Chapter 10: Unipolar World
On 29 November 1990, the fifteen members of the United Nations Security Council took their seats in New York. Many of them were represented that day by their foreign ministers rather than by their usual ambassadors. The seating alone told the world that the vote about to be taken mattered.
Four months earlier, Iraq had invaded its small, oil-rich neighbour Kuwait and declared it annexed. The Council had condemned the invasion and imposed economic sanctions. Iraqi forces had not moved.
The draft resolution on the table did something the Council had not done since the Korean War of 1950. It authorised states cooperating with Kuwait to use ‘all necessary means’ to reverse the invasion if Iraq did not withdraw by 15 January 1991. In the careful language of diplomacy, ‘all necessary means’ is how the Council says war.
For forty years such a vote had been close to impossible. The United States and the Soviet Union each held a veto in the Council, and each had used it to block the other. Now the Soviet Union voted in favour. China, which could have stopped the resolution, abstained instead. Only Cuba and Yemen voted against. The resolution passed by twelve votes to two.
Something had changed in world politics, and that evening in New York showed it. Thirteen years later the same state would go to war against the same country — and this time the Council would refuse to approve it.
Map
Map 10.1 Caption: Kuwait sits at the head of the Persian Gulf, with Iraq to its north and Saudi Arabia to its south. Brief: Regional map of the Persian Gulf as it stood in 1990. Label Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait City; shade Kuwait to mark the invaded state and shade Iraq in a second tone. Mark the Persian Gulf and the Iraq–Kuwait border. Do not mark troop movements or battle lines. All international boundaries to be shown as officially recognised by the Government of India.
10.1 The Meaning Of A Unipolar World
Political scientists often describe the world of states as having ‘poles’. A pole is a centre of power around which other states arrange themselves. Weaker states shelter near a pole, borrow strength from it, or work to keep away from it.
Counting the poles is a rough but useful way of describing an international order. It tells you how many states are strong enough to matter everywhere, rather than only in their own neighbourhood.
A superpower is a state whose military, economic and technological strength allows it to act anywhere in the world. Its decisions shape events far beyond its own region, and no distant conflict is truly beyond its reach.
A unipolar world is an international system in which one superpower stands so far ahead of every other state that no rival, and no realistic group of rivals, can balance it. Others may disagree with it, but they cannot match it.
Counting The Poles
Before the Second World War, several European states, along with Japan and the United States, each held a share of world power. Such an order is called multipolarity — many centres of comparable strength.
Between 1945 and 1991 the world was bipolar. Bipolarity is an order built around two rival centres of roughly equal strength, which in those years were the United States and the Soviet Union. Most other states leaned towards one of the two, or worked hard to lean towards neither.
That order ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, which you studied in the previous chapter. One of the two poles simply ceased to exist as a state.
The United States was then the only state left with a worldwide network of military bases, the largest economy, and a clear lead in advanced technology. Scholars often call the years that followed a ‘unipolar moment’ — a period, not a permanent condition. The three shapes an order can take are set out in Fig. 10.1-1.
Diagram
Fig. 10.1-1 Caption: The same set of states can be arranged around many centres of power, two centres, or one. Brief: Three simple panels side by side, labelled ‘Multipolar’, ‘Bipolar’ and ‘Unipolar’. In each panel show small circles for ordinary states and larger circles for centres of power, with thin lines linking small circles to the centre they lean towards. Multipolar panel: four large circles of similar size. Bipolar panel: two large circles of equal size, with the small circles divided between them and a few standing apart. Unipolar panel: one very large circle with most small circles linked to it. No country names, no flags, no map.
What The Single Superpower Can Do
Describing an order as unipolar is not the same as saying the superpower gets everything it wants. It means that certain kinds of action become possible for one state and remain impossible for the rest. Five features of such an order are worth holding on to.
A wide power gap. The leading state is not merely first; it is ahead by a very large margin. It can move troops, aircraft and supplies across oceans and keep them there for years, which almost no other state can do.
The power to set the agenda. The strongest state has an unusual ability to decide which problems the world discusses. When it treats an issue as urgent, alliances, funding and diplomatic attention follow; when it loses interest, other states find it hard to keep that issue alive.
A security umbrella. Many states rely on the superpower’s protection instead of building large armed forces of their own. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, an alliance of North American and European states formed in 1949, and the security treaty between the United States and Japan are both examples. Depending on a state for your defence makes opposing it costly.
Soft power. Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than through force or payment. Films, music, universities, technology companies and a political model that others admire can all persuade people abroad without a single soldier moving.
The power to shape norms. A norm is a shared expectation about what counts as acceptable behaviour. The leading state has an unusual say in deciding whether an action is described as ‘defending human rights’ or as ‘aggression’ — and that description shapes how other states respond to it.
Taken together, these five features add up to what is usually called hegemony: the leading position of a single state, held not only through force but through rules, alliances and ideas that others accept or cannot resist. The state that holds it is called the hegemon.
The Limits Of One Pole
A unipolar order is not an empire. The superpower does not govern other states, collect taxes from them, or make their laws. It has to persuade, bargain and pay, and it is regularly refused.
Its lead also rests on things that can change. Economic growth elsewhere, the cost of long wars, and the willingness of its own voters to pay for a global role all affect how far ahead it stays.
