Ideal and Reality: From Liberal International Order to (Self-)Protective Order?

Translated from German by Richard Hewitt and Kristina Lange. 

Introduction

“The world has been thrown off balance.” – “We are witnessing a turning point in history.” – “The international order is eroding.” These and similar phrases have become commonplace in recent years. They reflect the unease and uncertainty with which citizens, decision-makers and analysts view the numerous concurrent crises in Europe and the world. How did such a proliferation of political, economic and military conflicts come about? Why is even Europe now afflicted by the turmoil of global politics, having long been considered a peaceful region? And where is the world heading? This essay attempts to answer these questions from a political science perspective by looking at how the international order is changing. It first defines terms and outlines how orders emerge and decline. Then it addresses the rise and fall of the liberal international order. Finally, it discusses current Western policy and ventures a glimpse into the future.

“World out of balance” – evolution and revolution in the international order

Order is frequently understood as the civilized counterpart –  restrained by the rule of law – to the unbridled tyranny and arbitrary exercise of power inherent in anarchy. The term “world order” implies a global system or framework of rules which, alongside the fundamental absence of violence, serves to guarantee core values such as peace, freedom, and justice. Consequently, some may be mistakenly led to view the existence of a world order – institutionalized through the United Nations, international law, and international bodies – as an inherent baseline of international politics that has merely shifted “out of balance”. This assumption, however, is incorrect.

The basic state of world politics is anarchy: states coexist without being subject to a world government. The international system is therefore a space in which strategic competition is not an exceptional phenomenon – and neither are power politics, violence or war. Security, peace, freedom, justice, and prosperity are goods that must be organized politically. A true “world order” in this sense is a distant dream. It would require a universally applicable and at the same time enforceable set of rules with global reach. In other words, it would mean overcoming anarchy by establishing a framework for the constitutional rule of law across the globe. Despite the unprecedented level of global integration and regulation since the second half of the 20^th century, this has never materialized.

Rather than employing the term “world order,” political science utilizes the analytically more precise concepts of “international order” or, in the plural, “international orders” when examining structural features. This terminology deliberately leaves open the geographical scope, depth, and degree of enforcement, thereby allowing for a measure of ambiguity. The central characteristic of an international order can be delineated using a qualifying adjective – as exemplified by the liberal international order. In addition, researchers can analyze functional orders relating to specific policy areas (such as the nuclear or global economic order) as well as geographically limited regional orders.

However, there are also different theoretical interpretations of the concept of “order”. Proponents of the realist school take the view that under the conditions of anarchy and the resulting security dilemmas, only the distribution of capabilities within the international system has a structuring effect. The international order is thus defined in terms of power relations and can be categorized using the term “polarity”. Proponents of liberalism, by contrast, categorize the international order in terms of patterns of societal preferences. The democratic peace theory emphasizes the dichotomy between democracies and dictatorships. Institutionalists argue that international institutions generate order by establishing binding rules of conduct. Constructivists, conversely, emphasize cognitive frameworks and normative socialization, which function as invisible rules that bring about order.

The author of this article adopts a neoclassical realist perspective. Power is the key currency for enforcing rules, and every order has power relations at its core. However, the powers shaping the international order differ in the rules they seek to establish or enforce. The specific strategic actions taken to shape the international order arise within the national decision-making process. This premise is as compelling as it is logical: the structural nature of the international order fundamentally depends on which state—be it the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, or the United States—shapes it. While it may be academically interesting to examine the visions of order articulated by smaller states such as Luxembourg or Vanuatu, these perspectives remain secondary in global politics. Ultimately, the interplay of power and national interests explains both the historical evolution of the international order and its contemporary crisis.

The international order is inherently dynamic. Orders emerge, evolve, and decay as the underlying power structures erode, existing paradigms lose their efficacy, or systemic preferences shift. There is always continuity and change, evolutionary development, and sometimes even revolutionary ruptures. Beyond mere enforceability through power, an order's longevity depends fundamentally on its structural functionality and perceived legitimacy. At its core, the stability of an order hinges on the balance between its active proponents and its challengers. Within this framework, attempts to alter the status quo constitute “revisionism,” a phenomenon requiring both revisionist intent and the requisite capabilities. Revisionist actors differ significantly regarding the scope of their objectives and the means they are willing to deploy. Ultimately, this interactive conceptualization demonstrates that order is a continuous product of political agency. Orders may arise through consensus or emerge from competition and conflict; they can adapt via peaceful evolution or collapse through major systemic wars.

