Revolutionary Not Evolutionary Times - Walter Russell Mead's Blog

Posted on March 8th, 2010 Revolutionary Not Evolutionary Times Walter Russell Mead Posted In: History, U.S. Foreign Policy

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.

United-nations-peace-sculpture

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.

( Photo: Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s sculpture Non violence, in the Visitor’s Plaza at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.)

10 Comments »

I mistrust all plans that attempt to corral reality, thus The New World Order (or anybody else’s World Order) is engaged in futility.

The best way to safeguard what is most important about this country is to preserve its exceptionality. That will give our society’s dynamism the fullest scope to invent, build, survive, and prevail in a turbulent world.

There’s one Europe already, nobody needs another situated in North America. I see nothing on offer in international institutions that’s worth trading away a single scrap of our national sovereignty.

Comment by Robert – March 8, 2010 @ 1:25 pm

I’ve always felt that Clinton (the Prez) made an absolutely disastrous mistake in expanding NATO, and encircling Russia. It undercut Russian democrats, making it seem as though liberalization was just a stalking horse for American interests, who only wanted a weakened former adversary. That we now have a Putin seems to me to be an inevitable consequence of that decision. Mightn’t the New World Order have been a stronger coalition if we had had a more conciliatory Russia, rather than one in which traditional nationalist interests are ascendant?

Zbigniew Brzezinski spends a lot of time criticizing ethnic lobbies and their influence on American foreign policy. And yet at the same time he was bravely spearheading a movement to persuade the Kremlin to acknowledge the Katyn Massacre, he was advocating for NATO expansion, on the grounds of containing Russian militarism, correct? In retrospect, are the benefits of containing Russia militarily worth antagonizing their leadership, and sabotaging our domestic allies there?

Comment by Roy – March 8, 2010 @ 5:43 pm

“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.”

As a unrepentant Jacksonian, I say from the lips of Mr. Mead to the ears of God.

Comment by Peter – March 8, 2010 @ 6:38 pm

The notion of “New World Order” is hardly new. One can argue that after war become genuinely global (which probably dates from the mid-eighteenth century struggle between France and England) almost every subsequent and major European “group-grope” (e.g.,1815′s Congress of Vienna) became an attempt to impose a New, Newer, and Newest World Order.

What has changed is the connection between national sovereignty and world order; current elites have sharply discounted the former while hyper-idealizing the latter.

Unfortunately for the idealists, there is an underlying assumption that must be true for the “New World Order” to work: a “natural” harmony of interests among the former sovereignties. Buttressed by the most advanced multi-culti idealizing this prospect may have even seemed quite real to some.

Again, unfortunately for the idealists, the shades of Metternich and Tallyrand continue to bow, joust, and cross their fingers behind their back–and even occasionally cross swords. The fact is that racial, cultural, ethnic, religious, regional, and economic differences are not only real, they remain real even after majorities have tendered them full “respect.”

The joke on the internationalists is that the only genuinely transnational movement turned out to be among the most retrograde: radical Islam. And within rising powers (e.g., China and India), it is nationalism that trades at a premium and internationalism at the discount.

Entropy and chaos have not been repealed. Balance of power theory continues to operate in international relations, only it is the power that “dare not speak its name.”

I predict that with the advent of a nuclear Iran, it will be speaking its name quite soon, and loudly.

Comment by Richard F. Miller – March 8, 2010 @ 7:28 pm

“Rather than trying to build an enduring global framework that will last until the end of time . . .”

I’d settle for one that looks good to last for the next couple of hundred of years. It is too early to write Europe off for reasons of demography and GDP alone. China must certainly replace Japan as the third leg of any stable stool, though mercifully it will not be based on any Kissingerian balance of power. And hopefully it will not take a third world war to see why not is not a good idea.

As for India, the Himilayan barrier effectively removes her from any military equation, unless as a source of manpower in an East/West showdown on the Eurasian continent, God forbid.

Trade and economic interdependence remain the surest basis for a stable international peace in my, perhaps wishful, opinion, the lessons of the 19th century notwithstanding. Nuclear weapons and biological weapons make all the difference. Hopefully even China will see that these are not paper tigers now that she has a great deal to lose.

Obviously these are just my knee-jerk reactions. Can’t we have a little more faith, hope, and charity Mr. Mead?

Comment by Luke Lea – March 8, 2010 @ 8:49 pm

Nice to see that you’ve caught up with the program Mr Mead.
President George W Bush and his team figured all of this out seven years ago.
As they say, better late than never.

