US decline is real, but a multi-polar world will not replace it
We face an era of ‘new abnormalities’[1] in which the major problems of our time, such as the threat of nuclear war, climate change and ‘fake news’ are potentially insoluble. One ‘problem’, however, is also part of the solution: US decline. It is undoubtedly the pressing question of our time, regardless of your frame of reference. With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, how will this global situation evolve? For years there has been discussion of the rise of the BRICS countries, as well as assertions about American revival both politically and economically. However, the world situation and US decline have been long in the making—since at least the end of the Vietnam War—and in more recent years this process has been accelerating.
Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Kazan, Russia on 22–24 October 2024 to attend the 16th BRICS-‘plus’ summit, an annual conference of emerging economies founded by Brazil, Russia, India and China in 2009. The BRICS group is gaining momentum in global influence and reflects a shift in the global political economy from the United States to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and a transformation of the international ‘liberal’ order and overall system of twenty-first-century imperialism. This article critically unpacks the seismic changes that have fast-tracked this shift and transformation, including China’s political rise through its growing ‘peace role’ initiatives, the looming dangers of nuclear war resulting from America’s decline, and the implications for Australia. This discussion holds special relevance for Australia in the wake of a second Trump presidency, since the ‘risk’ of a foreign war with China combined with the stubborn fact of America’s waning global influence means that Washington’s principal concern is increasingly its own hegemonic survival.
The BRICS-plus club and multi-polar vision
BRICS membership expanded last year to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, and most recently Indonesia and Nigeria. Saudi Arabia is seeking to join—its biggest trading partners are China and India, and it cooperates closely with Russia on oil policy through OPEC—as are Venezuela and NATO member Türkiye. The list of countries that want to join has grown to approximately thirty.
The aim of the BRICS summits is to forge closer economic alliances in a transforming ‘multipolar world’ in order to foster stability and cooperation, and also to reform international institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The 2024 summit finalised details to approve a BRICS digital payment system designed for transactions across BRICS countries, which will offer an alternative to existing global financial networks. Why do BRICS countries wish to ‘de-risk’ themselves from the Western financial system? Ultimately, because the Western financial system has been used historically to isolate them, and as a weapon, most recently by stealing Russian central bank assets and threatening more sanctions on Russia, and reinstating Cuba’s designation as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ and tariffs on anyone (100 per cent for BRICS nations, 25 per cent for Canada and Mexico, 10 per cent for China) who does not obey Washington’s every command. Those targeted, including the EU, have vowed retaliatory measures should those tariffs occur, while China says it will bring the case to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and hit back with a 10 per cent tariff of its own. Trump fears BRICS nations will replace the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency with something else, but, like Biden before him, he fails to grasp the reality of the world situation.[2] The decline of the United States, like the increasing trade in local currencies and cross-border payments, is about political and economic cooperation amongst Global South countries, and cannot be stopped with a trade war. Trump also suggests economic warfare will stop the flow of illegal drugs and migrants into the United States, yet both are essential to the US economy, as noted in my book Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror (2011), co-authored with Drew Cottle, and Immanuel Ness’s Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries (2023).
The rise of the BRICS nations comes at a time when the United States is increasingly frustrated by its inability to exercise any meaningful influence on global events (e.g. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and what UN human rights experts call Israel’s genocide in Gaza), which has accelerated this shift in global power, whereas BRICS countries are advancing peace initiatives that have global implications. For example, on the sidelines of the BRICS 2024 summit, China and India took the initiative of signing a border agreement concerning the ‘Line of Actual Control’ along the Sino-Indian border, restoring normalcy. China brokered a landmark peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia (and Yemen) in 2023, and plans to host a peace conference in Beijing to end the Israel–Palestine War (which is supported by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy); it supports a two-state solution, an immediate ceasefire and Palestinian membership of the UN, all positions which align closely with the views of Arab nations.
