How to Get Your Enemies to Gang Up on You
Some advice for America
If you are a global superpower looking to hasten WWIII and the destruction of the world, you might be in the business of getting all your opponents to gang up on you for a final nuclear showdown. The number one way to get the world’s other superpowers to form an alliance against you is to try to dominate the world economy through the power of your currency, spread “democracy” to every other country, orchestrate coups d’état and military interventions around the world, coerce sovereign world leaders to bend to your will, and generally throw your weight around. But you should also consider these nifty strategies for getting all your opponents really angry and encouraging them to work together to thwart your every move.
Confirm your enemies’ worst fears
The 2021 U.S. Threat Assessment Report, assembled by the U.S. intelligence community, wrote that:
Russian officials have long believed that the United States is conducting its own “influence campaigns” to undermine Russia, weaken President Vladimir Putin, and install Western-friendly regimes in the states of the former Soviet Union and elsewhere.
Russia seeks an accommodation with the United States on mutual noninterference in both countries’ domestic affairs and US recognition of Russia’s claimed sphere of influence over much of the former Soviet Union.
This is great material to work with! Since these are the things Russia worries about, you should go ahead and do them; that way, Russia will fear and distrust you and want to form closer relationships with North Korea, Iran, and China. You should fund NGOs1 in countries that your enemies consider to be part their spheres of influence to try to influence politics and public opinion in those countries. When a party you don’t like wins a domestic election in a country that’s part of one of your enemies’ historical spheres of influence (like Georgia, for example), you should declare it a stolen election, no evidence needed!
You should, as the president of the United States, say daft things like “Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power.” Despite walking this back by saying it’s not calling for regime change,2 you can still significantly push the world toward the nuclear brink with belligerent statements like this.3
When your enemies seek to (brutally and unjustifiably!) exert their power throughout their spheres of influence,4 much as you have done, still do, and pledge to continue doing, you should fight them, hard. It may be hypocritical and non-democratic, but it will encourage your enemies to join together into a league of countries that seeks your destruction, which will help bring about a final world war to end all wars (and all life).
Annoy and frighten your enemies
In an interview with the Financial Times, U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken cited a peculiar anecdote in defending his approach to China. The Chinese foreign minister had effectively told him that he found America’s posture threatening—to Blinken, this was great news.
“The last time I saw him, in Laos, he accused me half-jokingly, half-seriously of being on an encirclement tour, because I was going to Laos, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, and Mongolia on that trip.”
Never mind that going on a diplomatic tour of East Asian countries is not inherently aggressive. A key aspect of diplomacy is to do weird, often performative, actions to show other nations to you want peace and cooperation, that you’re not prepping for war. For example, China cared a lot about Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, even though it didn’t represent a threat to China in and of itself—it was showy and provocative.
I know the American foreign policy establishment thinks it has the right to send Pelosi to Taiwan. But foreign policy should be pragmatic! There’s a difference between what you think you ought to be able to do and what’s prudent. We’re trying to prevent the end of the world here, not flaunt the excesses of our ego. A wise foreign policy requires considering consequences, not just asserting rights.
Blinken seems to think that a successful foreign policy is one that makes China skittish and worried, not content and trusting. This is a great strategy if you want China to seek its security assurances in a partnership with Russia, perhaps. Not a great stance if you want a productive and non-belligerent relationship with the world’s other superpower. But that’s not what we want! We want another cold war, and, fingers crossed, another world war.
Sanction them
This is perhaps my favourite blunt object with which we can bludgeon the world order. Sanctions have historically been terrible at achieving their aim, and they usually punish the civilians living under regimes we dislike. What’s more, by cutting off our opponents from Western companies, we’ll encourage them to develop indigenous industrial capacity, ensuring that they can withstand an American embargo during a world war. Paul Triolo put it thus in Wired:
US export controls have slowed China, but at a high level the sanctions have unified the will and efforts of the Chinese government to become more self-reliant. It has plowed tens of billions into helping local players catch up technologically or scale capacity in core areas, resulting in significant changes within the semiconductor industry and its ability to support the advanced hardware for developing frontier AI models.
