Mircea-Codruț MARIN, PhD^

Abstract. The new postmodern international system is bipolar. The United States and China are the superpowers as the only states that can play at global level. The others simply cannot support the costs of such endeavours. More than ever, the foreign policies are to be determined by agenda of the national forces, political organizations, religious organizations, militant groups as culture wars replace democratic debate. The climatic change, the new technological evolution and deep sociological and economic rebalance in the Western societies create a new framework for policies. Globalization changed, as more and more countries of the Global South can compete with countries of the West in many strategic fields. While obstacles multiply, the global economy is fragmenting into competing blocks. The West promotes the end of fossil fuels both as an answer to environmental challenge and as new arrangement meant to reinforce the West position in the centre of the international system. While uncontested at declarative level, the plan meets the Global South reluctance.

Keywords: postmodern international system, climatic change, culture war, globalization, West, Global South, United States, China, Russia, Ukraine, fossil fuels

Each international system was shaped within a social and economic framework. Factors such as the generic world view, type of society, production relations, tech-nologies, major natural challenges determine what a human would strive to achieve. Old school historians ignored for centuries the role of nature in triggering the major human movements. Yet climatic changes were the first and most significant deter-minants of major episodes of the development in human evolution, not only of human history. And it could not have been otherwise: climate defines the conditions of life in general, the rains, the snows and the draughts, the heats and icing determined how much bread, take the world generically, humans put on the tables. More and more historians accept today that the Great Plagues and the Little Ice Age – pandemic and extreme weather – with their toll on human lives and scarcity, were responsible for the changing of the general world view that produced the shift from the medieval, agricultural, pre-modern and religious society to the capitalist, industrial, modern and scientific one. Modernity, capitalism and industry came together. Industry deployed the focus from controlling the trade routes to controlling the extraction zones. To keep industrial machines working, to keep moving trains, ships, and cars, to power and heat cities, coal and oil were essential. Colonization and the imperial capitalist expansion was a race between powers for coal and oil, before everything else. This race shaped the international modern systems from the first quarter of the 19^th to the first half of the 20^th centuries. Control over the World’s hydrocarbons was essential during the Cold War – the Soviet Union’s supported decolonization, in general, and decolonization driven by Marxism inspired forces, in particular, in Africa and Middle East, with the aim to limit the control exerted by the Western Transnational Companies (TNCs)¹ on global reserves. The strive proved successful – while at the end of the 1950s, the Western TNCs, and through them the major Western economies, controlled most of the global reserves, in the 2010s most of the hydrocarbon reserves were controlled by National Companies. Today, most of the hydrocarbon reserves of the world are controlled by non-Western countries.

While some of these countries are strategic competitors, this situation describes a structural vulnerability of the Western economic system and a threat to its global leadership, as well. The problem is double layered. First is the structural aspect of the problem: the essential fuel of its economy is controlled by the countries of the Global South, meaning that the cost of the most important commodity is determined by mechanisms and decisions process the West can no longer influence. In such conditions someone cannot claim global leadership – a leader is self-reliant. Second is the contextual aspect of the problem. Competitors could try to exploit this depen-dency. To overcome this, the West must replace hydrocarbons as fuel for its economy, and shift from natural resources, which need to be extracted or harvested from the soil of non-Western states to renewables and recycled materials and components – this ensures self-reliance, at least as a promise. While the West is not very rich in natural resources, this green and circular economy would only provide a limited and manageable dependence on strategic imports – a perpetual Achilles ankle. The transition from fossil fuels may be an attainable goal, but fossil fuels issue constitutes the exterior sheet of the onion, as technology goes deep in the direction of post human (autonomous Artificial Technology and robotics, technological enhanced human capacity) the materials become more sophisticated and rarer. If the race for oil and iron ore reserves, some common materials, was harsh, the race for rare earths would be even more – and the problem is that these rare resources are as well in the non-Western world. The dependency and vulnerability they nurture have same meaning no matter the object: fossil fuels or tellurium².

The West has another three additional problems. First: The West is naturally poor – this poverty drove Westerners to explore and then capture the entire world, building the colonial system. This is no longer possible. Second: The West created a world economy whose growth is powered by short living goods – a two-year life span of goods sold with the promise it represents the peak of technology, placed in the core of a narrative that nurtures uncontrollable desires in the cortex of buyers. One update would make the smart device (which may be a phone, but also, a car, a refrigerator, a tv-set or a washing-machine) unusable. While consumption triggers exploitation of resources it as well keeps the factories working. Third: the West is prosperity, affordability, market availability and comfort. All these are conditions of freedom and human dignity. Freedom and human dignity are undermined by pri-vations, in general, from privations of heating, feeding with animal protein, owning your own car and many other privations imposed to general population under different forms as personal cost of reducing environmental impact – that echoes too much the ashy years of Communism.

