By Benyamin Poghosyan
The 2007-2008 world financial crisis triggered discussions about the inevitable decline of the Post-cold war unipolar order, marked by the absolute US hegemony. The Arab Spring, the 2014 Ukraine crisis, the Syrian civil war, and the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 contributed to the ongoing debate about the US relative decline and rise of others. The growing influence of nonwestern institutions, such as BRICS and SCO, attempts to abandon USD in bilateral trade, and the establishment of alternative international financial institutions, such as the New development bank of BRICS and Asian Infrastructure Investment bank, seemed to shatter the undisputed leadership of western political and financial institutions and the role of the USD as the only global reserve currency.
The US political establishment coined its term for the emerging world order – great power competition – which is the prevailing theme in all strategic level documents published by the Trump and Biden administrations. The global uncertainty triggered regional instability as the absence of the hegemon of world policeman has revitalized the rivalry for regional hegemony among regional players. Regional problems have been increasingly dealt with by regional players, while global powers mainly used proxy forces to push forward their interests. The current mess in the Middle East perhaps is the most vivid example of this trend. Some experts coined the term "regionalization of globalization," seeking to put the practical developments into the theoretical framework. On a smaller scale, this trend manifested itself also during the 2020 Nagorno Karabakh war. The global players, notably the US and EU, were largely absent during the war, while arrangements to stop it and form the new status quo in the South Caucasus were agreed upon between key regional powers – Russia and Turkey.
While most of the expert community was discussing the consequences of the emergence of this new multi-polar global order, a part of the Western political establishment appeared to seek to bring the world back into the bi-polar confrontation familiar from the original Cold War history. Even before the November 2020 Presidential elections in the US, the idea of establishing some club of democracies started to float in the political and expert circles. Back in May 2020, then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson proposed to transform the G7 into D10, adding South Korea, India, and Australia into the club and making it a primary platform to defend democracies and elaborate ways to counter the growing rise of authoritarian powers. Originally the idea was to focus the attention of this new elite club on disruptive digital technologies – artificial intelligence, 5G, data science - to secure the West's edge in these fields amidst the astonishing successes of China.
President Biden expanded this idea, elaborating the vision of 21st-century geopolitics as the battle between democracies and authoritarian powers. During one of the first press conferences after assuming office held on March 25, 2021, Biden declared that the world was facing a battle between the usefulness of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies. During his address to Congress on his first 100 days in office, President Biden stated that the US had to prove democracy still worked, the government still worked - and could deliver for the people. This idea of a battle between democracies and others may bring back the bipolar features of the Cold war when the West opposed the USSR. It replicates the Cold War by narrowing geopolitics as a fight between two primary players - the free world vs. USSR then and democracies vs. authoritarians now - and adds a solid ideological component to geopolitics. As the first tangible step to bring together democracies, the US organized the first summit for democracy on December 9-10, 2021.
However, no event was as loud a confirmation of the end of the Post-cold war unipolar era as the 2022 war in Ukraine. Despite strict and explicit warnings from the collective West that an attack against Ukraine would result in strict actions against Russia, including economic sanctions and military support to Ukraine, Russia launched a "Special Military Operation" on February 24, 2022.
The war in Ukraine has sent global shockwaves. It made it clear that the post-cold war era was over, as was stated recently by the US Secretary of State Blinken on March 23, 2023, as he testified before the House Committee on appropriations. Some experts in the West seek to depict the new world order as the fight between democracies and autocracies, where everything is white or black. Good guys are fighting bad guys. According to this narrative, the democratic and free world is led by the US, while Russia and China lead the authoritarian states.
In this white and black world, every state should choose to be on the right or wrong side of history and pay the price for its choice. This narrative brings us back to the Cold War when the US led the free world in its fight against the "Evil Empire." Now the US again should lead the free world in the new fight against new "bad actors."
To push forward this worldview of a fight between “democratic and authoritarian states”, the Biden administration stated about its intention to organize the second summit for democracy on March 28-20, 2023.
However, this vision of the "good vs. evil" or "democracy vs. authoritarianism" world is not entirely in line with reality. Many countries want to avoid making a choice and joining either US or China/Russia camp. Even more, some significant actors believe that the new world should not be a remake of the original Cold war, with two main actors. They believe that the world should be multipolar. It is challenging to assess the final counters of the emerging world order; however, international relations are too complex to be put into the "good vs. evil" framework.
It should be noted that since the end of the WWII "soft power" was one of the key components of United States foreign policy. America was admired by many in the world as a beacon of democracy and rule of law, where every hard working person could realize the American dream. Americans themselves were often thinking of America as "a shining city on a hill", which should support all people around the world to defeat tyranny, and to live in freedom and prosperity.
The starting point in the image erosion of the American brand was probably the 2003 Iraq invasion, which was done without a proper UN Security Council mandate, and, as was clarified later, justified on the false pretext of fighting against the Iraqi program to develop weapons of mass destruction. The large scale violations of human rights in Iraq and Afghanistan by US led-coalition forces did not sympathy towards the US. In mid 2000s several weak voices could be heard arguing that the key motivation behind the US foreign policy was not democracy promotion and the concerns about the fate of other people, but mere pursuit of its objective to control Middle East oil reserves. The 2011 NATO operation in Libya supported by the US, which resulted in the Libyan debacle that is still ongoing, has only contributed to giving credence to these views.
Regardless of the intentions of the US and the future trajectory of the new world order transformation, the democracy vs. authoritarianism vision puts small states located between Russia and Europe in a complicated situation. One such country is Armenia. As one of the newly independent states, it is firmly anchored in the Russian sphere of influence, hosting a Russian military base and border troops and being a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization and Eurasian Economic Union. After the disastrous defeat in the 2020 Karabakh war, Armenia faces formidable challenges to secure its territory amidst ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan. The future status of Nagorno Karabakh and the fate of 120000 Armenians living there remain in limbo and primarily dependent on Russia. Armenia declared its intention to build a democratic state immediately after gaining its independence in 1991 and, during the last 30 years, moved towards that direction with successes and failures. Armenia has no intention and desire to be involved in excellent power geopolitics and be another small soldier in the US fights against Russia and China for the actual or imaginary sake of democracy. This game may endanger the mere existence of Armenian statehood.
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