Reasons to Be Optimistic About a Post-American Order

Opinion|Who’s Afraid of the Post-American Order?

The American-led world order that has prevailed since at least the end of World War II has long been precarious. Under President Trump, it is finally starting to crumble.

Mr. Trump is pursuing a sustained assault on allies and adversaries alike. Last week, he announced tariffs on vast categories of goods from even America’s closest trading partners, leaving global markets reeling and effectively ending the decades-long American commitment to international trade. He has repeatedly made his distaste for multilateral institutions clear, including the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, and has fundamentally damaged the bedrock of the trans-Atlantic alliance. He has dismantled U.S.A.I.D. and silenced Voice of America.

There are good reasons for pessimism about the future — a world in which China, Russia and Mr. Trump’s America carve out spheres of influence and control through leverage and fear. But chaos will not inevitably follow the end of the American order. That fear is partly based on two errors: First, the past seven decades or so have not been as good for everyone on the planet as they have been for the West. And secondly, the very precepts of order are not Western inventions.

That’s a reason for optimism. To understand that the American order is not the only possible system — that, for many countries, it is not even a particularly good or fair one — is to allow oneself to hope that its end could augur a more inclusive world.

Defenders of the current order argue that it has prevented major wars and maintained a remarkably stable and prosperous international system. And for a select club of countries, it has. Evan Luard, a British politician and scholar of international relations, calculated that, of more than 120 wars that took place between 1945 and 1984, only two occurred in Europe. But the corollary of this, of course, is that during the Cold War more than 98 percent of those wars took place in countries outside of the West.

If the first and main promise of the postwar order is peace, many countries might be forgiven for asking: Peace for whom? Not only has the West succeeded in shielding just its members (and some others) from chaos, disorder and injustice, but it has at times contributed to that disorder, as in the U.S. interventions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.