Front Burner - An obituary for the post-war order

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

Humiliating the president of Ukraine in the Oval Office. Admonishing European leaders about migration and free speech. Voting alongside Russia against a UN resolution to condemn the invasion of Ukraine. Withdrawing from the World Health Organization and UN Human Rights Council. They are all signs from the Trump administration that point to a massive shift in America’s foreign policy and alignment with the very “rules-based” international order the U.S. led after WWII.But how did the world order as we know it come to be? And if it comes to an end, what could the future look like? Dominic Sandbrook, co-host of The Rest is History, takes us through the last 70 years of global politics and how we got to this turning point. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

The following is advertiser content from Emirates. When you're boarding the Emirates A380 with your Emirates Business Class Ticket, you can be assured that you're in good hands. The spacious lie-flat seats are designed with comfort and relaxation in mind, all so you can stretch out and unwind. On board, you'll have the opportunity to indulge in a world-class dining experience. The gourmet menus on board are all regionally inspired, ensuring that you'll be tasting dishes crafted with the freshest of ingredients and paired with a curated selection of fine wines. Complementary Wi-Fi allows you to stay connected if you so choose, or you can disconnect and embrace award-winning entertainment options. And if you have a stopover in Dubai, you'll have access to one of the world's most vibrant

and exciting cities. It's the sort of city you could visit countless times and always explore and experience something new. There's Business Class and then there's Emirates Business Class. Book now on emirates.ca. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm Jamie Presson. You're not in a good position. You don't have the cards right now.

With us, you start having cards. I'm not playing cards. What are you just thinking about? You're gambling with World War III. And what you're doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, far more than a lot of people said they should have. So by now you have heard some of that explosive meeting between Donald Trump, JD Vance and Ukraine's Vladimir Zelensky.

Beyond the bullying, shouting, demands for gratitude, there was this other really notable moment in the exchange. I'm not aligned with Putin. I'm not aligned with anybody. I'm aligned with the United States of America and for the good of the world. I'm aligned with the world. That naked admission is just the most recent signal from the administration as it pivots away from a world order that has defined global politics for seven decades. We saw a similar thing when JD Vance spoke to the Munich Security Conference, where instead of focusing on Russian aggression in Ukraine, he admonished European allies about immigration and free speech.

There are other examples too. Executive orders pulling the US.S. out of the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the Secretary of State has been told to look at all international organizations to determine if they are in line with American interests. This is a seismic shift in the world order and America's allies are, to be frank, scrambling. Western leaders hosted by the UK met not once, but twice last week to discuss their defense strategies and how to continue to support Ukraine without America.

We are at a crossroads in history today. This is not a moment for more talk. It's time to act, time to step up and lead, and to unite around a new plan for a just and enduring peace. To look back at how and why the world order as we know it came to be and why it is teetering now and also where it could go next, I'm joined by Dominic Sandbrook. He's a historian, the author of a series of books about post-war Britain, and co-host of one of the most popular history podcasts in the world, The Rest Is History.

Dominic, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Thank you for having me, Jamie. It's a massive honor. So when we talk about this rules-based international world order, we're talking about the way that countries have conducted foreign affairs and business after the Second World War. And could you just take us back there and explain how it came to be? Sure. So most of the institutions that now people equate with the global order or the Western-led global order

originated in the late 1940s. So the United Nations in 1945. At San Francisco, 200 men and women of 50 nations labored to build an organization that will outlaw war for all time. President Truman attends the last session of this conference, which the whole world has anxiously watched. Actually predated by both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which the whole world has anxiously watched. I'm actually predated by both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which in 1944, and then GATT, that's the ancestor of the World Trade Organization in 1947, and NATO in 1949. So you've got a quite a short window of time in which all those institutions were set up. And basically, to cut a very long story short, they

were set up by the victorious allies in the second world war they believed that there had been an initial attempt with the league of nations after the first world war that had failed and they wanted to bind the nations of the world more closely together with a series of institutions that they thought would set the rules that would avoid another world war so in other words what they didn didn't want was a rerun of the 1920s and 1930s. They wanted the economic institutions to prevent a rerun of the Great Depression, which they thought had given rise to all the nationalism and all the dictators. And they wanted the United Nations as effectively a talking shop where the different nations of the world, and that included the Soviet Union at the time, could get together and could discuss their differences without resorting to, you know, World War

straight away. If we had had this charter a few years ago, and above all the will to use it, millions now dead would be alive. If we should falter in the future in our will to use it, millions now living will surely die. And I think there are two really important elements of that for people to get their heads around. Number one is that so much of it was about the security of Europe.

