There is no king on the throne
For the last two years, I have often pondered the question regarding international superpowers and how they behave with competing nations and the consequences for said actions. As a result, it remains important to always examine the existing assumptions that make up most of the discourse within both International Relations and Security Studies. One such existing assumptions that has become common place is that of an inevitability with how superpowers are destined for conflict. The most notable example of this being between both the US and China, there has been countless pieces of academic literature examining this topic and every aspect of what this means for the world at large.
This bipolarity between these superpowers has often left the question of which one will dominate the other eventually. Will the US curtail and contain a rising China, or will China come out as the global hegemon overstepping US supremacy. There have been many theories as too what will collapse the other nation eventually. From internal cultural divisions causing a Second US Civil War, to a demographic decline of China resulting from its One-Child Policy. As both, there has been much speculation to who will proverbially win out over the other.
This being said, there is a another direct and distinct possibility that instead neither the US nor China become the sole global superpower which then dominates the world and its structures. It is entirely possibly that within the next two decades we could be entering a period of where we have no global superpower at all.
The reason for this claim, is because nearly all assumptions regarding superpower competition ends with one nation rising and another declining, the point being it is hardly spoken that both nations can be in sharp decline themselves. Furthermore, from an outside perspective on both the US and China, this image might become increasingly apparent. For the US, we have a vast and almost increasingly uncrossable political and cultural divide between liberal and conservative America, we have the emergence of political extremism on both sides of the political aisle. Economically, we see the unstainable amount of private and public debt, that will have to eventually be repaid.
Within China, similar things can be witnessed, the failures of its Zero-Covid policies, its own demographic decline and political centralisation are other core issues that are often brought up, which many of used to explain why China will eventually fail. What is observable is that both nations in their own respective ways are declining in nature. The real question remains what would happen if both the US and China declined in power due to their own respective internal divisions at roughly the same time. Hypothetically it is not entirely unlikely that both nations could have a dramatic decline in a relatively short period of time (say in the space of five to ten years). The end results of this would mean that we are in turn live in a world without a major superpower dominating the international sphere, in short, we may not have a king on the throne. This may mean that both nations must spend much of their time tackling their own internal issues, instead of attempting to dictate the rest of the world.
The implications for this could be damning for the global world order, especially within the Indo-Pacific. This region has often been the proverbial and literal battleground for superpower competition, from colonialism, to World War 2 and the Cold War. As a result, Sino-American relations have been no different. If both superpowers were to in relative time decline, it would allow this vast region of the world to simultaneously develop outside of these core defining factions.
In conclusion, this aspect of how we view the international sphere (specifically within the Indo-Pacific) could yield a vital understanding of what may potentially happen within the next few years and our need to constantly reassess the core assumptions behind our pre-existing thoughts. One core assumption is that nations are either rising of falling, however it maybe worth remembering that it is entirely possible that both bipolar powers could easily fall off the map at any point. What this could simply mean is that there maybe no single defining ‘king’ on the global world throne.
Author
Mr. Nathan Wilson is a Research Fellow at Centre for Indo-Pacific Studies at the Forum for Global Studies, New Delhi. Nathan Wilson is a graduate of University of Glasgow in Global Security.