Trump's 'Liberation Day' Tariffs: Fair trade or global trade war?

尼爾‧弗格森 (NIALL FERGUSON) 是史丹佛大學胡佛研究所米爾班克家族資深研究員，也是《基辛格：1923-1968》一書的作者；理想主義者。 本文的早期版本錯誤地表述了蘇聯的權力概念。這是“力量的相關性”，而不是“力量的星座”。 基辛格與緩和的真正意義 重塑冷戰戰略以因應與中國的競爭 尼爾·弗格森 2024 年 3 月/4 月 MOST-READ ARTICLES India’s Feet of Clay How Modi’s Supremacy Will Hinder His Country’s Rise Ramachandra Guha The Strange Resurrection of the Two-State Solution How an Unimaginable War Could Bring About the Only Imaginable Peace Martin Indyk Who’s Afraid of Freedom? The Fight for Liberalism’s Future Helena Rosenblatt A War Putin Still Can’t Win To Thwart Russia, America Needs a Long-Term Strategy—and Ukraine Needs Long-Range Weapons Lawrence D. Freedman The Shoals of Ukraine Where American Illusions and Great-Power Politics Collide Serhii Plokhy and M. E. Sarotte 印度的泥足 莫迪的霸權將如何阻礙他的國家的崛起 羅摩禪陀羅古哈 兩國解決方案的奇怪復活 一場難以想像的戰爭如何帶來唯一可以想像的和平 馬丁·因迪克 誰害怕自由？ 為自由主義的未來而戰 海倫娜·羅森布拉特 普丁仍然無法贏得戰爭 為了挫敗俄羅斯，美國需要長期戰略，而烏克蘭需要遠程武器 勞倫斯·D·弗里德曼 The Age of Amorality Can America Save the Liberal Order Through Illiberal Means? By Hal Brands March/April 2024 Published on February 20, 2024 Chloe Cushman “How much evil we must do in order to do good,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors to do great evil to prevent the incalculably greater evil of a world ruled by its most aggressive regimes. He was witnessing the onset of another global conflict in which the United States would periodically transgress its own values in order to defend them. But the fundamental question Niebuhr raised—how liberal states can reconcile worthy ends with the unsavory means needed to attain them—is timeless. It is among the most vexing dilemmas facing the United States today. U.S. President Joe Biden took office pledging to wage a fateful contest between democracy and autocracy. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he summoned like-minded nations to a struggle “between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Biden’s team has indeed made big moves in its contest with China and Russia, strengthening solidarity among advanced democracies that want to protect freedom by keeping powerful tyrannies in check. But even before the war between Hamas and Israel presented its own thicket of problems, an administration that has emphasized the ideological nature of great-power rivalry was finding itself ensnared by a morally ambiguous world. In Asia, Biden has bent over backward to woo a backsliding India, a communist Vietnam, and other not so liberal states. In Europe, wartime exigencies have muted concerns about creeping authoritarianism on NATO’s eastern and southern fronts. In the Middle East, Biden has concluded that Arab dictators are not pariahs but vital partners. Defending a threatened order involves reviving the free-world community. It also, apparently, entails buttressing an arc of imperfect democracies and outright autocracies across much of the globe. Biden’s conflicted strategy reflects the realities of contemporary coalition building: when it comes to countering China and Russia, democratic alliances go only so far. Biden’s approach also reflects a deeper, more enduring tension. American interests are inextricably tied to American values: the United States typically enters into great-power competition because it fears mighty autocracies will otherwise make the world unsafe for democracy. But an age of conflict invariably becomes, to some degree, an age of amorality because the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts. Expect more of this. If the stakes of today’s rivalries are as high as Biden claims, Washington will engage in some breathtakingly cynical behavior to keep its foes contained. Yet an ethos of pure expediency is fraught with dangers, from domestic disillusion to the loss of the moral asymmetry that has long amplified U.S. influence in global affairs. Strategy, for a liberal superpower, is the art of balancing power without subverting democratic purpose. The United States is about to rediscover just how hard that can be. A DIRTY GAME Biden has consistently been right about one thing: clashes between great powers are clashes of ideas and interests alike. In the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years’ War was fueled by doctrinal differences no less than by the struggle for European primacy. In the late eighteenth century, the politics of revolutionary France upheaved the geopolitics of the entire continent. World War II was a collision of rival political traditions—democracy and totalitarianism—as well as rival alliances. “This was no accidental war,” German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop declared in 1940, “but a question of the determination of one system to destroy the other.” When great powers fight, they do so not just over land and glory. They fight over which ideas, which values, will chart humanity’s course. In this sense, U.S. competition with China and Russia is the latest round in a long struggle over whether the world will be shaped by liberal democracies or their autocratic enemies. In World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, autocracies in Eurasia sought global primacy by achieving preeminence within that central landmass. Three times, the United States intervened, not just to ensure its security but also to preserve a balance of power that permitted the survival and expansion of liberalism—to “make the world safe for democracy,” in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s words. President Franklin Roosevelt made a similar point in 1939, saying, “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” Yet as Roosevelt understood, balancing power is a dirty game. Western democracies prevailed in World War II only by helping an awful tyrant, Joseph Stalin, crush an even more awful foe, Adolf Hitler. They used tactics, such as fire-bombing and atomic-bombing enemy cities, that would have been abhorrent in less desperate times. The United States then waged the Cold War out of conviction, as President Harry Truman declared, that it was a conflict “between alternative ways of life”; the closest U.S. allies were fellow democracies that made up the Western world. Yet holding the line in a high-stakes struggle also involved some deeply questionable, even undemocratic, acts. Clashes between great powers are clashes of ideas and interests alike. In a Third World convulsed by instability, the United States employed right-wing tyrants as proxies; it suppressed communist influence through coups, covert and overt interventions, and counterinsurgencies with staggering death tolls. To deter aggression along a global perimeter, the Pentagon relied on the threat of using nuclear weapons so destructive that their actual employment could serve no constructive end. To close the ring around the Soviet Union, Washington eventually partnered with another homicidal communist, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. And to ease the politics of containment, U.S. officials sometimes exaggerated the Soviet threat or simply deceived the American people about policies carried out in their name. Strategy involves setting priorities, and U.S. officials believed that lesser evils were needed to avoid greater ones, such as communism running riot in vital regions or democracies failing to find their strength and purpose before it was too late. The eventual payoff from the U.S. victory in the Cold War—a world safer from autocratic predation, and safer for human freedom, than ever before—suggests that they were, on balance, correct. Along the way, the fact that Washington was pursuing such a worthy objective, against such an unworthy opponent, provided a certain comfort with the conflict’s ethical ambiguities. As NSC-68, the influential strategy document Truman approved in 1950, put it (quoting Alexander Hamilton), “The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.” When the West was facing a totalitarian enemy determined to remake humanity in its image, some pretty ugly means could, apparently, be justified. That comfort wasn’t infinite, however, and the Cold War saw fierce fights over whether the United States was getting its priorities right. In the 1950s, hawks took Washington to task for not doing enough to roll back communism in Eastern Europe, with the Republican Party platform of 1952 deriding containment as “negative, futile, and immoral.” In the 1960s and 1970s, an avalanche of amorality—a bloody and misbegotten war in Vietnam, support for a coterie of nasty dictators, revelations of CIA assassination plots—convinced many liberal critics that the United States was betraying the values it claimed to defend. Meanwhile, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, a strategy that deemphasized ideological confrontation in search of diplomatic stability, led some conservatives to allege that Washington was abandoning the moral high ground. Throughout the 1970s and after, these debates whipsawed U.S. policy. Even in this most Manichean of contests, relating strategy to morality was a continual challenge. In fact, Cold War misdeeds gave rise to a complex of legal and administrative constraints—from prohibitions on political assassination to requirements to notify congressional committees about covert action—that mostly remain in place today. Since the Cold War, these restrictions have been complemented by curbs on aid to coup makers who topple elected governments and to military units that engage in gross violations of human rights. Americans clearly regretted some measures they had used to win the Cold War. The question is whether they can do without them as global rivalry heats up again. IDEAS MATTER Threats from autocratic enemies heighten ideological impulses in U.S. policy by underscoring the clash of ideas that often drives global tensions. Since taking office, Biden has defined the threat from U.S. rivals, particularly China, in starkly ideological terms. The world has reached an “inflection point,” Biden has repeatedly declared. In March 2021, he suggested that future historians would be studying “the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy.” At root, Biden has argued, U.S.-Chinese competition is a test of which model can better meet the demands of the modern era. And if China becomes the world’s preeminent power, U.S. officials fear, it will entrench autocracy in friendly countries while coercing democratic governments in hostile ones. Just witness how Beijing has used economic leverage to punish criticism of its policies by democratic societies from Australia to Norway. In making the system safe for illiberalism, a dominant China would make it unsafe for liberalism in places near and far. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforced Biden’s thesis. It offered a case study in autocratic aggression and atrocity and a warning that a world led by illiberal states would be lethally violent, not least for vulnerable democracies nearby. Coming weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin had sealed a “no limits” strategic partnership, the Ukraine invasion also raised the specter of a coordinated autocratic assault on the liberal international order. Ukraine, Biden explained, was the central front in a “larger fight for . . . essential democratic principles.” So the United States would rally the free world against “democracy’s mortal foes.” Biden delivering remarks in Warsaw, Poland, February 2023 Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters The shock of the Ukraine war, combined with the steadying hand of U.S. leadership, produced an expanded transatlantic union of democracies. Sweden and Finland sought membership in NATO; the West supported Ukraine and inflicted heavy costs on Russia. The Biden administration also sought to confine China by weaving a web of democratic ties around the country. It has upgraded bilateral alliances with the likes of Japan and Australia. It has improved the Quad (the security and diplomatic dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan) and established AUKUS (a military partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom). And it has repurposed existing multilateral bodies, such as the G-7, to meet the peril from Beijing. There are even whispers of a “three plus one” coalition—Australia, Japan, the United States, plus Taiwan—that would cooperate to defend that frontline democracy from Chinese assault. These ties transcend regional boundaries. Ukraine is getting aid from Asian democracies, such as South Korea, that understand that their security will suffer if the liberal order is fractured. Democracies from multiple continents have come together to confront China’s economic coercion, counter its military buildup, and constrict its access to high-end semiconductors. The principal problem for the United States is a loose alliance of revisionist powers pushing outward from the core of Eurasia. Biden’s answer is a cohering global coalition of democracies, pushing back from around the margins. Today, those advanced democracies are more unified than at any time in decades. In this respect, Biden has aligned the essential goal of U.S. strategy, defending an imperiled liberal order, with the methods and partners used to pursue it. Yet across Eurasia’s three key regions, the messier realities of rivalry are raising Niebuhr’s question anew. CONTROVERSIAL FRIENDS Consider the situation in Europe. NATO is mostly an alliance of democracies. But holding that pact together during the Ukraine war has required Biden to downplay the illiberal tendencies of a Polish government that—until its electoral defeat in October—was systematically eroding checks and balances. Securing its northern flank, by welcoming Finland and Sweden, has involved diplomatic horse-trading with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, in addition to frequently undercutting U.S. interests, has been steering his country toward autocratic rule. In Asia, the administration spent much of 2021 and 2022 carefully preserving U.S. ties to the Philippines, at the time led by Rodrigo Duterte, a man whose drug war had killed thousands. Biden has assiduously courted India as a bulwark against China, even though the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has curbed speech, harassed opposition leaders, fanned religious grievances, and allegedly killed dissidents abroad. And after visiting New Delhi in September 2023, Biden traveled to Hanoi to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Vietnam’s one-party regime. Once again, the United States is using some communists to contain others. Then there is the Middle East, where Biden’s “free world” coalition is quite the motley crew. In 2020, Biden threatened to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. By 2023, his administration—panicked by Chinese inroads and rising gas prices—was trying to make that country Washington’s newest treaty ally instead. That initiative, moreover, was part of a concept, inherited from the Trump administration, in which regional stability would rest on rapprochement between Arab autocracies and an Israeli government with its own illiberal tendencies, while Palestinian aspirations were mostly pushed to the side. Not surprisingly, then, human rights and political freedoms receded in relations with countries from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. Biden also did little to halt the strangulation of democracy in Tunisia—just as he had decided, effectively, to abandon Afghanistan’s endangered democracy in 2021. Indeed, if 2022 was a year of soaring rhetoric, 2023 was a year of awkward accommodation. References to the “battle between democracy and autocracy” became scarcer in Biden’s speeches, as the administration made big plays that defied that description of the world. Key human rights–related positions at the White House and the State Department sat vacant. The administration rolled back sanctions on Venezuela—an initiative described publicly as a bid to secure freer and fairer elections, but one that was mostly an effort to get an oppressive regime to stop exporting refugees and start exporting more oil. And when a junta toppled the elected government of Niger, U.S. officials waited for more than two months to call the coup a coup, for fear of triggering the cutoff of U.S. aid and thereby pushing the new regime into Moscow’s arms. Such compromises have always been part of foreign policy. But today, they testify to key dynamics U.S. officials must confront. THE DECISIVE DECADE First is the cruel math of Eurasian geopolitics. Advanced democracies possess a preponderance of power globally, but in every critical region, holding the frontline requires a more eclectic ensemble. Poland has had its domestic problems; it is also the logistical linchpin of the coalition backing Ukraine. Turkey is politically illiberal and, often, unhelpful; nonetheless, it holds the intersection of two continents and two seas. In South and Southeast Asia, the primary barrier to Chinese hegemony is a line of less-than-ideal partners running from India to Indonesia. In the Middle East, a picky superpower will be a lonely superpower. Democratic solidarity is great, but geography is stubborn. Across Eurasia, Washington needs illiberal friends to confine its illiberal foes. The ideological battlefield has also shifted in adverse ways. During the Cold War, anticommunism served as ideological glue between a democratic superpower and its autocratic allies, because the latter knew they were finished if the Soviet Union ever triumphed. Now, however, U.S. enemies feature a form of autocracy less existentially threatening to other nondemocracies: strongmen in the Persian Gulf, or in Hungary and Turkey, arguably have more in common with Xi and Putin than they do with Biden. The gap between “good” and “bad” authoritarians is narrower than it once was—which makes the United States work harder, and pay more, to keep illiberal partners imperfectly onside. High-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go. Desperate times also call for morally dexterous measures. When Washington faced no serious strategic challengers after the Cold War, it paid a smaller penalty for foregrounding its values. As the margin of safety shrinks, the tradeoffs between power and principle grow. Right now, war—or the threat of it—menaces East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Biden says the 2020s will be