It is generally agreed today that the transatlantic alliance, as it has traditionally been known, has broken down.
It’s no doubt a glitch, although a symbolic one, but when I put the term into a Google search, the Nato website appears first, and below it the words “transatlantic alliance” are followed by “No information is available for this page”. Equally kaput is the liberal international or rules-based order, notwithstanding the fact that many questioned whether it ever existed, so egregious were its exceptions and waivers.
This therefore ought to be a time for new ideas, for thinking the unthinkable, for starting not necessarily afresh but with a clean page. I wrote last year about how three contrasting frameworks – China’s “Global Community of Shared Future”, the Association of South-East Asian Nations’ “Outlook on the Indo-Pacific”, and the Japanese-American-formulated “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” – should be considered. But now I propose that the canvas should not just be the Asia-Pacific region, but the globe. What are the regional and worldviews of the Gulf countries, of the African Union, of South America, South Asia and the Pacific states?
What do we share in common, and what can we agree on, in building the multipolar era we are entering? This is a time when documents such as the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (1990) and the Bangkok Declaration on Human Rights (1993), in which 34 Asian countries put forward their perspective, should be re-examined and taken just as seriously as documents such as the European Convention on Human Rights (1953).
This is a time for great debates. I’d love to hear Kishore Mahbubani, one of Singapore’s many outstanding public intellectuals, and a foremost advocate of the “Asian values” school of thought, in conversation with one of India’s greatest sons, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, who believes the opposite – that liberal democratic values are universal rather than primarily western.
This is a time to look into how concepts such as “borders”, “respect”, “tolerance”, “free speech” and “obligations” to family and society vary enormously in different countries. It’s a time not to be trapped by the past, but to reimagine a more just and equitable world order. It should be a time of intellectual ferment – which to me, at least, sounds tremendously exciting.
Unfortunately, it seems that many – particularly in Europe – are retreating to and doubling down on old ideas. It appears now to be conventional wisdom across much of the continent that Russia is both virtually on its knees, economically, and simultaneously, as French President Emmanuel Macron put it earlier this month, a “threat to France and Europe” whose aggression “knows no borders”. The first statement would seem to contradict the second, but that doesn’t trouble those who never cease to invoke the 1930s with dire warnings of “appeasement”.
There is no space to delve into the war in Ukraine here, but it does strike me that politicians such as Mr Macron might stop to ask themselves how they got into this situation in the first place. They have been warned, time and again, most famously by the US diplomat and historian George Kennan in 1997, that expanding Nato to Russia’s borders “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”. Mr Kennan was a Cassandra, and his prediction that such an expansion “would impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking” has been proven all too true. This is not to dismiss the death and destruction in Ukraine.
But I would suggest that Mr Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer take a much longer-term view. Russia is part of the European landmass, and the Ukraine war will end at some point. Sooner or later, it would be far more sensible to forge a security architecture that includes Russia, not excludes it. The truth is that just as the Middle East is unlikely to enjoy lasting peace without Israel feeling secure, Eastern Europeans will not sleep easy while Russia is made to feel insecure, threatened and spurned by a West that didn’t try anywhere near hard enough to turn a former foe into a friend after the ideology that divided them collapsed.
A similar hysteria about China also afflicts many in Europe and North America. Not all: I was pleased to see former UK prime minister Boris Johnson describe himself as “a Sinophile” in his recent memoir, Unleashed, and state, “China was not an enemy”. But there are plenty who continue to insist that the so-called “Thucydides trap” makes war between a rising power – China – and an existing hegemon – the US – almost inevitable. All this, while the very Harvard academic who popularised the term, Graham Allison, went to Beijing last year, met President Xi Jinping, and praised him for managing the “Thucydidean rivalry”. “They’ve risen to the conceptual challenge,” Mr Allison said. “I think both countries are already on the right track.”
If a senior American official – Adam Boehler, the US special presidential envoy for hostage affairs – could hold talks with Hamas, as was revealed early this month, that signals that nothing today is off the table. We should treat that as an opportunity, not a cause to retreat behind the ramparts of old ways that have failed. Because failure is the right word. How else would we explain to an alien visitor why, on a planet of such abundance and empty spaces, not only are millions starving but governments spend trillions on appalling weapons that most of us hope never get used?
Don’t mourn the death of an old order that served the interests of its creators who profited from their privileged place in a two-tier world. If we can get the conversations going – and what stimulating, mind-opening discussions they could be – we have a shot at formulating a fairer, more inclusive, and hopefully more peaceful world. But carpe diem: seize the day. Such chances don’t come around very often. The great global dialogue needs to start now.
