The American-Led World System Saves Lives And Prevents Wars – OpEd

Victory Day for World War II was celebrated recently on May 8, where eight decades have passed since the end of WWII. The world witnessed the defeat and the end of Nazism and fascism and the creation of the long peace by the West and the US has ensured global peace and stability.

The carnage, destructions and sufferings of both WWI and WWII have been unimaginable, and that ought to reaffirm the profound necessity for the world to appreciate and protect the rules-based world order that has been created and maintained since then, primarily by the holistic rule of law and peace dividends sustained by the United States as the primary custodian of this long peace and also among the biggest factors of the triumph of democracy and freedom and the victories of both world wars.

As Trump stated, if American tanks and ships were not involved, and if America were to isolate during both wars, victories would not be possible and the world now will be entirely different, with the absence of peace and order.

Playing a crucial role in critical moments, especially in D-Day landings and the defeat of Hitler, the US lost 400,000 service members and various military assets.

One player alone is insufficient to defeat the horror of Nazism and in preserving global peace, where the importance of the Soviet Union was also in play, losing around 27 million people during the war, including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilians in the war. Britain lost 384,000 soldiers and 70,000 civilians in the joint quest.

The Long Peace Must be Protected

Let’s be clear: the US-led order has been the greatest force for peace and human progress in modern history. The world has avoided a third world war that could end life on earth. Former enemies became allies. Over a billion people rose out of extreme poverty. Colonial empires ended, and a new era of long peace was maintained.

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States and its democratic allies constructed a rules-based international order unlike any prior global system.

This Western-led order, grounded in the basis of collective security, open markets, the rule of law, and liberal values – has propelled an era of critical peace and prosperity.

The long peace enjoyed since the end of WWII, has been pillared on the strength and efficacy of both the world systems and institutional capacity created by the US and the West, and the values and deterrent power and might of the US in both preventing and stopping wars.

For nearly eight decades, no great-power war has engulfed the world, a stark contrast to the first half of the 20th century.

This long peace has been largely underappreciated despite the fact that we are living in the most peaceful period of modern time. This stability is a direct dividend of the Western-led international order established after 1945,but this is now at risk of being dismantled by the forces out to undermine the current Western led order, with the persistent and strategic undermining of the US rules based order. 

Revisionist authoritarian powers seek to weaken the system of alliances and norms that has kept aggression in check. To understand how the US anchored order has preserved peace, saved lives, and deterred conflict, it is important to fist visualise how this order might be threatened by the current bandwagon of the world in ignoring this status quo of stability on the grounds of being smitten by the so called rise of the rest and the perceived inevitable decline of the West.

Contrary to these models and assumptions, the primary power and stability of the US and the West and their power supremacy have not ever been under threat by any of the rising powers out to challenge this primacy.

In all indicators of power, whether economic, military, technology, resources, demographics, and future trends, the US retains a significant power advantage, and no other power will come close to replacing this primacy in at least the next three decades.

However, this rules-based order and the long peace will be threatened if the world conveniently ignores it and if the US is weakened. For all its flaws,the Western-led order has been humanity’s best safeguard against global war and tyranny.

It has defeated totalitarian threats from fascism to communism to terror, protected the global commons and trade arteries, fostered unprecedented economic growth, saved lives through medical and technological inventions, prevented tyrannies and autocratic forces from unchecked human rights abuses, and championed humanitarian values.

All these make the case that the American-led rules-based system has been our time’s most important global force for peace and security.

The Long Peace Dividend: Deterrence, Democracy, and Rule of Law

The most overlooked achievement of this long peace and Western order is the prevention of another catastrophic world war. Before 1945, great-power conflicts were common with the likes of the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and countless earlier wars among empires.

World War II alone killed an estimated 70–85 million people (about 3% of the world’s population. The US-led initiatives to establish a new world order based on democracy and institutional governance, with the likes of the United Nations, NATO, and the Bretton Woods systems, helped to prevent conflicts and to minimise damages.

