Four-point proposal urges limits on self-defense and proxy wars
Two Yale law professors published an op-ed in The Guardian on Wednesday arguing that the U.S.-led world order is in decline and outlining a four-point antiwar agenda they said should replace it.
Aslı Bâli and Samuel Moyn, both law professors at Yale University, wrote that idealizing what they called “Pax Americana” and its “rules-based international order” was a misguided response to the current geopolitical situation. The old order was never good enough for the global south, they wrote, and President Donald Trump’s policies had further eroded its credibility.
The professors cited a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos in 2026, which they said was greeted as “daringly honest for saying aloud that, at least for great powers, the old talk of ideals and rules had always rested on a pleasant myth.” They wrote that Carney soon “exposed the limits of his own candor” by publicly supporting Trump’s war against Iran.
“The old order of high-minded hypocrisy was never good enough for the global south; it was not simply ruined by a president offering too raw a deal,” Bâli and Moyn wrote.
The professors proposed four commitments as the foundation of a new multipolar order.
First, states should reaffirm and strengthen limits on the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, they wrote. “The right of self-defense was never meant to be a general license to attack on the basis of speculative future threats,” they wrote, arguing that the distinction between defense against an imminent attack and preventive war “is essential.”
Second, states should recommit to the inadmissibility of annexation or territorial acquisition by force, including de facto annexation “accomplished through occupation, settlement, demographic engineering, or the creation of irreversible facts on the ground,” the professors wrote. They warned that “a world of spheres of influence is, almost by definition, a world in which weaker states’ territorial integrity becomes negotiable.”
Third, great and middle powers should commit not to instigate, enable or intensify proxy wars against one another, according to the op-ed. “Defensive support to a state resisting aggression is one thing; measures designed to prolong war or turn a local conflict into a means of bleeding a rival are quite another,” the professors wrote.
Fourth, states should not furnish military assistance or permit arms sales that “predictably abet gross violations of rules against aggression or atrocity,” they wrote. They noted that world military expenditure reached nearly $2.9 trillion in 2025 and that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council accounted for nearly 68% of global arms exports.
“The virtue of such a bargain lies in its thinness,” Bâli and Moyn wrote. “It does not ask states to agree on the whole architecture of world order, or to share a moral vocabulary.”
They said the four commitments provide “the minimum conditions for a world in which rival powers can compete without making war the normal instrument of politics.”
“Multipolarity must be understood as more than a fall from the American order into disorder,” the professors wrote. “It could become a scramble for domination if the strongest states are left to carve up regions, arm clients and rename coercion as security. 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 the nostalgia that mistakes yesterday’s hypocrisies for lost law.”
“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,” they concluded.