Artículo International Affairs, Vol.100 (1) 08.01.2024 John Ikenberry
The term ‘Third World’ was coined in 1952 by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy, in his attempt to map the emerging alignments and coalitions of the Cold War. The First World comprised the United States and its capitalist allies, including western Europe, Japan, and Australia. The Second World comprised the communist Soviet Union (USSR) and its eastern European satellites. The Third World was a more amorphous grouping of countries not actively aligned with either Cold War bloc, mainly postcolonial states from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. For Sauvy, the term Third World was meant to recall the Third Estate of pre-revolutionary France, where exploited and ignored commoners lived largely in the shadow of the First Estate (the clergy) and the Second Estate (the nobility). By the end of the 1980s, Sauvy's geopolitical mapping of the world had lost its usefulness. The world itself had changed. The western democracies were still sometimes called the First World, but the Second World disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union and communist bloc, and the Third World was now more frequently known as the developing world, increasingly marked by diverse interests and orientations. With the rise of American unipolarity and the spread of liberal democracy in the 1990s, Sauvy's world of divided and relatively coherent geopolitical and ideological blocs had all but vanished.
Today, among the many impacts of Russia's war on Ukraine, the most consequential may be that it marks the moment—the tipping-point—when history reversed course, pushing the world back in the direction of geopolitical and ideological groupings. Specifically, in the direction of Three Worlds. It is certainly the case that the Ukraine war has illuminated—and in various ways triggered—a far-reaching global debate over the fundamental rules and institutions of order. Moreover, the groupings of countries engaged in this debate have more than a passing resemblance to those depicted on Sauvy's old geopolitical map. Today, we might call these three groupings the global West, the global East, and the global South. One is led by the United States and Europe, the second by China and Russia, and the third by an amorphous grouping of non-western developing states, led by India, Brazil and others. Each ‘world’ offers grand narratives of what is at stake in the Ukraine conflict and how it fits into the larger problems and prospects for twenty-first-century world order. Each offers ideas and programmes for the reorganization and reform of global rules and institutions. Each has its own constructed history, its own list of grievances and accomplishments. Each has its leaders, projects and ideological visions.
These Three Worlds are not blocs, nor even coherent negotiating groups. They might best be seen as informal, constructed and evolving global factions, and not as fixed or formal political entities. Like the three estates of France's Ancien Régime, these groupings are rooted and animated by their divergent locations within the prevailing global structure of power. When, and in what way, states within these Three Worlds see themselves as part of, respectively, the West, East, or South—and act accordingly—is contingent on a myriad of shifting circumstances. The global West is the oldest and most coherent of these political groupings, and the US-led alliance system is its most formal and durable manifestation. But for the most part, the markers of these three coalitions are more situation-specific, activated by the conflicts and controversies of the moment.
This emerging Three Worlds system is not simply a reflection of shifts in global power and polarity. To be sure, it is premised on the partial erosion of American unipolarity and the rise of China as a potential peer competitor. But the idea of ‘polarity’ does not fully capture the unfolding dynamics of the Three Worlds system. Polarity is a measure of material power capabilities—economic, military, technological, demographic and so forth. A state—or grouping of states—operates as a ‘pole’ in international relations if it has sufficient capabilities to compete with other similarly powerful states. In this sense, China is increasingly occupying a position as a pole, creating what some observers see as an emerging bipolar system, reminiscent of the Cold War. But this description underplays the role of the global South, which is not a pole in the realist sense, but operates nonetheless as a collective, system-wide force. The Three Worlds are not best defined as poles so much as loose coalitions seeking to shape global rules and institutions. States in these three ‘worlds’ occupy different locations in the global system, creating shared interests and affinities that, taken together, shape patterns of interstate behaviour. The Three Worlds are defined in important respects by diplomacy—that is, by speeches, summit meetings and UN gatherings in which leaders advance their visions of world order. Each grouping has a loose political identity and a range of more-or-less consistent convictions about what constitutes a desirable and legitimate international order.
I make four arguments about this Three Worlds system. First, it has the makings of a fairly durable form of global order. Going forward, world order may be defined by the struggle between these three groupings, but no one will ‘win’ this struggle. This is because each of these groupings carries with it deeply held political ideas and projects, rooted in its global position and developmental circumstances, that will not disappear any time soon. Each, in effect, has its own set of conceptions about how modernity will and should unfold. In other words, it is hard to imagine another ‘global liberal moment’ like the 1990s, when states and societies around the world all agree on a common vision of modernity or universal conceptions of human rights. A certain irreducible political and ideological pluralism will long endure.
