An era of international conflict management appears to be at an end. In the three decades since the conclusion of the Cold War, the United States, its allies, and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations have devoted considerable political, military, and financial resources to mediating regional conflicts and civil wars and rebuilding fragile states. In a period of muted major power tensions and relatively rare classic interstate wars, the United States was able to focus on intrastate conflicts—those within states—and the attendant risks of regional instability and transnational terrorism. Despite disputes such as that over Iraq, the United States often worked through the UN Security Council and looked for common ground with China and Russia over conflict management. Now, with the return of major power competition, strategic priorities are changing. For policymakers in Washington, the contest with Beijing provides the framework for the years ahead, demanding a reorientation of U.S. resources away from conflict management and toward countering Beijing and limiting Moscow’s ambitions.
This new strategic focus has been all too obvious in discussions of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which many U.S. officials and commentators have justified in terms of a pivot to China. The rapid collapse of the Kabul government also inspired a wave of retrospective criticism of American nation-building in Afghanistan, with wider implications for future U.S. involvement in managing civil wars and regional conflicts. For some critics, this crisis demonstrated that many of the policy tools the United States has applied to fragile states—from international stabilization forces to development aid—are inherently flawed. This is overstated. Numerous studies have shown that many peacemaking and peacekeeping efforts have succeeded in creating stability and saving lives since the end of the Cold War. But it will be hard for policymakers to shake off memories of Afghanistan.
For some U.S. national security analysts, weak states and regional conflicts now look like a costly distraction and, worse, entirely irrelevant in the context of competition with China and Russia, meriting little U.S. attention. Others, influenced by Russia’s involvement in Syria and Ukraine, see these secondary conflicts as theaters for proxy wars similar to those that ravaged the Third World during the Cold War. By this logic, Washington and its allies will need to continue to participate in these conflicts, but primarily for the sake of weakening Beijing’s or Moscow’s allies rather than constructing sustainable peace. A third school of thought emphasizes that unstable states and violent regions continue to offer sanctuaries for terrorist organizations—as well as breeding grounds for other threats, such as organized crime networks and future pandemics—and the United States will still need to address these potential dangers, while avoiding the trap of heavy-duty nation-building.
Despite their differences, these arguments lead to common conclusions about the future of international conflict management. One is that the political space for the United States and its allies to collaborate with China and Russia on preventing and resolving conflicts will shrink, with all three powers likely to take a zero-sum approach to emerging conflicts (many commentaries on events in Afghanistan have taken such a stance and scored the U.S. withdrawal as a win for China). The second conclusion is that the major powers are unlikely to find much common ground through multilateral mechanisms that are meant to facilitate such cooperation over these conflicts, such as the UN Security Council. The third is that, even if the major powers can agree on the need to deal with civil or regional wars, they will not want to invest in deploying large, drawn-out peacekeeping or stabilization missions with bold state-building mandates. If all these arguments are correct, the era of international conflict management that followed the end of the Cold War is truly over, and the international mechanisms that made it possible—including the United Nations and other international organizations—will drift into irrelevance.
Yet a more optimistic, if still quite bleak, outlook for international conflict management efforts is possible, one that advocates for some degree of major power cooperation in an era of geopolitical rivalries. (From here on, the United States, China, and Russia are considered “the major powers” despite huge differences in their capacities.) And the multilateral conflict management mechanisms and institutions that the United States and other powers built up after the Cold War, including the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), continue to be relevant. These institutions still have a role to play in limiting and mitigating major power competition in acute crises and providing frameworks for limited but useful cooperation elsewhere.
Richard Gowan, UN Director. Originally published in Council of Foreign Relations.