The end of the Cold War gave rise to powerful new ways of thinking about the international order, a one-polar order without real competition. Moreover, the great power competition is being replaced by conflicts over cultural and religious identities, which occur within and between states in a global civil war. Nevertheless, the Cold War continues to define our political imagination even when the politics that defines the international system belies its concepts and prognostications. For instance, Russia’s post-Cold War reduced its economic and political power so that the United States and its Western allies did not see the Ukraine war as a version of great–power competition or a struggle between unipolarity and multipolarity.
However, supporting Ukraine in what was meant to be a slam–dunk for a unipolar order has turned into an intractable conflict even without great–power competition. Similarly, the War in Gaza has redirected Western attention to a region it had sought to set aside to focus on the immense economic growth of the so-called Indo–Pacific and, therefore, on China as a potential great power competitor.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both of which could broaden into regional conflicts, do not represent distractions to the putatively more severe and long–term struggle between unipolarity and multipolarity in defining world order. They put the very idea of such a great power politics into question. While the United States remains the most powerful country in the world, it no longer helms a unipolar order despite its potential competitors’ economic and military inferiority. In the course of both these wars, we have seen that curtailing the West’s political reach and diminishing, if not demolishing, its hegemony globally does not require great–power competition or multipolarity. Moreover, though such a vision of international politics might inform many states outside the West, it is not one that we can see being exercised in the wars that confront us today. On the contrary, the role of middle powers and regional politics determines conflict in the international system, leading to the latter’s transformation.
The United States has been trying to maintain its unipolarity and stave off any threat of a multipolar order since the end of the Cold War. However, instead of being confronted by the kind of threats it predicted and expected, it has been compelled to address entirely different ones since the beginning of the new century. First, there were the non–state threats of global militancy, with the rise of al-Qaeda and then, as a result of American intervention in the Middle East, ISIS. These crises, which seemed to play out according to Huntington’s script, allowed the United States to solidify its unipolarity during the War on Terror. However, this resulted in neither its hegemony nor formal dominance of the international system. Indeed, the unilateral deployment of American power did more to dismantle this system than prop it up. Just when the world seemed to have become safe enough for the West to turn its attention to China, we had the War in Ukraine and then, just under two years later, in Gaza. It appears that the emerging global order is not defined by great power competition, even in some distant future, but by entirely different visions of international politics.
The Crisis of Global Politics
In his address to the nation on October 19, President Biden brought together the wars in Ukraine and Gaza to illustrate America’s indispensable role in protecting the international order from threats like Russia and Hamas. It was a strange pairing. Russia, after all, is a vast state with nuclear arms, while Hamas is a non–state organization operating in a small strip of land. However, he was right in putting the two conflicts together because, in both cases, the United States and its allies have opted for War rather than diplomacy, negotiations, and ceasefires, which are the only means of peaceful resolution. These must wait until the enemy has been sufficiently degraded to accept their preferred terms. Nevertheless, this strategy has failed in Ukraine and is unlikely to succeed in Gaza.
The similarity of the West’s response to conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East suggests that the specificity of either case does not define it but instead tells us more about the changing structure of American power. President Biden is correct in seeing both conflicts as challenges to America’s hegemony and global politics. However, not the wars that threatens the unipolarity that has defined the international order since the end of the Cold War, but rather the unwillingness of many allied and client states to go along with them. In Ukraine, invocations of World War Two and the Cold War on both sides failed to gain any traction outside the West. There, the War on Terror failed to put together a new international order that proved a more relevant and cautionary precedent, dissuading countries from choosing sides in the War.
While Western historical narratives about global conflict have been provincialized this way, the rest of the world offers no alternatives. However, those refusing to align with the United States or Russia have managed to bring neutrality back to life as a fundamental principle of the international order, one pushed aside in the post-Cold War period and especially during the War on Terror. From NATO members like Turkey to countries like India that are friendly to the West, neutrality rather than pro–Russian sentiment defines policy, for these states realize that Russia’s War is a regional one meant to place limits on America’s global politics. They also see that Russia is neither interested in nor capable of engaging in global politics that threatens them. It is only her immediate neighborhood that is at risk. Neutrality has thus allowed the Ukraine war to be geographically limited and regionalized against American intentions while permitting countries like Turkey to mediate between its protagonists.