Second, the Three Worlds struggle could in fact be a creative struggle. The global West and global East will have incentives to compete for the support and cooperation of the global South. They will need to do so, as least in part, by offering enlightened sorts of global leadership, competing to be the better world for the provisioning of global public goods. Clean energy, development aid, peacemaking leadership, the championing of multilateral rules and inclusive governance—these sorts of policies and political orientations might be promoted as a result of competition between the global West and the global East.
Third, there are some deep principles of world order that undergird today's return to Three Worlds. These include Westphalian principles of territorial sovereignty and non-intervention, and United Nations principles of sovereign equality, self-determination, sustainable development and social justice. Principles of human dignity, as well as rudimentary social rights and protections, cut across the three worlds, at least to some extent. The growth of economic, security and environmental interdependence also tends to reinforce these global principles of shared fate and coexistence. The three worlds may find themselves fighting over the basic rules and norms of world order, but they also, in some larger sense, want to survive to fight another day. This creates incentives for some sort of agreed set of foundational principles upon which competition between the three worlds will unfold.
Finally, the global West may never again stand astride the world as a geopolitical and ideological colossus. But it still occupies a strong position in the long struggle over the terms of world order. This is partly because of its power and wealth, and its advantages in technology and military capability. But it is also because democracies still do have polity advantages: they have unusual capacities to affiliate and cooperate with each other, and their open societies seem to make them more dynamic and adaptable. China, under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, is attempting to put this proposition to the test. But Beijing's increasingly closed and authoritarian system carries with it deep structural constraints. Nonetheless, if the global West wants to remain at the centre of world order in the decades ahead, it will need to engage the other Two Worlds, and adapt itself to a more pluralistic world. But in the competition with the global East for the support of the global South, it has the advantage. The global South's critique of the global West, generally speaking, is not that it offers the wrong pathway to modernity, but that it has neither lived up to its principles nor shared sufficiently the material fruits of liberal modernity.
Ukraine as a struggle over world order
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked a global debate on world order, illuminating today's shifting global political alignments and coalitions. Military aid, sanctions, UN votes, summit diplomacy, alliance signalling—these are aspects both of the war itself and of the wider geopolitical struggles to shape international order in the aftermath of the conflict. Who wins the war and how it ends are widely seen across the global West, global East, and global South as critical outcomes that will shape future patterns of cooperation and conflict. It is a European war, but it is also a global geopolitical upheaval, with implications for Taiwan, US–China relations, world trade and investment, cooperation on global warming, and development prospects in emerging countries. In one way or another, everyone appears to have a stake in the war.
For the United States and Europe—and the wider global West—the war is about more than the political survival of Ukraine. It is about the future of the international order. Russia's brutal war has challenged the prevailing order at several levels. One level is the core principles of the modern state system, enshrined in the UN Charter and the post-Cold War security agreements in Europe. Vladimir Putin has violated the most fundamental principles of this system. The ‘holy trinity’ of these principles are: you do not use force to annex a neighbour's internationally recognized territory; you do not kill innocent civilians as a tool of war; and you do not threaten the use of nuclear weapons as a tool of coercive diplomacy. Putin has violated all three of these principles. For the global West, it is imperative that Putin fail in his efforts, if these principles are to be preserved. If Putin's transgressions were to stand, Washington and its allies fear this will usher in a more dangerous world of aggression and rule-breaking. For this reason, it is paramount that Russia is thwarted and pays an extraordinary price.
At another level, the Ukraine war is important to the US and Europe because it is a test of the viability and credibility of the western postwar security order, and America's leadership of it. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, but it is a member of Europe, and the leaders and people of Ukraine see the war as an existential struggle for freedom and democracy—and the right to affiliate with the European Union and the West more broadly. This is precisely the moral claim that stands behind the entire American postwar global project. The United States has put itself at the centre of a liberal order where its power and leadership are premised on commitments to uphold freedom and democratic values within a system of alliances and partnerships around the world. To step back and let Ukraine be overrun and colonized by Russia puts this larger logic of order at risk.
