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JakeSullivan
HowtheSystem CanEndure
TheWorld
AfterTrump
Volume97 Number2
March/April2018
10	 foreign affairs
JAKE SULLIVAN is a Senior Fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He served in the Obama administration as
Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department
of State and as National Security Adviser
to the Vice President.
LETTINGGO
order or a period with no real order at all.
But the existing order is more resilient
than this assessment suggests. There is no
doubt that Trump represents a meaningful
threat to the health of both American
democracy and the international system.
And there is a nonnegligible risk that he
could drag the country into a constitutional
crisis, or the world into a crippling
trade war or even an all-out nuclear war.
Yet despite these risks, rumors of the
international order’s demise have been
greatly exaggerated. The system is built
to last through significant shifts in global
politics and economics and strong enough
to survive a term of President Trump.
This more optimistic view is offered
not as comfort but as a call to action.
The present moment demands resolve
and affirmative thinking from the foreign
policy community about how to sustain
and reinforce the international order, not
just lamentations about Trump’s destructiveness
or resignation about the order’s
fate. No one knows for certain how things
will turn out. But fatalism will become a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
The order can endure only if its
defenders step up. It may be durable,
but it also needs an update to account
for new realities and new challenges.
Between fatalism and complacency lies
urgency. Champions of the order must
start working now to protect its key
elements, to build a new consensus at
home and abroad about needed adjustments,
and to set the stage for a better
approach, before it’s too late.
A RESILIENT ORDER
In a world where the major trends seem to
spell chaos, it is fair to place the burden of
proof on those who claim that the cur­rent
order can continue. Yet well before
The World
AfterTrump
How the System Can Endure
Jake Sullivan
T
he warnings started long before
DonaldTrump was even a presidential
candidate. For at least a
decade, a growing chorus of foreign policy
experts had been pointing to signs that
the international order was coming apart.
Authoritarian powers were flouting
long-accepted rules. Failed states were
radiating threats. Economies were being
disrupted by technology and globaliza­tion;
political systems, by populism. Meanwhile,
the gap in power and influence
between the United States—the leader
and guarantor of the existing order—and
the rest of the world was closing.
Then came Trump’s election. To those
already issuing such warnings, it sounded
the death knell of the world as it was. Even
many of those who had previously resisted
pessimism suddenly came to agree. As they
saw it, the U.S.-led order—the post–
World War II system of norms, institutions,
and partnerships that has helped
manage disputes, mobilize action, and
govern international conduct—was ending
for good. And what came next, they
argued, would be either an entirely new
The World After Trump
	 March/April 2018	 11
Trump, it had already demonstrated its
capacity to adapt to changes in the nature
and distribution of power. Three basic
factors account for such resilience—and
demonstrate why the emphasis now
should be on protecting and improving
the order rather than planning for the
aftermath of its demise.
First, most of the world remains invested
in major aspects of the order and still
counts on the United States to operate at
its center. The passing of U.S. dominance
need not mean the end of U.S. leadership.
That is, the United States may not be
able to direct outcomes from a position of
preeminent economic, political, and
military influence, but it can still mobilize
cooperation on shared challenges and
shape consensus on key rules. In the years
ahead, although Washington will not be
the only destination for countries seeking
capital, resources, or influence, it will
remain the most important agenda-setter.
Some context is important.The U.S.led
order was built at a unique moment,
at the end of World War II. Europe’s
and Asia’s erstwhile great powers were
reduced to rubble, and a combination of
dominance abroad and shared economic
prosperity at home allowed the United
States to serve as the architect and
guarantor of a new order fashioned in its
own image. It had not just the material
power to shape rules and drive outcomes
but also a model many other countries
wanted to emulate. It used the opportunity
to build an order that benefited itself
as well as others, with clear advantages
for populations at home and abroad. As
the international relations scholar G. John
Ikenberry has put it in this magazine,
the resulting system was “hard to overturn
and easy to join.” The end of the
Cold War and the fall of the Soviet
Union served to reinforce and extend
American preeminence.
JONATHANERNST/REUTERS
Missing link: Trump at an ASEAN summit in the Philippines, December 2017
Jake Sullivan
12	 foreign affairs
and their continued participation sends a
similar message. For example, leaders
of the major emerging powers eagerly
ac­cepted U.S. President Barack Obama’s
invitation to join the first Nuclear Security
Summit, in 2010; less eagerly but still
willingly, they joined the global sanctions
regime against Iran’s nuclear program.
