The international order may be explained as the configuration of major forces in the international system and the subsisting and dominant rules and protocols that they impose to govern relations among these big powers and all others in the system. These big powers constitute the elite powers that define the rules of the international system. The structure of the state system is often defined as the distribution of power among its constituent units. In this structure are embedded power alignments or arrangements or what may be expressed as the configuration of salient affinities in the system; ideological, regional, economic and sociological connectivities. The structure of the international system is important because it is central to the character of the international order that prevails in the system. It is this structure, which is based on the coefficient of power accumulated by each state actor or groups of states with particular validated affinities, often ideological, or just strategic and even regional, which underpins the hard protocols that actually govern international life. The hard protocols relate to accepted and conventional axioms on the ultimate use of power to achieve the goals of the most powerful in this universe of state and non-state actors. These hard protocols emanate from certain inherited principles related to universally acknowledged sovereignty and rights of states issuing there from to ensure their longevity in a Hobbesian environment.
The soft protocols, differentiated and distinct from soft power, including agreements on the treatment and management of refugees, asylum seekers, and host of other matters related to the well being of humanity, are often codified in what many liberals see as international law and treaties. They consist of the fine sensibilities and procedures that govern day to day relationships in the global system. The soft protocols of the interstate system are typically codified in the Charter of the United Nations and the Vienna convention and other instruments that regulate virtually all the civil dimensions of liberal interaction in the international system. Liberal institutions in the system such as the United Nations ensure that hard protocols are repressed as much as possible in the system. Yet, while the sustenance of soft protocols in directing interstate transactions is critical, the legitimacy of the prevailing Order is defined by the structure of the system.
This was amply demonstrated by the failure of the League of Nations. Again in war where hard protocols are ascendant, there are conventions that attempt to regulate the confrontations among protagonists as necessary intrusion of soft protocols in the application of hard protocols in interaction among states. This would include the Geneva Convention guiding the prosecution of war between states. This is the context in which the rights, roles and obligations of respective states and groups of states in various expressions of alliances in the system emerge.
There are a select group of elite states, mainly but not exclusively, in Europe and America, znd now China, that dominate the system. There are also powerful state actors that attempt to constrain the activities of the elite states, especially where such activities are harmful to their interests. These elite state actors led by the United States and counter veiled by China, are immediately followed by medium powers. Medium powers possess the leverage to moderate but not impede the activities of the first rank states. At the bottom of the ladder are the weak subordinate state actors, many with often dubious claims to sovereignty, including and especially in Africa, that historically have remained foil for the most powerful in the system. These non-entities provide the unguarded derivatives for the global extractive loot machine. Unfortunately, the African state, a mechanical implant of the first cluster of Westphalian states in the African environment, is the classic example of this prostrate unit of exploitation in the system. They are often derisively termed as quasi-states, Third world or even underdeveloped societies. Immanuel Wallenstein, Henrique Cardoso, Enzo Falleto and Mahmud Mamdani, among others, have codified the systemic pathologies of this historically exploited and dependent state and the dynamics of their exploitation.
As regards Trump and his white American nationalists, quotidian interactions among states in the system would largely be governed by the hard protocols of the system. These would accentuate the universal understanding that power or institutionalized coercion remains the ultimate currency in these transactions. Unfortunately, power is still the single most determinant factor in the role that nations play or are assigned in the system. The hard protocols would formally guide the emerged diverse, and almost specialized, roles of the different constituent units in this universe of diverse states and evolved groups of states consolidated on the basis of commonly defined interests. The elite states formulate the rule of the governing order that they dominate. By this they self-assign roles and impose rules that they enforce. They have the power to back their self-allotted aggrandizing role. These evolved alliances may be largely based on strong political affinities as in the European Union (EU). The political arrangements may be complemented by such military behemoths to protect ideological, economic and socio-political interests as in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
By virtue of their ranking in the system, powerful elite states have capacity for deep system penetration and by implication, virtually unlimited access to all spaces- political, social and spiritual, humanitarian and economic-in all corners of the universe. They also give direction to and validate through their powerful academies the intellectual ferment of the global system that consistently advance their political goals. They have the biggest and the most lethal militaries. They possess the strongest economies through control over the legal and institutional framework governing value extraction, processing and disbursement of both material and non-material value. They deploy a devastatingly potent propaganda machinery to sustain the legitimacy of the prevailing order. They control the space for action in the system. America, the biggest power in the system, is noted to have invested in being the World’s Police Force. But is a permanently partisan force to enforce the rule of the American hegemony.
The United States clearly leads the world in military spending at more than $600 billion a year. China is the closest nation to follow the US at nearly $130 billion bill dedicated to its military — which is still less than a third of America’s overall spending. Meanwhile, Russia has increased its arms spending by $88 billion and plans to ‘modernize’ its current weapons arsenal. These powerful forces and their allies dominate the system and drive the workings of key and preeminent global political institutions such as the United Nations and its subsidiaries directing socio-economic, developmental as well as humanitarian funds, agencies, and programs. For better or for worse, the strength of a country’s military is directly linked to its influence on the world stage. President Trump would seem to be very much aware of this and his strategic calculus would to seem to seek to reconfigure alliances at the very top of the power league.
With improved relations with Russia, the slowly evolving sympathetic awareness of collaboration between China and Russia would be stalled. Western Europe would have to find some accommodation with Russia, while nationalist Europe from the Scandinavia to Marie le Pen’s Nationalist Party would present President Donald Trump with potential allies in Europe if the planned reordering of global alliance system is his objective. That however portends great ideological schisms in European societies. This would destabilize the international order as presently configured. This would seriously impact US relations with Europe, as threat perception of Russia to the United States is downgraded and China becomes the main focus of the challenge to the United States.