Russia's view of what is at stake in the war is the precise opposite of this western perspective—and each reinforces the other. For Putin, the war is justified by a historical narrative of aggression by the United States and western Europe. It is a war fuelled by grievances about the encroachment of NATO and American hegemony. This is a view that Russian diplomats take to capitals in the global South. Somewhat differently, China sees its stakes in the war in terms of its own aspirations for global leadership, the future of Taiwan, and its ongoing efforts to expand its power and influence in East Asia and the wider non-western world. President Xi may not have welcomed Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but he is sympathetic to the narrative that stands behind Russian action. It is a shared view that was given expression in February 2022 in a joint Xi–Putin communiqué on building a post-American and post-western international order. Both seek an international order that dethrones western liberal values and is more hospitable to Chinese and Russian authoritarian systems of rule. The two leaders proclaimed that their countries had a relationship with ‘no limits’, no ‘“forbidden” areas of cooperation’. A year later, in March 2023, the two leaders met again; they reaffirmed their goal of building closer ties, while also criticizing states that ‘add fuel to the fire’ and ‘prolong the war’, a reference to the giving by US and European states of military assistance to Ukraine to defend its territory.
In the meantime, much of the global South has remained on the sidelines, hedging their geopolitical bets, and drawing on older principles of neutrality and non-alignment to navigate appeals from both sides. Many countries in the non-West do not explicitly endorse the Russian invasion, but nor are they moved to support sanctions, even less so to offer military assistance to Ukraine. In March 2022, 141 states, including a majority of countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America, voted for a United Nations resolution that condemned Russia's actions. In late 2022, 143 countries again voted to reject Putin's efforts to annex Ukrainian territory. But these votes did not cost these countries much, and it provided cover for many of them to resist support for western sanctions. The calculation is a complex one. On the one hand, many countries from the non-western developing world support the UN principle against the use of force to alter internationally recognized borders. Sovereignty and the norm of non-intervention are principles widely embraced across the global South. On the other hand, support for the western campaign to punish Russia and push it out of Ukraine would entail costs which these states do not wish to incur. To the extent that western-led support for Ukraine is seen as a manifestation of American hegemony, it is not a cause they want to embrace. And to the extent that Russia's actions are seen as a backlash to NATO expansion and indignities inflicted on Moscow from the West, this makes the western cause even more problematic.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's views on the Russian invasion are emblematic of the position of the global South. He has condemned the ‘violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity’ by Russia and has called for mediation to end the war. Yet he has also argued on various occasions, including during a visit to Beijing in April 2023, that both sides were responsible for Russia's invasion, and that western countries were exacerbating the conflict by not backing an early settlement. Under Lula, Brazil has sought to position itself as a peacemaker, avoiding taking sides with either Russia or the United States and Europe. ‘There is no use now in saying who is right, who is wrong’, Lula recently argued. ‘What we have to do is stop the war.’ This position offers Brazil a double dividend. It allows the country to protect its relations with China and Russia, including its extensive and growing trade ties with China. This is a vital consideration. China overtook the United States as Brazil's largest trading partner in 2009. Brazil's trade with Russia also reached an all-time high in 2022. Non-alignment protects these valuable trade ties. In addition, Brazil can position itself as a leader in what it envisages as an increasingly multipolar world, one that is less dominated by the United States. The result, as Matias Spektor has argued, gives Brazil and other countries in the global South room to manoeuvre. Brazil does not need to tie its future to either the global West or the global East, but can capitalize on its own ‘fence-sitting’ to pursue economic ties wherever they are most remunerative, while using this non-aligned position to enhance its global position and influence.
The global West versus the global East
The conflict in Ukraine is exposing a deeper conflict between the United States, together with its democratic allies, and China and Russia. At its core, this is a struggle between alternative logics of world order. Each superpower seeks to promote and defend a distinctive type of international order. Each brings with it allies and partners, assembling the groupings that comprise the global West and global East. The United States defends an international order it has led for three-quarters of a century—open, multilateral and anchored in security pacts and partners with other liberal democracies. China and Russia seek an international order that dethrones western liberal values—one that is more hospitable to regional blocs, spheres of influence and autocracy. The United States seeks an international order that protects and advances the interests of liberal democracy. China and Russia, each in their own way, seek an international order that protects authoritarian rule from the threatening forces of liberal modernity. The United States sees itself offering the world a vision of a post-imperial global system. The current leaders of China and Russia increasingly offer foreign policies which are, each in their own way, aimed at building spheres of influence and realms of order outside the US-led liberal international order.
