THE WAR OF TOMORROW AND THE POST-WESTERN GEOPOLITICAL ORDER

THE WAR OF TOMORROW AND THE POST-WESTERN GEOPOLITICAL ORDER
REGIONAL CRISES WITHOUT SOLUTIONS OR THE “DUEL OF THE CENTURY” BETWEEN CHINA AND AMERICA?

Irnerio Seminatore

Table of Contents

• Hegemon, the war of tomorrow and the post-Western world order
• Diplomacy and war. The Anglo-German rivalry and the “Crowe Memorandum”
• The rise of imperial Germany and Great Britain’s analysis at the peak of its power
• The “Stoltenberg Declaration” and the gravity of global challenges
• Awareness of the challenges and the subordination of democracy to hegemony
• The de-Westernization of the world and the asymmetry of wills
• The amplification of dangers and the war of tomorrow
• Heterogeneity of the system and multipolarity
• The end of hegemonic stability and the post-Western world
• The idea of transition. “Chain conflicts” or “systemic revolution”?

*******

Hegemon, the war of tomorrow and the post-Western world order

The war of tomorrow, “as an act of large-scale violence,” will be dictated, as always, by the historical incompatibility between two competing powers, by awareness of issues of planetary order, and by an accumulation of regional crises without solutions.

The incompatibility between two competing and rival powers is historical and has a contemporary precedent in the Anglo-German rivalry of the twentieth century. The reason for the conflict then was the rejection of any sharing of primacy between rising Germany and Great Britain at the height of its Empire; today, by a striking analogy, it is the confrontation between the antinomic ambitions and wills of millennial China and dominant America.

Awareness of global stakes and of the global order has focused explicitly, since 2021, on the declaration by Stoltenberg (Secretary General of NATO) concerning the “turning point” we are living through, the “decisive moment” that transcends the current situation and concerns the inversion of the dominant hegemony: in other words, the challenge, for the entire West, of a major turning point in the history of civilizations.

There is no doubt about the inspirer of Stoltenberg: the Master Hegemon of the imperial republic.

The regional accumulation of crises without solutions constitutes the very evidence of the chaotic disorder among states and civil societies, manifested in their military alliances or groupings, as well as in the de-Westernization and Balkanization of the world, affecting the pluralism of the actors involved.

The logical consequence is an amplification of threats and an increase in dangers.

In relation to the central conflict of tomorrow, which remains the “Duel of the Century” between the United States and China (the Zweck, or strategic purpose), the two wars in Iran and Ukraine appear as peripheral and limited in aim—in short, regional wars (Ziel, tactical) and wars of attrition, in view of an ultimate central confrontation.

As for today’s Europe, structurally allergic to any culture of combat, its wars will be dictated and almost imposed by its Eurasian or Euro-Atlantic future—an uncomfortable future that binds it, through history, to its Atlantic civilizational share and, through geopolitics, to its Euro-continental and Eurasian dimension. The political forms of these entangled conflicts will no longer be those conducted by the parliamentary democracies of nation-states, but those of the autocratic and presidential systems of the reborn continental empires.

The Europe of Nations, emerging from the ebb of globalization, is no longer that of the offensive and rival nationalisms of the interwar period, but that of the safeguard of their threatened identities. The content of the national idea is different today from what it was in the past. The policy of national dissociation (Brexit) and imperial integration (Atlanticism) is repugnant to France, isolated and declining, but seduces Germany, which has moved from the old consciousness of the “master people” to that of the “partner people” and is caught in a pincer between East and West. France, undermined from within by the collapse of authority, is on the verge of a “strategic surprise” arising from a latent “civil war,” through the questioning—which will prove fatal to it—of its constitutive unity, that of the nation-state.

What will be Europe’s share in the battles for the supremacy of the system? Will it still be that of the maritime powers to which it belongs? In a completely unprecedented situation, the major war of tomorrow will be that of multipolar empires with planetary projection, devaluing the peace of compromise based on the balance of forces. The minor actors, European and Asian, will play their part as vassals of each pole, under the authoritarian coordination of the three dominant masters of the blocs (United States, China, and Russia), with assigned war aims that exclude any freedom of maneuver and any political independence.

