Live! World War III and the Presidential Election

I just spoke at the New Zealand Fabian Society about how the Democratic and Republican Party’s views on foreign policy are changing, and what those changes (and continuities) mean in the context of the US presidential election. It was a great event.¹

A video snippet from the Q&A portion appears above. The full video of the event (it was live-streamed) appears here. There was some adverse weather outside and occasionally the stream glitched, but the entire unedited event—including the Q&A—is there.

For those who would rather read than watch, I’m sharing the lightly edited transcript of my remarks below. ✌️

Kia ora koutou,

Everybody wonders how changes in American politics might impact the prospect of World War III, America’s role in the world, the changing logic of trade, financial flows, and industrial policy. Basically, what’s the connection between American politics and the emerging world order such as it is?

In answer of that question, I want make three points, which I’ll then situate in the context of the US presidential election. 

The first point is that America’s current approach to Asia is closer to a primacist grand strategy than to any alternative strategy—and that’s a big deal because the requirements of primacy and the requirements of sustaining peace in this region are incompatible.  

The second point is that it’s not useful and is in fact dangerous to think of great-power competition as a struggle for hegemony or domination—that’s not what’s happening.

And three, what’s actually happening is an ethnonationalist competition within capitalism.

And these three points about how we should understand the world situation owe something to American politics.

Kamala Harris, for her part, has not proposed a different way of seeing China or relating to the world—she’s a bit of a blank slate on foreign policy but she’s also (as far as we’ve seen) a primacist and American exceptionalist. Trump and the MAGA movement are effectively far-right accelerationists on China and are still primacists on foreign policy generally, but they talk about it more nakedly and have different priorities for how to exercise primacy.

Primacy or Peace

So on the first point—the ongoing American bid to sustain regional primacy is at odds with regional stability. Primacy is a strategy that seeks security in a predatory way—it tries to preserve and prolong an extreme imbalance of power, and it’s singleminded about the threat from so-called great powers. 

And this is a source of regional instability because of how it encourages others—like China—to react. One of the closest things we have to an iron law in international relations (we have no iron laws, fwiw) is the observation that states tend to balance against the strongest power in the system. US strategy tries to defy that historical observation. 

Now, Washington policy elites prefer not to talk openly about primacy—they say “liberal hegemony,” “favorable balance of power,” or “rules-based order.” But I was once a strategist in the Obama administration. 

By definition, in America’s own declassified strategy documents under Trump, under Biden, and actually going back to George HW Bush—and these are all publicly available now—the US seeks preeminence in military, economic, and political life. That comes closer to a grand strategy that scholars call primacy than it does any other kind of strategy. 

And because primacy is structural domination as an end and means of policy, it’s the most perverse way imaginable of trying to uphold peace or stability. 

Peace requires regional cohesion, a level of interdependence and mutuality, and above all it requires military restraint. A child would understand that. 

And yet primacy right now requires the opposite of all that—regional fracture and bloc politics, techno-containment and economic decoupling, it requires military superiority, which in turn requires arms-racing. This is the context within which AUKUS becomes a thing.

Primacy is a zero-sum way of relating to the world that requires keeping others down.  And in our current fallen world, primacy necessarily comes at the expense of peace. 

And for those of us who take our image of America from the long unipolar moment—the late ‘80s through maybe the Obama years—this is hard to come to terms with because we’ve taken for granted that American primacy is always in the background and not especially onerous or dangerous. 

There’s a way in which it’s all we’ve ever known—we have naturalized living with an extreme imbalance of power that history tells us cannot last forever. 

And so we should start by acknowledging that whether a strategy is good depends on context. What primacy causes the US to do depends on the circumstances. 

At the end of the Cold War, the circumstances were that we inherited this extremely lopsided imbalance of power.  Primacy was the default that said “We’ll just preserve what we inherited and build a world order around it.” In that context, primacy was not especially costly for the US, and it was not especially risky at the level of global stability because America didn’t have anyone who was capable of challenging it. 

