This essay concludes The New World Disorder, a series exploring the disintegration of the postwar international system and how countries are adjusting as America steps aside. Read more in the series below.
By now it is clear to most of America and much of the world that America and what it stands for have changed. The dominant face of that change is President Trump and his determined and deliberate efforts to accumulate greater powers than the Constitution apportioned to the president, to create a cult of personality based on grievance and vengeance and to challenge every aspect of the postwar global order, demeaning allies and courting autocrats.
Is that the future of America in the world? An increasingly autocratic, rude and unpredictable superpower guided by populism, rancor and whim? Or will Americans, once Mr. Trump is gone, try to restore the United States as the world’s repository of democratic values and human rights?
It is hard to imagine that even a MAGA-minded successor to Mr. Trump (say, Marco Rubio or JD Vance) would be as petulant, inconsistent and vindictive as this president has been. Yet too much has already shifted in the world — beyond anything Mr. Trump has done — to believe that the liberal, rules-based and values-driven order shaped by America and its allies after World War II can ever fully return to what it was.
New realities have come to the fore since the Berlin Wall came down almost four decades ago: the emergence of China as a greater economic and military rival to the United States than the Soviet Union ever was; the re-emergence of Russia as a menacing police state and its starting of a European war; the global retreat of liberal democracy, led by the premier democracy, the United States; fast-evolving technology undertaking tasks once reserved for the human brain. Globalization, once promising a borderless world and worldwide prosperity, has revealed its dark side: mass migration, inequality, cybercrime, polarization.
There is no reboot mechanism in history; there is no way back to the conveniently binary world of the last century any more than Mr. Trump can realize the illusions of Make America Great Again. The world is moving on.
What lies ahead? There is no way to know. But we must consider possible scenarios, if only to prepare as best we can. The exercise is especially critical for Americans, because any coherent action against global disarray will have to begin with the return of American democracy, as Charles A. Kupchan argues in his book “Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come.” Though Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, might have articulated a widespread longing at Davos in January when he urged middle powers to join forces and “create a third path,” the power, wealth and traditions of a renewed United States would be critical for any meaningful reversal of illiberal and autocratic trends.
The scenarios below, looking a dozen years or so into the future, are drawn from conversations with and the writings of people who professionally gaze into the crystal balls of politics and world affairs, as well as with people who are concerned with what we leave behind. They are meant not to be scientific or comprehensive but to reflect on this critical moment, because, as the great American sage Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”
America Makes a Comeback
This is our most hopeful scenario. A leader committed to the primacy of law, honest governance and liberal democracy across the globe is back in the White House, and the United States has begun to clamber back to its place as the “shining city on a hill.”
Europeans have taken on greater responsibility for their defense and are warily coming to accept the United States as a friend and ally again. Vladimir Putin has been ousted and the conflict with Ukraine frozen, allowing Ukraine to make a rapid economic recovery and eventually have its territory returned. China has surpassed the United States economically but not militarily, and the two superpowers work to avoid conflict and find a modus vivendi.
A reinvigorated and re-empowered United Nations, no longer undermined by Washington, is mobilizing once again to combat climate change and public health challenges and find ways to regulate artificial intelligence. The consensus formed among rich nations after World War II — that aid to poor countries builds stability, fosters growth and reduces suffering — is restored as America retreats from Mr. Trump’s “America first” use of foreign aid purely as a transactional lever.
Before exiting, Mr. Trump called off the war in Iran, declaring victory even though Tehran retains its mullahs and its nuclear fuel. But at least the Middle East is calm, and with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel voted out of power, the new administration in Washington gets to work on beginning another peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.
Its own house in order and its democratic allies behind it, the United States is able to begin guiding the world to a new order. The verities long taken for granted about the benefits of globalization, free trade, automation, digital technology and liberal democracy have given way to a far more fragmented world, with multiple centers of power competing over influence and status, but at the same time, as Mr. Kupchan writes, “more tethered together and interdependent than it was during the 20th century.” A new system of global governance begins to take shape, perhaps along the lines of what Mr. Kupchan envisions: a global concert of major nations to preserve peace and cooperation while acknowledging the ideological and cultural diversity of a complex world.
The recovery of America is central to this future. However great the degradation of American ideals in the MAGA era, the United States remains unique in its power, resources and embedded values and in its ability to overcome serious failings. It took fourscore and seven years and a cruel civil war before the proposition that all men are created equal was expanded to include Black people and an additional century to translate that into law. Women have had the vote for only a bit more than 100 years, and the struggle for equality is far from finished. Yet to borrow further from Abraham Lincoln, America has succeeded in “a new birth of freedom” again and again, and it can do it once more.
