New World Order: Fading and Rising World Powers

TrueNeo

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A thread for keeping eye and discussing the changes and significance of the new world order where countries like UK becoming increasingly irrelevant in world affairs while US seems to be declining but expected to maintain its world dominance for quite some times to come and the place of projected future powers like China, India, Japan, etc who are taking and expected to assume greater role and responsibilities in the new world order.
 

TrueNeo

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No One Knows What Britain Is Anymore
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The clock tower at the Houses of Parliament.CreditGlyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


By Steven Erlanger

Nov. 4, 2017
BRUSSELS — Many Britons see their country as a brave galleon, banners waving, cannons firing, trumpets blaring. That is how the country’s voluble foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, likes to describe it.

But Britain is now but a modest-size ship on the global ocean. Having voted to leave the European Union, it is unmoored, heading to nowhere, while on deck, fire has broken out and the captain — poor Theresa May — is lashed to the mast, without the authority to decide whether to turn to port or to starboard, let alone do what one imagines she knows would be best, which is to turn around and head back to shore.

I’ve lived and worked for nine years in Britain, first during the Thatcher years and then again for the last four politically chaotic ones. While much poorer in the 1980s, Britain mattered internationally. Now, with Brexit, it seems to be embracing an introverted irrelevance.

The ambitious Mr. Johnson was crucial to the victory of Brexit in the June 2016 referendum. But for many, the blusterings of Boris have lost their charm. The “great ship” he loves to cite is a nationalist fantasy, a remnant of Britain’s persistent post-imperial confusion about its proper place in the world, hanging on to expensive symbols like a nuclear deterrent while its once glorious navy is often incapable of patrolling its own coastline.

Britain — renowned for its pragmatism, its common sense, its political stability and its unabashed devotion to small business (“a nation of shopkeepers”) — has become nearly unrecognizable to its European allies.

“People need to look again at Britain,” said Daniel Brössler, a correspondent for the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It’s no longer the country they understood it to be their whole lives.”

The divorce negotiations with the European Union start another round this week, but they are not going well, to say the least. The most visible fight is over the cost of the divorce. But other difficult and essentially political issues about the authority of the European Court of Justice and a customs border with Ireland must also be clarified before the other 27 member states agree to move on to the next stage, Britain’s future relationship with the bloc. That decision next month once seemed pro forma, but no longer, with some even predicting a breakdown in the talks.

Mrs. May’s Conservative government is now so split that some Brexit supporters are calling on her to simply quit the bloc with no deal at all — probably the worst alternative for the country, but just the kind of populist, tub-thumping gesture favored by the Brexit elite and the right-wing tabloids.

Meanwhile, with the Conservative government so riven and rudderless, the old hard lefty Jeremy Corbyn is leading the opposition Labour Party back into an equally fantastical socialist past.

Britain is undergoing a full-blown identity crisis. It is a “hollowed-out country,” “ill at ease with itself,” “deeply provincial,” engaged in a “controlled suicide,” say puzzled experts. And these are Britain’s friends.

“The sense in the rest of Europe is bewilderment; how much worse can it get?” said Tomas Valasek, a former Slovak diplomat who lived in Britain for many years and now directs Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based research institution. “After Brexit, no one is trying to help now. They’ve given up. Nobody on the Continent really cares that much about Britain anymore. Even worse, people feel the country will fall into the hands of Jeremy Corbyn and that will do more damage than Brexit itself.”

More chilling, perhaps, is the impact on countries less rooted than Britain once appeared to be. “Britain is an example for all of us, as a longstanding democracy, with centuries of the rule of law and traditional institutions,” said Guntram Wolff, a German economist who runs the Bruegel research institution here. “And if such a country has such difficulties, most of us wonder how our own countries would handle such political upheaval — whether we, too, are so vulnerable.”

Some make the comparison to that other great Anglo-Saxon country, the United States, under President Trump, who saw Brexit as a harbinger of his own election. But however politically divided the United States seems now, Europeans have never considered it a touchstone of stability the way they have Britain.

Jan Techau, a German who has traveled extensively in England and ran Carnegie Europe, sees Britain as a tragedy. The European country considered the most outward-looking and globalized is fractured by the backlash against the very model that made Britain strong. “It’s very sad, but Brexit is a controlled suicide,” he said.

