Consideration of changing nature of world order since 2000

At the beginning of the new millennium, there was optimism that a ‘new world order' would emerge to replace the tension and suspicion of the Cold War era. There was even some suggestion that history had come to an end and the world would no longer be divided by ideological struggle.  However, the new millennium is proving to be as prone to war as the last one.

 Can the UN adapt to the new world order?

The UN was hampered through much of its history by the divisions of the Cold War but the post-Cold War world has not been much different.  The behaviour of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, particularly the USA and Russia’s use of the veto, demonstrates how it is oſten difficult to reach an agreement because states seek to protect their national interests. Nationalism has proved to be as divisive as ideology and in many ways, the new century looks more like the 19th than the 20th century. National self-interest means that peacekeeping has a mixed record and is oſten hampered by disagreements between the permanent members and the need to gain the permission of sovereign states before peacekeeping missions can be deployed to them. This also means that reform of the UN, in particular the much-criticised Security Council, has proved impossible. 

In 2000 there seemed some reason to hope that the USA and Russia might form a  partnership.  While,Russia transformed into a capitalist economy,  this was not followed by what the West would recognise as a liberal democracy. There are elections in which a range of parties and candidates may stand, but there is increased ballot rigging in presidential elections, suppression of independent media, assassination of political rivals to Putin, and by the time of the invasion of Ukraine Russia has become an authoritarian dictatorship. 

 Putin did declare support for the ‘war on terror’ in 2001 but relations with the USA deteriorated as NATO expanded to incorporate the former Warsaw Pact countries. Russia has been further offended by Western intervention in Kosovo on behalf of the ethnic Albanians against the Serbian government, traditional allies of Russia, and the willingness to support recognition of Kosovo as a sovereign independent state. During this time, Russian nationalism has been growing as a force in Russian politics. United Russia, a right-of-center party that supports Vladimir Putin and encourages pride in the motherland and her achievements, dominates electoral politics. The party won nearly half of all votes in the 2011 Duma elections; the next nearest rivals, the Communist Party, gained only 20 per cent. Under Putin, there has been resurgence of Russian power and influence in the world, driven, in part, by rising economic prosperity. Russia is now an energy superpower, supplying the highest proportion of oil and gas of any country.  Putin has become more assertive in pressing Russia’s interests, by annexing Crimea and finally invading Ukraine as well as military interventions in Syria, Moldova and Georgia.  

Hopes for a more peaceful world post-2000 have been dashed. The communist systems in states such as Yugoslavia and Chechnya had suppressed national and ethnic differences for many years and the fall of communism led to a power vacuum, which was followed by civil war. The majority groups in these states desperately tried to cling to power, resorting to ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and genocide to maintain their dominance. The rise of the Islamic State followed the  ‘war on terror’ and its promotion of Western democracy,  which unleashed destabilising forces. The Arab Spring started in Tunisia in 2010 and spread across North Africa and the Middle East, culminating in revolutions in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, civil uprisings in Egypt and Bahrain, and pro-democracy demonstrations in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, and even Saudi Arabia. The Syrian conflict has raged since 2011, with no immediate hope of a peaceful resolution. Arguably, the world is in a state of disorder, much like the 19th Century making the Cold War appear to be an exceptional period of peace and stability. 

After the end of the Cold War the USA   was the world’s pre-eminent power but in the new millenium, its economic dominance is being challenged not only by China, but also by the rise of other emerging powers, such as Brazil, India, Russia and, the EU, which is now the largest single market in the world. China has become the world’s greatest neocolonial power, investing massively in Africa and South America — regions that were traditionally within the USA’s economic zone of influence. Is China a Super Power?  The fact, too, that China controls so much of the USA’s debt. China has steadily accumulated U.S. Treasury securities over the last few decades. As of October 2021, China owns $1.065 trillion, or about 3.68%, of the $28.9 trillion U.S. national debt, which is more than any other foreign country except Japan.   While the presumed pre-eminence of American-style free-market liberalism is increasingly being challenged by China's state-orientated capitalism, which weathered the 2008 financial crisis better than the USA. The establishment in 2015 of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as a rival to the World Bank in influencing the developing world provides a further example of the way in which economic power is moving eastwards. In the global economy the balance of power has shifted considerably. The credit crunch and the 2008 financial crisis inflicted a major blow upon its international standing, and the US cannot dominate an international organisation comparable to say NATO. It must also negotiate on a bilateral basis with a number of emerging economies and seek some form of accommodation (particularly with the Chinese government) 

 The election of Donald Trump has demonstrated extraordinary class and racial divisions within the USA, which can be seen to contrast with the burgeoning nationalist self-confidence of Putin’s Russia, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey and Xi Jinping’s China. However recent developments such as China's property debt crisis, Turkey's 70% inflation, and Russia's disastrous invasion of Ukraine have exposed serious weaknesses in these states.

