I recently spoke at an event in Berlin to inaugurate the first issue of the Global Geopolitics peer reviewed journal. For a variety of time and pacing reasons I ended up cutting significant portions of my already-written speech from my actual delivery, so I just wanted to put the entire text here in its original form. When video of the roundtable forum goes up I will add it to the links on my publications tab on this site.

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George Santayana in The Birth of Reason once wrote: 

“The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.”

I believe that in diplomacy, especially in multipolar diplomacy, this quote summarizes something of critical importance to understand going forward.

It has become customary to begin these types of speeches with a declaration that Francis Fukuyama was wrong, that history has returned. But this doesn’t go far enough. History never ended or even paused in the first place. What happened was that the hubris of teleology, of ideology as policy, takes root in complacent and decadent elites because it flatters their self-conception as the protagonists of the story. A hangover of the Book of Revelation, human history is held to be some kind of a moral fable leading inexorably to a singular outcome where good and evil are judged by universal standards- with the imperial administrators, of course, as jury. 

And when this Young Earth Creationist version of geopolitics inevitably fails, the prophets of doom descend. Heaven, having failed to arrive, has been replaced by Hell. We are to be tormented in a pit of fire forever for having come up short of our supposedly saintly potential.

This counter- vision is just as ridiculous and idealist as the one in which it replaces. 

The unipolar moment was, ultimately, a freakish occurrence. Other powers like the Mongols and the British came close, but the inability to leave the Eurasian landmass of the former and the continued existence of proper peer rivals in Europe of the latter meant not even they reached the heights that the United States enjoyed for a brief moment after the fall of the Soviet Union. 

And yet we hear constantly from so much of the commentariat that the supposedly reasonable options are either somehow restoring the 1990s consensus by voting the right way in a singular election or to live in a world of perpetual world war. But the first is now materially impossible due to rising capability of other power poles, and the second is so undesirable that only a conspiracy of true ideologues or incompetents would seek to bring it about. Sometimes, when I look at the foreign policy elite on both sides of the Northern Atlantic, I genuinely fear that the second is a very real possibility. Much like how a cult can pivot from a failed prophecy to mass suicide as compensation.

So the question arises: if we understand that 99% of human history was effectively ‘multipolar’, then how do we most constructively learn to be normal again after having bathed in the mentally stultifying lies of a universal human destiny? I would argue that the key lies in seeing things less as multiple poles contesting a shared future and rather as true polycentrism. There is no shared political journey whatsoever. The future will be as divergent as the past was. With strategic foresight this could even be a good thing.

An assumption we have inherited from the discredited liberal international order that should be fought is that to acknowledge political divergence is to embrace a kind of zero-sum expansionism. If one group doesn’t have something, it loses it. All or nothing. But the majority of stable and lasting power politics in diplomatic history is not this at all, it is the creation, maintenance, and navigation of the balance of power. Creating no doubt temporary islands of calm in the chaotic tempest of stormy seas. And the successful balance of powers of history, from Westphalia to the Postwar Era, were all ultimately based on accepting and even affirming different paths of governance. Different religions or ideologies between peers, even rival peers, might color the rhetoric but they would not prevent them from dealing with each other first and foremost as sovereign geographic entities.

Liberal internationalism, in its quest to become the universal arbiter of morality as a kind of Fourth Abrahamic Religion, forgot that once upon a time its greatest asset was that it acknowledged many forms of being. Its rise in political thinking was in reaction to the horrors of the religiously tinged and unrestrained nature of so much of 17th Century warfare, with philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes openly validating the concept of many different kinds of regimes having by necessity to exist with each other. As the philosopher John Gray put it in his book The Two Faces of Liberalism:

“One of the paradoxes that comes with accepting that there are incommensurate values is that tragic conflicts of value can sometimes melt away. If there are many incommensurable ways in which humans can flourish, choices among them need not be tragic.”

