The World's Best Available Order May Be a Nineteenth-Century Concert of Powers

Charles Kupchan, the Georgetown scholar and Council on Foreign Relations fellow, argues in an early release from Foreign Policy's Fall 2026 issue that the rules-based order is not coming back, and pretending otherwise wastes time the world cannot afford. Drawing on his forthcoming book, he proposes reviving the logic of the Concert of Europe: a network of high-level councils that let great powers manage shared problems across ideological lines without pretending to share values. Rather than a single hegemon or one rulebook, Kupchan foresees a polycentric order of regional blocs, each anchored by its own dominant powers, loosely stitched together by concert-style coordination on the handful of issues that spill across borders regardless — nuclear proliferation, pandemics, artificial intelligence, climate. The model's appeal, he writes, is its modesty: it asks nothing of Washington, Beijing or Moscow beyond self-interested crisis management, the same logic that kept European powers from a continental war for decades after Napoleon. Critics have long objected that a concert requires a shared sense of legitimacy today's rivals plainly lack; Kupchan's rejoinder is that the alternative on display this week — no coordination at all — is worse. The essay lands in a week that supplied its own case study: dueling strikes in the Strait of Hormuz, a Kyiv truce that lasted three days, and a German state election that just proved rules-free politics wins votes at home too.