Scholars therefore disagree about how long the unipolar moment lasted, and whether it has already ended. Some point to the continuing military lead of the United States; others point to the growth of Chinese economic power and to Russia’s willingness to use force in its own region.
The Security Council vote you read about at the start of this chapter shows why the question matters. In the Council, each of the five permanent members holds a veto — the power to block a decision single-handedly. Whether that power is used, and whether the strongest state feels obliged to seek approval at all, tells you a great deal about the shape of the order.
10.2 The Meaning Of Unilateralism
Unilateralism is an approach to foreign policy in which a state decides and acts on its own, without the consent of other states or of international organisations. The state judges the situation for itself and then does what it has judged best.
The word covers far more than war. A state acts unilaterally when it imposes trade restrictions on another country by its own decision, when it withdraws from a treaty it has signed, or when it refuses to accept the ruling of an international body.
Unilateral action is not the same as acting entirely alone. A state may invite partners who agree with it, share some of the costs with them, and still keep every important decision in its own hands.
That last point matters for the case studies later in this chapter. What makes an action unilateral is not the number of flags on the battlefield. It is who took the decision, and on whose authority.
Why It Is A Live Question
Every state claims sovereignty — the supreme authority to decide matters within its own territory. Acting on one’s own judgement therefore looks like the most natural thing a state can do.
The difficulty is that a state’s actions rarely stop at its own borders. Sanctions damage another country’s economy, and the use of force takes lives in someone else’s territory.
International law tries to draw a line here. The Charter of the United Nations, signed in 1945, does not leave the use of force to each state’s own judgement.
10.2.1 Unilateralism And Multilateralism
The opposite approach is multilateralism, in which states act together through shared institutions and agreed procedures. The decision is not one state’s to take; it is negotiated, voted on and recorded.
The Security Council is the clearest example, because the Charter gives it the main responsibility for international peace and security. Trade disputes settled through the World Trade Organization, and military action taken through an alliance, follow the same logic.
Multilateral action buys something valuable: other states are far more likely to accept an action they helped to authorise. It also costs something — time, compromise, and the risk that agreement never arrives. Table 10.1 sets the two approaches side by side.
Read down the middle column and one thing stands out. Every advantage of unilateralism is an advantage of speed and freedom, and every disadvantage is a loss of acceptance by others.
The table cannot tell you which approach was right in any actual case. It compares two ways of deciding, not two records of results, and a decision taken slowly and lawfully can still turn out badly.
10.2.2 Why A Unipolar Order Makes Unilateralism Easier
Any state may act unilaterally. A small state can refuse to sign a treaty or expel a foreign diplomat without asking anyone’s permission.
What changes in a unipolar order is the price. Acting alone becomes cheap for the leading state and expensive for everyone else.
Three reasons explain this. First, the superpower rarely needs the resources of others to carry out what it has decided, so it does not have to buy their agreement.
Second, no rival is strong enough to impose serious costs on it afterwards — no counter-alliance forms, and no economic punishment really bites.
Third, during the bipolar years each superpower’s veto blocked the other in the Security Council. Once that rivalry ended, the Council could finally act — but the strongest state also had less reason to fear being blocked, and less reason to wait for the Council at all.
The costs of unilateralism are therefore real but delayed. They appear as suspicion among allies, as a weakened rule that others may later ignore, and as a longer, lonelier burden once the fighting is over.
This is the tension the rest of the chapter examines. In each of the three case studies that follow, notice how much international authority the United States sought, how much it received, and what difference that made afterwards.
10.3 Iraq: Operation Desert Storm, 1990–91
The first large military operation of the post-Cold War years was fought over a country most students of politics had rarely thought about. Kuwait is a small state at the head of the Persian Gulf, wealthy because of oil and militarily weak.
Its powerful neighbour to the north, Iraq, was governed by President Saddam Hussein, who had led the country since 1979. In the summer of 1990 he decided to take Kuwait by force.
10.3.1 Causes Of Operation Desert Storm
The causes fall into two groups. One set explains why Iraq invaded; the other explains why so much of the world decided to reverse the invasion rather than accept it.
Why Iraq Invaded Kuwait
The invasion itself. On 2 August 1990, Iraqi forces crossed into Kuwait, occupied the country within a day, and shortly afterwards declared it annexed as part of Iraq. Saddam Hussein defended the action by arguing that Kuwait had historically belonged to Iraq and had been separated from it by British colonial decisions in the past.
Debt after a long war. Iraq had fought a war against neighbouring Iran from 1980 to 1988. It emerged with its economy exhausted and foreign debts of more than 80 billion US dollars, much of it owed to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Baghdad argued that it had fought that war on behalf of the Arab states of the Gulf and that its debts should therefore be cancelled. Kuwait refused. Iraqi leaders treated the refusal as a deliberate attempt to keep their country weak.
Oil and production quotas. Both states belonged to the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, a body of oil-producing states that sets production limits for its members in order to keep prices steady.
In the late 1980s Kuwait produced more than the quota allotted to it. The extra supply pushed world oil prices down, which cut exactly the income Iraq needed to rebuild and to service its debts.
Iraq also accused Kuwait of drawing oil from the Rumaila field, which straddles the border between the two countries, by drilling at an angle beneath it. Taking Kuwait would settle all of these disputes at once, and would place roughly a fifth of the world’s known oil reserves under one government.