Comment by Marcus – March 8, 2010 @ 10:42 pm

It’s just as well that such a rigid, brittle, and inflexible structure will not be implemented (I much prefer bilateral agreements as more flexible and adaptable to changing conditions). I don’t think that the US is in relative decline either, as I’ve heard this before, most recently in the late 80′s when Japan was going to take over the world. Now it’s the BRIC’s that are going to take over the world, I find that unlikely. China for example has a demographic disaster coming in the near future, where their work force is going to shrink by 40 million.
And while the future looks bleak at the moment. It is American culture, (which includes the four schools), that is the most highly evolved, most successful, and the one best positioned to weather the storm. I believe this even though I now think we are in Great Depression 2.0 which will be accompanied by Megalomaniacs 2.0, now with extra horrifying WMD. (Sounds like a breakfast cereal)
We will need to preserve the useful elements of the Hamiltonian and Wilsonian agenda, 20% of our economy is foreign trade after all. As a Jacksonian I really hate the International Criminal Court and will be happy to see it fail. I also think NATO has made us into Europe’s nanny and it would be best for their growth and ours to end it.
Global Warming is Bullshit, we know this because the Warmists models failed to predict temperatures, which have not warmed since ‘95’ (according to them in a recent interview) and have been cooling most recently, and are therefore at least flawed if not outright WRONG (the greatest scientific fraud in human history).
The Economist’s and Banker’s neo-classical equilibrium models have also failed to be predictive (and are seriously flawed); as they themselves have said none of them saw the Global Financial Crisis coming and even now refuse to acknowledge the deflation and depression we are in, despite the obvious indicators of massive unemployment, and foreclosures.
It’s called Capitalism for a Reason, Capital is what fuels it. But they don’t even track all the Capital, having stopped tracking M3 in 2006, and have never tracked some of the larger measures of money supply M4-6. There are some other economists out there whose models have been predictive. So it’s possible in the near future that we will be able to get up on this bike, and give this Hog the gas for accelerated growth in the future. That would be so cool.

Comment by Karl Maier – March 9, 2010 @ 1:05 am

Professor Mead:

I have to disagree with your characterization of Bush’s as setting aside the foreign policy elites’ globalist agenda. The administration made repeated efforts to force the IAEA to do their job and presented a case for war before the UNSC for their blessing. Outside of asking the OIS to mediate, what more would you have had them done? (I am assuming you are referring to Iraq, since the Afghan war was prosecuted under UN sanction).

The other point which I would like to make is instead of considering the actions and opinions of the BRICs in vacuo, consider the actions of the UN and the evolution of public international law since the mid-1990s. When looked at from a far field, it is astounding: we have had Higgins’ declaration that reservations to human rights treaties are nullified, the revival of universal jurisdiction (Pinochet), an attempt to expand jus cogens, the genocide treaty which places duty for every member state to stop genocide (military if need be), the world court ruling unilaterally on the admissibility of Israel’s reservations to the ICJ statute, ICC, oil-for-food, the IPCC boondoogle…

What developing country would not be hesitant to engage in a system that seems hellbent on aggrandizing its own power and expanding its legal jurisdiction while limiting yours? The Africans know that France will never sit in the ICC dock for its actions in Rwanda; that reservation will be unchallenged, I am sure.

I hope this dosen’t make me sound as if I buy gold from G. Gordon Liddy and should it, that was not my intent.

Comment by Joe – March 9, 2010 @ 1:28 am

Another lecture, not a blog post, but again a good one. I tend to agree with all of this, especially the gap identified between the need for global governance and the fact that we are unlikely to get it.

I would only add two points. First, there is global governance and there is global governance, by which I mean that not all functions need have or have the same political profile. There tends to be, as Frank Fukuyama pointing out in THE AMERICAN INTEREST some time ago, an inverse relationship between the effectiveness and the legitimacy of international/multilateral institutions. The wider their membership base, the less they can do — the UN is of course the quintessential example; the narrower, and more outcome-oriented the base, the less legitimate they tend to be — note the IMF, the International Bank of Settlements and so on. There are some institutions that are so far below the political radar because of the technical or niche character of their function–the UPU and Interpol, for example–that they can skirt this problem. My point? How well international governance structures can and do function is not an on/off switch. There are in fact several criteria across a few dimensions that shape their effectiveness.

Second point: Where are all the Hamiltonians? I know about 3 who matter, including one I used to work for. As I see it, the destruction of the old Hamiltonian Republicans (and the American System legacy of the Whigs, of Clay and Webster, they took on board way back) leaves American globalism today largely in the hands of Wilsonians.

We have today in the US — this is only a slight exaggeration I’m about to make–two Democratic parties: one of the goo-goos and the Big Blue Beast, to use your sonorous language, Walter, that calls itself the Democratic Party; and one of the old Dixiecrats and moral-majority populists that now calls itself the Republican Party. Hamiltonian Republicans are a vanishing breed. This is not good.

Comment by Adam Garfinkle – March 9, 2010 @ 11:14 am

Tuesday evening links…

Image: The American air is getting cleaner.
Gun-free zones: Shooting fish in a barrel
Brit governments putting microchips in garbage cans. h/t. How do the people put up with that crap? Well, The Englishman doesn’t.
Stimulants increase learning…

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