By GILBERTO LOPES*

Between the end of the Cold War and the current international scenario, what happened was that the victorious power had reached the height of its power. From then on, and ever since, it has been going down the other side of the slope.

Compose the world by force

The Cold War has taught us useful lessons for interpreting international conflicts. Past and present, there is one thing in common: it is the end of an era marked by confrontation between the great powers.

The end of the Cold War was marked by the reassertion of the dominant power, the United States, which had emerged stronger from the Second World War. It was the reassertion of the capitalist world, whose resources far exceeded the capabilities of the Soviet world, whose economic weaknesses determined its defeat.

This is a story that was convincingly told in a book I have referred to before: The triumph of broken promises, by Fritz Bartel. It was the last great triumph of capitalism and its most developed power: the United States. With its victory in the Cold War, it became the only great world power.

Fritz Bartel's text suggests a key to this process: the politics of Fed The success of raising interest rates to previously unimaginable levels made it possible to flood the United States with resources. This was a decisive factor in defeating a Soviet world that was not only increasingly indebted but also exposed to the weakness of an economic order based on cheap energy supplied by the Soviet Union. But this success was also the key to the decline, expressed today in an unstoppable debt that increasingly consumes the resources of a declining power: three billion dollars a day in interest.

Between the end of the Cold War and the current international scenario, what happened was that the victorious power had reached the height of its power. From then on, and ever since, it has been going down the other side of the slope.

It was the internal conditions of each country that determined the outcome of the Cold War. And it is safe to say that they will also be the key to the outcome of the current confrontation (unless we reach an unimaginable nuclear war).

As Rush Doshi, director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations and deputy director for China and Taiwan affairs on the National Security Council during the Biden administration, some of the most pressing issues in shaping China policy are domestic, the foundation of American strength. “But the foundations of that strength have atrophied, especially since the end of the Cold War,” he added in an article published in the journal Foreign Affairs on November 29th.

Of course, the Soviet Union was not a great capitalist power, nor was it in a position to successfully confront the United States. Its military capabilities were instrumental in Germany's defeat in World War II, and this helped to obscure the nature of the Cold War great power conflict by making it appear as if they were two powers with similar capabilities. The result showed that they were not.

But the emphasis on military capability also obscures the vision of those who suggest that Washington can replicate what happened then to meet today’s challenges. They fail to see the domestic picture, or the importance of economic capability in the outcome of the Cold War. They believe that through military threat (peace through strength), can repeat the feat they attribute to the aggressive policies of then-President Ronald Reagan. An illusion that is also present in Josep Borrell's pathetic assessment of his five years in charge of the European Union's foreign and security policy, for whom there is still much work to be done “to speak effectively the language of power”.

“If Europe fails to unite in this time of stormy change, it will not have a second chance,” says German Green leader and former foreign minister (1998-2005) Joschka Fisher. Its only option, he added, is “to transform itself into a military power capable of protecting its interests and ensuring peace and order on the world stage. The alternative is fragmentation, impotence and irrelevance.”

The danger, of course, is that they will try to do so. Any bet on a military triumph in the current scenario is either naive or in bad faith, because we all know that a war, with modern nuclear capabilities, will mean defeat for everyone.

Today's confrontational scenario is different from that of the Cold War in one fundamental respect. It is the decline of what was the leadership of the capitalist world order and the resurgence of old powers, a story that has the Singaporean academic and diplomat Kishore Mahbubani as one of its leading scholars, among others, in his book The new Asian hemisphere.

Among the powers that are reemerging, China is clearly the most important. But when a power like the United States has spread its influence throughout the world in a way that was previously unknown, with its capitalist economy (with an increasing concentration of private property) and the liberal ideology that sustained it (the basis of practically all dictatorships, especially in Latin America), its decline cannot occur without several confrontations, in the most varied scenarios in which it has been present.

Especially in Asia, home to the rising power, and in Europe, the rearguard of the real war – between the US and China –, where Washington's interests are mediated by its allies in a confrontation with Russia.

In any case, the most powerful, Germany, is no longer in a position to threaten any other power, as it did in two world wars. At great cost, it has been able to wrest resources from a Europe that sees its influence in the world increasingly diminished.

Doshi summarizes the different scenarios of tensions in Asia, where the strength of the United States derives from a wide network of alliances. To prevent aggression in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, Donald Trump will have to sustain those that Joe Biden has already built: Aukus, with the aim of providing Australia with nuclear-capable submarines; Quad, composed of the United States, Australia, India and Japan; and other initiatives involving, among others, South Korea, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea.

The scenarios in Africa and Latin America are different. In Africa, domination was colonial, exercised brutally by European powers. In Latin America, North American domination was practically total, linked to the dominant classes of the countries in the region. Therefore, the political struggles in these two continents, in this phase of transition, are conditioned by the characteristics of the domination to which they were subjected.

Cleaning the house

This idea is repeated repeatedly in the analyses of a wide range of American analysts. We have already quoted Doshi when he states that the most urgent issue in defining China policy is the solution of domestic issues.

Robert C. O'Brien, former national security adviser (2019-2021) in the first Trump administration, also discusses this in an article on his foreign policy, regarding “peace based on strength”.

In the 1990s (that is, at the end of the Cold War), the world seemed to be preparing for the second American century. But things did not unfold that way. The expectations created at the time contrast with today's reality, says O'Brian: "China has become a formidable military and economic adversary." With the United States stuck "in a quagmire of weaknesses and failures," O'Brian is betting on a restoration of American capabilities that will allow the country to continue to be "the best place in the world to invest, innovate and do business."

He reminds us that Donald Trump initiated a policy of decoupling the US economy from that of China, raising tariffs on about half of Chinese exports to the United States. Now, he says, “it is time to push even harder, with a 60% tariff on Chinese goods.”

On the other hand, he proposes renewing the US arsenal. He regrets that the Navy has fewer than 300 ships today, compared to 592 during Ronald Reagan's administration; that the hypersonic missile development project was canceled during the Obama administration.

But these fundamental changes must take into account debt levels and the need to reduce the fiscal deficit. “Could the United States emerge as a divided nation, where polls indicate that the vast majority of citizens believe the country is on the wrong track?” he asks.

There is no single answer to this question. There are many. For the French newspaper Le Monde, the path that Donald Trump will have to take in his second term is radically different from the one the country has taken since the end of World War II. “It is the end of the American era, that of a superpower committed to the world, eager to show itself as a democratic model.”

O Le Monde He is naturally concerned about the fate of Europe in this new world. He senses the end of the American era of a superpower committed to the world. This is one way of seeing things. But it is not the only one. Perhaps it is not only the United States that has changed, but, above all, the world. A change that also forces Washington to change, to seek new ways of adapting.

The proposals made by Donald Trump are, in a way, an original attempt, as Branko Milanovic explains in his article “The ideology of Donald J. Trump”. For Donald Trump, says Branko Milanovic, the United States is a rich and powerful nation, but not an “indispensable nation,” as former Secretary of State Madelaine Albright liked to say. It is a different vision, and his proposals do not generate certainties, but rather renewed concerns.

*Gilberto Lopes is a journalist, PhD in Society and Cultural Studies from the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). Author, among other books, of Political crisis of the modern world (uruk).

Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.

To read the first article in the series click on https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/a-desordem-do-mundo/

To read the second article in the series click on https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/a-desordem-do-mundo-ii/

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