Table of Contents
Subject: Politics & International Relations | Level: Masters | Word Count: ~2800 words | Referencing: Harvard
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Critically assess whether the liberal international order can survive the return of great-power competition.
The liberal international order (LIO) that took shape after 1945, and which expanded decisively after 1989, rested on three interlocking commitments: multilateral institutions that constrain state behaviour, open markets underwritten by rules rather than coercion, and a normative preference for democratic governance and human rights. For three decades this order appeared, to many Western policymakers, to be the natural endpoint of international politics. The return of great-power competition – most visibly through Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the deepening structural rivalry between the United States and China – has reopened a question that had seemed settled: whether an order built on liberal premises can survive a world in which relative power, not shared rules, again drives state behaviour. This essay critically assesses that question. It argues that the liberal order will neither collapse wholesale nor persist unchanged, but is being reconstituted into a narrower, more contested and more regionally bifurcated arrangement, whose survival depends less on the universality of its norms than on the willingness of a shrinking coalition of states to bear its costs. The argument proceeds in five stages: it first clarifies the competing theoretical accounts of what the order is and why it might endure or fail; it then traces the empirical evidence of great-power revisionism, institutional strain and Global South hedging in turn; and it closes by weighing three rival trajectories – collapse, reformed persistence and adaptive bifurcation – against that evidence.
Understanding whether the liberal order can survive great-power competition first requires clarity about what kind of order is under discussion. Ikenberry (2011) distinguishes the liberal order from a merely hegemonic one: its legitimacy derives not from American power alone but from the fact that weaker states accept its rules because those rules constrain the hegemon as well as themselves. Liberal institutionalists such as Keohane (1984) argue that institutions persist because they lower transaction costs and enable cooperation even amid distributional conflict, meaning the order should prove more durable than raw power calculations suggest. Realists, by contrast, have always regarded the post-1989 order as a permissive artefact of unipolarity rather than a self-sustaining structure.
Mearsheimer (2019) makes this realist case most forcefully, arguing that the liberal order was only ever possible because no peer competitor existed to contest it, and that its expansion into Eastern Europe and its liberal universalism actively provoked the revisionism it now confronts. Constructivist scholars occupy a middle position: Acharya (2014) contends that the order was never as universal as its architects claimed, having been negotiated selectively with the Global South, and that its current crisis reflects the belated assertion of alternative norms rather than the failure of rules as such. These three traditions generate sharply different predictions and are used throughout this essay to interrogate the empirical evidence of erosion and adaptation.
A further theoretical distinction matters here: that between the order’s institutional architecture (the UN Charter system, Bretton Woods institutions, the WTO) and its normative content (democracy promotion, human rights, market liberalism). Cooley and Nexon (2020) show that these two dimensions can move independently – institutions may persist procedurally even as their normative content is hollowed out, or contested from within by illiberal member states. This distinction is critical to the analysis that follows, because much of the debate about the order’s survival conflates institutional persistence with normative vitality, when in practice the former appears considerably more resilient than the latter, a pattern the remainder of this essay traces empirically across the security, economic and normative pillars of the order in turn.
A final theoretical resource worth noting is the English School’s distinction between an international system, which merely describes recurrent interaction among states, and an international society, which implies a shared commitment to rules, institutions and a minimal ‘rule of law’ among sovereigns (Bull, 1977). Read through this lens, the current crisis is best understood not as a binary choice between order and anarchy but as a question of how thick or thin the underlying international society remains once great-power consensus on its purposes breaks down. This framing is useful precisely because it allows for degrees of order survival, rather than forcing the analysis into a simple collapse-or-persist dichotomy that the empirical record, as the following sections show, does not support.
The clearest empirical challenge to the liberal order comes from the reassertion of major-power revisionism. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 represented a direct assault on the order’s foundational norm – the prohibition on territorial conquest – and was accompanied by explicit rhetorical rejection of a US-led ‘rules-based’ system in favour of a multipolar world of civilisational spheres (Sakwa, 2023). China’s trajectory is more ambiguous but arguably more consequential given its economic weight. Beijing has embedded itself deeply within liberal economic institutions, becoming the largest trading partner for most states globally, while simultaneously constructing parallel institutions – the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative, and an expanded BRICS grouping – that reduce dependence on Western-controlled multilateral finance (Cox, 2022).
This dual strategy has been termed ‘competitive coexistence’ by some analysts and ‘strategic hedging’ by others, but its practical effect is the same: it denies the liberal order the near-monopoly status it enjoyed in the 1990s. Renewed American tariff escalations from 2025 and periodic scepticism toward multilateral commitments further complicated the picture, illustrating that revisionist pressure on the order no longer originates solely from outside it; the order’s own principal architect has, at moments, treated its rules as optional (Walt, 2023). This intra-order contestation is arguably more corrosive to the order’s long-term legitimacy than external challenge, because it removes the assumption that the hegemon itself remains bound by the rules it promotes to others.
