Writing in The Guardian this week, Yale Law professors Ash Bâli and Samuel Moyn celebrate what they suggest is the end of the unipolar American-led international order. To borrow from Mark Twain, I suspect that news of America’s superpower death is exaggerated. Still, in their optimism about how a new multipolar order might be established, Bâli and Moyn regurgitate the error of idealists. Namely, their associated belief that nations will cooperate absent coercive restraint in the contrary. While many democracies and even some dictatorships/monarchies prefer cooperation, states ultimately act in their own self-interest.

The professors ignore this reality. Instead, they “imagine a multipolar world that might secure peace better than the old order ever did.” To reach this nirvana, they call for nations to accept four commitments. These commitments rest on “one clear, narrow and urgent proposition: no state is safer in a world in which coercion is unconstrained because every exception claimed by one power becomes available to its rivals.”

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It’s nice rhetoric. Its structural weakness should appear obvious, however. While some nations would broadly align against coercion under this principle........

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