#World issues free

Revisionism also manifests in the actions of a plethora of other powers, including the growing skepticism about free trade in the United States, the military buildup in once pacifist Japan, and the rearmament of Germany. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a violation of international norms and a further rebuke to the notion that Russia could find a comfortable role within a U.S.-led order in Europe. Often, revisionism takes the shape of territorial disputes, particularly in the Indo-Pacific: China’s friction with its neighbors India, Japan, Vietnam, and others in maritime Asia comes to mind. Major powers exhibit what may be called “revisionist” behavior, pursuing their own ends to the detriment of the international order and seeking to change the order itself. Recent years, however, suggest that this arrangement is a thing of the past. For much of the era that followed the demise of the Soviet Union, most powers, including a rising China, generally went along with the U.S.-led order. In reality, they rested on the dominance and imperatives of U.S. Both orders professed to be “open, rules-based, and liberal,” upholding the values of democracy, so-called free markets, human rights, and the rule of law. The United States led two orders after World War II: a Keynesian one that was not inordinately interested in how states ran their internal affairs in a bipolar Cold War world (a socialist India, therefore, could be the largest recipient of World Bank aid in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s), and, after the Cold War, a neoliberal one in a unipolar world that ignored national sovereignty and boundaries where it needed to. That failure stems from the fact that fewer and fewer countries, including the ones that built the previous international order, seem committed to maintaining it. The subsequent international response to climate change, the metastasizing debt crisis in developing countries, and the COVID-19 pandemic can only be described as pathetic. The last coherent response by the international system to a transnational challenge came at the London summit of the G-20 in April 2009, when in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, leaders took steps to avert another Great Depression and stabilize the global banking system. The world is between orders it is adrift.