A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
SEPTEMBER 01, 2024
Richard N. Haass, an American diplomat who served as the President of the Council on Foreign Relations for twenty years, presents a compelling case for the reform of the current global order in A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order. The book, which was originally published in 2017, discusses problems and ideas that continue to be at the forefront of international relations discourse seven years on. With 2024 being a year of elections in several parts of the world, most pertinently in the United States where a second Trump term could drastically alter geopolitical dynamics in Europe, the South China Sea, Taiwan, and in active conflict zones like Ukraine and the Middle East, A World in Disarray remains unquestionably relevant and, perhaps more than ever, merits reading and discussion. The book itself has three parts whereby Haass seeks to analyze the origins of the present world order, identify the problems that cause instability within it, and devise a viable solution.
In the first part of the book, Haass explores the development of the international system from the mid-seventeenth century through to the end of the Cold War. This sweeping analysis condenses around 350 years of history into three chapters, though the watershed moments that the author identifies and outlines should be recognizable to most students of international relations. Haass begins with a short reflection on the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the order that it engendered in continental Europe. Haass, quoting the historian Peter Wilson, writes, “Westphalia’s significance lies not in the number of conflicts it tried to resolve, but in the methods and ideals it applied… sovereign states interacting (formally) as equals within a common secularized legal framework regardless of size, power or internal configuration.” This model would then give way to the balance of power arrangement devised by diplomats such as Castlereagh, Talleyrand, and Metternich at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars ravaged Europe.
Fundamentally conservative in nature, the agreement reached at the Congress of Vienna sought to prevent a repeat of the chaos caused by the French Revolution through the creation of the Quadruple Alliance (the members of which were Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain) and the Holy Alliance (a pact between Austria, Prussia, and Russia, the conservative great powers). The system that emerged as a result of the negotiations was to be buttressed by the ‘Concert of Europe,’ whereby diplomats of the great European powers would seek to further their interests within the confines of the aforementioned balance of power arrangement. While the according of this level of power to diplomats allowed skillful operators like Bismarck to maintain a delicate balance and avoid a pan-European war, nationalist-secessionist forces in the Balkans, the expansionist proclivities of the German Empire, and an entrenched system of alliances (the Triple Entente and the League of the Three Emperors) dragged the continent into the First World War.
After Germany’s loss, the imposition of the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles caused resentment within German society, a disgruntlement that the Nazi Party used to come to power and begin transforming the country into a fascist state while allying with the similarly fascist Italy. Nazi Germany would later ally with Imperial Japan, a nation with which it shared expansionist ambitions. Ultimately, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the Anschluss (the Nazi annexation of Austria) seven years later would end up chipping away at the post-World War I order that was characterized by the League of Nations’ founding principles and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, both of which were explicitly anti-war. Following the failure of Britain’s policy of appeasing Nazi Germany by allowing them to annex Sudetenland unimpeded, the former declared war on Germany after the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Following the unimaginable destruction caused by the Second World War, a new bipolar international order emerged. The protagonists of this order, the US and the USSR, were able to maintain its stability through a careful balancing act that Haass attributes to the presence of an extensive arsenal of nuclear and conventional weapons on both sides, limited trade, and diplomatic and technocratic efforts including arms limitation treaties (like the NPT, SALT I and II, and the INF Treaty), the creation of the Washington-Moscow hotline, and scientific collaboration. Despite occasional flare-ups like the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and diplomatic successes like the détente, the order remained fairly stable, which meant that the two superpowers were able to avoid direct conflict. The bipolar order was not the only order during the Cold War period, though. The other order was a Western liberal one populated by America and its allies. This was undergirded by security cooperation through NATO and economic cooperation through the Bretton Woods institutions, primarily the World Bank and the IMF. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, this order would come to embody the international system and expand rapidly as new democracies and liberal economies joined in huge numbers.
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In the second part of the book, Haass examines the condition in which the post-Cold War world order finds itself. The author’s argument in this section rests on the position that the present order has failed to adapt to the speed of change in geopolitics and international relations brought about by new waves of democratization, market expansion, and technological progress. Power, as he writes, “is more distributed in more hands than at any time in history. The same holds for technology. Decision making has come to be more decentralized. Globalization, with its vast, fast flows of just about anything and everything real and imaginable across borders, is a reality that governments often cannot monitor, much less manage. The gap between the challenges generated by globalization and the ability of a world to cope with them appears to be widening in a number of critical domains.” This situation, for Haass, is characteristic of the twenty-first century’s “nonpolar” system, wherein power and political leverage are shared by many states, a considerable number of which (like China, India, and Brazil) grew at an exponential rate owing to market liberalization in the 1990s.
