FP -- Essay
How to Survive in a World Without Rules
Self-help is becoming more vital in a vicious world.
September 9, 2026, 12:02 AM
By Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Doug Chayka illustrations for Foreign Policy
Not so long ago, it seemed that the world was becoming more civilized. The end of the Cold War was supposed to bring the triumph of the rules-based order. Enlightened norms and cooperation, buttressed by a broad-minded superpower, would supplant anarchic patterns of the past. It was an inspiring vision—and, alas, an illusion.
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This article appears in the Fall 2026 print issue: How to Survive in a World Without Rules.
Now, all around the world, rules are in retreat. Aggression and conquest are surging; economic coercion and predation are rampant. Respect for international law and organizations is cratering; arms control is in decline. Great powers are reviving dreams of empire; the United States is tempted to seek narrow national aggrandizement at the cost of world order. And as global norms falter, strong leaders are shredding political constraints and institutions at home.
Our world is at risk of becoming a gangster’s paradise, in which rules matter far less than they once did—and raw power matters more.
This is a harsh shift for those whose mindsets were made in a kinder moment. It will present severe tests for leaders who must navigate an unforgiving age. There’s little utility, at this point, in lamenting the fall of the post-Cold War order. The task is to understand the requirements of survival in our post-rules world. The purpose of this essay, therefore, is to sketch a map of the new era we’re entering and provide some guidelines for making the best of the bad times ahead.
The dream of a rules-based order is fading into history, but there was a time when it seemed like the future. After World War II, Washington and its Western allies built half a rules-based order—a set of deeply cooperative relationships, structured by shared norms and supranational institutions—within the free world as a way of containing the Kremlin. Once the Soviet bloc collapsed and the Cold War ended, there was a chance to take that project global.
The core of the rules-based order was the idea that old, destructive impulses could be overcome through the adoption of liberal practices and principles—and the consistent application of U.S. power. A flourishing, open economy would enrich all participants; commercial disputes would be resolved through World Trade Organization (WTO) procedures, not mutually immiserating tariff fights. Habits of conquest and domination would be discouraged; vital norms, such as freedom of navigation and respect for borders, would be strengthened. Freed from Cold War paralysis, international organizations and law would gain influence. Great-power rivalry itself would fade as potential spoilers—a rising China, a resurgent Russia—became satisfied stakeholders in a system that delivered prosperity and peace.
The core of the rules-based order was the idea that old, destructive impulses could be overcome through the adoption of liberal practices and principles—and the consistent application of U.S. power.
That vision was an effort to tame the destructive forces that had repeatedly torn the world apart in the 20th century. It wasn’t as utopian as it might seem in hindsight: Just as laws are enforced by sheriffs, the rules-based order rested upon U.S. power. The U.S. Navy beat back piracy and other threats to freedom of the seas; the Pentagon anchored alliances that deterred aggression; Washington rallied coalitions that fought terrorism, rogue-state proliferation, and other scourges. The rules-based order was made in America: Washington, more than any other actor, set the terms of international stability. The country’s preferred concepts—free markets, democracy, human rights—advanced around the globe.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn’t wholly wrong when he angrily alleged, in 2007, that the rules-based order was a cloak for U.S. hegemony. That’s part, but only part, of why that order came undone.
Rules are never value-free, and Washington’s rules seemed oppressive, even existentially threatening, to autocratic regimes that sought to crush liberal impulses at home while building empires abroad. Putin’s Russia began forcibly changing borders in the post-Soviet space as soon as it regained the strength to do so. China plunged into the global economy and used the explosive growth that followed to fund a record-busting military buildup, a determined campaign to dominate the industries of the future, and a bid to dominate the South China Sea.
Washington’s rules prevailed in a unipolar environment. They sagged as the balance shifted—and America soured on its own global project.
The United States had always taken a selective approach to rule-following: It waged wars, in Kosovo and Iraq, without the blessing of the United Nations. But then something more fundamental changed.
Washington’s rules prevailed in a unipolar environment. They sagged as the balance shifted—and America soured on its own global project.
Americans became tired of playing sheriff after draining Middle East fights and a global financial crisis: By 2013-14, U.S. President Barack Obama was declining to enforce his own red line against Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons attacks against his population and doing little to contest Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine. Frustration followed fatigue: Persistent allied free-riding led politicians from both major parties to argue that the United States was bearing too much responsibility for global order and reaping too few benefits. Perhaps most damaging, China’s meteoric rise produced a sense that the system worked against U.S. interests—that an open world economy had eviscerated U.S. manufacturing and enriched a ruthless rival.
