Shitlib media often portrays conflict within a vacuum, but nothing ever really happens on its own. Regarding the situation in Ukraine, most of the focus has been on the particularities of Russia’s ideology, this type of analysis has its place but we shouldn’t hyper-focus on any one aspect of an individual conflict lest you risk missing the forest for the trees. The Ukrainian conflict’s real utility lies in what it can tell us about the ontology of the world and its future. Since the Russian invasion started this ontology has changed considerably, yet this change wasn’t unexpected to anyone who has been paying attention. Many, including myself, have suggested that a shift in the world order was inevitable and upcoming. Most of the world has decided to simply ignore this shift.
Instead of focusing on the particulars of this conflict, I would like to use the conflict to reassess the world order in two ways:
The conflict is a symptom of American hegemonic decline. This decline is real and measurable.
The more immediate future of the international order will move from unipolarity to multipolarity.
A Note on Realism
The dominant ideological cleavage in IR has always been between a world of realist assumptions and a world of liberal assumptions. Both schools assume that states exist in anarchy, meaning that there is no higher authority above the state. For realists, international natural order ends at that point. Liberals, however, believe that although states may exist in anarchy they can create order and authority through cooperation. This belief is also its greatest critique; liberalism isn’t so much an assumption about the natural order of states but rather an activist ideology. One may argue that this ideology created America's power but even if this is true, it has also created its demise.
The ideology which a country’s foreign policy operates under determines how it builds its security in its totality. Almost every country operates with a realist assumption except for the United States and a few western European states.
For realists, national security is chiefly pursued through the use of violence i.e. your state is only as secure as your ability to secure it through the military. Security then becomes a matter of weapons technology and military efficiency.
The United States on the other hand has built its national security upon liberalism. This doesn’t mean that the ability to enact violence isn’t a contributing factor to national security but that the primary means of securing the state are economic capacities and institutionalism. When the United States rolled out the Bretton Woods international order, the idea was that through interdependency and institutionalism war would become so costly that it would become all but totally unviable. Additionally, through the formation of multilateral treaties and international institutions, communication and information sharing would become a regular part of foreign policy meaning conflict would be resolved before it could occur. This system works when there is a unilateral power that can make it work. This power likely no longer exists.
A Hegemon in Decline
As a matter of the linear nature of time, nothing lasts forever. This includes global hegemony; at one point the US will no longer be the global superpower. A few actually intelligent IR scholars have tried to warn us about this. What’s often overlooked in hegemonic cycle theories is that it is possible for a hegemon to re-establish itself as the dominant power. If a state can implement intelligent and timely policies it can catch itself from falling. But if you want to extend your hegemonic life you can’t shit your pants. The US is currently shitting its pants. Without a clear understanding of the movement of power a state runs the risk of falling for a Thucydides trap, and the US has taken the bait.
In 1987 George Modelski released a book titled Long Cycles in World Politics in which he laid out a theoretical framework of global power cycles (I don’t recommend you read). Modelski proposes that world leadership can be viewed in long cycles lasting roughly 100 years comprised of 4 parts; global war, emergence of world power, delegitimization of power, and finally, deconcentration of power. From there another global war emerges and the cycle restarts. Looking back, Modelski’s theory is well supported by history as demonstrated in the graphic below.
Along with new ideas a hegemon has to provide global security. The United States constructed this through its dominant military but was able to significantly reduce the cost of enforcing global security through the use of international organizations (IO). The formal rules of IOs generally treat states as equals, this incentivizes international participation. If IOs were formally weighted in favor of great powers smaller states would see little reason to participate. The real power of the US within IOs lies in its informal rules where a major power can set the agenda in its favor. Neorealists have used balance of threat theory to suggest that the US has built its hegemony by being a benevolent world leader. They suggest that the US exercises its multilateral dominance peacefully through IOs so that other states don’t feel threatened.
Apart from political and security IOs, the US also practiced its hegemony through the infrastructure that it provides the world. Part of this is capital which it provides through economic IOs like the World Bank and IMF but also the infrastructure of American corporations.
As of now, the US is still the dominant world economic power but this is obviously changing. Not only is the US now sharing trade hegemony, but it has also sabotaged the previous institutions that it created. The US often mismanages the institutions that it creates in the hopes of solving immediate problems to the detriment of long-term stability. In several cases of IMF lending, the US used its informal influence to extract concessions on issues that seemed more important at the time. Ultimately this damaged the IMF’s legitimacy among developing countries.
