Who Writes the Rules of the World?

From BRICS to Beijing’s Victory Parade, Xi Jinping is laying the foundations of a parallel system — and the West is barely watching.

Hello and welcome back to States of Play, the newsletter and podcast exploring how the world is changing, from geopolitics to technologies, from defence to demographics.

We talk about “world order” as if it were foggy atmospherics, a vibe that shifts with headlines. It isn’t. It’s architecture: values we claim, rules we accept, laws we codify, and the institutions that carry them out - resting on power, justified by legitimacy. This summer, three set pieces - the BRICS summit, the SCO meeting, and Beijing’s Victory Parade - announced that China intends to redraw that architecture. What follows is a guide to the blueprint: how the American order was built after 1945, and how Beijing is building a parallel system around it. Read this as a map of the contest, and a preview of how it will touch money, tech, security and daily life.

Understanding the changing world order is exactly why I write States of Play. In today’s post, we’ll dig into what a world order really is, why it matters, and how China is working to reshape it.

Many thanks for reading.

Sam

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Setting the Stage: Three Events, One Message

Earlier this summer, Beijing gave the world a glimpse of its ambition. Across Tiananmen Square rolled serried ranks of tanks and missile launchers, flanked by columns of robot wolves and formations of drones. Overhead, China’s sleek new J-35 stealth fighters cut through the haze, joined by surveillance aircraft and swarms of smaller unmanned systems. The showpiece was unmistakable: gleaming hypersonic and ballistic missiles designed to extend China’s reach across continents. Reviewing the spectacle was Xi Jinping, flanked by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, as more than two dozen other leaders watched from the stands.

It was military theatre, but theatre with a message. China is no longer content to be seen as a regional power. It intends to shape the rules of the international system itself.

The parade formed the third act in a carefully choreographed trilogy of events. In July, leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the BRICS summit. Their “Rio Declaration” set out 126 commitments calling for reform of global governance, diminished Western influence, and greater power for the Global South in shaping financial, technological, and diplomatic decision-making. It was, in tone and substance, a manifesto for multipolarity.

In August, Tianjin hosted the largest-ever meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Originally conceived in 2001 as a regional security forum, the SCO has since evolved into a Eurasian platform that spans counter-terrorism, infrastructure finance, energy, and technology policy. At this year’s summit, Beijing unveiled plans for an SCO development bank, mirroring BRICS’ own New Development Bank but with the explicit purpose of creating financial systems that could one day reduce dependence on the U.S. dollar. The language, too, was revealing. The communiqués spoke of “true multilateralism,” a thinly veiled challenge to America’s sanctions-led diplomacy.

Then came the Beijing parade. The hardware mattered - China’s rapidly modernising arsenal is an undeniable reality - but the choreography mattered more. Xi’s position at the centre, flanked by Putin and Kim, turned the event into a declaration that an alternative axis of power now stands in open defiance of Washington. The attendance of leaders from Africa, Asia and Latin America made it something more than a martial pageant: it became an international summit with missiles as its backdrop.

Taken together, these three moments tell a coherent story. They are not isolated spectacles but deliberate signals of China’s ambition to construct an alternative order. They show how Beijing is weaving together diplomacy, finance, and military might into a single narrative: the claim not just to participate in the system, but to remake it.

It is tempting, especially from London or Washington, to treat these gatherings as distant theatre - exotic summits and parades with little bearing on ordinary lives. Yet behind the choreography lies a harder question: who gets to write the rules of the world? And that matters, because the rules are never neutral. They shape the flow of money and trade, the technologies that become global standards, the security arrangements that decide which states are safe and which are vulnerable, even the values that gain legitimacy and those that are dismissed as illegitimate.

This is the thread that connects Beijing’s summer of spectacle: it is about more than missiles or communiqués. It is about the power to define the architecture of international life. To grasp its importance, we first need to understand what a world order actually is, how it has worked in the past, and how China now seeks to rewire it.

What is a World Order?

