2015 was a momentous year. If 2014 is to be remembered as the year the post-Cold War era ended with Russia's annexation of Crimea and proxy invasion of eastern Ukraine, 2015 is likely to be remembered as the year that the new, post-post-Cold War era really set in. And that means that 2016 - with its critical US presidential election - could well be the year that democracy triumphs or collapses.
For starters, it's "post-post-Cold War" for lack of a more definitive term: at this early stage, all we know with relative certainty is that a quarter century of world order underpinned by the unchallenged superpower status of the United States is behind us. We are already, in certain key respects, in a multipolar as opposed to unipolar world, even if it will be some years yet before this acquires a more or less stable and definitive form. But we can already delineate the likely main contours of this new order based on the events of 2015 as follows.
First and foremost, by outward appearances, the US remains far and away at the top of the pecking order. At the end of 2015, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates for the first time since 2006 - the height of the pre-financial crisis, housing-fueled credit boom. This not only signals the start of a new global monetary cycle, but underscores that it is the mighty dollar which still reigns supreme. True, China's yuan has now joined the IMF's elite basket of reserve currencies that comprise the dollar, euro, yen, and pound sterling; but few serious analysts doubt that it has done so as a fourth auxiliary to the premier greenback, or that this is primarily a reflection of China's importance to global asset prices as the world's factory floor and big builder. In other words, Washington and Wall Street still very much call the big shots: Beijing follows their lead, though it is clearly staking out a bigger piece of the pie for itself and is increasingly the one junior partner who can tweak Uncle Sam's beak without fear of reprisal, but only inasmuch as it doesn't appear inordinately hostile to broader Yankee leadership.
This must be kept in mind when looking at the South China Sea dispute: to those who have seriously considered the facts, it should be a foregone conclusion that stopping Chinese dominance of this crucial body of water promises to become only somewhat easier than stopping American dominance of the Gulf of Mexico was in about 1900; what's really at stake isn't the question of legal sovereignty per the international system - it's the question of who's the big boss that can set the rules in a given part of the world as he sees fit because, well, he's the big boss there. And that in itself doesn't mean he seeks to supplant the even bigger boss that he continues to acknowledge elsewhere - not least in the latter's own hemisphere. Can Washington live with a Chinese-dominated Asia? You bet - especially since Asia itself can live with it. Evidence? Even the plucky, bully-defying Philippines has joined Beijing's new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which leaves Japan: of course the mandarins in Tokyo aren't excited at being relegated to junior status in the Oriental hierarchy again, but there's little to suggest their overall China policy is now changing from one of all but enabling China's rise to one of constraining it.
The Sino-US relationship, which has been dubbed "G-2" or even "Chimerica", has effectively matured to such a co-dependence that every other piece and aspect of the post-post-Cold War order can be framed around it. Ideologically and philosophically, it represents the rivalry and dichotomy between the modern Western concept of individual freedom and the ancient tradition of Oriental despotism. Whichever way you cut it, the post-post-Cold War era seems to be defined by a protracted contest between the two: Russia's nabbing of Crimea in early 2014 marked the end of the post-Cold War era in the sense that it was the first major authoritarian territorial expansion at the free world's expense since 1989. Yes, kleptocratic Ukraine was in many respects a sham democracy as much in Moscow's orbit as in the West's, but the outright dismembering of territory from it in Donbas as well as Crimea was a shocking blow for the "end of history" nonetheless.
In this light, whereas Russia's intervention in Ukraine in 2014 was essentially reactive, its intervention in Syria in the last quarter of 2015 has been the first great active check by the authoritarian camp against the democratic camp. The brutal Syrian dictatorship now looks secure against the ill-wishing Western democracies, even if it remains nowhere close to actually liquidating its internal insurrectionists. 2015 will be remembered as the year that the whole idea of "regime change" finally died a well-deserved death. The West generally, and even the US specifically, has all but admitted that just because a government isn't nice and pretty doesn't mean it can simply be disposed of like a dirty rag. Fundamentally, the Syrian conflict has retaught the whole world, but most pointedly the liberal West, that the whole purpose of a state is the monopolization of violence within a geographic area: it may derive legitimacy from popular sovereignty in the form of free elections and the like, but the only real test of viability is its ability to maintain security, even if that means curtailing freedom to a harshly repressive degree. In such diverse societies as Syria and Iraq that were cobbled together by Western colonialism - indeed, even in more homogeneous ones like Libya - the brutal stability maintained by dictators isn't easily replaced by a democratic consensus which in itself simply lacks the muscle to contain latent sectarian strife (religious, ethnic, tribal, etc.) that can boil over after decades of dormancy. Regime change requires culture change - if imposed by external force, it demands far more blood and treasure than comfortable Western democracies are willing to expend.