Conventional, nuclear, and hybrid conflicts are thus to be expected on the different theaters, according to the different political aims, for the stake will be, from the outset, an unshared hegemony, and this will entail a technical, scientific, cognitive, and intellectual dominance that will subject the global confrontation to the civilizational and historical ambitions and projects of the Master-Subjects of Great Politics.

The world of established empires will be subjected to a kind of “soft balancing” by the existing regional powers, reacting in counter-tendency to any policy of primacy. This evolution does not invalidate the fundamental consideration that the solution of the most demanding problems will always require intervention or support from the major powers. The future of multilateralism, subordinated to the logic of the great powers, will rather be a mixture of multilateralism and bloc polarization, which may play an influential role provided that the decisive actors of the system are included in the confrontation.

What, then, of the future distribution of intermediate powers, or of the justification and legitimacy of the new hierarchies? In this decisive turning point of the historical process, imperial opprobrium will fall upon democracy, equality, and the history of progress, for in the new era the political order will be unequal, post-humanist, and post-Hegelian, shaped by the transformative force of the rivalries of the triad (China, United States, and Russia) and by the rise of the world’s peripheries.

A debate is emerging at once about the form the high-intensity conflict will take: “war without limits,” or else “invisible war,” secret and underground? The situation we are living through, by the reluctance of the major actors on the international stage to use military force and by the visible extension of the domains of confrontation, implies “a change in the strategic grammar, but not in the logic of war” (Clausewitz). The result is a new face of armed conflict, profoundly shaped by the technetronic revolution and by artificial intelligence used in the military-digital complex. This will affect the strategy of means and the battlefield, producing an inversion of innovation that now proceeds from the strategic to the political.

Empire, as a tendency toward hierarchy and social and political homogenization, stems from a monistic vision of history, in contrast to multipolarity, which is founded on the heterogeneity and pluralism of states. The heterogeneity of political groupings will have as its sole limit the uniqueness of the system, and as its shared distinction geography, anthropology, culture, and history.

Diplomacy and war.

The Anglo-German rivalry and the “Crowe Memorandum”

In the context of the virtual confrontation between Chinese East and American West, theories of China’s “peaceful rise” and of the advent of a “harmonious world” depend on the level of credibility of diplomacy and the degree of confidence induced by regional stability. These two referents can be compromised by the development of technology and weapons systems conceived with a view to acquiring a significant strategic advance, and this impact in turn leads to an arms race and risks of conflict. It is with regard to a comparative analysis of the international balances of the European concert of the twentieth century and of the disturbances in the calculation of power relations following the unification of the German Empire in 1871 that the debate on China’s national destiny (2007–2010) prompted a search for the sources of confidence of a millennial country; these were identified in tradition, ideology, and national spirit—something Europe has superbly forgotten. Historical analysis seems to have demonstrated that the causes of the First World War conflict in Europe were less the structures of power relations resulting from German unification than the stakes and ambitions of the Empire’s elites and, among other important factors, nationalism and diffuse irredentisms. The Anglo-German rivalry, which was grafted onto this permanent tension, dominated European politics at the end of the nineteenth century, when the world was still essentially Europe, and was characterized by the difficulties of a rigid and inflexible diplomacy that limited the field of action of the principal countries of the European concert. Indeed, the unification of rising Germany, which felt surrounded by hostilities and limits to its influence, led the British Foreign Office to question the objective threat of the German Empire to its survival and, above all, the naval threat of a continental country incompatible with the very existence of the English maritime Empire.

