The new world order isn’t coming.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
When President George H.W. Bush delivered a speech to Congress envisioning the emergence of a “new world order”, he had it backward. The new world order wasn’t emerging, it was over.
A “new world”, Bush claimed, “is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known” and he shared that vision with Gorbachev. The Soviet Leader, a year away from being toppled, who had cut his teeth on Communist visions of a new world being born only to inherit a failing system that could no longer win wars or feed its own people, must have been amused.
Gorbachev understood what Bush did not, that no new world order was coming, an old world order was returning. Bush lasted a year longer in office than his Soviet counterpart. And yet his own farewell speech couldn’t help but echo Bush, declaring, “we live in a new world now.”
The new world we live in now is one where Russia is trying to rebuild a Czarist empire, and China, Iran, and every other power or power that was, is fighting to recreate its glory days.
The patchwork international order had been a product of the Cold War that Bush and Gorbachev were eagerly bidding farewell to. Globalism, or the post-Cold War international order based on trade, human rights and conferences proved to be as much of a joke as the UN, the WTO, the NGOs and the multilateral organizations that served as its shaky infrastructure.
Bush envisioned “a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle” and “nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice” on the brink of the original Gulf War.
But the only law that ever existed was the law of force enforced by self-interest or idealism.
Last year, Secretary of State Blinken declared that human rights would be at the center of our foreign policy, but that other nations would have to make it happen. “Promoting respect for human rights is not something we can do alone, but is best accomplished working with our allies and partners across the globe,” he claimed. The chosen venue for the job was the Human Rights Council whose members include China, Cuba, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia and Venezuela.
As the old political gag goes, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.”
The new world order means world leaders gathering for a NATO summit that accomplishes nothing except the indignity of Finland and Sweden having to bribe an Islamist butcher in Turkey for the privilege of membership in the hope that if Russia comes for them, we’ll defend them.
In the real world, Finland will be on its own just as it was against the USSR and Germany.
The old world order is the reality that once the meetings are done and the conferences are over, every country is all alone. Virtue signaling globalism means that everyone will fly Ukrainian flags, just as they expressed solidarity with Hong Kong and will hashtag Taiwan at need.
And then they’ll move on to the next political outrage, celebrity gossip or trending news.
In his address on September 11, 1990, Bush called Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, the “first assault on the new world that we seek, the first test of our mettle.” The first test also proved to be the last. The Iraq wars would shatter any bipartisan and multilateral appetite for American interventions. Obama’s Syrian red line, Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine all mark the slow collapse of the potemkin village erected in the nineties.
The myth of a new world order and its illusion of collective security is worse than the reality of the old world order, offering popular protesters and small countries the false hope that some international consensus or military intervention will come to their aid when help isn’t coming.
Instead of 19th century realpolitik or late 20th century internationalism, we have a much more expensive and imaginary version of the League of Nations. Countless billions of dollars and endless hours are spent propping up an imaginary new world order of a world without war when it would be much healthier for us and for everyone else to acknowledge that none of it is real.
The world isn’t governed by law, but by force, and no one is coming to save anyone. Not us.
The United States isn’t entirely out of the intervention business, but our international forces are deployed for deterrence purposes. Rather than fighting to change things, we are managing the decline. That’s what our troops were doing in Afghanistan for at least a decade, trying to keep one of our old potemkin villages, a “democratic” government, from its inevitable defeat and fall.
Other powers and movements, from Russia and China to Sunni and Shiite Islam, are expanding while America remains committed to a failed vision of a static world. A shrinking West, avidly being colonized by the rest of the world, touts decolonization. But the West has few colonies, instead its cities, London, Los Angeles, and Toronto, are rapidly becoming third world colonies.
America first embraced the ideal of a new world order when it ceased to expand territorially. A century of wars for democracy, along with drastically falling birth rates, convinced Europe to cease its expansionism, but the rest of the world has not decided to be happy with what it has.
