Making Sense of Contemporary Geopolitics: Historical Analogies and Present Constructs
“Making Sense of Contemporary Geopolitics: Historical Analogies and Present Constructs“
Speaker: Wyne, A. (RAND)
Date: 20 June 2019
Speaker Session Preview
SMA hosted a speaker session presented by Mr. Ali Wyne (RAND) as a part of its Future of Global Competition & Conflict Speaker Series. Dr. Wyne first stated that neither historical analogies, nor present constructs that try to characterize modern geopolitical situations, help us navigate the muddied waters of modern geopolitics and great power competition. He then discussed two analogies that experts often use: the “1930s redux” and the “new Cold War.” Observers generally cite three concerns when invoking the 1930s: 1) democratic stagnation, 2) the prospect of de-globalization, and 3) the return of great-power competition. In the present day though, democracy and globalization are far more entrenched than they were in the 1930s. Today, there is also a current order to defend. With regards to the Cold War comparison, the US faces a skilled opportunist in a revanchist Russia and a selective revisionist in a resurgent China, according to Mr. Wyne. It does not, however, confront a rival power with ambitions of global dominance, pretensions to a universal ideology, and a willingness to employ territorial aggression, proxy warfare, and client states in the service of its strategic objectives. Especially vis-à-vis China, the Cold War analogy both exaggerates and understates the challenge to the US’s role in the world. Mr. Wyne then posed several questions about great power competition that US decision makers must ask: 1) Who is America’s principal competitor?; 2) What is the US competing for?; and 3) What is the US’s ultimate objective? He added that the US must identify a long-term objective and attendant metrics for gaging its progress towards that end; otherwise, there is a risk of strategic disorientation. He then spoke briefly about the singularity of contemporary geopolitics. To conclude, Mr. Wyne stated that historical analogies have their appeal, but there is “more on the ledger of deficiency” than there is to recommend them.
ALI WYNE
Ali Wyne is a Washington, DC-based policy analyst in the RAND Corporation’s Defense and Political Sciences Department. He serves as a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a nonresident fellow with the Modern War Institute. Since January 2015 he has been the rapporteur for a U.S. National Intelligence Council working group that convenes government officials and international relations scholars to analyze trends in world order.
Ali served as a junior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s China Program from 2008 to 2009 and as a research assistant to Graham Allison at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs from 2009 to 2012. He has also conducted research for Robert Blackwill, Derek Chollet, Henry Kissinger, Wendy Sherman, and Richard Stengel. From January to July 2013 he worked on a team that prepared Samantha Power for her confirmation hearing to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. From 2014 to 2015 he was a member of the RAND Corporation’s adjunct staff, working for the late Richard Solomon on its Strategic Rethink series.
Ali graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with dual degrees in Management Science and Political Science (2008) and received his Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School (2017), where he was a course assistant to Joseph Nye. While at the Kennedy School, he served on a Hillary for America working group on U.S. policy towards Asia. Ali is a coauthor of Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World (2013) and a contributing author to Our American Story: The Search for a Shared National Narrative (2019), Power Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Mapping a Multipolar World? (2017), and the Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy (2008).
Ali is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a David Rockefeller fellow with the
Trilateral Commission, and a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project.
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