On dominance and slightly less dominance – Rana Mitter in TLS:

‘The Munich Security Conference in February 2020 was a nervous place. Bottles of hand gel everywhere reminded people of a new and mysterious illness only a few hundred miles away in Italy. But the overall theme was something else: “Westlessness”. As puns go, it wasn’t bad. And its overall sense, that the US-led western world no longer enjoyed the global dominance that had marked the previous thirty years since the end of the Cold War, seemed to fit the zeitgeist. Four years on the term and its meaning are still finding a place in political discussion: there is a wider consensus that the Global South (and China in particular) is rising, but less consensus as to what the new world will actually look like.’

(…)

‘Evolution, not revolution, is the prediction for the world order.
The book is arranged thematically, laying out compelling examples of how “Westlessness” can be detected in the wild. One central theme is geoeconomics. Although the US still accounts for some 25 per cent of the world’s GDP (compared to China at 18.6 per cent), the story becomes different when that GDP is based on purchasing power parity (PPP), which compares countries’ GDP by adjusting for their different currencies. By this measure, in 1980 the US accounted for 21 per cent of the world’s GDP, a figure that had shrunk to 15 per cent by 2023. Figures from the International Monetary Fund now put China at just over 19 per cent by this measure, making it the world’s largest economy. Yet Puri points out that China’s economic rise should not just be treated as a story about the relative decline of the US. Instead he argues that a multipolar system, of the kind that is emerging, does not require “many powers of an equal size: all it requires is three or more countries to have significant power”.’

(…)

‘With western populations also ageing and failing to replenish, by 2050 half of the world’s population growth is likely to come from just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania. The rise of these actors will create new economies and middle classes, with different types of mass consumer demand.’

(…)

‘The two most notable factors that spring to mind are a serious military conflict and the effects of rapid climate change. Puri does, to be fair, address both: he points out that China is establishing more naval bases around the world, and that countries in the Global South continue to chide the West for its failure to take adequate responsibility for financing the necessary green transition. But it is worth ringing the alarm bells even more loudly. While a confrontation between the US and China seems less likely than a continuation of the current grinding distrust between the two, a conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea is not impossible, and it would unleash a humanitarian and economic crisis of global significance.’

(…)

‘In other words, while Puri’s argument is a welcome reminder that not every change must be apocalyptic or catastrophic, we cannot rule out such scenarios. And certainly the past decade has shown how low-probability, high-risk scenarios can come to shape the globe in unexpected ways.’

Read the article here.

The Apocalypse is always a possibility but it’s not a given. A relief,

And if Iran can be deterred from all-out war with Israel, China and the US must be able to deter each other, for the foreseeable future at least.

Also, it’s demography, stupid.

I quote once again: ‘With western populations also ageing and failing to replenish, by 2050 half of the world’s population growth is likely to come from just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Tanzania.’

Most if not all the border security plans are jokes. Painful, immoral and expensive jokes. Deadly jokes.