The phrase “world order” is often tossed about casually, as if it simply meant the general state of international affairs. In reality, it is something much more structured and enduring. A world order is the architecture of global society: the set of ideas, practices, and organisations that define how states behave, how disputes are managed, and how power is legitimised. It is the invisible framework within which diplomacy, trade, and security all take place.

Every world order rests on certain foundations. The first are values - the beliefs that give an order its moral coherence. Values do not need to be shared by every participant, but they provide the justification for why the system exists at all. In the American-led order after 1945, those values were democracy, liberty, markets, and human rights. In earlier times, the European Concert of the nineteenth century put its faith in dynastic legitimacy and the balance of power, while the medieval order of Christendom found coherence in religious universality. Whatever their content, values lend an order its sense of higher purpose.

From values flow rules, the unwritten codes of conduct that guide state behaviour. Rules reduce uncertainty and make the system predictable. When states broadly accept that borders should not be changed by conquest, that trade should flow relatively freely, or that nuclear weapons should never again be used in anger, the result is a measure of stability. Rules are not laws; they are more like norms of good conduct. But they shape expectations and guide decisions.

Rules become more durable when they are codified into law. Treaties, conventions, and charters formalise the practices of the system, binding states to obligations that can be invoked in times of dispute. The UN Charter of 1945, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, and the trade agreements that evolved into today’s World Trade Organisation are all examples of laws that turned habits into obligations. An order without laws remains fragile, for it depends entirely on the goodwill of its participants.

Institutions give this structure permanence. They are the organisations that embody the order, turning laws into lived practice and rules into enforceable standards. The IMF and World Bank stabilise global finance, NATO provides collective defence, the WHO coordinates against pandemics, the IAEA polices nuclear safeguards. Institutions are not merely bureaucratic machinery; they are the tangible expression of order. They show that the system is more than rhetoric - that it has forums, offices, and processes through which states can interact.

Yet even this edifice cannot stand on its own. Every world order rests on two supporting pillars: power and legitimacy. Power is the capacity to enforce the rules and sustain the institutions. Without military strength, economic weight, or technological superiority, an order is little more than wishful thinking. But power alone is not enough. Orders also require legitimacy — the belief by others that the system is broadly fair or beneficial, even if imperfect. The post-war American order, for example, worked not only because the United States had unmatched power, but also because it convinced allies that the system would deliver prosperity and stability for them too. When either pillar weakens, the order begins to totter. The Versailles settlement of 1919 collapsed not only because Germany rejected its legitimacy, but also because the Allies lacked the will to enforce it.

This is the anatomy of world order: values, rules, laws, and institutions, sustained by power and legitimacy. To speak of a “new world order” is not just to describe a shift in influence. It is to speak of a wholesale reconfiguration of the framework within which states act and societies live. And it is precisely this kind of reconfiguration that China, through its diplomacy, institutions, and displays of power, now seeks to advance.

The American World Order After 1945

If today’s contest is about who writes the rules of the twenty-first century, it is worth recalling how the rules of the last order were set. For eight decades, the international system has borne the imprint of American design. It did not emerge spontaneously. It was constructed, brick by brick, in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The circumstances were unique. Europe and Asia lay in ruins. Britain was exhausted, its empire fraying. The Soviet Union had suffered catastrophic losses even as it emerged victorious. Only the United States stood relatively unscathed: its homeland untouched, its industry humming, its military unrivalled. It commanded half of the world’s GDP and, briefly, a monopoly on nuclear weapons. It was in this environment that Washington sought to shape not merely its own security, but the entire architecture of global life.

At the heart of the system were values. The American order was framed as an order of democracy, liberty, free markets and human rights. Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech, the Atlantic Charter of 1941, and the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations all projected these ideals as universal. The Marshall Plan of 1947 - a vast programme of reconstruction aid for Europe — tied prosperity to democracy and markets, providing a moral as well as material case for U.S. leadership. These values were not always consistently applied - Washington often supported dictatorships when it suited Cold War strategy - but they gave the system its legitimacy and coherence.

