• English Site
• > World
• > Found in IP Global

A Hundred Little Napoleons

Is Anyone in Charge in Today's Nonpolar World?

By Adam Roberts

As the era of US hegemony comes to an end, great power politics is making a comeback. The world will need to figure out how to deal with a new global system in which power is dispersed and variable.

A nonpolar international system is emerging from the false starts and misleading visions that characterized the post-Cold War years. No clear leadership role is exerted by a single, preeminent power. In different regions, and from crisis to crisis, different states and combinations of states will take the lead. The UN is only one option among many.

In his State of the Union address in 1992, President George H.W. Bush declared: "By the grace of God, America won the Cold War." This view of the past led seamlessly to a US-centric view of the future:

"A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America. And this they regard with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair and restrained. They trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what's right."

How remote this speech now seems. Its self-congratulatory tone and hubristic vision of the world has disappeared -- and not only because of the difficulties of an ill-judged and poorly planned US-led venture in Iraq since 2003 and Russia's reassertion of its military power in Georgia in 2008. Already toward the end of the Clinton presidency, US dominance was waning. The world-wide move toward democracy had encountered setbacks in several countries, including Russia. The international sanctions regime against Iraq was as much of a running sore for its perpetrators as for its intended target. Nuclear weapons proliferation expanded, especially in the Indian subcontinent. Somalia, despite the US-led intervention in 1993, found itself among the many failed states producing refugees and providing havens for terrorists. Afghanistan had been saved from Soviet control only to fall under the Taliban and to provide a base for Osama bin Laden. The United States refused to participate in several key international legal regimes. US-led attempts to address the Israel-Palestine problem also failed. The United States, far from leading a consensual international order, was the most frequent wielder of the veto in the UN Security Council.

The US inability to lead may be temporary. The United States has many attributes that will bring it back into a close relation with other states. These skills include patient cooperation, as shown in the Cold War, and a unique capacity to deploy and use force distant from its own shores. The United States remains the one power that maintains a world-wide network of alliances. Moreover, the US body politic is genetically imprinted with a vision of the United States as the savior of a corrupt and troubled world. Yet the United States is caught up in the consequences of maintaining its vision and its interventions on the cheap, without resorting to either conscription or taxation. The initial US response to the Russian intervention in Georgia -- the bluster not matched by effective action -- confirmed that US power is operating under severe constraints. Even under a new president, and with the worst of Iraq behind it, the US capacity to embark on a revived global role will be limited.

Naturally, many have concluded that if there is neither the bipolar order of the Cold War years nor the unipolar order conjured up by President Bush in 1992, then the world must be entering a multipolar order. The utility of such a description of the world is questionable on several grounds. The very point of thinking about the world in "polar" terms is that poles are few and far between, and form the center of constellations of power. In the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union had exactly this capacity, symbolizing each in its own way a distinctive approach to international order and indeed to the destiny of human society. Both formed world-wide networks and alliances.

Such a capacity is much less evident in the post-Cold War world. The newly emerging major powers, especially India and China, have impressive achievements to their credit, extensive interests abroad, and distinctive foreign policies. Yet their rise as great powers has coincided with a diminution of earlier rhetoric in which India presented itself as a global standard-bearer for non-alignment, and China carved out a role as the defender of revolutionary purity against Soviet social imperialism. As they have become great powers they have ceased to be beacons. They are certainly not poles. Similarly, post-Soviet Russia is hardly a pole: It sees itself as defending Russian interests, standing up for Russians who live in various post-Soviet states, becoming powerful regionally, and perhaps even as leading the fight against US hegemony. It does not see itself as offering a distinct political and social system for the world.

There has always been reason to doubt the value of thinking in "polar" terms. The countries of the world never were, and are certainly not now, mere iron -filings, ever ready to align themselves with the strongest magnetic field. On the contrary, each has its own interests and its distinctive political culture. The history of the Cold War, and of its end, is partly the history of states and their peoples refusing to fit into the rigid ideological straitjackets imposed upon them. Ceasing to talk of poles may liberate us from some of the limitations of polar thought.

Yet there are hazards aplenty in the nonpolar world. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, is right to warn that "nonpolarity will be difficult and dangerous," and to call for a degree of organization and order which he terms "concerted nonpolarity." This is the key issue: Can nonpolarity be consistent with the maintenance of norms and the preservation of order? Is a nonpolar world a fragile world?

Today, a notably wide range of possible risks and challenges appear to confirm the fragility of world order. The events in Georgia have graphically substantiated the built-in danger of the much-vaunted new principle for the conduct of international relations in the 21st century, the "responsibility to protect." As events have shown, this principle can easily be distorted and abused as a cover for the extension of national power, and may actually exacerbate the problems of international relations. In addition, possible threats in the next 30 years include climate change, population pressures, resource competition, the emergence of major new powers, nuclear proliferation, transnational terrorism, and religious and ideological fundamentalism. All could contribute to the outbreak of armed conflicts. The threats that we face lie also in ourselves and in our own societies -- for example in our own poor management of intelligence and poor understanding of foreign countries and cultures.

Several of the threats faced today expose inadequacies in the policies of major powers. Nuclear proliferation is the most obvious case in point. The policy of nuclear nonproliferation on which so many countries have placed emphasis requires a serious rationale for why some countries should have -nuclear weapons and others not. Such a rationale is not impossible to develop but has been positively hindered by simplistic interpretations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as a deal imposed by the nuclear powers (ignoring the major impetus of nonnuclear states in the negotiations for the NPT), or as a deal in which the nuclear powers promised to get rid of their own nuclear weapons completely (ignoring the extremely careful language that embodies a more limited and prudent undertaking). Nuclear nonproliferation worked for a generation partly because the Cold War alliance systems provided powerful disincentives for the development of nuclear weapons. Building a serious rationale for nuclear nonproliferation is one of the most difficult challenges faced in the nonpolar world.