Richard Fontaine and Daniel Kliman of
the Center for a New American Security
quote a Brazilian official who captured a
broader sentiment among emerging
powers: “Brazil wants to expand its room
in the house, not tear the house down.”
And indeed, Brazil has taken on a leading
role in defending important aspects of
the order, such as the multistakeholder
system for Internet governance. Emerging
powers’ quest for a greater voice in regional
and global institutions is not a repudiation
of the order but evidence that they see
increasing their participation as preferable
to going a different way.
FROM DOMINANCE TO LEADERSHIP
The second factor accounting for the
order’s resilience is that the United States
has managed the transition from dominance
to leadership more effectively than
most appreciate. Over the past decade,
U.S. diplomacy has facilitated a shift
from formal, legal, top-down institutions
to more practical, functional, and regional
approaches to managing transnational
issues—“coalitions of the willing” (in the
real, non-Iraq-war sense of the term). This
shift has not only expanded the prospects
for shared problem solving; it has also
made the rules-based order less rigid,
and therefore more lasting.
Consider climate change. Formal legal
structures, such as the Kyoto Protocol,
which failed largely because the United
States refused to participate and emerging
This precise state of affairs was never
going to last forever. Other powers would
eventually rise, and the basic bargain
would one day need to be revisited. That
day has arrived, and the question now is,
do other countries want a fundamentally
different bargain or simply some adjustments?
A comprehensive 2016 rand
analysis found that few powers display an
appetite for dismantling the international
order or transforming it into something
unrecognizable. And while Trump’s
election has forced countries to contemplate
a world without a central role for
the United States, many still view the
president as an aberration and not a new
American normal, especially given that the
United States has bounced back before.
Even China has concluded that it
largely benefits from the order’s continued
operation. Around the time of
Trump’s inauguration, breathless reports
interpreted Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
comments on an open international
economy and climate change as indicators
that China planned to somehow take
over for the United States. But what Xi
was really signaling was that China does
not want near-term radical change in the
global system, even as it seeks to gain
more influence by taking advantage of
the vacuum left by Trump. And to the
extent that Beijing has set out to construct
its own parallel institutions,
particularly when it comes to trade and
investment, thus far these institutions
largely supplement the existing order
rather than threatening to supplant it.
Other emerging powers chafe at certain
features of the order, and some seek a more
prominent place in institutions such as
the un Security Council. Yet rhetorical
flourishes aside, they, like China, talk in
terms of reform rather than replacement—
The World After Trump
	 March/April 2018	 13
party to some of these platforms, but it
has helped promote them with technical
and diplomatic support. Viewed from this
perspective, Beijing’s establishment of the
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is
largely in line with the “variable geometry”
that the United States has encouraged.
(Washington erred in resisting the aiib
rather than working to shape its standards.)
And on global health, the World Health
Organization has recognized the need for
more flexible arrangements to deal with
major health crises, including publicprivate
partnerships, such as the Global
Fund to Fight aids, Tuberculosis and
Malaria and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
Meanwhile, various emerging regional
and subregional arrangements are playing
larger roles in local problem solving.
One could add other examples to the
list, but the point is this: the overall trend
toward practicality and flexibility, encouraged
by the United States, has generated
more resilience in the rules-based order.
For one thing, more practical and flexible
approaches are better suited to handle
the diffuse and complex nature of transnational
challenges today. For another, the
rest of the world can continue to participate
even when the United States pulls
back. The new structures are designed to
extract greater participation and contributions
from a greater number of actors in a
greater number of places—even when the
most important of those actors temporarily
relinquishes its leadership role.
There is a concern about whether
this trend will water down rules. But the
record so far suggests this is not the case.
For example, the 11 nations currently
pursuing the Trans-Pacific Partnership
without U.S. participation might produce
a trade agreement with weaker labor or
environmental provisions than those in
powers were exempt, have given way to less
formal structures, such as the Paris climate
accord. Unlike Kyoto, Paris achieved broadbased
participation because its substantive
commitments are voluntary and states
have flexibility in how to meet them. It
can survive a temporary U.S. withdrawal
because other countries had already
fac­tored their targets into their national
energy plans and because the United States
can meet or exceed its own targets even
without the help of Washington (points
Brian Deese, a former climate adviser to
Obama, has made in this magazine).
