Beware the Gx world that awaits us

It’s a messy world of shifting alliances of countries drawn together by specific issues of common interest.

- Warren Fernandez

It is permanent. A rupture, not a transition.

So declared shocked leaders in recent weeks, in response to the great Greenland grab by US President Donald Trump.

Thankfully, this looks to have been aborted, at least for now. Relief greeted Mr Trump’s announcement at Davos in January that the US would not use military force to seize Greenland. Tacos, it seems, was back on the menu.

While the thought that “Trump Always Chickens Out” is comforting, this respite might be short-lived. Besides, Greenland is just a small part of Mr Trump’s broader attempts to reshape the world as we know it.

A strongly worded report issued ahead of this week’s Munich Security Conference described Mr Trump as a “demolition man” engaged in the destruction of the international order through his “wrecking ball” politics.

The irony is that in attempting to reshape the global order, the forces unleashed could give rise to a world quite different from anything Mr Trump might have in mind.

The late US secretary of state Henry Kissinger had a term for the likes of Mr Trump - “revolutionary chieftains”. These were radical and revisionist leaders, from Napoleon to Hitler, driven by historical angst, or what the author Robert Kaplan calls “Shakespearean forces”, the inner demons that sway powerful leaders. Such figures upend the order and stability Kissinger believed are essential to global equilibrium. He probably never imagined such a person inhabiting the White House.

So, what lies ahead?

Ironically, the US has been busy undoing the G1 world - the unipolar order that it led, and benefited from for decades, at a time when China seems neither ready nor willing to step up as global hegemon.

For a time, some envisaged a G2 world, in which rival powers competed fiercely but collaborated selectively to ensure systemic stability and avoid catastrophe.