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The new world order is here and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
There are whispers in DC that President Donald Trump is looking to sideline the G7—the grouping of seven major industrialized democracies—and replace it with what the beltway press is calling the “Core 5” [ [link removed] ]: the United States, Russia, China, India, and Japan.
Notably lost in the G7-to-C5 transition are five of the other free countries that make up the old alignment: Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Canada. Thrown in are two dictatorships (Russia and China) and a deeply flawed pro-Russian democracy (India).
Japan—a consolidated democracy and longtime US ally—is the only G7 survivor and, on the surface, the oddest inclusion. It can really only be chalked up to personal preference. Trump likes the Japanese [ [link removed] ], though, as recent events have shown, not enough to actually defend them [ [link removed] ] from an aggressive Beijing.
Why such a cockeyed assortment?
The answer is twofold:
First—unlike the democracies of Europe—Trump has a personal affinity for these four nations and their leaders.
Second, and perhaps more importantly in Trump’s mind, they’re big.
Here, Trump’s interview [ [link removed] ] from last week with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns is instructive.
On Russia and Ukraine, Burns asks Trump: “Which country right now is in the stronger negotiating position?”
To which Trump replies:
Well, there can be no question about it. It’s Russia. It’s a much bigger country.
Russia is bigger than Ukraine. What novel insight!
The president goes on to repeat:
Russia has the upper... upper hand. And they always did. They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger in that sense.
This is basically the same argument put forward by foreign policy “realists” like Professor John Mearsheimer, who are keen to remind all of us that Russia is larger than Ukraine and that there are more Russians than Ukrainians.
Too many people still treat Mearsheimer as a serious academic for making the same facile points [ [link removed] ] that Trump is rightly ridiculed over.
Like many self-described “realists,” Trump and Mearsheimer are capable of only the most basic geopolitical analysis: Recognizing which countries are big, and which countries are even bigger. But they struggle with math—specifically, addition.
And addition is what makes the Free World work.
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Russia only seems so big when you look at America’s democratic allies in isolation from one another. Yet the sum total of the democratic alliance’s economic and military might is several orders of magnitude greater than Russia’s.
Americans should be the first to recognize that size doesn’t always matter. This country was born out of a victory over the largest empire on the planet. With the help of allies like the French, Spanish, and Dutch, the colonists were able to challenge and defeat the eighteenth century’s premier superpower, Great Britain.
It is much the same today. Ukraine is only smaller than Russia if it is cut off from its natural partners. The support of the United States and an active NATO in Europe and allies like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea in Asia are sufficient counterweights to any would-be hegemon.
The Free World is wanting for willpower, not resources.
If Trump’s C5 materializes, it will be a departure from the democratic coalition’s strength in numbers. It actually looks a lot like the Russian- and Chinese-backed regional blocs, which no one has ever paid much mind to because they’ve always lagged far behind Western institutions.
Imperfect as it is, the EU forged a real political-economic union, innovative common currency, and shared institutions. Cheap imitators like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Eurasian Economic Union, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization mostly do photo-ops for dictators while papering over the deep conflicts between their members (like India versus Pakistan at the SCO or Armenia’s isolation from its neighbors in the Russian-sponsored groupings).
So it will be with the C5. The Core 5 will give Trump the image he craves of a big man at the head of a big table. But an image is just that. On substance, the C5 cannot resolve China’s conflicts with Japan or India—or, frankly, Russia and China’s deeper disputes with the United States. It is a poor substitute for Washington’s lucrative partnerships with other free countries, and may actually end up harming them.
The question is: Why such obvious self-sabotage in front of the entire world?
I’ll let you answer that one.
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