persons to travel freely.” Drawing on the
works of the French philosopher Michel
de Certeau, he noted, however, that much
less attention has been paid to Europe as
a place. “For Europe to become a place, to
feel more like a home, our union must be
able, if not to protect people, at the very
least to respect the places of protection
and belonging.”
Now, 10 years later, this transforma-
tion of the EU from a space to a place
seems well underway: From a space to
roam around and explore diversity and
freedom, it is turning into a place where
citizens want to feel safe and at home.
For the past several years, Kai Gehring,
a professor of political economy at the
University of Bern, has studied European
identity. In a report published last year,
he described how a stronger European
identity was emerging, one “associated
with higher trust in EU institutions and
support for common policies.”
But this raises the question of what
holds together a common identity
when it comprises various heteroge-
neous groups. It is often assumed that
citizens mainly identify with smaller,
close-knit groups; the larger the group,
even if formed voluntarily, the weaker
the common identity. Yet the most
important units of political and eco-
nomic organization today are much
larger. The EU is just one example.
But in Europe’s case, for Gehring, the
answer was becoming clear: a common
external threat.
His research builds on the balance-
of-power theory, which holds that when
faced with a powerful adversary, less
powerful states will attempt to balance
against it by cooperating or integrating.
This theory is often used to help explain
both the origins of European integration
in the 1950s (helped by the communist
threat) and the growth of Euroskepti-
cism among national administrations
and the public at large in the post-Cold
War years (as a result of the disappear-
ance of that threat).
Gehring tested this mechanism
for the EU after Russia’s annexation
of Crimea in 2014 and found that the
identification with the larger group
had already significantly increased.
He noted that this European identity,
as he called it, had nothing to do with
citizens’ rational calculations or with
the fact that they now knew more about
Europe. On the contrary, the identifica-
tion with Europe was emotional—“an
unconscious, psychological response
rather than a rational one.” It is stable
and does not disappear immediately.
This would help explain why trust in
European institutions is rising, why
citizens attach more importance to
European values than before and have
become more positive about common
policies such as the issuance of common
EU debt or a European minimum wage.
Russian President Vladimir Putin,
former U.S. President Donald Trump,
and Brexit supporters thought they
could undermine or even destroy the
EU by bullying it. The opposite seems
to have happened. Far-right populist
leaders such as France’s Marine Le Pen
and Italy’s Matteo Salvini no longer call
for exits from the EU.
Vera Jourova, the European Commis-
sion vice president for values and trans-
parency, recently admitted that she had
been “scared” of former Trump strate-
gist Steve Bannon’s negative influence
ARGUMENTS
on the European parliamentary elec-
tion in 2019. Now, those fears are gone.
Jourova thinks that in 2024, when Euro-
pean voters go to the polls again, they
will vote for established, more moder-
ate parties because “the people now see,
especially in the time of crisis, it’s not
the time for [populist] experiments.” Q
CAROLINE DE GRUYTER is a Europe
correspondent and columnist for
NRC Handelsblad and columnist at
FOREIGN POLICY.
ASIA &
T H E PAC I F I C
Tie India
to the West
By C. Raja Mohan
ndia’s new enthusiasm for the
global south—it convened a
special summit of developing
nations in January and presides
over the G-20 with a develop-
ment-focused agenda this year—should
not be mistaken for reduced interest in
its quest to build stronger ties with the
West. On the contrary, the centrality of
the G-7 for India’s economic and geo-
political prospects is continuing to grow.
For India, the West is the most important
trading partner, the dominant source of
capital and technology, and the major
destination for the Indian diaspora.
Cooperation with the G-7—comprising
Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy,
SPRING 2023 15
Japan, and the United States—is also
critical for India to effectively deal with
the increasing challenges from China.
In fact, India’s dual orientations are con-
verging: Both its gradual but inexorable
alignment with the West and its renewed
engagement with the global south are
expressions of New Delhi’s reposition-
ing against Beijing’s growing influence.
The West, too, has an interest in a
stronger India that can counter growing
Chinese and Russian diplomatic, eco-
nomic, and military influence among
developing countries. Washington’s
recent offer of a range of technolo-
gies to India—including jet engines—
underlines the Biden administration’s
desire to strengthen ties with New Delhi
despite Indian ambivalence on Russia’s
war in Ukraine. The United States is also
eager to incorporate India into a new
network of global supply chains with
trusted partners.
Integrating India—soon to be the
world’s third-largest economy—into the
G-7 process is therefore the logical next
step for the West. After all, the G-7 is no
longer just a forum for major industrial-
ized countries to align economic policies,
as it was in the past. In recent years, it has
increasingly taken on the character of a
bloc of leading democracies cooperating
on global security and other important
issues, including more effective compe-
tition with China and Russia.
India’s long history as a leader of the
Non-Aligned Movement has given rise
to fears—or hopes, depending on whom
one asks—that New Delhi is returning
to its old habit of mobilizing the global
south against the global north. But there
are few indications that this is the case.
At the Voice of Global South Summit
in New Delhi in January, for example,
there was little anti-Western rhetoric.
For now, India’s immediate objective
for its outreach isn’t geostrategic—it’s
more about reconnecting with a global
constituency. New Delhi had built up
much goodwill across the global south
during the Cold War but has some-
what neglected these regions in recent
16
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President
Joe Biden greet other world leaders at the G-20 summit
in Bali, Indonesia, on Nov. 15, 2022.
decades. As India focused on finding its
place in great-power relations commen-
surate with its growing economic heft, on
reconnecting with its neighborhood, and
on joining Asian regional institutions,
engagement with the rest of the global
south fell low among India’s priorities.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in
particular, got flak at home for ignoring
India’s old partners in the Non-Aligned
Movement. But Modi’s interest in the
global south picked up in recent years.
The devastating impact of the COVID-
19 pandemic on the developing world,
as well as the effect of Russia’s war in
Ukraine on global food and energy secu-
rity, lent some urgency to—and provided
a window of opportunity for—India’s
reengagement with the global south.
In part, this push has been enabled by
India’s growing economy over the last
three decades, which has given New
Delhi more ways to aid (and invest in)
poor countries. This year, India’s presi-
dency of the G-20 is a major diplomatic
opportunity to build on this engagement.
That said, geopolitics is never far
behind. India’s growing concerns about
an assertive China have convinced the
Modi government not to simply cede a
large part of the developing world to Bei-
jing. Although India does not yet have
the resources that a richer China brings
into play, New Delhi could fill at least
part of the vacuum left by the West in the
global south. But it’s difficult to see India
have much more than a small impact
acting alone. If India were to partner
more closely with the West, on the other
hand, it could offer much stiffer compe-
tition to China—a geopolitical priority
for both India and the West.
India is not the only major power out-
side the trans-Atlantic West worried
about China’s deep penetration of the
global south. Japan, too, has woken up
to the danger. In a major speech during
his visit to the United States in Janu-
ary, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio
Kishida called on fellow G-7 leaders to
do more to engage the global south—
and show more humility when they do
so. Kishida also warned of the conse-
quences if developed nations continued
to neglect the global south: “Even if we
walk on a path which we believe to be
right, if the global south, holding inte-
gral places in the international arena,
turn their back, we will find ourselves
in the minority and unable to resolve
mounting policy issues.”
Japan’s expanding geopolitical pro-
file and newly muscular security poli-
cies have raised the value of Tokyo as
a partner for New Delhi. Japan, as the
LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGES
only Asian voice in the G-7, can also help
bring greater nuance to Western poli-
cies and move the group closer to India
on regional issues. Kishida has been
particularly concerned about the West’s

inability to convince large parts of the
global south of the dangers of Russian
aggression against Ukraine—a topic on
which India’s silence is largely a relic
of Soviet-Indian cooperation. Japan,
like India, also has no interest in see-
ing China as part of the global south.
In the last few years, Japan and India
have sought to work together in the
Indian Ocean region to counter China’s
expanding regional influence. India’s
participation in the Quadrilateral Secu-
rity Dialogue—along with Japan, Aus-
tralia, and the United States—is also
driven by growing security concerns
about China. At the bilateral level, too,
India’s economic and security cooper-
ation is increasingly oriented toward
Western countries.
It is no surprise, then, that New Delhi
has no desire to frame its outreach to
the global south in adversarial terms
with the West. Indian External Affairs
Minister S. Jaishankar has often talked
about India as a south-Western power—
rooted in the global south with “very
strong bonding” to Western and West-
aligned countries.
This brings us to the growing engage-
ment between India and the G-7 in the
last few years. While India was only occa-
sionally invited to G-7 summits (or G-8
summits before Russia’s expulsion from
the group) since 2000, it has become a
regular attendee in recent years. It par-
ticipated as a special guest at the 2019
summit in Biarritz, France, the 2021 sum-
mit in Cornwall, England, and the 2022
summit in Bavaria, Germany. This May,
Modi is expected to attend the group’s
next summit in Hiroshima, Japan.
Beyond the regular participation of
India, there has been some discussion
about expanding the G-7 to include a
few additional countries outside the
geographic West—without including
Russia and China, as in the G-20. Cur-
rently, Japan is the only member out-
side Europe and North America. One
proposal has been to turn the G-7 into
the “Democracy Ten” (D-10) with the
addition of Australia, India, and South
Korea. But the idea did not gain much
traction when it was last proposed
during the Cornwall summit.
The proposal deserves another look.
Strengthening the G-7 while keeping
its democratic geopolitical orientation
deserves more intensive discussion.
Drawing New Delhi away from Mos-
cow and enabling it to compete with
Beijing have long been U.S. objectives.
This should be a goal for the G-7 as well.
Tying India, especially, more strongly
to the G-7 by including it in the group
would also lend the West greater influ-
ence and legitimacy with the global
south. India is the key to breaking the
old East-West and North-South divides
that shaped so many of the debates and
conflicts of the 20th century. Q the South China Sea, and its mooring
C. RAJA MOHAN is a senior fellow at
the Asia Society Policy Institute and
columnist at FOREIGN POLICY.
The
Philippines
Is America’s
New Star Ally
By Derek Grossman
he election of Ferdinand
“Bongbong” Marcos Jr.
as Philippine president
in May 2022 has proved
exceptionally significant
for Washington’s security alliances in
the Indo-Pacific. Marcos, the son of
former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, has
prioritized the maintenance of healthy
ties to the United States just as his father
did during the Cold War. This marks a
sharp departure from the foreign pol-
icy of Marcos’s predecessor, Rodrigo
Duterte, who sought to systematically
dismantle the U.S.-Philippine alliance,
ARGUMENTS
decrease Manila’s reliance on Washing-
ton, and pursue new partnership oppor-
tunities with China and Russia.
Marcos’s return to normal alliance
relations with the United States was
not an abrupt or surprising decision.
Indeed, toward the end of Duterte’s
tenure, it had already become appar-
ent that the latter’s pro-China policies
were failing spectacularly, as Beijing
pressed ahead with its territorial expan-
sion against its maritime neighbors in
the South China Sea. China’s encircle-
ment of Philippines-administered Thitu
Island (also known as Pag-asa) with
hundreds of militia boats, its autho-
rization of the Chinese coast guard to
fire on non-Chinese vessels throughout
of more than 200 Chinese boats at the
disputed Whitsun Reef made Duterte’s
policy to cooperate with China in the
South China Sea appear not only out of
touch with reality but even dangerous
to Philippine national security.
Ultimately, Duterte was forced to
reverse course even while he was still
in power. After four years of staying
silent, he finally allowed the Philip-
pine Department of Foreign Affairs in
July 2020 to recognize a 2016 ruling
by the Hague-based Permanent Court
of Arbitration that rejected Beijing’s
claims to disputed waters. (Previously,
Duterte had ignored the ruling for fear
of undermining his own pro-Beijing
strategy.) In July 2021, he backtracked
on his plan to terminate the Philip-
pines-United States Visiting Forces
Agreement, a pact that allows the U.S.
military to enter and move around the
Philippines with less bureaucracy—to
facilitate joint training, for example.
Similarly, he refrained from revok-
ing the Enhanced Defense Cooper-
ation Agreement, which authorizes
U.S. forces to operate out of designated
military bases on a rotational basis.
All of these moves were a recognition
that the U.S.-Philippine alliance was
essential to countering China’s rising
assertiveness in the South China Sea.
SPRING 2023 17

Under Marcos, the Philippines’s
China problem has only worsened. Most
recently, in early February, the Chinese
coast guard directed a “military-grade
laser” at the Philippine resupply mis-
sion to Second Thomas Shoal, another
Philippines-controlled islet, prompting
Marcos to summon the Chinese ambas-
sador. Separately, according to analysis
by the Center for Strategic and Interna-
tional Studies’ Asia Maritime Trans-
parency Initiative, Chinese coast guard
patrols became more frequent in 2022.
The Philippines is stuck in these patrols’
crosshairs, with key targets being
Second Thomas Shoal and Thitu Island
as well as Scarborough Shoal, which
Manila lost to Beijing in 2012. In Janu-
ary, Marcos remarked that the tense sit-
uation “keeps you up at night, keeps you
up in the day, keeps you up most of the
time. … It’s very dynamic. It’s constantly
in flux so you have to pay attention to
it.” The next month, he remarked: “This
country will not lose an inch of its ter-
ritory. We will continue to uphold our
territorial integrity and sovereignty.”
And then there is a new concern: Tai-
wan. In an interview in January, Marcos
said China’s growing military pressure
against the island, which sits just north
of the Philippines, was “very, very wor-
risome for us.” In February, he took it a
step further, lamenting, “When we look
18
U.S. Secretary
of State Antony
Blinken arrives
for a meeting with
Philippine President
Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
at the Malacanang
Palace in Manila
on Aug. 6, 2022.
at the situation in the area, especially
the tensions in the Taiwan Strait, we can
see that just by our geographical loca-
tion, should there in fact be conflict in
that area … it’s very hard to imagine a
scenario where the Philippines will not
somehow get involved.”
In response to China’s aggressive
behavior, Marcos has taken several
steps that are positive not only for the
U.S.-Philippine alliance but also for
Washington’s broader Indo-Pacific
strategy. In February, U.S. Defense
Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Manila,
the capital, and met Marcos and key
Philippine defense leaders. The two
nations announced an expansion of the
Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agree-
ment from five to nine sites, which will
provide additional capacity for the U.S.
military to project power from the Phil-
ippines to handle future contingencies.
Also in February, Marcos visited
Tokyo to meet with Japanese Prime
Minister Fumio Kishida. The two
leaders signed a new Philippine-
Japanese agreement that allows the
Japan Self-Defense Forces to operate in
the Philippines on humanitarian assis-
tance- and natural disaster-related con-
tingencies. This was explicitly framed
as a first step, with both sides talking
about plans to upgrade the agree-
ment to include joint military training
in the future. Standing alongside
Kishida, Marcos proclaimed: “I can con-
fidently say that our strategic partner-
ship is stronger than ever as we navigate
together the rough waters buffeting our
region. The future of our relationship
remains full of promise as we continue
to deepen and expand our engagements
across a wide range of mutually benefi-
cial cooperation.” Manila’s deepening
of its defense relationship with Tokyo—
another key U.S. ally—greatly comple-
ments Washington’s regional strategy to
deter and counter Beijing in the South
China Sea and Taiwan Strait.
As encouraging as the start of Mar-
cos’s tenure has been for the United
States, these steps may be just the
beginning of a broader strategic shift.
While in Tokyo, Marcos revealed that
Japan and the Philippines aren’t only
cooperating with each other but also
are engaged in joint defense pact talks
with the United States. If it comes to
fruition, then such a pact could, in
Marcos’s words, be “a central element
to … providing some sort of stability in
the face of all these problems that we
are seeing around us.” Bilaterally, the
U.S. military could also expand defense
cooperation with the Philippines to
include not just the number of mili-
tary bases but also the authorization of
what U.S. troops can do at these sites,
such as stationing troops on a more
permanent rather than rotational basis.
It will also be geostrategically import-
ant to see what the Philippines does with
other U.S. security allies, particularly
Australia and South Korea. Australia
has a long-standing security partner-
ship with the Philippines, and it is the
only country other than the United
States that has both a Status of Forces
Agreement and Visiting Forces Agree-
ANDREW HARNIK/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
ment with the Philippines. Given their
common interests in countering Bei-
jing’s coercion throughout the Indo-Pa-
cific, it would be surprising if Canberra
and Manila did not enhance their
security cooperation during Marcos’s
tenure, which ends in 2027.

Meanwhile, South Korea under Pres-
ident Yoon Suk-yeol has also expressed
interest in enhancing security coopera-
tion with its traditional ally, the United
States, and other like-minded demo-
cratic nations. In practice, Yoon has
been cautious to avoid unnecessarily
angering Beijing, but he is nonethe-
less clear that he does not trust China,
which would seem to favor additional
security cooperation between South
Korea and the Philippines. In the past,
Seoul has been a significant provider
of military equipment to Manila, not
least because South Korean weapons
are highly interoperable with Philip-
pine military systems.
Nonetheless, there are clear limits to
Marcos’s approach. The U.S. military,
for instance, is very unlikely to regain
permanent U.S. bases in the Philip-
pines, as it had in the 1990s at Naval
Base Subic Bay and Clark Air Base. This
is mainly due to the Philippine Consti-
tution expressly outlawing foreign bases
on Philippine soil unless approved by
the country’s parliament, where such
a vote would be highly controversial.
Moreover, the Philippines, like vir-
tually every other small- and medium-
sized nation in the Indo-Pacific, seeks
to avoid getting trapped in the intensi-
fying great-power competition between
the United States and China. That will
likely keep any further security moves
incremental. After meeting with U.S.
President Joe Biden in New York in
September 2022, Marcos visited Bei-
jing in January to meet with Chinese
President Xi Jinping to discuss poten-
tial areas of cooperation in spite of the
ongoing conflict in the South China Sea
and heightened concerns over Taiwan.
Marcos is likely to continue to seek com-
promises to avoid conflict rather than
simply align fully with Washington.
Overall, however, the Philippines
under Marcos has undoubtedly and
pleasantly surprised U.S. policymakers.
Marcos appears to be just as pro-United
States as his father—and the opposite
of Duterte in many ways. That is more
than the Biden administration could
have hoped for in its wildest dreams. Q
DEREK GROSSMAN is a senior defense
analyst at the Rand Corp. and an
adjunct professor at the University
of Southern California.
SOUTH ASIA BRIEF: Michael Kugelman
writes a weekly digest of news and
analysis from India and seven
neighboring countries—a region that
comprises one-fourth of the world’s
population. Sign up for email newslet-
ters at ForeignPolicy.com/briefings.
CHINA
Beijing Needs
to Junk Its
Economic
Playbook
By Zongyuan Zoe Liu
espite China’s record-
breaking exports of
$3.59 trillion and 7 per-
cent export growth, the
government fell short of
its 5.5 percent GDP growth target for
2022. The economy, according to offi-
cial statistics, grew by only 3 percent,
one of the country’s worst performances
in nearly half a century—mostly thanks
ARGUMENTS
to the uncertainty caused by repeated
COVID-19 lockdowns.
After abruptly ditching zero-COVID
policies late last year, Chinese leaders
expressed their commitment to reviv-
ing the economy. But to do so, Chinese
leaders must move beyond the familiar
playbook that calls for boosting exports
and government investment stimulus.
Without first addressing the problems
of household underconsumption and
sluggish income growth, public pessi-
mism about the future may offset the
positive effects of export growth and
government stimulus, holding back eco-
nomic recovery.
Chinese household consumption
was a solid growth driver over the past
two decades, supporting nearly 40 per-
cent of Chinese GDP. China’s rising con-
sumer class was willing to spend more
on aspirational goods, confident that
their incomes would continue to grow.
They were right: The Chinese econ-
omy maintained an average 9 percent
annual GDP growth rate between 2000
and 2019. As a group of Gallup research-
ers observed using data from a 10-year
nationwide survey, about 3.5 percent
of Chinese households had annual
incomes of 30,000 yuan (about $3,800)
in 1997. This number skyrocketed to
more than 12 percent in just five years.
Researchers found a continued strong
consumer appetite for both must-have
items and discretionary fun.
Until roughly 2017, household con-
sumption growth never lost steam.
Yet during Chinese President Xi
Jinping’s second term, Chinese house-
holds experienced the worst slowdown
in consumption growth in a generation,
dropping from 6.7 percent during Xi’s
first term to 4 percent during his sec-
ond term—considerably slower than
GDP growth.
The gap between consumption
growth and GDP growth has widened
since COVID-19 hit. Before the pan-
demic, China’s real per capita consump-
tion grew at an average annual rate of
6.38 percent from 2013 to 2019, 59 basis
SPRING 2023 19
points below the average annual real
GDP growth rate of 6.97 percent. This
gap increased to 170 basis points from
2020 to 2022, when GDP growth dipped
sharply to 4.5 percent and consump-
tion plummeted to 2.8 percent, less than
half the rate before the pandemic. 2020
saw Chinese household consumption
experience the sharpest contraction
in growth since the 1990s, even though
China was the only major economy to
see economic growth that year.
As sharp as the pandemic’s impact
was, declining income growth has been
the real driver of shrinking consump-
tion during the Xi years. The average
nominal annual household disposable
income growth rate fell to 8.39 percent
from 2013 to 2022 from an average rate
of 11.04 percent from 2001 to 2012. Chi-
nese households are experiencing the
worst material stress as income growth
stagnates and are more insecure about
their economic security than at any time
since 1990. In November 2022, China’s
Consumer Confidence Index plum-
meted to a record low of 85.5 points.
China’s exports have boomed, but
that hasn’t helped ordinary households.
This suggests China cannot export its
way out of an economic slowdown
or stimulate its way toward an eco-
nomic boom. Boosting export growth
is important, but its marginal effects
at this point are limited. China became
the world’s largest exporter in 2009, and
in 2020 China’s share of global goods
exports reached 14.7 percent, more
than the shares of the United States and
Japan combined. China’s exports-to-
GDP ratio peaked in 2006 at 36 percent
and fell below 20 percent between 2016
and 2020. Even if China could increase
its service exports while maintaining its
dominance in goods exports, there is
only a narrow space for the exports-to-
GDP ratio to rise as China’s GDP grows
and supply chains relocate out of China.
The usual government solution to
hard economic times has been major
stimulus packages—but over the past
14 years, these have exacerbated local
20
government indebtedness, chained
financial stability to an unstable and
often corrupt property market, shrunk
fiscal space, and raised the amount of
credit necessary to stimulate growth
for future crisis response.
China’s two major economic stimu-
lus packages offered a temporary boost
but had long-lasting negative conse-
quences. In the wake of the 2008 finan-
cial crisis, the Chinese government
deployed 4 trillion yuan ($586 billion)
between November 2008 and December
2010. This stimulus boosted growth to
8.7 percent in 2009 and 10.4 percent in
2010, and it gave China the final push to
overtake Japan and become the world’s
second-largest economy in 2010.
However, this short-term growth
came at the cost of ballooning local gov-
ernment debts and rampant expansion
of local government financing vehicles
(LGFVs). These are investment compa-
nies owned and provided with capital
by local governments for the purpose
of issuing debt in bond markets and
financing property development and
other local infrastructure projects.
Because the primary lenders to LGFVs
have been banks, a large-scale default
of LGFVs could trigger contagion in
the banking sector. Additionally, debts
raised by LGFVs can be more suscepti-
ble to corruption because they are kept
off local governments’ balance sheets.
An employee wears a protective mask as he sits in the showroom
of an Apple store in Beijing after it closed on Feb. 1, 2020,
during the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak.
The 2015-16 credit expansion to save
the stock market amid a housing mar-
ket slowdown was estimated to have
cost at least 5 trillion yuan ($805.2 bil-
lion). Despite costing more, the effect
of this was weaker than the first round
of stimulus—and aggravated the leg-
acy problems of the previous 4 trillion
yuan in spending.
During the pandemic, the Chinese
government strongly encouraged local
governments to take advantage of the
special purpose bonds program—intro-
duced in 2015 as a form of off-budget
financing that local governments could
use to issue bonds and raise capital to
finance a particular policy or address
a certain problem—to front-load the
economy with more infrastructure
investments and public projects.
The result of a proactive fiscal pol-
icy since 2008 is that about a quarter
of Chinese provinces will spend more
than half of their fiscal revenue on debt
repayment by 2025, as former Chinese
Finance Minister Lou Jiwei warned.
Previous credit expansion schemes
also aimed to support major corpora-
tions, not to boost private consump-
tion or provide household support. As
a result, Chinese household income
growth and consumption growth fell
behind GDP growth. Although the U.S.
government’s pandemic relief mea-
sures were also primarily targeted at
KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES

corporations rather than households,
many American households received
greatly increased unemployment insur-
ance as a cushion. However, this option
was unavailable for the hardest-hit mil-
lions of unemployed migrant workers
and recent college graduates in China.
In this context, Chinese leaders’ shift
over the last year to prioritize private
consumption for economic recovery
is the right policy move. In April 2022,
the State Council released a report titled
“Opinions on Unleashing Consumption
Potential and Promoting Sustained Con-
sumption Recovery.” The report men-
tioned 20 measures in five areas to
promote consumption, providing imple-
mentation guidelines for local govern-
ments. Then, at the Central Economic
Work Conference in December 2022,
policymakers reaffirmed their intention
to prioritize supporting household con-
sumption over investment and export.
One way to interpret these policy
announcements is that they collectively
signal that Chinese policymakers have
recognized the urgency of correcting
China’s underconsumption problem.
If that is true, then this year could be a
watershed moment as the government
pivots toward prioritizing household
consumption over exports, which has
been China’s canonical growth strat-
egy since 1978.
But changing the course of govern-
ment priorities in China, especially ones
deeply mixed with local government
finances, can be a slow and tangled pro-
cess at best. And even if Chinese leaders
genuinely attempt to prioritize con-
sumption, they still face two primary
challenges: financial repression and
household balance sheet deterioration.
Since Deng Xiaoping, three gener-
ations of Chinese leaders have estab-
lished a system of financial repression
that suppresses consumption, forces
savings, and prioritizes export and state-
led investments. At the operational
center of China’s repressive financial
system are state-owned commercial
banks, whose primary customers are
state-owned enterprises and have lit-
tle experience promoting relationship
banking. Take the episode in 2022 when
Chinese banks offered loans to compa-
nies and then allowed them to deposit
funds at the same interest rate—or the
time when Chinese banks inflated their
loan numbers by swapping bills with one
another to meet regulatory requirements
for corporate lending. Both are evidence
that the only type of lending that Chinese
banks know how to do—and are allowed
to do in the current system—is lending
to enterprises, and when demand from
enterprise is weak, Chinese banks are
incapable of channeling credit to any-
one else, especially consumers.
The balance sheet of the average Chi-
nese household has gotten increasingly
dire over the last 15 years. Household
net asset growth has decelerated since
2010, a problem that worsened during
the pandemic. A report by Zhongtai
Securities, a Chinese securities ser-
vice firm, estimated that between 2011
and 2019, Chinese household net asset
growth rates dropped to around 13 per-
cent from close to 20 percent before
2008. During the pandemic, household
net asset growth sunk below 10 percent.
Most of this wealth is concentrated in
the country’s increasingly shaky prop-
erty sector. An urban household balance
sheet survey conducted by the People’s
Bank of China in 2019 showed that hous-
ing was roughly 70 percent of household
assets, with mortgage loans accounting
for 75.9 percent of total household debt.
This level of indebtedness was compara-
ble to the United States in the run-up to
the 2008 subprime crisis and the burst
of the real estate and stock market bub-
ble in Japan in the 1980s.
Between December 2008 and Decem-
ber 2022, the Chinese household debt-
to-GDP ratio increased from 17.9 percent
to 61.9 percent, equivalent to an annual
increase of 17.6 percentage points. Chi-
nese household debt reached an all-time
high of 62.4 percent of GDP in Septem-
ber 2021 and has since stayed above
62 percent of GDP. Research by the
ARGUMENTS
International Monetary Fund has shown
that higher household indebtedness
boosts consumption growth in the same
year but reduces it after two years—and
acts as a severe drag on consumption
even when incomes grow.
Household debt has also risen faster
than income growth. Between Janu-
ary 2007 and December 2022, Chinese
household debt increased from $517.66
billion to $10.86 trillion, amounting to
an annual compound growth rate of
nearly 22.5 percent. During Xi’s first two
terms, household disposable income
grew at an average annual real rate of
6.25 percent. In contrast, the house-
hold debt-to-income ratio increased
from 68.7 percent in 2013 to 161.5 per-
cent as of September 2022, higher than
the U.S. ratio of 119.8 percent. From 2011
to 2021, driven by fast-growing mort-
gages, the Chinese household lever-
age ratio increased by 33.8 percentage
points, the fastest increase in the world.
Between 2012 and 2021, household debt
increased at an annual rate of 18.3 per-
cent, whereas income rose by only 10
percent annually.
Fast-growing household debt, com-
bined with pandemic lockdowns, sal-
ary reductions, layoffs, and major
policy swings, has exacerbated Chi-
nese households’ financial insecurity.
The most unfamiliar—and most chal-
lenging—problem for Chinese policy-
makers is not decoupling or weakened
exports. The real test comes at home:
how to incentivize and persuade dis-
heartened Chinese families to contrib-
ute to economic growth by expanding
household consumption. The govern-
ment has previously mobilized house-
holds to boycott foreign goods or travel,
but can it mobilize Chinese people to
spend more when many have become
increasingly insecure about their eco-
nomic future? Q
ZONGYUAN ZOE LIU is a fellow for
international political economy at
the Council on Foreign Relations and
columnist at FOREIGN POLICY.
SPRING 2023 21
‘Strategic
Ambiguity’
Has the U.S.
and Taiwan
Trapped
By Raymond Kuo
ate last year, China dis-
patched 71 aircraft for
militar y maneuvers
around Taiwan, its larg-
est single incursion ever.
The incident came on top of hundreds
of flights over the past 18 months as
well as military exercises and missile
launches near the main island in the
wake of then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi’s visit in August 2022. Alongside
warnings of further reprisals, Beijing
has also increased its nuclear warhead
stockpile, deployed a hypersonic glide
vehicle, launched a third aircraft carrier,
and further modernized its military.
Meanwhile, the United States contin-
ues to debate how best to maintain the
status quo in the region, support Taiwan,
and deter a Chinese attack. Washing-
ton’s current policy is one of “strategic
ambiguity”—based on the theory that it’s
best to keep all parties guessing whether,
and to what extent, the U.S. military will
intervene in a war across the Taiwan
Strait. Is that still the appropriate strat-
egy to deter Beijing? Or should Washing-
ton publicly commit to Taiwan’s defense,
as former NATO Secretary-General
Anders Fogh Rasmussen has urged?
Strategic ambiguity typically is under-
stood as deliberately creating uncertainty
in Beijing and Taipei about whether the
United States would intervene in a war.
This supposedly creates dual deterrence:
The threat of U.S. intervention prevents
China from invading, and the fear of U.S.
abandonment prevents Taiwan from
22
sparking a war by declaring indepen-
dence, which China considers a casus
belli. This approach, supporters contend,
has kept peace for decades and prevented
entrapment, whereby the United States
unwillingly gets pulled into war.
Strategic ambiguity, however, may
rest on faulty concepts and little sys-
tematic evidence. The United States
has never officially articulated what it
means or adopted it as policy. At this
point, strategic ambiguity may be doing
more harm than good. And there are
good arguments that Washington might
consider for switching to a policy of stra-
tegic clarity—such as a NATO-style
security guarantee for Taiwan—instead.
Political science considers strategic
ambiguity a form of pivotal deterrence,
where one state prevents two others
from going to war against each other.
But this only works under three condi-
tions. First, the pivot (the United States,
in this case) must possess decisive mil-
itary power over the adversaries (China
and Taiwan). Second, both adversar-
ies must want war more than the pivot
does. (Otherwise, the pivot should sim-
ply line up with its preferred partner.)
Finally, neither adversary can be irratio-
nally committed to going to war. When
all three conditions hold, the pivot can
swing its decisive power against which-
ever country is upsetting the status quo.
Because it doesn’t commit to any partic-
ular course of action, both adversaries
are unsure about the pivot’s reaction
and therefore avoid escalation.
Across the Taiwan Strait today, the
first two of these conditions no longer
hold. The Chinese military budget has
increased fivefold since 2001, and Bei-
jing now fields the world’s largest mis-
sile force, the second-largest navy, and
the third-largest air force. According
to a Rand Corp. report, in 2017 China
already possessed parity with or even
an advantage over U.S. forces in five
of nine operational areas involved in a
Taiwan scenario. In deterrence theory,
the United States is no longer a pivot.
Beijing’s rising power also deters
Taiwanese adventurism. Taipei doesn’t
want a war because it knows that it will
be the first to suffer Beijing’s retalia-
tion. No major Taiwanese politician
has advocated declaring independence
from China since 2005. In any event,
Taiwan’s president has no constitu-
tional authority to unilaterally declare
independence, and solid majorities con-
sistently favor maintaining the status
quo for fear of a military reprisal.
As Beijing’s military capabilities
have increased, pivotal deterrence has
steadily faltered—exactly as the theory
predicts. In 1996, Beijing fired missiles
over the island to protest the then-
Taiwanese president speaking at his col-
lege reunion in the United States. But it
avoided further provocation after Wash-
ington sailed two aircraft carriers through
the strait. After Pelosi’s 2022 trip to Tai-
wan, China responded with military exer-
cises and missile overflights. Washington
restricted itself to verbal condemnation
and avoided any military displays, even
as the People’s Liberation Army contin-
ued its coercion and incursions.
Despite this, proponents cling to stra-
tegic ambiguity in large part because
they worry that an unconditional secu-
rity guarantee would enable Taiwan to
entrap the United States into going to
war against China.
But entrapment almost never hap-
pens. One scholar found only five pos-
sible instances since 1945, and in only
of them—Vietnam—was the United
States dragged into war. Countries
wriggle out of alliance promises by
attaching conditions, taking advantage
of ambiguity, employing legal language
tricks, or simply walking away. Wash-
ington could put guardrails on any
defense promises, such as mandatory
crisis consultation and nullification if
Taiwan declares independence. Even
NATO’s supposedly ironclad mutual
security guarantee is implemented
“in accordance with [each country’s]
respective constitutional processes,”
language specifically inserted by U.S.
negotiators. If the United States can

avoid entrapment by NATO, then it
likely can avoid it by Taiwan.
Further, strategic ambiguity is largely
irrelevant to whether China decides
to attack Taiwan. China “has already
priced in a full U.S. defense,” U.S. Sen.
Chris Murphy tweeted last August. Its
operational plans assume Washington
will intervene. U.S. and allied power—
not ambiguity—is what deters China.
Ambiguity by itself offers little addi-
tional benefit.
That means that if anything is likely
to deter Chinese aggression, it is fur-
ther improvements to Taiwan’s secu-
rity. Since U.S. intervention is essential
to defeating a Chinese invasion of Tai-
wan, Taipei must ensure that the United
States shows up, and arms sales are the
clearest and strongest indication of
U.S. support. Taipei purchases high-
end weapons systems, believing that
Washington’s willingness to sell these
platforms raises the likelihood that it
will step in to defend the island.
Analysts agree that Taiwan’s best
strategy is an asymmetric, porcupine
defense, which is embodied in a Tai-
wanese military plan called the Over-
all Defense Concept. The island would
bristle with mines and anti-ship, anti-
air, and anti-vehicle missiles, buying
time for the U.S. military to arrive. How-
ever, high-end equipment such as F-16
aircraft, heavy tanks, and submarines
are useless for this mission; they are
likely to be destroyed in any invasion’s
opening salvo. But Taipei cannot fully
switch to asymmetric defense because
strategic ambiguity leaves it uncertain
whether Washington will intervene.
This creates a U.S. problem in Taiwan-
ese politics. Former Taiwanese President
Ma Ying-jeou said last February, in the
CENG SHOU YI/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,
that “the Americans … will sell us weap-
ons and provide us with intelligence, but
they won’t send troops.” Kuomintang,
his political party, is skeptical of Wash-
ington’s intentions, prompting some
members to advocate greater autonomy
in Taiwan’s defense decisions. Other
experts go so far as to suggest accom-
modating China. This attitude shouldn’t
come as a surprise. Military alliances
allow small states to resist overwhelming
threats. Without them, countries tend
to bandwagon with their threatener to
avoid a hopeless war.
If this were to happen in Taiwan,
Washington would lose a critical part-
ner in strategic competition with China.
Beijing could use Taiwan as an “unsink-
able aircraft carrier” to project power
into the Pacific, choke off U.S. support
to Japan and South Korea, dominate
the Philippines, and further consoli-
date control over the South China Sea.
Strategic ambiguity seems to have
snared the United States and Taiwan
in a prisoner’s dilemma. Washington
wants Taipei to increase defense spend-
ing and implement its porcupine strat-
egy before making further, unspecified
commitments. Taiwan spends a larger
proportion of its government budget on
defense than even the United States, but
it wants to receive the U.S. commitment
its defense concept depends on before
further implementation. Taiwan’s will
to fight increases significantly if Wash-
ington intervenes. Each side’s strat-
egy hinges on the other’s actions, and
each side is stuck waiting while China
Taiwanese soldiers stand guard as flares are fired during
a live-fire drill in Pingtung, Taiwan, on Sept. 6, 2022.
ARGUMENTS
continues modernizing its military.
Strategic clarity may offer a way out of
this dilemma. Of course, any shift would
have to be implemented carefully, with
military preparations in place before
any public announcement of a U.S. com-
mitment. But as the weaker, threatened
party, Taiwan runs much greater risks
from closing the door on accommodat-
ing China; it would need private, con-
crete assurances that these risks would
be rewarded. These, of course, would
have to be tied to clear markers that Tai-
pei is actually implementing its existing
defense strategy.
Abandoning ambiguity might offer
the best chance for a superior Taiwan-
ese force posture that is aligned with
U.S. defense strategy. Moreover, as Tai-
pei enhances its asymmetric defenses,
the need for U.S. intervention decreases.
Ukraine’s successful fight against
Russia’s invasion demonstrates how the
right weapons, paired with an effective
strategy, can defeat a seemingly over-
whelming force at relatively little cost to
the United States and other NATO allies.
Strategic clarity would resolve the polit-
ical obstacles currently preventing Tai-
wan from adopting a similar posture and
would advance U.S. interests by improv-
ing Taiwan’s defense, lowering the risk
SPRING 2023 23
of a wider war, and containing China.
For its proponents, the idea of strate-
gic ambiguity seems to have become an
end in itself that has not adapted to the
disruptive growth in Beijing’s military
power—and logically cannot. The con-
ditions under which the policy worked
have evaporated with China’s rise. Q
RAYMOND KUO is a political scientist at
the Rand Corp.
CHINA BRIEF: FP’s James Palmer
explains the political drivers behind
the headlines in Beijing and shows you
the stories the West has missed. Sign up
for email newsletters at ForeignPolicy.
com/briefings.
MIDDLE EAST
& AFRICA
How Africa
Can Avoid
Getting
Scrambled
By Howard W. French
t the conclusion of the
1884-85 Berlin Con-
ference, which noto-
riously carved up the
African continent and
apportioned its territories to Europe’s
imperial powers, signatories to the act
24
highlighted education and the “material
well-being of the native populations” to
justify their historic power grabs.
Over the half-century or so that fol-
lowed what came to be known as the
“Scramble for Africa,” Europe did vir-
tually nothing to further education on
the continent and inflicted some of the
worst atrocities of the modern era on
Africans, as colonists raced to extract
natural resources using land seizures
and forced labor and implemented mil-
itary conscription to fight and provide
pack horse-like logistical support in
Europe’s wars.
Most of what is recalled today about
this terrible scramble are the arbitrary
borders that created numerous eco-
nomically hobbled, landlocked terri-
tories and by turns divided members of
coherent ethnic groupings and thrust
together people with vast cultural dif-
ferences or histories of enmity. For-
gotten are the moral rationales that
Western powers mobilized to justify
their takeover and stewardship of an
entire continent.
Much has been written about the new
scramble for Africa supposedly under-
way and involving a growing list of out-
side powers. The list is led by China, the
United States, France, and Russia but
also present are other parties that have
less history of involvement with Africa
but are now being drawn in, including
Brazil, Japan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia
and other Gulf states, South Korea,
Turkey, Vietnam, and others. All are
seeking business opportunities on the
continent that is positioned to drive
most human population growth over
the rest of this century—or more insid-
iously, are aiming to counter a global or
regional rival’s influence.
Talk of a new scramble for Africa was
revived by the U.S.-Africa Leaders Sum-
mit held in Washington in December
2022. U.S. press coverage was peppered
with allusions to a subtext for the event
that was all but proscribed in the pro-
ceedings themselves but nonetheless
seemed ever present in U.S. officials’
minds: how the United States can com-
pete with China for influence in Africa.
Not everyone in Washington, it
seems, got the memo that Africans don’t
want to be lectured about distrusting
the Chinese or nudged in the direc-
tion of a coalition favoring one outside
power over another. After a meeting on
the margins of the summit with Zam-
bian President Hakainde Hichilema, for
instance, Republican Sen. Jim Risch,
the ranking member on the Senate For-
eign Relations Committee, tweeted that
Hichilema “is working hard to curb
China’s malign & predatory influence
in #Zambia, as well as increase cooper-
ation” with the United States.
China has not been alone as a target
in the U.S. drive to build influence and
limit that of rivals in Africa. While the
Washington summit was underway,
the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy
feature about Russian activities on the
continent that took as a given the Biden
administration premise that after years
of losing ground to others in Africa, the
United States needed to rebuild influ-
ence there. This time, using a longtime
U.S. client state, Uganda, as an example,
Russia was presented as the nemesis.
The problems with this thinking, sud-
denly so ubiquitous, are multiple. Most
importantly, few in Washington seem to
have dwelled on the purpose of building
U.S. influence in Africa, a continent that
has always been at or near the bottom of
Washington’s list of global priorities. In a
generic way, the Biden administration’s
answers have a positive ring to them, but
they don’t seem connected to U.S. behav-
ior, whether that be consistent diplo-
macy, support for democracy, major
sustained foreign-policy initiatives, or
business community engagement.
As long as the question of what intrin-
sic reasons make Africa deserving of
greater U.S. attention remains open,
the only available answer returns us to
the unsatisfyingly empty and poten-
tially dangerous logic of the scramble:
The continent is there, and others are
gaining influence on it.

