Once upon a time, the world was multipolar. The great powers of Europe all competed to see who would dominate, but employed a shifting alliance system to balance out anyone who seemed to be getting too powerful. When new players joined the game this system fossilized, leading to World War I and as a consequence World War II. After that, the world was dominated by two superpowers with opposing ideologies, who led coalitions of like-minded governments to see whether communism or democracy would triumph. The winner turned out to be democracy, and so with the Soviet Union's collapse, the United States became the world's sole superpower, a country with unrivaled military strength able to deploy anywhere on the globe.
Back in 1989, Fukuyama talked about the "End of History," since after all the great political debate seemed to be over, liberalism was ascendant, and the former Warsaw Pact countries were kicking out their communist regimes and clamoring for democracy. Others looked forward to a Pax Americana, in which the United States would use its preponderance of power to protect the international system as a mostly benign overlord. The original Gulf War seemed to vindicate this idea, and saw the US enforce a United Nations resolution to kick Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. Everything seemed to be going well, and the future looked bright.
We are not living in that world anymore. Global freedom has been in decline for nine years running. The former Soviet satellite states are under threat by a resurgent, authoritarian Russia that's undermining their autonomy through means just short of outright war. The United States went back to Iraq, defying the United Nations in doing so, spent nearly a decade there, and now tries to keep the dysfunctional "democracy" it created from being toppled by an Islamic State even worse than Saddam Hussein's despotism. Everything seems to be getting worse, and there's little hope in sight.
Has the global distribution of power changed over the past quarter century? I would say no, not substantially. The world isn't multipolar, there's no "great game" being played on the global stage by a handful of major powers. The United States is still supremely powerful, despite the exhaustion from decade-long deployments in two countries. Russia is resurgent - that is, aggressive, it's still an economic time bomb and its army hasn't recovered from the USSR's collapse - but it still can't match the United States. As I've said before, this isn't Cold War II, Russia has no ideological appeal. At best Putin can try to start an "absolute power" club with the rulers of Iran and Syria, but nobody else is looking at Russia as a model government.
No, the world still seems to be unipolar. What's changed is our understanding of what that means. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we've seen that just because you have a state-of-the-art army capable of pulverizing any adversary doesn't mean that you'll be able to build something in the resulting ruins. We've seen the international community picking and choosing when and where to live up to its ideals, intervening in Kosovo but watching the Rwandan genocide. And we've seen a supposed bastion of freedom imprison people without trials, torture them as suspected terrorists, and turn into a surveillance state that spies on both its own citizens and its allies.
But rather than describing the world in terms of how power is distributed in the international system, an alternative is to name an era after something more intangible. There were the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, an era popularly perceived as one of ignorance and barbarism. There was the Renaissance, when the Western world rediscovered the good parts of Greek civilization while skipping the pederasty. There was the Enlightenment, in which liberalism blossomed and transformed political thought, laying the foundation for modern democracy.
And now? I call the current era the Disillusionment.
The big difference between now and the end of the Cold War is not in the distribution of power, or the emergence of some rival to the liberal international order. What's changed is us - we've seen the limitations and shortcomings of these things, but don't have a viable alternative to them.
We thought freedom and democracy would fill the vacuum left by communism, and while Eastern Europe was able to pick up the habit of letting people vote, in the rest of the world, that didn't happen. China's one-party government has gotten so good at quashing dissent and controlling information that most of its subjects don't know anything happened in Tienanmen Square. In Russia, when President Yeltsin's opponents objected to his power-grabbing, he had the army shell Moscow's White House; his successor Putin never leaves power, and when a rival politician is gunned down just outside the Kremlin, Russian state media is quick to decry the murder as an attempt to discredit their beloved leader. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring saw the region rise up against its repressive and incompetent regimes, but only Tunisia can be said to be better off for its revolution; the others either failed or resulted in regimes that are at best as bad as the ones replaced.
And what of the democracies that won the Cold War? America’s
political system is increasingly partisan, its conservative faction is
increasingly radical, and the national legislature is so dysfunctional that it is now an
accomplishment to pass an unbalanced budget without the GOP's lunatic fringe shutting down the federal
government. The national debt is skyrocketing and neither
party is willing to risk votes by properly fixing it, the country’s
infrastructure is decaying, and attempts to reform America’s health care system
- well short of the sort of comprehensive government health care seen in the Nordic countries - have been viewed as a socialist takeover and led to the aforementioned
government shutdowns. Voters aren't happy, Congress' approval rating is in the toilet, and yet the public keeps voting for politicians who exacerbate these problems.
It's rather telling that we set up parliamentary systems in Iraq and Afghanistan instead of the brand of federalism America currently fails to function under.
Across the
pond, the socialist democracies of Europe have been peaceful since World War
II and have come together in an unprecedented European Union, but this is showing signs
of strain. It’s easy to support a lot of
social programs when America has effectively paid for your national defense,
but with the current global economic downturn it’s getting harder to find the
funding - plus Putin’s antics make defense spending more relevant than it’s
been in decades. The EU is struggling to deal
with the economic malaises of its least successful members, leading countries like Great Britain
to talk about dropping out. And now
there’s a flood of refugees from a war no one did anything about that is
putting Europe’s welcoming, open-minded
reputation to the test.
Global governance, the liberal international order, the same system that punished Saddam for invading his neighbor? Helpless to do anything about Syria because Russia has its Security Council veto. Capitalism, the free market system that maximizes wealth while minimizing government interference? The gap between the rich and everyone else
keeps growing wider, a global economy means you can lose your job simply
because it’s cheaper to have a foreigner do it on the other side of the world,
and the people ostensibly in control of the economy are willing to wreck it in
pursuit of short-term profits.
All the systems and principles the West fought the Cold War for just don't seem to be living up to their potential. And since the Cold War is over, there's no viable alternatives to them. Communism was a failure, it was simultaneously naive and ruthlessly brutal. The medieval society the Islamic State is trying to construct in the ruins of the Middle East lacks appeal to anyone but sufficiently sociopathic Muslims. Nobody wants to live under an authoritarian regime like in Russia or China, and people outside of them would take democracy on its worst day over a dictatorship on its best, but it's going to be hard for a Russian or Chinese to get galvanized to stand against the system when they see the US government shutting down over Obamacare or Europe threatening to kick out Greece if it doesn't get its economy together, especially if those authoritarian regimes can deliver a similar standard of living.
So disillusionment, pessimism. Recent events have done for politics and economics what World War I did for science, so I suppose you could say we've been living in one long Age of Disillusionment for a century now.
As gloomy as this situation is, there's a straightforward way out - if the system is broken, and we don't have an alternative, fix what we have. Of course, "straightforward" isn't the same as "easy." Can the American electorate support candidates who vow to bridge the partisan divide and solve their nation's problems, instead of politicians who stick to their principles and refuse to compromise? Can Europe hold itself together and maintain its standards in the face of an uncertain economy, Russian aggression, and an influx of refugees? Can we reform the international system so that disasters like Syria aren't allowed to happen, and have free markets that benefit more than the richest participants?
The Western world getting its act together is an important first step, but that in itself won't bring us back to the good old days of 1991. Saddam's gone, but there's plenty of people like him out there. But if we can't solve the problems at home, how can we expect to fix what's wrong with the rest of the world?
No comments:
Post a Comment