If this is true, the competition between the global West and the global East is not just a story of old-fashioned great power rivalry. It is a struggle between, in effect, liberal and illiberal visions of world order. Each grouping embraces a set of ideas and projects for the building and reform of global rules and institutions. Each grouping seeks to create a geopolitical setting to make its political system—and its values and institutions—protected and secure. The global West seeks to make the world safe for democracy, and the global East seeks to make the world safe for illiberalism and autocracy. These two projects can—at least theoretically—coexist. To be safe and prosperous, they do not need to eliminate the other side. But because the contest between the global West and the global East is about more than power—it is about ideas and the pathway of modernity itself—they find themselves as systemic rivals, where the entire world is a field for competition.
The United States and its allies have a long tradition of liberal order-building. This liberal internationalist tradition of world politics is inextricably tied to the rise and spread of liberal democracy, and across two centuries it has established a long and grand lineage of ideas and projects. After the Second World War, and again after the end of the Cold War, liberal order-building—in the hands of the United States—came to define the western logic of international relations. The essential goals of liberal order-building have not changed: creating an environment—a sort of cooperative ecosystem—in which states, starting with liberal democracies, can operate by providing tools and capacities for their governments to manage their mutual economic and security relations, balance their often-conflicting values, and secure rights and protections for their citizens.
In the years after 1945, in the shadow of the Cold War, the United States and its allies built a new type of international order. It was a far-flung and complex system of intergovernmental relations and institutions—global, regional, economic, political, security. The order was built around institutions, alliances, bargains, partnerships, and shared values and interests. Liberal order-building sought to chart a ‘third way’ between two extremes—order defined by anarchy and the balance of power, and order defined by empire and domination. The result was a sort of ‘world system’ that provided layers of institutions—functional and political—that in turn provided platforms for states to come together and seek mutual gains and protections. Across the postwar decades, the institutionalized cooperation generated by this order accomplished a great deal. It opened up the world economy after the Great Depression and era of protectionism. Under its auspices, Germany and Japan were integrated into its political and security core. It provided a setting for Germany and France to settle their differences and launch the European project. The United States and its partners in the Group of Seven (G7) led in the creation of a multiplicity of functional organizations to manage economic interdependence. Along the way, liberal democracy itself was transformed through postwar efforts to build the welfare state and various types of social democracy. In the later decades, particularly after the Cold War, newly transforming non-western societies were welcomed into this order, gaining access to resources and institutions that supported their liberal-oriented reform efforts.
After the Cold War, the global West became the dominant political formation in world politics, built around a critical mass of liberal democracies. The global West can be seen as an expansive membership association. It is multilateral and decentralized, and because of this it tends to be open to new members. To be in the liberal order is to gain access to ‘club goods’—security protection, economic assistance, and other resources and tools to navigate the global system. Importantly, this American-led liberal system is not a geographically defined order. It is not a territorial region. It is an order defined by its political principles and rules of admission. Nor is it simply a grouping composed of the world's liberal democracies. Various non-liberal states have been part of this order over the decades, playing roles as clients, strategic partners, and balancing allies.
China's vision of international order is not as longstanding, nor perhaps as coherent. But as it grows stronger, China has increasingly defined itself as a global leader that offers an alternative to the global West. Deep forces are at work that have turned China into a systemic rival of the United States. These forces amount to a triple power transition. It is a power transition in the traditional sense in that the rise of China is creating a powerful rival that might soon become a peer competitor of the United States. This sort of power transition has been a defining feature of the western great power system, chronicled by historians such as Paul Kennedy. But, in addition, the rise of China is also a power transition in the sense that it is the first non-western great power to emerge as a truly global superpower. It is a power transition from West to East. Finally, the rise of China is a power transition in the sense that it is a transition from a liberal hegemonic leader to an illiberal hegemonic leader. These triple dynamics reinforce the profundity of the rivalry between the two global powers.
