Speak less softly but don't forget the big stick, Opinion News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

Speak less softly but don't forget the big stick, Opinion News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

Speak less softly but don't forget the big stick

Niall Ferguson

PUBLISHED DEC 29, 2017, 5:00 AM SGT

As 2017 draws to a close, the world has seldom been so
binary. You either love Donald Trump or you loathe him. You either adore Brexit
or abhor it. This polarisation has been fostered by the giant online social
networks of our time and the phenomenon that students of networks know as
"homophily". In plain English: Birds of a feather flock together.

Facebook encourages you to like or not like what you see in
your news feed. Twitter allows you to retweet or like other people's tweets or
block those users who offend your sensibilities. Pretty soon you are in a
filter bubble inhabited exclusively by people who share your view of the world.

The result is a paradise not just for fake news but also for
extreme views.

In the wake of the exposure of Harvey Weinstein as a sexual
predator, shrill voices insist all men are potential rapists. Since the death
of a (white) protester in Charlottesville, Virginia, other zealots insist all
white people are racists. White men must therefore be racist rapists. Dare to
dissent from this new doctrine and you will only confirm the hypothesis -
because you would say that, wouldn't you, if you were a racist rapist.

In this binary world, there is not much room for
ambivalence.

I have had a tough time this year explaining even to friends
why I can like some aspects of the Trump administration while at the same time
disliking others. And I wish I'd had a bitcoin for every time someone has
complained that my position on Brexit has flip-flopped. No: I'm just
ambivalent.

I had a great deal of sympathy last year with those voters
who expressed their dissatisfaction with the status quo by voting for Brexit or
Mr Trump. But I was also keenly aware there would be significant difficulties
with both these populist ventures, as has indeed proven to be the case.

This was not flip-flopping. This was what used to be known,
in a bygone era, as nuance.

ST ILLUSTRATION : MIEL

A good occasion for more ambivalence is the Trump
administration's new National Security Strategy (NSS). As usual, there were
plenty of commentators ready to denounce it and to predict the imminent end of
days, similar to the calamities supposed to follow the ending of Net neutrality
- the policy requiring Internet service providers to treat all data equally -
and the passage of the Republican tax cuts.

In reality, this new NSS is a great improvement on the last
administration's essays in "strategic patience".

Gone are the highfalutin but vacuous proclamations of virtue
that were Mr Barack Obama's presidential signature tune. Instead we have a
muscular and unambiguous identification of the principal threats to America and
a clear commitment to meet those threats by force if necessary.

The idea that this document will destroy the "liberal
international order" supposedly established in 1945 and unleash the Third
World War is absurd. On the contrary, it was high time to call out China, which
has become increasingly brazen in its assertion of power, not only in the South
China Sea but further afield too.

This was Mr Obama's 2015 NSS: "The scope of our
cooperation with China is unprecedented... The United States welcomes the rise
of a stable, peaceful and prosperous China. We seek to develop a constructive
relationship with China that delivers benefits for our two peoples and promotes
security and prosperity in Asia and around the world. We seek cooperation on
shared regional and global challenges... While there will be competition, we
reject the inevitability of confrontation."

Compare and contrast with the 2017 edition: "China
seeks to displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its
state-driven economic model and reorder the region in its favour... China
gathers and exploits data on an unrivalled scale and spreads features of its
authoritarian system, including corruption and the use of surveillance.

"It is building the most capable and well-funded
military in the world, after our own. Its nuclear arsenal is growing and
diversifying... China is using economic inducements and penalties, influence
operations and implied military threats to persuade other states to heed its
political and security agenda."

I know which I prefer. I also agree wholeheartedly that it
was naive to assume - as the past three administrations tended to - that
including Russia and China "in international institutions and global
commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners".

In reality, (the Trump administration's new National
Security Strategy) is a great improvement on the last administration's essays
in "strategic patience". Gone are the highfalutin but vacuous
proclamations of virtue that were Mr Barack Obama's presidential signature
tune. Instead we have a muscular and unambiguous identification of the
principal threats to America and a clear commitment to meet those threats by
force if necessary.

A new report on China's "sharp power" by the
National Endowment for Democracy shows just how wrong this was.

Those who worry about the alleged collusion between the
Trump campaign and the Kremlin last year ought to welcome the NSS' tough talk
about Russia. Those who feared Trump would terminate Nato should be reassured.

My concern about the NSS is simply that it is a
fundamentally old-fashioned document. Its main preoccupations are with threats
posed by established nation states - China, Russia, North Korea, Iran - to
America and its allies. The document says much less about the new threats that all
nation states now face.

Earlier this year, I participated in an eye-opening
conference at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California,
convened by the former secretary of state George Shultz.

At the age of 97, Dr Shultz remains astonishingly
forward-looking. As he argues, cyber-warfare has the potential to disrupt vital
infrastructure without warning. A new strain of influenza could devastate the
world's population with astonishing speed. Nanotechnology could fundamentally
alter the calculus of conflict by threatening conventional forces with
overwhelming swarms of hostile devices.

Climate change is conventionally cited as the principal
common danger facing all the world's states. But it is only one of a number of
such dangers and by no means the most proximate. The new NSS alludes to some of
these threats, but it does not make clear how America is going to combat them.
Coming in the wake of a tax Bill that significantly reduces the federal
government's tax base for the foreseeable future, the NSS can make only vague
commitments to increase expenditure on national security.

The new NSS is therefore just another aspect of the Trump
administration about which it is right to feel ambivalent. It's an improvement
on the bromides of the Obama era. But it falls a long way short of explaining
how America can be made great again.

As the authors of NSS 2017 note, however: "China,
Russia and other state and non-state actors recognise that the US often views
the world in binary terms, with states being either 'at peace' or 'at war',
when it is actually an arena of continuous competition."

This insight applies equally well in the realm of domestic
politics, where binary thinking is the enemy of rigorous thought.

And if you like only parts of what I've just told you,
that's just fine with me.