This article appears in the Fall 2026 print issue: How to Survive in a World Without Rules, available in full Sept. 9.

This article is an early release from the Fall 2026 print issue: How to Survive in a World Without Rules, available in full Sept. 9. Subscribe now to support our journalism.

As the West’s ideological and material hegemony continues to wane, a new multipolar world is taking shape. This change is structural—a product of the unstoppable diffusion of power. The transition from the industrial era to the digital age has meanwhile destabilized the liberal democracies that long oversaw global governance. A combination of automation and free trade has undermined the industrial-era social contract, hollowing out Western middle classes and the political centrism that sustained liberal internationalism. These dual tectonic shifts are stoking geopolitical rivalries and eroding international rules and institutions, putting out of reach the collective initiative needed to govern a globalized world.

U.S. President Donald Trump is a symptom more than a cause of this disarray and the anti-establishment anger it has provoked. He and other populists promise to tear down the old liberal order. But they lack the skills and inclination to build what comes next. The policy community needs to urgently prepare for the post-Trump era by generating a plan for governing an interdependent world that is in the process of falling apart.

As the West’s ideological and material hegemony continues to wane, a new multipolar world is taking shape. This change is structural—a product of the unstoppable diffusion of power. The transition from the industrial era to the digital age has meanwhile destabilized the liberal democracies that long oversaw global governance. A combination of automation and free trade has undermined the industrial-era social contract, hollowing out Western middle classes and the political centrism that sustained liberal internationalism. These dual tectonic shifts are stoking geopolitical rivalries and eroding international rules and institutions, putting out of reach the collective initiative needed to govern a globalized world.

U.S. President Donald Trump is a symptom more than a cause of this disarray and the anti-establishment anger it has provoked. He and other populists promise to tear down the old liberal order. But they lack the skills and inclination to build what comes next. The policy community needs to urgently prepare for the post-Trump era by generating a plan for governing an interdependent world that is in the process of falling apart.

Building order in the world to come should begin with recognizing the renewed importance of regions; the diffusion of power logically necessitates the decentering and devolution of authority. Order will need to come from the bottom up, drawing on regional groupings that tap into the natural order-producing effects of geographic proximity, commercial ties, and common cultures. The regionalization of governance sets the stage for a polycentric international system: a multiorder world of considerable ideological and political diversity.

A key challenge will be to construct a global order that strikes the right balance between top-down and bottom-up governance.

Yet precisely because the emerging multipolar world is set to remain globalized and interdependent, the centrifugal force of regionalization must be offset by order that comes from the top down. Multiple regional orders will require collective supervision. A concert system—a network of high-level coordinating councils—offers the most realistic and feasible option for overseeing global governance. Like the 19th-century Concert of Europe, which preserved peace for decades after the Napoleonic Wars, flexible and informal steering groups can provide a vehicle for genuine and sustained strategic dialogue and for dampening and managing conflicts of interest.

A concert system would complement, not replace, the United Nations. The U.N. would be buttressed from above by this network of steering groups and from below by regional bodies. A key challenge will be to construct a global order that strikes the right balance between top-down and bottom-up governance. An international system that is at once centralized and regionalized offers the best—and perhaps only—hope of maintaining order in the world that lies ahead.

Doug Chayka illustration for Foreign Policy

Our world is hurtling toward a decentered international system. No single country or coalition of countries will dominate. Assuming they can restore their political health and continue as strategic partners, the United States and its democratic allies will remain a formidable coalition but no longer a preponderant one. China will emerge as a peer competitor, but even if its partnership with Russia endures, it will have neither the power nor the appeal to anchor a Sinocentric world order. A host of rising powers—Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey among them—have made it clear that they will chart their own courses, leading to shifting alignments and uncertain coalitions.

The coming international system will be not only decentered but also politically and culturally diverse. Each center of power and governance will play by its own norms and reflect its own civilizational and cultural attributes. The diffusion of power and devolution of authority and responsibility to diverse regional groupings will naturally produce a world that is polycentric and multiorder.

This essay is adapted from Bringing Order to Anarchy: Governing the World to Come by Charles A. Kupchan (Yale University Press, 328 pp., $32.50, October 2026).

This organic process of regionalization is already underway. The United States remains a truly global power, but Trump is reasserting U.S. preeminence in the Western Hemisphere and encouraging allies to assume more responsibility for security in their own regions. China and Russia look set to anchor a regional grouping that stretches from Eastern Europe to the Pacific, while Beijing simultaneously works to establish its own sphere of influence in its immediate neighborhood. Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and other regional powers are also seeking greater autonomy and influence, in part by advancing projects of regional integration.

The case for polycentrism rests not only on the inevitability of power diffusion and the decentering of the international system but also on the order-producing effects of a bottom-up, regionalized approach to global governance. Geography and proximity still matter. The countries closest to a threat usually have the strongest interest in countering it. Although the United States—due to its unmatched military muscle—led this year’s air campaign against Iran, regional players such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates have the strongest interest in containing Tehran’s revisionist ambitions. The parties with the sturdiest motivation to counter extremists in Africa are those directly threatened by the violence and its spillover. To encourage regional solutions to regional challenges is to tap the will of the parties most keen to address those challenges and aggregate regional effort.

The same goes for trade. Globalization........

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