Lost Futures

The suggestion that the "rules-based international order" is over, as a result of Donald Trump threatening to annex Greenland, is not the harbinger of a new international settlement, let alone a replacement for NATO, but a plea for a new narrative to explain US hegemony and excuse its attendant hypocrisy. 

It was notable that in his speech at Davos Mark Carney argued that we must move on from the "pleasant fiction" of the old order by quoting Václav Havel's fictional tale of an honest greengrocer "living in truth". The liberal commentariat predictably swooned at this display of muscular liberalism and the invocation of a humanist saint, but what they failed to acknowledge was that the Canadian Prime Minister wasn't arguing for the creation of a counterbalancing pole to American power but simply a more palatable story that could be sold to the electorates of the "middle powers". Inevitably, many spun the speech to suit their priors, notably those arguing for closer cooperation between the UK and the EU, but Canada is never going to seek accession (hilarious as that scenario might be) because its own interests necessitate a bilateral approach to its neighbour across a 5,000 mile indefensible border. Likewise, Keir Starmer knows that the UK is too entangled with the US security state and financial markets to be anything other than a rule-taker.

The idealised "rules-based international order", which obviously never lived up to the dreams of a Kantian perpetual peace, was a busted flush long before Israel invaded Gaza and proceeded to liquidate part of the civilian population, let alone before the US kidnapped Nicolas Maduro. As Larry Elliott notes, the economic and trade base of that order has been problematic for decades and the political superstructure increasingly dysfunctional. If you wanted to isolate a geopolitical moment when the veil was lifted, you could go back to the Iraq War or the wider War on Terror, but 9/11 was simply the moment when the narrower illusion of security that the long-90s depended on was revealed as a pause between the existential fear of the Cold War and our contemporary "polycrisis" anxiety over climate breakdown, novel pandemics, demographic decline, infrastructural decay and the deleterious effects of social media on fragile young minds. Fear has been the norm and it has been exercised systematically by politicians to discipline populations, particularly in the "sophisticated" democracies of those middle powers (that Carney's speech largely ignored the rest of the world, beyond listing Canadian trade deals, wasn't an oversight).

In this historical context, Trump's turn as a mobster who whacks opponents and demands both protection money (tariffs) and the signing over of property titles (Greenland, maybe Iceland) is frankly comical, or would be if it didn't translate to the murder and incarceration of civilians from Minneapolis to East Jerusalem. These deaths and imprisonments are the normal currency of hegemonic power. Long before Trump appeared on the scene, the US was jailing hundreds of thousands of its own citizens on racially-biased charges, and aiding and abetting murders by its proxy agents abroad, from South America to East Asia. ICE is a texbook example of how the methods of empire are inevitably imported to the metropole, but it is also an example of continuing imperial privilege: this abuse of process is not meant to happen to "us", even though it has happened to plenty of US citizens over the years. The problem now, for both the middle powers and liberal opinion in America, is the lack of a plausible narrative to whitewash the grim reality. 

After 1989, anti-communism was no longer effective at a geopolitical level, albeit it continues in weak form as a habitual recourse in domestic politics, now often combined with the charge of antisemitism. Russia may no longer be communist, or even remotely socialist, but it will forever be burdened with the psychic legacy of anticommunism simply because the charge that the Western left is "soft on Putin" remains too useful to dispense with. The 1990s narrative of liberal interventionism that succeeded anticommunism was never stable enough to survive either the raised expectations of those seeking genuine democracy, or the realities of its application on the ground by cynical realists, resulting in the anodyne compromise of the rules-based order. This was simply a rhetorical placeholder for want of anything better, and one that looked increasingly threadbare after the Balkan Wars.

The current attempts to construct a new narrative are struggling because they are being driven by the supporting cast rather than the lead character, and are consequently tentative and circumspect. Carney's frank truths aren't going to stop Trump dismissing him as a lightweight. Commentators who talk about the US President's unusual approach or unconventional style are really highlighting a void: Washington isn't providing hegemonic leadership to its empire, obliging the satrapies (those middle powers) to step forward and attempt to fill the gap. This raises two questions. First, can the "rest of the West" really constitute an independent power, whether as a collective posture in response to American unreliability or as a genuine competitor on the economic, military and geopolitical planes? Second, would their political establishments, so imbricated with American empire, even want to if they could? A third, more parochial, question is how the UK would fit into any new structure or narrative. 

The middle powers aren't going to gang up on the USA, or cut substantive deals with China and Russia. All they really want is a more palatable narrative in which their political classes aren't humiliated in public by the buffoonish head of a New York crime family. There will be much talk of realism and pragmatism, plenty of acceding to American demands dressed as compromise, and permanently clenched teeth behind fixed smiles until the Trump regime is deposed. Though the preferences of the middle powers mean nothing to the average American voter, the Democrats will, like latterday Bourbons, take heart from this international disdain and imagine that the liberal order can be restored. But the truth is that those middle powers are passing judgment on the inadequacy of that order, or at least the narratives that supported it. What the likes of Carney seek is not a Washington Consensus 2.0 but a return to the consoling fictions of the Cold War, hence the emblematic role of the Russian basket-case in current European thinking.

The UK will remain relatively isolated, still supposedly navigating between the imagined Scylla and Charybdis of America and Europe, despite the fact that we went all-in with the former 80 years ago. As Keir Starmer has made clear, the establishment is unwilling to adopt as provocative a rhetorical stance towards the US as the other middle powers and will insist that the special relationship remains sound and will show its value any day now. We will continue to make TV programmes like Downton Abbey and The Crown, for domestic consumption and American export, that highlight our uncertain self-image, somewhere between a thoughtless aristocrat and a pompous butler. We will painfully inch towards the EU to redress the impact of Brexit, while the City of London will become ever more a satellite of New York, and UK public services and government itself will be ever more penetrated by American businesses as we "embrace AI". We will continue to be haunted by the lost futures signed away at Bretton Woods and Nassau, and in June 2016.