Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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A RECENT SERIES of tweets by Elbridge Colby, Under Secretary of War in the Trump administration, lashes out at the idea of “middle powers” supplanting US dominance. Colby claims that “We at [the Department of War] are not concerned that this is a serious possibility. Rather, we are more concerned that a few allies and partners will *think it is* and waste valuable time, money, and political capital on a distraction.”
Indeed, that Colby saw fit to devote so many words to trying to refute the idea seems to show otherwise, that Colby does find the idea threatening or irksome. Colby claims that “Middle powers’ don’t have a coherent basis for alignment” and that the US sees its allies as increasing engagement with the US, rather than decreasing it.
Colby goes on to tout superior US capacities. He states: “The simple fact of the matter is that no alternative country or countries can compete with the U.S. defense industrial base, either in quantity or quality. The United States, as the President says, makes the best equipment, and we make it at a scale that no plausible competitor can match. If anything, access to the American DIB is a privilege, not a right […] There is no credible free world alternative to American tech and its implications for defense”.
Colby’s tweets have been interpreted variously as the US throwing a temper tantrum. After all, Colby has sought to push European allies to step up and do more for their own defense by threatening to pull US support. Now that this has happened, it may be that the US is upset that its allies are drawing away from it.
To this extent, Colby would be hitting out at the idea that there can be anything to the US-led global order. The notion of “middle powers” stepping up has been elevated internationally after a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Of course, the idea of aligning against a global order dominated by two superpowers has appeared previously in history, as in the notion of the Non-Alignment Movement or of South-South solidarity. It may not be surprising as to why the idea would recur at a time when the world increasingly looks to be a multipolar one between the US and China. Colby seems to be rather ignorant of history if he thinks that there is no coherent basis for this idea recurring in an era that some have termed a “New Cold War”–though, of course, Carney’s alignment of “middle power” is still a reconfiguration of the western-led global order in a way that the Non-Alignment Movement was not.
At the same time, it may be that Colby is attempting to have his empire and eat it, too. With the US unwilling to fulfill the commitments that held its empire together, Colby’s tweets reflect how the US is now complaining that its empire is fraying.
Yet one also notes how the US has also jettisoned anything along the lines of soft power as a basis for cultural and political hegemony. Instead, the US has turned towards direct coercion of its allies. But it may be that an empire simply cannot hold together without some element of soft power, framed in terms of the rules-based international order, shared democratic values, adherence ot the capitalist free market, or otherwise. Indeed, soft power serves as reassurance to the powers subordinate to a hegemon that such hegemony will not involve coercion beyond what is implicit. As Theodore Roosevelt phrased it, the point is to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” so as to induce the political order that one forms under one’s self into cohering together.
By contrast, Colby seems to be intent on shouting threats about punishment for defiance while holding a big stick. Can it be surprising that powers who find this threatening will try to consider alternatives, rather than be subordinate to a mercurial hegemon that has little understanding of the underpinnings of its own global order?
Colby would seem to be intent on undermining US power, then, perhaps having never understood how it worked to begin with. Likewise, one notes how this series of tweets simply gives rival powers, such as China, ammunition against the US. After all, if no alliance of “middle powers” emerges as a counter to both the US and China, there will be those that turn directly to China as an alternative to the US. Or, as also occurred with the Non-Alignment Movement, China will itself claim leadership of middle powers. Still, such ignorance is unsurprising from members of the Trump administration.