Western analysts debate what the ‘West’ must do—whether to prioritise its geopolitical imperialist interests (focusing on China, Ukraine or Israel) over its own prosperity. The BRICS nations view the Ukraine War as part of a US effort to encircle Russia through NATO, whose former Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has admitted that it was Washington’s push for NATO enlargement that was the real cause of the war. Both BRICS and a growing chorus of ASEAN[3] countries (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) that benefit greatly from having China as their largest economic partner view US–China tensions in the South China Sea as part of a US encirclement of China. These conflicts and disputes could be dealt with through diplomacy and negotiations, but the ‘West’ chooses military confrontation.
Trump 2.0 is the embodiment of US decline, and of its vulnerability. China is not only the world’s sole manufacturing superpower, but now a rising political power. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which monitors China’s high technology sectors, China is the world’s leading science and research superpower in the crucial fields of defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, advanced materials and quantum technology.[4] Furthermore, the ongoing demise of the US petrodollar and cuts to China’s holdings of US treasury debt are reinforcing the shift towards a ‘multi-polar world’.
Violence with a rusty sword
The spiralling decline of the United States is evident on the battlefield. According to the NATO Military Committee, the West’s capacity to produce ammunition is at ‘the bottom of the barrel’. NATO intelligence reports, by contrast, that Russia is producing nearly three times as many artillery munitions as the United States and Europe. The Russian economy is growing faster than those of ‘advanced economies’ despite the Western sanctions, according to the International Monetary Fund. According to the European Parliament, the Ukraine War has been devastating to not only Ukraine itself, but also the EU and world economies. To end the Ukraine War, the United States, as Ukraine’s backer, would need to accept Russia’s terms: lift all sanctions, withdraw Ukrainian forces from the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, and abandon NATO (and Crimean) aspirations, becoming a permanently neutral state drastically reducing Ukraine’s military forces and no deployment of NATO’s ‘peacekeeping’ forces.
The overwhelming BRICS position is that these wars, and Israel’s destruction and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, must end, and so too should Washington’s attempts to encircle China. While the United States views China as a threat, China is as much a threat to it and the world as the United States and Israel’s actions in Gaza are a threat to China.
The shift: Myth versus reality
There is no question that there is intense competition between China and the United States in almost every facet of world affairs, yet notions that the BRICS nations are out to replace the United States misunderstand how US decline is taking place. Both powers have entered an era of ‘adversarial strategic competition’. Whether the West acknowledges it or not, we live in a ‘multi-polar world’ which represents a new vision for the system of twenty-first-century imperialism. The United States and some of its allies misconstrue China as a ‘revisionist’ state that wants to politically and economically replace it, but the reality is that China has benefited from and flourished under American hegemony. China only benefits from reinforcing the current US ‘rules-based’ order.
As a result of the current conflicts, dynamics and tensions, the Global South is merging, not only economically with Chinese financial institutions, but politically and militarily through the development of partnerships between the BRICS countries. Take the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (Belarus, China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan), the Eurasian Economic Union (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia) and the China–Russia Strategic Partnership, which bolsters China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China has signed more than 200 BRI agreements in over 150 countries.[5]
Trump seems determined to take on BRICS in another trade war, with an emphasis on ‘tariffs’. The BRICS have surpassed the ‘G7’ (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany and Japan) in terms of GDP calculated on purchasing power parity. Economists warn that such methods will likely increase inflationary costs for workers and manufacturers in the Global North, forcing the ‘West’ to diversify its exports away from the US to ‘alternative markets’. They will reinforce existing global production patterns, ‘multipolarity’ and the US’s isolation, further legitimising closer political and economic alliances and widespread de-dollarisation in the Global South.
As the US–China rivalry intensifies through conflicts, tensions and economic warfare, the United Nations, with Global South support, has expressed a desire to build a more pragmatic and inclusive rules-based international order. It is reasonably clear that Chinese and Global South efforts to establish a ‘multi-polar world’ are seeking to modify the international order to peacefully reflect the real international status of the major and emerging powers. The United States is preventing the other members of the Global North from planning their own initiatives or plotting an independent course.
