The Great Conversation: What Happens Between Two World Orders?
Hello everyone, and welcome to The Great Conversation.
History rarely announces that one era has ended and another has begun.
There is no bell that rings when an international order starts to disappear.
Instead, there are signs.
Wars that become harder to contain.
Institutions that seem less capable of solving problems.
Great powers increasingly testing the limits of accepted rules.
Economic pressures.
Climate extremes.
New technologies advancing faster than the systems meant to govern them.
And countries beginning to reconsider relationships and assumptions that once seemed permanent.
In her New York Times guest essay, A New World Order Is Coming. We Aren’t Ready., historian Margaret MacMillan argues that these may not simply be separate crises.
They may be symptoms of something larger.
The international order that emerged after the Second World War, imperfect as it has always been, created institutions, alliances, rules, and expectations intended to make relations among nations more predictable.
For generations, much of the world became accustomed to operating within that framework.
But systems do not necessarily collapse all at once.
Sometimes they gradually lose their ability to shape behavior.
Rules are violated more frequently.
Institutions lose influence.
Countries become less certain that alliances will hold.
And power begins moving into spaces where agreement once existed.
MacMillan draws an interesting comparison with Albert Camus's The Plague.
In the novel, dead rats begin appearing in the city of Oran.
The signs are visible.
But people initially continue with ordinary life because accepting what those signs might mean would require them to imagine something outside their normal experience.
Perhaps societies behave similarly when historical change begins.
We often assume disruption is temporary because the world we know feels permanent.
Yet history repeatedly reminds us that what appears permanent may simply be what has lasted long enough for us to stop imagining its end.
That does not mean another world war is inevitable.
Nor does it mean that whatever comes next must necessarily be worse.
The collapse or weakening of one system can also create the possibility of building another.
But there is an uncomfortable period between those two moments.
The old rules no longer command the confidence they once did.
The new rules have not yet been written.
And countries must make decisions while uncertainty grows around them.
Perhaps this is one of the most difficult places for human beings to find themselves.
Between what was and what will be.
Because recognizing a turning point while living through it is much harder than identifying one in a history book.
Afterward, the warning signs often look obvious.
During the transition, they can look like unrelated headlines.
Which raises a deeper question...
When an old order can no longer provide the stability people have come to expect, but no new order has yet emerged to replace it, how do we recognize the difference between temporary disruption and a genuine turning point in history?
Take a moment to reflect.
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