Zero-Sum World

Politics, Power and Prosperity After the Crash

Gideon Rachman

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857891624
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The economic crisis that struck the world in 2008 has drastically altered the logic of international relations. Globalisation no longer benefits all the world's superpowers and they face an array of global problems that are causing division between nations. A win-win world is giving way to a zero-sum world.

Zero-sum logic, in which one country's gain looks like another's loss, has prevented the world from reaching an agreement to fight climate change and threatens to create a global economic stalemate. These new tensions are intensified by the emergence of dangerous political and economic problems that risk provoking wars, environmental catastrophe and ever-deeper debilitating economic crises.

This timely and important book argues that international politics is about become much more volatile - and sets out what can be done to break away from the crippling logic of a zero-sum world.

CONTENTS

	Foreword
	Prologue – Davos, 2009
	Part One: The Age of Transformation, 1978–91
	Introduction
1	China, 1978: Deng’s Counter-Revolution
2	Britain, 1979: Thatcherism
3	The United States, 1980: The Reagan Revolution
4	The European Union, 1986: Embracing the Market
5	The Soviet Union, 1985–91: Glasnost, Perestroika and Collapse
6	Europe, 1989: The Year of Revolutions
7	Latin America, 1982–91: The Triumph of Democracy and Markets
8	India, 1991: The Second Asian Giant Awakes
9	The Gulf War, 1991: The Unipolar Moment
	Part Two: The Age of Optimism, 1991–2008
	Introduction
10	Democracy: Francis Fukuyama and the End of History
11	Prosperity: Alan Greenspan and the End of Economic History
12	Progress: Bill Gates and the Triumph of Technology
13	Peace: Bill Clinton and the Win-Win World
14	The Optimistic East: Kishore Mahbubani and the Asian Century
15	Europe: Günter Verheugen and the European Dream
16	The Anti-Globalizers: From the Asian Crisis to 9/11
17	Power: Charles Krauthammer and the Neoconservatives
	Part Three: The Age of Anxiety
	Introduction
18	The Crisis of the West
19	A World of Troubles
20	Global Government: The World as Europe
21	Axis of Authoritarianism: The World as Russia and China
22	Fractured world: The World as Pakistan
23	Zero-Sum World
24	Saving the World
	Notes
	Bibliographic Essay
	Acknowledgements
	Index

FOREWORD

Writing a book on contemporary politics is a hazardous exercise. All such works are vulnerable to unexpected shifts in world affairs that can make wise-sounding predictions suddenly seem foolish. I finished the first draft of Zero-Sum World in January 2010. In the following year, however, the central arguments of the book seem to me to have gained in strength.

What I call the ‘rise of zero-sum logic’ in international politics has become more visible in three vital areas: US-Chinese relations, the crisis inside the European Union, and global governance. Meanwhile, in early 2011 popular revolts across the Arab world – above all, in Egypt – have injected new uncertainties into global politics. These events, foreshadowed in my book, are still unfolding. Depending on how they turn out, they could end up either re-energizing the liberal narrative of the Age of Optimism or further heightening the uncertainties of the Age of Anxiety.

An increase in tensions between America and China was one of the most striking political developments of 2010. In the background was the growing sense that the financial crisis had marked an important shift in economic and political power from West to East. The US is still the world’s largest economy and its dominant power. But on both sides of the Pacific there is now a realization that China’s challenge is becoming much more real. The much-touted Goldman Sachs prediction that China would become the world’s largest economy by 2027 was made before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, new calculations moved the date forward. Projections by The Economist suggested that China might be the world’s largest economy by 2019.¹

American anxiety about the rise of China was increased in 2010 by the knowledge that the US budget deficit was out of control. Towards the end of that year, Admiral Michael Mullen, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued that America’s burgeoning national debt was now the single biggest threat to national security. He pointed out that some 50 per cent of the discretionary spending in the US budget goes on the military. Observing the deep cuts in military spending being made by cash-strapped European governments (including Britain), the admiral remarked, ‘I do worry that it won’t be too long before these kind of cuts will be part of our future as well, and that would be very dangerous.’²

The perception of an emerging threat to America’s military dominance of the Pacific was strengthened by China’s military build-up. Shortly before a trip to Beijing in January 2011, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, expressed concern at China’s latest weapons developments. On arriving in Beijing, Mr Gates was greeted with the spectacle of the maiden flight of China’s first ever stealth fighter. To many observers, it looked like a deliberate and bellicose message from Beijing to Washington.³

It is not just the United States that worries about a more assertive China. Possibly emboldened by a sense that power was moving their way in the aftermath of the economic crisis, the Chinese government took a noticeably tougher line with its neighbours during the course of 2010. Talking to Indian officials, I found mounting alarm about what the government in New Delhi claimed was increasing Chinese pressure over the two countries’ unsettled territorial dispute over the Indian province of Arunchal Pradesh. The Indians also looked with alarm at China’s close strategic and economic ties with India’s neighbours – Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Burma.

China’s assertion that its territorial claims in the South China Sea were now a ‘core national interest’ alarmed many of its South-East Asian neighbours, in particular Vietnam. That led Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, to assert that America too has a national interest in developments in the South China Sea – a statement that was received with some hostility in Beijing.⁴ Japan was yet another Asian power to take fright at the spectacle of a more assertive China. A clash over a Chinese fishing boat that strayed into waters claimed by Japan became a major diplomatic incident in the second half of 2010 – and sent Japan hurtling back into the arms of Uncle Sam. Indeed, one of the biggest geopolitical shifts since I completed the first draft of this book has been Japan’s abandonment of its flirtation with a rapprochement with China. Following the fall of the Hatoyama government in June 2010, Naoto Kan, the new Japanese prime minister, shifted his country’s policy back in a more pro-American direction.

Inept and overassertive Chinese diplomacy during the course of 2010 handed the US a diplomatic opportunity in the emerging struggle for power and influence between the two nations. Increasingly disillusioned by its relationship with China, the US began to cultivate much warmer military and diplomatic ties with China’s neighbours – in particular India. In November 2010 President Obama visited India and lavished praise on the country, hailing its emergence as a great power.⁵ Indeed, just as the Indians worried about encirclement by allies of China, so China began to look anxiously at a network of powerful American allies surrounding the Middle Kingdom – including Japan, India, South Korea and Australia.

A battle to win friends and influence allies is clearly under way between the US and China. Some American strategists have argued that their country’s budgetary problems could be compensated for by the construction of a network of Asian alliances, in a policy of ‘soft containment’ of China. And yet many countries in the region face a strategic dilemma as their economic and security interests increasingly diverge. China is now the major trading partner of Japan, South Korea and Australia. But these countries’ key military relationship is with the United States. Unless China massively overplays its hand, these economic ties may end up mattering more in the long run, particularly amidst lingering questions about America’s staying power in the Asia-Pacific region. As Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean academic, put it to me in early 2011, ‘The countries of the region have to be careful. We know China will still be here in a thousand years, time. We don’t know if the United States will still be here in a hundred years’ time.’⁶ By the end of 2010 tensions between China and the US were so overt that President Hu Jintao, shortly before visiting Washington in January 2011, took it upon himself to warn against those promoting ‘zero-sum cold war thinking’.⁷ (I decided not to take this reproof personally.)

While security and strategic tensions between the US and China soared over the course of 2010, economic te...