It would, however, be a mistake to treat great-power competition as a single undifferentiated phenomenon. Russia’s challenge is primarily military and territorial, targeting the order’s prohibition on conquest; China’s is primarily economic and institutional, targeting the order’s monopoly on rule-setting; and the erosion of American commitment is primarily domestic-political, reflecting a bipartisan retreat from the costs of liberal hegemony (Colgan and Keohane, 2017). Because these three pressures operate on different registers, no single institutional reform or deterrence posture can address all of them simultaneously, which is a central reason why the order’s collective response has so far appeared incoherent and reactive rather than strategic.
The Indo-Pacific dimension of this competition adds a further layer of complexity. The AUKUS security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, alongside deepened Quad cooperation with Japan and India, signals an attempt to construct a minilateral security architecture specifically calibrated to Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea and around Taiwan (Medcalf, 2020). Unlike NATO’s Article 5 commitment, these arrangements are deliberately looser and more issue-specific, reflecting the reality that most Indo-Pacific states, unlike most European ones, are unwilling to frame their China policy as unambiguous alignment with either great power.
Institutional responses to great-power competition have been strikingly uneven across different pillars of the order. Security institutions have shown notable resilience: NATO’s response to the invasion of Ukraine included the accession of Finland and Sweden, a substantial increase in European defence spending, and sustained, if politically contested, military assistance to Kyiv, suggesting that the alliance’s core deterrent function retains considerable vitality when confronted with unambiguous territorial aggression (Sperling and Webber, 2022). This is consistent with realist expectations that security cooperation persists when a clear and proximate threat exists, largely independent of the theoretical merits claimed for liberal institutionalism itself.
Economic institutions present a starker picture of erosion. The WTO’s Appellate Body has been non-functional since 2019 owing to the United States’ refusal to approve new judges, effectively removing binding dispute settlement from the global trading system and pushing major economies toward unilateral tariffs and industrial policy (Hoekman and Mavroidis, 2021). The G7’s attempt to coordinate a unified economic response to China through ‘de-risking’ rhetoric has achieved only partial consensus, with European states more reluctant than Washington to decouple supply chains given their deeper commercial exposure to the Chinese market. This divergence illustrates that even within the order’s own core coalition, threat perception and cost tolerance are not uniformly shared.
Bretton Woods institutions such as the IMF and World Bank retain formal universality but face mounting legitimacy challenges from a Global South that regards their governance quotas as outdated and their conditionality as intrusive (Stiglitz, 2022). The proliferation of alternative financing channels, particularly Chinese bilateral lending under the Belt and Road Initiative, has not displaced these institutions but has given borrowing states genuine exit options for the first time since 1945, weakening the disciplinary leverage that partly sustained the order’s economic pillar and forcing incumbent institutions into a still-unfinished process of governance reform.
The G20, once celebrated as the premier forum for crisis-era global economic governance, has itself become a site of contestation rather than consensus since 2022, with joint communiqués repeatedly diluted or delayed over language describing the war in Ukraine. India’s 2023 presidency and Brazil’s 2024 presidency both prioritised Global South concerns – debt relief, climate finance and multilateral development bank reform – over the security language favoured by Western members, illustrating how great-power competition has degraded even the order’s most inclusive economic forum into a venue for parallel, only loosely reconcilable agendas.
Financial statecraft offers a partial counterweight to this picture of institutional decay. The coordinated freezing of Russian central bank reserves and the exclusion of major Russian banks from SWIFT in 2022 demonstrated that the order’s Western core retains formidable coercive capacity when it acts in concert, precisely because so much of global finance still clears through dollar- and euro-denominated systems (Drezner, 2022). Yet the very scale of this sanctions response has accelerated efforts by China, Russia and others to build alternative payment infrastructure, illustrating a recurring pattern in this essay’s argument: the order’s remaining coercive tools are effective in the short term but corrosive to its long-term centrality, since each demonstration of financial leverage further incentivises the construction of parallel systems designed to escape it.
A further complication for any account of the order’s survival is the agency of states outside the US-China-Russia triangle. Much Western commentary treats great-power competition as a bipolar or bipolar-plus contest, yet the responses of India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey demonstrate that a large majority of the world’s states are pursuing deliberate non-alignment rather than choosing a side (Tourinho, 2021). India’s simultaneous participation in the Quad alongside the United States, its continued purchase of discounted Russian oil, and its leadership role within an expanded BRICS-plus grouping exemplify a strategy of multi-alignment that treats the liberal order as one resource among several rather than a singular normative commitment.
