Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has ushered in a dangerous new era of world history, I have watched many American commentators (and sometimes others in the West) treat the whole affair as either irrelevant, far away and not affecting their lives, or as some kind of dog-and-pony show, puffed up beyond its real significance and something they can safely ignore. These instincts, while understandable in narrow light of recent history, are wrong. With the increased tensions around Taiwan, this attitude is also being transposed onto that potential conflict, which would be far more disastrous than Ukraine.1 In the real world, we do not get to choose without constraints a paradisiacal political system to live in. We only get to choose among the options available. The reactions I have seen among some in the West come, I believe, from failing to understand the real options before us.
The current world order
In the aftermath of World War II (which was in some ways an outgrowth of the aftermath of World War I), the United States decided that Europe could not be left to its own devices, as these people would just destroy the world again. In addition, leaving the continent alone would allow the Soviets to move in, granting resources and territory to their rising adversary.
Historically, most nations in the aftermath of a decisive victory and facing these kinds of geopolitical dangers would annex the conquered (sometimes “liberated”) territory, or set up puppet regimes to extract resources for themselves. Instead, the United States took an unprecedented approach with the Marshall Plan and poured billions of dollars into rehabilitating and rebuilding Western Europe’s economies. Though these countries for the most part functioned as allies and there were certain economic conditions involved which required reducing trade barriers (which benefited US consumers and US global power), the US did not install or maintain puppet governments, leaving these countries to a significant degree to decide their own domestic and economic policies. A similar plan was enacted for occupied Japan, which was rebuilt into an economic power under American administration.
It’s worth pausing to appreciate the strangeness of this. The victorious nation in a world-historic war, rather than reducing conquered nations to clients or impoverished vassals, built them up to serve as economic partners in a global trade network. The victorious nation benefited from this over the long run, but at the cost of substantial investment and forgoing the spoils of war. Western Europe and Japan also benefited from this arrangement and maintained their political independence. This is not at all what the Soviet Union did in Eastern Europe, where those states were subjugated totally to Moscow.
The economic order that the United States implemented in the aftermath of World War II was not done out of selflessness. It was part of a strategy of containment to counterbalance the Soviet Union. If the Soviet system had an internal, centralized economy that ended up impoverishing its satellite states for the benefit of Moscow, the US was going to create a distributed economy that encompassed everyone else, allowing other nations besides itself to become rich, increasing the relative attractiveness and robustness of its global system against the Soviet one. Sure, the US would reap the greatest rewards of it, but if you ascribed to this system you could always become a Japan, or South Korea, or even a Denmark. Even developing nations like Turkey obtained access to far more wealth under US-secured global trade than they did previously.
This is not to say this option was available to everyone, nor that the US committed no crimes in the 20th century in the pursuit of its vision of global order. The greatest of these is probably the needless and extremely destructive war in Iraq (an insane idea to replicate the success of the occupation of Japan by selecting a country in the Middle East to destroy and then refashion — the sociopathy of this staggers the imagination), but there was also the bombing of Cambodia, the Vietnamese War itself (an apparent attempt to replicate and improve on the half-success at communist containment in Korea), the support of Suharto in Indonesia, coups and organized economic disasters in Africa and Latin America, not least among them the assassination of Lumumba, the overthrow of Allende, and abuses in the Guatemalan Civil War. The list goes on. In particular, once the nation turned its gaze beyond its allies (and conquests) in World War II, the ideas of a globally connected and peaceful market instantiated through cooperation and largess very often lost out to much more old-fashioned ideas of colonial rule.
Not allowing ourselves to forget the wrongs, this system of economic integration nevertheless worked fairly well where it was implemented. Many countries outside of the Soviet sphere that joined the American-led economic order became wealthy, and even if they only attained middling economic success, they got access to a globe-spanning market which brought economic advances to their nations, whether in the form of better agricultural machinery, food, electronics, or consumer goods.
