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New World Disorder 2.0WALTER RUSSELL MEAD � ARTYOM LUKIN �

GEORGE YEO � GARETH EVANS �

MARCO VALERIO LO PRETE � STROBE TALBOTT �

ANDRÁS SIMONYI � ALI HAKAN ALTINAY �

AKBAR GANJI � TAHAR BEN JELLOUN � PARAG KHANNA

In 1990, right after the Berlin Wall fell, NPQ published our Spring edition,

titled “The New World Disorder,” about the nationalistic chaos and up-in-the-

air sensibility of that fraught new historical moment.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, the regime of globalization that had

supplanted the Cold War world of blocs is itself coming apart at the seams.

Even Henry Kissinger these days says “the world order is crumbling.”

Will this New World Disorder 2.0 revert to a system of conflicting blocs,

as during the Cold War, or will we be mature enough to save the interdepend-

ence of plural identities that is the foundation of a new global civilization?

In this section our contributors offer their perspectives on what the

future holds.

In 1914, Germany was the

rising power, the UK the weary

hegemon and the Balkans was

the powder keg. In 2014, China

is rising, the United States is

staggering under the burden

of world leadership and the

Middle East is the powder keg.

Have We Gone From a Post-War to a Pre-War World?

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at

Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine.

On June 28, 1914, a chauffeur panicked after a failed bomb attack on his boss,

took a wrong turn and came to a complete stop in front of a café in Sarajevo

where Gavrilo Princip was sitting. Princip, discouraged at the apparent failure

of the planned murder, seized the unexpected opportunity and fired the shots

that began the First World War, a cataclysm which claimed over nine million

lives, ended four empires and set in motion events from the Communist

Revolution in Russia to the rise of Nazi Germany.

One hundred years later, the world is nervously keeping its eyes peeled for

misguided chauffeurs and asking itself whether history could repeat. The great

powers are at peace, and trade and cultural ties between nations seem closer

than ever before, yet the international scene is in many ways surprisingly brit-

tle. In particular, a rising naval power is challenging an established hegemon,

and a “powder keg” region replete with ethnic and religious quarrels looks less

stable by the day.

In 1914, Germany was the rising power, the UK the weary hegemon and

the Balkans was the powder keg. In 2014, China is rising, the United States is

staggering under the burden of world leadership and the Middle East is the

powder keg.

Only a few years ago, most western observers believed that the age of

geopolitical rivalry and great power war was over. Today, with Russian forces

in Ukraine, religious wars exploding across the Middle East, and territorial dis-

putes leading to one crisis after another in the East and South China seas, the

outlook is darker. Serious people now ask whether we have moved from a post-

war into a pre-war world. Could some incident somewhere in the world spark

another global war?

MIDDLE EAST POWDER KEG | Let’s start with the powder keg. Theimmediate cause of the fighting in World War I was the set of ethnic and reli-

gious conflicts in the Balkans. In the second half of the 19th century, economic

development and modernization led to heightened competition among the

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region’s peoples. The drive for self-determination set Croats, Serbs, Magyars,

Kosovars, Bosniaks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Greeks and others at one another’s

throats. The death toll mounted and the hatred grew as massacres and ethnic

cleansing spread—and the ability of the outside powers to control the region’s

dynamics shrank as the imperial powers were themselves undermined by ris-

ing social and nationalist tensions.

The Middle East today bears an ominous resemblance to the Balkans of

that period. The contemporary Middle East has an unstable blend of ethnici-

ties and religions uneasily coexisting within boundaries arbitrarily marked off

by external empires. Ninety-five years after the French and the British first

parceled out the lands of the fallen Ottoman caliphate, that arrangement is

now coming to an end. Events in Iraq and Syria suggest that the Middle East

could be in for carnage and upheaval as great as anything the Balkans saw. The

great powers are losing the ability to hold their clients in check; the Middle

East today is at least as explosive as the Balkan region was a century ago.

GERMANS THEN, CHINESE NOW |What blew the Archduke’s mur-der up into a catastrophic world war, though, was not the tribal struggle in south-

eastern Europe. It took the hegemonic ambitions of the German Empire to turn

a local conflict into a universal conflagration. Having eclipsed France as the dom-

inant military power in Europe, Germany aimed to surpass Britain on the seas

and to recast the emerging world order along lines that better suited it. Yet the

rising power was also insecure, fearing that worried neighbors would gang up

against it. In the crisis in the Balkans, Germany both felt a need to back its weak

ally Austria and saw a chance to deal with its opponents on favorable terms.

