At the Munich Security Conference last weekend, prospective standard-bearers for the left and right flanks of mainstream US politics offered dramatically different narrative accounts of the postwar period of American hegemony. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, looking to establish a foreign policy vision ahead of a potential presidential run in 2028, described a set of ostensibly universal promises made by the West that were ultimately unfulfilled in the Global South: The supposed “rules-based order,” which sought to secure non-aggression after the world wars, only seemed to apply for the former colonial powers. By contrast, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, also a 2028 hopeful, lamented a shameful retreat from the glory of European colonial empires. After half a millennium of racial supremacy—culminating, according to Rubio, in “the genius of . . . the Beatles and the Rolling Stones”—the West had succumbed to “terminal decline” in the face of national liberation movements and “godless communist revolutions.”
In AOC’s account, Western moral leadership was undermined by the hypocrisy of powerful states acting in their own self-interest; in Rubio’s, the West’s civilizational power was undermined by decolonization. Both messages seemed to land. Though she stumbled at times during the conference, AOC’s version of pragmatic progressivism earned her praise at home; Rubio’s keynote address got him a standing ovation from about half of the room in Munich. That both stories have rhetorical purchase is a sign of the ongoing erosion of the system of coercion and consent that sustained the liberal international order during and after the cold war.
While AOC and Rubio’s descriptions of that order contrasted sharply, their prescriptions for US foreign policy had more in common. Both advocated for a revitalized Atlanticism: the former as an alliance of democracies against authoritarianism, and the latter as an alliance of whites against the barbarian masses. And though they differed on the immediate geopolitical questions of Trump’s decapitation operation in Venezuela and his threats to conquer Greenland, both AOC and Rubio emphasized the maintenance of US military partnerships and kept a level of strategic ambiguity with respect to China, the US’s largest competitor on the global stage. AOC’s response to concerns about potential military conflicts with Iran over its nuclear program in the short term and with China over its claims over Taiwan in the medium term was standard DC-blob pablum about hoping things don’t get to that point.
AOC repeatedly lamented the rise of right-populist governments around the world, which she blamed on rising inequality. “We have to have a working class–centered politics if we are going to succeed, and also if we are going to stave off the scourges of authoritarianism, which also provides political siren calls to [lure] people into finding scapegoats.” But “working class–centered politics” is not a foreign policy program, and its invocation is particularly unconvincing when attached to the same democracy-versus-authoritarianism framework that underwrote decades of cold war geopolitics. Yes, the world is dramatically unequal. It is also defined by massive population flows, wars, and the early onset of an extended ecological collapse, many of them the direct or indirect product of US interventions, alliances, and sanctions. All these factors create zero- or even negative-sum conditions that make a transnational working-class alliance impossible to simply will into existence. AOC failed to offer an alternative mode of US engagement with the world that could point the way out of this impasse.
If this is the best that the electoral left has to offer, then we are in deep trouble. Not because Rubio’s crude revanchism is more compelling—though his minimal degree of ideological coherence stands in contrast to Trump’s solipsistic ramblings—but because a return to the liberal international order, or to any plausible harmony of interests between the US and the world, is simply not in the cards. Whatever the Pax Americana was, it’s coming to an end, and any grand strategy that does not reckon with that reality is doomed to failure.
This isn’t an electoral problem per se; Joe Biden’s 2020 foreign policy platform showed that it’s easy enough to run and win on the promise of restoring America’s pre-Trump place in the world. But it is a problem of governance. After more than three-quarters of a century of supremacy, America’s standing as the preponderant economic power is now in relative but irreversible decline, and its military preponderance may not be far behind. This means that preserving the US’s position in the global hierarchy and preserving the world order that has heretofore sustained it—supranational institutions, humanitarian aid, multilateral diplomacy—are increasingly contradictory objectives.
That reality has yet to sink in for the Democratic Party, which remains committed to a liberal internationalism that regards America’s interests as coterminous with the world’s. On foreign policy, the Party mainstream has refused to meaningfully reckon with the failure of Barack Obama, perhaps the last brilliant liberal grand strategist. Across his eight-year presidency, Obama sought to square the circle of US supremacy and liberal internationalism by countering the rise of China not through direct military means—though the much-discussed “pivot to Asia” brought a significant rebalancing of the US’s force posture in the region—but through the more muted discipline of global markets. With the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the administration sought to bind the economies of the Asia-Pacific together in a US-centered legal and regulatory order, while marginalizing China. But the deal would ultimately collapse under the force of US domestic backlash against neoliberal free trade. In 2016, skepticism of the deal on both the left and the right helped fuel the insurgent political campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—the former backed by sections of organized labor tired of the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession, and the latter by rising middle-class anti-globalist sentiment. Reading the room, Obama heir apparent Hillary Clinton recanted on her former support for the deal, but it was too late. Trump took power and killed it.
