Since order has little to do with justice, but a lot to do with the distribution of power among states, realists date the new world order from the collapse of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe in the autumn of 1989. Both aspects of order are relevant to the current world situation, but the administration has not sorted out the relation between them.įrom the realist perspective there is definitely a new world order, but it did not begin with the Gulf War. The problem for the Bush administration was that it thought and acted like Nixon, but borrowed the rhetoric of Wilson and Carter. They see order arising from broad values like democracy and human rights, as well as from international law and institutions such as the United Nations. Liberals, in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, look at relations among peoples as well as states. World order is the product of a stable distribution of power among the major states. Realists, in the tradition of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, see international politics occurring among sovereign states balancing each others’ power. Neither the administration nor its critics were clear about the fact that the term "world order" is used in two very different ways in discussions of world politics. But the Bush administration, famous for eschewing "the vision thing," added to the confusion because it had never really thought through what it meant by the concept it launched. It is worth recalling that it took Americans several years to adjust to the last great shift in the late 1940s. Familiar concepts fail to fit a new reality. It is difficult to keep one’s conceptual footing within such fundamental shifts in politics. The world has changed more rapidly in the past two years than at any time since 1945. The administration faces a deeper problem than mere political tactics. The White House thus decided to lower the rhetorical volume. The victory lost its lustre because of an unfair comparison that the president inadvertently encouraged, and recession shifted the political agenda to the domestic economy. The proper standard for judgment should have been what the world would look like if Saddam Hussein had been left in possession of Kuwait. People were led to compare the war’s imperfect outcome with an impossible ideal. But after the war, when reality intruded, grand schemes turned into a liability. Like Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points or Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms, George Bush’s grand rhetoric expressed the larger goals important for public support when a liberal democratic state goes to war. peaceful settlement of disputes, solidarity against aggression, reduced and controlled arsenals and just treatment of all peoples." Not long after the war, however, the flow of White House words about a new world order slowed to a trickle. The 1991 Persian Gulf War was, according to President Bush, about "more than one small country it is a big idea a new world order," with "new ways of working with other nations.
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