European and world history since the 17^th century provide ample illustrations of these forces. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 established the Westphalian state system, based on core principles such as the sovereignty of the (secular) territorial state and non-interference in the internal affairs of others. However, this did not eliminate competition or the potential for violence between states. Following Napoleon’s failed bid for European hegemony, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 sought to institutionalize a stable equilibrium of power. The resulting international order was characterized by domestic restoration coupled with an external policy of systemic balance. While the European great powers engaged in geopolitical competition, they simultaneously cooperated to safeguard and maintain the continent's monarchical status quo. In the decades that followed, this status quo came under pressure from democratic and nationalist movements, and collapsed during the First World War. During the interwar period, hopes were raised for democracy and popular sovereignty, international institutions, and the rejection of violence. On the other hand, reactionary forces of resistance and totalitarian ideologies with limitless potential for violence were on the rise. This interregnum ended in the disaster of World War II.

In 1945, the United Nations was founded with its groundbreaking Charter, which laid out the basic rules of interstate relations and was intended to establish a cooperative global order. The Charter locked in two inherently competing sets of ordering principles. While traditional Westphalian principles anchored state sovereignty, non-intervention in domestic affairs, and great-power management within the UN Security Council, the Charter simultaneously institutionalized a contrasting set of liberal principles. These include an emphasis on the rights of the individual, societies and peoples; the ideal of the sovereign equality of all states, and the limitation of state power through the general prohibition of the use of force. The Anglo-American influence is clearly visible here. The hoped-for cooperative internationalism was quickly overshadowed by the Cold War. Under the structural conditions of bipolarity, the international system dissolved into two deeply integrated and institutionalized blocs operating on diametrically opposed principles of order. While the Soviet sphere enforced communist party dictatorships, planned economies, collectivism, and a regime of limited sovereignty, the Western camp championed liberal democracy, free markets, individual liberty, and institutionalized collective defense. Ultimately, the Soviet model collapsed due to its own systemic flaws.

The rise and fall of the liberal international order

In the wake of the Cold War, a U.S. policy of liberal world ordering appeared inevitable, especially given the immediate absence of any major geopolitical competitors capable of challenging its power. The principle of state sovereignty was increasingly re-defined on liberal terms. In intergovernmental relations, the United States championed the ideal of the sovereign equality of states and a rules-based order designed to safeguard the rights of weaker actors. Even more revolutionary was the second paradigm: regarding the domestic exercise of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, state sovereignty was to be structurally subordinated to liberal norms. Firstly, this entails a structural delegitimization of autocracy, given that in a democratic framework, sovereignty is vested in the people as the ultimate source of legitimacy, rendering elected governments mere representatives. Secondly, it accentuates individual rights vis-à-vis the state, the institutional restriction of state power, and good governance. The political foundations for this trajectory had been in place for decades, notably with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, before finding new avenues for implementation after the Cold War.

From the 1990s onward, the liberalization and globalization of the liberal international order – previously confined to the Western bloc – gained new momentum. To preserve the territorial status quo in Europe and Asia while projecting regional security, the United States maintained its strategic alliance structures. Concurrently, the principle of state self-determination increasingly superseded traditional notions of spheres of influence, a shift clearly institutionalized by the open-door policies of both NATO and the European Union. At the same time, the West invested in promoting democracy, while dictatorships were criticized or even subjected to targeted sanctions. Universal human rights norms gained greater prominence. Human rights violations were increasingly condemned and punished, and even humanitarian interventions increased markedly in number. The subsequent conceptual evolution entailed the formulation of an international obligation to intervene, ultimately codified as the “responsibility to protect”. Under this framework, the international community is empowered – subject to a UN Security Council mandate – to act when sovereign governments either fail to shield their populations from egregious human rights violations or actively perpetrate such atrocities themselves. In the broader picture, Europe and the U.S. worked hand in hand to shape a liberal international order that prioritized political self-determination, market economies and free trade, individual freedom, democracy, institutionalization, and rules-based governance.

From the perspective of Moscow and Beijing, the United States acted as a revisionist power that sought to reshape the foundational principles of the international order to its own unilateral advantage and severely complicated their positions. Furthermore, Russia and China perceived this liberal order as an existential threat – specifically targeting their regime security, their great-power status, and their strategic geopolitical objectives. They demanded a “democratization” of international relations, by which they meant a containment of American power, the normative recognition of autocracy and dictatorship, and a conception of sovereignty that legitimizes force as a means of securing power and grants them prerogatives as great powers. It was precisely from this impulse that Russian and Chinese revisionism against the U.S.-led international order emerged from the late 2000s onward, as opportunities presented themselves. Meanwhile, the vision of a post-Western world has also been articulated by others: many developing countries and states with a colonial past openly reject the – as they see it – moral excess of the “elitist” West, which elevates its own value judgments to the standard of all things while applying them only selectively themselves.

