By Benn Steil
Friday, January 23, 2026
For all but the chronically disengaged, it is difficult
to reflect on the past year of Donald Trump’s presidency without concluding
that the world order is undergoing a brutal demolition. For those of us
appalled by it, it is tempting to fall back on the notion that it reflects the
pathologies of one personality, and that the damage might be halted by
distracting him or, time and Trump permitting, the results of an election or
two.
But this would be to ignore the fact that at least a
sizeable minority of the American electorate either supports the president’s
actions or has no beef with them—including his deposal of Venezuela’s Nicolás
Maduro; his threats against Cuba, Colombia, Panama, Mexico, Canada, and
Greenland; his scorning of NATO; his sellout of Ukraine; and his dismissal
of international law more broadly. A Wall Street Journal poll finds
that a rock-solid 92
percent of Trump voters approve of his performance, and 70 percent
“strongly approve.” If they turn against him, it will be over rising electric
bills, and not his contempt for liberal order.
That order was the product of elite thinking in
Washington and New York some 80 years ago, when the United States was at the
apex of its military, economic, and diplomatic dominance. During and
immediately following World War II, the Roosevelt and Truman administrations
spearheaded the creation of an enormous latticework of international rules and
norms relating to everything from trade and currency to labor and human rights
to diplomacy and war. This universalist thinking was reflected in the architecture
of the United Nations (1945), the International Monetary Fund (1945), the World
Bank (1945), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947), although
even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949) and the European Coal and
Steel Community (1951)—offshoots of the early-Cold War Marshall Plan
(1948)—aimed at furthering universalism by placing the defense and expansion of
democracy at its heart.
As extensive as this legal latticework was, it could
neither cover all exigencies nor resolve contradictions. In practice, it relied
on the United States to initiate action as a kind of Aristotelian uncaused
cause, godlike from outside the system, while generally forgoing the type of
nakedly self-interested behavior that would openly deny the order’s authority.
By historical standards, the project was astoundingly
successful—not in that all nations conformed, since the United States itself at
times strayed willfully and radically, but in that virtually all nations felt
compelled to align themselves with it, to argue for alternative understandings
of it, or to justify their deviations from it. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark
Carney said
Tuesday at Davos, “Countries like Canada prospered under what we called the
rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its
principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could
pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.”
Still, he continued, “We knew the story of the
international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would
exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced
asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor,
depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” On balance, though,
“this fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide
public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security
and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.”
And so, Carney concluded, “We participated in the
rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and
reality.” But “this bargain no longer works.”
What happened?
The rules-based order rested on a fundamental paradox.
Liberal universalism held that decisions had to be taken through the liberal
doctrines of deliberation, compromise, and proceduralism—none of which could
ever ensure timely and effective action. Such an order cannot acknowledge the
limits of liberalism without undermining its own moral premise—that no decider
can stand beyond the system, imposing its will as a supposed means of
maintaining it.
This paradox was unproblematic so long as the U.S.
behaved so as not to make it manifest. But the slow-motion death of the World
Trade Organization shows how it can prove fatal.
Launched in 1995, the WTO operates a Dispute Settlement
Mechanism and Appellate Body that arbitrates trade disputes. For many years, it
functioned well, peacefully settling conflicts over rules and practices. The
DSM can reasonably lay claim to being the crown jewel of post-Cold War
supranationalism.
U.S. frustration with the system, however, began growing
rapidly after China’s WTO accession in 2001. Key features of China’s
state-capitalist system—such as subsidized capital, coerced technology
transfer, and systematic overcapacity generated by industrial policy—were
beyond the organization’s ability to discipline. Yet it also denied Washington
a free hand to counter China’s abuses with protective trade barriers.
In 2011, the Obama administration, objecting to the
Appellate Body’s scrutiny of American antidumping and countervailing duty
determinations, refused to allow the reappointment of an American judge,
Jennifer Hillman. Since 2017, early in President Trump’s first term, the U.S.
has blocked all appointments to the body, rendering it inquorate and unable to
function. From that time, the U.S. has also repeatedly justified new trade
barriers on the grounds of “national
security”—which it insists are not subject to review. Consequently, many
other countries have followed suit, leading to a global proliferation of new
trade barriers, all justified by “national security” concerns.
