Are We Returning to a Pre-World War II World Order?

Image Credit: Royal Navy official photographer, Ware, C J via Wikimedia

Is it over yet? 

As the news cycle grinds on relentlessly, pundits catastrophise, and the world appears to hurtle towards chaos and confusion, this question becomes increasingly difficult to avoid. Conquest, war, famine, and death once again dominate the headlines; everywhere, institutions seem to have collapsed, are collapsing, or are assumed to be living on borrowed time. And nowhere is this sense of exhaustion and terminal decline more keenly felt than in debates over the fate of the international order itself. 

Now, it’s fair to say this sensation is hardly new. In the 70s and 80s, confronted with economic stagnation, rising oil prices, and the failure of the Vietnam war, the international order was called into question. Again, in the 2010s, faced with a resurgent Russia, a splintering West, and failures in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, the international order was once again challenged.  

However, today the threat seems even more serious, more dangerous; not a mere  ‘crisis of confidence’, but a collapse of the post-WW2 edifice itself. 

So, is it over? And what, if it has truly collapsed, will replace it? 

Firstly, yes. Yes, the days of liberal universalism, American primacy, and the notion of ‘the end of history’ are over. They ended with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They ended with the trade war in 2025. They ended with the proposed invasion of Greenland. What’s left now is for the corpse to realise the head has been cut off. 

It’s easy to say, “pre-WW2 order” without defining what that order was, what it looked like, and whether it, in some respects, was better. Very often it is taken to mean the 1930s. Mass rearmament, collapsing diplomacy, and an inexorable march towards destruction. Yet, in an age where nuclear weapons restrain great powers more effectively than courts ever did, such a scenario is less than likely. 

Instead, the “pre-WW2” order that is likely to manifest is that of a multipolar world. Of great and medium-tier powers competing for spheres of influence, preferential trade policies, and defence as a centrepiece of every nation’s national strategy. A world where the comfortable blanket of their international law and legitimate diplomacy has gradually, but certainly, come undone. 

A better world, perhaps this isn’t. And yet, even in the ‘golden age’ of the rule-based order, Thuycidices’ maxim, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”, held, as so boldly demonstrated by the wars in the Middle East and various insurgencies, rebellions, and coup d’etats funded through the supposed guarantor of that order, America. Can we really call this new world a worse one then? Is it not, at the very least, more honest, and in some ways a world better suited to a nation like Britain? 

The UK has, after all, historically performed best not in rigid systems dominated by a single hegemonic power, but in looser, competitive orders. From the age of the Tudor monarchs, through to the long eighteenth century, Britain prospered through careful diplomacy, sound finance, and maritime reach; habits of statecraft that either still exist or can be rebuilt. After all, history shows that one need not be the Spain of Philip II, or the France of Louis XIV, to thrive. Greatness has never required hegemony; it has required judgement, balance, and an instinct for opportunity. In such a world, Britain’s challenge is not to arrest history, but to recognise it is being offered room to act once more. 

So yes, we are returning to a pre-WW2 order. No, it will not simply be a collapse into warring great powers or firm decline; it will be an order defined by competition, a balance of powers, and national agency. Britain is not condemned to a world of decline or defeat, but a world where it can thrive.