By Samuel Goldman The Week

On the afternoon of Aug. 5, 1990, President George H.W. Bush appeared at a press conference on the South Lawn of the White House. After reviewing developments related to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Bush took questions from reporters. The last elicited the most memorable words of the crisis, and perhaps of Bush’s whole presidency. “This will not stand,” Bush insisted, “this aggression against Kuwait.”

Bush’s awkward grammar and delivery made the remark an object of satire, most famously in the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. It was memorable, though, less because it was funny than because Bush’s words expressed a particular vision of international politics. Born in the wake of the Second World War but made plausible by the collapse of Soviet power, that vision promised an American-led world in which states would fight only in defense of recognized territorial boundaries, limiting their rivalries to economics, sports, and culture. In his address to a joint session of Congress in September, Bush would describe that vision as a “new world order”. Others spoke of a “new global community“, the “end of history“, or the “rules-based international order.”

Despite the apparent success of the First Persian Gulf War, the new world order never lived up to its billing. Within just a few years, a series of wars in the former Yugoslavia demonstrated that the ghosts of Europe could not so easily be exorcised. Elsewhere in the world, ethnic, ideological, and religious clashes continued with little relief. Sept. 11 reminded us that we were not immune to those tensions. The wars of occupation that followed raised justified doubts about whether our leadership possessed the competence or wisdom to meet the grandiose standards that they set for themselves. By the 2010s, the revival of great power competition with China was conventional wisdom. And the election of Donald Trump raised serious questions about whether the American public was willing to continue paying the economic, military, and political costs of liberal hegemony.

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