The New World Order

History is a funny thing; although it is made at every instant we never quite feel ourselves caught in the maelstrom of historical currents. It is often only with hindsight that those events thought important are proven meaningless, and those meaningless, important. Yet every now and then certain things come to pass which make me wonder if the tapestry of history is changing patterns to form a new design in the evolution of mankind.

That is how I feel about these last days of 2016, which I believe have effectively marked the end of the United States of America as at the world’s Hegemon. While most Americans were sound asleep Vladimir Putin was busy hammering the last nail in its coffin. We should have seen it coming, it should be no surprise! We have been expecting this for years after all, and the steady degradation of American power has accelerated during the last few months. We have witnessed brazen acts by rival nations that they would never have dared commit in bygone times: from the aggressive militarization of the First Island Chain in the Pacific, to the attack of one of the most fundamental pillars of Western society (that of free and fair elections), and now the announcement of a cease-fire in Syria brokered by Russia and Turkey following Russia’s expeditionary intervention. While the last may not feel to many as an act that undermines American power, the fact that the United States was completely sidelined (oh, I am sure the Kremlin will magnanimously extend an invitation to any peace talks) in a conflict it actively involved itself within a region that it considers to be strategically important to its security demonstrates that the United States is now a power that can be sidelined by rivals of sufficient stature. 

Please, do not misunderstand me: the United States is and will remain the most powerful nation on the planet for the foreseeable future. 
We are however entering a new multipolar world and this will have tremendous consequences for the survival of Western society in the coming decades. I would argue that there are two requirements to have a multipolar world: the first is the existence of truly integrated global system and the second is the existence of nation-states with competing ideologies. In my view, the first Multipolar World spans the rough hundred years from the Congress of Vienna (1814) to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This period defined the ideological battle between competing groups whose composition would shift according three distinct but often overlapping interests: the first was the conflict between autocratic vs liberal forms of government, the second layer was the quest for spheres of economic dominance which eventually developed into imperialistic competition, and the third was distinctly ethno-nationalistic in nature and which would find its most aggressive and final expression in Japanese, Italian and German expansionism in the post-war period. The strain of this first multipolar system culminated in what I think we could all agree to accurately call “the 30 year shitstorm period” of 1914-1944. The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to a mostly bipolar world split between Capitalist and Marxism-Leninist ideologies. What we face today, I fear, is far more like the world pre-1914 and possibly leading us towards the same outcome but in a much more accelerated timeline. 

Our global international system has four competing ideologies vying for supremacy and which all seek the behavioral modification of the societies they come into contact with: Western liberal democracy, illiberal democracy, Islamic fundamentalism and good old fashioned Marxist dictatorships. In three of these cases they all closely align with ethno-national sentiment: Russia does not seek the reconstruction of the USSR but it does seek the consolidation of Russians -and to a larger extent all Slavs- under its leadership and its recognition as a global power. The PRC does not seek the annexation of neighboring countries but it does long for the reestablishment of tributary relationships acknowledging the preeminence of the Chinese nation (and thus by extent, of the Han). And while the Islamic faith spreads across all races, Islamists seek to unify the Ummah under a single caliphate that will either convert or exterminate the kuffar. All this while the global economic supremacy of the United States (which underpins the West’s ability to enforce the global rules of play) is being challenged by a military rival and while the EU’s economy continues to choke on its structural stagnation.

Twenty years ago it would have been impossible for any ideological rival to unilaterally assert its will over the strategic interests of the United States. The success of Russia’s intervention in Syria has now demonstrated this is no longer the case and that Russia, China, and Islamic elements of sufficient strength can shape their near-abroad in detriment of American or European policy. In 1996 the United States dispatched a carrier task-force to the straits of Taiwan to beat down Chinese aggressiveness with a simple show of force. Today, mathematical wargames simulations have shown that it would require roughly 20 wings (~2,000 aircraft) for the United States to achieve air supremacy over Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. In other words, we’ve likely already lost the ability to prevent the PRC from forcing reunification or establishing military dominance within parts of the first island chain. 

In Europe, the Georgian and Ukrainian campaigns have demonstrated Moscow’s willingness to use force to pursue its objectives all under the passive watch of the European Union. There is no reason to believe Russia will refrain from using force in the future if it suits its interest, nor any reason to believe the European Union will do anything to stop it. 

All three actors are busy acquiring or already control resources crucial to the West’s economic infrastructure which they do not and will not hesitate to use to exert pressure on behalf of their interests – think of China’s retaliatory withholding of rare earth minerals necessary for high-tech goods or Russia’s use of the energy weapon during the Crimean intervention. The third uses a more insidious tactic: it coopts Europe’s liberal civic structure to force society to modify its behavior to suit its needs. In essence, Islamic fundamentalists have become masters of Social Engineering and adepts at utilizing the human capital at their disposal to destroy us from within. 

Finally, although we still hold an edge in military hardware, our rivals’ ability to wage asymmetrical warfare has far surpassed our ability to counter it, which, as proven by recent events, can quickly level the playing field and transform the puppeteer into the puppet. 

All this means that the United States and the European Union are no longer able to guarantee global compliance with the order that has underpinned the relative stability and prosperity of the post-war period. Slowly but surely the international system that we know today will degrade to be transformed into one partitioned among very distinct socio-economic models vying for strategic assets and resources against each other, with the rules-of-play being regulated not by international law, but by each nation’s ability to project power regionally relative to its rivals, and its capacity to coerce, seduce or transform a given population.

The current state of affairs was certainly not foreordained. We have arrived here in part because of 12 years of failed Euro-American foreign policy.  In part some of the elements contributing to our relative decline stem from purely economical factors and cannot be fully avoided, while some others of our own making are socio-political in nature and have contributed to weakening the state of our civilization. 

Although I could go on -and this is after all just a blog entry not a doctoral dissertation- the prognosis in my mind is clear: I believe the degradation of the current paradigm will ultimately generate too much strain on the world-system to maintain long-term stability.  Throughout this period there will inevitably be an internal collapse of any of the models leading to further instability or  a violent lash-out of historic dimensions, probably ignited by some innocuous event and one side’s miscalculations. After all who in 1914 would have predicted that a single bullet would set-off four years of global war? The drastic remaking of the geopolitical landscape means that during the next two decades the West will face increasing pressure on its borders and from within, both of which it may be unable to contain simultaneously

We Westerners often assume our system to be superior, and thus, both invulnerable and impregnable. Yet our hubris is our downfall: we should keep in mind that in no way can the survival of any of social system (and certainly not western liberal democracy) be guaranteed. The end result of our self-inflicted weakness (for it is self-inflicted indeed!) could be a drastic transformation of our liberal,secular, and democratic society akin to the agonizing transformation of the Roman Empire from world power to a religious backwater run by Germanic barbarians.