After the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the world started realizing a new ideology.

We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by …Fukuyama’s Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a life that is ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First will not.

This means that what is coming will not necessarily be anarchy in all parts of the world, but rather we might be confronted by a situation in which the world will become divided into two parts heading in different directions. The world of “the Last Man”, that world of liberal democracy, of modernization and technology, will shelter itself from the world of the poor, thus leaving the latter to suffer, without offering any help. This is probably the case nowadays in Africa, which is suffering from tremendous problems, and is not given any attention from the rich countries remaining totally neglected because it is no longer of use after Colonialism and Neo-colonialism have already exhausted its resources.

Kaplan mentions that future wars will be “those of communal survival, aggravated or, in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity.” He adds that future wars would be primitive rather large-scale conventional wars, where religious fanaticism will play a larger role in armed conflicts, taking advantage of the available technology. Furthermore he points out that the distinction between war and crime will cease to exist. This suggestion is of course very interesting when examined in the light of September 11 and the resultant so-called “War on Terror”. The fact that the terrorist attacks are said to be carried out by religious fanatics, namely and AL Qa’eda Network led by Ussama Bin Laden and that these attacks took advantage of technology, as they were broadcasted on air, forcing the whole world to witness the shock, adds a lot of weight to Kaplan’s suggestions. Likewise the fact that the distinction between a crime and war becomes very ambiguous is very true, especially in the sense that even the word “terrorism” is universally undefined as what some call a terrorist attack, others refer to as Jihad or war on aggressors, which also works in favor of the theory.

Another interesting aspect of Kaplan’s theory is the part where he mentions that:

Whereas the distant future will probably see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalize man, the coming decades will see us more aware of our differences than our similarities. To the average person, political values mean less, personal security more. The belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding obsession of the ancient Greek travelers:  Why the differences between peoples?

A close observer of the world post September 11 would to a large degree agree with this idea, where in the United States as well as many parts of the world security has gained precedence over any political or personal values. It can also be argued that cultural and ethnic differences rather than similarities stand out now, as earlier predicted by Kaplan.

        However, some rightly argue that the suffering of the developing poor nations, their ongoing civil wars and the rich developed nations’ reluctance to interfere has always been the case. Yet the real question is how this anarchy will threaten the other sheltered part of the world as it intensifies.  The answer might simply be through terrorism. Therefore, if we carefully consider Kaplan’s theory we will deduce that anarchy does not have to be restricted to the inferior, poor part of the world, but rather that it could prevail in the whole world shaping the nature of the New World Order.

But must this anarchy be explained through environmental concerns that increase the misery of the poor part of the world and cause social unrest, eventually producing an anarchic society or can it be explained by other ideological or cultural factors. More importantly, must overpopulation and refugee migration lead to the weakening of regimes or might they bring about the exactly opposite trend. Most important of all, although Kaplan might not be far fetched in predicting anarchy, does this mean that we should take all the reasons for and the consequences of anarchy that he gives us for granted.

Nevertheless, a theory as skeptical as Kaplan’s might be more suitable to the world we are living in nowadays compared to a theory as optimistic as Fukuyama’s “End of History” because simply the reality is that September 11 has showed us that the domination of Liberal Democracy is not very realistic, while a move towards anarchy is quite possible. After September 11, Fukuyama’s theory has lost its glamour, leaving us with two theories, on the one hand Kaplan’s pessimistic theory and on the other hand Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”.

This form of ‘clash’ was among the ideas that have haunted many since September 11. Huntington states that after the French Revolution there were conflicts between nations and during the Cold War, the famous Iron Curtain was the division that led to a conflict of ideologies. He suggests that in the New World Order, the new iron curtain is dividing cultures, and the clash is between members of different cultures or civilizations:

“It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

One of the major criticisms of Huntington’s theory is Edward Said’s “The Clash of Ignorance”, in which he argues that “The Clash of Civilizations” is a mere simplification because Huntington overlooked the internal dynamics and plurality of each civilization. According to Said, the problem is with “un-edifying labels like Islam and the west.” . He argues that a clear division among civilizations is fictional because “we are swimming in those waters [the deep waters of tradition and modernity], Westerners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them is useless.” 

An eventual cultural conflict between civilizations is what Huntington anticipates in his theory, and this Kaplan does not disagree with as he relates overpopulation and environmental degradation to ethnic conflict.  Kaplan argues that as refugees continue to migrate due to over-population and disease and other environmental factors, national borders become more meaningless, and more power will fall into the hands of the less educated and less sophisticated people who are more concerned with the more “basic” and tangible borders: those of culture and tribe. Thus, as Kaplan suggests, due to the symptoms of anarchy that the world would be witnessing, culture would become very crucial, because it is the only tangible identity that people will have when national borders becomes meaningless. Moreover, due to the problems that the nations have to face, cultural conflict must become directly correlated with environmental and social-political unrest. In other words Huntington argues that the ‘clash’ might lead to ‘anarchy’ while Kaplan believes that the vice-versa could be true, and this means that although they probably disagree on causality, both offer theoretical frameworks that entail explanations for the phenomenon of terrorism unlike Fukuyama.

