When Nation-States Compete

I don’t like Jake Sullivan, and for anybody who follows the news it must be very clear why. But his recent article in Foreign Affairs is massively important and fascinating. There is a lot of pre-election political speak but that’s all noise. Let’s concentrate on what Sullivan is saying that is actually important. Here are some quotes:

“In the previous era, there was reluctance to tackle clear market failures that threatened the resilience of the U.S. economy. Since the U.S. military had no peer, and as a response to 9/11, Washington focused on nonstate actors and rogue nations. It did not focus on improving its strategic position and preparing for a new era in which competitors would seek to replicate its military advantages, since that was not the world it faced at the time.”

“the United States is to win the competition to shape the future of the international order”

“the United States needs to prepare for a new era of strategic competition—in particular by deterring and responding to great-power aggression”

“the coming era of competition will be unlike anything experienced before. European security competition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely a regional contest between midsize and proximate powers that ultimately ended in calamity. The Cold War that followed the most destructive war in human history was waged between two superpowers that had very low levels of interdependence. That ended decisively and in America’s favor. Today’s competition is fundamentally different. The United States and China are economically interdependent.”

“we seek a free, open, prosperous, and secure international order, one that protects the interests of the United States and its friends and delivers global public goods. But we do not expect a transformative end state like the one that resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union. There will be an ebb and flow to the competition—the United States will make gains, but China will, too.”

“And we need a sustained sense of confidence in our capacity to outcompete any country.”

“At times, the competition will be intense. “

“Washington and Beijing need to figure out how to manage competition to reduce tensions and find a way forward on shared challenges.”

“But it also needs to be clear about what is most important to the United States. That is how we will seek to shape relations with them: so that on balance they have incentives to act in ways consistent with U.S. interests.”

“This commitment to national strength through industrial investment began to erode in the 1980s, and there was little perceived need for it after the Cold War. “

What are you noticing in these quotes?

One obvious thing is the extraordinarily high incidence of the words “competition” and “competitors”. I only copied a tiny number of the sentences that contain these words. And what does the word “competition” tell us?

It’s a neoliberal concept par excellence. Neoliberalism turns everything into a competition. It gamifies everything. Sullivan can’t start telling us about neoliberalism because nobody will understand, so he does the next best thing and uses the clearest, easiest to understand descriptor. He is telling us that we are living in a neoliberal world that’s completely different from the preceding Cold War era.

And how are we to deal with this new neoliberal world?

By going back to being a nation-state.

There are also nice parts in the article about needing to bend the supranational institutions like the UN and the World Bank over the knee and make them serve the interests of the American nation-state. This is a highly nationalist text, the likes of which I never expected to see at this point in time.

This is not just god news. This is brilliant news.