By Alfred W. McCoy
November 21, 202:
Information Clearing House
--VWhen the leaders of more
than
100 nations gathered in Glasgow for the U.N.
climate conference last week, there was much
discussion about the disastrous effect of climate
change on the global environment. There was,
however, little awareness of its likely political
impact on the current world order that made such an
international gathering possible.
World orders are deeply rooted global systems
that structure relations among nations and the
conditions of life for their peoples. For the past
600 years, as I’ve argued in my new book
To Govern the Globe, it’s taken
catastrophic events like war or plague to overturn
such entrenched ways of life. But within a decade,
climate change will already be wreaking a kind of
cumulative devastation likely to surpass previous
catastrophes, creating the perfect conditions for
the eclipse of Washington’s liberal world order and
the rise of Beijing’s decidedly illiberal one. In
this sweeping imperial transition, global warming
will undoubtedly be the catalyst for a witch’s brew
of change guaranteed to erode both America’s world
system and its once unchallenged hegemony (along
with the military force that’s been behind it all
these years).
By charting the course of climate
change, it’s possible to draw a political road map
for the rest of this tempestuous century — from the
end of American global hegemony around 2030, through
Beijing’s brief role as world leader (until perhaps
2050), all the way to this century’s closing decades
of unparalleled environmental crisis. Those decades,
in turn, may yet produce a new kind of world order
focused, however late, on mitigating a global
disaster of almost unimaginable power.
The Bipartisan Nature of U.S. Decline
America’s decline started at home as a distinctly
bipartisan affair. After all, Washington wasted two
decades in an
extravagant fashion fighting costly conflicts in
distant lands, in part to secure the Middle East’s
oil at a time when that fuel was already destined to
join cordwood and coal in the dustbin of history
(though not faintly soon enough). Beijing, in
contrast, used those same years to build industries
that would make it the world’s workshop.
In 2001, in a major miscalculation, Washington
admitted Beijing to the World Trade Organization,
bizarrely confident that a compliant China would
somehow join the world economy without challenging
American global power. “Across the ideological
spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,”
wrote two former members of the Obama
administration, “shared the underlying belief that
U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to
the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy
debate erred.”
A bit more bluntly, foreign policy expert John
Mearsheimer recently
concluded that “both Democratic and Republican
administrations… promoted investment in China and
welcomed the country into the global trading system,
thinking it would become a peace-loving democracy
and a responsible stakeholder in a U.S.-led
international order.”
In the 15 years since then, Beijing’s exports to
the U.S.
grew nearly fivefold to $462 billion annually.
By 2014, its foreign currency reserves had
surged from just $200 billion to an
unprecedented $4 trillion — a vast hoard of cash it
used to build a modern military and win allies
across Eurasia and Africa. Meanwhile, Washington was
wasting more than
$8 trillion on profitless wars in the Greater
Middle East and Africa in lieu of spending such
funds domestically on infrastructure, innovation, or
education — a time-tested formula for imperial
decline.
When a Pentagon team assessing the war in
Afghanistan
interviewed Jeffrey Eggers, a former White House
staffer and Navy SEAL veteran, he asked
rhetorically: “What did we get for this $1 trillion
effort? Was it worth a trillion? After the killing
of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably
laughing in his watery grave considering how much we
have spent on Afghanistan.” (And keep in mind that
the best estimate now is that the true cost to
America of that lost war alone was
$2.3 trillion.) Consider it an imperial lesson
of the first order that the
most extravagantly funded military on Earth has
not won a war since the start of the twenty-first
century.
Donald Trump’s presidency brought a growing
realization, at home and abroad, that Washington’s
world leadership was ending far sooner than anyone
had imagined. For four years, Trump attacked
long-standing U.S. alliances, while making an
obvious effort to dismiss or demolish the
international organizations that had been the
hallmark of Washington’s world system. To top that
off, he denounced a fair American election as
“fraudulent” and
sparked a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol,
functionally making a mockery of America’s long
history of promoting the idea of democracy to
legitimate its global leadership (even as it
overthrew unfriendly democratic governments in
distant lands via covert interventions).
In that riot’s aftermath, most of the Republican
Party has
embraced Trump’s demagoguery about electoral
fraud as an article of faith. As it happens, no
nation can exercise global leadership if one of its
ruling parties descends into persistent
irrationality, something Britain’s Conservative
Party demonstrated all too clearly during that
country’s imperial decline in the 1950s.
After his inauguration last January, Joe
Biden proclaimed that “America is back” and
promised to revive its version of liberal
international leadership. Mindful of Trump’s
battering of NATO (and that he, or someone like
him, could take the White House in 2024), European
leaders, however, continued to
make plans for their own common defense without
the U.S. “We aren’t in the old status quo,”
commented one French diplomat, “where we can
pretend that the Donald Trump presidency never
existed and the world was the same as four years
ago.” Add in Biden’s humiliating retreat from
Afghanistan as Taliban guerrillas, wearing tennis
sneakers and equipped with aging Soviet rifles,
crushed an Afghan military armed with
billions of dollars in U.S. gear, entering Kabul
without a fight. After that dismal defeat, it was
clear America’s decline had become a bipartisan
affair.
