Yves here. This post describes yet another way the US squandered its unipolar moment. Rather than try to build a more stable world order, the US instead tried to secure its dominance and continued to undermine the rise of regional powers (oddly ex China which we were so arrogant that we believed we could corrupt them sufficiently by turning them into proto capitalists). That has led to the remarkable policy of nation-breaking along with continued exploitation via other means, such as financialization, of the Global South.
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, former UN Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development. Originally published at Jomo’s website
The new geopolitics after the first Cold War undermines peace, sustainability, and human development. Hegemonic priorities continue to threaten humanity’s well-being and prospects for progress.
End of First Cold War
The end of the first Cold War has been interpreted in various ways, most commonly as a US triumph. Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the ‘end of history’ with the victory of capitalism and liberal democracy.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and allied regimes, the US seemed unchallenged and unchallengeable in the new ‘unipolar’ world. The influential US journal Foreign Affairs termed ensuing US foreign policy ‘sovereigntist’.
But the new order also triggered fresh discontent. Caricaturing cultural differences, Samuel Huntington blamed a ‘clash of civilisations’. His contrived cultural categories serve a new ‘divide-and-rule’ strategy.
Today’s geopolitics often associates geographic and cultural differences with supposed ideological, systemic and other political divides. Such purported fault lines have also fed ‘identity politics’.
The new Cold War is hot and bloody in parts of the world, sometimes spreading quickly. As bellicosity is increasingly normalised, hostilities have grown dangerously.
Economic liberalisation, including globalisation, has been unevenly reversed since the turn of the century. Meanwhile, financialization has undermined the real economy, especially industry.
The G20 finance ministers, representing the world’s twenty largest economies, including several from the Global South, began meeting after the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
The G20 began meeting at the heads of government level following the 2008 global financial crisis, which was seen as a G7 failure. However, the G20’s relevance has declined again as the North reasserted G7 centrality with the new Cold War.
NATO Rules
The ostensible raison d’être of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has gone with the end of the first Cold War and the Soviet Union.
The faces of Western powers have also changed. For example, the G5 grew to become the G7 in 1976. US infatuation with the post-Soviet Russia of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin even brought it into the G8 for some years!
Following the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the sovereigntist Wolfowitz doctrine of 2007 redefined its foreign policy priorities to strengthen NATO and start a new Cold War. NATO mobilisation of Europe – behind the US against Russia – now supports Israel targeting China, Iran and others.
Violating the UN Charter, the 2022 Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine united and strengthened NATO and Europe behind the US. Despite earlier tensions across the north Atlantic, Europe rallied behind Biden against Russia despite its high costs.
International law has also not stopped NATO expansion east to the Russian border. The US unilaterally defines new international norms, often ignoring others, even allies. But Trump’s re-election has raised ‘centrist’ European apprehensions.
Developing countries were often forced to take sides in the first Cold War, ostensibly waged on political and ideological grounds. With mixed economies now ubiquitous, the new Cold War is certainly not over capitalism.
Instead, rivalrous capitalist variants shape the new geoeconomics as state variations underlie geopolitics. Authoritarianism, communist parties and other liberal dirty words are often invoked for effect.
New Europe
Despite her controversial track record during her first term as the European Commission (EC) president, Ursula von der Leyen is now more powerful and belligerent in her second term.
She quickly replaced Joseph Borrell, her previous EC Vice President and High Representative in charge of international relations. Borrell described Europe as a garden that the Global South, the surrounding jungle, wants to invade.
For Borrell, Europe cannot wait for the jungle to invade. Instead, it must pre-emptively attack the jungle to contain the threat. Since the first Cold War, NATO has made more, mainly illegal military interventions, increasingly outside Europe!
The US, UK, German, French and Australian navies are now in the South China Sea despite the 1973 ASEAN (Association of South-East Asian Nations) commitment to a ZOPFAN (zone of peace, freedom and neutrality) and no request from any government in the region.
Cold War Nostalgia
The first Cold War also saw bloody wars involving alleged ‘proxies’ in southwestern Africa, Central America, and elsewhere. Yet, despite often severe Cold War hostilities, there were also rare instances of cooperation.
