SINCE I was a kid, I’ve always been drawn to the dark world of espionage. At around the age of 11 or 12, I was already poring over my father’s Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy and Eric Lustbader novels, tomes which ran from 500 to 800 pages or more.
Holding those thick paperbacks under the faint, yellowish light of my study lamp gave me a sense of adulthood, a similar feeling I had whenever I sat on my father’s rickety swivel chair and pounded on his Remington typewriter.
These second-hand books, with their frayed covers and sepia-tinged pages, instantly transported me to places I’ve never been: the cobblestoned, café-lined streets of Paris, the frenetic, neon-landscape of Tokyo, and the frigid regions of the Antarctica.
The protagonists in these novels were usually a seasoned CIA officer whose mission was to save the world from impending nuclear Armageddon, or a veteran Navy seal who was deployed to Syria to rescue a top-level American diplomat and his diplomatic team.
Reading, for me, became an immersive experience. I was not merely seeing words across the page. I was witnessing scenes unfold before my eyes --- a plane exploding in mid-air, cars colliding and turning turtle, or the operative duking it out with the bad guys.
It felt like I was watching an ultra HD movie on Dolby. And in these films, which my hyper-active imagination conjured, I was not just a spectator. I was actually the hero who was being shot at by the KGB, hunted by the Yakuza, or pursued by the Mossad.
Every punch, kick or bullet felt real. Or, at least my mind told me so.
Despite their length, what really got me hooked to these spy novels was the worldview they gave me. It was in the pages of these books that I first learned about the US-Russian Cold War, the Middle East conflict, globalization and other key global issues.
And it is now this worldview that has served as my compass in understanding, interpreting and navigating the myriad challenges of the emerging global order that is now upon us, which is being labelled by American political analyst Ian Bremmer as the GZero World.
In this so-called GZero World, there is no longer a dominant hegemon or a group of allied countries that can dictate and influence at will virtually all key aspects of world affairs – financial markets, peace and security and diplomacy, to name a few.
With the United States, under the leadership of President Donald Trump, deciding to step back from its global leadership role, the world has entered uncharted territory where nations have to fend for themselves without their “big brother” covering their backs.
This was the stark reality presented by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in his talk during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, an annual gathering of top-tier global leaders in the fields of governance, business, civil society and media.
Carney argued that the old world order wherein the U.S. projected its military power across the Pacific to serve as a blanket of protection for its allies, while propping up the economies of struggling countries, has “ruptured” and is gone – for good.
As I listened to the impassioned speech of the prime minister, I remembered a similar scene in a Clancy novel where a world leader warned that there will come a time when America will eventually loosen its grip on power and others will be quick to fill in that vacuum.
And that day has finally come. With President Trump’s “America First” policy, he believes that is it no longer the responsibility of the United States to look after the welfare of other nations, which have traditionally relied on America for aid and protection.
The businessman-turned-president has bluntly made it clear to his international counterparts, most of them close allies, that they also have dig deep into their pockets to ensure their nation’s security. The U.S., he said, can no longer shoulder the tab as it has done for decades.
This “pay up or suffer the consequences” strategy of the Trump Administration, though not exactly well-received by NATO member-nations, have led them to seriously consider raising their defense budgets closer to the 5% of their GDP as demanded by the U.S. President.
Despite the possible strain this will create on the economies of NATO members, experts believe that increasing their defense budgets will be to their benefit and be advantageous in the long run, especially with the looming threat posed by Russia on the region.
The developments that are now unfolding in the global stage were just incredulous scenarios that were laid out in the works of fiction of my favorite authors, Ludlum, Clancy and Lustbader. And now, it is a reality that we must all grapple with in order to survive this GZero world.