Rising to the Challenge of the New World Order

The United Nations (UN) is a mammoth, comprising an impressive array of agencies. Its primary objective, however, and the very reason for its existence, is encapsulated in the Preamble to its Charter. In it “the peoples of the United Nations” avow their determination “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which [referring to the two World Wars] twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”

Building on the Preamble, the first purpose of the UN outlined in Article 1 is “to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace”.

Article 51 of the Charter confirms the right of individual or collective self-defence in the event of an armed attack until the Security Council has effectively intervened to restore the peace. Such measures the Security Council takes in accordance with Chapters VI and VII.

The Charter exemplifies the highest aspirations of the international rule of law, giving body to the belief that all politics can effectively be subjected to the obligatory discipline of the law, binding not only weak states and middle-sized powers, but also the great powers. Previously there were similar attempts to outlaw the use of armed force, primarily through the League of Nations (1920-1946), and in the 1928 General Treaty for the Renunciation of War (the Kellogg-Briand Pact). The failure of these lofty aspirations culminated in the Charter of the United Nations.

The UN system is the quintessence of what is fondly praised as the rule-based international order — an order cherished for its splendid multilateralism, because it is regulated by the widest-ranging multilateral treaty ever, namely the UN Charter.

Needless Lamentation

Precisely because it was so cherished, the apparent perilous demise of this order is currently bitterly lamented. Yet, this grief is largely misplaced, because the perceived multilateral rules-based order for peace and security has never really been in existence at all.

To the extent that international peace and security were maintained, especially peace between the great powers, it was all thanks to something seemingly not lofty but crudely base, namely power, more specifically the superpowers maintaining an effective balance of power in their own interest. In consequence, the superpowers became so potent that neither of them ever risked direct military action against the other, both realising that the response would be fatal.

This was the surest guarantee for the superpowers — the United States (US) and the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the Soviet Union or USSR) — never engaging in armed conflict after World War II. This balance of power and accompanying mutual risks the great powers posed to each other were bolstered by the two military alliances they formed: the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) established in 1949, comprising the US and most states of Western Europe, and the Warsaw Pact, founded in 1955, comprising the USSR and most of its communist kin in Eastern Europe.

After the USSR developed its own military nuclear capacity in the early 1950s, this power balance was reinforced. From then on, both the nuclear powers were certain of their own assured annihilation by the other if either of the two risked the first strike — mutually assured destruction (MAD), as it was pithily called.

The lauded multilateral rules-based international order under the auspices of the UN played no part in this awe-inspiring, power-fuelled security system. Yes, the international law as encapsulated in the UN Charter was seemingly impressive, highfalutin, and widely applauded but finally of no moment.

A New Power Configuration

The dissolution of the Soviet Union into a raft of successor states, including Russia, and the concomitant demise of the Warsaw Pact in the early 1990s, brought the long-standing security of the balance of power that existed up to that point to a close.

It signalled a power configuration completely different from what had been in existence since the end of World War II. The US was the only superpower now in a unipolar order; NATO, without its old Warsaw Pact adversary, was left without a clear reason for continued existence. And a muddled and weakened Russia, having twice in a little more than two centuries been militarily ravaged from its west, was once again dangerously vulnerable not only from the west but also from a re-emerging China.

But the unipolar order of a single great power in the guise of the US, combined with the apparent dawn of a gorgeous multilateralism, was no more than transitory, and the great powers were once again rising.

This time round the cast is somewhat different. Most important for present purposes are the US, China, and Russia.

The US is assertively playing the role of superpower again. It is claiming its spheres of influence again, amongst others, clearing (its) Western Hemisphere from unwelcome adversaries, notably China and Russia. It is also pinning China down in the Far East, cultivating sound relations with China’s actual and potential adversaries including Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, and Taiwan. It is also yearning to cultivate closer relations with Russia, which has been driven closer to China in part because of unwise western policies vis-à-vis the Russians. The US is also trying hard to free itself from the Middle Eastern quagmire — hence its cultivating détente between Israel and ever more Arabian powers, and trying to neutralise Iran, at least to the point where it does not pose an imminent threat to Israel, its closest ally in the region.

China has now risen to a fully-fledged great power, strong enough through various strategies to have extended its influence far beyond its borders — in Africa, the Arctic, and in the Western Hemisphere, and seemingly increasingly able to, in due course, sweep its longstanding irritation, Taiwan, out of the way.

China’s strategies for enhancing its power and extending its influence include BRICS, the Global Governance Initiative (GGI), the Belt and Road Initiative, and various others. All these are dressed in the typically misleading benign human rights and rules-based parlance of the UN Charter, but they are emphatically promoting Chinese power in opposition to its adversaries, primarily the United States.

Then there is Russia. Still but a shadow of the former USSR, it has at least regained some balance. While for decades it was too weak to keep an ominously eastward-creeping NATO at bay, it is now under Putin at least capable, with great difficulty, to draw a line in the Crimea and in its sphere of influence — what it calls its “near abroad” — in eastern and southern Ukraine.

All other states will have to find a modus vivendi vis-à-vis this new scenario of mounting great power rivalry.

Apart from everything else, the primary challenge is once again to prevent economic competition from exploding into a major great power military conflagration.

Still Hapless

The international law framework exemplified by the UN system, which proved utterly impotent in superpower conflict in the decades after 1945, has not been amended to face this new power configuration. This hapless old system remains as irrelevant as ever — bound to be as unable to regulate great power relations in the new fledgling order. To be sure, no legal dispensation is up to that task.

But there are strategies with the ability to manage great power rivalry and to prevent a major conflagration: essentially the same tried and tested strategy of power balance that has served the world well in the forty-five odd years after World War II.

The Tried and Tested

US President Donald Trump is singled out as the main destroyer of the rules-based order. The charge is without substance. Trump, as unwise and rumbustious as he might be, is merely treating the rules-based order as the false mirage it has been since its inception.

Trump is responding to the challenge of the rising great power, China. He does so by again following the logic of the tried and tested strategy of the balance of power now increasingly playing out between the United States and China. And, in doing so, the great powers are maintaining international peace, at least by preventing the greatest menace: large-scale war between the great powers.

All this is occurring against the backdrop of the still existing Charter proclaiming the principle of the “sovereign equality of states”. This, however, is nothing more than soothing sweet talk, possibly satisfying romantic dreams of rule of law, but as inadequate as ever to providing any meaningful insight to the realities of great power interaction.