This hedging behaviour matters because the liberal order’s historical claim to universality depended on the perception that its rules, even if imperfectly applied, represented a genuinely global consensus rather than a Western sectional interest. Acharya’s (2014) concept of a ‘multiplex world’ captures this shift well: rather than a single order being replaced by a rival single order, multiple regional and issue-specific orders now coexist, overlap and compete for adherence, with states selecting institutional venues opportunistically according to context. The expansion of BRICS to include several Gulf and African states from 2024 should be read less as the formation of a coherent anti-Western bloc than as further evidence of this multiplex fragmentation.
The practical consequence is that any assessment of the order’s survival must move beyond a great-power-only framework. Even if Washington, Beijing and Moscow reached some new grand bargain, the order’s original universalist ambition would remain compromised by the accumulated hedging of dozens of middle and emerging powers who have concluded, rationally, that dependence on a single rule-set is a strategic vulnerability rather than a public good worth exclusive loyalty to, regardless of which great power currently sets its terms.
Regional organisations reinforce this picture of fragmentation rather than binary alignment. The African Union’s increasingly assertive positioning on UN Security Council reform, ASEAN’s studied centrality doctrine of avoiding explicit great-power alignment, and Gulf states’ simultaneous courting of Washington and Beijing on security and technology respectively, all point toward a systemic pattern in which regional bodies mediate, rather than simply transmit, great-power competition (Acharya, 2014). This regional mediation further complicates any straightforward claim that the liberal order is being replaced by a rival illiberal order, since no single alternative order commands comparable regional buy-in.
Three broad trajectories dominate the scholarly debate about the order’s future. The pessimistic realist trajectory, associated with Mearsheimer (2019), anticipates a return to unconstrained multipolar competition in which institutions become epiphenomenal to underlying power balances, and liberal norms retreat to a shrinking core of consolidated democracies. The optimistic institutionalist trajectory, associated with Ikenberry (2020), anticipates that the order’s institutional depth and the mutual gains it generates will allow it to absorb even a rising China, provided the order itself reforms its governance to accommodate non-Western power – a process he terms ‘liberal internationalism 3.0’.
A third, increasingly influential trajectory anticipates neither collapse nor unreformed persistence but adaptive bifurcation: the emergence of overlapping, partially incompatible orders – a narrower, deeper liberal order among consolidated democracies, evident in an enlarged NATO, an increasingly security-oriented G7, and technology-control regimes among trusted partners – coexisting with looser, more transactional arrangements that connect this core to the wider multiplex world (Cooley and Nexon, 2020). Under this reading, the order does not so much survive as contract, trading universality for cohesion: a smaller club with harder rules, embedded within a larger and much less rule-governed international system.
Evaluated against the evidence assembled above, the bifurcation thesis appears the most persuasive. Security institutions among consolidated democracies have deepened rather than weakened; economic multilateralism has fragmented into competing blocs and unilateral measures; and a large population of hedging states has emerged that participates selectively in liberal institutions without underwriting their normative claims. None of this constitutes the order’s collapse in the Mearsheimer sense, since core alliance structures and market-access networks continue to function among their most committed members. Nor does it constitute the reformed universalism Ikenberry envisages, since neither China nor the wider Global South shows serious appetite for adopting liberal governance norms as a condition of participation in an interconnected but no longer singular international order.
A sceptical counter-argument deserves consideration before accepting the bifurcation thesis: that ‘bifurcation’ is merely a relabelling of continued Western dominance, since the deeper, harder-rules core remains overwhelmingly composed of the order’s original architects. On this reading, nothing fundamental has changed except the order’s rhetorical humility. This critique has force, but it understates the material significance of exit options that middle powers did not previously possess – alternative financing, alternative security partnerships and alternative technology suppliers – which collectively give hedging states genuine leverage to extract concessions from the core that would have been unavailable under unipolarity, even if the core’s institutional membership has not dramatically expanded.
This essay has argued that the liberal international order will neither collapse wholesale under great-power pressure nor persist in anything resembling its post-1989 form. The empirical record instead supports a bifurcation thesis: security cooperation among consolidated democracies has proven considerably more resilient than economic multilateralism, while a large and growing population of middle and emerging powers has adopted deliberate non-alignment, treating the order’s institutions as instrumentally useful rather than normatively binding. The order’s survival, on this account, is real but partial – contingent on a shrinking coalition’s willingness to fund its security guarantees and absorb the costs of institutional reform, rather than on any renewed global consensus around its founding liberal premises. Future research should attend closely to whether the order’s democratic core can sustain the domestic political consensus required to bear these costs, since internal erosion of support may ultimately pose a greater threat to the order’s survival than external revisionism from Moscow or Beijing. In this sense, the fate of the liberal international order is likely to be decided as much in the domestic politics of its remaining champions as on any battlefield or trade negotiation abroad.
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