With the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House at the beginning of the year, the United States, Russia and China embarked on a new game with the world as a board and with the rules they want to follow or impose, on the basis that unilaterality and sacrosanct national security are above moral values and legality.
The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza or Sudan; the terms under which trade, tariffs and the exploitation of natural resources should be developed; the interpretation of freedoms and human rights, everything is subject to the will of actors who no longer feel linked to the international order that emerged after the Second World War.
Trump’s punch on the board
Trump arrived at the White House kicking the board of the already faltering international order. He dislocated and cut funding to humanitarian assistance and UN agencies, rewrote the rules of trade and military cooperation with his NATO partners, and has markets and countries fearful of his next occurrence.
This year it decided to attack vessels supposedly related to drug trafficking, murdering their crew members, promoted peace processes outside international conflict resolution mechanisms and even sanctioned the judges of the International Criminal Court, in charge of ensuring international legality.
“Internally and externally, Trump believes in the use of power and sees legal limits as fictitious things that should not bother him,” Richard Gowan, program director of Institutions and Global Affairs at the International Crisis Group, told Efe.
He even proposed turning Gaza into a river without Palestinians and sold as peace agreements the intermediations to solve almost a dozen conflicts, agreements that in the best of cases led to truces, but which he considered sufficient credentials to claim the Nobel Peace Prize, as if it were a prize for having done one’s duties well.
“I think Trump has an instinctive belief that the world should be run through great power cooperation and that countries should not interfere,” he adds, all motivated by a mix of personal interests and narcissism.
We recommend: Trump’s approval rating, according to the latest survey, dropped 8 points since the beginning of his term
Russia, from the Yalta consensus to chaos theory
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been defending for years the return to the consensus forged at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, in which it was decided to found the UN, but Europe was also divided into two sides.
Recovering the populist discourse against the colonial hegemony of the West, Putin tries to become leader of the Global South by arguing that it is necessary to create a multipolar order with many centers of power.
However, in recent times, as the war in Ukraine drags on, Kremlin analysts are betting on the already known as Chaos Theory, in which there are no universal principles of justice and human rights, but rather the militarization of society and the extreme defense of national security, explains Antón Barbashin, director of the Riddle Russia portal.
In this new world without rules, Russia can ally itself with completely different regimes, from democratic India to authoritarian North Korea and Burma. If your ally, Bashar al-Assad, is overthrown in Syria, you grant him asylum and the next day you start negotiations with the new authorities.
In this sense, the title of a report presented in September by the Valdai Debate Club, in which Putin participates every year, was “Doctor Chaos or how to stop being afraid and embrace global disorder.”
According to this theory, ethics no longer govern behavior in the international arena, so the defense of national interests justifies any action, including the bombing of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. In this new world disorder, the Army is key, which is why war is normalized as an instrument of foreign policy and international institutions do not play any role in the settlement of conflicts.
“I think what Russia really wants is for the United States to once again recognize it as its equal,” Gowan said.
China, a cautious giant that sells confidence
With its traditional pragmatism, Beijing has adopted the saying that “a troubled river is a fishermen’s gain” and, in the face of the turbulent world stage, it is trying to position itself as a responsible power and reliable partner who is not fond of rudder twists.
Calls for dialogue, cooperation “for a shared future for all humanity” and a commitment to multilateralism are the pillars of the Chinese strategy to project an image of stability that, however, runs into Western suspicion over trade imbalances and technological rivalry.
This mistrust is also due to the game of ambiguity that Chinese diplomacy practices in areas such as the war in Ukraine, on which Beijing defends that it maintained a constructive stance while turning a deaf ear to international requests that it use its proximity to Moscow to end the crisis.
This alliance, like those it maintains with Iran, Venezuela or Cuba, does not prevent China – despite repeated trade frictions – from relating to Europe, which it considers an indispensable trading partner that can balance the multilateral balance against the attacks of the United States.
The always complicated relationship with Washington over Taiwan and the security of the Indo-Pacific escalated due to the trade war, currently in a truce phase.
Unlike what happened during Trump’s first term, this new trade war has not taken China by surprise, which in recent years has pursued technological self-sufficiency and which, in addition to equaling the successive volleys of tariffs, has used its dominance over rare earths as its main negotiating asset.
“I think the Chinese are trying to look like the adults in the room. I think they don’t have to do much to benefit from the United States’ withdrawal from international leadership. They just have to stay where they are and say we still want to follow the rules,” Gowan said.
With information from EFE
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