There are many who see Britain as having suffered a sudden nervous breakdown, said Simon Tilford, an economist and deputy director of the Center for European Reform. But he believes that Britain’s political culture and economic stability have been eroding for some time, hidden by the longstanding willingness of others to give it the benefit of the doubt as a pragmatic democracy with a strong civil society and civil service.

He too blames the Conservatives and the right-wing tabloids that support them for much of the erosion. “The readiness of the political right in particular to lie and peddle obvious untruths, to place their party politics and party unity over and above the national interest, has been going on for a long time,” he said. “The harrumphing nationalism masks a country ill at ease with itself.”

Rather than a vote for a global Britain and economic liberalism, Mr. Tilford said, Brexit was a vote for protectionism, and its political system now “is deeply provincial and introverted at a time when Britain is supposed to be heading out into the world.”

The divisions in the society — over Brexit, over politics — are both a function and a result of Britain’s confusion about its identity and global importance. The 19th-century myth of Britain as the “workshop of the world,” a doughty Protestant nation surrounded by Catholics with an empire on which the sun never set, confronted a post-World War II reality, when a lot of these tales stopped being true, suggests Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Britain became a service economy, the empire disappeared and people stopped identifying with the Church of England. Then Margaret Thatcher arrived, and with her, Mr. Leonard said, “there was a last gasp of this old identity — an ethnic, exclusively white and backward-looking version of Englishness.”

However successful, it also excluded an increasingly large number of Britons — black, Asian and Muslim — who felt disenfranchised from “the national story.” Tony Blair and New Labour moved toward more inclusiveness and cosmopolitanism and openness to Europe, too.

But those validated by the old identity then felt like strangers in their own land, Mr. Leonard said. “Their revenge was Brexit.”

Confused and divided, Britain no longer has an agreed-upon national narrative, said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. “In the 2012 Olympics we had one,” he said. “Global Britain, open Britain, generous Britain.” But now there is a competition between that narrative and the nativist one.

Mr. Grant, like others who have spent their careers watching British and European politics, predicts rough seas for Britain as it casts off nearly 45 years of intimate trade and legal ties with those annoying Europeans.

“Everywhere I go,” he said, “people are asking me, ‘What’s wrong with your country?’ ”

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/sunday-review/britain-identity-crisis.html
 

TrueNeo

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Britain once punched above its weight. Now we are irrelevant:TheGuardian
Jonathan Powell
After Brexit and Trump, with the two pillars of its foreign policy broken, the UK’s allies can only look on in puzzlement

Britain has lost its way and is having an identity crisis, says the New York Times. Just as Dean Acheson’s barb that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role hit home in 1962, so did an article last week by Steven Erlanger, the paper’s diplomatic editor and former London bureau chief, claiming no one knows what Britain is any more.

The article sparked a storm on the twittersphere and hurt rebuttals in the rightwing British press. But the counterattacks missed the point. It is not a question of whether Britain still has some good universities or the gaming industry is doing well. The question is whether Britain still has real influence in the world: and the answer to that is clearly no.

As Simon Fraser, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary, said in a speech last week: “It is hard to call to mind a major foreign policy matter on which we have had a decisive influence since the referendum.” To put it even more cruelly: we have rendered ourselves irrelevant.

I work in 11 countries across the globe and no one is interested in what Britain thinks, even in those parts of the world where we had a historical role. Since the second world war, our foreign policy has been built on two pillars: Europe and the transatlantic relationship. Both are now broken, one by us and the other partly by circumstance. We are no longer able to build a coalition in Brussels behind our foreign policy objectives. No one wants to be seen to be working with a member state about to depart. And no one seriously believes that Donald Trump is sitting in Washington waiting for Theresa May to advise him on what to do on North Korea – as we were able to do with President Clinton on Kosovo.

Even if we did still have influence, we don’t have any attention to spare for the rest of the world because all of our efforts are going into the destructive process of Brexit. Just as blood goes to the stomach when you have a large meal, so most of our civil servants and diplomats are working on dismantling our EU membership rather than on maximising our influence around the world, – and paradoxically we are taking on thousands more to do so in the pursuit of less bureaucracy.