China's leadership of the global East is based on each of these features—power, geography and ideas. As an increasingly powerful state, it offers countries within its region and around the world alternatives to the American hegemonic order. Already, China has passed the United States and its allies as the world's leading lender of development and infrastructure assistance. In its Belt and Road project and other infrastructure lending programmes, China has used its massive financial assets to build ties and project influence across the developing world, particularly in its relationships with other authoritarian and autocratic states. China's terms of lending tend to reinforce rather than restrain the illiberal and autocratic practices of recipient states. Along the way, President Xi has called on China to ‘lead the reform of the global governance system’, and chief among his goals has been to transform global institutions and norms in ways that reflect China's values and interests.
It is not clear whether China has the ideas and capabilities to offer a global-scale alternative to the western liberal international order. China has certainly benefited from the liberal-oriented, open world economy. It is revealing that China is less enthusiastic about the ‘deglobalization’ and ‘decoupling’ of the world economy than the United States. In many areas of global governance, Beijing is attempting to gain greater authority over institutional decision-making and to reduce the salience of liberal values and western human rights standards. China certainly seeks to reduce the role of the United States as a global hegemon, looking for ways to undercut and erode the American alliance system in east Asia and beyond. As the leader of the global East, China seeks to build friendly partnerships and linkages that reinforce its global leadership position. Working within and outside the western-led international order, China is steadily building a China-centred grouping, with strategic partnerships forged around transactional economic ties and ideological affinities.
Two features of the relationship between the global West and global East reinforce rivalry and conflict. One is the expansive character of the global West. As noted, the global West is a political grouping defined as much by its political principles and affinities as its geographic location. Countries near and far are welcome, at least in principle, into the global West. China and Russia, on the other hand, see international order more in terms of traditional great power politics and spheres of influence. Geography and regions matter to China and Russia. Putin, of course, has made the protection of Russia's sphere of influence the raison d'être of its invasion of Ukraine. This conflict in the logic of order will remain a persistent source of contestation. Ukraine and Taiwan are the leading examples of how this happens. While their legal status differs, both Ukraine and Taiwan are vulnerable democracies which are struggling to resist the efforts of a more powerful, illiberal neighbour to bring them into its orbit. Both Taiwan and Ukraine seek, one way or another, to be part of the global West. China and Russia seek, respectively, to make them part of the global East.
Second, the global West is simultaneously two things: a global system organized around openness, rules-based relations, and liberal social purposes, and a US-led hegemonic order. There was a time when the architects of the post-1945 system tried to build an international order that would not be run by the United States. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to keep the Soviet Union inside the postwar order and to centre global leadership around the United Nations. But with the rise of the Cold War, the operation of the postwar liberal order gradually became fused with American power and leadership. Security protection moved from the UN to NATO. The Bretton Woods system, designed to manage the world economy, became tied to the American dollar and the large US domestic economy. In effect, liberal international order and American hegemony became conflated. This has complicated the interaction between the western countries and the outside world. Many countries in the global East and the global South seem to want to keep various parts of the liberal order, even as they resist and oppose American hegemony. But it is difficult to separate the attack on one from an attack on the other. Likewise, many leaders in the global West see support for American hegemony as indispensable for the support and protection of the liberal international order.
The coalitional power of the global South
The main axis of the struggle over world order runs between the global West and the global East. These two groupings each have a superpower and a coalition of great powers to drive their agendas. The global South is weaker. It is not led by an established great power. No state in the global South has a permanent seat or veto in the UN Security Council. It is an amorphous and diverse coalition of states with a wide range of ideologies and agendas. Its members exist on the world's periphery, outside the inner circle of leading great powers. The global South is also defined by its collective aspirations for development, voice and status. In this sense, it is like the grouping Alfred Sauvy had in mind when he coined the term Third World. Like the commoners in the Ancien Régime, the global South operates from a position of weakness, looking for opportunities to join coalitions and movements aimed at the reform of international order.
Nonetheless, the global South is not without its capacities. After all, it is where most of humanity resides. Specifically, as a global grouping of states, the global South has at least two types of capacities to assert itself in world order struggles. One is simply its ability—in various regional and global configurations—to join larger coalitions linked to the global West or global East. It is a sort of ‘swing grouping’, available to join other states in ways that tilt world politics in one direction or the other. Both China and the global East and the US and the global West acknowledge and act upon this situation. The United States and Europe are actively trying to cultivate support from the global South for the defence of Ukraine, as is Ukraine itself. This support may come in the form of direct military assistance or participation in the sanctions programme. Or, more likely, it may come in symbolic ways, such as in votes on resolutions in the UN General Assembly that condemn Russia's actions in Ukraine. At the May 2023 G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, the leading democracies made efforts to reach out to swing states in the global South, symbolized in the presence of the Indian and Brazilian leaders. In various statements and communiqués, the leaders promised stronger economic engagement with developing countries. They affirmed their shared commitment to raising new capital—up to US$600 billion—for the G7 partnership for global infrastructure and investment. Competition with China has also given additional impetus to efforts by the G7 countries to respond to global South calls for new global assistance to promote development and alleviate crushing debt burdens.
