Global Affairs Expert Webinar: Axis of Autocracies
Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, and Philip Zelikow, Botha-Chan senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, colead the conversation on the axis of autocracies.
Speakers
Jennifer Kavanagh
Senior Fellow and Director of Military Analysis
Defense Priorities
Philip Zelikow
Botha-Chan Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations
Transcript
FASKIANOS: Thank you. And welcome today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2025 Global Affairs Expert Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.
Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org if you would like to share the materials with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
We are delighted to have Jennifer Kavanagh and Philip Zelikow with us to discuss the axis of autocracies.
Dr. Kavanagh is senior fellow and director of military analysis at Defense Priorities. Previously, she was a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and worked as a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Dr. Kavanagh has spent her career studying U.S. national security and defense policy. And her research focuses on U.S. military strategy, defense industrial base, and military interventions and alliances in Asia and the Middle East.
Dr. Zelikow is the Botha-Chan senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Previously, he held a chaired professorship in history at the University of Virginia for twenty-five years. He taught at Harvard. Dr. Zelikow focuses on critical episodes in world history and the challenges of policy design and statecraft. His most recent book is The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Turning Point of the Great War, 1916-17, which was published in 2021. And Dr. Zelikow has served in six administrations, is one of a few Americans to have served on the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board from presidents from both political parties.
So thank you both for being with us today. I thought we could start with you, Dr. Zelikow, to talk about the axis of autocracies, and give us an overview of how this axis has evolved and where the U.S.’s role has shifted in this new global world order.
ZELIKOW: Sure. Thanks very much, Irina, and it’s a pleasure to join all of you today if only virtually.
Let me just start out the conversation by offering you four points about the historical moment we’re in, about the character of this group of adversaries, about what their strategy is, and about some of the things that are special about this moment in comparison to past moments.
So, first, this historical moment we’re in, I think we are—we have now for some time been in the most serious period of world crisis since the end of 1962. There has been and remains a serious possibility of worldwide warfare—not necessarily a World War III, but of war breaking out in multiple regions of the world even beyond the present instability, which in Europe anyway is the most serious since 1945. So very serious historical moment that we’re in right now.
And the final point I’ll make about the moment is I think the situation is currently unstable and it will resolve into some new equilibrium one way or another in the next—I think in the next few years, in the 2020s. So I’m actually somewhat optimistic about the basic fundamentals for the free world, oh, looking out to the 2030s, but all of that will be determined by, I think, what happens in the 2020s.
So, second point, the character of this group of adversaries. The topic here is axis of autocracies. I personally—as a former policymaker and historian, I don’t actually call this an axis. I don’t actually find the term “axis” very helpful. People use it as an analogy in order to drive people to certain conclusions, but I don’t actually find that the term “axis” helps me understand this group any better. It is really useful, however, to study past groups of adversaries that America has faced.
So this is the third time in the history of the United States that we have faced a purposeful group of adversaries that are trying to significantly change the world system short of general war—short of general war. The first of those occasions was between 1937 and ’41 against a group that did call itself an axis. A second time was, with ups and downs, between about 1948 and the end of 1962, and again against a group that didn’t call itself an axis but it was a coherent, organized group of adversaries purposefully trying to change the basic balance of power and world system. And we are now in the third such period. You can have an argument as to when this period began, but certainly we’ve been in this period now for several years. The first of this—the first encounter of this kind did resolve into total war at the end of 1941. In the second occasion, we avoided general war and the situation stabilized into a—into a better equilibrium. We’re now in the third such period.
It’s not really useful to talk about whether or not this group of countries likes each other or trusts each other. Actually, in the past periods they didn’t much like or trust each other either, so that’s kind of not very interesting. It is striking the relationship between Putin and Xi, the Russian and Chinese leaders, is exceptionally close. Probably for both leaders this is the closest personal relationship they have with any other leader in the world, and they have established this over scores of meetings and conversations over a number of years. So at that personal level, that connection is quite important. So the issue of whether they like or trust each other or have different interests is a little bit beside the point. What they share in common is a general resentment of America’s role in the world and the way they think America organizes the world to keep them down, basically.
What you can also look at is the degree of their cooperation. And on that point, in both the breadth and in some cases the depth of their political and military and economic cooperation, this group of adversaries has actually been cooperating on more things longer and in greater depth than was the case in either of the other two groups, with all their problems. I do think Russia and China are the core. There’s—Iran is at a different level, important. North Korea. And then there are a number of countries that are pretty good friends of this group of countries, including nuclear weapons states like Pakistan. So they are not an isolated group, and they have a lot of friends and sympathizers, actually, across the world—South America, Africa, Asia. But they do have a clear common purpose and they work together opportunistically, but in a very sustained, complex way.