We can’t even get the negotiations with the EU right, even though that is supposed to be the government’s principal objective, because cabinet ministers cannot agree on what they want the end state of our relations with the EU to be. Our interlocutors in Brussels are giving up because they have nothing to engage with. And meanwhile the Brexiters are gearing up to blame the Europeans and our own quisling civil servants.

The foreign policy ministerial team is in crisis: the international development secretary resigned over an ill-advised private venture in Israel; and the foreign secretary should have resigned, having apparently failed to read his brief and thereby possibly landed a British motherheld in Iran with a longer jail sentence. Our politics is in turmoil, the prime minister powerless, the minority government on the verge of extinction. The cartoon sequence of teetering on the edge of the cliff is likely to continue until Jeremy Corbyn goes down in the polls, because only then can the Tories risk an election.

Britain has historically been the strong and stable democracy in Europe on which others – both the Europeans and the US – could depend. In the first world war, in the second, in the cold war and in building a liberal, free-trading and open Europe, we played a central role. We took pride, as Douglas Hurd put it, in punching above our weight. Now we have taken to punching each other in a polarised and uncertain country. Italy appears more politically stable, and France far more internationally relevant.

What puzzles our friends and erstwhile allies most is that all of this is self-inflicted. We didn’t have to give up the two pillars on which our nation has depended for so long. And we didn’t have to do so when we had nothing with which to replace them. So Erlanger’s judgment of our state of introverted irrelevance is, if anything, an almost British understatement of the sad position in which we find ourselves.

• Jonathan Powell was Tony Blair’s chief of staff from 1995 to 2007
 

TrueNeo

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Of all the P5 members, Britain happens to be the least significant member of at all. There is no sense in them having a permanent seat simply to compliment US led resolutions. The only reason they the seat is because of the creation of UN back in 1940 and failing to reform it as per changing global leadership/realities. They
 

Bornubus

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Of all the P5 members, Britain happens to be the least significant member of at all. There is no sense in them having a permanent seat simply to compliment US led resolutions. The only reason they the seat is because of the creation of UN back in 1940 and failing to reform it as per changing global leadership/realities. They

Hmm time to declare Malvina's independence
 

TrueNeo

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In a new world order, let’s put India first
We have a window to replace a reactive foreign policy based on possibly misdirected philosophies, with one putting Indian interests at its centre.


Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. In PM Modi we have a leader with real international credibility. We should rediscover strategic partnerships – building on the prime minister’s personal impact. (AFP)
Updated: Oct 29, 2017 17:07 IST


By Saket Misra

At China’s OBOR inauguration in May 2017, India was a conspicuous absentee. Breaking from the past, instead of platitudinous appeals to global “principles”, India’s rationale was clearly spelt out in terms of its national interest.

Till the early 1990s, India displayed inexplicable embarrassment at putting its interests overtly front and centre of foreign policy. Our policy pillars — non-alignment and support for democracy — were often not reflected in actions, for example the 1956 Hungary invasion. Similarly, domestic portrayal of our international “leadership” was divergent from the more “ordinary” view of our international standing that the world had.

Distortions resulting from “faux” socialism in both foreign policy and economy were similar. In the economy, it resulted in the licence raj, concentration of economic power with a few families, and an inefficient public sector. It deprived most of our population of opportunities and created a dependence on the State that we find tough to move away from. In our “socialist” foreign policy, we committed to “non-alignment”, but our dependence only grew — on the USSR for arms and the US for economic aid. By the early 1970s, the NAM had become a motley collection of states that were soft satellites of one of the “blocs”, with an embarrassing galaxy of dictators as leading lights. The NAM provided a platform for India’s “vision” of global order but few other benefits. It was telling that during the 1971 war, a UN resolution inimical to India got 104 of 129 votes including most of NAM.

Nehruji, the great statesman, recognised the shortcomings – at great personal cost after having to seek US help, and Pakistani “sympathy” in 1962. Addressing the nation, he said “We were .. out of touch with reality … and … living in an artificial atmosphere of our creation”. Unfortunately, governments since didn’t heed this , and foreign policy remained long on slogans and short on effectiveness.

The 1990s forced us to deal with reality and Prime Minister Narasimha Rao began the process of unwinding the faux socialist economy and diplomacy. It is time to complete the process.

