“The non–West ‘stands up.’”
We witness history.
When and where it started. Zhou at Bandung, 1955. (Government of Indonesia/ Wikimedia Commons.)2 JANUARY—“It’s hard to imagine a whole lot of people saying, ‘Remember all the great times we had in 2021.’” So saith Gail Collins from her perch on the New York Times opinion page as she looked back just before Christmas on the year now gone.
The Queen of Vapidity never lets me down. ’Tis precisely so if… If you spend your time waiting for the low, dishonest people who sit atop our republic to do anything constructive, not to say humane, for Americans or anyone else. If your perspective on the world is thoroughly Western-centric, in Ms. Collins’ case American-centric—indeed, if yours is the narrow perspective of liberal Americans who prefer not to talk about empire and all the suffering it causes but love all the material benefits accruing from this suffering. No, not a good year.
Let us leave Gail Collins and her whole lot of people to their failed imaginations. It was a damn good year if we open our eyes to the events that mattered in the course of it.
It was difficult, 2021, no matter where you stood and put your head down at night. To one or another extent, the Covid–19 pandemic now starts to look like some kind of managed narrative with aspects of a social-control experiment. It nonetheless took a debilitating toll more or less everywhere, whether we measure this in terms of human health, psychological and emotional burdens, economic deprivation, or the further concentration of power in small elites, political and corporate.
There were the continuing wars, the ones we were told would end: Is there a war anywhere at this point for which the U.S. does not bear responsibility? And the subversion ops—these in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria (of course), and elsewhere. Much suffering, deprivation, and insecurity arises from these, let us not forget. And then there were the purposefully cultivated tensions with Russia and China. And the declaration of Cold War II.
What do we see when we look beyond these circumstances? This is our question. What happened during 2021 in the line of the longue durée the Annales historians named, those currents of advance or regression that are destined to endure, to lead humanity in a new direction—to make history, in short?
To see in this way, even to look, requires a fundamental change in our thinking, our consciousness of ourselves and the world we live in. And if we are able to accomplish this change, we can look back on the year just past and see that we have been witnesses to an historic turn whose importance it would be very hard to overstate.
Risking the boredom of my readers, I have noted repeatedly over the past decade or so the inevitability of parity between West and non–West in the course of this century. A risk worth taking, I have concluded, as the point is so defining of our time.
The thought first came to me as I finished 29 years of reporting and commenting on the non–Western world, mostly but not only from Asia. At the time, in the late 2000s, I assumed from all I saw that the rise of non–Western powers and people to a position of equality with the West would come gradually over the course of some decades. I was wrong on this point. It is coming much more swiftly than I had reckoned. And I count 2021 as the very fateful turning point in this evolution of human relations—and so a damn good year.
The first easily legible sign of the year’s importance came last March, when Secretary of State Blinken and Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, took their maiden journey as the new regime’s senior foreign policy people. As was well-reported at the time, their encounter with Chinese counterparts in an Anchorage hotel was an unmitigated debacle if considered from the American point of view.
Blinken and Sullivan, being as unimaginative as Gail Collins and her whole lot of people, determined to lecture the Chinese on all the old stand-bys—human rights, democracy, a free press, persecution of Muslims, and so on. Instantly, the occasion blew up in their faces. In a manner I will risk terming unprecedented, FM Wang Yi and top diplomat Yang Jiechi dumped the whole shopping cart of condemnations back across the mahogany table: Who in hell are you to talk to us about human rights and press freedoms? Who are you to tell anyone else about how democracies ought to be governed? How dare you affect concern about the treatment of Muslim populations?
Across the great divide. The scene in Anchorage, March 2021. (State Department/ Wikimedia Commons.)I quoted the remarks of the Chinese side at the time. What Wang and Yang had to say was extraordinary, and hardly was I the only one they startled. For those interested, the column published a short while later can be read here.
If Anchorage and its aftermath were disasters for the Americans, it was something else for the Chinese. They faced the U.S. in a way they rarely had until then. They said, We are done with humoring you people. We are done trying to work with you in a cooperative spirit so long as you insist on speaking to us as other than equals. It was not hard to detect that China had assumed a new posture toward America, the non–West as it faced the West.
To take Mao’s famous phrase, the Chinese simply stood up. And it seemed to bear great significance for the non–West in its relations with the West.
This impression was quickly confirmed. Immediately after the Anchorage encounter, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s very able FM, flew to Beijing to confer with Wang. And immediately after that Wang flew to Tehran to sign a long-negotiated, sanctions-busting development accord with the Islamic Republic worth some $400 billion over the course of 25 years.
As the year unrolled, there were too many events of this kind, non–West to non–West, to count. China and Russia, as suggested by the latest summit of their leaders, on 15 December, are closer than ever, just short of a formal alliance. Iran and Venezuela have signed a bilateral trade and investment agreement that already has Venezuelan oil production on the way back to its level before American sanctions crippled it. China is forging ahead with plans to take a major role in Syria’s reconstruction. Nicaragua, following its 7 November elections, dropped its recognition of Taiwan in favor of full diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic—a minorly important, majorly symbolic turn.