With global politics made possible by a unipolar international order threatened in Ukraine, the United States has reduced whatever regional autonomy the European Union possessed to create a Western bloc of countries, including Canada, the U.K., Australia, Japan, and South Korea, set against Russia. Now, it faces the same quandary in the Middle East, where Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, also demolished the region’s post–Cold War politics, which had been defined by a globally–agreed and guaranteed peace process leading to normalization. By contrast, the extra-legal activities of the Palestinian movement in the 1960s and 1970s had been made possible by the Cold War, which allowed space for the P.L.O. like the I.R.A., the Red Brigades, and other militant groups to operate internationally. All of these were pushed into various kinds of negotiated settlements shepherded by the United States following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
This kind of politics characterized the unipolar moment from Camp David to Oslo and the Abraham Accords. However, it is one that the United States can now defend only by opting for War to restore the status quo. This might then allow it to push for a two-state solution in which the Palestinians might be funded and managed by the international order, as represented, perhaps, by wealthy Arab countries. This, too, is part of the post–Cold War playbook of global politics as exemplified by Bosnia and Kosovo, East Timor, and South Sudan, all wards of the international order rather than sovereign states. The dated nature of this vision is evident in the historical narratives that underpin it. If in Ukraine, it was World War Two and the Cold War that gave the conflict meaning, in the Middle East, it is 9/11 that is routinely mentioned. However, given its consequences, this is a bad precedent, while any new future vision does not match President Biden’s invocation of an inflection point in history.
The Aftermath of 9/11
What 9/11 resulted in was the destruction of the international order that had been put in place during the Cold War, which had allowed for diplomatic, economic, and other relations between its rival camps. With the disappearance of the U.S.S.R. and opposition to the remaining superpower globally, the United States was able to marginalize the entire U.N. system. Elaborated through interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Libya, such practices constituted a “rules-based international order” that enjoys no formal agreement and, therefore, differs from the international law that had defined the U.N. order during the Cold War. We are seeing the consequences of the latter are final destruction in Eastern Europe and the Middle East today.
The development of political practices outside international law was meant to be reserved for the United States and its Western allies. The exceptions to established civil liberties in the name of security, such practices were not meant to be normative and thus could not create a new international order. Nevertheless, they have come to be invoked by many countries as a new norm. Russia has cited American practice in the War on Terror to justify its actions in Ukraine. Accordingly, political practice now takes its models from before or after establishing a post-war international order and its rule of law. In other words, international law seems to have become the exception rather than the rule in defining the actions of states today. Are such practices coming to constitute a new, if as yet informal, model of international relations, or do they signal the breakdown of such an order altogether?
The Abraham Accords
The Abraham Accords represented the region’s division within a global context. They were meant to embed Israel as a leading power within a Sunni bloc set against Shia Iran and its allies. It was even suggested that if Saudi Arabia made peace with Israel, the Sunni world would fall into line. This project, drawn from orientalist stereotypes, is now in tatters given the Palestinian refusal to be shoehorned into it. Instead, we see a surge of regional support for the Palestinian cause, putting authoritarian Arab regimes on edge.
America has, therefore, had to scupper Israel’s autonomy just as it had the European Union’s at the start of the Ukraine war in order to–globalize the conflict and so maintain its unipolarity in the face of an emerging regional politics. Its navy and air force have been deployed to the Middle East to prevent the regionalization of its politics. However, rather than defining it in terms of Israel’s national security, this array of forces has made the conflict a global one. The Americans have responded to attacks in Iraq and Yemen in a way that accomplishes what they fear: the War’s regionalization. Whereas we tend to think about the War’s regionalization in terms of its expansion, however, the opposite is true since it may shift its center of gravity away from politics at the global level and reduce the United States to a powerful yet inevitably external actor in a conflict it cannot fully control.
