Whoever says that the world belongs to two, the US and China, is wrong. And if it says that it is three, for including Russia or Europe, too. And if he says that there are only a “few blocks” that dominate it, the same.
Alliances today come and go according to interests.
Examples abound.
And several, surprise.
India, for example, highlights different bands in this game. And it is that if in Asia the AUKUS stands out between the USA, the United Kingdom and Australia for their coordination in the field of defense and security and against China, without India, the latter is included in the QUAD, which avoids to London and adds Japan.
New Delhi is, in parallel, in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization promoted by Beijing as a channel of influence in the region. And all this despite the Sino-Indian border dispute with skirmishes included.
It is the new and convoluted multi-aligned world.
Israel and the United Arab Emirates, after normalizing their relations, collaborate in a today central and technological aspect: in innovation in solar energy and in food parks, etc. Together with India and the US, they form the I2U2 alliance. But Washington maintains, in parallel and without them, a privileged relationship for access to essential technology in the form of semiconductors, essential for the above, with Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, its key producers, and, again, against China.
In Latin America, for example, the Ibero-American alliance stands out on the one hand. And Mercosur in the Southern Cone. Or the North American Free Trade Agreement and in parallel, for example, the Lithium Alliance, an agreement between Mexico, Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, the main producers of an essential raw material for the 21st century economy (it is called White gold).
It gives them a differentiated regional weight. And overall. Often pitted against each other.
(“Uruguay is a younger brother of Mercosur. Brazil and Argentina have the responsibility of taking care of it like their older brothers,” said the Argentine Minister of Economy a few days ago for the unchecking of Montevideo from Mercosur and its trade negotiations with third countries, something expressly prohibited by this block.)
Poland, in Europe, for its part, nurtures the Visegrad group against ceding sovereignty to the EU. It is not in the EI2 promoted by France to reinforce coordination in the always key military sphere and going beyond Brussels. In fact, only Western Europe participates in it.
-“What would the State be without the monopoly of force?”, the political scientists cite and cite.
Warsaw, on the contrary, is in NATO. A contradiction?
The position of and with Israel, in the Middle East, repeats the play. Tel Aviv helps above all in intelligence to the international coalition against the Islamic State. But in its formal plan, the CJTF-OIR, it is not included. The coalition does add, however, Arab countries that surround the Israeli state and do not recognize it.
For example, to Saudi Arabia. For example, to Lebanon.
Africa, meanwhile, is in the middle of a global tug of war. The Burkina Faso government’s request to France for its army to leave the country makes it clear: it will entrust its security to Russia. Also the growing web of investment from China in the continent. And the multiple agreements of one and the other both to the West and to the East.
Here as in the rest of the globe, the specific interest is the one that dominates for each case. Agreements multiply. Contradictions are multiplying in a world, as Pascal Boniface says in Vanguardia Dossier, of new multipolar disorder.
Oh.