Opposing the petrostates will be the Green Entente.
Foreign Policy
75
19 دقيقة قراءة
0 مشاهدة
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney didn’t come to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January to offer hope. He came to pronounce a death. The liberal international order—that elaborate architecture of institutions, norms, and U.S.-guaranteed public goods constructed in the aftermath of World War II—was over, he announced, and the rupture was irreversible. But Carney’s eulogy, sober and precise as it was, understated the depth of the break.
U.S. President Donald Trump isn’t merely ending a set of diplomatic arrangements or a particular configuration of great-power relations. He is presiding over the end of the fossil-fueled model of industrial civilization that made the liberal order possible, profitable, and, for a time, politically sustainable. Trump didn’t initiate the decline of fossil fuels’ global metabolic hegemony; it was instigated by the manifest instability posed by climate change and rivalrous oil-access impediments like the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. But he has ensured a rivalrous competition, rather than a smooth transition, to replace it.
The liberal international order’s replacement thus won’t be negotiated in Geneva or adjudicated in The Hague. It will be determined by who controls the energy flows, mineral deposits, and technological systems on which all modern life now depends.
This is an ecological cold war, and it differs from its predecessor in ways that matter enormously. The original Cold War was a contest between liberal capitalism and Soviet communism—between two theories of how human societies should develop themselves economically and organize themselves politically. The new cold war is a contest between competing metabolisms.
On one side, the Green Entente: China and an emerging electrostate bloc, which has bet its industrial future on solar panels, batteries, and the vast mineral supply chains that feed them. On the other, the Axis of Petrostates: the United States under Trump, Russia, and the Gulf monarchies, which have staked their power and fiscal survival on prolonging the fossil fuel era and weaponizing energy abundance against those who would end it.
Ideology still matters at the margins—but it cuts across these blocs rather than defines them. As during the Cold War, the winner in the struggle may well be determined not as much by the actions of the superpowers themselves as by the choices of the nations caught between them: what Carney called, with characteristic understatement, the middle powers.
A giant oil refinery at night with a U.S. flag on it.
An aerial view of Marathon Petroleum’s refinery in Carson, California, one of the largest oil refineries in North America, on March 10.David McNew/Getty Images
The Axis of Petrostates is a reactionary coalition—led notably by the United States, in tacit coalition with other major oil- and gas-producing states such as Russia and the Gulf monarchies—whose economic models and civilizational narratives are inextricably tied to fossil fuels. For these leaders, oil and gas are more than commodities; they’re proof of national virility, fuel for a specific brand of traditionalist restoration, and leverage they can use to undermine the liberal order they all detest.
Upon returning to office, Trump effectively decided to wave the white flag on the global competition for green technology leadership by rescinding subsidies for the industries of the future. To be sure, rather than straightforwardly admitting defeat, Trump went on the rhetorical offense, with his 2025 National Security Strategy dismissing climate change as a “disastrous” ideology and speaking of national “energy dominance” as a counterpoint to weak (and feminine-coded) green globalism. Echoing similar gender anxieties, Russian President Vladimir Putin argues that oil revenues can fund Russia’s pursuit of a unique, self-sufficient Orthodox civilization that resists “Western decadence.” And for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s oil bounty promises to transform the desert kingdom into a high-tech global hub while maintaining Islamic leadership. In sum, while they differ in regime type, all three are united by a shared vision of “fossil sovereignty” that sees the green transition as a Trojan horse for a liberal and regulatory worldview that threatens their specific forms of centralized power and masculinist national identity.
To ensure that global demand for fossil fuels remains buoyant, the United States is leveraging the advantages of incumbency. Unlike the Green Entente, which must build an entirely new energy production, distribution, and consumption infrastructure from scratch, the Axis of Petrostates is playing infrastructural defense—a strategically easier position. It is using its financial and military weight to protect existing global fossil fuel supply chains—with Trump threatening, amid the war on Iran, to “take over” the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the Persian Gulf’s oil passes—and encouraging developing nations to lock in their developmental model with coal- and gas-fired power plants and internal combustion infrastructure.
Under Trump, the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., which under former President Joe Biden had been restricted from financing fossil fuel projects abroad, has redirected its lending toward coal, gas, and oil infrastructure in the developing world, effectively subsidizing the export of metabolic lock-in alongside the hardware itself. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove European nations to seek alternative gas supplies, Trump has pressured European allies to purchase more U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a condition of continued security guarantees. These contracts, typically spanning 15 to 20 years, are commitments as binding as any infrastructure investment. The United States thus aims to create long-term metabolic dependency.
