Let us not unravel and tear our clothes lamenting the “new world order”

The great stake of this year's Munich Security Conference was not mentioned by any analyst, not even externally, and even less by us, writes Cristian Grosu, from the Governance Course, in an opinion published in Hotnews.

The US wants Europe to be able to support it in the Indo-Pacific in the event of a conflict with China, just as it is ready to support Europe in the event of a conflict with Russia. And for that, the EU can no longer remain in the position of maintaining the USA for European security, but must be able, in addition to its own defense, to be an ally in the Indo-Pacific.

It took only one year for America to put Europe in the right socket, using the style of Donald Trump with the whip and the sugar, and with the bad boy and the good boy: If in Munich last year JD Vance was sent to overturn the table, now Marco Rubio has come, with a plan and a speech like for a partner, not for a servant.
Unfortunately, European “annalism” insists on not seeing this.

The US got, in just one year, what it was common sense to get from genuine allies:

• The EU took its defense seriously, committed to increasing its contribution to NATO, remembering that the mere citation of Article 5 means the involvement not only of the US, but also of the EU states.
• The numbers of would-be combatants are growing, states are counting their recruits and reservists, and they are thinking about mobilization scenarios in case of war.
• The EU arms industry has begun to falter.
• Germany, the EU's leading economy, woke up to the new military reality.
• Poland has become a fortress between Western Europe and Russia, an outpost of the West in front of the Asian world.
• The fault line between the free West and Russo-Chinese Asia is moving, before our eyes, from the alignment of Poland-Romania-Turkey-Greece to Ukraine-Black Sea-Turkey-Central Asia.
• The thorny security issue of Greenland is finally being taken seriously by the Europeans, along with the nerve center of the Arctic Circle, where Russia has been weaving its strategic position for years.
• That's to talk only about security issues, not economic ones, which are another US success story in terms of European unmasking.

What Europe still lacks at the moment is to make its citizens aware of the reality of the global confrontation: the European establishment should explain to the citizen the movie they are playing in, because maintaining confusion, against the background of the hybrid war waged by Russia and China, can create masses that react politically in a destructive way for the EU.

The problem is that, instead of doing that, the European establishment promotes – through the media and ideological experts of all kinds – one of the most dangerous ideas for Western society: namely, that “Trump wants to change the world order” or, even worse, “the USA wants to change the world order”.

In reality, it is the exact opposite, and we Europeans should be aware of the complicated equation that the world power paradigm enters into – aware beyond what our leaders and “analysts” are trying to sell us in the communication market.

What shocked, first of all, in the days leading up to the Munich conference was the European “analysis” of the situation: our enemy, of Western and free Europe, is not Russia and China, but… the USA, which “wants to change the world order”. And the arguments of our leaders and “analysts” configure the idea that the world order that must remain unchanged is that the Europeans are not able to decide and mobilize against an aggressor like Russia, and rely only on the US in the matter of defense – and the best example is Germany, which dismantled its Bundeswehr during the Social Democratic governments and Angela Merkel, inviting Russia (at a cost, that is, against gas) to advance, through Ukraine, towards the West.

But here's how things are with the “new world order”:

The new world order has been gone for 20 years. Marco Rubio's most important statement

Marco Rubio's most important statement in Munich was not “the USA is the child of Europe” (after which our tender “analysts” rolled their eyes, only to later dispute it):

Rubio's most important statement is that “post-war mistakes” have weakened both the US and Europe, and “they must be repaired together.”

To understand this, we have to accept the idea that the old, post-war world order has NO LONGER EXISTED for 25 years.

What the old Order looked like:

1. The world was bipolar: the US and its allies, the USSR and its allies.
2. USA and USSR were the only reporting points.
3. The US and Western Europe (ie the free world) protected their economies (including through well-managed measures of protectionism) against communist economies, excluding any dependence on them.
4. Essential: Global institutions (UN, WHO, WTO, IEA, etc.) functioned because their decisions were negotiated between the US and the USSR, and the rest simply followed them.
5. The European Union was concerned with its security, the 2% of GDP allocated to defense was out of the question.

The Old World Order has changed in the last 20 years and none of it WORKS TODAY:

1. China has emerged as the second pole of power, while Russia, crushed by corruption and lagging behind the Economy, is trying to compensate with military aggression for what it has lost as a geopolitical power.

   The so-called “revisionist triangle” China-Russia-Iran (all three countries, with access to the free world) appeared, whose explicit and officially formulated desire is to dismantle the hegemony of the West in terms of social system and create a new global order. So NOT the US wants a new global order, but Russia and China – America is just trying to adapt the West to the new Asian reality.