No one could deny that the planet is going through a huge climatic change, and that humanity needs to change its relations with Nature. Modernity was the most destructive period of the Anthropocene. It was rooted on both Abrahamic Patriarchal religions that placed human (understand the man only) in the top of Creation and capitalism that placed the profit as raison d ‘être. To this ideological material, in-dustrialism provided means of action at unprecedent scale. In the last three hundred years humanity wiped off the face of the Earth species, altered irremediably habitats, affecting now the crucial components of the planetary ecosystems. Yet, this situation is only a historical context the great powers would exploit according to their own interests. The major game has still the purpose of pushing a few in front of the others. The scenario of General Extinction, no matter how plausible, did not determine the major actors to cease strategic competition, but to increase it even more, raising the level of tension and risks of escalation to war. As a new development in the logic of soft power the West decided to lead again the weave supporting environmentalist groups and personalities in promoting their narratives and agenda at the level of international organizations while promoting from counter to dominant culture. The entire effort targets an international agreement on renouncing to fossil fuels.

The reason the Global South countries are reluctant to renounce fossil fuels is obvious: their economies rely on the exports of raw materials, commodities and cheap manufactured goods. If the West only, no mentioning the entire World, ceases to buy fossil fuels at the same level it used to at the beginning of the millennium, because the global economy turned green, these countries would be in the situation to see a devaluation of the riches they exploit not only to achieve prosperity but to play a role on the international affairs as regional actors. At the middle of the 19^th century, before the first hints regarding the existence of oil and gas reserves, the Arabian Peninsula was one of the poorest corners of the Ottoman Empire, the inhabitants of the inner lands of peninsula looked with envy to Yemenites, in the gardens of which, fruits and roses were grown. Oil and gas earnings helped the princes and emirs overcome poverty and make Western leaders listen to them much carefully and diligently than Georges Clemenceau listened Prince Faisal when the later came to Paris Conference to ask the recognition of an Arab state. As the Gulf states generally used the oil and gas exporting gains to develop a strong financial sector, the perspective of the hydrocarbon trade freezing, only transform them into a Switzerland on the dunes, minus chocolate and watchmaking. Still, they would be forced to rely on money investments to produce wealth, while having not anything else to sell – mean time, while they will no longer control a strategic commodity, they will witness a diminution of their present political influence, especially in relation to the West. Gulf States are a happy case, they had time (understand decades) to accumulate money from exports of oil and gas and strategic vision to use them in building of own financial companies. The size of their population makes the problem as well less complicated. Other countries are less happy, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan are, as former soviet republics, some of the youngest states in the world, they are as young as the present, while they started to copy the model of using the gains from oil and gas exports for fuelling national investment funds, the time did not allow them significant accumulation. On the other hand, they take into consideration that while the West’s appetite for oil and gas will lower the West’s interest in them will, as well, fade. A bundle of questions bothers them – initially they will sell fossil fuels to the West as an alternative to Russian imports, this gains time to accumulate financial resources, still how long this will last? At a certain moment the West will shift to green economy and cease to buy fossil fuels – then will the financial resources they accumulated be enough to secure development? Would the West delay its speed of this shift just to give to them more time to accumulate? Finally, from whom will they buy technology and know-how at a lower price – will the West, or its competitors in Central Asia and the Caspian region make a discount for them? In the cases of more populated countries the problem is even more com-plicated: For decades they strived to diversify their economic output to add value to the raw materials they extracted, investing in the development of the manufacturing sector, the efficiency of which was given by the cheap prices of coal, gas and oil resources they possessed and the low wages they paid, instead they provided slow but constant improvement of the standards of life in many aspects – the most important of them being the availability of food, in general, and the improvement of daily diet while increasing the animal protein intake (eggs, meat, dairy). The end of fossil fuels would force them to give up to a source of energy that ensures their economic growth renouncing to gains its exploitation provides and to assume new multi-billion dollars effort for the acquisition of technologies and production systems of green energy, instead of continuing their development on the known path. The bill has as well something printed with smaller letters in the footer: they will become dependent on those who produce technologies of post fossil fuels economy. In the eventuality of accepting these financial and political costs, for the salvation of the Planet, these countries would lose present day competitivity and with that the rhythm of their development. Returning to the aspect of food availability and protein intake increasing as markers of social development some should notice that both were achieved through extensive agriculture and deforestation, affecting especially the tropical rain forest, a zone of essential importance for the global ecosystem.

