The author is Chas. Freeman, formerly US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. I have just clipped the ending piece- it is much longer.
Chas W. Freeman, Jr - Wikipedia.
The disorderly birth of another, yet unnamed world order (2022 -?)
The immediate U.S. war aims in Ukraine are to preserve Kyiv’s freedom to remain aligned with the U.S. and EU, if not now to join NATO. The longer-term U.S. strategic objective is avowedly “to isolate and weaken Russia.”
U.S. policies toward China parallel these objectives. Washington seeks to keep Taiwan in its sphere of influence and to isolate and weaken China in order to retain its regional and global economic and technological as well as politico-military supremacy. It should surprise no one that Beijing and Moscow have come to perceive a common interest in thwarting and countering U.S. policies aimed at subordinating them and retarding their growth in wealth and power.
U.S. policies of confrontation with Russia and China have unenthusiastic support from most NATO countries and Japan. But rising and resurgent powers, like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey, oppose the effort to perpetuate the U.S. “unilateral moment” that they represent. With the notable exceptions of Australia, Britain, Japan, and south Korea, other major countries clearly prefer a multipolar, polycentric world order to one dominated by the United States or any other single power.
So far, the protectionist trade and technology policies the Trump administration launched against China in 2018 and the current economic and financial war on Russia are having pernicious results. China has accelerated its scientific, technological, and military advance. Far from collapsing, the Russian economy now has the second largest balance of payments surplus after China’s. Meanwhile, Europeans face recession, energy shortages, and other hardships. Both China and Russia are finding new markets for their goods and services. The war in Ukraine shows no sign of ending, and the probability of war in the Taiwan Strait is rising dramatically.
The shape of things to come
The world order that appears to be emerging is one in which:
- Sanctions-induced commodity and food shortages, breaking supply chains, and rearmament fuel persistent inflation.
- The fiscal burden of rising interest payments forces a turn to domestic pay-as-you-go policies and a choice between “guns and butter” that the U.S. has long evaded.
- The bloc formed by the United States, EU, Australia, Britain, and Japan to ostracize Russia and China is itself marginalized by the rest of the world, including its fastest growing economies and markets. Countries outside the US-led bloc refuse to choose between it and its designated adversaries, remain open for business with both, and reject the West’s imposition of end-use and retransfer restrictions on its exported products.
- The ability to mount planetwide responses to issues like climate change and pandemics is impaired. Every region is on its own and, in terms of its impact, the sum of the parts is less than the whole.
- The principal strength of the United States – its military prowess – proves irrelevant to most of the challenges in the emerging world order, which require economic responses that Washington cannot muster.
- Russia permanently abandons its three-century-long effort to integrate with Europe to seek an Asian identity through intensified relations with China and India.
- Turkey does the same, redefining itself as a West Asian and Islamic country rather than a European one and further attenuating its commitments to other members of NATO.
- Smaller countries resist affiliation with either the West or its designated adversaries.
- China’s “Belt and Road” initiative gradually extends Chinese economic influence throughout the Eurasian landmass and beyond in Southeast Asia and East Africa. Chinese political influence in the areas covered by the BRI gradually displaces that of the United States.
- NATO and other multinational alliances become less cohesive, with members gradually reducing or withdrawing their commitments to them.
- Germany, Japan, and other post-World War II dependencies of the United States rearm and develop more independent foreign policies.
- Latin America develops relations with China, India, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and other countries that increasingly undercut American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
- Africa is where most of the world’s industrial labor force comes to reside, and its economies become more connected to Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Turkey than to the EU or United States.
- Technology standards differ from region to region, and new technologies are often unavailable in regions beyond those that originated them.
- The internet evolves into regional and national zones, separated from each other by firewalls.
- Inexpensive Russian energy, metals, minerals, and other natural resources nourish economies in the so-called “global South” but are no longer reliably available at favorable prices to the U.S. and members of its anti-Russian coalition.
- U.S. sanctions give China and Russia a compelling incentive to form consortia with Iran and others to eliminate dependence on the United States for civilian, military, and dual-use products like passenger aircraft.
- The ability of the United States to finance its government and global power projection by issuing Treasury bonds is in increasing doubt, given the reputational damage of its confiscation of Iran’s, Venezuela’s, Russia’s, and Afghanistan’s dollar reserves.
- The rising risk from U.S. unilateral dollar-based sanctions causes ever more countries to price exports and imports in their own currencies, use swaps to pair their currency with those of their main trading partners, switch to hard currencies other than the dollar, institute point-of-sale digital cross-border currency exchanges, and create new units of account for transnational trade settlement. The “exorbitant privilege” that has underwritten U.S. global primacy unwinds.
- China, India, Russia, Arab oil producers, and other rising economic and financial powers respond to the incentives to build a separate financial world order that provides alternatives to the dollar-based SWIFT system and can destroy the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. They do so.
- Deglobalization generates multiple regional trade and investment regimes and divides global markets, from some of which specific great powers, like China, the EU, India, Russia, or the United States are excluded.
- Disputes over international transactions are handled bilaterally or by region-specific processes rather than by global dispute resolution mechanisms like those of the WTO.
- The world continues to rely on UN specialized agencies to address technical problems, but the UN Security Council and other international policy organizations, paralyzed by great power rivalries and disagreements, have diminished diplomatic utility.
- There are few, if any, new global – as opposed to regional — rule-setting treaties and arrangements. The worldwide regulatory regimes of the post-Cold War era atrophy.
- U.S. military supremacy erodes as regional forces strengthen themselves and new weapons systems and capabilities emerge in China, India, Japan, Korea, and Russia.
- Given the escalation risks of the US-NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, the increasing likelihood of a Sino-American war over Taiwan, north Korea’s reliance on a nuclear deterrent for regime survival, the India-Pakistan nuclear standoff, and the incentive to acquire nuclear weapons that Israel’s nuclear arsenal provides to other countries in its region, the danger of nuclear war is now significantly greater than at any moment of the Cold War.
Conclusion
There is great dissatisfaction internationally with the now decaying “Pax Americana” of the late 20th century and a desire to see it replaced by a multipolar world order or orders in which different countries play leading roles in different sectors of world affairs.
Current trends suggest that the kaleidoscope is once again rearranging international actors and their relationships in new patterns in which economic, financial, political, cultural, and military prowess is distributed regionally and functionally rather than centralized. But there has been little consideration so far of the likely consequences of an international system that entails much more complex interactions among states and peoples than before. If nothing else, this is a timely reminder of the old saying: ‘be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.’
To cope successfully with the challenges of a world with many competing centers, statecraft must take the long view, focusing on abiding interests rather than the passions of the moment. To manage a world in which rapid, unexpected change is the norm, diplomacy must be nimble rather than steadfast. And to be able to compete, countries must not only get their act together at home but employ all the instruments of statecraft – political, economic, financial, technological, and military – to shape the views and actions of their competitors to their advantage.
World Orders: The Global Kaleidoscope in Repeated Motion – Chas W. Freeman, Jr.