Home > Work > A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
1 " In foreign policy, managing a situation in a manner that fails to address core or what are sometimes described as final status issues can be preferable to attempting to bring about a solution sure to be unacceptable to one or more of the parties and that could as a result provoke a dangerous response. Economics, "
― Richard N. Haass , A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order
2 " although it is one of the tragic ironies of history that the end of the colonial era, rather than promoting order, in many instances created disorder on a large scale. "
3 " the ability of the United States to translate its clear advantages in wealth and military power into influence was limited at the global and local levels alike. "
4 " no country, much less a major power, is prepared to forgo the opportunity to act on behalf of what it perceives as its national interest simply because it lacks a blessing from the United Nations. "
5 " Syria in particular emerged as an example of what could go wrong: hundreds of thousands of Syrians had lost their lives and more than half the population had become internally displaced or refugees, in the process threatening to overwhelm not just Syria’s neighbors but Europe as well. "
6 " The driving force in many cases around the world was less a push for self-determination and the creation of a new state than it was some version of score settling or a winner-take-all effort to establish a new political, social, and economic hierarchy. "
7 " no progress was made on the tension arising from the U.S. dollar’s status as both the national currency of the United States and the global reserve currency, that is, the currency used for most international transactions, which required most countries to keep a store of it on hand. The U.S. Federal Reserve thus acted as both the country’s and the world’s central bank; the problem in the eyes of many resulted from the fact that the world had no oversight or control over the U.S. central bank or U.S. economic policy more broadly. "
8 " Populism and extremism gained ground in mature democracies and authoritarianism in other countries. The result was the opposite of a virtuous cycle: challenges stemming from globalization contributed to many of these domestic developments, while these same developments made it more difficult for governments to deal effectively with global challenges. "
9 " But the cold reality is that no such broad and deep consensus exists as to what is to be done, who is to do it, and how to decide. There is a substantial gap between what is desirable when it comes to meeting the challenges of globalization and what has proven possible. "
10 " The motive that most captured the imaginations of the upper reaches of the George W. Bush administration, though, was the belief that a post-Saddam Iraq would become democratic, setting an example and a precedent that the other Arab states and Iran would have great difficulty resisting. The road to a transformed Middle East, it was widely believed, ran through Baghdad. "
11 " A cardinal reality associated with globalization is that little stays local in terms of its consequences. "
12 " As became all too clear, an era that began brightly and optimistically with the end of the Cold War did not stay that way for long. And today, some twenty-five years later, it would be difficult to argue that the world is orderly or headed in that direction. To the contrary, there are real reasons for concern about the world and its trajectory even though the principal source of disorder over the centuries—major-power conflict—has been absent from the world scene. "
13 " Much of history is the result of friction leading to conflict between existing and rising powers, reflecting the difficulty in peacefully accommodating the changing power balance and relationship between the two. "
14 " U.S. influence was limited by the commitment of the target country to pursue its nuclear-related goals and, partly as a result, to resist U.S. pressures. U.S. influence was also undercut by the actions of other governments that did not share U.S. preferences or priorities. "
15 " nuclear weapons can offer protection against foreign intervention—and the lack of them can increase the odds of a country being attacked and its government ousted. "
16 " Widespread is the belief that the United States stands in the way of China’s emergence as a regional and global power of the first rank. "
17 " The world economy increased fivefold between 1950 and 1990. Trade volume grew even more rapidly, from approximately $125 billion in 1950 to $7 trillion forty years later. As for development, the number of people on the earth living in extreme poverty (about 1.3 billion) stayed roughly constant over those years even though global population doubled, from 2.5 billion to more than 5 billion.10 "
18 " One has to assume that as often as not individuals of mediocre or poor skills will enter into positions of responsibility. "
19 " Technological innovations and uneven rates of absorbing them matter, as do demographics, leadership, culture, policies, and fortune. The result of these and other factors was a first half of the twentieth century that was unprecedented in its disorder, and a second half characterized by considerable order, however different in its origins and however unexpected. "
20 " History is filled with examples of individuals and countries acting against their own self-interest. "