Global leadership lost is not readily recovered,
particularly when a rival power is prepared to fill
the void. As Washington’s strategic position
weakens, China has been pressing to dominate
Eurasia, home to 70% of the world’s population and
productivity, and so build a new Beijing-centric
global order. Should China’s relentless advance
continue, there will be serious consequences for the
world as we know it.
Of course, the current order is, to say the
least, imperfect. While using its unprecedented
power to promote a liberal international system
based on human rights and inviolable sovereignty,
Washington simultaneously violated those same
principles all too often in pursuit of its national
self-interest — a disconcerting duality between
power and principle that has afflicted every global
order since the sixteenth century.
As the first hegemon that didn’t participate in
any way in the fitful, painful process of forging
just such a liberal world order through six
centuries of slavery, slaughter, and colonial
conquest, China’s rise could ultimately threaten the
current system’s better half — its core principles
of universal human rights and secure state
sovereignty.
The Coming of Climate Change
Beyond Washington’s strategic failings, there was
another far more fundamental force already at work
eroding its global power. After seven decades of the
profligate kind of fossil-fuel consumption that
became synonymous with the U.S. world system,
climate change is now profoundly disrupting the
whole human community.
As of 2019, following years of bipartisan
evasions and compromises (along with partisan
Republican denials of the very reality of climate
change), the U.S. still
reliedon fossil fuels for 80% of its total
energy; renewables, only 20%. The situation was even
worse in China, which
depended on fossil fuels for 86% of its power
and renewable sources for only about 14%. As energy
expert Vaclav Smil
explained, the underlying global problem was 150
years of embedded inertia that made the “production,
delivery, and consumption of fossil fuels… the
world’s most extensive, and the most expensive, web
of energy-intensive infrastructures.”
If there is ever to be a true transition beyond
fossil fuels, the world’s two largest economies will
have to play a determinative role in it. In the
meantime, the picture is anything but cheery.
Global carbon dioxide
emissions rose by a staggering 50% from 22.2
gigatons in 1997 to a peak of 33.3 gigatons in 2019
and, despite a brief drop at the height of the
Covid-19 pandemic, are
still rising. Significantly, China
accountedfor 30% of the world’s total in that
year, and the U.S. nearly 14% — for a combined 44%
share of all global greenhouse gasses.
At the 2019 Madrid climate conference, U.N.
Secretary-General António Guterres
warned that, if current emissions continue,
global warming will reach as high as 3.9° Celsius by
century’s end, with “catastrophic” consequences for
all life on the planet. And at Glasgow two weeks
ago, he
renewed this warning, saying: “We are digging
our own graves… Sea-level rise is double the rate it
was 30 years ago. Oceans are hotter than ever — and
getting warmer faster. Parts of the Amazon
rainforest now emit more carbon than they absorb… We
are still careening towards climate catastrophe.”
In the 600 years since the age of exploration
first brought the continents into close contact,
90 empires have come and gone. But there have
been just three new world orders, each of which
survived until it suffered some version of
cataclysmic mass death. After the bubonic plague,
also known as the Black Death, wiped out an
estimated 60% of medieval Europe’s population, the
Portuguese and then Spanish empires expanded to form
the first of those world orders, which continued for
three centuries until 1805.
The devastation of the Napoleonic wars then
launched the succeeding British imperial system,
which survived a full century until 1914. Similarly,
Washington’s hegemony, along with its current world
order, arose from the devastating destruction of
World War II. Now, climate change is unleashing
cataclysmic environmental changes that could soon
enough overshadow such past catastrophes, while
damaging or destroying the global order that has
pervaded the planet for the past 70 years.
As wildfires worsen, ocean storms intensify,
megadroughts spread, flooding increases drastically,
and the seas rise precipitously, many millions of
the world’s poor will be uprooted from their
precarious perches along seashores, flood plains,
and desert fringes. Recall for a moment that the
arrival between 2016 and 2018 of just two million
refugees at the borders of the United States and the
European Union unleashed a surge of populist
demagoguery, which led to Britain’s Brexit, Europe’s
increasing ultranationalism, and Donald Trump’s
election. Now, try to imagine what kind of a world
of political upheaval lies in a future in which
climate change generates anywhere from
200 million to
1.2 billion refugees by mid-century.
As at least a
million refugees start to crowd America’s
southern border every year, while storms, fires, and
floods batter coasts and countryside, the U.S. is
almost certain to retreat from the world to cope
with growing domestic crises. Include in that the
inability of its two political parties to agree on
just about anything (other than spending yet more
money on the Pentagon). Similar and simultaneous
pressures worldwide will certainly cripple the
international cooperation that has long been at the
core of Washington’s world order.