the “decisive decade” for the world. As Winston Churchill quipped in 1941, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” When threats are dire, democracies will do what it takes to rally coalitions and keep the enemy from breaking through. Thus, a central irony of Washington’s approach to competition is that the same challenges that activate its ideological energy make it harder to keep U.S. diplomacy pure. So far, the moral compromises of U.S. policy today are modest compared with those of World War II or the Cold War, in part because the constraints on unsavory methods are stronger than they were when Hitler and Stalin stalked the earth. But rules and norms can change as a country’s circumstances do. So Biden and his successors may soon face a daunting reality: high-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go. When the Cold War started, few officials imagined that Washington would conduct covert interventions from Afghanistan to Angola. Just three years ago, hardly anyone predicted that the United States would soon fight a proxy war meant to bleed Putin’s army to death in Ukraine. As the present competitions intensify, the tactics used to wage them could become more extreme. Washington could find itself covertly trying to tip the balance in elections in some crucial swing state if the alternative is seeing that country shift hard toward Moscow or Beijing. It could use coercion to keep Latin America’s military facilities and other critical infrastructure out of Chinese hands. And if the United States is already ambivalent about acknowledging coups in out-of-the-way countries, perhaps it would excuse far greater atrocities committed by a more important partner in a more important place. Those who doubt that Washington will resort to dirty tricks have short memories and limited imaginations. If today’s competitions will truly shape the fate of humanity, why wouldn’t a vigilant superpower do almost anything to come out on top? DON’T LOSE YOURSELF There’s no reason to be unduly embarrassed about this. A country that lacks the self-confidence to defend its interests will lack the power to achieve any great purpose in global affairs. Put differently, the damage the United States does to its values by engaging dubious allies, and engaging in dubious behavior, is surely less than the damage that would be done if a hyperaggressive Russia or neototalitarian China spread its influence across Eurasia and beyond. As during the Cold War, the United States can eventually repay the moral debts it incurs in a lengthy struggle—if it successfully sustains a system in which democracy thrives because its fiercest enemies are suppressed. It would be dangerous to adopt a pure end-justifies-the-means mentality, however, because there is always a point at which foul means corrupt fair ends. Even short of that, serial amorality will prove politically corrosive: a country whose population has rallied to defend its values as well as its interests will not forever support a strategy that seems to cast those values aside. And ultimately, the greatest flaw of such a strategy is that it forfeits a potent U.S. advantage. During World War II, as the historian Richard Overy has argued, the Allied cause was widely seen to be more just and humane than the Axis cause, which is one reason the former alliance attracted so many more countries than the latter. In the Cold War, the sense that the United States stood, however imperfectly, for fundamental rights and liberties the Kremlin suppressed helped Washington appeal to other democratic societies—and even to dissidents within the Soviet bloc. The tactics of great-power competition must not obscure the central issue of that competition. If the world comes to see today’s rivalries as slugfests devoid of larger moral meaning, the United States will lose the asymmetry of legitimacy that has served it well. This is not some hypothetical dilemma. Since October 2023, Biden has rightly framed the Israel-Hamas war as a struggle between a flawed democracy and a tyrannical enemy seeking its destruction. There is strong justification, moral and strategic, for backing a U.S. ally against a vicious proxy of a U.S. enemy, Iran. Moreover, there is no serious ethical comparison between a terrorist group that rapes, tortures, kidnaps, and kills civilians and a country that mostly tries, within the limits war imposes, to protect them. Yet rightly or wrongly, large swaths of the global South view the war as a testament to American double standards: opposing occupation and appropriation of foreign territory by Russia but not by Israel, valuing the lives and liberties of some victims more than those of others. Russian and Chinese propagandists are amplifying these messages to drive a wedge between Washington and the developing world. This is why the Biden administration has tried, and sometimes struggled, to balance support for Israel with efforts to mitigate the harm the conflict brings—and why the war may presage renewed U.S. focus on the peace process with the Palestinians, as unpromising as that currently seems. The lesson here is that the merits of an issue may be disputed, but for a superpower that wears its values on its sleeve, the costs of perceived hypocrisy are very real. RULES FOR RIVALRY Succeeding in this round of rivalry will thus require calibrating the moral compromises inherent in foreign policy by finding an ethos that is sufficiently ruthless and realistic at the same time. Although there is no precise formula for this—the appropriateness of any action depends on its context—some guiding principles can help. First, morality is a compass, not a straitjacket. For political sustainability and strategic self-interest, American statecraft should point toward a world consistent with its values. But the United States cannot paralyze itself by trying to fully embody those values in every tactical decision. Nor—even at a moment when its own democracy faces internal threats—should it insist on purifying itself at home before exerting constructive influence abroad. If it does so, the system will be shaped by regimes that are more ruthless—and less shackled by their own imperfections. The United States should also avoid the fallacy of the false alternative. It must evaluate choices, and partners, against the plausible possibilities, not against the utopian ideal. The realistic alternative to maintaining ties to a military regime in Africa may be watching as murderous Russian mercenaries fill the void. The realistic alternative to engaging Modi’s India may be seeing South Asia fall further under the shadow of a China that assiduously exports illiberalism. Similarly, proximity to a Saudi regime that carves up its critics is deeply uncomfortable. But the realistic alternative to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is probably a regime that remains quite repressive—and is far less committed to empowering women, curbing religious zealots, and otherwise making the country a more open, tolerant place. In a world of lousy options, the crucial question is often: Lousy compared with what? Another guiding principle: good things don’t all come at once. Cold War policymakers sometimes justified coup making and support for repressive regimes on grounds that preventing Third World countries from going communist then preserved the possibility that they might go democratic later. That logic was suspiciously convenient—and, in many cases, correct. Countries in Latin America and other developing regions did eventually experience political openings as they reached higher levels of development, and democratic values radiated outward from the West. Morality is a compass, not a straitjacket. Today, unseemly bargains can sometimes lead to better outcomes. By not breaking the U.S.-Philippine alliance during Duterte’s drug war, Washington sustained the relationship until a more cooperative, less draconian government emerged. By staying close to a Polish government with some worrying tendencies, the United States bought time until, late last year, that country’s voters elected a coalition promising to strengthen its democratic institutions. The same argument could be made for staying engaged with other democracies where autocratic tendencies are pronounced but electoral mechanisms remain intact—Hungary, India, and Turkey, to name a few. More broadly, liberalism is most likely to flourish in a system led by a democracy. So simply forestalling the ascent of powerful autocracies may eventually help democratic values spread into once inhospitable places. Similarly, the United States should remember that taking the broad view is as vital as taking the long view. Support for democracy and human rights is not an all-or-nothing proposition. As Biden’s statecraft has shown, transactional deals with dictators can complement a strategy that stresses democratic cooperation at its core. Honoring American values, moreover, is more than a matter of hectoring repressive regimes. A foreign policy that raises international living standards through trade, addresses global problems such as food insecurity, and holds the line against great-power war serves the cause of human dignity very well. A strategy that emphasizes such efforts may actually be more appealing to countries, including developing democracies from Brazil to Indonesia, that resist democracy-versus-autocracy framing because they don’t want any part of a Manichean fight. Of course, these principles can seem like a recipe for rationalization—a way of excusing the grossest behavior by claiming it serves a greater cause. Another important principle, then, revives Hamilton’s dictum that the means must be proportioned to the mischief. The greater the compromise, the greater the payoff it provides—or the damage it avoids—must be. By this standard, the case for cooperation with an India or a Poland is clear-cut. These countries are troubled but mostly admirable democracies that play critical roles in raging competitions. Until the world contains only liberal democracies, Washington can hardly avoid seeking blemished friends. The United States should, however, be more cautious about courting countries that regularly engage in the very practices it deems most corrosive to the liberal order: systematic torture or murder of their people, coercion of their neighbors, or export of repression across borders, to name a few. A Saudi Arabia, for instance, that periodically engages in some of these practices is a troublesome partner. A Saudi Arabia that flagrantly and consistently commits such acts risks destroying the moral and diplomatic basis of its relationship with the United States. American officials should be more hesitant still to distort or destabilize the politics of other countries, especially other democracies, for strategic gain. If Washington is going to get back into the coup business in Latin America or Southeast Asia, the bad outcomes to be prevented must be truly severe—a major, potentially lasting shift in a key regional balance of power, perhaps—to justify policies so manifestly in tension with the causes the United States claims to defend. Chaos at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 2021 Sgt. Victor Mancilla / U.S. Marine Corps / Reuters Mitigating the harm to those causes means heeding a further principle: marginal improvement matters. Washington will not convince leaders in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, or Vietnam to commit political suicide by abandoning their domestic model. But leverage works both ways in these relationships. Countries on the firing line need a superpower patron just as much as it needs them. U.S. officials can use that leverage to discourage extraterritorial repression, seek the release of political prisoners, make elections a bit freer and fairer, or otherwise obtain modest but meaningful changes. Doing so may be the price of keeping these relationships intact, by convincing proponents of human rights and democracy in Congress that the White House has not forgotten such issues altogether. This relates to an additional principle: the United States must be scrupulously honest with itself. American officials need to recognize that illiberal allies will be selective or unreliable allies because their domestic models put them at odds with important norms of the liberal order—and because they tend to generate resentment that may eventually cause an explosion. In the same vein, the problem with laws that mandate aid cutoffs to coup plotters is that they encourage self-deception. In cases in which Washington fears the strategic fallout from a break in relations, U.S. officials are motivated to pretend that a coup has not occurred. The better approach, in line with reforms approved by Congress in December 2022, is a framework that allows presidents to waive such cutoffs on national security grounds—but forces them to acknowledge and justify that choice. The work of making moral tradeoffs in foreign policy begins with admitting those tradeoffs exist. Some of these principles are in tension with others, which means their application in specific cases must always be a matter of judgment. But the issue of reconciling opposites relates to a final principle: soaring idealism and brutal realism can coexist. During the 1970s, moral debates ruptured the Cold War consensus. During the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan adequately repaired—but never fully restored—that consensus by combining flexibility of tactics with clarity of purpose. Reagan supported awful dictators, murderous militaries, and thuggish “freedom fighters” in the Third World, sometimes through ploys—such as the Iran-contra scandal—that were dodgy or simply illegal. Yet he also backed democratic movements from Chile to South Korea; he paired rhetorical condemnations of the Kremlin with ringing affirmations of Western ideals. The takeaway is that rough measures may be more tolerable if they are part of a larger package that emphasizes, in word and deed, the values that must anchor the United States’ approach to the world. Some will see this as heightening the hypocrisy. In reality, it is the best way to preserve the balance—political, moral, and strategic—that a democratic superpower requires. HAL BRANDS is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. MORE BY HAL BRANDS More: United States Afghanistan Ukraine Russian Federation Middle East Israel Palestinian Territories World Democratization Geopolitics Ideology Defense & Military War & Military Strategy World Order Liberalism Authoritarianism World War II Cold War War in Ukraine Israel-Hamas War Hamas Most-Read Articles India’s Feet of Clay How Modi’s Supremacy Will Hinder His Country’s Rise Ramachandra Guha The Strange Resurrection of the Two-State Solution How an Unimaginable War Could Bring About the Only Imaginable Peace Martin Indyk Who’s Afraid of Freedom? The Fight for Liberalism’s Future Helena Rosenblatt A War Putin Still Can’t Win To Thwart Russia, America Needs a Long-Term Strategy—and Ukraine Needs Long-Range Weapons Lawrence D. Freedman Recommended Articles Illustration by Mark Harris; Photo Source: Reuters Only the Middle East Can Fix the Middle East The Path to a Post-American Regional Order Dalia Dassa Kaye and Sanam Vakil Ukrainian military cadets at a swearing-in ceremony in Kyiv, September 2023 The Next Global War How Today’s Regional Conflicts Resemble the Ones That Produced World War II Hal Brands The Shoals of Ukraine Where American Illusions and Great-Power Politics Collide By Serhii Plokhy and M. E. Sarotte January/February 2020 Published on November 22, 2019 Terms and conditions: signing the Budapest Memorandum, December 1994 At first, it might seem surprising that Ukraine, a country on the fringes of Europe, is suddenly at the turbulent center of American politics and foreign policy. With an impeachment inquiry in Washington adding further detail to the story of the Trump administration’s efforts to tie U.S. security assistance for the country to Ukrainian cooperation in investigating President Donald Trump’s Democratic opponents, Trump’s presidency itself hangs in the balance. And the repercussions go even further, raising questions about the legitimacy and sustainability of U.S. power itself. In fact, that Ukraine is at the center of The Strange Resurrection of the Two-State Solution How an Unimaginable War Could Bring About the Only Imaginable Peace By Martin Indyk March/April 2024 Published on February 20, 2024 Mark Harris For years, the vision of an Israeli state and a Palestinian state existing side by side in peace and security has been derided as hopelessly naive—or worse, as a dangerous illusion. After decades of U.S.