El autor plantea la necesidad que, tanto los EEUU como China, operen coordinadamente en la escena mundial.
Demand as Power in a Resilient Global Order
Thomas P.M. Barnett | 22 Mar 2011
One of the most revealing features of today's international system is that only two nations, America and China, possess sufficient power to truly disrupt it -- either directly, through the application of military force, or indirectly, by unleashing an uncontainable economic crisis. In fact, to truly derail globalization in its current trajectory, the two would need to act in concert, either by fighting each other directly or experiencing simultaneous economic collapses. Short of those two scenarios, modern globalization remains highly resilient to shocks of all sorts. That resilience is the only power that really matters in this world. It defines our global present, and it enables a global future worth attaining.
Globalization still suffers all manner of system-perturbing events, such as the impact of Libya's civil war on oil prices and that of Japan's recent mega-disaster on the future of nuclear power. But these are primarily problems of supply, not demand. And in today's globalization, true power is expressed by demand -- for energy, materials, goods and services -- and not by provision. Some may still imagine that the world dances according to whoever has "cornered" the supply of some precious resource, with "rare earths" being the latest buzzword. But in reality, absent access to consumers, the value of even a supply monopoly remains completely unrealizable. In a world experiencing explosive growth of its middle class, controlling access to consumption is far more crucial than controlling access to supply.
Indeed, the true power grab exemplified by China's "rise" is its growing demand for everything. America has been the global economy's demand center on so many goods for so long that most Americans cannot remember when that wasn't the case. When you're the global demand center, the entire world revolves around your desires, tastes and manias. It is an intoxicating, hubris-inducing condition, one that America had especially bad during the just-now-ebbing consumer reign of the Boomers, who served as a sort of global demand center squared -- the generational demand center within the global economy's demand center nation. Little wonder they fell deeply in love with themselves and imagined the world as their oyster.
As China assumes the mantle of global demand center, America will suffer a genuine loss in global influence, but it is the same slow loss of economic heft that we've been suffering going back to the early 1950s, when, thanks to the mass destruction of World War II, we enjoyed an absurdly skewed position of relative dominance of demand and supply. Neither was meant to last under our managed world system, which specifically encouraged the peaceful rise of numerous great powers, first in the West and now in the East and South.
But our relative decline hardly represents a "loss of empire," any more than parents -- having seen all their children grow up, move out and start their own families -- suffer a "loss of family." This is not a zero-sum contest and never was. As the globalization "family" multiplies, so, too, does its collective pool of wealth and experience.
It is interesting to note how, despite our steady loss of demand power in the global economy these past several decades, our role as security supplier of last resort has arguably ballooned. This, too, was part of our system: We offered our Leviathan services so as to encourage would-be great powers to rise on the basis of their economic power alone. We have been amazingly successful in this grand strategy, so much so that we now instinctively feel the need to retreat somewhat from that role, lest it put us at an undue disadvantage in this "flat" economic competitive landscape.
The selection of Barack Obama as president reflected that instinct, for now we are "building at home" while "shaping abroad" -- the subtle mantra of Obama's National Security Strategy. Until such time as we are truly disengaged from Afghanistan, our military will fundamentally remain in crisis-response "restricted access" mode, our now-severely constrained "small wars" bandwidth still largely consumed by that one engrossing intervention. Our narrow military engagement -- with no boots on the ground -- in Libya demonstrates this reality.
But it is on America's "big war" wavelength where the question of relative hard power impinges on a global order otherwise defined by soft power, in the form of all that economic demand power. Again, the one great-power conflict that could truly derail globalization is the Sino-American version, for it would disable the world's two great economies. And as the recent global financial crisis demonstrated, economic collapse in either state, let alone both at the same time, would automatically stress globalization's stability to its very limits. Knowing this, the single most important policy both nations could muster at this moment in history would be to dramatically expand their military-to-military ties.
Instead, as things now stand, Sino-American military-to-military ties are dead in the water -- specifically, in China's coastal waters -- over such contentious issues as:
- America's genuinely provocative arms sales to Taiwan;
- China's somewhat fantastic and clearly unreasonable sovereignty claims in the South China Sea;
- U.S.-South Korean close-in joint naval exercises in response to North Korean provocations;
- and America's consistent -- and somewhat aggressive -- military electronic eavesdropping and surveillance along China's coastline.
China's consistent -- and somewhat aggressive -- campaign of hacking and intellectual property theft in the U.S. national security arena rounds out the agenda.
As an aggregate list of grievances, it's fairly shallow -- the kind of small stuff that true great powers negotiate away. So why isn't this happening? After all, these issues form the crux of a budding military rivalry at the very epicenter of the global economy. Why suffer this cancerous growth amid globalization's continued expansion? Globalization itself is, after all, the result of America's successful grand strategy of most of the last century, from the "open door" onward, and a process that has fundamentally enabled China's historic rise.
In fact, if we examine the process here, we are witnessing a none-too-subtle arms race between the two behemoths: America's new AirSea Battle Concept dueling China's much-hyped Assassin's Mace strategy. Most disturbing is the fact that both strategies emphasize the pre-emptive strategic "blinding" of the other at the first sign of trouble.
That development should strike observers as truly odd, given both sides' profound desire to see globalization remain whole, and yet there it is: a queer sort of unintentional reconfiguration of America's hair-trigger, "mutually assured destruction" standoff with the Soviets during the Cold War. The absence of a single threat to the "American way of life" on the list of issues above suggests that there is something truly wrong with our conceptualization and application of American power in this age.
It's not just that we suffer the possibility, by way of historical analogy, that a potential Archduke Ferdinand is now roaming the East Asia littoral, waiting to take a bullet. By insisting on a strategy of keeping China "pinned down," we likewise prevent China's natural assumption of some portion of the global policing role that America can no longer afford to do on its own. Thus we put globalization at double risk by threatening both to self-destructively sabotage its core economic relationship and to prevent its effective and comprehensive policing -- all because of these dueling Sino-American perceptions of a zero-sum power shift.
In sum, America feels the need to contain and hedge against a "rising" China, and China feels the need to encourage America's "imperial exhaustion" by denying cooperation globally, while pressing its growing strategic advantage in East Asia to, in effect, keep America a bit tied down strategically itself. The sum effect of all these "realist" choices is a growing hair-trigger strategic standoff, with cyber warriors, anti-satellite weapons, attack submarines, long-range missile strikes and aircraft carriers at the ready.
Eventually, the right crisis will come along to reveal the very poor state of Sino-American military-to-military relations, and when it does, both sides will be scared to discover just how unprepared each is for the near-death experience that ensues. Recognizing that, Obama would do well to shift his game-changing ambition from his rather fantastical pitch for a "world without nuclear weapons" to addressing the growing superpower military standoff that desperately needs his attention. And to muster that effort, he'll need to address America's gnawing fears of relative strategic decline in this world of our making.
Accomplishing that shift would be the single most important thing Obama could do to truly warrant his Nobel Peace Prize.
Thomas P.M. Barnett is chief analyst at Wikistrat and a contributing editor for Esquire magazine. His latest book is "Great Powers: America and the World After Bush" (2009). His weekly WPR column, The New Rules, appears every Monday. Reach him and his blog at thomaspmbarnett.com.
Fuente: http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/print/8264
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