That being said, the post-post-Cold War era is marked by the end of the inevitable ascent of a mushy kind of universal liberalism - or conversely, liberal universalism - and the strong reemergence of primitive cultural and even racial identity assertion. Even the West is now discovering that an open and progressive society depends on a preexisting spirit of inclusion that is enshrined by the rule of law, but that this spirit obviously isn't evenly distributed across different cultural traditions; such a society can't be built the other way around, i.e. upon an artificially constructed rule of law that purports to somehow engender a spirit of inclusion by essentially altering the fundamental character of less open cultural traditions.
This is really at the heart of the rise of Donald Trump and the nationalist politicians of Western Europe like Marine Le Pen. Western elites, such as the Republican party's professional politicians and their corporate sponsors, have yet to confront this foundational cause of the rise of neo-nativist, neo-isolationist insurgents among them - both Trump and Le Pen, for instance, advocate friendship with Putin - but the crucial US presidential election this year may just force an honest discussion: the prevailing worldview that essentially assumes that non-Westerners are just as freedom-loving as Westerners, which thus means that open borders are a great thing, is also the worldview that assumes that the autocratic leaderships of non-Western societies are inherently bad and should be undermined or even changed. Over and against this Western triumphalist-globalist mentality that has bound most of the right and the left together in a dominant political mainstream since the Cold War - promoted as it has been by the very deep pockets of the business and financial elite, especially through the corporate media (liberal or "conservative") - the rising tide of anti-globalist, populist anger appears to be going increasingly global itself. Mr. Trump's well-publicized late-year bromance with Mr. Putin could be a harbinger: American Tea partiers, including Texas secessionists, are finding natural bedfellows in Russian neo-fascists that the Kremlin has wielded as foils to make itself seem moderate. Angered by the constant activity of the "fifth column" of pro-minority, pro-feminist, and pro-gay progressives in its midst, the Russian state is now looking at anti-minority, anti-feminist, and anti-gay reactionaries in the West as its own potential fifth columnists against the US-EU-NATO nexus.
And so, a polarization has occurred between East and West, i.e. between despotic and democratic nations and societies, leaving dissenters on both sides increasingly marginalized by their ruling classes: reformers and proponents of openness are hounded and harassed in the authoritarian camp led by the Sino-Russian axis, even as nativists and cultural conservatives are character-assassinated in the "free" world led by a United States that now exhibits an absurd kind of virtually coercive political correctness. The future development and trajectory of this dichotomy is not very difficult to surmise.
So here goes nothing: my forecast for 2016 (and beyond).
Unless a deep and genuine revitalization and revival of Western democracy takes place, the authoritarian camp will make further apparent gains against the democratic camp, simply because it enjoys an internal unity - what dissidents still speak or act promise to be relatively muted - that the free world appears unlikely to recover in the near or even medium term. Free elections, free press, and rule of law in the West seem to have become, unfortunately, a convenient cover for the most boorish and childish partisanship imaginable, to such an extent that the political center appears increasingly irrelevant, if it still even exists substantially - it has certainly been uncomfortably quiet. Even if the reactionary right is being amplified by the Republican US presidential campaign, in which the most intolerant and uncompromising tends to be the loudest faction, the long-term deterioration of the cultural and demographic trends against the conservative cause is probably already too advanced to reverse, and likewise the hostility between the GOP's globalist elites and populist base. This in itself spells doom for the American project both at home and abroad - and hence of the Western liberal democratic cause more generally.
What America desperately needs is a presidential election characterized by unity-building and conciliatory language, but nobody can force this outcome on a free society. If, left to their own "freedom", America's partisan factions freely choose the path of mutually assured enmity - and hence slavery - then democracy itself will have failed. If "Black Lives Matter" and the Tea Party don't get on talking terms with each other, the trouble is that their own wider communities aren't organizing sufficiently to marginalize them from within. This is how extremism devours a once-thriving mainstream center: the toxic brew of sectarianism among a minority with the apathy of the majority.
In conclusion, this viral video of Ukraine's prime minister getting picked up by his crotch by a fellow legislator, triggering a parliamentary session barroom brawl, shows what's at stake. Though Ukraine is the front line in the East-West confrontation, the most critical battle will be within free society itself: what's scary is that our own politics these days don't look much more civil than this video incident. Though appearances are often deceiving, we seem to be living in an era where men underestimate their own propensity for evil - a time when the one thing that unites the extremes of the political spectrum is their celebration of arrogance and concomitant contempt for humility.
2016, then, could be the year that democracy triumphs or collapses - in either case, both as never before.
No comments:
Post a Comment