Order, Counter-Order, Disorder? Alliances, Orders, and International Security

Abstract

I argue that while Braumoeller makes a very convincing case that war remains with us, he also acknowledges that the rate of conflict initiation declined at the end of the Cold War, which is significant. The policy insight here is not to declare victory over war and move on, but to avoid the “irony of Pinkerism (Mitzen 2013:525)” – wherein national leaders schooled in Steven Pinker’s (2012) arguments about the long-term decline of violence behave in ways that make those arguments into a “self-defeating prophecy (Fazal and Poast 2019:83).” I contend that assiduously and continually reconstructing international order is central to mitigating this risk of Pinkerist triumphalism leading to complacency, an unwinding of the current international order, and a rise in international conflict. I further contend that alliances are central to such order: since at least the end of World War II, US alliances have anchored regional orders in both Asia and Europe (Rynning and Schmitt 2018; Goh and Sahashi 2020).

Keywords: Order, Alliances, International Relations, Security, International Organizations