Is New World Order Working?

Is New World Order Working?

By Dr Arvind Kumar

A new multipolar world is fast emerging to relace the so-called ‘unilateralism’ espoused by the United States for the past two decades. The emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa etc are making their international presence felt. The multipolar moment seemed to have arrived in May 2010 when Brazil and Turkey joined together to announce they had stepped in to broker a nuclear-fuel swap deal with Iran that reportedly -- not actually -- paved the way toward a peaceful solution to the standoff. A little over two decades ago, then U.S. President George H.W. Bush had proclaimed a "new world order," a U.S.-dominated international system "where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle." Two decades later, the "new new world order" looks almost nothing like what Bush -- and most Americans -- imagined or hoped.

Undoubtedly the United States still retains the world's most powerful military, but its utility is diminishing as the capacity to deter and resist spreads. Ongoing developments in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved that military might and political influence no longer necessarily go together and too much of the former can even undermine the latter. More fundamentally, the world has quickly become multipolar, with the European Union a larger economic player than the United States while China rises quickly on all measures of hard and soft power. Today nobody's talking about the Washington Consensus anymore -- instead the Beijing Consensus, the Mumbai Consensus etc., are competing for international space. Rather than a world of alliances, it's a world of multi-alignment.