By Philip H. Gordon
Tuesday, June 09, 2026
Americans these days agree on very little about politics
and international relations. But there is a growing consensus around two
fundamental points. One is that the long-standing liberal world order—founded
after World War II and based on a system of U.S.-led alliances, multilateral
institutions, relatively open trade, and the defense of rules and norms such as
state sovereignty, nonaggression, and freedom of navigation—is now dead and
buried. It had been waning for some time, the logic goes, but the second Trump
administration is proving to be the final nail in the coffin. The second point
of emerging consensus is that a fundamental remaking of that order has become
essential. The American role in preserving the old order had become
counterproductive and unsustainable, and it is long past time that Americans
shed the burdens required to try to maintain it.
The problem with this line of thinking is that neither
assertion is true, and assuming otherwise could create a dangerous,
self-fulfilling prophecy. U.S. President Donald Trump certainly doesn’t believe
in a liberal, rules-based, U.S.-led order, and there is no guarantee that order
will survive four years of the damage his administration is inflicting on it.
At the same time, it would be premature to succumb to the fatalistic conclusion
that there is no hope for more principled and reliable U.S. leadership after
Trump, whose policies are now reminding many Americans what they lose when such
leadership is abandoned. It would be even more misguided to presume that if the
U.S.-led world order really is dying, it won’t be sorely missed when it is
gone. To paraphrase what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said
about democracy, a U.S.-led world order is probably the worst of all possible
orders—except for all the others that have ever been tried.
Cynics (or frankly any honest observer) might question
the degree to which a liberal rules-based order ever actually existed; it would
be easy to make a long list of examples of how rules have been bent, broken, or
ignored, not least by the United States itself. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark
Carney acknowledged in his landmark address to the World Economic Forum in
Davos in January 2026, the notion of a rules-based order was always “partially
false.” The world’s strongest powers would consistently “exempt themselves when
convenient,” trade rules were “enforced asymmetrically,” and international law
was “applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the
victim.” At the same time, as Carney also acknowledged, the liberal international
order was also partially true, and for eight decades, American hegemony “helped
provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective
security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” The United States
during that period adopted and maintained a broad, enlightened
view—historically unprecedented among great powers—that it had a national
self-interest in making other countries secure, prosperous, and free. That view
in turn gave other countries an interest in supporting U.S. leadership and the
order that came with it.
The U.S.-led international system that has been in place
since just after World War II has been marred by wars, injustices,
inequalities, and other horrors. But it has also underpinned the most stable,
secure, and prosperous 80-year period in world history. Much of that is because
every U.S. president before Trump believed in it, defended it, and had the
necessary public support to do so. Rather than complacently accepting its
demise—let alone celebrating or contributing to it—the American president who
comes after Trump should set out to update, improve, and sell the idea of an
enlightened and U.S.-led world where leadership, rules, values, institutions,
and norms still matter.
Top of Form
Bottom of Form
SILVER LININGS
In the 1979 film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, set
in AD 33, the character Reg (played by the comedian John Cleese) famously asks
fellow members of his Judean resistance group, “What have the Romans ever done
for us?,” only for them to mention aqueducts, sanitation, roads, irrigation,
medicine, education, public order, and even wine. Reg is reduced to responding,
“Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, . . . what have the Romans
ever done for us?” A similar joke could be made about American critics who
dismiss the benefits of U.S. global leadership over the past 80 years: apart
from avoiding great-power war (for the first time in history), keeping
sea-lanes open, curbing nuclear proliferation, fostering unparalleled
prosperity, advancing democracy, and granting the United States the unique
benefits of global preeminence, what did the U.S.-led order ever do for
Americans?
To say this is not to ignore the conflicts, injustices,
and hypocrisies of the past eight decades but to note how favorably that period
compares with any previous one in world history. Consider, for example, the
prevention of wars between major powers. In the 80 years that preceded 1945 or
any similar period before that, the world’s strongest countries fought
regularly and repeatedly, wreaking havoc on humanity. World War I and World War
II alone killed roughly 100 million people. By this standard, the last 80 years
compare rather favorably. To be sure, what the historian John Lewis Gaddis has
called “the long peace” that followed World War II was due in part to the
deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, whose invention coincided with the dawn of
the U.S.-led world order. As the political scientist John Mueller has pointed
out, it was also due to the simple reality that modern military technology,
even beyond nuclear weapons, makes war so catastrophic that major powers are
largely deterred from waging it against each other. But much of the long peace
also had to do with the presence and power of American military forces,
alliances, and defense agreements all over the world, which have deterred the
sort of territorial aggression and great-power wars that used to be
commonplace.