For now, NATO operations that are mainly funded by the USA is focused on containing Russia. NATO Operations Anaconda 2016 counting 31,000 soldiers from 24 countries exercising for 10 days with 14,000 American troops participating, has been dubbed the largest NATO war game in Eastern Europe. In the biggest movement of foreign allied troops in Poland since the end of the Cold War, NATO undertook an extended—a unprecedented war game. The operations was very probable NATO’s largest field exercise in Europe east of the current German-Polish border since 1992. Austin Bay notes that NATO exercises are designed to test and validate procedures and tactics. It is emphasized that more broadly exercises enable militaries and civilian organisations deployed in theatres of operation to practice working together.” Integrating capabilities is difficult. It requires practice. Integrating capabilities and using the integrated capabilities to achieve a goal is the sine qua non of officership.
However, in the specific instance of Operation Anaconda, Bay illuminates that although during an exercise, forces are asked to respond to a fictional scenario that resembles what might occur in real life from combat to humanitarian relief and from stabilisation to reconstruction, the slow war Russia is waging in eastern Ukraine and continual Russian military harassment in the Baltic sea—buzzing aircraft for the most part—are the prime instigators of Operation Anaconda. Russia’s February 2014 invasion of Ukraine and its war in the Donetsk region is said to have spurred this major exercise. Troops, combat equipment, aircraft, communications and logistics units are pretending, but the potential for war is real. He notes that the U.S. Army Europe map of Anaconda 2016 is very likely an act of information war that supports NATO political goals. In Phase three executed on June 10, Alliance troops and vehicles crossed the Vistula River and entered Lithuania. However, the main maneuver was to explicitly cut off Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast. Kaliningrad was once the Prussian city of Konigsberg. Russia kept the city and its environs as a special Kremlin reward for winning World War II. So Bay continues that the maneuver delivers a useful political warning. The Russian exclave can be taken by NATO military forces. The NATO exercise is therefore a warning to Putin. It recalls the Russian seizure of the port of Sevastopol in Crimea and then swallowed the entire Crimean peninsula. NATO is asking if a Polish-controlled Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea would be a fair trade? What if NATO donated Kaliningrad to Ukraine? Operation Anaconda then was typical slide back of NATO to the territorial expansionism and schisms of Eighteen century old Europe.
Yet again in December, 2016, NATO conducted Operation Iron Sword on the door steps of Russia. Over 4,000 troops took part in the exercise, which began on 20 November in Pabrade and Rukla, Lithuania to demonstrate Allies’ resolve and commitment to collective defence. Under the auspices of the OSCE, military observers from Belarus and Kazakhstan visited the exercise. NATO partners Sweden and Ukraine also sent military observers. Yet, the assumptions of NATO and its focus on Eastern Europe is immediately rendered obsolete in a Trump white American nationalist presidency of the United States.
Meanwhile, there are looming paradoxes and contradictions in the evolution. The evolved White American nationalism poses a fundamental challenge to mainstream American nationalism. American nationalism has evolved through the centuries of struggles to validate the credo that “We the people” has a universal intonation. White American nationalism is exclusive and largely repudiates the very philosophical contours of the American nation space. At the global level, the realignment of Trump’s threat perception from Russia to China rejects the assumption that Europe and its unending centuries old and tired feuds should remain central contentions as the center of world action. This de-validates the exclusive focus of NATO on Russia as the traditional enemy. So if China is the perceived threat to continued long term American hegemony of the global system, it alters the very logic for the existence of an anachronistic NATO.
Europeans have fed fat on American largess since the end of WWII when the Marshall Plan was instituted to reconstruct the devastated continent. The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $12 billion (approximately $120 billion in dollar value as of June 2016) in economic support to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World. Experts note that American military spending has always eclipsed other allies’ budgets since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s founding in 1949. NATO has for years been pushing for more spending by its member states. The alliance increased overall defense spending for the first time in two decades in 2015, but most NATO countries still don’t pay their recommended share. According to NATO statistics, the U.S. spent an estimated $650 billion on defense last year. That’s more than double the amount all the other 27 NATO countries spent between them, even though their combined GDP tops that of the U.S. Of the 28 countries in the alliance, only five — the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and the U.K. — meet the target. Of the main leaders of Europe, Germany spent 1.19% of its GDP on defense last year, France forked out 1.78%. The consequences of Trump’s revised threat perception may mean that Europe has to find new accommodation of Russia or pay to fund their strategic objectives. But beyond funds is building a common understanding of threat perception across the old Atlantic alliance.
For Trump the future war would be directed to contain or neutralize the threat from China. It is therefore doubtful, if he would sustain current levels of funding for NATO. Donald Trump has been forthright on this, saying the U.S. should rethink its involvement in the military alliance because it is “obsolete” and other states don’t pay a fair share. The expected recalibration of military cooperation with Europe would seem to be based on new gradations of threats perceived by the Trump led American white nationalists voted into power in the November, 2016 elections.
The power equation and the dominant national sentiments in elite states are reflected in the roles that nations play in global affairs, including their leverage for leadership and dominant action in the United Nations. The United Nations is the single platform in which virtually all states of the system are members. It is therefore the prime arena, but it is by no means the only significant forum, for interactions among states. The United Nations and its institutions provide the platform for the regulation and mediation of international life. It safeguards the legitimacy of the soft protocols as the validating principles of international life while mitigating the tendency of powerful states to resort to the hard protocols, represented by the use of violence, to resolve contentions in international interactions among states. This was at play in the challenge of United Nations to President George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. It also mediates among sovereign states and significant non-states actors in the system such Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). The reach of the UN however falls short of influencing such bodies as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and their African off shoots in the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the Al Shabab in East Africa or Boko Haram in West Africa. These organizations challenge the legitimacy of the global Order of which the United Nations is an embodiment.
Leave a Reply