No one should expect the present
scramble to play out as the historic
one did, but it still has great potential
for serious harm. Seeking to lock down
mineral wealth crucial for strategic fron-
tier sectors, from batteries to mobile
phones to nuclear power, before oth-
ers can or subjecting African nations
to litmus tests about their support for
foreign-policy questions extrinsic to
the continent—say, relations with Tai-
wan or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—
sustains the continent’s subordination.
Some of the answers to how to break
out of such patterns lie in Africa itself,
while others require a revolution in the
mindsets of the global powers that are
ramping up their drives for influence
there. None will be easy.
First, Africa must find more effective
ways to speak with one voice or at least
fewer voices. This is the unavoidable
price of having been so severely Balkan-
ized during the Berlin Conference. This
will require engaging the world not as
a continent of 54 disparate and mostly
small countries with little global eco-
nomic or diplomatic leverage but instead
making better use of regional diplomacy,
including working through regional
organizations such as the Economic
Community of West African States, the
East African Community, and the South-
ern African Development Community.
The Biden administration made a
baby step in this direction with its pro-
posal that African countries receive per-
manent G-20 representation. Almost
simultaneously, Senegalese President
Macky Sall told the New York Times that
Africa is seeking not one but two seats
on the U.N. Security Council. The prac-
tical and political obstacles to this are
many, making it unlikely to occur any-
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
time soon, if ever, but such plain-spoken
ambition is good to see. Africa’s history
of subjugation and exclusion requires a
radical reconsideration of how it is rep-
resented in global institutions. If that
is not enough, its population, which
amounted to less than one-tenth of the
world’s population in 1950, will account
for 40 percent of humanity by the end
of the century, according to U.N. pre-
dictions—lending even more urgency
to this question.
African countries must also become
better drivers of their international
engagement agenda. More priori-
ties should come out of Africa itself,
which should mean less acceptance of
off-the-shelf plans from outside pow-
ers—whether for Chinese infrastruc-
ture, U.S. “capacity building,” or other
forms of engagement that favor non-
governmental organizations and civil
society. In these cases, as well as with
Russia’s burgeoning security presence
on the continent, most of the funds flow
back to the outside power.
Taking greater charge should also
mean pushing for conventions around
borrowing, lending, and debt so that
the continent is less at the mercy of
practices defined by Washington (or
the international financial institutions
the United States has traditionally dom-
inated), Beijing, or others.
If Africa is to cease being a ward or
stepchild of the international system,
its leaders are going to have to be much
more imaginative and proactive in pool-
ing their efforts and setting the agenda.
For the United States, the best way to
convince Africans of its interest is not
U.S. President Joe
Biden takes part in
a photo with African
leaders during
the U.S.-Africa
Leaders Summit
in Washington on
Dec. 15, 2022.
ARGUMENTS
through the tired and overused formula
of big summits—a patronizing form of
African convocation invented by the
French long ago and eagerly embraced
more recently by China—but through
quiet and steady engagement.
The tools for doing so can be found
in economics. The United States must
get its companies more involved on
the continent in ways less centered on
oil and mineral extraction and more
focused on manufacturing and knowl-
edge-based industries, of which Africa
is in desperate need. It is not clear that
Washington has the diplomatic energy
or bandwidth to do this, but more fre-
quent, high-level engagement with the
continent, including at the presidential
level, is an important gauge of serious-
ness. One useful course of action might
be having industrialists fly with U.S.
President Joe Biden on bilateral visits
to African countries to strike business
deals that move away from mining and
pumping oil.
Many of Africa’s topline needs are
obvious. The continent is urbanizing
at an unprecedented pace and scale,
but too many of its cities are chaotic,
unplanned messes. Housing con-
struction on a massive scale, as well
as figuring out financing by leverag-
ing pensions, insurance funds, and
SPRING 2023 25
revenues from extractive industries, is
an area ripe for doing well by doing good.
By 2050, about 40 percent of people
under age 18 will be African. Stop and
read that again, and if you don’t see
that as an enormous market for edu-
cation, something is wrong. The West
has a choice between bemoaning Afri-
can migration—which, given demo-
graphic trends, will grow significantly in
the decades ahead—and getting ahead
of the curve by forming educational
partnerships on a continent desperate
for more and better schools and uni-
versities and the knowledge-based jobs
that can flow from them.
So far in this scramble, with coun-
tries driven by their search for influ-
ence, nobody has emerged looking very
good. Maybe it is time to be driven by
something else. Q Behzat asked his wife, my sister Gokce,
HOWARD W. FRENCH is a professor at the
Columbia Journalism School and
columnist at FOREIGN POLICY.
Corruption
and Misrule
Made Turkey’s
Earthquake
Deadlier
By Gonul Tol
n the southern Turkish city of
Antakya, Behzat put a blanket
and an umbrella over his father,
who was trapped under the rub-
ble after one of the most devastat-
ing earthquakes in recent history hit the
town and destroyed Behzat’s childhood
home. He dug his father out with his
bare hands and promised the old man,
whose legs were stuck under a concrete
block, that help was on the way.
26
A woman reacts as rescuers search for earthquake survivors
amid the rubble of collapsed buildings in Adana, Turkey, on Feb. 6.
Twenty-four agonizing hours later,
to check on him. “I cannot look him in
the eye anymore. I told him help was
coming. It isn’t.” Behzat’s father died,
as did his mother, his cousins, and thou-
sands of others, because there was no
one there to provide the needed help.
It wasn’t just loved ones who were
buried under the rubble but also the
promises of good governance, a cor-
ruption-free country, and a state that
is responsive to the needs of its people.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan made those promises after his
Justice and Development Party (AKP)
swept to power following another dev-
astating quake in northwestern Turkey
in 1999, when thousands of people died
due to the government’s slow response.
He blamed all the ills of the 1990s on
widespread corruption, dysfunctional
governments, and unresponsive state
institutions and pledged that, under
his rule, things would change radically.
They have, and they have not. Gone
are the days when internal squabbling
among coalition partners paralyzed
government decision-making. In his
two decades at the helm, Erdogan has
centralized power in his own hands. To
do that, he hollowed out state institu-
tions, placed loyalists in key positions,
wiped out most civil society organiza-
tions, and enriched his cronies to create
a small circle of loyalists around him.
The culmination of all those things
paved the way for the tragedy that
struck my country in February.
The sheer magnitude of the quake
made it deadly, but academic research
shows that earthquakes kill more people
in countries affected by widespread cor-
ruption. The Turkish economy under
Erdogan rode high on the back of a con-
struction boom. He enriched a small
circle of close associates from the con-
struction sector by awarding them infra-
structure projects without competitive
tenders or proper regulatory oversight.
These companies embarked on a
massive building spree, constructing
infrastructure and homes in earth-
quake hot spots without following
proper building codes. In Hatay, one
of the areas hardest hit by the quake,
residential buildings, hospitals, and
even the local branch of the Turkish
Disaster and Emergency Management
Presidency (AFAD), many built by Erdo-
CAN EROK/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
gan’s cronies, were either leveled or suf-
fered massive damage. The town’s only
airport runway, built on top of a fault
line by a company closely tied to Erdo-
gan, was split in two by the earthquake.
The practice of granting government

infrastructure projects to Erdogan’s
allies, many of whom cut corners on
safety, has led to other tragedies in the
past. Last year, a snowstorm hit the west-
ern city of Isparta, causing extensive
damage, leaving residents without power
for weeks, and leading to several deaths.
The city’s utilities had been privatized
by the AKP and sold off to companies
owned by Cengiz Holding and Kolin
Holding, firms controlled by Erdogan’s
closest associates. The companies did
not take steps to ensure the infrastruc-
ture was resilient to such disasters, failed
to respond when the snowstorm hit, and
rejected any help from opposition par-
ties in neighboring towns, sparking pro-
tests by residents and opposition parties
against the corrupt tender system.
In 2018, as a result of a lack of mainte-
nance work, a train crash in the north-
western town of Corlu killed 25 people,
including children. In 2014, 301 min-
ers were killed in the Aegean town of
Soma after an explosion sent carbon
monoxide shooting through the tun-
nels of a mine while 787 miners were
underground. The chairman of Soma
Holding, Alp Gurkan, is another close
associate of Erdogan’s. The company
benefited from privatizations during
the AKP’s years in power, branching
out into the construction sector and
receiving contracts worth billions of
dollars. The miners and opposition par-
ties said the company did not take nec-
essary security precautions. Only 20
days before the explosion, Erdogan’s
AKP had thwarted an opposition-led
parliamentary motion to investigate
conditions at the mine.
While Erdogan and his cronies’ disre-
gard for safety regulations makes disas-
ters more common, the government’s
slow and inadequate response makes
them more lethal. In 2021, wildfires
ripped through southern Turkey, kill-
ing at least nine people and forcing thou-
sands to flee their homes. Erdogan came
under intense criticism over the gov-
ernment’s apparent poor response and
inadequate preparedness for large-scale
wildfires. Opposition parties and resi-
dents accused the government of fail-
ing to procure firefighting planes while
channeling billions of dollars to construc-
tion companies that have little regard
for the environment. The government
later admitted that it did not have a fire-
fighting aircraft fleet and that the exist-
ing planes were not in usable condition.
The government’s response to the
February earthquake was once again
slow. In Antakya, my family had to dig
out loved ones trapped under the rub-
ble with their bare hands. AFAD staff
showed up 48 hours later, only to tell
us that they couldn’t help because they
had orders to focus their rescue opera-
tions elsewhere. The Turkish military
could have played a role here, too, but
Erdogan did not dispatch troops early
enough to help with the search and res-
cue efforts. Turkish civil society orga-
nizations, which played a critical role
after the 1999 earthquake, were not
there, either. All these failures were the
result of Erdogan’s policy of centraliz-
ing power in his hands, sapping institu-
tions of their independence, appointing
loyalists who lack the necessary back-
ground to key posts, and wiping out
civil society organizations that do not
back his agenda.
For Turkey, a country that is prone
to earthquakes and natural disasters,
AFAD is a critical state agency. Yet its
budget is much smaller than that of
the Presidency of Religious Affairs,
which was originally created to exer-
cise oversight of religious affairs but
has expanded under Erdogan to become
a tool to provide religious legitimacy
to government policies. The person in
charge of AFAD’s natural disaster emer-
gency response is a theology graduate
with no previous experience in disaster
management.
The Turkish military, which was on
the scene to help carry out search and
rescue efforts within hours after the
1999 earthquake, has also been weak-
ened and politicized under Erdogan
since the failed coup in 2016. Erdogan’s
ARGUMENTS
government dissolved a protocol
enabling the armed forces to respond to
disasters without instruction, one of the
factors that explains the slow dispatch
of troops to areas affected by the quake.
Powerful earthquakes kill people, but
they are deadlier in countries like Tur-
key, where building regulations aren’t
enforced, unqualified loyalists fill key
positions, independent state institu-
tions do not exist, civil society organi-
zations have been wiped out, and the
interests of a corrupt few are prioritized
above all else.
While my sister and her family were
trying to pull the bodies of their loved
ones out of the rubble to give them a
proper burial, Erdogan was calling those
who complained about the slow state
response “dishonorable” on national
TV. He wants us to accept this tragedy
and the ones that came before it as
“fate,” but more and more people are
beginning to think that the country’s
compounding problems have a first and
last name. Q
GONUL TOL is the founding director of
the Middle East Institute’s Turkey
program and author of Erdogan’s
War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home
and in Syria.
Unconditional
U.S. Support
of Israel Fuels
Extremism
By Tariq Kenney-Shawa
n January, U.S. Secretary of State
Antony Blinken touched down in
Israel at a time when prospects
for reviving the so-called peace
process looked grimmer than
ever. A week before his arrival, Israeli
SPRING 2023 27
forces killed nine Palestinians during a
raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the
northern West Bank. The next day, a
Palestinian opened fire on Israeli set-
tlers in the illegal settlement of Neve
Yaakov in occupied East Jerusalem,
killing seven people.
The surge in violence was the con-
sequence of disturbing wider trends.
2022 saw the most Palestinians killed
by Israelis since 2006 and the election
of a far-right Israeli governing coalition
with prominent members openly call-
ing for the ethnic cleansing of Palestin-
ians—not to mention an unprecedented
expansion of illegal Israeli settlements,
skyrocketing attacks by settlers, and
the rapid displacement of Palestinians.
For the Biden administration, the
Israeli government’s unapologetic
embrace of the far right presented an
opportunity to live up to its lofty human
rights rhetoric and restore respect for
U.S. diplomacy shattered by the Trump
administration. It was an opportunity to
demand accountability from the lead-
ers responsible for the deteriorating
situation.
Instead, Israel was let off the hook,
and Palestinians were being told, once
again, that they must wait and put their
faith in a process that betrayed them
long ago. Standing beside Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jeru-
salem, Blinken mechanically reiterated
Washington’s support for a “two-state
solution” and pleaded for both sides to
restore calm.
By reverting to obsolete talking points
that are being abandoned across the
board, including by the man standing
beside him, Blinken proved that not
only is the U.S. government out of touch
with reality but it is actively refusing
to acknowledge it. More important,
the events after Blinken’s visit showed
the world that Washington’s strategy
is backfiring.
Instead of preserving the status quo
of a stable Israeli occupation with min-
imal resistance from Palestinians and
the international community, the Biden
28
A member of security for the Israeli settlement Har Bracha gestures
amid clashes between settlers and Palestinians after settlers reportedly
set fire to cars in Burin village in the occupied West Bank on Feb. 25.
administration’s obstinate refusal to
hold Israel accountable is in fact
enabling its violent implosion.
As the most powerful country in the
world, the United States regularly wields
its diplomatic, economic, and military
influence to get what it wants. If the
United States is really the “honest bro-
ker of peace” it has long claimed to be,
then there are several steps the Biden
administration could take to prove it.
For instance, it could condition the
roughly $3 billion in U.S. tax dollars it
provides to Israel annually on the coun-
try abiding by international law and
ending the occupation. It could also
recognize Israeli war crimes, such as
the killing of Palestinian American jour-
nalist Shireen Abu Akleh, as violations
of the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S.
funds from going to security forces that
commit human rights abuses.
Alternatively, Washington could
hold Israel to the same standards
that it applies to other countries—by
ending its practice of shielding Israel
from accountability in international
forums such as the United Nations and
the International Criminal Court. Of
course, these would represent the bare
minimum, a mere fraction of the tools
available to the most powerful country
in the world.
However, the United States has never
been an honest broker of peace, and
it is becoming clear that Washington
is now reaping what it sowed. Blank
checks and special treatment have fed
Israeli hubris.
Following Blinken’s visit, the Biden
administration excitedly announced
that it had averted further crisis by
effectively bribing the Palestinian
Authority to withdraw support for a
U.N. Security Council resolution con-
demning Israeli settlement expansion
in exchange for explicit Israeli commit-
ments to reduce the number of deadly
raids into Palestinian cities, temporar-
ily freeze settlement construction, and
pause home demolitions.
Just days after the agreement was
JAAFAR ASHTIYEH/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
reached, Israeli soldiers killed 11 Pal-
estinians and injured nearly 500 peo-
ple in a raid in Nablus, announced the
construction of more than 7,000 set-
tlement units, and demolished several
Palestinian homes near Bethlehem. So
much for U.S. influence.
Meanwhile, Israel is laying the

foundation for a third intifada: Illegal
Israeli settlements continue to expand
throughout the West Bank, including in
East Jerusalem; Gaza remains under
a suffocating blockade; and Israel’s
leaders have made it clear that they
have no interest in allowing Palestin-
ian statehood.
Protesters in Israel are rallying to
oppose an extremist, fundamentalist
government that is trying to change
the status quo and reshape the coun-
try’s character.
All of this contributes to the reali-
zation that a Palestinian state formed
under even the most idealistic circum-
stances would be sovereign in name
only, a reality Palestinians have been
alerting the world to for years. Confi-
dent in their immunity, Israeli forces
have killed Palestinian American jour-
nalists, destroyed European Union-
funded preschools, and ethnically
cleansed entire neighborhoods with-
out fear of facing justice. Indeed, this
was all enabled by the most powerful
country in the world, which has made
clear time and again that it will priori-
tize frictionless ties with Israel over the
human rights norms it claims to uphold
and its own vision of a peace process.
By refusing to enforce its professed
commitment to human rights when
it comes to Palestinians, the United
States is now facing the inevitable col-
lapse of the status quo it has helped
cultivate for so long. The Biden admin-
istration’s decision to ignore the Israeli
government’s growing hubris and esca-
lating violence in the West Bank will
only add fuel to the fire.
By refusing to take a stand against
Israeli extremism, Washington is effec-
tively giving Israel’s leaders the green
light to carry out their most violent
fantasies.
In late February, after two settlers
were killed in the Palestinian town of
Hawara, hundreds of Israeli settlers
rampaged through the town in what
many described as a pogrom. While
Israeli soldiers looked on, they attacked
Palestinians—killing at least one person
and injuring around 390 others—and
set fire to cars and homes.
In response, far-right Israeli law-
maker Zvika Fogel applauded the set-
tler terrorism, saying: “A closed, burnt
Hawara—that’s what I want to see.”
Days later, Israeli Finance Minister
Bezalel Smotrich explicitly called on
the state to carry out ethnic cleansing,
saying Hawara should be “wiped out”
by the Israeli military.
These are not fringe voices; rather,
they represent the widely held beliefs
of a society built on the systematic
dehumanization of Palestinians.
Policymakers in Washington must
recognize Israel’s popular embrace of
far-right extremism as not merely an
aberration but the logical culmination
of decades of Israeli absolutism that has
been rewarded and encouraged by its
most powerful international benefactor
at nearly every stage.
Things can get much worse. The
facade of legitimacy that enshrouded
the U.S.-led peace process has helped
entrench Israeli domination by distract-
ing Palestinians and the international
community with myths of eventual
statehood in exchange for submission.
For decades, this approach achieved
U.S. and Israeli goals of managing the
status quo as quietly as possible—
with minimal resistance. Now, when
Israeli leaders call for ethnic cleansing,
the world should take them seriously
because they are confident that those
with the power to stop them are unwill-
ing to do so. Q recent years—conspiring on messag-
TARIQ KENNEYSHAWA is a U.S. policy
fellow at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian
Policy Network.
AFRICA BRIEF: Nosmot Gbadamosi
rounds up essential news and analysis
from Algeria to Zimbabwe and
countries in between. Sign up for email
newsletters at ForeignPolicy.com/
briefings.
ARGUMENTS
AMERICAS
Can Lula
Rein In Brazil’s
Military?
By Oliver Stuenkel
he Jan. 8 attack on Brazil’s
Congress, presidential
palace, and Supreme
Court by supporters of
former President Jair Bol-
sonaro has understandably drawn par-
allels to the U.S. Capitol insurrection
on Jan. 6, 2021, launched by backers
of then-U.S. President Donald Trump.
Both were incited by populist right-
wing presidents who failed to win
reelection and spread disinformation
about supposed voter fraud to mobi-
lize their most radical followers. The
U.S. and Brazilian extreme right have
also become increasingly enmeshed in
ing and strategy and sharing advisors
such as Steve Bannon.
But the rush to view Brazil’s attack
through a U.S. lens minimizes its threat.
There is a key difference between the
Brazilian and U.S. insurrections. Unlike
the U.S. riots—which seem to have been
led mostly by radicalized citizens—
there is strong evidence that Brazil’s
iteration was a result of the armed
forces’ connivance. Decades after the
end of Brazil’s military dictatorship,
SPRING 2023 29
civilians still do not fully control the
country’s security establishment.
This is the biggest weakness Brazilian
democracy faces today.
Bolsonaro—a former army captain
backed by Brazil’s military and police
forces—exacerbated this problem by
militarizing government. He appointed
more than 6,000 military officers to
positions in his administration and
blurred the lines between the armed
forces and civilian government. By the
time of Brazil’s presidential election
last October, military officers occupied
numerous executive positions in state-
owned companies and weighed in on
the electoral process.
Now, with the armed forces tempo-
rarily on the defensive, President Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva has a historic oppor-
tunity to reassert civilian control over
Brazil’s military. If Lula fails to rein in
the military, the process of Brazilian
democratization will remain incom-
plete—and subject to the vagaries of
those in uniform for years to come.
In the days after Jan. 8, public atten-
tion in Brazil quickly centered on the
role of the army and the military police
tasked with protecting Brasília’s Three
Powers Plaza. Unlike the U.S. Capitol
insurrection—which genuinely sur-
prised security forces and political
observers—the riots in Brasília had
been predicted almost to a fault. Ana-
lysts, myself included, had warned for
months that Brazil was at risk of experi-
encing its own insurrection if Bolsonaro
lost the election. The Biden adminis-
tration also dispatched top officials to
Brazil last year to “coup-proof” the vote.
Clearly, incompetence alone cannot
explain security forces’ failures.
Evidence leaves little doubt that parts
of Brazil’s armed forces and the capi-
tal’s military police—the latter of which
is overseen by Brasília Gov. Ibaneis
Rocha, a Bolsonaro ally—actively sup-
ported and facilitated the rioters. On
Jan. 8, the Supreme Court suspended
Rocha from office for 90 days, pend-
ing an investigation. Anderson Torres,
30
Rocha’s secretary for public security
and Bolsonaro’s justice minister, was
detained for allegedly dismissing the
command in charge of protecting the
Three Powers Plaza before traveling to
the United States ahead of the attacks.
Police also discovered a draft decree
annulling the result of the 2022 elec-
tion while searching Torres’s home; he
was taken into custody upon returning
to Brazil on Jan. 14.
One week later, Lula sacked Gen.
Júlio César de Arruda, the head of the
Brazilian Army, over his reluctance to
detain Bolsonaro-supporting rioters
who had camped out in front of mili-
tary headquarters in Brasília after the
attacks. Critics argue that Arruda’s
opposition to the request by Lula’s jus-
tice minister to move into the camp the
night of the attacks allowed numerous
Bolsonaro supporters to flee. (The camp
was disbanded the next morning.)
In an effort to de-Bolsonarize the
police, Lula also fired 26 of 27 state
chiefs of the Federal Highway Police—
which had become more powerful
under Bolsonaro—and 18 of its superin-
tendents. Forty percent of police officers
in Brazil considered the Jan. 8 attackers’
agendas to be “legitimate,” according
to a Jan. 30 poll by Brazil’s Forum of
Public Security.
Much of the focus in Brazil will be
on the prosecution of those responsi-
ble for the Jan. 8 riots. Yet while nec-
essary, punishing those responsible
for the wanton destruction of public
property that occurred on Jan. 8—
including by military and police offi-
cers—will not be enough. Those trials
will do little to address Brazil’s struc-
tural problem of civil-security relations
that goes far beyond the attacks—and
even Bolsonaro.
The military has played a central
role in Brazil’s history for well over a
century. In 1889, a military coup over-
threw the ailing Brazilian monarchy and
proclaimed the first Brazilian repub-
lic. It would be five years before Pres-
ident Prudente de Morais took over as
its first civilian leader. The tenentismo
movement of the 1920s—from the
Portuguese tenente, or lieutenant—
demanded national reforms and led to
revolts across the country. Tenentismo
was influenced by the belief that the
army was more competent than civil-
ian leaders and continues to permeate
the security establishment.
Brazil has experienced several mil-
itary coups since then, most recently
in 1964. While generals in other post-
dictatorship Latin American countries
such as Argentina and Chile left power
in disgrace—and later faced transitional
justice—Brazil’s generals were able to
largely set the terms of the country’s
gradual re-democratization in the 1980s
by granting themselves broad amnesty.
The military’s impunity after democ-
ratization allowed it to propagate myths
about its role in Brazilian society. These
include the idea that its members are
more patriotic than civilian leaders
and that security forces are a “moder-
ating power”—an independent cen-
ter of political power able to stabilize
the country in moments of tension or
volatility.
Memory of Brazil’s dictatorship
remains contested. The military estab-
lishment has pursued what historian
Lucas Pedretti has called the “imposi-
tion of amnesia” to avoid identifying
those responsible for human rights
abuses during the dictatorship and
delegitimize its victims in the name
of reconciliation. Though the govern-
ment of Lula ally Dilma Rousseff cre-
ated a truth commission that in 2012
began to investigate the military’s dic-
tatorship-era crimes, it did not have the
power to prosecute alleged offenders
and was rejected by leading generals as
“revanchism” and “cowardice.” In office,
Bolsonaro sought to move dictatorship
nostalgia into the mainstream by pub-
licly celebrating the anniversary of
the 1964 coup and stressing the armed
forces’ role in “pacifying the country.”
In retrospect, it seems clear that the
period of relative political stability

