ABSTRACT
Until recently, argues Philip Stephens in the Financial Times, Western leaders believed China and Russia ‘would eventually decide they wanted to be like “us”. China would develop as a responsible stakeholder in the existing international order and Russia, albeit with missteps, would see its future in integration with Europe’ (Stephens 2014: 1). However, he adds, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin ‘have decided otherwise. The world is waking up from [its] postmodern dreams of global governance to another era of great power competition’ (ibid.). In this final chapter we will examine the merits of this observation and the extent to which it accurately reflects the unease felt by Western leaders and commentators towards the emergence of a posthegemonic order and, more specifically, the implications of Chinese and Russian foreign policy for the financial and strategic power of the West. For while Russia does indeed see its future in partnership with Europe, this is precisely what the US and UK fear the most, namely a geopolitical condominium between Berlin and Moscow which excludes the Anglosphere from Eurasia. But while relations between Russia and the West are complicated by Realpolitik, a deeper source of conflict concerns the financial logic of capitalist geopolitics, namely the social form of monetary power constituted by transnational capital in a decentred global growth system in which the US dollar now constitutes a less secure medium of exchange and store of value. The approaching conflict of the early twenty-first century is not simply a consequence of traditional great power rivalry or the refusal of the US to abandon its claim to exceptionalism, but a conflict over the right to issue and control the international unit of exchange, particularly in the global energy markets. Since 1944, this right has belonged to the US, which abandoned gold in 1971 and debased the dollar in a effort to sustain America’s global financial and geopolitical power. However, America’s current failure to resolve its fiscal crisis is undermining the stability of the US dollar as a transnational form of money capital, and as the global economy transitions towards a posthegemonic multipolar growth system, US corporate-state elites are faced with the prospect of a multi-currency trade settlement system and a loss of monopolistic power in the energy markets.
