What will the state of world order be 10, 15, 20 years from now? Any analysis of world order and its future is only as good as the underlying assumptions it is based upon. I offer five.

The first assumption involves defining terms clearly. ‘World order’ does not mean the same thing as the ‘international system’, though these terms are often used interchangeably. Nor is world order the same as ‘theories of international relations’. The international system describes how the world works: what are its features and characteristics, principal drivers, dangers, constraints, actors and opportunities that shape global affairs. Some suggest it is shaped by unchanging, structural and material forces, whereas others believe the international system shifts over time and can be altered through political interventions.

Order, on the other hand, is constructed, negotiated, and/or imposed, sometimes through coercion, more often through negotiation, cooperation and attraction. It is a cumulative and complex political, institutional, cultural and normative response to the international system. World order is how the dynamic forces of the international system are channeled and structured into a recognisable form through the choices made by the key actors. It is the consequence of conscious activity, as opposed to passive acceptance. It is how the world is managed.

‘Theories of international relations’, on the other hand, reveal how much you believe key actors can intervene to respond, contain, redirect, shift or create forces that make up the international system. Different theories offer different views on how to best manage the international system, or whether ordering is even possible. One’s theories of international relations can also lead to order-building activities and priorities that are at odds with how the international system actually works, undermining the legitimacy of the order. As will be discussed below, I believe that is the situation we face today.

My second assumption is that what we today call ‘world order’ is actually a series of extraordinary, often unseen but interconnected, interwoven, designed and reinforcing sets of arrangements – regional and partial orders – largely developed after the Second World War (though some have deeper roots), involving a whole range of activities and issues we rarely focus on and indeed take for granted – from development and climate to technology and values. These partial orders encapsulate often mundane but critical activities ranging from banking, finance, accounting and investment to travel and flight safety to intellectual property and consumer standards, and on and on. They also emerge from, are buttressed by, and reinforce converging sociocultural practices and norms as well as the behaviours and interests of private sector and non-governmental actors. In other words, world orders can be cumulative.

We often focus – understandably – on the global security order first, and the large macroeconomic trade and monetary order second, and overlook the rest. But the nuts and bolts of world order – the thick set of rules, relationships, networks, practices – that allow us to fly almost anywhere on the planet, safely and with relative ease, from many different parts of the world, to take out our phones to call home or play our preferred artist on Spotify without second thought, and to use our credit cards to go to a local store, filled with products from any number of countries, reflect the nuts and bolts of these deeply interwoven, highly networked, regional and partial orders. It is historically unprecedented, wildly successful, very popular, and probably more resilient than we think. This is the ‘taken-for-granted’ of a densely networked and interconnected order that functions at multiple levels.

Even the contested security order is not one, monolithic thing. Arguably, its most successful component – the set of arrangements surrounding nuclear weapons, with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and associated agreements at its core – is related to, but is distinct from and has a different history and logic than, the broader security order emerging from the United Nations and the actions, treaties, alliances and institutions of the great powers.

Most of the debate about the resilience, health and future of world order focuses on the big issues involving security and macro-economic arrangements. These have often been labelled as the ‘liberal’ or ‘rules-based’ world order, believed to be largely created by the United States and its allies, and to be imperilled if no longer led by them. The debate about ‘order’ and its future shape focuses primarily on contentious questions surrounding China’s geopolitical rise and its claims to Taiwan, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America’s erratic security and tariff decisions, the size and composition of the UN security council, the rules and practices of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. There are sharp and divergent views among and between nations about whether this security and macro-economic order is healthy, dying or shifting, and whether it should be revived, transformed or replaced.

Despite these overarching disagreements, however, few want to see most of these functioning partial orders disappear. People still want to fly safely and with ease, use their phones, scroll social media, consume safe food and medicines, and make purchases without concern. Russia, China and the United States – and most other medium powers ranging from Indonesia to South Africa and Brazil – do not want to see the nuclear security order collapse, regardless of their other disagreements. Even North Korea actively participates in parts of the UN climate order.

