"To boldly think what no one has thought of before". Challenge conventional, establishment punditry. Explore new ideas about world order and global governance. Welcome to the Multiplex World Cinema. Instead of just one show – a Hollywood blockbuster – watch a variety of new shows with different plots, actors, producers and directors, from all over the world. How will the old and new powers, global and regional bodies, corporations, social movements and shape-shifting villains like Al-Qaeda and COVID19, play in the 21st century? From the author of The End of American World Order (2014, 2018), Constructing Global Order (2018), Whose Ideas Matter? (2009) and other books, and co-author of The Making of Global International Relations (2019), plus hundreds of journal articles & op-eds, including in Financial Times, Washington Post, Times of India, Straits Times, Bangkok Post, The National Interest, & Foreign Affairs. Join me on Twitter @AmitavAcharya
Below my reply to a vitriolic review of my book WSJ by Tunku Varadarajan (@tunkuv) the paper’s own contributor and affiliate of a conservative think tank, which the paper rejected (editor went on personal leave). I am not surprised (feel vindicated actually) that some might feel aggravated by my book’s argument that civilization is a shared creation, but at least they should tolerate a right of reply if democratically-minded. Let’s debate and let readers decide.
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Reviewing my book, The Once and Future World Order (WSJ, June 22, 2025), Tunku Varadarajan denounces my view that the end of Western dominance may “turn out to be a good thing.” (in the “long run”, I say). He brushes aside my reasoning that Western dominance produced colonialism, inequality, racism, and avoidable wars in the global South.
Mr Varadarajan condemns the 1955 Bandung conference in which postcolonial nations demanded decolonization and racial equality, alleging that that it produced authoritarianism. But there is no such causal link.
My book argues that civilization and world order are not the West’s monopoly. Mr Varadarajan asserts the superiority of Western civilization – with its Greco Roman heritage – as being “more scientific than most.” Yet, the West borrowed scientific and rationalist ideas; for example Indian mathematics, Chinese paper-making and printing, and Islamic algebra, medicine and rationalist philosophy, which fed Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Greeks invented democracy, but with limited participation and without individual liberty. Other civilizations in Near East, Asia, and Africa invented diplomacy, peace treaties, humanitarian values, freedom of seas, etc., but get little credit.
Mr Varadarajan attacks my “values” and the book’s blurbs from Australia’s former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, and Singaporean public intellectual Kishore Mahbubani, because of their allegedly anti-American or pro-China views. He ignores endorsements from Yale historian Odd Arne Westad and Cambridge Professor Ayse Zarakol, and novelist Amitav Ghosh.
Mr Varadarajan falsely alleges that I ask Western nations to pay “material reparations” for their past colonialism. I did not make such a call. He further has me saying that the end of Pax Americana will create a “global Eden.” I clearly state that a post-Western world – I call it a “global multiplex,” “does not mean paradise,” but might “alleviate the conflicts and injustice it had caused,” and produce an “inclusive world order.”
Amitav Acharya
P.S. before being turned down, the text of my rejoinder was compressed and resubmitted at the suggestion of the letters editor of WSJ. But I did not hear back from him for weeks and in the end he wrote back saying he went on personal leave and it was too late to publish the rejoinder. I found this excuse implausible. as my revised rejoinder was sent to the official email address of the letters editor and one would expect a big paper like WSJ would have someone covering for him.). I invited Mr Varadarajan to directly debate with me but he at first ignored it and then refused it in his X Post.
Professor at American University, Washington DC, and author of The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West (Basic Books 2025)
Soon after taking office in his first term, Donald Trump declared, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Now, early into his second term, it is clear that the biggest threat to the West and the world order led by it, is actually from Trump himself.
In recent decades, the main threat to the West came from Russia and China, but even so in a more slow motion and uncertain way. But in a few months, Trump has inflicted greater and more decisive blow.
While America’s rise to global power rode on the back of European or Western dominance, Trump’s policy to ‘make America great again’ comes at the expense of the West.
Trump is doing this in multiple ways, but the most important is his assault institutions and alliances on which the idea of the West has rested, starting with NATO, the signature militant platform of the West. Before his re-election, Trump had threatened to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want to” to NATO members who don’t meet the defense spending targets set by NATO. It has now become all-encompassing. His Vice President JD Vance has attacked Europe’s values, degraded by intolerance of “free speech”, by which he meant right wing positions that attack immigration and respect for cultural diversity. The Trump administration has so far refused to give Europe a seat at the table to negotiate over Ukraine’s future.
Add to this, Trump’s taunt to incorporate Canada as America’s fifty-first province, and his threat to take over Greenland from Denmark in “one way or other,” are further blows to Western unity, as both countries are founding NATO members.
Europe is responding to Trump by increasing defense spending and offering more assistance to Ukraine. But some East European countries, like Hungary may not join Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy and pursue separate security ties with the US and even Russia. Moreover, Trump’s attack on European liberalism will embolden the European and Western far right and further divide the West internally.
The crisis in transatlantic relations will reverberate around the world and weaken the West as a global force. Even if its self-reliance project does not go too far, building a substantially enhanced military capacity will stretch Europe’s resources, and end the EU’s role as the largest provider of international humanitarian aid in the world. Combined with Trump’s massive roll back of US foreign aid, the West’s position and prestige as the leader in development and humanitarian assistance, a major source of its global influence, will be compromised.
In pursuing his stated aim to “rule the world,” Trump has adopted a divide and rule strategy, a classic instrument of many Western imperial powers, especially Britain. Using both economic and military coercion, he could separate nations between those who are making deals with the US like India and those who won’t such as China. And in cultivating right wing populists from El Salvador to Italy, he is sharpening a global ideological divide as well.
Trump is also empowering hitherto challengers to West, China and Russia. He is deflecting attention from China’s own controversial policies such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which pales in comparison with Trump’s demand for critical minerals from Ukraine and his covetous eye on Greenland – motivated by territorial size, strategic location and natural resources, pretty much the dams reasons that are used to explain China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. He is making China’s own divide and rule approach in Southeast Asia appear mild.
Trump is also letting Russia off the hook following its invasion of Ukraine and helping to strengthen Moscow’s global position. He has rejected Ukraine’s demand to gain NATO membership and wants to invite Russia back to the G7 from which it had been ousted since 2014 over its annexation of Crimea. He is most likely to ease sanctions on Russia as part a deal that allows Russia to keep territories it grabbed from Ukraine. If such a deal materializes, it will not only irreversibly legitimize Putin’s geopolitical ambitions but would be a fatal blow to Europe.
Some might hope that Trump’s policies against Western allies can be reversed under a democratic or republican president. Trump’s tariff war continues to play out, and whether he carries it to the fullest extent or not, the damage to the idea of the West is done. Indeed, as the President the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen, put it, “the west as we knew it no longer exists.” The victory of the Liberal Party campaigning on an anti-Trump platform in the Canadian national election shows that the country’s revulsion against the US is for a long haul, and will not be easily healed.
However, it is worth asking if, while weakening the West, will Trump’s policies strengthen the US? Not necessarily. Not only would America’s friends and partners worldwide have less faith in US reliability as a security partner; they may also wonder what resources and other benefits the US might coerce out of them in return for past or continuing security assistance. Such concerns will weaken the US alliance system, one area in which the US and the West enjoy a significant edge over its competitors, Russia and China.
While countries such as Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, India or Singapore are not going to cut security ties with the US, they and other countries would be tempted to reduce dependence on the US and improve ties with America’s rivals. Trump’s foreign policy could also fuel policies of hedging or non-alignment, as alternatives to relying on either the US or its rivals, China and Russia. Faced with doubts over US leadership and support, the EU could expand partnerships with others leading non-Western nations such as Turkey, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, while Americas ties with them regress.
Moreover, Trump’s policies could strengthen momentum for cooperation without the US such as the expanded BRICS grouping. It will enhance the appeal of regional arrangements like Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in Asia-Pacific that excludes the US, but where its allies, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, are actively engaged, as well as that of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) which brings together China with India, Britain, Germany and Italy, but which the US has boycotted. Such “world-minus-the US” cooperation, already seen in the Law of the Sea, International Criminal Court, and the Paris Climate Treaty, would gain more traction in the Trumpian world.
In short, Trump’s foreign policy undercuts not only Western dominance, but also America’s own global influence. It might encourage different combinations of rising powers, middle powers, regional influencers, and arrangements across the West-Rest divide. This framework, which I call a global multiplex, hastens the arrival of both a post-American as well as a post-Western world.
