Friends,
The US Empire is in decline. But our
politicians with blinders on continue to just whistle as they go through the
graveyard, McCoy points out our government has been wasting trillions of
tax dollars on warmongering, while China has focused on development projects in
Asia and Africa. This is a recipe for a US collapse. Kagiso, Max
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CounterPunch.org - https://www.counterpunch.org To Govern the Globe:
Washington’s World Order and Catastrophic Climate Change
By Alfred W. McCoy on Nov. 19, 2021
When the leaders of more
than 100 nations gathered in Glasgow for the U.N. climate
conference last week, there was much discussion about the disastrous effect of
climate change on the global environment. There was, however, little awareness
of its likely political impact on the current world order that made such an international
gathering possible.
World orders are deeply rooted
global systems that structure relations among nations and the conditions of
life for their peoples. For the past 600 years, as I’ve argued in my new
book To Govern the Globe, it’s taken catastrophic events
like war or plague to overturn such entrenched ways of life. But within a
decade, climate change will already be wreaking a kind of cumulative
devastation likely to surpass previous catastrophes, creating the perfect
conditions for the eclipse of Washington’s liberal world order and the rise of
Beijing’s decidedly illiberal one. In this sweeping imperial transition, global
warming will undoubtedly be the catalyst for a witch’s brew of change
guaranteed to erode both America’s world system and its once unchallenged
hegemony (along with the military force that’s been behind it all these years).
By
charting the course of climate change, it’s possible to draw a political road
map for the rest of this tempestuous century — from the end of American global
hegemony around 2030, through Beijing’s brief role as world leader (until
perhaps 2050), all the way to this century’s closing decades of unparalleled
environmental crisis. Those decades, in turn, may yet produce a new kind of
world order focused, however late, on mitigating a global disaster of almost
unimaginable power.
The Bipartisan Nature of U.S.
Decline
America’s decline started at
home as a distinctly bipartisan affair. After all, Washington wasted two
decades in an extravagant fashion fighting costly conflicts in
distant lands, in part to secure the Middle East’s oil at a time when that fuel
was already destined to join cordwood and coal in the dustbin of history
(though not faintly soon enough). Beijing, in contrast, used those same years
to build industries that would make it the world’s workshop.
In 2001, in a major
miscalculation, Washington admitted Beijing to the World Trade Organization,
bizarrely confident that a compliant China would somehow join the world economy
without challenging American global power. “Across the ideological spectrum, we
in the U.S. foreign policy community,” wrote two former members of the Obama administration,
“shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold
China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.”
A bit more bluntly, foreign
policy expert John Mearsheimer recently concluded that “both Democratic and Republican
administrations… promoted investment in China and welcomed the country into the
global trading system, thinking it would become a peace-loving democracy and a
responsible stakeholder in a U.S.-led international order.”
In the 15 years since then,
Beijing’s exports to the U.S. grew nearly fivefold to $462 billion annually. By
2014, its foreign currency reserves had surged from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4
trillion — a vast hoard of cash it used to build a modern military and win
allies across Eurasia and Africa. Meanwhile, Washington was wasting more
than $8 trillion on profitless wars in the Greater Middle
East and Africa in lieu of spending such funds domestically on infrastructure,
innovation, or education — a time-tested formula for imperial decline.
Then a Pentagon team assessing
the war in Afghanistan interviewed Jeffrey Eggers, a former White House
staffer and Navy SEAL veteran, he asked rhetorically: “What did we get for this
$1 trillion effort? Was it worth a trillion? After the killing of Osama bin
Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave considering
how much we have spent on Afghanistan.” (And keep in mind that the best
estimate now is that the true cost to America of that lost war alone was $2.3 trillion.) Consider it an imperial lesson of the first
order that the most
extravagantly funded military on Earth has not won a war since the
start of the twenty-first century.
Donald Trump’s presidency
brought a growing realization, at home and abroad, that Washington’s world
leadership was ending far sooner than anyone had imagined. For four years,
Trump attacked long-standing U.S. alliances, while making an obvious effort to
dismiss or demolish the international organizations that had been the hallmark
of Washington’s world system. To top that off, he denounced a fair American
election as “fraudulent” and sparked a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol, functionally
making a mockery of America’s long history of promoting the idea of democracy
to legitimate its global leadership (even as it overthrew unfriendly
democratic governments in distant lands via covert interventions).
In that riot’s aftermath, most
of the Republican Party has embraced Trump’s demagoguery about electoral fraud as
an article of faith. As it happens, no nation can exercise global leadership if
one of its ruling parties descends into persistent irrationality, something
Britain’s Conservative Party demonstrated all too clearly during that country’s
imperial decline in the 1950s.