One of the most critical questions we face is: how much are these partial orders, which almost everyone appreciates (indeed, takes for granted), related to the health and resilience of the larger security and macroeconomic order? Can the partial orders survive if the security and macroeconomic orders are threatened? Might the popularity of the former help save the latter? These are open, debatable questions which will shape the future.

My third, and most contentious, assumption is that I believe the greatest challenge to – and the source of much of our anxiety about – our current world order is that it is poorly suited to today’s international system.

The wildly successful order constructed in the aftermath of the Second World War was a response to four enormous, existential issues. The first of these was the need to prevent financial and economic turmoil from cascading into debilitating economic depressions of the type that had been a regular feature of the global economy ever since the trade and financial revolution that had emerged in early modern Europe and accelerated with the Industrial Revolution. Second, reducing global misery while developing the economies in parts of the world that had not participated in the ‘great takeoffs’ produced by industrialisation, which had been concentrated largely in North America and Western Europe. Third, managing the traumatic dissolution of Europe and Japan’s empires while creating safe and stable conditions for the emergence of scores of newly sovereign nations. Fourth, and most important, inhibiting the kinds of fully mobilised, often genocidal, great power wars of conquest and empire, emanating largely from Europe and Japan, which dominated world politics from the late 19th through the middle of the 20th century and culminated in the Second World War, which killed 80 million people, or three per cent of the world’s population.

The postwar order has been extraordinarily successful at meeting these tasks, and in transforming the fundamental nature of the international system. While this could of course change, it is worth taking stock of these successes: great depressions of the post-1929 variety no longer loom over the world economy, and full scale, fully mobilised world wars of conquest have receded from view; formal empire is in the dustbin of history; prosperity and well-being have increased massively, and, while uneven, spread globally. As a consequence, the sovereignty of scores of new nations is largely secure. The Malthusian worldviews, millenarian ideologies, revolutionary impulses and the martial spirit that animated many political outlooks from the late 19th through much of the 20th century have greatly dissipated. Order builders from the middle of the 20th century would have been shocked and overjoyed by this result; even the builders of the United Nations only expected it to last a few decades.

The reasons for this historically unprecedented success are many, but I believe that one of the keys to it is what I’ve called ‘the taming of scarcity’. For most of humanity’s life on this planet, people were tormented by terrifying scarcities in basic resources, security and information about the world. Over the past century or so, we have massively increased the amount, quality, consistent delivery and availability of food, fuel, shelter, safe transport, security, medicine, sanitation, education and information about the world. We have also experienced profound changes in governing effectiveness and the provision of public goods, business efficacy, financial innovation and technology. In addition to all this, we have witnessed a rights revolution that has transformed the human experience. Unimaginable levels of wealth have been created, misery and want reduced, literacy massively expanded, the Malthusian curse destroyed, health outcomes dramatically improved, life expectancy doubled. Plagues, famines, fires, pogroms, wars and a myriad of other disasters that regularly visited the lives of most humans in most places at most times in history are no longer the rule, but are instead exceptions that generate justified outrage and political responses.

A byproduct of this extraordinary success, however, has been what I call ‘the problems of plenty’. Material abundance has generated existential climate and ecological threats. Prosperity has produced infuriating inequality. The dark underbelly of globalisation has unleashed the challenges of mass migration, pandemics, drugs, cybercrime and human trafficking. Perhaps most shockingly, the digital telecommunications revolution has generated a dystopian world of misinformation, alienation, conspiracy and polarisation.

Our current world order – and the political and intellectual apparatus that supports it – was constructed to tame scarcity. Aided by concurrent and extraordinary economic, technological, managerial, political and socio-cultural revolutions over the past century – to say nothing of the nuclear revolution – this order has accomplished this goal far better than anyone could have imagined. Indeed, the ‘problems of plenty’ generated by the postwar liberal order are like what the computer scientist Roger Needham labeled a ‘success disaster’: a product or service that is so successful that it overwhelms the organisation that created it. Needham suggested that the worst failures are those that occur because everything happened as planned.

