World Orders 世界秩序 重複運動的全球萬花筒

世界秩序：重複運動的全球萬花筒

https://chasfreeman.net/world-orders-the-global-kaleidscope-in-repeated-motion/

查斯·弗裏曼 2022-09

外交和政策過程課程講座

Chas W. Freeman, Jr. 大使（USFS，退役）
布朗大學沃森國際與公共事務研究所訪問學者
2022 年 9 月 21 日來自華盛頓特區的視頻

世界現在正處於向其組成區域和職能部門的新秩序的混亂過渡。 這並不罕見。 自從全球各地相互交流以來的五個世紀裏，發生了許多這樣的演變。

第一個相對於區域秩序的全球秩序直到 15 世紀最後幾年才出現。 1492年，哥倫布橫渡大西洋。 這將美洲與歐洲連接起來。 不久之後，即 1498 年，瓦斯科·達伽馬環繞非洲到達印度。 這兩件事首次使世界各大洲和海洋成為一個單一的地緣政治和地緣經濟競爭場。 他們還開啟了一個長達四個世紀的時期，歐洲技術、工業和軍事能力的快速發展擊敗了所有競爭對手，西方帝國主義、殖民主義和思想征服了全球。

16世紀和17世紀，歐洲人消滅了美洲大部分土著居民，成為那裏的主要人口，並開始將數百萬被奴役的非洲人運往大西洋彼岸。 18世紀末和19世紀，歐洲人和他們的北美後裔推翻了非洲、亞洲和南太平洋的本土文明，開始了政治文化的更替。 一個以大西洋為中心的新世界秩序已經形成。

這是一張白色地圖，顯示了掠奪最成功的歐洲帝國主義列強英國沒有入侵的二十二個國家。

英國人從未入侵過的地圖

歐洲國家通過本地區的競爭尋求安全和繁榮。 但為了在競爭中增強自己的實力，他們追求對海外資源和市場的控製，在海外建立軍事基地，並將其公民安置在土著人口稀少但氣候宜人的土地上。 結果是歐洲列強對全球的政治、技術和軍事統治，以及歐洲人向美洲和澳大利亞溫帶地區的大規模移民。

第一次世界大戰（1756 – 1815）

18世紀末19世紀初，英國和法國打響了第一次真正的全球戰爭。

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從 1756 年到 1815 年，他們的全球霸權之爭時斷時續，對其所定義的世界秩序中的國家和地區產生了決定性影響。 法國是一個絕對君主製國家，但它與英國的全球競爭使其有強烈的興趣支持英國激進民主的美國殖民者反對他們的國王，盡管他們犯下了冒犯君主的罪行。 如果沒有法國的幹預，約克鎮的美國獨立決戰就不會發生，殖民者的叛亂也可能不會成功。

全球歐洲 (1815 – 1914)

1815 年拿破侖最終失敗後，維也納會議通過將法國重新納入其治理委員會來重建歐洲秩序。 所謂的歐洲協調建立了一個權力平衡體係，防止任何單一國家統治歐洲次大陸。 但隨著 19 世紀的發展，英國在歐洲之外成為無可爭議的全球霸主。

英國總督統治印度。 歐洲人瓜分了世界其他地區。 英、法、德、俄四國將中國劃分為勢力範圍。

http://imperialisminchinaandjapan.weebly.com/uploads/9/8/6/2/98623894/published/spheres-of-influence-china.png?1487626178

比利時、英國、法國、德國、意大利、葡萄牙和西班牙瓜分了非洲，隻留下埃塞俄比亞和利比裏亞獨立。

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在西亞，隻有沙特阿拉伯，在東亞，隻有日本保持完全獨立。 日本很快效仿歐洲帝國主義列強，建立了自己的海外帝國，於 1895 年占領了中國台灣省，於 1905 年征服了大韓帝國，並於 1910 年吞並了它。

相隔一個半球（1815 -？）

1815 年戰勝對手法國後，英國進行了長達一個世紀的努力，試圖阻止其歐洲對手獲得美洲資源。 新生的美國與英國有著同樣的利益，盡管它發現承認這一點是不明智的。

美國獨立以及隨後的 1789 年至 1799 年法國革命激勵海地和西班牙在美洲的領地擺脫殖民統治並宣布獨立。 到 1821 年，西班牙僅牢牢控製著古巴島和波多黎各島。

美國在 1823 年的“門羅主義”中宣布反對任何新的歐洲大國在拉丁美洲和加勒比地區的存在。 在實踐中，鑒於華盛頓在“昭昭命運”學說下的弱點和專注於領土擴張，它依靠倫敦來執行其宣布的西半球戰略封鎖政策。 就這樣，在英國的默許支持下，美國成功地將美洲從全球秩序中剔除，使它們免受歐洲帝國主義、殖民主義和文化霸權的影響，而這些在其他地方都取得了勝利。 美洲成為美國的勢力範圍。

美國加入俱樂部（1898 – 1934）

19世紀末，美國加入了帝國主義俱樂部，在夏威夷策劃政權更迭並吞並它，然後從西班牙手中奪取了古巴、關島、菲律賓和波多黎各。 英國認識到，在美洲，美國的實力已經超越了自己。 倫敦決定安撫並討好華盛頓，而不是讓英美之間的利益衝突和對抗引發一場可能讓英國失去加拿大統治權的戰爭。 因此，它承認美國而不是加拿大對阿拉斯加狹長地帶的主權，並撤回了對美國在巴拿馬建設和管理跨地峽運河的反對意見。

1900 年，帝國主義時代達到頂峰，其中日本和美國作為最早的非歐洲實踐者，八個殖民國家（奧匈帝國、英國、法國、德國、意大利、日本、俄羅斯和美國） ）聯合力量鎮壓反對外國控製中國的“義和團”叛亂並掠奪北京。

1903年，美國將巴拿馬從哥倫比亞分離出去，開始了一個世紀的暴力幹預，並在拉丁美洲和加勒比地區強行政權更迭。 在美國霸權下，西半球仍然是一個與整個世界秩序截然不同的地區。

美國作為跨大西洋平衡者、規則製定者和逃避者（1919 – 1929）

到1917年，英國已經改善了與美國的關係，以至於能夠吸引美國人支持糾正因德國統一和崛起而導致的歐洲力量平衡崩潰的努力。 鑒於歐洲在全球事務中的主導地位，美國加入第一次世界大戰對世界範圍產生了影響。 美國前所未有地介入歐洲事務，成為世界最大經濟體和債權國，標誌著全球秩序的又一次變革。 但這一點需要一段時間才能變得明顯。

在第一次世界大戰中戰勝德國後召開的 1919 年和平會議標誌著國際社會承認美國作為大西洋和全球主要大國的地位。 在這次會議上，伍德羅·威爾遜總統主張美國對基於自決的世界秩序的願景 — — 哪怕隻是歐洲白人國家 — — 並用新的“聯盟”下的法治取代國際強權政治。 國家的。” 他對自決的支持既反映了美國人對美國獨立宣言的崇敬，也反映了他對家鄉弗吉尼亞和童年居住地佐治亞所擁護的分離權的同情，這兩個國家都是命運多舛的美利堅聯盟國的不甘心的成員。 威爾遜關於基於商定的規範和監管機構的新世界秩序的理想主義願景在會議上得到了口頭支持，但除此之外幾乎沒有其他內容。 “自決”翻譯成與歐洲和西亞相關的民族語言術語，為奧匈帝國和奧斯曼帝國的解體和分裂提供了理由。

長期以來，美國的核心意識形態就是法治。 “國際聯盟”的提議代表了這種意識形態在國際事務中的投射。 隨後美國拒絕加入國聯，使其失去了能力，但受規則約束的秩序的理念繼續在理想主義項目中得到體現，例如 1928 年的《凱洛格-布裏安條約》，該公約的簽署者道貌岸然地放棄使用戰爭來解決國際爭端。 糾紛。

