Behind a considerable amount of upheaval and suffering in the world today, looming in the background of almost any policy area, is the rising shadow of great power competition. Such rivalry is consuming constrained resources, threatening confrontation and stymying constructive diplomacy on almost any issue. The geopolitical situation seems grim, but compared to when? The increasingly disordered world that is emerging is one that will be shaped by the struggle for a new balance of power between post-Enlightenment civilisational states. The path to surviving, and thriving, in this era will not be to restore or construct a new order, but rather to learn how to navigate an evolving state of disorder.

In Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, set during the Second World War, the US serviceman Edward J Nately III meets an old man drinking in a brothel. ‘Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed,’ the old man says. ‘All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours?’ The old man’s ironic thesis that unnerves Nately is this: if survival is the name of the game of power politics, the only way to win may be to not play at all. Why be America, when one can be Switzerland? The United States will someday join the gallery of has-been hegemonies; Switzerland never will. The problem, of course, is that few countries enjoy the special conditions of Switzerland. The skill of great power politics lies not in avoiding the contest altogether, but rather in how long one can stay in the game, and what the state of things may be when your time is up.

These lessons are not especially new. Thucydides’ oft-cited Peloponnesian War is the classic source for them. In his ‘Melian Dialogue’, Thucydides tells us that when the Athenians arrived on the island of Melos, they demanded its submission, in their struggle with Sparta. The Athenians dismissed the moral appeals of the Melians, because the reality is – or so they claimed – ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ Is this simply the way things are? The recurrent triumph of might over right? Melian Dialogues happen almost routinely in international politics, but it is not always so straightforward or one-sided. Imagine, for instance, if Melos was not an island? What would have happened? The Spartans, a land power, would likely have defended the Melians. In the world today, there are concerning examples of might suppressing right in the service of great power politics, although in quantitative terms these are more often the exception, occuring when a small power finds itself without the protection of a larger coalition.

In reality, most states tend to band together with others, or cultivate great power backers, seeking a balance of power. It is not really a ‘war of all against all’ out there, to use Hobbes’ phrase; it is a balancing of some against others, and occasional war of some against some others. A great power, in the Rankean definition, has sufficient power to resist any and all other powers, to go ‘toe to toe’. But a genuine great power has such an excess of security that it can both provide for its own security and export it to defend lesser powers against preying rivals. Vietnam may not have endured US intervention if not for Soviet and Chinese support, just as Ukraine today may not endure without American or equivalent European support. No great power can defend all others, just as no great power can subject all others to it. This means that moral choices in international politics are a luxury of power. Even though the great powers are forced to choose lesser evils, that is their political responsibility.

Because great powers by their nature have pervasive multi-regional interests, geography finds ways of bringing them into conflict, such as in the South China Sea, or elsewhere. In these places, conflicting visions for ordering the whole world seem to become the stakes of a few thousand miles of land or sea. It is sometimes, but not always, productive to blame the great powers for having these conflicts. Yet if they did not defend their interests, the great powers would not stand for anything. Besides, the historical causes of great power conflict are usually elusive anyway, and it is more productive to hold the great powers responsible for how they manage their conflicting interests than to moralise about why they have conflicting interests in the first place. What matters is avoiding unnecessary wars and worst outcomes; exercising restraint and tact as they struggle to impose constraints on one another.

It is easy to see that the reasons behind great power actions tend to be self-interested, but a more complete picture shows that the reasons for political action are not the same thing as its goals. The reasons for action are the interests of powers, but, once acted upon, they become goals – ambitions and purposes for changing the state of things. The goals of great powers tend to be aspirational, relating to competing visions of international order as well as conflicting moral choices and values. The prolific English essayist William Hazlitt, for instance, in his writings on the Napoleonic Wars, highlighted how great powers attempt to reshape the world according to their own competing visions of it:

France fought for its own existence or for the continuance of the new order of things, and in this object it had triumphed; England fought confessedly… for the re-establishment of the ancient order of things or of what was called social order, which would not be effected without the total subjection of France.

Great powers, and the statesmen steering them, have two minds at once; what they want for themselves and what they fear in one another. In broad terms, China today wants, among other things, to secure its coast so as to ensure its rise but fears that the US will stifle it; Russia wants a secure and ideally extended frontier with a diminished NATO, but fears its own internal collapse; and the US, for its part, wants to deter its challengers and continue to thrive from a position of predominance, but fears China will outlast and surpass it.