In 1979, the Soviet Union challenged the US to eradicate smallpox within a decade. US President Jimmy Carter accepted the challenge. In less than ten years, smallpox was eradicated worldwide, underscoring the benefits of cooperation.
Official development assistance (ODA) currently amounts to around 0.3% of rich countries’ national incomes. This is less than half the 0.7% promised by wealthy nations at the UN in 1970.
The end of the first Cold War led to ODA cuts. Levels now are below those after Thatcher and Reagan were in power in the 1980s. Trump’s views and famed ‘transactional approach’ to international relations are expected to cut aid further.
The economic case against the second Cold War is clear. Instead of devoting more to sustainable development, scarce resources go to military spending and related ‘strategic’ priorities.
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Those of us old enough to remember the first Cold War were always told it was about our freedom. Whereas the reality of course is that it was about the ruling class, Hitler distraction out of the way, going after their true enemies–the Commies–and taking away their freedom. And when they finally got yes for an answer on Communism no need to disband NATO until “full spectrum dominance” had been established over those who dared to resist.
And so the Achilles heel of the powerful was once again revealed since power tends to promote sociopathy if not downright psychosis. We the sometimes deluded normals have merely been along for Mr.Toad’s Wild Ride.
Some talk lately about Lucy and the football but perhaps the Peanuts character’s other famous preoccupation more to the point and it only costs 5 cents. Hegemonians please get some therapy.
They were lying the whole time about “our freedom”. They fought Communism because they were afraid that the USSR and China would inspire the workers in the West to demand a more egalitarian distribution of wealth than the New Deal or European social democracy offered.
Now that the USSR is no more, they’ve gone full class warfare at home and full wars abroad, launching aggressive wars like Iraq or proxy wars like in Ukraine, along with more regime changes (which was done during the Cold War as well under the pretext of restraining Communism, but really a resource grab).
Ultimately, our elites are just greedy and evil people who want to loot their own nations and other nations to get richer.
The elites of a nation can be replaced only following a military defeat or an economic catastrophe, a necessary but not sufficient condition. The European elites (the economic ones who then decide which will be the political ones) are largely the same ones that led Europe to the first and second world wars. Moreover, much of the nazi-fascist nomenclature at every level has remained exactly as it was before the war. This is Europe, not the dream of millions of deluded people who do not know their own history.
We may be heading to a collapse like the USSR in the Western world.
I think we may be heading to an economic crisis at this rate. Europe has lost its supply of cheap energy.
It’s an even bigger problem than the kind of recession caused by financial bubbles – those can be solved by stimulus, but replacing energy is much more difficult (keep in mind MMT is bottlenecked by natural resources and energy, so the threshold for inflation would be much lower; it isn’t just the labor force).
Hubris is antithetical to long-term strategic thinking. Post cold war 1, triumphalism was oozing from every pore in elite western circles, resulting in an impenetrable hubris and a sense of invincibility quickly enveloping Washington, making it impossible to parlay the Unipolar moment that followed into enduring geostrategic advantage. With the commies defeated, the world was to be (re)made in the image and likeness of the US culturally, politically and economically (with western multinationals given unfettered access to plunder the global south to their heart’s content). The assembly lines for western puppets to be delivered to every corner of the globe were fired up and the think-tank and NGO industrial complex became a magnet for capital needed to scale political subversion into a global enterprise etc. The “New American Century” and the “manifest destiny” of zero-sum “full spectrum dominance” of global affairs by the US was well under way. Or so it seemed.
Yet here we are, just over a generation later and the “rules based order” is coming apart at the seams. The political elites in the west haven’t had an original idea in decades but instead collectively retreat further and further into the protective hive of delusional group think as a matter of course (e.g. on Ukraine), the serially mendacious western propaganda machine is losing credibility around the world at lightspeed (carpet bombing people with propaganda when their default setting is that western msm is lying unless proven otherwise has become a high effort, low yield endeavour) and the levels of brutality needed to maintain the facade that US hegemony is still in its heyday are exposing the ugly face of tyranny hiding behind the mask of western liberal democracy. The unipolar world is dead, but the excruciating labour pains of birthing a multipolar world will persist for a while still…
Col. Wilkerson in a recent interview with Nima on Dialogue Works defined the best what the US has brought to the world: The Time of Bestiality. He cites an Italian guy on the issue. But it is what it is, bestiality. Haaretz is describing it and this is the appropriate name for it.
