The Core and the Gap

How you prevent any game from collapsing into a chaos is to play that game with an appropriate set of rules. To enforce those rules the game needs a referee or an umpire. For the states, their constitutions are their rules and the institutions are the referees and umpires that enforce the implementation of the rules. But what if the leaders of the state are corrupt, and the institutions compromised? Not playing the game with a given set of rules will ultimately lead to statelessness — a state of chaos.

Thomas PM Barnett is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Pentagon’s New Map — War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. He divides the world into the core and the gap. Obviously, the core is the developed world and the gap is the world still developing. The core’s good life attracts the people of the gap who are fed up and frustrated when they compare their sorry existence with the good life being lived in the core. This frustration and resentment lead to public anger and demonstrations and coups. The latest has been in Gabon — a country that was a former French Colony. Sadly, the world that is developed today has contributed to the statelessness that most countries in the gap experience today. The British and the French colonised more than 95% of the African continent. Britain colonised 22 African states while the French colonised 20. My generation read history of evil empires but today’s generation has not only read that history but the history of ‘evil states’ created by the colonisers led by ‘evil leaders’. The definition of evil state is different for different people and it depends on which part of the world you reside. If you reside in the core, ‘axis of evil’ states are the definition and leaders like Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and Muammar Gaddafi are the evil leaders that must be eliminated. But if you reside in the gap, the military dictators and the colonisers imposed ruling regimes and their leaders are considered evil by the people, and hence coups and chaos.

Barnet, in his bestseller, states that there are four flows that keep the balancing act across the globe — people, energy, investment and security. I disagree and would also like to add one more flow — intellect. Core’s best grand strategy should have been to embrace the gap, shrink the gap and take the countries in the gap in its fold so that the core could gradually expand. Instead, the people in the gap have been left to fend for themselves — the classic example is my own country more being ruled by the dictates of IMF than by its own government. The people and the state have grown poorer while the elite through which the core ruled countries like us have gone richer. Energy scarcity and its availability on high prices has shut down the industries and now shutting down the basic life in people’s homes. Core provides security in the gap as long as the gap serves the interests of the core. Niger and the uranium deposits there is a good current example. A large percentage of France’s nuclear power plants ran on the uranium extracted from the deposits in Niger and to serve that end, France had a military base there. Now the people want them out, their ambassador has been declared persona non grata only because Niger has realised that they no more want to remain colonised.

After the two great wars, the US found, in globalisation, the remedy for a peaceful existence of the world. Not many would disagree with the idea but it is the disproportionate benefits of globalisation which are being enjoyed more by the core and less by the gap that has created hatred and resentment in the gap countries. We must understand the current strategic environment which is the ‘Ukrainian conflict strategic environment’ under which the process of globalisation is proceeding. One word that describes this process is mismanagement. If the process was being managed properly, would more than 58 countries representing more than half the world population abstain from condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine? The Americans and the West think that Ukraine has united the world. No, it has not; it has rather divided the world like never before. The West may be united but the rest is up against it and wants the root problems to be addressed rather than symptoms. If globalisation was managed properly, would there be increase or decrease in the number of people needing humanitarian aid in the world? Today 350 million people need humanitarian aid compared to only 81 million people 10 years ago. The African continent where coups are taking place, 600 million people have no access to electricity out of a total population of 1.2 billion in the entire Africa. There goes your one flow, the flow of energy, which was supposed to create balance between the core and the gap. Such disparity would only create imbalance and that is the reason why I have added the fifth flow of intellect — the faculty of reasoning and understanding that is now in plenty amongst the people in the gap to know how their lives have been exploited and ruined by the imperialist powers, the so-called liberal colonisers.

The countries in the gap are tired of listening, watching and understanding the definition of good life that the countries in the core live. For the want of such good life, people in the gap have over and over again elected representative governments and surrendered their freedoms but many such governments have only served their colonial masters abroad. The US may be the global leader, the world’s Leviathan but the countries in the gap don’t see it performing the role of the ‘Gap’s Leviathan’. People in the gap hate Western political influence and the control of their politics and their lives by these liberal imperialists.

Gap is not the problem. It is the core that is the problem. The core that creates firewalls to prevent the flow of immigrants, drugs, illegal money, pandemic, etc only to keep itself insulated from the gap countries. This is not the grand strategy of globalisation but a grand strategy of solidifying a permanent divide in the world.

African countries are setting a tone of how to get liberated from the repressive grasp of poor leadership, a leadership that continues to serve its colonial masters. I am convinced that these weak, lower and lower middle powers would not have taken such a position unless they had the backing of China and Russia — the two great powers that advocate multipolarity as the true substitute that can take forward the current World Order that unjustly benefits the core and in which the gap suffers.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 3^rd, 2023.

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