On nuclear proliferation, formal
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review
conferences have not advanced the ball on
new legal norms. But during the negotiations
that led to the Iran nuclear deal, the
P5+1 (the five permanent members of
the un Security Council plus Germany)
joined together to develop a rules-based
plan to address a major global proliferation
problem. The resulting agreement,
the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,
involved practical commitments from the
negotiating parties but also incorporated
key international institutions—the International
Atomic Energy Agency and the
Security Council—for oversight and
enforcement. And although Trump may
eventually withdraw from the agreement,
the broad participation and buy-in that it
achieved, and the fact that it is working
as intended, have thus far constrained
him from doing so, despite his claim that
it is “the worst deal ever.”
On trade and economics, although
universal rule-making in the World Trade
Organization has stalled, “plurilateral”
and regional initiatives of various shapes
and sizes have proliferated, from the East
African Community to Latin America’s
Pacific Alliance. The United States is not
Jake Sullivan
14	 foreign affairs
over­whelmingly approved new sanctions,
tyingTrump’s hands. (The administration
subsequently surprised most observers
by announcing that it would provide
lethal assistance to Ukraine, a move
pushed by top members of Trump’s
national security team.)
Perhaps most important, Trump has
found that whatever his contempt for
the rules-based order, he needs it. Here
he follows a line of American politicians
who have chafed at perceived limits on
U.S. freedom of action but ultimately
recognized that the order protects and
advances U.S. interests. To counter
North Korea, he needs both strong
Asian alliances and a working relationship
with Beijing (contrary to everything
he said during the campaign). To
defeat the Islamic State (also known as
isis), he needs the allies and partners
that made up the coalition, built during
the Obama administration, that helped
eject isis from Mosul and Raqqa. Trump
has therefore been forced to embrace
elements of the order he would
rather dismiss.
Trump’s own lack of focus has
helped. The international relations
expert Thomas Wright is correct to
warn that “since World War II, the
foreign policy of every administration
has been defined by the character and
opinions of its president,” not anybody
else. And Trump’s worst impulses may
yet win out, with disastrous consequences.
But unlike his predecessors,
Trump has displayed relatively little
interest in translating his impulses into
consistent policy actions. That can
potentially allow the system around
him, including voices outside government,
to play a more powerful constraining
role than usual.
the U.S.-brokered version, which the
Trump administration withdrew from
last year. But those provisions would still
represent an improvement over existing
rules, and a new baseline against which
future rules would be measured. Nor is
this broader trend mutually exclusive
with action in the un system. The rise of
informal mechanisms of cooperation has
not detracted from basic global standardsetting
on issues such as civil aviation.
To the contrary, the informal and the
formal can be mutually reinforcing.
Progress conceived in smaller formats
outside the un system can help catalyze
universal action.
BINDING TRUMP
Finally, although Trump has created a
temporary vacuum of global leadership
and keeps raising questions about his
basic fitness for office, he has thus far
been unable to do the level of systemic
damage in foreign affairs that he threatened
on the campaign trail. He has—
again, thus far—been constrained by
Congress, by his own national security
team, and by reality.
Consider the U.S. alliance system, a
central feature of the U.S.-led order.
Trump continues to deride U.S. allies
as free riders. But Washington’s policy
toward its alliances in both Europe and
Asia has been marked more by continuity
than change. Trump’s advisers have helped
ensure that, as have outside advocacy and
congressional oversight. And European
leaders have sought to sustain the alliance,
despite their misgivings aboutTrump, by
working around him. Similarly, whatever
the administration’s desire to ease pressure
on Russia for violations of Ukraine’s
territorial integrity—a foundational norm
of the rules-based order—Congress
The World After Trump
	 March/April 2018	 15
National Endowment for Democracy
calls the “sharp power” of authoritarian
states, a mix of strategies to undermine
political pluralism and open elections.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
interference in the U.S. presidential
election likely helped secure Trump’s
victory, and in the years ahead, Russian
“active measures” and Chinese influence
operations will continue seeking to destabilize
democratic systems.