2. The reference points are no longer two (the USA and the USSR), but also China + the large emerging economies, such as India and Brazil, whose markets and productive forces are rewriting the global trade equation.
3. And here, Rubio's most important warning in Munich: the US and the EU have no longer protected their economies in the face of the systemic adversary. Well, on the contrary:
   – have become dependent on China and Russia for the resources needed for the new economy (rare earths, chips, energy, etc.).
   – they found themselves facing a China that, through the Belt and Road Initiative, has spread its tentacles to 360 degrees in global trade: ports, infrastructure, logistics, ownership of large natural resources, etc.
   – they woke up with their economies penetrated by the Chinese momentum – the car market from which the EU lived is simply shattered by Chinese companies and investments.
   – found themselves in the storm of a hybrid war waged by China and Russia (each sharing their global geography), in which the two rely precisely on Western freedom, as they apply harsh prohibitions to the communication landscape in their own states.
   – The US and China have created a dual-use logistics system (civilian and military) in the Arctic Ocean from where they can project power throughout the Northern Hemisphere.
4. Global institutions no longer work, and this is also due to the Western “blindness” to their small-step changes: the UN has become as ineffective as the Organization of Nations had become before WWII, the WHO is penetrated by China (that's why no one could protest when China rejected the inspection at the Wuhan Laboratory, where the COVID virus escaped), the WTO (Global Trade) has not been working for 20 years, since China first violated its rules and flooded the global market with dumping prices and no one in the West stepped in then.
5. The European Union is currently not able to defend itself even against Russia (140 million inhabitants, compared to 550 million), and it will take a long time before it gets back on its feet both militarily and industrially.
6. For the first time in history, China is ahead of even the US (not to mention Europe) in certain technological areas, and the rise of AI in economies and the military sector will make a difference in the coming decades.
7. Along with far-eastern Russia, China is playing games in the Indo-Pacific by establishing artificial islands and using North Korea as a nuclear proxy, including arming at a level unprecedented in history.
8. The relationship between the USA and the EU must be returned to a PARTNERSHIP between two strong allies, including economically – we, the Romanians, have the saying, found in the human survival DNA, “brother, brother, but the cheese is on the money”.

So what will the New World Order look like, which the European leadership refuses to accept and adapt to, and struggle to find its geopolitical meaning, beyond the traction that the US (still) provides for the West?

I said it before: the big problem between the USA and the EU is mutual DISTRUST: if tomorrow the AfD comes to power in Germany (with pro-Russian tendencies – brought by the wave of rejection of uncontrolled immigration) or Le Pen's party in France (with the same characteristics), or even in the peaceful Nordic states (far-right parties, brought by the wind for the same reasons): who else could the USA count on in the EU?

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The Old World Order has been gone for at least 20 years, and our European leaders and the “analysm” of European geopolitics insult the intelligence of European citizens and keep it to themselves: Trump is also doing drege, MAGA is also doing drege, etc. – when, in fact, we are dealing with the USA, which also woke up at the 12th hour and is sounding the alarm for Europe as well.

What is the cause of this method of treating your peoples – that is, on a concrete level, citizens – in the face of the new realities on which the survival of our democracies will ultimately depend – liberal market capitalism?

I, for one, have been trying to find an explanation since last summer – and the conclusion I reached is very personal, i.e. subjective:

I watch, night after night – as a professional obligation – everything that is discussed in the Romanian geopolitical “analysis”, where they are brought from paraerologists to university professors: you are frightened by the stupidity of the ideas and the deep misunderstanding of the current geopolitical equation, from the very people from whom you should have claims:

One (university passed through top European schools) says that it is imminent for a country like Canada to enter… the EU. Another comes up with the idea that our chance is to host nuclear weapons in Romania… Another is still crying after the disastrous foreign policies of Obama and Biden (the word is coming, Biden – the old man didn't know who he is and where he is for a long time) – everything is just babbling and the bazacons who see a deep misunderstanding of how things work.

My opinion is that the fault for these tricks that European citizens are sent to is either incompetence and “lack of talent” in understanding the world around them, or, rather, all kinds of “grants”, “projects”, “studies” well financed with public money (European, of course) to sing one song or another, or personal ideological orientations, belonging to ideological groups or, simply, the convenience of joining a camp or another.

Beyond all this, our chance, the Europeans, is to UNDERSTAND, beyond the conjunctural speeches (sometimes, themselves part of the transatlantic negotiations included) of our leaders and “analysts”:

We are living years of pure history, and barely understanding it places us, objectively, in the “camp” of the elites: not political, not administrative, not academic: the elite of those who, regardless of their social position, understand the world they live in and position their personal lives according to this meaning.

The article was originally published on Governance Course.