An equivalent system was set up after World War II with a peace anchored by the Allied Powers, decolonization, and the US-Soviet rivalry. That system has lasted for about 80 years and is showing significant strain.
What? No it hasn’t. The cold war ended by 1992 at the latest. At that point the US achieved total, unipolar hegemony over the world and began exercising it. Clinton’s “interventions” in Kosovo, Africa, etc. The Bush era Neo-Cons, those were all results of a new era of unchallenged American power and hegemony. That marked a new era.
Right now the world, led by China and Russia as well as other members of BRICS are trying to buck that total dominance and hegemony of the US and set up a multi-polar world but the US is not letting go, it is not ceding power, it has replaced international law as set out in agreement with the victorious powers of WW2 with “rules based order” which means its way or the high-way, the rule of their might and their wants and nothing else matters. Trump is flexing that built up power, the fact they control SWIFT, the fact the dollar is world reserve currency, their incredible ability to do sanctions to anyone anywhere and put a big hurt on them for defying US interests and wants. He’s unleashing the full might, threatening sanctions, tariffs, straight up invasion to take Greenland or the Panama Canal, etc. All to do what? To maintain US primacy, to prevent the emergence of a multi-polar world where the US doesn’t dominate everyone else and set the terms and rules for the entire world.
So there are movements to try and strive towards a Westphalian (multi-polar) order led by China, Russia, and followed in those steps by other BRICS nations but they are cautious, they don’t want to anger the US and even China still backs down if the threats of sanctions gets too big. So right now we’re in a struggle to determine what kind of world we have either a continuation, a hardening of US empire and unipolar hegemony, unchallenged dominance of the world and its peoples to their dictates and benefits or else a multi-polar world structured around Westphalian principles of sovereignty of individual nations and cooperation and peace born out of multiple strong powers checking each other’s ambitions against other weaker nations.
The US ended an era of struggle and some independence for nations on its own after it won the cold war, it chose to build up its power, to break international law (Yugoslavia, Iraq, war on terror, sanctions regimes galore, etc), to replace it with “rules based order” which no one can solidly define the rules of because they’re ever shifted based on the wants and needs of the US.
It has still been a relatively peaceful time in human history post fall of the Soviet Union even when you include Iraqi and Afghani deaths as a proportion to the world’s population. Wars still happened in that relative time of peace, but those conflicts were relatively contained to not create a new great power war.
Great powers haven’t entered in open conflict on the scale of World War II, which was chosen as a bench mark.
It has if you think only conflicts in western land matter. What’s more, the US might launder its military operations within proxy organizations and banking institutions but it absolutely has wars going on even outside Iraq and Afghanistan. Whistleblowers have confirmed the CIA as being behind every major terrorist attack in Chechnya and Xinjiang, and financing paramilitaries all over the world, as well as dealing with narcos and creating huge waves of drug violence in México, Ecuador and Colombia just to name a few.
Millions are dead as a direct result of US intervention in Iraq alone.
I didn’t just provide one example, though. There are cycles of war and peace in Europe that got mapped out to the globe as European nations became the dominant powers. There are eras of wars where various great and lesser powers participate in more destructive wars because the international order has broken down and isn’t there to restrain belligerents. There are also times when costly wars don’t end with a lasting “peace”, but an armistice before fighting resumes.
We seem to be at a point where the post World War II international order is breaking down. When that happens historically, there is usually a big war and destruction on the order of magnitude of World Wars I and II.
What? No it hasn’t. The cold war ended by 1992 at the latest. At that point the US achieved total, unipolar hegemony over the world and began exercising it. Clinton’s “interventions” in Kosovo, Africa, etc. The Bush era Neo-Cons, those were all results of a new era of unchallenged American power and hegemony. That marked a new era.
Right now the world, led by China and Russia as well as other members of BRICS are trying to buck that total dominance and hegemony of the US and set up a multi-polar world but the US is not letting go, it is not ceding power, it has replaced international law as set out in agreement with the victorious powers of WW2 with “rules based order” which means its way or the high-way, the rule of their might and their wants and nothing else matters. Trump is flexing that built up power, the fact they control SWIFT, the fact the dollar is world reserve currency, their incredible ability to do sanctions to anyone anywhere and put a big hurt on them for defying US interests and wants. He’s unleashing the full might, threatening sanctions, tariffs, straight up invasion to take Greenland or the Panama Canal, etc. All to do what? To maintain US primacy, to prevent the emergence of a multi-polar world where the US doesn’t dominate everyone else and set the terms and rules for the entire world.
So there are movements to try and strive towards a Westphalian (multi-polar) order led by China, Russia, and followed in those steps by other BRICS nations but they are cautious, they don’t want to anger the US and even China still backs down if the threats of sanctions gets too big. So right now we’re in a struggle to determine what kind of world we have either a continuation, a hardening of US empire and unipolar hegemony, unchallenged dominance of the world and its peoples to their dictates and benefits or else a multi-polar world structured around Westphalian principles of sovereignty of individual nations and cooperation and peace born out of multiple strong powers checking each other’s ambitions against other weaker nations.
The US ended an era of struggle and some independence for nations on its own after it won the cold war, it chose to build up its power, to break international law (Yugoslavia, Iraq, war on terror, sanctions regimes galore, etc), to replace it with “rules based order” which no one can solidly define the rules of because they’re ever shifted based on the wants and needs of the US.
It has still been a relatively peaceful time in human history post fall of the Soviet Union even when you include Iraqi and Afghani deaths as a proportion to the world’s population. Wars still happened in that relative time of peace, but those conflicts were relatively contained to not create a new great power war.
Great powers haven’t entered in open conflict on the scale of World War II, which was chosen as a bench mark.
It has if you think only conflicts in western land matter. What’s more, the US might launder its military operations within proxy organizations and banking institutions but it absolutely has wars going on even outside Iraq and Afghanistan. Whistleblowers have confirmed the CIA as being behind every major terrorist attack in Chechnya and Xinjiang, and financing paramilitaries all over the world, as well as dealing with narcos and creating huge waves of drug violence in México, Ecuador and Colombia just to name a few.
Millions are dead as a direct result of US intervention in Iraq alone.
Still less than the dead of World War II
Sure, but this isn’t an "inordinately peaceful "time just because it isn’t as deadly as the single biggest war in all of history.
I didn’t just provide one example, though. There are cycles of war and peace in Europe that got mapped out to the globe as European nations became the dominant powers. There are eras of wars where various great and lesser powers participate in more destructive wars because the international order has broken down and isn’t there to restrain belligerents. There are also times when costly wars don’t end with a lasting “peace”, but an armistice before fighting resumes.
We seem to be at a point where the post World War II international order is breaking down. When that happens historically, there is usually a big war and destruction on the order of magnitude of World Wars I and II.