第一次世界大戰使德國陷入癱瘓，使英國和法國陷入貧困，並促進了俄羅斯帝國的解體和蘇聯的重生。 包括美國在內的勝利者將德國和蘇聯排除在新的歐洲治理體係或權力平衡中發揮任何作用。 這種治國之術的失敗導致了不穩定，並為二十年後歐洲重新爆發的霸權暴力鬥爭奠定了基礎。

與此同時，1914 年至 1918 年的世界大戰將美國推向全球經濟、金融和文化的主導地位。 美元成為主要的國際交換媒介，美國音樂、文學和消費品贏得了全世界的讚譽。 但隨著美國的自我孤立、歐洲列強的衰弱以及海外帝國獨立呼聲的高漲，世界陷入了日益混亂的狀態 — — 正在向未知的方向轉變。

大蕭條和法西斯主義的興起（1929 – 1939）

1929年，美國經濟屈服於不受監管的資本市場的大規模投機、“美聯儲”的失誤以及引發一係列貿易戰的保護主義措施。這些事態發展的連鎖反應所產生的全球苦難加速了更替。 德國和日本的民主與軍國主義相結合，與意大利一起發展了“法西斯主義”的形式——由種族至上的社會達爾文主義理論、對領土擴張的癡迷和政府引導的法團主義經濟驅動的獨裁政權。

1931年，日本侵略中國，吞並了中國東北各省。 四年後，意大利入侵埃塞俄比亞。 1938年，德國並入捷克斯洛伐克。 1939年，意大利吞並阿爾巴尼亞和德國，蘇聯瓜分波蘭。 1940年，德國征服了法國。 1941年，入侵蘇聯。

第二次世界大戰及其創造的世界（1939 – 1945）

盡管遭受重創和四麵楚歌的英國和遭受重創的中國拚命懇求，美國仍對歐洲和亞洲的戰爭置之不理。 但 1941 年 12 月，美國的製裁被日本視為生存威脅，引發日本對珍珠港以及菲律賓、印度支那、馬來亞、新加坡、印度尼西亞和香港的絕望攻擊。 在泰國盟友的幫助下，日本入侵緬甸。 四天後，德國、意大利及其轄區向美國宣戰，美國也做出了回應。 這場競賽現已成為全球性的。 第二次世界大戰開始了。

到 1945 年結束時，第二次世界大戰已經摧毀了之前的世界秩序，奪走了大約 70 至 8500 萬人的生命，約占當時世界人口的 3%。 死亡人數中約有三分之一是蘇聯人，另外三分之一是中國人。 美國死亡人數接近 42 萬人，英國死亡人數為 45 萬人，法國死亡人數約為 60 萬人。 德國失去了超過 700 萬公民，日本失去了近 300 萬公民。 戰爭結束時，隻有美國的經濟狀況比以前好，其戰時經濟已增長至全球 GDP 的 60% 左右。

美國戰時總統富蘭克林·德拉諾·羅斯福了解建立新世界秩序的必要性，並設想建立一個建立在勢力範圍之上的世界秩序。 在他的理念中，英國首相溫斯頓·丘吉爾認為英國將管理其全球帝國，中國將管理東亞，蘇聯將管理東歐和內亞，而美國將管理西半球。 雖然這一提議於 1945 年隨著羅斯福的去世而夭折，但隨著法國的加入，這一概念在聯合國安理會擁有否決權的常任理事國的組成中繼續存在。

世界秩序計劃（1944 – 1945）

第二次世界大戰期間，曆史上第一次在全球範圍內進行多國談判，明確旨在製定新的世界秩序。 1944 年，44 個獨立國家的代表齊聚新罕布什爾州北部的布雷頓森林度假村，就戰後世界商業和金融關係以黃金和美元為基礎的體係達成一致。 第二年，隨著戰爭接近尾聲，五十個國家的代表齊聚舊金山起草《聯合國憲章》。 這奠定了國際法的基礎，並為 1945 年 10 月（日本投降兩個月後）正式成立聯合國奠定了基礎。 這一改進版國際聯盟的總部設在紐約，反映了美國戰後的優勢地位以及對美國孤立主義可能卷土重來的擔憂。

聯合國關於以規則為指導的全球治理合作體係的願景幾乎立即成為大國對抗的犧牲品，但美國發起的規則建設卻進展迅速。 《國際人權公約》和《滅絕種族罪公約》的曆史可追溯至 1948 年。1949 年，規範戰爭行為的兩項《日內瓦公約》得到更新，並獲得了兩項新公約。 隨後製定了一係列禁止各種殘忍行為的國際條約，包括禁止種族主義、歧視婦女和酷刑。 但到了 20 世紀 80 年代，這一勢頭有所減弱，這在很大程度上是由於美國對聯合國和國際法的尊重減弱。

美國努力締結1982年《聯合國海洋法公約》，但隨後拒絕批準。 同樣的命運也降臨到了國際社會自 1981 年以來通過的約二十個多邊條約。在過去的四十年裏，美國隻是不穩定地參與了它在第一次世界大戰後努力建立的基於法律的世界秩序 和第二次世界大戰時期。

冷戰秩序（1947 – 1989）

到 1947 年，以蘇聯和美國霸主為首的敵對集團開始在地緣政治和意識形態問題上相互對抗。 這兩個爭論的根源在 1947 年杜魯門主義支持希臘和土耳其對抗蘇聯壓力、1948 年至 1949 年柏林危機以及 1950 年至 1953 年血腥的朝鮮戰爭中都很明顯。這些事件建立了一個準封建的兩極世界秩序 這種情況一直持續到1989年，蘇聯的東歐帝國解體，它不再爭奪歐亞或全球霸權。

在冷戰的四十年裏，民族國家與一個或另一個超級大國的關係（或缺乏關係）決定了它們的地緣政治地位、行動自由、獲得公共物品的水平以及免受外國煽動的豁免程度。 政權更迭行動。 與此同時，相互競爭的超級大國開始期望那些與他們結盟的國家自動追隨他們在世界事務各個方麵的立場。

美國和蘇聯都小心翼翼地防止各自勢力範圍內的國家溜走或投奔對方，但兩國都意識到核交鋒中相互毀滅的危險，而且雙方都不準備冒這種風險進行交戰。 與對方直接戰鬥。 兩國都認為試圖保持不結盟 — — 與任何一個集團分離 — — 的新獨立國家都是意誌薄弱且容易被爭奪的，並且各自都試圖通過代理人戰爭、政權更迭行動、操縱選舉和政治活動來維持或擴大其勢力範圍。 經濟上的奉承和剝奪。

與之前的世界秩序相比，意識形態是冷戰時期更加突出的特征。 以美國為首的集團 — — 所謂的“自由世界” — — 政治上是異質的。 它由民主政體、獨裁政體、君主政體和帝國前哨的混合體組成，除了希望不被無神論的共產主義所征服並通過與美國結盟來獲取物質利益之外，沒有什麽共同點。 其成員國實行多種形式的資本主義、社會民主主義和宗教信仰。

相比之下，蘇聯集團的成員相對單一。 他們的政治以馬克思列寧主義、殘酷的精英獨裁、無神論意識形態和莫斯科倡導的國家主義政治經濟體係為藍本。

冷戰時期的外交與塹壕戰非常相似。 其目的不是縮小對方的勢力範圍，而是避免給對方攻擊自己的理由。 盡管雙方都在努力顛覆對方，但這兩個集團在長達四個十年的對抗過程中仍然非常穩定。 兩個超級大國都在各自稱為“盟友”的集團成員的領土上駐軍，這意味著他們承諾確保其免受對方攻擊或意識形態轉變的附屬國家。 雙方都限製這些“盟友”針對對方采取可能升級為雙邊戰爭的行動。 冷戰秩序的結束消除了蘇聯對伊拉克等國家的限製，伊拉克隨後可以隨意在阿拉伯半島發動一場擴張戰爭，而在蘇聯的監督下，這些國家永遠不敢冒險。

