Power without Ideology

The Donald J. Trump Administration’s war against Iran has renewed talk about the role the United States should play in the world. While in recent American history, public support for US wars has been relatively high in the first days of a conflict, only 41 percent of Americans supported the Iran War when it began, and these numbers have remained low. This lack of support is evidence of a broad shift in US public opinion away from kneejerk support for hegemony: Americans, it seems, have become skeptical of their empire.

As often occurs, public opinion has tracked material reality. The statistics tell a clear story: US economic and military power is in decline. In 1980, the United States represented 21.6 percent of global GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP); by 2016, that number had dropped to 15.9 percent; by 2025, it dropped to 14.6 percent; and it is projected to drop to 13.9 percent by 2030. The same is true when one examines the G7’s share of global GDP adjusted for PPP. In 1980, the G7 countries—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan—represented 51.9 percent of global GDP adjusted for PPP; in 2016, 32.3 percent; in 2025, 28.3 percent; and this share is expected to drop to 26.2 percent by 2030. Over the past two decades, several countries in Asia have arisen to challenge North Atlantic economic power. In 1980, China represented only 2.1 percent of global GDP adjusted for PPP; in 2025, 19.6 percent; and is expected to grow to 20.4 percent by 2030. For its part, India grew from representing 2.7 percent of global GDP adjusted for PPP in 1980, to 8.2 percent in 2025, to a projected 9.7 percent in 2030. In both absolute and relative terms, the United States and its closest allies have experienced significant economic decline.

The same is true of US military power. Though the United States in 2025 spent $954 billion on its military, for decades the nation has been unable to achieve strategic victories. The Taliban presently controls Afghanistan; Iraq is an unstable democracy; Libya experiences regular violence; and the Trump Administration not only failed to engender regime change in Iran, but provided just cause for the latter country to close the Strait of Hormuz and thus affirm itself as a genuine regional power. Spectacular events such as the assassinations of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro in 2026 should not blind us to the fact that the US military has proven unable to shore up a hegemony in decline.

Most dramatically, the United States has lost its status as the undisputed regional hegemon of East Asia. China, whose military spending increased by over 3,000 percent between 1990 and 2024 and which has engaged in decades-long projects of military modernization and economic liberalization, now seriously challenges American power in the region. According to the Lowy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Australia that publishes an “Asia Power Index,” in 2025 the United States, while still “the top power in Asia,” also “recorded the largest decline in comprehensive power of any country included in the Asia Power Index, reducing US power to its lowest level since the inception of the Index in 2018.” China, in comparison, “recorded a small increase in its comprehensive power” and appears able “to weather the current geopolitical environment and withstand coercive US economic policies.”

The writing is on the wall. Whether it’s in five years, ten, or fifteen, the United States will no longer exert the same degree of influence that it has since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. We are witnessing the advent of a new multipolar world order that will be defined by a pyramidal structure. At its top will sit two superpowers—the United States and China—with three great powers beneath them—India, Russia, and the European Union—and a series of middle powers occupying the base: the United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, Iran, and South Korea among others. 

The globe, in other words, is collapsing into several “spheres of influence” of various geographic scales. The United States looks set to dominate the Western Hemisphere and the Middle East; China to dominate East and Southeast Asia; India to dominate South Asia as it battles China for influence in its near abroad; Russia to dominate its own near abroad; and the European Union, led by France and Germany, to dominate Western and Central Europe. For their part, the middle powers will probably align with one of the superpowers—the United Kingdom and Israel have done this with the United States, as Iran has with China—or attempt to play the stronger nation-states off of each other, as India did with the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War.

This new multipolar world order will be very different from the bipolar system that existed during the Cold War. In the latter conflict, the two superpowers, despite occasional diplomatic and economic engagement, largely operated independently and devoted significant resources to fighting each other in proxy wars on behalf of universalistic ideological projects. It will also be nothing like the unipolar moment, in which the United States exerted unprecedented economic, military, political, and cultural influence over global affairs. Finally, it will be unlike the Concert of Europe that lasted from the Congress of Vienna of 1814–1815 until the outbreak of World War I. Whereas in the latter period the world’s most powerful states operated within a shared diplomatic culture refined through centuries of interaction, nothing like that exists today.

