A World in Disarray

Picture this: on a November day in 1989, jubilant crowds wielded hammers and pickaxes against the Berlin Wall, sending chunks of concrete flying as they tore down the symbol of Cold War division. The world watched in amazement as decades of frozen hostility seemed to melt away overnight. Just months later, when Saddam Hussein's tanks rolled into Kuwait, an unprecedented coalition of nations—former enemies now standing shoulder to shoulder—united to reverse this aggression. It felt like humanity had finally learned to cooperate, that the age of great power conflict was behind us forever.

How wrong we were. Today, nearly three decades later, the optimism of those heady days feels almost quaint. Instead of the promised "new world order," we find ourselves navigating an increasingly chaotic landscape where traditional alliances strain, new powers rise with their own agendas, and threats emerge from directions we never anticipated. The story of how we got from that moment of hope to our current predicament is not just one of missed opportunities, but of fundamental changes in how power works in our interconnected world. Understanding this transformation requires us to trace the arc of international order from its origins in the ashes of medieval chaos, through the careful balance of the Cold War, to the fractured reality we inhabit today.

In 1648, exhausted European powers gathered to sign the Treaty of Westphalia, ending thirty years of devastating religious and political warfare that had torn the continent apart. This agreement established a revolutionary principle that would shape international relations for centuries: the idea that sovereign states should respect each other's borders and refrain from meddling in each other's internal affairs. For the first time in European history, rulers agreed that what happened within another country's borders was, generally speaking, not their business.

This Westphalian system created an elegant solution to the chaos of constant interference and intervention that had plagued medieval Europe. Strong states could no longer simply impose their will on weaker neighbors under the guise of religious crusades or dynastic claims. Instead, a balance of power emerged where coalitions would form to prevent any single nation from becoming too dominant. The system wasn't perfect—wars still occurred—but they were increasingly about specific territorial or commercial disputes rather than existential struggles over how entire societies should be organized.

The Westphalian order found its most sophisticated expression in the Concert of Europe that followed the Napoleonic Wars. After witnessing the devastation that revolutionary France had unleashed across the continent, European statesmen like Metternich, Castlereagh, and Talleyrand crafted a system of regular consultation and mutual restraint. This wasn't mere balance of power politics, but something more sophisticated: an understanding that stability required active diplomatic management, not just military deterrence.

Yet this order contained the seeds of its own destruction. As new nation-states like Germany emerged with grievances against the existing arrangement, and as old empires like Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire began to crumble, the careful balance became increasingly unstable. The system that had prevented major European wars for nearly a century finally collapsed in the trenches of World War I, revealing that neither economic interdependence nor diplomatic sophistication could ultimately contain the explosive forces of nationalism and industrial warfare. The world would need to learn these lessons the hard way, twice, before finding a different path forward.

The mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't just end World War II—they fundamentally altered the nature of international conflict forever. For the first time in human history, weapons existed that could destroy entire civilizations, making traditional concepts of victory and defeat obsolete. This terrifying reality paradoxically created one of the most stable periods in modern international relations, as the United States and Soviet Union developed an intricate dance of competition that stopped just short of direct confrontation.

The Cold War order rested on a foundation of mutual nuclear deterrence, where both superpowers understood that any direct military clash risked escalating to mutual annihilation. This "balance of terror" was reinforced by sophisticated arms control agreements that ensured neither side could gain a decisive advantage, and by tacit understandings about acceptable behavior in their respective spheres of influence. When crises did emerge—Berlin in 1948, Cuba in 1962, or various Middle Eastern conflicts—both sides showed remarkable restraint in preventing escalation.

Alongside this military standoff, a parallel system of international cooperation emerged from the ashes of World War II. The Bretton Woods economic institutions, the United Nations, and various regional organizations created frameworks for managing global challenges that transcended the East-West divide. While the UN Security Council was often paralyzed by superpower rivalry, other institutions facilitated unprecedented levels of international trade, development assistance, and coordination on technical issues from aviation to postal services.

Perhaps most remarkably, this period saw the successful transformation of former enemies Germany and Japan into democratic allies. Unlike the punitive peace that followed World War I, the victorious powers chose to rebuild rather than destroy, integrating their former adversaries into new security and economic arrangements. This approach proved that international order could be based not just on balance of power, but on shared institutions and values. However, this Cold War stability was always artificial, dependent on the discipline imposed by nuclear competition. When that competition ended, the world would discover how much of its apparent harmony had been merely frozen in place, waiting to thaw into something far more complex and unpredictable.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many believed that history itself was ending—not in catastrophe, but in the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets. The Gulf War seemed to confirm this optimism, as former adversaries united to reverse Saddam Hussein's conquest of Kuwait with unprecedented efficiency. Surely this heralded an age where international law would finally have teeth, where collective security would replace balance of power politics, and where economic interdependence would make war obsolete.

Reality proved far more stubborn than these hopeful theories. Without the organizing principle of superpower competition, the international system began to fragment in unexpected ways. Power diffused from major capitals to a bewildering array of actors: terrorist networks, multinational corporations, regional organizations, and even individual hackers wielding influence that once required vast state resources. The neat bipolar world gave way to something messier—a "nonpolar" system where many players could affect global affairs, but none could control them.

