This week, we’re sharing a 2018 essay by Richard Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, on what nineteenth-century conflicts can tell us about the current world order. History has shown that “even the best-managed order comes to an end,” Haass wrote. But although eventual demise is assured, “the timing and the manner” of the ending are not.
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1814 and 1815, European leaders created the Concert of Europe, “the most important and successful effort to build and sustain world order until our own time.” At first, it worked “because each state had its own reasons for supporting the overall system,” Haass noted. But as the decades passed, “great-power comity” fell apart, and wars broke out. By the eve of World War I, when it had become obvious that the order had all but collapsed, “it was far too late to save it—or even to manage its dissolution.”
Two centuries after the founding of the Concert of Europe, today’s “liberal order is exhibiting its own signs of deterioration,” warned Haass. “Good policy and proactive diplomacy,” however, “can help determine how that deterioration unfolds.” It is up to the United States to prevent “a breakdown in U.S.-Chinese relations, a clash with Russia, a conflagration in the Middle East, or the cumulative effects of climate change,” wrote Haass. “The good news is that it is far from inevitable that the world will eventually arrive at a catastrophe; the bad news is that it is far from certain that it will not.”
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