對冷戰秩序單調穩定的最大衝擊是 1971 年至 1979 年美國加入中國遏製蘇聯。 中國向所謂“自由世界”的轉變實現了再平衡，但並沒有改變當時世界秩序的基本性質。 這仍然是由美國及其集團與蘇聯及其轄區之間的對抗性互動所決定的。 除了美國與中國的協約以及南斯拉夫早些時候轉向中立之外，幾乎沒有人背叛這兩個集團。 隻有一件事——古巴轉向蘇聯的保護——促成了兩個超級大國之間核對峙的瀕臨死亡的經曆。 巧妙的外交避免了災難。

殖民主義的終結（1947 – 1997）

第二次世界大戰結束後，歐洲帝國曾試圖收複二戰期間失去的海外領土，但未能成功。 幾個世紀以來歐洲的全球統治地位將基督教西方文化的元素強加於其海外領地，包括大西洋地區的主要語言和公開的價值觀。

其中包括植根於民眾選舉的代議製政府規範，這與帝國統治固有的暴政存在明顯的衝突。 具有諷刺意味的是，歐美殖民列強的意識形態和政治文化最終激發了全球南方國家爭取獨立的鬥爭。

輸出的西方意識形態包括馬克思主義，它最初是一種基於哲學和社會科學的批評，批評西方文明未能培養其宗教信仰和理想所需的個人和集體的自我實現、平等主義和博愛。 在中國和其他地方，馬克思主義是一種受歡迎的西化手段，同時也貶低了西方。 與列寧主義 — — 一套組織精英一黨專政以重新設計社會經濟體係並指導其發展的政治原則 — — 相結合，它被證明是革命和政治經濟轉型的有力工具。

歐洲帝國主義的撤退為兩個公開反對殖民主義的“超級大國”之間的鬥爭創造了新的舞台。 從1941年到1945年，日本強行用自己的統治取代了歐洲在東亞和東南亞的統治。 它的失敗留下了一個權力真空，被勝利的美國占據。 在緬甸和印度，日本對亞洲的主張引起了緬甸和印度民族主義者的共鳴，他們於 1947 年從英國手中奪取了獨立。1945 年至 1949 年間，美國控製的菲律賓、荷蘭印度尼西亞、英屬印度、巴基斯坦、緬甸 、錫蘭都在殖民統治者的暴力反對下獲得了獨立。 這些國家爭取自決的鬥爭造成了數百萬人的傷亡。

1949年，作為加入北約的條件，法國要求歸還其在印度支那的殖民地。 但到了 1954 年，越南共產黨軍隊迫使他們接受越南北部以及柬埔寨和老撾的獨立。 此後，在1954年至1975年的“第二次印度支那戰爭”中，北越擊敗了南越及其讚助者美國。 在越南爭取民族自決的鬥爭中，三百萬或更多的越南平民和戰鬥人員死亡。 北方戰勝南方後，200萬越南人在國外尋求庇護，另外100萬人死於海上。 20 世紀 60 年代初，法國賦予其非洲殖民地政治獨立，但在經濟上仍對它們保持忠誠。

相比之下，1957 年，英國效仿了印度和緬甸的先例，開始了給予其最堅持的殖民地完全獨立的進程，首先是馬來亞和加納。 1952年至1963年的毛毛起義中，英國殖民者殖民主義在肯尼亞遭受了致命打擊。1980年，經過長達十年的血腥戰爭，津巴布韋擺脫了南羅得西亞的白人統治。 到 1990 年，最後一個非洲殖民地——納米比亞——獲得了獨立。 1997年，英國最後一個非自治殖民地香港回歸中國。 長達五個世紀的帝國主義時代結束了。 現在唯一剩下的侵略性定居者殖民主義的踐行者是以色列，隻有美國在聯合國安理會的否決權才使其免受國際譴責和製裁。

冷戰的後果（1989 – 2007）

美國外交官喬治·凱南 (George Kennan) 在 1946 年提出了“遏製”蘇聯的大戰略，他的判斷是，如果孤立，蘇聯最終會因自身缺陷而崩潰。 我們花了四十多年的時間才證明他是對的。 1991年蘇聯解體以及其組成的波羅的海、東歐和中亞共和國獨立後的幾年裏，正如弗朗西斯·福山所宣稱的那樣，曆史似乎以自由民主的勝利而結束。 但事實並非如此。 西方的騙子對蘇聯經濟進行了徹底的重組，使人民陷入貧困，但卻讓新的富豪和寡頭階層變得富有。 俄羅斯與西方融合的努力遭到了矛盾、不受歡迎和令人反感的回應。

在冷戰剛結束的時期，沒有人質疑美國的全球霸主地位。 實際上，華盛頓掌控著一個僅排除中國、伊朗、朝鮮和俄羅斯的全球勢力範圍，它可以在其中為所欲為，而無需考慮《聯合國憲章》、國際法或其他國際互動準則。 早些時候曾幫助開過處方。 與此同時，貿易和投資自由化、全球化給包括中國和南方國家在內的世界經濟帶來了新的財富。

但資源密集型“永久戰爭”和反恐運動所帶來的必勝主義和注意力缺失外交使美國失去了與新崛起的俄羅斯聯邦建立合作關係的任何戰略。 相反，西方將俄羅斯視為潛在敵人的傳統觀點盛行。 在莫斯科仇俄鄰國及其美國僑民、因敵人剝奪綜合症而迷失方向的軍工國會複合體、冷戰頑固老兵以及習慣勢力的壓力下，對俄羅斯的恐懼仍然是北約的指導精神。

俄羅斯的反應（1994 – 2008）

早在1994年，俄羅斯就開始警告美國，如果北約東擴擴大到俄羅斯邊境，莫斯科將視其為敵對證據並采取軍事回應。 但到了 2004 年，前蘇聯主導的華沙條約組織的所有成員國都已加入北約。 冷戰期間，北約是一個純粹的防禦性聯盟，旨在對抗歐洲的莫斯科。 但1995年，北約開始采取攻勢。 它對波斯尼亞和黑塞哥維那進行了幹預。 1999年，它發動了為期78天的轟炸行動，從傳統上與俄羅斯有聯係的塞爾維亞手中奪取了科索沃。 2001年，北約與美國一起參與了長達20年的戰爭，以平息遙遠的阿富汗。 2011年，它支持了一場政權更迭行動，導致利比亞陷入無政府狀態。 隨著北約向俄羅斯擴張，莫斯科開始將其視為日益活躍的軍事威脅。

2007年，俄羅斯總統普京對北約進一步東擴發出強烈警告。 但2008年，在美國的壓力下，北約向格魯吉亞和烏克蘭提供了成員國資格，這兩個國家都是與俄羅斯聯邦接壤的前蘇聯成員國。 隨後，勇敢的格魯吉亞挑戰了俄羅斯在其與俄羅斯邊境的少數民族地區的影響力。 結果是21世紀的第一次歐洲戰爭，最終以俄羅斯協助下南奧塞梯和阿布哈茲從格魯吉亞分裂出去並在那裏建立宗主權而告終。

頓巴斯代理人戰爭（2014 年 -？）

2014年，一場美國支持的政變推翻了民選但腐敗的親俄政府。 政變後，美國再次向北約施壓，要求將烏克蘭納入其中。 烏克蘭加入北約可能帶來的後果之一是剝奪俄羅斯在克裏米亞擁有數百年曆史的黑海海軍基地。 隨後，俄羅斯不流血地使用了非戰爭軍事措施，收回了克裏米亞，蘇聯於 1954 年將克裏米亞的行政控製權從俄羅斯移交給了烏克蘭。

