New World Order

Not a conspiracy at all!

The American Decline

The Western-established liberal hegemonic order is collapsing. To clarify: this does not refer to the cultural liberal hegemony in the English-speaking world, sometimes understood as “woke culture”, though in some sense “wokeness” has become a constitutional cultural signifier of the global liberal hegemony. Rather this liberal hegemony refers to the status quo organization of the world order post-WW2.

The establishment of the UN was the effective beginning of internationalist architecture (the League of Nations, its failed precursor, did not have the same impact). Now as we near its end, we live at the precipice of a total restructuring of the global political arena.

No longer is the United States the prevailing force that binds together nations under its umbrella of liberal-progressive norms. The collapse has been a long time coming. One could argue that the global wave of right-wing populism was its start — beginning initially with Australia in 1997 and the birth of the One Nation party. It reached total acceleration in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidential win in 2016.

For the last 20-something years anti-globalist, anti-liberal, and anti-progressivist politics have gradually introduced and established themselves on the international stage. There have been ebbs and flows but in the last decade or so they have taken the world by storm. Now they have reached their apex; The Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China is the manifesto of the new world order. This has been a long time coming: the United States’ internationalist “multilateralism” has been anything but. Rather, the multilateral agencies that bind nation-states together have effectively served as another organ of the US state department.

Unilateral demands pursued via soft and hard force on the end of the Americans have been the primary legacy of these systems. Interference in other states’ affairs to proliferate Western-liberal ideals has been the primary modus operandi of these globalist institutions. The facade of international cooperation between sovereign states is revealing itself as a global hegemonic project of American-aligned interests. The liberal treatment of independence as a primarily aesthetic reality instead of a culturally and historically grounded one is now blowing up in America’s face.

Flying gay flags in the UAE was one of many examples of the United States impressing its prescription of liberal “human rights” in nations within which these rights either don’t even exist or are defined so differently as to be unrecognizable to Western arbiters. The fact that these Western defined “human rights” are lacking abroad is then the perpetual justification for Western imperialism and occupation. There is a Western monopoly on the criteria that define democracy.

The notion that democracy commands a certain set of progressivist liberal human values is a Western delusion. The joint statement released by China and Russia stresses that their interests lie in achieving their form of democracy through their interests — ones that do not align with those of the United States. The joint statement makes clear that China and Russia have long lost their patience with the propagated belief that there is universality to the Western prescription of human rights. Human rights are relative to the culture within which they are defined.

The recent invasion of Ukraine is the first real exercise of power in restructuring the world order. As I wrote in my previous essay, the invasion of Ukraine is not an irrational venture like many Western pundits have made it out to be. Putin is not an irrational actor but an ideological one.

The ideological rationale for the invasion is a resistance to the expansion of Western-backed institutions in Eastern Europe. The geopolitical threat of a US-aligned Ukraine is obvious and urgent to a decaying Russia. The ability to remain Russia, and Russia alone, is contingent on the state’s ability to resist the influence of the economically powerful west. Many western liberals seem entirely confused as to why such an economically weak regime would instigate such a potentially grave conflict while wielding its nuclear arsenal as a last-ditch cudgel in negotiation. Understanding this war as one of Eastern resistance to the West better illuminates the why.