Follow the link for a full transcript of "Global Threats Today: The 2024 Edition."

Illiberal Actors Are on the Move  |  Amichai Magen

Around the world, we are seeing a new axis of influence coalescing. Some have called it the "axis of misery" or the "axis of resistance." It is composed of Russia and Iran and North Korea, with a lot of Chinese involvement as well. It is transforming our international system in unbelievable ways. It is united by the desire to dismantle the liberal international order, and we're starting to see the nature and the interconnectivity of this new axis of chaos much more clearly. 

You see North Korean soldiers fighting for Putin in Ukraine. You see Putin helping the Houthis attack international Western shipping in Yemen. We see North Korean tunnel technology turn up in Lebanon with Hezbollah and then with Hamas in Gaza. The interconnectivity is something that we really need to know much more about.

Historically, emperors, kings, dukes, used to spend 50% of their resources on preparing for war or waging war. But in the post-Second World War era, we built a critical norm that we've called the liberal international order. And the miracle of the liberal international order is that we've managed to take global averages of defense spending from about 50% to a global average of about 7%. And the resulting surplus wealth has allowed us to invest in education, health, and scientific discovery.

What is at stake now is the possibility of a return of a norm where states are destroyed and disappear. And we have currently three states in the international system, at the very least — Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — that are at risk of annihilation. To that end, we must articulate a positive strategic vision for the Middle East that will strive towards a two state solution, that would give the Palestinian people the dignity and the freedom that they deserve alongside a safe and secure Israel, and that will leverage the new spirit of cooperation that exists in the Middle East.

If we allow the norm of the non-disappearance of state to erode and collapse, we will go back to the law of the jungle, where we will have to spend so much more money on the wrong things. That is what is at stake in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and with Taiwan.
 

Challenges to Democracy Come From Within |  Didi Kuo

Many people think that the threat to democracy comes from outside our borders, particularly from countries like Russia and China that are asserting themselves in new and aggressive ways.

But the real threat to democracies that we're seeing across the globe is coming from within. Leaders come to power through democratic means, but then they begin to erode power from within. They attack the electoral system and the process of democratic elections, and they take power from other branches of government and aggregate it to themselves within the office of the executive. 

The good news is there are examples of countries like France, Brazil, and Poland where illiberal leaders have been stopped by pro-democracy coalitions of people who came together. These coalitions don't necessarily agree with each other politically, but they've come together and adapted in order to foreclose on these anti-democratic forces. 

That flexibility and adaptability is the reason democracies succeed. We see this over and over again in the the United States. When our institutions have become out of date, we've changed them. We extended suffrage, first to Black Americans who were formerly enslaved, then to women, then to Native Americans. We eliminating poll taxes and rethought what it means to have a multiracial democracy. We have a long track record of making changes.

Today in 2024, some of our democratic institutions are antiquated and don't reflect our contemporary values. This is a moment where we should lean into that flexible strength of democracy and think about institutional reforms that will both strengthen our system against illiberal creep and help us better achieve the ideals that we aspiring to as a people.
 

Ukraine Is Not Fated to Lose |  Steven Pifer

There's a narrative that's taking place that Russia is winning the war, Ukraine is losing, and it's only a matter of time. And it is true that Russia has captured a bit more territory than they occupied at the start of the year. But they've only achieved that at enormous cost.

As of September, the Pentagon says Russia had lost 600,000 dead and wounded soldiers. To put that in context, in February of 2022 when this major invasion began, the total Russian military — not just the army, but the total Russian military — was 1.1 million people. And the British Ministry of Defense earlier this week assessed that Russia now is losing 1,200 soldiers killed or severely wounded per day. You have to ask how long that's sustainable.

When I talk to Ukrainians, they still regard this war as existential. They're very determined to win, and we need to do a better job of supporting that. A stable and secure Europe is vital to America's national security interests, and you're not going to have a stable and secure Europe unless there's a stable and secure Ukraine. So we need to both provide them the weapons they need and relieve some of the restrictions we currently have and allow the Ukrainians to use those weapons to strike military targets in Russia.

Because we have to ask ourselves: what does an emboldened Vladimir Putin do if he wins in Ukraine? I don't think his ambitions end with Ukraine, perhaps not even with the post-Soviet space. There's going to be a much darker Russian threat hovering over Europe if Putin wins. So let's not count the Ukrainians out.
 

China Isn't Going Away Anytime Soon  |  Oriana Skylar Mastro

There is a lot of discussion right now about the fact that the economy in China is slowing down and its demography is undergoing significant changes. What I'm here to tell you is that the challenge of China is not over, and is not going to be over any time soon. China has built power in a different way than the United States, and we have to reassess how we understand that power if we want to effectively deter, blunt, and block them from acting out in ways that threaten our partners and allies.