與此同時，基輔新的極端民族主義政權試圖使烏克蘭語成為全國公共機構官方和人際交流的唯一語言，結束在國家和地區層麵官方使用俄語和其他少數民族語言。 此後不久，俄羅斯在克裏米亞舉行了全民公投，克裏米亞的大多數居民——其中四分之三以上的母語是俄語——歡迎克裏米亞重新並入俄羅斯聯邦。 頓涅茨克和盧甘斯克的頓巴斯州，講俄語的人口占人口的百分之七十或以上，隨後宣布脫離烏克蘭自治，這一決定得到了俄羅斯的支持。

烏克蘭發動攻勢，收複了頓巴斯部分地區。 俄羅斯向分裂分子提供軍事援助作為反擊。 在聯邦化的烏克蘭內恢複語言和其他自治要素的外交努力產生了兩項從未實施的協議（在明斯克）。 隨著頓巴斯戰爭在偶爾停火的情況下進行，烏克蘭在頓巴斯建立了一係列防禦工事，每天都從那裏轟炸分裂分子，而俄羅斯幫助他們建立了強大的軍隊。 美國、英國和其他北約成員國為重新訓練、重組和重新裝備烏克蘭軍隊做出了重大努力。 俄羅斯同時加大了對頓巴斯分裂分子的軍事支持。

北約東擴戰爭、中美關係疏遠、中俄協約

2021年底，俄羅斯要求進行談判以排除烏克蘭加入北約的可能性。 美國和北約拒絕討論此事。 俄羅斯在與烏克蘭邊境集結軍隊。 美國和北約再次拒絕莫斯科就北約東擴問題進行談判的要求。 2022年初，俄羅斯承認頓涅茨克和盧甘斯克獨立，駐軍並入侵烏克蘭。

作為回應，美國與歐盟、英國、澳大利亞和其他一些安全夥伴一起，對俄羅斯發動了全麵經濟戰，將其從以美元為基礎的全球貿易體係中剔除，試圖禁止其能源出口 ，並奪取其美元儲備，同時向烏克蘭發起大規模武器轉讓和戰術情報支持，烏克蘭目前正陷入與俄羅斯長達數千公裏的消耗戰。

西方對俄羅斯入侵烏克蘭的反應伴隨著信息戰，這是世界曆史上最激烈、最全麵的信息戰。 由於除了有利於烏克蘭的信息來源之外的所有信息來源都被切斷，因此不可能了解那裏到底發生了什麽。 西方支持烏克蘭代理人戰爭的政策是否能夠挽救烏克蘭並恢複歐洲和平充其量是值得懷疑的，但對俄羅斯的經濟戰爭及其連鎖反應，隨之而來的中美關係的爆發以及世界範圍的轉變 國家安全而不是經濟問題驅動的保護主義共同催化了一種全新的國際互動模式的出現。

另一個尚未命名的世界秩序的無序誕生（2022 -？）

美國在烏克蘭發動戰爭的直接目標是維護基輔與美國和歐盟保持結盟的自由，即使不是現在加入北約。 美國的長期戰略目標明確是“孤立和削弱俄羅斯”。

美國對華政策與這些目標相一致。 華盛頓尋求將台灣留在其勢力範圍內，並孤立和削弱中國，以保持其地區和全球經濟、技術以及政治軍事霸權。 毫不奇怪，北京和莫斯科已經認識到，阻撓和對抗美國旨在從屬於它們、阻礙它們財富和權力增長的政策是共同利益。

美國與俄羅斯和中國的對抗政策沒有得到大多數北約國家和日本的熱情支持。 但巴西、印度、印度尼西亞、伊朗、墨西哥、尼日利亞、巴基斯坦、沙特阿拉伯、南非和土耳其等崛起和複興大國反對美國延續它們所代表的“單邊時刻”的努力。 除了澳大利亞、英國、日本和韓國等明顯例外，其他主要國家顯然更喜歡多極、多中心的世界秩序，而不是由美國或任何其他單一大國主導的世界秩序。

到目前為止，特朗普政府2018年針對中國推出的保護主義貿易和技術政策以及當前針對俄羅斯的經濟和金融戰爭正在產生有害的結果。 中國科學技術和軍事進步加快。 俄羅斯經濟遠未崩潰，目前擁有僅次於中國的第二大國際收支順差。 與此同時，歐洲人麵臨經濟衰退、能源短缺和其他困難。 中國和俄羅斯都在為其商品和服務尋找新市場。 烏克蘭戰事尚無結束跡象，台海爆發戰爭的可能性急劇上升。

未來事物的形態

正在出現的世界秩序是：

製裁引發的商品和食品短缺、供應鏈斷裂以及重新軍備加劇了持續的通貨膨脹。
利息支付增加的財政負擔迫使美國轉向國內現收現付政策，並在美國長期以來回避的“大炮和黃油”之間做出選擇。
由美國、歐盟、澳大利亞、英國和日本組成的旨在排斥俄羅斯和中國的集團本身就被世界其他國家邊緣化，包括其增長最快的經濟體和市場。 以美國為首的集團以外的國家拒絕在美國及其指定對手之間做出選擇，保持與這兩個國家的業務開放，並拒絕西方對其出口產品施加最終用途和再轉讓限製。
全球範圍內應對氣候變化和流行病等問題的能力受到削弱。 每個地區都是獨立的，就其影響而言，部分之和小於整體。
事實證明，美國的主要優勢——軍事實力——與新興世界秩序中的大多數挑戰無關，這些挑戰需要華盛頓無法采取的經濟應對措施。
俄羅斯永久放棄了長達三個世紀的與歐洲一體化的努力，以通過加強與中國和印度的關係來尋求亞洲身份。
土耳其也做了同樣的事情，將自己重新定義為西亞和伊斯蘭國家，而不是歐洲國家，並進一步削弱了對北約其他成員國的承諾。
小國拒絕與西方或其指定對手有任何聯係。
中國的“一帶一路”倡議逐漸將中國的經濟影響力擴展到整個歐亞大陸以及東南亞和東非。 中國在“一帶一路”沿線地區的政治影響力逐漸取代美國。
北約和其他多國聯盟的凝聚力逐漸減弱，成員國逐漸減少或撤銷對它們的承諾。
德國、日本和其他二戰後美國的附屬國重新武裝並製定更加獨立的外交政策。

拉丁美洲與中國、印度、伊朗、俄羅斯、土耳其和其他國家發展關係，這些國家日益削弱美國在西半球的霸權。
非洲是世界上大多數工業勞動力居住的地方，其經濟與巴西、中國、印度、俄羅斯和土耳其的聯係比與歐盟或美國的聯係更加緊密。
技術標準因地區而異，新技術往往在其起源地以外的地區無法獲得。
互聯網演變成區域和國家區域，通過防火牆相互隔離。
廉價的俄羅斯能源、金屬、礦產和其他自然資源滋養了所謂的“全球南方”的經濟，但美國及其反俄聯盟成員不再能以優惠的價格可靠地獲得這些資源。
美國的製裁使中國和俄羅斯有強烈的動機與伊朗和其他國家組成財團，以消除在民用、軍用和客機等軍民兩用產品方麵對美國的依賴。
鑒於美國沒收伊朗、委內瑞拉、俄羅斯和阿富汗的美元儲備所造成的聲譽損害，美國通過發行國債為其政府和全球實力投射提供資金的能力越來越受到質疑。
美國單邊美元製裁帶來的風險不斷上升，導致越來越多的國家以本國貨幣為進出口定價，利用掉期將本國貨幣與主要貿易夥伴的貨幣配對，轉向美元以外的硬通貨，並建立了以下觀點： 銷售數字跨境貨幣兌換，並為跨國貿易結算創建新的記賬單位。 支撐美國全球霸主地位的“過高特權”正在消失。
中國、印度、俄羅斯、阿拉伯石油生產國和其他新興經濟和金融大國對建立獨立的金融世界秩序的動機做出了反應，該秩序為基於美元的 SWIFT 係統提供了替代方案，並可能破壞美國製裁作為製裁工具的有效性。 對外政策。 他們這樣做了。
去全球化產生了多種區域貿易和投資體製，並分裂了全球市場，其中一些特定大國，如中國、歐盟、印度、俄羅斯或美國被排除在外。
國際交易的爭端是通過雙邊或特定地區的程序來處理的，而不是通過像世貿組織這樣的全球爭端解決機製來處理。
世界繼續依賴聯合國專門機構來解決技術問題，但聯合國安理會和其他國際政策組織因大國競爭和分歧而陷入癱瘓，外交效用已經減弱。
與區域性不同，新的全球規則製定條約和安排很少（如果有的話）。 冷戰後時代的全球監管製度萎縮。
隨著地區力量的增強以及中國、印度、日本、韓國和俄羅斯出現新的武器係統和能力，美國的軍事霸主地位受到削弱。
鑒於美國、北約和俄羅斯在烏克蘭的代理人戰爭升級的風險、中美就台灣問題爆發戰爭的可能性日益增加、朝鮮政權生存依賴核威懾、印度和巴基斯坦的核對峙以及 如果以色列核武庫向其地區其他國家獲取核武器，核戰爭的危險現在比冷戰時期的任何時候都要大得多。