Why The World Responded
A challenge to a basic rule. One state had swallowed another and abolished it. If that stood, the rule that borders may not be redrawn by force would have been shown to be worthless.
The Security Council met on the day of the invasion and passed Resolution 660. Its language was short and unusually blunt.
Notice how narrow the demand is. The Council asks for the map of 1 August 1990 to be put back, and says nothing about who should govern Iraq. That limit would shape everything the coalition did, and did not do, seven months later.
Within days the Council added sanctions — penalties such as bans on trade, investment or travel, imposed to force a change of policy without using troops. It later authorised member states to use force if Iraq had not withdrawn by 15 January 1991.
A resolution, however, records what governments were willing to agree to in public. It cannot tell you why each of them voted as it did, or how far any of them was prepared to go to enforce what it had signed.
Oil and the shape of the Gulf. Kuwait lies between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, then the world’s largest oil exporter. If Iraq held Kuwait and could threaten Saudi Arabia, it would have great influence over the oil supply of Europe, Japan and much of Asia.
This turned a quarrel between two Arab states into a question about the world economy. Governments far from the Gulf concluded that their own economies were at stake.
A superpower without a rival. During the Cold War, a crisis of this kind would probably have divided the Security Council, with each superpower shielding its own friends. That was no longer the situation.
The Soviet Union was in deep difficulty at home and did not block the resolutions. The United States was therefore free to organise a response, and it built a coalition that included European allies alongside Arab states such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
10.3.2 Main Events Of Operation Desert Storm
The military response came in two stages: a long defensive build-up, and then a short war. TL 10.1 sets out the sequence.
Operation Desert Shield
The first task was defensive. From August 1990, American troops, aircraft and equipment were moved into Saudi Arabia to guard it against a further Iraqi advance. This build-up was called Operation Desert Shield.
It grew into the largest deployment of United States forces abroad since the war in Vietnam. By January 1991 more than 500,000 American personnel were in the region, alongside forces from about thirty-five other countries, including Britain, France, Egypt and Syria.
The Arab states in the coalition mattered for reasons that were political rather than military. Their presence made it much harder to describe the operation as a Western attack on an Arab country.
The Air Campaign
The deadline of 15 January passed without an Iraqi withdrawal. On 17 January 1991 the coalition began Operation Desert Storm with an air campaign directed at Iraq’s command centres, air defences and communications.
The bombing continued for about five weeks. It made heavy use of weapons that were new to most people watching — aircraft designed to avoid radar, cruise missiles, and bombs guided to their targets.
This was also the first war carried live into people’s homes. Television networks broadcast the bombing as it happened, which gave audiences a vivid picture of the weapons and almost no picture of what happened where they landed.
The Ground War And The Ceasefire
The ground offensive began on 24 February 1991 and lasted about four days, which is why it is often called the One Hundred Hour War. Coalition columns moved across the desert, cut off the Iraqi forces in Kuwait, and drove them out.
Large numbers of Iraqi soldiers surrendered. Retreating Iraqi convoys on the road north out of Kuwait were attacked from the air and destroyed, and the scale of that destruction later became a subject of criticism.
On 28 February 1991 President George H. W. Bush ordered a halt to the fighting. In the weeks that followed Iraq accepted the ceasefire terms set by the Security Council, which required it to recognise Kuwait’s sovereignty, return prisoners of war, and accept inspections to verify the destruction of its weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, so called because a single one can kill very large numbers of people.
The Halt At The Border
The most consequential decision of the war was a decision not to act. The coalition stopped at the Iraqi border and did not march on Baghdad or remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Two reasons were given at the time. The authority the coalition held was to liberate Kuwait, and nothing more; and several Arab governments that had joined to free Kuwait would not have supported overthrowing the government of a neighbouring Arab state.
Judged against the ideas in section 10.2, Operation Desert Storm was close to the multilateral end of the scale. The action was authorised in advance, fought by a broad coalition, and limited to the aim the Council had set. Thirteen years later, the same country would be invaded on a very different basis.
10.4 Iraq: Operation Iraqi Freedom, 2003
The 1991 war left Iraq defeated but intact, its government still in office and its people living under sanctions. For twelve years the two states circled each other, with inspections, air patrols and periodic crises.
Then, in March 2003, the United States and a much smaller group of allies invaded Iraq and removed its government. Nothing in the shape of the world had changed in those twelve years. What had changed was how one government thought about danger.
10.4.1 Causes Of Operation Iraqi Freedom
A New Doctrine After 2001
On 11 September 2001 nearly three thousand people were killed in coordinated attacks on the United States. You will read about those attacks and their immediate consequences in section 10.5; what matters here is what they changed in American strategic thinking.
President George W. Bush and his advisers concluded that the old rules of self-defence no longer fitted the danger. Traditionally, a state was entitled to use force after it had been attacked.
The new approach, widely called the Bush Doctrine, rested on pre-emption — striking first against a threat that has not yet materialised, on the argument that waiting for the attack may mean waiting too long. If a hidden network could obtain a devastating weapon, the reasoning ran, the first warning might also be the last.
Iraq Named As A Danger
In his State of the Union Address of January 2002, President Bush grouped Iraq with Iran and North Korea as an ‘axis of evil’ threatening world peace. The phrase placed a regional quarrel inside a global struggle.
