The US-unipolar hegemony’s “diplomatic” defence is making simultaneous use of attempting to create wedges among neutral or countries that are sympathetic to the multipolar order and exercising greater control of their own system of vassal and client states. Its intention is to enforce the strategic imperatives identified in the
Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski for geopolitical gaining and maintaining hegemony. In its diplomatic strategy, the US attempts to position itself as a powerful broker in its attempt to preserve its global hegemony. However, the cooperative diplomatic approach of non-Western-centric powers of the multipolar order, there are signs of a strategy more aligned towards an honest broker in regional conflicts that have been initiated and perpetuated by the US and its allies. This is seen in the diplomatic successes that saw a US-controlled system of international “mediation” in Geneva of the Syrian conflict (purposed for regime change) that has been replaced by the
Astana Process format or
the Afghanistan talks held in Tehran in the wake of the chaotic US retreat. This contrasts significantly when compared with attempts to create a
“NATO” in the Middle East or to expand NATO’s mission to include operations
against China to preserve the “rules-based” order. However, the diplomatic stance by countries considered to be ‘allies’ of the US and its global order such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, indicate they are taking a much more balanced and self-preserving stance in the wake of political, geopolitical, economic and social instability in core countries of the Western-centric order. Furthermore, the pragmatism and common sense of the non-Western-centric countries such as India in maintaining an independent position on hot foreign policy topics as Ukraine in spite of US coercion and not being drawn into US-controlled geopolitical structures
as QUAD intended to contain China.
As such the power of knowledge and information in the contemporary global knowledge society has the potential to accelerate and slow down the global transformation. In the run up to the US presidential election that saw Joe Biden come to power, a major foreign policy platform was for the United States to
“take back” the global leadership role. Western politics, mass media and diplomacy are used as instruments of war, which operate in the information realm, but are aimed at the cognitive realm of global audiences to shape the physical realm that is currently in a state of unstable geopolitical flux. At this stage, the efforts to preserve the unipolar order seems to accelerate the decline of the Western order and the rise of the Non-Western order. The value and role of national sovereignty and foreign policy decision making autonomy is especially paramount during periods of geopolitical instability for lesser powers to be a subject of international relations and not an object of geopolitical games by an empire in decline.