The world order established after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the US as the hegemonic power and Western Europe and Japan as subordinated allies, is coming to an end. 2023 seems to be the turning point – and 2024 promises to accentuate the changes.
There are several driving forces behind these changes.
The first is the failed attempt by the US to strangle the rise of China as an economic, technological and military power, by impeding its access to the latest technologies and creating military alliances and military bases around the country. That it is a failure has become increasingly clear during 2023. A consequence of this failed attempt is a partial reversal of the globalisation that has been ongoing since 1990 and on which much of the prosperity of the Western elites is built. The main victim of this struggle between US and China is the EU, who is paying the price for supporting the US in the trade and technology war against China, without reaping any benefits. South Korea and Japan are other possible victims.
The second it the economic rise of the Global South, particularly India, but also Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam and other Asian countries, and some African countries (most importantly Ethiopia). They are aspiring to emulate the success of China and the “Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia) with a drive to stimulate their national industries. They are welcoming foreign investments, including outsourced production, but they are increasingly unwilling to accept to be reduced to the role of providing cheap labour for outsourced production from the Western powers.
The world is changing, as the economies of the BRICS countries are now bigger than the G7. Source: https://www.statista.com/chart/30638/brics-and-g7-share-of-global-gdp/
The third is the defeat that NATO is heading towards in Ukraine, coupled with the rise of a re-industrialising and assertive Russia. This defeat comes on top of NATO’s humiliating defeats in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. While the US can shake this defeat off with relative ease, this is not the case for the EU, which has invested too much of its political, economical, military and reputational capital in the Ukraine war.
The fourth is the Israeli extermination war in Gaza, where the unconditional support from the US and the EU to their ally’s excesses implies a moral defeat in the eyes of not only the Muslim countries, but also most of the Global South. Next time the Western Powers (calling themselves the “International Community”) try to lecture other countries on Human Rights and the “International Rights Based Order”, they will find out that their already dwindling support in the Global South has shrunk further. They will be met with claims about hypocrisy and double standards that the usual sneering about “what-aboutism” will not be able to brush them aside.
South Africa has together with four other countries referred Israel’s war in Gaza to the International Criminal Court, ICC. ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan visited Israel at the invitation of Israel to meet the victims of Hamas attacks, but he has not taken any action in the case against Israel (he says the court has been conducting investigations on the situation on the West Bank and Gaza since 2021, so he obviously is in no hurry – unlike the prompt international arrest order he emitted against Russian President Putin). Kahn's predecessor in the ICC was sanctioned by the United States because he started an investigation into the American war in Afghanistan. Kahn dropped the case. He knows where the power lies.
The lack of action by ICC has caused South Africa to raise the case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Israel cannot claim that the court has no jurisdiction, as Israel is a member of the UN (but not the ICC). The South African denunciation of Israel at the International Courts is putting the EU in an uncomfortable situation. The ICC has up to now only indicted Africans, mostly black Africans (and lately also five Russians, including President Putin). The courts can take up the case, and unleash the ire of the US and Israel, or they can reject it, and lose whatever credibility they might still have in the Global South (which is not much). Interesting. I guess both courts will find ways to kick the can down the road. If they can.
President of the EU Commission told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nethanyahu that “EU stands with Israel” in its war of extermination against Gaza. The reputational cost to the EU in the Global South is immense.
The fifth is the increasing internal divisions within the Western countries themselves, struggling as they are with increasing inequality, an unpopular inflow of migrants, anti-muslim sentiments, and cultural wars around LBQT+ issues, which find little understanding and support in most of the Global South. This is not to say that the Global South itself is not bereft with internal problems such as ethnic conflicts, separatist movements, extreme inequality, corruption, and so on, but that doesn’t provide any consolation to the Western elites.
Most of these driving forces have been building up for years, but as is often the case, the accumulation of small quantitative changes may suddenly result in major qualitative leaps. And that is what seems to be happening just now.
