War by Other Means by Robert D. Blackwill

Author:Robert D. Blackwill [Blackwill, Robert D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674737211
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Structural Limitations

If American limitations when it comes to geoeconomics are partly institutional, they are also largely structural. Certain geoeconomic tools will be simply better suited for some countries than for others. And for better or worse, given certain structural realities, the United States will probably never be capable of using trade and investment for foreign policy goals—and especially not in shorter-term, more transactional or coercive ways. Consequently, the most important question is not how inclined the United States is to engage in the geoeconomic uses of trade and investment but rather how (and how assertively) the United States sees fit to respond to the growing geoeconomic use of trade and investment by other countries.

Similarly, cyber is another geoeconomic tool that, for a mix of structural and ideological reasons—many of them compelling—is not likely to be of much use for the United States. Not only do countries such as Russia and China not face any real legal or popular constraints in committing cyberattacks against private firms, but these countries also tend to be adroit at translating the stolen data into economic and geopolitical gains without ever leaving state-controlled channels. The United States has spent billions developing offensive cyber weapons—but to date it has deployed these weapons in only one known instance (a conventional military application).47 Underpinning this reluctance is a deeper concern about geopolitical outcomes. To put it mildly, in the context of the recent domestic controversy regarding the National Security Agency’s acquisition of big data, it is difficult to imagine that Washington could ever replicate in peacetime the cyber instruments so pervasively used by certain countries, especially China and Russia. Nevertheless, President Obama told an audience of business executives in September 2015, “If we wanted to go on offense, a whole bunch of countries would have some significant problems.”48

Considerable as the gap is between potential U.S. geoeconomic power and U.S. willingness to use that power on trade and cyber issues, nowhere is the gap larger than in the realm of financial and monetary policy. Nor, with the exception of cyber, is any realm of U.S. geoeconomic power undergoing such dramatic shifts. As Chapter 3 noted, the United States no longer enjoys a monopoly on where capital originates, how it is intermediated, and where it ends up. This fact makes U.S. financial sanctions more difficult—and more reliant on multilateral diplomacy. Even short of sanctions, it means that countries are more able to challenge the United States without exacting a toll on their borrowing costs. Finally, the emergence of swap lines and deep-pocketed central banks outside the United States means that Washington no longer owns a decisive say on whether a country receives a sovereign bailout or credit lifeline in times of crisis.

Even if the United States no longer enjoys a monopoly on these financial and monetary chokepoints, it still retains considerable leverage. Discomfort with exercising this potential for geopolitical use, however, can amount to geoeconomic blinders. It is telling that in the run-up to a potential military strike on Iran’s nuclear

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