From a ‘rules-based order’ to the new wild, wild West

The United States has 34 crore people (the size of the combined population of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar). Americans represent 4 per cent of the global population and they are the biggest beneficiaries of what the US calls the ‘rules-based order’.

This order, imposed by the US and its European allies after World War II, seeks global cooperation through institutions like the United Nations and also the World Trade Organization (WTO). Americans refer to their president, unironically, as the ‘leader of the free world’.

America’s per capita income is almost $90,000 according to one of the institutions of the ‘rules-based order’, the International Monetary Fund. India’s per-person income is less than 1/30th of that, at under $3,000. The US economy has surged over the last few decades because American companies have sent their products (like planes, phones and computers) and services (like social media platforms) across the world, which they dominate.

Even with the recent downward revision in their jobs numbers, the US is running at what is referred to as ‘full employment’ — meaning, unemployment is only around 4 per cent, which is optimal. This means that from the standpoint of income and jobs, the US is in a very good place, particularly when compared to nations like India, where poverty and joblessness — particularly the absence of regular, salaried employment — are serious problems.

And yet the US is unhappy with the world, which it says is ‘ripping it off’, in the words of the current US president.

Trump has reversed this theft, as he sees it, by making it more difficult for countries to export their products into the US. America is India’s largest export market, and a 25 per cent tariff on our goods will weaken demand, hurting our exporters. There is no getting around that fact. If the tariffs remain, our interests will be harmed, no matter who ultimately pays the tariff — the American importer or the American consumer.

There is no meaningful debate inside the US democracy on whether the actions taken by President Trump harm the global rules-based order or the US’ friends and allies, to say nothing of poorer nations. What the US has done is tear up the system where tariffs existed but were used under a system of WTO rules and regulations, with the possibility of appeals against decisions. The US has disregarded those and weakened the system that for decades has served it well. In doing so, it is damaging the rest of the world.

There is a second disregarding of the rules-based order by the US, and that is its enabling of the genocide in Gaza.

Ever eager to free the world from tyranny and despotism through war, the US has protected Israel while it massacres and starves thousands of Palestinians and wages illegal war on Iran. The majority of the world’s nations have called for an end to the horror in Gaza through their votes in the United Nations General Assembly, but the US has used its veto to support the continuation of this 21^st-century holocaust.

Like in the matter of the tariffs, the US is telling the world by its political actions that it is leaving the rules-based order and prefers to use its strength to extract, and even extort, what it can from the world.

There are a few things that we can take away from these actions. One is that America has now set a precedent. The next nation that becomes powerful will have an example of how to behave with weaker nations, and will know that ‘might is right’ is regarded as being as legitimate as the rules-based order.

There is today quite weak resistance to this from the Global South, and the fissures inside BRICS, which we need not go into here, have helped the American bullying.

The second is that we in India should seriously consider what the benefit of our recent ‘personalised’ style of diplomacy has been. We have thrown away decades of institutional consensus on matters like Palestine for a hug with the Israeli leader. All the honours we have bestowed on the US president, whether in rallies here or there — indeed, even encouraging Indian-Americans to vote for him — have not produced any benefit or even mercy. Emperors do not listen to anything other than the voice inside their head, but this must be said nonetheless.

The last thing that we should consider is what is agitating the US at this point in time. Given the wealth and power it has and its comfortable economic situation, why is it that the US is going through this spell of madness?

The answer is to be found in the rise of the Global South and, in particular, in the rise of China. If things continue as they have been for the last 30 years, in a decade or two, the US will be — for the first time in more than a century — not the largest economy in the world. This is unacceptable to what is called ’the West’. For it will then not be able to continue doing what it has done for centuries in North America, in Australia, in South Africa, or what it is doing today in Palestine.

As the rest of the world grows equal to the West, its ability to control and dominate is slipping. It has therefore given up on the rules-based order and is resorting to elevating and exercising pure might.

This is a most dangerous time for the world and, in particular, for those countries which need a few more decades of stability and global cooperation to pull themselves out of poverty.

Views are personal

More of Aakar Patel's writing may be read here.