In contrast to America’s history of violent expansion, China today is building through a unique form of social imperialism that does not require war, and seeks to reinforce the existing ‘liberal’ order, much to the growing frustration of the United States. Trump’s renewed trade war only accelerates US decline as Washington opts for economic domination and military threats. The political cost is China’s rise as a world leader and the further erosion of US hegemony at the expense of diplomatic soft power and politics, something Trump is trying to change by acting as ‘peacemaker’. Barack Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, Joe Biden’s Ukraine War and Washington’s never-ending support for Israel show that the US ruling class has run out of ideas as to how to arrest its decline and confront China. It is not about ‘Donald Trump’. In Australia, reactions have been mixed: there are calls to both ‘stand up to Trump’ and to ‘reach out’ to the White House ‘as soon as is humanly possible’.
Implications for Australia and the myth of the China threat
The rise of China and the decline of the United States (in relative or accelerating terms) hold special relevance for Australia. According to Hugh White, a leading Australian strategic studies analyst writing in Sleepwalk to War: Australia’s Unthinking Alliance with America (2022), the United States will sooner or later step back from the Asia-Pacific region and leave Australia to make its own decisions. As he writes in How to Defend Australia (2018), it is therefore imperative that Australia should seek to provide its own security, independent of the US alliance. Al Palazzo in From Dependency to Armed Neutrality: Future Options for Australian National Security (2018), Sam Roggeveen in The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Peace and Security (2023) and former Australian prime minister Paul Keating echo similar sentiments. Whilst they propose closer relations with new BRICS member Indonesia as part of an alternative military strategy (with no increase in defence budget for Roggeveen, with a substantial increase to 3–4 per cent of GDP for White), they support Keating’s mantra of the need to ‘cut the tag’ with the United States.
They are right, though the issue is not simply military, but rather twenty-first-century imperialism in transition: China’s rise, BRICS and the Global South, and America’s own hegemonic survival. With or without the US alliance, Australia remains defenceless against any potential attack in the most heavily nuclearised region in the world. No evidence that China is a military threat to Australia has ever been presented by supporters of AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States to counter the ‘China threat’.
China’s security is based on the mutually assured destruction doctrine, something that should preoccupy US security planners. Chinese submarines would need to bypass US submarines before they could reach Australian submarines, though these would not be in operation until sometime after 2040. The reality is that it is the United States attempting to contain China, not vice versa. As Keating argues, the threat that China poses is its mere existence, and America’s inability to control and intimidate it in the same way as it does Europe and its allies.
Regarding ‘economic coercion’, AUKUS supporters argue that China may someday want to ‘blockade’ Australia, ‘sink trade’ or other nasty surprises. But this just demonstrates the price Australia must pay for America’s ‘friendship’. China is Australia’s largest trading partner and Canberra is forced to undermine its own economic interests and forfeit its political sovereignty for the ‘no questions asked’ US insecurity policy. Australia would be more secure if it committed in deed, and not just in word, to the One China Policy,[6] and by leaving American wars to be fought by Americans.
A common argument put forward by ‘America firsters’ is that Australia has always relied upon its great and powerful friends.[7] This overlooks the seismic changes happening today, including America’s waning influence. Despite this, there are numerous middle and regional powers which would be more than happy to accommodate Australian interests, like the BRICS countries. In the Global North and Global South alike, security cooperation has a long history within Australian strategic policy.[8] For instance, India maintains a ‘special and privileged strategic partnership’ with Russia, and both India and China are BRICS members, but it is also part of the ‘QUAD’, or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which consists of the United States, Australia, India and Japan. There is ASEAN, where Australia would find support for a balanced stance in the US–China rivalry. And if that is too complicated for some, there is the New Zealand option of being ‘unarmed and independent’.[9] China has not invaded New Zealand. It is not difficult to get along, if we think outside the ‘but we have always relied upon our great and powerful friends’ box.
