电力国家 vs 石油国家
正文翻译
题图：绿色协约与石油国家轴心的斗争。
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.
今年一月，加拿大总理马克-卡尼来到瑞士达沃斯参加世界经济论坛，并非为了传递希望。他是来宣告一场死亡的。他宣布，自由国际秩序——那套在二战后建立的、由制度、规范和美国保障的公共产品构成的精密体系——已经死亡，且这一断裂不可逆转。但卡尼的悼词，尽管确实冷静而精准，却低估了这场断裂的深度。
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.
美国总统唐纳德-特朗普远不只是在终结一系列外交安排或某种特定的大国关系格局。他正在推动化石燃料驱动的工业文明模式的终结，正是这一模式使得自由秩序成为可能、有利可图，并在一段时间内保持了政治上的可持续性。特朗普并未开启全球能源代谢霸权的衰落；其衰落是由气候变化带来的日益显现的不稳定性，以及诸如美以对伊朗战争等争夺石油获取途径的障碍所引发的。但他已确保，取而代之的将是一场对抗性竞争，而非平稳过渡。
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.
因此，自由国际秩序的替代方案将不会在日内瓦通过谈判达成，也不会在海牙通过裁决决定。它将由谁掌控当今所有现代生活所依赖的能源流动、矿产储量和技术体系来决定。
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.
这是一场生态冷战，其与先前冷战的差异至关重要。最初的冷战是自由资本主义与苏联共产主义之间的较量——关乎人类社会应如何发展经济和组织政治的两种理论之争。而新的冷战则是不同能源代谢体系之间的竞争。
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.
一方是绿色协约：中国及新兴的电气化国家集团，它们将工业未来押注于太阳能电池板、蓄电池以及支撑这些产业的庞大矿产供应链。另一方是石油国家轴心：特朗普领导下的美国、俄罗斯及海湾君主国，它们将权力与财政存续寄托于延续化石燃料时代，并以能源丰沛为武器对抗试图终结该时代的势力。
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.
意识形态在边缘地带仍具影响力——但它横跨而非界定这些阵营。如同冷战时期，这场斗争的胜负很可能不仅取决于超级大国自身的行动，更取决于夹在中间的国家们的选择：正如卡尼一贯轻描淡写地称之为的“中等强国”。
插图：从空中俯瞰位于加利福尼亚州卡森市的马拉松石油炼油厂，该炼油厂是北美最大的炼油厂之一。
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.
石油国家轴心是一个由反动势力组成的联盟——尤其在美国的领导下，与俄罗斯及海湾君主国等其他主要油气生产国形成的默契同盟——其经济模式与文明叙事皆与化石燃料密不可分。对这些领导者而言，油气不仅是商品；更是国家“阳刚性”的证明，是特定传统主义复兴思潮的燃料，也是他们用以瓦解共同憎恨的自由主义秩序的政治杠杆。
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.
特朗普重返白宫后，通过撤销对未来产业的补贴，实质上决定在全球绿色技术领导权竞争中举起白旗。当然，他并未直白承认失败，而是转而发动修辞攻势——其《2025年国家安全战略》将气候变化斥为“灾难性”意识形态，并鼓吹以国家“能源主导权”对抗软弱（且被刻意“女性化”）的绿色全球主义。
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.”
俄罗斯总统普京同样呼应着类似的性别焦虑，宣称石油收益能资助俄罗斯追求独特、自给自足的东正教文明，以抵御“西方堕落”。
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.
而对沙特王储穆罕默德-本-萨勒曼而言，石油财富既承诺将沙漠王国转变为高科技全球枢纽，又能维系伊斯兰世界的领导地位。
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.
总之，尽管政体类型各异，这三国领导人都被共同的“化石燃料主权”愿景凝聚——他们将绿色转型视为特洛伊木马，内藏威胁其特定中央集权模式与男性气概民族认同的自由主义与监管主义的世界观。
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.
为确保全球对化石燃料的需求保持旺盛，美国正利用其现有优势。与必须从零开始构建全新能源生产、分配及消费基础设施的“绿色协约”不同，石油国家轴心正在打一场基础设施防御战——这在战略上更为轻松。它正运用自身的金融和军事力量来保护现有的全球化石燃料供应链——特朗普在伊朗战争期间甚至威胁要“接管”霍尔木兹海峡（波斯湾大部分石油的必经通道），同时鼓励发展中国家通过燃煤燃气发电厂和内燃机基础设施来锁定其发展模式。
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.
在特朗普执政下，美国国际开发金融公司已将其贷款重心转向发展中国家的煤炭、天然气和石油基础设施。在前总统拜登任期内，该公司曾被禁止资助海外化石燃料项目。此举实质上是在出口硬件设施的同时，补贴了能源路径锁定的输出。在俄罗斯入侵乌克兰迫使欧洲国家寻求替代天然气供应后，特朗普已向欧洲盟友施压，要求其购买更多美国液化天然气作为持续安全保证的条件。这些通常为期15至20年的合同，是与任何基础设施投资同等具有约束力的承诺。美国由此意图构建长期的能源代谢依赖。
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.
在这一阵营中，沙特阿拉伯扮演着调节性供应国的角色，这不仅依靠其外交影响力，更基于开采地质学的冷酷数据。沙特王室对自身的长期愿景是：即便世界能源格局转型，也要成为最后屹立不倒的化石燃料生产国。海湾地区的石油开采成本为全球最低，很少超过每桶10美元——远低于美国页岩油压裂开采成本（根据美联储数据约每桶62美元）或俄罗斯最低运营成本的油井（每桶25至40美元）。这意味着沙特能够承受足以令其盟友破产的价格战。通过保持向市场倾销原油并打压价格的能力，沙特既能惩罚能源转型国，又能确保化石燃料继续成为发展中经济体阻力最小的选择路径。
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.
