After America, Nothing (Neon Liberalism #75, with Nicholas Grossman)

Join Samantha Hancox-Li and guest Nicholas Grossman, professor of political science at the University of Illinois, as they discuss the damage Trump is doing to the Pax Americana, the prospects for a "Chinese Century," and why the likeliest future is simply multipolar anarchy.

Neon Liberalism can be heard on Spotify, on Apple, on YouTube, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Transcript

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:00:10]**
Well, welcome back to Neon Liberalism. I'm Samantha Hancox-Li. We live in an increasingly turbulent age. The war in Iran is only the latest manifestation of an international system that kind of feels like it's falling apart at the seams. For most of my life, I lived in what they called the unipolar moment — or the new American century, that's what they were aiming for at one point — this era where the boundaries of the world system seemed pretty fixed. There wasn't really that much chaos. There wasn't that much upheaval. There were a few wars here and there, but there was a kind of stability to it. And that is out the window.

And so to try and understand what's going on in the world, how we got here, what this means, and maybe what the future holds, I am very excited to have on Nicholas Grossman. Nicholas is a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois. He is the editor of Arc Digital, and most recently the author of "Staggering Towards Anarchy" for Liberal Currents. So yeah, Nick, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

**Nicholas Grossman [00:01:25]**
Sure, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:01:32]**
So I guess one way to get into what your article in specific was talking about is to talk about how people look at what Trump is doing on the world stage — all of it — and say: this is it, we're toast, America is toast. And who's going to pick up the crown? China, right? China is rising, China is strong, it is going to be a Chinese century and not an American one. And you want to argue against that, if I understand your thesis correctly. So what's your view on where we are, and how we got here, and where we're going?

**Nicholas Grossman [00:02:10]**
Yeah, so I'd sort of argue against that in that the part about America relatively declining, China rising — I don't dispute any of that part. It's more that, with the United States losing its unipolar moment, or hegemony, or US-led world order — liberal world order, whatever we want to call it — losing that, there is not going to be some sort of Chinese-led world order that replaces it. China doesn't have nearly the power, resources, or capabilities to be able to even set something like that up, even if they wanted to, which we're not totally sure if they do. But even if they did, they couldn't.

And I think this speaks to what you said at the beginning, which is that these are things that tons of people, myself included, growing up with this, took for granted — well, not completely, but took for granted. The idea that there is a dominant world power that is able to keep a semblance of order, that other countries defer to somewhat — whether they want to or not — but that acknowledge this power structure and act accordingly within it, which is relatively stabilizing: that's been something that has been in place for most of our lives. After the end of the Cold War in particular, and sort of with the Cold War throughout — the post-World War Two order, where you had this idea of the free world, or first world, second world, third world, and leader of the free world. Any of that stuff implies that there is such a thing to be leader of, and that's something I think people have taken really for granted.

So the United States — we can get into details about various ways the US is declining — but China, while rising, is not possibly going to set up some sort of world order that they are more in charge of controlling. Instead, what it's looking like is we're heading to something more chaotic. Even after the 2024 election, one of the first things I said afterwards was that when future historians are looking to mark the end of the American century, or the end of the US world order, they're going to pick November 2024. But that doesn't necessarily mean that China's century is starting. It's something likely more chaotic, multilateral, and dangerous.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:04:55]**
Okay, so there's a lot in there, and I guess I just want to start with hegemonic suicide, right? Like, what brought us to this crisis in the first place? We had this era of American hegemony — depending on where you want to start the date on that — but what is going on that is leading to this kind of implosion of the existing world order?

**Nicholas Grossman [00:05:30]**
So hegemonic suicide is a great term that I didn't come up with, but I think is very useful, in that I don't think we've ever really seen something like this before. The British Empire fell, but didn't really do it to themselves. Or various regional empires — Rome, the Mongols, the Chinese empires, the Inca, sort of take your pick — they all rise and fall, but they don't have as much of a shooting-themselves-in-the-foot aspect as the United States currently has.

So the broad big picture: the US became the dominant world power, and has a more stable — officially we don't call it an empire, but kind of an empire — than previous instances, because of something that really is unique in history, which was that the US mostly did it by voluntary alliances, by mutual partnerships. The US did not go and form, say, NATO by armed subjugation of Western Europe and Central Europe. They did it by these mutually beneficial alliances — by things like the Marshall Plan, using a lot of money to rebuild Europe after World War Two. A lot of that was national interest: build up Europe, and then get to sell them a lot of stuff, open up markets for the United States, and get basing rights. The US got a whole lot out of it, but it was a mutual agreement, one based on joint interest and mutual respect.

You could say the same thing about the US relationship with South Korea, for example, or Australia, or a variety of other allies. And then also using force to impose itself — for example, during the Cold War, in Latin America, places in the Middle East — but also with different partnerships: a lot of democracies, but also an ongoing economic and quasi-military alliance with Saudi Arabia, for example.

And with all of this, the whole world structure was based on this one core bedrock idea, which was a belief in American power and American stability. People knew that if you're going to mess with the rules in some way — if you're going to do piracy, or disturb open trade, or you're going to do a blatant aggression, kind of like, say, Russia into Ukraine in 2022, or Iraq into Kuwait in 1990 — it meant that you were messing with the world's premier power. You're disrupting the global order, and the United States would stand by its friends and push back against its enemies, and they were bigger than you, so you might as well learn to work within it.

And we can see this in many different structures: the financial system centered around the United States and the dollar; the United Nations — the headquarters of the world government — it's not really a world government, but to the extent we have one, where is the UN? It was in San Francisco, then New York. Everybody travels to us; we don't travel to them. The President of the World Bank is always an American. The President of the IMF is always a European. The UN has its Security Council role and its nuclear nonproliferation role — all these different roles. But it was built on that idea of American reliability and American power.