But times change. Technology changes. Distributions of power shift. Political economy has shifted (I’ll talk about that in a minute). And Asia has radically changed since the ‘80s—so much so that now Washington doesn’t even want to call it Asia anymore! They want to call it Indo-Pacific!

What I’m saying is that it was easy to believe that primacy was a global public good when Uncle Sugar had all the power and there were not even imagined alternatives. But that’s not the world we live in now.

With the exception of Australia and a few right-wing governments, every smaller power in Asia and the Pacific is actively trying to avoid a new Cold War, avoid this thing we call “great-power competition” as much as possible. They’re resisting rivalry and bloc politics in different ways and we can talk about that in Q&A.

But the point is just that a power imbalance favoring America matters because there’s a way in which America’s insistence on primacy is now everybody’s problem—not only because it worsens the many problems that we see when we look at China. But also because it narrows the space of possibility for smaller nations to look after their own interests.

Rivalry Doesn’t Mean Struggle for Hegemony

So America’s doing primacy, primacy is antithetical to peace.

The second point I wanted to make is that it’s wrong to think of Sino-US rivalry as a struggle for hegemony or domination. But the US is approaching rivalry precisely that way—it’s approaching rivalry as if it’s a struggle for domination. But it shouldn’t be, it’s far from clear that China is seeking the kind of domination that we fear, and China lacks the power to dominate even if it did want to.   

The reason policymakers in Washington think the primacy toolkit (of containment and arms-racing and tariffs) is so essential is because they have this view that America writes rules or China writes the rules. Obama used to say that all the time and we just read it innocently in that moment, but it hits differently now. And this is why policy needs an analysis underneath it, not just vibes.

China’s material power comes from the privileged position it occupies within the capitalist world-system. China cannot airbrush out the United States without undercutting its own power because the Core of our world system is the US. And even in relative decline, the US still has unique advantages. It’s the first among unequals in a more multipolar world.

So imagining that China could take over the world or displace the US is to imagine China defying the realities of how power is structured. 

But think about it. China’s ability to economically coerce others.  Its ability to pour resources into the PLA. Its ability to finance infrastructure development in other countries—all of this is dependent on it occupying a particular position in Asian political economy and global production networks. To some extent it even depends on continuing access to the US market.

So because the world-system is structured in this highly networked way, there’s a way in which China’s fate is Asia’s fate, and Asia’s fate is America’s fate. Pretending otherwise is dangerous but it’s also kind of wooly-headed.

So I’m not saying that America doesn’t have conflicts of interest with China—it does. But primacy makes those conflicts worse. It only makes sense if you assume world order has to be run by a single great power and it’s either us or them.  And that’s just not true. That’s actually what neofascists like Steve Bannon have been trying to make a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

So if we’re clear-eyed, we should see that China is a problem that holds up a mirror to the problems in our own nations. But it’s also a problem within a world-system that favors America—China’s not some free-floating bad guy who stands outside of world order threatening civilization as we know it. 

China is embedded in global order with us and there’s very good research showing that its ruling regime is satisfied with most aspects of the world as it’s currently structured.

And I don’t want blow anyone’s mind here, but there are growing signs that both China and the US are in relative decline—and we don’t have a convenient narrative for that alternative future, but it sure as hell isn’t “American hegemony or Chinese hegemony.”

And even if Sino-US rivalry was about who rules or who dominates, the only sane response to that would be to denaturalize it—take it apart, challenge the premise.  Because a story about great powers battling for domination is a story that won’t end well for most of us. 

Ethnonationalist Competition Within Capitalism

So primacy is antithetical to peace, and China can’t take over the world. 

The third point I wanted to make is that rivalry between the US and China should be understood as an ethnonationalist competition within capitalism. 

So up until the 1970s, advanced economies used to be producerist, manufacturing economies. That became less profitable as manufacturing became more competitive. And as profits fell, investment capital in advanced economies looked for profits through services more than production. 