And when it comes to the interaction
between economic and political reform, the
Chinese Communist Party has been trying
to prove—including to receptive audiences
in developing-world governments—that
economic openness is perfectly compatible
with a closed political system. Unlike the
Soviet Union, which relatively few aspired
to emulate, China offers what many
see as an attractive alternative. Xi has
described his country’s model as a “new
option for other countries.” Audiences
in Africa and Asia, and even some in
Europe, are paying attention.
These trends preceded Trump, and
they are now being compounded by new
threats to democracy, including a wholesale
assault on the very idea of truth. But
they are not irreversible. The year 1989
did not bring the end of history in one
direction; neither did 2016 in the other.
The liberal part of the rules-based
international order has always been
imperfect and will remain so. As Ikenberry
has pointed out, the current order is
actually a blend of the traditional Westphalian
system (founded on state sovereignty)
and a more liberal variant that
emerged first with British hegemony in
the nineteenth century and then deepened
under U.S. leadership in the twentieth.
This combination has always involved an
uneasy balance between sovereignty and
ORDER BEGINS AT HOME
The system’s resilience should not be the
end to a comforting story; it should be
the starting point of a badly needed effort
to reinforce and update the international
order and address the real threats to its
long-term viability. That must begin with
the most serious challenge today: growing
disillusionment with some of its core
assumptions. This disillusionment has
been stoked by forces of nativism and
illiberalism, but it is rooted in the lived
experience of many who have seen few
promised benefits flow to them.
The United States built the order
on three foundational propositions:
that economic openness and integration
lead to greater and more widely
shared prosperity; that political openness,
democratization, and the protection
of human rights lead to stronger,
more just societies and more effective
international cooperation; and that
economic and political openness are
mutually reinforcing. All three propositions
are now contested.
As the political scientists Jeff Colgan
and Robert Keohane have argued in these
pages, the link between globalization and
shared prosperity is no longer clear. The
current international economic system is
“rigged,” in their telling, and a new set
of rules is needed to better advance the
interests of middle classes around the
world. Meanwhile, a growing reaction
in the West treats global integration as
a threat to national identity and economic
vitality.
On the merits of the open political
model, democracy is now on the
defensive—from within, thanks to selfinflicted
wounds and the gathering
strength of populist political parties,
and from without, thanks to what the
Jake Sullivan
16	 foreign affairs
TROUBLE FROM WITHOUT
Along with weaknesses within the
West, the order is facing challenges
from without, starting with renewed
great-power competition. Indeed, the
Trump administration’s National Security
Strategy explicitly makes competition—
in opposition to order—an organizing
principle. It taunts previous administrations
for seeing great powers as “benign
actors and trustworthy partners” and
assuming that “competition would give
way to peaceful cooperation.” But the
Trump team is wrong to frame this as an
either-or proposition. As a prescriptive
matter, abandoning the postwar order is a
strange concession for a status quo power
to make, since the order’s existence is a
major competitive advantage. Defending
it, and mobilizing its assets, is essential
for contending with Russia and China.
And as a predictive matter, it is by no
means inevitable that great-power
competition will upend the order in
the foreseeable future. To understand
why this is the case, it’s necessary to
distinguish between the two primary
great-power competitors.
Russia under Putin does want to
undermine U.S. leadership, as well as
the cohesion of Washington’s democratic
allies. But so far, the Kremlin has proved
to be more of a spoiler than an existential
threat. Yes, Putin brazenly violated
Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but he
was met with a common transatlantic
response that kept him from pulling Kiev
back into Moscow’s orbit, as well as with
new nato forward deployments to resist
further Russian aggression. Yes, Putin’s
intervention in Syria assisted Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad’s butchery
on an industrial scale and gave Russia a
brokering role there, but that has not
noninterference, on the one hand, and
universal values and multilateral cooperation,
on the other. A shift in emphasis
toward the former does not spell the
end of the entire order.
