World order

The concept of "world order" refers to the prevailing international system of governance, power dynamics, and global relations, which in the 21st century is shifting towards a multipolar structure with significant implications for global stability and governance.

Congress of Vienna (1815 - 1914)

After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Congress of Vienna reconstituted order in Europe by reintegrating [[France][ into its councils of governance. The so-called Concert of Europe established a balance of power system that prevented any single power from dominating the European subcontinent. But as the 19th century proceeded, outside Europe, Britain emerged as the undisputed global hegemon.

A British viceroy ruled India. Europeans divided the rest of the world between them. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia sliced China into spheres of influence.

Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain apportioned Africa between them, leaving only Ethiopia and Liberia independent.

In West Asia, only the Arabian Peninsula, and in East Asia, only Japan remained completely independent. Japan soon emulated Europe’s imperialist powers by building its own overseas empire, seizing the Chinese province of Taiwan in 1895, subjugating the Empire of Korea in 1905, and annexing it in 1910.

Treaty of Versailles

See also: Treaty of Versailles

The 1919 peace conference in Paris that followed the armistice with Germany in the First World War marked international recognition of the United States as a leading Atlantic and global power. At the conference, President Woodrow Wilson advocated a distinctly American vision of world order based on self-determination – if only for the white nations of Europe – and the replacement of international power politics with a version of the rule of law under a new "League of Nations." His support for self-determination reflected both popular American reverence for the U.S. Declaration of Independence and his own sympathy for the right of secession espoused by his native Virginia and childhood residence in Georgia, both unreconciled members of the ill-fated Confederate States of America. Wilson's idealistic vision of a new world order based on agreed norms and regulatory institutions gained lip service at the conference, but little else. Translated into ethno-linguistic terms relevant to Europe and West Asia, "self-determination" furnished the justification for the dismantling and partition of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.

America's core ideology had long been the rule of law. The proposal for a "League of Nations" represented a projection of this ideology into international affairs. The subsequent refusal of the United States to join the League incapacitated it, but the idea of a rule-bound order continued to find expression in idealistic projects like the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, whose signatories sanctimoniously renounced the use of war to settle international disputes.

The First World War had crippled Germany, gutted and impoverished Britain and France, and catalyzed the dissolution and rebirth of the Russian Empire as the Soviet Union. The victors, including the United States, excluded both Germany and the Soviet Union from any role in a renewed European system of governance or balance of power. This miscarriage of statecraft ensured instability and laid the basis for a renewed violent struggle for hegemony in Europe two decades later.

Meanwhile, the world war of 1914 – 1918 had propelled the United States to global economic, financial, and cultural preeminence. The dollar became a major international medium of exchange, and American music, literature, and consumer products achieved worldwide acclaim. But with the United States self-isolated, the great powers of Europe weakened, and agitation for independence in their overseas empires mounting, the world was in a state of increasing disorder – in transition to something yet unknown.

In 1929, the American economy succumbed to mass speculation in its unregulated capital markets, blunders by the Federal Reserve, and protectionist measures that kicked off a series of trade wars. The worldwide Great Depression generated by the knock-on effects of these developments precipitated the replacement of democracy with militarism in Germany and Japan, which joined Italy in developing forms of "fascism" – dictatorial regimes driven by social Darwinist theories of racial supremacy, obsessions with territorial expansion, and government-guided corporatist economies.

Cold War (1947 – 1989)

By 1947, rival blocs led by Soviet and American overlords had begun to confront each other over both geopolitical and ideological issues. Both sources of contention were evident in the 1947 Truman Doctrine's support for Greece and Turkey against Soviet pressure, the 1948 -1949 Berlin Airlift, and the appallingly bloody Korean War of 1950 – 1953. These events put in place a quasi-feudal bipolar world order that lasted until 1989, when the Soviet Union's eastern European empire disintegrated, and it ceased to contend for Eurasian or global hegemony.

