By Vijay Prashad
March 22, 2023:
Information Clearing House
-- On 24 February 2023,
the Chinese Foreign Ministry released a
twelve-point
plan entitled ‘China’s Position on the
Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’.
This ‘peace plan’, as it has been called, is
anchored in the concept of sovereignty, building
upon the well-established principles of the
United Nations
Charter (1945) and the
Ten Principles from the Bandung Conference
of African and Asian states held in 1955. The
plan was released two days after China’s senior
diplomat Wang Yi
visited Moscow, where he met with Russia’s
President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s interest in
the plan was
confirmed by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry
Peskov shortly after the visit: ‘Any attempt to
produce a plan that would put the [Ukraine]
conflict on a peace track deserves attention. We
are considering the plan of our Chinese friends
with great attention’.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky
welcomed the plan hours after it was made
public,
saying that he would like to meet China’s
President Xi Jinping as soon as possible to
discuss a potential peace process. France’s
President Emmanuel Macron echoed this sentiment,
saying that he would visit Beijing in early
April. There are many interesting aspects of
this plan, notably a call to end all hostilities
near nuclear power plants and a pledge by China
to help fund the reconstruction of Ukraine. But
perhaps the most interesting feature is that a
peace plan did not come from any country in the
West, but from Beijing.
When I read ‘China’s Position on the
Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis’, I
was reminded of ‘On the Pulse of Morning’, a
poem published by Maya Angelou in 1993, the
rubble of the Soviet Union before us, the
terrible bombardment of Iraq by the United
States still producing aftershocks, the tremors
felt in Afghanistan and Bosnia. The title of
this newsletter, ‘Birth Again the Dream of
Global Peace and Mutual Respect’, sits at the
heart of the poem. Angelou wrote alongside the
rocks and the trees, those who outlive humans
and watch us destroy the world. Two sections of
the poem bear repeating:
Each of you, a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace, and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the rock were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sang and sings on.
…
History, despite its wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
History cannot be forgotten, but it need not
be repeated. That is the message of Angelou’s
poem and the message of the
study we released last week, Eight
Contradictions of the Imperialist ‘Rules-Based
Order’.
In October 2022, Cuba’s Centre for
International Policy Research (CIPI) held its 7th
Conference on Strategic Studies, which studied
the shifts taking place in international
relations, with an emphasis on the declining
power of the Western states and the emergence of
a new confidence in the developing world. There
is no doubt that the United States and its
allies continue to exercise immense power over
the world through military force and control
over financial systems. But with the economic
rise of several developing countries, with China
at their head, a qualitative change can be felt
on the world stage. An example of this trend is
the ongoing
dispute amongst the G20 countries, many of
which have refused to line up against Moscow
despite pressure by the United States and its
European allies to firmly condemn Russia for the
war in Ukraine. This change in the geopolitical
atmosphere requires precise analysis based on
the facts.
To that end, our latest dossier,
Sovereignty, Dignity, and Regionalism in the
New International Order (March 2023),
produced in collaboration with CIPI, brings
together some of the thinking about the
emergence of a new global dispensation that will
follow the period of US hegemony. The text opens
with a foreword by CIPI’s director, José R.
Cabañas Rodríguez, who makes the point that the
world is already at war, namely a war imposed on
much of the world (including Cuba) by the United
States and its allies through blockades and
economic policies such as sanctions that
strangle the possibilities for development. As
Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis
Varoufakis
said, coups these days ‘do not need tanks.
They achieve the same result with banks’.
The US is attempting to maintain its position
of ‘single
master’ through an aggressive military and
diplomatic push both in Ukraine and Taiwan,
unconcerned about the great destabilisation this
has inflicted upon the world. This approach was
reflected in US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin’s
admission that ‘We want to see Russia
weakened’ and in US House Foreign Affairs
Committee Chairman Michael McCaul’s
statement that ‘Ukraine today – it’s going
to be Taiwan tomorrow’. It is a concern about
this destabilisation and the declining fortunes
of the West that has led most of the countries
in the world to refuse to join efforts to
isolate Russia.
As some of the larger developing countries,
such as China, Brazil, India, Mexico, Indonesia,
and South Africa, pivot away from reliance upon
the United States and its Western allies, they
have begun to discuss a new architecture for a
new world order. What is quite clear is that
most of these countries – despite great
differences in the political traditions of their
respective governments – now recognise that the
United States ‘rules-based international order’
is no longer able to exercise the authority it
once had. The actual movement of history shows
that the world order is moving from one anchored
by US hegemony to one that is far more regional
in character. US policymakers, as part of their
fearmongering, suggest that China wants to take
over the world, along the grain of the
‘Thucydides Trap’ argument that when a new
aspirant to hegemony appears on the scene, it
tends to result in war between the emerging
power and existing great power. However, this
argument is not based on facts.
Rather than seek to generate additional poles
of power – in the mould of the United States –
and build a ‘multipolar’ world, developing
countries are calling for a world order rooted
in the UN Charter as well as strong regional
trade and development systems. ‘This new
internationalism can only be created – and a
period of global Balkanisation avoided’, we
write in our latest dossier, ‘by building upon a
foundation of mutual respect and strength of
regional trade systems, security organisations,
and political formations’. Indicators of this
new attitude are present in the discussions
taking place in the Global South about the war
in Ukraine and are reflected in the Chinese plan
for peace.
Our dossier analyses at some length this
moment of fragility for US power and its
‘rules-based international order’. We trace the
revival of multilateralism and regionalism,
which are key concepts of the emerging world
order. The growth of regionalism is reflected in
the creation of a host of vital regional bodies,
from the Community of Latin American and
Caribbean States (CELAC) to the Shanghai
Cooperation Organisation (SCO), alongside
increasing regional trade (with the BRICS bloc
being a kind of ‘regionalism plus’ for our
period). Meanwhile, the emphasis on returning to
international institutions for global
decision-making, as evidenced by the formation
of the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN
Charter, for example, illustrates the
reinvigorated desire for multilateralism.
The United States remains a powerful country,
but it has not come to terms with the immense
changes taking place in the world order. It must
temper its belief in its ‘manifest destiny’ and
recognise that it is nothing more than another
country amongst the 193 members states of the
United Nations. The great powers – including the
United States – will either find ways to
accommodate and cooperate for the common good,
or they will all collapse together.
At the start of the pandemic, the head of the
World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Adhanom
Ghebreyesus,
urged the countries of the world to be more
collaborative and less confrontational, saying
that ‘this is the time for solidarity, not
stigma’ and repeating, in the years since, that
nations must ‘work together across ideological
divides to find common solutions to common
problems’. These wise words must be heeded.
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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