Of the torrent of words written about American foreign policy under Donald Trump, none are more revealing than the six that his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, uttered to Fox News host Megyn Kelly recently: “We live in a multipolar world.” They are words that any secretary of state would have never uttered – let alone a president – in the past 80 years.
For the first half of that period, the defining feature of global politics was the division of the world into the two rival camps of the Cold War. Such wars as they fought were proxy conflicts in Third World countries. The non-aligned nations mattered, particularly in global forums such as the United Nations, but when it came to grand strategy, essentially, it was a bipolar world.
Trump went to his golf course in Florida on Friday as global financial markets collapsed after his tariffs announcement.Credit: Bloomberg
After America won the Cold War and the Soviet Union collapsed, the world entered a new period in which, complacently and wrongly, many Western policymakers assumed that the ascendancy of the West – with its democratic and pluralist values – was more or less a given. The collapse of communism was seen by many as a proof of concept that democratic capitalism was the optimal form of governance to which human development had naturally evolved. One renowned Harvard scholar, Francis Fukuyama, even published a book with the provocative title The End of History. (As Fukuyama’s thesis began to fray in light of events, subsequent editions added a question mark to the title.)
The thesis was not unchallenged: two years later, Fukuyama’s rival, Samuel P Huntington, published an alternative prognosis of the post-Cold War world, The Clash of Civilisations, which predicted the rise of militant Islamism. Nevertheless – particularly during the lotus-eating years of the Clinton presidency – the pre-eminence of the West, led by a globally engaged United States, was the prevailing expectation.
Loading
Scholars spoke of the 1990s and early 2000s as a “unipolar moment”. They underestimated the rise of China and wrongly assumed the economic liberalisation begun under Deng Xiaoping would inevitably evolve into political liberalisation as well.
For a short time after the beginning of the new century, there was even a hope that post-communist Russia might be integrated into the democratic world. The new presidents who both assumed office in 2000 – George Bush and Vladimir Putin – briefly enjoyed something of a bromance, which reached its peak with Bush’s visit to Russia in 2002.
As The New York Times journalist David Sanger writes in his recent book New Cold Wars: “The sense … was not simply that the Cold War was over but that with effort it could almost be erased from history … Russia would join the World Trade Organisation, just as China had done. Then, perhaps, the European Union. And maybe – just maybe – NATO itself … There remained plenty of brewing disputes, many of them concerning the Western drift of the former Soviet states. But the idea that Russia might follow [Eastern European nations] into NATO didn’t, at that moment, sound insane.”
There was even an office established at NATO headquarters in Brussels to plan for future Russian membership.
