By The Diplomat | Created at 2026-08-07 02:12:01 | Updated at 2026-08-07 05:02:03
12 hours ago
For most of the post-war era, power, legitimacy, and cooperation reinforced one another. American leadership underwrote security, open markets, and freedom of navigation. Democratic partnerships generated political trust. Universal institutions such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the nuclear nonproliferation regime provided common rules and legal legitimacy. Though imperfect, these three pillars generally worked in concert.
That alignment has broken down. Security, economic governance, political legitimacy, and practical cooperation are no longer occurring in the same institutions or even among the same groups of states. I call this structural transformation the “unbundling of order.” The result is disalignment, a condition in which power, legitimacy, and cooperation no longer reinforce one another.
Analysts today often ask whether the liberal international order is collapsing or which great power will replace the United States. The real question is whether the essential functions of the international order can be reconnected under increasingly fragmented geopolitical conditions.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the inability of existing institutions like the United Nations to prevent or halt great power aggression. The ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran demonstrated that military superiority alone cannot ensure regional stability or the credibility of the global nonproliferation regime. Competition – especially, but not exclusively between China and the United States – over semiconductors, artificial intelligence, critical minerals, and maritime supply chains blurs the traditional boundary between economics and security.
Cooperation is increasingly necessary, but the most inclusive institutions are often the least capable of collective action. This paradox has driven the rise of minilateralism. Smaller groups of like-minded partners can coordinate quickly, protect sensitive technologies, strengthen supply chain resilience, and respond effectively to shared threats. But while minilateral coalitions can act quickly, they lack broad legitimacy. Meanwhile, universal institutions provide legal authority and political inclusion but often struggle to act.
Neither is sufficient alone. Democratic multilateralism must combine legitimacy with operational capacity.
This is why democracy itself retains strategic importance. Democratic multilateralism is more than cooperation among states with shared political values. It provides a foundation for institutional trust. Intelligence sharing, advanced technology cooperation, defense industrial integration, financial coordination, and resilient supply chains all depend on confidence that partners will safeguard sensitive information, uphold long-term commitments, and remain accountable despite changes in government. Democratic governments may disagree, yet transparent institutions and political accountability make sustained strategic cooperation more credible.
South Korea stands at the intersection of today’s defining strategic challenges: nuclear deterrence, China-U.S. competition, technological rivalry, supply chain resilience, and democratic cooperation. Its security depends on the alliance with the United States, its prosperity on an open global economy, and its future competitiveness on reliable technology networks. Few countries are therefore more exposed to the unbundling of order or better positioned to shape what follows.
Seoul must continue to diversify its partnerships, but diversification alone is not a strategy. It needs an organizing logic that connects its alliances, partnerships, markets, and institutions. It must determine which functions remain anchored in the U.S. alliance, which require broader networks, and how smaller, function-specific coalitions can be linked to or nested within broader regional and global institutions.
For South Korea, deterrence will continue to depend primarily on the U.S. alliance. Technological resilience requires secure networks for protecting sensitive knowledge and coordinating investment. Economic security depends on diversified markets, suppliers, and production chains. Wider institutions remain essential for common rules, political inclusion, and international acceptance. The task is to make these different frameworks, each built for different purposes, mutually reinforcing.
South Korea should therefore seek not simply to balance among great powers, but to develop connective power: the capacity to align security commitments, economic partnerships, technological networks, and multilateral institutions around compatible purposes. This is a distinctive source of middle power influence. It rests not only on institutional access, but on a reputation for reliability, effective brokerage, and contributions to regional and global public goods. States with that standing can bridge alliances, functional coalitions, and wider institutions, and thereby shape the terms of cooperation.
The post-war order cannot simply be restored because the architecture that sustained it has already changed. But that doesn’t mean the world is doomed to a fate of closed and competing blocs. Instead, the more plausible alternative is not a singular order but several layered and overlapping ones. States will pursue national interests through different arrangements while cooperating where regional stability and global public goods require collective action. The most indispensable states will not necessarily dominate every arena, but will make cooperation across arenas possible.
For South Korea, bridging these system is a national imperative. Its security, prosperity, technological competitiveness, and diplomatic autonomy depend on its ability to operate across multiple institutional systems.
This essay is one of four to emerge from discussions at an international conference jointly organized by the Seoul Forum for International Affairs and the Hairan Series of Korea University’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Unification Studies, “Democratic Multilateralism at the Edge,” held in Seoul on April 20, 2026.