During the four decades of the Cold War, the relationship – or lack of relationship – of nation states with one or the other superpower determined their geopolitical positions, freedom of maneuver, level of access to public goods, and degree of immunity from foreign-instigated regime change operations. Meanwhile, the contending superpowers came to expect automatic followership from those aligned with them for their positions on each and every aspect of world affairs.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union took care to prevent states in their respective spheres of influence from slipping away or defecting to the other, but both were conscious of the danger of mutual annihilation in a nuclear exchange, and neither was prepared to risk this by engaging in direct combat with the other. Both saw newly independent states that attempted to remain nonaligned – separate from either bloc – as weak-minded and up for grabs, and each sought to sustain or expand its sphere of influence through proxy wars, regime change operations, the manipulation of elections, and economic blandishments and deprivations.

Ideology was a much more prominent feature of the Cold War than it had been in previous world orders. The US-led bloc – the so-called "free world" – was politically heterogeneous. It was composed of a mixture of democracies, dictatorships, monarchies, and imperial outposts with little in common other than a desire to remain unsubjugated by godless communism and to derive material benefits through alignment with the United States. Its member states practiced multiple versions of capitalism, social democracy, and religious faith.

The members of the Soviet bloc, by contrast, were relatively homogeneous. They modeled their politics on Marxism-Leninism, the ruthless elitist dictatorship, atheist ideology, and statist political economic system championed by Moscow.

Diplomacy in the Cold War resembled nothing so much as trench warfare. Its object was less to rollback the spheres of influence of the other side than to avoid giving the other a reason to attack it. Despite the efforts of each side to subvert the other, the two blocs remained remarkably stable over the course of their four-decade-long confrontation. Both superpowers kept garrisons on the territories of those members of their blocs they termed "allies," by which each meant subordinate states they had committed to secure against attack or ideological conversion by the other. Each restrained such "allies" from actions against the other that might escalate into bilateral warfare between them. The end of the Cold War order removed Soviet constraints on countries like Iraq, which then felt free to launch a war of expansion in Arabia it would never have dared to risk when subject to Soviet supervision.

The greatest shock to the boring stability of the Cold War order was the 1971 – 1979 U.S. enlistment of China in the containment of the Soviet Union. China's shift to the so-called "free world" rebalanced but did not alter the fundamental nature of the world order of the time. This remained defined by adversarial interactions of the United States and its bloc and the Soviet Union and its satrapies. Aside from the U.S. entente with China and an earlier shift to neutrality by Yugoslavia, there were few defections from either bloc. Only one — Cuba's turn to Soviet protection – catalyzed the near-death experience of a nuclear standoff between the two superpowers. Deft diplomacy kept disaster at bay.

Unipolar (1991 - 2017)

The American diplomat George Kennan based his 1946 proposal for a grand strategy of "containment" of the Soviet Union on his judgment that, if isolated, it would eventually collapse of its own defects. It took more than four decades to prove him right. For a few delirious years immediately after the 1991 implosion of the USSR and the independence of its constituent Baltic, eastern European, and central Asian republics, it seemed that, as Francis Fukuyama declared, history had ended in the triumph of "liberal democracy". But this was not to be. Unlike economic aid given to defeated Nazi Germany with the Marshall Plan after World War II, Western carpetbaggers administered a drastic restructuring or "shock therapy" to the Soviet economy that immiserated the population but enriched a new class of oligarchs. Russia's efforts to integrate itself with the West met with an ambivalent, unwelcoming, and off-putting response.

As early as 1994, Russia began warning the United States that, if NATO enlargement extended to the Russian borders, Moscow would view this as evidence of hostility and mount a military response. But by 2004, every member state of the former Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact had been inducted into NATO. In the Cold War, NATO had been a purely defensive alliance designed to counter Moscow in Europe. But in 1995, NATO began to take the offensive. It intervened in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1999, it launched a 78-day bombing campaign that wrested Kosovo from Serbia, a state traditionally associated with Russia. In 2001, NATO joined the United States in its twenty-year war to pacify faraway Afghanistan outside Europe. And in 2011, it supported a regime change operation that threw Libya into anarchy, again outside Europe. As NATO expanded toward Russia, Moscow came to see it as an increasingly active military threat.

In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a strong warning against further NATO enlargement. But in 2008, under U.S. pressure, NATO offered membership to the Republic of Georgia and Ukraine, both former constituent states of the Soviet Union bordering the Russian Federation. An emboldened Georgia then challenged Russian influence in minority regions on its Russian border. The result was the first European war of the 21st century, which ended in the Russian-aided secession of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia and Russian establishment of suzerainty there.