Could something like that happen again? China today is both rising and turn-

ing to the sea in ways that Kaiser Wilhelm would understand. Like Germany in

1914, China has emerged in the last 30 years as a major economic power, and it

has chosen to invest a growing share of its growing wealth in military spending.

But here the analogy begins to get complicated and even breaks down a bit.

Neither China nor any Chinese ally is competing directly with the United

States and its allies in the Middle East. China isn’t (yet) taking a side in the

Sunni-Shia dispute, and all it really wants in the Middle East is quiet; China

wants that oil to flow as peacefully and cheaply as possible.

The Middle East today

bears an ominous

resemblance to the

Balkans of that period.

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AMERICA HAS ALL THE ALLIES | And there’s another difference:alliance systems. The Great Powers of 1914 were divided into two roughly

equal military blocs: Austria, Germany, Italy and potentially the Ottoman

Empire confronted Russia, France and potentially Britain.

Today the global US alliance system has no rival or peer; while China,

Russia and a handful of lesser powers are disengaged from, and in some cases

even hostile to, the US system, the military balance isn’t even close.

While crises between China and US allies on its periphery like the

Philippines could escalate into US-China crises, we don’t have anything com-

parable to the complex and finely balanced international system at the time of

World War I. Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia and as a direct result of that

Germany attacked Belgium. It’s hard to see how, for example, a Turkish attack

on Syria could cause China to attack Vietnam. Today’s crises are simpler, more

direct and more easily controlled by the top powers.

On the other hand, the Middle East’s supplies of oil will keep China, as

well as other powers, more involved in events there than geography would sug-

gest. The Balkans had no products in 1914 that the rest of the world much

cared about; the Middle East looms much larger in the global economy than

the Balkan peninsula ever has. Already, countries including Russia and Iran have

been involving themselves in Iraq. If the slide into regional chaos continues and

countries like China and Japan believe that direct action is needed to secure

their oil supplies, almost anything could happen in a few years.

ASIA IN 2014 IS NOT EUROPE IN 1914 | Furthermore, the geopo-litical situation of Xi’s China is more different from that of Wilhelm’s Germany

than many observers realize. While it is true that many of the same forces that

drove Germany toward war 100 years ago are present in China today (especial-

ly a public mood of nationalism and an aggressive military psychology among

some of the armed forces leadership), there are differences as well.

In 1914, Germany was a rising empire surrounded by powers who were,

and who felt themselves to be, in decline: Russia, Austria-Hungary, Britain, the

Ottoman Empire and France all felt themselves to be in decline. China’s neigh-

bors today are growing China militarily and economically: South Korea, Australia,

India, and the nations of South-East Asia. Germany’s growing preponderance

Today the global US

alliance system has no rival

or peer; while China, Russia

and a handful of lesser

powers are disengaged

from, and in some cases

even hostile to, the US

system, the military balance

isn’t even close.

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in Europe was tipping the balance of power toward instability. It’s not yet clear

that something like that will or can happen in Asia.

Besides the Germany/China parallel, there is the question of whether the

US today is beginning to resemble Great Britain. In 1914, Britain was the only

global superpower in the sense that nobody had an empire as large, played as

important a role in managing the world financial system, or provided the same

kind of political and military security to the international system, but many in

Britain were beginning to think that its best days were behind it.

By 1914, both the US and Germany had passed Britain in economic terms,

and internal political paralysis was turning the country inward. (The political

struggles that would result in the partition of Ireland had much of the British

army in a state approaching mutiny in the months before Sarajevo.)

A small but significant number of historians blame Great Britain, as well as

Germany, for the outbreak of that conflict. France was the bitterest and most

committed of Germany’s enemies, but Germany (then Prussia) had beaten her

soundly in the Franco-Prussian War one generation previously. France’s ally

Russia was a formidable power on paper, but the Japanese had savaged the

Russians in the past decade, and a wave of revolutionary agitation nearly

brought the Tsarist system to its knees.

Germany didn’t think a war against those two powers would be a cake-

walk, but Wilhelm and many of his advisors thought that Britain would stay out

of any war over Serbia. The Kaiser, some argue, would probably have thought

twice had he known that he would be fighting the full weight of Britain and her

Empire. If the British had made clear to the Germans that they would stand by

Russia and France, it is possible that German diplomacy in the fateful month of

July 1914 would have reined in Austria-Hungary rather than egging it on.