Another source of discomfort for the West besides losing control on fossil fuels reserves is the changing dynamic of globalization. As long as countries like China, India, the Gulf states used to be simple factories or extraction zones for the Western economies, globalization presented no challenge. Now, it does. It did not happen overnight – globalization passed through phases of development. In its first phase, a Western TNC would come in a Global South country to develop from green a factory of its own to use local work force and resources to manufacture generally simple pieces and components – low wages, available and cheap raw materials and fuels, together with low standards regarding the human and nature factor representing a friendly business government. In its second phase, the Western TNC would bring more complexity, while establishing assembly lines of parts that would be shipped in the Western countries factories to be aggregated in the final product that would proudly wear its logo. In a third phase, the Western TNC would externalize the production costs to local manufacturers, besides optimization of costs, with addi-tional profitability, this would spare the mother company of head-achingly issues related to work conditions, of polluting technologies, and so on, that would pass on the local entrepreneurs and authorities. While many products incorporated new advanced technologies – the Western TNCs found themselves forced to transfer with the blueprints of the products, the technology they worked on. This technological transfer marked a fourth phase of globalization, in which, Global South countries started to promote their own brands, as more affordable substitute to the Western brands they as well manufactured. A buyer’s dilemma appeared – why should someone buy a more expensive Western brand smartphone made in China instead of a cheaper Chinese brand smartphone that offers similar functionalities and technology. In first instance the answer was generated by the psychological mechanism of branding – the Western brand was more attractive than the price of the Chinese brand, because it was more notorious and fashionable. Less notorious but more affordable the Chinese brand entered the Western markets where all buyers wanted to use tech-nology not necessarily to show high income status using luxury brands. That pushed globalization into its fifth phase. Global South companies, most of them state-owned, started to develop their own Technology sector, to invest more in branding and even to buy Western brands. Soon, they extended the area in which they could be providers on the Western markets including big infrastructure projects like highways and high-speed rail ways, ship building, 5G development projects and so on, if not for the countries in the West’s core at least in its periphery. While for centuries (since the fall of the Arabic Empire) the West’s anxiolytic mantra was to repeat itself that it leads the wave of knowledge and technology, this challenge hit the brain areas of self-confidence and security and determined a closure reflex. This put an end to globalization as we knew it. The new kind of globalization is described by competition between the West and South from equal standings and increasing protectionism of both sides.

As important voices notice there are “increasing signs that the global economy is fragmenting into competing blocs”³. As more and more domains that half a decade ago were free zones become now limited access zones (banking and other financial, transportation, media) or even forbidden zones (cutting the edge technology, rare earths, infrastructure), trade start to lose its capacity to build trust and consolidate peace. This competitive fragmentation presents many similarities to the 1930s. Then competition between trade blocks laid the economic foundation of WWII.

The shape of any international system is given ultimately by the dynamic of its members. How the powers would act and react to challenges is essential. More than ever the foreign policy would be dictated by domestic evolutions – see demographic trends (continuously ageing of core cultural population and increasing cultural diversification in the West, decelerated but constant growth of the population in the Global South, continuous international migration from the Global South to the West), climate change generated problems and pollution (the reduction of cultivable area of some major crops and the increasing uncertainty of their output in many countries of the Global South already confronted with the problem of famine, the increasing occurrence of extreme weather phenomena with highly destructive impact in the West, increased endangering of bees and other insect species responsible for pollination of most crops, the multiplication of draught episodes), health issues (the increasing vulnerability of the general population due to the growing number of unvaccinated individuals, the deterioration of the air quality of the air in most of urban areas, that gather now the majority of the world population), societal (increasing cultural and economic divisions, the erosion of the centre under both economic and political aspects, in the Western societies, extreme economic polarization in the Global South, general decreasing quality of public education and increasing reticence toward science and technology), economic (the challenge to maintain the growing rhythms of economy in concordance with the growing rhythms of population, in the Global South, the challenge to decarbonize economy and increase the role of AI and automated self-service machines without generating two digits unemployment rates), financial (devaluation of most of the currencies, high rates of inflation and rising of both private and public debt). All these generate agendas of domestic actors and determine state policies, foreign policies, included.

