The World’s Only Real Hope of Maintaining Order

As the West’s ideological and material hegemony continues to wane, a new multipolar world is taking shape. This change is structural—a product of the unstoppable diffusion of power. The transition from the industrial era to the digital age has meanwhile destabilized the liberal democracies that long oversaw global governance. A combination of automation and free trade has undermined the industrial-era social contract, hollowing out Western middle classes and the political centrism that sustained liberal internationalism. These dual tectonic shifts are stoking geopolitical rivalries and eroding international rules and institutions, putting out of reach the collective initiative needed to govern a globalized world. U.S. President Donald Trump is a symptom more than a cause of this disarray and the anti-establishment anger it has provoked. He and other populists promise to tear down the old liberal order. But they lack the skills and inclination to build what comes next. The policy community needs to urgently prepare for the post-Trump era by generating a plan for governing an interdependent world that is in the process of falling apart. Building order in the world to come should begin with recognizing the renewed importance of regions; the diffusion of power logically necessitates the decentering and devolution of authority. Order will need to come from the bottom up, drawing on regional groupings that tap into the natural order-producing effects of geographic proximity, commercial ties, and common cultures. The regionalization of governance sets the stage for a polycentric international system: a multiorder world of considerable ideological and political diversity. Yet precisely because the emerging multipolar world is set to remain globalized and interdependent, the centrifugal force of regionalization must be offset by order that comes from the top down. Multiple regional orders will require collective supervision. A concert system—a network of high-level coordinating councils—offers the most realistic and feasible option for overseeing global governance. Like the 19th-century Concert of Europe, which preserved peace for decades after the Napoleonic Wars, flexible and informal steering groups can provide a vehicle for genuine and sustained strategic dialogue and for dampening and managing conflicts of interest. A concert system would complement, not replace, the United Nations. The U.N. would be buttressed from above by this network of steering groups and from below by regional bodies. A key challenge will be to construct a global order that strikes the right balance between top-down and bottom-up governance. An international system that is at once centralized and regionalized offers the best—and perhaps only—hope of maintaining order in the world that lies ahead. A top-down view of piano keys overlaid with a light blue and white world map pattern. The white keys feature the continents in white against light blue oceans, while the black keys rise vertically across the keys. Doug Chayka illustration for Foreign Policy Our world is hurtling toward a decentered international system. No single country or coalition of countries will dominate. Assuming they can restore their political health and continue as strategic partners, the United States and its democratic allies will remain a formidable coalition but no longer a preponderant one. China will emerge as a peer competitor, but even if its partnership with Russia endures, it will have neither the power nor the appeal to anchor a Sinocentric world order. A host of rising powers—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey among them—have made it clear that they will chart their own courses, leading to shifting alignments and uncertain coalitions. The coming international system will be not only decentered but also politically and culturally diverse. Each center of power and governance will play by its own norms and reflect its own civilizational and cultural attributes. The diffusion of power and devolution of authority and responsibility to diverse regional groupings will naturally produce a world that is polycentric and multiorder. The book cover for "Bringing Order to Anarchy" set against a light background. The top half displays an abstract network of fine black geometric lines, while the center features the title in bold black and red sans-serif text. Below the title, a wireframe sphere illustration occupies the bottom portion of the cover. This essay is adapted from Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come by Charles A. Kupchan (Yale University Press, 328 pp., $32.50, October 2026). This organic process of regionalization is already underway. The United States remains a truly global power, but Trump is reasserting U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and encouraging allies to assume more responsibility for security in their own regions. China and Russia look set to anchor a regional grouping that stretches from Eastern Europe to the Pacific, while Beijing simultaneously works to establish its own sphere of influence in its immediate neighborhood. Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other regional powers are also seeking greater autonomy and influence, in part by advancing projects of regional integration. The case for polycentrism rests not only on the inevitability of power diffusion and the decentering of the international system but also on the order-producing effects of a bottom-up, regionalized approach to global governance. Geography and proximity still matter. The countries closest to a threat usually have the strongest interest in countering it. Although the United States—due to its unmatched military muscle—led this year’s air campaign against Iran, regional players such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have the strongest interest in containing Tehran’s revisionist ambitions. The parties with the sturdiest motivation to counter extremists in Africa are those directly threatened by the violence and its spillover. To encourage regional solutions to regional challenges is to tap the will of the parties most keen to address those challenges and aggregate regional effort. The same goes for trade. Globalization has peaked, and the international economy is becoming fragmented. Almost one-third of U.S. trade is with Canada and Mexico, some two-thirds of European Union trade takes place within the bloc, and intra-regional trade makes up more than half of Asia’s international commerce. These trends are poised to deepen due to tariffs, friendshoring, the repatriation of supply chains, and other forms of economic decoupling. Regions are becoming increasingly important sites of commercial activity. A polycentric approach to global governance would also capitalize on the ordering effects of regional power asymmetries. The largest countries in a region usually rely on their geopolitical and economic heft to play a leading role in designing and overseeing regional initiatives. At the same time, projects of regional integration produce institutions and practices that bind major powers to consensual rules and norms. Regional bodies both empower and check their largest countries, one of the reasons they enjoy buy-in among bigger and smaller countries alike. EU membership may expose less powerful member states to the outsized sway of Germany and France, but these smaller countries also have a compelling interest in entering a compact that constrains and dilutes the influence of their big neighbors. The same goes for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which both enables and restrains Saudi Arabia, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which does the same for Indonesia. The size of China’s economy gives it immense influence within the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, but this regional trade pact also binds Beijing to consensual rules. By encouraging major powers to hold sway in their own neighborhoods, the regionalization of global governance would to some extent bring back and legitimize spheres of influence. Yet that outcome is inevitable in a world of diffusing power. Ideally, tomorrow’s spheres of influence would be less coercive than past ones. The global delegitimation of imperial rule makes it more likely that major powers would wield their influence largely through consensus rather than coercion. Admittedly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Moscow’s defense of what it considers its sphere of influence has been anything but benign. Yet the Kremlin might well be less aggressive toward its neighbors if it believed that other major powers—the United States in particular—would refrain from extending their strategic reach into Russia’s rimlands. In similar fashion, if the United States and China can dial down their rivalry, Beijing might pursue its regional objectives through less coercive means. The regionalization of global governance is also suited to a world in which regions have different priorities. Certain challenges, such as climate change, are global in reach and require a coordinated global response. Yet other issues on the international agenda have salience and import in some regions but not others. In Latin America, combating organized crime and drug trafficking is a much higher priority than in most other regions. In Africa, building state capacity and alleviating poverty animate efforts to advance regional governance. The Middle East’s priorities include managing sectarian cleavages, taming Iran, and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In short, one size does not fit all. A polycentric order would be fit for purpose in a world of diverse regional priorities. Finally, the regionalization of global governance would capitalize on the cooperative potential that comes with cultural ties. Across history, zones of stable peace have most frequently taken shape among nations that enjoy ethnic, racial, or religious commonalities. The sense of likeness that accompanies shared cultural practices and symbols encourages solidarity. A communal identity helped establish the social and political foundations of the EU, which has established a flag, common passport, and single currency. The African Union’s founding charter commits its members to build on the work of “generations of Pan-Africanists” to advance a “common identity” and “achieve greater unity and solidarity.” ASEAN has adopted a motto—“One Vision, One Identity, One Community”—as well as a flag, emblem, and anthem. In a decentered world of ideological diversity, a polycentric system of governance would tap into the ordering effects of shared regional cultures and identities. The EU, the Commonwealth of Independent States, ASEAN, the Arab League, the AU, the Organization of American States—these are among the major regional institutions that will need to serve as key building blocks