VSIt’s not yet time to take stock of the past year, but we’re getting closer and the metaphor that comes to mind is animal: the predators have all left the enclosure. To tell the truth, this is not completely new. In 2018, the German Social Democrat Sigmar Gabriel, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, already lamented that, in a world full of carnivores, the herbivores among which the Europeans were counted did not have an easy life.
He was not the only one. A year later, the former American neoconservative Robert Kagan – who always refused this distinction – had published a book warning the United States against the return of ” the jungle “. A world in which the latter renounced their responsibility as an imperfect metronome, he explained, would turn out badly, including for their interests.
“America First”, then hammered by Donald Trump, was a guarantee of stage success, but certainly not a long-term vision, given the tangle of economic, health and climate crises. The latter all have the bad idea of being totally indifferent to borders. Their answer ideally presupposes an order, inadvertently breached on all sides. From the return of war on the European continent to competition between great powers, everything is indeed going from bad to worse.
Large predators
At the G20 summit in Bali (Indonesia), in November, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, also went there with his animal allegory to describe the confrontation between the United States and China, assimilated to “two very restless elephants”. “If they start fighting, the whole jungle will suffer”he assured, pleading for an interposition force of other animals.
For vegetarians, more attached to norms and rules than to force, the brutal invasion of Ukraine produced by Russian savagery illustrated in an implacable manner the inevitability of the return of large carnivores and of a grammar that don’t bother with subtleties. In the latter, the abbreviations no longer refer to complex forums or subtle negotiation formats, but more prosaically to types of armament and calibers.
Under the effect of this return, the mechanisms of the international order of the past, often dysfunctional, spin in a vacuum without anything emerging. There is thus not much left of the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which brought together, more than a decade ago, ambitious powers combining strong economic growth and geopolitical ambitions.
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