Even the most ardent Pollyanna would admit that the past few years haven’t gone well for human beings. Increasing political polarisation was magnified by the way algorithms drive people apart. A controversial pandemic response followed, enormously accentuating existing trends towards inequality, surveillance capitalism and the corporate takeover of the public sphere. The war in Ukraine then rolled out the existing stark divisions onto the global diplomatic stage: while Europe and the US united around the war with Russia, the rest of the world did not.
There’s a growing consensus that the war in Ukraine has not worked out as either side predicted – very few wars do. The West has definitely united, with NATO expanding to welcome Scandinavian nations, and foreign policy frameworks cohering around US-led NATO goals (US gas supply, increased military spending). However, the rest of the world doesn’t see global geopolitics in quite the same way – and the senior French diplomat Gérard Araud recently claimed that the “Western moment is over”.
But while much of the Western media is full of doom and gloom at all this, there’s an alternative way of looking at it which is much more optimistic. After all, 30 years of US (and NATO) dominance has not helped the world become a better place. Instead, environmental crises, global conflicts and political extremism have become rampant. On this reading, a return to a balance of global power is a massive opportunity to put right some of these imbalances.
The rapid ending of western dominance crystallised in May when the US ambassador to South Africa claimed the country was supplying weapons to Russia for use in Ukraine. This created a diplomatic spat, exacerbated by South Africa’s army chief, Lawrence Mbatha, undertaking a “bilateral visit” to Moscow. Angry words followed from all sides, but the move simply reflected broader opinion in Africa about the war, which has driven rising fuel costs and devastated food security in a continent already reeling from the impact of the pandemic response.
As 2023 unrolls, the three decades of US hegemony that followed the Cold War are being systematically brought to an end by one seismic event after another. In April, Brazil’s president, Lula da Silva, suggested on a trip to China that Brazil might stop using the dollar as its principal trading currency. Other BRICS (Brazil, India, China, South Africa) countries followed, mooting the idea of a new standard currency, and now the idea of de-dollarisation is widely discussed.
The realpolitik of the new multipolar world is clear enough to senior diplomats. In a recent interview for the New Statesman, Simon McDonald – former head of the UK Foreign Office – described the situation as “the end of the game” for Britain: Britain was now a “soft power” player, trying to broker the illusion that it could back this up with hard power. The sense of decline, stately disarray and even dismay among the British diplomatic elite is palpable. If the US is no longer the only power that counts, and Britain’s power is dependent on the US as McDonald says, then it’s clear that Britain is on the path to becoming irrelevant. Since history teaches that this is the fate of every empire, perhaps there’s not much surprise in that.
This new global balance of power simply means a return to normality. While the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of unipolarity on steroids, the trend had been slowly evolving since the rise of Britain as a world power in the 19th century. Following a century of British global dominance, the baton passed on to the US during WWII.
Yet prior to the mid-19th century, balances of power always characterised world politics. When the Ottomans captured Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire in 1453, it presaged three centuries of a world in which power was evenly distributed. It even drove the rise of European imperialism, as Portuguese voyages along West Africa’s coast in the 15th century were aimed in part at trying to find Christian African kings with whom to ally against the Ottomans. The Ottomans, China’s Ming and Qing dynasties, and European empires all had more or less equal stakes in global politics.
This era of mutuality of power was finally eroded by what historian Kenneth Pomeranz called “the great divergence”, when European empires eclipsed the power of China. This shift ultimately led to the growing weakness and collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the WWI. Looking at the fractured political landscape of the 21st-century Middle East, and the conflicts ranging from Iraq and Syria to Palestine and Yemen, there’s a case to be made that its disintegration was one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.
As the impact of the rise of the British empire on Ottoman history shows, eras of the hyperconcentration of power tend to coincide with social and political crisis. As with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, many of the crises that the world now faces have arisen in the aftermath of the Cold War, when one nation has exercised military and economic dominance over all others. Seen in that context, de-dollarisation and the end of US “command and control” is not a crisis – in fact, it’s a massive opportunity for human beings.