Police walk past damage at the Planalto Palace after an attack by
supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in Brasília on Jan. 8.
Brazil enjoyed between 1995 and 2013
lulled many observers into believing
that the issue of civil-military relations
had been settled once and for all. The
18-year spell of progress not only stabi-
lized Brazil’s economy but also saw the
creation of the Defense Ministry in 1999,
a move opposed by the generals. (The
heads of the military’s three branches
previously sat in the presidential cabi-
net.) While the civilian ministers were
initially weak, Lula during his second
term in office in 2007 appointed a polit-
ically powerful civilian and former pres-
ident of the Supreme Court to serve as
defense minister and—for a time—was
able to centralize civilian power over
military affairs. “The barracks are no
longer a threat to democracy in Bra-
zil,” Brazilian political scientist Octavio
Amorim Neto declared in 2014.
Yet in the years after 2013, as politi-
cal stability and economic growth gave
CARL DE SOUZA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
way to instability and stagnation, the
armed forces moved closer to the polit-
ical arena. In February 2018, embattled
then-President Michel Temer ended
two decades of civilian leadership in
the Defense Ministry by appointing
a general to its top job. Temer, who
took office following Rousseff’s con-
troversial 2016 impeachment, saw his
presidency marked by instability and
approval ratings that sunk into the sin-
gle digits, and he occasionally employed
the army to address domestic problems
such as urban crime. The political and
economic precarity of that time made
voters more susceptible to the strong-
man rhetoric of candidate Bolsonaro,
who promised—and then implemented
—a militarization of government.
Generals have meddled in politics on
numerous occasions in recent years.
In 2018, for example, the then-army
chief seemed to publicly threaten the
Supreme Court on Twitter a day before
its deliberation about Lula’s habeas cor-
pus request. The justices, by a 6-5 deci-
sion, sent Lula to jail. Military police
have also conducted illegal labor
strikes—which usually lead to spikes
in crime and murder—to undermine
the authority of state governors; these
have sometimes taken the form of vio-
lent mutinies.
While pollsters peg the Brazilian pub-
lic’s trust in the armed forces at around
30 percent—not particularly high—it is
still the country’s second-most trusted
ARGUMENTS
institution, behind the churches but
ahead of the presidency, Congress, judi-
ciary, and media. Bolsonaro’s radical-
ism allowed the armed forces to project
themselves as technocratic adults in the
room capable of controlling the mercu-
rial former leader.
Still, most Brazilians disapproved of
the Jan. 8 attacks, and evidence of high-
level collusion or even active support
from parts of the armed forces has put
the military on the back foot. This pres-
ents a unique opportunity for Lula not
only to punish the perpetrators of the
attacks but also to initiate a broader pro-
cess of reform to civil-military relations.
The Brazilian armed forces should part
with the idea that they are a guarantor
of stability and commit to staying away
from politics for good.
Lula could start by asking his
defense minister to reform the cur-
riculum at military academies so that
it explicitly rejects any dictatorship
nostalgia and the notion that the army
is more competent than civilian lead-
ership; governors could do the same
at police academies.
Lula could also institute a zero-
tolerance policy for members of the
military who share their political views
publicly and participate in political ral-
lies, enforcing a law that has been often
ignored in the past. In 2021, a military
court not only acquitted Bolsonaro’s
health minister, an active-duty general,
after he joined a pro-Bolsonaro rally but
also blocked documents surrounding
the case from public view.
Here, Lula might place an empha-
sis on keeping officers from sharing
anti-democratic ideas or glorifying the
dictatorship, as rose-tinted accounts of
Brazilian military rule are still shared
widely by military and police officers
in pro-Bolsonaro social media groups.
The president might also consider a
rule banning active-duty military from
occupying positions in government.
Additionally, Lula should strip the
military of the domestic responsibilities
it was granted under Temer and
SPRING 2023 31
 ARGUMENTS
Bolsonaro. Patrolling favelas and fight-
ing organized crime and deforestation
should not involve the armed forces
and can be managed by other author-
ities. Bolsonaro’s initiative expand-
ing so-called civic-military schools,
partially managed by military offi-
cers, should also be reversed. Finally,
Lula should consider training civil-
ian experts in defense and security so
that they can populate the Brazilian
bureaucracy. This effort should involve
government-financed scholarships for
Brazilians to study security policy at
schools around the world.
No future Brazilian president is
likely to encounter a more hospitable
international environment for bold
action than the one Lula faces today.
In recent months, high-ranking mem-
bers of the Brazilian military publicly
signaled that they opposed a Bolsonaro
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coup because the global reaction would
be negative. Paradoxically, Bolsonaro’s
decision to strengthen military ties
with the United States during the
Trump presidency has also increased
U.S. President Joe Biden’s leverage over
the Brazilian armed forces. Military
leaders surely noticed how quickly
world leaders rushed to congratulate
Lula for his victory over Bolsonaro on
Oct. 30, 2022—and all rallied behind
the new Brazilian president on Jan. 8.
Critics may accuse Lula of conduct-
ing a witch hunt against the military
should he pursue the above reforms.
Others will rightly point out that the
widespread rosy views of Brazil’s armed
forces will not go away overnight. But
Lula’s window to address one of the
major weaknesses of Brazil’s democracy
may close soon, once the public debate
moves beyond Jan. 8, so he must take
advantage of this moment while he can.
As military historian Francisco Teix-
eira told a Brazilian newspaper in Janu-
ary, “If you’re unwilling to provoke [the
generals], you accept military tutelage.”
There is reason to believe that unless
Lula articulates a swift answer to the
current crisis in civil-military relations,
Brazil’s generals may feel even more
emboldened in the years to come. Q
OLIVER STUENKEL is an associate
professor of international relations
at the Getulio Vargas Foundation.
LATIN AMERICA BRIEF: Catherine Osborn
in Rio de Janeiro traces the contours of
debates that shape the region’s future,
from geopolitics to business to human
rights. Sign up for email newsletters at
ForeignPolicy.com/briefings.
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Illustrations by DOUG CHAYKA
 WHY CURRENT
U. S . I N D U ST R I A L
POLICY IS NOT JUST
MISGUIDED BUT
L I K E LY T O B A C K F I R E .
BY ADAM POSEN

35
 eginning with the Trump
administration, and accelerating under the Biden admin-
istration, U.S. trade and industrial policy has prioritized
relocating manufacturing production back to the United
States. For all their differences, both administrations dis-
regarded other countries in this pursuit. Both also attacked
international trade and investment as harmful to U.S. eco-
nomic and national security, even though the rules for that
very system were established by the United States and serve
its interests. Along with members of Congress from both
parties, the Biden administration has sought to take away
production from others in a zero-sum way—explicitly from
China and a bit more courteously from others.
This policy approach, while having considerable popular
appeal at home, is based on four profound analytic fallacies:
that self-dealing is smart; that self-sufficiency is attainable;
that more subsidies are better; and that local production is
what matters. Each of these assumptions is contradicted by
more than two centuries of well-researched history of for-
eign economic policies and their effects. Neither the real
but exaggerated threat from China nor the seeming differ-
ences of today’s technology from past innovations change
underlying realities.
Industrial policy—government subsidies and protections
to promote domestic capacity in a favorite sector—is noth-
ing new in U.S. or global economic history, and it can be
useful. The Biden administration’s renewed push for pub-
lic investment in infrastructure, research, and innovation
is welcome, if oversold in its direct employment benefits.
Targeted export and investment controls on China, Rus-
sia, and other military rivals on a limited number of well-
defined high-tech goods could also be sustainable and worth
the economic cost. But the protection and promotion of
U.S.-located manufacturing against foreign competition is
not only unnecessary for industrial policy’s success—it will
defeat the worthy purpose of it.
THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT MANY CHINESE POLICIES, including
economic ones, are aggressive. They pose a threat to China’s
immediate neighbors, to U.S. national security, and more
broadly to human rights and democratic sovereignty. But the
36
extent to which China poses a direct threat to U.S. economic
security is overblown. This is especially true since commerce
with China yields significant benefits, Beijing is no longer
massively undervaluing its currency against the dollar, and
many of its supposedly self-serving, even cheating, tactics
in trade have backfired. For example, subsidizing steel until
it reached vast overcapacity has been a sinkhole rather than
a success for China, contributing to environmental degra-
dation and helping to ensure an uncompetitive workforce.
Nonetheless, those involved in U.S. economic policymaking
face two difficult questions: First, what parts of the economic
relationship are fueling Chinese military aggressiveness,
either in capacity or intent? And second, what economic as
opposed to diplomatic or military tools would be effective
in stymieing Chinese threats to U.S. security? After all, fur-
ther economic decoupling from China will have costs: not
just to consumers and businesses but to U.S. military and
intelligence capabilities. These include losing access to Chi-
nese technologies that the U.S. military can benefit from and
forgoing intelligence derived from commercial engagement
with Chinese companies. Additionally, Washington would
have meaningfully fewer resources to spend on defense and
information-gathering because everything the United States
acquired abroad would be more expensive, including capital
to finance part of government debt.
A unilateral U.S. withdrawal from commerce with China
would be partially offset by other economies taking up mar-
ket share where the United States no longer operated. If
anything, it would increase the arbitrage opportunities for
other countries and for companies headquartered elsewhere
to trade and invest where the United States ceased to do so.
What will not address these threats—and what, in fact,
will backfire—are U.S. attempts to impose arbitrary export
and investment restrictions on China that extend to other
countries. In order for such restrictions to succeed, the United
States would have to become a commercial police state on
an unprecedented scale. The United States would also have
to monitor and prevent its own headquartered companies
from moving activities abroad. Washington has done this,
on a limited scale, on specific technology transfers. But
scale matters, and current proposals would be an order of
magnitude more ambitious and thus infeasible. Besides, U.S.
industrial policy should encourage the widespread adoption
of the best technologies at home and abroad rather than
favoring localized domestic production, which only limits
the spread of technology.
Aggressive behavior from Beijing is instead best confronted
by diplomacy and defense capabilities. Washington may feel
frustrated with the lack of quick wins here, but that is no reason
to take that frustration out on the rest of the world—let alone on
private Chinese companies that happen to have had commer-
cial success. In fact, doing so will make U.S. security worse by
hindering the technological progress necessary for resilience
and by eroding the United States’ influence on third countries.
Compare this approach to what was for a long time the sta-
tus quo: the United States as creator and enforcer of interna-
tional economic rules, not visibly and directly picking who
was in or out in a given industry. The United States benefited
from acting within the system to constrain countries’ specific
The Biden administration has
sought to take away production
from others in a zero-sum way.
behaviors rather than publicly judging their general nature.
It could even occasionally flout the rules, or tweak them in
its favor, if it didn’t overdo it. Most of all, though, leading a
rules-based system allowed maximum economic traction
while minimizing the need for direct conflict.
An economic and trade strategy that calls out individual
countries, complete with tit-for-tat retaliation for perceived
or actual slights, throws this all away. Instead, the United
States becomes just another player in the game, with no
justification for its self-dealing and no reason to stay on its
good side beyond one-off transactions. That transactional
view, in turn, defeats the goal of reordering the economic
system, whether to limit China’s military power or speed up
adoption of green technologies.
Additionally, if the United States and Europe agree to
discriminatory manufacturing subsidies, and only China
can afford to compete, it tells the rest of the world that their
aspirations for development do not matter: Only those in
the lead now will be allowed to scale the heights of techno-
logical production. This would mean that countries in the
developing world would have to go cap in hand, government to
government, to get access to one nation-state’s products—
let alone be a part of the production process. The ability
of individual companies in developing economies to earn
investment on merit would be sharply diminished. That
would disincentivize growth and breed justified resentment.
In big-league sports, the best job is to be league commis-
sioner. As commissioner, you make money whichever team
wins or loses on a given day, you are welcome at every sta-
dium (even if occasionally booed), and you can ultimately
decide the big questions of how the game is played and who is
allowed to own a team. If you instead become identified with
a single team, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but
most importantly, others have an interest in your losing. You
might even get repeatedly punished for cheating, instead of
being the one to decide who is cheating. And when it comes
to another issue in the news—supply chains—the tendency
to join a side rather than oversee it all is equally shortsighted.
THE IDEA OF “BUY AMERICAN” has broad populist
appeal. It connotes an economy that is self-
sufficient, producing all it needs, and “putting
American workers first.” Yet detailed research has
repeatedly shown that policies aimed at maximiz-
ing domestic manufacturing employment rather
than the development and adoption of new tech-
nologies are not only doomed to fail but crowd out
the very industrial and trade policies that contrib-
ute the most to innovation, national security, and
decarbonization.
Recent supply problems contributed to the
Biden and Trump administrations’ proposals to invest in
local production. But as scary as a shortage of semiconduc-
tors has been, it is truly the exception that proves the rule.
In reality, market economies adapt quickly to shortages;
dominant suppliers almost never boycott selling to cus-
tomers. Also true is that shortfalls in supply are much better
addressed through trade and, in the case of some technolo-
gies, the stockpiling of strategic reserves.
Take the European Union’s response to stoppages in oil
and gas supplies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Eurozone
economies adapted to higher and more volatile energy prices
far more rapidly than most expected. Prices even dropped
after European economies stopped demanding so much
supply. The same has been true at every juncture when there
has been an interruption in supply or when energy exports
have been withheld; in 1973, after a Saudi-led oil embargo,
Western economies shifted production and consumption
patterns within a couple of years.
Yes, a supplier of a critical commodity with malevo-
lent intent can cause pain via temporary shortages, but an
SPRING 2023 37
effective response is to stockpile strategic reserves and turn
to trade with other places.
Meanwhile, Russia did not get anything terribly useful in
diplomatic terms when it tried to weaponize Europe’s depen-
dence on its oil and gas. When Russian President Vladimir
Putin cut off gas from the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in mid-
2022, he induced Germany and other European economies
to reduce their dependence on Russia while strengthening
Europe’s support for Ukraine. His dominant supply position
did not even prevent the EU from encouraging Ukraine to
turn its way in recent years. And despite Putin’s threats to
cut off global supplies, Russia has up to the present day con-
tinued to keep oil and gas exports flowing to other buyers.
In other words: In an actual war situation, with a most
malevolent supplier making seemingly credible threats,
Europe has not been deterred or even swayed. This shows
that market economies’ resilience is much greater, and the
ability of suppliers to extract concessions much less, than
the scaremongering used to justify extreme U.S. industrial
policy would suggest.
Investing in productive capacity tied to jobs in specific
localities is misguided for two reasons. First, it does not cre-
ate new jobs; it merely shifts jobs from one place to another.
To create jobs in one place, a handpicked publicly subsi-
dized investment has to draw the workers with the relevant
skills from other U.S. employers, unless those workers come
via immigration increases or are sitting idle and willing to
move. More immigration would certainly be desirable for
this and a host of other reasons, but it is extremely unlikely
in today’s political climate. As for idle workers with the right
skills, they don’t really exist. Currently, the U.S. industrial
economy has a vast excess of job vacancies relative to the
number of available workers, with notable shortages in the
kinds of employees needed for the production of semicon-
ductor chips and their components.
Furthermore, Buy American policies actually cost jobs.
When the United States imposes Buy American requirements
on government procurement, or restrictive “rules of origin”
or local content requirements on imports, these require-
ments have three effects. First, they simply raise the costs
of any government purchases undertaken, thereby reduc-
ing the amount of bang U.S. taxpayers get for their invest-
ment buck. Second, they cost U.S. sales in foreign markets.
And third, they erode the competitiveness of U.S. goods by
making exports too expensive. As is becoming apparent
with the high, restrictive domestic content requirements
of the 2020 United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, there
are ever fewer cars produced for export in North America.
Meanwhile, there is more investment by U.S.-headquar-
tered auto companies in China to reach that market. But
what of the race for subsidies for green tech production?
38
As desirable as it is to have the United States move forward
on green tech, starting a subsidies contest with the EU is
misguided, too.
AN ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF GREEN SUBSIDIES is that all economies
need to make more rapid progress on the energy transition
away from carbon, so more investment—however achieved—
is better. Decarbonization is an important goal, but history
shows that rather than converging on best practices, or at least
putting useful competitive pressure on domestic industries,
subsidy races lead to a perpetuation of corruption. This, in
turn, stifles innovation.
A classic example is the long-running conflict between
Airbus and Boeing. Large airframe manufacturing has repeat-
edly been deemed a strategic industry by both the EU and
the United States. But what has been the outcome of these
two giant economies subsidizing their respective champions?
For one thing, there has been limited innovation in pas-
senger aircraft and almost none in energy usage or chang-
ing transport paradigms. Instead, Airbus commissioned a
plane that was too big for the market—the A380—and we
have seen little or no investment in changing the underlying
high-emissions jet fuel-based model (though some fuel effi-
ciency improvements have been made). As with other large
incumbents, let alone ones with government-protected mar-
ket share, subsidies created an incentive to maximize cur-
rent production, not to innovate disruptively.
More generally, with Airbus and Boeing deemed too stra-
tegically important to fail by the EU and U.S. governments,
they are inadequately supervised. The companies exploit
this fact, not just in cost overruns on defense and public proj-
ects but in substandard production. Like the too-big-to-fail
banks in the run-up to the global financial crisis, they put
both the underlying system and many of their customers at
risk of devastation.
Why would semiconductor or other subsidized manufac-
turers, which would also be too big to fail, respond differently?
These are industries with large upfront capital investment
costs and multiyear production planning, allowing them
to play on government dependence to prevent entry of new
competitors. Anyone rightly concerned with monopoly
power from industrial concentration should recognize that
this threat applies especially to companies insulated from
both domestic and international competition.
Setting aside the risks of monopoly power, undersupervi-
sion, and corruption, there is another reason that national
subsidies for strategic industries do more harm than good:
They add a political tenor to the allocation of supply chains.
While it may feel consistent with values to have Washington
encourage friendshoring, the result is supply chains that are
designed to pursue neither efficiency nor resilience; instead,
they are designed to forge political and security relationships.
This has other, unintended consequences: Supply chains
become more rather than less fragile, as they lack redun-
dancy and are subject to changing political relationships.
Plus, trade disputes escalate, slowing commerce as well as
blocking other (useful) forms of cooperation among nations.
The Airbus-Boeing subsidies war is again an example. It
has prompted recurrent trade and legal disputes that have
directly impeded EU-U.S. cooperation on a range of adjacent
issues. That’s even as supply chains in aircraft manufactur-
ing have become highly fragile, as evident in production
The single best thing the
United States can do to advance
its national security and climate
change goals is support
the widespread adoption
of common technologies that
reduce vulnerabilities.
problems long before the COVID-19 pandemic and China
raised concerns about such vulnerabilities.
Another compelling example of the damage done by coun-
tries discriminating on a national basis is food subsidies. For
all the current talk about resilience and local supply chains,
the fact is that agriculture has been the most subsidized
industry in the advanced economies for decades. Just as
with Airbus and Boeing, the results have been far from ideal.
Where there has been innovation in agriculture, national
barriers have prevented its uptake. Genetically modified
organisms, or GMOs, offer great promise for health and
nutrition enhancement globally. The EU’s impo-
sition of standards against them blocks adoption
in large parts of the world. Some of that is due to
genuine concern, but a lot of it is European agri-
cultural interests using vague fears as an excuse to
block competition from U.S. exports. As a result,
if developing countries import GMOs, they can be
blocked from exporting food to the EU. Countries
in the developing world are forced to choose to
accept viable crops and food aid from either the
United States or the EU—but they cannot ben-
efit from both.
If anything, the harms of the dueling subsidies
dynamic would be particularly bad for accelerat-
ing a green energy transition. To get new energy
technologies to displace older ones, they need to
be adopted on a large scale—mass electric vehicle
charging or replacing coal power generation. Dif-
ferences in energy performance among technol-
ogies will matter materially for our outcomes in
adapting to climate change; when a given techno-
logical standard is set and in wide use, the impact
of lagging efficiencies compounds.
There also is no reason to think that domesti-
cally favored producers in the EU or United States,
or for that matter China, would have a monopoly
on good ideas for decarbonization technology. As
with vaccines, global competition and innovation
are needed. If you shut yourself off, insisting on local pro-
duction of indigenous technology, as China and Russia did
in developing their COVID-19 vaccines, there are vast con-
sequences. In a subsidies duel, there is every reason to think
that national-champion companies and their captured gov-
ernments will use differing standards to set up barriers to
entry for foreign-produced products. Even more than food
or airplanes or vaccines, having energy grids, batteries, and
innovative technology for transportation or heating, venti-
lating, and air conditioning separated into autarkic networks
will be counterproductive for resilience and adaptation.
The political dynamic of third countries—including large
SPRING 2023 39
carbon emitters such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Mex-
ico, if not China—being forced to choose between European
and U.S. technology for their energy systems will directly
impede decarbonization. Maybe these larger emerging
economies will be able to set off a bidding war among trans-
Atlantic producers for the contracts, but that will not lead to
the best technology winning or to the fastest adoption of it.
That’s why the subsidies competition between the United
States and the EU that the Biden administration is ratchet-
ing up is in reality a dangerous setback for decarbonization.
THE SINGLE BEST THING THE UNITED STATES CAN DO to advance its
national security and climate change goals is support the
widespread adoption of common technologies that reduce
vulnerabilities to supply conditions, to Chinese intelligence
incursions, and to dependence on carbon-based energy. This
is best done through extensive public investment in research
and infrastructure as well as by encouraging global compe-
tition and the spread of technologies in relevant industries
such as batteries, cyberdefense, and vaccine manufacturing.
It is important here to distinguish technology production
from technology adoption. Public investment in producing
technology is sometimes productive and sometimes waste-
ful, but it is nothing new for the United States. For all the
hype circulating around the Inflation Reduction Act and
the CHIPS and Science Act, as well as other measures on
their way, these policies do not represent a major creative
break with neoliberal constraints. These measures will not
accelerate U.S. economic growth or job creation beyond an
initial spending bump, as with any fiscal expansion. They
will not revolutionize U.S. competitiveness, and their imple-
mentation will most likely enrich small pockets of protected
businesses rather than making a dent in reducing income
inequality. As an economic program, these policies may be
helpful or may not, but they are far from transformative.
What these programs do not do is accelerate the adoption
of technology. It is much less the production than the adop-
tion of technology that ensures national security and that can
slow climate change. To see adoption in effect, rather than just
production, we need only look to the 1990s. U.S. productivity
(and defense capabilities) surged during that decade because
U.S. companies (and the U.S. military) adopted information
technology across the economy. Shippers were tracked, inven-
tories were monitored and restocked, repetitive tasks were
automated, and job descriptions changed mostly for the better.
That leap in productivity came about not because the
United States produced computers or chips, which got repeat-
edly cheaper, moved down the value chain, and represented
an ever-smaller part of its economy. The leap happened
because the United States transformed its business practices
and created new offerings—in services as well as manufac-
40
turing—to make full use of the new technology. Simultane-
ously, Europe, Japan, and China all failed to adopt and adapt
as much as the United States did, and they fell behind. Nota-
bly, they fell behind despite their own protectionist industrial
policies on behalf of local information technology producers
—which the Biden-Trump worldview says were unfair advan-
tages and that the United States should now emulate. They
needed to import new technologies and best practices from
abroad to close the productivity gap, but the Chinese, Ger-
man, French, and Japanese obsessions with their own man-
ufacturing hindered that adaptation.
This example reflects a general rule of economic develop-
ment. If the source of technological power were producing
a given weapon or manufacturing system, not its applica-
tion and use, everyone could reverse-engineer their way
to technological near-equality. There has been no shortage
of industrial espionage and intellectual property theft by
Chinese, North Korean, and Russian entities over the last
two-plus decades. The evidence is that the vast extent of IP
theft claimed by China hawks has occurred while China’s
growth rate has rapidly slowed down.
Developing economies from Brazil to India have also
demanded licensing of advanced technology and acquired
it only with an eye to creating their own industries. That
has not meaningfully closed the gap with the United States
on per capita income or technological sophistication at the
frontier. Here, then, is the central fact: Growth comes from
economywide adaptation of general-use technologies and
not the production of particular products.
Compounding matters is that attempting to increase
domestic production of technologies when you do not already
have a leading industry generally backfires, as displayed by
China recently. China’s major effort to create indigenous
semiconductor production, undertaken even before U.S.
export restrictions, left it unable to produce the cutting-edge
chips. By China’s own admission, its chips industrial policy
project also wasted billions of dollars, diverted engineers
from other activities by shifting rather than creating jobs,
and resulted in corruption by managers and officials. China
failed to catch up, let alone create widespread, innovative
use of the latest chips in the economy.
Even on the military side, where advantages in specific
weapon capacities can be critical, the persistent failures of the
Russian military in Ukraine came in large part from the failure
of preferred local producers to deliver. There has been no lack
of effort from Russian intelligence to gather the technological
secrets of the West, nor any scruples holding Russian compa-
nies back from reverse-engineering on a vast scale with gov-
ernment support. Getting your hands on a particular weapon
is far less important than an ability to use it effectively—and
a willingness to make such systems available across society.
SUPPLY CHAIN RESILIENCE, SUSTAINABLE INCOME GAINS for Amer-
ican workers, defense against Chinese aggression, and
accelerating greener energy are all worthy goals and worth
paying for. Disregarding the global realities of technology
and trade in pursuit of those goals, however, will do more
harm than good for U.S. economic and national security.
At issue is the longer-term damage to Washington’s own
interests from pursuing a zero-sum approach to manufac-
turing production at the expense of the rest of the world.
Such an approach, largely shared by the Biden and Trump
administrations, will certainly harm China (as well as the
Innovation and technical progress
are accelerated by having
common standards at global
scale, not by politically captured
industries with barriers to entry.
United States), but it will still be ineffective at reducing the
threat from there.
At its core, a successful U.S. industrial policy is one that
promotes the widespread diffusion and adoption of the best
technologies, even if that means the United States purchasing
them from production located abroad. Innovation and tech-
nical progress are accelerated by having common standards
at global scale, not by politically captured industries with
barriers to entry. This approach is especially necessary for
decarbonization but also to increase supply chain resilience
and the ability of other countries to stand up to Chinese threats.
The best path forward for the U.S. government
is to simply correct the discriminatory aspects of
recent legislation—including the CHIPS Act, the
Inflation Reduction Act, and the Infrastructure
Investment and Jobs Act—directly. Reality has
already forced the Biden administration to do
this in an ad hoc way: To prevent a mass counter-
attack by European and Asian allies, the U.S. Trea-
sury inserted a loophole for foreign-manufactured
electric vehicles to get buyers the same tax credit.
In key industries where a U.S. producer does not
exist, such as in batteries and other electric vehi-
cle clean tech, it is forcing them into joint ven-
tures with U.S. firms. This is what China forced
foreign firms to do when it wanted to “acquire”
leading technologies. China’s move led to the
mutual distrust between the two countries today,
but now the United States is doing the same to
its allies.
Instead, Washington should post a narrow list of
militarily important technologies that should not
be exported to China and that the United States
should not be solely dependent on Chinese pro-
duction for. Let the rest develop organically. Sim-
ilarly, it’s better to coordinate, not compete, with
the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan on public
investment in high tech. This would remove com-
mercial conflict and reduce barriers to the spread
and adoption of the best technologies while still subsidizing
progress in critical areas. The United States should go back
to its commissioner’s role in the global economy—allowing
others to win or lose any specific game or even season but
ultimately shaping who plays under what conditions. That,
rather than the current shortsighted self-dealing, would be
an industrial policy that would work. Q
ADAM POSEN is the president of the Peterson Institute
for International Economics and author of books
including Restoring Japan’s Economic Growth and
Facing Up to Low Productivity Growth.
SPRING 2023 41
ZERO-SUM
GAME

