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.

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........

© Foreign Affairs