A New World Disorder

The evil eye has been cast upon us: not only by the Spanish but the entire world. For some time we haven’t been free from misfortunes, the latest one being the tsunami that struck Japan’s Northeastern coast making everyone tremble. This follows another kind of tsunami, namely the political situation sweeping across North Africa, which no one knows yet how or when it will end. Not to mention the third tsunami: the economy that has been devastating our homes for three years. There’s nothing safe and expert predictions are worth less than those of any random person, perhaps because they live on the street and those in their offices calculate outdated data. We have entered another era where the above parameters do not apply, and until we find out the new ones we are going to give ourselves quite a few punches and tremendous frights.

What has changed so that everything surprises us and nothing fits together anymore? Well, first is the global balance. That old order, in which two super powers — the U.S. and the USSR — ruled the planet by dividing it into their zones of influence, is over. It was certainly unfair, but it was stable. Washington and Moscow were in charge of maintaining peace in their respective empires, and although some sporadic clashes arose within their borders – Berlin and Cuba — both the Americans and the Russians were careful not to let it become more. They both knew what it meant: mutual annihilation and the possibility of the end for all life on Earth. It was called “The Cold War,” but it was actually a “warm peace,” or, more exactly, a “balance of terror.” But it permitted decades of stability without autonomy and the people of both empires could dedicate themselves to progress and to having fun, not having to worry about military expenditures, which were taken care of by their respective leaders.

The stalemate ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Without firing a shot, the United States became the winner of the Cold War and the only superpower. Some, driven by their optimism, predicted that the story had ended and the only way forward politically would be democracy, while the market would be responsible for regulating the economy. The futility of our predictions has rarely been so evident. What no one took into account was that all the imprisoned forces trapped by the worldly diumvirate had become free. In Eastern Europe, the satellite countries were quick to reject communism and embrace capitalism, while the Russians had to forgo much of their empire, leaving a power vacuum. In Afghanistan this was vacuum was filled by the fiercest Islamism, forcing the West to intervene in a country that had become a nest of terrorists. So that victory was not going to be free and 9/11 was the beginning of this new age of chaos, which is not yet over because Islamic terrorism is more difficult to beat than Soviet communism, even with all of its megatons. So now we find ourselves stuck in two armed interventions, Iraq and Afghanistan, which, at best, we can go without losing but not win.

The deficit of the major financial institutions coming from the false idea of the market needing to be the only regulator of economic activity warned us how wrong we were, and still today we are not out of the crisis. To make matters worse, the popular uprising of the Arab peoples against the oligarchs who had come to rule them has filled us with bewilderment. But do we not agree that Muslims hated Western democracy? Where do these cries of freedom come from? Aren’t the fundamentalists behind it? And, above all, should we help or not help the multitudes in the street or the sons of bitches that we have been supporting to maintain order and continue supplying us oil? In these doubts, things have leaned toward following the internal equilibrium within each country: the place where our son of a bitch was very strong had been forced to leave, leaving the army in control of the situation. In the place where this happened, it is being assessed while we discuss if they are greyhounds or hounds. We are left with a mystery floating over these countries, and no one knows how it will clear; whoever says he knows is either a liar or a fool.

All we know is that the old world order has been ruined and that the new one is only just appearing. An order still in disorder, but in which few things remain as they were. Its most prominent feature is the appearance of new actors on the world stage. China is at the head, turning into a second economic power, however without aspirations to use its leadership. The Chinese are not interested, as the Soviets or the Americans were, in creating an empire beyond its borders. With the problems they have within them, it is enough. Its interest is in ensuring the supply of raw materials that its industry devours with growth over 10 percent annually. Hence they are closing agreements with the countries that produce the same things in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Ideology doesn’t interest them and military adventures do even less. Disturbing the ultramontane materialism, Deng Xiaoping explained to Felipe Gonzalez the lapidary phrase “Be it a black cat or a red cat, the important thing is that it catches mice.” This is an attitude that is not in the least bit expansionist, except in the commercial field, but it does not help create a new world order.

And they are not alone in it. They are accompanied by “emerging countries” – India, Brazil, South Korea and Chile — to which they will be joining from very different ideological camps to build a hybrid system that gives priority to the economy over politics and national interests over any other. If this is going to be the climate of the next century, I fear very much that rough times await us, as none of these new players seem interested in assuming greater international responsibilities. And if Russia gave up theirs with its empire, it can be feared that the paralysis of the U.N. Security Council, the only U.N. body with executive powers, will become more an obstacle than a factor in peace and justice.

Meanwhile, the United States has taken on the enormous effort over the last twenty years to shoulder global leadership. Much of its debt is in Chinese hands; its military budget exceeds that of the fifteen countries that follow it combined; and the deficit has taken on astronomical proportions. This country has an enormous capacity for resilience and the resources to succeed, so do not doubt that it will come out of this crisis as much as it came out of previous ones as, or much more, severe. But it will. And more doubtful is that you can fire at others, as after World War II. And what is left is the uncertainty about who can or who would want to take over.

Europe doesn’t have the clear capacity or the will to do it, as demonstrated in recent military, economic and political crises that we have faced. Hence the question that was formulated by Paul Valery: “Will Europe become what it really is, the head of Asia?” We already have the answer: more than the head, the tail.

Meddling with a prophet today is to object against the absurd.