Continuity and change in Australian foreign and defence policy

It is being rivalled by BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and now South Africa. The term was originally conceived by UK economist Jim O'Neill in 2001.

Traditionally the main WEIRD World economic group has been the elite G7, created in 1973. The Group's seven members are US, UK, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada. The G7 has about 10 per cent of the world's population and about 43 per cent of global economic output.

BRICS represent about 42 per cent of the world's population and about 33 per cent of world economic output. The BRICS lack the unified worldview that underpins the G7 (India and China, for example, are not the best of friends). But they certainly see themselves as the rival to the WEIRD World.

A third change is the decline of the "McDonald's Golden Arches Theory of World Peace". The slogan was never taken too seriously by International Relations scholars, but it did have a hint of truth: trade knits countries together. Therefore, no two countries which allowed the sale of fast food in their countries ever went back to war against each other.

There have been some exceptions to the theory, such as the conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but overall the theory held until February last year with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It remains to be seen if it will continue to apply in the case of China and Taiwan.

A fourth change is the impact of Moore's Law. Information technology pioneer Gordon Moore, who died a few weeks ago at age 94, wrote an article on April 19 1965 speculating on the increasing power of IT and reducing cost of IT. That rate of change has held up. We are now heading for a third revolution in warfare: gunpowder, nuclear weapons, and now artificial intelligence (AI).

We have no way of knowing where AI will take us. It is assumed that by about the year 2045 we will have AI as smart as humans (or at least until it doubles again and so leaves us well behind!). Will AI keep us on as pets – or tell us we are now redundant?

Implications

I never thought I would be talking about a war in Europe in the 21^st century. I thought we had left that habit behind in the 20^th century.

February 24 2022 was a turning point in world affairs. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has created a new level of uncertainty in world affairs.

1989-91 saw the end of the Cold War, which had been the central defining event of the period 1945 to 1989. President George HW Bush spoke about a "new world order": the Soviet Union had collapsed, China was opening up peacefully for international trade, and the US was the sole undisputed super-power. It was then fashionable to be optimistic about world politics. This new world order represented the "triumph of the Western idea" of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.

But the Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed that. Ukraine represents the best-situated, most productive piece of Russia's former Soviet empire, and so it was the logical place for Putin to start rebuilding the Russian empire.

Optimism has now been replaced by pessimism. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has shown how hopes of trade knitting the world together via trade (such as Germany's heavy reliance on importing Russian gas) have proven illusory.