‘The United States Is Abdicating’

I'm Lydia Pullgrain, a columnist for New York Times' opinion. The global order that's been in place since World War II is falling apart and no one knows exactly what will replace it. The United States has been stepping away from its role as a leader while China has emerged in many ways as a peer power. Not content to wait at the White House President Trump chopper to joint base Andrews this afternoon to greet Chinese President Xi Jinping. It's the first time a U.S. president has made that gesture for a foreign head of state since 1962. As part of opinion's new world disorder series, I wanted to have a conversation about what all this means for the rest of the world, especially middle powers, countries like Canada, South Africa, and Brazil. Joining me today are Rachman Idrisah, a political scientist and historian based at Liden University in the Netherlands, who focuses on the politics of democracy and state building, and Kaiser Guo, based in Beijing, and host of the Seneca podcast on Current Affairs in China. Good afternoon and evening to both of you respectively. Good morning to you Lydia, good morning to you Lydia. So before we get into anything else, I'm curious what you guys actually make of this thesis, the end of American hegemony. Is it in fact just a more kind of inert anxiety from the west about the way that the world is changing? Before we even speak of the decline in fall of the American hegemony, we probably need to understand what it was in the first place. A hegemony is like the conductor in our orchestra. So he's the figure that is irreplaceable. So it's really this kind of top of the stage. And everyone else is just a dispensable player. And then all of a sudden we have this other entity starting to play its own music, China. And you could not prevent it from doing so. So from that moment you're no longer really a hegemony, you're just a pretender and power. And a pretender and power tries to check rivals. It's no longer the conductor that conducts a whole orchestra, it has a rival. I just want to jump in and ask about this question of China's role in breaking this hegemonic power that the United States had. Because I think that we tend to think of this as like it was a plan, it was something that China wanted all along. That may be, it may not be, they may have stumbled into becoming a peer power to the United States. I'm curious, guys, do you think China does seek to lead a new global order and if they do, what would that order look like, do you think? Maybe it would be a little helpful if I talked about how China sees this whole question of American decline. Because I think there's a tendency in a lot of the report, it just sees on a couple of phrases that Xi Jinping has uttered from time to time, or cherry pick quotes from party publications to suggest that China's all in on this idea that America's day and the sun is at an end. I think for the Chinese strategic class, if I may be so bold as to generalize from all of the people that I've talked to, their belief is very conditional in this idea of an American decline. It's not as hubristic, I think, as it's often been portrayed. There is, I think, a lot of caution and caviating. First of all, it's always talked about in terms of a relative decline, not an absolute one. But they also recognize that much of it's just had to do with the single person of Donald Trump, and more importantly, they recognize there are still a lot of these sort of pillars of American hegemonic strength that endure that could spring back. It sees a lot of things, the whole sort of innovation ecosystem in the United States. Proponderant military might still. It sees, you know, it's excellent university, still as a source of strength, it's ability to attract talent from around the world. I am not here trying to sort of defend this, but I think that you're talking about this great question that gets asked again and again, what is it that China wants? Does it really want to displace the United States as a single global hegemon? I think that the answer is that China feels itself neither to be ready to do that, doesn't have the capacity to do that nor does it really want to. It still believes that there is something to be had from the preservation of certain aspects of the present order. So yeah, I think it's a much more cautious approach. Yeah, for sure. You know, it's interesting because I think that when we talk about American decline and China's rise, there is a desire to kind of impute authorship, right, that, you know, I think that there was a lot of misapprehension and frankly, hubris, you know, America has this tendency to think of itself as the prime and in many ways only driver of global events, you know, I think back to things like, you know, when the communist managed to take power in China, the talk in the State Department was about the loss of China as if China was something for America to win or lose as opposed to being a driver in its own right. You know, all of these other countries are watching as these huge, you know, powerful countries are building out, are reacting, are figuring out how they're going to exist in a world that is, you know, dominated in many ways by one power that is, you know, clearly changing slash declining and another that may or may not have ideas about what the shape of the world should be, but is clearly, you know, having a huge amount of influence. And I'm curious, like, how are other countries responding to these sort of competing models of what the future might look like? Rahman, do you want to start with that? Speaking from an African perspective, I guess, this is kind of bringing me back to the Putin moment. What was important in it was not the invasion of Ukraine