We Muddle Along
In this version of our collective future, the world carries on much as it is. A new U.S. administration ends Mr. Trump’s tariffs and tries to restore relations with allies and avoid conflicts, but a deep polarization continues to grip American politics, feeding constant tensions among the branches of government and destabilizing the executive.
America’s wealth and military power command fear and respect, but after all the back and forth of the Trump and Biden administrations, most of the world — including Europe and Canada — can no longer view the United States as either the democratic standard or a moral leader. American-led alliances and economic institutions weaken. Governments around the globe form shifting economic groupings and increasingly turn to China for trade and security.
As China surpasses the United States economically and draws closer militarily, Beijing forges ever closer economic ties to Europe and emerging economies and escalates pressure on Taiwan, though it avoids confrontations that could provoke American action. Several of the countries once relegated to the developing world — like India, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia — approach first rank but without a shared vision for how the world should work together.
In the Middle East, Mr. Trump finally found an exit ramp in Iran before leaving office, restoring passage through the Strait of Hormuz, but the mullahs, with much of their enriched uranium, remain in power in Iran. Mr. Netanyahu is gone, but Gaza remains devastated, and new Israeli settlements in the West Bank continue to fan Palestinian resentment. Mr. Putin has been overthrown by a junta of siloviki — the military and security barons through whom he ruled — but the war with Ukraine remains a smoldering stalemate. Europe accepts greater responsibility for its own defense but struggles to find a unified approach to China, Russia or the problems of the world.
Global tasks like battling climate change continue in fits and starts, without major commitments or progress. The United Nations and its major agencies, like the World Health Organization and UNICEF, remain suspect to much of America and thereby limited in reach and financing. The world is largely at peace, but this can change at any moment as China rapidly gathers force.
Unchecked Decline
Here, polarization and recriminations paralyze the United States. NATO and other American-led alliances lose meaning in a maelstrom of tariff wars and mutual rancor. Major international organizations — the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund — founder as countries north and south seek security and trade in shifting alliances and trading blocs. Beijing succeeds in annexing Taiwan without international military resistance, but China’s growth stalls, leaving the world without a dominant center. Unregulated A.I. leads to a host of new crises — rogue incursions and raids, proliferation of misinformation, loss of countless jobs, dangerous advances in cyberwarfare.
An America distrusted by other nations and trapped in debilitating internal struggles leads to a deeply fragmented and unstable world, increasingly vulnerable to Chinese demands. Xenophobia and ancient grievances become the stuff of local politics and international relations, leading to flare-ups in the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Horn of Africa and other places where demagogues fan animosities.
Unchecked global warming creates chaos the world over, from seawater sloshing through the Bowery to flooding and drought in Africa and Asia, setting off vast new migrations and conflicts. A total breakdown of alliances and international organizations leaves the world vulnerable to the full range of historical scourges, from famine to war.
Russia, its oil and gas fields battered by Ukrainian drones, threatens a tactical nuclear strike against Ukraine. The United States and Iran remain at a yearslong stalemate, rendering passage through the Strait of Hormuz sporadic and dangerous, pushing the price of oil ever higher and adding, most grievously, to the woes of developing countries and the poor with rising energy, transportation and food costs. Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern powers lose faith in America. Terrorist attacks multiply in Israel and the occupied territories, the threat of war hanging over the region.
Even in this scenario, a major clash of great powers — the United States, China, Russia or even Europe — remains unlikely, given that such conflicts tend to be over historical wrongs, artificial crises or regional borders, but the threat of regional conflicts going out of control is ever present. The strongmen in power are not above using conflict to extend control over their subjects.
The world is a dark place, and America is no longer there to offer light.
There are, of course, innumerable other ways things could play out in coming years and decades. As our great American sage, again, reputedly said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
The dangers are huge, but the future need not be dystopian. However the old liberal order is viewed, its achievements cannot be denied — or quickly undone. Even as autocracies spread, the yearning for freedom remains strong. Ukrainians have demonstrated an extraordinary determination to stay free; American judges still often stand up to Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the law; journalists the world over risk freedom and even death to report the truth; countries still rush to help others when catastrophe strikes, as they did when floods ravaged Nepal and Tibet in August.
Elections can reverse an extremist drift, as they did in Poland and Hungary, but they can also raise warning signals, as with the gains of the Alternative for Germany in Germany’s recent regional elections. The midterm contests in the United States next month will be scrutinized the world over, the presidential race in 2028 even more.
In the words of the hymn, the fate of humanity still turns on the decisions that people and nations take “in the strife of truth with falsehood.” They do not always make the wrong choice. The key is not to wait too long.
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