What if the biggest obstacle to global peace is the fear of sharing power?
On the Club of Rome Podcast, Chandran Nair, Founder & CEO of Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT), was in conversation with Nolita Mvunelo to explore what it means to understand and navigate a multipolar world. He examines China's rise, the US-China relationship, the assumptions shaping today's global order, and why great-power rivalry continues to define international affairs. Chandran also questions how international law is applied, and what could happen if the world's two major powers moved beyond confrontation and learned to share power.
And the United States is essentially a creation of imperial powers, which I argue is born out of a great sense of superiority and white supremacy, is unable to contend with the rise of others and in this instance China. When you look at the three big issues that we're all concerned about – the Russia-Ukraine war, Gaza, Venezuela, the intimidation of a country like Cuba, you look at Iran, it's all western-led.
I just like to make a point about this term "civilization." Everybody uses that to imply that there are hundreds of civilizations around. And then this whole thing about well, which civilization is older, which civilization is deeper. In the context of trying to explain China to the world, I do say that China remains very much a civilizational state. You could not say that the United States is a civilizational state because it's too young. It has no underlying sort of long history of 10,000 years of culture, civilization, traditions. If the Native Americans had not been slaughtered, then you'd say there was a civilization there.
How do I see the current world order in terms of civilizational relationships? The American worldview you heard call, is a punk who became very rich and through as we know - colonization, genocide, extermination of large amounts of the flora and fauna particularly, but this is basically a modern warring state, advanced technologically, but doesn't make it a civilization.
So let's cut to the chase. Some may disagree: the major tensions in the world. This is not to say there aren't badly governed countries in Africa, Middle East, in my region, but if you look at global tensions, then these are all a result of both the unraveling of the post-colonial era and the desire for past imperial powers to retain supremacy. And the United States is essentially a creation of imperial powers and created this powerful nation which because of its well-known sense of exceptionalism, which I argue is born out of a great sense of superiority and white supremacy, is unable to contend with the rise of others. And in this instance, China, if it survives its resistance against the rise of the others, the equity that others are striving for, then it'll find itself opposing the rise of Africa, opposing the rise of India perhaps first. So global tensions at the moment are a function of the inability of western powers, Europe and the United States to deal with the rise of the others. So if you look at the biggest global geopolitical tension today, it's essentially China and the USA.
And then you have in Europe of course, the tension between the notion that there is this communist block, the Cold War mentality, this socialist country called Russia, and then there's all this "freedom-loving" people in Europe or these governments, who then have been exposed as being willing to support a genocide in Palestine which is itself a creation of the last 100 years because of colonial exploits. So you have to really understand where is the angst coming from, because some people say bad leaders exist in different parts. I want to acknowledge that bad governance exists. But when you look at the three big issues that we're all concerned about, the Russia-Ukraine war, Gaza, what's happening in Venezuela, the intimidation of a country like Cuba, Iran, it's all western led.
Q- What leadership is needed for a way forward that avoids conflict and loss of rights?
Leadership is always a reflection of where the society is at any one point because the pathways are dialogue, understanding, respect. We can call it allowing nation states collaborating with self-determination. But you can't deal with people who are either supremacists, who are captive to the war industry. That is the world we've created to the most powerful nations in the world. That's NATO. That's the USA.
And all I wanted to say was that's why the global tensions are arising out of this complex economics in which then leaders have risen. Leadership is a reflection over the state as it's not about 8 billion people, yes. But understand that because this one nation has accumulated so much power that they can sanction Iran, kill half a million babies by not allowing them access to medicine, etc. The former secretary for state, I think it was Madeline Albright, when asked tens of millions of people, children have died, she said, well, you know, tough stuff happens. That's how it is, right? But they don't say it if they were white kids. We have seen democracy is not accountable. So that myth that democracy creates good leaders, it's accountable and you can change, is just been washed away because the system is corroded, that the most precocious sort of individuals get into that system and I think that's the big challenge about leadership, which system allows you to essentially have the best policy leaders. If I look around, and I don't want to mention China because then people would say, "Oh, he's pro-China."
But if you look around to places like Singapore and people say, "Oh, Lee Kuan Yu was probably one of the greatest leaders of the 20th Century." Now, was Lee Kuan Yu soft-peddling Democrat? No, he was hard-nosed. But it was a predominantly Chinese culture.
Singapore itself is very young, but the civilizational roots are Chinese, Confucius. So within that culture people understood the need for a strong leader and so long as he was not corrupt he delivered, he was revered and he won. It is a function of where the society is at what place, what leaders come to the fore and then which system allows it. I am sure there are very capable Americans but they will never get into or they will not desire to enter the system because the system is totally corrupt now. It's drenched in money and no good person wants to go through all of that. The same in the UK and I think that's the big unknown and I don't want to say what's the alternative, well you might want to look at the Chinese model.
Q- Europe had 1000 years to work out its government systems. Africa never got the same chance.
So Europe having plundered the world essentially became wealthy, small population that wealth trickled into the societies so you built homes you had roads you had all of these things built so people had nothing to complain because life seemed to be improving all the time. Now on the other side then you have the poor Africans, who as you said, that "who are these people taking all of this from us?" Our whole way of living has been essentially altered and this happened in India as well. We were put in and we were told our borders are this and we already had been raped and pillaged. When you look at South Africa how long was the apartheid era - for about 150 years. When you have 150 years of that sort of oppression, you can't expect people to come out of that within the space of 25 years. No chance. It's going to take some time. If you put Lee Kuan Yu in say, a large country like Indonesia today with close to 300 million people when he became Prime Minister of Singapore, the world's population was only about three and a half billion and I think Singapore was less than a million people. Today it's 8 million. So you can see what I'm talking about. Everything is so complex and I think large countries in the developing world are caught in a really complex situation. Their wealth has been taken away. They've still got a lot of wealth, but then it's all trapped in an old system. Their elites want to be like those who raped and plundered because that's all they know about neo-classical sort of economic theories, and they don't have the wisdom to essentially bring their countries forward.
We should be realistic and say there are paths to peace that have been created otherwise the rest of the world, most of the world, will be mayhem, right? So in many parts of the world we coexist. And again we come back to my point when you say the path of peace, let's be very straight about this: if the most powerful country, the United States, was able to essentially curtail the excess of Israel, things be very different in the Middle East, extremely different. Huge amount of prosperity would be created that doesn't mean the Middle East would essentially become a haven of peace. But my god, it would change. And let's be very clear and again I don't want to be seen as someone who's saying China is all great. But when people talk about the US-China conflict, a conflict means that two people trying to get at each other. The Chinese are not trying to get at the US. The Americans who essentially instigated all the anti-China stuff for whatever reasons, but mainly around their inability to share power with a rising superpower and therefore deeming many actions of the Chinese as breaking international law, which have all fallen by the wayside given that the main country that has broken both international laws is the United States.
But if the United States gave up its fear of sharing power with China, imagine what the world will look like. So the answer is there is a path to peace, of global peace. If the two major powers work together, I think we would see a very different world.
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