Thirty-five years ago this Thursday, President George H.W. Bush gave an important speech entitled “Toward a New World Order.” Wikipedia has excerpted a few of its central elements:
Until now, the world we’ve known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict, and the cold war. Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the genuine prospect of 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.
Bush’s public address before a joint session of Congress emphasized the successful conclusion of our decades-long Cold War against Soviet Communism, a struggle ending in a complete victory for the West.
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A year earlier the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Warsaw Pact established by the USSR to counter NATO had collapsed. The Soviet Union itself was on the verge of disintegrating seven decades after its original creation, leaving behind a shrunken Russian successor state that included only half that previous population. Moscow would soon be reduced to ruling territories far smaller than those held by Peter the Great in the early 18th century.
During that same summer of 1989, enormous pro-Western demonstrations by students and workers had filled Beijing’s central square, and although the Chinese government had successfully suppressed those Tiananmen Square protests with considerable loss of life, the Communist regime seemed to be tottering, widely expected to follow its Soviet counterpart onto the ash-heap of history.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama also published his famous article “The End of History?” describing what seemed to be a sweeping and permanent ideological triumph for the Western system. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he dropped his question mark and expanded that analysis into a bestselling 1992 book of the same title.
Not only did America tower over the entire world politically and economically, but nearly all of the other large and successful countries were numbered among its longstanding allies, with Japan and the members of NATO looking to Washington’s leadership. And although the Japanese had seemingly challenged American economic dominance during the 1980s, that country had already entered a decade of economic stagnation, soon eliminating any such prospect.
Just a few weeks before Bush’s speech, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded and occupied Kuwait, and many of our president’s statements regarding international law addressed this situation even as he began assembling a powerful coalition to defeat the aggressor and expel it from the territory it had seized. The ultimate result was a complete military triumph in February 1991, with the large and experienced Iraqi army being totally destroyed by our advanced weaponry with negligible American loss of life, further demonstrating that our power was completely unmatched by any possible rival.
So that same year saw both our sweeping victory in the Gulf War and the final collapse of our longtime Soviet rival. America entered what soon became known as the unipolar moment, with both our hard and our soft power entirely supreme across the globe.
No previous country in the history of the world had ever achieved such total dominance across so many different sectors, whether political, economic, ideological, or technological. Educated individuals from around the world received much of their information from American media outlets even as their populations were entertained by Hollywood productions. The children of the world’s ruling elites eagerly sought to enroll at American academic institutions, as did so many of the best and brightest youngsters of every country, thereby allowing America to shape the minds of the world’s next generation of leaders.
President Bush himself was one of our most establishmentarian political figures, someone who had spent the bulk of his entire career in public service, and he probably regarded the declarations in his speech as the final fulfillment of America’s longstanding political goals, the culmination of two generations of effort. In his mind, the New World Order that he hailed merely represented the proper functioning of the United Nations and other postwar international organizations. He assumed that America would play a dominant role in those institutions, but hardly a unilateral or dictatorial one.
As it happened, Bush’s choice of phrases was rather unfortunate. Both he and his speechwriters came from entirely mainstream backgrounds, so they were probably unaware that for decades the term “New World Order” had inspired severe paranoia in far right political circles. Such individuals believed that it represented the plotting of evil globalist elites to destroy American freedom and sovereignty and create a one-world government under their nefarious control.
Gary Allen, an influential figure in the conspiratorial John Birch Society, had published several books with that theme, often including “New World Order” in his titles. Many Republican grassroots organizations were dominated by the right-wing followers of Christian televangelist Pat Robertson, and in 1991 he published The New World Order, a book that expressed very similar fears and became a major bestseller. Indeed, that much demonized term became so widespread in such ideological circles that it was often abbreviated as the acronym NWO, associated with the dark, Satanic forces of the world.
If President Bush had been deliberately trying to provoke a popular right-wing revolt in his own Republican party, his speech could not have done a better job. The resulting ideological backlash probably contributed to his unexpected reelection defeat in 1992, as large numbers of fearful and angry conservatives flocked to Pat Buchanan’s insurgent challenge in the primaries and then pulled the lever for Ross Perot in November. As a third party candidate, Perot drew nearly 19% percent of the national vote, an astonishing total for someone who had never held any political office.
Although Bush was replaced by Bill Clinton in the White House, the foreign policy positions of the two administrations were not so very different, and America’s commitment to the existing international structures that it had created and dominated remained strong.
But today our country is run by Donald Trump, a very different sort of American leader. If the world has spent the years since 1991 mostly living in what Bush once called the New World Order, the actions of our current president are overthrowing and replacing that international system with what might be called the Newer World Order, one that largely reverses many of its major elements.
According to some contemporaneous wits, the heavy-handed policies and political blunders of King George III played such a crucial role in inspiring the American Revolution that the British monarch should probably have been regarded as one of our founding fathers, perhaps even more important to the creation of our country than George Washington or anyone else.
In a very similar manner, day by day and week by week President Trump has been overturning the existing system of American global dominance that has endured for the last thirty-five or even eighty years, dismantling it brick by brick in ways that would have been far beyond the capabilities of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or any other American rival.
Although Trump’s actions are now producing the final destruction of American hegemony, the underlying trends responsible for this development actually stretch back for decades, beginning before Trump had even opened the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City, his first important real estate project,
The central factor in this changed international landscape has been the economic and technological rise of China, which since the late 1970s has advanced far more rapidly than any other major country in the history of the world, and I discussed this in a 2012 article.
- China’s Rise, America’s Fall
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 7,000 Words
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Three years later, Graham Allison, the longtime founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, published a seminal 2015 article describing the high historical likelihood of a geopolitical clash between between a reigning power such as the U.S. and a rising international competitor such as China, a confrontation that he described as “The Thucydides Trap.”
- The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?
In 12 of 16 past cases in which a rising power has confronted a ruling power, the result has been bloodshed
Graham Allison • The Atlantic • September 24, 2015 • 3,700 Words
Allison then expanded this same idea into Destined for War, a national 2017 bestseller that attracted almost unprecedented praise from influential American policy-makers and intellectuals as it persuaded our ruling DC foreign policy elites that a global geopolitical clash with China was almost inevitable. Similar concerns were held by former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who had been a career diplomat with decades of deep personal expertise on China, and he expressed these in his 2022 book The Avoidable War, bearing the grimly accurate subtitle “The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China.”
Even earlier, the eminent political scientist John Mearsheimer had released an updated 2014 edition of his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, adding a long last chapter on the rise of China and the strong likelihood of a clash with America.
In his historical analysis, Mearsheimer explained that the usual geopolitical approach followed by American strategists had been to form a balancing coalition against a rising regional rival. In the case of China, he naturally assumed that this loose alliance would include Russia, India, and Japan, as well as smaller powers such as South Korea and Vietnam. Any rational American leaders would have taken this approach.
