When President Joe Biden spoke to UN General Assembly in September 2024, he said the world was at an “inflection point.” This was an admission that the current order is showing unmistakable signs of strain. With wars and mass killings occurring around the world, protectionism and populism rising, democracy fraying, and relations among the strongest states deteriorating, the need for a better world order is obvious. What is less clear is what its key elements would be or how we might go about creating one.
Most definitions of “world order” describe it as a set of rules or institutions that establish who the principal actors are and that help manage their interactions. According to Hedley Bull, an order is “a group of states. . . that conceive themselves to be bound by a set of common rules in their relations with one another.” For John Mearsheimer, an order is “an organized group of international institutions that help govern the interactions among the member states.” He adds that institutions “are effectively rules that the great powers devise and agree to follow because they believe that obeying those rules is in their interests.” Similarly, Henry Kissinger argues that world orders rest on “a set of commonly accepted rules that define the limits of permissible action.”
Political orders invariably reflect an underlying balance of power. The strongest actors set and enforce the rules, and the weaker actors must for the most part accept them, even if they push back on occasion. Although others may benefit from the stability and predictability that institution and norms provide, powerful actors invariably favor rules that advance their own interests. It follows that orders will evolve as the balance of power shifts, but this process does not happen overnight and is often contentious. For example, the list of permanent, veto-holding members of the UN Security Council hardly reflects the current realities of world politics but it persists because there is no consensus on how to change it. Given the “stickiness” of many global institutions, it is not surprising that order-creating moments tend to occur after major wars, when the prior order has broken down and a new hierarchy of power has been established.
Orders also reflect what John Ruggie called “social purpose”: the goals that the actors are trying to achieve and the broader notions of right and wrong to which they subscribe. For example, modern states do not just provide security or serve a monarch’s whims—they are also expected to provide their citizens with many other benefits and they will favor a global order that will help them do so.
The major powers can ignore or amend their own rules when necessary but doing so is not cost-free. States that repeatedly violate existing norms will be seen by others as untrustworthy and even dangerous, and they are likely to face growing opposition. Repeated violations also undermine the legitimacy of the rules, which encourages others to ignore them as well. The United States’ willingness to violate important norms while insisting that others obey them is one of the main reasons the present order has lost legitimacy, especially in the Global South. But the problem is much bigger than that.
Why Is Today’s Order Collapsing?
Today’s order is under severe strain for several interrelated reasons. First, the global balance of power has shifted dramatically. Asia’s share of the world economy has soared; Europe’s has declined sharply; that of the United States remains roughly the same; and Russia has recovered from the economic morass of the 1990s. Countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa are more significant global players, and China is now a clear peer competitor to the United States. An order based on the distribution of power in 1945 or 1992 was not going to endure once that underlying foundation was gone.
Second, humanity as whole faces an unprecedented challenge from climate change. Today’s global institutions have yet to devise adequate solutions to the problem, and the consequences are going to reshape politics within and between states for years to come.
A third challenge is migration. Millions of people are fleeing violence, moving to escape the effects of climate change, or seeking greater economic opportunities, and modern means of transportation make it easier for them to do so, but every state wants to control who can enter their territory. This problem will get worse as more young people from the Global South seek to move to the wealthy, aging, and depopulating Global North, and there is no international consensus on how to manage this issue.
A fourth factor is science and technology. We are witnessing an explosion of potentially revolutionary advances in many areas, including biology, energy production, artificial intelligence (AI), and medicine. The impact of the internet and social media has been more profound and troubling than many expected, and the same will be true for AI, which is already affecting warfare, labor markets, education, and public opinion. Technological revolutions always leave their mark on politics, and there is no agreement on how to regulate these technologies or to manage their consequences.
Finally, the norms and rules that shaped the order of the past 75 years, however imperfectly, are unraveling before our eyes. A broad commitment to economic integration is giving way to protectionism. The United States’ invasion of Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights and de facto incorporation of the West Bank have weakened norms prohibiting preventive war and conquest. Targeted killings by governments have eroded the norm against international assassination. Genocides and mass killings are occurring with growing frequency, and major powers have turned a blind eye to these events or actively supported them. Ideologies once thought to be discredited, such as Nazism, are back. In the United States and some other countries, politicians become more popular when they do and say reprehensible things that would have ended their careers instantly in the past.
