In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, “America's Awesome Military: And ow How to Make It Even Better,” by two grandees of American security policy, Michael O’Hanlon and David Petraeus, readers were assured that they are safe as, in the author's words, “the United States has the best military in the world, by far.” We are further assured that all US military branches and weapon systems are technologically far superior to those of any competitor country and that this Western military superiority will continue in the foreseeable future. The United States, together with its Western allies, controls about two-thirds of all defense spending worldwide. Who can speak of a decline in global Western dominance?

However, boasting about military superiority might miss the point. The United States, with or without all of its huge military hardware and software, is losing its status as the world's only superpower and, although still very influential, it can no longer dominate world affairs as it once did. Geopolitics have changed. We are now entering a multipolar world with many global and regional players and different political systems. And we have entered a world in which intrastate armed conflicts have replaced interstate wars. This has created a completely different form of warfare. Military superiority has not helped the United States or its Western allies in dealing decisively with these kinds of intrastate armed conflicts and win their engagements against belligerent nonstate actors. Faced with the problems of intrastate armed conflicts, any overwhelming military superiority appears to simply melt away.

After a post-Cold War period during which the West mostly failed when relying unilaterally on its exceptional military might to force its peace solutions, political solutions based on collective security should now be given a new chance in preserving global peace and security. In order to do so, the collective security system of the United Nations would have to be reformed to enable it to respond to the new security challenges emanating from failing nation-states and the rising influence of armed nonstate actors.