There had been two successive world orders before WWII. The first emerged at the 1815 Congress of Vienna and ended with WWI. The second was created after WWI and ended with WWII. See this Foreign Affairs magazine article for more explanations: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2018-1...
There was no world order after ww1. It was great powers building up to fight. How anyone could claim there was an international order between ww1 and ww2 is beyond me.
I've read the foreign affairs article before. It's propaganda junk like all foreign affairs articles. Foreign affairs is published by a think tank ( aka propagandists ).
Take one of it's central thesis : "The American grand strategy that emerged in this era—continental expansion and internal development combined with self-righteous aloofness from the world beyond the seas—suited a commercial republic deep in the global periphery. It could work, however, only because the United States was protected by geography and British naval supremacy. "
The idea that america was "aloof" in the 1800s is laughably false. And the idea that we depended on british naval supremacy is also patently false.
Nevermind that we fought and won against the "mighty" british in the early 1800s and essentially forced our will on them in the western hemisphere, we were also busy partaking in the opium wars in china, destroying the spanish empire in the US and abroad and forcing japan to open its ports ( something the "mighty" british couldn't get japan to do ). We became a world power in spite of the british naval supremacy, not because of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol
http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_1750_perry.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams%E2%80%93On%C3%ADs_Treaty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty
French is an offical language of the UN, but so is mandarin, arabic, russian, spanish, etc. Using your logic, the chinese, egypt, russia, etc ruled the world?
There has been one international world order. The american world order. The british empire never created one. Neither did the french, russians, chinese or arabs.
What basic principles and norms? The international world order, like all order, is ruled by the fist ( or might ). A lot of people had to die and will continue to die for "order". "Priniciples and norms" are just fluff we make up to distract from or justify the fist.
Lots of people would want to "upset the apple cart". Do you really think the chinese or the russians or even the germans or japanese or eventually the indians or any other major nation wouldn't want to be top dog?