US failure to build an inclusive international order in the post-Cold War era is at the heart of the world's present troubles, writes Ayman El-Amir The financial tsunami that hit the United States in 2008 also swept all shores of all continents. Not only has it crippled industrial activities, set back economic growth or triggered the collapse of financial markets, but it also shook the very foundation of the international economic order as we knew it since the end of World War II. If it were only a matter of Bear Stearns' value declining from $60 billion in 2007 to $236 million in March 2008, and bought by J P Morgan at $2 a share, or of Lehman Brothers' seeking the protection of Chapter 11 when declaring bankruptcy in September, or the insurance giant AIG getting $85 billion in treasury bailout assistance, or the insolvency of Icelandic Bank that served as a safe haven for British depositors, then bailout plans by treasuries around the world may help mitigate the situation. But it seems that the problem is far deeper and reaches into the very core of the world's political, economic and trade system where emergency financial triage could hardly save the situation. World order, surrendering to accumulated pressures, is bursting at the seams and needs not to be fixed, but to be recast. The cascading series of crises that rocked the world through 2008 may have started with the 2007 collapse of the subprime rate housing loan market, leading to a financial credit meltdown. It was a crisis in the making for almost a decade and when it matured in 2008 it left nearly three million house owners in the US homeless. This led to a credit crunch and an ensuing slump of business that was cut off from the jittery banking system. The outcome makes the Bush-era boom look like a speculative bonanza that eventually had to give way to economic realities, including the estimated $3 trillion military spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is matched only by the massive $50 billion securities fraud hatched by the former chairman of the NASDAQ, Bernard Madoff, who called his Investment Securities Company "a giant Ponzi scheme", adding "It's all just one big lie." If speculative boom and financial fraud seem to reflect US political values of the past 20 years, it is no coincidence. Since the downfall of the former Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the US has assumed the leadership of the world community. To start with, there was no new world order, only a vacuum that the US rushed to fill as the sputtering republics of the former Soviet Union collected the pieces, buried the remains of the Soviet superpower and proclaimed independence. The US did not lead with a sense of international responsibility but with its own global interests in mind. On few occasions it rallied international consensus to tackle a delicate crisis, such as Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait or the belated reaction to the Serbian genocide in Bosnia. Professed US leadership was marked by withdrawal from multilateral partnership, whether in the form of retracting the reluctant Clinton administration's signature on the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court or rejection of the Kyoto Protocols on climate change. A dubious community of nations went along with Washington until the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its disastrous consequences showed the true mettle of US policy. It revealed the old myopic Republican aversion to internationalism under the banner: 'If it is not in US interests, it is not good for the world.' And, like the New York Stock Exchange, US interests had such a voracious appetite that they derailed whatever new world order that was in the making in the post-Cold War era. As the community of nations began to realise that US leadership is about power, not partnership, several members began to rebel, including those traditional loyalist allies in the US backyard of South America. Russia, after surviving its economic doldrums in the late 1990s and with its newly found oil and gas wealth, began to reassert itself as a leading power that could step into the shoes of the bygone Soviet Union. It has manifested its new political might during the brief war with Georgia, in conducting joint military manoeuvres with rebellious Venezuela and in gestures of willingness to supply Iran with a surface-to-air missile defence system to counterbalance US deployment of anti-missile defence shields in Poland and the Czech Republic. On the other hand, China emerged on the scene as an economic giant that now holds $1 trillion of US treasury bills that finance the budget deficit. India followed. As Iraq resisted the US invasion and the Palestinians fought back the crushing blows of the Israeli Goliath, Iran stepped on the regional stage to forestall US-Israeli hegemony over the oil-rich region. Automatic US support of Israeli actions has frozen the peace process for the entire tenure of the Bush administration, leading to the escalation of Middle East tensions. Then the failure of the seven-year-long Doha Round to establish fair terms of trade between powerful Western economies and those of the struggling, developing countries exposed the self-serving unilateralist policies of the US and its Western allies. It also undermined the tenets of globalisation and betrayed imbalances in the US-driven world order. National and international grievances continue to fuel acts of terrorism that show no sign of abatement as dictatorial practices on both levels show more signs of entrenchment. For the foreseeable future, the world will continue to suffer the consequences of terrorist reactions to autocratic regimes. In this environment, military coups seem to be a lucrative business as was demonstrated in both Mauritania and Guinea in 2008. Then the old phenomenon of piracy was reborn in Somalia as a syndrome of a failed state caught in regional and international rivalries. Elsewhere in Africa, Zimbabwe qualified for the most rigorous definition of a failed state but more as a consequence of a power-hungry dictator than for other reasons. As 2008 drew to a close, the world was in the throes of unpredictability and no one could say that the worst was over. The world, now in recession, will limp into 2009 with the same wounds and woes it has endured for most of the preceding decade in the absence of a genuine and balanced world order. It will spend most of the year reeling from the aftershocks of the global financial crisis for which the Bush administration has taken responsibility. On the brighter side, the US presidential election seems to have produced a saving factor -- a president that was eager to breathe a fresh breath of change into the decadent neoconservative body politic left over by the Bush administration. President-elect Barack Obama's expressed priority of changing America's image in the world will require more than cosmetics. It will need a sustained effort to right the wrongs of past decades and to reach out to build a new world order based on justice, non-aggression and respect for international law so much trashed by the Bush circle of power. The new US president will face a tall order of domestic and international priorities that will compete for his attention. To help set the international order of priorities, the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Martti Ahtisaari, had a piece of advice, a plea, for the president-elect: make the Middle East your priority. It makes good sense in view of the recent atrocious Israeli assault on the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip. The need to rein in Israel and make it more responsible in the peace process has never been more urgent. When the world recovers from the financial and political disaster it has suffered as a consequence of rabid US policies it ought to take a long pause to reconsider the leadership role it has endowed the US with in international affairs. The US will still be first among equals, but it will not be the only leader as other rising powers like China and Russia seek a more assertive role on the global scene. Poor performance by the US will lead to distrust of the concept of central leadership and to the fragmentation of global power. It will eventually create narrower regional alliances that will be more challenging to mould into an international consensus. The US will lose considerable assets of its international standing. By the end of 2009, the world will likely undergo deep transformation as it realises that it has so far tried to adapt the rules of the order of the 20th century to the needs of the 21st century. It will then be forced to coin a new strategic, economic, military and environmental order that should have been in place with the start of the third millennium but was stymied by the distorted priorities of a self-styled world leader.