The obvious point, however, is that Australia would be in a far better position than most. Fear of China stems from the United States, and historically from militarist Japan. Reaching an accommodation with China would be an insurance policy that is more sustainable than one supporting US wars. The fear of who will replace the United States or whether Australia can exist independently would be eliminated, as would the manufactured fear of China. The US military, Pentagon and Congress obsess that a war against China is ‘likely’ to occur in 2027.
Revival meeting: Can the US hold off the challenge?
The growing momentum and influence of BRICS countries raises questions about a rapidly shifting world order. There are some who believe that the United States is not in decline and that ‘revisionist’ forces within the Global South represent no substantial threat to US dominance. For such writers, there has been only a slight decline, with the US remaining ‘partially unipolar’.[10] The underlying factors that ‘renewalists’ such as Joseph Nye and others point to are America’s competitive advantages—geography, dollar dominance, productivity and China’s population challenges.
The renewalists point to the fact that the United States is surrounded by two large oceans (the Atlantic and the Pacific) and two economically smaller neighbours: Mexico and Canada, both ‘friendly’. China, however, has limited ocean access and is bordered by large, often hostile powers. They argue that in terms of economics, China’s total factor productivity of labour and capital has been declining, while productivity in the United States continues to grow, thus making it easier for it to maintain its lead in GDP even with slightly lower growth rates than China. US power is based on its large transnational financial institutions and the international role of the dollar, deeply rooted in capital markets and the rule of law, all which China lacks. China is experiencing demographic decline, with its workforce expected to follow. These arguments are worth considering. But there are powerful counterpoints.
In geopolitical terms, China and its allies have been eating away at these advantages. China, in particular, has increased its influence across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), establishing its own hegemony in the ‘backyard’ of the United States and becoming South America’s main trading partner and Central America’s second, as well as strengthening its military ties with many countries including Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba.[11] Most significantly, total exports from the United States and other traditional markets to LAC are projected to diminish over the next 15 years.
Furthermore, China has been seeking to create similar ‘advantages’ for itself in its ‘backyard’. For instance, it has been working towards ensuring that its maritime border (e.g. the South China Sea) is under its control. BRICS is an alliance between China and some of its neighbours—India and Russia—which furthers China’s goal to have friendly relations with its neighbours. Since the defeat of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan in 2021, China has increasingly dominated Central Asia, its other border.[12] All of this means that China is creating a similar geographic advantage to the United States. On the military front, a US–NATO defeat in Ukraine will cement China as the dominant power in Eurasia, with Russia as a junior partner, allowing China to project its power globally in direct competition with the United States.[13] In the Asia-Pacific, China’s economic and political influence has surpassed that of the United States, with growing diplomatic and military ties across the region.
In terms of economics, the idea that China’s total factor productivity of labour and capital has been declining, while productivity in the United States continues to grow, paints an inaccurate picture. China’s economy has slowed but is not failing; its GDP growth rate for 2024 was 4.8 per cent, nearly double that of the United States at 2.8 per cent.[14] The United States claims China’s success is based on theft, but China has shown it can outpace the United States by doing more with less, leading in thirty-seven of forty-four critical technologies.[15]
DeepSeek AI technology serves as a reminder that China is well on track to becoming the centre of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’,[16] primarily focused on being self-sufficient and creating infrastructure that can facilitate its own research and development. Threatening Taiwan with 100 per cent tariffs on its semiconductor exports to pressure Taiwanese chip manufacturers to move their factories to the United States is likely to benefit China and isolate the United States. Moreover, most of Taiwan’s engineers are employed in China to work on semiconductors that produce microchips essential to Chinese research and development.
Western economists say the answer to a declining population and labour force are machines and robots to increase total productivity. China leads here with over 290,000 robot installations in 2022, or 52 per cent of all industrial robots in 2022 and the fastest rate of worker replacement in the world.
