Beyond Poles
Anne-Marie Slaughter
I have a recurrent nightmare about global politics. At the end of this century, or even midway through it, life as we know it is forever transformed for the worse through a combination of flames, flood, disease, drought, famine, and continual conflict caused by hundreds of millions of migrants. And atop the ruined globe, Uncle Sam is waving a flag, declaring victory over China and insisting that the United States is still “number one.”
Brooks and Wohlforth’s article deepens my pessimism. It is as if they are writing in 1985 or 1945. They approach international politics as if it were a game of great powers, where the distribution of different kinds of power among various states determines the size, location, and tilt of the playing field. The point of their article is to demonstrate that the world remains unipolar, with the United States as the dominant pole, even if its measurable military and economic power has diminished relative to other countries. “The world is neither bipolar nor multipolar, and it is not about to become either,” they argue. But those who are dying from heatwaves and fleeing floods and fire might beg to differ. The world has two poles: north and south. The ice at both is melting rapidly, with untold dangers for all of us.
As the Biden administration’s 2022 National Security Strategy points out, existential “transnational” threats such as climate change, pandemics, and energy shortages exist side by side and on equal footing with the traditional geopolitical threats that Brooks and Wohlforth address. The distribution of power captured by unipolarity, bipolarity, or multipolarity is thus still a key background condition for officials to consider as they formulate policy.
The question, however, is what counts as a pole. And curiously, Brooks and Wohlforth seem to have determined that the answer is limited to states. They therefore write as if the European Union simply does not exist. That is a major omission. Even according to their own calculations, the EU is a major power. And it may be the one doing the most to stem existential risks.
STATE OF AFFAIRS
Brooks and Wohlforth offer a straightforward definition of multipolarity: a system in which the international order is “shaped largely by the three or more roughly matched states at the top.” At present, they write, “the United States and China are undoubtedly the two most powerful countries, but at least one more country must be roughly in their league for multipolarity to exist.” They then present two charts, one showing data on GDP and the other showing military spending, to demonstrate that the United States and China are far ahead of France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, and the United Kingdom. The data, they argue, also show that the United States is far ahead of China.
Add the EU to these charts, however, and the authors’ claims become harder to support. According to the International Monetary Fund, the United States’ GDP is $26.9 trillion, China’s is $19.4 trillion, and the EU’s is $17.8 trillion. Among the other biggest economies are India and Japan, which both have GDPs between $3 and $5 trillion. The United States may be well ahead of its nearest competitors, but the top three global economies are an order of magnitude ahead of all the others.
The United States still far outpaces both China and the EU with regard to military spending. But the EU’s spending is in the same range as China’s: the European Defense Agency reported in December 2022 that the defense expenditures of the 26 EU member states that provided data totaled roughly $214 billion for 2021, compared with China’s $242 billion in 2022. Given the war in Ukraine, the EDA’s 2022 numbers will be substantially higher. Collaborative EU defense procurement is steadily rising (although it started from a very small base), and the EU is engaging in 12 civilian and nine military missions around the world under its Common Security and Defense Policy.
All in all, Brooks and Wohlforth’s argument is at its strongest when analyzing pure military power. The United States is indeed far ahead of other countries, spending three times as much as its nearest competitors. Still, if the United States had to support Ukraine against Russia or Taiwan against China without the European members of NATO or the EU at its side, Washington’s odds of success would be significantly diminished. As the war in Iraq demonstrated, the United States cannot simply command its allies to fight. NATO runs on the consent of its members, including important European powers. The EU plays an essential role alongside NATO in forging this consensus.
Brooks and Wohlforth are hardly alone in their insistence that only states count in calculations of international power. It is a view shared by the larger U.S. national security community, which consistently ignores and underestimates the EU. Yet the EU has many of the attributes of a state: a currency (which serves as the world’s second-largest reserve currency), lawmaking abilities, diplomatic representation, and a common foreign and security policy. And regardless of what kind of entity it is, the EU is an extremely powerful player. It is the world’s most influential regulator, a status that is ever more important as climate crises expand and multiply. It is the world’s leader in the transition to green energy. The EU’s economic aid kept Ukraine afloat between 2014 and 2022, and the bloc will provide the bulk of reconstruction funds after the war ends. And the EU’s sanctions against Russia are more significant than the United States’, given the bloc’s major trading relationships with its eastern neighbor.
Critically, the EU is a deeply stabilizing force. To see why, imagine the world without it. The bloc’s countries would still be military allies through NATO, but they might otherwise be economic competitors. China would have been able to move many eastern and southern European states into its orbit, as it was doing before Russia invaded Ukraine. And Moscow would have had a better chance of splitting European governments from one another. Some major EU countries, for instance, would have been far more reticent to reduce their dependence on Russian oil and gas, even during the Ukraine war, without the EU compromise machine.
UNDER THE INFLUENCE
The EU challenges analysts to rethink the definition of a state. But so did the United States when it was founded; the U.S. Constitution was designed to form “a more perfect union” among its member states. There are critical differences between the EU and countries such as the United States, of course. Australia, Canada, Germany, the United States, and many other countries are federated unions, ultimately subordinate to a national government, whereas the EU is a networked union that allows its members to act together in some ways and apart in others. The EU certainly has less power over its constituent parts than does the United States. Yet the EU still has far more power over its members, which remain sovereign states, than any other regional entity. It is one of a kind.
That may not be the case forever. In pioneering its networked form, the EU has developed a template that other regional organizations are following and customizing in various ways. The African Union, which replaced the Organization of African Unity in 2002, seeks increased social and economic integration for its continent. To better figure out how it can achieve this end, AU and EU ministers and commission members meet regularly. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, established in 1967, was controlled almost entirely by networks of national ministers, with very little central authority. But in recent years, ASEAN has established more coordinating mechanisms, including a strong free trade agreement among its members. The body also created the ASEAN+3 forum—which includes China, Japan, and South Korea—through which all the members’ foreign affairs ministers discuss security issues.
Foreign policy practitioners should hope these blocs succeed. Powerful regional unions are the necessary intermediaries between international or global institutions and state and local governments. They will be essential to the world’s ability to meet global challenges that require the cooperation of all states (or at least the vast majority of states) to solve. Even the mighty United States will have to act in concert with Canada and Mexico to strengthen the resilience, biodiversity, health, and security of North America. This fact became readily apparent this summer, when the U.S. government sent firefighters to Canada to control wildfires, whose smoke was choking major American cities.
Brooks and Wohlforth might still dismiss regional blocs, even as those blocs aspire to become unions. In their article, the authors distinguish between mere influence—“the ability to get others to do what you want”—and power, which they suggest demands statehood and must be quantified. But this division is meaningless. Power has multiple components; influence is certainly one of them. Thankfully for the planet, and for humanity’s ability to address a variety of existential threats, the influence of institutions that balance sovereignty and unity will help determine the future.
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