Some welcome this prospect with joy, others with sadness. But the story is the same. The United States is slowly losing its dominant position in the global distribution of power. The East now rivals the West in economic power and geopolitical weight, and countries in the global South are growing rapidly and taking a greater role on the international stage. As others shine, the United States has lost its luster. Divided and besieged, melancholy Americans suspect that the country’s best days are behind it. Liberal societies everywhere are struggling. Nationalism and populism are undermining the internationalism that once underpinned the United States’ global leadership. Sensing blood in the water, China and Russia have been quick to aggressively challenge US hegemony, liberalism and democracy. In February 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint declaration of principles for a “new era” where the United States does not lead the world: a shot across the bow of a sinking American ship. But in fact, the United States is not founding. The stark narrative of decline ignores deeper world-historical influences and conditions that will continue to make the United States a dominant presence and organizer of world politics in the twenty-first century. What is certain is that no one knows the future and no one owns it. The coming world order will be shaped by complex, changing and elusive political forces and choices made by people living in all parts of the world. However, the deep sources of American power and influence in the world remain. Indeed, with the rise of the brazen illiberalism of China and Russia, these distinguishing traits and capabilities have come into sharper display. The mistake the prophets of American decline made is to see the United States and its liberal class as another empire in decline. The wheel of history turns, empires come and go – and now, they suggest, it’s time for the United States to languish. Yes, the United States has at times resembled an old-fashioned empire. But her role in the world is based on much more than her previous imperial behavior. US power rests not only on brute force, but also on ideas, institutions, and values that are intricately woven into the fabric of modernity. The world order that the United States has built since the end of World War II is best thought of not as an empire but as a world system, a sprawling multifaceted political formation, rich in adversity, that creates opportunity for people around the globe. This global system was called into action most recently in the global response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The struggle between the United States and its rivals China and Russia is a struggle between two alternative logics of world order. The United States is defending an international order that it has led for three-quarters of a century—an order that is open, multilateral, and anchored in security agreements and partnerships with other liberal democracies. China and Russia seek an international order that dethrones Western liberal values—one that is more hospitable to regional blocs, spheres of influence, and autocracy. The United States supports an international order that protects and promotes the interests of liberal democracy. China and Russia, each in their own way, hope to build an international order that will protect authoritarian rule from the threatening forces of liberal modernity. The United States offers the world a vision of a post-imperial world system. Today’s leaders of Russia and China are increasingly crafting foreign policies rooted in imperial nostalgia. This struggle between liberal and illiberal world classes is an echo of the great struggles of the twentieth century. At key earlier moments—following the conclusions of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—the United States promoted a progressive agenda for world order. Its success rested somewhat on the blunt fact of American power, the country’s unrivaled economic, technological and military capabilities. The United States will remain at the center of the world system in part because of these material capabilities and its role as a pivot in the global balance of power. But the United States still matters for another reason: the attractiveness of its ideas, institutions, and ability to build partnerships and alliances make it an indispensable power in the coming years. This has always been, and may remain, the secret of his power and influence. The United States, despite repeated announcements of its demise as a world leader, has not really declined. It has created a distinct type of class in which it plays an integral role. And in the face of threatening illiberal rivals, this class remains widely in demand. The reason the United States does not decline is because large constituencies within the existing order have a stake in remaining active and the United States participating in maintaining that order. Even as US material power declines relative to, say, China’s growing capabilities, the order the United States has built continues to strengthen its power and leadership. Power can create order, but the order over which Washington presides can also underpin American power. Like an onion, the liberal internationalist order of the United States has many layers. On the outer level are liberal internationalist ideas and designs, through which the United States has provided the world with a “third way” between the anarchy of fiercely competing states and the hegemonic hierarchy of imperial systems—an arrangement that has provided more profits for more people than any previous alternative. Beneath the surface, the United States benefited from its geography and its unique trajectory of political development. Separated by oceans from the other great powers, its landmass faces both Asia and Europe, and it gains influence by playing a unique role as a global balancer of power. Adding to this, the United States has had critical opportunities after major conflicts in the twentieth century to build coalitions of like-minded states that shape and consolidate global norms and institutions. As the current crisis in Ukraine demonstrates, this ability to mobilize coalitions of democracies remains one of the United States’ key strengths. Beneath the sphere of government and diplomacy, the United States’ domestic civil society—enriched by its multiracial and multicultural immigrant base—links the country to the world in networks of influence unavailable to China, Russia, and other powers. . Finally, at the core, one of the United States’ greatest strengths is its ability to fail. As a liberal society, it can recognize its vulnerabilities and mistakes and seek to improve, a distinct advantage over its illiberal rivals in dealing with crises and setbacks. No other state has enjoyed such a comprehensive set of advantages in trading with other countries. This is why the United States has had such power for so long, despite periodic setbacks and disappointments. In today’s struggle over world order, the United States should draw on these strengths and its long history of liberal order-building to once again offer the world a global vision of an open and rules-based system in which people can work. freely together to advance the human condition.
AMERICA’S THIRD WAY
For more than a century, the United States has championed a kind of order different from previous international orders. Washington’s liberal internationalism represents a “third way” between anarchy (orders based on the balance of power between competing states) and hierarchy (orders based on the dominance of imperial powers). After World War II and again after the end of the Cold War, liberal internationalism came to dominate and define the modern logic of international relations through the building of institutions such as the United Nations and alliances such as NATO. People around the world have connected and built on these intergovernmental platforms to advance their interests. If China and Russia seek to usher in a new world order, they will need to deliver something better—a tall order indeed. The first generation of liberal internationalists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were heirs to an Enlightenment vision, a belief that through reason, science, and measured self-interest, societies could construct political orders that improved the human condition . They imagined that institutions and political orders could be devised to protect and promote liberal democracy. The international order can be a forum not only for waging war and seeking security, but also for collective problem solving. Liberal internationalists believed in peaceful change because they assumed that international society is, as Woodrow Wilson argued, “fixable.” States could tame fictitious, belligerent power politics and build stable relationships around the pursuit of mutual gains. The essential goal of building liberal classes has not changed: to create a cooperative ecosystem in which states, starting with liberal democracies, manage mutual economic and security relations, balance their often conflicting values, and protect the rights and freedoms of their citizens. The idea of building international order around rules and institutions is not unique to the United States, Western liberals, or modern times. But creating orders in the US is unique in placing these…
