Dr Jawaid Iqbal, Professor, Department of West Asian and North African Studies, AMU
a 6 mins read.
The Crisis of Imperialism
We live in a geopolitical interregnum where the old world order is in its death throes while the new world order is struggling to be born. The symptoms of disintegration are visible in two critical events: the Russia-Ukraine war and the Zionist genocide in Gaza. The Russia-Ukraine war has shown that Vladimir Putin will not tolerate the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the borders of Russia. This decision to respond was a long time in the making.
In the early 2000s, Putin realized that his initial hopes for a tighter bond between Russia and the US were misguided. The US’s decision to pull out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, NATO’s decision to expand its membership during its 2002 summit, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US’s involvement in regime changes and color revolutions in Eurasia, and the growth of the European Union (EU) all led Russia to the conclusion that it needed to pursue an autonomous foreign policy to recover from the aftermath of the Soviet era. Consequently, under Putin’s leadership, Russia has been advocating for multilateral organizations like the G20 and strengthening its ties with China. This shift in strategy is largely a response to the West’s destabilizing interventions in key countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine.
Russia’s antagonism with the US-centric world order is reverberating throughout the Global South due to the tyrannical manner in which the West is responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The US aid package for Ukraine that President Joe Biden signed allows the administration to seize Russian state assets located in the US and use them for the benefit of Kyiv. $300 billion has been mobilized through this legalized piracy. For Third World countries, this has meant that investing in Western banks and bonds is not a safe option. Their assets can be looted according to the political exigencies of Western imperialism.
The Israeli carnage in Gaza has displayed the utter indifference of the Global North to the lives of Palestinians. Israel functions as a Western proxy in the Arab world, militarily intervening in neighboring Arab countries and selling arms to countries with which the US didn’t want to associate itself publicly, like apartheid South Africa, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Given the centrality of Israel to the US and its allies, the genocide of Palestinians has been completely ignored. From October 7, 2023 to May 1, 2024, 34,568 Palestinians have lost their lives and another 77,765 have been injured due to Israel violence. This represents over 5% of the total population of Gaza. Over 2% of Gazan children have been killed or injured. This translates to 14,500 Palestinian children who have been killed.
Due to the continued Western support for Israeli colonialism, the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance has unleashed a series of attacks against the Zionist regime. This has escalated regional tensions between Iran and Israel. After the Iranian consulate in Syria’s Damascus was destroyed in an Israeli air strike, Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles against Israel, this being the first direct strike on Israel from Iran. Instead of decreasing regional tensions through the resolution of the fundamental issue, namely Zionism, the West has been busy shoring up Israeli bellicosity. Solidarity protests with Palestinian people have been banned in many European countries. The American empire continues to fund the Israeli settler-colonial state, planning a new $1 billion sale of arms and ammunition to Israel. This has greatly tarnished the USA’s role as a regional security guarantor, giving rise to demands for a global order that values national sovereignty over imperialist interference.
In a historical world system that has been constructed through exploitative and violent relations, “ideology” remains a vital way of magnifying the traces of inequality that are all too easily obscured by the glimmer of abstract “national interests”.
Ahistorical Analysis
As the Global North suffers delegitimization, the academic field of international relations should make the effort to register the tendential movements toward change. However, the discourse on minilateralism does precisely the opposite. It believes that “shared values” are a burden that needs to be thrown away in favor of more targeted objectives. Foreign policy is considered a purely technical and neutral enterprise that needs to be freed from “ideology”.
This post-ideological sentiment derives from the end of the Cold War, which was interpreted in a particularly biased manner by Western political scientists. For them, the downfall of the Soviet Union demonstrated that global affairs couldn’t be regulated by “totalitarian” values like Communism. USSR’s Communist administrators saw the world as an ideological battlefield, whereas it is more like a free market where nations participate in mutually beneficial exchange relations. Thus, each nation became an atomistic player in the global market, trying to maximize its own “national interest”.
