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 internationalists more broadly, have justified their own foreign policy preferences, including U.S. commitments to NATO and support for Ukraine. Each of those policies, they contend, is necessary to defend immutable principles: not just support for democracies but the preservation of a liberal order worldwide. Yet this argument is increasingly out of touch with the complex realities of contemporary international politics. The Biden administration’s framing of the Ukraine crisis failed to sway countries of the global South, which often associate rhetoric about a liberal or rules-based international order with Western efforts to dictate their economic policies, meddle in their politics, and disrespect their sovereign autonomy. It also exacerbated the backlash against the United States over its unwavering support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

It is well past time to retire the understanding of international politics encapsulated by the term “liberal international order.” It has become less lodestar than lodestone, saddling foreign policy debates with a surfeit of ideological, often Manichaean, baggage. It mires internationalists in nostalgia for an idealized past. And worst of all, it is now driving reactionary populists and postliberals to mistakenly support policies that weaken the United States.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

NATO was indeed founded as a defense pact among liberal democracies, one rooted in the internationalist principles that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill laid out in the 1941 Atlantic Charter. After the end of the Cold War, the organization rebranded itself as the anchor of a liberal democratic security community rather than a defensive alliance aimed more narrowly at deterring external threats. But the rationale for the United States to sustain its commitment to NATO—as well as to support Ukraine—cannot be reduced to a principled wish to protect liberalism worldwide. NATO also owes its existence to two fundamental tenets of postwar U.S. grand strategy: that the United States cannot afford to see a rival power establish dominance over Europe and that preventing such an outcome requires a standing U.S. military presence on the continent.

These strategic precepts first failed to prevent, and then prolonged, World War II. The United States and the rest of the world paid an unacceptable price in blood and treasure after Washington attempted to wash its hands of European power politics in the wake of World War I. NATO, by contrast, achieved key U.S. strategic goals not merely by deterring the Soviet Union but also, as its first secretary-general, Hastings Ismay, put it, by “keeping Germany down.” NATO did not merely end the threat of German aggression against its neighbors. It greatly reduced the risk that any of its member states would engage in significant and sustained military conflict. The arrangement proved so successful that a war among France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom now seems inconceivable. The American architects of NATO worried about a rival power achieving dominance in Europe; instead, the United States became the dominant player in European security.

Many “America first” foreign policy hands and self-described realists believe that the United States can drastically scale back its commitments to NATO without jeopardizing its long-standing strategic goals in western Eurasia. They point to post–Cold War developments such as the apparent ease of deterring Russia from invading Europe, the lack of military friction between European nations, and the existence of a functional European Union. The problem here is straightforward: the U.S. commitment to NATO made all of these developments possible in the first place. Advocates of a U.S. drawdown claim that current trends would persist in the absence of a strong American presence. Perhaps they are right. But if they are wrong, the costs will far outweigh any possible gains the United States could win by freeing up some forces for use in the Asia-Pacific.

The United States does not uphold its obligations to NATO out of some kind of misguided altruism. The alliance is a crucial instrument of U.S. power: NATO ensures that competition between the United States and Europe remains restricted to the economic sphere. And within that sphere, the alliance helps keep the European market—one of the world’s largest, accounting for 15 percent of global trade—especially friendly toward the United States and aligned with American economic interests. If the world is entering a new, more chaotic era of great-power competition, the existence of NATO dramatically reduces the number of serious geopolitical competitors that the United States faces. Policymakers who believe that the United States can simply “pivot to Asia” must understand that Washington will need the support of all its existing allies if it intends to compete with China. Already, NATO’s activities in support of Ukraine have boosted allied countries’ willingness to act in concert with Washington against Beijing.

DUAL USE

In their antipathy to all things “liberal,” many Trump advisers are playing into the hands of America’s rivals. The irony is that the United States’ authoritarian adversaries have no difficulty distinguishing between multilateralism and liberalism. Indeed, they are building out their own infrastructure of international institutions and multilateral forums. China has already made significant progress on this front, having founded or taken the lead in a large number of new institutions, including the BRICS, in which Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa were the first members; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with other Asian states, including Russia; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation; the China-CELAC forum, a set of summits in which it meets with Latin American and Caribbean governments; and the newly established China–Central Asia mechanism. Beijing is leveraging these to promote its goals—many of them profoundly illiberal—and to explicitly counter the United States. The Astana Declaration, for example, which the Shanghai Cooperation Organization adopted in July 2024, opposed protectionist measures and “unilateral missile defense systems,” thinly veiled references to the United States.

Neither China nor Russia is focusing exclusively on building its own institutional capacity. Both also seek to undermine the United States’ existing influence in the international order. Rather than attacking incumbent institutions such as the UN, China and Russia have focused on expanding their sway over the organizations’ staffing and policy priorities. And capitalizing on the tendency of American leaders to look at world politics through the lens of ideological shibboleths, Beijing and Moscow are playing U.S. conservatives for suckers. Consider Russia: to some degree, the American right’s turn away from backing Ukraine reflects Trump’s own idiosyncratic obsessions. If Trump were less enamored of Russian President Vladimir Putin—or if his worldview were less informed by the burden-sharing debates of the late 1980s, when trade tensions between the United States and Germany and Japan were at their peak—more American conservatives would likely back aid to Kyiv. The Kremlin has also conducted a long-term effort to cultivate the U.S. right by using the same techniques that Russian intelligence used to build ties with European far-right parties, including junkets, financial support, and propaganda.

