One has to be somewhat sympathetic to the American policy-makers of the 1990s. They
ruled the only superpower in an interwar period of unknowable duration. And that was a
period blessedly innocent of any security threat of sufficient seriousness to mobilize US
policy creativity and national energy. America is not especially gifted in putting out
small-scale, but well-established, fires in culturally alien contexts.
9/11 and a hegemonic order
Only when provoked violently on 11 September 2001 did the lone superpower, the
principal guardian of international order, put on its uniform and declare its intention to
make the world a safer place, irrespective of whether the world approved. After 9/11,
world order had a clearly defined meaning, in Washington at least. America committed
itself to the thankless and predictably internationally unpopular task of behaving like
a hegemonic power. Islamic terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction
- separately and, even more terrifyingly, possibly in tandem – were identified as the
dominant threats of the new era. America now had a job to do. It had found a foe worthy
of serious and sustained attention. In addition, it had come to identify its own national
security closely with a world order that was very much the product of American ideas,
practices and material effort.
The world order of the twenty-first century that the United States has volunteered to
police does not rest upon an international consensus. US policing authority derives from
its military and economic strength. The international community, a largely notional
entity, makes its appearance on the stage of the UN in New York. With some exceptions
among America’s closest friends and allies, and those who feel themselves dependent
upon the United States for their security (e.g., the Baltic States and others recently
relieved of Soviet overlordship), the international community demands that America
should act only with its blessing. This is not an endorsement of collective security.
The context, rather, is one of asserted rights without responsibilities. Today there are two
rival master principles vying for primacy for the maintenance or restoration of world
order.
On the one hand, there is an insistence upon multilateralism and consensus. World
order should be protected by behaviour agreed among all the major state players. Those
willing and able to act should do so strictly under licence from the international
community as represented at the United Nations. Given that three of the veto-armed P5
members of the Security Council (France, Russia and China) tend to be more concerned
to constrain America than to solve challenges to world order, this consensual approach
has obvious weaknesses from the perspective of order.
The second approach to maintaining world order is that which is extant. As the only
possible executive agent of the international community, and by now wise in the ways of
unhelpful but uncompetitive detractors, America takes such action as it judges necessary
for world order. Support and endorsement are invited from the international community.
Diplomacy is practised actively at the UN as well as bilaterally in capitals around the
world. But in the event that international consensus proves elusive, especially among the
rest of the P5, America, as self-appointed guardian of global order, is prepared to go into
action anyway. This was the story of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to impose a forcible
change of regime.
274 War, peace and international relations