The generic West is still the pivot of the international system. It happens so because it still generates the dynamics of the global economy. The evolutions of economies of the Global South, from the largest (China) to the smallest, are still dependent on the Western demand. Despite its imperfection and many fissures, the Western liberal democracy fulfils most of the promises regarding the freedom and dignity of the human being – more than any illiberal, post-soviet, religious funda-mentalist or communist version. While personal data, conversations and location data may be stored on governmental servers, people with divergent views, thorny journalists or political challengers do not vanish from the public eye, are not poisoned or shot on the main street, do not fall mysteriously from the window, or die while their plane is targeted by air missiles. Despite the discontent of many of its citizens, many inclined to be critical, Western democracy works for good. The mark of this success is given by the millions of those who running from poverty, insecurity, into-lerance, persecution chose to go West, even for the prospect of the lowest opportunities – strangely but no one has a Chinese or Russian dream.

The United States centres and dominates the West. Its global military presence too close to comfort its strategic competitors in Pacific, Atlantic, Europe and the Middle East offers an advanced line of defence for the Free World, at least for classical military threats. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the unequivocal statement made by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping regarding Taiwan, the military threats are again of prime importance. The United States is forced to answer all major security and strategically challenges raised at regional and global level by the competitors of the Free World:

• Regional: the re-nuclearization of security and the re-militarization of the in-fluence disputes in Europe (see Russia’s new approaches and its war in Ukraine), the consolidation of the unfriendly control over the Middle East (see Iran in Iraq and Lebanon and Rusia in Iran and Syria), the radicalization of the Chinese position over Taiwan and its quest for outposts in the wider Indo-Pacific area and Sub-Saharan Africa;

• Global: building of massive arsenals of AI driven weaponry of all kinds for field, sea air and even space combat (see China).

While not impossible, the mission is more complicated than ever – first, because, excepting Russia, all the other competitors are consolidated regimes that attended enough technological development to build important armies, well-armed up to the nuclear, that deter any adventure on their soil. Even more, these rogue regimes can now manufacture all seize of intelligent weaponry from those handled to those driven, or long distance guided that while being relatively cheap can neutralize, destroy or render inoperable military equipment and installations worth of millions to billions of dollars. Transferred to their proxies, that may, equally, be other rogue regimes or non-state groups, these weapons raise the threat level over the America’s allies, and with that the costs of its answer. Second, because it cannot count much on the help of its allies and proxies – in fact, in sharp difference with the WWII situation, none of the America’s allies is able to second it with decisive engagement in its challenges at global level, or in assuming sole responsibility on regional fronts, easing America’s burden. Some may say that the United States themselves suffocated its allies and proxies’ while luring with its generous incentive policy the most dynamic companies and best specialists in the technology sector from Europe, UK, Japan and South Korea to relocate to America. This could be true, yet partially – while these countries simply could no longer afford to access resources and markets beyond seas to support such armies and follow such plans. From this perspective, America remains a lonely super-power, a giant among dwarfs.

While Europe is the most socially developed and socially conscientious component of the West, it is, as well, the slowest in its reactions to the challenges of global competition. The European Union, which after Covid pandemic accelerated its transformation into a post-national construction, with the tacit agreement of the chiefs of states and governments, that found in the Commission the perfect tree to hide behind from national criticism and blame that pay for the tough decisions on issues as migration and decarbonization to nominate only the most important – cannot be more than the sum of its members. A sum of economies unequal in output and development, with relatively small level of integration, with few natural resources on their soil and higher and higher obstacles in assessing resources from other regions of the globe. The holly idea of integration sometimes helps the development of all its members, sometimes hinders development opportunities at national and local level. While as whole development, satisfaction and opportunities are the highest in the world – inside there are major imbalances between North and South and West and East – imbalances that are nurtured on one hand by the inevitable inadequacy of a common policy to answer fully particular needs and on the other hand from the fact that the new members from the East were welcome as simple markets after socially painful post-Communist deindustrialization and land de-collectivization that let no local producer able to compete with Western merchandise, with the result of a massive intra EU migration of labour force and specialists that only increased the problems of this already less developed countries (see the increase of their demo-graphic deficit with its toll on national accounts).

