Augusto Manzanal Ciancaglini
Political scientist
The narratives that claim a completely secure world order, based on a hegemonic power with absolute power or a supposedly multipolar system, suffer at the slightest crisis and in the face of quantitative changes based unidimensionally on economics or elections.
The Pax Americana suffers impacts in the form of economic and geopolitical challenges, but also from the contradictions of globalization. This power game is partially played out on a board of confusion, the product of disinformation, the instrumentalization of which has become a fundamental weapon in an increasingly hybrid international competition, which some already perceive as digital bipolarity between the techno-authoritarianism of Russia and China, and the U.S. model of Silicon Valley.
The United States realized very early on that its preponderance would push its enemies to develop unconventional weapons: General James Mattis makes this clear when he understands that threats will come from various types of actors in multiple forms: challenges that can combine the traditional, the irregular, the catastrophic and the disruptive; this is hybrid warfare.
For its part, Russia, while accepting its inferior position, was, at the same time, the most capable of developing this type of weapon. The Gerasimov Doctrine, by General Valeri Gerasimov, shows that Moscow understood that “the rules of war have changed. The value of non-military means to achieve political and strategic ends has not only increased, but in some cases exceeds the effectiveness of weapons.” Paradoxically, Gerasimov points to the West as the source of this form of warfare. However, Russia assumed a strategy of attrition of the West by all means that fits the conceptual keys of hybrid warfare, which injects uncertainty into the enemy from multiple fronts in order to destabilize him.
In this context, conventional warfare nourishes confusion, as those who were already taking the lead in the sophisticated rules of the game of the current competition between States, observe how the tangible refuses to disappear: Ukrainian troops resist the Russian invasion and Israeli troops advance in various directions against the Iranian hosts, both with US weapons that do touch.
For the United States, these represent two distractions with respect to the region where the only power with the capacity to project hegemony, i.e., the Indo-Pacific and China, must be placated. This especially is the thinking of many of those likely to be in the next administration. In any case, redoing ping-pong diplomacy in reverse is still complicated in the face of Moscow’s aggressiveness.
The U.S. strategy in the background swings between the attrition of one and the containment of the other. Israel and Ukraine are in the vanguard of the former, with Arab allies and Europeans behind. Regarding the latter, there are many more details to be sorted out. From Tehran to Moscow and from there to Beijing the escalating potential danger requires proportionality; Washington has simply been debating between different measures of the distribution of its attention.
Today the Pax Americana does not represent a time of harmony, but a period of challenged hegemonic stability with high levels of entropy; this interactive actuality of the real with the virtual invites the final completion in a balanced circuit of Carl von Clausewitz’s concept, for if war is the continuation of politics by other means, politics, in turn, must be the continuation of war by other means.
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