itself, but the way in which other countries responded when this American hegemonic system tried to rally the world against Putin, then just found that, okay, many, many other countries were saying, though, yeah, they were very lukewarm or even kind of reluctant, reticent, et cetera, and China, even kind of in the end, aided Putin. And the reaction of the African countries was interesting in that regard, because they were the kind of weak link, the soft underbelly of the world that was used to be kind of ordered about, and they didn't kind of fall in line. And this is when you have this talk of global south emerging from the west. It is not starting the south. It is not the people in the south that started to call themselves a global south. It's people in the west because they realize, oh, there is some kind of weird resistance or kind of vague power emerging in that direction. And this is something also that set the hegemonic in crisis. But I think this emergence of the global south that looks so abrupt from the western point of view also was a very kind of drawn out process in which China, of course, played a very big role in the case of Africa, because what it did was to kind of diversify the options of African countries, which until then had been in this kind of tetatet with western countries, and where the kind of terms of the tetatet were set by the western countries. And this had a kind of hypocritical aspect to it, because in many respects when some vital interests of the west are in part play, these normative conditions tend to disappear. We see it in the issue of migration, for instance, where western European countries in particular are very much ready to work with authoritarian regimes in North Africa, even with Omar Al-Bashir, who was kind of genocide perpetrator, or you know, be ready to work with him. So it was very problematic, and the existence and activity of China, all of a sudden kind of creative disdiversification. And I think from the perspective of Africa, this has been going on for a while. It also explains why in many countries in Africa were sympathetic to Russia, because it was also seen as this kind of entity that was being bullied by the west. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there is this kind of, you know, the very large bill for years of hypocrisy, you know, good for the, but not for me. I grew up mostly in East and West Africa, you know, very much among aid workers and people who were doing development work for western governments. You know, my father was an American who worked in global development in agriculture, and also was a correspondent in West Africa and South Africa and in India. You know, I really saw how, you know, things like structural adjustment, you know, these economic models that were imposed by, you know, American and European dominated institutions, the kind of cynicism that they generated among These these countries and you know what we now call what we now call the global South and you know Kaisar, I'm curious because I think that there is you know clearly There has emerged alternatives. So yeah, I'd like just just to hear about that that from your perspective in Beijing Yeah, of like how this unfolded Yeah, I think that's perhaps the most important thing that China's story of development did is it opened up the menu They'd opened up an alternative and you know you the a hegemon cannot abide There being an alternative to it when it insists so stubbornly on this Washington consensus that there needs to be only you know one path to development China comes along and it achieves it and it does so in a way that doesn't wear a Western face when A word like affordability becomes the most important word in electoral politics that to me suggests that Performance legitimacy is bearing a little more weight now and that process legitimacy bearing a little less in my native US That that you know advantage goes to China a lot of that is sort of built on the argument that he look why we're we not able to build even a hundred miles of high-speed rail In China, you know, they rolled out 48,000 kilometers of it since 2008. How is that possible? Yeah, so I think Just just the the very existence of an alternative model is sort of inherently threatening This even a kind of winning model. Yeah, you're very much correct. I mean, I was kind of noticing this Last few months the existence on YouTube of this trend of China maxing You have all do this kind of influences producing these videos about yes, the glorious achievements of the Chinese This English YouTuber who is explaining that China is a much better country than the UK. I know at first glance This may look like an airport This is better than than the UK's best airport And this is this is just a it's a metro station Yeah, I call that genre of video infrastructure porn and I think a lot of young Americans are marinating in it And there's questions about how much of an active hand Chinese, you know propaganda organs have in orchestrating it But I think that a lot of it is certainly enough of it is organic to make it something that's very worrisome to two American Leaders, yeah, I mean, it's it's funny. I think Japan used to play that role that you know you'd go to You know, the people would go to visit Japan and ride the shinkansen Trains and just be like, why can't we have this in in America? It's interesting though because I think that there's also this idea that Democracy and and you referred to a Kaiser is kind of process, I guess That this this valorization of one particular way of doing things And it had a kind of inherent good You know over and above the results that it delivers and you know Recently there was it was the UN General Assembly week here in in New York and You know mayor