Thomas E. Graham
The liberal rules-based international order it built and sustained in the years after the Second World War is disintegrating at an accelerating pace.
After a period of comity following the end of the Cold War, great-power competition has returned with a vengeance, pitting the United States against two major revisionist powers, China and Russia, meanwhile, smaller powers cozy up to one or multiple members of this unfriendly trio.
The Trump administration stressed the return of great-power competition in its National Security Strategy, and the Biden administration only amplified that view on its own. In these administrations’ telling, America’s rivals are disputing the foundations of the liberal order, including the democratic values that inspire it and the U.S. power that undergirds it.
As the United States’ margin of superiority over other powers thins, new, mostly illiberal centers of global power such as China, arguably India, and possibly Russia, gain authority and influence. More generally, world power and dynamism are flowing away from the Euro-Atlantic community, the core of the liberal order. Although the United States resists the idea, the world is moving toward illiberal, if not necessarily anti-liberal, multipolarity.
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