The world today is unipolar, with China as a challenger. The India-China relationship remains somewhat “competitive”. Rooted in history and strategic rivalry, it is now also about a Modi-led India offering an alternative narrative of democracy-rooted economic and national strength to China’s efficient totalitarianism. Pakistan remains a state with India-hating as its unifier. Free trade euphoria has been replaced by a “global” nationalism.

India has also evolved. The economy is one of the better performing ones globally. Despite the red-tape, entrepreneurship has begun to flourish. Militarily, India is the strongest it has ever been. Economic and military strength, combined with lack of hegemon ambitions has made India a key player for ensuring stability, especially in the region.

Thus, we have a window to replace a reactive foreign policy based on possibly misdirected philosophies, with one which puts Indian interests at its centre.

The policy should be one that defines where we want to be in the global order and then tenaciously stick to it through temporary volatility. This must co-opt views of key stakeholders – the MEA, the home-security establishment, defence and finance. Effective cooperation between the MEA and the NSA establishment merits emulation. Moreover, any foreign policy must be backed by economic and military strength – else we will regress to empty speeches.

We should replace self-depriving isolation with partnerships. Rediscover strategic partnerships – building on PM Modi’s personal impact. The expanded Malabar exercises, the BRICS initiatives and BIMSTEC are steps in the right direction. This cooperation can create a positive momentum overriding other differences.

The US is focused on preventing Chinese hegemony over the South China Sea. India can step in, project its naval strength and be a stability provider in the “near” Indian Ocean. In addition to helping regional maritime and trade security, India must give “face” to its immediate neighbours and make them partners – a contrast to China’s dollar denominated, neo-colonial terms of trade approach.

We need to shed the Cold War mindset and recognise that the US is a superpower, and likely “strategic ally” of choice on most issues. Beyond the economic relationship, it may be most natural to quickly upgrade our naval cooperation with the US.

The legacy of 1962 legacy and modern rivalry have placed India and China in an unnecessarily adversarial position. Our policy should focus on convincing China to restrict competition to the economic sphere, rather than military or territorial.

India is an important market for all key producing nations. This, along with our strength in skilled manpower and manufacturing can help us become an “embedded” part of the production and supply chains of major economies – like Germany, Japan and ASEAN. Then they will have more “skin in the game” and a stake in a robust Indian economy.

A strategic approach to diplomacy focused on India’s needs will go a long way towards creating a sustainable and successful foreign policy.
 

Anikastha

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They tried but failed.

________________________________________
Falkland war.
Why on earth some country need god damn Island miles away from their ass. Once Britain's power is lost , just watch Argentina will take those Island and bitch slap them.
 

Kay

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Falkland war.
Why on earth some country need god damn Island miles away from their ass. Once Britain's power is lost , just watch Argentina will take those Island and bitch slap them.
It's a bit more complex - Falklands, though close to Argentina and far away from UK was inhabited and was settled by British settlers. They want to remain British. During Falklands war, nationalism caused British people to root for Falklands. But gradually that spirit died.
Until a few years ago Britain and most British considered it a burden on tax payers until oil was found near Falklands.
For Argentina, it was always an emotive issue.
 

Kay

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Falkland war.
Why on earth some country need god damn Island miles away from their ass. Once Britain's power is lost , just watch Argentina will take those Island and bitch slap them.
Argentina is not doing too well itself - China can sell arms to Argentina but nothing that will actually anger the Brits. Brits are still important Chinese trade partners.
 

proud_indian

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No British judge on world court for first time in its 71-year history
Indian candidate fills 15th and final place on bench of international court of justice after UK withdraws its pick for post\



UN security council members vote for prospective ICJ members in New York. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
Owen Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent

Monday 20 November 2017 23.21 GMTLast modified on Tuesday 21 November 2017 00.35 GMT

The UK will not have a judge on the bench of the international court of justice for the first time in its 71-year history after the British candidate withdrew following an acrimonious competition.


Minutes after an 11th round of voting was scheduled to begin in New York on Monday, a letter was released by the UK mission to the UN announcing that Sir Christopher Greenwood would accept defeat and allow the rival Indian candidate, Dalveer Bhandari, to fill the final vacancy on the ICJ.

The decision to bow to mounting opposition within the UN general assembly is a humiliating blow to British international prestige and an acceptance of a diminished status in international affairs.


