The decline of old certainties has created a world of disarray

The decline of old certainties has created a world of disarray
By Philip Stephens
Published: February 3 2006 02:00 | Last updated: February 3 2006 02:00. Copyright by The Financial Times

The kaleidoscope turns faster. Monday morning saw the great powers huddled in confusion about Hamas's victory in the Palestinian elections. Hours later and United Nations Security Council brows were furrowing over Iran's nuclear ambitions. A short night's sleep and the talk turned to the warlords and Taliban in Afghanistan. Soon enough, the death of the 100th British soldier reminded us of Iraq.

It all seems too much - enough sometimes for diplomats to yearn for the dangerous simplicities of the cold war. Then, at least, the west knew where it stood. A wrong move in Washington or Moscow and we might all have been immolated. But everyone knew the rules. A neat strategic doctrine - containment - at once described, and circumscribed, the confrontation with communism.

Nothing that simple now. You can find threads other than of geography between today's conflicts. Resentment of American power is an obvious one; the west's dependence on Middle East oil another; the rise of Islamist fundamentalism a third. But the overwhelming sense they convey is one of events beyond control. A landscape once drawn in straight lines has somehow turned into a maze.

There are many reasons why a world no longer threatened by nuclear destruction should somehow seem more insecure. A big part of the problem is one of knowledge and perception. We know a lot more about what is happening in far-flung lands. The sheer speed of modern communications and the ubiquity of television news channels kindles the demand for swift solutions to intractable problems. Globalisation has made us at once more aware and more impatient. Politicians are caught in the headlights of rolling television news. Western democracy has become disdainful of the long view.

None of the challenges, threats, call them what you will, are susceptible to ready-made answers. "Shock and awe" fits the demands of the age - it took just weeks to depose Saddam Hussein. Nation building - witness the Balkans as well as Afghanistan and Iraq - is as costly as it is painfully slow.

Iran's nuclear ambitions, we are told, present an urgent challenge. Urgent enough for the permanent members of the Security Council to labour this week into the early hours to frame an ultimatum to Tehran. But, for all of the last chances, these ministers and diplomats were buying time. In moments of candour, they will acknowledge that, while they can impose penalties on the present Iranian regime, they cannot actually stop its nuclear programme. The best to hope for is delay and, eventually, a new leadership in Tehran.

The election victory of Hamas throws up the same disjunction between the expectations generated by summit communiqués and the grinding realities on the ground. Strip out the rhetoric from this week's joint statement from the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations - the so-called quartet - and they, too, are playing for time. There were many reasons why Palestinians chose as a government a group committed to the violent destruction of Israel. Behind every one of them lay the failure of the peace process.

The politicians must bear their share of the blame for the public mood of impatience. They have run scared of asking for sacrifices from their electorates. Ringing declarations about toppling tyrannies and rescuing broken states come easily enough. The costs in blood and treasure of commitments spanning decades are glossed over.

Unsurprisingly, voters grow weary, providing a ready audience for those who style themselves foreign policy "realists". Scornful of anything that smacks of idealism, these realists sell a different brand of snake oil. Bring the troops home from Iraq. Why bother with the Palestinians if they want to elect Islamist extremists? Let the Afghan warlords fight it out.

Behind all of this lies another reason for the present disarray. We are living in a world without a system, without a shared set of rules and assumptions. A succession of geopolitical shocks - the collapse of communism, the emergence of Islamist extremism, the rise of China and India - have erased familiar reference points. We have found nothing to replace them.

US power remains the dominant reality of the age but there is no certainty as to how it will be deployed. In the immediate aftermath of September 11 2001, George W. Bush made a bonfire of America's multilateralist commitments. The new global dynamic would be the permanence of US hegemony. Such hubris has not survived Iraq. Nor can it make the necessary accommodations with China and other rising powers.

The US administration has since embraced diplomacy. The effort to find consensus with Moscow and Beijing over Iran speaks to a change of heart. But is it permanent or temporary? The White House, we know, has not rediscovered an affection for the old multilateralism.

Mr Bush holds up the spread of democracy in the broader Middle East and beyond as the new lodestar of America's "global engagement". To my mind, that is a worthy aspiration. But it is not a magic wand. Mr Bush has sidestepped the difficult trade-offs between short-term costs and long-term gains. The result is an ambition without the necessary strategic framework.

The US president is not alone in his confusion. Europe has yet to acknowledge that the soft power that served it so well during the second half of the last century is sometimes unsuited to today's hard challenges. The EU hankers for old certainties - easier to cling on to the past than imagine a different future.

We should not romanticise the cold war. For much of the time it was an excuse to turn our heads away from the sort of conflicts that now preoccupy us. Today's world is a less brutish place. Who, save the cold war strategists, paid much heed to Afghanistan during the 1980s? Many of the humanitarian and peace-making interventions now undertaken would not have been contemplated 30 years ago. The multilateral institutions built after the second world war were not the perfect construction they may sometimes seem in retrospect.

Somehow, though, mutually assured destruction and a global rule book provided the security that flows from predictability. They also bred patience. That is what we have now lost. It was Tony Blair who, in the aftermath of September 11, evoked the rotating images of the kaleidoscope to describe the threatening uncertainties of the new world. It was an apposite metaphor. Everything is still changing.