China partially integrated itself into the liberal order, but has always pursued the goal of gaining strength and reshaping the rules-based system. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – according to its own rhetoric – regards the preservation of its power as the sole guarantee for the political sovereignty, territorial integrity, and well-being of the Chinese people and state. Only in this way, it argues, can China return to its historic role as a hegemonic power. This return requires not only a withdrawal of the United States from Asia, but also structural and territorial “corrections” that Washington currently stands in the way of. Specifically, China lays claim to Taiwan, a large part of the South China Sea, and areas in the East China Sea. To this end, Xi Jinping has stated that the “Chinese dream” of a “rebirth of the great Chinese nation” is to be realized by 2049, the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Ultimately, the People’s Republic seeks an international order that supports the CCP’s claims to power and global ambitions.

Russia takes a similar view of the global situation. Moscow accuses the U.S. and its European “lackeys” of “overturning” states, manipulating their political course, robbing Russia of its traditional status as a power center, and potentially even threatening its regime stability. In reality, however, these societies turned to the West because the Russian model offered them no prospects. To counter this trend, Moscow resorted to violence in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine from 2014 onward. Thus, the Russian regime externalizes its own lack of appeal. While China relies on incentives based on its economic capabilities, Russia’s options have increasingly narrowed to military threats, violence, and hybrid instruments. With the war of conquest against Ukraine waged since 2022, the Kremlin is attempting to prevent the end of its imperial dream, aiming to force the West to accept an order tailored to Russian ideas.

The rise of anti-elite discourses and populist parties in the 2010s, the Brexit vote, and the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in 2016 made it clear that a counter-movement against the liberal international order was also gaining ground in the West. Trump’s core message is that the status quo shaped by political elites does not serve the interests of the American people. Given similar voting patterns across all Western democracies, these allegations should be examined stripped of their populist rhetoric. The institutionalization, legalization, and integration of political action at the international level with no clear endpoint potentially conflict with the legitimizing and decision-making functions of nationally organized democracy. Furthermore, liberal universalisms potentially clash with national sovereign rights, as evidenced by issues such as asylum and migration. Economically, globalization has not proven to be a win for everyone. Humanitarian interventions also warrant reflection. While alleviating human suffering in a third state is a noble goal, whether one’s own armed forces should be responsible for doing so is another question. This is all the more critical given that in Germany, for example, the capacity to fulfill the constitutional defense mandate was knowingly allowed to erode. Whether national climate policy, in its specific form, actually benefits the global climate or – given state dirigism, economic costs, and limited global utility – is primarily self-harming, remains another point of discussion. The same applies to identity politics over gender and sexual identity, which have entered not only domestic but also foreign policy. “Liberal” has thus come to be defined in an increasingly expansive, particular, and at times ideological manner. Whether liberal governance in its real-world manifestation truly serves the welfare, security, justice, and freedom of the national political sovereign is therefore a legitimate question, even as a way must simultaneously be found to counter the threat posed by external revisionists.

From a crisis of the international order to a new order?

The Western-shaped international order of the post-Cold War era is mired in a crisis of enforcement, functionality, and legitimacy. Over the past three decades, global economic interdependence has combined with intensifying geopolitical competition to generate massive vulnerabilities. The costs and benefits of this order have been unevenly distributed: the primary rising power, China, has benefited immensely from the West’s political, economic, and social openness, while the American hegemon has shouldered an increasing burden of costs with a relatively lower yield. China, by contrast, has skillfully exploited the existing system, grown stronger with Western assistance, and is now turning its capabilities against the West. Beijing is systematically expanding its influence within the UN system and creating new alternative institutions; it operationalizes economic dependencies and harms Western market economies with its state-capitalist apparatus; it strives for dominance in the technology race by any means necessary; and it invests heavily in foreign propaganda as well as its military, while backing states like Russia and Iran to project power. Russia has been only partially successful in its operations and is now resorting to subversion, threats, hybrid warfare, and conventional military means to assert its imperial ambitions. Meanwhile, the U.S. under Trump has likewise abandoned the guiding principle of a liberal international order under American auspices. The hegemon is thus actively challenging the preservation of the system. This includes restructuring existing alliances like NATO, questioning institutions that may no longer serve American interests, and realigning priorities. It is precisely this dual disruption that shakes Germany and Europe to their very core.

It should not come as a surprise that the U.S. is questioning the status quo of the political order, which to a certain extent has been overtaken by real-world developments. If there were a solid consensus in the West about the political order, then a united front against external revisionists, combined with an evolutionary adaptation to new circumstances, would be a likely scenario. However, as the U.S. under Trump is questioning the validity of its own political assumptions as well as the costs and benefits of the status quo, we are witnessing a policy of radical change – as set out, for example, in the 2025 National Security Strategy. It is being deliberately pursued and not coordinated with traditional partners. It remains to be seen how the U.S. will position itself in future, and whether a coherent and purposeful alternative vision for the international order will emerge that others can align with. In any case, Germany and Europe must seriously explore their own possibilities and options for shaping the international order.

