ASIA
02 June 2026
After the unravelling: Confronting the new world order
Thomas Wright’s analysis of the unravelling of the world order, as recorded by John West
The post–Cold War international order hasn't collapsed from a single shock. It's been deliberately unwound, according to Thomas Wright, from the Brookings Institute, a former member of President Biden's National Security Council, and recent guest of Australia’s Lowy Institute.
Wright argues that China, Russia, and the United States have each adopted foreign policies that broke the foundational restraints holding the system together. By historical measures, what has emerged has the hallmarks of a pre-war environment.
Drawing on his time inside the White House, Dr Wright diagnoses how we got here and what may come next. From Xi Jinping's strategy of asymmetric economic dominance, to Putin's war of conquest in Europe, to Trump's redefinition of American alliances as transactional arrangements.
Set out below are the main points from Wright’s recent conference with the Lowy Institute.
Wright recalled that US postwar treaties, like ANZUS, were based on the parties acting “in good faith” which was more important than the precise language of each treaty. But today, that assumption of good faith is in great doubt.
Wright argues that the international order has unravelled because of deliberate decisions taken in three capitals who each concluded that the limits placed upon them and their countries were limits they were no longer willing to accept.
The conditions we are experiencing now are consistent with a pre-war environment. He is not predicting war. But if war did occur, future historians would not find this puzzling.
Wright has his own definition of world order. It's often equated with international law and institutions. Canadian Prime Minister Carney argues that the order was always a fiction that the West told itself.
According to Wright, world order is about a set of foundational restraints that the major powers observed for decades. Three stand out.
First, is the restraint on the use of force to redraw borders. Major powers did not conquer and seek the territory of their neighbours. There were exceptions of course, but these were exceptions and not normalised.
Second is a baseline of reciprocity in the global trading system -- tariffs were low, markets were open. Countries competed hard within the system, but did not seek to dismantle the system.
Third is an American restraint. The US as the systemic hegemon exercised enough self discipline to allow its allies to grow into genuine partners and stakeholders, not vassals or tributary states. That restraint made the alliance system work.
Within those three guardrails, the system was flexible. It absorbed the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, the rise of populism, the seizure of Crimea, Covid, and the steady weaponisation of economic interdependence. It bent, strained, but did not snap.
Why did it not snap? It is the reason that Henry Kissinger gave in his book “A World Restored”. He argues that the stability of any international order does not derive from a perfect harmony of interests. It derives from a shared acknowledgement among the major powers about “the nature of workable arrangements”, an understanding of permissible aims and methods of foreign policy however grudgingly.
That is, the consensus that has now collapsed, not the institutions, not the laws, but the consensus on permissible aims.
So how did we get here?
The three most consequential states in the international system – China, Russia and the US – each adopted a revolutionary foreign policy, not a competitive policy, not an assertive policy, but a revolutionary policy meaning that the policy aims not just at adjusting the order, but at breaking the limits that order placed on it.
China came first. For most of the post Cold War, the China story was one of integration, joining the WTO, becoming the workshop of the world. China was being woven into our system. But that changed with Xi and the launch of “Made in China 2025” in 2015.
This is not a faster version of integration. It’s a system of asymmetric dominance. The aim is to use the full weight of the Chinese state -- subsidies, financing, regulatory protection, industrial policy at a scale no Western country can match – to dominate the high end industries of the future -- semiconductors, robotics, EV, solar, batteries, magnets.
The strategy is to move from being the world's factory for cheap goods to being the world dominant and only supplier of goods that matter the most. The strategy is working. China's production capacity in key sectors exceeds its domestic demand. The result is a flood of subsidised exports that no country can match on price. At the same time, China keeps barriers to stop foreign firms from its market.
So China’s trade is a one way flow. As FT said there is nothing that China wants to import, nothing that it does not believe that it can make better than others, and nothing for which it wants to be dependent on foreign suppliers. This is not a competitive economic strategy within a reciprocal system. It is a strategy of dominance.