And that is what the United States has thrown away. It had started at least wobbling in 2017, with Trump's first term, as the United States started shifting its position to be friendlier to authoritarians, especially Putin, and more antagonistic towards democracies and traditional US allies. And that has really accelerated in this term. By alienating a lot of allies, by cozying up to various US rivals and authoritarians, by egregiously violating international law left and right, by being incredibly corrupt — really world-historically corrupt, from the Trump administration inside the United States — and using force in a way that is never cast as a coalition effort, as something that is good for the world, that gets a lot of buy-in from other people, but instead doing it like an aggressive bully — all of this amounts to the United States forfeiting its role as the world hegemonic power, the guarantor of global security, this force of world stability.

That, of course, did many things that were either destabilizing or bad or immoral in history — and the thing about this point is, I concede all those criticisms. Anybody can have absolutely all of those criticisms, and we could say they're all correct — I'm sure I'd dispute a few — but nevertheless, it was providing more of an order than the world saw, for example, in the early half of the 20th century, where you had World War One, the Great Depression, World War Two. That was less stable, more chaotic.

And the loss of American power — by Trump throwing it away, and convincing people that, since the United States reelected him, they can't do any long-term security planning assuming that the US is going to be reliable, because America is at most four years away from flipping sides again, from breaking agreements, from just becoming an unreliable, chaotic, lie-based force — that is heavily disrupting. And it's something that so many people took for granted, where the criticisms of America, while a lot of them were deserved, were not things like: you started a giant war of conquest just to take a bunch of resources and keep them for yourself permanently. That is the way that powerful countries used to all operate, and now we're heading into something more like that. And the United States has been doing this voluntarily, as opposed to being forced to. We didn't have something like China beating the US in a war — it's the US giving it away.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:11:04]**
Yeah, so — there's a lot to respond to, and I want to get to the other powers in the world and how they're reacting to this, especially how what is clearly the other great power in the world, China, is reacting to this, or positioning themselves in all this. But I am kind of interested in some of the historical perspective here. You said that we don't usually see cases of hegemonic suicide — you mentioned Rome and other examples — and I'm a little suspicious of that, actually. Right? I mean, there's a narrative of Rome, of like, everything in Rome is going great, then there were the barbarians, oh no, fall of the Western Roman Empire. I don't think that's really accurate. You look at what's happening there, and it is the decay of Roman institutions — the way that they start recruiting barbarians into the Roman system to resolve some of their internal disputes that leads to further decay.

And I think you can see a similar pattern in some of the great episodes of European imperialism, right? When the British conquer and colonize India, they do so in part because the Mughal Empire is in catastrophically dire straits, and it's an opening that the British are able to take advantage of. You can make a similar point about the Qing Empire in China. So I think there's something to this idea that the domestic politics of these hegemons can often be a cause of the end of their hegemony.

**Nicholas Grossman [00:12:45]**
I think that's right. I'm not suggesting — I mean, the argument that it's Trump as the cause of it, and specifically reelecting him, is a domestic politics argument, that it was something internal. The difference, I think, with the suicide part is throwing it away so fast and so voluntarily, without a push from the outside. So where the British give up North America because of wars, and eventually give up South Asia because of massive protests and also violence, and because of an overextended empire — they can't hold on to it.

The United States — unless we can somehow extricate ourselves from this, and I don't really see a good path — the US just gave away freedom of navigation by attacking Iran without really thinking it through or lining up any allies, and didn't have to do that at all. The US has given up a lot of NATO and a lot of the support of allies, mostly, it seems, because the president has a personal disdain for democracies and rule-of-law systems, and a personal affinity for both Putin himself and for Russian authoritarianism, and that style of it. And so I can't think of an equivalent — even in Rome, when you think of a lot of the worst leaders — I don't know, Nero — by that point it's solidly an empire. He didn't get elected, and then reelected to do it again, but worse.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:14:10]**
Yeah, that's a good point, and I very much take your point that it is really the re-election of Trump more than anything that has convinced everybody around the world — like, well, it was fun while it lasted. Maybe one Trump was an anomaly — and they were very happy when Biden came back, he's like, okay, NATO is great, we're always committed to NATO — but then we elect Trump again. So it's like, yeah, there goes that.

**Nicholas Grossman [00:14:40]**
Yeah, it's like that was our mulligan, you know. We got one. The world really did bear with us once. I can't really blame them for not doing so a second time.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:14:55]**
Well, we'll see. But to kind of come back to the other side of this — what's your read on China, and what they're doing, and how they see the world?

**Nicholas Grossman [00:15:10]**
Uh, so for one, I think you're right in the sense that China has accumulated enough power — I think we can reasonably call it a great power. There's no question that it's number two in terms of power in the world. I don't even know who that would be a contest with. I suppose people would have said Russia, but we've seen Russia throw so much of its society at failing in Ukraine, failing to conquer it — and whatever's left of their military afterwards, they're ending up decently more dependent on China long term. India, maybe. If Europe congeals into a single state, maybe Europe — who knows. But clearly now China is the other one.

So for one, I would think from a Chinese strategic perspective that there are two big things that have happened — or maybe three. But with Trump specifically, there's a lot of the old adage of never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. China seems pretty content to sit back and let the United States damage itself and damage its relationships. China, by contrast, looks steady, looks more attractive as a potential international leader — not because they have changed something. There are still strings attached to working with China, for example, and their system is not reformed. It doesn't reflect the values of countries like, I don't know, Australia, for example, which is still very wary of China. But by being just more stable than the United States — by being somebody that looks like, if you make an agreement with them, they will honor that agreement five years from now, as opposed to the way that the United States is breaking tons of agreements and not even sticking to ones it just made really recently. So they mostly seem to be content to stand back.