World powers seek to restore or build empires, carving up regions into spheres of influence, intimidating, invading, and conquering smaller nations. That old world order was always the defining reality. The Cold War era incorporated it into a larger struggle against Communism, but afterward, the same ugliness continued stripped of any pretense of a world revolution.
With the old world order, the United States can continue to impotently preach Bush’s vision of Americans, “together with Arabs, Europeans, Asians, and Africans in defense of principle and the dream of a new world order” or think about what an American future really looks like.
One in which America is no longer declining or tethered to maintaining an illusory new order.
A century of tired arguments have reduced us to the false choice between isolationism and internationalism. But at the height of our rising power in the 19th century, the United States was neither. It was not afraid of asserting its ideals, but neither was it foolish enough to believe that the rest of the world would go along or that we were obligated to make them all behave. We primarily pursued our own interests and we were not afraid of a little expansionism either.
Most importantly, we did not see our place in the world as bound by the rest of the world.
American foreign policy has come to be a prisoner of a global construct. Its exponents have shouldered a global burden that no empire in history has ever been able to carry. Americans have been told to take on the responsibility for the freedom and happiness of the entire world. Our national policy is to first conceive of how the world should be and then try to bring it about.
But a better world doesn’t begin with American self-sacrifice, but with a greater America.
America can best serve the world by being itself. The new world order never really existed and pretending that it did does no favors to the countries who might actually depend on it. Instead of trying to mobilize the world, America can provide a meaningful alternative for the world.
The American Revolution and the Constitution ushered in the true new world order not by seeking to control the world, but by showing the human race what was possible. Every effort to outdo that order with a new world order has failed. And Bush’s, like Gorbachev’s, has joined the trash heap of history. The real new world order is not one that envisions a transformed humanity, but that empowers individuals, not nations, not from the top, but from the bottom.
The constitutional order is not the end of history, but the beginning of humanity.
Infidel says
We need to stop pretending that we can police the entire world. Right now, we have troops in some 150 countries. It’s time to pull them all back, and then decide the strategic area of the world that matters to us, which is the Indo-Pacific, and focus on that. That would mean winning back the Americas from pro-Beijing socialist regimes, which are there in all countries but Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica, and then putting together an alliance to combat Chinese hegemony on both sides of the Pacific. Quad is a good first step here, and that’s where we should focus. Let the EU form its own armed forces, and determine how to deal w/ Russia, whether Russia or Turkey is a greater enemy and so on
mortimer says
Thanking Daniel Greenfield for the quote: “As the old political gag goes, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.””
That certainly describes the Old Fool in the White House, but his followers are wokist fanatics who believe in their own infallibility.
Hoi Polloi says
I liked that one. Good piece of writing on the whole, as well.
somehistory says
The Washington Examiner had a report a couple of days ago about soros and his millions funding “beto” o’phony in Texas for governor. He has his filthy evil fingers in so much of what is happening in the U.S. His intent is to ruin lives…as he has done so often in the past. Same old same old.
“AOC and Ilhan Omar coordinated Supreme Court arrest stunt with Soros-funded dark money group”
Bleak is what they have given the children’s future. but they still tout a “new world order.”
“Getting arrested was the whole point of the stunt, Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram post on Tuesday. She said organizers of the Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund asked her and her colleagues to “submit themselves for arrest in front of the Supreme Court.”
The New York lawmaker insisted in the post what she and her colleagues did was “very different than a ‘publicity stunt.'”
AOC FUNDRAISES OFF OF ARREST AT PRO-ABORTION RIGHTS PROTEST
Omar spokesman Jeremy Slevin tweeted about 30 minutes before the lawmakers hit the street that a film crew with the dark money group would be on the scene live streaming the event.
“Members of Congress, including [Omar] will be participating in a civil disobedience at the Supreme Court, potentially including arrests, shortly,” Slevin tweeted before the lawmakers began illegally obstructing the street outside the Supreme Court. “@CPDAction is live streaming it. Follow along!”