The rules-based order came to seem like a burden, or perhaps a bad deal, for its chief defender. Now, we’re in a new moment, as that order comes undone.
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We’re a long way from a rules-based economy: Commercial and strategic rivalries are ripping that system apart. The WTO has been moribund for years as countries take trade fights into their own hands. Protectionism proliferates as governments try to dominate key industries or defend them from foreign competition: Tariffs and other trade-distorting measures were rising before U.S. President Donald Trump’s onslaught in 2025. The United States and China are wielding their control of key supply chains against each other as tools of economic coercion and geopolitical competition. The global economy has become a battleground as countries clash for power and cast aside once respected rules. Developing countries that profited enormously from trade and investment flows under the old system—even as they resented, often bitterly, its inequities—face tougher growth prospects in a world with higher walls.
Likewise, the global security environment grows more disordered. The post-Cold War peace is over: Levels of state-based conflict have reached their highest mark in decades. Arms control frameworks—whether U.S.-Russia nuclear agreements or international accords against the use of land mines—are crumbling. Territorial expansion is becoming commonplace as countries from China to Rwanda encroach upon neighbors; Russia’s effort to eradicate Ukraine is only the most egregious example of that disturbing trend. And as interstate violence rises, respect for international law and organizations plummets. The notion that the U.N. Security Council is the arbiter of anything seems quaint.
Respect for borders isn’t the only norm in trouble. Gone are the days when leaders touted a “responsibility to protect” peoples victimized by their own rulers. Impunity prevails as atrocities against civilians increase and powerful autocracies pay scant price for their crimes. China, for example, has engaged in industrial-scale repression against Uyghurs and suffered only modest scrutiny from international organizations and trade partners. Transnational repression is on the upswing as dictators hound their critics around the world. Meanwhile, the norm that underpins global trade—freedom of navigation—is under violent assault. China’s offensive in the South China Sea, the Houthi campaign against Red Sea shipping, Russia’s claims to sovereignty over the Northern Sea Route, and Iran’s Strait of Hormuz chokehold are all indicative of a trend in which predatory actors try to enclose the seas.
Domestic and international politics evolve in parallel—and the United States is playing a catalytic role in this post-rules world.
This isn’t full-blown anarchy; the rules-based order may be yielding to a neoimperial age. For years, U.S. policymakers argued that spheres of influence were an impermissible anachronism. Yet China is building a traditional sphere of influence on its territorial and maritime peripheries, a vast arc spanning from the Himalayas to the East China Sea; it is also building a digital sphere encompassing huge swaths of the global south. Russia uses strategic corruption and brutal aggression to assert its writ in parts of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Turkey and Israel have effectively carved up a post-Assad Syria; Ankara seeks an Ottoman revival in North Africa and the Middle East. Then there’s Washington’s imperial restoration: The United States has turned Venezuela into a vassal state and claimed an entire hemisphere as its domain. It exacts tribute from allies around the Eurasian periphery.
Institution-breaking at home enables norm-busting abroad. Two decades ago, a U.S. president could tout the coming triumph of democratic institutions. Now, a panoply of democratic, semi-democratic, and autocratic leaders—Trump, Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan—are demolishing constraints on their authority. They are building personalized polities around the strength and charisma of a dynamic leader. Xi’s deconstruction of term limits has allowed him to pursue a generational strategy of Chinese restoration. Trump’s disdain for checks and balances enables tariff wars, dodgy economic deals, and surprising resorts to force. Domestic and international politics evolve in parallel—and the United States is playing a catalytic role in this post-rules world.
A dark gray vintage compass broken into several sharp fragments, arranged in a circle against a bright blue background. The needle sits detached in the center, surrounded by broken pieces displaying cardinal directions and degree markings. Image 4 (Alligators in Water)
To be fair, Trump’s record isn’t pure rule-breaking. On his watch, the U.S. military has brawled with bad actors—the Houthis and Iran—that are waging war against freedom of navigation. Trump struck a blow for nonproliferation by smashing Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025. His administration has sought to broker peace in locales from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia; it has exerted sharp pressure against roguish governments in Caracas, Havana, and Tehran. It has continued, albeit ambivalently, to support Ukraine against Russia. And if the president isn’t a stickler for moral niceties, he and his advisors argue that ruthlessness is the price of survival in a cutthroat world.