The American-led world order that has prevailed since at least the end of World War II has long been precarious. Under President Trump, it is finally starting to crumble. Mr. Trump is pursuing a sustained assault on allies and adversaries alike. Last week, he announced tariffs on vast categories of goods from even America’s closest trading partners, leaving global markets reeling and effectively ending the decades-long American commitment to international trade. He has repeatedly made his distaste for multilateral institutions clear, including the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and has fundamentally damaged the bedrock of the trans-Atlantic alliance. He has dismantled U.S.A.I.D. and silenced Voice of America. There are good reasons for pessimism about the future — a world in which China, Russia and Mr. Trump’s America carve out spheres of influence and control through leverage and fear. But chaos will not inevitably follow the end of the American order. That fear is partly based on two errors: First, the past seven decades or so have not been as good for everyone on the planet as they have been for the West. And secondly, the very precepts of order are not Western inventions. That’s a reason for optimism. To understand that the American order is not the only possible system — that, for many countries, it is not even a particularly good or fair one — is to allow oneself to hope that its end could augur a more inclusive world. Defenders of the current order argue that it has prevented major wars and maintained a remarkably stable and prosperous international system. And for a select club of countries, it has. Evan Luard, a British politician and scholar of international relations, calculated that, of more than 120 wars that took place between 1945 and 1984, only two occurred in Europe. But the corollary of this, of course, is that during the Cold War more than 98 percent of those wars took place in countries outside of the West. If the first and main promise of the postwar order is peace, many countries might be forgiven for asking: Peace for whom? Not only has the West succeeded in shielding just its members (and some others) from chaos, disorder and injustice, but it has at times contributed to that disorder, as in the U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Equally, the idea of cooperation among nations long predates the rise of the West. Henry Kissinger’s book “World Order” portrays the Concert of Europe consensus that emerged after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 as a model for the preservation of international stability. But great-power diplomacy and cooperation go back to some 3,000 years earlier, when the great powers of the Near East — Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Assyria and Babylonia — developed a system known as Amarna diplomacy, which was based on principles of equality and reciprocity. The Concert of Europe lasted less than a century, until around World War I. The Amarna system kept peace about twice as long. The oldest known written pact of nonaggression and nonintervention was concluded between Egypt and the Hittites around 1269 B.C., and humanitarian rules of warfare, including the protection of civilians and the treatment of defeated soldiers, can be found in the Code of Manu of India from 2,000 years ago. When a warrior “fights with his foes in battle,” it stipulated, let him not strike one “who joins the palms of his hands (in supplication), nor one who (flees) with flying hair, nor one who sits down, nor one who says, ‘I am thine.’” There are additional rules for warriors who have lost their coats of mail, or who are disarmed. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 contain strikingly similar prohibitions against mistreating “members of armed forces who have laid down their arms.” The comfort in acknowledging the roots of these concepts in antiquity is in the reciprocal promise that they can still exist in a world that is not dominated by America. Order has always been a shared endeavor, and many nations of the global south are eager to participate in a world in which there are fewer double standards and more fairness. In the postwar period, many of these states gained independence and became active participants in international politics and in the multilateral institutions that America is now undermining. And when non-Western powers pursue their own agenda through groups that exclude Western nations, they are not necessarily motivated by resentment. For example, the BRICS group of emerging economies has expanded its membership significantly in the last year, but most of its new and founding members are not anti-American; they seek to use the bloc to reform and expand, rather than subvert, global cooperation and promote a more equitable system. The old order is not dead yet. America remains the most powerful country in the world thanks to a combination of unparalleled military strength, the dominance of the dollar and a formidable technological base. It will remain a — perhaps the — global superpower. But the world which it has built is unlikely to survive deep into this century. A world shaped not just by the U.S., China or a handful of great powers, but by a global multiplex of countries, would not be a paradise, but then nor has been this one. A fairer world is possible.
Amitav Acharya is a professor of international relations at American University and the author of
The most enduring consequence of Donald Trump’s second coming could be the end of the idea of the West, at least in its contemporary, geopolitical and geo-economic sense, caused by an irrevocable fracture of the relationship of mutual trust and benefit between the US and its closest allies, Canada and the NATO/EU members. From the outset, America’s European allies saw Trump’s return to office with trepidation.
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A poll conducted by the European Council for Foreign Relations, asking “Do you think the election of Donald Trump as US president is a good or a bad thing for your country?” showed that of all parts of the world, the EU members that were part of the poll (Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain) dominated the “bad thing” response, with 38 per cent replying bad, 22 per cent good, and 40 per cent “neither” or “don’t know.” Among respondents in the UK, which remains America’s closest ally, the “bad” response was more than 3 and half times the “good.” Only South Koreans were more negative about Trump’s return, with six times more saying Trump is bad for them than good. These responses among America’s friends is in contrast to Russia and China, where “good” outnumbered “bad” by substantial margins; 49 to 8 per cent for Russia and 46 to 18 per cent for China.
Since then, transatlantic relations have worsened considerably. The divide within the West is no longer over defense spending only – or the demand that European do more for their own security rather than rely on the US – or over trade issues, such as Europe’s subsidies, but much broader: it extends clashes over values and institutions. As Vance’s fiery rhetoric insults and half-truths at Munich made clear, the Trump and his lieutenants see European culture as having gone astray, degraded by tolerance for immigration, departure from religious orthodoxy, and seeking to do good for the whole world instead of focusing on family and country.
In his crosshairs is a key pillar of transatlantic solidarity – NATO. For Trump, America’s European allies are national-security free riders and abusers of trade privileges given to them by the US. Before his re-election, Trump threatened to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want to” to NATO members who don’t meet the defense spending targets set by NATO. But the animosity is broader than an argument about defense spending. In a video to promote his campaign’s “Agenda 47” platform in March 2024 Trump also pledged: “We have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”
On the crucial issue of the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump administration does not want to give Europe a seat at the table in negotiations to settle Ukraine’s future, and that insists that Ukraine can hope neither to regain its lands seized by Russia nor expect NATO membership. Add to this Trump’s suggestion that Russia should be invited back to the G7 from which it had been ousted since 2014 over its takeover of Crimea. In short, it looks like the West will not survive Trump 2.
Add to these the Trump administration’s tariff aggression against Canada and the EU, and his threat to take Greenland from Denmark (which, like Canada, is a founding member of NATO) in “one way or the other.” Wither, then, goes the West? Over the ages, the West has been a Christian notion, an imperial notion, and a white racial notion, but it really became a “thing” during the Cold War, during which the West came to be synonymous with the United States and its European NATO allies, plus Japan and a few former European colonies, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. This “West,” united by liberal-democratic values, had a very concrete purpose, collectively to prevent the takeover of the world by the East, meaning the Soviet Union and its socialist allies, joined together in the Warsaw Pact.
But once that purpose was achieved and the Cold War ended in victory, the West didn’t go out of business—indeed it was strengthened. No one put in more eloquently than Francis Fukuyama in his famous 1989 essay in The National Interest: “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” Fukuyama repeated this claim after the shocking terrorist attacks of 9/11, affirming that history was still moving toward the “liberal-democratic West,” but he added a caveat, acknowledging that the threat to liberal democracy hadn’t withered away. If the US and its Western allies failed to counter Russia in Ukraine and China in Taiwan, “then that really is the end of the end of history.”
Ironically perhaps, the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually gave the idea of the West a new validating purpose and unity, and it added two powerful new members, Sweden and Finland. The war provided what the commentator Lili Loofbourow called “a category of identification that hasn’t enjoyed real, popular international relevance in a good long while.” But now, three years into the Russian invasion, it is clear that the revival of the West is not happening. The reverse is. Trump may indeed be on the verge of accomplishing what the former Soviet Union in all its power could not: bring about an inglorious end to the idea of the West. Even if Trump statements are negotiating positions, and even if he does not carry through on his threat to sanction European allies and Canada, his rhetoric has already shaken confidence about American reliability in the Rest of the West.
The main result of the transatlantic rift is Europe’s fairly rapid move towards defense self-reliance, which has until now appeared half-hearted to say the least. Now European have committed to more investment on defence, even an “Army of Europe,” a more far-fetched idea mooted by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after his public humiliation by Trump and Vance in the White House in February. Europe is mobilizing hundreds of billions of dollars of Euros to help Ukraine and rebuild its military capacity. This does not mean the end of NATO although that is not as unimaginable as it seemed less than three years ago.. But there would be a psychological shift, a broad European reassessment of its interests in a post-Pax Americana world, that renders NATO a shadow of its former self, a geopolitical rump. Can the humpty-dumpty be put back together again?
