Global Power and the Green Economy

This year’s World Economic Forum in Davos marked the end of globalization and the rise of regionalism. Indeed, it ushered in a new architecture in global governance and a new reformulation of the role of multilateral institutions. The world order that was structured after World War II, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War that gave rise to the unipolar hegemonic power of the U.S. came to an end.

The end of that unipolar world gave way to a new tripolar world order with three powers vying for control of the world: the U.S., China and Russia. India is a fourth power seeking to participate in that feast, moving between the three with autonomy and its own agenda, but it has yet to show its cards. Other regional powers have also emerged, such as Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria, which, hand in hand with the BRICS countries, are set to play a strong global role.

On the one hand, the U.S. and Britain lead the seven most developed economies in the West. Hence the Anglosphere’s move, along with NATO, to provoke the war in Ukraine against Russia in order to break Germany, the leading European economy, and in the process, the rest of Europe, and turn the European countries into vassals to preserve its global hegemony.

On the other hand, China, Russia and India lead the bloc of the most developed economies in Asia and, with the geo-economic blocs of BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and others, control most of the economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America. A power that has the U.S. hegemony reeling as it faces its decline and the imperial resurgence of the Asian powers.

Its bid was to replace the neoliberal economic policies of the Washington consensus with the new Cornwall consensus, whose battleground is the green economy, clean energy and energy transition. The green economy is the new religion of Western power, a way for the U.S. to shake off its declining imperial powers and, through environmental policies, seek to stop the swing of the pendulum of global power from the West to Asia.

It sees the resurgence of former empires such as China, Russia, India, Iran and Turkey as a threat. China and Russia are decades ahead of them in advances in the control of new technologies and clean energy. And whoever controls the new technologies holds the key to world control.