By Eric Vandenbroeck
and co-workers
The Urgent Issues That Preoccupy Much Of
The Developing World
For the past year, many
Western analysts have regarded the war in Ukraine as a turning point in
geopolitics, bringing together the United States and its NATO allies and a
broader liberal coalition to counter Russian aggression. In this view,
countries worldwide should naturally support the West in this defining contest
between democracy and autocracy.
Beyond the borders of
North America and Europe, however, the past 12 months have looked very
different. At the outset of the war, numerous countries in the global South
identified with neither the West nor Russia. Several dozen—including such large
democracies as India, Indonesia, and South Africa, as well as numerous other
countries in Africa—abstained from resolutions condemning Russia at the UN
General Assembly and in the UN Human Rights Council. Many have also been
reluctant to formally adopt the West’s economic sanctions against Russia while
respecting them. As the war has unfolded, some have sought to maintain
relations with Russia as much as with the West.
Moreover, in many
parts of the world, the most crucial issues of 2022 had little to do with the
war in Ukraine. Emerging from the havoc of the pandemic and confronted by
far-reaching challenges ranging from debt crises to a slowing world
economy to climate change, many developing countries have been alienated by
what they view as the self-absorption of the West, China, and Russia. For them,
the war in Ukraine is about the future of Europe, not the future of the world
order, and the war has become a distraction from the more pressing global
issues of our time.
Yet despite this
disillusionment, a coherent third way, a clear alternative to current
great-power rivalry, has yet to emerge. Instead, these countries have sought to
work with present realities, respecting Western sanctions on Russia, for
instance, in an international system that no longer inspires much faith in its
relevance to their security and economic concerns. In this sense, a year of war
in Ukraine has done less to redefine the world order than to set it further
adrift for many parts of the globe, raising new questions about how urgent
transnational challenges can be met.
Greater Rivalry, Diminished Power
A year of war in
Ukraine has weakened the world order in two critical ways. First, the Russian
invasion, combined with the continuing effects of the pandemic and the global
economic slowdown, diminished all the great powers in both power and prestige.
The diminution was most apparent for Russia itself: in the unanticipated course
of the war, the country’s increasing economic and political isolation, and the
acceleration of its decline. It was least evident in the United States, which
has managed to respond forcefully to the war without involving its forces or
causing serious escalation while at the same time strengthening Western unity
and staying focused on the main game in Asia.
Worries remain about
the United States being distracted by Ukraine from its roles elsewhere,
particularly in the Middle East and Africa. The precipitate withdrawal from
Afghanistan in 2021 also raised questions about U.S. staying power and
perseverance, especially now as it enters a new presidential electoral cycle.
Nor has its domestic politics permitted the United States to provide
constructive leadership to the international multilateral system. For Europe,
the war has limited its ability to play a broader global role, given its
preoccupation with European order for the foreseeable future, regardless of
whether the war ends in victory for either side or in a protracted frozen
conflict.
China, too, has been
taxed by the war. Because of its secondary effects on the world economy,
China’s energy and food imports, and China’s virtual alliance with Russia, the
war has limited Beijing’s influence abroad. Unlike other permanent members of
the UN Security Council, China has not played a meaningful political or
military role in the Ukraine crisis. Other middle powers outside Europe have
experienced similar effects. But in China’s case, two additional factors have
been at play. One was Beijing’s domestic preoccupations through much of the
year with its economic slowdown and its need to project a smooth buildup to the
20th Party Congress in October. The other was China’s zero-COVID policy, which
compounded its inward fixation. Together, these domestic
concerns reinforced the effects of China’s unproductive “Wolf Warrior”
diplomacy, which created an inability to find negotiated solutions to bilateral
disputes or to play a meaningful role in transnational issues such as climate
change and the developing-country debt crisis.
How China and the
other powers will respond to their straitened circumstances is still being
determined. Since the Party Congress, China has been attempting to restore
balance in important relationships with Australia, Europe, and the United
States. But Beijing’s domestic imperatives to reignite economic growth and to
control the social and political fallout of its COVID-19 policies are likely to
take precedence and limit meaningful shifts away from its recent assertive
actions in maritime Asia and its land border with India.
The second effect of
a year of the war is that the economic policies of major powers like China,
Europe, and the United States are now shaped by politics as much as by
economics. Today, in many cases, the security of supply and political interests
take priority over price considerations in global manufacturing and value
chains. Friend-shoring and onshoring are driven by political considerations
rather than economic responses to the changing situation. Although globalized
markets have limited the extent of decoupling between the United States and
China, they have yet to prevent strong efforts by both countries to reduce
mutual dependence in strategic sectors such as semiconductor manufacturing, AI,
energy, and rare-earth metals.
