This Is the Way a World Order Ends

The Atlantic

30-04-2025

In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig looked back on Europe before the First World War. That was, he wrote, the Golden Age of Security, when institutions such as the Habsburg monarchy appeared destined to last forever. Zweig lived to see much of his world swept away by first one war and then another, even more devastating, which was raging when he died by suicide in 1942.
The Europeans of Zweig's youth did not grasp the fragility of their world, with its growing domestic tensions and fraying international order. Many of us in today's West have suffered the same failure of imagination. We are stunned and dismayed that what we took for granted appears to be vanishing: democracy in the United States, which was a model for much of the world, and international institutions and norms that allowed many nations to work together to avoid war and confront shared problems, such as climate change and pandemic disease.
As a historian, I study those moments in the past when an old order decays beyond the point of return and a new one emerges, but I never expected to live through one. I should have. Today's world is lurching toward great-power rivalry, suspicion, and fear—an international order where the strong do what they will, as Thucydides wrote, and 'the weak suffer what they must.' Imperialism, which never really disappeared, is back. Governments and think tanks now speak of spheres of influence, something the U.S. long opposed. If history is a guide, this will not be an easy or pleasant transition.
The past holds many examples of great change: regimes ending, monarchies becoming republics, whole civilizations vanishing, ways of managing relations between peoples and states swept aside, to be replaced by new ones.
Change can come slowly or suddenly. The Roman empire and its successor in the East decayed gradually, with intervals of revival. The French Revolution of 1789, Russia's in 1917, and, much more recently, the end of the Soviet regime and the Cold War happened within weeks or months.
Warnings beforehand can tell us, if we pay attention, that the old structures and rules are giving way. As with an apparently solid house, the foundations start to shift, the roof leaks, and greedy neighbors start to encroach on the grounds. When old regimes fall, the causes tend to be economic: France before 1789 was effectively bankrupt. Sometimes governments have ceased to function, and large sections of society, including elites, have become disaffected. By 1917 in Russia, housewives were marching in city streets to protest a lack of food, peasants were seizing land, and many Russians saw the czarist government as irrelevant, even treasonous. Soviet citizens in the 1980s could no longer ignore the glaring differences between the utopian promises of communism and the reality of an autocratic and incompetent regime. Even party members no longer believed.
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International orders collapse in the same way. Pressures mount on the system from within and without. Support ebbs, even among those who have benefited most from the existing order, while those who would defy it grow bolder, and embolden one another. Before the First World War, the fading Ottoman empire promised rich pickings in North Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East. Nevertheless, the world's powers shared a general understanding that they would leave it alone, for fear of setting off a major conflict among themselves. Then, in 1911, the relatively new state of Italy, using the flimsiest of excuses, invaded what later became Libya. The Balkan states watched with interest as the other great powers did very little. The next year, several of them banded together to launch their own attack on the Ottoman empire.
We should never underestimate the power of example in human affairs. In our own time, we are seeing one country and then another flouting what had been a basic rule since the end of World War II: that ownership by one country of territory seized by force from another would not be recognized. President Vladimir Putin of Russia took parts of Georgia in 2008, and in 2014 invaded Ukraine to seize Crimea and part of the Donbas region to further his mission of rebuilding the czarist empire. The peace negotiations under way between Ukraine, which is being abandoned by the United States, and Russia seem almost certain to allow Russia to keep that territory and very likely acquire even more. Israel seems to be maneuvering toward annexing parts of Gaza and maybe even southern Lebanon, while in Africa, Rwandan troops are pushing into neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. China can only be encouraged to think that the world will accept its bringing Taiwan under its rule.
A new world order with new rules is taking shape.
The alternative to an accepted international order, much like the alternative to government, is Thomas Hobbes's dystopia: a grim, anarchic world with 'no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' The way back to a sustainable and effective international order, once that order has been lost, is long and difficult.
Until recent centuries, international orders were not global but regional in scale. Those regional orders became the models for much bigger ones later on, but until the end of the 15th century, travel was slow and frequently dangerous, and one part of the world did not always know much, if anything, about the others.
The underpinnings of a global order can be traced to the age of discovery, when Europeans first learned to circumnavigate the globe, then established a presence at vast distances, and followed that with empires. The Industrial Revolution in the 19th century produced, among much else, railways, steamships, and telegraphs, which connected people in far-flung territories with one another. The international orders that followed these advances assumed many different shapes. Sometimes, as in 18th-century Europe, powers balanced against one another, forging alliances and leaving them in a jostling for advantage that could easily topple into war. Sometimes international relations fell under the sway of a powerful hegemon—or of outright imperialism, where a single state, such as Rome, or an outside invader, such as the Ottoman empire, dominated its neighbors and provided them with security. For centuries, the Chinese believed that their land was the center of the world and that their emperor held the mandate of heaven to govern it. The British empire was the world's hegemon from the second half of the 19th century until, arguably, the start of the Second World War—just as the United States was from 1989 until now.
