How can the West reinforce the international order in a multipolar world?

The world is becoming more geopolitically competitive with dangerous territorial disputes at sea (including between the world’s second and third largest economies), the return of proxy wars in the Middle East, and a more fraught relationship between the United States and China. At the same time, the world remains incredibly interdependent and interconnected—financially, economically, and politically. This blend of competition and interdependence will define the challenge that emerging powers pose to the international order. This poses a unique strategic challenge for the United States which is more accustomed to Cold War style competition with states that it has little economic connection to. In this roundtable, Tom Wright will discuss how the United States and its allies should adjust their strategy to preserve and strengthen the international order in a more geopolitically competitive world. 

Thomas Wright is a Fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Managing Global Order project. Previously, he was Executive Director of studies at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and Senior Researcher for the Princeton Project on National Security. Wright's writings have appeared in the American Political Science Review, theFinancial Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the Washington Post, and a number of international newspapers and media outlets.

Anthony Dworkin is a Senior Policy Fellow at ECFR working on human rights, democracy and international justice. He is the co-author of the ECFR policy brief “Towards an EU Human Rights Strategy for a Post-Western World” as well as several papers on the EU's response to the Arab revolutions, most recently “The Struggle for Pluralism after the Arab Revolutions” (2013). He is currently finishing a policy brief on drones and targeted killing. He was previously the executive director of the Crimes of War project and is a contributing editor of Prospect magazine.