Above all, we are entering an era in which ideology will matter less to geopolitical competition than it did in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first  centuries. In the last two hundred years, the world’s most important powers fought in favor of particular ideologies such as liberalism, fascism, and communism that they considered to be globally applicable. That period is over. Instead, what unites the world’s powers today is that they are not fighting in favor of universalist visions of the good society but are instead committed to the pursuit of material national interest. Ours is therefore the first era in two centuries in which raw power is the sole end of international politics.

To avoid the outbreak of a major war, we must confront this reality openly and honestly. And a good way to do so is to turn to the past, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt envisioned a world similar to the one presently emerging.

For FDR, World War II was about more than defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: it was about creating a world order that would prevent the outbreak of great power conflicts themselves. Earlier in the twentieth century, leaders like President Woodrow Wilson had insisted that, with the correct institutional arrangements, rationality and law could both tame geopolitics and enhance US global power. By the middle of WWII, however, history—above all, the failure of the League of Nations to arrest international conflict—appeared to prove this view incorrect. For this reason, Roosevelt rejected the idealism of his predecessor and embraced a realism that insisted the only way to order global politics was to divide the world into spheres of influence governed by the great powers.

On November 29, 1943, Roosevelt met with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin during the Tehran Conference of the Big Three allied leaders. Roosevelt wanted to discuss with Stalin a number of issues related to the war as well as the organization of the postwar world. At this point, the US was advancing in Italy and the Pacific while the USSR was pushing back against Nazi forces that had been defeated at Stalingrad and Kursk. Hitler might not have admitted it, but the allies were on the path to victory. It was an opportune time to negotiate postwar great powers relations.

The US and USSR had a checkered history. In 1918, Wilson dispatched US troops to the Soviet Union to aid “White,” anti-Bolshevik forces. Even after the Bolsheviks consolidated their power in the 1920s, the US refused to recognize the Soviet Union. It was only in 1933, once Roosevelt took office, that formal diplomatic relations between the two countries were established, creating channels that would later be used to form an alliance in the wake of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa.

Fortunately, Roosevelt and Stalin got along well. What united the two leaders was that each, in their own way, was a realist: They both understood the importance of power to structuring international relations and did not believe it was possible to impose their own political-economic systems on the entire globe, even as they wanted to dominate their neighbors.

When they met in Tehran, Roosevelt approached Stalin with a plan. In addition to forming an international organization dubbed the “United Nations” after the coalition of wartime allies, the president also floated the idea of establishing an additional body he termed “the Four Policemen.” This group would comprise the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China, and would have, Roosevelt explained, “the power to deal immediately with any threat to the peace and any sudden emergency” that required concerted action.

When confronted with Roosevelt’s idea, Stalin had one question: Wouldn’t the Four Policemen concept “require the sending of American troops to Europe”? No, the president replied—“he had only envisaged the sending of American planes and ships to Europe”; otherwise, he added, “England and the Soviet Union would have to handle the land armies.”

This mollified Stalin, who recognized, as the historian John Lewis Gaddis has noted, that the very idea of the Four Policemen “clearly implied the existence” of spheres of influence. In Roosevelt’s geopolitical vision, the United States would dominate the Western Hemisphere and parts of the Pacific; the Soviet Union would control Eastern Europe and the Baltics; the United Kingdom would have dominion over its overseas empire and Western Europe (with US aid); and China would have primary influence in East Asia (again, under significant US guidance).

Roosevelt, in other words, was willing to “give” Europe to the United Kingdom and Soviet Union. In fact, at the Yalta Conference fourteen months later, Gaddis writes that Roosevelt “in effect promised the withdrawal of American troops from the Continent within two years of Germany’s surrender.”

The president thus articulated a non-universalist, non-hegemonic vision of international relations in which the world’s four great powers would divide up the globe between them. According to him, the United Nations would merely be a body that “would meet periodically at different places, discuss and make recommendations to a smaller body.” The Four Policemen would be running the show, with the US standing as primus inter pares.

