by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Thirty-five years ago this Thursday, President George H.W. Bush gave an important speech entitled “Toward a New World Order.” Wikipedia has excerpted a few of its central elements:
Until now, the world we’ve known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict, and the cold war. Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the genuine prospect of new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a “world order” in which “the principles of justice and fair play … protect the weak against the strong …” A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.
Bush’s public address before a joint session of Congress emphasized the successful conclusion of our decades-long Cold War against Soviet Communism, a struggle ending in a complete victory for the West.
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A year earlier the Berlin Wall had fallen and the Warsaw Pact established by the USSR to counter NATO had collapsed. The Soviet Union itself was on the verge of disintegrating seven decades after its original creation, leaving behind a shrunken Russian successor state that included only half that previous population. Moscow would soon be reduced to ruling territories far smaller than those held by Peter the Great in the early 18th century.
During that same summer of 1989, enormous pro-Western demonstrations by students and workers had filled Beijing’s central square, and although the Chinese government had successfully suppressed those Tiananmen Square protests with considerable loss of life, the Communist regime seemed to be tottering, widely expected to follow its Soviet counterpart onto the ash-heap of history.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama also published his famous article “The End of History?” describing what seemed to be a sweeping and permanent ideological triumph for the Western system. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he dropped his question mark and expanded that analysis into a bestselling 1992 book of the same title.
Not only did America tower over the entire world politically and economically, but nearly all of the other large and successful countries were numbered among its longstanding allies, with Japan and the members of NATO looking to Washington’s leadership. And although the Japanese had seemingly challenged American economic dominance during the 1980s, that country had already entered a decade of economic stagnation, soon eliminating any such prospect.
Just a few weeks before Bush’s speech, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded and occupied Kuwait, and many of our president’s statements regarding international law addressed this situation even as he began assembling a powerful coalition to defeat the aggressor and expel it from the territory it had seized. The ultimate result was a complete military triumph in February 1991, with the large and experienced Iraqi army being totally destroyed by our advanced weaponry with negligible American loss of life, further demonstrating that our power was completely unmatched by any possible rival.
So that same year saw both our sweeping victory in the Gulf War and the final collapse of our longtime Soviet rival. America entered what soon became known as the unipolar moment, with both our hard and our soft power entirely supreme across the globe.
No previous country in the history of the world had ever achieved such total dominance across so many different sectors, whether political, economic, ideological, or technological. Educated individuals from around the world received much of their information from American media outlets even as their populations were entertained by Hollywood productions. The children of the world’s ruling elites eagerly sought to enroll at American academic institutions, as did so many of the best and brightest youngsters of every country, thereby allowing America to shape the minds of the world’s next generation of leaders.