Nuclear weapons nonproliferation provides another case in
point. U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1963 warning that the world
could see some 15 to 25 nuclear states by the 1970s—a thought that “haunted”
him—was hardly implausible. Many experts and intelligence services concurred.
But it didn’t happen, not because nuclear know-how, material, or technology was
not available to states but because the United States gave credible security
guarantees to many of the states that might have considered that option and set
up multilateral institutions to deny access to adversarial potential
proliferators. The system was far from perfect—five countries developed nuclear
weapons after Kennedy’s warning—but others were deterred from or incentivized
against doing so. More nuclear weapons proliferation will not necessarily lead
to nuclear weapons use, accidents, or terrorist threats, but it does not seem
to be a gamble worth taking.
The liberal international order—anchored by American
security guarantees that provided stability for large parts of Europe and Asia,
open sea-lanes for the entire world, and U.S.-led institutions such as the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade
Organization—also helped to foster the largest expansion of global prosperity
in history. Critics may claim that the U.S.-led order benefited only the United
States and other advanced industrial countries, and that economic growth was unevenly
distributed among and within countries. But from 1945 to today, global GDP
increased more than tenfold, thanks in no small part to rising levels of wealth
in so-called developing countries. Average incomes tripled, and the share of
humanity living in extreme poverty fell from nearly 60 percent in 1950 to
around ten percent in 2025. The rise in global income lifted over a billion
people out of poverty altogether, and the global middle class grew to include
more than half the world’s population. Life expectancy rose from 46 years in
1950 to 73 years in 2024. This economic growth cannot be solely attributed to
the U.S.-led world order. But that order did provide unusually propitious
conditions for it to take place.
American global leadership also helped promote the
greatest expansion of individual freedom and democracy the world has ever seen.
In 1945, most of the world lived under authoritarian rule. By the 1990s, more
than half of all states were democracies; by 2016 it was six out of ten. Even
with the democratic recession of the past decade, the world remains far more
democratic than in any previous era. The United States often wielded its great
power selfishly, but it nonetheless provided a model and the space for
promoting open societies, rule of law, and human rights far beyond anything
before.
NOT DEAD YET
Some critics of the U.S.-led order might grant that it
has been great for the world. But they believe it has been an unsustainable
drain on American resources. Trump, for example, framed his campaign for
president in 2024 on a narrative of U.S. weakness and global decline, and many
voters seemed to believe him. According to a February 2024 Gallup poll, just 33
percent of Americans were satisfied with the position of the United States in
the world—a decrease of 20 percentage points from just four years prior. Many
Americans feel the United States has not been well served by the international
system that preceded Trump and have become convinced that the country is no
longer capable of playing a global leadership role.
But neither of these assumptions hold up to scrutiny.
U.S. economic growth over the past two decades has dwarfed that of other
wealthy countries, and the economy that Trump inherited was what The
Economist in October 2024 called “the envy of the world.” Whereas in 2008
the European Union’s economy was larger than that of the United States, U.S.
GDP is now more than 40 percent higher than that of the EU and more than seven
times that of Japan. Once common predictions that China would soon surpass the
United States economically have largely ceased as Beijing’s decades-long trend
of double-digit growth has ended and its economy faces demographic challenges,
weak consumption, and a bloated property market. Russia’s already much weaker
economy has been devastated by sanctions, export controls, and over four years
of war—to the point that the U.S. defense budget alone is now half the size of
Russia’s entire GDP. The United States obviously faces real economic problems—particularly
growing inequality and rising debt—but it still accounts for 26 percent of
global GDP, the highest share in nearly two decades and about where it stood at
the end of the Reagan administration.
Other measures of relative power underscore Washington’s
global strength. U.S. military power eclipses that of any other country, with a
defense budget more than three times China’s and larger than the top ten other
biggest spenders’ combined. U.S. energy production has reached a record high:
Washington leads global production of both oil and natural gas, at 20 percent
and 25 percent, respectively. American technology companies dominate global
markets and far outcompete rivals in the field of artificial intelligence. The
U.S. dollar is used in nearly 90 percent of foreign exchange transactions and
makes up 60 percent of foreign exchange reserves, which gives Washington broad
power to impose sanctions, freeze assets, and run deficits.
The United States still faces considerable domestic and
international challenges, and Trump’s policies—not least his inflationary
tariffs, cuts to top research institutions, indiscriminate restrictions on
immigration, and weakening of democratic norms and the rule of law—are doing
serious damage to the sources of its strength. But the notion that the United
States is no longer capable of playing a global leadership role or that its
exercise of such a role for the past 80 years has not served it well is not backed
up by the facts.