And then, watching the United States use a lot of its resources and damage its relationships with the Iran war and similar — the other big event being the Russia-Ukraine war. From China's perspective, you have to imagine both seeing Russia weaker and potentially as a long-term junior partner to China, but also, if China had military ambitions about Taiwan — I would think that if they have smart strategists at all, they are looking at the way that the Ukrainians have kept Russia at bay, and the way now the Iranians are keeping America at bay, and wondering if they're all that sure about a military operation with Taiwan now.

So that's just, I guess, the broad perspective — an opportunity to rise just by existing, by being kind of stable. And then, though, they also have a lot of internal problems that they'll manage as things are going forward. I don't know if you want me to get into details about where it might — yeah.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:18:30]**
No, let's talk about some of the external questions first. There's a book that just came out — it's, what is it, The Persistence of Conquest, or The Endurance of Conquest — maybe just Conquest. Anyways, I would need to look that up. It basically says, like you said, in the past, way back when, big empires, big states would look at their neighbors and say: I want to take a bite out of you — in fact, I might want the whole thing, right? And this happened a bunch of times, and in the modern era this has kind of become economically ruinous.

And sometimes you think you can get away with it, right? Vladimir Putin obviously thought — just even from the way they deployed their troops, the way they tried to conduct operations — they really thought it was going to be a three-day special military operation. They thought this was going to be their thunder run to Baghdad. They were just going to drive straight to Kyiv, and the Ukrainians would capitulate, and then they would suddenly have a lot more Russia, or possibly a satellite republic, or whatever.

And there's that temptation to be like: we're just going to do a quick raid, and it'll be over in three days. And we saw Trump do this — we saw Trump do this twice, actually. Once in Iran, with the Midnight Hammer raid, when they blew up some Iranian facilities, and then afterwards he immediately declared a ceasefire and somehow it stuck, right? Or we saw in Venezuela, where they helicoptered in and snatched the president of Venezuela and helicoptered out, and we're like, we're friends now — and the number two woman there, Delcy Rodríguez, is like, you're right, we are friends now. So there's this attraction to doing these little military raids that you think are not going to come back and bite you — that you think are going to be clean and quick, and are going to provide you with a really big domestic political win. That's kind of what's driving all of this.

And you can just see China kind of torn between the two poles here. They have a lot of domestic political reasons to be like, we'd really like to reunify China — of course, excuse me, not reunify, China's always been unified — like, whatever, reintegrate, I don't know what you want to call it — conquer-but-not-conquer our wayward friends who were actually us the whole time. I don't know exactly how they're selling it. So there's these domestic reasons — the way they've talked it up, the way they've talked up recovering from the century of humiliation — and yet also there's the fear that we might be sticking our hand into something that we can't get it out of. Because that has happened — it's happened in Iran, it's happened in Venezuela. And so I guess I'm curious where you think Xi Jinping specifically is going to jump on that.

**Nicholas Grossman [00:21:00]**
So I think that one's really hard to gauge, of course, from the outside, but two of the factors that I keep looking at are aging — I guess that's one factor in two places: both him aging and the society aging. So, Xi is 72. By ending term limits he has essentially made himself leader for life, and by just about all accounts he's the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao. So he has a lot of domestic control. But that also means, like most older leaders, he's probably thinking about things like legacy — that if he's going to be somebody who reunifies China, or whatever — it's really something, right? How you have to say stuff to keep certain lies straight — like, if you're trying to pretend that Taiwan and China are not separate countries, how many ways you have to twist yourself.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:21:48]**
Yeah, for the listeners out there: China and Taiwan are separate countries. I'm just going to say it.

**Nicholas Grossman [00:21:52]**
Yeah, yeah. And I'm saying it right — we can say it, so we're sort of freed from it. Or — this is another one that's been driving me nuts — how you're just not allowed to say that Trump lost the Iran war, or that negotiations aren't going anywhere. For whatever reason, you're just not allowed to say that. They're in talks, he's doing things, doing moves. Anyway.

With China specifically: so, one, Xi would likely be thinking about legacy — both a successor, perhaps setting somebody else up, or keeping any talk of a successor at bay, because that would reduce some of his own power. And likely thinking — and there's been all this pressure — that he could go down in history as the leader who finally solved the Taiwan issue. And so that has to be awfully tempting.

And also, with the society aging, China is rapidly becoming a society that doesn't have enough young people to support its old people. That not only means a shortage of workers, it also means potentially a shortage of soldiers. And so, if they are going to have the men at arms to do a large military operation, they only have a fairly short window — measured in years, not decades — of when they were going to potentially do it. And then also with the United States finally backing off Taiwan — no matter how exactly it's covered, who would really expect Donald Trump to order the US Navy to get into direct engagements with China and cause World War Three over China trying to take Taiwan? And so they see the US weaker and backing off — an opportunity based on current demographics and leader age. If they're going to, now is probably the time.

And yet — as I mentioned with the Ukraine war, one thing that stood out was when the Ukrainians blew up the Moskva, the flagship Russian ship that was in the Black Sea. I'd be willing to bet quite a bit that there were some planners in China who took a circle that was drawn around Taiwan and drew a larger circle that was approximately the length of that missile range. Because it was a Ukrainian-made missile — it wasn't really supposed to be able to sink a ship like that, and they hit it twice. And so there would be a lot of military difficulties for China trying to take Taiwan: it's an island, it has few landable beaches, it has a lot of missiles, it would be very expensive. And the alternative — surrounding, blockading, and trying to squeeze the island — is something that would likely take years and have economic damage in the process.

