Trade, sanctions, gas, people: the weapons of choice in our new world war of economics and alliances
- It may not be ‘war’ by its standard definition, or even a cold war, but geopolitical conflict in this century is being waged through weaponisation of relationships and people
- Perhaps the disappointing path of globalisation in the 2020s heralds the beginning of the end of interdependencies that have ultimately come back to hurt us
I am a sixties child and have never been in the thick of any armed conflict. My parents were born in the 1930s and were caught up in World War II as children, being evacuated from suburban London as the German V-1 flying bomb menaced them from overhead. My grandparents were caught up in both world wars, having been born just before the first one kicked off, with my grandfather shooting German bomber aircraft out of the sky in the second one.
As a young clerical assistant in the City of London, I followed the Falklands war through newspaper and TV reports. And stuck at home during a bout of glandular fever, I watched the Gulf War on TV a decade later, but that was as near as I got.
After the two “big ones” of the last century, the world has managed to avoid armed conflicts on anything near their scale. There have certainly been localised wars around the planet, and the Korean and Vietnam wars took place in the context of the Cold War’s global power struggle. But close as we may have come at times, World War III never happened.
Yet in the absence of “hot” conflicts between countries, perhaps we’ve just found new ways to attack each other, with the aim being the same as always: to exert influence and pressure on other nations. If we broaden the definition of war to include 21st century methods, who is at war with whom in 2022?
China
Indonesia’s urea lifeline keeps Australia trucking amid China curbs
USA
The US controls access to the US dollar and the payment systems through which the currency flows. Without access to global dollar trading, any country would find it difficult to pay for most commodities, international trade would get very difficult, and it would find itself thrown back into the dark ages.
US losing Asean centrality to China and Cambodia’s ‘ironclad brotherhood’
Russia
On the other side, the European gas supply is interconnected with other suppliers, such as Norway. Any disruption, which could reverse the direction of the gas flow from West to East, has devastating effects on prices across all of Europe, including the UK. Heating homes throughout the winter could become prohibitively expensive if Europe falls out with Russia over politics. As the US comes charging in to add to pressure over the Ukraine conflict, the supply of gas too becomes weaponised.
Europe
The rules-obsessed EU has its own arsenal of weapons with which it can inflict pain on its own member states, mostly through trade and rules governing the shape of cucumbers and the definition of a sausage. But it is also running into something far more sinister: the weaponisation of people.
Interdependencies
We read about modern warfare and the way that wars supposedly will be fought in the future, the vast amounts of money spent on “defence”, and live in fear of the next great war breaking out.
Here, I have simply pulled together a few examples of where global interdependencies have now come back to bite us and although it may not be “war” by its strict definition (i.e. protracted armed conflict between two countries) the superpowers, in particular, can painfully exert their will and influence in these new ways.
So it’s just war, by other means? If that’s too strong a term for it, I think it’s fair to say the world is at least not fully at peace. How nations fight back against this will evolve over time, but perhaps it signals the end of globalisation and the return of localisation – coupled with the end of interdependencies and a long-term return of independence.