It is debatable whether Russian entry into Donbass breached UN Charter. Art 51 gives a right to Russia further to R2P which Samantha Power used to proclaim as US violated UN Charter in Serbia and Libya.
As for Cold War – it was strange how US deemed all anti-colonial struggles as „Communist“ as if France had a right to Vietnam or chunks of Africa. What went on in Congo or Namibia was hardly to Western credit – nor were massacred in Algeria. Refusing loans for Aswan Dam gave USSR an entry.
Even Ba‘athist Syria or Iraq were hardly hostile to West and that lovely prison in Damascus was a CIA Black Site for Extraordinary Rendition like the ones in Poland.
Then again with 50,000 prisoners in US Kurdish areas it is hard to claim some moral high ground.
Global South needs to look to China for business and less to exporting capital into personal offshore accounts of its leaders laundering through London.
Russia was not relying on that. Putin used the same device the US did with Kosovo, of recognizing the two breakaway oblasts as republics, as they liked to call themselves, and entering into mutual defense pact with them.
The US and EU knew exactly where Russia was going. Putin signed those agreements on February 21 and also gave a long and more discursive than usual speech. The US and EU imposed the shock and awe sanctions on February 22. Russia invaded on February 24. So the sanctions were NOT in response to the attack but intended as a pre-emptive strike.
No disagreement.
We know the Nordstream sanctions were prepared by Merkel mid-2021 and that the Donbass Trap was prepared and ready to be sprung
Putin pre-empted a baited trap being sprung
By then he did not have much choice. Ukrainian artillery opened up on Donetsk and Luhansk on 18th February. The explosions observed by OSCE went from 40 per day to 1500 per day. By 21st February several hundred thousand women and children were seeking refuge from Russia all the while the EU leaders denied anything at all was happening.
That is, looking past to these recent events, a good exercise. Looking for news about those days it is easy to check how the West was constructing its narrative. The so called “Russian-backed rebels” and the escalation of “violence” without agency in the region post Maidan as if the ultranationalist government in Ukraine wasn’t a West-backed regime including weaponry deliveries. Then of course the annexation of Crimea, a move that the West wasn’t able to endure. In their push towards the West, when they applied to EU membership, Yanukovitch stated that “No nation has ever paid such a high price to become Europeans” which explains very much the feeling of the nationalists who decided to embrace the West ignoring the wills of about half their population and deciding to harass them as much as possible to force the situation plus the MH17 incident as an excuse. That violence consisted mostly on the bombardment of the city of Donetsk though the West was not interested on publicizing it. Putin showed to be the adult in the room pushing for the Minsk agreements which managed to reduce the violence, the bombardments basically, significantly for a while but the West couldn’t help itself and went for all avoiding its implementation while preparing for war and again escalating violence in February 2022 plus the sanctions.
Russia didn”t recognize DPR and LPR from 2014 to 2022. It did everything possible in order to bring US totalitarism to reason.
USA in 99 went into full illegality as per both NATO own rules and UN rules. USA went again illegal in 2003 in Iraq. Etc. And in 2015 in Syria.
Now with openly assumed nazi-like policies in Gaza and full scale destruction of the sovereign nation of Syria USA and UE has told they don’t give a toss about ANY rule.
20th century is dead, we are back in History with strenght of the strong and pure anglo-germanic bestialty.
Only thing I know is that soon or later I WILL kill Americans, Otherwise they will do it to me.
That does not contradicts what I said. We have repeatedly made precisely that point. We have also pointed out how a sequence of events, recounted multiple times with exact dates by former CIA presidential daily briefer Ray McGovern, that Putin in late 2021 was very concerned about the live prospect of the US installing missiles that could reach Moscow with inadequate decision times for Russia from Romania. Putin called Biden on December 30, explained Russia’s security concerns, and got Biden to say the US would not do that. That was walked back mid-late Jan by various US officials, most importantly Blinken to Lavrov. That plus Zelensky asking for nukes at the Munich Security Conference on Feb 15, with Kamala among other important US officials present. The failure to walk that back was the final straw for Putin.