After his inauguration last
January, Joe Biden proclaimed that “America is back” and promised to revive its
version of liberal international leadership. Mindful of Trump’s 
battering of NATO (and that he, or
someone like him, could take the White House in 2024), European leaders,
however, continued to make plans for their own common defense without the
U.S. “We aren’t in the old status quo,” commented one French diplomat, “where we can pretend
that the Donald Trump presidency never existed and the world was the same as
four years ago.” Add in Biden’s humiliating retreat from Afghanistan as Taliban
guerrillas, wearing tennis sneakers and equipped with aging Soviet rifles,
crushed an Afghan military armed with billions of dollars in U.S. gear, entering Kabul
without a fight. After that dismal defeat, it was clear America’s decline had
become a bipartisan affair.
Global
leadership lost is not readily recovered, particularly when a rival power is
prepared to fill the void. As Washington’s strategic position weakens, China
has been pressing to dominate Eurasia, home to 70% of the world’s population
and productivity, and so build a new Beijing-centric global order. Should
China’s relentless advance continue, there will be serious consequences for the
world as we know it.
Of course,
the current order is, to say the least, imperfect. While using its unprecedented
power to promote a liberal international system based on human rights and
inviolable sovereignty, Washington simultaneously violated those same
principles all too often in pursuit of its national self-interest — a
disconcerting duality between power and principle that has afflicted every
global order since the sixteenth century.
As the
first hegemon that didn’t participate in any way in the fitful, painful process
of forging just such a liberal world order through six centuries of slavery,
slaughter, and colonial conquest, China’s rise could ultimately threaten the
current system’s better half — its core principles of universal human rights
and secure state sovereignty.
The Coming of Climate Change
Beyond
Washington’s strategic failings, there was another far more fundamental force
already at work eroding its global power. After seven decades of the profligate
kind of fossil-fuel consumption that became synonymous with the U.S. world
system, climate change is now profoundly disrupting the whole human community.
As of 2019, following years of
bipartisan evasions and compromises (along with partisan Republican denials of
the very reality of climate change), the U.S. still reliedon fossil fuels for 80% of its total energy;
renewables, only 20%. The situation was even worse in China, which depended on fossil fuels for 86% of its power and
renewable sources for only about 14%. As energy expert Vaclav Smil explained, the underlying global problem was 150 years
of embedded inertia that made the “production, delivery, and consumption of
fossil fuels… the world’s most extensive, and the most expensive, web of
energy-intensive infrastructures.”
If there is ever to be a true
transition beyond fossil fuels, the world’s two largest economies will have to
play a determinative role in it. In the meantime, the picture is anything but
cheery. Global carbon dioxide emissions rose by a staggering 50% from 22.2 gigatons
in 1997 to a peak of 33.3 gigatons in 2019 and, despite a brief drop at the
height of the Covid-19 pandemic, are still rising. Significantly, China accounted for 30% of the world’s total in that year, and the
U.S. nearly 14% — for a combined 44% share of all global greenhouse gasses.
At the 2019 Madrid climate
conference, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that, if current emissions continue, global
warming will reach as high as 3.9° Celsius by century’s end, with
“catastrophic” consequences for all life on the planet. And at Glasgow two weeks
ago, he renewed this warning, saying: “We are digging our own
graves… Sea-level rise is double the rate it was 30 years ago. Oceans are
hotter than ever — and getting warmer faster. Parts of the Amazon
rainforest now emit more carbon than they absorb… We are still careening
towards climate catastrophe.”
In the 600 years since the age
of exploration first brought the continents into close contact, 90 empires have come and gone. But there have been
just three new world orders, each of which survived until it suffered some
version of cataclysmic mass death. After the bubonic plague, also known as the
Black Death, wiped out an estimated 60% of medieval Europe’s population, the
Portuguese and then Spanish empires expanded to form the first of those world
orders, which continued for three centuries until 1805.
The
devastation of the Napoleonic wars then launched the succeeding British
imperial system, which survived a full century until 1914. Similarly,
Washington’s hegemony, along with its current world order, arose from the
devastating destruction of World War II. Now, climate change is unleashing
cataclysmic environmental changes that could soon enough overshadow such past
catastrophes, while damaging or destroying the global order that has pervaded
the planet for the past 70 years.
As wildfires worsen, ocean
storms intensify, megadroughts spread, flooding increases drastically, and the
seas rise precipitously, many millions of the world’s poor will be uprooted
from their precarious perches along seashores, flood plains, and desert
fringes. Recall for a moment that the arrival between 2016 and 2018 of just two
million refugees at the borders of the United States and the European Union
unleashed a surge of populist demagoguery, which led to Britain’s Brexit,
Europe’s increasing ultranationalism, and Donald Trump’s election. Now, try to
imagine what kind of a world of political upheaval lies in a future in which
climate change generates anywhere from 200 million to 1.2 billion refugees by mid-century.
As at least a million refugees start to crowd America’s southern
border every year, while storms, fires, and floods batter coasts and
countryside, the U.S. is almost certain to retreat from the world to cope with
growing domestic crises. Include in that the inability of its two political
parties to agree on just about anything (other than spending yet more money on
the Pentagon). Similar and simultaneous pressures worldwide will certainly
cripple the international cooperation that has long been at the core of
Washington’s world order.