As a result, this ‘success disaster’ has left an order woefully inadequate to deal with the challenges these triumphs have unleashed. The failure of the global order to deal effectively with the Covid-19 pandemic, which killed over 20 million people worldwide – a number similar to the battlefield deaths during the First World War, albeit among a far larger global population – starkly revealed its inadequacies. It appears equally ill-suited to confront the vexing problems of rapid climate change, emerging technology, inequality, immigration and other problems of plenty. And orders that fail to meet the challenges that most worry people soon lose legitimacy, domestically and internationally, which I would suggest is a key contributor to our current anxiety and apprehension over the global order.

My fourth assumption involves demographics. The world of the future will age and shrink, likely with profound, if unknown, consequences. By 2100, China will have half its current population, with an estimated median age of 57. Demographic compression will shape every region of the world, regardless of ideology or regime type, and while it is affecting developed economies the most, it is an increasingly global phenomenon. Ageing, shrinking populations will have different interests and behave much differently; they are less likely to support fully mobilised wars of conquest and revolutionary actions. Furthermore, historically unprecedented and large gender gaps are also appearing in political behaviour and preferences, demonstrated in elections from South Korea to Germany to the United States. And while fecundity is many things, it is clearly a vote on the future.

This leads to my fifth and final assumption. Much of the anxiety, concern and worry surrounding order appears to be driven less by the material interests that shaped most of human history and more by non-material issues of individual and collective identity, historical belonging, meaning and purpose and even teleology.

We live in an era of historically unimaginable wealth, knowledge about ourselves and the natural, physical world, extraordinary technological advances, and security from the natural and human threats that tormented humanity since millennia. Yet people appear deeply angry and anxious. Contemporary politics are as often fuelled by rage, fear, resentment, and humiliation as by material interest.

Think about Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine. In 1900, controlling the Donbas made sense from a material interest perspective, since wheat and coal were valuable, fiercely contested commodities, making the territory, along with its supplicant population, a source of power. No one believes wheat or coal are highly sought-after sources of power in today’s world, where food and energy are historically cheap and plentiful. Moreover, Ukraine’s population is far from supplicant, and the world was outraged by Russia’s invasion in a way that would have been hard to imagine 125 years ago, generating huge costs for Russia. Even in a world where Russia wins on the battlefield in Ukraine, it is difficult to see how a military victory translates into the elements that generate power in 2026 and beyond. And yet, Russia persists.

This is not an isolated incident – there are countless contested hotspots that could generate a crisis and war that, unlike in the past, makes little sense from a material interest perspective. Thucydides reminds us that war can be caused by interest, fear or honour. Much of our current constructed order, both domestic and global, as well as many of our intellectual tools and scholarly disciplines, assumes that states and their citizens are largely motivated by calculable, measurable interests that can be satisfied in tangible, material ways. Yet in a world of historically unimaginable abundance, knowledge, technological progress and security – and shrinking populations – there is little calculable material interest in spilling blood and treasure to acquire negligible territory or impose empires that drain state coffers, especially when those resources could be invested in technology or education or finance or cultural products that attract admiration and better translate into today’s currency of power.

But we live in an era where fear and honour matter far more than we understood, dominating both domestic and international politics, and may be the key force shaping contests over order in the years to follow.

Given these assumptions, what plausible future orders are worth exploring?  Below I offer four scenarios for the future of world order in the period 2035-2040.  They are not exhaustive or mutually exclusive, deliberately focus on negative outcomes, and are presented to generate discussion and debate. I can imagine scenarios where the world rallies to constrain the problems of plenty while furthering reducing scarcity, advancing prosperity and global well-being and avoiding great power war.