However, despite of this, we can deduce that arguing that culture is the main reason behind the current clash and that cultural lines are the dividers between the different civilizations of today’s world, seems to be an oversimplification of a situation that involves different factors, as culture maybe an important factor but can hardly be the major factor, especially that we are living in a world that is highly interdependent.

 Alongside the fact that theories came out trying to speculate how the New World Order would take shape, analyses of the nature of the conflicts that would surface in this new world structure were also noticeable. Clark Staten, for example, suggests that there would be a general shift in how future conflicts will unfold, in the sense that, “mass violence, injuries and death will continue to occur, although –they will happen in different places and in different ways than one might currently imagine.” Here it is important to note that “Asymmetrical warfare” was the concept most frequently used to describe this beyond-current imagination nature of future post Cold War conflicts.

According to Patrick M. Hughes, “Terrorism will remain a major transnational problem, driven by continued ethnic, religious, nationalist, separatist, political and economic motivations” Moreover, it seems that it would take precedence over all other security problems, standing as the major global crime and the most threatening form of conflict. This is particularly the case because as Marenches and Adelman point out “Future Conflicts, at least in the near term, may not involve commitments of massive number of troops to fixed battle zones, but will likely involve combating small units of fanatical terrorists using Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and other sophisticated tactics and technologies.” 

Not only was the US able to anticipate this new kind of war, the Pentagon was also able to present a report about terrorism concluding that it is the most dangerous form of “Asymmetric Warfare”, and like Hughes, specialists also anticipated that terrorism will stand as the major global crime. In this report it was anticipated that the greatest danger that will face the international community is terrorism, which was not very new itself, yet what was very insightful is the conclusion that in the future it will take a new form for several reasons. First of all, according to the report, terrorism is no longer about an individual or a group of people who have secretly agreed to assassinate someone for vengeance or even for political reasons. Also it is no longer about groups who belong to certain Leftist or Rightist ideologies. As Heikal argues terrorism has transformed and adopted itself to the modern time and it now involves groups who are stretching all over the world, including elements who are fighting for a cause, or people who are suffering from poverty, social inequality or injustice and terrorism is simply the channel through which all these different elements express their suffering. This observation of course is very close to our earlier reference to “Non-Systemic Forces” and to Barber’ idea of “Jihad” linking all three ideas by explaining how terrorism can be utilized by forces outside of the international system or marginalized by it in order to attack it as hard as possible.

These thoughts or motivations of ‘terrorist groups’ are not the only features of terrorism that have changed or adapted to the modern or post-modern era, but also their methods. Technology has reached the terrorism arena, giving it strength and enabling it to reach places it previously could not reach. Not only this, but since globalization is the symptom of the new century, terrorism has also taken advantage of it. The globalization factor, as Heikal puts it has made world markets become very close to being like “spider nets”, very interconnected, inter-related and endless, which could help terrorists cause severer damages. The Internet has not only connected people together in the fields of arts, science and entertainment, but it has also brought the terrorists together: people who are oppressed and angry, along with criminals and smugglers of weapons and drugs. It has simply made terrorism a more sophisticated threat that is very difficult to control.

In addition, Clark points out, that among the reasons why terrorism is widespread, is that countries that were considered stable are witnessing religious, ethnic and other internal conflicts, and will witness separatist movements that will try to fragment large countries into small ethnic areas. These conflicts might be old conflicts or new ones occurring due to demographic changes, changes in political regimes or due to religious/ideological changes. These changes that have caused a disturbance in the international community could be related to the end of the Cold War, in the sense that during the Cold War, the world was roughly divided into two factions, those who belonged to the Soviet bloc, and those who belonged to the American/Western bloc. Naturally, this structure of the Cold War period has engulfed any possible separatists movements and prevented this fragmentation. Yet, after the end of the Cold War, and the break up of the Soviet Union, this previously engulfed diversity somewhat exploded. Clearly, Clark’s remarks are somewhat similar to the predictions of Kaplan in his theory of the “Coming Anarchy”.

