Revive the Anglosphere as a countervailing force

IN spite of the massive economic globalisation that followed the end of the Cold War three decades ago, a fragmenting world today faces the possible formation of several power blocs. Such blocs reflect the return of multipolarity to international relations after the bipolar world of the Cold War gave way to a historically unnatural moment of unipolarity belonging to the United States. Emergent power blocs are the reality of today.

Among the nascent power blocs are the Sinosphere, the Slavosphere and the Eurosphere. What is missing is the Anglosphere.

The Anglosphere is a potential bloc (which used to exist once) produced by cultural, political, economic and strategic affinity among English-speaking nations. It would consist of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

It is time to revive the Anglosphere to provide a countervailing force in the global politics of this day.

The times demand change. Resurgent China and Russia are seeking to reclaim the strategic space that they have ceded to others - China since the end of its rapprochement with the West in the opening years of this century, and Russia even earlier, since the implosion of the Soviet Union in the closing years of the last century.

Revisionist (that is, anti-status quo) actions undertaken by China in the South China Sea and by Russia in Ukraine in recent years signal their determination to be back on the fractious international stage with a vengeance.

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There is nothing alarming about all this. Great powers such as China and Russia do not retreat to the backwaters of history for long. They seek new streams of power projection. That is what they are doing, quite expectedly.

Caught between the Sinosphere and the Slavosphere, the Eurosphere is an example of approaching global irrelevance. The European Union has neither the will nor the ability to confront China or Russia to preserve a global balance of power. Europe is a supranational entity which would rather leave the ugly business of containing or fighting off rivals to others (in this case the United States) so as to concentrate on pooling sovereignty ever more closely among its members. That integration might be good for Europe but it means little for the rest of the world.

NO PUSHOVER

In these circumstances, a revived Anglosphere would introduce into global politics a countervailing force that it lacks today.

The Anglosphere would not be a pushover. It would consist of the United States, the pre-eminent economic and nuclear power in the world; Britain (the fifth largest economy which possesses a nuclear deterrent as well); Canada (the ninth largest); Australia (a continental nation that is the 13th largest economy); and New Zealand (the 50th largest economy).

Geographically and militarily, the United States and Canada oversee the centrality of North America in Atlantic affairs through Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Australasia represents the Anglospheric presence in Pacific affairs through Anzus, the Australia-New Zealand-United States pact.

The idea of a revived Anglosphere is so attractive to some that the British historian Andrew Roberts last year floated the notion of shaping the shared social values of the Anglosphere into strategic coherence by forming a kind of federation among the four "Canzuk" countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Federation would involve free trade, the free movement of people, a mutual defence organisation and combined military capabilities, and create "a new global superpower" allied to America, "the great anchor of the Anglosphere".

That would have been a dream with Britain enmeshed in Europe, and with the United States ruled by a viscerally isolationist president. Brexit and the arrival of a redemptive presidency in America offer hope that the two nations might come closer in bringing Canada, Australia and New Zealand on board a new adventure.

It will not be easy.

According to the scholar Andrew Mycock, the Anglosphere as it exists nascently now consists primarily of the Five Eyes, a secret intelligence and military network that connects the global dots among Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Expanding that network into a public declaration of global strategic identity would not come about easily. The remaining lure of Europe on the one hand and the fear of China on the other would make it difficult to forge an exclusive Anglospheric identity among its constituent nations.

However, Brexit has taken Britain out of Europe's immensely jealous orbit, and Australia is trying to keep itself out of the even more demanding Chinese one. Canada and New Zealand might not take too long to understand that they cannot defer making choices indefinitely. Those choices have to be anchored in America holding the default balance in shifting international equations.

A DETERMINING ROLE

True, pacifists would ask whether the reappearance of the Anglosphere would not amount to the containment of China and Russia. Of course it would, but containment is not a bad strategy. It signifies a wise middle way between appeasement and war. Appeasement feeds the growing appetite of contrarian powers, as Nazi Germany was fed once. War is what it took to stop an insatiable Germany ultimately. When successful, containment avoids war without appeasement. That is a great blessing in a nuclear age.

The Anglosphere, if revised, would help to hold a ring of containment around revanchist global powers. It would not bring back the unipolar moment in world history when American ascendancy after the Cold War proved to be short-lived. It would not recreate the bipolar world order. All it would do would be to try and ensure that the Sinosphere and the Slavosphere, with a pliant Eurosphere lying between them, do not set the terms of global history by default.

If, in time to come, today's spheres expand to encompass the Islamosphere (led by whichever power emerges victorious in the Iranian-Saudi Arabian contest) and the Indosphere, the Anglosphere would contribute to ensuring that the world remains recognisably secular and democratic.

The lessons of two world wars in the last century, in which the Anglosphere played a determining role, are a reminder of its possible agency in avoiding a global war in this century.

• The writer is a Singapore journalist.asad@sph.com.sg