But then again, as we've seen both in the United States and in Russia, these are authoritarians who are surrounded by people who kiss their ass, and who don't tell them bad news, and who tell them how tough they are, and how everybody else recognizes how tough they are and does whatever they want. So it's hard to say what the internal planning inside China would be, or if they even would have an accurate sense that Taiwan would be difficult. But I do think that we could say there is a greater risk of an attempted Chinese expansionism in the next few years than there has been in really many decades at this point.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:26:40]**
Yeah, I'm really struck by something you said at the beginning, which is that we have to talk about the aging not just of populations, but of specific leaders — of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump. They can tell, they know they're aging, they can feel it in their bodies. They know the clock is running out on them in some fundamental way, and they're starting to think about how they'll be remembered. And you can say all kinds of stuff, like, I raised GDP by this much, or I restored American prestige in the world, or Chinese prestige in the world — but these things are hard to measure. If you can change the map, right — if you can make your country's color a little bit bigger — it's very hard to argue with your place in history. That's just a fact.

If Vladimir Putin had pulled it off — if he had done it, if he had conquered Ukraine, and if he had turned it into a new part of Russia — yeah, they would have to write him into the history books right alongside Catherine the Great. And I think we absolutely see Trump obsessed with this logic. That's why he's always talking about the 51st state, he's talking about Greenland or Canada, or he'll post some map with, like, Cuba with an American flag over it. So they've all got map-painter brain. It turns out you don't need to play Paradox games in order to be afflicted with map-painter brain — or, I don't know, maybe Xi is really into Hearts of Iron Four. That's possible, but I kind of doubt it. Anyways. So there's that. That's great. What a wonderful time to be alive.

But I want to ask a little bit more about the other side of this aging question — China's aging population — which ties into something that I've written about for Liberal Currents a couple times, which is always controversial on the internet, which is the birth rates thing, right? Where, in America, this discourse is kind of torn between right-wing idiots who think that it's time we banned women from education because they're running out of babies, or whatever, or have some insane Great Replacement stuff going on — and then, on the other hand, people on the left who are like, we shouldn't even be talking about this, it's not a real problem, it isn't happening — at the same time, right? It's not real, and it's also real but it doesn't matter, and also it doesn't matter but we shouldn't be talking about it. I think those arguments are a little bit confused as well. But China is a different context. What's going on in China demographically?

**Nicholas Grossman [00:28:20]**
Yeah, it's an important difference, in that there's a basic idea with demographics of what economists call the replacement rate — just the idea that you need more people to keep societies going. It seems like a really basic proposition, but it is true. You need more people — and in fact, you need a few more younger people than you have older people, because of the way labor is distributed. It's just a basic thing about societies.

The reason why, in the United States — or maybe the West more broadly, but especially in the US — a lot of the talk gets so creepy and weird is because the people who are advocating it clearly mean white babies. Because for the replacement rate, the United States has a great way to handle it, which is immigration. Pretty much throughout human societies, as people get richer, they have fewer children, and they don't have children until later. You don't need to have 12 kids where six die before they're five years old, and then the other six grow up to be able to work your farm and take care of you when you are old and retired at 50 — it's not that society anymore. And so the US could easily make it above a replacement rate and continue thriving, growing, being able to pay things like pensions, retirement, Social Security, Medicare — be able to pay those things by having a bunch of immigrant workers. And it was working really well. So the "people need to have more babies," when that comes from a right-wing position in the United States, it's always white people specifically — as in, we can't replace them with people who aren't white. And so there's that clear racist element to it.

With China — they don't have America's history and success with immigration, and they have different cultural resistances to it and legal resistances to it. China is not about to get a flood of immigrants who are going to work in China and support the Chinese retirees — which is a group that's growing, not only because of things like the one-child policy, and then the continued culture of that, where they are shrinking in population that way, but also because of medical care: people are able to live longer and get more care, and that means more people are needed to care for them. So China, by not being able to solve this problem with immigration, is going to run into an increasing amount of economic problems in the not-that-distant future — more people retiring who can't work, and more people needed to support them. And that can hinder economic growth.

And where that becomes an especial problem with China is that it's an authoritarian country. They're still technically called the Chinese Communist Party, but they haven't really been communist in a while. What they have been is state-managed capitalism, and they have been in part staying in power by delivering economic growth. So there was this old theory — this was part of the argument for bringing China into the World Trade Organization — the idea that as China liberalizes more in terms of trade, in terms of economics, that they will then liberalize more in terms of politics: that they will democratize, or they will have greater human rights, or anything like that. And that clearly hasn't happened. China did become a lot more capitalistic, and a lot more market-oriented, but it has not become freer in any noticeable way — and in some ways, technologically enabled, a more authoritarian and tighter-controlled society.

But still, what that meant is the Chinese government had a sort of bargain with the Chinese people, and especially with the growing Chinese business class: we will continue delivering economic growth, and you're all going to be getting richer, more prosperous, things are clearly getting better — so don't complain about the politics, don't start asking about, I don't know, greater freedom of speech, or anything like that. And if the government can't continue delivering on the economic growth part of the deal, well, then the political lack of freedom and stagnation and lack of democracy starts becoming a potentially thornier issue — what's the bargain for people? And if that happens — I'm not saying there's going to be a flowering of democracy in China. I don't see that happening anytime soon. But it does mean, at minimum, that if China is having more unrest and needs to suppress more dissent, they have to spend more resources doing that, and that is less resources they can use for any other national priority.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:33:30]**
So I'm actually kind of skeptical about a lot of what you've just said here. The demographic problem — that's clearly true, right? Like you said, they had the one-child policy for a long time, they've gotten rid of the one-child policy, it hasn't really done anything to increase birth rates, they do have a rapidly graying population, and there's no sign that that's going to stop — because if you look across the cross-cultural comparisons, no government policies really affect this stuff that much. At least yet, anyways.

What I'm a little skeptical of is the idea that this is going to significantly impede a potential invasion of Taiwan or other military contingency. And one way to look at that is to look at the war in Ukraine, where both Russia and Ukraine are facing at least as much demographic pressure as China is. They are both rapidly graying societies, they are both facing shrinking populations, and both of them have tried to adapt to this.

