Failing International Relations (Not Me!)

One of the most interesting classes I'm taking this term is "The Causes of War", which is about as complicated as it sounds. Luckily, I have an excellent professor. Briefly, for those of us who aren't PoliSci majors, there are really two major camps in International Relations theory - Liberals and so-called Realists. A decent (but not entirely accurate) shorthand for these two camps would be to say that Liberals look for variables, Realists look for constants. Why war? Liberals would say that regime type matters - is it a democracy or not, etc? Realists say that regime type is almost irrelevant, and what you have to look at is human nature, or the nature of the international system (anarchy).

Obviously, these two camps disagree on a lot. One of the interesting insights from realism, though, is the belief that allowing one nation to achieve dominance in inherently destabilizing - realists believe that bipolarity is the most stable of all arrangements. Realists would point to the example of the Cold War - 50 years without major-power war - and nod with approval. However, since the end of the Cold War, the world has failed IR 101 miserably. By allowing the US to achieve unipolarity, the world has created a perfect recipe for instability. My professor was noting this in class Thursday night, and was asking why we don't see anyone forming major alliances to check the US?

Well, going back to something I've mentioned earlier, I think we are seeing the beginnings of that process. So far, the construction of regional alliances has been explicitly economic, and not military. However, and I've banged on this drum before too, military power by itself is increasingly worthless these days. So by constructing strong regional economic blocs, much of the world is aligning itself away from the US.

But why the delay? After all, the US has had 15 years since the fall of the USSR, and the world is really only now starting to get together. Well, not to sound overly partisan (heaven forfend!) but this is one of those examples where leaders and personalities matter. For most of the post-Cold War period, the US looked pretty benign as hegemons go. Let's face it - Clinton really added incredibly to the US's reputation across the world. Even before Clinton, Bush I laid the foundations for a new multilateral world with Gulf War I. Then, things took a turn...

Ironically, Bush II's furious drive to cement the US's position for all time - to keep the sun from setting, so to speak - has probably done more to start the anti-US system rolling than anything else. Sure, people had their grievances with the system of the 1990s - economic chaos across the world, for example - but at a basic level, most of the major players were invested in the system. You now have the Asian countries more or less rebuilding the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere just to snub the US, and the EU is taking on a deliberately separate strategy - something that was laughed at even in the late 1990s. Anyone who remembers the derision and scorn that greeted the introduction of the Euro can attest to what I mean. They can also, in retrospect, laugh their asses off.

If the EU, ASEAN, African Union and SACN can build their own poles of influence, then the US will effectively be reduced from Hegemon to third or fourth among somehwat-equals. It might not sound like a huge change (being in the top 5 in a world with 200 sovereign states ain't that bad), but there aren't a lot of examples of hegemons giving up their positions easily. Which brings me to my final piece of terrifying analysis - Billmon assembles some quotes from the Canadian business community, and compares them to the German Anschluss of Austria in 1938. Between the people on our right who want to sell us to the Americans, and the Quebec nationalists on the left who want to take a third of the country away, Canada's in a tight spot. All the while, David Orchard is ridiculed for wanting something as naive as a sovereign state...