Journal of Global Faultlines Security Matters: The Reconstruction of the 'New World Order' in American Foreign Policy (original) (raw)
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Security Matters: The Reconstruction of the ‘New World Order’ in American Foreign Policy
Journal of Global Faultlines, 2014
This article explores the construction and reconstruction of 'new world orders' as a dominant narrative framework in American foreign policies. While several scholars have made productive inroads to investigating how this terminology has shaped US security agendas and actions, it is suggested that how we conceptualise the language of the 'new world order' is in need of constant updating. Adopting a critical constructivist framework, this article examines how competing conceptions of 'new world orders' have been framed in the past and present. It is argued that by sketching the continual reconstructions of 'new world orders' it becomes possible to examine how 'old' and 'new' world orders interact, overlap and even collide to create fault lines in national and international affairs. One of the biggest intellectual challenges advanced here is to reaffirm the tensions and complexity behind an axiomatic part of the lexicon of US security matters.
The years of the Cold War were characterized by a clear US strategy: the containment of Soviet power. Once it was over, the United States emerged as the only superpower, with a great military capacity. With the collapse of USSR, though, America was left without a clear enemy and therefore without a clear strategy for its foreign policy. Therefore, if the United States did not want to go back to the isolationism that characterized its first centuries, it needed to find a new rationale for its international engagement. Nevertheless, the world after Cold War had a much wider agenda. New challenges such as the threat of terrorism and the risk of cultural clashes put in danger the stability of the Western order. Besides that, the idea of the democratic peace started to be developed. Without the contradictions of the Cold War, the United States could justify its internationalism by presenting the spread of democracy as its duty as the hegemon in the post-Cold War era. This view of the US role was consolidated during President Clinton`s mandate and is yet dominant in the country`s foreign policy. This essay will argue that the end of the Cold War left the United States with a great military capacity and means to continue its internationalist foreign policy but also without clear objectives. The route chosen by American foreign policy makers was to keep the global stability and the democratic values worldwide. Therefore, its new enemies became every actor – state or not – that defied this new world order, characterized by democracy, free trade and stability.
" The New World Order " : An Outline of the Post-Cold War Era
This article provides an analytical discussion on post-Cold War developments and the emerging world order in that era. In this regard, some of the main characteristics of the international system, basic trends, and new threats in international relations are addressed, in that order. It is argued that while classical interstate wars tend to decrease in the post-Cold War era, there are many other serious threats to international peace beyond the full control of nation-states, most notably ethnic conflicts, religious militancy, terrorism, North-South conflict, and unfair economic competition. The future of the world is stressed to depend on whether major powers are able to, and willing to, work on these threats in a cooperative manner.
The Iraqi referendum has been great news for the US, which has been very short on good news since it invaded the country 2,000 American lives and heaven knows how many Iraqi lives ago. It is the closest they have got to a retrospective rationalisation of the invasion that alienated them from many of their close allies and attracted widespread condemnation around the world. But it falls far short of a genuine justification because it was not the reason for attacking in the first place. The rationale for the invasion was that Saddam Hussein's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was a threat to the security of the entire region. Critics doubted these claims and UN inspectors could not verify them. Still the US and its allies insisted they were absolutely true and acted accordingly. The US was eventually forced to concede that not a single WMD was found, let alone stockpiles of them. The whole sorry affair raises a number of significant questions that will be explored in this paper. First, there are the issues of the accuracy of the intelligence upon which the US and its allies rely, and also about the nexus between those who generate the intelligence and those who deploy it to advance their political aims. These are matters that go to the heart of the War on Terror. It also raises issues about the genuine significance of weapons of mass destruction, a term in constant use before the invasion that has barely rated a mention since. It also raises questions about the relationship between fighting military wars and the more multi-dimensional and metaphorical war on terror. There is also the issue of the nature and strength of various alliances among the parties to the war on terror, an issue that will be discussed with reference to New Zealand, a country well down the military intelligence food-chain. A New World Order A useful starting point in addressing all of these issues is the end of the Cold War. No sooner was it over than the US, as self-appointed captain of the winning team, set out to define and demonstrate the dimensions of the post-Cold War world. It would be enforced by alliances of freedom-loving
Turning Points: In Search of a Post-Cold War Global Security Order
2019
The present paper will briefly review several turning points in the evolution of the Post-Cold War global order. During the Cold War, the bipolar international order was defined by an opposition between two superpowers whose positions were carefully balanced across the world. By contrast, due to the fact that the global security architecture was, and continues to be, in flux, the past three decades have witnessed a gradual transition from a unipolar world characterized by weak and inconsistent American leadership, to unmitigated efforts on the part of Russia and China to establish a multipolar equilibrium of power. At the same time, the New World Order was breaking with the long-held tradition of placing the military component at the center of the global security system and proclaimed the so-called “Comprehensive Security Doctrine” in which supremacy of law, democratic values, global economic prosperity, social justice, human rights, environmental protection, education and other ele...
The New Yorker, 2002
Publisher: The New Yorker Author: Nicholas Lemann Date: Apr. 1, 2002 http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/020401fa\_FACT1 Bush Doctrine, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Fascism, George W. Bush, Iraq War, National Security State, Neo-Conservatives, Osama Bin Laden, Paul Wolfowitz, Pre-emptive War, Project for the New American Century, PNAC, Regime Change, Saddam Hussein, September 11th Attacks, Terrorism, U.S. Empire, U.S. Foreign Policy, War On Terror