I recently gave a public lecture that addressed the question of how to make sense of the current state of international disorder. The sponsors of the talk know some of my writing and media comments about various aspects of international relations and foreign affairs, so they asked me to try and frame the picture for a group of smart non-experts. I decided to do so by noting the sources of the disorder and the three general responses to what, as I noted in the earlier post about A Return to Nature, is a moment of global chaos.
The current moment of chaos has its origins in the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, Donald Trump’s ascendence and Putin’s invasion. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the inherent fragility and biases of Western institutions that underpinned the so-called liberal international order. The more international entities were tied into Western financial circles, the more they lost when the artificially heated (via things like sub-prime lending) markets crashed. On the other hand, entities that were lesser tied into Western financial circles, including Asian banks, suffered less from the crisis. A lesson was learned there, one that rippled across increasingly skeptical views of the full range of institutions that underpinned the liberal international system.
COVID accelerated public skepticism about the role of science, international and national government responses to public health crises, and the balance between individual rights and collective responsibilities in modern societies. Although some countries like NZ managed to mitigate the negative impact of COVID in largely successful ways, even then the trade-offs involved in terms of freedom of movement, economic security and bodily autonomy have been widely debated and, sadly, largely detrimental to public faith in democracy. In other countries (such as the UK and US), gross government incompetence only served to confuse and sour the public on government, full stop. For their part authoritarian states simply clamped down on public discussion of whatever measures they undertook, so the public in many places is none the wiser for having experienced the pandemic.
Donald Trump’s appearance on the political scene was the both the culmination of and a catalyst for a trend towards rightwing authoritarian populism in erstwhile liberal democracies, and has had a major ripple effect the world over. In fact, it is safe to say that Trump will be the seminal figure of the 21st century, for better or worse (I vote worse) unless some other sociopathic bullying narcissist learns from him and doubles down on his governing approach in the latter half of this century.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine followed a pattern of increasing unilateral military “diplomacy” that violated international norms and disregarded legal strictures. The PRC’s actions in the South China Sea, Israel’s behaviour in Gaza and the West Bank, the Syrian civil war, Russia’s previous incursions in Georgia and Crimea all paved the way for the invasion of Ukraine.The bottom line to all of these actions is two-fold: no one had the capability to enforce the liberal international rules as given regarding conflict initiation, and therefore actors who had the capabilities to do so engaged in rules violations with relative impunity. International sanctions and condemnations, it turns out, are not enough.
In light of that and the moment of chaos that is now the post-liberal global state of affairs, three responses have emerged.
Going it alone: America First Disruptors.
The core idea comes from Chaos Theory, which sees opportunity in disorder. Those who are prepared for the moment can seize it. It champions agency (of actors) and events (COVID, revolutions, coups) in the way Machievelli wrote about virtu (agency as a virtue) and fortuna (fortune or luck in the form of external events). Only the US and PRC have the ability to “go it alone” in today’s global system based other respective resource bases, but China has chosen a different path (see below). So the US has opted to go it alone with Trump playing the role of great disruptor. It suits his management style as described in biographies and interviews, so fits comfortably as an approach to governance.
As it turns out, the father of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, was an adherent of Chaos Theory. He believed that a big crisis, such as the Chilean coup d’état of September 11, 1973, created a vacuum into which disruptors can pour new ideas and policies. Trump is now the theory’s foremost exponent, but to varying degrees Xi, Putin, Modi, Milei, Bukele and Netanyahu also see themselves as great disruptors willing to use the moment of international disorder to their advantage. Trump and his advisors saw the liberal international order as strait jacket on US power, and in its demise see opportunity for the imposition of US hegemony on a global scale. For them, the old adages about might makes right, law of the jungle and dog eat dog can now apply. But in order to do so on the world stage dominated by strong-willed and often authoritarian competitors, domestic authoritarianism must be employed to impose the Disruptor’s will and demonstrate resolve to foreign interlocutors. This helps explain why the Trump administration is engaging a militarised response to immigration and urban crime fighting at home. For him the issue is simple: hurting democratic norms at home proves his willingness to impose US dominance abroad in unilateral pursuit of its interests.
The potential problem for this approach is one of incompetent over-reach: at some point the effort to impose unilateral authoritarian solutions may backfire and produce a blowback from negatively affected parties and their allies.
In term of employing chaos theory, US can be seen as the as sun, with Israel, Argentina and El Salvador in its orbit. In each case national leaders are pushing the boundaries of acceptable government behaviour because of their association with and backing by the Trump administration. Whether this will hold over the long-term is a risky bet.
Liberal reformism.
In this approach the goal is to redeem liberal internationalism by emphasising democratic values and regulated market capitalism. The idea is to broaden and reform the liberal institutional structure in order to accomodate non-Anglo-Saxon European representation in global institutions like the World Bank and IMF. In other words, the approach is trying to maintain an updated liberal order by becoming fairer. The move is European-led with non-European and post-colonial actors now on board such as Japan, Canada, ROK South Korea,, NZ and Australia. The trouble with this approach is its hypocrisy, lack of enforcement powers and domestic polarization undermining consensus on its basic premises (about the preferability of democracy and regulated markets). Security of this system is still tied to the US-centric order but weakening as countries peel off from US on the question of Israel/Palestine. A fundamental premise of the liberal order, that of tying trade and security between market democracies, is now under siege and will continue to be so as long as the US persists with its go it alone strategy.
Global South Constructivism/Institutionalism.
Here the response to the moment of crisis is to develop parallel institutional networks led by the BRICS bloc of nations that are based on interests (prosperity), not values. These interests increasingly focus on developing and maintaining technology hubs where none existed before (say, Qatar and the UAE), and tcreating parallel institutional networks developed to replace the Western-dominated post-World War Two liberal institutional order. The idea behind this approach is that economic integration will be followed by South-South security linkages (but are not there yet). Since demographic change points to the world’s population increasingly concentrated in and technologies migrating to previously under-developed regions of the Global South, the belief is that the trends favour the post-colonial world, not the Western colonisers.
The PRC-led Belt and Road Initiative largely financed by the Chinese Development Bank (now lending more money than the World Bank) and recent Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meetings are the biggest manifestation of this approach, with the incorporation of Arab oligarchies, Iran and Indonesia into the BRICS signalling a major broadening of the South network. In this the US go-it-alone approach acts as a trigger or catalyst for action, with Trump’s approach to the Ruso-Ukrainian conflict also serving as a get out of jail card for Putin as the South shifts from neutrality to support for Russia in the midst of a growing tariff war on the part of the US and most everyone else (except places like Russia, oddly enough). For many, the economic war led by the US is far more existential than the physical war waged by Russia in Ukraine and many have chosen sides, however discretely, accordingly.
This is just a short outline of the responses to the moment of international crisis, drafted as notes for a public lecture rather than a full analysis of the phenomenon. I shall leave it for readers to ponder whether the classifications are correct or whether they need to be replaced, modified or additions made. The basic idea is that we have moved from a unipolar international system to an emerging multi-polar order comprised of actors and constellations of actors with increasingly high technology orientations (“technophiles” creating “technopoles”) that transcend and in fact challenge traditional Western dominance of international institutional norms and agencies.
The time is ripe to seize the moment.