-led diplomacy failed to achieve that outcome, it seemed to many observers that the dream had died; all that was left to do was bury it. But it turns out that reports of the death of the two-state solution were greatly exaggerated. In the wake of the monstrous attack Hamas launched on Israel on October 7 and the grievous war that Israel has waged A War Putin Still Can’t Win To Thwart Russia, America Needs a Long-Term Strategy—and Ukraine Needs Long-Range Weapons By Lawrence D. Freedman February 23, 2024 A Ukrainian soldier near Robotyne, Ukraine, February 2024 A Ukrainian soldier near Robotyne, Ukraine, February 2024 In the two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, the brutal war has often defied expectations. In the weeks after February 24, 2022, when Russian forces poured over the Ukrainian border, Ukraine surprised the world, and possibly itself, as it mounted an effective resistance and quickly ended the siege on Kyiv. Then, after the war moved south and east, Ukraine again caught observers off guard with its lightning campaign to push Russian forces out of Kharkiv Province in early September 2022. But in addition to these stunning results, there were also disappointments. Rather than signaling a larger change in momentum, for example, the Kharkhiv REVIEW ESSAY Who’s Afraid of Freedom? The Fight for Liberalism’s Future By Helena Rosenblatt March/April 2024 Published on February 20, 2024 It has become trite to say that liberalism is in crisis. As long ago as 1997, in an article in these pages, Fareed Zakaria warned of the rising threat of “illiberal democracy” around the world. Since then, countless essays, articles, and books have tried to explain the growing threats to the liberal world order posed by populism, authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and nationalism. Scholars have also devoted a great deal of thought to the human dislocations—be they economic, political, demographic, cultural, or environmental—that seem to have given rise to these threats. In the last ten years or so, another theme has emerged. A small but vocal group of thinkers claim that the source of the crisis lies within liberalism itself. Often referred to as “postliberals,” those in this camp argue that liberal conceptions of the social and political order are fatally flawed. Liberalism, they say, is responsible for many of the ills that afflict the world today, including rampant globalization, the destruction of communal bonds, rising economic insecurity, environmental degradation, and other perceived defects of twenty-first-century society. Now, the British political philosopher John Gray and the Yale intellectual historian Samuel Moyn, two academics turned public intellectuals, have both weighed in on what they see as the self-inflicted decline of the liberal project. Although they agree that liberal democracy has, in some sense, failed, what they mean by liberalism and what they see as its prospects diverge sharply. In The New Leviathans, Gray contends that liberalism is a fundamentally erroneous creed built on dangerous myths and illusions. Rather than bringing freedom, it has led to unfettered government power that has brought much of the world to the brink of totalitarianism—not only in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China but also in advanced Western democracies. By contrast, in Liberalism Against Itself, Moyn argues that liberal thought is fundamentally sound, based as it is on ideals that are both laudable and realizable. As Moyn sees it, the present crisis has been caused not by liberalism but by its betrayal, by none other than the architects of the liberal order themselves. Abandoning their core values and principles, he argues, liberalism’s champions have become timid and anxious—more concerned with fending off their enemies than winning new converts. Where Gray sees liberal states growing into ever more controlling monsters, Moyn finds them reduced and enfeebled, having presided over the tragic dismantling of the welfare state. THE NEW THOUGHT POLICE The pessimism of The New Leviathans should not come as a surprise. Long known for his criticism of liberalism and gloomy forebodings, Gray posits that the contemporary liberal order was constructed around the delusion that “where markets spread, freedom would follow”—that market capitalism and liberal values were destined to triumph everywhere. Instead, he writes, these forces were simply a temporary “political experiment” that has “run its course” and left nothing but disaster in its wake. The future is bleak, he asserts. Societies will not be able to arrest climate change or prevent environmental destruction. New technologies will not save civilization. The English economist Thomas Malthus’s dire eighteenth-century predictions about overpopulation may yet be proved right. Western capitalism, Gray says, is “programmed to fail.” Perhaps most disastrous of all, Gray argues, market forces, and the resulting connection between wealth and political leverage, are making our states more, not less, totalitarian. “Instead of China becoming more like the West,” he writes, “the West has become more like China.” Moreover, there is no reason to think that in the future, liberal governments will be any more successful than other forms of political order. Instead, he foresees “disparate regimes interacting with one another in a condition of global anarchy.” For Gray, liberalism is based on faulty premises. Liberals flatter themselves when they assert that humans are better than animals. They are not. Humans persecute for pleasure. Liberal dreams of making the world a better place are just that: dreams, and hazardous ones at that. The idea of humanity, Gray writes, is a “dangerous fiction” that allows some people to be identified as less human than others and can provide a justification for eliminating them. The notion that history is a story of progress is another self-flattering illusion. He singles out the political theorist Francis Fukuyama and the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker for special rebuke for their assumptions about society’s inexorable advancement. Protesting a far-right campus speaker in Berkeley, California, September 2017 Justin Sullivan / Getty But the liberal myth Gray most wants to shatter is that people in the West live in free societies. He acknowledges that for much of the modern period, liberal states set out to extend freedom and safeguard against tyranny. With the fall of the Soviet Union, however, these same states increasingly “cast off” traditional restraints on power in the pursuit of material progress, cultural conformity, and national security. “Like the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century,” he writes, liberal states today “have become engineers of souls.” If governments have become totalitarian, so has society. Gray sees pervasive efforts in Western countries to control thought and language, and he is especially agitated by what he calls the “woke religion” on college campuses across the United States today. Indeed, his distress over “wokeism” seems to feed both his fear of totalitarianism and his penchant for hyperbole. The American university, he writes, has become “the model for an inquisitorial regime.” Wokeism and identity politics, he continues, are the products of “a lumpen intelligentsia that is economically superfluous” yet eager to become society’s guardians. The New Leviathans is studded with occasional insights and curious bits of information. Gray writes that Putin admires an obscure nineteenth-century Russian thinker named Konstantin Leontyev, who revered feudalism and wanted the tsar to impose an “autocratic socialism” on Russia. Gray, in fact, devotes more than 70 pages to Russian or Bolshevik topics whose purpose, one surmises, is to remind us how random and full of horrors life is and to make clear that liberal society is headed toward totalitarianism. After all, tsarist Russia had its own “lumpen intelligentsia” that turned against the society that nurtured it, and look what happened there. What any of this history really has to do with liberalism, however, is left unexplained. Gray also does not make clear what he means by liberalism. At the beginning of the book, he lists four key liberal principles he identified in 1986: that individuals have moral primacy over any social collectivity; that all people have equal moral worth; that moral values are universal for all humans and take precedence over specific cultural forms; and that all social and political arrangements can be improved. But Gray does not acknowledge that these principles can mean different things to different people at different times. Today, there are people who call themselves “classical liberals,” “social liberals,” “liberal socialists,” or just plain “liberals.” Although they may share a number of beliefs, the policies they support can vary radically. Which variety of liberalism is proto-totalitarian? For Gray, as for many other postliberals, liberalism seems to mean whatever he wants it to mean. BAD AUTHORITY Gray’s jaundiced view of the liberal tradition partly explains his odd use of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Each chapter of The New Leviathans begins with a quotation from Leviathan, Hobbes’s major treatise on state power, as if to provide the reader with a kernel of truth and an ominous warning about what is to come. Among liberals, Gray writes, Hobbes is “the only one, perhaps, still worth reading.” Hobbes is worth reading, it seems, because of his exceedingly dark view of human nature, a view Gray shares. Hobbes famously referred to the state of nature as a state of war, in which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Men, he reasoned, would willingly submit to an absolute sovereign—they would form a social contract to give up their liberty in exchange for safety—to escape such an existence. In other words, government with unlimited power is necessary for society to flourish. Through Hobbes’s eyes, Gray invites readers to see for themselves where the world is headed. He insists that no matter what liberals may say, they actually fear freedom and, to relieve them of its burdens, seek protection from the state. Supporters of liberalism will thus inevitably create a powerful state, one that will devolve into totalitarianism. By calling Hobbes the only liberal worth reading, Gray implies that liberals are really closet totalitarians—and know it. But Gray is wrong here. Hobbes was no liberal. Although twentieth-century political philosophers often recognized Hobbes, along with John Locke a generation later, as one of the founding fathers of liberalism, this Anglocentric tradition ignores the actual language and ideas that both men used, as well as the stark differences in their conceptions of liberality. Notably, Leviathan was published over 150 years before there was anything called “liberalism”; and no self-identified liberal has ever recognized Hobbes as a founder, or even a member, of the liberal canon. Had Gray begun his book with a true early liberal thinker, he would have been obliged to tell a different story. Liberals concerned themselves with threats posed not only by the state but also by society. Consider the French Swiss political theorist Benjamin Constant (1767–1830). One of the first to identify as a liberal and be called one in his own lifetime, Constant rejected the concepts of the state of nature and the social contract as too abstract for practical use. He had an optimistic, although never naive, view of human nature. Like his fellow nineteenth-century liberals, he believed humans were capable of peaceful self-government in the best interest of all. These early thinkers fought to make Hobbesian authoritarianism impossible by establishing the rule of law and constitutionally limited government, with safeguards in place to protect individual freedoms. Although Gray recognizes this to a certain extent—and even admits that emerging democracies initially showed that “Hobbes was mistaken”—he blames liberalism for supposedly abandoning its original intentions by creating omnipotent states in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By taking on nineteenth-century liberalism more directly, Gray would have seen that, from the very beginning, liberals concerned themselves with threats posed not only by an all-powerful state but also by society, whether through an unfair economy, an oppressive religion, or the many impediments to individual advancement and fulfillment, including stultifying social mores. Rather than fearing freedom, as Gray says, nineteenth-century liberals, as well as their successors, fought to secure and expand it. To blame liberalism for restricting individual rights and liberty makes no sense at all. But for Gray, not even Hobbes is pessimistic enough. “There is no final deliverance from the state of nature,” Gray writes. In the end, he topples the only liberal he thinks is still worth reading. PARADISE LOST Moyn agrees that there is a problem with liberalism, but the similarities with Gray’s account end there. A scholar best known for his iconoclastic history of human rights—arguing that the late-twentieth-century human rights movement largely failed—Moyn nevertheless believes that humans are not doomed and that liberalism is reparable. In Liberalism Against Itself, he argues that liberal thought in its original form is not the cause of the current crisis. In his telling, nineteenth-century liberals were optimists about human nature and believed in human beings’ ability to improve themselves and society. And until the mid-twentieth century, he writes, liberals were committed to “free and equal self-creation” and strove to establish the conditions for human flourishing. Over time, these conditions came to include universal suffrage and the welfare state, as well as individual empowerment and market freedom. But then, in Moyn’s account, a group of Cold War liberals reconceived liberalism beyond recognition. Having experienced World War II and the extremes of Nazism and Stalinism, they embraced views of human nature that were much less hopeful. These thinkers worried that by embracing ideals of emancipation and continual improvement, liberalism could devolve into totalitarianism. As a result, Cold War liberals became “anxious” and “minimalist,” adopting a negative view of liberty in which freedom was defined as noninterference by the state. According to Moyn, they shrank their aspirations for human progress, and liberalism eventually “collapsed into neoliberalism and neoconservatism.” Moyn devotes separate chapters to representative Cold War liberals, including the Oxford political theorist Isaiah Berlin, the Austrian British philosopher Karl Popper, the American historian of ideas Gertrude Himmelfarb, the German Jewish émigré political theorist Hannah Arendt, and the American literary critic Lionel Trilling. Along the way, he introduces others, including the libertarian Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Moyn takes special interest in Judith Shklar, a political theorist who taught at Harvard through much of the Cold War and whose work shows how liberalism became downgraded, its ambitions diminished. Thus, in her 1957 book, After Utopia, she lamented a new liberal order that had abandoned many of its original Enlightenment precepts. Yet by the later decades of her career, she, too, viewed liberalism as, in Moyn’s words, “less a basis for the construction of a free community of equals and more as a means of harm reduction.” “Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe,” Moyn writes. By overreacting to the Soviet threat, it failed to produce a liberal society “worthy of the name.” The world is living with the consequences. Even if these thinkers did not oppose the welfare state, Moyn argues, their rejection of liberal idealism set the stage for spiraling in equality and the assault on welfare in the generations that followed. Rather than challenging this tradition after the fall of communism, Moyn sees a new generation of writers and theorists extending Cold War liberalism to a range of new perceived threats to democracy, from Islamist extremism to the MAGA right to what he calls “‘woke’ tyranny.” This later generation, he writes, has continually failed to make clear the qualities that might give liberalism “enthusiastic backing” in the first place. Notably, Moyn’s account of what happened to liberalism is diametrically opposed to Gray’s. In Moyn’s view, Cold War liberals and their contemporary successors have weakened the state, not, as Gray insists, made it grow. One is even tempted to read Moyn’s book as a response to Gray. Moyn disagrees with those who insist that liberalism is “poised on the precipice.” He believes that it is precisely this kind of catastrophism that has led people astray and made them afraid, fatalistic, and despondent when action is needed. It is such thinking that has caused liberalism to take a wrong turn. CRISIS OR CATALYST? Even skeptics and critics must admit that Liberalism Against Itself is clearly written and argued. Moyn does not make the mistake of anchoring liberalism in the thought of an antiliberal such as Hobbes. Instead, he draws on the ideas of true liberals such as Constant and his younger contemporaries John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. Moyn also brings to light something that is often left out of histories of liberalism, namely its moral optimism and what could even be called its moral agenda. A central purpose of nineteenth-century liberalism was to create the conditions that would allow people to grow intellectually and morally. But Moyn picks and chooses the principles of early liberalism with which he agrees. He favors a socialistic form of liberalism, but there was another, libertarian form that he leaves out. It is something of a simplification to say that nineteenth-century liberals saw the state as a “device of human liberation.” Some of them, such as the British idealist philosopher T. H. Green and the French politician Léon Bourgeois, did, but others, such as the British philosopher and social scientist Herbert Spencer and the French economist Frédéric Bastiat, did not. These latter thinkers, who would be called “classical” or “orthodox” liberals, also believed in progress and emancipation and were optimistic about the future, but they had less confidence in the state. The New Leviathans, unlike Liberalism Against Itself, is a sad book, one that suggests there is no way out of the present predicament. As Gray sees it, to try to save liberalism—or what he calls “the moth-eaten musical brocade of progressive hope”—would be pointless. Instead, Western democracies should simply lower their sights and “adjust.” Moyn rejects such fatalism. People have important choices to make about how they should live their lives and what kind of society they wish to live in. He thinks it is time to reinvent liberalism, not bury it. Liberalism has faced multiple crises throughout its history. It was even born in crisis, the crisis of the French Revolution. It has faced formidable enemies before and has reinvented itself several times, as well. It can certainly do so again. Exactly how it should do so is up to a new generation of thinkers, policymakers, politicians, and, ultimately, voters themselves to decide. They are more likely to find success, however, if they aspire to a vision of liberalism in which a well-governed society does not come at the expense of individual liberty but rather serves to further it. HELENA ROSENBLATT is Professor of History, Political Science, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. The Self-Doubting Superpower America Shouldn’t Give Up on the World It Made Fareed Zakaria At a Trump rally in Mesa, Arizona, October 2022 The Antiliberal Revolution Reading the Philosophers of the New Right Charles King India’s Feet of Clay How Modi’s Supremacy Will Hinder His Country’s Rise By Ramachandra Guha March/April 2024 Published on February 20, 2024 Narendra Modi Eduardo Morciano This spring, India is scheduled