Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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On Sept. 3, Chinese President Xi Jinping oversaw a spectacular military parade in the streets of Beijing. His guests at the event were a who’s who of world leaders not aligned to the current America-dominated world order, foremost among them Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In a new audio essay to kick off the eighth season of The Lede, New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai considers whether the meeting could signal not just China’s rise as a global superpower, but a retreat of the United States on the world stage.
“I don’t think what we are seeing in Beijing is the beginning of the end of an American-led Western order. I think that story has already started, and we’re right now in the middle of it.”
“I don’t think what we are seeing in Beijing — and in an accompanying summit in the city of Tianjin — is the beginning of the end of an American-led Western order. I think that story has already started, and we’re right now in the middle of it,” Al Yafai says.
Referencing high-profile guests from past episodes of the podcast, such as the writer Robert Kaplan, the journalist Arwa Damon and authoritarianism expert Ece Temelkuran, Al Yafai considers why the American-led world order has invested so heavily in the Ukraine war — not only financially, but ideologically.
However, he also considers whether American decline may have started during the 2003 war in Iraq, and entered a new phase in the ruins of Gaza.
“Just as Ukraine exemplifies a worldview to Europeans, so Gaza exemplifies a worldview to the Global South. The world — the majority of the world — looks at the devastation of Gaza, and looks at its own history, and says, that is what the Western order is all about,” Al Yafai remarks.
Maybe the world is already moving on from the Pax Americana, wonders Al Yafai. He considers a quote from New Statesman columnist Bruno Maçães on the podcast in February, during a conversation about China’s rising superiority in the field of A.I. “They are now doing something better than us, they’re innovating. It’s not that they will become better than us at being Western. The leading ideas of the world will no longer be Western. The hierarchy will no longer be with the West on top.”