The crash course of history and the new shaping multipolar world order

BY: Muhammad Yasir

Whenever we look at the pages of history, we see that nations rise on the global fronts, up and up, just out of some old debris. They rule the world, dominate in norms and cultures, economic and financial systems, and they again fall. The only thing that remains behind in the course of history is how they served their people. History has proven that no great power has long been able to maintain its hegemony on the face of Earth. Eventually, the time comes when they have to face threats to their authoritarian power. Either they were British, or the Ottomans or the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, they all faced threats.

The revolutions we saw on the European plains in the 18th and 19th centuries were the segment of one general movement. The heart of this great movement was a revolutionary attack against the feudal system, which restricted only to the propertied or elite class, i.e., capitalism actually. And it wasn't the French Revolution that changed the course of history and time, but the machine, from where the new social dynamics emerged, later on, a new world order also.

It is important to note that capitalism was not the sole product of those revolutions, but the counter to dismantle the anti-feudal revolution that might have created space for the people's inherent rights, but this general movement couldn't step forward than a new ascending stage for humans hard struggle from savagery to capitalism, which is now in imperialism form in different parts of the world.

Sitting in Paris, in 1919, Woodrow Wilson (US), Lloyd George (Britain), and Georges Clemenceau (France), together controlled the world, determined what countries would exist and which would not, what new countries would be created, what their boundaries would be, who would rule them, and how the Middle East and other parts of the world would be divided, which would ultimately turn into a war zone between different ethnicities. They also decided on military intervention in Russia and economic concessions to be extracted from China. A hundred years later, no small group of statesmen will be able to exercise comparable power; to the extent that the group does, it will not consist of three Westerners but leaders of the core states of the world's seven or eight major powers.

By the end of the Second World War, the two superpowers of Europe, Britain and France, became the part of history, and the two new powers, the US and Soviet Union, Russia, emerged on the face of Earth.

The surprising end of the Cold war brought a shift in power poles and a uni-polar world with the US as a sole super-power emerged at the screens of global geo- political landscapes. The preachers of the liberal school of thought celebrated it as their win. The hegemony of US did go unchallenged for over several decades and the International system practically swung on the dictations of the US-led western bloc. Rest of the world, particularly the smaller Asian and Middle Eastern countries had to mend their policies in compliance to the norms and regulations of the US-led liberal world order.

In the year 1979, where at one end we were seeing the fall of the US-backed Shah's regime, on the other, the US’s greater plan was at rise in the mountains of Tora Bora (Afghanistan), dismantling the Soviets' expansions, leading to never-ending rifts between the shared ethnicities, as in the words of Samuel P. Huntington: "miles of Indian territory was divided, setting the stage for multiple subsequent wars." The British wanted to use Afghanistan as a buffer state in the defense of British India from the Russian expansions, and the pages of history are witness that the imperial powers later on used Afghanistan as a buffer state against the Soviet Union, Russia, in 1979, which ultimately resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia.

The hegemony of the US did go unchallenged for several decades, the rich and powerful countries attempted to conquer and dismantle poor and more traditional countries. But the gradually changing global power dynamics, indicated by the rise of several regional powers like China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, etc., and the resurgence of Russia and Iran as key powers in their respective regions, show the signs of the transition of the global order from a unipolar into a multipolar world, weakening the very power of the US-led Western bloc in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, threatening the Western dominance.

“A civilization can die. And the end can be brutal, things can happen much more quickly than we think, Europe is mortal, it can really die.” —French President Emmanuel Macron.

In all this scenario, when the US was busy in wars in the Middle East, African, and Asian countries, out of all these powers, China rose on the map as a full-fledged economic and maritime power, shaping the new world order, becoming the only country that keeps the tendencies of potential hegemon, threatening the US interest in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

In the last number of years, since 1979, when the US normalized relations with China, the United States has been in constant war with Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and many other countries. Expert economists estimate that the US has spent $2 trillion merely on an Afghan war. China has not been at war with anybody since 1979, and they have that same $2 trillion to spend on that multilateral project, i.e., OBOR, spreading across Asia, Africa, Europe, and West Asia, lifting around 800 million people out of poverty in the last 40 years.

The global shift is under process; countries are more and more being aligned with the China-led Eastern bloc from the floors of BRICS and SCO. The US has never been this isolated as it is today now in the Middle-East, Africa and Asia. The triad of Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing has exposed the military and naval vulnerability of the US-led Western bloc in the Red Sea. The sanctions and the quagmire that the military-industrial complex has spread over the number of nations since 1945 have backfired today, leaving the US with nothing but wars in different regions of the world for a long run. The covert colonial grip is getting looser and looser, as Chad has joined Niger in demanding the withdrawal of US troops after Mali, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria has put an end to the French colonial era. Washington is losing its foothold in Western Africa as these countries are replacing it with Russian troops. From 2001 to 2018, China loaned approximately $126 billion and invested about $43 billion in 2,300 smaller and bigger projects. About 1,200 firms, ports, industries, hydropower plants, railways, and dams are under development in different African countries.

Not just in Africa, but also in South Asia, where Moscow is trying to level up the heaps of the East and South China Sea, securing their global trading routes as Beijing is also constantly showing its dominance over the East and South China Sea in a potential conflict between China and the US over the Taiwan dispute. The aftershocks of the Ukraine war can be seen in different parts of the world, especially in the European Union, where the inflation rate has increased from 0.3% to 2.6% due to the disruption of Russian oil. The two backbones of the European Union, Germany and France’s regimes, have also fallen. The petrodollar agreement hasn’t been revised yet, and countries are trading in their local currencies, trying to decrease dependence on the dollar, leaking the US’s dominance over the global financial systems.

The US’s uni-polarity is being threatened and fighting for its existence, becoming a regional power in the new world order. As the US is losing its foothold in different regions, waging war on a number of countries by the US can be seen. The Middle East is burning, Gaza is being bombed, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Taiwan, and Ukraine are on the verge of total collapse. US-backed separatist movements are knocking at the doors, regimes are being overthrown, leaving them with an uncertain future, and setting the stage to contain new emerging powers.

This is what the new world is shaping out of the old one. This present contemporary world has become the ashes for the new one. The time in which we are living and seeing major political shifts is nothing but the ashes of the 1980s era we saw on the global geopolitical landscapes. Countries and financial systems are at the cusp of history today. The countries today have entered an era of cardinal changes and trials, not just for companies and industries, but for entire countries, their people, and their regions. And there's no intermediate state; either a country is sovereign today, or it's a colony. No matter what the colonies are called, if they aren't able to make sovereign decisions, it’s a colony. It has no credibility or any historical prospect.

And only a strong, stable, and sovereign country will be able to pass through this and create space for itself in this new global arena.