A hegemon can make nonparticipation costly as the US did with the WTO; the WTO diverts trade away from nonmembers making the price of exclusion far greater than the advantage of maintaining policy competences. However, when members accumulate greater resources they become less dependent on the hegemon, making an exit viable.
The other half of American infrastructure supremacy, corporate infrastructure, is even more concerning. As millions of midwitted seals blindly clap for cruel Russian sanctions that only harm Russian civilians and themselves, their tunnel vision blinds them to the damage these sanctions are doing to American power. Or maybe they’re doing it on purpose.
Emerging powers are watching and taking notes on what they can expect if they ever decide to pursue policies that might upset the western regime. Accordingly, they are developing plans on how they can deal with potential western sanctions.
When western corporations ban Russia, and any other state in the future, from using their products do they expect that the banned state will simply go without payment processors, social networks, and administrative software? This is absurd of course, instead, they will be forced to adopt a non-Western competitor or build their own infrastructure. Power is then moved from one node to another outside of American control. Sanction warfare, which is truly the most cringe type war, may initially inconvenience the sanctioned state but when done too often for too long it begins to delegitimize the holders of power.
Multipolarity – A Whitepill
In periods between unitary hegemonic orders the world experiences paradigms of brief multipolarity; a global regime with three or more equally powerful competing states. The onset of multipolar order is often one of the first and best signs that there is hegemonic decline occurring. Most obvious is the consolidation of Chinese power but within the Middle East, there is currently a Saudi-Iranian rivalry for regional hegemony. The gradual withdrawal of American military forces from the Middle East is almost exemplary of Robert Gilpin’s causal explanation of hegemonic decline. Robert Gilpin thought that it was a cost problem. When hegemonic power is at its highest, the cost of maintaining the status quo becomes higher than the means to afford it. Private and public expenditure rises faster than GDP, service economies grow slower than manufacturing economies, and finally, the hegemonic power becomes too comfortable and ceases taking proper risk precautions because they feel too big to fail. The expenditures of maintaining the status quo in Afghanistan were becoming far too expensive, when the US finally, without proper precautions, left Afghanistan it left behind an unknown quantity of arms and vehicles for the Taliban. Domestically, the efforts of the state to maintain the quality of life by printing and spending money without consideration have in the end caused a deterioration of the status quo they desired to maintain.
As other states consolidate their power within their regions and the US withdraws and sabotages its efforts, the unitary order will turn into a multipolar order of regional great powers, each power being equally powerful. In this type of international regime, great powers will be in a constant power struggle seeking relative gains over each other. These power struggles will be real- and geo-politic, true struggles of power politics. States in existential competition cannot afford to waste their time with frivolous luxury cultural issues of equality and social justice. The western global regime will either have to put this ideology aside or be taken over by states concerned with real power. And this is my white pill for you; the state will soon be forced by external existential threats to act seriously again. This will not only take place in the international realm but also in domestic life.
I think here we might be able to learn something from Gramsci (yeah yeah Gramsci bad, depict him as soyjak. Whatever. I don’t care just listen for a second.) States are reflections of the elites which rule them, even within so-called democracies. For this reason, understanding the state as simply the monopoly of force is too simple, modern states are biopolitical in nature, fighting for the attitudes of their citizens. Elites don’t run the day-to-day politics of a state, they can outsource this role to normies as long as they build acceptable structures within their minds. In this way hegemony is upstream from civil society, the insulation which elites build with cultural hegemony through civil society proceeds international hegemony. Powerful states have freedom in determining their foreign policy, weaker states do not as they need to react to external forces. Furthermore, powerful states typically result from great revolutions through which domestic affairs settled. The world experienced the hegemony of the American revolution, the soviet states witnessed the consequences of the Bolsheviks. Currently, the world is experiencing the effects of the communist revolution in China and many regions are witnessing the effects of regional revolutions like the Iranian Islamic revolution. Changes within weak states are often not the result of slow internal progress but rather a reflection of international developments which transfer their systems into the periphery.
As the unitary American hegemony fades, elites will no longer be able to insulate themselves from external realities and ideologies of the peripheries, they will no longer be able to sit back and toy with transsexuality and anal sex. The state power of foreign actors will begin to leak into where was once the Global American Empire and indeed within America itself. This is the white pill, in a multipolar world, which seems inevitable now, America will be forced to act seriously as it did post-revolution to exert real power into the periphery. Or it will be forced to become just another country. Yet, to me, this seems the only way to reconstruct not a new America, but the old America. The occupational class will have to instate the help of the genuine intellectuals to do what they had already once done, giving way to a new legitimate elite. The struggle for power brings out the best in men.