Two specific charges were made against Iraq. American officials said that Saddam Hussein was secretly developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in defiance of the ceasefire terms he had accepted in 1991.
They also alleged links between his government and al-Qaeda, the network responsible for the 2001 attacks. The evidence for that second claim was weak, and it was disputed at the time by analysts in several countries.
Cartoon 10.1 comments on the distance between the confidence of the public argument and the evidence that the search on the ground could supply.
Cartoon
Cartoon 10.1 Caption: The case for war was argued with more certainty than the search itself could support. Brief: On the left, a speaker at a tall podium labelled ‘The Case’, gesturing broadly at a large wall chart covered in question marks. On the right, and drawn much smaller, two figures in inspectors’ jackets crossing an enormous empty desert with a magnifying glass and a clipboard. Exaggerate the size of the podium and chart against the tiny figures and the vast emptiness. No national flags, no caricature of any named individual, no religious or community symbols.
The cartoonist’s claim is about proportion. The podium and the chart are drawn far larger than the search itself, which suggests that the public argument had grown well beyond anything that had actually been found.
A cartoon, though, argues in one direction only. It cannot show what the intelligence reports of the time really said, and it cannot tell you whether the officials at the podium believed their own case or knew it to be thin.
Inspectors, And A Divided Council
Under heavy international pressure, Iraq allowed United Nations weapons inspectors to return in late 2002. In November of that year the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, giving Iraq a final opportunity to meet its disarmament obligations.
The inspectors’ reports were mixed. They found no stockpiles, complained of incomplete Iraqi cooperation, and asked for more time to finish the work.
In February 2003 the United States Secretary of State, Colin Powell, presented his government’s case to the Security Council. It did not persuade the Council.
France, Germany, Russia and many developing countries opposed war without a fresh authorisation. They argued that the inspectors should be allowed to finish, and that an invasion would destabilise the region.
The disagreement was not only about Iraq. It was about who decides: whether force requires the approval of the Council, or whether a state may act on its own reading of a threat.
No second resolution was obtained. Unable to secure one, the United States assembled what it called a ‘coalition of the willing’, which included Britain, Australia, Poland and several smaller states.
Suspicions About Motives
Beyond the public argument, many critics suspected other purposes: influence over Iraq’s very large oil reserves, permanent military bases in the region, and a reshaping of Middle Eastern politics along lines the United States preferred.
Whether such motives were decisive is disputed, and no settled verdict exists. What can be said is that the suspicions were widespread, and that they weakened international acceptance of the war before it began.
10.4.2 Main Events Of Operation Iraqi Freedom
Invasion And Collapse
The invasion began on 20 March 2003. Its opening phase, known as ‘shock and awe’, used massive air and missile strikes intended to paralyse the Iraqi leadership rather than merely to destroy its equipment.
Ground forces advanced from Kuwait up the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Baghdad fell on 9 April 2003, and television carried pictures of a large statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down.
On 1 May 2003, standing on an aircraft carrier beneath a banner reading ‘Mission Accomplished’, President Bush announced that major combat operations were over. The conventional war had indeed ended in about three weeks. The far harder phase was only beginning.
Two Findings That Shaped Everything After
The first was an absence. No stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons were found in Iraq, then or later. The main public justification for the invasion had rested on a claim that turned out to be untrue.
The second was a decision. In May 2003 the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority, the body then governing occupied Iraq, dissolved the Iraqi army and barred members of the ruling Ba’ath Party from public employment — a policy known as de-Ba’athification.
The aim was to break the old government’s grip on the state. The effect was to leave hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers and officials without work or standing, and to abolish the police and administration that keep order in any country.
Insurgency, Capture And Withdrawal
In December 2003 American troops captured Saddam Hussein near his home town of Tikrit. It was a major symbolic moment, and it did not slow the violence.
Between 2004 and 2006 a fierce insurgency developed — an armed revolt by irregular fighters against a government or an occupying force, fought through ambushes and bombings rather than open battle. Former soldiers, nationalist groups and Islamist militants attacked coalition troops, Iraqi forces and civilians.
Fighting also broke out between armed groups drawn from Iraq’s Sunni and Shia communities, over control of neighbourhoods, ministries and resources. Out of this period emerged al-Qaeda in Iraq, the organisation from which the group later known as the Islamic State developed.
The United States sent additional troops, trained new Iraqi forces, and gradually handed formal authority back to an elected Iraqi government. American forces completed their withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, more than eight years after the invasion began.
The Two Iraq Wars Side By Side
Set the two operations against each other and the difference is not mainly military. Both were won quickly on the battlefield. They differ in the authority under which they were fought, and in the company the United States kept.
The table shows a shift from the multilateral end of the scale towards the unilateral end, in the space of twelve years and against the same country.
What it cannot settle is whether that shift was justified. A table records what was authorised and by whom; it cannot tell you whether the danger in 2003 was real, and that is the question the whole dispute turned on.
10.5 Afghanistan: Operation Enduring Freedom, 2001
Afghanistan is a landlocked country in south-central Asia, bordered by Pakistan, Iran, three Central Asian republics, China and, in the north-west of Jammu and Kashmir, India. Mountainous and poor, it had already been at war for more than twenty years by 2001, first against Soviet forces and then among rival Afghan groups.
