After examining the Unipolar Moment in our previous article, it’s time to shift our focus to recent developments in the areas explored by World Order and its evolving trajectory.
World, early 2010s. The Arab World has been shaken up by the Arab Spring, while the building of a new international order has invisibly begun. Russia has understood from the Georgian experience that it’s not only the United States that can resort to force to defend its national interests. China, after having put to sleep the Tibetan protests and the Xinjiang-based terrorism, is preparing to launch the Belt and Road Initiative, also known as the New Silk Road. Meanwhile, the European Union is trying to not being weakened excessively by the North African and Middle Eastern turmoils and the economic crisis. It’s the end of an era, the unipolar era, but the world doesn’t know yet.
The US entered the 2010s as the world’s only superpower, but a series of strategic mistakes made by the Obama administration paved the way for a years-long decline process. The decision to violently overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi proved counterproductive: the US was not able to replace him and to put an end to the civil war. Eyeing Syria proved equally self-damaging: Russia intervened militarily in 2015 to prevent Bashar Assad from following Gaddafi’s steps. Last but not least, Obama’s mismanagement of the Ukraine crisis, which witnessed Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of Russian-sponsored separatism in Donbas, laid the foundations for today’s Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The Trump administration lessened the MENA focus in favour of greater recalibration towards the Asia-Pacific, but, in doing so, it lost Afghanistan to the Talibans, it lost Iraq to Iran, it made Libya a no-go zone inhabited by terrorists, mercenaries, warlords, and spies from all over the world. The Biden administration followed Trump’s footsteps on every theater, despite their apparent political distance, hardening the economic war on China, re-vitalizing NATO, and fighting Russia indirectly through Ukraine. In short, what started as the second decade of the much-dreamed-of new American century, ended with the rise of an increasingly multipolar international order.
Over the course of the same period, China kept ascending from an important but regional player to an aspiring superpower. Its rise, no matter how will end, will be studied by posterity as one of the defining narratives of the 21st century. Learning from, and taking advantage of, the US’ strategic mistakes across the MENA region, including the excessive focus on the War on Terror, China didn’t spend a penny in risky military adventures, preferring to invest in infrastructure, army modernisation, domestic development, technological advancement, and power-building abroad.
In 2013, with the launch of the New Silk Road, China showed the world its ambition to become (again) the Middle Kingdom by reshaping global trade and extending its influence across the continents. Still a work in progress, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has enabled China to project soft power through infrastructure development, aid, loans, heterodox gifts – such as stadiums – and financial investment, while also securing vital resources, like the rare earth metals, and strategic footholds, from Djibouti to Sri Lanka.
China’ level-up from a regional player to a want-to-be superpower has been accompanied and symbolized by increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea, and growing influence within international organizations, with the result that the US ceased to see China as a mere competitor and started to treat it as a systemic rival, that is, a hegemonic challenger. The Sino-American economic war, initiated during the Trump era and continued by Biden, is the greatest emblema of the US-China worsening relations and, as of 2024, shows no sign of slowing down.
Russia’s trajectory from 2011 to 2024 has been mainly characterized by an ever-growing resort to force to pursue foreign policy goals, with force defined as both military and hybrid. The 2014’s hybrid intervention in the Ukraine crisis marked a turning point in Russia-West relations and it can be defined as the geopolitical 9/11 of our time. Since then, Russia-West relations have deteriorated significantly, with the former being widely sanctioned by the latter, and with the two at (hybrid) war on a number of theaters, notably the Sahel, North Africa, the Balkans.
In 2022, Russia attempted to solve what it perceived as the Ukraine problem, that is Ukraine’s path to EU and NATO, by invading the country and leading to a large-scale with international consequences, which further polarized the international system and galvanized the transition from unipolarity to multipolarity.
Throughout the 2011-24 period, the EU attempted to become a geopolitical bloc of its own, but the US-Russia rivalry and the US-China competition, combined with other challenges, such as the eurozone crisis and the persisting internal division, caused this ambition to fail inexorably.
Despite these challenges, the EU remains a key player and a trend-setter in global governance, particularly in areas such as climate change, trade, and human rights. The EU-written Green Deal and the EU-inspired Paris agreements exemplify the EU influence and soft power when it comes to multilateral cooperation, environmental protection and climate action.
As of today, internal divisions, particularly over migration policy and relations with Russia, and external pressures, especially from the US, have strongly limited and keep limiting the EU’s ability to act as a unified actor on the global stage.
In conclusion, the 2011-24 period has seen the end of the Unipolar Moment, which collided against the multipolar dreams of a rising number of regional players. The EU and the US attempts to simultaneously face Russia and China, and to a lesser extent Iran, eventually encouraged the three powers to act more and more as an anti-hegemonic coalition. The birth of a new brave world, where there’s no place for global policemen and Westerners aren’t untouchable anymore, as the Houthi’s war on Western vessels in the Red Sea has shown.
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