Actual Sovereign Nations and the End of the Unipolar Moment

Turkey got an exemption from the sanctions. Suspect horse trading over the Khashoggi and Brunson affair led to it. Erdogan is playing the longest strip tease ever on the Khashoggi murder, letting the Sauds lie, then leak new evidence that shows it to be a lie.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html?.tsrc=fauxdal

Amazing how rapidly Iran and China rolled up a CIA Network and carried the fight beyond their borders. Aiding the disaster was the CIA’s refusal to listen to a whistle blower.

China knows what it is doing, and the first fight it is winning is within. Question is, can its leadership prepare its successors to well enough that they know what to do? If not, their successes will die with their current leadership.

Good point. Trump’s very overt, obnoxious form of imperialism helps clarify who calls the shots.

I don’t think the unipolar moment is over, but US dominance is being damaged by inept use of soft power and by incompetent use of hard power. Pushing Russia, China, and Iran into a near alliance was really stupid. If India or S. Korea or Saudi Arabia break further away from the USA, then it’s a big blow.

I’m amused at Erdogan’s Turkey. They’ve brilliant and ridiculous at various moments.

Brazil SHOULD be able to exercise more sovereignty, and started to do so under PT leadership, but have been undone by a combo of their own mistakes and a conniving, ruthless opposition.

“[China has] more respect for most other countries sovereignty than the US”

What nonsense.

And, by the way, the Han Chinese (which is most Chinese) make our white supremacists look like amateurs at racism.

In a way I am sad about the end of the unipolar world dominated by the United States. Multipolar systems tend to be more explosive and prone to war. I think our world is looking more and more like the world before World War I. The world before World War I was also very globalized and there were Steven Pinker types back then saying that everything was getting better and better thanks to economic growth, technology and trade. Then 1914 came and war broke out over “some damn foolish thing in the Balkans.”

Pax Americana could have been a real force for good in the world but we blew it because we didn’t live up to our best values. Instead of helping Russia like we did with Japan and West Germany we expanded NATO eastward and promoted devastating shock therapy that produced excess deaths in the millions. Instead of supporting a global New Deal and Marshall Plans for the developing world we supported right-wing dictators and violent religious fanatics in the name of anti-communism.

Sadly, I think China has the potential to be even worse than the United States but only time will tell. China has not been powerful enough for long enough to really judge how it will act as an imperial power. However, looking at China’s domestic policies I cannot say that I am hopeful. When I look at China’s lack of basic freedoms, its creepy, authoritarian social credit system and the way the Chinese government dismantled many of the better aspects of the old socialist system I don’t feel hopeful about Chinese power. Too many people on the Left (not you, Ian) display a reflexive anti-Americanism and think that any power that opposes the United States must be a good guy.

Chine does want to rule the world.

I disagree, Stir, but we shall see what we shall see, shan’t we? Tis moot never-the-less, in the generally accepted vernacular, as the atmosphere, the thin layer of exponentially more toxic gasses we live in enveloping the only ball of rock we know of we can live on recognizes no borders.

@scruff,

From an environmental perspective a multipolar world is probably worse than a unipolar world. If Great Power competition heats up then no country can adopt the necessary limits on economic growth and technological expansion that will be needed to prevent catastrophic environmental disaster. If any of the powers decides to take the green route and limit economic growth and technological development it will become a sitting duck for more aggressive powers.

The United States, Japan and China all learned these lessons when confronted by more powerful industrial powers from Europe hence their adoption of mercantilism to industrialize and gain the economic power needed to have enough military power to defend themselves against predatory empires. In the American and Japanese examples they eventually developed their own empires. China might do the same in the future.

You are right that a unipolar world requires its own imperialism. The Roman Empire was fairly close to a unipolar world power even though it had some peer competition from Parthia/Persia and eventually from the big tribal confederations outside the limes. In order to establish the Pax Romana the Romans had to violently conquer the Mediterranean world and eliminate peer competitors like Carthage and the Hellenistic monarchies and even after the Romans wiped out their competitors the Empire was still rocked by periodic civil wars. So a unipolar world has its problems but I sometimes wonder if benevolent empire has its place. Would we have been better off if Napoleon won his wars against the various coalitions thrown at him? We might have been spared the two world wars of the twentieth century and maybe France would be a better world hegemon than the United States or China. Maybe a hegemonic empire could impose the necessary environmental reforms on the rest of the world by eliminating peer competition.

A better multipolar world might be something like the Middle Ages where you had a great diversity of powers none of which were really all that powerful. The Lombard League of North Italian cities managed to defeat the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa at Legnano. Could a group of cities and towns defeat any major national power today? The growth of modern techno-industrial society makes nations so powerful that I fear we are stuck with a choice between an imperial world hegemon or an escalation of Great Power competition which might lead to World War III and environmental catastrophe. I wish this was not the case but I cannot think of a viable alternative.