Out of that long conflict the Taliban had emerged. This armed movement captured Kabul, the capital, in 1996, went on to control most of the country, and imposed a severe legal and social order in the areas it held. Map 10.2 shows where all of this was happening.
Map
Map 10.2 Caption: Afghanistan is landlocked, and its long eastern border with Pakistan runs through difficult mountain country. Brief: Regional map of Afghanistan and its neighbours. Label Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China and India, and mark Kabul, Kandahar and the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. Shade Afghanistan. Do not mark troop movements or areas of control. The full extent of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, must be shown as officially defined by the Government of India, and all other international boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India.
10.5.1 Causes Of Operation Enduring Freedom
The Attacks Of 11 September 2001
On the morning of 11 September 2001, four passenger aircraft were hijacked in the United States. Two were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, which collapsed.
A third struck the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, near Washington. The fourth came down in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers tried to retake control of the aircraft.
Nearly three thousand people were killed. The United States identified al-Qaeda, a transnational armed network led by Osama bin Laden, as responsible.
The attacks changed how governments thought about security. The danger had come not from a rival state’s army but from a network of individuals operating across borders, with no territory to defend and no capital city to threaten.
Why Afghanistan
A network still has to be somewhere. Al-Qaeda’s leadership, training camps and planning were based in Afghanistan, which the Taliban then governed.
The United States demanded that the Taliban hand over Osama bin Laden and close the training camps. The Taliban refused. That refusal turned a search for a network into a war against a government.
The Legal And Political Basis
The United States did not claim a right to strike first here. It claimed the older and better-established right of self-defence, on the ground that an armed attack had already occurred.
The Security Council recognised that right in a resolution passed immediately after the attacks. So did the alliance to which most of America’s closest partners belong.
For the first time since it was founded in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation invoked Article 5 of its founding treaty. That article treats an armed attack on one member as an attack on all of them, which is what collective self-defence means in practice.
This is worth pausing on. The war in Afghanistan began with wider international backing than either Iraq operation — a Council that agreed, an alliance that mobilised, and dozens of states offering troops, bases or intelligence.
10.5.2 Main Events Of Operation Enduring Freedom
Operation Enduring Freedom was launched on 7 October 2001. Its course over the following twenty years is set out in TL 10.2.
The Rapid Campaign
The opening phase combined heavy air strikes with small numbers of special forces on the ground. Crucially, those forces worked alongside the Northern Alliance, a coalition of Afghan groups that had been fighting the Taliban for years.
This combination worked quickly. Kabul fell in November 2001, and the Taliban government collapsed within about two months of the first strikes. Its leadership retreated into rural districts and across the border into Pakistan.
The military objective had largely been achieved. What followed was a task of a different kind altogether.
From Fighting To Building
In December 2001 the Security Council authorised an International Security Assistance Force to help stabilise the country. It drew troops from NATO members and many other states, and NATO took command of it in 2003.
The aim now was nation-building — the attempt to construct working state institutions, such as an army, a police force, courts, schools and an elected government, in a country where they are weak or absent.
In 2004 Afghanistan adopted a new constitution, and Hamid Karzai was elected president in the country’s first presidential election under it. On paper, a legitimate government was in place.
The Long Insurgency
The Taliban regrouped in rural provinces and along the mountainous border with Pakistan. From about 2006 they mounted a growing insurgency of ambushes, bombings and targeted killings, and steadily regained influence in parts of the countryside.
The United States responded by raising troop numbers, first under President Bush and then, on a larger scale, under President Barack Obama. Reconstruction, meanwhile, was hampered by corruption, weak administration and the fact that authority in many districts lay with local commanders rather than with Kabul.
In May 2011, almost ten years after the attacks, American forces located and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. It was the war’s clearest single success, and it did not end the fighting in Afghanistan.
Withdrawal
After twenty years, the United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of August 2021.
A Multilateral War That Turned Unilateral
Operation Enduring Freedom began as close to a collective action as the post-Cold War years produced. It did not stay that way.
As the mission widened from destroying a network to rebuilding a state, decisions increasingly followed American priorities, timetables and judgements. From 2003 attention, troops and money were pulled towards Iraq, and Afghanistan was managed largely on American terms.
The case therefore complicates the neat contrast drawn in section 10.2. Unilateral habits can grow inside an action that began with wide agreement, simply because one participant is paying for most of it and taking most of the risks.
10.6 India’s Relations With The USA After 1991
For most of the Cold War, India and the United States were polite strangers. India followed non-alignment and refused to join either bloc, while the United States built a military alliance with Pakistan. India’s own closest partner in defence and diplomacy was the Soviet Union.
Two events in 1991 changed the basis of the relationship at once. The Soviet Union disintegrated, so India’s principal partner ceased to exist. In the same year India began liberalisation — the opening of its economy by reducing state controls over trade, investment and industry.
An India that traded freely and no longer leaned on Moscow was a different proposition for Washington. TL 10.3 marks the main steps of the three decades that followed.
10.6.1 Defence Relations
From Estrangement To Contact
The first steps were modest and practical. In 1992 the two navies held their first joint exercise, named Malabar, which has continued and grown ever since.
In 1995 the two governments signed the Agreed Minute on Defence Relations. It created something that had simply not existed before: regular contact between the two defence establishments, with dialogues, visits and exchanges on a settled footing.