Within this bloc, Saudi Arabia serves as the swing supplier not merely through diplomatic weight but through the cold math of extraction geology. The House of Saud’s long-term vision for itself is as the last fossil fuel producer left standing even as the world shifts. The cost of oil extraction in the Gulf is the lowest in the world, rarely exceeding $10 per barrel—far below the cost of shale fracking in the United States (about $62 per barrel, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve) or Russia (where the least expensive wells cost $25 to $40 per barrel to operate). This means the Saudis can survive price wars that would bankrupt their allies. By maintaining the ability to flood the market and crash prices, Riyadh can simultaneously punish transitioners and ensure that fossil fuels remain the path of least resistance for developing economies.
Those differences underscore that, like Berlin-Rome-Tokyo in the 1930s, this new petrostate alliance is a marriage of convenience rather than a monolithic bloc. While Moscow, Riyadh, and Washington are aligned on the desire to maintain global fossil fuel consumption, and to spreading disinformation about climate change to do so, they are also price competitors on the global oil market. Many geopolitical differences continue to divide them: The United States and Russia remain at loggerheads over Ukraine, and Russia and Saudi Arabia continue to back different sides in regional wars from Iran to Sudan to Syria.
Workers wearing red walk through water underneath rows and rows of solar panels.
Workers check solar panels installed in a lake in Tianchang, in China’s eastern Anhui province, on Jan. 12. AFP via Getty Images
Opposing the petrostates will be the Green Entente, dominated by China. While the United States and its new compadres retreat into retro fuels, Beijing has positioned itself to dominate the emergent post-carbon energy system.
Born of a technocratic ambition to secure regime legitimacy and capture the industries of the future, China dominates every link in the green industrial value chain: According to the International Energy Agency, China controls more than 90 percent of global processing of rare earths and 94 percent of the production of permanent magnets (essential for electric vehicle motors and wind turbines); its share in manufacturing solar panels exceeds 80 percent; and it produces more than 70 percent of all EV batteries and also accounts for over 70 percent of global EV production. Nine-tenths of China’s investment growth in 2025 was in the green energy sector. It has also decoupled this growth from Western demand: Some 47 percent of China’s green tech exports now flow to emerging markets, making it the indispensable partner for countries across the global south, from Africa to Latin America. In short, by leveraging its authoritarian developmental state, China has gone in less than a generation from the world’s greatest environmental villain to its green tech hegemon.
Those inclined toward the Green Entente often view ecological modernization as an imperative for sustaining planetary habitability. But this isn’t just about environmentalism. Green technologies possess fundamental thermodynamic advantages over fossil fuels, which suffer from expensive energy losses during extraction, refining, and transport. For most terrestrial purposes, EVs, being simpler to manufacture and maintain, are already functionally superior to internal combustion engines. Likewise, the marginal cost of green energy production is already cheaper than that of fossil fuels, even if we ignore environmental externalities. Even skeptics of the likelihood of a speedy green transition, such as Vaclav Smil, concede that green tech is winning in energy production and transport.
The European Union, having suffered from its reliance on Russian natural gas and now facing a parallel dependence on a belligerent United States (which also happens to have tens of thousands of troops stationed on European soil), has a strong strategic incentive to join the Green Entente. The logic behind this alignment would be pragmatic: Europe provides affluent markets, while China provides the industrial muscle. The same applies to countries such as India and Japan, respectively the fourth- and fifth-biggest economies in the world, which rely on imports for most of their oil.
The trouble, of course, is that joining this bloc isn’t a simple trade agreement; it effectively means entering a hierarchical system led by Beijing. Because China has secured a massive (perhaps even insurmountable) lead in both green power generation and transport systems, any country seeking to go green is essentially forced to adopt Chinese hardware and standards. From this perspective, the Green Entente could represent the emergence of what Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann have labeled the “Climate Leviathan”: a global system where the climate emergency is used as a pretext for a new form of command-and-control dominance, in which tribute is paid in technological dependency and the risk of political blackmail at the hands of what is also a deeply illiberal and nationalistic regime in Beijing.
The transition from the liberal international order to the new eco-ideological cold war forces a brutal strategic calculation on the countries caught between the two blocs. What Carney called the middle powers—a diverse group ranging from wealthy established nations such as Canada, France, and Japan to emerging giants such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia—face an illiberal double bind: to choose between dependence on a bloc of militarily aggressive petrostates whose preferred technological suite all but guarantees planetary ecological ruin and bowing to the budding Leviathan in Beijing.
If the original Cold War was in large measure a contest for the “hearts and minds” of the postcolonial world over competing models of economic development, this new era will be a contest for the metabolic souls of the middle powers—the infrastructural and energy foundations on which their futures will be built. And unlike ideological allegiance, energy infrastructure is sticky. Once a country builds its grid around natural gas, once it populates its roads with internal combustion engines, once it ties its industrial base to petrochemical inputs, reversing course becomes extraordinarily expensive. Likewise if a country chooses the electrostate route. The leaders of both blocs understand this, and both are weaponizing it.
