More than six months have passed since the horrific attacks of October 7th, 2023. The world has seen enormous upheaval since then, with terrible devastation in Gaza, Israel on a war footing for the indefinite future, American carriers in the Mediterranean, and protests convulsing Western and Arab capitals and college campuses.
Plenty of commentators have written about the conflict already, focusing on the war on the ground and its human and political cost. Yet, relatively few have considered what the war implies for global grand strategy — for it reveals a great deal about order, disorder, and order creation, especially by the major powers of the day.
Consider the Saudi-Israeli rapprochement underway in early October, on the eve of the attacks. Both Riyadh and Jerusalem were moving towards a peace settlement greased by the prospect of continued American support for Saudi Arabia, through a promise of nuclear reactors and a Saudi-American mutual defence pact. Whether you agree or disagree with the strategic wisdom of America embedding itself in the Middle East for the foreseeable future, there is no denying that Washington attempted to create a new order in the Middle East, one based on pragmatic economic and geopolitical calculations, on the transformation of the region’s economies and alignment against common threats (Iran and its proxies), instead of the ethno-nationalist fault lines of the last century — most notably, the Palestinian Question.
What October 7th proved was that that order was flawed. It did not consider the continued salience of Hamas’ threat to Israel’s security, and therefore, the enduring relevance to the Middle East of the Palestinian Question, a mobilizing issue for publics across the Arab and Muslim worlds, and one capable of dragging great powers into direct conflict. Yet, that does not diminish the fact that Washington was in the process of order creation, one severely disrupted, if not shattered, by the attacks of October 7th.
It seems that Hamas acted rather independently of its backers, Hezbollah and Iran, and did so to destroy the budding order Washington, Riyadh, Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi, and others were creating. The barbarity of the attacks notwithstanding, they were nonetheless an understandable move, given the budding ‘new order’ of the Middle East threatened to permanently move the Palestinian Question to the backburner. Hamas caught Israel completely off guard, achieving strategic surprise on a level not seen since an October day almost 50 years ago, when Israel was attacked by Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War, nearly portending the end of the State of Israel.
A comparison with the Yom Kippur War draws useful parallels. In 1973, as today, American aid came at Israel’s request, assisting in its war effort. In both, furious ‘shuttle diplomacy’ was under way, with then-Secretary of State Kissinger flying between Arab and Israeli capitals, just as Secretary Blinken is doing, embarking on his sixth trip to the region since the start of the crisis on October 7th. Both Blinken and Kissinger attempted to bring peace to the Middle East, on American terms largely advantageous to Israel, yes, but peace nonetheless. Indeed, by all accounts, American efforts to restrain Israel from further escalation after Iran’s 300-warhead barrage on April 13th were highly impactful, potentially averting a far greater regional crisis.
But here is where the comparison diverges. In 1973, strong Soviet efforts were made to restrain its ostensible clients, Egypt and Syria, from further escalation, and to bring regional tensions down. Yet today, where are the other superpowers? Despite its traditional position in the region and its strong ties to Iran, Russia is unable and/or unwilling to do very much to broker negotiations, occupied almost entirely with its war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, China is nowhere to be seen — once viewed as a potential new heavyweight in the Middle East’s Byzantine diplomacy with its mediation of Saudi-Iranian normalization last spring and its incorporation of the UAE, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia into its BRICS bloc, it has proposed little in the way of substantial efforts to improve the situation, beyond performative displays meant to play to the Global South. For instance, in contrast to the $174m that the United States committed to Palestinian relief between October and February 2023, China only committed $4m in that period — a paltry figure from a superpower with the world’s second-largest economy.
Today, as in 1991, America is the only superpower willing and able to try to bring peace to the periphery — to be the global policeman. It may not succeed, or do the right thing, either for world peace and stability or its narrowly-conceived national interests, but it nonetheless tries. Despite constraints in both Washington and Jerusalem on the Biden administration’s ability to restrain Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose policies have thus far resulted in upwards of 34,000 dead in Gaza, the Biden administration is pressing forward with an concerted effort to simultaneously end the carnage in Gaza, prevent the re-emergence of Hamas terror, broker a formal Saudi-Israeli alliance, and kick-start an enduring two-state solution — in short, an attempt to create order in the Middle East, in what Thomas Friedman terms the ‘Biden Doctrine’. While whether this effort will succeed is unknown, what is clear is that no other superpower is presenting an alternative vision, despite Secretary Blinken’s multiple invitations for Beijing to play a constructive role here. Indeed, considering the reduced importance that the Middle East has for America in light of its strategic ‘pivot to Asia’ and its premier position in world energy production, its continuing efforts to create order in the periphery are even more remarkable. The United States remains, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once dubbed it, “the indispensable nation”.
Leading international relations theorist John Ikenberry has written about the United States as a ‘liberal leviathan’, ushering a new concept of world order based around an American-led, consensus-based hierarchy founded on its provision of global public goods, chiefly the free market system and global security. He described the liberal world order that America created at the end of World War II as “easy to join, hard to overturn”, arguing that so long as America exercised its power in favor of leading that global order, the costs of forming an alternative system outside that order were immense, but so were the benefits of joining in and participating in that order — thus predicting both the longevity of the order and the United States’ leading role within it. Yet he did not account for the possibility that the United States itself, the global leader, might no longer seek to play its role as the central state within that order.