Third point I wanted to make is about their strategy. Their strategy is not necessarily a strategy of world conquest in any kind of simplistic way. Their strategy is what—from their point of view is to break U.S. hegemony and to keep us out of their business. So the whole thrust of their strategy is to get the U.S. to mind its own business. And they have a notion as to what they think—what business they think the U.S. should mind, and mostly it’s: Don’t mess with what we need to do in East Asia. Don’t mess with what we need to do in Europe. And so, therefore, their whole strategy—we often think that we’re trying to deter our enemies from doing bad things. I’ll just say this group of adversaries looks at this in just the opposite way. This group believes they are trying to deter us. They believe they have things they may need to do in their neighborhoods, the United States asserts that it might interfere, and they’re going to do things to keep the Americans out and to deter us. So, therefore, in most of the most dangerous crisis scenarios, the burden of escalation is not going to be on them; the burden of escalation is going to be on us as to whether or not we’re willing to step up and confront some of the things that they’re already doing or may contemplate doing in the future.
And you can—you can judge how well that strategy is going. I think from their point of view, they think they’re doing very—they think they’re doing pretty well and they think the currents are running their way.
The fourth and final point I just wanted to bring out is about some of the differences between the present situation and these past ones. The American position fundamentally is weaker in many significant respects than it was in those past periods. The fundamental—the scale of the American defense industrial capability is actually a good deal smaller now than it was then. In some respects our overseas deployments are also weaker and less engaged.
As a practical matter, some of the debate posits that there is a choice between Europe and Asia, that we have to commit one way or another. I actually don’t agree with that argument. I think that’s a false choice. I also think that as a practical matter, if you want to show them that the—that their plans are not going to meet easy success, the United States actually has a comparative advantage in Europe, where it has stronger allies and is partnered with much stronger fighting forces—like the Ukrainians, who are fighting hard and on a very large scale against a very challenging adversary. So I think the notion that we can lose in Europe and win in Asia is—(laughs)—is ill-judged. And actually, in the past periods those sorts of conceptions turned out to also be ill-judged.
But the challenge on the part of the United States is obviously significant, and we’re clearly going through a period of enormous turmoil in the reflection and reconsideration of all the old alliances. And myself, I don’t believe that there’s any interest in, oh, let’s turn the clock back to our magnificent past. I think we actually have to design a strategy for all this that looks at the situation we’re in now and judges what’s practical and feasible going forward.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.
I’m going to go to you, Dr. Kavanagh.
KAVANAGH: Yes. Great. Thanks.
So I’m going to disagree on some things, so hopefully that’s OK, and we can maybe hash it out in the—in the Q&A.
So, you know, for me the starting point here is like a basic question: Are these four adversaries cooperating more than they used to? And I think there the answer is clearly yes. We could go through a number of examples. I don’t want to waste, you know, my time here talking to you sort of listing things that you’ve probably read in the news, but there is a lot more cooperation between sort of probably all the dyads.
So the fact of the cooperation isn’t in question, but I do think what is more debatable is what this means for the United States. How worried should we be about these four countries? Is this a set of four countries that have a clear strategy to unseat the United States and damage its international interests? Or is it a partnership of convenience, transactional relationships that don’t amount to much? I think the reality is neither of those, but something somewhere in the middle. I think there are clearly aspects of this cooperation that are challenging, and should be troubling to U.S. policymakers, and that they should be focused on thinking about how to respond to. But I think that the idea that they are cooperating as sort of an alliance goes too far. I think there’s less coordination than it sometimes appears on the surface. And I think the U.S. is actually in a much stronger position, with some strategic changes, to counter some of the threats that these adversaries pose.
More generally, I think that lumping the countries together in a group of four and thinking about this as one threat is both misleading and not helpful for U.S. policy. So I’m going to sort of unpack that in just the—in the next couple of minutes.
So the first is, you know, why don’t I think that this is as coherent as is sometimes portrayed in definitely the popular press and sometimes even more academic journals?
The first is that it’s still mostly bilateral. You don’t see a lot of cooperation here at the trilateral, certainly not all four at once. It’s mostly two countries cooperating on specific issues. Where there even is potential for trilateral cooperation—for example, with China, North Korea, and Russia—you see pushback. China hasn’t really been interested in engaging in that kind of trilateral because it doesn’t want to be lumped in with Russia and North Korea. It has a different set of interests, and those interests are based more in preserving parts of the existing order than either Russia or North Korea.
The second key thing I think we have to think about is the role that the war in Ukraine has played. It’s clearly been an accelerant here in pushing these four countries to cooperate more. And a lot of the examples that you would give if we went through a list of examples of increased cooperation over the past few years are increased cooperation between Russia and another country—between Russia and Iran, between Russia and China, between Russia and North Korea. And that doesn’t mean that the Ukraine war caused these four countries to line up together, but it’s clearly playing a role. This is—clearly, Russia is an instigator both because it has to, because it has no—very few choices and needs these other countries in order to continue to carry out its war; and because it benefits from this narrative that it is fighting the West and, therefore, it needs to have its own sort of set of countries in order to kind of call back to this idea of bloc—security bloc base competition. So that’s the second.
