Realistically, since no world-leading country prevails presently, the contestation boils down to three would-be candidates (or 'pretenders', since that is what their actions betray): China, Russia, and the United States in alphabetical order. All three have both the clout (ample military capabilities) to inflict unacceptable damages and the resources to do so (regardless of whether this is done through democratic channels or totalitarian dictation). France, Germany, and Great Britain could be contenders, but they seem unlikely, in the foreseeable future, to drift from the US camp, even more so, challenge the United States (a necessary condition of world leadership is the readiness, willingness, and ability to challenge any other contender, should circumstances warrant). None presently have the intention to play as a world leader. More than that, Chinese, Russian, and US global actions show them actually playing the global "games of thrones." Only one leader can prevail at the top. The United States clinched that spot from the 1940s, the Soviet Union failed, over those same fifty-odd years, to break through. How far are they now?
CHINESE CHALLENGE: Examining each case, again, in alphabetical order, exposes what is at stake. China formidably challenges many western institutions, not in a zero-sum fashion, but with what one might dub "friendly fire." Rivalling the World Bank, China's Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank (AIIB) is proceeding full-speed to fund infrastructure-building by enticing even West European countries as members. Recall how the Bretton Woods institutions, of which the World Bank is one, alone played this crucial role, through the Marshall Plan, for West European countries, after World War II. Getting those countries back on track, fending off communism, and setting the prototype for post-World War II development have their post-Cold War counterparts in China: it is lifting African and Asian countries, fending off western influences, and aligning the AIIB institution with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to prepare a 21st Century analogue to the North Atlantic order through the "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) strategy. Of all these Chinese institutions, the SCO initiative interestingly subdued Russian rivalry (before Vladimir Putin made Russian world leadership a goal again), while still keeping it a partner of a non-Atlantic order.
China's OBOR strategy and asymmetrical trade partnerships bear resemblance to Germany's orientation between 1934 and 1937. Economic Minister Hjalmar Schacht's bilateral trade and tight monetary policy approach enabled Adolf Hitler to (a) build a zero-sum commercial network with East European countries, since dubbed "dependency" by Latin countries to describe their own post-World War relations with the United States; and (b) stockpile raw materials, a crucial war ingredient. If "push" ever turned into "shove," China could, like Germany in the 1930s, simply usurp those OBOR markets, control the raw material supply line, or convert them into low-cost military bases against any armed conflict. If one connected all the dots that these trade and investments currently represent, China is well beyond first-base in its world leadership quest. This is even more evident in how it is beginning to flex its military muscles, with Japan, across the South China Sea, and through space initiatives.
RUSSIA UNDER PUTIN: Russia, especially under Putin's third term as president (1999-2004, 2004-9, then from 2014), is throwing more punches than showing a coherent and pragmatic game plan. With Ukraine he exposed the soft underbelly of a European Union (EU) bereft of US or NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) support, even getting away unscathed after discriminately shooting down a Malaysian passenger airplane.
If these were not enough of an inducement to global meddling, Putin has sheltered behind, often free-riding when he can, Chinese initiatives. As SCO members, both China and Russia have been grooming institutional counterparts to the western NATO military alliance and the OECD (Organization for Economic and Cooperation Development) economic club. Russia's global interferences exemplify its global-leadership scrambles: in the South China Sea square-off between China and the US-led resistance; snatching of Pakistan from its fraying US relations now that India has turned more to the United States than to Russia in its strategic interest; and unnecessarily oiling the superficial BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). One might recall how it went through the same motions, less successfully, when it was the Soviet Union: the Warsaw Pact was the NATO counterpart, COMECON (Council of Mutual Economic Assistance) OECD's, and, though it then faced China's challenge within the communist movement, its own version was pitched far wider globally than China's as a counterpoise to the Atlantic Order of multilateral trade and democracy, developmental partnership, supplying leadership to other emerging countries, and prickling sensitive strategic zones.
Though the BRICS collectivity has been used by both China and Russia to promote their individual and collective non-western goals and show how they lead this bloc, interestingly, India has become an increasingly and independently assertive internal challenger, evident in its expanding US relations. On the other hand, given India's past leadership role within the non-aligned bloc, it is not likely to completely split from this non-western grouping to promote its obvious western interests. Not so China and Russia. They seem to playing on calculations designed to promote their country-specific non-western goals through collaborative platforms.