Moreover, the developments of the
past two years—Brexit, Trump’s election,
the rise of right-wing parties in
Europe, foreign interference in democratic
politics—have served as a wake-up
call. There are new and urgent conversations
in Western democracies not just
about how to resist pressure from abroad
but also about how to address social and
economic dislocations at home and the
distributional consequences of globalization
and automation. Whether this
brings about a genuine recovery of
strength for liberal democracy over
time remains to be seen. But there are
promising signs. Trump’s excesses have
generated energetic efforts to push back
against them. In Europe, the eu has
proved more cohesive, and its economic
foundation stronger, than most anticipated,
and although populist movements
continue to make some progress, they
have also met considerable resistance (as
the French far-right candidate Marine
Le Pen discovered). Democratic nations
have not lost the wherewithal to manage
and alleviate the strains of authoritarian
populism. If the West can succeed
in restoring some of the appeal of the
democratic model, the weaknesses and
contradictions in the authoritarian
model—which, after all, rests on the
systematic suppression of basic human
freedoms and is usually accompanied
by debilitating corruption—will come
back into sharper focus. In this regard,
the major disconnect between Beijing’s
outward projection of confidence and
its deep insecurity at home is telling.
The World After Trump
	 March/April 2018	 17
damental global challenge—especially if
Beijing succeeds in building a sphere of
influence in East Asia. That China aims
to change the balance of power in Asia,
reducing the United States’ role and
increasing its own, is evident in its
military buildup, its activities in the
South China Sea, its coercive economic
diplomacy, and the expansion of its
influence through such efforts as the
Belt and Road Initiative. And the
Trump administration is helping in this
cause, by neglecting Asian security and
economic institutions.
But the United States and its partners
have plenty of cards to play. The demand
for an enduring U.S. presence in Asia,
from key treaty allies and others resistant
to Chinese hegemony, will likely
block any aspirations Beijing has for an
Asian Monroe Doctrine, or anything
close to it. Even in areas where China
has made significant strides, such as the
South China Sea, the United States and
its partners still have the capacity to
protect regional prerogatives and global
norms such as freedom of navigation and
unim­peded lawful commerce. Ultimately,
a return to an effective Asia strategy,
anchored in Washington’s historical
alliances and contemporary partnerships,
could sustain the U.S. role in
Asia and manage regional com­petition
while pro­moting global cooperation
with Beijing.
Finally, the paroxysms of violence
across the arc of instability from North
Africa to South Asia have led some
observers to conclude that disorder in
the Middle East could threaten the entire
global order. But Middle Eastern instability
has been a feature, not a bug, of the
system since the fall of the Ottoman
Empire after World War I. In just one
translated into a broader role as security
manager for the region, and it likely
never will. And on the global level, Russia
simply does not have the power to decisively
shift the course of international
trade and investment regimes or scuttle
multilateral efforts to deal with such
challenges as climate change. That will
be increasingly true going forward, given
Russia’s fragile economy and unfavorable
demographic trends. The United States
has to avoid the trap of underestimating
Putin, but also the temptation to overestimate
him.
China is a different story. It has far
greater capacity to upend the global
order—but will be cautious in attempting
to do so in the near term. For all of
Xi’s rhetoric, China cannot be expected
to replace the United States at the
center of a newly constituted order. As
the China scholar David Shambaugh
has noted, Beijing remains a “partial
power.” Its basic global strategy has
been to act, to borrow a phrase from the
former U.S. official Robert Zoellick, as
amended by Hillary Clinton as secretary
of state, as a “selective stakeholder,”
picking and choosing which responsibilities
to take on based on a narrow
cost-benefit analysis. This strategy
proceeds from the assumption that the
United States will remain the burden
bearer of last resort.
China will clearly seek greater
influence in the operation and evolution
of the order. Other emerging powers
will, too. That will require adjustments
by both the United States and emerging
powers, but not something fundamentally
new.
That still leaves the question of whether
China’s competitive posture in its region
will over time translate into a more fun­
Jake Sullivan
18	 foreign affairs
A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
None of this is an argument for complacency.
In Washington, checking Trump’s
destructive instincts requires constant
work, which will only get harder as he
looks more often to the global stage to
score points. And the internal constraints
often come down to a few individuals
who could easily be replaced by less
responsible voices. Internationally, the
difficulties are accelerating, not abating,
among them the technology-driven
challenge to state supremacy itself. The
resilience of the rules-based order offers
just a window of opportunity to get things
right. It will eventually close.