Russia is also courting global South support for its war against Ukraine, sending its diplomats to countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia in search of trade, investment and favourable public relations. In turn, Brazil and other leaders of the global South are seeking to use their political clout as independent swing states to promote diplomatic solutions to the war. This sort of global South coalitional politics can also play out in regional settings. For example, the influence exerted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as the most enduring regional organization in the global South has long been seen to be tied to its ability to play off—and manoeuvre between—the powerful states in the region. China and the United States have both stepped up their efforts to cultivate ties with ASEAN countries, doing so in an attempt to tilt public opinion across the region in their direction.
Second, and relatedly, states from the global South can also confer ‘legitimacy’ on moves by one or the other superpower bloc. This is not to say that the countries from the global South necessarily hold more enlightened views about the proper organization of world order. As one scholar has put it, ‘for both analytical and political purposes, it is important not to simplify or romanticize the idea of the global South’. But the global South can act as a sort of third party—a global audience—that can weigh in to help shape global narratives about what passes for proper and acceptable behaviour in world politics. As global powers, the United States and China both have an incentive to shape global public opinion. The Chinese have called this ‘narrative power’, a strategy to increase their standing on the world stage by promoting pro-Chinese narratives and critical opinion about their rivals.
This type of coalitional politics is increasingly front and centre in the competition between the United States and China. Both superpowers seek to establish the centrality of their grouping in the evolving global order. Neither superpower can do it alone. They need allies and partners. This is true in security relations, but also in areas across economic, technological and environmental spheres. China leads the global East, but this grouping is mostly just China and Russia, and Putin's Russia is a shrinking geopolitical presence with little global appeal. China needs support from large swatches of the global South. Likewise, the United States and its global West partners are less of a dominant global presence than in earlier decades. The G7 coalition of rich capitalist democracies accounts for a smaller fraction of the world's gross national product than even a decade ago. The United States is still the largest military power in the world, and its security ties to countries in all regions put it in a league of its own. But Chinese power is growing, and economic and technological competition with Beijing is intensifying. In these competitive circumstances, larger coalitions are better than small coalitions, and the global South is where these potential partners exist.
In cultivating ties with the global South, both the East and the West have something to offer. China has various attractions. First, it is offering countries in the global South a pathway to development. As one analyst argues, ‘China is selling the developmental model that raised its people out of obscurity and poverty to developed global superpower status in a few short decades to countries with people who have decided that they want that too’. Beyond this, partnership with China, together with Russia, can create groupings of states that can work together to tilt the world away from American hegemony. These might be balancing coalitions that play out at the United Nations, or they might be more ambitious projects, such as the New Development Bank (formerly the BRICS Development Bank), to create alternatives to western trade and finance. Countries in the global South have not shown great interest in switching security ties with the United States to China, but they have been eager to strengthen economic and financial ties. Moreover, China is only a decade or two away from its earlier position—proclaimed by Mao Zedong—as a leader of the global South, and indeed Chinese diplomats will still talk in these terms. As such, it is a natural partner in efforts to create counterweights to American and western dominance. Beyond this, China is a growing source of trade and investment for the developing world. Almost all leading countries in the global South trade more with China than with the United States. Quite apart from any ideological affinities they might have with China, these countries have pragmatic incentives to strengthen ties with Beijing.
The United States and global West also offer various attractions. These countries remain the richest and most powerful countries in the world, and they continue to be the core sponsors of the postwar liberal international order. At the very least, for these reasons, it is difficult to simply ‘work around’ the West. On the contrary, it is necessary to engage the West and seek the best deals you can get with them. But more than this, the global West is the repository of global rules and principles that are attractive to developing countries. After all, it is the United States and its western partners that put open and multilateral rules and institutions at the centre of the modern world system. The United States championed the founding of the United Nations, which has long been the most important platform for elevating the voice and authority of the global South. Not all countries in the global South are drawn to China's brand of authoritarian rule. There are large factions and constituencies across the global South that seek to strengthen the rule of law, build democratic institutions and attack autocratic corruption. To the extent that they are looking for international allies in this cause, they will find it in the global West and not in the global East.