However, the conflict may be regionalized in other and less destructive ways. Just as the Ukraine war has been regionalized by the neutrality of countries outside the West, so too might the War in the Middle East. Here, it calls for a ceasefire that represents neutrality. Moreover, though they have not proven successful for the moment, such calls indicate little sympathy globally for the politics of unipolarity. It is no accident that voting patterns on the U.N. resolutions dealing with Ukraine and Gaza are so similar, the West’s punitive measures having been repudiated in both cases. These defeats will not stop the United States and its allies from continuing with their policies, though the anti–Israeli shift in public opinion among their citizens might give them pause for thought. However, they had not been deterred by the even larger demonstrations of anti-war feelings in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Both cases indicate the separation of executive power from public opinion and even democratic accountability, with foreign policy remaining the last domain of sovereign discretion. Nevertheless, what looked then like the hubris of untrammeled power now looks like desperation, as a failed global transformation project is tried again, this time to pull a region back under U.S. management.
D.E. Globalization
Taken together, Ukraine and Gaza allow us to see the trajectory of post–Cold War history more clearly. It now appears that America’s undisputed unipolar moment only lasted a decade, from 1989–2001, when it was interrupted by the emergence of al–Qaeda as a non-statist threat in a context where the United States faced no severe rivals. Al-Qaeda’s globalized militancy was meant to disrupt the social cohesion of countries rather than posing any kind of military challenge to them. It aimed to expose the hypocrisy and weakness of the West’s liberal societies and destroy them from within. Responding to 9/11 as an opportunity to reinforce its unipolarity and remake the international order, the United States ended up fulfilling al–Qaeda’s aims by demolishing the Cold War international order it had done so much to put in place. While the end of the War on Terror promised a return to some version of the U.N. system, events in Eastern Europe and the Middle East belie it by turning to unilateralism, brute force, and the crushing of dissent around the world.
Already, with the emergence of ISIS from American prisons in Iraq, it had become clear that the War on Terror had led to a shift from global to regional forms of militancy by territorializing the conflict. Though it continued to draw from a global population of recruits, ISIS was unlike al–Qaeda in its desire to capture and hold territory. It also turned its wrath from the West to internal enemies among Muslims themselves, most prominently the Shia they would–be representative in the Islamic Republic of Iran. ISIS prefigured the regionalization of the post–9/11 international order, even as its diminution by the coordinated action of Kurdish, Iranian, and Iraqi militias with the United States allowed the latter to imagine returning to a new kind of global politics in which it prepared to contain the rise of China. Instead, it was faced with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, another effort to regionalize politics that the Americans unsuccessfully tried to turn into a global conflict. Moreover, now there is Gaza.
While the Americans imagine a global politics in which their unipolarity must triumph over any attempt to create a bipolar or multipolar international order, historical developments appear to be moving in a different direction. Neither China nor Russia is in a position to take on the Cold War role of a superpower and so threaten American unipolarity. Instead, regional politics has come to the fore internationally, one in which middle powers like Turkey and Iran in the Middle East, Brazil in South America, or South Africa on its continent are starting to play leading roles. The destruction of the U.N. system by the West has made such regionalization a paying proposition, as has the failure of the rules-based international order to guarantee an equitable distribution of global goods even in times of crisis, with the West’s hoarding and monetization of vaccines during the pandemic serving as an excellent example of this.
Deglobalization is not about states taking hold of the economy through protectionist measures. Deglobalization was an idea emblematized by terms like reshoring, which emerged during the pandemic in opposition to offshoring and the threats posed by its just–in–time supply chains in moments of global crisis. While legislative acts like President Biden’s Green New Deal may succeed in making the United States a hub for new technologies and innovation in this way, they cannot push back the economic development of rivals like China or demolish the economy of enemies like Russia even by the massive use of sanctions. The economy and its technologies remain global and have freed themselves from politics to the degree that we might be seeing the coming apart of political economy as a founding concept of modern capitalism. This separation of state from economy makes deglobalization possible in the political arena, not least because global economic growth is no longer confined to or controlled by the West.