結論

國際社會對20世紀末日益衰落的“美國治下的和平”非常不滿，並希望看到它被多極世界秩序或不同國家在世界事務不同領域發揮主導作用的秩序所取代。 當前的趨勢表明，萬花筒再次以新的模式重新安排國際參與者及其關係，在這種模式中，經濟、金融、政治、文化和軍事實力按區域和職能分布，而不是集中。 但迄今為止，很少有人考慮到國際體係可能產生的後果，因為該體係需要國家和人民之間的互動比以前更加複雜。 如果不出意外的話，這正好提醒我們一句老話：“小心你的願望”。 你可能會得到它。

為了成功應對這個擁有眾多競爭中心的世界所帶來的挑戰，治國之道必須著眼長遠，關注持久的利益而不是一時的激情。 為了管理一個快速、意想不到的變化成為常態的世界，外交必須靈活而不是堅定。 為了能夠競爭，各國不僅必須在國內齊心協力，還必須運用所有治國手段——政治、經濟、金融、技術和軍事——來塑造競爭對手的觀點和行動，使其對自己有利。

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World Orders: The Global Kaleidoscope in Repeated Motion

https://chasfreeman.net/world-orders-the-global-kaleidoscope-in-repeated-motion/

Chas Freeman 2022-09

Lecture to a class on Diplomacy and the Policy Process

Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)

Visiting Scholar, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University

By video from Washington, DC  21 September 2022

The world is now in a confusing transition to a new order for both its constituent regions and its functional divisions. This is not unusual. In the five centuries since all parts of the globe were brought into mutual communication, there have been many such evolutions.

The first global, as opposed to regional order emerged only in the final years of the 15th century. In 1492, Columbus crossed the Atlantic. This connected the Americas to Europe. Soon after, in 1498, Vasco da Gama circumnavigated Africa and reached India. These two events for the first time made all the world’s continents and oceans a single geopolitical and geoeconomic playing field. They also inaugurated a four-century-long period in which rapidly advancing European technology, industry, and military capabilities bested all competitors, and Western imperialism, colonialism, and ideas conquered the globe.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Europeans exterminated most of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, became the predominant populations there, and began the transport of millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the late 18th and the 19th centuries Europeans and their North American descendants overthrew the indigenous civilizations of Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific and began the replacement of their political cultures. A new, Atlantic-centered world order had come into being.

Here is a map showing in white the twenty-two countries that the most successfully predatory European imperialist power, Britain did not invade.

European states sought security and prosperity through competition in their own region. But to strengthen themselves in that competition, they pursued control of overseas resources and markets, established military bases abroad, and settled their citizens in lands with sparse indigenous populations but congenial climates. The result was the political, technological, and military domination of the globe by Europe’s great powers, and mass migration by Europeans to the temperate zones of the Americas and Antipodes.

The first worldwide war (1756 – 1815)

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the British and French fought the first truly global war.

Their battle for global hegemony flared on and off from 1756 to 1815. with decisive effects on the countries and regions within the world order it defined. France was an absolute monarchy but its worldwide contest with Britain gave it a compelling interest in supporting Britain’s radically democratic American colonists against their king despite their crime of lèse majesté. Absent French intervention, the decisive battle for American independence at Yorktown would not have occurred and the colonists’ rebellion might not have succeeded. 

Global Europe (1815 – 1914)

After the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the Congress of Vienna reconstituted order in Europe by reintegrating France into its councils of governance. The so-called Concert of Europe established a balance of power system that prevented any single power from dominating the European subcontinent. But as the 19th century proceeded, outside Europe Britain emerged as the undisputed global hegemon.

A British viceroy ruled India. Europeans divided the rest of the world between them. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia sliced China into spheres of influence.

Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain apportioned Africa between them, leaving only Ethiopia and Liberia independent.

In West Asia, only Saudi Arabia, and in East Asia, only Japan remained completely independent. Japan soon emulated Europe’s imperialist powers by building its own overseas empire, seizing the Chinese province of Taiwan in 1895, subjugating the Empire of Korea in 1905, and annexing it in 1910.

A hemisphere apart (1815 -?)

After its 1815 victory over its French adversary, Britain made a century-long effort to deny the resources of the Americas to its European rivals. The newborn United States shared this British interest, even if it found it impolitic to acknowledge this. U.S. independence, followed by the French revolution of 1789 – 1799, had inspired Haiti and the Spanish fiefdoms in the Americas to throw off colonial rule and declare their own independence. By 1821, Spain was in firm control only of the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico.

In its 1823 “Monroe Doctrine,” the United States declared its opposition to any new European great power presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. In practice, given its weakness and concentration on territorial expansion under the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” Washington relied on London to enforce its declared policy of hemispheric strategic denial. In this way, with tacit British backing, the United States managed to subtract the Americas from the global order, exempting them from the European imperialism, colonialism, and cultural supremacy that were everywhere else triumphant. The Americas became a U.S. sphere of influence.

America joins the club (1898 – 1934)

As the 19th century ended, the United States itself joined the imperialist club, engineering regime change in Hawaii and annexing it, then seizing Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico from Spain. Britain recognized that, in the Americas, U.S. power had eclipsed its own. Rather than allow Anglo-American conflicts of interest and confrontations to spark a war that might cost Britain its Canadian dominion, London decided to appease and court Washington. So, it recognized U.S. rather than Canadian sovereignty in the Alaska Panhandle and withdrew its objections to the U.S. construction and management of a trans-Isthmian canal in Panama.

In 1900, in a culmination of the age of imperialism that included Japan and the United States as its first non-European practitioners, eight colonial powers (Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States) combined forces to suppress the “Boxer” rebellion against foreign control in China and to pillage Beijing.

In 1903, the United States detached Panama from Colombia and began a century of violent interventions and imposed regime changes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Under American hegemony, the Western Hemisphere remained a region distinct from the world order at large.

America as transatlantic balancer, rule giver, and cop-out (1919 – 1929)

By 1917, Britain had improved its relations with the United States to the point that it was able to draw Americans into support of efforts to redress the breakdown of the balance of power in Europe brought about by the unification and rise of Germany. Given Europe’s dominance of global affairs, the U.S. entry into World War I had worldwide effects. The unprecedented involvement of the United States in European affairs and America’s status as the world’s largest economy and creditor nation marked yet another transformation of the global order. But it took time for this to become apparent.