The Setback Of 1998
In May 1998 India conducted nuclear tests. The United States responded with economic and military sanctions required under its own law, and defence cooperation stopped.
The freeze did not last. Sanctions were lifted in 2001, and after the attacks of that September the two governments found a common interest in countering terrorism.
Trust was restored more slowly than contact. The turning point was an agreement on civil nuclear cooperation, begun by a joint statement in July 2005. India agreed to separate its civil and military nuclear facilities and place the civil ones under international inspection; in September 2008 the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which regulates nuclear trade among its members, granted India an exemption from its rules, and the agreement came into force that year.
The importance of this step for defence was indirect but large. It ended India’s exclusion from high-technology trade and made the sale of advanced American equipment politically possible.
The Framework And The Foundational Agreements
In June 2005 the two countries signed a ten-year framework for the defence relationship, setting priorities such as maritime security, disaster relief and counter-terrorism. It was renewed a decade later.
In 2016 the United States designated India a ‘Major Defence Partner’, a status it has given to no other country outside its formal alliances. It allows India access to technology normally reserved for treaty allies, without India becoming one.
Three agreements, often called the foundational agreements, followed. Each is technical, and together they explain what the partnership now permits.
- The logistics agreement of 2016 allows each country’s forces to use the other’s bases for refuelling, repair and supplies, on a reimbursable basis.
- The communications agreement of 2018 gives Indian forces access to secure American communication systems fitted to the equipment India buys.
- The geospatial agreement of 2020 provides for the sharing of high-quality mapping, navigation and satellite data.
Both agreements of 2018 and 2020 were signed at the ‘2+2’ dialogue, a format begun in 2018 in which the foreign and defence ministers of the two countries meet together. In 2018 India was also granted Strategic Trade Authorisation status, which eases the export of sensitive high-technology goods to India.
Exercises And Equipment
Joint exercises now run across all three services — Malabar at sea, Yudh Abhyas for the armies, Vajra Prahar for special forces and Tiger Triumph across the services together. Their purpose is not only training. Forces that have practised together can work together in a crisis, which is what militaries call interoperability.
India has also become a significant buyer of American defence equipment, including heavy transport aircraft and maritime patrol aircraft used to watch the Indian Ocean. Fifty years ago almost none of this would have been available to India from that source.
A Partnership, Not An Alliance
One point must be kept clear. India has not joined an alliance, and there is no treaty obliging either country to defend the other.
India continues to buy a large share of its equipment from Russia, votes independently at the United Nations, and describes its position as one of strategic autonomy — keeping the freedom to choose its partners and its policies case by case, rather than committing in advance to one camp.
10.6.2 Trade Relations
The Opening After 1991
Before 1991, high tariffs and tight controls on foreign investment kept trade between the two economies small. Liberalisation changed that, and American firms began to see India as a market and as a place to invest.
The early years were bumpy. The United States pressed India hard on intellectual property rights — the legal protection given to patents, copyrights and trademarks — and on tariffs, and threatened action under its own trade laws.
Political contact improved matters. A ministerial-level Trade Policy Forum was set up in 2005 to discuss trade and investment disputes before they hardened into quarrels.
What The Two Countries Trade
Trade has grown enormously since. Two-way trade in goods and services now runs at well over a hundred billion US dollars a year, and the United States is among India’s largest trading partners.
India’s main exports to the United States include:
- pharmaceutical products, where India is a major supplier of generic medicines;
- gems, jewellery and precious stones;
- electrical machinery and equipment;
- information technology and IT-enabled services.
India’s main imports from the United States include:
- mineral fuels and oils, including crude oil;
- machinery and mechanical appliances;
- aircraft and defence equipment;
- medical devices.
India generally runs a trade surplus with the United States — that is, it sells more to the United States than it buys from it. A surplus is comfortable for the country that has it and is a standing grievance for the country on the other side, which is why it appears in almost every negotiation between the two.
Points Of Friction
Growth has not removed disagreement, and the disputes are worth knowing because they recur.
In 2019 the United States withdrew India’s benefits under its Generalised System of Preferences, a scheme that had allowed certain goods from developing countries to enter the American market duty-free. India lost an advantage it had held for years.
Tariffs are the other constant. American duties on Indian steel and aluminium, imposed in 2018, were met with Indian duties on a list of American products, and tariff disputes have continued into the 2020s alongside continuing negotiations.
Two further complaints are made regularly by the American side: that India’s market remains harder to enter than it should be, and that its enforcement of intellectual property rights is weak. Indian negotiators reply that a developing economy is entitled to protect its farmers, its small industry and its access to affordable medicines.
Neither set of arguments is simply right. What the dispute shows is that a close partnership does not mean an easy one, and that trade quarrels are settled by bargaining rather than by friendship.
10.7 Summary
An international order can be described by the number of ‘poles’, or centres of power, it contains. The world was multipolar before 1945, bipolar between 1945 and 1991, and unipolar thereafter.
A unipolar world is one in which a single superpower is so far ahead that no rival, and no realistic group of rivals, can balance it. That order began in 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Such an order shows five features: a very wide power gap, the ability to set the international agenda, a security umbrella over other states, soft power, and an unusual say in what counts as legitimate behaviour. Together these amount to hegemony.