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Under the Trump administration, the United States no longer demonstrates the will to dominate the globe, and China does not yet have the capacity. History offers yet another model for the present situation, and perhaps for the future: spheres of influence, in which great powers dominate their own neighborhoods or strategic points, such as the Suez Canal for the British empire or Panama for the U.S., while lesser powers within the sphere accept, not always willingly, their sway, and outside ones steer clear to preserve their own dominions. Western powers and Japan carved out such spheres of influence in the 19th century, when they took advantage of a declining China to establish exclusive zones of interest there. Britain and Russia did something similar in Iran in 1907.
Such an order is inherently unstable: The regions where the spheres meet become fields of conflict known as 'shatter zones.' Austria-Hungary and Russia vied for dominance in the Balkans before the First World War, just as China and India do with the countries between them and along around their shared border today. One power can be tempted to intrude on another's sphere when it thinks a rival's grip is slackening. And the influence that powers have in their spheres can wax and wane depending on domestic factors, including political upheavals and economic downturns. Lesser powers that find themselves under the dominion of a great power against their wishes can be resentful and rebellious. By its words and actions, for example, the Trump administration has reignited anti-Americanism in much of Latin America and turned Canadians against their neighbor.
A once-dominant power that fears it is declining can be particularly reckless. In 1914, Austria-Hungary saw that Serbia, nominally within its sphere of influence, had fallen under Russia's influence. Resentful and determined to destroy Serbia, Austria-Hungary instead precipitated a world war that destroyed the empire itself and much else.
Perhaps history can offer some hope as well as warning. The notion of an international order based on rules, norms, and broadly shared values has deep roots. Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch scholar of the 16th and 17th centuries, talked of an international society with laws and ways of settling disputes. A century later, Immanuel Kant proposed a League of Nations, which he imagined would prevent wars and eventually enfold all the countries of the world into one peaceful society.
For a time in the 19th century, what Kant called the 'crooked timber of humanity' appeared to be straightening. Democracy spread globally, and with it, challenges to the received idea of the national interest as something determined by autocratic elites, or of military power as the only kind that mattered. Democratic leaders and thinkers began to envision a new and better international order—one with worldwide laws, institutions, and values. The First World War turned such musings into a plan of action.
The conflict's outbreak came as a shock to many Europeans, but signs were visible before 1914. Jobs for Europe's skilled workers were vanishing, or their wages were lowering, as production moved to areas of the world where labor was cheaper. Populist leaders stirred resentment against minorities—Jews, immigrants, elites. Revolutionaries condemned the whole system as unequal and unjust and called for the creation of a new order. At the same time, the willingness of the great powers to work with one another, as they had done in the first half of the century in the Concert of Europe, evaporated. New alliances emerged—one among Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy, and the other among France, Britain, and Russia. Crises and wars in the Balkans in the first years of the 20th century fueled resentments, desires for revenge, and an arms race. Europe had entered a danger zone where a sudden crisis could start a chain reaction. And that is what happened with the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne in June 1914.
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The war's consequences were so devastating for Europe and the wider world that many feared humanity was doomed. But catastrophes have a way of focusing attention on solutions that might once have been dismissed as fanciful or impossible.
Woodrow Wilson, the president who took the United States into the war in 1917, made clear that he wanted nothing for his own country, and that his overriding aim was a new international order animated by ideals of fairness: Peoples are entitled to self-determination, and the nations of the world must come together to protect the defenseless and prevent future wars. Wilson told Congress in January 1918 that 'reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail.' To that end, a new institution, the League of Nations, would provide collective security for its members, confront aggression (with military force if necessary), and endeavor to improve the lot of humanity. When Wilson traveled to Europe for the peace conference in Paris, adoring crowds greeted him as a savior.
Historians now describe the league as a failure, because in the 1930s, the revisionist powers—Germany, Japan, and Italy, which were members—defied it to wage unprovoked war: Germany on its neighbours, Japan on China, and Italy on Ethiopia. Other powers, including the Soviet Union, France, Britain, and the United States, expressed disapproval and imposed some ineffective sanctions, but shrank from anything more drastic. A second and even more destructive world war was the result. But the hope and the idea behind the league did not die. If anything, the scale of the Second World War and the advent of the atom bomb made the quest for a peaceable international order more urgent than ever.