The idea that a global power imbalance is at the root of many of the world’s current crises may seem controversial, but there’s a lot of evidence to support it. The emergence of the US as the one global superpower in the 1990s coincided with its technological and political capacity to concentrate wealth as never before. This has gone hand in hand with the massive increase in inequality of the past three decades. And that inequality has been a major driver of the global migration crisis, triggered by poverty and environmental crises. Those disasters have also driven increasing divides both between the Global North and the Global South – and within the western nations themselves, as these emergencies interact with others related to housing, intergenerational injustice and ageing populations.
The three decades of US hegemony are being brought to an end
So, if US hegemony has been one of the major drivers of the current policrisis, dispensing with it for a more even balance of global political power can only be a good thing. And this kind of world order has, in fact, been the historical norm – as the history of the Chinese, European and Ottoman empires of the early modern world make clear. The idea that the end of the era of unipolarity is rife with danger only makes sense if we view dominance of one superpower as desirable and normal, rather than as an historical anomaly – or if we subscribe to the bankrupt “Whiggish” view of history as progress, with a unipolar order the logical “end of history” (another now defunct perspective from the 1990s).
If we adopt an open-minded view of a more even distribution of global power, then the current US political grandstanding about the possibility of war in the South China Sea over Taiwan becomes a harmful distraction from what should really be preoccupying foreign policy makers.
A just transition to a multipolar world
World leaders should focus on taking advantage of the new multipolar paradigm to address the massive environmental, economic and human crises they all say are their priorities. Again, looking to the past gives a sense of how this can be achieved.
The Gleneagles G8 summit of 2005 offers a great guide to addressing one of the major (if largely unspoken) issues faced today, which is the socio-economic catastrophe caused by the covid pandemic policies in low- and middle-income countries. With a massive increase since 2020 in unsustainable levels of debt in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria and other nations, there is widespread talk of a new era of austerity. This will have devastating impacts on future health outcomes and the global health security supposedly at the heart of covid policies. In a situation where over half of low-income countries reduced health spending during the pandemic, it’s clear that “business as usual” can’t address the ensuing crisis – one which if allowed to fester will only have knock-on effects worldwide.
At Gleneagles, eighteen of the world’s poorest countries had their debts to the IMF and World Bank wiped out, with additional countries qualifying for this assistance in subsequent years – the first (and only) instance of debt cancellation to low-income countries since the end of the colonial era. Debt cancellation led to expanded healthcare in Zambia, increased spending on education and healthcare in Ghana, and more secure food supplies in Tanzania, to give just three key examples.
More importantly still, removing the debt burden had a massively beneficial impact in poorer countries in the 2010s. This was the era of “Africa rising”: the continent’s economies grew massively, with huge beneficial knock-on impacts in life expectancies, healthcare and the creation of a rising middle class. The lesson of Gleneagles was that removing unsustainable debt burdens is a clear win for everyone.
In this context, the IMF and campaigning organisations such as Debt Justice are calling for another “Gleneagles moment”.
Africa may have been the continent that suffered the least impact from actual covid deaths (with a population whose average age was around twenty, this was only to be expected), yet it faces perhaps the most devastating social and economic consequences of the global pandemic response. The fact that 4.5 million schoolchildren left education in Uganda alone speaks volume as to the level of the crisis.
There’s a strong moral and economic argument in favour of debt cancellation, but how can it be achieved? One problem is that much of the debt is held by private investors. On the other hand, leading global philanthro-capitalists such as Bill Gates often talk of the pressing needs of the world’s poor. Between them, the world’s plutocrats have certainly reaped enough profits in the past few years to pay off the debt with plenty to spare: their pockets are one place to start looking for urgent solutions to this problem.
This kind of global cooperation would have the added benefit of solidifying the emerging global balance of power, quietening alarmists. Perhaps more commentators would then admit the era of US hegemony has coincided with the emergence of a policrisis – and that far from protecting us, having the US as the world’s policeman has made that world more dangerous for almost everyone.
If the “American moment” is over,
we can all say good riddance to it. A protection racket which offers little protection can only be called a failure. Dealing with the multiple challenges human societies face in the 21st century requires lasting collaboration. The powers that take the lead in cementing the end of US global dominance will also be at the forefront of consolidating a better future for the world.
Toby Green’s latest book – co-authored with Thomas Fazi – is “The Covid Consensus” (Hurst)