A superpower that fetishizes global rules, in this telling, disarms itself against foes that flout them. Washington can’t play by WTO standards if China doesn’t; it can’t let international law shield governments that consort with drug traffickers, sponsor terrorism, or seek the world’s worst weapons. There’s something to these arguments: Global order does require that the United States be resolute in defending its interests. The problem is that Trump has also made common cause, implicitly or explicitly, with revisionist actors tearing the old system down.
An illustration showing a pair of hands tightly wringing out an American flag. Water droplets shaped like missiles squeeze out of the twisted fabric and fall toward a puddle shaped like the map of Iran on a red background.
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Trump periodically tries to turn global public goods into protection rackets—for example, by declaring that Washington will control and toll shipping through Hormuz. His administration lacerated the global trade system with tariffs and has ignored international law in carrying out lethal strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere. Impunity appeals to Trump: He reportedly proposed that Beijing, Moscow, and Washington cooperate to paralyze the International Criminal Court. And Trump has joined the revisionists in a more fundamental sense—by using economic pressure and threats of violence in bids to extort territorial concessions from weaker states. Many U.S. allies fear that Trump will break any rule that constrains his ambition—perhaps because that’s exactly what the president sometimes says.
After ordering the January snatch of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump declared that only his own morality—not international law or the U.S. Constitution—could constrain him. “We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” White House official Stephen Miller added. “These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
Fortunately, the world is nowhere near the levels of violence and anarchy of the 1930s or other blighted eras. Many alliances and institutions that have long fostered stability are being challenged—but remain intact. What’s clear is that the world is becoming darker, more disordered, and less forgiving of leaders who neglect the realities of this dawning age.
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Several alligators swim through bright blue water with only their heads above the surface. Shadows or reflections under the water below each alligator are shaped like continents of the world map.
What, then, are the requirements of survival in a post-rules world?
The first imperative is to recognize that nostalgia isn’t a strategy. It’s tempting for U.S. allies and others who relied on the rules-based order to make Trump the sole villain of this story, to hope that U.S. policy—and global conditions—will snap back once he leaves the scene. It’s probably true that the next U.S. president won’t be hell-bent on grabbing Greenland. Yet Trump isn’t the only source of trouble: Beijing and Moscow were assailing the rules-based order long before he was ever elected president. Trump is a symptom of deeper changes—the insecurities of interdependence, the resurgence of great-power rivalry—that will outlast his time in office. Leaders do matter, and there are critical uncertainties about the future of U.S. policy. But whoever becomes president in 2028 or 2032, don’t expect that the world will revert to a fundamentally gentler state.
Countries that root their mindsets in this new era will be better able to handle its vicissitudes. Those that defer hard decisions are headed for trouble. Indeed, if America’s European allies often seem so off-balance, perhaps that’s because the continent’s most ingrained habits—its optimism that the bad old ways could be banished, its continual invocation of the rules-based order, its chronic underinvestment in the tools of self-protection—are products of a prior age. Even as European rearmament accelerates, legacy commitments linger: Most countries won’t reach ambitious military spending targets unless they pare back domestic entitlement programs that swelled during decades when Washington covered so much of the tab for NATO’s defense. That’s a tough trade-off but one the new era will require.
Thus, a second rule: Self-help is vital in a vicious world. There are fewer protections against predation at the hands of revisionists; there’s decreased certainty that a benevolent great power will counteract the malevolent ones. Countries that rely solely on their alliance with Washington are risking disappointment with fatal implications; those that bank on international law, multilateral institutions, or moral principle risk becoming prey for stronger foes. Self-help gets a bad name in the academic literature, where it is associated with lawless, dog-eat-dog behavior. Yet in present conditions, self-help is eminently rational: It’s a matter of developing the sovereign capabilities and alternative coalitions that can extend an exposed state’s life.
Poland and Japan are models: They are making historic defense investments that blow through old fiscal and political barriers. They are cultivating new coalitions as complements to their existing alliances—whether the nascent Intermarium concept, in which Warsaw cooperates more closely with other front-line states in Europe, or the quasi-alliances Japan has built with Australia and the Philippines and the deepening defense relationships it has cultivated with states from India to Vietnam.
