A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order

by Richard N. Haass

Populism and nationalism are on the rise. What we are witnessing is a widespread rejection of globalization and international involvement and, as a result, a questioning of long-standing postures and policies, from openness to trade and immigrants to a willingness to maintain alliances and overseas commitments.

States, long the dominant building blocks of international relations, are losing some—and in select cases much—of their sway to other entities. Power is more distributed in more hands than at any time in history.

Decision making has come to be more decentralized. Globalization, with its vast, fast flows of just about anything and everything real and imaginable across borders, is a reality that governments often cannot monitor, much less manage. The gap between the challenges generated by globalization and the ability of a world to cope with them appears to be widening in a number of critical domains. For its part, the United States remains the most powerful entity in the world, but its share of global power is shrinking, as is its ability to translate the considerable power it does have into influence, trends that reflect internal political, social, demographic, cultural, and economic developments within the United States as well as shifts in the outside world.

What this teaches is that neither a balance of power nor economic interdependence is a guarantee against conflict and disorder.

The existing guidelines stated that for a war to be just, it needed to meet several criteria: it must be fought for a worthy cause, have a high chance of success, be sponsored by a legitimate authority, be undertaken only as a last resort, use no more force than was necessary and proportionate, and be fought in a manner that respected the welfare and rights of noncombatants.

Germany and Japan embraced goals in the 1930s that could not be accommodated within the existing international order. Both had become hostage to political systems at home that eliminated checks and balances on those wielding political power. Both invested heavily in the means to wage war. Both did their part to upset the balance of power that had developed. The result was that whereas World War I was largely an accidental and avoidable war, World War II was anything but.

All wars are “fought” at least three times. First, there is the debate about whether to go to war and, in retrospect, its causes. Second, there is the war itself, what takes place on battlefields. And third, there is the debate about the lessons of the war and, quite often, the wisdom of what was done in its aftermath.

Nearly three-quarters of a century later, Germany and Japan stand out as among the few successful examples of what today would be called regime change followed by nation or state building.

More to the point, to turn the old maxim on its head, U.S.-Russian ties during the Second World War proved that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

two alliances also reached an understanding governing political order in Europe. The Final Act that emerged in 1975 in Helsinki from the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe was a remarkable document.7 On one level it reads as a tribute to the classic Westphalian notion of order. It is a multilateral accord premised on state sovereignty, the impermissibility of the threat or use of force, the inviolability of borders, respect for the territorial integrity of all European states, a commitment to the peaceful settlement of disputes, and acceptance of the principle of nonintervention in one another’s internal affairs. The one exception to this traditional approach was a commitment by all governments to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms within their own borders.

every war is fought at least three times, and the Cold War is no exception.

promote the recovery of war-ravaged countries and the development of poor ones;

set up a functional monetary system that would reflect the desire of sovereign states to control their own fate but also to be able to trade and invest with others.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was established to provide loans on a temporary basis to governments running a net deficit so that they could meet their short-term spending needs and reach a point of fiscal balance.2

The Biological Weapons Convention, signed in 1972 and entering into force three years later, makes it illegal for any state party to the accord (and all the parties to it were states) to acquire, develop, or transfer biological weapons of any kind.5

Universal Declaration of Human Rights both reflected and contributed to the growing salience accorded human rights concerns. In many ways it was the forerunner of other efforts to protect individuals from the actions of government and to hold governments and those who acted on their behalf responsible for such actions.

How is it that the world is not doing better, if what has been the principal source of history’s problems is by most measures relatively absent?

Answering this question requires an examination not just of great-power relations but also of global and regional dynamics.

focus on why major-power ties have been better than h...

Great-power relations have also been relatively good because three of the powers (the United States, Europe, and Japan) are not just market-oriented democracies but are tied by alliances.

No relationship has been more important than the one between the United States, the dominant power of the era, and China, the country widely seen as posing the biggest challenge to American primacy.

no relationship was likely to experience more difficulties.

This pattern often goes by the shorthand of the “Thucydides Trap,” named for the ancient Greek historian who two and a half millennia ago chronicled the competition between a rising Athens and the established but suspicious power of Sparta, which resulted in the Peloponnesian War.1

realpolitik. It was the right choice for a number of reasons. First, the United States had many interests involving China; it did not have the luxury of allowing the entire relationship to rise and fall on how China treated its own citizens. Second, it is anything but clear that a U.S. policy of greater censure and sanction would have brought about a China that accorded its people more political and economic freedom.

