Michael J. Mazarr — Summary of the Building a Sustainable International Order Project

The growing threat to the rules-based postwar order has become a defining feature of current discussions about world politics. Over the last two years, a RAND project team, working with outside experts, has sought to understand the existing international order, assess current challenges to the order, and recommend future U.S. policies to advance U.S. interests in the context of a multilateral order. This summary report of that project, Building a Sustainable International Order, outlines the overall project’s basic findings and lessons.

Key Findings

Major findings of the study

• Because of both internal stresses on leading democracies and rising pressure from such challengers as Russia and China, the order is under unprecedented strain — but retains areas of persistent strength.
• The order has value for U.S. interests and constitutes a significant form of U.S. competitive advantage by offering a supportive, multilateral context for U.S. objectives and values.
• The international economic order has been the engine of the wider geopolitical order.
• Orders grow out of broader realities in world politics, such as the degree of shared interests and values among leading states — but once institutionalized, the structure and habits of an order can shape state preferences and behavior.
• The order must become more multilateral and shared.

Is the US deep state shifting geopolicy and geostrategy away from unipolarism and unilateralism?

I only read the summary. I downloaded the report but have not read it yet, so I cannot comment on the details.

RAND Corporation
Summary of the Building a Sustainable International Order Project
Michael J. Mazarr

The following references a typically skewed article (diatribe, rant) in The Economist that aggregates very different situations in diverse countries and attempts t generalize from a superficial and biased analysis. Naturally, the decline of democracy in the Western (bourgeois) liberal "democracies" that are actually oligarchies is ignored, save for the obligatory mention of Donald Trump in the US with the added observation that he will be gone and the US will recover. But what else to expect from an organ of the British oligarchy?

Duncan Green effuses over it though.

Oxfam Blogs — From Poverty to Power
Democracy’s Retreat: a ‘how to’ guide
Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB

Another establishment view, this one with Donald Trump as the target.

By imposing tariffs on US allies and cozying up to brutal dictators such as North Korea's Kim Jong-un, US President Donald Trump is sowing deep mistrust within the West. But if Trump thinks a divide-and-rule strategy can "make America great again," he is in for a rude awakening.

Project Syndicate
The Western Crack-UpJavier Solana was EU High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Secretary-General of NATO, and Foreign Minister of Spain. He is currently President of the ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics, Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Europe.