Leon Hadar: No World Order
[Leon Hadar is a Cato Institute research fellow in foreign-policy studies and author, most recently, of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.]
Since the end of geostrategic competition between the U.S. and the (former) USSR, pundits have been proposing new conceptual frameworks for understanding the evolving global political and economic balance — or imbalance — of power.
Indeed, for close to two decades, scholars have been debating the direction that the “paradigm shift” in international relations would take. What would replace the obsolete bipolar international system and the strategic and ideological forces that had driven it?
From Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” assuming a stable unipolar system under which the process of economic globalization and the spread of democratic and liberal values would widen to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” forecasting a challenge to American power and values from the Muslim world and other civilizational blocs, and through other complementing and competing big and small ideas warning of (or hailing) the formation of rival trading blocs, the collapse of the nation-state, the New World Order, the Coming Anarchy, or the rise of a world government, we have been bombarded with a few useful and a lot of useless foreign-policy paradigms.
In a way, these ambitious models were fashioned in response to developments in the real world and seemed to enjoy brief popularity when this or that crisis seemed to be “confirming” one’s favored theory. Hence the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. military victory in the First Gulf War, and China’s entry into the global economy made Fukuyama’s vision trendy. The civil war in the former Yugoslavia and radical Islamic terrorism transformed Huntington into an international celebrity and his “clash” paradigm was all the rage. The post-Maastricht Treaty consolidation of the European Union (EU) and the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to be a sign that regional economic blocs would dominate the international system, while the Zeitgeist of globalism — AKA the Spirit of Davos — seemed to reflect the eroding power of the nation-state.
More recently, the growing economic power of China and India coupled with the relative decline in American power have helped popularize the notion of the coming of the “post-American world” while against the backdrop of the heated debate over the so-called Ground Zero mosque and the rising electoral power of anti-Muslim political parties in Western Europe it looks as though the Clash of Civilization thesis is once again very much “in.” The conventional wisdom is that the brief unipolar American moment is over and that U.S. allies are now hedging their strategic bets as the global environment is taking an elastic multipolar shape.
And so it goes...
Read entire article at American Conservative
Since the end of geostrategic competition between the U.S. and the (former) USSR, pundits have been proposing new conceptual frameworks for understanding the evolving global political and economic balance — or imbalance — of power.
Indeed, for close to two decades, scholars have been debating the direction that the “paradigm shift” in international relations would take. What would replace the obsolete bipolar international system and the strategic and ideological forces that had driven it?
From Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” assuming a stable unipolar system under which the process of economic globalization and the spread of democratic and liberal values would widen to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” forecasting a challenge to American power and values from the Muslim world and other civilizational blocs, and through other complementing and competing big and small ideas warning of (or hailing) the formation of rival trading blocs, the collapse of the nation-state, the New World Order, the Coming Anarchy, or the rise of a world government, we have been bombarded with a few useful and a lot of useless foreign-policy paradigms.
In a way, these ambitious models were fashioned in response to developments in the real world and seemed to enjoy brief popularity when this or that crisis seemed to be “confirming” one’s favored theory. Hence the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. military victory in the First Gulf War, and China’s entry into the global economy made Fukuyama’s vision trendy. The civil war in the former Yugoslavia and radical Islamic terrorism transformed Huntington into an international celebrity and his “clash” paradigm was all the rage. The post-Maastricht Treaty consolidation of the European Union (EU) and the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to be a sign that regional economic blocs would dominate the international system, while the Zeitgeist of globalism — AKA the Spirit of Davos — seemed to reflect the eroding power of the nation-state.
More recently, the growing economic power of China and India coupled with the relative decline in American power have helped popularize the notion of the coming of the “post-American world” while against the backdrop of the heated debate over the so-called Ground Zero mosque and the rising electoral power of anti-Muslim political parties in Western Europe it looks as though the Clash of Civilization thesis is once again very much “in.” The conventional wisdom is that the brief unipolar American moment is over and that U.S. allies are now hedging their strategic bets as the global environment is taking an elastic multipolar shape.
And so it goes...