Moreover, Trump’s threats could lead not just a divide between Europe and America, but also divisions among the Europeans themselves. While few EU or NATO leaders are as openly welcoming of Trump as Hungary’s Victor Orban, others among NATO’s newer members such as Poland and the Baltics states and those in the EU’s southeastern flank, which have most to lose from US abandonment, will simply put up with Trump, including his demands for higher defense spending, but they will do so out of fear and coercion rather than from a sense of shared interests Some in that situation would be tempted to make deals with Russia on their own to reduce the threat they perceive from Moscow. As the ECFR put it, “It may no longer be possible to speak of ‘the West’ as a single geopolitical actor.”
Consequences for World Order
What about the world at large? It is quite clear now that “make America great again” (MAGA) does not mean Trump wants to restore the world order of the post-WWII period. Trump objects to the core principle behind that order, as developed by international relations scholars from Charles Kindleberger to John Ikenberry: the notion of hegemonic stability, whereby a leading state accepts some sacrifices (such as a trade deficit) to provide global public goods such as free trade and security. This was at the heart of the US-led liberal international order which in Trump’s view has led the United States to be “ripped off by virtually every country in the world.”
Many scholars and leaders see multipolarity as the likely outcome of the collapse of the US-led liberal international order, that is a system wherein several great powers view each other as more or less equals and cooperate through some mechanism like the European concert of powers that emerged after the defeat of Napoleon. But it is not clear that Trump would want or tolerate such an arrangement. Trump wants to coerce rather than cooperate with other great powers, such as China or the European Union, while developing some sort of a sphere of influence, an expanded Monroe Doctrine that would coerce not only central America, but also Western allies such as Canada and Denmark, to submit to America’s will. This sort of order, if it emerges, will be highly contested and unstable.
However, the rest of the world is not going to follow Trump in ditching multilateralism. It is possible that other major powers, not just China and Russia but also moderate nations like France, India, Saudi Arabia and Canada will step up engagement with existing multilateral mechanisms. Even the BRICS, regarded as rivals to the West, are becoming less so with new moderate members such as Egypt, the UAE, and Indonesia, in additional to original member India.
One might see the emergence of cooperation and affiliations that cut across the West and the Rest divide. The EU – the largest provider of international aid in the world, which enjoys more trust around the world than any other multi-national entity (according to surveys in Europe and Southeast Asia) could become a key player here, partnering with emerging countries. It is noteworthy that the EU’s attitudes towards China increasingly diverge from that of the US, and EU members have stepped up cooperation with China, Turkey and India. America’s non-European US allies such as Australia, Canada and Japan, could feel the same way.
To be sure, faced with the amplitude of the Trumpian challenge, the nations that still call themselves Western will be tempted simply to wait him out and go back to business as usual when he is gone. But this will be a mistake. Unlike Trump 1, Trump 2 seems intent not only on disengaging from the international order, but also disrupting it, and doing so in ways that may not be reversible. And this actually creates an opportunity for building a new order that may better reflect the distribution of power in the world today and that could still provide plenty of opportunity for cooperation, which leaves the door open to the US joining in after Trump’s exit.
Hence, some international cooperation could take the form of “world minus X”, whereby countries – including US allies – cooperate on specific issues while the US stays out. This is by no means novel or inconsequential. This is how the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea have functioned. The refusal of the US to join these multi-lateral organizations has not rendered them insignificant. Regional cooperation mechanisms not involving US allies will also play a role here. ASEAN has developed the “ASEAN Minus X” formula whereby initiatives move ahead despite the non-participation of one or more members. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in Asia-Pacific does not include the US, but its allies, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, are actively engaged. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) brings together China with India, Britain, Germany and Italy, without the US being present, despite exaggerated concerns over Chinese manipulation of the Bank.
Ending West-versus-the Rest
Trump’s disruption of the West may help to get rid of the West-versus-the Rest mindset. And this need not be a bad thing for world order. For a majority of people in the world, the term West has a dark history and meaning. What was originally a geographic or cultural notion, acquired an imperialist and racist meaning through the 19th and 20thcenturies as a result of European colonization which the US, itself a product of colonization of indigenous people and slavery, helped to prolong or even strengthen. The West sees itself as liberal, tolerant, democratic and progressive, and this self-image has some truth, but for the states and societies in the rest of the world the concept “the West” carries notions of cultural, political, moral, intellectual and racial superiority. As this fact of global history becomes more known, the idea of the West becomes more divisive than unifying.
Confronting Trump 2, the nations that still call themselves Western may be tempted him out and go back to business as usual. But this will be a mistake. Trump may be a catalyst of Western disunity, but he is not the reason, for the West’s decline. And his destruction of the old liberal order creates an opportunity to create an inclusive world.
A major lesson of history is that the West never had the monopoly of creating or managing world order: meaning institutions and norms that underpin the basic stability of the world, or a big part of it, at a given period of time. No world order in history (including the British empire or the US-led Liberal Order) has been truly global; none has been permanent, and none has been free from conflict. It’s not that and institutions and values the West cherished are wrong, what is wrong is to regard them as uniquely Western. As my study of 5000 years history shows, the core elements of world order – independence of state, diplomacy, peace treaties, economic interdependence, the notion of collective goods, freedom of the seas, protecting the environment, humanitarian values, and much more – emerged in early foundational forms from multiple locations, before the rise of West. It’s time to acknowledge these and promote them so as to get rid of West vs rest mindset, which has been a force for distrust and division in the world.
Hopes of imminent defeat of regime may be optimistic but resistance is making gains
Amitav Acharya
Nikkei Asia, January 9, 2025,
When Myanmar’s military under Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing seized power on Feb. 1, 2021, abruptly ending the country’s decade-long democratic experiment, no one expected a quick resolution to the ensuing conflict and humanitarian disaster. But the fallout — including death, destruction and economic damage –has exceeded even the worst fears. Will 2025 be any different?
The regime has been fighting various armed resistance groups. These have included ethnic armed organizations, consisting of minority groups that have been fighting for autonomy since the country’s independence in 1948; the People’s Defense Forces (PDF) that were et up in opposition to the military takeover in 2021 under the banner of the rebel National Unity Government; and local defense forces (LDF) that were also established in 2021 by activists. In October 2023, there was a dramatic turn in the conflict when a coordinated offensive by three opposition armed groups, comprising the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army, launched an offensive campaign known as Operation 1027 after the date it started. The so-called Three Brotherhood Alliance inflicted significant losses on the military. This led to hopes that the stalemate on the battlefield had been broken, with the advantage shifting decisively to the armed opposition groups seeking to oust the regime.
While Myanmar is no stranger to internal strife, this is the first time that the Burmese military is fighting not only ethnic groups, but also armed pro- democracy groups among the Bamar majority in the country’s heartlands. The proliferation of resistance groups has also led to unprecedented levels of cooperation. The crisis monitoring group, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), estimates that the PDF and LDF have captured some 80 towns and 200 military bases across Myanmar.
But hopes that the victories of the opposition would lead to a quick and total defeat of the military have proven too optimistic. Part of the reason is that those areas where the opposition scored its most sensational victories were particularly favorable to them, but they constituted only a small — if significant — part of the conflict areas. While the loss of some border posts might underscore the regime’s vulnerabilities, they did not prove decisive.
The opposition groups are also plagued by infighting. While they often display substantial cooperation, there are also plenty of military clashes. Ironically, victory on the ground has exacerbated tensions among the opposition units as they compete for territory and administrative control over areas seized from the military. ACLED recorded more than 300 cases of such armed clashes in 2024.
China has played a crucial role in limiting the regime’s losses. Closing border posts to Kachin and northern Shan state rebels, it has put pressure on them to strike a ceasefire with the regime. While China’s primary motive is to ensure security along its border with Myanmar, the result of its actions is to give the generals some breathing space.
The regime has also benefited from diplomatic intervention by Thailand, which stepped up efforts in late December to find a political settlement. Bangkok last year hosted the first of “informal consultations” between Myanmar’s military and representatives from neighboring countries: China, India, Bangladesh, Laos and Thailand. It has also been holding meetings with other ASEAN members on a ministerial level.