A unipolar order is not an empire. The leading state must still bargain, and its lead depends on economic growth, the cost of its wars and the patience of its own voters. Scholars disagree about whether the unipolar moment has already ended.
Unilateralism means deciding and acting on one’s own judgement, without the consent of other states or international organisations. Gathering willing partners does not make an action multilateral; what matters is who took the decision, and on whose authority.
Multilateralism means acting through shared institutions and agreed procedures. It costs time and compromise, and buys acceptance. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter makes force the exception, but leaves open who decides when an exception applies.
A unipolar order makes unilateralism cheap for the leading state and expensive for everyone else, because it rarely needs others’ resources and no rival can impose serious costs afterwards. Its costs appear later, as lost legitimacy and a longer burden.
Operation Desert Storm followed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990. Its causes were Iraq’s claim to Kuwait, debts of over 80 billion US dollars after the war with Iran, disputes over oil quotas and the Rumaila field, and the strategic position of Kuwait beside Saudi Arabia.
The world responded because a state had been abolished by force. The Security Council condemned the invasion, imposed sanctions and authorised force — a response made possible because the Soviet Union no longer blocked it.
Its main events were Operation Desert Shield, the air campaign from 17 January 1991, the four-day ground offensive from 24 February, and the ceasefire of 28 February. The coalition halted at the Iraqi border, because its authority extended only to liberating Kuwait.
Operation Iraqi Freedom followed a change of doctrine after 2001. Pre-emption — striking first against a threat not yet realised — replaced the older rule that force follows an attack.
Its other causes were the naming of Iraq in the ‘axis of evil’, allegations about weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda, unfinished inspections, a divided Security Council that gave no fresh authorisation, and widespread suspicion about other motives.
Its main events were the invasion of 20 March 2003, the fall of Baghdad on 9 April, the declared end of major combat on 1 May, the finding that no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons existed, the dissolution of the Iraqi army and ruling party, the insurgency of 2004–2006, and withdrawal in 2011.
Operation Enduring Freedom followed the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the Taliban’s refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden or close al-Qaeda’s camps. It rested on the right of self-defence under Article 51, and NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history.
Its main events were the rapid campaign of October–November 2001 fought with the Northern Alliance, the international force created under a United Nations mandate, the constitution and presidential election of 2004, a long insurgency, the killing of bin Laden in 2011, and the withdrawal of August 2021 followed by the collapse of the Kabul government.
Across the three cases the pattern is not military but political. Authorisation was fullest in 1991 and absent in 2003; and Afghanistan shows that unilateral habits can grow inside an action that began with wide agreement.
India’s relations with the United States were transformed after 1991 by the end of the Cold War and by liberalisation. Defence ties grew from the Malabar exercise of 1992 and the Agreed Minute of 1995, were suspended after the nuclear tests of 1998, and resumed when sanctions were lifted in 2001.
The civil nuclear opening, begun in 2005 and completed with the Nuclear Suppliers Group exemption of 2008, ended India’s exclusion from high-technology trade. India was designated a Major Defence Partner in 2016, and the logistics, communications and geospatial agreements followed between 2016 and 2020.
India nevertheless remains a partner and not an ally. It signs no mutual defence treaty, continues to buy Russian equipment, and describes its position as strategic autonomy.
Trade grew from a small base after 1991 to well over a hundred billion US dollars a year, with India exporting medicines, gems, machinery and IT services, importing fuels, machinery, aircraft and medical devices, and running a trade surplus. Tariffs, the withdrawal of preferences in 2019, market access and intellectual property remain live disputes.
10.8 Key Terms
Bipolarity — an international order built around two rival centres of roughly equal strength, as between 1945 and 1991.
Coalition — a group of states acting together for a shared purpose, usually for a limited time and a limited aim.
Hegemony — the leading position of a single state, held through rules, alliances and ideas as well as through force.
Insurgency — an armed revolt by irregular fighters against a government or an occupying force, fought through ambushes and bombings rather than open battle.
Liberalisation — the opening of an economy by reducing state controls over trade, investment and industry.
Multilateralism — acting together with other states through shared institutions and agreed procedures.
Multipolarity — an international order containing several centres of power of comparable strength.
Nation-building — the attempt to construct working state institutions, such as an army, police, courts and an elected government, where they are weak or absent.
Pre-emption — striking first against a threat that has not yet materialised, on the argument that waiting may be fatal.
Sanctions — penalties such as bans on trade, investment or travel, imposed on a state to force a change of policy without using troops.
Soft power — the ability to get what one wants through attraction rather than through force or payment.
Strategic autonomy — keeping the freedom to choose one’s partners and policies case by case, instead of committing in advance to one camp.
Superpower — a state whose military, economic and technological strength allows it to act anywhere in the world.
Trade surplus — the position of a country that sells more to a trading partner than it buys from it.
Unilateralism — deciding and acting on one’s own judgement, without the consent of other states or of international organisations.
Unipolar world — an international system in which one superpower is so far ahead that no rival, or realistic group of rivals, can balance it.
Veto — the power of a permanent member of the Security Council to block a decision single-handedly.
Weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, so called because a single one can kill very large numbers of people.
10.9 Points to Ponder
If a state is strong enough to act without anyone’s permission, what does it still gain by asking for it?