of global order in a polycentric world. Some regional bodies, such as the Arab League, will have to mature considerably if they are to play a more robust role in anchoring a regional order. New regional bodies will need to be created in South Asia and Northeast Asia, where capable institutions are lacking largely because of the geopolitical tensions that continue to arrest regional integration. There is no neat, widely accepted understanding of where regions begin and end or of what regional family some countries belong to. Egypt is a member of the Arab League as well as the AU. Russia’s ongoing effort to subjugate its neighbor emerged from Ukraine’s desire to leave a relatively coercive Eurasian community for a more voluntary European one. Regional organizations develop as they see fit, and their membership evolves as nations perceive value in joining them—or sometimes leaving them. But even if location does not determine alignment and regional affiliation, geography powerfully shapes national and regional interests. Europe, though part of a trans-Atlantic strategic bloc, has successfully pursued its own project of regional integration. As Chinese power continues to grow, U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific will need to navigate Beijing’s inevitable effort to build a more Sinocentric regional order in its neighborhood. Canada, alienated by Trump’s America First policies, is looking for a new home among middle powers. But like it or not, Canada will remain deeply integrated into North America both strategically and commercially. Regional bodies are layered within a network of institutions that extends both below and above them. Below them are subregional groupings, which can be important sites of localized governance and consensus-building. The Economic Community of West African States is a subgroup of the AU, just as the Visegrád Four and the Three Seas Initiative are subgroups of the EU, and members of the GCC are also members of the Arab League. Above regional institutions is a proliferating array of transregional bodies. Some, like NATO, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) grouping, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), explicitly seek to build ties across geographic regions. NATO traverses the North Atlantic, APEC spans the Pacific Rim, while the SCO groups China and Russia with states in Central, South, and West Asia. Other transregional bodies—such as the G-7, the G-20, and BRICS—base their membership not on geography but on economic size. The G-7 is a league of wealthy democracies, the G-20 includes wealthier democracies and autocracies alike, and BRICS is an expanding club of large countries that aims to counterbalance the West and advance the aspirations of the global south. Regional groupings are set to be the primary vehicles for building international order from the bottom up. But a polycentric approach to global governance must also capitalize on the subregional and transregional linkages that are very much a part of a complicated architecture of international institutions. The challenge will be to use this messy structure of nested and overlapping bodies to build collective initiative. Collective efforts will be easier to come by if alternative groupings end up being complementary and additive rather than competitive and adversarial. Russia and China may intend BRICS and the SCO to serve as counterweights to Western institutions, and to some extent they do serve that purpose. But the Western democracies should approach them pragmatically and welcome their delivery of public goods; BRICS, for example, provides loans and other financial support to emerging economies, while the SCO has advanced cooperation on countering trafficking of humans and weapons. This lattice-like network of regional, subregional, and transregional institutions constitutes the substructure of a polycentric global order; it must be effectively tapped to maximize international cooperation. If the bottom-up elements of governance represent the skeleton of a globalized and multipolar world, such a system will still need a central nervous system. For that, we need to look to history. An historical illustration depicting a large group of men in formal 19th-century military uniforms and coats gathered around a large wooden table. Several men sit and stand around the table looking over documents and a terrestrial globe, while others stand in ranks behind them. An illustration depicts the Congress of Vienna, circa 1814, which gave birth to the Concert of Europe.Wikimedia Commons Even as a significant measure of order comes from the bottom up, the world needs a global architecture to provide governance from the top down, dampening great-power rivalry, addressing crises as they emerge, and coordinating collective action across the world’s regions. The U.N. and its supporting network of international institutions are meant to fulfill this function. But the U.N. system is manifestly inadequate: It is too big, too bureaucratic, and too often paralyzed by the veto power wielded by the permanent members of the Security Council. The gap between the demand for global governance and its supply grows by the day. A concert system offers a pragmatic and workable means of establishing such centralized governance. The Concert of Europe is the prototype. Fashioned in 1815 at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, this steering group of five major powers preserved