The creation of a BRICS currency as a US dollar alternative remains a long-term project when logistical and temporal challenges are considerable. The US dollar wields economic power, with 60 per cent of foreign exchange reserves held in dollars, and this greatly benefits the United States, which historically has used this position to oppress others that are unwilling to allow it to dominate them (e.g. Cuba, Iran, Venezuela). The proposed BRICS currency presents as an alternative to that norm. With proposed tariffs likely to mean that the US dollar exchange rate will soar, countries owing debts in USD will see the value of their debts in their local currencies increase. The Global South will face tough austerity measures, price inflation, unemployment and social chaos, or will suspend its payments on foreign debts denominated in dollars. This plays into the hands of the BRICS countries as they seek to create an alternative whilst the United States seeks to cannibalise ‘friendly’ industries so that it can strengthen its national power, putting ‘America first’.
The United States faces great difficulty in disentangling its economy from global dependence on supply chains, despite Nye and other renewalists’ belief that the election of Trump may prove a turning point in this aim. US manufacturing cannot ‘quit’ China anytime soon, and offshoring production elsewhere (to BRICS or ASEAN countries) is not bringing manufacturing back to the United States. The ‘West’ still relies on China’s production lines and China, with its 1.4 billion people, produces ten times more STEM graduates than the United States.
Despite dollar dominance, global currency relations may finally be changing. The $36 trillion national debt of the United States is making the dollar very unattractive to those it targets. China has been producing and buying gold as it sells its US bonds—$400 billion worth so far—with the aim of establishing the yuan and renminbi (including a digital yuan project) as the benchmark currencies for the global economy alongside expanding Beijing’s influence through the BRI. If the United States were to somehow maintain its dominance, or slow its decline to a crawl, it would be due above all to the fact that dominant powers have the advantage of already being on top, and can thus extend their power for decades—or in ancient times, centuries—of over-extensions and internal decline. But the renewalist argument is frequently glib and propagandistic.
Yet neither side is free from difficulty. On the US side, the difficulties of holding the reins of an empire it inherited from the British and modified in its own image, lie in realising its limits with a restless and divided population. On China’s side, there is the reality of the BRICS group’s growing size and dissension. There is no denying that imperialist rivalries, and aspiring ones, exist even in the United Nations, the EU and the WTO. China, India and Russia are competitors, but all BRICS supporters wish to be heard, and view BRICS as a means towards building stability and cooperation.[17]
BRICS has only recently begun accepting new members, and the ‘multi-polar’ vision is also code for the idea that the Global South wants a greater voice in world affairs. This is bad news for those who wish for an Anglo-American imperium ‘infinitum’—an ahistorical sentiment. China would prefer to be accepted as an equal to the United States, which is why BRICS’s strength resides in its capacity to integrate a diverse array of countries that are not fully aligned. Countering US dominance requires loose international organisations to navigate complex global issues from climate change to hunger in a world in transition. To expect a coherent unit in any democratic setting at a time of increasing polarisation is to miss the forest for the trees.
The point, however, is that BRICS is just one of many ‘liberal’ institutions bolstering China’s BRI, which, given the absence of an official BRI map drawn up by the PRC, provides a ‘useful fuzziness’.[18] Whether or not BRICS will increase its membership in the foreseeable future is unlikely to matter (e.g. Venezuela’s membership was opposed by Brazil, and Türkiye’s and Pakistan’s memberships were opposed by India), as BRICS reflects a shift in the global political economy from the United States to the PRC. Meanwhile, US antagonisms and enduring conflicts risk pushing US ‘friends and allies’ closer to China. This does not require BRICS membership, and the Global South does not need any convincing.
The ‘multi-polar’ world vision masks a deeper inter-imperialist rivalry between the United States and China, where both sides are giving the rivalry their all, but one is rising as the stabilising force while the other is declining and even deindustrialising despite ‘market optimism’ and its insistence on a unipolar world and dominance. The United States cannot return to its heyday as the manufacturing power of the twentieth century, and Trump will not put an end to America’s astronomically expensive, and profitable, wars. The United States remains the dominant imperialist power, but China is the principal rising power playing the ‘long game’. Even if US alliances remain intact, new ones are emerging which outweigh the ‘collective West’. The United States must accommodate its rivals as it has done in the past or face further decline.[19]
Conclusion: The point of no return?