Many assume that the coming world order will be multipolar. This implies the existence of several poles of roughly equal strength. This does not reflect reality. Despite relative losses, the U.S. remains far more powerful than any other state. Its geographical location, with only two land borders with non-threatening neighbors, its favorable demographics, its economic might and technological innovation capacity, its access to natural resources, its recent, highly robust reduction of vulnerabilities (e.g., rare earths), and its military strength – measured in terms of quantity, quality, and power projection capability, right through to strategic assets – all justify optimism that, measured purely by resources, the U.S. is likely to remain the dominant state for a long time to come. China has at best grown into a “near-peer competitor” but is not on an equal footing, and given its now visible demographic and economic problems, it may never achieve parity. By comparison, all others lag far behind because they possess power only selectively. This also applies to Russia, which is a nuclear superpower but marked by weakness in economic, technological, and even conventional military terms. Brazil, South Africa, India, or the individual European states lag far behind.

Thus, the United States is not responding to a new multipolarity. It is seeking to maintain its hegemony in a world that is characterized by a high degree of interdependence and is, at most, on a path toward bipolarization. The U.S. administration is attempting to force its allies to share the burden, to scale back its own responsibilities, to exploit networks and hubs of financial and technological power ruthlessly for its own benefit, and to slow down China’s rise. Russia, by contrast, is viewed merely as a secondary challenge. Institutionally, the U.S. relies on bilateral, smaller minilateral, and inherently U.S.-centric formats. Unlike large multilateral forums, these allow the U.S. more direct influence and the ability to assert its will. Donald Trump’s leadership style facilitates disruption, but at the same time potentially undermines the strategic reorientation of U.S. policy. The 2026 war with Iran illustrates this perfectly. It was provisionally brought to an end with a “memorandum of understanding” that appears remarkably promising for the Islamic Republic. Washington’s superior capabilities did not translate into political success.

Meanwhile, Europe finds itself in a precarious position. The threat posed by Russia is assessed differently in Europe than by the U.S. government, which could lead to a decoupling of European and American priorities. Because Europe remains highly dependent on the United States, it must rapidly succeed in upgrading and expanding its own capabilities. At the same time, Europe needs a leadership arrangement that ensures its capacity to cooperate, as the U.S. is no longer undertaking this role. Moreover, time and again, Europeans are presented with a fait accompli by their most important ally and pressured into compliance through the threat of consequences. This is a far cry from the previous model of a cooperative transatlantic partnership based on persuasion and coordination. How, then, can Europe become more independent? One should beware of blanket calls for “more EU,” as there is no consensus on this; the EU is in dire need of reform and lacks jurisdiction in the field of defense. Hopes for European “strategic autonomy” or an alliance of middle powers also require a reality check. In fact, European integration is a byproduct of American hegemony. Without the U.S. protective umbrella and involvement, the European order would look very different. Conversely, the frequently voiced swan songs regarding the demise of the U.S. as the world’s dominant power are premature. The U.S. is adapting to a world of unbridled great-power competition, even if the collateral damage of Trump’s policies must be factored in. What common ground exists between Europe and the United States for a new vision of an international order more focused on self-protection? This is the crucial political question for the future of the transatlantic partnership.

Outlook

The thirty years following the Cold War seem like a dream today. Admittedly, there were security crises back then too. But looking back, it was a period of unprecedented global cooperation, prosperity, freedom, and security. This was not something that could be taken for granted, but rather a product of American power and the policies pursued in conjunction with Western partners. Today, the situation is different. The threat scenario of a major war with Russia expanding beyond Ukraine is being seriously discussed, and the old status quo of the post-Cold War liberal international order is a thing of the past. The reactions of external revisionists and the internal shift away from the former policy course are equally responsible for this. Currently, therefore, we find ourselves in an interregnum. It is clear to see what has already been lost, yet what is to come remains shrouded in the mists of the future.

For Europe, a particular difficulty lies in acknowledging the limits of its own possibilities. Of course, taken together, the countries of Europe possess substantial capabilities. However, translating these into targeted action and influence is hampered by the fact that cooperation must be organized among sovereign states whose interests often diverge. In the past, the U.S. assumed the role of leader and coordinator. Within Europe itself, there is no natural or universally accepted leading power. Yet, without the community amplifying the power of individual states, it is practically impossible to become a key player in a world of major powers. Added to this is a second, home-grown problem: The states of Europe are as politically divided as the U.S. There is no simple “European option” in opposition to the “Trump revolution”. The most demanding political task of our time will likely be devising a new vision of a stable order—one that is commensurate with our capabilities and, moving beyond populist rhetoric, sets out in detail how the rights, freedoms, security, and well-being of Europe’s citizens can be protected.