Realism, as a paradigm of international relations, assumes that the world is (more or less) anarchy; that the most important actors are states; and that those states will struggle for survival in a dog-eat-dog world, relying mainly on strategies of self-help and calculations of zero-sum games.

But this is not how the world of the 21st century is working out. And as Thomas Kuhn observed years ago, the best evidence of impending paradigm change is an accumulation of anomalies, events that cannot be explained by the orthodox way of thinking.

Realism is confronting an increasing number of these anomalies.

First, the world is not anarchic. While it is true that there is still no authoritative world government with the power to enforce its decisions, relations among nations are nevertheless far from anarchic. Economic interdependence, advanced means of communication and transportation, and international institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, have transformed international relations in ways that profoundly alter calculations of cost/benefit and national interest.

Moreover, in an anarchic world, inter-state warfare is common, but in today’s world, the incidence and expected gains of war among states have sharply decreased. At the same time, the perceived benefits of state-to-state cooperation have increased. If there were any doubts about how interconnected our world had actually become, the current financial crisis has demonstrated our interdependence in a devastating way.

Second, realism assumes that international relations can be explained simply by focusing on state behaviour. For realists, the state is the basic unit of analysis. But how can you explain 9/11 in terms of state behaviour? Or the global financial crisis, labelled by many analysts as the greatest security threat of our time?

The basic concept of state sovereignty, a cornerstone of orthodox thinking, has also come under attack. Kofi Annan, when he was UN Secretary General, spoke of ‘two concepts of sovereignty,’ the state and the individual, in a world in which ‘states are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice versa,’ and he urged that individual sovereignty should be a priority for the United Nations.

More recently, the concept of R2P, the responsibility to protect, claims that the international community has the responsibility to intervene to protect civilians from major abuse in states that are either unable or unwilling to protect their own. Finally, at the same time that state sovereignty has come under challenge, multinational corporations, NGOs, and other civil society actors have played an increasingly influential role in foreign affairs.

The third major assumption in the realist paradigm, self-help, is also being challenged. The classic realist interpretation of the world envisions states that operate as isolated individuals in a struggle of ‘the survival of the fittest,’ where each must rely principally on its own wit and capacity. Cooperation among states is understood to be motivated mainly by the principle of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ or, at best, balance of power. Today, by constrast, virtually every major world problem appears to require sustained cooperation among states, rather than confrontation.

The world has changed. Governments today are responding to a very different strategic environment than during the Cold War. Just as, by the 1960s, it was clear that autarky as an international economic strategy for any country was no longer viable (and the price that China had paid for its ‘self-reliance’ period under Mao was clear evidence of this), by the turn of the century, it had become clear that strategic autarky was no longer viable for any state, including the United States. George W. Bush’s adventure in unilateralism and the disasters that his administration produced were strong evidence that even for the world’s sole superpower, going it alone would not work.

Aware of this fact, President Obama is searching for opportunities to cooperate with other states to deal with the immense problems left to him by Bush. It is clear that the United States will not be able to resolve any of these problems by itself: getting out of Iraq; reaching a viable solution in Afghanistan; dealing with the global financial crisis; handling the nuclear-weapons challenges by Iran and the DPRK; or, indeed, climate change.

Peter Van Ness is a visiting fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University, and coordinator of the project on peacebuilding in Northeast Asia. His most recent book is Confronting the Bush Doctrine (edited with Mel Gurtov).