Chapter 2: Breakpoint
The end of the European age was not the end of the global system. It was only the end of the European global system. The world had a new center of gravity. It had a new geographical foundation around which the rest of the world pivoted—North America. And it had a global power which dominated North America—the United States. 1991 was therefore a breakpoint. It marked the end of an era. But far more important, it marked the end of the first global age and the beginning of the second.
Like the first global age, the American Age didn’t announce itself. It just crept up on us. The importance of North America had been increasing since the late 19th century and with it, the global significance of the United States. The collapse of the Soviet Union came as a surprise to most people. It took a while to believe that it had really disintegrated. Its consequences took even longer to be understood. But what still hadn’t been grasped was that the entire architecture of the world had changed, not only in the sense that the Soviet Union was gone, but in the deeper sense that Europe, if not gone, had ceased to be what it once was. Just as it took quite a while for the meaning of 1492 to sink in on the world, so it took quite a while for the meaning of 1991 to sink in.
At first it appeared that history had somehow ended. Francis Fukiyama wrote an important book with the title “The End of History,” which made the case that in some sense history as we had known it had come to an end. President George Bush made a speech about the “New World Order.” Everyone understood that something momentous had happened. No one could quite grasp what it was or what was its significance.
The New World Order
On March 6, 1991, following the successful conclusion of Operation Desert Storm, President George Bush made a speech that has since become famous for the following passage:
Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a "world order" in which "the principles of justice and fair play ... protect the weak against the strong ..." A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.
The speech was made while the Soviet Union was falling, but ten months before it actually fell. Bush, reflecting on how most of the world rallied to the American war to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, thought he saw a “new world order.” In this order, the United Nations would cease to be a cockpit for fighting over conflicting geopolitical ambitions, and become what it was supposed to be, a tool for peace. It would be a place where “Freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.”
In other words, the world would be a place where liberal democratic values would change from being an ideology for some, into a set of universal principles. In this world everyone would accept core American values and the United Nations—and the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, NATO and the entire international system—would become an instrument for implementing these values.
The illusion of an end to history was rooted in two assumptions. The first was that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, everyone agreed with the fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Second was the assumption that the institutions that had constituted the alliance system that had fought the Cold War would now incorporate the vanquished and start to become the tools that administered the world. Basically, the idea of the end of history was built around the assumption that everyone now shared the same values, and that the struggle between values—and even between national interests—had ended. The problem was now to use the consensus to contain and civilize rogue states like Iraq, and facilitate the real interest of the world, which was not conflict, but prosperity.
At the end of every great conflict, the victors assume, for a moment at least, that the alliance that won the war could continue to hold together and run the world after the war. There is an assumption that the alliance didn’t consist of shared temporary interests but of shared values and therefore permanent interests. When Napoleon was beaten at Waterloo, the victors came together at the Congress of Vienna. They tried to institutionalize the Europe they had fought for, the old regime. From their point of view, its preservation was the most important thing for all the allies, and therefore all other matters were secondary. Of course, the interests of England, Prussia and Russia were wildly different. They had agreed on fighting Napoleonic France and little else. The Congress of Vienna was an optical illusion.
The same thing happened at the end of World War I with the League of Nations. The victorious powers (excluding the United States) joined together to create a system in which the anti-German alliance would now administer the peace in perpetuity, a perpetuity which lasted about two decades. At the end of World War II, the victorious anti-German and anti-Japanese coalition constituted the United Nations as a body to administer the peace as it had overseen the war. In this case the illusion died within three years.
At the end of an era, there is a sense that the victorious alliance, held together by fear of an enemy, will stand together to avoid war. It never works. The only thing holding the alliance together is the enemy and absent the enemy, the alliance will collapse. Thus, the Jihadists who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan were hardly likely to join in Bush’s New World Order, any more than Stalin would agree to rule the world with Truman, or Hitler with Chamberlain. Lasting a few years or a few decades, the illusion always dissolves into reality.
The Bush “New World Order” speech saw its fullest expression in the Clinton Administration which saw itself as leading a global coalition of like-minded states with the goal of eliminating injustice. The intervention in Haiti, in Bosnia and in Kosovo, the continuation of the no-fly zone in Iraq, were not seen as the pursuit of American interest, except that the American interest was to maintain stability and eliminate extreme injustice.
In this sense, Clinton understood that the historical order had shifted, and that the United States was now the leader of a coalition of the victorious whose mission was to bring order to a disorderly world. The primary instrument of this mission was not military. That was an action of the last resort. The instrument was economic—encouraging economic development and growth, using the Cold War instruments like the IMF and World Bank to administer this process. Thus, the goal was not to destroy Russia so it could never rise again. The goal was to transform it into a liberal democratic regime. The goal was not to isolate and break communist China, but to integrate it into a global trading system.
Clinton’s view of the world, following on Bush’s was that the Cold War alliance of Western Europe, Japan, some Middle Eastern countries, would now continue to administer the world, institutionalizing the alliance system and diffusing its values to the world. Clinton did believe that the world had made a radical break, but rather than seeing it as a new phase of geopolitics, in which conflicts would continue, his view was that the world had moved beyond geopolitics, and that conflicts consisted of disciplining the disorderly and that this now constituted the national interest.