to hold its 18th general election. Surveys suggest that the incumbent, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is very likely to win a third term in office. That triumph will further underline Modi’s singular stature. He bestrides the country like a colossus, and he promises Indians that they, too, are rising in the world. And yet the very nature of Modi’s authority, the aggressive control sought by the prime minister and his party over a staggeringly diverse and complicated country, threatens to scupper India’s great-power ambitions. A leader of enormous charisma from a modest background, Modi dominates the Indian political landscape as only two of his 15 predecessors have done: Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister from Indian independence in 1947 until 1964, and Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 to 1984. In their pomp, both enjoyed wide popularity throughout India, cutting across barriers of class, gender, religion, and region, although—as so often with leaders who stay on too long—their last years in office were marked by political misjudgments that eroded their standing. Nehru and Indira Gandhi both belonged to the Indian National Congress, the party that led the country’s struggle for freedom from British colonial rule and stayed in power for three decades following independence. Modi, on the other hand, is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which spent many years in opposition before becoming what it now appears to be, the natural party of governance. A major ideological difference between the Congress and the BJP is in their attitudes toward the relationship between faith and state. Particularly under Nehru, the Congress was committed to religious pluralism, in keeping with the Indian constitutional obligation to assure citizens “liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship.” The BJP, on the other hand, wishes to make India a majoritarian state in which politics, public policy, and even everyday life are cast in a Hindu idiom. Modi is not the first BJP prime minister of India—that distinction belongs to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was in office in 1996 and from 1998 to 2004. But Modi can exercise a kind of power that was never available to Vajpayee, whose coalition government of more than a dozen parties forced him to accommodate diverse views and interests. By contrast, the BJP has enjoyed a parliamentary majority on its own for the last decade, and Modi is far more assertive than the understated Vajpayee ever was. Vajpayee delegated power to his cabinet ministers, consulted opposition leaders, and welcomed debate in Parliament. Modi, on the other hand, has centralized power in his office to an astonishing degree, undermined the independence of public institutions such as the judiciary and the media, built a cult of personality around himself, and pursued his party’s ideological goals with ruthless efficiency. Despite his dismantling of democratic institutions, Modi remains extremely popular. He is both incredibly hardworking and politically astute, able to read the pulse of the electorate and adapt his rhetoric and tactics accordingly. Left-wing intellectuals dismiss him as a mere demagogue. They are grievously mistaken. In terms of commitment and intelligence, he is far superior to his populist counterparts such as former U.S. President Donald Trump, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, or former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Although his economic record is mixed, he has still won the trust of many poor people by supplying food and cooking gas at highly subsidized rates via schemes branded as Modi’s personal gifts to them. He has taken quickly to digital technologies, which have enabled the direct provision of welfare and the reduction of intermediary corruption. He has also presided over substantial progress in infrastructure development, with spanking new highways and airports seen as evidence of a rising India on the march under Modi’s leadership. Modi’s many supporters view his tenure as prime minister as nothing short of epochal. They claim that he has led India’s national resurgence. Under Modi, they note, India has surpassed its former ruler, the United Kingdom, to become the world’s fifth-largest economy; it will soon eclipse Japan and Germany, as well. It became the fourth country to land a spaceship on the moon. But Modi’s impact runs deeper than material achievements. His supporters proudly boast that India has rediscovered and reaffirmed its Hindu civilizational roots, leading to a successful decolonizing of the mind—a truer independence than even the freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi achieved. The prime minister’s speeches are peppered with claims that India is on the cusp of leading the world. In pursuit of its global ambitions, his government hosted the G-20 meeting in New Delhi last year, the event carefully choreographed to show Modi in the best possible light, standing splendidly alone at center stage as one by one, he welcomed world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, and showed them to their seats. (The party was spoiled, only slightly, by the deliberate absence of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who may not have wanted to indulge Modi in his pageant of prestige.) Nonetheless, the future of the Indian republic looks considerably less rosy than the vision promised by Modi and his acolytes. His government has not assuaged—indeed, it has actively worked to intensify—conflicts along lines of both religion and region, which will further fray the country’s social fabric. The inability or unwillingness to check environmental abuse and degradation threatens public health and economic growth. The hollowing out of democratic institutions pushes India closer and closer to becoming a democracy only in name and an electoral autocracy in practice. Far from becoming the Vishwa Guru, or “teacher to the world”—as Modi’s boosters claim—India is altogether more likely to remain what it is today: a middling power with a vibrant entrepreneurial culture and mostly fair elections alongside malfunctioning public institutions and persisting cleavages of religion, gender, caste, and region. The façade of triumph and power that Modi has erected obscures a more fundamental truth: that a principal source of India’s survival as a democratic country, and of its recent economic success, has been its political and cultural pluralism, precisely those qualities that the prime minister and his party now seek to extinguish. PORTRAIT IN POWER Between 2004 and 2014, India was run by Congress-led coalition governments. The prime minister was the scholarly economist Manmohan Singh. By the end of his second term, Singh was 80 and unwell, so the task of running Congress’s campaign ahead of the 2014 general elections fell to the much younger Rahul Gandhi. Gandhi is the son of Sonia Gandhi, a former president of the Congress Party, and Rajiv Gandhi, who, like his mother, Indira Gandhi, and grandfather Nehru, had served as prime minister. In a brilliant political move, Modi, who had previously been chief minister of the important state of Gujarat for a decade, presented himself as an experienced, hard-working, and entirely self-made administrator, in stark contrast to Rahul Gandhi, a dynastic scion who had never held political office and whom Modi portrayed as entitled and effete. Sixty years of electoral democracy and three decades of market-led economic growth had made Indians increasingly distrustful of claims made on the basis of family lineage or privilege. It also helped that Modi was a more compelling orator than Rahul Gandhi and that the BJP made better use of the new media and digital technologies to reach remote corners of India. In the 2014 elections, the BJP won 282 seats, up from 116 five years earlier, while the Congress’s tally went down from 206 to a mere 44. The next general election, in 2019, again pitted Modi against Gandhi; the BJP won 303 seats to the Congress’s 52. With these emphatic victories, the BJP not only crushed and humiliated the Congress but also secured the legislative dominance of the party. In prior decades, Indian governments had typically been motley coalitions held together by compromise. The BJP’s healthy majority under Modi has given the prime minister broad latitude to act—and free rein to pursue his ambitions. Modi presents himself as the very embodiment of the party, the government, and the nation, as almost single-handedly fulfilling the hopes and ambitions of Indians. In the past decade, his elevation has taken many forms, including the construction of the world’s largest cricket stadium, named for Modi; the portrait of Modi on the COVID-19 vaccination certificates issued by the government of India (a practice followed by no other democracy in the world); the photo of Modi on all government schemes and welfare packages; a serving judge of the Supreme Court gushing that Modi is a “visionary” and a “genius”; and Modi’s own proclamation that he had been sent by god to emancipate India’s women. Modi’s supporters view his tenure as prime minister as epochal. In keeping with this gargantuan cult of personality, Modi has attempted, largely successfully, to make governance and administration an instrument of his personal will rather than a collaborative effort in which many institutions and individuals work together. In the Indian system, based on the British model, the prime minister is supposed to be merely first among equals. Cabinet ministers are meant to have relative autonomy in their own spheres of authority. Under Modi, however, most ministers and ministries take instructions directly from the prime minister’s office and from officials known to be personally loyal to him. Likewise, Parliament is no longer an active theater of debate, in which the views of the opposition are taken into account in forging legislation. Many bills are passed in minutes, by voice vote, with the speakers in both houses acting in an extremely partisan manner. Opposition members of Parliament have been suspended in the dozens—and in one recent case, in the hundreds—for demanding that the prime minister and home minister make statements about such important matters as bloody ethnic conflicts in India’s borderlands and security breaches in Parliament itself. Sadly, the Indian Supreme Court has done little to stem attacks on democratic freedoms. In past decades, the court had at least occasionally stood up for personal freedoms, and for the rights of the provinces, acting as a modest brake on the arbitrary exercise of state power. Since Modi took office, however, the Supreme Court has often given its tacit approval to the government’s misconduct, by, for example, failing to strike down punitive laws that clearly violate the Indian constitution. One such law is the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, under which it is almost impossible to get bail and which has been invoked to arrest and designate as “terrorists” hundreds of students and human rights activists for protesting peacefully on the streets against the majoritarian policies of the regime. The civil services and the diplomatic corps are also prone to obey the prime minister and his party, even when the demands clash with constitutional norms. So does the Election Commission, which organizes elections and frames election rules to facilitate the preferences of Modi and the BJP. Thus, elections in Jammu and Kashmir and to the municipal council of Mumbai, India’s richest city, have been delayed for years largely because the ruling party remains unsure of winning them. The Modi government has also worked systematically to narrow the spaces open for democratic dissent. Tax officials disproportionately target opposition politicians. Large sections of the press act as the mouthpiece of the ruling party for fear of losing government advertisements or facing vindictive tax raids. India currently ranks 161 out of 180 countries surveyed in the World Press Index, an analysis of levels of journalistic freedom. Free debate in India’s once vibrant public universities is discouraged; instead, the University Grants Commission has instructed vice chancellors to install “selfie points” on campuses to encourage students to take their photograph with an image of Modi. This story of the systematic weakening of India’s democratic foundations is increasingly well known outside the country, with watchdog groups bemoaning the backsliding of the world’s largest democracy. But another fundamental challenge to India has garnered less attention: the erosion of the country’s federal structure. India is a union of states whose constituent units have their own governments elected on the basis of universal adult franchise. As laid down in India’s constitution, some subjects, including defense, foreign affairs, and monetary policy, are the responsibility of the government in New Delhi. Others, including agriculture, health, and law and order, are the responsibility of the states. Still others, such as forests and education, are the joint responsibility of the central government and the states. This distribution of powers allows state governments considerable latitude in designing and implementing policies for their citizens. It explains the wide variation in policy outcomes across the country—why, for example, the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have a far better record with regard to health, education, and gender equity compared with northern states such as Uttar Pradesh. A Modi supporter in Ayodhya, India, December 2023 Anushree Fadnavis / Reuters As a large, sprawling federation of states, India resembles the United States. But India’s states are more varied in terms of culture, religion, and particularly language. In that sense, India is more akin to the European Union in the continental scale of its diversity. The Bengalis, the Kannadigas, the Keralites, the Odias, the Punjabis, and the Tamils, to name just a few peoples, all have extraordinarily rich literary and cultural histories, each distinct from one another and especially from that of the heartland states of northern India where the BJP is dominant. Coalition governments respected and nourished this heterogeneity, but under Modi, the BJP has sought to compel uniformity in three ways: through imposing the main language of the north, Hindi, in states where it is scarcely spoken and where it is seen as an unwelcome competitor to the local language; through promoting the cult of Modi as the only leader of any consequence in India; and through the legal and financial powers that being in office in New Delhi bestows on it. Since coming to power, the Modi government has assiduously undermined the autonomy of state governments run by parties other than the BJP. It has achieved this in part through the ostensibly nonpartisan office of the governor, who, in states not run by the BJP, has often acted as an agent of the ruling party in New Delhi. Laws in domains such as agriculture, nominally the realm of state governments, have been passed by the national Parliament without the consultation of the states. Since several important and populous states—including Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal—are run by popularly elected parties other than the BJP, the Modi government’s undisguised hostility toward their autonomous functioning has created a great deal of bad blood. In this manner, in his decade in office, Modi has worked diligently to centralize and personalize political power. As chief minister of Gujarat, he gave his cabinet colleagues little to do, running the administration through bureaucrats loyal to him. He also worked persistently to tame civil society and the press in Gujarat. Since Modi became prime minister in 2014, this authoritarian approach to governance has been carried over to New Delhi. His authoritarianism has a precedent, however: the middle period of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, from 1971 to 1977, when she constructed a cult of personality and turned the party and government into an instrument of her will. But Modi’s subordination of institutions has gone even further. In his style of administration, he is Indira Gandhi on steroids. A HINDU KINGDOM For all their similarities in political style, Indira Gandhi and Modi differ markedly in terms of political ideology. Forged in the crucible of the Indian freedom struggle, inspired by the pluralistic ethos of its leader Mahatma Gandhi (who was not related to her) and of her father, Nehru, Indira Gandhi was deeply committed to the idea that India belonged equally to citizens of all faiths. For her, as for Nehru, India was not to be a Hindu version of Pakistan—a country designed to be a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims. India would not define statecraft or governance in accordance with the views of the majority religious community. India’s many minority religious groups—including Buddhists, Christians, Jains, Muslims, Parsis, and Sikhs—would all have the same status and material rights as Hindus. Modi has taken a different view. Raised as he was in the hardline milieu of the Hindu nationalist movement, he sees the cultural and civilizational character of India as defined by the demographic dominance—and long-suppressed destiny—of Hindus. The attempt to impose Hindu hegemony on India’s present and future has two complementary elements. The first is electoral, the creation of a consolidated Hindu vote bank. Hinduism does not have the singular structure of Abrahamic religions such as Christianity or Islam. It does not elevate one religious text (such as the Bible or the Koran) or one holy city (such as Rome or Mecca) to a particularly privileged status. In Hinduism, there are many gods, many holy places, and many styles of worship. But while the ritual universe of Hinduism is pluralistic, its social system is historically highly unequal, marked by hierarchically organized status groups known as castes, whose members rarely intermarry or even break bread with one another. The BJP under Modi has tried to overcome the pluralism of Hinduism by seeking to override caste and doctrinal differences between different groups of Hindus. It promises to construct a “Hindu Raj,” a state in which Hindus will reign supreme. Modi claims that before his ascendance, Hindus had suffered 1,200 years of slavery at the hands of Muslim rulers, such as the Mughal dynasty, and Christian rulers, such as the British—and that he will now restore Hindu pride and Hindu control over the land that is rightfully theirs. To aid this consolidation, Hindu nationalists have systematically demonized India’s large Muslim minority, painting Muslims as insufficiently apologetic for the crimes of the Muslim rulers of the past and as insufficiently loyal to the India of the present. Modi has worked diligently to centralize and personalize political power. Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, is a belief system characterized by what I call “paranoid triumphalism.” It aims to make Hindus fearful so as to compel them to act together and ultimately dominate those Indians who are not Hindus. At election time, the BJP hopes to make Hindus vote as Hindus. Since Hindus constitute roughly 80 percent of the population, if 60 percent of them vote principally on the basis of their religious affiliation in India’s multiparty, first-past-the-post system, that amounts to 48 percent of the popular vote for the BJP—enough to get Modi and his party elected by a comfortable margin. Indeed, in the 2019 elections, the BJP won 56 percent of seats with 37 percent of the popular vote. So complete is the ruling party’s disregard for the political rights of India’s 200 million or so Muslims that, except when compelled to do so in the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, it rarely picks Muslim candidates to compete in elections. And yet it can still comfortably win national contests. The BJP has 397 members in the two houses of the Indian parliament. Not one is a Muslim. Electoral victory has enabled the second element of Hindutva—the provision of an explicitly Hindu veneer to the character of the Indian state. Modi himself chose to contest the parliamentary elections from Varanasi, an ancient city with countless temples that is generally recognized as the most important center of Hindu identity. He has presented himself as a custodian of Hindu traditions, claiming that in his youth, he wandered and meditated in the forests of the Himalaya in the manner of the sages of the past. He has, for the first time, made Hindu rituals central to important secular occasions, such as the inauguration of a new Parliament building, which was conducted by him alone, flanked by a phalanx of chanting priests, but with the members of Parliament, the representatives of the people, conspicuously absent. He also presided, in similar fashion, over religious rituals in Varanasi, with the priests chanting, “Glory to the king.” In January, Modi was once again the star of the show as he opened a large temple in the city of Ayodhya on a site claimed to be the birthplace of the god Rama. Whenever television channels obediently broadcast such proceedings live across India, their cameras focus on the elegantly attired figure of Modi. The self-proclaimed Hindu monk of the past has thus become, in symbol if not in substance, the Hindu emperor of the present. THE BURDENS OF THE FUTURE The emperor benefits from having few plausible rivals. Modi’s enduring political success is in part enabled by a fractured and nepotistic opposition. In a belated bid to stall the BJP from winning a third term, as many as 28 parties have come together to fight the forthcoming general elections under a common umbrella. They have adopted the name the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance, an unwieldy moniker that can be condensed to the crisp acronym INDIA. Some parties in this alliance are very strong in their own states. Others have a base among particular castes. But the only party in the alliance with pretensions to being a national party is the Congress. Despite his dismal political record, Rahul Gandhi remains the principal leader of the Congress. In public appearances, he is often flanked by his sister, who is the party’s general-secretary, or his mother, reinforcing his sense of entitlement. The major regional parties, with influence in states such as Bihar, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, are also family firms, with leadership often passing from father to son. Although their local roots make them competitive in state elections, when it comes to a general election, the dynastic baggage they carry puts them at a distinct disadvantage against a party led by a self-made man such as Modi, who can present himself as devoted entirely and utterly to the welfare of his fellow citizens rather than as the bearer of family privilege. INDIA will struggle to unseat Modi and the BJP and may hope, at best, to dent their commanding majority in Parliament. The prime minister also faces little external pressure. In other contexts, one might expect a certain amount of critical scrutiny of Modi’s authoritarian ways from the leaders of Western democracies. But this has not happened, partly because of the ascendance of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Xi has mounted an aggressive challenge to Western hegemony and positioned China as a superpower deserving equal respect and an equal say in world affairs as the United States—moves that have worked entirely to Modi’s advantage. The Indian prime minister has played the U.S. establishment brilliantly, using the large and wealthy Indian diaspora to make his (and India’s) importance visible to the White House. In April 2023, India officially overtook China as the most populous country in the world. It has the fifth-largest economy. It has a large and reasonably well-equipped military. All these factors make it ever more appealing to the United States as a counterweight to China. Both the Trump and the Biden administrations have shown an extraordinary indulgence toward Modi, continuing to hail him as the leader of the “world’s largest democracy” even as that appellation becomes less credible under his rule. The attacks on minorities, the suppression of the press, and the arrest of civil rights activists have attracted scarcely a murmur of disapproval from the State Department or the White House. The recent allegations that the Indian government tried to assassinate a U.S. citizen of Sikh descent are likely to fade without any action or strong public criticism. Meanwhile, the leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, seeking a greater share of the Indian market (not least in sales of sophisticated weaponry), have all been unctuous in their flattery of Modi. In the old quarters of Delhi, January 2024 Adnan Abidi / Reuters Currently, Modi is dominant at home and immune from criticism from abroad. It is likely, however, that history and historians will judge his political and personal legacy somewhat less favorably than his currently supreme position might suggest. For one thing, he came into office in 2014 pledging to deliver a strong economy, but his economic record is at best mixed. On the positive side, the government has sped the impressive development of infrastructure and the process of formalizing the economy through digital technology. Yet economic inequalities have soared; while some business families close to the BJP have become extremely wealthy, unemployment rates are high, particularly among young Indians, and women’s labor participation rates are low. Regional disparities are large and growing, with the southern states having done far better than the northern ones in terms of both economic and social development. Notably, none of the five southern states are ruled by the BJP. The rampant environmental degradation across the country further threatens the sustainability of economic growth. Even in the absence of climate change, India would be an environmental disaster zone. Its cities have the highest rates of air pollution in the world. Many of its rivers are ecologically dead, killed by untreated industrial effluents and domestic sewage. Its underground aquifers are depleting rapidly. Much of its soil is contaminated with chemicals. Its forests are despoiled and in the process of becoming much less biodiverse, thanks to invasive nonnative weeds. This degradation has been enabled by an antiquated economic ideology that adheres to the mistaken belief that only rich countries need to behave responsibly toward nature. India, it is said, is too poor to be green. In fact, countries such as India, with their higher population densities and more fragile tropical ecologies, need to care as much, or more, about how to use natural resources wisely. But regimes led by both the Congress and the BJP have granted a free license to coal and petroleum extraction and other polluting industries. No government has so actively promoted destructive practices as Modi’s. It has eased environmental clearances for polluting industries and watered down various regulations. The environmental scholar Rohan D’ Souza has written that by 2018, “the slash and burn attitude of gutting and weakening existing environmental institutions, laws, and norms was extended to forests, coasts, wildlife, air, and even waste management.” When Modi came to power in 2014, India ranked 155 out of 178 countries assessed by the Environmental Performance Index, which estimates the sustainability of a country’s development in terms of the state of its air, water, soils, natural habitats, and so on. By 2022, India ranked last, 180 out of 180. The effects of these varied forms of environmental deterioration exact a horrific economic and social cost on hundreds of millions of people. Degradation of pastures and forests imperils the livelihoods of farmers. Unregulated mining for coal and bauxite displaces entire rural communities, making their people ecological refugees. Air pollution in cities endangers the health of children, who miss school, and of workers, whose productivity declines. Unchecked, these forms of environmental abuse will impose ever-greater burdens on Indians yet unborn. Modi has played the U.S. establishment brilliantly. These future generations of Indians will also have to bear the costs of the dismantling of democratic institutions overseen by Modi and his party. A free press, independent regulatory institutions, and an impartial and fearless judiciary are vital for political freedoms, for acting as a check on the abuse of state power, and for nurturing an atmosphere of trust among citizens. To create, or perhaps more accurately, re-create, them after Modi and the BJP finally relinquish power will be an arduous task. The strains placed on Indian federalism may boil over in 2026, when parliamentary seats are scheduled to be reallocated according to the next census, to be conducted in that year. Then, what is now merely a divergence between north and south might become an actual divide. In 2001, when a reallocation of seats based on population was proposed, the southern states argued that it would discriminate against them for following progressive health and education policies in prior decades that had reduced birth rates and enhanced women’s freedom. The BJP-led coalition government then in power recognized the merits of the south’s case and, with the consent of the opposition, proposed that the reallocation be delayed for a further 25 years. In 2026, the matter will be reopened. One proposed solution is to emulate the U.S. model, in which congressional districts reflect population size while each state has two seats in the Senate, irrespective of population. Perhaps having the Rajya Sabha, or upper house, of the Indian Parliament restructured on similar principles may help restore faith in federalism. But if Modi and the BJP are in power, they will almost certainly mandate the process of reallocation based on population in both the Lok Sabha, the lower house, and the Rajya Sabha, which will then substantially favor the more populous if economically lagging states of the north. The southern states are bound to protest. Indian federalism and unity will struggle to cope with the fallout. If the BJP achieves a third successive electoral victory in May, the creeping majoritarianism under Modi could turn into galloping majoritarianism, a trend that poses a fundamental challenge to Indian nationhood. Democratic- and pluralistic-minded Indians warn of the dangers of India becoming a country like Pakistan, defined by religious identity. A more salient cautionary tale might be Sri Lanka’s. With its educated population, good health care, relatively high position of women (compared with India and all other countries in South Asia), its capable and numerous professional class, and its attractiveness as a tourist destination, Sri Lanka was poised in the 1970s to join Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan as one of the so-called Asian Tigers. But then, a deadly mix of religious and linguistic majoritarianism reared its head. The Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority chose to consolidate itself against the Tamil-speaking minority, who were themselves largely Hindus. Through the imposition of Sinhalese as the official language and Buddhism as the official religion, a deep division was created, provoking protests by the Tamils, peaceful at first but increasingly violent when crushed by the state. Three decades of bloody civil war ensued. The conflict formally ended in 2009, but the country has not remotely recovered, in social, economic, political, or psychological terms. Modi speaking in New Delhi, January 2024 Altaf Hussain / Reuters India will probably not go the way of Sri Lanka. A full-fledged civil war between Hindus and Muslims, or between north and south, is unlikely. But the Modi government is jeopardizing a key source of Indian strength: its varied forms of pluralism. One might usefully contrast Modi’s time in office with the years between 1989 and 2014, when neither the Congress nor the BJP had a majority in Parliament. In that period, prime ministers had to bring other parties into government, allocating important ministries to its leaders. This fostered a more inclusive and collaborative style of governance, more suitable to the size and diversity of the country itself. States run by parties other than the BJP or the Congress found representation at the center, their voices heard and their concerns taken into account. Federalism flourished, and so did the press and the courts, which had more room to follow an independent path. It may be no coincidence that it was in this period of coalition government that India experienced three decades of steady economic growth. When India became free from British rule in 1947, many skeptics thought it was too large and too diverse to survive as a single nation and its population too poor and illiterate to be trusted with a democratic system of governance. Many predicted that the country would Balkanize, become a military dictatorship, or experience mass famine. That those dire scenarios did not come to pass was largely because of the sagacity of India’s founding figures, who nurtured a pluralist ethos that respected the rights of religious and linguistic minorities and who sought to balance the rights of the individual and the state, as well as those of the central government and the provinces. This delicate calculus enabled the country to stay united and democratic and allowed its people to steadily overcome the historic burdens of poverty and discrimination. The last decade has witnessed the systematic erosion of those varied forms of pluralism. One party, the BJP, and within it, one man, the prime minister, are judged to represent India to itself and to the world. Modi’s charisma and popular appeal have consolidated this dominance, electorally speaking. Yet the costs are mounting. Hindus impose themselves on Muslims, the central government imposes itself on the provinces, the state further curtails the rights and freedoms of citizens. Meanwhile, the unthinking imitation of Western models of energy-intensive and capital-intensive industrialization is causing profound and, in many cases, irreversible environmental damage. Modi and the BJP seem poised to win their third general election in a row. This victory would further magnify the prime minister’s aura, enhancing his image as India’s redeemer. His supporters will boast that their man is assuredly taking his country toward becoming the Vishwa Guru, the teacher to the world. Yet such triumphalism cannot mask the deep fault lines underneath, which—unless recognized and addressed—will only widen in the years to come. RAMACHANDRA GUHA is Distinguished University Professor at Krea University and the author of India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. Students at an outdoor lesson, New Delhi, November 2022 Is India’s Rise Inevitable? The Roots of New Delhi’s Dysfunction Milan Vaishnav An armed Kuki man in Manipur, India, July 2023 Why Modi Can’t Make India a Great Power Government-Backed Intolerance Is Tearing the Country Apart Sushant Singh What Happened to Lula? How He Dashed High Hopes for Brazil’s Foreign Policy—and How He Can Get Back on Track By Matias Spektor February 28, 2024 Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brasília, November 2023 Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brasília, November 2023 Adriano Machado / Reuters Sign in and save to read later Print this article Send by email Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Get a link Page url https://www.foreignaffairs.com/brazil/what-happened-lula Get Citation Request Reprint Permissions Few leaders could claim, on taking office, to have induced sighs of relief from both Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Joe Biden. Yet in January 2023, that is exactly what Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did. His narrow victory over Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing extremist and admirer of Donald Trump, sparked optimism across borders. Democratic leaders everywhere saw Lula’s win, which returned him to power for a third term after a 12-year hiatus and a stint in prison over corruption charges, as the herald of an antiauthoritarian tide. Autocrats the world over relished him as a seasoned statesman with a reputation for standing up to the West. And developing countries of all kinds recognized him as someone who knows better than most how to exact concessions from the global North. “Brazil is back,” read headlines, as Lula seized the spotlight. But during his first year in office, Lula has struggled to translate his vision for a more progressive global order into action. His foreign policy thus far has been beset by diplomatic missteps that have strained relations with partners in both the West and the developing world. His statements and actions have cast doubts on his role as peacemaker, coalition builder, and champion of the marginalized. His commitment to environmental leadership has been marred by his decision to turn Brazil into the latest petrostate. And his grand design overlooks his country’s most pressing threat: the explosive expansion of criminal networks that are working hard to turn Brazil into a failed state and that are undermining the ecological integrity of the Amazon rainforest. To fix these problems and deliver on his vision of a progressive international order, Lula will have to change course. He must reengage partners in the West and Latin America after a year of growing estrangement. He must unequivocally come out in defense of democracy in neighboring Venezuela. He has to craft a new set of climate policies, ones that allow him to use Brazil’s newly discovered oil reserves without becoming another regressive member of OPEC. And Lula must revamp the country’s intelligence apparatus and better coordinate with outside partners to reverse the dangerous growth of Brazil’s criminal networks. