The American-led world order that has prevailed since at least the end of World War II has long been precarious. Under President Trump, it is finally starting to crumble.
Mr. Trump is pursuing a sustained assault on allies and adversaries alike. Last week, he announced tariffs on vast categories of goods from even America’s closest trading partners, leaving global markets reeling and effectively ending the decades-long American commitment to international trade. He has repeatedly made his distaste for multilateral institutions clear, including the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and has fundamentally damaged the bedrock of the trans-Atlantic alliance. He has dismantled U.S.A.I.D. and silenced Voice of America.
There are good reasons for pessimism about the future — a world in which China, Russia and Mr. Trump’s America carve out spheres of influence and control through leverage and fear. But chaos will not inevitably follow the end of the American order. That fear is partly based on two errors: First, the past seven decades or so have not been as good for everyone on the planet as they have been for the West. And secondly, the very precepts of order are not Western inventions.
That’s a reason for optimism. To understand that the American order is not the only possible system — that, for many countries, it is not even a particularly good or fair one — is to allow oneself to hope that its end could augur a more inclusive world.
Defenders of the current order argue that it has prevented major wars and maintained a remarkably stable and prosperous international system. And for a select club of countries, it has. Evan Luard, a British politician and scholar of international relations, calculated that, of more than 120 wars that took place between 1945 and 1984, only two occurred in Europe. But the corollary of this, of course, is that during the Cold War more than 98 percent of those wars took place in countries outside of the West.
If the first and main promise of the postwar order is peace, many countries might be forgiven for asking: Peace for whom? Not only has the West succeeded in shielding just its members (and some others) from chaos, disorder and injustice, but it has at times contributed to that disorder, as in the U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Equally, the idea of cooperation among nations long predates the rise of the West. Henry Kissinger’s book “World Order” portrays the Concert of Europe consensus that emerged after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 as a model for the preservation of international stability. But great-power diplomacy and cooperation go back to some 3,000 years earlier, when the great powers of the Near East — Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Assyria and Babylonia — developed a system known as Amarna diplomacy, which was based on principles of equality and reciprocity. The Concert of Europe lasted less than a century, until around World War I. The Amarna system kept peace about twice as long.
The oldest known written pact of nonaggression and nonintervention was concluded between Egypt and the Hittites around 1269 B.C., and humanitarian rules of warfare, including the protection of civilians and the treatment of defeated soldiers, can be found in the Code of Manu of India from 2,000 years ago. When a warrior “fights with his foes in battle,” it stipulated, let him not strike one “who joins the palms of his hands (in supplication), nor one who (flees) with flying hair, nor one who sits down, nor one who says, ‘I am thine.’” There are additional rules for warriors who have lost their coats of mail, or who are disarmed. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 contain strikingly similar prohibitions against mistreating “members of armed forces who have laid down their arms.”
The comfort in acknowledging the roots of these concepts in antiquity is in the reciprocal promise that they can still exist in a world that is not dominated by America. Order has always been a shared endeavor, and many nations of the global south are eager to participate in a world in which there are fewer double standards and more fairness. In the postwar period, many of these states gained independence and became active participants in international politics and in the multilateral institutions that America is now undermining.
And when non-Western powers pursue their own agenda through groups that exclude Western nations, they are not necessarily motivated by resentment. For example, the BRICS group of emerging economies has expanded its membership significantly in the last year, but most of its new and founding members are not anti-American; they seek to use the bloc to reform and expand, rather than subvert, global cooperation and promote a more equitable system.
The old order is not dead yet. America remains the most powerful country in the world thanks to a combination of unparalleled military strength, the dominance of the dollar and a formidable technological base. It will remain a — perhaps the — global superpower. But the world which it has built is unlikely to survive deep into this century.
A world shaped not just by the U.S., China or a handful of great powers, but by a global multiplex of countries, would not be a paradise, but then nor has been this one. A fairer world is possible.
Amitav Acharya is a professor of international relations at American University and the author of “The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West.”
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