Richard Fontaine

probably less stable.

We talk often in sort of foreign policy circles about the so-called rules-based international order or the liberal international order or whatever you would like to call the panoply of rules and norms and principles and institutions that have guided international behavior really since the end of World War II, if not the end of the Cold War.

And

Lots of countries, including the United States, express great discontent with the way things are right now and wish to find something else.

But that something else has not yet come into existence.

And what it might look like is not even clear.

And so we're exiting this period.

where some aspects of what we call this liberal international order are falling away or getting weaker.

And yet they haven't been replaced by new things.

And so I think we're in for a potentially decade long or so period of greater disorder until we enter a new international dispensation.

They don't hold the entirety of the balance of power.

But if you look at their aggregate weight economically, militarily, diplomatically, in terms of the ability to play a dominant role in each of their regions and their ability to kind of set narratives at the international level,

They have disproportionate weight, especially if you combine them.

And so that's one reason why we've you know, we've talked in this conversation about these countries sort of courting different forms of relationships with the United States and China.

But it's another reason why China and at least until recently, the United States have been courting these countries.

because of their combined geopolitical weight.

They're not going to accrue solely to the Western side of the ledger, to the axis of upheaval side of the ledger, but on different issues, they're going to express different preferences, get involved in different activities.

And, you know, anyone who is looking at these global swing states would want to engage them in a way in which their activities and preferences reflect our own to the maximum degree possible and not those of our adversaries.

Well, there's about a million things going on in the world today, you know, including a festering acute military crisis in Iran and the Middle East and everything else.

The hard part, I think, for American policy right now is to set priorities globally and in terms of countries and issues.