WHEN ARTHUR Schlesinger Jr. published the first volume of his Age of Roosevelt series in 1957, he titled it The%20Crisis%20of%20the%20Old%20Order:%201919-1933,%20The%20Age%20of%20Roosevelt,%20Volume%20I%20" target="_blank">The Crisis of the Old Order. He devoted a considerable portion of the book to a description of that Old Order in crisis, including chapters with such titles as: “The Politics of Frustration,” “Protest on the Countryside,” “The Stirrings of Labor,” “The Struggle for Public Power” and “The Revolt of the Intellectuals.” Together, they rendered a portrait of a domestic status quo under severe challenge. That status quo could not hold, and thus did a new order emerge in American politics based on a far greater concentration of power in the federal government than the country had ever before seriously contemplated.

Schlesinger did not complete his multivolume FDR project, but had he done so, he also would have probed the global status quo under a similar severe strain. The Old Order—based on Europe’s global preeminence, British naval superiority and financial dominance, and a balance of military force on the European continent—had been destroyed with World War I, and no new structure of stability had emerged to replace it. The result was a period of flux culminating in World War II, which yielded a new order based on America’s global military reach, the strength of the dollar, and a balance of power between the U.S.-led West and an expansionist Soviet Union positioned in the ashes of war to threaten Western Europe.

Franklin Roosevelt, one of the most powerful figures in his country’s history, essentially remade the American political structure. And then he remade the world. The result was a new order of relative stability, Western prosperity and global development. It has been called Pax Americana, and it lasted nearly seventy years.

Now the new order that Roosevelt created is the Old Order, and it is in crisis, much as the Old Order at the time of FDR’s emergence was in crisis. The status quo, like the status quo in Roosevelt’s time, cannot hold. We are living in a time of transition.

Domestically, Roosevelt’s concentration of power in Washington has yielded over time a collection of elites that has restrained the body politic in tethers of favoritism and self-serving maneuver. Wall Street has captured the government’s levers of financial decision making. Public-employee unions utilize their power to capture greater and greater shares of the public fisc. Corporations foster tax-code provisions that allow them to game the system. “Crony capitalism” is endemic. Members of Congress tilt the political system to favor incumbency. A national-debt burden threatens the country’s financial health. And American citizens have become increasingly frustrated and angry.

The postwar global system also is under serious strain. America is still the world’s preeminent power and will remain so for a considerable time. But the era when the world generally accepted American dominance is coming to an end. Challenges to U.S. preeminence are emerging from a host of quarters, and they will gather force in coming years and decades. The rise of China is the most obvious development signaling this new era, and prospects for tensions between Beijing and Washington are on the rise. But other regional powers are stirring in various areas of the globe—Turkey, Brazil, Russia and India. Meanwhile, the Middle East has taken a bold new direction that almost inevitably will render it less receptive to American blandishments and influence. And Europe faces perhaps its most harrowing challenge of the postwar era. With the euro threatened by debt problems and tensions mounting between northern European nations and their southern counterparts, some analysts wonder about the sustainability of the European Union itself.

The ramifications of these developments are huge. And herewith The National Interest sets out to explore those ramifications in this special issue, which is based on a central insight: whenever the status quo in any polity or setting comes under strain, the first reaction of many is to cling to that status quo, to protect it from the pressures and forces that seem threatening to what we know. In politics and in foreign policy, this is not a wise approach. Far better to face the changes converging upon the body politic or the global stage, to parse them for understanding and to fashion decision making aimed at crafting a new replacement order of the future.

It is in that spirit that we offer the following articles probing the profound changes under way in the American political structure, the global power structure and the global financial structure. We offer also regional spotlight pieces on Europe, East Asia and the Middle East, all of which are in the throes of fundamental change. The emergence of ambitious regional powers—what author and geopolitical analyst Parag Khanna calls the “Second World”—also is explored. Finally, we asked Brent Scowcroft, the national-security adviser under presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and a formidable analyst of global affairs, to offer some ruminations on what he calls a “world in transformation.”

Our contributors were enjoined not just to linger over current developments but also to provide historical backgrounders to those developments. Only through a historical perspective can we fully understand the profound developments of our time and glean, perhaps only dimly, where they are taking us.

One thing is clear: they are taking us into a new era. The only question is how much disruption, chaos and bloodshed will attend the transition from the Old Order to whatever emerges to replace it.

Brent Scowcroft | A Time of Transformation

Robert W. Merry
 | The Assault on U.S. Elites

Christopher Layne
 | America's Waning Influence

Christopher Whalen
 | The Fate of the Dollar

Gideon Rachman
 | The European Maelstrom

Jonathan Broder
 | Unfinished Mideast Revolts

Alan Dupont | An Asian Security Standoff

Parag Khanna | Surge of the 'Second World'

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