Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting was held last week in an atmosphere of global realignments. The leaders’ speeches (3 women among men) from multiple countries expressed opinions on common issues: the war in Ukraine, the global financial system, poverty, the environment, democracy, and authoritarianism.
The first significant global difference was expressed between the countries of the so-called South and the North. That is, between developing countries and industrialized countries. There, the claim has to do with the massive debt that the countries of the South have with the world financial system, both private banks and international financial organizations, mainly the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The combination of the COVID pandemic, high interest rates, and unstoppable inflation has severely eroded the repayment capacity of many countries in the South. The UNGA meeting defined a generalized demand for relief from debt repayment yields and the conditions creditors want to impose.
On the other hand, concerns about environmental issues were also a priority for many reasons. The scarcity of water supply in vast regions of the world is aggravated by tremendous fires that devastate entire economies and rising sea levels that threaten the physical existence of whole island nations. In addition, the pollution of the seas endangers the existence of entire villages that depend on daily fishing for survival. In other words, the problems generated by climate change have already arrived, and many nations feel threatened by what they perceive could have apocalyptic effects on the very existence of their peoples and nations.
The South rightly considers that the major polluting countries are the most powerful economies: The United States, China, and Europe, including Russia. The unanimous demand of the South is that the North should do more to address the world’s climate crisis.
The novelty at the UNGA was the emergence, with a vital level of articulation, of an Eastern bloc against the West. The new Eastern bloc, led by China and Russia, seeks to create a counterweight to the Western bloc, led by the United States, Canada, Great Britain, the European Union, Australia, and Japan.
While elements of the Eastern bloc existed before the UN meeting, Russia’s war against Ukraine has completely altered the world’s geopolitical map. The dispute over the illegality of the Russian invasion and its violation of the Founding Charter of the United Nations has opened a deep rift in the structure of consensus agreed upon at the end of World War II among the international community. The division is being presented deceitfully by China and Russia, with the mermaids’ chant that it is a battle between capitalism and socialism, justice versus the injustice of the world’s centers of power. It is a disguise because China and Russia are capitalist powers worldwide. What really differentiates the East-West bloc is their political systems. They are divided between a market economy with democracy or a market economy under a dictatorship.
Thus, the world has regressed to two major systemic conflicts, as existed during the Cold War, but without the debate between socialism and capitalism. Today, the competition is for hegemonic positions in global markets. China and the United States are the two great hegemons in this dispute, which is for markets but also technological and military superiority. The rest of the world is aligned behind these two countries in confrontation.
In this dispute, Mexico will have to calculate how much it is in its interest to be “neutral” in its bidding or if, for strategic reasons, it will have to stop being neutral (“fence-sitter”) and commit itself to one side or the other. It is difficult for Mexicans to accept being part of the China-Russia bloc. Even if that is López Obrador’s first preference.
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