In Russia, the solution is: we're going to recruit a lot of older guys. This is not a war where they're conscripting 18-year-olds and marching them into the trenches. This is a war where they're offering 48-year-olds, 50-year-olds signing bonuses, from the various poor rural areas of Russia, to go out and man the trenches. It's not a young man's war — it's an old man's war, kind of bizarrely.

Ukraine has done the same thing. Ukraine has been enormously resistant to mobilizing its young population. There was this huge spate of articles in the Western press, of like, oh no, Ukraine's running out of infantry, they're going to collapse, they're going to crumble. And Ukraine was like, we can't throw our kids away — that's the national future right there. What are we going to do? We are going to put them all in factories, and they're going to build drones instead. So, to summarize very briefly, their answer was: we are going to replace people with materiel. We can afford to lose materiel; we don't want to lose people. And that seems to have worked. They have driven up Russian casualties quite a lot, and they have kept their own casualties at a reasonable level.

And if you take these two policies and you look at a war over Taiwan — China has an enormous rural population that is often quite poor, that may not have a lot of prospects, that is systematically excluded from the political process, much like Russia has an enormous rural hinterland. And likewise, if you look at an attempted invasion of Taiwan — well, they're not going to be walking there, right? It is a kind of amphibious invasion. These kinds of air-sea operations are going to be enormously materiel-intensive. And so an authoritarian government that doesn't care very much about its people — I can see them saying: yeah, some of you are going to die, but we've got a lot of you, you don't matter, and besides, we can just use materiel instead to prosecute this war. So I'm a little bit skeptical of the idea that the demographic problem is really the kind of military pressure that you suggest it is.

**Nicholas Grossman [00:36:50]**
If anything, I would think just militarily the demographic problem would add to the temptation of doing it now — that there's a relatively short window. I think you're right that if China were in a war, they could get tons of people and stuff to throw at it, and keep on throwing at it — that part I have very little doubt about.

The part with the demographic problem is more longer-term, about domestic control — where they are looking at a future of being less and less able to deliver constant economic growth, and then progressively, if they can't do that, they have difficulties, potentially, of political disagreement, or people feeling like — and this would be, I'm thinking, more urban business types than, say, the poorest rural Chinese peasant — where they start getting wary of not having some political power. So this is more, if we're reaching for historical analogy, this is more like the merchants in the French Revolution: the idea that we're playing a big role in society and clearly generating a lot of power for the state via all the wealth generation we're doing, and yet we don't have any say in how this is going, and you're treating us like you can just push us around. But that's more long-term.

If anything, the reason why I think a lot of the demographic stuff is relevant for the discussion of highest-level power in the world is that it's one of the things that outside observers — the West, but others too — that are expecting China to be this dominant world power are discounting. The demographic issue makes it that we might be looking at the next decade or so as the peak of Chinese power, as opposed to just the start of something that keeps rising. And it's really hard to say long-term — there are huge open questions about things like where technology goes. I mean, who knows — if in five years some Chinese company cracks artificial general intelligence in a way that then runs ahead of everyone else and starts having great economic and military benefits, then all bets are off. So who knows on that one.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:38:55]**
Yeah, the singularity might happen, but, like, I'm not gonna bet on it.

**Nicholas Grossman [00:39:00]**
Yeah, yeah — so who knows. But it's a common thing for outside observers, especially in freer societies with more free-flowing information, to have this jealousy sometimes of authoritarians. Because they're watching from the outside, and it can often look like: oh, they're so efficient, they don't have to deal with all this red tape, and they can make all these things happen. And in actuality, they often have a lot of internal problems, and they're better at masking them.

I'll give you a China-specific example of this: something like the Belt and Road Initiative. China is doing its version of, like I mentioned earlier, the US and the Marshall Plan — where they spend a bunch of money building stuff in other places, and then those places both get some new infrastructure, and China gets access to the infrastructure, and potentially military bases, access to the market, things like that. And so sometimes when Americans are observing it, or Westerners, they'll look at it and say: oh, China, they didn't have to deal with getting approval in Congress, they didn't have to deal with this bureaucratic red tape, they just said, we're doing this project, and then they threw resources at it, and they did it — oh, isn't that so efficient?

And sometimes, yes. And other times — it's an authoritarian system. It doesn't have the type of market feedback, it doesn't have the type of internal reviews that more open systems do. And so some of those Belt and Road initiatives are done by the son of some party leader who's being groomed for future leadership, and this was a project that he was going to do that was going to show how he was such a great leader, and so it's a success — and if it's not working well — no, no, no, this guy is groomed for future leadership, it's a success, and so all of you say it's a success. And then they'll throw resources at something that isn't working, or that has bad cost overruns that they hide, or many other potential examples of this. But hindering China's potential rise to global power are internal problems that they are partially masking.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:41:30]**
So again I want to push back on some of the things you said here, because you said: well, China, they still call themselves the Chinese Communist Party, but they're not really communists, they're basically just capitalists, and they have this kind of bargain with the Chinese people, and especially the urban bourgeoisie — that we'll deliver economic growth, and you'll accept authoritarianism. And I am a little bit skeptical of this idea — in particular because, structurally, this is a Leninist party-state system, I think.

And there was a time when another Leninist party-state system embraced some capitalist reform, created some economic growth, seemed to be delivering for the people, created new classes — the NEP men and the kulaks, who were this kind of entrepreneurial capitalism — and then the party said: well, actually, we're going to kill all of you. And then they did it, right? They very much did wipe out the NEP men, they wiped out the kulaks, they pursued economic policies that were ruinous beyond what it's possible to describe.

And so when I look at the Chinese system, it's like — yeah, they have delivered economic growth, and the Chinese people seem to like it, but I don't know if that's really the foundation of their political power. And I don't know if they wouldn't be willing to just say: yeah, we are going to break the urban bourgeoisie — which we can absolutely do, because we just need to van a bunch of them, and then the rest will fall in line — if that is what's necessary for the party's objectives, politically speaking.

