What Has Become of the “New World Order”?

Peter Jenkins spoke recently at an international meeting convened by Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. This Insight is based on what he said.

The title of this session, Challenges to Global Order, took my mind back to March 1991 when President George H W Bush addressed Congress following the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Here are a few sentences out of that address:

“To the aid of this small country came nations… united against aggression. Our uncommon coalition must now work in common purpose to forge a future that should never again be held hostage to the darker side of human nature. …The consequences of the conflict in the Gulf reach beyond the confines of the Middle East…. Until now the world we have known has been a world divided – a world of … conflict and cold war. Now we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order…. A world order where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfil the historic vision of its founders.”

President Bush was true to his word. During his administration Washington and Moscow brought the Cold War to an end, signed or brought into force a strategic arms reduction treaty (START 1) and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, eliminated thousands of tactical nuclear weapons, co-sponsored the Madrid conference that paved the way for the 1993 Middle East Oslo Accords, and led to a conclusion the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) and Chemical Weapons Convention negotiations.

For a youngish diplomat, observing those developments from the British Embassy in Paris, those were good times. “Bliss was it to be alive!” The outlook for global order seemed set fair.

What a contrast with a present when Washington and Moscow are once more daggers drawn; the INF, CFE and Anti-Ballistic Missile treaties are gone; New START may well expire without issue in February 2026; the United States and China are  growing the means to wage war in the Western Pacific;  North Korea has profited from the collapse of the 1994 Agreed Framework to acquire 50 or more nuclear weapons; and the sabotaging of a 2015 nuclear agreement (the (JCPOA) has incited Iran to reduce International Atomic Energy Agency inspector access to a minimum.

Speaking in June to the annual conference of the U.S. Arms Control Association, the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) said: “Humanity is on a knife's edge, the risk of a nuclear weapon being used has reached heights not seen since the Cold War. States are engaged in a qualitative arms race.”

Why has the promise of the Bush years evaporated? ‘There has been too much of the aggression that President Bush deplored in 1991, and too little diplomacy’ could be one very short answer.

The use of force without authorisation from the UN Security Council is a form of aggression of which several major powers have been guilty, but on which I need not dwell as the instances are well known.

Aggression has also taken the form of covert interventions in support of one or more of the parties to a civil war and/or to overthrow regimes considered uncooperative or malign.

Yet another form, over-use of sanctions, was alluded to recently in an article by my distinguished namesake, Simon Jenkins: “Almost half a century of containment and cohabitation with communism has given way to a shrill new agenda. Not just Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Syria, but states across Asia and Africa are…  made victims of economic aggression through sanctions, distorting global trade and impoverishing millions.”

The use of force without UN authorisation is a reminder of another feature of the last 33 Years: there has been too little respect from major powers for international law. It’s a loss of commitment that threatens global order because order is rooted in rules, norms, and law.

An aspect of that has been the multiplicity of instances in which double standards have been on display. Double standards are not a preserve of the major powers, still less of the West, but they are often seen as such in what is coming to be known as the Global South – partly because they are associated with the West’s enthusiasm for a “rules-based order” that is perceived as different from a global order based on the UN Charter and the body of international law that has resulted from negotiations open to all UN members.

Double standards can breed contempt, cynicism and, over time, indifference to international obligations. They can impair the prospect of the global community coming together in a constructive spirit to find collective solutions to common problems.

As for the neglect of diplomacy, it has been accompanied by a paucity of empathy. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) drew attention to this, indirectly, in the introduction to this year’s U.S. annual threat assessment: “U.S. actions intended to deter foreign aggression or escalation are interpreted by adversaries as reinforcing their own perceptions that the United States is intending to contain or weaken them.”

My point is this. In the absence of the understanding which empathy can offer, a state risks provoking other states into taking actions it sees as threatening by itself taking actions which seem threatening to them. This action–reaction phenomenon can fuel arms races.

There is also a growing tendency to attribute only negative motives to those regarded as adversaries or enemies. Recognising that even adversaries have some legitimate national interests is especially desirable at a time when so many politicians, in thrall to social media, tend to over-simplify.

Addressing these features of a period in which great promise has evaporated is what I see as the foremost challenge confronting the world. The clock cannot be turned back to 1991. But those states that bear most responsibility for the darkening of the outlook can become less aggressive and more restrained, less bellicose and readier to talk, less inclined to double standards and more compliant with international law, and keener to understand the concerns and interests of others.

Of course, the darkening of the outlook has not taken place in a domestic political vacuum. There have been political pressure on governments to pursue aggressive foreign policies. I fear those pressures will persist. But my job today is to identify challenges, not to predict that those challenges will prove insuperable or that worse is yet to come!