Many of the most crucial steps require
that the United States get its own house
in order, which would create more fertile
ground for consensus building on national
security. But there is also a clear task for
foreign policy leaders, in both parties: to
strengthen and adapt the postwar international
order so that it responds to current
needs and reflects new realities but still
secures a central U.S. role. That will
require new ideas and productive advocacy
to ensure that globalization delivers
more widely shared prosperity. It will
require effectively managing strategic
competition with Russia and China by
protecting U.S. prerogatives without
descending into all-consuming rivalry
or outright conflict. And it will require
convincing governments and citizens
around the world that in spite of the
current president, a strong majority of
Americans remain committed to working
closely with other nations to secure
shared interests through common action
and rules.
A temporary American absence is
survivable; sustained American absence
is not. In the long run, the international
30-year stretch—the period from the
early 1970s to the first decade of this
century—the region saw the Yom Kippur
War, the Lebanese civil war, the Iranian
Revolution, the dawn of the modern age
of terrorism with the siege of Mecca,
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the
Iran-Iraq War, the first Lebanon war,
two Palestinian intifadas, the Persian
Gulf War, the war in Iraq, and a Yemeni
civil war.
Today, it is true that the combination
of weak state structures, violent ideologies,
and Iranian-Saudi competition has
transformed a number of local conflicts
into a regional crisis. In addition to the
horrific human toll, this has had the
spillover effects of sending refugees
flowing to Europe and inspiring jihadist
attacks across the West. At the same time,
the United States is no longer as willing
or able to play the external role it played
before, for reasons relating to both the
supply side (reduced U.S. willingness
to invest resources, especially troops)
and the demand side (reduced regional
enthusiasm for U.S. involvement). Yet
the roiling waters of the Middle East
have not swamped the whole system.
U.S.-led efforts against isis have rolled
back the biggest threat to the international
community, the existence of a
terrorist state in the heart of the Middle
East. Europe is learning to manage
the refugee crisis. And despite Tehran’s
advances on several fronts, the basic
power politics of the region tilt toward
the eventual emergence of an uneasy,
sometimes messy balance between Iran
and its proxies on one side and a Saudiled
Sunni bloc on the other. Effective
statecraft can help manage, contain,
and reduce regional instability
over time.
The World After Trump
	 March/April 2018	 19
two terms of Trump might not be 1x
versus 2x, but more like 1x versus 10x.
For one thing, Obama needed two terms
to get to the ideas he campaigned on in
2008, and if the same proves true for
Trump, his second term could be cataclysmic.
For another, his reelection would
confirm that Trumpism is in fact the
new normal in the United States, not an
aberration, causing other countries to take
more decisive steps to rearrange their
relationships and commitments. It would
be an especially severe blow to the longterm
health of U.S. alliances; many of
the United States’ friends would more
seriously contemplate following through
on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
comment about going their own way.
On the other hand, the election of a new
president in 2020 would say something
quite different—and allow the United
States to resume its leadership role.
The U.S. foreign policy community
should prepare for this world after
Trump. It is tempting to conclude that
all hope is lost. That conclusion, however,
is not only unproductive; it is also wrong.
In every dimension—from technology
to security, development to diplomacy,
economic dynamism to human capital—
the United States’ advantages are still
significant. The opportunity remains
to reconstitute the old consensus on
new terms.∂
order will still need leadership, even in
the best-developed areas of international
cooperation. Who is going to make sure
that countries increase their emissions
reductions under the Paris accord when
the next round of pledges comes in 2023?
Who is going to pull the world powers
together to execute a follow-on agreement
to the Iran nuclear deal? American
leadership is even more critical in emerging
areas where the rules have not yet been
developed or where previous solutions no
longer work. How will updated trade and
investment arrangements account for the
endurance of state-managed economies,
the changing nature of work, and rising
income inequality? What should be done
to counter trends in state fragility that
could lead to even more profound migration
flows in the future? What new
norms will govern cyberspace and
artificial intelligence?
The world cannot count on undifferentiated
collective action. Nor can it
count on China, which has neither the
instincts nor the inclination to take on
such a role in the foreseeable future. The
United States is the only country with the
sufficient reach and resolve, and something
else as well: a historical willingness
to trade short-term benefits for long-term
influence. It has been uniquely prepared
to accept a leadership role of an international
order in which it feels as though
the maxim from Thucydides’ famous
Melian Dialogue is often inverted: the
strong suffer what they must and the
weak do what they can.
All of this underscores the United
States’ window of opportunity. Taking
advantage of this window does require
getting past the current presidency, which
is whyTrump must not be handed another
term. The difference between one and