Because of course, the two world wars had originated in Europe. And certainly for the Western powers, the priority was to avoid a third World War beginning with the confrontation along what became the Iron Curtain. So that was a really important element of it. And the other important element was about binding the United States into the world order. And that's why the whole Trump-Vance thing is so unsettling for people, because what

people wanted to avoid was the isolationism that had followed World War I. And they believed that basically you bind the United States in alliance with Europe to the security of Europe, and that's the way you'll avoid a future conflict. And just tell me a little bit more about how the United States became this leader of the post-World Order. Yeah, so I mean, lots of your listeners will remember

the United States didn't, of course, join either World War at the beginning. They like to enter these things late. Right. Yeah. Order. Yeah. So I mean, lots of your listeners will remember the United States didn't, of course, join either World War at the beginning. They like to enter these things late. So they joined the Second World War in 1941. December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. And Britain, which had previously been the world's preeminent kind of naval

financial power, imperial power, was increasingly exhausted by the war time commitment. So the United States became basically the banker, Britain's banker, lent Britain an awful lot of money. And the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was an extraordinary president, the only president to serve four terms, Roosevelt was determined, he wanted to drag the United States really kicking and screaming into the top table of world diplomacy. Whereas previously they stood aloof, Roosevelt said, no, no, no, no, we have to be absolutely

in on this. We have to drive it. We have to, we are the single most important player. We will restructure this world as we want it to be. And I am confident that the Congress and the American people will accept the results of this conference as the beginnings of a permanent structure of peace So it'll be an american world but effectively And here is where you know donald trump's partisans they might prick up their ears

He said we will pay for it So a lot of these institutions we will put up a lot of the money for them. And also, of course, the United States paid with the Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of the nations that have been exhausted by the Second World War. So what that means is that when you get to the end of the 1940s, as you enter the 1950s, the Cold War is now on in earnest, but the United States, rather than basically packing up, packing its bags and going home as it had done after the First World War, is now there at the top of the table as the kind of as the self-described leader of the free world and the British who had previously had that position, happy to let the Americans

do it because basically the British run out of money. And fair for me to say, I suppose to state the obvious here, this was just as much or even more about protecting America and the West's dominance as it was about bringing order and peace, right? Right. I mean, nations always have self-interests. There's no nation that behaves entirely altruistically and it would be bizarre to imagine them to do so. National Democratic leaders, you know, in particular particular have to answer to their electorates so. Roosevelt and then harry truman who succeeded him they would have said look. It's not just in the world's interests that we're doing this to avoid future wars to create a series of rules that everyone will follow to lend people money when they're in trouble and when they get in trouble and all that kind of thing but it it's in America's interests. We've learned, their argument would have been,

we learned the lessons in the 1920s and 1930s of standing in a loop, of isolationism. And basically if we want the United States to be safe, to be secure, to be rich, all of those kinds of things, the only way to do that is to get involved and to lead, not to basically pack our bags and go home. Can you tell me a little bit more about the Soviet Union? Russia did fight alongside allied forces to defeat Nazi Germany, but they were not part of this new global system.

Why was that the case? And how did the Cold War change the plans for the new world as they were originally set out? So there was a lot of existing bad blood between the Soviet Union and what we might call the Western capitalist democratic nations. So that goes back to the Russian Revolution of 1917-18. And ever since then, the Western powers, what you might call the democratic capitalist countries, had basically taken the attitude that the Soviet Union was a kind of rogue state, was a threat to their to their well-being, that the Soviet Union was the head of a communist conspiracy, which was dedicated to world revolution and overthrowing capitalism and democracy. And you know what? They weren't wrong. I mean, it was.

But in the 1940s, when after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet Union had become one of the one three as they were called, the three main allies, Britain, the United States, and the USSR. And the Soviet Union, I mean, there's no way of getting away from it, they had done by far, by far the majority of the fighting. Soviet soldiers, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian soldiers had died in their millions to defeat Nazi Germany. And so when the war ends, Stalin takes basically half of Europe.

He carves out his own empire in Eastern Europe, but Britain and the United States and their allies are not only, are they frankly too exhausted to take him on. I mean, there was talk of doing it by Churchill in particular, but all his sort of military planners said, look, it's impossible. You're not going to beat the Red Army. But also there was a sort of sense, well, you know, we kind of owe them, you know, we have worked together. That's fine.