This global trade network was (and still is) only enabled by the absolute supremacy of the US (and its allies) at sea. This has been true for so long now that the ability to ship goods across the oceans of the world safely is now taken for granted. But when these shipping paths become uncertain — whether by pirates, as off the coast of East Africa, or by a nation-state looting goods (something which has not happened in a long time) — trade in that part of the world will simply stop. If it does not stop, it will become restricted: Only certain approved goods (or nations) will be allowed to enter, breaking our currently-global communication and trade networks into separate systems.
Contradictions and fraying of the American order
Quite aside from the cases in which the US has forgone this new economic system in favor of direct colonial-style intervention, this system has generated many of its own internal contradictions. Some of them are ideological, such as the on-paper demand that countries integrated into this market have a system of at least partially democratic governance, but with giant exceptions carved out for oil-providing nations like Saudi Arabia or labor-producing nations like China (the latter also done by Nixon to keep China out of the Soviet sphere). But time has shown that a much more fatal flaw is the economic contradictions generated at home.
To tie nations all across the world together in a network of trade, whether these nations were China, India, Australia, or France, those nations had to be offered something in order to make it worth their while. For wealthy nations, this mostly meant opening their markets to goods from nations with lower labor costs. For poorer nations, this mostly meant opening themselves up to foreign investment, trading cheap labor for the construction of factories and infrastructure by outside capital, in the promise that over time the poor nation would accumulate enough capital to start importing cheaper goods themselves. Everyone wins over the long term, or that was the neoliberal message.
There is perhaps a very long-term problem with this, which would be running out of global cheap labor. But long before arriving at this point, the system ran into another contradiction: The labor classes of the rich nations were displaced by the labor classes of the poor nations, and ended up with nowhere to go. Inside America, the message of the Clinton administration was the most clearly articulated response to this issue: Don’t worry, you can go to college, get a managerial-level job, and we’ll all be a nation of rich managers. This message eventually got boiled down into a three-word imperative, often said derisively: “Learn to code.”
The problem with this plan, which should have been obvious as early as the 90s, is that there are only so many managerial positions that an economy has a need for, even a globally interconnected one. And even beside that, simply put, not everyone is able to take on these kinds of jobs. This creates an unpalatable dilemma for the managing superpower: (1) maintain internal low-level manufacturing jobs via tariffs and other penalties on trade, at the risk of imperiling the stability and attractiveness of the global network; (2) maintain the global network, at the risk of the welfare of the internal labor classes and, ultimately, the risk of one’s own internal political stability. There may be a balance a country can strike here (“learn to code” was a failed attempt to do so), but when push came to shove, the US chose (2).
The downward pressures on the US’s labor classes eventually led to the election of Donald Trump, who broke through the historically Democratic midwest partially on a platform of labor resentment against the managerial class. I’d say that this unexpected election was the culmination of these trends, only I do not think this contradiction of the American system is over, nor that anything has culminated yet. Instead of the American world order cracking on problems from abroad, it cracked the internal body politic into two: A class which benefited from global capital and trade flows, and a class harmed by them.
There may be some brilliant policy or readjustment which can both protect the world order of (relatively) peaceful and secure trade and economic integration while also creating an economic space for laborers in rich nations like the US. However, I have not seen very many politicians or public intellectuals looking in this direction. Instead, they seem to be still in shock from finding out that this fissure has opened up within their own country. (There’s not much excuse for this, six years on after Trump, who should’ve been the wake-up call.) In their stupefied response, one group of elites has doubled down on privileging global connections above their internal labor class, something which is guaranteed to exacerbate their nation’s internal discord and could only be successful if they were to construct of a vast internal police state. Another group of elites, sensing opportunity, has leapt to defend (so they say) their national labor class by demanding an exit from the global trade networks. Burn the whole system down, anything is better than what led us here. This is where a lot of “dissidents” and people who sense something wrong in the world have ended up. Let’s see what the alternatives are, then, if we follow this path and blow up this global order.