China has given much of the Western world a choice between the hollowing out of its industrial/manufacturing base or protectionism. And many countries – US, Europe – are now choosing protectionism.
Second rupture is Putin's.
Russia has been chipping away at the order for nearly 20 years, ever since Putin’s Munich Security Conference speech in 2007 – Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and the slow war in the Donbas that followed. We imposed sanctions, we protested, we sent some non-lethal aid. The order strained throughout that period, but it held.
What broke the order was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – the largest war in Europe since 1945. Russia casualties over 1.2 million. The Soviet Union lost about 15,000 soldiers across the entire 8 year war in Afghanistan. It’s now been at war in Ukraine for longer than the Soviet Union was at war in the second world war.
Putin’s war aims have not moderated. He still wants all of the territory he occupies, and additional territory that Ukraine occupies. He wants strict permanent limits of Ukraine's ability to defend itself, and regime change in Kiev. He has defied, for the first time in three generations, the proposition that the borders of Europe can be revised by force.
3rd rupture.
The constant in US strategy since 1945 has been the conviction that the US is more secure, prosperous and influential when it operates as the leader of a network of alliances and partners who are themselves stakeholders in the shared system.
President Trump has rejected that conviction. He has redefined US foreign policy in explicitly zero-sum terms. And redefined allies as counterparties to be pressured for short term advantage. Consider the trade record. When Trump took office in January 2025, the US average tariff was about 2.4%. By November last year, tariffs reached 17.9%.
Consider the security relationships. For 70 years US alliances rested on a bargain. Collective defence in exchange for shared political alignment.
That bargain has now been reframed. Allies are now told that US protection is contingent on economic concessions, investment commitments, restraint on tariff retaliation,
Consider territory. Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland as a territory of the US over the objection of Greenlanders and Denmark is a chilling manifestation of how he sees allied nations, as an easy mark rather than true partners.
The character of US hegemonic leadership has shifted in the past. But what we are seeing now is something more fundamental. The Trump administration is no longer acting as a guarantor of the global system. It is drawing down on the power and influence that successive presidents have built up over many decades in an effort to accumulate gains on a transnational basis whenever it can.
So that’s how we got here. 3 revolutionary foreign policies, 3 ruptures.
Now for 4 dynamics that will shape the period that we are now in.
The landscape is looking uncomfortably like a pre-war environment. A familiar pattern is taking shape. Rapid rise of a revisionist power in China. Deep uncertainty about the balance of forces and where it is heading. An acceleration in arms development which by historical standards is significant. Doubts over the alliance commitments of the US has.
The world’s major powers are reorganisng their economies for a long era of confrontation. Defence spending is rising sharply across all the major powers. All are investing heavily in new weapons of war including drones, AI and cyber.
Several of the world’s most consequential leaders are old, temperamental and animated by ideological visions of national revival. For some of them, now might seem like a closing window of opportunity, a now-or-never moment to reshape the international system before their time runs out. That type of mentality makes restraint harder. It makes risk taking more attractive as we saw in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s exactly the type of psychology that makes prewar periods dangerous.
The second dynamic is the deepening alignment of US rivals and competitors. Russia’s war with Ukraine accelerated this. It has deepened its ties with Beijing, Pyongyang and Teheran. Russia has paid for this with military technology which could shift the balance of power in East Asia and the Middle East. The implication of this is sobering. A war between the US and China over Taiwan may spread to the world.
Third dynamic is on the Western alliance. Trump’s treatment of allies has been extraordinary. This should have produced a fracturing of the alliance. But alliances are still intact because of fear. Europe cannot deter Russia without the US. Many Indopacific countries feel exposed to China and DPRK. This shared anxiety has proved greater than the shared grievance against US behaviour. Allies fear American absence more than its pressure.
Allies are doing two things at once. Managing Washington in the near term, swallowing what they have to swallow, keeping channels open, refusing to be provoked, and quietly building the capacity to depend less on Washington. They’re increasing their own defence budgets. Cross regional security cooperation is deepening. There is more talk of European autonomy, and Indopacific minilaterals, and partnerships that do not run through the US – more so than at any time in history.
