The foreign-policy establishment that mismanaged the post–Cold War order is now laying claim to the post-neoliberal one. Having learned nothing, it offers the same self-justifying bromides—only this time dressed up as “rational” versions of Trump’s economic nationalism. The Foreign Affairs essays by Emily Kilcrease and Geoffrey Gertz (“Tell Me How This Trade War Ends”) and by Wally Adeyemo and Jeffrey Zoffer (“The World Economy Was Already Broken”) are exemplary of this trend. They represent a bipartisan elite consensus whose purpose is not to rethink U.S. hegemony but to manage its decline while pretending to renew it.

Kilcrease and Gertz, both affiliated with the Center for a New American Security—the Democratic Party’s national-security talent farm—write for a readership of policy professionals worried about the erosion of U.S. dominance and the rise of China. Their message is reassuring: the liberal order can be saved if only America acts like Trump but thinks like Harvard. They divide the world into “good” and “bad” states, scrubbing corporations and class relations from the picture entirely. In their scenario, virtuous states must defend themselves against China’s “abuses” by sacrificing economic efficiency for security.

Most strikingly, they propose abandoning the Most-Favored-Nation principle, the cornerstone of GATT and the WTO, to allow preferential trade among “trusted” partners. Their CNAS war-game reaches a predictably self-serving conclusion: if Washington escalates tariffs, other countries will submit, terrified of losing access to the U.S. consumer market. Coercion becomes........

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