The alternatives
Abandoning the current structure of the global political order does not mean that things will continue as before but with a few more jobs domestically. We have a more-or-less global and interconnected marketplace, and as I have outlined above, a market that is not so much guided by an invisible hand as propped up and managed by America. If the US withdraws from this role (which there is alarmingly good reason to believe it will), this system of global exchange will not simply go on under new leadership, nor will capital just “shift” under new multipolar rules. There will instead be very deep shocks to the economic and political orders of the entire globe. There will be a tussle to establish a new set of global rules, or to carve out local networks.
Not every nation has the capacity to engage in managing a global or even local trade network in the US’s absence: No new order will be established by Hungary or Kenya or The Philippines. There are only a few countries (really, two) with the ability to step into this vacuum with their own ideas of global order, or at least an order which might encompass a reasonably large percent of the total human population. So with that in mind, let’s look at the other options on offer.
Russia
Russia is currently engaged in a military operation to control what it considers to be a critically important neighboring country. This is not about the Donbass (as seen by the push well beyond Donbass) and it’s not even only about Ukraine. Shortly after the initial invasion, Belarus’s president Lukashenko stood in front of a map that appeared to show in detail Russia’s plans to conquer Ukraine as well as annex or occupy the Transnistria region of Moldova. The plan must have been either to fully annex the country or annex a part and carve up the rest.
The Ukraine War is part of a strategy by Moscow to secure its future by either annexing or controlling as puppet regimes (as it does with Belarus) all of its European neighbors. It’s not even clear that they could or would stop after a full victory in Ukraine, as seen by the threatening rhetoric toward Finland and Sweden when those nations suddenly decided to apply for NATO membership.
If you are a traditional empire, as the Soviet Union was and Imperial Russia before that, then controlling and intimidating nations along one’s border is indeed a security requirement. A traditional empire does not seek to enter into mutually beneficial economic arrangements with its neighbors, but to suck up neighboring resources for its own benefit. The most famous example of this under the USSR is the Holodomor, the great famine that swept through Ukraine from 1932-33. The exact causes and intentions are still debated, but what is clear is that collectivized farms in Ukraine which failed to meet their quotas were punished by having extra resources taken from them. Or put in raw material terms, food was systematically taken out of Ukraine during a period in which it was already experiencing lower food production. Millions died. A very similar form of administrative famine wracked Kazakhstan (largely from 1931-33), also with millions left dead. The details of these famines are not particularly important for my point here. Rather, I simply want to point out that these famines conform to the general pattern of an empire extracting resources, in this case food, from its conquered and peripheral territories in order to enrich the center. There was no such food shortage in the heart of the empire.
The Soviet Union imposed severe reparations on its conquered territories.2 Romania was obligated to pay $300 million (in 1938 dollars, i.e., prior to war inflation) to its new Soviet masters; Hungary was also obligated to pay $300 million (200 to the USSR and 100 to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia). The on-paper equivalent of the Marshall Plan within the Soviet sphere was the Molotov Plan, which officially offered aid to conquered Eastern European nations. However, this assistance was meager at best (nations like Romania and Hungary still suffered under their war debts), and could reasonably be understood as a public relations effort at countering the Marshall Plan. The nations that took part in this ended up as full Soviet satellite states, losing all autonomy, and subjected to Soviet policy run out of Moscow. There was no equivalent of the western post-war economic bounce-back for nations behind the Iron Curtain.
Forced population movements (both within Russia, largely targeted at kulaks, and within its satellites, targeted at displacing any ethnic resistance to Russianization) consciously reduced the independence and viability of non-Russian states within the USSR (including Molotov Plan states). Over a million Poles were deported, 200,000 people of the much-less-populous Baltic nations, and unknown but probably greater number of Romanians. This greatly weakened non-Russian states within the Soviet system, in a conscious effort of Russianization of the Soviet Union. Although it is extremely difficult to know exactly what occurred within the Soviet system (we still do not have anything like full records over the entire bloc, and not even for Comecon decisions), and though the Soviets famously implemented an aggressive industrialization policy, it appears that most of the benefits of this system flowed toward Moscow. Certainly no secondary economic powers emerged along the periphery of this system.
