{"id":253757,"date":"2024-02-05T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2024-02-05T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=253757"},"modified":"2024-02-03T05:40:05","modified_gmt":"2024-02-03T05:40:05","slug":"the-return-of-bipolarity-tom-friedman-prophesies-a-new-round-of-global-conflict-and-mostly-gets-it-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/02\/the-return-of-bipolarity-tom-friedman-prophesies-a-new-round-of-global-conflict-and-mostly-gets-it-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"The Return of Bipolarity: Tom Friedman Prophesies a New Round of Global Conflict (and Mostly Gets It Wrong)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent long opinion article for the New York Times<\/em>, pundit Thomas Friedman announces \u201ca titanic geopolitical struggle between two opposing networks of nations and nonstate actors over whose values and interests will dominate our post-Cold war world.\u201d\u00a0 (NY Times<\/em>, January 26, 2024, p. A26). \u00a0This perception is not silly.\u00a0 The essentially unipolar hegemony enjoyed by the United States since the end of the Cold War is surely under fire, and new constellations of power and influence are forming.\u00a0 But Friedman\u2019s description of the emerging conflict is a sophomoric mashup of historical theory and primitive moralism. It is as if he were a sportscaster announcing a match between villainous and heroic boxers or wrestlers.<\/p>\n

Welcome to the Fight of the Century!\u00a0 In the far corner is the Resistance Network, consisting of nations like Iran and Russia, and organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, that are \u201cdedicated to preserving closed, autocratic systems where the past buries the future.\u201d (You may hiss now). In the near corner is \u2013 no, not Rocky Balboa, but the Inclusion Network, \u201ctrying to forge more open, connected, pluralizing systems where the future buries the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guess which network the United States, the NATO countries, Israel, and Ukraine are part of! \u00a0We \u201csecularizing, pluralizing, more market-driven\u201d nations are the wave of the future \u2013 in Friedman\u2019s adoring terms, the home of \u201cbusiness conferences, news organizations, elites, hedge funds, tech incubators and major trade routes.\u201d Wall Street is our Main Street!\u00a0 We weave things together like high-tech globalists should, and our reward is not just power but legitimacy.<\/p>\n

The Resistance baddies, by contrast, want to return us to the rotten old days of great power competition and backward-looking cultures. They are good only \u201cat tearing down and breaking stuff.\u201d\u00a0 What it is, exactly, that they are resisting?\u00a0 Friedman can\u2019t or doesn\u2019t want to say.\u00a0 His conclusion is that the members of this network \u201chave shown no capacity to build any government or society anyone would want to emigrate to, let alone emulate,\u201d while the Includers, by contrast, \u201chave the potential to redefine power structures and create new paradigms of regional stability.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whew!\u00a0 To those old enough to remember the Cold War, this sort of good guy\/bad guy analysis (if it can be called \u201canalysis\u201d) will be entirely familiar.\u00a0 We \u2013 the \u201cFree World\u201d \u2013 strong and virtuous, were the party of free politics, free enterprise, and free fire zones. They \u2013 the Commie Conspirators \u2013 stood for nothing except unfreedom. We were the progressive future; indeed, Cold War apostles like Frank Fukuyama taught that, after us, there could be no history to speak of. They were the barbaric, prehistoric past.<\/p>\n

The rest of the Friedman essay develops the policy implications of these stereotypes.\u00a0 For example, we (the U.S.) should give the Ukrainians everything they are asking for to fight the Russians and more, since they represent the Inclusion Network\u2019s interests in Europe at a bargain basement cost. And we should convince Bibi Netanyahu to accept some sort of harmless Palestinian ministate so that Israel, the Gulf States, and the Saudis can become a \u201ccultural, investment, conference, tourism and manufacturing center\u201d that dominates the Middle East and undermines the power of the Resistance Network.<\/p>\n