Case Study America's War in Iraq 

In terms of soft power, the United States still has an international reach. It provides a considerable amount of international aid in various regions and has the most diplomatic missions of any country in the world. Yet having said this, quantitative measures do not in themselves mean that the world order is necessarily dominated by the US.  The way in which global news networks such as Al Jazeera and RT (formerly Russia Today) increasingly challenge the USA’s traditional dominance of global news has also fostered this greater sense of empowerment among emerging powers. 

Even with its considerable military arsenal, the United States has not always managed to translate hard power into a satisfactory outcome. In 2001, the US launched the Orwellian-sounding ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ when it dispatched armed forces to invade the failed state of Afghanistan. Without a military presence from the US, it seems inconceivable that a coalition of over forty countries would have defeated the Taliban. In 2021 Afghanistan was once again under the control of the Taliban after the USA's chaotic withdrawal. 

Widespread coverage of human rights abuses, such as waterboarding in Guantanamo Bay and the shooting of black Americans by the police has also eroded the USA’s global cultural influence. President Trump has even admitted that the USA is no better than any other country in terms of human rights violations. This has therefore undermined the USA’s traditional claim of moral exclusivity, indicating that the USA may now see itself more on a par with other powers.

THE UNIPOLAR SYSTEM: The decline of Russia and the faltering of China

The concept of a unipolar system in global politics refers to a structure where one state holds a predominant amount of power and influence over international affairs. This system emerged prominently after the Cold War, with the United States as the dominant superpower2.

In a unipolar world, the leading state can shape international norms, policies, and the distribution of power. The US, for instance, has maintained significant influence through its economic, military, and cultural dominance. However, discussions around the unipolar system often include debates on its stability and the potential shift towards a multipolar or bipolar system, especially with the rise of other powerful nations like China

The height of US  power was perhaps most evident immediately following the 9/11 attacks, when it seemed as though the pronouncement of a War on Terror, whilst at the same time the World united around the US and at the same time the Russian and Chinese economies increasingly opened up to Western access. There appeared to be an End of History with the global victory of free market capitalism and the slow but steady acceptance of Western liberal values.

The peak period of American hegemony lasted less than 20 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to around the financial crisis in 2007-09. The country was dominant in many domains of power back then—military, economic, political and cultural. The height of American hubris was the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when it hoped to be able to remake not just Afghanistan (invaded two years before) and Iraq, but the whole of the Middle East. The USA  overestimated the effectiveness of military power to bring about fundamental political change, even as it underestimated the impact of its free-market economic model on global finance. The first decade of the new century ended with US troops bogged down in two counterinsurgency wars, and an international financial crisis that accentuated the huge inequalities that American-led globalisation had brought about.

The dominant Tview became that the degree of unipolarity in this period had been relatively rare in history, and the world was now reverting to a more normal state of multipolarity ever since, with China, Russia, India, Europe and other centres gaining power relative to America

However, unipolarity has made a comeback and it has been suggested that the world can still be considered unipolar. The United States is still dominant in terms of hard power. In terms of GDP per capita - adjusted for, population - its national economy remains far ahead of any other terms of size. The US registered some impressive growth figures since the pandemic, and its vital signs are good. US productivity continues to increase, manufacturing and public investment are on an upswing, and it has a relatively young population relative to many rivals in East Asia and economies in Europe.  Similarly, militarily there continues to be no nation on earth that can challenge the US - it spends more on its military capacity than the next nine highest military spending nations combined. And it is able to rapidly deploy forces anywhere in the world, in a way that simply isn't possible for any other state. In soft power, too, the US still occupies a towering global position both diplomatically and culturally. And it remains intensely involved in global affairs. Its close involvement in the Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine conflicts has been the most visible manifestation of this activity in recent years. 

