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The Perils and Promise of the Emerging Multipolar World
The world economy is experiencing a deep process of economic convergence, according to which regions that once lagged the West in industrialization are now making up for lost time.
Jun 06, 2024
The World Bank’s release on May 30 of its latest estimates of national output (up to the year 2022) offers an occasion to reflect on the new geopolitics. The new data underscore the shift from a U.S.-led world economy to a multipolar world economy, a reality that U.S. strategists have so far failed to recognize, accept, or admit.
The World Bank figures make clear that the economic dominance of the West is over. In 1994, the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, U.K., U.S.) constituted 45.3% of world output, compared with 18.9% of world output in the BRICS countries (Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Russia, South Africa, United Arab Emirates). The tables have turned. The BRICS now produce 35.2% of world output, while the G7 countries produce 29.3%.
As of 2022, the largest five economies in descending order are China, the U.S., India, Russia, and Japan. China’s GDP is around 25% larger than the U.S.’ (roughly 30% of the U.S. GDP per person but with 4.2 times the population). Three of the top five countries are in the BRICS, while two are in the G7. In 1994, the largest five were the U.S., Japan, China, Germany, and India, with three in the G7 and two in the BRICS.
Despite the new global economic realities, the U.S. security state still pursues a grand strategy of “primacy,” that is, the aspiration of the U.S. to be the dominant economic, financial, technological, and military power in every region of the world.
As the shares of world output change, so too does global power. The core U.S.-led alliance, which includes the U.S., Canada, U.K., European Union, Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, was 56% of world output in 1994, but now is only 39.5%. As a result, the U.S. global influence is waning. As a recent vivid example, when the U.S.-led group introduced economic sanctions on Russia in 2022, very few countries outside the core alliance joined. As a result, Russia had little trouble shifting its trade to countries outside the U.S.-led alliance.
The world economy is experiencing a deep process of economic convergence, according to which regions that once lagged the West in industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries are now making up for lost time. Economic convergence actually began in the 1950s as European imperial rule in Africa and Asia came to an end. It has proceeded in waves, starting first in East Asia, then roughly 20 years later India, and for the coming 20-40 years in Africa.
These and some other regions are growing much faster than the Western economies since they have more “headroom” to boost GDP by rapidly raising education levels, boosting workers’ skills, and installing modern infrastructure, including universal access to electrification and digital platforms. The emerging economies are often able to leapfrog the richer countries with state-of-the-art infrastructure (e.g., fast intercity rail, 5G, modern airports and seaports) while the richer countries remain stuck with aging infrastructure and expensive retrofits. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook projects that the emerging and developing economies will average growth of around 4% per year in the coming five years, while the high-income countries will average less than 2% per year.
It’s not only in skills and infrastructure that convergence is occurring. Many of the emerging economies, including China, Russia, Iran, and others, are advancing rapidly in technological innovations as well, in both civilian and military technologies.
China clearly has a large lead in the manufacturing of cutting-edge technologies needed for the global energy transition, including batteries, electric vehicles, 5G, photovoltaics, wind turbines, fourth generation nuclear power, and others. China’s rapid advances in space technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other technologies is similarly impressive. In response, the U.S. has made the absurd claim that China has an “overcapacity” in these cutting-edge technologies, while the obvious truth is that the U.S. has a significant under-capacity in many sectors. China’s capacity for innovation and low-cost production is underpinned by enormous R&D spending and its vast and growing labor force of scientists and engineers.
Despite the new global economic realities, the U.S. security state still pursues a grand strategy of “primacy,” that is, the aspiration of the U.S. to be the dominant economic, financial, technological, and military power in every region of the world. The U.S. is still trying to maintain primacy in Europe by surrounding Russia in the Black Sea region with NATO forces, yet Russia has resisted this militarily in both Georgia and Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to maintain primacy in Asia by surrounding China in the South China Sea, a folly that can lead the U.S. into a disastrous war over Taiwan. The U.S. is also losing its standing in the Middle East by resisting the united call of the Arab world for recognition of Palestine as the 194th United Nations member state.
Yet primacy is certainly not possible today, and was hubristic even 30 years ago when U.S. relative power was much greater. Today, the U.S. share of world output stands at 14.8%, compared with 18.5% for China, and the U.S. share of world population is a mere 4.1%, compared with 17.8% for China.
The trend toward broad global economic convergence means that U.S. hegemony will not be replaced by Chinese hegemony. Indeed, China’s share of world output is likely to peak at around 20% during the coming decade and thereafter to decline as China’s population declines. Other parts of the world, notably including India and Africa, are likely to show a large rise in their respective shares of global output, and with that, in their geopolitical weight as well.
