A Perilous World

About four years ago, I wrote a post about the first twenty years of this and the last two centuries.  Unlike the 19^th and 20^th centuries when the Napoleonic Wars and World War I laid waste to Europe, the first twenty years of this century were free of major military confrontations, and they held the promise of a more peaceful and prosperous future.

Now as we approach the mi-2020s, it starts to feel this decade may be the prelude to worse things just like the 1920s was a hundred years ago.  In the case of the 1920s we do know that they ended with the Great Depression, and eventually with the rise of fascism and a global conflagration in World War II.  What is in store for our own 2020s is difficult to predict but its first four years are full of ominous signs.

What followed the 1920s can be traced in the extremely onerous reparations imposed on the defeated Germans, followed by nationalist policies of economic antagonism that culminated in outright warfare.  In a similar way, we can trace the current unraveling of world affairs in the mismanagement of the Post Cold War period.  For many, this period is over but nobody can predict what comes next.  The reckoning is especially painful to the Western democracies which, in the ruins of the Soviet Block, saw the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism – all that captured in Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 article “The End of History.”

In fact, people have come to distrust both liberalism and capitalism.  By the second decade of the 21^st century, it had become clear that the neo-liberal order (unrestrained markets, trade, and finance) was falling short of producing shared prosperity and global peace.  Deindustrialization in the U.S. and much of Europe had decimated blue color communities and the Covid 19 pandemic generated fears of supply chain dependence on foreign, often rival countries, like China.  Those left behind, mostly the blue-color working class, came to blame liberals for their faith in technology and globalization. 

It is an irony that an international economic order that was heralded as the catalyst for global prosperity and peace has led us back to the 1920s world when national priorities became an impediment to international cooperation.  Although private companies reaped enormous profits from the globalization of markets and production, the execution of this grand design turned out to work against the interest of workers and national security.  Thus, as in the 1920s, Western countries, starting with the U.S., have already begun to adopt the defensive tactics of tariffs and trade restrictions that a hundred years ago pushed the world into the Great Depression.

A global economic order cannot be sustained outside a stable international environment.  That was what Pax Britannica provided for most of the 19^th century.  In the post WW II years, the U.S. became the de facto enforcer of the so called “rules based international order.”  But now in the opinion of many, this order seems to be slipping away.  The blows to this order have come in various fronts during the Post-Cold War era.  Here are some questions that beg for answers.   Why did the West fail to engage the post-Soviet Russia in a way that would align it with the West?  Why was the Arab spring left to fray and revert to authoritarianism?  Why is the Middle East a cluster of dysfunctional or autocratic Arab regimes, despite intense U.S. involvement, both military and diplomatic, in the area?  Why has America failed to contain the wars in Gaza and Lebanon despite huge civilian and infrastructure losses?  What will the end of the war in Ukraine mean for the inviolability of national borders?  Can we afford to turn China from a capitalist comrade to a mercantilist foe?

In his recent Foreign Affairs article “A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is” Ben Rhodes, a former Deputy National Security Adviser to President Obama, offers a highly critical view of the current state of the “rules-based international order.”  Rhodes writes that our professed commitment to human rights sounds hollow when we keep cozy relations with illiberal and oppressive regimes.  And our tendency to turn a blind eye to the violations of international law by our allies while we castigate our enemies for the same has undermined American credibility, especially across the Global South.  In short, Ben Rhodes concludes the “rules-based international order” is gone and we have to accept the world as it is, with multiple nations from China and Russia to Brazil and India challenging American hegemony in world affairs.

As the international order in economic and security matters is collapsing people feel less secure and look for simple answers to complicated problems.  This is a fertile ground for strong men to rise and lead populists and nationalist movements.   We know from the 1920s and 1930s that when a climate, real or due to misinformation, of insecurity and frustration overtakes a nation, people seek radical solutions, even if grounded in authoritarian tactics.   And this is what we see in the U.S., Russia, Europe, India and elsewhere. 

The challenges liberal democracy is facing in Western countries, does not bode well for the state and future of democracy in the rest of the world.  There is a reason for that.  Although the neo-liberal economic order is on its way out, liberal parties have yet to develop a compelling vision to convince their citizens that democracy can work for all.  Nor have they developed ideas how to reorient their economic models toward the goal of shared prosperity. 

While democracy and international cooperation flail, critical issues of universal concern, like climate, Artificial Intelligence, and international economic relations, are pushed to the back burner.  All three issues require international cooperation if we have a chance to come to peaceful and constructive solutions.

If the U.S. withdraws its cooperation and involvement from these critical areas of global concern, then its leadership role will diminish further and the odds of global instability will rise as others will certainly try to transplant the U.S. as world leaders.