Today as yesterday, competition has become strategic, and the limitation of the spaces of maneuver granted has slowly produced two blocs of rival alliances in the East and the West, to which resurgent nationalism or sovereigntism supplies the ideological nourishment for the future belligerents. As regards the historical analogy—always imprecise—between the European situation of the nineteenth century and the Eurasian situation of the twenty-first, the fundamental question that preoccupied Great Britain of that time and the United States of today is whether the crisis of hegemony and the problem of alternation that will manifest themselves are due to the general structure of the system’s configuration or to a specific policy of one or the other of the two “competitors,” and whether, ultimately, the very existence of the American empire is threatened, and with it the survival of the West and of Western civilization, including its Russo-Orthodox variant. The “Crowe Memorandum” (1907), in the case of rising Germany and within the framework of an analysis of the power structure of the time, concluded that the two powers, British and German, were incompatible and ruled out trust and cooperation on the part of Great Britain. Thus the importance of the stakes forbade the latter to assume risks and obliged it to prepare for the worst. Which is what happened with the First and Second World Wars.

The rise of imperial Germany and Great Britain’s analysis at the peak of its power

The “Crowe Memorandum,” drafted in January 1907 by Sir Eyre Crowe, a senior official of the Foreign Office, analyzes the rise of the German Empire and lays the foundations of Great Britain’s foreign policy on the eve of the First World War. In 1904, after the signing of the “Entente Cordiale” between France and Great Britain, which settled their colonial differences, Germany provoked the Tangier crisis (1905) with the aim of putting this nascent alliance in crisis. It was in a climate of growing tensions that the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Sir Edward Grey, demanded and obtained a comprehensive strategic analysis. It is as if, following the Russian Federation’s Special Military Operation in February 2022, Mrs. von der Leyen had asked Ms. Kallas for a “Memorandum on the European and world situation” in order to define the Union’s foreign policy—assuming they know the British precedent, which is highly doubtful. To recall, Sir Eyre Crowe’s argumentation turned on two fundamental axes: the balance of power in the world and the analysis of German objectives, under the hypothesis—calculated or not—of a hegemonic ambition on the continent. In both cases, Crowe concluded that Germany represented an existential danger to the European balance and that any policy of conciliation with it was to be rejected, since this would only increase the aggressiveness of the Land der Mitte.

Two diplomatic recommendations were thus put forward: a confirmation of the Entente Cordiale with France and inflexible firmness toward Germany. This Memorandum, like David Hume’s cardinal principle on the conduct of any foreign policy based on the defense of England’s insular interests, is to be regarded as one of the founding texts of British and world diplomatic realism of the twentieth century.

The “Stoltenberg Declaration” and the gravity of global challenges

Is there something equivalent to the “Crowe Memorandum” in the crisis of American hegemony and the rise of China, comparable to the rivalry of the two Anglo-German powers of the twentieth century and, in our case, to the very existence of the West?

Party and judge of this “Great Game” of historical alternation, the Atlantic Alliance, which has become a security alliance with a global perspective, through the voice of its Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, has stressed the importance of NATO’s “turning point” in order to highlight the gravity of the inversion of pre-eminence between the United States and China and the need for the Western powers to meet the challenge.

Chinese hegemony appears unacceptable to imperial America, just as German hegemony was to Great Britain in the twentieth century, and, through NATO in Europe and ANZUS in the Far East, it becomes so also to the Western world.

Thus the Summit of 15 June 2021 in Brussels may have the same significance and scope for the United States as the “Crowe Memorandum” had for the British Empire of the twentieth century. Indeed, giving priority to the isolation of China and to de-escalation with Russia was the more optimistic reading for the destiny of the West. The idea of creating a global alliance of democracies with two poles—NATO for the European theater and the Quad (USA, Japan, Australia, and India) for the Asia-Pacific—justified, in the background, two concordant projects: political independence and strategic autonomy of Europe vis-à-vis the United States, and simultaneously the search for détente with Russia. Faced with the resilience of the Atlantic Alliance and the growing influence of China, the immediate threat nevertheless appeared to be that of Russia (Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states), restoring the contradictory confidence of the elites subordinated to declining America.