The 1919 peace conference that followed victory over Germany in the First World War marked international recognition of the United States as a leading Atlantic and global power. At the conference, President Woodrow Wilson advocated a distinctly American vision of world order based on self-determination – if only for the white nations of Europe – and the replacement of international power politics with a version of the rule of law under a new “League of Nations.”  His support for self-determination reflected both popular American reverence for the U.S. declaration of independence and his own sympathy for the right of secession espoused by his native Virginia and childhood residence in Georgia, both unreconciled members of the ill-fated Confederate States of America. Wilson’s idealistic vision of a new world order based on agreed norms and regulatory institutions gained lip service at the conference, but little else. Translated into ethno-linguistic terms relevant to Europe and West Asia, “self-determination” furnished the justification for the dismantling and partition of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.

America’s core ideology had long been the rule of law. The proposal for a “League of Nations” represented a projection of this ideology into international affairs. The subsequent refusal of the United States to join the League incapacitated it, but the idea of a rule-bound order continued to find expression in idealistic projects like the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, whose signatories sanctimoniously renounced the use of war to settle international disputes.

The First World War had crippled Germany, gutted and impoverished Britain and France, and catalyzed the dissolution and rebirth of the Russian Empire as the Soviet Union. The victors, including the United States, excluded both Germany and the Soviet Union from any role in a renewed European system of governance or balance of power. This miscarriage of statecraft ensured instability and laid the basis for a renewed violent struggle for hegemony in Europe two decades later.

Meanwhile, the world war of 1914 – 1918 had propelled the United States to global economic, financial, and cultural preeminence. The dollar became a major international medium of exchange, and American music, literature, and consumer products achieved worldwide acclaim. But with the United States self-isolated, the great powers of Europe weakened, and agitation for independence in their overseas empires mounting, the world was in a state of increasing disorder – in transition to something yet unknown.

The great depression and the rise of fascism (1929 – 1939)

In 1929, the American economy succumbed to mass speculation in its unregulated capital markets, blunders by the “Fed,” and protectionist measures that kicked off a series of trade wars  The global misery generated by the knock-on effects of these developments precipitated the replacement of democracy with militarism in Germany and Japan, which joined Italy in developing forms of “fascism” – dictatorial regimes driven by social Darwinist theories of racial supremacy, obsessions with territorial expansion, and government-guided corporatist economies.

In 1931, Japan invaded China and annexed its northeastern provinces. Four years later, Italy invaded Ethiopia. In 1938, Germany took part of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Italy annexed Albania and Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland. In 1940, Germany conquered France. In 1941, it invaded the Soviet Union.

World War II and the world it created (1939 – 1945)

Despite desperate pleas from a battered and beleaguered Britain and a decimated China, the United States stood aside from the wars in Europe and Asia for two years. But in December 1941, U.S. sanctions regarded by Japan as an existential threat provoked it into a desperate attack on Pearl Harbor as well as the Philippines, Indochina, Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. With help from its Thai allies, Japan invaded Burma. Four days later, German, Italy, and their satrapies declared war on the United States, which reciprocated. The contest was now global. A second world war had begun.

By the time it ended in 1945, World War II had smashed the previous world order and taken the lives of an estimated 70 – 85 million people or about 3 percent of the world’s then population. About one-third of the deaths were Soviet, another third Chinese. American deaths came to almost 420,00, British to 450,000, and French to about 600.000.  Germany lost over seven million citizens and Japan almost three million. At the war’s end, only the United States, whose wartime economy had grown to about 60 percent of global GDP, was better off than it had been.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the U.S. wartime president, understood the need for a new world order and imagined one built on spheres of influence. In his concept, which Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill found congenial if charmingly naïve, Britain would manage its global empire, China would manage East Asia, the Soviet Union would manage eastern Europe and inner Asia, and the United States would manage the Western Hemisphere. While this proposal died with Roosevelt in 1945, the concept lived on – with the addition of France – in the composition of the United Nations Security Council’s veto-wielding permanent members.

A plan for world order (1944 – 1945)

During World War II, for the first time in history, multinational negotiations took place on a global basis explicitly to craft a new world order. In 1944, the representatives of forty-four independent nations gathered at the Bretton Woods resort in northern New Hampshire to agree on a gold and dollar-based system for the postwar world’s commercial and financial relations. The following year, as the war neared its end, the representatives of fifty nations convened in San Francisco to draft the Charter of the United Nations. This set out the fundamentals of international law and provided the basis for the formal establishment of the UN in October 1945, two months after the Japanese surrender. Reflecting the post-war ascendancy of the United States and concerns about a possible renewal of American isolationism, the headquarters of this improved version of the League of Nations was in New York.

The UN vision of a cooperative system of rule-guided global governance almost immediately fell victim to great power antagonism, but US-sponsored rule-building proceeded apace. The International Convention on Human Rights and the Genocide Convention date to 1948. In 1949, the two Geneva Conventions regulating the conduct of war received an update and gained two new conventions. A wide range of international treaties prohibiting various cruelties followed, including bans on racism, discrimination against women, and torture. But by the 1980s, the momentum slackened, in large measure due to flagging U.S. deference to the UN and international law. The United States worked hard to conclude the 1982 UN Convention on the Law  of the Sea but then declined to ratify it. The same fate befell some twenty other multilateral treaties adopted by the international community since 1981. For the past four decades, the U.S. has participated only erratically in the law-based world order it had worked so hard to establish in the post-World War I and World War II periods.

The Cold War order (1947 – 1989)

By 1947, rival blocs led by Soviet and American overlords had begun to confront each other over both geopolitical and ideological issues. Both sources of contention were evident in the 1947 Truman Doctrine’s support for Greece and Turkey against Soviet pressure, the 1948 -1949 Berlin crisis, and the appallingly bloody Korean War of 1950 – 1953. These events put in place a quasi-feudal bipolar world order that lasted until 1989, when the Soviet Union’s eastern European empire disintegrated, and it ceased to contend for Eurasian or global hegemony.

During the four decades of the Cold War, the relationship – or lack of relationship – of nation states with one or the other superpower determined their geopolitical positions, freedom of maneuver, level of access to public goods, and degree of immunity from foreign-instigated regime change operations. Meanwhile, the contending superpowers came to expect automatic followership from those aligned with them for their positions on each and every aspect of world affairs.

The U.S. and the Soviet Union took care to prevent states in their respective spheres of influence from slipping away or defecting to the other, but both were conscious of the danger of mutual annihilation in a nuclear exchange, and neither was prepared to risk this by engaging in direct combat with the other. Both saw newly independent states that attempted to remain nonaligned – separate from either bloc – as weak-minded and up for grabs, and each sought to sustain or expand its sphere of influence through proxy wars, regime change operations, the manipulation of elections, and economic blandishments and deprivations.

Ideology was a much more prominent feature of the Cold War than it had been in previous world orders. The US-led bloc – the so-called “free world” – was politically heterogeneous. It was composed of a mixture of democracies, dictatorships, monarchies, and imperial outposts with little in common other than a desire to remain unsubjugated by godless communism and to derive material benefits through alignment with the United States. Its member states practiced multiple versions of capitalism, social democracy, and religious faith.

The members of the Soviet bloc, by contrast, were relatively homogeneous. They modeled their politics on Marxism-Leninism, the ruthless elitist dictatorship, atheist ideology, and statist political economic system championed by Moscow.

Diplomacy in the Cold War resembled nothing so much as trench warfare. Its object was less to roll back the spheres of influence of the other side than to avoid giving the other a reason to attack it. Despite the efforts of each side to subvert the other, the two blocs remained remarkably stable over the course of their four-decade-long confrontation. Both superpowers kept garrisons on the territories of those members of their blocs they termed “allies,” by which each meant subordinate states they had committed to secure against attack or ideological conversion by the other. Each restrained such “allies” from actions against the other that might escalate into bilateral warfare between them. The end of the Cold War order removed Soviet constraints on countries like Iraq, which then felt free to launch a war of expansion in Arabia it would never have dared to risk when subject to Soviet supervision.