**Nicholas Grossman [00:43:00]**
I think so — no, I think you're right. It's more that what I'm trying to highlight is the trade-off. China, like pretty much every state — power ultimately is coming out of the barrel of a gun, all the way down. But if they have to use a lot more force to repress people, if they are going to do some sort of "we're reasserting control here, we're killing a lot of people" — both, I think it is fully within their capabilities to do so, and something that would fit with at least parts of their history. And it would also weaken them — weaken their economy internationally. You can't go through and liquidate a bunch of the business class and then turn back around to the world and say: this is a great place to do business, come and build a bunch of stuff here, move here, have offices here, you'll be fine. So if they do something like that, they are then asserting domestic control at the expense of international power.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:43:36]**
Yeah, that much I thought I would agree with, I guess. What I'm trying to say here is — I think it's important to distinguish between certain kinds of short-run questions, like will they invade Taiwan, and what are the calculations behind that, or what makes that possible — versus, you know — the Cold War, to take one example, was a marathon, it wasn't a sprint. Both the United States and the Soviet Union faced numerous different setbacks, and had numerous different victories, but it wasn't any one particular contest in the Cold War that mattered. It was this thing that spanned decades. And I think it's a similar thing with China and the United States today.

There's clearly some kind of rivalry going on of some kind — call it whatever you want — and there are questions about this proximate little contest, like, what's going to happen to the 20 million people who live in Taiwan? What are the factors driving that? And then there are these more long-term questions, where I think you're just right that the demographic question is going to be very serious for the People's Republic of China — that if they hit some kind of economic stumbling block of one kind or another, and they turn to more repression, they could easily find themselves in an unenviable cycle of stagnation and repression, and that might damage their long-term prospects. But I just want to distinguish that from these kind of short-term questions about, like, is Xi actually going to pull the trigger on this?

**Nicholas Grossman [00:45:07]**
Yeah, I think that's important. I don't think there's anything that could change the overarching dynamic of US-Chinese rivalry going forward in terms of global power — those forces are so big and will play out over a long time, and with a lot of open questions: artificial intelligence, does somebody end up using a nuclear weapon, does anything like the global financial crisis happen, COVID or a future pandemic. There are so many potential exogenous shocks, disruptors.

But what Trump has done by throwing away so much of America's power is accelerate that process — you could almost say, now that I'm thinking of it, moved it forward before China was ready. If this was the path this was on, the United States' decline was going to be more gradual, and something that was more forced. So, imagine you're China in, like, the mid-2010s — you survived the financial crisis, so things are looking pretty good. The United States has shown the limits of its military power, or overextended it, in the Iraq war and Afghanistan. The world is getting somewhat wary of the American-led economic system after the global financial crisis. So, good opportunities for China — and they start doing some things: they set up the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and that's sort of an alternative to the World Bank and the IMF, because they can't get a lot of seats there. And there are some tensions over global health, and they now have more separate health organizations sharing information.

Whereas — you mentioned the US and the Soviet Union — that was something where you had these entire systems that were functioning, and where both were able to project power globally. The idea of China doing something like Moscow's power projection into Cuba at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis — that is beyond something that China could do now, and well beyond. And so, with Trump accelerating a lot of this, you didn't have China ready to step in on things like global military power, with interventions and stability, or upholding international law, or enforcing open trade and freedom of navigation — and China doesn't have the resources for that. And so we're having this almost rapid, faster transition than was supposed to happen. It was supposed to end up as something more like: China builds up a lot of its capacity and more regional power, and the United States is gradually pulling back, in some fits and starts, and then you have almost two global systems again — and how do they interact, and how do we keep them more integrated than the Cold War system, where they got so separate, and that had so many dangers with it? And none of that was able to take place in its normal gradual way, because the United States went and threw away a bunch of that power and its alliances and stability, and China — or nobody, really — has anything to replace it.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:48:35]**
Oh, yeah — what's this line from your essay? "What will replace US global leadership after the Trump-accelerated American decline is nothing." And I kind of want to ask you about that — about this, you use the phrase "multipolar chaos," that seems to be coming. Why do you think that's the future, and what's that future going to look like?

**Nicholas Grossman [00:49:00]**
So I think it's the future just because there isn't anybody that can hold it together. The period that we lived through post-Cold War is very unusual in history. In fact — post-Cold War, sorry, the post-World War Two period — we are still in the longest period in human history, in the history of the state system, without great power war. A lot of that is because of nuclear deterrence, but that is also very much tied up in American reliability — so a lot of that is also American power and American hegemony.

A lot of times in periods throughout history — especially what we think of as global history, so when you have enough ships going across oceans; before that we don't really have anything that is global, it's a lot of separate histories — but when they're all interacting, more of the time you have these periods of intense international competition from the world's most powerful countries. You think of the whole European colonization period and all the ways that they are competing with each other to exploit various places they can land. Or the period of the Franco-Prussian War, World War One, the Great Depression, World War Two — where you have these big rivalries, and nobody is clearly bigger than everybody, and everybody's starting to think that either they have a shot at being the world's biggest power, or — often — that they can be a regional hegemon, that they can push around, do conquest, do resource theft, whatever they want, to the people that are their immediate neighbors, and that everyone else can stay out.

So, in fact, you could even argue that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was already a sign of this eroding — that's the sort of thing they would not have done during the Cold War, because the US would have prevented it, and in the period after the Cold War, because they didn't have the capabilities or didn't necessarily want to take that risk. And so, with the lack of anybody in charge — to paraphrase Churchill, just like his comment about democracies: the worst international system is American hegemony, except for all the others. And the temptation of conquest, and the loss of fear of deterrence, and the loss of a belief that working within the system was the best way for each country to pursue its own national interest, rather than trying to upend the system or push out the global system and install something more local — all of that is pre-World War Two stuff. More chaotic, more dangerous — kind of the most violent, dangerous periods in history. Whereas the other periods obviously have their problems, but have something more stable to them — it's an order you can organize around. And this was the case in the Cold War too: the bipolar US-Soviet Union, everyone kind of knew where they stood, knew what was likely to happen in terms of things like who might invade whom, where you were not at risk of invasion. And a lot of those things are up in the air.

