On the 1st of December 2016, Rob de Wijk gave a lecture at the Embassy of Japan in the Netherlands.
A summary of this lecture was placed on the Japan Up Close website.
Present Strategic Context
We are heading into a new phase of geopolitics; the power of ‘the West’ declines and shifts to ‘the East’ which will have a significant impact on the international security situation.
The coming era will be one of multi-polarity and fragmentation. One of the key issues at play, which I discussed at length with my Japanese peers, is the eroding of the international rules that ‘the West’ created over the last centuries and decades. There is a high probability that these rules will not stand as we move into an era where new rules have to be developed which by definition leads to friction in international politics as we are unfamiliar with the behavior of the new team players.
To illustrate how the situation has changed it is interesting to note that up until about ten to five years ago in was quite easy for ‘Western’ countries to carry out an intervention into another country with a mandate from the United Nations. There are also instances however where ‘the West’ intervened without a mandate anyway, as happened for example in 1999 in Kosovo. Such courses of actions are becoming increasingly difficult however as mandates have become harder to obtain because of opposition by countries such as Russia and China, and for good reason. Russia and China have different views on democracy and human rights as well as a more traditional view of sovereignty which makes them less accepting of interfering into the affairs of other countries. The coming period the economic and political centers of gravity will move away from ‘the West’ and shift towards ‘the East’, accompanied by a rise of power politics, while at the same time the classical challenges such as climate change, scarcity and demography remain. Continue reading
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