The status quo coalition

This article is about contemporary international relations, but since Devereaux is a historian, there’s some good background about how it used to work, before he gets to how he thinks it works now:

We’ve talked about the most common condition states find themselves in, interstate anarchy, before. In brief interstate anarchy is a condition in which there are many states operating in a state system which has few or no constraints on the use of violence. Because larger states can use the greater resources of their large size to impose their interests on smaller states, these conditions create a dog-eat-dog race in militarism where the only way for states to avoid becoming prey is to become the most effective predators. Such systems can be durable, if not stable, because everyone is doing this, creating a ‘Red Queen effect,’ where because all of the states are trying desperately to maximize security by maximizing military power, no one actually gets ahead.

But sometimes one or more powers do get ahead and begin to dominate the system. If it several larger powers doing this what we tend to see emerge are ‘balance of power’ systems. These too can be durable and even potentially stable (for a time), because of a key behavior that emerges among both the larger ‘Great Powers’ and smaller states: balancing. This behavior will be immediately familiar to players of strategy games, but we see it emerge in actual state systems too. The logic is fairly simple: weaker powers benefit from the relative independence that continued competition in the system gives them. Consequently, small powers want to avoid anyone ‘winning’ the game, since a singular winning power would be able to dominate and possibly absorb them.

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When balancing fails, the resulting system is hegemony. Once balancing fails, everyone’s interests suddenly recalculate in a diametrically opposed way. So long as balancing was possible, it was in most state’s interests to oppose the leading power in an effort to contain it; the moment balancing becomes impossible, it is suddenly in every state’s interest to support the leading power and align with it in the hopes of persisting as a client state and maintaining at least some degree of autonomy.

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Immediately after the end of the Cold War, we got the rough result we might expect: the rapid expansion of US influence as the United States – the sole remaining superpower after the collapse of the USSR – became a global hegemon and was thus in a position to rewrite the rules of international relations to suit itself. The End of History and all that. Many countries more consciously aligned with the United States and few more were made into high profile examples of what might happen to countries that failed to align with the new hegemon, being either ‘regime changed’ or isolated from the global economy. That part wasn’t the surprise.

What was surprising is that in the years that followed, a number of potential counter-weights to the United States did, in fact, emerge during what we may term the End of the End of History and yet balancing didn’t meaningfully reassert itself. One the one hand, two major revisionist powers emerged (Russia and China), with one of them clearly having the economic heft to potentially act as a peer-rival to the United States, to shield potential allies from the full brunt of American economic might and the nuclear umbrella to prohibit direct US military intervention in areas of high concern. Meanwhile a third possible power, the EU, emerged as ‘the dog that didn’t bark.’ A confederation of European states with enough economic power and population to immediately form a peer-competitor or at least containing coalition against US influence which simply opted not to.

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Despite the fact that the first real challenger to the US-led world order since 1989 has emerged in the form of the People’s Republic of China, the PRC has the same meager list of allies in 2023 that it had in 1953: North Korea. Russia likewise has a single European client state (Belarus); Russian friendship with Hungary has merely bought neutrality, not aid. The idea that BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) would constitute some developing-world coalition hasn’t really materialized either. While the rest of the BRICS won’t, for economic reasons, join the anti-Russian sanction regime, they also aren’t sanction-busting to any significant degree; even China’s support for Russia has been remarkably tepid. These are precisely the countries that ought to be eager to balance against the United States in order to open space to push their own interests.

Meanwhile, the United States’ list of allies is preposterous. […]

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And yet again, this is strange, because the countries arrayed, en masse around the United States ought to be some of the very countries – strong regional powers with big economies – that might benefit most from having the freedom to ‘revise’ the international order to suit themselves. And yet they don’t.

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I think the answer here is actually simple: the incentives for these countries have changed and now enough time has passed that they’ve realized it. The difference between Russia and France is, to be blunt, that the French know something the Russians haven’t learned yet (but are apparently in the process of learning right now).

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So whereas in the old system, almost every power except potentially the hegemon, had something to potentially gain by upending the stability of the system, the economics of modern production means that quite a lot of countries will have absolutely nothing to gain from a war, even a successful one. Now that dispassionate calculation has arguably been true for more than a century; the First World War was an massive exercise in proving that nothing that could be gained from a major power war would be worth the misery, slaughter and destruction of a major power war. Subsequent conflicts have reinforced this lesson again and again, yet conflicts continue to occur.

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Now one may well argue the coalition is just a figment of my imagination, but I’d argue that the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine had demonstrated anything but. While many countries were willing to vote against Russia at the UN, the number of countries willing to sustain real economic costs by either supporting sanctions or sending meaningful aid to Ukraine was far more narrow and maps fairly well on the coalition as formulated above. The coalition action here is striking because none of the countries currently aiding Ukraine or sanctioning Russia had any sort of treaty obligation to do so. Instead, the coalition leapt to Ukraine’s aid with everything short of war (including free weapons, training, economic assistance and intelligence sharing) to defend the status quo, in which they are so invested. This is why, I’d argue, the response to the War in Ukraine and previously to cross-border conquests by ISIS was so much more intense than status quo coalition responses to other humanitarian crises, because it threatened a core component of the status quo, that territorial acquisition by conquest is not permitted in the international system.