From Rules-Based Order to Rivalry-Based Order
Designing Stability in a World of Persistent Power Competition
The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy advocates a shift in how international order is maintained. It moves away from a rules-based order, where stability depends on international institutions, legal frameworks, and voluntary restraint by major powers and toward a rivalry-based order, where long-term competition is assumed and stability is maintained through balance-of-power, deterrence, access control, and leverage.
This shift matters because it changes the foundations of global order. A rivalry-based system organizes security, economics, technology, and alliances around persistent competition rather than shared governance.
This post examines that transition and then moves beyond it, asking how order can be deliberately shaped in a world where power competition is real, continuous, and unavoidable.
Designing Order in a World of Power
Power competition is not a failure of the international system. It is a permanent feature of it.
The mistake of the post–Cold War era was not believing in rules, but assuming power could be transcended rather than governed through design. The task ahead is not to restore a past order or react to new doctrines, but to deliberately design systems that remain stable under conditions of power asymmetry, persistent competition, and technological acceleration.
Why Neither Rules nor Rivalry Are Sufficient
Rules-based systems fail when enforcement erodes. Rivalry-based systems fail when pressure accumulates faster than judgment.
Both models treat order as something that emerges after behavior:
rules constrain behavior after the fact;
rivalry manages behavior through deterrence and signaling.
Neither is sufficient for a world defined by continuous interaction, fast-moving technology, dense interdependence, and irreversible infrastructure dependencies. What is missing is system design.
System design sets constraints, boundaries, and failure limits upfront, so stability comes from how systems are built rather than how well actors behave. Shared values and voluntary restraint are unstable under pressure, and rules that regulate behavior after the fact weaken as competition and power asymmetries increase.
Why Structure Now Matters More Than Policy
Competition has shifted into system-level domains, data, logistics, energy, space, and finance, where outcomes are shaped more by structure than by policy. Architecture determines what is possible, what is fast, what is reversible, and what fails first. When competition targets system structure rather than individual actions, stability depends on how those systems are built.
Designing for limits and resilience becomes the most effective way to preserve order under sustained pressure.
What Systems do we Design
This is not about designing a single global system. It is about shaping interlocking system layers that determine how power is exercised, how pressure spreads, and how failure propagates.
Infrastructure Systems
Infrastructure is no longer a neutral backdrop. Ports, energy grids, data centers, undersea cables, satellites, and logistics networks now shape strategic outcomes directly. Designing order at this layer means embedding redundancy, repairability, civilian protection norms, and escalation limits so disruption does not cascade into systemic failure.
Escalation and Deterrence Systems
Conflict now escalates across domains. Cyber, space, economic, information, and kinetic actions are linked through cross-domain retaliation and ambiguous signaling. Design here focuses on making escalation pathways explicit and bounded so pressure does not automatically compound or spiral.
Economic and Financial Systems
Markets transmit geopolitical pressure faster than diplomacy can respond. Sanctions, trade controls, capital flows, and industrial policy now function as competitive tools. Designing order in this domain means ensuring economic pressure degrades adversary capacity without causing indiscriminate system damage.
Technology and Standards Systems
Standards increasingly determine who can participate, scale, and interoperate. Communications protocols, AI governance, certification regimes, and interoperability standards lock in power. Design at this layer embeds resilience, reversibility, and openness, rather than dependency by default.
Military–Civilian Interface Systems
The boundary between civilian and military domains is a central fault line. Dual-use infrastructure, civil–military integration, and non-kinetic operations shape escalation risk. Design here reduces incentives to target civilian systems while preserving deterrence credibility.
Alliance and Alignment Systems
Alignment is no longer binary. Interoperability, intelligence sharing, industrial cooperation, and issue-based coalitions define how states align. Designing order at this layer preserves autonomy while maintaining cohesion under pressure.
Crisis Management and Recovery Systems
Most systems are built for normal operation, not sustained stress. Incident response, repair capacity, cross-border coordination, and escalation communications determine whether disruption stabilizes or spirals. Design here ensures systems fail gracefully and recover quickly.
These are not separate projects. They are interdependent systems.
Designing order means limiting how failure spreads between them, preventing shocks in one domain from cascading into others, and preserving function under stress rather than optimizing only for efficiency in calm conditions.
The systems being designed are the infrastructure, escalation, economic, technological, and alliance systems that now determine how power is exercised, how pressure spreads, and how failure is contained.
Order Should Be Built Around Limits, Not Preferences
Durable order does not depend on shared values or permanent alignment. It depends on clear, enforceable limits on damage.
A future-oriented system focuses less on:
who is right
who leads
who dominates
And more on:
what must not be broken
what must remain functional
what must be reversible
what must be protected from escalation
This shifts order from ideology to engineering.
Constrain Outcomes, Not Actors
Rather than trying to regulate intentions, alliances, or competition, a more durable system constrains outcomes.
This means designing systems where:
civilian infrastructure cannot easily be weaponized
escalation pathways are bounded
coercion has diminishing returns
disruption does not cascade uncontrollably
Power still exists, but it becomes less decisive.
Infrastructure as the Backbone of Order
In the 21st century, order is anchored in infrastructure. Ports, energy grids, data systems, satellites, logistics networks, and supply chains determine whether societies function under stress.
A world worth shaping:
treats civilian infrastructure as stability assets
builds redundancy and repair into critical systems
separates infrastructure resilience from political alignment
This does not eliminate competition. It reduces catastrophic failure modes.
Agency Is a Stabilizing Force
Systems dominated by great-power logic underestimate the stabilizing role of middle powers, cities, networks, and institutions that sit between blocs.
Order improves when:
more actors retain decision space
alignment is partial and contextual
cooperation occurs without total integration
More agency means fewer single points of failure.
Militaries as System Guardians
In a forward-designed order, militaries are not the architects of stability, but its guardians.
Their role is to:
prevent irreversible harm
protect civilian systems
maintain access without coercion
signal restraint as clearly as resolve
Deterrence remains essential, but it serves system continuity, not dominance.
Foresight as Design Intelligence
Foresight is not a warning system for inevitable conflict. It is design intelligence.
Its role is to:
identify where systems are becoming brittle
detect where pressure exceeds resilience
surface unintended consequences early
expand option space before paths lock in
Foresight shapes conditions, not narratives.
Order Is Something We Build
The future is not a choice between rules and rivalry. It is a choice between systems that amplify power shocks and systems that absorb them; between orders that escalate by default and those that fail gracefully.
Rivalry will persist. Rules will matter unevenly. But order is not the absence of conflict, it is the management of consequence.
The world worth shaping is one where power exists, competition continues, but failure is contained, damage is limited, and societies remain functional under stress.
That is not idealism. It is systems design applied to geopolitics.