The greatest shock to the boring stability of the Cold War order was the 1971 – 1979 U.S. enlistment of China in the containment of the Soviet Union. China’s shift to the so-called “free world” rebalanced but did not alter the fundamental nature of the world order of the time. This remained defined by adversarial interactions of the United States and its bloc and the Soviet Union and its satrapies. Aside from the U.S. entente with China and an earlier shift to neutrality by Yugoslavia, there were few defections from either bloc. Only one — Cuba’s turn to Soviet protection – catalyzed the near-death experience of a nuclear standoff between the two superpowers. Deft diplomacy kept disaster at bay.

The end of colonialism (1947 – 1997)

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Europe’s empires had tried and failed to recover the overseas dominions they had lost during World War II. Centuries of European global dominance had imposed elements of the Christian West’s culture on its overseas possessions, including the Atlantic region’s major languages and professed values. These included norms of representative government rooted in popular elections, with which the tyranny inherent in imperial rule was in obvious conflict. Ironically, the ideologies and political cultures of the Euro-American colonial powers ended up inspiring the global South’s struggles for independence from them.

The exported Western ideologies included Marxism, which had begun as a philosophical and social science-based critique of Western civilization’s failure to foster the individual and collective self-fulfillment, egalitarianism, and fraternity that its religious faith and ideals required. In China and elsewhere, Marxism served as a welcome means by which to westernize while simultaneously disparaging the West. Allied with Leninism – a set of political principles for organizing an elite one-party dictatorship to reengineer socioeconomic systems and direct their development – it proved a potent tool of revolution and politico-economic transformation.

The retreat of European imperialism created new arenas for the struggle between the two “superpowers,” both of which were avowedly anti-colonialist. From 1941 to 1945 Japan had forcibly replaced European rule in East and Southeast Asia with its own. Its defeat left a power vacuum that was occupied by the victorious United States. In Burma and India, Japan’s advocacy of Asia for the Asians had resonated with Burmese and Indian nationalists, who wrested their independence from Britain in 1947. Between 1945 and 1949, the US-held Philippines, Dutch Indonesia, and British India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon all achieved independence over often violent opposition by their colonial masters. The casualties involved in the struggles of these countries for self-determination numbered in the millions.

In 1949, as a condition for joining NATO, the French demanded the return of their colonies in Indochina. But, by 1954, Vietnamese communist forces had forced them to accept the independence of northern Vietnam as well as Cambodia and Laos. Thereafter, in the “Second Indochina War” of 1954 – 1975, north Vietnam defeated both south Vietnam and its American sponsor. In the Vietnamese struggle for national self-determination, three million or more Vietnamese civilians and combatants died. After the north’s victory over the south, as two million Vietnamese sought asylum abroad, another million perished at sea. France gave political independence to its African colonies in the early 1960s but locked them into continued economic fealty.

In 1957, by contrast, Britain followed the precedent it had set in India and Burma and began the process of conferring full independence on its most insistent colonies, beginning with Malaya and Ghana. British settler colonialism suffered a mortal blow in Kenya in the Mau Mau uprising of 1952 – 1963. In 1980, after a bloody ten-year-long war, Zimbabwe emerged from white rule in Southern Rhodesia. By 1990, the last African colonial territory – Namibia – had achieved independence. In 1997, the last non-self-governing British colony, Hong Kong, reverted to China. The five-century-long age of imperialism had ended. The sole remaining practitioner of aggressive settler colonialism is now Israel, which only the U.S. veto in the UN Security Council has shielded from international censure and sanctions.

The aftermath of the Cold War (1989 – 2007)

The American diplomat George Kennan based his 1946 proposal for a grand strategy of “containment” of the Soviet Union on his judgment that, if isolated, it would eventually collapse of its own defects. It took more than four decades to prove him right. For a few delirious years immediately after the 1991 implosion of the USSR and the independence of its constituent Baltic, eastern European, and central Asian republics, it seemed that, as Francis Fukuyama declared, history had ended in the triumph of liberal democracy. But this was not to be. Western carpetbaggers administered a drastic restructuring of the Soviet economy that immiserated the population but enriched a new class of plutocrats and oligarchs. Russia’s efforts to integrate itself with the West met with an ambivalent, unwelcoming, and off-putting response.

In the immediate post-Cold War period, no one contested the global supremacy of the United States. In effect, Washington presided over a global sphere of influence that excluded only China, Iran, north Korea, and Russia in which it was able to act as it wished without regard for the UN Charter, international law, or other norms of international interaction it had earlier helped prescribe. Meanwhile, the liberalization and globalization of trade and investment brought new wealth to the world economy, including China and the global South.

But a combination of triumphalism and attention deficit diplomacy derived from resource-intensive “forever wars” and counterterrorism campaigns deprived the United States of any strategy for crafting a cooperative relationship with the newly reemerged Russian Federation. Instead, the traditional Western view of Russia as a latent enemy prevailed. Under pressure from Moscow’s Russophobic neighbors and their American diasporas, a military-industrial-congressional complex disoriented by enemy deprivation syndrome, diehard veterans of the Cold War, and force of habit, fear of Russia remained the guiding spirit of NATO.

Russian reactions (1994 – 2008)

As early as 1994, Russia began warning the United States that, if NATO enlargement extended to the Russian borders, Moscow would view this as evidence of hostility and mount a military response. But by 2004, every member state of the former Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact had been inducted into NATO. In the Cold War, NATO had been a purely defensive alliance designed to counter Moscow in Europe. But in 1995, NATO began to take the offensive. It intervened in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1999, it launched a 78-day bombing campaign that wrested Kosovo from Serbia, a state traditionally associated with Russia. In 2001, NATO joined the United States in its twenty-year war to pacify faraway Afghanistan. And in 2011, it supported a regime change operation that threw Libya into anarchy. As NATO expanded toward Russia, Moscow came to see it as an increasingly active military threat.

In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a strong warning against further NATO enlargement.  But in 2008, under U.S. pressure, NATO offered membership to Georgia and Ukraine, both former constituent states of the Soviet Union bordering the Russian Federation. An emboldened Georgia then challenged Russian influence in minority regions on its Russian border. The result was the first European war of the 21st century, which ended in the Russian-aided secession of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia and Russian establishment of suzerainty there.

Proxy war in the Donbas (2014 -?)

In 2014 a US-supported coup overthrew the elected but corrupt pro-Russian government of Ukraine. After the coup, the U.S. again pressed NATO to induct Ukraine. Ukrainian membership in NATO threatened, among other consequences, to deprive Russia of its centuries-old Black Sea naval base in Crimea. In a bloodless use of military measures short of war, Russia then took back Crimea, administrative control of which the Soviet Union had transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954.

Meanwhile, the new ultranationalist regime in Kyiv sought to make Ukrainian the sole language of official and interpersonal communication in public institutions throughout the country, ending the official use of Russian and other minority languages at both the national and regional levels. Soon thereafter, Russia conducted a referendum in Crimea, most of whose inhabitants — more than three-fourths of whom are native speakers of Russian – welcomed reincorporation into the Russian Federation. The Donbas oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk, where Russian speakers are seventy percent or more of the population, then declared their autonomy from Ukraine, a decision that Russia endorsed.

Ukraine launched an offensive that recovered parts of the Donbas. Russia countered with military aid to the secessionists. Diplomatic efforts to restore linguistic and other elements of autonomy within a federalized Ukraine produced two never-implemented agreements (at Minsk). As the Donbas war proceeded amidst occasional ceasefires, Ukraine built a line of fortifications in the Donbas from which it daily bombarded the secessionists, whom Russia helped build formidable armies. The United States, Britain, and other NATO members made a major effort to retrain, reorganize, and re-equip the Ukrainian army. Russia simultaneously escalated its military support for the Donbas separatists.