With the interests of these parties being diffuse and, in many cases, divergent, the mechanisms within the United Nations have become increasingly inadequate in facilitating the formation of a consensus on critical issues among its member states. This is because the Security Council, the only organ of the United Nations whose resolutions are binding under international law, has devolved into a platform where political competition between the United States and illiberal powers like China and Russia causes the aforementioned states to regularly use their veto power to protect their interests and those of their allies. Besides, the non-permanent status of nations like Germany, Japan, and India, all of which are major economies and regional leaders, contributes to making the Council somewhat unrepresentative and unreflective of the twenty-first century’s global power distribution. Furthermore, the lack of a permanent international forum wherein states can interact with other pillars of modern polity like the innovation and technology industry and social media companies on matters like developments in artificial intelligence also hinders the present world order’s ability to account for changes brought about by scientific progress that will play a very influential role in the politics and international relations of the future.
To some extent, Haass’ diagnosis of the problems that undermine the post-Cold War order’s efficacy is similar to that of liberal scholars like G. John Ikenberry. The latter, in his work entitled “The End of Liberal International Order?”, writes that the world order that emerged in the 1990s is now facing a ‘Polanyian’ crisis brought about by market overstretch and the assimilation of a large number of states into the global liberal economy at breakneck speed. This phenomenon caused the erosion of the security community that characterized the Western liberal order during the Cold War era (by way of falling defense expenditure) and instead rendered unrestrained financial globalization the defining feature of the international system. The result of the liberal order’s inability to keep up with the speed of these developments was the 2008-09 financial crisis, which laid the ground for socio-economic inequality and the rise of populism in the West. Consequently, internal instability in Europe and in the United States began to define the political agenda, which detracted from these states’ capacity for building on their relations with democracies in other regions of the world while countering the rise of China and Russia.
Where Ikenberry and Haass differ somewhat, though, is in their proposed solution to the crisis facing the present order. The former emphasizes the need for strengthening the transatlantic security community (NATO) and reintroducing some form of ’embedded liberalism,’ i.e., strong welfare mechanisms within states that could help in curbing the affinity that the disaffected masses have with the populist movement and, as a result, allow liberal democracies to focus on maintaining the sanctity of the liberal international order while tackling the often malign influence and explicit expansionism of illiberal states like China and Russia. Haass, however, having used a broader approach in analyzing the problems facing the post-1990 international system, recommends the creation of an amended order (“World Order 2.0”) wherein both states and corporations participate actively.
The third part of the book is centered around the features of ‘World Order 2.0′ and the kind of foreign policy that it is supposed to be characterized by. Haass writes in unequivocally clear terms that the fundamental objective of the amended order should be the prevention of great power competition to avoid the disastrous consequences of any conflict between them. Moreover, in Haass’ view, such a system will also enable cooperation among the United States and its primary competitors, whom he identifies as Russia and China. This, he believes, can be achieved using a policy of “integration.” Such a policy would entail the US being wary of what China and Russia perceive as threats to their interests and security, while also working closely with their diplomats on issues where they might find agreement.
To better explain his idea, Haass propounds that the US, to deter China from pursuing an aggressive policy in the South China Sea, should maintain and bolster its military presence in the Asia-Pacific. Foreign policy towards Russia, though, would require military restraint on America’s part in order to avert a situation wherein Article 5 of NATO is triggered owing to Russian insecurity or expansionism. Therefore, the ex-President of the Council on Foreign Relations suggests that NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia be “put on hold” because “(n)either comes close to meeting NATO requirements, and going ahead would not only further alienate or provoke Russia but would also add military commitments that the United States is not in a position to fulfill.” These considerations, though, the author says, must go hand in hand with diplomatic efforts on matters such as the climate crisis that make Russia, and perhaps more pointedly China, feel like responsible stakeholders in the global system.
