AEI (American Enterprise Institute)
The World Order Is Becoming More Cutthroat
Hal Brands
Author
by Hal Brands
Author Title
Senior Fellow
Date
January 11, 2026
A superpower is zapping drug boats, on shaky legal premises, and snatching foreign leaders in the dead of night. From Greenland to Ukraine to the Himalayas, strong countries are redrawing — or threatening to redraw — the borders of weaker neighbors. International law and arms control agreements are unraveling as strategic rivalry intensifies. The incidence of armed conflict is surging as curbs on aggression erode. Freedom of navigation has been challenged in crucial waterways, from the Red Sea to the Western Pacific. The rules-based trading system is, increasingly, a thing of the past.
The symptoms are many, but the affliction is the same. The world is experiencing a gradual, but accelerating, transition away from the liberal international order of the post-1945 era. Crucial norms and principles are coming undone.
What awaits is a nastier, cutthroat age in which rules matter less and raw strength matters more — and one in which the superpower that once sustained the system tries to profit by tearing it down.
Don’t mythologize the liberal order. Every era has its outrages, atrocities and hypocrisies: Ask the people of Guatemala, Iran or Chile whether the US has always scrupulously obeyed the rules.
But the decades after 1945 were comparatively humane and enlightened, because the world’s leading power mostly used its strength to protect norms like freedom of the seas and the prohibition against violent conquest, while also building alliances and other structures that sustained impressive stability and peace.
A sole, revealing statistic: Between 1816 and 1945, a quarter of the world’s states simply vanished from the map at some point. Since 1945, “state death” has become vanishingly rare.
Self-interest, not altruism, structured this project: The US and its allies believed it was the best way of holding back the anarchic darkness that had fallen twice in the decades before. After the Cold War, American presidents saw a chance to turn a Western order into a global order: to embed respect for vital norms and liberal values in an architecture upheld by US power.
Historians will see the post-World War II era as a golden age of peace, prosperity and expanding freedom. But perhaps its time has passed.
The culprits are many. Russia and China long chafed at America’s rules, particularly its preference for democracy and aversion to autocratic spheres of influence, and have sought to unwind them as their power grows. Endangered democracies, from Israel to the Baltic Sea, have decided — reasonably enough, in many cases — that buffer zones and land mines will protect them better than international law or arms control could.
The excesses of globalization, and the emergence of a predatory China, destroyed the World Trade Organization. Even the US — especially, but not solely, under President Donald Trump — has been recalculating whether the liberal order serves its interest.
As always with Trump, the matter is complicated. A president who disdains international order nonetheless struck a blow for nonproliferation, by smashing Iran’s nuclear program. He toppled a ruthless, drug-running tyrant in the Caribbean by snatching Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump waged a brief, brutal war against the Houthis of Yemen to restore seaborne commerce. No order can be defended without power, and frontline US allies are raising military spending at Trump’s behest.
But the president is pursuing mercantilist ends, like control of Venezuelan oil, through gunboat diplomacy. He has ripped up trade deals and threatened established borders. He uses democracy promotion and human rights as transparent rationales for mercenary policies. Trump, and many of those around him, seem to seek a world in which power is unconstrained by norms, at home or abroad.
“We live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” White House adviser Stephen Miller recently remarked. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
That sentiment isn’t exactly wrong — of course power matters. But it is incomplete, and it is terribly revealing of Trump’s hyper-coercive view of global affairs.
Trump calculates that a more nakedly competitive world works to the benefit of its fiercest, most formidable player. If the great powers grab spheres of influence in their neighborhoods, the US — with its unmatched military and its vast, resource-rich domain in the Western Hemisphere — will have the greatest sphere of them all.
Trump’s central strategic insight has always been that America is better prepared than any other country to thrive in a cutthroat arena. If Washington no longer wishes to sustain the liberal order, or just can’t afford to uphold it against growing challenges, perhaps it makes sense to seize the largest share of the loot.
In the short term, that is. The longer-term consequences may be less benign. If the US grabs Greenland, as Trump persistently threatens, it might fracture the North American Treaty Organization, the alliance that most enhances America’s own leverage and reach. If the US makes the Melian Dialogue — the idea that the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must — its ethos, it will lose the global legitimacy that lubricates the use of American strength. And if a post-liberal-order world is less prosperous, less stable, even the US may eventually suffer.
Trump is betting that American power and well-being will survive, even soar, after the demise of the US order. In typically Trumpian fashion, he won’t be around to pay the price if the wager fails.
Publisher
Op-Ed | Bloomberg Opinion
Category
Foreign and Defense Policy
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