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.

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