The two regions most likely to generate conflict in this scenario are the Middle East and Asia. In the former, which has long depended on outsiders to maintain an unstable security equilibrium, the influence of increasingly cost-conscious and risk-averse foreign governments has already begun to diminish. Political earthquakes rumbled through North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, but only in Libya did the United States and NATO actively intervene in a national crisis -- and intervention occurred only from high altitude and following an appeal from other Arab governments. The retreat of outside powers will produce intense competition for leadership among Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and perhaps Egypt -- governments that will have quite different visions of the region's ideal balance of power and influence.
Asia might prove even more volatile. Increased competition for resources and local influence will bring Asia's most powerful states -- China, India, and Japan -- into various forms of conflict. States like Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand are large enough to resist being pulled entirely into another country's orbit. Asia will probably enhance its role as the engine of global growth, but from North Korea to Pakistan, the region has too many potential security emergencies and will prove too large and too complex for a single country to dominate. Compounding the risks, many of China's neighbors are simultaneously trying to deepen commercial ties with Beijing and security ties with Washington -- an unsustainable balance should the United States and China find themselves in conflict.
This scenario would not be without interregional cooperation. Small groups of established and emerging powers would work together on particular issues of common interest. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa -- the so-called BRICS states -- would likely build on trade and investment ties in some areas and increase their weight within lending institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Russia and China would continue to use organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to bolster their local influence and keep the United States from deepening ties with other members. Developing states in Latin America and Africa, led by Brazil and South Africa, would further develop "south-south" political and commercial relations. The United States, Europe, and China would continue to depend on the trade relationships that sustain their economies.
But despite the provision of public goods by would-be neighborhood hegemons, this more fragmented international order will ensure that some G-Zero-related transnational problems cannot be fully addressed.
G-Subzero
Given the various forms of turmoil that the G-Zero vacuum of leadership is likely to create, we must also consider a wild-card scenario, one that threatens a different kind of fragmentation of the global order. What if the G-Zero creates the kinds of problems that discredit governments, cripple their credibility, and move citizens of worst-affected countries to look for alternatives of governance?
Take China today, which is in need of ambitious long-term economic and social reforms; its government will be undertaking these changes just as the G-Zero supplies the system with unexpected shocks. If Beijing cannot manage the resulting social unrest, if it can't cope with a rising tide of environmental disasters, if rising labor costs persuade enough companies to relocate operations to neighboring economies, if a more serious market meltdown inside Europe and the United States puts tens of millions of Chinese out of work, if public disgust with corruption floods the Internet, if state attempts to quell large-scale demonstrations meet resistance coordinated via modern tools of communication, we might see a fundamental change in how China is actually governed. It might not take state collapse or a revolution to bring about this change. If local officials come to believe that they can ignore Beijing's orders, China's central government could remain too preoccupied with domestic challenges to play an important international role.
There's a nightmare scenario for Europe, too. If debt burdens deprive key European governments of an even greater outlay of resources, they may find themselves without the financial muscle to create and enforce policy. Local officials might begin to usurp much of their authority, leading to fragmentation of power within states like Italy and France. The breakdown could then be exacerbated by the re-emergence of separatist movements in Britain, Belgium, and Spain.
What if the trend then spreads to regions where borders have historically been drawn by outsiders? Local governments in the Caucasus and Central Asia cite Kosovo as a precedent for small, ethnically based states to declare independence. Former European colonies in Africa, including large, resource-rich states like Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, face tremendous stresses from within as local governments insist on greater control over natural wealth drawn from within "their" territories.
Today, Russia has a strong central government, but one that depends largely on one man, Vladimir Putin, for its legitimacy. It is a country that encompasses one-seventh of the Earth's land surface, 89 regions, 170 ethnic groups, and dozens of minority languages -- in other words, it is always at risk of fragmentation. The history of the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union, is one of shifting borders. If its oil and natural gas become a lot less valuable before the Russian government and its business community can better diversify the country's economy, the Russian government may one day find itself with too many internal threats to dominate its neighbors.
Thus, if the leaderless G-Zero-era in international politics generates global problems that metastasize into a thousand local emergencies, large parts of important countries could go ungoverned -- or become ungovernable. And that result would ensure that, whatever the global balance of power, the world's most powerful states would all find themselves fully occupied with management of internal crises.
Call this scenario the G-Subzero, where weakened leadership and a fragmentation of power inside individual countries create G-Zero conditions within some of the world's largest economies. After all, as much as some folks love to hate government, this scenario is (by far) the ugliest of them all.
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