这些差异凸显出，与1930年代的柏林-罗马-东京轴心相似，这个新的石油国家联盟实为权宜性联盟，而非铁板一块的集团。尽管莫斯科、利雅得和华盛顿在维持全球化石燃料消耗、并为此散布气候变化虚假信息方面目标一致，但它们在全球石油市场上也是价格竞争者。诸多地缘政治分歧仍将其割裂：美国与俄罗斯在乌克兰问题上持续对峙，俄罗斯与沙特阿拉伯在从伊朗到苏丹再到叙利亚的地区冲突中仍支持不同阵营。
插图：工人们在中国东部安徽省天长市检查安装在湖泊中的太阳能电池板。
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.
与石油国家阵营对立的将是绿色协约，其主导力量是中国。当美国及其新盟友退守传统燃料之际，北京已将自己定位为新兴的后碳能源体系的掌控者。
Born of a technocratic ambition to secure regime legitimacy and capture the industries of the future, China dominates every lix 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.
源自技术官僚阶层为巩固政权合法性并抢占未来产业先机的雄心，中国已主导绿色产业价值链的每一个环节：据国际能源署统计，中国掌控全球90%以上的稀土加工量和94%的永磁体产量（电动车电机与风力涡轮机的核心组件）；其太阳能电池板制造份额超过80%；全球70%以上的电动车电池产自中国，电动车总产量占比也超过七成。2025年中国投资增长额的十分之九集中于绿色能源领域。这种增长已与西方需求脱钩：当前约47%的中国绿色技术出口流向新兴市场，使其成为从非洲到拉丁美洲的全球南方国家不可或缺的合作伙伴。简言之，通过发挥其威权发展型国家的体制优势，中国在不到一代人的时间里，从世界头号环境破坏者转型为绿色科技霸主。
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.
倾向于绿色协约的国家常将生态现代化视为维持地球宜居性的必然要求。但这不仅关乎环保主义。绿色技术相比化石燃料具有根本性的热力学优势——后者在开采、提炼和运输过程中会遭受昂贵的能量损耗。对于大多数陆地应用场景而言，电动汽车因制造和维护更简便，在实际使用中已更具优势。同样，即使忽略外部环境成本，绿色能源生产的边际成本也已低于化石燃料。即便是对快速绿色转型持怀疑态度的学者如瓦茨拉夫-斯米尔，也承认绿色技术在能源生产和运输领域正占据上风。
The European unx, 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.
欧盟曾因依赖俄罗斯天然气而遭受重创，如今又面临对好战美国的类似依赖（该国恰好在欧洲领土驻有数万军队），这使其具备加入绿色协约的强烈战略动机。这种结盟背后的逻辑将是务实的：欧洲提供富裕市场，中国则提供产业实力。这一逻辑同样适用于印度和日本等世界第四、第五大经济体——它们的大部分石油依赖进口。
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 C 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 C 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.
然而问题在于，加入这一阵营并非简单的贸易协定；它实质上意味着进入一个由BJ主导的等级体系。由于C已在绿色发电和交通系统领域确立了巨大（甚至可能是难以逾越）的领先优势，任何寻求绿色转型的国家都不得不采用C的硬件设备与技术标准。从这个角度看，绿色协约可能正催生出乔尔-韦恩莱特与杰夫-曼所称的“气候利维坦”：一种以气候危机为借口的新型全球管控体系，其代价体现为技术依赖的风险，以及可能面临BJ方面——这个本质上极度非滋油且民族主义的郑泉——的Z治勒索。
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.
从自由国际秩序向新的生态意识形态冷战的转型，迫使夹在两大阵营之间的国家做出残酷的战略抉择。卡尼所称的“中等强国”——这一多元群体涵盖了从加拿大、法国、日本等富裕发达国家到巴西、印度、印度尼西亚等新兴大国——正面临一种非自由的双重困境：要么选择依赖一个军事侵略性的石油国家集团，其偏好的技术体系几乎注定导致全球生态崩溃；要么屈从于北京正在崛起的“利维坦”。
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.
如果说最初的冷战在很大程度上是围绕经济发展模式的竞争，旨在争夺后殖民世界的“民心与思想”，那么这个新时代将成为对中等强国“代谢灵魂”的争夺——即决定其未来命运的能源与基础设施根基。与意识形态效忠不同，能源基础设施具有路径依赖性。一旦某个国家围绕天然气构建电网，一旦其道路上遍布内燃机车辆，一旦其工业基础与石化原料深度绑定，扭转方向将付出极其高昂的代价。选择电气化道路的国家亦然。两大阵营的领导者都深谙此道，并都在将其武器化。
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.
石油国家轴心将在两个方向上同时运用能源作为杠杆。对内，美国与海湾产油国将把廉价易得的化石燃料作为庇护主义工具——为发展中国家提供快速、可负担的能源接入，以换取其基础设施的长期锁定。沙特阿拉伯可以随意向全球石油市场倾销原油，在绿色替代能源即将实现成本竞争力时精准打压价格，从而削弱价格敏感型经济体对电气化转型的投资意愿。
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.
对外，石油国家将把能源作为针对绿色协约本身的胁迫手段——通过威胁切断供应、操纵价格或扰乱尚未完成可再生能源转型的化石燃料依赖型经济体，实施战略压制。即便在俄罗斯断供之后仍依赖液化天然气的欧洲，对此类压力依然极度脆弱。
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.
与此同时，绿色协约将以同等程度的战略意图，利用其在清洁能源硬件领域的支配地位。对太阳能电池板、锂离子电池、电动汽车供应链以及稀土加工的控制，使北京对任何寻求实现能源代谢现代化的国家握有基础设施层面的扼制力。此处的杠杆作用较少关乎价格打压，而更多关乎标准、兼容性与依赖性。一个国家若基于中国逆变器构建电网，让中国电动汽车遍布其道路，并通过中国的数字管理系统传输其能源数据，那么无论其初衷如何，实质上已加入了绿色协约阵营。
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.
尽管官方喉舌予以否认，中国亦将利用绿色金融准入和技术转让作为外交筹码，奖励那些与其立场一致的国家，而对那些过于明显地倒向石油国家轴心的国家则暂缓合作。此外，对于德国、日本和韩国等国家而言，以中国的“电力霸权”替代美国的“石油霸权”，不仅与其长期以来对民主和人权的意识形态及道德承诺相悖，还可能掏空其本已摇摇欲坠的工业基础。
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.