This diffusion of power coincided with the emergence of challenges that transcended traditional sovereignty. Climate change, cyber warfare, pandemic disease, and international terrorism couldn't be contained within borders or addressed by any single nation, no matter how powerful. Yet the international institutions created in the 1940s proved woefully inadequate for these twenty-first-century problems. The UN Security Council remained frozen by great power disagreements, while newer forums like the G-20 were too broad to be effective and too narrow to be legitimate.

Most troubling was the growing gap between global challenges and global responses. While problems became more interconnected and urgent, international cooperation became more difficult as domestic politics in many countries turned inward. The very globalization that created these challenges also generated backlash from populations feeling left behind by rapid change. By 2016, with Brexit and the rise of populist movements worldwide, it was clear that the liberal international order was under severe strain. The question was no longer whether this order would evolve, but whether it would survive at all, and what might replace it.

The Arab Spring of 2011 began with hope—a young fruit vendor in Tunisia whose self-immolation sparked protests that spread across the region like wildfire. For a brief moment, it seemed that the Middle East might finally break free from decades of authoritarian stagnation and join the democratic wave that had swept through Eastern Europe and Latin America. Instead, the region descended into a chaos that would define the following decade and send shockwaves around the globe.

Syria became the epicenter of this breakdown, transforming from a stable authoritarian state into a multisided conflict involving government forces, opposition groups, jihadist organizations, and eventually the armed forces of Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the United States. What began as peaceful protests evolved into a proxy war that displaced over half the country's population and created a refugee crisis that would destabilize Europe itself. The Syrian conflict revealed how quickly regional disorders could become global problems in an interconnected world.

The Middle East's troubles were compounded by the return of great power competition in other regions. Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 shattered the post-Cold War assumption that European borders were permanently settled, while China's assertive behavior in the South China Sea challenged American primacy in East Asia. Unlike the Cold War, however, these weren't ideological confrontations between incompatible systems, but complex relationships where cooperation and competition coexisted uneasily.

These regional breakdowns exposed the limitations of American power in a nonpolar world. The United States remained the strongest single actor globally, but its influence was increasingly constrained by domestic politics, fiscal pressures, and the sheer complexity of modern challenges. Other powers were rising, but none were willing or able to assume global leadership responsibilities. The result was a series of regional crises that festered without effective international response, creating a downward spiral where each failure to act undermined confidence in the international system itself. The world was discovering that order didn't maintain itself automatically—it required constant effort and adaptation, qualities that seemed to be in increasingly short supply.

Standing amid the ruins of the old order, we face a fundamental choice: we can either drift toward greater chaos or actively build something better adapted to twenty-first-century realities. The traditional Westphalian system of sovereign rights must evolve into something that recognizes sovereign obligations—the responsibilities that governments have not just to their own citizens, but to the international community in an interconnected world.

This new approach recognizes that in an age of globalization, few problems remain purely domestic. A government's failure to control disease outbreaks, cyber attacks, or carbon emissions can have devastating consequences far beyond its borders. Similarly, a state that harbors terrorists or allows nuclear materials to proliferate threatens the security of all nations. The challenge is developing international consensus around what these obligations should be, and what should happen when they're not met.

The United States, despite its reduced relative power, remains uniquely positioned to lead this transformation. No other country possesses the combination of military capabilities, economic resources, diplomatic networks, and institutional relationships necessary to address global challenges. But American leadership in a nonpolar world must look different from the hegemonic dominance of earlier eras. It requires building coalitions of the willing, sharing burdens with capable partners, and sometimes accepting outcomes that are good enough rather than perfect.

Most critically, effective international leadership begins at home. America cannot promote order abroad if it cannot govern itself effectively, maintain economic growth, or adapt to technological change. The country's mounting debt, aging infrastructure, and dysfunctional politics all undermine its ability to play the global role that the times demand. The task ahead is not to restore American hegemony—that era has passed—but to help create a new form of international order that can manage the challenges of an interconnected but fragmented world. Success will require wisdom, restraint, and above all, the recognition that in a nonpolar world, everyone's security depends on everyone else's responsibility.

The great paradox of our time is that we live in both the most connected and most fragmented world in human history. The journey from Westphalian sovereignty through Cold War bipolarity to today's nonpolar disorder reveals a consistent pattern: every international order eventually becomes obsolete, not because it fails, but because it succeeds too well, creating the conditions that make it unnecessary or inadequate. The challenge we face today is unique in its complexity—managing relationships between major powers while simultaneously addressing global challenges that no single nation can solve alone.

The path forward requires abandoning the illusion that we can return to simpler times when great powers could manage world affairs among themselves, or when domestic and international politics operated in separate spheres. Instead, we must embrace the messy reality of shared sovereignty, where effective governance requires coordination across multiple levels—local, national, regional, and global. This means strengthening international institutions while reforming them to reflect current power realities, promoting free trade while helping those displaced by economic change, and maintaining military strength while recognizing that most twenty-first-century challenges cannot be solved by force alone. The world will not order itself, and the cost of disorder grows higher each day we delay building something better suited to the realities of our interconnected age.