However, right from the moment victory was won and frankly even before it, the old blood bloods, the old tensions had re-emerged. It was pretty obvious that Stalin and Churchill in particular were not on the same page at all about the future of Europe. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. I mean, historians argue about exactly when the Cold War started, but in the second half of the 1940s, that wartime alliance pretty much falls apart. And so this is a world order set up in the 40s from which, by and large, the Soviet Union is shut out. I mean, it is

in the United Nations. It's one of the parts of the Security Council has a veto. But obviously, it's not really part of the kind of the IMF, the World Bank, all of that kind of thing, because they want to create their own non capitalist world economy sealed off behind the Iron Curtain, which is effectively what they do with their Soviet Union and its satellite states and its communist allies. So the world order that we now take for granted is very much that that the Allies created and maybe younger listeners in particular it's easy to forget that for 40 odd years there was an alternative world order which was the one that was effectively being directed from Moscow. How did the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War change things? Well this changed everything. So the funny thing about the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War change things?

Well this changed everything. So the funny thing about the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of communism is that right up until it happened, most people in the West thought it was unthinkable. So no one predicts it. No one knows that it's coming. There have been some people in the West who had said, you know, that communism is so flawed that it will fall apart one day under its own contradictions. But I think most people imagine the Soviet Union and its alternative world order, if

you like, would be a fixture of the international landscape for the rest of their lives. Then suddenly, between 1989 and 1991, that world falls apart. First of all, all the European, Eastern European satellites go their own way. Astonishing news from East Germany, where the East German authorities have said in essence that the Berlin Wall doesn't mean anything anymore. The wall that the East Germans put up in 1961 to keep its people in will now be breached by anybody one who wants to leave. And then the Soviet Union itself collapses at the end of 1991 under Mikhail Gorbachev

and then Boris Yeltsin. In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lured for the last time and an era comes to an end. This struggle shaped the lives of all Americans. It forced all nations to live under the specter of nuclear destruction. That confrontation is now over. What that effectively meant was that the Western order, which had always been part of a kind of a duality, you know, that always been the other side of the coin. Suddenly it's the only game in town. And I think looking back when we look back now at the 1990s, we in the West were probably very hubristic and very over idealistic and a little bit complacent. There

was an assumption that all the world would basically turn into little capitalist democracies, that this was the way of things, that the order that had served us so well would work for everybody forever. And of course, we know now that that wasn't the case at all. Because actually what was happening, particularly if you look at Russia for example what was happening in the ruins of the Soviet Union was a chaos and a sort of sense of anarchy and then the rise of a new nationalist strongman Vladimir Putin that would end up challenging the Western The following is advertiser content from Emirates. When you're boarding the Emirates A380 with your Emirates Business Class Ticket, you can be assured that you're in good hands.

The spacious lie-flat seats are designed with comfort and relaxation in mind, all so you can stretch out and unwind. On board, you'll have the opportunity to indulge in a world-class dining experience. The gourmet menus on board are all regionally inspired, ensuring that you'll be tasting dishes crafted with the freshest of ingredients and paired with a curated selection of fine wines. Complementary Wi-Fi allows you to stay connected if you so choose or you can disconnect and embrace award-winning entertainment options. And if you have a stopover in Dubai, you'll have access to one of the world's most vibrant and

exciting cities. It's the sort of city you could visit countless times and always explore and experience something new. There's Business Class and then there's Emirates Business Class. Book now on Emirates.ca. At Desjardins, we speak business. We speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets. And we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes.

Because at Desjardins Business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardins today. We'd love to talk business. And just tell me more about what has chipped away at that order over those years, right? Because Donald Trump didn't just walk into office a month ago and flip it on its head all by himself, right? No, no, absolutely not.

Donald Trump is not an aberration or an anomaly. He's the expression of something much deeper. And I think it was easy, I guess, to be quite frank with you, easy particularly for kind of people like me, that's to say, you know, well-educated affluence, I mean, for millions, tens of millions of people like me, like lots of people listening to this program, to think that we had it all our own way and to be very complacent. But actually, there were always a lot of losers.

