My excellent friend and former colleague Steve Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School calls them the predatory hegemons. America, China, and Russia are prowling the world, turning a rule-ordered playing field into a jungle in which the rule of the strongest prevails. The middling powers Prime Minister Mark Carney talked about at Davos are scrambling to escape the jungle. Carney’s travel schedule—Delhi, Tokyo, Sydney—maps the emerging contours of a counter-order of defence and economic partnerships.
Middle powers can seek to protect themselves from the predators, but they can’t keep the predators from ripping each other’s throats. So, the biggest question in international politics is whether the predatory hegemons can cease their depredations and forge a new global order instead. From the hegemons’ point of view, a future in which the only question left is who destroys the other first is not a happy prospect.
Animal predators tend to stay out of each other’s backyards, feast only on prey that other predators won’t touch, and risk a fight to the death only when the survival of their group is at stake. If this is true in the animal kingdom, it might be true in our fragile human world. As in the animal kingdom, a jungle without rules is too dangerous even for predators.
At least once before in history, great powers have drawn back from the fearful implications of a lawless world. We owe the order created in 1945 to the Soviet, American, and British realization at Yalta and Potsdam that armed giants—one possessing nuclear weapons, and another on the brink of doing so—would destroy each other unless they agreed to a basic framework of deconfliction and conflict management. The order was often violated—by the predators themselves—but at least it kept the world free of nuclear war. The question is whether a new order among the three predators is possible.