Gabriel G Tabarani
The world the United States helped build after 1945 was never perfect. It was marked by hypocrisy, selective enforcement, and periodic abuses of power. Yet it rested on a shared premise that distinguished it from what came before: that the strongest countries would accept limits on their own freedom of action in exchange for a more stable, predictable, and less violent international system. That premise is now under direct strain.
President Trump’s foreign policy does not simply revise priorities within the existing order; it calls into question the value of order itself. Alliances are treated as temporary bargains rather than enduring commitments. Trade is wielded less as a mechanism for shared growth than as a blunt instrument for leverage and punishment. Institutions built to manage conflict, coordinate economic shocks, and restrain raw power are dismissed as obstacles to be bypassed or replaced. The message to the world is unmistakable: rules matter only when they serve immediate advantage.
Supporters argue that this approach reflects a hard-headed realism. Why should the United States bind itself to norms that others bend or break? Why subsidize allies who, in this telling, free-ride on American protection? Why privilege abstract principles over visible, transactional gains? These questions resonate with a public weary of endless wars, uneven globalization, and elites who promised stability but delivered insecurity.
Yet realism, properly understood, is not synonymous with short-term dealmaking. The postwar system was not an act of charity. It was an exercise in enlightened self-interest, born from the catastrophic lesson that unrestrained competition among great powers leads not to strength but to devastation. Tariff wars, territorial threats, and alliance erosion were not theoretical dangers; they were the accelerants of the most destructive conflicts in human history.
What is striking today is not only that Washington is loosening its grip on this framework, but that many countries are responding by hedging rather than resisting. Allies quietly diversify their security partnerships. Governments exposed to arbitrary tariffs seek alternative markets. States long resentful of Western lectures on democracy and human rights welcome a world in which access and transactional relevance matter more than values. Disruption itself becomes a strategy.
This does not amount to the emergence of a coherent new order. No shared vision has replaced the old one. Instead, the system is fragmenting into overlapping spheres of influence, ad hoc arrangements, and personalized deals. Trust—once the invisible infrastructure of global finance, security cooperation, and crisis response—erodes faster than formal treaties can be rewritten. Once lost, it is difficult to restore.
The economic consequences are already visible. Confidence in American stewardship has long underpinned the global role of the dollar and the centrality of U.S. markets. As predictability gives way to impulse, governments and investors begin to insure themselves against political risk. There may be no immediate alternative to American dominance, but the search for insulation is underway. Fragmentation, once it starts, feeds on itself.
Nor is this a story of one country’s decline neatly matched by another’s rise. Rivals eager to see the old system weaken often discover that a world governed more openly by power exposes their own limitations. Military might, economic scale, and technological capacity matter more, not less, when rules recede. For states whose strength is overstated or uneven, a “might makes right” environment can be unforgiving.
The deeper danger lies in what fills the vacuum left by eroding norms. When restraint is no longer expected, coercion becomes normalized. When institutions are sidelined, coordination in moments of crisis becomes harder. Pandemics, climate shocks, financial panics, and regional wars do not pause for ideological transitions. They demand habits of cooperation built over time, not improvised in the moment.
It is tempting to see this period as a temporary aberration, one that will correct itself when political winds shift. That may underestimate the damage already done. International systems are sustained less by formal rules than by shared expectations of behavior. When a leading power signals that self-restraint is optional and commitments are provisional, others adjust accordingly. Even a future attempt at restoration would face a more skeptical, more cautious world.
Still, the story is not finished. History suggests that periods of disorder often clarify costs that ideology obscures. A more unstable environment, diminished influence, and weaker alliances carry real consequences for American security and prosperity. Leadership, when it returns, is rarely driven by nostalgia but by necessity.
The choice, then, is not between dominance and decline, or between idealism and realism. It is between a world in which power is exercised with foresight and one in which it is spent recklessly. The order built after World War II was not a gift to the world; it was an investment in avoiding catastrophe. Abandoning it without a credible alternative risks relearning lessons the last century taught at an unbearable price.
This article was originally published in Arabic on the Asswak Al-Arab website
