On US Hegemony, the Quest for a New Economic Order, and Colour Revolution Tech
On US Hegemony, the Quest for a New Economic Order, and Colour Revolution Tech
Two articles and a speech that are highly relevant to international affairs and are subjects of note on this Substack
At this moment I am impatiently tapping my fingers, awaiting the answers to my questions from my selected interview subject. I wanted to publish this interview well over a week ago, but I cannot force others to write. I know how much all of you want new interviews to be published here. Please bear with me.
In the meantime, there are two articles and one speech that I would like to draw your attention to, as the timing and the subject matter make them highly relevant, especially to this Substack. Let’s turn to those now.
The War Against Ukraine as a “Revolt Against the US-Led Global Order”
As you’ve heard me say dozens of times previously, the USA achieved its main goal on the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as it quickly led to the complete severance of Russian political and economic ties to Europe, forcing the continent into “US protectorate” status. Everything since then has been about bleeding Russia as much as possible by gently and gradually raising Western involvement step-by-step.
The light touch that Russia used in the first phase of the war surprised everyone, including me. Why they approached this conflict in this matter is of great interest to us all, but we will have to wait years until we receive a definitive answer. Over-confidence is surely part of the equation.
Two other facts have surprised many observers, especially the Americans:
the resilience of the Russian economy, which was supposed to have collapsed by this point in the conflict
the West’s isolation, whereby diplomacy has failed to bring Latin America, Asia, and Africa aboard the sanctions regime targeting Moscow
It’s this second surprise that forms the basis of a recently-held lecture by British-American Russia hawk (and former US National Security Council official under President Trump) Fiona Hill. In it, she warns of global fatigue with constant US demands, insisting that a new approach and new language is required to maintain dominance even as the old order is ebbing away.
This has not, as Vladimir Putin and others claim, become a proxy war between the United States or the “collective West” (the U.S. and its European and other allies) against Russia. In the current geopolitical arena, the war is now effectively the reverse—a proxy for a rebellion by Russia and the “Rest” against the United States. The war in Ukraine is perhaps the event that makes the passing of pax Americana apparent to everyone.
In its pursuit of the war, Russia has cleverly exploited deep-seated international resistance, and in some cases open challenges, to continued American leadership of global institutions. It is not just Russia that seeks to push the United States to the sidelines in Europe, and China that wants to minimize and contain U.S. military and economic presence in Asia so both can secure their respective spheres of influence. Other countries that have traditionally been considered “middle powers” or “swing states”—the so-called “Rest” of the world—seek to cut the U.S. down to a different size in their neighborhoods and exert more influence in global affairs. They want to decide, not be told what’s in their interest. In short, in 2023, we hear a resounding no to U.S. domination and see a marked appetite for a world without a hegemon.
“They want to decide, not be told what’s in their interest.”
Fiona has clearly read the room, and has found that US heavy-handedness has become an impediment to maintaining the pre-eminent role it currently has on the global stage.
In this context, the next iteration of the global security, political and economic system will not be framed by the United States alone. The reality is already something else. It is not an “order,” which inherently points to a hierarchy, and perhaps not even a “disorder.” A range of countries are pushing and pulling in line with their own priorities to produce new arrangements. We in the transatlantic community may need to develop some new terminology as well as adapt our foreign policy approaches to deal with horizontal networks of overlapping and sometimes competing structures. We have entered what Samir Saran, President of India’s Observer Research Foundation, has dubbed the age of “limited liability partnerships.”
Ms. Hill recognizes the limits of the current approach, and finds it lacking. A big issue here is that her realist approach collides head on with the current messianic environment in US governance. There is a global liberal revolution based on rapidly-changing American mores to export.
Fatigue with America:
Since 1991, the U.S. has seemingly stood alone as the global superpower. But today, after a fraught two-decade period shaped by American-led military interventions and direct engagement in regional wars, the Ukraine war highlights the decline of the United States itself. This decline is relative economically and militarily, but serious in terms of U.S. moral authority. Unfortunately, just as Osama bin Laden intended, the U.S.’s own reactions and actions have eroded its position since the devastating terrorist attacks of 9/11. “America fatigue” and disillusionment with its role as the global hegemon is widespread. This includes in the United States itself—a fact that is frequently on display in Congress, news outlets and think tank debates. For some, the U.S. is a flawed international actor with its own domestic problems to attend to. For others, the U.S. is a new form of imperial state that ignores the concerns of others and throws its military weight around.
The USA could have retrenched and recognized the criticisms leveled at it (as eloquently listed and described by Ms. Hill), but it instead decided to sabotage a presidency and go TURBO in order to cut down to size two revisionist powers that threaten its standing.