The heart of Burisma Holdings' Yuzov field in the Dniepr-Dontes Basin (Donbas).

The Dniepr-Donets Basin (Donbas) center of Burisma Holdings on the Kharkov front during the NATO war in Ukraine.

In 2014 a US-supported color revolution and regime change operation overthrew the democratically elected but corrupt pro-Russian government of Ukraine. After the coup, the U.S. again pressed NATO to induct Ukraine. Ukrainian membership in NATO threatened, among other consequences, to deprive Russia of its centuries-old vital national security Black Sea naval base in Crimea. In a bloodless use of military measures short of war, Russia then took back Crimea, administrative control of which the Soviet Union had transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954.

Meanwhile, the new ultranationalist regime in Kyiv sought to make Ukrainian the sole language of official and interpersonal communication in public institutions throughout the country, ending the official use of Russian and other languages at both the national and regional levels. Soon thereafter, Russia conducted a referendum in Crimea, most of whose inhabitants — more than three-fourths of whom are native speakers of Russian – welcomed reincorporation into the Russian Federation. The Donbas oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk, where Russian speakers are seventy percent or more of the population, then declared their autonomy from Ukraine, but were denied reincarnation into the Russian Federation by the Russian State Duma.

The US-backed Kyiv regime launched an offensive that occupied parts of the Donbas. Diplomatic efforts to restore linguistic and other elements of autonomy within a federalized Ukraine produced two never-implemented agreements, the Minsk Accords. As the Donbas war proceeded amidst occasional ceasefires, Ukraine built a line of fortifications in the Donbas from which it daily bombarded the civilian residents. The United States, Britain, and other NATO members made a major effort to retrain, reorganize, and re-equip the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Russia simultaneously escalated its military support for the Donbas militias.

In late 2021, Russia demanded negotiations to rule out Ukrainian membership in NATO. The U.S. and NATO refused to discuss this. Russia massed troops on its border with Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO again rebuffed Moscow’s demand for talks about NATO enlargement. In early 2022, Russia finally recognized the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, garrisoned them, and invaded Ukraine.

In response, the United States, joined by the EU, Britain, Australia, and a few other security partners, declared all-out economic war on Russia, cutting it off from the global dollar-based trading system, attempting to ban its energy exports, and seizing its dollar reserves, while initiating massive arms transfers and tactical intelligence support to the Kyiv regime, which is became mired in a thousand-kilometer-wide war of attrition with Russia. The information war that accompanied the proxy war is the fiercest and most comprehensive in world history. With all sources of information other than those favoring Ukraine cut off, it became impossible to understand what is actually happening there. Whether a Western policy of support for proxy war in Ukraine can save it and restore peace in Europe is at best doubtful, but the economic sanctions on Russia, its knock-on effects, the concomitant paroxysm in US-China relations, and the worldwide turn to protectionism driven by national security rather than economic concerns together catalyzed the emergence of a very new pattern of international interactions.

Multipolar

In a globalized economy, national borders are relatively stable and respected. Goods flow freely, with the result that inventories can be maintained at low levels because they can be readily replenished. This has been the norm for the post-1945 period until the Iran war and closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Many countries were caught with their pants down—meaning, they had no meaningful reserve inventories of critical goods, like oil, fertilizers, sulfuric acid, and so on.

Through the petrodollar system the US rigged the system to control it. This forced the rest of the world to finance the US government's budget deficits, and America living beyond its means. If the United States needed or wanted to import foreign consumer goods or raw materials, it simply printed paper dollars, which the rest of the world needed to buy oil. This system, while facilitating global trade, led to a system of neocolonialism in which the US was able to extract wealth from the rest of the planet. That led to the US running up a $38 Trillion national debt and beggaring the American middle class. That global order could have worked if the United States had been willing to abide by international law, rather than unilaterally instituting its own so-called Rules Based Order, with the constant threat of military force and economic sanctions.

MAGA meant deglobalizing the economy. In a deglobalized economy every nation would need to build up its own critical inventories of what they need.

China and Russia dreamed up BRICS and the notion of fair dealing. Iran, which had ejected the neocolonialist CIA/MI6 regime of the Shah, was more than willing to join the BRICS bandwagon.