Another American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been talking about an organization of the world's nations even before the U.S. came into the war. He gained British support and brought the American people and Congress along with him, something Wilson had failed to do. He also managed to gain Joseph Stalin's grudging assent that the Soviet Union would join the new order, which included not only the United Nations but also the Bretton Woods institutions, established to organize global economic relations.
After 1945, these instruments and the order they upheld allowed the world's powers to manage many of their antagonisms without resorting to war. A strong web of international bodies, special agencies, treaties, laws, and NGOs bound the globe ever closer. The Cold War threatened at times to break that web apart, and shooting wars were always present somewhere in the world. But the order held, such that even the United States and the Soviet Union found ways to reach agreements and ease tensions. When the Cold War abruptly ended with the collapse of first the Soviet empire in Europe and then the Soviet Union itself, the world looked set for greater cooperation, and perhaps even the onward march of democracy.
History has a way of clarifying that what looks like the only possible future at one moment is actually just one possibility among others. Few in the 1990s anticipated the emergence of revisionist powers, for whom the existing order was a sham, a cover for the dominance of the United States and its allies. These actors saw the post–World War II order as an obstacle to their nations' ambitions, whether to restore past glories, reclaim land they felt was rightfully theirs, or dominate their own people and regions. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has threatened to reconsider the Treaty of Trianon, which assigned much of Hungary's territory to its neighbors after World War I. The greatest revisionist of all, so far, is Putin. But perhaps the most serious rebuke to the liberal international order has come from inside the democracies, where populist parties have hitched economic grievances, anti-immigrant sentiments, and the loss of faith in their own elites and institutions to an authoritarian domestic turn.
Resentments and goals may differ from country to country, but populism is fueled everywhere by the promise of undoing the mistakes of the past. Internationally, this translates into contempt for the liberal rules-based order and international organizations such as the United Nations. Far-right leaders prefer to work with like-minded counterparts to further their own interests, even at the expense of others.
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Nowhere is this shift more consequential than in the United States, which was the original visionary and anchor of the postwar order. The Trump administration has characterized that role as one for suckers, in which the United States restrained its hard power and allowed other countries to bleed its wealth. Donald Trump has proposed instead for the United States to use its economic and military predominance as tools of naked coercion, dispensing entirely with the niceties of international agreements and even domestic constitutional constraint.
We are witnessing the resurrection of spheres of influence. In the past, U.S. leaders decried these as characteristic of the cynical old Europe that Americans had escaped. But in truth, the Monroe Doctrine, which warned outside powers to stay away from the Western Hemisphere, asserted an American sphere of influence; during the Cold War, the United States implicitly accepted Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe and extended its own influence over the West. Yet, however imperfectly, the U.S. also stood for another, better order, which recognized the rights of small nations and spoke to much of humanity's hope for a world run for the collective good, not just for the benefit of a few powerful states. Today's American administration, however, seems openly wedded to the idea of dividing the globe among great powers, and oblivious to the potential for conflict where spheres interact and struggle against one another—for example, U.S. and China in the Pacific.
The recent leaked proposal to drastically reduce the State Department and the Foreign Service and reorganize what is left into four regional 'corps'—Eurasia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Indo-Pacific—is a first step toward accepting such a division. The fact that Canada would come directly under the aegis of the secretary of state suggests that the Trump administration sees the whole of the Western Hemisphere as its own. In a recent Time interview, the president repeated his airy claims that Canada was a burden on the U.S. and went on: 'We don't need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.' In a new division of the world, Russia could presumably preside over Central Asia and most or all of Europe, dismissed so contemptuously by Vice President J. D. Vance and others. China may well claim hegemony in East Asia. The current drift toward authoritarian leaders in this fractured world will leave international relations at the mercy of their whims, dreams, and follies.
As is often the case in history, what appears sudden isn't really. Pressures build; small changes accrete—and then burst into view. The first months of 2025 have felt like a movie suddenly speeding up, images rushing by so fast that the dialogue is an almost incomprehensible gabble. What the world once took for granted in the U.S.—checks and balances, respect for the courts, reverence for democratic values and practices—is now in question. And because America was the crucial player in the international order, the tremors of its earthquake are felt everywhere. In Asia and Europe, U.S. allies prepare to face China and Russia alone. In the Americas, a president who sounds like a 19th-century imperialist crossed with a New York real-estate developer talks about taking over Greenland, Panama, and Canada. And all at once, spheres of influence have ceased to be just something historians and political scientists study, but the emerging reality of a volatile new world.