The Future of World Order
By Joseph S. Nye, Jr. - March 4, 2025
Are
we entering a totally new period of American decline, or are the second
Trump administration’s attacks on the institutions and alliances that
defined the American Century just another cyclical disruption? Since
"world order" is a matter of degree, we may not know until 2029.
CAMBRIDGE
– US President Donald Trump has cast serious doubts on the future of
the postwar international order. In recent speeches and United Nations
votes, his administration has sided with Russia, an aggressor that
launched a war of conquest against its peaceful neighbor, Ukraine. His
tariff threats have raised questions about longstanding alliances and
the future of the global trading system, and his withdrawal from the
Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization has undercut
cooperation on transnational threats.
The
prospect of a wholly disengaged, self-focused United States has
troubling implications for world order. It is easy to imagine Russia
taking advantage of the situation to try to dominate Europe through the
exercise or threat of force. Europe will have to show greater unity and
provide for its own defense, even if a US backstop will remain
important. Likewise, it is easy to imagine China asserting itself more
in Asia, where it openly seeks dominance over its neighbors. Those
neighbors will surely have taken note.
In fact, all countries
will be affected, because the relationships among states and other major
transnational actors are interconnected. An international order rests
on a stable distribution of power among states; norms that influence and
legitimize conduct; and shared institutions. A given international
order can evolve incrementally without leading to a clear paradigm
shift. But if the preeminent power’s domestic politics change too
radically, all bets are off.
Since relations among states
naturally vary over time, order is a matter of degree. Before the modern
state system, order was often imposed by force and conquest, taking the
form of regional empires such as China and Rome (among many others).
Variations in war and peace between powerful empires were more an issue
of geography than of norms and institutions. Because they were
contiguous, Rome and Parthia (the area around modern-day Iran) sometimes
fought, whereas Rome, China, and the Mesoamerican empires did not.
Empires
themselves depended on both hard and soft power. China was held
together by strong common norms, highly developed political
institutions, and mutual economic benefit. So was Rome, especially the
Republic. Post-Roman Europe had institutions and norms in the form of
the papacy and dynastic monarchies, which meant that territories often
changed governance through marriage and family alliances, regardless of
the subject people’s wishes. Wars were often motivated by dynastic
considerations, though the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought
wars born of religious fervor and geopolitical ambition, owing to the
rise of Protestantism, divisions within the Roman Catholic Church, and
increased inter-state competition.
At the end of the eighteenth
century, the French Revolution disrupted the monarchical norms and the
traditional restraints that had long sustained the European balance of
power. Although Napoleon’s pursuit of empire ultimately failed after his
retreat from Moscow, his armies swept away many territorial boundaries
and created new states, leading to the first deliberate efforts to
create a modern state system, at the 1815 Congress of Vienna.
The
post-Vienna “Concert of Europe” suffered a series of disruptions over
the following decades, most notably in 1848, when nationalist
revolutions swept the continent. Following these upheavals, Otto von
Bismarck launched various wars to unite Germany, which assumed a
powerful central position in the region, reflected in the 1878 Congress
of Berlin. Through his alliance with Russia, Bismarck produced a stable
order until the Kaiser fired him in 1890.
Then came World War I,
which was followed by the Treaty of Versailles and the League of
Nations, whose failure set the stage for World War II. The subsequent
creation of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions (the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the precursor to the
World Trade Organization) marked the most important institution-building
episode of the twentieth century. Since the US was the dominant player,
the post-1945 era became known as the “American Century.” The end of
the Cold War in 1991 then produced a unipolar distribution of power,
allowing for the creation or strengthening of institutions such as the
WTO, the International Criminal Court, and the Paris climate agreement.
Even
before Trump, some analysts believed that this American order was
coming to an end. The twenty-first century had brought another shift in
the distribution of power, usually described as the rise (or more
accurately, the recovery) of Asia. While Asia had accounted for the
largest share of the world economy in 1800, it fell behind after the
Industrial Revolution in the West. And like other regions, it suffered
from the new imperialism that Western military and communications
technologies had made possible.
Now, Asia is returning to its
status as the leading source of global economic output. But its recent
gains have come more at the expense of Europe than the US. Rather than
declining, the US still represents one-quarter of global GDP, as it did
in the 1970s. While China has shrunk the US lead substantially, it has
not surpassed the US economically, militarily, or in terms of its
alliances.
If the international order is eroding, America’s
domestic politics are as much of a cause as China’s rise. The question
is whether we are entering a totally new period of American decline, or
whether the second Trump administration’s attacks on the American
Century’s institutions and alliances will prove to be another cyclical
dip. We may not know until 2029.
Joseph
S. Nye, Jr., Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, is a former US
assistant secretary of defense and the author of Do Morals Matter?
Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump (Oxford University
Press, 2020) and A Life in the American Century (Polity Press, 2024).