Analysis by Max Bergman, director of the Center for Euro-Atlantic and North European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, published in the pages of the authoritative American international policy journal Foreign Policy.
After the Cold War, the United States had the power and legitimacy to transform the world, but it squandered its moment for a unipolar world. America, in retrospect, repeated the mistakes it made after World War I. In both cases, it did not seek to build and institutionalize a liberal international order, preferring to remain unconstrained.
In the post-Cold War order, Washington ruled the world. This brought enormous benefits both to the United States and, frankly, to the world. But the international order depended on US over-involvement and hegemonic benevolence, which proved difficult to sustain. Ultimately, the greatest challenge to the US-led order is not China but a depleted United States.
The concept of a liberal international order is difficult to articulate and therefore to defend. For the realist school of foreign policy, world order is about power and is inherently anarchic, and dreams of a rules-based order are therefore rejected.
But over the past century, under US leadership, anarchy has been tamed. An order has been built that places clear constraints on nation-states, with both rules and norms regulating their behavior. There is a UN Charter that prohibits states from invading each other, and a treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as a treaty on chemical and biological weapons that significantly limits the development of dangerous weapons. Rules, norms, and codes of conduct governed how states and people interacted with each other and dealt with problems ranging from travel to refugees to healthcare to war. There was a global trading system that created clear standards and rules. The world became much less anarchic, more predictable, and more orderly. All of this was underpinned by U.S. power.
Was this sustainable? International relations scholar J. John Eikenberry argues in his 2001 book "After Victory" that America must embrace its far-sighted self-interest and agree to some limits on its power in order to "consolidate a favorable postwar order." Through strategic self-restraint, the United States is more likely to "win the consent of the weaker" countries, and to prepare for the day when the unipolar moment would end.
This is how the United States approached its victory after World War II. The Roosevelt administration was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the interwar period, when Washington had rejected the League of Nations and allowed the spread of the "make your neighbor poorer" economic policy.
Even before the war ended, in 1944, negotiations were held in Washington, D.C., at Dumbarton Oaks that led to the creation of the United Nations, and at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the foundations of the postwar economic order were laid.
As the Soviet Union shifted from ally to rival and the Cold War began, isolationist attitudes in the United States receded. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower built alliances in Europe and Asia, provided significant military and scientific and technological assistance, and pushed for European integration.
Yet after the victory in the Cold War, the United States made no comparable effort to transform the international institutional order in the manner proposed by Eikenberry. There was no effort to drastically strengthen the United Nations, reform the Security Council, or create new stable institutions.
Unable to ratify international agreements in the Senate, the United States stood by as treaties including the Convention on the Law of the Sea; the Rome Statute Establishing the International Criminal Court; the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty; and the Kyoto Protocol on climate change advanced. Senator Jesse Helms led the effort to halt U.S. funding for the United Nations, despite the fact that tens of thousands of U.N. peacekeepers were increasingly deployed around the world to contain conflicts. The global institutions that were created—such as the Community of Democracies, created at the end of the Clinton administration to connect and organize the world’s democracies—were quickly ignored by the United States. The most significant development in the global political architecture did not involve the United States at all, as it occurred at the regional level, with the formation of the European Union, Mercosur, and the African Union.
In contrast, the United States did seek to establish a universalist liberal economic order.
It pushed for trade liberalization and in 1995 helped create the World Trade Organization (WTO) to govern world trade. This unleashed an era of globalization and economic interconnectedness. Washington assumed that democracy and capitalism would reinforce each other and develop organically. The perniciousness of Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?" and Thomas L. Friedman's "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" was that they absolved politicians of responsibility. Why build new institutions, delegate authority to the UN, or sign treaties that limit US power when democracy and capitalism are inevitable? The vision of order thus became strongly libertarian.
However, as economic crises in one country quickly spread to others, it became clear that a more interconnected world also needed deeper international cooperation. In 1999, in response to the Asian financial crisis, the G20 was created as a mechanism for coordinating economic policy. But with nation-states increasingly powerless to address global challenges on their own, the lack of effective global governance became particularly acute in the 1990s.
Yet the United States was politically divided on multilateralism at the time. This was, in fact, the main foreign policy battle of the 1990s. The Clinton administration believed in Wilsonian internationalism and multilateralism, but it was on the defensive. Republicans vigorously objected to limits on American power and declared themselves against international institutions. The only consensus was that America was indispensable and should rule the world.