Roosevelt’s vision found partial reflection in the architecture of the UN Security Council, which privileged the great powers. But a world ordered by the Four Policemen never came to fruition, and when the president died in April 1945, that vision died with him. His successor, Harry S. Truman, was much more of an anti-communist than FDR. Truman also embraced a genuinely global—and genuinely ideological—vision of US power that framed the Soviet Union as an illegitimate and existential threat. With Truman in power, it was only a matter of time before the Cold War erupted.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States emerged as the undisputed economic, military, political, and cultural hegemon, able to do what it wanted, when it wanted, around the world, without fear of existential blowback. It spent much of the next quarter-century promoting a neoliberal form of political-economic organization that permeated many of the regions over which the United States had dominion. Liberalism, American style, appeared triumphant, “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” as Francis Fukuyama put it in his 1989 essay “The End of History?”

But nothing lasts forever, especially a world order whose hegemon made manifold strategic blunders—from financial deregulation to the Global War on Terror—that undermined its authority and power. Today, we are returning to the international order that Roosevelt imagined, one divided between regional spheres of influence.

Above all, we are not replaying the Cold War with a new existential rival. Despite talk of a “New Cold War” with China, there are several significant differences between the US-China rivalry in 2026 and the US-Soviet rivalry throughout the Cold War that make simple analogies misleading at best, foolish at worst.

First, the US and China are much more economically intertwined than the US and Soviet Union ever were. Even Trump’s tariff wars couldn’t prevent China from remaining the US’s fourth-largest goods trading partner, fourth-largest export market, and third-largest source of US imports. And unlike the Soviet Union, China is a genuine technological leader, especially in the fields of green energy and artificial intelligence. It also controls the supply chain of the global minerals sector, which means that any country that wants to develop advanced technology must deal with it. Finally, China is in the process of modernizing its military, an effort that has already produced significant gains. This will eventually give it the power to try to push the US out of East Asia altogether, which will force US leaders to either accept losses in a way they never had to during the Cold War or commit the nation to a devastating war with China that could result in nuclear conflagration.

When it comes to Eastern Europe, the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed two things. First, that the US was not willing to send troops to defend Ukraine. Second, that as the war went on, both the American public and politicians lost their appetite for even supplying the country with materiel. Since Trump became president, he has not asked Congress for funds to send military assistance to Ukraine. The US has also retreated from its leading position in the Ukraine Defense Contact Group and required European countries to pay for new US military aid to Ukraine.

Intriguingly, certain elements of the Trump Administration seem to understand the new multipolar reality. The administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS), released in November 2025, takes a decisive turn away from the global vision that has defined US foreign policy since 1945, and especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead of pursuing the “permanent American domination of the entire world,” the NSS insists that the US will focus primarily on two regions: the Western Hemisphere, where the Trump Administration will “restore American preeminence,” and the Middle East, where the administration will do everything “to prevent an adversarial power from dominating.” In contrast, when it comes to Asia, the strategy proclaims that the United States will “successfully compete there”—an implicit recognition that the era of US regional hegemony is over. For Europe, the strategy affirms a commitment to having the continent “stand on its own feet” and assume “primary responsibility for its own defense.”

While the NSS doesn’t use this language, Trump and his foreign policy appointees envision a world defined by spheres of influence. This is not, it is important to underline, a world defined by peace, as Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro and his war with Israel on Iran reveal. It is, rather, a world shorn of ideological pretensions and universalist projects. It is a world organized around economic and military—not cultural or even political—power.

The new, multipolar, spheres-of-influence structure of international relations has already had profound effects on geopolitics. Most dramatically, the lack of significant pushback by China to Trump’s capture of Maduro or his war against Iran—the latter despite the fact that in 2023 China helped broker a normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran—indicates that the US’s primary competitor has accepted the reality of spheres of influence even as it attempts to impose stability on the Middle East by helping broker a peace. One imagines that were China to invade Taiwan in the coming years, it would expect the US and its allies to allow it to do so. And as time goes on, Putin or a successor likewise would not anticipate much backlash from the United States should Russia affirm control over its near abroad, maybe even including the Baltic states.

In terms of power politics, the world order has not been organized in this way since the late nineteenth century, when the great powers of Europe divided vast portions of the globe between them. And of course, that global system came to an end during World War I, at the cost of millions of lives.