Ideally I would rather have a “small is beautiful” world with decentralization and more power devolved to smaller organizations closer to the people. But it seems like anarchist and similar societies cannot compete with powerful nation-states. They will eventually be crushed or they will only exist at the sufferance of the State like the Amish and other intentional communities. If the State wanted to it could destroy the Amish and similar communities with ease.

Mass movements dictated by resource scarcity is migration.

It’s already begun. It can’t be stopped.

“The new world order being born will be governed by mass movements dictated by resource scarcity”

“Mass movements dictated by resource scarcity is migration.”

Nice. I’m impressed.

*Not* governed by resisting nation-states at borders, but by migrating masses (and sympathetic indigenous)

Facing not a couple thousand at the border, but hundred thousands will even Trump incarcerate or shoot them all? The wall is ridiculous, but shows some foresight. And once they’re in, they must be provided for, however well. I still don’t know from “govern” but the relations to migrants and refugees will partly determine domestic politics in receiving nations.

That said, as someone who has lived in Taiwan for a few years, I find it really hard to believe that China’s government is better at respecting other countries’ sovereignty than the US. That is obviously not true with regards to Taiwan, and I doubt that is true in any part of the world which is of particular interest to China’s government.

China historically tries to assimilate entities it considers “internal” and takes a much more standoffish approach to ones it considers “external”, more like Great Britain’s Continental policy. Taiwan is an extreme case of the former–OTOH I recall some U.S. observers complaining that China was “exploiting” African countries because it was simply trading with them without interfering with “improving” their governance.

Would we have been better off if Napoleon won his wars against the various coalitions thrown at him? We might have been spared the two world wars of the twentieth century and maybe France would be a better world hegemon than the United States or China.

Go read Benjamin Constant, or War and Peace. The Napoleonic Empire’s constitution served as an inspiration for some of the most despotic regimes of the modern era, including the Third Reich. Though the mad scramble for colonies that followed Napoleon’s defeat was a horrendous thing in its own right.

Nuclear weapons are the obvious counter argument, and they win the argument of course, since now that they’re on the table the potential reduction to a better world is possible to destroy utterly. Still, when the alternative is the grey goo of unipolar imperial power, I’m not sure a sterilized Earth is worse, from a cosmic point of view.

It’s a big question in my mind whether nuclear non-proliferation was really a good idea.

The alleged original goal of total abolition almost immediately fell by the wayside in favor of a system where a handful of “legitimate” nuclear powers act as “protectors” of non-nuclear states, which supposedly reduces the chances of catastrophic wars by reducing the number of possible combatants.

However historically the most such wars between major powers started out with a conflict between a pair of small nations, each allied with a different great power, that then escalated uncontrollably into a total war. A world in which a few countries possess the “ultimate weapon” and the rest must either go effectively defenseless or else ally with one of them seems tailor-made to produce such highly dangerous situations.

On the other hand, permitting minor states to possess such massively powerful weapons would give them a serious recourse against external bullies without having to seek the protection of a more powerful state’s “umbrella”, which would seem to make the larger powers less likely to have an extensive system of “entangling alliances”. And given the staggering cost of even a “very small” nuclear war, even for its ultimate “winner”, would a world with widespread possession of nuclear weapons really be less stable than a “non-proliferation” world?

Maybe a hegemonic empire could impose the necessary environmental reforms on the rest of the world by eliminating peer competition.

But hegemonic powers are also almost always ultimately technologically reactionary. Could even a hegemon sustain a livable industrial civilization over the long term with only the present technological toolset at its disposal?

Its own over-inflated ego “must come first” I guess.

These days “the U.S.” is mostly a small group of donor corrupted politicians with the rest of the population being taken along for the ride, willingly or not. Maybe it was always that way, but ever obviously increasing incompetence in taking care if its own is suggesting the egos of those PTB is getting over-inflated.

It’s a simple point and a good one, but Krieger reminds me of a dozen other “macro” economic forecasters who parlay their gamblers’ intuitions (and paranoia) with a little knowledge of history and culture (enough to fool most people into thinking they’re well educated or experts) which they mash together to develop a conspiracy theory. Fans arrive, and they become gurus. Low-level internet fame.

The main differences are who gets scapegoated, and who is defined as the implied audience of enlightened goodshits who will come out okay if they just heed the master. Blame reptilians, Republicans, Zionists, the party of Davos, whatever.

It’s a sad indicator of nothing good that this is the type of miscreant who says something obvious about sovereignty and great realignments of power, not a newspaper of record. It’s like watching Steve Bannon be smarter than David Frum by stating the obvious.

Go Ten Bears. All about the water. And you know, other stuff.