Scenarios one and two are more static or evolving, suggesting how world order might unfold absent a major systemic shock. Scenarios three and four involve catastrophic jolts, which likely overwhelm the order (though, in time, may lead to a new order emerging). Which is most likely? As Yogi Berra said, ‘it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future’; but I believe scenario one is (marginally) more likely, followed by two; controversially, scenario three is the least likely, and scenario four the one we should spend far more time discussing and planning for than we typically do.

Scenario One: Trundling Along

As I suggested earlier, despite its fractures and inadequacies, the interconnected undergirding of our current world order is popular, resilient and, in many ways self-reinforcing. In this scenario, the future order looks roughly as it does today in 10-15 years. This does not mean there won’t be pressures or that the overarching order is wildly popular. The Russia-Ukraine war might reach an uncomfortable stalemate, with Ukraine retaining a measure of independence, but Russia will continue to be a spoiler and pursue menacing grey zone tactics abroad.

China will persist in its pressure on Taiwan, though stop short of an outright invasion or even blockade, and pursue policies often inimical to the West. The United States will remain erratic, weakening though not ending its alliance system and commitment to an open global economy. Europe will struggle to achieve full autonomy and generate economic growth and dynamism, but the European Union will stay intact. The Global South will demand a greater voice but offer no compelling substitute for world order.

The problems of plenty – climate, immigration, emerging technology, inequality, pandemics and disease – will nibble away at the legitimacy of the system, but major players will attempt to cobble together ad hoc responses through existing institutions and muddle through medium level crises.

Why will this order persist? Despite the widely shared view of its underperformance and outdatedness, states will recognise that it is better than the alternatives. While Covid-19 revealed the current order’s deep weaknesses, leaders will reflect that, in its absence, one could have imagined far greater tragedy (a collapse in global logistics, famine, inter- and intra-state war, no vaccines, less central bank cooperation). Though it is an age of honour and fear, states and regions will calculate that, as frustrating as current arrangements are, they must support an order that helps avoid world war, nuclear proliferation, and global depressions, while promoting some measure of prosperity. It is like living in an old, creaky, hard-to-maintain house that you continually complain about, but cannot afford (or being older, lack the will) to undertake a complete teardown or move to a new home.

In many ways, it is comparable to the order of the 1970s, which was exposed by a changing international system marked by economic volatility and subpar performance, a weakened, distracted America less committed to its alliances, civil and interstate war, widespread domestic discontent and increased resource competition. These worries were enough to weaken the order but not bring its collapse.

Even during that troubled decade, the order persisted, and indeed, even saw occasional reform and innovation. In 1972, for example, the United Nations hosted the first major conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. Even deep ideological adversaries, the Soviet Union and the United States, were able to strengthen and stabilise the order when the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect in 1970 and the 1975 Helsinki Accords were signed.

The next decade or so may witness something similar: begrudging acceptance of the current, limited, creaky order, with occasional efforts to address specific problems through new, ad hoc institutional arrangements, perhaps even efforts by the two superpowers, China and the United States, to work on shared problems (of plenty), such as emerging technology and climate concerns, without resolving their underlying geopolitical disagreements.

Scenario Two: Entropy and Division

A key assumption I offered is that the current world order, while wildly successful at taming the scarcities that plagued a previous era of human history, is woefully inadequate to deal with our current and future woes. Orders, domestic or international, that don’t solve the problems that most vex citizens and states eventually lose legitimacy. An order without legitimacy frays, fades and can fall into ruin, even without a catastrophic event to generate a new order to replace it.

In this scenario, American-led alliances atrophy, and even collapse. The trading order becomes clunky and inward-looking as states double down on national autonomy and/or attempts at mercantilism. Openness and democracy continue their decline. While outright great power war and the ruin it brings is avoided, the globe is divided into regional groupings and spheres of interest.