The third key reason why I don’t think it’s necessarily accurate is that there’s—there are real limits to the cooperation between these countries, and it’s not—it’s not just that their interests don’t align. They’ve clearly shown a willingness to kind of go beyond the sort of very transactional relationships, but there are reasons why—institutional reasons why they have held themselves back.
So I think for the case of China, there’s been a lot of talk about how China has aided Russia’s war effort. Definitely true, but China could have done more if it had wanted to. But it didn’t. Why? Because it has a stake in retaining its relationships with Europe, at least to some extent; in not totally alienating the United States. And so that’s going to be a natural check on how far it’s willing to go.
Same thing if you look at even Russia and its involvement in the Middle East. It’s been a little bit more restrained in how it’s worked with Iran because it has other interests in Syria and elsewhere that it doesn’t want to upset.
Same with China and Iran. China’s the number-one oil buyer for Iran. It buys now 80 percent of Iran’s oil. But it hasn’t done everything the Iranians have wanted because it has business ties to Saudi Arabia and UAE.
So there are these natural checks on the relationship that I think aren’t going to—they’re not going to stop—cause the relationships to fall apart, but they’re checks on how far they can go.
And the last is that this idea of these—increasing cooperation along, like, multiple axes is not just a trend among these four countries, but it’s a global trend. We see countries in Southeast Asia who are working with Russia, and reaching out to the Middle East, and working with the United States. Even U.S. allies like Japan and countries in Europe aren’t just settling in with their relationships with the United States, but they’re looking to diversify those relationships in their own neighborhood, to other U.S. allies, as well as trying to balance their relationships with China and sometimes even Russia.
So I think this idea, this—what I usually refer to as sort of a multi-aligned world, where countries really want to take advantage of the fact that power is more diffuse—world may not be multipolar, but it’s at least moving in that direction. And so taking advantage of the opportunities they have requires that they have lots of relationships. So this isn’t just a trend among these four countries.
For these four countries, though, they don’t have all that many options—although they do have, you know, Belarus and Pakistan, as was mentioned previously, and Venezuela. And so that raises the question for me: Are we even talking about the right set of countries? Like, is focusing on these four actually capturing the things that are a threat to the United States? So I don’t think the construct is all that helpful in helping us understand what’s going on. And I think it—it overinflates the level of cooperation in ways that I think that are distracting.
And I think this damages U.S. policy or is an impediment to good U.S. policymaking on this in three ways.
The first is it distracts—it simplifies the problem. It’s nice to think about that we have four adversaries and they’re all in a bloc. But it distracts from the differences between them—between the countries and between the pairings—and the reasons why they’re doubling down on their relationships with each other. But that’s really important. Understanding their specific motivations and their differences is the key levers that policymakers need to understand if they want to design policies to help reduce this cooperation.
And so, you know, some dyads are very threatening to the United States. I agree Russia and China is the key one. It’s the one that’s the—poses the most challenges to U.S. interests. But other ones maybe aren’t quite as important or could be managed in a way that doesn’t require as much policymaker attention.
Same thing with types of transfers. To me, the big focus should be on transfers of sensitive military technologies. That’s the thing I’m most worried about, transfers of drone technologies and submarine quieting technologies and jet engine technologies. Those are the key things that shift balances of power in major ways. I’m not that worried if China is selling, you know, clothing to Russia. Like, that, to me, is lesser priority. And so I think that this idea to think of them as a bloc distracts from really digging down into what are the threats that are posed to U.S. interests.
The second is, I guess, building off this idea of prioritization, in my view, this idea that all threats are interlinked naturally drags towards the idea that the United States must maintain its U.S. presence everywhere. If all threats are linked, and the U.S. faces threats in all theaters, it cannot prioritize. And so I guess I am more of the school of thought of people who think that in a world of constrained resources the U.S. does need to prioritize. That doesn’t mean abandoning Europe, but it does mean prioritizing and thinking about what threats are most important. But if all threats are interlinked, you can’t do that. And that drives to conclusions that I don’t agree with, things like if we—if we make any concessions to Russia on Ukraine then Xi is more likely to invade Taiwan. Like, I think that is a leap of logic that doesn’t make sense. But it—but that sort of—the thinking of all these threats being interlinked leads us, I think, in that direction. So I don’t think it’s helpful for policymakers who have to prioritize. It’s vital to U.S. interests that they’re able to prioritize, to have all these threats interlinked.