对于中等强国而言，关键问题在于真正的独立是否依然可能，抑或能源基础设施的内在物理属性终将迫使其作出选择。电网互操作性、金融结算体系、设备服务网络以及不断深化的人力资本投资，都将激励各国作出非此即彼的承诺。日益加剧的地缘政治压力会提高骑墙观望的成本——但同时也将激励这些国家在两大阵营之间开拓自主空间。
Call it a new nonaligned movement.
不妨称之为一场新的不结盟运动。
插图：在智利阿塔卡马盐沼的一座锂矿中，遍布着含有碳酸锂的池子和成堆的盐副产品。
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.
最初的不结盟运动诞生于1955年在印度尼西亚万隆举行的亚非会议，并于1961年在南斯拉夫贝尔格莱德正式成立。它由五位传奇人物领导：埃及的贾迈勒-阿卜杜勒-纳赛尔、加纳的克瓦米-恩克鲁玛、印度的贾瓦哈拉尔-尼赫鲁、印度尼西亚的苏加诺以及南斯拉夫的约瑟普-布罗兹-铁托。这些领袖为刚刚挣脱殖民枷锁、拒绝卷入冷战二元对立的国家寻求一条“中间道路”。
A principal aim of the NAM was to promote economic cooperation among postcolonial states as an alternative to economic dependency on either the Soviet unx 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.
不结盟运动的一个主要目标是促进后殖民国家间的经济合作，以此替代对苏联或美国的经济依赖。其使命既是政治的，亦是心理的：它要求尊严、自决权，以及坦桑尼亚朱利叶斯-尼雷尔所称的“积极中立”——这种立场将防止其领土沦为超级大国代理人战争的单纯舞台。
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.
如果说最初的不结盟运动旨在摆脱美苏冷战分野，保持意识形态与经济自主，那么新的集团则将更侧重于基础设施层面的不结盟。与当年由贫困的后殖民国家领导的情况不同，如今的中等强国拥有可观的外交、军事和经济实力。它们具备资源去构建多边外交安排，从而绕过国际货币基金组织、联合国或世界贸易组织等传统且日益衰落的机构。智利、新西兰和新加坡之间的绿色能源与贸易协定，或是巴西与印度达成的矿产生产国协议，既无需大国首肯，也不必听从任何霸权仲裁者的裁决。
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.
能源转型的物质特性也为部分中等强国提供了第一次冷战时期所不具备的杠杆形式。由于“电力国家”模式需要巨量的关键矿物——锂、钴、稀土等——这些资源丰富的国家已成为关键的战略争夺目标。巴西、印度尼西亚和哈萨克斯坦等国同时拥有丰富的碳氢化合物与绿色技术相关矿产资源，它们正成功推行多方结盟政策，吸引两大阵营的投资，通过让北京和华盛顿相互制衡来最大限度地实现本国自主。
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.
中等强国在另一美中地缘战略竞争领域——人工智能及其他计算形式——所采取的策略，为基础设施层面的不结盟可能呈现的样貌提供了线索。许多中等强国并未接受任一超级大国预先打包的“技术栈”，而是寻求第三条道路。例如，越南正在开发自己的人工智能实例，而非完全绑定美国或中国的硬件。在非洲，企业家们正进行“算法缝合”，将中国硬件与西方软件融合，创造出两大超级大国均无法完全掌控的本土解决方案。印度也在发展其自身的人工智能主权模式。
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.
除了基础设施的物质特性外，这种新的不结盟运动在结构上区别于前身之处，不仅在于其成员拥有更强的实力，更在于它们集体倾向于将多边机构视为工具而非神圣存在。最初的不结盟运动主要依托联合国体系运作——在最终由大国控制的论坛中进行游说、请愿和通过决议——而如今的中等强国正在构建平行的架构。金砖国家的扩员、东南亚国家联盟日益增长的外交分量，以及区域性开发银行的激增，都反映了一种共同的直觉：现有的基于规则的秩序，是为一种已不复存在的特定权力格局所设计、并服务于该格局的。
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.
这些国家与其说是试图推翻现有体系，不如说是在体系之外另辟蹊径。它们通过建立双边货币互换协议、区域性供应链协定以及技术共享安排，降低对任一超级大国影响力的依赖。这场新运动很可能不会设立正式的秘书处或创始宪章；其凝聚力并非源于意识形态的团结，而是来自对保持战略选择权的共同务实利益。
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.
然而，与最初的不结盟运动一样，中等强国内部也存在深刻分歧，受益于高油价的产油国与迫切需要能源安全的转型国家之间泾渭分明。这条断层线可能成为新运动最致命的弱点。最初的不结盟运动曾多次因类似的物质利益分歧而破裂——大宗商品出口国与制造业经济体之间、寻求外资的国家与推行进口替代的国家之间——如今的格局同样蕴含着类似的紧张关系。
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.
安哥拉或尼日利亚等国的财政收入仍极度依赖油气出口，其根本利益驱动与孟加拉国或肯亚等国截然不同——后者的发展轨迹取决于可负担的可靠电力供应，且其人口正直接暴露于气候危机之中。前者有充分动机悄然与石油国家阵营结盟，延长支撑其财政生存的化石燃料时代。后者则需要电力国家阵营的技术与资金，即便对随之产生的依赖关系心存芥蒂。
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.
这些分歧无法通过外交公报来粉饰弥合。它们反映了本质上互不相容的物质利益，任何新的不结盟联盟都将被迫持续协调这些矛盾，否则就可能重蹈其前身因内部失序而最终空洞化的覆辙。最可能出现的结果是形成碎片化的议题联盟格局：各国围绕矿产定价、气候融资或技术获取等具体利益形成集群，却始终无法完全整合为统一的第三极力量。
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.
