During his campaign for president, Donald Trump promised to deliver a nationalist “America first” foreign policy. He boasted about how, in his first term, he had threatened to abandon NATO allies and claimed that in his second, if European NATO members failed to increase their defense spending, he would let the Russians “do whatever they want.” His high-profile nominees and appointments have elevated MAGA loyalists who have long inveighed against “globalism” and the “liberal international order”; his administration will be staffed by a large number of contributors to the Heritage Foundation’s policy wish list, Project 2025, which calls for the United States to exit the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Days after Trump tapped the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Hegseth condemned the United Nations as “a fully globalist organization that aggressively advances an anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-freedom agenda.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Trump’s 2024 victory has generated headlines such as “America Chooses a New Role in the World” and “Trump Will Deliver the Final Blow to the Liberal Order.” Trump’s second term will, without a doubt, reorient both domestic and international politics. He fully intends to push both in illiberal directions. But his presidency will not end the so-called liberal international order, for the simple reason that it has already ended.

The liberal international order is shorthand for the international institutions and treaty arrangements that Washington took the lead in creating during the first decade after World War II, including the United Nations and NATO. These ostensibly, and sometimes actually did, promote human rights, freer trade, democracy, and multilateral cooperation. Washington—along with its most powerful allies—expanded and reworked that order after the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse left the United States the world’s sole superpower; that expansion saw a wave of democratization, the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and a worldwide push for unfettered global trade and financial flows. For more than a decade, however, China and Russia have been engaged in their own international ordering projects. They have done so directly, such as by contesting human rights norms at the UN, and indirectly, by offering economic and security deals that are, at best, indifferent toward defending democratic governance and combating corruption. Meanwhile, the relative economic decline of the G-7 countries has enhanced the bargaining leverage of weaker states. For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, such states now enjoy meaningful alternatives to Western markets, development assistance, and even military protection. And the rise of reactionary populism—not just in North America and Europe but also in India and in parts of Latin America—has shattered the ideological dominance that liberalism enjoyed for two decades after the end of the Cold War. U.S. President Joe Biden retained key aspects of Trump’s nationalist economic approach, including Trump’s tariffs, and pushed forward the first major U.S. industrial policy in decades via the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

References to the “liberal international order” discount the growing strength of illiberalism in global politics. The broad-brush phrase also wrongly implies that many aspects of contemporary international order—principles and practices such as state sovereignty, the rule of law, and multilateralism—are inherently or necessarily liberal, when in fact they are perfectly compatible with some nonliberal and illiberal forms of politics. Consider the fact that China and Russia—hardly liberal countries—are not seeking to destroy multilateralism. On the contrary: they are racing to expand their influence in long-existing multinational institutions and to create their own counterparts.

This is in part because they understand the power that such institutions provide to the United States. Important elements of what is known as the liberal international order are, in fact, components of the infrastructure of American power: norms, institutions, and relationships that offer Washington a still unmatched ability to influence other states, coordinate responses to emerging threats, and secure cooperation on matters it considers crucial to its national interests. Even a foreign policy solely concerned with preserving American power would invest in sustaining key elements of this system. With Trump’s victory, however, self-proclaimed American nationalists now hope to wreck or upend an unrivaled network of American influence that took more than 50 years to build.

But internationalists who oppose these nationalists should also reconsider the way they talk and think about the stakes. Trump’s contempt for institutionalism is the mirror image of how the Biden administration, and liberal........

© Foreign Affairs