Though no longer the unipole as it was in 1991, America maintains its globally preponderant position, with the world’s strongest, largest, and most nodally central economy, the world’s most powerful military, and the world’s most far-reaching and comprehensive alliance system, projecting American power far into Europe and the Pacific. Yet, despite its enduring strengths, America appears weaker than any time in living memory, as a result of shifts in both absolute and relative power, through both convulsions at home and the broader shift towards a multipolar system. These twin shifts are related: according to Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s exposition of overall structural theory, as the distribution of power among states changes, as it surely has in the post-Cold War era with the renewal of Russia and the rise of China (among others), the hegemon in relative decline sees less benefits to providing those public goods that constitute order but have allowed others to grow powerful, effects observed with the contemporary domestic backlash against globalism and American world leadership.
Today, the United States appears increasingly likely to shirk the burdens of global order-creation in favor of a far more narrow conception of national interest. After November’s presidential election, there is a strong possibility that a second Trump presidency might see him abandon NATO allies or even encourage potential aggression against them, as he has publicly bragged about doing. Even if President Biden emerges victorious, American global leadership remains in grave peril — in mid-February, 54% of Senate Republicans voted against authorizing further aid for Ukraine and Israel, pointing at the depth of isolationist sentiment in Washington.
What will the world look like without the shadow of the American giant, ready and willing to be a peacemaker in every corner of the globe? Ikenberry, Keohane, and Nye all implicitly assume superpowers strive for hegemony, and will attempt to construct an order to their benefit both in their own backyards and outside of it, to the extent that they can. The result is either a balance of power or a hierarchical or semi-hierarchical world structure that spans the globe. According to overall structural theory, what we should observe is a more insular America less eager to exercise overall leadership as its relative power declines, but correspondingly, a drive by the would-be hegemons towards global leadership. Yet what we have seen is an unwillingness in these superpowers to pay even a share of the cost of creating and sustaining a global order.
Take, for instance, China. On a purely pragmatic level, it has a strong interest in containing any Israel-Hamas or Israel-Iran conflict, due to its potential to spread to the wider Persian Gulf region — keep in mind that Chinese imports of Saudi Arabian oil this year are a close second only to its purchases of Russian crude, and China’s huge volumes of Red Sea trade are at risk of disruption with every Houthi attack. On a broader level, China, without the baggage the United States has in the region, and with (at least, before October 7th) relatively warm ties with Palestine, Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, is well-positioned to help broker peace. Indeed, in some ways, it has more tools at its disposal than Washington, able to offer military, technological, and economic assistance without ideological or governance preconditions. If Beijing were to take a more encompassing view of its superpower mission — to be a creator of order — it could simultaneously enhance China’s diplomatic clout, more deeply embed itself into the Middle East, and further the Chinese challenge to American leadership of the international system, while protecting its economy and energy supplies from further disruption.
Instead, Beijing has opted for a policy that can be best described as “let’s sit this one out”, preferring to snipe at Washington from the sidelines. This is the very definition of a narrow conception of national interest. To be sure, China’s policy also stems from its own position of relative weakness and lack of embeddedness in the Middle East and the international order as a whole, at a time when it faces increasing challenges from Washington and an economic crisis at home. But a superpower is — or at least should be — able to “walk, talk, and chew gum at the same time”, to quote Simon Tay, director of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. To illustrate this point, in 1970, Soviet GDP amounted to merely 40% of American economic prowess, a far worse position than China’s 73% of US GDP today — yet it mounted a full-spectrum challenge to American regional and global leadership.
China and Russia’s approaches to the Middle East highlight a disturbing new reality for the international system. Should Donald Trump be re-elected in 2024, or if domestic polarization further paralyzes the United States, the world will no longer have an actor willing and able to exercise decisive leadership outside of its own immediate sphere of influence (e.g. the Russian ‘Near Abroad’ or China’s East Asian sphere). At a talk at the University of Oxford on February 8th, Ikenberry characterized China and Russia as essentially free-riding on American efforts to resolve the crisis and provision security, further suggesting that one of the most profound challenges for the coming decades is the question of how to move from the American-led liberal international order towards a greater sharing of the burdens of global order-creation.
This reluctance to aspire to global leadership is a development not seen in the postwar era; even during the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was willing and able to create order in the periphery. A world without a single superpower interested in anything beyond a narrow conception of national interest will be a much more chaotic world. This is not simply a question of the end of the Pax Americana, as some commentators have described the current confluence of crises. Instead, this is very possibly the end of the relatively stable order we have seen since 1991, and perhaps, since 1945. If no countries are willing and able to provide it, world order may gradually devolve into a collection of rival blocs centered around the superpowers, with a periphery outside any individual superpower’s core interests increasingly abandoned to second and third-rate powers struggling for regional hegemony.
Yet, as the conflict in the Middle East demonstrates, struggles in the periphery still retain the potential to bring great powers into direct conflict. While eventually the EU, Russia, or more likely, China, may step up to the mantle of global leadership, if only to avoid catastrophic collapse in the periphery, before that realization steps in (very possibly after a nearly-calamitous crisis originating from the periphery), an era of American retreat from order-creation may well lead to a perilous era of chaos along the global periphery — whether in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, or elsewhere — that might eventually escalate into serious conflict within the global core.
Former President Obama noted in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize speech that “whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” As much as many have disagreed with the United States and its efforts to create order in the periphery, October 7th may well have signalled the end of any reasonable hope that another power might step up to the plate. And that is a seriously frightening thought.
