Learning to live in a post-American world

The Architecture of Global Order Is Crumbling, and No One Has a Blueprint for What Comes Next

Ecorescuezone.com – The question that now haunts every capital from Brussels to Beijing to New Delhi is deceptively simple: what happens when the country that built, funded, and enforced the postwar international system decides it no longer wants to? Mark Leonard, cofounder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, has spent months pressing that question into the ears of sitting heads of state. His conclusion, laid out in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs and elaborated in conversation with journalists, is blunt — the rules-based architecture that has governed interstate relations since 1945 is not merely under strain. It is being dismantled from within by the very power that constructed it.

Two Pillars, One Undermined

Leonard frames the problem through a lens borrowed from Henry Kissinger: a durable world order rests on two interlocking supports. The first is a shared rulebook that major powers accept, even if they grumble about its terms. The second is a distribution of military and economic power that makes those rules enforceable rather than merely aspirational. For roughly eight decades, the Western bloc developed that rulebook, and after the Cold War’s end the framework expanded to encompass far more states. The United States served as its principal guarantor — the nation willing to project force, underwrite institutions, and absorb costs that smaller partners could not.

What Leonard identifies as the decisive rupture is not a gradual drift but a deliberate reversal of narrative. In his second term, President Trump has told a fundamentally different story about American history: that the United States was not the beneficiary of the postwar arrangement but one of its greatest victims. That rhetorical inversion, he argues, has given political cover to actions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

An Accelerant, Not a Cause

Leonard is careful to note that erosion of multilateral norms was already underway before the second Trump administration took office. Trade friction, rising nationalism in Europe, and the slow hollowing out of UN reform processes had been chipping at the structure for years. But the current president, in his assessment, has functioned as what a chemist might call an accelerant — not igniting the fire, but making it burn far faster and far wider.

The institutional withdrawals are concrete and catalogable. The United States has exited the World Health Organization. It has pulled back from numerous UN bodies and programs. It has signaled, through both words and budgetary choices, that the World Trade Organization’s dispute mechanism is no longer regarded as binding. Each withdrawal removes a layer of predictability that trading partners, health agencies, and smaller states had built their planning around.

“He’s made a bonfire of lots of different institutions, has withdrawn the U.S. from the World Health Organization, from lots of different parts of the United Nations. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t believe in the World Trade Organization.”

Yet Leonard singles out two moves as qualitatively different from mere institutional disengagement. The first is the explicit conditional placed on NATO’s Article 5 guarantee: if allied nations do not meet a higher defense-spending threshold, the American commitment to their territorial defense becomes negotiable. The second is the suggestion, voiced publicly, that the United States might acquire Greenland from Denmark — a sovereign territory of a fellow NATO member. Both gestures, he notes, would have been dismissed as science-fiction plotlines before this administration.

A Cultural Current, Not a Single Man

One might expect the argument to end with the observation that a different president after the 2028 election could restore the old commitments. Leonard pushes past that assumption. He points to a broader shift inside American political culture: across the ideological spectrum, there is growing consensus that domestic nation-building — infrastructure, education, industrial policy — should take priority over the expensive work of sustaining a global system. Trump, in his reading, is less an aberration than a channel for a sentiment that predates him and will outlast him. That makes the question of succession less reassuring than it first appears.

The practical implication for allies and partners is therefore not to wait for a friendly election cycle. It is to build redundancy. Diversify supply chains. Deepen regional security architectures that do not hinge on a single guarantor. Invest in multilateral fora that can function even when the largest member is absent or hostile.

Advice From the Other Side of the Atlantic

In conversations with leaders across Europe, Asia, and Africa, Leonard reports a common anxiety: the assumption that the next decade will resemble the last one has quietly evaporated. His counsel to those leaders compresses into a few imperatives. Expect the unexpected. Do not anchor national strategy to the preservation of an order that may no longer exist. Maintain flexibility in diplomatic posture. Cultivate a wide web of bilateral and regional relationships so that no single disruption — American or otherwise — can paralyze a country’s foreign policy.

“They need to expect the unexpected and therefore, rather than relying on predictable order and trying to preserve that order, they need to be flexible. They need to think on their feet.”

The stakes are not abstract. Climate negotiations, pandemic preparedness, trade arbitration, and conflict mediation all depend on institutional continuity. When the guarantor walks away, the remaining participants must decide, often under time pressure, whether to rebuild the institution, replace it, or simply absorb the risk themselves. There is no playbook for that transition. The post-American world, in Leonard’s telling, is not a world without rules. It is a world in which the rules must be renegotiated, enforced by a broader coalition, and sustained by states that previously had every reason to let someone else carry the cost.

That renegotiation has already begun, whether or not the parties involved have named it. The question is no longer whether the old order will survive intact. It is whether the successor arrangement, whatever its shape, will be built deliberately or stumbled into by accident.