We are therefore entering a post-hegemonic, multipolar world. It too is fraught with challenges. It could usher in a new “tragedy of great power politics,” in which several nuclear powers compete—in vain—for hegemony. It could lead to a breakdown of fragile global rules, such as open trade under the World Trade Organization. Or, it could lead to a world in which the great powers exercise mutual tolerance, restraint, and even cooperation, in accord with the U.N. Charter, because they recognize that only such statecraft will keep the world safe in the nuclear age.
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2023: The Year the Bubble of US Leadership Burst
If Ukraine exemplifies yet another iconic U.S. military failure, and BRICS the changing of the guard in the economic realm, the sadistic savagery in Gaza repudiates the moral right of the U.S. to lead… anything.
Dec 29, 2023
Year-ends invite retrospectives. And every year is, by definition, “unprecedented.” After all, it has never occurred before. But “unprecedented” is a cliche that drains the very word of its intended impact.
The year 2023 is not so much “unprecedented” as it is “epochal,” a “turning point,” or, as in the terminology I choose, “The Year the Bubble Burst.” That implies rapidity, for bursting happens quickly, and irreversibility, for burst bubbles don’t reassemble themselves. This bursting is especially true on the foreign front where the U.S. has been the global leader since the end of the Cold War, if not since the end of World War II.
The bubble of U.S. leadership in the world burst in 2023 because of the combined impact of three events: Ukraine, BRICS, and Gaza.
The year will be remembered as the pivot point, the turning away from the post-Cold War unipolar era, and the ushering in of the post-unipolar, post-Western-centric multipolar world.
Ukraine is lost. In a war of attrition, the advantage goes to the side with the greater population. Russia’s population is six times Ukraine’s. And a defense has an inherent 3-to-1 advantage over an offense. Russia, having captured 20% of Ukraine, is now on the defense. Ukraine doesn’t have the manpower, the artillery, the ammunition, the air power, the air defenses, the time, the money, the strategy, or the allies to repel what U.S. News & World Report says is the strongest military in the world.
Absent the U.S. getting directly involved, which is just not going to happen in a presidential election year, there is no plausible scenario in which Ukraine wins. Insiders know this. The public will have to wait until after the 2024 election to get the memo. Either way, the damage done in the loss is incalculable.
The U.S. menaced Russia for decades by relentlessly moving NATO up to Russia’s borders. Then, the U.S. helped overthrow the democratically elected but Russian-leaning government in Kiev and installed its own oligarchic, crypto-fascist, Western-leaning government. That was the 2014 Maidan coup, referred to by one U.S. intelligence asset as “the most blatant coup in history.” The mission was to dismember Russia and put its vast natural wealth in the hands of U.S. corporations.
The failure of that mission cannot be disguised or minimized. It is especially embarrassing after the very public U.S. defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it is all the more damning because Ukraine sacrificed 500,000 of its men to carry out the U.S.’ mission, yet the U.S. couldn’t even keep it supplied with ammunition. Beyond the direct damage, the collateral damage of the loss is staggering.
The never-deserved reputation of the U.S. for military prowess is devastated. NATO is weakened. The Nord Stream pipeline destruction revealed the U.S. to be the world’s greatest perpetrator of international terrorism. The loss of the pipeline has left Europe with energy costs 2.5 times what they were before the war, gravely damaging its international competitiveness. The mythic repute of U.S. weapons, before this only deployed against much lesser foes, is shattered. And, instead of being dismembered, Russia has come out of the war stronger than ever.
In addition to now possessing the world’s strongest military, Russia’s economy shook off “the greatest sanctions regime in the history of the world” and is outstripping those of the U.S. and Europe. It has pivoted east and deepened its strategic ties with China, the world’s leading commercial power and the U.S.’ leading adversary. And it has gained enormous stature in the Global South for having stood up to and defeated the world’s most inveterate bully. Ukraine is an epochal failure for the U.S. in all dimensions, the worse for having been entirely self-inflicted.
Then, Ukraine accelerated the growth of the BRICS consortium. This group, originally made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (hence, the acronym) aims to bypass the U.S.-dominated global trading system, instead building one that allows nations of the Global South to not simply be milked of their wealth by the West, but to prosper in their own right. In August, it named six new nations for membership: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.
These now-11 nations contribute a combined 37% of global GDP, versus 30% for the Western G7 bloc. They are explicitly committed to dethroning the dollar as the world’s international reserve currency, by, among other things, trading with each other in non-dollar currencies. Russia and China, for example, no longer use dollars in trade between themselves.
Of key significance is the composition of the new members. Half of them are major oil exporters, among them, importantly, Saudi Arabia, a formerly staunch U.S. ally. With Russia, they produce 44% of the world’s oil. Why is this important? The dollar’s status as international reserve currency is closely tied to oil. Until recently, oil was only sold in dollars, meaning that all of the world’s nations had to acquire dollars to be able to buy oil. So, when BRICS+ oil exporters begin accepting payment for their oil in non-dollar currencies, it is the dollar that will be damaged.