Trying to replace good with evil is working temporarily. but not for always. (Rev 21)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/aoc-and-ilhan-omar-coordinated-supreme-court-arrest-stunt-with-soros-funded-dark-money-group/ar-AAZNtfs?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=2aa48993040b4161ab1f7d666
CogitoErgoSum says
It’s interesting to me that the Great Seal of the United States contains the Latin phrases “Annuit Coeptis” (He has favored our undertakings) and “Novus Ordo Seclorum” (new order of the ages”). Also, an eye and an unfinished pyramid appear on the seal. You can find this also on the back of the dollar bill.
The eye symbolizes God, in whom we hope we will find favor for our undertaking to build a new nation like no other nation in the world. The unfinished pyramid represents that our project is ongoing and unfinished but, we hope again, will be as long lasting as the great pyramids at Giza. So I think maybe the U.S. has been about a new world order from its very beginning but we have forgotten what that order should be or look like …. just as we have forgotten how or why the pyramids of Egypt were built. Human beings are of a species which undergoes intervals of amnesia (who knows how many times) since our time upon the Earth began. We are drifting into a period of amnesia once again.
somehistory says
Your comment brought to my mind the Israelites in the Wilderness. The Bible says they “forgot” all that their God had done for them, in bringing them out from the land where they had been slaves. all they seemed capable of doing was complaining about how things were back when they had “leeks” and other things….where they had been enslaved.
People learn to complain and forget to be appreciative.
Wellington says
Another thoughtful article by Daniel Greenfield and which demonstrates again the extraordinary wisdom of the Founding Fathers of America, arguably the greatest group of men in all of history. No wonder powerful Britain lost the Revolutionary War fighting against such people as Washington, Adams, Greene, Jefferson, Madison, Morris, Franklin, et al.
Too damn bad most of the world hasn’t learned from these men. Instead we get people like Obama, Biden, Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Maduro, Trudeau, et al.
Occasionally mankind is superb. Most of the time mankind is an idiot.
gravenimage says
The Old World Order
………………………………………..
Grimly, much of this from Daniel Greenfield is spot on. Who just thirty years ago would have considered Islam and Russia to be threats? This certainly seems part of the “old world order”.
But hoping for a better world does not make it so.
More:
America can best serve the world by being itself.
………………………………………..
*Spot on*. We can serve as a model for the world. They can follow our example–or not.
somehistory says
the “old world” replaced by “slow world”
I went to a post office on Monday morning. I mailed two packages, being told they would be delivered three days later, on Thursday. they were to be delivered two and a half miles from the PO in the same town..
I was given tracking numbers. On Wednesday, I looked. One package had left the PO and would be delivered that day. The other package, was still at the PO where I had left it.
Yesterday, Thursday, I found that the package had travelled from the PO in the middle of the night to a town 137 miles away. Later that day, it travelled 22 miles to a different city, then, in the night, travelled another 70 miles to yet another city. Each stop was at a “distribution center.”
this morning, the package left that city and returned to the very PO where I had taken it, and was then sent out for delivery.
the government agencies are so inept and expensive. the cost of stamps and other mailings went up this week.
Once upon a time, one could mail a package or letter in the morning and it would be delivered that same day in the same city, or by the next morning at the latest. That was the “old world”.
Tanya Notkoff says
I must disagree with the main thesis because we are already living in the New World Order that is Globablism (I’m leaving the Freudian typo…for Babel it is!) The Bushes are a part of it, selling the American Individualism for Global Collectivism that is Socialism-Communism-Fascism-Islam…completely un-American. This has been decades in the making, with the 2020 US Election Coup the final move before the Fall. Agenda 21 completed! Agenda 2030 and 2050 are well underway. We are lost. We lost once Academia was perverted with anti-American anti-Individualism, and that was back in the 90s…