How The Current World Order Evolved, And Why Nations Are Seeking An Alternative

In French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 work La Chinoise (The Chinese), a group of students influenced by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong’s thoughts gather at an apartment in Paris and start living like a commune. One day, they sit down to discuss the events unfolding in Vietnam—the US got involved in the conflict between communist-controlled North Vietnam and pro-capitalist South Vietnam, siding with the latter.

The discussion revolves around the split in the communist bloc. The US started bombing and deploying ground troops in North Vietnam in 1965, polarising the world amidst the tense Cold War years. In addition, the Sino-Soviet split that happened in the early 1960s also left the communist camp divided.

In Godard’s film, the setting emulates a classroom complete with a blackboard, table and chair for the teacher. Guillaume, one of the protagonists, sits on the table and faces his comrades sitting on the floor. He elaborates on how the US is fighting communists in Vietnam but not fighting communism in European countries “at all.” He points out how Washington signs agreements with Moscow, invites swimmers from Hungary and violinists from Czechoslovakia—both countries under communist rule—and is building factories in Romania and Poland in a bid to increase association and involvement with the Soviet bloc—that covered much of the central-eastern Europe—but, on the other hand, is also destroying factories in Vietnam.

“This proves that there are two kinds of communism—the dangerous one and the one that is not dangerous,” Guillaume tells his comrades. “The Russians and their friends have become revisionists that Americans can get on with, while the real communists, who haven’t changed, need to be kicked in the face. That’s what Vietnam is about.” 

In the post-World War II scenario, the rise of Soviet Russia—formally the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)—had split much of the world in geopolitical bipolarity. Though threats from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany brought Joseph Stalin’s Russia to join hands with Britain and the US, the ideological conflict grew more prominent by the time the end of the war neared.

The US, the sole nuclear power in 1945, led the capitalist camp—also called the First World or the Western Bloc or the free-market world. The USSR, which became the second nuclear power in 1949, led the communist bloc or the Eastern Bloc. Countries split on ideological lines—Korea into North and South in 1948, Germany into East and West in 1949 and Vietnam into North and South in 1954.

The Western bloc formally came under the common platform of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which was founded in 1949 with 12 countries in Europe and North America–Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the US. By 1955, Greece, Turkey and West Germany joined it. The Eastern bloc formalised their alignment under the Warsaw Pact of 1955, with East Germany, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania joining hands with the Soviet Union.

Two different trends emerged since the late 1950s, largely in response to this bipolarity. First, India, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, Ghana and Egypt led the development of a third bloc, formally launched in 1961 as the Non-Aligned Movement. 

Second, growing differences between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) since 1956 led to the Sino-Soviet split by 1963-64. While the CPSU proposed a “peaceful transition through the parliamentary path” as the general line for the international communist movement, Mao’s China called for ‘resolute revolutionary struggle by the people of all countries’, effectively backing armed struggles. 

By the beginning of the 1970s, China had started normalising relations with the US, perceivably to counter the USSR’s influence. In 1974, China introduced its own third bloc plan. Mao bracketed the US and the USSR under the First World; Japan, Europe and Canada—the middle section—made up the Second World, and Africa, South America and Asia, excluding Japan, composed of the Third World. Since then, China has pursued a policy of increasing its influence in these Third World countries. 

Over the next four decades, the power balance has greatly changed. The US has emerged as the most powerful. While NATO solidified, the Warsaw Pact withered with the collapse of communist governments across Eastern Europe between 1989 and 1991. The once-mighty USSR gave birth to 15 new independent countries, including the Russian Federation. The new Russia has not come under communist rule since then, even though it continues to be a superpower. China, though formally communist, has incorporated a great deal of the capitalist economic model. 

Adding a new twist to the power equations, US President Donald Trump indicated in February-March 2025 that the US was going to woo Vladimir Putin’s Russia—at the cost of ditching, or at least distancing, its long-term allies of Western Europe—in its bid to corner China, whose global influence has surpassed that of Russia over the past couple of decades.  

“If war is what the US wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end,” Lin Jian, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson, said on March 4 in response to the US threat of a ‘tariff war’.

As the Chinese threat has come amidst the Russia-Ukraine war in Europe, Israel’s war on Gaza and growing US-Iran tensions, it has fuelled anxieties about the possible outbreak of another world war. What’s significant is that Europe, which once dominated the world, stands much weakened.

In an article written in September 2024, Reuters columnist Hugo Dixon highlighted how the European Union (EU), which brought peace and prosperity to a troubled region in the decades following WWII, may lack energy and become impotent in the decades ahead. Apart from the stagnation of its economy, “the bloc may also be bullied by Russia, China and even the United States,” he wrote. In January 2025, Trump became the 47th US President and announced that “the golden age of America begins”. His actions since then raise serious concerns about the future of NATO.

Empires and Alliances

From the age of city-states to the era of nation-states, strategic and military alliances have been integral to the rise, survival and fall of different empires. When there are multiple rival forces, kingdoms or empires usually allied with the weaker rival to weaken the stronger one.

Around 550 BCE, the Greek city-state of Sparta formed a loose alliance called the Peloponnesian League to protect the territories from aggression from the rival Greek city-state of Athens as well as from the ambitious Achaemenid Empire— the first Persian empire. Responding to the increasing Persian invasions and growing Spartan influence, the city-state of Athens led the formation of the Delian League in 478 BCE. 

For about two millennia since then, the world witnessed the rise and fall of many large Eurasian empires that spread mostly through the land route—the Macedonian, the Mauryan, the Roman, the Han Chinese, the Byzantine, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Mongol, the Ming, the Mughal, the Ottoman, and so on. There, though, was no global order as such.