If your feelings about Fiona are becoming positive, check out this next bit:
The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, hot on the heels of Afghanistan, revived the horrors of U.S. Cold War interventions in Korea and Vietnam. U.S. inaction in conflicts like Yemen, and selective interventions in Libya and Syria, underscored U.S. foreign policy inconsistency. The 2008-2010 financial crisis and Great Recession, followed by America’s domestic upheaval and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 dimmed the power of America’s democratic example. Trump’s contempt for international agreements and his flagrant mishandling of the global pandemic, as well as, more recently, the Biden Administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, cast further doubt on the U.S. capacity for global leadership.
Fiona Hill is a Deep State creature. Her problem isn’t with the overall vision of global US dominance, but rather how it is being pursued. She is agitating for a course correction.
A significant concession on the dissipating moral standing of the USA:
Ukraine is essentially being punished by guilt through association for having direct U.S. support in its effort to defend itself and liberate its territory. Indeed, in some international and American domestic forums, discussions about Ukraine quickly degenerate into arguments about U.S. past behavior. Russia’s actions are addressed in a perfunctory fashion. “Russia is only doing what the U.S. does,” is the retort … Yes, Russia overturned the fundamental post-1945 principle of the prohibition against war and the use of force enshrined in Article 2 of the UN Charter … But, the U.S. already damaged this principle when it invaded Iraq 20 years ago.
“What aboutism” is not just a feature of Russian rhetoric. The U.S. invasion of Iraq universally undercut U.S. credibility and continues to do so. For many critics of the United States, Iraq was the most recent in a series of American sins stretching back to Vietnam and the precursor of current events. Even though a tiny handful of states have sided with Russia in successive UN resolutions in the General Assembly, significant abstentions, including by China and India, signal displeasure with the United States. As a result, the vital twin tasks of restoring the prohibition against war and the use of force as the critical cornerstone of the United Nations and international system, and of defending Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, get lost in a morass of skepticism and suspicions about the United States.
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”, said Carl Schmitt. The world has noticed these repeated exceptions and is growing less tolerant of appeals to the rule when they are so often violated due to the self-interest of violator.
A loss in standing:
In the so-called “Global South,” and what I am loosely referring to as the “Rest” (of the world), there is no sense of the U.S. as a virtuous state. Perceptions of American hubris and hypocrisy are widespread. Trust in the international system(s) that the U.S. helped invent and has presided over since World War II is long gone. Elites and populations in many of these countries believe that the system was imposed on them at a time of weakness when they were only just securing their independence. Even if elites and populations have generally benefitted from pax Americana, they believe the United States and its bloc of countries in the collective West have benefitted far more. For them, this war is about protecting the West’s benefits and hegemony, not defending Ukraine.
Some of this sentiment is an own-goal thanks to western academia’s insistence on reducing western history to “evil white men did evil things”.
This bit is unintentionally funny:
Russian false narratives about its invasion of Ukraine and about the U.S. resonate and take root globally because they fall on this fertile soil. Russia’s disinformation seems more like information—it comports with “the facts” as others see them. Non-Western elites share the same belief as some Western analysts that Russia was provoked or pushed into war by the United States and NATO expansion.
“…as others see them”. Fiona cannot help but insist that the West retains a monopoly on facts.
They resent the power of the U.S. dollar and Washington’s frequent punitive use of financial sanctions. They were not consulted by the U.S. on this round of sanctions against Russia. They see Western sanctions constraining their energy and food supplies and pushing up prices. They blame Russia’s Black Sea blockade and deliberate disruption of global grain exports on the United States—not on the actual perpetrator, Vladimir Putin. They point out that no-one pushed to sanction the United States when it invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, even though they were opposed to U.S. intervention, so why should they step up now?
The oil and gas-producing states were definitely taken aback by the sanctions placed on Russia, clearly seeing that the same could be done to them if they ran afoul of the USA at some point in the future. This is most likely the main reason why western diplomacy has failed to expand the list of countries sanctioning Russia.
“Open rebellion”:
Countries in the Global South’s resistance to U.S. and European appeals for solidarity on Ukraine are an open rebellion. This is a mutiny against what they see as the collective West dominating the international discourse and foisting its problems on everyone else, while brushing aside their priorities on climate change compensation, economic development, and debt relief. The Rest feel constantly marginalized in world affairs. Why in fact are they labeled (as I am reflecting here in this speech) the “Global South,” having previously been called the Third World or the Developing World? Why are they even the “Rest” of the world? They are the world, representing 6.5 billion people. Our terminology reeks of colonialism.
Fiona can’t help but shoehorn in climate change, and “colonialism”.
