The balance of power is changing as US influence declines. Amid a nuclear crisis and a fractious G20 summit in Hamburg, who will win the struggle for succession?
The overt US threats of punitive military action that followed last week’s provocative test-firing of a potentially nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile by North Korea transformed a long-running regional problem into a frightening global crisis.
With Donald Trump ordering a show of force off the Korean peninsula and warning of “very severe” reprisals, it fell to China and Russia – usually bad guys in the White House’s global narrative – to act responsibly by appealing for calm and dialogue. The confrontation, not yet defused, intensified broader fears that the world is becoming more dangerous and chaotic – and that no one is really in charge.
Established collaborative structures – such as the UN, international law and alliances, multilateral treaties and human rights conventions – are being tested to destruction or repudiated outright. This weekend’s G20 summit of the planet’s most powerful leaders, far from steadying nerves, only added to the sense of a downward spiral.
If the Hamburg meeting showed anything, it was that Trump, China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Germany’s Angela Merkel don’ t know, or cannot agree on, what to do about Korea, Syria, climate change, terrorism, mass migration, and many other scary issues.
Are these fears of deepening world disorder justified? Or is the existing international order simply undergoing one of its periodic reformations, as the balance of power shifts and new global forces challenge the status quo?
The biggest single change is a perceived decline in US influence. Almost as impactful as North Korea’s filmed images of airborne armageddon was a jibe by its dictator, Kim Jong-un, that the missile launch was an Independence Day gift to “the American bastards”.
Such lèse-majesté on Kim’s part is telling. He was playing to a worldwide audience that suspects the era of solo American superpower – the “unipolar moment” that followed the cold war – is drawing to a definitive close.
His taunt was aimed at Trump, who exhibits scant understanding or liking for the traditional US role of global policeman, preferring to parrot his “America first” slogan. But Kim is far from alone in attempting to exploit US ambivalence for national advantage.
This process of America turning inwards, and its concomitant reduced appetite for international leadership, arguably began in 2009.
