The most significant statement of desire which came out of the recent presidential summits between China’s President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump, and that between Beijing and Russia, is President Xi’s call for a “multipolar world order”.
As President Xi explains, it’s a movement from the contemporary “unilateral hegemony” and Western dominance, to an order “which emphasises traditional spheres of influence, national sovereignty, and prioritising the “Global South”.
In previous columns, I outlined in some detail the avarice and the violence used to satisfy the greed of the dominant powers of the Euro-American world. Over hundreds of years, they have captured the lands and resources of countries which do not have the firepower to respond to protect their countries and populations.
Such a philosophy of a dominant people has led to the practice of Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” i.e., that God in his eternal wisdom has given Euro-America the responsibility to look after others, and to do so by taking possession (by whatever means necessary) of the resources which are spread across the non-white continents of Africa, India, China and Latin America.
Only thing is, when those resources are captured, they are not utilised to carry out the responsibility, but become captured by small majorities in the “burden-carrying” countries to satisfy the appetites of special interest groups. If there is doubt, readers should take a moment to scan the globe where the strong and violent are in the process of taking the resources of the weak and unprotected without the slightest qualms of conscience, and why? Because that is the right of the White Man, given to him by his God.
For Britain, Germany, Russia, France, Belgium, the Dutch, and the USA, that is what has given them the moral authority to plunder the resources over hundreds of years of Africa, India, China, South America, the Caribbean and elsewhere. President Trump did not invent the USA’s barging into sovereign countries with a pretext which seeks to justify the intervention and absorption of the resources of those countries. Indeed, those Europeans who crossed over into the New World felt it was their right to take the resources from those who had lived there for centuries.
In 1823, US President James Monroe put into practice the notion that the hemisphere belonged to the US. That right has been preached, re-formulated and practised over the century-plus years in the Middle East, in parts of Asia and Europe, and in the northernmost regions of North America. Most recently, it has been re-articulated as the “Donroe doctrine”.
To therefore justify the rationale of this column, its predecessor of a couple of weeks ago, and the citing of President Xi Jinping’s desire for change, I do so because together, they hold the possibility for a revolutionary movement from the present order of domination in which President Trump has threatened to bomb Iran into the stone ages.
“Why”? Because he, like others, both in the past and the present in the Euro-American civilisation, is grounded in the notion that they have the right to the resources of the world, and to take them at gunpoint when such need arises.
President Trump has even threatened his NATO partners in Europe with taking hold of the resources under their own jurisdiction, Canada, Greenland, not to say anything about Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, because he believes it’s the right of the USA and its civilisation to do so.
The disposition to bullying, though, does not rest only with the USA/Europe combine; the wielding of power in an authoritarian manner is often commensurate with the holding of power.
Although I perceive of President Xi’s desire for the movement away from the ruthless single power reality exercised by the USA, to the “multi-polar” model to be an honest quest for a measure of fairness, the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are massive and militarily powerful countries compared to the small and medium-sized majority of states which are constantly preyed upon by the powerful.
The holding and exercise of power can have a bewitching effect, a kind of drug which feeds into the minds of leaders who gain hubristic notions of themselves and countries and so become authoritarian in the exercise of power; history is replete with examples of leaders who were placed in office with genuine intentions becoming “Strongmen” dictators - Ruth Ben-Ghiat. China and Russia do not have histories of being open democracies.
So yes, there is a measure of hope in the statement of President Xi, and the expectation that action to achieve the objective can gain acceptance. The issue is, how is change to be achieved when the power resides with those with the whip in hand; how to transform the thinking and the exercise of state power by leaders who become addicted to the self-centred exercise of power.
Here is an apology to historian Dr Rita Pemberton for erroneously ascribing her work as the Head of the Cabinet Appointed Committee to Review the Placement of Statues, Monuments and Signage in Trinidad and Tobago, to Prof Bridget Brereton. I similarly apologise to the latter.
Tony Rakhal-Fraser – freelance journalist, former reporter/current affairs programme host, and News Director at TTT; programme producer/current affairs director at Radio Trinidad; correspondent for the BBC Caribbean Service and the Associated Press; graduate of UWI, CARIMAC, Mona, and St Augustine – Institute of International Relations.