S H O C K WAV E S H AV E S H R E D D E D
T H E G L O B A L I Z A T I O N S C R I P T,
WITH PROFOUND CONSEQUENCE S
FOR POORER COUNTRIES.
BY ESWAR PRASAD

42
 lobalization was meant to bring
the world closer together, enmesh-
ing advanced and developing econ-
omies in a web of mutually ben-
eficial economic and financial linkages. From about the
mid-1980s, trade and financial flows between countries
expanded rapidly as governments dismantled barriers to
these flows.
Not everything went according to plan. Tensions rose as the
benefits were not equally shared within or among countries.
Widening economic inequality, often attributed to free trade,
roiled many advanced economies and has had far-reaching
political consequences. While they benefited from access
to foreign markets for their exports, many emerging mar-
ket countries were ravaged by volatile capital flows and the
fickleness of international investors. Still, there was a broad
consensus that shared economic interests would ultimately
triumph and even help smooth over geopolitical frictions.
This script held up well through the mid-2000s. Over the
last decade and a half, a series of shockwaves has shredded
the script. These include the 2008-09 global financial cri-
sis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and various geopolitical ruc-
tions, such as rising U.S.-China tensions and the Russian
invasion of Ukraine. Worldwide trade and financial flows
have fallen well below their peaks.
While economic factors account for much of this decline,
industrial policies in various guises are spurring the shift
toward weaker global trade and financial integration. China’s
“dual circulation” policy, for instance, involves a state-led focus
on increasing self-reliance (by boosting domestic demand
and indigenous innovation) while remaining engaged with
the global economy. The “Make in India” initiative has simi-
lar objectives of boosting Indian manufacturing by protecting
domestic manufacturers in specific sectors from foreign com-
petition. Even advanced economies, once seen as unabashed
proponents of free trade, are joining the bandwagon. The
Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act aims to boost
green technologies by deploying subsidies and tax breaks to
incentivize the domestic production of electric vehicles and
renewable energy components. The CHIPS and Science Act
provides similar incentives to semiconductor firms to set up
manufacturing facilities in the United States and bans out-
sourcing to “China and other countries of concern.”
As countries retreat from globalization and begin to look
increasingly inward, there could be wide-ranging implica-
tions for both economic and geopolitical stability. Just as
with the surge in globalization, however, the consequences
Illustration by DOUG CHAYKA
of this pullback are proving to be unevenly distributed, with
low- and middle-income countries bearing the brunt.
DURING THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION, trade and financial flows
around the world were driven mainly by economic consid-
erations. With transportation costs falling, corporations in
advanced economies found that they could take advantage
of lower labor costs in developing countries. Moreover, they
were able to structure lean and efficient supply chains that
threaded through multiple countries, enabling cost savings
by relying on different countries’ specialization in various
intermediate products. To this day, iPhones and MacBooks
have electronics and other components sourced from mul-
tiple Asian countries, with the final stages of production
mostly being handled in China.
Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows have tended to fol-
low trade, with corporations setting up operations abroad and
investing in manufacturers as well as suppliers of various kinds
of inputs, including raw materials and intermediate goods.
Emerging market countries, which had for a long time been
able to get foreign financing only in the form of debt and at
unfavorable terms, were now receiving more stable flows and
at better terms that did not require them to assume all the risk.
Direct investment tends to be less volatile than debt or other
forms of financing, and foreign investors share in the risks
of such investment in return for prospects of better returns.
Financial flows ran both ways, with many emerging mar-
ket countries using their trade surpluses to accumulate rainy
day funds and invest them in government bonds issued by
the United States and other advanced economies. This way, if
and when foreign investors turned their backs on an emerg-
ing market country that had been in their favor, that country
would still be able to pay for its imports in hard currencies
and protect the value of its own currency. A symbiotic rela-
tionship developed between advanced and emerging market
countries, with both groups profiting from relatively unfet-
tered trade and financial flows.
Emerging market countries benefited from globalization
in multiple ways. They were able to expand markets for their
products beyond their national borders, allowing them to
build strong manufacturing sectors and robust middle classes.
Trade relationships with advanced economies and their more
sophisticated corporations facilitated transfers of technology
as well as state-of-the-art production processes and mana-
gerial practices. As a result, many companies in emerging
market countries became large and modern enough that they
were able to compete toe-to-toe with their advanced economy
SPRING 2023 43
counterparts, engendering more competition, innovation,
and benefits for consumers worldwide.
Foreign investment played a similar role, as corporations
had an incentive to ensure that their suppliers in emerging
market countries were operating with the best technologi-
cal and managerial practices. Foreign funds even helped in
creating more robust financial markets with larger trading
volumes and better regulation. Domestic financial market
development in fact came to be seen as a key “collateral bene-
fit” of globalization, as it allowed emerging market countries
to channel not just foreign funds but even domestic savings
to more productive investments.
Cross-border financial flows fell after the global financial
crisis, mainly as a result of Western banks reining in their
global aspirations, while trade flows continued to expand.
For both types of flows, economic considerations such as
efficiency and cost minimization remained front and cen-
ter in determining their patterns. It seemed just a matter of
time before financial flows, or at least FDI flows, would also
return to pre-crisis levels.
THEN THE WORLD CHANGED. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted
supply chains worldwide. With various countries affected
at different times and with varying intensities, this wors-
ened the pandemic-induced recession as one broken link
could disrupt the entire chain. China’s zero-COVID strategy
wreaked further havoc on global supply chains. Corporations
that had touted the efficiency of their supply chains were left
adrift as those became points of vulnerability. The pandemic
accentuated other fragilities that had already been brewing
in the background. Geopolitics took a turn for the worse,
with rising tensions between the United States and China
exacerbating these problems. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
showed that relying on a single supplier of energy products
could leave an entire continent vulnerable.
National governments and corporate leaders have taken
note. There is change in the air and on the ground as they
adapt to difficult new realities. Trade tensions, geopolitical
fractures, and efforts to combat climate change are shifting
the focus away from efficiency, typified by lean and mean
supply chains, toward stability and resilience. One way to
deal with uncertainty is through diversification of supply
sources and export markets for goods and services. Apple,
for instance, is trying to switch some of its production and
assembly to India and Vietnam. But diversification is typically
costly and adds complications of a different sort, including
having to manage multiple supply chains.
Instead, countries and corporations are taking a different
tack, redirecting their trade and financial flows to align with
geopolitical commitments. Such responses include trade
measures (tariffs as well as import and export restrictions)
44
but also industrial policies to promote domestic technolo-
gies—policies that effectively act as trade and investment
barriers. Governments of all stripes feel a need to stimulate
investment in new technologies, especially green technolo-
gies. For emerging market economies—especially countries
with unfavorable demographic trends, such as China—such
investment is viewed as essential to keeping economic growth
from declining precipitously. For advanced economies facing
rising competition from emerging markets, such investment is
seen as existential for their shrinking manufacturing sectors.
Supply chain disruptions, geopolitical fragmentation, adap-
tation to climate change, and a host of economic and political
pressures are thus all pushing in the same direction, toward an
inward tilt of economic policymaking. In the guise of preserving
U.S. technological supremacy, improving energy security, and
promoting domestic investment in green and other new tech-
nologies, the Inflation Reduction Act has put in place a number
of policies that implicitly serve as barriers to free trade, such
as tax credits for electric vehicles made in the United States.
Private corporations are also causing a pullback from global-
ization, with reshoring and friendshoring having become their
mots du jour. Reshoring involves moving a good’s entire pro-
duction process back within the borders of the home country;
friendshoring involves threading supply chains only through
countries that are seen as geopolitical allies to eliminate the
threat of disruption as a result of geopolitical tensions.
Globalization is not dead, but it has clearly taken a turn
toward fragmentation along geopolitical lines, which could
have important economic consequences for all countries.
Patterns of both trade and FDI flows are gradually shifting
in ways that mirror geopolitical alliances. Emerging market
economies, which have in many ways benefited from global
trade and financial flows but also been subject to globaliza-
tion’s whiplash effects, now stand to suffer the adverse effects.
For emerging market economies not politically aligned
with advanced economies, lower trade and financial flows will
mean fewer technology and knowledge transfers, hindering
their path to development. With countries pulling back from
global integration, access to export markets could also become
more constrained over time. This might matter less for coun-
tries such as China, India, and Brazil—which have grown large,
more self-sufficient, and richer than many other emerging
market economies—but could stifle those countries that are
smaller and still at earlier stages of economic development.
These trends will hamper the economic development of
low-income countries, many of which have the advantage of
relatively young and expanding labor forces but remain bereft
of financial and other resources. Low-income countries in
sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, lack the financial capital
and technological know-how to build basic manufacturing,
let alone compete effectively in the industries of the future.
Limited foreign investment, especially in manufacturing
rather than just resource-extraction industries, and restric-
tions on access to global markets for their goods will make
it even harder for these countries to attain economic prog-
ress and improved standards of living for their populations.
IT’S POSSIBLE THAT THE MAGNITUDE OF FINANCIAL FLOWS to emerg-
ing markets will essentially remain the same. Advanced econ-
omies are beset by aging populations, high levels of public
debt, and low productivity growth. For investors looking for
better returns on their investments or, at a minimum, diversi-
fication opportunities, emerging market economies are likely
to remain attractive. But the nature of that financing could
change in important ways. Rather than more stable flows
such as FDI, emerging markets might receive more of this
funding in the form of portfolio investment—money flowing
into equity and corporate debt markets—that is still welcome
The consequences of this
pullback are proving to be
unevenly distributed, with
low- and middle-income
countries bearing the brunt.
but tends to be volatile. These flows also tend to bring with
them fewer collateral benefits such as technology transfers.
Many low-income African countries are becoming increas-
ingly indebted to foreign creditors, both private and official, who
provide them with foreign currency loans that are inherently
riskier for borrowing countries. Meanwhile, direct investment
flows to much of the region have leveled off in recent years.
These countries typically have low levels of foreign exchange
reserves, leaving them vulnerable to the whims of their creditors.
The restricted patterns of trade represented by reshoring
and friendshoring, which are intended to lower volatility,
could also increase rather than decrease vulnerability to
certain types of adverse events. Climate change is, after all,
becoming a greater risk that transcends economic and geopo-
litical frictions among countries. In 2011, floods in Thailand
brought global supply chains for automobiles and certain
electronic products to a grinding halt because the country
was a manufacturing base for certain types of electronic
chips. Regional concentration could make supply chains
more vulnerable to such climate-related events.
There are other costs as well. As economic flows come to
closely parallel geopolitical alignments, an important coun-
terweight to geopolitical frictions is being eroded. Take the
complicated U.S.-China relationship, which has become
increasingly fraught as China’s rising economic might puts
the two superpowers in direct competition on multiple fronts.
The economic and financial relationship between the two
countries once served as a counterweight to geopolitical ten-
sions. After all, such a relationship can be constructed and
maintained in a way that benefits both countries, making it
a positive-sum game. By contrast, geopolitical influence is
inherently a zero-sum game, with one country’s rising influ-
ence coming at the expense of its rival.
The evolution of the U.S.-China relationship is a precursor
for how even economic relationships have come to be seen as
a zero-sum game. China’s aspirations to ascend from middle-
income status to the ranks of rich economies will require
an upgrade of its industrial structure and a shift
from low-wage, low-skill manufacturing to higher-
productivity firms that are at the frontiers of
technology. Indeed, technology has become the
new battleground, with China aiming for self-
sufficiency and looking to increase its global mar-
ket share for high-tech products and the United
States seeing a threat to its commercial interests
as well as national security as Chinese companies
increase their global footprint. The United States
has restricted exports of high-tech products and
technologies and even tried to dissuade private
investment from flowing to China. Trade and eco-
nomic tensions between the two countries are now
feeding into and heightening political tensions.
Thus, and somewhat ironically, fragmentation of trade and
finance along geopolitical lines might not deliver the presumed
benefits of greater economic stability and resilience. Rather,
these forces might ultimately foment even greater volatility,
both economic and geopolitical. The burden of these shifts
will fall disproportionately on low- and middle-income econ-
omies. Such developments are also leading to restrictions on
the free flow of ideas and intellectual property. Restrictions
of this sort come at the cost of hindering the advancement of
technology and other forms of knowledge at a global level.
A retreat from globalization might leave countries feeling
more secure and less exposed to global volatility. The costs
of such a retreat will be less evident but will be large none-
theless, and all countries, both rich and poor, will one day
come to rue their inward turn. Q
ESWAR PRASAD is a professor of trade policy at Cornell
University’s Dyson School and the author of, most
recently, The Future of Money.
SPRING 2023 45
Photos by JESSE DITTMAR
PROTECT
AND
DEFEND
U. S . T R A D E R E P R E S E N TAT I V E
K AT H E R I N E TA I C O U N T E R S
A C C U S AT I O N S O F U N FA I R
COMPETITION.