中等强国的最终选择，归根结底在于它们希望栖身于何种现代性之中。石油国家阵营提供了一种向后看的、高碳排的愿景——在这种图景中，弱小国家被牢固地置于强大国家的从属地位，能源丰裕被武器化为庇护主义，廉价石油用以收买忠诚，而无数采购合同所造成的基础设施锁定，正缓慢地扼杀未来。
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.
加入由中国主导的绿色联盟，则提供了一种形式上更具进步性的选项：一种前瞻性的、后碳的模型，认真对待地球变暖所带来的物理性约束。但它同样投下了一道阴影——国家代谢主权可能从属于以北京为中心的供应链架构，不过是以一种依赖形式替换另一种。这是一个战略困境：究竟是选择与咄咄逼人、日渐衰朽的过去结盟，还是投向高效却带有新极权主义色彩的未来。
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.
这一时刻在历史上显得尤为独特，是因为其选择并非主要基于意识形态。最初的冷战，其核心是一场关于人类社会应如何组织的竞争理论之间的较量——民主对共产主义、市场对计划、个人自由对集体动员。而新的冷战则跨越了所有这些范畴。威权主义的石油国家与名义上的民主国家可以安然置身于同一阵营。中国的绿色威权主义与欧洲的气候自由主义，在同一个潜在的协约框架内展开竞争。组织轴心不再是政治哲学，而是物质代谢——谁控制着现代性所依赖的能源、矿产与技术。
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.
这正是为何新兴不结盟运动一旦成形，其面貌将与前身判然有别。它不再由万隆时代的团结精神或第三世界主义意识形态所驱动，而是由多边矿产采购联盟与技术缝合的冰冷实用主义所主导。其最大资产在于转型本身的物质性：阿根廷盐滩下的锂矿、澳大利亚卡尔古利的镍钴项目、遍布印尼与哈萨克斯坦的稀土资源，为中坚国家提供了后殖民时代不结盟运动从未拥有的杠杆力量。而其最致命的弱点——正如最初的组织以沉重代价所发现的——在于内部裂痕：石油生产国与转型国家之间存在着不可调和的张力，前者的财政存续依赖于化石燃料时代的延续，后者的发展未来则取决于终结这个时代。
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.
卡尼在达沃斯对旧秩序的悼词并非哀叹。它承认了基于规则的自由主义国际秩序——那种律师规范与制度尊重的美好虚构——早已付之一炬，问题不再是如何恢复它，而是如何在它缺席的情况下生存。中等强国正是锻造答案的熔炉。它们的成功取决于能否将矿产资源、人口体量与来之不易的外交能力转化为真正的第三条道路——一条既拒绝石油国家轴心附庸主义所导致的地球生态自杀，也拒绝绿色协约所造成的基础设施依赖。
题图：绿色协约与石油国家轴心的斗争。
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.
今年一月，加拿大总理马克-卡尼来到瑞士达沃斯参加世界经济论坛，并非为了传递希望。他是来宣告一场死亡的。他宣布，自由国际秩序——那套在二战后建立的、由制度、规范和美国保障的公共产品构成的精密体系——已经死亡，且这一断裂不可逆转。但卡尼的悼词，尽管确实冷静而精准，却低估了这场断裂的深度。
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.
美国总统唐纳德-特朗普远不只是在终结一系列外交安排或某种特定的大国关系格局。他正在推动化石燃料驱动的工业文明模式的终结，正是这一模式使得自由秩序成为可能、有利可图，并在一段时间内保持了政治上的可持续性。特朗普并未开启全球能源代谢霸权的衰落；其衰落是由气候变化带来的日益显现的不稳定性，以及诸如美以对伊朗战争等争夺石油获取途径的障碍所引发的。但他已确保，取而代之的将是一场对抗性竞争，而非平稳过渡。
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.
因此，自由国际秩序的替代方案将不会在日内瓦通过谈判达成，也不会在海牙通过裁决决定。它将由谁掌控当今所有现代生活所依赖的能源流动、矿产储量和技术体系来决定。
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.
这是一场生态冷战，其与先前冷战的差异至关重要。最初的冷战是自由资本主义与苏联共产主义之间的较量——关乎人类社会应如何发展经济和组织政治的两种理论之争。而新的冷战则是不同能源代谢体系之间的竞争。
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.
一方是绿色协约：中国及新兴的电气化国家集团，它们将工业未来押注于太阳能电池板、蓄电池以及支撑这些产业的庞大矿产供应链。另一方是石油国家轴心：特朗普领导下的美国、俄罗斯及海湾君主国，它们将权力与财政存续寄托于延续化石燃料时代，并以能源丰沛为武器对抗试图终结该时代的势力。
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.
意识形态在边缘地带仍具影响力——但它横跨而非界定这些阵营。如同冷战时期，这场斗争的胜负很可能不仅取决于超级大国自身的行动，更取决于夹在中间的国家们的选择：正如卡尼一贯轻描淡写地称之为的“中等强国”。
插图：从空中俯瞰位于加利福尼亚州卡森市的马拉松石油炼油厂，该炼油厂是北美最大的炼油厂之一。
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.
石油国家轴心是一个由反动势力组成的联盟——尤其在美国的领导下，与俄罗斯及海湾君主国等其他主要油气生产国形成的默契同盟——其经济模式与文明叙事皆与化石燃料密不可分。对这些领导者而言，油气不仅是商品；更是国家“阳刚性”的证明，是特定传统主义复兴思潮的燃料，也是他们用以瓦解共同憎恨的自由主义秩序的政治杠杆。
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.
特朗普重返白宫后，通过撤销对未来产业的补贴，实质上决定在全球绿色技术领导权竞争中举起白旗。当然，他并未直白承认失败，而是转而发动修辞攻势——其《2025年国家安全战略》将气候变化斥为“灾难性”意识形态，并鼓吹以国家“能源主导权”对抗软弱（且被刻意“女性化”）的绿色全球主义。
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.”
俄罗斯总统普京同样呼应着类似的性别焦虑，宣称石油收益能资助俄罗斯追求独特、自给自足的东正教文明，以抵御“西方堕落”。
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.
而对沙特王储穆罕默德-本-萨勒曼而言，石油财富既承诺将沙漠王国转变为高科技全球枢纽，又能维系伊斯兰世界的领导地位。
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.
