The Laws of
Game Theory

The Law of the Discarded Order

Why would a superpower dismantle the world order it built? A hegemon dismantles the order it built once maintaining that order costs more than the order returns. The order was an asset; it became a liability; it is being written down.

The mechanism

An international order is infrastructure, and infrastructure has running costs: guarantees that must be honoured, markets that must be kept open on terms favourable to others, institutions that must be funded and occasionally obeyed.

In the founding period those costs buy something enormous — a system in which the founder's preferences are the default. Over decades the returns fall. Other participants industrialise using access the founder provided. The guarantees are drawn on by parties contributing little. The institutions acquire independent standing and occasionally rule against the founder.

At some point the ledger inverts, and the rational move for the founder is to keep the parts that still pay and discard the parts that do not. From inside the order this looks like betrayal; from the founder's balance sheet it is a write-down.

The mechanism is indifferent to who holds office. Any leadership facing the same arithmetic reaches the same conclusion, which is why the behaviour persists across changes of government.

A worked example

Build the ledger explicitly for any order and any founder.

On the cost side: the security guarantees and what they would cost if drawn, the market access granted on asymmetric terms, the institutional funding, and the constraint on the founder's own freedom of action.

On the return side: the currency privilege, the setting of standards, the alliance access, and the ability to shape outcomes without force.

Now track both over decades. The costs rise with the number of participants; the returns fall as others gain capacity. Where the lines cross, expect the founder to begin renegotiating precisely the elements it once insisted upon — and expect the commentary to describe this as a departure from tradition rather than as the tradition's arithmetic conclusion.

What would prove this wrong

A hegemon that continues to fund an order whose costs demonstrably exceed its returns across a generation, or one that abandons an order while the ledger still favours maintaining it.

Where it comes from

Book One, chapter Game Theory #18: Trump World Order. The law is named in the second edition of that volume.

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Last reviewed 31 July 2026