Coronavirus reveals the dread of a ‘non-polarʼ world | Financial Times 16/04/2020, 09*34

Coronavirus reveals the dread of a

‘non-polarʼ world
The two great powers cannot lead and there is no
persuasive coalition to replace them
April 1 2020

John Maynard Keynes at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Led by the US, the western powers mapped out
much of today's global economic order © Getty

It would be tasteless to crown the geopolitical winner of the coronavirus

pandemic. What a blessing, then, that there isnʼt one.

Not one global power has distinguished itself of late. From the US, there has
been no Bretton Woods or Desert Storm in this crisis: no herding of allies
into concerted action. Even if President Donald Trump had the inclination for
such work, he does not have the finesse.

The mistake is to bank on a change of president this November to restore

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Coronavirus reveals the dread of a ‘non-polarʼ world | Financial Times 16/04/2020, 09*34

Americaʼs old knack for leadership. The problem goes deeper than any one
man and touches on the countryʼs underlying dividedness.

The US can afford two squabbling parties. It cannot afford two different
accounts of the truth. The discrepant seriousness with which Red and Blue
America have taken the virus outbreak is not just a domestic problem. It
compromises Washingtonʼs ability to lead any other nation. For all his
diplomatic grounding, a President Joe Biden — the Democrat is polling well
against Mr Trump — would face the same constraint. A nationʼs leadership
abroad is not somehow removed from its internal coherence.

But then nor has this been the Chinese Moment either. Beijing has
squandered credibility through its lack of candour. International
recriminations as to the origins of the virus have only just begun.

As for Europe, its response to the pandemic now spans British vacillation
and Hungarian autocracy. It has thrown up no version of Gordon Brown (the
then UK prime minister) during the crash of 2008: no leader with the nous
and political grip to maximise their nationʼs middling clout. At EU-level, we
are back to the eternal question of whether “ever closer union” is to include
common public debt.

As its one service to us, then, the pandemic is exposing the true state of
global affairs in the early 21st century.

It is now plain enough that we no longer live in a unipolar world. But then nor
do we exactly live in the bipolar one of such loud and recent billing. When it
matters, the established power is too dysfunctional to lead but its rival lacks
the capacity or the trust to fully supplant it. Neither is there a persuasive
third power or coalition of countries.

Settle in, therefore, to what we must call the non-polar world. It might last a
while. No one nation is formidable enough to shepherd the global commons,
but at least two are too large for international institutions to direct. The

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Coronavirus reveals the dread of a ‘non-polarʼ world | Financial Times 16/04/2020, 09*34

resulting lack of control passes unnoticed most of the time. In a crisis, it

tells.

Eight years ago, the risk consultant Ian Bremmer anticipated this state of
affairs in his book, Every Nation for Itself. In a “G-Zero” world, he wrote, “no
single country or bloc of countries has the clout to impose a solution.” A lot
of globaloney weighs down the worldʼs nonfiction bookshelves, but it is
increasingly hard to deny his prescience.

With luck, one victim of the crisis will be all the lurid and premature talk of a
“second cold war”. The term attributes more structure to the world than it
really has. True enough, the US and China are mutually hostile — even more
so than before the pandemic.

But the point about the cold war is that it did not just pit two powers against
each other. It arranged much of the rest of the globe into more or less
coherent blocs. It gave shape to international relations for half a century.

Maybe this great planetary cleaving will happen again. For now, though, the
world is much more fragmented than that. It is not as if the US is curating
the westʼs antivirus response while China takes the lead in its own equally
cohesive camp. Instead we see national strategies, arrived at nationally.
Even regional co-ordination is scarce.

And this is the trouble. A flawed world structure, led by flawed powers, can
be better than no structure at all. The 19th-century radical Alexander
Herzen used the metaphor of a “pregnant widow” to describe the lull
between historical eras. That is, one dispensation has expired and its
successor is yet to be born.

This interim is so fraught because there is no controlling power. The 1930s

come unpromisingly to mind, when Pax Britannica was on its bandy last legs
but the US and the USSR had not yet usurped it. For all the later agonies of
the cold war, the world had a semblance of predictability then that it lacked

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Coronavirus reveals the dread of a ‘non-polarʼ world | Financial Times 16/04/2020, 09*34

in the free-for-all Thirties. The mistake is to think we are living through a

repeat of the former, when the crisis is much more evoking the second.

Horror vacui, or fear of the void, was an old principle of art. It rejected the
idea of empty space in a painting. History does not even allow the choice.
From time to time, it throws up a vacuum. Whether this one will be quite as
anarchic as the last, it is our burden to find out.

janan.ganesh@ft.com

Follow Janan Ganesh with myFT and on Twitter

Letter in response to this article:

Two versions of Marshall McLuhan’s global village / From Paul Strebel,
Professor emeritus, IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland

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