On American Diplomacy and the Disorderly Oscillation of World Orders.

• Author: Freeman, Chas W.

Title: On American Diplomacy and the Disorderly Oscillation of World Orders

Text:

Editor's Note: American Diplomacy Journal asked several foreign policy commentators to address the significance of growing chaos in many parts of the world, as failed and failing states are increasingly unable to perform the fundamental functions of the sovereign nation-state. This is one of five articles looking at those concerns.

As the final decade of the 20th century began, the Soviet Union gave up its effort to become the global hegemon and dissolved into its constituent republics.[1] This ended the Cold War and the bipolar world order it had created. The USSR and the Soviet bloc were no more. The consequences of this vindication of George Kennan's grand strategy of "containment" were both immediate and long term. A new and unfamiliar international reality began to emerge.

Those who had grown up in the Cold War had come to consider the international system it created normal, but in historical terms it was sui generis. The Cold War replaced World War II and the decaying colonial era with a world order that:

* Divided the world between two contending blocs of nation states, each headed by an overlord with a messianic ideology and a history of territorial expansion.

* Replaced differentiated political, economic, cultural, and military rivalries with across-the-board confrontation between blocs.[2]

* Relied on fear of a massive nuclear exchange that would extinguish the human species to preserve global peace.

* Made readiness for such a nuclear exchange the most important yardstick of international security for both superpowers.

* Limited armed conflict between the contending superpowers to proxy wars and covert actions in third countries, carefully kept below the threshold at which escalation into direct conflict might occur.

* Locked all but a few states into alignment with one or the other of the contending blocs and its overlord.

* Prioritized spending on military posturing and preparedness over diplomacy and investment in domestic human and physical infrastructure.

As a result, national security policies in each superpower focused on:

* Deterring attempted inroads by its opponent in its domain.[3]

* Preventing nations in its bloc from opting out.[4]

* Freezing conflicts to prevent their escalation into a hot war.[5]

* Constraining military actions by client states.[6]

At the outset of the Cold War, in 1950, Kim Il-sung was obliged to seek Soviet support for his invasion of South Korea. The 1990 end of the Cold War bipolar order eliminated both the protections the USSR afforded client states and the constraints on military adventurism that dependence on Moscow entailed.

Consequences of the Disappearance of Superpower Rivalry

Iraq saw no need to seek Moscow's permission to invade Kuwait and, having done so, felt free to ignore Russian efforts to persuade it to retreat so as to avoid an American-led invasion. Iraq understood before others that the disappearance of superpower rivalry had freed both state and non-state actors from the restraints imposed by the concern of their erstwhile superpower patrons to avoid apparent complicity in reckless risk-taking. Once Moscow had no client states, it was freed from the risk that it might be held accountable for attacks on America by other enemies of the United States. It saw no need to try to...