The Times have Changed

Madeline Albright in an Op-Ed in the New York Times today rightfully criticizes the impotence of the global community to compel the Burmese government to action to aid or simply to allow others to aid the suffering so many endured in the wake of the cyclone several weeks back. She bemoans that sovereignty as the ultimate foundation of the international system is back in vogue and she blames this resurgence on President Bush and the US-led invasion of Iraq.

I think her assessment of the situation is correct, but she gives her villain too much credit. The Iraq War is the turning point, where we realize that the world has changed since the creation of the UN after World War II and that the new global order is starting to take shape since the fall of the Berlin Wall after nearly two decades of global confusion as to what was to come next.

Without a doubt, sovereignty as the guiding principle of the global order is back on the rise. It never totally faded away but there were flashes were it was subjugated. The problem we face now is that there are too many global leaders, which forces less powerful countries to act as if they lived in an anarchic world. It was easier during the Cold War. There were two sides and both sides had the nearly unchallenged military and economic might to project their influence to the far corners of the world. In the process both sides left a path of destruction and a several generations imbued with resentment towards the omni-present forces of the East and the West.

In the 1990s it was clear that the Soviet Union could no longer project their influence around the world, they were no longer of the means to do so. It was a jubilant time. It was the seeming golden opportunity for the global community to coalesce around shared aspirations of equality and fairness. Desert Storm was an incredibly successful and restrained collective military action. Emergency and unrequested aid was sent to Somalia. The US-led NATO forces intervened in Bosnia to stop a genocide. It was a heady time to be a diplomat, and it was the time when Madeline Albright so the better angels of humanity strike a blow against the demons of our flawed nature. The world is not a static entity, however. There is no status quo only a status at the moment. The world stumbled. American soldiers died in Somalia and American citizens asked why. The Hutus set out to annihilate the Tutsis (artificial ethnic groups created by Belgian colonialists) in Rwanda and the White House press room demurred on terminology.

These were but the first let downs in the dream of collective security. The Iraq War was the straw that broke idealism’s back. The Bush administration failed to gain adequate international support (for reasons we will talk about in a few) and charged ahead anyway with the coalition of the cashed checks. It was a stunning invasion and a sputtering occupation. The Iraq War proved that even America, the “victor” of the Cold War, was unable to force the benevolent gift of democracy on people. It also showed that our inability to force democracy might not disqualify invasion as a legitimate policy tool. Suddenly may countries got very rigid to work with the US and rather then making the governments of “rogue” states scared of invasion, we made the populations of these “rogue” states afraid that we would essentially break their country turning a bad situation worse.

The reasons the US failed to get proper international support is not for lack of true intelligence. At the time the global consensus was that Iraq had WMD. The problem was that America’s prestige had slowly eroded, while several other countries’ prestige was on the rise. China and India were new, big players in the international arena. The ruling class of nations (the US and Western Europe) had never faced this situation before. So the US kept insisting it was the unipolar leader of the world and Europe stoked the long burning coals of xenophobia and isolationism. Europe’s response, I believe, was in large part due to the US being able to project the kind of unchallenged military power (the oft called security umbrella) around the world any more. So the US continued to over estimate its own importance (a truly American character trait) and Europe just tried to make sure Europe remained European. All the while China consolidated power and offered a less judgmental kind of cooperation with the questionable governments of the world.

To bring this back to Burma, China trades with Burma and so long as the money is right China could care less about the regime in charge of the plight of Burmese citizens. Welcome to the perfect combination of Stalinist authoritarianism and laissez-faire capitalism. The rest of the world could do little. The US lacked the moral authority or diplomatic clout to bring a change in behavior, and as the US diminished in prestige it sought to torpedo the UN leaving the UN incapable of dealing with the crisis either. And so the Burmese people suffer and the world watches as it has gone for centuries, only this time we get to see the suffering in hi-def.

The basic global order has changed. We live in a multi-polar world, driven primarily by economics, not idealism. Perhaps this is the natural order. Perhaps this is the best we can do as a global community. It’s tough to say, but one thing is certain. People all over the world suffer because their governments don’t care about them, and there isn’t any help on the way.