The International Order Is Not Dead Yet

But it’s on a lifeline, becoming less liberal, and will only survive if we work hard to reform and renew it

Credit: NATO

The recent World Economic Forum in Davos was a disaster for anyone who believes in the benefits of liberal internationalism. This annual gathering of world leaders and the ultra-rich is traditionally devoted to celebrating globalization, but the latest conference may yet go down in history as the place where globalization ended. In the run-up to the forum, the leader of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy, America, threatened to invade another democracy, Denmark. That’s not supposed to happen. Democracies do not go to war with each other. President Donald Trump thankfully backed down in Davos. European unity—in combination with American constraints on presidential power, such as the stock market, Congress, and public opinion—compelled Trump to blink. He accepted some vague “framework” agreement as a consolation prize. But the damage was done. The democratic world—the “liberal core” of the international system, as James Goldgeier and I labeled it in a 1992 article—seemed to be imploding. (That article was called “A Tale of Two Worlds: Core and Periphery in the Post-Cold War Era,” International Organization, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 467-491. Check it out here. Tell me how well it predicted the next three decades, as we are thinking of revising it now). As the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney precisely diagnosed in his speech in Davos, a “rupture” had occurred within the liberal democratic world. “The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must,” he told those gathered, paraphrasing ancient international relations theorist Thucydides. Other concurred: the rules-based international order led by America “is over,” argued New York Times columnist David French. Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the same: “One of the things that can be drawn from the events of recent weeks is that the old world order no longer exists.“

I disagree, at least for now. Analytically, several false assumptions underlie the claim that the rule-based international system is dead. Normatively, this fatalism about international cooperation can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The rules-based international system established after World War II is definitely on a lifeline, but Americans will be better off trying to rebuild a new order based in part on old, but reformed principles and institutions rather than walking away entirely—or worse, blowing up what’s left of the old order and hoping that what comes next will be better than the status quo. Hope is not a strategy.

Mythologies about the Liberal International Order, Past and Present

The first flawed assumption about the old liberal international order is that it existed in the first place. Politicians and scholars nostalgically pine for a past rules-based international system that actually was not that liberal, became only international for a few years, and was rarely orderly. A romanticized portrayal of the past produces inflated expectations about how the current international system should perform.

After World War II, American leaders sought to create a global order that would prevent future wars. The most ambitious multilateral institution established towards that end—the United Nations, and especially the United Nations Security Council—quickly became dysfunctional due to the deep divide between the Soviet Union and the United States. At the end of World War II, Americans also created a set of economic institutions to foster economic development, namely the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which later became the World Trade Organization. But the Soviets and their allies never joined these clubs, meaning that during the Cold War, the liberal economic order was never actually “international.”

Regarding democratic governance, the soaring rhetoric of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 has never been universally adopted either. The Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and other communist countries joined theocratic Saudi Arabia and apartheid South Africa in abstaining from signing, seeing it as an American-created instrument of ideological promotion. But even the United States and other democracies that signed the Declaration did not always adhere to these liberal values. American hypocrisy regarding democracy and human rights during the Cold War – allying with apartheid South Africa, supporting coups against democratically elected leaders, supporting anti-communist insurgents with little commitment to liberal values—was an enduring theme of the 20^th century. In parallel, dying imperial powers such as France in Algeria or Portugal in Angola and Mozambique also violated the norms of the UN charter.

And of course, the Cold War was not “orderly.” In fact, the Cold War was not cold at all—millions died all over the world, including citizens and soldiers from Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China.

The winding down of the Cold War in the late 1980s sparked new hope about the possibility of a genuine liberal international order. Most amazingly, in 1990, the UN Security Council voted to authorize the use of force to roll back Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait—and then collectively managed to achieve that end. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush described this moment as the onset of “a new world order,” in which for “the first time, the United Nations Security Council, free from the clash of Cold War ideologies, functioned as its designers intended—a force for conflict resolution in collective security.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the government of newly independent Russia sought vigorously to join all the American-anchored international clubs, including NATO. Chinese leaders at the time were not interested in joining Western alliances or adopting Western governance norms, but actively sought to join international economic institutions, including, most importantly, the World Trade Organization.