Also, our enemies will start trading with one another more as they lose trade opportunities in Western countries—this naturally coaxes them into forming strategic partnerships.
Lastly, countries that don’t trade with one another have less to lose economically when they go to war than countries that do. Not only is trade mutually economically beneficial; it prevents war. This means that with sanctions we can effectively cram ourselves into zero-sum relationships with Russia and China, ensuring that any small grievance between us and them quickly explodes into a full-blown conflict, without pesky business leaders and workers advocating for diplomacy and peace out of their own financial interest.5
Ignore, and if possible chastise, your opponents’ diplomats
Here’s Trita Parsi writing in The New Republic:
In 1997, then-Senator Biden recounted on C-SPAN how Russian diplomats had told him that NATO expansion would push Moscow toward Beijing. Biden responded dismissively, “Good luck. And if that doesn’t work out, try Iran,” while insisting that such an alliance simply wasn’t an option.
Great stuff! America went on to expand NATO into most of Russia’s former sphere of influence, which many Western policy makers and analysts predicted would be viewed as belligerent by Russia. They’ve been vindicated, and now we’ve got a proxy war in Eastern Europe between two nuclear powers. If only we could find a way to get the world’s other large nuclear power, China, to start working with Russia against us….
Declare a league of democracies
Other countries will hate being excluded from your special club, especially if they view themselves as historically and culturally important. For example, China and Russia, the largest countries by population and size respectively, will be peeved that you didn’t invite them to your exclusive international summit, the goals of which were “to strengthen democratic institutions, protect human rights, and accelerate the fight against corruption, both at home and abroad.” They’ll be especially enraged by the irony of those goals, considering that America’s democratic institutions are crumbling, America often overturns democratic elections when it dislikes the outcome, America’s favourite ally/client state is currently committing heinous human rights violations, and the wealthiest man in the world gave a quarter-million dollars to the victor of the last U.S. presidential election in exchange for massive policy influence.
You know, come to think of it, declaring a league of democracies might encourage your opponents to declare their own alliance and start cooperating more on trade and security. What was that saying about powder kegs and matches again?
In all seriousness
I realize this is pretty sassy. I write as a gadfly, encouraging people to consider issues that often go ignored in foreign policy discussions. I think there’s a time and place for funding pro-democracy NGOs, fighting wars, and using sanctions. But many values are important and must be considered, not just “democracy promotion.” When we have to trade off promoting democracy with preventing nuclear war, I’ll always choose preventing nuclear war.
I think that the American foreign policy orthodoxy that views geopolitics in terms of a Manichaean struggle between the good countries and the evil countries is terribly mistaken. It prioritizes war over global cooperation on the things that really matter, like climate change, AI risk, pandemic risk, and nuclear risk. I also think that America’s hypocrisy on issues of international law, democracy, and fighting corruption undermines its efforts to promote these values via an aggressive foreign policy.
The work of the National Democratic and International Republican Institutes (and other organizations like USAID and Open Society) is at times laudable: democracy is good, and supporting and promoting it are also often good. However, when US-backed NGOs end up calling for and working toward regime change in other countries, it causes significant backlash that ought to be taken into account; it’s effectively a breach of the sovereignty principle of international law. And looking back at our track record, interfering in the domestic politics of other countries usually doesn’t work.
In what world is this not calling for regime change?
Notice that this interventionist sentiment, the idea that we have the right to change how other countries are governed, is one of the things Biden supposedly finds so problematic about Vladimir Putin. It’s certainly one of the things I don’t like about the guy!
Really, America has gone far beyond any kind of Monrovian sphere of influence. We invaded Iraq, for crying out loud.
The US and China used to both receive high-end semiconductors from TSMC in Taiwan, which was a massive deterrent for Chinese invasion. Now China can’t access those chips in any case, making invasion a comparatively less costly decision. The only person I’ve seen discussing this potential harm of chip war on China is Bob Wright at Nonzero.