The idea that the future seems bleak has been made popular by the modern notion that the future should always be better than the past. In international politics, the scope and ambition of the major postwar settlements of 1815, 1919 and 1945 have instilled increasingly the idea that an order can be made to last in perpetuity if the order is made correctly. Looking back at the postwar moments, we can see that order has always been a struggle. Small wars, for instance, tend to spring up soon after major wars are settled. And the grand alliances of the victors tend to gradually morph into grand rivalries. Each new hegemony has had a challenger arise in the shape of its former partner and friend. The UK in the 19th century soon found itself in a far-flung contest with Russia after the Napoleonic wars, just as the US fell into its contest with the USSR, after their grand alliance unravelled in the second half of the 1940s. Today, the US and China find themselves in an uneasy contest after partnering in the latter half of the Cold War and carrying on good relations sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The struggle for order is relentless.

In the jockeying rise and decline of powers, we can see that the latest world-historical contest is underway. As the great powers round the corner, the prospects of great power war are concerning, because, as the classic scholar of International Relations Martin Wight put it, ‘great powers do not die in their beds’; they do not die of old age, and do not go down without a fight. But, if great power war is avoided, what matters is not the decline of the old order as such, but the political values it at least had pretences and, in principle, aspirations to advance. ‘Liberalism’ was far less embedded in the postwar world order than it was once thought to be. In other words, the fate of the West would be less concerning if its values were more widely held. The precariousness of deterrence – to avoid great power war – may be less necessary, too, if shared values made the terms of peaceful change more reasonable.

There is also disagreement within the West over what its values are. Western allies have had many issues of strain and internal disagreement before, especially over external actions, such as the Suez Crisis or the invasion of Iraq. But signs of division within and between western states, over the NATO alliance itself and its principles, are troubling. Authoritarian powers are betting that, in a long-distance race, their government-enforced domestic stability will outlast what they perceive as the West’s internal instabilities. It is conceivably possible to break the West in this way because the West is, ultimately, just an idea, even if it is a powerful one. Indeed, it is an important and meaningful idea, legitimating a set of very real military alliances; but still, the idea of the West itself is what social scientists would mundanely call a ‘discursive construct’, or, to use another well-worn term, an ‘imagined community’. This is why it shapeshifts. During the Cold War, invocations of ‘western values’ were more common. These values, loosely defined, were largely Lockean in substance, although Burke also enjoyed a revival in the contest with Marxist ideas. After the Cold War, talk of western values shifted again, into notions of ‘universal values’ at the ‘end of history’. Today, it is obvious that these values need to be reformulated again by drawing on the deep wellsprings of the western tradition, but in new ways for new times and new challenges.

A cynical view would say that what the great powers define as legitimate and illegitimate is simply what serves the interests of their structural position. Hegemons, for instance, at the top, tend to cultivate a halo of ideology around them, to say that their hegemony serves the interests of not only friendly states, but humankind itself. Rising powers tend to loathe this, call it hypocritical and smothering, in order to justify their preferred alternative, in the name of the justice and equality of nations. It is striking, for instance, how similar China’s diplomatic dispositions today are to America’s around the time of the First World War: risen but not yet entirely dominant, industrious and proud, presenting itself as a different, new peace-loving kind of power on the world scene, ‘above’ the power politics of the old world, promising another way. China today professes to be an anti-hegemonic power, and a special non-Western power, offering a new model of development for the ‘common destiny for mankind’.

Yet the world has changed since the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ideological sources of political power have changed in character also. Great power politics, Paul Kennedy has suggested, is now in a ‘post-Enlightenment’ era. Indeed, political ideas in the 21st century are increasingly cast in ‘cultural’ and ‘civilisational’ terms, and their dissemination is algorithmic. Christopher Coker observed that China, Russia, India and other powers increasingly present themselves as ‘civilisational states’ with historical missions. We can also observe that the United States increasingly discusses its foreign policy in terms of ‘western civilisation’, too. Ranke, in his essay on ‘The Great Powers’ (1833), argued that in the wake of Napoleon’s wars, being a nation state had become necessary if states were to mobilise power sufficient to join the concert of great powers. In the geopolitical disorder of the 21st century, being a ‘civilisational state’ may become necessary to be a great power.