Moscow knows that its often superficial commitment to cultural conservatism gives it soft power with the American right. It uses that appeal to sell an anti-NATO, ostensibly antiglobalist vision of international order to American conservatives—a vision that just so happens to serve Russia’s interests. Moscow does not want to weaken NATO because the alliance is “liberal” or “globalist.” It wants to weaken NATO because doing so will enhance Russian power at the expense of the United States. And like China, it seeks to increase its influence in the kind of institutions that Trump’s camp dismisses. In July, when Russia hosted the 2024 BRICS summit, it was eager to present the organization as a counterweight to Western-led multinational financial institutions and touted the attendance of the UN secretary-general, António Guterres.

China and Russia are furiously seeking new forms of multilateral engagement because they believe that doing so will only become more important. Unlike during the Cold War, when many countries chose or were coerced to align with one of two patrons, today’s states want to hedge risk and maximize their leverage by establishing a diverse portfolio of security commitments, political support, and aid from rival powers. Even governments closely aligned with the United States are becoming more independent and entrepreneurial in their geopolitical allegiances. Any anxiety that India, for instance, might have initially felt about its neutrality on Ukraine quickly gave way to a confident defense of its right to strategic autonomy and to maintain dialogue with Moscow. Turkey remains part of NATO. But it has refused to join the anti-Russian sanctions regime, has applied to join the BRICS, and continues to promote its own interests in the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates’ position as a major U.S. security partner has not prevented it from establishing itself as a hub for Russians who want to evade U.S. sanctions.

POWER STRIP

In the short term, if Trump withdraws from alliances and multilateral institutions, his purely transactional foreign policy may succeed in extracting greater concessions from countries that depend on U.S. security guarantees or cannot afford to lose access to American markets. But great-power competition will give many of those countries exit options. They can shift toward other export markets, find alternative sources of development assistance, or seek military protection from a rival great power.

And if the United States abandons, explicitly or implicitly, even a minimal commitment to some of the foreign policy principles it has long espoused—such as human rights, democracy, and good governance—little will set it apart from its great-power competitors. To be sure, the country has never lived up to the loftiest articulation of its values in either its domestic politics or its international behavior. When it comes to naked power politics, the United States can give any great power a run for its money. But despite that history, the United States has also won allegiance from other countries because it has stood for ideals with widespread international appeal. It is vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy because its support for those principles is inconsistent, not nonexistent. If Trump’s most transactional impulses become U.S. policy, however, the United States will lose a tarnished but nontrivial asset in its power-politics toolkit. When other governments ask themselves why they should partner with the United States instead of, say, China, the only answer will be “better compensation.” That means the United States will have to spend more to get less.

There are other ways that the abandonment of liberal values—or values often coded as “liberal,” such as an opposition to corruption—could damage the United States’ security, impinge on its economic interests, and diminish its power, putting it at the mercy of competitors. The post–Cold War unipolar moment allowed the United States to build a huge toolbox of policy mechanisms by which it influences countries, companies, and individuals around the world. Like some of the kleptocratic regimes he mistakenly admires, Trump could easily repurpose these instruments to enrich himself and his friends. A politicized Justice Department and Treasury Department could deploy the anticorruption measures found in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Foreign Extortion Prevention Act, and the Magnitsky Sanctions Program to persecute foreign officials who offend Trump or target foreign leaders’ opponents with time-consuming corruption investigations in return for payments or favors. An illiberal American leader could selectively and arbitrarily use such tools to punish governments that refuse to transact with his cronies.

Such behavior would pose obvious dangers to U.S. national security. But it would also destroy important instruments of American power. Consider the United States’ ability to impose targeted sanctions, enforce broader sanctions regimes, investigate corruption in other countries, and target terrorist groups’ finances. It is able to do these things effectively in part because of the ways in which it dominates the global financial system, such as prohibiting sanctioned actors from transacting in U.S. dollars in the United States and across the international financial system. Many foreign governments tolerate their vulnerability because the United States uses these instruments in relatively predictable ways. But if an American president started deploying them for corrupt purposes, other countries would become much less willing to accept how vulnerable they are to U.S. financial pressure. And finding ways to limit the United States’ influence over the global financial system—by increasing nondollar reserve holdings, including digital assets and cryptocurrency, and their use in international transactions—would become much more appealing. Although a single credible alternative to the U.S. dollar, such as a BRICS currency, is still a long way off, sanctioned countries including Iran, North Korea, and Russia are making international de-dollarization a priority.

Trump and his acolytes are poised to commit a string of unforced foreign policy errors driven by ideological opposition to a system—the liberal order—whose nature and value they clearly do not understand. The nature of this order is already shifting because of forces well outside the United States’ control. To cope with urgent challenges such as interstate conflict and large-scale migration, U.S. policymakers will need a keen, nuanced sense of which powers and advantages their country possesses. Sweeping disruption is not the means to promote American power and stability. Yet to assert his vision of primacy, Trump would unilaterally destroy the very infrastructure that has helped the United States advance its core interests through previous eras of turbulent political change.

Internationalists must spotlight the real costs of such an ideologically driven project. If they cannot preserve the bureaucracies tasked with managing America’s global commitments and if pragmatists in Trump’s administration cannot moderate his “America first” foreign policy, the incoming president will voluntarily relinquish powerful tools that almost any interpretation of American interests would counsel him to preserve.