BY RAVI AGRAWAL

47
 t’s no surprise that international trade is expe-
riencing turbulence. After the global finan-
cial crisis began in 2007, a decades-old trend
of increased globalization first decelerated and
then started to reverse course. The COVID-19
pandemic emerged in 2020, instantly snapping
supply chains. Countries and companies focused
on so-called “nearshoring” and “friendshoring.”
Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and geopolitics
began to impact trade even more. Add in a brewing cold war
between the United States and China, as well as a wave of
nationalism around the globe, and one can start to see why
the world seems to have embarked on an era of industrial
policy. From the United States to China, India, Europe, and
beyond, major economies are turning inward, favoring domes-
tic expansion over free trade and the global flow of goods.
In his State of the Union address in February, U.S. Presi-
dent Joe Biden deployed the phrase “Buy American” to loud
applause. His administration has passed landmark legislation
such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS and
Science Act, which provide subsidies in clean energy and semi-
conductors worth more than $400 billion. But the inducements
encourage U.S. companies to invest only at home—not else-
where. Opportunistic firms in Asia and Europe have already
begun to relocate investments to the United States. Cue the
protests from other parts of the globe: A chorus of nations are
accusing Washington of fostering unfair competition.
If the United States is turning protectionist, it is hardly
the only country to consider its own interests above the
interests of others. But it raises questions about whether a
subsidies race represents sound economics. After the initial
sugar high, will the world end up sacrificing the benefits of
“We take extremely
seriously the concerns
that our partners
and our allies are
sharing with us.”
48
efficiency and innovation? Who benefits from a new era of
great-power competition?
To understand Washington’s part in fostering industrial
policy, I sat down with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine
Tai, the Biden administration’s top official tasked with map-
ping out and implementing the White House’s trade policy.
Our conversation was broadcast on FP LIVE, the magazine’s
forum for live journalism. What follows is an edited and con-
densed transcript.
FOREIGN POLICY: Ambassador Tai, European policymakers
look at the IRA or the CHIPS Act and smell unfair competition
and protectionism. How do you respond to their criticisms?
KATHERINE TAI: The CHIPS Act and the IRA are significant
accomplishments. Finally, after many years of inability
and neglect, we are investing in ourselves. For a very long
time, we have pursued a liberalization policy to integrate
ourselves with the rest of the world without paying atten-
tion to the needs that we have here.
The criticism that you describe is more what I read in the
press than what I hear in the room. It’s delivered to me as
concerns from our partners. That’s an important distinction.
Take the Inflation Reduction Act. In all of my conversations
with partners and counterparts in Europe, the conversation
always begins with congratulations to President Biden for
an incredible accomplishment—the largest contribution we
have ever made to battling the climate crisis. The reason why
the conversation starts there is an important fact to keep in
mind: The United States and Europe are completely unified
in recognizing the significant challenge that we are all facing
as an entire planet with respect to a changing climate and its
impacts on the sustainability and the future of our economies.
We take extremely seriously the concerns that our partners

and our allies are sharing with us. It is important to rec-
ognize that while the IRA is a signature and significant
contribution to the fight against climate change, it is also
a product of a democratic rule-of-law system that we have
here. The partners that we are in conversation with and
working with most closely are also democracies. Democra-
cies are coming together in the work we are doing and are
seriously grappling with the challenges that we are facing
to figure out how we can do this together. In that overall
context, the IRA is not going to be the thing that solves [the
economic sustainability challenge]. It is an important moti-
vator to incentivize technologies and economies to meet the
challenge. This may be the first, but it will not be the last
significant policy contribution that will need to be made.
FP: You’re addressing the criticism from Europe, but there’s
also a macroeconomic angle. Economists worry about the
world embarking on an era of industrial policy. They say
that unlike free trade, industrial policy can be inefficient in
the long run. They also say that when you subsidize large
industries, that can stymie innovation.
KT : The first challenge that the IRA is responding to is the
climate crisis, but we are encountering the urgency of this
crisis at a time of significant world economic disruption and
volatility. What we have seen through the pandemic, through
Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, is a fragility in the world
economy that we’ve got to navigate.
The global economy is also experiencing a significant distor-
tion from the rise of a very large and growing economy that has
an incredibly important role to play in the world economy but
U.S. Trade
Representative
Katherine Tai walks
down a hallway on
her way to a briefing
with Republican Sen.
Mike Crapo (facing
page) on Capitol Hill
in Washington on
March 14.
structurally does not operate the way that our economy does.
FP: You’re talking about China.
KT : I am talking about China. That is a factor that we abso-
lutely cannot ignore in terms of the challenge to the funda-
mental premise of the globalization project that has been
going on for the past several decades.
To your point about subsidies being inefficient—to the
extent that we are providing subsidies or tax incentives—
they’re meant to operate in a market system and to influence
firm behavior. The types of subsidies and state support that
we see powering the Chinese economy are of a completely
different scale. In fact, they power the economy; they are
not about creating incentives in a market system. There is a
direct through line between the state and expression in the
economy. And that is a really important aspect of another
shared challenge we have with our European friends and
other partners around the world in terms of a sustainable
path to economic growth and development. In a version
of globalization where the field is not level, we are having
to figure out how to adapt. We will need to adapt together.
FP: It seems to me that so much of U.S. domestic and for-
eign policy is filtered through the prism of competition with
China. Is the United States already decoupling from China?
KT: There are a couple of words used in questions I get asked
that I always fight against. Decoupling is one of them, and
de-globalization is another one. If you mean by decoupling
that we are trying to completely divorce our economies, even
if that were the desired goal, I think it would be extremely
difficult to make that happen.
SPRING 2022 49
 What we are trying to do is to ensure and to identify where
the risks and vulnerabilities are—in the version of globaliza-
tion that we see right now. The supply chain challenges we
experienced through the pandemic are instructive. Whether
it was personal protective equipment, masks, gloves, or ven-
tilators early in the pandemic or the semiconductor chip
shortage that impacted all of us, we see global supply chains
that were designed for efficiency, chasing the lowest cost,
without recognition that concentrations of supply and pro-
duction create significant risks and vulnerabilities.
Our focus is on what I hear my European friends call
de-risking, and that is actually quite a helpful way of think-
ing about things. From my perspective, it is to build resilience
in our supply chains and to create incentives to ensure resil-
ience for our economies. Because whether it is geopolitical,
climate-related, or epidemics, there will be more
crises that we will encounter. What we need to do to
be constructive and productive through this period
of time is to figure out how to adapt and prepare the
global economy to be able to withstand and cushion
future shocks. I wouldn’t call that decoupling. It is
really about ensuring that we all have more options.
FP: I’m not satisfied with the word decoupling either,
so I’ll just point out that several U.S. officials, includ-
ing your predecessor Robert Lighthizer, have used
the term and advocated for decoupling as U.S. policy.
But staying on China: If part of U.S. policy is to contain
China or to slow its rise, doesn’t that have negative impacts
on the global economy itself?
KT: From my perspective—at least in the trade and eco-
nomic lane—it isn’t about containing China. It is about lift-
ing up America. Lifting up our workers in certain sectors who
feel as if they have been very much invisible in the pursuit of
efficiency in global economic integration; lifting up our infra-
structure, which is really still coasting on investments that
we made a couple of generations ago; and pulling ourselves
up to make sure that we can run faster and jump higher. That
is probably the most useful lens through which to view our
economic policies, including our trade policy.
FP: Of course, your role is to look at America’s interests first.
But again, there are economists who will say that in a world
in which big countries are building up their own resilience—
their own industrial policies—what often ends up happening
is that smaller economies suffer. The global south doesn’t
win in an era where the United States, China, and Europe are
looking inward. How do you think through that in your role?
KT: You said, “America’s interests first,” and that triggered
another pet peeve around former President Donald Trump’s
America First policy. All countries are looking after their inter-
est, right? But I would distinguish the Biden administration
approach. It’s not America first and only. It’s also about how
50
America can lead and how America can partner. We need to
invest in ourselves, but how do we not do it alone? Because
that just isn’t the kind of world that we want to live in, where
we would be doing things alone.
To your question about what happens to smaller countries
or developing economies: All along the spectrum of least
developed to middle-income countries, in order to be able
to be a leader, as befits the largest economy in the world, we
necessarily have to take good care of ourselves while never
losing sight of the need to be a good partner.
In trying to facilitate the creation of a new, more resilient
version of globalization, there is an important element that
we’ve got to innovate in, which is how the United States can
improve on previous models of partnership between large,
developed economies and smaller, less developed economies.
“In a version of globalization
where the field is not level, we are
having to figure out how to adapt.”
You are absolutely right that the global economy does feel
as if it is in flux, but we all have a certain prejudice against
change because change is scary and there’s no guarantee in
terms of what the change will look like.
FP: What is the long-term goal of U.S. trade policy with
respect to China?
KT: I gave a speech on the U.S.-China trade relationship a
little over a year ago. I stand by everything in it, which is that
we need to find a way that we can coexist and compete fairly
and continue to be able to thrive and to safeguard the institu-
tions and principles that we hold dear that are really core to
our political and economic DNA. And that is to ensure that
we have the space to continue to have a strong democracy and
thriving economy based on market competition principles.
How do we accomplish these goals, given that the second-
largest economy in the world operates on a very different
system, has a lot of heft, is its own sovereign, and makes
its own decisions? This is one of the most important issues
that we will grapple with as the United States, along with
our partners and allies, who are looking to create the space
to safeguard and to thrive in the ways that we are.
FP: I have one last question, and I’m going to make it a per-
sonal one. I’m an Asian American. You’re an Asian American.
Here’s a question I grapple with myself: How do you think
through your cultural heritage, your multiple identities,
 Tai leads an all-hands meeting to prepare for upcoming congressional testimony
at her offices near the White House in Washington on March 14.
and the many hats that you wear? I should add that you
are a fluent Mandarin speaker as well, one of very few in
the administration. How do all of these factors inform your
policymaking, given that America’s interests are what you
were hired to defend but you also have this global outlook
that isn’t always the case for people in your position?
KT: Being the child of immigrants, having grown up speak-
ing a different language at home, I love to learn languages.
I think I can ask, “Where is the bathroom?” in many lan-
guages, and I might be able to understand the response in
at least two or three. It underscores an important aspect of
the work that we do at the Office of the U.S. Trade Represen-
tative but also the Biden administration’s outlook interna-
tionally, which is that you have to be able to build bridges
and you have to be able to bridge gaps—in communication
and in understanding. I spend so much of my time seizing
opportunities, like this one with you, to have the conversa-
tion and be able to elaborate on and explain our thinking
and what we’re trying to accomplish.
In terms of our partners in Asia, including China, a very
large, important partner with which we have a quite com-
plex relationship, you always have to start with being able
to communicate your point of view and then also being
able to listen and receive that communication. This is a
skill set that is really important to policymaking on the
domestic side as well. These differences aren’t just limited
to national outlooks. Something that I take particular pride
and a sense of responsibility in is maintaining a bipartisan
outlook on how we advance U.S. trade policy, because it
really is in the title of my job and in the title of our agency:
We are the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and it
is the interest of all of America, all the component parts of
the economy and communities and regions, that we need
to drive and formulate policy for. Q
BECOME AN INSIDER: Insiders have exclusive online access to
Q&As, including condensed transcripts of FP LIVE interviews
like this one. Join today at ForeignPolicy.com/Insider.
SPRING 2023 51
Photo by CLINT BLOWERS
 OBJECTS OF
T HE GLOBAL
MOMENT
Everyday objects are often at the center of the events
we cover in FOREIGN POLICY but rarely the subject
of the coverage themselves. This new feature is
an overdue corrective. By focusing attention on
the ordinary artifacts that regularly appear in global
news coverage, we hope to acknowledge the ways
they give meaning—through their design, their
history, and their layers of symbolic associations
—to our collective social life in the first place.

53

Face Masks Are
Our COVID-19
Memorial
By Blake Smith
ome Americans still wear face masks—to
do what exactly? To prevent the spread
of COVID-19? To signal their continuing
vigilance amid growing public uncon-
cern? As a now permanent part of their
hygienic habitus?
Over the last three years, I have tried to
avoid thinking about the particular motivations and reason-
ings that lead people around me to their various positions on
masks, vaccines, and other health measures. Not least because
those people were often so eager to explain themselves and
attack others. People like my conservative family, who feared
the vaccines as others feared COVID-19, and my academic
colleagues, who imagined such people to be deluded, dan-
gerous, and condemnable, each enjoyed speculating about
the psychology of what quickly became the opposing team.
Both had some points. Those suspicious of and resistant
to public health protocols noted the strange pleasure that
those who followed them, mostly on the left, seemed to
take in ostentatious displays of virtue at the intersection
of biology and politics—remember how people changed
their social media profile photos to masked versions of
themselves? This was more than simple rule-following in
an emergency; it was an opportunity to showcase one’s per-
sonal goodness. It was, of course, strange to see conserva-
tives denounce such people as conformists happily trading
their liberties for the promise of safety—hadn’t Republi-
cans beaten us about the ears for decades with patriotic
blather and bullied us into joining the dramaturgy of the
global war on terrorism? They’d made Barack Obama wear
the flag pin; they could at least wear masks.
If the left saw the hypocrisy of the right, it seemed unable
to detect its own. Although the government lied to the public
in the first months of the COVID-19 crisis—first downplaying
the usefulness of masks, then insisting on them, to prevent
a run on what was initially a scarce resource—few progres-
sives seemed to hear the echoes of the Bush administration’s
mendacity about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or suc-
cessive presidents’ deceptions about the Vietnam War. In all
54
these cases, the state suspended civil liberties (in the case of
the COVID-19 crisis, freedom of assembly) for the sake of a
crisis about which its spokespeople deceived us. Shouldn’t
we expect—indeed, be encouraged to find—people protesting
being lied to, being imposed on by those who think they’re
too stupid for the truth?
If masks became immediately and intensely political in
the spring of 2020, it was only in the barest sense of politics
as partisanship. They became team symbols. But, like the
flags and flag pins that appeared across the country after the
9/11 attacks or the safety pins that progressives briefly wore
to protest Donald Trump’s election as president, they were
simple, even insubstantial, means of demarcating “us” and
“them.” They did not, like World War II Victory Gardens or
campaigns to collect scrap metal, encourage citizens to work
together to common ends or provide—even if their practical
contribution to the war effort was minimal—experiences of
solidarity from which a postwar world better than the disas-
ter of the present could be imagined.
Indeed, the response to COVID-19 had in common with
the Iraq and Vietnam wars the strange character of demand-
ing sacrifices on the basis of falsehoods and of foreclosing,
in the very manner of making that demand, the possibil-
ity that a mass mobilization could become the basis for
new forms of civic inclusion, as had been seen during the
world wars. We experienced, rather, a mass immobiliza-
tion, a demand to stay at home, isolate, cover ourselves.
We retreated either into an obedient, atomized self-
concealment or, for those who protested, a confused, aim-
less howl of refusal, wishing the nation would go back to the
“normal” preceding 2020—that is, a normal of falling life
expectancies, obscenely routine bankruptcies for health care
costs, and collective immiseration expressed as screeching,
seemingly insuperable pseudo-political conflict.
RAUL ARBOLEDA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES; STYLING ON PREVIOUS SPREAD BY MELANIE FRANCES
Most of us, in our stoic resolution or stupid indifference,
A health care worker kisses a woman’s
forehead after she received a COVID-19
vaccine in Sibaté, Colombia, on Feb. 24, 2021.

People wear masks in Times Square in New York City on May 21, 2020.
are carried through crises, our lives and sense of integrity
returned to us ultimately undisturbed. But every crisis also
leaves behind not only the dead but those who persist in
their horror and grief over what has happened. Years ago,
after a family reunion, my mother told me about a cousin of
hers who, after coming home from his tour of duty in Viet-
nam, bought a house in the woods, sealed the property off
with barbed wire, and withdrew from the world. He never
spoke to our family again. Only in a physical sense had he
“made it back.”
On any drive through Chicago, my hometown, I pass several
government buildings flying the black-and-white POW/MIA
flag. Originally a symbol of protest against the U.S. aban-
donment of American soldiers taken prisoner or missing
GARY HERSHORN/GETTY IMAGES
in action during the Vietnam War, the flag, over the past
half-century, has become a strangely enduring and biparti-
san symbol of…something.
Legislation passed in 2019 (sponsored by Sen. Elizabeth
Warren) mandates it to be flown over public buildings. It
cannot be that a majority in Congress, or even a sizable
OBJECTS
minority of those flying the flag, think, in a kind of politi-
cal mythology out of Rambo: First Blood Part II, that there
are still American soldiers in Vietnamese prison camps,
held decades after the war for inscrutable diplomatic (or
sadistic communist) motives. Disconnected from its orig-
inal urgency, from any particular aim, the flag appears as
a vague injunction to remember the Vietnam War, ranged
alongside similar fading appeals on billboards across the
nation to “never forget” 9/11.
There is no public memorial for those lost to COVID-19.
We have had no “mission accomplished” moment (perhaps
because the last one proved so ironic and ill-fated). We were
never told that our compliances, or even the mass deaths,
were made for the sake of a better future; no one dares sug-
gest there can be one. The last maskers, whether there is any
medical basis or only a kind of bitter clinging (as Obama once
said in another context) to their choice, are living emblems
of our most recent lost war. Q
BLAKE SMITH is a Fulbright scholar in North Macedonia.
SPRING 2023 55
Aviators Make
Joe Biden an
All-American Badass
By Virginia Postrel
n February, as I walked past a drugstore display
rack, a greeting card caught my eye. On a bright
blue background, a stylized image of black avi-
ator sunglasses sat above the phrase, “COME
ON, MAN!!” in white, with the E represented as
three red stripes. It was Joe Biden in a graphical
nutshell.
The stripes, lifted from Biden’s campaign logos, evoke
the American flag. His catchphrase, repeated throughout
his debates with Donald Trump, is an Everyman expression
of incredulity. The shades are Biden’s signature accessory,
the embodiment of American swagger. Aviators are for bad
boys who want to do good.
Biden and his team have gone to great pains to make the
iconic lenses a central element of his personal brand. The first
photo posted on his vice presidential Instagram account in
2014 was a close-up of Ray-Ban Aviators posed on his desk.
His 2020 campaign created a “Team Joe Aviators” Instagram
filter to let supporters put the glasses on their own photos.
For the 80-year-old president, whose age makes even par-
tisan Democrats nervous, the sunglasses offer a reminder
that classics go in and out of fashion but never disappear.
Aviator sunglasses date back to the 1930s, when the U.S.
Army Air Corps commissioned them for pilots. (Contrary
to popular belief, the first versions were made by American
Optical, founded in 1833 and still in business, not Ray-Ban.)
The slightly curved, teardrop shape blocks peripheral glare.
The sunglasses became iconic in World War II, when they
were worn by soldiers and sailors as well as airmen. After
the war, civilians adopted the style, which was in plentiful
supply thanks to military surplus stores.