China’s Short Reign as Global
Hegemon
So, when might shifting
geopolitics and climate cataclysm converge to fully cripple Washington’s
current world order? Beijing plans to complete the technological transformation
of its own economy and much of its massive trans-Eurasian infrastructure, the
Belt and Road Project, by 2027. That projected date complements a prediction by the U.S. National Intelligence Council
that “China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of
the United States a few years before 2030.”
By then, according to projections from the accounting firm PwC, China’s
gross domestic product will have grown to $38 trillion — more than 50% larger
than a projected $24 trillion for the American one. Similarly, China’s
military, already the world’s second largest, should by then be dominant in
Asia. Already, as the New York Times reported in 2019, “in 18 of the last 18 Pentagon war
games involving China in the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. lost.” As China pushes its
maritime frontier farther into the Pacific, Washington may well be faced with a
difficult choice — either abandon its old ally Taiwan or fight a war it could
well lose.
Weighing
Beijing’s global future, it seems safe to assume that, minimally, China will
gain enough strength to weaken Washington’s global grip and is likely to become
the preeminent world power around 2030. Count on one thing, though: the
accelerating pace of climate change will almost certainly curtail China’s
hegemony within two or three decades.
As early as 2017, scientists at
the nonprofit Climate Central reported that, by 2060 or 2070, rising seas and storm
surges could flood areas inhabited by 275 million people worldwide and,
suggests corroborating research, Shanghai is “the most vulnerable major city in
the world to serious flooding.” According to that group’s scientists, 17.5
million people are likely to be displaced there as most of the city “could
eventually be submerged in water, including much of the downtown area.”
Advancing the date of this
disaster by at least a decade, a report in the journal Nature
Communications found that 150 million people worldwide are now living
on land that will be below the high-tide line by 2050 and that rising waters
will “threaten to consume the heart” of Shanghai by then, crippling one of
China’s main economic engines. Dredged from sea and swamp in the fifteenth
century, much of that city is likely to return to the waters from whence it
came, possibly as early as three decades from now.
Meanwhile, increasing
temperatures are expected to devastate the North China Plain, a prime
agricultural region between Beijing and Shanghai currently inhabited by 400
million people. “This spot is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat
waves in the future,” according to Professor Elfatih Eltahir, a specialist
on hydrology and climate at MIT. Between 2070 and 2100, he
estimates, the region could face hundreds of periods of “extreme danger” when a
combination of heat and humidity will reach a “wet bulb temperature” (WBT) of
31° Celsius, and perhaps five lethal periods of 35° WBT — where a combination
of heat and high humidity prevents the evaporation of the very sweat that cools
the human body. After just six hours living in such a wet bulb temperature of
35° Celsius, a healthy person at rest will die.
If the “Chinese century” does
indeed start around 2030, barring remarkable advances in the
reduction of the use of fossil fuels on this planet, it’s likely to end
sometime around 2050 when its main financial center is flooded out and its
agricultural heartland begins to swelter in insufferable heat.
A New World Order?
Given that Washington’s world
system and Beijing’s emerging alternative show every sign of failing to limit
carbon emissions in significant enough ways, by mid-century the international
community will likely need a new form of global governance to contain the
damage.
After
2050, the world community will quite possibly face a growing contradiction,
even a head-on collision, between the foundational principles of the current
global order: national sovereignty and human rights. As long as nations have
the sovereign right to seal their borders, the world will have no way of
protecting the human rights of the hundreds of millions of future
climate-change refugees.
By then,
facing a spectacle of mass global suffering now almost unimaginable, the
community of nations might well agree on the need for a new form of global
governance. Such a supranational body or bodies would need sovereign authority
over three critical areas — emissions controls, refugee resettlement, and
environmental reconstruction. If the transition to renewable energy sources is
still not complete by 2050, then this international body might well compel
nations to curb emissions and adopt renewable energy. Whether under the
auspices of the U.N. or a successor organization, a high commissioner for
global refugees would need the authority to supersede state sovereignty in
order to require nations to help resettle such tidal flows of humanity. The
future equivalents of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank could
transfer resources from wealthy temperate countries to feed tropical
communities decimated by climate change.
Massive
programs like these would change the very idea of what constitutes a world
order from the diffuse, almost amorphous ethos of the past six centuries into a
concrete form of global governance. At present, no one can predict whether such
reforms will come soon enough to slow climate change or arrive too late to do
anything but manage the escalating damage of uncontrollable feedback loops.
One thing
is becoming quite clear, however. The environmental destruction in our future
will be so profound that anything less than the emergence of a new form of
global governance — one capable of protecting the planet and the human rights
of all its inhabitants — will mean that wars over water, land, and people are
likely to erupt across the planet amid climate chaos. Absent some truly
fundamental change in our global governance and in energy use, by mid-century
humanity will begin to face disasters of an almost unimaginable kind that will
make imperial orders of any sort something for the history books.
This essay was distributed
by TomDispatch.
Article printed from CounterPunch.org: https://www.counterpunch.org
URL to article: https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/19/to-govern-the-globe-washingtons-world-order-and-catastrophic-climate-change/
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"The master class
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The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
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