And so then my last point here is just about threat inflation. In my view, this idea that all these four countries are cooperating and looking to unseat the United States inflates the threat in ways that are not helpful. The United States is actually very secure. We have oceans on either side, and so far we still have friendly neighbors on our borders. That may change if we invade Canada or Mexico, but right now they’re still friendly neighbors. So we are actually very secure. Changes in Europe or Asia that would threaten U.S. interests, in my view, would have to be massive. It would have to take more than taking Taiwan to really threaten U.S. interests in Asia. It would have to mean taking Taiwan and Japan, and maybe the Philippines. I don’t see Russia as a power that could become a hegemon in Europe. So I think the threats to U.S. interests are actually maybe a little bit further away and the U.S. can act here from a position of strength, not to drive wedges between countries but to think about providing these countries with alternatives, to lean into reaching out to them and engaging them in ways that might at least make some of the cooperation that’s happening between them—between them less threatening.
So I would vote for thinking about the causal arrow as not just running in one direction. It’s not just that the U.S. faces threats everywhere so it must be everywhere. But if the U.S. is everywhere, then it is naturally predisposed to feel like it’s threatened everywhere. So kind of rethinking that and thinking about the role the U.S. plays in a world that is very different I think is a question that we should be asking.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.
I’m going to go to all of you now for your questions.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
So I’m going to take the first question—written question—from Matthew Szucs, who’s an undergraduate student at Buffalo State University: Do you think the Chinese-Russian alliance will hold strong after both Putin and Xi Jinping either lose power or likely die? We have seen both the USSR and China fluctuate wildly in their relations with the West based on their current strongman leaders. So what is your prediction?
ZELIKOW: I don’t—I think that’s kind of an idle exercise. I mainly work on practical problems to try to get us through a major world crisis in the next few years, and I don’t roll the dice and spend much time speculating on what happens when the leaders die.
I will say that in the case of both of those governments the nature and character of the leader has been very important. So, there are some people who think that China is on a basic pathway and Xi didn’t really make that much difference. I have a different view. I think China began taking some important changes in direction beginning in the mid-2000s, and that those changes have been intensified by Xi’s leadership, and Xi has personally be highly important. I think Putin also has been highly important. It’s true that both of these men now sit atop a leadership elite that shares many common beliefs, but I think in this case, the role of the individual leader is extremely important, which is always the case in these very powerful dictatorships.
But I don’t really find it—and the personal relationship between Xi and Putin is exceptionally strong. But I don’t really find it very helpful to think about what will happen when or if either of them dies because I can’t plan—I can’t plan to solve problems on that basis. And actually, if you did plan, what you would do then is you would—instead of saying here’s what I think will happen, is you would array a set of possibilities: very little change, quite a lot of change, change here, change there. You’d look around those possibilities, and then you’d ask yourself: Are there things we need to do to prepare ourselves better for one or another of these possibilities?
And also, the general world environment will make a lot of difference. If it looks to those countries like those leaders are being successful and their policies had been winning, if they feel like they’re—that those policies have been successful, then the succession is likely to want to continue policies that are perceived as successful. And of course, just the opposite could be the case. And the judgments of kind of how things—whether things are successful or not will vary, of course, depending on points of view and factions inside those countries. But a general sense of political-military success and stature matters.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
Jennifer, do you want to add, or should we go to the next question?
KAVANAGH: I think we can go to the next question. I agree generally with that answer.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.
I’m going to go next to Patrick Duddy, who’s at Duke University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Q: Good afternoon. I’m also the former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela.
My question has to do with the Western Hemisphere, and we’ve seen the rise and to a very large degree the consolidation of three very autocratic governments—that is to say, Nicaragua and Venezuela joining Cuba in a kind of triumvirate. And all three have courted China and Russia. So, my general question to you is: Do you think it matters? And if it does, how do you think the United States should respond to this sort of erosion in what for a long time we talked about as the democratic consensus in the Western Hemisphere? Thank you.
KAVANAGH: Do I think it matters? I definitely think that it’s worth keeping an eye on Russia and China’s entry into the Western Hemisphere. It has increased from what was a very low level to something that is more significant, especially for China and its investment in infrastructure projects and energy projects across the region.
I think, though, it’s worth thinking kind of at the regional level about the fact that U.S. power still substantially dominates over any of those efforts, just—and has the geographic advantages that the U.S. lacks in the other theaters. So still the United States I don’t think should feel like its position or its, you know, hegemony, for lack of a better word, in the Western Hemisphere is threatened in any way, although I know there are people in the current administration that perhaps disagree with that.
So, I guess my solution would be—would be more outreach to these countries. In a lot of cases, countries in the region—in the Western Hemisphere that are reaching out to Russia and China are doing so because the United States hasn’t really been all that present or active, especially on the economic front. So I would encourage, like, more—rather than trying to shut China out, trying to get the U.S. more involved. Now, I recognize that’s a challenge with the countries you mentioned because the U.S. has limited diplomatic ties and has sanctions of various kinds on those countries.
So, you know, in my view, more engagement is better. I don’t see any of those countries as a real threat to the United States, and so I would push for our engagement. On the question of democracy, I don’t find the democracy/autocracy framing to be all that useful as a way to think about the world right now. There are lots of countries that the United States works with that are not democratic, for various reasons. So I think it’s important to kind of put that aside as an organizing framework for the world and to think more about how we engage with countries where we do have common interests, even if we have areas of disagreement.