总之，尽管政体类型各异，这三国领导人都被共同的“化石燃料主权”愿景凝聚——他们将绿色转型视为特洛伊木马，内藏威胁其特定中央集权模式与男性气概民族认同的自由主义与监管主义的世界观。
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.
为确保全球对化石燃料的需求保持旺盛，美国正利用其现有优势。与必须从零开始构建全新能源生产、分配及消费基础设施的“绿色协约”不同，石油国家轴心正在打一场基础设施防御战——这在战略上更为轻松。它正运用自身的金融和军事力量来保护现有的全球化石燃料供应链——特朗普在伊朗战争期间甚至威胁要“接管”霍尔木兹海峡（波斯湾大部分石油的必经通道），同时鼓励发展中国家通过燃煤燃气发电厂和内燃机基础设施来锁定其发展模式。
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.
在特朗普执政下，美国国际开发金融公司已将其贷款重心转向发展中国家的煤炭、天然气和石油基础设施。在前总统拜登任期内，该公司曾被禁止资助海外化石燃料项目。此举实质上是在出口硬件设施的同时，补贴了能源路径锁定的输出。在俄罗斯入侵乌克兰迫使欧洲国家寻求替代天然气供应后，特朗普已向欧洲盟友施压，要求其购买更多美国液化天然气作为持续安全保证的条件。这些通常为期15至20年的合同，是与任何基础设施投资同等具有约束力的承诺。美国由此意图构建长期的能源代谢依赖。
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.
在这一阵营中，沙特阿拉伯扮演着调节性供应国的角色，这不仅依靠其外交影响力，更基于开采地质学的冷酷数据。沙特王室对自身的长期愿景是：即便世界能源格局转型，也要成为最后屹立不倒的化石燃料生产国。海湾地区的石油开采成本为全球最低，很少超过每桶10美元——远低于美国页岩油压裂开采成本（根据美联储数据约每桶62美元）或俄罗斯最低运营成本的油井（每桶25至40美元）。这意味着沙特能够承受足以令其盟友破产的价格战。通过保持向市场倾销原油并打压价格的能力，沙特既能惩罚能源转型国，又能确保化石燃料继续成为发展中经济体阻力最小的选择路径。
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.
这些差异凸显出，与1930年代的柏林-罗马-东京轴心相似，这个新的石油国家联盟实为权宜性联盟，而非铁板一块的集团。尽管莫斯科、利雅得和华盛顿在维持全球化石燃料消耗、并为此散布气候变化虚假信息方面目标一致，但它们在全球石油市场上也是价格竞争者。诸多地缘政治分歧仍将其割裂：美国与俄罗斯在乌克兰问题上持续对峙，俄罗斯与沙特阿拉伯在从伊朗到苏丹再到叙利亚的地区冲突中仍支持不同阵营。
插图：工人们在中国东部安徽省天长市检查安装在湖泊中的太阳能电池板。
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.
与石油国家阵营对立的将是绿色协约，其主导力量是中国。当美国及其新盟友退守传统燃料之际，北京已将自己定位为新兴的后碳能源体系的掌控者。
Born of a technocratic ambition to secure regime legitimacy and capture the industries of the future, China dominates every lix 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.
源自技术官僚阶层为巩固政权合法性并抢占未来产业先机的雄心，中国已主导绿色产业价值链的每一个环节：据国际能源署统计，中国掌控全球90%以上的稀土加工量和94%的永磁体产量（电动车电机与风力涡轮机的核心组件）；其太阳能电池板制造份额超过80%；全球70%以上的电动车电池产自中国，电动车总产量占比也超过七成。2025年中国投资增长额的十分之九集中于绿色能源领域。这种增长已与西方需求脱钩：当前约47%的中国绿色技术出口流向新兴市场，使其成为从非洲到拉丁美洲的全球南方国家不可或缺的合作伙伴。简言之，通过发挥其威权发展型国家的体制优势，中国在不到一代人的时间里，从世界头号环境破坏者转型为绿色科技霸主。
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.
倾向于绿色协约的国家常将生态现代化视为维持地球宜居性的必然要求。但这不仅关乎环保主义。绿色技术相比化石燃料具有根本性的热力学优势——后者在开采、提炼和运输过程中会遭受昂贵的能量损耗。对于大多数陆地应用场景而言，电动汽车因制造和维护更简便，在实际使用中已更具优势。同样，即使忽略外部环境成本，绿色能源生产的边际成本也已低于化石燃料。即便是对快速绿色转型持怀疑态度的学者如瓦茨拉夫-斯米尔，也承认绿色技术在能源生产和运输领域正占据上风。
The European unx, 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.
欧盟曾因依赖俄罗斯天然气而遭受重创，如今又面临对好战美国的类似依赖（该国恰好在欧洲领土驻有数万军队），这使其具备加入绿色协约的强烈战略动机。这种结盟背后的逻辑将是务实的：欧洲提供富裕市场，中国则提供产业实力。这一逻辑同样适用于印度和日本等世界第四、第五大经济体——它们的大部分石油依赖进口。
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 C 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 C 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.
然而问题在于，加入这一阵营并非简单的贸易协定；它实质上意味着进入一个由BJ主导的等级体系。由于C已在绿色发电和交通系统领域确立了巨大（甚至可能是难以逾越）的领先优势，任何寻求绿色转型的国家都不得不采用C的硬件设备与技术标准。从这个角度看，绿色协约可能正催生出乔尔-韦恩莱特与杰夫-曼所称的“气候利维坦”：一种以气候危机为借口的新型全球管控体系，其代价体现为技术依赖的风险，以及可能面临BJ方面——这个本质上极度非滋油且民族主义的郑泉——的Z治勒索。
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.
从自由国际秩序向新的生态意识形态冷战的转型，迫使夹在两大阵营之间的国家做出残酷的战略抉择。卡尼所称的“中等强国”——这一多元群体涵盖了从加拿大、法国、日本等富裕发达国家到巴西、印度、印度尼西亚等新兴大国——正面临一种非自由的双重困境：要么选择依赖一个军事侵略性的石油国家集团，其偏好的技术体系几乎注定导致全球生态崩溃；要么屈从于北京正在崛起的“利维坦”。
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.