And just because liberal internationalism is dying out after decades of hubris and overreach need not mean that liberalism itself will die out. The reality of polycentrism is that the future promises diversity, not uniformity. Russian dreams of being a kind of messianic counter-liberalism are just as delusional as the very thing they claim to be countering as they order the planet away from the accommodation of a Modus Vivendi and into an artificial binary camp inspired by Platonic ideals. But multitudes, not binaries, now reign.

If the United States is the premier liberal state, it was not founded as a messianic or missionary power. That came much later. In fact, it originally was done as an experiment not just in political distinction, but in geographic distinction as well. To break with Britain was to break with putting the global empire’s needs over its own growing core. It is less well known today how after allying with France to break away from Britain, and feeling an immense euphoria and vindication with the rise of the French Revolution shortly thereafter, the U.S. turned against France when the new fellow enlightenment republic began to pressure the young nation to join it in waging global war. Indeed, the U.S. Navy itself was originally founded to combat attempts to force ideological solidarity by a once beloved ally. The first naval battles in American history would be against France, the only other enlightenment republic. So much for democratic peace theory.

Today the Trans-Atlantic shoe is on the other foot, with U.S. belligerence towards, of all countries, Denmark. Mercurial shifts in domestic policy cause the mask to fall and unequal relations once referred to as partnerships are now exposed as vassalage networks between an imperial core and subalterns. Denmark, which stood beside the U.S. for so long, who sent its armed forces into Afghanistan at American behest, now gets its thanks in terms of thuggish and short-sighted demands for Greenland. Trans-Atlanticism has a far worse record on both sides of the Atlantic than its biggest defenders would ever admit. Much as communist solidarity in the Cold War could not survive the Sino-Soviet Split, the ideological alliance has been shown time and time again to be the most overrated concept in geopolitical history. The needs of the alliance have also ironically harmed liberalism at home on both sides of the Atlantic, as frank discussions of what the national interest of these different regions have long been buried in exchange for a gargoyle of globalism which yokes vast regions together under the promise of some unproven ultimate ideological or global market based outcome.

And yet the states of Eastern Europe rightly fear Russian power and intentions towards them too. But this is not an either-or choice, it is a challenge. Can European states form an independent bloc that can stand up to both the U.S. and Russia? I would argue yes, but they must drop the ultimate conceit of universalism which they have inherited first from the Age of Discovery and then from the subsequent Victorian periods. No longer in the cockpit of history, they must contend with what they were before Columbus: Asia’s westernmost peninsula. A region like any other. But this could be a liberation rather than a curse. Free of the delusion of being missionaries of global telos, Europeans can now rediscover the imperative virtue of having a specific geographically located interest. They can have, as Phil Cunliffe would say in his excellent book on The National Interest, an actually comprehensible internal debate on what is feasible and what is not. An open contestation between citizens and politicians of what is in their collective best interest. It is something they seem to have forgotten how to do, so reliant on American power to maintain the illusion of continued global tastemakers as they have become. 

They should also be cautious that their first instinct, especially here in Germany if recent history is any guide, could be to become a kind of Saudi Arabia of militant humanism. An exporter of a universalist world view as a “moral conscience” that retains its purity in light of Big Bad America’s descent into overt gangsterism. This would be a massive mistake. Strategic autonomy comes not from posturing and pontification, as domestic politics are likely to change what is ideological fashionable on a whim, but rather it comes from a rooted geographic interest that emphasizes the local- and hence anti-universal- over that of any abstract global cause. People will rally to defend their homes in a way they never would to defend the idea of a global governance that was and will always be used to justify whatever the strongest powers, upon whose whims it relies on, wish to do. 

This brings us to the question of the smaller states in polycentrism. Great powers must learn to live with each other or face ruin. Middle Powers are likely to make huge gains under polycentrism as their freedom of action opens up in their immediate near-abroad, at least so long as they avoid making revisionist bids for hegemony beyond their means. But the future could well be bleak for the smaller nations of the world, or the ones without favorable geographic defenses. Some will have to reach an accord with a dominant regional power. Others risk being contested in clashing spheres of influence. It might be tempting for them to ask that someone save them, but this cannot be guaranteed either. 