WORTH THE RISK?
As Americans have grown tired of their global role, the
track record and consequences of the U.S.-led order have been harshly and
increasingly criticized from both sides of the political spectrum. The right,
once internationalist but now dominated by Trump loyalists and “America first”
proponents, believes that American foreign policy elites have squandered vast
amounts of blood and treasure in search of “permanent American domination of
the entire world,” as the 2025 National Security Strategy put it. In contrast
to postwar American leaders such as President Harry Truman or Secretaries of
State Dean Acheson and George Marshall, Trump sees the world in zero-sum terms.
He has little appreciation for concepts such as public goods or the global
commons. He sees alliances not as force multipliers but as mechanisms for
allies to exploit the United States, and he harbors nothing but disdain for
multilateral institutions, rules, laws, or norms.
On the left is a different but overlapping critique: that
the history of the U.S.-led world order has been one of an unnecessary quest
for domination, excessive defense spending, failed military interventions,
hypocrisy, and the neglect of human rights. Many progressives recognize the
challenges posed by various U.S. adversaries but often blame American policies
and provocations as much as the adversaries themselves. They note that high
U.S. defense expenditures incentivized allies’ free-riding and came at the
expense of American workers, and that U.S. bases abroad provided targets for
Washington’s enemies as much as they deterred them. These critics question the
United States’ capacity for responsible global leadership and oppose the
defense spending that leadership requires.
There are of course huge differences between (and within)
these two schools of thought. But what they have in common is that neither
believes the U.S.-led liberal order is in the United States’ continued
interest. They also tend to take the benefits of U.S. leadership for granted
and fail to recognize the dangers that would loom if Americans gave up on it.
The biggest risk in a world without a strong United
States committed to allies, rules, and norms would be a lower cost of
aggression and a higher risk of major conflict as a result. As Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine showed,
outright territorial conquest is hardly extinct, and it would be naive to
conclude that ambitious or insecure states would not seek to take advantage of
a withering of American military power and security commitments. Trump likes to
brag about (and overstate) how he persuaded NATO allies to spend more on
defense. But if the U.S. defense commitment is made conditional and U.S. forces
deployed in Europe are reduced, the continent as a whole will be less secure,
and Russia could be tempted to think it could get away with further aggression
beyond Ukraine. If U.S. security commitments in the Indo-Pacific are no longer
backed by credible military forces, deterrence for Japan, South Korea, and
Taiwan could fail. Trump’s war of choice in Iran was reckless and
irresponsible, but if the United States withdrew its forces from the Middle
East and left its rivals to their own devices, nothing in history suggests
these states would just get along peacefully or that the United States would be
immune to the consequences if they didn’t.
Also at risk would be critical public goods such as open
sea-lanes, which have been taken for granted since the United States embraced
the principle of freedom of navigation after World War II and built up its navy
to enforce it. Skeptics of that role were given a sharp reminder of its
importance when Iran responded to U.S. attacks in February 2026 by closing the Strait
of Hormuz, sending fuel and other commodity prices skyrocketing. For more than
40 years, U.S. forces in the region had successfully deterred an Iranian
closure of the strait—even in periods of conflict—until Trump launched a war
that left the regime with little to lose. In a matter of weeks, American gas
prices rose by 50 percent, some Asian countries had to move to four-day
workweeks because of lack of fuel, farmers in Africa and other regions didn’t
have fertilizer for spring planting, and rising inflation and interest rates
put the entire global economy at risk. If the United States were now to give up
on the principle of freedom of navigation or the means to enforce it, other key
waterways—including the Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea, and the Suez
Canal—would be vulnerable either to adversarial domination or conflict among
competing powers. To the argument that such a role is too costly for the United
States to maintain, consider that a one percent reduction in U.S. GDP, which
could easily result from the closure of any of these key waterways, would cost
Americans over $300 billion in a year. A similar blow to the global economy
would cost over $10 trillion.