These different developments reinforce each other, and existing institutions cannot address all of them at once. The result is growing uncertainty about the future, which in turn fosters insecurity and fear. Building a better world order under these conditions will be especially difficult.
What Is To Be Done?
Ideally, a new and better order would preserve the physical conditions required for sustained human existence; minimize the risk of major war; manage the movement of goods, capital, information, and people in broadly beneficial ways; and encourage respect for basic human rights. As the present order weakens, scholars and practitioners from many different countries should be working together to develop concrete proposals for what a new order might entail. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Better Order Project, whose participants represent countries from every continent, is one promising example, but it is just a first step.
To succeed, the states that are primarily responsible for and committed to the current order must recognize that the balance of power has shifted and that they will have to accommodate some of the interests of states that were excluded when the order was established. Acknowledging that reality does not require them to surrender all their core interests or principles, but it requires greater flexibility than they have shown in the past. At the same time, if rising powers such as China insist that new rules give them everything they want, building a legitimate and effective global order will be impossible. If that happens, the world is more likely to divide into partial orders governed by significantly different principles, each eying the other with considerable suspicion.
To avoid this outcome, states and other relevant actors will need a framework to guide their efforts and to build trust among them. My colleague Dani Rodrik and I have suggested that states might begin this process by formally adopting a “meta-regime” in which issues or policies are placed into one of three categories, but without having to agree in advance which problems or actions go in each one, or deciding what specific norms or rules will eventually be adopted.
The first category—“prohibited actions”—would contain those actions or policies that states agree not to do. The UN Charter contains a number of these proscriptions (such as barring the acquisition of territory by force), and one could imagine agreements not to engage in beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies, not to use nuclear weapons, and not to conduct targeted assassinations or torture.
The second category—“cooperative negotiation and mutual adjustments”—would be for areas or issues where states realize they can be better off if they adjust some of their behavior in exchange for reciprocal adjustments by others. Tariff reductions and arms-control agreements are classic examples of this sort of mutual adjustment; indeed, such compromises constitute much of the “business as usual” among states and other global actors.
The third category—“independent actions”—would cover issues where mutual adjustment prove elusive and each state retains the right to act on its own to protect its interests. But there should still be guardrails: states would be free to act to protect a key interest, but not to deliberately harm another’s interests or to try to gain a unilateral advantage. For example, a country might ban the use of a foreign technology to protect its national security—as the United States has done by restricting Huawei 5G systems—but not to harm a foreign competitor or weakening another country.
Once the idea of this meta-regime is adopted, states could begin to discuss which action might be prohibited, which areas are amenable to mutual adjustments, and which realms will be reserved for independent action. Over time, success would allow a greater number of harmful actions to be prohibited and more problems to be resolved via mutual adjustment, thereby decreasing the need for independent action or embedding within the constraints of a multilateral agreement. Competition would undoubtedly continue, but it would be a more benign, prosperous, and legitimate order.
This scheme is agnostic about the precise content of the new order whose concrete features would ultimately be determined by the participants. It is simply a mechanism for launching a constructive conversation among them. It encourages participants to state their preferences openly and to explain the reasoning behind them, which can help alleviate suspicions and build trust over time. It will not work, however, if the major powers make the pursuit of primacy their primary goal. But if they recognize the dangers of an all-out struggle for primacy and want to build a better order instead, adopting this meta-regime would facilitate their efforts.
Conclusion
We are at one of those Gramscian moments when “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born.” The bipolar Cold War order ended in 1992 and the United States’ attempt to construct a global liberal order collapsed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the global resurgence of populism and authoritarianism. Given the problems bearing down upon humanity, it is easy to be fatalistic and assume that a better world order will not emerge until we go through another catastrophic global upheaval like the Second World War.
But we need not and should not accept that grim fate. We can choose instead to be more optimistic, and work to develop norms, rules, and procedures that more accurately reflect the world of today and the needs of the future. Given those two alternatives, the right choice seems obvious.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was a guest at the IWM in 2024.
