How's That New World Order Working Out?

Looking for a sign of when the multipolar moment suddenly seemed real? You could do worse than mark the day when Brazil and Turkey -- two of the world's most avidly internationalist emerging powers -- joined together this May to announce they had stepped in to broker a nuclear-fuel swap deal with Iran that potentially -- though sadly not actually -- paved the way toward a peaceful solution to the standoff. Turkey and Brazil aren't superpowers, nor are they permanent U.N. Security Council members. But just as U.S. President Barack Obama came into office preaching a renewed focus on multilateralism, rising powers are reminding us that respect for hierarchy is no longer on anyone's agenda.

What a difference a couple of decades makes. A little over 20 years ago, then U.S. President George H.W. Bush -- who had just witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and saw the Soviet Union disintegrating before his very eyes -- stood at the granite podium of the U.N. General Assembly in New York and 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" we are in fact living looks almost nothing like what Bush -- and most Americans -- imagined or hoped.

“Novus ordo seclorum” - written on the back of the Great Seal of the United States, designed shortly after the founding. Essentially the same meaning.

Bush applied his own special meaning to the phrase. If he had half the vision of his predecessor he could have set about doing something useful - like closing out NATO - instead all he could do was stand back and pontificate about the changes falling into place around him.

The phrase “new world order” was explicitly used in connection with Woodrow Wilson’s designs in the period just after World War I, during the formation of the League of Nations.

“The war to end war” had been a powerful catalyst in international politics, and many felt the world could simply no longer operate as it once had.

The first world war had been justified not only in terms of U.S. national interest but in moral terms—to “make the world safe for democracy.”

After the war, Wilson argued for a new world order which transcended traditional great power politics, instead emphasizing collective security, democracy, and self-determination.

However, the United States Senate rejected membership of the League of Nations, which Wilson believed to be the key to a new world order.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge argued that American policy should be based on human nature “as it is, not as it ought to be.”

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/League_of_Nations

The phrase “new world order”, as used to herald in the post-Cold War era, had no developed or substantive definition.

There appear to have been three distinct periods in which it was progressively redefined, first by the Soviets, and later by the United States before the Malta Conference, and again after Bush’s speech of September 11, 1990.

Throughout the period of the phrase’s use, the public seemed to expect much more from the phrase than any politicians did, and predictions about the new order quickly outraced the rather lukewarm descriptions made in official speeches.

There were people right here on this site, declaring that 100,000 companies being sent to low wage countries like Mexico and Communist China, while big-gov flooded America with upwards of 30 million low wage illegal aliens, was a good thing.

I kid you not.

Actually, there are people still saying that on here....unfortunately

Free Trader Globalists are no different than Communists: Both push failed economic ideas that are proven failures

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