AEI - Op-Ed Three Ways America’s World Order Could Collapse By Hal Brands Bloomberg Opinion July 28, 2025

AEI - 

Op-Ed

Three Ways America’s World Order Could Collapse

By Hal Brands

Bloomberg Opinion

July 28, 2025

Nothing lasts forever: Every international order finds its end. Pax Romana stabilized the greater Mediterranean world, until decline set in. The British global order flourished in the 19th century but came apart amid two world wars in the 20th. Today, in an unruly world led by an erratic America, it’s hard not to wonder if the US-led order is on its way out.

Since 1945, that order has generated tremendous peace, prosperity and freedom. It can only be termed a smashing success. But stresses on that order — those imposed by its challengers, and those imposed by its creator — have been mounting. One way of gauging just how severe the risks have become is by considering the various ways an order might end.

The brilliant Cambridge historian Brendan Simms has suggested that international orders typically end in one of three ways: Through defeat in war or some catastrophic failure of deterrence; through economic decline or a divergence between the order’s political and economic arrangements; or through the collapse of respect for its guiding rules and norms.

The US order has proven remarkably resilient, but the possibility of a breakdown is growing as America piles up risk on each of these dimensions at once. And while recent leaders, including President Donald Trump, have made important moves to shore up the order, America’s present policies are increasingly making those dangers worse.

Orders can die of murder, exhaustion or suicide. Today, it’s difficult to rule any of those grim finales out.

How America Took the Lead

Order is about rules and rule-makers. International orders feature commonly accepted norms or principles meant to govern global behavior. Those rules are made, and sustained, by mighty actors and institutions. A long line of powers has sought to structure the globe to their liking. But since World War II, America’s order has been the biggest, most successful game in town.

The lesson US policymakers took from that conflict was that only a secure, prosperous system could ensure America’s own wellbeing. So the US built an order based on relatively free trade; a 

preference for human rights and democratic values; the 

prevention of great-power aggression and war; and 

institutionalized cooperation to address common problems.

Washington used its unmatched military and economic power to buoy the fortunes of like-minded nations. America, said President Harry Truman, was “assuming the responsibility which God Almighty intended” for “the welfare of the world in generations to come.”

Make no mistake: This endeavor was rooted in US interests. But because America was so powerful, and defined those interests so broadly, this project brought historic gains for much of the world.

Democracy went from endangered to dominant in the postwar decades. Trade flourished and living standards soared, first in the free world and then globally after communism fell. A world that suffered two all-consuming great-power wars in quick succession has avoided anything like that since 1945.

The US presided over a global golden age. Yet the stresses on America’s order have become impossible to ignore.

Revisionist powers — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea — are challenging a system they view as dangerous to their illiberal regimes and oppressive to their geopolitical ambitions. The Global South has become disillusioned with Western dominance. The US itself has seemed ambivalent, in recent decades, about world leadership. Threats to its economic and military supremacy have grown more severe.

Visit nearly any US ally, and you’ll notice conviction that American power remains necessary — and concern that the post-World War II order is slipping away. So how real is the danger? Let’s consider the three ways an order can come apart.

Losing a War

One path to failure runs through defeat or devastation in war. Nothing ruptures the authority of a hegemonic power like a humiliating beatdown on the battlefield. The Athenian empire collapsed after losing the Great Peloponnesian War. Britain won World War I, but never recovered from its costs.

For decades, America has been the sole superpower. As last month’s attack on Iran’s nuclear program reminded us, the Pentagon still possesses power-projection capabilities without peer. But anyone who thinks the US is militarily invincible hasn’t been paying attention.

The Pentagon faces a vexing military arithmetic problem. Several challenges — from Russia in Europe, Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, and China and North Korea in Asia — are stretching US resources. A superpower with a military designed to fight one war at a time is always at risk in a world of multiple, interlocking threats. But the danger of crushing defeat is most concentrated in the Western Pacific.

“The intelligence couldn’t be clearer,” said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall in 2023. “China is preparing for a war and specifically for a war with the United States.” The Chinese threat is real, “and it could be imminent,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth observed this year. Those are only two of many alarming statements from US officials.

