While designing World Order, we faced a crucial decision: which nations would best represent the distribution of global power across the current-day international arena? After careful consideration, we chose these four actors: the United States, China, Russia and the European Union.
The reasons behind this choice is that each of these powers actually plays a critical role in shaping international relations through soft power projection, involvement in conflicts, influence over multinational institutions, and importance of globalization. Thus, their inclusion in the game provides players with a realistic and immersive experience that mirrors the complexities of today’s geopolitical landscape.
The United States, or the lone superpower, has been the dominant force in the western hemisphere since the mid-19th century and turned into a great power over the course of the subsequent century, finally becoming the world-only superpower after defeating the Soviet Union. Its superpower status is underpinned by a unique network of alliances, economic might, military strength and projection, and cultural influence. The US boasts the world’s largest economy, with a GDP that has consistently set the pace for global economic trends. Its technological advancements, particularly in the digital, military, and information sectors, have revolutionized industries and reshaped global commerce.
Militarily, the United States maintains the most powerful and technologically advanced armed forces in the world, with a global presence that includes military bases in more than hundred countries and more than seventy collective defense arrangements, most notably NATO and ANZUS. The US has played a leading role in major international conflicts, from the 20th century-era world wars to the War on Terror-related interventions, and continues to be a central player in global security issues.
Diplomatically, the US has been the key architect of the post-World War II international system, also known as the rules-based liberal international order, promoting democracy, human rights, and free trade through institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. However, its influence has also been met with challenges, notably the Soviet Union in the second postwar and China in the 21th century.
In World Order, players assuming the role of the United States will experience the pressures of maintaining a superpower status, managing vast resources and resorting to powerful alliances while responding to crises and resisting pressures in the Western Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and in Latin America.
China is included in the game because it simply cannot be ignored. Its (re)ascent as a global power, often marketed as the peaceful rise, is one of the most significant developments of the 21st century. With its unprecedented meteoric economic rise, China has transformed itself from a developing agricultural nation into the world’s second-largest economy and the major challenger to American hegemony. This epoch-making transformation has been fueled by a combination of industrialisation-focused state-led capitalism, with massive amounts of goods manufactured for and exported to the Global North, which served as the foundation for investing in infrastructure and urbanization. Added to the low profile maintained over the course of the Cold War, which helped China spare lots of human and economic resources, this decades-long domestic focus made possible its subsequent rise in the 21st century.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative exemplifies its ambition to expand its influence across the continents and to stop being the low-cost factory of the West. Such an ambition is being accompanied by mammoth investments in military modernisation, especially in naval power, cyber and hybrid capabilities, and space weaponry, and in military build up in the near abroad.
On the diplomatic front, China is being sought to challenge the Pax Americana by promoting alternative international institutions, such as the BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, by teaming up with other multipolarity-seeking players, such as Russia and Iran, by taking a more assertive stance in regional disputes and by protagonizing the negotiating tables in the Middle East. Its influence now extends beyond economics and military power, as China increasingly plays an ever-growing role in global governance, diplomacy, development cooperation, against the backdrop of the building of its own network of strategic alliances.
Players choosing China in World Order will face real world-modeled challenges, such as the goals of sustaining economic growth, asserting regional dominance in the face of the American presence in the Pacific, and balancing relations with other major powers, sometimes aligning with them, while pursuing a vision of a multipolar world.
The European Union is a sui generis hybrid entity which deserved to have a role in the game. It’s true that the European Union is far from being a single nation, but it is equally true that it is the only way to give space (and a chance) to the declining European powers.
Alone, the EU countries mean increasingly less in world affairs. However, together they make up the world’s third-largest economy, the world-largest free movement area, and the world-largest unified job market. But the EU’s influence extends beyond economics: it’s the number one promoter and funder of development cooperation, human rights and progressivism, it’s the driving force of the climate action movement, and it’s a key force of peace-keeping operations.
Being an economic union with some political features, the EU has historically faced a number of challenges, such as the absence of a common foreign policy, the lack of consensus for what concerns the creation of a single army, and the internal divisions between EU nationalists and EU skeptics. This combination of issues has made the EU strongly reliant on the US-led NATO for its defense policy and very vulnerable to hybrid operations and electoral interference carried out by hostile powers.
Players who choose the EU in World Order will experience what it means to lead an economically powerful but militarily weak power, have a multipolar near abroad and have an assertive actor like Russia as permanent neighbor.
And then there’s Russia. While we fully understand concerns and doubts regarding its inclusion in the game, it’s an objective truth that Russia belongs to the great power club, even though it no longer enjoys the Soviet Union’s superpower status, and its actions are shaking up the West-led rules based international order from its very foundations.
Russia re-emerged as a great power during the 2000s, seeking to reclaim by force what it lost in the aftermath of the Cold War, and to overturn the West-led rules-based international order. Geo-economically speaking, Russia is one of the most influential players on the global stage, being among the richest countries in natural wealth. Militarily, Russia remains one of the world’s leading nuclear powers, ranking first in terms of nuclear warheads and belongs to the hypersonic weapons club – with five different types of hypersonic missiles, compared to the six of the US. What’s more, it has also developed a threatening network of paramilitary forces that help project its influence abroad.
Natural wealth, military power and, last but not least, the willingness to use the force to achieve its geopolitical goals, as shown by the war in Georgia, the intervention in the Syrian civil war and, ultimately, the invasion in Ukraine, make Russia, from a realist point of view, a player that it’s better not to ignore or to underestimate, mainly because it cannot be ignored at all.
Besides the aforementioned facts, it must be noted that Russia has resumed and updated Soviet-era hybrid war tactics, employing disinformation, cyber-attacks, and entryism to interfere in foreign elections and sponsor regime changes worldwide, especially in Africa. Asymmetry as a way to reshape the balance of power.
Lastly, since the early 2010s, Russia has increased its influence in the Global South, as evidenced by events such as the Russia-Africa forum, and has actively sought to counterbalance Western influence worldwide, with a particular focus on the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, collaborating with China and other like-minded partners such as Iran and North Korea. From a reality-adherent point of view, and also from the realist perspective, Russia can be considered a great power due to its fact-proven ability to disrupt trends, to challenge regional orders and to wage hybrid and conventional wars.
In World Order, players who take on the role of Russia will need to manage a resource-rich but economically unpredictable and low prosperous nation, balance internal development and world hegemony-oriented militarisation, and assert influence in a landscape where the United States and the European Union dominate most of the post-communist world.
In the end, in choosing these four powers, World Order offers players a realistic simulation of contemporary international politics. Each of these powers represents a different approach to power, with distinct strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and strategies. The game’s design allows players to experience what it’s like to manage the resources, diplomacy, military strategies, and domestic politics of these major powers. By focusing on them, World Order provides a rich and engaging experience that reflects the actual world order. But what do you think? If we had two more players, which powers would you add and why? Let us know your thoughts!