America Has Squandered the International Commons, Here’s How To Get It Back

by Bill Murray

For most of the last hundred years, ships sailed the globe without much thought to who ruled the sea. Governments agreed on organizations and protocols for getting along, capital flowed, scientists collaborated and manufacturers built supply chains stretching around the world. The international commons became so ordinary as to disappear from view. That didn’t happen by accident, and it isn’t guaranteed to continue.

To preserve America’s place in all this, its next president must abandon the Trump administration’s goal of hemispheric dominance. The future won’t be secured by controlling more territory, but by building stronger networks of allies across institutions, industries and technologies. America’s next leader must be a builder.

Former Secretary of State George Schultz once compared diplomacy to gardening. Maintaining relationships, he thought, was “one of the most underrated aspects of diplomacy.” He believed that “the way to keep weeds from overwhelming you is to deal with them constantly and in their early stages.”

The United States spent the seventy years before Donald Trump pruning away at the public commons, deterring great-power war, developing and enforcing trade rules, keeping the dollar the global currency and the sea lanes open—in short, maintaining the alliances that made its global position possible.

Neglected for the past decade, the public commons is in disrepair. The question for our moment is how future American leadership might restore an international commons that promotes progress based on common interests, and fend off the return of the law of the jungle.

George F. Kennan was chargé d’affaires at the American embassy in Moscow in February 1946 when he sent his seminal “Long Telegram” back to Washington. Kennan was an old hand at US-Soviet relations, having served as part of the original American embassy staff in Moscow in 1933. He had become convinced that at heart, the Soviet Union was ideologically driven and expansionist, but also insecure and fundamentally cautious.

He proposed to match Soviet caution by resisting its expansion, consistently and over the long term. That became known as Containment, and constraining Soviet ambition shaped American strategy throughout the Cold War.

But the Cold War ended more than thirty years ago, and much of the world’s institutional framework still operates on Cold War rules. For the United States to lead a renewal will require a new strategy of inclusion, to recruit and ‘contain’ the world’s most innovative economies within an allied ecosystem—a sort of positive Containment.

This is no argument to abandon self-interest for altruism. Rather, it begins with the observation that strategic advantage can emerge from unexpected places.

After the Soviets astonished the world by launching Sputnik in 1957, the United States founded ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency, later DARPA) to reduce the risk of being surprised by technological breakthroughs like Sputnik in the future.

It was a strictly reactive move, certainly not meant to invent the future. Yet it ultimately spurred development of then undreamed-of life-enhancing benefits—the internet, global positioning and Siri, among many others.

In an era of potentially revolutionary new tech, updating a means to grapple with unknown unknowns and minimize strategic surprises is only prudent. But to get there we have to stop measuring power in twentieth-century terms.

Decisive, forward-looking leadership ultimately will not turn on tariffs, for example. That’s a little short on the vision thing.

FIRST DO NO HARM: The Trump administration proposes hemispheric dominance, an expression of power in which Fortress America rules from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego. Step one in righting the ship of state is abandoning this ‘Donroe Doctrine.’

The diminishing effectiveness of relying solely on military might is playing out around the world, before our eyes. The next administration should augment its military capabilities with a policy of innovation in which containment no longer means confining adversaries inside physical borders.

Hemispheric dominance may suit the unilateralist tendencies of this administration, but it is ill-suited to our strategic moment. In America’s current state of ennui and dysfunction, the last thing it needs is an imperial, chest-beating lunge toward territorial acquisition.

Post-Cold War American triumphalism may have survived the Forever Wars, but American hubris now needs a reality check, and fast. The unipolar moment is long gone and the United States faces a century full of new challenges and rising adversaries.

Today’s contest for strategic leadership plays out across fast technological advances, fabrication of sophisticated electronics, energy flows, undersea pipes and cables, maritime chokepoints, digital platforms and industrial capacity. Only some of these sources of power depend on physical possession of territory. Semiconductors don’t much care about contiguous territory.

America’s future strategic mission is to attract the world’s most innovative economies into a web of international networks built around interoperability, shared research and supply chains shared with trusted partners, underwritten, in large part, by believable security guarantees from Washington.

This will require an adjustment to Americans’ self-image. It will mean embracing a policy of helping partners grow stronger alongside the United States.

Put another way, that means accepting relative American decline. Decades of fierce, bare-knuckled international competition have made such a notion thoroughly foreign, but in the 1940s the United States followed just such a strategy with the Marshall Plan.

Deliberately accelerating the recovery of Germany and Japan, implicitly promoting America’s decline relative to those vanquished countries, resulted not in American weakness, but decades of shared prosperity and the creation of two of the country’s strongest and most enduring alliances.

The mission ahead is to assemble a new group of the world’s most capable partners, both public and private, comprising an array of strategic capabilities, to think about the foundations of future power.

Work should range from basic research and scientific discovery across industrial production, financial architecture, digital infrastructure, collective defense and much more. The world needs new research into institutional design, as postwar creations like NATO, Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan and the GATT lose relevance.

As capabilities increase across an emerging array of partners, new areas of exploration will emerge organically. As new participants create new relationships, each with all the others, the collective value of the group increases sharply, as each new participant exploits new relationships with all the others.

In the last century alliances grew with the addition of like-minded states and their physical territory. Physical space provided buffers, but some of those buffers may effectively be bypassed in future wars. Future alliances are likely to grow differently.

