The Long Game

This timely and highly acclaimed book highlights how rivalry and the pursuit of power has shaped the geopolitics of global order, which is now in a state of flux as the thirty-year US hegemony – purchased at enormous cost with $1 trillion spent on foreign wars in the last 25 years – is giving way to an emerging multipolar world order. On the basis of previously inaccessible documentary evidence, the author shows that there is indeed the Chinese grand strategy to displace American hegemonic order, which he sees as based in three broad forms of control used to regulate the behaviour of other states: ‘coercive capability’ (to force compliance), consensual inducements (to incentivise it), and legitimacy (to rightfully command it).’ (p. 3) He goes on to explain that rising states will seek to blunt the hegemon’s exercise of these forms of control, then to build forms of control over others, followed by a phase of expansion. In the case of China, the aim is to restore it to its rightful place in the global hierarchy and to roll back the overwhelming global influence of the West. It is in this context that one should understand the Belt and Road Initiative as the creation of networks of coercive capability, consensual inducement and legitimacy that make it difficult for indebted countries to criticise China. Where the US has invested in military influence, China has invested in infrastructure.

Missing from the context of this analysis is the role of the Rockefellers through Henry Kissinger and the others in funding the opening up of China economically and politically in the 1970s. The long-term aim was to create a technocracy, of which China is a leading exponent – also with respect to the Fourth Industrial Revolution - while advancing autocratic norms at the expense of liberal ones. Bankers have a history of hedging their bets. It is significant that the country is held up as a model by leaders of the technocratic World Economic Forum (not mentioned in the index) that seeks through public-private partnerships to bring in digital ID and currency as a means of social control and forced compliance. The overall argument of the book is that China has pursued a grand strategy to displace American order first at the regional and now at the global level. As countries become more powerful, they can renege with impunity on previous commitments, as the US has systematically done since 1945 in the name of national interest.

As an American and now national security adviser, the author outlines an asymmetric strategy for US-China competition as China seeks to be the world’s leading state at a time when democracy seems to be on the decline and authoritarianism on the rise. Neither of the main 2024 presidential candidates offer much by way of vision, which is not the case with Bobby Kennedy Jr, who seeks to revive instantiation of American values embodied by his father and uncle, ironically assassinated with the cynical self-serving assistance of their own intelligence services. As a thought experiment, just think of how different the world might be today if John F. Kennedy had served as president until 1968, and Bobby Kennedy until 1976. You can check out RFK Jr’s State of the Union reflections on YouTube. How many centuries will have to pass before we learn to live together in peace rather than rivalry on our home planet?