When the Soviet Union disintegrated, President George H. W. Bush, never a great man with words, awkwardly dubbed the post-Soviet era as one framed by a “New World Order.” Aside from the general feeling of well-being the term evoked, there was no clear understanding of what it meant. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama suggested we were witnessing “the end of history” as we had known it. Being the short sighted, instant gratification culture that we are, we couldn’t wait a moment to see if it really was, and what it all meant.
If the modern nation state stemmed from the mid seventeenth century Peace of Westphalia, much of modern international law began with the 1899 Hague Convention that presumed to find a way to define certain “laws of warfare.” This international foolishness continued through the founding of the League of Nations, that stillborn creature that essentially broke the British Empire while accomplishing little, and the United Nations, an equally futile organization that “kept everyone talking” in order to avoid another world war, while tens of millions more were killed in genocidal wars of national liberation, from Afghanistan to Kosovo, Biafra to Vietnam, Croatia to Syria, Iran to . . . you get the idea. Still, all those agreements and organizations did give the nation states they nurtured a structurer to rest on, talk across, and fight with.
Through all that, rebellions were put down, and national integrity was mostly preserved. Where new nation states emerged, they did so from the framework of colonial systems. As bad as those colonial systems may have been, they gave initial structure and infrastructure to the emerging nations. All this happened with the backdrop of the super power nuclear balance of terror. Though the United States and the Soviet Union never fought each other, they fought proxy wars on every inhabited continent. For the longest time, the Soviets seemed to be winning; the forces of socialism appeared more appealing, especially to the leadership of the new nations. Then, suddenly, it was over. The Soviet Union fell of its own weight in 1991, proof of its own ineptitude, collapsing back into nothing but Mother Russia, and ushering in that new world order that Bush and Fukuyama both thought would fundamentally change the world.
The new order held together for seventeen years. Then in 2008 Russia sponsored a conflict between Georgia and its ethnic Russian-sympathetic enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Not only did the Russian clients win, but in the following years, the South Ossetians continued to surreptitiously to move the border, a few hundred meters at a time, shrinking Georgian farm land as they went. This process continues to this day. The entire Georgia war was close to being completely under the western press radar, but it was a watershed moment. For the first time a modern nation-state was losing its borders in the post-World War II era. This wasn’t a temporary adjustment, it was permanent.
In 2014 Russia invaded Crimea, a part of Ukraine, and in the presence of invading troops, conducted a rapid election that called for the unification of Crimea with Russia.
In 2022 Russia declared that Ukraine was not a legitimate country, but rather a natural historic part of Russia. Shortly thereafter Russia conducted a multi-axis invasion of Ukraine with the intent of incorporating it into the Russian Federation. We can’t prove those orange clouds that have begun to support the Russian advance in eastern Ukraine are chemical weapons, but it does appear Russia has once again shown its disdain for both the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Well, when they were signatories, they had little use for those documents.
These activities, taken together, tell us we are in a post Westphalian world. National boundaries no longer exist, except as they can be maintained by force of arms. It should be no surprise that Russia is offended by the expansion of NATO. She has serious plans for the domination, and possible absorption of her neighbors. The question isn’t whether the United Nations will be up to the task of preserving the world order. It clearly is not. The UN is even more hollow and futile than was the League of Nations in the 1930s. The question is: Will NATO be up to the task of keeping the modern western world order from collapsing? The ‘N’ in NATO may stand for North Atlantic, but South Korea has expressed interest in a relationship with it. NATO is the gold standard. But the presence of an adequately firm leadership at the NATO helm is not guaranteed. Much of the free world is wringing its hands and wondering.
Those of us in the west think Eurocentrically, but there is a similar, multi-threaded issue to that of Ukraine brewing in the far east. China is a nation nursing many grudges, both actual and perceived, concerning historic wrongs. While everyone is familiar with the Chinese claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, all Chinese grow up with a firm understanding of the historic Chinese claims to at least some territory of all her neighbors. In 1969 China and the Soviet Union fought a bitter seven-month war over borders that made a strong enough impression on the Soviets that they moved the Baikal-Amur Railway several hundred miles north to distance it from what might become a frequently violent border region.
In 1979 China launched attacks against Vietnam, ostensibly due to Vietnam’s interference in Cambodia. But once again, the dispute seems to have centered on China’s theory of the border’s placement.
All Chinese geography text books have maps emphasizing Chinese sovereignty claims, not only to land areas, but also to adjacent seas and even traditional fishing grounds far from China, some abutting distant countries.
In the absence of a strong hand by united democracies, it is likely that the near future will see increasing violent acts by claimants to adjacent nations’ territories, with the danger that open war as we knew it in much of the 20th century may resume, with all the risks it entails.
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