Though modern Russia is not the same political unit as the Soviet Union, it appears as though the aim of Russia’s leaders seems not so different from previous imperial ambitions. In 2005, Putin himself said (and it is still translated into English on the Kremlin’s website):
[W]e should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. […] Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.
This was not a one-off remark. Shortly before beginning the invasion of Ukraine in December of 2021, Putin called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union.” He’s in fact speaking honestly here: the Soviet project was not the project of many nations working together, but of a central nation, Russia, extracting value from its neighbors to enrich itself. It is this lost dream of Russian imperialism to which he now seeks a return.
A new Russian sphere of economic and political dominance will not be an alternate version of the American one, just with some different rules. Unlike the American order, in which there is a central pole (the US) and significance allowance for other states to become secondary players in the economic terrain, this would rather be a return to the historic Russian imperial system (a system openly admired by its authoritarian leadership) which deliberately impoverishes and materially exhaust the states within its orbit.
China
The other nation that has a chance of rising to status as an orderer of global affairs is China. Not long ago, the Davos crowd (the billionaires who are enriched by and collectively exert an enormous power over the Western system) were openly hoping for an ascendant China to take the reins from the US, or at least for its system of governance to grow in international influence. If you are a capitalist seeking cheap labor and minimum regulations, China looked very attractive for a long time. So long as you dealt with government officials well, there was no risk of pesky democratic elections changing representatives and then laws that could affect your business, there were no labor unions to worry about (illegal in the PRC); you had only to keep your government connections happy and you could exploit a massive labor pool in the context of relatively minimal labor and environmental regulations. Why couldn’t your own nations follow the lead of China, and similarly streamline processes for you back home?
There’s a lot of ugliness to the 2000s and 2010s capitalist love-fest for an authoritarian regime because of its plentiful, disposable, and cheap workers. But this led to two important consequences: Western capital investment built up Chinese manufacturing, and it generated a sense in the culture (both in business and among people and politicians) that China was poised to become the dominant force in the world. With an unprecedented level of investment from businesses in foreign nations (nations that, in a pre- (or post-) Pax Americana world, one would expect to be China’s geopolitical enemies), China has built up such a significant reserve of capital and industrial capacity and it does look to be in a position to reorder the world, or at least a significant part of it, in the near future. In the face of a withdrawing US, what would this actually look like?
Despite the earlier love, two recent events have taken the sheen off China’s star recently: The COVID-19 pandemic, and the personality cult of Xi Jinping. Early in the pandemic, China received great praise for its handling of SARS-CoV-2, both from the (deeply compromised) WHO and from governments around the world. The lockdown response followed by nations around the world was itself based on China’s response. However, as the pandemic dragged on, more unsavory facts about China’s handling of COVID came to light. The first is that the government lied about human-to-human transmissibility of the virus, going so far as to keep international airports open (spreading the virus internationally) while limiting movement within the country, as the virus was already known to be highly contagious. In the early days of the pandemic, the local (and probably national) government clamped down on information from doctors (most famously, of Li Wenliang) about a fast-spreading SARS-like virus. Maintaining a good public image won out over honest sharing of information, both within the country and internationally. Lab leak theories (here for the non-peer-reviewed version) are being taken more seriously now,3 as continuous irregularities in the Chinese story have led to more questions about how this virus came to begin in the middle of a city with a large coronavirus laboratory and far from its natural carrier species of bats. On top of this, China remains to this day in rolling lockdowns, adhering to a zero-COVID policy that most of the rest of the world has abandoned, locking down cities years into the pandemic. If the Western world is facing uncertain fallout from the wild and often experimental governmental reactions to COVID, China is still in the midst of turbulent reactions to the pandemic, and the effects there are more uncertain.
