ISAS Working Papers

The global world order that was established by a series of diplomatic initiatives after the calamitous Second World War basically set the basic ‘club rules’ for international relations on the basis of near-consensus. It seemed to work well for a few decades, the Cold War notwithstanding. However, the end of the Cold War was accompanied by the combination of excessive power leading to hubris on the part of what has been call the ‘hyper-power’, the United States. Its behaviour appeared to challenge the norms of what had been seen as globally acceptable to date. The phenomenon actually pre-dated the election of President Donald Trump whose seemingly erratic actions accentuated the tendencies. Unfortunately, the pattern is unlikely to change in any radical sense in the post-Trump period. The era of the ‘new world disorder’ is likely to become the new normal, shaping present and future international politics. This will have ramifications for the countries and regions of the world, including South Asia. This paper seeks to analyse these and related developments, and it concludes with the extrapolation that the world has little option but to learn to live with these changes.