UKRAINE AND THE END OF THE "NEW WORLD ORDER".

• Author: Gottlieb, Stuart

INTRODUCTION

During a February 2023 episode of NBC's "Meet The Press," host Chuck Todd brought up the dire concerns of the Biden administration that China may begin offering direct military assistance to Russia in its year-old war against Ukraine. With a look of incredulity he turned to one of his panelists and asked, "Why would China do this?"

Mark this moment down as a turning point in modern international relations--a moment when it suddenly became clear that the world we have known since at least the end of the Cold War, and which many assumed would continue indefinitely, was in fact confronting tectonic shifts.

Whether or not China moves forward with more extreme support for Russia, the genie of global change is out of the bottle, and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Indeed, this moment should not come as much of a surprise. For 30 years, Western optimism that a post-Cold War "New World Order"--or, more specifically, United States-led "rules-based" liberal order--would sustain global governance has been slowly fraving. The 1990s turned into a decade of vicious civil wars and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The 2000s was defined by a globalized terrorist war between al-Qaeda and the United States, along with two land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The 2010s was a decade of clean-up from the 2008 global financial crisis and the rise of anti-liberal populism in the world's leading democracies, including the United States, Britain, and France.

And now, it is increasingly clear the 2020s will be the decade that witnessed the return of realpolitik to the Westphalian system--a time when a powerful array of non-Western states began openly challenging the U.S.-led global order. Though such pressures may have been building for some time, the West's united front against Russia following its brutal invasion of Ukraine has offered the starkest evidence to date of the softening underpinnings of American and Western global leadership. Not because supporting Ukraine was not the right thing to do--it certainly was. But because it has exposed fissures and fault lines between the world that adherents of Western ideology have long believed would emerge, and the one that has emerged.

This may seem like a pessimistic take on the future of world politics. It is not. If fairly grasped, this turning point might offer a more realistic future of stable global relations. But for that to happen, the West will need to scale back significantly on its ideologically-driven hubris. And the non-West will need to recognize that Western democracies are not going away and will in fact remain amongst the most powerful actors in the international community

This article will first analyze the foundations of the post-Cold War "New World Order" and its increasing vulnerabilities. Next, it discusses the evolution of challenges to the order, culminating with today's direct Westphalian (state-based) challenge from non-Western states and budding coalitions of states. Lastly, it concludes with thoughts about the future.

THE NOT-SO-NEW WORLD ORDER

It should not be particularly surprising that in the early post-Cold War period, the United States sought to make its vision for a world based on its own liberal ideals permanent. Beginning with Thomas Paine's 1776 cry that Americans "have it in our power to begin the world over again," though to Woodrow Wilson's vow to "make the world safe for democracy" and Franklin Roosevelt's creation of the post-World War II liberal international order, America has always thought in terms of refashioning the world in its own image.

After vanquishing the competing ideologies of fascism in the first half of the twentieth century and communism in the second, the time was ripe to build a world order based on "universal" liberal values, which many in the West--taking their cues from the Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama--believe represents the "end of history" (1) in world politics. America's first post-Cold War president, George HW. Bush, declared it his mission to inspire the creation of this "New World Order," (2) while his successor, Bill Clinton, operationalized it with his administration's aggressive strategies of free market "engagement" and democratic "enlargement." (3)

To be clear, liberal values have proven to offer the soundest foundations for domestic political and economic systems and, when used efficiently, to positively influence global politics. During this early period, the world witnessed what liberal values can do at their best by extending freedom and opportunity to parts of the world that never had them before, notably to former Soviet republics, India, and China, helping to pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

However, Western governance of the liberal order has veered off of its efficient path ever since, mostly due to Western hubris and a near-universal certainty amongst Western elites that liberal values, liberal politics, and neoliberal economics are the only legitimate ways to organize domestic and international society. This hubris, and the overreach that has come along with it, has abetted the emergence of serious counter-movements that now openly tiireaten the contemporary world order.

Before discussing these threats, it is necessary to review the basic foundations of the post-Cold War liberal order and the many missteps committed in its name.

First, it is important to recognize that the liberal order is not a U.S. concept, even if the United States has been its titular and tangible leader since World War II. It's a Western concept, grounded in Western liberal philosophy, and Western notions of liberal internationalism.

We see this most clearly in the four big institutions--the United Nations (UN), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), World Trade Organization (WTO), and European Union (EU)--that serve as the foundation of the post-World War II liberal order. (4) The UN manages international law, NATO manages international security, the WTO manages international economics, and the EU represents the exemplar of "post-sovereignty liberalism" (for which it won a Nobel Peace...