In the Middle East, there is gradual progress toward a regional security architecture that will not depend on the U.S.—a regional solution to regional problems. Javad Zarif, now departed as Iran’s excellent FM, argued for this over many years, and it will be a very major advance if it comes to be. In December Russia and India signed a series of agreements covering technical and defense cooperation—this despite the threat that Washington might punish New Delhi for daring to persist in its longstanding policy of nonalignment.
Among my favorites in this line came in early December, when China and Cuba—yes, China and Cuba—signed two agreements providing for new levels of cooperation on the economic and investment sides. Ninety-miles-from-America Cuba, believe it, is now formally a participant in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (as Syria will be, eventually).
We cannot think of culminating events here, as the process I describe will by definition continue and continue and continue. That is what history does. But I will mention Russia’s recent back-and-forth with the U.S. and NATO as a marker of a sort.
At issue, of course, has been the West’s long list of provocations in Ukraine, as considered here. It was following the video summit of Presidents Putin and Biden on 7 December that things got interesting. Moscow subsequently handed Washington one draft treaty and NATO another, each listing demands that amount to—the word is not too strong—an ultimatum: Step back on Ukraine and NATO’s eastward expansion or you will cross a red line.
At his annual end-of-year press conference a couple of weeks ago, as also considered in the column linked above, Putin spoke as firmly as Wang Yi did in Alaska. What struck me most forcefully was the Russian leader’s confidence as he addressed the West. Was it not a variant of Wang’s? Are they not saying, in very different contexts, the same thing: You have declined to address us as equals. And so we will claim the ground of equality on our own.
The developments I describe are as promontories, events that make the news but reflect a multiplicity of deeper, broader currents at social and cultural levels. A few months ago, a new publication called The Cradle, published in Beirut, declared that “the Middle East” will henceforth be known in its pages as “West Asia.” It is a question of consciousness among those in the non–West, of identity.
(I consider myself on notice that a nomenclature improvement on “the non–West” is in order. Will “the East” do, I wonder.)
‘Up there. That’s where we’re going.’ Xi and Putin. (Kremlin.ru, cc by 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)If I consider 2021 a point of inflection, it is not to say it arrived suddenly. The things I see in the year just passed were indeed a long, long time coming. Depending on how we count, we can go back as far as “the independence era,” those postwar years when scores of new nations broke free of colonial bonds. Why now? is the question begged.
Part of the answer lies in history. The Cold War all but extinguished the aspirations that the independence era reflected—or buried them, better put. Then came America’s unipolar moment, which was never fated to last. What we watch now is the end of that interim and the resumption of what it interrupted. In part this is due to the increased economic power of leading non–Western nations, notably China, Russia, and India.
And that, in turn, does much to prompt the change noted above in the consciousness of non–Western people and the better of their leaders. To modernize, after five centuries of misunderstanding does not mean to Westernize.
This brief précis leads to another thought on the year gone by. From Anchorage onward I could not but notice the signs that the non–West’s “values”—a tiresome word but it will do for now—still rest on the Five Principles Zhou Enlai famously articulated as the terms by which China would “stand up.” These first appeared in the Sino–Indian Agreement signed in April 1954 and subsequently made a splash at the Bandung Conference of nonaligned nations, which Sukarno hosted exactly one year later.
For those unfamiliar or with short memories, these principles are in brief mutual respect for sovereignty, nonaggression, noninterference in the internal affairs of others, equality for shared benefit, and peaceful coexistence. Consider these five phrases. Then consider the extent to which the positions non–Western nations take today in international affairs derive from these 70–year-old principles.
Then consider what kind of a world we would live in were Western nations to adhere to these principles.
In May 1996, during his time as the Czech Republic’s president, the late Václav Havel addressed a German audience in a speech he called “The Hope for Europe.” He began this way:
Recently, when I looked into how Europe got its name, I was surprised to discover that many see its primeval roots in the Akkadian word erebu, which means twilight or sunset. Asia, on the other hand, is believed to have derived its name from Akkadian asu meaning sunrise.
Given all that I surmised about our world in the course of 2021, how could I not think of Havel’s memorable remarks? And the significance of his title came back to me, too. The East’s rise in the post–Cold War world was as inevitable as the sun’s daily routine, he seemed to say, and this does not have to mean the demise of anybody.
It is, rather, the hope of us all, including us, we in the West—providing, of course, we understand our moment in history well enough to see what it has in store. Our leaders do not: They have no clue what time it is. And the tragedy as measured in missed opportunities is incalculable. For those of us who can read clocks, it is ours to stand “on the right side of history,” as the overworked saying goes, and seize every chance that comes our way to advance it.
The Scrum takes this opportunity to thank all of its readers, subscribers, and supporters and wish all a Happy New Year.