Thailand’s move is not surprising. Bangkok had already shown impatience with ASEAN’s muddled approach that had been marred by giving Laos, which just finished its one-year term as ASEAN chair and handed over to Malaysia, the exclusive prerogative in appointing ASEAN’s chief interlocutor with the Myanmar regime. In addition, the Thai military enjoys a special relationship with the Myanmar military.
Sharing a 2,400-kilometer border with Myanmar and hosting hundreds of thousands of Myanmar refugees in border regions and many more inside Thailand, Bangkok can claim to have a special interest in seeking a quick resolution of the Myanmar conflict.
Thailand played a similar role in ending the Cambodia conflict in the 1980s. But there are notable differences this time. While the earlier efforts involved all the warring Cambodian factions, the NUG, Myanmar’s government-in-exile, has not yet been invited to the Thai-led informal consultations. It is not clear if and when the NUG will participate in these talks.
Whatever its motive, the Thai initiative is viewed as providing a lifeline to Min Aung Hlaing, who has faced battlefield defeats, defections from his forces and internal dissension. His battered regime faced another major setback in late December, when the Arakan Army, a member of the Brotherhood Alliance, captured the headquarters of the military’s western military command center in Rakhine state, a humiliating defeat and the second such command to fall after the Alliance’s capture of the northeast command headquarters in Lashio in August 2024.
The regime promised elections soon after it seized power in 2021. But it has delayed conducting them, citing instability in parts of the country. China is applying pressure for them to be held. The election issue was understood to have featured in discussions when Min Aung Hlaing made his first visit to China in early November.
Myanmar’s foreign minister has reportedly suggested that officials from neighboring countries would be invited to observe elections when they take place. But there is much skepticism that the regime would hold free, fair and inclusive elections. The NUG almost certainly will not attempt to participate as it is now an outlawed group and might urge people to boycott the elections under conditions that it deems unfair.
The NUG has scrapped the 2008 constitution that allowed the military to occupy 25% of parliamentary seats. Drafting a new constitution to eliminate or reduce the military’s privileges will take time and may be politically impossible. There is always the danger that fighting could severely disrupt the electoral process unless all sides in the Myanmar conflict agree to any new arrangement.
The success of the Thai approach and a diplomatic solution will also depend on how other ASEAN members respond to it. Malaysia, Indonesia and Singaporehave shown a deep distrust of Myanmar’s regime. But this might change as ASEAN member states feel more desire to move on from Myanmar issues. Malaysia, as ASEAN chair in 2025, will have an especially critical role. While Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has been fiercely critical of the Naypyidaw regime, he once advocated for “constructive intervention” with Malaysia’s then- military rulers in the 1990s when he was Malaysia’s deputy prime minister. Western nations would reject any election that did not involve the NUG and the other major opposition parties. But even a rigged election could help the regime gain legitimacy as long as ASEAN members and other regional powers such as China and India accept the result.
The West, distracted by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, might pass the buck to ASEAN to solve the Myanmar issue. Although ASEAN so far has failed to make much diplomatic headway in ending the conflict, the Thai-led initiative might give a new opening to ASEAN in addressing the Myanmar crisis. But time is running out as Myanmar’s economy is close to collapse. With half the country’s townships affected by the fighting and millions of people displaced, poverty levels have doubled since 2021. A string of natural disasters, including two major typhoons in 2023 and 2024, have delayed a recovery from the COVID pandemic.
According to the World Bank, Myanmar’s economy is expected to contract by 1%, in the fiscal year ending March 2025. With a third of the population in dire need of humanitarian assistance, it warned of severe long term consequences, including “the risk of a lost generation.”
The coming year could be a decisive one in Myanmar’s political situation and might determine whether an end to the fighting is possible or whether the country is condemned to permanent Balkanization.
Regions are not permanent entities — their names and boundaries change. The concept of the Asian region has evolved over time due to strategic, economic and cultural drivers, leading to its classification into different concepts such as ‘Asia Pacific’, ‘East Asia’ and ‘Indo-Pacific’, shaped by economists, culturalists and strategists respectively. Most recently, the Indo-Pacific idea has emerged, with a more culturally and politically diverse range than East Asia. But the Indo-Pacific idea’s future depends on it becoming more inclusive, multilateral and non-hegemonic, moving towards a framework that allows regional benefit without dominance by any one country.
‘Asia’ was built by nationalists, the ‘Asia Pacific’ by economists, ‘East Asia’ by culturalists and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ by strategists. To endure, the Indo-Pacific architecture would have to become more inclusive, multilateral and non-hegemonic. The idea of ‘Asia’ in the modern era was anchored on pan-Asianism. Earlier, Western imperial powers, Britain in particular, had called the region ‘Far East’. But Asian leaders wondered: ‘far from where? east of what?’ and coopted Asianism as a new identity.
While Japanese imperialists used the term to exclude Western powers, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, former Chinese president Sun Yat-sen and Japanese scholar Okakura Kakuzo promoted it as a cultural and anti-imperialist construct.
India’s efforts to lead pan-Asianism by convening two Asian Relations Conferences in 1947 and 1949 in New Delhi and establish a permanent political organisation — Asian Relations Organization — petered out after the 1962 China–India war.
Since then, the Asia Pacific idea has taken off. This occurred with the creation of a number of economic forums, such as the Pacific Basin Economic Council (1967), Pacific Trade and Development Conference (1968) and Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (1980). Economists, businesspeople and academic and think tank policy experts played the key roles in these forums. In 1989, governments stepped up by establishing APEC. In 1994, the ASEAN Regional Forum — the first Asia Pacific multilateral security group — was established in Bangkok. But neither APEC or the ASEAN Regional Forum were founded on shared culture and identity.
That changed with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, when the Asia Pacific idea was challenged by a turn towards East Asian regionalism. This was prompted in large part by resentment against the United States for its unwillingness to help crisis-hit Southeast Asia and its heavy-handed rejection of Japan’s Asian Monetary Fund initiative.
East Asian cooperation took on a culturalist undertone when analysts called it ‘East Asia minus the Caucasians’ — or for that matter, the Indians. The 2001 report of the East Asia Vision Group, set up by then South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, described East Asia as ‘a distinctive and crucial region’ and called for ‘fostering the identity of an East Asian community’ based on ‘shared challenges, common aspirations and a parallel destiny’. Interestingly, these were almost the exact words in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s idea of a ‘Community of Shared Destiny’.
Another East Asia group emerged in 1997, when Japan, China, South Korea and ASEAN set up ASEAN + 3 to foster financial cooperation, leading to the Chiang Mai Initiative in 2000 — a bilateral and multilateral currency swap system.
Yet when the East Asia Summit held its first meeting in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, India, Australia and New Zealand were allowed to join despite China’s objections, as Indonesia, Japan and Singapore sought to balance China with the participation of other powers. The United States and Russia joined the group in 2011. Here, security attempted to trump identity.
Unsurprisingly, the East Asia Summit was stymied by US–China rivalry. At this juncture, the Indo-Pacific idea came into vogue. The term was not new, a 2007 paper on India–Japan security cooperation by a retired Indian naval officer, Gurpreet Khurana, gave it contemporary policy prominence. But the term was initially sidelined in US policy, which under president Barack Obama was promoting ‘rebalancing’ or ‘pivoting’. But his successor president Donald Trump dumped the ‘pivot’ and embraced the Indo-Pacific. President Joe Biden has continued this embrace.
Regions are not named purely based on geography, but are often shaped by strategic, economic and cultural drivers. Thus regions are not permanent entities and their names and boundaries change. India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Pakistan — now considered South Asian states — were members of a group called the Conference of South East Asian Prime Ministers, which officially sponsored the 1955 Bandung Conference, along with Indonesia and Burma (now Myanmar) in the 1950s.
The Indo-Pacific is a particularly fragile idea. If it is not just two huge oceans, it is a region that encompasses more cultural diversity than Southeast Asia or East Asia but has economic links within the region are also weaker than those in the Asia Pacific or East Asia.
India is not well integrated into East Asia nor the trans-Pacific production networks that were crucial to the Asia Pacific idea. New Delhi is not an APEC member and pulled out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership negotiations out of concern of competition with China as well as deep internal vested interests that resisted opening up the economy. India’s interest in the Indo-Pacific idea owes to security considerations, especially to counter China, geopolitical flattery and to achieve a geopolitical prominence that it cannot enjoy in the Asia Pacific or East Asia constructs.
