Everything Everywhere All At Once: Not So Much
By Cameron Munter, Contributing Author/ April 17, 2023
Cameron Munter served as ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the Bin Laden raid. He was ambassador to Serbia during the Kosovo independence crisis. He served twice in Iraq, in Mosul as Provincial Reconstruction Leader and in Baghdad as Deputy Chief of Mission. In the course of three decades as a career diplomat, he was also NSC Director in the Clinton and Bush White Houses, and served overseas in Warsaw, Prague, and Bonn.
Munter studied at Cornell and earned a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins, and has taught at Pomona College, Columbia University School of Law, and UCLA.
Currently a consultant living in Prague, Munter was President and CEO of the East West Institute, a nonprofit engaged in global conflict prevention. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Diplomacy, and serves on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards.
Fuzzy Ground Rules
According to Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, leaders don’t have the luxury of managing one crisis at a time. This is a point well taken. Not that such a luxury has ever, in fact, been the case. Yet in the past the ground rules seemed clearer, allowing decision makers the ability to prioritize and address certain tasks earlier than others, with the expectation that, with some reasonable assurance, that their actions might be sustainable.
No longer.
Any executive under the age of 50 has known that the globalist set of assumptions, in the past, seemed predictable. Today the neoliberal frame of mind is cracking. The old way of doing things is eroding but the new one is not yet clear–to paraphrase the much-mentioned quote of Antonio Gramsci. It was easy to learn of shareholder value as the basis of geopolitics and related planning. This seemed to make sense up until recently, driven by the spread of democracy as a coefficient with global economic growth.
This too is no longer the case.
Lopsided Globalization
This change did not come out of nowhere: it has its antecedents in the past.
For instance, in the late 1990s, a famous essay by Richard Rorty foresaw the revolt of the masses against the lopsided results of globalization. His forethought is now our experience. It’s only now that we cope with the fallout.
May we say that the forty-year cycle, beginning in the 1980’s with Reagan and Thatcher, has apparently come to an end. And now we’re struggling to define the next forty years, and what they will bring.
Russia as a Reflection
Start with Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022, as the boldest and definitive change in the world order. Perhaps America’s attack on Iraq in 2003 was also a “war of choice” that went against the notion that modern globalized societies don’t fight one another. However, couched in the messaging of a global war on terror that sought to universalize that fight, it may have been an ill-fated effort to change perception. Most Americans and quite a few elsewhere supported this. What makes Iraq different from Ukraine was that Iraq was not a clear effort to annex a nation state, or even, as some critics thought, to steal Iraq’s oil. The Americans ended up without any concessions when the Iraqi government put the fields out to bid. No, it was couched by its architects as an attempt to deepen the liberal world order, not as a challenge to it.
Russia’s attack last year should be characterized differently.
Liberal World Order
Ukraine challenges liberal world order. It didn’t limit itself to an impact in Eastern Europe: it challenged the world view of that most successful experiment of the last forty years, the European Union. As German diplomat Thomas Bagger thoughtfully observed, European leaders no longer felt that they had to exercise political power, or military might as well, because the structure of the EU, growing deeper and wider, was itself in charge. Its leaders simply had to fuel the machine and keep it well oiled.
Now that notion, at the very heart of the EU for a long time, has been challenged. Now, because of this, the debate in the EU (especially within Germany) is difficult and serious. If it were only that, it could be seen as a quirk of the West, or a bump in the road to progress.
But it’s not.
The war in Ukraine has had an impact on the transnational issues that the peaceful globalized world expected. This includes multilateral diplomacy and the emergence of great state competition. Already nascent before Ukraine but now out in the open, sanctions are elevated from a seldom-used mechanism to the diplomatic tool of choice. World hunger? Pandemics? Climate change? Cyber issues and AI? All these challenges, neatly folded into discussions at Davos or into the Millennium Goals of the UN, are still pressing. However, they are now bereft of a format. They are flawed as such formats may have been to unite nations in exploring solutions together.
Globalism Redefined
This puts the notion of globalism in perspective. The Foreign Minister of India, S. Jaishankar, has made the point repeatedly, offering that when Europe has an outbreak of violence like Russia’s attack on Ukraine it’s a global crisis, However, when such an event happens in the Global South, it’s considered a regional problem.
If he’s right, we need to consider the prospect of other non-European events. For instance, the prospect of a Pakistani financial default, or the crushing 95 percent inflation in Argentina, potential famines, and state collapse in places as diverse as Lebanon and Yemen, and the overall impact of indebtedness. Thanks to the rather poorly thought-out impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Africa should be considered a global crisis rather than regional questions to be contained “elsewhere.”
Regarding Ukraine, there is an apparent unwillingness of many developed countries loosely called the West to take sides against Russian aggression. Using this as a values filter, it seems that there will likely be a lessening of the need for enhancing its relationship with the Global South.
Or, perhaps, as Ivan Krastev, an astute observer of change, has said, the Global South has just concluded that Russia is too weak to fear – after all, many rulers in the Global South are themselves hardly paragons of democracy, and will sit this one out and then decide whose side they’re on.
Autocracy Against Democracy
Is it autocracy against democracy? That may be part of it. That was always part of it. But in this new era, it’s somewhat simplistic to reduce these problems to such a dichotomy.
If globalization is, or at least was, seen to be a process of homogenization among countries, the populist nationalist backlashes have all been particularistic in nature. Viktor Orban’s Hungary wants advantages for Hungary, but it’s doubtful that it sees itself as a model for all other states run by an illiberal clique. It’s neither useful nor accurate to compare India with Sri Lanka, Mexico with Brazil. The revolt against globalism, up to now, has often been a retreat to the uniqueness of a culture that political leaders believe needs to be protected. It is not a vision of how all of humankind is similar. Rather, it celebrates what is unique about each nation – accentuating the difficulty of finding common ground with others.
To cope with this, it’s incumbent on political leaders, business leaders, and the public sphere to do our best to assess the crises on their own terms, even if they seem to be coming at us from all sides. From all directions, at the same time. Through a new lens, meaning not through the lens of a dated globalism. But through a lens that rejects the importance of what globalism has done over the last four decades.
It’s time for a sobering look at detail rather than seeking a simple formula that reduces these many problems to some basic essence. In this era, we need to be broad in our scope and most of all, we need to be honest with ourselves about our challenges. Only by assessing detail – detail that, to many, seems increasingly overwhelming – will we be able to make sense of the new reality, and then seek solutions to the broad and pressing issues that we face.