In 1991 a war was authorised in advance and stopped at Iraq’s border; in 2003 a war without fresh authorisation removed a government. Does needing approval limit what a war can achieve, or only what it is allowed to attempt?
A resolution, a cartoon and a table of trade figures are all evidence. For what kind of question is each of them useless?
If institutions built with foreign money and foreign troops collapse once that support is withdrawn, were they ever really institutions?
India describes itself as a partner rather than an ally. What does a state gain by refusing to promise in advance whom it will defend, and what does it give up?
Can an order still be called unipolar if the single superpower repeatedly fails to get the outcome it wanted?
10.10 Objective Questions
- An international order in which one state is so far ahead that no rival can balance it is called a
- multipolar world
- bipolar world
- unipolar world
- unilateral world [1 mark]
- The air campaign of Operation Desert Storm began on
- 2 August 1990
- 17 January 1991
- 24 February 1991
- 20 March 2003 [1 mark]
- Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations deals with
- the imposition of economic sanctions
- the right of individual and collective self-defence
- the prohibition on the use of force
- the election of the Secretary-General [1 mark]
- The expression ‘coalition of the willing’ was used in 2003 to describe
- the members of the Security Council that voted for war
- the group of allies that joined the invasion without a fresh Council authorisation
- the Arab states that supported the liberation of Kuwait in 1991
- the Afghan groups that fought alongside American forces [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq without a fresh resolution of the Security Council. Reason (R): France, Germany and Russia argued that the weapons inspectors should be given more time.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): The United States has designated India a Major Defence Partner. Reason (R): India and the United States have signed a treaty obliging each to defend the other.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Match the event in Column A with the year in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. First Malabar naval exercise | i. 2003 |
| b. Launch of Operation Enduring Freedom | ii. 1992 |
| c. Fall of Baghdad | iii. 2021 |
| d. Completion of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan | iv. 2001 |
- Fill in the blank: Striking first against a threat that has not yet materialised is known as ______. [1 mark]
10.11 Check Your Concepts
Define a unipolar world. [2 marks]
State any two ways in which a state may act unilaterally without using military force. [2 marks]
Differentiate between unilateralism and multilateralism. [3 marks]
Give three reasons why Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example from this chapter, what is meant by pre-emption. [4 marks]
Why did the coalition halt at the Iraqi border in 1991 instead of advancing to Baghdad? Evaluate the claim that this was the most important decision of that war. [4 marks]
Explain any two disputes that have arisen in trade relations between India and the United States since 1991. [4 marks]
Discuss the causes of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and explain why the prospect of the invasion divided the international community. [6 marks]
Describe the main events of Operation Enduring Freedom, from its launch in 2001 to the withdrawal of 2021. [6 marks]
Describe the growth of defence relations between India and the United States after 1991, and explain why India is described as a partner rather than an ally. [6 marks]
10.12 Source & Passage-Based Questions
- Study the description of this cartoon and answer the questions that follow. A heavy wooden door stands alone in an open field. A signboard above it reads ‘Security Council’. A line of small figures waits patiently in front of the door. A very large figure, carrying a suitcase marked ‘Decision’, is walking around the side of the door instead of passing through it.
- Which idea from this chapter is the cartoonist illustrating? [2 marks]
- What is the cartoonist suggesting by drawing the door standing alone in an open field? [2 marks]
- State one thing this cartoon cannot tell you about the decision in the suitcase. [1 mark]
- Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. State A sends its forces across the border into State B, a small neighbour with large oil reserves, occupies it within a day and declares it annexed. State A argues that State B was historically part of its own territory and that its independence was the work of a colonial power. Within days the Security Council condemns the action and demands an immediate withdrawal. State A does not comply.
- Which principle of international order has State A violated, and why does that violation concern states far away from the region? [3 marks]
- Identify two options short of war that are available to the Security Council at this stage. [2 marks]
- If a coalition later frees State B, what would decide whether its action counted as unilateral or multilateral? [2 marks]
- Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. A country’s parliament is debating a logistics agreement with a much stronger power. Under the agreement, the two countries’ forces may use each other’s bases for refuelling and supplies, with each paying for what it uses. One member warns that the agreement will end the country’s independence in foreign policy. Another replies that it creates no obligation to fight anyone’s war and that the country remains free to buy weapons from any source.
- Which concept from this chapter is the second speaker relying on? Explain it in your own words. [3 marks]
- Give one argument, drawn from this chapter, that supports the first speaker’s fear. [2 marks]
- What information would help the parliament decide between the two views? [2 marks]
10.13 Practice With Data
- Look again at Map 10.1 in this chapter.
- Name the countries that lie immediately to the north and to the south of Kuwait. [1 mark]
- Explain, using the map, why the occupation of Kuwait alarmed oil-importing countries in Europe and Asia. [3 marks]
- By January 1991 more than 500,000 American personnel had been assembled in the Gulf region, alongside forces from about thirty-five other countries.
- What do these two figures together suggest about the purpose of the build-up before 17 January 1991? [2 marks]
- State one thing these numbers cannot tell you about the coalition. [2 marks]
- Using the master timeline (TL 10.4), work out how many years passed between the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom and the completion of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and between the invasion of Iraq and the completion of the withdrawal from that country. Show your working. What do the two figures together suggest about the phase that follows major combat? [4 marks]