Nothing in the history of imperialism is inevitable, only new imperialisms, and on occasion revolutions. There is a complex web of factors that will determine whether the United States will be able to halt its decline and enjoy stability, or whether it will descend into chaos. It has room to manoeuvre, but underlying trends show that Washington is running out of ideas.
Twenty-first-century imperialism does not mean a ‘clean break’ with US imperialism, but an ongoing transition in the system of imperialism. The study of twenty-first-century imperialism is a critical exploration of the general economic, financial, and military strength of the major powers and how they are reconfiguring. In the case of BRICS, it is a study of the political economy of US decline as Washington faces two major turning points: how to manage the US–NATO defeat in Ukraine and how to hold off China’s challenge including in its own ‘backyard’.
China favours a nuanced approach towards the ‘West’, based on multilateralism and ‘free trade’. A non-confrontationist approach ensures that more countries will be won over. In a Sun Tzuist way, it requires the art of fighting without fighting, and China knows that a non-confrontational approach is the best way to attract more countries and to win hearts and minds in the Global South, solidifying BRICS as a force for more social-imperialist global governance. What we are witnessing are some pivotal moments in much larger processes of achieving a balanced ‘multipolarity’.
The Global South has been threatened with escalating violence and economic warfare by US imperialism. The shift in the global political economy from the United States to the PRC and the transformation of the international system are defensive by design. Russia and Iran have now formed a security pact. There is also China and North Korea. Nuclear facilities and oil refineries across the Middle East and Europe are under threat.
If Australia signalled its abandonment of the US–China rivalry or simply committed to impartiality, such an approach would work favourably with its geographic isolation and lack of real interest in clashing with China.[20] Australia has ‘manufactured a problem’ for itself with its blind US alignment. China supports, rather than undermines, the ‘liberal order’ of the ‘international institutions the UN, IMF, WTO and WHO’. The late Henry Kissinger’s maxim that to be America’s enemy is dangerous while to be its friend is fatal is relevant here.
Critical thinkers should not be forced to choose sides in a confused (though power-serving) twentieth-century American Cold War mindset between ‘East’ and ‘West’, ‘democracy’ and ‘authoritarianism’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. We must not underestimate or inflate China’s rise or the US decline. Most important, we need to develop our own voices on imperialism, even if it means resisting ideological pressures represented by those with a self-serving stake in the contest for twenty-first-century imperialism.
Trump represents a nation at a crossroads faced with two choices: Empire or Republic. There is little to indicate that America’s internal political and social problems are going away, and there is nothing to suggest that a real alternative will appear in the White House that will be able to steer the United States back towards a Republic. That would require a major shift in US policy spanning several presidencies to make ‘America Great Again’. However, those very words signify the inevitable paradox of imperial hubris, which speaks truth to power but ultimately denies reality itself. The United States became an imperialist power through violence and plunder, and Trump, like his predecessors, has surrounded himself with hawks, not doves. In the grand scheme of world history, though, the major shift in the US’s hegemony has already begun, and Trump will be viewed as the symptom, not the cause, of US decline.
We face a tyranny of mindless conflict, and of a dangerous twenty-first-century imperialism in transition. We have now entered a new era of world affairs with an aggressive and unstable (though ‘highly developed’) form of global capitalism that is in rapid transition through that imperialism—a battle between the rusty sword of the ‘West’ and the cheque-book of China’s BRI. But China is an economic powerhouse, and central to the system that the United States itself helped to build in the twentieth century. The United States is not accepting multipolarity without a fight. Must the ‘West’ march in defence of an ageing and imploding empire in internal disarray?
[1] According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which coined the term, the new abnormal is a ‘new normal’ that is not what normal used to mean but is just what life is now. Of course, none of what is happening today is ‘new’ to critical thinkers, just potentially insoluble.
[2] When asked about NATO countries like Spain which fail to commit a minimum of 2 per cent of their GDP to defence, Trump believed Spain was a member of BRICS.
