A Technocratic Take on Global Power Politics

The Covid-19 crisis is far from over, but the recalibration of supply chains and trade, travel and technology, that it has accelerated indicates a future that will be more regional than global. Yet deep tensions persist both across and within the world's major centers of gravity: Europe, Asia, and North America.

Europe is not "caught" between China and America

As Angela Merkel and Xi Jinping hold a Zoom summit to discuss the state of Euro-Chinese relations, European sentiment has clearly shifted towards far greater suspicion of China. But remember that the EU trades almost twice as much with China as the US does. It is also taking advantage of China's capital account liberalization with less political backlash than American financial face, and more broadly has signed free trade agreements with Japan and Vietnam, with others to follow. It remains to be seen how Germany's Indo-Pacific strategy will take shape, but Europe stands a far better chance than America of engaging Asia without alienating China.

See The Future is Asian for more on how Europe and Asia are converging along the new Silk Roads.

What's good for Asia is good for China

The great question for Asia is whether it can sustain the past three decades of relative geopolitical stability amidst elevated tensions between China and many of its terrestrial and maritime neighbors. China's military ambitions have risen, as has its strategic and economic penetration across the region through the Belt and Road Initiative. At the same time, India, Japan, Australia, the US, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other powers have stepped up their counter-measures such as the "Quad" military coordination mechanism and numerous new frameworks to offer concessional terms of infrastructure finance so weaker Asian countries can avoid debt traps. Can the pushback against Chinese encroachment induce China to accept a collective Asian interest higher than its own?

See my recent essay featured in The National Interest on how Asian powers can use technocratic methods of conflict resolution to settle their centuries old disputes.

America: From populist democracy to direct technocracy?

"Every nation gets the government it deserves," stated French counter-revolutionary philosopher Joseph de Maistre. It was a century after the French Revolution that the Third Republic was established in 1870, an attempt to introduce greater professionalism into the training of public servants in the manner of its rival Prussia who soundly defeated it in the Franco-Prussian War. Historically, it is such moments of utter failure that reveal to a population the need for a more technocratic form of government in which a strong and utilitarian public administration sets long-term policies in the collective public interest. America capably fused democracy and technocracy for a century from the time of its late 19th century westward expansion and the creation of a modern federal government and bureaucracies such as the Social Security Administration. But America today is paying the price for recent decades of dismantling and disempowering the civil service while allowing special interests and partisanship to dominate politics. As much as the US needs to get through the upcoming election with a peaceful transition of presidential power, it also needs a total overhaul in its system of government towards a fusion of direct democracy and data-driven technocracy.

 Shortly after Trump's 2016 election, my book Technocracy in America argued for a complete redesign of American government, from replacing the single elected president with a Swiss-style "collective presidency" to abolishing the Senate and instead convening an "Assembly of Governors."