The teetering world order | thearticle

The New Year’s Day siege at the United States’ embassy in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, where a crowd — organised, Washington said, by Iran in response to US retaliatory attacks on bases of

the Iran-backed Kataeb Hezbollah militia — was another reminder of the Trump administration’s diplomatic eccentricity. 2019 ended with a unilateral US troop withdrawal from Syria, leaving a

void for Russia to fill; 2020 began with preparations for a redeployment to the region. Trump’s decision on January 2 to escalate tensions with Tehran by ordering strikes in Baghdad that

killed Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard — among the most powerful people in Iran — represent a potential flash point. How Iran reacts to the

“defensive, decisive action,” that the Pentagon pointedly said was personally ordered by Trump will be the stage-setter for the coming decade in the Middle East. There would be no benefit

for either the US or Iran from a serious military escalation, though muscle will be flexed. Trump’s policy towards Iran has been one of isolation, and yet it is one of a collection of states

to have slipped the White House’s diplomatic grasp. The US withdrew from a multilateral nuclear deal with Tehran — in contrast to North Korea, whose leader, Kim Jong-un, Trump has professed

to love. Kim closed out 2019 saying he no longer felt bound by his own moratorium on testing nuclear devices. He threatened to unleash “shocking action” with an unspecified “new strategic

weapon”. No word on feeding his hungry people. North Korea remains, as former President Barack Obama warned his successor, a pressing global security issue. Trump’s predilection for

authoritarian strongmen, like Kim and his peers in Russia, Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel, the Philippines and Turkey, is shaking faith in American leadership on a wide range of

globally-relevant issues, from human rights to economic, sexual and racial equality, media freedom, immigration, scientific progress, environmental policy, and more. This decline in American

global leadership is coming at a time of deep global uncertainty. Economic, class, race and sex inequality are among the obsessions we bring with us into the new decade. Climate change;

China’s human rights abuses, imbalanced economic expansion project and belligerent forays into the South China Sea; and, of course, Donald Trump’s political fortunes as he seeks re-election

are set to dominate 2020, though perhaps with more clarity and purpose than in the year just ended. When it comes to the environment, Australia’s apocalyptic bushfires could be the

much-needed pivot on which the climate debate turns. The widespread derision aimed at the activist Swedish teenager Greta Thunburg — blamed for spooking teenagers into believing the end of

the world is nigh — could even make way for serious, sensible policy discussion. As much as climate change sceptics like to accuse Thunberg of fomenting alarm based on a thin understanding

of scientific fact, the crisis in Australia has been smouldering for a decade, while the conservative government there has taken the shilling of Big Coal, banned civil servants from uttering

the words “climate change,” and Prime Minister Scott Morrison has apologised, not for lack of action, but for going on holiday abroad while large parts of his country went up in smoke. This

nadir could be the spark that Australia needs for change. A move away from fossil fuel exports — which, contrary to perceptions, do not dominate the economy — is desperately needed in a

country which, in the midst of drought, has sold its natural water resources overseas, and fails to properly manage its now-volatile landscape. Leadership is sorely, desperately needed, but

in short supply. Perhaps the fires of Summer 2019-20 will be the catalyst for effective policy choices, not only in Australia, but in other parts of the world where people have been

genuinely shocked by the scenes of horrifying devastation. Perhaps even the sceptics now know, deep down, that climate change denial is, at the very least, one of the culprits. The Glasgow

climate change conference in November may offer an opportunity for governments to make good on the mixed results of Madrid 2019. China, a major importer of Australian coal to feed the

engines of its economic growth and one of the planet’s biggest polluters, is unlikely to leave the headlines in 2020. As the US heads into an election year, Trump is determined to turn

tariffs on Chinese imports into a policy success — forcing China to buy American products — as he seeks re-election. But a cloud is hanging over the authoritarian regime of President Xi

Jinping, as widespread disgust — though, shamefully, not in the capitals of Islamic countries — with his incarceration of Muslim Uighurs in “re-education” concentration camps starts to focus

Western attention on the true nature of the Chinese surveillance state. It seems unlikely that Xi will risk a Tiananmen-style military crackdown in Hong Kong, where millions continue to

march against Beijing’s encroachment on freedoms they have long taken for granted and now fear losing. Despite the violent turn the protests have sometimes taken, they are widely supported,

inside and outside Hong Kong. Beijing’s retaliation against governments and corporations that do not support its intolerance will become less effective, as lip-service support for the

world’s second biggest economy — with 1.3 billion people, 100 million of whom live in abject poverty — gives way to the reality that self-determination isn’t such a bad thing after all. As

for China’s international ambitions, the “Belt and Road” scheme that aims to stretch Beijing’s influence across Asia to Africa, is leading to loan defaults that are handing control of

sensitive infrastructure, such as ports in Kenya, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, to China. Chinese largesse isn’t all that it seems. An upcoming election in Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a

renegade province to be folded back into the mainland, could further weaken China’s reputation. Attention to Beijing’s egregious human rights abuses could lead, at last, to the

re-evaluation, in Western capitals, of the long-term wisdom of dealing with China only on its terms. Perhaps the most sensational story of 2019 was the daring, movie-plot escape from Japan

of former Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi boss Carlos Ghosn. He was smuggled out of his Tokyo home in a musical instrument case, and onto a series of private plane hops to Lebanon, where he is

apparently regarded as something of a superstar. Maybe Javier Bardem will play him in the film of his great escape. Ghosn’s flight — not from embezzlement charges, he said, but from

“injustice and persecution” — saw him take up residence in his palatial pink home in Beirut, guarded by Lebanese police, not too far from the scene of anti-corruption rallies that have

choked Beirut for weeks. This juxtaposition, between Ghosn’s extreme wealth, power and connections and the ordinary people on the streets of his adopted hometown protesting official graft,

is a reminder of the yawning inequalities that have only widened over the past decade, or two. Refugees from conflict have been “weaponised” to destabilise Western liberal states, countries

that not a century ago were reduced to rubble by war and whose people were forced to flee to new life in the New World. How quickly we forget. The US, the world’s richest country and the

self-appointed Land of the Free, now locks up children seeking sanctuary from murderous crime gangs in their own riven countries. In the midst of all this, Tokyo’s Summer Olympics will be a

timely circus of individual achievement to lighten the global mood. But with the events in Baghdad and the weakness of the international order, 2020 has got off to a worrying start.