Even before Donald Trump launched his ill-advised war on Iran, America’s allies were already pronouncing the end of the era of U.S. leadership of the free world. “The West as we knew it no longer exists,” European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in April of 2025 as she tried to rally governments in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe to counter massive tariffs that Trump had recently imposed. “The old order is not coming back,” declared Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney this past January in a widely reported speech at Davos after fresh attempts by Trump to seize Greenland.
But in the wake of Trump’s cavalier attack on Iran and the global economic pain that has resulted, even some of America’s most vocal and influential champions of U.S. supremacy seem ready to throw in the towel. The neoconservative national security scholar Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution recently penned a requiem in The Atlantic for eight decades of Pax Americana:
Those days are now over and will not soon return. Nations that once bandwagoned with the United States will now remain aloof or align against it—not because they want to, but because the United States leaves them no choice, because it will neither protect them nor refrain from exploiting them. Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower. It will be lonely and dangerous.
Such declarations of the end of the U.S.-led international order are understandable. In a sense, they are a simple recognition of what Trump writes every day in ALL CAPS in his Truth Social posts, and of what his second-term government has been doing for 16 months. Just as Trump burned through his inherited wealth in a series of failed real estate ventures in his younger years, so is he now squandering decades of accumulated U.S. power in a mad attempt to overthrow the post-war system of alliances and institutions that was the means of acquiring that power. And he still has more than two-and-a-half years left in his presidency. Who knows how much more damage he will do? There is no reason to think he will abandon his beliefs that our allies are parasites, that international institutions are for losers, and that strongmen like him and Vladimir Putin should rule their spheres without constraint.
Countries across the globe are now recognizing that their past reliance on Washington for everything from advanced weaponry to sea lane protection has made them vulnerable to a leader like Trump. Consequently, they are looking for ways to give themselves some “strategic autonomy” from the United States—by, for instance, tilting towards China, or crafting a new coalition of “middle powers,” as Carney suggested in Davos, or creating a “European NATO” in which the U.S. no longer plays a leading, or perhaps any, role.
Given the circumstances, countries are wise to pursue these new arrangements. But they are poor substitutes for the U.S.-led liberal international order that Trump is dismantling. A better strategy is to rebuild that order in some form as soon as Trump leaves office. That might seem like wishful thinking, but it is not. Rather, it is the probable course of events if (as also seems likely) a Democrat wins the White House in 2028.
According to numerous polls, Democratic voters remain staunch supporters of Ukraine, NATO, and international institutions generally. They profoundly oppose Trump’s gunboat diplomacy in Venezuela and Iran. To win the presidential primary, any Democratic candidate must adhere to these views and, if successful in the general election, follow through in office to remain popular with the base. That shouldn’t be a problem if Democrats also control both houses and support a more internationalist foreign policy. Agencies gutted by Trump, such as USAID and the State Department, could be refunded and even expanded via reconciliation, thus requiring no GOP votes.
Some Republican lawmakers, free of Trump, might also be willing to support a more traditional foreign policy approach. In April, when Trump threatened to pull out of NATO if the allies didn’t help open the Strait of Hormuz, GOP Senate Majority Leader John Thune said there was little appetite in his caucus to support Trump in that effort. “We got an awful lot of people who think that NATO is a very critical, incredibly successful post-World War II alliance. And I think in the world today, you need allies,” Thune told reporters. Additionally, a NATO in which member states have raised their defense spending and taken increased responsibility for aiding Ukraine is an alliance that more conservative Americans can get behind without feeling like suckers.
Many supporters of traditional U.S. multilateralism fear that, because of Trump’s nationalist and extortionist policies, other countries can no longer trust us. After all, American voters elected Trump not once, but twice. That’s a fair point. But it’s also true that American voters threw Trump out of office once and, in virtually every election over the past year-plus, have signaled their unhappiness with the state of the country under his leadership. Moreover, all advanced democracies have far-right authoritarian political movements that could take over their governments. We can’t trust their voters any more than they can trust ours. We may all be fated to oscillate between liberal and illiberal governments, as Hungary has, until we address the working-class economic distress that is the root cause of the problem. As I have argued, it’s easier to do that multilaterally than separately.
