Power shifts are never easy. A major one is now underway, not between rival states, but between competing approaches to international order. Call it a clash of two operating systems. One view holds that the most pressing issues of the day can be addressed only through a framework of global and supranational institutions and multilateral rules. The other insists that the nation-state remains the foundation of legitimate authority and effective action, and that outcomes ultimately depend on the decisions, capacities, and accountability of individual states.

For much of the post–Cold War era, what one can call a “global first” approach dominated international thinking. Governments, international organizations, and nongovernmental actors shared the assumption that challenges to do with security, economic disruption, migration, pandemics, and climate change required global solutions. The collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization accelerated economic globalization, reinforcing the belief among leaders in the United States and elsewhere that global institutions were best suited to manage complexity and preserve peace. For decades, these institutions (and the governments and the phalanx of nongovernmental organizations that supported them) advanced a common creed: that only global bodies could tackle the defining problems of the age.

Yet the results of this global-first model have been uneven at best. Despite decades of negotiations, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and no major economy is on track to meet the targets set by the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change. Record numbers of people have been displaced, migration has destabilized domestic politics in many countries, and armed conflicts are more numerous and protracted than at any point since the end of the Cold War. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed failures in global health governance, while progress toward the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals has fallen dramatically short of ambitions.

At the same time, China rose rapidly within this global order, accumulating economic, technological, and military power while selectively exploiting international rules and arrangements. Today, China is mounting the most serious strategic challenge the United States has faced since the end of the Cold War, discrediting the notion that deeper integration and multilateral engagement would produce a more cooperative and stable international system.

Instead of assessing why decades of global efforts have failed, many leaders dig in their heels. The current UN secretary-general, António Guterres, frequently laments that multilateralism is “under fire,” warning that there is no path forward except through “collective, common-sense action for the common good.” What this view leaves largely unexamined is the possibility that the fault lies in the limitations of the global-first approach itself.

In the 2010s, long-simmering doubts about the post–Cold War global order rose to the surface. The United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union in 2016, as well as mounting impatience in Europe and elsewhere with supranational institutions, had already begun to erode many of the assumptions that shaped the policies of Western governments after 1991. U.S. President Donald Trump accelerated this shift when he assumed office in 2017, but he did not start it.

In his second term, Trump argued in his September 2025 address to the United Nations that despite the organization’s “tremendous, tremendous potential,” it was not “coming close to living up to that potential.” The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy states that “the world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state.” Trump’s withdrawal from dozens of international organizations, his call in January for a “Board of Peace” that would bypass the UN Security Council, his cuts to international aid, and his challenges to trade and immigration orthodoxies have been widely denounced, but the president’s actions reflect a broader rejection of global-first pieties. His clear priority, in places such as Iran and Venezuela, is to act on the basis of national interest and collective defense without first deferring to global bodies.

Beneath Trump’s theatrics, however, lies a coherent claim: only states generate problems (their industries pollute), experience those problems (their citizens suffer), and hold the means to address problems (through revenues, infrastructure, and services). Only states acting to advance their own interests—whatever the implications for so-called international order and norms—can solve problems that global institutions and processes have so far failed to fix.

The global frame functions much like the passive voice in English: it conveniently detaches agency from problems and obscures true causes. It also produces elaborate organizational processes that impede real progress. Even advocates of global approaches acknowledge that international negotiations often entangle officials in dense webs of meetings, procedures, and rules. These layers of complexity slow action or prevent it altogether.

Disagreements over these competing operational approaches matter. They are straining alliances, complicating partnerships, and fueling accusations of isolationism, while leaving many of the world’s most vulnerable populations no better off. By challenging failing global frameworks, a state-centric approach could produce truly positive change—and place states back at the center of practical action.

THE GROWTH OF THE GLOBAL

The United States both shaped and was shaped by the rise of the global order in the twentieth century. The horrors of World War I, in which industrialized warfare killed an estimated 20 million people, severely undermined faith in the nation-state as the foundation of international order. The League of Nations emerged just afterward as the first major supranational experiment in collective security. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson described the league as a “community of power,” arguing that states must yield freedom of action to a common council to preserve peace. The novelist H. G. Wells went further, arguing that “there can be no great alleviation of the evils that now blacken and threaten to ruin human life altogether, unless all the civilized and peace-seeking peoples of the world are pledged and locked together under a common law and a common world policy.”

But the league failed to prevent the chaos of World War II, and it is doubtful that it would have succeeded even had the United States joined. After that war, countries again sought to build a more durable peace. The United States emerged as the principal architect of the post-1945 international system, using its unmatched economic and military power to forge new global institutions. It led the creation of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which governed global trade for nearly five decades before the creation of the World Trade Organization.

Over time, member states ceded elements of their sovereignty—authorizing the UN Security Council to define threats to peace, empowering the WTO to adjudicate trade disputes and authorize retaliatory tariffs, and allowing the IMF to lend large sums to states with balance-of-payment problems—in exchange for the promise of a more stable world. State power would be constrained not only by domestic constitutions but also by international law and the rules of international institutions.

In Europe, where nationalism had fueled some of the twentieth century’s most devastating conflicts, pressure grew to find alternatives to the power of the nation-state. The European Economic Community, founded in 1957 and later broadened into the European Union, rested on the belief that economic interdependence could tame conflict. By deepening integration and limiting national sovereignty, European leaders argued, war could be made not only undesirable but implausible.

Devotion to global process replaced attention to outcomes.

Over time, transnational and supranational efforts to move beyond the nation-state gained ground, and international institutions........

© Foreign Affairs