Beijing is building the forces and rehearsing the plans needed to attack Taiwan or otherwise reorder the Western Pacific. It is racing to construct a nuclear arsenal that will match, and maybe exceed, America’s. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping’s government is hoarding food, fuel and other resources. Xi would surely prefer to eject America from the Western Pacific peacefully. But he’s getting ready for a fight.

A US-China war would cause cascading economic carnage and bring serious risks of nuclear escalation. And if America lost — which is a real possibility — the damage to the US order would be profound. America’s alliances in the Indo-Pacific might fracture. A broken US military might struggle to police other parts of the world. “The trajectory must change,” the head of US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Paparo, has warned: America isn’t responding with the urgency the threat demands.

In fairness, there have been encouraging developments. Israel, with American help, has ravaged Iran and its proxies since late 2023. The US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies have used the war in Ukraine to grind down Russian power.

Trump can take some credit for getting the allies to agree to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense, and another 1.5% on related investments. Over time, that spending will strengthen the military position of the democratic world. But global overstretch remains real, the trends in Asia are daunting, and the US still isn’t acting like it could lose World War III.

American military spending is below 3.5% of GDP, among the lowest levels since World War II, and could dip next year. Stockpiles of munitions and missile defenses are, reportedly, low, and have been depleted by recent scrapes in the Middle East.

With a moribund shipbuilding industry and a sluggish, fragile industrial base, America would struggle to replace assets lost in the opening phase of a fight. “You can’t AI your way out of material deficiency,” Paparo has argued: A country that can’t replace battlefield losses won’t win a grinding, great-power war.

No one, not even Xi Jinping, knows exactly how capable China’s untested military is. But as the Pacific military balance changes, the dangers of an order-breaking catastrophe mount.

An Economic Collapse

Orders don’t have to explode violently. They can also implode, when the leading power can’t — or won’t — sustain the economic arrangements that make the system work. The British order crumbled when two world wars bankrupted the empire. The American order has long rested on two economic pillars.

The first is simply the economic and financial wherewithal to sustain America’s global power — among other things, to pay for military capabilities that keep revisionist threats in check. The second pillar consists of economic arrangements that reinforce strategic commitments: the international economic leadership, the ties of trade and investment, that bind Washington to its allies and give them all a shared stake in preserving a US-led world.

Both pillars have been remarkably durable. For all the talk of decline, America’s share of global GDP is roughly the same as it was in the 1970s. The dollar dominates world trade and finance. Foreign investors have long been willing to support dollar dominance, and finance large US deficits, because those arrangements help Washington fund its alliance commitments and military muscle. And when the economic arrangements that underpin the order grow outdated or unbalanced, they are typically renegotiated — as happened when the US ditched the gold standard in 1971 and shifted to the floating exchange-rate system we know today.

There are, however, three real challenges to the order’s economic structure: Profligacy, protectionism and politicization. All are getting worse.

First, profligacy. A quarter-century ago, the US had a budget surplus. Now, it’s deficits without end. Publicly held US debt is around 100% of GDP. It will soon eclipse the 119% America reached at the close of World War II. And if the spending and taxation levels enshrined in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill become permanent, debt could exceed 200% of GDP by 2050.

As debt and deficits grow, interest payments will increase and borrowing costs could rise, crimping growth and crowding out spending on defense. At some point, continued profligacy could undermine dollar hegemony, weakening America’s global power — its ability to wield sanctions, for instance — and compounding all its other economic problems.

There’s no reliable formula for determining where, exactly, that dangerous threshold lies — where persistent fiscal recklessness finally makes global leadership unaffordable or otherwise exacts a crushing geopolitical price. But the US seems intent on finding out.

Second, protectionism. The US has never been shy about renegotiating economic relationships with partners: Recall the brutal trade fights with Japan in the 1980s. But Trump’s extreme affinity for tariffs could have more lasting, corrosive effects.

US allies complain that those tariffs are making it harder to raise defense spending. The more the US brawls over trade with allies, the more it undermines the collective cohesion and resilience needed to outcompete a mercantilist China on everything from shipbuilding to AI.