For Australia specifically the question of how to deepen self reliance while sustaining the US alliance is the defining strategic problem of this period. Whether this hedging strategy succeeds depends more than anything on domestic politics. Raising defence budgets and reducing social spending is a genuinely difficult task. It’s a task that risks speeding the very populist movements that are most sceptical of alliance commitments. This is one of the central tensions in democratic politics, and there is no easy answer.
Fourth dynamic concerns the US itself. Division in US society reflects two very different visions of the US role in the world. Both are likely to remain durable for the years to come. One is internationalist which is committed to alliances and open markets, with alliances to sustain America’s role in shaping a world order. The US is more secure when it leads coalitions than when it acts alone.
The other vision, the America First vision prioritises sovereignty, economic protection, a narrower definition of the national interest, sceptical of alliances, comfortable with tariffs and is convinced that long term commitments abroad do not serve the interests of ordinary Americans.
These are not deviations from a shared consensus. These are durable world views each with a constituency, each with an intellectual infrastructure, each with a roster of officials who are ready to staff administrations
Because US politics is highly competitive, the two parties have basically split control of the presidency almost evenly over the past 80 years – the Democrats held the presidency for 40 years, while the Republicans have for 42 years. The presidency will likely continue to swing from one side to the other.
What has changed is the size of the swing. Changes in administration used to bring changes in the margin. It now brings dramatic shifts in trade and alliance policies. Allies cannot assume that a particular US strategy will outlast the next US election. Adversaries cannot assume the same about American resolve.
The defining feature about international order over the next 20 years may not be American decline. It may be the world’s adjustment to the alternation between two competing American foreign policies.
Did not mention AI. It could affect the balance of power between the great powers more than any dynamics.
What will come next? What should we be doing now. Too early to predict next international order. Still in the unravelling phase.
Two broad structures are visible on the horizon at least for US foreign policy.
First, a world that’s organised primarily around US/China competition. Not like the old Cold War. Too integrated. A partial bifurcation layered on top of continued trade and financial linkages. A world of two loosely integrated blocs connected by shared supply chains in the West and China. In that world, the West remains a powerful and coherent entity even if it has a smaller share of global GDP than it once was. This is the better of the two scenarios.
The second resembles more 19th century great power politics. A loose and more competitive system in which the US treats its allies as competitors and the allies themselves accelerate their own efforts to become strategically autonomous. In that world, traditional alliance structures weaken, some states reconsider longstanding taboos like acquiring nuclear weapons and the West as a coherent project ceases to exist.
The most important variable separating those scenarios lies in Washington. The contest between internationalism and America First more than anything will decide the path that we travel.
Conclusion. What rebuilding will require and how long it will take. The next years are about something less ambitious than rebuilding. They are just about preserving what we can, investing in what we will need, and being ready to act affirmatively when the moment comes. It means preserving as much of the alliance architecture as we can in this period. It means investing in technology and the defence industrial base in ways that will define the coming era and diplomatically not just other, but also the global south.
It means resisting the temptation in our own politics to treat the international order as something we are well rid of. We must be honest with ourselves and our public about what actually happened. The order was ruptured, that rupture was a choice. What comes next will be a choice as well. The order cannot be rebuilt when a new administration takes office mainly because Xi and Putin are likely to remain in office for some time.
A genuine reordering moment, one that allows leaders to set limits is unlikely to arrive until all three have left the stage. Rebuilding will require the right sequencing. Menzies described an alliance (ANZUS) held together by mutual confidence. That confidence can be repaired partially at least by a future American administration. But it will need to be repaired in a particular way by helping allies become genuinely self-reliant, so that the alliance can survive the next time Trumpism or something like it comes to power.
What Kissinger called the “consensus on permissible aims” will take longer. It will not be restored until there is more enlightened leadership in Beijing and Moscow, as well as Washington. And we cannot say with any confidence when that will be.
