The Fall of the Liberal World Order, and the Rise of a Russo-China Empire
The West best beware chasing the bear toward the fangs of the dragon.
With the G7 exploring the introduction of a digital dollar, political dissidents could face being cut off from their bank accounts. But imagine this digital deplatforming on an intra-national scale. The world’s financial, institutional, and corporate entities have been unanimous in their condemnation of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Putin has even deftly framed this as an international act of “cancel culture”: revising Russian history to extricate the Soviets of culpability for their own genocides, anti-Semitism, exile and imprisonment of dissidents, and censorship of records and literature against Party ideology.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine deserves our repudiation. Being against his incursion on Ukraine’s national sovereignty is as obvious a statement as being against pollution or poverty. Its obviousness makes the placement of Ukrainian flags in one’s bio, by those who couldn’t find it on a map a month ago, a repugnant virtue signal as odious as putting vaccine emojis in your name during the pandemic.
But we should fear the fierceness of our ostracism: as cancelling Russia from financial infrastructure is pushing them toward a parallel economy with China, and other UN nations who neglected to condemn Putin.
The West best beware chasing the bear toward the fangs of the dragon.
To turn the Russian people against Putin, the UK, EU, US, and its allies have iced the Kremlin out of the global economy. Swift, the world’s premiere cross-border payment processor, banned Russian transactions. Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and American Express have revoked access to their services. Moscow Metro commuters were shocked to find Apple and Google Pay no longer worked at the barriers. Russia has since banned its citizens from buying U.S. dollars — bringing their economy to the brink of defaulting. Even the world’s financial centre famed for its neutrality, Switzerland, adopted the EU’s package of sanctions.
Bloomberg once ran a mocked op-ed, advocating Amazon and Facebook getting a seat at the UN. Now, this war in Europe has become the pretext for corporate monopolies — who accrued record profits during the pandemic — to annex unto themselves the power of nation states. In the wake of this coordinated corporate ostracism, Russia is turning to China as an ally.
Presidents Xi and Putin recently signed a partnership with “No limits.” China’s Belt and Road Initiative has invested over $900 billion in 139 countries: annexing infrastructure and airports in Barbados and Uganda. Our carbon tariffs threaten ostracising emerging economies from western markets, turning them to the east instead. Does China’s unwillingness to condemn Russia’s invasion precipitate not only an incursion on Taiwan, but also an absorption of Russia into their digital Silk Road?
While Nixon and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown sold the US and UK’s gold reserves, China and Russia have been stockpiling. Russia have stipulated “unfriendly countries” must buy their gas using rubles, or even Bitcoin. At the same time, Saudi Arabia displaced the dollar with yuan as the reserve currency for oil deals, and refused to take President Biden’s calls.
Is China’s eagerness to intercede in peace talks an attempt to bring Russia into the fold of their new eastern breakaway economy? Are we witnessing the fall of fiat currency, and the withdrawal of the last backing of the American petrodollar?
Another inadvertent way of undermining the West’s economic influence is the abandonment of profitable fossil fuel trading. But while the West attempts to get off Russian gas, China has captured rare mineral resources. They manufacture 80% of global battery capacity. They control Zimbabwe’s lithium stores, and $1 trillion worth of cobalt, nickel, and copper deposits after Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. Perhaps Ukraine’s own rich lithium reserves factored into Putin’s decision to launch this invasion. What happens when the West is forced to run to China for materials for the renewables we need to decarbonise our energy sectors? Should those renewables fail, will two adversaries control Russia’s vast gas reserves?
China is not acting alone in making backroom deals. Five nations opposed the UN General Assembly motion condemning the invasion of Ukraine — including usual suspects North Korea, Syria, and Belarus. A further thirty-five nations abstained — including Cuba, El Salvador, and Iraq. The recent ban on Russian gas imports, combined with Biden’s refusal to reverse anti-fracking policies, has caused America to forge uneasy alliances with Venezuela and Iran. Both nations refused to condemn Putin. Thanks to Democrat energy policy, America is courting socialist and Islamist petrostates while they cozy up to China and Russia.
Biden’s administration is also preparing to re-enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Member state Vietnam abstained from the UN vote. The TPP’s Investor State Dispute Settlement provisions lock countries into contracts with expensive cancellation clauses. Should ideological divisions deepen, the financial repercussions could be just as costly as any unilateral trade legislation.
And what do the UN, headquartered in New York, do while a new anti-American axis forms on domestic soil? Ban any reference to the conflict in Ukraine as being a “war” or “invasion” to avoid causing offence.
The West rested on the laurels of a neoliberal hegemony, after Francis Fukuyama declared their Cold War victory to be the “End of History”. C. Wright Mills observed how disaffected socialists saw the failures of Stalin, and the economic supremacy of the United States, and consigned themselves to a compromised “End of Ideology” — abandoning a Marxist utopia as an impractical pipe-dream, in favour of conciliatory liberalism. A Golden Arches theory arose to governed international relations: assuming an equilibrium of consumerism was the antidote to all war.
Growing complacent with the material abundance of globalisation, politicians took the advice of a Swedish schoolgirl, and offshored emissions by manufacturing energy elsewhere. Their greenwashing left Europe spending more on Nordstream than NATO.
Now, as the World Economic Forum predicted: the global economy is capsizing, and America’s status as the world’s premier superpower is waning with the petrodollar. U.S. President, Joe Biden; Ukrainian MP, Kira Rudyk; and CEO of WEF-partnered investment firm BlackRock, Larry Fink — all lamented the loss of a liberal world order, and a transition toward a “new world order.” This order may be a plurality of world powers:
A disintegrating United States
An allied Russia and China, backed by a resource-rich Belt & Road empire
An India, keen to trade with and play both sides
An EU, haemorrhaging member states and expanding economic influence into Africa
A UK, with its Cabinet spearheading a Fourth Industrial Revolution — developing financial technologies and digital identity infrastructure
The global status quo is being reconfigured by decades of wealth creation and digitisation. Fukuyama’s historicist hegemon is unending. A hypothesis that liberal democracy was the apotheosis of human social organisation neglected the inevitability of entropy. Entropy, not only of material goods, and the transmutation of energy, but also of the resolve of the human spirit and moral standards, should be grow distracted and complacent. As Plato predicted, our democracies have fallen into oligarchal tyrannies — their totalitarianism worsened by the technological advancement facilitating the creation of the surveillance state. It is up to us to dig our heels in, and right this fall from grace.
The coming food and fuel shortages should be a lesson that Trumpian protectionism has its merits. It is too late to avoid the repercussions of offshoring manufacturing to our enemies, but not to secure supply-chains against future international incidents. Repatriating manufacturing and energy production is our only nationally secure path to peace and prosperity.
If liberalism is to mean anything, it must be a muscular defense of individual sovereignty and limited governance, with also a personal upholding of standards which sustain the civilisation. It may be too late to separate the Russo-Chinese alliance, but we can hope this new axis of evil is the catalyst to reducing reliance on our international enemies, and a reconstitution of the spirit of the Anglosphere.
The Cold War never ended — but the ceasefire has.