ZELIKOW: So, I’ll just say I don’t think—I don’t think the term “hegemony” is useful. I don’t know what that means. We don’t have hegemony even in Mexico, in the sense that, like, does the Mexican government think it usually does whatever the Americans tell them to do? No. No. Not today, not yesterday, and not the day before that. So, and then I could just go through—do I think the Peruvian government or the Ecuadorian government, right? Certainly not the Venezuelan government. (Laughs.) And definitely not the Brazilian government. So we could—and we could just kind of go through the list.
You can look at where these countries trade. Actually, China has become a really important trading partner for countries like Brazil and Peru. And Ambassador Duddy knows well the situation in the northern half of South America. There are particular flashpoints, having to do with places like Guyana, that we need to watch. But what’s happening is South America is in play. That is, the South American countries themselves regard their—are having a lot of difficult choices about their future. And they’re looking around and trying to figure out who their trading partners are, who they can look to for investment. And the United States is one among several possible answers to their dilemmas, and is often not the most important answer.
You’re muted, Irina.
FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Alexa Rodriguez, who is an undergraduate student at Lewis University.
How would the growing cooperation between China, Russia, and Iran challenge the UN? And what steps can the U.S. take to maintain the international order?
ZELIKOW: I think the—I think it is important to step back and understand that a lot of the institutions that people are used to are now decaying or moribund. We went through a period of Cold War rivalry that came to an end at the beginning of the 1990s and ushered in a period in which we attempted to build institutions with global scope and global participation, in an effort to create a kind of global commonwealth. The United Nations briefly revived in its importance and briefly came a little closer to the original 1945 aspirations for it, and then subsided. I think the United Nations now, other than a place to make performative statements, is now largely moribund. Some of the particular UN agencies, like the World Food Program, do particular things that are valuable, but in general, the United Nations is going down.
The World Trade Organization is already in nearly a zombie form. The international financial institutions are going are—are payment constrained and, because of this administration, I think will be even more constrained in their significance. I think the future of NATO is unclear and the future of other principal alliances are unclear. There is no leader in the free world who regards President Trump as trustworthy, none. They don’t all say so in public, just trust me. No—you can trust me on this statement, is there is no leader in the free world who considers the current American president trustworthy. So whatever agreements they think they have, no one thinks they can really count on the United States to do particular things in a crisis. So they’re all now making recalculations and adjustments based on that—based on that realization.
Now it’s perfectly possible to say that, gee, that’s a good thing. We don’t want people to—we don’t want our friends to trust us and we don’t want our enemies to know what we’re going to do. We’re really powerful where everyone has no idea what we’re going to do, because it makes us sneaky and unpredictable and menacing. Of course, I don’t believe any of that, but I know people who make that argument. So we’re just in a—the questioner called out the United Nations. And so what my answer is doing is saying, you kind of need to step back from the whole apparatus of institutions we’ve been thinking of as the natural furniture of the world system for the last thirty years, and begin reconceiving the institutional framework for the world order that’s going to take shape during the 2020s, which I believe will be a different world order than the one we’ve had for the last generation.
KAVANAGH: So I would just like—yeah, I agree 100 percent with that last point. Like, I do think that the world order is shifting. And I don’t think it’s just the Trump administration coming in that’s driven this. Like, I think the institutions that were set up at the end of World War II don’t really fit the current distribution of power and so new institutions are needed. It makes sense that after, you know, seventy-five years we would need new institutions, or changed institutions. The challenge is thinking about, like, what those institutions look like. And the U.S. should want to—want to have a say in what those are.
At the end of World War II, and certainly at the end of the Cold War, the United States had a lot of say. And some—after the end of the Cold War, it had most say. And that’s not going to be the case now. There are going to be other parties at the table. But the U.S. is still, you know, a leading superpower. And should—and so should have a seat at the table. I think the question is whether the current administration sees it that way or not, or whether it’s OK, you know, with this sort of transactional unpredictability that, I agree, isn’t that helpful. Are they ready to step up and redefine those institutions? Or are they more likely to reject all ties as unhelpful?
And I think the latter would be dangerous because the rest of the world is going to set these—is going to find new institutions that work, and the U.S. would be left out. So, if I were advising a policymaker, I would encourage thinking about what are the pieces of the current order that we want to keep, what are the pieces that don’t work for U.S. interests, what are the pieces we want to change, what new things do we need? And I would be engaging with countries in Europe and countries in Asia that think like the United States, or less, you know, like, have overlapping interests—we don’t have the same interests, but have overlapping interests—to try to shape that debate. So that’s what I’d like to see, but I probably won’t get my wish. (Laughs.)