Awareness of the challenges and the subordination of democracy to hegemony

Are we then surprised that a political and military alliance bases its historical awareness on a declaration by its Secretary General concerning a decisive turning point in the evolution of the world, and presents this moment as a lesson for the future and as a link between present and past? Illuminating moment or unprecedented paradox: what does this awareness mean if not the inscription of our near future in the determinisms of the great historical forces that dominate the planetary situation and that imply the subordination of Europe to the United States in the “Great Game” of the twenty-first century? Could political independence and strategic autonomy call into question the structure and hierarchy of the system and reverse the primacy of Western civilization in the event of America’s defeat? In this perspective the option of peace and war is no longer a pure hypothesis but a necessary alignment with the Hegemon, whose scope transcends the conjuncture and concerns the history of humanity as a whole.

Concretely, the Sino-American antagonism at the Brussels Summit took precedence over the Russo-Chinese rapprochement, so that the logic of contingency transforms the traditional nature of concepts and democracy becomes an instrument of hegemony (and not the reverse)—a modality for attaining global power, since protection and security are conditioned by obedience (Hobbes).

In an analogous perspective, the debate on “national destiny” (Liu Mingfu) that took place in China in the 2010s left the terrain of politics to become the mode of thought of a civilization on the march and of a powerful universe that is re-emerging and asserting itself on a world scale.

The regional threat has become systemic and is no longer merely military; it rests on the organic unity of a “sense” that mobilizes the minds and forces of an entire era and finds its accomplished form not in a precarious and abstract political regime (democracy and political universalism) but in Empire, the “perfectissima” form of the government of men, transcending politics and the secular changes in the balances of power.

Can we say with certainty that an American politico-cultural hegemony over Eurasia, even more than a conjunctural politico-strategic superiority, threatens the independence of the other states of the world and the very existence of their sovereignty?

The logic of doubt is a method in relations between states, for the criterion of friend and enemy remains latent in domestic politics and serves to break any opposition (Navalny, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang). The enemy becomes an objective and hostile power, and it is there, in Stoltenberg’s “turning points,” that the latent tension becomes active and keeps the history of the world in motion.

Will the strategic confidence and political cooperation of a NATO Summit such as that of Brussels be able to forbid, slow, or delay the confrontation or the “duel of the century”? From whom and in what form will the decision to settle the matter come? Will it be individual or collective, near or long-term, given the enormity of the stakes and the rupture of the dam that holds back the great regions of the world from their tectonic slide toward war?

The de-Westernization of the world and the asymmetry of wills

The forms of antagonism in the different regions of the planet were one of the major themes of the “CIA Report on the State of the World in 2020,” published in 2005 under the significant title “The De-Westernization of the World.” This can be summarized as an increase in military expenditures far superior to those of Europe and therefore as an inversion of the asymmetry of means, as proof of an asymmetry of wills.

A global dilemma, within a planetary and constraining geopolitical framework: that of an international system in full transformation, whose constitutive principles, hierarchy, and interdependencies are contested and called into question.

The key concept of this challenge is that of a multipolar world and the dominant framework of its triad: United States, Russia, and China. Europe, by contrast, has entered a process of instability and disintegration (Brexit, East-West fissuring, Euro-Turkish tensions, migratory crises, etc.). The extreme and radical term of this transformation is called “war,” and this concerns the configuration of the system, its hierarchy, and its philosophy—in short, its power and its authority.

The amplification of dangers and the war of tomorrow

To scrutinize the signs of this evolution is to master the future, for everything is a sign and an index in the highest strategic combinations! Now, the war of tomorrow is the threat of today, which grows under a new face and at the heart of the greatest challenges. The war of tomorrow is not limited only to the modification of the apparent face of war or of its “grammar,” but even more to the extension of its profound “logic,” political and systemic.

This logic is called the direction of history, or, in other words, the inversion of an established hegemony.

Thus we can say, by a kind of hazardous analogy, that the loss of the strategic unity of the West, the crisis of the democracies, the emergence of authoritarian regimes, and the present era of de-Westernization coincide with a period of amplification of dangers, represented by ruptures of deterrent rationality and, at the conventional level, by deregulated, hybrid, and unlimited combat.