So, even just to connect to the China stuff — when we were talking about Taiwan, the quick answer there would have been: no, there's probably not a war over Taiwan, because the United States is going to work to prevent it, and the US and China will deter each other, and both of them want stability. And we are talking about it as a live possibility — just another sign of what happens when you don't have that stabilizing force, whether you like the specific actor or not, of a global power that is going to try to keep an established order.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:53:20]**
Uh, yeah — I recently saw the eminent Cold War historian Odd Arne Westad basically say: yeah, a lot of people are talking about the Cold War as a model for what's coming, but that's wrong. What's coming is what we had not even before World War Two, but before World War One — where we had the many great powers of the world, and they all had their rivalries and their ambitions, they wanted their place in the sun, or they were afraid of somebody else taking their place in the sun, and it wasn't particularly ideological.

And another element of comparison — we've talked about this a bit already, but I think it's very interesting — is how much of it was being run almost separate from democratic publics. What you see in Sean McMeekin's July 1914 is how much of the July crisis and the precipitation of World War One basically just happened in foreign offices, and on the phones of various personalist dictators. And the people wound up dragged into this — and participated quite enthusiastically — but the choices were made by old men, basically, or ambitious middle-aged men who were kind of dumb. That happened too. So I think there really is something to that comparison — that we're entering into this age that is much more like this old-school great power competition, where there is no arbiter of the rules.

**Nicholas Grossman [00:55:00]**
Well, I think you're right — that is basically the answer to it, that the Cold War is really not the model for it, and hasn't been so much with China. A lot of this also connects to declining democracy — democratic backsliding, especially. So there's a theory of international relations, which I don't especially like, called democratic peace theory, and it shows that democracies are less likely to go to war with each other. And that part, statistically, is fine — a good finding. The reason why I don't especially like it is that I think a lot of the theorists over-attribute it to democracy itself. American allies not going to war with each other — that isn't surprising; that's power. Or sometimes capitalist countries that trade not going to war with each other — that's not democracy. But anyway.

There is a degree of a democratic check on at least certain types of wars — on a type of maybe disastrous foreign adventurism that can come from a few unchecked leaders. Putin and Ukraine is a good example, and the one that the United States is seeing — the Iran war is the best example of this. It was done totally arbitrarily out of the White House. There's not only no congressional permission, no legal authorization — as is required by the War Powers Act and required by the Constitution of the United States — nothing like that, but even more strikingly, no effort to get the public on board at all.

Contrast that with the lead-up to the Iraq war, where the Bush administration spent over a year selling people on the necessity of the war and the weapons of mass destruction — and I don't think it's necessary to get into the specifics of the case, how honest or true or false it was — but they still spent a lot of effort lining up all these international allies, getting a big coalition of the willing, and the war was popular at the start. The American public supported the Iraq war at over 60 percent.

And the Iran war, by contrast, was done without any public buy-in, without any effort to get public buy-in — not only not getting legal authorization, but not even bringing it up, not making the case that it's in the American people's interest. No allied buy-in — not even giving allies where the US has bases a heads-up of: hey, we're about to do this, and would you help, would you send troops? And there were British troops, and Australian troops, and Polish troops, and others in the Iraq war — eventually it was over 40 countries helping with the occupation. And all of this — whether one agrees with any of those wars or not — separate from the question of if you're going to do it, actually getting societal buy-in means there is a greater chance of success, of something actually happening.

So if you look at the Iraq war — this was something where I thought it was a bad idea in advance. I argued against it. I think history has mostly vindicated that. But it is worth acknowledging that the Bush administration said what they were going to do: they're going to invade Iraq, overthrow Saddam Hussein, do regime change, install a democracy, have local elections, build up local capacity, and then hand over to a local elected government, and leave. And that's what happened. There were a lot of other problems, and I don't want to downplay those, but still — that is what happened.

And you can contrast that with the Iran war — there is none of that. With the exception of, kind of like you mentioned with Venezuela earlier, a "we do something really quick, and it's easy, and we kill a few people, and then the new people say, sure, we'll do whatever you want, and then we win, and then we get cheers at home" — that seems to be the entirety of the thinking on it. And without a lot of that potential democratic check, or the need to get democracies and peoples and publics on board with it, that also meant that they did so much less in terms of planning. It's like they never had the slightest stress test for their idea, because they never tried to sell it to everybody. And that has made it not only the single least popular war at the start in modern US history — so since World War Two, as long as we've been measuring it: less popular than Iraq, less than Obama's intervention in Libya, you name it, any of them — and no allied support, but also just a lack of capabilities.

And it's those types of actions, as more things crumble, that get you into these types of situations where it causes problems for everybody, and there is no good extraction. You have the 21st-century equivalent of some prince's loser son who was given a captainship in the military to help set him up — we're kind of getting that equivalent now. And that puts the US in a much weaker strategic position and less able to win the war. Even if I thought it was a good idea — which I don't — I would still prefer to succeed rather than fail, and they are set up for failure. And it's hard to see that without connecting it to the larger problems — the loss of both the governmental check of democracy and even the interest in going through democratic channels.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [00:59:40]**
Okay, so we're coming up on the end of time here, but I thought I would ask you one final question, which is: we've talked a lot about chaos, we've talked a lot about the instability that Trump has been bringing, both to the international system and domestically — domestic planning for war, etc., etc. Let's say, purely hypothetically, a Democratic president gets elected in 2028, right? We have a new Democratic administration, and they're going to be looking at a world that is very different than it was in, say, 2016, or 2020 even. What should they do? How should a future democratic liberal administration think about foreign policy? You've argued in this essay, and on this podcast, that there's still going to be a lot of American power left lying around — we might be blowing up our alliances, but there are a lot of ways in which American power endures. What should we do with it?