56 Photo by CLINT BLOWERS


Aviators remain permanently imbued with the aura of Gen.
Douglas MacArthur, who was photographed wearing them
as he waded ashore the island of Leyte in 1944, fulfilling his
promise to return in victory to the Philippines. In surveys in
the 1980s, Ray-Ban found that “macho” and “American” were
the words most often associated with its Aviator shades. Those
associations haven’t changed much in the intervening years.
“The aviator has a butch quality that few other sunglasses
can match,” Financial Times style columnist Nicholas Foulkes
wrote in 2002. Women wear the style, but it has a particularly
masculine appeal. Suggesting that the sunglasses’ endur-
ing popularity stemmed from their U.S. sensibility, Foulkes
quoted a London optician who declared that “aviators meant
the very essence of America.”
That essence is closely related to a constant projection of
confidence. In mirrored form, aviators intimidate. But they
can also reassure. Something about these sunglasses, style
journalist Teo van den Broeke wrote in a 2020 column for
British GQ, “speaks of mastery and dependability.” Top Gun’s
Maverick breaks rules but triumphs in the end. MacArthur
did return. Sure, these guys boast, but they aren’t just talk.
They get the job done. That’s the image—of America and of
himself—that Biden wants us to see in his eyes.
With the swagger comes sex appeal. “[N]o man has ever
worn a pair of aviators and looked anything other than sex on
a plate,” van den Broeke enthused, pronouncing the aviator-
wearing Biden his “personal #ManCrushMonday.” Big enough
to cover aging eyes yet graceful enough not to seem like
deliberate camouflage, the style offers the suggestion of
eternal youth.
Much of the style’s allure emanates from its original
purpose. From the days of biplanes and silk scarves, the
aviator—a more glamorous term than pilot—has been an
archetype of masculine glamour. Whether in a biplane or
an F-22, the aviator combines youth, daring, grace, bravery,
technical mastery, and forward-looking modernity. World
War I aces, historian Robert Wohl writes in his book A Passion
for Wings, “exemplified more purely than any other figure
of their time what it meant to be a man.” Unlike the grunts
in the trenches, they were the masters of their fates, of their
machines, of the air itself.
For Biden, the sunglasses also represent loyalty and per-
sistence. He says he has worn Ray-Ban Aviators since his teen-
age years, regardless of current fashion. During the Obama
years, aviator shades weren’t exactly on trend. A 2008 arti-
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
cle in Biden’s hometown paper, hopefully titled “Joe Cool,”
twitted the vice presidential candidate for “a look that was
super-hip when Maverick and Iceman were roaming the
deck of an aircraft carrier in ‘Top Gun’ in 1986.” The veep
was a throwback. At a 2010 rally, President Barack Obama
said, “Joe looks cool in those glasses, too, doesn’t he?” It
OBJECTS
wasn’t clear whether he was complimenting his vice presi-
dent or teasing him.
In Vanity Fair in August 2020, Erin Vanderhoof skewered
Biden as insufficiently radical, writing that the glasses “stand
in as a symbol for why so many young people feel disillu-
sioned by the candidate. Six decades ago, Biden picked an
accessory and he has stuck with it ever since … . It seems
to reflect his approach to ideas like bipartisanship and
respect for norms.”
But that continuity—including the promise of respect for
norms—appealed to much of the electorate, which wasn’t
ready to write off the United States as an irredeemably awful
country or make a virtue of demonizing their fellow citizens.
Like Trump’s MAGA hats, Biden’s sunglasses hark back to the
triumphs of the 20th century but without the sense of loss.
Aviators suggest an America that is feisty, nonconformist,
powerful, competent, and ultimately good. Like the classic
lenses, that vision of the country goes in and out of fashion
but never disappears.
Now Biden’s look is back in style. Late-night TV host Jimmy
Kimmel got a laugh last year when he introduced the presi-
dent: “Our very special guest tonight is to aviator sunglasses
what Tom Cruise is to aviator sunglasses.” Maverick was
once again at the top of the box office, as cocky as ever in
his signature shades.
Biden isn’t Joe Cool. He’s the guy at the bar, the talkative
uncle at Thanksgiving, the fan yelling, “C’mon, man!” at
the referee. He was born the year MacArthur escaped the
Philippines for Australia. He’s older than the oldest baby
boomer. But he wears aviator shades for the simple reason
that he wants to look like a badass. Q
VIRGINIA POSTREL is a visiting fellow at Chapman
University’s Smith Institute for Political Economy and
Philosophy. Her books include The Power of Glamour
and, most recently, The Fabric of Civilization.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign stop
in Monaca, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 2, 2020.
SPRING 2023 57

A Tank by Any
Other Name
By Elliot Ackerman
he tanks are arriving in Ukraine, Abrams and
Leopards to face off against T-90s. The last
time German heavy armor traveled that far
east, it wasn’t Leopards but Panthers and
Tigers, and they tore up the earth around
Stalingrad and Kursk. The last time U.S.
heavy armor fought in Europe, it wasn’t
Abrams but Shermans, named after Gen. William Tecumseh
Sherman, who commanded Union troops in the Civil War.
The names of tanks tell a story. The M1 Abrams main bat-
tle tank is named after Gen. Creighton Abrams, who com-
manded armor units in World War II. The time separating
Abrams’s service in World War II and today’s war in Ukraine
is roughly the same time separating the Civil War service
of Sherman from those who rode in the tanks that bore his
name. These naming conventions form neat, 80-year links
in a chain of American war. Germany, which has eradicated
so much of its martial past from its heritage, retains the nam-
ing convention of its tanks, a fact that Russian President
Vladimir Putin touts in claims of Ukraine’s Nazification as
today’s Leopards follow their Panther and Tiger progenitors
into the bloodlands of Eastern Europe.
The Russian T-90s, whose charred carcasses littered the
highways into Kyiv last summer, have their own lineage.
They are descendants of the first Soviet tank, the T-18, which
entered mass production in 1928, long after Western powers
pioneered tank design during the later years of World War I.
After Russia’s communist revolution, development of a tank
became an important signal that Soviet industry could keep
pace with the West.
Unlike the U.S. tanks named for generals or the German
tanks named for predatory cats, Soviet tanks would forgo
romanticized naming conventions. A collectivized society
was more pragmatic and literal. Soviet tanks (and most Rus-
sian tanks today) would have only a T followed by a number
(typically the year of their adoption) to denote the model.
Anglo-German rivalry gave birth to the tank during World
War I, so it makes sense that the names would be differ-
ent. Like today in Ukraine, tanks were deployed to break
a battlefield stalemate. They promised to breach trenches
and silence machine-gun nests on the Western Front, a
wonder weapon to end the war. Secrecy surrounded their
58
development. Initially, the British conceived of the tank as
a “landship.” The Royal Navy participated in its design, and
the program described its purpose as the development of
a “water carrier”—also called a “tank.”
When the British first used the Mark I variant at the Bat-
tle of the Somme in 1916, it augured a new era of industrial-
ized warfare, one that witnesses struggled to comprehend.
A British soldier, seeing a tank for the first time, recalled,
“We heard strange throbbing noises, and lumbering slowly
towards us came three huge mechanical monsters such as
we had never seen before.”
Even though most could not comprehend the tank when it
first arrived on the battlefield, humanity’s greatest dreamers
—among them, H.G. Wells and Leonardo da Vinci—envis-
aged tanks long before their creation. The tank’s lineage can
be traced back to the armored chariots of ancient armies. The
words used by other cultures place the tank more firmly in the
evolution of war machines. In the Arab world, tanks are called
dabbaaba, after a type of medieval siege engine. In Sweden,
they are stridsvagn, which translates as chariot. The Polish call
them czolg, from the verb “to crawl,” an attempt to describe the
machine’s movement. The Japanese term, sensha, translates
as “battle vehicle,” an articulation of its function.
I drove an Abrams once, in Iraq. I was an infantryman
and had made friends with one of our supporting tankers,
a squat gunnery sergeant who looked as if he was born to
sit in a turret. A tank’s efficacy is judged by balancing two
characteristics at odds with each other: speed and armor.
In this way, every good tank is a contradiction. It is both
impossibly heavy and impossibly fast. After taking a cou-
ple laps around the base, I commented on how well the
tank handled. The gunnery sergeant laughed, and what he
told me that day is true: “Tough to go back to walking after
you’ve ridden one of these into a war.” Q
ELLIOT ACKERMAN is a former captain in the U.S. Marine
Corps and the author of books including The Fifth Act
and the forthcoming Halcyon.
Above and right: Russian T-80 tanks in
Ukraine’s Donbas region on March 11.
 OBJECTS

Photos by PAULA BRONSTEIN SPRING 2023 59

 What Marvel Teaches
SONY PICTURES/MARVEL/DISNEY MOVIE PHOTOS

Us About Geopolitics
One is a fantasy universe mostly invented
in the 1960s—and the other has Spider-Man.
By Daniel W. Drezner

Illustration by ABIGAIL GREENBERG SPRING 2023 61


wenty-first-century political scien-
tists have not shied away from using
their conceptual wares to analyze
significant pop culture phenomena.
Name your favorite piece of intel-
lectual property—Harry Potter,
Battlestar Galactica, The Lord of the
Rings, Game of Thrones, Star Trek,
Star Wars—and political scientists
have written a book about it. There are entire podcasts devoted
to the intersection of political science and science fiction.
The latest addition to this lineup is The Politics of the
Marvel Cinematic Universe, a volume edited by Nicholas
Carnes, a professor of public policy and political science
at Duke University, and Lilly Goren, the chair of the his-
tory, political science, and religious studies department at
Carroll University. Even among behemoths like Star Wars and
Harry Potter, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) might
be the hegemonic actor of the pop culture universe. Eight
of the 25 highest-grossing films of all time are Marvel films,
more than those registered by the Star Wars, Harry Potter,
Jurassic Park, and DC Extended Universe franchises combined.
In 2021, Statista polling revealed that 82 percent of U.S. adults
between the ages of 18 and 34 had seen at least one MCU film.
For those FOREIGN POLICY readers who have been paying
closer attention to Latin American politics or Middle East tur-
moil than to superheroes in recent years, a brief primer: The
MCU has its origins in Marvel Comics, created by Stan Lee,
Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, who produced an array of super-
heroes designed to compete with DC Comics’ more estab-
lished Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Marvel’s
edgier superheroes include the X-Men, the Fantastic Four,
Spider-Man, the Avengers, and more. Since its 2008 debut
hit Iron Man, Marvel Studios has released 31 films, around 20
television shows, and an array of shorts and one-off specials.
The MCU includes conspiracy thrillers (Captain America:
The Winter Soldier), comedy (Guardians of the Galaxy), and
Afro-futurism (Black Panther). The MCU is also known for
quips and interlocking plots and cameos that make each
character part of a larger universe. Marvel—which Disney
acquired in 2015—proved to be more successful at this project
62
than DC. Last year, Warner Bros. launched a 10-year plan to
model DC’s extended universe after Marvel’s.
With great power come great expectations of an edited vol-
ume, and Politics clocks in at more than 400 pages, suggesting
that political scientists could—in the words of Captain America
—“do this all day.” At their best, books like this one use pop
culture to court new readers and then use political science
to inform them about what makes the cultural artifact tick.
While only a superficial knowledge of the Marvel universe is
required to comprehend the material, I would recommend
some familiarity with political science. As one of my editors
put it: The difference between political science and Marvel
is that one is a fantasy universe mostly invented in the 1960s
with roots in World War II—and the other has Spider-Man.
Carnes and Goren organize their volume around three
topics: sociopolitical issues in superheroes’ origin stories,
the role of governments in the MCU, and shifts in represen-
tation (i.e., who gets to be a superhero) over time. In their
introduction, they note that “the MCU can be a driver of
contemporary political and social currents, but the MCU
can also be driven by those same forces.” One could make
a similar claim about political science analysis of the MCU.
Not all the nooks and crannies of the MCU get equal treat-
ment in the book. There are a combined eight films and one
TV show covering Thor and Ant-Man, but they are refer-
enced sparingly in this book. The book also covers more adult
Netflix TV shows such as Jessica Jones. Like the rest of the
MCU fandom, however, the volume’s contributors have made
the sensible decision to pretend that Iron Fist never existed.
Political scientists clearly have favorites within the MCU.
There are multiple chapters devoted to the politics of Black
Panther, for example. This is to be expected—political scien-
tists Allison Rank and Heather Pool point out in their chapter
that the fact “that [filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s] blockbuster film
manages to open such important questions while also being
a rousing action film is truly impressive.” Captain America,
Jessica Jones, Captain Marvel (the character who inspired
Carnes and Goren to assemble this book), and Agent Carter
are also covered in multiple chapters.
Politics offers lessons big and small about the relationship
between the MCU and politics. Multiple contributors quantify
various political aspects of the MCU. For example, political
At their best, books like Politics
use pop culture to court new
readers and then use political
science to inform them about what
makes the cultural artifact tick.

The Politics of the Marvel
Cinematic Universe
ED. NICHOLAS CARNES AND LILLY J.
GOREN, UNIVERSITY PRESS OF
KANSAS, 456 PP., $29.95,
DECEMBER 2022
scientist Ora Szekely’s chapter confirms that Black Panther
was a standout film not only because its protagonist was a
person of color but also because it featured the highest ratio
of female to male characters of any MCU film. Researcher
Bethany Lacina’s chapter reveals the diversity of MCU audi-
ences: “People of color are the majority of the MCU’s eigh-
teen-to-twenty-four-year-old audience,” she writes.
The book’s more conceptual arguments are also interest-
ing. Multiple authors point out that key MCU superheroes
(such as Black Panther, Captain America, and Thor) have
origin stories rooted in national interest and provide, in
the words of Goren, a “kind of gentle, nostalgic national-
ism.” Multiple chapters also connect the exceptional role
of superheroes within their fictional societies to questions
about emergency politics and sovereign power in the real
world. Indeed, political scientist Christopher Galdieri’s chap-
ter delineates how and why Captain America—a human so
worthy he can wield Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir—rejects the
all-American idea of institutional checks on his power. The
whole plot of Captain America: Civil War revolves around
Captain America’s resistance to the idea of political oversight
of the Avengers, a team of Marvel superheroes.
Contributors do not always agree in their interpretations
of the MCU. The two chapters on environmentalism, for
example, are at odds over whether mega-villain Thanos was
right to wipe out half of all life in the universe in the name
of environmental sustainability.
Multiple authors also bemoan the objectification of
the MCU’s female superheroes. Political scientist Kristin
Kanthak asserts, with just a hint of hyperbole: “We demand
that Captain Marvel defeat Thanos entirely on her own while
simultaneously keeping the house clean and the kids fed, all
while looking dead sexy.” But political scientist Dan Cassino’s
exploration of how the MCU treats masculinity suggests a
REVIEW
different perspective. “The male superheroes we’re shown
are impressively muscled and not shy about showing it off.
Indeed, one of the more progressive aspects of the MCU is
its tendency to sexualize male, rather than female, bodies,”
he writes. Cassino’s study of Captain America’s evolution
hints at the MCU’s surprisingly subtle take on masculinity.
The superficial superhero archetype is muscle-bound men
smashing their way to victory. In the MCU, battles incur costs:
Iron Man has PTSD and Thor depression. Captain America
copes better in no small part because, while counseling sur-
vivors of the MCU’s various disasters, he embraces a more
capacious view of masculinity.
As big as Politics is, I wish it were bigger—because the
book leaves out some fascinating political questions raised
by the MCU. Surprisingly, there was no extended discussion
or debate about how a superhero is different from a vigi-
lante. (This might explain why Spider-Man, Daredevil, and
the Punisher did not feature significantly.) Another trend
that garnered little analysis is the steady disappearance of
ordinary civilians from the narrative. Most early MCU films
were about how a superhero coped with their new pow-
ers within their preexisting network of friends and family.
But by the time the MCU got to Avengers: Infinity War and
Avengers: Endgame in 2018 and 2019, nearly all the protago-
nists were superheroes. As Carnes notes in his chapter, the
U.S. government’s prominence in MCU films also recedes
over time. The politics of the MCU may change in a world
where almost everyone with a speaking part is a superhero
and normal Earth-bound institutions seem invisible.
The biggest gap in the book is the absence of, um, foreign
policy. Most of the chapters are concerned with questions
of domestic U.S. politics or political theory. Political scien-
tist Stephen Saideman’s chapter discusses civil-military
relations, but beyond that, there is little mention of tradi-
tional international relations questions. That is not due to a
shortage of subject material: The question of whether Black
Panther’s Wakanda can be an isolationist superpower, for
example, merits further exploration. How great-power pol-
itics on Earth will progress after the reveal of alien civiliza-
tions such as the Skrulls or the Kree seems like an important
topic, too. And don’t get me started on the effect of time
travel on credible commitment mechanisms.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the MCU is that over time,
even as its characters become more representative, the uni-
verse has been drained of the political institutions that we
take for granted. In other words, the MCU now looks like
our world—in every way but its politics. Q
DANIEL W. DREZNER is a professor of international politics
at Tufts University’s Fletcher School.
SPRING 2023 63
 SAUDI ARABIA: ECONOMIC DIVERSIFICATION BUILDS ROADS TO SUCCESS Sponsored Content
Produced by Prisma Reports

© Shutterstock / Ziyad Alangri

Economic diversification
builds roads to success
As the Kingdom pursues the myriad socioeconomic
development goals featured in its Vision 2030 strategic
blueprint, its fiscal performance is setting the benchmark

Saudi Arabia’s outstanding eco-

nomic results and upward trajec-
tory are expected to propel the
Kingdom to number one position
in 2023. Leading economists ex-
pect it to soon become the fast-
est-growing economy in the world
as it closes in on many of the am-
bitious goals contained in its com-
prehensive strategic development
blueprint: Saudi Vision 2030.
According to the latest data,
the country’s real gross domes-
tic product (GDP) for Q3 2022
jumped by nearly 9% from the
same period of the year prior,
mainly due to an increase in oil
activities. In addition, non-oil ac-
tivities climbed by an impressive
6% year-on-year as economic di-
versification continued to progress
well. A reduction in reliance on
SRC is an enabler of the primary market development by
pushing the creation of the secondary mortgage market,
and as a link between the primary and capital markets.”
Fabrice Susini, CEO, Saudi Real Estate Refinance Company
oil revenue is at the core of HRH
Crown Prince Prince Mohammed
Bin Salman’s Vision 2030.
The Public Investment Fund
(PIF) is supporting and enabling
key strategic sectors in Saudi Ara-
bia, in line with Vision 2030. One
such strand of this support was a
recent $1.3 billion investment to
enable the construction services
sector to scale up capacity, expand
capabilities, stimulate growth,
drive the adoption of advanced
technologies and improve local
supply chains for current and fu-
ture projects as part of moves to
further develop the country’s con-
struction ecosystem.
The PIF’s Saudi Real Estate &
Infrastructure Development pool
features a range of strategic assets
across the Kingdom. The projects
cater to latent demand from the
Saudi population for leisure, retail
Saudi Arabia is taking giant strides towards its socioeconomic goals in Vision 2030
“We have homes and we have
people that are applying for mort-
gages that could be accepted by
banks. But how long and how far
can the banks go if the mortgage
market keeps growing? Isn’t there
a point at which they would need
liquidity, where they would need to
better manage their balance sheet
or take care of certain risks? That’s
Fabrice Susini where SRC comes into play.
CEO, Saudi Real Estate “We are part of this consistent
Refinance Company continuum, coming at the end of
the equation to make sure that
and entertainment facilities, help primary mortgage originators will
promote Saudi Arabia as a tour- keep originating mortgages and
ism destination, improve access that they won’t be stopped by
to modern urban living, upgrade considerations related to liquidi-
ty, capital adequacy, interest rate
risk and so on. That’s where SRC
plugs itself in: as an enabler of the
primary market development by
pushing the creation of the sec-
ondary mortgage market, and as a
link between the primary and cap-
critical infrastructure to support ital markets.”
economic development and indi- According to the senior exec-
rectly help unlock related sectors utive, SRC has traditionally been
in the Kingdom. focused on the domestic market,
To support its multiple real but one key objective is to be-
estate goals, in 2017 the PIF es- come better known international-
tablished and capitalized a mort- ly, whether through the issuing of
gage refinancing company: Saudi
Real Estate Refinance Company,
more commonly referred to as
SRC. The dedicated, but relatively
small-sized entity aims to push the
development of the whole housing
ecosystem in Saudi Arabia, as
CEO, Fabrice Susini, explains.
“Alongside the responsibilities
of a private entity — we have to
be self-sustainable, and we have to
make sure we cover our costs and
generate a fair profit — we also
have to contribute to the housing
system and our objectives include
a focus on liquidity and mortgage
affordability,” he explains.
FP Editorial had no part in the creation of this content.
corporate sukuks (Islamic finan-
cial certificates) or a move into the
structured finance capital market.
SRC has laid strong foundations
via the benchmark mortgage ref-
erence curve and issuing of $3.5
billion in guaranteed sukuks in 18
months.
“We have made the link we
wanted between the mortgage and
the capital market domestically,
and want to replicate that inter-
nationally,” Susini continues. “You
can expect to see SRC becoming
more visible in the international
market and to the international
investor community.
“We’re still a small company
that has quadrupled its balance
sheet in just two years and that is
trying to contribute to the changes
and opening up of the Kingdom.
I’m a strong advocate of the mes-
sage that people should come and
visit Saudi Arabia and see the op-
portunities for themselves; don’t
stay on the sidelines. There is a
lot to discover, appreciate and see,
with a broad range of openings
available to international inves-
tors who are interested in this new
frontier.”
 Trysts With
Sri Lanka’s Ghosts
A Booker Prize-winning novel excavates
memories of the country’s civil war.
By V.V. Ganeshananthan

n July 1983, Sri Lanka’s capital of Colombo erupted in anti-Tamil

pogroms effectively sanctioned by the state. The violence followed
the deaths of 13 Sinhalese Sri Lankan Army soldiers at the hands of
Tamil militants in the city of Jaffna. The night after the ambush,
mobs from the country’s Sinhalese majority targeted and attacked
Tamils—members of the country’s largest
ethnic minority group—in Colombo. Tamils A soldier takes a coffee break
were murdered or displaced, Tamil houses in downtown Colombo, Sri Lanka,
in front of two burned-out shops
and offices burned. The violence raged for on Aug. 2, 1983, in the wake
days before then-President J.R. Jayewardene said anything. of anti-Tamil violence.
The death toll is estimated to have been in the thousands,
although no official number was ever announced. What happened in Colombo
echoed all over the country, and many Tamils fled, some leaving Sri Lanka for-
ever. Although decades of ethnic tensions preceded this event, known as Black
JEFF ROBBINS/AP

