On Sept. 11, 1990, President George H.W. Bush delivered an address to a joint session of Congress at what he believed was a critical moment in history. The Cold War was winding down, and democratic revolutions were collapsing the Iron Curtain. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded Kuwait, and the U.S. had responded by leading an international military coalition onto the Arabian peninsula – with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s blessing.
The president uttered three words in that speech – new world order – that resonate today. In the view of U.S. leaders and foreign policy thinkers in those heady days, the emerging “new world order” would open up possibilities for peace and cooperation unheard of during the coldest years of the Cold War. But, as the president stated on that late summer evening 32 years ago, Iraq’s invasion threatened to upend those possibilities before they could be realized.
“The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward a historic period of cooperation,” Bush said. “A new world order can emerge – a new era.”
Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is viewed through the same post-Cold War prism, at least among the foreign policy establishment: It threatens not only to wreck what is left of the order constructed by the United States and its NATO allies, but it also is delaying cooperation on global issues such as hunger, climate change and pandemics.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Jeffrey Engel discusses the ways in which Bush’s vision failed to materialize in the 1990s and the implications of those failures for today’s policymakers seeking to maintain something that may not be worth saving in the eyes of non-Western powers. We now live in a multipolar world where China and India, whose combined population is close to 3 billion people, do not view the stakes in Ukraine through the same lens as the West.
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“Bush was a very reluctant global architect. This was not a man who came into office looking to restructure the international system,” said Mr. Engel, the author of “When The World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War.”
The new world order “was not new,” Mr. Engel said. “And Bush never intended it to be new. What they wanted to do was finally implement the world they had been promised in their youth by Franklin Roosevelt and others, of making a safer world with a United Nations that actually worked. The rationale was that the Cold War got in the way of that vision in 1946.”
By the end of the 1990s, the aftermath of the Gulf War, the humanitarian crises in Somalia, the Balkans, and Rwanda, and the failure of Russia to politically and economically integrate with the West, all exposed the weaknesses in the new world Bush had hoped to leave to his successors. In this framing, the collapse of the USSR was not an event but rather a process still unfolding today on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine.
Listen to the full interview with Southern Methodist University’s Jeffrey Engel by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