Zora Mamdani of New York was posted a bunch of mayors from different countries and At one of these panels he talked about, you know, we talk about democracy as if it's a good and enough itself rather than a Amiens to delivering You know and delivering with equity and with participation and with fairness To the greatest number of of people and and and you know, we're seeing Trends towards autocracy, you know in places like India obviously in Turkey These are very very big important countries that you know for a long time had traditions of Democratic rule that are are sort of looking at the world and saying you know, actually if we really want to get things done Maybe we we just need to to put up with a certain level of Of Autocracy, yes, but it doesn't seem very convincing in terms of actually delivering if we look at what is happening in India I am not sure that it is delivering up to the expectations of what Inbitious people in India would have wanted to see and and of course Turkey is kind of married in crisis To me, this is this is kind of old debate almost like it's it's something that keeps keeps coming back We have that in in Africa where we started with some form of democracy at least some kind of party rule Didn't work out very well. Then we moved to military dictatorships Then we with the military dictatorship. We had an economic failure plus a political oppression So it became worse there then we came back to democracy and now people are complaining that democracy is not working very well I think it's not just that the criticism of democracy that we see it is not that just that it is not really delivering But it is also actually fostering bad governance corruption because you have all these kind of parties politicians Political classes that are completely corrupt and how do we deal with that? So there's a temptation to go back to what people see as a clean Honest military rule But example from the region where I'm coming from the Sahel. It doesn't really support that That hope as well So we are in a kind of I would say in a kind of cacophonous moment Nowadays in terms of kind of norms of politics Yeah, that certainly seems to be the case. I mean I I tend not to think of of this simply in terms of regime type As the key to whether development is successful clearly. It's not we've had failures that were all sorts of different regime types What puzzles me about the United States is its insistence that there is only one way that you have to privilege Civil and political rights above economic rights, and that's the only way that it can be done that Economic development will necessarily flow from the safeguarding of civil and political and property rights I think that We should maybe expand our thinking and embrace it a kind of pluralism when it comes to how different nations of the world prioritize these values that it's a valid thing And I think probably one that much of the so-called global south would understand implicitly because it's based on kind of that mazzlers hierarchy of needs that You need to take care of food clothing and shelter first. I don't think it's a matter of regime type I think that that much of it has to do simply with Capacity building with state capacity with with however you arrive however these people are placed into office but putting a a developed me mentally minded more Technologically or technocratically sophisticated class of of politician into office And particularly looking at middle powers it seems that in in some ways kind of the the the opposite is happening We're seeing this you know rise of populism and it seems that the faith in Democratic technocracy is has has really plummeted And that that in some places you're not even seeing a choice between authoritarian Right or authoritarian left uh pop you know a technocracy It's really it's really much more a politics of of of the you know of the gut of blood and soil and and resentment and resentment exactly that feel quite removed I mean in in this cacophonous moment rachman that you talked about um, you know Where you know kind of where are we seeing the these these energies bubble up and and and play out in either hopeful or Or destructive ways. I must say It's a bit distressing because as of now I have the the impression that this conservative trend is much more powerful than the than the than the progressive or liberal trend and you you can you can just assess it by the number of of you know world leaders who belong to it Trump put in a modi Erdogan in turkey Mahindlöpen seems to be On the verge of co-entering the elise palace and in Africa you have of of of course this kind of conservative wave that glories in in the rejection of human rights LGBTQ please rights etc so it's um It's a global phenomenon and what I'm not seeing as of now is the pushback from the other count Interestingly, it's china that seems to have raised the old flag of of globalism And has as tried to rally people around that. I think it's it's notable that after mark carney's Famous Davos speech about the rupture prime minister mark carney didn't mention president Donald Trump by name in that speech But his message was clear that nations should band together as the us weaponizes its power and unravels the World order. