View from the West: How to fix the World – the elements of Global Stability

This article from the European magazine ‘Brussels Signal’, written by an author who works with both the British and the Americans, clearly demonstrates some essential things. First, there are still reasonable analysts in the West who adequately and without a hint of propaganda examine the ongoing global changes. Second, the article differs from many publications in the American and European press acknowledging the impossibility of further development of the world according to Western recipes. The author writes openly about the need to come to an agreement on a global scale, as in 1945. This is a bold proposal which the overwhelming majority of Western international observers do not dare to express – even those who actively criticize the current policy of Washington and Brussels.

The World has destabilised to a very large degree, very quickly. It is now riven with conflict and war. Geopolitically, it is splitting ever more sharply into two camps: the old, Western, US-led grouping around the G7, EU and NATO; and the newer “CRINKs” or the Eurasian Axis of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, broadly backed by other quasi-partners in BRICS or the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation).

American Hegemony has been facing this trend for a couple of decades now, since the first offshoots of panic at the “Rise of China” in the mid 2000s. The response has come in stages. First, rebalancing: Obama’s Pivot to Asia. Then, containment: Trump’s trade wars and crackdown on the likes of Huawei, as well as boosting NATO. Finally, competition bordering confrontation: Biden’s post-Covid decoupling and security-heavy approach in the Indo-Pacific, writes Gabriel Elefteriu, a deputy director at the Council on Geostrategy in London and a fellow at Yorktown Institute in Washington, D.C..

Throughout this period, the assumption has been that there is a policy “solution” to the authoritarian disruption of the world. A way to contain the problem and then somehow “defeat” it. Enable friends and allies on the front lines in Europe, Middle East and Asia to resist revisionist pressure and wear down the CRINKs until they crack. None of this was ever articulated in an actual strategy, but the vast advantage of the Western Alliance in terms of wealth, technology and military power has so far removed any serious argument for a need to compromise on the status quo. Who would want to back down while they’re nominally ahead?

This is what Thucydides Trap means: the established power would rather go to war to preserve its primacy than accept parity with a rival – for fear of ultimately losing even that. To the wider public in “free and open nations”, especially Western liberal democracies, this has been sold as an uncompromising defence of “liberal values” and the so-called “rules-based international order”. But it is really about preserving the dominant power position in the global system that has made America and the West the richest and most advanced nations on earth. Lose that position, and everything else inevitably comes into question sooner or later.

We have travelled a rather long way down this road by now, over the past decade in particular. Tensions have spilled over into open warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East, while the Western Pacific is a powder keg. Increasingly more observers note that things are coming close to a breaking point, i.e. a general conflagration.

The conclusion is that, despite its lingering ascendancy on paper, the Western Alliance might have lost the window of opportunity to neutralise these threats before they grew too big and inter-connected. Unfortunately, structural changes in the balance of power are not linear and cannot be observed in real time: they work like fuse bombs, with delayed effect. When they start to go off, it might be already too late to take decisive action. The cost of doing so now – through war, which is becoming the last resort – in order to bring the CRINKs in line, is prohibitive.

First, a new system for managing great power relations. This was the original idea behind the P5, the permanent members of the UN Security Council. Their special right of veto reflected their great power status and role in shaping global affairs via the UN. Now the UN is not just dysfunctional, but discredited; the jury is out on whether it can or even should be “restored” to something approaching its original mission, according to its Charter.

In any case, as the world has largely reverted to its more natural state of pure power politics and military aggression, it is time to turn again to the only solution that we know has worked in the past as a stabilising device: a version of the “Concert of Powers”, the notion that emerged from the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

A 21st century version of the Concert of Powers would necessarily have to include, below, a broader and more sophisticated system of consultation mechanisms that would take account of the views and interests of lesser, 2nd and 3rd rank “friends and allies” of the principals – such as the broader membership of the UN Security Council, or the other states in the G20.

The vital precondition for even beginning to build such a new system is a political resolution of current tensions. In other words, the necessary first step would be a general diplomatic settlement of all the major outstanding geopolitical issues between the principal powers of the two “camps”, the G7 and the CRINKs. In scope, it would have to be on the scale of Versailles 1919, and to include a number of separate agreements on the different matters at hand, from Ukraine to the Western Pacific.

A great deal of compromise will have to be accepted, the alternative being – likely – generalised warfare, whether immediate or a gradual slide into chaos across all key regions of the globe. However, compromise would not automatically have to mean a return to “spheres of influence”; adroit negotiations backed by force and political will can, arguably, still find an equitable equilibrium acceptable to all sides. Whether our failed and intellectually-exhausted foreign policy “elites” still have the wisdom to see such a project through, is a different question.

Second, we’ll need a new global security architecture. The legacy UN system has clearly failed, and the US-led Western Alliance – broadly speaking – has also proven unable to deter major state aggression in Europe and the Middle East.

