This article is written by yours truly. I'm a historian by study and have been thinking more and more about civilizational politics. I'm willing to bet this is going to be a big mover of geopolitics in the next decade onward.
With the ongoing 'rise of the rest,' we're living in a time of great narrative-building by rising powers who want a seat at the table. Although I'm not a subscriber to the 'clash of civilizations' thesis by Huntington at all, I do think that civilizational narratives are potent justifications for spheres of influence. They are so malleable and vague, thus making them valuable chips for geopolitics.
With globalization as we knew it waning, there have been efforts to repackage the nation-state order into looser blocs justified by culture. Many people take liberal universalism for granted, but I believe cultural particularism could potentially become the dominant form of international relations. Alliances are already forming on these grounds. It's arguably the single biggest obstacle to Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis.
In this piece, I first open with some background on 'civilizational theories of history' and why they were initially a fad. I then profile four states who are now leveraging such narratives to project power abroad.
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Agree but I’ve been very confused with global affairs since COVID. It seems like more countries are making stupid mistakes. I see three policy failures driving the world now.
Wtf is Russia doing. I don’t expect the Russian people to exists in a generation. They’ve spent their traditional army. Now it sounds like their spending their accountants by either getting them to flee or making them dead conscripts. Neoliberal is a dirty word but I don’t understand why they never did that. Ally with the west. Seek commercial benefit. Grow your economy. Kamil does a lot of smart threads and how they have a gangster economy that can’t get out of commodity selling because entrepreneurs need protections to build businesses. I just don’t understand Putins development of Russia and that goes far past anything related to this war. The war I relate to COVID because while Russia failed to reform the war is a huge unforced error that only accelerates the fall of Russia. I respect Russians so I don’t want their people to disappear.
Europe and energy. War magnified it but their policies seem stupid. Nothing against wanting renewables but their also closing nukes.
China and zero COVID. And China and moving to authoritarianism. They had a nice model. Basically for a few decades they realized they were backwards and just rode the US coattails to development. Sort of like a weak empire playing civilization that has a few advantages - high hbd value (Chinese outside of China are rich everywhere) and huge population. Maybe Trump triggered China I don’t know. But they had a good thing of sucking a little American cock and then ride a technological adoption curve into at approximately Japanese level wealth. Why did this break? From their side basically just don’t be too mean to Uiyghurs and perhaps even give up Taiwan. Then just let your population eventually dominate.
I know Americans have their cultural wars and it’s caused some bad things. But it’s nothing close to these monumental policy failures in the rest of the world. I feel like I’m watching three great civs killings themselves.
Japan/UK still seem like serious people. Japan restarted nukes. UK has tried to fix their problems but honestly their too tied to Europe because of geography so things like Brexxit just doesn’t work. They made a smart decision to want to be more US connected except it doesn’t work because of geography. Italy might still have serious people in charge.
WHAT! Just in the last few weeks there was a massive debt crisis as the govt decided to lower taxes and spend 200 billion pounds on subsidising energy prices. The entire British pension system nearly disintegrated as bond prices fell and needed intervention from the central bank! The Tories are considering selecting a 5th party leader in 6 years - Truss is now even more unpopular than Boris at his end. They're talking about the UK taking on the qualities of an emerging market. The UK is not run by serious people.
I also have an explanation for China.
China was hit by biowarfare in WW2 by the Japanese, causing somewhere between 100,000 and 400,000 Chinese deaths, perhaps more. The CCP claims they were targeted by US biowarfare in the Korean war, which the US denies. Independent investigations are mixed. The CCP certainly thinks that biowarfare was waged against them by the US, that's their official history.
Now consider that in 2019, there was a coronavirus outbreak near Wuhan lab, where the researchers within were studying coronaviruses. They were importing bats all the way from caves in Laos, where the nearest biological ancestor was found. Organizations like Daszak's EcoHealth were asking for money from the US to insert furin cleavage sites in bat coronaviruses. Lo and behold, COVID then emerges with a furin cleavage site. No concrete biological ancestor has been found.
Also in 2018-2019, China had been hit unusually hard by African Swine Flu, costing them about 0.8% of GDP that year. It would seem to be an unusual run of bad luck. What if the Chinese think that the US is back to their old tricks, using bioweapons against them? There was a dodgy US-funded NGO nearby and the US contingent in the 2019 International Military Games (held in Wuhan of course) did unusually poorly, falling sick. Chinese officials have alleged that COVID came from elsewhere, that the US was somehow involved. But they haven't really blamed the US, put their full blame on America, it's as though they're waiting for something.
Now China coped very well with the first two rounds of COVID, squelching it with massive state power and lockdowns. The US and the rest of the West panicked and flailed around like a headless chicken for a year and a half until the vaccines came out. Our lockdowns were not effective in squelching the virus like the Chinese ones were. The US has had over 3000 deaths per million to China's 4. Even the Chinese can't possibly fake three orders of magnitude difference in efficiency.
Of course, the Chinese have since struggled more with lockdowns under Omicron. Omicron and new subvariants are more infectious than before. I think they're maintaining their defences as they prepare a biological counterattack against the US. Imagine a new disease starts circulating in America, highly infectious and fairly lethal.
This time, China will have warning of the disease since they'll be initiating it. It'll start overseas so they can close borders early (and it's completely in character for them to do so, given the costly signalling they've already made). They've got the strongest lockdown capabilities on the planet all set up and initiated. The West is divided over masks and vaccines, they desperately won't want to lockdown again.
At the same time, China's new nuclear forces will come online: the new ICBM fields that were started in March 2021 and the new ballistic missile subs scheduled for 2024-5, along with their stealth bomber. When the West is distracted, sick and exhausted, the Chinese will invade Taiwan, secured against our nuclear forces by MAD (right now my belief is that much of China's forces could be taken out or fail to reach the US, they don't have quite enough warheads to be really devastating).
TLDR; the age of biowarfare has begun and China is moving to capitalize on it. They think we bio-attacked them, they're concealing this knowledge while they prepare a counterblow. Sometime within the next year or so they'll release a new disease, sit comfy behind their lockdown shield, let it ravage us and then claim world hegemony in our moment of weakness.
Do we have remind me bot here?
I'll happily bet against a Chinese bioweapon release in the next year.
That's a good idea, you should put it in the Out of the Frying Pan thread.
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