America's days as sole super-power over?

The recent expansion in BRICS has brought to fore yet again that the days of unipolarity are finally over. Though the widely spread tentacles and influence levels of the American power still keep it in the global forefront yet its decisive impact is widely debated.

Despite America’s huge influence, the end of the Cold War blew away some of its perceptions and so helped to chart a new political geography which had been taking shape in the shadows of the Cold War. Essential elements in the accepted formulation of world politics suddenly seemed to be false and many impressions went haywire. The most crucial failure to emerge out of the fall of the Soviet Union was the final breakdown of the much-dreaded belief in the concept of bipolarity.

Though doubts started to emerge after the resurrection of Japan after 1945 and the later inclusion of China in global affairs made bipolarity look quaint yet such was the strength of the Cold War matrix that Japan had been regarded as an adjunct of the United States and China of the USSR.

As a power struggle, the Cold War had the appearance of a traditionally territorial contest but its ideological wrappings gave it a scope with no territorial bounds. From the American point of view, it extended to China and all parts of the world supposedly open to Chinese influence but the reintroduction of China into world affairs had the opposite effect for it caused the first major breach in the bipolar mirage as Yugoslavia provided the first but lesser breach. It must be kept in view that for much of the world the Cold War dictated the pattern of world politics. The Cold War was an enormously costly and destructive conflict, notwithstanding that it took comparatively few lives. It was a power struggle of a familiar kind between mutually distrustful antagonists with ever-evolving ideological additives but it had also two distinguishing features, both of them profoundly misleading.

The protagonists, for whom the new category of superpower was invented, were opposed in a pattern which was neither a duel between exclusive autocracies nor a mutable constellation of several powers like the European states system which it superseded.

The fact of the matter was that the superpowers were two and supposedly roughly equal but in truth they never were equal. And this eventuality was widely known and acknowledged. The United States was superior to the USSR in material resources, in education and invention and in governmental skills and principles. Though these aspects were not made part of any logical debate about the functionality of superpower phenomenon yet the disparity was made manifest when the Cold War wrecked the Soviet communist economy without doing comparable damage to American capitalism.

This started to become manifest after the demise of Brezhnev as the Soviet system was unable to prepare adequate leadership material for the future and left the union under the fragile watch of octogenarian leadership with its members kept on dying with regular intervals weakening the hold over the huge state that was kept together by the apparent use of force.

The special feature of the Cold War was the existence of nuclear weapons which were deemed to be specific to superpowers and were considered the hallmark of their supremacy. However, with the passage of time other states also acquired them taking their sting out of the equation and they virtually became paper tigers though the perceived horrors associated with them kept their awe intact.

Though nuclear weapons are potentially devastating but they are rated to be inefficient weapons of war barely credible political weapons and not used after the Second World War. In fact, more money and resources were spent to keep them safely in their arsenal and the most important sign of bipolarity was recognised to be their efforts to contain nuclear weapons.

It was a widely acknowledged fact that nuclear weapons made war supremely irrational, conferred more power on fanatics than on sanely calculating statesmen and distracted attention from the undiminished incidence and mounting toll of non-nuclear wars.
One of the most significant offshoots of the Cold War was the strengthening of NATO alliance that not only survived the Cold War but actually outlasted it.

Despite the overweening influence of NATO during the Cold War, the American point of view was gradually challenged by the European members of the alliance that became manifest when America tried to assess its own strength against the Iraq conflict but that lasted just a year and the Gulf War of 1991 demonstrated among other things that the United States had ceased to be a virtually unchallengeable and necessary ringmaster in world affairs. Although indubitably a dominant power, it no longer commanded the same kind of leadership, no longer possessed a simple touchstone whereby to test and tune its foreign policies and might no longer choose to act in concert rather than alone.

These facts however reduced the sense of relief felt by the fall of Soviet Union and kept the tensions within the European theatre intact.

Another factor that challenged the American unipolarity was the gradually deteriorating relationship between the US and the United Nations as the pressure exerted by large number of member states resulted in creating tremendous discomfiture for America. The UN is committed to preservation of sovereignty of member states and upholds the independence of each of its members along with explicitly forbidding intervention in the domestic affairs of other states unless the Security Council finds a state guilty of a threat to peace, a breach of the peace or an act of aggression.

The non-committal status of the UN was a contradiction in terms for the US for this fundamental, although qualified, immunity of the state from intervention severely restricted the capacity of the UN to discharge its obligation to uphold human rights since, on the one hand, it frequently could not do so without forcible intervention and, on the other, such intervention was no less frequently blocked by a veto – or threat of a veto – in the Security Council.
The movement of events however frequently created disunity in the Security Council in the case of a powerful member, determined on action, was opposed by a majority in the Council forcing it to abandon its purpose or proceeding in defiance of the law as was borne out by the operations against Iraq after the war of 1991 and against Serbia in 1999 that made the US to intervene in breach of the law of the Charter.

The consequences included a diminution of the UN’s effectiveness and prestige and a blow to the aim of strengthening the rule of law in international affairs. So, there were at the core of the international system tensions between the UN and its more powerful members and with the end of the Cold War the United States, uniquely powerful, found itself in a fateful position. As a consequence, America found it difficult to map a course between leadership and high-handedness and has to exercise extreme caution thereby reduction in its status as a superpower. This where countries like China and India emerged as protagonists of bringing back the multipolarity in international affairs and BRICS is its manifestation. TW