Heterogeneity of the system and multipolarity

Finally, and still taking into account the heterogeneity of the system, this situation engenders a defensive strategy on the part of the Hegemon, consisting in anticipating the dissidence of important members of the community of belonging (the exit of Great Britain from the EU and the distancing of the EU from the United States), while at the same time maintaining the cohesion of alliances in both hemispheres (NATO/ANZUS).

At the level of the new uncertainties and new challenges, Europe will have difficulty establishing a connection between the multilateralist diplomacy practiced until now and the multipolarist diplomacy dominant on the planetary stage. Multipolarism asserts itself as a tendency toward the classical regularity of political groupings in the organization of international relations, and understanding this evolution requires, from the standpoint of the dominant power of the system (the United States), recourse to two major interrogations:

• What strategy to adopt vis-à-vis a great Eurasian and anti-hegemonic coalition, Russia-China-Iran?
• What hypotheses of open conflicts and what scenarios of belligerence between continental poles and insular poles?

The end of hegemonic stability and the post-Western world

The question that emerges from the debate on the role of the United States in the current situation, in Europe and in the world, is whether the “hegemonic stability” (R. Gilpin) that has been assured for seventy years by America is in the process of disappearing, bringing with it the decline of the Hegemon and of Western civilization, or whether we are confronted with a hegemonic alternation and a post-Western world. The transition from the end of the Cold War to the unipolar system with incomplete hierarchical integration has clarified itself as an evolution toward shared power and relative leadership.

The new transition (that of the new Cold War) has manifested itself as:

• the inability of the Hegemon to impose a constraining planetary order and as the slow decomposition of the American moment (progressive decline of capacitarian unipolarism and decision-making unilateralism).

This has been translated into:

• the passage from the “global dominance” of the unipolar period to “global leadership,” which defines a series of network balances and a function of arbitration that the dominant power (USA) exercises within its network balances.

In this sense, the “global leadership” of the United States, faced with Russia and China, disposes of a wide range of options allowing it to have recourse to a more differentiated panoply of political means:

• an unmatched worldwide network of military alliances; strategic partnerships of choice, at the western extremity of the Heartland (Europe), or at the intercontinental junction of the Turkish plateau and on the littoral façade of the Middle East (Israel), as well as a constellation of insular and peninsular “pivot countries” all along the Rimland (Japan, India, the Gulf);
• finally, an institutional and informal multilateralism, alternative and of convenience.

On the debit side of the United States, these assets cannot hide the disappointments and failures, of which the most resounding was Afghanistan. Here the lessons appear in full light: the reconquest of power by the Taliban, the continuation and extension of instability in Central Asia to the detriment of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, and indirectly of Russia, but to the advantage of China. The continuation of the Israeli-American conflict has no other consequence than to destabilize the West.

The idea of transition.

“Chain conflicts” or “systemic revolution”?

The interrogation that accompanies this decline and the transition toward an articulated multipolar system is equally central and can be formulated thus: “What form will this transition take?”

The already known form of a series of chain conflicts, according to the model of Raymond Aron modeled on the twentieth century, or the deeper form of a upheaval of civilization, of the idea of society, and of the figure of man, according to the model of the “systemic revolutions” of Strausz-Hupé, embracing the universe of socio-political relations of the Western world and covering the great known areas of civilization? In this case it appears evident that this transition will not mark an agreement on principles of legitimacy capable of assuring the stability of the world, as in the time of the Congress of Vienna of 1815, but the fatal concordance of a condominium over the world between the United States and China, or a general and total war for imperial pre-eminence, as in the Peloponnesian War. An inexorable concordance, inherent in the contingent dimension of human history and in the fatality of political destinies, according to the global interpretation of becoming and according to the stylized models of “rupture” that have spared no great civilization.

Yesterday as today, reflection on war is the basis of every philosophy of peace, for the ruin of a system is also the birth of another, linked to another constitutive idea of the world or to another civilization.

The original French-language version of this text has been translated using AI technologies.