By Abubakar Aliyu Liman
Scriptural discourses, characteristic of Abrahamic faith-systems, are replete with graphic allusions to Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Such narratives are invoked to foretell future happenings. In other instances, the apocalyptic tales are couched in malevolent symbolic shibboleth.
For me, I would rather reduce the four Horsemen to three in order to make sense of the geo-political and geo-strategic drama currently playing itself out before us. The global system is being overheated by the raging struggles between the forces of containment and hegemonic co-optation and those of resistance to western global hegemony.
Put simply, the matter at stake involves the inevitable decline and fall of Anglo-American Empire based on its arrogant miscalculation of the limits of its own powers, and the powers of the institutions and structures deployed to perpetuate its global hegemony. But the emergent powers in our post-cold war world are putting up a stiff resistance.
New block in the power global game
In today’s geopolitics, the three Horsemen of the Apocalypse, again discussing in eschatological terms, are here seen as the Achilles’ heel of the global hegemons together with their newfangled “rules based order”, which, to all intents and purposes, are everywhere flaunting all the carefully crafted conventions of international law, and the principles of decent behaviour in the processes of shaping the destiny of our world.
But what are the three Horsemen of the Apocalypse that are threatening to hasten the collapse of the current global hegemony? First, we have the misguided NATO adventure to contain Russia in its own backyard. As we are well aware, the raging war between Russia and Ukraine is not going on as planned by its western sponsors.
Second, the tinderbox of the seventy year old violent conflicts between the Israelis and Palestinians in the holy land of historical Palestine is another source of great concern. The pestering conflict has the potential of turning ugly, as it is indicating in the current conflagration. The Zionist State of Israel is refusing any form of peace entreaties simply because of the unalloyed support it enjoys from the United States and the European Union.
Another version of a global war
Third, the United States has since reconfigured itself into self-anointed global gendarmerie. On this score, it wants to start war with a more confident People’s Republic of China over Taiwan, the renegade Chinese territory. Like a bad general of an amateur army, America is opening up many theatres of war across the globe all at the same time.
However, one typical example of the dysfunction of the international system can be seen in the incapacitation of United Nations’ General Assembly and Security Council, two key organs of the body regulating international relations. While the General Assembly has totally lost its moral voice, the Security Council has, on its part, lost the capacity to enforce the resolutions it willingly arrived at through the consensus of its permanent members.
At the moment, explosive global developments can best be described only in terms of those very same looming find-de-siècle signs of angst and despair that have turned the atmosphere rancid. The existential crises constraining the wellbeing of our world today have the potential to seal the fate of the existing international system.
The ruling ideas and practices of the neoliberal global system are everywhere creaking. Anglo-American global hegemony is also showing clear signs of atrophy. Hence the manifest desperation of western powers in the face of counter-hegemonic challenges posed by the emergent forces of multipolarity, and the advocates of a more equitable international order.
New contending power blocs have already emerged, and they are so determined to upset the applecart. The new power brokers are eagerly waiting to fill the inevitable power vacuum, as global dominance slips out of the hands of residual western hegemons. Empires have come and gone. No empire is everlasting. That is just the way of the history of empires and civilisations. Nothing of course is permanent under the sun!
Otherwise, what do we think is the effect of the current challenges posed by the BRICS nations? What do we think of the ambitious expansionism of their new organisation? What are its strategic ambitions, especially looking at its de-dollarisation policy? Above all, what is the intent of its bid to create its own international system of currency exchange?
At this juncture, If all these developments are anything to go by, Anglo-American hegemony should as well be ready to kiss its dominance of the world goodbye. This is the context in which Nigeria, our Nigeria, is called upon to recoup its sovereignty, to rethink its dependency syndrome, and to also begin to reprioritise its engagement with the dying global powers for its own very survival.
The author is a professor of Popular Culture and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in Nigeria