Dalveer Bhandari. Photograph: Hindustan Times/Getty Images
That the runoff for the last place on what is known as the world court was between Britain and India, a nation likely to feature as a more significant trading partner post-Brexit, may have been a contributory element in the final calculations.

There have been calls in Indian media for the country to leave the Commonwealth if the UK exploited its position as one of the five permanent members of the security council to defend its weakened position.

The ICJ is composed of 15 judges elected to nine-year terms by the UN general assembly and the UN security council.

Four other judges, from Brazil, France, Lebanon and Somalia, had already been elected to the ICJ in the earlier rounds.

In the last round of voting at the UN a week ago, Greenwood secured only 68 votes in the general assembly against Bhandari’s 121 votes. The British candidate, however, had nine votes in the UN security council against the Indian’s five. A majority in both the general assembly and security council was required to win a place on the ICJ bench.

The race for last place involved weeks of diplomatic lobbying and, in the end, the UK was partially the victim of residual international resentment in the UN general assembly of the dominance and privileges of the permanent five members of the security council – the US, Britain, France, China and Russia.

Other factors also torpedoed UK efforts. Greenwood, a highly experienced and capable lawyer, was tainted in some eyes because of his advice to the Blair government in the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003.

He was instructed by the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to examine the arguments over the legality of using force against Saddam Hussein and concluded that use of force was justified.

This is the second time the UK has been humiliated at the UN in recent months, amid signs that some EU nations no longer feel the need to automatically support an isolationist former partner.

There has also been resentment of the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, and his undiplomatic put-downs of other countries.

In a separate vote at the UN general assembly last June, the UK was defeated 94-15 when a Mauritian-backed resolution questioning the disputed legal status of the UK’s hold over the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean was referred to the ICJ.

The world court, which is based at The Hague, hears disputes over sovereignty and international borders from all over the globe. Greenwood had served one nine-year term as a judge there.

The letter from Matthew Rycroft, the UK’s permanent representative at the UN, said: “The current deadlock is unlikely to be broken by further rounds of voting.

“We have therefore consulted our candidate, Sir Christopher Greenwood, who has confirmed that his candidature for re-election to the international court of justice should be withdrawn.

“In taking this step, we have borne in mind the close relationship that the United Kingdom and India have always enjoyed and will continue to enjoy, and the fact that both candidates fulfil the requirements for election and have already served the court diligently with impartiality and independence.”

The letter added that had voting been stalemated again, there is a mechanism for resolving disputes – a joint conference between the UN security council and general assembly - but it acknowledged that “some thought needs to be given to this procedure before the next ICJ election in order that it might be used when it is clearly needed”.

Rycroft added: “The UK has concluded that it is wrong to continue to take up the valuable time of the security council and the UN general assembly with further rounds of elections.

“The UK congratulates the successful candidates, including Judge Bhandari of India. We are naturally disappointed, but it was a competitive field with six strong candidates.


“If the UK could not win in this runoff, then we are pleased that it is a close friend like India that has done so instead. We will continue to cooperate closely with India, here in the United Nations and globally.”

https://www.theguardian.com/law/201...d-court-for-first-time-in-its-71-year-history
 

Willy2

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In a separate vote at the UN general assembly last June, the UK was defeated 94-15 when a Mauritian-backed resolution questioning the disputed legal status of the UK’s hold over the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean was referred to the ICJ.
Unfortunately , If USA have no deal in Diego Garcia ,then Mauritius might have chances to get back Chagos.

I don't think any sincere nation who fear Chinese encroachment in IOR might help them now ,include India.
 

Willy2

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UK need to rediscover , she no longer had that sizable landmass under her control to have influence on world , as those transcontinental colonies gone , there is simply no need for them to keep vast navy just for pride.

BRitish colonies turnout to be far more stable after independence than French one , it's the reason that French forces have to fight /negotiate treaties through out Africa and give illusion that they are more relevant than their english channel partner in geo-strategic spectrum.

Also French led EURO and all subsidiary stuff like defense deal, companies , space agencies ...while UK due to strategic miscalculation seems more like US agents in europe , while France due to strong policies of De Gaul and next presidents despite being a NATO member seems more independent in decision making , which help them in cause .
 

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