The old order is dead – this new unique sphere we now inhabit is prone for conflict because of failures of i law (oh also the LIO is dead lmao) Lantham 22 Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minn., and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C. (Andrew, “The liberal international order is over. What will replace it?” The Hill, 05-05-2022, https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3478080-the-liberal-international-order-is-over-what-will-replace-it/, DOA: 7/6/24)//LFS – LMH

But if the new geopolitical realities ought to be self-evident, they are not.

The contours of this new and historically unique geopolitical order remain only vaguely perceived, obscured by a veil of concepts, frames and imaginaries that were formed in the geopolitical contexts of yesteryear but that remain firmly in place today. Precisely why this should be is something of a mystery — though the usual suspects of nostalgia, anchor bias, willful ignorance and failure of imagination are all likely to play their part.

But it cannot be denied that there is a widespread failure to grasp the existing geopolitical realities of the current moment. Simply listen to all those in positions of political power and intellectual influence as they invoke the memes and metaphors of the Cold War, or the liberal international order, or even the appeasement tropes of “Munich” and 1938, and you will be left with little doubt that the overlapping mental maps of the bipolar and unipolar moments continue to be treated as reliable strategic guides, even though they no longer bear any relationship to the topography we are now forced to navigate.

And this is a problem — a very serious problem.

As the British historian and international relations theorist E.H. Carr argued long ago, one of the principal causes of World War II was just such a failure to recognize that the geopolitical realities (and utopian fantasies) of the 19th century had given way to a different geopolitical field of forces in the 20th. It was the inability to grasp this hard truth, and the reflexive attempt to address the challenges of the interwar period on the basis of assumptions that were by then superannuated relics of a bygone era, that led first to what he called the  and ultimately to global conflagration.

Assuming, as I do, that another 20 years’ crisis and subsequent world war is undesirable, this would seem to suggest that we get over our nostalgia for world orders past and come to grips with the unique realties of the present world order.

And what are these realities? Well, the first and most fundamental is that we no longer live in a unipolar world. The post-Cold War era of American hegemony has passed from the historical scene, superseded by a new era defined by the institutional residues of U.S. dominance, China’s emergence as a second indispensable power, Russia’s persistence as a diminished great power and the emergence of other powers (including India) that are not only dominant players in their home regions but countries that will shape global politics more broadly.

Second, we no longer live in a world defined by the norms, rules and institutions of the liberal international order (recently rebranded as the “rules-based international order” in partial recognition of the seismic changes that have taken place). We have grown very accustomed to thinking and talking as if the planet were governed through a single operating system, one structured around essentially liberal rules of democracy, free markets, human rights, peaceful resolution of disputes. But that operating system, built by the U.S. in 1945 and coming fully into its own with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, is giving way to something new and qualitatively different.