如果说最初的冷战在很大程度上是围绕经济发展模式的竞争，旨在争夺后殖民世界的“民心与思想”，那么这个新时代将成为对中等强国“代谢灵魂”的争夺——即决定其未来命运的能源与基础设施根基。与意识形态效忠不同，能源基础设施具有路径依赖性。一旦某个国家围绕天然气构建电网，一旦其道路上遍布内燃机车辆，一旦其工业基础与石化原料深度绑定，扭转方向将付出极其高昂的代价。选择电气化道路的国家亦然。两大阵营的领导者都深谙此道，并都在将其武器化。
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.
石油国家轴心将在两个方向上同时运用能源作为杠杆。对内，美国与海湾产油国将把廉价易得的化石燃料作为庇护主义工具——为发展中国家提供快速、可负担的能源接入，以换取其基础设施的长期锁定。沙特阿拉伯可以随意向全球石油市场倾销原油，在绿色替代能源即将实现成本竞争力时精准打压价格，从而削弱价格敏感型经济体对电气化转型的投资意愿。
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.
对外，石油国家将把能源作为针对绿色协约本身的胁迫手段——通过威胁切断供应、操纵价格或扰乱尚未完成可再生能源转型的化石燃料依赖型经济体，实施战略压制。即便在俄罗斯断供之后仍依赖液化天然气的欧洲，对此类压力依然极度脆弱。
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.
与此同时，绿色协约将以同等程度的战略意图，利用其在清洁能源硬件领域的支配地位。对太阳能电池板、锂离子电池、电动汽车供应链以及稀土加工的控制，使北京对任何寻求实现能源代谢现代化的国家握有基础设施层面的扼制力。此处的杠杆作用较少关乎价格打压，而更多关乎标准、兼容性与依赖性。一个国家若基于中国逆变器构建电网，让中国电动汽车遍布其道路，并通过中国的数字管理系统传输其能源数据，那么无论其初衷如何，实质上已加入了绿色协约阵营。
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.
尽管官方喉舌予以否认，中国亦将利用绿色金融准入和技术转让作为外交筹码，奖励那些与其立场一致的国家，而对那些过于明显地倒向石油国家轴心的国家则暂缓合作。此外，对于德国、日本和韩国等国家而言，以中国的“电力霸权”替代美国的“石油霸权”，不仅与其长期以来对民主和人权的意识形态及道德承诺相悖，还可能掏空其本已摇摇欲坠的工业基础。
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.
对于中等强国而言，关键问题在于真正的独立是否依然可能，抑或能源基础设施的内在物理属性终将迫使其作出选择。电网互操作性、金融结算体系、设备服务网络以及不断深化的人力资本投资，都将激励各国作出非此即彼的承诺。日益加剧的地缘政治压力会提高骑墙观望的成本——但同时也将激励这些国家在两大阵营之间开拓自主空间。
Call it a new nonaligned movement.
不妨称之为一场新的不结盟运动。
插图：在智利阿塔卡马盐沼的一座锂矿中，遍布着含有碳酸锂的池子和成堆的盐副产品。
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.
最初的不结盟运动诞生于1955年在印度尼西亚万隆举行的亚非会议，并于1961年在南斯拉夫贝尔格莱德正式成立。它由五位传奇人物领导：埃及的贾迈勒-阿卜杜勒-纳赛尔、加纳的克瓦米-恩克鲁玛、印度的贾瓦哈拉尔-尼赫鲁、印度尼西亚的苏加诺以及南斯拉夫的约瑟普-布罗兹-铁托。这些领袖为刚刚挣脱殖民枷锁、拒绝卷入冷战二元对立的国家寻求一条“中间道路”。
A principal aim of the NAM was to promote economic cooperation among postcolonial states as an alternative to economic dependency on either the Soviet unx 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.
不结盟运动的一个主要目标是促进后殖民国家间的经济合作，以此替代对苏联或美国的经济依赖。其使命既是政治的，亦是心理的：它要求尊严、自决权，以及坦桑尼亚朱利叶斯-尼雷尔所称的“积极中立”——这种立场将防止其领土沦为超级大国代理人战争的单纯舞台。
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.
如果说最初的不结盟运动旨在摆脱美苏冷战分野，保持意识形态与经济自主，那么新的集团则将更侧重于基础设施层面的不结盟。与当年由贫困的后殖民国家领导的情况不同，如今的中等强国拥有可观的外交、军事和经济实力。它们具备资源去构建多边外交安排，从而绕过国际货币基金组织、联合国或世界贸易组织等传统且日益衰落的机构。智利、新西兰和新加坡之间的绿色能源与贸易协定，或是巴西与印度达成的矿产生产国协议，既无需大国首肯，也不必听从任何霸权仲裁者的裁决。
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.
能源转型的物质特性也为部分中等强国提供了第一次冷战时期所不具备的杠杆形式。由于“电力国家”模式需要巨量的关键矿物——锂、钴、稀土等——这些资源丰富的国家已成为关键的战略争夺目标。巴西、印度尼西亚和哈萨克斯坦等国同时拥有丰富的碳氢化合物与绿色技术相关矿产资源，它们正成功推行多方结盟政策，吸引两大阵营的投资，通过让北京和华盛顿相互制衡来最大限度地实现本国自主。
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.
中等强国在另一美中地缘战略竞争领域——人工智能及其他计算形式——所采取的策略，为基础设施层面的不结盟可能呈现的样貌提供了线索。许多中等强国并未接受任一超级大国预先打包的“技术栈”，而是寻求第三条道路。例如，越南正在开发自己的人工智能实例，而非完全绑定美国或中国的硬件。在非洲，企业家们正进行“算法缝合”，将中国硬件与西方软件融合，创造出两大超级大国均无法完全掌控的本土解决方案。印度也在发展其自身的人工智能主权模式。
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.