War over NATO enlargement, Sino-American estrangement, and Sino-Russian entente

In late 2021, Russia demanded negotiations to rule out Ukrainian membership in NATO. The U.S. and NATO refused to discuss this. Russia massed troops on its border with Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO again rebuffed Moscow’s demand for talks about NATO enlargement. In early 2022, Russia recognized the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk, garrisoned them, and invaded Ukraine.

In response, the United States, joined by the EU, Britain, Australia, and a few other security partners, declared all-out economic war on Russia, cutting it off from the global dollar-based trading system, attempting to ban its energy exports, and seizing its dollar reserves, while initiating massive arms transfers and tactical intelligence support to Ukraine, which is now mired in a thousand-kilometer-wide war of attrition with Russia. The information war that accompanied the Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the fiercest and most comprehensive in world history. With all sources of information other than those favoring Ukraine cut off, it is impossible to understand what is actually happening there. Whether a Western policy of support for proxy war in Ukraine can save it and restore peace in Europe is at best doubtful, but the economic war on Russia, its knock-on effects, the concomitant paroxysm in US-China relations, and the worldwide turn to protectionism driven by national security rather than economic concerns are together catalyzing the emergence of a very new pattern of international interactions.

The disorderly birth of another, yet unnamed world order (2022 -?)

The immediate U.S. war aims in Ukraine are to preserve Kyiv’s freedom to remain aligned with the U.S. and EU, if not now to join NATO. The longer-term U.S. strategic objective is avowedly “to isolate and weaken Russia.”

U.S. policies toward China parallel these objectives. Washington seeks to keep Taiwan in its sphere of influence and to isolate and weaken China in order to retain its regional and global economic and technological as well as politico-military supremacy. It should surprise no one that Beijing and Moscow have come to perceive a common interest in thwarting and countering U.S. policies aimed at subordinating them and retarding their growth in wealth and power.

U.S. policies of confrontation with Russia and China have unenthusiastic support from most NATO countries and Japan. But rising and resurgent powers, like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Turkey, oppose the effort to perpetuate the U.S. “unilateral moment” that they represent. With the notable exceptions of Australia, Britain, Japan, and south Korea, other major countries clearly prefer a multipolar, polycentric world order to one dominated by the United States or any other single power.

So far, the protectionist trade and technology policies the Trump administration launched against China in 2018 and the current economic and financial war on Russia are having pernicious results. China has accelerated its scientific, technological, and military advance. Far from collapsing, the Russian economy now has the second largest balance of payments surplus after China’s. Meanwhile, Europeans face recession, energy shortages, and other hardships. Both China and Russia are finding new markets for their goods and services. The war in Ukraine shows no sign of ending, and the probability of war in the Taiwan Strait is rising dramatically.

The shape of things to come

The world order that appears to be emerging is one in which:

• Sanctions-induced commodity and food shortages, breaking supply chains, and rearmament fuel persistent inflation.
• The fiscal burden of rising interest payments forces a turn to domestic pay-as-you-go policies and a choice between “guns and butter” that the U.S. has long evaded.
• The bloc formed by the United States, EU, Australia, Britain, and Japan to ostracize Russia and China is itself marginalized by the rest of the world, including its fastest growing economies and markets. Countries outside the US-led bloc refuse to choose between it and its designated adversaries, remain open for business with both, and reject the West’s imposition of end-use and retransfer restrictions on its exported products.
• The ability to mount planetwide responses to issues like climate change and pandemics is impaired. Every region is on its own and, in terms of its impact, the sum of the parts is less than the whole.
• The principal strength of the United States – its military prowess – proves irrelevant to most of the challenges in the emerging world order, which require economic responses that Washington cannot muster.
• Russia permanently abandons its three-century-long effort to integrate with Europe to seek an Asian identity through intensified relations with China and India.
• Turkey does the same, redefining itself as a West Asian and Islamic country rather than a European one and further attenuating its commitments to other members of NATO.
• Smaller countries resist affiliation with either the West or its designated adversaries.
• China’s “Belt and Road” initiative gradually extends Chinese economic influence throughout the Eurasian landmass and beyond in Southeast Asia and East Africa. Chinese political influence in the areas covered by the BRI gradually displaces that of the United States.
• NATO and other multinational alliances become less cohesive, with members gradually reducing or withdrawing their commitments to them.
• Germany, Japan, and other post-World War II dependencies of the United States rearm and develop more independent foreign policies.
• Latin America develops relations with China, India, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and other countries that increasingly undercut American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
• Africa is where most of the world’s industrial labor force comes to reside, and its economies become more connected to Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Turkey than to the EU or United States.
• Technology standards differ from region to region, and new technologies are often unavailable in regions beyond those that originated them.
• The internet evolves into regional and national zones, separated from each other by firewalls.
• Inexpensive Russian energy, metals, minerals, and other natural resources nourish economies in the so-called “global South” but are no longer reliably available at favorable prices to the U.S. and members of its anti-Russian coalition.
• U.S. sanctions give China and Russia a compelling incentive to form consortia with Iran and others to eliminate dependence on the United States for civilian, military, and dual-use products like passenger aircraft.
• The ability of the United States to finance its government and global power projection by issuing Treasury bonds is in increasing doubt, given the reputational damage of its confiscation of Iran’s, Venezuela’s, Russia’s, and Afghanistan’s dollar reserves.
• The rising risk from U.S. unilateral dollar-based sanctions causes ever more countries to price exports and imports in their own currencies, use swaps to pair their currency with those of their main trading partners, switch to hard currencies other than the dollar, institute point-of-sale digital cross-border currency exchanges, and create new units of account for transnational trade settlement. The “exorbitant privilege” that has underwritten U.S. global primacy unwinds.
• China, India, Russia, Arab oil producers, and other rising economic and financial powers respond to the incentives to build a separate financial world order that provides alternatives to the dollar-based SWIFT system and can destroy the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. They do so.
• Deglobalization generates multiple regional trade and investment regimes and divides global markets, from some of which specific great powers, like China, the EU, India, Russia, or the United States are excluded.
• Disputes over international transactions are handled bilaterally or by region-specific processes rather than by global dispute resolution mechanisms like those of the WTO.
• The world continues to rely on UN specialized agencies to address technical problems, but the UN Security Council and other international policy organizations, paralyzed by great power rivalries and disagreements, have diminished diplomatic utility.
• There are few, if any, new global – as opposed to regional — rule-setting treaties and arrangements. The worldwide regulatory regimes of the post-Cold War era atrophy.
• U.S. military supremacy erodes as regional forces strengthen themselves and new weapons systems and capabilities emerge in China, India, Japan, Korea, and Russia.
• Given the escalation risks of the US-NATO-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, the increasing likelihood of a Sino-American war over Taiwan, north Korea’s reliance on a nuclear deterrent for regime survival, the India-Pakistan nuclear standoff, and the incentive to acquire nuclear weapons that Israel’s nuclear arsenal provides to other countries in its region, the danger of nuclear war is now significantly greater than at any moment of the Cold War.

 

Conclusion

There is great dissatisfaction internationally with the now decaying “Pax Americana” of the late 20th century and a desire to see it replaced by a multipolar world order or orders in which different countries play leading roles in different sectors of world affairs. Current trends suggest that the kaleidoscope is once again rearranging international actors and their relationships in new patterns in which economic, financial, political, cultural, and military prowess is distributed regionally and functionally rather than centralized. But there has been little consideration so far of the likely consequences of an international system that entails much more complex interactions among states and peoples than before. If nothing else, this is a timely reminder of the old saying: ‘be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.’

To cope successfully with the challenges of a world with many competing centers, statecraft must take the long view, focusing on abiding interests rather than the passions of the moment. To manage a world in which rapid, unexpected change is the norm, diplomacy must be nimble rather than steadfast. And to be able to compete, countries must not only get their act together at home but employ all the instruments of statecraft – political, economic, financial, technological, and military – to shape the views and actions of their competitors to their advantage.