The Global Order Is Shifting

For eight decades following the close of World War II, America's postwar architecture of alliances, institutions, and economic leadership provided leadership. America's foreign policy served as the scaffolding around which other nations organized their foreign policies. That scaffolding is now visibly straining. As multipolarity accelerates and America's role in leading the world diminishes, leaders across the Global South face a crossroads. The defining question of the moment: will Washington remain a stabilizing anchor of international order, or become another unpredictable actor in a transactional, zero-sum system?

Governments across Africa, South Asia, the Gulf and Latin America are recalibrating accordingly. Strategic diversification — expanding economic, security and diplomatic partnerships simultaneously — is no longer opportunistic. It is insurance against regional threats, insecure supply chains, and economic instability.

What leaders repeatedly underscored, however, was not a desire to sideline the United States. It was a need for predictability. They spoke of wanting a partner whose commitments survive election cycles; whose economic tools are not perceived as episodic coercion; and whose security assurances are durable enough to plan around. In a multipolar world, credibility is not nostalgia for primacy, it is the currency of partnership.

Having spent years inside the U.S. national security system, including at the Pentagon and across the interagency on counterterrorism, regional stability and international security cooperation, I have seen that America’s greatest strategic asset is not power alone. It is credibility, the expectation that commitments endure, alliances are honored and policy remains steady even as politics change. If Washington cannot restore that confidence, others will fill the vacuum, not necessarily with stronger institutions, but with fewer constraints.

This framework has been tested beginning in 2016, when U.S. foreign policy became more explicitly transactional. The pressures and concerns driving that shift were real: public fatigue with prolonged wars, economic dislocation, and skepticism about globalization’s benefits. The resulting shift reframed alliances as burdens, diplomacy as leverage, and commitments as conditional, causing allies to hedge. The problem: when predictability weakens, adversaries probe. When diplomacy becomes zero-sum, volatility increases.

These dynamics are especially visible in the Middle East. Regional powers that once assumed durable U.S. engagement are now diversifying security and economic partnerships. Smaller states like Qatar and Oman are hedging as competition intensifies in arenas once moderated by American leadership. Longtime U.S. security partners such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates increased political and economic coordination with China and Russia, from the Beijing-brokered Saudi-Iran normalization to expanded energy, infrastructure, and defense cooperation.

Across the Global South, governments are not choosing sides; they are choosing options, illustrating the ongoing diversification away from exclusive reliance on Washington. Strategic autonomy and multi-alignment have become rational responses to uncertainty. This is not ideological defiance. It is pragmatic realism.

Take Pakistan, for example, whose relationship with the U.S. has always moved in cycles: intense cooperation followed by recalibration. Today, it is a pragmatic phase. And that pragmatism matters.

That durability will require Pakistan to remain functional and cooperative. Pakistan maintains strategic relevance due to regional instability emanating from Afghanistan, persistent counterterrorism concerns, and broader Indo-Pacific competition. Accordingly, Pakistan’s current government has positioned itself carefully under the second Trump administration, offering counterterrorism cooperation and signaling openness to economic discussions and cooperation on minerals.

Pakistan’s regional utility keeps Islamabad within Washington’s strategic calculus, mindful of the growing recognition that disengagement does not equal safety. The debate is not whether the United States should still play a global role. It is how to exercise that role in a more multipolar, contested environment without eroding the credibility that makes American power effective.

The most durable power is not coercion, it is consistency. And the most stable international systems are built not on dominance, but on shared interest in preventing chaos.

The world is not returning to the unipolar moment of the 1990s. Nor should it. The emerging order will be more diffuse, more competitive, and less centralized. If Washington wants to remain central to the evolving global order, it must decide what kind of leader it intends to be: reactive or reliable, transactional or trusted. In a world already in motion, that choice will shape not only America’s standing, but the stability of the system itself.

Laurie A. Watkins is a Truman National Security Project Partner and former U.S. Department of Defense Official.