By contrast, Joe Biden sought to more forcefully defend US primacy, even at the expense of liberal internationalist structures of global governance. This meant a more antagonistic approach to China: Instead of trying to box China out of international trade with the tools of multilateralism, à la TPP, Biden kept the tariffs imposed by the first Trump administration and ratcheted up competition on the terrain of technology, imposing export controls on US microchips. He also threatened to militarily defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. All of that was before October 7 and the onset of Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Biden’s ironclad support for Israel overrode not just the International Criminal Court, which has indicted top Israeli leaders for war crimes, but also the International Court of Justice, which ruled that Israel was plausibly committing a genocide.1 As a key vector of US power in the region, Israel could not be allowed to lose. Even in the face of mounting criticism of the US support for Israeli atrocities, Kamala Harris could not articulate a single thing she would do differently. Trump gleefully exploited the fractured Democratic base, and won the election.
Eyeing a presidential run, AOC is clearly haunted by these failures. At Munich, she grounded her foreign policy vision in support for the working class—blaming inequality for the rising tide of right-populism—and repeatedly emphasized opposition to genocide in Gaza. But the future of US primacy and engagement with China formed a glaring lacuna. The current Trump Administration, she said, is
looking to . . . withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarians that can carve out the world where Donald Trump can command the Western Hemisphere and Latin America as his personal sandbox, where Putin can saber rattle around Europe and . . . try to bully around our own allies there. And for essentially authoritarians to have their own geographic domains.
It was an awkward rhetorical construction, seemingly set up to list a third “authoritarian.” But instead, after a pause, AOC continued: “And it actually is the Trans Pacific Partnership. It is our global alliances that can be a hard stop against authoritarian consolidation of power, particularly in the installation of regional puppet governments.” She later clarified that she did not mean to reference the TPP, and instead was trying to say “transatlantic partnership.” But this Freudian slip revealed the extent to which China still raises fundamental questions that remain unanswered—and, within the framework of liberal internationalism, unanswerable.
AOC is not alone on the left flank of the Democratic Party. Fellow travelers such as Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani have likewise built popular brands and successful campaigns by centering on economic justice and vocal criticism of US support for Israel. By all accounts, it’s a winning message—a version of Bernie Sanders’s line about “costly forever wars,” updated for the post-Obama years. But it’s not a roadmap for governance, so long as it does not address the contradiction between the reality of US empire and the aspirations of liberal internationalism. American power is receding, in part because of secular economic trajectories, and in part because the narrative justification for America’s global militarism has faded with the cold war. The so-called “rules-based order” that was once the safeguard of a status quo highly favorable to Washington and a plausible system of international stability no longer serves either function. Sustaining both is impossible, and something will have to give.
By contrast, and for all Rubio’s neo-Spenglerian doomsaying about Western decline, the right has charged headlong into the changing world order. During both presidencies of Donald Trump, its approach has been to confront the reality of hegemonic decline with a chaotic fusion of neoconservative bellicosity, overt ethnonationalism, and transactional cronyism. In the span of a single week, the White House threatened to bomb Iran in defense of human rights, defended the use of immigration enforcement to summarily execute protesters, and justified the abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on the grounds that it would enrich multinational oil companies.
Fitting all this underneath the banner of isolationism, or in Trumpian parlance, “America First,” has understandably caused confusion in the MAGA ranks. The haphazard interventionism of Trump 2 has opened questions within the Republican base around US military support for Israel, whose status in the broader reactionary worldview as a fellow protector of white civilization is ambiguous (and not only for the MAGA movement’s frankly antisemitic elements). It has also engendered a degree of hesitancy around initiating sustained military engagements, chiefly against Iran, as opposed to grandiose displays of force, which are Trump’s preferred medium. But on the whole, Trump’s second-term foreign engagement amounts to a rejection of even the fiction of US moral leadership, or of an “international community” to be led.
This was not the case under Trump’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, who built a highly effective propaganda apparatus in the aftermath of 9/11 in the language of liberal internationalism. “Making the world safe for democracy”—or its neoconservative iteration, “making the world safe with democracy”—justified a massively expansionist and massively expensive set of foreign engagements that drew, at least initially, bipartisan support. To be sure, not everyone was convinced. The Bush Administration faced sharp criticism for cronyism, especially in Iraq, and for ethnonationalism, in its coziness with the hard edge of the evangelical right. But these were critiques from without, not a constitutive element of the official narrative. Officially, we were in the business of remaking the world in the image of America, for the good of all humanity. Today’s Republicans make their claims to dominance on much cruder terms. The common thread among them is the virtue of, in Stephen Miller’s words, “strength,” “force,” and “power”—of the strong over the weak, the West over the rest, of the domestic over the international.