The Clinton Presidency represented an interregnum between eras and ages. Like the Congress of Vienna, the League of Nations or the United Nations in 1945-47, the period 1991-2001 was the time after victory when the victors harbored fond illusions. It was a time in which the rules of geopolitics appeared to have been suspended, and the world had passed through its time of danger. It was a time of hope, ultimately misplaced.
The first place we saw this thinking was in Yugoslavia. It was the first indication that excessive hope was, as usual, out of place in geopolitics.
First Tremors
The collapse of the Soviet Union obviously had a massive consequence on the international system. One of the effects was surprising. A powerful Soviet Union and a powerful United States had actually stabilized the international system, creating a balance between super powers. This was particularly true along the frontier of the Soviet Union, where both sides were poised for war. Europe, for example, was frozen into place by the Cold War. The slightest movement could have led to war, so neither the Soviets nor Americans permitted such movement. What was most interesting about the Cold War was all the wars that didn’t happen.
Think of it as a giant tug of war in which one side suddenly weakened and let go of the rope. The side still holding the rope won, but lost their balance, and triumph was mixed with massive confusion and serious falling down. The rope, which had been locked into
place by the two sides, now came loose and started behaving in unpredictable ways. This was particularly true along the boundaries of the two blocs where nations had been frozen into place for decades. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the pressure was suddenly released, and geopolitics became undone.
Some changes were peaceful. Germany re-united, and the Baltic States re-emerged as did Ukraine and Belarus. Czechoslovakia had its velvet divorce, splitting into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Other changes were violent. Romania underwent a violent internal revolution. But it was Yugoslavia that went completely to pieces.
Of all the countries, Yugoslavia was the most artificial. It was not a nation-state, but a region of hostile and diverse nations, ethnicities and religions. Invented by the victors of World War I, Yugoslavia was like a cage for some of the most vicious rivalries in Europe. The theory was that to avert a war in the Balkans, an entity should be created that made them all part of a single country. It was an interesting theory. Yugoslavia was an archaeological dig of fossilized nations left over from ancient conquests, still clinging to their distinct identities.
You see regions like Yugoslavia in rugged, mountainous areas that are strategic enough to have undergone numerous conquests. It is hard to conquer rugged terrain, particularly when you are just passing through on your way to somewhere else. Inhabitants withdraw from the conqueror’s path, getting out of his way to survive in the rugged backwaters of the region. In less rugged regions, these nations would be annihilated or would be assimilated by the conqueror. In these areas, they endure, if not prosper, paranoid and violent, all with good reason. Think of places like Afghanistan, the Caucasus or the Lebanese mountains and we can see the same phenomenon. Survival consists of digging in, waiting it out and getting even. These regions have their own little geopolitics that endure for many centuries, while great empires come and go.
Historically, the Balkans has been a flashpoint in Europe. This was the Romans’ road to the Middle East, the Turks’ road into Europe. World War I started in the Balkans. Each conqueror left behind a nation or a religion and each detested the other. Each warring group had committed atrocities against the other of monumental proportions. Every one of these atrocities was remembered as if it had happened yesterday. This is not a forgive-and-forget region.
Yugoslavia shattered during World War II with Croats siding with Germans and Serbs with the Allies. It was pulled together by the Communist League under Joseph Broz Tito. Yugoslavia was Marxist but anti-Soviet. It didn’t want to become a Soviet satellite and actually cooperated with the Americans. Caught in the force field between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, Yugoslavia was held together.
The force field gave in 1991 and the pieces that made up Yugoslavia blew apart. It was as if a geological fault had given way to a massive earthquake. The ancient but submerged and frozen nationalities suddenly found themselves free to maneuver. Names that hadn’t been discussed since before World War I suddenly came to life: Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia. Within each of these nations, other ethnic minorities from a neighboring nation also came alive and wanted to secede and join another country. Suddenly, all hell broke loose.
The Yugoslavian war has been misunderstood as simply a local phenomenon, an idiosyncratic event. It was much more than that. It was first and foremost a response to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Things that had been impossible for almost fifty years abruptly became possible again. Frozen boundaries became fluid. It was a local phenomenon made possible—and inevitable—by a global shift.
War in Yugoslavia was not an isolated phenomenon. It was just the first fault line to give—the northern extension of a fault line that ran all the way to the Hindu Kush, the mountains that dominate northern Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Yugoslavian explosion was the prelude to the major earthquake that erupted when the Soviet Union collapsed.
The Islamic Earthquake
The U.S.-Soviet confrontation had run all around the periphery of the Soviet Union. At the end of the Cold War, there were three sections to this line. There was the European section running from Norway to the German-Czech frontier. There was the Asian section, running from the Aleutians through Japan and into China. There was the third section, running from northern Afghanistan to Yugoslavia. When the Soviet Union collapsed, this entire section blew apart, starting with Yugoslavia, but eventually running the entire length of the sector and including countries not adjacent to the front line.