The moral of the tale is that the WTO’s liberal rules and
proceduralism worked well only so long as nations followed the lead of the
United States and restrained their use of export subsidies, import barriers,
and measures contradicting accepted principles of free and fair trade. But once
trust and good faith were undermined by the deadly dialectic of Chinese abuses
and U.S. reaction, argument and deliberation within the body became
performative, no longer aimed at actual resolution. Absolutist serial moral
pronouncements and specious “national security” invocations replaced reasoned
dialogue. Enforcement became impracticable. And so the WTO became a zombie
body, shorn of its animating purpose. This same process is now playing out
within NATO, where long-standing U.S. frustrations over its disproportionate
funding burden have, with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, boiled
over into an open assault on its raison d'être as defender of a European
liberal order.
At the broadest level, the breakneck rise of China as an
illiberal superpower has fatally undermined the role of the United States as
the hegemon ex machina, holding together a liberal order from beyond it,
and making plain the paradox that had always underlain it. That order could not
survive the proliferation of rules without enforcement, legalism without
legitimacy, and procedural fixation amid conflict over fundamental values. This
last problem—the absence of underlying common values within a liberal order—has
been a central source of concern among political philosophers and juridical
scholars from Leo Strauss on the reasoned right to Carl Schmitt on its far
anti-liberal extreme.
The logical limitations of liberal order are perhaps
nowhere better captured than in the writings of psychiatrist Iain
McGilchrist—although he has, to my knowledge, never actually written on the
question. McGilchrist contrasts rationality, a left-hemisphere brain
preference, with reason, a right-hemisphere preference. Rationality is
rules-based and detached from lived reality. Reason is context-sensitive,
grounded in experience. The tension between the desires for rationality and
reason is mirrored in the functioning of the liberal order.
The United States has long evinced a “split brain”
outlook on the system—believing, on the one hemisphere, that the rules-based
liberal order was rational, all-encompassing, and self-regulating, and, on the
other, that Washington required discretionary reasoning in the conduct of its
own affairs. This can be interpreted, as Schmitt surely would have interpreted
it, as hegemonic hypocrisy. But it also reflects a certain animating naïveté in
the Washington of 1945—a belief that the United States, the sovereign
incarnation of liberal principles, could never be unduly constrained by the
universal application of those principles.
Nowhere is the flaw in this belief clearer than in the
evolving U.S. approach to the International Court of Justice—created, like much
else in the universalist firmament, in 1945. The U.S. has long supported the
ICJ as the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. Yet it has, over
time, placed increasingly strict limits on the ICJ’s authority over U.S.
action, withdrawing entirely its acceptance of compulsory jurisdiction under
Article 36(2) of the ICJ Statute in 1986, when Nicaragua charged it with violating
international law on the use of force. It turns out that when the rationality
of the rules-based system the U.S. created clashed with the reason it applied
in determining its vital interests, its reason won out. Still, it has remained
vocal in supporting ICJ decisions against adversaries—such as Russia,
over its invasion of Ukraine. Herein lies the contradiction highlighted by
Carney.
It is hard to imagine the willful destruction of the
liberal order being undertaken by any plausible alternative president—or at
least not with the brutality of Donald Trump. Still, the signs of its crumbling
have been evident for years. It tracked the relative decline of the United
States, economically and militarily, vis-à-vis China, which eroded American
willingness to sacrifice short-term advantage to long-term stability.
Even as Trump pulls back from his threat to invade
Greenland, the broader trajectory is unmistakable. We are drifting—not by
accident, but by structural necessity—toward a world that looks far less like
the liberal universalism of 1945 and far more like the balance-of-power order
of the late 19th century: spheres of influence, managed rivalry, and
transactional diplomacy. The United States will dominate the Western
Hemisphere; China will dominate the Asia-Pacific; Russia will contest Europe’s
eastern frontier. International law will persist, but as rhetoric rather than
restraint.
There are no obvious winners in this world. Economic
growth will fall as trade walls rise. Border-blind threats—to health, to the
environment, to financial stability—will rise as cooperation falls. Wars will
be quicker to start and harder to end. This world was always latent in liberal
universalism itself. Trump did not invent its contradictions; he merely
stripped them of their euphemisms.
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