In an article "The Twilight of the Liberal World Order" (24 January, 2017), a brief for the Brookings Institution, Robert Kagan hits the nail on the head. What matters most is not ISIS. It's the inflexion point of a possible collapse of the liberal world order that has defined global peace and stability since the Second World War.
There is popular anger that American largess as guarantor of the liberal world order has been taken advantage of by "Others". The Trump Presidency shows every sign of abdicating from America's global responsibilities unless compensated by calculated, short-term transactions.
This is feeding the inevitable revisionism of dissatisfied rising powers, which, together with huge historical grievances, are re-asserting themselves to modify the US-dominated world order to suit their own world view and national interests.
All these hark back to the unstable world order prevalent in the late 19th century, eventually leading to two World Wars.
Kagan rightly points out that US global military dominance is best suited to maintain global security. Neither China nor Russia can be a credible substitute.
However, military coercion cannot overturn what may, after all, be the changing tide of history as Western power and influence are beginning to give way to the rising East.
China has been embedded firmly in the world economic order underpinned by the United States. While America is now backing off, China wants to uphold the status quo. From WTO rules to climate change, it seems that most of the world feel unsettled by America's change of course and begin to think that China may be a force for good.
China in the 21st century is no longer the weak China of previous centuries. It is the world's second largest economy, soon to become the largest as the productivity and ingenuity of a fifth of mankind continue to be unleashed.
China's global strength is not the military. Or economic size. It's her economic connectivity. From mobile phones, cars and household goods, almost everything has China embedded, even if the final product is not marked "Made in China". That's why six of the top eight container ports around the world are in China, including Hong Kong. This "centrality" cannot be reversed easily as no other developing country has the manufacturing scale, capacity and global connectivity.
Global connectivity is very much at the heart of the Zeitgeist of the times defined by the world's Fourth Industrial Revolution. Driven by a combination of technologies and powerful integrated cross-border platforms, it is upending business models, labor markets, socio-political matrix, and is reshaping economic, social, cultural, and human environments.
Nothing illustrates the power of internet-economics better than President Trump’s apparent agreement that Jack Ma’s Alibaba internet-driven global business empire could help create a million American jobs by selling US goods and services to China and the rest of Asia, Trump’s China-bashing and protectionist rhetoric notwithstanding.
China is in no position to replace the United States as the guarantor of a new global order. Nor does she wish to do so, knowing her own many limitations. However, a reformed, rising, and more assertive China is sufficient to challenge an American-First world order.
Russia under Putin is also playing her cards deftly. While the United States looked powerless with the Syrian crisis, Russia is now seen as a more effective problem-solver.
The growing global gravitas of these rising powers cannot be deterred by relying only on brute American military dominance.
As President Trump focuses on America First, prioritizing American jobs, profits, and the military, it begs the question whether the world is not being driven towards another historical inflexion point of global instability.