This chapter analyses the origins, evolution, achievements, and challenges of the US-led liberal international order, examining its construction after the Second World War, its consolidation during the Cold War, and its expansion after the collapse of communism. It explains how American power, liberal ideas, and institutional innovation combine to create a rules-based order grounded in multilateral institutions, economic openness, shared values, and security cooperation among democratic states. The chapter demonstrates that this order promotes stability, economic growth, democratic diffusion, and resilience, integrating former enemies and sustaining claims of liberal triumph. It assesses pressures on the order, including unilateral shifts in US foreign policy and the rise of China, arguing these developments strain but do not overturn the system. Finally, the chapter contends that the most serious threat comes from within, as Donald Trump's rejection of liberal internationalism undermines legitimacy.

Among the many impacts of Russia's war on Ukraine, the most consequential may be in pushing the world in the direction of Three Worlds—the global West, the global East and the global South. One is led by the United States and Europe, the second by China and Russia, and the third by an amorphous grouping of non-western developing nations. These Three Worlds are not blocs or coherent negotiating groups, but loose, constructed and evolving global factions. This article makes four arguments. First, the Three Worlds system has the makings of a fairly durable pattern of global order, shaping struggles over rules and institutions. Second, the Three Worlds system will encourage a ‘creative’ politics of global order-building. The global West and global East will have incentives to compete for the support and cooperation of the global South. Third, there are deep principles of world order that provide a foundation for the Three Worlds competition. Finally, if the global West is to remain at the center of world order in the decades ahead, it will need to accommodate both the global East and the global South, and adapt itself to a more pluralistic world. But in the competition with the global East for the support of the global South, it has the advantage. The global South's critique of the global West is not that it offers the wrong pathway to modernity, but that it has not lived up to its principles or shared sufficiently the material fruits of liberal modernity.

What is the future of the Western-led liberal international order? This paper makes four arguments. First, over the last two centuries, liberal democracies have pioneered a tradition of international order building, the essential impulse of which has been to create an environment-a sort of cooperative ecosystem-in which liberal states can manage interdependence, protect their values and interests, and aggregate capabilities to defend against threats and challenges to their global position and way of life. Second, liberal democracies have used institutions as tools and mechanisms to respond to dangers and opportunities in the global system, focused on the problems of anarchy, hierarchy, interdependence, liberal openness, and geopolitical vulnerability. Third, the most dramatic forms of liberal order building have occurred after major wars, when liberal democracies found themselves in war and geopolitical competition with rival and threatening illiberal great powers. Finally, liberal internationalism and the liberal project still have a future in that they offer cooperative solutions the core problems of twenty-first century world order.

L’ordre libéral international a été la résultante d’une organisation lancée dès le XVIII e siècle par l’émergence des puissances occidentales. L’internationalisme libéral issu des conséquences de la Seconde Guerre mondiale a été dominé notamment par les États-Unis. Or, celui-ci est désormais remis en cause par de nouvelles puissances comme la Chine récusant les règles de la démocratie. La question est de savoir si le modèle libéral démocratique a encore de l’avenir.

We live in an age of disorder. This essay explores the various ways in which disorder has played out in global politics. I begin by defining what scholars mean by global or international order. After this, I look at the various features of disorder – its types, its causes, and its consequences. I argue that not all disorder is unwelcome. Disorder can generate both positive and negative life experiences. It can variously undermine or advance the human condition. I argue that modern industrial societies are actually premised on the expectation of ongoing disorder, as revolutions and advances in science and technology destabilize societies and force people to adjust, often with the promise of greater economic and societal benefits. I argue that the most farreaching forms of disorder have occurred in the aftermath of major wars – the Napoleonic war, the world wars, and the Cold War. This is disorder that is the result of powerful states engaged in violent efforts to overturn world order and redirect the pathway of modernity. Finally, I end by looking at features of the current global order that provide sources of stability and resiliency, doing so in the face of the great and growing storms of the 21st century.

We develop a theoretical logic and character of a Chinese model of international order. We begin by considering general problems of power transition and hegemonic order-building, with reference to the American experience with liberal hegemony. China will, like all powerful states, seek an order that protects its interests. But unlike its predecessors, China faces an existing order containing elements that threaten its domestic political and economic model. We describe this domestic model and consider how it might be defended at the international level—embedded in the logic and organizational principles of hegemonic order. Our contribution is to theorize the consequences of China’s hegemonic interests, including domestic preservation, and its order-building practices, for the operation and underlying character of a China-led hegemonic order. Though not inherently illiberal in form, we outline how the emergent order could generate illiberal outcomes. This article therefore theorizes the concept of illiberal hegemony.

In recent years, liberal democracies around the world have weakened and lost ground to autocratic and authoritarian states. This essay asks the question: what precisely has been the impact of liberal democracy on the global system? How did the rise and spread of liberal democracy alter and shape international relations? If liberal democracy continues to weaken and disappear, how will the world be different? In identifying the impacts that liberal democracy has had over the last two centuries on the logic and character of international order, I focus on three levels. First, I show the connections between the rise in power of liberal states and the spread of democracy across the global system. Second, I look at the impact of the rise of liberal democracy on the system-structure of international order as it evolved across the 19th and 20th century through its entanglements with the other great transitions and movements of the modern era–nationalism, empire, and Anglo-American hegemony. Third, I look at the “problems” that liberal democracies have grappled with over the centuries and how they have responded. These are the problems of anarchy, hierarchy, interdependence, liberal openness, and geopolitical vulnerability.