In his press conference the morning after the US military forces executed a baffling overnight special operation to abduct Maduro, a grinning Donald Trump explained, in characteristically plain terms, that this is just how things go now. The US decided to decapitate the Venezuelan state apparatus, largely because our political leaders felt like it. Trump made sure to name who ought to thank him: first and foremost oil corporations, who he expects will spend the hundreds of billions of dollars required to bring Venezuelan crude online despite questionable profitability and political volatility, but also Venezuelan Americans, who have long agitated for the overthrow of the Chavista government, even as the US operation appears to have left that regime largely intact. The people of Venezuela barely earned a passing mention, and the world democracy was not uttered. “We are going to run the country,” he claimed. It didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t have to. The world got the message.
Though Trump trotted out Rubio to address reporters, the invasion and kidnapping had the marks of a Miller operation. The focus of Trump’s remarks wasn’t socialism or authoritarianism, it was the enemy within—this was, after all, a “law enforcement” mission, per Rubio. Venezuela, Trump declared, had “sent their worst and most violent monsters into the United States to steal American lives,” already necessitating the military occupations of DC, New Orleans, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The reality is that Venezuela’s economic collapse, dramatically accelerated by nearly a decade of US sanctions, has displaced millions of people—largely to surrounding Latin American states, but increasingly to the US as well. Since the start of Trump’s second term, the administration has been in a legal fight over its attempt to strip protected status from hundreds of thousands of these refugees. Though forcing Venezuela’s now acting president Delcy Rodríguez to accept these migrants as deportees has not yet been part of the theatrical public extortion directed at her, it’s almost certainly an operative logic. Import the war, export the border: Trumpian foreign policy is less a mode of remaking the world than a crude (re)incorporation of the world, or as much of it as possible, into American dominion.
In recent weeks, the administration has fully turned its attention to Iran, and if the military buildup around the country—the largest since the 2003 invasion of Iraq—is any indication, we may be on the verge of a massively destructive bombing campaign. It’s unclear what exactly the Trump team wants. The administration already claims to have prevented an Iranian nuclear weapon with Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025, and could easily negotiate for more by offering meaningful sanctions relief. But thus far its demands to the Islamic Republic amount to total capitulation. An attack could catalyze a regional war of unpredictable duration, scale, and intensity.
Meanwhile, Trump has moved forward with his “Board of Peace” initiative, nominally a plan to resolve the Gaza war, but in effect a not-so-subtle attempt to overrule or at least undermine the UN Security Council. On Thursday, nearly two dozen world leaders from the Global South and the European periphery assembled at the Board of Peace’s inaugural summit to prostrate before Trump, who is the body’s chairman for life, and pledge financial tribute—essentially a global street tax to avoid the fates of Venezuela and Iran. The US’s European allies in NATO looked on with unease.
The liberal international order was a set of norms, alliances, and institutions built to preserve a status quo of US unipolar power. Though it was meant to last forever, unipolarity has never been an enduring feature of the international system. As economic power rebalances toward the East, systemic preservation from the US perspective has required so much coercion that the consent it relied upon means increasingly little. The Pax Americana is giving way to a more chaotic and unstable world, and the risk of global war is real. This is the reality faced by both historic US allies in Europe and historic US enemies in the Global South.
If we are to avoid the worst possible outcomes of this conjuncture, we need an electoral left willing to countenance the collapse of liberalism and to be honest about the need to deconstruct our overseas empire. Critically, that means fully abandoning Israel, the country most likely to spark a global military conflagration. But it also means effectuating a managed withdrawal from our hundreds of bases worldwide, and working in conjunction, not competition, with China to address climate risks. This project in turn requires a radical narrative and conceptual shift, toward a story that does not limit itself to domestic economic exploitation, but extends to US imperialism—and connects both to the urgency of the climate crisis and the reality of global migrations. Otherwise we are fated to remain trapped between a liberalism that can no longer deliver on the promise of American global leadership and a reactionary revanchism articulated in increasingly explicit ethnonationalist terms. It’s a tall task, but given the stakes, we are obligated to try.
The United States has never been a party to the ICC, but as a member of the United Nations, it is at least nominally bound by the ICJ. ↩
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