The Axis of Petrostates will deploy energy as leverage in two directions simultaneously. Internally, the United States and Gulf producers will use cheap, readily available fossil fuels as a tool of clientelism—offering developing nations fast, affordable energy access in exchange for long-term infrastructural lock-in. Saudi Arabia can flood global oil markets at will, crashing prices precisely when green alternatives become cost-competitive, thereby undermining the investment case for electrification in price-sensitive economies.
Externally, the petrostates will use energy as a coercive instrument against the Green Entente itself—threatening to cut supply, manipulate prices, or destabilize fossil fuel-dependent transition economies that haven’t yet completed their shift to renewables. Europe, still dependent on LNG even after the Russian rupture, remains acutely vulnerable to this kind of pressure.
The Green Entente, meanwhile, will leverage its dominance of clean energy hardware with equal deliberateness. Control over solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, EV supply chains, and rare-earth processing gives Beijing an infrastructural chokehold over any nation seeking to modernize its energy metabolism. The leverage here is less about price crashes and more about standards, compatibility, and dependency. A country that builds its grid on Chinese inverters, populates its roads with Chinese EVs, and routes its energy data through Chinese digital management systems has effectively joined the Entente whether it intended to or not.
Though regime mouthpieces deny it, China will also use access to green finance and technology transfers as diplomatic currency, rewarding alignment and withholding cooperation from those who hedge too visibly toward the Axis. What’s more, for countries such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea, trading U.S. petro-hegemony for a Chinese electro-hegemony not only is at odds with long-standing ideological and ethical commitments to democracy and human rights but also threatens to hollow out their already shaky industrial bases.
The critical question for middle powers is whether genuine independence remains possible or whether the physics of energy infrastructure will eventually force a choice. Grid interoperability, financial clearing systems, equipment serving networks, and deepening human capital investments will all incentivize making a commitment one way or the other. Intensifying geopolitical pressure will raise the cost of straddling—but also the incentive for such powers to carve out space between the two blocs.
Call it a new nonaligned movement.
An aerial view shows a patchwork of brightly colored pools.
Pools containing lithium carbonate and mounds of salt by-product stretch through a lithium mine in the Atacama Desert in Salar de Atacama, Chile, on Aug. 24, 2022.John Moore/Getty Images
The original Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was born of the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 and formally established in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961. It was led by a legendary quintet: Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito. These leaders sought a “middle course” for states that had just escaped the shackles of colonialism and refused to be drafted into the binary madness of the Cold War.
A principal aim of the NAM was to promote economic cooperation among postcolonial states as an alternative to economic dependency on either the Soviet Union or the United States. Their mission was as much psychological as it was political: a demand for dignity, self-determination, and what Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere called a “positive neutrality” that would prevent their territories from becoming a mere theater for superpower proxy wars.
Whereas the original NAM was about maintaining ideological and economic autonomy apart from the Cold War division between the Americans and the Soviets, the new grouping will be more about infrastructural nonalignment. Unlike the original NAM, which was led by impoverished postcolonial states, today’s middle powers possess significant diplomatic, military, and economic capacity. They have the resources to form plurilateral diplomatic arrangements that can bypass traditional, decaying institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, United Nations, or World Trade Organization. A green energy and trade agreement between Chile, New Zealand, and Singapore or a mineral producers’ compact between Brazil and India requires no great-power blessing and answers to no hegemonic arbiter.
The material specificity of the transition also provides some middle powers with forms of leverage that were unavailable during the first Cold War. Because the electrostate model requires vast quantities of critical minerals—lithium, cobalt, rare earths, and so on—countries rich in these resources have become a crucial strategic prize. States such as Brazil, Indonesia, and Kazakhstan, which are all well-endowed with both hydrocarbons and green tech-relevant minerals, are successfully pursuing multialignment policies to host investments from both blocs, playing Beijing and Washington against each other to maximize their own national autonomy.
The strategies that middle powers are adopting with respect to another domain of U.S.-China geostrategic rivalry, namely artificial intelligence and other forms of computation, provide a clue as to what infrastructural nonalignment may look like. Rather than accepting a prepackaged “stack” from either superpower, many middle powers are seeking a third way. Vietnam, for instance, is developing its own AI instances rather than committing exclusively to U.S. or Chinese hardware. In Africa, entrepreneurs are engaging in “algorithmic suturing,” melding Chinese hardware with Western software to create local solutions that neither superpower fully controls. India, too, is developing its own model of AI sovereignty.