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. TRIALS AND ERRORS Before taking office, Lula suggested that his foreign policy ambition was to bridge the vast gaps between the rich North and the developing South. He promised to actively pursue international cooperation, facilitating dialogue between the West and the rest, and he declared that Brazil would, again, lead Latin America. His administration hoped to secure major policy victories at the next G-20 summit and at the 2025 UN climate change conference—both of which Brazil will host. To this end, Lula has unveiled plans to launch a global initiative to combat hunger, facilitate the flow of climate finance toward developing countries, and help Africa secure seats in global governance institutions. Yet since assuming power, Lula has made a sequence of costly mistakes. He committed his first foreign blunder with the United States. The Biden administration broke with tradition to all but endorse Lula during his campaign, cautioning Bolsonaro against using unconstitutional interventions to stay in power. Lula, however, has not leveraged the United States’ rare opening to advance his vision. Instead of pushing Biden on the long list of deliverables Brazil wants for the G-20 and the climate conference, Lula squandered his goodwill by blaming the war in Ukraine on President Volodymyr Zelensky, NATO, and ultimately the United States. A much-anticipated presidential meeting between Biden and Lula produced meager outcomes, leaving the bilateral relationship in a fraught and constrained state. Brasília has legitimate grievances with Washington. In October, the United States single-handedly blocked a Brazilian-led UN Security Council resolution for a Gaza cease-fire, which Lula’s government had heavily campaigned for in close consultation with American officials. And Lula is persuaded that the U.S. Department of Justice was behind his imprisonment over a vast corruption scandal, marring his relationship with Washington (although evidence of U.S. involvement remains thin at best). But with the G-20 summit in Rio de Janeiro on the horizon, just after the U.S. elections in November, Brazil cannot afford this estrangement. Biden, after all, could easily torpedo Lula’s initiatives by either ignoring or opposing them. The initial enthusiasm that greeted Lula’s return has dissipated. The United States is not the only Western country Lula is alienating. His comments on the war in Ukraine and his penchant for describing NATO as a source of instability have made him less popular among European countries, as well. Germany and Portugal, Brazil’s closest partners on the continent, have felt particularly slighted, unable to decipher the president’s aims. These tensions have been compounded by the collapse of trade talks between the EU and Mercosur (a South American trade bloc led by Brazil), which was prompted by French agricultural protectionism and Mercosur disunity. Given that the EU plays a central role in doling out foreign aid, financing climate projects, and reforming international institutions, this discord could cost Lula his ambitious G-20 agenda. Such failures in the global North might be less concerning if Lula had racked up victories in the global South. But he hasn’t. In South America, the initial enthusiasm that greeted his return to office has dissipated. He failed to dissuade Uruguay from seeking trade deals with China outside Mercosur, a move that severely weakens Brazil’s influence in its region. Lula’s bid to revive the Union of South American Nations proved futile. And his vocal endorsement of the unsuccessful Argentine presidential contender Sergio Massa, coupled with his absence from the inauguration of the victorious right-wing candidate, Javier Milei, have unsettled Brazil’s closest relationship. Its regional plans are contingent on the tacit support of Argentina, which has enough diplomatic influence to bolster or hinder its neighbor’s initiatives. As a result, any enmity between Lula and Milei could seriously undermine the former’s ambitions. Lula has also run into trouble with fellow leaders on the South American left. He is engaged in a public rift with Colombian President Gustavo Petro over oil drilling in the Amazon. Brazil’s geographic distance from Mexico has made it hard for Lula to cooperate with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, better known as AMLO, on critical issues for Lula, such as his G-20 agenda or the election of the next secretary-general of the United Nations. Lula has offered unwavering support for Venezuela’s purportedly left-wing but brutal, kleptocratic autocracy, yet this stance has earned the ire of progressive leaders elsewhere in the region—including Chilean President Gabriel Boric. Lula’s support for Venezuela has also backfired. In December, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro threatened to invade Guyana, dragging Brazil into a regional dispute that could lead to war. Maduro and Lula in Brasília, Brazil, May 2023 Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters Lula believes he can strengthen his international hand by partnering with China to secure concessions from the West, so he wants to closely coordinate policy with Beijing. “The BRICS is the most important development in world politics in recent times,” reasoned the presidential adviser Celso Amorim last January, referring to a consortium of non-Western states. (The acronym stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.) “The group has awakened Western nations to the need to strengthen the G-20, which ought to be the main institution [for global governance].” But even if Amorim’s assessment is correct, Brazil can gain support from the global North for Lula’s progressive vision only if his country maintains clear autonomy; any hint of subservience to China will draw Western backlash. And for all the government’s positive talk about China’s rise, ties between Beijing and Brasília are not particularly close. The Chinese continue to play hardball on UN security council reform, which could land Brazil a permanent seat, as well as when it comes to bilateral trade and investment. China’s growing diplomatic clout in South America could also make it hard for Brazil to advance its interests in the region. It still makes sense for Lula to partner with China and other BRICS members, especially since they can help him achieve his G-20 goals. Yet his uncritical collaboration with these states exposes him to accusations of hypocrisy. Lula is known for his readiness to call out Western violations of international law, but he has been silent about China’s brutal oppression of Uyghurs and India’s crackdown on dissent. He has also been quiet when it comes to Russia’s indiscriminate killing of civilians in Ukraine. Confronted by the media about Alexei Navalny’s death in prison, Lula said the world should wait for forensic results before blaming Putin. And although Lula condemned the October 7 Hamas attack, he created an uproar in mid-February by declaring that “what is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has not occurred at any other moment in history—actually, it has, when Hitler decided to kill the Jews.” Leaders everywhere, of course, have loudly criticized Israel’s war in Gaza, so Lula is far from alone. But to be a successful progressive voice and advocate at a time when the world is so profoundly divided, Lula has to establish himself as a broker who is intensely focused on finding pragmatic solutions. He cannot express moral outrage only when it is convenient. RIGHTING THE SHIP Fortunately for Lula, changing tack is possible. In Brazil, the executive branch has unilateral authority to set foreign policy. And for all his missteps, Lula still wields a unique set of strategic and diplomatic assets that can help him claim global leadership. At a time when almost all major powers are coping with war or its specter, Brazil’s geographical and political distance from the primary zones of conflict allow Lula to try to refocus global attention on the scourges of poverty and inequality. The country has sovereignty over the Amazon—the planet’s most extensive rainforest—and is a top-tier food producer, giving it a major say in climate governance. And Brazil, with its turbulent but instructive history of democratic resilience and poverty alleviation, can provide other developing states with insights on how to push back against the threat of populist extremism. Lula’s eight-decade journey from hardship to the presidency remains a source of universal admiration, earning him a superstar reception everywhere he goes. This personal allure is not cosmetic; it is a testament to his pivotal role in lifting millions of people from poverty, which he continues to do. In the first year of his third term, Lula secured legislative backing to pass a sweeping tax reform, skillfully quelled a populist insurrection, and aligned military factions. He introduced policies that have effectively slowed Amazon deforestation. Following in Biden’s footsteps, he unveiled an ambitious industrial policy alongside plans for a green transition. And despite uncertainty about Brazil’s future economic trajectory, GDP growth in Lula’s first year impressively neared three percent—more than triple earlier market projections. These triumphs have reinforced Lula’s political capital. A recent Atlas Intel poll shows that 58 percent of Brazilians rate his administration positively. Lula still wields a unique set of strategic and diplomatic assets. Yet the best card in Lula’s deck is simple serendipity. The fact that Brazil is hosting both the G-20 summit in 2024 and the COP30 conference in 2025 means that Lula will have two global stages on which to unveil and champion a progressive foreign policy agenda centered on poverty reduction, equitable representation for emerging states, and climate justice—a reshuffling of the deck in favor of the global South. These summits demand the painstaking construction of big-tent coalitions. But this is a task at which Lula should excel, provided he can rework relations with other world leaders. Lula can start by rebuilding ties with the United States. He should do so by focusing on his administration’s mutual interests with Biden, such as the green transition and food security, and by encouraging the White House to follow through on its professed commitment to UN reform. He should make the case that Brazil’s G20 conference will offer a showcase for the Biden administration to promote a progressive global order, one that distinguishes it from the policies Trump would pursue. But Lula should also initiate dialogue with Republican counterparts now in the event the GOP wins in 2024, capitalizing on his innate capacity for engaging ideological adversaries. Although Trump is an unpredictable politician, Lula managed to craft excellent and profitable relations with former Republican President George W. Bush, even as Brazil staunchly and publicly opposed the Iraq war. Lula must rebuild ties with other countries in South America, as well. Here, humility will be key. Lula should acknowledge that Brazil’s recent domestic turmoil has tarnished its brand, not least because the cross-border corruption scandals unearthed during Lula’s tenure eroded trust in the country and implicated numerous South American leaders. A better Latin America policy also entails a new approach to Venezuela. Lula has historically protected Venezuela from external criticism, even as it immiserates its people, by arguing that any liberalization is contingent on the regime’s acquiescence. But the reality remains that without concerted international pressure, liberalization is unlikely. As a result, Lula must stop defending Venezuela’s autocrats. Brazil will have to cooperate with NATO in the South Atlantic. To be a true progressive leader, Lula will need to make strides on climate change. His administration may have slowed deforestation rates, but it must make fundamental changes to Brazil’s increasingly carbon-intensive economy if it wants to stop rising emissions. It will have to realign the country’s voters, agricultural sector, and industrial sector toward sustainability in a way no Brazilian government has done before. To succeed, Lula must introduce legislation to compensate the losers of the ecological transition, such as farmers and ranchers, so they do not fight as Brazil makes the switch. He should reconsider his November 2023 initiative to fully integrate Brazil into OPEC and instead harness the country's oil reserves as a catalyst for its green transformation, channeling revenues into sustainable energy initiatives. He should modernize Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil company, to lead in eco-friendly innovation. Finally, Lula must root out criminal actors in the immensely complex Amazon region, which are responsible for much of Brazil’s deforestation. Lula must also take on organized crime more broadly. Successive Brazilian administrations, including Lula’s, have allowed the country’s gangs to grow in size and scope, resulting in groups that are now powerful enough to seriously challenge the authority of the state. Criminal rings influence politics at all levels of government, co-opting state institutions that oversee roads, ports, airports, border controls, financial systems, and even law enforcement and the armed forces. They also control cross-border illicit trades in narcotics, counterfeit goods, auto parts, and human beings. The toll on ordinary Brazilians has been brutal. With an average of 110 murders per day, Brazil’s homicide rate is one of the highest in the world. The country is home to 17 of the globe’s 50 deadliest cities. With respect to crime, there will be no strictly national solutions. Brazil’s criminal networks span many borders, so reversing the trend will require deep international cooperation of the kind not only that Brasília is unused to but that its foreign policy elites have also traditionally rejected. Yet the country will have to work with poorer and weaker neighbors to clean up their security forces, which have sometimes fallen under the sway of criminal organizations. Lula must also reorient Brazil’s intelligence apparatus—which Bolsonaro tried to train on domestic opponents—toward tracing and rooting out gangs, wherever they operate. And Brazil will have to cooperate with NATO in the South Atlantic. Working with the alliance may be toxic to Brazilian diplomats and military officials, but it’s simply a fact that many of Brazil’s criminal networks are transatlantic. As a result, the country needs to collaborate with Europe. Revamping Brazil’s grand strategy is a formidable task, and the timing is urgent—the G-20 summit is just ten months away. But if Lula plays his cards right, he can still mend strained partnerships and rebuild his reputation as a diplomatic broker. He can help stabilize his region and his country. He can, in other words, deliver on the core promise of a progressive global order: using diplomacy to solve problems, even as fires proliferate in a politically fragmented world. You are reading a free article. Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access. Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives Unlock access to iOS/Android apps to save editions for offline reading Six issues a year in print, online, and audio editions MATIAS SPEKTOR is Professor of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 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Freedman Recommended Articles The leaders of Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile meeting at a summit in Brasília, Brazil, May 2023 Latin America Is Stronger Together The Case for Regional Integration David Adler and Guillaume Long Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brasilia, March 2023 The Restoration of Brazilian Foreign Policy How Lula Can Make Up for Lost Time Hussein Kalout and Feliciano Guimarães 尼爾‧弗格森 (NIALL FERGUSON) 是史丹佛大學胡佛研究所米爾班克家族資深研究員，也是《基辛格：1923-1968》一書的作者；理想主義者。 本文的早期版本錯誤地表述了蘇聯的權力概念。這是“力量的相關性”，而不是“力量的星座”。 基辛格與緩和的真正意義 重塑冷戰戰略以因應與中國的競爭 尼爾·弗格森 2024 年 3 月/4 月 發表於2024 年 2 月 20 日 美國國務卿亨利·基辛格於 1975 年在華盛頓特區舉行的新聞發布會上 美國國務卿亨利·基辛格於 1975 年在華盛頓特區舉行的新聞發布會上 威利麥克納米/蓋蒂 沒有什麼詞比「緩和」與已故的亨利·基辛格聯繫更緊密了。這個術語首次在外交領域使用是在 1900 年代初，當時法國駐德國大使試圖改善法國與柏林日益惡化的關係，但以失敗告終；1912 年，英國外交官也做出了同樣的嘗試。但直到20 世紀60 年代末和70 年代，緩和關係才在國際上聞名，當時基辛格先是擔任美國國家安全顧問，後來又擔任美國國務卿，率先提出了後來成為他標誌性的政策：緩和蘇聯和美國之間的緊張關係。狀態。 緩和不應與友好混淆。這不是為了與莫斯科建立友誼，而是為了降低冷戰升級為熱戰的風險。「美國和蘇聯是意識形態上的對手，」基辛格在回憶錄中解釋。「緩和不能改變這一點。核子時代迫使我們共存。言辭上的鬥爭也無法改變這一點。” 對基辛格來說，緩和是介於導致第一次世界大戰的侵略和他認為導致世界大戰的綏靖政策之間的中間道路，「當時歐洲儘管存在軍事平衡，卻陷入了一場沒人願意的戰爭」。第二次世界大戰，「當民主國家無法理解極權主義侵略者的陰謀」。 為了實現緩和，基辛格試圖在軍備控制和貿易等各種議題上與蘇聯接觸。他努力在蘇聯似乎想要的東西（例如，更好地獲得美國技術）和美國知道它想要的東西（例如，幫助自己擺脫越南）之間建立“聯繫”，這是那個時代的另一個關鍵詞。 。同時，每當基辛格發現蘇聯正在努力擴大其勢力範圍（從中東到南部非洲）時，他就會準備好戰。換句話說，正如基辛格本人所說，緩和意味著擁抱「威懾與共存，遏制與緩和緊張局勢」。 隨時了解狀況。 每週提供深入分析。 如果這種務實情緒在五年後引起共鳴，那是因為華盛頓的政策制定者似乎對中國得出了類似的結論，美國總統拜登和他的國家安全團隊似乎準備與中國嘗試他們自己的緩和政策。「我們必須確保競爭不會演變成衝突，」拜登去年 11 月在加州對中國領導人習近平說道。“當我們認為這樣做符合我們的利益時，我們也對我們的人民和世界負有責任。” 