One big problem for the United States in its success as superpower and defender of the Free World is the degradation of the American democratic debate as core process of the liberal political system. While political marketing strategies since Bill Clinton’s election bet on shock and polarization, the political discourse ceased to be addressed to one and the same political community but to different irreconcilable sides of culture wars. The success of these strategies is related to increasing anguish over deep social and economic transformation – while the core capital is still WASP⁴, the WASP are no longer socially and culturally dominant, the non-WASP groups are the productive force of today America and with the democratic power of vote they may change the neo-liberal policies of pure capitalism. The culture war strategy offers to right wings political strategists the only angle to address and attract the non-WASP voters as Latin Catholics, Muslims, Confucian Chinese, African American Christians. America exports these culture wars through many channels – academic connections, public or private programs, NGOs and religious networks. American groups of interest finance and support both sides. Two evils arise from this – first, America contributes to the success of forces that assume a revision of the liberal values as main project, creating with its own hands cracks in the defence wall of the Free World, to be exploited by its competitors, second, as political alternance in office is unavoidable despite a change of actors, the persistence of the cultural wars in the core of the political life induces incoherence in foreign policy – making America a superpower with double personality disorder. One other problem for the United States is the failure of many of its regional allies and proxies to comply with the American general proclaimed standards and evaluations. As a superpower that legitimises its position and actions from the moral height of universal values, in sharp distinction with the Empires of Evil, America must sustain that the actions of its friends are always right and unquestionable even if they have same disastrous results as those of America’s foes. While for its closest allies, the European nations, in first place, Japan, South Korea and other, this does not constitute an issue, for the rest of the world raises questions that limit America’s convincing power and ability to gather a favourable majority of world states.