除了基础设施的物质特性外，这种新的不结盟运动在结构上区别于前身之处，不仅在于其成员拥有更强的实力，更在于它们集体倾向于将多边机构视为工具而非神圣存在。最初的不结盟运动主要依托联合国体系运作——在最终由大国控制的论坛中进行游说、请愿和通过决议——而如今的中等强国正在构建平行的架构。金砖国家的扩员、东南亚国家联盟日益增长的外交分量，以及区域性开发银行的激增，都反映了一种共同的直觉：现有的基于规则的秩序，是为一种已不复存在的特定权力格局所设计、并服务于该格局的。
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.
这些国家与其说是试图推翻现有体系，不如说是在体系之外另辟蹊径。它们通过建立双边货币互换协议、区域性供应链协定以及技术共享安排，降低对任一超级大国影响力的依赖。这场新运动很可能不会设立正式的秘书处或创始宪章；其凝聚力并非源于意识形态的团结，而是来自对保持战略选择权的共同务实利益。
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.
然而，与最初的不结盟运动一样，中等强国内部也存在深刻分歧，受益于高油价的产油国与迫切需要能源安全的转型国家之间泾渭分明。这条断层线可能成为新运动最致命的弱点。最初的不结盟运动曾多次因类似的物质利益分歧而破裂——大宗商品出口国与制造业经济体之间、寻求外资的国家与推行进口替代的国家之间——如今的格局同样蕴含着类似的紧张关系。
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.
安哥拉或尼日利亚等国的财政收入仍极度依赖油气出口，其根本利益驱动与孟加拉国或肯亚等国截然不同——后者的发展轨迹取决于可负担的可靠电力供应，且其人口正直接暴露于气候危机之中。前者有充分动机悄然与石油国家阵营结盟，延长支撑其财政生存的化石燃料时代。后者则需要电力国家阵营的技术与资金，即便对随之产生的依赖关系心存芥蒂。
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.
这些分歧无法通过外交公报来粉饰弥合。它们反映了本质上互不相容的物质利益，任何新的不结盟联盟都将被迫持续协调这些矛盾，否则就可能重蹈其前身因内部失序而最终空洞化的覆辙。最可能出现的结果是形成碎片化的议题联盟格局：各国围绕矿产定价、气候融资或技术获取等具体利益形成集群，却始终无法完全整合为统一的第三极力量。
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.
中等强国的最终选择，归根结底在于它们希望栖身于何种现代性之中。石油国家阵营提供了一种向后看的、高碳排的愿景——在这种图景中，弱小国家被牢固地置于强大国家的从属地位，能源丰裕被武器化为庇护主义，廉价石油用以收买忠诚，而无数采购合同所造成的基础设施锁定，正缓慢地扼杀未来。
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.
加入由中国主导的绿色联盟，则提供了一种形式上更具进步性的选项：一种前瞻性的、后碳的模型，认真对待地球变暖所带来的物理性约束。但它同样投下了一道阴影——国家代谢主权可能从属于以北京为中心的供应链架构，不过是以一种依赖形式替换另一种。这是一个战略困境：究竟是选择与咄咄逼人、日渐衰朽的过去结盟，还是投向高效却带有新极权主义色彩的未来。
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.
这一时刻在历史上显得尤为独特，是因为其选择并非主要基于意识形态。最初的冷战，其核心是一场关于人类社会应如何组织的竞争理论之间的较量——民主对共产主义、市场对计划、个人自由对集体动员。而新的冷战则跨越了所有这些范畴。威权主义的石油国家与名义上的民主国家可以安然置身于同一阵营。中国的绿色威权主义与欧洲的气候自由主义，在同一个潜在的协约框架内展开竞争。组织轴心不再是政治哲学，而是物质代谢——谁控制着现代性所依赖的能源、矿产与技术。
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.
这正是为何新兴不结盟运动一旦成形，其面貌将与前身判然有别。它不再由万隆时代的团结精神或第三世界主义意识形态所驱动，而是由多边矿产采购联盟与技术缝合的冰冷实用主义所主导。其最大资产在于转型本身的物质性：阿根廷盐滩下的锂矿、澳大利亚卡尔古利的镍钴项目、遍布印尼与哈萨克斯坦的稀土资源，为中坚国家提供了后殖民时代不结盟运动从未拥有的杠杆力量。而其最致命的弱点——正如最初的组织以沉重代价所发现的——在于内部裂痕：石油生产国与转型国家之间存在着不可调和的张力，前者的财政存续依赖于化石燃料时代的延续，后者的发展未来则取决于终结这个时代。
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.
卡尼在达沃斯对旧秩序的悼词并非哀叹。它承认了基于规则的自由主义国际秩序——那种律师规范与制度尊重的美好虚构——早已付之一炬，问题不再是如何恢复它，而是如何在它缺席的情况下生存。中等强国正是锻造答案的熔炉。它们的成功取决于能否将矿产资源、人口体量与来之不易的外交能力转化为真正的第三条道路——一条既拒绝石油国家轴心附庸主义所导致的地球生态自杀，也拒绝绿色协约所造成的基础设施依赖。
评论翻译
@foolonthehill12
China is ahead of the US by almost any metric compared. The US is no longer a world leader and may never be again. Possible exception being the leader of violence and chaos.
从几乎任何可比的指标来看，中国都已领先于美国。美国不再是世界领导者，可能永远也无法重回巅峰。或许唯一的例外，就是它在制造暴力和混乱方面依然独占鳌头。
@Deepfire_DM
Chinese think "tomorrow". US thinks "yesterday". It's very simple.
中国人着眼“未来”，美国人沉溺“过去”。就这么简单。
@Temporary-Job-9049
Funny how every Empire in history failed because they refused to adapt.
历史真是讽刺，每个帝国的衰落都源于拒绝变革。
@Dreamsofjetpacks
There are a number of factors for why this happens but an important one for modern audiences to understand is how often the rich and powerful within the declining empire are actively working and fighting against any reforms that might help the empire but take away from their own wealth and power. Essentially prioritizing their own fortunes over the very Empire that helped give them that wealth and power to begin with. It's very petty but sadly human.
