The Sultanate of Oman under the rule of Sultan Qaboos (r. 1970–2020) developed a culture of peacemaking and mediation over the five decades of his rule. Oman’s geographical position on the edge of the Arab world abutting the Strait of Hormuz, its good relations with both Saudi Arabia and Iran, the diversity of its population (with significant Baluch, South Asian, and African minorities), and the adherence of many of its people to Ibadi Islam (i.e., neither Sunni nor Shiite), all contributed to this potential for a role as mediator. The personality and convictions of Sultan Qaboos himself, however, were central to the development of the country’s eirenic foreign policy. Although it is a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) that groups the Arab Gulf oil monarchies, including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, established in 1981 to counter Iran’s rising power, Oman has steadfastly pursued an independent foreign policy.

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Oman played a mediating role in three big crises wracking the Middle East. These included US–Iran relations, the Saudi and UAE war on Yemen, and the Qatar Crisis that began in 2017. In each instance, Oman offered a neutral ground on which conflicting sides could meet, and it exercised its good offices in carrying proposals from one side to the other. Oman’s mediation efforts initially succeeded with regard to the Obama administration and Iran, but faltered once the Trump administration breached the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran Nuclear Deal. In Yemen, Oman kept lines open to all of the belligerents, and facilitated transfer and medical treatment of POWs, but Sultan Qaboos was unable during his last years to bring the sides together for serious negotiations. The rise of extremism in neighboring Mahra province threatened to embroil Oman itself in the conflict. With regard to the Qatar blockade in 2017–2021, Oman supported the mediation efforts of Kuwait and also made its own efforts. Oman’s own mediation between Qatar, on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, on the other, from 2017 forward may have smoothed the rough edges of the conflict and helped to pave the way, along with Kuwait and Washington, for its resolution at al-Ula in January 2021.

The main theme of this part is the collapse and partial restoration of the liberal, capitalist, and imperial orders that allowed Europeans to dominate most of the world. For Europeans, the nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented prosperity and power. Their mastery of the new industrial technologies had given them direct control of over half of the world’s peoples and huge influence over the rest. The great global linkages created by the European empires drew in commodities and labor from all over the world to create the products that went out to consumers everywhere. The USA, too, enjoyed its Gilded Age of wealth and empire, and Japan was rising quickly to join the elite club of great powers. It seemed that this machinery of expanding production and power could continue indefinitely. Many predicted, in the words of the historian Arnold Toynbee, the coming of an age of universal peace, wealth, and justice, an “earthly paradise.”

It was not to be. The Great War which broke out in 1914 destroyed the international imperial order, devastating all the European societies far beyond anyone’s expectations. Worse was to come. The brief, precarious stability of the 1920s fell apart in the 1930s under the impact of a savage world depression and the rise of a new, vicious mass movement: fascism. The world plunged into a new global war even more destructive than the first.

The lawyer Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) spent twenty-five years in jail for organizing against the South African apartheid regime, but in 1994 he was elected president of South Africa. The young Mandela was an activist against the racist policies of the white regime; only later in life did he endorse non-violent political action. In his inauguration speech, he called for the “healing of wounds” and an end to the “pernicious ideology and practice of racism and racial oppression.” His Korean counterpart, Kim Dae-jung (1925–2009), also spent time in jail under military rule, but as prime minister pursued policies of democratization and reconciliation with his colonial rulers, the Japanese. Both won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Other anti-imperial leaders took different paths. Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and Kim Il-sung (1912–94) strongly endorsed violent struggle, isolating their countries from the world. Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) and his Viet Minh nationalists successfully fought off both the French and the Americans during a thirtyyear struggle. The bloody contest between Palestinians and Israelis continues today, despite intensive efforts at mediation. The struggle to rid the world of imperial domination has led to many unpredicted outcomes, and it is not yet over.

We conclude with a discussion of two critical issues: global terrorism and global warming. Both of them threaten to harm huge numbers of people, and both have roots far back in the human past. The greatest recent terrorist threat, that of al-Qaeda, derives directly from the imperial domination of the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but al-Qaeda's supporters find their inspiration in the founding of Islam in the seventh century. Yet only the globalization of the late twentieth century made al-Qaeda's actions possible.

Global warming is a more subtle, but equally dangerous trend which, if nothing is done to avert it, will bring catastrophe to hundreds of millions of vulnerable people. It is a direct result of global industrialization since the nineteenth century. Scientists have carefully documented the warming of the planet over the past century, but the nations of the world have so far only taken very small steps to address this vital threat to human existence.

GLOBAL TERRORISM

On September 11, 2001, members of the terrorist group al-Qaeda hijacked four transcontinental airliners taking off from Boston’s Logan airport. They crashed two of them into the two World Trade Center towers in New York City (see Figure 1). The explosion of the gasoline in the airplanes incinerated the twin towers and their occupants. The third plane crashed into the Pentagon. Passengers on the fourth plane, probably intended for the White House, brought it down in a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 people died in these attacks. The boldness of the al-Qaeda attacks stunned and horrified the world. Never before had so many civilians been killed by a deliberate attack on American soil. President George W. Bush vowed to make a War on Terror the theme of his administration.