While the Asia Pacific and East Asia are anchored on multilaterals — such as APEC, the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit — the Indo-Pacific rests on minilaterals, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, promoted by the United States, is another minilateral. The Indo-Pacific idea lacks the support of a vibrant track II community, like the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council or the Council on Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific.
ASEAN has been relegated from being in the ‘driver’s seat’ in the Asia Pacific to the ‘passenger’s seat’ in the Indo-Pacific. The ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific is a limited response out to avoid being sidelined by the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.
The Indo-Pacific suffers from an aspirational gap — between the US idea of ‘free’ and ‘open’, terms meant to isolate China and China’s ‘inclusive’ vision of Indonesia and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. This leads to vastly competing visions of the Indo-Pacific idea.
These considerations are cause for caution. The historical Indian Ocean region before the arrival of European imperial powers was a thriving commercial and cultural region that no one country dominated but everyone benefited from. The future of the Indo-Pacific idea could learn from that experience.
Amitav Acharya is a Distinguished Professor at American University, Washington DC, and co-author of Divergent Worlds: What the Ancient Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Can Tell Us About the Future of International Order with Manjeet Pardesi. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300214987/divergent-worlds/
(NOTE: a shorter version of this essay was first published in Responsible Statecraft on MARCH 29, 2022. But key passages from the original essay were deleted due to the word limit, especially some lines concerning the effects of sanctions and the unity of “the West”, which are included in this draft.)
Does Putin’s invasion of Ukraine revive the fading idea of the West, or hasten the demise of the Western-led international order?
Amitav Acharya
American University
Among its wide ranging consequences for international order, Vladimir Putin’s of Ukraine adventure, triggering sweeping Western sanctions against Russia has rekindled hopes for a revival of US leadership and Western unity in global affairs. As Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations writes “In one fateful step, the Russian president has managed to revive Western solidarity, reenergize U.S. global leadership, catalyze European integration, expose Russia’s weaknesses, undermine Moscow’s alliance with Beijing, and make his authoritarian imitators look foolish.”
Putin has given the idea of “the West” a fresh lease of life, at least in Western societies. Writing in Slate,Lili Loofbourow notes, “Pro-Ukraine feelings in search of an organizing principle are coalescing around a category of identification that hasn’t enjoyed real, popular international relevance in a good long while: “the West”—a category Vladimir Putin has long railed against, but which Westerners themselves haven’t, at least in recent years, claimed with much personal attachment or ideological loyalty.”
But Western analysts are not alone in thinking of this possibility. From China, Hu Wei, vice-chairman of the Public Policy Research Center of the Counselor’s Office of the State Council, expects that as a result of the Ukraine crisis, “The power of the West will grow significantly, NATO will continue to expand, and U.S. influence in the non-Western world will increase…no matter how Russia achieves its political transformation, it will greatly weaken the anti-Western forces in the world… The West will possess more “hegemony” both in terms of military power and in terms of values and institutions, its hard power and soft power will reach new heights.”
Not so fast. While the Russian invasion is deeply self-injurious, instead of reviving the West’s dominance of world order, it could hasten its demise, or create a more level playing field between the West and the Rest
The Ukraine conflict shows that Europe is no longer immune to major conflict, as it was during much of the Cold War. There is now a major war at the heart of Europe. The idea of the West as peaceful as well as prosperous has taken a beating.
The conflict also demonstrates that there is nothing special about European values or European approaches to institution-building and stability that is fail-proof or protects it from disorder. There was once much enthusiasm about Europe’s concepts such as “common security”, pan-European identity, or “European common home”, articulated by the Palme Commission in 1982 and promoted by the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as the Cold War ended. US presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton endorsed the vision of a Europe that is “whole, free and at peace”. Today, Europe is neither whole, nor free nor at peace. As The Economist magazine noted on 4th March 2022, “As much as the war’s reverberations are felt around the world, though, they sound most strongly in Europe. The invasion has upended the idea of a continent “whole, free and at peace”.
The implication is that European values, no matter how noble they may seem, are not universally shared, even without the larger European region. Instead, if pursued dogmatically, without regard to the interests and identities of others, they could cause conflict.
Second, the war in Ukraine if not resolved soon, will cost both Russia and the US dearly. While Russia reels from unprecedented sanctions, the US and the West will not go unscathed due to the interdependent nature of the global economy. Russia’s role as supplier of energy and critical minerals is not trivial, and they have already forced the US to look for support from such adversaries as Venezuela. This cannot be high point for America’s moral standing in the world.
Furthermore, the freezing of Russia’s assets, coming on the heels of those of Afghanistan after the return of Taliban, would send chills to those who keep their reserves in the US, such as China, who would consider reducing their holdings and developing alternatives financial arrangements. This would not be easy, but bilateral arrangements such as those between China and Russia may well dent the global dollar hegemony.
As columnist Fareed Zakaria wrote commenting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine: “One of the defining features of the new era is that it is post-American. By that I mean that the Pax Americana of the past three decades is over.” Zakaria himself had written about the “post-American world” in 2008, but this was mainly about the rise of other powers relative to others. He had until now refused to accept the end of the liberal international order the US had built. In reality, as this author had argued in 2014, the US-led world order was in peril. The Ukraine conflict puts another nail on its coffin.
The Ukraine conflict may revive NATO, but that also means raising Europe’s defence burden, with Germany taking the lead with a major increase in its defense spending. This would dissipate Europe’s economic resilience. Higher energy prices would further stoke inflation, including in the West undermining post-pandemic recovery.
The Ukraine conflict confronts the US, the leader of the West, with a two front war; with Russia and China more closely aligned than at any point since the 1950s. The only difference is that this time, China’s is the senior partner, in terms of wealth while also being a significant nuclear power. And China is a much more comprehensive adversary of the US than an economically anemic and isolated Soviet Union. The Ukraine crisis may undermine if not reverse Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy which had built on Obama’s pivot to Asia and Trump’s considerable investment on the Quadrilateral Strategic Dialogues (QUAD), which would be seriously compromised if the US was to retaliate against India’s purchase of Russian air defense missiles or its refusal to condemn the UN General Assembly resolution against Russia of 2 March, 2022.
Moreover, while condemning Putin’s aggression, the developing countries are not necessarily supporting the revival of the US-led liberal order. Aside from the fact that China, India and South Africa abstained on the UN General Assembly vote on 2 March condemning Russia, among African countries, voting on that resolution was 28 in favor with 17 abstentions.
The sweeping sanctions on Russia, which was criticized by Brazil despite having voted for the UNGA resolution, remind developing nations of the coercive economic power of the West, which may be used against them if they stray from Western interests and expectations. African and Middle Eastern opinion also points to the harsh treatment of refugees from these regions in Eastern Europe, including on the Ukrainian border. Then there is the issue of the West’s own record of military intervention. As Gilles Yabi, the founder of WATHI, a “citizen Think Tank” in Senegal, notes, “In Africa, we are…stunned by this invasion of Ukraine by Russia…This is unjustifiable, as were the interventions of the United States and NATO in many countries, sometimes under false pretenses and in flagrant violation of international law.” This shows attempts by Western policymakers and analysts to reject any moral equivalence between Russian and US/NATO interventions, are not entirely convincing in the non-Western world.
Some non-Western countries also resent the pressure from the West, as revealed in then Pakistani premier Imran Khan’s “are we your slaves” outburst in March when confronted with a missive from Western ambassadors to condemn Russia.
One of the rays of hope amidst the gloom of the Ukraine crisis must be noted. It is not a “clash of civilizations”. In fact, the late Samuel Huntington, who coined that phrase, had written in his 1996 book, “If civilization is what counts, violence between Ukrainians and Russians is unlikely.”
Of course, violence has now taken place, but it is not due to a civilizational clash. Russia’s grievance against the West (real or imagined), Putin’s miscalculation of Ukrainian resistance, and the geopolitics of NATO expansion, are more important factors behind the conflict, which Huntington’s thesis had underestimated. Indeed, condemnation of Russia’s invasion cuts across cultures and continents: including Islamic Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, Buddhist Thailand and Cambodia, Catholic Philippines and Brazil and Christian-Muslim Nigeria.
For the same reason, the Ukraine conflict does not imply a global breakdown of norms against war and imperialism. The nations that abstained on the UNGA resolution, such as India and South Africa, for their own reasons of national interest, have not endorsed Putin’s action. In short, the Ukraine conflict paradoxically highlights the importance of global norms against aggression and conquest, which is not surprising, since as I have argued elsewhere, those norms were not the West’s unique creation, but were crafted jointly by the West and the Rest.