Russian leaders claimed for about a decade that the United States and NATO broke their promises not to enlarge eastward the border of former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in exchange for peaceful retreat of the Russian soldiers and recognition of the new German state. From their point of view new European realities without Communist regimes and without the Warsaw Pact should have been governed by the percentages negotiated at Yalta Conference. As KGB got rid of the Communist Party and created its own political and economic system with liberal democratic mask in Russia, which was replicated with variations in all former satellites and soviet republics, Central and Eastern Europe could have been controlled through proxies based on shared interests – conserving political and economic dominance. What the Kremlin’s mastermind calculated wrong was that (1) with the massive deindustrialization of their economies the product of which indeed depended on Russian raw materials (cheap gas) or was destined to the Russian market, the interests of the new oligarchs shifted toward West, (2) that the West itself, acknowledging their ability to control the economy and the society, accepted them as partners with all the stains of their past and present, in exchange for their cooperation. With all the troubles and crises during the first two post-Communist decades, Russia was able to provide little help to its proxies, they faced internal challenges alone, and found their own responses and solutions to keep control on power and capital while assuming a pro euro-Atlantic agenda. For NATO was impossible to keep the door locked as most of Central and Eastern European countries were making noise knocking and crying a narrative of blaming West for indifference, cynicism and abandon. What worked most against Kremlin’s mastermind calculus was the growing pressure of national societies in Central and Eastern Europe not only for cosmetic westernization but for integration within the West. At the level of the common citizen Russia was always perceived as a menace and as a political model to avoid – long before the Soviet Union and the WWII. Attempts to separate Central and Eastern Europe from the West by imagining various cultural fractures: one Europe of Slavs vs one Europe of Germanic and Latin people, one Europe of Orthodox East vs one Europe of Catholic and Protestant Europe – failed successively. People of this region found ways to accom-modate both Slavic heritage and Orthodox rites in the larger cultural and spiritual framework of the West. In the post-WWI Europe such cultural fractures were simply irrelevant – all Europe was Old, all inspired by Paris. The post WWII division lines functioned only as long Red Army’s soldiers were there to enforce them. The Kremlin’s mastermind resigned to this but found comfort in other thought: Poles, Rumanians, Czech, the Baltics were not part of the Ideal Russia – in the sense the Eastern Slavs were. The Russian modern state, since Catherine the Great till Nicolai the II, counted equally on Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians to form the Slavic and Orthodox core of the nation. Especially in the case of Ukrainians this official nation building program was contested by an alternative one. Ukrainians negotiated with the Germans the recognition of their independence months before the end of the WWI – that ignited the antipathy of Clemenceau that favoured demands of Francophile Poles and Romanians. Ukrainian nationalists were once again on the wrong side during the WWII. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic were parts of the United Nations – an artifice of Kremlin to counterbalance the British Commonwealth. While these soviet republics were not Ukraine or Belarus of today, they served the today independent states by shaping their future (1) regional and local administration, (2) economy, (3) political and in tellectual elites, (4) interests, and not lest (5) sense of distinctiveness and competition with Moscow. This sense of distinctiveness and competition involved in the post-soviet reality a constant clash of interests, first economic, between Kiev and Moscow oligarchs – disputes that Moscow never had the ability and wisdom to settle in a win-win logic, but from the position of a controlling centre. A questioned arose in the mind of Kiev oligarchs – why should we accept this self-imposed obedience and not do business with the West. Besides this economic unsatisfaction there was as well a growing scepticism regarding the direction imposed to Russia by the Chekist hardliners brought to Kremlin by Vladimir Putin. For both common citizens and oligarchs of Ukraine and Belarus it became clear that their countries would have nothing to gain following Putin’s Russian Dream. Singes of this shift accumulated during the last decade – see results of national elections, orange revolutions and many other. While in Belarus, just like in Russia, the oligarchs failed to control the Chekists in power, in Ukraine the oligarchs convinced the Chekists to support the split from Russia. The victory of Maidan Revolution was only possible with a major defection of internal intelligence service that forced the leave and exile of Yanukovich and defended the new power against its many internal enemies. Today, few analysts remember that the 2022 War on Ukraine (known to Russian citizens as Special Military Operation) came after major protests in Russia – see 2017-2018, and Belarus, see 2020-2021, that made clear to Putin that the active and conscientious part of the Russian society, those who produce value in all the fields, reject the system he created and want a change. Being rejected by all young, educated Russia, Putin understood that the success of a pro-Western Ukraine would signal not only to his oligarchs and rest of Chekists but to all common citizens of Belarus and Russia from Minsk to Vladivostok that life in different conditions is not only desirable, but possible. In a twisted way the idea of that Ukraine is in fact an alter ego of Russia works against Putin as a living example of what Russia could become – free from tyranny, opened to the world, respected at the height of its mighty cultural value. Regardless the military result the impact of the war on the Russian society is not to increase unity but questions and doubt. Repression may rend simple Russian silent. Economy may be restructured and oriented entirely to China and the rest of the Global South where sanctions do not reach. Even so much desired Western luxury brands – from cars to shoes may be accessible to the rich and superficial – yet a worm of dissatis-faction will exist. What Putin as Kremlin’s mastermind of the day gets wrong about Russians is that, from his Chekist brothers in arms and oligarchs to students and further – the idea of West dominates both Slavism and Orthodoxy, the idea of national success, the political testament of Peter I, that shaped the political and cultural mindset of Russians is that Russia must be a power… within the West, a Western Power. In sharp contrast with their Chinese and Iranian counterparts, the members of the Russians state and economical elites, holders of power and capital, Chekists and Oligarchs, not to mention both obedient academic intelligentsia and dissident intellec-tuals, cannot be satisfied by the limits of the Global South. While Vladimir Putin might have the chance to die in office as President, his surviving camarilla will be sacrificed in exchange of Russia’s reintegration in the West – Sacred Motherland before all.