Since the 1990s, China has developed a significant amount of political, economic, and military power. They've gone from having an economy smaller than France’s  to the second largest in the world. They've gone from not being involved in international institutions to a great degree, not even having diplomatic relations with major countries like South Korea, to now having stronger and greater diplomatic networks, especially in Asia, than the United States.

What we really need to understand is that the U.S.-China competition is not about the United States or about China; it's about the rest of the world, and how the rest of the world sees us and how China interacts with us. The balance of power is shifting, and we have to be a lot smarter and a lot faster if we want to make sure it shifts in favor of our interests.

The United States hasn't had a comprehensive strategy towards the developing world in a long time. And we are running out of time to get that balance right in Asia. We don't have the right stuff. We don't have it in the right numbers, and it's not in the right place. Some of this is about deterring war over Taiwan, but it's also about generally maintaining peace and stability in Asia.
 

We're Doing Better (But Not Enough) on Climate Change |  Marshall Burke

Many people don't recognize how much progress we're actually making on climate issues. Emissions have fallen by 20% since 2005. We're actually speeding up the amount of substantial progress being made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and dealing with the core climate change problem, which is the human emission of greenhouse gasses.

In the United States, the Inflation Reduction Act and the subsequent implementation of various rules the Biden administration has championed has given a huge boost in transitioning our economy to greener energy technologies, transportation technologies, and other kinds of infrastructure. We're moving a lot of cash to get that done, and the president is trying to get as much of it out the door as he can before his term ends.

Globally, the progress has been less rapid. Emissions are roughly flat. But overall, we're still making progress. I co-teach an undergraduate class on climate change, and we've had to update our slides on how much warming we're expecting over the next century. We thought it was going to be four degrees Celsius. Now we think it's going to be something between two and three degrees Celsius.

But the flip side of that is that we're still going to get warming of two to three degrees Celsius. We're already experiencing warming of about a degree Celsius, which is about two degrees Fahrenheit, and it's projected that we're going to get another three to five degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That is a lot of warming, and we are not prepared to deal with it. We need to do much more on mitigation and much more on adaptation if we're going to meet the realities of living in a changing climate.

So we've had progress on the one hand, but there's still a lot of work left to do in the coming decades.
 

Get additional analysis from scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies by following us on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and by subscribing to our newsletters and updates.

During the lecture, Pan detailed the survey she and her collaborators conducted in China and shared a case study using data from Weibo to illustrate how China uses select charges to manipulate the public's view of influential dissidents and induce self-censorship among other dissidents in an act of disguised repression.

SCCEI produced a China Brief based off of Professor Pan’s paper on disguised repression in China. Read the brief here for a synthesized recap of the paper. 
 

Watch the recorded lecture to learn more about the research and her findings. 
 

The United States remains a leader in the global economy, yet over the past decade, it has taken a sharp turn away from its traditional support of free, rules-based trade. Since 2016, Washington has withdrawn from international trade agreements it once championed, opting for a more unilateral approach and pivoting from many of the obligations and norms it had shaped and insisted others honor to make trade fair, equitable, and mutually beneficial. How did the United States arrive here, and what steps should it take to leverage its strengths in the global trade system moving forward?

APARC visiting scholar Michael Beeman addresses these questions in his new book Walking Out: America’s New Trade Policy in the Asia-Pacific and Beyond (published by APARC, distributed by Stanford University Press). As a former Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Japan, Korea, and APEC, Beeman brings an insider’s perspective to the recent transformation of U.S. trade policy. He provides a timely analysis of the forces driving this shift, examines its implications for America’s role in the global economy, and offers prescriptions for a robust U.S. trade policy that still serves American interests while allowing for compromise among competing ones.

Join Dr. Beeman on campus for our book launch event on October 17. Reserve your spot today >

Beeman joined APARC Communications Manager Michael Breger to discuss his new book. Listen to the conversation on our SoundCloud or YouTube channels. You can also download a transcript of the conversation.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive our event invitations and scholar updates >

A Departure From the Norm

In Beeman's analysis, the tactic of "walking out" as a means to renegotiate international agreements reflects a fundamental shift in U.S. trade policy, marked by a rejection of established conditions, obligations, and norms that had previously facilitated global trade and reduced conflict. This shift has had significant repercussions, as Washington has increasingly distanced itself from the principles it once championed, such as non-discrimination, transparency, openness, and reciprocity in trade. The change represents more than the inability to agree to a specific trade deal. According to Beeman, it is a rejection of Washington's long-held principles in pursuit of new goals.

