A World In Disarray

The longest chapter in the book, Chapter 5 discusses the challenges of the last quarter century since the Soviet Union fell and what happened to diminish world order. The state of foreign relations started this period looking very different from what the reality would become. The Gulf War, which expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 1991, was truly an international endeavor, made by a broad coalition of armed forces with the validation of the United Nations. The rest of that decade, however, played out in a much less orderly fashion across the world.

One challenge was the internal threat some governments posed to their own people. As the Soviet Union broke apart and its satellite nations spun off from Russian control, some nations that had been formed from different ethnic peoples also began to break up. Czechoslovakia did so peacefully; Yugoslavia did not. The case of self-determination of nations was clear in terms of colonialism, but it was decidedly murkier when it involved people who already belonged to an established state. The latter is what happened in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. As the fighting there grew worse, it veered into the realm of genocide by Serbian forces against Bosnian Muslims.

This pattern of conflict posed the biggest problem of the time. It involved weak rather than strong states and usually had an element of either settling old scores between groups of people (who differed in terms of ethnicity or religion) or one group trying to gain the upper hand economically or politically. The challenge for the United States and other powers was a humanitarian rather than military one.

One weak state, Somalia, cast a shadow on how the United States responded to others. Somalia fell into disorder when competing warlords fought each other and left a power vacuum. This conflict created a humanitarian crisis that drew the involvement of the United Nations, but after 18 American troops there were killed in 1993, all foreign troops withdrew the following year. Haass says this incident had a “ripple effect,” making the United States reluctant to enter into future humanitarian crises, such as in Haiti and Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

Eventually, the world community reached a consensus about what came to be called “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). This stated that a nation has a responsibility to protect its own people from harm and that the international community can intervene if it fails to do so. Some nations had reservations about this (namely China, Russia, and India), but the larger roadblock was implementing the policy when needed. The dangers of getting involved in a country’s civil war, as was the case in Syria, were numerous and daunting.

Weak states also posed a serious threat when it came to terrorism, as the September 11 attacks against the United States in 2001 so forcefully demonstrated. Terrorist groups that were allowed to operate within a country and gain strength could take their fight anywhere else in the world and threaten any government. Thus, most nations agreed on the need to intervene in such cases, including going after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The world was not united, however, in backing the Iraq War in 2003. Most nations felt that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat and viewed the American military action as less than legitimate when the United States failed to get the approval of the United Nations.

The lack of agreement about the Iraq War was also partly due to the stated reason for the United States taking action: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Haass explains that inconsistent responses to nations acquiring such weapons became a problem. When some nations acquired nuclear weapons in violation of the NPT, the United States did nothing (as with Israel). Other nations that did the same, however, drew scorn and sanctions (North Korea). The author reviews how the United States responded to these countries’ nuclear ambitions, as well as those of India, Pakistan, and Iran, and concludes that there was a disconnect between stated policy and reality.

Haass briefly reviews other areas where international cooperation has been needed. The World Health Organization coordinates public health but is relatively weak. In terms of economics, trade and monetary policy get the most attention. Trade has been encouraged and, thanks to fewer barriers and the formation of regional associations, has increased steadily. In recent years, however, the rate of growth has slowed a bit, and within the United States there has been a loss of support for trade pacts that appear to have a negative domestic impact, such as jobs being moved overseas. Other aspects of the international domain are relatively new: climate change and cyberspace. In both areas, norms are still being worked out, and what has been established lacks the means for enforcement.

After touching on great-power relations and global organizations in the previous chapters, Haass turns his attention to regional relationships. He begins in the Middle East after the end of the Cold War, reiterating the successful approach taken in the Gulf War in 1991. For more than a decade afterward, the United States was the main external power in the region and played a role in its overall stability. This changed drastically in 2003 with the Iraq War, the goal of which was to overthrow the authoritarian leader of a sovereign state in hopes that democracy could take hold instead.

With the chaos that ensued, democracy in the Middle East seemed to be a tarnished entity until the series of events starting in 2010 that came to be known as the Arab Spring. It began with protests over the treatment of a produce vendor in Tunisia and swept across many Arab states. Haass describes what happened in some of the key nations and analyzes the American response in each. He believes that the Obama administration mismanaged the events in Egypt, which made other nations in the movement look unfavorably toward the United States. First it shifted its stance from counseling caution to advocating that President Mubarak immediately step down; then it gave the impression of favoring the political party the Muslim Brotherhood.

Some of what happened in Egypt was about optics, but the Libyan situation was worse, says Haass, “first by doing too much, then by doing too little” (160). With United Nations backing, the United States and NATO partners intervened for humanitarian reasons when they felt that Libya’s embattled leader, Muammar Gadhafi, was planning to attack defenseless civilians. The mission morphed into regime change, however, seeking to overthrow Gadhafi. This angered Russia and China, both of which had supported the humanitarian effort in the UN, and caused the R2P doctrine to be seen as suspect. Then the NATO partners withdrew too soon, leaving the nation in chaos with no single group in control.

Finally, the Syrian case was worse yet, as “the Obama administration was plagued by a gap between pronouncements and policies” (164). It made demands but did little to back them up. The best-known example was when the United States declared that the use of chemical weapons by Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad would cross a “red line.” When Assad did in fact use such weapons, Obama decided against a military strike. His administration worked with Russia to broker a deal in which Syria would avoid attack if it gave up the rest of its chemical weapons, but Haass argues that the damage to US prestige had been done. The following years saw the Syrian civil war worsen and terrorist groups gain a foothold in the country.

In contrast to the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region was quite stable, lacking any significant conflict during this period. The reasons for this are that the nations in this region were considerably connected by trade and the United States had been a strong presence since World War II, with allies spread out geographically from South Korea to Australia. In addition, many Asian states had been established for centuries and had relatively homogeneous populations; their loyalty was therefore to country rather than ethnic, tribal, or religious groups. South Asia is a different matter, dominated as it is by two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, which have long been at odds with each other.

Europe, Haass writes, has had competing visions in which it is seen as either “a United States of Europe” or “a United Europe of States” (188, 189). The former means more interconnection, while the latter retains more focus on individual sovereignty. This tension has prevented the European Union from being a stronger, more unified entity. Structural economic problems came to light after the 2008 financial crisis, as monetary policy was set by the EU but fiscal policy controlled by individual states. What’s more, the Russian invasion of Crimea brought a renewed geopolitical instability.

This chapter begins with an overview of what might be called a downward progression of international cooperation and legitimacy since the end of the Cold War. The 1991 Gulf War had full UN support, while just a few years later action against Serbia was opposed by Russia, so the United States took the issue to NATO for approval. In 2003, the United States began working with the UN on Iraq but then acted unilaterally when approval was lacking. Finally, Russia consulted with no international body when it intervened in Crimea in 2014.

At the center of this lack of cooperation is a crisis of legitimacy. Haass notes that, in the end, countries do what they want (especially if they have the power) regardless of international bodies. Moreover, it’s “impossible to define legitimacy in terms of process alone if there is no consensus on norms and rules” (197). For that matter, the UN Security Council itself cannot be considered legitimate as its permanent members (the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China) are representative of a time 75 years in the past rather than the present day.

There is now greater parity among nations as the gap between great powers and developing countries is not as great as it once was. The main thing diluting their power, however, has been the rise of nonstate entities. Haass lists a number of these, which include regional bodies like the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), multinational corporations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Increasingly, “[p]ower on paper does not necessarily translate into power in practice” (205).