By Indrani Talukdar and Monish Tourangbam
The idea of a “New World Order” often rests on the assumption that world politics can somehow be infused with more predictability, rules and fairness and yet this assumption can be highly misleading, and many times perilous. It conceals the power relations that construct “order,” rendering it falsely as natural and neutral.
Periods in world politics that are deemed “orderly” and relatively more stable mask the practice of hegemonic dominance, often explained or rather justified by hegemonic stability theory. In such periods, rules and institutions become shadows of those who write them and enforce them with fait accompli, and stability often meant dependence, constraint, intervention for some and marginalization for many.
In the age of Trumpian politics of “my way or the highway”, leaders of the West are found glorifying and invoking the nostalgia of a post-World War II “liberal international order”. But historian Niall Ferguson during a one-on-one debate with Fareed Zakaria bemoaned that it was “neither liberal, nor international, nor very orderly.”
What is often lamented as the collapse of world order may instead be the unveiling of contradictions long buried beneath it. In that sense, today’s disorder is not an aberration but a revelation. Order, in the universe, is not confined to neat binaries-stability versus chaos, progress versus decay. Nature operates through cycles of creation and destruction, growth and rupture. International politics follows the same non-linear rhythm. The real question, then, is not whether disorder exists, but whether order must be imposed by a single hegemon-or whether it can emerge organically, unevenly, and even violently, from systemic change.
A useful metaphor is the whale fall: the slow, majestic descent of a dead whale to the ocean floor. What appears to be an ending becomes the foundation of a new ecosystem. Life flourishes not despite decay, but because of it. Perhaps the current unravelling of the global order is not simply collapse, but transformation. This leaves us with an enduring tension: quality versus quantity. What kind of order is worth preserving and how much order is truly orderly?
International Order: A Non-Linear History of Rise and Fall
The idea of an international order grounded in rules, norms, and shared values long predates the twentieth century. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius articulated a vision of an international society governed by law, arguing that even sovereign states are bound by universal moral and legal obligations. His work laid the foundations of modern international law by asserting that war itself could be subject to legal restraint rather than brute force.
A century later, German philosopher Immanuel Kant advanced this vision in his proposal for Perpetual Peace, which envisaged a league of states capable of restraining war through shared commitments and mutual accountability. This philosophical ideal gained political form after the First World War in the vision of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. In his 1918 address to the U.S. Congress, Wilson declared that “reason and justice and the common interests of mankind shall prevail,” framing the League of Nations as the institutional embodiment of collective security and moral progress in international affairs.
Yet the League was undermined from its inception by a critical contradiction between its ambitions and its political foundations. Most notably, the United States, the principal architect of the League and the world’s emerging economic and military power, failed to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and never joined the organization. The U.S. Senate’s rejection deprived the League of legitimacy, leadership, and enforcement capacity, signalling to both allies and adversaries that collective security lacked the backing of decisive power. Without American participation, the League became an institution heavy on moral authority but light on strategic credibility.
This weakness proved fatal in the face of rising revisionist powers. Germany, Japan, and Italy rejected the post–First World War settlement and pursued expansion through force, calculating that international opposition would be fragmented and risk-averse. While Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States expressed disapproval and imposed limited sanctions, these measures were uncoordinated and insufficient. The failure of the League to deter aggression in the 1930s revealed not merely a lapse of will, but a structural flaw, that an international order cannot endure on norms alone. Absent credible enforcement, sustained consensus, and the participation of great powers of the day, the promise of a rules-based system collapses under the pressure of revisionism, paving the way to World War II.
The devastation of World War II catalysed a concerted effort to construct a stable international order through institutionalized cooperation. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods financial architecture, and an expanding body of legal norms were designed to constrain the unilateral exercise of power and embed state behaviour within predictable frameworks, meant to manage power asymmetries and generate legitimacy. However, these arrangements were lopsided although cloaked in universalist terms.
The post-war order rather emerged through a top-down process shaped by the U.S.-led Western dominance. During the Cold War, this asymmetry was partially obscured by bipolar competition. With the collapse of that structure, however, the tension between universality and hierarchy became stark. This imbalance became particularly pronounced after the end of the Cold War, when the United States emerged as the sole superpower. The expansion of Western-led institutions, especially NATO, and the selective application of international norms deeply alienated countries such as Russia, fostering resentment and a renewed sense of revisionism.
In the Russian case, revisionist behaviour was fuelled not just by material decline but by exclusion from meaningful influence within the evolving order. More broadly, the system’s legitimacy deficit revealed a structural contradiction in which institutions designed to stabilize power relations became vehicles through which power was exercised and contested.
What distinguishes the contemporary moment, however, is the diffusion of revisionist practices to the system’s core. In the early twenty-first century, the United States, the principal architect and long-standing guarantor of the post-war order, has increasingly treated institutions instrumentally rather than as constraints on its own behaviour. Patterns of intervention and pressure in Latin America, territorial signalling with respect to Greenland, and coercive rhetoric toward close allies such as Canada suggest a declining commitment to norm consistency and institutional restraint. This behaviour blurs the distinction between status quo and revisionist actors.
