When I first heard the saying “may you live in interesting times”, I thought its meaning was positive. Many years later a colleague at Malaysia’s national think tank corrected me. It was a Chinese curse, he told me, with the word “interesting” serving as a euphemism for confusing, disruptive or contradictory. It certainly seems apt for the period we are in at the moment.
Take the recent G20 summit in South Africa. Despite the fact that US President Donald Trump boycotted the event due to his belief that whites in the country were being persecuted, it appeared to go well. “The G20 should send a clear message that the world can move on with or without the US,” South Africa’s foreign minister Ronald Lamola said. “We will mark them absent and continue with the business.” I was not alone in wondering whether this was a sign of a new world order, in which the Brics and the Global South took a greater lead without US participation if necessary.
But then came what may be the very real possibility of the G7 readmitting Russia to become the G8 again, which would be a reversion to the status quo from 1997-2014. At that time, it was still possible for a respected organisation such as the Carnegie Moscow Centre to publish a paper which stated: “As for Russia’s presence in the group, it is often useful to have a contrarian who would question the others’ basic assumptions and offer a wholly different worldview. Ideally, Russia would be even more valuable if it managed to function as a global mediator – belonging to all main groups, but to none exclusively, and seeing its goal in moderating international tension and fostering global understanding.”
Such a scenario may not seem at all imminent, but sooner or later Russia must be dealt with as an actor in reasonable standing, as the West’s pushing it away has done no one any good. But if the G20 is forging a new path and the G8 reunifies there is no singular, clear direction.
Russia’s possible return to the G8 is on the cards because of Mr Trump’s 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine. Talks are ongoing, and most would surely welcome the carnage stopping. But given that a peace deal that was better for Ukraine than what is currently being discussed may have been available in March 2022, less than a month into the war, what do those who told Kyiv to fight on propose telling the families of the hundreds of thousands who died? What did they die for?
Such issues must be raised because the question of what this cessation of hostilities might actually mean is already being analysed and commentaries about what lessons should be learnt published. Their authors tend to be very confident. Mr Trump’s plan “undermines the fundamental principle that has prevented major wars in Europe since 1945: borders cannot be changed by force”, wrote Bohdan Nahaylo, chief editor of the Kyiv Post, earlier this week. “By legitimising Russia’s territorial seizures, Trump would be dismantling the rules-based international order that has underwritten American prosperity and security for generations.”
But is that true? Russia – and some others too – would point to Kosovo’s breaking away from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the late 1990s in which the assistance of Nato air strikes was crucial. Singapore’s former foreign minister George Yeo talked about this in an interview a few months ago. Noting that he regularly used to sit next to his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov at regional meetings “because Singapore is S, Russia is R, we were permanent neighbours”, he said Mr Lavrov had been very upset about what he viewed as an illegal act of aggression against a sovereign state. “I don’t think you can argue against Russia’s intervention in Ukraine on the basis of a principle. Kosovo was broken away by force,” he said. “So what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
The lesson to be drawn from this war could, instead, be that great power spheres of influence are back (if they ever truly went away). Two former US secretaries of state, Anthony Blinken and Condoleezza Rice, have said that they don’t or shouldn’t exist any more. Present circumstances may beg to differ.
In Europe and beyond, many of the old guardrails are failing or disappearing as the centre right and left can't take control of events – witness the hapless governments of Emmanuel Macron in France and Keir Starmer in the UK. Parties that have long presided over a model that has left ordinary working people behind may deserve their fury. But dangerous populists may take their place, we are warned; and if it is they who are responsible for norms like mainstream politicians not telling people to "go back where they came from" breaking, we should indeed be wary of them.
Yet two populists – Mr Trump and the New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani – recently held extremely friendly talks in the White House and appeared to be united on a laudable affordability agenda. It may seem remarkable that two men who only recently called each other a “fascist” and a “communist lunatic” could get on so well, but shouldn’t we welcome that?
The tectonic plates aren't just shifting; they're spinning all over the place. The words of Antonio Gramsci – “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born” – also seem very apt. If many are confused, that is not surprising. Analysts who claim to have complete clarity about the current global trajectory should be regarded with scepticism. The irony is that some political scientists who did correctly predict what is happening today, as the American professor John Mearsheimer did about Russia and Ukraine back in 2014, are often treated as though they are beyond the fringe.
If there is one group of countries that seems to be navigating all this turmoil quite well, it's the Gulf states, and, as I noted two weeks ago, other middle powers like (collectively) the Central Asian “five”. So maybe the lesson is that pursuing a policy of friendship with all, non-interference in other countries and a laser-like focus on trade is the smart course right now. Keeping it that simple in these "interesting times" may be the best.