This euphoric moment for the liberal international order after the end of the Cold War did not last long. The norm of collective security was the first to fade. In 1999, NATO decided rightly to use force against Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but without obtaining a UN Security Council resolution. In 2001, collective security seemed on the rebound when the United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11. In 2003, however, the UN Security Council split once again, as did the NATO alliance, when deciding whether to support President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia without the UN Security Council’s approval. In 2011, the UN Security Council acted collectively one last time when authorizing the use of force against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya (China and Russia abstained on these resolutions, consciously greenlighting military action.) In 2014 and again in 2022, the UN Security Council failed to act in unison to stop Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukraine. And Trump, of course, never asked the UN Security Council, NATO, or even the U.S. Congress for permission to bomb Iran or use military force to arrest Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Taken together, these episodes show that the security pillar of the liberal international order had been significantly weakened long before the recent Davos meeting.

The liberal international economic order has also been fraying for decades. International organizations have proved ineffective in enforcing their rules against China, which joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. But the United States has also violated the WTO’s rules and norms from time to time, too. I saw that first-hand as an Obama White House official, when I participated in negotiations leading up to Russia’s accession to the WTO in 2011. We explicitly bent the rules to allow our car companies to keep subsidies provided by the Russian government and compelled Moscow to import pork produced with ractopamine (a synthetic feed additive that is used to promote leanness)—even though the EU and China had banned such imports. And that concession did not last long; after Russia joined the WTO, it eventually banned these exports, proving again that powerful countries are less constrained than weaker ones by international institutions.

The bigger blow to the liberal international economic order came during Trump’s first term. Trump immediately withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade bloc representing roughly 40% of the global economy that the United States, under the Obama administration, had played a vital role in forming. Trump also weakened the WTO and withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords. In his second term, Trump withdrew from many more international agreements and defied the tenets of the WTO and the liberal international economic order more generally by imposing tariffs on nearly all countries—a process often driven by his own emotions rather than American interests. During the same period, however, Chinese President Xi Jinping was also wielding economic power coercively in ways that ran counter to the norms and rules of the WTO. As Carney rightly pointed out in his Davos speech, “We knew…that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically.”

Imperfect, but also Enduring

So, let’s be clear: the liberal international order was always more of an aspiration than a functioning system. At the same time, even when imperfect, international institutions, rules, norms, and procedures have positively influenced international politics over the last century—and continue to do so today. The assumption that this system is dead—that international institutions play no role in shaping international relations today—is also wrong. Despite the egregious violations of international rules by the great powers described above, significant elements of the rules-based international order have survived both the Cold War and the current era of great-power competition.

During the Cold War, the liberal international order achieved two significant successes—decolonization and the near end of annexation. These two norms of the international system not only survived but also strengthened during the Cold War. They remained robust in the post-Cold War order, too, until Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and then launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. When threatening to invade Greenland, Trump came close to joining Putin as a flagrant violator of this norm against annexation. It is tragic that an American president would even think of doing such a thing. But he did not. Norms against imperial annexation championed by Europeans and American society held him back. Unfortunately, new crises sparked by Trump’s desire for American imperial expansion in the Western Hemisphere are likely to arise. But in the crisis over Greenland, at least, imperial annexation lost out, and the rules-based liberal international order prevailed. To date, Xi’s China also has not launched a war of imperial annexation.

Multilateral economic treaties and organizations governing trade and investment also remain widespread. The United States continues to participate in many of these agreements, as does most of the world. China has been especially active both in expanding its influence in older multilateral organizations, including the IMF, as well as by creating its own economic clubs, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Even Russia has its Eurasian Economic Union. China’s growing role in the international economic system is making it less liberal. So too is Trump’s new approach to trade and investment. However, weaker countries still rely on international economic institutions and agreements to advance their interests. They must, because their collective power is one of their strategies for resisting complete domination by the great powers.

If America Quits the International Order, Others Will Not Follow

The third flawed assumption about the international order is that it relies entirely on the United States today. American hegemony played an instrumental role in establishing this system decades ago. But once multilateral institutions are established, they can (but not always do) take on a life of their own. (See, Stephen Krasner, ed. International Regimes.) If the United States, under Trump, continues to withdraw from this system, then others may not follow his lead. Rather, it just means that America will be alone, outside of an international rules-based system in which others still participate.