Perhaps more significantly than COVID, the personality cult and rule of Xi Jinping has brought substantial changes to the nation. The changes have been profound enough for even previously-bullish westerners to start expressing concern. Xi has removed term limits, enabling him to become the first president since Mao to serve an open-ended number of terms. In his first term and under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign, Xi purged the Party of all potential rivals, so it is difficult at this point to imagine how he could fail to serve as president until his death. China was never a democratic country, but Xi has legalized his personality cult (Xi Jinping Thought was incorporated into the constitution in 2017), something not seen since Mao, substantially tightened control over domestic media in the form of censorship and further restricted access to foreign media, and pivoted foreign policy to his much more aggressive “wolf-warrior diplomacy.”
So what would a shift to a global order under Chinese authority look like? Within its periphery, one place to look would be the changes brought to the Xinjiang province, a territory governed by China but filled with non-Han4 peoples with a substantially different culture and a history of conflict with Beijing. As has by now been very widely reported, the Chinese government is currently engaged in a program of de-Uyghurfication, including the construction of concentration camps, the separation of children from their parents, and forced sterilizations. These actions are not carried out on an external population (not that this would be morally better), but against China’s own citizens, just citizens that are ethnically out of favor with the central government. It’s not only ethnic minorities who are experiencing a change under Xi. Hong Kong has seen its special status effectively ended under Xi’s term in office, fully falling under the legal jurisdiction of the mainland (the trigger for the protests being a wide-ranging national security law), and as a result the status of Hong Kong as a global city is fading. It is hard to read this as anything other than an intentional move on the part of Beijing to shift the centers of economic power toward the east, above all into the business/finance center of Shanghai and the administrative center of Beijing.
Abroad, perhaps the exemplar case of Chinese ambitions is Sri Lanka. Part of the Belt and Road Initiative, Sri Lanka holds large amounts of debt to China, amounting to some $5 billion, and has suffered under very heavy interest payments to its many creditors (7 percent of its national GDP). Among the projects funded by Chinese loans was the Hambantota International Port, the country’s second largest port and now owned by a company in which China owns a controlling share, as part of a renegotiation of Sri Lanka’s debts (which were used to build it in the first place). Sri Lanka is the exemplar case of China’s so-called “debt-trap diplomacy,” in which a developing nation takes on debt to build infrastructure, cannot pay it back, and then a Chinese company ends up owning the infrastructure (in this case for the next 99 years) as part of a debt relief package. (This is not to excuse Sri Lanka for its extreme financial mismanagement.) The country’s economic malaise led to the 2022 protests that toppled the government. Though the repercussions have been nowhere near as severe, Pakistan is also accumulating large amounts of debt to China in return for infrastructure projects which may ultimately prove to be to the benefit of China, not Pakistan. Afghanistan may prove a site for Chinese mining operations in the near future, likely with similar debt-inducing financial structures. The details vary from nation to nation, but it appears as though these infrastructure projects (especially in Africa) are often done with a Chinese, rather than a local, labor force, meaning that the countries taking on debt do not even benefit from training their local labor in skills that can be of use to them afterwards.
While the tools used in this case are economic power, just as with Russia the Chinese strategy for creating a sphere of influence is to extract resources from other countries (especially on its periphery) in order to benefit its centers of power. As Moscow is the nerve center of the Russian empire, here the eastern seaboard of China (in particular, the Beijing-Shanghai corridor) is also the recipient of the economic extraction, even to the detriment of the nation’s other cities like Hong Kong.
Deglobalization is a pain
The global order under US hegemony has been an experiment in empire as a managed global economic unit. You had to play by certain rules, adopt the dollar as the trade currency, and have at least a nominally democratic and capitalistic society (at least most people did). But once you do that, you get access to the whole system. You can put on the market whatever you have locally (even if it’s just labor) and in exchange receive access to what you don’t have available locally, like energy, raw materials and manufactured goods. In the absence of an American order securing it, this interconnected trade can go away or fragment, leaving nations that are currently dependent on this market for (say) food, fertilizer, advanced manufacturing, minerals and ore in the dangerous situation of not being able to acquire them. In perhaps an even worse case, small nations on the edges of powerful states with imperialistic ambitions, like China and Russia, may find themselves turned into vassal states with their wealth flowing out of their borders toward the local imperial center. Even if you avoid the worst of this, the global trade network that allowed for global regional specialization is unlikely to continue under new management (if there even is any global management), so access to and even production of many complex goods will simply disappear.
