With the United States and the world it leads in disarray, how should we construct a new international order?
The stable and open international order erected on America’s watch is unraveling. Democracy is losing ground to autocracy; globalized markets are fragmenting; and the era of perpetual peace foreseen at the close of the Cold War has given way to great-power rivalry. This fracture of the international system comes just as many of our greatest challenges, such as climate change, the threat of pandemics, and rapidly changing technologies, require collective action.
Charles A. Kupchan diagnoses the sources of global disarray and offers a handbook for building a new order fit for the emerging multipolar world. Drawing on the Concert of Europe, which preserved great-power peace after the Napoleonic Wars, Kupchan proposes a global system of concerts—high-level steering groups that cut across ideological dividing lines—to anchor a regionalized, polycentric world. The mission of order building must begin with the revival of American democracy and the nation’s steady leadership abroad. Only when democracies can outperform illiberal and autocratic alternatives, Kupchan says, will they be able to guide the world through the coming transition and ultimately bend the arc of history back toward freedom.