Yale law professors Aslı Bâli and Samuel Moyn argue that the decline of Pax Americana presents an opportunity to build a new multipolar world order based on mutual restraint rather than nostalgia for a flawed unipolar system. In a recent opinion piece, they outline a four-point anti-war agenda designed for an inevitably plural and rivalrous world.
The Failure of Nostalgia
The dominant response to America's decline, according to Bâli and Moyn, has been a futile effort to revive the old order. Liberal commentators mourn the threat to Atlanticism and issue sentimental defenses of lost multilateralism, often hankering for morally uplifting wars. However, the authors argue that idealizing the American peace since 1945 and its 'rules-based international order' is misguided. They note that few outside the Atlantic core ever mistook Pax Americana for the best of all possible worlds.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's 2026 Davos speech, which admitted that the old talk of ideals and rules rested on a myth, was greeted as daringly honest. But Bâli and Moyn point out that Carney soon exposed the limits of his candor by publicly supporting Trump's war of choice against Iran. The old order of high-minded hypocrisy was never good enough for the global south.
Four Commitments for an Anti-War Agenda
The authors propose four commitments to replace the old order. First, states should reaffirm and strengthen limits on the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, distinguishing between defense against an imminent attack and preventive war. They oppose doctrines that permit attacks on states 'unwilling or unable' to control non-state actors.
Second, states should recommit to the inadmissibility of annexation or territorial acquisition by force, including de facto annexation through occupation, settlement, or demographic engineering. This principle tests whether multipolarity will be governed by mutual restraint or regional domination.
Third, great and middle powers should commit not to instigate, enable, or intensify proxy wars against one another. Proxy conflict allows states to deny direct responsibility while sustaining conflicts that devastate civilian populations and destabilize regions.
Fourth, states should not furnish military assistance or allow arms sales that predictably abet gross violations of rules against aggression or atrocity. The authors note that world military expenditure reached nearly $2.9 trillion in 2025, and the international arms market is highly concentrated: the United States accounted for 42% of global exports from 2021 to 2025, and the five permanent UN Security Council members together accounted for nearly 68%.
Mutual Restraint Over Selective Enforcement
The virtue of this bargain lies in its thinness, the authors argue. It does not ask states to agree on the entire architecture of world order or share a moral vocabulary. Instead, it asks them to accept one clear proposition: no state is safer in a world where coercion is unconstrained because every exception claimed by one power becomes available to its rivals.
This approach addresses the charge of hypocrisy more directly than appeals to an older order whose enforcement was systematically uneven. It gives rival powers a reason to comply even when they do not share a common political project. Every major and middle power is less secure in a world where preventive war, annexation, proxy conflict, and coercive strangulation are normalized tools of statecraft, as demonstrated by the war on terror, Russia's war against Ukraine, and the US-Israeli war on Iran.
Building on Existing Frameworks
Bâli and Moyn suggest that a robust agenda on arms transfers could build on the Arms Trade Treaty, which prohibits transfers where a state knows the arms would be used to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, or other war crimes. They propose extending that framework to transfers foreseeably facilitating aggression, annexation, or other non-defensive force.
The authors conclude that multipolarity must be understood as more than a fall from the American order into disorder. It could become a scramble for domination, but it also creates a chance to build an order less dependent on one power's virtue, less compromised by selective enforcement, and less vulnerable to nostalgia. The task now is to stop mourning the old order, refuse the new lawlessness, and make restraint the thin, hard core of whatever comes next.