Three criteria are central to the degree or quality of order: the extent to which there is a widely shared definition of the rules and principles by which the world is to operate; the existence of a broadly accepted process for setting, adjusting, and applying these rules and principles; and a balance of power.

The Gulf War, it turns out, was misleading in two ways: not only was there uncharacteristic global consensus surrounding the issue at stake, but virtually nothing about Operation Desert Storm was a template for subsequent military interventions.

The experience of the 2003 Iraq War demonstrated, though, that no such international support for a norm of “preventive” intervention existed. Often the word “preemptive” is used to describe what the United States did—indeed, it was the word used by the Bush administration in its 2002 national security document—but this is to confuse two terms that mean very different things and have very different standing and acceptance.9 To be clear, what the United States did in 2003 was to launch a preventive action, one aimed at stopping a gathering threat, in this case what

was thought to be Iraq’s development of a nuclear weapon. Such an action is for good reason controversial, as governments inevitably see threats gathering from many sources, and a world of frequent preventive military actions against perceived gathering threats would soon degenerate into a world of frequent conflict.

Another domain of international life beyond those already discussed—sovereignty, self-determination, humanitarian intervention, combating terrorism, and frustrating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—involves climate change.

The world can be viewed and understood through several prisms. We have already looked at two: great-power relations and global governance. A third is the regional.

Many countries that count for little at the global level, because of a lack of either reach or relative weight, have a much greater impact on their neighbors.

The 2003 Iraq War violated any number of strategic tenets, beginning with the Hippocratic oath: First do no harm.

“The majority of states failed to introduce democratic governance and institutions of representation that ensure inclusion, the equal distribution of wealth among various groups, and respect for cultural diversity.”3 Upheaval in such circumstances was highly likely if not inevitable.

Libya proved to be a textbook case of where the United States and the world got it wrong (and contributed significantly to disorder), first by doing too much, then by doing too little.

The Saudi intervention was a costly distraction for a country much weakened by low energy prices and infighting over the line of royal succession. The Saudi foreign minister described the intervention as a war of necessity, but in actuality it was a war of choice.

Today’s Middle East is the result of local pathologies made worse by foreign policy action and inaction alike. “Iatrogenic disorder” is not a term of art when it comes to foreign policy, but it should be.

I don’t want to leave this discussion of U.S. Middle East policy over the past twenty-five years without making one more point. How foreign policy is made counts for a great deal.

What also helped was that the most senior people involved were experienced, had independent standing apart from their relationship with this president and their position, and were comfortable with both one another and with disagreement.

To begin with, there were a large number of unresolved territorial disputes in the region, many going back to the end of the Second World War or before.

A second reason the region’s stability is remarkable is that it survived amid significant change and dynamism.

A third reason the history is something of a pleasant surprise is the relative lack of regional architecture.

The question obviously arises as to why the Asia-Pacific region remained relatively stable in these circumstances. One reason is economic.

A second reason is structural. Unlike the Middle East, where many loyalties are to tribe or religion and many borders lack deep historical roots, in Asia most of the countries have strong national identities and strong governments.

A third reason for the region’s stability is the United States. The United States departed South Vietnam ignominiously in 1975, but it did not leave either Asia or the Pacific more broadly.

G-7 and G-8 mechanisms suffered both from who was still not in the room as well as from the reality that the groups rarely met and had no real staff.

First, to describe this world as multipolar ignores the many other centers of meaningful state power.

Today’s foreign policy must begin with a concerted effort to discourage major-power rivalry, competition, and above all conflict from again becoming the dominant feature of the international system. The reasons are twofold. First, any such deterioration in major-power relations would be extremely costly even if it did not lead to direct conflict and incomparably more costly if it did. Second, adversarial relationships between and among the major powers would prove to be a major distraction that would make it far more difficult for them to work together to deal with the many global and regional challenges that confront them.

China and Russia need to know that the United States has both the will and the ability to respond locally to anything they might do. Deterrence is obviously preferable to defense.

suggesting something fundamentally different: to make the goal of diplomacy to preserve and even expand areas of cooperation amid inevitable areas of disagreement.

United States also needs to exercise more traditional foreign policy restraint. NATO membership for either Ukraine or Georgia should be placed on hold. Neither comes close to meeting NATO requirements, and going ahead would not only further alienate or provoke Russia but would also add military commitments that the United States is not in a position to fulfill.