Perhaps Taiwan is absorbed into the PRC through methods short of outright invasion or blockade, as most Americans or European’s have little interest in pursuing a global war to maintain its status. Russia’s menacing behaviour, combined with the loss of American support, causes Europe to arm itself, though perhaps the sovereignty of the Baltics is compromised. The Global South refuses to choose between China’s and the United States’ competing visions of world order, yet is not strong or unified enough to offer an alternative vision or to coordinate effectively amongst themselves.

In this context, the United Nations declines as both a source of legitimacy and rule-making. The nuclear non-proliferation order collapses, as states ranging to Poland and Germany to Japan and South Korea to Australia and Vietnam seek their own secure deterrent. Economic growth slows as trade and financial flows wither.

This order is cranky and inward looking, not unlike the older, shrinking populations it reflects. It is less pluralistic, marked by jingoism, nationalism and turbulence, dominated by monopolists and high tariffs, and at times violent, mirroring some aspects of the world of the 1880s and 1890s. Planetary problems, such as climate and pandemics, are confronted nationally, not globally, and the results are far poorer as a result (though migration is severely regulated and constrained by the wealthier countries).

This order is marked by two ironies novel to this future world. First, technologies, such as additive and micro-manufacturing, cultivated/cell-centred food, synthetic production, renewable energy, automation and robotics fuelled by artificial intelligence, etc, lessen the importance of differential wages and comparative advantage as a key driver of globalisation. National and even decentralised economies may be able to exit the global economy and focus internally with less economic and political damage than in the past. Second, this economic autonomy, married to shrinking and ageing populations as well as wider nuclear proliferation, may make great power war less likely. This order is not pretty or hopeful and is a far remove from the promises of the post-Cold War era – but it possesses a certain unexpected stability and even safety. If this order had a meme/theme, it might be ‘get off my lawn!’ 

Scenario Three: Great Power War Redux

The conventional wisdom holds that we are in a new era of great power geopolitical rivalry, and ‘Cold War II’, a trend that could intensify over the next decade or so. I believe this framing – and the theories of international relations it is based upon – is overstated, emerging from the mistaken view that the international system of 2025-2040 is driven by the same forces as that of 1890-1950. Demographic compression, the massively decreased need for (and value of) territory and formal empire, the shifting sources of power, and the waning of Malthusian/Social Darwinist worldviews or other millenarian ideologies militate against the kind of fully mobilised wars of aggression that darkened the past.

That does not mean, however, that devastating war cannot emerge in the next decade or so. Irredentism and the desire to correct perceived historical wrongs continues to drive politics and policies. Honour and fear, as much as interest, drove conflict in the past and will in the future. Misperception and miscalculation can mark even the most information rich environment. Indeed, our obsession with deterrence – the idea we can ascertain an adversary’s material interests and shape their calculations – may blind us to more powerful, if less ‘utility maximising’ motivations that drive state behaviour and war. War is more than a bargaining failure.

And once a conflict begins, it is hard to know how and when it will end. Imagine China attempting to invade Taiwan and initially finding itself rebuffed with the help of the United States and its Pacific allies. Does anyone believe China will not try a second, third or fourth time, doing whatever it takes until its mission is accomplished? Further, imagine if material American military assets and allies in the Western Pacific are targeted and destroyed during such a conflict: is it reasonable to expect the United States will not escalate? In such a desperate situation, where neither side is willing to concede defeat, can we really count on the side that is losing to not escalate to nuclear use? Other scenarios, such as a Russian attack on a vulnerable NATO country – the Baltic states being key targets – could be similarly disastrous and escalate to horrendous outcomes.

A war between great powers could devastate the global economy. It would quickly force nations to choose sides. The risk of the conflict spreading globally, as the First, Second, and Cold Wars did, would be considerable. ‘Sitting out’ a major conflict might not be an option. The interconnected partial orders so prized around the world would be unlikely to survive. Major wars always bring unexpected and catastrophic second and third order effects, including hunger, disease, violent rebellion, and repression, and even a return of the problems of scarcity.