**Nicholas Grossman [01:00:40]**
So that is both a great and extremely difficult question. I am not going to give you a good answer — I already know I'm not going to find one satisfying. But yes — just on the premise: the US has an immense amount of hard power. As much as people would be critical of uses of American power, I think they took for granted how much the US was not using it — how much restraint you saw from the United States compared to, I don't know, the Nazis or Imperial Japan, or for that matter the British Empire, the British colonizers. Decently more restraint from American military power. And then just control of the financial system, the size of the economy, the fact that so much of global financial assets are denominated in dollars — there simply isn't anywhere else for the money to go. The US military budget is still approximately three times the size of China's — give or take, but decently larger — and has all the legacy systems and capacity built up. So yeah, the US is huge, and even while declining relatively, it will be the country with the most hard power in the world for the indefinite future. And power has a way of smoothing aside a lot of other things. A broad example from history: look at the United States having positive relationships and now formal alliances with Germany and Japan. People get over it, they move on, they have new interests.

And I could see it going in many different directions. So I would think that it would be pretty important for a future Democratic president — let's just say 2029, and a strong electoral repudiation of Trump, approaching the world with a trifecta in US government and the rest of it — to at least acknowledge the problem. I don't mean go on an apology tour or something like that, but the Biden approach was: hey, let's just kind of pretend that didn't happen and snap back to where we were. And a lot of the world, especially American allies, seemed happy to have that — to treat it as an aberration, as a fluke, as something that you could just get rid of. And that is clearly not the case anymore. A lot of Americans — a plurality of voters — having lived through it and seen a lot of the consequences of it, said, "Yeah, let's do it again, let's do it more." And so the world can't pretend that way.

So: acknowledging it, and building up capacity, trying to renew various partnerships, restore — I can't see any alternative better than going to places like Canada and Europe and saying — I mean, there's gonna be a lot of work for people in the State Department, a lot of mid-level Treasury people. I'm imagining the mid-level Treasury person who's like: hi, Canada, yeah, we're sorry about those sanctions — look, that wasn't my call, I wasn't there, but we'll try to undo them. To try to move forward, while also setting up and encouraging and being supportive of alternative channels and capacities.

So, something like — the United States was maybe in the past wary or negative about a joint European military capacity, because it would be a rival to the structure of NATO. Which is another great example of American power — it drives me nuts when Trump says we could never get anything from NATO, where the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO is always an American. Other countries voluntarily put their troops under American command — that is unprecedented in history, so many countries putting so much of their armed forces under the orders of a foreign power like that. They even helped in Afghanistan. Anyway, all that stuff. But where a European military — instead of seeing it as a potential rival to US-controlled structures in NATO, see it as a very useful partner that could survive spasms of the United States, if it goes back and forth. How to resolve that, I think, is one of the ongoing questions.

The big one — this one, where I thought you were going to ask me — was something with the Iran war specifically. I really hope it's not still going by then — I mean, I think we are talking global economic calamity if it is, but who knows — and adjusting a lot of the US position in the Middle East.

Oh, actually, I'll tell you one. What I'd really like to see — and this will connect with those two — is leading a big global anti-corruption push. I think that would be both a response — including with the United States and various Trump malfeasance as a big target of it, where we would have to do a lot of it domestically, show the world that we hold our own accountable for this sort of thing, which is also why we're going to use resources and push you to hold yours accountable — and a lot of the challenge to the kind of far-right authoritarian, the nationalist, the transnational nationalist, fascist, whatever you want to call it — a lot of that is corrupt. We see it in Trump — corruption. We see it in Putin — corruption. With Orban in Hungary going down — all of a sudden, there is this money that goes to different, say, right-wing media in Western Europe and in the United States, that suddenly reported: oh no, we just lost this big source of funding that either we never asked questions about, or we're not going to disclose — and there's a decent chance that was coming through Orban and through Hungary, and he was also looting the state for himself and his friends.

And if we tie that to a push against oligarchy — against both tech oligarchs and any who are just trying to exercise oligarchic power, in a "I have an immense amount of money, and so laws don't really apply to me, and we, the people, can't tell me what to do — I'm beyond the state, I'm something else" way — if there's a big push there, I think that would be both something that the US was not doing nearly enough of before — more of that effort maybe could have helped to head off some of this before we got to it — but it would also be a way to kind of apologize and acknowledge the error to the world without turning into an apologetic, almost groveling mess.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:07:10]**
Yeah, I mean, this is the reason I actually don't like the pre-World War One comparisons — this is the reason that I like the interwar years — because I just do think that there is this highly ideological component to the world we're living in, and that ideology is right-wing authoritarianism. And I think you are right to highlight how these people are connected, not just ideologically, but in many cases financially — they are connected by webs of money, and especially of corrupt money. And so fighting that, I think, would be great. If our enemies are international, we must be international as well. But that's probably a whole nother podcast.

So, Nick, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

**Nicholas Grossman [01:08:10]**
Thank you. I both appreciate the invitation, and I really like your work in particular — the unabashed defense of liberalism as an idea, another one that we took for granted — I keep on saying that — the world order that we took for granted, basic liberal freedoms we clearly took for granted — and being one of the few people who I think actually understands power. I read so much, and there are a lot of people who I think are just missing power in a literal sense, and I think you're doing a great job with it. So, thanks for having me, and keep it up.

**Samantha Hancox-Li [01:08:46]**
Bye. Yeah — and for everyone out there listening, you can read Nicholas Grossman's "Staggering Towards Anarchy" at Liberal Currents right now.