To avoid such a potentially catastrophic outcome, it’s worth thinking through the novel features of our new pyramidal geopolitical structure. Only by identifying these can we begin the process of creating a global architecture capable of preventing the outbreak of a conflict that, given its potentially nuclear nature, could be world-ending.

The most significant difference between the new multipolarity and the unipolar, bipolar, and multipolar worlds of past eras is its non-ideological tenor. Here, I do not intend my use of “non-ideological” to suggest that ideas will no longer shape international affairs. Rather, I use it to indicate that, for the foreseeable future, no nation-state will dedicate itself to promoting, exporting, or even defending a universalist ideology on the world stage. This is a very different situation than previous periods.

During the era of unipolarity, the US hegemon claimed it was fighting on behalf of liberal capitalist democracy; during the era of bipolarity, the two superpowers articulated distinct visions of political economy that both sides believed to be irreconcilable; and during the Concert of Europe, European empires, namely the British and the French, presented their global projects as explicitly liberal. While the great powers always had material reasons for their actions, for the past two hundred years they cloaked these in ideological garb to which many historical actors expressed genuine adherence—the British really did fight for liberalism; the Nazis for Nazism; the Soviets for communism; the Americans for capitalism, and so on.

Ideology, at least in the universalist sense of the term, is far less important in current geopolitics. In “The End of History?,” Fukuyama maintained that liberalism would be the final ideology in the sense that, after communism’s collapse, it no longer faced a similarly grand antagonist. He was correct about this. But Fukuyama was wrong when he presumed that liberalism’s triumph would lead to “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

What actually happened was that, as the majority of countries embraced distinct forms of capitalism—liberal capitalism for the United States, oligarchic and autocratic capitalism for Russia, state capitalism for China—it was the justificatory ideology of liberalism itself that withered away. Historically, liberalism provided ideological ballast to democratic capitalism’s rise in the North Atlantic world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But what the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries revealed was that capitalism was quite suitable to autocracy, oligarchy, and other forms of government. In the final analysis, liberalism did not lead to “the universalization of Western liberal democracy”; instead, it dissipated. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and other countries are undoubtedly capitalist—what they aren’t is liberal.

This does not imply that within spheres of influence, or within states and societies themselves, ideology—understood as a systematic worldview that motivates and justifies government behavior—will no longer exert significant causal force. When the Russian government kidnaps thousands of orphans and forcibly “Russifies” them, it is acting ideologically; when the Chinese government detains approximately one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, it is acting ideologically; and when the Trump Administration arrests and deports pro-Palestinian activists, it is acting ideologically.

The point is that when it comes to geopolitics, universalist ideologies are unlikely to drive state action at the global level. We will therefore not witness a repeat of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union supported ideologically friendly regimes in places like North Korea and Cuba and the United States did the same in South Vietnam and Taiwan.

The most significant complication for this thesis is the relationship between the US and Europe. Trump’s NSS made much of “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity,” which was a thinly veiled criticism of the EU’s cosmopolitanism and supranationalism. The administration is clearly articulating a race-based ideology about the “character” of the North Atlantic world. To many observers, this civilizational rhetoric suggests that Europe will remain part of the American sphere of influence.

Nevertheless, the Trump Administration wants to attenuate the US position in NATO and US responsibility for European defense more broadly. The NSS thus declares that the US is committed to “burden-sharing and burden-shifting,” with American “allies and partners … assum[ing] primary responsibility for their regions” as the US acts mostly “as convener and supporter.” The tension here is telling: Trump and his coterie want Western and Central Europe to be racially and culturally American but strategically European.

Over time, the logic of multipolarity suggests that Europe will go its own way. European countries are already moving in this direction. A report released by McKinsey highlights that since 2019 “core defense spending” by European nations has doubled. Furthermore, Germany intends to double its defense budget by 2029; President Emmanuel Macron intends to increase the number of nuclear weapons in France’s arsenal and temporarily place nukes in allied European countries; and the EU has embraced a ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030 that moves the continent toward “strategic autonomy.” This all suggests that power, and not ideology, will govern the future of US-Europe relations.