Not all international politics, of course, can be regionalized. The West, for example, has been shaped by the United States into the rump of a global formation through the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Other parts of the world contain powers that are too big to be fully absorbed within regional politics but are not powerful enough to count as superpowers. China, for instance, is fully integrated into her neighborhood economically, including with Taiwan, but enjoys no political hegemony over it despite the military threat it poses to certain countries there. Her only allies are North Korea and occasionally Pakistan. China is thus a regional political actor by default, but its inability to gain the political support of its neighbors prevents China’s emergence as a global actor. Therefore, India enjoys neither economic nor political hegemony in South Asia and must assume a global role only in alliance with the United States. India is neutral on Ukraine but wavers on Israel because it can forsake neither the West nor the non–West. It makes common cause with the former not so much by appealing to democracy, as in the past, but instead to Muslim feeling, even as India identifies with Israel as a strong state in a hostile neighborhood.
A New Internationalism
Might we be entering a period in which two incompatible political models of the international order overlap? One is a global order of great-power competition in which the United States seeks to maintain its unipolarity against future rivals, similar to an old–fashioned vision modeled after the Cold War. The other is a regional one in which middle powers are active, and great ones find themselves with a reduced political role insofar as they are too big to actively take on their rivals without putting the international order at risk, which may lead to a politics of détente between them. How the U.S. responds to these emerging arenas of international politics will define its future. At the moment, it maintains its unipolarity against non-existent threats while being unable to prevent the regionalization of politics internationally. Nevertheless, regional rather than superpower politics may eventually reduce America’s scope for action globally, even without affecting its military or economic predominance.
We see this happening already, with non–Western allies and clients refusing to go along with the United States on Ukraine and Gaza. However, the loyalty of Western allies cannot be taken for granted, as we see in Eastern Europe with the winding down of the Ukraine War. The shrinking of the U.S.–led a naval expedition against the Houthis in Yemen is another. One need only think of France and Germany breaking ranks with the United States during the invasion of Iraq for further examples. If such refusals have been made possible by the failure of the War on Terror to put together a new international order, they have been preceded by the equally remarkable refusals of former clients to accede to American demands. Manuel Noriega in Panama was perhaps the earliest example of this in the last century, followed by Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. They were all pragmatic leaders who survived by constant adaptation.
More puzzling than the behavior of its clients in refusing to follow American directives has been that of the United States in trying to resuscitate its post–Cold War unipolar moment. America was primarily responsible for inventing the international order at the end of World War One. Dominated by European empires and with the United States not a member of the League of Nations, this order lasted only 20 years and was destroyed by its inner contradictions in World War Two. The Americans then put together a more durable order with the United Nations. It lasted longer by bringing together the Cold War’s rivals and former colonial and colonized countries in a joint enterprise where everyone had something to gain. That order was destroyed by the end of the Cold War, especially in the War on Terror. However, instead of putting together a third international order while it retains the power and credibility to do so, the United States seems intent on destroying every vestige of one.
What made the Cold War order a success, as it retained legitimacy and lasted more than half a century, was that it was premised upon a balance of power. Unipolarity destroyed this order. Perhaps regionalization and its refusal of global politics will bring some balance back to international relations. Alternatively, we can imagine a new international order in which the United States and its allies would come to some agreement with their enemies as they had with the U.S.S.R. Such an order would give emerging Asian, African, and South American powers decision–making roles in place of fading European ones. We can imagine a U.N. in which the Security Council is entrusted with interpreting rather than ignoring the General Assembly’s decisions in how a bicameral legislature works. Alternatively, a Security Council is deprived of veto powers, discouraging negotiation and compromise. It might also comprise a more extensive group representing the world’s regions, making for more legitimate decisions.
Such fantasy takes the U.N. as its basis at the moment; all we are left with is fantasies, which may become the basis of a new political imagination. Such an idea will have to address the problem of how to bring together an old–fashioned great-power politics that is global by definition with the new regional politics that seem to be emerging in various parts of the world. Interestingly, the latter appears capable of delinking from the former and ignoring it, as the United States has been ignored by much of the world over Ukraine. This refusal to compete with the superpower and circumvent it represents an extraordinary political development that may not always be viable but cannot be stopped. It constitutes a balance of power different from any we have seen before since the task of those who speak in the name of neutrality is not to diminish or, for that matter, imitate American power but rather evade it. A dinosaur from some lost age, the United States remains immense and ferocious but belongs to another world.