From the mid-second millennium, the spree of European colonisation, in what is called the Age of Discoveries, led to the birth of cross-continental empires spread mostly through the sea route. Spain and Portugal began this new era of European colonisation of Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. Britain, the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Belgium joined the race soon after. Gradually, propelled by the industrial revolution, the West European order transformed into the global order.

Spain emerged as the first superpower in the world during the sixteenth century, but its dominance was reduced by the seventeenth century with the rise of France and England as global colonisers. In the eighteenth century, there were five great powers—France, Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, even though Britain had become the hegemonic force by the end of the century.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Spain and Portugal receded to the background by losing most of their colonies in South America. Italy and Germany rose as new European great powers in the late nineteenth century, while Japan rose in Asia. Britain, despite the loss of its colonies in North America, maintained its hegemonic position by gaining colonies in Asia and Australia. It became the world’s biggest superpower, ruling the largest empire ever.

A new power dynamic started unfolding in Europe with the emergence of Germany as a major power following its unification in 1871. The Dual Alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary forged in 1879 became the Triple Alliance when Italy joined them in 1882. This paved the path for the Franco-Russian alliance in 1894 to counter Germany’s growing influence. By 1907, Britain resolved its disputes with France and Russia and formed the Triple Entente to counter the Germany-led Triple Alliance.

With different blocs taking shape, Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia—with which Russia enjoyed friendly ties—led to WW I. The war’s outcome had multiple implications on global power dynamics. The Austro-Hungarian empire collapsed, making way for the creation of new nations–Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.

The Ottoman Empire’s dissolution led to the birth of Turkey and British and French control over large areas of West Asia, including Iraq, Syria and Palestine, as part of the newly-founded League of Nations’ ‘mandate’ system. Germany lost its colonies and its monarchy was replaced by the Weimar Republic of parliamentary democracy.

However, two developments from two different camps had a wider impact on the European colonial powers, including Britain and France. First, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia led to the emergence of the communist camp with the formation of the USSR-backed Communist International (Comintern), which immediately declared its support for the anti-imperialist national liberation struggles in all colonies. 

Second, US President Woodrow Wilson’s famous 14-point programme strengthened nationalist voices in European colonies, as the US president championed “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike” and the “principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another.”

The wave of national liberation movements in Asia and Africa that swept different colonies since the 1920s eventually weakened European powers, including Britain. The post-WWII years saw a series of nations in Asia and Africa–including India, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Ghana and Kenya gaining independence from colonial rule, further diminishing Western European powers’ dominance. 

The US and the Rest

When Donald Trump launched his Make America Great Again campaign in 2015, the diminishing US greatness—what one might also call supremacy—had already been discussed for quite a few years.

“The ‘American Century’ only began 60 years ago. But it seems already to be over,” Philip S. Golub writes in an October 2007 essay titled, The Sun Sets Early on the American Century. Golub points out that while the disaster of the Iraq invasion forced some of the US’s ruling elites to realise that its hegemony had been severely weakened, nobody seemed to know what to do next, or even how to behave.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 paved the way for the US to emerge as the hegemonic power. However, two separate developments in the same decade also created grounds for future challenges for the US. 

First, the Afghan Mujahideen, who received US aid against Soviet occupation throughout the 1980s, emerged as a powerful force following the USSR’s fall and established the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 1996, turning the Central Asian country into a hub of Islamic terrorist activities led by Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. The rise of a global terror network, especially al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack of 2001 in the US criticising America’s West Asia policy, drew the US into a series of wars in Central and West Asia—Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, among others.

The Iraq invasion of 2003 destabilised large parts of West Asia and triggered the rise of a new radical group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which continues to influence parts of Syria. Worse, the US was forced to withdraw troops from Afghanistan after two gruelling decades, resulting in an immediate Taliban takeover of the country.  Second, China and India in Asia and Brazil in South America emerged as new global powers in the 1990s. By the end of the new millennium’s first decade, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa had come under a common platform—the BRICS. In a June 2014 essay titled, The Age of Entropy: Why the New World Order Won’t Be Orderly, American political scientist Randall L. Schweller notes that the world increasingly appears to no longer have a single superpower or group of superpowers to bring order to international politics. “Instead, it will have a variety of powers—including nations, multinational corporations, ideological movements, global crime and terror,” he says.

Russian philosopher and political anthropologist Leonid E. Grinin predicts in his 2016 essay titled Evolution of World Order, that the transition to the new world order would temporarily increase turbulence and strife, as well as the lack of stability and struggle between different patterns of the new order. He adds that technological advancements would be instrumental in shaping the new world order, especially if these innovations are converted into military supremacy. 

According to historian Faisal Devji, the US’ attempts to assert unilateral power during the War on Terror in ways that appeared to give the US alone a de facto exemption from global norms and institutions did not bode well with middle and smaller nations, prompting “many in the international community to seek alternatives to a system that seemed to grant the US almost arbitrary power to define the rules.”

“Smaller nations have successfully defied American-backed military force,” he notes in a February 2024 essay and cites how the US failed to impose its will—militarily or diplomatically—in both West Asia and Ukraine. Devji sees the current emerging world order as characterised by “regionalisation,” a situation where middle and even small powers feel free to circumvent or even defy US interpretations of global norms based on more local interests and regional security concerns. He terms the new world order as ‘deglobalized and regionalized’, which the US must come to terms with. When it comes to coming to terms with a new world order, Trump might disagree and push the envelope of American superiority, triggering unexpected developments. The rise of right-wing populism, religious/ethnic nationalism and the oligarchic race for resources in different parts of the world may only add to the uncertainties, intensifying existing conflicts or creating new ones.

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya is a journalist, author and researcher

This article is a part of Outlook's April 1, 2025 issue 'World At Reset', which explores the ongoing changes in the global geopolitical order. It appeared in print as 'Bromance'.