“It is time to acknowledge that the old order really has disappeared” and that a new one won’t replace it any time soon, Mark Leonard argues in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. The United States has lost interest in providing public goods, policing the globe, and championing free trade. “And no other power”—including China—“has the ambition to take up the mantle.”
Yet “too many leaders still act as if the old order can somehow be salvaged or even perfected,” Leonard writes. What they need to do instead is let go of the past and embrace flexibility and improvisation. In this “orderless age,” the most successful governments will be the ones that “take their fate into their own hands instead of waiting for a new set of rules to rescue them.”
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