Scenario Four: The Planetary Problems of Plenty

War, if nothing else, is typically produced by a legible, political process, the result of choices and agency, the decisions causing it unfolding quickly but typically in a linear fashion. The problems of plenty – fast spreading lethal pandemics, a climate catastrophe, a crisis from an emerging technology gone awry – can explode without warning, logic, or obvious origin point. For these reasons, such planetary crises can generate even greater fear, panic, conspiratorial thinking, and scapegoating than even the most horrific armed struggles. It may be unclear who or what the adversary is, whether it is internal or external, what the best response is, and who should bear the costs. This makes it hard to build the kind of policy consensus and legitimacy for the domestic mobilisation and international cooperation that war often inspires.

Imagine the earth’s temperature rising quickly – say, by three or five or even more degrees Fahrenheit – over a period of months. Devastated agriculture leads to famine, pestilence and mass migration crises, as well as another novel pandemic, perhaps more transmissible and lethal than the Covid-19 virus. This world could resemble the horrors that visited the globe between the 1610s and 1680. As the historian Geoffrey Parker has chronicled, a climate crisis – caused by falling temperatures – unleashed famine, disease and misery worldwide, producing, war, revolution, and repression. As much as one third of the world perished. It also highlights another nightmare of scenario four: failure to deal with a severe crisis of plenty can spell a return to the nightmarish world of scarcity, including the wars of scenario three.

The Futility of Prediction

What is the future of world order? The truth is that we have no way of knowing. Imagine a similar essay, written on 1 June 1914, setting out to discuss the future of world order. Using the events of the century following the 1815 Congress of Vienna as a guide to their future, an essayist from June 1914 could have identified vexing dangers, troubling fears and deep anxieties. Yet the same essay might also have pointed out that Europe had enjoyed a century of extraordinary growth, technological progress, cultural flourishing and political opening, with reasonable hopes that those trends would not stall or reverse. There were wars, and there were revolutions, but the cataclysms that rocked the continent in the quarter century after the beginning of the French Revolution seemed in the past. International conferences in Geneva (1864) and the Hague (1899 and 1907) established humane laws of war and expanding mechanisms for international arbitration.

Surveying recent history, one could point to two Balkan wars – of 1912 and 1913 – that had not escalated to a wider conflict, and, indeed, identify signs of détente emerging among the European powers. Later in June 1914 – during the same week in which Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated – the German Kaiser Wilhelm II warmly welcomed a squadron of the Royal Navy, led by a battleship named for the British king, to Kiel. Even if war came, it was expected to be quick and not undermine the fundamental drivers of European progress and its imperial order.

Indeed, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 was a day of bad luck produced by unlikely, highly contingent events, and it is an easy counterfactual to imagine it ending with the successor to the Habsburg throne still alive. If that had happened – if the Archduke had a more competent chauffeur and security detail – would there still have been a First World War? Might we still live in a world where the United States kept the world at arm’s length, radical political philosophies were contained to Central European coffee houses, with European empires still intact? Or would the powerful, tectonic forces lurking near the surface of the international system have found other opportunities to explode?

How you wrestle with that question reveals how you feel about the play and interaction between structural, longer-term forces – a complex, interactive world of political choices marked by radical, unmeasurable uncertainty; and more immediate contingency, context, chance and agency. It also reveals that dramatic changes in world order are less likely to emerge in a linear, easily mapped way, but result instead from explosive events that can generate profound, punctuated equilibrium types of effects, such as the world wars or the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Despite our uncertainty, we are compelled to at least ask what the future holds. We have no idea what unexpected, consequential events will take place – though we know it is likely to be something we are not focusing on today. Nor can we anticipate what choices will be made by which actors when faced with consequential decisions. We can, however, be more explicit about, interrogate and debate how we think the world works and why, recognise what from the past generates insight and acknowledge when history obscures fundamental changes, and identify the underlying trends and forces that will frame the future of the international system and the shape of any future order.