FASKIANOS: I’m going to take the next question from Mümin Ahmedoğlu, who’s at the—a graduate student at the Technical University of Munich. And my apologies for not pronouncing your name correctly.
Q: Yeah, thank you. I’m a master’s student at Technical University of Munich.
And my question is with now, like, the pending strategic alignment among the authoritarian powers, do you believe that the world is shifting from a unipolar order, dominated by the U.S., to a new bipolar order? And in the same context, do you think that the world is entering a new arms race, like the Cold War time? And how this—because I’m a Middle Eastern guy—so how do you think this or will affect the Middle East, since it’s historically a battleground for great power competition? How do you think this shifts, if so—if there’s shifts happening and arms race coming will affect the Middle East and Middle Eastern countries?
KAVANAGH: Well, I definitely think that the unipolar moment has passed, but I don’t find the polarity concept to be all that useful in terms of thinking about the world right now because, in some ways, the world is, you know, bipolar, in the sense that you have U.S. and China that are far ahead of other countries on many important dimensions, like military power and economic power. But then you have countries like Russia that on these traditional metrics are not—would not even be considered major powers, but that are able to influence world events in ways that are out of proportion to that power.
So, to me, I think—I guess I like to think of it as sort of, like, a diffused power world, where there are, like, lots of power centers. And that would include emerging powers like Brazil, and Indonesia, and India, and countries that have a lot of sway in their region, as well as often on specific issues on the global stage. And so, to me, that’s a more useful way to think about the world and to understand the choices that countries have to make in terms of navigating relations with bigger countries and smaller countries. And you see a lot of, like, minilateral, like, small organization groups that work together instead of multilateral. So, I do think the way countries work together is changing as well as this power distribution.
In terms of what it means for the Middle East, I mean, right now the signs are rather ominous because, as you suggested, the, you know, major powers have often—the Middle East has often been an area of contestation between these major powers. But I think a lot remains to be seen, sort of on how things unfold in Syria, what happens between Israel and Gaza, what happens with Iran, whether there’s some kind of new Iran deal or whether that situation escalates, what happens in terms of the other Arab powers and whether or not they’re able to organize themselves together. Now, historically, we haven’t seen much, you know, progress in that direction. So, I think there’s a lot of question marks right now. It’s very unsettled.
I guess I agree with the earlier comment that, you know, the next few years are going to be really decisive in terms of understanding kind of what sort of order emerges in the Middle East. From the U.S. perspective, you know, the U.S., every time it gets involved in the Middle East, just makes a bigger mess. So from my perspective, like, it would be better if the region was dealing with these issues without the United States meddling, because, my observation at least over my career, which is, you know, not as long as Dr. Zelikow’s, but has been just that the U.S.—every time the U.S. gets involved in the Middle East, it gets worse.
ZELIKOW: So the—I hope that this questioner is enjoying the die Union München and is having a nice day there.
These schematics about—I don’t think we were in a unipolar world even in the 1990s. People use phrases like that, and they sound grand. As someone who actually experienced having to try to get things done, it’s not like you kind of walked into rooms and people all, you know, bowed down, even in the Balkan Wars. So, these expressions about polarity, these schemas, are not very useful. But if the question is, are there going to be more arms races in this period? Oh, yes, you bet. (Laughs.) You know, when—as the world recedes more towards the law of the jungle, naturally, it’s a good period for people who make guns. So, yes, there will be more arms races.
Is that going to create more tensions in the Middle East? Yes. Above all, the situation that’s most urgent right now is Iran and Israel are at war now, in case anyone didn’t understand that. The war—it’s a peculiar kind of war, in that the—it explodes from time to time and then subsides. But the two countries are at war now. And Iran is actively contemplating whether and how to proceed with its nuclear weapons program, and Israel is actively contemplating whether to launch really quite massive strikes to try to preempt and disable that program, those decisions. There are a variety of subsidiary conflicts and crises in the Middle East beyond that, but that’s the central one.
There is a question of if the United—it’s even possible for the United States to stay aloof from an Iran—from the Iran-Israel war, and whether there’s a diplomatic way through it or not. And the Saudis and the Emiratis are trying to manage that as best they can. But that’s just one illustration of a central concern. And I actually share Professor Kavanagh’s general unease about—skepticism about the practicality of different kinds of American policy moves in the Middle East, even aside from the real estate development projects in Gaza. (Laughs.) So I’ve had enough experience with the Middle East to find her skepticism well warranted. But there are a number of things coming that I think are going to force choices one way or another.
I mean, we have major bases right at the top of the Persian Gulf. The notion that we can stay completely aloof from an—from the Iran-Israel war is kind of hard for me to see.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take a written question from Gary Armstrong, professor at William Jewell College in Kansas City: Clearly, some in the Trump administration think they can do a Nixon-Kissinger and detach Russia from China in the long term by making concessions in Ukraine and other issues. But the conditions that led to the 1972 breakthrough with China are very different. It sounds like Professor Zelikow thinks the relationship between China and Russia currently are too strong, even for the long term, to base policy on a potential realignment. Is that right?