[3] Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Defense Secretary, struggled to name a single member of ASEAN during his Senate confirmation hearing, naming South Korea, Japan and ‘AUKUS with Australia’ instead.
[4] For latest developments, see DeepSeek.
[5] This also includes seventeen members of the EU and eight countries of the G20.
[6] On 1 January 1979, the United States recognised the PRC as the ‘sole legal Government of China’—the One China Policy. However, ‘unofficial relations’ and weapon sales to Taiwan commenced.
[7] Brendan Taylor, ‘Searching for a new Great and Powerful Friend?’, in After American Primacy: Imagining the Future of Australia’s Defence, Peter J. Dean, Stephan Frühling and Brendan Taylor (eds.), Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2019.
[8] A. Carr and C. Roberts, ‘Security With Asia?’, in After American Primacy: Imagining the Future of Australia’s Defence, Peter J. Dean, Stephan Frühling and Brendan Taylor (eds.), Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2019.
[9] R. Ayson, ‘Unarmed and independent?: The New Zealand option’, in After American Primacy: Imagining the Future of Australia’s Defence, Peter J. Dean, Stephan Frühling and Brendan Taylor (eds.), Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2019; Albert Palazzo, From Dependency to Armed Neutrality: Future Options for Australian National Security, Canberra: ANU Press, 2018.
[10] In a media interview, Marco Rubio said ‘it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not—that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with’.
[11] Oliver Villar, ‘In whose backyard? China and Latin America in the imperialist chain’, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 51(2-3), 2024, pp 399–414.
[12] Geoff Raby, Great Game On: The Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2024.
[13] Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024. In discussing the future of Ukraine, Trump has said that Russia should be invited back to the G7/8, and it was a mistake to expel them, arguing that Moscow would have not invaded Ukraine if it still had a seat at the table.
[14] All other G7 economies were less than the US. Japan was just above zero and Germany was in the negative. For BRICS, Brazil was 3 per cent, Russia 3.6 per cent and India 7 per cent, almost three times the growth rate of the US. South Africa was low, at 1.1 per cent, but positive.
[15] The think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found that China is leading or globally competitive in five out of nine high-tech sectors—robotics, nuclear power, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and quantum computing—and rapidly catching up in four others: chemicals, machine tools, biopharmaceuticals and semiconductors. A Bloomberg analysis identified China as leading or globally competitive in twelve out of thirteen technology-intensive industries.
[16] Glenn Diesen, Great Power Politics in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Geoeconomics of Technological Sovereignty, London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
[17] For example, the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), a 7,200-kilometre network of ship, rail and road routes for moving freight between India, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Central Asia and Europe, will connect the Global South into previously untapped trade circuits and lucrative markets. Its main backers are Russia, Iran and India, and it is a creation of BRICS ‘multi-polarity’. It includes thirteen countries (including Azerbaijan, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Oman, Syria, Tajikistan, Türkiye, Ukraine and newest member Pakistan) and is a counterbalancing force rather an antagonising one. The overarching mechanism which allows it to operate is the BRI, which is part of the geo-economic drive of the China-Russia Strategic Partnership. China is developing interlocking trade partnerships as China, Russia, India and Iran become the real ‘QUAD’ of Eurasia.
[18] Thomas P. Narins and John Agnew, ‘Missing from the map: Chinese exceptionalism, sovereignty regimes and the Belt Road Initiative’, Geopolitics, 25(4), 2020, pp 809–839.
[19] At the time of writing, there are signs that Trump may be prepared to normalise relations with Russia as part of the peace negotiations in Riyadh to end the Ukraine war, and there are signs of potential future talks with Russia and China on nuclear weapons. Trump has said: ‘At some point, when things settle down, I’m going to meet with China and I’m going to meet with Russia, in particular those two, and I’m going to say there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military … and I’m going to say we can spend this on other things’.
[20] B. Thorhallsson and S. Steinsson, ‘Small state foreign policy’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, William R. Thompson (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017; A. Wivel, ‘The grand strategy of small states’, in The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy, Thierry Balzacq and Ronald R. Krebs (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.