New World Order will be (after) a new Age of Empires
Ukraine is the current scenario where the transition between old and new World Order takes place, a.k.a Third World War.
In physics we are used to study what it’s called “Phase Transitions”, that often are short periods of chaotic behavior between two stable states of matter. Applied to geopolitics, a new World Order is established replacing an older one after some violent changes, mainly a big war. After the havoc, typically the New Order emerges and settles, implying new cultural references, de facto laws and powers, and new ways of life.
These days we are watching the horrific scenario where this drama is being unfolded: the war between Russia and Ukraine is far from being an adhoc , specific and isolated conflict. It could perfectly be a prelude, or even a first episode, of what we could name as the Third World War.
Who is fighting in this new war? Not so different actors than in the previous one, I guess.
Just like in the first and second, this third world war aggregates countries in two or more blocks, plus the always present “neutral countries” acting like passive spectators of the show.
In one side, we have what we call “the West”, that are the United States, European Union, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea (also Taiwan?). Basically wealthy countries based on liberal democracies and their values.
On the other block, we have the alliance between China and Russia, big countries that rely on heavy, authoritarian regimes; disputing the world hegemony to the West block.
There is also some other important countries and regions like India, the Persian Gulf countries (Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc) whose alliances swing depending on their interests.
The confrontation between the West and the China-Russian block goes beyond geostrategic interests, or the fight for economic resources. It represents the shutdown of an exceptional period of time, just after WWII, where humanity tried an experiment: running the world beyond the logic of the empires. That is why United Nations was created, to keep away the monster of the war, to cool down the desire of uncontrolled, despotic regimes, of conquer the world.
During few decades, and despite all of its natural flaws, United Nations kept some sort of respect, acting like a decisive diplomatical actor in many minor conflicts around the globe, deploying their own armed forces (blue helmets) where asked or needed, and containing the Cold War tensions. It looked like, with that order, chances that a new Hitler-like thread would arise were going to be so low.
But after that short, peculiar period of time, that matched the greatest peace and wealthy period ever known in the West (mainly), the old geopolitics is back. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened the door to an uncertain landscape, where the United States was likely the solo, uncontested world leader. Then, the beginning of the end of the United Nations dream started, together with the new century.
The United States started new war campaigns on their own, not on behalf of the UN, like after the Kuwait invasion in 1991. Just picking some of its allies and then go invade Iraq and Afghanistan. We now know how these expensive wars ended, and how the world’s scenario has evolved since that. With international institutions devaluated to almost nothing, a new era of geopolitical chess began: a new Age of Empires.
All of a sudden, many countries realized how useless those international institutions actually are. So they started making up their own agenda. Western-like liberal democracies are perceived as an extremely weak political system, being the European Union as the main example with their heavy bureaucracy, lack of leadership and internal dissents. That model, represented not only by the EU but also by the UN, where decisions were hard to take after eternal democratical discussions, lost all of its appeal.
In exchange, a new way of leaderships emerged, ironically from democratic processes, but with such different intentions. Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia… are just two main examples of the alternative to those weak, liberal western democracies. A strong, charismatic leader that manipulates national constitutions in order to gradually transform a classical democratic system into some sort of “dictatorship with elections”, autocratic regime. Those charismatic leaderships, in order to survive, are typically linked to old nationalistic speeches; evoking a past national glory that must be revived. No one can change that. People’s opinion is not something desired or even good: only the messianic vision of the charismatic leader accounts. The old empires must be restored, building a new order that goes against the values of the West, that West that opressed us for decades, even centuries. That’s the speech.
So we have Turkey’s Erdogan trying to resurrect the old Otoman Empire with huge invests in military that has been openly deployed in foreign conflicts like Syria, Lybia or Nagorno-Karabaj. We have China building the biggest army humankind have ever seen, and threatening almost all of its neighbors in the south Chinese Sea. And, of course, we have Vladimir Putin trying to rebuild a Russian Empire back from the USSR’s ashes using the brute force. That’s how he smashed the Tchetchen unrest, then invaded Georgia to rip it off Abkhasia and South Osetia in 2008, how he just blew Crimea up from Ukraine in 2014 and, finally, this flawed blitzkrieg against all of them now in 2022.
There are more examples of some other countries that, at a minor scale, are buying their strategic agendas based on the new model of using the brute force. They just learnt that United Nations of any other transnational organisms are completely useless, and the new world order is, again, as usual, a matter of military alliances. Just like everytime in human history.
In order to accomplish their expansionist’ agendas, those countries have also learnt that to be a liberal democracy is not just also useless, but even a threat. So they copycat what it seems to succeed: a long-term stable system that sticks into that agenda. And that can only mean some kind of autocratic, authoritarian regime.
Now it’s been a few generations that had born in the West that only have known peace and prosperity, that got used to live in comfortable societies while outside that island of wealth, the usual wild world continued to exist. Today’s ukrainian society, just like russian, was learning to live in such that way. Families that had access to the full amenities that the West had: shopping malls, consumer electronics, social media, summer trips to warm mediterranean beaches, etc. Today, those families are broken(hearted), half having to leave and the other half learning how to suddenly use a kalashnikov rifle. One day you are hanging out, having fun in a mall; the day after you are in the darkness of constant shelling. Just because some kind of charismatic leader, inside his bunker thousand miles away, decided that his messianic mission was to rebuild an old empire.
In this story, replace “ukrainian society” by “taiwanese society”, “armenian society”, georgian, kazaji, south korean… or any other society that is constantly under the threat of any authoritarian regime that is not controlled by its people, but instead exploits and kidnaps its own population in order to unchain their historical madness in form of a war.
Are we, westeners used to a lazy, comfortable way of life, that totally forgot what a war is like… are we ready to leave all of this behind and take a weapon, willing to fight to the end defending our values? Or should we just prevent that by surrender in advance, and let the new World Order represented by current Russia and China’s values settle and prevail?