peace in a multipolar and ideologically diverse Europe for decades to come. Two liberalizing countries—Britain and France—worked comfortably alongside three absolute monarchies in Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The concert centralized governance through great-power congresses while also regionalizing leadership by granting each member special sway in its own neighborhood. It was informal and flexible, shunning charters and fixed rules and instead, according to a British memo from 1818, allowing consensus to “arise out of the circumstances of the time and of the case.” Concert diplomacy has distinct advantages when it comes to providing top-down governance in the world to come. Concerts put at the table only the influential parties best suited to tackle the task at hand, facilitating consensus by limiting the number of voices in the room. Small-group formats may be exclusive and violate the norm of sovereign equality. But by deliberately sacrificing broad representation in favor of efficacy, they offer the best means of forging agreements in a decentered and ideologically diverse world. As during the Concert of Europe, a contemporary version would deliberately span regime type, helping to overcome the bitter cleavages that have lately emerged between democracies and autocracies. Member states would consciously set aside differences over matters of domestic governance and political rights to ensure that these issues do not hinder international cooperation. A new concert system would also have the flexibility to put at the table nonstate actors such as NGOs and CEOs when they can effectively contribute to collective initiative and problem-solving. Concerts work not only because of their limited and select membership but also because they avoid institutionalization, legalization, and binding procedures. To be sure, international governance would ideally be formalized and legalized, buttressed by enforceable rules and commitments. But most states, especially the major powers whose interactions have the biggest impact on the inter-national system, are unwilling to compromise their sovereignty by submitting to the will of international bodies. These obstacles to institutionalized cooperation will only become more acute in the years ahead. As the diffusion of power heats up geopolitical rivalries, formalized agreements will be harder to reach. Meanwhile, the political backlash against socioeconomic dislocation, globalization, and immigration is intensifying domestic opposition to, in Trump’s words, “international unions that tie us up and bring America down.” Amid a widespread surge in populist nationalism, institutionalized multilateralism will be increasingly elusive. Indeed, stalemate in the U.N. Security Council, the World Trade Organization, and other bodies is already the norm; the U.N. far more regularly serves as a forum for public grandstanding than for constructive diplomacy. The shift to informal, small-group diplomacy is already underway—more by default than by design. Since well before the arrival of Trump’s pronounced unilateralism, the United States and other countries were already gravitating toward greater reliance on coalitions of the willing and informal pacts. A contact group of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States led the successful effort to bring peace to the Balkans during the 1990s. The P5+1 grouping (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. More recently, Oman, Pakistan, and Qatar have been leading efforts to mediate between Iran and the United States, Trump’s Board of Peace has been seeking to pacify Gaza, and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the United States have teamed up to try to end Sudan’s civil war. Ad hoc groupings and coalitions of the willing have become the new normal. An explicit move to regularize concert diplomacy would thus channel a shift that is already taking place, driven by both geopolitical and domestic realities. Rather than lamenting the decline of institutionalized multilateralism and struggling to restore it, the international community should normalize concert diplomacy and seek to make the most of its cooperative potential. A contemporary concert system would consist of a Global Concert supported by a network of subconcerts. It would put at the table the influential actors that need to be there—regardless of their regime type. It would include autocracies as well as democracies and developing as well as developed countries. It would be large enough to be globally representative but small enough to be effective. Major powers have been busy sorting themselves into rival groups—the G-7, BRICS, the SCO. They should now channel that cooperative impulse into a new grouping that cuts across geopolitical and ideological dividing lines and aims to surface and further common interests. The Global Concert would serve as a great-power directorate, a steering group tasked with overseeing global governance. Its initial members would be the familiar heavyweights: China, the EU, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America would be represented by emissaries from their main regional bodies—ASEAN, the Arab League, the AU, and the Organization of American States. Having Europe be represented by the EU rather than by Germany, its most powerful state, would legitimize the inclusion of emissaries from regional bodies. Having representatives from ASEAN, the Arab League, the AU, and