Yet in present conditions, self-help is eminently rational: It’s a matter of developing the sovereign capabilities and alternative coalitions that can extend an exposed state’s life.
This path—preserving as much cooperation as possible with Washington while simultaneously creating stronger hedges against an uncertain future—is the best one available to allies that can’t fully depend on U.S. power but can’t do without it, either. It also buys time to consider whether more radical forms of self-help, such as acquiring nuclear weapons, might one day be necessary.
This self-help surge illustrates a third principle: Don’t bet on cooperation among middle powers to save the old system, even if such cooperation can mitigate the damage caused by the system’s demise. In January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made himself a Davos darling by touting a middle-power moment, in which supporters of the rules-based order would come together to sustain it against Beijing and Washington alike.
But that’s a big ask. If middle powers could set the terms of global order, they wouldn’t be middle powers. Power realities are stubborn: There’s no plausible middle-power coalition that can contain China without support from the United States. The Carney concept also exaggerates middle-power unity. Some key players, such as Brazil, India, and Saudi Arabia, see as much opportunity as danger in a fragmented environment; they are ambivalent at best about an order that was built by the West. Efforts to forge a grand middle-power coalition will likely prove a waste of time and energy.
The smarter approach is for smaller, more cohesive groups to find ways of limiting their vulnerability and dependence in a world with fewer guarantees.
It’s eminently reasonable for Europe to gradually reduce its reliance on the U.S. market through deals with India and Mercosur—just as it is reasonable for India, Mercosur, and other developing economies to broaden their commercial options as U.S. tariff barriers rise. It’s prudent for Japan to foster Asian defense supply chains that might one day shore up the front line against China while mitigating technological dependence on Washington. It makes sense for Canada to cooperate more closely on Arctic security with the Scandinavian countries as great-power pressure mounts from several different directions. In a self-help world, resilience at the margin is worth seeking—even if there’s no good near-term substitute to working with the United States.
Fourth, even as U.S. alliances become less special, Washington and its friends must still find ways of ensuring that those alliances endure. Whatever Trump says, the United States still needs alliances in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia: It can’t act as a global heavyweight without the strategic real estate and military access they provide. Likewise, Washington may have the best artificial intelligence models, but it can’t dominate the AI age without the help of friends, from the Netherlands to Taiwan, that occupy key nodes in the global tech stack. Even a self-interested superpower still needs help.
An illustration of Donald Trump in a blue suit and long red tie gesturing with open hands in front of a grid patterned background with jagged red, blue, and black line graphs diving downward.
An illustration of Donald Trump in a blue suit and long red tie gesturing with open hands in front of a grid patterned background with jagged red, blue, and black line graphs diving downward.
An illustration of Donald Trump in a blue suit and long red tie gesturing with open hands in front of a grid patterned background with jagged red, blue, and black line graphs diving downward.
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And whatever their concerns about Washington, U.S. allies still need those pacts for protection against nearby gangsters, whether China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. Even if those allies can balance against their adversaries without U.S. backing in the future, they must avoid the piercing vulnerability that a break with Washington would bring between now and then. Sure, self-help becomes more important as U.S. power becomes less reliable. But for the time being, front-line countries from South Korea to Finland prefer imperfect, uncertain alliances with the United States to the costs and risks of going it alone.
Whatever their concerns about Washington, U.S. allies still need those pacts for protection against nearby gangsters.
Even allies that need U.S. support won’t want to rely on it too heavily, of course. Events in recent years have made it tougher to argue the idea that U.S. security pacts are rooted in shared values. By making U.S. defense commitments more conditional, Trump has made the specter of abandonment all too real. So the task for Washington and its allies will be to find a more transactional basis for their economic, military, and technological collaboration—for example, pacts that trade allied support in securing and strengthening AI supply chains for privileged access to U.S. computing power and frontier models. The key is to preserve the ability to work together on common interests even as institutions that once anchored the free world become wary partnerships rather than enduring communities of strategic trust.
Fifth, if the dilemmas of the new era are sharpest for U.S. allies, countries everywhere should prepare to pay rising risk premiums in a disordered environment. Realists roll their eyes at talk of “global norms.” Yet some of those norms, namely freedom of navigation, constitute the foundation of world trade. Virtually all countries, from developing nations to onetime colonial powers, have profited massively from the stability and openness of the global commons. An era in which those norms crumble is one in which shipping and insurance costs shoot upward, supply chains are violently disrupted, and economic friction multiplies. And as the recent Persian Gulf war has demonstrated, the United States may not have the ability to uphold freedom of navigation in contested waters, even when it summons the will.