Nor can it be assumed that Kennedy’s nightmare of further
nuclear proliferation could be avoided. Indeed, mounting questions about
continued U.S. security commitments may have already set the stage for such an
expansion. Over 75 percent of South Koreans now support the development of an
independent arsenal. Polish President Karol Nawrocki has suggested that
his country develop its own nuclear weapons, and Germany is pursuing nuclear
cooperation with France and the United Kingdom. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman, whose country signed a comprehensive defense agreement with nuclear-armed
Pakistan in September 2025, has said since 2018 that his country would develop
its own nuclear weapons “as soon as possible” if Iran did so, and the Turkish
foreign minister said in February of this year that Turkey and others in the
region would consider doing so as well. Even Japan—the world’s only victim of
nuclear weapons use so far—is starting to debate the need for an independent
nuclear deterrent. The Trump administration’s mishandling of its war in Iran
does not negate the reality that without the U.S. capacity to prevent it from
doing so, the Islamic Republic might have produced nuclear weapons a long time
ago.
Critics of the U.S.-led order tend to downplay or wish
away all these risks, hoping that if Washington reduced its role, others would
step up to fill the gap. Some think that countries would start recognizing
great powers’ spheres of influence and, in doing so, avoid conflict. But in
truth, there is no replacement for what the United States provides. By taking
relative peace, prosperity, and stability for granted and focusing solely on
the costs of U.S. leadership rather than the benefits, these critics are
setting aside many of the lessons of the past century and proposing an
extraordinary gamble that those lessons no longer apply.
DON’T NIX IT, FIX IT
There is no guarantee that the U.S.-led order will
survive Trump, who is taking a sledgehammer to almost all its core pillars and
comprehensively destroying the institutions, principles, and the trust in the
United States on which it depends. Trump reflects American attitudes as much as
he drives them, and after seeing him elected twice, no one can claim that
Trumpism is a passing phenomenon. As Mara Karlin and I wrote in
Foreign Affairs earlier this year, Washington’s allies would be
irresponsible not to start urgently preparing for a world in which responsible
U.S. leadership never returns, and Americans who believe in such global
leadership are in no position to promise it ever will.
But Americans do not have to take that future as a given.
Instead of fatalistically accepting the premise that the U.S.-led order is dead
and cannot be revived, the next president should remind Americans of its value,
acknowledge its shortcomings, and offer a new vision for American leadership.
The United States after Trump should seek to reform the U.S.-led world order,
not retreat from the responsibilities of maintaining it.
The first step in this process would be to propose a new
bargain with allies. To address legitimate concerns that the old alliance
system placed unfair burdens on the United States, a new arrangement will have
to include greater contributions from allies, both to deal with growing threats
and to make alliances politically sustainable in Washington. Fortunately, the
process of greater burden sharing is already underway and likely to continue.
Even if the next U.S. administration believes strongly in the value of the
United States’ partnerships, American allies will know that a potential return
to a Trumpist foreign policy is just one election away. That, after all, is
what American officials warned their allies for years as they pressed for
greater burden sharing. Now, these countries have all too much reason to
believe it.
A renewed U.S. alliance system will also have to be
updated to reflect the most likely global challenges of the second quarter of
the twenty-first century. These include great-power competition with China and
Russia, growing cooperation among those powers and other adversaries such as
Iran and North Korea, the emergence of artificial general intelligence, the
need to create more resilience in supply chains and the U.S. defense industrial
base, and the impacts of climate change. To do that, and to increase linkages
between U.S. allies in different regions, the G-7 could be expanded to include
partners such as Australia and South Korea and given a mandate to include
national security–related export controls, outbound investment restrictions,
and collective responses to economic coercion. A new American president who
recommits the United States to the ironclad security guarantees that have
helped deter aggression for decades, and who once again treats allies with
trust and respect, would likely be welcomed enthusiastically as the leader of
this modernized alliance.
The next U.S. president will also have to demonstrate
respect for the rules, norms, and institutions that Trump is destroying. The
notion that previous American leaders abided by such rules may well have been
partially false, but no previous president came anywhere close to the degree of
domestic or international lawlessness Trump is displaying. All great powers
will be inclined to use the international system to their advantage, and no
multilateral system will ever be robust enough to ensure comprehensive respect
for all international rules and laws. But comprehensively eschewing
institutions, rules, international law, and norms altogether in a world of
“might makes right” is a recipe for injustice and renewed conflict among great
powers.
