As we advance deeper into our crisis-plagued 21st century, east-west conflict is driving headlines. But a closer look reveals that tensions between the West and the Global South, which broadly includes regions in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific, will pose the most important threats and challenges over the next decade.
The received wisdom is that the next superpower conflict will pit America against China. But there is not, and will not be, a global cold war between the two countries. That is because their 21st-century interdependence will not be undone by 20th-century threats. It’s true that trust between Washington and Beijing is in short supply. But there remains a consensus within America’s government that the country still needs China to succeed. America’s closest allies in Europe, Asia and the Americas want absolutely no part of a great-power conflict. Trade with China is too important to their futures.
A dangerously destabilised China would create mutually assured economic destruction. China remains America’s largest trading partner in goods, its largest supplier of goods imports and its third-largest export market. America remains both China’s largest goods-trade partner and its biggest export market. And Xi Jinping knows that the Communist Party’s monopoly on domestic political power depends on continuing to meet the expectations of China’s people. To keep living standards rising, Beijing needs to sustain robust commercial relations with the eu, America and Japan, which together buy nearly 40% of China’s exports.
Continuing interdependence leaves east and west in the same boat toward a common destination. Unfortunately, many poor countries in the Global South are those most vulnerable to the world’s political and economic turmoil. India, which projections suggest will be the world’s most populous country by next year, is among them. Such countries are adrift, and may become a source of millions of migrants and refugees over the next decade. That will exacerbate global turmoil in turn.
Broken supply chains, rising interest rates and surging inflation, combined with falling growth and fewer remittances, create conditions for a developing-world debt crisis this decade. That is in spite of the fact that in recent decades cross-border flows of ideas, information, people, money, goods and services have sharply reduced wealth gaps between rich and poor countries and created the first global middle class (defined as those with incomes five to ten times higher than the World Bank’s global poverty line).
The pandemic bears some of the blame. It has pushed already-indebted poor countries into dangerous territory. The World Bank has warned that 58% of the world’s poorest countries “are in debt distress or at high risk of it”. Middle-income countries will be next.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has added price volatility and shortages of food and fuel to the mix. Given the high likelihood that an unstable stalemate in Ukraine will feed further uncertainty for years, that problem will widen the gaps between west and south over much of the next decade. America and Europe insist that the economic pressures the war has added on poor countries are the result of naked colonial aggression by Russia. Countries in the Global South see Western hypocrisy. They believe American and European outrage is reserved for crimes committed against white people and for the plight of white refugees. For the rest? Not so much.
Poor countries are also less well prepared to limit the harm done by increasingly erratic weather patterns than rich ones. This is especially true in Africa and the Middle East, where surging temperatures will more often test the limits of human endurance, and in Central America, a region already plagued with poverty and violent crime.
Wealthier countries will respond to these crises in coming years with steps designed mainly to protect themselves, an approach as predictable as it is short sighted. High inflation and recession fears in America and Europe will reduce already-limited political appetites for expensive investments in emergency management and debt restructuring in other regions. Concerns over continuing threats from Russia will further distract Western leaders from existing conflicts and crises in Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere. Plans to limit climate damage will focus on disasters and dislocated people at home. Western-led institutions, such as the imf, will have to make tough choices on where to invest resources made increasingly scarce by the swelling number of local emergencies.
In response, poor countries will either find ways to act as a bloc within international institutions to demand more help for themselves, or they will spoil consensus, creating the conditions for more economic and political instability within their borders, more violence and more forced migration.
In this fractious environment, India will emerge as a leader of the Global South. At present it is allied with American efforts to contain China’s expanding influence, but there are too many commercial opportunities to be had from China and Russia to ignore them. And when it comes to trade, technology and climate change, India’s experiences fall strongly alongside the developing world. How will Narendra Modi’s government respond in the coming years to the increasingly crippling economic challenges his country will face? India’s present alignment with America is probably at its high water mark.
To meet all these challenges over the coming decade, the countries of the West must co-ordinate their plans as much as possible. And rich countries must invest generously in global stability, whether through debt relief, technology transfers or through programmes for climate adaptation. Is there any kind of co-operation to be had with China when it comes to the needs of the Global South? For now that appears to be a pipe dream. But as the world’s largest creditor, China is a country with even more to lose from chaos in developing markets than America or its allies. Ultimately, more constructive east-west engagement may be the only way to keep the Global South from melting down.
Ian Bremmer is the founder and president of Eurasia Group.