The Enlightenment cosmopolitan futurisms of the Cold War and post-Cold War eras have been traded in for civilisational futurisms. These ideologies entertain semi-nostalgic world order visions in foreign policy discourse, but the new civilisationalism is also mixing with new techno-futurisms. The economic and technological sources of military power are increasingly digital as well as industrial. The largest companies in the world are digital. Future war and great power capabilities increasingly depend on their innovations. Sino-futurism and US-futurism are evident in the merging of state and ‘big tech’ power. Whose AI ‘wins’ is often vaguely supposed to ‘win’ the future.

There may not be ‘winners’ for some time, however. Unanticipated world-historical events should be expected, but all things being equal, the eerie world order depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 may be prescient: a world divided between three great powers deterred from waging war directly, while subjecting ad hoc swathes of the earth to back and forth proxy wars. The digital empires of our times, however, reach into each other’s territories and populations, in cyberwar, information warfare and subversion campaigns. Conventional missile and drone capabilities are also increasing in such range and precision that the ‘kill webs’ are becoming global, reaching across thousands of kilometres to target anyone anywhere. Deterrence today has become a ‘whole of society’ struggle.

How far things may unravel is unclear. Civilisational states are multiplying, but their civility seems to be declining. A new order or an order restored is unlikely in the foreseeable future, because selective disorder in degrees is serving the interests of several powers, steadily pushing for a reordering of things. Each peace made will slide into a new conflict. Until wider political conditions of the world change again, the great powers are better off crafting and defending the basic premises and principles of a tolerable disorder, to stabilise the new struggle for order. Opportunities may arise for something different in future, but they will be harder if not impossible to reach if worse disorder breaks out first.

Because the US is in contest with two powers today – China and Russia – rather than one, as it was in the Cold War, US demands for European states to contribute more is reasonable and arguably essential. Demands to annex allied territory are not. While Europe is not yet a power, it may become one in the course of a coming struggle, however reluctantly. It can in principle also do so while evolving the western alliance, maintaining US extended deterrence in new ways. A change in US posture and capabilities should not be mistaken with absolute decline, however. That would be to concede to the wishful thinking and ideological visions of adversarial powers. For the foreseeable future, the US remains the greatest of the great powers, while it is revising its strategic preferences for new circumstances, emphasising economic nationalism and its contest with China. The Democratic and Republican parties in the United States will formulate different expressions and implementations of foreign policy, but they are forming a similar set of grand strategy assumptions.

In crafting a tolerable disorder, the decline of cooperation between the great powers makes international organisation more important, but for opposite reasons. Multilateralism today is less about realising common ambitions, than it is about preventing discreet ambitions from claiming the greater share of legitimacy. The UN remains a useful venue for settling minor disputes. This function should not be underrated, in the interests of maintaining order. But the UN cannot settle major issues between great powers and should not be expected to. UNSC reform, for instance is unlikely if not impossible while the Permanent Five (P5) are in conflict, but if it were achieved, it would only provide concessions to other powers, rather than moderate existing tensions between P5 members. Because the great powers are in a state of strained relations, the UN matters as a venue in which each prevents one another from acquiring a monopoly on international legitimacy. In the Korean conflict, for instance, the Soviet Union learned the costs of non-participation in UN processes.

Because the differences between great powers are political, there may be no ideal world order model that can possibly resolve the struggle; but there are strategic dispositions that can manage and constrain the ensuing disorder, at tolerable levels. Crafting a tolerable disorder means acknowledging that conflicting world-order preferences and values exist, without accepting them as equivalent, while in the same movement making clear what is intolerable and deterring such actions. Great powers define for themselves what is intolerable, and in doing so reveal the limits of what each other will tolerate. A tolerable disorder does not mean the end of hostilities or tensions, but a resolve to keep them constrained. What is intolerable, in this sense, means meeting the threshold of escalatory response. This, in turn, means that the great powers will continue to tolerate far more disorder than we may be used to. But there are limits (even if politically defined), around which the bases of a tolerable disorder may be found.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was right that life is full of suffering and misery; it always has been. But he was too contrarian when he declared that, of all possible worlds, ours is the worst. Many possible worlds, if we may hypothesise alternative timelines, would have stumbled into nuclear war, or if non-totalitarian powers failed to rally to a common cause, fallen under terrible empires. This picture may admittedly be made with the benefit of hindsight, but it gives an indication of radically divergent possibilities. It gives the sense that if and when the disorder of our times eventually subsides, giving way to new issues and players, there is a possible world in which the modicum of order that we rely on and have concern for, as imperfect and costly as it may be, will continue to exist.