So losers within our own society. So people like a lot of frankly, Donald Trump's voters, people who feel understandably that globalization has left them high and dry, that jobs have disappeared, that communities have changed. They feel anxious about the the transformative tide of global migration, which basically reshapes their communities, whether they like it or not. They feel culturally, they are sneered at, forgotten, undermined, all of those kinds of things. And those anxieties were there in the 1980s, before the Cold War even ended, in kind of rust-belt America, or in steel towns, or those kinds of places, and countries all over the world, in Canada, the United States, whatever. So they were always there. But also, of course, globally, there were people who also felt they'd left out, they'd lost out. So the Russians would be a perfect example of that. They saw their empire fall apart, their living standards collapsed in the 1990s. Understandably, a lot of ordinary Russians felt very angry, betrayed by what had happened. So I think

the Western order, even at the point where it seemed most, where it seemed invincible, that it was carrying all before it, the seeds of its collapse were always there. And I think one of the things that so many people forgot in the 1990s is that history never stops. You know, it always keeps rolling on on and no institution continues unchanged forever. Even the Catholic Church has changed, one of the oldest institutions in the world. I think things like the rise of China, the rise of the internet, the digital economy, which has transformative effects on so many main street, high streets all over the Western world. All of those things gave people a great sense, I think, of dislocation and a feeling of being kind of left out and excluded and whatnot.

And then I think that was turbocharged really by the global financial crisis of 2007, 2008. So, so, so talking, you know, from, from Britain, like in Britain, we have had effectively no growth for almost 20 years as a result of the global financial crisis. So in other words, if you were 10 years old when that happened, you're now 30, you're coming up to 30. And in all that time, the economy has barely grown at all. You know that your life, there's a good chance that your life will not really be in your your eyes, as good as your parents. You're unable to buy a house as your parents did.

And these patterns are reproduced in different forms in lots of other European and Western countries. And so I think as a result of that, you've had, I mean, that coupled with the rise of social media has given rise to a kind of much more aggressive, intolerant, impatient populist politics that means that people just don't want to defer to these kind of institutions and these elite politicians that they would have done 20 or 30 years ago. They feel betrayed and they feel angry. Fair for me to say that, you know, during this time, we're also seeing lots of countries and the global self question, the system, right? Like I'm thinking about BRICS, right? The BRICS coalition that was formed in 2009, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, right? We had the US global war on terror, which, you know, I think a lot of people, a lot of

countries questioned like, what is the purpose of a rules based order when they seem to only apply to those in charge, right? Right. How does that fit into this conversation that we're having? charge, right? Right. How does that fit into this conversation that we're having? Well, I definitely think that, um, you know, the, the, the order that was set up by the Western powers at the, in the end of the second world war, it undoubtedly benefited the status quo. If you like the status quo powers. So we're looking at the United States, Britain,

France, and so on. And of course, I guess if you were looking at it from the perspective of, you know, Britain, France, and so on. And of course, I guess if you were looking at it from the perspective of, you know, a newly independent African country, to give an example, you might well say, well, hold on, are these rules not drawn up for the benefits of those who are already at the top? I actually think that's,

it's a little bit simplistic to see it just that way, because of course, one of the things that these thing that these lots of countries these that defines these countries is although they are very self-interested of course all countries are but there is an element i think of still trying to do the right thing you know foreign aid for example you know the united states is a very big donor of foreign aid it doesn't get reported often because it doesn't really fit into the image that we outside america like to have of America, which is that it's just a sort of bombastic bullying braggart. You know, that's the image that we in Britain love to have of the US. And we forget that actually the US, you know, gives loads of money to Africa and all this kind of thing. One thing I do think is that when historians look back, you know, it's always reckless for one historian to predict what other stories will say in the far future but I think they will say that George W. Bush's presidency was

uniquely disastrous and toxic for the image of the West because By waging the war on terror as he did perhaps not so much in Afghanistan You can understand why they felt they had to go after the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. But the invasion of Iraq threw away any moral capital that the West had for at least a generation. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger. On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. And it meant that, you know, whenever people say to Vladimir Putin,

you know, the invasion of Ukraine is brutal and legitimate and terrible. He can say, well, look at Iraq, you went into Iraq, didn't you? And it's very difficult, you know, for the West powers like Britain and the United States, which is so implicated in the disaster of Iraq, it's very difficult for them to have an answer to that because actually there is really no answer. And I think in retrospect, that that was really catastrophic for the image of the West because among a lot of the rest of the world, it did

create the image that there's one rule for us and one for them. And of course, we know that the you know, a lot of people died, it didn't have the have the effect, you know, it didn't have the, have the effect. You know, it didn't have the overnight transformative effects that it's architects had claimed the Iraq war. You know, Iraq is not now a kind of all singing or dancing paradise and certainly wasn't in the years after the invasion. Um, and I think that meant that when you got to, let's say 2010 or so, you had the

rest of the world saying, come on, you guys are a bunch of hypocrites. Can you just tell me more about how Ukraine in particular really became this test for the post-war order. And in some ways, I don't know if you'd agree with this, like a Rorschach test. Yeah, I think it's an extraordinary thing. So, I mean, Ukraine didn't start in 2022 when Putin ordered his invasion. It started in 2014. There was a revolution in Ukraine, the overthrow of a corrupt pro-Russian president in Viktor Yanukovych, huge crowds on the streets of Kiev and so on. He was Vladimir Putin's kind of client.

