Nils Gilman
We stand at the cusp of a reordering moment in international relations as significant as 1989, 1945, or 1919—a generational event. As with these previous episodes, the end of the liberal international order that coalesced in the 1990s is a moment fraught in equal measure with hope and fear, as old certainties both bad and good evaporate. Such pivotal moments are ones where charismatic opportunists rather than competent operators shine.
At each of those previous inflection points, the old order had been going bankrupt slowly, before collapsing all at once. Though it wasn’t always clear to contemporaries, in retrospect we can see that the new order that would succeed in each case had long been in the works. In 1919, for example, the outlawing of war and the establishment of a parliament of nations had been on the table for decades; in 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had proposed “national self-determination” as the basis of qualification for a state (albeit only for white-led nations). In 1945, the idea of a reformed League of Nations with an effective security council had been planned from 1942 onwards—though the advent of nuclear weapons at the end of the war would change the calculus, ushering in the Cold War. And before 1989, the idea of a universal “liberal” or “rules-based” international order as an alternative to East/West and North/South power struggles had been proposed as far back as the 1970s.
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