Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The traditional gathering of state leaders at the United Nations was a non-event. The meeting of the world’s largest multilateral organization was overshadowed by the bilateral meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. With a growing distrust of the multilateral system, some have described our current situation as anarchy. Others as chaos. Whichever word you choose, it is a distinction with a difference.

COVID showed the strengths and some weaknesses of an international system built around cooperation among states. Artificial intelligence tests whether that multilateral system can cope with new technology—and whether it is closer to chaos than anarchy.

The concept of anarchy has been an important subject in the study of international relations (IR). Oxford University Professor Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, first published in 1977, was for many years required IR reading. And Alexander Wendt’s “Anarchy Is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics” (1992) became one of the canonical IR articles.

What did Bull and Wendt mean by anarchy, and is it relevant today?

Bull’s point was that states exist without a higher authority above them. States are not subject to a central government. The United Nations is not, and has no pretense to be, a world government. It has no authority to legitimately use force in the way that a country’s government can.

But Bull’s starting point is that states without a higher authority do interact in ways that create an international society. States recognize that they have common interests and values and can function together without an overriding government. Bull’s international society is anarchical because it lacks a world government, but it........

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