P Kharel

New Year eve gets celebrated in countries where the Gregorian calendar is recognised as the state approved annual diary of days and dates. The year-end eve this Friday is predictably destined to be marked in a variety of ways. On the international plane, however, expect the year 2022 to be to be charged with dubious rivalries between the traditionally dominant powers and the new emerging big powers set to make their presence significantly more actively visible that the world witnessed as of year just rung out.

International analysts termed the Sino-American ties in 2021 as having recorded a new low. China’s successful testing of hypersonic anti-missile vehicle in October gave the traditionally dominant powers a massive jolt. Russia, too, has conducted its own tests while North Korea prepares briskly for similar success.
Frequent display of putting principle in the backroom and practising diametrically the opposite for far too long has exposed the lack of the claimed commitment. Barely two years in office as the United States president in 2018, Donald Trump found Saudi Arabia’s import order worth 110 billion too irresistible not to go soft on the oil-rich Islamic state’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is accused of ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi.

Faltering posture
Although Trump humoured and obliged the de facto absolute ruler of the enormous oil-rich Islamic Arab state in West Asia, his successor Joe Biden huffed and puffed but did not summon himself to personally phone Salman who wants to impress rivals at home about his reach and access to the superpower executive head of state. Biden said: “There’s a lot Middle Eastern folks who want to talk to me. I’m not sure I’m going to talk to them.”

A chronic question today is whether the White House is losing its touch, rather rapport with many of its allies desperately searching for ways of pushing China to the corner and preventing an erosion in their global influence. Latest reports indicate that China has just outstripped the US to become the world’s richest economy. President Richard Nixon sent Henry Kissinger as special envoy on a secret trip to Mao Zedong’s China half a century ago, followed by a presidential visit the very next year. That was when Beijing was no grave threat to the West’s strategic interests. Conditions are drastically different now.

In desperation, Washington has begun reinterpreting its One-China policy by playing the Taiwan card knowing very well that Beijing would go to any length to ensure that the island territory did not deviate and declare independence. China’s successful testing of hypersonic anti-missile vehicle, in October, together with highlights of Russia having already been successful on this score and North Korea working on similar project, prods the world to assess the situation in all seriousness.

Washington’s sabre-rattling and brinkmanship show how desperate the West is to check Beijing’s mounting success stories. The decline of the West has steadily begun. By the 2030s, the picture would be sharply clear. During a virtual summit in November, China’s President Xi Jinping politely but firmly told his American counterpart that encouraging Taiwan to independence would be “playing with fire”.
China has emerged as a leading participant in multilateral development organisations. According to the Centre for Global Development, the communist giant’s influence in as many as 70 global institutions has soared by leaps and downs over the past two decades. This has meant its increased multilateral engagement — something received as a grave development for the mecca of core capitalist community in strategic competition with China that celebrates a century of the founding of its Communist Party this year.

Reacting to China’s ambition of becoming the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country, Biden has vowed that this is “not going to happen on my watch”. The rest of the world watches closely and makes an assessment as to which way and at what pace the power equation shifts. Russo-American-Chinese ties will result in game changing developments.

Putting a brave face even as declining influence and power stares at the West, the lack of will to first exercise self-scrutiny reflects an arrogance developed over a long innings of world domination. The West’s policies no longer serve as the mega advertisements it used to be until the start of the new millennium. China’s official publication, The Global Times recently pointed out that the 0.1 per cent richest Americans possesses fortune equivalent to that of the bottom 90 per cent of the 333 million people.

A series of events in the recent times underscored that the traditional dominance theory of power no longer works in many cases. The Biden administration is disconcerted by North Korea not responding to its efforts at reestablishing direct contacts with Kim Jong-un. With China’s quiet backing, Russia came forward in support of Bashar al-Assad, and thus a countdown by some major powers to bringing about regime change in Syria was held back.

Russian voters furiously rejected Mikhail Gorbachev, the master of glasnost and perestroika that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union, when he obtained a pathetic 0.5 percentage of the votes cast in the first presidential election after the 1991 systemic changes in what was once the world’s first communist state.

Sample test
That Turkey, a NATO member, declared ambassadors from ten Western countries “persona non-grata” at one go in October just goes to demonstrate how changing alliances signal the emerging of new critical forces. The ambassadors were from Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States. Seven of the countries are NATO members. Ankara’s action was in answer to the foreign envoys’ joint statement pressing for the immediate release from prison a campaigner who President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government alleges was involved in sedition.

“Repression is everyone’s business,” proclaimed The Economist in November. The British weekly magazine, which had misleadingly claimed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons of mass destruction, refrains from exhorting its government and other close allies to at least apply their policies universally and not selectively so as not to lose international credibility.
Consistency contributes to credibility, without whose strength hypocrisy reigns supreme. Clear the way, for a new order that is slowly but surely and visibly on its way of making its presence felt loud and clear — for better or worse.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)