ZELIKOW: I don’t think there’s any percentage in a play to drive a wedge right now between Russia and China. People talk that game, and there are, I think, even people in the Trump administration who think that they can woo Russia away from China. (Laughs.) I think if one works that issue for a while and analyzes the premises, it’s not a promising strategy. So—and the people who run those countries are very serious people who’ve been pursuing very long-term projects in close cooperation for a number of years now, that involve both of their militaries and both of their economies in important ways. And they have a long-term perspective on the future place of the United States and the world and the future development of both Europe and East Asia, as well as global commerce. And so, no, I don’t—I don’t think that’s an interesting strategy.
Even, by the way, in the 1972 case that everyone remembers, the prime initiative for that wedge driving did not come from the United States. The prime initiative and opening for that diplomacy came from China, if one gets deeply into the history of this. And it came from China because of China’s increasing alarm about the danger from the USSR.
KAVANAGH: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. I had a conversation this morning with someone. We were talking about phrases we never wanted to hear again. And my nomination was the “reverse Kissinger.” So, I agree a hundred percent. (Laughs.)
FASKIANOS: All right. Let’s go to Madison Schramm.
Q: Hi. Thank you so much for your comments.
I have a question about regime type more generally. And I think I agree with your comments that regime type is going to be less a guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy in the years to come. But even looking back at the National Security Strategy from 2022, or public statements from Harris and others in foreign policy capacities, the fight against autocracy still seems to loom large. So, I guess, independent of the current administration, do you think that this ideational power of the threat of autocratic regimes or democratic peace is strong enough to be sustained in the near future?
KAVANAGH: Well—
FASKIANOS: And Madison is with the University of Toronto.
KAVANAGH: Yeah, Madison, it’s good to, like, see you virtually.
So, I agree 100 percent that the Biden administration was sort of all-in on this democracy versus autocracy framing, especially when their National Security Strategy came out. That was a big piece. And it kind of attenuated a little bit towards the end of the Biden administration, but Harris brought it back. I think the question is—I don’t necessarily see the Democrats doing a lot of self-questioning on whether or not that was the right framing so they may adhere to it, but at least the current administration seems to have completely jettisoned it. So, you know, we saw Vance’s speech in Munich, where he was criticizing the Europeans for their lack of democracy. So they seem to have a sort of different view here on this issue.
So, the question is whether or not the framing lasts four years. Like, is it even relevant when the debates come up in 2028 or 2026, at the midterms? I think, you know, if I’m a democratic policymaker or a policymaker who has aspirations towards, you know, having an impact on the world, like, the democracy versus autocracy framing was just extremely ineffective. I mean, it has this narrative appeal that goes back towards sort of this previous world order, but it didn’t—it failed to motivate countries, really, around the world. I mean, it was useful in getting Europe behind the United States when Russia invaded Ukraine. And it was useful for a small number of Asian allies—Japan and South Korea.
But now, we see the problems that South Korea has been having, so it’s not clear they can stand as sort of a pillar of liberal democracy. And for Southeast Asia, it was completely unmotivating. And it was alienating for a lot of the rest of the world. So, you know, I personally—although I value democracy, and I’m glad I live in one, and hope to stay living in one—(laughs)—I don’t think it’s a useful framing for a policymaker, and I wouldn’t recommend that they cling to it. I would focus on shared interests, really. That seems through the direction the world is moving right now. And in some cases, that might include domestic issues and commitment to specific values and democracy, but in most cases, I would push for a real interest-based approach to the world right now.
FASKIANOS: Philip?
ZELIKOW: All my life, I’ve been around people who have argued for dispassionate views of our interests versus caring about things like morality and ideals. I actually find that this kind of compartmentation between idealism and realism does not actually exist in human beings. Mostly human beings tend to like or dislike both people and other kinds of governments. And there are some human beings who are perfectly amoral, and they’re happy to deal with criminals and tyrants and murderers. And they don’t care. But actually, most people do care. That doesn’t mean they won’t do business with bad governments if they have to, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care who they’re dealing with. That doesn’t mean, like, that, hey, government of Venezuela is just like the government of Colombia, and we don’t care who we deal with as long as we make money. Actually, in the real world, most humans aren’t like that, including in government, including at the very top levels of government.
And, by the way, the American people are mostly like that. American people don’t actually tend to like governments that have tyrannies, that close their societies. I mean, Putin has been running a fascist government in Russia that has carried out the largest war of aggression since Adolf Hitler in the Second World War. A war that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, the kidnapping of thousands of children, and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, and millions of refugees. So, a lot of people in Europe kind of take that hard. (Laughs.) And you don’t have to use fancy words like democracy, autocracy. It’s, like, you know, and actually a lot of ordinary people in Europe see that, and they don’t like that. And whether it makes them fearful or just disgusted, they don’t like it. And so, I think the notion that government leaders ought to put aside those feelings implies a level of detachment that actually we’ve never really had.