Putin then ferments an uprising in Crimea and then sends his troops into the East. Foment an uprising in Crimea and then census troops into the east and at that point I think. You know the general sense was well you know it's a bit of a basket case is a very complicated issue we don't want to provoke him so there's a limited western response but any limited one and then. Fast forward eight years Ukraine in that period has basically moved more and more towards the West. Putin clearly thinks he's going to lose Ukraine from his orbit. And so he sends in what he calls a special military operation in 2022. But of course, what makes it so complicated and such, as you said, a Rorschach test, kind of onto which we can project our own political prejudices, is that if you are of a particular disposition, then you say, oh,

well, this is because Putin was provoked. This is because NATO expanded and because Russia felt shut out of the Western dominated world order. And we've goaded him and provoked him and provoked him. And now he's lashed out. And in many ways, it's understandable that he has, and it's kind of our fault. And you'll find academics, political scientists, and indeed politicians in the West who will make this argument.

I mean, I wouldn't make it myself, but this is basically the argument. I think that JD Vance and Donald Trump make, they have, they've signed up to interestingly, a, um, a worldview that I think originated effectively on the far left in the West and has now migrated across the political spectrum to the populist right, which is that actually most of the things that are wrong with the world. Many of them are our fault that we in the West that we've the order that we've set up is intrinsically flawed and should be scrapped. It's a great irony that Donald Trump has in the Oval Office a bust of Winston Churchill. Churchill was one of the people who really believed in this world order that was built in the 1940s. I mean, he was one of the people who built it. And Churchill, I think, would have been horrified by the spectacle of And Churchill, I think, would have been horrified by the spectacle of Trump and Vance goading Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.

Because what effectively I think they want to do is to undo that architecture, which they believe is unfair, is flawed, is not working. They think it's not just working in anybody else's interest. They think it's not working in America's interest. They want a world of almost untrammeled nationalism, untrammeled nationalist competition. And so they want to turn the clock back to the 1930s and 1920s and to demolish all these institutions, I think. You know, there are people in America who want to see the end of the United Nations,

who want to see the end of NATO. I think Elon Musk just tweeted that, right? That the US should pull out of the UN. Yeah. I think what they, what they're effectively wanting is a return to a world of Darwinian competition, the strong will, will, will, will survive and the wheat will fall and that is the way of the world. Yeah.

And that may well be where we're heading. If that is where we're heading, what that is where we're heading. Yeah. What do you think we're going to see in the next couple of years? Maybe. But the caveat that I know historians are. Historians are the worst predictors of the future that exists because they think they know it all and they always get it wrong. So you can confidently assume that everything I say will be wrong. You can confidently assume that everything I say will be wrong.

Um, I think if they want to press ahead with this, they will manufacture reasons. To, they will say, you know, they want to re rethink NATO completely. If they, if the United States pulls out of NATO, the NATO in its current form ceases to exist and West there would presumably be some sort of European alliance, possibly involving, you know, Canada or sort of European Alliance, possibly involving Canada or Australia. I mean, who knows? Do they want to pull out to the United Nations? I mean, it's not, it would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago.

Now perhaps, maybe not necessarily unthinkable. And then effectively, I think you'd have a much more dangerous world, because you would have a world in which countries felt a sort of sharpened air of competition. They, they didn't have the reassurance of international institutions on which to fall back and they would just think you'd have a succession of leaders who just felt like, you know, I just have to look out for my own interests here and our own people's interests.

And that I think is quite a frightening world because it only takes a few little flashpoints and then you have a lot and then you have a lot of conflicts. And then, as we know, conflicts have a habit of drawing other people in. I mean, this has been a constant in human history for as long as history has been written down. And it seems like we're back with it, the history being a sort of competition for power, for resources, for territory. And here we are again. Really, in many ways, these last 70 years have been an aberration. Yeah, I think that's right. The last 70 years have not been perfect by any means.

And as I said, there has been more than enough hypocrisy to go around, and bad behavior, and imperial adventures that have gone wrong, and all of these kinds of things. However, it may well be that we look back on the last 70 years or so and we say, my God, you know, we really didn't know how good we had it until it was all taken away. Okay, I think that's as good a place as any for us to end today, Dominic. Such a pleasure. Such a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right, that is all for today.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.