Talk of a 'new Cold War' has abounded in recent years. Whilst the temptation to view the US and Russia as rivals once again has grown since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the reality is that Russia is not the US's primary antagonist in the global system, it is China instead that threatens the US's geopolitical interests most directly - its enormous economy and productive base allowing it to make inroads and buy world, influence around the to the and giving the Global South a potential alternative US-dominated global order. By some metrics, China can also be considered a superpower. Its economy is rapidly comparable in size to the US It is the world leader in the production of advanced technologies, electric vehicles, renewable energy, and high-tech research and development. The enormous 'Belt and Road' initiative is perhaps the biggest state investment in Overseas economies since the US-funded Marshall Plan which financed post-war reconstruction in Europe. China is competing for military dominance with the US in the Pacific Ocean, and gaining diplomatic and economic access to countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Indo-Pacific. 

 We may have reached 'peak China'

Logan Wright' who leads China market research at the Rhodium Group,   firmly believes that China’s growth has already peaked when defined as the country’s share of nominal global GDP, which he thinks is the most precise metric of its impact on the world’s economy. He also believes the deceleration was underway much earlier than most experts think. 

“What I think other commentators get wrong is how much the economy has already slowed and the impact collapse of the property market and local government infrastructure in particular,” he said. These two sectors have historically contributed about 40% of China’s GDP, including their upstream and downstream impacts on the economy. “This is not a gradual slowdown, but particularly since 2022, a substantial discontinuity and level shift lower that will make it difficult not only to regain previous growth rates but a previous level of influence within the global economy.”

He believes this decline in economic growth will not be easily reversed because China’s boom was fueled by the world’s “largest single country credit expansion in over a century.” Today, China’s banking assets are $60 trillion, which is over three times the size of its GDP and dwarfs the assets of U.S. banks, which are $23 trillion. “It’s a very large, very unprofitable banking system, and the legacy costs of that expansion place significant constraints on them going forward.”

However, in one very important sense, the China-U.S. relationship cannot be compared to the Cold War. In the twentieth century, the US and Soviet Union economies were completely separated from each other - parallel economic universes in which both claimed spheres of influence that would participate in their chosen economic model. In contrast, the economies of the US and China are totally interdependent. The US is the largest purchaser of Chinese exports, whilst China is the US's prime importer. American living standards are highly dependent on Chinese consumer goods, whilst Chinese workers are highly dependent on American consumer demand. China holds the largest reserves of US dollars in the world, giving them power over the currency's value. All of these factors ensure the economies of both countries are co-dependent meaning bipolar competition can only ever go so far before it begins to impact the domestic economy of each, too. 

A third option is that we are starting to live in a multipolar international system, in which no single power can assert itself globally. This designation reflects the significance of emerging powers in the global economy. These nations, such as India, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Iran and Brazil, are widely forecast to become major regional players over the next decades - if they are not already -given the likely path of their economic and/or military development. Many of these nations - notably Russia and Iran - are holding strong geopolitical positions against the US-led order. Others, such as India and Brazil, tend to play 'both Sldes', forging their path and unwilling to get drawn too closely into great power politics. general, these nations take a far more transactional approach to global politics. Unlike the US, which has long sought to enforce a singular set of political and economic rules upon all states it conducts relations with, nations like China and Russia are far more prepared to deal with states on a case-by-case, issue-by-issue basis - a strategy which impedes far less on the sovereignty of nation-states, and allows the developing world to chart their own path of industrialisation, free from the conditions frequently imposed by Western or IMF-led deals.

 The European Union also provides another pole of attraction in this multipolar system - though closely allied with the US, it also leverages its significant economic heft for political purposes. The frequent calls from the French President Emmanuel Macron to pursue 'strategic autonomy' reflect a growing desire for Europe to chart its own path in this great power competition - particularly as a heavily polarised and inward-turning United States led A multipolar world is one that we are less familiar with - the last time the global system definitively met such a description might be before World War | - thus outside of living memory. For the realist school of thought in global politics, a multipolar world might more closely resemble that of the state of international anarchy where events are dictated by the absence of any overarching authority. This supposedly results in increased competition, unpredictability, and potential conflict. Interestingly, it is a description not unlike the geopolitical landscape we are beginning to see today.