But we have before been through periods longer and darker than this one. And the next international order will depend on the same thing that the last one did, namely the willingness of major states to accept once again limits on how their power is used and to act in good faith with those who have chosen to stand alongside them. That is the work ahead.
Wright argues that China, Russia, and the United States have each adopted foreign policies that broke the foundational restraints holding the system together. By historical measures, what has emerged has the hallmarks of a pre-war environment.
Drawing on his time inside the White House, Dr Wright diagnoses how we got here and what may come next. From Xi Jinping's strategy of asymmetric economic dominance, to Putin's war of conquest in Europe, to Trump's redefinition of American alliances as transactional arrangements.
Set out below are the main points from Wright’s recent conference with the Lowy Institute.
Wright recalled that US postwar treaties, like ANZUS, were based on the parties acting “in good faith” which was more important than the precise language of each treaty. But today, that assumption of good faith is in great doubt.
Wright argues that the international order has unravelled because of deliberate decisions taken in three capitals who each concluded that the limits placed upon them and their countries were limits they were no longer willing to accept.
The conditions we are experiencing now are consistent with a pre-war environment. He is not predicting war. But if war did occur, future historians would not find this puzzling.
Wright has his own definition of world order. It's often equated with international law and institutions. Canadian Prime Minister Carney argues that the order was always a fiction that the West told itself.
According to Wright, world order is about a set of foundational restraints that the major powers observed for decades. Three stand out.
First, is the restraint on the use of force to redraw borders. Major powers did not conquer and seek the territory of their neighbours. There were exceptions of course, but these were exceptions and not normalised.
Second is a baseline of reciprocity in the global trading system -- tariffs were low, markets were open. Countries competed hard within the system, but did not seek to dismantle the system.
Third is an American restraint. The US as the systemic hegemon exercised enough self discipline to allow its allies to grow into genuine partners and stakeholders, not vassals or tributary states. That restraint made the alliance system work.
Within those three guardrails, the system was flexible. It absorbed the Iraq war, the global financial crisis, the rise of populism, the seizure of Crimea, Covid, and the steady weaponisation of economic interdependence. It bent, strained, but did not snap.
Why did it not snap? It is the reason that Henry Kissinger gave in his book “A World Restored”. He argues that the stability of any international order does not derive from a perfect harmony of interests. It derives from a shared acknowledgement among the major powers about “the nature of workable arrangements”, an understanding of permissible aims and methods of foreign policy however grudgingly.
That is, the consensus that has now collapsed, not the institutions, not the laws, but the consensus on permissible aims.
So how did we get here?
The three most consequential states in the international system – China, Russia and the US – each adopted a revolutionary foreign policy, not a competitive policy, not an assertive policy, but a revolutionary policy meaning that the policy aims not just at adjusting the order, but at breaking the limits that order placed on it.
China came first. For most of the post Cold War, the China story was one of integration, joining the WTO, becoming the workshop of the world. China was being woven into our system. But that changed with Xi and the launch of “Made in China 2025” in 2015.
This is not a faster version of integration. It’s a system of asymmetric dominance. The aim is to use the full weight of the Chinese state -- subsidies, financing, regulatory protection, industrial policy at a scale no Western country can match – to dominate the high end industries of the future -- semiconductors, robotics, EV, solar, batteries, magnets.
The strategy is to move from being the world's factory for cheap goods to being the world dominant and only supplier of goods that matter the most. The strategy is working. China's production capacity in key sectors exceeds its domestic demand. The result is a flood of subsidised exports that no country can match on price. At the same time, China keeps barriers to stop foreign firms from its market.
So China’s trade is a one way flow. As FT said there is nothing that China wants to import, nothing that it does not believe that it can make better than others, and nothing for which it wants to be dependent on foreign suppliers. This is not a competitive economic strategy within a reciprocal system. It is a strategy of dominance.
China has given much of the Western world a choice between the hollowing out of its industrial/manufacturing base or protectionism. And many countries – US, Europe – are now choosing protectionism.
Second rupture is Putin's.
