The West’s hegemony after World War II rested on two claims: its ideological sponsorship of a globalised economy and its claim to being the guardian of international law. Both claims had become frayed over the years and in 2024 they came undone. America’s assault on TikTok and its complicity in genocidal violence in Gaza are two contrasting but connected symptoms of the dissolution of the US-led world order.
Till the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hypocrisies of the West were discounted by the reality of the Cold War. The Cold War was sold as an existential conflict, a life-and-death struggle that justified the napalming of Vietnam, murderous counter-insurgency in Southeast Asia, violent coups that overset democratic governments in Iran and Chile and the embrace of apartheid South Africa. Not everyone accepted the ‘free world’ at its own evaluation, but within its borders it was incontestably freer than its ideological enemy, actually-existing communism.
The end of Soviet communism deprived the West of this get-out-of-jail card but for the first twenty years after the Wall came down, this didn’t matter because America was the world’s solitary hyperpower and its world order was the only game in town. Manmohan Singh’s eagerness to tilt towards the US in the Noughties was just one instance of this geopolitical reality: countries had a choice of sheltering under America’s umbrella as an ally or a client, or risk becoming roadkill like Iraq or Afghanistan or Libya.
Historians will find many reasons for the end of this American era, but the siege of TikTok reminds us that its largest cause was the epoch-defining rise of China and America’s unwillingness to deal with China on level terms. The US government’s willingness to curb China’s technological and trading clout through bans and restrictions isn’t new. The bans that most Western countries imposed, prompted by the US, on the integration of 5G technology from China into Western networks, the ban on gadgets and appliances manufactured by Huawei, were early instances of Western discomfort at being out-competed by China.
Those interdictions had a semi-plausible rationale; Chinese hardware in the West’s digital plumbing might allow Beijing a backdoor into its data networks. The bid to force the sale of TikTok to an American company or some pliant third-country operator lacks even that pretext. Here the argument is that the algorithmic secret sauce dreamt up by Chinese scientists has captured the American imagination and that can’t be allowed. The solution is either a forced sale or a total ban.
Consider the implications of the ‘our young people are being seduced by alien Fu Manchus’ argument. The American State and its giant tech companies are conceding that ‘their algorithms’ are better than ‘our algorithms’. Failing a forced sale, the US government will make app stores delete the TikTok app and force internet service providers to block web access to TikTok, mimicking the Chinese State which has erected a digital firewall that blocks insidious social media platforms like Facebook and X from corrupting its citizens. The US, that apostle of laissez-faire and free speech, now wants to save 170 million American TikTok users from themselves by banning an app. It’s hard to be a hegemon and a laughing stock at once.
One of the arguments advanced for banning TikTok should the Chinese refuse to allow its sale was that the content it had served up to its American users about the war in Gaza was biased. The Economist, which has consistently promoted the Anglo-American consensus that there should be no permanent ceasefire despite the death toll till Hamas is eliminated, delicately observed that “some allege a skew in TikTok’s Gaza coverage”. The anxiety induced in the Western establishment when relatively small, non-Western platforms like Al Jazeera broadcast alternative perspectives on geopolitics metastasizes into a panic attack when a popular social media platform is seen to circumvent the mainstream media’s consensus on shibboleths like Israel’s right to self-defence, aka Gazan lives are cheap.
No one can claim to fully understand the quasi-religious conviction of Western leaders that Israel has a license to kill as many civilians as it likes in its pursuit of Hamas. Israel is still killing civilians; it says it has readied a plan to invade Rafah and Joe Biden continues to arm the Israel Defense Forces with the weapons it uses to kill Gazans. The IDF’s indiscriminate bombardment and barbaric gloating have been continuously visible on social media. South Africa has leveraged international humanitarian law to accuse Israel in the International Court of Justice of genocide. As a result, the West’s indifference to non-Western suffering, its steadfast support of atrocities that shred international humanitarian law, has been visible in real time, right through the duration of this slaughter.
The starkness of the West’s hypocrisy, its logistical support for war-making that is plausibly genocidal, can’t be unseen. The belief that endured amongst the opinion-making elites of the non-Western world that America and its allies embodied, under their carapaces of self-interest and realpolitik, an aspiration to a rights-based world and a rules-based order has been graphically shown to be deluded. There is no holy Cold War to be invoked to buy Israel or the West indulgences for these crimes, no ideological enemy who can be relied on to collateralise this killing. China is an authoritarian State but it’s hard to make people believe that the country that makes the world’s solar panels, iPhones and washing machines is the devil incarnate.
Europe’s politicians, across the ideological spectrum, are doing their best to fashion an Islamist bogeyman out of the anti-war protests. In Britain, Lee Anderson, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have all done their bit to suggest that Muslims protesting the war in Gaza harbour within their ranks extremists who threaten the lives and political independence of members of Parliament. Three calculating men, desperate to caveat any call for a ceasefire, yet willing to play with fire.
Meanwhile, Russia’s unending war on Ukraine demonstrates that a dollar-denominated world economy and the threat of an American embargo cannot guarantee victory. If anything, the war in Ukraine has given large, non-Western nations like India and Turkey experience in circumventing (or ignoring) Western embargoes. As Ukrainian forces retreat and their Western supporters begin to count the cost of reclaiming every inch of ceded ground, military historians will chronicle not the weapons the West gave but the weapons it withheld. A West that fails to hold the line in Ukraine and draws no red lines in Gaza is a fitful, dangerous power bloc, not a hegemon.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