Beeman attributes the collapse of the decades-long bipartisan consensus supporting free trade to a domestic political climate, where “the emergence of America’s zero-sum-centered politics [is] the new, defining feature of its political system.” In this new system, trade is viewed not as mutually beneficial but as a competition for limited resources. This transformation began gaining traction during the 2007-2008 financial crisis, which galvanized new political movements, like the Tea Party and the so-called New Right, that simultaneously criticized free trade agreements.

Acknowledging the effects of domestic politics on trade policy, Beeman explores how the current political landscape, marked by extreme division, shapes trade decisions and reflects broader societal tensions. The author draws parallels between historical trade policy and the contemporary environment, noting that just as the 1930s saw dramatic swings in U.S. tariff policies, today’s new political geometry is “forged from extreme new levels of domestic political division [...] On trade, it is a geometry of acute angles and no longer one of curves and tangents.”

This political backdrop has resulted in an increasingly politicized trade policy that hampers efforts to find consensus. Beeman emphasizes that the transformation of U.S. trade policy is not merely a reflection of external pressures but a byproduct of internal political dynamics that redefine the goals and assumptions underpinning U.S. trade strategy.

Trade Policy Tensions
 

Among the many trade agreements that the U.S. has recently abandoned was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). According to Beeman, internal divisions regarding the TPP's stringent rules and demands — especially concerning auto manufacturing — highlighted a rift between America's expectations of its trading partners and its willingness to accept compromise.

Various rules and regulations dictated by the TPP stoked domestic contention and “had scrambled the usual pathways to achieve the vote margins needed for these agreements. [They] also revealed the sharp new tension between what America expected and wanted from others and what it was willing to agree upon and accept for itself.” The Biden administration's decision to abandon its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) trade agreement in late 2023 further illustrated ongoing tensions in U.S. trade policy, underscoring a lack of coherent strategy following the TPP's collapse.

The book explores how the Trump and Biden Administrations have grappled with the contradictions in their trade policies. While Robert Lighthizer, the former trade representative under Trump, embraced a confrontational approach, Beeman criticizes the fallout from these decisions, arguing they often left established commitments unfulfilled and damaged international relationships. But Beeman also maintains that the Biden Administration's attempts to repair and redefine trade relationships have resulted in a series of inconsistent policies, reflecting internal domestic tensions yet to be resolved.

“As a set of social values and domestic priorities in search of a means to express themselves through America’s external trade policies, [the Biden] Administration attempted to explain its approach in ways that often only raised contradictory distinctions.” Once these “became harder to explain and justify, [it] began developing what amounted to a new theory of global trade disorder and dysfunction in an attempt to more convincingly frame its decisions.”

According to Beeman, disruptions from Covid-19 were a “helpful backdrop,” but, he argues, “if set against the vastly more immense challenges of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when America made an intentional policy choice to work with other countries to commit to open, rules-based trade to lead the world out of crisis, the problems of 2020-21 were challenges that policymakers from that time undoubtedly would have preferred.”

Barriers to Progress
 

The current political landscape has made it challenging for Congress to reach a consensus on trade issues. The failure to renew the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), which provided tariff relief to developing countries, exemplifies the paralysis in U.S. trade policy. Beeman remarks upon how, “after the bipartisan mainstream that advanced open and freer trade […] was swept away by America’s New Right and progressive Left, their shared interest in adding new and ever more conditions to America’s imports was insufficient to overcome their sharp disagreements over which conditions to add.” For Beeman, the inability to agree on new conditions for trade reflects broader ideological divides that hinder progress.

Ultimately, Beeman warns that America’s zero-sum approach to trade may lead to a cycle of self-inflicted isolation. He argues that this shift is not solely a reaction to China’s rise but represents a deeper ideological rift in American politics. “International trade adds a foreign, or external, dimension to zero-sum thinking that has facilitated a surprising degree of alignment between the New Right and the progressive Left,” he writes, specifically the “zero-sum belief that America is made worse off by freer trade, which benefits ‘them.’” Such an alignment has created an environment where bipartisan support for trade agreements has eroded, complicating efforts to establish a coherent and effective trade policy moving forward.

An essential read for anyone interested in the international political economy of trade and the future of America’s role in the global economy, “Walking Out” highlights the urgent need for the United States to reconcile its domestic divides to reestablish its role in the global economy. The current trajectory, characterized by a rejection of its foundational principles, risks fostering new conflicts with allies and adversaries alike, contradicting the original goals of the international trading system.