The American global hegemony has a lot to answer for, and I have only touched on some of its crimes in the introduction. And yet, it remains a remarkable step forward in the history of empire. Just as Rome, however imperfectly, advanced the concept of empire to incorporate conquered peoples as citizens, America advanced the concept of empire beyond a tool for conquest and resource extraction to one of mutually beneficial (if lopsided) economic trade. Some may not like the cultural leveling this introduced (and I am quite sympathetic to these complaints), but the arrangement of Pax Americana is just about as good a form of empire as has ever existed. Small states which otherwise found themselves either at perpetual periodic war or under the extractive rule of an outside force had the possibility to enrich themselves. Just the presence of a globally-connected trade network greatly enriched most of the world.
So you say you want to blow up the world order? And what would come next?
Both the Russian and Chinese systems would be, undoubtedly, a step back in the history of empire toward an imperial center feeding off an impoverished and dominated periphery. The economic network which is currently the world will splinter into separate, less productive spheres that will, just by virtue being local, lack some of what they once had access to. For the majority of the world’s people, the end of the current system will mean first a period of great uncertainty and then a permanent reduction in living standards.
America is currently in the midst of one of its periodic internal political crises (in part spurred by the domestic contradictions of this system), and doesn’t have the attention to focus on these international issues. However, I would much rather see American intellectuals and politicians addressing questions of how to resolve the key domestic contradiction of this system, the crisis of the domestic labor class, while maintaining as much of this (frankly miraculous) global system as possible. It’s possible that conditions mean that this system just cannot be maintained in its current form and extent, regardless of the most brilliant policy decisions. But the material wealth and (relative) peace that empire-as-trade has engendered are worth preserving as much as possible.
Proposals people begin working out in detail now will stand a greater chance at achieving consensus once the US comes out of its current internal chaos. It is clear a new bargain will have to be reached: Domestic labor cannot simply be told to learn to code, and if you can’t, then too bad, your immiseration is for the betterment of the global system. But neither is a world carved up by Chinese and Russian spheres a desirable one. The political question of the moment then is: What can we preserve, and how do we preserve it? An unstructured collapse of globalization would be a disaster for most of the world.
Do not panic about Taiwan yet. It’s hard to read the tea leaves (even if they are high-quality Taiwan tea), but there is a real possibility that the surprise difficulty in Ukraine — and the surprise unity of (many) Western nations — coupled with internal problems linked to the banking system and the COVID reaction may have delayed Beijing’s plans. But one shouldn’t get too sanguine about it because powers do ridiculous things, as history shows us.
The US and the allies imposed war reparations too. However, I would argue that the post-war economic bounce-back for most of these nations proves that the Marshall Plan more than offset the war reparations. There was no equivalent in the Soviet sphere.
One of the many missteps of Western journalism in recent years, and an honest cause of the public mistrust in media narratives, is the immediate quashing of reporting about the lab leak hypothesis in the early stages of the pandemic. It was always highly likely that a novel coronavirus that appeared in the same city as the Wuhan Institute for Virology, a global center of novel coronavirus research, was related to the presence of the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
Not that Han is even a real genetic designation. In genetics literature, one frequently sees “Northern Han” and “Southern Han” because “Han”, like all ethnicities, even genetically unitary ones, is a post-hoc political invention. In this case, it means “your ancestors were ruled by the Han dynasty,” but this was a dynasty created by the military conquest of multiple people groups, not a collection of people who shared the same set of recent common ancestors.