The recurring obituaries for the multilateral international order have been a feature of foreign-policy commentary for more than a decade. The obituaries have been overtaken, with notable consistency, by the order's actual ongoing adaptation. The adaptation is real; the obituaries are tracking a configuration of multilateralism that no longer exists rather than the configuration that has emerged in its place.

What is genuinely changing

What is genuinely changing in the multilateral order is the locus of activity, the composition of the most active coalitions, and the kinds of issues that produce the most substantive cooperation. These changes are not collapse; they are reorganisation.

Where the activity has moved

The activity has moved away from the largest universal-membership institutions toward smaller plurilateral arrangements that organise themselves around specific functional or geographic concerns. The smaller arrangements have been delivering operational results on supply chain coordination, technology governance, and certain categories of regulatory cooperation that the universal-membership institutions could not have produced.

What does and does not work

What does not work as well as it did a generation ago is the universal-membership-based deliberative process for the issues that require broad consensus. The reasons are several; none of them is mysterious.

What does work, on the operational evidence, is the smaller and more focused cooperation that the new institutional architecture supports. The architecture is less elegant than the universal-membership model; it is also producing more outcomes.

The American role

The American role in the new architecture has been more constructive than the broader public commentary often acknowledges. American convening capacity has supported several of the most successful smaller arrangements; American technical and financial contributions have been the backbone of others.

The honest framing

The honest framing is that the multilateral order is doing what institutions do when their environment changes: adapting. The adaptation produces both gains and losses. The gains are real; the losses are also real; the order continues to operate, in its altered form, as the structure through which most international cooperation continues to happen.