Glyn Ford on a new world order
Westlessness – The Great Global Rebalancing by Samir Puri published by Hodder & Stoughton
The rest are on track to challenge the West. On any measure the US and friends’ hegemony is slipping out of their grasp. Western predominance was neither manifest destiny, nor accident. Rootling about in history, Westlessness contends that the economies in 1500 of the Ming, the Aztecs and the Kingdom of Benin were on par with Europe’s best. Europe’s fate was to seize the accidents of technology and theology to destroy the others. It was projection and infection. Nautical advances shrank the globe and allowed the easy export of military power. Where guns failed, disease delivered death. Our germ warfare, whether unconscious, negligent or wanton, often contributed more to victory than our armed soldiers. Theology anointed a white elect that whipped on by Malthus and eugenics justified and gloried in the worst.
Over the next centuries Europe rose to the top of the pile with a succession of lead nations, briefly Portugal, then Spain followed by the Dutch until the British Empire emerged on which the sun never set. The moment of war in 1914-18 saw the coerced passing on the torch to kissing cousins in Washington. All, but especially the last two, benefitted from the industrialisation of slavery to provide cheap energy to remain ahead of the game. These 250 years of white hegemony is now under question. US full-spectrum omnipotence is threatened in trade and political economy, military might and morality play.
The West’s beleaguered wagons are being circled. Washington and Brussels are throwing free trade overboard, behind a smokescreen of Beijing bashing, for favoured trade regimes between friends, family and the indispensable. It will be faster under Trump than Harris, but the direction of travel was well set by Biden’s legacy protectionism of the misnamed Industrial Recovery Act. The only exemptions will be for those bearing gifts; those with the access to the Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) like rare earths the West can’t find at home or the oceans. Alongside, it attempts to contain China with a set of inter-locking political alliances and NATO’s European defensive umbrella transformed into pro-active global police force for Greater Christendom. As for morality that died abroad with Iraq and Afghanistan, while its death foretold at home in the US and EU with democratic elections no longer electing democrats, alongside democratic decline as farce in the first and tragedy in the second. The walls are crumbling with the West’s power of excommunication gone and a world increasingly defiant, disobedient, and distrustful as respectively exemplified by Russia, Israel and India. The invasion of Ukraine saw few of the Global South back Russia, but they saw the diabolical logic. Gaza’s double standards doubled down.
Here Samir Puri swerves from his expected track. This is no update of former Marxism Today editor – Martin Jacques – When China Rules the World (2009). This time Westlessness sees no one winner. Instead, there will be three or four big powers, US, China, India and the EU – if the last can get its act together – plus a twice longer list of middle powers, selected as much by demography as development. China’s recruits to its extended BRICS shows who’s been paying attention. Initially Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, BRICS+ adds Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, with only Argentina declining the invitation. Them, plus Japan, Indonesia and Nigeria will be those that matter. Already BRICS+ has an economic punch in purchasing power parity above that of the G7 – 31.5% to 30%.
Puri’s problem is he clearly thinks the world’s great game is played within the rules of cricket, not combat. Graham Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap (2017) found amongst 16 historical examples of a rising power threatening to best a ruling power 75% ended in war. The British had infamous enthusiasm for sending gunboats to solve its problems, but in comparison with the US over the last 125 years they could have been candidate members of the Peace Pledge Union. As Abraham Maslow wrote in 1966, ‘it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” The last of the Washington’s omnipotence’s to be reversed will be its military might. The proximate cause of war will not be oil or homeland security, but a conflict over CRMs between this mix of powers, or containment. Difficult to imagine Washington won’t be in the mix as they have a dog in every fight. A more apt title might be ‘The Coming Global Disorder’. Maybe Samir Puri sees a hidden exit I’ve missed. I lack the faith seeing it for myself!