One way they might grow is by using the same network effect that allowed social media to rise so quickly, as each new participant strengthens the network as a whole, such that an effectively networked alliance ultimately attracts new partners, clamoring to join and bring their strengths to the mix. In such a network, every member reinforces the others simultaneously.

Development of the Covid-19 vaccine involved just such a networked alliance, of universities, intellectual property law specialists, regulatory agencies and manufacturing and supply chains that had previously hardly existed. Some players were countries, others private business. The strength of the project lay less with any one contributor than in the density of the resulting network.

Such future cross-border collaboration won’t be so much a new strategy as a recalibration of national strengths, and a new weaving together of capabilities across public and private spheres. It’s an accelerated integration of the best capabilities of partners, both governmental and corporate, that stands to succeed less by acquisition of territory than by creating denser networks of cooperation among trusted partners.

With democratic systems under strain today, those who prefer democracy to autocracy acutely need such a broad alliance of states and private entities to work together. Happily, that’s already happening.

The Nordic countries aren’t waiting for a temporarily hostile Washington to solve every problem in the Baltic. (Read more here about the lattice of competencies growing in Nordic Europe right now in response to American hostility to NATO.)

No longer as stunned by a suddenly reluctant America, Europe now develops its own defense industries. South Korea’s Hyundai Rotem is sharing technology with Poland to build Black Panther battle tanks in Gliwice.

Australia will use a Japanese design from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for its next-generation frigate fleet, replacing the standard Japanese anti-ship missiles with naval strike missiles supplied by the Norwegian defense company Kongsberg.

American companies design blueprints for the world’s most intelligent computer processors. ASML, in the Netherlands, builds the extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines used to print the smallest features on advanced microchips. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company uses those machines to manufacture the chips themselves. No one country controls the entire process in any of these examples, and the network benefits as a whole.

A model like this can apply to any number of exciting propositions for the future: Solid state electrical transformers. Long-duration battery storage of energy generated by intermittent renewable power sources like wind turbines. Industrial biotech, in which organisms are engineered to produce chemicals and medicines.

The European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan and the US have complementary strengths in the area of next generation geothermal systems, which seek to provide always-on carbon-free electricity. Or consider the advancements a collaborative effort might make in space services, things like removal of orbital debris or development of in-space manufacturing.

These are the kinds of efforts that positioned a confident post-World War II America as a world leader, and that could become a twenty-first century expression of a new alliance built to do far more than protect trade routes. It could create and lead a reinvigorated new, collaborative international commons.

A WORD ABOUT HOW AMERICA THINKS: This kind of collaboration doesn’t diminish American influence. To the contrary, it reduces the burden the country must carry.

But United States will need the ability to play well with others, a skill it has lost since the unipolar moment. It must be willing to allow networks to emerge instead of insisting on designing systems and retaining control. Counterintuitively, in doing so, the United States grows relatively stronger while simultaneously becoming less central.

America’s new role must reach beyond providing military security to include leadership and maintenance of this new network. Beyond being the military provider of last resort, America’s contribution, in former Secretary of State Shultz’s metaphor, is to serve as gardener: cultivating relationships, doing the maintenance and tending the whole enterprise.

Done right, the network as a whole, as well as its individual geographic entities, acquires agency. In the process, capability is deliberately distributed for the benefit of all.

When the international commons has functioned smoothly, the secret has been keeping friction low. But today, friction in international affairs is on the rise. Today’s America, jaded by ineffectual forever wars and debilitating political dysfunction, is of a mind to tear things down.

The overuse of sanctions as coercion, for example, (well described in Edward Fishman’s book Chokepoints) illustrates a harmful tendency toward punishment as a first option. Too much of America’s strategic prescription has become negative: stop this, deter that, punish the other.

This is no strategy for the future. New American leadership must clear a path allies can travel together.

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George Kennan and the other architects of Soviet Containment were informed by three of the last century’s important geostrategic thinkers, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford J. Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman. Mahan, writing first, argued that command of the seas translated into national power.

Next, Mackinder proposed that whoever controlled the Heartland (his term, essentially the interior of Eurasia), would be unbeatable. Elaborating on Mackinder, Spykman thought control of what he called the Rimland (the area that surrounds Eurasia and extends beyond), was the key to world domination.

Kennan, as an inhabitant of that Rimland, developed his theory of Containment to contain the Soviets in Eurasia.

All these twentieth-century theories were fundamentally rooted in territorial control. Geography remains essential today, but it is now only one source of national power.

The international commons is fraying just as the world enters the most consequential tech revolution we’ll ever see. At such a moment, democracy needs an advocate.

But the same tech that’s changing our world is accelerating disinformation, political fragmentation and institutional distrust, putting democracy on the defensive just at the moment it sorely needs confidence.

Staking out a hemispheric sphere of influence just won’t do. Reclaiming the international commons will require a new agenda-setting alliance that seizes the world’s attention, providing a vibrant new venue for invention, networked and distributed across countries, companies and competencies.

America’s historic strength has been its ability to bring together people, ideas and institutions on a scale no other nation could match. No other country is as well placed to reach beyond geographic boundaries and create conditions in which the world’s most advanced technological ecosystem can thrive.

America’s challenge has grown beyond defending the twentieth century order. Its challenge, its strategic necessity, is to inspire and then harness the collective ambitions of the next one. America built the postwar commons. It can build its successor.

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