Last fall, eight months into the new world disorder created
by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the University of Cambridge’s Bennett
Institute for Public Policy produced a long report on trends in global public
opinion before and after the outbreak of the war.
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Not surprisingly, the data showed that the conflict had
shifted public sentiment in developed democracies in East Asia and Europe, as
well as the US, uniting their citizens against both Russia and China and
shifting mass opinion in a more pro-American direction.
But outside this democratic bloc, the trends were very
different. For a decade before the Ukraine war, public opinion across “a vast
span of countries stretching from continental Eurasia to the north and west of
Africa”, in the report’s words, had become more favorable to Russia even as
Western public opinion became more hostile. Similarly, people in Europe, the
Anglosphere, and Pacific Rim democracies like Japan and South Korea all turned
against China even before COVID-19, but China was regarded much more favorably
across the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central Asia.
Putin’s war in Ukraine shifted these trends only at the
margins. Russia did become less popular in 2022, but overall, developing-world
public opinion after the invasion was still slightly warmer to Russia than to
the US, and (for the first time) warmer to China than to America, too. To the
extent that the Ukraine conflict betokened a new geopolitical struggle between
an American-led “maritime alliance of democracies”, as the report put it, and
an alliance of authoritarian regimes anchored in Eurasia, the authoritarian
alliance seemed to have surprisingly deep reservoirs of potential popular
support.
Russia’s growing non-isolation
This reading of the geopolitical landscape has found
vindication in the months since. Outside the Anglosphere and Europe, the
attempts to quarantine the Russian economy have found little sustained support,
and the attempts at diplomatic isolation likewise.
Outside the Anglosphere and Europe, the attempts to quarantine the Russian economy have found little sustained support, and the attempts at diplomatic isolation likewise.
Russian military forces are active across Africa. Moscow is
finding willing energy buyers from South Asia to Latin America. Putin’s regime
just convened a peace conference with Syria and Turkey and Iran, in the hopes
of stabilizing its own position in Syria while sidelining the US and its
Kurdish allies. Leaked documents from US intelligence indicate that President
Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi of Egypt recently authorized secret arms sales to Russia,
notwithstanding his country’s status as a US ally and aid recipient.
Overall, according to a recent Economist Intelligence
survey, outside of the Western alliance there has been a slow bleeding of
support from Ukraine: The number of countries condemning the Russian invasion
fell slightly in the past year, and the number of neutral and Russia-supporting
countries rose. And Russia’s growing non-isolation is matched by increasing
diplomatic and economic influence for its ally China, which is playing a
crucial role as peacemaker and power broker in the Middle East — with, again,
official US allies like Saudi Arabia as its partners.
The need for a broader perspective
It is not clear that the Biden administration has a grand
strategy calibrated to this reality. While the White House has resisted some
calls for escalating brinkmanship with Moscow, it has tended to accept the
hawkish portrait of a geopolitical landscape increasingly divided between
democracy and autocracy, liberalism, and authoritarianism. Witness, for
instance, President Joe Biden’s recently convened Summit for Democracy, which
deliberately excluded two NATO allies, Hungary and Turkey, because they are
considered worrisome examples of democratic backsliding.
Abroad, you simply cannot build the alliances required to contain China or Russia if you cannot work with countries that do not embrace Anglo-American liberalism or Eurocrat proceduralism.
As Walter Russell Mead noted in The Wall Street Journal,
this framing clearly describes international reality to some degree. It also fits
with Biden’s domestic political message, which conflates an “international
fight for liberal democracy” with an “internal struggle against the populist
GOP”.
But as Mead went on to argue, this crusade-for-democracy
vision risks being strategically self-defeating. Abroad, you simply cannot
build the alliances required to contain China or Russia if you cannot work with
countries that do not embrace Anglo-American liberalism or Eurocrat
proceduralism. You need a way to deal constructively not just with monarchies
and military rulers but also with the political models variously described as
populism or illiberal democracy or soft authoritarianism, with leaders in the
style of Narendra Modi of India and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, if you do
not want the world to belong to the harder authoritarianism of Moscow or the
techno-totalitarianism of Beijing.
Likewise at home, you cannot rally sustained bipartisan
support for a pro-democracy grand strategy if you are constantly linking this
strategy to your conflict with your domestic political opponents. Or, for that
matter, if you are constantly linking it to values that are the province of
only your own political coalition. A grand strategy that equates democracy
simplistically with social liberalism or progressivism is never going to get
sustained buy-in from Republicans, and it will always be hostage to the next
election cycle.
This last point is crucial to understanding America’s global
challenge as well. Some liberal hawks might like to believe that the challenge
of illiberalism is primarily a challenge of regimes imposed on unwilling
populations — that Middle Eastern, African, and Central Asian elites are
favorable to Russia and China because they want to imitate their ruthless mode
of rule but that the inhabitants of these countries would be in the liberal
camp if only the boot came off their neck.
Who do policies alienate?
The Bennett Institute report should cast doubt on that
assumption. It does not just show that non-Western mass opinion is favorable to
China and Russia. It also offers evidence that a divergence in fundamental
values, not just a difference in political leadership or perceived interests,
is driving the split between developed democracies and the developing world.
What you see are high-income democracies becoming steadily more liberal since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But there is hardly any change in the values of the rest of the world
Here the most striking chart appears deep in the report: It
shows an index of socially liberal values (measuring secularism, individualism,
progressive ideas, and personal freedom) worldwide across the past 30 years.
What you see are high-income democracies becoming steadily more liberal since
the fall of the Berlin Wall. But there is hardly any change in the values of
the rest of the world, no sign that social liberalism is taking hold outside of
countries where in 1990 it was powerful already.
This creates a challenge for anyone intent on organizing US
foreign policy around current progressive values. Maybe you can unite our
closest allies, our liberal imperium’s rich and aging core, around that kind of
ideological vision. But you run a real and growing risk of alienating everybody
else.
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