From Washington to Cairo and Tripoli, old institutions are breaking down. This special issue of TNI explores the profound global transitions taking place, examines the collapse of the Old Order and looks toward the future.
Those nations falling between the developed West and the world’s poorest countries are jockeying for position in their own regions and playing powers against each other. They will make life increasingly difficult for the reigning great powers.
An intense security competition is under way in East Asia. Beijing and Washington must take care to ensure that this competition does not give way to entrenched bloody-mindedness or even outright violence.
Pax Americana and the age of Western dominance are fading. Washington can manage this decline, but first it must acknowledge its reality. History moves forward with a crushing force and does not wait for the unprepared.
The world we know is changing. The result is an uneasy mixture of the traditional Westphalian state system and the forces of globalization. Until we find a balance between them, this is a recipe for drift, transition and increasing chaos.
No national interest was cited as a rationale for America's Libya campaign; the action was justified solely on humanitarian grounds. This marks a fundamental break with past U.S. policy prescriptions for such military interventions.
China must choose between kowtowing to domestic nationalism and submitting to a peaceful rise. Lately, nationalist belligerence has ruled the day. Washington is overreacting, encircling China. A latent rivalry ratchets up to dangerous levels.
Two lost wars. Eroding infrastructure. A crippled economy. The time when the United States could create and lead a political, economic and security order in virtually every part of the world is over. The cure? A new American strategy.
Nearly fifty years ago, India and China met in a brief, bloody border clash that would come to define—and destroy—the legendary Nehru. Was this the first step in an inevitable clash between two rising civilizations?
Experts opine on how democracy would change China's foreign-policy priorities.
