Tim Black
So this is how the so-called liberal international order ends. Not with a bang, but with a Trump.
That, at least, is how Western and especially European elites perceive the crumbling of the Western alliance and the decay of assorted international conventions – as the world-destroying handiwork of the disruptor-in-chief and his gang of vandals. In the US’s new tariff-charged trade wars with allies and, above all, in the seeming abandonment of Ukraine and perhaps even America’s fellow NATO members in Europe, they see a US administration determined to ‘destroy the rules-based world order’ and replace it with one based on ‘might is right’, as one liberal pundit has it. The Trump administration is not so much ushering in a ‘brave new world’, argues another, as ‘reverting to a dangerous old one’, dominated by great-power rivalries.
In one regard, they’re right. We are in the midst of a tectonic shift in international relations. A rebalancing of global power as potentially significant as that which finally undid the world order of the 19th century. Established after the Napoleonic Wars, and semi-formalised in the Concert of Europe in 1820, that world order, originally dominated by Britain, France, Austria and Prussia, came undone as vast empires rotted from within and a unified Germany rose during the long 19th century. Indeed, today’s American-dominated world order, which has held since the end of the Second World War, does now seem to be buckling, as Western nations’ relative decline fuels the assertiveness of regional powers and, in the shape of China, a global superpower.
No comments:
Post a Comment