International (Dis)Order

When Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, called for a new world order in 1988, it seemed that the institutions and agreements built to ensure a more stable, open and economically integrated world after World War II might finally gain universal acceptance. Just a few decades later, what scholars call the liberal, rules-based international order and its underlying norms — including free trade, the inviolability of territorial borders and multilateral dispute settlement — is showing signs of stress. Hopes that Russia and China in particular would adopt Western views on matters such as human rights and the rule of law proved misplaced. Yet the greatest threat to a system that some argue has produced the most peaceful and prosperous period in history comes from the growing isolationism and nationalism in its traditional champions, the U.S. and Europe.

U.S. President Donald Trump, channeling popular discontent over the perceived failures of globalization to deliver widespread prosperity, has launched a protectionist trade war, withdrawn from a global agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear program, vowed to pull the U.S. out of the Paris plan to mitigate global warming and questioned the value of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Trump says his administration rejects “the ideology of globalism.” In the years before he took office, Russia and China had been pushing back against some aspects of the arrangements, such as the United Nations’s 2005 pledge to protect people at risk of genocide, which they condemned as intrusions on national sovereignty. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia flouted a basic rule of international order by annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. It has opposed expansion of NATO, the European Union and other alliances that developed as U.S.-backed pillars of the system, which Russia sees as hostile to its goal of reasserting its influence in the former Soviet bloc and beyond. China has embraced components of the global system and introduced new ones of its own, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. But it also makes exceptions for itself, such as when it rejected an international tribunal’s ruling against its territorial claims in the South China Sea in 2016.