{"id":272477,"date":"2024-09-02T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2024-09-02T11:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=272477"},"modified":"2024-08-29T03:34:50","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T02:34:50","slug":"achieving-peace-in-the-new-multipolar-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/09\/achieving-peace-in-the-new-multipolar-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Achieving Peace in the New Multipolar Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

26 Aug 2024 <\/em>– With the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US assumed that it would dominate the world as the unrivaled hegemon. Yet the US \u201cunipolar\u201d moment proved to be short-lived.\u00a0 US geopolitical dominance ended with the rise of China, the recovery of Russia from the period of Soviet collapse, and the rapid development of India.\u00a0 We have arrived at a new multipolar age.<\/p>\n

The US still fights to remain world hegemon, but this is delusional and doomed to fail. The US is in no position to lead the world, even if the rest of the world were to want it, which is not the case. The US share of world output (at international prices) is 16% and declining, down from around 27% in 1950, and 21% in 1980. \u00a0China\u2019s share is 19%.\u00a0 China\u2019s manufacturing output is roughly twice that of the US, and China rivals the US in cutting-edge technologies.<\/p>\n

The US is also militarily overextended, with some 750 overseas military bases in 80 countries. The US is engaged in protracted wars in Yemen, Israel-Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.\u00a0 The US wars and quest for hegemony are financed through debt, including debt owed to rival powers such as China.<\/p>\n

Moreover, America\u2019s budget politics is paralyzed. The rich, who fund the political campaigns, want lower taxes, while the poor want more social outlays.\u00a0 The result is a standoff, with chronic budget deficits (now above 5% of GDP).\u00a0 The public debt has swelled from around 35% of GDP in 2000 to 100% of GDP today.<\/p>\n

The US sustains technological dynamism in areas such as artificial intelligence and microchip design, yet US breakthroughs are quickly matched in China through the spread of knowhow and advances pioneered by China.\u00a0 Most of the world\u2019s green and digital hardware — including advanced solar modules, wind turbines, nuclear power plants, batteries, chips, electric vehicles, 5G systems, and long-distance power transmission \u2013 is manufactured in Asia, with a large share in China or Chinese-dominated supply chains.<\/p>\n

In view of its budget deficits, the US shirks the financial burdens of global leadership. The US demands that NATO allies pay their own way for military defense, while the US is increasingly stingy in its contributions to UN system for climate and development finance.<\/p>\n

In short, while US deludes itself that it remains the world\u2019s hegemon, we are already in a multipolar world.\u00a0 This raises the question of what the new multipolarity should mean.\u00a0 There are three possibilities.<\/p>\n

The first, our current trajectory, is a continued struggle for dominance among the major powers, pitting the US against China, Russia, and others.\u00a0 The leading US foreign policy scholar, Professor John Mearsheimer, has put forward the theory of \u201coffensive realism,\u201d according to which the great powers inevitably struggle for dominance, yet the consequences can be tragic, in the form of devastating wars.\u00a0 Surely our task is to avoid such tragic outcomes, not accept them as a matter of fate.<\/p>\n

The second possibility is a precarious peace through a balance of power among the great powers, sometimes called \u201cdefensive realism.\u201d \u00a0Since the US cannot defeat China or Russia, and vice versa, the great powers should keep the peace by avoiding direct conflicts amongst themselves.\u00a0 The US should not try to push NATO into Ukraine, against Russia\u2019s strenuous objections, nor should the US arm Taiwan over China\u2019s vociferous opposition.<\/p>\n

In short, the great powers should act with prudence, avoiding each other\u2019s red lines.\u00a0 This is surely good advice, but not enough.\u00a0 Balances of power turn into imbalances, threatening the peace.\u00a0 The Concert of Europe, the balance of power among the major European powers in the 19th<\/sup> century, eventually succumbed to shifts in the power balance at the end of the 19th<\/sup> century, which led onward to World War I.<\/p>\n

The third possibility, scorned in the past 30 years by US leaders, but our greatest hope, is true peace among the major powers.\u00a0 This peace would be based on the shared recognition that there can be no global hegemon and that the common good requires active cooperation among the major powers. \u00a0There are several bases of this approach, including idealism (a world based on ethics), and institutionalism (a world based on international law and multilateral institutions).<\/p>\n

Sustained peace is possible.\u00a0 We can learn much from the long peace that prevailed in East Asia before the arrival of Western powers in the 19th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 In her book Chinese Cosmopolitanism<\/em>, philosopher Shuchen Xiang cites historian David Kang, who noted that \u201cfrom the founding of the Ming dynasty to the opium wars \u2013 that is, from 1368 to 1841 \u2013 there were only two wars between China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. These were the China\u2019s invasion of Vietnam (1407-1428) and Japan\u2019s invasion of Korea (1592-1598).\u201d East Asia\u2019s long peace was shattered by Britain\u2019s attack on China in the First Opium War, 1839-1842, and the East-West (and later Sino-Japanese) conflicts that followed.<\/p>\n

Prof. Xiang attributes the half-millennium of East Asian peace to Confucian norms of harmony that underpinned the statecraft among China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, in contrast to the struggle for hegemony that characterized Europe\u2019s statecraft. China, during this long period, was the region\u2019s uncontested hegemon, but did not use its predominant power to threaten or harm Korea, Vietnam, or Japan.<\/p>\n

Dr. Jean Dong, an expert in China\u2019s foreign policymaking, makes similar points about the differences between Chinese and European statecraft in her book Chinese Statecraft in a Changing World: Demystifying Enduring Traditions and Dynamic Constraints<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have recently proposed 10 Principles for Perpetual Peace in the 21st<\/sup> Century<\/a>, building on China\u2019s five principles for peaceful co-existence, plus five practical further steps, hence, a mixture of Confucian ethics and institutionalism.\u00a0 My idea is to harness the ethics of cooperation and the practical benefits of international law and the UN Charter.<\/p>\n

As the world assembles in September at the UN Summit of the Future<\/a>, the key message is this.\u00a0 We don\u2019t want or need a hegemon.\u00a0 We don\u2019t need a balance of power, which can too easily become an imbalance of force.\u00a0 We need a lasting peace built on ethics, common interests, and international law and institutions.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbia\u2019s Center for Sustainable Development and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as Special Adviser to three UN Secretaries-General [Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres. His books include <\/em>The End of Poverty<\/a>, Common Wealth<\/a>, The Age of Sustainable Development<\/a>, Building the New American Economy<\/a>, and most recently,<\/em> A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism<\/a>. Sachs was also an advisor to the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as to the first president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

26 Aug 2024 – The US \u201cunipolar\u201d moment was short-lived.\u00a0US geopolitical dominance ended with the rise of China, the recovery of Russia from the Soviet collapse, and the rapid development of India.\u00a0We have arrived at a new multipolar age.\u00a0The US still fights to remain world hegemon, but this is delusional and doomed to fail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":216053,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[239,244,1126,1050,759,2941,613,119,278,3145,70],"class_list":["post-272477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-brics","tag-china","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-india","tag-multipolar-world-order","tag-new-world-order","tag-peace","tag-russia","tag-unipolar-world","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272477","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=272477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":272478,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272477\/revisions\/272478"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}