Capping these, Russia's interference in the Middle East raises the most current concern. It has teamed up with Iran, not just to launch missile attacks on enemy positions in Syria, even as this enflames other countries like Saudi Arabia and Israel, but by also giving President Bashar Assad full-fledged support against both "rebels" and the so-called Islamic State (which seems a far more formidable force than the US supported for Syrian "rebels"), it is poised to evict the United States from a region where the United States has become unbelievably unpopular yet equally and intractably unwilling to disassociate. As if to put a feather on its Middle East cap, Russia has adroitly managed to disengage Turkey from the west, with enormous implications for the United States, Western Europe, and the NATO alliance that binds them all. That the United Nations even supported the Russia-Turkey agreement on Syria in the final 2016 days indicates how far the US regional slip has gone, the dithering UN commitment, and the commensurate strides that Russia's policies have made.
ENTERS DONALD TRUMP: We, finally, come to the United States, a country known, under President Barrack Obama, as a world power either retreating from or reluctant to go the way global military leadership does. He himself campaigned in 2008 against such an engagement, apparently picking up ample domestic/voter support as to win so convincingly. Yet, the costs and consequences of such a retreat are only now beginning to pile up and weigh heavily against such retreat/reluctance. Though well-intentioned (and perhaps one reason why he received the Nobel Peace Prize without doing any of the ground-work prior recipients have), Obama might have unwittingly steered the United States into an irreversible corner: many who voted against Hillary R. Clinton this year may have had this apprehension in mind, thinking that Donald J. Trump's own braggadocio intentions of restoring US global power may be more worthwhile only because it was flaunted more loudly and clearly than Clinton's equally hawkish but defensive Syrian response. Anthony Zurcher's C+ rating for Obama's 8-year foreign policy record in a BBC News article may be about as fair an evaluation as might emerge: pursuing both world leadership through military strength and peace through non-violent means cannot but be oddballs without a coherent grand strategy, which eventually and inevitably preyed upon Obama's presidency. Whether this is a recipe for future conflict or not, the United States is running out of reliable friends; besides, the rest of the world has learned over the past eight years that they can get along very nicely without the United States, whether individually or in compacts.
What is at stake may also be beyond any US reach: even the most gung-ho chief executive cannot prevail over institutional sclerosis, resource-depletion, and civilian distaste for military preparedness. At this crossroads, therefore, two diametrically opposite trajectories explain the 44th US president's fate: as the right president at the right time at the right place to signal an irreversible retreat from conflict for one of the best equipped world leaders in human history; or as the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place to clip the wings of an irreversibly-oriented military-industrial complex (and the mindset that accompanies it).
The final act of the waning US superpower era may be too protracted to clearly identify a winner. Many factors determine this prediction: in a nuclear age, China, Russia, and the United States have shown they would not like to resort to that course unless it is defensive, yet non-nuclear skirmishes have the capacity to produce as much damage; China and Russia continue to resemble emperors, but without enough clothes to look regal enough, if one compares them with past world leaders; and because of the growth of an enormous subversive industry (including terrorist activities or cyber-based conflicts, for instance), that can bedevil any institutionalied growth of any leadership indicators, especially those administered by the government, without going to the battlefield. In the final analysis, the loss of confidence in democratic governance holds an answer: areas of least loss may be better off as a world leader than those of most. China has been the most removed from democratic governance of the three; Russia closely follows China in that dubious ranking, especially in the way Putin has been retrenching democratic practices; while the United States, even as it struggles more than ever before with democratic practices, boasts the least.
This could matter in global leadership calculations today. It matters because countries that "follow" generally scramble to, rally behind, or push to the pedestal any leading country showing more democratic tendencies than less: the Soviet extinction shows that; and countries far and wide have trashed communism of which China remains the key bastion, in favour of western capitalism.
China's hopes to capitalise on a withering global system by resurrecting bits and pieces from an ancient era when it exerted unrivalled leadership depend more upon force than free will, both domestically and externally. Russia's similar hopes to resurrect its past moment of global leadership claim, itself possible because of a totalitarian system, also elevated warfare over welfare goals, which is unacceptable to the Internet society. Only the United States has the democratic wherewithal for all sorts of leadership (economic, ideological, military, and so forth), but the one least needed now, the military, overshadows those others still. Obama, who sought to break that jinx, must now wait in the wings as Trump pledges to restore it.
If the 20th Century had both hot and cold wars, welcome to the 21st Century, and the rollercoaster ride it predicts.
Dr. Imtiaz A. Hussain is Professor & Head of the newly-built Department of Global Studies & Governance at Independent University, Bangladesh.
imtiaz.hussain@iub.edu.bd
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