China’s Short Reign as Global Hegemon
So, when might shifting geopolitics and climate
cataclysm converge to fully cripple Washington’s
current world order? Beijing plans to complete the
technological transformation of its own economy and
much of its massive trans-Eurasian infrastructure,
the Belt and Road Project, by 2027. That projected
date complements a
prediction by the U.S. National Intelligence
Council that “China alone will probably have the
largest economy, surpassing that of the United
States a few years before 2030.”
By then, according to
projections from the accounting firm PwC,
China’s gross domestic product will have grown to
$38 trillion — more than 50% larger than a projected
$24 trillion for the American one. Similarly,
China’s military, already the world’s second
largest, should by then be dominant in Asia.
Already, as the New York Times
reported in 2019, “in 18 of the last 18 Pentagon
war games involving China in the Taiwan Strait, the
U.S. lost.” As China pushes its maritime frontier
farther into the Pacific, Washington may well be
faced with a difficult choice — either abandon its
old ally Taiwan or fight a war it could well lose.
Weighing Beijing’s global future, it seems safe
to assume that, minimally, China will gain enough
strength to weaken Washington’s global grip and is
likely to become the preeminent world power around
2030. Count on one thing, though: the accelerating
pace of climate change will almost certainly curtail
China’s hegemony within two or three decades.
As early as 2017, scientists at the nonprofit
Climate Central
reported that, by 2060 or 2070, rising seas and
storm surges could flood areas inhabited by 275
million people worldwide and, suggests corroborating
research, Shanghai is “the most vulnerable major
city in the world to serious flooding.” According to
that group’s scientists, 17.5 million people are
likely to be displaced there as most of the city
“could eventually be submerged in water, including
much of the downtown area.”
Advancing the date of this disaster by at least a
decade, a report in the journal Nature
Communications
found that 150 million people worldwide are now
living on land that will be below the high-tide line
by 2050 and that rising waters will “threaten to
consume the heart” of Shanghai by then, crippling
one of China’s main economic engines. Dredged from
sea and swamp in the fifteenth century, much of that
city is likely to return to the waters from whence
it came, possibly as early as three decades from
now.
Meanwhile, increasing temperatures are expected
to devastate the North China Plain, a prime
agricultural region between Beijing and Shanghai
currently inhabited by 400 million people. “This
spot is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat
waves in the future,”
according to Professor Elfatih Eltahir, a
specialist on hydrology and climate at MIT.
Between 2070 and 2100, he estimates, the region
could face hundreds of periods of “extreme danger”
when a combination of heat and humidity will reach a
“wet bulb temperature” (WBT) of 31° Celsius, and
perhaps five lethal periods of 35° WBT — where a
combination of heat and high humidity prevents the
evaporation of the very sweat that cools the human
body. After just six hours living in such a wet bulb
temperature of 35° Celsius, a healthy person at rest
will die.
If the “Chinese century” does indeed
start around 2030, barring remarkable advances
in the reduction of the use of fossil fuels on this
planet, it’s likely to end sometime around 2050 when
its main financial center is flooded out and its
agricultural heartland begins to swelter in
insufferable heat.
A New World Order?
Given that Washington’s world system and
Beijing’s emerging alternative show every sign of
failing to limit carbon emissions in significant
enough ways, by mid-century the international
community will likely need a new form of global
governance to contain the damage.
After 2050, the world community will quite
possibly face a growing contradiction, even a
head-on collision, between the foundational
principles of the current global order: national
sovereignty and human rights. As long as nations
have the sovereign right to seal their borders, the
world will have no way of protecting the human
rights of the hundreds of millions of future
climate-change refugees.
By then, facing a spectacle of mass global
suffering now almost unimaginable, the community of
nations might well agree on the need for a new form
of global governance. Such a supranational body or
bodies would need sovereign authority over three
critical areas — emissions controls, refugee
resettlement, and environmental reconstruction. If
the transition to renewable energy sources is still
not complete by 2050, then this international body
might well compel nations to curb emissions and
adopt renewable energy. Whether under the auspices
of the U.N. or a successor organization, a high
commissioner for global refugees would need the
authority to supersede state sovereignty in order to
require nations to help resettle such tidal flows of
humanity. The future equivalents of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank could
transfer resources from wealthy temperate countries
to feed tropical communities decimated by climate
change.
Massive programs like these would change the very
idea of what constitutes a world order from the
diffuse, almost amorphous ethos of the past six
centuries into a concrete form of global governance.
At present, no one can predict whether such reforms
will come soon enough to slow climate change or
arrive too late to do anything but manage the
escalating damage of uncontrollable feedback loops.
One thing is becoming quite clear, however. The
environmental destruction in our future will be so
profound that anything less than the emergence of a
new form of global governance — one capable of
protecting the planet and the human rights of all
its inhabitants — will mean that wars over water,
land, and people are likely to erupt across the
planet amid climate chaos. Absent some truly
fundamental change in our global governance and in
energy use, by mid-century humanity will begin to
face disasters of an almost unimaginable kind that
will make imperial orders of any sort something for
the history books.
This essay was distributed by
TomDispatch.
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