Opinion | Reasons to Be Optimistic About a Post-American Order

Defenders of the current order argue that it has prevented major wars and maintained a remarkably stable and prosperous international system. And for a select club of countries, it has. Evan Luard, a British politician and scholar of international relations, calculated that, of more than 120 wars that took place between 1945 and 1984, only two occurred in Europe. But the corollary of this, of course, is that during the Cold War more than 98 percent of those wars took place in countries outside of the West.

If the first and main promise of the postwar order is peace, many countries might be forgiven for asking: Peace for whom? Not only has the West succeeded in shielding just its members (and some others) from chaos, disorder and injustice, but it has at times contributed to that disorder, as in the U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Equally, the idea of cooperation among nations long predates the rise of the West. Henry Kissinger’s book “World Order” portrays the Concert of Europe consensus that emerged after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 as a model for the preservation of international stability. But great-power diplomacy and cooperation go back to some 3,000 years earlier, when the great powers of the Near East — Egypt, Hatti, Mitanni, Assyria and Babylonia — developed a system known as Amarna diplomacy, which was based on principles of equality and reciprocity. The Concert of Europe lasted less than a century, until around World War I. The Amarna system kept peace about twice as long.

The oldest known written pact of nonaggression and nonintervention was concluded between Egypt and the Hittites around 1269 B.C., and humanitarian rules of warfare, including the protection of civilians and the treatment of defeated soldiers, can be found in the Code of Manu of India from 2,000 years ago. When a warrior “fights with his foes in battle,” it stipulated, let him not strike one “who joins the palms of his hands (in supplication), nor one who (flees) with flying hair, nor one who sits down, nor one who says, ‘I am thine.’” There are additional rules for warriors who have lost their coats of mail, or who are disarmed. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 contain strikingly similar prohibitions against mistreating “members of armed forces who have laid down their arms.”

The comfort in acknowledging the roots of these concepts in antiquity is in the reciprocal promise that they can still exist in a world that is not dominated by America. Order has always been a shared endeavor, and many nations of the global south are eager to participate in a world in which there are fewer double standards and more fairness. In the postwar period, many of these states gained independence and became active participants in international politics and in the multilateral institutions that America is now undermining.