The current moment calls for an anti-war agenda suited to an inevitably plural and rivalrous world, according to Yale law professors Aslı Bâli and Samuel Moyn. They argue that America is in decline, and with it the American-led world order, but that this decline presents a chance to imagine a multipolar world that could secure peace better than the old order ever did.
The flaws of Pax Americana
Idealizing the American peace since 1945 and its “rules-based international order” is a misguided response to the current situation, they write. The dominant response has been a futile effort to get the good old days back, with liberal commentators mourning the threat to Atlanticism and issuing sentimental defenses of lost multilateralism. However, the old order of high-minded hypocrisy was never good enough for the global south, and conventional responses are not only unconvincing and undesirable but also unavailable.
Four commitments for a new order
Bâli and Moyn propose an anti-war agenda based on four commitments. First, states should reaffirm and strengthen limits on the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, distinguishing between defense against an imminent attack and preventive war. Second, states should recommit to the inadmissibility of annexation or territorial acquisition by force, including de facto annexation. Third, great and middle powers should commit not to instigate, enable or intensify proxy wars against one another. Fourth, states should not furnish military assistance or allow arms sales that predictably abet gross violations of rules against aggression or atrocity.
Mutual restraint over selective enforcement
The virtue of such a bargain lies in its thinness: it does not ask states to agree on the whole architecture of world order or share a moral vocabulary. Instead, it asks them to accept that no state is safer in a world where coercion is unconstrained. This bargain also answers the most obvious danger of the emerging order: that a declining American hegemon may produce an even more violent order. But multipolarity creates an opening for an order based on mutual restraint rather than hierarchy.
The authors note that every major and middle power is less secure in a world where preventive war, annexation, proxy conflict and coercive strangulation are normalized. The last quarter century has demonstrated this through the global costs of the war on terror, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and the US-Israeli war on Iran.
