The New Cold War Gönderileri
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Above all, we should treat the large and diverse set of countries in the Global South as partners to progress. Given their growing economies, Indian decisions between investing in new coal plants or more solar power, Brazilian decisions on how to develop their agriculture and exploit their tropical resources, African approaches to mining, protection of biodiversity, and low-carbon urbanization will all help determine whether the world meets the Sustainable Development Goals. Global South countries can be pioneers on sustainable development, whether through Argentinian techniques of ‘dry tilling’ to promote low-carbon farming, or innovations in the development of sustainable biofuels in Kenya, Tanzania and other African countries. India’s recent successes in lunar exploration open a vista to joint research with established space powers on the feasibility of mining for minerals on the moon, or further afield in our solar system. With the right technical support, African countries could undertake the genetic sequencing of new viruses locally, becoming key links in the early warning chain for global health.
As the number of functioning democracies across the world declines, and some flirt with authoritarianism, democratic leaders need to prove once again that they offer the most effective model of governance for dealing with the challenges of the twenty-first century. On most measures and in most domains, the US and its allies still stand at the top of the world league tables (if you exclude those small countries with exceptional wealth from natural resources). This is easy to forget, when the middle classes in America and many of its allies are struggling with the impacts of globalization and technological innovation, putting their social contracts under severe stress. Although the path is very difficult politically for each country, the keys to their rejuvenation at least lie in their hands, whether this involves upgrading their physical and digital infrastructure, delivering more sustainable energy, or reforming their education, health, pension and social care systems. One of their biggest new challenges is to manage the politics of apportioning and integrating the growing but much needed influx of young immigrants from the conflict-ridden and poorest countries in the Global South.
One of the worst tendencies of governments is to interpret their opponents’ intentions incorrectly and create the future that they sought to avoid. Capabilities do not always reflect intentions. And official statements today do not necessarily point to actions tomorrow. Or they might. It is easy to underestimate the danger a hostile government poses to your security, as most Europeans did when assessing Putin’s intentions towards Ukraine in 2021 or indeed Hitler’s in the 1930s. But we can just as easily overestimate a threat, as the George W. Bush administration did in the wake of the 9/11 attacks when it misread reports about Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda and his clandestine stocks of weapons of mass destruction. The result was a failed military intervention that greatly increased Iranian influence in the heart of the Middle East.
It is uncertain whether the US and its allies will put most of their newfound unity and effort into resisting China and Russia, or whether they can also lift their sights to what is the biggest global challenge of this era – climate change. What is clear, however, is that the visions for international order on both sides are contradictory and incompatible. One will dominate the twenty-first century. If the most powerful liberal democracies still want to midwife a world in which the majority enjoy freedom of thought and expression and prize the rule of law and transparency, with governments under pressure to serve the people rather than the opposite, then they need a new playbook. Learning from our recent history and understanding the important differences between the New Cold War and the last, it is possible to identify five rules to manage this new contest. These rules can reduce the risk of devastating conflict, sustain some of the main benefits of economic globalization, revive liberal democracy, and create space for greater international cooperation on global challenges.
G7 governments could argue that they no longer have the financial means to meet their climate pledges in full, in the wake of the very costly COVID pandemic. But this argument does not hold when we consider that in 2022 the US committed $370 billion over the next ten years for its green energy subsidies, the EU committed €750 billion on its post-COVID, green energy recovery through to 2027; Germany found an additional €200 billion for its own national adjustment to higher energy costs after the invasion of Ukraine, plus a commitment of €100 billion extra for its defence budget over the next five years; and the US and Europe between them provided just under $100 billion for the Ukrainians to defend their country in 2022–23 alone.12 Rather than treating the climate emergency as an opportunity for collective action, countries in the Global South see it as another example of the Global North’s attitude of ‘us first’, despite being the instigators of the planet’s changing climate.
Progress in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the major emitters has been uneven since 2015 and sets the scene for difficult negotiations ahead. China has become by far the largest emitter of carbon in the world, accounting for 29.2 per cent of total global GHGs in 2022, nearly three times the US at 11.2 per cent. Even considering the fairer measure of GHG emissions per capita, Chinese emissions have been on a rapid rise, exceeding those of the EU27 countries in 2019. At 11 tonnes of CO2 per capita in 2022, it is still well below the US level of 18 tonnes. However, the US level is falling (from 24 tonnes per capita in 2005), whereas China’s is still rising, if now modestly. And, significantly, China’s cumulative emissions since the industrial era in 1851 (14.2 per cent of the world total) were almost equal to the EU27’s (15.6 per cent) in 2021, making it the third largest cumulative contributor. India’s emissions per capita, in contrast, have risen only from 1.6 tonnes per capita in 1990 to 2.8 tonnes in 2022, and it has contributed just 4.6 per cent to the cumulative total so far.7