July, it is often considered the beginning of the Sri Lankan civil war.
Black July lives on through communal memory, of course, but also in photo-
graphs. A famous picture by photojournalist Chandragupta Amarasinghe shows a

SPRING 2023 65
naked Tamil man cowering on a bench while several laugh-
ing young Sinhalese men swing their feet in his direction.
One is preparing to kick him. Over the years, this image
has arguably circulated more than any other depiction
of the violence—undeniable proof of the cruelty of those
days. How does such evidence pass into fiction? In Shehan
Karunatilaka’s novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,
which won the 2022 Booker Prize, the photograph (or one
strikingly like it) is taken by the eponymous character, who
describes it as the “naked boy surrounded by dancing dev-
ils.” Rather than publishing it, Maali has tucked it away in
a box—along with a number of other politically explosive
shots—in anticipation of the day when harm might befall
him, just as it has so many other Sri Lankan journalists.
Now it’s 1990 Colombo, that day has come, and Maali
is dead. Unable to remember the circumstances of his
demise and suspecting murder, he finds himself in an office
building-like In Between, staffed by the civil servants of
the afterlife. Like many bureaucratic buildings, this one
is populated by signs that send one in circles, entities of
dubious authority, shouting people, obfuscatory replies,
and disorganized lines (“Lankans can’t queue”). The freshly
deceased are handed ola leaf forms to fill out so they can
exit the In Between and reach something known as The
Light. “What’s The Light?” Maali asks. “The short answer
is Whatever You Need It To Be. The long answer is, I don’t
have time for the long answer,” he is told.
This non-reply comes via the afterworld-weary but patient
Helper, Dr. Ranee Sridharan, one of the In Between’s reign-
ing bureaucrats. Dr. Ranee is based on Rajani Thiranag-
ama, a doctor and professor of anatomy at the University of
Jaffna’s medical school who was a dissident and critic of the
militant separatist Tamil Tigers; in 1989, they assassinated
her. (A character connected to her also appears in my most
recent novel, Brotherless Night.) The In Between is full of souls
like Dr. Ranee—the ghosts of people murdered not only by
the Tigers but also by the Sinhalese Marxist insurrection and
the government. They are accompanied by the ghosts of car
crash victims, those who died by suicide, and others, as well
as a terrifying demon, the Mahakali, whose body pulses with
those who have given her their souls and given up The Light
in pursuit of vengeance.
Maali has seven moons—seven nights—to take care of
the things that prevent him from getting to The Light, if he
cares to reach it. But despite Dr. Ranee’s best efforts, Maali
isn’t that interested in filling out the form, which includes
assessing his sins. Instead, he is desperate to ensure that the
work he has hidden gets into the right hands. In Karunati-
laka’s merciless, madcap version of the afterlife, dead Maali
can ride the wind to anywhere his body has gone. He can
see all that is unfolding, but he has no power to interfere
Down There, as the real world is known.
66
The Seven Moons
of Maali Almeida
SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA,
W.W. NORTON COMPANY,
400 PP., $18.95,
NOVEMBER 2022
Between the In Between and Maali’s view of Colombo,
the afterlife is thick with argument and regret. Maali is
not the only one who cannot let the photographs go; it
turns out they’re of interest to plenty of other people, too.
As people implicated by the violence in some shots jostle
with people who commissioned pictures for propaganda,
those who love Maali struggle to ensure that the photo-
graphs are used for justice.
The narrative really takes off when Maali’s charismatic
flatmates, DD and Jaki, enter the scene. Like thousands of
Sri Lankans who searched for disappeared family members
and friends during the war, the two Tamil cousins hunt for
their loved one and then, heartbreakingly, for his body and
the box of photographs they know was precious to him.
The novel’s settings toggle between In Between amor-
phousness and intense specificity in Colombo, each thrown
powerfully into relief by the other. With notable excep-
tions such as Black July, Colombo was not the center of the
war, but with Maali’s story, Karunatilaka reminds us of the
aspects of the conflict that did touch Sri Lanka’s capital,
from buildings used for torture—in the novel, a building
known as the Palace—to the abductions of journalists and
meetings between unlikely political bedfellows.
The scenes in the city also offer a sly skewering of Colombo’s
elite. Maali has seen too much violence, much more than
most in his privileged “Colombo bubble,” Karunatilaka
writes. Through flashbacks, we catch glimpses of the life
Maali led: dipping in and out of Colombo to shoot photo-
graphs for whoever would pay him, no matter what side
they were on—the Sri Lankan Army, the British Embassy,
a Tamil nongovernmental organization. Maali recalls trav-
eling to the Vanni, Kilinochchi, and Mullaitivu, as well
as other locations where shelling and violence occurred;
when he returned to Colombo, the cognitive dissonance
seemed impossible to him. Even so, he participated in the
vibrant queer life of Colombo’s high society. He was in a
relationship with closeted DD, the privileged son of the
lone Tamil cabinet minister, and serially unfaithful to him.
Maali’s life bears a more than coincidental similarity to
that of Sri Lankan journalist Richard de Zoysa, who was
abducted and killed in Colombo in 1990. De Zoysa was gay;

rumored to be connected to the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
(JVP), which had led a Marxist insurrection in Sri Lanka’s
south; and is generally believed to have been killed by a gov-
ernment death squad. He was Sinhalese and Tamil; Maali
is Tamil, Burgher, and Sinhalese. De Zoysa’s life, too, has
received multiple fictional treatments. (Seven Moons refer-
ences him as though he and Maali occupy the same world.)
Indeed, in the 1983 Sinhalese film Yuganthaya, de Zoysa, who
was also an actor, played the character of leftist Malin Kaba-
lana—whose name bears a striking resemblance to Maali’s
birth name, Malinda Albert Kabalana (with Malin one of his
many nicknames). A corrupt cop who appears in the novel
also shares a name with one of the policemen indicted and
subsequently acquitted of de Zoysa’s abduction and murder.
The book seems to invite us to look for such real-world
correspondences. After all, as Karunatilaka writes, “The
thing that makes you most Sri Lankan is not your father’s
surname or the holy place where you kneel, nor the smile
you plaster on your face to hide your fears. It is the knowing
of other Lankans and the knowing of those Lankans’ Lank-
ans. There are aunties, if given a surname and a school, who
can pinpoint any Lankan to the nearest cousin. You have
moved in circles that overlapped and many that stayed shut.
You were cursed with the gift of never forgetting a name,
a face, or a sequence of cards.” One can only imagine and
hope those aunties are reading this book.
But even those less informed will sense the presence of
ghostly doubles in Karunatilaka’s cast of characters. His
dreamed worlds are haunted most powerfully by the ghosts
of facts—facts that refuse to go away, despite some people’s
best efforts. He reminds us that shadows can be cast only by
what is there. Perhaps most satisfyingly for a depiction of a
country racked by unresolved death, he gives those ghosts
the chance to speak to us, which both we and they deserve.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was originally titled
Chats With the Dead and first published in the Indian sub-
continent in 2020. It was reedited for an international audi-
ence. Still, the narrative is dense with references for those who
either know Sri Lanka’s histories or are willing to plumb their
depths. (Perhaps we might expect more of international audi-
ences or at least Western ones.) While Karunatilaka’s story
is set in 1990, he dances over the timeline of the country’s
Perhaps most satisfyingly for
a depiction of a country racked
by unresolved death, Karunatilaka
gives those ghosts the chance
to speak to us, which both we
and they deserve.
REVIEW
history lightly and with elegance, invoking everything from
Sri Lanka’s year of independence (1948, when upper-crust
Tamil and Sinhalese politicians shamefully joined hands to
disenfranchise Tamil workers from the upcountry tea plan-
tations) to the future, via a mention of a young parliamentar-
ian named Rajapaksa. In one scene, two characters discuss a
human rights-minded Rajapaksa holding up a leaflet on the
“Mothers of the Disappeared” in parliament, advocating for
the state to identify the “morgues full of our innocent dead.”
“It’s easy to shout when you’re in opposition,” one char-
acter says. “Let young Rajapaksa run a war and see what
happens. If he had to deal with the JVP, what would he do?”
We know what happened: The Rajapaksa family, and spe-
cifically Mahinda, rose to power in 2005 on a promise to
end the civil war. They made good on that vow, crushing
the Tigers with a brutal military push—and many casual-
ties among Tamil civilians. (Mahinda’s brother Gotabaya
was recently president and during Mahinda’s term served
as defense secretary. Mass protests over botched economic
policies last year led to Gotabaya’s resignation and flight
from Sri Lanka, though he has since returned to the coun-
try.) When facing international calls for accountability,
the Rajapaksas and their allies have often proclaimed Sri
Lanka’s sovereignty and decried interference from the United
Nations. Yet in Seven Moons, we are haunted by the earlier
version of Mahinda, in a world in which the “[U.N.] forensic
team had been invited by Rajapaksa to train our local author-
ities on identifying bodies against the records of the missing.”
With callbacks like this, Karunatilaka underlines how we are
haunted not just by the ghosts of lost others but by the ghosts
of lost selves—the better people we might have been. His tar-
gets include historical and political wrongs, such as discrim-
ination, homophobia, and impunity, but also intimate ones,
such as infidelity and dishonesty. As Maali’s beloved DD and
Jaki push the boundaries of their considerable privilege and
head into peril on his behalf, he realizes that to make right the
wrongs of his life, he may need to strike a dangerous bargain.
The story is as cannily plotted on earth as in heaven; pay-
ing attention to every demon, literal or figurative, yields rich
rewards. In Karunatilaka’s hands, history is a hall of mir-
rors. As the narrative, which is full of wit and sharp social
observations, gathers steam, one cannot help but enjoy
hurtling through that hall and toward disaster alongside
the surprisingly but convincingly moral Maali. He’s already
dead, but, in the loves of his life, he still has something to
save. His attempt is riotous, frank, and unsentimental—
and while some people try to bury the evidence, he seeks
to resurrect it. Q
V.V. GANESHANANTHAN is an associate professor of English at
the University of Minnesota and the author of two novels,
Brotherless Night and Love Marriage.
SPRING 2023 67
 Why Is Adam Smith
Still So Popular?
Debates about the Scottish economist have
raged with special passion in the United States.
By Ashley Lester

he 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith pub-

lished his most influential work, The Wealth of Nations,
in 1776—a year of singular historical resonance for
Americans. In the centuries since, the book has come
to play a uniquely controversial role in
U.S. political and economic life, claimed A crowd gathers to watch
with almost equal fervor by the free mar- the unveiling of a bronze
statue of Adam Smith at
ket right and the social democratic left. the Royal Mile in Edinburgh,
On the surface, Smith seems an Scotland, on July 4, 2008.
unlikely figure to inspire more than two centuries of heated
debate. Born in a small Scottish village, he was a lifelong bachelor, some-
times academic, and public servant. His fame and reputation rest principally
on Wealth of Nations, which opens with a famous discussion of a pin fac-
tory able to profit off the division of labor thanks to broad markets and the

68

Adam Smith’s America:
How a Scottish Philosopher
Became an Icon of
American Capitalism
GLORY M. LIU, PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY PRESS, 384 PP., $35,
NOVEMBER 2022
freedom to pursue one’s own self-interest. This narrative
seemed to view restraints to competition as obstacles to
growth and has been embraced by apostles of the free market.
Yet Smith’s views were more nuanced than this narrow
interpretation. In Wealth of Nations, he argues that “when
the regulation … is in favor of the workmen, it is always just
and equitable.” And his first published work, The Theory of
Moral Sentiments—which emphasizes “sympathy” rather
than “self-interest”—has surprisingly egalitarian instincts.
Glory M. Liu’s Adam Smith’s America invites us to ponder
how and why debates about Smith have raged with special
passion in the United States. The book is an exhaustively
researched tour of American responses to Smith over the
past 250 years, from the country’s founders to economist
Milton Friedman and beyond. Liu, a lecturer in social stud-
ies at Harvard University, presents it as a work of “recep-
tion history,” a historiographical approach that focuses on
how a text—in this case, Smith’s writing—is received by
readers rather than on the text itself. Liu not only empha-
sizes that Americans have developed their own distinct
interpretations of Smith and his work but also argues that
those interpretations have played an active role in creating
today’s United States.
Much of Liu’s book focuses on debates over free trade and
protectionism that started with the founders and contin-
ued as the principal focus of economic policy debate until
the early 20th century. Alexander Hamilton, today’s favor-
ite founder, looms large in this discussion. Smith’s writing
helped Hamilton promote his vision of a cosmopolitan and
manufacturing-led economy, in contest with Thomas Jeffer-
son’s agrarian vision. But Smith’s prescription of free, unfet-
tered trade sat less well with Hamilton, who sought instead
to vigorously support U.S. industry with subsidies and
tariffs. Hamilton became one of the first in a now long-run-
JEFF J. MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES
ning U.S. tradition of finding in Smith’s writings evidence
to support one’s preexisting convictions while faulting or
ignoring elements that contradict them.
While 19th-century economic debates focused on free
trade and protectionism, in the 20th century the locus of
economic policy debate shifted to the domestic economy. Two
REVIEW
world wars and the Great Depression produced a demand for
greater government involvement in market regulation and
the provision of goods such as health care and education. It
was therefore perhaps inevitable that Smith would be drafted
into service again, this time as an apostle of freedom from
government interference in the economy.
The Chicago School—so called because it was devel-
oped by members of the University of Chicago’s economics
department—was largely responsible for crafting this new
reading of Smith. Liu insightfully tracks changes in what
economists of the Chicago School chose to emphasize in
Smith’s work over the past 100 years, from the moderate
classical liberalism of Jacob Viner and Frank Knight in the
1930s to the strident free market advocacy of Friedman and
George Stigler in the latter half of the 20th century. Fried-
man was an influential economist and the winner of the
1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, but his
stature as a public intellectual eclipsed his purely academic
work. In his political war on all types of government activ-
ism and regulation, Friedman resurrected Smith to play
the father of free market liberalism.
Liu focuses on the allusions to Smith in Friedman’s mas-
sively influential 1980 PBS series, Free to Choose. (In 2023, it
is hard to imagine that a documentary series on PBS hosted
by an economics professor could have a significant effect on
public opinion, but that was the case in the United States on
the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election as president.) Liu con-
vincingly demonstrates that Friedman’s depiction of Smith
was the product of Friedman’s political agenda rather than a
serious attempt to deal with Smith and his work.
For example, Friedman emphasized Smith’s metaphor of
the “invisible hand,” which holds that private agents who
act in their own self-interest unwittingly serve the common
good. Today, perhaps as a result, almost everyone familiar
with Smith still associates him with the invisible hand—
despite the metaphor appearing once each in Wealth of
Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments.
With free markets on the ascent under Reagan, Liu then
illustrates how Friedman and his colleagues made Smith a
cultural icon. Amusingly, for example, Adam Smith neck-
ties came to be the hottest fashion item among right-wing
intellectuals and policy wonks of that era—including in the
corridors of the Reagan White House.
Liu is less successful in recounting academic interpreters’
and historians’ reactions to Friedman’s depictions of Smith.
Her final chapter surveys the work of a succession of ear-
nest and worthy scholars who have together ensured that
modern Smith scholarship is a rich and burgeoning field.
But one might reasonably question how relevant highly
scholarly responses are to Friedman’s distinctly political
SPRING 2023 69
onslaught. It seems at least possible to argue that there is a
direct line from Friedman’s focus on “freedom” conceived
as freedom from government regulation to the “freedom”
championed today by gun-rights supporters, anti-vaxx-
ers, and the like.
Liu highlights the (academically) famous and engagingly
named “Das Adam Smith Problem” coined by German aca-
demics. The question asks whether Wealth of Nations is best
read alone or as a set with Smith’s earlier Theory of Moral Sen-
timents. Loosely speaking, the former can be caricatured as
focusing on people’s “regard to their own interest” (in Smith’s
words), while the latter places “sympathy” (again, Smith) at
the center of its analysis. Read alone, Wealth of Nations can
seem an apologia for a particularly myopic form of capitalism;
read together, the pair present a more nuanced approach to
both individual morality and the role of government.
Liu focuses her work on political-academic interpretations
of Smith but almost entirely omits the insights of econom-
ics, the discipline Smith arguably founded. Although few
academic economists of the past 50 years have explicitly
appealed to Smith’s authority, many have grappled, at least
implicitly, with Das Adam Smith Problem.
Other economists have sought to enrich the discipline
beyond a pure theory of the optimality of self-interest. Liu
mentions Paul Samuelson only in passing, in reference to
his famous introductory economics textbook. But for aca-
demic economists, Samuelson was arguably the most influ-
ential economist of the postwar period. His 1947 treatise,
Foundations of Economic Analysis, formed the bedrock of
the mathematical methods that have dominated econom-
ics ever since. Like Friedman, Samuelson was taught by
Viner as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in
the 1930s. Unlike Friedman, he went on to study at Harvard
and teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and,
more importantly, to develop rigorous insights into govern-
ment’s role in the economy.
One example is Samuelson’s theory of public goods, in
which he explained why markets fail to provide certain
types of goods, such as national defense, which instead
must be provided by government. Fascinatingly, Smith
anticipated this role for government, favoring a stand-
ing army maintained by the state rather than a part-time
militia, an idea that was more popular in his time. More
recently, many economists have grappled with theories of
individual motivation that include the well-being of oth-
ers rather than pure self-interest. A particularly notable
example is Indian economist (and Nobel Memorial Prize
winner) Amartya Sen, who has tried to formalize Smith’s
idea of sympathy in modern economics.
Expecting Liu’s reception history to provide detailed
70
Liu not only emphasizes that
Americans have developed their
own distinct interpretations
of Smith and his work
but also argues that those
interpretations have played
an active role in creating
today’s United States.
analyses of economic theories that do not even mention
Smith would be to ask too much. But a less cursory consider-
ation of the development of economics as a discipline might
help Liu explain an underlying problem her book never fully
addresses: Why is Smith still so famous? It seems fair to say
that modern economics as a discipline would possibly not
have been too different had he never lived.
One reason Smith remains a first-rank intellectual celeb-
rity after nearly 250 years may simply be that—unlike almost
all other economists—his most important works are engag-
ing and accessible to read. Moreover, Smith had a habit of
maintaining ambiguity in his writing, which allows for
endless reinterpretation.
Far more importantly, however—and in a way that Liu
comes tantalizingly close to teasing out—Das Adam Smith
Problem has identified the basic dilemma of capitalism. In
a world of mostly self-interested individuals, to what extent
can we rely on motives beyond self-interest to beneficially
organize society? To what extent—and according to what
moral calculus—should government be able to limit the
economic freedom of some for the benefit of many? Liu
tends to write sympathetically about academic interpreters
of Smith but to deal brusquely with politicians and public
thinkers who create bastardized versions of him for their
own rhetorical purposes—particularly when, as with Fried-
man, she disagrees with them.
Nevertheless, Liu’s account of academic discussions
around Smith, while at times dense, is insightful; her
account of the political invocations of Smith is lively and
sometimes even surprising. In bringing these two accounts
together, Liu tells a compelling tale that can lend almost
any reader fresh insights into Smith, capitalism, and even
the act of reading itself. Q
ASHLEY LESTER is a finance professional who holds
a doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
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 QUIZ

What in the World?

By Alexandra Sharp
The following is adapted from past editions of FP’s online news quiz.

1. On Jan. 1, the head of the 6. Feb. 24 marked the anniversary

International Monetary Fund warned of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
that it expected how many of the What percentage of additional
world’s economies to experience a Ukrainian territory did Russian troops
recession this year? capture in the war’s first year?

a. 15 percent b. 27 percent a. 5 percent b. 7 percent

c. 33 percent d. 46 percent c. 9 percent d. 11 percent

2. A week later, which country

experienced an insurrection on its
capital?

a. Brazil b. Colombia 9. Which Israeli official came under fire

c. Nicaragua d. Honduras in March for saying the Palestinian town
of Hawara should be “wiped out”?

3. India blocked the airing of a a. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

documentary produced by which
broadcaster in late January?
a. NBC b. CNN
c. ITV d. BBC
4. In early February, the Canadian
Broadcasting Corp. reported that the
top-rated restaurant on Tripadvisor
for which city didn’t exist?
7. How many unidentified flying
objects did the United States and
Canada shoot down in February?
a. 2 b. 3 c. 4
8. Who won Nigeria’s Feb. 25
presidential election amid
allegations of vote-rigging?
b. National Security Minister Itamar
Ben-Gvir
c. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich
d. President Isaac Herzog
10. Who did not unexpectedly
announce their resignation during
the first quarter of 2023?
d. 5

a. Toronto b. Montreal a. Bola Tinubu b. Nnamdi Azikiwe

c. Vancouver d. Ottawa c. Atiku Abubakar d. Peter Obi
a. b.
United Nations New Zealand
Secretary-General Prime Minister
António Guterres Jacinda Ardern

c. d.
5. The Middle East’s worst earthquake World Bank Scottish
AP AND GETTY IMAGES

in almost a century hit Turkey and Syria President First Minister

on Feb. 6. What was its magnitude David Malpass Nicola Sturgeon
on the Richter scale?
ANSWERS: 1. c; 2. a; 3. d; 4. b; 5. b; 6. d; 7. c; 8. a; 9. c; 10. a
a. 8.3 b. 7.8 c. 6.4 d. 5.5

SPRING 2023 85
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