The post-Soviet political perspective is ahistorical: by regarding the global order as a level-playing field for “national interests,” it ignores the history of colonization and neo-imperialism that has built the foundation of geopolitics. The formal sovereign equality of nation-states hides the embedded structures of hierarchy whereby the Global North is able to dominate the Global South. USA controls, through NATO and other means, 74.3% of all military spending worldwide.
This equates to more more than $2 trillion. By renouncing all talk of “ideology,” minilateralism wants to conceal this power imbalance that constitutes the very field on which nations interact. In a historical world system that has been constructed through exploitative and violent relations, “ideology” remains a vital way of magnifying the traces of inequality that are all too easily obscured by the glimmer of abstract “national interests”.
Power Dynamics
For the nations of the Global South, opposition to imperialism is a primary way through which their “national interest” can be facilitated. Here, we get a picture of “national interest” that is contrary to the minilateral paradigm. The national interest of a country is not a discrete entity whose gains and losses can be manipulated and entered into the ledger of foreign policy. Rather, it consists of a complex relation of forces whose weight is decided at the level of global power struggle. This gestures towards the necessity of combating the influence of Euro-Atlantic states through robust alliance-building among Southern nations.
Minilateralism forgoes the task of systemic change by saying that “minilateral formats are nimbler and more flexible than traditional diplomacy, allowing countries to react faster to crises or opportunities without being bogged down by bureaucracy.” Flexibility is a weasel word that creates the illusion of a small enclave where a few nations can come together to pursue their own interests. But such an enclave doesn’t exist. At all times, nations are surrounded by a global thicket of power dynamics from which they can’t escape unless they undertake a collectively coordinated effort to do so.
Consider the US blockade against Cuba, which has cost the country’s economy the equivalent of $144 billion over the past decades. Cuba found a respite from the USA’s economic warfare by finding a strong ally in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, whose government proclaimed the dawn of “socialism of the 21st century”. Cuba and Venezuela founded a regional grouping with a common ideological vocation: the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). After 2000, the two leading countries cooperated in developing medical and literacy campaigns in many Global South countries.
The US conceives of the quad as a platform through which it can further its New Cold War against China. Both Australia and Japan are partners of NATO in the Indo-Pacific region, sharing the USA’s objective that China needs to be contained.
Future Indian Foreign Policy
Even with the advocacy for minilateral foreign policy, we can find the marks of the global power system. In the Indo-Pacific region, many have applauded how India entered into strategic relations with Japan and Australia owing to the common threat perception regarding China. This was thought of as a strategic minilateral that grew independent of the US alliance system. In some more positive appraisals, it even constituted an alternative to the American security architecture, which is marred by declining credibility. However, these fantasies were soon deflated when the partnership between Australia, India, and Japan developed into the quadrilateral format with the inclusion of the US.
The US conceives of the quad as a platform through which it can further its New Cold War against China. Both Australia and Japan are partners of NATO in the Indo-Pacific region, sharing the USA’s objective that China needs to be contained. India, on the other hand, doesn’t want to participate in a New Cold War. As Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar puts it, India doesn’t share a “NATO mentality”. India’s autonomous attitude has led to the US abandoning the Quad to create Squad, where a more obediently anti-China Philippines has replaced India.
This shows that minilateralism is not a viable foreign policy outlook. It focuses on short-term solutions, ignoring the necessity of structural changes. In the current geopolitical interregnum, this involves participating in the rise of the East through a triple India-China-Russia alliance. From a long-term perspective, is not in India’s interest to maintain hostile relations with China. Chinese imports to India exceed $100 billion in 2024, entrenching China’s status as India’s largest trading partner. Furthermore, the border disputes between the two countries don’t involve any population exchange. By acting as a member of the India-China-Russia bloc, India will provide moral guidance to a Global South that is in a process of tumult and that needs the message of unity against a decaying and arbitrary imperialist system.
(Dr Jawaid Iqbal, Professor, Department of West Asian and North African Studies, Aligarh Muslim University. The views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The News Analytics Journal.)