At a conference I recently attended in Tokyo, the dominant themes were that China is endangering Asia’s security — and America is endangering the region’s prosperity. A relatively open international economy once bound America and its allies together. High tariffs and unending trade wars might pull them apart.

Third, politicization. Trump’s campaign against the independence of the Federal Reserve threatens to undermine the apolitical, competent management of the US economy and weaken the Fed’s ability to act as global stabilizer in times of crisis. Trump’s willy-nilly use of tariffs in political disputes — over migration, drugs, or the legal woes of his illiberal fellow travelers — is making America a force for geo-economic upheaval.

Trump is playing fast and loose with the global economy. It’s hard to see many countries supporting that sort of superpower over time.

Trump Breaking All the Rules

No system of order can flourish when its key rules are consistently flouted or disregarded. Once it became clear, in the late Cold War, that the Soviet Union would no longer force socialist regimes upon Eastern Europe, the regional order it had constructed there fell apart.

The US order features key norms, from freedom of the commons and discouragement of nuclear proliferation to protection of human rights and prohibitions on stealing territory from one’s neighbor. Although America has periodically been guilty of hegemonic hypocrisy, its advocacy for these rules has helped create a comparatively civilized, prosperous world. Today, unfortunately, those rules are being flouted by bad guys and good guys alike.

Freedom of navigation is under assault from the Red Sea, where the Houthis have been terrorizing shipping , to the Western Pacific, where Beijing has claimed most of the South China Sea, to the Arctic, where Russia is asserting that international waters along the Northern Sea Route are its own. Human rights standards are slipping: China’s treatment of the Uyghurs is the sort of industrial-scale abuse that was supposed to be a relic of the past.

A rising incidence of interstate war and territorial conquest indicates that curbs on aggression are getting weaker. Meanwhile, a US administration with an ambivalent commitment to democratic norms at home has taken an ambiguous position on defending key norms abroad.

To his credit, Trump bolstered the nonproliferation regime by striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. He pushed back against the Houthis harder (if more briefly) than President Joe Biden had.

If Trump finds his way to supporting Ukraine, he’ll also continue the precedent Biden set in backing the prohibition against territorial acquisition by force. Unfortunately, Trump — beyond weakening US support for democracy and human rights overseas — has also behaved in ways that challenge that same vital norm.

The president has mused about grabbing the Panama Canal, annexing Canada and taking Greenland (a mostly autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark) against the will of their inhabitants. He has said that the US might use economic pressure or military force to enlarge its lands. The norm against territorial aggrandizement is so fundamental because its collapse could send the world spiraling back into the ugly chaos of an earlier age. If America itself upends that principle, it will be complicit in its own order’s demise.

The End of the World as We Know It

President Bill Clinton used to say that a lot of people have lost money by betting against America. The same goes for the American order. In the early 1960s, no less a figure than Henry Kissinger argued that America and the system it had created were careening toward disaster. In the decades since, the end of the US order has often been predicted and consistently failed to occur.

The fact that the order has survived for generations reflects its great resilience, and the great exertions America and its allies have made to defend it when it is threatened. But don’t think that a good thing must go on forever, or that the US is immune from the dangers that brought old orders down.

It’s never easy to know where dangers become disasters — where the afflictions of an imperiled order turn fatal. What is certain is that America will regret that moment when it comes.

Orders evolve; change is healthy. But the outright demise of an order, whether peaceful or violent, is typically an epic historical event. The country best placed to shape a post-American age is China, which has an utterly opposing vision of how the world should work. What comes after an order that has been run in a relatively enlightened way by a relatively enlightened superpower, almost certainly won’t be as good for the world — or America — as the system we have known since 1945.

That order could meet its end in a sharp, bloody clash in the Western Pacific. Or in a long crisis caused by accumulating profligacy and protectionism. Or in the sad slide into irrelevance that results from persistent erosion of rules. Or, perhaps, the demise of the American order will occur, someday, at the intersection of these three dangerous paths.

History tells us that there are many ways in which orders unravel. A worrying marker of our current moment is that America is courting all of them at once.