The Makings of a Prewar World

Donald Trump offered perhaps the clearest summation yet of his worldview in an otherwise discursive address to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday.

Defending the American takeover of Venezuelan oil, he invoked an old maxim: “To the victor belongs the spoils.” He then presented Iran with a choice between accepting his terms and being driven “into hell with no chance of survival.” These remarks are the latest sign that world politics is entering an era when might makes right.

Yet Trump is only one of the leaders driving this rupture from the post–World War II international order.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have also broken the order, although their methods differ profoundly—morally, legally, and otherwise.

American policy may change when Trump leaves office in January 2029, but Putin and Xi may remain in power well into the next decade.

A new American president will likely not be able to restore the old order or create a better one, even if they want to.

Their greatest challenge will be to arrest the slide.

International order is a notoriously vague and politically contested concept.

Many leaders in the global South, along with Western critics, reject the idea that the United States ever consistently abided by a rules-based system.

They point to Western military interventions, double standards, and the unequal distribution of power within international institutions.

But the old order’s failures do not mean that its restraints were meaningless.

In his first book, A World Restored , Henry Kissinger argued that a stable and legitimate order rests on a limited consensus: an understanding among the major powers about what he called the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy.

Governments can compete intensely and violate rules without seeking to overturn the system itself.

The danger arises when a major power becomes so dissatisfied with the limits imposed upon it that it adopts a revolutionary foreign policy. [ Vivian Salama: America’s allies are no longer waiting for Trump to leave ] Under the old international order, major powers did not, as a general rule, conquer and annex the territory of their neighbors.