AMERICA IN 2014 IS NOT QUITE BRITAIN IN 1914 | Despiteworries about the rise of China, the place of the US at the pinnacle of world

power is more secure today than Britain’s was 100 years ago. The US economy

is a larger share of GDP, the US military advantage is qualitatively greater than

anything Britain ever enjoyed, and none of its political problems are as polar-

izing as the Irish question or the rise of a socialist working class party were for

the UK in 1914.

Besides the Germany/

China parallel, there is the

question of whether the

US today is beginning to

resemble Great Britain.

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Even so, it is possible that other powers may not be sure how committed

the US is to defending its allies or its interests around the world, and that can

make bold or even rash moves look attractive.

It’s possible, for example, that some people in the Chinese leadership look

at President Obama’s mixed messages about his “red lines” in Syria and wonder

how seriously to take American red lines in the Pacific. Would the US really go

to war over a handful of uninhabited rocks scattered through the East and South

China seas? Would we take stronger steps against an invasion of Taiwan than we

have against Russia’s conquest of the Crimea? Russia and Iran may be asking

themselves similar questions and looking for places where they can push against

what they see as weak spots in the US alliance system. At the same time, coun-

tries that depend on US guarantees (like Israel and Japan) may become more

aggressive to deter potential adversaries.

RAILROADS THEN, DIGITAL NETWORKS AND DRONES NOW |There was one more factor that contributed to the outbreak of World War I:

technological change introduced new factors into warfare that policymakers

failed to understand. A driving force in the tragedy of 1914 was the impact that

mobilization timetables had on diplomatic and military choices.

The development of national railroad networks in the 19th century allowed

countries to call up reserves and mobilize their forces for war on an unprece-

dented scale. On the other hand, once your neighbor began to mobilize, you had

to move yourself; otherwise, your armies would still be scattered while your

neighbor had a large and powerful force on the frontier. Russia had the largest

armies, but the size of its territory and the relatively backward state of its rail-

road network meant that it had to mobilize early in a crisis or risk being caught

unprepared. But once Russia began to mobilize, Germany could not delay its

own move much longer, and German mobilization forced France’s hand. Few

European policymakers on the day of Franz Ferdinand’s death understood how

railroad timetables would force their hands in the weeks ahead.

Today the disruptive effect of technological change is greater than ever.

New weapons systems emerge (like drones) that transform the balance of

power and set off new and unpredictable arms races. As information technol-

ogy transforms the battlefield, tech itself becomes a battleground in a new era

Few European policymakers

on the day of Franz Ferdinand’s

death understood how railroad

timetables would force their

hands in the weeks ahead.

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in war. Disrupting the enemy’s communications, attacking its information sys-

tems (through viruses, attacks on communications satellites and EMPs for

example) and otherwise wreaking havoc in cyberspace is a new frontier in war

which nobody really understands.

The rapid pace of technological change makes it harder for policymakers

to assess the strength of their opponents even as it puts them under pressure

to speed their deliberations in a time of crisis. No one wants to be the victim

of a cyberspace version of Pearl Harbor, so leaders may feel forced to acceler-

ate the move toward war before suffering a devastating attack.

Technological change had another, deeper role in the making of World War I.

The unprecedented social shifts that accompanied the Industrial Revolution had

a lot to do with the shifts in the balance of power and the rise of ideologies like

nationalism and socialism that made the period so turbulent. We are certainly

seeing that again today; globalization put societies all over the world under

stress, and that stress often results in the rise of nationalist and even chauvinist

political movements in some countries and religious fanaticism in others.

DON’T FORGET ABOUT NUCLEAR WEAPONS | One more fac-tor needs to be noted. The existence of nuclear weapons has changed the terms

on which great powers engage. In 1914, nations could still hurl everything they

had at one another in a struggle to the death; nuclear weapons change that

dynamic. No major war can be as politically straightforward as war tradition-

ally has been; the prospect of nuclear escalation will inhibit both sides in future

crises as it did the US and the USSR during the Cold War.

NOT THE SAME, BUT ALSO NOT SO DIFFERENT |History, per-haps unfortunately, can’t give us a clear answer to the question of whether we

face anything like another Great War. Looking into the rear view mirror can

only tell you so much about the conditions ahead. Our situation today is differ-

ent enough from that of a century ago to make renewed great power war much

less than a certainty, but there are enough troubling similarities that we can’t

rule the prospect out.

The one thing we can say with certainty about the 21st century is this:

peaceful or war-torn, it isn’t going to be boring.

�

The unprecedented social

shifts that accompanied

the Industrial Revolution

had a lot to do with the

shifts in the balance of

power and the rise of ide-

ologies like nationalism

and socialism that made

the period so turbulent.

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