We are going through one of the worst moments in the world since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The future is always open and depends on the freedom of the people who have to make the decisions. But the trends we see are dangerous, as there is intense rivalry between the major powers, which governs the configuration of the international landscape. On one hand, the US, and on the other, Russia and China, which are in clear confrontation, and neither party is taking steps to ease this situation, making it worse every year. As a consequence of this, there is already a war in Europe, which is the war in Ukraine.
All wars are terrible, and this is no exception. There is a danger that we may have another war, which the entire world is waiting for, and that is Taiwan. There is a hot war and another one that is currently cold.
“We are facing Russian roulette, but to defeat Russia, one must accept that risk and play.”
We are living in a moment of historical inflection, changing the course of trends, so we need to rethink the future. The trends we used to rely on are no longer valid, because the world is changing in a direction that we do not know. In the previous trend, we had a world dominated by the West, led by the US, and that is changing. This induces a lot of insecurity. Long ago, when the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance was happening, Leonardo da Vinci said, “We are not in an era of change, we are in a change of era.” A different world is being born.
In the security strategy published by the US, we can see that “the world is at a turning point” and “this decade will be decisive.” It is a new and unprecedented vision that shows the concern of the US. It shows a competition between the US and China, in which the US wants to win a battle of values, as it believes that Russia and China are revisionist and authoritarian powers that oppose the international order built upon the West.
The main trend behind this is that we are at the end of a great historical period dominated by the West, which began in the Iberian Peninsula 500 years ago, when two empires, Spanish and Portuguese, first dominated the seas and then the world along with other European countries. Those countries gave meaning to the adjective ‘international’ that they invented in Europe.
The international world as we know it was invented here, but before this, the most advanced world was in Asia. European powers came to dominate the world using Chinese inventions: gunpowder, paper, and the compass. From then on, after the conquest of the oceans, the great inventions were from the West, which led to 500 years of dominance in history.
This era has ended, as Fukuyama confirms in his work “The End of History”. What was thought when the Cold War and the confrontation between capitalism and socialism ended, in which capitalism prevailed, was that the principles that organized Western society and were created in the image and likeness of the US were going to be definitively imposed globally, based on democracy in politics and freedom in economics, along with the values of equality, freedom, and human rights.
It was thought that globalization, modernization, and Westernization were equivalent, necessary for a society to advance, as Japan did in the 19th century, even changing its attire. What was previously a dogma, the Chinese Communist Party changed it. China modernized without Westernizing, without democratizing. No other country could make such a decision against the current, but a country as large as China could, as it had power concentrated in a single party that meets and makes decisions that changed history and the dynamics of time.
“We all depend on things that are manufactured in distant places.”
Demographics are becoming increasingly important. There are two countries that together account for a third of the world’s population: China and India. When the Cold War ended, the population was not important because power and population were not connected. Now they are; per capita GDP is equalizing, and there is no longer such a difference in wealth between countries. Therefore, quantity is becoming decisive in terms of power. This is also affecting Africa, which will be the most populated continent by the end of the century. All that excess population will eventually come to Europe, linking the future of both. The future of Spain depends on the future of Africa and its development.
The war in Ukraine is taking place under a very serious threat, which is nuclear, as Russia uses this threat to avoid being defeated. If Russia did not have nuclear weapons, it would have already been crushed and this war would not have occurred.
“We are not in an era of change, we are in a change of era.”
This war is very similar to the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon, in which Spain had lost the northern fortifications before the war even began. Napoleon expected it to be child’s play and used the strategy that had been successful for him in other occasions in Europe, but in Spain it was not, thanks to the passion and patriotism of those defending their nation, and in the end, he was defeated. Any war that is not won in the first few months drags on, and if it drags on, help and support from other countries will come, as is currently the case with the Americans and European countries. The same thing happened to Napoleon because he did not put enough emphasis on the beginning of the conflict. This led to the prolongation of the conflict, brutality, and horror.
We must choose between peace or justice. Ukraine has chosen justice. But the rest of the countries want peace to be chosen, and there are three options for that: to drive Russia out of Ukraine, to prolong the war as the US wants from a distance, or to stop the escalation by seeking a cooling-off. None of the three options is easy because trust between Russia and the West has been completely lost.