US military strength and nuclear deterrence dissuade any would-be aggressors from launching global war.

In essence, a dominant democratic superpower acted as a stabiliser, where the hegemonic stability theory helped to keep peace and deter wars.

Conflict-related deaths have fallen dramatically from mid-20th-century levels, reflecting the long peace under the post-WWII international order.

By the 21st century, war deaths worldwide had dropped to historically low rates – in most years, conflict killed fewer than 1 in 700 people globally. The avoidance of another great-power war is the chief reason. The Cold War ended without direct superpower combat. The post-1945 great-power stability has twice outlasted the interwar period and is the longest period of stability among the great powers in centuries. The international order anchored by U.S.-led alliances, nuclear deterrence, and democratic norms created a balance that made large-scale war infeasible. Hence, the world has reaped the reward in hundreds of millions of lives not lost to war.

Of parallel importance is the spread of democracy and the rule of law, which has created more peaceful relations: democracies rarely fight one another, as reflected in the democratic peace theory.

Countries that share the values of democracy and rule of law through institutions like the EU or U.S. alliances have virtually eliminated the likelihood of conflict among themselves. Western Europe, once the ground zero for two world wars, has seen 77 years without war between major states.

This has moved us away from the notion of might is right to a time when independent and sovereign nations would respect each other’s rights and rules, but this has now come under increasing threat without the US led prevailing power stabiliser if other powers continue to undermine this.

The Western liberal order won the 20th century, making democracy and free markets the prevailing paradigm worldwide. Millions in Eastern Europe were freed from dictatorship and the Cold War ended with the expansion of freedom and democracy and a liberal economic order that has seen the global economic progress today.

From fascism to communism to terrorism, the Western-led order has preserved the lives and freedoms of billions of people – those rescued from tyrannies, and those never caught in wars that were avoided.

As John Kennedy once said, “A mankind that has managed to avoid war is one that will find prosperity and progress.” The Western order has embodied that maxim. Defending free nations and deterring aggressors ensured that the latter half of the 20th century was far less bloody than the first. It is difficult to imagine any alternative system achieving the same record.

America as Global Policeman: Securing the Seas and Skies

American military preeminence has formed the global security backbone that all nations benefit from. On the high seas, the U.S. Navy has ensured freedom of navigation and the safety of maritime commerce for decades. The U.S. Navy’s dominance of the world’s oceans has made it as an indispensable guarantor of global trade, as 90% of global trade by volume travels by sea. Under Pax Americana those sea lanes have remained largely open and peaceful. No other power comes even close in having this capacity and might to ensure global peace and maritime order.

U.S. and allied naval forces patrol choke points like the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Strait of Malacca to deter blockades or piracy.

This resulted in energy supplies and goods flowing relatively freely, fueling the world economy. The US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain and Seventh Fleet in the Pacific act as constant stabilising presence in critical regions.

American-led security of the seas has been a true global public good – one often taken for granted. The US naval umbrella not only secures trade but also allows countries to forgo building massive navies of their own, thereby reducing arms races.

The stability of shipping routes enables astonishing expansion of global commerce, where exports as a share of world GDP quadrupled from about 5% in 1945 to over 20% by the 2000s, reflecting how much more interconnected the world economy became under a US protected trading system.

China benefited from this new economic order and the stability and security of the market system and the maritime route that are critical for its export oriented economy.

Beyond the seas, the US continued to lead in policing global airspace and outer space. The US Air Force’s global reach deters rogue states from threatening civilian aviation and American GPS satellites provide navigation free-of-charge worldwide, but borne by American taxpayers.

Prosperity Through Stability: Unprecedented Global Development

The Western-led order created conditions for a surge in global prosperity, lifting billions out of poverty and transforming the economic landscape. In 1950, much of Europe and Asia were still in ruins as a result of the wars and most of the world’s population lived in poverty. Today, the world economy is roughly $100 trillion in size. Global GDP per capita has tripled since 1945. Life expectancy worldwide has jumped from about 45 years in 1950 to over 72 years now, owing to better nutrition, healthcare, and technology diffusion. These gains were not inevitable, but rather they were nurtured by the Western system’s open markets, financial aid, and technological leadership.