Russia has been chipping away at the order for nearly 20 years, ever since Putin’s Munich Security Conference speech in 2007 – Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and the slow war in the Donbas that followed. We imposed sanctions, we protested, we sent some non-lethal aid. The order strained throughout that period, but it held.
What broke the order was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – the largest war in Europe since 1945. Russia casualties over 1.2 million. The Soviet Union lost about 15,000 soldiers across the entire 8 year war in Afghanistan. It’s now been at war in Ukraine for longer than the Soviet Union was at war in the second world war.
Putin’s war aims have not moderated. He still wants all of the territory he occupies, and additional territory that Ukraine occupies. He wants strict permanent limits of Ukraine's ability to defend itself, and regime change in Kiev. He has defied, for the first time in three generations, the proposition that the borders of Europe can be revised by force.
3rd rupture.
The constant in US strategy since 1945 has been the conviction that the US is more secure, prosperous and influential when it operates as the leader of a network of alliances and partners who are themselves stakeholders in the shared system.
President Trump has rejected that conviction. He has redefined US foreign policy in explicitly zero-sum terms. And redefined allies as counterparties to be pressured for short term advantage. Consider the trade record. When Trump took office in January 2025, the US average tariff was about 2.4%. By November last year, tariffs reached 17.9%.
Consider the security relationships. For 70 years US alliances rested on a bargain. Collective defence in exchange for shared political alignment.
That bargain has now been reframed. Allies are now told that US protection is contingent on economic concessions, investment commitments, restraint on tariff retaliation,
Consider territory. Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland as a territory of the US over the objection of Greenlanders and Denmark is a chilling manifestation of how he sees allied nations, as an easy mark rather than true partners.
The character of US hegemonic leadership has shifted in the past. But what we are seeing now is something more fundamental. The Trump administration is no longer acting as a guarantor of the global system. It is drawing down on the power and influence that successive presidents have built up over many decades in an effort to accumulate gains on a transnational basis whenever it can.
So that’s how we got here. 3 revolutionary foreign policies, 3 ruptures.
Now for 4 dynamics that will shape the period that we are now in.
The landscape is looking uncomfortably like a pre-war environment. A familiar pattern is taking shape. Rapid rise of a revisionist power in China. Deep uncertainty about the balance of forces and where it is heading. An acceleration in arms development which by historical standards is significant. Doubts over the alliance commitments of the US has.
The world’s major powers are reorganisng their economies for a long era of confrontation. Defence spending is rising sharply across all the major powers. All are investing heavily in new weapons of war including drones, AI and cyber.
Several of the world’s most consequential leaders are old, temperamental and animated by ideological visions of national revival. For some of them, now might seem like a closing window of opportunity, a now-or-never moment to reshape the international system before their time runs out. That type of mentality makes restraint harder. It makes risk taking more attractive as we saw in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s exactly the type of psychology that makes prewar periods dangerous.
The second dynamic is the deepening alignment of US rivals and competitors. Russia’s war with Ukraine accelerated this. It has deepened its ties with Beijing, Pyongyang and Teheran. Russia has paid for this with military technology which could shift the balance of power in East Asia and the Middle East. The implication of this is sobering. A war between the US and China over Taiwan may spread to the world.
Third dynamic is on the Western alliance. Trump’s treatment of allies has been extraordinary. This should have produced a fracturing of the alliance. But alliances are still intact because of fear. Europe cannot deter Russia without the US. Many Indopacific countries feel exposed to China and DPRK. This shared anxiety has proved greater than the shared grievance against US behaviour. Allies fear American absence more than its pressure.
Allies are doing two things at once. Managing Washington in the near term, swallowing what they have to swallow, keeping channels open, refusing to be provoked, and quietly building the capacity to depend less on Washington. They’re increasing their own defence budgets. Cross regional security cooperation is deepening. There is more talk of European autonomy, and Indopacific minilaterals, and partnerships that do not run through the US – more so than at any time in history.
