What in the World Is Going On?

In this moment, when global politics feel overwhelmed by unprecedented change and intense international upheaval, the Network for Responsible Public Policy convened foreign policy experts to discuss tariffs, conflicts between Israel and Gaza, Israel and Iran, the U.S. and Iran, Russia and Ukraine, North Korea’s role in all of this, and more. As program moderator and Axel Springer Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Gideon Rose put it at the outset, “Everybody's really interested in trying to figure out what is happening, what will happen next, what the consequences will be. The first point to make is that nobody knows anything. We are in uncharted territory in various areas.” Rose was joined by distinguished scholars, F. Gregory Gause III, Minxin Pei, Kathryn Stoner, and Shibley Telhami.

On Iran: Greg Gause discussed the situation in Iran and mentioned that, happily, the worst-case scenario based on the U.S. attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities did not happen, which is good for everyone. That worst-case scenario would have been an Iranian attack on Gulf oil facilities to bring in other actors to counter the U.S. and Israeli attacks. His concern with the current situation is that, with the U.S. President insisting that the nuclear facilities were obliterated, U.S. intelligence assessments must now be questioned, as they will necessarily be skewed to conform to the President’s preferred reality. Since it seems unlikely that the facilities were, in fact, destroyed, Gause believes that Iran now has an enormous incentive to race to develop a nuclear weapon. In what would become a main theme of this conversation (long-term stability even in the face of intense short-term upheaval), Gause mentioned that he does not believe that the current situation in Iran will result in a change to the Iranian regime.

On Gaza, Shibley Telhami described the ongoing humanitarian horror and the continuing hostage situation. With the focus turning to a ceasefire, he said, a “ceasefire is by no means guaranteed because the interests of Hamas and the interests of Israel remain zero-sum. Israel wants a ceasefire that does not end the war and does not compel them to withdraw. Hamas sees that as suicidal. They will not accept a ceasefire that releases all the hostages without a commitment by Israel to withdrawal. And so, in a sense, I don't think anything has changed in the postures right now.”

On Russia and Ukraine: Kathryn Stoner said that “people often say ‘How do you think the war is going to end?’ and I guess the appropriate response is ‘Why do you think the war is going to end?’” While many, including the moderator, believe that the war in Ukraine was a failure on Putin’s part and a surprise to him, Stoner is not so sure that Putin agrees. Since, as she said, Putin “does not care about people,” the casualties are not a concern for him. What is working for him is that Ukraine has not joined NATO, and the U.S. has said that it will not. So, there is nothing that will keep Putin from continuing to prosecute that war for another year or more.

On China: Minxin Pei offered that chaos in the world has provided “breathing room” for China. Essentially, the rest of the world is preoccupied while China focuses on its ongoing real estate bust and flagging economy. The Chinese have opinions about these other conflicts, and they have cast their lots with some of the players (supporting Russia, for example), but mainly, they study these other conflicts to determine how they will reflect on the Asia-Pacific region. China favors fewer countries breaking the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is why they might prefer that Iran not break the NPT, even if they don’t care about Iranian nuclear weapons. In the Russia-Ukraine war, China’s ideal outcome is “a settlement in favor of Russia, which would engender such animosity between Russia and the West over the long term that Russia would never be recruited back into the anti-China coalition in the West.”

Rose summarized the status of the global order as, “We're talking about a spring of nearly unprecedented crisis in a whole variety of areas. Crises which the mainstream press, the non-mainstream press, many observers have seen as about to bring on various kinds of Armageddon, about to bring on various kinds of triumph, about to bring on various kinds of dramatic change of some sort. And yet, despite all that, as we come into summer after this spring, we see a NATO that is revivified with European defenses. We see Ukraine holding its own in the way that everybody has held their own in that damn war for the last three years because of the inherent stalemate on the battlefield. We see Russia going on, losing stuff, but not changing. We see Iran getting hurt but not necessarily collapsing or giving up its nuclear program. We see Israel persisting but not achieving its goals. And what I'm struck by is … the world that will go on from here looks a lot like the world that we came into this spring with; Compared to the dramatic supposed changes and shocks to the system that everybody was talking about and expected.”

Telhami argued that the regimes are still there, and the big players are still the big players. However, he believes that what has really changed is the expectation that there are rules to international affairs. There used to be a “legal normative international order that has more or less held…” In terms of the rules of that order, in the past, “We have at least pretended, even when we violated them… that we're violating them for some reason, [and] we've made some effort to justify… [those violations] in the very terms of the international law and order.” Previous administrations did violate those rules, but with at least a nod towards their existence. Recall the G.W. Bush rationale for the Iraq war. Even then, there was a multinational coalition and an attempt at the UN to justify the actions. Now, we not only ignore all of that, now we have even taken on the very international institutions that established that order. Telhami said, “What we now have in the Trump administration's behavior is not even bothering with any reference to it regarding Iran. It had nothing to do with the NPT treaty. It had nothing to do with international order. It had nothing to do with getting something from the UN. And I think that whole international legal and normative order, with the attacks on the ICC [International Criminal Court], with the attacks on the International Court of Justice, with the attack on the United Nations institutions, has really shaken a foundation in ways that I have not seen before.”

Expanding on this description of change in world order, Rose acknowledged that there was a time when we believed that Israel was different from the rest of the Middle Eastern countries, more of a liberal democratic player. But now, Israel has become just another authoritarian Middle Eastern power. In Europe, we had positioned U.S. values as a more liberal democratic way of dealing with the world, but now, the U.S. has become more like Russia, not the other way around. That is, our diplomats go in to make deals and for personal privilege. “The liberal and rules-based and procedural aspects of the liberal order at home and abroad are basically past their sell-by date,” added Gause.

Overall, the speakers agree that the world is moving from a unipolar world, with the U.S. promoting a liberal democratic world view, into a multipolar world with the U.S. retreating into its local region, the EU separating from the U.S. and becoming a dominant world power with its own military, and China benefitting from the ongoing chaos and becoming more dominant in its own region.

The full NFRPP program can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvCO29R9Kfo

Leigh Chinitz is a board member of The Network for Responsible Public Policy.