It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was an anomaly. It was the product of the end of the Cold War. But eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world with great powers in different parts of the planet…. So now more than ever, we need to remember that foreign policy should always be about furthering the national interest of the United States and doing so to the extent possible avoiding war and armed conflict, which we have seen two times in the last century be very costly. They’re celebrating the 80th anniversary this year of the end of the Second World War. If you look at the scale and scope of destruction and loss of life that occurred it it would be far worse if we had a global conflict now that may end life on the planet.
We recently heard Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently refer to the end of the “unipolar order,” which is a term popularized in 1990 by pundit Charles Krauthammer. In his State of the Union Address speech in 1991, President George H.W. Bush began to speak of a New World Order (NWO) just a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bush spoke of the end of the Cold War, which was a long era of division between the communist world and the West (or the “free world”). This is sometimes referred to as the bipolar world order.
In his first essay, Krauthammer stated, “The unipolar moment will be brief.” He spoke of the inevitable reemergence of great powers that would challenge the hegemony of the United States. However, in a couple of subsequent pieces in the 1990s, he claimed that the unipolar era would likely last a few more decades.
The idea of a unipolar power is that the United States could cooperate with the collective West toward a harmonious order of governments that promoted universal human rights and free elections. The New World Order would be characterized by a growing network of Liberal democracies. Further, US military intelligence, the CIA, in cooperation with other foreign governments, could stamp out the “bad actors” and weaker terrorist regimes. Theoretically, China and the Russian Federation would reform, cooperate, or stay out of the way.
Krauthammer was both right and wrong.
This idea was developed by Harvard professor, Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, but later refuted by his mentor, Samuel P. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996. Paradoxically, Huntington argued that “clashes between civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, but also … an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war.”
As a young Christian media missionary, I founded a Russian language newspaper, Predvestnik (The Forerunner) in Kiev, Ukraine in 1991 and worked with similar projects with ministries to Chinese international students, and projects in South Africa and Latin America. We continue today to work on books, media, including translation projects to reach the world.
Therefore, I was literally giddy with excitement at the prospect of training young Christians in previously “closed” countries to reach their own cultures with a full orbed Christian worldview Gospel message.
I discarded the idea of many pessimistic Christians that the NWO was a conspiracy to lead us to a globalist one world government led by the antichrist. That was just a conspiracy theory — a fable concocted by dispensational premillennialist theology. However, there was some truth in this. There was a conspiracy — but it was predestined to fail.
The first big blow to the NWO came on September 11, 2001. The US began what is known as the “forever war.” Almost 24 years later, over one million people have been killed in these conflicts. Some claim 3 to 5 million indirectly. The US has added $8 trillion to our national debt, which is now over $36 trillion at this writing. One wonders how our economic outlook could have been different if this amount were never printed and spent, considering it also has compounded trillions in interest toward the total.
Donald Trump seems to be the first US president in 35 years who thinks this course is suicidal. But rather than use the buzz phrase, “multipolar world order,” his administration has begun to use, the “Great Power” order. This recognizes that a seismic shift is here without implying that the US is giving up its sovereignty. Trump sees several equal players. Based on Trump’s comments during meetings with Putin, Xi, and Modi, he evidently thinks these are the USA, Russia, China, India. The multipolar order will soon include at least eight great powers. Huntington’s view back in 1996 was that these would also include Japan, and a core state (or states) from Latin America (Brazil), Sub Saharan Africa (Nigeria or South Africa), and the Islamic world (Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia). He admitted the latter to be the most problematic “civilization” due to its size and diversity.
Analysis of Huntington’s Civilization States
In seeking to identify the core nations of the eight great civilizations, I use a chart based on five metrics – (1). Population; (2). Land mass; (3). GDP/PPP; (4). Wealth of natural resources; (5). Nuclear strength.
The rationale is that in order to be the core state of a civilization, a nation must have (1). A large population of workers; (2). A large defensible territory; (3). Great wealth production capacity; (4). Great riches in natural resources; (5). Nuclear weapons as source of deterrence against any existential threat.
The top ten nations in each category may be identified – eight of which would be the core nations of the eight civilization states. Potential core states are listed in order of strength in each area. Nations that appear in two metrics or less are italicized. These statistics are based on the most recent data at the time of the this writing.
Today’s geopolitical landscape particularly resembles the close of World War II because major powers are seeking to negotiate a new Global Power Order primarily with each other, much as Allied leaders did when they redrew the world map at Yalta, and much as European leaders have done every 50 to 100 years going all the way back to the 1500s. The difference is that this time it won’t simply be the European map, but it will be spheres of influence for the whole globe.
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