Moreover, the United States is unusually positioned to provide countries in the global South with security assistance. Its geography, wealth and power, and postwar grand strategy have turned the US into the world's foremost alliance partner. The United States faces both Asia and Europe. Its offshore position has made security cooperation mutually advantageous across the world's regions. This is seen most clearly in the Indo-Pacific region, where India and other countries have become increasingly receptive to Washington's efforts to build counterweights to Chinese power, while simultaneously seeking to remain on good economic terms with Beijing. As Raja Mohan observes, reluctant to put at risk their deep economic ties with China, ‘many Asian chancelleries are quick to criticize US action but bite their tongue when it comes to Beijing's deeds’. This does not mean, however, that they want a region dominated by China: quite the contrary. ‘After all, China has been grabbing disputed territories from its neighbours, and it is the US that is offering help to defend territorial sovereignty in Asia.’ In this complex setting, countries in Asia and other regions want to be able to both trade with China and pursue security partnerships with the United States. Countries in the global South want to avoid making a choice of global partner. This translates into a deep strategic interest in remaining as aloof as possible from the geopolitical competition between China and the United States.
The global South may be the weak party in this Three Worlds system, but it has structural features that will make it a durable and important grouping in the evolving world system. It represents a large part of the world's population. Demographically, its people represent the future. Within the global South, a variety of key states are geographically and economically situated to be important players over the long term. India and Indonesia in Asia, Brazil in Latin America, Turkey in Europe and the Near East—these and other global South states will help shape the larger global patterns of partnerships and alignments.
The evolutionary politics of a Three Worlds system
If this analysis is correct, both the global West and the global East will have incentives to widen their coalitions, reaching out to swing states in the global South. How might this competition evolve over time, and how might it have an impact on the evolution of global rules and institutions? We might expect at least three impacts.
First, China and the United States will increasingly look to build alliances with key states outside their orbit. As noted earlier, neither superpower has the ‘critical mass’ to shape and dominate the global system by relying only on states inside their orbit. The contrary is the case. Both the United States and China have reason to worry that the other side will build the bigger global coalition. Therefore, both states will increasingly seek to cultivate strategic partners in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. For example, both Washington and Beijing have recently stepped up efforts to deepen their ties with Saudi Arabia. The United States has already sought to move beyond its postwar alliance system to cultivate security ties with India. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (‘the Quad’) is the most obvious example in this new politics of coalition-building. China has been equally assiduous in cultivating ties with countries such as Brazil, in addition to its efforts at building economic and political ties in various regions under the Belt and Road initiative.
Moreover, both the United States and China will seek to prevent various countries from being incorporated into the other's camp. Some countries will be more important than others. For example, for geographical and strategic reasons, the Philippines is critical to both superpowers, and so it is not surprising that both Washington and Beijing have sought to deepen ties with Manila—seeking to draw it into their orbit, or at least preventing it from moving into the other's orbit. The leading edge of the American pitch is security ties, and the leading edge of the Chinese pitch is trade and investment. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in a similar global balancing exercise, competing across the various regions of the world for influence and political ties. The competition between China and the United States is slightly different. Countries in the global South have more complex and intensive economic relations with both superpowers, and the ideological stakes do not seem as stark to many players in this global game. This does not mean that the competition for friends and allies will be less intense, but it does mean that neither side will be able to win the competition in any definitive sense. It will be a competitive game that might well persist for decades.
Second, the United States and China should also have growing incentives to demonstrate their virtues as a global hegemonic leader. Each seeks to build coalitions that go behind its base in, respectively, the global West and the global East. Showing the world that your brand of hegemonic leadership has wider global benefits is one way to achieve this. Each should, therefore, seek to be a major purveyor of global public goods. Each should want to ‘lead the world’ in the development of sustainable energy, or research on vaccines for global public health, or lending capital for economic development. In this sense, the competition between western and eastern camps might be good for the world. Neither camp can establish global dominance—or even centrality in global governance—without the consent of third parties, including countries in the global South. This means they will be constantly searching for ways to cultivate that consent. China has shown itself to be aware of this strategic incentive. It has stepped forward recently to offer its leadership in finding settlements for various conflicts, including between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In the unfolding Israel-Hamas crisis, China is signaling its common cause with countries across the global South in their support for the Palestinians. It looks like China will also become more fully involved in the search for a settlement of Russia's war on Ukraine. The United States has long tied its hegemonic leadership to this sort of diplomatic and peacemaking role.
