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[cocademango]

<2017,multipolarity,EndOfHegemony>

Lately i've been thinking about how the end of the Obama years and also probably more precisely the red line moment in Syria signaled an end to American global hegemony and unipolarity that had been present since the late eighties, where the US could in a sense move their weight around to effect change around the world. This change of the guard has been quicker than I would have ever expected, probably accelerated by Trump, Covid, Biden, and Ukraine to name a few contributing situations. The end of unipolarity would have seemed to me to be a big positive a few years ago, but today either despite or because of the end of US hegemonic power things seem to be headed in the wrong direction globally.

Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr. and Obama as well as the US Security apparatus definitely handled the unipolar moment in a very poor manner and this is not just monday morning quarterbacking. Instead of actually trying to bring up a liberal global order that could finally signal an end to the 20th century and all the bloodshead of the era, they tried to find windmills to fight and new conflicts through which to justify the continued existence of the security state and the military apparatus. The attitude towards Russia is a perfect example of this as instead of integrating a then very willing country into the "Western World" as happened notably with Poland and Eastern Germany during this period and as happened with West Germany and Japan earlier in that century, they kicked the country while it was down, sending it through a decade of humiliation that led in turn to the rise of Putin. The exclusion wasn't even wholehearted as Russia was included economically up to a point with its participation in the G8 for instance yet it was always kept at at least arm's length.

If you were to look at where the lack of a single liberal power to keep global order (insofar as that ever really existed) is felt more intensely, I think the prime example would not be Palestine (which never had much western support in the 20th century to begin with) or Ukraine, but Armenia. It seems to me very likely that in the next 15 years we will see a genocide of Armenians on a large scale and armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the latter of which is fervently supported by Turkey and Israel. Azeris are not hiding their genocidal intentions, they are shouting them from the rooftops in the same way that Israelis and Russians are. These three groups deny the existence of Armenians, Palestinians and Ukrainians as separate identities by talking about indigeniety, about them being the same group with minor differences or by outright acting as if they were not there. In the world that existed before, all the incentives would be against Azeri escalation of the conflict. There were scuffles since the inception of both these countries but none at the level of what was seen in the past year.

Rightly or wrongly, I think we'll look back at the failure of the United States to establish a more solid, inclusive and permanent liberal order through multilateral institutions and to instead focus on so called nation building as one of the greatest missed opportunities of our era. Unipolarity was not meant to last, but it could have still been used to establish a lasting order through international organisms that could work together to prevent many of the conflicts we see today.