This makes workarounds—even cost-intensive ones—for maritime chokepoints crucial. An expanded pipeline network that brings Gulf oil to the world, while bypassing Hormuz, is an expensive but essential insurance policy—and a way of gradually decreasing the leverage Iran can exert. Likewise, the weaponization of energy flows, critical minerals stocks, and other aspects of interdependence necessitates a broader shift from efficiency to resilience. As blockades, embargoes, and other sanctions become the warp and woof of the world economy, prudent actors should be willing to pay a premium for insulation from coercive threats. This applies, unfortunately, to poorer states as well: As conflict roils food and energy distribution networks, even developing countries may need to invest in the creation of larger strategic reserves.
This all sounds so promising for the world’s revisionist states. The collapse of the rules-based order opens the way to the pursuit of their designs. But a sixth imperative is that those states should be careful what they wish for: A gangster’s world might not suit them forever, even if it energizes them for a while.
Xi and Putin will surely profit as Washington weakens international law and flirts with violent expansion. They’ll delight when U.S. alliances—the principal hard-power barriers to their own aggrandizement—come under doubt. In a world without rules, the returns to ruthless behavior increase. Take a longer view, however, and those dividends could dwindle over time.
Revisionist states should be careful what they wish for: A gangster’s world might not suit them forever, even if it energizes them for a while.
If countries concerned about aggressive autocracies and an erratic America end up arming themselves feverishly, that won’t necessarily end well for Putin, Xi, and their ilk. We’ll see how much China likes facing a Japan bristling with weapons as it casts off historical shackles on its foreign policy or whether Russia’s strategic situation improves once Polish and German military muscles are bulging and those countries are no longer constrained by the United States. If rampant insecurity eventually brings rampant nuclear proliferation, both Beijing and Moscow could face tenser, more dangerous conditions in their home regions. In a truly zero-sum era, everyone could end up less secure. Moreover, China’s trade-dependent economy still needs safe seas and foreign markets. If the international economy fragments and freedom of navigation falters, Beijing may miss the rules-based order after all.
Finally, leaders must consider a seventh reality: Different futures are still possible—and much depends on whether the United States can summon a targeted, enlightened ruthlessness or not. In one, more desirable scenario, Washington recognizes that it can’t restrain remorseless rivals while worshipping rules; it adopts a gangster’s ethos in combating autocratic powers that trample borders and try to dominate the world economy. But it accepts, as it did during the Cold War, that there’s one set of standards in dealing with friends and another in dealing with enemies; U.S. officials understand the need to go easier on allies so they can, collectively, push back harder against China and other foes.
If this scenario materializes after Trump leaves office, then a turbulent era need not be disastrous. A vital, transactional baseline of allied cooperation could endure on issues from securing rare-earth and semiconductor supply chains to shoring up the Western Pacific military balance. In fact, a brush with abandonment during the Trump era might convince allies that it’s in their interest to offer more of the help Washington needs if the democratic community is to out-compete its foes. If, however, the United States keeps pursuing coercion in all directions, the world—and eventually Washington—will end up in a harsher place.
If the United States keeps pursuing coercion in all directions, the world—and eventually Washington—will end up in a harsher place.
A true gangster’s paradise might, initially, benefit the United States. Raw power counts for more when standards of behavior are debased. What country would fare better in a might-makes-right environment than a superpower with more might than anyone else? That’s the short-term allure of a zero-sum agenda. The long game looks less inviting.
U.S. support for a broadly beneficial order has lubricated its power by giving it greater global legitimacy. Alliance relationships have been eased by the sense that the United States is basically a decent country, even if it sometimes does distasteful things. If Washington adopts a gangster’s ethos, it will rupture the relationships that have magnified its influence. It will give other countries greater incentive to withhold their cooperation or even find ways of pushing back. Principle is a fount of power. If Washington forgets that, it will pay a heavy price.
The post-Cold War era was a time when the light of progress shone so brightly. Our unfolding era promises to be darker and, perhaps, more desperate. It’s all the more critical, then, for leaders to mentally map the contours of this moment—if only so they can better navigate the dangers it presents.
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Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and managing director at Macro Advisory Partners. X: @HalBrands