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture not a transition Over the past two decades a series of crises in finance health energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration But more recently Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons terraces leverage financial infrastructure as coercion supply chains as both vulnerabilities to be exploited? - The reaction in China was, I think, a pretty clever one. Normally, the Chinese leadership likes to sell economic dynamism. The pitch is always about China's fast growth and all these things. Of course, that's not as much of an option as it was in years past, in the go-go years of yesterday. But nowadays, the sales pitch is all about stability at the China development forum, at the World Economic Forum's Summer Davos. These were the messages from the premiere about China as sort of this bastion of wealth of sanity and stability in this chaotic and tumultuous world, in this world where we are seeing this massive upsurge of right populism. And yeah, as Rahman rightly points out, that's not geographically constrained. It's happening in many corners of the world, notably not in China. There are people, of course, who look at Xi Jinping's leadership as a species of ethnonationalist right wing populism. But I don't think that it really fits the bill all the way down the line. - Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Mark Carney's speech, because obviously, it does feel as though we are entering this era, or maybe we're already quite deep in it, of much greater competition, and a sense that there are alliances to be made, there are new networks that are gonna be built, sometimes they'll be regional, sometimes they'll be based on shared history and culture, like Canada and the European Union. But it does seem like this is a very ripe moment of fostering these kinds of different alliances. And I think countries are coming together under different banners than the one that was hoisted by the United States in the aftermath of World War II. Rahman, I'm curious, as you look around the world, where do you see these perhaps unlikely or entirely predictable groupings coming up? - Well, I see here, especially we've got to Canada and Europe, to me, this is just the reaction of Jelte de Vassels, they really wanted the American, the Germanic system to continue because they drew lots of benefits from it, like the security guarantees of the Europeans, trade, in the case of Canada. But Trump has decided that the US is no longer the conductor. The US is now a player in orchestra, a big bully player. So he came to power with this slogan, "Make America great again." But what he's doing basically is making America a little at last because the idea is now we are going to make America a nation state like others. It's no longer this kind of top power, this head among who is hovering around the world. Since it has this very, very large amount of power, it can pretty much do what it wants, which of course the adventure in Iran is revealing that not to be the case, but this is the route that he has taken. And so this has traumatized the Western country, it's like Canada and Western Europe. And so now they're trying to find a solution and alternative to this situation. Of course, the situation can change once Trump is gone, but I think he has infected so much damages to the system that they see it as a wise path to try to form a block that would talk on a kind of equal footing, or something that looks like an equal footing both to China and to the US, because it is not just the US that they are worried about, it is also China, right? They have to engage these two. - Yeah, Kaiser, I'm curious. How does this look from your vantage point? - Well, when I think about the first rupture moment, the late Joe Nye in 2017, he came up with this idea and it was really kind of a challenge to this idea of the Thucydides trap, which has gained a lot of currency. He said the more dangerous trap is the Kindleburger trap, wherein an incumbent power either refuses to or is unable to provide those public goods any longer. And the rising power in the world is unable to step in and do that in its place. So we are in such a trap right now. I think where the United States has abdicated its traditional role of provision of public goods, and it's unclear that China is willing to do all of that. In some areas it clearly is in development, in infrastructure lending, in provision of manufactured goods, in absorbing all the demand for commodities. There are a lot of things in which China has stepped up, but it clearly show no appetite for much of the rest of it. Look at its relative absence of a role in the Iran crisis. It's not going to step in. And the United States doesn't want it to. The United States seems hell bent on preventing China from filling that role. So we're then stuck with this question of, can you unbundle all of these things? Can all of these different public goods come from a disparate set of actors? Can Brussels provide sort of regulatory public goods while China does what it's good at doing the manufactured goods? The United States is abdicating it at a very, very difficult time where we face unprecedented challenges from the advent of AI and all these other things. So I think that the waters are going to be choppy for a while. I'm curious, Rahman. I mean, are there possibilities of something different and newer and perhaps more equitable coming out of this time of great rupture? I think there is the possibility of an aspiration. It has to be cultivated because this situation of the Japanese is actually quite rare in history. Actually, the US situation of the end of the Cold War to the age of Trump is the one example that I can really think as a hegemony that we have known since the Roman Empire, basically. What has tended to exist in the past is those competing big powers that created endless wars. And in fact, the problem that we're facing here is that we do not want to go back to that situation. When you remove the kind of hegemonic system, what you might end up having is big powers with ambitions, even if they don't fight each other, they can create wars elsewhere. So I think the problem that this sliding into this new cacophonous war