the Organization of American States would encourage these bodies’ members to aggregate their voices and advance regional integration—while also sidestepping the controversy that might accompany invitations to only the largest country from each region. The members of the concert would have the flexibility, through consensus, to alter the body’s composition over time. As in the Concert of Europe, ideological differences over domestic governance would be fenced off from matters requiring international cooperation, and concert diplomacy would take place alongside the devolution of authority to regional groupings. Unlike the Concert of Europe, whose congresses occurred sporadically and in various locations, the Global Concert would meet on a continuous, daily basis. Its headquarters should be located in a city that sits between West and East and North and South, such as Istanbul or Dubai. Fly-in, fly-out summits, whether of the G-7, the G-20, or BRICS, are woefully inadequate. By providing a vehicle for continuous face-to-face dialogue, the Global Concert could realistically mute and manage geopolitical and ideological differences and foster consensus. In addition to serving as a high-level steering group, the Global Concert would also function as a council of councils. It would set up a network of subconcerts—bespoke contact groups—to tackle pressing issues that require sustained engagement and collective initiative. Subconcerts would be established to address geopolitical flashpoints such as Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, Iran, and Taiwan. Focused dialogues on the underlying disputes will not guarantee their resolution. But active and sustained diplomacy is better than no diplomacy, and at a minimum, it reduces the chances of mis-understandings, mishaps, or inadvertent escalation. Other subconcerts could focus on international commerce, climate change, technological advances, global health, and human development. These groups would put at the table not only powerful states but also relevant nonstate actors. The subconcert focused on the regulation of technology and artificial intelligence, for example, could include representatives from the major tech companies as well as experts from NGOs and universities. Additional subconcerts would be set up as needed to respond to emerging crises or other longer-term challenges. The Global Concert, backstopped by the subconcerts, would primarily be a consultative body; it would tee up decisions that would often be finalized and implemented by the U.N. and other global and regional institutions. Concert members would be behind closed doors, meeting on a continuous basis, and disarmed of veto power, boosting the likelihood of forging a diplomatic consensus that existing bodies could build on. A concert system would provide a venue for a sustained conversation that does not now exist, bolstering the current international architecture and strengthening, not sidelining, the U.N. by facilitating agreement and thereby making the body more effective. The concert system would thus serve as a global governance hub, providing the governing core needed to anchor a polycentric world. The overall logic of this approach is to marry the bottom-up governance that will accompany power diffusion and regionalization with the top-down oversight and coordination that would be provided by a concert system. Ordering moments tend to follow major wars. The Peace of Westphalia emerged in 1648 after a century of war sparked by the Protestant Reformation. The Concert of Europe took shape in 1815 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The establishment of the League of Nations in 1920 followed the close of World War I, and the U.N. was founded in 1945 just after the end of World War II. Wars are wake-up calls that encourage humankind to try to end the cycles of bloodshed that have come before. The world now needs a new ordering moment—but before, not after, another great-power war. Unfortunately, neither in the United States nor anywhere else has a constructive dialogue begun about building an order fit for an era of globalized multipolarity. Instead, diplomacy and public dialogue are afflicted by growing rivalry among nations and political division within them. The pragmatic vision of order laid out in this essay is neither elegant nor grand. Putting it into place would not entail the great fanfare that accompanied the launch of the League of Nations or the U.N. Nor is this vision of a reimagined global order a magic bullet. Even if regional bodies mature, they will at times fail to prevent conflicts and fall short of adequately delivering public goods. Concert diplomacy cannot solve all problems. The national interests of great powers will still come into conflict even if they all join the Global Concert. Climate change will remain a vexing challenge even after a steering group to tackle it is up and running. But the current system of global governance is manifestly inadequate. A polycentric order anchored by a concert system is the best available option for managing the world to come. It offers a pragmatic approach to advancing the cause of global governance and peace in an era of globalized multipolarity. At this historical inflection point—as democracies stumble, geopolitical fracture mounts, global challenges intensify, and collective initiative grows more elusive—we need a workable and attainable plan for where we go from here. Let the debate begin.