Our world is now made up of EUUSJACKs & CRINKs
People talk about all the bad things going on as if that itself is its own topic. Even as a conversation starter, people are unsure which to lead with, Israel/Palestine, Russia/Ukraine, Armenia/Azerbaijan, the list goes on. There is even a new term for it, “polycrisis” which is an erudite way to say, “Wow, there’s alot of scary stuff going on right now!” In times of uncertainty, always good to look back at history. But another way to extract meaning from apparent chaos is history’s steady companion, taxonomy.
In the last twenty years the world has gradually settled into two broad camps, the EUUSJACKs (EU, US, Japan, Australia, Canada, Korea, etc) and the CRINKs (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, etc).
The EUUSJACKs are economically powerful, democratic states that act predictably and overwhelmingly in accordance with the rule of law. They are not perfect, and many forces within them fight against their basic identity, Victor Orban in the EU, Trump and his supporters in the US, etc. But they have a basic commonality and ability to coordinate.
The CRINKs are are lead by supreme leaders for life, are corrupt, imperial, and aggressive. They are inherendly unstable because they have no leadership succession plan after the strong man dies. There is little differentiation between government, party, leaders, and commercial entities. Journalists who promote truth are in danger. These governments do what their leaders want, and act in the interest of those leaders. They each and all work with varying degrees of success to coerce or encourage support from their citizens, but without real elections, that is a “nice to have” rather than a “must have”.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sped up the clarity around membership of these two groups. Russia has become completely reliant on China and that is likely to continue even after the war and Putin. Russia’s and certainly Siberia’s fate is likely to be as a colony of China. As China emerged from isolation, it became economically powerful in the decade after joining the WTO in 2001. But in the last several years, it’s economy has weakened under a lack of transparency and corruption and Xi Jinping has diverted its focus from peaceful commercial success to a more harsh and imperial posture and alliances.
There are three main foundational traits that the identify EUUSJACKs and those who are close to them: Democracy, Transparency, and Climate Policy. All the EUUSJACKs are largely democratic. Each struggle with areas or aspects that are not democratic, but there is a process and possibility for massive popular antipathy to change leadership. Minority rights are to a degree protected and there is largely rule of law. There is sufficient transparency that corruption is kept within limits and it can be identified and punished in the courts. And each agrees that humans caused climate change and that it is the most important long term policy challenge facing the human species. They each agree that all states bare some responsibility for addressing it.
The CRINKs are not democratic in almost any way. Iran has elections, but candidate selection and freedom of expression is so circumscribed that it cannot be said to be a democracy. All four are wildly corrupt and nationalistic with considerable state sponsored efforts to support national narratives of victim-hood. They all sabotage or ignore international efforts to address climate change. The leaders steal money and usually try to invest or deposit it in the EUUSJACKs.
Until Russia needed China’s help with it’s invasion of Ukraine, China was more or less trying to appear to stay out of each group. Now it has clearly decided which side it is on. But there are other countries that try to stay independent. These tend to be countries that need close relations with the EUUSJACKs and/or have a leader who wants to stay in power for life and so wants to limit the power of democracy. The most important of these is India, which is still a democracy, albeit one lead by a popular demagogue that does not sanction Russian oil. The enormous volume of cash that Saudi Arabia takes from the ground and deploys allows it to buy proximity to the EUUSJACKs. For now, Israel, lead by a corrupt demagogue, is a democracy for its nine million citizens but not for the five million Palestinians it controls but who have no rights.
Corrupt leaders, demagogues, autocrats tend to like, respect, or at least understand each other, Trump, Orban, Putin, Xi Jinping. There is a stylistic affinity, but because they lie and have such weak institutions, real lasting agreements are challenging for them. Self interest is how they operate. At the same time, the EUUSJACKs are or at least try to be, even handed and fair and are good at agreeing on common interests and working together via signed agreements.
Our future will be largely decided by whether the EUUSJACKs can coordinate and harmonizes their efforts domestically in terms of guarding against sabotage, supporting each other militarily, strengthening democracy and transparency, and addressing climate change. Or, the other possibility, the CRINKs will project their power internationally via corruption, sabotage, and war so that the EUUSJACKs divide and each become even more inwardly focused. Hope not.
#EUUSJACK #CRINK