Therefore, we have seen, how the phenomenon of terrorism has become a very crucial global crime, as it now shapes the nature of future conflicts and makes the new “enemy” a very ambiguous one. This global crime with its distinctive nature has made it very hard for the international community, especially the only super power and it allies to maintain acceptable levels of security. As Clark puts it, “By the advent of the 21st Century, not only is it likely that many of the conflicts facing the United States and her allies will be of an asymmetrical and developing nature, it is also likely that the threats will occur in diverse and differing vectors.” Finally, we can conclude that whatever the New World Order is, it is haunted by a new form of conflict (that of course being Asymmetric Warfare), which most dangerously takes shape in the international crime of terrorism.

Terrorism, whether defined or not, still exists, and states who are subjected to attacks that they consider a form of terrorism act in retaliation. For example, when a country as powerful as the US was subjected to terrorist attacks on September 11, that were acknowledged by most of the world to be undertaken by El-Qa’eda Network led by Usamma Bin Laden, it has not only retaliated powerfully by embarking on a military campaign against the Taliban Regime that harbored Bin Laden in Afghanistan, but also by organizing a massive military and security “War on Terror”. And this by now, is a war that has seen the US settle many scores with different parties, and therefore it has extended its operations to offering the Georgian and the Philippine governments assistance against Muslim radicals in their respective territories, came up with notion of “Axis of Evil” made up of North Korea, Iran and Iraq, included Hamas, Jihad and Hizbollah in its list of terrorist organizations and accused Syria of backing them, took a biased stance in the Middle East by particularly choosing to ignore the Palestinian National Authority after accusing it on being soft on terrorism, and finally it is currently trying as hard as possible prepare the international community for the use of force to change the regime in Iraq. Moreover, in the meantime, the Russian Federation found a pretext for its actions in Chechnya using the “War on Terror” slogan, which was also done by India regarding its conflict over Kashmir with Pakistan and by Israel in defending its operations in the Occupied Territories.

According to Naom Chomsky, “The new millennium quickly produced two terrible new crimes, added to the gloomy record of persisting ones. The first was the terrorist attacks of September 11; the second, the response to them.” Undoubtedly, terrorism is a global crime that causes the death of innocent civilians and threatens their sense of security, which is something totally against norms of international law and human rights. However, the issue becomes more intolerable when the response to terrorism is itself a violation of international norms.

When people with yellow or black or brownish skin, with Communist or Islamic or Nationalist credentials, murder their prisoners or carpet bomb villages to kill their enemies or set up death squad courts, they must be condemned by the United States, the European Union and the “civilized” world. We are the masters of human rights, the liberals, the great and good who can preach to the impoverished masses. But when our people are murdered-when our glittering buildings are destroyed- then we tear up every piece of human rights legislation, send of the B-52s in the direction of the impoverished masses and set out to murder our enemies.

A just world where actions are driven by good intentions is a mere Utopia that does  not really exist. However, the question of whether the “War on Terror” is an American war or a “World’s War” is very controversial one, and the intentions behind this war arouse many suspicions. Yet, it in order to grasp what has happened in Afghanistan, and consequently grasp the so-called “War on Terror”, and before jumping to any conclusion regarding US motives or policy objectives, we must understand how the American decision-making process is shaped. Any careful analysis of American history would point out to the fact that the “War on Terror” campaign is not the beginning of American Unilaterlaism, which probably dates back half a century or so.  Moreover, American history has witnessed a great isolationist tendency, where in the US, as Barber suggests, this is part of the independence myth. In demonstrating the American history of Isolationism, he portrays it as follows:

From the Monroe Doctrine to [the] refusal to join the League of Nations, from isolationism that preceded World War II, and from which [Americans] were jarred only by Pearl Harbor, to the isolationism that followed the war and that yielded partially to the Cold War and the arms race, and from the [American] reluctance to pay [their] UN dues or sign on to international treaties [like Kyoto] to [their] refusal to place American troops under the command of friendly NATO foreigners.

Moreover, Barber illustrates in his article how American politicians think, stating that: “that coalitions and alliances in war or peace are tolerable only to the degree that we [Americans] retain our sovereign independence in all critical decisions and policies; and that international institutions [like the UN] are to be embraced, ignored or discarded exclusively on the basis of how well they serve our sovereign national interests, which are entirely separable from the objectives of such institutions”.  Not only is American unilateralism apparent in history, or in political ideology, but also in the American mentality and its value system. Barber demonstrates that this unilateralist tendency is deeply rooted in the American mentality and is considered one of the normal results of the American independence myth. This myth is simply concluded in his words: “ Not the US. Wrapped in its national myths of splendid isolation and blessed innocence…encircled by two oceans and reinforced lately in its belief in sovereign invincibility by the novel Utopia of a missile shield. Thus, American unilateralism did not just pop up, on the contrary, the US has a long history of isolationist tendencies, followed by reluctance to pay the dues to international organizations, and finally resulting in a reluctance to cooperate and work inter-connectedly with other parties. American unilateralism could be a manifestation of how the US has never felt the need to compromise by abiding to international organizations’ agendas or working under the command of other parties under the NATO umbrella.

