At a recent event for his 2024 US presidential election campaign, US President Joe Biden invoked the language of a “new world order,” saying Washington has the ability in the next few years to ensure that it will remain the dominant global power for the next several decades.
“We’re at an inflection point in history, and that is that decisions we make in the next four or five years are going to determine what the next four or five decades look like,” Biden said. “If we do what I know we can do, we can change history.”
“I think we have an opportunity to do things, if we’re bold enough and have enough confidence in ourselves, to unite the world in ways that it never has been,” he continued. “We were in a post-war period for 50 years where it worked pretty damn well, but that’s sort of run out of steam. It needs a new world order in a sense, like that was a world order.”
It’s not the first time Biden has used the phrase in recent years. After the US attempted to turn Russia into a pariah state with punishing sanctions and other pressures in early 2022, Biden gloated about a “ liberal world order” in the world, saying, “There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.”
Biden’s rhetoric follows a move by his predecessor, Donald Trump, to reorient US foreign policy toward “great power competition” with Russia and China, which Trump and Biden have accused of seeking to upend a so-called “rules-based international order.”
In response to Biden’s remarks, on Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the Russian government “agrees with Biden,” that “the world needs a new world order, based on completely different principles, free from attempts to concentrate all mechanisms of global governance in the hands of one state.” However, he added that Moscow “disagrees” with how Biden intends for such a world order to be shaped, because “no matter what world order they talk about, they mean an American-centric world order, that is, a world that revolves around the United States. It won't be that way any more."
Dan Kovalik, former adjunct professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of "No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using 'Humanitarian' Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests," told Sputnik on Monday that much of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s has been directed at demonstrating its contempt for institutions of international law and cooperation, most especially the United Nations, since the Soviet Union no longer existed as a superpower counterweight to American ambitions.
“The old world order - meaning what [then-US President] George Bush announced as the New World Order, I think in 1989 - what went wrong was that, once the Soviet Union collapsed and there was no check on US power,” he explained. “The US was the only power in the world and it misused it to go to war numerous times without [UN] Security Council authorization in places like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya. And essentially, through that process, international law was totally undermined. In fact, on purpose, Bill Clinton was very clear that he wanted to go to war in Yugoslavia, in part to make a point that he could go to war without Security Council authorization.”
“Essentially, international law and the international law system has been systematically dismantled since the so-called ‘New World Order’ - which is now the ‘old world order’, if that makes sense. And so now I think the world wants to try to put things back in place,” Kovalik said.
“For Biden, the new rules order that he's contemplating is basically, the US will make up the rules as it goes along, everyone else will have to go along. So that's not really a rule of law, that's more the rule of the mighty. The rest of the world, I think, or most of the rest of the world wants to go back to the UN charter and have a real law-based system instead of a ‘US rules based system’, which is what Biden is really talking about.”
“There's no chance” such a framework would genuinely prioritize another nation’s interest over those of the United States, he said. “That's not the goal. The goal is to prioritize the US' interest over everyone else's, and that's why the rest of the world is balking at it. Well, we see that right now with the Israeli-Palestine conflict, that the US is now the only country to veto at least three resolutions attempting to end the war there, to protect civilians. And so the US wants to be able to basically go its own way in the world without any brakes on it. I think the whole goal is for the US to prioritize itself over everyone else.”
“I think the rest of the world won't sign up for that. I think the rest of the world wants to go back to a real law based order in the UN Charter. Several years ago, there was a group founded called the Group of Friends of the UN Charter. China was part of that, Russia, Iran, several other countries essentially wanting to reassert the UN charter as the law that everyone follows, and that was the whole idea. So I think most of the countries in the world want that.”
Kovalik said the US doesn’t have the political or diplomatic influence to be able to actually bring such an order into existence any longer, especially considering its involvement in both the conflict in Ukraine and the one in the Middle East, where Israel and Hamas are locked in a war that threatens to draw in nearby powers.
“It certainly has military might - and that's pretty much all it has. But I don't think that's enough to be able to get countries to go along with this New World Order, so-called. And I think even countries in Europe won't go along with it because they now feel that they were tricked into supporting the Ukraine conflict to their own detriment. I don't think they're going to get many takers here.”
“Given the emergence of the multipolar world, I think, the US ultimately is going to have to find a way to comply more with the wishes of other countries. It's not going to have the same ability to dictate to the world. I think those days are over.”