Members’ Day Lecture: The New World Order

At the Members’ Day held in the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament on 18 May, FVD International director, John Laughland, gave an hour-long lecture on the seismic shift currently underway towards a new multipolar world order.

There are three principal elements to this:

1. Political
2. Economic
3. Military

Politically, the Sino-Russian axis is stronger than ever. Putin’s recent visit to Peking only emphasized how deep the alliance is. The joint Russian-Chinese statement put out after the visit is a severe rebuke to both the EU and the US which had both tried to drive the two giants apart.

Economically, the West is losing ground. China overtook the USA as the world’s largest economy in 2015.  More importantly, both China and Russia make things. The GDP figures for the USA are largely inflated by essentially unproductive economic activity – overpaid lawyers, for instance. When Western leaders laughed at Russia for having an economy the size of Spain’s, they were duped by misleading GDP figures. Sanctions have severely harmed Europe which is rapidly growing poorer relative to the USA whose per capita GDP is currently 80% higher than that of the euro zone, the two having been the same in 2008.

Militarily, NATO is losing in Ukraine. NATO is not used to, and unequipped for, fighting classic wars.  It has fought counter-insurgency operations for the last 30 years - and often lost them. Russia has demonstrated industrial and military superiority – at the top end, hypersonic missiles are a game-changer but Russian shell production is three times that of the US and EU combined. This combination of industrial output, manpower (the Russian army has hundreds of thousands of men) and the capacity to wage a classical war, including a war of attrition, means that the writing is on the wall for NATO and the collective West.

The slides shown contain hyperlinks to the original sources.

The full presentation can be found here.