For the Clinton administration, international organizations and global governance were justified on tactical grounds—because both served the interests of the United States. The White House struggled to articulate a grand vision for a reordered world and instead focused American leadership on solving specific crises.
This led to a series of interventions, seen by many as whack-a-mole operations—in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Such actions prompted complaints that the United States was acting as the "world's policeman," and during the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush criticized them as too liberal a policy of "nation building". America had to lead because it was indispensable, but it also meant doing too much.
The Clinton administration's greatest achievement, the expansion of NATO, also exposed this tension. NATO expansion enabled European unification, but it also strengthened America's position in Europe, since NATO revolved around the United States. But when faced with the choice of whether to support the emergence of the EU as an independent player in defense and foreign policy, the Clinton administration balked, worried about losing influence. Of course, Washington wanted Europe to "share the burden" of defense, but in the end it prioritized control.
After 9/11, the United States was given another opportunity to reshape the world. But instead, its unilateral approach was deployed.
The 1990s saw the rise of neoconservatives, who largely shared the liberal goals of the Wilsonian internationalists but believed that the way to do this was unilaterally through U.S. hard power. As Robert Kagan and William Crystal wrote in an influential 1996 essay arguing for a neo-Reaganist foreign policy, "the appropriate goal of American foreign policy is therefore to preserve this hegemony as far into the future as possible". They called for more defense spending and more vigorous confrontation with the adversary. The global war on terror, the drone campaigns, and the invasion of Iraq undermined the notion of a rules-based international order and severely undermined confidence in American hegemony, creating space for the rise and counter-pressure of rivals.
The Iraq War transformed the Republican Party. It turned many of the most patriotic Americans, those who volunteered to serve their country after 9/11—like J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth, who led a veterans’ organization in support of the war—not against the war itself but against the liberalism used to justify it, along with the idea of using U.S. power and leadership to further build a liberal world.
But the failure in Iraq also changed Democrats. It was difficult to articulate a liberal vision of the world when liberal values were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. President Barack Obama, by default, adhered to a more realistic “don’t do stupid things” perspective. That also meant a softened commitment to maintaining international order. Obama’s reluctance to use direct force against the Assad regime in Syria over its use of chemical weapons was a sign of restraint. But it also showed that the United States would not instinctively defend the world order, even when a critical norm was at stake. America did not feel the same “responsibility to protect” as it had in the 1990s.
In the end, democratic administrations continued to publicly advocate for international institutions. But when the costs of circumventing international norms were intangible and delayed, those norms rarely dominated national security debates in the White House. Gradually, this began to affect America’s position.
Trust in the United States was shaken in multilateral forums, where American hypocrisy was used as an argument against it and led to weaker engagement on the part of Washington. Today, the United Nations is hardly discussed in the American capital. As the United States has shown less and less interest, China has been increasing its presence—making global institutions increasingly ill-suited to a more liberal world order. There is currently little serious effort to forge international agreements in the areas of cyberspace, space, or new types of weapons systems.
When the global economy collapsed in 2008, it created a sense of American decline and a deadly blow to the sense of the inevitability of liberalism.
Then an illiberal wind blew. China seized the moment, expanding its economic engagement with the global South, while autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin increasingly sought to challenge American hegemony.
Surprisingly, the 2008 crisis did not ultimately turn the world against the US-led liberal economic order, but it did turn Americans against it. The rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership by the Republican-led Senate in the summer of 2016, followed by the Trump and Biden administrations’ opposition to the WTO, meant that the United States was turning against the main thrust of its post-Cold War order.
Democrats during the first Trump administration imagined that the country would reverse the illiberal tide by pursuing a “free world” or “democracy rebalancing” strategy to create a democratic bloc. But President Joe Biden never fully implemented such an approach during his presidency. The Democracy Summit he promised to hold became largely a meaningless NGO talk rather than an attempt to connect and organize democracies into a new bloc; it was quickly rejected by the Biden White House. Frankly, the United States may no longer have the credibility to make such an effort. The Biden administration has indeed sought to bring “America back” by embracing familiar allies and structures, reviving the stagnant G-7 format, re-embracing NATO, and strengthening the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue in Asia. Yet, it has usually all revolved around U.S. overindulgence.
Ultimately, however, it was not China that proved to be the greatest threat to the US-led order, but rather the United States’ willingness to uphold it. America’s unilateral approach placed too much of the responsibility on American shoulders, provoking a reactionary backlash among the people. If a post-Trump US administration were to try to salvage what was left of the liberal order, it would not have the clout, credibility, or ability to do so alone. The unipolar moment is over.