Ever since the ‘cluster of Copenhagen’ ended in open disarray I’ve been blogging about the breakdown of the movement to fight climate change through the negotiation of an international treaty. These days, I’m increasingly wondering whether the climate meltdown is just one aspect of something much bigger. It’s beginning to look as if the whole New World Order project could be breaking down.
The “New World Order” is an American-led, European- and Japanese-influenced attempt to build a single worldwide network of institutions and laws that would govern most aspects of the emerging international system. From the World Trade Organization to the International Criminal Court, the thickening network of institutions and agreements would shape politics, investment, trade and energy use around the world. The movement to monitor and regulate the world’s energy use would have been the capstone of this effort. Energy is the lifeblood of the modern economy; establishing an international authority with the ability essentially to allocate energy use among the world’s countries would be an extraordinary historical development.
In American foreign policy, the effort to build a new world order reflected the ambitions of a globalist coalition including both the Hamiltonian and Wilsonian foreign policy schools. Modern Hamiltonians want the United States to build a world order that promotes the interests of American business and anchors the security interests of the United States in a global network of alliances. Wilsonians want this Hamiltonian world order to reflect American ideals; Hamiltonians get excited about the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, but Wilsonians focus on international law, arms control and human rights.
For both Wilsonian and Hamiltonian globalists, the end of the Cold War was an opportunity to build the kind of international system they have wanted for a very long time. During the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, this vision dominated American foreign policy. George W. Bush was never much of a globalist; after 9/11 he set the globalist agenda aside to fight the War on Terror. That put him at odds with most of the foreign policy establishment which continued to see the creation of the ‘New World Order’ as the most important strategic challenge facing the United States. For globalists, it was vital to avoid polarizing world politics or alienating potential partners while the work of building the foundations of the world order went on. By elevating the ‘strategic threat’ of international terror over the ‘strategic opportunity’ of building the New World Order, Bush in their view fundamentally misunderstood American interests.
Partly as a result of Bush’s failure to generate a politically sustainable base of support at home or abroad for his war policy, most of the foreign policy establishment is solidly united behind either the Hamiltonian or the Wilsonian vision of the globalist project and the Obama administration came into office determined to reinvigorate the quest for the New World Order.
There is, however, a yawning gap between what the American foreign policy establishment mostly wants and what the world can or will do. It isn’t just climate change. The Doha Round of trade talks at the World Trade Organization shows no sign of coming to a conclusion. The difficulties that the United States has encountered in trying to get Security Council support for tough sanctions against Iran suggest a continued decline in the effectiveness of the United Nations.
For better or worse, I’m beginning to think that the whole sweeping and daring new world order project may have reached its limits. It’s not simply that the complex and intrusive nature of any effective international climate change agreement makes it virtually impossible to negotiate a binding international treaty (much less get that treaty through the US Senate); it’s that the global economy is becoming too dynamic and complex, and world history is moving too quickly for the architects of the international system.
The New World Order is an artifact of the 1980s and it looks back rather than ahead. It was built for the Trilateral world, at a time when the business and political elites of the United States, western Europe and Japan pretty much spoke for the effective political world. There were many differences among these powers and their interests, but on the whole the idea of an international system that reflected their core ideas and served their interests made a certain amount of sense. The core vision behind the New World Order was a shared conviction that the world was changing, and that Japan, Europe and the United States were in a long-term process of decline. The hope was that by establishing a set of ground rules for the international system, the values and interests of the Trilateral powers could be ‘grandfathered’ into international life. The rising powers would buy into the system and the interests of the old powers would be protected even as power shifted.
That was the plan; it’s beginning to look as if it has failed. Japan and Europe are fading too quickly, and the new powers are rising too fast. The Trilateral coalition can no longer shape the world and the United States — as we saw in Copenhagen — has to reorient its policy away from the old powers and towards the new ones.
The trouble is that the new players have very different interests and priorities than the old ones. The BRIC powers aren’t nearly as invested in the institutional models of the New World Order as Europe and Japan are. No longer tied to Washington or anybody else by a perceived security threat, and conscious of their growing economic and political clout, the BRICs and other countries around the world are rapidly losing their respect for a system of global governance that does not serve their perceived interests.
Beyond this, the increased small ‘d’ democratization of the world makes public opinion and cultural and religious politics more important around the world. This makes it harder for elites anywhere to sell international institutions and agreements seen as imposing alien values or interests on domestic society. The populist rebellion against the climate change movement in the United States has its parallels overseas. The Chinese and Indian governments have very different political systems, but both governments must deal with a much more aggressive and demanding public opinion than they have faced in the past.
As we’ve seen both with the Doha Round and the climate change talks, international agreements are becoming simultaneously harder to negotiate among countries and harder to sell in domestic politics. The global issues are becoming more complex and the agreements are becoming more intrusive, but national political systems are less and less open to the growing demands of international institutions and agreements. Developing international agreements on complex topics that intimately affect domestic politics in countries with so many different interests and such different cultural histories is going to keep on getting harder. It may well be that the progress toward a more ‘institutionalized’ world at the global level has come to a juddering halt.
This is going to cause problems. The Trilateral vision may be out of date, but the problems it sought to address are real. More and more of the world’s problems will require international coordination and action, but that international cooperation is going to be harder to get. We have an increasingly volatile economic system and the effect of human activity on the global commons, the air and the sea in particular, continues to grow. Living with these problems won’t be easy, but we are unlikely to be able to solve them all.
Meanwhile international life is going to start looking more tumultuous: less like a larger version of post-historical Europe and more like the great power politics of old. Severe crises and threats of great power war cannot be excluded from this new world disorder. The legitimacy and effectiveness of institutions like the UN is likely to decline; world politics will revolve less around institution-building and law and more about finding ad-hoc solutions for specific issues. American diplomacy will need more Kissingerian students of power politics and fewer lawyers. Rather than trying to build an enduring global framework that will last until the end of time, we will have to think much more about navigating through stormy seas.
The American foreign policy establishment, essentially bureaucratic and legalistic in its approach, will have a hard time adjusting to a world in which bureaucratic thinking and proper procedure matters less and less. Like an army of peacetime, desk generals suddenly confronted with a war, our technocratic and bureaucratic foreign policy thinkers are going to face a whole new set of challenges. Most of the desk generals fail when they get to the front, and battles are lost until the winnowing process brings forward the unconventional figures like a Grant or a de Gaulle who lack the talents needed to succeed in a somnolent peacetime bureaucracy — but know how to win wars. Expect something like this in American foreign policy; a lot of the talents and ideas that worked in the Trilateral world won’t work as well now.
The globalist establishment hoped and believed that President Obama’s inauguration would get the New World Order back on track. Everything that has happened since then suggests that this hope was misplaced.
If that’s right, and the New World Order project has gone irretrievably off the rails, the United States is going to need a new vision of its role in the world. This will not be easy to develop. The New World Order project embodied a coherent and thoughtful vision for achieving what many foreign policy experts believe are the country’s true and enduring strategic goals. Further, it grew out of an American response to perceptions of its decline back in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea was that instead of relying on American leadership, the Free World would promote a joint project in which its three principal power centers (the US, Europe, Japan) would coordinate their policies. What has to happen now is a new and much more searching rethink of American interests and strategies for our post-Trilateral world. Developing that vision and building support among a skeptical public for it will not be easy, but that, apparently, must now be the primary task in American foreign policy.
We are living in revolutionary not evolutionary times. I’m not sure that either our foreign policy elite or the broader public is ready for the kind of wrenching changes that a new vision of America’s role in the world might entail, but ready or not, they are coming our way.