might present us with is this dire return of the international war and conflicts. So to me, the direction to go is how to save international law from the ambitions of the big powers, because big powers don't like international law. The Soviet Union and the United States are the two countries that refused to adhere to the international justice system when it was being born in the late 1940s. They didn't want to be tied to that. And whichever country is reluctant to accept or adhere to international law, you may be sure it has bad intentions. And it's usually those big powers. So in our case, it's China and the US, but as-- and I agree with Kaiser here, is proving to be even the worst case in this situation. They are practically attacking the international justice system, trying to destroy it and undermining it. I think there is an aspiration of reviving international law that kind of exists in very small groups in many countries. The problem is that this has not coalesced into a movement. And also, this is being a bit checked and contained by the fact that what really kind of sustains the growth of international law is a reality of domestic law. International law, you don't have an army. There's no force behind it. The force that is behind it is a commitment of states. So if you have states that have good domestic laws, then you can have this system of international law emerging. And so I think we should be worried by all these processes of democratic backsliding and things like that, because they are, by definition, anti-law, they kind of destroy domestic law and destroy the commitment of states to international law. So I think going forward, I don't know what will happen. I cannot predict, but if we really want to avoid going back to the horrors of the past, we have to fight for international law. And it has to start within our own respective countries. - Kaiser. - If we look at what China says, at least sensibly, probably it wants to lean into the extant UN system. It's been a very sort of vocal proponent of existing multilateral institutions. And it's quite clear. I mean, they've made clear that China's preferred outcome from all of this when the dust settles is a genuinely multipolar order with polls, including, of course, China and the United States, the EU, Brazil, India, certainly, Russia. And I think we need to look what else is on offer right now? The United States' vision at the Busan conference afterward, Donald Trump called it G2. He re-invoked this old dead word. China is at least on record as being adamantly opposed to that. I don't know whether China, in fact, I mean, it's hard of hearts, really dislikes the idea as much as it says it does. I think that for the middle powers, this is the worst possible outcome. They want to hedge. They want to be able to play the powers off against one another. They want a voice in how decisions are made. They certainly don't want the two powers in condominium, making decisions over their heads. So I think that's probably a terrible outcome and one in which China's vision of a more genuinely multipolar order probably has some purchase. So we shall see. Yeah, we keep adding numbers, you know, after the G and then taking them away. And I think it tells you a lot about the state of global affairs. So just wrap this up in just a sentence or two. I'd love to hear from both of you. You know, what are the opportunities for these middle powers as their governments assert themselves in the absence of U.S. Hegemony and encounter the rise of China? I think that in a world where we have these two rival sort of aspirants to the throne, it's possible to play them off against one another to exact concessions from each because they are the jury. They are the audience to which these two powers are ultimately playing. It in an ideal world keeps them on their best behavior. And they have resources that both need. I mean, you look at a country like Indonesia with its near monopoly, really on nickel, which is so important for electric vehicle batteries and for so many other things. And they're able to exert that. I think that in this world of sort of mutually assured disruption, people are coming into their own realizing the kinds of chokehold power that they have. I think that there are going to be ways in which they're hold on certain necessary minerals and on critical resources. We'll be able to help them in exacting the kind of leverage and we'll help them to hedge more successfully to hedge in the balance. Rahman? Well, they probably have to engage the big powers anyway. I mean, there is nothing that can be done without China or the U.S. in the picture. I guess they should probably exploit the fact that they are no longer have to be beholden to the U.S. to create a different pathway that could be an alternative to pure domination because in the end, when you are dealing with these very, very large powers, the inequality is such that even if they do not want to crush you, they will tend to crush you just by the sheer physics of the relationship. Whereas with the middle power, you do not actually have that amount of radical inequality and also it is with the middle power that this return to international law is more feasible, not with China or the U.S., especially not with the U.S. as it is today. Yeah. Well, the U.S. might change, but the world has already changed and I don't think that we will soon be seeing a return to the restoration of the rhetoric of what drove U.S. hegemony for all those decades. A boy can hope. Thank you so much for coming together across these time zones and distance to have this really important conversation with me. I really, really enjoyed it and I'm sure that our listeners will too. Thank you. Thank you, Lydia. Thank you, Lydia.