Perhaps the legends are true. Global elites of days past were portly, cigar-chomping con artists. They sat around a massive table, hidden deep below the earth in a secret smoke-filled bunker, pounding back bourbon and planning how to run the world. But by the time Trump arrived at the White House in 2017, those old globalists had all died from massive coronaries, lung cancer, or cirrhosis of the liver. They were so obsessed with running the world that they forgot about themselves.That story may sound like a bad dream, but the existence of a newer generation of global elites — little like those from our imagination — isn’t fiction at all. The new elites are skinny Europhiles who don’t drink or smoke. They can often be found in plain sight, surrounded by private security while out jogging with their spouses. They are nerdy, but they also have less than 15% body fat and are trying to live their rich lives as long as possible. They’re nothing like the old globalist myth, save one thing: they plan how to run the world.But don’t take my word for it; take theirs.Enter two of the newer global elites, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney and his jogging partner, Finnish President Alexander Stubb. .While my cynical depiction of old global elites is impossible to prove, the modern-day one is easily verified. Besides being posted on YouTube, members of this newer elite write books promoting their plans to run the world, using ideology. For Mark Carney, it’s his book Value(s) and net-zero ideology. For Alexander Stubb, it’s his book The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order, and his ideology called “value-based realism.” I’ve already reviewed Value(s), so now it’s time to look at Stubb’s work.In The Triangle of Power, Stubb tells the story of how democracies of the Global West, which today include the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, and South Korea, have fallen from their dominance in the 1990s. The West’s heyday was marked by George H. W. Bush’s “new world order” based on multilateralism, free trade, and the collapse of communism. It was then, Stubb believes, that we missed our chance. “The West, we now see clearly,” he laments, “had an opportunity to solidify Western values around the globe then — but we did not seize it. And the changes made to international institutions were modest and mostly regional, insufficient to match the magnitude of global change.”Today, Stubb argues, because of the West’s missed opportunity and increasing US protectionism, the autocracies of the Global East are moving to fill a growing power vacuum. The Global East includes China, Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and Iran. They broadly view multilateralism as a threat to their sovereignty and underlying undemocratic values.Critically, that nationalist tendency is why globalists like Stubb, or even Justin Trudeau, tend to conflate the global threat from autocratic regimes in the East with that from populist movements in the West. Stubb considers populism a serious threat to democracy. Trudeau made an even clumsier assertion in his speech to the European Parliament in 2022, when he equated the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine..While the Global East and West compete and tension between China and the US grows, a third bloc of nations is rising: the Global South. The Global South is a diverse group of nations that run the gamut from democracy to autocracy and contain over 50% of the world’s population, but less than 25% of the world’s GDP. Stubb explains the foreign policy of the Global South: “A new cohort of middle powers such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and India take a transactional, rather than ideological, approach.”His point is that a shift in his “triangle of power” between the diminishing Global West and the increasing Global East and Global South blocs means the old neoliberal world order is crumbling. Global democracy and human rights didn’t set in. Trying to impose Western values on other countries proved fruitless in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, as Stubb doesn’t mention, he also failed in economic efforts like Trudeau’s 2017 attempt to achieve a trade deal with China while imposing Western values on them.Stubb’s concern is that without Western values undergirding a new world order, fragmentation will continue within and between these three geopolitical blocs (the triangle), and open conflict around the globe will increase. His solution is that the West must stop trying to spread Western values, particularly because we are so often hypocritical about those values while still forcing them onto others. Instead, he suggests a new approach. “Our path toward a steadier future starts with seeing the world as it is,” he explains. “And defining a way to hold our liberal values while working humbly and respectfully with those who do not share them. I call this approach ‘value-based realism.’” .The bottom line then is that under value-based realism, the West would overlook the fundamental rights abuses and authoritarianism in other countries, so we could continue to do business with them. That would (somehow) also promote world peace.But whether the West maintains its position, according to Stubb, lies largely with the future of the Global South. He believes that following value-based realism will allow the West to grant agency to the South within crucial multilateral institutions like the United Nations (UN) as they become bigger world players. Otherwise, they might gravitate towards the East and multipolarity.A big problem with value-based realism, however, is a caveat of Stubb’s plan to maintain world peace: more global bureaucracy. He doesn’t attribute enough of their past failures to the inherent weaknesses within the UN, World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, or any global institution. Instead, he suggests they failed because the West didn’t allow enough agency in those institutions to both the defeated Cold War power in the East and the up-and-coming powers in the South. But, using his value-based realism, we can increase the size of global bureaucracy to include all these countries, whether they adhere to Western values or not. I find Stubb’s solution remarkably pedestrian and even a little naïve. .We don’t already have enough global bureaucracy? We don’t already have enough “diversity” within global bureaucracy? Stubb asserts the need for global bureaucracy exists more than ever because “the challenges we all face — demography, technology, and climate — know no borders.” Yet at least two of these may be an artifact of our laws and practices having not yet caught up to changes, which nations can address with their own initiatives. Stubb’s solution is self-indulgent too. To stop the number of escalating conflicts in the modern world, Stubb believes we just need more global elites to run multilateral institutions like the UN more effectively, as opposed to concrete changes within those institutions themselves. Magically, those changes will occur when we diversify by adding more bureaucrats from around the world. More rich people jogging together, deciding our future, (hopefully) avoiding more wars. How is that solution in the hands of newer global elites anymore trustworthy than the old myth of the fat cats in the bunker? How is it any more accountable to the average citizen of the world that they want us to become? I don’t think it is. While real elites are clearly more prosaic than imagined ones, they still have the same desire to run the world above everything else.