From these ideals flowed rules of behaviour. States were expected to renounce wars of conquest, to participate in freer markets, to adhere to collective security arrangements. The nuclear taboo emerged as an informal rule: even though arsenals multiplied, no nuclear weapon was used after 1945. Rules such as freedom of navigation on the seas underpinned global trade. These norms reduced uncertainty, stabilised expectations, and made the system predictable.

Rules gained endurance when they were codified into law. The UN Charter outlawed aggressive war and enshrined sovereign equality. The Bretton Woods agreements of 1944 created the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to stabilise currencies and provide development finance. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) institutionalised the gradual reduction of trade barriers, evolving decades later into the World Trade Organisation. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty created NATO, binding the United States to Europe’s defence. During the Cold War, other legal instruments followed: arms control treaties like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), the SALT and START agreements, and the Helsinki Accords (1975), which blended East–West détente with commitments to human rights.

Europe in 1945 was devastated, and the power and legitimacy of the United States made adopting its vision of a world order an easy step to take

Institutions carried these laws into practice and gave the order visible form. The UN provided a forum for diplomacy; the IMF and World Bank managed finance and development; NATO deterred Soviet aggression. After the Cold War, institutions proliferated further: the WTO expanded global trade law (and welcomed China into its fold, in 2001); NATO enlarged eastward; the EU deepened integration. These organisations were not perfect, and the United States often wielded disproportionate influence within them. But they gave the order more than American diktat. They offered a framework in which others could participate, shaping outcomes even as they operated within U.S.-designed structures.

All of this rested on American power. U.S. military supremacy was underpinned by nuclear weapons and a globe-spanning network of bases, alliances across Europe and Asia, and an unrivalled navy that guaranteed freedom of the seas. Economically, the dollar became the world’s reserve currency, cementing U.S. dominance of global finance. American corporations and technologies set the pace in oil, aviation, semiconductors, computing, and eventually the digital revolution. Power ensured that the order’s rules were credible and its institutions resilient.

Yet power alone cannot explain the endurance of the post-1945 order. Its longevity lay in legitimacy. The Marshall Plan rebuilt allies rather than exploiting them. West Germany and Japan, instead of being crushed, were rehabilitated as prosperous democracies and welcomed back into the community of nations. Aid, trade, and cultural influence — from Hollywood films to Harvard scholarships — spread the sense that the American-led system was not merely self-serving, but broadly beneficial. Even adversaries, such as the Soviet Union and later China, were compelled to engage with its institutions and acknowledge its norms. After the Cold War, the system seemed to acquire a universal legitimacy: the “end of history” was declared, liberal democracy and open markets portrayed as the natural destiny of all.

The story did not end there. The post–Cold War years saw the U.S. attempt to widen and deepen its order. NATO expanded into Eastern Europe. The WTO, founded in 1995, globalised trade rules to an unprecedented degree. Humanitarian interventions in the Balkans and later in Iraq and Afghanistan were justified as enforcement of international norms, though often with disastrous consequences. The 2008 financial crisis and the failures of the Iraq war tarnished America’s legitimacy, but the order it built remained the default framework of global life.

The American-led order endured because it combined strength with persuasion, values with institutions, laws with enforcement, and power with legitimacy. It was never perfect and never uncontested. But for nearly eight decades it provided stability, prosperity, and a set of rules by which much of the world conducted its affairs.

The challenge now is that China, joined by Russia and supported by partners across the Global South, is attempting to build a rival architecture — one that borrows the same building blocks of order but reconfigures them around very different foundations.

China’s Counter-Order: Rewiring the System

If the American-led order was built from the rubble of 1945, China’s project is emerging in the fractures of the twenty-first century. Beijing is not attempting to blow down the old edifice with a single strike. Its strategy is more incremental: to construct a parallel architecture around the U.S.-led system until, piece by piece, the balance tips. This is the essence of what might be called the Counter-Alignment — a network of institutions, norms, and alliances that look like the familiar world order but are anchored in China’s values and interests.

The differences begin with values. Where the American system proclaimed