James Bond has returned to international politics | Ash Narain Roy

In the 2021 James Bond film No Time to Die, the protagonist sacrifices himself and saves the world. The film, however, ends with a familiar swagger: "James Bond will return." Donald Trump promises no such sacrifice but is hell-bent on destroying America’s long-time allies. If James Bond is a blunt instrument, Trump’s personality possesses the dark triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. And Elon Musk, the first Bond villain has an office in the White House.

In international politics, we are witnessing the return of history with a similar flourish and rant. Donald Trump has forced a near divorce with Europe, the civilisational cousins. What is most galling is power-hungry Elon Musk’s arrogant, condescending behaviour. He dubbed Marco Rubio, US secretary of state, as “Little Marco.” He told Rados?aw Sikorski, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, to “be quiet, small man” after Sikorski said Poland might seek an alternative to Musk’s Starlink terminals.

Since history had ended for good for the West, the Ukraine war was a big shock. Even bigger surprise is the new transatlantic divide. US Vice-President J D Vance has rubbed salt to the old continent’s wound by likening the current state of Europe to that of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 
Trump is a modern-day Don Quixote. His persona and comportments strike a chord with the Quixotic ambition, idealism and the pursuit of an elusive dream. Like Miguel de Cervantes’ Quixote, Trump embroils himself in battles that are ill-advised and downright dumb. Trump’s misguided valour and mockery of America’s Western allies have made way for the return of history.
For over three decades, Francis Fukuyama’s “End of history” thesis led Europeans to believe that war in Europe was a relic of the past. Europe, which considered itself the most “post-historical” continent finds itself in a mess. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has aptly described it a “zeitenwende”, a turn of the times.

Imperial tendencies seem to resurface around the world. What Trump is doing to Europe is to turn transatlantic alliance on its head. For some, it is outright fascist. As Zoe Williams, Guardian columnist, says, fascism doesn’t arrive “in fancy dress”, it “arrives as your friend.”

Hopes for a new peaceful international order after the end of the Cold War have been dashed by sobering realities: Great powers are once again competing for honour and influence. The international competition among the United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, and some others raise new threats of regional conflict.

Liberal international order has ended and the world is in a flux. As Joseph S Nye argues, an international order rests on a stable distribution of power among states, norms that influence and legitimize conduct, and shared institutions. This is exactly what is missing.

In all likelihood, we are going to be in the midst of multiple great powers. China’s rise is phenomenal. But Russia, India will not be pushovers. The unipolar world has been buried forever. The more viable and acceptable to the larger world will be the collective rise of group of nations. The united Europe has the potential.

BRICS also holds the potential to acquire a dominant position. It remains to be seen how united Europe and BRICS remain and how they negotiate the tricky alleys of world politics. Their clout and appeal will depend on hard and soft power as also their norms and institutions.

President Woodrow Wilson had famously claimed that the US was making “the world safe for democracy.” The world has changed. Today, as political scientist John M. Owen writes in The Ecology of Nations: American Democracy in a Fragile World Order, “great powers negotiate among themselves, striking deals on borders and other matters, while smaller nations simply have to accept the decisions.” They have also fought each other in wars.

Trump has shaken the transatlantic alliance and Europe is finding it hard to recover from the trauma. Trump’s ‘America First’ policy means Europe alone’. The old continent has been given no time to “Trump-proof” transatlantic institutions, especially NATO. But that is thanks to Europe’s lethargy. Even President Barack Obama had spoken about Europe’s complacency “about its own defence.” 

European analysts claim that the growing gulf between Europe and America is not only about left and right, populist and centrist, but about a rupture between freedom and fraternity, democracy and solidarity. With the surge of right-wing populist parties and governments, Europe can no longer claim to be a harbinger of democracy, freedom and fraternity. To imagine the end of West is no longer a wishful thinking.

Asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi famously quipped that it sounded like a good idea. He was being ironic, but in many ways, it still does.

The rise of China is emblematic of a rapidly changing global order. China has challenged the US. But China is not the only one. A noteworthy feature of the rapidly evolving contemporary international order is the “rise of the rest.” Today several aspiring great powers are jostling for influence and recognition.

There is a concerted effort by the emerging powers to construct parallel multilateral architectures that route around the liberal order and will likely reshape international politics and economics in fundamental ways. The challenge to the liberal Western world order has other dimensions.

The post-war monetary system is slowly crumbling. We are witnessing the birth of what Credit Suisse’s Zoltan Pozar calls “Bretton Woods III.” It is a new world monetary order centred around commodity-based currencies in the East. It has the potential to weaken the Eurodollar system and also contribute to inflationary forces in the West.

Thanks to the West’s erroneous sanctions regime, several countries have found ways to do business with the sanctioned countries like Russia and Iran. China is establishing a new order in which it buys oil and gas with renminbi and developmental investments. Petrodollar is losing its salience for a variety of factors.

Countries have found mechanisms to beat Western sanctions. The mBridge, for instance, enables its users to bypass the existing US-Centric Financial System. It not only bypasses SWIFT but also all intermediary banks in cross-border transactions as well as the US dollar in forex trading.

Moreover, China and Russia are working together to deepen the bifurcation of the global financial system with the mBridge project, a competitive payments pipeline based on central bank digital currencies. Within BRICS, there is ongoing discussion about establishing a new monetary unit for member countries.

More importantly, scholars are rethinking all theories of international relations. Will the shift from the nation-state to civilisations define the new global order? Or is the world in, what Henry Kissinger warned, “a parlous condition verging on international anarchy?”

Chris Hughes, defence and security editor of Mirror, believes, Trump has shaken “NATO to its very core” and trampling “on years of choreographed global diplomacy”. His repeated declarations about taking over other countries “are making it seem invasions of sovereign territory are acceptable.”

The world is now learning to deal with the return of history. The international community in general and Europe in particular, can ignore the warning of leading American thinker of the 20th century Kurt Vonnegut, at their own peril. He said, “history is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”

All said, whether James Bond returns or not remains to be seen. One thing is plainly evident that the emperor of chaos has no clothes. And it is not a pretty sight.

(Author: Ash Narain Roy, writes on global affairs)