In recent years signs have emerged that the global balance of power is shifting and formerly dominant nations are no longer able to maintain their positions. No single state, nor any alliance of nations, wields sufficient power to impose a global system on others. As a result, a multipolar equilibrium based on realpolitik has already redefined the international order.
There is a famous quote attributed to both Henry Kissinger and Winston Churchill, but most likely originates from a speech by Lord Palmerston, which states that nations have no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests. This underpinned Kissinger’s efforts to befriend China to undermine the Soviets during the Cold War and explains Churchill’s alliance with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis, despite Britian’s distrust of Russia.
This decidedly British notion, originating from the realist era of Palmerston’s premiership, was often used to justify the divide-and-conquer tactics of the British empire, allowing it to play other nations against one another for its own gain. It was nothing personal, just business.
Nowhere was this clearer than in Britain’s simultaneous support of Arab nationalism during World War 1 and its secret collusion with France to divide the spoils of the collapsing Ottoman empire. While promising Arab states postwar independence, the same British government was negotiating the Sykes-Picot Agreement, partitioning the region between Britain and France.
These contradictory arrangements were emblematic of a deeper logic that international order, even then, served as an instrument of imperial convenience, designed to mask power grabs in the language of peace and civilisation. Democracy, but only if the “right” people are elected.
From World War 2 to US hegemony
After World War 2 the Western powers decided international law might actually be a good idea for its own sake, though this was most likely because Europe was devastated and no longer able to secure its international interests militarily.
Of course, the US emerged as one of two dominant victorious powers along with the Soviet Union, and their competition for influence dominated international politics for the remainder of the 20th century.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US emerged as global hegemon, though in real terms its economic power was already waning. The industrial might of Germany, Japan and soon thereafter China, combined with a string of reckless US fiscal, monetary and foreign policy adventures, have resulted in unbridled US supremacy proving relatively short-lived.
Nevertheless, people still believe in the concept of an international order, both as a reality and an ideology worth fighting for, even though the institutions that once symbolised the architecture of international governance are observably weakening.
For example, the UN Security Council and World Trade Organisation are both gridlocked or ignored, while the former champion of the liberal international order, the US, has withdrawn from many of the international bodies and treaties that held this system together. Influence lingers, but only in the sense that monuments do. Impressive, but from a bygone era.
New centres of power
Instead, we are witnessing the reassertion of national interest over shared rules and the rise of new centres of power over old ones that cannot hold. The Brics bloc has proven remarkably adept at promoting both national sovereignty and multilateral co-operation. Meanwhile, the EU, poster child of post-World War 2 co-operation, no longer sings from a single hymn sheet, with countries such as Hungary openly at odds with Brussels.
Just as individuals seek to benefit themselves, states tend to operate on a similar principle, and historically international orders have only ever been a political by-product of catastrophic wars. After the Napoleonic wars, the Congress of Vienna sought to achieve a balance of power in Europe on the premise that peace could prevail only without a dominant power. Likewise, the UN Charter was a direct result of World War 2.
Nevertheless, in each case, order was still imposed by those who had the power to do so, and tailored to reflect their interests. This is shown clearly in the composition of the UN Security Council and its members’ veto powers.
The world moves forward not through enforced co-operation or common ideology, but through the calculus of game theory and its variables.
What makes the current moment unique is that no comparably large conflict has occurred to reset the system. No great war. No peace conference. Just the slow, grinding entropy of global norms, combined with the relative demographic and economic stagnation of the West.
Of course, there is a counterargument that a number of smaller but no less significant conflicts, including Trump’s trade wars and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have once again illustrated the limits of the perceived hegemon, thus ushering in a new balance of power.
China is the world’s largest economy in real terms and a genuine technological competitor to the West. Similarly, Russia has re-emerged as the dominant economy and military power in Europe, far leaner and meaner without the bloat of its former satellites. Combined with the vitality of India and Southeast Asia and the wealth of the Gulf States, one can see how new centres of gravity have dispersed global influence.
This has not happened overnight. The trend just went unnoticed. Perhaps because Moscow embraced the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union, prioritising trade within the former Group of Eight (G8). Perhaps because China, despite being integrated into global supply chains, remained an isolationist political outsider.
China and India’s parallel pathways
For decades Beijing has operated within a Western-dominated economic system while quietly undermining its political assumptions, profiting from participation in the West’s liberal system while never embracing its values. But as trade tensions rise and Russia switches sides, Beijing has begun accelerating the build-out of its own parallel institutions.
There are numerous examples, from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to the Digital Silk Road and the e-CNY cross-border payment system. Within Brics, China has helped develop other alternatives, such as Brics Pay and the New Development Bank. This suggests that rather than seeking a seat at the West’s table, Beijing will invite the rest of the world to sit at its own.
Within Brics, China has helped develop other alternatives … suggesting that rather than seeking a seat at the West’s table, Beijing will invite the rest of the world to sit at its own.
India’s trajectory has been more cautious, but the direction is similar as it voices dissatisfaction with a global system that was never designed with non-Western powers such as itself in mind. India does not seek to replace the old order, but nor is it content to be an afterthought within it.
In contrast, the US suffers from domestic division, strategic failures and institutional decline. Its closest Asian ally, Japan, is no longer the dominant regional power, and Europe appears similarly fragmented and consumed by internal contradictions. As a consequence, the Group of Seven (G7) no longer possesses the will or the means to underwrite a global framework others will accept.
In their place a looser equilibrium is forming based on respect for national sovereignty while pursuing co-operation that is mutually beneficial. This is the enigma of Brics. An order built out of the seeming disorder of transactional politics, parochial yet at the same time universal.
The world moves forward not through enforced co-operation or common ideology, but through the calculus of game theory and its variables. Countries balance relations, hedge bets. They join Brics without leaving the IMF. They welcome Huawei while still accepting World Bank loans. They understand the game.
There is no order. There are only permanent interests.
- Shubitz is an independent Brics analyst.
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