Beyond the material specifics of infrastructure, what makes this new nonalignment structurally different from its predecessor isn’t just the greater capacity of its constituent members but their collective willingness to treat multilateral institutions instrumentally rather than reverently. Where the original NAM operated largely through the U.N. system—lobbying, petitioning, and passing resolutions in forums ultimately controlled by the great powers—today’s middle powers are constructing parallel architectures. The expansion of BRICS, the growing diplomatic weight of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the proliferation of regional development banks all reflect a shared instinct: that the existing rules-based order was designed by and for a particular configuration of power that no longer exists.
These nations aren’t so much seeking to overthrow the system as to route around it, building bilateral currency swap agreements, regional supply chain compacts, and technology-sharing arrangements that reduce their exposure to any single superpower’s leverage. The new movement will likely lack a formal secretariat or founding charter; its coherence will emerge not from ideological solidarity but from the shared pragmatic interest in preserving optionality.
But, as with the original NAM, the middle powers also face deep internal divisions, split between oil producers that benefit from high prices and transitioners that are desperate for energy security. This fault line may prove the new movement’s biggest vulnerability. The original NAM fractured repeatedly along precisely these kinds of material interest lines—between commodity exporters and manufacturing economies, between nations seeking foreign investment and those pursuing import substitution—and today’s configuration carries analogous tensions.
An Angola or a Nigeria, whose state revenues remain overwhelmingly dependent on hydrocarbon exports, has fundamentally different incentives than a Bangladesh or Kenya, whose development trajectories depend on affordable, reliable electricity and whose populations are acutely exposed to climate disruption. The former has every incentive to align quietly with the petrostate bloc, prolonging the fossil fuel era that underwrites its fiscal survival. The latter needs the electrostate bloc’s technology and finance, even if it resents the dependency that comes with it.
These aren’t disagreements that can be papered over with diplomatic communiqués. They reflect genuinely incompatible material interests, and any new nonaligned coalition will be forced to manage them continuously or risk the kind of internal incoherence that eventually hollowed out its predecessor. The most likely outcome is a fragmented landscape of issue-specific coalitions: nations clustering around shared interests in mineral pricing, climate finance, or technology access without ever fully consolidating into a coherent third pole.
Ultimately, the choice for the middle powers comes down to what kind of modernity they want to inhabit. The petrostate bloc offers a backward-looking, carbon-intensive vision in which the weak and the small are firmly subordinated to the strong and the large—a world where energy abundance is weaponized as clientelism, where cheap oil buys loyalty, and where the infrastructural lock-in of a thousand procurement contracts slowly forecloses the future.
Joining a China-led Green Entente offers something formally more progressive: a forward-looking, post-carbon model that takes seriously the physical constraints of a warming planet. But it, too, carries a dark shadow—the potential subordination of national metabolic sovereignty to a Beijing-centered supply chain architecture that trades one form of dependency for another. This is a strategic abyss: to align with the aggressive, decaying past or the efficient, neo-totalitarian future.
What makes this moment historically distinctive is that the choice isn’t primarily ideological. The original Cold War was, at its core, a contest between competing theories of how human societies should organize themselves—democracy versus communism, markets versus planning, individual liberty versus collective mobilization. The new cold war cuts across all of those categories. Authoritarian petrostates and nominally democratic ones sit comfortably in the same bloc. China’s green authoritarianism and Europe’s climate liberalism compete within the same potential Entente. The organizing axis is not political philosophy but physical metabolism—who controls the energy, minerals, and technology on which modernity relies.
This is why the new nonaligned movement, if it coheres, will look so different from its predecessor. It won’t be animated by Bandung-era solidarity or Third Worldist ideology but instead by the icy pragmatism of plurilateral mineral-purchasing clubs and technological suturing. Its greatest asset is the very materiality of the transition: The lithium under Argentina’s salt flats, the Kalgoorlie nickel-cobalt project in Australia, and the rare earths distributed across Indonesia and Kazakhstan give the middle powers a form of leverage that the postcolonial NAM never possessed. Its greatest vulnerability, as the original grouping discovered to its cost, is internal fracture—the irreconcilable tension between oil producers whose fiscal survival depends on prolonging the fossil fuel era and transitioners whose development futures depend on ending it.
Carney’s eulogy for the old order at Davos was not a lament. It was a recognition that the rules-based liberal international order—that pleasant fiction of lawyerly norms and institutional deference—had already been torched and that the question was no longer how to restore it but how to survive its absence. The middle powers are the crucible where the answer will be forged. Their success depends on whether they can convert their mineral wealth, demographic weight, and hard-won diplomatic capacity into a genuine third path—one that refuses both the planetary ecological suicide of the Axis of Petrostates’ clientelism and the infrastructural dependency of the Green Entente.
