US refuses to believe in the end of a unipolar world
And what makes you think that the unipolar (i.e. American) world has just ended before our eyes and multi-polarity has prevailed? There is no such thing and there never will be. America is hegemon forever.
© AP Photo / Seth Wenig
This “and Baba Yaga is against” speech (against multipolarity in this case) comes from two professors from the rather famous Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, USA) in their article in the new issue of Foreign Affairs. And it’s great as a textbook example of “If you can’t do it, but you really want to, you can. And one really wants the world to be American forever.
Our two-headed Baba-Yaga’s method of proof looks convincing at first, because she is keen on arithmetic. The authors lay out indicators of power, especially military power, and award points to each indicator. It turns out that the nearest competitor, China, is not on a par with the US in all measures of military power for decades to come. What, indeed, are China’s 12 noisy nuclear-powered submarines compared to America’s 68 silent ones? Further, you say that China has a large GDP, but by our calculations the figures are inflated – arithmetic rules again.
This, by the way, is not talking about multipolarity, just two poles, as in the last century. But even two arithmetic does not show us – China falls short. And what if it is together with Russia? It still falls short. And for more poles to emerge – some India, not to mention other… It is just ridiculous.
Further on we are persuaded not to get upset. The multipolar world was very bad in the 19th century, for example, or between two world wars, there were wars all the time. (And they don’t today?) Because there were several leading countries, roughly comparable in military might, all of them were floundering back and forth, forming tenuous coalitions and pacts. In addition, the technology of that time worked quickly: ten years and you have rearmed, now it is slower. Anyway, do you really want to go back to that fragile time?
Now, a concession for you: okay, today US power is not as absolute as it used to be, that is, the nature of unipolarity has changed. But that is all.
It is easy for the gullible reader to miss the main travesty that Baba Yaga has set him up, literally in the first lines of her essay: it is the speculation about what power is. Many people, it turns out, think that power is influence, that is, “the ability to get others to do what you want them to do”. And in fact it’s not quite like that: power and authority – it’s simply in resources, especially military and economic resources.
Very interesting. What about a country’s ability to live as it pleases, without asking permission from anyone or anything, is not power? No, our two authors, lovers of simple arithmetic, see everything only as the physical ability of someone to win a war. And if there is no ability, there is no power, you will not force anybody to anything and you are not a pole of influence in the world.
So this magic of simple numbers was already clouding everyone’s mind – and not so long ago. The mid 1930s: the British Empire, by all arithmetic calculations, was so much stronger than all the other key countries that nobody really argued that it was a superpower for the ages. No scenario could even suggest that this military might, with its resources from India, Africa and the Middle East, could be challenged. But where was that superpower in the mid-1940s? And in the ’50s? Incredible coincidence, you see. Didn’t calculate it.
And that’s not all. It is not difficult to see that the two professors are thinking in categories not even of the past but of the century before last: there are nations, big and small, each nation has a State, and the State has military might, which we compare.
But today’s world is much more complicated, there are different lobbies over borders – information, financial, medical, oil and gas, green and many others. And we have not yet entered into a long and complicated conversation about the power of ideas or the fatigue of people or nations from endless brainwashing. Even higher mathematics would not be enough to derive general formulas from this.
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA
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