Geopolitical Swing States
During my walk last Monday, I listened to Preet Bharara’s podcast Stay Tuned. You may recognize Preet’s name – he was US Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2009-2017. After TFG won the 2016 election, he met with Bharara in Trump Tower, during which TFG asked Bharara to remain as US Attorney. Bharara agreed to do so. Then, in March of 2017, TFG’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked all 46 US Attorneys who were holdovers from the Obama administration, including Bharara, to submit letters of resignation. Bharara declined and was then fired. He has since been an outspoken critic of TFG, although not usually overtly partisan in his writing and commentary.
In this podcast (which he’s been releasing weekly since 2017), Preet features long-form interviews with prominent guests
The episode I listened to was called “The Race for Geopolitical Influence,” which featured a long interview with Jared Cohen, a foreign policy expert who served as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff under both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. He currently serves as the President of Global Affairs at Goldman Sachs. Here’s a link to the podcast on Spotify if you want to listen.
Like most normal people, I find world affairs to be almost unapproachably complex. I don’t know what to pay attention to – there are noisy hot spots that get a lot of attention, and then, apparently out of the blue, a crisis will emerge in a place I almost literally have never given serious thought to.
So how does the lay observer – the casual but interested citizen – figure out what’s important? In this podcast, Cohen provides a theory: as the U.S. and China coexist, compete, and confront each other to determine who will set the geopolitical rules, they will either court or thwart an emerging group of countries to gain an edge. This new class of influential nations are the geopolitical swing states of the 21st century.
This, like all theories, is a hypothesis. And like all hypotheses, it needs to be tested. So you begin to ask yourself: Does this theory capture anything important? Are there holes in this hypothesis that require it to be revised or abandoned altogether? Does it make us look at parts of the world in different ways so that we might understand them differently?
To me, this hypothesis met the test – at least at the level I’ve thought about it up to this point (which is to say not really very deeply at all).
Here’s a link to the article Bharara and Cohen were talking about, if you want to learn a little more. https://www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence/pages/the-rise-of-geopolitical-swing-states.html
At the beginning of the interview, Bharara presents a quick overview of the analysis, saying that Cohen has identified three geopolitical “swing states” – Brazil, India, and Vietnam. My first thought was that this was an improbable combination, but as I listened to the podcast I became convinced that these counties deserved closer examination.
I won’t go into the details of the analysis – you can read the article or listen to the podcast if you want to know more. But his hypothesis meets one of the criteria of a good theory – it seems to explain some things and it also suggests avenues for further research.
The podcast spent some time talking about how the global economy is assuming a two-power dimension – the US and China – leading some observers to say that this is a new Cold War. Cohen dispenses with this idea, saying that the conditions are very different now. During the Cold War, the power of the Soviet Union was almost entirely based on its military – and in particular, its nuclear weapons arsenal. The threat of the use of these weapons was always in the front of people’s minds as they interacted with either the US or the Soviet Union for the almost 50-year duration of the Cold War, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
The situation now is very different, Cohen says. China is an economic power that rivals the US in ways that the Soviet Union never did. China’s economy is the second largest in the world, trailing only the United States, and it competes for resources and trade throughout the world, as does the United States. Cohen doesn’t see the relationship between these two economic superpowers as being as dangerous as the Cold War superpower relationship was; both the US and China are too deeply interconnected in the world economy for them to destroy their own economy in an effort to defeat the other nation.
Cohen suggests that the three countries that could swing the global balance of power are India, Vietnam, and Brazil. Here’s why he chooses these states:
India is the most obvious choice. According to the World Population Review, its population has recently surpassed that of China. Its position on the Indian subcontinent – bordering China and adjacent to the global hot spots of Pakistan and Afghanistan – and its historical dependence on Russia for armaments make it an important arena for the interaction of the interests of the economic superpowers. It is not surprising that President Biden’s most recent international visitor was India’s Prime Minister Modi.
Brazil is also easy to understand. It is Latin America’s largest economy and is thus in a position to become a hub for the extraction and utility of natural resources of South America. China has invested heavily in Latin America – which is one reason why Americans ears should prick up when they learn that Brazil’s President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva (known as “Lula”) went to China recently with 240 Brazilian business leaders. One of the topics discussed, according to Lulu, was why the international economy is based on the US dollar. A great deal of US economic power in the world rests on the fact that the dollar is the default currency for international trade. When the leader of Brazil is talking to the leader of China about whether this is the proper state of affairs, American leaders worry.
The presence of Vietnam on this list was a little harder for me to understand. Like many Americans of my generation, I associate Vietnam with the image of underdevelopment that we saw during the Vietnam War. But Vietnam last year replaced the UK as the US's seventh-largest trading partner, and is also an important US ally in efforts to resist China’s economic expansion into Southeast Asia. I need to read a little more about what’s going on in Vietnam to understand Cohen’s point.
I don’t fully understand this argument yet, but it provides me with an approach to grasping the broad outlines of what’s going on in the world. I can’t understand everything in the world, but I can begin to focus on three countries. I’ll read what I can find about them, and constantly mentally test Cohen’s thesis that his framework helps the world make sense. That is what we should ask of any theory.