For instance, after Trump withdrew from the TPP in his first term, this multilateral economic organization not only endured, but also changed its name to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and expanded. CPTPP would be stronger with the United States as a member, but it did not die after Trump withdrew. On January 6, 2026, Trump announced the signing of an executive order withdrawing the United States from several dozen international organizations, including roughly three dozen affiliated with the United Nations. Will the United Nations and these other organizations now collapse? No. Most importantly and most dangerously for American national interests, Xi did not withdraw China from the same bodies. Instead, he sees an opportunity to expand the CCP’s influence within these very organizations that we initially took the lead on creating. And while Trump continues to show disdain for existing international organizations and has devoted no time or interest to creating new ones, Xi is expanding his multilateral engagements; BRICS has added five new members in the last two years alone.

At the same time, while Trump unilaterally coerces even democratic allies to produce economic gains for the United States, our friends are forming new economic partnerships without us. As we blow up our trade relations with Europe, the EU has just announced a massive new trade deal with Mercosur, the South American trading bloc, creating a “trading zone of 700 million people”. The EU followed this up by announcing a new free trade pact with India, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi said would “bring major opportunities for the 1.4 billion people of India and the millions of people in Europe.“ Evidently, Europeans and Indians do not want to go back to the law of the jungle, which is being proclaimed by some analysts as inevitable. It is also not a spurious coincidence that Carney became the first Canadian prime minister in years to travel to China and sign a trade deal with Xi earlier this month, after repeatedly being referred to by Trump as “the governor” of America’s 51^st state. Our European allies seem eager to get to Beijing these days, too. British Prime Minister Starmer is in Beijing today; French President Macron and German Chancellor Merz have already been there recently. Meanwhile, Trump’s lack of support for our Asian allies, including his failure to support Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaich when she rightly claimed that Beijing’s threat to Taiwan was a threat to Japanese security, is also compelling them to hedge their bets and prepare for an unreliable American ally. (For the details, see the article by Mira Rapp-Hooper and Ely Ratner in Foreign Policy called “Washington’s Silence in Asia Is a Gift to Beijing.”) If, God forbid, Trump quits NATO, the alliance will not collapse but will continue without us—perhaps adding Ukraine as a powerful new member in our place. Again, NATO is much stronger with U.S. membership. But the alliance can endure without us.

Trump is not America

If the United States withdrew from all international organizations, it would remain an economic and security superpower for a long time. But abandoning the international rules-based order will weaken the United States in the long run, especially as China continues to pursue multilateralism at our expense. And therefore, a fourth and final flawed assumption about the death of the international rules-based order must be interrogated: America’s current retreat from the rule-based international order is neither inevitable nor the consequence of innate structural forces in the global balance of power. Rather, it is mostly driven by a single individual—Donald Trump. The damage Trump is doing today is deep, but also reversible. To be sure, the scars of imperial unilateralism will remain open for a long time, especially in Europe. There is no going back to the glory days of the new world order proclaimed by George H.W. Bush in 1991. In addition, American hegemonic power, which had anchored this system for decades, has peaked. And American taxpayers are no longer willing to subsidize the public goods that underpin the liberal international system. At the same time, American long-term security and economic interests are still best pursued by maintaining alliances, participating in trade and investment agreements, and cooperating with other democracies to promote the ideals of freedom and liberty. That’s how we won the Cold War in the last century, and that’s how we will succeed in our new era of great power competition in the 21^st century. Moreover, public opinion shows that Americans value allies, do not want to go it alone, and are not enthusiastic about unilateral imperialism.

Rather than just observing the problem of the decline of the rules-based international order, American strategists should focus instead on identifying the parts that still serve American interests and on thinking creatively about how to renew rules-based and multilateral cooperation. That enterprise should begin by designing new clubs, organizations, and institutions to strengthen ties among democracies. We did it before at the dawn of the Cold War. We can do it again at the dawn of our new era of great power competition between autocrats and democrats.

For new ideas on how to do so, see the final three chapters of my latest book, Autocrats vs Democrats: China, Russia, America and the New Global Disorder.