拜登的國家安全顧問傑克·沙利文去年在他的文章中也提出了類似的觀點。「這場競爭確實是全球性的，但不是零和遊戲，」他寫道。“雙方面臨的共同挑戰是前所未有的。” 用基辛格的話來說，美國和中國是主要競爭對手。但核子時代和氣候變化，更不用說人工智慧，迫使它們共存。 如果緩和關係名義上捲土重來，那麼為什麼它會過時呢？基辛格於 2023 年 11 月去世後，他的左翼批評者毫不猶豫地重複了他們以前的指控清單，從轟炸柬埔寨平民到支持智利、巴基斯坦和其他地方的獨裁者。對左派來說，基辛格代表了一種冷血的現實政治，這種政治使第三世界的人權服從於遏制。這是美國總統吉米·卡特所反對的緩和關係的一個面向。但最近保守派對基辛格的批評卻少之又少，他們聲稱基辛格的政策無異於綏靖政策。身為加州州長，雷根 (Ronald Reagan) 在 20 世紀 70 年代一直將緩和關係斥為「蘇聯用來實現其目標的單行道」。他嘲笑基辛格在蘇聯人憤世嫉俗地利用緩和關係時默許，例如當他們及其古巴盟友在後殖民時期的安哥拉佔據上風時。1976 年，雷根在第一次競選總統期間多次承諾，如果當選，將廢除該政策。「在基辛格和福特先生的領導下，」他在當年三月宣稱，「這個國家已經成為世界第二大軍事力量，而在這個世界上，屈居第二是危險的——甚至是致命的。” 雷根並不是一個局外人。當他發表演說時，政府中的鷹派人士已經厭倦了基辛格的做法。共和黨人普遍抱怨說，用新澤西州參議員克利福德·凱斯的話來說，「緩和關係所取得的成果都歸於蘇聯一方」。兩黨的西維吉尼亞州民主黨參議員羅伯特·伯德指責基辛格“非常信任共產主義俄羅斯”，並通過緩和關係“擁抱”莫斯科，這激怒了基辛格。同時，美國軍方表示，尋求緩和就等於承認失敗。1976 年，剛從美國海軍司令職位上退休的埃爾莫·朱姆沃爾特 (Elmo Zumwalt) 辯稱，基辛格認為美國「像許多早期文明一樣已經過了歷史的巔峰」。正如綏靖政策這個原本受人尊敬的術語在 1938 年名聲掃地一樣，緩和也成為了一個骯髒的詞——甚至在基辛格卸任之前就已經如此。 緩和不應與友好相混淆。 然而，20 世紀 70 年代的緩和政策與 1930 年代的綏靖政策不同，無論是其運作方式還是所產生的結果。與英國和法國試圖用領土讓步收買阿道夫·希特勒不同，基辛格和他的總統們努力遏制對手的擴張。與綏靖政策不同的是，緩和政策成功地避免了世界大戰。政治學家哈維·斯塔爾 (Harvey Starr) 在 1980 年代中期撰文指出，在尼克森執政期間，美蘇關係中合作行為與衝突行為的比例顯著增加。基辛格時代（1969 年至 1977 年）基於國家的衝突數量比其後和之前的年份要少。 半個世紀後，隨著華盛頓適應新冷戰的現實，緩和關係可能再次被鷹派破壞。共和黨政客喜歡把他們的對手描繪成對中國軟弱的人，就像他們的前任在 1970 年代把他們的對手描繪成對蘇聯軟弱的人一樣。例如，阿肯色州參議員湯姆·科頓（Tom Cotton）聲稱拜登正在「縱容和安撫中國共產黨」。前總統唐納德·川普的競選團隊指責拜登“軟弱”，“繼續招致對台灣的侵略”。 這些指控並不令人意外。共和黨人總是很想喚起雷根的精神，重新批評他對緩和關係的批評。但雙方都存在誤解 20 世紀 70 年代的教訓的危險。在主張毫不妥協地遏制中國時，共和黨人可能高估了美國在對抗中獲勝的能力。在避免升級的過程中，拜登政府可能低估了威懾作為緩和關係組成部分的重要性。基辛格戰略的本質在於，它結合了接觸和遏制，考慮到20 世紀70 年代美國經濟和美國公眾輿論的狀況，或者蘇聯人喜歡稱之為“力量的相互關係”，這種方式是明智的。今天也需要類似的組合，特別是當力量對比對北京比以往對莫斯科更加有利時。 在邊緣上 如今，更老練的基辛格學術批評者並沒有抱怨蘇聯從緩和關係中得到的好處比美國更多。相反，他們認​​為基辛格一再犯了這樣的錯誤：從冷戰的角度看待每一個問題，並將每一場危機視為對抗莫斯科的決定性因素。正如歷史學家尤西·漢希邁基（Jussi Hanhimaki）在一本長達一本書的猛烈抨擊中所寫的那樣，基辛格認為“遏制蘇聯實力——即使不是共產主義意識形態——應該成為美國外交政策的核心目標。” 這種批評反映了歷史學家近年來為關註生活在冷戰交火國家的人民所付出的努力。但它低估了蘇聯對第三世界美國的威脅程度。無論狡猾的蘇聯大使阿納托利·多勃雷寧可能會對基辛格說些什麼，克里姆林宮並不認為緩和關係只是為其獲得對華盛頓的優勢的戰略的掩護。正如 1971 年向政治局提交的一份報告明確指出的那樣，蘇聯希望美國“以不造成直接對抗危險的方式處理其國際事務”，但這只是因為這樣做可以讓華盛頓“認識到有必要西方以實現蘇聯的利益。” 為了實現這一目標，報告呼籲政治局「繼續利用美國政府的客觀利益與蘇聯保持接觸和談判」。 基辛格並不了解這份文件，但這並不會讓他感到驚訝。他對多勃雷寧的大師們玩的遊戲不抱任何幻想。畢竟，蘇聯人也在1975年公開表示，緩和並不妨礙他們繼續“支持民族解放鬥爭”，反對“社會政治現狀”。正如基辛格在1970 年對專欄作家喬·艾爾索普所說的那樣：「如果蘇聯人認為核對等協議符合他們的利益，那麼他們完全有能力用一隻手達成這樣的協議，同時試圖用另一隻手割掉我們的砂囊。 」。 1974 年 11 月，基辛格和福特在俄羅斯符拉迪沃斯托克附近與蘇聯領導人勃列日涅夫等人就軍備控制進行談判 傑拉爾德·R·福特圖書館/路透社 儘管如此，儘管基辛格知道克里姆林宮別有用心，但他仍然出於一個簡單的原因推進緩和：保守的選擇，即回到1950年代和1960年代的邊緣政策，冒著核末日的風險。1975 年，基辛格在明尼阿波利斯對觀眾說，「除了共存別無選擇」。蘇聯和美國「都有能力摧毀文明生活」。因此，緩和關係是道義上的當務之急。基辛格次年表示，“我們負有歷史性義務，與蘇聯接觸並消除核災的陰影。” 這些擔憂並沒有使基辛格成為核裁軍的倡導者。他以一本名為《核武與外交政策》的書而成為公共知識分子，他對有限核戰的可能性仍然感興趣，同時他對全面核戰的前景感到震驚。1974 年春，基辛格甚至要求參謀長聯席會議針對假設的蘇聯入侵伊朗制定有限的核反應。 但幾週後，當他得知計畫草案時，他感到震驚。五角大廈提議向伊朗邊境附近的蘇聯軍事設施發射約 200 枚核武。“你瘋了嗎？” 基辛格喊道。“這是一個有限的選擇嗎？” 當將軍們回來時提出僅使用一枚原子地雷和兩枚核武炸毀從蘇聯領土通往伊朗的兩條道路的計劃時，他感到難以置信。“這是什麼樣的核攻擊？” 他問。一位使用如此少武器的美國總統會被克里姆林宮視為「膽小鬼」。他很清楚，問題在於，永遠無法確定蘇聯會對美國的任何核打擊做出有限的反應。 基辛格在 1975 年表示，「除了共存，別無選擇」。 基辛格對核武的看法激怒了他的保守派批評者，尤其是五角大廈的批評者。他們對基辛格對待戰略武器限制談判的方式尤其感到憤怒，該談判於 1969 年 11 月開始，為美蘇第一個主要軍備控制協議鋪平了道路。1975 年 9 月，國防情報局發布了一份長達 10 頁的情報評估報告，聲稱蘇聯為了獲得核武主導地位而無恥地欺騙了其 SALT 承諾。在福特政府的最後幾天，這場爭論再次爆發，當時中央情報局和國防情報局的報告表明，在核武方面，莫斯科正在尋求優勢，而不是平等。政府官員聲稱基辛格知道這一點，但選擇忽視。 這些批評並非完全錯誤。到20 世紀60 年代末，蘇聯在洲際彈道飛彈的原始數量上已經與美國持平，到1970 年在百萬噸級方面擁有巨大領先優勢。其中一些洲際彈道飛彈攜帶大型、多個可獨立瞄準的再入飛行器，可以以更高的速度發射一組彈頭。比一個目標。但1977年，美國在潛射彈道飛彈方面保持了5比1的優勢。美國在轟炸機攜帶核武方面的優勢更大：11比1。莫斯科從未接近獲得足夠的彈道飛彈來對美國核資產進行打擊，這使得華盛頓無法用自己的核攻擊做出回應。事實上，冷戰後對蘇聯高級軍官的訪談顯示，到 20 世紀 70 年代初，軍方領導層已經不再相信蘇聯能夠贏得核戰。隨後該國核武庫的成長主要是軍工複合體慣性的結果。 在某種程度上，基辛格分享了蘇聯同行的觀點。自 20 世紀 50 年代以來，他一直認為，全面的核世界大戰對任何人來說都是災難性的，誰都無法獲勝。因此，他對兩個超級大國核武庫的規模和品質細節的興趣遠不如緩和外交可以降低世界末日風險的方式。他還認為，鑑於蘇聯的經濟規模遠小於美國，蘇聯的核均勢最終將被證明是不可持續的。基辛格在 1976 年的一次演講中表示：“構成西方軍事實力基礎的經濟和技術基礎在規模和創新能力方面仍然具有壓倒性優勢。” 他補充說，「我們沒有什麼可怕的競爭：如果有軍事競爭，我們有力量捍衛我們的利益。如果有經濟競爭，我們早就贏了。” 輸掉戰鬥，贏得戰爭 保守派反對基辛格的原因超出了他表面上對蘇聯核均勢的容忍範圍。霍克斯也認為，基辛格已經準備好接受蘇聯體制的不公正特徵，而自由派則抱怨基辛格已經準備好容忍右翼獨裁政權的不公正特徵。這個問題因蘇聯限制猶太人移民以及對待蘇聯政治異議人士（例如作家亞歷山大·索爾仁尼琴）而受到關注。1970 年代，索爾仁尼琴訪問美國（被趕出蘇聯），基辛格建議傑拉爾德·福特總統不要與他會面，這激怒了保守派。 索爾仁尼琴成為基辛格最頑固的對手之一。這位小說家在 1975 年咆哮道：“容忍任何殘暴形式的暴力以及針對數百萬人的大規模暴力的和平，即使在核時代也沒有道德崇高。” 他和其他保守派批評者認為，透過緩和關係，基辛格只是促成了蘇聯共產主義的擴張。1975年西貢的陷落、柬埔寨陷入波爾布特共產主義獨裁的地獄、古巴和蘇聯對安哥拉後殖民衝突的干預——這些以及其他地緣政治挫折似乎證明了他們的主張。1976 年，雷根在共和黨總統初選中反對福特時宣稱：“我和任何人一樣相信福特先生所說的和平。” 「但在安哥拉、柬埔寨和越南等地，他們所感受到的和平是墳墓裡的和平。我所看到的就是世界其他國家所看到的：美國意志的崩潰和美國實力的撤退。” 與蘇聯核子優勢的指控不同，基辛格從未否認蘇聯在第三世界的擴張主義對緩和和美國實力構成威脅。他在 1975 年 11 月的一次演講中表示：「時間已經不多了；繼續實行幹預主義政策必然會威脅到其他關係。」「我們將採取靈活和合作的方式解決衝突。。。。但我們絕不會允許緩和關係成為單方面優勢的藉口。” 然而現實是，在缺乏國會支持的情況下——無論是保衛南越還是保衛安哥拉——福特政府別無選擇，只能接受蘇聯的軍事擴張，或至少接受蘇聯代理人的勝利。「我們的國內爭端，」基辛格在 1975 年 12 月說道，「正在剝奪我們為（蘇聯）溫和派提供激勵的能力，例如限制貿易法案，以及抵制蘇聯軍事行動的能力。蘇聯就像安哥拉一樣。” 當然，基辛格聲稱，如果國會繼續支持美國的援助，南越甚至安哥拉可能會擺脫共產黨的控制，這一說法在多大程度上是正確的，這一點還可以爭論。但毫無疑問，基辛格關心的是阻止蘇聯體系的蔓延。“我們所認為的緩和關係的必要性並不反映對蘇聯國內結構的認可，”他在 1974 年表示。“美國一直以同情和高度讚賞的態度看待所有社會中思想自由的表達。 ” 如果基辛格拒絕接受索爾仁尼琴，那並不是因為基辛格容忍（更不用說暗中同情）蘇聯模式。這是因為他相信華盛頓透過與莫斯科保持工作關係可以取得更大的成就。 1974 年 11 月，福特和基辛格在俄羅斯符拉迪沃斯托克舉行的峰會前進行磋商 傑拉爾德·R·福特圖書館/路透社 在這一點上，他肯定是對的。透過緩解歐洲和世界其他地區的緊張局勢，緩和關係至少幫助改善了共產主義統治下一些人的生活。在基辛格牢牢掌控緩和局勢期間，來自蘇聯的猶太移民數量激增。在華盛頓的民主黨參議員亨利·「湯匙」·傑克森和其他國會鷹派試圖公開向莫斯科施壓，要求其通過阻止美蘇貿易協議釋放更多猶太人後，移民人數下降。基辛格的保守派批評者強烈反對美國在 1975 年夏天簽署《赫爾辛基協議》，認為該協議代表對蘇聯戰後征服歐洲的認可。但透過讓蘇聯領導人承諾尊重其公民的某些基本公民權利作為協議的一部分（他們無意履行這項承諾），該協議最終侵蝕了蘇聯在東歐統治的合法性。 這些事實都無法挽救基辛格的政府生涯。福特一卸任，他的國務卿也隨之卸任，再也沒有重返高位。但基辛格的核心戰略理念在未來幾年繼續取得成果，包括在緩和關係的主要批評者卡特和雷根的影響下。卡特曾批評尼克森、福特和基辛格的現實主義不夠富有同情心，但他自己的國家安全顧問茲比格涅夫·布熱津斯基卻說服他對莫斯科採取強硬態度。1979 年底，卡特被迫警告蘇聯從阿富汗撤軍，否則將面臨「嚴重後果」。就雷根而言，他最終採取了名義上的緩和政策作為自己的政策，而且實際上超越了基辛格緩解緊張局勢的做法。在尋求和解的過程中，雷根同意削減華盛頓的核武庫，其規模遠遠超出了基辛格認為的謹慎。1977年1月基辛格離開政府後，「基辛格時代」並沒有結束。 儘管這個真理已經被遺忘，但基辛格的同時代的觀察力更敏銳的人還是認識到了這一點。例如，保守派評論家威廉·薩菲爾指出，即使基辛格本人被拒之門外，雷根政府還是很快就被「基辛格派」和「緩和派」滲透了。事實上，雷根政府變得如此包容，以至於現在輪到基辛格指責雷根過於軟弱，例如他對波蘭實施戒嚴令的反應。基辛格反對建造一條從蘇聯向西歐輸送天然氣的管道的計劃，理由是這將使西方「比今天更容易受到政治操縱」。（事實證明，這項警告是有先見之明的。）1987 年，尼克森和基辛格在《洛杉磯時報》的專欄版上警告說，雷根準備與蘇聯領導人米哈伊爾·戈爾巴喬夫達成協議，其中雙方各國將銷毀所有中程核武器，這太過分了。對於這些批評，國務卿喬治·舒爾茨給出了一個相當啟發性的回應：“我們現在已經無法緩和關係了。” 緩和2.0 考慮到 1969 年初美國所面臨的麻煩，基辛格所設想的緩和關係是有道理的。由於無法擊敗北越，飽受滯脹之苦，而且在從種族關係到婦女權利等各方面都存在嚴重分歧，華盛頓無法對莫斯科採取強硬態度。事實上，20 世紀 70 年代的美國經濟根本無法維持整體國防開支的成長。（緩和也有財政上的理由，儘管基辛格很少提及。）緩和並不意味著——正如基辛格的批評者所聲稱的——擁抱、信任或安撫蘇聯。這也不意味著允許他們獲得核優勢、對東歐的永久控製或第三世界的帝國。這意味著承認美國實力的局限性，透過胡蘿蔔加大棒結合的方式降低熱核戰爭的風險，為美國的復甦爭取時間。 有效。誠然，基辛格並沒有確保美國從南越撤軍和韓國被朝鮮征服之間有“適當的間隔”，他原本希望這段間隔足夠長，以限制對華盛頓信譽和聲譽的損害。但緩和關係使美國能夠在國內重組並穩定其冷戰戰略。美國經濟很快就以蘇聯無法做到的方式進行創新，創造了經濟和技術資產，使華盛頓取得了冷戰的勝利。緩和也給了蘇聯人上吊的繩索。受到在東南亞和南部非洲的成功的鼓舞，他們對欠發達國家進行了一系列錯誤且代價高昂的干預，最終於 1979 年入侵阿富汗。 鑑於緩和關係在這些方面取得了很少被承認的成功，值得一問的是，美國今天是否可以吸取與其與中國競爭相關的經驗教訓。基辛格當然相信這一點。2019年在北京發表演說時，他宣稱美國和中國已經「處於冷戰的山麓」。2020 年，在COVID-19大流行期間，他將其升級為「山口」。在他去世前一年，他警告說，由於人工智慧等技術的進步，新冷戰將比第一次冷戰更加危險，這些進步不僅可能使武器更快、更準確，而且可能具有自主性。他呼籲兩個超級大國盡可能進行合作，以限制這場新冷戰的生存危險，特別是避免因台灣有爭議的地位而發生潛在的災難性攤牌。 新的緩和並不意味著安撫中國。 與 20 世紀 70 年代一樣，許多專家在當前有關美國對華政策的爭論中批評了這種做法。新一代保守派戰略家中最有思想的埃爾布里奇·科爾比（Elbridge Colby）勸告拜登政府採取“否認戰略”，以阻止中國從軍事上挑戰台灣享有事實上的自治和蓬勃發展的民主的現狀。有時，拜登政府本身似乎也質疑半個世紀以來戰略模糊的對台政策，即美國沒有明確是否會使用軍事力量來保衛台灣。兩黨幾乎達成共識，認為先前與北京接觸的時代是一個錯誤，其基礎是錯誤的假設，即增加與中國的貿易將神奇地實現其政治體系的自由化。 然而，我們這個時代的超級大國，就像它們20世紀50年代和1960年代的前輩一樣，沒有充分的理由在進入冷戰的緩和階段之前忍受20年的邊緣政策。緩和2.0肯定比在台灣上演新版古巴飛彈危機更可取，但角色互換了：共產主義國家封鎖附近有爭議的島嶼，而美國必須實施封鎖，並承擔所有隨之而來的風險。這無疑是基辛格在他漫長生命的最後一年所堅信的。這是他百歲生日不久後最後一次訪問北京的主要動機。 與緩和1.0一樣，新的緩和並不意味著安撫中國，更不代表期望中國會改變。這將意味著再次參與無數談判：軍備控制（由於中國在各個領域瘋狂增強力量而迫切需要）；關於貿易；關於技術轉移、氣候變遷和人工智慧；以及太空方面。與 SALT 一樣，這些談判將是漫長而乏味的，甚至可能沒有結果。但與戰爭相比，英國首相邱吉爾通常更喜歡「面對面的交鋒」。至於台灣，超級大國最好的做法就是重新兌現基辛格敲定的舊諾言，求同存異。 習近平和拜登 2023 年 11 月在加州伍德賽德 凱文拉馬克/路透社 當然，緩和關係不會創造奇蹟。在 20 世紀 70 年代，它既超賣又超買。這項政策無疑為美國提供了時間，但它是一種國際象棋策略，可能需要棋盤上的小棋子做出太多無情的犧牲。一位蘇聯分析家對美國反對其國家幹預安哥拉感到困惑，他評論說：“你們美國人試圖像銷售洗滌劑一樣推銷緩和劑，並聲稱它能做到洗滌劑能做的一切。” 批評者最後成功地毒害了這個詞。1976 年 3 月，福特禁止在連任競選中使用它。但一直沒有可行的替代品。當被問及是否有替代術語時，基辛格給出了典型的諷刺回答。「我一直在尋找一個，」他說。「緩和緊張局勢，緩和緊張局勢。我們很可能會再次使用舊詞。” 如今，拜登政府已經接受了自己的說法：「去風險化」。它不是法語，但幾乎不是英語。儘管由於當今超級大國之間的經濟相互依賴程度大大增強，這場冷戰的起點有所不同，但最佳戰略可能與以前基本相同。如果新的緩和關係要受到批評，那麼批評者不應該像他的許多敵人經常歪曲基辛格的緩和關係那樣歪曲它，以免他們發現自己像以前的里根一樣，在戰情室裡做著本質上相同的事情。 更正日期為 2024 年 2 月 25 日 本文的早期版本錯誤地表述了蘇聯的權力概念。這是“力量的相關性”，而不是“力量的星座”。 本文前面的標題錯誤地表述了列昂尼德·勃列日涅夫的頭銜。他是蘇聯共產黨總書記，不是蘇聯總理。 評論文章 權力檔案 基辛格眼中的世界 傑西卡· T·馬修斯 2023 年 1 月/2 月 發表於2022 年 12 月 20 日 撇開弗拉基米爾·普丁、習近平、納倫德拉·莫迪和本雅明·內塔尼亞胡不談，他們都以不同的方式領導著自己的國家倒退，當代世界並沒有提供高超的、長期擔任政治領導的例子。因此，亨利·基辛格的新書《領導力：世界戰略的六項研究》乍看之下似乎既及時又具有潛在價值。基辛格著手考察偉大領導人的能力，不僅是成功應對他們所面臨的環境，也是深刻改變周遭的歷史的能力。 Kissinger and the True Meaning of Détente Reinventing a Cold War Strategy for the Contest With China By Niall Ferguson March/April 2024 Published on February 20, 2024 U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at a briefing in Washington, D.C., 1975 U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at a briefing in Washington, D.C., 1975 Willy McNamee / Getty Few words are more closely associated with the late Henry Kissinger than “détente.” The term was first used in diplomacy in the early 1900s, when the French ambassador to Germany tried—and failed—to better his country’s deteriorating relationship with Berlin, and in 1912, when British diplomats attempted the same thing. But détente became internationally famous only in the late 1960s and 1970s, when Kissinger, first as U.S. national security adviser and then also as U.S. secretary of state, pioneered what would become his signature policy: the easing of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. Détente should not be confused with amitié. It was not about striking up a friendship with Moscow but about reducing the risks that a cold war would become a hot one. “The United States and the Soviet Union are ideological rivals,” Kissinger explained in his memoirs. “Détente cannot change that. The nuclear age compels us to coexist. Rhetorical crusades cannot change that, either.” For Kissinger, détente was a middle way between the aggression that had led to World War I, “when Europe, despite the existence of a military balance, drifted into a war no one wanted,” and the appeasement that he believed had led to World War II, “when the democracies failed to understand the designs of a totalitarian aggressor.” To pursue détente, Kissinger sought to engage the Soviets on a variety of issues, including arms control and trade. He strove to establish “linkage,” another keyword of the era, between things the Soviets appeared to want (for example, better access to American technology) and things the United States knew it wanted (for example, assistance in extricating itself from Vietnam). At the same time, Kissinger was prepared to be combative whenever he discerned that the Soviets were working to expand their sphere of influence, from the Middle East to southern Africa. In other words, and as Kissinger himself put it, détente meant embracing “both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions.” Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. If that pragmatic sentiment resonates five decades later, it is because policymakers in Washington appear to have reached a similar conclusion about China, the country with which U.S. President Joe Biden and his national security team seem ready to attempt their own version of détente. “We have to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict,” Biden told the Chinese leader Xi Jinping in California in November. “We also have a responsibility to our people and the world to work together when we see it in our interest to do so.” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, made a similar point in his essay in these pages last year. “The contest is truly global, but not zero-sum,” he wrote. “The shared challenges the two sides face are unprecedented.” To paraphrase Kissinger, the United States and China are major rivals. But the nuclear age and climate change, not to mention artificial intelligence, compel them to coexist. If détente is making a comeback in all but name, then why did it go out of fashion? In the wake of Kissinger’s death, in November 2023, his critics on the left have not been slow to repeat their old list of indictments, ranging from the bombing of civilians in Cambodia to supporting dictators in Chile, Pakistan, and elsewhere. For the left, Kissinger personified a cold-blooded realpolitik that subordinated human rights in the Third World to containment. This was the aspect of détente to which U.S. President Jimmy Carter objected. But much less has been heard lately of the conservative critique of Kissinger, which claimed that Kissinger’s policy was tantamount to appeasement. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan spent the 1970s blasting détente as a “one-way street that the Soviet Union has used to pursue its aims.” He taunted Kissinger for acquiescing as the Soviets cynically exploited détente, such as when they and their Cuban allies gained the upper hand in postcolonial Angola. During his first run for president, in 1976, Reagan repeatedly pledged to scrap the policy if elected. “Under Messrs. Kissinger and Ford,” he declared in March of that year, “this nation has become number two in military power in a world where it is dangerous—if not fatal—to be second best.” Reagan was hardly an outlier. By the time he spoke, hawks across the government were fed up with Kissinger’s approach. Republicans commonly complained that, in the words of New Jersey Senator Clifford Case, “the gains made in détente have accrued to the Soviet side.” Across the aisle, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia enraged Kissinger by accusing him of having “put great trust in Communist Russia” and, through détente, “embracing” Moscow. The American military, meanwhile, suggested that to pursue détente was to admit defeat. In 1976, Elmo Zumwalt, who had recently retired as head of the U.S. Navy, argued that Kissinger believed the United States had “passed its historic high point like so many earlier civilizations.” Just as appeasement, which had started out as a respectable term, fell into disrepute in 1938, détente became a dirty word—and it did so even before Kissinger left office. Détente should not be confused with amitié. Yet 1970s détente was unlike 1930s appeasement, both in the way it functioned and in the results it produced. Unlike the British and French attempt to buy off Adolf Hitler with territorial concessions, Kissinger and his presidents strove to contain their adversary’s expansion. And unlike appeasement, détente successfully avoided a world war. Writing in the mid-1980s, the political scientist Harvey Starr counted a marked increase in the ratio of cooperative to conflictual acts in U.S.-Soviet relations during the Nixon administration. The number of state-based conflicts was lower in the Kissinger years (1969 to 1977) than in the years after and right before. Half a century later, as Washington adjusts to the realities of a new cold war, détente could again be derailed by hawks. Republican politicians love to portray their opponents as soft on China, just as their predecessors portrayed their opponents as soft on the Soviets in the 1970s. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, for example, has claimed that Biden is “coddling and appeasing the Chinese communists.” Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has accused Biden of “weakness” that “continues to invite aggression” against Taiwan. These charges are not surprising; it is always tempting for Republicans to summon the spirit of Reagan and rerun his critique of détente. But there is a danger that both parties are misunderstanding the lessons of the 1970s. In advocating an uncompromising containment of China, Republicans may be overestimating the United States’ ability to prevail in the event of a confrontation. In shying away from escalation, the Biden administration may be underestimating the importance of deterrence as a component of détente. The essence of Kissinger’s strategy was that it combined engagement and containment in a way that was well advised given the state of the American economy and American public opinion in the 1970s, or what the Soviets liked to call the “correlation of forces.” A similar combination is needed today, especially when the correlation of forces is a good deal more favorable for Beijing than it ever was for Moscow. ON THE BRINK These days, the more sophisticated of Kissinger’s academic critics don’t complain that the Soviets got more out of détente than the United States did. Instead, they argue that Kissinger repeatedly made the mistake of seeing every issue through the lens of the Cold War and treating every crisis as if it were decisive to the struggle against Moscow. As the historian Jussi Hanhimaki has written in a book-length broadside, Kissinger took it “as a given that containing Soviet power—if not communist ideology—should be the central goal of American foreign policy.” This critique reflects the efforts historians have made in recent years to focus on the sufferings of people who lived in the countries caught in the Cold War crossfire. But it underestimates just how threatening the Soviet Union was to the United States in the Third World. Whatever the crafty Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin might have said to Kissinger, the Kremlin did not regard détente as anything other than cover for its strategy to gain the advantage over Washington. As a 1971 report to the Politburo made clear, the Soviet Union wanted the United States to “conduct its international affairs in a way that did not create a danger of direct confrontation,” but only because doing so could make Washington “recognize the need for the West to realize the interests of the USSR.” To achieve this objective, the report called on the Politburo “to continue to use the U.S. government’s objective interest in maintaining contacts and holding negotiations with the USSR.” Kissinger was not privy to this document, but it would not have surprised him. He had no illusions about the game being played by Dobrynin’s masters. After all, the Soviets also stated publicly in 1975 that détente did not preclude their continued “support of the national liberation struggle” against “the social-political status quo.” As Kissinger told the columnist Joe Alsop in 1970, “If the Soviets think an agreement on nuclear parity will serve their interests, they are perfectly capable of reaching for such an agreement with one hand, while trying to cut our gizzards out with the other hand.” Kissinger and Ford negotiating arms control with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and others near Vladivostok, Russia, November 1974 Gerald R. Ford Library / Reuters Nevertheless, although Kissinger knew that the Kremlin had ulterior motives, he still advanced détente for one simple reason: the conservative alternative, a return to the brinkmanship of the 1950s and 1960s, risked nuclear Armageddon. There was “no alternative to coexistence,” Kissinger told an audience in Minneapolis in 1975. Both the Soviet Union and the United States “have the capacity to destroy civilized life.” Détente was, therefore, a moral imperative. “We have an historic obligation,” Kissinger argued the following year, “to engage the Soviet Union and to push back the shadow of nuclear catastrophe.” These concerns did not make Kissinger an advocate of nuclear disarmament. Having risen to prominence as a public intellectual with a book titled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, he remained as interested in the possibility of a limited nuclear war as he was horrified by the prospect of an all-out one. In the spring of 1974, Kissinger even requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff formulate a limited nuclear response to a hypothetical Soviet invasion of Iran. But when he was briefed on the draft plan a few weeks later, he was appalled. The Pentagon proposed firing some 200 nuclear weapons at Soviet military installations near the Iranian border. “Are you out of your minds?” Kissinger shouted. “This is a limited option?” When the generals returned with a plan to use only an atomic mine and two nuclear weapons to blow up the two roads from Soviet territory into Iran, he was incredulous. “What kind of nuclear attack is this?” he asked. A U.S. president who used so few weapons would be regarded in the Kremlin as “chicken.” The problem, as he well knew, was that there could never be certainty that the Soviets would respond in a limited way to any kind of American nuclear strike. There was “no alternative to coexistence,” Kissinger said in 1975. Kissinger’s views on nuclear arms rankled his conservative critics, particularly those in the Pentagon. They were especially infuriated by how Kissinger approached the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which began in November 1969 and paved the way for the first major U.S.