But, how is did the rise of terrorism influence the tendencies of unilateralism and isolationism? Smith argues that the US has ended its experiment with unilateralism and that it was apparent after September 11 that the US has worked on building exactly the kind of multilateral response that it previously avoided. He also argues that the future world order will witness a stronger US that is more likely to impose its leadership on its allies under the theme of the “War on Terror.” Fighting terrorism then becomes the ‘grand cause’ that would shape the forms of alliances that the US would undertake, through which it would be in a position to “provide leadership in world politics.” In spite of the fact, that Smith and others have evaluated the US attitude in its current war as the end of its unilateralism, because of certain coalitions that were built, there are also other very strong arguments backed with evidence that could prove otherwise.

As Chomsky claims, although the United Nations has issued resolutions denouncing terrorism and even though there was no anticipated veto, the US preferred to reject Security Council authorization and insisted on its right to act unilaterally in violation of international law. However, specifically in the case of war on Afghanistan, the US used article 51 of the UN charter which states that “nothing in the present charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the UN, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” Nevertheless with this quasi-legal pretext, and even if coalitions were made and regardless of the fact that the US campaign in Afghanistan has gained international approval, the UN umbrella was ignored intentionally.

The more complicated the problem is, the harder it is to find a comprehensive answer. However, after exploring theories and examining them in the light of  practical implications, we are able to derive certain conclusions. First let us address the main question: Where is the world heading? Are we heading towards a clash between civilizations? Or is it anarchy that will prevail? Or is it just a trauma that will pass and then the world will continue its assumed path towards Liberal Democracy?

Kaplan’s concerns about over-population and scarcity of resources and how they can be the reason for future conflicts are very legitimate, in the light of the wide-spread poverty, disease and indebtness that haunt most developing countries, which include the majority of the world’s population. Therefore, such a problem could play a major role shaping of our future. Unfortunately, the gap is even widening between the rich and the poor, which could lead to a division of the world, where as Kaplan argues, Fukuyama’s Last Man would continue to evolve in a constant path towards achieving greater power, wealth, technology and individuality, leaving behind the majority of the world to poverty, disease, ignorance and despair.

 It can also be argued that along those lines, cultural identity will play a major role because the poorer and more ignorant the people are, the more aggressive about preserving their traditions they get, holding to what is basic, which is as Huntington points out, “culture”. Moreover, the more the world is subjected to waves of globalization, as Barber suggests in his article “Jihad vs. Mc World”, an opposing tendency would originate to preserve the traditional, which could stretch to being Jihad for what is authentic and traditional, not necessarily in the Islamic but also in the global sense, as opposed to what is modern and part of globalization. Even though it is hard to accept a single theory as being the most accurate one, each approach presents us with arguments that would help us understand the New World Order. It is interesting to point out here that this term was developed mainly in the US as the world first entered the era of unipolar dominance, but today and more so in the future, it can be used to describe a reality no one foretold or imagined.

 

However, one less controversial issue, is the new kind of warfare that will prevail in the future, which we took a glimpse of on September 11, 2001. In the light of the current world structure, and the present-day levels of technology, a Third World War is impossible due to abundance of weapons of mass destruction, as it would simply mean the end of mankind. Moreover, due to the lack of a competitive power to the US, a conventional large-scale warfare is also not likely. Thus, this leaves us with “Asymmetric warfare”, with terrorism as the most powerful and dangerous expression of what it entails.

However, the problem with terrorism is that it is a notion that is still not defined. Simply, the phrase “one man’s freedom struggle is another’s terrorism” summarizes the problem. Terrorism, implies violence, terror, attacks on civilians that disrupt their peace, among many other meanings, yet a concept as general as this can include a lot of disputabledimensions. Given the magnitude  of the problem and the threat it poses to the international community as a whole and even to its major powers including the US, and given the fact that terrorism has now become a symptom of the Twenty First Century, or at least its opening years, a sound definition of the phenomenon becomes vital.

Further more, given the significance of terrorism, as an unprecedented security threat, it is clear that it will require the cooperation of the whole international community to curb this major global crime. And definitely this is unfeasible without agreeing on a universal definition for this complex phenomenon because this is a necessary first step before any agreement on a methodology to combat terrorism can be reached. This leaves us with the major problem of deciding how to tackle the issue, whether unilaterally or multilaterally, which immediately pushes us towards examining a possible role for the UN in combating terrorism, and more importantly drives us to examine US/UN relations.

 

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