The tendency of ANC cadres and government bureaucrats to traipse off to Beijing or Moscow, in the context of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s victory at the Turkish polls and the Russian/Ukraine war playing itself out, inevitably leads to many of us asking: where is the world going?
Through the lens of the US and the UK we are on the brink of a new world of rising autocracies. Larry Diamond of Stanford University speaks of a “democratic recession” where today “only about 28% of people in the world are living in democracies”, compared to the 60% reached in the early 1990s.
The democratic recession ranges from the rise of illiberal regimes, as seen in Turkey, Poland, Mexico and India, to repressive regimes as in many of the Arab Gulf States, Egypt, Hungary, China and Iran, to outright autocracies such as Russia. Israel has been subject to many assaults on its judiciary, one of the pillars of its democracy.
Anne Applebaum, columnist at The Atlantic, adds that it is not just the recession of democracies but “the rise of autocracies, their growth in power and influence and economic size” and the rise in the connection between autocracies.
According to her, autocracies today are not a bloc or an alliance, but do work together with some common goals. “They have in common a dislike of their own democratic oppositions, of democratic activism and democratic language.”
Martin Wolf, author of Democratic Capitalism, argues that the other part of the democratic recession “is the degradation and backsliding in some of the world’s most established democracies, as can be seen in the US and the UK”.
The closely fought elections in Turkey and the US are representative of the divide between those who support democracy and those who couldn’t care less for it. It shows that we should not be looking only at the regimes themselves but be concerned about the antidemocratic trend affecting all of humanity.
To try to answer the question of where the world is going the US-based Rand Corporation identified four possible scenarios around “great power wars” — and none of them is comforting. Given the increasing war rhetoric over the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Taiwan, this is a timely warning of the possibility of full-scale wars, even involving nonstrategic nuclear weapons of limited size and effect.
Having scanned the main great power wars over the past few centuries, a cardinal finding Rand Corporation emphasises is that “political and military leaders often discovered only once a conflict had begun that they had miscalculated the balance of power, the resolve of their adversaries, the commitment of their allies, or the costs and benefits of conflict”.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates that well, with Russia having to throw in much more personnel and weapons for a longer period than expected. And its hopes that China would rush to its aid have not worked out that way.
In the first of the Rand scenarios China annexes Taiwan, a conflict that ends in victory for Bejing after eight months upon its demonstration of a nonstrategic nuclear weapon. Rand also spells out a scenario where a Taiwan conflict ends indecisively, largely because the possible use of nuclear weapons deters the combatants from further escalation.
The third scenario begins when the US stretches China’s military through an East China Sea conflict and Japan and Russia are drawn into battle. It culminates in victory for the US and Japan.
The fourth scenario, which is being played out today involving the US and its Nato alliance, is one where Russian losses result in it using a nonstrategic nuclear weapon and the US responding in kind. This conflict also ends indecisively.
SA policymakers should look at a number of factors in calculating where their alliances should lie. These include the principled commitment to uphold fundamental democratic rights, through to narrow national interests.
Making the wrong call now on having Vladimir Putin grace our shores, or yet another study tour to China, could have wider ramifications for SA.
• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute.
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