Realism regarding how the non-western world views China:
Most countries—including many in Europe—reject the current U.S. framing of a new “Great Power Competition”—a geopolitical tug-of-war between the United States and China. States and elites bristle at the U.S. idea that “you are either with us or against us,” or you are “on the right or wrong side of history” in an epic struggle of democracies versus autocracies. Few outside Europe accept this definition of the war in Ukraine or the geopolitical stakes. They don’t want to be assigned to new blocs that are artificially imposed, and no-one wants to be caught in a titanic clash between the United States and China. In contrast to the U.S., as well as others like Japan, South Korea and India, most countries do not see China as a direct military or security threat. They may have serious qualms about China’s rough economic and political behavior and its blatant abuse of human rights, but they still see China’s value as a trading and investment partner for their future development. The United States and the European Union don’t offer sufficient alternatives for countries to turn away from China, including in the security realm—and even within Europe the sense of how much is at stake for individual countries in the larger international system and in relations with China varies.
BRICS:
China clearly dominates the BRICS and wants to use the organization to consolidate its regional and global positions. Beijing sees the U.S. as the enemy of its ambitions and Moscow as an important counterweight to Washington. China does not support Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, but U.S. security framing—including the frequent invocations of Taiwan and “China is watching Ukraine” in the U.S. Congress—raises concerns in Beijing that Washington sees the Ukraine war as a test run for a clash with China.
Brazil values China as a counterweight to the United States. As one Brazilian interlocutor told a group of us recently during a think tank exchange: “Brazil is condemned to exist on a continent dominated by the United States.” As in China, heated American rhetoric about the war in Ukraine has shaped perceptions of the conflict in Brazil. Some Brazilian elites and officials view the war in Ukraine as “the first proxy war of the 21st century between the United States and China!” For them Russia is already subordinate to China and weakened as an actor beyond its neighborhood.
India wants to play a larger role in the Indian Ocean but, unlike Brazil, it sees China as a genuine security threat—especially in the Himalayas where the two countries have clashed over territory. For New Delhi, Washington is a fickle source of support, while Moscow is a major supplier of arms and ammunition. India fears Russia’s dependency on China. Of all the BRICS member states, India is in the most difficult policy predicament. It wants to keep tabs on China and Russia inside the BRICS and still maintain relations with the U.S.
The Saudi wild card:
Saudi Arabia, among the BRICS aspirants, sees U.S. power fading in the Middle East after its military withdrawals from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. In seeking to join the BRICS, Saudi Arabia wants to take advantage of global power and trade shifts. China is the major importer of Middle East oil, a significant regional investor, and the recent mediator in Saudi Arabia’s relations with Iran and Yemen. For the Saudis, Russia is a factor in Middle East energy calculations as well as Syria and offers new economic opportunities as Russian businesses move money and activities to the Gulf region to avoid Western sanctions.
Fiona has annexed Ukraine on behalf of the US-led West:
Because of its size and location, Ukraine is a multi-regional state. Its security will be defined by Neil Melvin’s idea of “mini-lateralism.” Ukraine will have to consolidate its existing relationships with the United States, the European Union, and NATO, as well as with its neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe, close partners here in the Baltic States, in Scandinavia, in the UK, and in the Black Sea region. The G7 and G20 country groupings will also be critical. This is where the persistently negative global views of the United States complicate Ukraine’s foreign policy. What will happen, for example, if China, along with Iran (and we suspect North Korea), provides weapons to Russia based on enmity with the United States? Then, there is NATO. As a direct consequence of the war, and Finland and Sweden joining, the Alliance has become the major driver of Ukrainian and European security. At least for the duration of the conflict, ongoing debates about European strategic autonomy have taken a backseat. Europe has jolted back to the kind of reliance it had on U.S. military power from 1945-1989. This is another challenge. Outside Europe and the Transatlantic arena, NATO has an image problem that Putin exploits.
What is to be done? More support for Ukraine:
All this means that we need a diplomatic surge—a skillful and patient effort alongside the vital military track—to end Russia’s brutal and senseless war. Ukraine needs broad-based global support. We must push back against Putin’s disinformation and anti-U.S. and NATO narratives. The United States and Europe will have to engage the rest of the world in an honest conversation about the stakes of this war and actively listen to their feedback and concerns on specific issues. Given the disparate views and agendas, we will have to take a piecemeal and more transactional approach to identify areas where we can make common cause with other states as well as international and private sector actors.
If I were to be tasked with delivering a speech on how to preserve the USA’s pre-eminent global position, this is the speech that I would give. It recognizes some tactical (and even strategic) blunders on the part of the US, but it does not diverge from the overarching goal of US hegemony.
Fiona Hill is a very sharp lady. However, the question remains: Can this kind of realism win over the USA’s current messianism?