The era we now call neoliberal globalization has been an era of financialization and de-industrialization in the West. And during my lifetime, manufacturing was never a sign of an advanced economy—because manufacturing was an activity that had shifted from rich countries to the global South in the search for new markets and cheaper labor. And China was a major beneficiary of that process, which is how it became the world’s factory. 

I think most people know that much.  But less obvious is that what we’ve seen over the past half century is that financialization of the economy—neoliberal globalization itself—has had diminishing returns and is unacceptably volatile…especially since 2008. 

We keep ending up in these cycles where investment capital floods into a sector, creates a speculative bubble, and then too much capital chasing too little profit leads to overproduction. Overproduction drops prices, drops profits, and that creates a fiscal crisis. 

So neoliberal globalization is now facing its own crisis of capital accumulation—and we see evidence of that crisis in economic stagnation. Global growth has slowed, and in many places it’s stopped altogether. So the previous economic order isn’t delivering the goods like it used to, but recurring crises also call the order into question politically. 

And you might be wondering what the hell does all that have to do with foreign policy or World War III. Well, the US, China, and rich nations that can afford it have decided that the answer to an era of low growth is zero sum economic nationalism. The tide doesn’t lift all boats if the tide isn’t rising. 

So now the US and China have turned to using the power of the state to secure a competitive advantage in strategic sectors of the economy. In fact, China was doing this first and the US decided to emulate China. 

One long-term problem with this is that we’re already overproducing relative to demand in the so-called strategic sectors of the world economy. And looking out 5-10 years, we’re actively building toward yet another fiscal crisis, but this time in these strategic sectors—semiconductors, AI, green tech, and military hardware.

But that’s long term. The more immediate problem is that in order to do state-driven political economy, you end up having to exploit nationalism—use state power to build national power, strengthen yourself and weaken your competitors. But nationalism is a dangerous force. It’s prone to a politics of reaction—it’s inherently exclusionary, it often assumes scarcity, and it becomes a justification for violence. And in the US and China in particular, it’s ethnically charged—it’s ethnonationalism.

In both countries, nationalism has an exceptionalist quality—they both talk and act as if they’re special…as if their behavior is exempt from the rules that everyone else plays by. And when powerful nations do that, it leaves the rest of us in a world where the great powers are competing for a greater share of global growth while that same growth is declining in relative terms. And that relative decline of growth intensifies what starts to look like an inter-imperial competition.  

So great-power exceptionalism is not new but it could co-exist in a high-growth world—it wasn’t a source of WWIII in a high-growth world. We’re not in that world anymore. So what we’re left with is militarism and economic nationalism. And who benefits from that? Not lovers of peace. Not lovers of democracy. And definitely not workers, ironically, given the promises attached to slogans of a foreign policy “for the middle class.”

And a lot of America’s insistence on primacy is a fear that it’ll be excluded from Asia, recognizing that Asia is the future of the global economy. And American elites are convinced that primacy is the only way to ensure their access to Asia. 

This is wrongheaded. Policymakers are thinking about China and America’s role in the world in a fundamentally incorrect way that’s super dangerous but that also justifies some pretty evil behavior. To take just one of many examples, American primacy in the Pacific is built on the back of not just a US sphere of influence there but also sustaining actual formal colonies in the year of our lord 2024.

But the rest of us don’t have to accept that—we should be able to see clearly that what’s happening is an elite-driven ethnonationalist competition within capitalism.  Primacy makes it worse. No great power is gonna save us. And to get at the root of the problem will not involve bombs and bullets—it will involve 1) changing how the great powers relate to each other, and 2) fixing some of the pathologies of our global economic order. 

China and the US Election

But the reason all this matters in the context of the 2024 presidential election is both that US politics has fueled this monster of a situation, but it’s also constrained by it in ways that are not good. 

So Kamala Harris doesn’t bring much foreign policy experience to the table. In 2020, she ran as a progressive, but that was a very popular thing to do in 2020, and she ran as a very mainstream progressive that was trying to look tough on security and appeal to Wall Street’s interests. 

