The New International Environment

Abstract

Crucial changes in the international system during the past few decades have affected the fundamentals of international politics. Geopolitics has declined in importance as the balance of power concerns that shaped US policy in the twentieth century have diminished. The nuclear revolution and the increasing cost of war have rendered conquest among great powers unthinkable. China is a less plausible threat to Eurasia than Germany in 1917 and 1941 or the Soviet Union after World War II (WWII). Simultaneously, other threats have arisen. The spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and the rise of transnational groups that have the will and the capability to deliver lethal strikes without the surety of retaliation pose new and unsettling danger to the United States and other nation-states. Other threats that pose a global threat and can be fought only through collective action, including global warming, pandemics, cyber attacks and extinction of species, have also become pressing emergencies that require global action. As Stephen Van Evera puts it, never in modern times have the world’s major powers had less reason to compete with each other or more reason to cooperate together for the solution to common problems (Van Evera, 2008). This is not to say that geopolitics is not important. The connection of both oil and terrorists to, among other regions, the Middle East, shows regions still matter.