Nations will no longer need dollars to buy oil. That means they will not need to “buy” dollars by purchasing U.S. Treasury securities. That will make it almost impossible for the U.S. to fund its massive budget and trade deficits, which are financed—that’s right—by selling treasures to other nations. That day is fast approaching, as seen in Saudi Arabia announcing this year that it will begin accepting payment for oil in Chinese yuan.
The growth of BRICS, its economic clout, its explicit de-dollarization agenda, and the centrality of oil-exporting nations in its members will prove like the water shifting in the bottom of a rowboat. It will decisively reverse the primacy of the U.S. and the West in global economic affairs. The damage isn’t all landed, yet, and won’t be for many years, but the direction is clear and irreversible. There’s a new economic sheriff in town.
Most important in bursting the bubble of U.S. leadership in international affairs is its tragic, morally suicidal complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Biden administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to enable Israel to murder tens of thousands of innocent, defenseless Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children.
It has provided—and dramatically increased—economic subsidies. It has rush-shipped tens of thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition to Israel, even bypassing Congress to do so. It has provided military cover in the form of two aircraft carrier battle groups to prevent other nations from intervening to stop the slaughter. It has exercised its veto power at the U.N. Security Council to prevent a cease-fire, even for humanitarian reasons. The U.S. is all in on the massacre of tens of thousands of defenseless Palestinian civilians.
As a result of the U.S.’ help, Israel is able to bomb, with impunity, working hospitals, refugee camps, schools, churches, mosques, relief agencies, anything where civilians shelter to try to escape the apocalyptic destruction. And it is doing this, knowing that civilians are the main casualties, thus making it not just “killing” innocent, defenseless women and children, but murdering them. And this is still just the beginning of the depraved degeneracy.
The World Food Program says that as many as 750,000 civilians are now being intentionally starved. This, by a supposedly civilized nation. And, with no hospitals, no medicines, no water, and no sewerage, it is only a matter of time before epidemic diseases emerge and spread and kill hundreds of thousands. It is undisguised mass murder for the undeniable purpose of ethnic cleansing, which has always been Israel’s agenda, since even before it was founded. It is genocide, pure and simple, and all in public view of the world’s 8 billion people.
In Gaza, the U.S. returns to its roots, albeit vicariously. It, too, was founded in genocide, in its case, of the 50+ million native Americans who once populated the North American continent. It too, used vastly disproportionate force, the mechanized tools of an industrial-age civilization systematically exterminating a stone-age one. It, too, bolstered its commitment to ethnic cleansing with its self-flattering myths of racial superiority and its carefully cultivated conceits of cultural supremacy.
The difference is that then, all the world was not watching the daily depravity. And it had not formed its present-day revulsion and international prohibitions against such state-sponsored barbarism. Now it is, and has. The damage to the U.S.’ reputation is palpable, undeniable, stunning, and irreversible.
I’m not a Bible thumper in any way. But, I was raised in a Christian household and remember some of my verses. One of the most wise, in no way connected to theology, is from Mark: “No man can be defiled by anything that comes to him from without. A man can only be defiled by that which comes out of himself, from within.” Isn’t it so? The U.S. has defiled itself, humiliated itself, as no other nation could possibly do. It has destroyed goodwill that has taken centuries to acquire and that will never be recovered.
If Ukraine exemplifies yet another iconic U.S. military failure, and BRICS the changing of the guard in the economic realm, the sadistic savagery in Gaza repudiates the moral right of the U.S. to lead… anything. No nation will ever again be intimidated by its hypocritical tut-tutting about human rights or its sanctimonious finger wagging about the responsibility to protect. It is, more than anything else, the world’s leading purveyor of death and all the nations of the world can see it.
The combination of these three events signal the 2023 bursting of the bubble of U.S. global leadership. The year will be remembered as the pivot point, the turning away from the post-Cold War unipolar era, and the ushering in of the post-unipolar, post-Western-centric multipolar world. Five hundred years of Western domination of the world order are ending. There will be no going back.
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Ten Surprisingly Good Things That Happened in 2022
While some are only partial gains, they are all steps towards a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.
Dec 21, 2022
With wars raging in Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere, Roe v. Wade overturned and our resources being wasted on militarism instead of addressing the climate crisis, it can be hard to remember the hard-won progress being made. As we end a difficult year, let's pause to remind ourselves of some of the positive changes that happened in 2022 that should inspire us to do more in the year to come. While some are only partial gains, they are all steps towards a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.