As the centrality of universalistic ideologies to international politics has waned, the material interests of nation-states have taken center stage. In the Trump Administration’s recent NSS, for example, the term “interests” and its variants are mentioned forty-five times, where “ideology” and its variants are mentioned only six. Compare this to the George W. Bush Administration’s NSS of 2006, which used the word “interests” only about twenty times. In a similar vein, the Trump NSS underlines that the “fearsome powers” of the US government “must never be abused, whether under the guise of ‘deradicalization,’ ‘protecting our democracy,’or any other pretext.” This is very different from the Bush NSS, which insisted that “the most effective long-term measure for conflict prevention and resolution is the promotion of democracy.”

The same indifference to ideology is expressed in strategic documents recently published by Russia and China. The very first line of the “Strategy of the National Security of the Russian Federation,” which was released in July 2021—about eight months before Russia invaded Ukraine, when Putin had probably already made his decision for war—affirms the importance “of strengthening defence capability, internal unity and political stability, modernizing the economy and developing industrial capacity.” Ideology is barely discussed. Similarly, in China’s May 2025 version of the NSS, “security” is mentioned over 400 times; “ideology” and its variants are mentioned only seven times; and “socialist” and its variants are mentioned only thirteen times.

When it comes to geopolitics, we are living through an “end of ideology.” This is the most distinctive feature of the new pyramidal multipolarity. The world’s most powerful nation-states no longer envision themselves as engaging in grand universal projects designed to transform other societies by encouraging them to adopt a particular model of political-economic organization.

Even China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which has often been interpreted as the equivalent of something like democracy promotion but for authoritarian state capitalism, is not a genuine ideological project. China has aided all types of governments—democracies, authoritarian states, monarchies, socialist countries—and has publicly declared that “it is imperative to respect the development paths chosen independently by the people of other countries, not to impose one’s will on other countries, and not to interfere in their internal affairs.” This is not to say that China is acting benevolently; it very clearly wants to establish relationships of dependency between itself and other countries. It is to say that, outside of its sphere of influence, China is not motivated by a universalist program that it wants other countries to adopt.

If God died in the nineteenth  century, ideology died in the twenty-first.

Much will be lost in our new era of non-ideological, multipolar power politics. While the liberal international order never operated as its most idealistic promoters claimed it did, it was still a useful fiction. Its disintegration will likely have the most negative effects on weaker nations unable to assert themselves in the new spheres of influence system.

In the decades after 1945, a “liberal international order” or “rules-based order” genuinely existed in Western and Central Europe, where major wars became a thing of the past. Unfortunately, it did not operate outside these regions. The political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke has found that, during the Cold War, the US attempted to covertly overthrow foreign regimes 64 times, and that regimes targeted by the US were, in O’Rourke’s words, “less likely to be democratic afterward and more likely to experience civil war, adverse regime changes, or human rights abuses.” Furthermore, the political scientists Monica Duffy Toft and Sidita Kushi have crunched the numbers and shown that between 1946 and 2019 the United States intervened abroad with “the threat, display, or direct usage of force” 216 times. To borrow from Voltaire, the liberal international order was neither liberal, nor international, nor an order.

Nevertheless, it is also true that the language of liberalism sometimes allowed groups to make real claims on the global stage, as Black South Africans did when they fought apartheid and as Palestinians have done as they attempted to combat Israeli oppression. The fact that many political parties around the world have replaced their previously deployed liberal discourses with overtly chauvinistic and ethnocentric nationalism is not an advance but a retreat. They have, in effect, removed the liberal mask.

The breakdown of the fantasy of a liberal international order does not mean that domination has ended, only that the character of domination has changed. In East Asia in particular, US power is already being replaced by Chinese power, and nations like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines—to say nothing of Taiwan—will still be in hock to a greater power. The same is true of the countries in Russia’s near-abroad. As the liberal international order continues to dissolve, it is weaker nations that can expect to suffer most.

There are further negative consequences to this order’s collapse. Weapons of mass destruction are likely to proliferate. Historically, competition between states of roughly equal power has encouraged the spread of military technology. It is a genuine miracle that over the last eighty-one years more nations have not developed nuclear weapons, but in a newly competitive environment there is a good chance that this miracle will end. And the emergence of a competitive multipolarity further means that extant collective action problems, especially climate change and pandemics, will be even more difficult to address.