The response of
countries that have hitherto relied on their economic strength for global
influence has varied. Japan is now transitioning to more robust defense and
security policies better suited for today’s challenges, giving it a more
balanced stance emphasizing political and military power. Germany’s government
speaks of a Zeitenwende, or historic
turning point. And China, a global economic power militarily and politically
constrained in its neighborhood, has recalibrated the nature of its engagement
abroad and how it projects that engagement to its people and the world.
Meanwhile, Europe and many countries in the global South pay an economical
price for the West’s unprecedented sanctions against Moscow, and recession
looms in some of the world’s most important economies.
Alienated And Unaligned
As much as the war
has affected relations between the major powers, the effect of a weakening
world order is also profound on countries outside of the West. One year later,
these countries seek alternatives to the current order, but a clear third way
has yet to emerge, whether economically or politically. According to the
International Monetary Fund, a growing debt crisis has affected over 50
countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America since before the pandemic. This
limits the developing world’s ability to strike out on an independent economic
path. Indeed, most countries have respected the sanctions on Russia in
practice.
Politically, the
present situation also inhibits the emergence of a single or coherent third way
akin to the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War. A crucial difference is
that today, unlike in the Cold War, there is no bipolar order. For all the talk
of autocracies and democracies facing off against each other, economic
interdependence between China and the United States and the reality of a
globalized economy mean that the world does not have a clear two-part division
offering opportunities for traditional balancing. Instead, it is a world in
which great-power rivalry is not between two superpowers but among multiple
players. As a result, the multisided competition and great-power rivalry have
led many countries in the global South to be unaligned rather than non-aligned,
disassociated from the present order and seeking their independent solutions rather
than an alternative set of widely held approaches to global issues.
Alienated and
resentful, many developing countries see the war in Ukraine and the West’s
rivalry with China as distracting from urgent issues such as debt, climate
change, and the effects of the pandemic. Take South Asia. Three countries in
the region—Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—have been in talks with the IMF
for more than a year about adjustment packages to deal with their debt. And
over the last 18 months, five countries in the region—Afghanistan, Myanmar,
Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka—have also changed governments, not always
smoothly or constitutionally. Sri Lanka defaulted on its international debts in
April 2022. During the summer, one-fifth of Pakistan’s population was homeless
by floods inundating one-third of the country—a devastating consequence of
climate change. Neither international institutions, the West, nor its Chinese
and Russian rivals, have found or offered meaningful solutions to these
problems.
Great-power rivalry
complicates the task of addressing such issues. In dealing with Sri Lanka’s
debt, for instance, the West is naturally reluctant to pay for Sri Lanka to
settle accounts with China, the country’s largest creditor. For its part,
Beijing is waiting for the rest of the international community to act, worried
that if it moves to reschedule Sri Lanka’s debt, it will set a precedent for
other countries that have taken on significant loans in China’s $1 trillion
Belt and Road Initiative, many of which are only marginally more solvent than
Sri Lanka. Indeed, the situation in South Asia is paralleled in many other
parts of the developing world. Many countries now feel left to their devices
without a multilateral working system or international order. But this malaise
has yet to produce a coherent or organized response.
India’s Opportunity?
The war in Ukraine
and the growing rivalry between China and the United States have produced a
fluid situation for countries outside the United States and Europe. There are
new opportunities for more extensive and powerful middle powers in this
uncertain world. India, for example, can work with neighbors to build the
peaceful and prosperous periphery that its development demands. It can
participate in remaking the rules of the international system now underway,
particularly in new domains such as cyberspace. And it can reengage
economically with the dynamic economies of Asia, participating in global value
chains to further its transformation.
But many smaller
states are more vulnerable than ever. And the overall systemic risk is higher
than it has been for many decades. That heightened risk is less about the prospect
of a direct great-power conflict: as the first year of the war in Ukraine and
the aftermath of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August
have shown, the United States and other great powers are capable of avoiding
direct conflict among themselves. But their ability to contain local disputes
or even get their way in their neighborhoods has been constrained by their
rivalry and the demands of a globalized economy. It is also limited in Asia,
mainly because power in the region is much more evenly distributed than during
the Cold War or the subsequent unipolar moment of U.S. dominance.
With India chairing
the G-20 in 2023, New Delhi may be tempted to try to mediate between Ukraine
and Russia, though that seems unlikely to produce results for now. A more
fruitful way ahead would be for India to bring the concerns of the global South
to the forefront of the international agenda. For the time being, however, the
international system will likely continue to drift. Amid a prolonged war and continued
great-power rivalry, the coming year is unlikely to see more than incremental
progress in addressing the urgent issues that preoccupy much of the developing
world.
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