Last week, within days of Washington applying sanctions against Chinese quantum technology, US President Joe Biden blocked the release of audio recordings of his interviews with a specially appointed committee. In an apparently single sweep, the US was flexing its power domestically and its influence abroad while the British elected Pan Jianwei, China’s “father of quantum”, as a fellow of London’s Royal Society.
Pan is a leading physicist who built the world’s first quantum satellite and is among “over 90 exceptional researchers from across the world” named by the Royal Society in 2024, in recognition of “their invaluable contributions to science”. Biden is president of an important (and historically vital) country in the global political economy of the past six or seven decades. While the comparison of two apparently discrete events is not entirely appropriate, it does lead to thinking about the political economic relations of the past several decades. I may be mixing up things, but the mind does what it does.
We take most of the following for granted. The US has, since the late 1940s, had the economic and military power to sanction countries while investing in science and innovation and expanding communications technology, all of which rested on physical and intellectual infrastructure. The US led the world because of three important factors: domestic political economic strength, foreign economic and financial strength and influence, and military power to back up everything.
In the long run, this leadership could not last. That is what we learn from historians and theorists. Giambattista Vico provided an early understanding of the decline of what we have come to accept as “advanced societies”. Vico wrote about “civilisational” collapse. Arnold Toynbee’s work on this collapse is more readily accessible.
Earlier in 2024, research results published by the American Public Health Association showed that country was “falling behind in global science [and] technology” and, as mentioned previously, in infrastructure renewal and investment. The US presidency reported three years ago that public investment in infrastructure as a share of GDP fell “by more than 40% since the 1960s”. In November 2023, the Council on Foreign Relations, the standard-bearer of status quo patriotism, reported that US infrastructure was “dangerously overstretched and lagging behind that of its economic competitors, particularly China”.
China is not exactly the glowing paradise of liberal capitalism, but we’re looking at the rise and fall of orders. In this context, the US continues to “fall behind” globally while resorting to illiberal practices domestically. A most uncomfortable admission to make.
I have written about this over and over again from different perspectives. One thing that is relatively unexplored is the way our beliefs and values, our ideological beliefs, determine whether we think this decline, and the rise of China and India, is good or bad. Economic sanctions are one of the issues that divides opinion.
Economic sanctions are not always an effective strategy. Never mind the sanctions against Havana, Cuba has not disappeared. Never mind sanctions by Arab countries against Israel since 1947, the Israeli state has continued to exist. Economic sanctions have mainly significant symbolic value. In most cases they fail to dislodge political leaders and leadership. Fidel Castro died peacefully in his sleep. Sanctions against Iraq killed thousands of people, but not Saddam Hussein. He was killed when (as Chris Hedges, author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, may explain) the individual lives of US soldiers were given meaning.
What is unremarkable is that the same people who would have opposed sanctions against SA in the 1980s would support sanctions against Cuba. It is also unremarkable, I imagine, that the same people who would raise the alarm about President Cyril Ramaphosa withholding information from the public, would support, “understand” or consider permissible Biden’s secrecy and authoritarian shutdown of the information flow.
Much the same can be said about China’s increased prominence and activity. Status quo patriotism means we are compelled to point out that China is communist and illiberal, but we readily accept illiberal authoritarianism when peaceful protesters in the US, Britain and across Europe are beaten and arrested. The 1989 photograph of the “Tank Man” shows a man who stood in the way of a tank on Tiananmen Square as a hero (as he was), but the Palestinian youngster of 12 or 13 swinging a catapult at an Israeli tank is a terrorist (he was not).
I am sure there is a way beyond all these misplaced sensibilities, but I’m not sure how or when we will be able to do that successfully. We can, all of us, at least agree that gains in science and technology, in innovation in general, are generally a good thing. I say “generally” because when scientific advances get into the hands of politicians who have the political power to withhold information, that’s how we got the twin holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The election to London’s Royal Society of Pan Jianwei, Biden’s blocking of information and the overall decline of the US add to what Thomas Mann described in Doctor Faustus as the “stupidity” of our gaze and our “present impotence”.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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