The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 inspired much talk of a new world order, headed by the USA and reinforced not only militarily, but by the global spread of the American model of economic liberalism with its commitment to free markets, deregulation of finance, and the privatization of state-owned assets.
But the USA ran into severe opposition in the early years of the 21st century. In the Islamic world, America and its allies clashed with a range of opponents. Religious fundamentalists often adopted terrorism as a strategy, most dramatically with the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 that used hijacked passenger aircraft as weapons. Fundamentalists exploited popular hostility to what they called Westernization, which they presented as a form of globalized ‘Crusader’ power hostile to Islam. The initial response of the USA to the 9/11 attacks was to start wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it later backed popular uprisings in other parts of the Middle East. Neither tactic brought peace, and the backlash both inside and outside the region has forced the USA to re-evaluate its military and diplomatic response to a world of ‘asymmetric instability’, in which its main enemies might be small armed groups rather than superpowers.
At the same time, other great powers were becoming more assertive. China’s economy, mostly based on manufacturing, was expanding fast. Nominally communist China had adopted those features of capitalism that it chose, though unchecked by democratic control, as it remained an authoritarian one-party state. Meanwhile in Russia, the upheavals of the end of communist rule had begun to subside. These power shifts weakened the USA’s ability to confront China’s growing territorial ambitions in the East China Sea, or Russia’s renewed desire to dominate countries that had formerly been part of the Soviet Union.
The economies of other nations were also evolving. For instance, India’s growth rate overtook China’s in 2015, with an economic and political approach that was less economically liberal and more corporatist than the American one.
To focus solely on the tension between the United States and its potential rivals risks downplaying other sources of friction worldwide. One common factor, though, was the use of violence to secure political outcomes. Countries all across the Middle East, Europe and Africa experienced civil wars and internal conflict. In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, civil wars have cost more than 5 million lives since the 1990s. This conflict combined bitter ethnic differences with interventions by neighbouring African powers, as well as intense competition to control valuable natural resources. From these perspectives the world of the 21st century looks depressingly like the world of the 20th century, one in which military conflict and instability are ways of life for many of the world’s population.
BRICS
The late 2000s and early 2010s brought the prospect of a new pecking order in the world economy, as a number of countries began to play more prominent roles. The most significant were the ‘BRICS’ countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa – and after these the ‘MINT’ countries – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey. The USA and Europe appeared to be in crisis, while these other countries prospered. By the mid-2010s, however, Chinese growth was slowing, while Russia suffered a major loss of revenues caused in part by the plunging price of oil and in part by sanctions incurred after its interventions in successor Soviet states. Such developments cast doubt on the futures of many economies and states, including the oil-backed systems of the Middle East.