Haass also recommends a course of action for the US to adopt in various regions of the world. This includes signing trade pacts and conducting capacity-building operations with Latin American and African states to help them in undermining terrorism and organized crime, holding high-level strategic meetings with the leaders of South Asian countries like India and Pakistan with a view towards easing diplomatic hostilities between the two nuclear-armed neighbors and thereby averting a global security crisis, and protecting energy interests and Israeli security in the Middle East while also making efforts to ‘selectively cooperate’ with Iran and “to discourage the further nuclearization of the region” despite the failure of the Iran Nuclear Deal. With the foreign policy groundwork laid for ‘World Order 2.0,’ Haass finally proceeds to an explanation of its features.
Fundamentally, the new order would be characterized by three amendments to the current system. First, policymaking on issues that are primarily dealt with at the domestic level but have global importance would be predicated on a form of multilateralism based on the idea of ‘sovereign obligation,’ whereby states would be “expected not just to live up to agreed upon behaviors but also (to) make sure that no third party carried out prohibited actions from their territory and that any party discovered to be so doing would be stopped and penalized.” Therefore, Haass writes, “(t)he goal should be to get governments to commit to adopting certain best practices at home in areas that inevitably affect global efforts to deal with common challenges.” Consequently, issues such as global warming and emissions standards, immigration, counterterrorism, and law enforcement would be handled at the domestic level by states within a normative framework that, as a matter of principle, has global support and acceptance. It is important to note that the author does not provide any mechanism for enforcing compliance beyond naming and shaming, which he believes could lead to a reduction in foreign investment and tourism.
Secondly, multilateralism in ‘World Order 2.0,’ besides being dictated by the notion of sovereign obligation, would be based on the formation of “coalitions of the willing.” Such international groups would initially operate informally and involve countries whose participation and mutual cooperation is absolutely mandatory to solve certain global issues. As Haass writes, “what matters is that the bias favors getting things done with those who matter most rather than favoring inclusion for its own sake.” The third and last aspect of the new order would be the active participation of corporations and other major players in today’s polity, such as NGOs, in relevant policymaking, crisis resolution, and capacity-building operations. This would entail, to adduce the example that Haass provides in the book, representatives of states working with pharmaceutical companies, the Gates Foundation, the WHO, Doctors Without Borders, and other NGOs to deal with public health crises. Similarly, meetings for regulating cyberspace and formulating appropriate legislation would be held in the presence of representatives of companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook/Meta, and Microsoft, among others. In many cases, heads of local councils could also be formally included in discussions to tap into their knowledge of relevant localities.
Upon review, the recommendation that ‘World Order 2.0′ be formed emerges as the most salient feature of Haass’ work. While the arguments presented in favor of it would have made compelling reading when the book was originally published in 2017, one can rebut some of the former American diplomat’s ideas with the benefit of hindsight. For example, a restrained foreign policy towards Russia that creates avenues for potential collaboration is no longer viable owing to its invasion and ongoing occupation of Ukraine. As a result of this act of Russian belligerence, Ukraine submitted an official application for NATO membership in 2022, thereby detracting from Haass’ argument. Furthermore, Israel’s response to the October 7 Hamas attack has divided the American body politic on the subject of the nation’s foreign policy. While the Biden administration’s contribution to the Israeli effort since October 7 has been substantial, debates in Congress and the country at large have created a rift within the United States’ political system, with many being uncomfortable with the degree of material support for the IDF’s excesses and flagrant violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza.
Besides, the escalation of tensions between Iran and Israel, which peaked with the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus and later with Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, has made ‘selective cooperation’ with the Islamic Republic impossible. The situation has also not been helped by the repeated failure of talks to negotiate a renewal of the Iran Nuclear Deal. In addition to the active conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, Iran’s commitment to disrupting the stability of the current order, North Korea’s illegal testing of nuclear weapons, and China’s policy of constantly undermining American strategic interests have rendered a global consensus on Haass’ vision of ‘sovereign obligation’ unattainable. However, the idea of forming ad-hoc international contact groups that include both state and non-state actors to solve specific problems continues to be immensely interesting and relevant, though it could perhaps be made more potent with the inclusion of Ikenberry’s argument for the reintroduction of ’embedded liberalism.’
Such an arrangement would not only help in tackling the cost-of-living crisis that was initially caused by COVID-related supply chain issues and exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but would also, to some extent, curb the rising support for populism among those left feeling disaffected by their inability to afford bare necessities. With this in mind, one can justifiably conclude that ‘A World in Disarray’ is essential reading for students of international relations and geopolitics—not only because it proposes innovative solutions to some of the problems facing the present world order but also because it allows the reader to reimagine and reframe the arguments that the world has left behind in the seven years since the book was published.
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