A renewed U.S.-led world order will have to address the
global economic imbalances and inequities that contributed so much to the
fading support for the old one. It will not be possible to go back to a world
where globalization and free trade agreements were touted as the path to
prosperity for all without recognition of their downsides—such as trade
imbalances with China and the decline in American manufacturing jobs in certain
communities. But it will also be necessary to pull back from the overcorrection
that has taken place over the past decade—and especially during the second
Trump term—in which the very word “trade” became a sort of taboo and huge
increases in U.S. tariffs interfered with trade flows, raised prices for
consumers, failed to restore manufacturing jobs, reduced farmers’ incomes, and
created enormous economic uncertainty while leaving the country’s overall trade
deficit virtually unchanged. The next president will have to be honest with the
American people, explaining that tariffs are a mostly regressive tax on
Americans; productivity gains and technology advances are far more responsible
than trade for the decades-long decline in the U.S. manufacturing sector; the
greatest beneficiaries of lower-cost imports are lower-income families; reducing
barriers to trade and opening up new markets can create good, high-paying jobs
for Americans; and protectionism and tit-for-tat tariff wars are more likely to
be a path to 1930s-style economic stagnation than to the massive expansion of
U.S. and global prosperity seen during the post–World War II era.
To the extent that reform of the World Trade Organization
and other institutions proves impossible, the next president should look to
develop new, flexible, and overlapping partnerships among like-minded states.
Such groupings could agree to use their collective leverage (the current G-7
countries alone represent some 750 million people and $55 trillion in GDP) to
deal with issues such as global supply chain vulnerabilities, China’s predatory
trade practices, and economic coercion in general. Such an approach would make
a lot more sense than putting up trade barriers within such groupings and
allowing China to play their members off one another. The United States should
also be prepared to explore bilateral and regional trade agreements that would
not only lower trade and investment barriers but also include enforceable
standards on labor rights, state subsidies, and environmental protection. By
boosting exports and making imports cheaper, such agreements would both
contribute to an overall rise in U.S. living standards and generate revenues
that could be used for worker transition assistance, training and “upskilling,”
and investments in local communities negatively affected by trade. Indeed,
formally linking commitments to make such investments to the trade deals
themselves would boost domestic political support for these types of
agreements.
The next administration must also recognize the American
public’s frustration with the burdens of global leadership and forever wars by
exercising greater humility and discretion in the wielding of American military
power—and allowing Congress to play its constitutional role. Most of the
problems with the past order were not about global military engagement or
presence but excess and overreach. The United States does need to deter China,
Iran, North Korea, and Russia; it did not need to spend $4 trillion over 20
years and sacrifice countless lives to try to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into
pro-American democracies. The United States did need to build and maintain a
global coalition to help save Ukraine from occupation and reinforce the
principle of nonaggression; it did not need to launch a unilateral war of
choice to try to accomplish regime change in Iran when diplomatic alternatives
were available. Of course, no administration can always exercise appropriate
wisdom in the face of hard foreign policy challenges, but forgoing the
capability to defend the international order is a recipe for disaster that
Americans would come to regret.
STILL AT THE READY
Americans who are worried about the domestic political
consequences of defending U.S. global leadership might admit that U.S.
leadership makes sense substantively but is not politically viable because they
are tired of the burdens it requires of them and the perceived lack of results.
This is what Trump’s second election was widely understood to suggest. Less
than two years into his term, however, the results of his unilateral,
transactional, and values-free policies are backfiring. He is the least popular
president ever at this point in his tenure, and polls now show American support
for alliances and international engagement at an all-time high. According to a
Gallup poll conducted in early February 2026, 64 percent of Americans think the
United States should play a major or leading role in solving international
problems, and the same percentage believes it’s important for the United States
to be the world’s leading military superpower. An NPR/Ipsos poll from January
2026 found that 61 percent of Americans believe the United States should be the
moral leader of the world (though only 39 percent believe it actually is). And
a July 2025 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey found that eight in ten
Americans believe that international trade benefits the United States and free
trade agreements effectively advance U.S. foreign policy goals. By the time
Trump’s presidency ends, in 2029, the case for supporting an updated vision of
an American-led world order may be more compelling than it has been in years.
Critics might argue that too much damage will have been
done for the United States’ allies—having been “fooled twice”—to believe any
new American commitments to global engagement, deterrence, institutions, or
rules. In fact, even after all that has transpired since January 2025, or
perhaps because of it, allies around the world would likely embrace a new form
of U.S. leadership with open arms. It is Washington’s adversaries who would
not.
After World War II, American leaders also faced doubts
about the country’s role in the world, and the system they created in that
war’s aftermath was not preordained. After the Vietnam War and the 1970s
Watergate scandal, many observers concluded that the United States no longer
had the strength, will, or moral authority to play a healthy role on the world
stage. In both cases, however, U.S. leaders understood that global peace,
prosperity, and security required a powerful and active United States,
committed to institutions, rules, and norms, and persuaded their compatriots to
support it, with historically unprecedented results. As Americans consider
their future role in the world, even as they focus on the need for change, they
should keep that record in mind.