At the same time, both superpowers know that it is important not to be blamed for generating global crises and instability. The United States lost some of its global ideological appeal with the 2008 financial crisis. China loses public support in countries when it exercises ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy, or when it employs coercive forms of economic statecraft. The United States and China will presumably continue to exercise hard power, but the specific qualities of their competitive relationship create incentives for both states to be seen as providers of stability and global goods. It is an old insight. Hegemonic power is more durable and expansive if it is widely seen as legitimate. Legitimacy of hegemonic power hinges on the perceptions of other states, and ultimately on the normative appeal of the hegemonic state. If China and the United States are increasingly competing to be the top hegemon of the twenty-first century, each will want to align itself with the wider progressive advance of the global system.
Finally, the competition between the global West and the global East should have some impact on the underlying rules and norms of world order. Part of the competition for support of the global South will hinge on material outcomes—trade, security, foreign aid, etc. But it will also hinge on whether the kind of world that the United States and China are seeking to build—its rules, norms and principles—are ones that others embrace. This would seem to mean that it is not enough for the United States to simply work to make the world safe for democracy, or China to simply work to make the world safe for autocracy. Surely each superpower will make efforts to promulgate rules and principles with wider appeal. This is precisely the dilemma that the United States and Europe have encountered with their support for Ukraine. The global South does not want to support Ukraine when it is seen as a struggle between western liberal democracy—let alone American hegemony—and Russia. This has led the United States to more frequently talk about the larger global principles at stake in the war, starting with the UN Charter. More generally, this dynamic should play out over the years to come, leading to creative new ways to talk about the principles and norms of world order. Transparency, sovereign equality, multilateralism, best practices and sustainable development—these sorts of principles, enshrined in various ways by the UN, might increasingly be the currency of the global normative realm.
Conclusion
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once quipped that there was one specific geopolitical scenario that kept him up at night—the uniting in alliance of France and Russia. This was his ‘nightmare coalition’. Bismarck's brilliance, as historians tell us, was in preventing this catastrophic outcome. Kaiser Wilhelm II's famous incompetence, which seemed to have no bounds, manifested itself most fatefully in triggering the formation of precisely this alliance.
What is America's nightmare coalition, and what is China's? For the United States, it would be for the global East and global South to combine in a way that left the global West on the outside, weaker and smaller in its global position. For China, the nightmare coalition would be for the West and the global South to swing into alignment. For the reasons detailed in this article, neither scenario is likely to happen completely, or any time soon. The Three Worlds system of global politics is likely to be with us for the foreseeable future. But this Three Worlds system will generate incentives and patterns of conflict and cooperation that could shape and reshape the rules and institutions of global order.
The United States and its western partners have the advantage in this struggle. They are the curators of a century-long effort to build an open, rules-based, and progressively oriented global order. The postwar system of multilateral institutions and alliances has bent the arc of history in a direction that is widely seen as beneficial. Measured in terms of physical security, economic growth and the glimmerings of social justice, the western-led system has made the world a better place. There is widespread dissatisfaction today with the existing international order, a view held inside the West as well as in the global East and global South. But the liberal states in the West are in the best position to offer leadership in the reform of this order. Neither the global East nor the global South really have new ideas about how to replace the existing order with something fundamentally different. What it needs is reform.
Reform is, of course, inherent in the logic of liberal international order. This order is not a fixed order. It is a set of principles, institutions, and working relationships—led by liberal democracies, but not exclusively so—for solving global problems. Historically, this order has found itself grappling with the most basic challenges of modernity—war, empire, great power politics, global capitalism and decolonization. It has experienced successes and failures, but it has survived to remain the centrepiece of global order because it is oriented toward solving problems and upholding universal-style principles of openness, the rule of law, and the liberty and consent of the governed. In a world where these principles are increasingly under fire, the global West has discovered it still has a role to play in a performance where the script for the ending has not yet been written.