Predictions that China will overpass United States in terms of GDP by the end of this century may prove overoptimistic. China’s national economy is cooling, and its population started ageing. Both phenomena were unavoidable, as they happened to all emerging nations. China knew five decades of constant growth. Grandparents’ generations that knew hardship, famine and insecurity are passed away. No inhabitant of China in his fifties confronted with such plagues. China confronted deceleration of its growth but never in the last decades contractions and growing unemployment. ‘Zero-Covid’ strategy was a stress test that indicated the discipline of both state enforcers and population. Yet, as one anonymous wise man once said, democracies can afford to be unsuccessful and unpopular, autocracies and totalitarian regimes do not. It is the balance of responsibility – if the state takes all freedom takes all responsibility, as well, and finally, all the blame. Some may say that China builds the most advanced and complete system of surveillance of its own citizens, being able to monitor even their daily expenses and routines. Even so, individuals will search and find blind spots and hiding corners, as small as a crack within a wall, may dissimulate good behaviour and none the less, they may corrupt both guardians and their infor-mants. In a country whose culture historically set the standards of indulgence and sophistication, people are essentially corruptible. Corruption is driven by China’s two bourgeoisies – the nomenklatura and the capitalists. President Xi can only hope to control and satisfy both dragons – A single Party with many competing cliques that act following the winner takes it all and a capitalist economy with its competing interests. Despite the official narrative of the regime, both bourgeoisies oppress and exploit the mass of common citizens. This economic and political triangle complicates the social entropy of the Chinese state. China has still room for economic growth – shifting its prime orientation from West to its rural and inland areas. Yet, while this growth may last for decades, it will no longer reach the same pace – mainly due to the changing nature of globalization and the growing suspicion of its Western partners. President Xi put greater emphasis than his predecessors on China’s military power capability to go global and spatial. China has now many interests to defend over the seas – in Africa, Middle East, the Mediterranean region, the Balkans, as well in Central America, the Pacific and Indian oceans. Besides the United States, it is the only power that still can play at this level. As an economy that structurally depends on the foreign markets both to sell its products and to acquire row material to made them, China constructed transcontinental routes for export and supply. A blockade of one of them would represent a major hostile act possibly triggering a military response. To secure its influence across these routes, far now, China opted for sup-porting proxy regimes and groups. While its interests are hot in many points of the earth – as South Africa (see China’s route to Brazil and Argentina), or the Solomon Islands, the most neuralgic are on the geopolitical rift at the contact of Europe with Asia, from Finland to Belarus, from Belarus to Serbia, from Serbia to Georgia and Armenia, from Georgia and Armenia to Iran and Turkye, and finally to Syria, Iraq and Lebanon. As the West, including the EU defined China a strategic competitor, China is irritated by both prospects of democratic developments and euro-Atlantic enlargement in countries on the zone making it an interested allied of autocratic and anti-Western regimes and forces. Yet, while interested to see both Vladimir Putin consolidating his power in Russia and the region and blocking of Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the EU, China is, as well, interested in the ending of the conflict and a reopening of the terrestrial and north oceanic routes to Western Europe. China likes and supports in any single way autocracies and anti-Western forces of all sorts but equally dislikes conflicts – Beijing wants to secure trade routes not to block them. If China would start a major conflict by attacking Taiwan, is more unlikely, despite the promise made to President Biden by President XI – Beijing strategists want to secure development, for as long as the growth of economy is still possible.

As a conclusion, we may say that the next century will be a poker game between the United States and China. Other players simply cannot afford to pay the opening price. The United States chose to be the dynamo of the new system while proposing a major technological shift that would bring a structural transformation at the level of the world economy that would reconsolidate the position of the entire West. The problem of this attempt is that beyond the narrative this involves too difficult decisions for the majority of the Global South to really commit to it. Europe cannot be more than a sum of developed economies too small to count in the global game. Nor Japan, the United Kingdom or any other of the United States allies. Russia with its huge potential is driven solely by the interest of a single man to conserve his power that build a system for crooks and thieves⁵ that narcotize the quiet Russians and chase away the young and the smart ones, the only able, through their enthusiasm, to instil development. India tries to play both sides between the West and the Global South, self-condemning to small gains and even smaller status. Argentina and Brazil enter again in the storm of internal crisis dominated by flamboyant extremists that despite the noise and troubles that make bring no real solutions. Iran became dangerous not through its ability to build its own ballistic program and arm its long-range missiles with atomic charge, but to manufacture cheap small size high tech destructive weapons it may supply to non-state actors it funds and cultivate to secure its regional game, in the Middle East. War in Ukraine indicated that the democratic enlargement of the West may be responded with military as competitors see their red lines crossed. Besides Russia, the pursuit of the democratic enlargement beyond the countries of Central-Eastern Europe, in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia irritates China that wants to keep its influence across its new Silk Road. While constantly provoking and competing, restricting access to critical resources, techno-logies and routes, the two powers still seek to avoid direct clash – the competition should be decided by a stress test of economies and societies, not by war.

Bibliografie

1. Miskimmon Alister, O’Loughlin Ben, Roselle Laura (2017) Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations, University of Michigan Press

2. Walt Stephen M. (1990) The Origins of Alliance, Cornell University Press

3. Hobsbawm Eric John (1999) Industry and empire: from 1750 to the present day, Penguin Books

4. Lieberman Benjamin, Gordon Elizabeth (2018) Climate Change in Human History: Prehistory to the Present, Bloomsbury Academic

5. Bilchitz David, Landau David (2018) The Evolution of the Separation of Powers: Between the Global North and the Global South, Edward Elgar Publishing