Of course, another possibility is that Trump’s Iran “excursion” leads to a global recession, which the International Monetary Fund now sees as a possibility. In that case, the 47th president could exit the White House as the most despised in history, leaving MAGA-aligned politicians unable to get elected dogcatcher for years to come.
Still, why should other countries risk resubmitting themselves to U.S.-led alliances and institutions, given the Lucy-and-the-football chance that we will screw them again? The answer is that their other options are worse.
For all the brave talk about creating a European NATO, the truth is that the continent would have a difficult time defending itself from a full-on Russian attack at its weakest points, such as the Baltics, without U.S. assistance. Sure, events over the last year have forced more NATO countries to increase their military budgets, and plans are afoot to invest those funds in building up the European defense industrial base to reduce dependence on the U.S. But it could take decades for Europe to build the military capabilities that America has to counter the Russian threat—including the nuclear umbrella and the long-range intelligence and surveillance capacity that makes nuclear deterrence credible. The investment required for Europe to achieve that level of security on its own would entail unprecedented cuts to its social safety nets, which in turn would further fuel support for the far-right. If, three years from now, a newly elected American president promises to renew the U.S. commitment to NATO—including to Article 5, which states that an attack on one member is an attack on all—in return for continued U.S. preeminence in the alliance, will member states refuse?
We don’t have to speculate. Consider what happened five years ago. The very same president, Donald Trump—having spent his first term badmouthing NATO and pulling America out of various international agreements—was tossed out of office and replaced by Joe Biden. Soon after his inauguration, Biden flew to Munich and announced, “America is back.” European heads of state embraced him. And over the next four years, Biden—despite his fumbles, as with the shambolic exit from Afghanistan—led the international community as capably as any president in decades. He built a global alliance to support Ukraine after the Russian invasion, strengthened and expanded NATO, and brokered a military partnership between once-antagonistic allies Japan and South Korea to counter China’s rising power.
We often read that America’s ability to lead is fated to decline because we now live in a “multipolar” world with many competing centers of power. In fact, there are only two superpowers with the military and economic heft to lead international alliances: The United States and China. Yet while the United States has binding mutual defense treaties with more than 50 countries worldwide, China has only one, with neighboring North Korea. If it chose, it could probably expand that list to include the handful of dictatorships—like Russia, Myanmar, and Cambodia—with which it has looser military arrangements, and possibly draw in a few more in the so-called “global south” thanks to the goodwill it has built up with its Belt and Road Initiative of foreign investment. But few, if any, advanced democracies would accept membership in a China-led military coalition and risk being enmeshed in that dictatorial country’s many systems of repression.
There’s a reason the U.S.-led international order survived for 80 years and remained vital a year and a half ago, despite the relative decline of the American economy in recent decades. All things considered, it was a good deal for participating countries. Smaller states got security guarantees, access to larger markets, and a bigger voice in international decision-making. The U.S. obtained the cooperation of allies that multiplied its power and influence while helping defend and spread its values—democracy, human rights, open markets, the sanctity of borders, environmental stewardship, and so on.
Of course, America frequently acted in blatant disregard of those values. But it still had the clout to promote them as long as it was seen as acting on their behalf most of the time. And in addition to being admirable in and of themselves, those values enhanced the power of our smaller partners, because they could call America out when it threatened to act in contravention of them, often to positive effect. Just because Trump is contemptuous of those values and blind to their strategic advantages doesn’t mean that the next president can’t rededicate the U.S. government to them—and reap public support at home and cooperation abroad in the process.
I know it may seem absurd, or at least a profound misreading of the room, to argue that a return of benign U.S. leadership of the world is on its way when billions of people are being made economically miserable by the folly of the current White House occupant. But the truth is that the same power that makes America capable of doing vast damage also enables it to do great good. The world understands that. Liberals here at home must not lose sight of it.