1. The growth of Latin America's "Pink Tide." Continuing the wave of progressive wins in 2021, Latin America saw two new critical electoral victories: Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil. When President Biden's June Summit of the Americas excluded Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, several Latin American leaders declined to attend, while others used the opportunity to push the United States to respect the sovereignty of the countries in the region. (Stay tuned for CODEPINK's spring forum "In Search of a New U.S. Policy for a New Latin America.")
2. The U.S. labor movement caught fire. In 2022 we witnessed the brilliant organizing of Chris Smalls and the Amazon workers, Starbucks reached nearly 7,000 unionized workers and close to 300 unionized stores. Requests to the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections were up 58% in the first eight months of 2022. Labor is back and fighting the good fight.
3. Despite assaults on our elections, people fought back and gained some notable wins.
Voters delivered victories for progressives in districts across the country, including in Texas, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Hawaii, California, Pennsylvania and Vermont, and Democrats kept control of the Senate. Young people showed up at the polls in record numbers--one out of eight voters in the midterms was under the age of 30. Abortion rights won in states where it was on the ballot (California, Michigan and Vermont) and in the "red" state of Kentucky, voters rejected a proposed amendment to the Kentucky constitution that would declare there is no constitutional right to an abortion. Another plus: Every election denier running to oversee state elections lost.
4. Peace comes to Ethiopia. After a devastating two-year civil war that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced and facing starvation, the federal government of Ethiopia and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) signed a peace treaty on November 2, 2022. The surprise deal came out of peace talks convened by the African Union. So far, the fighting has ceased, and both parties vowed that they are determined to make the peace deal last.
5. Mainstream media finally did right by Julian Assange, as his international support grew.
The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel-the media outlets that published WikiLeaks' revelations 12 years ago--finally called on President Biden to free Assange. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (Assange is an Australian citizen) also finally said he has personally urged the U.S. government to end its pursuit of Assange. More enthusiastic has been his support in Latin America, with calls for his release coming from President Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Mexico's President Lopez Obrador, Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro, and Brazil's President-elect Lula da Silva.
6. Indigenous and Global South voices were finally heard at the largest climate summit, COP27.
Thanks to the relentless work of Indigenous peoples and organizers from the Global South, marginalized communities not only got into COP27 this year but their voices were finally heard and a historic loss and damage fund was established to help vulnerable countries cope with the destructive impacts of climate change. The development marks an important achievement for civil society and collective action in the Global South that has been nearly three decades in the making. Now we have to push the wealthier countries to come through with the funds, and to finally get serious about our own transition to clean energy before it is too late to avoid global catastrophe.
7. Some 200 countries (minus the U.S. and the Vatican) commit to stemming the loss of nature worldwide. Another critical environmental gathering, the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Canada, reached a watershed agreement pledging to protect nearly one-third of Earth's land and oceans as a refuge for the planet's remaining wild plants and animals by 2030-dubbed "30 by 30." This agreement is critical to stemming the massive loss of diversity--about a million species are at risk of disappearing forever. But it will take constant grassroots pressure, and significant resources from the wealthier countries, to put this 30 by 30 goal into practice.
8. The passage of the Respect for Marriage Act. The U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 but the court's June decision overturning a right to abortion at the federal level raised concerns that federal protections for same-sex marriage might be in jeopardy. The Respect for Marriage Act was passed to address this by guaranteeing federal recognition of any marriage between two individuals if the union was valid in the state where it was performed. It won't force states to issue same-sex marriage licenses should nationwide marriage equality be overturned by the Supreme Court but it will extend equality under the law to all same-sex couples, no matter which state they got married in. It also protects interracial marriages.
9. The World Cup put the spotlight on Palestine. The World Cup was a spectacular event that created a sense of global solidarity and joy, with Argentina's win lifting up all of Latin America. But the fans, especially from Muslim and Arab countries, put the spotlight on another place in the world: Palestine. Palestinian flags and chants popped up everywhere-on the field, in the bleachers, on the streets, while videos showing Israeli journalists being ostracized went viral. At least for the month of these games, the call to "Free Palestine" went global.
10. A multi-polar world is here. China's enormously ambitious Belt and Road Initiative now encompasses over 80 countries. And with the U.S. abusing its economic power by imposing extraterritorial sanctions against countries all over the globe, the push for alternatives to the dollar has exploded. Over a dozen countries have asked to join BRICS (the alliance of the powerful economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), whose countries account for 40 percent of the global population and 25 percent of the world's GDP. BRICS members are already transacting their bilateral trade in local currencies. And new or strengthened non-aligned movements have emerged in Latin America and Africa. A multi-polar world is already a reality for much of the world, and this is actually better for people everywhere-even for Americans-than one where the U.S. keeps using war, militarism and coercive financial sanctions to try to prolong its post-Cold War unipolar moment into our new century.
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