The story of international relations since Renaissance times equaled a struggle for order.
Renaissance thinker Hugo Grotius, an advocate of natural law, envisioned a world defined by order, as he saw a form of law that could bind nations together, or international law. In some ways, the international system recorded some victories. War no longer decimates 25 percent of the population like it did before the 1700s. However, the search for order continues to this day.
We're in an international relations situation that theorists would call spheres of influence where various powers are dominant in certain areas, and there isn't a lot of cooperation between those powers. However, the powers are competing for influence in each other's spheres. The United States and its allies project power through the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, and Russia and China project power through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. For international law to live up to its potential, there would have to be some cooperation between the world's powers, a situation that doesn't exist now.
Russia will most likely be driven back within its previous borders in the Ukraine War; its borders before the war, but there's still the worries about China's designs for Taiwan. However, and let's hope they're right, many in the American defense community feel that China is too afraid of the international fallout from an invasion that it won't try it. China just brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran. So, it looks like US influence in the Middle East is waning.
The situation is likely to remain tense in the decades to come, but there is hope for both in short-term and the long-term. As writer Michael Lind stated in his story "Liberal Internationalism Failed, but We Can Still Live in a Multipolar World," the international community can use diplomatic expedients like arms control treaties, summit meetings, and hotlines to avoid war and increased tensions. This can bring a sense of law to the world.
The bad part, in the short-term, is that the world's power centers will be balancing each other militarily, meaning high defense budgets when the US has so many internal problems. It looks like a dim future, but can't we look to something better? Can we keep the Grotian dream alive? Yes, we can! The US seems to have learned a lesson from its long stay in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, let's go back to the past and look at the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years' War (1818-1648) and the Eighty Years' War (1568-1648). Westphalia was the beginning of the modern international system in which most countries agree not to interfere in each other's affairs, even though we've seen interruptions in this pattern.
The Westphalian system, the principles of the system were based on the ideas of Grotius and the state theory of Jean Bodin, defines itself by the idea that each state in the system has a monopoly over the ability to wage war, an improvement over the pre-nation state days when other entities claimed that right. The ideas of the system are enshrined in the United Nations Charter.
The Westphalian system reached its peak in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it has faced recent challenges from advocates of humanitarian intervention - remember our attempt to bring Western values to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya? Then there's also the mentioned influence spreading Russian invasion of Ukraine. We've also seen an attempt to take back sovereignty from international organizations - the United Kingdom's Brexit.
Let's hope that we can make it through this turbulent time in international relations by the mechanisms that Lind advocated. However, let's move to an even brighter future, a realistic internationalism based around the Grotian idea that states have sovereignty over their territory but shouldn't interfere in the internal affairs of other states. It would be a vision of a world at peace with itself, and it would avoid the mistakes we've seen since the end of the Cold War.
This new internationalism would concentrate on preventing interstate warfare and preventing states from invading others and engaging in ethnic cleansing, the original purpose of the UN. It would however allow for various types of governments (even though we hope the democratic republic will survive and prosper) and for various interpretations of ideas like human rights. A non-governmental organization like Amnesty International does a wonderful job of defining human rights, but all in the world are not likely to believe in this vision. However, if history plays itself out, then maybe more and more would believe in this vision, but this new internationalism would be neutral on the subject.
Perhaps a future internationalism would adhere to Franklin Roosevelt's vision of the "four policemen" after World War II. Either the UN will have to be reformed or abandoned entirely.