I would contend that these countries too must learn to embrace difference and distinction. Even if the great powers hopefully learn to live with each other and put a halt to grand ideological battles, they will almost certainly try to affirm their contested frontiers with projects of ideological dross. Religious and racial chauvinism, clash of civilizations, left vs right, etc. For countries that wish to avoid becoming the playthings of others it becomes doubly important that even if one wishes to reach a subordinate security arrangement with a great power it must combat missionary activity from the outside world lest it risk foreign fueled civil strife at home. 

The polycentric world could be made stable and its worst excesses curbed. But only if the accommodation reached between the powers is one of a Modus Vivendi that explicitly eschews grand ideological projects or the conversion of others along cultural, religious, political or economic universals. Otherwise, whatever benefits there are of returning to the core bedrock of stability- geography and negotiated interest- will be immediately squandered by supremacist factions who are uninterested in long term stability.

All orders are temporary and become obsolete, of course. This is the humility that those of us opposed to treating history as teleology can affirm. But it is worth looking at the results achieved by the most aggressively anti-missionary state in history: The Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. Founded in an internal coup against a then reigning newly-unified government who saw its primary purpose as increasingly fruitless expansion abroad, the Shogunate knew two things: 1. Spanish and Portuguese missionaries were destabilising society at home and possibly paving the way for future integration as a vassal or colony in their growing empires, and 2. Attempting to displace the Chinese as masters of East Asia by force had been a failure. 

So what did they do? They played to their geographic strengths as a large archipelago and closed the country. They expelled or exterminated the missionaries and invested everything into building a distinct state separate from both the Chinese tribute system and the European empires. Edo, now Tokyo, became the largest city in the world. Infrastructure expanded. The world’s first government mandated national forest preserves were set aside. And above all, a country that had known nothing but war for over a century now would know peace for well over 200 years. The order had its excesses, of course. In time it would become obsolete and in need of replacement. But it still stands as an example of what a country can do when it utilizes its unique geographic gifts to cultivate a specific sense of self-interest separate from the schemes of greater powers and divorced from delusions of being “on the right side of history.”

The context of the Eurozone today is vastly different from 17th Century Japan or 18th Century America, of course, but that is my point: the contexts are always regional and different. In the 21st Century the European states are economically subordinated to U.S. interests in a way that harms their capacity for independent action but so integrated that it will take cautious long term planning to make a pivot away from dollar dependence and security networks. I suspect we will see a variety of paths from different states unfold, and doing so will be a boon to social and political science research if nothing else.

We may have little control over the vast bureaucratic entities of the modern state and the chaos of events, but by purging ourselves of the missionary mentality we could begin the process of making the world more habitable and conducive to diplomacy. Caring about the physical space around us goes far further than caring about abstract universal idealism ever could. The energies of activists and reformers could be spent responding to their actual constituents. Change starts at home.

Every country with remotely natural or defensible borders has now been given the opportunity to find divergent ways to secure their sense of self and security. Many will fail, but the more that embrace localism and anti-universal paths to security, the more viable the non-aligned buffer state becomes. Perhaps more relevant to us social scientists, the more interesting case studies we have to test theories on as well. This would be riding the tiger of polycentrism, in a world of many shrines to different genus loci it is best not to adhere to a universal church. Psychologically, the North Atlantic may be the least prepared region of the world for this shift today, but if they want to avoid future calamities they would be wise to prepare themselves. 

But this quest for reasoned distinction is not alien to the North Atlantic, merely to its moderns. If I may close by quoting at length from George Washington’s “Farewell Address”, which was as good advice for a new and young republic then as it is for those disoriented by the end of unipolarity today:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.

Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? 

In short, reject Baerbockism, embrace circumstantial realism.