The US will continue to be the main military and technological power for years to come, but its hegemony is coming to an end. What will follow is difficult to predict. Some foresee a bipolar world with the US and China as the two poles, while others see a big role for the BRICS alliance, which is now becoming BRICS+ (but I doubt that). Some predict a more fragmented system, where the countries are gathering around several regional powers and a looser system of relations between them is established, which is what I consider as the most probable outcome. We will see a quite strong China-Russia-Iran axis (not an alliance), due to their rejection of Western sanctions, each of them connected to some Central Asian and Middle East countries (Syria, Iraq), India as a centre of power in its own right, connected to neighbouring countries as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and an assertive Turkey as a minor regional power with close relations to several Central Asian countries (Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and perhaps Kazakhstan). Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America are politically too divided and volatile to constitute new regional centres of power, but individual countries from these continents will probably want to avoid choosing between alliances, and will instead try to enter into cooperation with whoever they consider convenient - the US, China, Russia, India, etc.
The US would clearly prefer a new bipolar cold war, where the world is divided between the good and the evil, but most countries in the Global South are unlikely to be willing to play along. Nobody really cares what the EU wants - it is seen as a simple appendix to the US, and hence irrelevant. Want to deal with the EU? Just see what happened to the infamous Minsk Agreements agreed between Ukraine, France, Germany and Russia. Better go directly to the big boss: the US.
So will the new world order be better or worse than the US system of forever wars (confusingly called “Pax Americana”)? To my opinion it will be neither. It will be different and it will be unstable, so it can go many ways. Much statesmanship will be needed to avoid catastrophes, and new forms for international cooperation are needed. Unfortunately, both are in short supply for the moment.
For this to happen, the Western elites will have to understand – and accept – that the world is changing. They may dig in their heals, throw bombs here and there, scream and cry, but change will come. And then new agreements will necessarily have to be negotiated with the rest of the world to meet the big global challenges. Negotiated, not dictated. For the common good.
The greatest global challenge is to avoid an all-out war between the US and the emerging powers, a war that has a high risk of ending in a nuclear war with devastating effects. The US has since 1990 withdrawn from all the agreements on weapons control it had signed with the Soviet Union, one by one, including agreements to lower tensions and create confidence. They did so because they couldn’t see any point in negotiating with a had-been world power, as then President Obama said: US is the only real world power, while Russia is hardly a regional power. Why bother negotiating with them? This arrogance is the direct road to hell. New arms agreements will have to be negotiated, but proposals that just aim at cementing the US overwhelming superiority in military power will never fly. At least China and India will have to be part of any negotiated solution. It really doesn’t matter much whether the EU is in or out. The US can let Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland inform them about the outcome afterwards.
The other big global challenge is Climate Change. The Ukraine conflict and the Western Sanctions have implied big steps backwards. Europe has shifted from piped natural gas from Russia to dirty fracking gas converted to LNG and sent by ship from the US, which has a considerably heavier CO2 foot-print. Coal is back, and piped oil from Russia has been substituted with oil shipped from faraway countries. As a result of the sanctions, Russia is now also investing heavily in climate unfriendly LNG to avoid being stuck with the piped gas that the EU doesn’t want any more, and their oil is being shipped to other faraway countries. So much about the EU priorities regarding climate change.
The mass emigration from countries of the Global South is another big challenge. There is an urgent need to change the whole international model set up during the roaring globalisation decades, a model where the Global South is exporting raw materials, basic agricultural products, and people to the rich countries, and is serving as a basis for cheap labour for outsourcing of simple assembly work, while the rich countries skim the cream of the best educated and talented (“brain drain”). The developing countries have to start producing more of what they need themselves, creating jobs, reducing inequality and making it attractive for their young people to stay and develop their country.
Mass migration is part of the Neoliberal paradigm, prevailing since 1990. Here families on the US Mexican border in June 2019. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico%E2%80%93United_States_border_crisis
The increasing inequality is another global challenge, which is threatening the coherence, internally and in the relation to other countries. This is perhaps the most difficult challenge, given that the whole world today is basically capitalist, even if state-owned companies still are important in some countries as China, India and Russia. The capitalist economic system’s built-in contradictions, including what seems to be an unavoidable increasing inequality, will make it difficult for the world to meet these challenges. It may therefore not be possible to save capitalism from itself.
But that is another story.
