Navigating the Mountains and Ravines of a Post-Western World

The West needs an organising strategy to meet the challenges of the compact between China and Russia.

These are the opening paragraphs of an essay on the new global order I have contributed to a project run by Institute Montaigne. Those persuaded to read the full text - and the contributions to the project of many experts far more eminent than I - can find it at: http://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/analysis/navigating-mountains-and-ravines-post-western-world

We have become overly attached to neatness - to a global system drawn in straight lines. The postwar confrontation with the Soviet Union produced a bipolar world. Then, after the collapse of communism, came America's unipolar moment. The rise of China seemed to promise Sino-American bipolarity. More recently, in the wake of the Sino-Russian pact and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, political leaders have gone in search of another simple dividing line - on one side the world’s liberal democracies, on the other its autocrats and tyrants.

Russia’s war, however, imposes an inconvenient reality. A world that once seemed flat is fast being repopulated by mountains and ravines. The emerging order, or perhaps we should call it disorder, will be complex, fragmented and fluid, its jagged contours mapped by opportunistic alliances, plurilateral pacts and overlapping boundaries. To borrow a phrase coined by former British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, "the geometry will be variable". 

In place of tidiness, the prospect is for an international system arranged around shifting allegiances and blocs. Sino-American competition will sit at the core, but the new order will be one of multiple competing camps. Nations will be promiscuous. Significant powers will sometimes sit on the fence, and sometimes seek to stand on both sides of it. 

The great majority of nations from the Global South voted at the United Nations to condemn Putin's aggression. Yet only a handful have joined the Western democracies in imposing economic sanctions. This is a world in which India works closely with the United States, Japan and Australia in the Indo-Pacific "Quad" - a group calculated to constrain if not contain China - and sits down with the same China along with Russia, South Africa and Brazil in the "BRICS". 
 
For all the vaulting rhetoric during the past few months about the fight for freedom and democracy, values are already colliding with realpolitik. Liberal democracies face uncomfortable trade-offs. As a candidate in the 2020 US presidential election, Joe Biden pledged to reduce Saudi Arabia to the status of a pariah state. This summer a humbled American president traveled to the Kingdom cap in hand to ask the Saudis to ease the global energy crisis by pumping more oil. 

What the West needs now is an organising strategy to meet the challenges of a compact between China and Russia that, in the description of Xi Jinping, "knows no limits". 

One of the miscalculations made by Putin was to underestimate the reaction to his aggression. Ukraine has been resolute and Western democracies cohesive. The EU has acted as one, Germany has shed Angela Merkel's mercantilism, Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, Denmark has signed up to EU defence collaboration and US leadership has been light-touch. Sanctions will take time to bite. Europe has yet to wean itself off Russian gas. But the measures in place provide an impressive demonstration of economic power, not least the importance of the dollar's role as the world’s sole reserve currency.

The end of the Cold War saw the assertion of the primacy of liberal economics over geopolitics. Now friction-free global supply chains take second place in the urgent quest for security and resilience. Germany is rearming, and the EU is providing arms for Ukraine. What the West needs now is an organising strategy - something comparable, say, to the Cold War doctrine of containment - to meet the challenges of a compact between China and Russia that, in the description of Xi Jinping, "knows no limits". This is a work in progress.

Three urgent priorities present themselves: 

continued at:

http://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/analysis/navigating-mountains-and-ravines-post-western-world