-Soviet arms control agreement. In September 1975, the Defense Intelligence Agency circulated a ten-page intelligence estimate asserting that the Soviet Union was cynically cheating on its SALT commitments to gain nuclear dominance. The debate flared again in the last days of the Ford administration, when reports by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency suggested that Moscow was seeking superiority, not parity, when it came to nuclear weapons. Government officials claimed that Kissinger knew this but had chosen to ignore it. These criticisms were not entirely wrong. The Soviets had already achieved parity in the raw numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles by the late 1960s and had a huge lead in megatonnage by 1970. Some of these ICBMs carried large, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, which could fire a cluster of warheads at more than one target. But the United States retained a five-to-one advantage in submarine-launched ballistic missiles in 1977. The U.S. advantage in bomber-carried nuclear weapons was even greater: 11 to one. And Moscow never came anywhere close to acquiring enough ballistic missiles to carry out a strike against U.S. nuclear assets that would have made it impossible for Washington to respond with its own nuclear attack. In fact, interviews with senior Soviet officers after the Cold War revealed that by the early 1970s, the military leadership had dismissed the notion that the Soviet Union could win a nuclear war. The subsequent growth of the country’s nuclear arsenal was mainly the result of inertia on the part of the military-industrial complex. To a degree, Kissinger shared his Soviet counterparts’ perspective. His view since the 1950s had been that an all-out nuclear world war was too catastrophic for anyone to win. The details of the size and quality of the two superpowers’ nuclear arsenals therefore interested him much less than the ways in which the diplomacy of détente could reduce the risk of Armageddon. He also believed that Soviet nuclear parity would ultimately prove unsustainable, given that the Soviet Union’s economy was much smaller than that of the United States. “The economic and technological base which underlies Western military strength remains overwhelmingly superior in size and capacity for innovation,” Kissinger said in a 1976 speech. He added, “We have nothing to fear from competition: If there is a military competition, we have the strength to defend our interests. If there is an economic competition, we won it long ago.” LOSE THE BATTLE, WIN THE WAR Conservatives objected to Kissinger for reasons beyond his seeming tolerance of Soviet nuclear parity. Hawks also argued that Kissinger was too ready to accept the unjust character of the Soviet system—the obverse of liberals’ complaint that he was too ready to tolerate the unjust character of right-wing dictatorships. This issue came to the fore over Soviet restrictions on Jewish emigration and the treatment of Soviet political dissidents, such as the author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. When Solzhenitsyn visited the United States in the 1970s (having been kicked out of the Soviet Union), Kissinger infuriated conservatives by advising President Gerald Ford not to meet with him. Solzhenitsyn became one of Kissinger’s most implacable opponents. “A peace that tolerates any ferocious forms of violence and any massive doses of it against millions of people,” the novelist thundered in 1975, “has no moral loftiness even in the nuclear age.” He and other conservative critics argued that through détente, Kissinger had merely enabled the expansion of Soviet communism. The fall of Saigon in 1975, the descent of Cambodia into the hell of Pol Pot’s communist dictatorship, the Cuban-Soviet intervention in Angola’s postcolonial conflict—these and other geopolitical setbacks seemed to vindicate their claim. “I believe in the peace of which Mr. Ford speaks, as much as any man,” Reagan declared in 1976, as he campaigned against Ford in the Republican presidential primary. “But in places such as Angola, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the peace they have come to know is the peace of the grave. All I can see is what other nations the world over see: collapse of the American will and the retreat of American power.” Unlike the allegation of Soviet nuclear superiority, Kissinger never denied that Soviet expansionism in the Third World posed a threat to détente and U.S. power. “Time is running out; continuation of an interventionist policy must inevitably threaten other relationships,” he said in a speech in November 1975. “We will be flexible and cooperative in settling conflicts. . . . But we will never permit détente to turn into a subterfuge of unilateral advantage.” Yet the reality was that in the absence of congressional support—whether for the defense of South Vietnam or the defense of Angola—the Ford administration had little choice but to accept Soviet military expansion, or at least the victories of Soviet proxies. “Our domestic disputes,” Kissinger said in December 1975, “are depriving us of both the ability to provide incentives for [Soviet] moderation such as in the restrictions on the trade act, as well as of the ability to resist military moves by the Soviet Union as in Angola.” It can, of course, be debated to what extent Kissinger was right to claim that with continued congressional support for U.S. aid, South Vietnam and even Angola might have been saved from communist control. But there is no doubt Kissinger cared about stopping the spread of Soviet systems. “The necessity for détente as we conceive it does not reflect approbation of the Soviet domestic structure,” he said in 1974. “The United States has always looked with sympathy, with great appreciation, at the expression of freedom of thought in all societies.” If Kissinger declined to embrace Solzhenitsyn, it was not because Kissinger was tolerant of (much less secretly sympathetic to) the Soviet model. It was because he believed that Washington could accomplish more by maintaining working relations with Moscow. Ford and Kissinger conferring before a summit in Vladivostok, Russia, November 1974 Gerald R. Ford Library / Reuters And in this, he was surely right. By easing tensions both in Europe and across the rest of the world, détente helped improve the lives of at least some people under communist rule. Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union rose in the period when Kissinger was firmly in charge of détente. After Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and other congressional hawks sought to publicly pressure Moscow into releasing more Jews by holding up a U.S.-Soviet trade deal, emigration went down. Kissinger’s conservative critics were vehemently opposed to the United States’ signing the Helsinki Accords in the summer of 1975, arguing that they represented a ratification of Soviet postwar conquests in Europe. But by getting the Soviet Union’s leaders to commit to respect certain basic civil rights of their citizens as part of the accords—a commitment they had no intention of honoring—the deal ultimately eroded the legitimacy of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. None of these facts could save Kissinger’s governmental career. As soon as Ford was out, so was his secretary of state, never to return to high office. But Kissinger’s core strategic concept continued to bear fruit for years to come, including under the principal critics of détente: Carter and Reagan. Carter had criticized Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger for being insufficiently compassionate in their realism, but his own national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, persuaded him to get tough with Moscow. By the end of 1979, Carter was compelled to warn the Soviets to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan or face “serious consequences.” Reagan, for his part, ended up adopting détente as his own policy in all but name—and indeed went beyond what Kissinger did to ease tensions. In his pursuit of rapprochement, Reagan agreed to reduce Washington’s nuclear arsenal by a far larger amount than even Kissinger thought prudent. The “Kissinger era” did not end when he left the government in January 1977. Although since forgotten, this truth was recognized by Kissinger’s more observant contemporaries. The conservative commentator William Safire, for example, noted how quickly the Reagan administration was penetrated by “Kissingerians” and “détenteniks,” even if Kissinger himself was kept at bay. In fact, the Reagan administration became so accommodating that it was now Kissinger’s turn to accuse Reagan of being overly soft, such as in his response to the imposition of martial law in Poland. Kissinger opposed plans for a pipeline to transport natural gas from the Soviet Union to Western Europe on the grounds that it would make the West “much more subject to political manipulation than it is even today.” (This warning, it turned out, was prescient.) And in 1987, Nixon and Kissinger took to the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times to warn that Reagan’s readiness to make a deal with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in which both states would get rid of all their intermediate-range nuclear weapons, was going too far. To such criticisms, Secretary of State George Shultz gave a revealing response: “We’re beyond détente now.” DÉTENTE 2.0 Considering the troubles the United States was facing by the start of 1969, détente as Kissinger conceived of it made sense. Unable to defeat North Vietnam, afflicted by stagflation, and deeply divided over everything from race relations to women’s rights, Washington could not play hardball with Moscow. Indeed, the U.S. economy in the 1970s was in no condition to sustain increased defense spending overall. (Détente had a fiscal rationale, too, although Kissinger seldom mentioned it.) Détente did not mean—as Kissinger’s critics alleged—embracing, trusting, or appeasing the Soviets. Nor did it mean allowing them to attain nuclear superiority, permanent control over Eastern Europe, or an empire in the Third World. What it meant was recognizing the limits of U.S. power, reducing the risk of thermonuclear war by employing a combination of carrots and sticks, and buying time for the United States to recover. It worked. True, Kissinger did not secure the “decent interval” between the U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam and the South’s conquest by the North, an interlude he had hoped would be long enough to limit the damage to Washington’s credibility and reputation. But détente allowed the United States to regroup domestically and to stabilize its Cold War strategy. The U.S. economy soon innovated in ways that the Soviet Union never could, creating economic and technological assets that enabled Washington’s Cold War victory. Détente also gave the Soviets the rope with which to hang themselves. Emboldened by their successes in Southeast Asia and southern Africa, they mounted a series of mistaken and costly interventions in the less developed world, culminating in their invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Given détente’s rarely acknowledged success in these terms, it is worth asking if there are lessons the United States can learn today that are relevant to its competition with China. Kissinger certainly believed so. While speaking in Beijing in 2019, he declared that the United States and China were already “in the foothills of a cold war.” In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, he upgraded that to “the mountain passes.” And a year before his death, he warned that the new cold war would be more dangerous than the first one because of advances in technology, such as artificial intelligence, that threaten to make weapons not only faster and more accurate but also potentially autonomous. He called on both superpowers to cooperate whenever possible to limit the existential dangers of this new cold war—and, in particular, to avoid a potentially cataclysmic showdown over the contested status of Taiwan. A new détente would not mean appeasing China. As during the 1970s, plenty of experts criticize this approach in the current debate over U.S. policy toward China. Elbridge Colby, the most thoughtful of the new generation of conservative strategists, has exhorted the Biden administration to adopt a “strategy of denial” to deter China from militarily challenging a status quo in which Taiwan enjoys de facto autonomy and a thriving democracy. At times, the Biden administration has itself seemed to call into question the half-century Taiwan policy of strategic ambiguity, in which the United States leaves unclear whether it will use military force to defend the island. And there is almost a bipartisan consensus that the previous era of engagement with Beijing was a mistake, predicated on the erroneous assumption that increased trade with China would magically liberalize its political system. Yet there is no good reason why the superpowers of our time, like their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s, should endure 20 years of brinkmanship before having the détente phase of their cold war. Détente 2.0 would surely be preferable to running a new version of the Cuban missile crisis over Taiwan, but with the roles reversed: the communist state blockading the nearby contested island and the United States having to run the blockade, with all the attendant risks. That is certainly what Kissinger believed in the last year of his long life. It was the main motivation for his final visit to Beijing shortly after his 100th birthday. Like détente 1.0, a new détente would not mean appeasing China, much less expecting the country to change. It would mean, once again, engaging in myriad negotiations: on arms control (urgently needed as China frantically builds up its forces in every domain); on trade; on technology transfers, climate change, and artificial intelligence; and on space. Like SALT, these negotiations would be protracted and tedious—and perhaps even inconclusive. But they would be the “meeting jaw to jaw” that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill generally preferred to war. As for Taiwan, the superpowers could do worse than to dust off their old promise, hammered out by Kissinger, to agree to disagree. Xi and Biden in Woodside, California, November 2023 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters Détente, of course, does not work miracles. In the 1970s, it was both oversold and overbought. The policy unquestionably provided the United States with time, but it was a chess strategy that perhaps required too many callous sacrifices of lesser pieces on the board. As one Soviet analyst, puzzled by U.S. opposition to his country’s intervention in Angola, remarked, “You Americans tried to sell détente like detergent and claimed that it would do everything a detergent could do.” Critics ultimately succeeded in poisoning the term. In March 1976, Ford banned its use in his reelection campaign. But there was never a workable replacement. Asked then if he had an alternative term, Kissinger gave a characteristically wry response. “I’ve been dancing around myself to find one,” he said. “Easing of tensions, relaxation of tensions. We may well wind up with the old word again.” Today, the Biden administration has settled for its own word: “de-risking.” It is not French, but it is also barely English. Although the starting point of this cold war is different because of the much greater economic interdependence between today’s superpowers, the optimal strategy may turn out to be essentially the same as before. If the new détente is to be criticized, then the critics should not misrepresent it the way Kissinger’s détente was so often misrepresented by his many foes—lest they find themselves, like Reagan before, doing essentially the same when they are in the Situation Room. CORRECTION APPENDED FEBRUARY 25, 2024 An earlier version of this article misstated a Soviet concept of power. It was the “correlation of forces,” not the “constellation of forces.” An earlier caption in this article misstated Leonid Brezhnev’s title. He was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not the Soviet premier. NIALL FERGUSON is Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author of Kissinger: 1923–1968; The Idealist. Profiles in Power The World According to Kissinger Jessica T. Mathews Kissinger’s Contradictions How Strategic Insight and Moral Myopia Shaped America’s Greatest Statesman Timothy Naftali