They carry the stigma of a colonial past. They came on stage supervised by the institutions of Washington. For decades they have only known American hegemony. Now they have tired of her and want to go on their own.
Fiona Hill is a specialist in international relations, an expert on Russia and Europe. The daughter of a miner from Durham, in the north of England, she worked as a waitress and in the car wash as a young woman. In the 80s she wanted to enter Oxford. But the interview went bad. “It was like a scene from Billy Elliot [the movie about the dancing son of miners]. Those in the office laughed at my accent, at how she was dressed. It was the most embarrassing and horrible experience of my life.”
He had to go to Saint Andrews, Scotland, to study history. She traveled to Moscow, learned Russian, and was seated next to Putin at a dinner. "He ignored me." She later traveled to the United States, became a naturalized citizen, and worked as an intelligence analyst in the Bush and Obama administrations. She entered the National Security Council and in 2017 was appointed adviser to President Trump for Russia. She respected him: “He had a rare talent. She spoke the language of ordinary people. She knew what people wanted." But she was as invisible to him as she was to his Russian counterpart. As far as Trump came to, whom she defined as the exponent of the "macho", she went to call him "dear".
He knew how to get revenge. When the first impeachment against the president came, who was prosecuted for blackmailing the Ukrainian Volodimir Zelenski, Fiona Hill testified for ten hours against Trump. She began her speech by thanking the United States for allowing her to pursue a career that would not have been possible in class-oriented Britain. She later described an erratic president, illiterate in international affairs, overly sensitive to flattery and sympathetic to Putin.
With everything that has just been told, you will understand that Fiona Hill is a tough person, capable of eating a child raw. She demonstrated it this May 14 in Tallinn (Estonia), where she spoke about the situation of the United States in the world today. This is the summary of what she said: the war in Ukraine has triggered a rebellion by the countries of the so-called Global South (she calls them The Rest, as opposed to The West). They have grown tired of the hypocrisy of a Washington prone to force others to take sides in their own conflicts without concern for the problems of others.
According to Hill, the War on Terror alienated the Muslim world from America. This would have fulfilled the prophecy of Osama bin Laden, who sought to erode American power with the 9/11 attacks. Today it is the countries of the Global South -the Non-Aligned of the 1960s, but with greater power and presence- that express "a marked appetite for a world without hegemony". They do not fear China, to which they turn to trade and ask for credit. They just don't like Russia, with whom they also trade. But what they are clear about is that they want to distance themselves from the United States.
Pax Americana, Hill concludes, is dead. They, those countries that are not interested in the war in Ukraine, that do not want to get caught up in the clash between Washington and Beijing, think that the best thing the United States can do is to solve its internal problems.
What Hill said in Tallinn would not matter more if it were not for the fact that she has been a convinced neocon, an interventionist prized for the certainty of her diagnoses. She was the first senior member of the administration -not active, it is true- to break with the consensus of recent years in Washington, to verbalize this perception of global fatigue of the American power.
Hill may have exaggerated. But his frankness allows you to see where the world is moving. All these ideas already permeate the way of acting of the American power. His diplomacy will have to move towards a more “transactional” space, giving space to those countries that until now have been mere extras in the global theater. Biden snubs Chinese Xi Jinping, calling him a dictator, but rolls out the red carpet for politically dubious Indian Narendra Modi. These are the contradictions of the Biden administration, which claims to have human rights at the center of its foreign policy, but which exhibits stark pragmatism.
India is a sign of that transition towards a world “without hegemony”. It rivals China, which it surpasses in demographics; it buys oil from Russia, whom it has not denounced for invading Ukraine. And it closes technological agreements with the United States, a country that wants to make it the great global partner to counterbalance Beijing. India is going free, and the quality of its democracy has been questionable since the arrival of Narendra Modi at the head of the country. It is not the only symptom of that transition. The expedition of African countries to Kyiv to present a peace plan for Ukraine is another example of the diversity of interests that cross the global scene.
In the next decade, the climate crisis will put pressure on this world in apparent disarray to come to terms. One of the most pressing will be that of debt. The pandemic and the effects of the war have placed many countries at unsustainable levels. Frequently, those most exposed to the effects of global warming are the poorest. The institutions that have forged Washington's hegemony in the era that is ending - the IMF and the World Bank - will have to be reformed to accommodate these changes. The summit that has been held this week in Paris has been a first, timid attempt to reform the global financial architecture. But this has only just begun.
