A summary of Reimagining Great Power Relations

This week on the News and Information Study Group, our participatory YouTube Live Show, we are reading Reimagining Great Power Relations Part I by Ambassador Charles W. Freeman, Jr. I would like to summarize it here.

Key Points

• America is still “the only all-around world power.”
• The American-led, world order is collapsing.
• Europe could challenge America for the leadership position, but lacks the will.
• China and Japan have worldwide economic influence but cannot project the necessary military power and are not as politically appealing.
• Russia has profound nuclear power, but lacks the reach politically, economically and culturally.
• The Trump administration’s rejection of multilateralism is expediting the world’s move into regionalism.
• The United States is isolating itself internationally through its antipathy to science on climate change and similar issues, as well as its disdain for the United Nations.
• Despite global power projection capabilities, Americans generally identify “power” as exclusively military in nature.
• Freeman says: “global military primacy no longer translates into political leadership at either the global or regional levels.”
• Recent military interventions have failed without “clearly attainable political objectives.”
• The “slaughter of foreigners and destruction of their artifacts” have created more “blowback than security.”
• Major powers are centering their focus on their region.
• “America first” has made it clear to the rest of the world that America is indifferent to the interests and concerns of the rest of the world.
• American abandonment of agreements is leading other nations to abandon theirs.
• In the post-Cold War era large states are not allowed to annex smaller, weaker neighbors.
• Small and medium-sized nations must accommodate larger powers, make alliances or possess capacity to inflict severe injury on any potential attacker.
• The United Nations is being ignored.
• Nations are using nuclear deterrence to avoid being attacked by the United States
• Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism and anti-semitism are on the rise.
• “We are witnessing the consolidation of national security-obsessed garrison states.”
• Sub-global powers are “demanding deference to their power” regionally.
• The “Trump administration has inadvertently confirmed foreign doubts about American reliability.”
• “Almost all countries still under U.S. protection continue to affirm their alliance with the United States even as they ramp up a capacity to go it alone.”
• Nations around the world are looking for alliances other than the United States.
• Many new regional trade groups are forming.
• “Regionalism limits the reach of great powers. Bilateralism limits it even more.”
• Mexico has made its economy dependent upon ours, but is now being asked to do many things against their interests “risking their prosperity and stability.”
• Russia, China and India are working to create a multipolar world order.
• Right now the global economy could be wrecked by trade wars and armed conflict could break out on Asian borders.
• “The politically expedient demonization of strategic rivals in democracies like the United States inhibits cooperation even where specific interests nearly completely coincide.”
• Cooperation where mutual interests lie is failing do to “politically expedient demonization of strategic rivals.”
• American nuclear deployment is escalating an arms race.
• “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its ‘Doomsday Clock’ the closest to midnight since 1954.”
• “The risks the world now faces were not (and are not) inevitable.”
• “In the current atmosphere, slogans displace considered judgments, intelligence about the outside world is unwelcome, expertise is dismissed as irrelevant or worse, and policy pronouncements appease the delusions of political constituencies instead of addressing verifiable realities.”