What a difference two decades make. In the early years of this century, the world appeared to be moving toward a single, seamless order under U.S. leadership. Today the world is fragmenting, and authoritarian challengers, led by China and Russia, are chipping away at American influence in East Asia, eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
In the mid-twentieth century, modern art and design represented the liberalism, individualism, dynamic activity, and creative risk possible in a free society. Jackson Pollock’s gestural style, for instance, drew an effective counterpoint to Nazi, and then Soviet, oppression. Modernism, in fact, became a weapon of the Cold War. Both the State Department and the CIA supported exhibitions of American art all over the world.
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is a global public health disaster of almost biblical proportions. It is a once-in-a-century occurrence that threatens to destroy countless lives, ruin economies, and stress national and international institutions to their breaking point. And, even after the virus recedes, the geopolitical wreckage it leaves in its wake could be profound.
Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of nationalist and populist forces seemed inexorable, threatening to deal a fatal blow to rules-based multilateralism. Could the current global crisis spur a new wave of international cooperation of the sort that emerged after World War II?
The international structures that have helped address many Arctic problems through negotiation and cooperation are insufficient for the military and security challenges brought on by climate change.
A nation that has the aspiration to become a leading power someday cannot continue with unsettled borders, an unintegrated region and under-exploited opportunities. Above all, it cannot be dogmatic in approaching a visibly changing global order. Napoleon once said that history is a version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. The world that awaits us not only calls for fresh thinking, but eventually, a new consensus at home as well. Putting dogmas behind us is a starting point for that journey, says India’s Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar.
As China transformed, many Western scholars and policymakers predicted that economic reform and integration into the world economy would force the country to liberalize politically and become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. The idea, sometimes called “convergence theory,” was that as China grew wealthier, it would become more like the United States. The theory was comforting, but it did not pan out.
Photo courtesy: White House/Flickr
As the United States prepares to cut-and-run from Afghanistan, Trump and his allies may believe that now is the time to reset relations with Pakistan. They are wrong. Under Imran Khan, Pakistan has continued its move to become an instrument of Chinese strategic policies. Successive Pakistani leaders have fallen victim to China’s debt trap. Thus, even if Khan wished to chart an independent course, it would have been impossible for him to do so.
Sometime in the last two years, American hegemony died. The age of U.S. dominance was a brief, heady era, about three decades marked by two moments, each a breakdown of sorts. It was born amid the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. The end, or really the beginning of the end, was another collapse, that of Iraq in 2003, and the slow unraveling since. But was the death of the United States’ extraordinary status a result of external causes, or did Washington accelerate its own demise through bad habits and bad behaviour?
Recent remarks by a senior Trump administration official suggest that the United States’ current approach to China is dangerously misconceived. The rise of China under a one-party dictatorship should be met with a united front in defense of the liberal order, not talk of a clash of Caucasian and non-Caucasian civilizations.