这种现象背后有多重原因，但现代观众需要理解一个关键点：在衰落的帝国内部，权贵阶层往往不遗余力地阻挠任何可能拯救帝国却会削弱他们自身财富与权力的改革。本质上，他们宁愿守护个人私利，也不愿维护那个最初赋予他们财富与权力的帝国。这种行为狭隘，但可悲的是，却是人性使然。
@Midiamp
Command & Conquer sequel will have American equivalent of units rolling coal while the Chinese equivalent running electric.
《命令与征服》续作里，美系单位怕不是要狂喷黑烟，而中方单位全改成纯电驱动了。
@rushmc1
The U.S. has abandoned the future in almost every way.
美国几乎在所有方面都放弃了未来。
@Splenda
They want to go back to when we were great, whenever that was.
他们总想回到那个我们曾经伟大的时代，不管它到底是什么年代。
@rushmc1
It was before they got into power.
那个年代是在他们掌权之前。
@Only-Worldliness2006
Electrostate because those benefit from technology innovation curves. Petrostates have already "peaked" in terms of innovation.
电力国才是赢家，因为它们能吃到技术创新的红利。石油国在创新这块儿早就“登顶”了，没新花样可玩了。
@cool-sheep
Nobody doubts that the future is mainly renewables and batteries. I know we’re badly positioned but I’m tired of depending on dictators for oil and gas.
没人怀疑未来主要是可再生能源和电池的天下。我知道我们处境不妙，但我已经受够了依赖独裁者来获取石油和天然气。
@East_Worldliness2287
One is the future One is the past. Maybe should go back to rotary telephones and dial up modems.
一个是未来，一个是过去。或许我们该回归转盘电话和拨号上网的时代了。
@DiamondJim222
If this was 1910 Trump would be forcing Henry Ford to build horse buggies.
这要是1910年，特朗普准得逼着亨利-福特继续造马车。
@Mission_Search8991
Damnit, don’t give the old man any ideas
见鬼，可别让那老头冒出什么鬼点子
@MCMLIXxiX
Interesting, one of them has geared up for the next few hundred years. The other geared up for the last few hundred years. Has trump just handed the energy market to China?
有意思，一个已经为未来几百年做好了准备，另一个却还停留在过去几百年的水平。特朗普这是要把能源市场拱手让给中国吗？
@Nearby-Lab0
Ironically, this is how the Qing dynasty ended. Fell behind in technology and vast corruption.
讽刺的是，清朝就是这么完蛋的。技术落后，腐败横行。
China is ahead of the US by almost any metric compared. The US is no longer a world leader and may never be again. Possible exception being the leader of violence and chaos.
从几乎任何可比的指标来看，中国都已领先于美国。美国不再是世界领导者，可能永远也无法重回巅峰。或许唯一的例外，就是它在制造暴力和混乱方面依然独占鳌头。
@Deepfire_DM
Chinese think "tomorrow". US thinks "yesterday". It's very simple.
中国人着眼“未来”，美国人沉溺“过去”。就这么简单。
@Temporary-Job-9049
Funny how every Empire in history failed because they refused to adapt.
历史真是讽刺，每个帝国的衰落都源于拒绝变革。
@Dreamsofjetpacks
There are a number of factors for why this happens but an important one for modern audiences to understand is how often the rich and powerful within the declining empire are actively working and fighting against any reforms that might help the empire but take away from their own wealth and power. Essentially prioritizing their own fortunes over the very Empire that helped give them that wealth and power to begin with. It's very petty but sadly human.
这种现象背后有多重原因，但现代观众需要理解一个关键点：在衰落的帝国内部，权贵阶层往往不遗余力地阻挠任何可能拯救帝国却会削弱他们自身财富与权力的改革。本质上，他们宁愿守护个人私利，也不愿维护那个最初赋予他们财富与权力的帝国。这种行为狭隘，但可悲的是，却是人性使然。
@Midiamp
Command & Conquer sequel will have American equivalent of units rolling coal while the Chinese equivalent running electric.
《命令与征服》续作里，美系单位怕不是要狂喷黑烟，而中方单位全改成纯电驱动了。
@rushmc1
The U.S. has abandoned the future in almost every way.
美国几乎在所有方面都放弃了未来。
@Splenda
They want to go back to when we were great, whenever that was.
他们总想回到那个我们曾经伟大的时代，不管它到底是什么年代。
@rushmc1
It was before they got into power.
那个年代是在他们掌权之前。
@Only-Worldliness2006
Electrostate because those benefit from technology innovation curves. Petrostates have already "peaked" in terms of innovation.
电力国才是赢家，因为它们能吃到技术创新的红利。石油国在创新这块儿早就“登顶”了，没新花样可玩了。
@cool-sheep
Nobody doubts that the future is mainly renewables and batteries. I know we’re badly positioned but I’m tired of depending on dictators for oil and gas.
没人怀疑未来主要是可再生能源和电池的天下。我知道我们处境不妙，但我已经受够了依赖独裁者来获取石油和天然气。
@East_Worldliness2287
One is the future One is the past. Maybe should go back to rotary telephones and dial up modems.
一个是未来，一个是过去。或许我们该回归转盘电话和拨号上网的时代了。
@DiamondJim222
If this was 1910 Trump would be forcing Henry Ford to build horse buggies.
这要是1910年，特朗普准得逼着亨利-福特继续造马车。
@Mission_Search8991
Damnit, don’t give the old man any ideas
见鬼，可别让那老头冒出什么鬼点子
@MCMLIXxiX
Interesting, one of them has geared up for the next few hundred years. The other geared up for the last few hundred years. Has trump just handed the energy market to China?
有意思，一个已经为未来几百年做好了准备，另一个却还停留在过去几百年的水平。特朗普这是要把能源市场拱手让给中国吗？
@Nearby-Lab0
Ironically, this is how the Qing dynasty ended. Fell behind in technology and vast corruption.
讽刺的是，清朝就是这么完蛋的。技术落后，腐败横行。