History, it seems, does not merely repeat—it rhymes.
Fragile Order in Anarchy
What distinguishes international order from order within sovereign states is the absence of a central authority. Inside states, order is enforced through constitutions, courts, police, and shared norms. Internationally, no such hierarchy exists. The system remains anarchic, and no accumulation of treaties, conventions, or customary law can fully constrain sovereign states when vital national interests are perceived to be at stake.
Revisionism is not an aberration in this system; it is a structural feature. Fuelled by nationalism, historical grievance, shifting power balances, and security imperatives, or a concoction of all of them, major powers are tempted to claim or reclaim territory, rewrite rules, or undermine institutions through their respective perceptions of disenchantment, discontent, vulnerability, or decline. In these moments, international law becomes conditional rather than binding. While scholars continue to mourn the erosion of a rules-based order, a starker reality is now on display, which is the return of unapologetic power politics. Especially among the strongest states, the language of cooperation has given way to open assertions of interest and dominance. The metaphorical velvet gloves have come off.
The concept of “order” is far more elusive in practice than it appears in theory. Who introduced it into international discourse, and by what authority? How much weight does it truly carry and who determines its quality and quantity? These questions expose a central problem in international relations. International order is not a neutral condition but exist and evolve in a highly contested geopolitical space.
The so-called “rules-based international order” is especially ambiguous. Is it grounded in treaties, norms, institutions, or raw power? And if it is rules-based, whose rules prevail? The paradox is hard to ignore. All major powers profess loyalty to this order, yet they are often the first to violate its principles when convenient. Order, in this sense, becomes selective and instrumental. It becomes a rhetorical device rather than a binding framework.
This contradiction lies at the heart of hegemonic stability theory, which argues that international order requires a dominant power to supply public goods such as security, financial stability, and institutional leadership. But what happens when the hegemon retreats? Order, it turns out, is not self-sustaining. The U.S. withdrawal from and defunding of key international organisations under President Donald Trump exposed this fragility.
Global governance depends not only on shared ideas but on material commitment. Institutions require financing. Norms require enforcement. When great powers disengage, the architecture of order does not merely weaken. In fact, it hollows out. But, at the same time, such a period of power rearrangement creates geopolitical spaces, for a new hegemon to fill. Both China’s material capability and intention to do so, either through funding of older institutions or forming new ones for distribution of public goods, will have wide-ranging and deep influence on global governance and the future of multilateralism itself. International order, in other words, is less a universal principle than a contingent project which is constantly shaped by power, sustained by resources, and vulnerable to the very actors who claim to uphold it.
The New Normal of Naked Realism and the Silver Lining
Recent events, from Ukraine to Venezuela to Greenland, offer a grim diagnosis of the international system. The United Nations survives largely as a symbol. Powerful states flout the law with impunity; weaker ones are left exposed. Sovereignty rings hollow, and international law appears unenforceable.
Yet this lawlessness is hardly new. What is being witnessed is not an unprecedented collapse, but a return to a more candid equilibrium. The post–Cold War “liberal world order” was never universally accepted. It defined legitimacy in terms of freedom and democracy, enforcing those standards selectively and often coercively. For instance, the contradictions of the so-called international order are laid bare in U.S. foreign policy. While Washington proclaims its commitment to civilian-led governments, its repeated courtship of military rulers or monarchical powers tells a far messier story. Labels such as “terrorist” or “rogue state,” and the privileges extended to select allies, are less matters of principle than products of shifting threat perceptions and convenient national security calculations.
The disorder on display today, therefore, is not an aberration but a reflection of the darker impulses of human nature-self-interest, the relentless pursuit of power, and the quest for security and dominance that define international politics. The international order was never free of these forces; it merely masked them beneath a veneer of moral rhetoric.
Yet even this bleak diagnosis carries a productive insight. As in a whale fall, where decay becomes the basis for new life, the breakdown of an old order opens space to rethink global governance. The unmasking of hypocrisy may not be a failure of the system so much as the first condition for a more realistic, if still, flawed one. So, amidst the chaos of the old order unravelling, there may exist the seeds of a new order forming with all its frailties.
The question, then, is not whether the so-called New World Order can be restored, but whether a different kind of order can be imagined at all. One that recognizes power as it is exercised, not as it is idealized. One that accepts imperfection rather than disguising it; and that builds guardrails collectively, not as instruments of national advantage or bloc dominance, but as shared constraints rooted in a minimal sense of common humanity.
Without such a recalibration, which represents an enlightenment grounded on common humanity as well as on a clear-eyed understanding of the realities, the cycle of rise, collapse, and replacement is likely to repeat. Russian author Leo Tolstoy captured this tension in his works including War and Peace: two soldiers facing each other across a border, bound by duty to oppose one another, yet united in a simple, unspoken refusal to die for abstractions they did not choose.
Authors: Indrani Talukdar and Monish Tourangbam – Fellows at the Centre for Geopolitics and Strategic Studies, Chintan Research Foundation (CRF), New Delhi, India.
(The opinions expressed in this article belong only to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of World Geostrategic Insights).