The idea that the international order is stronger than ever is not shared by those often on the receiving end of its coercive tactics.
Amitav Acharya, Responsible Statecraft, MARCH 29, 2022
Among its wide ranging consequences for international order, Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion and its triggering of sweeping Western sanctions against Russia have spurred hopes for a revival of U.S. leadership and Western unity in global affairs.
As Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations has written, “In one fateful step, the Russian president has managed to revive Western solidarity, reenergize U.S. global leadership, catalyze European integration, expose Russia’s weaknesses, undermine Moscow’s alliance with Beijing, and make his authoritarian imitators look foolish.”
Putin has given the idea of “the West” a fresh lease of life, at least in Western societies. “Pro-Ukraine feelings in search of an organizing principle,” according to Slate’s Lili Loofbourow, are coalescing around a category of identification that hasn’t enjoyed real, popular international relevance in a good long while: ‘the West’—a category Vladimir Putin has long railed against, but which Westerners themselves haven’t, at least in recent years, claimed with much personal attachment or ideological loyalty.”
But Western analysts are not alone their assessment of a possible Western revival. From China, Hu Wei, vice-chairman of the Public Policy Research Center of the Counselor’s Office of the State Council, expects that as a result of the Ukraine crisis, “[t]he power of the West will grow significantly, NATO will continue to expand, and U.S. influence in the non-Western world will increase…[N]o matter how Russia achieves its political transformation, it will greatly weaken the anti-Western forces in the world… The West will possess more “hegemony” both in terms of military power and in terms of values and institutions, its hard power and soft power will reach new heights.”
Not so fast. There is another school of thought, that while the Russian invasion is deeply self-injurious, it could hasten the West’s decline, or at least create a more level playing field between the West and the Rest when it comes to moral leadership of the international order.
“One of the defining features of the new era is that it is post-American,” charged Fareed Zakaria after the invasion was launched. “By that I mean that the Pax Americana of the past three decades is over.” Zakaria himself had written about a “post-American world” since at least the 2008 financial crisis, but he was referring then to the rise of other powers relative to the U.S. Until now, he had refused to accept the breakup of the post-1945 U.S.-built liberal international order. In reality, as this author argued in 2014, the U.S.-led global system had been moving toward life support. And the Ukraine conflict has moved it closer to pulling the plug.
Aside from the fact that China, India, and South Africa abstained on the U.N. General Assembly vote on March 2 condemning Russia, those developing countries that voted in favor of the resolution were not, by doing so, voicing their support for the revival of this U.S.-led order. Among sub-Saharan countries, for example, voting on that resolution was 28 in favor with 17 abstentions.
At the same time, no matter how much Western leaders may dislike the term, “moral equivalence” between Russian invasion and past U.S. interventions is being drawn. To cite Amin Saikal, an Afghan-Australian scholar and a leading authority on Middle East: in invading Ukraine, “President Vladimir Putin has deftly observed and exploited the past misdeeds and current limitations of the United States…The Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos are a powerful reminder of the moral lapses and human tragedies that the U.S. and some of its allies were responsible for in those countries.”
In other words, it is not entirely inconsistent for the “Global South” to both condemn the Russian invasion on principle and express criticisms of Western “internationalism” and its double standards.
The sweeping sanctions on Russia, which were criticized by Brazil despite having voted for the resolution, remind developing nations of the coercive economic power of the West, which may be — and has been used — against them if they fail to protect or uphold Western interests and expectations.
African and Middle Eastern governments and media have also pointed to the harsh treatment of refugees from their own regions in Eastern Europe, including on the Ukrainian border, not to mention the issue of the West’s own record of military intervention. As Gilles Yabi, the founder of WATHI, a “citizen think tank” in Senegal, noted, “In Africa, we are… stunned by this invasion of Ukraine by Russia… This is unjustifiable, as were the interventions of the United States and NATO in many countries, sometimes under false pretenses and in flagrant violation of international law.”
The attempts by Western policymakers and analysts to reject any moral equivalence between Russian and U.S./NATO interventions are not entirely convincing to the non-Western world.
Some non-Western countries also resent the pressure from the West, as revealed in Pakistani premier Imran Khan’s “are we your slaves” outburst in March when confronted with a missive from Western ambassadors urging Islamabad to unequivocally condemn Russia’s invasion.
Much depends on whether the Ukraine conflict ends with the humiliating defeat of Russia or the collapse of European and Western unity. But a war at the heart of Europe that has already taken a terrible toll in human lives and inflicted major damage on both Ukraine and Russia is not a glowing advertisement for the approach to regional and international order that the West had envisaged. It shows the limits and dangers of the post-Cold War European project of continental peace and stability.
For background, as the Cold War ended, European concepts such as “common security,” pan-European identity, or “European common home,” as articulated by the Palme Commission in 1982 and promoted by the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, drew global attention. U.S. presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton enthused about the vision of a Europe that is “whole, free and at peace.”
But as the Economist magazine noted earlier this month, “As much as the war’s reverberations are felt around the world…[it] has upended the idea of a continent “whole, free and at peace.” With this the idea of Europe (and the West) as a model of conflict management for other regions such as Southeast Asia, Africa, or Latin America, takes a beating.
In its most recent Strategic Compass issued on 22 March, the EU reminded of it being “a consistent leader investing in effective multilateral solutions,” of its “crisis management missions and operations operating on three continents” and its “global security responsibilities.” But if Europe cannot put its own house in order, how can it be taken seriously as a conflict manager outside.
Finally, while a debate rages over whether Putin’s imperial ambition or the threat posed by NATO expansion was responsible for the Ukraine invasion, it is also clear that many Western policy-makers, including George Kennan, Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretaries William Perry and Robert Gates, and current CIA Director William Burns, had warned against the latter. That such warnings went unheeded not only smacks of America’s geopolitical arrogance or incompetence, or both, it also reminds the world of the perils of the U.S. entanglements in security alliances in general.
There was a time not long ago when Europe was seen by much of the world as a model for peace and cooperation. The Cold War had ended with the peaceful implosion of the Soviet Union. The European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and other similar institutions were seen as a beacon for the rest of the world, including Asia and the Middle East, to emulate. Europe was “primed for peace,” wrote Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Stephen Van Evera in 1991. Princeton scholar Aaron Friedberg concurred: “The movement toward democracy, equality, and cosmopolitanism in each of the states in Europe, the increasingly dense and diverse linkages between them and the mounting costs and declining benefits of war among them have mutually reinforcing effects” and “taken as a whole their impact would be ‘overwhelming’” in creating conditions for peace.
Today all these claims are shattered. How did Europe come to this? What are the implications for world order? While the Ukraine situation continues to evolve, some consequences immediately come to mind.
To begin with, the Ukraine crisis is another nail, perhaps the final one, in the coffin of postwar liberal order. The order was already fraying due to a global economic shift from the West to China, among others. That shift was in motion even before President Trump assumed office with a foreign policy agenda that distrusted both economic globalization and multilateral institutions. President Biden upon taking office pledged to “repair our alliances and engage with the world once again.” But the Ukraine crisis would go on to impede multilateralism, paralyze the U.N. Security Council, and severely limit cooperation among the major powers. It would return the world to opposing power blocs where the U.S. and its NATO allies faced Russia and China.
Predictably, in confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden has turned to NATO. There have been celebrations about renewed NATO unity brought about by Putin’s provocations. But NATO has been as much part of the problem as of the solution. Writing in the New York Times in 1997, George F. Kennan, the father of the U.S. “containment” strategy against the Soviet Union, warned, “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.” Kennan’s warning has proven correct. Some influential commentators, such as former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul vigorously reject the view that NATO expansion had anything to do with Putin’s Ukraine move. But alliances are known to provoke as much as deter conflict. In fact, recognition of the war-making effects of Europe’s alliances led President George Washington to pursue a foreign policy “to steer clear of permanent alliances,” while the same distrust led Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to advocate a universal security system.
The Ukraine crisis not only challenges peace in Europe, it will also test U.S. global strategic goals. The U.S. is now facing the prospect of a two-front war, especially if Putin’s military moves go beyond Ukraine. In sending troops to Ukraine, Putin has threatened to inflict “consequences you have never encountered in your history” on countries that try to stop him, a threat directed more at Europe, including the new NATO nations in the Baltic, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, than at the U.S. Biden has said that the U.S. had “no intention of fighting Russia”, but he also wants to “send an unmistakable message that the United States together with our allies will defend every inch of NATO territory and abide by the commitments we made to NATO.” Some of that territory could well turn out to be those of these Baltic states. But it is not unreasonable to ask: Will the U.S. risk a nuclear war to defend Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn?
