What is this world coming to?
Recep Tayyip Erdogan not only wins the Turkish elections; he uses his consolidated grip on power to negotiate a new arms deal with the US in exchange for Swedish accession to Nato, while also reopening the process for Turkey’s accession into the EU.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, once so reviled in the US because of anti-Muslim pogroms he was implicated in that he couldn’t get an entry visa, joined the pantheon of Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill by addressing the US Congress in June. Then he later popped up in Paris on Bastille Day, alongside French President Emmanuel Macron.
At the same time more and more countries are queuing up to join the Brazil, Russia, India, China, SA alliance, Brics. Add the likes of Kenya, Turkey and Egypt and you can imagine the headlines: ‘Briscket anyone?’
Some of the states are not averse to a measure of infidelity by enjoying several conjugal bonds. So, you have the I2U2, not to be mistaken for the band U2 from yesteryear, which includes India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the US, or the security alliance called the Quad focuses on Asia-Pacific having India, Australia, Japan and the US as members.
What shapes the moves the US is making? In a speech earlier in 2023 by Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, he spelt out a new strategic industrial policy aimed at empowering and enriching the American middle-class, combating climate change and beating China in the technology race.
Western firms have already had to decide whether to follow in the wake of the US government decision against Huawei’s telecommunication equipment or to deny China advanced semiconductors. Such moves are now being followed by curbs on outbound investments in technologies and this will have national security implications.
The US allies, such as the Philippines or South Korea, are concerned not just about the stridency of US rhetoric but also about the harshness of its measures against their large neighbour, China.
The US allies fear that prioritising American workers and manufacturers through mountains of subsidies, as set out in the Inflation Reduction Act, comes at the expense of firms and workers in Europe and Asia. Also, that US talk of reform of the World Trade Organisation will end up disrupting long-established trade rules.
China has responded in kind: Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks of the “profound unity” of economic development and national security — meaning that China will boost growth, including through foreign direct investment, as long as it does not jeopardise its national security. Raiding the offices of US consultancies Bain, Capvision and Mintz is the mirror image of the actions taken by the US on Chinese firms.
Thrown into this already worrying geoeconomic maelstrom is the prospect of Donald Trump enjoying a second presidency and his promise to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of resuming office.
There is a group of nations not willing to let the future of the globe be determined by such narrow nationalistic interests. Jorge Heine, former Chilean Ambassador to SA and now at the Pardee School of Global Studies, points to the emergence of active nonalignment (ANA), inspired by the nonaligned movement (NAM) rooted in the 1960s and 1970s, when more and countries were liberating themselves from the bondage of colonialism. He describes it as ‘pragmatic, non-ideological and focused on the global issues that keep being sidelined by the great powers in their misguided obsession to attain primacy over each other’.
While ANA has been used to assert the role by Latin American countries on the world stage, the Africa peace initiative, led by President Cyril Ramaphosa, to find solutions to the Russia-Ukraine war, is an expression of that.
As Alec Russell, writing in the FT, suggested “when the histories of the rise of the post-unipolar world are written, Africa’s quixotic mediators may well merit a mention”. In this scenario, 2023’s Brics summit in Durban in August may well be a critical inflection point in the tectonic shifts shaping global relations.
• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute (MISTRA).
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