How the Last Two Weeks Shook the World Order

History is moving fast these days: The global order is shifting in real time. Just consider the course of the past two weeks. A series of events, in places from Beijing to Georgia, demonstrate that the enemies of the existing US-led order are flexing their muscles, while its chief defender is in danger of lowering its horizons and squandering vital strengths.

Revisionist dreams were on display in China. On Sept. 1, Xi Jinping hosted the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, where he critiqued American “hegemonism” and economic bullying, called for a more “just and equitable” system, and announced a Global Governance Initiative meant to make further inroads in the Global South.

Two days later, he convened a massive military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, with honored guests Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. These rulers are united not just in their quest for immortality, but even more fundamentally, in their hostility to a world in which Washington and its allies make the rules.

That unity is producing real cooperation: According to a new report from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Eurasian autocracies are sharing technology and pooling military capabilities in increasingly ambitious ways. Russia is contributing tech and know-how to North Korea’s weapons programs. Strategic trade with China, and military assistance from Iran and North Korea, helps sustain Putin’s war in Ukraine. That conflict has only intensified: Putin’s encore to his summit with President Donald Trump in Alaska has been to ramp up murderous aerial assaults.

Xi, meanwhile, called for a new era of peace — while advertising capabilities, such as new intercontinental missiles, China might use to remake the Western Pacific by war. His military has increased coercion of the Philippines, normalized aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan, and shown it can project power as far away as the Tasman Sea. Xi’s China is an aspiring superpower brimming with confidence, while the reigning superpower engages in self-harm.

Trump took notice of the rogues’ reunion: He accused Xi, Putin and Kim of “conspiring against the United States of America.” He’s not wrong, and it’s a shame he’s not better at frustrating their design.

Trump has spent recent weeks brawling with India over trade and buying oil from Russia. Trade tensions have slowed a quarter-century of momentum in promoting US-India cooperation as a counterweight to China, while giving Prime Minister Narendra Modi added cause to seek a modest thaw in his own relations with Beijing. The fact that Trump has so far targeted India, but not China, for buying Russian oil is revealing of his strange strategic judgment: Why confront an enemy when one can coerce a vital partner instead? Trump’s most recent proposal is only a little better: He’s asking Europe to tariff both China and India for buying Putin’s crude.

The US-India affair isn’t the only key relationship that is struggling. In Tokyo, Prime Minster Shigeru Ishiba announced that he would resign, the denouement to a political downfall that is linked to the lopsided trade deal he felt forced to conclude with Trump. Around the same time, Trump’s immigration agenda was colliding with his economic agenda, and with the US-South Korea alliance.

In Georgia, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrested and, in some cases, shackled more than 300 South Korean workers, not long after Trump had demanded that South Korean firms ramp up investment and operations in the US. The result, in Seoul, is frustration over mixed signals from Washington — and across-the-spectrum political fury at the rough treatment of its nationals.

The US-South Korea alliance is thicker than any one setback. But here, as in so many cases, Trump seems indifferent to the political humiliation and diplomatic harm he inflicts.

Perhaps that’s because his focus is closer to home. Last week, Politico reported that a draft of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy prioritizes the security of the homeland and the Western Hemisphere over global engagement in Europe, the Middle East and even the Western Pacific: the theaters that the US has long treated as its first line of defense. Trump has been building up American combat power in the Caribbean to coerce Venezuela and, as of last week, carry out lethal strikes against suspected drug traffickers.

The get-tough politics of that strike are probably favorable; the legalities, or lack thereof, are disturbing. Not that the administration seems concerned. Vice President JD Vance tweeted that he doesn’t “give a sh@t” about such trivialities, and accused Democrats of trying to send America’s sons and daughters to die fighting Russia in Ukraine.

Trump, for his part, threatened to use his newly rechristened Department of War against another nemesis: The city of Chicago. The remark says volumes about Trump’s ever-more illiberal tendencies, and about his sense that America’s worst foes are to be found at home, not abroad.

“There is a lot of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith observed. Likewise, global orders don’t end overnight. But it is getting ever-easier to picture how, if not precisely when, a global order long rooted in America’s power and productive leadership will founder — under pressure from rivals that are advancing and assertive, and perhaps also from a US that is sliding into political illiberalism and strategic decay.

Source: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/how-the-last-two-weeks-shook-the-world-order/