Out With The New Order, In With The Old

The conflicts raging today reveal that the old world order, long declared dead, is back with a vengeance. Raison d'état and balance of power underpin the realignments afoot

- MANISH TEWARI

Few questions of global governance today are as consequential as the following: Is the post-World War II order dead, and a new one yet to be conceived? Do we, therefore, exist in an age of monsters? Or are we back to the old order as it was conceived in the 17th and 18th centuries?

Humankind is witnessing conflicts playing out concurrently on five continents. The rise of unprecedented trade tensions across the world, triggered by President Donald Trump's attempt to de-structure the international architecture of commerce; Russia's war in Ukraine that began in February 2022; the conflicts between Israel on one side and Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and Iran on the other since October 2023; and the rise of China over the past three decades, which has attained portentous overtones in large parts of the world. The added dynamic is the latest India-Pakistan standoff—the worst since the Kargil War 26 years ago—and the US bombing of Iran.

Modern strategic thought is, essentially, a European construct because of an era of experimentation with ideas and the impulses of colonialism. The arrival of mechanized printing animated the Renaissance, Reformation, and other humanist movements. Those, in turn, gave structure to contemporary strategic canons.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 sanctified the construct of a nation-state. Cardinal de Richelieu, the first minister of France in the first half of the 17th century, propounded the concept of raison d'état—each nation acting in its best national interest. It was closely followed by the doctrine of balance of power, an alliance system conceptualized by Hugo Grotius and first put into practice by William of Orange, later King William III of England, in the second half of the century. These three doctrinal templates laid the foundational stencil of international relations that is kosher even today.