More important, can Washington put adequate resources to defend NATO while also pursuing a vigorous Indo-Pacific strategy directed at China? The U.S. was able to win the Cold War by concentrating on one enemy—the Soviet Union—especially after U.S.-China rapprochement neutralized Chinese hostility following the Nixon visit almost exactly half a century ago. This helped the U.S. to counter the Soviet Union’s geopolitical adventures in places such as Cambodia and Afghanistan, ultimately leading to its decline and fall. Now, Russia and China are ganging up against the U.S. Beijing, as an ardent defender of nonintervention, has remained almost silent in the U.N. Security Council debates over Ukraine.
China could secure geopolitical gains if Washington’s attention and resources are diverted to Europe, an ironic reversal of the “rebalancing” strategy pursued by the Obama administration, and working against the purpose of the withdrawal from Afghanistan conceived by Trump and completed by Biden with unseemly haste. The Ukraine invasion comes at a time when China is mounting new military pressure on Taiwan. It may be argued that Ukraine could turn out to be Putin’s Afghanistan, thereby sparing the U.S. the strategic burden of a two-front war. But Ukraine is no Afghanistan. It is much closer geographically and culturally to Russia than Afghanistan. The strategic stakes for Russia in Ukraine are far greater than they were in Afghanistan, not the least due to the continuing pressure from NATO. Putin is not going to leave Ukraine alone without significant concessions from the West, including non-membership in NATO, which the U.S. has ruled out. And if Biden makes similar commitments to nation-building in Ukraine as the U.S. made to Afghanistan, it will turn out to be Biden’s Afghanistan rather than Putin’s.
Former Foreign Minister of Indonesia and Secretary-General of the Bandung Conference
Interview conducted by: Professor Amitav Acharya
April 25, 2002
Preface to Interview with Dr Roselan Abdulghani (Amitav Acharya)
Most students of Asian politics and international relations have heard about the Asia-Africa Conference held in the Indonesian town of Bandung between 18 and 24 April 1955. Attended by 29 nations, the conference discussed cooperation among the nations of Asia and Africa, their social, economic and cultural problems, problems affecting national sovereignty, racialism and colonialism, and the contribution of Asian and African countries to world peace and cooperation.
The Secretary-General of this historic conference was Dr Roselan Abdulghani. At the time of the conference, he was the secretary-general of the Indonesia Foreign Ministry. Later, he became President Sukarno’s Foreign Minister, and the Permanent Representative of Indonesia to the UN.
On April 22, 2004, I had the privilege of interviewing him in Jakarta. Dr Roselan was 88 years old, frail, but in good mind and spirit. Our conversation lasted for an hour. During the interview, I had the opportunity to seek his reflections on several aspects of the conference:
Why did Indonesia organize this conference?
What were the main issues discussed and debated at the conference?
How effective were the procedures adopted at the conference?
What was his impressions of some of the key leaders at the conference, such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Chou En-Lai of China? And
What is the main legacy of the Bandung Conference?
In the interview that follows, Dr Roselan provides clear and insightful answers to these questions. What comes through here is one of the finest diplomatic histories of that time by one of the most distinguished and ablest diplomats the developing world has ever produced.
AA: Tell me why Indonesia decided to organize the Bandung Conference.
RA: Well, as you know, in 1953, 1954, we faced the danger of the Vietnam War spreading to Southeast Asia. We felt that there was a danger. Secondly, we were fighting, at that time, against Dutch colonialism about West Irian. And that was a tough struggle, and we were of the opinion that colonialism was an international problem. So to fight off colonialism, we should also fight on an international level. That means that the Asian-African countries, who were at that time still colonized, should be mobilized. Thirdly, we wanted an economic cooperation between these countries who were not yet technically developed. And lastly, there was President Sukarno’s dream in 1930, 1932, during the colonial period. He said that the benteng of Indonesia, the bullof Indonesia, should cooperate with the lembu mandi of India, with the barong, the dragon of China, with the tiger of Philippines, also with the white elephant of Thailand. And if we all cooperated in fighting against colonialism, then we would win. Therefore, his idea of having a Conference of Asia and Africa was motivated by the situation at the time, but also by the dream he had in 1930.
For the Colombo Conference between the five South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Burma and Indonesia), we had the idea that we would like to invite China, and so, this was discussed. Not only China, but also the other countries that were more or less involved in the Cold War. Because we knew that between the Colombo powers at that time, there was the problem of Pakistan and India. Pakistan was a member of a military alliance, while India rejected military alliances – we knew that. When the Bandung Conference was opened, 29 countries were there. So you have endless ranks of the 29 countries.
You have countries who are members of a military alliance, and also countries who are neutral, which means non-aligned. This posed a problem because in one of the resolutions we talked about the right of defence, and it required very tough bargaining to come to a balanced decision, especially in terms of the wording. Later on, the right of self-defence, singly or collectively, was recognized. This had consequences for countries such as Pakistan, Turkey, and other countries who were members of NATO or SEATO. We recognized that they had the right of self-defence collectively, but we would prefer that they had the right of defence individually as well. The verdict on the right defence, singly or collectively, is recognized, but there should be an abstention from the use of military alliances to serve the particular interests of the great powers.
There was a big debate. Nehru, Indonesia, and all the countries who were against the military alliances, said: “Alright, you have the right of self-defence collectively. But you should abstain to use that military alliance for the special interests of big powers.” Pakistan could not say that they were serving the interests of the big power, because Pakistan said “No, if we are a member of SEATO, we are after our own security.” So that was a compromise. And that was one of the delicate problems at the Conference which was solved.
That would also solve the problem of Communism. Because we invited China, and China is Communist. Moreover, China is considered to be an annex of Moscow. In Bandung, there were other opinions, especially from Nehru, but also from Indonesia, and from Zhou Enlai himself. Zhou Enlai said, “Look, we are Communists. I am Communist. But this does not mean that we follow everything that Mao Zedong says.” And that’s how the idea came that Chinese Communism is different from Moscow Communism. So when Sir John Kotelawala presented the idea that there is a new form of colonialism, and the relationship between Moscow and East Europe, we said: “No that is not colonialism, that is up to them.”
Therefore, the meeting about this problem of colonialism, and all its new forms, ended with a compromise. And the compromise was this. We are going say that there was a very antagonistic debate about colonialism in all its forms, because the idea of Sir John Kotelawala was that Communism was colonialism in another form. This was rejected by Zhou Enlai, and also by the other people. No, you cannot say that communism is colonialism. But how could we solve this problem?
We agreed not to mix up the problem, and interfere in the relations between Moscow and the Eastern countries. That was up to them. We don’t want to be mixed up in that. And then, said Zhou Enlai, “If you would like to have colonialism in all its manifestations, then I agree. And he used his hands, like this, showing the Conference. This is colonialism, and its manifestation is in the political field, in the economic field, in the social field, in the ideological field, and so on. But this is manifestation. If you change colonialism in all its manifestations, it is an evil that should be brought to an end. Then I agree.”
So this delicate problem was compromised. Everybody knows that we were treating very delicate problems. That was the success of the Bandung Conference – to eliminate sharp conflicts of ideas, and to come to compromises. This was possible because the rules of procedure made it possible. There are no fixed rules of procedures. It is up to the Chairman to conduct the procedure, the debate, on a very wise way. And that is avoiding floating. How will you come to a decision? By consensus, which is a very interesting problem. I think in Indonesian society, we used four things: discussion (mushawarah), and then we come to mufakat, which means consensus. So if you have two different opinions, you cut off the sharp points of both, and you come to a compromise.
Therefore, the final Communiqué of the Bandung Conference, actually is full of compromises. But without compromises, how can you come to an agreement between twenty-nine countries, which was nearly half of the world, at that time where the United Nations consisted of sixty members. And twenty-nine countries were in Bandung.
AA: Do you think this idea of consensus was Indonesia’s idea? From Indonesian village culture? You also thought this was the most practical way.
RA: We suggested that.
AA: You suggested that? Indonesia suggested?
