BANGKOK: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, was in New York this week to attend the UN General Assembly. As it turned out, he embarked on a PR blitz, giving interviews freely and casually to the international media. The highlight was his call for a “new world order”, which would see the end of US bullying.

”God willing, a new order will come and will do away with...everything that distances us,” Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday. “All of the animosity, all of the lack of sincerity will come to an end. It will institute fairness and justice.”

He said the world was losing patience with the current state of affairs. “Now, even elementary school kids throughout the world understand that the United States government is following an international policy of bullying,” he said. “I do believe the system of empires has reached the end of the road. The world can no longer see an emperor commanding it.”

It is not clear what Ahmadinejad’s idea of a new world order looks like. But he predicts the end of the system of empires, now led by the United States.

The current world order is being controlled by the Anglo-Saxon alliance of the United States and the UK via the Washington Concensus, which covers globalism, competitive exchange rates, liberalisation, de-regulation, “democracy” and legal security for property rights.

The international institutions have evolved since the Second World War to guard and enforce the Washington Consensus. The current world order is guided by the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the US Federal Reserve and the US Treasury Department, among others — with the US dollar as the anchor of the global financial system.

Former US president George Bush senior envisaged a new world order while he was president, though the United States was already the undisputed global power. In 2009 Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, gave a TV interview, saying that the crisis in the Middle East would create an opportunity for Barack Obama to push for a new world order. This suggests that the United States, which already reigns supreme in the current order, is not happy with the status quo and wants to push for a new world order of complete globalism.

The situation in Europe shows that we’re moving to a new order. Mass demonstrations in Greece and Spain are taking place as the people are bitterly dissastisfied with the state of their economies and the high rates of unemployment. Greece, in particular, is being crucified as a warning to other countries that resist the advent of the “federation of nation states” or the “United States of Europe”. If any euro-zone countries do not abandon their sovereignty, or let go of their control over fiscal policy and banking, to join a “United States of Europe”, they will be left to decay in the cold as the euro takes flight from their banking systems.

Germany is not likely to play this game. The mathematics says it all. Germany’s annual tax collection is 1.2 trillion euros, but its share, or burden, in bailing out other weak euro-zone states could run up to 2 to 3 trillion euros. The euro-zone crisis, which will need at least 4 trillion in bailout money for the time being, can’t be contained. That is why the European Central Bank will be printing unlimited euros to bail out the bankrupt sovereign states and the banking system.

The “United States of Europe” and Obama’s new world order are from the same mould. Germany will have no choice but to leave the euro zone because it can’t afford to bail out the whole of Europe.

This brings us back to Ahmadinejad’s version of a new world order, which is likely to be shaped by China, Russia, India, Germany, Iran and other emerging states. The Middle East is in turmoil. Once it is united, it is likely to turn its back on a US-led new world order to join the China-led new world order.

We are at a crossroads of unprecedented historic proportion, with two alliances of global powers at play to forge their versions of a new world order. This could, unfortunately, have to be determined by a war.

By arrangement with The Nation/ANN