A Disengaged U.S. and a Global Order in Transition

Who Will Mind the Gap? A Disengaged U.S. and a Global Order in Transition

The U.S.-led liberal international order is today poised at a dramatic inflection point in more ways than one. It is, also in many ways, an induced crisis precipitated, in large part, by the slew of executive actions by U.S. President Donald Trump at the start of his second presidency in January. Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from international agreements and institutions as well as reneging on commitments under international law, have stoked fears of the global order going into a tailspin. The looming threat of a U.S. return to an isolationist foreign policy have resurfaced with the spate of U.S. withdrawals from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Paris Agreement, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA). Trump’s announcement of sweeping foreign aid cuts have further fed these fears, in no small measure, owing to the fact that the U.S. has been the world’s single-largest donor for decades, having disbursed nearly $65 billion in overseas development assistance in 2023. Trump administration’s spiel of ‘selective engagement’ at the global stage and derision towards the idea of open and free trade, could possibly be the proverbial last nail in the coffin of the post-war liberal international order.

As the U.S. cedes space at the global stage, of its own free will, it will have to contend with new actors laying claim to it. The space thus ceded could well be an incubator of sorts, of new forms of Southern multilateralism helmed by the Global South such as the New Development Bank (NDB) and the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Fund. For emerging powers of the Global South, it could also afford increased opportunities of agenda-setting within UN bodies.  A case in point is the role that China has been playing in shaping the discourse within the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which it has headed since 2019. At an ideational level, these represent a discursive shift towards a non-Western model.

The shaping of a distinctly non-Western agenda does not, however, mean an anti-Western agenda. This is reflected, for instance, in India’s nuanced shift from hitherto conventional views of seeing the West in adversarial terms. This was further echoed by India’s External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar dismissing the ‘West as bad guy’ as a dated trope. Interestingly, this marks a continuity rather than a departure as the history of Southern multilateralism reveals. It may be recalled that despite its strident anti-West posturing, the New International Economic Order (NIEO) debates of the 1970s, were not framed in confrontational terms. Rather, the Charter of NIEO, for instance, called upon states to ‘cooperate in facilitating more rational and equitable international economic relations’.

The spillovers from the global to the regional are likely to cast a long shadow on South Asia, as the region copes with declining aid flows, rising debt levels and economic downturns. This will also compounded by the scaling back of development assistance by traditional donor countries as they battle budgetary constraints as well as a rising groundswell against foreign assistance. Across Europe, for instance, aid budgets are being slashed with the European Union recently announcing plans to reduce its development spending by 35 per cent ($2.2 billion) over the next three years. For South Asia, this would mean a declining share of already falling global development funding. In the short term, with the sudden suspension of long-running development projects, the region could be staring at an impending humanitarian crisis. The World Bank’s latest State of Social Protection Report paints a dismal picture of 1.6 bn people in low and middle-income countries being without social protection. The UN’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) predicts that if current trends continue, governments will fall significantly short of meeting the 2030 Zero Hunger target.

The fundamental challenge for South Asia’s policymakers will be to address these widening funding gaps.  Humanitarian agencies have been reporting increasing shortfalls in aid receipts. Emergency programmes in Afghanistan have been terminated due to the administration’s concerns that the funds were benefitting terrorist groups. The Trump administration’s ending of funding to the World Food Programme (WFP) could push millions of people back into destitution and starvation. There are also serious concerns that reduced funding could result in the resurgence of epidemics worldwide. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has warned of a potential resurgence in HIV infections and funding shortfalls could jeopardise programmes that have offered critical services to marginalised communities. India is likely to be impacted, given that it has the world’s third-highest number of people living with HIV infection. The funding cuts are also likely to have a disproportionate gender impact, with women bearing the brunt of the setbacks. For millions of people, especially women in recipient countries, its immediate impact is already being felt in terms of loss of access to a range of critical services, ranging from lifesaving emergency relief, mobile health teams, and initiatives that aim to prevent gender-based violence.

Going forward, increasing U.S. global disengagement will open pathways for new entrants to not just question the continued salience of liberal normativity as the organising principle of the world order but will also help shine a long-overdue light on Southern accounts of modernity and their critical role in historically shaping the contemporary world.