The global security order has been evolving since 1989, led initially by the USA to expand its post?1945 order in Europe to the rest of the world but propelled as well by competition and debates within that post?Second World War alliance, as collective victors in the Cold War, about how to define a new international order. This article identifies three US policies that began this restructuring; their parallel redefinitions of security, and the tensions provoked by this agenda and its consequences, both within the ‘North’, replacing the ‘West’, between North and ‘South’, replacing the‘East’and the resulting multiple opportunities for alternative political coalitions, North against South, between North and South, and within the South, that have yet to play themselves out fully. The resulting fluidity has not yet stabilised into a new international security order.