Beyond the Marshall Plan, institutions like the World Bank funded infrastructure and industrial projects in developing nations.

The security provided by the US led peace allowed countries to spend resources on development rather than defense. Europe could demilitarise compared to its past. Japan, shielded by the US alliance, devoted itself entirely to economic growth, with minimal military spending.

Both China and India, which remained poor through the Cold War, saw spectacular economic rises in the 1990s to 2000s by integrating into the US led international economy.

China’s export-driven boom, lifting 800 million people out of poverty, and this was facilitated by access to Western markets and adherence to Western-devised rules of trade and investment.

The numbers of people living in extreme poverty worldwide dropped substantially. In 1990, more than 1.9 billion people, or 36% of the world’s population, lived under the World Bank’s extreme poverty line. By 2019, that number had fallen to about 650 million or around 8% of the population. Over 1 billion people lifted out of extreme poverty in one generation, where the stability and openness of the post-Cold War international order allowed capital and goods to reach more places, creating jobs and raising incomes.

The Western-led international order has been the first to act in cases of genocide, famine, or natural disaster, securing the sanctity of life. From the concept of responsibility to protect, to providing non-military humanitarian leadership, the order has sustained basic human principles and sanctity of life.

The New Threat: Autocratic Revisionism and the Erosion of Order

This order is now under threat, where the global pivot toward anti-US will unravel the fabric of international law and norms that have kept the peace. From China’s open defiance of maritime law in Asia to the constant undermining of the global financial and American security support, these create the buy in for a post-American order that new forces might lead if the US is weakened, but the new order would be far less stable, less free, and potentially more hazardous and risky for there is no precedent and no global experience for any of these new powers in even experiencing any form of pervasive global security and economic management, what more to lead the world in revising the old rules.

Replacing rule-of-law principles with raw power politics will endanger the world and push it back to the dangerous anarchic era of might is right.

The revisionist ideology will weaken the institutional deterrence, putting the world into a more dangerous phase of non abidance and non adherence to the rules based order, where affiliation will be based on economic entanglement and appeasement to the higher power based on the hard power threats.

The diminished role for international law will create spiralling security dilemma, arms races and a free for all where anarchy prevails in a survival-of-the-strongest era. The constraints and deterrence on war and abuse built up over 75 years, could deteriorate and erode quickly if this revisionist momentum is not checked.

The world would be entering a period of high risk, just like the unstable decades before 1914 or 1939, but with far deadlier weapons in play.

History serves painful lessons of what happens when global orders are overturned by aggressive powers. The world sleepwalked from the Concert of Europe into World War I; the failure of the League of Nations in the 1930s led to World War II.

Defending the Greatest Peace System in History

Defending the rules-based order does not mean resisting change or being blindly rooted to the conventional systemic approach, but reforms and changes can be made. Notwithstanding that, core facets must remain.

These include the notions that aggression is unacceptable, genocides and human rights abuses will never be tolerated, that all nations are bound by common laws, and that democracy and human dignity are worth protecting.

The order can endure and adapt as long as these ideals remain at the forefront of the Western alliance. If they are abandoned, we risk descending into an era of darkness again.

For all its flaws, the current global order dominated by the single Western power parity is still the best bet in preventing aggression, saving lives, and inventing new progress for mankind.

The world has grown more complacent and has taken the long peace brought by the US for granted, at its own peril.

The cost of upholding the order, from military spending to sacrifices made in supporting global security is real. But the cost of allowing it to crumble would be far, far greater, and the world has seen and enjoyed the dividends of the US and Western led efforts to safeguard it. Allowing this status quo to change or to erode is shooting ourselves in the foot.