RA: We know that the other countries, such as the Islamic Arab countries, also agreed that it should come to consensus. Because in the Qu’ranic verse it is said that you should always come to an agreement. Of course you have different opinions, but if you have different opinions, you should try to persuade the other with reasoning, by being very kind, and patient, but also think of the time. That is what the Qu’ran said. You cannot talk for months. So we said: “Of course we should think of the time. And therefore you should come to a consensus because the situation was dangerous at the time. The situation of the Cold War.
The Bandung Conference affected the whole world. From Southeast Asia spreading to the Middle East. That is what I think is the greatest achievement of the Bandung Conference. And the idea that the world is not divided into two blocs. Why should the world be defined by a liberal democracy with capitalism on the one hand, and on the other, an authoritarian Communism with an altruistic ideology. Why should that be the world? No. We said no. There is a Third World.
AA: Can you tell me about the role of China, and especially Prime Minister Zhou Enlai?
RA: It is very interesting, because at first we thought that Zhou Enlai would be a hardliner. Because he was a Communist, and he admitted in his speech that “I am atheist.” We were all frightened, but we didn’t expect his openness. He said: “Why I am an atheist? We, Chinese Communists, respect religion. And we don’t want to have a religion war. And we are not against religion, but religion should be fighting against colonialism. Because religion should be fighting against colonialism, because colonialism is against the religion and against the other communisms. That was revealing of the man. This man is very tolerant. And then he said, “Don’t worry about me. I am an atheist. But that doesn’t mean that I do not recognize, and respect others. In my delegation, there are Muslims. And there were.
This is what we mean by peaceful co-existence. We may differ, but we have a peaceful co-existence. We will not quarrel over this problem, because we are facing colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and so on. This is what Zhou Enlai revealed to us. This actually was not new, because Nehru also had this idea. But this came from the man we thought was a hardliner. And this was revealing.
In his role, he was very, very cooperative. He listened to the speech of Sir John Kotelawala. And then in the mid-afternoon he stopped and said: “Sir John Kotelawala, are you expecting me to fight against you? No!” John was amazed. “Look, I would like to see your text. I will reply tomorrow. But I am not here to quarrel with you. I am here to come to a peaceful settlement of our ideas.” And that is what the whole conference respected, this attitude of Zhou Enlai.
The next morning he made a very short speech. He said, “ I have listened, and I have disagreed, but I have talked to Sir John Kotelawala about it.” And later on, John Kotelawala said that he did not mean Chinese Communism when he spoke.
A very positive role, and very constructive role.
Another thing was that he was adamant. He did not want to recognize Formosa. He is a man of the One-China policy. And he knows the second fleet of the American army is around there. He said, “No, we cannot accept two Chinas.” That is his only stubborn, if I may use the word, attitude.
AA: There was a compromise on the question of military pacts and also on the question of colonialism. Do you think that compromise, that military pacts collectively or singly is OK, but should not be used for the interests of a superpower. That formula, or that compromise, did it have an impact on SEATO later? That it got the Asian countries to think that military alliances are not good.
RA: Of course, we know what will be the attitude of these two big powers. But we said to them that this is our position, if there is a Cold War problem. Because one of the purposes of the Asian-Africa Conference was to feel the professions of Asia and Africa in the World today. That was one of the purposes. We feel our professions in the Cold War. If there is a problem of Cold War in Korea, in Vietnam, in Berlin, our profession is mediation. We try to mediate. We do not use nuclear weapons. We do not use force. If it comes to colonialism, then we fight against it. If America supports colonialism, we will fight America. And if the Soviet Union supports colonialism in Eastern Europe, then we may fight them. But when it comes to the problem of Cold War, we will mediate. That was clear. These two big powers began to think about it.
AA: How about the question of sovereignty, and the principle of non-interference, non-intervention of states? Was there a lot of discussion?
RA: Oh yes. That was also discussed. We rejected any intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. But of course the big problem is economic, because we were all from the Third World. We urged an oil-policy, because we know that we need countries that have oil in Middle East, and here as well. The idea of having an oil-producing organization, like OPEC, was conceived in the Bandung Conference.
AA: Question about Nehru’s role.
RA: Prime Minister Nehru had a very, very leading role. Not only because he has such great charisma, but he is considered the man who is the forerunner of the freedom movement, in India and so on. He mastered the English language, he mastered politics, and he knew all the tactics and strategies of the Great Britain colonial policy. And that is reflected in his ideas when he is talking about this. So his role is a very leading one. That is what I can say. He is a state senior. Of course, he was always criticized by Mohammad Ali. But that does not make any sense, because we know that they were brothers who fought, so we tried to mediate between them.
The problem of the impact of the Bandung Conference, was the non-Aligned Conference. They had a membership that started at 24, later it was 50, showing the relevance of the Bandung Conference. If you ask me whether the ideas at Bandung are still relevant today, mostly they are. But we should also understand the changes of the world. Not all it is still useful. But the basic things, about peaceful co-existence are still valid. Now the people say that the Cold War is over, but there is new war coming. That is the war between the developed countries and the countries that are underdeveloped. This should be bridged. That is why we addressed the debt problem, the problem of technology. The peaceful co-existence idea, I think, is still relevant today.
What we see today, the problem of Zionism against the Arab, Islamic World, and the Third World. Zionism also has its roots in America. It is different from anti-Semitism. If you ask me how to solve this, I believe that you can still use some of the ideas from Bandung.
AA: Did it have an impact on ASEAN. Later on, when Southeast Asian countries led by Indonesia, decided to have their own regional organization, ASEAN. Did Bandung – the process, the principles – have any impact on Indonesia’s involvement in ASEAN?
RA: I think ASEAN has its history. ASEAN has its contribution to the problem of stability in Southeast Asia. But later on, it becomes too limited. So ASEAN must expand its membership, and therefore you now have APEC., the problem of new regional cooperation. I understand that the original ASEAN members would like to keep the ASEAN idea. But you cannot keep it limited.
AA: But what I was asking you also is that ASEAN also operates on the basis of consensus. And ASEAN is also trying to develop, in the 1950s and 60s, a policy of neutralization of Southeast Asia. Do you that some ideas of Bandung had an impact on Indonesian foreign policy, and in the foreign ministry. And when Indonesia became a member of ASEAN, it was trying to make ASEAN in the same mold as the Bandung principles of consensus.
RA: That is true, but it depends on the cabinet in Indonesia, whether it was intensive enough, or just superficial. So we had times were the cabinet in Indonesia was only superficially doing it. But there are times where we are going to be intensive.
Look at the period of Suharto. Suharto is committed to ASEAN. Because ASEAN, at birth, was to keep peace in this area, and not to be a communist organization. But later on, it could not control the influence of China. But China also changed. In the later period, Suharto went to China. Then you have the Habibie period, but it was too short to say what it was. Then came Gus Dur who tried to intensify ASEAN. And now Megawati, I don’t know. The new foreign Minister talks to me as a senior person, and his staff also. I ask him what he is doing: “You cannot keep ASEAN the way that it was. You have to move on. The world is moving, so you need a larger regional cooperation.
In this respect, we were also very clear with Zhou Enlai. Do not interfere anymore. Do not interfere in other states. That is what we told Zhou Enlai. Because colonialism is not only a monopoly of the West, but also exists in the East. He understood. He later on invited me to go to Ulan Baator, in Outer Mongolia.
AA During the Bandung Conference, Nehru said that if you join a military pact, you degrade yourself. The countries that join military alliances are not very sovereign countries. Is there a sense that if countries like Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, and Philippines join military alliances with the US, and use the alliance against other countries in Asia, that means they are not acting as sovereign states?
RA: That’s true, which is why we acted to protect the right of self-defence collectively, that you should abstain from the use of collective military arrangements for the specific interest of the people. Of course, this is just a formulation to caution them. Don’t be used by America as a weapon against other countries. You can see from the “Ten Principles of Bandung” that the right of self-defence singly or collectively is recognized. But you should abstain the use of collective military alliances for the specific interest of the big power.
Hinduism and Buddhism are the so called hydraulic civilizations. They are of the rivers, big rivers. The Rhine is also big, but there are no civilizations.
AA: I think it is interesting to see that you are recognized as one of the key players in the development of non-alignment and Afro-Asian cooperation. And I’m very glad that you are still able to participate in many of these functions. It is a real privilege to meet you.
RA: Professor Amitav, this should give us new inspiration and some confidence that Asia can compete with the rest.
AA: That concludes my interview with Dr. Roeslan Abdulgani, who was, in 1955, the Secretary-General of the Bandung Conference. This is in Jakarta at 11:30 am.
Multiplex World: Once & Future World Order 