Even Henry Kissinger, the supposed amoral realist, was not as amoral and detached from those sorts of concerns as people like to make out. So, in the real world, there is actually a constant blurring of situations where, for various reasons, including your own ideals and background, you dislike the people you have to deal with or you like the people you have to deal with. You respect them or don’t respect them. You can—you feel like you can work with their societies, or you can’t. And those are just factors to be taken into account in practical evaluations of what it is—of what it is you need to do to accomplish your country’s purposes. Now, it’s true, a country’s purposes are driven by material interests and by the need for its safety and prosperity. But almost all countries—by the way, including China and Russia—think they have a lot of other purposes besides those. I mean, China and Russia constantly talk about their values and their spiritual values, which may sound odd to us but is very important in their world too.
FASKIANOS: So, in light of that comment, Philip, I mean, President Trump is obviously in conversation with Putin, has made statements now about Ukraine starting the war. So how should we parse that?
ZELIKOW: Well, he’s a unique figure in the history of the United States. I mean, he truly is. He really—I mean, in a way, I don’t need to tell people how they should think about President Trump. President Trump is an open book. You can read the book and decide whether or not you like it. The one thing I’ll tell people is if people think, no, there are great depths there beneath what we can see, I’ll just assure them that no, actually, about what you see is about what’s there. And he is happy to parade that every day. And he thinks this makes him sound tough and wise. And rather than tell people how they ought to think about that, I just, you know, read the book, believe that actually there’s not a lot more there than what you can see every day, and then decide what you think about that. And you don’t need the help of a professor at Stanford to help you—to help you make that judgment.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next written question from Yaffa Reichwald, a student at Adelphi University: What will be the role of technology in strategizing and responding to the axis of upheaval? The U.S. is protected by oceans from territorial invasions, but cyber warfare need not respect such boundaries.
KAVANAGH: Oh, is it my turn to go first? OK. So, I agree. Cyber warfare is a concern. And it does not respect territorial boundaries. So while I—you know, I do still believe that the United States is pretty secure, the cyber threat is an important one. China and Russia especially—and North Korea and Iran—have been very active in hacking campaigns of various kinds. China’s has been, I think, the most sophisticated, in the sense that they have gone after really strategic pieces of information. So, they’re now able to build extensive profiles on U.S. individuals and track cellphones of important people. But Russia and North Korea have also, I think, punched way above their weight in terms of the damage they’ve been able to do. And I think it’s our—I don’t think our cyber defenses are up to what they need to be, given the challenges that we face. I think the United States is still very vulnerable in cyberspace. And I think it should be an area of focus.
I know that the U.S. military is focused on it, but the challenge is really from—my worry is more about the civilian infrastructure and the vulnerabilities that we have there. It’s quite old and vulnerable to these actors. So, you know, I don’t—it’s hard for me to know. Sort of, like, with any normal administration I would believe that that would have to be a priority. But this administration is unique. They have a different set of priorities. And so, I don’t know how high up or down that’s going to fall on their list. But if they’re really serious about protecting the United States, all that money that’s going to the Iron Dome for America, or the golden dome, I guess they’re calling it now, for America, really, like, should be reinvested in in protecting critical infrastructure inside the United States from just the threats that you’re talking about.
FASKIANOS: Philip.
ZELIKOW: (Laughs.) I’m just smiling about the golden dome. That’s—
KAVANAGH: It could be—I just saw—I just saw they were renaming the contract bid as the Golden Dome for America. I could be wrong.
ZELIKOW: No, I hear you. No, I hear you.
KAVANAGH: I saw it yesterday. I don’t know. I—
ZELIKOW: I can’t help—but I can’t help but smile.
KAVANAGH: There’s too much information for me to absorb and verify everything, so.
FASKIANOS: Yeah. It’s a pretty fast-moving cycle of news and things coming out that we have to track. (Laughs.)
So, we are at the end of our time. There are lots of raised hands, lots of questions. Sorry we could not get to you all, but this has really been a terrific hour. And we appreciate you sharing your expertise with us, Jennifer Kavanagh and Philip Zelikow. So thank you very much for taking the time to be with us. It’s really been fantastic.
KAVANAGH: Thanks. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for having us.
FASKIANOS: The next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Wednesday, March 12, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Bonnie Jenkins will be joining us to talk about women, peace, and security. We will be at the International Studies Association in Chicago this weekend and we have a panel discussion on Monday, March 3 from 12:00 to 1:30 p.m., I believe, or in there. So if you are interested in—if you’re going to be in Chicago and you want to attend, please email [email protected]. And I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. And, of course, visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org, for research and analysis on global issues.
So, thank you all again, Jennifer, Philip. And we look forward to your continued participation.
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