The United States is crafting a new foreign policy that keeps the economic superpower at its centre
As I am writing this, I am well aware that the furore over US ambassador Reuben Brigety’s claim against South Africa could soon be replaced in the news-cycle by some other economy-shaking blunder, probably committed by one of our own politicians.
But, given that the world seems to be shifting under our feet — and that South Africa may someday be torn between the US’s stewardship and China’s — it is only right that we use this moment to figure out exactly what message the US is trying to send insofar as foreign diplomacy is concerned.
On 20 September 2001, in the wake of 9/11, then US president George W Bush sent a very clear message when he said: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Bush’s War on Terror would give rise to a new era of American nationalism, last seen during World War II — in the wake of which the US helped craft the enduring global system.
This was the posture that seemed to be on display when Brigety accused South Africa of supplying arms to Russia, effectively bringing into question the country’s non-alignment. “You are either with us, or against us.”
But the world has changed a lot since Bush. The 2008 global financial crisis laid bare the deep flaws in a system devised through the Washington Consensus, pushing some into protracted negotiations for a new economic order.
Then another dalliance with American nationalism, roused in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, put the dangers of this brand of statecraft into full focus. So too has Brexit, which has greatly jeopardised the economy of one of the US’s greatest allies.
With the prospect of China and its own “basket of deplorables” threatening to smash the old rules of politics, the task of putting the pieces back together has fallen at US President Joe Biden’s feet. Over the weekend, Biden and his fellow G7 leaders were no doubt seized with the seriousness of this moment, made even more menacing by a climate crisis that threatens to flatten economies around the world.
In the lead-up to the summit, the US president has carefully crafted a new doctrine for the renewal of America’s economic leadership, which was outlined by his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in a speech at the Brookings Institution last month.
This moment, Sullivan said, “demands that we forge a new consensus”, seemingly turning the page on an era which extolled the merits of deregulation, privatisation and fiscal discipline. It’s a vision that effectively repurposes capitalism as we know it.
For Biden, a new consensus means building “a more durable global economic order”, according to Sullivan. This requires “de-risking” the world economy’s ties with China by building more resilient supply chains, which, in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, were at the heart of the world’s inflation problem.
The strategy of de-risking has clearly already found favour with others in the G7, with UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak having entered into a partnership with Japan that will result in an up to £1 billion investment in his country’s semiconductor industry. Investing in the semiconductor industry will shield the UK against the economic effect of chip shortages amid a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, according to Sunak.
In this way, the new consensus picks apart the stated virtues of globalisation, which helped build up the economic dependencies that became so perilous in the pandemic’s wake.
But this means the US will have to do the difficult work of painting a new picture of what a world post-globalisation looks like. This world cannot revert to the “us-versus-them” posture that persisted during the Trump years. That would be an admission that the likes of China and Russia — and the UK through Brexit — have got it right.
It must, however, still put America (and the Western bloc) first. The centre has to hold, and the US must remain its linchpin.
Building confidence in this vision requires creating the illusion that the new economic order will, somehow, close the yawning gap that has been created between the so-called global south and its stewards in the West — with the former’s economies so hitched to the Bretton Woods twins in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Like its earlier iteration, which gave those twins such power, the new Washington Consensus is a tide that lifts all boats, Sullivan would have us believe.
This consensus, like any other, will be built on the flimsy politics trust — nearly decimated during a pandemic that exposed the West’s hypocrisy through its vaccine apartheid and which will probably continue to be eroded by its failure to take financial responsibility for the climate crisis.
It was this message, to trust in the US, that Sullivan was so keen to express: “As we pursue this strategy at home and abroad, there will be reasonable debate. And this is going to take time. The international order that emerged after the end of the Second World War and then the Cold War were not built overnight. Neither will this one.”
South Africa is no stranger to the difficult work of consensus-building, which so often involves re-writing the same piece of dreary fiction over and over again.
Like the rest of the world, this country is on a precipice which spells untold danger and yet our president has been seized with creating compact after compact, councill after council, inquiry after inquiry — all with the aim of building trust, not just with the South African public, but with a West that still holds our economic fortunes in its grasp.
When Brigety accused South Africa of arming Russia, a claim that has by now had plenty of holes punched into it, he expressed America’s willingness to wield its weapons over those less eager to buy into the story of a US that lifts all boats.
Those weapons were forged through the Washington Consensus and the US will not let go of them without a fight. Don’t be fooled, the so-called new consensus, stripped of its niceties, is that fight.