Xi and Biden's pre-APEC meet is all about power politics

As two ageing and aged leaders of two most powerful countries – China and the United States - met on the sidelines of the APEC meeting, the war in Palestine between Israel and Palestinians raged on. Both are revelatory: they point out, one, an ineffable law of politics and two, that interdependence (thin or thick) cannot be entirely wished away. 

Consider the law of politics first: Post the Treaty of Westphalia where the state form of political organization became ‘secular religion’ and the cardinally ‘theological premise of political theory,' it is power and power politics thereof that determines political life among states. The rest, hogwash, is amply demonstrated in the war between Israel and Palestinians. 

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Supported by the United States and broadly the West, Israel, contra international law, has gone on a rampage in Palestine. This is a critical point. The institutional ingress that forms the rubric of international relations, say, the United Nations, is helpless against this. The best that ‘The Parliament of Man’ can do is to issue declamatory statements from the office of the UN secretary-general. The inference that can be drawn from Israel’s no-holds-barred war and the fact that there is no real check on it is that ‘power is the ultima ratio of political life between and among states’.  And to partly paraphrase one neo-conservative American scholar, Robert Kagan, ‘international law is for the weak’. (In a loose way the United Nations embodies the reification of international law).  

The question here is: what explains the impotence of international organizations like the United Nations? 

I would argue that it is because international bodies besides the oft-repeated and known lacunae- structural and normative- are conceived as ‘The Parliament of Man’. That is, these are deliberative bodies that require consensus and deliberation to forcefully translate their writ into action. In other words, unlike states, bodies like the UN cannot impose what the controversial but brilliant political philosopher called 'the state of exception’. 

In Schmidt’s schema, ‘the state of exception' is the state’s ability to transcend the rule of law for the sake of public good. The ultimate test of a state’s sovereignty is to institute a ‘state of exception’. Because, again in a loose sense, international organisations like the UN are arenas where states ‘pool their sovereignty'. This body cannot institute a ‘state of exception’. In international political life, it is ultimately the hegemon of the day that either by securitisation or by its writ can and does impose a ‘state of exception’.  (The second Gulf War and the misnomer, the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’ was an example of the same). 

And now the war in Palestine bears a faint echo of that. Important here is how 'public good' is defined. In both cases referred to here, it is the hegemon and its allies that define(s) in consonance with their interests.

Is this significant? If so, how?

Here some context is warranted: the onset of the Cold War 2.0 between China and the United States has generated a flood of debate on ‘norms and ‘values’ in international political life. One pedestrian and cliched ‘fact’ doing the rounds is that China is trying to upend the norms of international relations and forge a new world order based on its norms and values. (What these are left undefined or generally go under the broad and vague rubric a synthesis between Marxism with Chinese characteristics and Confucianism). But what norms and values? If it is human rights then surely there is deep violation of these going on in Palestine. If it is democracy, then what explains the ‘democratic recession’ in the world? And above all, if democracy means the rule of law, where in the world is it reified in a way that approximates the ‘good society’? Obiter Dictum, if America is held to be the ultimate paragon of democracy, its current paroxysms are nothing but a joke.

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Culled from this discussion what can be safely gleaned is that power is indeed the ultima ratio of politics and power politics is the sine qua non of international relations. This holds lessons for the rest of the world suspended between China and the United States. Both, in the final analysis, are power-seeking and power-maximizing entities overlaid by exceptionalism where each preens on the world stage with rhetorical flourishes aimed to seduce. Under these conditions what is the ‘rest’ to do?

Look after itself in the idiom and structure of ‘self-help’ is the answer. Or, in other words, be power-seeking and power-maximizing entities where more power leads to security but the ‘security dilemma' too. The latter is good and the former can be obviated through arms racing which need not always be ‘bad’.  But there is a flip side to this. 

To put this into relief, the Xi and Biden meeting and its real thrust and nature need to be visited. Both China and the United States are finding ‘decoupling’ difficult- especially in the terrains of economics and even political economy. Hence the meeting on APEC sidelines. The implication is that the world since the past few decades is too interconnected for a comprehensive divorce between the US and China. Both leaders I would assume would be aiming to revive a mechanism that establishes, in the least, a modus vivendi for some kind of interdependent trade relationship. Here again, there is a lesson for the rest. The constituent states of the rest cannot exist as mere autarkic, isolated islands. They have to partake and be part of complex trading networks too, if only for the survival and prosperity of their peoples. What is the larger lesson for the rest then? It is ‘self-help’ in the broadest terms possible and divided neatly into two axioms: one is the pursuit of power and power maximization and the second more in a semantic sense of self-help enmesh themselves in trade networks that are not zero-sum but neither mercantilist either but either or and all depending on context, circumstance and their own interest and their people’s welfare. The post-APEC meeting for the rest is a time for review. Let it begin sooner than later!

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)