For Australia specifically the question of how to deepen self reliance while sustaining the US alliance is the defining strategic problem of this period. Whether this hedging strategy succeeds depends more than anything on domestic politics. Raising defence budgets and reducing social spending is a genuinely difficult task. It’s a task that risks speeding the very populist movements that are most sceptical of alliance commitments. This is one of the central tensions in democratic politics, and there is no easy answer.
Fourth dynamic concerns the US itself. Division in US society reflects two very different visions of the US role in the world. Both are likely to remain durable for the years to come. One is internationalist which is committed to alliances and open markets, with alliances to sustain America’s role in shaping a world order. The US is more secure when it leads coalitions than when it acts alone.
The other vision, the America First vision prioritises sovereignty, economic protection, a narrower definition of the national interest, sceptical of alliances, comfortable with tariffs and is convinced that long term commitments abroad do not serve the interests of ordinary Americans.
These are not deviations from a shared consensus. These are durable world views each with a constituency, each with an intellectual infrastructure, each with a roster of officials who are ready to staff administrations
Because US politics is highly competitive, the two parties have basically split control of the presidency almost evenly over the past 80 years – the Democrats held the presidency for 40 years, while the Republicans have for 42 years. The presidency will likely continue to swing from one side to the other.
What has changed is the size of the swing. Changes in administration used to bring changes in the margin. It now brings dramatic shifts in trade and alliance policies. Allies cannot assume that a particular US strategy will outlast the next US election. Adversaries cannot assume the same about American resolve.
The defining feature about international order over the next 20 years may not be American decline. It may be the world’s adjustment to the alternation between two competing American foreign policies.
Did not mention AI. It could affect the balance of power between the great powers more than any dynamics.
What will come next? What should we be doing now. Too early to predict next international order. Still in the unravelling phase.
Two broad structures are visible on the horizon at least for US foreign policy.
First, a world that’s organised primarily around US/China competition. Not like the old Cold War. Too integrated. A partial bifurcation layered on top of continued trade and financial linkages. A world of two loosely integrated blocs connected by shared supply chains in the West and China. In that world, the West remains a powerful and coherent entity even if it has a smaller share of global GDP than it once was. This is the better of the two scenarios.
The second resembles more 19th century great power politics. A loose and more competitive system in which the US treats its allies as competitors and the allies themselves accelerate their own efforts to become strategically autonomous. In that world, traditional alliance structures weaken, some states reconsider longstanding taboos like acquiring nuclear weapons and the West as a coherent project ceases to exist.
The most important variable separating those scenarios lies in Washington. The contest between internationalism and America First more than anything will decide the path that we travel.
Conclusion. What rebuilding will require and how long it will take. The next years are about something less ambitious than rebuilding. They are just about preserving what we can, investing in what we will need, and being ready to act affirmatively when the moment comes. It means preserving as much of the alliance architecture as we can in this period. It means investing in technology and the defence industrial base in ways that will define the coming era and diplomatically not just other, but also the global south.
It means resisting the temptation in our own politics to treat the international order as something we are well rid of. We must be honest with ourselves and our public about what actually happened. The order was ruptured, that rupture was a choice. What comes next will be a choice as well. The order cannot be rebuilt when a new administration takes office mainly because Xi and Putin are likely to remain in office for some time.
A genuine reordering moment, one that allows leaders to set limits is unlikely to arrive until all three have left the stage. Rebuilding will require the right sequencing. Menzies described an alliance (ANZUS) held together by mutual confidence. That confidence can be repaired partially at least by a future American administration. But it will need to be repaired in a particular way by helping allies become genuinely self-reliant, so that the alliance can survive the next time Trumpism or something like it comes to power.
What Kissinger called the “consensus on permissible aims” will take longer. It will not be restored until there is more enlightened leadership in Beijing and Moscow, as well as Washington. And we cannot say with any confidence when that will be.
But we have before been through periods longer and darker than this one. And the next international order will depend on the same thing that the last one did, namely the willingness of major states to accept once again limits on how their power is used and to act in good faith with those who have chosen to stand alongside them. That is the work ahead.