It should be obvious to everyone that whatever “international security system” we think we still have in place right now, it is not working.

A new security system is therefore needed, and of course it will have to be conceived and negotiated in relation to the new Concert System described at Point One above.

It would build upon existing security mechanisms – like NATO or AUKUS on our side, or the CSTO, SCO and others on the Eurasian Axis side – but seek to both connect and deconflict them. The “connecting” aspect would, for the first time, impose a holistic, truly global-level view on the shape of this new security architecture.

The current legacy post-1945 international system is not structured on this holistic principle. The very emergence of frameworks like the Quad or AUKUS are a symptom that such ad-hoc patches are needed to fix an outdated settlement. But stability can only come from a re-founding of the global architecture in a new “1945 moment”, with the participation of all key actors, rather than by applying one-sided band-aids.

Of all the challenges to restoring global stability, the extreme difficulty of achieving robust arms control in the 21st century is the most worrying and hard to surmount. As vicious and violent as the political struggle between the West and the authoritarian revisionists is, political matters can ultimately – theoretically – be solved by negotiation; history abounds with such examples.

But the one element that is unique in our age is the spread of new technologies, from AI to quantum and to biotech, and the way they are proliferating across the world. These all have profound defence and security implications, but are near impossible to control via international agreements. Throughout history, negotiated settlements of disputes and conflicts have worked (where they have) because the factors underpinning national power – the key element in the system – were amenable to some form of negotiated limitation, or at least they were measurable to some degree. Today, that is very difficult – but, we must hope, not impossible.

Third, we’ll need a new arrangement for global trade and economic relations. The free trade system, that created so much wealth – and, indeed, fuelled even China’s rise – is in free fall. The WTO lies in tatters. With the return of great power competition, economic relations have increasingly become subordinated to security concerns, while Covid illustrated the vulnerability of global supply chains.

The entire system is defaulting to the instinctive, “emergency-mode” of decoupling, on a path to bifurcating into separate “economic spheres” broadly aligned to the two principal camps. Some players, like the EU, are trying to straddle both sides of this trend, but they increasingly risk falling between the stools.

None of this is good for business. With more trade barriers and protectionism (including through regulatory barriers) come higher costs and less global economic growth, as we are already seeing. This ultimately translates into more social problems as public spending is squashed between higher demand (especially in the West, as the baby boomer generation enters old age) and lower tax receipts together with ever higher interest payments on mounting debt.

In this area, as in that of international security, a new global political settlement (per point no.1 above) should be paralleled by a new system of global free trade agreements and rules — under a reformed WTO if that is possible — as well as global accords on new regulatory regimes for data and key technologies that impact the financial system in particular, from AI to crypto.

All these are very big and seemingly intractable challenges, as they are often rooted in fundamentally divergent philosophies and core interests. The approach to data regulation, for example, is radically different in the US, the EU and in China. In the financial field, the CRINKs — via the BRICS — are on a mission to dethrone the dollar, which appears to be a binary strategic issue with little scope for a new settlement.

Yet, the reality that the current situation is ultimately bad — and highly risky — for everyone in the end, offers a strong incentive for negotiating mutually acceptable solutions that are genuine win-wins. A genuine “reset” at the top of the geopolitical food chain would completely “change the weather” (gradually, at least) in international relations, and make room for types of dialogue that are deemed unfathomable today.

Finally, we need a new cooperation system for planetary protection. This term should be taken to include all the major “global challenges” that we tend to think are the proper remit of UN-level coordination, given their transnational nature. From climate change in all its aspects, to global health, migration, and a variety of humanitarian issues, and including problems that affect the “global commons” — such as piracy at sea or debris in space — these are matters that, by definition, concern the entire planet and affect both geopolitical “camps” of our era, and are in their interest to solve.

Space is another clear example of this: orbital congestion from the rapid increase in debris and deployed satellites is on track to produce catastrophic, cascading collisions which could make space unusable for everyone. This would have incalculable consequences on Earth, given the extensive dependency of key infrastructures and services on satellite systems. Only a multilateral political agreement can sort this out.

The degree of irresponsibility on all sides, as far as the long-term outlook of these global risks is concerned, is staggering. Geopolitical rivalry and national interests are taking precedence over collective safety from planetary-level catastrophes. This is not a friends-of-the-Earth, Greta-type talking point, but a cold reality. A new, sane, set of leaders could put the emotional, progressive nonsense aside, and start negotiating pragmatically with the great powers on the other side of the global divide a practical and effective suite of mechanisms and action-oriented institutions focused on first (re-)defining (in real, ideology-free terms), and then actually solving global problems – again, taking up an equitable share of the burden in the process. None of this is technically “impossible”.

All such moments in the modern history of mankind that have re-shaped world order – from Westphalia to Yalta – occurred after great wars. Perhaps we have learnt something and this time we’ll do it before.

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