Assume for a moment that a new bipolarity in international affairs is <\/em>developing, with Russia, Iran, China, and their allies on one side (although Friedman\u2019s odd treatment of China \u2013 to be discussed in a moment \u2013 muddies the water) and the United States and its allies on the other. If so, what drives this conflict? What is it about? And what about the major players so far non-aligned, such as Brazil, Turkey, and India?\u00a0 The moralistic, neo-Cold War response is to distinguish between \u201cour\u201d superior institutions and good intentions and \u201ctheir\u201d inferior and evil ones and to consider non-alignment immoral. \u00a0But all this leaves us without a clue as to the real ideas, emotions, and interests in play on both sides.<\/p>\n

Friedman\u2019s silence on this score is calculated.\u00a0 What he doesn\u2019t want to admit is that the Resisters are resisting domination by the richest, best-armed nations in world history, the United States and its G7 allies, successors to the European empires that colonized and exploited the globe\u2019s non-Western peoples from the sixteenth century onward.\u00a0 As soon one recognizes the historic character of this resistance, one understands that China, formerly the poorest and most brutally colonized nation on earth, is not only a member of this network but its leader<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This, of course, is why the US elite is currently so anxious to make a \u201cpivot\u201d from European and Middle Eastern affairs to Asia, and why it is so busily attempting to create an Asian equivalent to NATO in the form of a rearmed Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the pundit will not recognize China as a party to the \u201ctitanic political struggle\u201d he claims to be describing, much less as the leader of one side.\u00a0 Instead, he describes the Asian giant as a neutral!\u00a0 The Chinese leaders\u2019 \u201chearts, and often pocketbooks, are with the Resisters,\u201d he opines, \u201cbut their heads are with the Includers.\u201d At first, this categorization seems purely bizarre.\u00a0 Then one thinks of the Chinese efforts to make peace between certain elements of the two competing networks \u2013 for example, Beijing\u2019s attempts to mediate between Iran and Saudi Arabia.\u00a0 Finally, however, Friedman\u2019s motivation becomes clear: China is excluded from the Resistance Network because it is economically and technologically so advanced!\u00a0 Its government may be authoritarian, but it doesn\u2019t fit the stereotype of the backward-looking, culturally stagnant society without a future that the pundit has constructed to discredit the Resisters.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir heads are with the Includers,\u201d indeed!\u00a0 But there is little doubt that the Chinese will continue to challenge the hegemony of the U.S. and its allies on virtually every front, using programs like the Belt and Road Initiative and organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS alliance to achieve their goals and those of the other Resisters.\u00a0 Friedman\u2019s neo-colonial stereotypes of advanced Includers and backward Resisters can actually help to define those goals.\u00a0 The imperial powers have always claimed cultural and political superiority to their subjects \u2013 and they have often been more \u201cdeveloped\u201d in certain ways.\u00a0 Great wealth and physical security do give masters more room to play, take risks, and innovate than their impoverished, endangered servants.\u00a0 But if one loses sight of the basic division between \u201ctop dogs\u201d and \u201cbottom dogs\u201d (as Johan Galtung puts it), one entirely misses the point that power and \u201cdevelopment\u201d go hand in hand.<\/p>\n

The Resisters do not want to be included in the masters\u2019 world order. They want the power to decide their own fate.\u00a0 As Franz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth<\/em>, the natives do not want the settler\u2019s status: \u201cthey want his place.\u201d Fanon also wrote scathingly of the inability of native oligarchs and politicians wired into colonial and neo-colonial networks to represent their people\u2019s real values and interests.\u00a0 It is time for Western global hegemony to end, but we have yet to see whether the new order proclaimed by Resistance leaders like China will be more than an updated version of imperial rule.<\/p>\n

This conclusion, to put it mildly, is bizarre.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/em>Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a> and a <\/em>professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University\u2019s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is <\/em>Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017). <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To those who remember the Cold War, this good guy\/bad guy \u201canalysis\u201d will be familiar. We \u2013 the \u201cFree World\u201d \u2013 strong and virtuous, were the party of free politics, free enterprise, and free fire zones. They \u2013 the Commie Conspirators \u2013 stood for nothing except unfreedom. We were the progressive future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[3228,232,813,1061,532,907,551,70],"class_list":["post-253757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-bipolar-world-order","tag-capitalism","tag-cold-war","tag-cold-war-ii","tag-colonialism","tag-communism","tag-neocolonialism","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253757"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":253759,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253757\/revisions\/253759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}