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. This questioning is by no means limited to Great Britain; there are signs of it throughout Europe, in the United States, and nearly everywhere else.

Now, some twenty-five years later, it is clear that no benign new world order materialized. What exists in many parts of the world as well as in various venues of international relations resembles more a new world disorder. If there were a publicly traded stock called “World Order Incorporated,” it would not have crashed, but it would have suffered a correction, losing at least 10 percent of its value. The world might even be entering bear market territory, something normally associated with a fall of 20 percent. What is worse, no rally is in sight; to the contrary, the trend is one of declining order.

The questions that flow from this assessment are many and important. Why and how did this happen? How did the world get from that moment of optimism to where it is today? Was this journey inevitable or might things have turned out differently? And where are we precisely? What about today’s world should be thought of as simply the latest chapter in the long march of history and what constitutes something fundamentally different? To be sure, many things look bad, but how bad in fact are they? Might they get worse? And of course there is the question of what, if anything, can and should be done about them.

the notion of “society” as described by Bull has specific meaning. First, the principal “citizens” of this society are states, a word used interchangeably here and elsewhere in these and other pages with both “nation-states” and “countries.” Second, a founding principle of this society is that states and the governments and leaders who oversee them are essentially free to act as they wish within their own borders. How those individuals come to occupy positions of authority, be it by birth, revolution, elections, or some other way, matters not. Third, the members of this international society respect and accept not just this freedom of action on the part of others (in exchange for others in turn accepting that they can act as they wish within their own borders) but also the existence of other members of this society.

Strong states need no definition, but weak states arguably do. What makes a state weak is not an inability to project military power or fight wars beyond its borders so much as its inability to control what takes place within its borders. It is a lack of capacity, one that often leads to large swaths of territory (often termed “ungoverned spaces”) being outside the writ of the government. A failed state is simply the extreme version of a weak state, one in which governmental authority effectively collapses, leading to chaos, the rise of local gangs and militias ruling over parts of the country, or both.

What gradually emerged from this conundrum was the notion of “Responsibility to Protect,” or R2P, as it became widely known. The idea was enshrined in a 2005 statement of a “World Summit” convened by the United Nations. “Each individual state has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

But what made R2P even more significant was an associated notion, namely, that the “international community” also had the responsibility to help to protect populations from the same four threats, including through the use of military force if need be, regardless of whether the government of the country involved asked for it or even if it opposed outside involvement.

the phrase “international community” is far more aspirational than actual. Much less international community exists than anyone could be forgiven for thinking given how often the phrase is invoked.

At several points in this book I have underscored the potential costs of inaction. I am reminded here of the Yom Kippur service, the Jewish Day of Atonement, during which no fewer than ten times each member of the congregation recites a prayer in which he or she asks forgiveness for specific transgressions committed during the year about to end. Some forty sins, reflecting the full range of improper thoughts, words, and behaviors, are noted. The last sin, however, often translated from the Hebrew as the sin of having “a confused heart,” is the sin of inaction when action is warranted.

incomplete or what Fareed Zakaria terms “illiberal” democracies can be dangerous both to those living in the country and to others.4 Incomplete democracies such as Russia, Turkey, and Iran have some but in no way all or even most of the attributes of mature or full democracies. Elections that take place in a context in which opposition figures are prohibited from standing for office or are denied equal access to media and resources along with the ability to organize if they do, or where the process of voting is in one way or another manipulated, can give some countries the appearance of being democratic when in fact they are far from it.

A large portion of the burden of creating and maintaining order at the regional or global level will fall on the United States. This is inevitable for several reasons, only one of which is that the United States is and will likely remain the most powerful country in the world for decades to come. The corollary to this point is that no other country or group of countries has either the capacity or the mind-set to build a global order. Nor can order ever be expected to emerge automatically; there is no invisible hand in the geopolitical marketplace.