War re Ukraine: Thread

[grarpamp]

What Follows US Hegemony

Authored by Vijay Prashad via thetricontiental.org,

On 24 February 2023, the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a
twelve-point plan entitled ‘China’s Position on the Political
Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’.

This ‘peace plan’, as it has been called, is anchored in the concept
of sovereignty, building upon the well-established principles of the
United Nations Charter (1945) and the Ten Principles from the Bandung
Conference of African and Asian states held in 1955. The plan was
released two days after China’s senior diplomat Wang Yi visited
Moscow, where he met with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Russia’s interest in the plan was confirmed by Kremlin spokesperson
Dmitry Peskov shortly after the visit: ‘Any attempt to produce a plan
that would put the [Ukraine] conflict on a peace track deserves
attention. We are considering the plan of our Chinese friends with
great attention’.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky welcomed the plan hours after
it was made public, saying that he would like to meet China’s
President Xi Jinping as soon as possible to discuss a potential peace
process. France’s President Emmanuel Macron echoed this sentiment,
saying that he would visit Beijing in early April. There are many
interesting aspects of this plan, notably a call to end all
hostilities near nuclear power plants and a pledge by China to help
fund the reconstruction of Ukraine. But perhaps the most interesting
feature is that a peace plan did not come from any country in the
West, but from Beijing.

When I read ‘China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the
Ukraine Crisis’, I was reminded of ‘On the Pulse of Morning’, a poem
published by Maya Angelou in 1993, the rubble of the Soviet Union
before us, the terrible bombardment of Iraq by the United States still
producing aftershocks, the tremors felt in Afghanistan and Bosnia. The
title of this newsletter, ‘Birth Again the Dream of Global Peace and
Mutual Respect’, sits at the heart of the poem. Angelou wrote
alongside the rocks and the trees, those who outlive humans and watch
us destroy the world. Two sections of the poem bear repeating:

    Each of you, a bordered country,
    Delicate and strangely made proud,
    Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
    Your armed struggles for profit
    Have left collars of waste upon
    My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
    Yet today I call you to my riverside,
    If you will study war no more. Come,
    Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs
    The Creator gave to me when I and the
    Tree and the rock were one.
    Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
    Brow and when you yet knew you still
    Knew nothing.
    The River sang and sings on.

    …

    History, despite its wrenching pain
    Cannot be unlived, but if faced
    With courage, need not be lived again.

History cannot be forgotten, but it need not be repeated. That is the
message of Angelou’s poem and the message of the study we released
last week, Eight Contradictions of the Imperialist ‘Rules-Based
Order’.

In October 2022, Cuba’s Centre for International Policy Research
(CIPI) held its 7th Conference on Strategic Studies, which studied the
shifts taking place in international relations, with an emphasis on
the declining power of the Western states and the emergence of a new
confidence in the developing world. There is no doubt that the United
States and its allies continue to exercise immense power over the
world through military force and control over financial systems. But
with the economic rise of several developing countries, with China at
their head, a qualitative change can be felt on the world stage. An
example of this trend is the ongoing dispute amongst the G20
countries, many of which have refused to line up against Moscow
despite pressure by the United States and its European allies to
firmly condemn Russia for the war in Ukraine. This change in the
geopolitical atmosphere requires precise analysis based on the facts.

To that end, our latest dossier, Sovereignty, Dignity, and Regionalism
in the New International Order (March 2023), produced in collaboration
with CIPI, brings together some of the thinking about the emergence of
a new global dispensation that will follow the period of US hegemony.

The text opens with a foreword by CIPI’s director, José R. Cabañas
Rodríguez, who makes the point that the world is already at war,
namely a war imposed on much of the world (including Cuba) by the
United States and its allies through blockades and economic policies
such as sanctions that strangle the possibilities for development. As
Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said, coups these
days ‘do not need tanks. They achieve the same result with banks’.

The US is attempting to maintain its position of ‘single master’
through an aggressive military and diplomatic push both in Ukraine and
Taiwan, unconcerned about the great destabilisation this has inflicted
upon the world. This approach was reflected in US Defence Secretary
Lloyd Austin’s admission that ‘We want to see Russia weakened’ and in
US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul’s statement
that ‘Ukraine today – it’s going to be Taiwan tomorrow’. It is a
concern about this destabilisation and the declining fortunes of the
West that has led most of the countries in the world to refuse to join
efforts to isolate Russia.

As some of the larger developing countries, such as China, Brazil,
India, Mexico, Indonesia, and South Africa, pivot away from reliance
upon the United States and its Western allies, they have begun to
discuss a new architecture for a new world order. What is quite clear
is that most of these countries – despite great differences in the
political traditions of their respective governments – now recognise
that the United States ‘rules-based international order’ is no longer
able to exercise the authority it once had. The actual movement of
history shows that the world order is moving from one anchored by US
hegemony to one that is far more regional in character. US
policymakers, as part of their fearmongering, suggest that China wants
to take over the world, along the grain of the ‘Thucydides Trap’
argument that when a new aspirant to hegemony appears on the scene, it
tends to result in war between the emerging power and existing great
power. However, this argument is not based on facts.

Rather than seek to generate additional poles of power – in the mould
of the United States – and build a ‘multipolar’ world, developing
countries are calling for a world order rooted in the UN Charter as
well as strong regional trade and development systems. ‘This new
internationalism can only be created – and a period of global
Balkanisation avoided’, we write in our latest dossier, ‘by building
upon a foundation of mutual respect and strength of regional trade
systems, security organisations, and political formations’. Indicators
of this new attitude are present in the discussions taking place in
the Global South about the war in Ukraine and are reflected in the
Chinese plan for peace.

Our dossier analyses at some length this moment of fragility for US
power and its ‘rules-based international order’. We trace the revival
of multilateralism and regionalism, which are key concepts of the
emerging world order. The growth of regionalism is reflected in the
creation of a host of vital regional bodies, from the Community of
Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) to the Shanghai
Cooperation Organisation (SCO), alongside increasing regional trade
(with the BRICS bloc being a kind of ‘regionalism plus’ for our
period). Meanwhile, the emphasis on returning to international
institutions for global decision-making, as evidenced by the formation
of the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter, for example,
illustrates the reinvigorated desire for multilateralism.

The United States remains a powerful country, but it has not come to
terms with the immense changes taking place in the world order. It
must temper its belief in its ‘manifest destiny’ and recognise that it
is nothing more than another country amongst the 193 members states of
the United Nations. The great powers – including the United States –
will either find ways to accommodate and cooperate for the common
good, or they will all collapse together.

At the start of the pandemic, the head of the World Health
Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, urged the countries of
the world to be more collaborative and less confrontational, saying
that ‘this is the time for solidarity, not stigma’ and repeating, in
the years since, that nations must ‘work together across ideological
divides to find common solutions to common problems’.

These wise words must be heeded.