Take that as you will, but she’s not known for taking big risks, doesn’t have a record of challenging the prevailing conventional wisdom. And so personnel is always policy, as they say, but this is likely to be especially the case in a Harris presidency; to a large extent, we should expect that she’ll take her cues from her personnel and the Democratic Party. 

It matters, then, that 99% of the foreign policy staff surrounding her are all from the Biden administration—and they’re a cadre who explicitly believes in American exceptionalism and a strategy of primacy. 

So even though Kamala hasn’t carved out explicit positions on most issues, she’s hawk-leaning/hawk-adjacent on everything so far. She talks about Gaza better than Biden, but she has explicitly said she’s going to keep flowing arms to Israel. She’s explicitly endorsed military superiority, so the trillion-dollar defense budget is going to continue. She supports Bidenomics, which is economic nationalism as part of a strategy to rebuild the middle class on the back of rivalry with China—which, we can talk about this, but that won’t succeed because it’s full of contradictions.  

In her entire foreign policy world, which is dozens of people, there’s only 2-3 people that you could consider remotely progressive. Tim Walz, on the other hand, her VP, is pretty progressive and does have a more relational view of China—he has a track record opposing this whole Cold War situation we’ve gotten ourselves into. 

So the best hopes for stability in a Kamala presidency depends a bit on whether she makes unconventional staff picks, and to some extent on her Vice President. And that’s unpromising, because Vice Presidents tend to be pretty ceremonial. 

And yet, as much as Democratic Party thinking about foreign policy is in flux and unpromising, the right-wing, Trumpist version of all of this is not a slow-burn crisis it’s an urgent crisis. 

MAGA and Trump have laid out all kinds of markers indicating they’re going to be much more confrontational with China even though the Biden admin itself has been more hawkish on China than even the previous Trump administration had been. MAGA has promised to outspend Biden on defense. They have pretty insane and vocal views about nuclear arms-racing.  Republicans see Palestinians the same way Zionists do in Israel—which is mostly as a threat. 

There’s a meme out there that MAGA and Trump are isolationists…And that could not be farther from the truth. They’re unilateralists, they’re militarists, they take a clash of civilizations view of the world—which is pretty explicitly racialized.  But they’re not isolationist.

And so you could almost understand the Democrat-Republican divide on foreign policy being basically about Democrats wanting to preserve and expand an empire that has cosmopolitan qualities but is an empire all the same…versus Republicans wanting the benefits of a global empire without any of the obligations of maintenance that come with it. 

And so the MAGA movement is looking at war with Iran; war with Mexico; extortion of allies; economic nationalism on steroids; and a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine that makes the entire Western Hemisphere a formalized American sphere of influence again. And its real alliances would be white, culturally Christian, right-wing countries like Russia and Hungary. So if MAGA gets its way, they’re going to reimpose something like a global color line and assume a leading role in the emerging global far right. 

And Trump himself makes all of this a little less predictable, and we can talk about that, but his unpredictably is located within these preferences. So presumably Republicans wouldn’t go to war with Mexico and Iran at the same time, but both options are on the table. Trump is happy to stoke Sino-US rivalry and position America to end up in a war with China, but chances are he isn’t going to directly, proactively launch such a war. 

So the commonality here is that America’s policy elites are committed to primacy. They’re fairly locked in to relating to the world in a highly predatory, militarized way. 

And regardless whether it’s a Democrat or Republican presidency, they’re committed to cannibalizing the existing economic order as part of doing economic nationalism. But one party is a much more immediate threat than the other, and one party offers a more favorable terrain to struggle for peace than the other. 

1. They did accidentally introduce me as “Van Corbyn” and during the Q&A some of the audience opinions were…edgy…ranging from Taiwan should be a Chinese province to America forced Putin to invade Ukraine (not kidding). But all that actually made it a pretty fun time.