Welcome to the Interregnum

Yes, the former world has passed away -- but no one yet knows what will replace it.

Photo by NOAA on Unsplash

Perhaps my most normie opinion is that I think Titanic is a great film.

I believe this to be true not only because of the spectacle or the charismatic leads or the love story between them, but because James Cameron made the story of the Titanic a parable about the end of the 19th century order and the beginning of the 20th century. The Jack-Rose love story is all about escaping the strictures of 19th century expectations and embracing a world of more choices.

But Cameron made the film interesting by suggesting that some things were lost during the transition. When the Titanic first hits the iceberg, the 19th century rules apply in terms of who gets on the lifeboats. Cameron valorizes the quartet playing music on the deck. As the situation on Titanic becomes more dire, however, the old rules and norms break down; as Billy Zane’s Cal Hockley says, “it’s starting to fall apart.” The film works in no small part because of Cameron’s agnosticism about the tides of history.

When I think about Titanic, I don’t think about the romance or the action. I think about this scene:

Think of this as the pop culture backdrop for my latest World Politics Review column, “The Old World Order Is Dead. Its Replacement Struggles to Be Born.” The column makes two points. First, both defenders and critics of the post-Cold War order agree that it’s time to call the time of death, and that time is 2025:

For the first time, both critics and supporters of the liberal international order seem ready to deliver its eulogy. For example, it’s no surprise that Jamieson Greer, the current U.S. trade representative under President Donald Trump, would characterize the neoliberal order as “untenable and unsustainable.” Lauding what he dubbed the “Turnberry system”—after Trump’s golf resort in Turnberry, Scotland—based on high tariffs and macroeconomic rebalancing, Greer bragged, “What was long dismissed as heresy by the free-trade fundamentalists in Brussels, Geneva and Washington is now becoming conventional wisdom.”

More surprising is that some high-profile defenders of the status quo have conceded his point. Michael Froman, the current president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. trade representative under Barack Obama, acknowledged that “there is no going back” to the old economic order. “The global trading system as we have known it is dead,” Froman wrote. “Even if pieces of the old order manage to survive, the damage is done.”

It doesn’t matter that “a broad swathe of countries remains committed to the liberal international order,” those countries are not powerful enough to preserve the system.

The second point is that even if the post-Cold War system has ended, there is zero comprehension about what might replace it:

There is a difference… between declaring one global order dead and declaring that a new global order has arisen to take its place. In international relations, it is a truism that destruction is far easier than creation.

Some commentators have argued that what defines this new order is an embrace of realism. No doubt, the appetite for such an approach in Washington is powerful. [Michael] Hirsh suggests that strategists in both parties agree that “most of us are realists now, schooled in the hard-nosed realities of power geopolitics in ways that our Pollyannaish predecessors weren’t.”….

The incompleteness of the emerging international order comes from the fact that most international orders are unlikely to subsist on realism alone. Even some self-proclaimed realists acknowledge this point. Most international relations scholars think of E.H. Carr’s “The Twenty Years Crisis” as a jeremiad against “utopian” ways of thinking about world politics. But while Carr did warn against an excessively utopian worldview, he also cautioned against a strictly realpolitik-basedapproach as well. As he noted, most actors in world politics need power, but they need social purpose as well.

Perhaps the new social purpose of today’s emergent world order will be a revised definition of sovereignty or a belief that nationalism trumps all other global values. But the point is that this remains an area of contestation. And until the great powers can either agree—or at least agree to disagree—on what comes next, the new world order will remain radically incomplete.

Do be sure to read the whole thing.