[Mb-civic] League of Dictators? - Robert Kagan - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

League of Dictators?
Why China and Russia Will Continue to Support Autocracies
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By Robert Kagan
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 30, 2006; B07

Ever since liberalism emerged in the 18th century, its inevitable 
conflict with autocracy has helped shape international politics. What 
James Madison called "the great struggle of the epoch between liberty 
and despotism" dominated much of the 19th century and most of the 20th, 
when liberal powers lined up against various forms of autocracy in wars 
both hot and cold.

Many believed this struggle ended after 1989 with the collapse of 
communism, the last claimant to "legitimate" autocracy, and was 
supplanted as the main source of global conflict by ancient religious, 
ethnic and cultural antipathies, a view seemingly confirmed by Sept. 11, 
2001, and the rise of Islamic radicalism.

But the present era may be shaping up as, among other things, yet 
another round in the conflict between liberalism and autocracy. The main 
protagonists on the side of autocracy will not be the petty 
dictatorships of the Middle East theoretically targeted by the Bush 
doctrine. They will be the two great autocratic powers, China and 
Russia, which pose an old challenge not envisioned within the new "war 
on terror" paradigm.

If this seems surprising, it is because neither power took the course 
most observers predicted. In the late 1990s, despite the failures of 
Boris Yeltsin, Russia's political and international trajectory seemed 
roughly to be in a Western, liberal direction. China was, as recently as 
2002, assumed to be heading toward greater political liberalization at 
home and greater integration with the liberal world. Sinologists and 
policymakers argued that whether Beijing's rulers liked it or not, this 
was the inescapable requirement for transforming China into a successful 
market economy.

Today these assumptions look questionable even to their authors. Talk of 
Russia's impending democratization has faded, as has talk of 
integration. As Dmitri Trenin recently put it, Moscow has "left the 
Western orbit and set out in 'free flight.' " China continues to 
integrate itself in the global economic order, but few observers talk 
about the inevitability of its political liberalization. Its economy 
booms even as its leadership firmly maintains one-party rule, so people 
now talk of a "Chinese model" in which political autocracy and economic 
growth go hand in hand. Russia's leaders like this model, too, though in 
their case, economic growth rests on seemingly limitless oil and gas 
reserves.

Until now the liberal West's strategy has been to try to integrate these 
two powers into the international liberal order, to tame them and make 
them safe for liberalism. But that strategy rested on an expectation of 
their gradual, steady transformation into liberal societies. If, 
instead, China and Russia are going to be sturdy pillars of autocracy 
over the coming decades, enduring and perhaps even prospering, then they 
cannot be expected to embrace the West's vision of humanity's inexorable 
evolution toward democracy and the end of autocratic rule. Rather, they 
can be expected to do what autocracies have always done: resist the 
encroachments of liberalism in the interest of their own long-term survival.

In small but revealing ways this is what Russia and China are doing, in 
places such as Sudan and Iran, where they are making common cause to 
block the liberal West's efforts to impose sanctions, and in Belarus, 
Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe and Burma, where they have embraced various 
dictators in defiance of the global liberal consensus. All these actions 
can be explained away as simply serving narrow material interests. China 
needs Sudanese and Iranian oil; Russia wants the hundreds of millions of 
dollars that come from the sale of weapons and nuclear reactors. But 
there is more than narrow self-interest involved in their decisions. 
Defending these governments against the pressures of the liberal West 
reflects their fundamental interests as autocracies.

Those interests are easy enough to understand. Consider the question of 
sanctions. As China's U.N. ambassador explains, "As a general principle, 
we always have difficulty with sanctions, whether it is this case 
[Sudan] or other cases." And well they might, since they continue to 
suffer under sanctions imposed by the liberal world 17 years ago. China 
would like to get the international community out of the sanctions 
business altogether. So would Russia. Its opposition to sanctions 
against Sudan "isn't really about Sudan," notes Pavel Baev. It "is 
taking a line against sanctions . . . to reduce the usability of this 
whole instrument of the U.N. to the absolute minimum."

Nor do Russia and China welcome the liberal West's efforts to promote 
liberal politics around the globe, least of all in regions of strategic 
importance to them. Their reactions to the "color revolutions" in 
Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan were hostile and suspicious, and 
understandably so. Western liberals see political upheaval in these 
countries as part of a natural if uneven evolution toward liberalism and 
democracy. But the Russians and Chinese see nothing natural in these 
occurrences, only Western-backed coups designed to advance Western 
influence in strategically vital parts of the world.

Are they so wrong? Might not the successful liberalization of Ukraine, 
urged and supported by the Western democracies, be but the prelude to 
the incorporation of that nation into NATO and the European Union -- in 
short, the expansion of Western liberal hegemony? As Trenin notes, the 
"Kremlin is getting ready for the 'battle for Ukraine' in all 
seriousness," and it understands, too, that the departure of Alexander 
Lukashenko from power in Belarus could well "push Minsk onto the 
Ukrainian-Euro-Atlantic path."

As usual in eras of conflict between liberalism and autocracy, perceived 
strategic and ideological interests tend to merge on both sides. Thus 
the Chinese understandably worry about preserving access to oil in the 
event of a confrontation with the United States. So they seek improved 
relations with the governments of Sudan and Angola, both out of favor 
with the liberal West; with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela; and with the 
government of Burma in exchange for access to port facilities. They are 
in a constant struggle for votes at the United Nations to strengthen 
their hand against Taiwan and Japan, so they court leaders such as 
Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, another autocrat loathed by the liberal West. 
Although European liberal interventionists such as Mark Leonard 
criticize China's willingness to offer "unconditional political support, 
economic aid and weapons to autocratic regimes that might otherwise . . 
. be susceptible to international pressure," one wonders why in the 
world the Chinese should do otherwise. Does one autocracy sacrifice its 
interests to join the West's condemnation of another autocracy?

An irony that Europeans should appreciate is that China and Russia are 
faithfully upholding one cardinal principle of the international liberal 
order -- insisting that all international actions be authorized by the 
U.N. Security Council -- in order to undermine the other principal aim 
of international liberalism, which is to advance the individual rights 
of all human beings, sometimes against the governments that oppress 
them. So while Americans and Europeans have labored over the past two 
decades to establish new liberal "norms" to permit interventions in 
places such as Kosovo, Rwanda and Sudan, Russia and China have used 
their veto power to prevent such an "evolution" of norms. The future is 
likely to hold more such conflicts.

The world is a complicated place and is not about to divide into a 
simple Manichean struggle between liberalism and autocracy. Russia and 
China are not natural allies. Both need access to the markets of the 
liberal West. And both share interests with the Western liberal powers. 
But as autocracies they do have important interests in common, both with 
each other and with other autocracies. All are under siege in an era 
when liberalism does seem to be expanding. No one should be surprised 
if, in response, an informal league of dictators has emerged, sustained 
and protected by Moscow and Beijing as best they can. The question will 
be what the United States and Europe decide to do in response. 
Unfortunately, al-Qaeda may not be the only challenge liberalism faces 
today, or even the greatest.

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for 
International Peace and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall 
Fund, writes a monthly column for The Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042801987.html
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