In practice, international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations were limited in their ability to shape the world because they were unable to overcome powerful nations’ unwillingness to limit their own sovereignty: the United States, for example, never joined the International Criminal Court. Nonetheless, some international organizations can boast significant achievements, including the World Health Organization, whose anti-smallpox vaccination campaign helped eradicate smallpox, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which helped limit nuclear proliferation.

But as nations jockey for position, they are less likely to cooperate with one another to solve the issues that confront humanity as a whole. While organizations like the UN will continue to exist, their impact will be reduced.  In several decades, we may look back on the era of unipolarity as a missed opportunity, during which the American hegemon failed to use its awesome power in service of the greater good by establishing new, genuinely internationalist, norms and groups.

Indeed, it is likely that the world that emerges from the era of US unipolarity will be fragmented and violent, especially withinspheres of influence. Russia is apt to continue to press its advance in Ukraine and might even move into the Baltics; China will probably attempt to seize Taiwan; the US will likely affirm its authority over Latin America; and so on.  And there will be areas of the globe—the China-India border and sub-Saharan Africa above all—that are not strictly within a given sphere of influence. In the short and medium terms, war will very much remain with us.

The truth is that the American Century did not work. The publisher Henry Luce dream that the US would become “the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels” curdled into a nightmare. Between 1945 and 2026, the United States did an enormous amount of damage abroad and proved itself unable to support only “good” wars. For every Japan there’s an Indonesia; for every South Korea there’s a South Vietnam; for every Kosovo there’s a Libya; for every Ukraine there’s a Gaza. In some real sense, drawing down the US empire and the liberal international order it supported is a necessary recognition of the fact that it is impossible for any single country to govern international relations, and that the very project of hegemony is doomed to collapse into violence.

In directing global politics and putting its thumb on regional scales, the US distorted local economic and political developments. Removing US forces from around the world might therefore have the benefit of allowing regions to develop more organically, according to internal logics unshaped by outside powers—or at least, very outside powers. While China is likely to dominate East Asia and Russia parts of Eastern Europe, over time we may nonetheless witness regional consolidation in groups that mirror ASEAN and the African Union. This would be the first step on a pathway that could end in a world order that is the product of negotiation between spheres of influence instead of imposition by an exceedingly powerful state. Because such an order would be based on voluntary commitment, it would probably prove more durable—and effective—than the one that prevailed after 1945.

Moreover, the new pyramidal multipolar order will probably witness fewer attempts at regime change by states outside their given sphere of influence. Pursuing regime change in a bloc not your own would run the risk of provoking the wrath of other powerful governments; this is why President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to aid rebelling East Germans in 1953 and Hungarians in 1956. A world with fewer attempts at regime change is a positive development.

There is also the possibility that shearing ideological contestation from geopolitical consideration could allow nation-states to engage with each other more pragmatically. States could argue over interests—which can be reconciled—instead of ideology—which cannot. This might allow the US, for instance, to take advantage of China’s advancements in green technology, and could also provide the opportunity to reach more long-lasting agreements about WMD, pandemic management, and other problems of the global commons. Coming to these agreements will not be easy and will require far-sighted leadership from both the US and China, but it is possible. 

The US is also likely to experience significant domestic benefits as the liberal international order fades away. Someday soon, a wise president will recognize that the nation can spend less on its armed forces, which will free resources for more social spending and could slow the increasing militarization of American society. Furthermore, recent history has demonstrated that centralizing power in the executive branch, and especially in the office of the president—both of which are functions of US global “leadership”—has had deleterious consequences. The reduction of the US’s global power could contribute to the re-democratization of American society.

The new geopolitical order will be similar to the one that Roosevelt envisioned in the 1940s. The task for those of us who will govern this new multipolar world is to build, from the wreckage of the American Century, something more robust: not a liberal international order that was usually not very liberal, nor a world defined only by power, but a genuine multipolarity in which very different areas of the globe meet on a more equal basis than they ever have before. And from these meetings, a better world might one day emerge.

Daniel Bessner is the Anne H.H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and co-host of the foreign affairs podcast American Prestige.