by WALDEN BELLO
What can replace the global order?
The recent unilateral strikes by the United States on Iran’s nuclear development sites underline the fact that multilateralism is dead, and has been so for some time.
It is not only when it comes to the question of the deployment of military power that multilateralism is shown to be dead or dying. The key institutions of Western-led globalization are no longer functioning or are in sleep mode. This was underlined by the U.S. government’s decision to boycott both the Finance and Development Summit in Seville, Spain, this week, and the Bonn Climate Summit two weeks earlier.
The World Trade Organization has never recovered from the collapse of the Fifth Ministerial in Cancun in 2003, with the United States, in fact, taking the lead in emasculating it by preventing appointments to its decisive unit, the appellate court.
There has been stiff resistance at the IMF and World Bank to change the shares of voting power to give the China, the other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), and other countries in the Global South the weight they deserve in the changing global balance of economic power. For over four years now, since the end of the G-20 debt suspension initiative, even as many countries in the Global South lapse deeper into a debt crisis worse than that of the 1980s, no new effort at addressing the problem has come from the Global North. Instead, the Paris Club has played a blame game, accusing China of not joining a common front vis a vis the indebted countries.
As for climate finance—despite a conciliatory retreat by the Global South like the Bridgetown Initiative spearheaded by Barbados by folding development into climate finance—the $58 billion delivered after years of difficult negotiations is puny compared to the $1 trillion needed annually for the loss and damage inflicted on the Global South by the climate-destructive activities of the main climate polluters. And with a climate denialist administration now in the saddle in Washington, DC, the other leading climate criminals have been provided the excuse not to add to the commitments to the already weak, voluntary ones they have made. The UNFCCC will meet in Belem, Brazil, in November for its annual Climate Summit, but the reality is that negotiations are dead in the water.
Death of a Grand Strategy
The United States has been decisive in this retreat from multilateralism, and this process unfolded long before the advent of Donald Trump. It is Trump, however, who has cut the cant, shed the hypocrisy, and sounded the death knell on the grand strategy of liberal internationalism that served as the guiding U.S. strategy over the last 80 years, when it was committed to engaging threats to U.S. capital and U.S. state power where ever they were threatened globally. As Viktor Orban, the European figure most admired by Trump, has noted, his fellow strongman’s plan is to retrench to the Americas, focusing on reinvigorating the imperial heartland, North America, while strengthening the U.S. grip on Latin America in an aggressive reiteration of the Monroe Doctrine. And Orban adds, “there will be no more export of democracy.”
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